Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (43 page)

‘I am – a pastor.’

‘You don’t sound so sure of that.’

Maybe I’m not, at that
. ‘Think of us as four pilgrims.’

‘Well, pilgrim, as far as words are concerned, there’s truth in Mister Sariel’s. Chike was raised on the plains by a diviner, a great diviner. Have you heard of them?’

‘Some kind of shaman, a grassland wizard?’

‘They practise magic, that is true. Herbal medicine and simple science for the most part. But they can scry the future. The grand duke keeps his own stable of diviners in the palace, shamans he has captured from the tribes during fighting. The diviners are chained so they can’t commit suicide. And he blinds them, as that is said to increase their power of augury.’

‘A barbaric practice,’ said Khow. He raised his little metal calculator. ‘They must be powerful indeed, if they can follow the branches of the great fractal tree using only the power of their mind.’

‘Barbaric practices? Very much so,’ agreed the librarian. ‘It was the great diviner that declared Chike to be the child spoken of by the Prophecy of the Seven Suns, after Chike found an old spear-bow in a cave as a boy.’

‘I’m not familiar with the weapon,’ said Jacob.

‘A war spear as tall as a gad with a crossbow and winding mechan­ism built into the wood,’ said Iaroia. ‘All adults carry them on the plains.’

‘A royal bastard raised by a wizard, a boy fated to claim the kingdom,’ murmured Sariel, in wonder. ‘This is an ancient story with many roots.’

‘Ancient it may be,’ said Iaroia, ‘but the story’s lost none of its potency for the grand duke. He’s been driven insane trying to kill Chike and his followers, trying to prevent the prophecy coming true. And the harder the grand duke squeezes, the worse the situation becomes. An irony, don’t you think? The tribes around the city have laid aside their blood feuds and differences and united behind Chike. That is something unique. I may not be a diviner, but I can tell the future of Hangel, and it will not be a happy one, whichever side wins.’

‘I do not think we should linger here,’ said Khow.

‘On that we’re agreed,’ said Jacob. ‘Where do the city’s ticket brokers operate from?’

‘There is a hotel called the Salyut on the market square; any air passage broker worth dealing with can be found inside or on the streets alongside. Seeing as you carry the guild’s seal with you, I won’t even charge for telling you that.’

‘I need to borrow your map room, too,’ said Jacob. ‘Preferably also without charge. What funds we have, we need to conserve.’

‘Just four pilgrims in search of a distant investment opportunity?’

‘Something like that,’ said Jacob. ‘Although I think our ultimate business’ll be paying some people back.’

‘There are too many traders in the world operating in that market,’ said Iaroia. She stood up to lead them down the corridor, unlocking a series of doors and taking them into a warm stone chamber filled with large wooden map tables. The surfaces were empty, but her librarians turned up with a large-scale geographical key, and consulting with Khow, Jacob worked out the chain of maps they needed to examine.

Khow leant over the key thoughtfully. ‘Here. This is where Kerge has been for the last month. He has not moved.’

Jacob tracked the most direct route from their current position in the middle of the plains and began writing out the numbers of the tube rolls that would need to be brought out of archive, filling a sheet of paper with pencil-scrawled reference codes.

‘You gentlemen of the road really are far-called,’ noted Iaroia, reading the list before passing it to one of her librarians.

‘The distance is of no concern,’ said Jacob. ‘It’s a journey we need to make.’

‘Well, you’re going to keep some cobblers in business between here and there.’

It took two hand carts clattering into view, each filled with map tubes, for the surfaces of every table in the chamber to be covered. Perhaps fifty counters in all. The maps were ancient, dust-spattered things that looked as if they hadn’t seen the room’s electric lights for centuries. Jacob and Sheplar used spools built into the tables to trace red journey threads above the nations drafted on the thick paper, thousands of states with every type of geography… from seas to marshes to deserts to forests to mountain ranges. Sheplar looked despondent as he examined the distance they needed to cross. Sariel was more thoughtful, running his finger across the charts as though he was dipping into the soil of each land.

‘You are sure about this?’ Jacob asked Khow.

‘I am certain, manling.’

‘If we could harness a strong trade wind and fly with no refuelling,’ said Sheplar, ‘following this thread would mean seventeen years in the sky. Realistically, with layovers, perhaps twenty years’ journey time with merchant carriers. How can the skels have travelled so far, so fast? They should not have this level of lead on us.’

Iaroia stood by the last table they had papered with map sheets, examining their destination. ‘You are certainly travelling by a strange compass. Not to mention a dangerous one.’

Jacob walked over, looking down at the land on the map. ‘Is your atlas accurate, to scale? The country on this last map covers too much territory?’

‘Accurate when it was drawn, and if anything, an underestimation. This isn’t a country, it’s an
imperium
. Vandia. The richest, most powerful state I have on record at the hold, and then some.’ She waved at her staff to fetch the gazetteer volumes for the country. ‘They are said to have mines in the imperium, working mines overflowing with metals and ores.’ She reached out and patted the leather money purse attached to Jacob’s belt. ‘The copper in your coins most likely came from Vandia, passed down the caravan routes millennia ago. The gold in the grand duke’s treasury was probably pulled from the ground there. The steel in the rifles you brought in extracted there centuries ago.’

‘Do they keep slaves?’ asked Jacob.

‘Jacob Carnehan,’ laughed Iaroia, ‘if what I recall from our gazetteer is even half-correct, every nation within a hundred thousand miles of the imperium acts as their serf. You wish to safely build a tower over four-storeys tall, you need steel. You need that… then you must deal with the imperium and their agents on whatever terms they dictate. You require lead for your bullets and metal for your sabres, you must offer regiments to fight for their cause. What Hangel has here and your society back in the Lanca possesses in the way of factories and mills and technology, these are but the distant, ancient wash of that wealth and power. Metals transported for centuries, each league travelled making the ore rarer and more expensive. Do the Vandians keep slaves? Why wouldn’t they? I imagine they are very much like the grand duke here, except with the riches of the very gods to satisfy their demented whims.’

‘I understand something of the nature of ores,’ said Khow, raising his little metal calculator. ‘They do not all originate from a single source. My people have chemical tests that prove that.’

‘My needle-skinned guest, you are indeed learned. Yes, there are working mines elsewhere on Pellas. Too distant to be shown on the maps I possess here. I’m not sure if your lifespan is similar to those of us of the common pattern, but if you could fly far and long enough, you would one day reach a librarian’s guild hold with an alternative source of metals in its maps. But for us, Vandia is the closest source. The mother lode, you might say.’

‘Surely, the Vandians are a benevolent people,’ said Khow. ‘If they possess such wealth, they could dedicate their lives to learning and progress… they could send their charity to distant parts of the world?’

‘Ha,’ snorted Iaroia. ‘Have a look around the royal city tomorrow and then walk around the common city below. You will see gads sweating in the fields and in the workshops, encouraged by the lash and the cane. If you stumble across a group of Hangel philosophers sitting around the streets engaged in rarefied discourse and teasing out insights into the secrets of the universe, do let me know. I’d love to meet them. One thing I know about the Vandians is that they are normal men and women. That tells me all that I need to know about their imperium, without even consulting the archives.’

‘Do you know if the Vandians have fast aircraft?’ said Jacob.

‘I don’t need our gazetteer for that. I saw something once, when I was a girl in Denka. I was in my aunt’s gardens when the clouds parted and an object came flashing past, like an arrow, although with its size and the altitude it seemed to be flying at, it was probably closer to the size of a four-hundred rotor carrier. It was made of metal, and there was fire roaring behind it. It sounded like the gates of hell had broken open and the howls of the whole underworld were echoing across the land. It crossed the whole width of the sky in a couple of seconds. That, I was told by my aunt, is how the people of the far south travel.’

‘There are a people called skels,’ said Jacob. ‘Big ugly twisted brutes that survive as raiders and bandits. Do you know if they have dealings with the Vandians?’

‘Let us see.’ Iaroia waited for her staff to come back, returning twenty minutes later with a third cart, this one piled with leather-bound volumes. Everything the library contained on distant Vandia. Iaroia inspected an index tome, followed the trail through a handful of other volumes, and finally settled on one particularly heavy-looking history book. ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ She turned the book around towards Jacob for him to read the dense text hand-written inside as she talked. ‘See here. The skels were the previous rulers of the Vandian territory… masters of the mines that fund the imperium. The Vandians’ ancestors were the skels’ slaves, tribute from the nations surrounding the mines. But the bordering states grew tired of being forced to pay tribute. The countries rose up and overthrew the skels, turning their old overlords into refugees and nomads of the air. From the date here, that was over sixty thousand years ago. I wonder if the skels still nurse a grudge against their old workforce for usurping their seat at the feast.’

‘I may speak too much for that,’ said Sariel. ‘Skels are cold-blooded devils and they resent all not of their nation.’

Jacob scanned through the entry, hundreds of additional volumes cross-referenced. Details irrelevant to his mission. Long histories of the states that had struggled and fought for possession of the mines, empire after empire. Vandians and skels merely the most recent masters of these riches. That was the guild of librarians for you, always taking the long-term view. He felt a stab of regret.
This should have been Carter’s life. In a hold like this
. ‘This says the skels are often found working as privateers for the imperium.’
That’s a polite term for damn mercenaries. Licensed to plunder at others’ expense.

‘That’s the link,’ said Sheplar, excited and grinning.

Jacob was about to question Iaroia further, but she and her staff were called away to take delivery of the first batch of updates from the radiomen, leaving the four tired travellers alone, surrounded by a sea of maps and piles of tomes.

‘Don’t piss on your own doorstep,’ said Jacob, tapping the chart of Vandia. ‘The imperium has its mercenary brutes flying out to capture slaves from so far away that the raided nations will never be able to band together, repeat history, and unseat the imperium. A land army marching from the Lanca would take centuries to reach Vandia.’

Khow clucked unhappily as he tapped at his calculator. ‘Bad numbers. A closed branch of the great fractal tree. In a world without end… for this to have happened to my son.’

‘Had to happen to someone’s son,’ said Jacob. The words were cold comfort to him. To Mary Carnehan. To Carter and the taken. To distant Northhaven lying burnt with its crops fed by the ashes of the dead. Weyland would be raided for a few years or so, picked over, and then the slavers would move on. Choose another country from a thousand distant lands that wouldn’t have heard of the empire attacking them. Mere primitives compared to the forces assaulting them. Leave Weyland like a fallow field for millennia before returning again.
Just bad numbers and the random roll of fate
. Jacob smashed his fist on the map table in frustration. ‘Damn them! You know what this means, don’t you?’

Khow rolled one of Benner Landor’s trading coins between his leathery fingers. ‘The rarity value of the funds we carry will be close to worthless in our destination. We cannot bargain for our children in a Vandian slave market. Not with this metal.’

‘It just has to get us there,’ said Jacob. ‘Then I’ve got something else to trade. We’ll be dealing in lead.’ He looked at the others. Four of them. Against the weight and power of something so large and powerful, he could barely wrap his mind around the might of what they faced. Iaroia was right; they were a travelling circus act. Just dust blowing in the breeze compared to what they needed to accomplish. ‘None of you signed up for this. We don’t need all of Benner’s money now. We can divide it among us and you can travel back home.’

Sheplar shook his bushy head of hair. ‘Act well your part, there all honour lies. However strongly my heart is called back towards the mountains, I would count myself already dead if I flew for five minutes fleeing in the direction of home.’

‘Spoken like a true Rodalian. And you, Khow?’

‘I fear for what you are becoming, Jacob Carnehan. You are losing yourself in the vastness of the world. But I cannot abandon my child to the caprice of his captors in the imperium. I shall press on, come what may.’

Jacob sighed. Against all the odds the gask’s homing instinct had been proved correct. Was Khow’s estimation of the struggle within Jacob just as accurate? A dark splinter of his soul, long suppressed, whispered the answer.
Whatever it takes
. Just like the good old days. Except they had been anything but good. How could he remember the past now? How could he ever have forgotten?

‘There then,’ said Sariel, banging his gnarled old wooden walking staff on the stone floor of the map room. ‘Anywhere I sit is where my home shall be. These odds are nothing. I have faced far worse a hundred times and considered my enemies nothing but mere spit in the wind.’