Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (58 page)

‘You understand nothing of my country, our history,’ shrieked the grand duke. ‘Vandia will not send its skyguard to intervene directly here. What is the imperium
here
? Nothing but the voices on the end of a crackling radio relay. Only sorcery may protect against sorcery.’

Out on the sand the predators were prodded back by lances in the direction of the wall’s opening. The creature that had removed Sariel’s arm was having problems complying, however. It groaned and rolled over on the ground, shaking and trembling, trying to stand, but failing to find the strength to re-join its pride in slinking away.

A fresh wave of panic rippled through the ranks of the ruler’s attendants. ‘You see!’ bayed the grand duke, as if he blamed the major for everything that had gone wrong with the morning. ‘It is just as it is written…
And his flesh shall be poison in the mouth of the basest animal
.’

The grand duke retreated, leaving Alock arguing in vain for the Weylanders’ immediate execution with the few bodyguards and courtiers who weren’t retreating after their master. The major was still yelling when soldiers forced Jacob and the rest of the prisoners at spear point back towards the searing dungeons. The grand duke’s soldiers had a hard job of containing the gads. They had boiled over into a state of frenzy that no amount of coercion short of murder would be able to suppress. Jacob’s trip down the passage to the cells was like being caught in a riot, shoved and jostled from every side, the soldiers’ yells and threats barely audible over the gads’ clamour.

Sheplar pulled at Sariel’s torn clothing as he was caught up in the mob. ‘What manner of man are you – did you have wings?’

‘Of course my people possess wings,’ said Sariel, as though the mountain aviator was a dolt for not realising such an evident truth. His face turned ashen and uncharacteristically grim at what was left of his memory of those times. ‘Mine were offered back as a cruel gift to me by the skel raiders, bloody saws clutched in the cursed hands that had just finished strangling my beloved. My people heal uncommonly fast, but our wings and our hearts may be easily broken and never repaired.’

‘To glide on the wind without a flying wing,’ said Sheplar, as though in a dream.

‘I walk now,’ said Sariel, sadly, as they funnelled through the dungeon’s unlocked doorway. ‘I walk everywhere. It’s all I have left.’

‘But you walk with flesh that is anathema to local predators,’ said Khow, trying to stay with them in the press of gads that packed the chamber. ‘That is an adaptation as advantageous as my spines and toxin.’

‘I’ll take the uncommonly fast healing,’ said Jacob, not quite believing the storyteller’s explanation for what had transpired. All around them, the dungeon filled fuller with excited locals. ‘They have a saying in the army: that it takes a man’s weight in lead to stop him during a full charge with bayonets. It’s a lie, of course. But in your case…’

‘The prince of players is not to meet his end at the fangs of a handful of scabrous sabre cats,’ said Sariel, some of his old colour returning. ‘Nor at the whim of the much-diminished House of Bragin. Standards have fallen here, yes they have. Such foul inhospitality, I have rarely sampled the like.’

Zanasi appeared from the crowd of prisoners, the half-breed scout shrinking back in the presence of the vagrant, Sariel recast by his people’s superstitions into a terrible figure of legend. The rest of the prisoners were not quite so bold. They held well back, nervously singing and keening. ‘You will sample it again soon, if you tarry here. The diviners the grand duke captured are held in cages, blinded with their arms and legs hacked away. Their wounds are sealed with tar and most of them have gone mad from the pain. But even a deranged diviner will eventually come to the conclusion that the best way of getting rid of Jok is to burn him at the stake and scatter his ashes before the Land Mother.’

‘I told you before, noble gad, I carry the title of King of All Stories. I am not Jok, although I believe I did have to impersonate him once to escape being torn apart by horses when I was a guest of the war leader of the northern tribes.’

Zanasi merely shook his head, looking as unconvinced as Jacob, although for different reasons. ‘It is said that Jok always denies his name, in fear that the Land Mother might find him again. Your appearance augurs the fall of the grand duke and the dawn of a great new age.’

‘I haven’t seen many great ages, except in the memories of old men,’ said Jacob.

‘And I doubt if this old scoundrel is to usher one in,’ said Sheplar. ‘Truly, did you fly on your own wings? This is not just another of your ridiculous tales?’

Sariel waved his white beard as if it might lift him high. ‘We do not fly, Rodalian. We
soar
.’

‘I have heard stories of such twisted people,’ said Sheplar. ‘But their kind has never passed as travellers through our canyons. Not in caravans or with the aerial traders.’

Sariel rubbed his forehead roughly. ‘So many stories filling my head, I have forgotten what it is to ascend free. Trapped by dirt and gravity. Maimed by the skels. Is it any wonder my only comfort is my next stride, always another one to be taken?’

It was a strange turn of events. Sariel rendered maudlin by the memories of what he had lost. Their fellow prisoners had formed a circle of veneration around the bard. If you were going to imagine a saviour heralding in a new destiny for your people, a beggarly old rascal who bathed little and boasted much wouldn’t have been Jacob’s first choice. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the fact that they were still prisoners, awaiting a fate highly likely to be fatal if Major Alock had anything to do with its outcome. Jacob brooded for half an hour before the dungeon’s thick door creaked open and a team of slaves entered with a fresh barrel of water, shepherded in by a semicircle of soldiers.

‘So, the grand duke wishes to keep us alive for now,’ observed Khow.

None of the prisoners seemed particularly concerned by the water this time, and the soldiers fanned out, pointing their rifles in the mob’s direction. Behind them, the slaves broke open the barrel, and un­noticed by the guards, began dipping their arms in towards the bottom of the tub. Jacob felt Zanasi’s hand hard on his sleeve. He was being warned to pass no comment. It only took seconds… then a sudden flourishing of sharpened blades from the barrel, the slaves sealing the guards’ mouths with their palms at the same moment they plunged knifes into the startled soldiers’ spines. Soundlessly and almost gently, the guards were lowered to the stone floor while the prisoners kept up their racket, as unsurprised by the turn of events as if slaughtering soldiers were a regular feature of the dungeon’s routine.

Zanasi was fast by the water bearers’ side, Jacob and the others rushing behind him. ‘So, we are to sacrifice our eyes inside the palace?’

The slave he addressed finished wiping the blood off his blade on a guard’s uniform. ‘More than that, Zanasi. I have tripled the potency of the diviners’ drugs. They will be raving for hours, and by the time they have finished, they will be dead.’

‘Better to die free than live as they do.’ Zanasi clasped the slave’s arm. ‘Come with me.’

The slave shook his head and indicated the knife-wielding gads. ‘We will stay here, and sing the songs with our brothers and sisters. When more guards come, they can join these on the floor. You must use your time well, every hour will be precious. When the Hangels follow, it will be with everything.’ He gazed over wide-eyed at Sariel. ‘I never thought I would live to see the day. The Age of the Seventh Sun!’

For once, Sariel wisely held his peace.

‘I haven’t seen much of the palace beyond these cells,’ said Jacob. ‘But I’m presuming it’s well fortified and as tight as a drum.’

‘Very,’ said Zanasi. He walked to the doorway where one of the slaves kept watch, checking the passageway outside remained empty. ‘The word impregnable might have been invented for this citadel. Fortunately, we have long turned the paranoia of the grand duke’s descendants against the present regime.’ He didn’t elaborate, but quickly stepped outside the dungeon, indicating that Jacob and the expedition members should follow silently. Jacob glanced back towards the loud crowd of prisoners. None of the gads strung along. The guards’ bodies were dragged out of sight, their blood cleaned off the cobblestones. Once more, Jacob couldn’t help but be impressed by the discipline and purpose of this proud people. They were all sacrificing their lives, not a single argument or fistfight over who should stay and who should go. He could imagine exactly how badly matters would have run if a hundred or more Weylanders had been imprisoned down here alongside them. They crept away, following an exposed channel in the floor which carried away the prisoners’ urine and night soil. It led down a dead-end of a passage, a small rusted iron drain for the waste to trickle into. Zanasi knelt down. He reached into the drain and thrust his hand in deep, searching for something. Jacob reckoned it wasn’t a turd. Then Zanasi located what he was probing for. A click and a section of the stone wall swung back on a concealed metal cantilever. The stairs of a tunnel were just visible dropping away. Light so dim it was hardly perceptible, falling from a series of intermittent shafts little larger than a box of matches. Zanasi led the way, beckoning them inside. Once they had all climbed inside the narrow passage, he turned the counterweight’s handle and sealed them into near darkness. The smell inside was rank; it seemed they’d be sharing their travels with the dungeon’s sewer channel.

‘Follow me,’ instructed the gad. ‘As fast as you can, while bearing in mind we will be descending for the best part of an hour.’

‘In this vile darkness?’ asked Sheplar.

‘Consider yourself lucky you are leaving the plateau, rather than climbing up it.’

Jacob began the long climb down the steep winding stairs. ‘Someone was expecting to be imprisoned in their own dungeon at some point.’

Zanasi ran a finger along the passage’s rough-hewn stone. ‘The corpses of the builders who dug this secret passage were dumped in the lower city’s rubbish tip centuries ago. One of them wasn’t quite as murdered as the guards that had shot him believed. My people have been using the passage to smuggle messages in and out of the palace from long before I was born.’

‘The grand duke doesn’t know about it?’

Zanasi shook his head. ‘The House of Bragin’s family members are almost as proficient at murdering each other in their feuding for the throne as they are skilled at slaughtering gads. The ruler who commissioned this passage was poisoned a year later by his cousin. His cousin was smothered in his sleep by his sister, and so on and so forth, down the years. I suspect the current grand duke will uncover it now, though. He will search
very
hard to explain our curious disappearance.’ Zanasi gazed back at Sariel, the bard gently grumbling as he wound his way down the tight steps. ‘Another sacrifice. Will it be worth it?’

‘It is to me,’ said Jacob.
It is to my son
. ‘But I reckon your friends back there would have turned up in the dungeon with a barrel full of daggers without us.’

‘How so?’

‘You’re not just a scout. I saw the way you looked at the grand duke in the arena,
Chike Bragin
.’

‘You are sharp-witted, Jacob of Northhaven. I do not use my father’s name… it is washed with too much blood and dishonour. Among the gads, I am simply Chike Zanasi. Only the grand duke issues wanted posters with the name of Chike Bragin still printed on them.’

‘I remember how pissed my son was when I forced him to a trade he didn’t have the heart for. I know how a disappointed son looks at a father.’

‘You are the leader of gad rebellion!’ exclaimed Sheplar, stumbling behind the two of them. ‘You have great heart, to venture so close to your enemies.’

‘Among our people, a leader who will not share his people’s risks will not remain leader for long,’ said Zanasi. ‘And it is not a rebellion I lead. The grand duke does not rule us. The lands outside the city have belonged to the Gaddish since the rising of the first sun. It is not for Pavlorda Bragin to divide every league that may hold a head of wheat and parcel it among his favourites. It is not for the nation of Hangel to erect fences and shoot every creature that dares to cross the arbitrary lines they draw upon their maps.’

‘From what you say, I’m wondering if the grand duke might be distantly related to a man called Benner Landor,’ said Jacob.

‘When we exit the tunnel we will be inside the lower city,’ said Zanasi. ‘I shall pretend to be your guide. Many travellers hire one while they layover during refuelling.’

‘Unless you’ve got a secret passage under the wall, too, I’ll thank you to “guide” us through the same guardhouse we entered by.’

‘We will not need to scale the ramparts. As far as the Hangels are concerned, we are still held within their inescapable royal dungeons. And the soldiers that man the wall are dull-witted hyenas, only concerned with shaking coins out of gads passing through. But why should you care?’

‘I left a couple of friends in the wall’s guardhouse,’ said Jacob, touching the empty belt around his waist. ‘And I’d be right glad to have them introduced to our mutual acquaintance, Major Alock.’

‘The officer will follow you? Pursue you, even into the savannah?’

‘I’m counting on it,’ said Jacob.

Zanasi sighed. ‘Then our fates are bound. For the grand duke will need to take back Jok, to prove to his people that our prophecy lacks the power to end his rule. Every soldier he commands will be thrown into the fray. And he will do it within the week. All the tribes will unite as soon they hear of Jok’s reappearance. The Hangels will want to crush us before we can train and prepare.’

‘Such adulation,’ said Sariel. ‘But why should I be surprised? I have long known the power of a well-told story.’

Yet to Jacob’s eyes, the bard appeared to squirm in discomfort at the thought of being the centre of one he could not so easily weave to his will.

‘You are real, Jok. For all who have eyes to see,’ said Zanasi.

‘As is that treacherous bastard Alock,’ said Jacob.