Duncan heard moans and saw wringing of hands, but there were no more takers for the prince’s justice.
‘Gyal has his father’s knack for making friends,’ whispered Paetro.
Duncan shook his head, sadly. ‘This is badly done.’
But the reality was that the princeling could no more afford to lose face in front of his subordinates than the empire could appear weak before its neighbours. Palden Tash finally stopped struggling at the end of the rope, his corpse swaying limply in front of a religious tapestry of
The Saints’ Seven Mercies
.
‘Cut him down!’ barked Baron Machus. ‘Draw and quarter the dog’s body, load his remains in a fast patrol ship and drop them over whatever piss-hole he hails from.’ Machus’s legionaries obeyed with the kind of alacrity that only the truly terrified could show. They knew what their celestial caste masters were capable of: the nations of the Lanca were only just beginning to learn.
That poor Rodalian fool should have kept his mouth shut
.
Prince Gyal indicated the king seated on the throne of Weyland for the benefit of the league’s ambassadors. Marcus had broken out in a cold sweat despite being swaddled in so many robes. ‘This is what an ally of the imperium looks like.’ Then Gyal’s hand jabbed towards the corpse tumbling toward the floor. ‘While that is how those who oppose us look. Send word to your barbarian chiefs that they must choose which they wish to be considered; but have them know it matters naught to me. My fleet carry shell and fire enough to leave every kingdom of the three oceans nothing but burning dust.’
A clear example had been set. Duncan worried it would not be the last one he was forced to witness before Vandia’s expedition left his homeland’s shores.
Carter rode ahead of the force of mounted soldiers, carefully following a rutted earthen road through the woods, bristlecone and limber pine that had hadn’t been cut back for a long time; dark needle leaves giving the place an ancient, haunted feel. Carter sat astride a black mare called Peppercorn almost as ancient and slow as his father’s old horse at Northhaven. But then horses, like so much else, were in short supply among the Army of the Spotswood, and though Carter was a newly minted captain under Prince Owen’s command, the steeds allocated by commissary staff reflected the beggarly nature of their war. Horses that had been pulling wagons across Middenharn’s farm fields one month had been requisitioned as reluctant cavalry mounts for the Second Royal Cavalry Brigade of the Army of the Spotswood the next. The
royal
in their title was all that was regal about the brigade, and that only to remind everyone who fought under the rebels’ banner that Owen was Weyland’s true heir. The riders’ rough woollen uniforms had been left grey, not enough dye available in the north to colour their coats the southern forces’ proud blue. Half Carter’s troop fought with a mishmash of weapons collected from above their own mantelpieces, the rest carried notoriously unreliable rifles shipped west across the border from Gidor. If only that had been
all
that had slipped across the border. Battle hardened royalist cavalrymen from the Eastern Frontier, the Fourth King’s Mounted Riflemen, had ridden north from the prefecture of Victorair and flanked the prince’s defensive line, passing unchallenged through Gidor and striking deep into rebel territory. The unwelcome visitors from the Army of the Bole were acting as marauders, riding and hiding, striking and burning, leaving random northern farms and towns in ashes behind their passage, refusing engagements with the prince’s regiments, disappearing like ghosts whenever they were pursued. These soldiers had hunted bandits for decades along the perilous frontier region, and they were proving themselves adept now they’d switched from gamekeeper to poacher. Carter found himself riding eagerly to encounter the marauders, though. A small recompense for champing at the bit in Midsburg while the country was turned into a patchwork of confused, contested, warring territories. He’d seen nothing of battle beyond sad wagon trains returning overladen with bandaged soldiers, many missing arms and legs, their faces tired and hard and blank. Carter pushed the war’s victims out of his mind. He needed to know he was making a difference, pushing the enemy back, pressing towards the day when he stood again in Arcadia, his father freed from a royal prison and Willow unshackled from her forced marriage.
I’ll go mad riding around in circles up here. Waiting for the fortunes of war to hand me a chance to liberate my family
.
‘The fight will come north soon enough without us seeking it,’ Carter’s sergeant told him. Arick Densen had been an innkeeper before the war, as dry-humoured, dour and flinty as the Sharps Mountains he hailed from, as did the majority of their company. Pragmatic, independent-minded people, and as tough as the Rodalians in their down-to-earth way. Thin and rangy, not an inch of spare fat on the lot of them. Fine shots, too, even with the unreliable foreign rifles in their hands. Carter half-thought his soldiers might be eating the same grass as their mounts when he wasn’t looking; such was their endurance on sparse rations. Not for the first time he wondered what the soldiers really thought of him and his competence as an officer. Carter had ended up with the nickname of
Cap’n Warrener
, the rough and ready soldiers taking the two knives tucked into his riding boots as a sign his previous employment had involved skinning a warren of rabbits. Every time they stopped to make camp, Carter suffered a barrage of joke apologies about the lack of rabbit with the rations, and how they’d try harder to capture loyalists for some shaving.
‘You brooding about your father again?’ asked the sergeant, noticing the far-called look on Carter’s face.
‘And my girl,’ said Carter.
‘Best not to dwell on it,’ said Arick. ‘Ain’t any of us riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels in this war.’
‘Have you had any more news from your brother?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘Don’t reckon northern crewmen are being allowed shore leave now, in case they split for their home prefectures. And even if Jarret got a pass, every Guild of Radiomen’s hold would be closed to him. Bad Marcus doesn’t want sympathizers sending messages our way … too many chances for spies to slip us a few coded words.’
Bad luck for Densen’s brother to be serving on a ship declared for the south. The royal navy was the last of the nation’s fighting forces to fracture, the tradition of discipline at sea a strong anchor, but its ships and sailors had finally taken sides, the captain and officers’ decision – mutinies aside – depending on where a skipper called home. There was a loyalist fleet in Arcadia and a rebel fleet moored in Midsburg to oppose it. ‘Least ways you won’t be facing him across a northern wheat field, bayonet pointed in the wrong direction.’
‘There’s that. Might be that old tramp will return with word of how your family are doing?’
‘Here’s hoping, Sergeant.’
Sariel
. Sariel’s surprise visit to the company in their Midsburg barracks had allowed Carter a brief glimmer of hope, but it seemed no sooner had Carter told the sorcerer about Willow and his father’s miserable fate, than the mysterious man had disappeared again. Among the vagrant’s outlandish boasts and unlikely anecdotes, there had been a vague muttered promise that he would do what he could to put matters right, but Carter had focused more on his rambling account. It had been half an apology and half bragging, that there were greater affairs of man and wider wars that needed to be fought.
Wider than this? If there’s any more trouble in the world, I hope it stays well clear of my shoulders. I’m stumbling here as it is.
Sariel understood how to open hidden portals in the ancient standing stones raised around Pellas and travel vast distances as easily as stepping through an open doorway, and the vagrant frequently used them to disappear for seasons at a time, fleeing the demons he claimed still chased him. Carter suspected Sariel was merely a hedgerow magician and itinerant medicine man who had come into genuine arcane knowledge at some point and been driven half-mad by it.
Maybe wholly mad after Vandia?
God knows, Carter could still feel the suppressed shadow of the strange visions which had plagued him. Sariel had cured Carter somehow, reclaiming the madness from his mind and absorbing it into his own; yet the bizarre residue still tugged within the young Weylander, a hidden tide dragging at his mind. Carter could still feel the dreams’ dead fingers clutching him, even though he was troubled less by insane hallucinations. It was Sariel who had changed after administering Carter’s ‘cure’, as though the extra madness he’d soaked up had shocked the vagrant out of himself. Sariel could still be wildly boastful, embroidering the truth into fanciful tales, but at times he forgot and something darker and more malevolent stared through the performance.
I may not know which is the real Sariel, but I know the old dog abandoned us fast enough after we escaped from Vandia
. ‘Judge a man by his deeds, not his words.’ That was something his father had often preached in Northhaven. Sadly, Jacob Carnehan had fallen prey to his own advice. Named as kin to a notorious sell-sword and a pirate.
What does that make me
?
Carter wished his mother was alive. He could have counted on the good-natured, ever-practical Mary Carnehan to counsel him. But she had been murdered by the slavers, along with her son’s chances of understanding who and what he was, it seemed. His mother’s absence still seemed unnatural, even after surviving as a slave in Vandia and a rebel at home. He’d walk into rooms in the rectory, expecting to find his mother standing there, before recalling she was buried in the churchyard outside, a cold wave of remembrance that seized him like a riptide.
What would she say if she could see me now? Call me a damn fool for signing up, I suppose. Demand I abandon the fight and head home
. But the fight was coming for him, wherever he travelled in Weyland.
It’s already cost me my parents and Willow
.
‘Lord, but I’d welcome the chance to happen across those raiders,’ said Carter.
Anything to take my mind off what I can’t change
. ‘You reckon they’ve passed this far west, Sergeant?’
‘My, but you surely are an eager one. Prince Owen promised you a bounty I don’t know about?’ Densen shrugged. ‘Hard to say where those bushwhackers are. Right now, planters no sooner spot a peddler’s silhouette on the horizon than they start hollering and ringing the church bells, lower storm shutters and bring down their crow rifles. So many alarms across the prefecture, it’d be easier to tell you where the frontier mounted
aren’t
than where they
are
.’
Carter thought he heard something and fell silent. He drew in the reins, stopping Peppercorn. An angry hornet buzzing somewhere beyond the enclosed ceiling of evergreen leaves, dull and distant. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Royal Sharps Greys, halt the line,’ ordered the sergeant, raising his hand in air.
The sound hummed again, clearer without the clatter of their hooves on the road. ‘That’s a duel in the air,’ said Carter.
‘I swear, Bad Marcus’s skyguard are growing bolder every week,’ said Densen. ‘We hold every airfield north of the river, and with fighting beyond the Spotswood so fierce, the usurper’s pilots can’t be sure the dirt they put down on’ll still belong to them when they climb out of a cockpit.’
‘Might be one of ours intercepting a long-range resupply kite looking for the King’s Mounted?’ guessed Carter. ‘Those bushwhackers can’t be finding too many bullets in their raids.’
Sergeant Densen rattled the half-empty ammunition pouch dangling from his belt. ‘If they are, they’re better at finding rounds than we are.’
Carter rested a hand on the gun belt with his father’s expensive twin pistols; their weight a memento every day of all he had lost, as though he needed an extra reminder.
I’ll hand them back to you, one day, Father. Just stay alive
. ‘Let’s ride clear of the woods and have a look. If we’re lucky the usurper’s plane will put down on pasture and lead us to that band of roof-burning bluecoats from Victorair.’
‘Not sure I’d call that luck,’ said Densen, ‘but the job needs doing, and we’re the only fools on the hunt for them in this forest.’
In truth, hunting any band of marauders in Weyland was tough work; there was so much empty territory for bandits to hide in while towns and villages had to stay put, plump poultry marked on the map for every fox with a hunger to steer towards. When you were dealing with professionals like the Frontier Mounted, you could take that work and multiply it tenfold. Carter’s Royal Sharps Greys put the woodland behind them, leaving the road and taking a direct path through the trees, cold dead leaves heavy with hoarfrost whirling around their steeds as they pushed on as fast as they dared across the frozen ground. When they broke the treeline they faced rolling flat land filled with prickly green shrubbery rising as high as a mounted rider’s boots, a log fence close to the woods marking where a local landowner’s territory started. Clear of the shrubs and further back the landscape sat broken by hills topped with more trees, thin stands of red and orange woodland, and above it all the aerial combat they’d heard. True to Carter’s guess, one plane appeared to be a fighter and the other a larger, slower transport kite. Their exhausts had left white contrails scratched against the cold sky, doodles on a sheet of paper pointing to the combatants. Carter pulled his battered brass telescope from the saddle and extended it towards the wheeling planes. The fighter was a sleek twin-engined monoplane, outsized compared to the Rodalian flying wings Carter had grown up watching in the air – maybe a fifty-foot wingspan. Someone had painted a leering wolf’s muzzle on the front of the plane and it was living up to its predator’s colours. Wing-mounted cannons blazed away at the transport kite, a slow, heavy five-engined tri-plane with a sealed cabin at the front, a few portholes for passengers along its length and an open cockpit gun turret twisting at the rear of the fuselage, trying to discourage the pursuing fighter with insignificant bursts of fire. The transport plane weaved from side to side while the fighter spun around it, swooping in and out to leave traces of flapping fabric holes after each attack.
Wouldn’t want to be a passenger inside that bird
. The tri-plane began to dodge erratically, a pair of engines on either side smoking as a matched set, leaving only three rotors to carry the large plane forward. Carter growled as he took in the planes’ insignia.
Not what I was expecting
.