Will Power

SCENE X The King

The lackey, a small, obsequious man in a carefully tailored suit with brass buttons and little epaulettes, led us through a series of corridors and double doors, several of which opened onto smaller versions of the room we had just left. In each, diamond-encrusted courtiers sat around swapping witty banter, reciting lousy sonnets, and singing to each other about their disdainful mistresses. Fortunately, we were moving quickly, so I only caught the odd word, but I’d already heard enough of this verbal poncing about to last me a lifetime, and each half-heard quip, each shrewdly worded jest, each ripple of polite amusement stuck me like the blade of a stiletto.

“Don’t these people have anything better to do?” I murmured after one particularly sophisticated remark about how kissing a beautiful lady was a rung on the ladder to the divine.

“The question,” said the lackey who led us, tossing the remark over his shoulder in a manner one of his masters would have been proud of, “is whether anyone could do it better than them.”

This was obviously supposed to close the matter. I thought otherwise.

“But if what they’re doing is worthless, who cares whether they are any good at it or not? It’s like being the national champion of balancing a spoon on the end of your nose. I mean, so what?”

Our little procession stuttered to a halt and the lackey turned on me with an offended look that flushed his cheeks.

“These are the elite,” he said stiffly, “and their accomplishments do not merely accompany their station, they demonstrate it and show why they are courtiers and others aren’t. A tradesman can buy clothes and friends, but these people are different, superior. No tradesman could enter here without being shamed. These people just know how to behave, how to dress, and how to converse in civilized society. It is in their blood, and that is why they have the ear of the king and the tradesman does not.”

With a curl of the lip which neatly coincided with the word “tradesman,” the lackey turned on his heel and marched off. Garnet and Renthrette shot me the obligatory looks of hostility, amazed I could have missed something this obvious, and stalked after him. Someone in the corner began to sing about how beauty and virtue were really the same thing. I, the tradesman who didn’t belong, hurried after the others.

We had to be announced before being admitted to the king’s chambers. This, for reasons unknown, took a good ten minutes. During that time we stood at the door and tried to look reverential, something which seemed to be an effort only for me. The somber siblings, despite having spent their adult lives fighting the hand of authority, were clearly very impressed with all this ritual and glamorized hierarchy. I suspect that if the Diamond Emperor himself condescended to invite them and their rebel brethren to tea, all organized resistance would collapse overnight while they basked in the glow of his magnificence and that paradoxical “human” quality which apparently justified any semblance of tyranny. “Such and such a lord butchered my father to get his land, but he personally sent a basket of fruit to the funeral. What a decent chap-you know, always has a smile for the locals. Sure, he lives in a castle and eats gold, but if you meet him he’s so genuine, so ordinary. What’s it to us if he wants to turn our village into one big sheep farm and send us into whoredom and beggary? I mean, I’m sure he knows best. After all, he is a lord.”

Anyway, the announcements started echoing down the halls and through the palace’s sumptuous chambers. “Garnet and the Thrusian wanderers,” they called us.

“We sound like a pub act,” I remarked, with bitter amusement. And all at once I could see the three of us playing for a crowd in Cresdon’s Eagle Tavern: Renthrette with a lute, Garnet with a bloody big drum, and me with a pair of bent spoons, dodging insults and rotten fruit. But before I could share this little vignette with my companions, we were hustled down yet another corridor, through three more antechambers and, with a silvery fanfare, into the presence of King Halmir, son of Velmir, lord of Phasdreille.

He was seated in an alabaster throne padded with purple velvet at the end of a long chamber with high windows along the walls. A narrow carpet of the same rich purple led up to it, and on each side stood guards and courtiers, their eyes turned toward us. The king himself was pale and blond, perhaps forty, his hair breaking around his shoulders in luxuriant ringlets, but these were details I noticed later. My first impression of him was one of spectacle. He was dressed from head to foot in cloth-of-gold, and the early afternoon sun splashing down in great diagonal shafts through the windowpanes picked him out and made him shimmer astonishingly, like a man seated amidst flames. We faltered, our eyes on him, and Garnet gasped audibly.

“Approach his majesty the king,” said the lackey, a smug smile sprawling across his plump face as he took in our response.

There was a fluttering of fans from the female courtiers as the king inclined his head fractionally: a tiny nod which sent the light in the room dancing, as if a thousand burnished mirrors had been flashed toward the sun.

We began to edge forward, onto the carpet and down it, Garnet leading, then Renthrette, then me, all half-blinded by his brilliance. He did not move, but a ripple passed through the crowd as we approached and a number of men gathered at the foot of the throne: councilors and private secretaries, no doubt. Some were clad as the rest in bright, expensive fabrics and jewels, others wore the somber black of the archetypal civil servant. I noted that Gaspar, the middle-aged courtier I had seen earlier trading metaphors as proof of his love, was in the latter group. He was changed out of his finery now and looked positively funereal. Sorrail was among the courtiers. His eyes fell on Renthrette in her borrowed finery, and he smiled, pleased.

I had tried to wash my clothing for the event, but still looked like something dragged in by the proverbial cat: dragged, I might add, through hedges and waterlogged ditches, and then partly eaten. This had not gone unnoticed. While Renthrette got glances of quiet, polite admiration from the men and equally quiet, polite malice from the women, and Garnet got an inverted version of the same thing, the whole assembly found common ground once they’d looked me over: I was a scumbag. My shirt was yellowed with age and sweat, my breeches were stained disturbingly, worn at the seat, torn at the knee, and shredded altogether at the hem. It had been a tough journey, all right? If my comrades hadn’t been so lovingly supplied with fresh and dazzling attire, they would look no better. Well, not much. The point is that I was an adventurer (I had just decided), not a fop. And anyway, I wasn’t the least bit interested in people who would evaluate me according to what I looked like. Who did they think they were?

The problem was that all this elegance and spectacle was getting to me, and the truth was that, yes, I did feel a bit awkward and out of my element. I once witnessed a frog race in Cresdon years ago. (Bear with me, and the relevance of this will become clear). Some idiot had marked out a little course and people were expected to place bets on which of the five uninterested frogs would finish first. People did, too. When the “race” started, the frogs either sat where they were, went in the wrong direction, hopped out of the course altogether, or tried to make friends with the other frogs. The idiot organizer was press-ganged into paying the gamblers as if everyone had won, and finished the afternoon badly out of pocket and looking like a complete prat. Anyway, being before the king reminded me of that, though I couldn’t decide if I, surrounded by courtly leers and polite smiles, felt more like him or one of his stupid frogs. (See? I told you it was relevant. Sort of.)

While I was musing on my frog-like status, we had reached the dais where King Halmir, son of Velmir, sat like a human sunbeam. He looked us over, opened his mouth pensively, and said nothing. Not a sausage. So we stood there looking deferential, and lowered our eyes as his gaze strayed over our clothes, lingering significantly on mine. I felt my beard growing. Nothing happened and there was, for a moment, total silence. I felt. . something, like I was being held under a lens like a bug, an odd sensation that was more than being simply looked at. I was being studied, evaluated, but since no one said anything I had no idea whether or not I had passed whatever test I seemed to be taking. Then Gaspar, who was standing beside the king’s throne, no expression on his austere privy-councilor face, coughed politely. We looked up and he bowed fractionally.

“Thank you,” he breathed. “That will be all.”

My jaw dropped. I looked from him back to the king, whose attention had turned to his finger ends in a manner which said that our presence in his was no longer required. Garnet and Renthrette bowed and turned. With a rushed and halting movement, I followed suit, glancing back at the king, too bewildered to speak. He was conversing in hushed tones, his mouth barely moving, to Lord Gaspar, who was nodding thoughtfully. We got about a third of the way down the carpet before the crowd began to buzz with chatter as their ordered ranks collapsed. Suddenly there was a throng of people about us, milling here and there and taking no notice of us whatsoever. The king, I discovered, had left the room through a door at the far end. We were propelled out by the lackey, whose manner was now casual to the point of brusqueness, and dismissed. The frog race had been abandoned.

“Excuse me?” I gasped, as we were virtually ejected from the inner chambers and directed toward the street entrance. “Could someone tell me please what the bloody hell just happened?”

“What confuses me,” said Garnet, pushing ornate little pastries around his bowl sullenly, “is why we were presented to His Lordship in the first place.”

“Especially since he was just going to look us up and down like we were maggots in the dregs of his salad,” I added, taking one of the elegant little pies and sampling it.

“What do you mean we?” asked Renthrette, spitefully.

“Oh, it was my fault,” I exclaimed, incredulous, spitting crumbs. “I should have known.”

“Couldn’t you at least have changed your clothes?” she spat like an alley cat disputing ownership of a fish head.

“Into what?” I shouted back. “This is it, my entire wardrobe, right here on my back. I’m sorry, but all my golden suits are being polished and I haven’t found some horny courtier to buy me another, all right?”

At this last she wilted a little and turned irritably away.

“Have you any idea how much that little get up must have cost?” I went on, pushing the point home and flicking my finger accusingly up and down her dress and jewelry. “More money than I’ve seen in a long time, that’s for sure. Don’t start with me because I don’t look like what happens when you tie a tailor to a goldsmith and ply them with cash. And what the hell is in these pies?” I said, studying Garnet’s ornamental lunch. “They taste of nothing at all. Why can’t we go somewhere where people know how to cook?. .”

“Shut up, Will,” said Garnet, flaring. “I should have known you’d humiliate us just by being here.”

“Listen. .” I began.

“I said, shut up!” he roared, his hand straying for his axe with that just-try-me gleam in his eye. It was a familiar gesture, but it was one of those that never got stale, somehow. It was sort of like watching a favorite play: I always got a little something new out of it, something I’d not seen before. This time it was a hot flush that rushed through me like a bison with its tail on fire and almost made me stain my britches. All right, stain them some more. Happy?

That night I sat in my room for a while and sulked. Our meeting with the king had turned into another of those “adventurer” games which I always seem to lose, at least partly because I’m the only one who doesn’t know the rules. More to the point, I was no nearer to figuring out the real burning question: What the hell was I doing here? This was followed by a question which didn’t so much burn as rage like some apocalyptic furnace: How could I get back home?

Home. An odd word, that, always brimming over with unsaid promise of comfort and a sense of ease, a removal of fear and pressure, a restoration of the familiar and the reassuring. Yet, for all these associations to kick in effectively, it helped to know where exactly home was. For me, home had been Cresdon, though it had never been especially comforting or reassuring under the guardianship of Mrs. Pugh-particularly when the Empire found my name on their “top ten seditious actors and playwrights” list and, more dramatically, tried to put arrows through my gizzard. So home had become a concealed fortification in Stavis where the company of my new friends had taken the place of the homely hearth and steak and kidney pie with the family that I’d never really had. But now I was hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away, with the two “friends” most likely to slit my throat for belching at table, and a growing suspicion that all my other friends were dead. To top things off, there was a race of sinister goblins and specters who thought I was darkly important, and a race of handsome, sophisticated hero-types who thought I wasn’t.

This last raised another question. If we were so clearly worthless, if we were the kind of human refuse you could glance over in a second and completely get the measure of, if we were such slime that we could be dismissed without a word in our defense, why the bloody hell had they wanted to see us in the first place? Garnet was probably making a name for himself as Goblin Slayer Extraordinaire, and Renthrette was, shall we say, connected by way of Sorrail, but so what? In a city full of would-be ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting, why had we been so quickly pushed to the head of the list for an audience with his royal goldness? And impressive as the city was, why were Garnet and Renthrette sitting around instead of moving heaven and earth to rescue their friends? I mean, I was in no hurry to go crawling about goblin-infested caves, but for Orgos and Mithos I would at least consider it. Shouldn’t Renthrette, champion of the oppressed whatever the odds, be promising to charge back for her friends-by herself if no one would come with her-rather than sitting around the court playing fancy dress? The answer to all these questions was the same, and it came in a pint glass with a foaming head. I went out.

We were still residing in the palace, for reasons unknown, and our little suite of rooms had a tall and slender guard not unlike Garnet in physique but blond and quiet in that removed, dignified manner all the people around here seemed to have when they weren’t improvising love poems to their mistress’s eyebrows. I hadn’t seen much in the way of passionate outbursts since I’d been here, now that I thought of it. Yes, the waiting rooms had been awash with wry chuckles and other forms of polite amusement, but there had been no real laughter, per se. I mean no side-splitting, eye-watering, thigh-slapping laughter, the kind people make when they think something is really funny, as opposed to, you know, amusing. Everyone was so controlled, so restrained. It was beginning to get me down.

So I had a word in our guard’s shell and asked for directions to the nearest tavern. Nothing fancy, I assured him, in case he hadn’t got a good look at my britches lately, just somewhere I could get a good beer. He gave me a blank look, one of many I had been getting lately.

“You mean, an inn?” he said uncertainly.

“Spot on, mate. Good shot,” I encouraged him.

“The closest is some distance from this part of the city. Perhaps half an hour on foot.”

No problem. I had begun to feel like a trapped rat in the palace and figured the walk would do me good. I jotted down some directions on a little rectangle of parchment which the guard had for just such an eventuality. No wonder Renthrette and Garnet were so fond of this place. In Cresdon the local militia’s idea of giving directions is to turn you to face the appropriate compass point and then give you a hearty kick in the ass.

So off I went, ambling casually, in no great hurry, and content to soak up the quiet evening. It was always pretty quiet around the palace: hardly what you’d call urban. The streets felt like the neglected cloister of some vast monastery or temple: all pale stone, clean, faintly ascetic angles, and a slightly unearthly silence. I tried whistling to myself but it felt disrespectful so I gave it up. The few people who passed me, mounted or on foot, barely made eye contact with me as they went about their business or pleasure (you couldn’t tell the difference) in a demure, even stately fashion. It didn’t bode well for the tavern, I suppose, but I had to try.

The point turned out to be, as they say, moot. I had just consulted my parchment and taken a left into the closest thing to an alley I had seen thus far, when I heard soft, careful footsteps behind me. I came instinctively to a halt. A second later, so did they. I turned and looked up to the main street I had left, but saw nothing. I started to walk again, a little quicker this time. At first there was only the echo of my own feet in the tunnel-like alley, but then I heard them again, slightly out of sync with mine, following me. I began to run.

The footfalls were joined by voices, urgent, hissing whispers that bounced off the walls. I ran on and the alley descended slightly, snaking through a series of arches to the left. In front of me was a narrow flight of steps, climbing about ten feet back up to a passage that joined a main street. With panic driving me on, I was almost on the staircase before I saw the squat, heavy figure that stood in the shadows at the top. It stepped forward as I scuttered to a halt, and the evening light picked out an evil-looking figure, cowled all in black. Clasped in his hands in front of him was a huge, bladed weapon, heavy and brutal-looking.

It was a goblin, and it wasn’t alone. Another appeared out of the shadows to my left and a third came running up from behind. They were all lithe, dark, and strong.

I backed up without thinking, but they were too close. A swarthy hand took me by the arm and thrust my face against the alley wall. My hands were caught and pinned behind my back. A trickle of cold water ran into my shirt collar and I shuddered.

“I have no faith in prophecy, Mr. Hawthorne,” the big goblin on the stairs hissed into my ear in a strangely accented voice, a voice cold and hard as steel, which filled me with the sense of certain death. “Nor will you, by the time your blood has been poured from your throat.”

“Listen,” I spluttered desperately, “if it’s money you want. .”

One of those holding me laughed softly, a throaty chuckle, rich and chilling. I closed my mouth quickly as if paralyzed. Neither money nor words seemed likely to help me now.

A gloved hand passed over my mouth, pulling my head back so that my throat was exposed to the air. I heard the knife drawn by the third goblin and braced myself for the pain, the momentary warmth of blood running down my chest, the drowning, frothing gateway to darkness that would follow.

Yet, through the terror, a voice in my head, faint and indistinct, was repeating a single word: prophecy? It grew louder and, as I saw the blade raised, a flash of bluish light on its razor edge, I spoke. “You do not need to believe in the prophecy to be part of it.”

The knife hovered in the air. I could smell my assailant’s hesitation, and pressed my advantage, fighting for calm and evenness in my voice. “Remember the words of the prophecy,” I said, improvising desperately. “And remember what happens to those who forget they are subject to destiny. Strike me down and take the inevitable consequences.”

It was a little heavy-handed, but the fact that I was still alive to say the words suggested they were having some effect. Words have a life of their own, as I’m fond of saying, and it’s best to run with that fact rather than insist on them meaning only one thing. This time I was really running with it. Sprinting away at full pelt, no less. My would-be assassin apparently thought my words meant something, though what that something could be, I had no idea. The knife paused in the air, frozen in time. Then it lowered uncertainly.

There was an angry sputtering of sharp, unfamiliar words and a hand spun me round. A dark, leathery face with narrow and malicious goblin eyes was inches from mine. This was the one who had laughed and, absurd though it seemed to be choosing between them, I liked this one least.

“You do not scare me, Outsider,” he said. “What magic will strike me down when I cut out your heart and throw it to the swine?”

“My spirit will pursue you in the form of a great, gray hound with eyes like lanterns and teeth like scimitars,” I managed, coolly.

“Really?” said the goblin. There had been a fractional pause, but the word was touched with bitter sarcasm. “We shall see,” it resolved. It held out its hand for the knife, and the other goblin-after a fractional pause-gave it.

Then the big one on the stairs spoke uncertainly in his own tongue. The knife-wielder replied angrily and perhaps threateningly, and the big goblin responded with guttural hostility. They were arguing. The one with the knife turned to him, spat, and answered in crisp, bitter sounds, thrusting me away as it did so as if to give itself more room to fight. The big goblin glared and took a step down the stairs, brandishing its great cleaver and shrugging aside its heavy black cloak. The one with the knife turned disdainfully and peered at me through its tiny, squinting eyes. The knife, gleaming along its edge slightly, hung in the air.

And then, quite suddenly, the goblin stiffened and sank into a heap. I turned, wildly looking around me, since neither of the other two had stirred. At the far end of the alley was a shadowy figure, one hand outstretched as if pointing to the fallen goblin.

There was a confused struggle behind me and the smaller of the two remaining goblins, with a bestial snarl, took a great bound down the dark passageway toward the figure. “Pale Claw,” it said, and I thought it sounded scared.

In one hand, a razor which had been concealed in its foul tunic sparkled. The other was stretched out, fingers splayed to grapple with the newcomer. I stepped back cautiously, glancing to the steps where the large, cleaver-wielding goblin was descending awkwardly. There was a startled cry from the alley and I turned just as the razor clattered to the street, the goblin slumping down after it. A slim spike of metal stuck out of its chest, small and delicate as a needle. The big goblin on the stairs had slowed uncertainly. Another moment, I thought, and it would try to flee.

“Hell’s teeth, but you cut that fine!” I exclaimed, too delighted for there to be any real criticism there.

The figure did not move, and his reply was calm, detached, and suave. “Now William,” he said, almost casually, but slow, as if savoring every word, “let us not count our chickens.”

The voice was all wrong: too dry and quietly amused, too knowing. And suddenly, in a wave of chill sweat, I knew he was no savior. He meant to kill me as coolly, precisely, and methodically as he had killed the goblins. In fact, I was pretty sure the goblins had been an inconvenience, a distraction for him. And while being a tad more famous than the other people on stage had once been appealing, I suddenly thought it a very bad thing that though he had dispatched the goblins with ruthless efficiency, it was my name he knew. He had barely moved so far, but now I saw his head tilt microscopically and felt his eyes upon me from within his hood.

“Hold still now,” he breathed almost seductively, as if he was taking a speck of dust from my eye. “The pain will be surprisingly brief.”

For a moment I stood quite motionless, trying to shake off the dread that the ease and elegant restraint of his words sent through me. Stepping back, I looked to the staircase, where the large goblin was now inching out into the alley, cleaver raised, and flung myself backward into the shadows. The stone wall where I had been standing sparked briefly and the tinkling sound of steel rang out, small and musical. I stood up quickly, thought for a desperate second, and ran behind the goblin whose eyes were on the hooded stranger, toward the stairs.

The goblin heard me, made a stumbling turn toward me, bellowing and hewing the air with its cleaver, and caught the needle-dart meant for me in its shoulder. It cried out, sagging fast, and I ran, throwing myself against the stone and climbing the stairs in three-at-a-time leaps.

“Now, William,” said the smooth, quiet, but perfectly audible voice of the hooded figure, “don’t be tiresome.”

I think the goblin took a second dart, but I was up the steps before it fell, and running from the purposeful strides I could hear coming after me. I found myself in another short passage which rejoined the main street. I ran hard, but my pursuer had made it up the stairs by the time I got to the corner.

The goblins had fallen quickly: too quickly. The killer’s darts had to have been tipped with something particularly nasty. Bearing this in mind, I ran still faster, weaving erratically down the street. One deserted block, then another. Then a third. From some ways back came the voice again, raised fractionally, but still barely concerned:

“Till next time, then, William. Soon.”

I ran one more block and then looked back. There was no sign of anyone following, but I only paused for a second to take a long, sucking breath. Then I ran again, waiting for the momentary sting of one of those poisoned needles sliding suddenly into my spine.