Foul Tide's Turning (21 page)

‘There’s only one true king in Weyland,’ said Carter.

‘You’re a believer, whelp? You share that in common with your old da, then. I find kings are a lot like gods. So many to choose from, and believing in exclusivity is never as profitable as embracing the many. Poor Weyland … a boy the king calls pretender and a king the boy calls usurper. And freemen of the air who only care which noble will pay most to guarantee sole use of the title. King, king,
king
. Such a stubby little word, given how many lust after it. Maybe if it was longer and harder to pronounce, the Burn wouldn’t be the Burn and we would all live in a land of milk and honey.’

‘Forget her, book-botherer. Fly west with us, instead,’ invited Aurora. ‘You’ll meet few nobles on the far side of the ocean that don’t style themselves kings or queens.’

‘This whelp’s not for you, Aurora. Can’t you see he’s fixing to die nobly? Along, I suspect, with a great many others. Famine is coming for Weyland,’ said the captain, swigging from his wine cup. ‘But it’ll be a feast for us. Nothing drives up the price of our services like a bit of honest competition.’

‘The word honest doesn’t belong on your lips,’ said Jacob. ‘That’s the province of people who rise with the sun and break their backs in the field every day to provide for their children.’

‘Yet, neither of us are farmers out a-toiling,’ said Black Barnaby, indicating the trophy-heavy walls of his chamber. ‘And do I not provide handsomely for my children?’

‘I can’t complain,’ said Aurora.

‘You do. Frequently and loudly. I suppose you must have hundreds of bastard half-sisters and brothers scattered along the coastline who might take issue with my generosity. Of course, if I knew who they were, I’d do more for them.’

‘Try flying over the port-side whorehouses and bombing them with coins,’ said Aurora.

‘And how then would I pay you and the rest of my valiant crew?’ laughed Black Barnaby. He raised his cup and called for more wine, a young cabin boy rushing forward with a crystal decanter. ‘Will you two groundling rascals not drink with me?’

‘Carter’s barely out of the sickbay,’ said Jacob, ‘and wine dulls my wits.’

‘That’s rather the point. And you can hardly grow much duller,
good
man.’ He waved them away. ‘Go. Go. I was in a happy mood before you came in. You drain my natural cheerfulness as fast as an engine with a spray of bullet-holes in its fuel chamber. Away with you, before you convert me into a dour saint-loving pilgrim and I swap my carrier for a monk’s coarse robes.’

‘Why’s he flying us south?’ asked Carter, once they had put the chamber behind them, exchanging it for a narrow corridor with porthole views out of the fuselage. They were in the heart of the spear, fast-flowing winds shredding the clouds, rivulets of water running across the glass. No fighter squadrons or flying boats circling around them in the air now, all the little birds landed inside the flight decks under the carrier’s monstrous wings.

‘Pirates are romantics at heart,’ said Jacob. ‘Maybe your story touched his heart.’

‘He has a heart?’

‘Barnaby has a sense of honour, in his way. Let us say that this passage on his carrier helps settle some debts that were long resting in the dust.’

‘Please tell me you never served with this crew,’ said Carter, wishing his suspicions away.

‘I don’t have to lie to you to tell you that. Barnaby has only ever fought for money and wealth. And wealth makes a good servant but a poor master. I’m going to remind King Marcus of that fact one day very soon.’

‘We’re travelling south for
Willow
.’

‘You don’t need to remind me, boy. But it won’t just be Benner Landor and his house’s hirelings facing us in the capital. The usurper has too many scores to settle with us to simply let matters rest.’

‘Damn him. I’ve never even met the man.’

‘He sold you and countless thousands of Weylanders he was sworn to protect into slavery for imperial silver. He’s as responsible for your mother’s death as the skel slavers and the imperium. That’s all you need to know about the usurper.’

‘Sometimes I—’

‘—wish you had taken up Sariel on his offer?’ said Jacob. ‘Allowed him to carry you and Willow away to some quiet far-called country where news of our home’s troubles might drift in over the radio relays in five hundred years’ time as distant history.’

‘Something like that.’

Carter’s father halted him in the corridor. ‘Maybe that would have been for the best. I know I’d sleep easier knowing you were safely out of Weyland. But you’re a man now, and I won’t demand you do the wrong thing just because it’s the easy option. Doing the right thing often comes with a cost. It sure as hell comes with no guarantees. Bad men can end up occupying thrones and good men can end up face down in the dirt with a dagger in their back. Your mother was the best woman I ever knew, and she died at the hands of slavers she’d never heard of, by arrangement of a king she’d never met, in exchange for wealth she wouldn’t have given a damn for, along with half the friends and neighbours she loved buried with her. There was no fairness, no sense, and if anyone could call that justice I’d damn them as a devil.’

‘And you? Are you a good man? The one that pirate scorns.’

‘I’m good enough,’ said Jacob, patting his twin pistols. ‘Or we’re all in trouble.’

‘And if not?’

‘Man’s got to die doing something, Carter. You have something else you need to do?’

No
. On reflection, he really didn’t.

EIGHT

THE WALLS OF THE LEAGUE

Lady Cassandra Skar sat, shivering, in the rear of the wagon. Her legs were manacled together, but with enough play on the chains that she could shuffle about the wagon if the mood took her. Her hands were still bound behind her back, chafing, gloveless and chilly. It was freezing in these monstrous damned Rodalian Mountains and it didn’t seem to matter how many layers you wore or blankets you wrapped around yourself, the winds would seek you out like snakes of ice, slipping through the smallest gap to bite into your bones. She could see why superstitious savages like Sheplar Lesh treated the winds as spirits and worshipped them. You always worshipped the things which had power over you. In Vandia that was the emperor and the Cult of the Imperium Cosmocrator. Here it was the high winds. That she was born of divine blood was of little concern to the weather as she rattled through the mountain passes. They travelled at such altitude that the air had thinned out, Cassandra having to breathe faster and harder, even gravity’s touch not as strong as the forest where she had been held previously.
If only the local fools who tried to rescue me had made a better job of it.

As if the cold wasn’t bad enough, there was a constant whistling in the air that only varied in intensity as it slipped through the cracks and crags. Cassandra could tune it out for large periods of time, background noise she hardly noticed. And then suddenly it would reappear randomly at night when she was trying to go to sleep, or when she was eating a bowl of rice, and when it was there she would hear nothing else. It was almost enough to send her insane. It probably explained much about the demented Rodalian flyer and his people. When she complained to Sheplar Lesh and demanded something she could plug her ears with, he only laughed and told her that it was the spirit called Naimzeraw the Prankster, welcoming her to Rodal and trying to gauge the measure of a Vandian.

‘You are probably the first Vandian to visit, bumo,’ said Sheplar. He huddled next to Kerge on the wagon’s footplate while the gask held the reins. He sported a rabbit-fur-trimmed aviator’s hat, the fur dyed purple, with its leather earflaps worn down. She was more than a little envious of its obvious warmth. ‘Naimzeraw merely wants to test you. To see what sort of person comes calling.’

‘Why would any of my people want to come to this barren, forsaken place?’

‘The clear air and a view from heaven’s doorstep?’ suggested the Rodalian, condescendingly.

‘These winds are intolerable.’

‘These are hardly winds, bumo,’ said Sheplar. ‘We call this Sogo, the windless region of Rodal. In trade tongue,
porch
.’

‘You are joking.’

‘He does not joke,’ said Kerge from the front of the wagon. ‘Rodal is not known as the walls of the league just because it holds back the steppes’ nomads. It’s also a containing chamber for weather systems that form when cold air from the league nations meets warm air from the steppes, mixed in with massive quantities of moisture from the Lancean Ocean to the west. Rodalian winds are a thing of legend and terror.’

‘Not to us,’ said Sheplar. ‘We respect the spirits, but we never fear them. This is our home and they are our guides. Rodal has given me everything.’

‘You must forgive me my apprehension, then,’ said Kerge. ‘Given the choice, we gasks prefer not to venture far from our forests. We live in the shadow of the mountains but few of our traders travel this far. As much as we appreciate the protection of your heights, Northhaven streets are as far-called as we wish to explore.’

‘Given the choice.’ Sheplar glared back at Cassandra.

‘You should have stayed in Vandia,’ she goaded. ‘You could have joined the spiky one as a slave in the sky mines. You keep boasting about what an excellent pilot you are. You could be put to service flying transporters between our mines.’

‘It is not a boast when it is a statement of fact,’ said Sheplar. ‘And Kerge, son of Khow, will never be your slave again. He is a free gask.’

‘That is so, yet I may never be considered a gask again,’ said Kerge. ‘The universe moves, but my mind may no longer move ahead of it. Without the gift of prediction, what am I? Little more than a common pattern manling with a few poisoned spines running along his skin.’

‘Your future sight may return to you,’ said Sheplar. ‘Your ranger friend Slell was hopeful.’

‘I fear he is too optimistic. To survive in the sky mines is to have your soul stolen. I, among very few, escaped. My lifetime’s luck has been depleted,’ said Kerge.

‘It had better not be,’ said Cassandra. ‘For when the empire comes for me, you will need a great deal of good fortune.’

Sheplar shook his head. ‘There is nobody on the road to hear her cries, but I am sorely tempted to gag her.’

‘Find cloth to cover my ears rather than my mouth and you will find me silent enough.’

Sheplar pulled himself off the footplate, rummaged around inside the covered wagon’s boxes and came out holding a cape with a fur-lined hood. He dropped it over her head and re-joined the gask at the front of the wagon. ‘Keep to your word, bumo.’

She snorted but held her peace. She had been filled with hope since realizing that the imperium’s local agents were sweeping the land for her. The very fact these barbarians had moved her so suddenly from the gasks’ forests spoke volumes of how much they feared she would be located, secured and returned to the empire. It didn’t matter where they took her now. Vandia would not give up on her. Not, she understood, out of any deep or abiding love for her. But because Lady Cassandra Skar carried divine blood, the
emperor’
s blood. To be held like this was to insult Vandia and all that was Vandian. Her only worry was that the empire’s agents would prefer see her dead than left a living hostage to remind Vandia’s enemies of the empire’s fallibility. It was all too feasible that if she was chained in some Rodalian mountain nest and proved too hard to rescue alive, the alternative – a little poison slipped into one of her meals – might seem a pragmatic solution to the kind of foreign intelligencers kept on the imperium payroll. Still, if her mother had anything to do with the matter, being retaken alive would be the only scheme they countenanced.

They rode on for the best part of the day. The back of the wagon’s cover was tied up against the elements but she could see well enough out of the front between her two captors. Green grassland covered the lower mountain slopes and valleys between the rises, giving way to mottled white where snow covered dark rock. They rattled slowly along a high path carved out of the mountainside, barely wide enough to accommodate the wagon. A vertiginous view to the left, only a few wooden markers with colourful pennants whipping in the breeze to mark places where they might fall to their deaths, wispy clouds drifting past below. There was little sign of the aviator’s countrymen along the path. Only the flags showed that anything sentient had passed this way or considered it, literally, a highway. The sun was going down, snow along the distant peaks glowing orange, when she spotted what looked to be a town or perhaps a large village. Blocky white-washed buildings had been carved out of the slopes of the mountains opposite, flat vertical walls dotted by hundreds of narrow windows sealed by sliding stone storm shutters. There were a few slanted lines where external staircases ran and a long flat stretch of rooftop for a skyguard plane to set down. The bulk of the space was no doubt burrowed inside the mountain face itself. Cassandra could hear a constant clacking from exposed rotating cylinders turning in the wind. No sign of electric lights, though, so the drums weren’t wind turbines. Prayer wheels, perhaps. Rice terraces sat in the shadow of the town’s underhang, narrow ledges as carefully carved from the mountainside as the buildings. There was no bridge across the chasm to the town, however. It seemed the three of them wouldn’t be spending the night there, whatever that place was called.

‘Your artisans have yet to master suspension span engineering,’ said Cassandra.

‘We can build bridges when necessary,’ said Sheplar. ‘But they are more use to our enemies than us.’ He pointed towards the town opposite. ‘To reach Salasang we would need to take a road down to the valley floor, cross the valley and then travel up again. Maybe two days, by foot. That is two days in which we can see our foe approaching and prepare for attack.’

It was a good point. Although who was around to attack this godforsaken land apart from mountain goats and eagles, she did not know. If it had been closer to Vandia she supposed they would have conquered it, installed an imperial governor and extracted annual tribute from the kingdom. The barbarian country would be considered a hardship posting, though, and thin pickings for the calculators of the empire – unless you valued snow, ice, granite and baskets of rice. They could always have found a use for Rodal’s pilots in the legions’ levies, she supposed. Anyone who could set an aircraft down on that thin long building in the gusty winds and survive the landing might make a passable pilot for imperial service. Maybe they were all mad, though, like poor clown-faced Sheplar Lesh. She almost laughed at the thought. An air legion of loons. Mad enough to call these bleak rocks home. Crazy enough to fly here.

They rode on, leaving the mountain with the town behind. The party continued their slow, careful journey through the high mountains for days, passing small villages and towns in the distance but never stopping. At one point they crawled past a structure she mistook for a dam, a sloping wooden structure built across a valley between two mountains, squatting in the shadow of a stone temple nearby. But when Cassandra asked about the angled doors opening and closing in the wood by a complex system of rope pulleys – with no sudden torrents of water released – the aviator told her it was one of the nation’s many wind walls. They channelled and managed the worst of the winds that flew through Rodal, mitigating the gales that would otherwise lash the valleys. Priests here, it seemed, did more than pray for clemency from their gods, they also operated as wind keepers on their high walls. A primitive solution compared to the cloud seeding that the empire used to guarantee the provinces’ harvest, but a reminder that you underestimated barbarians such as these mountain tribes at your peril.

It was getting close to dark when they took a fork in the road and headed away from the cliff edge, rock walls on either side of them, following a winding path until they reached a dead-end – a circular space for a caravan halt with a single building. They drew to a stop in front of a low brick building that resembled a windmill, stripped with vanes replaced by rope webbing hung with dyed pennants – devoid of houses’ arms and sigils, but fluttering in every imaginable colour. It was as though a party of children had descended on the bleak place and decided to decorate it with silks cut from their mothers’ dresses. The high rock walls and the winding road managed to cut off the worst of the wind, and the building, while simple grey brickwork and little more sophisticated than an oversized kiln, would keep any rain and snowfall off their heads. There was a small well next to the building but, given the small stream running down one of the walls, it seemed superfluous. Then she realized it must serve as a toilet. It seemed they were not the only travellers staying over. A horned yak had been tied up outside, its flanks warmed by a woollen saddle – a patchwork of colours every bit as bright as the fluttering flags – thrown across the leathery-skinned creature. It must make for an uncomfortable, slow mount. But then, what use a fine racing stallion on these dangerously high roads? The dull creature chewed at mossy grass that grew from cracks in the walls, oblivious to the newcomers.

Kerge gazed at a line of firework-like rockets dangling from a basket on the yak’s side. ‘A military patrol?’

Sheplar Lesh shook his head as he dismounted. ‘There is a hold of the Guild of Radiomen on one of the peaks nearby. What you see are postal rockets to fire bundles of messages across to villages and towns too small or poor to have their own guild receiving station.’ He left Cassandra’s leg irons on but untied her hands so she might eat, administering a stern warning about what to expect if she tried to escape. She shuffled after them. There was no door, but a blanket had been hung over the entrance. It was warmer inside the squat domed building than outside, if a little pungent. There was a single room with a lonely fireplace, and what she took to be dried yak shit acting as fuel for an iron pot simmering with rice. The room’s sole occupant glanced up from stirring the meal. An ancient man with lazy eyes, smothered in a brown fur coat that looked like the best part of a bear wrapped around a bony, wrinkled old stick.

Sheplar bowed towards the guild courier and introduced the party, one by one, condescendingly omitting Cassandra’s titles, as though she were no better than a common goat herder. The postal courier’s name, it transpired, was Gephal. He introduced himself by sweeping off his embroidered hat that had a wide white-fur brim and a tall crown elaborately sown with yellow and black mountain peaks.

‘You come from Weyland,’ said Gephal, more of a statement than a question, his curious gaze taking in the gask and Cassandra.

Sheplar nodded. ‘That is so.’

‘An aviator without a plane is a rare sight,’ said Gephal.

‘I buried her bones in the mud of Northhaven,’ said Sheplar, sadly. ‘Lost in combat.’

‘There will be more of that in the south,’ said Gephal. ‘I read many of the messages sent by the wireless voices. Hopefully their troubles will stay far from us.’

‘We travel to the skyguard station at Talatala,’ said Sheplar. ‘For passage on to the capital.’

‘The roads are open. Snow has been light here this winter. The winds from the steppes have blown angry and warm. That is never a good augury. Still, share my rice, Sheplar Lesh, you and the bumo and the man of the deep forests.’

‘You are kind.’

The old man handed the wooden spoon to Sheplar to stir and used a metal-tipped walking staff to hobble over to the door to check his yak. On the way he stopped and gazed thoughtfully at Cassandra. ‘You are not a Weylander.’