Foul Tide's Turning (56 page)

Screams started a few minutes later, from outside the vat room. Willow shuddered. The treacherous Thomas Purdell had started his foul work with Paetro.

‘You don’t understand. I planned for this. I
wanted
this,’ moaned the pastor. ‘Not you here, Willow, but all the rest. The Vandians, they were too far away. The imperium had to come to Weyland so I could avenge Mary. That’s why I took the emperor’s granddaughter as a hostage. Not to use her as a shield, but as bait to draw the imperium’s killers down on me.’

‘Vandia’s legions would have come anyway,’ said Willow, ‘to punish the slave revolt.’

‘Who’s to say that’s true? It was in the hands of God and fate. I should have left it there, been the man Mary married, not the devil that washed up on Weyland’s shores half-dead. I deserved to die before, and I deserve it twice over now. Thomas Purdell is only my due.’

‘Weyland doesn’t need a pastor to pray for our souls,’ said Willow. ‘It needs the man you once were to fight for us. You must have known that when you left Northhaven to find us, when you set aside your prayer-book and picked up your pistols.’

‘You don’t understand.’ Jacob shuddered in the chair as though he was already feeling the turncoat’s blade against his skin. Jacob Carnehan began to speak to Willow of the acts he’d perpetrated as a mercenary officer across the ocean in the Burn. Fleeing over the water as a fugitive murderer alongside his young brother, serving with mercenary companies until they had both fully mastered the fighter’s trade. Hundreds of nations wracked by bloody warfare which had endured for centuries: nation against nation, region against region, then finally town against town and family against family; until all that was left was hatred and feuds and warlords and the ashes they fought over. Everything else forgotten … no cause but death without end, purpose or sanity.

Jacob’s tale, his terrible choked confession, came out between Paetro’s stifled screams. Until Willow had to close her eyes, trying to will away visions competing in her mind, choosing between Paetro twisting in agony just beyond the hall and peasants slaughtered by a warlord nicknamed Quicksilver. Starving farmers’ flayed for hiding crops.
Please stop
. Innocent women raped with every village sacked.
End this
. Children pressed into service and marched against enemies just as young.
No more
. Battle after battle and victory after victory until the skies danced dark with crows.
No more
. So much blood that even Jake Silver’s own brother abandoned him and found greater peace in piracy.
It was all true, the king’s lies. Not propaganda, but the truth. How can this be the man I grew up with?
The acid drip of the tale continued until everything she had ever known about Carter’s father had melted away. And by the time the confession had finished, Willow drifted as hollow and light as a leaf blown on the winter wind.

‘Is that what Weyland needs?’ pleaded Father Carnehan, his eyes as wild and fierce as a wolf.

Willow could hardly speak.
The choice is mine. Why should the choice be mine? Haven’t I done enough? How can this possibly be Carter’s father?

‘Tell me, Willow Landor. The countries west of the ocean weren’t much different to the league of the Lanca once. Shall I remake Weyland as similar ashes?’

‘You never lost?’ asked Willow.

‘I lost
everything
I had,’ cried Jacob.

She forced herself to look into the pastor’s eyes. ‘You never lost a battle?’

‘Quicksilver never lost a battle,’ admitted Jacob.

Sweet saints forgive me
. ‘Then the man the north needs is here.’

Jacob Carnehan’s head lolled back and a tearing scream escaped his lips – a horrible, unholy mix of agony and pain and primeval rage. Willow had never thought such a torn sound could issue from anything human.
Perhaps it hadn’t.
Slowly the sound died away and his tired crazed eyes focused solely on her. ‘How will I know when to stop?’

‘You must know.’
You must
. Tears spilled down Willow’s cheeks, but she was no longer sure who she wept for.
Myself, Carter, his father? Maybe even the Vandians
. Vandia’s slavers hadn’t murdered poor Mary Carnehan, nor had King Marcus sold Willow and her friends into slavery. No. They had just broken the lock on the cage, and the imperium and the usurper had stepped into the trap.
And I opened the door for them
.

Jacob rocked and scraped his chair back towards the end of the hall, inch by inch, shaking the wooden frame and his bonds, and then he shoved back and overturned the chair, landing in the litter of broken glass with his arms tied behind his back, choking down a cry as it sliced his back, head and hands.
They’ll have heard the chair scraping, surely?
But the thud of the distant guns and yells of the tortured Vandian were too loud. The pastor writhed on the floor, trying to clutch a shard of glass with his fingers, cutting at his rope even as blood from his wounded hands slicked across the floor. He was silent with his pain, working to Paetro’s screams. Willow watched the scene in horror, waiting for the moment when Purdell or one of his lackeys would return and discover Jacob and Willow trying to escape. And then two did, the pair of bruisers in northern uniforms, probably released from holding Paetro by the fact the Vandian was no longer in any fit state to struggle. Jacob still lay bound to the chair, thrashing on the floor among a wash of his own blood.

‘There’s a rum sight,’ hooted the ginger-haired soldier. ‘Trying to slit his wrists before Mister Purdell takes his entertainment.’

‘That’s a pastor for you,’ said the other soldier, ‘ain’t no fun a man can make that a churchman can’t come along and spoil it.’

They moved across the hall. The ginger-haired soldier knelt down to haul Jacob’s chair back up while his comrade just stood and shook his head sadly, eyeing Willow, a look of lust burning in his eyes. ‘Don’t reckon the God-botherer will approve of our turn with his pretty little parishioner, then. You ever tidied it up with a lady viscount?’

‘Don’t reckon I’ve had the pl—’ The soldier’s banter gurgled to a halt, a shard of glass embedded in his throat, collapsing to the floor as Jacob seized the hunting knife from the soldier’s chest holster and hurled it into the other man’s face. The second soldier almost turned a cartwheel with the blade’s impact, his arms flailing in the air like a marionette with severed strings, and then he thumped down on the floor with the knife’s hilt quivering deep inside his right eye socket.
Dead, just like that. As easy as breathing for him
. Willow gagged and barely held down her retch. Jacob Carnehan brought a fist down against the chair’s frame, splintering wood. He released the ropes around his ankles and lifted a revolver from the closest corpse’s belt, before rising, as a shadow might rise. He walked over, drawing the knife out of the second soldier’s skull, wiping the blade carefully on the corpse’s grey tunic before using it to slice away Willow’s ropes.

‘Save Paetro,’ pleaded Willow.
I opened the door, I opened it. There’s nobody but me to blame
.

Jacob looked like he wasn’t going to answer. He tugged a belt studded with bullets away from the second corpse and clipped it around his waist instead, but finally he spoke. ‘He’s a Vandian killer whose daughter I shot dead for stepping in front of me.’

‘Then you owe him.’

‘Only the first bullet.’ Jacob passed Willow one of the brace of pistols he had stolen from the dead thugs.

So heavy
. She inspected the metal weight uncertainly. ‘What do I do with this?’

‘There are six answers to that question inside there.’

Jacob stalked towards the doorway Paetro had been dragged through. Willow hardly dared follow, but she forced herself to.
He’s our beast, my beast
. And if she was not his keeper, then nobody was. They passed a series of smaller vat rooms and storage chambers, following the sound of the Vandian’s anguished moans, growing louder and more pained, until they found what they were looking for. Willow wished they hadn’t. An abattoir chamber with a series of slabs large enough to hold cattle, easily large enough to accommodate Paetro’s form staked out naked in a horizontal ‘X’, the slab’s surface crusted with the blood of decades of work. Mrs Sackville hobbled between a stone sink containing the instruments of Thomas Purdell’s trade as well as a tanners’. The turncoat glanced up in surprise at being interrupted, a hooked blade hanging in his hand and a brown leather apron to protect his uniform from the worst of the butchery.

‘If you had worn that uniform for real, you’d know a soldier expects a little blood,’ said Jacob.

Purdell lifted the blade up high in the air carefully, moving it to the side of the slab. ‘That’s hardly fair, is it, a gun against a feather dissection blade?’

‘That’s why I’m going to shoot your over-the-hill tutor first, to give you a chance to go for that pistol tucked in your army holster.’

Purdell snorted. ‘You never did possess any flair, you dolt.’

Willow had to give Mrs Sackville her due, she ducked fairly spryly when her life was on the line, but Jacob’s pistol tracked her dipping form viper-fast, the barrel jouncing with a single shot. Sackville screamed as the bullet’s impact twisted her wizened old body and sent it spinning to the floor. Purdell’s revolver was in his hands and coming up towards Jacob as the first of the pastor’s volley caught the traitor in the chest. Maybe if Purdell’s hands hadn’t been slick with Paetro’s blood, he might have drawn faster. Jacob strode towards the traitor, shot after shot, fanning the pistol and emptying his chamber into the treacherous guild courier, Purdell stumbling back, striking the wall before slipping down the back of the abattoir, sliding on a trail of red strokes, painting the bricks behind him.

An unholy scream of rage tore out of Sackville’s wounded throat as she picked herself up and came charging towards the pastor waving a meat cleaver sharp enough to sever a cow’s heavy head. The pastor turned and fired, but the pistol chamber clicked uselessly.
Empty
. Willow winced as the blade came arcing down towards Jacob Carnehan’s skull until Mrs Sackville went dancing sideways under a volley of fire, her old body fountaining with entry wounds before she tipped over one of the spare slabs. There she lay, a slight trembling and a moan before all life was extinguished. Willow stared down in shock at the pistol in her hand, its barrel warm and a tail of gun smoke stinging her eyes.

‘That’s your answer,’ growled Jacob, looking sadly at Willow. ‘And it’ll go hard on you.’

There was another groan. Thomas Purdell tried to get to his feet, but he failed and collapsed. ‘No … style, no … sophistication,’ Purdell hissed from the floor, the words bubbling from his lips. A hand reached towards Mrs Sackville, but if his teacher had a human soul, it had already departed. ‘I should … have gone … first.’

‘Nobody ever dragged a mace to a duel,’ said Jacob.

‘Mace? You’re … little different … to me,’ spluttered Purdell from the floor. ‘You need … this as much as I do.’

‘There’s one fundamental difference,’ said Jacob, reloading the pistol’s chamber with a single shell before lowering the gun towards the prone traitor. ‘And it’s the only one that ever counted.’

Willow jumped despite herself as the weapon’s barrel bucked with the explosion.
He didn’t murder Purdell. I did. Just as surely as I sent that wizened old demon back down to hell.

‘Finish me,’ moaned Paetro from the tanner’s slab. ‘For the love of the ancestors …’

Jacob brought his pistol around and rested its barrel against the soldier’s forehead. It was hard to believe that Paetro could be harmed any more than he’d already been hurt, a web of crimson lines bleeding across his face which were so fine they might have been pencilled on.

‘No, please,’ begged Willow, stepping forward between the pastor and the slab. ‘I promised Paetro I would save his daughter.’

‘Then I’ve made a liar of you twice.’

‘
Please
. I came to Midsburg to save you, Father!’ Willow thought briefly about turning the gun in her hand on the pastor, ordering him to stop. But she knew Jacob Carnehan would turn and gun her down before she could summon the speed or will to squeeze the trigger.
Like Quicksilver
. Some storms you couldn’t stand in front of – you just had to wait for them to pass. Willow felt like a coward, standing there paralysed with a fear far more raw and primeval than when Purdell had held her prisoner. Willow watched the pastor struggle with himself, his finger white and tight around the trigger, stealing herself for another sudden explosion. But the shot never came. She allowed her breath to escape in a deep rush.

‘Hadra-Hareer is due north of here,’ said Jacob, uncocking the hammer and lowering the pistol at last. ‘It’s a bleak, rocky place, the capital of Rodal. But men like you and I can always find a way to make such places bleaker, can’t we?’

‘Why won’t you finish me? You want to watch me bleed out slow, you bastard?’

Jacob leant over and unstrapped Paetro’s legs before releasing his arms. ‘Your wounds are bad, but hate can goad a man into surviving almost anything. And if that’s not enough, I figure the duty you owe Lady Cassandra should be good for the difference.’ He pushed the radio into Paetro’s blood-covered fingers. ‘Tell your legionaries to come for you.’

‘You can’t save me. Not
you
. Not you.
Damn you
!’

‘Damn me?’ Jacob laughed. ‘That ship’s already sailed. Tell your mistress not to bother using her carriers to transport prisoners to Vandia. You’re going to need every last vessel … every soldier and gun and murdering imperial noble you shipped here, as well as all those turncoat southerners your blood money’s paid for.’ Jacob bent down beside the weeping soldier, whispering so low Willow could barely hear the rest of the exchange. ‘Remember your duty to your house. And the look of surprise on your girl Hesia’s face when I drew on her. I’ll never be far from you.’ He turned to Willow. ‘You’re my conscience, now. You and Carter. There’s nothing left in me but you.’