Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (4 page)

The journey changes the mind, but the mind can never change the journey.
Jacob took the librarian’s point, but the nearly infinite size of the world outside Northhaven was precisely what he was worried about. ‘There’s a horizon full of land to swallow a soul out there, Lucas. What’s one man in the beyond, without friends or family to give him the foundations he needs to rely on?’

‘The furthest update I’ve ever received was from somewhere called Jhark,’ said Lucas. ‘The transmission stamp on the message puts it at about ninety million miles away. Physically, I could ride a horse only a fraction of that distance in my lifetime. But up here—’ he tapped his head ‘—with our archives, I can make a fair stab of understanding what life is like there – or at least, what it
was
like when that message first started to pass down the radiomen’s relays. For you and I, that’s more than enough. For your son, it is not. He wants to see a piece of the infinite for himself. To feel it under his boots and experience it.’

‘Things are the same any place you travel to, consistent…’ Even as Jacob said the words, he knew he was trying to convince himself.

‘Consistently appalling, you mean, Pastor,’ smiled Lucas.

‘Carter’s talking about sneaking down to the harbour and trying to ship out unregistered,’ said Jacob. His hand passed west over the vast waters on the map, towards the blackened patchwork of feuding states along the opposite shore of the seven-thousand-mile-wide Lancean Ocean. ‘He’s liable to get himself drugged and sold to some mercenary company over the water. Enslaved in the Burn as cannon fodder for one of their warlords.’

‘My library isn’t a prison,’ said Lucas. ‘And there are safer ways of working the wanderlust out of a young man’s system.’ He passed his fingers over the countries of the Lancean League, the nations hugging the eastern coast. ‘Why not consider an apprenticeship for Carter with the Guild of Rails? He would be away a couple of years travelling the mainline circuit on a train – every league member as boring and civilised as we are in Weyland. He’d be back soon enough, after he realises that the water that runs through our neighbours’ land is no sweeter than the streams of home.’

‘What if he doesn’t come back? Things are meant to be better down south. Bigger cities, wealthier living.’

Lucas laughed. ‘That’s merely a function of our kingdom’s position at the far end of the caravan routes. They still have resources somewhere down south, metals and ores and chemicals, and the caravans don’t have so far to travel to bring raw materials up to trade. Are you worried that Carter will be seduced by a life of ease? Do you think he is the sort of man who cares if he owns a machine that can cool and preserve food, or another that can steam his clothes clean?’

‘He might.’ Even as Jacob said the words, he heard the uncertainty in his own voice. How much of that was true and how much of it was an excuse? He and Mary had lost Carter’s two brothers to the plague, lost them far too young. The pain was meant to pass, eventually. Everyone said it would. But after a decade had gone by, there wasn’t a week that passed when Jacob didn’t think of his dead sons and mourn their loss. How much of what he and Mary did now was just trying to clutch onto Carter too tight for his own good?

‘In this matter, at least, I think you underestimate Carter,’ said the library hold’s master. ‘He yearns for adventure. I would be more worried about him heading north, to the real edges of the caravan route. There are northern states where they carry only swords and bows to repel the nomadic hordes of the Arak-natikh steppes. Countries situated too far away from the passage of ores to build even the simple life we enjoy in Weyland. No metal for machines in their towns. Not even lead type for a printing press. Only iron for the swords that protect your village. That’s what Carter thinks he wants. Not lanterns lit by the pulse of electricity, but the life of an adventurer or a sailor or a caravan guard. So, you must both compromise. Secure Carter a position with the Guild of Rails and point him towards the civilised heart of the league. Let him travel.’

‘Mary worries about Carter’s wild ways when he’s no further than a cart ride away from our home,’ said Jacob. ‘How can I sell her a couple of years riding a railway carriage?’

‘You’re a good man, Jacob Carnehan, but you worry too much. Sometimes matters just have to run their course.’

Jacob sucked in his cheeks.
Two years.
And was he going to raise that little matter before or after he told his wife about having to drag Carter away from crossed sabres with the Landors’ heir?

Carter trudged down the gallery of shelves as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Actually, it wasn’t the world’s weight. It was the barrel of water strapped to his back, a rubber hose attached to a spigot on its side… a wooden nozzle to refill humidifier boxes mounted on the wall like bird feeders every hundred yards.

‘Dry paper is dead paper,’ muttered Carter, aping the Master of the Codex’s voice as he soaked the sponge-like filling of the nearest box. ‘And books with dead paper will eventually die. Control the environment, limit the sunlight and the archives’ pages will prosper.’

Hell, I’d be better off breaking my back in one of Benner Landor’s fields. At least I’d feel the wind on my face and the sun on my neck, watering something other than these old tomes.

A librarian poked his head through the archway into the chamber, snapping Carter out of his mood of despondency. ‘Got a job. The master says you’re the lad for it.’

‘Really? Then I’m betting it’s not one of the better tasks on today’s rota.’

The other man grinned. ‘I was late three days in a row during my apprenticeship. Master Lettore had me humping re-shelving crates for so long I thought I was on probation with the longshoremen, not the librarians.’

Carter clipped the hose back onto the barrel. ‘Well, I’ve already unloaded the last message cart of the day, so I know there’s nothing heavy that needs humping.’

‘There’s an old tramp at the entrance, hollering and banging on the gate. Sounds as mad as a sailor marooned six months with only sun and seawater for company.’

Isn’t that fine and dandy? Another way to punish me.
‘And what would the master like me to do?’

‘Deal with the vagrant, Mister Carnehan. Use your initiative.’

Carter left the chamber, racked his humidifier in the storeroom and walked the stairs up five levels to reach the entrance. He slid open the sally door’s metal hatch to see what he was dealing with. Outside, the tramp had abandoned his attempts to communicate via the intercom and was dancing a mad jig around the caravan’s traveller children. Wide, watery eyes blinked as he capered and croaked a badly out-of-tune song. Happy to have new company, the children seemed delighted to frolic with the lunatic, although an old matriarch was keeping a wary eye on this exuberant newcomer. The object of Carter’s attention wore a bright brown leather coat that flapped around his riding boots, kicking up dust. Carter had never seen a coat like the one worn by the tramp, carefully etched with hundreds of intricate pictures as though they were tattoos in leather. In his hand he thumped a sturdy walker’s staff into the dirt, using it as a maypole to lift his legs off the ground. Hanging off the man’s jutting chin, a long straggly white beard swished through the air that surely would have benefited from the attentions of a bath and comb.

Carter was half-tempted to leave him outside, cavorting for the travellers, and tell the Master of the Codex he had dealt with the vagrant. But the traditions of courtesy to strangers were too strong in Carter’s blood to allow him to lie, even if it meant having to talk to this odd-looking lunatic. Unlocking the sally port, Carter stepped outside in the sunshine and felt the brief joy of being in the open, not stuck in that badger warren of desiccated learning behind him.

‘Old man!’ Carter called to the tramp. ‘Over here.’

Glancing up, a look of surprise creased his features. He halted his dance around the caravan, lurching forward towards the entrance. ‘Am I old?’ The tramp’s voice creaked like his words were being dragged over gravel, too many nights spent out under the stars with mossy woodland clearings for his mattress.

‘I’d say you are. Maybe sixty, seventy years?’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t count that as old. Are you the baron?’

‘Baron of what?’

The tramp jabbed his walking staff towards the metal gate buried in the hillside. ‘Of yonder castle…’

‘Isn’t much of a castle. That’s a guild hold, old man. The Guild of Librarians. You know… archives, knowledge?’

‘Ah, reading!’ smiled the tramp. His teeth gleamed white and perfect. He’d clearly never wheedled enough coins for tobacco or whisky to stain them properly. There were dentists in Northhaven with poorer sets of dentures than his. ‘I do so love reading. And food, of course. A
good
meal. Nothing fortifies the soul more than reading a good book having first been served with a hearty stew.’

Carter took the hint. ‘If you’re claiming visitor’s poverty, I can enter you in the
Ledger of Salt
and Roof
and give you a drink and a feed.’

‘Poverty? Why, young man, I am insulted! Yes, I am. I shall pay, naturally.’

‘You can pay?’

‘Of course, through the telling of fine tales.’ He ran a finger along the images on the leather coat. ‘All of these are stories. I have recounted them to kings and presidents and sultans and princes and emperors the length of Pellas –
all
have been entertained and none have been left disappointed.’

Well, the hobo hasn’t met the Master Codex; there’s a man who’d surely slid out of his mother’s womb with a disappointed look on his face.
Pellas.
The hobo had used the archaic, formal name for the world. Not a word you often heard.
A bard then, with a sideline in panhandling.

Carter reluctantly led him through the entrance. ‘Let’s just enter you in our
Ledger of Salt
and Roof
, and call it quits. One meal, mind, and you can’t sleep inside. Only the guild’s members are allowed to sleep underground. There are a couple of log shelters down a path behind that caravan there. They belong to us. You’re welcome to bunk in one of them for a while.’

‘If I do that, I won’t be able to see the stars, and I do so enjoy the stars’ company.’

‘I’ll need your name for the ledger, Mister…’

‘Sariel, that’s what the stars call me.’

‘They do?’

‘Oh yes. They often whisper to me during the long nights, recounting new stories to illustrate on my coat. It was the Duchess of Krinard, a courteous lady and a great scholar, who taught me how to communicate with the stars. She owned a telescope cut from a single great diamond and she kept two hundred ravens to drag it into position every night. Perhaps I could teach you the trick of communicating with the heavens, Mister…?’

‘Carter Carnehan. That’s kind of you, but I’ll pass. If you walk through Northhaven, maybe you can show my father. He’s a great one for watching the sky at night.’

Sariel ran a hand through the hedge of wiry white hair above his wrinkled forehead. ‘The stars undoubtedly whisper to him, too. He must be trying to hear the heavenly orbs better.’

Carter led the tramp through the most indirect route he could think of to avoid the other librarians. The
Ledger of Salt
and Roof
was really intended for wandering monks, maybe merchants who had fallen on hard times and were reaching the end of their supplies as they passed the guild’s hold. It wasn’t meant for any lazy rascal who fancied a free supper at the guild’s expense, but here was Carter, using his ‘discretion’ in a way guaranteed to rile the Master Codex when he asked how Carter had dealt with the tramp.
I guess I just like making mischief.
Carter avoided the hold’s refectory, seating the tramp at a reading table in the corner of the nearest map room, leaving him there while he slipped into the kitchens – liberating a jug of water, flat bread, cold ham, cheese and a bowl of rice along with a glass vessel filled with soy sauce. It wasn’t the hearty stew the hobo had hinted at, but the librarians preferred rations as plain and bland as their lives. Balancing the food on a wooden tray, Carter carried it back to the map room.

As Carter slipped through the doorway, he found Sariel leaning over one of the map tables, swaying from side to side and banging his temple with his left hand. ‘It’s so big, so large, so much of it. I remember the size now, how could I ever have forgotten? I’m no better than a fobbing, evil-eyed horn-beast.’

Carter felt a twinge of nerves. Just how unbalanced was his unpredictable guest? Carter hadn’t swept him for matches or a flintbox, either, before allowing him inside the hold. Carter’s apprenticeship might be miserable, but he didn’t want to end his tenure with the first fire in the library’s recorded history. ‘I’ve got your meal here, old fellow. Sit down.’

‘I apologise. I suffer headaches sometimes. So many stories cluttered inside my mind, plotting and planning with each other. Which nation does your castle lie in, Lord Carnehan?’

‘Come south over the mountains, have you? Through Rodal? This country is Weyland, old fellow. We’re part of the Lanca, just like Rodal. You understand? Part of the Lancean League? You will be walking for a couple of decades before you’re free of the league. Every country south of here and a few more out to the east, all part of the Lanca, all as quiet and peaceful as a church social in the meadows with the picnic blankets laid out.’

‘No, I don’t think I recall mountains. Sea, there was a significant surfeit of sea. Waves as big as mountains crashing down on top of us… of those there were plenty.’

‘Worked passage on a vessel, did you? Shipped in from the west? Know how to rig a schooner as well as spin a yarn?’

‘A schooner? Twenty-five sails hung across seven proud masts,’ said Sariel, tugging his silver beard as if he could wring information out of the hair. ‘No, of course not, don’t be ridiculous. I crossed the ocean on a pod of whales, borne by the noblest of those great mammals of the sea, the Prince of Baleens. He was grieving for the loss of his favourite cow, what we would call his wife. He sang only songs of sorrow for the entire journey. So many tears shed, my lord, sometimes it was hard to know where the tears ended and the ocean began. I’m not embarrassed to say I wept for his loss.’