Foul Tide's Turning (28 page)

Carter watched the streets in resignation as his taxi cab rattled over the cobbles. The police were out in force, chasing down looters and protesters, and his carriage had already been forced to divert four times on the journey to the sea fort as barricades rose up across the streets, furniture being thrown out of windows, crates dragged out of shop fronts, mobs of angry workers reacting to the news that the king had dissolved the national assembly. It wasn’t just mill workers raising barricades against the king. The wealthier areas had barricades of their own, citizen militia composed of shop workers and house servants; armed civilians chasing away looters and opportunists in search of plunder, the flag of Weyland fluttering over overturned wagons as they bellowed support at passing police and threatened to lynch any rebels that strayed into their territory.
Civil war, then. So easily started
.

Royal guardsmen swarmed across Arcadia’s lanes too, blue-coats dragging angry yelling labour combination men out of cheap apartments and shackling them in ankle chains to the back of army wagons. Luckily for Carter, he travelled in a civilian vehicle and the troopers left him unaccosted, their attentions focused on rounding up everyone listed as enemies of the king from their known addresses. Carter shared his cab with Assemblyman Sparrow and two other Gaiaist Party politicians, their chatter about the implications of this situation arcane compared to the chaos on the streets. How the prefects would need to be removed from each territory and the assemblymen rule alone; which assistant assemblymen would need to take over to replace loyal northerners arrested up on the hill. Which prefectures would declare for the prince and which for the king? Their gassing continued, apparently oblivious to paving stones being ripped up from the road around them, piled up by citizens to be used as crude ammunition between the rival forces vying for power. The ride passed a timeless haze. As they reached the sea fort, Carter saw the soldiers loyal to Field Marshal Houldridge arrayed in long lines, boarding civilian ships down in the harbour. Men, horses, artillery, all being loaded along the quayside. In the distance, he could just hear the dim rattle of small-arms fire, the barricades’ rise being opposed, grey lines of smoke drifting up from the proud city.

Carter stepped out of the carriage and he and Assemblyman Sparrow found Prince Owen in the sea fort’s courtyard with Anna Kurtain, supervising the embarkation.

Owen nodded gravely towards them. ‘Is it as bad as we thought, Assemblyman?’

‘I fear it is, Your Majesty,’ said Sparrow. ‘Marcus didn’t even allow the vote to go ahead before giving credence to our worst fears. His troops dissolved the assembly by force. Half the party are heading towards the usurper’s cells and awaiting his “mercy”, now.’

‘I sent a warning to you on the hill as soon as we heard the southern armies had disobeyed the field marshal’s orders to stay in barracks. They’re advancing on Arcadia and seizing all the bridges along the Boles River.’

‘I’m afraid I never received your note,’ said Sparrow. ‘Marcus’s soldiers invading the council served as warning enough of the usurper’s intentions. He planned this devilry well in advance, that much is certain. Marcus’s troopers are scouring the streets, arresting our people house by house. It’s a damned premeditated coup is what it is.’

Prince Owen sighed. He indicated the vessels at harbour. ‘My uncle has his plans. We have ours.’

‘What are you doing escaping by sea? Why aren’t you making a stand?’ demanded Carter, looking at the vessels below. ‘This fortress controls the harbour. Thick walls guarded by heavy cannons. If you control access to the ocean, you control the city.’

‘In the days before the skyguard, perhaps,’ said Prince Owen. ‘But now? This isn’t a tenable position anymore, however thick our bulwarks.’

‘Arcadia isn’t just the capital, anymore, Northhaven,’ said Anna. ‘Arcadia is the
enemy
capital.’

‘We have to fall back north,’ said Owen. ‘The saints know, I don’t want to. But if we fight now, here, we’ll lose before we’ve even started. This is the heartland of the usurper’s support. We intend to declare a Provisional Army of the Northern Prefectures and establish a new national assembly at Midsburg. We’ll organize ourselves there and push back to the capital eventually.’

‘I don’t have that long! Damn your eyes, my father’s in Marcus’s hands.’

‘It is true,’ said Sparrow. ‘Prefect Colbert appeared in the assembly to name Father Carnehan kin to Black Barnaby and a few darker things besides. In the end, it was as though the father wanted to be arrested … to give himself up.’

‘Barnaby the pirate?’ said Owen, shocked. ‘You cannot mean the pirate raider?’

‘My father’s the man who brought the slaves back from Vandia,’ protested Carter. ‘The
same
man who saved you, Anna, all of us. Half of what was said by the prefect was lies.’
It must be. It has to be.

‘The prefect also accused you of being in cahoots with slavers in the Burn,’ said the assemblymen. ‘Colbert claimed your father was behind the skel attacks and that he took his own life when Marcus courageously uncovered the conspiracy, before driving you and your brothers across the ocean.’

‘I must have missed that part of my life,’ said the prince.

‘I reckon we were too busy starving in the mines to notice,’ said Anna. ‘Marcus has surely spent some of his Vandian silver on a brass neck. Your uncle’s pissing on the nation’s back and telling us it’s raining.’

‘We live in strange days,’ said Sparrow. ‘When monarchs become tyrants and pastors become pirates.’

‘Well, I guess we’re all rebels now,’ said Anna. ‘Not much choice in the matter.’

‘I wanted the crown by law, not by war,’ said Owen, sounding anguished.

‘Any blood is on the usurper’s hands,’ said Anna. ‘No different from when we were dying for Marcus’s damned gold in the sky mines.’

‘Forgive me, Carter. Perhaps I should have listened to your father’s advice,’ said Owen, his voice wracked with regret. ‘Had a blade slipped into my uncle’s spine before he learned we’d returned alive. I could have let that sin rest on my head alone, not involved the rest of the country.’

‘There are no words that rest more bitterly on the tongue than “I might have”, Your Majesty,’ interjected Sparrow. ‘We are where we are. Your uncle seizes power in the south and raises steel against the nation. If we are to cast the usurper off your rightful throne, it will be a long, hard pounding between here and seeing the devil unseated.’

Carter’s hands tightened on the handles of his father’s pistols. Their weight felt strange and uncomfortable around his waist.
They’re not all I’ll take with me to remember him by
. ‘The past is gone. But today? How can I leave Willow here, married against her will to that bastard Viscount Wallingbeck? I won’t just abandon my father. What kind of man would I be?’

‘The kind who’s still alive to fight for your family’s freedom,’ said Owen. ‘If you stay, you’ll face nothing but southern regiments loyal to Marcus for a thousand miles in every direction. Your father’s probably locked up tight as a tick in the palace dungeons and heavily guarded by my uncle’s forces. The best fate you’ll meet hiding in the capital is to be swept up from your lodgings and chained inside an aristocrat’s arms mill or conscripted to fight for the south. The worst is someone will recognize you and turn you in for the price on your head and you’ll end up in Marcus’s hands.’

‘Listen to the prince,’ urged the assemblyman. ‘Your name’s sure to be on the arrest lists the guardsmen are scouring the capital with. A man’s got to use his wits to fight as well as his heart.’

‘If I can’t free my father, maybe I can rescue Willow. We could board a plane north and follow you.’

‘You won’t be flying anywhere until the skyguard’s engineers flush their planes’ engines. The teamsters’ union are presently busy spoiling every fuel drum in the capital’s airfields with tar,’ said Owen. ‘I can’t risk the skyguard attacking our fleet as we sail back up the coast. They’re my uncle’s creation. Don’t expect safe passage from any airfield in this half of the nation.’

‘My father came for us,’ said Carter, trying to keep his voice level. ‘Against all the odds, he crossed half the world, stood against an entire empire. Everyone at home said he was insane, a dead man seeking suicide on an impossible journey. But he still came for us in Vandia …’

‘Son,’ said Sparrow, ‘if half the things Jacob Carnehan stands accused of are true, he had a unique talent for raiding and an enemy that wasn’t expecting him at the far end of his travels. Your pa chose to surrender in the assembly so you could escape. Don’t let his sacrifice be in vain. Your father made his choice, and as for your lady, Arcadia is going to be a long way from the frontline. Think things through. If you grab her, what then? Your lady travels with you and has to survive a string of bloody battlefields up north, dodging cannonballs, bayonets and strafing runs by the skyguard? She’s a good deal safer down here in some aristocrat’s warm mansion than she would be back in Northhaven alongside a man whose cards have been marked by the usurper.’

‘Live to fight,’ said Prince Owen, almost pleading with the pastor’s son. ‘Sometimes, it takes far more courage to retreat than advance. You saved my life once, Carter Carnehan, and I have to believe it was for this task. The seeds of despotism have been planted at our door and we must stamp them down. I have as little choice in the matter as when we were slaves struggling to survive in the sky mines. Sail with me to Midsburg and we’ll fight, I promise you that. For your father, for Willow, for a free assembly and for everyone in the land. There’ll be fighting enough until you’re sick of it. That I can promise you – perhaps it’s all I have to promise you.’

Carter’s skull felt as heavy as lead as he slowly nodded his agreement. He tried to tell himself that he was a rebel, not a coward. But however much sense it made to fight another day, he was still running away. So much fear, so many worries blistering away inside his heart. Only today, none of his dread was for himself.

Cassandra gazed through the narrow window at the high white-topped mountains beyond, pale and shining in the bright moonlight. It was too narrow to lean out of and see the other buildings clinging to the mountain side in the Rodalian town. Too narrow to feel the wind on her cheeks, but she knew it still blew here, angrily hissing and shushing beyond Talatala’s thick stone walls. If the near gale serving as her constant companion wasn’t annoying enough, there was the persistent clacking of prayer wheels mounted on the town’s exterior, turning, turning, turning like the sails of a windmill. Even closing and locking her wooden shutters couldn’t dampen the relentless background noise. Cassandra was locked in a cell-like room, simple and spare, intended for skyguard staff. A bamboo cot with a stuffed mattress and a black walnut wood table with a small stool, the monastic room’s cold stone tiles warmed only by a square woollen rug with a blood-red amulet pattern which wouldn’t have looked out of place as a nomad’s saddle. A single door, always locked; with a basic and somewhat rickety cupboard to its side. And a single arrow slit of a window, no glass of course, opening on to her soaringly cold view. There was a pair of iron oil lamps mounted on the wall, their flicker and burnt grain stink giving her a slow but unremitting headache. Cassandra was loath to turn them off, though. Something about this place left her with a nagging unease. It was as though the previous occupants of this harsh, rocky outpost of Rodal still lingered in the stone, standing sentry over her. She would wake up sometimes, shivering, convinced that someone was watching her. Perhaps a guard had opened the door to the room and checked she was still securely imprisoned inside. But they were never present when she opened her eyes, neither closing the door nor locking the latch outside.
How long have I been here now? A week? Waiting for permission to be dispatched to Rodal’s capital; ferried there with as little respect as a sack of grain
. The gask, who still insisted on tutoring Cassandra in uselessly abstract arithmetic, had told her she was to remain in Talatala for one more night before departing at daylight’s first gleaming.
Another flight. I hope I won’t be sick this time
. Cassandra had gained an unexpected respect for the talents of the Rodalian skyguard pilots on her journey to the town. Flying through insanely strong winds that would have grounded most modern imperial craft, risking their necks – and hers – in a fierce aerial dance across the canyons and peaks. Cassandra was fairly sure she could pilot one of the triangle-winged aircraft if it came to it. Rodal’s pilots talked a good talk about how they could only fly by communing with the spirits of the wind, but she was fairly sure it was just sharp flying instincts supplemented by the barbarians’ false local religion. Their planes were basic enough to embarrass even the humblest imperial trainer. Wood and fabric rather than an armoured metal fuselage; a rear-mounted propeller and engine which stank like a kitchen range from the organic ether poured into it. Although Cassandra had to admit, she had never before seen an airfield like the one the skyguard squadron plunged into. Hangars driven into the peaks with long tunnels for runways to land and launch, then a maze of turns and twists to deprive the winds of their terrific hold, the bulk of the field’s facilities carved into the mountain’s heart. Like the town itself, what you saw clinging to the slopes’ surface was just the silver plating on a cheap goblet. Cassandra had caught glimpses of Talatala on the way to her current chamber, carefully memorizing the route in case she could slip her captors. She’d seen buildings which scarcely differed from the brick and wood constructions of Weyland, except they clung to rock walls of vast hollowed-out spaces inside the mountain, carts, yaks, horses and people crowding the enclosed stone streets, cold light from shuttered openings in the slopes entering like spears of illumination through a forest. Cassandra passed temples, shops, homes and bazaars; the smell from the food sellers overwhelming the cloying sweetness of incense candles and reminding her just how poor her rations had been during her captivity among the nomad raiders. She looked hungrily at dumplings bobbing in rich beef and potato stew, sizzling yak strips and golden-coloured fried flatbreads stuffed with spiced meats. Flickering lamps and warm air from inside the tiered buildings lent the place a surprisingly homely feel – well-insulated from the mountain winds beating down beyond their half-buried town. The subterranean spaces were intertwined with corridors, buildings and chambers constructed on the mountain slope itself – which were chillier and exposed to the whipping gales. Much like the mountain people’s nature, the Rodalians kept the greater part of themselves hidden and out of sight. Certainly, she’d find it easier to wring blood out of a stone than get any useful information from Sheplar Lesh. But Cassandra was canny enough to know that her captor still intended to imprison her inside the Rodalian capital. And everything she learnt of this country made her realize how hard it would be for Vandia’s agents to winkle her out of the stronghold she would end up trapped within. Bad enough if the imperium’s local sell-swords tried to assault a provincial town like this tonight. Talatala could give the Castle of Snakes and her mother’s formidable defences a run for their money. How much stronger was Rodal’s capital?
They have to come for me again. They found me in the gask forests: they can find me here, surely? And next time, I’ll try not to cut them down before I hear them out
.