Act of Will
Page 22
Orgos picked up a tiny pair of boy’s shoes whose heels were worn to nothing. He just looked at them and said nothing. I sighed, a little irritated that these people’s poverty should take the edge off our adventure. The bakery was clean but poorly stocked, and the flour was coarse and cut with chalk in fine old Cresdon style. There was no sign of anything remotely suspicious.
“Ah, the thrifty lower classes,” I said sardonically as we slipped out. “Salt of the earth.”
“Don’t make light of poverty,” said Orgos. “It kills more than the raiders ever will.”
“Really?” I said. “How interesting. Having been destitute most of my life I never would have known that.”
Orgos didn’t reply. Sentimental idiot.
Mithos was pleased with our report.
“Well, we can cross that one off the list,” he said.
We would have to watch the other two houses closely. I suggested breaking in by night, but this was generally considered an extraordinarily bad idea, even by my standards.
“So we just sit around and wait?” I said.
“Until we get a better lead,” said Mithos.
And, right on cue, we got a better lead. Orgos burst into Lisha’s room, where the rest of us had gathered, and tossed a curved knife on the bed.
“Look at that,” he exclaimed. “Familiar?”
“Not to me,” I muttered, wondering why I felt a thrill of alarm whenever Orgos got excited about weapons.
“It’s kind of like the scyax that we looked at,” said Garnet, picking it up and holding it up to the light.
“The same steel,” said Orgos triumphantly. “The same workmanship.”
“Where did you get it?” asked Lisha.
“I was stocking our weapons chest in the marketplace and came upon a stall that sold nothing but this stuff. The stall keeper was reluctant to tell me where he got his material, but I persuaded him. He is supplied exclusively by a weapons dealer known locally as the Razor. He pays certain traders in town well above the average for the best ores and sells his exclusive wares to whoever can afford them.”
We were about to ask more when Mithos came in hurriedly. He pointed to the center of the map again.
“That building in the middle of the map?” he said. “It’s a keep. A fortification belonging to one Eric Thurlhelm, known as the Razor.”
We were dining in the same tavern we’d been at since we reached Hopetown. Renthrette was watching one of the Joseph houses and Orgos had returned to the market for supplies, but I was eating steak and kidney pie and swilling it down with a dark, mellow beer, half bitter, half mild. Mithos took a forkful of steak and told me what he knew.
“I spoke to a garrison officer,” he said. “Thurlhelm, the Razor, moved here from Thrusia shortly after it fell to the Empire. He is rich. He pays his taxes and keeps himself to himself. The duke doesn’t ask about his past operations, where he gets his money from, or how he amuses himself at present. The keep is larger than his requirements, since he lives alone save for a few friends, various female companions, and a sizable staff of servants. He has a resident defense unit of about thirty men. I think it’s time we checked him out—cautiously. The Razor runs his house as he pleases and we can expect rough justice from him if we get on his nerves. We can also expect trouble from the duke, who won’t want to lose the tax revenue unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“What a prince,” I said, dark memories of the scaffold in Iron-wall haunting me briefly.
“Quite.”
“Has anybody given any thought,” I said, figuring it was time we addressed this, “to how the raiders are able to get from wherever they are to the site of an attack without anybody seeing them and without . . .”
Mithos was staring across the room, oblivious to me. By the empty fireplace a man was sitting at a table. He had his back to us but his head was turned slightly in the way people do when they are trying to listen in on someone else’s conversation. Mithos was motionless except for his left hand, which was moving silently for the small crossbow on the floor by my chair.
I watched in confusion as he pulled the weapon onto his lap and cocked it with one deft motion, his eyes still fixed on the stranger. Then he opened his left palm and extended it towards me.
“What?” I murmured.
“A bolt,” he breathed, barely audibly.
I reached behind me uncertainly, took hold of the feathered end of a quarrel, and drew it out of the bag. But my eyes were on Mithos and as I passed it to him, another one slid out and clattered to the stone floor.
Suddenly the man leapt to his feet and spun around, raising a pair of small crossbows, one in each hand and pointed directly at us. His eyes were dark and cold, his mouth set, and I knew that he meant to kill us.
Mithos turned the table over, sending the crockery crashing to the ground and pulling me down behind it with him. There was a slight swish and one bolt cracked into the tabletop as the other slammed into the wall behind us. I felt the wind in my hair as it passed.
Mithos dived to the right, rolled once, and aimed the crossbow. Our would-be assassin had fled. Mithos went after him, but the streets were a maze. He could have gone anywhere.
Or he could have just vanished like the raiders always did, even when they were dead.
Mithos returned, breathing hard, and plucked the crossbow bolt from the tabletop. It was flighted with crimson feathers.
SCENE XXXVII
Time for a Beer
My intention to abandon the party had been only temporarily suspended, but this new attempt on my life put a slightly different complexion on things. It bore thinking about.
On the one hand, of course, it made my desire to get away from the party and the arrowheads, lance tips, fire, and death that seemed to follow them about stronger still, but it also made life without the likes of Mithos at my side rather less appealing. And painfully brief. Without him, I would have been snuffed out like a candle, and not a particularly bright candle at that. Scattering crossbow bolts on the ground in a moment that called for absolute silence hadn’t been too bright, and it had been an act of unprecedented mercy that Mithos hadn’t killed me himself. His glower on returning from the empty street softened into a resigned sigh and the muttered remark that it “could have happened to anyone.” Perhaps so, but it had happened to me, and, to my mind, it usually did. The idea of running from the party, top though they were on someone’s unpopularity list, was, for someone with my combat skills, roughly equivalent to going swimming with three or four large rocks chained to my legs. I wondered absently if the party members thought of me as the rock chained to their legs. I made a mental note to be a little nicer to them, in case they should decide that this rock-lugging bit wasn’t worth the effort. If I was cut free of the party, I would sink. Fast.
“I wonder,” said Mithos in the voice of a man who had been hunted before, “whose idea that was.”
“The raiders’, obviously,” I said.
“You think so?” he asked pensively. “It takes more than a few red feathers to make a crimson raider. And until now they’ve seemed almost anxious to keep us alive.”
Mithos left me to think this over and I took out the map we had been looking at earlier.
“Hi, Will!” said Garnet enthusiastically. “I heard about the attack. We must be making progress.”
That was Garnet logic for you.
“I see you’ve got the map there,” he said, keen as mustard. “Considering tactics?”
“Er, yeah,” I answered, wondering what I had been doing and realizing with muted shock that he was sort of right. I had been having those Adventurer Thoughts again. In the circumstances, that was odd.
“So,” he said, sitting down.
“So?”
“Here we are,” he said, pleased again, “in a pub.”
“That’s right,” I answered, conscious of the way he was putting me on my guard again.
“Two mates out for a beer,” he concluded.
“Garnet, is there something on your mind?”
“No,” he answered emphatically. “Not at all.”
“You want to talk about the guy who shot at us? . . . ” I guessed, reluctantly.
“No,” he said with a little gesture of defiance. “Let’s not talk work.”
So that’s what it is, I thought, when someone tries to skewer your jugular with a crossbow bolt: work.
“I just thought,” he went on, “that we could, you know, do what ordinary people do.”
“I’m an expert on that,” I said.
“I thought you would be. So what do they do? Ordinary people, I mean.”
“They drink, they talk, they play games, they pick up women . . . ” I said.
“Games?” he asked.
“You know, cards, darts, dominoes, or something.”
“Let’s play cards,” he said with an enthusiasm that said it was going to be a long night.
“What can you play?”
“Nothing,” he said, slightly frenetic now, “but you can teach me, right?”
This was getting seriously strange. But I watched the slightly hunted way he seemed to be looking around, the shifty nervousness, like a kid about to be deliberately naughty, and it made a kind of sense to me. Garnet had been with the party for years. In that time he had gone from child to dignified warrior with his ax and his honor code, and he had never had a second to sit back and be an ordinary kid, make a fool of himself, get a little wild, and have a good time without worrying if he was being noble or righteous. Now I was here, representing all he had missed, all he didn’t know of the ordinary world, and he was cautiously ready to give it a shot.
Fair enough, I thought. Endearing, really.
Time to educate him in some of life’s simple pleasures. We ordered beer, or, rather, I ordered it for him. He had no preferences.
We got six pints: a selection of ales, a lager, a wheat, and a milk stout. He gulped down one of the ales and was halfway through the lager when, with a sudden sense of alarm, it occurred to me that he had never drunk beer before. Even in those party meetings, I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him take more than a sip at a toast. The fact that he had finished one of the ales, the lager, and had made serious headway on the stout by the time the thought had fully registered confirmed both my suspicions and my panic.
“Let’s take it easy, shall we?” I said, grasping the beer in his hand and pushing it back down onto the table.
“This is great,” he said, apparently unaffected. “Let’s get some more. I didn’t know it would be this much fun, just sitting in a bar.”
I grinned and sat back as he got to work on another ale. I supposed I was overreacting. Things didn’t look so grim after all. I went to the outhouse and, on my way back, walked into Renthrette. She smiled at me rather warmly and I knew that I had somehow gained masculine adventurer points by nearly getting killed again. She was wearing a light summer dress and had let her hair down. It took about thirty seconds for things to get grim.
“I heard you were with Garnet and thought I’d join you.” She smiled, her eyes meeting mine. This rash of goodwill was a veritable epidemic. “I hope you’re looking after him,” she said coyly.
I chuckled and said, “He’s over—”
I had started to point to our table, which she had her back to, when I saw Garnet, sprawled across the table in a pool of spilt beer. He had drunk at least two pints in the time I had urinated away one.
“Er, I think he just left,” I spluttered. “Yes. You can probably catch him if you leave quickly.”
“You can come with me, then.”
“Yes. Yes, I mean, I could do that,” I said, thinking desperately. “But, well. But I have to settle the bill.”
“I’ll wait,” she said, nicer—damn her—than she had ever been before.
“Well, it could take a while. We had some, er . . . complicated drinks and—”
“Complicated?”
“Yes.”
“How?
“Well, you know. Complicated. Complex.”
She gave me a blank look.
“Mixed!” I exclaimed. “They were mixed drinks and it always takes a while for the barman to figure out how much they cost.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’ll sit down then.”
She turned, took a few steps towards the table where Garnet was now dragging himself upright with a bleary, vacant look in his eyes, and froze.
Then, very slowly, she turned and there was the look I knew so well: cold, cynical, murderous, and reserved entirely for me.
“He drank too quickly . . . ” I began.
“This is your fault,” she muttered in a voice like dripping acid.
“Renthrette?” said Garnet distantly. “I don’t feel well.”
As his sister turned to him, he seemed to reconsider this statement and amended it.
“I feel really bad,” he said, clearly surprised.
I made a run for it, slamming a few coins on the bar as I left. I could handle a lot of things, but Renthrette protecting her cub from the evil Mr. Hawthorne wasn’t one of them. I had reached the door when I heard the guttural surge and splash of vomit, followed by Renthrette’s imperious yell:
“William Hawthorne, come back here!”
No chance. No chance whatsoever.
SCENE XXXVIII
The Razor’s Edge
Garnet had stayed in bed late, groaning. Renthrette had banged on my door, and while I lay still, pretending not to be there, it occurred to me that this was the first time she had actually wanted to come in. The irony was almost unbearable.
It was going to take three people to maintain surveillance on the remaining two Joseph houses. That meant only half of the party could be spared to investigate the Razor’s keep, but since even Lisha’s little band wasn’t stupid enough to go storming a castle with a small army inside, numbers didn’t matter too much. We just had to decide who was going where.
Garnet and Renthrette were tired of surveillance and thought this Razor thing sounded like action. They put their names forward, which would count me out; after the previous evening, I didn’t want to be anywhere near them. I figured I’d just stay where I was and let Mithos chaperone the dismal duo.
I should have guessed that things wouldn’t be decided so democratically. That night I was told to get my stuff together. Orgos and Lisha and I were going to see Mr. Razor and his boys. Garnet and Renthrette, though pleased to see the back of me, must have been livid.
“Will, do you want to ride Tarsha?” asked Lisha as we saddled up.
“Nope,” I said with a slight shudder.
“Why not?” she asked as she launched herself into the saddle.
“Because I value my life,” I answered, “as if you didn’t know. Where’s the wagon?”
“We aren’t taking the wagon,” Orgos beamed. “Too slow. Just fill your saddlebags and we’ll go as we are. Hopefully we’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“By about three or four o’clock we should come to an inn,” said Lisha. “The Sherwood. That’s less than a mile from the keep. We can stay there.”
Six hours on horseback, I thought, clambering awkwardly into the saddle. Wonderful.
Orgos grinned at me. I told him to go away, or words to that effect, and he spurred ahead, laughing. My horse started slightly at the movement and I fell off. It was going to be a long day.
The tracks we followed took us directly west towards Shale through meadows of long, sweet-smelling grass, hedged fields of barley, and clustered fruit trees. We went at a canter, occasionally walking the horses to let them get their breath back. Whenever we started to move faster again, I gripped the reins and the beast’s thick mane as tightly as I could until the panic subsided.
We ate our lunch of cold chicken, goat cheese, and coarse-ground oa
t bread by a clear stream where dragonflies hovered. Orgos chilled a bottle of plum wine in the stream and we shared it among us. Lisha preferred the water. She told us the names of the plants that grew by the stream and their uses, and then I watched her entice a red-and-black butterfly into her fingers and study it carefully, tenderly, before it flew away. I was going to remark that this was a bit odd for the grim party leader, but something in her glance told me not to.
The sun was hot as we rode the rest of the day, so we took it slower than before. I had a very slight headache from the wine, but I was also getting more relaxed and at ease on horseback and the miles passed surprisingly quickly. Orgos told me more tales of ancient battles and heroes, and I recited parts of the banned Thrusian history plays. Orgos lapped it up. It almost felt like I had something in common with this principled swordsman and his artifact of power. Weird.
The sun was still high when we rounded a bend in the hedged track and saw the Sherwood set back from the road, its chimneys placidly curling smoke. I was sweating a little and was glad of the shady porch where we could take our boots off while the stable boy dealt cautiously with Tarsha. The kid looked awestruck and terrified at the same time, which I could relate to.
The innkeeper was glad to see us. He introduced himself and offered us cold roast pheasant for supper. We bathed, changed, and came down to eat as the sun set. Apart from two blokes at the bar, we had the place to ourselves.
“Innkeeper!” I called, trying out the local dialect with fair success. “This is the best piece of roast pheasant I’ve ever had. Do you know that? I mean it.”
The innkeeper smiled with genuine pleasure. The two men at the bar had turned around and were nodding agreement. They were big, athletic types with thick sculptured biceps and suntans. Probably laborers.
“Trapped ’em in the woods myself yonder, sir, I did,” said the innkeeper.
“Remarkable,” I said. “Just the right gamy flavor without being too sharp, and moist but not greasy. This is a tribute to the bird. Remarkable. I expect it is much in demand round these parts?”