by Ember Lane
“Do you agree Stobart should be avenged?”
“Sure do, but you don’t have t’be a lord to see the sense in that. Right is right even if some folk try an’ taint it with wrong.”
“Then…” Melody closed her eyes. Her lips pressed into a thin, determined line. She fell silent, just the slight sound of breath, but Merl knew she was still talking.
His head jerked back the minute the words smashed into his mind. At first there wasn’t enough space between his ears, but then they rearranged into several lines and fit together just right. Not that it made any difference. He still couldn’t read them.
“Well? Do you accept?” Melody asked, opening her eyes and exhaling like she’d performed some monumental task.
“Don’t rightly know what I’m accepting.”
“You can’t read?”
“Not that jumble.”
Melody closed her eyes once more. Crow’s feet spread from their edges as her brow creased.
A voice then rang in his mind.
Quest received! Melody has offered you a quest: KILL THE EVIL MAYOR LYNCHWELL. Travel to Salastar and avenge the death of Stobart Torped. Do you accept the quest?
Merl really wanted to, but he didn’t feel he was the man for the job. “Na,” he said, declining. “You should ask Frank, he’s the one who can sort that stuff out.”
Melody drew away from Merl and her face flushed with anger. “But I’m asking you, Merl. His blood rests with you. Quaiyl fetched you and you alone. I ask again, and I ask with the full force of my guardians facing your friends.” She snapped her fingers. “There! Damnable choice! Do you accept my quest?”
Merl’s gaze darted around the little grotto. If he was honest with himself, he thought she’d gone a bit mad. He wanted a way to escape Melody’s ensuing stare. This was too much for him. Merl had never asked Stobart to do anything for him, so why did Merl have to avenge Stobart’s death? It wasn’t such an adventure anymore, and now she was threatening Frank, Billy, and Desmelda. He wanted to be back on the giant ship. Merl wondered what Frank would do. He instantly knew what Frank would do. He’d accept the quest and see where it’d take him.
“Can I take Frank and everyone?” Merl asked.
“You can.”
“Then I accept the quest.”
Quest— KILL THE EVIL MAYOR LYNCHWELL—accepted. The quest has been added to your menu.
The voice startled Merl so much that he completely skipped the unintelligible words that scrawled across his brain. Melody’s anger evaporated. A smile graced her lips again. Merl had dealt with nutters before, and Melody had all the halmarks of a mad ‘un. His dad had warned Merl about mad ‘uns, which Merl had always found amusing because Walinda Alepuller was as mad as a snapncrack wasp trapped under an upturned beer mug on a sunny day. Quiet was the way—let them get the madness out of their blood.
After a short while, Melody gathered a smile and let it settle on her lips.
“I will help you. Lynchwell resides in a small fort on the Dewing Hill, which is surrounded by a small stockade. He has a small but loyal troop that draw their coin from the honest citizens of Salastar. You will struggle to vanquish them on your own.” Melody snapped her fingers. “I have increased the number of guardian in the Hall of Rally. They can be commanded by you or any of your party.” Melody blinked and then swept her arm around. An archway appeared in the grotto’s wall. Quaiyl stood outside it. “Go, Merl. Avenge Stobart Torped, and then return to me for your reward.”
Merl walked from there with his head held high and his knees shaking. He’d never been so pleased to see Quaiyl as he was in that moment. Gloomy Joe followed, yawning as he went. Merl had already decided he’d complete the quest all right, but then he’d run for the bloody hills. Melody was madder than Walinda Alepuller.
“It’s all right for you,” he muttered to Gloomy Joe. “You don’t get offered quests all the time.”
The archway led back to the vast, vaulted hall. Merl sensed the tension in the air before he’d taken more than a couple of paces. Frank, Billy, and Desmelda stood in a line. Frank was crouching, ready to spring. Billy was wiping sweat from his head, and Desmelda was chanting—readying a spell. A square of constructs faced them. Merl counted ten constructs deep and the same across and decided it was a lot. The constructs in the front two rows had spears, the next had swords, and the last rank had bows shouldered.
“Merl, get over here,” Frank growled, but then scratched his head. “Merl, are you okay… You’re okay!”
“I think so,” Merl said, double-checking his gut for bloody leaks. “Yep, I’m okay.”
“Merl!” Billy shouted, and he broke away from Frank and Desmelda, bounding toward Merl like a human dune dog. “You’re alive, Merl, you’re alive.”
Quaiyl tried to get in the way, but Merl brushed him aside with a hand and a stern “No!”
Billy swept Merl up and span him around. “I’m so bloody relieved, Merl. So bloody relieved. How?” He set Merl down.
“How, Billy? How did I live? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Watch this…”
Merl strode up to the square of guardians and marched through their middle like some drill sergeant, or Roddy Beefmaker looking over cows at market. Gloomy Joe followed on Merl’s heels.
“What are you doing, Merl?” Desmelda shouted.
“Merl!” Frank cried, though he stayed put.
“Hold, Frank. Keep yer hair on an’ wind yer neck in. I know what I’m doin’.”
If he was truthful with himself, he actually didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but he did know one thing. The constructs weren’t moving. They weren’t reacting at all.
“What the hell’s going on, Merl?” Frank asked as Merl emerged from the ranks of the constructs with a great big smile on his face.
“I’m looking at our new army, Frank. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Well, I’m as muddled as a dune dog,” Frank said.
Merl walked up to Frank. “I think we need your mud hut, a fire, and a cauldron of Desmelda’s broth. While we’re eating, I will tell you all. Then… well then, Frank, you have to make good on a promise I just made, because I haven’t got a cat’s chance in hell of doing it.”
Frank scratched his head. “These are yours to command?”
“They are. I’ll show you.” Merl faced the constructs. “Sit! Sit all of you and wait!” Merl shouted.
The constructs sat.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Frank said. “One thing though.”
“Name it.”
“We sleep after we finish eating. We haven’t slept for over a day.”
Tiredness suddenly washed over Merl. “That’s why you should be in charge, Frank,” he said.
A level-one mud hut appeared in the great, vaulted halls.
20
Melody marched along a great stone corridor. Merl followed her with Quaiyl and Billy at his side. Behind them, Frank and Desmelda muttered and whispered to each other.
“’Telligent folk,” Billy said. “They can’t accept nothin’—have to look at everythin’—and in the doin’ they understand nothin’.”
Merl nodded. He agreed with Billy. While Frank and Desmelda had argued and reasoned the first part of the morning away, Billy and Merl had come up with a perfectly good explanation of what Melody was and wasn’t. She, they’d decided, was the Queen of the Constructs, and that summed up the current and past situation. She commanded all other constructs.
Frank had tried to derail their explanation by pointing out that a queen couldn’t conjure subjects from thin air. So, after minimal discussion, Merl and Billy added a caveat. She could magic them into being as, not only was she queen, she was also head sorceress. They both agreed that their explanation now solved everything, and further debate wasn’t needed.
Frank and Desmelda then found something new to argue about, namely her origin. They questioned her method of conjuring constructs out of thin air when Stobart had needed the blocks of food and
materials. They wondered who she was and where she fitted in to the prophecy. At first, they had postulated that she was, in fact, a lord, but then decided that she couldn’t be because she’d be much more powerful. Whatever avenue their path of reason turned down, it was always presented with a dead end, and so they were still debating it as they followed.
No, Merl thought, his and Billy’s explanation is infinitely better. If Melody wanted to explain exactly what she was, then she’d do so in her own good time.
“Why can’t you just accept it, Frank?” Merl called back. “You got yer twenty swordsmen, you got your twenty spears, and you got your ten bows. We got us a quest in front of our noses, so, as me old dad used t’say on dippin’ day, let’s roll our sleeves up an get it done.”
“Because, Merl,” Frank began to say something but quickly concluded it with a, “never mind.”
The corridor opened up to a tall and lofted hall that was steeped in shadows and had a vast bell lurking right above their heads. A huge set of ironbound gates rose up, pointed at their top. Melody snapped her fingers, and the gates swung inward with a spine-twisting creak. Blinding light streamed in, angled only slightly, which told Merl it was close to noon. Those rays pierced fat ivy vines that were slowly ripped from the opening gates. A bank of undergrowth reared like a thick hedge from a gutter of earth that had settled against the gates and blocked their way.
Melody retreated. “You have your quest. Remember, knock thrice on the doors and they will open so that you may return to me and receive your reward.” She shimmered, she faded, and then she was gone.
“Okay,” Frank said. “The vanishing thing’s new. We might have to rethink what she is.”
Merl was sure head sorceress would cover it, and so there was no need to rethink. Frank, though, didn’t appear to be in the mood to debate his or Billy’s much simpler conclusions. Frank stretched his arms, and then stood to attention.
“Right, let’s try these constructs out. Swords! Clear a path.”
The constructs had been flowing in a long column. The front spears stepped aside, and twenty swords marched to the front. They immediately started setting about the undergrowth. Once they’d cleared a path ten yards in, Frank barked at them and told them to stop. “Was the town called Salastar?”
“Apparently so,” Merl replied.
“Swords! Clear a path to the road to Salastar.”
The swords began hacking away again.
“Spears! Ten of you follow the swords. Bows! Five and five, front and rear of us. Remaining spears follow behind. And, go!”
The constructs formed up and marched out. Merl, Frank, Desmelda, and Billy walked in the middle along with Gloomy Joe and Quaiyl. Merl felt like a piece of driftwood being carried along by a river. The swordsmen were relentless. They hacked, cleared, and hacked again. By midafternoon they stumbled across a muddy trail. Frank covered their rather expansive tracks up, and they then marched twenty-five and twenty-five constructs either side of the little party.
Frank soon got his bearings, which made Merl wonder exactly how much time he’d spent in Alaria. The trail threaded its way down a lush valley that at first was heavily forested, but soon became dappled with overgrown pasture that Merl guessed was probably being grown for winter hay. They passed a couple of remote farmsteads, and just before nightfall a hamlet came into view. Frank made them wait until after dusk, then they skirted around the settlement, marching through the night until they joined a new, much larger valley. A patch of yellow lights speckled the valley floor.
“Salazar,” Frank said, and then led them into the thick of a forest and ordered the constructs to make camp. “I guess they don’t sleep, then,” Frank muttered. The constructs’ idea of making a camp appeared to consist of taking up lookout positions and little else. Frank conjured his hut and the fire, then allowed the group to eat broth and rest. Merl felt safer than he had in an age. He had fifty guardians surrounding him, and Quaiyl never more than a few feet away.
When he woke in the morning, Frank was gone.
“He’s taken a half-dozen constructs and gone to spy on Salazar. He’ll be back this afternoon. We attack tonight,” Desmelda said.
Tonight, to Merl, meant just after the sunset, but to Frank it was completely the other side and more just before dawn. It meant that Merl had spent the whole of the night crouched in undergrowth and looking at the burning pyres that lit the fort’s compound. Merl was also confused about what a fort was and wasn’t. He had no measuring stick with which to judge, but Lynchwell’s fort looked more like a large house surrounded by a stockade that had the odd watch platform dotted near one of the pyres. Within the bounds of the stockade, a single long hut sat, and according to Frank it was a barracks where the soldiers slept.
Frank, by his own account, had had a good sniff around the compound, including popping into Lynchwell’s house. He had tried to explain the importance of reconnaissance to Merl, but it just ended up being another overly long word that Merl couldn’t understand. Either way, Frank had a plan, and that plan involved all of them.
The construct archers dipped their arrows in hidden fires. Merl held his breath. The archers waited for the tallow-coatings to catch alight. The first ten flaming arrows arced into the air, all found their target, and the roof of the long hut rippled with hungry flame. Merl lurched forward, ready to go, ready to storm the stockade, but Frank held him back. Another ten arrows were in the air before the watchguards started screaming. Merl strained, wanting desperately to get the battle over with. He wanted to do some simple fighting and get away from the constant thinking and reasoning that had been going on of late.
Frank barked an order out, finally sending Merl and Billy forward. They scrambled toward the stockade. Panicked screams rang out. Anguished cries turned to whimpers. Merl slipped through a hole in the stockade as retching guards spilled out of the long hut, all of them swiping at the smoky air.
More soldiers burst from Lynchwell’s grand house, barely awake then instantly wide-eyed. They started screaming urgent orders. Confusion reigned. Desmelda’s crimson magic streaked across the lightening dawn sky. Thorns rolled over the stockade like a storm-surge wave and wrapped around the watchguards; all of them were dragged from their feeble towers, as Desmelda’s power ebbed back to her. Inside the compound, Frank stole toward the gates, Scaramanza in hand, yelling like a mad ‘un. He dispatched a guard, rending him in two with a terrible strike. Billy jumped another, his stupid elfen sword spearing the stunned soldier through his throat. Great gouts of crimson sprayed from the vicious wound. The guard’s legs gave way, and he crumpled into a ball of sodden crimson. Merl slashed at the gate’s ties and yanked them open. The construct swords and spears marched through in silent formation. Frank held Merl and Billy back. “Let them do their fighting,” he said. “No point in having a dune dog ‘n barking yerself.” But no barks erupted from the constructs. They were clinically silent, and that scared Merl more than anything else that was going on.
After a few turns, and maybe even a couple of taps, the constructs had laid waste to the barely woken soldiers. Frank darted toward the big house. Merl, Billy, and Gloomy followed. They hurdled dead bodies, severed reaching arms, and slashed exposed throats. They encountered little resistance. The constructs waited. Their enemy now gone. Merl breathed hard, trying to calm his beating heart. Was battle always over so fast? Was killing always so quick? He glanced at the home’s upper windows.
Something was up.
Frank marched to the entrance. Merl saw a movement coming from a parapet wall that edged the large home’s roof. He squinted, sure he’d seen another, just a hint of a shadow moving in dawn’s fledgling amber. Frank closed in—the, arrows began raining down, thudding into the hardened mud and kicking up dirt.
The Wizard of Quintz scrambled sideways, diving for cover behind a haycart. Billy landed on top of him, and Merl darted behind a barrel. He crouched and quivered and he tried to make himself impossibly small.
“Keep
your heads down!” Frank screamed, as arrows splintered the feeble wood that sheltered them. Merl’s barrel was slowly reduced to little more than splinters.
Quaiyl stood, emotionless, still. The construct looked up at the source of the arrows, and then at Merl, before running at full speed toward the house. He scaled its side within a few moments, jumping over the concealing parapet and lifting the first archer in the air before tossing him away. One, two, three, and more all fell, screaming their lungs out before thumping onto the yard’s unyielding mud.
“Now that’s a handy trick,” Frank said.
“Handy indeed,” Billy agreed, and the muckspreader stood, dusting himself off.
Merl scratched his head. “How comes Lynchwell has so few men? I thought armies had hundreds.”
“Armies cost money, Merl, and men who like grand houses don’t like spending their coin. Let’s go have a chat with the bastard of Salazar and see what he has to say about our old friend Stobart. No killing the man until we’re done.”
They marched toward building. Quaiyl jumped down from the roof, resuming his position by Merl. Frank sent half a dozen sword constructs inside to clear the way. He gave them strict instructions to just defend themselves, nothing more.
Merl had never been in a huge house before. The closest he’d come to it was the inns in Three Valleys and Harrison’s Reach. This was different, though. Its walls were smooth, like a mirror, and had paintings daubed all over them, of summer skies and lush green valleys. They entered a grand hall, its floorboards polished and shining. Blood pooled around the floor, spilling from the guts of a dead soldier. Another held a bloody stump where his leg used to be. A splash of bright red blood had been splattered over a scenic lake. The man pleaded for a swift death, and Frank duly obliged him with it. Two doors led away to either side of the hall, and a set of steps led upward. A commotion came from one side, though silence held sway everywhere else.
Desmelda rushed in, barging Merl and Billy out of the way. “If it’s information we need, let me. I have better ways than you.”
