Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (56 page)

‘They’re not
slaves
,’ snarled Jacob. ‘They’re family and friends.’

‘Not mine, pastor. I got rid of most of my family a long time ago. Now, before we move on to the main course, I’ll introduce the entrée and see if that changes your mind any.’ He snapped his fingers and a naked figure was dragged out and deposited in the middle of the arena by two soldiers. ‘Of course, the grand duke’s pets won’t eat dead meat. But it would have been rude of us to feed her to them alive when she gave us so much good sport during the interrogation.’

Jacob could hardly stand to watch as the soldiers rolled the badly scarred body over. It was Iaroia, the head of the local librarian’s guild hold. They had beaten her to death. ‘You murdering bastard! She didn’t know anything!’

Alock raised his hands, as though he had merely been caught in a breach of manners. ‘She was a librarian, of course she knew things. She gave you shelter for a night. You might have let something slip. How could I not ask her?’

Another poor innocent dead, because of him.
Because of Jacob Carnehan
, the voice inside whispered.
When Jake Silver is the man who should have gone looking for his son
.
Quicksilver
. ‘You’re crazy, Alock! The guilds will pull out of Hangel when they hear you violated their immunity.’

‘Let’s just say the authorities here have a superior source of intelligence. Now, who next?’ The major pointed Sariel out to the grand duke. ‘There! That one’s name I don’t know, although I have a feeling the coins shaken from his pocket came from the Landor moneybox which mysteriously went missing. I resent scum thieving my wealth; especially after I’ve gone to so much trouble to steal it in the first place. He can die next…’

Guards appeared with long lances and prodded Sariel, the vagrant waving his arms wildly as they jabbed him towards the centre of the arena. Jacob, Sheplar and Khow were driven back behind the wooden barrier where the gads stood corralled, the locals moaning and swaying, exposed under the hot sun. A series of iron gates rattled at the far end of the arena, a white-washed wall splattered with blood and dust. Jacob and his two companions were protected by the wooden palisade from whatever was caged inside there. No such protection was afforded to Sariel, however.

The guards held Jacob at bay, their spears digging into his chest and drawing blood. ‘Your filthy scheme murdered my wife, Alock! You traded my son’s future for a handful of metal. I’m going to kill you, Major. You and your crooked royal master, both!’

‘Not today,’ sneered Alock. ‘I much prefer working for the state. It’s a lot easier to work when everything you do is rendered legal by royal warrant. I’ll leave you to last, pastor. Anytime you get tired of seeing your friends ripped apart, just tell me what I need to know…’

Jacob spat on the floor. The second he revealed the secret of Khow’s homing sense was the second Alock would order their execution. There was only one way for the major to keep the true source of the slave raids from Weyland, and that was to plant every member of the expedition in the ground. Jacob would have done exactly the same, once.

‘Your milk-livered animals will not attack me,’ shouted Sariel. He hobbled forward, shaking his walking staff in the air. His actions wouldn’t hold back a determined predator for longer than a second or two. ‘They know the prince of players too well.’

A roar of laughter emerged from the grand duke’s protected viewing station, the courtiers clapping and jeering.

‘I am sorry for your friend.’ It was the gad scout. He gazed up at the royal viewing platform with a curious expression that Jacob recognised only too well.

‘My beauties know what time it is,’ hooted the grand duke. He waved his hand. One of the poorly oiled iron gates in the wall began to squeal upwards, a frantic mound of fur trying to scrabble out from the holding chamber before the gate was fully retracted. It was joined by another shape, then a third, all competing and howling to be the first to be released. ‘Breakfast time!’

The gate rose halfway into the wall and the creatures had enough clearance to escape. They surged out, a trio of big cats – a similar patterning along their hides to the gads – half as tall as a man and at least ten feet long, with manes that made them seem giants from the front. Two hunters broke to Sariel’s left, a third prowling low along the right, working as a pack. The first pair was just a feint. It was the lone hunter that would make the kill.

‘Friends,’ shouted Sariel, jabbing his cane skyward. ‘My friends, you will not harm me.’

If that was the creatures’ intention, they had a strange way of showing it. The creeping predator leapt at Sariel, baring a set of white teeth as sharp as a phalanx of sabres; its roar so loud and penetrating that Jacob felt his heart shuddering inside his ribcage from the power of it. Khow moaned in horror. Even Sheplar, who believed the vagrant a thieving chancer, turned his head rather than witness this unequal slaughter. Jacob could not. He had led Sariel to this fate. As surely as he steered old Deputy Wiggins to a burning inside the forest by the major’s killers. As surely as Iaroia’s fate had been sealed by assisting him
. I was the kind of man who would have questioned captives this way, once. Now I’m just the kind who leads them into the butcher’s pit. And I don’t know which breed is worse.

Sariel screamed as he flailed at the leaping creature with his staff, the wooden rod sent flying as the massive predator ripped his right arm off and continued the arc of its leap to land in a cloud of dust behind the bard. It began triumphantly shaking Sariel’s dismembered limb. The bard was spun around by the force of the attack, landing on the arena sand just as the other two cats hurled themselves on top of him, ripping his leather coat and tearing at his clothes, batting him with their clawed paws, and sending his mangled body rolling limply across the ground.

Duncan learnt his lessons well under the tutelage of the grizzled old Paetro. Paetro, it transpired, was one of the many janissaries who served in the legions. Foreign troops that took the empire’s coin on the basis that there was always so much of it to go around. They worked their way up through the castes, as best they could. Some would call them mercenaries, although many might consider them pragmatists. The imperium always won every war and always would, so if you had to fight as a career, better to fight on the winning side. Duncan and Paetro’s duties almost seemed to him like licensed paranoia. Gaming how to kill the girl and make it seem like an accident, then sweeping for each potential avenue for murder in advance. Accidents were the best method of assassination. Nothing to link an aggressor to the actual deed; hard to retaliate against through the legal channels of duelling or low-level warfare permitted by the emperor. Having a helo fall out of the air or a sky mine’s blasting powder detonate under an enemy’s boots would be an ideal kill. Stylish, even. Using a sniper who could be captured and tortured, that was counted as brutish: plausible mechanical failure, or a chance encounter with one of the island’s many varieties of venomous snake, sublime. The hardest part of Duncan’s training came when a surgeon in the Castle of Snakes administered low levels of poisons commonly used by assassins, peppering samples of food with toxins, so Duncan might learn to detect tampering well before it ever reached the lips of young Lady Cassandra. Duncan spent days throwing up, taking anti-venom injections and drinking purges to clear the filth from his body. By the time he finished, he could smell a table full of plates and identify the one which had been sprinkled with devil-dust or coated with poison mixed with honey to conceal its toxic aftertaste. The effects of that regime aside, he put on weight for the first time since his enslavement, sampling fare from the feasts served to Cassandra. The young noblewoman, by contrast, never seemed to put on weight. Partly through the metabolism of Lady Cassandra’s tender age, partly through the gruelling regime of weapons training she was expected to attend daily. Gymnastics to learn balance and poise. Weights to build strength. Combat practice of every sort – spears, tridents, knives, maces, sabres, foils, short-swords, bolas, pistols, ranged target shooting. Paetro supervised the combat, with experts shipped in from every corner of the empire to impart their talents. Once, for fun, Paetro let Duncan fight the young girl with wooden practice swords on the wooden slats of the training hall. Despite their difference in size, strength and age, Duncan barely walked away without his knuckles being shattered. She was like a little demon, whirling and swinging, using moves so quick and esoteric that few Weylanders would have been able to keep up. Maybe some of the trained swordsmen in the army would have been her match, but even then Duncan had his doubts. Or maybe that was just what he needed to tell himself after losing so badly to a young girl. The days were long, but after the sky mines’ gruelling regime, keeping up with the young noble was quite literally child’s play. And there was always the possibility, ever-playing through Duncan’s thoughts, that he might see Adella again here. The imperial siblings that Helrena counted as her allies were always showing up at the Castle of Snakes to confer on strategy and scheme their schemes. Surely Baron Machus would appear one day with Adella in his retinue? But that day never seemed to come, however much he hoped for it. Perhaps it was for the best. Duncan didn’t think he could bear to see Adella being pawed by another man, one of the mighty princelings who could order a slave’s execution just for spilling soup over him during a meal, let alone for punching him for stealing Adella away like a rustled horse. Like a
slave
. And it might have been cowardice – or prudence – but Duncan didn’t want to jeopardise his chances of getting Willow transferred to the castle alongside him as a house slave. All he needed was Princess Helrena feeling that she was in Duncan’s debt again. Life inside the castle seemed different from the station. There were still the distinctions of caste here; but there was also a camaraderie and a commonality of purpose which was distinctly lacking at the raw level of existence in the sky mines. It was almost as if having gained a place at the centre of the house, no higher position existed, irrespective of hierarchy. Better a beggar here than a prince at home.

With Adella still in Duncan’s dreams, and his sister’s fate in the sky mines filling his mind, he distracted himself by packing his days with the routine endured by his charge. In addition to Lady Cassandra mastering arms, there were the many practical lessons of learning the house’s business. Not far removed from the demands Duncan’s father had once made upon his time. Attending metal brokerages and auctions in the capital, the vast wealth of the sky mines traded for scientific advances and other commodities and resources. Visiting the house’s mills processing the ores that slaves gave their lives to obtain. Mile upon mile of metallic plant separating raw materials, vast glowing furnaces tended by thousands of lower caste workers, glowing ingots rolling out of the other end in a sea of steam and metallic vapour. Passing work parties in leather suits and steel helmets, battered and burnt from molten spattered metal. Walking across gantries with nervous managers reeling off lists of figures and targets, treating Cassandra and her retinue with a seriousness Duncan worked hard not to find comical. Back home, the Landor staff would have sent Duncan away with a flea in his ear if he had made similar demands on their time – not that he’d deigned to work a quarter as diligently as this solemn young girl seemed determined to. When Duncan realised that losing employment in one of the houses’ great commercial concerns meant demotion through many layers of the imperial caste system, he understood a little better the managers’ fawning obsequiousness. Caste was everything here. Advancement was
everything
. To belong to the wavering-lower caste was to only be allowed to travel on foot along the moving walkways of Vandis. Promotion to the wavering-upper caste meant travelling through the capital by bat-like trains hanging from aerial rail lines. Advancement beyond that meant you were permitted to drive an electric carriage, as well as live above the eighty-storey level in one of the great granite-lined towers; and that offered a view of something more than fog, the multitudes and the clamour of the streets. And above them all, the emperor’s many children ruling the imperium like bandit chiefs; everything of worth concentrated in their hands. Farms, factories, land, the lives of the lower orders, all just numbers tallied against the ledgers of Princess Helrena and her relatives. There was no national assembly here, as in Weyland, to keep the rulers honest. The emperor was a god, and his word and whims were absolute. All of the emperor’s children lived in fortresses along the massive city’s coastline, circling the urban masses with their forces like a ring of siege-works; the islets in the sea beyond providing airfields and naval bases that could be brought to bear on internal rebellions.

Cassandra rarely mingled or mixed with the people she ruled, passing over the crowds’ heads in her helo as divorced from their pedestrian concerns as an angel in the wind. Duncan was glad of it. From what he could see of the packed streets and roadways, Vandis was more crowded than anything he could have imagined before his arrival. The capital itself an unnatural arrangement; the population breeding and expanding, never once checked by natural concerns such as how the city could possibly feed another hungry mouth. Beyond the empire’s borders there was always another state dependent on the stratovolcano’s resources, sending grains and food into the empire in return for whatever Vandia would trade, however one-sided the terms. And the imperium required its neighbours to pour food down the throats of its teeming, hungry, restless masses. Many inside Vandis lived without employment, subsisting solely on the empire’s basic dole, made clients of whichever imperial benefactors controlled their district. Such citizens were nominally many tiers above Duncan’s lowly status, but in practice these people too were slaves. Packed into the capital’s concrete mountains, living without meaning or hope, distracted by vast screens hanging from the buildings; glowing picture radios showing blood being shed. Organised combats in arenas and duels between citizens. The unwashed masses had become a force within the empire, a slumbering dragon easily roused to violence; citizens descended through a hundred generations without a single ancestor having known work or purpose. Duels among the lower castes were as commonplace as the violent manoeuvring for power among the celestial-uppers; jostling in the street frequently leading to knives being drawn. Duncan had seen such duels from the safety of their helo… a circle formed in the crowd along the raised walkways; shouts and jeers of encouragement, two people in the centre warily circling each other, blades flicking out to test their opponent. There was a sudden brutal flurry and one of the men withdrew, his victim left spread-eagled in a pool of blood while cheers rose into the air. Duncan shivered. From his altitude the duels were something desperately savage and feral.
That was me and Carter back in Northhaven, in another life
. Didn’t seem like any affair which should have the word honour attached to it. Closer to rodents tearing each other to pieces in a gutter over crumbs of bread. Duncan came to the point where venturing out from the castle made him uneasy. Pellas was so big, its expanses vast and endless and green. Yet here, humanity teemed and bred without limit or good sense, suckling on the tit of the stratovolcano and the riches it vomited out. In many ways, this land’s riches were its curse. Overpopulated to an unnatural degree, ceaseless masses of people, and yet the imperium still relied on foreign soldiers to aim the guns that held its capital in check; spent fortunes importing slaves to do the unpleasant labour which its own teeming hordes refused to lay their revels aside to consider. There were so many feast days in the imperial calendar, honouring the holy deeds of past emperors and empresses, that Duncan had to rely on the castle’s staff to tell him which ancient emperor they had to bow their knee to in the shrine of a morning. Such devotions were as far as Lady Cassandra went in paying lip service to the imperial cult. Pieties were really intended for the lower orders. Beyond the castle, the hovering presence of helos and clouds of riot gas rising from the streets would indicate that another drunken mob had taken the daily entertainments to excess again and were being dispersed by the legions.