Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (8 page)

‘What, the saints wrote some passages on bandit tactics that I missed out on?’

‘Don’t be smart with me, boy. That’s the way it’ll happen. Don’t look to fight them. They’re not some pony-riding barbarian horde aiming to settle here. They’re raiding for the corn oil and any trade metals and valuables not nailed down or buried. They’ll hit hard and fast and brutal. Anyone that stands against them is a corpse. Their reputation is all the baggage they’ve got up there.’

‘What’s the point of me passing through the cadet force if I can’t take a stand?’

‘I’m glad the territorials aren’t here, boy. They’re good for scaring off wolves from the livestock in the winter, but bandits like those devils up there, if their raiders haven’t left a trading caravan looted and dead on the road at least once a week, they’re not pulling their weight.’

Despite the chill in the air, Carter was sweating by the time they arrived home. His father banged on the door and got their mother out, pointing to the sky and growling out the town’s predicament in a quick, terse explanation. Mary Carnehan sucked in her cheeks, shielded her eyes with her hand, looking up at the approaching aircraft as if this was just one more thing sent to try her patience this morning. Might as well have been a cloud of locusts looking to strip the town of its harvest. Carter had to admit he was impressed; secretly proud, even.
No hysterics. No flapping or cursing or tears.
Just a couple of seconds to get a handle on the situation and then she was straight to business.

‘What tune will you be ringing?’

‘There’s only plague bells or fire bells,’ said Jacob. ‘And people hear the former and they’re as like to lock themselves inside their house as scurry out for the old town.’

‘Ring them loud.’ She thumped Carter on the arm. ‘Don’t just stand there, boys, get to it.’ She started to go back inside the porch, but Jacob grabbed her. ‘Leave the cutlery and altarware.’

‘Stick the church’s finery,’ said Mary. ‘I’m going to grab my school bell and rouse the neighbours. The Littimer boys have just left for the distillery and Leanna Littimer sure isn’t going to be good for pushing her old man up to the gates in his wheelchair.’

Jacob shook his head as she ran back inside. ‘Just once, maybe someone could do what I ask.’ He produced the key for the bell tower and they sprinted for the church. Above the woods where Carter had duelled Duncan Landor, the massive bandit carrier was circling slowly, lazily, clouds of smaller planes beginning to drift away from her black belly. Monoplanes with a single propeller up front, as larger gliders slid into the sky from their hangars – silent and gull-like as they rode thermals rising from the valleys. The attack was happening just as Jacob Carnehan had described, as if the saints had sent his old man’s predictions as a vision. From the north, a more familiar sight arrowed towards the city-sized bandit carrier, a tiny triangle, bright blue with two friendly red stripes on its fuselage, a single small rotor spinning at the back. It was a Rodalian aircraft, a solitary flying wing from the mountain people’s skyguard.

‘Look, Father!’ called Carter. He pointed out the diminutive dart vectoring in against the storm of raiders discharged by the carrier.

‘Sweet saints,’ whispered Jacob as he unlocked the bell tower. ‘There goes the unluckiest man in the whole Rodalian nation.’

‘Or the bravest,’ said Carter.

‘Won’t make any difference,’ said his father. ‘A single flying wing against twenty bandit squadrons.’

‘Have the element of surprise, though.’

‘Surely will have that. Let’s get it done, boy. Fill the streets with our people.’

Carter entered the gloom of the belfry and grabbed one of the bell-pulls, putting his back into the work as counterpoint to his father – two peels to every three his father was pulling, sounding the fire warning until the ropes were practically lifting him off his feet. They went at it for a good few minutes, raising hell fit to wake the dead in the graveyard out back, ringing the bells until Carter’s skull throbbed from the sound. Their fire warning was to prove prophetic. Carter and his father traded the bell tower’s twilight for the churchyard, finding the first fighters from the bandit carrier diving down, trailed by banshee screams as they descended. Dark packages unlocked from under the planes’ wings and continued plummeting as the aircraft pulled up. Geysers of flame erupted as each bomb struck, columns of burning embers settling and sparking fires across the timber roofs. Carter recognised the ordnance, remembering the day the old territ­orial sergeant had brought along a variety of cannon rounds to show the cadets. One cannonball in particular, packed with tar and cloth fuses trailing like mouse-tails.
Incendiary shot.

‘We’ve rung our alarm true,’ said Carter, watching people gathering in the street beyond the church’s walls.

‘They’re landing bombs on the new town, not inside the battlements,’ noted his father, looking up at the screaming gull-winged dive-bombers, ‘where the buildings are stone and won’t catch alight so quickly. That’s where we need to be… up the hill. Find your mother!’

Two fighters zoomed overhead, hardly higher than the bell tower; a couple of seconds in the air above and then they were gone. Carter ducked at the low pass, the propellers on each nose a circular blur. Just enough time for Carter to see them passing as gaudy as a traveller’s caravan. Not neat and uniform like the Rodalian Skyguard’s flying wings. These aircraft had been painted with bands of rainbow colour, unfamiliar animals pictured on the fuselage as elaborate as a sailor’s tattoos. Their engines reverberated louder than any machine Carter had heard before, the deep roar of beasts, throaty and powerful. Any other day, Carter would have loved to watch such aeroplanes passing over their backwater
. Don’t look half so wondrous when they’re raining destruction down on you, though.
In the distant sky a handful of their brethren twisted, dogfighting with the Rodalian flying wing, planes rolling and barrelling around each other. The battle was fought like crows mobbing a hawk, the small swift triangle falling through the flock whirling around it, seemingly too tiny to be torn out of the sky. Carter could just hear the distant thud of guns mounted along their side, bullets traded invisibly at this distance. Plaintive fingers of black smoke from the burning town reached up towards the duelling aircraft, black spirals blown into shreds by passing bandit fighters. Higher still, the massive carrier circled, extra waves of gliders launching from its hangars. When the carrier’s shadow fell on the edge of town, it was as though a stormfront was passing over; sunlight cut off, the only illumination from the fires spreading and raging across the new town.

Chaos reigned in the streets. Almost everyone had come out to see why the bells were sounding, finding not a single fire but dozens burning across the houses and shops and mills of the new town. Some of the Northhaven citizens had formed fire lines, buckets passed from wells and troughs and public fountains. Others dragged panicking horses out from stables; attempting to load up with as many personal possessions and family members as their beasts could bear. A few people fled along the roads out of town, even as the circuit of the huge bandit aircraft passed directly over the woods and fields beyond, bandit gliders drifting down towards the cornfields and river landing. In front of Carter, the balance of the town surged for the old city and the relative safety of the hill’s battlements, streets congested by people. They jostled an exodus in the opposite direction as wagons and carts full of goods tried to head away from town. Northhaven wasn’t home for the travellers and peddlers – they’d only feel safe on the open road or concealing their trading caravans under a forest canopy. Northhaven’s market day would be one to remember. Now local historians would have something to record to liven up their jour­nals. Northhaven, a town where dropping a cornhusk was an event most years.

‘Get moving into the old town!’ yelled Jacob, shepherding people up the hill and towards the battlements. ‘When you pass the gate, head for basements and storm cellars!’ He began shouting at families desperately loading up carts, wheelbarrows, horses – anything that moved – with as many of their belongings as they could lay their hands on. ‘This is your wife’s lucky day, Rufus, she’s getting new plates this year. Dump your cart and haul your family through the western keep while it’s still open. Mary Frances, you planning on moving house this afternoon? Then leave now. Cole, you born in a sheep pen? No? Then quit wandering around the street like a lost lamb and move with a
purpose
!’

Carter’s mother appeared, pushing old man Littimer, the gnarled invalid cursing and hollering in his three-wheeled hospital chair, its pine frame bumping over the cobbles set in the road. Mary Carnehan steered it around abandoned wagons and through the scared jostling mass of townspeople. She had Carter helping in a second, the wailing Littimer grandchildren – no more than three years old – one under each of his muscular arms, thrashing about as they fled up the slope for the battlements. It got more and more crowded as roads narrowed towards the wall and the old town. Occasionally the bandit fighters overshot him, colourful streamers on their wings angrily flapping as they roared over low. The raiders appeared empty of incendiary bombs to release and didn’t seem inclined to waste expensive wing-gun ammunition on the panicked mobs below. The fires in the new town grew worse higher up the rise. Maybe due to the buildings being packed in tighter, maybe because the high sheriff’s men manned the wall, heavy rifles mounted on iron stands tracking planes and loosing off the odd shot, and the raiders retaliated by smoking the defenders’ aim. Barrage balloons bobbed at intervals along the ramparts, big brown canvas bags shaped like cigars. They had each been stitched with the royal crest of Weyland, the black boar, as if to tell the bandits which nation was doing the defending in this town. Hell, if they had heard the corn oil harvest had just been collected, they knew that much already. Probably didn’t care either way. Just pockets that need picking, and easier to steal from someone already kicked down to the floor. Up above, the mismatched aerial defence of the town finally ended, the remains of the Rodalian flying wing corkscrewing towards the woodland leaving a black coil of burning smoke in its wake. There was a nest of contrail tentacles where the brief combat had been fought. He hadn’t gone alone. In his wake he’d left half a dozen bandits scratched out of the sky, as many more fighters desperately limping back towards the carrier streaming smoke and flames. The Rodalian pilot had experienced one small piece of luck, anyhow… surviving for now. A white parachute drifting towards the town, caught by the suction of fires raging across the town in the chilly breezeless morning. Bandit planes arrowed past the chute, not bothering to plug the Rodalian pilot with cannon fire. A display of gallantry between fellow pilots?
Doubtful
. The bandit fliers were probably running light on ammunition after their aerial duel. Carter could see where the parachute was heading – a couple of streets over and lower down the hill’s slope. The Magnus Brewery, burning brighter than any of the surrounding rooftops, green-painted boards spewing flames from its high windows. Down the chute floated, catching on a loading beam poking out a third storey warehouse door. The pilot was left hanging like a puppet with cut strings, boots thrashing.
Can’t cut the chute from that height. It’s a choice between plummeting to death or staying put and being roasted alive.

Carter pointed the pilot’s predicament out to his parents.

‘He’s still alive,’ said his mother.

‘That flier risked his life to help the town,’ said Carter. ‘I’m not going to leave him strung up there like a chicken dangling on the spit.’

‘Don’t suppose there’s any point asking you to stay here?’ Jacob asked his son.

Carter shrugged. His father already knew the answer to that question.

Mary Carnehan pushed the wheelchair over to one of their neighbours, Carter passing the care of the children tucked under his arms to the same family. His mother returned to stand in front of his father. ‘You fixing to head over there and pray him down, Mister Carnehan?’

‘Not if I’ve got you to nag him down, Mrs Carnehan.’

Trying to head back down the hill was like wading against a tide. People were desperate now, shoving and shouldering each other as the fear of fire became panic. Some yelled angrily at Carter and his family as they pushed through, others not even seeing him, eyes fixed on the safety of the old town. Carter and his parents had to avoid the smaller passageways between buildings; many already blocked by burning debris. Taking one of the larger cobbled roads that circled the hill, they came back on the brewery, flames lapping around Ale Hill. Street lamps were still burning, too early in the morning for the lamplighters to have finished their circuit extinguishing the previous night’s work. Little fire risk from those lamps now, not with the windows of the brewery building crackling and exploding. Something about the scene put Carter in mind of sitting in the stalls of the town’s theatre. Maybe it was the back of the street hollowed out so just the frontage was left standing, like a flat piece of scenery in the wings. He gazed at the surreal sight of Northhaven burning and imagined the leaping blaze as red tissue paper waving from windows, an actor struggling and twisting in the tangled remains of his parachute.

There he is.
The pilot looked to be male; stranded three storeys up and suspended from a gantry crane, its wooden arm creaking as the rest of the brewery crumbled. One of the building-fronts came tumbling down ahead of Carter, landing across the street in an outrush of burning timbers and sparks. Carter glanced inside the brewery entrance. Too much fire and smoke to even begin to see the staircase inside. No way up to the roof to try and release the pilot. The interior of the brewery was a death trap.

‘I don’t think we can get to the roof to bring him down,’ said Carter.

His father gazed up at the figure. Carter could watch the pilot’s kicking legs growing weaker, enveloped in waves of black smoke from the burning brewery.
Brave devil’s going to suffocate from smoke inhalation before he burns.