In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Carter has been kidnapped. Enslaved. But he's determined to fight to the end. Jacob is a pacifist. His family destroyed. He's about to choose the path of violence to reclaim his son. Their world has changed for ever. Between them, they're going to avenge it. Jacob Carnehan has settled down. He's living a comfortable, quiet life, obeying the law and minding his own business while raising his son Carter ... on those occasions when he isn't having to bail him out of one scrape or another. His days of adventure are - thankfully - long behind him. Carter Carnehan is going out of his mind with boredom. He's bored by his humdrum life, frustrated that his father won't live a little, and longs for the bright lights and excitement of anywhere-but-here. He's longing for an opportunity to escape, and test himself against whatever the world has to offer. Carter is going to get his opportunity. He's caught up in a village fight, kidnapped by slavers and, before he knows it, is swept to another land. A lowly slave, surrounded by technology he doesn't understand, his wish has come true: it's him vs. the world. He can try to escape, he can try to lead his fellow slaves, or he can accept the inevitable and try to make the most of the short, brutal existence remaining to him. ... unless Jacob gets to him first and, no matter the odds, he intends to. No one kidnaps his son and gets away with it - and if it come to it, he'll force Kings to help him on his way, he'll fight, steal, blackmail and betray his friends in the name of bringing Carter home. Wars will be started. Empires will fall. And the Carnehan family will be reunited, one way or another ...

Release date: May 15, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 575

Sample

ONE

THE ABACUS BOX

Northhaven Township.The Kingdom of Weyland

Jacob Carnehan could tell there was going to be a whole mess of trouble. A hush fell across the crowded street, stillness as sharp as a razor. That was when the constable appeared sprinting around the corner, his silver badge clipped to a belt jangling with a pistol on one side and a long-knife balancing the gun. This trouble didn’t involve Jacob, but from the look of urgency on Constable Wiggins’ face, Jacob was going to be involved in it anyhow. Wiggins was old for the job, late sixties and running around after street thievery and sheep rustling at his age. No wonder he was sweating; rivulets of the stuff running down the skin of his shiny white skull, white tufts soaked at the side.

‘Jacob,’ the constable puffed, drawing to a stop and placing his hands on his knees as he recovered.

‘Constable Wiggins. You planning on taking retirement any time before the call of God puts you in a box before the congregation?’

‘What would I be doing then?’ Wiggins coughed, clearing his throat and spitting across the street. ‘If you are what you do, when you don’t, you ain’t. I finish with my job, I’ll be in that box by the end of the week anyway. We’ve got some trouble in old lady Kalem’s inn, the Green Dragon.’

Jacob sighed. End of the harvest season, naturally there was going to be trouble. Wheat and corn being shipped out along the train line, moved down the river to the port. Farm workers with money, dockers with money, sailors with money, just about everyone looking to spend that coin too hasty or steal someone else’s. Northhaven reaped a whole crop of aggravation this month, and if people were sitting in the pews of Jacob’s church with just a few black eyes by the end of the week, not lying at home with bandages covering stab wounds or worse, then he would consider himself a lucky man. ‘Who is it this time?’

‘Sailors up from the coast,’ said Wiggins. ‘From a schooner called the Venture. They were playing cards against a gask. He won of course. Sailors claim he’s cheating, using one of their people’s abacus machines to hoodwink them.’

Jacob had to stop himself from laughing. Gasks didn’t have much use for gods or preachers, given how they worshipped probability. It was a brave man who played cards against one of their people. ‘I don’t suppose they’ve heard how dangerous a gask can be?’

‘Reckon they’ve heard how almighty peaceful they are,’ said Wiggins.

Up to a point. And when push came to shove, that point could be damn efficient.

‘I’ve left that green-behind-the-ears probationer, Jay, holding the line,’ said Wiggins, raising a hand placatingly to encompass the simple black churchman’s tunic Jacob was wearing. ‘You’ve got a way of calming men down, Jacob, that’s rare to behold. If it’s not you settling the trouble, then it’ll be the high sheriff, and then there’ll be caskets at the front of your church for sure.’

That was true. The high sheriff was up for re-election soon. Coming down hard on rowdy out-of-towners was just the kind of crowd-pleasing that would be going on if the shallow, politically-minded dolt arrived in Northhaven’s new town district.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Jacob. ‘Where’s the sailors’ skipper?’

‘Crew’s captain stayed downriver,’ said Wiggins. ‘I’ve already been to the radiomen’s hold and sent word to the harbourmaster at Redwater to have him take a boat up here. His sail-tuggers have been creating problems in town all week as it is, but this is the first time they’ve actually pulled a knife on anyone.’

‘Do they speak any language I can understand, Mister Wiggins?’

‘They sure curse in trade-tongue well enough for a man to understand.’

Jacob walked fast, his long legs pacing as the short constable struggled to keep up. I wonder if Wiggins knows the other constables call him Stumpy behind his back? ‘Sometimes I don’t know who it is I’m working for here. The church or the high sheriff?’

‘Hell, I could just shoot them,’ said Wiggins. ‘But then I’d be at the front of your church having to listen to you sermonise about the natural harmony of the universe and how it don’t include shortening another’s natural span.’

Jacob snorted. ‘You haven’t drawn that gun in years. You shoot, you’ll lose your fingers when the barrel blows.’

Wiggins patted a retractable baton belted next to his long-knife. ‘When I give my sermons with this, the cuss receiving the Word of Wiggins stays alive long enough to learn better. Weren’t we all young once?’

The constable’s philosophising reminded Jacob that this wasn’t the only predicament he was facing this morning. If only rowdy sailors were the start and end of my troubles. ‘Never a truer word spoken, friend.’

They arrived where they needed to be. The Green Dragon inn was part of Northhaven’s outer ring, a sprawl of buildings spilling beyond the high battlements that protected the old town. It was a lot easier to apply for a licence from the city’s aldermen to sell liquor this far out. But this far out also meant visitors never reached constables on the gates into the town’s centre, where the ordinances to hand over weapons were enforced. An angry buzz resonated from behind the tavern’s open doors. Jacob noted the flow of foot traffic moving away from the three-storey tavern. Those were the sensible ones. Fleeing the trouble. So, how come I’m the only one heading towards it? Jacob stepped up to the entrance; brownstone bricks, half-covered by climbing ivy, sunlight on windowpanes obscuring the drama unfolding within. Jay stood inside the tavern, a contemporary of Jacob’s son. His blue constable’s uniform seemed a couple of sizes too large for his frame – someone at the station with a sense of humour pranking the cadet officer. His pistol appeared equally out of place. The Landsman five-shot as jarring as finding a timberman’s saw in the fingers of an infant – equally as dangerous to the boy wielding it as the patrons of the inn he was threatening.

The quarrelsome sailors had overturned the drinking hall’s tables. One of their number held the gask from behind, a second man in front had a dagger pushed up against the twisted man’s leathery brown neck. The gask looked young to Jacob. You could tell from the ridge of quills running along the side of his arms. Orange, not black, as a mature adult male’s would be. His fingers were coiled around a little silver box; which, apart from its illuminated dials, might have been a tinder-lighter. Jacob noted the ring of patrons, farm labourers mostly, standing nervously apart from the rowdy seamen. Behind the long serving counter, old lady Kalem’s staff crouched out of aim of the cadet constable. Old lady Kalem was as fearless in the face of the destruction of her drinking house as she was about anything else. The tavern’s owner hurled abuse at the sailors from behind the heft of her heavy scattergun, her weapon seesawing on the counter with the best part of a small cannon’s menace.

Jacob and Wiggins walked forward, the constable pushing down the cadet’s pistol while the usual patrons moved aside for Jacob. There was a stillness and calm about the pastor… the quiet before a stormfront. Some people called it a church aura, though not all the church’s pastors possessed it. You didn’t have to have met Jacob Carnehan before to feel it. There were many in the room that had never met the churchman before, but they fell aside with the same hesitant wariness. This pastor in his black jacket and his serious face and penetrating green eyes. No hat to cover his curly mop of dark hair. It was as though he carried an invisible lance before him, a space clearing, all eyes fixed upon him.

Jacob stopped just short of the puddle of spilled beer. He spoke to the mob of sailors, maybe twenty of them, his voice deep and res­onant. ‘You’ve been out at sea a long time, I know. The Lancean Ocean, more than half a year’s sailing, with only the occasional island to steady your feet in between. Curled up so tight. A watch spring, ready to snap when it tries to unwind.’

‘This one cheated us!’ cried the sailor holding a knife against the gask’s neck, his indignant tone wavering in the face of the pastor’s still, quiet demeanour.

‘I assure you, I did not,’ said the gask, with the slight watery accent of all his people, his vocal cords jouncing against each other.

‘I know,’ said Jacob.

‘He was counting cards on that abacus machine of his,’ spat the knifeman.

Jacob shrugged. ‘Of course he was. But not to rig your game. When a gask gambles, he has to make sure he doesn’t offend against the laws of probability. If your friend here were winning too heavy, he’d have needed to fold his hand. Too much luck for him in the game would bring bad luck to the rest of his people out in the forests, right?’

‘You are learned,’ said the young gask. ‘It is not wise to offend the harmony of averages.’

‘And I appreciate your forbearance,’ said Jacob, ‘with these gentlemen of the ocean.’

‘I’m the one with a blade pushed up against this dirty card-sharping leather-skin’s neck,’ said the sailor. ‘Maybe you should be appreciating me more, here, in this arrangement?’

Seems like these fellows fresh off the boat don’t know how hard adult gasks work to teach their young kin to master their temper. Or why. Jacob lifted up one of the cards spilled across the floorboards during the fracas. He nodded at the gask before tossing the card into the air. The muscles along the gask’s brown arm swelled taut and an orange spine flicked out from the quills along the twisted man’s forearm, impaling the card quivering against a wall.

‘That’s the reason gasks don’t boil over,’ Jacob told the astonished sailors, the man holding the gask from behind releasing his prisoner. The idiot had just realised how easily he could have been turned into a human pincushion. Jacob’s words and the gask’s demonstration both served their purpose. ‘There’s poison on a gask spine that’ll have you dead on the floor in seconds.’

All fight fled from the sailors. The mob believed they had been in control, but in reality, they had been balancing on a precipice, dulled by drink and anger and too blind to see the fall in front of them.

‘Set those tables back up,’ ordered Wiggins. ‘You lads can pay for any breakages before you leave.’ He patted Jacob on the arm as the pastor headed towards the bar. ‘They sure are as dumb as dirt.’

‘They’ve never seen a gask before,’ said Jacob.

‘You ply foreign parts, you learn caution,’ said Wiggins. ‘Or if it ain’t a gask to teach you better, it’ll be someone else.’

‘Like you said, they’re young and ignorant.’

‘Never seen a man talk ’em down like you can,’ said Wiggins. Behind him, Cadet Constable Jay glowered at the sailors. Probably disappointed that he hadn’t got to fire off a warning shot or bust some heads with his lead-weighted baton. ‘Not all pastors got the way like you have. Maybe that wandering monk that comes begging through here every few years with his rice bowl stretched out. He can talk up a storm, or whistle a tornado out of existence like you can. But have you ever heard the pastor out at Redwater sermonise? Dry as tobacco in a curing chamber.’

‘Better words than sharp steel,’ said Jacob. ‘Without words, people become wolves. Without words we forget ourselves.’

‘Them words in the Bible?’

‘All words are. All learning.’

Wiggins drew out a long noise at the back of his throat, something close to doubt. ‘You know, I warned you that your boy would buck. Apprenticing him to the Librarians’ Guild, sticking him in that windowless shelter below the hills. A boy like Carter, that’s the same as burying him. I could’ve got him onto the high sheriff’s rolls. If I can turn that young blockhead Jay into police, I surely could have done it for Carter Carnehan.’

‘My son needs to reach for words more,’ said Jacob. He tapped the grip of the constable’s holstered pistol. ‘I won’t have him treating that as a tool of work. Violence solves nothing.’

‘If you’d given the boy a little more of the back of your hand when he was younger, maybe…’ muttered Wiggins.

Jacob said nothing. It was too bad. If my son had his way, he’d sign on with one of the captains in port as quick as a flash. But what kind of life would that be for Carter? No roots in his life, years sailing the ocean, running short of drinking water and chewing on biscuits with more weevils than wheat. Storms flashing out of the immense waters, capable of ripping masts off a vessel and sweeping her crew into the depths. In exchange for what? Seeing strange lands? However far you travelled, wherever you landed, you always ran into yourself. Travel only ever offered the illusion of escape. A trick. A distraction. Human nature was the same everywhere.

Old lady Kalem had slipped her artillery piece back under the counter. The tavern’s owner manoeuvred her large bulk opposite Jacob and Wiggins. ‘Whisky, my dears?’

‘A little early in the day for me,’ said Jacob. ‘A rice wine instead, perhaps.’

‘I swear you must be part-Rodalian,’ laughed the Green Dragon’s proprietor, bringing out a bulbous pottery decanter alongside a bottle of the local firewater. She dropped them both on the counter.

Deputy Wiggins rubbed his hands together approvingly. ‘Sweet and warm.’

‘Just like my soul,’ Jacob smiled.

The young gask appeared at the pastor’s side, requesting a lemon juice. Alcohol was a pure poison to gasks. Poison for most common pattern people too, but then Jacob had never met a man half as clever as the stupidest gask. The gask brushed the sawdust off his simple white cotton toga before he leaned across the counter to drink.

‘You’re a little early in town, friend?’ said Wiggins. ‘The monthly caravan from the forests isn’t due in for another couple of weeks. You arrived early for the market tomorrow?’

‘I am called Kerge among my people and I’ve come here from Quehanna in search of my mean,’ said the gask. ‘I thank you for your assistance.’

‘Well, hell, you found a whole pack of mean among those sailors on shore leave.’

‘He’s talking about a spiritual journey,’ Jacob corrected the constable. ‘His people’s wandering as they pass from child to adult. Kerge is seeking to weigh himself against fate, against probability.’

‘Well, your luck nearly ran out on you here,’ said Wiggins, downing his tumbler. ‘Did some of that wandering myself when I was a pup. King’s Cavalry, posted in the east; bandits and marauders like weeds out there back in the day.’

Kerge bowed towards Jacob. ‘You are my balance. Fate led you to my path when my mean fell short.’ He showed them his little silver box, pointing to a small screen flickering with moving numbers. For the gask it was his tarot deck.

The equations didn’t mean a whole lot to Jacob. ‘Life has a way of sending you what you need, Kerge, not what you want. You can call that fate if you like.’

‘You are a priest in the church? I’ve heard there is some similarity of philosophy between the fates of the gask and the harmony of your god. May I have your name, manling?’

‘Father Carnehan,’ said Jacob. ‘The ugly fellow here is Constable Wiggins, and I’ll give you some more advice. In a town like Northhaven, you’re not testing your luck, you’re pushing it. You need to journey on up through the old town’s gates. Climb the hill. There are a few more constables and a lot less weapons behind the old city’s walls.’

Kerge sipped at the lemon juice, his bear-like eyes blinking in appre­ciation at the tartness of the liquid. ‘You are kind to a traveller. And your advice should shorten my journey.’ He slipped his abacus machine into a simple leather satchel hanging across his shoulder.

Wiggins shook his head as the young gask left the tavern. ‘Forest men blow into town as bare-assed as a monk with a begging bowl. Beats me how those leathernecks ever got so clever with machines, or find the money to make them. Reckon they’ve got an alchemist’s mill out in the glades of Quehanna turning wood into gold?’

Jacob finished his rice wine. ‘No police. No politics. No army. No brawling. No crime. No riots. No drinking or lighting up weed. The gasks put their passions into thinking and arts and invention, Mister Wiggins.’

‘Life as quiet as all that, you won’t live to reach two hundred years old, but it’ll sure feel like it.’

‘I believe that’s called serenity.’

Wiggins looked at the sailors clearing up the smashed-up tavern. ‘The forest people sure can gamble, though.’

‘That they can.’ The men of the forest didn’t have much to do with the rest of Weyland, that much was certain. They had been separate from the main branch of mankind for so long that any union between a gask and a Weylander resulted in children born insane. Too many twists on the spiral, that was the midwives’ old piece of wis­dom. Damned if Jacob knew what spiral they meant, unless it was the serpent wrapped around a staff, the old healers’ symbol, but he understood the sentiment. Forest people’s minds were too different now; the gasks’ prophetic gifts too dangerous to be held in common pattern flesh.

Jacob heard a train of horses pulling to a halt outside the inn and the pastor suspected his fortunes were about to take a turn for the worse. Confirming his premonition, one of the few men in town who could afford a private carriage with six horses on train came barrelling through the entrance. Benner Landor. The largest landowner in Northhaven. Probably the richest in the whole prefecture. With enough ambition to propel him even further.

‘Father Carnehan,’ said Benner, his eyes settling on the pastor next to the constable. ‘Where do you think your son’s at?’

Jacob lifted the fob-watch on his tunic. ‘Well, I’m hoping he’s at work in the library by now.’

‘Try again,’ said the landowner. ‘There’s a duel being fought over at Rake’s Field this morning, and unless I’ve been misinformed, Carter and Duncan are both out there. Not—’ he sucked in his cheeks ‘—mark you, as seconds.’

Jacob groaned out loud. ‘Pistols or sabres?’

‘Given there’re two cavalry swords usually crossed above my fireplace that are missing, I would say the latter.’ He looked at Wiggins, the constable’s wizened fingers floating over a second whisky. ‘And I think you’ll find that duelling is still listed on King Marcus’s statute books as an offence, even in a town as out of the way as Northhaven.’

‘Only if someone dies in the duel,’ sighed Wiggins. ‘If they live… well, there’s nothing the girls find half so attractive as a duelling scar or two to mark that puppy fat.’

‘Father,’ growled Landor. ‘Do you think Mary’s going to share this ex-battalion roughhouser’s view of one or both of our children ending up on the surgeon’s slab?’

No. Jacob’s wife would surely give him a few scars of his own if he let a duel involving their son go ahead.

‘Make sure reparations are made,’ Wiggins called back to Jay.

The constable hobbled after Jacob, looking to reach the coach. Wiggins sure wasn’t about to walk out to Rake’s Field at his age.



It was crowded in the carriage, bouncing along towards the woodland at the edge of town, rocking like a cradle on the rough roads. As well as Jacob, Wiggins and Benner Landor, they had the company of the landowner’s daughter, Willow. Her warning about the duel, it seemed, was the spur behind their speedy departure to Northhaven’s outskirts. Willow’s long red hair swayed with the carriage’s bumpy passage over the dirt track, the woman flashing little daggers of anger towards her father when she wasn’t biting her lip in worry about her brother’s plight.

‘I should’ve packed the two of you off to an academy in the capital,’ complained Landor, his words momentarily lost under the crack of the driver’s whip and the clatter of hooves outside. The footman at the back of the carriage called out warnings to those on the road to leap aside. ‘The promise I gave your mother on her deathbed was a mistake. Honeyed words about learning the running of the business here and staying close to the family. This behaviour is all that Duncan’s learned at Northhaven. Brawling like a river-boatman over a spilled glass of rum.’

‘It’s a girl they’re fighting over,’ corrected Willow.

‘Then you should’ve told me earlier,’ said Landor.

‘I only discovered the news from one of the staff an hour ago when I couldn’t find my brother,’ said Willow. ‘You knew as soon as I did.’

‘Which one?’ asked Benner Landor. ‘I mean which girl is the duel over, not which member of staff told you about this foolery?’

‘Adella Cheyenne.’

‘The daughter of old Cheyenne who keeps the minutes of the town’s aldermen?’ said Landor, his temper not best improved by the news. ‘A clerk’s daughter. That’s who he’s quarrelling over?’

Willow nodded.

‘Your brother,’ hissed Benner Landor, a finger poking the rich red upholstery of the carriage’s interior as if it was his boy’s ribs. ‘Your brother. And what does he think he’s going to do if he wins his duel? There’s a whole season’s worth of society beauties who’ll be throwing themselves at Duncan for just a sniff of our wealth. Earls, barons, counts – fancy titles, draughty baronial mansions down south that need their roofs repaired, and not two farthings to rub together. That’s the wife Duncan will be taking, not a clerk’s daughter.’

‘High hopes and great expectations,’ snorted the constable. ‘From a man that sweet-talked a timberman’s daughter into going down the aisle with him. You sure you been distilling your corn for fuel, Benner Landor, not drinking it raw?’

‘When I married Lorenn, we were starting out with nothing,’ said Landor throwing an angry glance at Wiggins. ‘We were equals and what we built, we built together. You think any nobleman’s daughter would have taken me when I was a farmhand? Swans swim with swans, ducks swim with ducks, that’s just the way it is.’

The constable spat out of the open window. ‘You should’ve told me that’s the way it is. I would’ve got the radiomen to send a message to King Marcus to set a princess aside for you. You don’t want all the royal family married off before your boy gets to court.’

Landor looked to Jacob. ‘What about you, pastor? You’ve not got an opinion?’

‘You know I travelled here after I married Mary.’ And it doesn’t matter how many years I’ve stayed. I’ll always be an outsider. ‘Families want what’s best for their children,’ added Jacob. ‘That’s a natural yearning. It’s not for me to pontificate to anyone else on what their best might be. I’ve got trouble enough convincing Carter of what constitutes a good path.’

‘You could try letting himself find his own way,’ suggested Willow, tartly.

Jacob’s hand slipped down to a handgrip by the seat as the carriage twisted to one side. ‘When you know where the bends in the road are, it is an unkindness not to call a warning to someone driving too fast.’

Benner Landor nodded. ‘That’s the way I’m thinking too. I wish there was some of your wisdom in our young men, pastor.’

Jacob held his peace. It was exactly what the son had inherited from the father that had him worried.

‘And am I also expected to be married off to some earl’s drooling, half-wit heir?’ asked Willow. ‘Or is one coat of arms to hang above the fireplace enough to satisfy the family’s honour?’

‘We’ll see how that goes,’ growled Landor. ‘The Avisons of Grovebank have two sons who need to find matches, and the end of their land is only two hundred miles down the coast from the corner of our last farm.’

‘Of course, why go to the expense of sending me to court, when there’s a local idiot adjoining our corn fields?’

‘When you’ve got four fool-headed grandchildren arguing about whose gambling bills the sale of our estate is going to pay off first, you’ll be glad your long dead father had the sense to marry the Landors into a title they can’t trade away as easily as their land.’

‘You can always get your sons to marry a timberman’s girls,’ the constable winked at Willow. ‘At least that way they’ll always have wood for the fire as well as between their ears.’

The creaking of the carriage lessened as the six horses slowed. They were arriving by the woods. Benner Landor was out before the coach had even stopped, leaping down into the meadows in front of the woodland, the traditional setting for local duels. Far enough outside town that a stray bullet wouldn’t catch a bystander; near enough that a wounded man could still be carried back to Northhaven’s surgeons without bleeding-out more than a pint’s worth of blood. Grass before breakfast, that was what the tradition was called. A polite euphemism for a brutal settling of so-called honour among dunces. And here were two of them, surrounded by a crowd of their jostling, jeering peers… cheering on the clash of swords as Carter Carnehan and Duncan Landor parried and thrust at each other. A corded duelling line across the field was all that separated the pair, a boundary neither combatant was meant to step over. Nominally, it was to ensure the duel was to the first blood and not the death. Although much good that did the gallants frequently pulled wounded from Rake’s Field.

‘Thought those two were meant to be friends,’ said Wiggins. ‘Leastwise, it was always that pair trying to sneak into taverns together on the wrong side of the age ban.’

‘They’ve moved on,’ noted Willow, the sarcasm dripping from her voice. ‘Now they’re finding trouble with women who should know better, rather than at the bottom of an ale glass.’

Carter Carnehan and Duncan Landor might have been much the same in temper and temperament, but in looks they were poles apart – all they really shared was their height and frame – both tall and raised barn-strong by country living. Carter was dark-haired, his mane tending to unruly twists like his father, while Duncan possessed an untidy straw-coloured mop. Carter was dark-skinned and swarthy, a face all hard lines and as jutted as granite; Duncan’s features fairer, the angelic suggestion of his handsome countenance undermined by a slight curl of superiority that often crinkled around the edges of his lips. Duncan waiting for the whole world to be given to him on a plate, Carter with nothing but an ageing pastor’s hopes and worries. As dissimilar as they were, it had seemed natural to Jacob they had become fast friends growing up – two halves of a coin snapped apart and joined to make a whole. How had it come to this, their friendship spiked by the pressures of looming adulthood? Well, their friendship might be skewered, but damned if I’m going to let these two young fools do the same to each other with sabres.

Jacob could see the young woman Willow had mentioned on the side-lines. From the flushed look on her face, her hands clasped together in anticipation as if she was praying, she seemed to think that it was terribly exciting to have two beaus crossing blades on her behalf. Willow had Adella Cheyenne pegged straight all right. At their age, men needed a good woman’s common-sense to stop them cracking antlers. A lady with as little insight as a man was as dangerous as a crowded inn on payday. Blockheads like Carter and Duncan needed civilising, not encouraging behind a duelling line.

Benner Landor was ahead of Jacob, bellowing his way through the onlookers, his large farmer’s hands seizing members of the audience and shoving them out of his way. Not all of the onlookers were contemporaries of the two young men… new apprentices. There were gamblers and roughhousers aplenty; the kind of rascals who would’ve turned up to any duel, morning, afternoon or evening, just for a chance to view spilled blood. They sounded angry curses at the exertions of the barrel-chested estate owner cutting a passage through their ranks but the mob quietened down quick enough after they saw Constable Wiggins trailing in the landowner’s wake. If this combat took a fatal turn, the audience could be locked up for incitement to murder. It took Benner Landor getting to the front of the circle of jeering brutes before the two participants realised that unwelcome company had arrived at their duel.

‘You fool,’ bellowed Benner Landor striding out, ‘you damnable young fool. What are you doing here? Have the stealers got into you this morning?’

Stealers. Benner had used the old formal name for the demons that could worm a way into a man’s soul and twist it to evil. Give Duncan Landor his due; he seemed willing to brazen it out. ‘It’s a matter of honour.’ Duncan said the last word as though it had been passed down to him on a scroll by an angel to protect him from his formidable father’s wrath.

‘Honour! Whose honour would that be, boy?’

Duncan pointed toward Carter and then Adella. ‘This ruffian’s slighted Adella. Says he’s going to throw his post at the library and take passage on a ship at Redwater Harbour.’

‘So what?’ Benner Landor’s voice wavered angrily. ‘So this girl’s the harbourmaster of Redwater is she? Making s