Foul Tide's Turning (52 page)

Princess Helrena left the map table and took Duncan aside, the officers clustered around the table behind her, discussing the finer tactics of the coming assault.

‘Matters here are as good as settled … this battle can have only one outcome now. I am trusting you to stand ready with the helo squadron, waiting for word from Paetro.’

‘He’ll free Cassandra,’ said Duncan. ‘And I’ll be ready to bring them out,
all
of them.’

‘Thank you.’ She glanced back towards Prince Gyal stretched over the command table, moving the counters around like a child playing with toy soldiers. ‘You saved Cassandra once in the sky mines and again in the Castle of Snakes. This will be the third time.’

‘There are some habits that I find hard to break. Please tell me you are still certain about this arrangement,’ said Duncan.

‘We must deal with the world as we find it, not as we wish it.’

Duncan nodded, sadly. ‘If “as we find it” is all we can hope for, we had better make the best of it.’

‘Return Cassandra to me unharmed, Duncan. This victory might help give Gyal the throne, but it will be dust to me if my daughter is not there to see me sitting by that dullard’s side.’

‘I’ll get her and Cassandra will be empress after you,’ Duncan swore.
And I’ll still be at your side when Gyal is under the dirt
.

Jacob was in his quarters above the garrison’s stables, empty since Carter’s cavalry company departed for the field, when he heard one of the gate’s sentries calling for him.
What now? I doubt the field marshal’s had a change of heart and requires my services
. Houldridge might not know it yet, but he soon would. The shells landing inside the city’s walls spoke volumes for how poorly the battle was progressing for the assembly’s forces.
The south’s driven off our regiments thoroughly enough to set up their batteries on those hills to the east.
Projectiles were landing every minute now. Whistles as they flew, followed by the deep thud of impact and a distant detonation, then a column of black smoke drifting into the cold air.
Those are the southern batteries. The Vandians haven’t even bothered attacking yet.
The far-off cordite scent brought back the memory of other battles, other sieges. Usually, Jacob had been on the other side of the besieged walls.

The soldier ducked into the stable and located the pastor in the hayloft. ‘Father Carnehan, there’s a boy arrived outside the gatepost. Says he has a message for you.’

Jacob grunted and followed the soldier out to the keep’s wall. A boy in a patched wool jacket waited there for him, a leather satchel for selling the city’s newspapers slung around his shoulder. He beckoned the street seller to enter through the gatehouse. For a moment, Jacob wondered if the lad had been dispatched by Sariel with a message, but instead the young newspaper seller wordlessly handed Jacob a silver-plated locket.
I know this
. Jacob searched for the hidden clasp and opened it up, staring down at a familiar miniature brown-tinted photographic portrait of his son.

‘Who gave you this?’ demanded Jacob.

‘A man, sir, dressed as a house servant. He said the locket belonged to his mistress and she needs your help.’ The boy’s voice dropped to whisper as he glanced around the parade ground in front of the stables. ‘The servant said there’re people in the city who might think his mistress an enemy, but that you’ll know the truth. She’s being hunted by both sides.’

‘Describe the man.’

‘Short, sir, not much taller than me, but as big as a bull. Red hair and a fine thick moustache the same colour. Perhaps forty years of age on him.’

Nobody Jacob recognized.
A loyal retainer, perhaps?
‘Willow,’ sighed Jacob. Carter would be overjoyed to find the woman he loved had fled here from Benner’s forced marriage, but the pastor felt a heavy weight settle on his shoulders.
You might have been better off laying out picnic hampers with the courtiers outside the city, Willow. The assembly’s soldiers will have you in jail for the sake of your southern lady’s title, and you’ll only end up ducking your husband’s shells and bullets in here
. Willow’s life was in his hands once more, and he doubted Carter would speak to him again should he allow any harm to come to the young woman.

The boy handed Jacob a folded sheet of paper, the expensive vellum kind that might have been taken from a lady’s writing bureau. He unfolded the note to discover an address written inside. ‘Where’s Kemble Yard?’

‘On the south side of the city, sir … the tannery district. Cheap rooms around there, if you can stand the stench of the works. You want to visit, just follow your nose.’ The boy halted. ‘The servant said you’d give me a coin or two for safe delivery of the locket, but I’d sooner take a rifle from the armoury for the battle. I want to be up on the walls.’

Jacob gazed up at the sky, streaks of smoke from the shells coming in, felt the ground trembling from the impact of explosions inside the city. ‘This isn’t the battle yet. This is just the orchestra warming up for the main dance. You don’t want to fight,’ said Jacob. He tossed a coin at the scruffy street vendor and the boy caught it. ‘Trust me.’

‘That’s what a pastor’s meant to say, even an army one … sermons about the peace of the saints.’

‘It’s the
army one
that’s telling you, lad,’ said Jacob. ‘All that talk of honour and glory in the papers you’ve been selling, that’s all it is, talk. The real thing is just blood and dust and pain.’

The boy snorted and ran off through the gatehouse.
There’s no fool like a young fool
. But Jacob had been little different, once.
He’ll find out, if he lives long enough
.

Jacob set off across the city, walking hand-in-hand with his old friend.
Carnage
. Plenty of citizens left inside Midsburg to run panicked through the streets, yelling for fire buckets and carriages to drag the wounded to the by-now overrun hospitals, pushing their way past wagons arriving in from the trenches and defence lines outside loaded with maimed and dying soldiers on the flatbeds. Some of their coarse grey tunics were almost dyed brown with blood, grown men screaming and howling like babes for laudanum to ease their agony. The wounded had to compete for the road with private buggies loaded with Midsburg’s citizens maimed in the shelling.
Why do they never leave in time? Are their homes and family heirlooms ever worth more than their lives
? Dying for a cabinet full of patterned porcelain and a chest full of clean sheets and blankets. But some people preferred to stick with what they knew.
And may the saints forgive me, I’m no different
. Jacob Carnehan was gone and Jake Quicksilver was back.
This isn’t my doing. The Vandians would have come seeking revenge whatever I did or didn’t do in their empire. Bad Marcus would have fallen out with the assembly sooner or later. Some people, they just require killing
. If Jacob had acted on that impulse with Bad Marcus, he’d only face half the enemy numbers presently tossing incendiary shells into the city.
Marcus and his Vandian dogs, they’re no different to the scum that drove me and Barnaby from our farm and murdered our mother. Just standing up to evil is enough of a reason for evil to seek you out. I was happy in Northhaven. I had a wife and a family and friends and the respect of the people I lived with. Everyone but Carter’s dead now. They did this to me, not I to them
. Still, Jacob was glad that he had sent Sariel out of Midsburg; Jacob’s cawing conscience absent for this portion of the siege.

He rounded a street and walked into a wall of smoke from buildings burning on both sides of the boulevard. As the rolling cloud cleared, Jacob found himself standing in front of a young costermonger not much older than Carter, the young man clutching his cold, dead wife in his arms, lying together in the wreckage of their barrow. It was as though Jacob was forced to relive his final moments with Mary, murdered by the skel slavers. The costermonger’s tear-stained face twisted up to face Jacob, but he saw the wrong man …
the pastor, not Jake Quicksilver
. But neither who Jacob was or who he had been could do anything for this poor slain woman.

‘Why?’ yelled the man. ‘Why were they aiming at us?’

They weren’t
.

‘Because you’re here,’ said Jacob.

‘What can I do, Father?’

‘Go to the ramparts and put a bullet in the head of the first of the bastards that tries to storm the wall.’

‘Is that what the scriptures teach?’

‘No, I reckon that’s a lesson from an artillery shell.’

‘I don’t want to fight them; I don’t want to kill anyone.’

Jacob knelt down beside the weeping husband. ‘Get into a cellar. I’ll fight them for you.’

‘But you’re just a pastor, what can you do?’

I’m not even that
. ‘They murdered the priest. I’m all that’s left.’ Jacob reached out to touch the man’s arm, as though sharing a confidence. ‘I’m going to kill Bad Marcus. I’m going to kill his Vandians and his slavers and every one of his filthy allies. I’m going to kill so many of them that the Broadaxe is going to turn red with their blood.’

‘Father, please, you’ve gone mad, the bombardment’s snapped your mind.’

‘No,’ said Jacob, blinking away the tears for this man’s love lying in the ground, missing an arm and half her face. ‘But they’ll wish I had when this is over. I’m sorry they butchered your wife, but I’ll make it up to you, I swear it.’

He pushed away the costermonger’s trembling hands. The man started begging the pastor to join him in a cellar, shouting that Jacob would die outside. ‘I’ve already died twice. What’s a third time?’ muttered Jacob. He stumbled back into the smoke, heading for the address on the paper.

He heard Mary’s voice calling through the cinders and the choking clouds.
How many corpses do you need to pay for mine, Jacob? A hundred?

‘More,’ he coughed.

A thousand?

‘More.’

A hundred thousand?

He wiped the tears from the biting hot smoke out of his eyes. ‘Quicksilver’s just getting started.’

But I didn’t love him. I never loved him.

‘I know: I changed for you. And I grew soft enough to lose you. You had the wrong man protecting you, Mary.’

How many’s enough?

‘How many do Bad Marcus and his Vandians have to send after me?’ Jacob yelled into the flames. ‘Three armies and an empire’s worth! And when they get truly desperate, they’ll send their skel slavers too. Everyone, I need every last one of them!’

How can I ever love you again?

‘You can’t. You— Can’t.’ Jacob weaved his way through the city, grabbing fleeing soldiers and citizens, seizing those fighting the fires in lines with fire buckets, shaking the directions out of their confused mouths. ‘I’d come back for you, Mary, if I could.’

But she was gone.
Almost everything is
. Hard to tell which way was which when the city was burning. ‘This will be my war,’ he muttered.
Soon enough it will be mine. Just survive the siege. A little bit longer.
But Jacob had one life to save, one life for the empty side of the ledger before he began adding to the already packed tally on the opposite side. The newspaper boy was right about one thing … the stink of the tannery district was enough to banish the cinder and gunpowder miasma of the siege. Jacob followed the scent and found the address. Wedged in between the tanneries and warehouses stood a tall tumble-down three-storey building wearing moss-covered slate tiles like a worn hat, a hanging sign swaying in the wind with the painting of a bed, and an equally faded wooden sign above the door which bore the words
Mrs Sackville’s Workingmen’s Boarding House
for those who could read. This was the address. The front door swung inward, not locked and hardly on its hinges. A hallway. An old woman sat behind a wooden porter’s booth in the entrance, presumably Mrs Sackville, a staircase on her right leading up to the rooms. Another thing that could be said of the stench of the tanneries outside: it masked the damp wood and musty unclean smell inside the flophouse.

‘You have a lady staying here on the third floor?’ Jacob’s voice was hoarse and just talking hurt.

‘I’d say I do,’ said the old woman. ‘Along with a bunch of cheap Gidorian traders. They’ve all gone, but she’s still here, dearie. Knew she wasn’t any Gidorian. Weylander, same as you or me, what with that fluting north-country accent. You come to take her away before the loyalists come marching through? You tell her that she has to pay for her rooms, you hear! She’s staying in my most expensive accommodation. Half my tenants have skipped their bills, off with the first whiff of grapeshot in the air.’

‘Take me to her,’ said Jacob. He placed a silver shilling on the guest book right in front of the owner. He hacked and cleared his throat. Raw from the smoke of the burning city; as though he’d been drinking cheap whisky for the best part of the day. ‘I’ll give you another just like it to cover her rent. But I need her. I need to save her.’

‘Do you, you say? Better you should chant your prayers for the whole city, Father.’ The old woman whistled unhappily, but opened the swing door inside her porter’s booth and came out to tramp up the rickety staircase, her bones creaking along with the floorboards.

‘I’ll give you some advice,’ said Jacob. ‘Follow your tenants and get out of the city while you can.’
I don’t want to slay you too
.

‘I’m of no age to be bothered by the likes of those fine southern gentlemen outside the city,’ said Sackville as she opened the door while knocking on it and calling out, ‘A visitor for you, dearie!’ She moved out of the way and indicated the pastor could enter.

‘This place will burn like tinder before you ever put the manners of those fine southern
gentlemen
to the test,’ said Jacob. ‘I know them.’
I was them
. A wooden-floored room sat inside, three doors leading off to other quarters. An expensive purple dress was stretched out on the bed next to an open travel case, shot silk, next to a couple of long Gidorian cape-cloaks. ‘Willow?’