Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  One thing we did learn, for what it was worth, was that although the long corridors did have concealed doors into the raiders’ quarters, the raiders themselves almost certainly never used them. The raiders moved between their barracks and the great circular chamber in the basement, which could put them anywhere in the area. They could come and go without ever setting foot in a public area inside or outside the keep. It was tough to swallow the idea that the servants, the regular army, the count, his pale wife, and the rest of the castle were unaware of the presence of two hundred armed men, but it was possible.

  “Well, now we know,” said Renthrette with a satisfied smile, as if she’d figured it all out for herself. This annoyed me, as it had been my flash of genius, but it was typical of Renthrette and Garnet. You only make progress by doing things. Ideas are worthless. What really moves things along is hefting your ax at somebody or swinging from the walls like some lesser primate. I might as well give up on the smooth, witty banter and just toss her a piece of fruit from time to time.

  But not everything was falling neatly into place. The attack on Arlest, which we’d witnessed when we first arrived, was a round peg for our square holes. I was tempted to see the count as innocent and the attack as genuine, while Renthrette thought they were all guilty as hell and the attack had been purely for our benefit. That men had died in the course of laying this false trail only convinced her of its spuriousness.

  I considered the spectral army that had ravaged the region 250 years ago. After the dust had settled, three new capital cities had been built, and one of them had been Adsine. The keep was as old as the town. Someone had known what that opaline rock could be used for and they had built it into the basement of the fortress. Had those who had lived here ever since forgotten about the spectral army, or had they always known what that stone could do, and Arlest (or whoever was responsible) was merely the first to use it since? And if so, why now?

  As ever, the more I learned, the less I understood. The only thing I knew for certain was that we had to get out, and we had to do so quickly and without rousing suspicion. I figured we should just fill our saddlebags and take a couple of fast horses. Renthrette argued that the contents of the wagon were too potentially useful in what might yet transpire.

  Right. We needed that wagon like we needed cobras in our underwear. I told her it was slow and obvious. She said we weren’t supposed to look like we were running away and that if we did, no matter how fast our horses were, they would get us. I suspected they would “get us” Whatever we did, but she was sick of hearing me say that, so I shut up and let her play party leader, grudgingly grateful for her not pointing out that I could no more handle a fast horse than I could beat my arms and fly back to Cresdon.

  It was a curious thing, but considering that we’d solved the main part of the mystery, I couldn’t help feeling that it made little difference. After all, knowing where the raiders came from didn’t make them disappear. What were we supposed to do, shout “We know where you live!” and figure they’d go away out of sheer embarrassment?

  Renthrette was all business, only interested in the job at hand. Whatever minuscule spark there had been between us had given up the ghost as soon as adventuring had reared its ironclad head. Her face was all steely again and she had gone back to double-checking our equipment and polishing her sword. I was just an extra, a walk-on who announces the arrival of the mad duke and then goes off into the wings and is forgotten. In my plays I’d always tried to give my walk-ons a bit of something special: some pithy philosophy or wry political humor. I got Enter Messenger. Messenger gives letter to the warrior queen. Exit Messenger. Renthrette had her script memorized and was ready to hold center stage for a good while to come.

  Then, while I was laboriously pursuing this metaphor through my head and she was carefully checking the links of her mail shirt one by one, she said, “You’d better think up something to tell the count so that he won’t suspect anything.”

  Great. So she’s in control but I have to think us out of this fortress.

  “Such as?” I said testily.

  “You’re the storyteller,” she answered, without looking up.

  I thought through all the lies that had helped me out of tight corners before: the sudden death of an aged aunt, the news that my house was on fire or that my wife had just had twins. I was a good liar and could deliver all the usual one-liners with a straight face: “What a delightful baby,” “You can count on me,” “I only play cards for fun,” “I wouldn’t dream of such a thing, Officer,” and of course, “Your wife? I had no idea. ” Still, this time my back was really up against the wall and the old chestnuts wouldn’t help. As a rule, however, I don’t worry about plausibility when I lie, I just state the case and adamantly say that it is so until the opposition begins to waver and confesses that he was too drunk to recall, exactly. I went to think amongst the ancient volumes of the tiny library on the second floor.

  Renthrette and I saw Arlest immediately before dinner and announced our intention to leave as soon as we had eaten, hoping to travel a few hours before stopping for the night. She thought this was too sudden, but what we had learnt had radically altered my perspective on the place and the people in it, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine speaking to Arlest at all without freezing up. The castle seemed still darker and colder, with longer, more eerily silent corridors and more guards than seemed necessary. The chancellor struck me as calculating and the pale, silent countess was positively sinister. It had become a place of strange shadows and howling winds: a castle of ghosts and vampires. Only Arlest himself remained oddly unblemished. I still couldn’t quite cast him as the villain, plotting and laughing up his sleeve as he ensnared his victims. I had seen too much death and misery to be able to pin it all on this weary, mild-mannered old man.

  “Why the change of plan?” he asked with guileless interest.

  “Well, sir,” I began.

  “You needn’t call me sir, Will, you know that.” He smiled.

  “Right,” I said, a little uncomfortably. “Well, we are moving off because we have vital information to pass on to our friends who are currently monitoring the movements of the raiders in northern Greycoast.”

  I felt Renthrette shift anxiously. We hadn’t discussed my story.

  “Information?” he said. “What information?”

  “I know where the raiders come from,” I said.

  Again Renthrette moved, fractionally. They were both still and tense, waiting to hear what I had to say. I swallowed hard to steady my nerves. “They come from the lost kingdom of Bangladeia across the sea.”

  I paused for effect and the count sat down slowly, as did Renthrette. I doubted either had heard of Bangladeia, and both, for quite different reasons, were about to start doubting my sanity.

  “Over two hundred years ago,” I went on earnestly, “the people of Bangladeia were beset by a terrible calamity which the books of your library here describe as a dragon.”

  “A dragon?” said Renthrette, a little too dryly.

  “Probably a poetic description,” I added with the indulgent smile of a teacher imparting knowledge, “for something far more mundane. A drought or famine, for example. The small kingdom of Bangladeia was unable to support itself, and many of its people died. From the dregs of their civilization they formed an army and set to wandering from place to place, taking from others what they could not grow or produce for themselves. Somewhere along the line, it seems,” I went on, quite reasonably, “they met Relthor the Necromantic Sage of the Western Mountains, and through him they traded their souls for life. After a hundred and eighty years of wandering, they have found their way to your lands. The warriors are vampires. We must completely rethink our approach, since I am in no doubt that we are facing the ranks of the Undead, who dwell in the darkness of centuries and survive by drinking the blood of their victims.”

  There was a long silence and they both looked at me with wide eyes.

  “
You think the raiders are vampires?” said the count, cautiously.

  “Certainly,” I replied with becoming gravity. “And have been for a hundred and eighty years. They turn into bats between attacks.”

  Renthrette’s mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.

  “So you’ll want to borrow some good horses,” said Arlest with a sort of resigned bewilderment. I couldn’t say if he was disappointed or just caught completely off-guard.

  Renthrette found her voice and cleared her throat before saying slowly, “We are in no great hurry. Will has been working very hard over the last few days and is-” She paused for thought. “-rather tired. I will drive the wagon back to Greycoast and he can rest in the back.”

  Now she was getting the hang of it. The two of them exchanged knowing glances, and Arlest nodded thoughtfully.

  “I’ll provide some blankets,” he said kindly.

  “That would be helpful,” I said, “and we will want as much garlic as you can get hold of.”

  The count nodded slowly, his eyes wary. I tapped my finger on the side of my nose significantly and sidled over to the bar. I poured myself a very large glass of wine, downing it hurriedly as I muttered about sunlight and wooden stakes. Meanwhile, Renthrette and the count talked in concerned tones.

  Fine. I get to be scapegoat again, but if it gets us out of this fortified charnel house in one piece, I’ll take it.

  The rest of the dinner party arrived as I was conspicuously downing a third cup of wine, and they were informed of our decision to leave, along with a version of the reason. Nobody said too much about Bangladeia and its blood-swilling geriatrics. Renthrette didn’t speak to me until dinner was over, though she gave me a couple of long, blank looks while I was talking earnestly about vampire battle tactics and plotting the positions of certain ghoul units with pieces of cheese and cured ham. It was a quiet meal.

  A couple of hours later we were on the road and Renthrette was driving. Once out of Adsine’s rutted and smelly streets I came up front and sat beside her. She turned a stony face on me and said, “What exactly were you trying to do, Will? Get us killed?”

  “We were quite safe,” I answered cheerfully.

  “I have never heard such rubbish in all my life,” she said, clutching her face in both hands for a moment. “I couldn’t believe my ears.”

  “You told me to come up with a story. I did.”

  “How could you come up with something so absurd? All that Bankle-Whatever-it-was rubbish-”

  “Bangladeia,” I inserted.

  “Whatever,” she snapped back at me. “If I hadn’t suggested you were going mad, he would have smelled a rat so fast that our heads would be on the block by now.”

  “You’re a lousy judge of human nature.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” I said, “that so far they haven’t given us credit for discovering anything. They must believe that we’d fall for something utterly preposterous or they wouldn’t have invited us to share a castle with the raiders, would they? If Arlest really is responsible, then he brought us in on the assumption that we were too stupid to figure out the truth. They are dying for a chance to laugh at our stupidity, so I gave it to them, and they went for it. Hook, line, and sinker. You don’t have to be plausible. Just give them what makes them feel good about themselves.”

  “Well, it seemed dangerous to me,” she said, a little less emphatically.

  “A serious excuse would have made them analyze it seriously. In our position, our greatest strength is our ineptitude.”

  She thought for a moment and said, “How on earth did you dream up all that garbage?” she said.

  I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be praise, but I took it as such.

  “Actually,” I said humbly, “most of it is from a legend I came upon in the library. As I said, it’s probably a reworking of that ghost army story. If you see it as just a small, ruined country trying to win itself some profits by force, then it seems kind of similar to Shale’s current position.”

  “So you were deliberately sailing close to the wind.”

  “If you have to sail at all, you may as well get a thrill out of it.”

  “But,” she said, coming back to the matter in hand with a jolt, “the raiders have attacked villages and convoys in Shale as well as elsewhere.”

  “True. But, as you said, they also seem to have staged an attack on Arlest in which their own people got killed. Maybe they wanted to divert suspicion, or thin out the population a bit. You know, make resources go further.”

  “That’s appalling.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It is.”

  As the sun got low behind us I turned over the question as to why Arlest had let us go. Though it was tempting, I couldn’t quite resign myself to the idea that-if it was him holding the reins of the raiders-he had believed us so completely that he no longer considered us a danger. That seemed far too casual for so meticulous an operation, even considering what a wooden sword our knowledge was. Someone in that room, maybe several or all of them, knew that our discovery of those barracks had always been a danger. That they took our departure so calmly bothered me and made me wonder for a moment exactly who it was who had been deceived. I felt the explanation in my bowels rather than in my head. They were about to do something that would make our suspicions and discoveries worthless: something conclusive.

  It was getting too dark to go on, rather like this narrative. We would soon have to camp or stay in an inn. I told Renthrette that I was worried. For once she didn’t seem to want solid reasons. I wondered if she felt it too, that sense of brooding heaviness, like the air before a storm. I was glad when we came upon an inn and the chance for a beer and a night’s sleep. Renthrette suggested that we get up early and-if we could buy or rent them from the innkeeper-yoke two extra horses to the wagon. That way we might be over the Greycoast border by noon the following day.

  Nothing of a remotely personal nature happened.

  SCENE LI A Decision

  By the evening of the second day we were only ten miles from the road between Ironwall and Hopetown and we had worked our four horses till they staggered and snorted with resentment. I patted one on the neck and it tried to bite my hand off. I sat, gazing out of the back of the wagon, and wondered vaguely what I was supposed to do if the raiders appeared. Wave? Make one last move on Renthrette? It would have to be a quick one.

  The track rolled through the Proxintar Downs until the Iruni Wood was small behind us. Atop each rise we looked for horsemen, and on one of the highest of the hills we could see the distant citadel of Ironwall to the southeast as the sun set. Even from this distance, it was impressive. We would make for it at first light and hope to find some of our company there, alive and well, though who knows what trouble they could have gotten themselves into by now.

  I made a small fire by the wagon while a little light remained and put a billy of vegetables and water on it. Renthrette tended the horses, whispering secretly to them. We ate, and the meal was hot, but nothing more. It wouldn’t feed my soul, but it might sustain my body until the raiders had other plans for it.

  For once she did not shrink away when I sat close to her, but her mind was elsewhere and I didn’t pursue the advantage. After a while, when her total lack of interest had started to infect me, I went to sleep under the wagon. I think she was grateful.

  It was just becoming light when I heard my name called by a strong male voice. I jumped, bashed my head on the front axle, and rolled out, instinctively moving away from the caller. With the wagon between me and him I had time to cock my crossbow before I peered round the side. My first thought was that the raiders had come, and my second was that Renthrette was nowhere in sight. The Downs boasted little in the way of cover, and though she could have been hiding somewhere nearby, I doubted it. I heard voices out there and swallowed hard. Not for the first time, I thought my number was up. And I wouldn’t get to use all those great speeches I’d m
emorized. It was the actor’s nightmare, dying alone, poised to give the best performance of his career to an empty house.

  “I’ll show them what Will Hawthorne is made of,” I muttered to myself, almost immediately regretting my choice of words. I dived out from behind the wagon, grunting as I hit the ground and shooting the crossbow towards the approaching people. The bolt whistled wildly off into the air and they ducked as it soared harmlessly overhead.

  “It’s a good thing you still can’t shoot,” called a large black man. “If that had come near me, I’d have been really irritated.”

  “Orgos!” I shouted. “Lisha! Where have you been?”

  I ran towards them shouting random insults at the top of my lungs. And then I saw that they weren’t alone. With them, brandishing makeshift weapons that looked suspiciously like farming implements, were Maia, her parents, and the other villagers. Lisha had gathered more from the surrounding area, so that there were forty or fifty of them, probably all homeless and destitute, all looking for a cause around which to rally.

  They were pleased to see me, and I got the distinct impression that even those villagers I had never met had heard things-good things-about me from the others. It was like being back on the stage in Cresdon.

  “Hello, Will,” said Maia. She smiled a little but her eyes were as big and serious as ever. Recent events seemed to have aged her, and when she gravely put out her tiny hand to shake mine, it didn’t seem inappropriate. I said hello and chatted to the ones I recognized, though it was an odd dynamic, since we had been through fire and death together but knew nothing of each other. Most of them were no more than faces from a dream and I couldn’t think of anything to say to them. But they smiled and shook my hand or slapped me on the shoulder as if genuinely glad to see me; as if, in fact, they thought my presence would somehow help. They were all armed, even the children, and suddenly my heart sank, because this could mean nothing but torment and death.