Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (10 page)

‘Didn’t see my leg outside, did you?’ growled the woodsman as Jacob bent down.

Jacob shook his head and checked the bandaged stump. ‘Reckon a wolf must have had it away, Mister…?’

‘Folks just call me Hamlet. You can take your choice of wolves out there. Sneak a peep out of the window behind me. Careful you’re not seen, man.’

Jacob lifted his head and glanced through the broken glass. Long lines of townspeople marched down the river road, their legs man­acled together, just enough play to allow them to shuffle forward. Their captors were twisted. The bandits strutted a head taller than most of Northhaven’s men and women, green-scaled and lizard-snouted to boot. Twisted far beyond the common pattern. Short powerful tails swayed behind the raiders as they cursed and poked their prisoners forward with the business end of rifle-mounted bayonets. Before the Weylanders were chained in the cornfields, Jacob saw some locals being removed from the line, and he choked back his bile as he saw what happened next. Prisoners made to kneel, then one of the bandits – who must have been large even for his nation – walked the line with a scimitar, decapitating the hostages from the start to the end of the queue.

‘It’s the old ’uns they’re murdering,’ said Hamlet, hearing the catch in Jacob’s throat. ‘And the ones too young to work.’

‘Not just bandits, then,’ said Jacob. ‘
Slavers
.’

Hamlet nodded. ‘Oh, they’re raiding the town’s corn ether too. You can see their transport planes landing near the wharves on the river. But out in those fields? Any Weylander over thirty-five isn’t worth the fuel it’d cost to fly them to the slave block. Wouldn’t survive long enough under the whip to fetch a good price. And anyone under ten years is too small to do a day’s hard labour.’

Off on the horizon, Jacob could see blimps hovering where the river ran. Skyhooks connected to grounded gliders, every craft filled with captured townspeople. Squat triplanes dipped down, all engines and wings, catching lines dangling from the balloons and pulling the gliders back into the sky, towing them up to the bandits’ monstrous carrier.
Slavers
. Jacob felt a dagger of fear jabbing in his side. How many people did Jacob know were chained inside one of those bandit gliders? Good people, terrified and bloody and cowed. His parishioners. His friends.
Thank God I got Carter out
.

Mary came over behind Jacob with a wooden pole. ‘You can tie this on as a splint. Got a longer piece of wood you can use as a crutch.’

Hamlet snorted in amusement. ‘Seen enough lumber come down the wrong way and crush a fellow to know this is only going to end one way for me.’

‘We’re not leaving you here,’ said Jacob.

‘Sure you are. Because those ugly twisted brutes have raiding parties tearing up houses for silver and anyone hiding in storm cellars, and they’re going to be rolling right through here any minute. Then you two lightweights are going to need a mighty powerful distraction to see these youngsters safely up to the town’s walls.’

‘What can we do for you, friend?’ asked Jacob.

Mary began to protest. ‘We’re not—’

Hamlet raised his hand, silencing any argument. ‘Wedge me up here on a chair and pass me my quiver. Come on now, be about it – I’m shy a leg, not my arms.’

Jacob heaved the woodsman’s body up onto a chair, feeling the tremors in the man’s chest.
He’s right. Too much blood lost. Dead soon enough, even without the slavers helping him on his way.
Hamlet’s life had narrowed to a single, slim path, that wasn’t leading anywhere a sensible man wanted to travel. Hamlet hefted his bow, a tight grip on it, laying it across his leg and stump. ‘This here is
magic
wood.’

‘I know what a compound bow is,’ said Jacob. ‘Though they’re rare enough around these parts.’

Hamlet pulled an arrow from his quiver, fitted the string around it, and locked the arrow back in one smooth motion. The weapon’s pulleys held the arrow taut without any extra effort on the woodsman’s part, ready to be loosed with a finger’s worth of pressure. ‘Bought it from a caravan that passed through town last summer. They told me it had been in their family for twenty generations. Think about that, travelling millions of miles, just to end up in my hands. End up here on this day. It’s almost a miracle.’

‘Maybe it is,’ said Jacob.

‘You see those children to safety up the hill and I’ll know it travelled true,’ coughed Hamlet. ‘Know it got here with a purpose.’

‘Trick bow like that,’ said Jacob, ‘Maybe I ought to cut your other leg off to make sure it’s a fair fight.’

Mary had the children lined up and ready to leave; fourteen of them, only half the class that had turned up early for competition practice. Some of them still had the school’s practice bows in their hands, clutching them tight like totems to protect against the fate that had befallen their friends and teachers.

‘We’ll head up Prospect Rise,’ said Mary. ‘That’s where the fires are worst. Bandits’ll leave that end of town last; those devils came here to start fires, not put them out.’

‘Sounds like a plan.’

One of the little girls peeled away from the line and offered her quiver to Hamlet, intent green eyes in her smoke-blackened face looking up at the dying woodsman. ‘Thank you for our archery lesson, Mister Hamlet.’

‘That’s a mighty kind gift, young lady. I’ll see if I can put some of those bolts where they need to be.’

Mary hustled the girl back into line, placing a finger against her lips. ‘We’re going up to the wall and playing silent rabbits all the way. Even if you see fires or other things on the way, you’ll be silent, won’t you? There’ll be a prize for the quietest when we get there.’

‘And there might be ugly lizard-faced strangers about who’re looking to trick you into making a noise,’ added Jacob. ‘But none of you are to fall for their pranks.’

‘You know the archer’s tradition,’ Hamlet said to Jacob before he left, ‘the final shot?’

Jacob nodded.

‘What’s that?’ Mary whispered as they ducked through the wrecked part of the school.

‘Something for later,’ said Jacob.
And sweet saints, let there be a later for us.

They had slipped beyond the school fields, winding their way slowly, quietly up the hill, when a coughing snarl of rifle fire broke out behind them, short bursts of fire. Jacob couldn’t hear the twang of arrows being returned, but the angry discharge of guns told its own story.
Sell yourself dear, woodsman.

Supported by Carter’s shoulder, the Rodalian pilot grew a little more coherent as they limped together through the Western gate. His face was a work of art, all right, and not just because he was Rodalian. His eyes were like a crow’s feet turned on their side, a line-apiece for eyebrow, eyes and the bags underneath, all three razor-thin. His hair might have been a twelve-year-old’s, as thick and bushy as any Carter had seen, and probably unnatural for a man who must’ve been in his late forties at least. Two prominent smile lines hung off a nose slightly too wide for the face, twitching above a clear white set of teeth that would’ve looked unnatural doing anything other than smiling. Even allowing for the man’s injuries, his movements were awkward and ungainly, like a mime pretending to be a pilot. The saints only knew how he had twisted and turned that flying wing of his with so much skill during his outnumbered duel above the town. Desperate refugees streamed all around Carter and his pilot, citizens grabbed by constables standing duty and pushed down the streets that branched out into the old town. Anything to hurry the townspeople along and keep the portcullis entrance unblocked.

‘What’s your name?’ murmured the pilot, using the back of his leather flying gloves to rub a streak of soot away from his cheek.

‘I’m Carter Carnehan.’

‘Where are your two friends, the ones who caught me after you cut my chute?’

‘My parents. They’re helping people down in the new town.’

The flier glanced towards the sky; the noise, but not the sight of the bandit raiders still rolling about up in the blue. ‘I have failed in my duty.’

‘You’re kidding me, right? Bandits must have sixty fighters in the air. You went right at them, flew into their squadron like the bravest fool I ever saw.’

‘The number of foes does not matter. You win or you do not win – one enemy or a hundred, no difference. If your soul is pure you will triumph. What chance now for the name of
Sheplar Lesh
to be entered in the skyguard’s rolls of honour after
this
defeat?’

Sheplar Lesh continued mumbling about losing his plane and his honour as Carter stumbled with the pilot towards an aid station set up in the lee of the wall. A gang of young men stood in the road, milling around uncertainly. Many of them faces that Carter recognised from his final year at school, others from the taverns and river when the ferries sailed up from Redwater bringing sailors who’d pay to be guided to good rooms and amiable company. It was obvious the mob wanted to do something.
And it sure isn’t hunker down in some cellar and let the most interesting thing to happen in Northhaven for a couple of centuries pass on by while they’re quaking in the dust next to old jam bottles and spare blankets.
The men moved aside for Carter, a jabber of excited voices talking fast and breathless.

‘Heard they dive-bombed a crowd outside the Five Horseshoes and put thirty into the grave.’

‘No, that was along Blists Hill.’

‘Flattened the Pickerell house, killed Amy Pickerell and her little sister too.’

‘Bastards.’

‘Hey, is that the Rodalian—?’

Carter slipped past before the group could try and detain him. A makeshift surgery had been set up inside an ironmonger’s store, merchandise tables swept of goods and wounded constables stretched across the counters, burnt and gunned by the bandit planes wheeling through the sky, civilians too. Just townspeople out minding their business and looking to make an honest living when death had come screeching down on them.
Damn the bandits to hell.
Unexpected, uninvited and looking to steal what they had no right to.

Auxiliaries from the town’s hospital quickly stretched the Rodalian flier over one of the cleared tabletops, pulling away his flying jacket. Carter watched their practised hands at work. ‘You fix him up. This man’s the Rodalian who flew for us. He’s called Sheplar Lesh. One pilot against a whole bandit horde, that’s a name worth remembering.’

‘I’m not a head doctor,’ said the orderly, wiping bloody hands on his butcher’s apron. ‘But I’ll tend to everything except his madness.’

‘Can’t cure a man of being Rodalian,’ said the medic next to him. ‘You head up north and cross the mountain border; I hear they’re all like that.’

Carter ignored their mortuary humour. This flier had nearly died for them, a stranger in a flying wing honouring the ancient compact of the Lanca.
Attack one, attack all.
Well, now it was Carter’s turn. He was boiling as he pushed his way past the stretchers and blood and bandages and the stench of wounds soaked in pure alcohol. His temper wasn’t much improved by the sight of the high sheriff arguing with Constable Wiggins in the shadow of the keep. The squat leader of the town’s police was demanding that the portcullis be lowered; old Wiggins squared up to the officer as though he was planning to wrestle his commander to the ground.

‘There’s still too many down in the town,’ insisted Wiggins.

The high sheriff appeared unmoved. ‘We’ve got a care to keep the people inside these walls safe. There’s more on this side of the battlements, now, old man. Northhaven can’t afford to have a gate sitting wide open when the bandits’ ground forces push up the hill. If there’re stragglers still outside, that’s just how it is.’

Carter pushed past two officers behind the high sheriff, big men squeezed into blue uniforms with hands resting on holstered pistols. ‘Stragglers be damned! My parents are still out there. They’re coming up from the school with children.’

‘You’re the pastor’s son, aren’t you? What’s that you say… children at the school this early?’ The high sheriff dug his pocket watch out of his jacket pocket, taking in the time. ‘Damn, but I’d like to know who’s got our luck today; this is a hell of a mess!’

Carter stuck a finger up towards the enormous bandit carrier looping lazy circuits below the clouds, her engines a distant drone while fighters, gliders and transporter tugs passed in and out of her belly, a cloud of midges buzzing around their massive host beast. ‘Not a mess for the raiders. They know what they’re doing, right enough. Hit us on market day when we’ve long lines of oil tanks ready for shipment, the town fat with trade metals and travellers. The territorial force off with the fleet, and Northhaven a chicken fat on corn and clucking for a plucking. In at sun-up to maximise daylight for looting, catching us at breakfast.’

‘They know their business, that I can see. Clumsy bandits wouldn’t have lived long enough to fly this far out.’

‘They’ve got a map of the town is what they got,’ said Carter. ‘Striking Ale Hill and every part of the new town that’s tinder to burn. But they don’t really
know
the streets, not the way we do.’ Carter indicated the mob milling in the shadow of the ramparts. ‘You’ve got a guardhouse full of weapons handed in for market week. You give them to us and we’ll keep the bandits away from the walls. Give them something to think on ’sides rolling up all of Northhaven’s silver into a sack.’

‘That’s crazy talk,’ spat Wiggins. ‘You think I’m going to let you—?’

Carter jabbed a hand towards the battlements. ‘You’ve got new signings the same age as us up on the wall, only difference is most of us can shoot worth a damn. Hell, how old were you when you signed on as a constable? All those tales you tell of the old days, they just hot air or did they actually happen the way you told?’

‘This ain’t the old days, Carter.’

‘He’s got a point, old man,’ growled the high sheriff. ‘We did as bad back in the day. And if these wharf rats and tavern brawlers raise half as much hurt for the raiders as they do for us on pay day, then the stragglers in the new town’ll have a good chance of making it up the hill.’