Duke Raymon had left his litter and stood before us, shaking Mithos by the hand and beaming conspicuously to the crowd. He was dressed in turquoise silk with a fur mantle and looked regally impressive. There was a touch of swagger in his gait, which may once have merely been his size but was now part of his politician’s confidence. On either side of him stood Arlest, count of Shale, and Edwyn Treylen, governor of Verneytha. In a voice meant to be heard throughout the region, he said, “Welcome, thrice-noble Mithos and your honorable companions. Today you have shown the people of Greycoast that there is yet hope. The ruthless enemy of our people, the enemy indeed of the free world, will be vanquished. This cargo is of great import to us, but more so is this victory over the crimson tyrants who rape our land. Together we have shown them that we will not submit to their barbarism. Greycoast and its allies stand firm and will give no quarter to those who persecute the innocent. We will sorrow for those who fell, but we will also celebrate the dignity of their ends, for their blood has been turned to gold by the service they have performed for their country. We salute you all for your stand against evil.”
The crowd exulted and waved their Greycoast flags. They threw flowers and their petals fell about us like snow. The injured remnants of our escort smiled proudly and shouted back words of triumph and determination. God help them.
Only when we reached the palace did the duke’s smile slip away. He began to scowl at us irritably before finally slamming his fist on the great walnut table before him and roaring, “Sixty-five dead and thirty injured? Three wagons destroyed and the contents of one other all but burnt up? You incompetent fools!”
I stared at him in astonishment as he released the chain clasp at his throat and shook off his fur mantle, his face red and ugly with sudden anger. Arlest was watching uncertainly, his features drawn and his eyes weary. The weaselish Treylen looked out of the window, as if stepping out of the room.
Mithos said, in a deliberately measured tone, “We brought the majority of the cargo to Ironwall as requested. The casualties we sustained were . . . regrettable, but apparently unavoidable.”
“Unavoidable?” bellowed the duke, his mouth wide through his beard, the fat in his cheeks quivering. We were in his throne room, a large stone chamber surrounded by guarded archways from which his words echoed.
“Now, Raymon,” said Arlest, conciliating. “I’m sure the party did what it could—”
The duke cut him off, continuing to berate us as if the count weren’t really there. “You are professionals,” he snorted, his voice full of derision, “but you can’t protect a few wagons with a hundred men? How is it possible that you could have lost so heavily? And how is it possible that you pathetic mercenaries emerged unscathed?”
At these random insults and queries I saw Garnet, his green eyes suddenly lit with fury, lay his hand to the haft of his ax. Lisha also saw and touched his wrist gently with her fingertips. He froze. Mithos answered, “The men you gave us were untrained and inadequately equipped to deal with such an adversary.”
“So you sent them in to protect your worthless hides?” shouted the duke.
“We stood in the front line,” persisted Mithos, his voice still restrained, but with an increasing edge of bitterness. “We fought alongside them and organized them as best we could. Ask them. The enemy was vastly superior to our force, something we were unprepared for.”
“Unprepared for?” the duke responded. “You were warned—”
“You gave us raw recruits!” Mithos inserted. “What did you expect?”
There was a frosty pause, and Treylen turned back from the window, as if he thought that what happened next might be interesting. Greycoast stepped up to Mithos’s chest and whispered hoarsely into his face,
“How dare you interrupt me and toss me this abuse! You are in Ironwall now, friend, and I have great power here. Absolute power. If you do not learn some respect for your superiors, it will be beaten into you. Henceforth you will address me as ‘sir’ and speak only when you are asked to. Is that clear?”
Mithos looked at him silently, his fists clenched so that the olive skin of his knuckles whitened. By the heavy entrance door a pair of guards exchanged swift glances and swung the heads of their pikes round towards us. Treylen raised one eyebrow, curious to see how Mithos would respond.
“Is that clear?” repeated the duke of Greycoast, leaning closer still to Mithos.
“Yes,” said Mithos slowly, adding, after a pause, “sir.”
“Good,” said the duke with an unpleasant smile of satisfaction. “Now—”
I couldn’t take it anymore. “No, it’s not good, and I’ll respect my superiors when I meet them.”
This was probably not the best thing I could have said, but I figured I was out of this farce for good, so what the hell. I continued, “I’m sure that Your Most Excellent Majesty was grieved that you couldn’t be with us when the convoy was attacked, and I for one wish you had been around to enlighten us with your brilliant military mind, but you weren’t. You see,” I said, starting to feel good about myself for the first time in weeks, “I know it sounds like child’s play, defending ten wagons of coal with a hundred soldiers who are waiting for their voices to break, but that’s because you wouldn’t know a battle plan if it bit you in your massive ass.”
Lisha stirred but I cut her off before she could say anything.
“No,” I said quickly, with a look in her direction, “it doesn’t matter anymore, so I’ll say what I like. Now, Your Royal Immensity, judging from your speech to the ignorant masses earlier, you either have no grasp on reality or choose to ignore it when it suits your political career.”
I couldn’t stop. I was enjoying myself, and he wasn’t the only one who needed someone to blame. I pointed my finger squarely at him and went on. “You spoke of their dignified deaths. What do you know about death? I was there and there was no dignity. Not that you care. I’ll bet the armed escort that brought you home from Seaholme was a sight better trained than the boy soldiers you left with us. But then, what’s a hundred boys compared to a duke? You probably eat close to that at a sitting.”
I sat down.
“Are you finished?” he murmured, with the kind of cold reserve that you know is going to explode any second.
“For the moment,” I said cheerily.
“Did you know that throughout Greycoast, treachery is punishable by death, the traitors being hanged, drawn, and quartered?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“And do you know how we define treachery here?” asked the duke.
I thought for a moment and said, “Calling you a fat, self-important bastard would probably do it.”
“Guards!” he called, lashing out with one heavily braceleted fist. They came at me with their pikes and rapiers. His knuckles caught me just under the chin, and I felt my head lurch up and back so that the room spun for a second. I whirled away from him, barely retaining consciousness as my teeth slammed together. The guards descended on me like hawks. They pinned my arms behind my back and, at the duke’s cursory command of “Get him out of my sight,” they marched me out. One guard gestured to Garnet in a way that suggested the misguided nature of any intervention on his part. They had to virtually carry me out of the room.
SCENE XXXI
More Consequences
I came to my senses (if you can call them that) as I was pitched headlong into mud, total darkness, and appalling stench. I was lying facedown in the slime of a dungeon floor, my legs chained together. The dampness and cold suggested that I was underground, in the palace basement, perhaps: the lowest point of the citadel in more ways than one. I rolled over and tried to spit the filth from my mouth. I tried to sit up, but the mud squirmed beneath me and I fell back into it. The odor of excrement and decay was overpowering. A thin line of pale light showed under the door. Sliding up to it, hands sunk to the wrists in the ooze, I began to kick and shout.
My face was right up against the door when the jailer
on the other side kicked it and sent me sprawling on my back.
“Shut up,” he shouted without looking in, “or I’ll come in and break your legs. Both. Several times.” Someone laughed, impressed with this display of wit.
Miserably I floundered across to the far wall—the cell was only about ten feet square—and sat against it trying to believe that they couldn’t keep me here long. Such thoughts led rather inevitably to the question of what would happen to me when they brought me out.
I went over the incident with the duke and replayed the scene in my mind a dozen times with a few more incisive remarks assigned to yours truly. I soon had a tidy little plot in which straight-from-the-shoulder Will scared the cruel despot into gross abuse of his power, but even as I was reflecting on how it would bring the house down, I knew it was false. Here was no honor, only misery and shame. But why should a lack of honor bother me, of all people? What was really bothering me was how stupidly pointless my outburst had been. It could never have gotten me anywhere other than here, something I had known before I started talking, but I started anyway. I enjoyed making speeches, but I had a sneaking suspicion that there had been something righteous in my motivation, something distressingly principled. Or, at the very least, something like guilt for the pretty shameful circumstances that had the people of Ironwall thinking of me as a hero. It was an alarming notion.
The time passed slowly. I called out for water, suspecting that beer wasn’t on the menu, but only got more abuse and distant laughter from the less hopeful inmates of other cells. I had to go to the bathroom and did so in a corner, then sat as far away from it as possible with my back against the scummy wall. Thick, foul-smelling liquid coursed down the mossy rock. It soaked my back and made me shudder with cold and a sense of contamination.
In another part of the subterranean jail someone was being whipped. Long, slow lashes rang out and cracked into agonized gasps. I thought I saw a rat slide in under the door but I never saw it leave. I wanted to block off the crack with my soiled shirt to keep them out, but if they were already in with me, then that would make the problem worse. I listened and heard their thin voices. One time I put my hand down on warm, matted fur and pulled myself away screaming as the creature’s thin, fibrous tail slipped through my fingers. I got to my feet and stood quite still. Hours passed.
When the door was abruptly kicked open, I leapt through it and sprawled into the relative light of a circular stone chamber. The jailer kicked me once with a heavy leather boot and then put his weight on the small of my back, making me gasp and splutter through the muddy straw in my face. Seizing me by the hair, he wrenched my head up into the light of a torch, and I caught its pitchy scent with something like relief.
“This one?” he said brusquely. I heard a murmur of assent from close by but could see nothing but the blinding flare of the torch. “Get out,” said the jailer. He kicked me squarely in the rear and added, “And get a wash.” The guard laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard for days.
The irons were stripped roughly from my legs, and a sack was tied over my head. I was dragged up a flight of steps by two men. A third followed, a spear point pressed against my spine. We passed through long, echoing corridors of cold stone and then, as I was steeling myself for whatever verbal reprimand I was about to get, we stepped out into the open air. I was flung hard onto a wooden platform of some kind and then, with sudden and terrified panic, I heard it: the familiar bustle of an expectant crowd. As the bag was dragged from my head I saw a sea of upturned faces and the chill shadow of a gallows.
You have got to be kidding, I thought.
They weren’t.
There was Duke Raymon, large and impassive, flanked by his counterparts from Shale and Verneytha, watching me from a throne ten yards away. He met my gaze and then bade the shirtless, hooded executioner begin. Two guards dragged me forward and forced my head through the noose as I struggled and kicked, tying my hands behind me as they did so. Arlest, the only one I could see showing any kind of concern, was muttering earnestly to Raymon, who ignored him, then said something to Treylen, who just smiled thinly and shrugged. When the count of Shale continued to talk, the duke turned and shook his head once, glaring and final. Whatever Arlest had been trying to do to stop this brutal farce, the duke was having none of it.
Arlest looked across the crowd and shook his head fractionally. I followed his gaze and saw Mithos watching. He looked down, then straightened up and began pressing his way through the people, making for where the duke was sitting. I wanted to see what happened, but there was a man in a black hood who had other plans.
The executioner took the slack out of the rope and stood before me, a viciously curved and jagged knife in his hands. I should have known that a simple hanging was too much to hope for. The brazier for my intestines was brought forward and, as the executioner began to unfasten my filthy shirt, a great hush descended on the crowd. Whatever Mithos was doing, it didn’t seem to be slowing things down.
I stood on my toes as they began to hoist me up, but in a second I felt all my weight on the rope which cut into my throat. My feet flailed for some purchase on the ground, but it was too late. I hung there for a long, sickening moment, and then dropped, gasping and retching on the floor. The executioner gave me a few seconds, and then hitched me up again. I looked up as the rope started to tighten and saw Duke Raymon.
He had left his throne and now stood next to me, center stage, as it were, switching his eyes from me to the crowd and back. Mithos—unarmed—was hovering behind him. Then he held up his hand and the world fell silent.
“Perhaps you would like to say something, Mr. Hawthorne?” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. I thought quickly, and for a split second Mithos’s eyes met mine. This was one of those key performances when you had to get the lines just right.
“I throw myself upon your gracious mercy, Lord Duke,” I managed.
A ripple went through the crowd and the duke’s lip twitched fractionally. This was what he had wanted. “Is that all?” he said indulgently, his voice louder. I gasped for breath and swallowed.
“I humbly beg pardon for offending your royal personage and can only plead unfamiliarity with the customs of your land and the great authority you so rightly hold. I throw myself upon your merciful generosity and—”
“Enough!” he shouted, and it was a call to the executioner and to the crowd. As the one cut me free, the other cheered rapturously, lauding the duke’s spontaneous and benign wisdom. He gestured expansively as they carried me away, and the audience—for that was what it was—applauded wildly.
But if he had emerged as the benevolent and omnipotent ruler, I had at least emerged, and that was more than I had hoped for. It took some time for the horror of it all to subside. I would never know how much of the outcome had been planned in advance or whether my apology had made any difference. Well, I thought, as I scrubbed myself down and chose a clean shirt, I had lost nothing by making it. After all, they were only words.
The only real catch was that my decision to leave the party had been temporarily stymied. The duke had cut off our expenses after my little outburst, and though he had forgiven me for my “treason,” he hadn’t renewed our funds. Mithos came to see me and made things clear: The party figured I owed them. I told him that I was the one who had talked my neck out of the noose, but he said he had been trying to talk Raymon round since the moment I was arrested, and that he had also got Count Arlest to petition on my behalf. Without his intercession, he said, I would not have been allowed to “talk my neck out of the noose.”
I wanted to argue because I didn’t want to feel dependent on him or the party, but he clearly had a point. So I shrugged and muttered a thank-you, and said I would stick around, help out, and so on. However, Mithos, who was apparently prepared for me to make conciliatory noises, was not to be fobbed off with platitudes. He announced that I could start by earning some money. How was up to me.
I grinned. War, honor, polit
ical decorum: these things were beyond me. But sing for my supper? That, I could do. And I knew just the song.
SCENE XXXII
The Elixir of Sensenon
It was midmorning. The sun was warm as I passed out of the palace gates and wandered down towards the market, strolling along the fortifications whose towers bore the decomposing heads of traitors and murderers. It was good to be free and breathe the clear air again. I whistled as I went about my business, stowing the flasks I had prepared in a leather satchel.
The Ironwall market was a delight. I glanced around and got an idea where the guards were, assessed the general affluence of the townsfolk, borrowed a box from a copper worker, and set it up in the middle of the square. Getting onto it, I took a deep breath and began the show. “Gather round, ladies and gentleman. Yes, madam, you too. Gather round to hear of something that will change your life. No sir, I am no priest, prophet, or preacher. I am an apprentice to the sage priests of the Ottorian dragon herders who has seen marvels now told only in the tales of children.”
A couple going though a selection of pots and pans at a nearby stall stopped to listen, shading their eyes against the sun. A cluster of merchants beside them turned my way as well. It was starting.
“I have ridden the northwinds astride the ice wyverns,” I announced, in a full hit-the-back-wall voice. “I have crossed the Southern Ocean with Arrulf the pirate, who paints his toes with the blood of virgins and eats gold at every meal. I passed a year with the lizard-men in caves east of the Grey Forest, and dined with trolls in the fiery chasms of the western volcanoes. I resided four winters in the Library of Lore (ancient and modern) under the tutelage of Erelthor, high mage of the Council of Light. And after these my wanderings, I have come to your humble market, and I bring you life.”
There was quite a crowd gathering now. I could see the skeptics on the outside smiling and nudging their friends, but that was no matter. There are always enough fools, and besides, I was good at this. If the skeptics wound up paying out with the rest of them, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Act of Will Page 19