The Stealers' War (27 page)

He followed the maze of claustrophobic horizontal tunnels for half an hour, needlessly complex, avoiding the trapped tunnels and dead ends, opening each gate and grille he encountered. Every now and then he came across another shaft to descend, unfurling his lines and climbing gear. Then more cramped horizontal passages. Alexamir experienced a moment’s hesitation when a circular chamber with six tunnels failed to materialize, but he resolved to push on. As uncomfortable as crawling through these tight passages was for one who lived for the open skies, crawling backwards would be worse. He found a junction with two passages where both marker gargoyles had crumbled away.
I thought this lay behind me? Left then, I think.
He crawled ahead and, after ten minutes of leaden progress, finally arrived inside the six-tunnel junction. Enough space inside to stand and stretch his cramped bones and muscles.

Alexamir lifted a torch out to examine the features of the wind spirits carved above each tunnel. As he did so, he heard a challenge echo out of the fourth passage. Low and distant, but clearly discernible.

‘Who is there?’ called the voice.

A vent-man! Atamva preserve me.
Alexamir said nothing, hoping the worker would think him a rat scurrying about the vents.

‘I know every sound inside here,’ echoed the voice again. ‘Give me no answer and you’ll hear mine fast enough.’ There was a low click in the distance. The sound of a pistol being cocked. Alexamir touched the knife on his belt. He would have brought his sword along, but it hardly fitted his false tale of a couple of wreckers out stripping the Vandian ship.

Alexamir found the inlet he wanted and scrambled into the narrow passage, hoping to put enough distance between him and the ventman to throw the worker.
Keep on heading for their temple. Perhaps the vent-man will lose my trail.
Alexamir made as many tight turns as he could inside, scaling the horizontal chimneys by hand without ropework to slow him down.
I have climbed the heights of Rodal to raid this forsaken land. What are a few chimneys to a man such as me?
The nomad covered up all but one of his torches, keeping the illumination so low he could barely see where he was going himself, relying solely on his memory and questing fingers to guide him.
Is that a glow behind me?
He turned into a horizontal passage so narrow he could barely squeeze through.
I don’t think this is marked on the map?
Alexamir had memorized an area of the passages so narrow only the youngest, smallest vent-men could enter.
But it is far from here, surely?
Unless Alexamir was lost, disoriented by the chase.
No, my memory is as strong as sword steel. I can navigate the steppes at night and locate the same blade of grass I made camp on the previous year.
His tunnel grew narrower still. The only way Alexamir would pass through here was by staying until he starved himself thin, just like the Weylander had suggested.
I have to turn back.
He reversed course, crawling and backing up until he came to a junction whose space he could use to turn around. This was the fourth junction he had passed.
Yes, I know where I am
. But so did the vent-man. He spotted a dim glow from a torch identical to those he carried. Alexamir turned into the safety of the passage, out of the way of a pistol shot.

‘It’s Norbu,’ called Alexamir. ‘One of the new apprentices.’

A laugh from the darkness. ‘There’s thirty apprentices currently on the rolls and not one of them with that name, thief.’

Alexamir cursed.

‘Tell me then “apprentice”, how large is the bounty our guild pays for every dead intruder dragged out of the shafts?’

‘Two nights in your wife’s bed,’ laughed Alexamir. ‘Or three with your hag of a mother biting the pillow.’

‘So, perhaps not a thief, but a beggarly bard with a talent for jokes? Were you chased up here from a bedroom by some maid’s jealous husband? In either event, the money your corpse will earn me remains the same.’

Alexamir groaned. The nomad crawled as fast as he could down the tunnel. This tunnel felt damp below his hands and he could hear the drip-drop of water ahead. There would be another shaft ahead, if his remembrance of the map was correct.
And here it is. Just where it should be.
The nomad remembered the shameful time he had fought an older boy from the clan, wrestling with him in the rapids of a river. How the lout had held young Alexamir’s head under the water with his superior strength. How alien and strange the battle had seemed, water streaming around them, threatening to drag him under and pull him away. His aunt had smacked him around the head when she’d heard how badly he had lost. ‘He is the son of a fish netter!’ Nonna swore at him. ‘He knows how to swim and knows that you do not. He goaded you into wrestling by the riverbank so he could throw you in. Always choose your own field of battle, or you choose only your defeat. You must first fight using your brain before you fight using your hands.’

This is my foe’s field, but I am no boy now.

A crack sounded, followed by a ricochet of a round on the wall behind him.
Missed!
Alexamir gave the vent-man no further banter to use to help direct his fire. The nomad secured his line to the well’s highest iron pin. A second, louder shot exploded behind him. The vent-man hadn’t aimed into the correct side-passage yet, but that third killing shot was coming, Alexamir could feel it. He swung his hands on to the lip of the well and tentatively entered the shaft, just narrow enough to place his back against the wall and walk its walls down without the time-consuming business of line and clip. Alexamir hadn’t scaled more than a tenth of the deep well’s drop when the vent-man’s fierce victory whoop sounded above him. The nomad grabbed the end of the climbing line dangling before him, but the clip and line method of descent was even slower than spine-walking it. The riceeater leaned over the well’s mouth and aimed his pistol down towards a target a blind man wouldn’t fail to hit.

‘You’ve made me work for this one,’ the vent-man called triumphantly. Alexamir sensed the gun’s sight focusing on the top of his skull. ‘Sing me a song as you fall!’

SIX

THE VANDIAN MISSION

Cassandra sat in a chair, the wooden table in front of her covered by a pile of Temmell’s books. Histories, for the most part. The particular tome in front of her was the first volume in a series titled
The Rise of Empire
, penned by a long-dead scholar called Cinneide Tarson. Vandia’s achievements weren’t mentioned once, however. This book was all about the empire north of the steppes, Persdad. That it had risen at all seemed to be attributed by Cinneide to the nomads of the steppes, who had burnt their path through the nations preceding Persdad, hastening its formation much like the scars on a wound, sealing the Nijumeti into the territory they currently roamed. Cassandra had passed the ruins of city-states sacked by the riders out on the grasslands. Little more than boulder-strewn hills now, shadows in the ground marking once-mighty citadels.
At least the history texts are of some interest.

Temmell possessed a great many tomes, but much of the goldenskinned sorcerer’s library was of a wholly practical nature. Books on botany and anatomy, flight and engineering, metallurgy and chemistry, a variety of atlases; albeit of the crude, inaccurate variety that would have disgraced any Guild of Librarians’ hold, let alone the Imperial Ordnance Survey Service’s charts. Everything the trickster once needed to make a living as a travelling peddler and medicine man. Temmell had certainly landed on his feet among the nomads, the clans duped into believing the self-proclaimed sorcerer’s claims about his powers and talents.
Except there’s the glamour that makes Alexamir appear Rodalian. A powerfully strange sort of hypnotism. How does Temmell manage that? And there is my broken spine
. The bizarre nature of Cassandra’s healing. Ten sparse minutes of glorious mobility every morning, fully healed, sauntering and then sprinting before she collapsed pole-axed towards the grass. Her legs useless again, as dead as if both limbs had been amputated following her flying wing crash.
Everything I was taught about surgery and anatomy by Doctor Horvak says my temporary recovery should be impossible. I am either healed or I am wounded. Not flipped between the two states like a tossed coin each morning
.

Temmell administered no new drugs to Cassandra, although he preferred keeping her inside his quarters in the centre of the camouflaged aircraft works. That, Cassandra suspected, had more to do with the sorcerer’s desire to keep a beady eye on her while Alexamir risked his life on her behalf. Nothing to do with repeated medical treatments. Alexamir’s Aunt Nonna accepted this new arrangement with reluctant grace. Nonna wasn’t in a position to countermand the sorcerer’s hospitality. Instead, she insisted on visiting with food every morning, afternoon and evening, as though the servants in the Great Krul’s service were incapable of cooking. Still, Cassandra was always happy to see the old woman. She reminded her that Alexamir was in the world. Risking his neck in Rodal so the untrustworthy sorcerer would complete her treatment. And how Cassandra prayed Temmell would, that he
could
. How cruel would it be if Alexamir returned with the stolen secrets of the Rodalian monks only for Temmell to shrug and admit that her healing was only a temporary treatment and that is all it could ever be.
If ten minutes healed a day is to be my lot, how could I go on?

After an hour of perusing books, Casandra saw Nonna appear at the door. She smelt her before she heard her. Nonna came bearing a cold pie called a kurnak inside her small pottery dish – filled with chewy goat meat, berries, mushrooms and a little honey.

Cassandra hadn’t realized she was hungry until the old aunt entered the sorcerer’s lair. ‘Any word of Alexamir?’

‘What word do you think to receive, girl?’ sniffed Nonna. ‘All the metal we have stolen rests in our blades, not iron towers which foreign fools use to call the invisible radio spirits. Alexamir Arinnbold carried no cage of homing crows with him, and even if the fool had, I dare say he would have cooked them all up over his campfire by now.’

‘I hoped the pilot Zald might have returned with Alexamir or word of his success . . .’

‘Pah, the mighty Zald Mirok? If I know that old hound, he is snoring loudly in the shade of his wooden pigeon, an empty bottle by his side and dreaming of the days when he rode a swift horse like a real warrior. Two fools together, on a fool’s errand for a cunning foreign galoot. Never in my day.’

He’s no fool.
‘Alexamir will survive. He has to.’

‘Alexamir is a capable thief,’ said Nonna. ‘But that devil Temmell needs a fool as much as he needs a thief. He knows my nephew’s soul well. Always trying to prove himself in front of the Great Krul.’

‘Don’t all clansmen ride to prove their strength?’

‘Not all riders have their mother warming the Great Krul’s tent. Not all riders were raised as much a son of the Great Krul as his own blood. Alexamir is the same as my dead dolt of a brother. He would ride through hell for Kani Yargul. If Temmell has his way, I dare say my nephew will not lack for opportunities to show his hooves to hell’s minions.’

‘You should not speak ill of the dead. Insulting your ancestors brings bad fortune.’

‘A fie for my ancestors,’ snorted Nonna. ‘And a double fie for Alexamir’s father. My brother has been feasting like a hero beside Atamva and the hosts of the fallen while those who survive him work their fingers to the bone scrubbing clothes in the stream, gathering firewood, skinning goats and burning their fingers over hot clay cauldrons.’ She thrust her gnarled fingers under Cassandra’s nose. ‘Look at my hands. They belonged to a warrior princess once, fit for any man who dared consider himself Nijumeti and attempted to steal me. I could once fire a bow riding backwards while skinning a hare, dismount with a somersault and slice the necks of three rival clansmen, and then curse the morning’s work as only half-done.’

‘A pity there is no man in the tent now.’

‘There was never any man worthy of me. It is the curse of all those born to beauty and great cunning. Kani Yargul tried to steal me twice and I kicked him in the balls both times and cursed him for a weak-livered courtier. If he had tried a third time, I would have sliced his jewels off and made them into a bolas to chase off all the other wolves who came yapping after me.’

Cassandra believed it. Age had slowed Nonna a little, but Cassandra could tell from the way that the old woman moved that she had been blade-trained every bit as thoroughly as any Vandian noblewoman.
And where has it got her? For that matter, what did it bring me? A prisoner of my own flesh, dependent on an ambitious madman’s dreams and dark sorceries.

Nonna leapt up at the sound of an explosion in the distance, scattering her food as she practically sniffed the air. ‘What in the name of Seven Horses was that?’

A fuel explosion?
‘It came from inside the aircraft works.’

‘These twice-plagued wooden pigeons,’ said Nonna. ‘They are not our way. Such craft belong to rice-eaters and outsiders who sorely tempt holy vengeance by trespassing across the heavens.’ She disappeared outside to investigate, leaving Cassandra staring at her piefilled plate and wondering. Nonna returned with two of Temmell’s men, big riders with curved swords strapped to their backs.

‘You are sent for,’ said one of the warriors.

‘If it’s expertise in extinguishing aircraft fires you need, I suggest you seek out Sheplar Lesh,’ said Cassandra.

‘Come,’ repeated the second man. He pushed Nonna back as she attempted to leave with them. ‘Not you, woman. You are not sent for.’

‘You send for my blade,’ snapped the old woman. ‘You lay your dirty hand on me again and you’ll be holding the reins with the arm I didn’t slice to the grass.’

The two warriors grabbed Cassandra and carried her outside Temmell’s quarters. Cassandra’s mare waited there, tied to the building, and she shrugged off the riders’ thick hands as she mounted the saddle.
How quickly I’ve grown accustomed to using my arms to pull me up and throw my dead useless legs across the nag
. Nonna emerged from the entrance, looking irritated and worried in equal measure.

‘Stay here, Nonna,’ said Cassandra. ‘I’ll be back soon enough.’

‘Sharp eyes, Golden Fox,’ muttered the aunt. ‘With a sharper blade for what you ride across.’

A pall of thick dark smoke rose from somewhere on the steppes, perhaps inside the concealed manufactory itself ?
Is it Alexamir? If the ancestors love me, please, let him not have returned home only to crash.
The two men leapt into the saddles of their own horses and led her through the maze of half-stripped carriers, construction huts and mounds of salvage. Towards a sight she never thought she would see again. Just outside the camouflage netting thrown over the primitive aircraft works. Three grounded helos, another two hovering in the air, heavily armed gunships of Vandian design. And back behind the rolling hills and the small river, her heart quickened at the sight of a capital ship of the Imperium, soil still smoking from where her engine pods had scoured the grass upon landing.
That ship, she looks like
. . . it was at that moment she noticed a group of house guardsmen being led towards the works by Temmell. Cassandra could hardly believe her eyes.
After all this time. Mother, Paetro, Duncan!
They had come for her, found her.
But how
? Then she noticed the trader and smuggler, Brean Luagh, happily strutting at the front of the Vandian party.
So, Brean found something more valuable than aircraft fuel and metal engine parts to sell
. Her soul felt ripped apart. W
ill they take me away with them? How can I go now? What about Alexamir, still risking his life for me? How can I never see him again? Know if he lives or dies?
Cassandra felt as though she was two people inside one body, and only one could leave to return to the Imperium.

‘As you asked,’ said Temmell, halting in front of Cassandra’s horse. He raised his hand at her. ‘Your daughter.’

‘Do you think I asked?’ said Princess Helrena. She indicated the pall of smoke coming from a crashed carrier, the giant half-stripped aircraft further damaged by incendiary shells if Cassandra was any judge. ‘If I had kept on “asking” there would not be a barbarian left alive within a hundred miles of here.’

‘The Nijumeti are a civilized if simple people,’ smiled Temmell, ingratiatingly. ‘Despite some indications to the contrary. Have we not given roof and salt to your daughter? Treated Lady Cassandra as though she was one of our own clanswomen?’

‘If you maltreated my daughter, the range of my “asking” would have extended to every blade of grass in this dry, flat land of yours,’ threatened Princess Helrena. She beckoned Cassandra. ‘Are you not going to dismount? Give me a proper welcome?’

‘She cannot,’ said Brean Luagh.

Cassandra’s mother turned and shot the trader a dark glare. ‘What do you mean, she
cannot
?’

Brean advanced towards Cassandra’s horse and raised his arms to her. ‘Come, lady. Let me help you down.’

Cassandra dismounted into his arms and let him bear her towards the shocked visitors.
You fool, Brean Luagh. You didn’t tell them about my injuries. Of course they flew here for me, not knowing.
But then, how could any foreign-born smuggler from Hellin hope to understand what her impairment meant inside the Imperium?

Princess Helrena was practically shaking, the sight of her missing daughter being presented in this ignoble manner. ‘How badly are you injured?’

Cassandra shook her head and shrugged, fearing to speak the answer. ‘My spine was crushed. The aircraft I escaped my captors in came down hard on the steppes during combat.’

Paetro stared worriedly up at her. At his failed responsibility. Guilt and shame tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘Send for the surgeon from the ship. Get him down here at once.’

Soldiers rushed back to a helo to radio for the man. Cassandra vaguely recognized the doctor when he appeared from a newly settled fourth transporter. An old silver-bearded man attached to the house’s medical staff, a couple of orderlies behind him, bearing heavy black bags containing the instruments of his trade.
I know you. You’re the one who gave me the vaccine for Red Fever the last time the sickness swept through Vandis
. They lay her on the soil like a bedroll. The surgeon rolled up the simple cotton and leather clothing from her back and examined her body. First with warm hands, then with a variety of cold medical instruments. At the last, the surgeon brought out a heavy device with two handholds jutting at its side like iron ears, gripping it tightly with both hands. He pushed the cold metal against her spine and took an x-ray image of her back, skeletal bones and flesh imaged in spectral green on the glass plate at the machine’s rear. He examined the image slowly, then discussed it with his two assistants before walking across to Cassandra’s mother. Princess Helrena had a hushed conversation with the doctor, her temper obviously not improved by their news. Then she finally returned to speak with her daughter.

‘You have fractured three vertebras and your spinal cord has been severed in at least two places. Even the imperial surgeons cannot heal you. You will never walk again.’

‘But I can,’ insisted Cassandra. She glanced urgently at Temmell. ‘Tell my mother. Tell her of my healing each morning.’

‘That is but a potion for the pain,’ said the sorcerer.

‘There is no potion,’ spat Cassandra. ‘I can walk, unassisted. I can even sprint. For at least ten minutes each morning, before I return to this paralyzed state.’

‘You fly,’ said Temmell, sadly. ‘You soar. Caught up in the visions of our healing herbs.’

‘Are you so desperate to avoid upholding your honour?’ Helrena glanced in the direction of the surgeon again, but he just sadly shook his head.
You lying dog, Temmell!

‘What honour?’ said Duncan, confused, to Helrena. ‘We’ve found her at last. She’s safe! We can take Lady Cassandra home.’ Cassandra almost felt sorry for her old protector.
He doesn’t know. Poor Duncan. You have spent so much time among us, but you still don’t understand what it is to be born celestial caste. What it is to hold the Imperium against the rest of the world.