Will (Book 2)

by S. F. Burgess

  A damp cloth was wiped across his forehead, soothing and cold. It wiped the sides of his face and was then placed on the centre of the throbbing ache at the back of his head.

  “Oww…”

  The weak sound of his own voice pushed him towards reality, and his eyes flickered open for a moment before he screwed them tightly shut again. Light and shadow danced around him at dizzying speed, and his stomach tightened. He was lying on his side on a hard floor that smelt of wax, blood and cooking fat.

  He tried opening his eyes again. There was less spinning but still a lot of distortion. As he concentrated, a face he thought he knew came into focus. The small boy squatted at his side, a blood-stained cloth in his hand and a worried frown forming a line between his eyes. With effort, Harper placed the face before him from those in his memories.

  “You tried to steal my belt bag…” Harper said, his speech slurred. The pint-sized pickpocket nodded and gave him a grin.

  “Corin’s assertion that you have been kind to him is the only reason you and your friend are not dead already,” said a voice that came from behind Harper.

  Harper tried to sit so he could face the owner of the voice, but realised his hands were tied in front of him and movement seemed complicated.

  The voice gave an order. “Help him up.”

  A large figure came to stand over him, grabbed his upper arm and pulled Harper to his feet. Reality lurched again and his stomach shifted.

  “Do you mind if I throw up?” Harper enquired of the huge boy with the young face who was holding him.

  The boy rolled his eyes. “Could I stop it?”

  Harper shook his head and vomited noisily, splattering the floorboards at his feet with what appeared to be mostly stomach acid. There was a childish chorus of ‘eyew!’ and ‘yuck!’ and Harper realised he was stood near the edge of the stage and that he had a large audience of fascinated children staring wide-eyed at him from the body of the theatre.

  Corin, careful not to tread in the mess, moved closer and held out the damp cloth. Harper took it with his left hand; the right did not seem to be working too well, and it ached miserably. Most likely a couple of broken metacarpals, said an oddly cogent voice in his head. It made Harper giggle. Corin’s frown deepened. Folding the bloody side of the cloth in on itself, Harper used the rag to wipe his mouth before dropping it absently to the floor.

  “Thank you,” he murmured to no one in particular. He was turned carefully round and guided to a chair. Depositing him in it, his escort moved to stand behind the boy who sat at the head of the table. He was young, fifteen or sixteen maybe, but he carried an aura of authority and an adult manner, and spoke with a stern voice.

  “I am Jac. Your friend tells me he is Jonas. Who are you?”

  Harper stared at him, confused. Who am I? Do I even know any more? Who is Jonas? Pandral, Jonas is Pandral. So who is Jac? Were we looking for him? No, that was Rodin.

  “His name is Harper, and he is still recovering from the injury you inflicted. Leave him be,” Jonas said.

  It took Harper a moment to realise where the comment had come from. He carefully moved his head and found Jonas sat across from him, his bound hands resting on the tabletop.

  “Are you hurt?” Harper asked. Jonas shook his head. A subtly building anxiety he did not understand was suddenly released and Harper relaxed, slumping into his chair, groaning as his back screamed its distress at the abuse. Jac stared at him for several seconds before addressing his comments to Jonas.

  “Very well, Jonas, let us try this again,” Jac said. “How did you find us?”

  “I told you—” Jonas started.

  “I know what you told me,” Jac interrupted in a calm voice. “I told you I did not believe you; nobody here would be seen entering. So now I would like the truth.”

  Jonas glared at the boy, but Jac was not intimidated. You would be if you knew who you were sat at the table with, Harper thought, a giggle erupting and dying in the same breath. Jac and Jonas both gave him startled looks. Harper tried to get his eyes to focus consistently on their faces. Jonas turned back to address Jac.

  “I used to live here,” he admitted.

  “Prove it,” Jac said, a threatening snarl under the words.

  “My mark is a bird in flight,” Jonas said. “And it is carved into the base of the statue at the back of this stage, as I am sure your mark will be.”

  Jac nodded, satisfied with the proof Jonas had offered. “So what are you doing here, and why are you carrying a picture of Rodin?”

  “As I have been trying to tell you, we mean you no harm. We are looking for Rodin,” Jonas said.

  “Why?” Jac asked, suspicion narrowing his eyes.

  “We want to help him.”

  Jac held Jonas’s dark gaze. Realising the boy wanted more, Jonas sighed.

  “We have been asked to find him by his grandfather,” he added.

  “A Lord of Mydren hired you?” Jac said with disparaging amusement.

  The ridiculousness of the situation was too much for Harper, and another burst of giggles escaped him. Both Jac and Jonas shot him sharp looks, but for different reasons, which just made him giggle harder. Next to him Corin snorted and started giggling too, even though the boy had no idea what he was laughing at, which dragged the mirth to an even higher level. Harper was perilously close to hysterics; some tiny speck of brain matter recognised this and he clamped his left hand over his mouth, trying to control himself. Jac stared at him in bewilderment; Jonas glowered. When at last it appeared Harper had got himself under control, Jac spoke again.

  “Rodin was part of our group, a very valuable part,” Jac said. “He was teaching us all to read and write. Everyone who joins us accepts that they no longer have their own things. We share everything as a group so that nobody goes without. Rodin gave us his education, and we fed him.”

  Kiddie communism! With that thought, all control evaporated, and Harper burst into hysterical, overexcited laughter. He was soon joined by Corin and quite a few from their audience.

  “Maybe we should knock him around a little?” suggested the large boy stood behind Jac, staring at Harper with wary confusion.

  “If you think it would help…” Jonas agreed, watching with a vexed expression as Harper cried with laughter.

  “No, Jac,” Corin said, smothering his giggles, but still grinning. “Please, do not hurt him. He is funny.”

  The strong emotion was causing Harper’s energy to struggle to life within him, and suddenly he was fighting for control on two fronts. Reaching for all of the self-discipline Davlin had drummed into him, he forced his breathing to slow down and his mind to calm, pushing the energy back into its dormant state.

  “He is an idiot,” Jac said with disdain. The drive was dropping out of Harper’s mania, the laughter slowing to a stop. He felt dizzy and sick again, his head throbbing with tight, vicious rushes of pain. Concussion… possible fractured skull, said the clinical little voice in his head. This time there was no laughter; this time Harper felt fear. There was too much he needed to hide, too much he could not afford to show. Losing control could cost him his life before he had a chance to complete his mission.

  “Could I trouble you for a drink?” Harper asked, his voice rough. Without being given instruction, Corin ran to the other side of the stage and came back holding a mug carefully in two hands. He placed it on the table in front of Harper and gave him a friendly pat on his arm. Reaching for the mug, Harper found he was unable to grasp with his right hand. Upon examination, he discovered a thick purple spreading from his knuckles up the back of his hand to his wrist, then around into odd speckled lines of deep yellow and green across his palm. So he took the mug with his left hand instead and drank the water it contained in deep gulps, washing the taste of bile from his mouth. The drink helped bring clarity, but it was still lucidity from behind a fuzzy cloud of pain.

  “Now that you are finished…” Jac said stiffly. “As I was going to say, Rodin was here and he
was content; happier than he could ever be with his father. If that was still the case, we would kill you and have done with this.”

  “Rodin is not here anymore,” Jonas deduced.

  Jac shook his head. “No, he is not. About a moon ago, he and Hari, our leader, along with nine other older children, were taken. Normally a boy Rodin’s age would not be out late at night with the older children, for his own safety, but he and Hari had become good friends long before Hari invited him to join us. They did everything together.”

  “Taken?” Jonas asked, confused.

  “It started about five years ago: older children among us disappearing,” Jac said, the fear in his eyes not replicated in his voice. “Not all the time; a few every couple of moons. They never came back.”

  “Could they have decided to leave Hemtark?” Jonas asked.

  Jac shrugged. “Some of them, perhaps. But many left younger brothers and sisters. They would not have abandoned them willingly.”

  “Do you know who is taking them?” Harper asked, floundering blindly for his cognitive processes.

  Jac gave him a withering look. “If we knew who it was, we would have fixed the problem by now. We are children, but we are not stupid or incapable. None of us have seen the others being taken, and those taken have not escaped back to tell us about it.”

  Suspicion filled Jonas’s black eyes. “If you are not going to kill us, what do you want from us?”

  “We will let you go if you agree to never speak of this place to anyone—and if you promise to stop whoever is taking children from the streets of Hemtark,” Jac said.

  “Why would you trust us?”

  Jac sighed. “You are right. I have no idea if I can trust you. Corin appears to like the giggling idiot, but beyond that I must take a chance. We cannot ask for help—we do not want to end up as Protectors or whores. But if you find Rodin, you will be in a position to remove our hidden enemy. I must take the opportunity you present.”

  “Very well, Jac,” Jonas said. “We will do our best to stop these abductions. Is there anything more you can tell us?”

  “Only that Hari, Rodin and the others were heading for the taverns in the Wilting the night they disappeared.”

  The Wilting was an area of Hemtark where even Protectors needed the security of numbers to enter. It was also, Harper suspected, the origin of many of the dead bodies of which he had recently been made aware. In short, it was no place for a child.

  Jonas nodded, standing from the table. “We will be leaving now,” he said firmly, holding out his bound hands and giving Jac a pointed look.

  With a tight smile on his face, Jac nodded, giving his large friend a glance. The boy moved round to cut through the twine. As Jonas moved to help Harper up, Jac came closer and spoke in a low voice, his eyes carrying the shadow of an old pain.

  “If you find Rodin, please consider that returning him to his family might not be what is best for him. This life was not forced on all of us. Some chose it for a reason.”

  For Harper, the journey back to the Central Tower was a half-recollected, slow, shambling progress of pain and confusion. Pandral made several attempts to engage him in conversation, but he found he could not think, speak and walk at the same time. With Pandral guiding his steps and supporting him with a shoulder under his arm, Harper forced his feet to keep moving one after the other through the dark. They made it to the main gate eventually. Unfortunately, the guard they had passed several times that day was no longer on duty, and the hard-faced Protector who stood in his place was highly dubious about their claims of identity. Unable to prove who either of them were, Pandral insisted they summoned Fergus.

  While they waited for the sergeant to arrive, Harper found that standing had become an impossible feat. He eased himself to the ground, back against the cold wall of the gate tower, soothing his aching back. Pulling his knees to his chest, he rested his angrily thumping head against them, swallowing saliva repeatedly in an attempt to hold back the rather insistent need to be sick.

  “What happened to him, my Lord?”

  It took a while for Harper’s addled brain to let him know that it was Fergus’s voice he was hearing.

  “Head injury,” Pandral said with concern.

  “Would you like me to deal with him, my Lord?” Fergus asked.

  “That might be for the best, Fergus, yes,” Pandral agreed.

  There was more conversation, but it was fading. Harper felt his body lifted with firm hands. There was a short period of confusing movement. Liquid was given to him; it tasted of lepdrac, and he spat it out, frightened, trying to explain that he did not want it, his words garbled. Plain water replaced the drug, washing the bitterness out of his mouth. Then the ministrations stopped, warm comfort surrounded him, and Harper jumped willingly into unconsciousness.

  Rodin

  Harper awoke with what felt like a hangover. His tongue was swollen and sticky in his mouth, his eyes sore, his head throbbing and his stomach overly sensitive. He had a vague recollection of laughing children and following Pandral down a rabbit hole.

  What did I drink last night?

  Common sense told him it was unlikely he had drunk anything, given what he could have let slip whilst under the influence and his ever-present fear of getting caught. So why did he feel so bad? Twitching heavy, uncoordinated limbs, he discovered that he was lying face down in a very comfortable bed, the pillow under his right cheek wet with his drool. Knuckling his eyes with his left hand, as his right hand was trapped somewhere behind him, his vision came into focus on a wall of rough stone.

  “Welcome back to reality.”

  Fergus.

  Still struggling with the concept of basic movement, Harper turned his head so that his left cheek lay on the damp pillow and he was facing his ex-sergeant, wincing at the bright light streaming in through the window across the room.

  Fergus sat at his desk. He was pushed back in his chair, arms folded across his stomach, lean and hard despite his years, the heels of his boots resting on the paperwork that was scattered across the desk’s scarred surface. He watched his guest with what appeared to be amusement. Running his tongue round his mouth, Harper coughed and asked the question that was whipping around his mind.

  “What happened?”

  “You tell me,” Fergus said was a smirk. “I was called out in the middle of the night to vouch for you and Lord Pandral at the main gate. Lord Pandral! What were you two doing out together in the middle of the night?”

  “Not whatever it is you are currently thinking!” Harper snapped, hearing the insinuation in the sergeant’s tone.

  “I am not judging, you understand…”

  “Shut up,” Harper muttered in resigned annoyance.

  Fergus chuckled, and Harper closed his eyes in an attempt to stop the daylight from burning through his retinas. He was petulantly aggrieved when his eyelids proved to be an ineffective barrier. Raising his right arm, he moved his hand over his face and gasped at the unexpected pain.

  “You seem to have broken a few bones in that hand,” Fergus told him cheerfully. “I bound it for you. There is also an impressive lump on the back of your head.”

  “Wonderful,” Harper moaned, the confusing memory of throwing up coming to him. When was I on stage?

  Pushing himself to move, he tried to sit. His headache ramped itself up to ‘pneumatic drill’ level and his traitorous stomach made a sudden leap for freedom. He retched dryly, but nothing came forth. When the spasms subsided he sat for a moment, taking deep breaths.

  “Throw up in my bed and you will regret it,” Fergus told him with a gleeful menace that Harper would have rolled his eyes at had he not been trying really hard to avoid vomiting. “There is water on the floor next to you,” Fergus added.

  Harper could not stop his groan as he leant over and took the mug with his left hand, another memory shuffling through his head: a small boy giving him a drink. Where was I? Trying to force his mind to present an answer did nothing more than inc
rease the pressure behind his eyes and push his headache to an even higher intensity.

  He drank the contents of the mug in four uncouth gulps, feeling the cold liquid move down through his insides. As he placed the mug back on the floor another urgent question bounced through his head.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “It is nearly sunset,” Fergus told him.

  “I slept all day?”

  Fergus nodded. “Lord Pandral requested that you join him as soon as you were able. There is a clean uniform on the bottom of the bed.”

  Harper stood, ignoring the feeling of disorientation and his still griping stomach. Stripping out of his civilian garb, he dressed quickly in the clean clothes, being careful to hide his back from Fergus, as the man would surely notice that he was healing at a more advanced rate than was normal. The discomfort of his hand made it a little tricky, but he managed.

  “Thank you for your care and for the use of your bed,” he said, giving Fergus a weak but grateful smile. “If I can ever do you a favour, do not hesitate to ask.”

  A sly smile spread across the sergeant’s face as Harper turned away. “I might just hold you to that!” was Fergus’s parting comment as Harper left the room.

  Wincing at the noise that stabbed into his aching head as he knocked on Pandral’s office door, Harper was surprised when there was no immediate answer. Surprise turned swiftly to irritation when he realised there might not be an answer at all. He stared with annoyance at the dark polished grain of the wooden door. Where is he? Pandral had told Harper to come to his office, and given the effort he had exerted in order to follow that command, it was rather inconsiderate of the man not to be there.

  As more sequenced, logical memories of the night before began drifting though Harper’s head, he wondering if the Lord was punishing him. He waited, trying to work out what to do next. Should I go looking for him? In a building the size of the tower the chances of finding the Lord were small, although it might give him the chance to reconnoitre the place ahead of—