The Stealers' War (41 page)

Sariel watched the pair go and turning back to Carter he seemed to sense his companion’s unease. ‘How are you bearing up, Lord Carnehan?’

‘Physically, I’m fine,’ said Carter. ‘Whatever work you did to my mind, I am still myself.’

‘Exactly as it should be,’ said Sariel. ‘But I need to give you a second gift. Unlike acting as a key to unlock our memories, this is a gift you will be able to summon at your whim.’

That sounds ominous
. ‘More responsibility?’

‘You may call it that. You have seen how rapidly my body heals itself.’

‘I sure wish I had your talent at taking a knife through the heart.’

‘Given time, you would not appreciate the long life such a talent also bestows,’ said Sariel. ‘Always more to do. More duty. There will be a time when duty is not enough. I am going to give you the gift of destroying my healing ability.’

‘But that would make you mortal? You could die from bullet or blade?’

‘It would and I could.’

‘I’d have massive power over you,’ said Carter, astonished the old trickster would trust him with such influence.

‘I cannot use the gift on myself,’ said Sariel. ‘My flesh would subvert my own spell even as I tried to cast it. But I can give it to you to use, you who were never born to have it. It’s the blackest sort of magic of course. I am not meant to possess it. But when you live for so many years, you have to do something with your time. Breaking rules with a little forbidden research helped keep my mind fresh.’

‘Why would you give me this terrible threat to hold over you?’

‘Because, Lord Carnehan, the time may come when you will need to kill me. I can give you no guidance on the matter save to say that if that time comes, you will certainly know it.’

Carter was left stunned.
I can’t.
‘I don’t want such power.’

‘I know,’ smiled Sariel. ‘And that is precisely why I must give it to you. Merely touch me and wish me mortal and I will be changed.’

ELEVEN

PRODDING THE BEAR

The woman in the open cockpit ahead of him glanced around angrily. ‘You mean for a woman?’ said Anna Kurtain raising her voice over the wind rushing past, disapproval evident in her voice.

Jacob glanced down at the silvery rapids of the White Wolf River. An easy marker for their flying wing to follow. As good as a king’s highway for the route he had planned. ‘I meant as a Weylander who was never selected by a wind temple’s monks for skyguard training.’

‘And don’t I know it. The skyguard marshal’s guards took great joy in stopping me from attending the pilots’ briefing in Hadra-Hareer.’

‘I got you up here, didn’t I?’ said Jacob.

‘Is flying you meant to be some kind of honour or were none of the skyguard pilots willing to sully their holy kites with the task?’

‘One of the two,’ said Jacob.

‘You know, the Rodalians talk up these blows across the mountains,’ said Anna, ‘but you try learning to fly above a stratovolcano in something little better than an iron cage with four rotors on it. Constant steam and mist, poisonous outgassings, eruptions, superheated thermals, clouds of flying debris a hundred times hotter than coals from your fireplace, never operating lower than ceiling altitude. Navigating and landing on mining stations only kept in the air by anti-gravity stones. You fly and survive in that while starving on the Imperium’s lumpy slave gruel, then return to Rodal and tell me how hard it is to pilot through a hard gale or two.’

She has a point
. And Carter had survived alongside her as a slave. If Jacob still believed in miracles, he might have called her being here alongside him one. Maybe Anna was hoping for another miracle today. Her brother had last been seen by Carter, kept as a slave mechanic on a skel carrier.
We both have our reasons for flying today. Her reasons must seem as pure to her as mine are to me
. Avenging Mary. Avenging all the dead children and townsfolk of Northhaven. The ones buried in the town or left scattered as bleached bones in Vandia’s sky mines.
The slavers are used to dishing out hell to unsuspecting victims on the ground. Today I’ll serve them at their own feast.

‘Why are you so certain Bad Marcus’ mercenary carriers will be in a holding pattern over the Lancean Ocean?’ asked Anna.

‘Aircraft rated at between three-hundred and four-hundred propellers?’ said Jacob. ‘Doesn’t matter how high they fly to reduce drag, they’re drinking a lot of fuel to stay aloft and fly combat missions against Rodal. Even with Bad Marcus’ new airfields, there are too many carriers circling to land anywhere close to the number of shuttles needed to stay fuelled. Marcus’ tame slavers and privateers usually resupply from ocean smugglers, using seaplanes to ferry fuel up to them. And now they’ve got the royalist navy sailing north, keeping them provisioned.’

‘Before I had a taste of it, I always thought that war was glory and charges, sabres and rifle squares, drums and brigades marching through the streets.’

‘That’s what everyone thinks,’ said Jacob.
Maybe even most the poor sods huddled behind a hedge, never worrying how far the bullets for their rifles and the shells for their cannon have travelled.
‘Any fool can show up for a fight. Showing up rested with a full ammunition pouch and a warm stomach is what separates a corpse from a soldier who gets to limp away and fight the next day.’

‘Still seems like a hell of a risk.’

Jacob glanced superstitiously behind him. The sky starling-dark with the cloud of a thousand flying wings, a low drone of engines which made the very air vibrate. Each similar to their own aircraft: a tiny triangle, bright blue with two red stripes on the fuselage, a single small rotor spinning at the back. Some with just a pilot’s cockpit, others with an extra space for a spotter or bombardier. Every fighter squadron fit to fly, stripped out from towns they defended, taken from the border fortresses of the steppes, veterans and trainees fresh out of the temple barracks, all conscripted.
Everything has to be timed right, or this will fail spectacularly. This will become the day we lost the war. The hour that the rebellion finally crashed and died
. Rodal. The Walls of the League. The wall that was always defended. The skyguard known for protecting their high villages and towns from nomads and invaders and slavers. Defenders who are always there to protect their people. For century after century.
That’s what everyone knows. And now I’m going to show the world something different.
Or rather, Jake Silver was.
Quicksilver
.

‘This isn’t on me,’ whispered Jacob. ‘Marcus turned my home into a charnel house first. All I’m doing is showing him how to do the job properly.’

‘What did you say?’ Anna called back.

‘Time to prod the bear,’ said Jacob.
Why carry a stick, otherwise?

‘See if it wants a dance?’

‘See if it wants a
chase
,’ said Jacob.

There was fog shifting below now, reminding Jacob how close they were to the Lancean Ocean.
Always fogs, here.
Redwater Harbour became visible through the drifting white murk. The closest port to the Rodalian front, the White Wolf River feeding into it. Vital for ferrying supplies by riverboat across the length of Havenharl. Bad Marcus had seized the harbour immediately after the royalist navy sank the bulk of parliament’s ships east of the Rotnest Islands.
But then, it’s easy to sink ships when you’re supported by a skyguard and you claim mastery of the air.

‘You know,’ said Anna, ‘there will be a lot of sailors on those ships below who didn’t ask to be there. Just following their skipper after their vessel declared for the royalist navy or came over after what was left of parliament’s fleet surrendered. And that’s a northern harbour down there.’

‘Did you ask when your town along the Lakes was raided by slavers and you watched your family killed and taken?’ said Jacob.

‘That’s your answer?’

‘Not an answer. Not a reason. There’s only a question. How badly do you want to beat Bad Marcus and his Vandian masters?’

‘You know the answer to that,’ Anna growled.

‘Then I reckon you have your answer, too.’

‘May the saints forgive me.’

‘Damned if they possess the right,’ said Jacob.
Damned if anyone does
.

Each flying wing had been loaded with at least two bombs, some as many as four, making the tiny triangular-shaped aircraft as manoeuvrable as a brick with a propeller at the back.
Pray that we’re lighter when we need to be.
The Rodalians’ ordinance was little better than shrapnel-packed grenades, manufactured to scatter, kill and maim charging nomad horsemen, not hole sailing ships. Luckily, while the Vandians’ massive downed aerial warship’s main arsenal detonated when she collided with Hadra-Hareer’s peaks, her aft arsenal had been discovered intact with shells for the vessel’s smaller guns.
Recovered and put to a far better use than serving the empire.
Jacob had seen one of the captured shells from the wreckage of
The Caller
test-exploded on Hadra’s slopes. Chemists inside the Rodalian city were at a loss to explain the warhead’s composition, a thick putty-like paste that made nitro-glycerine seem as harmless as watered down rice wine. But then, Jacob didn’t need to understand how a cat caught mice, just as long as his grain store stayed intact.

‘We’re lead hawk,’ said Anna. ‘Give the order.’

The fog had a sea-salt smell to it. Jacob felt a brief twinge of homesickness.
How many times did I watch fog like this roll up past the monastery at Geru Peak?
Fog which hid the mountains opposite. Hidden Jacob, much like the ancient church order, when he had most needed it.
How much better if I had stayed there.
Never left to become pastor of Northhaven. But that was a lie as bad as any of the untruths Jacob told himself. The slavers would still have come. The rebellion against Bad Marcus too. And finally the Vandians.
Would I have stayed a monk, far away from the weight of the world, with Weyland tearing itself apart in civil war? Saints how I wish you were still here, Mary. That I had been a different man and we had settled in a different town.
His dead wife failed to answer him.
She’s given up on me, too. Or maybe I’m as dead as she is. As dead as the family we buried together.
Jake Silver was what had been spat out. Exactly who he was cursed to be.
And some curses are just meant to be shared.

‘Your command,
General
Carnehan?’

Jacob checked his pocket-watch.
This won’t be the worst of it.
‘Sink every vessel; merchant and naval, both. Leave the town, harbour and mouth of the river so wrecked they won’t be able to run so much as a rowing boat through their waters.’

The fog concealed the prize below, just as it masked the massed Rodalian skyguard, muffled the sound of the squadrons’ engines, too. But not their whine as they angled away and started to dive. That had to be loud enough to start a panic below. The white wall vanished behind them as Anna broke through, angling to the horizontal, giving Jacob a good look at everything he needed to see. The harbour was so packed with the king’s business that most of the local fishing boats and kelpers had been ordered outside the docks. Maybe sixty or seventy three-masted merchant barques moored up or at anchor, the largest class that could ship seven hundred tonnes of cargo. They were surrounded by thousands of tubby little hog boats, the hoggies’ decks packed with barrels of fuel ether. A small fleet of doreys rowed fresh food and transported crews between water and town. Jacob counted five frigates, seven heavy gunboats and an ironclad wheelship protecting the mouth of the harbour in the shadow of the sea fort. There should have been more escorts, but any vessel still flying the flag for parliament and Prince Owen was as good as a pirate in these waters now. Currently clinging to the dark rocks of the Rotnest Islands for protection. Down by the river mouth beyond there were hundreds of flying boats taking on cargo, lined up along both river banks like a long chain of hungry ducklings.
Hungry for fuel. Fuel that burns real well inside an engine – or out.

Jacob leant forward, tapping Anna on the shoulder. He indicated the wheel-ship sitting low in the water. A recent metal-built monstrosity, steel-hulled, every ounce of her heavy Vandian metal paid for in Weylander blood. ‘Lighten your load.’

‘I think that’s the
Gadquero Ironside
,’ said Anna. ‘She sank five of the assembly’s ships-of-the-line when our fleet retreated after the fall of Midsburg.’

‘Send her to join our people.’

Anna nodded and banked the flying wing towards the vessel, fixing a straight line of sight on the target, hundreds of barque sails flapping below them as they shot over the harbour.

Sailors sprinted to man heavy rifle mountings along the warship’s deck, a hail of bullets whistling past Jacob’s flying wing as they angled closer, but Anna was practically cleaning her undercarriage against the waves. She banked erratically, giving the sailors a rapidly-twisting target to practise on. None of the altitude-timed fused shells from the vessel’s big guns could explode low enough against their aircraft. Jacob ignored the slap and hiss of hot shrapnel raining in the water behind them.
Just the same as a rifle square marching against cannons. Nothing you can do but put one boot in front of the other. Pray it’s the soldier in the squad next to yours who catches it in the neck.

Anna snapped up at the last second, sending all four bombs skipbouncing towards the ironclad. The first hit the vessel on her massive steel ram, the second burst against a box-battery on top, with the remaining two bombs slamming into her hull above the waterline. Vandia’s shells had caused carnage on the Rodalian city clinging to the capital’s twin peaks – they proved just as effective when returned to sender. Fire and flames from the detonations chased Jacob up into the air, deafening him, the flying wing shaking in a wave of furious turbulence. For a moment, it looked like Anna was going to lose control of the aircraft, but she wrestled it back into level flight. Their aircraft was newly blessed and released to the skyguard by the temple artisans. Nobody but Anna had flown in it before. Jacob turned to examine the flat fuselage behind him. Burn marks in front of the single rear-mounted rotor and holes flapping in the fabric where bullets had torn through.
They’ll know she’s been blessed when we return her.
Then he caught sight of the ironclad. Only the fish would be enjoying the
Gadquero Ironside
’s company; cracked along the three metal welds of her hull’s construction, sinking under the water in front of the harbour mouth. As good as any scuttling for denying Bad Marcus access to his landing. Her destruction had more or less sealed the narrow entrance to the harbour. Not that any ship could navigate now through the crowded water enclosed by Redwater’s piers and jetties. Hundreds of flying wings dipped in and out above a sea of fire and burning sails, broken barques exploding from full cargo holds, sailors leaping from decks remade as an inferno. Docks and quays shattered under the product of the Imperium’s stolen arsenal. Taverns and warehouses and fishing markets stood only as dark silhouettes among the burning conflagration. He could barely see the figures stumbling blindly through the pall of smoke, tumbling as wing guns chattered and broke the narrow streets into a deadly haze of flying masonry and broken cobblestones.

Anna banked south, taking them close to the sea fort. Heavy fortress walls running up a slope behind the granite breakwater protecting Redwater Sound. They were trying to raise barrage balloons from towers along the crenellated walkways but hadn’t received any warning of the attack.
Complacent. That’s what happens when one side has almost absolute control of the air. You come to believe that everything in the sky has to be friendly.
Rodal had never mounted anything like this. And Weyland had never seen any attacks on this scale. Gunnery crews reached the wall cannons fixed inside armoured casemates, ramming shells inside the muzzles, others charging them with powder while their compatriots raised the big guns’ elevation. The guns had hardly spoken before they were answered by dark plunging silhouettes, a squadron of skyguard pilots piercing through the fog cloud and dive-bombing the sea fort’s roof. Jacob had ordered the largest bombs to be preserved for this task. Almost things of beauty. Engravings of Vandian military triumphs on the brass shell-casings, warheads moulded with the exaggerated visages of the Imperium’s most famous emperors and generals. The same hideous steel faces that slammed into the sea fort’s curtain wall, barracks and barbican, sending them rising into the fog on spouts of fire as fierce shockwaves rippled out, the closest buildings in the town crumpling in the blast.