Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service Read Online Free

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 sure every Northhaven man fresh out of schooling has valid papers of apprenticeship with the seaman’s guild? That’s her job?’
    ‘Carter said,’ Duncan went on, faltering under the intensity of the large man’s gaze, ‘that Adella didn’t matter to him as much as travelling.’
    ‘You draw your sabre every time some Northhaven man gets bitten by the bug to see what’s over the horizon and a girl takes hurt at it, I’d better build a log cabin here for you,’ said Landor. He jabbed a finger at Adella and the slowly dissipating crowd. ‘Because you’ll be cracking steel here for the rest of your dumb life. A town clerk’s daughter takes hurt; there are plenty of lamp-lighters and circuit riders around to pick up a sabre on her behalf. You want to fight duels for fun, you find a slighted countess from a good southern family to draw your blade out over.’
    From the crestfallen look descended upon Adella’s face, Jacob had a shrewd idea what game was playing out here. The pastor had spent enough afternoons drowning worms along the river with a rod and line to know that sometimes to snare the river’s big fish you had to use a minnow as bait. Carter Carnehan was being played, and Jacob’s young fool of a son was too full of fight to realise that he was the lure. The look of melancholy crossing Adella’s young face was the river’s big catch about to be yanked from her menu.
    ‘What have you got to say, pastor?’ demanded Benner Landor.
    ‘That I raised my boy better than this,’ said Jacob. ‘Any fool can fight and most fools usually do. Violence is the last refuge of the in­competent. It solves nothing and only ever comes back to cut the hand wielding the blade.’
    ‘Get into the coach,’ Benner Landor ordered his son. ‘Before I have the constable toss your tail in the gaol.’
    Wiggins rested his hands on his hips and called out to the dwindling number of onlookers. ‘Sabre practice is over… back to your homes, all of you!’
    Duncan reluctantly sloped off towards his father’s coach, sliding his sword back into its scabbard.