Will Power

SCENE VIII Eventor

Renthrette prowled the inn, brooding, muttering curses and shooting me black looks. We had to go back, she said. We hadn’t tried hard enough. We could still get them out. I let her rant and pace for a while and then told her she was talking nonsense, that we were lucky to be alive, and that going back was like taking a swan dive off the Cliffs of Doom or whatever they called that damned mountain that was full of teeth, scimitars, and other nasty, spiky things I wasn’t about to get stuck through my throat. Amazingly enough, she actually listened, and eventually nodded in silence.

That evening, over a melancholy dinner of meat and potatoes utterly devoid of flavor, we came to the obvious conclusion. We couldn’t get Mithos and Orgos out alone, presuming they hadn’t already been killed in reprisal for our botched “rescue,” and the locals were too concerned with protecting their own property to consider helping. We needed to go somewhere where we could mount a less suicidal rescue attempt with real soldiers instead of relying on incompetents like yours truly. The idea that the locals were “concerned” with protecting their farms and houses was an understatement. There was a frenetic mood approaching paranoia in the tavern’s sitting room that night, the men sitting armed and talking about how best to defend their houses and barns against the “hand of evil” which was expected to extend from the mountains. They feared, they said, for their wives and children, it having been confidently reported that the goblins had a taste for human flesh, raw or broiled. Moreover, the goblins, foul and twisted though they were themselves, prized human females as their concubines, and their brutal lust was legendary.

“My Alsary would die before she submitted to their loathsome hands,” said one, a large man, pale and blond as the rest but with a weathered look about him. This met with general agreement. “And if she could not, she would find a way later. She would not foster their brood or bring forth any creatures of tainted blood.”

“Tainted blood?” I repeated. Even given the subject matter, I thought the phrase a bit rich.

“I mean that she would stifle at birth any monstrous bastard fathered by such as they,” said the man, his blue eyes hard on mine. “A child with goblin blood, however little, is a goblin through and through and must be destroyed as such.”

I frowned and he responded instantly, leaning forward with an odd, disarming light in his eyes. “Do you not yet know what they are? Can’t you see it when you look upon their horrid blasphemy of the human form? They are born with a malice and cruelty so intense that it shows through in their very features, their twisted faces and foul hides. That is their nature as a species! They breathe the stench of death and corruption. They yearn to cause misery, to practice acts of obscenity and torture, to ruin the living and defile the dead. Nothing pleases them like the tearing down of all that is fair and beautiful, the ravaging of virtue, the perverting or violating of all which is true and bright. They bring terror, and in their path they leave destruction of a savagery you cannot conceive.”

There wasn’t much you could say to that. A grim silence had descended on the room during this dreadful litany and all I could do was nod respectfully as their pale faces clouded over and they each turned to their own thoughts. It was some time before anyone spoke again, and in the end it was me who tried to break the awkward silence. I wanted to ask about interesting local cuisine, their attitudes to plays and music, but I couldn’t think of a segue.

“So the goblins have always been on your borders like this?” I began.

“Far from it,” said an elderly man with a growth of silver-gold beard. “They used to cross the river rarely, and they have been in the mountain fastnesses only a few months.”

“But they have always been in this land with you?” I asked.

“God, no!” said another. “They first appeared only four or five generations ago. A wandering, vagabond race of cutthroats, they are. They steal and murder for their living, moving from place to place, sacking what they find and settling only when all is laid waste. Then they move on. Five or six score years they have been here, loitering away yonder on the far side of the river, inching into the mountains when we could not defend them adequately, mainly in the winter. But lately their numbers have grown, and they have massed an army bent on conquering our lands and cities.”

“The forests fell to them first,” said the older man, to whom the others seemed to defer. “A hundred years ago it is said they were fair and golden, full of deer and birdsong. Back then the forest west of the river was called Lucendale, the bright place, and the portion on the east bank, twenty miles south of here, was Eventor. Since then, the goblins have taken the forest west of the river and it has changed. They call it Sarak-Nul; it is a darksome place of blasted trees and stinking swamp into which few, save the enemy, will travel. On this side, Eventor remains ours, but goblins have been seen in its glades and clearings and the mark of their corruption is feared to be spreading, souring the air and rotting the earth. Their grasp on the mountain passes grows steadily stronger, and our Warders can no longer keep them at bay. The Falcon’s Nest, the ancient bastion and lookout, whose strength and beauty you can affirm, fell but recently as our warriors gathered in the White City. We have been sleeping and it has cost us dear. You have looked upon the wonders of the Falcon’s Nest, but many of us have not. Our ancestors carved its magnificence out of the very mountain, sweating and bleeding over their hammers and chisels. We will no longer lie silently while goblin filth soils the labor, the memory, nay, the very lives of our forefathers with their presence. Dark times are ahead and the struggle which you have seen begin will be long and bloody. It has been long in the making and will not end until they have destroyed us completely, or till we have vanquished them.”

Well, so much for music and theater. There didn’t seem to be much to say about their local cuisine either, since these people seemed to have no concept of the word “gourmet.” Never before had I tasted beef so cunningly disguised as tree bark. I know: tough to imagine, but the chef at the Refuge clearly had special gifts. Renthrette swore it was wholesome and nutritious, but since she rarely ate anything other than raw vegetables and rice, her opinion did little to sway me. I poked at the gray meat and wondered what day they had begun boiling it. The fact that no one remarked on this study in the culinarily bland and stodgy did not bode well.

The beer wasn’t much better, either. It looked like a kind of lager, but paler, with almost no alcohol content and absolutely no flavor. When I first sipped the fizzy, yellowish stuff, I presumed there was something wrong with the barrel and took it back to the bar. The landlord helpfully gave me another glass of the same gutless liquid and followed it up with a blank look when I asked to sample something else. The Refuge served only one kind of “beer” and this watered-down donkey urine was it.

Taking into account what we’d probably be eating and drinking if we stayed at the Refuge made it easier to consent to Renthrette’s desire to leave. We couldn’t save Mithos and Orgos alone, and there was nothing to do here, so she wanted to go on to the White City in pursuit of her beloved Sorrail. I hadn’t actually ascertained that he was her beloved Sorrail, but it aided my put-upon mood to think so, and I wasn’t about to bring the subject up with the ice queen herself. What did not initially occur to me was that the journey to said city took us through, or at least close to, the forests which had been so ominously depicted for us earlier in the evening. Renthrette pointed out that we wouldn’t be crossing the river and would thus be close to “the good bit.” This snippet of arrestingly vivid description referred to Eventor, the woodland which was, by all accounts, a little less rancid than its counterpart on the western bank. This was supposed, in so far as she gave a damn one way or the other, to make me feel better.

The first day of the journey passed without event. Our meager supply of silver had managed to wring us a pair of horses for the trip and some oh-so-inspiring bowls of something resembling gruel. (I hoped we were received favorably in the White City, because we didn’t have another penny to our names.) The horses, old and listless beasts with heavy feet and long, thick manes the color of new wool, had probably been used for pulling plows, and they seemed as likely to canter as they were to fly. The villagers wanted them back and the fee we had paid was a deposit we could ill afford to lose.

A series of rills and streams-including, I expect, the overflow from the Falcon’s Nest cistern-came down from the mountain and congregated randomly over the two miles north of the Refuge Inn. Thereafter our route followed the eastern bank of a slow river. This was the Snowborne, a southbound frigid curl of clear, shallow water only twenty or thirty feet across for much of its length but swelling, we were told, to several times that as it passed the White City. It was reedy and its surface was broken by rocks and stones, but there was never any chance of us losing it altogether, and it was as good a guide as we could have wished for.

That was presuming, of course, that we wanted to go at all. I was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around in the village of the damned while Renthrette rode off looking for her knight in shining armor and his heroic pals. I wanted to get some distance between me and that nightmare fort, at least until I could do something constructive to get my friends out of it. I did still feel responsible for them, to be honest, but I couldn’t wish myself into being something I wasn’t. If I could I would have been Will the Heroic and Invincible long ago. Well, probably.

Incidentally, I had not given up on finding some other road, one that got us away from these lands of legend and myth and back to more predictable problems and petty miseries, but when I had asked the residents in the Refuge about Stavis and Cresdon, the mountains of Thrusia and the Diamond Empire, I just got blank stares. One of the barmaids pointed out that someone had once had a cow called Cresdel. That was very helpful.

So what was I supposed to do? Take off by myself and go wandering through this land of goblins and talking bears? Good scheme. So I sat astride my ponderous mount and kept my eyes on the riverbank just in case something grotesque came striding over to tear my head off. It was, after all, only a matter of time.

Renthrette, by contrast, was quite jaunty. For her. She seemed to have gotten over our catastrophe in the mountains and the imminence of the denizens of Hell now that we were “taking the right course.” She rode on, talking idly about reforging her sword blade and how much she missed riding Tarsha. To these observations I made wary agreement, which seemed all that was required of me. We didn’t speak of the others-any of them, the ones we lost in Stavis or those we had left under goblin guard-as if even breathing their names would be bad luck.

Then we saw the forest. It appeared along the western bank of the Snowborne and it was all the villagers had said it was and more, a dank and sinister-looking wall of trees. Sarak-Nul, they had called it. An ugly name for an ugly place, though “ugly” doesn’t begin to describe it. The trees along the riverbank-those that were still standing, that is-were pale and gray, stripped of their leaves by more than winter. Their branches clawed the sky, and, at their feet, piles of dead lumber blackened and sprouted flesh-like fungus in great tubes and swellings clearly visible even from this side of the black water. The wood was swampy, silent, and vast, its dead, waterlogged foulness stretching farther than the eye could see. The horses snorted and tossed their heads uncomfortably, and a chill ran down my back, making me look sharply away. Renthrette stared at it fixedly, as if getting to know the enemy or staging her defiance. I just thanked God that we were forty feet of water away from it and did my best to ignore it.

I was less than completely successful at this because the woodland had a way of making you feel like you were being watched. I realize that sounds clichéd, but that’s how it felt. There is, after all, usually a degree of truth at the bottom of every cliché, only the familiarity of the words making the thought sound insincere. So, trust me, I’m being sincere. The trees had, I was convinced, eyes. If they didn’t, there were things among them that did, and the eyes were trained on us like a thousand crossbows. Could a place be evil? I had never thought so, but this soul-sapping forest was doing a pretty good impression.

An hour after the forest first appeared, we came upon a collection of buildings too small to call a village. None of them advertised itself as an inn or tavern, so we didn’t even dismount. We slowed, however, to discuss whether it was worth checking our route with one of the locals. As we did so, we became aware of doors and window shutters stirring fractionally. More eyes. Then the doors were closed carefully and bolts were thrown into place. Shadows passed across upper windows and vanished. The hamlet became quite still and we, it was apparent, were not welcome.

“Such warm people,” I remarked to Renthrette loudly. “Hard to believe the place isn’t awash with tourists! I mean, considering their openness and their exotic cuisine, amiable wildlife, and picturesque scenery”-this last bellowed with a broad gesture toward the fetid forest over the river-“it just takes my breath away that we aren’t fighting for road space. Well,” I concluded, in a bitter roar at the shuttered windows, “I’ll spread the word, have no fear! I’ll say, ‘If ever you’re passing a cramped and run-down shanty on the edge of a dead forest, a lousy collection of ruinous hovels populated by a bunch of inbred, misanthropic gits,’ I’ll say, ‘do yourself a favor and keep passing.’ ”

“Quiet, Will,” sighed Renthrette predictably. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, I’m not sure I can tear myself away from this. . ”

“Shut up, Will.”

That was the last haven of civilization (if you could call it that) that we saw for ten days. Thereafter it was just us, the river, and the forest, and a right hoot that was.

We slept alternately during the deepest hours of the night, taking a couple of hours each to watch by the fire. It was cold, but there was no wind, and we had brought extra blankets from the inn. Strange birds called from the river at night, great booming rolls that didn’t sound like birds at all; Renthrette said they were bitterns and that I should go back to sleep and stop being so pathetically infantile. There were other noises that she said were birds, too, lunatic cries that came out of the darkness when you least expected it, chuckling and whooping insanely to themselves, then stopping abruptly. The sooner we got to this White City place, the better I’d feel.

Then the forest crossed the river. I don’t mean that the trees of Sarak-Nul uprooted themselves and splashed their way across, though I was beginning to think anything was possible in this land of goblins and their conversational pets. I mean that the forest spread onto our side as we had been told it would. This was Eventor, the wood which was supposedly still largely untainted by the black hand from the western bank. Still, it was a forest and, given recent associations, I was more than happy to give it a wide berth, and said so.

“No,” said Renthrette in that apprentice-party-leader way she sometimes had. “We have to stick to the riverbank, and the forest is big. To go round it would take us twenty, thirty miles out of our way.”

“To go through it could cost us a good deal more than time,” I pointed out.

“Eventor is not Sarak-Nul. We’ve been told. .”

“We were told the goblins wouldn’t be living in the southern chambers of the Falcon’s Nest,” I reminded her.

“This is different,” she said, coming close to me and speaking straight into my face. “The sooner we reach the White City, the sooner we can come back with a force to help us get Mithos and Orgos out. We can’t take the chance of another two or three days on the road.”

“And if we don’t get through?”

“We don’t get through,” she said, shrugging. “But at least we tried.”

And there it was, Renthrette’s good old lust for glory and honor, that never-say-die spirit that led her to endure, no, to seek out, against-all-odds situations where she could put her neck on the line for a righteous cause. Unfortunately, there always seemed to be other necks involved, the owners of which (take me, for example) were less convinced of the value of principled martyrdom. Not that this ever mattered to her.

“Then let’s start moving,” I said, knowing better than to keep backing a three-legged horse. Her eyes held mine and a flicker of doubt rippled across them. Then she smiled, pleased-impressed, even. And then she walked away, a little spring in her step as I, knowing that my resignation had somehow been misread as resolve akin to her own, felt unaccountably guilty for not clarifying matters. But she didn’t smile at me that often these days, and when she did, it usually meant she was thinking about something else and I had just happened to be there, so I let it go.

Four days after passing through the Hostile Hamlet, we stepped into the forest of Eventor. I wished Orgos was with us, for his smile and his singing voice as much as for his sword. But Eventor wasn’t all bad. The night had been colder than before and the wind had picked up so that even I was glad of the shelter the trees gave us. The grass in the open had been frosty this morning, but the forest was dry and felt warm by comparison. While many of the trees were hardwoods and therefore bare, there were enough conifers of various shapes and sizes to keep the forest green and touched with life in defiance of the winter. The horses snorted and steamed softly with what I took to be pleasure or a sense of relief. Overhead in the canopied air, songbirds fluttered about, twittering to themselves. No maniacal starlings, hawks, or lunatic cries-just birds, small and pretty and generally barely worth noticing. I, with my new appreciation for wildlife that didn’t approach with vast, slavering jaws, noticed.

That evening we rested in a glade where copper beeches stood, still clinging to their oddly metallic leaves. The horses had browsed happily, and we had made a fire (or Renthrette had), cooked (likewise), and eaten (I helped). We were now sitting quietly as the last light dwindled and the stars, just visible glinting through the sparser branches above, came out cold and clear.

I told a story. She didn’t ask for one, and the last time I had told one she had come as close as ever before to slitting my throat, but we had been getting on better of late, so I gave it a shot. I chose something that would appeal to her, all knights and monsters, chivalry, and tests of loyalty and truth. She sat silently and watched the fire as I spoke-listening, I think, though she may have been thinking of other things. When I finished, she didn’t move for a while, then she wished me good night and got ready for bed. I hadn’t leaped to the front of her list of personal heroes, but seemed at least back in favor. For reasons I was not exactly sure of, this pleased me.

Renthrette had wrapped herself tight in a blanket and curled up like a kitten by the fire. Her hair fell across her sleeping face and, touched as it was by the flame-light, flickered like molten brass and copper running together in the finest streams imaginable. A little overly lyrical, perhaps, but not an altogether inappropriate image, since she had a good deal of fire about her even when just walking around in broad daylight. She could stand in a drenching rain and still light a fire with her glance. I felt it constantly, and while it could be appealing in a hopelessly unattainable way, the version I got was usually the red-hot-plowshare-on-the-bum kind of heat.

I was ruminating on this, and considering the heat that might break out of her if I could somehow convince her that I was her long lost handsome prince and not the septic rat-tail she had taken me for, when I heard the distinctive sound of whistling. It was a musical whistle, a snatch of an old Thrusian melody delivered with expert and easy confidence. I wheeled, pulled up my crossbow, and stared into the darkness of the wood, locating the sound at the same moment that I saw the man stepping unhurriedly toward me. I raised my weapon and he came on unabashed. Then the firelight picked him out.

“Orgos!” I exclaimed. “What the?. .”

“Sorry to surprise you, Will,” said the black man, smiling broadly so that his teeth shone. And there he was, large as life, tall and strong as ever, clad in his black armor with russet tunic and trousers beneath, his two long cutting swords strapped across his back so that their hilts stood proud on his shoulders like horns. He was the original sight for sore eyes.

“How the hell did you get out?” I began, approaching him quickly and slapping my hand into his. “God, it’s good to see you!”

“You, too, old friend,” he replied, laughing.

“How’s Mithos?” I spluttered, swallowing back something almost like the proverbial lump in the throat. Probably a remnant of dinner.

“Almost completely recovered,” he beamed, slipping a casual arm about my shoulders with that familiar ease of his. Relief and the courage which had always emanated from him blended and coursed through me.

“I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed, hugging him again. “I thought. .”

“What?”

I laughed and shrugged it off.

“So what are you doing here and how did you escape?” I demanded again, smiling wide.

“Sorrail sent a cavalry unit to get us out and I immediately came looking for you. Fortunately you aren’t too tough to track, and I knew where you entered the forest and when. It was just a matter of time before I found you.”

“What’s the hurry?” I said, observing the concern in his face.

“We have to get out of here. Not just the wood, the whole country, the region itself. We have to get back on the road and head south for as long as it takes, and we must leave this place to its own troubles.”

“But the goblins. .”

“There are dark forces at work here, Will: things we cannot comprehend and are too feeble to influence. Our first encounter with the goblins should have told us that much. There is power here, the kind of power we might call magic, and those who live here wield it. We don’t. We are just people, and our blades are insufficient. We must leave while we still can.”

I sat down by the fire to think, glancing over to where Renthrette lay motionless.

“Let her sleep,” said Orgos, as if reading my thoughts. “She needs the rest. We have a long journey home ahead of us.”

He was quite right, of course, and I was, I confess, relieved to hear him say it. The idea of leaving had been in the back of my mind since we arrived, but it didn’t appear to have occurred to anyone else. I kept it quiet because from me such a remark would mean cowardly flight, while from the others it was tactical withdrawal.

And I, who have spent my life fleeing, was suddenly unsure. Orgos wanted us to run for our lives because we were less powerful than our enemies? Since when? I thought for a moment, and something struck me.

“When we left Stavis,” I said, my eyes fixed on the dying fire, “you were virtually unarmed. Your equipment was back in the Hide. You had one of your swords. Now you have both of them again.”

I looked at him quickly and his expression was blank. “I don’t have them,” he said, apparently confused. “This is all I have, the blade I had when you saw me last.”

And sure enough, there was no sign of the second sword he had been wearing at his back.

“You did have them,” I said, getting to my feet, my body feeling like it had been plunged into icy water. “I saw them. Only a moment ago you had them.”

“No,” he said, his expression as before, “you are mistaken. I have only this.”

“Where did you get it?” I spluttered, nodding at the sword.

“What?”

“Where did you get it? Tell me about the first man you killed with it.”

“I don’t remember.”

He was quite calm, but his face had changed. A grayness had come into his eyes and his features had grown hard and implacable.

“I do,” I shouted. “I remember but you don’t? Does that strike you as terribly likely, swordsman?”

I turned hurriedly and kicked at Renthrette. There was a pause, and then his voice-or a voice like his but quite changed now-came low and cold as a mountain ice storm.

“You cannot wake her,” it said.

I spun and found that Orgos had risen silently and now loomed over me, all semblance of my friend running from him like melting wax. The grayness I had seen in the eyes was spreading cloud-like throughout his features, and with it came an odor, increasingly foul and pungent, but dry as old bones. It was decay.

“You are not Orgos,” I announced, somewhat redundantly in the circumstances, hoping that this would dispel whatever it was that was materializing.

“I am what is left of him,” the creature rasped. The cloud dissipated and the blasted corpse was revealed, desiccated and crumbling. The lipless jaws parted, but the sound that came out was more an emanation of the whole body than it was a voice:

“Fly, William, or perish utterly. Fly, or cower in despair. Fly, or have your body rent by pain, your mind by terror, and your heart by misery. Fly, or learn to wish for death and grieve unceasing that it never comes.”

The specter’s sightless eyes held me fast and, as its lower jaw fell away completely, its fleshless arms rose and bony fingers closed hard about my shoulders, pinning me to the spot. A new coldness, like the moist chill of grave earth, seeped into my body. I screamed, a long wail of horror, right into the skeletal face which closed on mine like some deathly suitor. One of its fingers splintered. Then another. Part of the face collapsed into the hollow skull, and the forearms snapped abruptly. The ribcage caved in, and in less than a few seconds, the entire corpse had crumpled in a shower of dust. It fell in a pile at my feet, dwindling still, fragmenting, disintegrating, reducing to powder.

And still I screamed.