Foul Tide's Turning (22 page)

‘I am a noble daughter of the imperium, old man. One day I will be a princess.’

He grunted. ‘I have three daughters. They are all princesses. And my wife acts as if she is the greatest empress of all the ages.’

‘It is
true
,’ said Cassandra, irritated by the thin old man’s lack of respect.

He raised a bony finger to point at the cloak she wore. ‘Is that why the skyguard keeps you chained … you are so royal that you will float away, otherwise? Wear your clothes looser. Allow air to circulate, or you will sweat, and sweat turns to ice here, bumo. Unless princess’s bones have special protection against the mountain spirits.’ He grunted again and walked outside, muttering in a sarcastic imitation of her voice.

Dogs, I am surrounded by low-born dogs
. She cursed him but sat down to eat his simple brown rice. It was astounding how hungry you could get when your body had to work so hard to stay warm. She drank from a clay pitcher of water filled from the mountain spring outside, so cold that it was almost hot. After the meal she lay down on one of the mats on the hard floor and covered herself in rough woollen blankets. Sheplar Lesh made the small concession of binding her hands in front of her rather than behind her back, so she could at least pull the blankets closer as she tried to sleep through their racket, the two Rodalians jabbering like monkeys as they supped warm rice wine from a glazed clay bottle. At least the gask did not join in their antics, happy to sit by the fire and drink spring water.

When she woke again it was the dead of night. The fire had gone out under the metal pot and she could feel the winter cold from outside pressing on her face. She was dog-tired, but her bladder was full and demanding a trip to the toilet. Cassandra really didn’t want to leave the warmth of her blankets, but the pressure was too great, there was no way she was going to sleep comfortably now. She kept the blankets wrapped around her as best she could as she shuffled slowly outside, pushing under the heavy blanket acting as door. It was every bit as freezing as she’d been dreading with little light from the stars and moon, the sky hidden by clouds. Her chains clinked against the rocky ground as she sat down and fumbled for her belt, shivering as she balanced on the primitive well-like structure. Her business done, she stood up, and suddenly noticed something was terribly wrong. The yak had vanished, its basket filled with postal rockets resting on the ground accusingly, chiding Cassandra for her woeful lack of observation. That was when a tattooed hand clamped a damp, sweet-smelling cloth around her mouth and an almost impossibly muscular arm yanked her off her feet as easily as a hurricane ripping a leaf from a tree. She struggled, trying to let out a muffled warning scream. But it was lost to the spinning blackness as the sweet hot stench of the cloth overwhelmed her.

Carter was getting used to moving in the shadows. At the end of their journey, the pirate carrier
Plunderbird
had unceremoniously set Carter, his father and Tom Purdell back down on the waves in the same flying boat which had picked them up; a night-time rendezvous with a crew of thoroughly anonymous smugglers inside a fishing boat. The boat sailed them to Weyland’s capital along with their catch – legal and illegal – before the three of them travelled by wagon to Arcadia’s fish market, merging with the early morning crowd of merchants and traders. They booked rooms in a cheap guesthouse frequented by market workers and porters and remained inside their rooms, Carter chafing to take the next step. To do something – anything.

Somewhere in Arcadia and its environs, Willow was being held against her will, drugged and insensible, waiting to be sold off like a prize cow by her family. It seemed like an age before a nameless messenger arrived carrying details for a meeting between Jacob Carnehan and their old patron and protector, Prince Owen. When the party left the guesthouse, Carter’s father led them around the corner to an army wagon waiting for them with two horses in front that had seen better days, a single army teamster in its seat. They sat under the wagon’s canvas bow as they rattled through the cobbled streets and Carter had his first proper look at the capital by daylight. There were no dirt roads here, every street either cobbled or covered in a smooth coating of asphalt. Arcadia would have counted as a
proper
city even before an army of navvies had set to improving it. Northhaven could have been squeezed into the corner of a single district. Wide boulevards, paved streets flanked by oil lamps, trees and statues; all of the roadways were congested with streetcars, riders, carts and private carriages. Mansions and gardens in the shadow of the dust and flurry of fresh building works, new metal-framed buildings rising above the city like the skeletons of giant beasts. Below the new works sat the old, street after street seemingly without end: hotels, shops, pavilions, churches, monuments, stately apartments, galleries, stables, guild railway termini, partially concealed courtyards and open sweeping crescents. Carter realized he felt ill staring like a rube at all this conspicuous wealth.
How much of this was unknowingly purchased with human lives? My mother; all of my friends murdered in the sky mines
.

Arcadia’s noisy crowds had other concerns; gentry and workers, shop assistants and hawkers, all utterly oblivious to a far-called northerner’s disquiet. Not just ignoring his worries, either. There were far too many people begging in the gutter, as well as long lines of unemployed men and women lined up for wagons that might come calling for day workers in the fields and factories. Carter’s love and life with Willow had seemed as large as the world up in Northhaven. Down here, it was too easily diminished; swallowed by the racket and throngs of the endless populace. He tried to stop himself brooding and worrying. If he was going to help Willow, it had to be done in the present, not a past he couldn’t change or in a future that had yet to arrive. The wagon brought the three travellers to a massive five-sided fort overlooking the capital’s harbour, high sloping granite walls lined with heavy guns protruding from fire holes, a wide sweep of fire over the navy’s monitors and ironclads resting in the water below alongside hundreds of trading vessels, starlings sweeping through the sky above. Gates opened in the gorge wall and gave them access to a parade ground the size of a small village. There was an efficient bustle about the place far removed from supposedly sleepy garrison life: cavalry horses being exercised in fenced paddocks, companies of crimson-uniformed soldiers drilling with rifles, artillery-men cleaning the large cannons and mortars on the ramparts above. They were preparing for trouble, Carter realized. And try as hard as he could, he couldn’t see a future where their efforts would prove unnecessary. A large sergeant appeared, to lead them inside the fort, taking them to a room filled with old friends for such unhappy times. Prince Owen and Anna Kurtain. It felt strange to greet them like this, in normal clothes rather than the slave’s robes they had all worn when he had worked and fought alongside them in the sky mines. They waited around a large wooden table with an obviously important officer, white haired, ruddy faced and perhaps seventy years old; he had enough medals and braid across his green uniform to drown him if he fell into the sea outside.

Carter bowed towards the prince, but Owen waved him up. ‘None of that, Mister Carnehan. I would still be stranded and far-called at the dark ends of the world if it wasn’t for you and your father.’

The prince indicated the officer. ‘This is Field Marshal Samuel Houldridge, commander of the standing army. It’s the field marshal and his officers who have kept me safe since I arrived in Arcadia.’

‘It is no more than my duty,’ rumbled the portly old warrior. ‘Your father appointed me head of the army during his reign, and despite the best efforts of that bloody shoemaker, I still command the army, rather than whichever jumped-up aviator from Marcus’s new skyguard the devil’d like to stick in m’post. Over these dead bones! Yes, I recognized the boy in the man as soon as I clapped eyes on his highness here. A man of honour and the best man for these difficult times.’

‘You’re willing to fight for Prince Owen when the time comes?’ asked Carter’s father.

‘I used to allow the prince and his two brothers to ride my horse when they were no higher than m’knee,’ barked the field marshal. ‘I’ll lend his highness a massed cavalry charge, if that rascal of a usurper doesn’t step down when he’s lawfully commanded. He’ll discover why my men call me Hard Charging Houldridge.’

Owen looked older than Carter remembered. It was odd that the cares of the world in Weyland’s so-called civilized circles could have aged him more than a near lifetime of captivity as a slave inside the sky mines. ‘It seems a long time ago now.’

‘I suppose it does,’ said Owen. ‘Back in Vandia, always dreaming of escape, I thought my troubles would be over when I returned home. How wrong I was.’

‘The troubles aren’t with the country,’ said Anna. She was wearing civilian clothing, but she had a large army pistol holstered around her thigh. She was obviously still acting as Prince Owen’s bodyguard. ‘They’re with your damned uncle.’

‘True enough,’ said Owen. ‘I’m glad to see that Mister Purdell here made it through with the message I entrusted to the Guild of Librarians, though. I was worried that my uncle’s agents would act against you before you received my warning.’

‘Oh, they certainly tried,’ said Jacob. ‘Of course, if we had done things my way when we first returned to Weyland, that “problem” of ours would be a surprised corpse occupying a shallow hole in the ground.’

‘I won’t begin my reign with regicide,’ said Owen. ‘Not when the throne is mine by right and the laws of the kingdom.’

‘It’s a pity that Marcus wasn’t so scrupulous about the niceties of the law,’ said Jacob, ‘when he arranged for the rest of your family to be buried in an avalanche so he could steal the throne and pocket the Vandians’ blood money.’

‘All the more reason to seek justice in the right way,’ said Prince Owen. ‘I am not my uncle. Tell me, is Lady Cassandra Skar still safely in custody?’

‘For what it’s worth, the imperial brat’s on her way to Rodal by now,’ said Jacob. ‘It might have been more fitting if we’d shipped her across the ocean to the Burn’s slave markets … give her a taste of her people’s own medicine.’

‘You do not defeat your enemy by stooping to their methods, Father Carnehan. It is not merely an exchange of tyrannies I seek here.’

‘Those are fine words, but I’m a pragmatic man,’ said Jacob.

‘And still a vengeful one?’ asked Owen. ‘Do I not have that right too, after all I suffered as a captive? My brothers worked to death. My youth wasted. Put it aside, Father. Nearly all men can withstand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. My uncle has failed that test and he must be removed. But he must be made to abdicate by the just laws of our land and the will of our people. Emissaries from the League of the Lanca have been here all week mediating between the two sides. The People’s Assembly will vote tomorrow on the matter of succession.’

‘And how many assemblymen have been bought and paid for by the usurper, Your Majesty?’ asked Tom Purdell.

‘Not nearly enough to save my uncle’s skin,’ said Owen. ‘Sons and daughters who have followed their parents into the same living for fifty generations find their old trades dead; the only work available to them is on terms that would shame a poorhouse foundling’s keep inside mills owned by Marcus’s cronies. Prices soar beyond the common people’s means to feed their families. But the workers still have the vote and their voices shall be heard.’

‘I’ve seen a few of those common people up north,’ said Jacob. ‘Hungry and jobless and desperate and roaming the roads like wolves.’

‘Common people are the best in the world,’ said Owen. ‘Surely that’s the reason the saints make so many of them in Weyland.’

‘I’ve had a gang try to pull me out of a coach and gut me, Your Majesty,’ said Tom. ‘I didn’t think so kindly of them, then.’

‘I appreciate the Guild of Librarians’ interpretation of the constitution in favour of my claim,’ said Owen. ‘And your personal efforts, Mister Purdell. Would that all our guilds were so partial to my cause.’ He returned his attention to Jacob. ‘Father Carnehan, I will ask you to testify about the king’s treachery tomorrow in the assembly if the vote is looking in the balance. How his guardsmen betrayed you and attempted to murder Northhaven’s rescue party.’

‘They won’t believe Marcus allowed the slave raids in return for silver,’ said Jacob. ‘Not with most of the newspapers in the king’s pocket and printing his lies.’

‘The truth can meet any crisis,’ said Owen.

‘We’ll have to disagree about that, but don’t doubt I’ll do whatever it takes to shove Marcus off his stolen throne,’ said Jacob. ‘You received the note I sent this morning?’

‘Indeed,’ said Owen. ‘I’m sorry to hear about Willow’s difficulties. She was the best of us inside the sky mines and she deserves far more than a loveless match with her consent provided by a bottle of laudanum and a bribed priest. Although the saints know, that’s hardly a unique tale in the south these days. I have investigated matters and the Landor family are staying in the Winteringham Hotel; the grandest in the capital. The hotel is hosting a ball tonight in favour of my uncle’s cause, and the man you say Willow is to marry, the Viscount Wallingbeck, is going to attend as one of the speakers. It seems his house is permanently impoverished and he’s looking to the king to reward his loyalty, no doubt in equal measure to the Landor dowry. He’s a lieutenant-colonel in the Territorial Army down here and commands a good-sized regiment of irregulars.’

‘A rank amateur,’ said Field Marshal Houldridge. ‘Commanding pasty-faced loom workers who can barely march in order, let alone load, sight and discharge a rifle under fire. We’ll see them off in quick order if the usurper has the gall to defy the assembly.’

‘I’ll pay Wallingbeck what he’s due,’ growled Jacob. ‘Damned if it’ll be what he’s expecting.’

‘I ask you not to act rashly, Father Carnehan,’ said Owen. ‘Matters are finely balanced inside the capital, it’s a veritable tinderbox. Party marches of Gaiaists and Mechanicalists clash regularly; mill owners pay thugs to act as regulators and go on the streets to keep order with whips and clubs. The labour combines and little guilds have lost their power with so many unemployed workers flooding in, and they’re champing at the bit for a quarrel too.’