Will Power

SCENE III The Only Way to Travel

We sat like that, silent and edgy, for about two miles. The darkness in the carriage was thick and liquid, giving the slightest rustle of clothing or creak of its steel spring suspension an immediate and unnerving resonance. I almost leaped out of my seat several times at the sound of someone shifting fractionally in theirs. Eventually, I mustered the courage to squint through the window blind, only to find that the land beyond it was almost as dark as the inside of the coffin on wheels we were riding in.

I could just make out a line of tall and narrow trees running alongside the road and pointing up into the heavens like spear tips. Cedars, perhaps. A quarter moon had just begun to rise, casting no useful light, so even the trees had a slightly sinister aspect that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I noticed-from outside myself, as it were-that I was clinging to the edge of my seat with one claw of a right hand while the fingers of my left drummed silently, obsessively, on the seat cloth.

Mithos, his sheer grimness rivaled for once by Ambassador Death’s, reached across to hold the shade open. What little light there was fell on his dour features as he gazed out into the passing trees. “This is the Vetch road?” he said.

“Yes,” said the ambassador. “There is an inn where we can rest before we reach the village.”

“The Black Horse?” Mithos asked, turning from the window. “Good. We have companions to meet there.”

“That is most convenient,” said the ambassador. “Our roads lie together.”

Convenient indeed, I thought to myself uncomfortably. Everything about this little jaunt was extremely convenient, as if it had been arranged weeks ago. The idea that it was all coincidence seemed no more plausible to me than the tale of Dantir, renowned rebel-drunk and gypsy wanderer. I was wary of getting caught out twice.

“Perhaps your friends can join me on my road north,” ventured the ambassador.

Perhaps not. The sooner I got out of this mobile graveyard, the better.

“What is your destination?” asked Mithos, casually enough, though I guessed he was probing.

“North,” he said simply.

“Specific!” I muttered, my discomfort switching suddenly into irritation.

“No,” agreed the voice of the ambassador, calm and unoffended. “But accurate.”

“Just not very helpful,” I persisted.

“The ambassador has a right to keep his own business to himself,” Mithos remarked coolly.

“I can’t say it fills me with confidence, that’s all,” I said sulkily into the blackness. The hint of skeptical hostility this remark contained had not really been intended, but I was wound as tight as a Dranetian merchant’s purse and in such situations tended to be the tool of my words, rather than the other way round.

The ambassador chuckled invisibly, a rich and throaty gurgle of a laugh that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

“Ever the realist, eh, Mr. Hawthorne?” he said when his amusement had passed. “Will Hawthorne the pragmatist. William the cynic, Bill the perceptive. A man who knows the world and sees through its various shell games as if they’re made of glass. A man too shrewd for principles, too practical to be distracted from the truth. . ”

This was an alarming speech, particularly for someone who had never set eyes on me before. He had pigeonholed me a little too accurately. It was like he had somehow seen into the way my head worked and seen the way I-in my less humble and bewildered moments-tended to see myself. I shifted in my seat.

Suddenly there was a flash of light and the inside of the carriage flickered into the shifting radiance of a greenish flame. It sprouted and guttered from the tip of the ambassador’s right forefinger. As my jaw fell open, he spoke again, looking me squarely in the face with an odd smile. “But what is real, Mr. Hawthorne? What is true?”

His bright eyes fastened on mine and held them for a moment, then his face loomed large, as if it had swelled to a great size, and filled the carriage, dwarfing me beneath it. I cried out and looked to Mithos, who sat in the strange light, his head lolling with sleep. The vast face of the ambassador hanging over me split into a broad grin and he began to laugh.

With a start I awoke to find myself sitting in the darkened carriage as before. There was no sound or movement from my companions. As my heart slowed to normal again, I laid my head on the rest behind it and watched the trees pass until I slipped into more restful slumber. It took some time.

It was still dark when we reached the Black Horse, tired and cramped from sitting. The motion of the carriage had caused a dull nausea to settle in my gut like some spawning shellfish. I found an outhouse and splashed some water on my face, though the predawn air was cold and damp. Then the stench of the toilet overwhelmed me quite suddenly and I vomited into the foul pit below, my stomach wrenching in great, painful waves till my eyes watered and I swore I’d never eat, drink, or travel again.

I groped my way across the courtyard to where a boy, bleary-eyed and yawning, helped our silent coachman to unyoke the horses by the light of a lantern. He gave me a sullen glower as I passed. Given the fact that we were responsible for dragging him from his bed at this ungodly hour, I could hardly blame him, especially since it was often touch and go whether I’d be up in time for lunch. Still, empathy didn’t improve my temper. I returned his scowl with interest.

The inn staff were already up, or some of them, at least, and they were busying themselves with the preparation of breakfast. I requested a mug of water and swilled it down hurriedly, as if we’d just emerged from the Hrof wastes, rather than the elegant sophistication of Stavis-by-the-Sea. A fire was burning in the hearth of the main bar room. Sitting in front of it, silently warming their hands, were Orgos and Renthrette. I joined them hesitantly, expecting the usual torrent of abuse, but Renthrette was too tired to bother. I quickly realized they were also anxious. Lisha and Garnet had not yet arrived.

“Bacon and eggs, sir?” inquired a far-too-perky maid as she skipped toward the kitchen.

“God, no,” I managed.

“Rough trip?” inquired Orgos, observing this rare instance of non-gluttony.

“Grim,” I said, and left it at that. The three of us returned our eyes to the fire, lost in our own thoughts.

Mithos joined us and announced that he had got us a pair of rooms. “You can rest for a while if you like,” he said.

“I’ll stay down here,” said Renthrette, “in case the Empire comes looking. . ”

“They won’t,” said Mithos. “They lost interest in us the moment we left their territory.”

“Still,” said Renthrette, ignoring him. “I’ll wait here.”

Mithos nodded minutely, understanding, and walked away. It was unlike her brother not to be here first, raring to go with his axe at the ready, and I had just assumed that we would find Lisha silently studying maps at the breakfast table. Their absence was worrying.

I followed Mithos, chose a bed, lay down, waited for the room to stop spinning, and, as dawn was breaking with an irritating flurry of birdsong, fell asleep.

I awoke to find some kind of meeting going on around me. Actually, “shouting match” might be more accurate, and that despite the fact that I had been snoring away pleasantly.

“We can’t just leave them behind!” Renthrette was shouting, her face as strained as her voice. “We have to go back.”

“If we go back,” answered Orgos, “we endanger them far more than we help them, as well as putting ourselves at risk.”

“Is that the issue?” Renthrette snapped. “Are we just going to abandon them to protect our own skins? If Garnet and Lisha had got out and we hadn’t, I think the situation would be a little different.”

“Are you listening to me, Renthrette?” Orgos said, biting off the words. “By themselves they might lie low and then slip out of the city unnoticed. If we go back we will only make them fifty times more visible, more recognizable. Lisha, of all people, would understand that. And your brother would be the last person to endanger the whole party unnecessarily.”

“Then why don’t we just stay here and wait?” she retorted. “You said yourselves that the Empire won’t stray out of its own lands to look for us.”

Mithos, who had been sitting silently in thought thus far, turned and said, “They might if they know we’re still here. There are travelers passing through this place on to Stavis all the time. The Empire won’t pursue us if we’re moving away, but if they know we’re sitting less than a day’s ride away. . who knows?”

Renthrette dropped angrily into a chair and sighed. Seeing what looked like a convenient break in the conflict I sat up and said, “I could murder that bacon now.”

“I could murder you, Hawthorne,” snarled Renthrette, “very easily. This is all your fault. As usual.”

I thought that a little uncalled for, but I knew better than to get in the way of the tigress protecting her cub. Well, sibling, actually, but you take my point. Her pale cheek was flushed and hollow, her eyes cold and hard, her slim lips tight, and there was a strand or two of golden hair straying unheeded into her face: appealing, in a homicidal kind of way.

“Do I smell sausage?” I muttered, attempting to slink out of the room with a semblance of preoccupation.

“Whether you do or not, you aren’t getting any,” Orgos remarked, his eyes still on Renthrette. “You’re getting fat again. And we’re moving out in ten minutes.”

“What?” I exclaimed, almost as outraged as Renthrette. “I’m starving!”

“If you ever had been,” the black man responded, “you wouldn’t toss that expression around so casually.”

“I have!” I shouted. “Almost.”

“Do you ever think with anything other than your gut?” Renthrette spat.

I started to giggle uncontrollably.

She just shook her head with the kind of disgust that took me right back to when we first met. As she stormed out and down the steps to the bar, I couldn’t help wondering how I had managed to dispel that mood for those few weeks in Shale when we had almost been friends. Ah, well. What goes around comes up short, and a stitch in time is worth two in the bush. But life goes on, and on, and on. .

Mithos and Orgos merely looked at each other and then set to packing their things.

“So where are we going?” I grumbled.

“North,” said Mithos.

“Not with Mr. Cheery and his traveling clownschool?” I bawled.

“What?”

“What’s-his-name: Diplomat to the Damned.”

“Ambassador Linassi?” said Mithos expressionlessly. “Yes. He has asked us to serve as an armed escort for him on the road, and has purchased a horse to the purpose.”

“He will buy us some basic weapons in Vetch,” added Orgos, “for those of us who came unprepared,” he added with a glance in my direction.

“And in the meantime,” I muttered, “I’ll just bite the arms off any bandits who attack us. After all, I’d risk everything for a total stranger.”

“Who saved your neck when it was on the block,” Orgos concluded.

“I’ll sacrifice my firstborn child in his honor,” I responded, bitterly.

“How about doing the world a real favor and just not having any children at all,” said Orgos.

The ambassador oversaw our final preparations in silence. I’d say he was dour, but there was always that touch of sparkle in his eyes that suggested a disarming private amusement, so I did my best to stay out of his way. Since I was also keeping clear of the more definitively dour Mithos, and Renthrette had reverted to treating me like a mangy and probably rabid dog, that left Orgos. As ever.

I found him sitting on the carriage’s driver’s plate, testing the edge of his sword with his thumb.

“I hate fighting with only one sword,” he remarked. “The balance is all wrong. Perhaps I am getting too set in my ways.”

“Change isn’t always good,” I said, thinking ruefully of our trip into “the North,” whatever that meant.

“I’m not sure,” he answered, looking up into the morning sun. “I was beginning to feel hemmed in in Stavis. A spell on the road will be pleasant. Invigorating.”

In Orgos’s mouth, that last word had an ominous feel. It was like “excitement.” For years “excitement” had conjured serving maids divesting themselves of unwieldy apparel, but when Orgos said it I shivered at the blood-smeared images charging through his head, lances poised to skewer the unrighteous. A spell on the road may indeed be pleasant, but if things got invigorating, according to Orgos’s definition, I might find myself looking for a way back to Stavis. Or somewhere else. Somewhere quiet and peaceful, where adventure means a new kind of beer and excitement follows you upstairs by candlelight. .

“Are you driving?” I asked, changing the subject. The black man nodded.

“The other driver was hired here two nights ago,” he said.

“What was the ambassador doing in Stavis for so short a time?” I asked.

Orgos shrugged. “Why so suspicious?” he said.

I shaded my eyes from the sun to see if this was a serious question. Apparently, it was.

“He just seems to have been exactly what we needed exactly when we needed it. Plus,” I added, as a slightly embarrassed afterthought, “he bothers me.”

“Bothers?”

“You know,” I hissed, glancing around as if he might be behind me, listening with that oddly watchful mirth of his. “He seems so. . I don’t know, calculating. Deceptive? No, that’s too strong. He looks at me like someone looking at a kind of ape, you know? Something that is intriguing and kind of funny because it is almost-but not quite-human?”

“Renthrette looks at you like that, too,” he grinned.

“She’s better looking,” I returned. “But it’s different. She’s obviously revolted by what she sees. He’s just fascinated. It’s like he’s joining in a child’s game, you know? He’s involved, and yet he isn’t.”

“I think you’re overanalyzing.” Orgos laughed.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I admitted. “I just have to come up with a reason for why he makes me feel so strange.”

“What is this, intuition? A hunch?”

“I suppose.”

“A bit metaphysical for you, isn’t it?” Orgos smiled.

“That’s why I’m trying to rationalize it,” I agreed. He took my hand and pulled me up beside him, and I found myself smiling. If we had to ride off into the unknown, I would at least have a companion who would exchange the time of day with me.

Renthrette appeared. She was mounted on a dapple-gray filly and still looked sullen. “Let’s go, if we’re going,” she said. She had tied her hair back with string and wore a long mantle of creamish wool. A sword hung beside her, but she had no other weapons or armor, and I couldn’t help thinking that we were ill-prepared to be anyone’s escort in unfamiliar territory. Her face, almost white with sleeplessness and anxiety save for lips tightened to pinkish lines and eyes rimmed with shadow, was hard, stoic, under my gaze. Then, without waiting for a response, she turned the horse and began walking it out of the inn yard. Orgos watched her quietly, his face showing that curious emotional elasticity it had. He could slip from violent rage to easy and expansive laughter in the blink of an eye without ever seeming remotely insincere. Now his brow was clouded with concern and fears he dare not speak.

“Garnet and Lisha are on their way,” I breezed. “Be sure of it.”

Orgos looked down for a second and then grinned at me, knowing I was trying to encourage him, and grateful for it.

“Where’s your crossbow?” said Mithos to me as he strode out of the inn with a basket of bread and cheese.

“I didn’t have it with me, exactly,” I faltered. “I. .”

“If you are unarmed,” he said, cutting me off briskly, “you’re no use up there. Get in the back with the ambassador. I’ll ride with Orgos.”

So that was it. I climbed down and loitered for a while, but it was clear that we were ready to go. I kicked at the gravel of the yard and then looked up to find the carriage door swinging open. The ambassador met my gaze from inside and he smiled slightly, knowingly. Even in daylight with the windows open, the interior seemed somehow dark and uninviting. It was like he exhaled shadow, or the sunbeams which came shafting through the windows like golden smiles took one look at him and thought better of it. I glanced round as if he might have been waiting for someone else but then, when no one came to my rescue, climbed in.

“It’s nice to have fellow travelers for company,” said the ambassador evenly.

“Yes,” I said, barely disguising the extent of the lie.

“And such a nice day.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, perhaps we ought to be getting on.”

“Yes,” I said.

He rapped on the roof with his knuckles once, and we set off. I tried not to look him in the face, though this was difficult to avoid since we were sitting directly opposite each other. As we turned out of the inn, I stared out of the window as if there was something extremely interesting about the countryside outside.

In fact, there wasn’t. We were only a dozen miles north of Stavis and about the same distance east of the river Yarseth, so although the ground was sandy and hard, the area was irrigated well and the near continual sun made the land fruitful for miles. How far it went, I really couldn’t say. I supposed there were isolated villages and little market towns, but if there were settlements on the scale of Stavis or Cresdon, or, for that matter, of Adsine or Ironwall, I had never heard of them. So we were heading aimlessly into the back of beyond, and I got to make the journey with the world’s funniest undertaker. Another smart career choice by all-knowing Will, clear-sighted clairvoyant extraordinaire.

After a few minutes studying the fields of green stuff we were passing as if my life depended on it, I sneaked a peek at the ambassador in the hope that he might have nodded off. He was sitting with his head tipped forward and his fingertips pressed together. His eyes, rolled slightly upward, were fixed unwaveringly on me.

“Oh, er. . Lovely countryside,” I blurted out. “So, you know. . green.”

“Yes,” he said, throwing my taciturnity back at me.

I flushed, awkward and embarrassed. He, predictably, smiled to himself as at a secret joke. I returned to the window, though I could feel his eyes on me continually as the miles passed.

We stopped for lunch three hours later and I was out of that coach before you could say Mobile Tomb. After a morning two feet from the prince of darkness, even Renthrette’s steely gaze seemed welcoming. Another misreading. She met my smile with a look that could turn milk to cheese at fifty paces and returned her attention to her horse, who she probably deemed a more worthy companion.

I had wandered cheerlessly off into the underbrush to relieve myself and was returning to the road up a shallow embankment when, glancing up, I saw that the sky, which had been bright and clear only moments before, was now darkening with huge purple storm clouds. They were moving at great speed, steadily obliterating the blue beyond, though I could feel no wind to speak of. There was a rumble of thunder and, almost immediately, there came a pattering of rain.

I scrambled up the slope to the road just as a distant lightning flash set Renthrette’s filly snorting and stamping. She dismounted hurriedly and whispered to it. As she did so, I glanced at the coach horses which, by contrast, were curiously still and unaffected, even as the thunder bellowed loud overhead. Orgos and Mithos slid down from the driver’s plate, hunching over to keep the rain from their faces, and, for a moment, the four of us were together in the road, caught quite off guard by the sudden storm. We exchanged bewildered and irritable glances and then I heard, from inside the carriage, the faintest laughter.

The ambassador, who was watching us through the coach window, clearly found the idea of great adventurers caught out by a cloudburst extremely amusing. His eyes fell on mine. “The pragmatist gets drenched!” he exclaimed with strange rapture. “How easily the unlikely takes you off guard, Mr. Hawthorne!”

There was something oddly knowing about his manner and, recalling my dream, I felt a shiver course through my spine. He continued to laugh, staring at me, and then, with a great sigh as if he’d finally got what he wanted, he turned his face up to the sky. “See, William,” he said. “Reality dawns.”

I followed his gaze and found that the clouds were now a charcoal gray marbled with wisps of violet and pea-soup green, thick and impenetrable. Light had fallen to a fraction of what it had been moments before, and the clouds seemed to be swirling like some heavenly maelstrom. Then, with a deafening roar and a crack like the splitting of a great tree, there was a flash of lightning that burned the world away, searing everything white and throwing me onto the ground.

I don’t know how long I lay there. It could have been seconds, but it felt like more. I thought I might have been blinded by the flash, but when I opened my eyes I found that they, and the rest of me, were quite unharmed. I was face down in the dirt and everything was still.

The dirt was dry.

Dirt?

I rolled over quickly and found Orgos already on his knees beside me. Mithos was a few feet away, and Renthrette, who was still holding her horse’s bridle, was standing a little to his right. They were all gazing about them in silence. There was no rain, no coach, no ambassador, no road.

“Where the hell are we?” I gasped.

Mithos gazed around the grassy vale in which we stood, his eyes lingering on the steep snowcapped mountains which hemmed us in on all sides.

“I have no idea,” he said.