Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  “The chalk marks are too close together,” Mithos said, looking at a pale blotch on the road. “I hope there’s enough dust.”

  “Any theories?”

  “About where they’re going? We’re heading north. I’d say Verneytha. Possibly the capital itself.”

  “Well, at least we’re ready for the raiders now,” I said.

  “The crossbows?” asked Mithos.

  “No,” I replied, “the coffins. One each.”

  SCENE XLII The Farmhouse by the Woods

  Ten miles south of Verneytha, the chalk vanished. We had lost them. But only for a moment. Garnet and Renthrette had retraced our path, and now they came cantering back from behind glowing with excitement.

  “They left the road a quarter of a mile back,” said Garnet. “We picked up their trail a couple of hundred yards after the last chalk mark.”

  We doubled back to where a narrow dirt track trailed off to the west through an orchard of small apple trees.

  “We didn’t want to risk following the wagon without you,” said Garnet, proud of such superhuman restraint.

  “It goes to a farmhouse,” said Renthrette. “There’s nothing else there.”

  “Excellent,” said Lisha, and they grinned at each other as if she’d tossed them a bone to gnaw on. “Plan?”

  “We get a closer look,” said Mithos.

  It had started to rain, and the early-evening sky was heavy with dark clouds. We had concealed the wagon and horses in a grove of trees close to the road, and then moved cautiously through the orchard in silence.

  The farmhouse was a rambling sprawl of ramshackle buildings gathered around a courtyard that housed a few chickens. The wagons we had pursued from Hopetown were there, their sides folded down, empty. There was no sign of life. We lay in the long, wet grass at the edge of the orchard and watched.

  I was just starting to get stiff from the cold when a man in a white linen tunic emerged from the main house and walked around the perimeter, looking about him. It was Caspian Joseph, the man who sold me the pendant. He completed his circuit of the buildings and went back inside, apparently satisfied.

  “Not much of a patrol,” said Garnet.

  “I don’t think it was a patrol,” said Lisha. “Something is about to happen.”

  And, right on cue, eight raiders emerged from the house in full armor.

  I reached for my crossbow, but Orgos stilled me with a touch.

  “They aren’t coming for us,” he whispered.

  He was right. The raiders came out carrying two coffinlike boxes, walked around the pigpen, and moved away from us, towards. what?

  “What’s over there?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” said Renthrette. “Fields, orchards, the edge of the Iruni Wood.”

  What was going on?

  Caspian Joseph had followed them out, but once they got a little ways from the farm buildings, he turned back towards the wagons. The rain was falling more heavily now, and there was a rumble of thunder that lasted several seconds.

  “Now is our chance,” said Mithos.

  “For what?” I asked, fairly sure I wouldn’t like the answer.

  “To look in the house,” he said. “I’m betting he’s alone. We can probably get in and look around without him seeing us. If he spots us, we can take care of him.”

  “And the raiders?” said Orgos, as if all was perfectly reasonable thus far.

  “Orgos and I will follow them,” said Lisha.

  Mithos and the siblings clearly had the better deal, though I doubt they saw it that way.

  “If we aren’t back by morning,” she added, “we’ll meet in Harvest at the governor’s palace. Will, you’re with us.”

  So while the others set to investigating the house, I went trekking through the rain with Orgos and Lisha to see what grim little picnic the raiders were on. I was on strict instructions to keep my distance and not “engage” the enemy. As if I needed telling.

  The storm had begun with gusto now, and we probably could have walked right behind the raiders and they wouldn’t have known we were there, but we went from tree to tree and ditch to ditch to be on the safe side. In fact, it was the first time since the mission had begun where I felt a kind of thrill: They didn’t know we were here, so we had the upper hand. Of course, if they suddenly turned and wheeled those scyaxes of theirs up to fight, that would change very quickly. We had had enough difficulty fighting them on even terms. With three of us against eight of them (assuming that the coffins didn’t spring open and release another couple of zombie raiders to make it a round ten), we wouldn’t have a chance.

  Renthrette had been right. The edge of the Iruni Wood, which we had seen from the Shale side that night in the burning village, loomed sudden and black out of the storm. The raiders went in.

  I faltered, but Lisha, moving close to the ground like an animal, her spear clasped in both hands, kept going. Orgos drew his sword and gave me a nod of something I took to be encouragement. I followed.

  It was better in the woods. There was more cover and less light. But I had barely had the chance to acknowledge this when muffled voices came through the pattering rain: They had stopped.

  Lisha raised a warning hand and Orgos fanned right. She nodded to me, and I, cautiously, moved left, unsure of what I was doing, certain that the snapping twigs under my feet would bring those crimson-cloaked monsters screaming out of the rain.

  We inched forward and the light changed subtly. Somewhere up ahead there was a break in the trees. A few more yards and we saw it: a clearing like a great hole in the forest. In the center was a circle of rough-hewn stones, each a little larger than a man. I hesitated. The place felt odd-dangerous-and not just because the raiders were here. I peered round a great oak into the clearing. In the middle was another rock, different from the others, pale and lustrous so that it seemed to glow slightly in the odd light of the storm.

  The raiders entered the circle, several of them crouching by the coffins they had carried. They were opening them.

  I turned to stare at Lisha, consumed with certainty that something bad was going on, something strange that I didn’t want to see or be a part of, something that would make all that talk of magic swords look like very small potatoes indeed. I could barely see her through the gathering darkness and lashing rain. She caught my gaze and pointed. She wanted me to get closer to the stones. I swallowed hard and chose the biggest.

  The raiders were busy with their coffins, so none of them was looking my way. There was a flash of lightning, followed by a lengthy roar of thunder. It was now or never. I scampered through the wet bracken and flattened myself as quietly as I could against one of the great half-sculpted stones.

  The raiders opened the coffins and lifted out a pair of corpses, both dressed in scarlet and bronze. These they dragged over to a pair of the standing stones only a few yards to my left, and propped them up in sitting positions. I stayed low and watched as the raiders gathered in a tight circle around that central milky boulder.

  And then I had an idea.

  Moving as quickly as I could, I slid over to the next stone, paused, then moved to the next, and the next. In a matter of seconds I was hiding by one of the great monoliths against which a dead raider lay. I didn’t think about Lisha or Orgos, or pleasing the party, or risking my life. I just had an idea and I was suddenly overwhelmed by what I can only describe, albeit inadequately, as curiosity. There was something I needed to know, and the presence of the raiders wasn’t going to stop me from finding out.

  It wasn’t like they were going to see me anyway. It was dark, and the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind was howling, and they were all wearing those closed helms with tiny eye slits and standing in a little huddle thirty yards away with their backs to me. I could just look quickly and then get away. Just a peep. Two seconds. Tops.

  I scrambled round the stone and stared at the dead raider’s bronze face. The stone between his eyes was just like the others I had seen, and it h
ad the opaline pallor of the rock in the center of the circle. I thought I heard voices from the raiders and glanced over my shoulder. Their voices rose in unison and sounded rhythmic: a chant.

  Whatever they were going to do with this raider corpse, it would involve that crystal in his helm. I was sure of it. It was set right into the metal, so I couldn’t pry it out. Instead, I fumbled at the chin strap and tugged the helm off. The raider’s eyes were open but sightless, and there was blood on his chin, but otherwise he looked quite ordinary and quite dead.

  I bolted, stepping quickly back round the standing stone and crouching, feeling my chest heave and my pulse race. Real evidence, at last. The mystery of the raiders was inextricably bound to the crystals in their helms. That was why the only raider corpse we had seen before today was one that had been beheaded and taken by those ritualists in Ironwall. The stone in the helm had power, the way Orgos’s sword had power, though what it did, I wasn’t sure.

  Then the chanting from the center of the darkened circle rose suddenly above the storm and ended with a shout. There was a crack of something that might have been thunder, but the pale light that accompanied it wasn’t lightning. For a second it was bright as day and the standing stone at my back threw a long, hard shadow; then it was dark again. I didn’t notice the mist for a second, but when I did, all my curiosity and triumph evaporated in the old panic. The raiders were coming! They were going to materialize in front of me and I was sitting here with one of their helms in my hand.

  I fumbled for my sword, still clutching the helm, but then I saw that the stone in its forehead was glowing softly. As it glowed, the mist grew denser. And I finally understood what the helm did. The mist wasn’t bringing a raider to me, it was gathering around the helm in my hands. It was taking me with it.

  SCENE XLIII One of Them

  For a second the greyness of the mist was complete. Then it began to thin and I instantly knew that I was not where I had been. There was no rain. There was a glow, as of torchlight, and I could see great stone walls and arches. I was inside some vaulted chamber that had no windows and smelled strongly of horses. It was hot and stuffy. And there were raiders everywhere.

  There must have been fifty of them. They were walking in pairs, some carrying boxes and weapons, some dragging corpses. They were all in full armor and looked like they were getting ready for something important. The mist was still clearing about me. Before it blew away altogether, I did the only thing I could think to do and jammed the raider’s helmet on my head. Instantly the world got a little darker, narrower, and more claustrophobic as I peered at it from inside the helm.

  I was standing in one of a series of arched alcoves around the wall of a huge circular room. To one side was a stack of scyaxes, to the other a pile of folded crimson cloaks. I grabbed one of each, threw the cloak over my shoulders, and hoped it would do. It was stuffy and dry in there and I could feel the sweat breaking out all over me. On the other side of the room, I could see a handful of raiders stepping out of similar alcoves and guessed they were the ones who had traveled with me from the stone circle in the Iruni Wood. Two of them started dragging one of the corpses from the circle. The other corpse, minus his helm, was probably still there. I had taken his place.

  The other raiders walked away. Only two were to do the job of funeral detail and they hadn’t come for me yet. I watched, thinking fast. If I played dead well enough, I might yet get out alive.

  I slumped down and kept very still, watching through my helm as the soldiers shouldered the corpse onto a table beside a pair of small metal doors. They removed his helm, cloak, and body armor, working quickly and methodically, as if they had done this many times before. When he was left wearing nothing but the light bloodstained clothes he wore under his armor, one of them took a long steel hook and used it to open the metal doors. As soon as the doors were opened I could see what they were doing. My heart sank.

  It was a furnace. The chamber was hot and stuffy because they cremated their dead down here. They just used the same magic that allowed them to transport themselves into a fight to spirit any dead away to where they could be privately and absolutely disposed of.

  And if I played dead much longer, they’d be sticking me in there to burn me with the others.

  I got to my feet, checking that the funeral detail wasn’t coming for me yet, then moved quickly, looking for a way out, walking with what I hoped looked like a sense of purpose. It would only be a matter of time before they realized they were missing a dead body.

  There were two stone staircases going up the sides of the chamber. I made for the left one, knowing that whatever was upstairs had to be better than this. I was halfway up when another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  Looking down, I could see that the floor of the great chamber was a single vast stone, pale and lustrous like quartz. It was the same as the rock in the stone circle by the farmhouse, the same as the crystals in the raiders’ helms. Whatever this place was, it had been built on an outcrop of that same rock. I stood there, staring at it.

  “Get down there,” said a commanding voice at my elbow. It was a raider: an officer, judging by the lateral crest on his helm. “You’re blocking the stairs. We’re ready to move.”

  I mumbled and stepped aside to let him pass, but he wasn’t to be sidestepped.

  “I said get down there,” he growled. I wondered if I could come up with something that would get me up and out, but then I saw something that changed my mind.

  Coming through the heavy oak door at the top of the stairs was the raider with the staff and the great horned helm. He moved slowly, and if the raiders always moved like cogs in a great machine, he was something different, something earthy and terrible, something animal but saturated with dark purpose. Immediately I knew that he was the one who worked whatever magic moved the raiders from place to place. Even at this distance I could feel his strangeness and the power that seemed to come off him like an odor. I wasn’t about to go up to meet him.

  The officer who was ordering me to go down sensed his presence and fell silent as if unnerved. Hugging the cloak about me, I hurried down. He followed at my heels, and right behind us came the magic worker in his horned helm, breathing power and malice.

  “Get your horse and weapons,” said the officer, and then turned away quickly, as if he was as anxious as I was to get away from the figure behind him.

  Suddenly the raiders seemed to be everywhere, hemming me in, moving as a unit. With no other options, I moved with them, down a passage to a great curved corridor that circled the chamber we had just come from. In fact, it wasn’t a corridor so much as a long narrow room where the smell I had picked up before became almost overwhelming. It was a stable.

  The raiders all seemed to know where they were going, and the moment I hesitated I was jostled until I got into the line. We kept moving as we filed past dozens of gigantic horses, all barded with leather and ring mail and cloaked in scarlet. Each raider opened the door to one of the stalls, seized the bridle of his mount, and waited. I had no choice but to do the same. Maybe we would lead our horses outside and I could slip away as soon as I had figured out where I was.

  Then a sound went through me like thin steel, a high, wailing cry from the circular chamber, a keening that contained words I couldn’t catch. There was a great roar, as of thunder, a flash of white light that bounced off the walls and made the horses start and whinny. As I tried to calm mine down, I saw the mist begin to gather around both of us and knew only that whatever nightmare I had stepped into was about to get worse.

  SCENE XLIV The Raid

  The mist had barely begun to clear when I felt the rain. It felt cool and refreshing after the stifling closeness of the stables, and it immediately made me think I was back where I had been. As the thin fog blew away I looked about me for the stone circle, then realized that I was also looking for Lisha and Orgos, desperately hoping that they would not be there when fifty crimson raiders appeared out of the air before them.
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  They weren’t there. But then, neither were the stones.

  In the darkness, I could barely see the vast ring of raiders, though I heard them mount their horses as one. We were not in the Iruni Wood, but more than that I couldn’t say. The ground around us was open, the grass short as if it had been heavily grazed. A field, then. There were trees, but they were some way off, and the rain was lighter than it had been in the stone circle. If it was the same storm, then I could be south of the Iruni Wood, I thought, only a mile or two from that torched village where we had first encountered the raiders. If I made for the forest and headed north, I might find the farmhouse and the others.

  But the raiders were already moving off, silent and purposeful as ever, and I knew that riding away would get me nothing more than a red-flighted arrow in my back. I clambered unprofessionally up onto my colossal horse, ignored the glance of the nearest raider as I swore my way into the saddle, and moved with them, trying to contain my dread at what might happen next.

  As an actor I was used to noticing how people moved, and it suddenly occurred to me that even in the low light of the evening I didn’t look remotely like a crimson raider. I didn’t have the stature, or the physical confidence, and I was obviously terrified of my horse. I needed to get out of this situation before it got me killed.

  Suddenly the column came to a halt and the officer up front gestured as another lit a torch. The column became a broad line facing forward, facing-more importantly-a village.