by Tim Akers
I woke up on a meat rack. My chest ached, and my arms and legs were stiff. I blinked dry eyes, squinting against the light, trying to get my bearings. I could smell blood and cured leather, the sweet smell of pipe smoke, and stale sweat. Birdsong filled my head. I tried to move my arms. There was a moment of resistance, then my hand pulled free of some sort of restraint, and I lurched forward, falling to my knees, then my hands. There was sand under my palms. Back in the practice yard.
“Ah, good. That took longer than I expected. Of course, I’m never around to count the hours when it happens to me,” Clarence said. My vision was still blurry, but I could see the yard finally, and the line of quintains. Finally, I made out Clarence, sitting in a wooden camp stool in the shadow of the wall. He was smoking a pipe and reading the world’s oldest book. He marked his place and stood up. “Shall we start again?”
“What the hell happened?” I asked. My voice was as dry as dust. I looked around the yard. Chesa hung on a rack next to me, a pair of deep wounds on her arms, and a final blow in the middle of her chest. Her clothes were soaked with blood. “Chesa! Chesa! What did you do, you monster!”
“Settle down. You’re fine, she’s fine.” Clarence got to his feet and strode toward me, scabbard in hand. “She had a poor reaction to your loss. Nearly got me, she did. That girl fights like a banshee.” As he got closer, I saw that his face was scarred, and his armor sported several deep gouges across the chest. “I don’t think we’re going to have to train her too much. Killing seems to come natural to that one.”
“What do you mean we’re fine? I thought I was dead! She sure looks dead as hell!”
“You were. Both of you. Mythically dead. Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Like a son of a bitch!” I snapped. I went to Chesa. The blood on her chest was dry, and if I looked closely, I could see that the three wounds were nothing more than scars. Even as I watched, those scars started to fade. The blood started to fade as well, like disappearing ink. “Are you sure she’s okay?”
“Capital O, capital K. Though she’s going to be pissed when she comes to. I might need your help with that. In retrospect, it might have been better to warn you.” Clarence rubbed his face. “Oh well. Next time.”
Slowly, I worked my way up to my feet. My whole body ached. “Was that necessary?”
“Yes, completely. This is not a game played for points, John. The masquerade is over. You are starting on a serious road. There will be pain, and misery, and most certainly death. For your enemies, hopefully many times. And for you, only once. Except here.” He drew his sword again, the rasp of steel loud in the silence of the yard. “Do not waste these deaths. Learn from them, so that when the true death comes, you will not fear it. So. Stand up. Retrieve your sword. Join the fight again.”
“I’m not so sure about this,” I said, rubbing my chest. There was no blood on my tabard, no evidence of the wound that had killed me. But I could remember the steel passing through bone and flesh, the startling heat as it pierced my heart. I shook the memory from my head. “Isn’t there a better way?”
“If you want to fail, yes. But I do not train the sword to fail. En garde!”
He lunged forward. I barely managed to get my sword up in time. The sound of steel on steel filled the practice yard, mingling with birdsong and the distant chanting of unseen monks, echoing off the castle walls.
A few minutes later, Chesa flinched, and her eyes fluttered open. She locked on to Clarence and started screaming. Clarence and I stopped circling and ran to her.
“You son of a bitch! You monster!” she screamed. “I’m going to tear the heart from your chest and—”
“Ches, Ches, it’s alright. I’m fine,” I said. I moved between her and Clarence. A moment of surprise passed over her face, quickly replaced by even more anger.
“So this is some kind of joke?” she shouted. “You did that just to freak me out?” Chesa tore free of the rack, coming swiftly to her feet. She scooped up the bow that lay nearby and drew, magically summoning an arrow from her quiver, drawing a bead on Clarence’s chest. The big knight took a step back, holding out his hands.
“Whoa, whoa, let’s not—”
The bow hummed, the arrow zipped, and Clarence went down. He lay on his back for a long second, staring up at the sky.
“Oh, bugger,” he said. “I suppose...that’s...fair.”
Then he died. I turned to Chesa. She shrugged.
“Tell me that isn’t fair,” she said.
Chapter ELEVEN
BLEED, RINSE, REPEAT
Over the course of the next three days, I died thirty-eight times, once because I fumbled sheathing the sword and put the tip into my thigh. Chesa only died twice more, but after the second time she gathered up her bow and spent her hours on the quintains, filling them with arrows. Their tiny wooden voices screamed each time she killed them. It was disconcerting, in a way that my own repeated deaths were not.
Every time I woke up, Clarence instructed me on how I had failed and what I needed to do to improve. We spent the daylight hours on the hot sand of the training yard, and our evenings in the banquet hall, listening to far off music and talking about Knight Watch. Clarence was a better guy than I thought at first. Much older than I expected.
“This is a pretty good place you’ve got,” Chesa said. “Kind of lonely, though.”
“I have what I need. And it’s better than the life I left behind,” he answered. “Tembo, Bethany, and Matthew are better friends than I ever knew before. At least the two of you are already close. It’s good to go into this with people you love.”
Chesa snorted derisively. I hurried to change the subject.
“So how did you get involved in this?” I asked. “Surely Knight Watch’s recruiting method has to extend beyond waiting for someone to be attacked by a dragon.”
“Esther MacRae hired me. I don’t suppose ‘hire’ is the right word.” Clarence sat thoughtfully at the head of the long table in the banquet room, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. “Enlisted me is more accurate. Duty to king and country, fight the Viking threat, all that sort of business. There was a war on, you know.”
“Which war was this?” I asked, thinking about Esther’s age.
“The big one. The second one. I understand there have been others,” he said, sipping from his goblet of wine. “I’ve lost track.”
“World War II? How old is she?”
“Let’s just say she didn’t have to lie about her age to enlist, and our branch cared little for gender. Something the mundanes are still figuring out, I understand.” Clarence nodded to himself, lost in thought. “By the time we landed in Europe, she was the best warden they had, already leading her own team. And she has changed less than you think.”
“I guess...I guess I’m learning to believe in unbelievable things,” I said. Clarence snorted, then set his wine aside and folded his hands together. “You talk about the service, and branches, but Esther insists this isn’t a military operation. I have trouble believing it.”
“She has some grudges. The service made some mistakes, refused to believe the war wasn’t over. Higher-ups didn’t like having faeries on the payroll. Esther hadn’t wrangled the actuator out of government hands, yet. There were still elements who thought...well, it doesn’t matter what they thought. They’re dead, and the actuator belongs to Knight Watch. There’s no one else doing what we do. At least, not on this side of unreality.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? This side of unreality?” Chesa asked.
“We’ve made a few alliances. Among the dead, the elder races, certain mythological factions who don’t want to see the mundane world getting fully involved in their affairs. We have friends among the monsters.”
“Like Kyle?” I asked.
“Kyle is a special case,” Clarence said. His face grew still, almost melancholy, but then he quickly changed the subject. “You’re making nice progress, Sir John. Once you put the
points system aside and started finishing your swings, that is.”
“There are penalties for striking too hard,” I said. “Too much finesse, not enough full-on smashing.”
“Finesse will always have a place in the swordsman’s art. Even in full plate. You will learn to land a proper blow in the exact right spot and with enough power to pierce your enemy’s steel without overreaching if you miss. In time, all things in time.”
“Which is why I prefer the bow,” Chesa said. “An arrow in the eye at a hundred yards is way better than crossed steel so close you can smell the other guy’s blood.”
“To each their own. And to be honest, I’m the wrong person to train you. We haven’t had an archer for...well, I lose track of time. A long while,” Clarence said. “It feels like you’re going to learn more in your domain than you could ever learn from me. Assuming the elves grant you an audience. They’re particular.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “I have to sweat my way through sword practice, wear armor, risk my blood, take a blade in the belly. Meanwhile, Chesa’s conjuring light-flowers with her breath and shooting magic arrows like it was nothing.”
“You are working on fundamentals, Sir John. There are things you have learned in the mundane that must be unlearned. Bad habits that are not true to the way of a real knight. Once you have the basic skills correct, then the magic will begin.”
“So there is magic in the sword?” I asked.
“Of course. You can’t honestly expect to kill a dragon with nothing more than a yard of steel and a stiff upper lip. All the elites have access to a particular form of mystical power. Ours is simply more brutal, less beautiful.”
“Some of us get all the luck,” Chesa said with a smile.
“Oh, I wouldn’t count yourself lucky just yet,” Clarence said. “The path of the fae is difficult. They ask a price I would not be willing to pay.”
Chesa grew quiet. She stared into the flames for a while, clearly thinking about the kind of costs a knight wouldn’t be willing to pay, when so much of his life seemed to involve almost getting eaten by a dragon, and risking death by steel on a regular basis. I cleared my throat.
“Is it the same for the others? Matthew, and Tembo?”
“I don’t know the specifics, of course. But the basic rules are the same for all of us. Our powers depend on staying true to our mythic selves. Going into the mundane world risks contamination, and the longer we’re there, the more our powers are eroded. Some of it is discipline...avoiding modern conveniences, that sort of thing. But it’s a balance. Given my druthers, I would stay here all the time. But that risks losing ourselves in the fantasy. And that’s just as bad, if not worse.”
“How so?” I asked.
“There’s a delirium in the unreal. We have to stay grounded, or we just become another myth, adrift inside our own minds. Esther will teach you more about this. The point is that you will have to seek balance. It’s difficult.”
“Sounds like it,” I said. “I can understand wanting to stay here all the time. It’s an attractive prospect.”
“It is. And speaking of that...” Clarence stood, the meal at an end. “I think I have taught the two of you all I can for now. I need to recover, and frankly, you’re both barely out of the mundane. You’re contaminating the domain and making it difficult for me to recuperate. Report back to Esther, maybe work on your own domains. We’ll take up your training at a later date.”
“Fine with me. I’m ready to be back in the real world for a while,” Chesa said, getting up. She looked around the empty hall. “This place is starting to give me the creeps.”
“Can I ask one more question?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Why are we training to fight like this? Sword to sword, armor against armor. Dragons don’t carry swords.”
“It’s not all dragons and trolls, Sir John,” Clarence said. “Some among the myths resemble us; the Valkyrie, the seelie and unseelie courts, even the usual panoply of elves and dwarves and other literary creations, though they are much rarer these days than they were in the Professor’s day,” he said, without explaining who the Professor might have been. He seemed about ready to go on when he thought better of it. “It’s a strong foundation, John. You will learn to fight monsters later on.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said. He grimaced but did not deny it. I stood. “Knights shouldn’t lie to their squires.”
“No. No, they shouldn’t.” He rested his hands on the back of the chair and thought for a long minute, choosing his words carefully. “There are others. I said no one else was doing what we do, and that’s true. But it doesn’t mean there aren’t people who seek to use the unreal world for their own purposes, if you know what I mean. Some of them were friends once. Some were comrades in arms, gone astray. The lure of the unreal is strong. And that is all I will say. Good night, John.” He turned and started toward the door.
“How do we get back to Mundane Actual?” Chesa asked.
“The way you came. There are horses waiting for you in the courtyard. Kyle will pay you no heed. Give Esther my greetings.”
Chesa and I walked out to the courtyard. She pulled on my sleeve as soon as we were out of Clarence’s earshot.
“What do you think that was about?” she asked. “They were comrades once?”
“Beats me,” I said. “But there’s a lot of power here. If you can become anything you imagine, don’t you think some people have pretty dangerous imaginations?”
Chesa grew quiet. It was hard to read her new face, but I could tell she was bothered.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. We’re with the good guys. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“I didn’t like seeing you die,” she said. “I don’t care what he said. I think that was too much.”
“Well. I didn’t like it either.”
We didn’t say anything else. The horses waiting for us outside looked solid enough. Chesa hopped up effortlessly, but it took me a few attempts. Four, to be exact, and I almost died again when I landed on my shoulder and spooked the horse, nearly earning an iron-shod hoof to the throat.
It was night, and ten thousand stars glittered in the sky, though none of the familiar constellations. Even the moon seemed bigger. Kyle’s silhouette wheeled in the distance, but true to Clarence’s word, the dragon came no closer. We followed the path into the forest. After a while it got too dark to see, and Chesa had to lead us with her amethyst eyes. As we entered the trees, I looked back at the castle one last time. Hundreds of lights shone throughout the towers and along the walls, torchlight flickering against the stone, an earth-bound constellation of burning stars. But one light shone brighter, in the highest tower. I thought I could just make out Clarence’s form in the window, watching us leave.
The trees closed around us, and with them came the sounds of the forest. Insects creaked and whistled, leaves stirred, joined by the strange, distant sounds of the forest at night. I couldn’t see where I was going, but Chesa seemed confident in the path. I gave my mount his reins and enjoyed the ride. The light from the moon grew dimmer and dimmer, the trees less distinct, and soon we were riding through pure darkness.
I woke up with my head in a bag, and ropes cutting into my wrists. It was pretty much what I was expecting. Dreams end. Hope fades. And burlap tastes like regret, especially when you’re eating it in the trunk of a car, and your hands are tied behind your back, and the shocks on the car have apparently been replaced with concrete. Or maybe I was just regretting the series of decisions that landed me in this situation. That was probably it. Yeah, burlap just tastes like burlap.
In all fairness, this was not the worst place I had woken up. I spent my first couple months at college befriending progressively less gainfully employed artistic types, leading to a period of regrettable parties that always ended in forests or abandoned warehouses. I slept on a lot of trash in those days and I woke up in my share of moving vehicles, religiou
s communes, and at least one hostage situation. But never all three at once.
I was just contemplating the depth of this error, whether this might be the mistake my mother relates in hushed tones to her friends at the funeral while they shake their heads and tut respectfully at the tragedy, when the car rattled to a halt and the engine shut off. This is it, I thought. This is the end of the road.
Turns out the road had ended a while ago. The trunk opened, and bright light flooded through the burlap bag over my head. Strong hands grabbed my arms and levered me out of the trunk, setting me on my feet and holding me up while I struggled to regain my balance. They ripped the bag off my head, leaving me blinking and blind in the bright sun. Two dark shadows lurked nearby, though I couldn’t make out their faces.
“So it was drugs, then?” I asked. “You put drugs in the mead at the faire and I imagined all that?”
“I’m not that kind of saint,” a voice said. I recognized Matthew’s disappointed voice, coming from the taller of the two shadows. “Things are weird enough around here.”
“Where’s Clarence?” I asked.
“Still down the hole. You and your friend are being discharged for a while. Try to not be weird about it,” Matthew answered.
“Sure. Nothing weird about this,” I said, holding up my bound hands. “Perfectly normal way to treat your new friends.”
“Are you going to run if we take these ropes off?” the other shadow asked. That was the girl. Bethany, I think.
I shook my head, and suddenly the bonds were gone. I regained just enough vision to see her closing the longest folding knife I had ever seen. The ropes lay in a heap at my feet, their ends cut clean. I blinked down at my wrists to see if she’d nicked me. My arm hair was shaved clean where the bindings had been.
“Thanks,” I said, looking around. The three of us were standing next to the most nondescript car I could possibly imagine. We were in the middle of a cornfield. Literally the middle. I couldn’t even see a road on the far horizon. A lane of battered stalks led into the distance. “Where are we? What happened to Clarence’s domain? And where’s Chesa?”