The Disposable

by Katherine Vick

  Tretaptus looked genuinely affronted. “That would hardly be gentlemanly, now would…ah!”

  The prince managed to raise his sword just in time to deflect Roderick’s attack, but it was a close-run thing. He ducked under the swing, back flexing as the blade missed his nose by less than half an inch. Roderick could hear pounding footsteps as the woman soldier hurtled to her ally’s aid, but yet again, Gort flew at her with fury, hammer raised in a hopeless charge. Almost delicately, however, the woman sidestepped his advance and, rather than cutting him savagely down as might have been expected, she simply lashed out with a hearty kick on the rump that sent him reeling.

  “I’m not going to kill you!” Roderick heard her cry. “So just push off!”

  “Still fighting!” Tretaptus’s voice cut through as his sword blade bounced off the knight’s shoulder plates, denting the metal harshly. “Please do pay attention! It’s almost rude!”

  But in spite of the fight, it was still Gort’s reeling figure that captured Roderick’s eye. The dwarf seemed unable to catch his balance as he staggered in an ungainly lurch across the narrow glade to where the other soldier had just stumbled to his feet, his eyes tight shut and body tense and shaking as he battled against some unseen foe.

  “I won’t!” Roderick heard him stammer. “I won’t, I won’t, I…”

  His arm lashed out, puppet-like, almost of its own accord. The sword blade gleamed.

  And Gort, lost and without control, had no chance to avoid the blade.

  With one harsh sweep, the dwarf fell in a flash of blood and dropped into horrible stillness.

  “Oh bugger!” The exclamation came from the woman. “Shoulders, just sit down!”

  “I can’t!” The other soldier’s cry was almost a wail in response to the nonsense statement as he jerked in an ungainly circle, limbs flailing. “I can’t, I can’t, it won’t let me!”

  Suddenly, a tremendous blow crashed down onto the top of Roderick’s helmet, driving him to his knees as his ears rang and lights danced before his eyes. He looked up into the distinctly miffed-looking face of Prince Tretaptus.

  “Now, really, look what you made me do!” The admonishment was supposed to be stern, but it was about as forceful as being spanked by a puppy. “I’ve tried to be patient and polite about this, but it’s not on! If we’re going to have a fight, the least you could do is pay attention!”

  His blade lashed out, catching Roderick’s sword and knocking it fluidly to the ground just out of reach. “I’ve tried to be courteous, I really have!” he declared as the woman, after a brief anxious look in the other soldier’s direction, rushed over to join him. “I was trying for a fair fight! But I can see your mind isn’t on this, so I’m sorry, but I’m just going to have to finish it now!”

  “Kill him!” the woman demanded as she closed the last few yards between them. “Stop being so damned nice and do it, dullard! This is an emergency!”

  “I know!” The prince pulled a reluctant face. “I just didn’t see the need to be rude about it.…”

  Roderick’s gauntleted fist lashed out, driving into Tretaptus’s stomach. The prince staggered back gasping, but the woman was already there, her sword raised and her expression grim as she swung around in a killer blow…

  “No!”

  The bushes erupted and, with a hearty crack, spat out Erik and his steed.

  Tretaptus’s face dropped. “Oh no, not aga—ah!”

  With a cry of frustration, both the woman and the prince were hurled off their feet by some invisible sledgehammer blow, tumbling backwards to land in an ungainly heap beside the unconscious form of their companion. Both battled at once to rise, but even as Erik yearned that they should not, it seemed as though unseen bonds enfolded them and pinned them in place.

  Erik’s eyes raked over the horror-filled glade. What was happening here? He could see his friend Roderick staggering to his feet as he snatched up his fallen broadsword from the leaf litter where both Gort and Zahora were slumped with agonising stillness. And there was another figure too, an impossible figure, for how could Halheid’s body come to be lying here and not in its high mountain grave?

  He could see that three enemies had fallen. Treacherous Prince Tretaptus and the woman dressed in chain mail and the livery of Sleiss still lay pinned and struggling next to the foul Sleiss soldier who had tried so hard to part Princess Islaine’s head from her shoulders in the fortress of his lord. Thankfully someone had made a fine job of staving in his head and he showed no sign of waking. And as for the fourth…

  But Sir Roderick had seen him too, for that last chain-mailed figure continued to reel and stagger as though drunken, swinging his sword randomly through the air as he muttered and struggled against some vicious, unseen foe.

  “I don’t want to surrender!” Erik heard him stammer. “I’m not throwing down my sword! Get off me! Get off!”

  Roderick was moving swiftly now, sword lifted, expression set and cold. Relieved now from the traitor Tretaptus’s assault, the knight gathered speed as he charged at this enemy and spun upon his heel, the great blade lifting, singing, soaring as he heaved it in a mighty arc towards the staggering soldier’s throat.

  “Shoulders!” Tretaptus screamed inexplicably, struggling desperately against his invisible bonds. “Look out!”

  But it was too late. With one awesome slice of the dreaded broadsword, the soldier’s head was sent flying.

  For a moment, the body seemed to continue to stagger, almost as if it were unaware that its most important appendage had just hurtled away into the bushes. But then, with an almost audible sigh, the chain-mailed torso folded and slumped to the floor.

  And then, from the bushes into which the head had vanished, came a long and echoing scream.

  Erik gasped as his heart pounded at the sound of a cry he would know anywhere.

  Islaine!

  Distantly, he heard Tretaptus gasp too. “But she was out cold!” he exclaimed, even as the bushes erupted once more, this time gloriously expelling a mass of blonde hair and a slender, beautiful figure cloaked in sodden blue velvet. Islaine’s hands and ankles were bound but had not, it seemed, stopped her from rolling down the slight incline from her hiding place into the glade, her pale face flushed and her dress splattered with fresh blood. A moment later, the loose head of the beheaded soldier rolled gently down the slight slope and spun to a halt beside her.

  “He landed in my lap!” Erik heard her cry in desperate distress. “Right in my lap! He blinked at me!”

  He could restrain himself no longer. He had to cry out.

  “Princess Islaine!” he exclaimed.

  Her eyes flashed up. She stared at him.

  And for a brief, inexplicable instant, it seemed to him as though her eyes had filled with horror.

  Erik fought down a surge of distress. Well, she did not know him. She had no reason to…

  “Don’t move!”

  The voice echoed from the far side of the glade. Erik’s head shot up. He stared.

  The Sleiss soldier, the brute from the execution whom Erik had earlier discounted, was on his feet. In spite of the throbbing head wound that should have negated any hint of consciousness for some considerable time to come, he showed no sign of distress or disorientation. In one hand, he was holding a small velvety pouch that he had just lifted from the restrained form of the woman soldier. His expression was one of raw, grim determination.

  “No one move!” he repeated, throwing the admonishment at Sir Roderick, who had half-started towards the princess. Behind Erik, the bushes parted a final time to reveal the breathless forms of Elder and Slynder. Their party was at last complete.

  “Why should we listen to you?” Elder’s hand was extended; Erik could only assume it was he who held Tretaptus and the woman pinned in place. “My magic can crush you in an instant, dog!”

  “But I have magic too!” With a jerk of one hand, the soldier emptied the little pouch onto the palm of his hand to expose a small, glistening o
bject that seemed almost to set the light around it dancing…

  A ring. It was a ring.

  “The Ring of Anthiphion!” Slynder breathed the words in shock, his hands grasping his dagger hilt. “You have it!”

  “Surrender the Ring and we will consider letting you live!” Elder’s voice was a tower of thunder. “It is of no use to you!”

  “But it’s magic, right?” The soldier’s hand was shaking but his face remained stubborn. “And everyone here knows and believes it’s magic. That’s how magic works.”

  “Your nonsense talk will not spare you.” Whole armies would have fled from the look in Elder’s eyes. “Give me the Ring!”

  The soldier pinched the Ring between two fingers as he lifted it into the air. “Everyone knows it’s magic,” he repeated softly. “That’s it. I believe it too. And I believe that if I want, I can use the magic in this Ring to pick up me, my friends, and the princess and drop us in the wild forest, far away from all of you.”

  “You cannot wield the Ring!” Elder snapped, but Erik could hear the slight tremble of uncertainty beneath his tone. The soldier heard it too.

  “You’re worried!” he exclaimed. “You’re not sure! You think I might be able to do it! And do you know what?” He grinned, impulsive, triumphant. “I think that’s all I need. Because I, my friends, and the princess are going to the wild forest! Right now!”

  Light blazed like fire across the clearing as the Ring burst alive with scarlet flames. Erik caught one last glimpse of the soldier’s face as he whooped with triumph and then the light was…

  …gone

  For a brief, everlasting moment, all Fodder could do was stare at the sky. Not that there was much sky to be seen, brief cloudy glimpses between twisting, gnarled limbs and finger-like shattered branches that clawed at the air above him. But he stared at it nonetheless, his breath rising and falling, his head itching and tickling from the Narrative damage done by the impact of Thud’s boot, his neck still disconcertingly loosened. But none of that mattered.

  Because the Narrative light was gone.

  And he knew these trees. He was in the Wild Forest. And the soft breathing he could hear nearby told him that he wasn’t there alone.

  He’d done it.

  He’d done it.

  He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d managed to wake. Such a severe Narrative wound should have left him unconscious for hours as long as the light lingered. But he’d been able to hear his friends struggling, battling without him, losing, and he’d been so desperate to help them that somehow he’d fought his way back through the demand he stay unconscious, back to a wakefulness he shouldn’t have been able to achieve. And then…

  He’d done magic.

  Magic was a Narrative conceit. He knew that. His thoughts from the night before had surged back into his head, and he’d finally grasped the idea he’d groped towards before. It worked because the characters believed it worked, and The Narrative made anything they believed possible. And even though he’d wondered, even though he’d doubted, those around him had doubted too and with the Ring in his hands, that had just been enough.…

  “Did that just…work?” Flirt’s voice drifted in, bewildered, from somewhere to his right.

  “He used Narrative belief.” Dullard’s response from over to Fodder’s left sounded awestruck. “He turned The Narrative against itself. That’s genius.”

  “Could…” The high-pitched, faltered sentence came from somewhere beyond Fodder’s feet. Pleasance’s voice sounded both harrowed and flustered. “Could someone please…be so good…as to get this…thing…out of my lap?”

  That didn’t sound promising. Slowly, carefully, Fodder pushed himself up to a sit. Curly-haired and dishevelled and grasping her sword, Flirt appeared to one side. Dullard gently pulled himself to his feet and loped the couple of yards past the headless and twitching chain-mailed body to where Princess Pleasance sat, bound and staring down at the blond and bloody head of Shoulders the Disposable, which lay nestled in her velvet skirts. Her lip was quivering with a mixture of distress and fury.

  As Fodder and Flirt approached, Dullard carefully lifted the detached head away from the whimpering princess, cradling it cautiously beneath the ears.

  Fodder bent down and stared into the unshaven face.

  “Shoulders?” he said softly.

  Shoulders’s eyes snapped open. He stared straight back.

  “You okay, mate?” Fodder queried softly. “How are you feeling?”

  Shoulders stared at Fodder for a brief moment longer. His eyes darted across to where Flirt was watching with her lips twisted, to Dullard’s long fingers grasping his cheeks, and to Pleasance’s horrified expression. And then finally, inevitably, his eyes alighted on the stumbling form of his body as it staggered and wheeled, without the aid of attached direction, to its feet.

  He blinked.

  “Naaarrrrghhhhh!!!!” he said.

  TO BE CONTINUED IN … The Merry Band

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  About the Author

  Katherine Vick was born in the middle bit of England longer ago than she’d care to admit (1979, if you must know. Aren’t you nosy?). She studied geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, writing her dissertation on the role of landscape and culture in fantasy novels. She then moved on to a master’s degree in literary studies and creative writing at the University of Central England, where she wrote the dissertation that inspired the creation of Fodder, so she hopes you’ll feel she put her education to good use. She flirted briefly with fast food and retail work before settling down as a college administrator. She spends occasional weekends on historic battlefields in her capacity as a rather clumsy late-medieval reenactor. She (mis)spent a part of her youth writing stories based around other people’s literary and media creations. She likes to read and watch fantasy, history, and science fiction—frankly, anything that gets her away from the real world, which is far too much trouble. Occasionally she even gets around to writing stuff.

  The Realm of Katherine Vick

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  @ThinklingsBooks

  Thinklings Books started out when three speculative-fiction-loving professional editors—Jeannie Ingraham, Deborah Natelson, and Sarah Awa—got together and formed a writing group. We called ourselves the Thinklings, in honor of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s group, the Inklings.

  Over time, we found ourselves agonizing more and more about how messed up the publishing industry had become. Why couldn’t good books get published? Why were so many bad books published just because their authors had big Twitter followings? We wished there were something we could do about the problem . . . and then we realized there was.

  As a developmental editor, a substantive/line editor, and a proof-reader, the three of us knew good writing when we saw it—and we knew how to make it even better. We had a lot of experience walking our clients through the publishing process—both traditional and self-publish—and we had contacts with marketing and design experts. We had some amazing unpublished books lined up and ready for production. We had, in fact, everything we needed to make a great publishing company. All that was left was to actually do it.

  So we’re doing it.

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