Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (14 page)

‘Hold it down if you can,’ said Joah. ‘Nothing to mop up puke with in here except our own clothes.’

‘My mother and father, Joah, they’re dead.’

‘I know. We’ve got to be strong for each other now. That’s all we got left, one another. They left the new town as ashes after we flew away from home. Us here, we’re all that’s left of Northhaven now.’

Carter could hold down his gut, but not hold in his tears. He lay down and sobbed for what might have been minutes or hours, until finally he drew himself up. Joah was still there. How long had the man been waiting? Carter hadn’t even noticed. ‘I’m done now, Joah. Where are the guards? I’m going to kill—’

‘Anyone enters the cages, it’s usually other slaves,’ said Joah, holding up a placatory hand. ‘The slavers are called skels. They’re as ugly, twisted and mean up close as they are at a distance. And escape? Well, take a peep out of the porthole. We’re way above the clouds. That’s why it’s so hot up here – the radiation belt is cooking us. And do you feel how light we are? Maybe a quarter less than we were on the ground. Unless you can pilot one of the slavers’ gliders, only way we’re getting off this carrier is when they sell our hide.’

‘Then we take the whole damn carrier,’ said Carter. ‘Stick a bullet in the skull of every twisted bastard on board until we find one willing to land us.’

‘Sure,’ smiled Joah. ‘Maybe then you can run for assemblyman when you get back home, catch the eye of one of the king’s daughters, marry her, and accept the crown when he passes over. If we’re going to stay alive as slaves, Carter, I think we’re going to need to inject a little realism into our schemes.’

‘I’ll be a corpse before I’m a slave.’

‘Well, at least that’s realistic. You want a victory in this hellhole? I reckon staying alive will do.’ Joah pointed to a wooden box-like affair in the corner. ‘That’s the only head, just a hole down onto the sky. Try and reach it if we hit turbulence and you’re feeling delicate.’

Carter was about to reply when a gask in a dusty white toga came up to him. ‘I beg your pardon, but might you have some paper upon your person you could spare me?’

Carter looked into the gask’s green, bearish eyes, as if the twisted man was insane. ‘Paper?’

The gask flourished a charcoal-burnt needle of wood he must have scavenged from the fall of Northhaven. ‘Our captors have stolen my calculator, manling, but they cannot imprison my intellect.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I can evaluate probabilities solely with my mind, but I am faster with a pencil and paper.’

‘Kerge here’s been asking everyone inside the cage,’ said Joah. ‘You might as well check.’

Carter emptied his pockets, coming out with his half of the receipt he had given the travellers at the library for their trade data.
Sure had been meaning to archive that.
‘It’s not much, but it’s blank on the other side.’

The forest man’s leathery face bobbed in appreciation and took it from Carter, his hand juddering as if the receipt was electrified. ‘I know
you
. You are the child of Jacob Carnehan, one of the priests of your people’s faith.’

‘Yes, I’m his son,’ said Carter. ‘How the hell can you tell? Sure didn’t see
you
in church!’

‘Your father preserved my life on the great fractal branch, along with the manling Wiggins. Our means are bonded by his actions. Your father is a noble soul.’

‘He was that, before the bastards flying this slave carrier blew him to pieces.’

‘I do not think that is so,’ said the gask. ‘I could make a truer reading if my calculator was returned, but I do not think the threads between us would appear so heavy if your father’s weight was missing from the world.’

‘You’re saying he’s alive?’

‘It may well be so.’ The twisted man waved the receipt. ‘Your presence here is significant to me. I must see what I can determine using pencil and paper.’

Carter watched him push his way gently through the crowd of prisoners to the other side of the cage, squatting against the fuselage and scribbling across the paper. Could it be true?
No, the gask’s mistaken, as much as I want to believe him. I saw father’s building take a direct hit from a mortar. My old man might have been a pastor, but if God provides those kinds of miracles, I haven’t seen many of them so far.
Carter listened to the distant drone from hundreds of propellers muffled by the fuselage. Every hour, they put more and more distance behind them. Carter felt a well of desperation surge inside his chest, as though he was choking. He wanted to run to the cage’s walls and shake it free
. Do something. Anything!

‘The gask’s a little mad, isn’t he?’ said Joah. ‘I wouldn’t put too much faith in that woodland magic of his.’

‘I saw my father die, right after my mother…’

‘You saw what you saw,’ said Joah. ‘You
know
. Hell if I do. My family might be holed up in the old town, weeping over me. They might be stretched out in the fields minus their skulls. Like as not, we’re all going to our graves not knowing what happened to each other. Odd thing, though…’

‘What?’

‘Check the sun outside. We’re flying south, have been ever since we left home.’

Carter stood up. ‘You sure? Not east? Not north?’

‘Might be flying higher than eagles, but the sun still sets and rises in the same place. Straight south, I swear it.’

‘Sweet saints, but that makes no sense?’

‘Well, they’re slavers, right? Must be a slave market out where we’re heading.’

Carter’s stomach sank further without the need for gravity’s light touch
. We’re going to be travelling further than anywhere I’ve ever heard of, right off the map.
And Joah was right, damn the man. The chances of their ever coming back were slimmer than pine needles. His eyes drifted to his right just in time to see the fist coming towards him. Carter side-stepped by instinct, the punch swinging wide, revealing Caleb at the head of a gang of young men – many of them the recently deputed irregulars he’d led out from the town’s battlements. He backed off as far as he could, bewildered by the sudden attack.

‘This,’ shouted Caleb, raising his other fist, ‘this is on you, Carter Carnehan!’

‘You’ve got to be pranking me…’

‘Get back,’ Joah shouted at the mob, trying to shove them away. ‘What did he do? Invite the slavers to Northhaven? Sell them the blasting powder to burn it to the ground? You followed Carter out of the old town, and nobody had to hold a pistol to your head to make you do it.’

‘You stand aside, Joah. This isn’t on you. Without this fool, I’d be back safe inside the old town.’

Joah tried to stay in their path, but the mob was too strong, flinging him aside. Then they were on top of Carter. He lashed and punched and kicked at them. But the mob shoved Carter into the mesh, giving him the sort of pummelling fit to finish the job before the slavers had taken their turn. Carter could smell the stench of smoked clothes, punch after punch landing. Suddenly there was an abrupt brightness, as if someone had turned on a sun inside the slave pen. This was no natural illumination. Long arclights activated along the chamber’s roof, blinding Carter after the cage’s murky half-light. It had blurred his attackers’ vision too. They stumbled about, all animosities briefly abandoned. Then something Carter struck in the back, flung him forward in a tsunami of water. As Carter slid across the soiled floor, he blinked water out of his eyes to watch a team of leather-clad slaves standing outside the cages wrestling with high-pressure hoses, knocking brawling prisoners down in the torrent. Tall skel guards waited behind the newcomers, well-armed and hissing orders at their house slaves. The servants turned their hoses off, leaving Carter and the others soaked and bruised from the pressure gunning. Carter watched a bandit officer step forward, a large coiled whip tied to his belt. His cruel snouted face turned to either side, examining his produce with contempt. Words came out, mangled by a forked snake-like tongue flickering through his twisted throat. The length of red flesh quivered back and forth over serrated teeth. ‘Me am Si-lishh, slave master of this most noble vessel. Weyland vermin now have the honour of belonging to Duke Si-meliss. Blessings be upon the duke.’ He raised a gloved fist towards the Northhaven mob sprawled in the lake of water. ‘Weylanders young, full of vigour. That is why you selected to serve. But mob cannot be allowed to cull itself. That am job of Si-lishh.’

At his command, a gate in the cage was opened, and a line of the skel guards moved in. As they entered, they lashed out with black rods twice the length of a constable’s truncheon, oily-looking batons sparking as the weapons connected with slaves. Men were flung back, landing writhing on the deck in agony.

The officer raised his voice loud enough for every crowded cage within the chamber to hear him. ‘Some Weylanders grow sick and die. Weylanders weak… they always perish. Skels allow for natural wastage. But skels not allow for bad discipline. Not allow slaves to be fighting each other. This too wasteful. And now, Si-lishh must also be wasteful to demonstrate Weylanders not wild anymore. You am property!’

Carter moaned as he was picked up from the floor by a couple of slavers. The ugly twisted soldiers loomed a foot over his height, muscles as solid as the flanks of a rhino. They pulled Carter and his assailants out of the cage, not a word spoken by the guards as angry, sibilant breaths rasped over their forked tongues. In the cage opposite Carter’s own, he glimpsed faces he recognised pressed against the mesh.
Duncan and Willow, Adella!
Shocked faces and eyes opened wide in recognition at the beaten, bloody form being dragged away before them. What a sorry sight he must appear. Pulled down the chamber’s central gangway, Carter was lugged in front of three cells. Unlike his previous lodgings, these pens couldn’t accommodate more than a handful of slaves inside. The stalls weren’t mesh-walled, but formed from some transparent substance – translucent but as thick as a farmhouse wall. The skel guards threw Carter into the middle of the three cells, then tossed struggling Northhaven men after him, each cell soon packed to capacity with miscreants. Transparent doors slid shut, the voice of the slave master carrying through tiny air holes dotted across the walls. Carter swayed on his feet, steadying himself against the enclosure – cold and oily to the touch, like fish scales.

‘Set timers!’ boomed Si-lishh. His soldiers jumped to it, laying gloved hands on some kind of clockwork mechanism embedded in the wall. Si-lishh turned to face the prisoners caged in the rest of the chamber. ‘Normally Si-lishh set timers to a day or two, to keep things interesting. But slaves’ fight has interrupted meal of Si-lishh, so slaves only going to stay inside punishment cells for five minutes.’

Carter glanced around his cell.
Punishment?
For only five minutes?
They were packed inside a little more crowded than they had been in the main cages, but with the air holes, Carter wasn’t about to suffocate any time soon. He glanced to the cell on his left and saw Caleb staring at him in hatred from the other side.

‘You’re a dead man, Carter Carnehan!’ Caleb yelled, banging the enclosure. ‘There’s not a cage thick enough to protect—’ Caleb’s words were cut off as he stumbled back, the wooden floor opening up beneath him like a bomb-bay hatch. One second he was here, the next he wasn’t. Falling away, a tiny black dot tumbling towards the clouds below. Just like that… maybe seven prisoners sent plummeting into the sky.
The man was an idiot, but he didn’t deserve that!

Carter’s face snapped up when he heard the laughter hissing from the slave master. ‘Guards set punishment cells’ timers. Two hatches open at random. Third cell will stay closed. But even skels do not know which one. This gives guards of Si-lishh something to wager on.’ Si-lishh leaned back rocking with amusement outside the enclosure. ‘Of course, sometimes Si-lishh set all three cells to open. Just for change.’

Carter began trembling. He tried not to, but it was as though he just walked out into a winter night wearing only his underwear. Carter tried to get a grip on himself. He wasn’t going to give the slave master the pleasure of seeing how hard he had to work to keep terror and panic at bay. Around him, men went wild in the two remaining cages; banging on the armoured walls, flinging themselves at the doors.

Si-lishh pulled out a watch on a chain fob from his belt. ‘Three minutes am left. But is it to be one cell or two today?’

Twisted alligator-faced bastards. Punishment cells. You might as well load a single shell inside a pistol, roll the cylinder, point it at your head and squeeze the trigger to see what happens.
Northhaven men threw themselves up the wall in the adjacent cell, fingers digging into the air holes. But the gaps were no bigger than a pencil lead, not enough purchase to hold a piece of paper, let alone a man’s weight. One of the men inside Carter’s cell lurched back at an imagined crack appearing in the floor – his screams mirrored from the cell on their right. Carter dragged his gaze across. Their neighbours had been flushed. Whistling wind from outside beat through the air holes. He could see white clouds through the open hatch; hear the distant humming of hundreds of vast rotors keeping the city-sized slave ship in the air.
And then there was one.

‘Two minutes left,’ laughed the slave master. ‘What Weylanders think? Did Si-lishh set two or three hatches to open this afternoon?’

Carter smashed his fist against the door. He felt the same burning anger he had back at the fall of Northhaven. A desire to break free and crush the eyes out of this twisted man’s skull with his bare hands. ‘Why?’

Si-lishh bent forward, close enough that only Carter could hear the reply. ‘Why? Why not, am better question. Common pattern scum overrun skels’ motherland age ago. Driving survivors into sky. Make nomads of all skels. Am not fitting that skels now make their living from people on ground? Most proper that Si-lishh send Weylanders back to it.’ He checked his watch. ‘One minute left.’

Inside Carter’s cell, the other slaves ran at the walls, trying to hang on for dear life before they met the same fate. Carter slammed his fist into the wall. ‘You’re going to kill me, do it and get it done, but don’t bore me to death.’ Carter slipped to the floor and stared up at the slave master, his face a mask of cold hatred. Si-lishh did not break his gaze, but just stood there, tapping his watch every few seconds. Carter tried to keep calm, each passing second as long as a full day. After an eternity, the cell door cracked open and the guards stepped forward. They smashed back the wave of desperate Northhaven men trying to flee, the spark of weapon prods filling the air.