Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (32 page)

Anna laughed to see the two of them alive. ‘Carter Carnehan. Hero of the dispossessed. King of the slaves.’

‘I’m nobody’s slave. Just a Weyland man stuck on a rock.’

‘That’s as maybe, but you’re going to sweat like a slave, Northhaven, we all are.’ Anna pointed to the increasing tempo of fiery rain outside. ‘That’s building up to a full-scale eruption, and Princess Helrena, she’ll be wanting herself a nice fresh rock full of something expensive. Trust me: she’s one lady none of us wants to disappoint.’

SEVEN

OUT OF THE NATION

If Talekhard was a city that never slept, it must be, Jacob mused, because of the constant roar of aircraft landing and taking off. Visitors might as well adopt the consensus view and sup on the teat of the non-stop stream of vice and licentiousness available to the city’s guests. Jacob needn’t have worried about a pastor, gask and mountain pilot drawing inquisitive stares arriving at the city. They might as well have painted their maintenance train red and ridden the line all the way into the town’s central station while dancing naked on top of the engine car for all the notice anyone would have taken of their arrival. Abandoning the train in a siding and walking in the remainder of the journey had been, it transpired, overcautious. Talekhard sprawled across a flat rocky saltpan, hemmed in by canyon walls twenty miles distant – empty ground ideal for planes to land, take off and taxi across. But the city made up for the remoteness of its location by importing all the taverns, gambling dens, bawdy houses, fighting pits and race tracks that any aircrew on leave could desire. It made Northhaven and its visiting sailors look like a serene saints’ day service in front of Jacob’s altar. All the constables Jacob spotted wore port authority uniforms, and short of arresting locals stabbing someone for their wallet, there didn’t seem much in the way of enforcing the laws going on. Maybe that’s what being a free port meant.
Free
to do anything shy of murdering a fellow reveller on ground leave. Stevedores from the freight yards mingled with aircrew from a hundred nations, every colour and hue of humanity weaving and wobbling and deaf to the roar of arriving aircraft kicking up clouds of dust from the flats. Space to land even the largest of flying machines – six-hundred-propeller carriers filled to the gunnels with cargo. The landing staff had their work cut out, galloping across the flats on geldings and flashing landing pennants at circling craft. Trying to clear space for bigger craft. Keeping the ground organised for a mosquito storm of smaller planes acting as shuttles for those carriers too large to land. Fuel traders dodged through the field staff, flashing signs that advertised their prices and fuel purities towards the air as though they were penitents waving prayers at heaven. Jacob and his friends arrived from the direction of the salt flats, mingling anonymously among passengers and crew leaving their parked aircraft.

They briefly stopped for Jacob to pump one of the landing-field men for information on where the cheapest ticket agents in town might be found. Then they entered the free port proper. Talekhard’s crowded streets reflected the diversity of visiting carriers. Transients from nations that were just names on the maps in a library hold. Women in thick fur stoles with bare tattooed arms, dancing wildly outside a tavern; twisted seven-foot giants tight in neat military-style uniforms with extendable javelins strapped to their backs; aircrews wearing an eclectic wardrobe of clothing collected during life-long one-way passages across the endless surface of the world. Among these eccentric, exuberant crowds, the twisted people seemed almost tame. Street hawkers yelling their trades assailed Jacob, the din of horse-drawn cabs and rickshaws trundling through the busy avenues, touts for the music halls and taverns and gambling dens trying to outcry each other. Drunks ejected from paradise with their funds exhausted. Doxies for the molly houses calling crude entreaties from the windows above. Preachers from a dozen religions and sects proselytising to the lost – and very few visitors showing much interest in what the priests had to sell. It was hard to tell who, between Khow and Sheplar, was the more shocked by this sin city’s peacock flash of feathers… as far removed from the quiet life of the forest people and the hand-to-mouth living of the mountain folk as was possible to imagine. There was another difference from Northhaven. A free port meant free to carry weapons too. Most of the travellers and passengers strolled around the streets with the weight of knives, swords, pistols and rifles strapped to their person. There were no guardhouses at Talekhard to hand in weapons. Jacob felt for the brace of pistols beneath his duster
. The uniform of a pastor or the uniform of a bandit. Which suits me better, in a hole like this?

‘How can an entire population function intoxicated?’ wondered Khow. In many matters, the gask was as wise as a woodland owl; but faced with the works of man, he was often left stupefied.

‘They’re just visiting for the most part,’ said Jacob. ‘This is the first time most of the visitors will have walked solid ground for months. This isn’t so much a city, Khow. Think of it as a pressure valve on one of those boilers your people are so adept at fixing up.’

‘It’s a wonder they’re fit to return to the air after shore leave taken here,’ said Sheplar.

‘You just judge the air-worthiness of their craft,’ said Jacob. ‘Find us a reliable carrier. Leave the state of the crew’s souls to the saints.’

Sheplar patted the pocket where he had secreted his share of the remaining money. ‘I fear we will end up sharing a pen with goats.’

‘We don’t have time to visit the radiomen and send to Benner Landor for extra funds. Major Alock and his troops are going to be riding the next train that comes in.’

Jacob hadn’t forgotten the matter of the strange miniature radio set. The one thing that made less sense than all the rest of this affair. An illicit device that could signal ahead to Talekhard. Whatever waited for them here, whoever might be coming from behind, Jacob didn’t have time to deal with it – not with his child taken to the other end of the globe.

‘The comfort of our trip is of no importance,’ said Khow. ‘We must book passage south and begin to close the distance.’

‘And you’re sure our people have stopped travelling?’ asked Jacob.

‘Yes, they have halted. I believe they have reached their destination,’ hummed the gask. ‘My son’s position has remained unchanged for too long for their layover to be a mere refuelling stop.’

‘A slave only has value when he’s put to work,’ said Jacob. ‘Until then, he’s just a food bill and the cost of a cage. Well, we’ve got money enough to rent a hotel room here. No more than a night, to be on the safe side.’

‘Major Alock’s men…’ said Sheplar.

‘Yes, they’ll be coming for us. We need to get ourselves a berth in the air before they get here.’

‘He’s a serpent,’ spat Sheplar. ‘For an officer to betray his oath so easily—’

‘There were a couple of thousand good reasons inside Landor’s money chests.’
Round, metal and shiny.
Jacob’s mind drifted to the impossibly advanced radio the guardsman had been using.
And if we’re real lucky, robbing the party is the only motive for silencing us.
‘Alock’s people are going to want us dead before we stand before an honest magistrate. We need to find a flight broker and see how far we can get on what we’ve got left. Then we can make the decision whether it’s wiser to stay and wait on fresh funds from Benner Landor or light on out of here.’

‘Will your rich friend in Northhaven send more money if you radio him?’ asked Sheplar.

That’s a real good question.
‘I don’t doubt Benner loves his children.’ But he’d already written them off as dead and the pursuit as a fool’s errand. And given how matters had begun out here, could Jacob really blame the landowner?

Not for the first time, doubts welled inside Jacob – not only their pursuit, but the direction he was following. The gask’s understanding of maps had increased with familiarity, but the distances he described made absolutely no sense to Jacob. The slavers had flown far further and faster than the range a bandit carrier should be able to cover in the time between the raid and Jacob’s arrival in Talekhard.
If Khow’s correct, we could be flying south for decades.
What if the distances involved had skewed the gask’s homing instinct? Maybe Carter really was languishing in a slave market in the Burn… being whipped into the service of one of the local warlords, handed a rusty sword and marched onto a distant battlefield? Jacob could hardly stand the thought.
My son maltreated, while I’m heading off in the wrong direction, chasing wood magic.
Jacob hadn’t even left Weyland yet, and he had already lost Wiggins. Jacob couldn’t afford to leave three more graves scattered across the world’s endless acres, while a slave’s brutish existence whittled Carter’s life shorter, day by day.
Dear God, Mary, tell me that I’m doing the right thing by him. Just give me a sign.
But none came. Only the raucous free port’s revelry. A thousand drunken strangers pressing through the streets, and not one who gave a damn for the look of agony creasing Jacob’s face.

Sheplar returned to Jacob and Khow’s table, the sad look on the flier’s normally effusive face speaking volumes for his luck in finding a crew willing to take the three of them on as passengers for what they had to pay. Jacob glanced around the lobby of the
Red Roof Coffeehouse
. The lobby looked more like a livestock auction than the ground floor of any coffee-house back home; brokers mingling with passengers, merchants with freight that needed shipping. Wasn’t much coffee being consumed, either – not compared to the beer and spirits available. Mirrored walls made the throng appear a dozen times larger. Staff manoeuvred through the tables and a fog of cigar smoke, carry­ing the orders that were the price of entry to this de facto trading pit.
So many brokers, and not a sniff of a damn passage south to be had for the slim funds we’ve got.

‘They are asking for twice as much as we have left,’ admitted Sheplar.

‘I’ve booked passage on ships before, and I seem to remember them being a lot cheaper than this,’ said Jacob.

‘The wind that fills a clipper’s sails is free, Jacob of Northhaven,’ said Sheplar. ‘Sadly, that is not the case for the fuel keeping a free trader in the air… even running at altitude with a fast trade wind behind its wings.’

‘Couldn’t we offer to work out our passage? A pilot as good as you – there must be airmasters in the port willing to take us on?’

‘Merchant carriers are owned by clans,’ said Sheplar. ‘They might accept me as crew through marriage and blood – but no other way. Pilots are the elite. It is an honour jealously reserved and guarded.’ Sheplar lifted one of their remaining coins. ‘If we are to fly, only
these
will gain us our cabins. If only we had more…’

‘I can send that message to Benner begging for extra funds. But I reckon Major Alock’s killers will be here hunting us long before another chest of money turns up.’

‘Money,’ said Khow, ‘is a troublesome concept.’

Jacob shrugged. ‘A lot of the world’s problems come from too much of it, friend, and the rest from not enough of it.’
Not to mention coveting it too fiercely. Poor Wiggins lying dead on the border speaks volumes for that.

‘I have never begrudged a warrior’s meagre salary until now,’ said Sheplar.

‘Well, we are where we are. Wishing won’t make it otherwise.’

Even so, neither of Jacob’s companions voiced doubts about con­tinuing without the ransom money.
Rich in mettle, if not in more material matters.
Jacob looked at Sheplar. ‘If we had the money, who would you choose to transport us?’

Sheplar indicated a couple of men in simple grey jackets that Jacob might have mistaken for monks’ habits, save for the heavily tattooed arms emerging from the sleeveless sackcloth. Both airmen had identical long black beards with their remaining hair cropped short. ‘They are crewmen from Touriel. Their carrier is called the
Night’s Pride
, rated at seven-hundred rotors. Large and safe. Pilots from their state are said to be solid and reliable. Best of all, they are flying towards the far south. Few layovers, no diversions.’

Jacob grunted. That was the sort of flight they needed. His nightmare was that they’d use what funds they had to begin the trip, only to end up in a foreign port down the line without friends, money, influence, or any idea how to complete the rest of the journey. To catch up with Carter and the others, they had to travel fast, go by air all the way. Otherwise, the three of them would end up fulfilling Benner Landor’s doubts. Living off the land, travelling by caravan and sailing ship, and dying of old age before they got within a thousand miles of any child of Northhaven. There was no helping it. Some things you couldn’t plan for – you just had to do.
Find Carter. Free my son. Return with my son.
Any one of those tasks seemed impossible, right now. But they always would be, as long as he believed they were. Jacob lifted the bottle of wine he and Sheplar had been drinking from. ‘It’s not too late for you, Sheplar. If Khow and I divide the money between the pair of us, we can pay for a flight south, even if it’s only to the end of the league. Out there we could radio begging messages to Benner Landor from relative safety. You could travel north back to Rodal.’

Sheplar shook his head. ‘The vow of a skyguard officer is not circumscribed by distance, Jacob of Northhaven. Any more than the bond that exists between father and son.’

Jacob shrugged sadly. Without the protection of the soldiers and Benner’s funds, this was looking less like a rescue mission, and more like two parents following their grief on a suicide mission.

‘We are with you in this, manling,’ said Khow. ‘To the bitter end.’

I don’t want a bitter end. I want Carter home with me, whole and safe.
An upsurge of voices rose to their side. Someone stumbled back into their table, spilling drinks across the lacquered floor. The broker who had fallen into them drew away, apologising profusely, and Jacob started as he saw the figure at the centre of the altercation. It was the vagrant bard, Sariel. A party of gold-uniformed airmen had thrown him to the floor, one of them pointing an angry finger at the rascal. ‘When you sing songs, old man, take care you do not impugn our country!’

Sariel’s walking staff had fallen to the floor, along with the tramp’s tattered backpack. From where Jacob sat, he could see the money piled inside the sack, a solitary coin rolling out for him to stop with his boot and scoop it up. On one side was the royal boar of Weyland, on the other was the all-too familiar crest of the House of Landor – twin maize stalks resting against a seashell.