‘Vicious little thing. Who would have suspected it? Willow would have buried that blade in me without a second’s regret. Still far too trusting, though. She appeared to swallow what you told her about the pastor’s son. Without hope, she should prove a lot more pliable. William will break her in a few months, and if I know him, once the thrill of the hunt has vanished, he’ll go back to leathering fresh whores. She’ll end up confined to the hall’s top floor, wet-nursing an ever expanding brood.’
‘Good for her, but I don’t give a shit about the little sweet-meat if she’s not going to end up on my plate.’ said Nocks. ‘We’ve got
another
problem for now.’
‘The lure’s been well baited.’
‘Maybe a little too well,’ said Nocks. ‘The pastor’s boy will pursue the girl. And the pastor will travel with him. He crossed a world to follow the lad before. What’s the trip down to the capital compared to that?’
‘I would have let them follow us by air,’ said Leyla. ‘But my dear interfering dolt of a husband had other ideas.’
‘A slow guild train’ll do nicely,’ said Nocks. ‘Old Benner doesn’t know it, but he did us a favour. We’re not hunting rabbits, this is a mountain cat. You put a snare in the open and bait it with a handsome young doe, and the cat’s going to get suspicious. It needs to believe taking the doe is its idea, not the hunter’s.’
‘He’s just one man,’ said Leyla. ‘And I know all about men.’
‘Not this one you don’t,’ said Nocks. ‘Jacob Carnehan’s the wildest mountain cat of them all. Taking him down is going to be as far distant from easy as both Poles of Pellas.’
‘You mistake me for someone else,’ said Leyla, coolly. ‘I always get what I want and I never fail.’
‘How nice that must be for you,’ said Nocks, running his finger down his scar. ‘When you do fall short, you’ll know it. That you will. A burning pain that you go to sleep with and wake up with just the same.’
‘Ah, my poor dear revolting little Nocks.’ A muffled scream of rage escaped into the corridor behind them. ‘There, you see. You have to earn everything in life,’ said Leyla, a smile twitching at her full lips. ‘Every penny, every title. Just ask
Lady
Wallingbeck.’
Carter awoke with a start. He was in a cabin, but not the schooner he had dreamt, wet with kelp and sea spray. A dry, warm cot, rather than a hammock. One of many in the room, alongside well-scrubbed carving tables.
A sickbay, then
. He could feel the distant drone of a hundred propellers, their vibration feeding through the fuselage.
Just like the skels’ slaver carrier. But healthier quarters
. An old man Carter didn’t recognize sat opposite him, a portly chap balancing on a stool, pushing a jelly paste around a clear glass dish. Whatever the substance was, it didn’t look fit to eat, covered in a mottled fur of coloured mildew.
‘Awake, are you? I am Mapple, the ship’s surgeon.’
‘Ship? This is the
Plunderbird
… or did I hallucinate that too?’
The surgeon nodded and tapped the side of his jelly, before sealing it with a transparent lid and placing it in a black surgeon’s bag by his boots. Carter noted the more traditional bone saw jutting out and was all too glad he wasn’t suffering from gangrene. ‘Aye to the matter of your location. But no more hallucinations for you. Not unless you’re partial to a pipe or two of strong dank. Mapple’s medicine has seen you cured. And a word to the wise … carriers are known as “ships”, by those that fly on board them.’
Carter reached behind his shirt and touched his back. It was crusted over, most of the pain gone, just a dull itch remaining when he touched the scar tissue. ‘If that’s so, what do you call sailing vessels?’
‘Boats,’ said the surgeon. ‘Or on the
Plunderbird
, “marks” or “catch” will do nicely.’
‘I’m a poor catch,’ said Carter.
‘That much I don’t dispute.’
‘You have my father and friend hostage?’
Mapple snorted. ‘Hostage? Worth much silver, are you?’
‘I must be, or why would a crew of pirates hold on to me – or cure me?’
‘Pirates? Oh, we’re never airbooters,’ said Mapple. ‘We’re
privateers
.’
‘Is there much difference?’
‘The difference between a prison cell and a gallows, in the right company. Or perhaps the wrong one. We only swoop when we hold letters of marque from a powerful patron. So, you’re really the pastor’s son, are you?’ He chuckled to himself. ‘There’s a thing, now.’
‘My father is alive – he’s here?’
‘Both, last time I checked. Same for that itinerant book-botherer travelling with you.’
Carter didn’t understand any of this.
Patrons? Pirates? Privateers?
He should be dead, a bloated corpse bobbing on the ocean’s surface. Unless the aircrew were planning to sell him off as a slave for a second time. Or receive a fat purse from King Marcus for turning them over to the usurper’s forces. ‘Why am I alive?’
‘Too deep a question for me, young-un,’ said the surgeon.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘That I do, but it isn’t Mapple’s place to tell you.’ The portly old man stood up and stretched. ‘I can tell you one thing. The dog that did that to your back didn’t want you dead. He was an expert at his craft. A minute or two more of the lash and you wouldn’t be here. He teased you right to the edge and then intentionally stepped back from the brink.’
‘He was an amateur flogger,’ said Carter. ‘But a professional bastard.’
‘No, I don’t think so. I was trained in the Burn. Surgeon and torturer are two sides of the same coin out there. The man that did this to you has mastered his trade.’
‘He’s a dead man, either way.’
‘That’s the spirit, young-un. Show a little gumption and folks on board might keep you around, rather than casting you out with the contents of last night’s piss-pot.’
‘Not much point in healing me for that.’
‘Mapple serves his captain. On your feet, lad. Black Barnaby wanted to meet you when you’re fixed, and you’re as fixed as my sickbay is going to see you.’
It proved to be a short trip between the sickbay and the pirate commander; narrow corridors, cold fuselage, riding a series of room-sized elevators transferring flying boats and fighter planes between hangar decks and the carrier’s repair workshops. Crewmen, all armed, swaggered around as though they were the lords of the sky.
Maybe they are at that
. The surgeon led Carter through a hatch and into a substantial hall that wouldn’t have looked out of place inside a castle. Walls hung with hunting trophies, not the usual bears’ heads and stags’ antlers; instead, carved wooden figureheads taken from sailing ships. Eagles, curly-haired maidens, sea gods, dolphins, unicorns; multiple painted eyes seeming to follow Carter as he advanced towards a throne at the far end – simple dark oak with a fan of wooden propeller rotors rising out of its rear. Doors opened to either side of the throne, giving on to the aircraft’s bridge, airmen manning long banks of instruments, spotters on swivel-mounted telescopes while crew strode across the floor’s planking. Power here, it seemed, resided close to the cockpit. The black-bearded man who filled the throne wore a crimson jacket, brown trousers with a military stripe, long leather boots draped insolently over the throne’s side; one hand clutching a glass of red wine, the other with a thumb tucked behind a military leather clip holster holding two pistols and multiple ammunition pouches. There weren’t many privateers idling in what passed for the
Plunderbird
’s throne room, a cabin boy and a scattering of officers, and a woman that was hard to miss … an exotic-looking privateer who looked to have a mixture of Weyland and Rodalian blood. Around Carter’s age, she stood alongside the throne, her dark hair tied back below a crimson aviator’s wedge cap, the competitive gaze of her fierce clever eyes tracking Carter’s entrance as closely as the ships’ ransacked figureheads.
The ship’s surgeon bowed before the throne, indicated the Weylander by his side, and then departed.
Carter gazed carefully around him before speaking. ‘You’re Black Barnaby?’
‘I much prefer
Brave
Barnaby,’ laughed the man. ‘But for some reason the name never sticks.’
The pirate looked oddly familiar, although Carter had never met him.
Must be his portrait drawn on all those newspaper covers
. ‘Try painting your carrier yellow instead.’
The woman reached for a dagger on her belt. ‘Do you call us cowards?’
‘Peace, Aurora. You must forgive my daughter. She gets cabin-fever when she hasn’t killed a groundling for a few weeks. Our crew are traditionalists and they prefer to fly with traditional colours.’
‘Yet here you sit on a throne.’
‘Just another wooden seat, whelp. We elect our leaders,’ boomed Black Barnaby. ‘And bow before no one.’
‘That’s good,’ said Carter. ‘I won’t curtsy before you, then.’
‘He’s got spirit,’ said Aurora, ‘I’ll say that for the dog. Is he a groundling noble?’
‘Another book-botherer,’ said Black Barnaby. ‘If the pastor and the young guild courier are to be taken at their word. And who would doubt a priest?’
‘Such broad shoulders,’ said Aurora, admiringly. ‘That’s a waste of a life, buried in a hold with only paper and dusty groundlings for company.’
Carter nodded in her direction. ‘I always thought much the same thing.’
‘Ha! I only had to gaze upon your spine to know you were an awkward sod,’ announced the captain. ‘Nobles still like to whip manners into their peasants, I see. Groundlings have to be expertly acquainted with bowing and scraping to survive. That’s why I’m up here.’
‘And why am I?’
‘Let’s call it idle curiosity,’ said Black Barnaby.
‘Why don’t we call it an obligation, instead?’ spoke a familiar voice behind Carter. He turned around. His father had entered the chamber. ‘I thought we agreed that my son would stay in the sickbay for the flight.’
‘You expressed that wish,’ said Barnaby. ‘I don’t recall agreeing to it.’
Carter was confused. From their tone, it was as though his father and this rogue had more of a history together than merely hostage and captor. Had the pastor’s monastery been involved with the kelpers’ fuel smuggling out to the
Plunderbird
? ‘You know this airbooter?’
Black Barnaby laughed and spoke for Carter’s father. ‘Me and this
good
man? Can’t a privateer occasionally request the mediations of a pastor, or are we also godless in your eyes, whelp?’ Black Barnaby’s needling brought back memories to Carter, a time when his and his father’s minds had fused under Sariel’s sorcery. He had recollections of blood and fighting; terrible and blasted. But none of this pirate, no memories from the air or of the
Plunderbird
.
‘That’s enough,’ said Jacob.
Carter looked at his father in astonishment. ‘Is
this
our ride south?’
Black Barnaby stretched languidly out in his throne. ‘Eventually the light dawns on even the dimmest horizon.’
‘We need to follow fast, and a carrier plane riding the arrow is the best I can do. Beggars can’t be choosers, Carter.’
‘And all priests are beggars,’ grinned the privateer captain. ‘On your knees to the saints, on your knees to the church and its bishops, on your knees to your congregation with the church plate extended and rattling. It’s a surprise you can still stand with the sores you must have developed on your knees.’
Carter felt a flash of anger. ‘Better an honest parish for a trade than raiding innocent merchantmen.’
‘
Innocent?
’ Black Barnaby rocked with laughter at Carter’s words. ‘What do you think the main trade east to west across the Lancean Ocean is? Fine silks and spices? They don’t have much call for extravagances in the Burn. It is guns and arms and sharp steel that flow, along with men who’re desperate enough to sell their skills across the ocean
and
know which end of a pike to stick a peasant with. This month, the
Plunderbird
flies as the skyguard of the Three Cities of Abbarriss, hunting for boats running supplies to their most troublesome neighbour, the Dukedom of Opard. There are Weyland clippers sailing west with cargoes of greased rifles and crates of bullets paid for in blood, because that’s all they have left to pay with in the Burn. And after all those centuries of war, even the ruins of the ruins being fought over, it takes a
lot
of squeezing to ring blood out of that much ash.’
‘You freely admit to hunting Weyland vessels?’ said Carter.
‘Compared to your state’s arms trade, what we’re about is almost missionary work,’ grinned Black Barnaby.
‘Maybe you should apply to the church council and study to wear the black.’
‘He’s your son, all right,’ said Black Barnaby to the pastor. ‘The
good
man you are presently, of course. I can hear your cant in every word he utters.’
‘You don’t know who I am, now,’ growled Jacob.
‘I can’t predict what you’re going to do next,’ said Black Barnaby. ‘But then, which of us ever could? What the hell do you think you’re doing travelling south? Into the mouth of the shit-storm brewing down there, and for what? A young noble-woman your whelp fancies?’
‘It’s true then?’ said the captain’s daughter. ‘These fools are following a girl? I thought the flying boat’s crew were joking when they spun me that yarn.’
‘No joke,’ said Black Barnaby.
‘Not to me,’ said Carter.
‘I hope she’s beautiful, groundling,’ said Aurora.
‘She’s the right woman,’ said Carter. ‘The only one. It took me a long time to realize that. I would cross all of Pellas on foot twice over to find her again.’
‘Then I hope you know a good cobbler,’ said the pirate captain. ‘You understand it won’t matter soon, even if you succeed. I foresee a long stream of boats sailing from west to east; carrying tutors to educate soft Weylanders in how centuries of war have elevated conflict into a higher form. That’s all you’d be rescuing the girl for. The way things are going in Weyland, it won’t be long before there are prefects and assemblymen breaking off and titling themselves kings and dukes, offering me letters of marque to hunt for
them
.’