The Stealers' War (37 page)

‘Too close,’ snarled Paetro.

Duncan turned as furious yells resounded across two other streets, fresh waves of warriors charging through the village in force, obviously timed to give the defenders something to worry about other than that battering ram.

The salvo of the rooftop sharpshooters turned into a hail of bullets as the charging soldiers opened up on the farm building in concert, dust and masonry crackling around Duncan. Before he could duck down there was a massive explosion. Duncan glanced down to try to find where the battering ram had blasted its way into the farm building, but then he saw the column of smoke rose streets away. Where the road had been boiling over with charging Rodalians, now it was a cratered mess filled with fire, smoke and confusion. As Duncan stared dumbfounded there was a scream overhead, an aircraft passing low at speed. Not a helo or one of the Vandians’ rocket-driven patrol ships. Then another plane and another, a wave of thumping explosions rising out of Ganyid Thang and washing warm air across his cheeks.

Duncan felt elation as he recognized the aircrafts’ notorious jet-dark cloth fuselage; the sketches of these deadly, feared fliers had filled a hundred sensational newspaper covers.
We’re going to survive this after all.
Twin booms on each fighter, each with a propeller, the booms joined at the back by a long horizontal stabilizer and midway, a single, central nacelle for the single pilot’s glass cockpit, the plane’s polished nosecone bristling with eight guns.
Black Bullets.
Usually illustrated attacking merchant ships on the Lancean Ocean while seaplanes landed to offload booty stripped from burning vessels. ‘They’re pirate fighter planes!’

‘King Marcus’ money is good for something,’ laughed Paetro. ‘The ancestors bless a friendly mercenary.’

Duncan followed the contrail of the aircraft. ‘It has to be the same squadron that took on the skyguard above the ambush of the Seventh Merlanda!’ Baron Machus won’t be happy, Duncan judged.
But then the baron can hardly complain about the king’s mercenaries engaging targets of opportunity. Taking on the task he’s hung back from.

The Black Bullets dived low across the valley, nose-mounted guns chattering and tearing strips of ground into the air, Rodalians tumbling inside plumes of soil and smoke. Unlike the Weylanders, whose regiments had centuries of drills shooting at planes with tripod-fixed heavy rifles, the Rodalians over-relied on their skyguard to see off threats from the air. Many of the pirate fliers flew with rows of rockets on racks under their wings. Meant for raking decks, sails and wheelship stacks and devastating vessels into quick surrender without actually sinking them, the rocket blasts were the last straw for the Rodalian ground forces. With no friendly flying wings in support, the mountain soldiers broke and ran. The troops turned tail in the village and fled back up the slope making for the safety of the mountains. Pirate aircraft wheeled across the escarpment, strafing with concentrated nose-fire, exhausts along their booms leaving contrails of angry dark smoke in their wake.
They’re showing no mercy.
Duncan wondered if that was simply the pirates’ way, or if they’d been promised a bounty for every enemy corpse collected from the battlefield. One Black Bullet flew fast over the farm buildings, the brief glimpse of a leather-masked face inside its transparent bubble canopy. Duncan noted the insignia painted across each tail wing: a white skull leering above a bone-white propeller, a pale bomb painted on either side, set against the field of a winged blood-red circle.
A flag as infamous as their planes.
‘They’re flying out of the
Plunderbird
,’ said Duncan. ‘That’s Black Barnaby’s fighter wing.’

Paetro spat contemptuously on the floor at the name. He obviously didn’t like the idea of being saved by Jacob Carnehan’s wayward brother.
To hell with that. I’ll take any help I can get
.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Kenem. ‘We’re alive, aren’t we?’

Paetro glared at the old legionary. ‘When I heard the Imperium was dispatching a legion for a punishment campaign, I had it in my mind it might be the enemy that was going to be punished.’

‘We’re alive,’ repeated Duncan, hardly believing it.

Kenem muttered something that sounded like, ‘Until next time.’

That’s fair enough
. Duncan was part of the house now. But they wouldn’t let him forget just why they had nearly died here.
Yes, alive, until Gyal and his lapdogs come up with a new suicide mission for us.

Willow sat on the hard stool allocated for the wooden defendant’s stand inside Northhaven’s courtroom. Three judges sat before her on high, a line of white powdered wigs and heavy crimson robes. Willow knew that the local circuit judges of the prefecture wore blue, so that these gentlemen of the law had no doubt been imported, along with the occupying Army of the Boles, from the royalist south of the nation.
Why am I here?
She didn’t recognize any friendly faces packing the public gallery or the open seats of the court. Newspaper writers and gawkers; ordinary townspeople, from their simple clothes, drawn by the sensation whipped up beforehand. Oddly, rubberneckers appeared to fill the jury benches too, rather than sworn-in citizens. Unfriendly faces, though, those she could find aplenty. Her odious step-mother, Leyla Holten. At least Holten’s repugnant creature Nocks wasn’t present. She could still see his face in her mind, looking triumphant for most of the time Willow had been trussed up on the back of a mule and smuggled out of Rodal and into Weyland.
No sign of my brother or father either?
Viscount William Wallingbeck was present, however. He stared angrily at Willow whenever he could stand to look at her at all.

Did I disappoint you, husband? Well, here’s your chance to take your pound of flesh, even though the pound of flesh you value most will be entering the world soon enough. They won’t dare put me on trial for high treason. The penalty for high treason during a time of war is immediate execution . . . I won’t even be able to plead my belly. So, what game is Leyla Landor playing at here?

Willow was to find out soon enough. The judge in the centre of the three notables banged his gavel and called the court into session. A prosecutor left the open benches and walked before the wooden stand where Willow sat. Perhaps sixty years old, the dark-robed lawyer had a tiny pair of spectacles balanced on a long nose and the superior manners of a scholar lecturing a student far beneath his towering intellect.

‘I am Callum Perry, your ladyship, representing the crown prosecution. Do you recognize the man seated in the stand to the left of the judges?’ began the prosecutor; a nasal voice that Willow hoped would irritate the judges as much as it did her.

‘No, he is
Viscount
Wallingbeck,’ corrected the prosecutor. ‘Your husband.’

‘He is not my husband,’ snapped Willow. ‘My sham of a marriage has been annulled.’

‘I am aware of no such annulment,’ said the prosecutor, sounding confused while flashing a knowing gaze that suggested he was anything but.

‘The annulment was signed by Prince Owen and ratified by the Supreme Chamber of the People’s Assembly.’

‘So, signed by a traitor and high insurrectionist, before being rubber-stamped by an assembly long since dissolved for corruption?’ He raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Are bandits who have robbed the bank of its silver allowed to flourish pardons written by their own marauding chieftains now? This is a court of law, Lady Wallingbeck, not a circus tent for japes in such poor taste.’

‘My surname is Landor, not Wallingbeck.’

‘And yet your own mother stands here in the court to testify otherwise.’

‘My
step-mother
sold me into a forced marriage so I would have no further claim on my house’s considerable estate. I have little doubt she also arranged for the kidnapping which sees me standing here in chains.’

‘What kidnapping?’ asked the prosecutor, professing surprise every bit as professionally as any actor. ‘You were returned to Northhaven by your family’s loyal retainers, your mother worried the winds of war would bring harm to both you and the child you carry. Acting on your mother’s instructions, a valiant party of your house’s servants put themselves in considerable personal danger, crossing the Rodalian border to an area where many beaten rebels have fled the rightful justice of the gallows.’

‘You mean your usurper’s war,’ said Willow. ‘Bad Marcus fighting to cling to a throne he murdered his way on to.’

‘But we’re not here to prosecute you for calumny, for repeating the lies which duped so many citizens in this unfortunate rebellion,’ said Callum Perry.

‘Just what am I charged with?’ demanded Willow. ‘I believe it is customary for the accused to know that much at least.’

‘Why, you are charged with murder, Lady Wallingbeck.’

‘Murder!’ spluttered Willow. She ached to shout down this fool. ‘You accuse
me
of that! When I gaze around this courtroom I find a great many faces for whom the gallows would be a due and just end, killers whose hands are stained with the blood of hundreds of decent Weylanders.’

‘There is one face you will not see today. Lloyd Horting. Do you know the man?’

A memory swam up from Willow’s mind. One of Viscount Wallingbeck’s tame brutes on staff. Always happy to beat any hungry family recently arrived begging at the mansion’s doorstep, attempting to claim the right of tenant’s alms from their landowner. ‘He is one of William Wallingbeck’s employees.’

‘It is good that you remember the man,’ said the prosecutor. ‘You should remember a man you stabbed!’

Was he the one?
Willow recalled being dragged back to the house after trying to escape yet again. A gang of servants restraining her while Wallingbeck took his foul amusement with her. She had stabbed one of them with a stolen dinner knife.
Was that Horting?
But the pig hadn’t been too badly hurt, more was the pity. His had only been a shallow wound. Willow’s attacker had stalked away cursing her. ‘I cut one of Wallingbeck’s dogs before the viscount raped me, I remember that much.’

‘I see that you take as many liberties, Lady Wallingbeck, when describing the natural relations between a husband and a wife, as you do when mistreating your house’s staff. You attacked a footman who had the temerity to try to restrain you during one of your frequent violent rages towards your long-suffering household staff. Perhaps you also remember how your poor servant died that night from the wound you inflicted upon him. Maybe you recall how you then slipped away from your home and fled north to escape justice? How you ran away from Arcadia and took up with any rebel or criminal who might keep you safely out of the constables’ hands?’

‘I escaped a false marriage and a sham husband,’ said Willow, incredulous at lie after lie being piled up here. ‘I departed because my so-called family blackmailed me into trying to infiltrate the rebel-held city of Midsburg for the royalist cause.’

‘Really? You must have done a tremendous job in the city because Midsburg did indeed fall. Of course, it fell under assault by the Royal Army and our Vandian allies. Well done, Lady Wallingbeck, very well done. A pity you didn’t stay in the city to claim the gratitude of your lawful king, rather than trying to escape justice by fleeing north across the Rodalian border. Why, it’s almost as if your claims are a tissue of lies and you’re trying to justify your guilt with falsehoods so ridiculous that not even a child caught scrumping from the apple tree would dare to fabricate them.’

‘Where’s my defender-under-law?’ Willow pressed. ‘Why do I stand here having to suffer you describing white as black without a defence?’

‘But you do not,’ smiled Callum Perry. He raised his hand and indicated Leyla Holten. ‘Your defence is here in the court. Your mother.’

‘I have not appointed that woman and I never would. She is nothing more than a conniving whore whose sole skill is the questionable ability to manipulate the opposite sex into making her wealthier than she was before.’

‘Oh dear,’ purred the prosecutor, ‘this is most unfortunate. You seem unaware that the assembly’s Common Law was supplanted by the House of Prefects’ High-law when the upper chamber was given sole governance below the king. It is now for a head of house to defend charges brought against their sons and daughters.’

‘That woman is head of nothing,’ snarled Willow.
So, my jury’s absence is explained, at least. A thousand years of legal progress tossed aside by Bad Marcus.
‘She’s here to testify against me. How in the name of the saints can you expect the same person to act as a witness for the prosecution and a defender? Where’s my cursed father?’

‘The Honourable Benner Landor is currently campaigning in the theatre of war with your brother, defending Weyland from all traitors as is their duty. In the absence of a male head of a house, duties of defending the house’s good name fall upon the wife.’ He indicated Leyla Horton again. She smiled softly at Willow as she took a stand on the other side of the judges, the very picture of motherly deference towards the court.

‘I will be happy to speak for my dear step-daughter in this sad matter,’ said Leyla Horton. ‘But first I would like to hear all the witnesses for the prosecution speak so that I may have the full picture of the accusations against my Willow.’

I just bet you would.

It was as bad as Willow feared. Servant after servant, half of whom she knew not at all, stood up to bear witness against her. How ‘Lady Wallingbeck’ spat at them, kicked maidservants, threw cutlery at butlers, whipped stable-hands while at horse, smashed hand-mirrors over the heads of the ladies who dressed her. How the great house had been a happy place before her arrival, a veritable paradise among the many rich mansions around Arcadia.
It’s a wonder I didn’t shove a kitchen maid into the oven, cook her body up and serve the corpse to the housekeepers for a joke
. After they were done, the prosecutor called a long line of male servants, mostly the same monsters who had helped Wallingbeck keep Willow a prisoner in the rambling, rundown hall. They spoke of Lady Wallingbeck’s terrible hysterics and attempts at self-harm, and how it was while restraining her during one of her breakdowns that she had stabbed poor Lloyd through the heart. Lloyd the saint, not Lloyd the thug who would kick a hungry child in the gut just to see the mother fall to her knees, begging for mercy.
If he did die then there’s an extra seat in hell around the stealers’ supper table.