‘Are we winning?’ asked Densen.
Carter passed him the telescope. ‘Hard to tell. Both kites are flying loyalist colours.’
Arick Densen looked through the eyeglass and nodded in surprise, seeing white tails with Weyland’s royal black boar on both fighter and transport plane. The north didn’t possess an abundance of squadrons, not when the skyguard owed its recent founding to the usurper’s coin, but those that did fly for Prince Owen had painted their tails red and displayed the national assembly’s flag as a token of support for Weyland’s lawful heir. ‘White on white, hell if that’s something you see every day. If one of those birds is defecting to our side, it must be the transport plane. The fighter could outpace it in less than a minute, no need to engage.’
‘Long guns to the fore,’ Carter ordered. ‘Let’s see if we can’t drive that loyalist hawk off our acres. Everyone else back in the treeline … the fighter doesn’t appear to be short of ammunition. I want pickets behind us, too. If we pitch a picnic blanket below these two jousting skyguards, might be Victorair’s bluecoats will join us while we’re watching.’
Three men smoothly separated from the company. They dismounted and removed the company’s precious
Landsman
single-shot long rifles, a separate holster on their saddles for extendable tripods that allowed them to shoot steady at a distance. The snipers needed tripods to bear the weight of the elongated, reinforced steel barrels designed for heavy powder charges and long-range ammunition. Against the polished red mahogany butts and furniture, the plates and barrel on their rifles glinted as grey as the company’s uniforms. Lacking the resources to mount a skyguard in Weyland, for centuries, the only carriers in the air had been nomads, traders and slavers, and the nation had grown expert in discouraging unwelcome aviators from its skies. His marksmen were careful and taciturn men, set up close enough to the treeline that they could retreat out of sight of an angered pilot. Carter trotted Peppercorn back towards the trees’ cover, halting just short of the pines. His three target shooters were all ex-hunters from the mountains, tough and stringy even for Sharps Mountain men, well-used to bringing back rare pelts for trade, as well as claiming farmers’ bounties on the lions that slunk down from the upper heights to decimate the cattle.
This lion’s got wings, though
. Carter reckoned they could handle the famous
Landsman No. 3 Grade Long
when it came to striking a target in the air.
‘Aim only for the fighter,’ barked the sergeant. ‘That fat pheasant it’s chasing might be carrying right-minded Middenharn boys flying the usurper’s coop.’
Carter heard the tone in the sergeant’s voice and he knew what the man was thinking. That if a lone kite dared desert the usurper’s command; maybe his brother’s frigate would mutiny for Prince Owen and sail north too.
We cling to what we can in this war, however faint the hope
.
No sooner had the marksmen raised ladder sights on the rear of their rifles than they began to bang out shots towards the wheeling fighter, swivelling barrels and making each shot count between reloading. Despite using the tripods, the recoil blasts were almost enough to throw the heavy weapons off their mounts. The long guns made enough noise to raise the dead, but it was impossible for Carter to see if they were striking the fighter at this range, even with his eyeglass fully extended. He and his troops were being ignored by the pilot at any rate, worms beneath contempt in this duel of angels. Whoever was in the cockpit, they would have to be blind not to see the drifting smoke trailing from the land below. It wheeled tight after the transport craft. Being mostly plywood and fabric; the troops needed to hit pilot or engine to bring this hawk down. The long triplane started to lose height towards the grassy flats between woodland and hills. From its erratic wobble and the streaming flames clinging to the wings between its engine mounts, Carter reckoned it didn’t have much choice in exiting the ill-matched aerial combat. If the transport plane didn’t land now, it wasn’t going to land anywhere except hell … and this kite was coming in hot enough that it might not make much difference. The skyguard fighter turned in fast behind the triplane’s tail, trailing the transporter, but then suddenly pulled up and began to angle away, setting its compass for south of the Spotswood River.
South. Definitely not on our side, then.
The few precious kites operating in Owen’s service were stationed north of Midsburg, away from the risk of being burned on their airfields by raiders paddling across the Spotswood. A lusty cheer rose up from the soldiers as the fighter dwindled to a dot in the sky, but Carter reckoned it hadn’t been driven off by ground fire. It had held back from an easy final kill of the descending transport plane.
Out of ammo
. The enemy pilot was heading home to re-arm, paint a crossed-out kite below his cockpit and feel a few congratulatory claps on his shoulder from the squadron’s officers. Carter turned his attention back to the triplane.
Damn – it’s not going to make it
. One of the engines exploded as its undercarriage bounced off the ground, showering the icy flats with fragments of wing and engine, rising weakly into the air again before the plane’s left wing started to fold in the final few feet of its glide, fixed gears collapsing as the kite’s wreckage ploughed across the plain. The whole aircraft spun around, engines disconnected and wooden propellers severed by the impact. If there was any mercy to the landing, it was that the transport plane looked to be operating at the end of its range, not enough fuel left for fires to turn the debris into a flaming comet. The triplane slowed to a halt along the lowland, a carpet of wreckage in its wake, the triplane’s body remade as a beached boat; the distant, desperate banging sounds carrying to Carter as whatever passengers and crew survived tried to smash their way free of the fuselage before they became engulfed in the final conflagration.
Carter stored his telescope. ‘Let’s go.’
Densen drew his rifle out of the saddle. ‘Keep the long guns set up and trained on what’s left. I don’t want to dig up more snakes than we can kill this fine morning.’
‘You’re a cautious man, Sergeant.’
‘Captains get paid for glory, sir. Mrs Densen won’t thank me if I return to Highbend Springs less a leg and up a crutch. More work for her at the inn.’
And I doubt if she’d like it much if you never returned at all.
‘Hell, most your customers are riding with us, aren’t they? Fan out. Let’s see who’s worth a whole drum of skyguard bullets.’
‘Those hares aren’t going coursing,’ someone hooted along the line of horses. ‘Not after a landing like that.’
Carter kicked Peppercorn forward, the horse deeply reluctant to approach the fire. ‘Less’n they’re friendly, we’ll skin them just the same.’
Horsemen from the Royal Sharps Greys galloped forward and surrounded the plane, rifles and sabres readied by the time the passengers desperately kicked their way through a broken door in the fuselage. Four men and a pilot, female, stumbled into the grass. The men all wore convict’s shifts, plain coarse woollen shirts and trousers with heavy boots, all of them ragged enough to put a vagrant to shame, unkempt beards hanging from chins and cheeks, with thin, hungry faces dirty from engine fire smoke. The woman wore a leather flying jacket, but it was pulled over the same convict’s clothing as the others; and she was standing next to a man … who Carter never believed he’d see again until war’s end. He barely recognized his old friend now, malnutrition and maltreatment having taken its toll. ‘Thomas Purdell!’
‘Carter, is that actually you up there? Thank the saints! I thought you were being held at the king’s pleasure. You look like a real soldier up on that horse.’
Carter dismounted. ‘I might even do some real soldiering, Tom. But I’d thank an empty drum on that kite pursuing you sooner than I’d thank the saints.’ Carter stopped. The gaunt man next to Thomas wheezed like a chimney, and he seemed oddly familiar too. Suddenly realization dawned. ‘You’re Assemblyman Gimlette!’ He had been a whole lot plumper when he toured Northhaven, campaigning in the hotels and taverns of the territory; never known to refuse any plate of food or cup of beer.
‘Charles T. Gimlette,’ coughed the politician, raising a weary hand. ‘Returned to the cause with a tale of travails on the way that would make a song fit to bring tears to the eyes of every true Weylander who hears it.’
‘I’m weeping already,’ muttered the sergeant.
‘The captain here is Father Carnehan’s son, assemblyman,’ said Thomas. ‘Carter Carnehan.’
The gaunt politician stared at Carter as though he was being presented with a ghost. ‘So this is the one, eh. I helped your father on his way to rescue you and the others taken from Northhaven by the slavers, that I did. And what reward did I receive? Cursed as a traitor by a mad king. Locked up and kept on rations so tiny they wouldn’t keep a street hound alive.’
Arick Densen glanced at Carter. ‘This crew are for Owen, then?’
Carter nodded. ‘Mister Purdell here is a courier for the Guild of Librarians. Mister Gimlette is Northhaven’s elected assemblyman. Both of them seized during the coup at the assembly building.’
‘And my two comrades are from the 13th Battalion, Humont Light Artillery,’ said Thomas, indicating the men in convict’s rags behind him. ‘Bombardiers Kimple and Oatman. Our pilot is Beula Fetterman, flying for the rebel skyguard squadron in Chicola until she was shot down.’
‘We were captured when the fort at Grand Valley was surrounded,’ said Oatman. ‘Didn’t even hear the national assembly had been dissolved until a loyalist bayonet was shoved half up my nose.’
‘Marcus ordered the survivors seized during the coup interned in a prisoner-of-war camp at Greealamie,’ said Thomas. ‘We were made to build it and then we were made to occupy it.’
‘Only those the king didn’t hang as traitors,’ added Gimlette. ‘I was forced to bury many an old party friend in ditches outside Arcadia before I was tossed inside that muddy camp, left to shiver in a tent in this foul cold.’
‘And there we were stuck until a party of us dug an escape tunnel, slipped our leg-irons, and escaped under the stockade one night,’ said Thomas. ‘Reached the skyguard field outside Greealamie and Miss Fetterman here stole us a plane. Sadly, one of the loyalist skyguards patrolling the waters of the Spotswood proved less than cordial about letting us pass.’
The pilot shrugged sadly, looking back at the wreckage of the aircraft. ‘Any landing you can walk away from …’
‘Saints, but it is good to see you again, Tom’ said Carter. ‘Do you know what happened to my father?’
‘Marcus has him tight as a tick in the palace dungeons,’ explained Thomas. ‘I thought you were rotting with him. I heard that straight from your Willow.’
Willow!
‘She came to see you? How, when—?’
‘Willow came a-visiting when we were on burial detail,’ cried Gimlette. ‘Along with that wicked-minded harpy who married Benner and turned the man against me, his oldest most loyal friend in the capital! I won’t talk of her evil; she as good as wished me dead, said I was useless to her, party and parliament dissolved, with no home for Charles T. Gimlette save a loyalist prison.’
‘It’s true,’ sighed Thomas. ‘I got the feeling Leyla Landor’s using your father’s captivity as leverage to keep Willow in line.’
‘Poor young woman,’ wept the politician. ‘Willow and her impending babe both hostages in the hands of the mad king.’
‘Babe?’
Thomas glared at the assemblyman. ‘I had hoped to give it you gentler, Carter. Willow’s husband, the viscount, he’s …’
Carter held on to Peppercorn’s reins, his world spinning. But what had he expected? Benner had finally gotten his way. Carter had been driven away from the Landor’s precious daughter, the woman given a patrician marriage the family approved of, and marriage not the only thing forced unwillingly on her. ‘He has his heir.’ It came out as half a sob.
‘At least Willow’s safe from the fighting, man,’ said Thomas, but even those words seemed uncertain. It was the same platitude Prince Owen had offered before they’d fled the capital, and as true as it was, Carter’s failure still felt like a knife filleting his soul.
I let you down, Willow. You were relying on me to protect you. All those times you helped save my life in the sky mines, and I couldn’t even protect you from a marriage forced upon you by your own family
.
‘And there’s still plenty of food in the south,’ added the sergeant, kindly. ‘The League might not allow arms shipments in from the Lanca, but Bad Marcus won’t let his court go hungry while he can ship up steak and potatoes.’ Densen stared at Thomas, the politician and two artillerymen from his horse. ‘Four more mouths to feed at Midsburg. Well, if we can scare up a cannon, you boys’ll be needed soon enough.’
‘We didn’t just escape to add four extra backs to the cause,’ said Thomas. He pulled out a sheaf of crumpled, snow-stained papers secured together with leather twine. ‘This is a sworn list of names compiled by the prisoners at our stockade. Every man and woman the camp’s captives had to watch hung, buried or bayoneted in Arcadia by Bad Marcus’s forces. Assembly staff and councillors murdered, army officers and constables who refused to bend the knee during the coup, small guild officials that stood against the new indentured labour laws, editors too friendly to Prince Owen’s claim to the throne. There’s enough blood here for even a false king to drown in.’
‘It was a wicked terrible risk we took,’ moaned Gimlette. ‘If we’d been discovered, the usurper’s soldiers would have hung the lot of us for treason and added our bodies to our tally with a grin. But we found some bravery in our bones, even behind the stockade, freezing in our tents with no fuel for a fire and the water rationed to us frozen in barrels.’
‘We’re lucky they didn’t hang us for rebels,’ murmured the captured pilot.
Carter ignored her. ‘The assembly’s never executed a king before.’
‘This is all you need to make it legal,’ said Thomas, flourishing the document.
‘Might be it is,’ said Densen, thoughtfully. ‘What do you say, Captain?’