The Stealers' War (21 page)

‘Look down,’ said Alexamir. The Weylander’s gaze drifted down to the dagger pressed against the uniform covering his gut. ‘If you breathe a word to the rice-eaters on the gate, I’ll carve out your heart and let the Yarl carry your corpse all the way to Hellin.’

‘Ain’t no need to be unfriendly,’ said Nocks, as though he was genuinely taken aback by the presence of Alexamir’s blade. ‘I know you’re here for mischief. If all I wanted was an end to your fun, I could have had a friendly word with Shan back on the
Arrow
. Mentioned my suspicions and how he could test the colour of your blood to prove it. As it happens, I’m about a little mischief in Hadra-Hareer myself.’

‘You are here with the Weylanders to swear fealty to your exiled prince.’

‘Well,
they
are. But me? Hell, it’s far easier for a soldier to change the colour of his uniform than it is for a blue-skinned raider to masquerade as some high-altitude hayseed. Ol’ Nocks, he’s got a little side-business to attend to, and it surely isn’t for the pretender’s benefit. It might be that if our mischief were to coincide, our chances for success could double up, too.’

It is bad luck to kill a man who helped save your life. Although perhaps it is Norbu’s life that was saved, not Alexamir’s. In which case killing this foreign devil would still be smiled upon by the gods
. ‘Are you a thief, Weylander?’

‘In a manner of speaking. I’m here for a bit of rustling. The female kind, if you catch my meaning.’

‘I should slide this dagger in your side and let the river take you.’

‘Bad form after I tossed you a sword. Couldn’t let any kin of Artdan’s end up munched inside a marsh monster’s ugly gob. The big man would never forgive me.’

Atamva sent this foreign fighter as a messenger . . . warning me of my father’s betrayal at the hands of his saddle-brother, my father’s survival against all odds. Perhaps Nocks has been sent to help me inside Hadra-Hareer, too
? The scarred Weylander seemed an unlikely sort of ally, but he had already proved his worth in the battle on the cog. ‘I am the mightiest of Nijumeti. You would be counted lucky to fight beside me.’

Artdan to you? An uncle? A father?’

‘Someone whose honour needs to be revenged.’

Nocks snorted. ‘I’ll go with father. That just makes you another

‘Artdan Arinnbold’s betrayal carries a price. It will be paid.’
But not by me ... by Kani Yargul
. ‘Atamva brought you before me for a reason. The gods demand vengeance.’

‘Maybe they do at that,’ chuckled Nocks. ‘I reckon you and me are going to have some fun in Hadra-Hareer, that we are.’

It was uncanny, Duncan considered, how closely the Rodalian landscape below matched the scale model he had glimpsed during Prince Gyal’s briefing. One of many advantages of the Vandians being able to fly over the area . . . capturing images of the coming battlefield and rendering it across a tactician’s tabletop. Before Duncan, the twin mountains of Hadra and Hareer loomed like titans in the distance, the girdle of grey stone buildings clinging to both crags masked by thin white clouds. Hadra was the lower of the peaks at nine thousand feet, while Hareer climbed to over ten thousand feet. Most of Rodal’s capital city lay underground, excavated below the canyon bluff where the twin peaks rose. But even the layout of these hidden underground chambers had been mapped by the ground-penetrating sensors of the Imperium’s fleet. The flight route taken by Vandia’s massed squadron of three hundred helos had also been carefully charted in advance. Bypassing the Rodalian cities of Baknam and Zimar and their skyguard and attendant ground defences, flying so low that pines and sequoia along the ridges almost brushed the legionaries’ boots, legs swinging lazily from their flying machines’ open hatches. Duncan’s helo had been named the
Airhorne
by the two female pilots seated at the front of the craft, its name painted in elaborate crimson calligraphy below the canopy; almost too graceful for the ugly armoured fuselage. Most of the soldiers seated in Duncan and Paetro’s helo were sharpshooters and scouts. They sat on helmets, protecting their family jewels from any shepherds and farmers on the slopes below with birding rifles, locals who might care to hazard a shot into their ranks. Oddly, hugging the ground inside a helo made the flight seem far more dizzying to Duncan than if they had been arrowing in at some great height. Paetro, of course, appeared unbothered by the whole experience.
But then, he fought with the legion for decades. How many times has he sat in one of these steel cans, waiting to descend on a surprised enemy?

Vandia’s helo force was a mixture of attack craft and troop transports, the latter heavily armoured two-rotor affairs. The former flew replete with rocket pods, angling in and out under a single blurring blade, their sleek lines disrupted by weapon turrets. With lower fuselages rendered mottled blue and grey to blend into the clouds, the crafts’ upper portions glowered in a matte-black scattered with legion insignia, the kill sigils of previous campaigns. A colourful assortment of fierce teeth, eyes, talons and bestial muzzles had been hand-painted across the fore of each metal-nosed aircraft.
Beetles and Hornets
. That was how the soldiers referred to their helos.
Beetles
, the armoured transport aircraft;
Hornets
, their deadly gunships. And the helos weren’t the only force in the sky this morning. Above them powered
The Caller
, a steel whale tracking a shoal of minnows to her destination. The ship resembled a cathedral tower ripped from its base, tipped on its side and sent thundering through the heavens. Rodal possessed nothing like Vandia’s helos, able to stop in the air and hover like deadly hummingbirds . . . but when it came to the Imperium’s monstrous capital ships, the locals might as well be bare-arsed barbarians staring in wonder up at the city-sized merchant carriers traversing the heavens. Air rippled around the stones, distorted by the lifting field. This low down in gravity’s clutches, the anti-gravity stones studding
The Caller
’s hull pulsed with an ethereal blue light. Like many of the aerial warships that projected the empire’s power,
The Caller
’s bow had been shaped as a dragon’s maw, the lights from twin bridge domes serving as her eyes, re-making the flaming engines at her stern as a flying beast’s fiery trail. Eight pivoting cylindrical engine pods on port and starboard supplemented the anti-gravity stones’ lift, helping
The Caller
turn, hover and swoop.

Duncan yawned, but not from any lack of excitement; anticipation and fear coursed through his veins. They had set out well before dusk to time the Imperial force’s arrival at Hadra-Hareer with first light, hundreds of helos’ blades rotating into a synchronized roar and lifting up into the darkness from the empire’s new camps outside Northhaven. ‘We’re meant to be overwhelming Hadra-Hareer with a show of might, so why is it that we’re flying in with the smallest capital ship in the expeditionary force?’

‘The rest of the fleet are designed to haul legions and slaves and trade goods,’ said Paetro. ‘
The Caller
is an imperial battery ship. The only thing she’s carrying are bombs, rockets, missiles and frames packed with shells for her batteries. She may be half the beam of Princess Helrena’s flagship, but she’s all lithe muscle, is our little maiden.’

Duncan poked his head out of the hatch and located
The Caller
’s dark hull, relying on the strap snaking up to the helo cabin’s roof to stop him tumbling out. It was freezing outside. The cold of their altitude combined with the driving wind.
I doubt if it’s any warmer down below. No wonder the Rodalian merchants always arrived in Northhaven wrapped in thick fur coats.
The weapon-pocked belly of the beast burned through the chill air far above their helo. Small compared to Princess Helrena’s flagship was still a relative matter when it came to the vessels turned out by the Imperium’s war foundries. A turret with three cannons piercing a domed mount tracked slowly around on her keel. Duncan could just make out the sailors’ heads under its transparent spotters’ canopy, finding only rocky scrub-covered peaks on either side to target.
They won’t waste their shells
. It wasn’t going to be much of a contest between the Rodalian skyguard and the Vandian invaders. Duncan had grown up watching the tiny triangles of Rodal’s single-pilot flying wings turning in the sky above the borderlands. In the days when Weyland’s northern neighbour had been considered a welcome ally, rather than defying King Marcus, harbouring rebels and traitors while peevishly clinging to their claimed neutrality. Wooden flying wing frames and silk cloth fuselages wouldn’t slow slugs from the heavy electric rifles mounted on either side of Duncan’s helo. Rodalian wing-guns might prove adequate for scattering nomad horsemen and tracing lines of bullets across a pirate carrier’s fighters, but these helos’ cockpits, engines and fuel tanks were protected by tough composite armour. As for
The Caller
, attacking her with the midget Rodalian flying wings would be like seagulls trying to mob a frigate into surrendering.

‘Have you visited this country before, lad?’ asked Paetro. ‘My father took us out hunting in the foothills once,’ said Duncan. ‘But we never ventured too deeply into Rodal’s mountains.’ He recalled their trip with a grimace. It had been after his mother died, and far from proving a rare moment of relaxation for Benner Landor, the hunting expedition had been mounted to court visiting foundry owners from the south, an attempt to win fuel contracts from their manufactories. Willow had stayed at home and Duncan’s sister hadn’t missed much. ‘Most of our house’s trade travels into the Lanca proper,’ added Duncan. ‘South, not north. Rodal’s a poor country by comparison. Insular.’
Nothing much comes out of those mountains but trouble
. That was what Benner Landor used to say. Not much gratitude from the old man, given that nomad raiding parties rarely made it alive through the mountains to trouble the burghers of Northhaven.

‘These Rodalians mounted a skyguard for centuries, though,’ said Paetro. ‘When Weyland did not.’

‘King Marcus’ skyguard may be newly minted, but Weyland already flies aircraft twenty times the size of a Rodalian flying wing. The winds are worshipped as holy spirits up here. The pilots of the Rodalian skyguard are closer to priests. The craftsmen that fashion their flying wings live in temples like monks, too. Every warplane is crafted by hand. No assemblies or mills or manufactories.’

‘Well, we’ll look to give Rodal’s pilots something worthy of a prayer after we turn up,’ growled Paetro. ‘Make them wish that they had handed over the rebels and the little highness, both, when they were asked politely, like.’

How I wish Cassandra was back with us. The Rodalians better have her safe in a well-protected cell
. Cassandra’s safety aside, Duncan was more than glad that Baron Machus had been sent back humiliated and empty handed. He’d snatched Adella out from under Duncan’s protection in the sky mines as though the young Weylander was nothing. As a slave at the time, of course, that was precisely what Duncan had been.
Nothing
. Worse yet, the duplicitous brute of a baron had gone on to betray Princess Helrena, coming perilously close to arranging her murder and Cassandra’s kidnap by a clan of assassins employed by the venomous Circae.
Turning on his own cousin to feather his nest. Is there anything worse than a dog that turns kin-slayer?
Duncan shared that experience with the princess, too. His sister Willow had proved herself all too capable of trying to have him murdered.

‘You didn’t have to come with us today,’ said Paetro, breaking Duncan’s dark thoughts.

‘It was my job to protect Lady Cassandra too,’ said Duncan.
And didn’t we both fail in our duty
.

‘Princess Helrena is on a different path, now,’ said Paetro, reminding Duncan of her union with Prince Gyal. ‘One that leads all the way to the imperial throne.’

‘I’m not doing this for the princess,’ said Duncan.
And if I repeat that enough, maybe I’ll even end up believing it myself. ‘
Well, I am. But for duty. For the house. For Lady Cassandra.’

‘Good. Stick to the plan of battle and may we both live to reclaim our honour,’ said Paetro. ‘We’re not looking to storm Hadra-Hareer this morning, only cut the capital off from the rest of the country. I wouldn’t fancy fighting my way through their tunnels and caves in close quarters. Too many advantages for the defenders.’

Duncan nodded in agreement. A siege with surrender at the end of it suited him just fine. He had seen all he wanted to of confined, claustrophobic shafts in the sky mines’ excavations. If the young Weylander never had to squeeze through another lamp-lit slurry tunnel, he would die a happy man.

‘Final briefing,’ announced Paetro to the forty lightly armoured soldiers packing the troop transport’s hold. These were house troops, part of the contingent loyal to Helrena Skar. In Weyland, the force inside the transport helo would have been called a company. The Vandians referred to it as a
stick
. Ten sticks to a maniple, five maniples to a cohort and up to fifty cohorts to a legion. Duncan had the impression that like Paetro, these guardsmen had previously served with the Imperium’s legions. Duncan had come to know a good few of them since departing Vandis for the shores of his old home. There were Charia and Arria Wyon, female twins and veteran sharp-shooters, as willowy and deadly as the single-shot long-barrelled rifles they carried. Both soldiers spare with their words. For entertainment, they carried a set of gem-tipped engraving tools with them, and for a couple of coins, they would happily carve animals, lucky icons and miniature vistas into the barrels, cylinders and blades of their compatriots’ weapons. Then there was Little Aldro, a seven-foot brute of a man with ashen skin and corded muscles that seemed oddly lumpen, from some province of the empire whose population were a good few twists of the spiral removed from the common pattern. There was snow-haired Kenem Posda, who seemed too old to still serve as a house guardsman, yet moved with a lithe agility of a soldier half his age that set the knives and equipment packs hanging off his leather belt jangling. He possessed tight, knowing eyes that could burn right through you.