Foul Tide's Turning

by Stephen Hunt

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The power struggle begins . . . The people of Weyland always believed the slavers raids, which destroyed families and homes like a natural disaster, were a misfortune that couldn't be averted or stopped. But it's not true. King Marcus struck a deal: his people in exchange for technology and a powerful alliance with the Vandian civilisation. And now everyone knows. Jacob and Carter Carnehan escaped the slavers - along with the true king of Weyland - and have returned home with both the truth, and a Vandian princess as their hostage. Their purpose was to avoid war . . . instead, the truth prompts a civil war at home - while an invasion force focused on reclaiming the captive princess starts to gather on their borders. Jacob and Carter will be separated once again - and this time they're fighting for something bigger than their lives.

Release date: June 4, 2015

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 448

Sample

ONE

WANDERER’S WELCOME

It was cold coming out of the east in winter, a biting chill that even the flames from the burning, overturned wooden coach couldn’t cover, nor the whipping snowstorm conceal. Young Thomas Purdell – Tom to those in his confidence – suspected he might not live long enough to warm himself at the wreckage’s inferno, though; not the way the bandits were working their way through the surviving passengers. So far, they had only slit the throats of those travellers who’d put up a struggle while resisting the sudden attack. Tom was far from hopeful he was out of the woods yet. It was hard to question a dead man or woman; and this attack wasn’t quite as it appeared. Not that the wilds of Northern Weyland weren’t infested with bandits and marauders. But such men usually rode cheap nags and carried old single-shot rifles. These eight killers were suspiciously well-equipped with lever-action rifles from the Landsman Repeating Arms Company, and though Thomas wasn’t much of a judge of mounts, their horses were healthy grain-fed sorrel-coloured steeds rather than the usual nags rustled as prizes by the likes of these. The dirty and well-patched clothes were fully in keeping with their supposed ignoble profession, however.

‘You’ve not got much on you,’ noted the bandit chief, placing himself in front of Tom. He carried a short sabre on his belt that lent him a piratical air.

Tom glanced at the prisoners on either side of him; a well-dressed traveller on his left, and one of the coach’s surviving drivers to his right. They cowered, not meeting their captors’ eyes, and were about as much use to Tom as trying to warm his hands on ice-cubes. As useless in a fight as the two women, a pair of sisters, from a southern city whose name he had already forgotten. Staying silent to avoid attracting attention; as the only two women on the coach, they had already failed in that task.

‘I’m a simple journeyman from the Guild of Librarians, travelling to my new order,’ said Tom. He tried to keep them talking. Keep them conversing long enough, and they might start to see him as a human being, rather than just another mark that needed robbing and killing. Sadly, Tom reckoned that basic tradecraft might not apply here. These men, he suspected, would share a feast with you, laugh at all your jokes, and then happily slit your throat at supper’s end, before lifting your wallet. ‘What wealth the guild has sits on its shelves. Archives,’ Tom added, ‘that are very well protected inside our guild holds.’

‘Anyone would think there were thieves abroad,’ laughed the chief. He waved a leather tube, the wax seal at the end broken. Tom groaned aloud. That had been well concealed inside his luggage tied to the coach roof. Not well hidden enough, it seemed, from the expert fingers of these dangerous, desperate men. Tapping the tube against his palm, the bandit removed a thick paper scroll and turned it around to reveal … a list of numbers scratched by hand in black ink. ‘And what the hell is this, then?’

‘A cipher.’

‘I know it’s a bloody cipher. What’s it say?’

‘I don’t carry the means to decrypt it,’ said Tom. ‘In all likelihood, it’s just a message of greeting from the Master of the Codex at my last library to my new master. The old girl was never happy with my work. She’s probably telling Master Lettore to watch me like a hawk in case I slack off.’

The bandit leader snorted. ‘That’s not going to be a problem for your guild boss anymore, simple librarian, trust me. If you know anything about what’s really written on this, I could make things go a lot easier for you.’

‘It’s encrypted,’ said Tom. ‘And you don’t send the key with the man. It’s not how the guild does things.’

‘Pity,’ said the bandit. Tom didn’t get the feeling he meant it was going to be a pity for the raiders. He swivelled toward the prisoner kneeling next to Tom, a slick dark-haired passenger with a jutting chin and a tanned neck enclosed by a starched white collar and dark red tie. ‘What about you, fancy pants? Where’re you travelling?’

‘Northhaven prefecture,’ said the passenger. ‘I’m a salesman for the Turnage Machinery Manufacturory, selling horseless ploughs and subsoilers to the landowners up that way.’

There was a ripple of discontent among the bandits at this news. ‘Ah,’ said their chief. ‘You’ll have to forgive my boys. Many of them were labourers on farms in the eastern plains … until their landlords cleared them out and stole their fields when they couldn’t make rent. What a hoot, eh? All those machines that can work land using just a tenth of the labour; such generous harvests they produce, and your family still dies of hunger when you can’t find work. I think that’s what they call irony, isn’t it?’ He kicked Tom in the ribs; painful, but meant as a gentle nudge. ‘What do you say, Mister Guild of Bloody Books? That’s irony, isn’t it?’

Tom nodded. ‘That’s one word for it.’

‘Yeah,’ said the chief, tugging a thumb behind his leather bandoleer. ‘I thought it was.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ asked Thomas Purdell. ‘Attacking a coach on the road? If we had money, we’d be travelling with a Guild of Rails train. If we had real money, we’d be flying.’

‘If I had wings, I’d attack merchant carriers in the sky. If I had a hundred more men and powder to blow the rails, I’d bushwhack a train and damn their high-and-mighty guild. As it is, you grass-suckers are my marks today. You see, there’s always someone worse off than yourself,’ said the bandit chief, pulling out his sabre. Its steel almost glowed in the white of the snowstorm. ‘The trick is to make sure that those worse off stay that way, while stuffing your own pockets. Just ask those landowners out east. Besides, it’s not just money that travels by road. Sometimes secrets do, too.’ He nodded at his men. There was a scream from the two sisters as the bandits dragged them closer to the burning coach, ripping the women’s dresses as they hauled them away. It looked like the marauders intended to stay warm by the coach’s wreck, at any rate. Tom cursed the old harpy of a guild mistress who had forbidden him to travel with a pistol. Librarians are not soldiers, she had archly instructed him. Knowledge is our weapon. Maybe he could try braining the bandit chief with the single book he carried as a gift to the new library. The Philosophies of Holtus. God knows, Tom had found it hard enough to penetrate the text … maybe its weight would concuss this fiend long enough to escape through the snow.

The travelling salesman tried to get to his feet, mumbling a protest about his ill-treatment after handing over his coins, but the bandit chief merely plunged his sabre into the multi-coloured threads of the man’s tweed jacket, adding a spreading stain of crimson to the rich fibres. Tom stared down at the salesman’s corpse as it collapsed to the hard, icy ground. Neatly and efficiently done.

The bandit chief winked at Tom, as though they were just exchanging pleasantries at a local tavern. ‘That’s man’s work, sticking someone to put ’em in the ground. Haven’t designed any dishonest machine to do that yet. Why waste a bullet, eh?’

Tom heard the words whisper out of the white, like jagged ice pushing in on the snowstorm. ‘It’s not a waste.’ The wind rose like a detonation. Just as Thomas Purdell thought he might have imagined the words, the sabre clattered to the ground, falling from the bandit chief’s fingers; the marauder staring in shock as a pool of bubbling blood spread across his chest, a mirror image of the wound he had just inflicted on his hapless prisoner. A snow-swallowed silhouette moved at the margins of the blizzard, barely visible, and Tom was deafened by the rippling explosions of two pistols being fired simultaneously, little arrows of flame marking each shot. A grey ghoul emerged from the white-out, cloaked in wolf fur, twin long-barrelled pistols smoking, hot gunmetal leaving a trail of vapour drifting behind as though the weapons had sucked up the souls of the departed only to expel them through its barrels. But this wasn’t a ghoul. It was a man concealed by a fur cape, only his face really visible. Why was there no return fire? Tom cast his eyes back. Four bandits lay scattered across the snow, crimson blemishes spreading where the men had fallen, three more had tumbled into the blazing shell of the coach, the two sisters shivering in the gusting wind, speechless, too shocked even to scream at the sight of the raiders charcoaling in the flames. Thomas Purdell hadn’t registered enough shots to match the number of fatalities. But there must have been, unless the man cloaked in wolf fur had found a way to dispatch multiple victims with a single bullet. It had all occurred impossibly fast … or maybe it was just impossible.

‘There’s a fork down the road which you passed a little while before the raiders hit you,’ said the figure. He had the kind of voice a ghoul should possess. Deep, sonorous, commanding. He crossed to the trees where the coach’s surviving horses had been tied up by the bandits, released them and led them back to the driver. ‘Follow it for ten minutes … you’ll arrive at a farm run by a family called the Proillas. They’re good people. They’ll take you in until Northhaven Township sends a patrol out to escort you.’

The figure walked back into the white-out and returned, leaning forward on a horse as if he was communing with the storm. Concentrating, in the event more raiders stalked the night. Tom watched the man pass before turning to their surviving driver. ‘Is he a scout for the army?’

‘That’s the pastor of Northhaven,’ said the driver.

‘Pastor? You mean a churchman? What kind of churchman is that?’

‘The kind that’s been through hell, I reckon,’ said the driver. ‘A while back the town was hit by slavers. They killed half the folks and stole most of the rest young enough to be worth stealing, murdered the pastor’s wife and kidnapped his son. It was the pastor that went after the missing people. Went out as one man. Came back as another.’

That was a familiar tale. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Jacob Carnehan.’

‘He’s the man I was sent to find,’ said Tom.

He grabbed one of the horse’s reins from the driver’s hand, mounted it and rode into the snow after the pastor, catching up with the churchman shortly after. Despite the fierce weather, he didn’t seem to be in any hurry; just advancing steadily through the storm as though it belonged to him. ‘My name’s Tom Purdell and I have a message for you. It needs to be taken to the librarian’s hold in Northhaven to be decrypted.’

‘You knew the message was for me? You should have told the bandit leader. He might have spared your life.’

‘He wouldn’t have,’ said Tom, swaying uncertainly on his borrowed horse. It was still skittish; after being halted, cut from the train, rustled and made a witness to two massacres in a single evening, Tom could hardly blame it. In fact, he knew how it felt. He took a closer look at the man he had been sent to find. As straight, tall and sharp as a razor; a big man in his late middle age with hard, knowing eyes fit to unpeel a man’s soul. His movements were careful and close, spare and measured. But he could explode into violence at speeds that should be impossible for anything mortal. Tom had already seen that. Can a devil be a churchman … can a stealer? Things here weren’t exactly what they seemed.

‘No,’ said the pastor. A voice that was used to being obeyed, the word dragged over gravel. ‘He wouldn’t have. You’re not stupid, boy. I’ll give you that.’

‘Foxy enough to know those raiders had been told to raid the coach and search it for messages,’ said Tom.

‘It’s not foxes that are needed out here,’ said the pastor. ‘It’s wolves. Wolves to eat wolves.’

‘I’m just a simple librarian.’

‘I believe that as much as the bandit leader did back there,’ said Jacob Carnehan.

‘You’re a distrusting man,’ said Tom.

‘I’m alive,’ said Jacob. ‘And fixing to stay that way.’ He spat onto the ground; it froze on the way. ‘You won’t be able to reach the library until tomorrow morning, not without freezing to death. You had better come into Northhaven with me. You can stay at the rectory.’

‘My credit’s good for a hotel in town,’ said Tom.

‘And I might wake up tomorrow to find you in a ransacked hotel room with your throat slit and your message vanished,’ said Jacob. ‘The kind of news that can’t be passed down open radio relays for fear over who might intercept it, that kind has a way of attracting trouble.’

‘I’ll be safe in your rectory?’

Jacob’s eye’s narrowed to dark slits. ‘The protection of the good lord, guildsman, do you doubt it?’

Tom’s eyes drifted down to the twin pistols on his belt. And his tools. ‘I’ll stay with you, don’t worry. Is it true, Father Carnehan? You were one of the people who brought back the true king.’

‘True king?’ said Jacob. The pastor grunted. ‘Seems there are two men who claim that title these days, which one of them did you mean … Marcus or Owen?’

Thomas Purdell knew when he was being teased, or perhaps tested. ‘Prince Owen. His uncle has to renounce his claim to the throne.’

‘I don’t suppose the people’s assembly is any closer to deciding the matter of who should wear the crown?’ said Jacob.

‘They’re in debate,’ said Tom.

‘That’s what assemblymen do best,’ sighed the pastor.

‘The assembly is split down the middle,’ said Tom. ‘People are talking about a war, a civil war, now. Both sides are at odds.’

‘Won’t be anything civil about it, if war comes,’ said the pastor. ‘Family against family, house against house. There’s no feud quite so vicious as a good clan feud.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Tom. ‘Were you one of the people who found Prince Owen at the end of the world and brought him back?’ Far-called, that’s what people called it. When you went travelling across a world without end, not knowing if you would ever return alive. Or ever want to.

‘I left my home to do two things, Mister Purdell. The first was rescuing my son from a slow death in a foreign hell-hole,’ said the pastor, ‘and that I did. A lot of enslaved Weylanders escaped during the same slave revolt.’

‘Some say the prince is mad …’

‘Some do? They wouldn’t happen to be newspapers controlled by the uncle who took the throne when the young princes conveniently disappeared, would they? Held as a slave for over a decade, watching his brothers worked to death in a mine under the whip? Wouldn’t you be mad about that? I’d say Prince Owen’s mildly irked right now. When he gets mad, then the country might really be in trouble.’

There was a fury in Jacob Carnehan’s words, every bit as cold as the blizzard swirling around them. ‘You said you went out to do two things, Father. I know you found and freed your son. What was the second thing?’

‘Oh, the second’s a-coming,’ said Jacob. ‘And I’ll let you into a little secret, guildsman, by way of thanks for the encrypted message you’re carrying. I won’t have to travel far for it. This time, it’s coming straight to me.’

Tom’s eyes drifted down to the holstered pistols, steel barrels still warm and cutting a fine mist in the cold. And he thought of the eight dead bandits lying back on the road around a burning coach. Gunned down so fast and quick. Like quicksilver. Tom had never seen anything like that before, never even read of anything like it. And reading was, in theory, meant to be his trade. How many killers’ corpses would you trade for a murdered wife before you counted yourself satisfied? Tom reckoned it would depend on the man. He stared at the shadowy silhouette sharing the road and being knifed at by biting snow, and he saw the pastor as he truly was for the first time. A shadow on the world, making shadows. Safe in this man’s rectory? Like hell. Thomas Purdell suddenly realized he was caught at the heart of the storm.



When Jacob Carnehan woke up and went downstairs, he discovered his visitor sitting at the breakfast table with his son, Carter.

‘Father Carnehan,’ said Tom. ‘I didn’t realize your son was a fellow guildsman.’

Jacob grunted, sitting down at the table. Carter Carnehan was about as much a member of the Guild of Librarians these days as Jacob was a churchman. But they all needed some illusions to cling to, to survive. ‘My boy will travel out with you to the librarian’s hold in the hills. Let’s see if that message of yours was worth an ambush and five dead souls.’

‘You shot more than that,’ said Tom.

‘I was counting the passengers and coach crew, not the wolves.’

‘More raiders from the east?’ asked Carter.

‘On the face of it,’ said Jacob. ‘But they were taking a suspicious interest in guild ciphers considering they had already stolen all the silver coins going. Take a pistol with you when you travel to the hold and keep a wary eye open for strangers.’

‘I think I might still qualify as a stranger,’ said Tom.

‘Yes, but I can still smell the scent of ink heavy on you, Mister Purdell, not blood. Carter, when you have that message decrypted, commit it to memory. Don’t risk travelling back to Northhaven with it on paper.’

Jacob watched the two young men make ready to leave. They would travel up to Northhaven’s old city where the Guild of Radiomen’s first message cart of the day would be preparing to set out to the librarian’s hold, a virtual fortress buried in the slopes of a valley an hour’s travel from the town. The two of them would hitch a lift to work. The fact that the librarians were sending physical couriers rather than trusting the radiomen to transmit messages for them spoke volumes for the splits appearing in the nation. Rifts even among the long guilds, which, stretched across the world of Pellas, were meant to remain neutral in such conflicts. A hard thing to manage when many of the guildsmen were locals with divided loyalties. The radiomen backed King Marcus, while the librarians – with their holds packed full of law-books – judged Prince Owen to have the better claim on the throne.

Jacob spoke to Carter before his son stepped out of the rectory. ‘You don’t look particularly happy this morning. Our unexpected guest worrying you?’

‘It’s not that,’ said Carter. ‘I went to visit Willow yesterday evening at the park, but the gatehouse guards wouldn’t let me in. Said she was too busy at some social function to see me.’

‘Too busy to meet you? That’s horse manure.’

‘Of course it is. Old Benner Landor’s made it clear he doesn’t want me seeing his daughter anymore. That refusal was on his orders.’

‘You and Willow survived a death sentence in the imperium’s sky mines,’ said Jacob. ‘I reckon you can endure her father’s disapproval.’

‘But we shouldn’t have to. After all we’ve been through, enduring hell at the end of the world, the two of us are just expected to slot back into Northhaven, same as it ever was? Rich man, poor man. Bowing down to the great and powerful landowner, doffing my cap and showing my respect. Benner Landor wouldn’t have lasted a week inside the sky mines if he’d been taken by the slavers. It might be the House of Landor’s money paying for the town to be rebuilt after the raid, but that doesn’t make him my master.’

‘Willow’s got it worse than you,’ said Jacob. ‘Living in the great house at Hawkland Park with all the changes up there. And you know Benner Landor hasn’t forgiven any of us for leaving his son behind in the imperium.’

‘Duncan chose to stay in the empire. He was a free man while the rest of us were dying as slaves in the sky mine.’

Jacob shrugged. ‘I don’t think Benner will ever believe it.’ The pastor was the only one in Weyland who knew that he’d put a bullet in Duncan Landor’s heart before they’d escaped the empire’s clutches. The boy hadn’t left Jacob with much choice in the matter and the pastor hadn’t lost much sleep over it. A boy who had turned against his own people … joined the enemy. Become an imperial citizen while his friends and family were dying from hunger and overwork under the whip. No, Jacob Carnehan wasn’t going to lose any sleep over a single dead turncoat, even if the boy had been the heir to a great northern house.

‘Doesn’t want to believe it, you mean,’ said Carter. ‘The son’s not that different from the father, that’s the truth of it.’

Jacob worried that the same might be true of him and Carter. Jacob lifted a gun belt down from the wooden wall – a simple rotating chamber pistol slid inside the holster – and passed it to his son. ‘You be careful on the road. Some of those marauders haunting the wilds aren’t real bandits. They’re the king’s agents, out hunting for that young imperial noble we took hostage.’

His son examined the pistol and belt. ‘I still prefer my knives.’

‘Hard to threaten a bandit with a blade,’ said Jacob. ‘You might have to kill the raider just to prove you can throw faster than he can draw.’

‘Fair point,’ said Carter, belting the gun around his waist. ‘They won’t find that little Vandian girl, you know.’

‘Not unless they tie you to a tree and light a fire under your feet, to loosen your tongue about where Lady Cassandra’s stashed,’ said Jacob.

‘They won’t be reckless enough to do that,’ said Carter. ‘King Marcus doesn’t know we’re not bluffing about hanging our hostage if he attacks us.’

Jacob didn’t correct his son. There wasn’t any artifice in the threat he’d sent south. As far as the pastor was concerned, if there was even a hint of a revenge attack against Northhaven and the escaped slaves, Weyland’s treacherous King Marcus would have to explain to his imperial allies why the Vandian emperor’s kidnapped grandchild was occupying a grave. Jacob would tie a noose around the young noblewoman’s neck and kick the chair away himself. Let the emperor suffer like he’d suffered. Vandia slave traders had murdered Jacob’s wife, taken his son and destroyed his life. The empire’s suffering for their crimes had only just begun.

‘Things will get better soon,’ said Carter. ‘Prince Owen will replace King Marcus and the country will settle down again.’

‘The prince is a good man,’ said Jacob. ‘But that’s my worry. Asking the assembly to force King Marcus to abdicate. Following the due process of the law, always doing the right thing.’

‘The law is on the prince’s side,’ said Carter.

‘The law’s been bought,’ said Jacob. ‘Bought and paid for by imperial gold secretly shipped to King Marcus. That rodent on our throne’s little better than a puppet ruler for the empire.’

‘We’re a long way from the empire,’ said Carter. ‘When it comes to raiding for slaves, the Vandians prefer their pickings easy and compliant. If King Marcus refuses to abdicate, the prince can reveal how Marcus arranged for his own brother and family to be assassinated so he could steal the throne. And if that doesn’t have the king hanging from a lamppost in the capital by the end of the day, Owen can explain how Marcus has been stuffing his treasury with imperial gold in return for selling his own citizens as slaves.’

‘Well,’ said Jacob. ‘We’ll see how much the truth and the right thing is worth soon enough.’

Yes, they would. Trouble was, a plausible lie could travel a million miles around the world before the truth got its boots on. Prince Owen should have listened to Jacob when they’d first returned to Weyland. Jacob’s method of abdication would involve a quick bullet in Arcadia City’s royal, long before King Marcus realized that the citizens he’d secretly sold off to the empire had rebelled and escaped home. Lord, how he’d love to be the one to do that. Once King Marcus became ex-King Marcus, Jacob would still be aching to try. Not many would miss the damn snake. And their endless world was certainly large enough to swallow a deposed king’s bones.

Carter and the guild courier had been gone a couple of minutes when a guest arrived in the form of Thaddeus Castle, the master mason supervising the building of the town’s first cathedral. Tanned from long exposure to the sun and sporting muscles built by hauling stone, Thaddeus looked like he’d been assembled from bricks himself; as though he could fill in for one of his crane-and-pulley arrangements. A human building machine if there ever was one. Damned if he wasn’t better company than most of the churchmen who’d be filling the new cathedral once it was finished. Jacob had loved the Northhaven of old, when it had been a quiet backwater and his pews the only seats in town. No politics, no interference from the church council; a simple, tranquil life. When Thaddeus departed for his next job, Jacob would miss the master mason for more than the good company the man had provided – it would mark the start of a new stage of existence for the pastor with a finality that he resented.

‘You haven’t forgotten you’re meant to meet the bishop this morning?’ said Thaddeus.

‘If I had, he surely wouldn’t let me.’ Jacob gathered his coat and closed the front door of the rectory. The day had hardly started and already he was deafened by the thump of hammers on wood, like a morning chorus of woodpeckers. When Jacob had left to track down his kidnapped son, large swathes of the new town had been nothing but burning ruins. Only the old town, sitting up high behind its fortifications on the hill, had escaped more or less unscathed. Now, the town of Northhaven was being rebuilt on the scale of a city. Bigger, wider, taller, better. Extra streets. Fresh faces. It didn’t seem much like the home he had lost along with his wife. What would Mary have thought if she could have seen all the new streets and shops and mills where once there had been meadows and woodland? Too much noise and too much buzzing without consequence, whispered his wife’s ghost. Jacob couldn’t fault Benner Landor on the landowner’s ambitions. The man had been given a clean slate to impose his vision across, and he’d taken to the task with a relish and all of his house’s resources. Even the great stone cathedral that Thaddeus and his workers were putting the finishing touches to had been paid for by Landor money. The same could be said of Northhaven’s new bishop – Virgil Kirkup – Jacob reckoned, even if the bishop had nominally been appointed in the capital by the Synod Council.

‘You won’t be his only visitor this morning,’ said Thaddeus. ‘Bishop Kirkup has himself a house guest too grand to check in at the big hotel up on the hill.’

‘Do tell,’ said Jacob.

‘Arrived last night at the airfield,’ said Thaddeus.

Jacob groaned. ‘I liked it better when the country didn’t have a shiny new-minted skyguard, when anyone who wanted to come to Northhaven had to spend months on a train to get here.’

‘Seems that progress is flying in whether you like it or not,’ said Thaddeus.

Jacob didn’t. Especially not when he suspected that the blueprints for the flying machines and the money and resources to build them had been supplied by the imperium; all part of King Marcus’s sly dealings with Vandia. ‘Somebody important, then, I’ll wager?’

‘Won’t find me accepting that bet. Nobody more important in this part of the world. It’s the head of the prefecture, Hugh Colbert.’

Now Jacob really had cause to be aggravated. Not that he had ever met the politician. But unlike the lower house of the assembly, voted for by its citizens, the nation’s upper house was appointed by writ of royal council, which in practice meant prefects swanning around acting as the king’s personal marionettes. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, Jacob suspected … and this particular apple was writhing black to its core with worms. ‘You heard what he’s come north for?’

‘Your assemblyman’s been protesting about the number of vagrants and hobos drifting in from the east to play highwaymen in the prefecture. Prefect Colbert’s come up to smooth the ruffled feathers of the great and the good in Northhaven.’

And that meant the House of Landor, since the assemblyman they had voted for was as much in Benner Landor’s pocket as everyone else around here. What are you really here for, king’s man? Maybe the kidnapped granddaughter of a very distant, very powerful emperor? ‘Give the poor enough work to feed their families and the royal highways would empty of brigands quick enough.’

‘Careful what you wish for, Father Carnehan,’ said Thaddeus. ‘I heard tell that you were out practising your own version of toll-keeping on the road last night.’

‘Just returning home from a farm. The church’s work has a greater call on my time than warming my feet around a fire,’ said Jacob.

‘And there’ll be a few souls who won’t be returning to the unruly bands roaming the wilds,’ said Thaddeus. ‘At least, that’s the story from a coach driver who rolled into town early this morning with twenty horsemen from the royal cavalry.’

‘Those bandits were violating the laws of the nation as well as the lord,’ said Jacob.

‘I’m sure your lead cure was very effective. You know, people in town ar