Act of Will (36 page)
Authors: A. J. Hartley
A Different Road
W
ell, do you blame me? Really? It was—had always been—hopeless. But calling Mithos’s name wouldn’t help now, and we weren’t facing a handful of them, stuck in the tight spiral of a lighthouse. We were facing an army, hundreds of them, appearing out of the mist on top of us. I knew what they were capable of (in every sense of that phrase) and no talk of principle could make a silk purse out of this particular sow’s ear. It would be a rout, and I would have no part in it.
I’m not sure when I made the decision to leave, though the possibility had been there since I first met them and had never completely gone away, even when things seemed to have been going well. But lately things hadn’t been going well and I had nearly wound up dead too many times. The idea that all those encounters had been mere rehearsals for the grand show itself was just too horrible. I couldn’t survive anything worse than I had already been through, and neither could they. Riding into certain death might be what they lived for. Not me.
Orgos was furious, of course, and my attempts to persuade him to come with me, to persuade all of them to quit now while they still could, just made him madder. Renthrette stared at me, her face flushed as if I’d slapped her very hard. As Lisha was saying that she understood my position and that I had more than repaid them for getting me out of Cresdon, she walked away and started messing around with her horse’s bridle, without looking back.
“You’ll need some expenses to get out of Shale,” said Lisha, handing me a small purse.
“I don’t need your money,” I said, suddenly feeling defensive.
“You earned it,” she said. “Though I wish you would reconsider.”
“You too,” I said. “And I’m no use to you anyway.”
She started to say something, but I waved it away. “You know what the odds are in this battle you’re walking into?” I said.
“Yes,” she answered. “But I know that without us, these people, Maia and the others you saved, have no chance at all. We have to try. Even if we can’t win, it is important to stand up to an enemy like this. I know you don’t think that ideas like that serve a purpose, but sometimes even destruction is better than compromise.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that. There are battles elsewhere you could win, causes you could champion. Why throw yourselves away in something so obviously futile?”
“Because this is where we are now,” she said firmly. “This is the injustice we are confronted with, and no fight is wholly futile.”
There was nothing to say to this. Orgos had been fuming up and down the makeshift campsite, but his anger had burned out. When I finally sidled up to him he just listened gravely and then smiled a sad, distant smile. “I had hoped you would ride into battle beside me,” he said.
“You’ll do better without me,” I said honestly. “It’s pointless to say otherwise, and it’s pointless to ask you to be careful and not take risks unnecessarily, but . . . Look after yourselves. Please.”
Lisha shook my hand and wished me well. Orgos clamped me to his chest and then, before releasing me, stared hard into my face.
“You’re a good man, Orgos,” I said, really believing it for the first time.
“So are you, Will,” he said. It was a kind of entreaty. I smiled and shook my head sadly, and walked away. I wasn’t a good man. I never had been. But I was a survivor, and that had to be worth something, to me if not to anybody else.
As I climbed into the saddle of my mare, I turned to look back at Renthrette. But I couldn’t place her among the crowd, and after a moment feeling foolish and indecisive as the villagers watched me, I rode away.
I figured I’d head west, mainly because it would be the shortest way out of the region, but also because it would take me back towards Stavis, which was at least familiar. I doubted I’d dare risk returning to Cresdon, even if I could find passage across the Hrof, but Stavis would serve as a place where I could gather my thoughts and look for options. Surely the Empire would have forgotten Will Hawthorne by now?
The downside of heading west was crossing Shale. Since I really didn’t want to ever lay eyes on the Adsine keep again, I figured I’d head north for a little ways, skirt the city, and then dip south and west again, wending my slow way across the two hundred miles of Targev coastline we had glimpsed from the deck of the
Cormorant.
Two hundred miles was a long way, but since I had no real destination in mind, it didn’t matter so much. Maybe I’d find a town with a little theatre or a pub where I could pull pints for a while.
I had the whole day ahead of me and, with luck, I’d be out of Shale territory before I had to stop for the night. The light rain that had been hanging around the area like a pathetic friend you couldn’t get rid of finally pushed off, and even the scraggy hills and tussocky fields looked almost beautiful enough to put the past weeks out of my mind. By midmorning I had started cutting north. I trotted on, right through lunch, until Adsine was behind me and I was only a few hours from the edge of Shale. I ate in the saddle wondering how mobile I’d be the following day after all this riding. It was still light, and I could see the sea. After another hour or so I passed through a tiny hamlet and dismounted to ask how far it was to the border.
“The Shale border?” replied an old woman with a basket of pears on her back. “You passed it about a mile back. You’re in Targev now.”
I nearly kissed her, but reason won out (she was seventy-five if she was a day) and I opted to celebrate my departure from the life of an adventurer by booking a room in the local inn and washing down the best supper on offer with a few pints of strong brown ale. I was still too close to Shale to expect a real feast, but I booked into the imaginatively titled Red Lion with a light heart and a sense of real escape, and not just from the raiders. It was the entire world I had gotten away from, that universe where wrongs have to be righted at tremendous personal risk and no one ever gets a decent meal or curls up with a warm body beside them. I ordered two pints, then, as soon as I got my platter of potatoes and roast pork—studded with rosemary and lined with a perfect ribbon of soft fat and crunchy skin—asked for a third.
There was no one else staying at the Red Lion. The landlord said that traffic on the road to Shale had completely dried up since the raiders had become a feature in the region. He wanted me to swap theories and speculations about who they were and what they were after, but I wouldn’t be drawn.
“Just passing through,” I said. “Can’t say I’ve heard much about them.”
He would have told me all he knew (most of it rubbish) but the journey and my first decent meal in weeks had exhausted me, and I could honestly tell him that I was ready for bed. It was one of those rare nights when, proverbially, I really was out as soon as my head hit the pillow, and my sleep was deep and dreamless.
I was woken by the sound of movement and voices downstairs. I wandered unsteadily down, still bleary-eyed, conscious that the sun was barely up. The landlord was talking to a tall man in a long grey traveling cloak dripping with the rain that had apparently returned. It was his boots that were making all the noise on the wooden floor. The landlord spotted me and made an apologetic face.
“Let me just deal with this gentleman, and then I’ll start breakfast,” he said.
I settled at a table and gave myself over to waking up properly as they haggled over the price of meat and bread. I peered out of one of the leaded windows into the courtyard, where four or five men were tethering horses and stretching as if they’d been on the road a while already. They all wore the same rain-spotted grey cloaks. The exact same cloak. I sat up, needled with a familiar anxiety, and at that moment, one of them came into the bar, stamping and shrugging off his wet clothes.
My first thought was that they were raiders and the grey cloaks were their version of being incognito. But the cloaks were clearly a uniform, one that fit neither the raiders nor any of the troops we had seen before. Shale soldiers wore black, Greycoast blue and silver, Verneytha green and copper. So who were these guys, and where had they come from? Maybe they were some neutral party from the north who could be persuaded to go and bail Orgos and co. out of the death trap they had thrown themselves into. . . .
As these hopeful thoughts circulated vaguely in my head, three things struck me almost simultaneously, appearing raiderlike out of the mist and driving all optimism into a screaming retreat. First, the prices being quoted by the landlord were astronomical if there were only five or six of them looking for a few loaves and a joint of pork. Second, the strangers all had the sort of fluid, powerful bearing that comes from training, exercise, and discipline. And last (but worst of all) was the fact—revealed unmistakably as the newcomer turned from hanging up his dripping cloak—that they wore shortswords and steel grey armor over white linen tunics emblazoned with a blue diamond.
I moved as quickly as I could to the door and looked out beyond the courtyard to where a hundred Empire troops, bristling with spears, their horses steaming, were sheltering from the rain, hoping to grab some fresh provisions for their journey east. They had found me after all.
But of course, they hadn’t come for me. You didn’t send a hundred battle-hardened Empire troops (and who knew how many more right behind them) all the way from Stavis after a minor fugitive. So what were they doing?
It seemed obvious. They had heard of the escalating problems in Shale, Verneytha, and Greycoast, and were moving east to capitalize on the slaughter. They would wait for the crippled victors to emerge, broken and bleeding, and they would roll right over them before they could take a breath, conquering all three lands in a handful of minor skirmishes. And if Orgos, Renthrette, and the rest survived the raiders, they would be wiped out in the conquest that followed.
It was as if one of the soldiers—it no longer seemed to matter much whether they wore red or white—had pushed the tip of his spear into my bowels and leaned on it, so the cold hard truth passed through my body, bringing pain and horror and delirium. You hear of people having their lives pass before their eyes in moments of danger. I had thought the experience would be kind of interesting, if not, in my case, terribly impressive. But now—a moment as full of dread and danger as any I had experienced in the dreadful and dangerous weeks that had just passed—I saw not my life, but other people’s deaths. Suddenly I saw—as in a dream, but with absolute clarity—Orgos’s body cut down and bleeding in the thick of the fight. I saw Garnet unhorsed and lifeless. I heard Lisha scream for the first and last time. I saw Mithos outnumbered and weakening as he flailed and parried. I saw Renthrette facedown in the mud of battle, her hair stained with blood and filth as the victorious Empire tramped past.
God alone knew what I could do to stop such visions from becoming reality, but I had to try.
Back on the Horse
I
rode as fast and as hard as I have ever done, and while that isn’t saying all that much, I covered a lot of ground and was well inside Shale territory by lunchtime. I had to assume that the Empire would march on the surviving armies as soon as they could be removed from each other’s throats. That meant they would head for the plains outside Ironwall, where Mithos was pushing the raiders towards Garnet and Orgos with whatever armies Greycoast and Verneytha could muster. It would take me several hours of steady riding just to get in sight of the citadel, and that was if I rode as the crow flies. But the crow flew straight through Adsine, under the very eaves of the keep that housed the raiders. I told myself that with the mystical transportation methods open to them, the raiders were unlikely to be trotting through the streets of Adsine, especially if the ordinary people of Shale didn’t know that the raiders were their neighbors and brothers, but it was impossible to be sure. I bent low in the saddle, pulled my cloak over my head to shelter me from rain and prying eyes, and spurred my horse towards Adsine.
I figured I had two choices as I entered Adsine and felt the keep watching blankly from the high ground in the center of the town: I could either charge through the streets as quickly as I could (fast but conspicuous); or I could walk my horse in a nonchalant fashion, blending in nicely and taking about a decade to cover four hundred yards. In the end, I followed both impulses, entering the city slowly and inconspicuously and then, when I glimpsed the first stray Shale trooper in his black-and-silver armor, bolting with panic and charging out of town as if the hosts of hell were at my heels. Remarkably, then, I managed to be both slow and conspicuous, once more demonstrating exactly why I wasn’t cut out for this kind of life at all.
I didn’t slow down till Adsine was a good half hour behind me, and I spent that half hour glancing backwards in search of pursuing horsemen. Knowing that those horsemen could be wearing black, red,
or
white and it would be equally bad news for Will the Hopeless Fugitive wasn’t encouraging, but I saw no traffic on the road at all until I reached the Proxintar Downs. There the road was clogged with bullock carts as a convoy of farmers and miners tried to get out of Ironwall before the approaching storm. Part of me wanted to warn them of the perils that awaited them as they headed west, but I doubted that my various enemies would bother with the likes of them, and I resented their abandoning of my friends. The fact that I had also abandoned my friends twenty-four hours ago was conveniently clouded by my sense of heroic purpose. I was a warrior returning to save the day, bringing crucial information and a keen eye with a crossbow, putting my life on the line for my friends. Well, kind of.
To be honest, my newfound heroism was due at least in part to a plan I had been forming in my head. If I could get to the party in time to explain the situation as I saw it, we would have the upper hand. We could hit the raiders hard and fast while our force still outnumbered theirs, then we could take the remains of our army into Ironwall and sit out the Empire’s assault. Those Diamond soldiers were looking for an easy victory, not a lengthy siege of the most secure citadel in the region. If we could get inside as soon as the first battle was over, they would probably just trek back to Stavis with their tails between their legs. People are fond of saying that knowledge is power. This time it might actually be true: knowing that the Empire was on its way might be all we would need to turn them back.
The sun was at my back and turning a deep red by the time the massive citadel came into view across the plains before me. I put my heels to my horse’s flanks and reached the guardhouse moments before they were due to lower that massive portcullis for the night. Indeed, they started its immeasurably slow and clanking descent as soon as I was in, and even though it took ten minutes to close completely, it was the most comforting sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I went up onto the walls before I sought out the party and gave a last look westwards to see if any of our enemies were coming.