Out of the corner of my eye, something moved, or seemed to. I turned hurriedly to my right, but the south end of the tight corridor was quite empty. I paused and had just managed to convince myself that it had been a trick of the light when the books directly in front of me exploded out of their shelf and, from behind them, I glimpsed first a pair of eyes which ducked away like an animal’s, then the business end of a large crossbow pointed squarely at my thorax.
“Don’t move,” said a voice, before the possibility had even occurred to me, “and drop the knife.”
It was a collected voice, as voices from behind crossbows tend to be, unruffled and in control. It was also a woman’s. I did as she said and smiled sheepishly. There was a tiny rustle of movement, and when I looked up, the space in the shelves was quite empty. I turned and found her coming from the north end, the crossbow leveled at me but held in that casual way that comes from familiarity. Her eyes were on me and there was neither casualness nor familiarity there. They were blue-gray, large, and beautiful like a snowscape is beautiful: entrancing but cold, and best enjoyed through the window of a room with a fireplace.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” she said evenly.
“Will Hawthorne,” I said. “I came to read a book. I was under the impression that this was a library.”
“It’s a museum library,” she said carefully, “and it’s closed. What have you been doing?”
“Reading,” I said. “What else would one do in—”
“What have you been reading?” she demanded with careful, impatient emphasis.
“A Seasonal Storm,” I said. She did not respond. “A play by, well, I don’t think it says. It’s on the table there.”
She stepped past me, the crossbow still trained on my breastbone a trifle melodramatically. At the desk she picked up the text, flashed her eyes over it, and dropped it carelessly back where I’d left it.
She was about about my age, maybe a year or two more, tall, and blond like everyone else here, but she was not dressed as a courtier. She wore a long dark smock with a white shirt beneath, open enticingly at her throat. Her arms were long and slender, her wrists and fingers similarly slim and pale as new ivory. Her hair was gathered tight to the back of her head with a silver clasp. Her mouth was small, her lips full in a permanent half-pout, her forehead and cheekbones high, her jaw sculpted. She looked like an alabaster statue which had come to life. To put it another way, she was hot.
“You must go now,” she said. “And if you wish to see the library, you need express permission from the King’s Counsel.”
“How might I get that?”
“I really don’t know,” she said, “but I’m sure—”
“I mean, it seems such a shame to lock away all these wonderful books,” I said. “People should be able to read them without ‘express permission,’ surely?”
“This is a museum. The stock here is too precious to—”
“I’d be very careful,” I tried.
“Parts of the building have not been structurally sound since last year’s earthquake,” she said, not really bothering to conceal the fact that she found these explanations tiresome.
“Earthquake?”
“You’re not from round here, are you?” she said, as if thinking the implications of this through for the first time.
“No,” I began, “I’m a guest of Sorrail, as I said, and . . .”
“Of course,” she said, and a light went on somewhere in her memory. “Well, yes, there was an earthquake. A large section of the outer wall has not yet been repaired, though it fortunately faces away from the goblin presence in the forest, so—”
“Perhaps you could show me around? You know, supervise me?” I said, pushing my luck a little.
“What?” she asked, caught off guard. For the first time it seemed like she wasn’t following a script.
“I mean, perhaps you could show me the library.”
“I’m very busy. I really don’t have time to . . .”
“I’d love to just come and read a little. I wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. . . .” I began.
“Perhaps I could have one of my assistants take some books to your lodgings.”
“Perhaps you could bring them yourself,” I said with a smile. There was a pause and her gaze flicked away, as if uncertain of what to say next. I filled the silence for her. “Couldn’t you just show me around the library?”
“I really am very busy,” she answered, less adamantly than before. “And if you do get permission to visit the library, you will also get a tour escort from the library staff.”
“Would that be you?” I smiled winsomely.
“It might be,” she said and, for a fraction of a moment, her eyes thawed slightly.
“Then I’ll make an appointment immediately,” I said, relaxing. “Might I request your company by name?”
The crossbow moved fractionally, paused, and then dropped completely.
“Aliana,” said the woman. “You’d better go.”
“Yes,” I said. “Er . . .”
“I’ll let you out the front way,” she said, and this time the smile, which had begun in her eyes, made its way to her lips. I was, momentarily, transfixed by the result. She saw me notice, recognized my interest, and turned away as her smile widened.
“This way,” she said, turning back to me, but not meeting my eyes.
She moved quickly, leading me into a dark, cold vestibule where the great oak doors that I had tried to force stood. She stooped and pulled at the floor bolt, but it was stuck.
“Allow me,” I said, bending with her till my cheek was inches from hers. She smiled, showing that little girlish flash of coyness again. As she straightened, I was struck with how different a response I would have gotten from Renthrette. The bolt moved easily in my hand and the great door shuddered as it came free. She held it open.
“Well, good-bye then,” I said, lingering in the doorway.
“Good-bye, Mr. Hawthorne,” she answered.
“Right,” I said, stupidly, before backing awkwardly away, my eyes still on her. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, smiling broadly now.
And with that, she closed the door and was gone. I turned, scuttled down the steps, and skipped across the forum.
“Did you find your admirer?” asked Renthrette, without looking up from the feathers she was trimming for arrow flights.
“Not exactly,” I replied, thinking wistfully of Aliana. “Why? Jealous?”
She snorted slightly and her thin lips creased into a dry smile. She lifted a goose quill to the light and examined it carefully.
“I mean,” I continued, “you should let me know, if that’s how you feel.”
There was a long silence.
“What?” she said slowly, her eyes and attention still wholly on the feather, which she had now laid on the table, her knife poised above it. She adjusted the angle of the blade fractionally and cut delicately, meticulously, like a surgeon.
“I said,” I explained, “that if you find yourself struggling to vanquish the resentment and envy you feel toward this unknown lady, then perhaps you should lay your heart bare. . . .”
“What are you talking about?” she said, looking at me for the first time since I had walked in.
“That special bond between us,” I said, grinning. “Give in to that unspoken, secret desire which keeps you awake, yearning for my presence beside you. . . .”
“Oh, that,” she said, returning her gaze to her work. “Well, what would be the use?”
This was new for Renthrette. My audacity usually irritated and flustered her in ways that made her prone to violence. I’d never seen her play along with such composure. For a moment I dried up. When words came to me, they did so slightly defiantly, though I grinned all the while. “Perhaps I would take you after all,” I said, wondering how far I’d have to push her before she took a swing at me. “Perhaps I’d take you in my arms and ki
ss you hard on the mouth and run my hands through your hair and . . .”
She stood up abruptly. I smiled in quiet triumph as she took a step toward me, but her face was set, unamused.
“Would you really, Will?” she said. “Would you?” Her voice was soft, pensive. Even sad.
I stood where I was, my mouth open, dumb with surprise.
What the hell?
Her eyes searched my face and then fell slowly, sorrowfully. My mouth moved, but initially, nothing came out. Then I whispered, “I didn’t think . . .”
“Don’t you think . . .” She paused, catching her hand up to her mouth as her hair hung across her face, a picture of desolation. “Don’t you think it could work? Us, I mean?” she whispered.
I hesitated, trying to catch up. “I think it could,” I said, trying to restrain my enthusiasm. “Sure. Why not? I just didn’t know that you were, you know, so . . . keen.”
“Oh, I’m keen,” she said, looking up with a little smile that could have been suggestive. “Keen as your wit. Maybe keener.”
Then she laughed like I had never seen her laugh before. What had been a smile snapped wide and opened up. She threw her head back and roared hysterically. “You . . .” she screamed. “You believed me!”
I faltered and said nothing while she went on, laughing harder than a tree full of monkeys, tears streaming down her cheeks. Doubling up and holding her stomach, she sobbed, “Oh, Will. Admit it. I got you.”
“Oh. Right. Yes. Very clever.”
Then she was back to cackling and complaining about how her sides and belly ached.
I stood there and watched.
“And I thought you were the actor!” she said, curtseying to an imaginary crowd. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!”
“You malicious bitch,” I managed. This was answered with another shriek of mirth.
“Oh, darling,” she blurted out, “how could you say such a thing about us?”
This new gem of wit brought her to her knees with delight. She remained for some time, laughing uncontrollably. When Garnet came crashing through the door five minutes later, she was still giggling to herself.
“What is going on?” he demanded.
“Renthrette’s just being oh-so-amusing this evening,” I remarked.
“Oh Garnet,” she said, “you have to hear this. Will came in and said—”
“Not now,” snapped Garnet. “The city is under attack. A huge goblin army has come out of the woods and is assaulting the main gate. Everyone is needed on the walls! Everyone.”
With that last word aimed pointedly at me, he grabbed his helm and armor and was out the door. Renthrette, former chief hyena and one-woman show, was now Renthrette the brave, a warrior stalwart, and grave. Garnet was barely out of the room and she was already half-buckled into her ring mail.
“Come on, Will,” she said, throwing a quiver of arrows over her shoulder and grabbing her longbow from the corner of the room. “Come and kill something. You’ll feel better.”
She paused and gave me a grim smile, then thrust my scale corselet into my arms so forcefully that I nearly fell backward.
“Touché,” I said, but she was already hurrying out the door. I stood there for a moment as if hoping to wake up, and then, with an uneasy apprehension tinged with nausea, I began to put on my armor. It took me longer than usual because my fingers fumbled with the buckles and straps as if I’d never seen them before. Pausing and raising my hands in front of my face, I could see that I was trembling palpably.
“Smug cow,” I said aloud. This confession of anger at Renthrette seemed to help, and the straps slid into place as they should.
I grabbed my spear and crossbow and strode out into the palace corridor where guards were running with the quiet intensity of the genuinely alarmed, relying on trained discipline rather than thought. I pushed Renthrette’s joke from my mind and decided to focus on the hordes of mythical beasts that had come to kill me.
SCENE XII
Holding the Walls
Renthrette was out of sight by the time I was ready, but it wasn’t too difficult to guess which way she had gone. I followed the running troops down the corridors and through a series of doors and courtyards that brought me out into the evening air, across a broad and chaotic street, and up a flight of fifty or sixty steps to the walls of the White City. The ramparts were wide enough for the town’s defenders to stand three or four deep, and they were protected by huge crenelations with sloping tops. In fact, these walkways where we now stood were not the tops of the walls at all, but a series of galleries like theater balconies, a row of long boxes cut two-thirds of the way up the fortified city perimeter. They ran about a hundred yards from tower to tower and above them were other walls, cut with arrow slits, and other galleries.
A hundred men stood against the back wall of the gallery. They were clad in knee-length mail corselets, leather trews, and slightly conical plated helmets with nose guards and mantles of metal scale which hung to their shoulders at the sides and nape of their necks. I grasped the stone of the battlements and peered out over the walls.
My heart quickened.
Below and to my left, the bridge over which we had first entered the city arched its way across the river and ended in a turreted barbican. On the tops of the white towers and leaning over the bridge’s stone balustrade were the shining helms and mail coats of the Phasdreille sentries. But all around them and across the entire far bank of the river was a dark, boiling mass bristling with spears and pikes and shrieking in wild and murderous joy: goblins. There were hundreds of them, seething like some foul volcanic geyser, spitting filth and heat at the walls which glowed with eerie beauty in the fading light.
The order was given, and the archers around me stepped up to the parapets in unison and released a long volley of arrows from their huge, tightly curved bows. For a split second, the sky darkened as their feathered shafts took flight in a long gasp, then the arrows flashed and burst into unnatural flame, greenish but so bright that I shaded my eyes.
I turned hurriedly back to the archers. On each end of their ranks were men clad in long white robes belted with silver rope. Their eyes were closed and their fingers moved rapidly in front of them, as if weaving invisible silk.
Magic.
The word jolted into my head like a kicking horse, but I brushed it aside and followed the arrows’ trajectory. The river was a good fifty yards across and the bows fired from the walls barely cleared it before falling like strange, burning hail. The goblins, apparently unmoved by this unearthly fire, backed off slightly, jeering, as if they had been poked with a stick.
“They’re a disorderly rabble,” said Garnet, appearing at my shoulder and speaking with distaste, “aren’t they? No tactics, just blood lust. No intelligence to speak of, just the desire to ravage and mutilate. But you should hear them scream when our blades find their loathsome flesh.”
“And that fire,” I began, “is it, you know, magic?” I said the word, but I could not keep the embarrassed snicker out of my voice.
“Magic,” he answered, without looking at me, “holy. Call it what you will.”
A cry of warning went up from the walls and I looked to see that several goblins had somehow bypassed the gatehouse and were now clawing their way up the bridge’s elegant stone. One of them swung itself over the stone rail and stood dripping on the bridge, its head lowered furtively. Then it unstrapped a broad axe from its thigh and ran at one of the unsuspecting guards who was leaning out over the river with his bow drawn. The goblin felled him with a brutal shout of cruel delight, but one of the other guards, wheeling promptly, leveled and fired his bow hard into the creature’s midsection before it could butcher anyone else. With the alarm raised, the couple dozen guards remaining returned to the barbican, bows trained on the bridge sides where the goblins were scrambling up and hanging back, like hyenas looking for the youngest or weakest buffalo in the herd. The sentries couldn’t see from down there, but there must have been cl
ose to a hundred goblins poised to clamber up and join the fray.
“The bridge guard are massively outnumbered,” said Renthrette, appearing from the bank of archers. “They’ll be slaughtered! We have to open the main door and relieve them.”
“Open the door?” I said. “The door of the city? You’re insane. That’s what they want us to do. What if we can’t hold them there? They’ll walk right in and that’s your war lost.”
“We’ll hold them,” said Garnet grimly. “We have to.”
“They’re not even animals,” spat Renthrette. “Animals are less malicious and destructive. I despise them.”
This she punctuated with a shot from her longbow fired with such effort that she gasped, almost losing her balance as the arrow left. It kindled in the air and fell smoking sulfurously into the mass of enemies. I gasped and looked at her.
“Did you do that?”
She shook her head and looked to where the strange priestly figures continued to work their fingers, eyes lightly, serenely closed.
“Who’s in command here?” shouted Garnet. “We need horsemen and a tight group of heavily armed and well-trained infantry to hold the gate after us.”
“Will,” said Renthrette earnestly. “Run around the walls and find the senior commanders. Tell them what we’re doing and have them support us if need be. Tell them we’ll stay on the bridge. We will not venture farther.”
And then they were gone. As the pair of them clattered off down the stairs with some corporal who was to lead them to the cavalry, I looked about me and tried to decide if this was a good development. No fighting for me, exactly, but a kind of importance: a kind unlikely to get me killed. An arrow with ragged black flights scudded over the parapet and fell against the back wall. I ducked my head and looked for the safest way out of there.
Will Power Page 18