Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service by Stephen Hunt

Carter Carnehan. This lively enough for you, you idiot?

    The school was in as bad a shape as Jacob had feared. Bombs had flattened the furthest of the four long buildings joined at the centre by a teachers’ block. Where the bandits had dived down, the classroom had been left a burning wreck. Children’s bodies lay scattered lifeless around the fenced-in fields, a couple of straw-filled archery circles stripped of their target cloth, overturned and smouldering from a strafing run, sods of grass torn where planes had passed overhead with their wing guns blazing.
    Mary hissed in fury as she saw the corpses, her fingers bunching into a fist. ‘How could anyone do this?’
    Jacob had nothing to say by way of explanation. Why does the sun come up each morning? Why does the rain fall and soak people? Why did bandits choose the life they did, preying on those weaker than themselves, rather than toiling in the soil and working with nature to provide a living? Why did hawks hunt hares rather than grazing the meadows beside their prey? Some things just were. Jacob scanned the skies from their hiding place, crouched in the vegetable patch of one of the homes bordering the school field. The aircrafts’ hornet buzzing sounded from behind them, raiders still driving townspeople up the hill as though this was a cattle drive.
    ‘I can see movement in those windows over there,’ said Jacob, trying to keep his wife focused on something other than her anger . It’s a fickle thing, anger. You can ride it like a log down a river. Sometimes it takes you where you want to go, other times it just dumps you down perilous rapids. Any angrier and Mary was likely to do something dangerous. Well, more hazardous than this morning’s business, anyhow.
    Jacob and his wife jumped the fence and ran across the fields, keeping low. Adults lay mixed among the children’s corpses, the head of the school, another teacher and her young assistant – a boy barely older than Carter. The headmaster had a couple of nine-year-olds clutched under his bloody body. Jacob stopped, turning the man over to check the children for life. No good. Not with bandit fighters pumping out shells large enough to tear apart an enemy aircraft’s fuselage. The strafing run had ripped the schoolmaster apart and his body had proved as much of a shield as rice paper for the pupils he’d scooped up to sprint to cover with. Tears sprang into Jacob’s eyes. He could barely stand to look at the two youngsters, fear left frozen on their faces as they had died. This isn’t glory. This isn’t war. Just shortened lives with as little point behind their end as—
    ‘Come on,’ Mary urged. ‘I can hear crying inside.’
    Jacob stepped through the wreckage of a blackened wall. Mary climbed behind him, kicking aside the building’s smouldering boards to gain access to the part of the school where they had seen heads bobbing through shattered glass. Two of the surviving classrooms were empty. Inside the third, they found desks overturned by the blast, whimpering heads quivering behind furniture. Frightened little faces stared out of a makeshift camp. An adult lay slumped against the wall under a window. A spreading pool of blood slicked out from his body where the left leg should have been, and Jacob saw where the archery target fabric had ended up. Ripped off and bandaged around the stump of limb which remained. Not one of the teachers, and from his size and workaday green jerkin, this was the woodsman who had come in for the market. He was still alive, just, his right hand clutching his bow as though it was a walking stick… a queer-looking contraption, a cam at the end of each limb supporting a sophisticated system of pulleys and cables. Jacob recognised the weapon for what it was. Haven’t seen one of those for a while . Mary raced to calm and gather the school children while Jacob ducked below sight of the shattered window to reach the man.
    ‘Didn’t see my leg outside, did