Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (71 page)

So the pastor came here searching for the wrong Weylanders? Duncan felt the anger rising inside him; so strong it threatened to overwhelm him and choke his words. ‘Where’s my father?’ demanded Duncan. ‘You’re it? You’re the entire expedition? The town’s pastor, a single mountain pilot, a woodland gask and this filthy old tramp? Where’s my
father
? He lost his only son and daughter… where is
he
?’

‘We started out with a company of the king’s guardsmen,’ said Jacob, ‘but some of them were killed and the rest deserted along the way. We had Constable Wiggins with us, too, but he was murdered by savages during the journey.’

‘To hell with the king’s men!’ shouted Duncan. ‘Where’s my bloody father? Was he badly wounded in the raid? Did he lose his legs?’

‘His people needed him back home,’ said Jacob. ‘The workers, everyone who relies on your house for their work and livelihoods. Benner funded our outfit and we’ve come on his behalf.’

Tears rolled down Duncan’s cheeks. ‘We needed him. Willow and I needed him
here
. You came! You came for Carter! Even this gask came for his son, didn’t he?’

‘We would never have made it this far without your pa’s assistance,’ said Jacob.

‘He didn’t give you his money for us,’ said Duncan. ‘That was just a cheque he wrote so he could forget all about his children, wasn’t it? He knew you were going to die! Nobody escapes from the sky mines… nobody ever turns up here searching for slaves.’

‘We’re not dead yet,’ growled the pastor.

The pastor didn’t answer Duncan’s accusations. But then why should he? Jacob Carnehan was a churchman. He only told the truth. And what he’d left unsaid was enough to make Duncan’s mind up for good. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you, Father Carnehan. You can take Willow back home with you if she wants to leave. I’ll pay for your passage myself. But I barely had a home worthy of the name to return to even before I was snatched by the skels. This is my place now – I’m needed here. I’ve seen wider horizons than the tiny little corner of our undeveloped backwater. Northhaven would seem small now.’

‘You’re needed here? I
need
my son!’

‘He will never be freed,’ said Duncan. ‘Carter’s still alive. That’ll have to be comfort enough for you, Father; and for everyone else in Northhaven. Tell them back home that quite a few of us are still alive. I doubt if anyone at Hawkland Park will be interested in the news, but there’ll be families on the hill that will care to know. And you tell my father that I’m not a slave anymore. I’m a citizen. I’m my own man. And I freed Willow too. I did it without him, without Landor money, or his name, or his precious house.’

‘You’re a renegade,’ snarled the pastor. ‘That’s what you call a man who sells out his own people to join the enemy.’

‘I’m the man who’s going to try and save you and your friends’ lives,’ retorted Duncan. He looked with astonishment at the churchman. Jacob Carnehan’s features twisted and contorted. Nothing like the stern, straightforward man who preached peace and gentleness in Northhaven. ‘You can thank me for it later.’ Duncan turned his back on the cage and stalked away with Paetro. Behind him, the churchman howled and shook the cage’s bars as though the prison chamber
was
an asylum. Duncan couldn’t help but feel pity for the pastor. The journey, its travails and the battles his party had fought on the way had clearly left him deranged. But there was little Duncan could do. Not for the pastor’s peace or those still trapped inside the sky mines.

‘That was a hell of a trip they must have undertaken,’ said Paetro. ‘All this way for nothing. The first to have made it. That’s the stuff of legend, lad.’

‘He’s a priest. Perhaps he prayed for a miracle,’ said Duncan. ‘But I don’t think his master is kind enough to grant two.’

Paetro glanced forlornly back towards the holding chamber. To where his daughter awaited her torturer’s arrival. ‘Aye, there’s truth in that. The gods love nothing better than to play with the fates of honest families. It’s always the ones like Apolleon, Circae and Machus who’re given wings to fly above the rest of us.’

‘Jacob Carnehan was lucky getting this far,’ said Duncan. ‘But it’s run out now.’

‘Chance, you say? I’m not so sure. You’re certain he’s a priest?’

‘Of course. I’ve sat in his church enough times to know he can preach until his congregation’s eyelids start to nod.’

‘I’ve seen a man stare at me with those kinds of eyes on the battle­field,’ said Paetro. ‘Never inside a temple.’

‘You can give Lady Cassandra the bad news,’ said Duncan. ‘I’ll see how my sister’s taking hers. My father sent those idiots out here? I’ll send him Willow back for his money.’

‘You don’t want to swap?’ asked Paetro.

‘Are you serious?’

‘The young Highness will take the word about Hesia better if she hears it from you,’ said Paetro. ‘And telling your sister she’s going home… well how bad can that be?’

You don’t know my sister
, thought Duncan. But he acquiesced. In truth, he was glad not to have to see Willow again for a few hours. He’d had more than enough of witless Weylanders judging him, when he was trying to do his best for the cretins. Maybe Willow and the pastor would have been happier if Duncan Landor had stayed in the sky mines to be worked to death? Stayed a slave rather than earning his freedom; confounding their low expectations of him. Poor useless Duncan Landor, who was no good to anyone without his family’s wealth and reputation backing him. A purposeless tool to be discarded by women like Adella as soon as a surer bet appeared. What Duncan had achieved, he’d earned on his own. With nobody to help him. They should have admired him for it, not been filled with jealousy for his feats.

FIFTEEN

UNHAPPY ARRIVALS

‘Oh, my dear vile-tilted crown,’ said Sariel, clutching his head in his hands. ‘My mind feels as though it has been torn in twain. It was a shaky bridge he established… curse the great diviner.’

‘How did it happen?’ demanded Jacob. ‘I remember the gads’ stone circle, their ritual. Then being woken up here, inside another circle, in the grounds of this giant Vandian fortress.’

‘You were thinking of them, weren’t you?’ said Khow. ‘This young manling Duncan Landor and his sister.’

‘Yes, they were on my mind,’ admitted Jacob. ‘The very last thing before I passed out. My boy Carter had quarrelled with Duncan over a girl and they’d fought a duel. A little while later the skels arrived for them both.’

‘Your thoughts were the homing sense that directed us here. My people have always known the stones were ancient, beyond our understanding,’ said Khow. ‘But this? They are gateways, are they not? They pass information.’ The gask talked to Sariel, but the old bard affected not to have noticed his cellmate. They spoke low so the gaoler couldn’t listen in on their conversation, but still, Sariel had heard the question well enough.

‘We’re not damn information,’ said Jacob. ‘We’re people!’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the gask, ‘we are merely points of data. And in a manner of speaking, the entire universe is. Otherwise my people’s calculations could not be brought to focus on mortal matters. Think of the stones as a radio set, but a radio that allows people to be transmitted from one location to another.’

‘You’re right about one thing, this is beyond your woodland magic,’ said Jacob. ‘Sariel, the gads seemed to think you know about the stones and their use…’

‘I knew once,’ whispered Sariel. ‘But the sorcery that controls the runes has been burnt from me. It comes and goes like a dream.’

‘A dream you must remember!’ said Sheplar, the pilot lifting Sariel off the cell’s floor and shaking him in frustration.

‘It is a nightmare. Leave me alone! There are things best forgotten.’

‘Come on, old man,’ urged Jacob. ‘We need your help. If the stones carried us here, they can carry us back home too.’

‘I don’t want to,’ whined the bard. ‘How do you think I ended up with a fraction of my memories and the rest of my head filled with naught but echoes? There are demons that haunt the passages those stones use to pass travellers across the world. Terrible entities. You call them stealers! Devils… evil and capering and endlessly hungry. They caught me using their strange bridges and they almost burnt me to ashes. That’s why I wander the land… why I can never slow, so they might never catch up with me. I am marked by the stealers for the sins of my trespass.’

‘Just tell me about the damn circles!’

‘Sometimes the stones open a gate for me, sometimes they don’t,’ said Sariel, tugging frantically at his beard. ‘The stones have a will of their own. You can only use the stones as a portal to depart once. Each circle draws power from the underworld, immense and terrible energies. The stealers feel it ripped from their hellish plains and trace the energy’s thread to the circle, then they overload the stones in a fierce explosion so there is one less source to rob them in future.’

‘So we can still use those stones out in the grounds to escape?’ asked Jacob.

‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Sariel. ‘But the stones outside will be destroyed by the stealers soon enough. Exiting a gate doesn’t rob the stealers of their power, but it does leave a ripple in their world, a current they can track. It may take a day or two, but the stealers will hunt down the stones we exited by and overload them too, place the circle beyond our use.’

‘Then we have to make sure the Landor boy releases us to his sister’s care before then,’ said Jacob. He wasn’t sure what to believe of the tale the mad old bard had told them. But there was one thing that certainly wasn’t one of Sariel’s crazy stories. They had crossed an impossible distance faster than anything alive should have been able to. Maybe they had trespassed into hell to reach Vandia? Jacob would gladly strike a deal with the stealers to get Carter back.
You might yet have to
.

‘We must escape,’ begged Sariel. ‘The stealers will come in search of me. They loathe the prince of players for tapping into their dark powers. They will hunt me and try to incinerate me again.’ He gazed out at the gaoler lounging behind his table, tucking into a plate of steaming meat. ‘They could come to us as anyone. That is why they’re called stealers… you can’t trust your friends, your family. It is the faces and bodies of those closest to you that they steal to cavort in.’

‘And their souls,’ said Jacob. ‘And we’re here to save my son’s. Damned if I’ll be packed off home by that Landor whelp like a piece of unwanted baggage.’ He remembered a passage from the Bible he used to work into his sermons.
Beware the devils that steal into your heart and turn your hand to evil
.
Beware such stealers and turn your hand only to good deeds
. If that was a warning for him, he was about to throw it out of the window. Nobody was going to stop him getting to the sky mines. Not Duncan Landor or the Vandians. And good deeds weren’t what it was going to take.

‘There will be nothing left of me this time,’ moaned Sariel. ‘Nothing left of my mind once they have crushed me again.’

‘Stop bleating, smelly one,’ said Sheplar. ‘It will not free us from here.’

In the cage next to theirs, its sole prisoner, the woman, called out to their gaoler. She sounded loud and desperate. ‘Lend me your blade. You used to be in the legion, didn’t you? Grant me a clean death.’

‘And reserve a bad one for me, when the torturer arrives and finds only a corpse to question?’ He laughed. ‘Better you than I, Hesia!’ She fell back to the floor, hugging her legs.

‘Misery loves company,’ said Jacob, shaking his head. The woman had looked wretched enough before. Jacob and the expedition had been the main audience when a young girl had slipped inside the cell block… the chief imperial’s daughter, as it transpired, obviously used to getting her way, shrieking and crying about the imprisoned woman’s base treachery. Until a party of guardsmen turned up, summoned by the gaoler to whisk Lady Cassandra far away from the dungeon level. Jacob sighed. So near, only to end up trapped here. Waiting on the good graces of Duncan Landor to convince his new friends the expedition posed no threat and deserved to be allowed home.
We’ll be lucky if they don’t turn up with a firing squad
. He paced the cell, waiting hours for Duncan to return. But when a new visitor did arrive inside the holding chamber, it was Willow Landor, her face streaked with tears and red from crying.

‘Dear god! Father Carnehan, it
is
you. I thought that they had made a mistake – that Duncan had asked the Vandians to mock me, telling me a pack of complete nonsense. But you’re here!’

‘So it seems,’ said Jacob. ‘We’ve come for you, for Carter, for everyone.’

‘The Vandians won’t free the sky miners for money,’ said Willow, her eyes glancing between the prisoners in the cage. He could see the hope dying in her eyes. Just the four of them against an empire. ‘As slaves we can mine more trading metal in a single hour than you can have possibly carried here.’

‘We used our funds getting to the empire and the rest was stolen,’ admitted Jacob.

‘It’s a wonder you are here at all. Duncan’s soldier friend told me you built a rocket-powered aircraft, similar to the Vandians’ vessels. Is it still operable?’

‘Would you want to come back with us?’ said Jacob. ‘Your brother seems to have turned native.’

‘He thinks he’s a Vandian lord now,’ said Willow. ‘He’s a fool.’

‘And Carter’s alive?’

‘Yes,’ she said, holding back her tears again. That was when Jacob knew he could trust her. There were a lot of things you could fake. The lie behind their strange arrival, maybe, but not what this girl felt towards Carter. ‘He’s in a bad way, though. They flogged Carter for trying to escape and have been punishing him ever since. It’s not just his body that’s broken either. He believes he’s being sent visions, seeing terrible things. I think captivity is driving him insane.’

Jacob glanced back to Sariel, moaning and shaking on the floor. He imagined Carter, freed and broken, wandering the world far-called, tramping down an endless road in search of a long lost life like poor, mad Sariel. Looking for his mother and his dead brothers. Comforting himself with alcohol. Never finding them. Tears came to Jacob’s eyes. He wished Mary was still here. She would know what to do, how to heal him. Jacob understood what was needed to free his son, but how to mend what had been broken? He reached through the bars, touching the girl’s fingers. ‘Nothing we can’t fix, Willow.’

‘No touching!’ shouted the gaoler. ‘Back there, he could snap your neck in a second.’

Jacob stepped away, something round and hard pushed into his palm. He gazed down. It was a small round brooch.

‘Damn you!’ swore Willow. ‘I came here to reassure you and you dare to steal from me!’

The guard drew a metal rod from his table, a rubber-insulated shaft of barbed steel that started sparking as soon as he pressed a button on its hilt. He strode around Willow. ‘You damn tinkers, you never learn,’ he snarled. ‘If it’s not tied down, you’ll steal it. Out of their reach, madam. A broken rib or two might teach these dogs to respect our house.’ He slapped his stick against the cage, and its bars sparked with energy, Sheplar yelping as he removed his fingers from the metal.

The gaoler laughed, but the sound turned to a croak as Willow sapped him from behind, a little black sack weighted with lead dangling in her hand. He tumbled limply against the cage to fall still against the bars.

‘Give me the brooch,’ ordered Willow. Jacob passed it to her and she tossed it to the other cage where the woman imprisoned inside caught it,

‘My father sent you?’ said Hesia.

‘He told me you would recognise it,’ said Willow. ‘And that you’d take a chance at exile over an appointment with an imperial torturer.’

‘Yes,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘I will, to save my sister’s life.’

‘A few more than that,’ said Jacob.

Willow dipped down to the gaoler’s belt, removing a silver card tied to a keychain. She ran the card through a steel box against the wall, its hatch springing open and revealing the keys to every cage. Willow walked to the cell holding the Vandian woman first. ‘Your father told me there’s a fast long-range munitions ship on the field next to the kerosene-liquid-oxygen tanks, fully fuelled and due to leave soon. You can fly it to the sky mines?’

‘Cross the dead zone? But there’s nothing there. The southern border’s closer.’

‘We’re going north,’ said Willow, firmly. ‘Agree, or you can stay and your father can find another fool to take the blame for springing you.’

‘So be it.’ Hesia stared across at Jacob. ‘But I’ll have your word in return that you won’t let the empire take me alive. Put a bullet in my head or a blade in my heart if it comes to it.’

Jacob nodded grimly from inside his cage. ‘You won’t fall into their hands alive… my word on it.’
That won’t be the difficult part in all this madness
.

Willow released the Vandian and then opened the Weylanders’ cage, Jacob and the others spilling out. Jacob lifted his gun belt off the hook on the wall and recovered his travel pack as his companions collected their possessions. Khow fiddled with his abacus box and had to be chivvied towards the chamber’s exit, vainly trying to calculate their fate as Sariel and Sheplar waited to brave the fortress proper.

Hesia found a domed pilot’s helmet on a shelf, strapping it over her head and pulling down a mirrored visor to conceal her bruised face. She opened a locker with spare guard uniforms and tossed them at the Weylanders. ‘Put these on. The castle is still packed with guests who’ve travelled here for a diplomatic summit. If we are stopped, you are servants heading to the landing field to make your master’s craft ready to depart. We have at least an hour before the next gaoler’s shift starts.’

Jacob was impressed she had watched the guards. He hadn’t spent enough time inside the holding area to work out the pattern. They had only just stepped into the corridor when Jacob halted them. ‘Forgot something. Wait here a second.’

Jacob ducked back into the chamber, dragging the unconscious gaoler into a cage. Then he slipped his knife out, placed his hand hard over the man’s mouth and plunged the blade deep into his heart. The man trembled slightly in the second it took him to die; the gaoler’s last breath warm and faint against Jacob’s fingers. He could never be allowed to tell his mistress of Willow’s part in this. Let them wonder if she’d been abducted during the prison break. How many times had Jacob crawled across battlefields in the Burn to silence sentries like this? Years before, but now it was as though he had never buried his recollection of the act.
His
memories again, not those of another man. Jacob pulled the dirty white collar of a pastor from his shirt and tossed it into the pooling blood. The Vandians had stolen the quietest part of his life, ripped it right from him. Now they would face the rage that filled that silence. Jacob locked the door to the cage and re-joined the others.

‘You found what you forgot?’ asked Sheplar.

Jacob grunted and they moved off.
My soul be cursed, but
I believe I have
.

Duncan went searching for his sister, leaving Lady Cassandra with Paetro; the young noblewoman hard at work in a draughty hall with one of the empire’s most famous gymnasts, balancing on a wooden horse while the tutor strode around her, barking out commands. It was typical of Willow to get lost so soon after she had arrived. True, the Castle of Snakes sprawled across the cliffs overlooking the sea, corridors and passages and chambers across multiple levels, below and above ground, but she should have wit enough to ask one of the house’s many retainers how to find her way back to her rooms. He reached the hangars with a view to going outside and checking the gardens when he noticed that Princess Helrena had arrived to greet new visitors. Duncan cursed his luck. Apolleon again, a retinue of hoodsmen standing menacingly at the man’s back. Whatever the head of the secret police wanted this time, he was going far beyond civility in demanding it. He appeared to be having a heated argument with the princess. With Apolleon’s party positioned in the middle of the open blast doors, the only way to avoid him would be to turn back. Duncan decided to walk past and hope he wasn’t noticed.