The Stealers' War (3 page)

‘He’s as big a fool as the dunces who went visiting Lares Shrine Street’s courtesans, then,’ said Paetro. ‘The northern army hasn’t disappeared, they’ve just scattered. The ones they can keep supplied are hiding out in the wilderness, the rest have buried their rifles in greased rags and are hiding in plain sight in the fields and towns, pretending to be farmers and shopkeepers.’

‘There’s a lot of wilderness in Weyland,’ noted Duncan.

Paetro halted. A line of townspeople marched down the street, a sorry-looking, slowly shuffling rabble, their feet clinking from leg irons welded around their ankles. The group of men and women were civilians mostly, a few tattered grey uniforms that marked some out as parliament’s rebels; with a scattering of young children – presumably the prisoners’ offspring – following behind the line, weeping and mewling, shoved back by the legionaries’ rifle butts when they grew too close. This progression towards the giant Vandian ships landed outside the town was suddenly halted by a group of southern officers in blue uniforms. Duncan wondered if the king’s men were going to protest the emptying of Midsburg’s quarters by their imperial allies. Supposedly, rebel sympathizers were being resettled to disperse any further support for the exiled pretender, but Duncan understood the prisoners’ true fate all too well. Duncan, who had once been taken as a slave of the empire to serve inside the brutally hard Vandian sky mines.
But I earned my freedom through wit and loyalty towards my owner. These fools supported the pretender’s rebellion. This is the just price of ending up on the losing side
. Not all the slaves would end up dying inside the sky mines. Some would be put to work tending crops and bringing in harvests to supply the sprawling imperial cities. Others would find themselves toiling as house servants, or workers in the mills and foundries.

Duncan and Paetro drew near to where the southern officers, a cavalry colonel, two majors and a captain, remonstrated with their Vandian allies.

‘You are taking too many,’ said the colonel. ‘You must have nearly two hundred head in this column alone.’

‘We have our orders,’ said the Vandian commander. ‘They come from Prince Gyal himself.’

‘And we carry out commands from our
king
,’ said the colonel. ‘I believe I know where the order of precedence lies between a king and a prince.’

‘A prince of the Imperium,’ barked the Vandian commander, ‘outranks a thousand raggedy-arsed local warlords. Prince Gyal speaks as the voice of the emperor here. Now move out of my way, before I decide to add you to the chain gang and ship you out.’

‘What is going on here?’ demanded Duncan. ‘What is the problem?’

‘Our trains stand half empty,’ complained the colonel.

‘What trains?’

‘The Guild of Rails’ marshalling yard outside Midsburg,’ said the colonel. ‘We have been bringing in wagons for days, but they wait half empty. I also have quotas to make.’

‘A quota for what?’ asked Duncan, the answer to his question hanging between himself and his moustached countryman.

‘Indentured labour,’ said the colonel. ‘The mill owners and great estates have placed fresh orders for workers. The rebellion has played havoc with the realm’s smooth running. Fields lie thick with weeds and foundries sit idle with cold furnaces after so many were pressed into army service. The rebels must pay for their crimes. Pay with grain from their winter stores and labour from their prefectures.’

‘They’re to be slaves?’ said Duncan. ‘In Weyland?’ The idea shocked him. There had never been slaves in the kingdom.

‘Twenty years’ service with full bellies and a dry roof over their heads?’ growled the colonel. ‘If you want to call these traitors slaves, let me march you out a thousand hungry soldiers fighting on short rations all too glad to head south for the peace of field and factory.’

Duncan merely shook his head and left the officers from the two allied forces bickering over the spoils of war, screeching crows pecking at a corpse’s entrails. Vandia had always kept slaves. The richest nation in the world paid for its domestic peace by maintaining as much of its populace as it could in a state of idle distraction, importing foreign muscle to feed and work for the indolent citizenry. But Weyland honoured a different tradition. Its people free and wilfully independent. The wealth flowing into Weyland from the empire wasn’t just feeding the southern nobility’s coffers, it seemed. It was driving them to ape the empire in other ways.
Well, it’ll be the locals’ problem, soon enough. Not mine
.

One of the children, a boy who couldn’t have been older than nine, tugged at the cloak covering Duncan’s back. His pallid face was smeared with tears and dirt and he trembled as though he hadn’t eaten for days, which was probably the case. ‘Why won’t they let me go with my ma and pa, sir? I’ll travel with them. I want to.’

Because you’re not old enough to sweat in the empire’s fields or mills, yet, and be glad of it
. ‘They’ll be travelling a long way. The journey won’t be kind.’

‘I don’t care; I can travel as well as anyone.’

The leg irons would slip off your stick-thin legs if you tried
. ‘Wait until you’re older. That’s what you need to do.’ Duncan felt inside his tunic and removed a gold coin, tossing it at the boy just as a Vandian legionary marched past and made to cuff the young refugee. The lad sprinted away fast, a dumbfounded expression on his face as he regarded his unexpected bounty.

‘You haven’t done him any favours,’ said Paetro. ‘One of the older packrats in the ruins will beat him and steal that coin before he ever gets to spend it.’

‘The city’s had our steel; it might as well have our gold.’
The saints know, it’s all I have to give. What the hell’s happened to Weyland and its people? My family not least among them? This isn’t my country anymore. I lost my home the moment I left.
‘I hope the pretender and his rebels roast in hell, starting a war they couldn’t hope to win. This misery and devastation, it’s all on their heads.’

‘Civil wars are just like any other kind,’ mused Paetro as they walked away from the prisoners. ‘They start from many causes, but they always end with one winner and one loser. Oft as not, not much difference between the two.’

True enough, old friend.
Duncan thought of the corpses littering the land beyond the shattered city walls. Weylanders loyal to King Marcus mingling in the mud next to the pretender’s rebels, Vandians dotted around the thick artillery-churned mud, lying between the locals.
Hard to tell them apart, now.
Looters crept out after dark to fight the crows for what the dead soldiers had to give up. A few coins and keepsakes. Rifles and pistols had already been stripped by medical orderlies checking for anyone left alive. Wounded traitors were bayoneted where they lay, on the orders of the officers commanding the Army of the Boles. That was the price of treason these days in Weyland. Not that Duncan needed to be reminded when he reached what had recently been Midsburg’s rebel parliament building. Bodies still hung from lampposts more or less intact. The nearest wore a once-fancy grey uniform, its tunic’s yellow piping spattered with dried blood. Field Marshal Samuel Houldridge had once been supreme commander of Weyland’s forces, but he had made the equally supreme error of supporting the pretender’s claim to the throne, rather than King Marcus’. Houldridge’s corpse had been discovered bled out in front of the assembly building after the siege, unable to feel the rope around his neck when it hoisted him high for all to see. But the forms had to be observed. Duncan suspected the same couldn’t be said of the rebel assemblymen swaying in the wind on lampposts down the street. The politicians who had stayed; or the ones caught fleeing the city, attempting to reach Deersota in the east or the Sharp Mountains to the north. If King Marcus ever recalled parliament, it would be a long time before he faced what once used to be called the ‘loyal opposition’.

A well-armed sentry post of Vandians and Weylanders checked Duncan and Paetro’s papers before admitting them to the old assembly building. What had once been the rebellion’s headquarters now served its conquerors. With the siege over, the various army followers and courtiers mingled freely with officers and nobility from two nations inside the building. And three of the women in the main chamber encapsulated Duncan’s plight right there. His countrywoman Adella Cheyenne, a local beauty whom he had once loved, and who had betrayed him to take up with Baron Machus. Princess Helrena, mistress of Duncan’s house, whom he still loved but who had forsaken him for the necessity of a future political marriage to Prince Gyal. And Leyla Landor, his father’s ridiculously youthful and spirited new bride, whom he felt little for, but who was the only one to console him behind Benner Landor’s back, the one woman who seemed to appreciate Duncan for who he was.

Paetro moved through the chamber to locate Princess Helrena while Duncan halted briefly to converse with his father. Benner Landor wore the blue uniform of a colonel of the Royal Artillery with a pleased, proud superiority that came naturally to the landowner. You wouldn’t have known that before the rebellion, the closest Duncan’s wealthy father had got to a cannon was walking past the unused wall guns mounted along the ramparts of Northhaven’s old town.
Yes, this has been a good war for old man Landor
. He had been elevated to the nobility for his support in the war; the self-made man made respectable at last. His young new wife had seen to that.

‘Have you heard the news?’ Benner Landor growled at his son. ‘We are to travel home to Northhaven. The Army of the Boles is to be garrisoned in the prefecture while we pursue the last few outlaws and seek to dig the damnable pretender out from the burrow of his exile.’

‘It’s not my home anymore, Father,’ said Duncan. ‘I will be returning to the Imperium when the Vandians depart.’
And the sooner, the better
.

Benner sounded hurt. ‘You don’t want to see Hawkland Park again?’

‘If the empire requires it . . .’

Benner shook his head, sadly. ‘I wish you would reconsider leaving.’ He turned to look for Leyla Landor, signalling his young wife should come over, calling out. ‘Talk sense to this lad, Leyla. He seems to heed your counsel these days far more readily than mine.’

‘You don’t need me. Not anymore,’ said Duncan. He watched the young wife walk towards them. Leyla might not spark anything approaching true love in his heart, but by the saints, she could certainly raise his ardour. Her walk, the way she slipped through the crowd, her sensual voice and manners. There wasn’t a thing about Leyla he would change except the old gull she had chosen to marry. ‘The House of Landor has a new mistress of the estate and a new heir.’

‘But it still holds our old welcome for you. Has your time away from our country changed the boy I knew so much?’

Duncan held back from pointing out that Benner Landor had rarely spent time with either of his two children. Too busy with the affairs of the house. ‘Perhaps time has. And Weyland won’t be the same country after the rebellion has been crushed.’

Leyla drew close and curtsied towards Duncan and he returned a shallow bow, having to tear his eyes away from the way she seductively brushed folds from her purple velvet and cotton day-dress.

‘You’re wrong about the nation, too,’ said Benner Landor. ‘Our tenant farms still need administering. The land will require seeding and ploughing and hard toil across the seasons. There will be even more contracts coming our way to supply grain fuel to the skyguard’s new squadrons. Whatever animosities the rebellion against the king sparked, they will be buried with the final few outlaws and traitors.’

Duncan’s father believed the southern newspapers’ propaganda a little too readily. The rural north bred hard families who lived equally tough lives. They wouldn’t bend their knees so readily in front of conquering southern armies. If anything got buried after the rebellion’s end, it might well be a dagger in the spine of those who had supported the king a little too readily.

Leyla observed her husband as he walked off towards the general, a look of mischief crossing her face. ‘You could stay with us.’ She leant in to rub the inseam of Duncan’s trousers unnoticed by the others in the room. ‘I will always have a
special
place just for you.’

‘You knew the time would come when I put Weyland behind me and returned to the Imperium.’

‘And things shall be so boring at Hawkland Park without you, Duncan. Peace will arrive and Benner will return to his tedious clerks and crops and bills of lading.’

‘Such tedium is where the house’s fortune is found. But my father will be Lord of the Northern Marches or whatever title it was King Marcus promised him for his support in the war.’

‘And what will I do while Benner glories in his newfound reputability?’

‘You could start by increasing the bounty on the head of Nocks. There’s still been no sighting of the creature since the fall of the city.’

Leyla sighed, as though it had been she who had suffered a great betrayal. ‘I don’t blame Nocks so much as I blame your sister . . . she seduced Nocks and goaded him into trying to murder you. Nocks was always the most loyal of man-servants before Willow dangled the promise of her body in front of him like a fancy lure to the trout.’

‘The law will catch up with my sister.’

‘And when are you and I to catch up?’

‘Don’t you have a son to raise? The House of Landor’s new heir.’

Leyla giggled. ‘How provincial of you, Duncan. A true lady doesn’t bother herself with the minutiae of childcare. That’s what all those wet-nurses, governesses and tutors are paid for. Young Asher will be educated at a grand southern academy inside the capital, alongside the children of the rich and the high-born. I refuse to bring him north after the war ends; he would be completely corrupted in base company.’

‘I didn’t turn out so bad.’

‘You ran wild like a ruffian by all accounts,’ said Leyla, squeezing his arm. ‘But then, perhaps it’s the rogue in you that calls out to me. Do I have to point towards your sister’s behaviour to illustrate the disadvantages of being raised alongside sordid commoners?’ She nodded towards Paetro. ‘Willow betrayed and abandoned your Vandian soldier friend during the siege, didn’t she? Left him for dead and fled with that outlaw Jacob Carnehan, all the while scheming for Nocks to put a bullet in your back.’