Saboteurs Read online

  Saboteurs

  Ben Peek

  Pan Books

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  1

  At low tide, Bueralan Le walked along the black-stained sand towards the dead body of Enaka, the God of Slaves.

  The god’s dark body was the size of a pirate’s favourite vessel, a schooner. It lay against the rough, jagged cliffs of the Gogair Peninsula, the lower half separated from the upper. The former lay out in the black sea, a blurred debris of wreckage that Bueralan passed as he drew against the shore, but the latter was a clear vision of pitted and broken divine flesh. Enaka’s long arms stretched out on the rocks on either side of him, his bony fingers dug into the stone in defiance of the act that had killed him over ten thousand years ago. During the War of the Gods, Enaka had been torn apart by the Goddess of the Ocean, the Leviathan. It was said that the Leviathan leapt from the then blue-green water and sunk her teeth into the other god. She meant to drag him down into her domain, but Enaka gripped the cliffs in an attempt to save himself. Yet such was the Leviathan’s strength that she tore his body in half.

  Hours ago, Bueralan had begun the approach to the god’s corpse in an old dinghy. He had been given little choice: the crew of Myntalo had dragged him out of his cabin and led him by burning torch to the edge of their ship, where the dinghy waited. Bueralan was fortunate that he had been dressed when they came for him – heavy, dark-red trousers, a black shirt and old boots – for the crew had not allowed him to take the small collection of coins he had, or to grab water or food. Their only parting gift before they pushed the dinghy out into the black ocean was to toss down his sword. They broke it first, however, and their laughter followed him out into the night. Before they were out of sight, Bueralan was scooping water out of the dinghy, his hands burning at its lethal touch. He was not a man to be unthankful for the luck that brought him to a shoreline in a low tide, hours later.

  He walked up the rocky trail to the top the peninsula. Once there, he sat on a flat piece of stone and looked around the washed-out orange world that the afternoon’s sun had created. To his right, the land was marked by strips of dead trees, while to his left, the pregnant shapes of circular water towers marked the empty sky. Beneath them, he knew, was a town called Zajce.

  After a moment the exiled baron, Bueralan Le, began to walk towards it.

  2

  Five months earlier, Bueralan had arrived in the coastal town of Örd.

  He left Myntalo alone. Beneath the morning’s sun, the first sun of the day, he wound his way through the dirt streets of the poor town and out into the farmland. It was defined by scrappy yellow grass and hard soil that promised to yield little, and the farm he approached was a sad affair. Along the right of the old house, empty kennels waited, their depths dark and full of yearning. It was a darkness repeated inside, where a solitary man waited for Bueralan at a large table, a series of locks and chains were laid before him, each of them slithering as if alive.

  ‘That’s a nice trick,’ Bueralan said before he untied his sword and laid it on the table. ‘I guess what I hear about you is true, then?’

  ‘Yes, Enaka’s power is within me.’ The man’s name was Kana. His age was difficult to determine – he was one of those men whom the sun had turned hard and dark – but it was said that he was older than most thought him to be. Bueralan thought he looked fifty. ‘But power is nothing unless you have the will to exercise it. Isn’t that right, Baron Le?’

  ‘It’s Captain, now,’ he said. ‘That title is an old one, and I lost it a long time ago. I have no interest in taking it back, either. Consider it a free piece of advice, Mayor.’

  The man who claimed a god’s power smiled faintly. ‘If I was the Mayor of Örd, I would. But I am not. I am the Mayor of Zajce.’

  ‘You’re also the mayor who was driven out of his town by Lord Makara and Lady Jaora. At least, that’s how I’ve heard it explained.’

  ‘It’s true. They wish to return Zajce to its original trade.’

  ‘The slave trade?’

  ‘I am told you know that line of work well.’ The chains on the table turned still, lifeless. Kana ran his hands along one of them as if it were a pet. ‘The power I have is not enough to take Zajce back. Not from the mercenaries they have hired. Not from their violence and their cunning. The power I have is but the smallest portion of Enaka’s divinity. It gives me a long life and the ability to move a chain. I cannot do what others like me can. That is why I need you.’

  ‘You have to do exactly what I say,’ Bueralan said quietly. ‘You might not like everything I do, but you must trust me and do as I say. If you can agree to that, I can help you.’

  The two men talked until the midday sun set and the afternoon sun rose. Afterwards, Bueralan left the farmhouse alone and returned to the winding streets of Örd. There he found a small bar. Out the back were the men and women of Dark, the saboteur group he led. They numbered seven, including him, and occupied a table that was left well alone by everyone else in the bar.

  ‘We have a job,’ he said to them.

  3

  There were over two dozen water towers scattered on the peninsula behind the god’s corpse. In the darkening sky, they looked like horrific trees that had sprouted from Enaka’s back and threatened to blossom into unknown monsters. The impression was given added emphasis by the fact that not a single one of the buildings in the town equalled the height of the towers – the smallest was seven storeys in size, the largest twice that. But it was what lay beneath the tanks that held Bueralan’s attention. Wire cages ran around the legs of the towers and, even at a distance, he could see people trapped within.

  As he drew closer, long trenches began to emerge around Zajce. To Bueralan’s left and right, thick wooden beams were set in the dry ground and the start of a thick wooden wall had been erected. It was a largely patchwork affair, with dozens of gaps throughout, particularly in the direction from which he was approaching.

  His path took him past two white men who sat against the wheel of a small cart, tools packed into the back, a cask of water between them. They’d pulled off the lid, and both were dipping in their tin cups.

  ‘You look like you could use a drink,’ the older one said as Bueralan approached. He was also the smallest, his body a series of knotted, wiry muscles. He offered his tin and, after a word of thanks, Bueralan dipped it into the water. ‘You have picked a bad time to come to Zajce, my friend,’ the man went on. ‘There’s no salvation here, not now. Just mercenaries and merchants.’

  Bueralan lowered the cup. ‘I thought Mayor Kana ran this town?’

  ‘Lord Makara and Lady Jaora run it now,’ the second man said. He was younger than the first, young enough to be his son, though Bueralan knew he wasn’t. He was a bigger man than the other, squarer in the face and with more hair. ‘Well, them and their soldiers run it. They each want the town, and they’ve got enough mercenaries ready to start a war for it.’

  ‘On bad nights you wake up to bodies hanging from the water towers,’ the older man said. ‘But most of that is Syl agitating.’

  ‘Syl?’ Bueralan asked.

  ‘She works for Scratch. She’s a cold killer. You look into her eyes, you see it. You want to avoid her, if you can.’

  ‘What – a black man with white tattoos like that up and down his arms?’ The younger man gestured dismissively at Bueralan before he could speak. ‘He’s lucky she isn’t here right now. Sy
l would spot him a mile way.’

  ‘Don’t pay no mind to him,’ the older said. ‘We just spent a long day digging trenches and listening to gossip. People here have started to believe that Mayor Kana is coming back to take control of Zajce. That he’s got an army, even. That’s why Syl is out of the town. Won’t miss her, either. She and her swords can go far, far away.’

  ‘Well,’ Bueralan handed the tin back, tapped the hilt of his broken sword, ‘maybe there is some money to be made in her absence.’

  ‘Not with the Lord or Lady, I don’t think. You might be best to try Inen at The Last Courtesy. I know he needs a new guard. The last one took a blade in the stomach the other night. Screamed all the way into the morning, before he gave up his misery.’

  The streets of Zajce welcomed Bueralan shortly after. They ran around the water tanks and wire cages that held a bitter collection of men, women and children. They formed a mix of ethnicities and skin colours, but his gaze did not linger on the slaves. Instead, he focused on the mercenaries who stood guard around them. The first few wore a mix of red and white amongst their leather and chain armour and displayed an insignia with a clawed hand dragging itself downwards. The second outfit of mercenaries, in greens and blues, seemed by and large younger than the first. Their symbol was a circle within a circle.

  The Last Courtesy was not the finest or largest brothel Bueralan had seen, but it was both of those things to Zajce. It was six levels high and made of a mix of brick and wood. At the back of it, Bueralan met Inen, a tall, dusky-skinned man who wore a robe of green and yellow adorned with cheap silver bells. ‘Your name is familiar,’ he said, after Bueralan told him that he was looking for work. ‘Where did you say you were from?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘There was a baron with the same name as you in Ooila, nearly a decade ago now. He was part of an uprising against one of the queens there, I think. You’d be about the same age as him, I think.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Bueralan said. ‘I just live my life now, one job at a time.’

  4

  A month after Bueralan and Dark took the job, Ruk returned to Örd.

  Ruk’s great gift was his heritage, or the lack thereof. He did not know his father, and thus did not know his origins. His mother offered no help, either: she’d said his sire was from here and there, and described herself similarly. By the time Ruk was on the road and working as a saboteur, he was describing himself as a mongrel, a man who was white enough to claim five or six countries as his heritage, and brown enough for another four or five. Because of that, he was often Dark’s point man, the saboteur Bueralan sent in first, the man no one would look at twice in any bar or inn.

  ‘Zajce is a mess,’ Ruk said inside the farmhouse. He sat at the table with Bueralan and Kana and another member of Dark, Zean. The others had left Örd and drifted up north to markets in the cities there. ‘After Makara and Jaora removed Kana, the two of them took all the people who protested against their rule and put them in cages beneath the water towers – to be sold as slaves. From what people said, no one was sure that was their purpose at first, until the two began to bring in new flesh to sell. They’ve now got maybe four hundred people lined up in the streets, waiting to be sold.’

  ‘Waiting?’ Zean repeated. He was a lean, dark-skinned man, who had grown up with Bueralan. ‘No slaver keeps flesh sitting around doing nothing.’

  ‘They do if they’ve fallen out with their business partner,’ Ruk said. ‘According to the people I spoke to, Makara and Jaora fell out with each other after just a month. It was over what to do with their slave-trade profits. Lord Makara wants to invest in the town, while Lady Jaora wants to bleed it dry and move on to a more profitable position in Gogair. The tipping point came when Makara began building a port on the coast. Since they both have their own mercenaries, it’s a stalemate now.’

  ‘My people,’ Kana said quietly, ‘come to Zajce to be free. They flee slavery in other parts of the country.’

  ‘Some still arrive thinking that’s true.’

  ‘How many mercenaries do they have?’ Bueralan asked.

  ‘About two hundred,’ Ruk replied. ‘The first hundred belong to Echoes, run by Captain Gertz. It’s a new unit, most of it green. The captain is a bit special, though – the stories I’ve heard about him will stick with you. The second hundred belongs to Scratch, run by Captain Khoury. It’s your average mercenary unit: some discipline, some skill. The captain’s probably on the way out, if her use of laudanum is any indication. But that’s where we have a problem, boss.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘Syl is in Zajce. She’s working as Captain Khoury’s second. She’s prepared to take over, if the captain should fall.’

  Syl.

  Dark-haired, smart, violent.

  Bueralan had not seen Syl for five years. The last time had been in Taho, in the bar where they had said their goodbyes. ‘She’s never met any of you, so it’s a small problem, not a huge one. You just be careful around her. Stay in character. She knows enough about our work that we can’t afford to let the plan slip around her.’

  ‘Am I missing something?’ Kana asked. ‘To me, the problem is not one soldier, but the two hundred soldiers. I know you said that this job could be violent, but you cannot kill two hundred, surely? Seven men and women, no matter who they are, cannot compete with those odds.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’ Bueralan turned to Zean. ‘You’re up next.’

  5

  ‘My brother is from Ooila,’ Inen said, leading Bueralan up a set of stairs inside his brothel. ‘He’s not my real brother, of course. I was born in Illate. I was taken from there when I was young and sold to his parents. I was lucky, though. My new brother knew what had happened was wrong. He knew it from the start. It was why, when we were old enough, we fled Ooila. It would have been shortly before your failed revolution, I think. Our plan was to start new lives, become new people.’ Inen pushed open the door to a narrow room fitted with a bed and an open metal clothes hanger. ‘But you can never forget that. You carry your childhood wherever you go.’

  ‘Is that why you came to Zajce then?’ Bueralan walked into the room. At the end, a narrow window looked over the town. ‘Those slave cages looked pretty full.’

  ‘There are more in them every day.’ Inen huffed, his bells ringing as he did. ‘As for coming to Zajce – well, when I arrived, it still had a reputation of being a sanctuary for slaves.’

  ‘And your brother?’

  ‘He thought the same, before he was killed. But enough of that. We open in two hours. I’ll send some food up. Try and get some sleep before if you can. The start of the night is always rough.’

  True to his word, food appeared shortly after Inen left. He sent up a tin jug of water as well. Bueralan ate and drank slowly while he stood at the small window, staring over the streets of Zajce. A few hours ago, just the thought of a bed would have been enough to lure him to sleep, but now his mind was on the street in front of him. Bueralan watched as it filled with mercenaries, watched deliveries of food to the slaves, and watched as water was dumped into troughs from the hoses in the towers. The sight reminded him of his childhood, of walking beside his father when he was very young. They’d wander through the slave markets of Ooila, where adults and children were kept behind wire fences; they would be led out in chains when someone wanted to inspect them for purchase.

  He did not sleep before his shift began.

  6

  On the ground floor of The Last Courtesy, Bueralan wore his broken sword as if it were complete, and Inen introduced him as an exiled baron. When Bueralan began to protest, the other man waved his hand dismissively and said that there were no secrets in a brothel.

  The guards were two young men, one black, one white. They were locals who, if not born in Zajce, were raised in it. The prostitutes were a much more diverse group. They numbered forty and ranged from women in their fifties to boys in their early teens – the collection a range
of ethnicities, weights and heights. Most had not been born in Zajce, but nearly all had arrived when Mayor Kana had been in charge. By and large, they did not like the mercenaries. Not one of them said so, but Bueralan pieced the mood together through comments and jokes. When the doors opened, half the prostitutes went upstairs to sit in the windows and call out to the men and women on the streets, and the other half remained on the ground floor with Inen and the guards. These men and women took their places in booths around the stage, which was occupied by the musician.

  She was called Sabine – a tall, olive-skinned woman in her late twenties. She kept a mix of drums and harmonicas set up on the small stage and took her place in the middle, with a guitar. She had a well-trained singing voice that filled the ground floor for three two-hour-long stretches over the night. Her first set came to an end fifteen minutes after Bueralan broke the arm of a mercenary who’d had too much to drink. To her credit, Sabine continued to play through his screams. But then few, either in the booths or at the bar, paid much attention to the soldier from Scratch.

  The second mercenary fight of the night gathered more attention, however.

  It was started by a young man dressed in the blue and green of Echoes. Vach Sala was a tall, brown-skinned, dark-haired woman much too beautiful for a brothel like The Last Courtesy. And sometime after midnight, the mercenary became too possessive with her in one of the booths. She swiftly made her way to where Bueralan was standing and put an arm around his waist. ‘I’ve a small problem,’ she said.

  Bueralan did not need to ask. ‘You bitch,’ the mercenary screamed as he followed her. ‘You don’t walk away from me. You’ll come back here and learn your place.’

  The music stopped and Bueralan stepped in front of Sala.

  The mercenary drew a knife from under his shirt. ‘You’ll end up like that last fat fuck, if you get involved with this,’ he spat.