Foul Tide's Turning (6 page)
Eleanor reached the frozen river and picked up a stone from the bank that hadn’t been concealed by the snow; bring it cracking down hard on the surface.
Good.
Strong enough to have gone ice skating under the bright full moon if she’d brought a pair of wooden blades. Tentatively, Eleanor tried to keep her footing on the ice as she edged across towards the opposite bank. She was perhaps a quarter of the way across when she heard an odd humming at her rear. ‘
Keep a little songbird, feed a little songbird
.’ She glanced behind her. Eleanor started at the sight of the mistress’s short, ugly manservant, lurking under the weeping willows. What in the name of the saints was he doing all the way at the grounds’ borders … ice fishing in the dark?
‘I was heading to my father-in-law’s farm. It’s quicker this way,’ spluttered Eleanor.
‘You want to be careful, petal. That river ice is mighty thin.’
‘In a midwinter freeze?’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s as thick as the walls of the house.’
Nocks leaned forward and she saw what he had been hiding behind his back. A heavy short sabre. What was the devil’s intent – did he meant to give her a poke, or worse, skewer her?
‘
Please
, I’m carrying my husband’s child.’
‘Are you sure that’s all?’ Nocks had the blade out in a second, driving it’s sharp point manically into the river’s frozen surface, the scar cleaving his features throbbing as vividly as a devil’s vein as he laid into the ice. Eleanor stumbled desperately for the safety of the opposite riverbank, trying to stay upright, but cracks in the ice rippled out, flowing below her boots, and suddenly she wasn’t standing on a solid surface anymore, but falling through a bobbing tear of crumbling ice shards, the shock of the freezing water so intense it was like slamming into a wall. The water here on the bend was shallow, hardly higher than her hips, but the current trapped below was dragging at her with the full force of a train of horses. She clawed with her fingers at the remaining ice sheet, desperately struggling for enough purchase to resist the force of water trying to drag her under. Nocks reached out and for a fleeting moment Eleanor thought he was trying to help her escape, but he merely tapped his blade against the sheet, as though measuring the distance between her and the river bank. ‘You see, petal, when I was listening at the door, I swear I heard you agreeing to carry something to Jacob Carnehan and his young buck.’
‘Help me! Don’t let me freeze!’
‘Bit late for that,’ grinned Nocks. ‘But don’t worry; you’ll drown long before the cold finishes you off. And I think Miss Haughty back at the house is due a proper lesson in submission. You’re the first part of it. The second part will be a lot more fun. At least, I plan to make it fun for me.’
Eleanor tried to scramble up onto the sheet, but it started to disintegrate under her weight. She was so numb; she couldn’t feel a thing below the waist anymore. What was this doing to her unborn baby? ‘Please!’
‘I’m doing a kindness for your man, saving him all those sleepless nights. He’d thank me if this wasn’t to be anything other than a tragic accident. He’s going to remember you how you were before you swell up as wide as a whale.’
‘It’s only a message,’ pleaded Eleanor, trying to think of something, anything, she could say to make this foul piece of human flotsam save her life.
‘And this is mine!’ snarled Nocks. He lashed out with the flat of his blade, striking her fingers with enough blunt force that she screamed, her grip abandoned. The instant Eleanor let go, the river yanked her downstream, striking her head against the sheet, and then she was sucked away, whirling in the darkness, banging uselessly on the wrong side of the ice, a muffled, useless thumping that got weaker and weaker until the bubbles of air obscuring her view slid away, replaced by cold darkness.
QUADRATICS WITH THE
FOREST FOLK
Pah, another morning in paradise
. Lady Cassandra Skar might have been one of the Vandian emperor’s numerous grandchildren, daughter of an imperial house and heir to more riches, land and vassals than most people could count but, sadly for her, her exalted status meant nothing to the creatures keeping her hostage. She wasn’t even sure these people of the forests, these
gasks
, had money. Not amongst themselves, anyway, to be used in the hidden deep woodland city of Quehanna. Perhaps to trade with the common pattern people beyond the green cathedral vaults of their pines; neighbours her ever-present minder, Sheplar Lesh, had to be counted among. The gasks were a nation of many contradictions. The twisted men and women were outwardly peaceful to the point of somnolence – avowed pacifists – but when roused, provoked, they could fire the spines that covered their leathery hides with all the speed, accuracy and lethality of a rifle. She had seen it for herself. During the slave revolt, the battle fought in the shadow of the great stratovolcano and the sky mines, a single gask slave had launched itself at the waves of imperial guardsmen, turning the air around its death dance into a dark cloud of fleeting spines, each spine tipped in natural neurotoxins that sent her loyal fighters’ bodies twitching and twisting to the ash to spasm their last breaths away. That wasn’t the only contradiction of the gasks’ society. They lived in the forest, seeming to do without most of the trappings of high civilization enjoyed by the Vandians – not even the barbarian stone buildings and crude society of the nearby Weylanders. Yet when they chose to, the gasks could produce miniature machines of such delicacy and advanced technology, that, in many ways, they rivalled those fashioned by the empire’s scientists. It was as though you were watching a drunk painted savage dancing around a fire stop, fiddle with his spear, and suddenly flourish an automatic rifle conjured from twigs and mud. Frankly, given the gasks’ dangerous temper, she did not want to test their nation by offering them physical violence, even though the likelihood was that when she escaped, she would have to. That point was fast approaching. She had waited to be ransomed. And waited. And then waited some more. What, she asked herself, was the point of being taken hostage if you weren’t going to be ransomed? Isn’t that why foreigners seized notables like Cassandra as hostages? To be honest, given that it was a ragtag bunch of escaped slaves who had carried Lady Cassandra away, she was more than a little surprised they hadn’t burnt her at the stake or had her skinned alive out of revenge. It was the fate the emperor would certainly have arranged for any of their number taken alive. With countless slaves in the imperium, not to mention hordes of lower-caste citizen rabble thronging their cities, strong messages needed to be sent that there was no escape for the empire’s living property, and that rebellion only led to certain death. So, not executed; not ransomed? At least, not yet. She could add the reasons for her captivity to the list of things she still didn’t understand … such as how she had arrived here?
Lady Cassandra had absorbed the blast of an exploding shell during the revolt and been knocked unconscious. Delirious and concussed for a few weeks. But that should have placed her location firmly within the empire’s boundaries, not here. This was the slaves’ homeland, millions of miles away. Territory that should only be reachable in any reasonable timescale using an imperial warship driving onward at full thrust. Even travelling on a merchant aircraft at high altitude, riding the fierce trade winds, Vandia was a decade or so of non-stop rotor-engined flight away. She knew she was in Weyland. Many of the slaves working in her sky mine had been harvested from this state over the years. And she had also learnt that she was being held in the north of Weyland, bordering a mountainous land called Rodal. Her clumsy, stupid minder, Sheplar Lesh, came from Rodal. But could Cassandra find Weyland on a map?
Of course not.
Weyland was just one of countless thousands of faraway states between here and the imperium. It would require a lifetime working as an imperial geographer to even attempt to commit the route home to memory. Cassandra’s present distance from home was no accident, of course, but a matter of imperial policy. You didn’t raid your immediate neighbours for slaves; neighbouring states gave people willingly as tribute in return for resources. No. Pissing on your own doorstep was never a good idea. Especially not when you possessed brutal proxy forces like the skel slavers, willing to absorb the locals’ animosity for the attacks, allies who would sell human cargoes on to the empire. Had the slave revolt ended in the rebellious sky miners seizing a Vandian vessel and escaping back to the lands they’d been harvested from? It seemed unlikely, yet here she most certainly was. And, as worrying as Cassandra found the prospect of how mere slaves had returned home so easily, she presently faced the far more pragmatic anxiety of how
she’d
travel home after she escaped? The best option she had come up with so far was to try to make contact with the empire’s agents who should be working here. Have them use their secret radio network to send for a warship. Cassandra knew that the imperium’s standard methodology for harvesting human flesh was to bribe a local barbarian warlord to look the other way while the skels raided and seized those young enough to survive the rigours of a lifetime of imperial service. Some primitive ruler around here was no doubt growing fat on imperial gold and silver. But she could hardly escape this forest and walk the streets of the barbarians’ capital wearing a sign saying ‘Kidnapped Vandian celestial-caste royal: large reward offered for return home,’ until she happened across a barbarian on the empire’s payroll.
Cassandra cursed herself for her defeatism. She was the heir to an imperial house, trained to rule and command and fight from the moment she had been old enough to walk. What were these gasks? Twisted leather-skinned savages, holding on to her as a favour to hairy-arsed slaves who had somehow got lucky and escaped from Vandia. If she couldn’t get away from gutter scum such as this, then she was not fit to be a celestial-caste imperial. She should be considered a mewling disgrace to her blood, breeding and house’s name. And rightly so. Her grandfather’s harem produced countless grandchildren sprung from his loins, all expected to fight and scrap for a share of what was rightfully theirs. It was how the empire kept itself strong. She was the empire’s strength. As far-called as young Cassandra Skar had ended up, she must survive and prosper, or wither and die. Unfortunately for her, Sheplar Lesh had other ideas.
Her minder had just turned up outside her quarters; a store room, originally. The one type of room that used doors in the gask city – to keep rodents away from baskets of pulses and grains that were the vegetarian people’s diet. And now, ironically, used to keep a Vandian noblewoman in. Sheplar stepped past the two gasks on guard duty outside, bowing to her. The foolish man had the face of a clown, Asiatic features buckled around a semi-permanent smile. He wore a leather flyer’s jacket dyed purple with white sheep-fur trim around its waist, cuffs and collar. An aviator. That was a joke. She had occasionally seen his people’s aircraft patrolling the border overhead, through gaps in the trees. Little wooden triangles with a single rotor at the rear powered by a primitive corn-oil fuelled combustion engine. The Rodalian barbarians wouldn’t last a minute in the air against her people’s advanced forces.
‘It is time, bumo. Lessons.’
Cassandra frowned. Always he called her bumo. Or even worse, young bumo. Whatever the term meant in Rodalian, she suspected it wasn’t respectful. Sheplar always managed to speak the common language, often known as
radio
, or simply
trade-tongue
, with a thick accent that made him sound more muddled then she suspected he already was. ‘As always, Lesh, I find I must consume your insolence for breakfast. Why do you believe your spine-skinned friends have anything to teach me?’
‘The gasks believe it is the duty of the young to learn, and so they will teach you, whatever your wishes. It will go easier if you set your mind to humility.’
‘Humility is about the only thing a slave has to teach me.’
‘The gasks have never been conquered by your people,’ said Sheplar. ‘You have only ever held one of their kind as a slave. And
that
arrangement did not work out very well for Vandia.’
‘All outside the empire are fit only to serve us as slaves. All countries yet to be claimed by Vandia pay tribute to us.’ Cassandra jerked a finger to the ceiling of the little wooden room. ‘The metal in the propellers on your toy aircraft comes from Vandia’s sky mines, even if you are ignorant of its origins. It has travelled along the caravan routes for centuries to reach your foul barbarian lands. When you pay travellers for metal, you ultimately pay us.’
‘I think I’m still paying for it,’ sighed Sheplar. He lifted Cassandra up by the scruff of the neck and manhandled her towards the door, the two gask guards falling in behind them as they left the room. They passed along a narrow wooden corridor; brown of course, as brown as everything in this cursed forest that wasn’t leafy and green. Even the membranes in the wall that admitted washes of emerald light were some form of solidified transparent sap. ‘You’ll discover this morning’s tribute to the empire waiting for you, bumo. Paid in the form of mathematics, I believe. A currency I hope you will find acceptable.’
Cassandra stepped through an open circle carved into the building and onto a swaying wooden walkway suspended high in the trees. She gazed down onto the forest floor seventy feet below. Like all the city’s gask hovels, the building she’d left was a shaped wooden pod grown organically around the trunk of a tree, clinging to the bark like some bizarre fungal growth. As far as the young imperial noble’s eye could see, hourglass pines rose like columns around her, thick at the base, pinched in the middle, before widening out for a final spurt to their full two hundred and fifty metre height. ‘In the imperium I was tutored by Doctor Yair Horvak, one of the greatest minds in the empire, which means the greatest mind in the world, in
all
of Pellas! I mastered weapons at the hands of Paetro Barca, the legion’s deadliest soldier and guardsman. Do you expect a herd of gask druids clinging to the trees to have anything to teach me?’
‘Teaching is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel,’ said Sheplar. ‘I fear that in you, they are kindling with very damp wood.’
Cassandra ignored him. They crossed the walkway on foot, a giddying prospect to someone born to finer things in the empire; where celestial-caste citizens kept air-conditioned helos with trained pilots to ferry them across the vast, towering cities. Not that one of the rotor-topped aircraft could have hovered between the trees. After a few minutes, they arrived at one of the larger communal pods used as a classroom for the younger gasks. Inside, she found twenty or so gask pupils sitting cross-legged in the floor, short bodies covered by identical brown robes resembling togas, each creature’s chest crossed by the belt of a satchel that contained their almost-holy calculator machines. In the teacher’s position at the front was a gask she recognized. Cassandra bridled. This gask had once been one of the slaves labouring in her mines. Did they really expect her to accept tuition from a lowly miner?
‘Do you expect me to accept lessons from this,
this
slave?’
‘An ex-slave, technically,’ said Kerge. ‘Given that I am no longer being exploited as a source of labour in Vandia’s sky mines. And in broader moral terms, gask-kind neither recognizes the concept of slavery nor practises it.’
Sheplar leant in behind Cassandra, a hint of menace infecting his usually jovial tone. ‘And as Kerge’s father gave his life to free him from your cursed empire, I suggest you count yourself lucky that the gasks are not a revengeful people and accept his tuition.’
Kerge indicated the floor. ‘Please, womanling …’
Womanling. Hardly any better than bumo
. Cassandra snorted, but occupied one of the vacant wicker mats on the floor regardless. That this gask Kerge’s heart had not filled with revenge was only a symptom of his nation’s weakness. Only the weak practised pity. Those born to rule defended their position without mercy. Of course the gasks wouldn’t dare to hurt her. For if the empire ever heard that one of the emperor’s own blood had been abused by barbarians, the imperium’s forces would arrive here and burn the forest to ashes in punishment.
Kerge shuffled in front of a blackboard while Sheplar Lesh stood guard by the doorway. ‘Today,’ announced the gask, ‘we shall examine measure-theoretic probability theory, looking in detail at sample spaces as applied to Borel algebra and the Dirac delta function.’
‘If you expect me to work at your ridiculous mathematical recreations, then you shall issue me with one of your calculation machines,’ demanded Cassandra.
‘None of those studying here will be using their computation engines during the lesson,’ said Kerge. ‘Before you pick up the chisel, you must develop enough understanding of form to carve.’
‘And what use are your stupid tortuous mind games? Are they rhetoric to allow me to sway minds and lead? Military theory to allow me to conquer battlefields? Economics to help my commercial interests flourish and prosper?’
‘Their mastery allows us to navigate the true paths of the great fractal tree.’
Cassandra snorted. The savages’ faith that they could scry the future and adjust their behaviour accordingly was no better than shamans swaying on the ground in a drug-induced haze, before emerging from their trance to announce that they had seen the future, and the gods wanted everyone to pay the witch-doctors a
lot
more tithes. ‘And do you also expect me also to commune with the heathen spirits of your holy tree?’
‘That would be too much to ask. But no learning is ever wasted,’ said Kerge. ‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live.’
‘And what did you learn as the imperium worked you in my sky mine, slave?’
