Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (3 page)

‘Honour! Whose honour would that be, boy?’

Duncan pointed toward Carter and then Adella. ‘This ruffian’s slighted Adella. Says he’s going to throw his post at the library and take passage on a ship at Redwater Harbour.’

‘So what?’ Benner Landor’s voice wavered angrily. ‘So this girl’s the harbourmaster of Redwater is she? Making sure every Northhaven man fresh out of schooling has valid papers of apprenticeship with the seaman’s guild? That’s her job?’

‘Carter said,’ Duncan went on, faltering under the intensity of the large man’s gaze, ‘that Adella didn’t matter to him as much as travelling.’

‘You draw your sabre every time some Northhaven man gets bitten by the bug to see what’s over the horizon and a girl takes hurt at it, I’d better build a log cabin here for you,’ said Landor. He jabbed a finger at Adella and the slowly dissipating crowd. ‘Because you’ll be cracking steel here for the rest of your dumb life. A town clerk’s daughter takes hurt; there are plenty of lamp-lighters and circuit riders around to pick up a sabre on her behalf. You want to fight duels for fun, you find a slighted countess from a good southern family to draw your blade out over.’

From the crestfallen look descended upon Adella’s face, Jacob had a shrewd idea what game was playing out here. The pastor had spent enough afternoons drowning worms along the river with a rod and line to know that sometimes to snare the river’s big fish you had to use a minnow as bait. Carter Carnehan was being played, and Jacob’s young fool of a son was too full of fight to realise that he was the lure. The look of melancholy crossing Adella’s young face was the river’s big catch about to be yanked from her menu.

‘What have you got to say, pastor?’ demanded Benner Landor.

‘That I raised my boy better than this,’ said Jacob. ‘Any fool can fight and most fools usually do. Violence is the last refuge of the in­competent. It solves nothing and only ever comes back to cut the hand wielding the blade.’

‘Get into the coach,’ Benner Landor ordered his son. ‘Before I have the constable toss your tail in the gaol.’

Wiggins rested his hands on his hips and called out to the dwindling number of onlookers. ‘Sabre practice is over… back to your homes, all of you!’

Duncan reluctantly sloped off towards his father’s coach, sliding his sword back into its scabbard. Carter passed his blade to a man who had been acting as his second, trying to ignore Duncan’s sister who was fixing him with a stare strong enough to burn wood lacquer off a cabin’s walls. The second carried Carter’s borrowed weapon over to the carriage.

‘This wasn’t my doing,’ Carter protested to Willow. ‘Duncan challenged me. What was I to do, be known as the biggest coward in Northhaven?’

‘I don’t know who’s the
biggest
idiot out of you two,’ said Willow. ‘It takes some choosing.’ Willow shook her head wearily before following her brother to the family carriage.

‘I’d offer you a lift back to the town,’ Benner Landor told Jacob. ‘But I reckon these two should be kept apart for a while.’

‘We’ll walk,’ said Jacob, his gaze hardening on his son.
Carter’s showing mighty little repentance for having come within a hair of running through a boy he used to call a friend.
‘And use the time to discuss this foolery.’

Carter watched the carriage depart with nonchalance. ‘You mean you’ll talk, Father, and I’ll have to listen, same as it ever was.’

‘You got something to say, boy?’ said Jacob. ‘Maybe about why you’re out here brawling and not working at the library where you should be? About how you’re planning to ship out from Redwater? Your mother agreed to sign your papers for the seaman’s guild apprenticeship has she? Because I know I haven’t.’

‘You don’t need an apprenticeship to sign on with a skipper. There are plenty of ships that will sign you on without papers.’

‘Sure there are,’ said Jacob. ‘If you don’t mind lighting out on some tub loaded down with twice as much cargo as she can safely carry. There’re sheets on your bed more sturdy than the sails those seabed-scrapers venture out with. Use your head, boy. I want a son, a living son, not a collection of bones scattered on the bottom of an ocean.’

‘Standing in the river tickling trout twice a week doesn’t make you an expert on matters nautical,’ said Carter. He looked around, noticing they were almost the last people left in the clearing. ‘Where’s Adella?’

‘She got onto the Landor carriage. Old Benner might be tighter than bark on a tree but he’s got a gentleman’s manners to go with his self-made fortune.’

Carter angrily lashed out at a sod of grass with his boot. ‘Damn!’

‘Nobody held a gun to her head to make her accept the ride,’ said Jacob. ‘You think on that, boy. Then you think what your mother would have done to me, if I’d been the one out here.’

‘You? What have
you
ever fought for?’ said Duncan, bitterly.

‘Only that which counts,’ said Jacob. ‘This is the trick of getting through life. Only stand up for what counts. Give it a few years, maybe you’ll start to mull on
what counts
might be.’

‘Why does everyone believe they got the right to tell me what to think and how to act and who to be?’ spat Carter. ‘You, that rich little turd Duncan, Adella, Willow, the Master of the Codex at the library. Do I tell any of you how to behave? Do I wake you up to nag you every minute of the day with your shortcomings? No! I keep it to myself; because I figure how you act and live is your concern. I think it’s time I got some of the same courtesy!’

‘And I think it time you finish the day where you should’ve started it. Working at the library. And to make sure you get there, I’ll be walking with you every step of the way.’

In the end, Jacob and his wayward son only had to walk half the ten-mile journey to the library. They hitched a lift with a cart coming out from the Radiomen’s Guild in town. Both men sat on the cart’s tail, behind a pile of wooden crates, each box holding dozens of message tubes. The sun grew hotter. Jacob rested under the shade of the cart’s tarpaulin cover – raised on four poles above the flatbed – while Carter swung his feet lazily in the bright light. Carter rode in silence.
Content to hold his tongue, or just annoyed with me?
As always, Jacob wondered about the contents of the messages. The colours of the wax seals indicated how far the messages had travelled to date. Most would have started their journey far beyond the Kingdom of Weyland’s borders. Some would have already travelled millions of miles… far further than any man could hope to travel in his lifetime. Distant librarians passing knowledge on to faraway guild brothers, slowly updating the universal indexes and ancient encyclopaedias of knowledge.
A worthy and noble calling.
Unfortunately, Carter Carnehan seemed unable to share Jacob’s enthusiasm for their mission.

Fertile golden fields of corn stretched out in between the woodland, slowly swaying in the gentle breeze. All owned by the Landors. Occasionally Jacob could see the mist of smoke from a fermentation tower, spherically stacked processors distilling corn oil into various strengths as well as producing ethanol. Landor’s improved fermentation process had been the source of his fortune, his invention allowing him to squeeze out as much as a quarter more refined ethanol than any other landowner. Allowing him to buy up most of the farmland around Northhaven, too. It would be the landowner’s son and daughter’s fortune, one day. And the expanse of cornfields a reminder to Carter of all he didn’t have to offer the girl he had set his heart on, every day he went to work. An hour out of town, Jacob caught sight of the library, their cart rounding a rise cut through pine woodlands. The road wound down through a valley and then up towards a series of foothills. Cut into the opposite slope stood the library’s concrete entrance, big metal blast doors locked into place, a series of circular air vents rising out of rocks overgrown by shrubs and vines. In front of the entrance lay an area of flat dirt where travellers could draw up, a caravan already resting there. It must have arrived recently. A couple of wagoners waited outside the doors, speaking to library staff through an intercom. The caravan towered two storeys high, their living and home, both.

Carter had arrived late for the day’s work and the staff inside weren’t in the mood to listen to Jacob’s apologies on behalf of his son, ordering Carter to handle business with the wagoners while his father repaid the cart driver’s kindness by helping him unload message crates.

‘I need sale prices for sheet glass,’ the older of the two wagoners explained to Carter, his accent making the words hiss slightly on each ‘s’. ‘For coastal towns within four months’ travel from here, as well as the dates and locations of market fairs that will be held along the route.’

‘Raise your right hand,’ said Carter, sounding bored. ‘Do you swear to carry no fire within the halls of the guild, and—’ he indicated a brass plate in the corner of the archway imprinted with the library’s rules ‘—abide by our ordinances and charges, as listed?’

The two men grunted affirmation.

‘And payment?’ asked Carter.

‘Copper trading coins or rice,’ said the wagoner. ‘I’d prefer to pay from our rice sacks, see. Even dried, it’s not going to keep forever.’

‘Rice is fine,’ said Carter, having to work to keep the sarcasm from his voice. ‘You can never have too much rice.’

Carter went to the intercom and had a brief conversation with the staff. A small sally port inside the blast doors opened, a librarian emerging with a metal detector which she passed quickly over the clothes of the travellers. She made a snide remark about Carter’s timekeeping before, satisfied the visitors were unarmed, allowing them access.

Jacob hefted one of the message crates towards the open entrance, nodding at the librarian. ‘The most dangerous thing I’ve got is my son.’

‘Pass,’ said the librarian. ‘He’s more annoying than he is dangerous.’ She glanced at Carter and tapped her blue tunic and the guild emblem sown there – a courier pigeon hovering above two open books. ‘And
you
had better be dressed appropriately when you stand before the Master of the Codex, Carter Carnehan.’

There was no natural light inside. Oil lamps illuminated a long stone corridor beyond the door. The corn oil smell made Jacob’s stomach rumble for the comforts of lunch. Inside – safe from fire, flood and bandits – the library’s subterranean labyrinth was laid out like a wheel. A massive six-storey chamber for a hub, shelf-lined corridors as its spikes. Corridors led to reading rooms and lifts and stairwells down to lower levels where non-guild members were not permitted. All libraries, Jacob understood, were built on a similar pattern, always defended as carefully against nature as against man. A second librarian came out to meet the two wagoners. He escorted the travellers down a spiral stairwell to the floor of the main chamber. There, they sat at a wooden table that could have hosted fifty for supper, the librarian leaving to retrieve ledgers with the requested calendars and trade prices. Carter came back a couple of minutes later looking ill at ease dressed in his formal tunic and was dispatched to unload the remaining message crates, piling them inside a dumb waiter where they were winched out of sight. When the Master of the Codex appeared he nodded towards Jacob, and, as the churchman hoped, pointed down a book-lined passage to one of the reading rooms for a private meeting. Whereas Carter made his librarian’s tunic look slovenly and ill fitting, Lucas Lettore wore his as if it had been hand-tailored to his short, fastidious frame.

Jacob started with an apology when they were out of earshot of the central chamber, but Lucas was having none of it. ‘You warned me what to expect of your son, and he’s certainly lived up to expectations.’

‘He’ll settle,’ said Jacob, trying to keep any note of pleading from his voice. ‘Given time.’

‘Well,’ sighed Lucas. ‘If a churchman can’t have faith who can?’

They ended up in a reading room, wood-lined walls concealing bare rock, a line of large map tables filling the centre of the room. The oil light from the lamp glass was just warm enough to make a man forget he was buried out of sight of the surface, standing here. Its illumination painted the wooden panelling a burnished orange, the arms of brass page-holders glinting across the tables.

‘There are plenty of young men kicking up, now they’ve been cut loose from their studies,’ said Jacob. ‘You can go into any Northhaven tavern and see the trouble that comes from apprentices downing their first pay packet in a single night.’

‘My guild hold isn’t a tavern,’ said Lucas, his eyes widening. There was something of the snake about those eyes, spiral-like. Sometimes Jacob expected them to spin if he stared too closely, trying to hypnot­ise him into taking his son back. ‘The guild offers more than a simple apprenticeship. Our life is a calling. After Carter’s first year probation, he will be expected to live inside the dormitory here, with home visits once a month or less. He could be assigned to another library.’ Lucas leaned over the map table, running his fingers across the contour lines of coasts and mountains on yards of paper unrolled before them. ‘You have to love what you do, Jacob. Your boy doesn’t have a passion for books and I can’t see him giving his life to preserving knowledge within the order. He can’t lay out type on a letterpress to save his life. When I ask him to update a ledger with what arrives from the radiomen, there are as many mistakes as words in his entries – and that’s if we can even find any volume he’s re-shelved. You can lock Carter’s body down here with us, but his mind’s been far-called.
These
are the only thing he’s ever paid any interest to inside the library. Our map tables.’

‘He’s not a traveller,’ said Jacob, ‘and my rectory is no caravan.’

‘Well,’ sighed Lucas, drawing the sound out. ‘Your son certainly isn’t any librarian. Those two wagoners you came in with; you know their accent isn’t the same as the one they were raised with, nor what they’ll end up speaking on their deathbed? The journey changes their accent, slowly, inevitably, with every mile they travel.’ Lucas tapped the long unfurled map. ‘This is a single tube’s worth of charts laid out here. About two-hundred million square miles. I’ve got another seven-hundred tubes in just this map room. I’ve lost track of how many map rooms we have inside the library. And what we have here is only a tiny slice of all that lies out there.’