Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (49 page)

He continued to climb the slope, homing in on the increasing fur­nace heat from the stratovolcano’s crater. Black ash fell again when he came to the vent’s lip, the great beast’s interior masked by a vast column of smoke, waves of heat buffeting against him. Tracking along the edge he ran low in the direction of the mangled transporter. Carter had almost run past the crash site when the mist briefly cleared down below, allowing him a horrifying glimpse of two grunting soldiers, swinging their bayonets into Eshean like miners swinging pickaxes at a rock face – the Weylander stretched out in the ground behind the craft’s passenger cage, already dead. Lifeless, but his body being used like a punch bag with a steady, continuous thud of blades into his chest. They were attacking him contemptuously, rhythmically, showing what they thought of slaves that attacked their masters. Dese­crating his corpse. One soldier lashed from Eshean’s left with his bayonet, the other swinging on the right, venting their fury on all that was left of the slave.

Carter bent down on one knee and took aim. When he pressed the trigger, the rifle surprised him. Not a single shot, but shaking with a continuous burst, the barrel rattling and bucking as he fought to keep it depressed in the direction of the two guardsmen. Whatever the hell Carter was shooting with, the two men were thrown back hard, tossed into the wreckage, their armour shredded by the spray of bullets, his rifle left clacking as the magazine complained that it was empty. Carter was getting to his feet, thinking about searching the dead guards for ammunition or just taking their rifles, when a furious red-faced Vandian appeared from the mist no more than a foot away, charging while firing his officer’s pistol at Carter. He hadn’t got off more than a single, wild shot when Carter’s empty rifle swept around like a club and cracked into the officer’s gloved hand, sending the pistol careening away into the air. Both the officer’s crimson gloves locked around the rifle’s stock and the two of them wrestled for the weapon – empty and useful only as a bayonet-tipped spear. Stumbling and pushing and pulling, the Vandian’s eyes wide and manic through the oxygen mask built into his helmet. Like all of the thugs in armour Carter had come across, the officer looked like he’d been bred from a nation of giants. Bigger than Carter; better fed; not rangy after being sweated close to death working the sky mines; used to full gravity on the ground, too. They struggled and grappled, grunting at each other like animals, Carter desperate for the freedom evaporating around him – this brute probably just as desperate to return to his base with the corpses of all the escaped slaves piled across his patrol ship’s deck. His legs ached. Carter could feel the strength slowly draining out of him as he stumbled back up the slope, pushed, higher and higher, giving ground to the Vandian officer. Sweat poured into his eyes faster than he could blink it away. Carter tried to concentrate on the tug of war for the rifle, the weapon’s stock slipping through his hands as the officer’s superior health began to tell on him. Heat hammered into his spine. They were on the crater’s ridge. Angry bombs of volcanic debris whistled down like mortars, tossed out of the volcano; the smallest debris from the barrage enough to decapitate the two insig­nificant figures struggling for life on the crater rim. Side-vents oozed rivers of lava off to their right, a bubbling grey mass flowing down the stratovolcano’s slope. There was a shattering explosion as it reached the transporter and burned through the surviving fuel reservoir, then the whole wreck was carried away, slowly melting, nothing left of Eshean or the Vandians who had murdered him. Whoever triumphed here would have to sprint through hell’s own garden to survive. In a final act of desperation, Carter let go of the rifle and the officer tumbled to the side as the momentum of the struggle took him forward clutching his prize; Carter pulling the short-sword out of the officer’s belt as he passed. Carter cracked the bayonet aside with the blade, the officer lunging forward and back in a professional thrust that should have speared Carter through the heart. Not many ways to beat an opponent with a longer reach and only a few weak spots between his steel plate. The Vandian seemed to have reached the same conclusion. He thrust again towards Carter, his aim only thrown off by the boot-quaking bellow of the stratovolcano behind them, the quake quickening, brittle rock under their feet shattering with the force of the roar. He screamed. Falling.
Falling
. Both Carter and his quarry tumbled directly down the crater’s steep interior – sword and rifle sent spinning into the boiling steam. The hot rock slope cracked around Carter’s ears as he rolled and turned through the fumes, gaining momentum. The glowing white-hot dome at the volcano’s centre illuminated the thick vapour cloaking Carter, even as the screaming officer was lost to his sight. While plummeting, Carter’s head glanced into a lava-dome solidified as hard as granite. It was almost a mercy when unconsciousness erased the furnace whirling up towards him.

Jacob walked the streets of Hangel’s royal city, heading towards the area of the capital where the air brokers plied their trade. Jacob took the path that circled the plateau with Sheplar, Sariel and Khow; not for the spectacular views over the country below, but so they could feel the high-altitude breeze slipping in. This road was built into the ramparts, which from their genteel state of disrepair, obviously hadn’t seen an assault for centuries. Hangel simmered already, the morning sun working its way to its full height. Small wonder the streets up here were so narrow; all the better to provide shade during the day. That and making the most of the mesa’s limited real estate. An embrasure protected Jacob from the fall; he couldn’t see the slums below without peering through arrow slits. Just the flat immensity of the savannah beyond – a few flat stands of trees breaking up the plains, a palette of yellows and browns and oranges as far as the eye could see, right up until the horizon was swallowed in heat shimmer. The height of the upper city didn’t seem any protection against mosquitoes, though. Jacob’s sweating skin itched, covered in bites from a single night spent in the librarians’ guest quarters. He put the discomfort out of his mind. For the first time since their journey had begun, he had a name for their destination. It might take decades to fly to Vandia, but as long as Carter stayed alive, Jacob would free his son from slavery. Whatever it took, whoever he had to face.

They passed elaborate stone staircases leading down to homes built into the escarpment, gates guarded by brutal-looking soldiers in the same uniforms as the men who had admitted them into the city. The four travellers approached a wicker chute designed to carry rubbish away from the mesa and onto the slums below. Far away enough from the merchants’ exclusive residences that the smell wouldn’t be a problem. A long line of servants queued up with slop buckets from the previous night. This was, Jacob suspected, a fitting metaphor for the arrangement between Hangel’s rich citizenry and the masses they kept subjugated. There appeared to be a disagreement at the front of the line. It sounded as though a local choir was practising, discordant singsong complaints. As Jacob got closer he found the cause of the dispute. Among the jostling crowd a wailing newborn was being held in the air, a half-breed from the mottled green sheen of the baby’s skin. One of the gad servants was attempting to toss the baby down the wicker tube, while other workers jostled and shouted, trying to save the newborn.

Jacob pushed his way through the crowd to the front. ‘What is this?’

‘My son,’ cried a female gad. ‘They are taking my son from me!’

‘It has been commanded,’ said the servant holding the child. ‘You know the king’s orders. You should not have lain with your master.’

There were chants of ‘shame’ from the crowd, servants moving forward menacingly, the mob’s tenor growing more discontented by the second.

‘And how much choice was she permitted in the matter?’ asked Jacob.

‘You are not a Hangel. This is not your affair, foreigner,’ said the servant, glancing nervously around the mob. His adherence to the letter of the law appeared to be the minority view among the commoners. ‘All half-breeds must be put to death.’

‘So, you’re just going to put this baby out with the trash?’

‘I have no choice,’ protested the servant. ‘The head of my household has ordered me to get rid of him.’

‘You always have a choice, friend,’ said Jacob, ‘take it from someone who’s made a few bad calls in his life.’

‘Fine for you to talk of bravery, you with your foreign accent and your travel belt jingling with money. You will be gone from here, soon. It is not you who will feel the lash on your back for disobeying your master.’

‘Is this wise?’ warned Sheplar, his toothy grin disappearing as he was shoved about in the near riot. ‘If we attempt to right every wrong from here to Vandia, the day will never arrive when we save your son.’

‘I’ve had a bellyful of looking the other way,’ retorted Jacob. ‘I don’t reckon I can travel much further with my eyes closed.’

‘It is why the Rodalians fly so high,’ said Sariel. ‘So the clouds may better conceal the sight of their backs fleeing their foes.’

Sheplar’s voice rose indignantly. Khow had to restrain him from laying into the vagrant. ‘I am no coward, you thieving scoundrel. Let me hear you say it!’

‘A fie on all Rodalians, that is all you will hear from me.’

With the expedition’s attention distracted from the terrified servant, the gad tried to reach the top of the wicker tube, but the other workers swelled forward, forming a line in front of him, their eerie wailing a match for the unhappy newborn’s screams. Jacob used the diversion to snatch the child from the servant’s hands, passing him quickly back into the crowd’s ranks. The babe spirited away through the gathering, swiftly hidden, his mouth covered to silence his bawling. It was as though a game of pass-the-parcel had just been played.

‘And what will happen to me now?’ the servant bleated, waving his empty hands in front of Jacob’s face. ‘Is my life worth any less than the child’s? My master will hear of this. Someone will betray me, they always do!’

Jacob seized the servant by his dirty robes. ‘I suggest you blame the ignorant foreigners.’

The servant was about to reply when the crowd dispersed at speed around them, shrieks and yells as some of the workers were bludgeoned to the ground. A company of soldiers had appeared, two lines of them; the first swinging clubs at the gads, the second standing back and grabbing as many fleeing servants as they could, kicking the workers to the ground and binding their arms behind their backs.

A Hangel officer strode forward, pointing to the gad servant. ‘What is the meaning of this disturbance?’

‘I live on the Road of Eucalyptuses – my master asked me to ob­serve the royal ordinances and dispose of a half-breed here. The mother did not want me to do this.’

‘And where is the female now?’

The servant looked around at the struggling gads on the floor, being tied up. Jacob could not see the baby’s mother among the pacified workers. ‘She has gone.’

‘And the child?’

Shaking his head sadly, the servant raised his empty palms to the air. ‘They took him away – these people…’

The officer noticed Jacob and his companions for the first time, realising that the people in front of him were no passing locals trying to discipline their slaves. His face broke into a toothy grin. ‘Well then, this is a fortuitous morning’s work.’

‘Just trying to break up the ruckus,’ said Jacob. ‘Didn’t realise there were soldiers on the job, nearby.’

‘On the job, that is what we are,’ said the officer. He drew his pistol and took a step back, the captain’s men raising their rifles as they followed their officer’s lead. ‘But we’re not looking for gad troublemakers.’

‘Brave soldiers of Hagel,’ said Sariel, ‘we are simple travellers in your city, passing through on the wings of the aerial traders.’

‘That’s right,’ said the officer to Sariel. ‘A dirty bard with a tramp’s beard; a spiky-skinned man so many twists on the spiral removed from the common pattern he might as well be a filthy gad; a yellow-faced flier and a middle-aged preacher. Foreigners and travellers, all. Can’t be many of you to the schilling in the city. We’ve been searching hotels for you dogs since before dawn.’

Jacob felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his gut alongside the empty weight of the holster on his hip. Both his pistols down in the outer wall’s guardhouse.

‘Keep your guns trained on spiky, here,’ ordered the officer. ‘Its spines aren’t for show. You shoot one of those in my direction, and you and your friends won’t live long enough to regret it.’

Jacob cursed. Whoever the locals had been communicating with knew exactly what a roused gask was capable of. That meant Weyland knowledge. And he could only think of one group back home who wanted the party dead… but how the hell did the treacherous major have any leverage in this faraway corner of the world?

Jacob tapped his money belt. ‘We could pay you to look the other way.’

The officer snorted. ‘You really don’t know the grand duke. But you will.’ He turned to his men. ‘Bind the foreigners and throw them in the palace cells along with the rebellious gads. The grand duke can have his sport with them later.’

‘Not me,’ pleaded the gad servant, falling to his knees. ‘My master has need of me.’

‘Of course,’ said the officer, tapping the gad absent-mindedly on the shoulder. ‘The price for failing to observe the law against half-breeds is clear. The grand duke would have
my
head if I dragged you before him unpunished.’ Two of the lobster-helmeted soldiers strode forward from the company and hauled the gad up from his knees, forcing him towards the waste tube. Lifting the slave up by his legs, they tossed the screaming servant over the plateau’s edge. A fading rattle from the pipe as his body collided with its edges, a fatal battering that would kill him before he ever struck the ground.

‘Out with the rest of the slops,’ said the officer.

‘Badly done, you degenerate guts-gripers,’ murmured Sariel.

‘You’re a brave man,’ spat Jacob. ‘With twenty rifles standing behind you.’