Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (9 page)

Jacob pointed to the drainpipe fixed to the brewery wall. ‘Could climb up that. But how to bring him down safe?’

Mary Carnehan was rifling through the contents of an overturned wagon, someone’s hastily packed possessions strewn over the street in their dash to safety. She emerged from the mess with a blanket roll and a small hand-axe. ‘Isn’t that just like men? Yakking when you should be doing. We’ll cut him down with the axe, slow his fall with the blanket, just as if the three of us were the real fire service.’

Jacob took the axe and passed it to Carter. ‘Can you make the throw? Seen you practising out in the trees when you think I’m not around, tossing those three throwing knives you bought last summer.’

Carter was briefly astonished. His father actually trusted his son to do something by himself. The old man had seen him throwing at targets on the trees and
rated
his aim?

‘If I thought I could make the throw better than you, I’d do it,’ said Jacob. ‘But I’ve never been much of a one for throwing cutlery about.’

Carter tucked the axe’s wooden handle under his trouser belt and started to shin up the drainpipe. The boards the drainpipe was nailed to felt scalding hot, the back of his fingers burning as they scraped the wall.
Wouldn’t take much to buckle now, bury you and your parents, both.

Coughing from the acrid backwash of smoke crackling inside the building, Carter halted, dangling two storeys above ground. Down below, his mother and father had spread the blanket out wide, holding it drum-tight at chest level, waiting below the Rodalian pilot. Could have done with a few more hands to catch the flier, but just his parents would have to do. The pilot was wearing a purple-dyed sheepskin aviator’s jacket edged with golden fur and he was getting smoked pretty good.
You could cure bacon in less than that
. His head lolled to one side, covered by a leather pilot’s helmet with the Rodalian’s Asiatic features partially hidden by wide flying goggles. Carter got the impression, though, that the flier might just be conscious enough to be aware of the suicidal young man clinging onto the drainpipe across from him.

Carter tugged out the hand-axe, his right palm so sweaty that it nearly slipped out of his grip. His left hand clung to the gutter’s increasingly hot surface.
Here goes nothing.
His eyes focused on the parachute cords wrapped along the loading arm. The flier’s line had become tangled with the warehouse pulley’s ropes. Carter let his mind clear, trying to forget the precariousness of his situation. The ridiculousness of it. His town ablaze around him. A bird’s eye view of townspeople fleeing up the hill along parallel streets. The thunder of bandit planes strafing the town.
Just focus on the parachute lines. That’s how you strike bark with a throwing knife. Nothing else. Just you and the target, not even thinking about it. The thinking only gets in the way.
The throw was made. The hand-axe left Carter’s hand before he was aware it had gone, its head rotating lazily before thudding into the tangle of pulley rope and chute lines, the whole mess exploding like a nest of kicked snakes. The pilot was suddenly freed from the loading arm. A loud ripping noise as what was left of the pilot’s chute took wing in the hot draught, flapping away as if the fabric were alive. The Rodalian plunged down, arrow-straight, taking the tension out of the waiting blanket below. After he’d slapped into it, the pilot was left lying in the middle of the street while Carter’s parents made a stretcher out of the blanket. Then they dragged the Rodalian away inside the roll to the other side of the road. They were both shouting something at Carter that he couldn’t hear. But he heard the smash of exploding glass in the surviving windows, the roar of collapsing floors giving way inside the brewery. He was getting good at shinning his way down the wall, sliding and slithering towards the ground.
A spooked lizard couldn’t do it any better.
The wall Carter had descended collapsed behind him even as he was throwing himself to the ground. He rolled once, then came up in a cloud of dust to sprint for the side-street his parents were retreating down, dragging the Rodalian flier with them. How Carter escaped was a pure-born miracle, the lick of burning timbers and rubble a wave of surf chasing him every step of the way. It was as though he outpaced a storm, the heat of burning dust and wooden cinders stinging the back of his neck. Carter barrelled in front of his parents. His father had the flier up, limping and leaning against his shoulder. Dazed, the man’s yellow cheeks covered in soot, the Rodalian hacked his guts out.

‘Ankle’s twisted with the fall,’ said his mother, ‘maybe broken.’

‘Take the man’s weight on the other side,’ Jacob ordered his son. ‘He’s not climbing up to the old town by himself.’
Not a word of admiration for my aim, not a word of thanks for what I’ve just done.

‘Surviving’s the only medal worth being pinned with,’ said Jacob, reading his son’s face. ‘And that was forty or fifty people’s livelihoods that just went crashing down. Nothing worth celebrating. Now, let’s move.’

Well, stick them, anyway.
He’d have something to tell his friends, now, something more than just running and hiding in old town cellars. Bravest man to ever take to the air, and he was only alive thanks to Carter.

‘You did okay,’ his mother whispered across to Carter as they hauled the flier away. The pilot wasn’t taller than five and a half feet, but he sure did weigh some for such a diminutive figure. It was like dragging bricks up the hill. She wagged a finger at her son. ‘But the only thing knife throwing is good for is a circus act, and I haven’t raised a Carnehan boy to turn circus tricks for pennies, you hear me?’

‘They’re good for other things too… I can draw them pretty fast.’

‘The
other
things I’m not even going to pass comment on,’ she warned.

The flier mumbled, but it didn’t sound like anything Carter understood. Maybe some local mountain dialect. The pilot had been concussed pretty hard, cuts and bruises all across his face. Must have taken a mouthful of fuselage bailing out of his flying wing.

There was no sign of refugee numbers abating on West Hill Road, a whole street full of hysterical townspeople throwing themselves onto the cobbles every time a bandit plane buzzed by. The town was full with visitors in from the countryside for the market, every hotel and guesthouse already packed. Seemed like the raiders had run out of incendiary bombs to drop and were relying on the screaming sirens built into their engines to inflict terror on the people
. Robbers softening up the householders before looting their property, that’s all they are.
Just give Carter a rifle and he’d show the bastards what you got for attacking good Northhaven folk. Gunfire rippled along the ramparts, heavy rifles bucking on tripods with the recoil from large-bore shells. If one of the bandit planes had taken damage from the defenders along the parapet, Carter had yet to glimpse it.

Carter’s family had just reached the gate’s shadow when his mother collided with a figure pushing the wrong way through the fleeing residents – a woman Carter recognised. It was Caroline Ormund. She always seemed to be bustling about town with more children than anyone else in Northhaven, a couple of them hanging on to her coattails right now.

‘Where in the name of the saints are you heading with your two youngest?’ demanded Mary, stopping the woman from heading down the hill. ‘You want to be putting some strong walls between you and these murdering devils in the air.’

‘It’s my boy, Felix,’ cried the woman. ‘He’s down at the school. His class started early for archery practice… some woodsman in town for the market going to teach them. I’ve just seen one of the girls from Felix’s class – she says all the adults are dead, half the children hiding in the classrooms under their desks. Sounds like chaos down there!’

Carter grimaced. The school was at the edge of the new town where the farmland began. Flat land leading out to the river road where those bandit gliders would surely be looking to land.

‘Damn that fool of a master,’ spat Mary. ‘Always angling to beat the Redwater Royal Free School at the thirty yards line. You’d think arrows in the gold were more important than making sure children get their letters and numbers. Call them in early for history and maths,
no
. But dangle an archery prize for our trophy cabinet…’

‘What am I going to do, Mary? He’s my little boy, what—’

‘You focus on your responsibilities to the rest of your family,’ said Mary firmly. ‘Keeping them alive.’ She looked at the two terrified girls hugging her leg. ‘You keep your head together for them. Because they need you, and you need your wits about you this day.’

‘There’s going to be bandits in town soon, ripping up houses for whatever’s not nailed down,’ Jacob told the woman. ‘You take those two little ones to shelter, Caroline. I’ll bring the children at the school back here.’

‘
We’ll
do it,’ said Mary. ‘It’s my school.’

‘We’ll bring little Felix back,’ promised Jacob.

Mary Carnehan’s eyes shone like two flints in a rockface. ‘We’ll bring them
all
back.’

Jacob turned to Carter. ‘Take the flier inside the walls.’

‘I’m—’

‘No arguing, boy. When you save a man’s life, his soul’s on you to care for. He’s not walking up the hill by himself. Take the flier to safety and tell Wiggins to hold the western gate open, you hear, keep it open until we get back.’

‘He’ll do it,’ said Mary. ‘Old Wiggins’ granddaughter is in the same class as Felix.’

‘But the raiders won’t be shooting at children?’ questioned Carter.

‘The bandits’ll want to put the fear in the town, keep the citizens bottled up and behind those walls and too scared to take offence at the looting outside. No better way to do that than a slaughter,’ said Jacob. ‘And youngsters don’t shoot back, which, for bandits, makes them the best target of all.’

Then Carter’s parents were gone. He was left with the weight of the semi-conscious pilot as well as the burden of his family’s slim chance of returning alive. As Carter hobbled forward with the stumbling Rodalian, it was hard to know which of them bore down greater.
Well, you wanted your life livening up, Carter Carnehan. This lively enough for you, you idiot?

The school was in as bad a shape as Jacob had feared. Bombs had flattened the furthest of the four long buildings joined at the centre by a teachers’ block. Where the bandits had dived down, the classroom had been left a burning wreck. Children’s bodies lay scattered lifeless around the fenced-in fields, a couple of straw-filled archery circles stripped of their target cloth, overturned and smouldering from a strafing run, sods of grass torn where planes had passed overhead with their wing guns blazing.

Mary hissed in fury as she saw the corpses, her fingers bunching into a fist. ‘How could anyone do this?’

Jacob had nothing to say by way of explanation.
Why does the sun come up each morning? Why does the rain fall and soak people?
Why did bandits choose the life they did, preying on those weaker than themselves, rather than toiling in the soil and working with nature to provide a living? Why did hawks hunt hares rather than grazing the meadows beside their prey? Some things just were. Jacob scanned the skies from their hiding place, crouched in the vegetable patch of one of the homes bordering the school field. The aircrafts’ hornet buzzing sounded from behind them, raiders still driving townspeople up the hill as though this was a cattle drive.

‘I can see movement in those windows over there,’ said Jacob, trying to keep his wife focused on something other than her anger
. It’s a fickle thing, anger. You can ride it like a log down a river. Sometimes it takes you where you want to go, other times it just dumps you down perilous rapids.
Any angrier and Mary was likely to do something dangerous.
Well, more hazardous than this morning’s business, anyhow.

Jacob and his wife jumped the fence and ran across the fields, keeping low. Adults lay mixed among the children’s corpses, the head of the school, another teacher and her young assistant – a boy barely older than Carter. The headmaster had a couple of nine-year-olds clutched under his bloody body. Jacob stopped, turning the man over to check the children for life.
No good.
Not with bandit fighters pumping out shells large enough to tear apart an enemy aircraft’s fuselage. The strafing run had ripped the schoolmaster apart and his body had proved as much of a shield as rice paper for the pupils he’d scooped up to sprint to cover with. Tears sprang into Jacob’s eyes. He could barely stand to look at the two youngsters, fear left frozen on their faces as they had died.
This isn’t glory. This isn’t war. Just shortened lives with as little point behind their end as—

‘Come on,’ Mary urged. ‘I can hear crying inside.’

Jacob stepped through the wreckage of a blackened wall. Mary climbed behind him, kicking aside the building’s smouldering boards to gain access to the part of the school where they had seen heads bobbing through shattered glass. Two of the surviving classrooms were empty. Inside the third, they found desks overturned by the blast, whimpering heads quivering behind furniture. Frightened little faces stared out of a makeshift camp. An adult lay slumped against the wall under a window. A spreading pool of blood slicked out from his body where the left leg should have been, and Jacob saw where the archery target fabric had ended up. Ripped off and bandaged around the stump of limb which remained. Not one of the teachers, and from his size and workaday green jerkin, this was the woodsman who had come in for the market. He was still alive, just, his right hand clutching his bow as though it was a walking stick… a queer-looking contraption, a cam at the end of each limb supporting a sophisticated system of pulleys and cables. Jacob recognised the weapon for what it was.
Haven’t seen one of those for a while
. Mary raced to calm and gather the school children while Jacob ducked below sight of the shattered window to reach the man.