Act of Will

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 oat 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?”

“To tell you the truth, sir,” he said, “there aren’t many people around here. The farmers just come in for a pint in the evening.”

“What about that castle up the road there?” I asked him smoothly. A cloud passed over his face.

“Aye, sir,” he muttered, starting to turn away, “I supply them.”

“Not good customers?” I ventured.

“Depends what you mean by good, doesn’t it?” he said.

Seizing our beer jug, he shuffled off to the bar.

“Interesting,” said Lisha. “But don’t be too obvious.”

“Me, obvious?” I asked, faintly offended. “Subtle Will? Please.”

“So,” I said as the innkeeper came back, “gives you a hard time, does he?”

“Who?”

“Whatsisname,” I said, pretending to fumble for it. “The Razor.”

“You know him?” the innkeeper asked, suddenly uneasy.

“Only by repute,” inserted Orgos.

“Very wealthy man is Mr. Thurlhelm,” said the innkeeper. “Gets anything he wants. Servants, women, entertainers, the best food and drink around; you name it.”

“How did he make his money?”

“He was an arms dealer in the West,” he confided. “Thrusia. Sold to the rebels for years until he realized they were going to lose. Then sold to the Empire. Never comes in here himself, of course, but his people do.”

“Are there a lot of people at the keep?” I asked.

“Not usually,” he said. “But they get visitors. Big groups of them. The servants talk about them, but only when they think no one’s listening, if you know what I mean. Not popular, Mr. Razor’s guests. But they never leave the castle, so that’s all right.”

“You’ve never seen them?” I asked, trying not to grin with excitement.

“No one does,” he said. “We only know they’re there when they send their food and drink orders.”

“More than usual, is it?”

“Three, four times as much,” he said. “No one leaves the castle while it lasts. Then things go back to normal.”

“And you’ve never seen these guests arrive?” I said, as if this was a minor curiosity.

“I’ve never even heard their horses on the road.”

We thought for a moment and there was silence. The men at the bar had stopped talking. They had their backs to us. I wondered how much they had heard and whether it mattered. I had no idea whether we had been talking loudly, but suspected we had.

“How often does this happen?” Lisha asked.

“Once a month or so, sometimes more.”

We sat around and nothing happened, save that the two men from the bar drank up and left a couple of minutes after our talk with the innkeeper. Lisha and Orgos exchanged significant glances. I looked up and muttered, “Well, at least the raiders eat.” The others gave me a blank look. “I mean, they appear out of nowhere and their corpses don’t stay put. It’s good to know they actually have to have food sent to them. It means they’re human.”

It was dark outside the Razor’s keep. Nights were short at this time of year and I figured it would be dawn soon. We had ridden past the fort and tethered our horses just under the lees of the Elsbett Wood, a hundred yards or so to the west. The castle was square and surrounded by a wall topped with a gatehouse flanked by a pair of turrets. In daylight it probably looked like a toy: a rich man’s whimsy. At night it was rather more forbidding, despite the glowing windows. We nestled amongst the trees and watched the silhouettes of sentries moving between the parapets. There was a faint sound of music and laughter drifting from within like smoke.

I yawned and stretched. We had rested for a few hours before we left the inn, but my body still told me I should be asleep. I thought about Garnet sitting in Hopetown sullenly grinding his ax blade with slow circles of his whetstone, and Renthrette watching over his shoulder in case he missed a bit. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Mithos having to babysit those two little rays of sunshine. The thought made sitting out here in the middle of the night slightly more appealing.

I wandered into the trees a little way off to relieve myself-too much beer, as usual. I had just about finished when I noticed that the quality of the darkness had changed: it was getting misty. In seconds the mist was a thick fog pooling among the trees. It was odd the way it just seemed to come out of nowhere, and, though the night had been warm, the temperature seemed to drop dramatically. And there was a strange quality to the mist. It reminded me of something.

The convoy from Ironwall. The scarlet cloaks flashing through the dense, grey air.

I felt the prickling of the hair on the back of my neck. I was still, holding my breath.

And then there was a sound in the mist. The soft clop of hooves. Horses. A lot of them, walking towards me.

I forced myself to move, running back to the others, tripping over roots I couldn’t see and glancing off tree trunks.

“Horsemen!” I hissed at Lisha and Orgos. “Raiders, I think. Coming towards us through the forest from the west.”

“Quickly?” gasped Orgos.

“No, walking.”

“How many?”

“I didn’t count,” I said. “A lot. This might be a good time to leave.”

“Where did they come from?” asked Orgos.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The woods.”

But that wasn’t strictly true, was it? I had been in the woods, and I had been pretty sure that I had been alone. And then it got misty and they were there. But I didn’t want to think about that.

We shifted quickly, shying away from the keep and sticking to the tree line. We checked over our shoulders as we moved, not speaking. The forest hung with an aura of dread. Something bad was going to happen. You could feel it. Whether we would be part of it, I couldn’t say.

Moments later the dark outlines of the horsemen appeared. They traced a broad arc along the edge of the woods only yards from where we had been waiting. There were perhaps sixty of them, silent and controlled, moving ominously forwards, rolling slowly down towards the keep. But they didn’t go in, not yet. A rider wearing the horned helm I had noticed during the raiders’ attack on the coal trotted over the bridge, and we heard the muffled voice of a sentry. Then the doors swung open and the raiders moved en masse. But there was no slow, measured caution now. They were charging.

“What is going on?” I whispered.

In seconds they were across the narrow bridge and through the gatehouse. Cries of confusion quickly replaced the music and merrymaking in the fort. Then screams, an occasional clash of metal, and then nothing. Less than five minutes later the raiders rode out two abreast, turned towards the mile-wide gap between the Elsbett and Iruni woods to the southwest, and rode away. A heavy mist was gathering about them before they were completely out of sight, and I knew we wouldn’t be finding any telltale hoofprints in the morning.

Ten minutes later, as the birds were beginning to sing in the woods and crows had begun to gather on the turrets of the little castle, we went in. We scurried from wall to wall, whispering and glancing about us constantly, but there was no one left to raise any kind of alarm. There were bodies transfixed with red-feathered arrows slouched across the parapets or sprawled on the stairways to the walls, and our fear slipped away from us. In its place came only revulsion mixed with a shoddy relief. The raiders wouldn’t be coming back, though why they had turned on the man who seemed to have been their ally, we had no idea.

We entered the banquet hall and found the revelers lying amidst pools of spilled wine and overturned plates of venison and suckling pig. It had been a sumptuous feast. The Razor had been a large, cruel-looking man. He was sprawled out on the table, his flesh still glistening like a dish ready for the carving. There was blood everywhere. It collected in pools on the floor, soaked the fine silks of the dead, and ran into the golden goblets that had fallen with them. A banquet for the dead, I thought to myself. It looked like the final scene of a play.

It was the stuff nightmares are made of, of course, but I was still alive, and the Razor had probably got no more than he deserved. These days it seemed I took my comfort where I could get it.

It was less easy to keep things at arm’s length when we got back to what was left of the inn. The innkeeper was dead, and the stable boy could tell us nothing that we hadn’t guessed. The raiders had asked for us by name before they ransacked the place and set it on fire. The crossbowman in the Hopetown tavern had been no random guest. For whatever reason, the Razor’s honeymoon with the raiders had ended abruptly, as had ours. Whatever purpose we had served had come to an end. They were looking for us, and we could expect no mercy from them now.