Fired

by Liam Reese

  This was a novelty, he suspected, after the events of the last few weeks.

  He rubbed at his chin. “And now that we know,” he said, “what is our next plan of attack?

  I don’t mean literally,” he hastened to add. “Just — so we’re on the same page.”

  “I will remain in my disguise as Jelen Woodborne, as that is probably the safest. They’ll have to know that you are Forged, though. And if you want to learn more about your family, you will probably have to tell them who you actually are. Keep the details as limited as possible, if you can.” She looked at Karyl. “He is — he’s my father, traveling with us for my protection.”

  Thorn smiled despite himself.

  “For your protection? From the dangers of the Badlands, or from me?”

  This appeared to fluster her, somewhat to his surprise.

  “We are childhood friends,” she said, “and my father and I travel with you as your family is lost.”

  “Childhood friends will not save you or excuse you. The Forged are still outlawed, and so is helping them. It’s safest if you stay here and let me go on my own.”

  “I will do no such thing. These people are on the edge themselves,” she argued, “and they won’t try to turn me into the powers that be. Besides, we’re between Ainsea and Henschot. There are no laws against the Forged in Henschot.”

  “Simply because there are no Forged in Henschot, none that have ever been discovered at any rate.”

  “The reason doesn’t matter. You’re not leaving me here. I’m going with you. I’ve come this far, I’m not about to let you go in on your own.”

  He smiled again, and he meant it this time.

  “Good,” he said, “I didn’t want to.”

  They approached the alchemists’ settlement cautiously, Thorn going first and the other two following. He swallowed hard to try and get rid of his over dry throat, which hurt as badly as it had when it had been affected by the proximity of Braeve. It had never really recovered, as a matter of fact, though the water of her well had soothed it a great deal.

  Perhaps it was the alchemy, the changing and refining of things, that tasted so much like metal and dried out his mouth so that he wasn’t entirely sure he could speak. Or maybe it was something simple and uncomplicated, like abject fear.

  No. He wanted to come here. This was his choice.

  He led his horse the last few hundred feet and stopped shortly out of range of the buildings. There was a space for a cooking fire in the middle of the buildings, which were arranged in a rough circle, but it was out and long dead. Instead, the fires seemed to be going on inside some of the buildings. There were holes hewn out at the top of each, and out of three of them was a small stream of smoke. There were doors on the buildings, made of a dark wood that Thorn did not recognize, but no windows. The doors were closed. The buildings were quiet. The carriage was nowhere to be seen.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Hello!”

  Absolute silence was all that greeted him, though if he concentrated he thought he could hear breathing, breaths that did not belong to himself or his companions. Perhaps a heartbeat or two or three, too. Heartbeats were difficult to get an accurate number on. Someone was here — they just weren’t saying anything. He looked back at Karyl and Irae, who shrugged at him. Well — Irae shrugged at him. Karyl didn’t do anything at all.

  “Hello?” he tried again. “Good day?” He felt a little foolish standing there and shouting. After all the caution they had taken not to be seen, it seemed quite anticlimactic, to say the least. He looked from building to building for any sign of life, but all that happened was, eventually, his horse nudged him from behind. “All right,” he told it, “I’m doing my best.”

  He heard a whispered voice say, “He speaks to animals!”

  “He must be a wizard.”

  “Perhaps he’s a changeling?”

  “Maybe he’s insane.”

  The voices were muffled, but there was a strange accent to them that was easy to discern. There was still no one to be seen, try though he might, and he turned again to Irae in some bafflement. She shrugged at him again, and he shrugged back. They appeared to have reached a standstill, which, at this point, was a surprise. He had been so geared for fighting, for scary things happening, for conflict, that he scarcely knew where to turn.

  “I can hear you!” he called, on the off chance that this would trigger something different.

  The voices were quiet for a few seconds, and then he distinctly heard one mutter, “Oh, all the hells and damns.”

  It came from above, he could hear it now, and he looked up, squinting. The roofs of the buildings were mounded, each one large and made of heavy rock. There was nowhere for anyone to hide — except for the smoke openings, and now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see a head in each of the openings in the buildings. The bodies, presumably, were what was blocking most of the smoke. As he watched, one of them embarked on a coughing fit.

  “Hello,” said Thorn, somewhat mystified, “are you the alchemists who are studying the Forged?”

  “Who wants to know?” said one of the heads.

  Thorn lifted a hand. “One of the Forged,” he said.

  “All the damns and hells,” said the voice.

  The heads disappeared, one by one, and there was a series of groans and even a yelp, and then the doors of the little stone buildings opened. Five men made their way out into the early morning sunlight, all equally difficult to put specifics to, apart from the fact that one walked with the aid of a carved wooden cane. They were all a little hunched, all a little smoky, all a little smudged from the fires. Above them, relieved of any obstructions, the smoke billowed out freely once more from the openings in the roofs.

  One of them — Thorn recognized the voice as the swearing one — said, “And we’re supposed to just believe that you are Forged?”

  Thorn hesitated for a moment, then swept his hair back, showing the holes where his ears should have been but were not. “I can offer further proof, if necessary,” he assured them, “but I’d rather not, at the moment.”

  This seemed to be enough, anyway; four of the men broke out in excited muttering, but the fifth, the spokesman, only sniffed dubiously.

  “And them?” he said, jerking his chin at Irae and Karyl behind Thorn. “Who are they when they’re at home?”

  “My friends,” said Thorn.

  “The Forged have no friends.”

  “Not by choice — only by necessity.”

  “No one would be friends with a Forged,” said one of the others from behind him. “For their own protection.”

  “Well, they are my friends, no matter what you believe,” said Thorn. “They’ve come with me all this way, to help me find out more about who I am, and who my family is. They’ve trusted me, and I’ve trusted them. For my protection. And that, too, is by necessity, as well as choice.”

  He waited while they kicked his speech around between themselves, like a ball.

  Finally, another of them, a little smaller than the others, stepped forward and said, in a voice like a timid crow, “It’s a wonder you made it here safely. We were followed by strangers all night long.”

  Thorn smiled, in spite of himself.

  “It’s very dangerous here,” he said. “Why are you living in the Badlands, anyway?”

  The smaller one gestured him forwards, turning to his little building and opening the door. “Come in, come in.”

  Thorn wasn’t sure there would be enough room for all of them in the building, but he was surprised to see that it opened up after an anteroom through which they entered — the building must have backed into the cliff itself, and part of it hewn out for a much larger space than he had anticipated. It was strangely wonderous to see, actually — the sandy yellow stone of the walls let off a soft glow that rendered the candles and torches nearly moot. Everywhere, tiny pieces of mica glinted and glittered in the reflected light. The anteroom was the stone-roofed
part of the building that he had seen from outside and held the fire pit with the opening for the smoke, the only opening to the building apart from the door. The realization of this gave him a little bit of fright, like claustrophobia. But he twisted his fingers together and held his breath. That helped his heart to ease its sudden furious thumping.

  Behind the initial space, the walls of the room curved out and away, a large, rough circle that was far more spacious than he expected. There were tunnels at the back of the room, somewhat hidden in the darkness, and four other openings at the front — two in the wall, two that sloped down into the ground, and from them, eventually, the other alchemists poured. The buildings were all joined together, with tunnels built into the rock, and Thorn shook his head in wonder.

  “How did you manage all of this?” said Irae, open-mouthed, staring upwards at the ceiling. “Tunnels in the rock? I’ve never seen anything like it. How did you do it?”

  “Moles,” snapped the spokesman, tartly.

  “This place has been here for many years,” said the gentle one with the voice like a crow. “We didn’t build it ourselves, we just moved in when we found it.”

  The room was full of strange things, most of them unlike anything Thorn had ever seen before. There were several small fires burning, none of which seemed to let off any smoke, some with pots and pans on them with things bubbling away — there was a creature in a cage that he did not recognize, but which gave him a knowing look as though they had been intimate friends in a past life — there was, oddly enough, what looked like a family portrait with all five of the alchemists, painted in still life, but with eyes that seemed to move and follow him as he walked about. He tried to avoid eye contact.

  “How did you find it?” he said. “Why are you here? What are you doing? I hear you are studying the Forged — what have you found?”

  They shared a glance amongst themselves.

  “Walk in, look around, start to ask questions without even introducing yourself,” said one with a slightly less raucous voice than the crow — a voice more like that of a chicken, if it could speak, Thorn thought. “Are you always this rude?”

  “Yes,” said Thorn. “I’ve never really seen a reason not to be.”

  They stared at him and he stared back, puzzled, until Irae clapped her hands together briskly.

  “Well, then,” she said, “introductions all around, shall we? I am Jelen Woodborne, and this is my father, Rario. Thorn here you have met, somewhat in spite of yourselves. Might we know your names?”

  The alchemists, it turned out, did not have given names, or at least, not given names that had been given to them by someone else. Thorn thought this was unlikely, as even he, who had spent most of his life in the woods, had been named something — but there was no way to fault or question it without seeming even ruder. The spokesman for the alchemists, who called himself Wayfare, was the oldest of them, though Thorn suspected he wasn’t as old as he had initially thought. Once in the main room with enough space to stand up straight, he did so, and turned out to be only a few inches shorter than Thorn himself. The one with the voice like a crow was, appropriately, named Crau. He was shorter than the others, and slighter, and had large blue eyes that stared wildly from his sooty face. It was Crau who relied on the cane to walk, hunched over it almost protectively. The other three were, respectively, Freg — nearly as wide as he was tall — Cammel — a long dark face, made to appear even longer by the unkempt goatee he wore — and finally the alchemist with a voice like a chicken, who turned out, upon further review, to be a woman. She wore the same plain tunic and trousers that the rest of them did, and her hair was caught up behind her head in a thin grey knot. Her name was Path, she told them, and she was the one who had founded the entire outfit.

  “Just not the loudest of us,” she said, casting a glance at Wayfare, who ignored her.

  “The science of the Forged,” he said, “has a long and complicated history. It is wrapped in mystery and shrouded in obscurity, and the laws against aiding and abetting any of the Forged have kept many from investigating its ins and outs. What are the rules of the Forged? We don’t know the rules. If we don’t know the rules, there might as well be no rules. There are no books on the Forged, no stories that can be verified, only legends and myths and lies and tales told by old, old women with too much time on their hands.” He fielded a glare from Path, at this, and added, “Present company most definitely excepted.”

  “I should hope so,” said Path.

  “If you want to learn more about yourself, about where you came from, I would encourage you to interrogate your parents.”

  “My parents are no longer around,” said Thorn.

  Wayfare turned a keen glance on him. “Dead?”

  Thorn nodded, hesitantly.

  “They weren’t too communicative when they were alive,” he said, “and being dead has not improved matters.”

  Path sighed and shook her head, but it was Crau who came to Thorn and reached up to put a hand on his shoulder. Thorn edged slightly away from it, looking askance at the touch, but could not go so far as to fling his hand from him entirely.

  “I’ve known Forged in the past,” he said, “and I’ve met several since we have been working here. It is never easy. They say that the Forged are cursed, because of their uncanny power and their deformities. But it is the family that abandons them that is the true curse — and no one brings that on themselves. Any cruelty will catch up with them, somewhere and somehow.”

  Thorn could not think of what to say. Kindness from a stranger was unexpected and almost entirely unknown in his life — he swallowed past the lump in his dry throat.

  “Perhaps you can help me,” he said. “I’ve come so far to learn. Will you teach me what you know?”

  Crau did not even look back at Wayfare for confirmation before he answered.

  “No,” he said, “but we will let you teach us.”

  Freg bustled them into a corner of the large room and settled them on wooden chairs at a little wooden table. Karyl did not take well to being bustled, and it took a bit more effort to get him to go with them, but eventually it was managed.

  “Now, just relax,” Freg ordered them. “I’ll have stew in a moment. Crau has taken care of your horses. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “It doesn’t seem as though there’s nothing to worry about,” said Irae. “You’re refusing to help us, you’ve taken our horses where we don’t know, and you took my sword.”

  “We aren’t refusing to help you,” said Freg, frowning so deeply that lines appeared in his forehead that crops could have been planted in. “We’re only saying that we would like you to help us.”

  “You can’t study the science of the Forged without a Forged participating,” pointed out Path, settling herself at the table along with them, and distributing mugs of what smelled like cider.

  “I understand that,” said Irae, “but we haven’t much time. He must —” She glanced quickly at Thorn. “He is needed in the castle. The king —”

  “The king will have to wait,” said Path. “What do we care for the king and what he wants? Science is our master here.” She reached out and took Thorn’s right hand in both of hers, turning it over and examining it closely. With finger and thumb she pressed the skin between his fingers, palpating it and pulling it. Thorn snatched his hand away from her, and she took it back with only a look of mild reproach. He pulled away again, and that was when he felt the sharp point at his neck.

  “These are scissors,” Cammel informed him helpfully, “as we do not typically resort to weapons, but I think they will do the trick of helping you to willingly comply just as well as a sword might.”

  “Why aren’t you using her sword?” Path asked him. Cammel frowned.

  “That seems a bit rude,” he said.

  “As rude as threatening him with scissors and touching him without his permission?” said Irae.

  “Ah, well, that’s for science.”

 
Science seemed to be the excuse and the reason for everything. They were given stew, as promised, and then the five alchemists sat closely around them at the table and fired questions at Thorn. Many of them he did not know the answers to, and finally, growing tired of his lack of knowledge and his continuing unwillingness to be touched, Path sat back on her little wooden chair and folded her arms.

  “The only thing to do, as I see it,” she said, “is to put him to work so we can observe him.”

  The rest of the alchemists straightened up, cheerfully, and Cammel clapped his hands and rubbed them together like a storybook villain.

  “What should we have him do?” he said.

  “It’s helpful that he came with his own experimental subjects,” said Wayfare, nodding at Karyl and Irae.

  Thorn started out of his chair, nearly knocking it over. He was pushed back into it, but he held a hand out as though he could protect Irae and Karyl from the very idea.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I won’t lay a hand on them.”

  “You will if we make you,” said Wayfare.

  “Now, I don’t think it will come to that,” said Path. “The boy wants to learn more about his family — if we observe his style, we may very well be able to tell which bloodline he has inherited his powers from. That’s one of the fascinating things about the Forged,” she informed Thorn. “The abilities seem to be passed down, usually from the maternal line, and they skip at least one generation. There are no instances, that we have found, of a father sharing abilities with their child. Of course, the fact that the Forged have for so long been reviled and misunderstood means it is rather difficult to trace them through the family lines. But still, we have managed to do our own small part, I think. The odds are that it’s likely to be your grandmother, or your great-grandmother, who passed the ability down to you, and your ability will be similar to hers. There.” She beamed at him. “How’s that for sharing information? And after we said we wouldn’t, too. I’m nothing if not generous.”

  “Even if you threaten me,” said Thorn, stubbornly sticking to the issue at hand, “I won’t give in. You can’t make me Forge my friends, changing them into who knows what for seven years. I’ll tell you, my powers are not reliable. They are not predictable. I cannot be forced to do anything that will put them in danger.”