Act of Will (28 page)

SCENE XLI

Rest in Peace

I
t was dark. I woke strangely, my senses seeming to revive one at a time. I felt numb throughout my body, and though I tried to move, it was as if my muscles were still asleep. I was lying on my back, arms formally by my side. It was an unnerving feeling, lying stiff in the blackness, listening to my heart quicken. I tried flexing each part—legs, shoulders, chest, straining against whatever invisible bond kept them so uncannily still—but nothing happened.

I’m dead,
I thought.
My body has shut down, and only my mind is still alive. Those hairy little bastards got me after all.

But then I could feel something near my fingertips: my shirt fabric. In a moment or two I could move my hands and wiggle my toes, and within another agonizing half-minute, life spread back up from my extremities and my body finally awoke.

I rolled to the right, or rather began to, and found I couldn’t. There was some kind of wall against my side. It smelled of pine. I rolled the other way with the same result. Panic seized me as, trying to sit up, I found the same solid restraint immediately above me. I was in a box.

Not just any box, though.

I clawed desperately at the wood with my fingernails as the awfully familiar shape of the thing registered: a coffin.

So I was either dead and having some kind of ghostly moment of consciousness, or someone had thought I was dead and I soon would be.

It was bloody typical that I should die, in this miserable fashion, through someone else’s stupidity. I drew up my forearms and attempted to bang on the underside of the lid, knowing immediately that it was a complete waste of time. I probably had about eighty cubic feet of dirt weighing down on me, slowly splintering the timber till the rats and worms got through.

Let’s hope I’m dead by then,
I thought. This body might not be up to much, but I didn’t want to stand (or rather lie) by as it got stripped down (an eye here, a kidney there) by vermin even lower than I had been in life. I pushed at the lid again.

And against all the odds, it moved. The lid lifted perceptibly and a crack of light appeared at its edge. I gasped away my terror-stricken panic and pushed hard. It splintered and tore free. Laughing with relief and shielding my eyes, I sat up.

I was in the back of the wagon and we were moving. There were five other coffins, neatly stacked and completely filling the wagon.

Now, it could have been that morbid obsession that sometimes draws us to glimpses of death, or it could have been feelings for my comrades that I had not really admitted, but I grabbed a conveniently positioned crowbar and began to jimmy the sides of the nearest coffin.

Burning with a dreadful anticipation, I freed the lid and pushed it aside. Inside was Orgos. Any hopes that he had been placed here prematurely crumbled as I touched his cheek. He was stiff, unresponsive, and cold as the grave.

I studied his still, lifeless face and felt a sense of loss and failure. Orgos was dead, and the knowledge that he had taken the bite to save my hide made it worse.

“Afternoon, Will,” said a voice from the front of the wagon.

I turned to find a man smiling at me. His face was grubby and his clothes hung in rags, but there was something about the voice . . .

“Mithos?” I said.

“Who else?” he remarked. “So you hatched by yourself?”

“Orgos . . .” I faltered.

“Within the hour, I expect,” said Mithos, turning back to the road.

“What? You’re taking all this resurrection pretty damned calmly.”

He gave me one of those what-is-your-mental-inadequacy looks of his.

I crawled into the front.

“So Orgos
isn’t
dead?” I said. “Is this magic as well? Like the sword and the raiders who come in the mist and . . .”

He gave me that look again, confused but suspicious at the same time, as if he thought I was being stupid on purpose.

“Orgos isn’t dead,” he said, returning his gaze to the road.

“That’s good,” I replied, totally bewildered.

“Yes,” he agreed. After a moment he added, “Why would he be dead?”

I wondered which of us was the imbecile. It was usually me, but it seemed time to make that nice and clear one more time.

“Why would he be dead?”
I repeated. “Well, when people get bitten by lethal spiders to which there is no known antidote, and shortly afterwards they stop breathing, go very stiff and cold, and people put them in coffins, that tends to be the first thing I think of. Stupid, probably, but there it is.”

“He didn’t tell you about the drink Lisha gave you?”

“What about it?”

Then there came one of those rare remember-it-for-prosperity moments: Mithos laughed. It wasn’t a guffaw or a full and throaty chuckle, but it was there, if brief. Not a smile, a laugh.

“It seems Orgos got the edge on you for once,” he said.

It turned out that Lisha brewed a species of potion for just such eventualities. It slowed the heart rate, shallowed the breathing, and induced a slumber that resembled death to all but the most thorough examination. Renthrette and Garnet had slipped away to follow the wagons. Lisha, Orgos, and I had been carried about publicly, to make people think that the raiders’ attack had been a success. It had all gone according to plan, except that no one had told me that there
was
a plan.

“We’re a day behind them,” said Mithos, “but the chalk device is working well. I think Renthrette took a leaf out of your book, Will.”

“My book?”

“She did something
theatrical
: distracted the driver while Garnet got under the wagon to fit the mechanism.”

“Distracted?” I repeated vaguely. “How?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She said something about
exploiting her femininity,
whatever that means.”

What
did
that mean? Selling fruit in a low-cut bodice? Hitching up her skirts and posing as a low-rent hooker? Doing exotic gypsy dances in the street with little cymbals on her fingers and tassels attached to her . . .

“You can start opening those coffins, if you like,” said Mithos.

I came back to reality, such as it was, and did so. Lisha lay quiet and peaceful in her small coffin, a strand of her long black hair across her face. I brushed it aside and looked at her. This deathlike trance didn’t look as bad on her as it did on the usually more animated features of Orgos. She looked as if she might open her eyes at any second and go about her business with a small nod of acknowledgment to me for not getting them all killed somehow. I was beginning to understand Garnet’s reverence for her. How could someone look so insignificant and make you feel so small and transparent?

I had to shift the top coffins to open those stacked underneath, which I couldn’t possibly have done except that Orgos had woken up. He looked dazed, but after stretching his broad shoulders he saw me and grinned.

“I guess you forgot to mention that we would all be sleeping for a while,” I said reproachfully.

“Guess so,” he said. “Help me up.”

I took his hand, and as he pulled himself upright he sort of half embraced me and slapped me on the back.

“Good to be alive,” he said, checking the slender cut on his arm.

I nodded. The things I had felt like saying before now seemed embarrassing and unnecessary, so I just said, “Make yourself useful and help me get these open.”

One of the coffins contained food and equipment, and the last two contained a pair of massive crossbows with slides that looked like they’d need a team of horses to draw them. They could probably skewer four men and their mounts at a hundred yards. I whistled, and Mithos called from the front, “They may help to even the odds a little if the raiders attack. The man who makes them called them scorpions.”

They’d pack one hell of a sting.

I said nothing as I climbed back through, one of the massive, brutal-looking bolts held loosely in my fingers. I wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of one of those. No worse than being killed any other way, no doubt. Better than some, probably.

“I want you to take charge of them, Will,” said Mithos. “When we stop for lunch you can set one up and familiarize yourself with how it works.”

“So now we blast our enemy out of the saddle from a hundred paces?” said Orgos with a scowl.

“The raiders aren’t going to line up and fight you in single combat,” said Mithos flatly.

“And their lack of honor means that we resort to . . . these?” Orgos demanded, with a nod at the colossal crossbows.

“Absolutely,” said Mithos.

Orgos scowled again and started polishing the blades of his swords, as if to make a point.

I was with Mithos on this one.

Still, my feelings were mixed. The crossbows (an inadequate word for those great, clanking death throwers) made me feel powerful, but what happened when the enemy came in close? What chance did I have face-to-face against men who had to be killed with machines like these? And what of Mithos’s new faith in me? Will the missile man? Bill the linchpin, cornerstone of the outfit? Someone to be relied on when the enemy charged? Suddenly I saw why they were all so earnest. It wasn’t about honor and virtue at all. They just couldn’t bear the thought of screwing up and having the deaths of their friends on their consciences. I looked at the scorpion crossbows and felt a gathering knot of cold somewhere between my stomach and my groin.

“The chalk marks are too close together,” Mithos said, looking at a pale blotch on the road. “I hope there’s enough dust.”

“Any theories?”

“About where they’re going? We’re heading north. I’d say Verneytha. Possibly the capital itself.”

“Well, at least we’re ready for the raiders now,” I said.

“The crossbows?” asked Mithos.

“No,” I replied, “the coffins. One each.”

SCENE XLII

The Farmhouse by the Woods

T
en miles south of Verneytha, the chalk vanished. We had lost them. But only for a moment. Garnet and Renthrette had retraced our path, and now they came cantering back from behind glowing with excitement.

“They left the road a quarter of a mile back,” said Garnet. “We picked up their trail a couple of hundred yards after the last chalk mark.”

We doubled back to where a narrow dirt track trailed off to the west through an orchard of small apple trees.

“We didn’t want to risk following the wagon without you,” said Garnet, proud of such superhuman restraint.

“It goes to a farmhouse,” said Renthrette. “There’s nothing else there.”

“Excellent,” said Lisha, and they grinned at each other as if she’d tossed them a bone to gnaw on. “Plan?”

“We get a closer look,” said Mithos.

It had started to rain, and the early-evening sky was heavy with dark clouds. We had concealed the wagon and horses in a grove of trees close to the road, and then moved cautiously through the orchard in silence.

The farmhouse was a rambling sprawl of ramshackle buildings gathered around a courtyard that housed a few chickens. The wagons we had pursued from Hopetown were there, their sides folded down, empty. There was no sign of life. We lay in the long, wet grass at the edge of the orchard and watched.

I was just starting to get stiff from the cold when a man in a white linen tunic emerged from the main house and walked around the perimeter, looking about him. It was Caspian Joseph, the man who sold me the pendant. He completed his circuit of the buildings and went back inside, apparently satisfied.

“Not much of a patrol,” said Garnet.

“I don’t think it was a patrol,” said Lisha. “Something is about to happen.”

And, right on cue, eight raiders emerged from the house in full armor.

I reached for my crossbow, but Orgos stilled me with a touch.

“They aren’t coming for us,” he whispered.

He was right. The raiders came out carrying two coffinlike boxes, walked around the pigpen, and moved away from us, towards . . . what?

“What’s over there?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Renthrette. “Fields, orchards, the edge of the Iruni Wood.”

What was going on?

Caspian Joseph had followed them out, but once they got a little ways from the farm buildings, he turned back towards the wagons. The rain was falling more heavily now, and there was a rumble of thunder that lasted several seconds.

“Now is our chance,” said Mithos.

“For what?” I asked, fairly sure I wouldn’t like the answer.

“To look in the house,” he said. “I’m betting he’s alone. We can probably get in and look around without him seeing us. If he spots us, we can take care of him.”

“And the raiders?” said Orgos, as if all was perfectly reasonable thus far.

“Orgos and I will follow them,” said Lisha.

Mithos and the siblings clearly had the better deal, though I doubt they saw it that way.

“If we aren’t back by morning,” she added, “we’ll meet in Harvest at the governor’s palace. Will, you’re with us.”

So while the others set to investigating the house, I went trekking through the rain with Orgos and Lisha to see what grim little picnic the raiders were on. I was on strict instructions to keep my distance and not “engage” the enemy. As if I needed telling.

The storm had begun with gusto now, and we probably could have walked right behind the raiders and they wouldn’t have known we were there, but we went from tree to tree and ditch to ditch to be on the safe side. In fact, it was the first time since the mission had begun where I felt a kind of thrill: They didn’t know we were here, so we had the upper hand. Of course, if they suddenly turned and wheeled those scyaxes of theirs up to fight, that would change very quickly. We had had enough difficulty fighting them on even terms. With three of us against eight of them (assuming that the coffins didn’t spring open and release another couple of zombie raiders to make it a round ten), we wouldn’t have a chance.

Renthrette had been right. The edge of the Iruni Wood, which we had seen from the Shale side that night in the burning village, loomed sudden and black out of the storm. The raiders went in.

I faltered, but Lisha, moving close to the ground like an animal, her spear clasped in both hands, kept going. Orgos drew his sword and gave me a nod of something I took to be encouragement. I followed.

It was better in the woods. There was more cover and less light. But I had barely had the chance to acknowledge this when muffled voices came through the pattering rain: They had stopped.

Lisha raised a warning hand and Orgos fanned right. She nodded to me, and I, cautiously, moved left, unsure of what I was doing, certain that the snapping twigs under my feet would bring those crimson-cloaked monsters screaming out of the rain.

We inched forward and the light changed subtly. Somewhere up ahead there was a break in the trees. A few more yards and we saw it: a clearing like a great hole in the forest. In the center was a circle of rough-hewn stones, each a little larger than a man. I hesitated. The place felt odd—dangerous—and not just because the raiders were here. I peered round a great oak into the clearing. In the middle was another rock, different from the others, pale and lustrous so that it seemed to glow slightly in the odd light of the storm.

The raiders entered the circle, several of them crouching by the coffins they had carried. They were opening them.

I turned to stare at Lisha, consumed with certainty that something bad was going on, something strange that I didn’t want to see or be a part of, something that would make all that talk of magic swords look like very small potatoes indeed. I could barely see her through the gathering darkness and lashing rain. She caught my gaze and pointed. She wanted me to get closer to the stones. I swallowed hard and chose the biggest.

The raiders were busy with their coffins, so none of them was looking my way. There was a flash of lightning, followed by a lengthy roar of thunder. It was now or never. I scampered through the wet bracken and flattened myself as quietly as I could against one of the great half-sculpted stones.

The raiders opened the coffins and lifted out a pair of corpses, both dressed in scarlet and bronze. These they dragged over to a pair of the standing stones only a few yards to my left, and propped them up in sitting positions. I stayed low and watched as the raiders gathered in a tight circle around that central milky boulder.

And then I had an idea.

Moving as quickly as I could, I slid over to the next stone, paused, then moved to the next, and the next. In a matter of seconds I was hiding by one of the great monoliths against which a dead raider lay. I didn’t think about Lisha or Orgos, or pleasing the party, or risking my life. I just had an idea and I was suddenly overwhelmed by what I can only describe, albeit inadequately, as curiosity. There was something I needed to know, and the presence of the raiders wasn’t going to stop me from finding out.

It wasn’t like they were going to see me anyway. It was dark, and the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind was howling, and they were all wearing those closed helms with tiny eye slits and standing in a little huddle thirty yards away with their backs to me. I could just look quickly and then get away. Just a peep. Two seconds. Tops.

I scrambled round the stone and stared at the dead raider’s bronze face. The stone between his eyes was just like the others I had seen, and it had the opaline pallor of the rock in the center of the circle. I thought I heard voices from the raiders and glanced over my shoulder. Their voices rose in unison and sounded rhythmic: a chant.

Whatever they were going to do with this raider corpse, it would involve that crystal in his helm. I was sure of it. It was set right into the metal, so I couldn’t pry it out. Instead, I fumbled at the chin strap and tugged the helm off. The raider’s eyes were open but sightless, and there was blood on his chin, but otherwise he looked quite ordinary and quite dead.

I bolted, stepping quickly back round the standing stone and crouching, feeling my chest heave and my pulse race. Real evidence, at last. The mystery of the raiders was inextricably bound to the crystals in their helms. That was why the only raider corpse we had seen before today was one that had been beheaded and taken by those ritualists in Ironwall. The stone in the helm had power, the way Orgos’s sword had power, though what it did, I wasn’t sure.

Then the chanting from the center of the darkened circle rose suddenly above the storm and ended with a shout. There was a crack of something that might have been thunder, but the pale light that accompanied it wasn’t lightning. For a second it was bright as day and the standing stone at my back threw a long, hard shadow; then it was dark again. I didn’t notice the mist for a second, but when I did, all my curiosity and triumph evaporated in the old panic. The raiders were coming! They were going to materialize in front of me and I was sitting here with one of their helms in my hand. . . .

I fumbled for my sword, still clutching the helm, but then I saw that the stone in its forehead was glowing softly. As it glowed, the mist grew denser. And I finally understood what the helm did. The mist wasn’t bringing a raider to me, it was gathering around the helm in my hands. It was taking me with it.