Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  I made it across the room, staring ahead of me, waiting for an imperious demand to hold-it-right-there, and tried the door. It opened, but it didn’t get me outside, just into a corridor lined with more doors: guest rooms, no doubt. Then there was the sound of hurried boots in the barroom coming my way, and I knew that I had about fifteen seconds.

  Bolting down the corridor, I tried one of the doors, but it was locked. The second, likewise. The third swung open and I found myself stuttering apologies and scattering pleas for help at three men and a girl.

  They were perhaps as unlikely a group as Cresdon’s uncosmopolitan social milieu would ever see. The girl, who looked about my age, was fair, pale, and slim. I had some experience of looking at pretty girls, and there was no question that this one was a bit special. One of the men-actually, he couldn’t have been much older than the girl-was similarly pale of complexion, though his hair was short and brown and his eyes were green as a cat’s. The other two were of foreign stock, one black, the other of a swarthy olive complexion with dark hair and eyes. These last two had both drawn swords as I came in.

  “Help!” I squeaked.

  The men peered at me. I snatched my wig off and their eyes widened a little.

  “Empire guards!” I blurted, glancing over my shoulder.

  It was, apparently, the right thing to say.

  For a split second they looked at me, then at each other. Then the girl pulled one of several large trunks from the corner. Her pale male counterpart opened it and wordlessly motioned me over.

  Then they started arguing.

  “Garnet, are you mad?” hissed the black man. “It could be a trap!”

  “We can’t take that chance,” said the girl. “We have to trust her. Him. Whatever.”

  Even in my terror I managed an indignant glare.

  “It isn’t worth the risk,” replied the black man heatedly.

  “Who are you?” the olive-skinned man asked me quietly.

  I thought I could hear the guards forcing the door of the first guest room. My moments of liberty were numbered and I wanted to scream at them. The sweat broke out on my brow and my eyes widened with fear, but I restrained myself and gasped, “William Hawthorne. I’m an actor. And a playwright. And,” I added reluctantly, “I kind of cheated at a card game.”

  “A petty criminal,” said the black man, rising to his feet. He was impressively built and in alarmingly good condition. In fact, all of them were. He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on the bloodstained dress and then, as the door to the second guest room was audibly kicked open, flashed his eyes to the olive-skinned man who had demanded my name and who, I sensed, would have the last word.

  I was right. For a second he said nothing, and then he whispered, “Get in the box. Quickly!”

  The black man bundled me into the crate and sat on it.

  “Oh, brilliant,” I mumbled. “Put him in the box. They’ll never think to look there.”

  The room fell silent for a second and then, muffled slightly by the wood of the crate, I heard the door open and imperious footsteps enter.

  “Any of these?” demanded a soldier.

  “No,” replied a voice I took to be the innkeeper’s.

  “Has anyone been in here?”

  Muffled negations and murmured inquiries as to what the problem was.

  “Open those boxes!”

  Blood and sand!

  I heard movement and a creaking lid, then another; then I saw daylight, and the irritated face of a soldier peering in at me.

  SCENE IV A New Problem

  The soldier’s eyes lit up: he drew his sword swiftly and had begun to shout when something stopped him. There was a brilliant flash, yellowish, like firelight, but sudden and stark, so that everything solid went flat and pale, casting hard shadows. I think there was a sound too-a bang? Or a sudden and powerful gust of wind? I wasn’t sure. And there was something else, something like falling asleep after too much beer and coming to again with a raging hangover, except that the entire process lasted no more than a few seconds. It was panic, I supposed, and some kind of weird head rush at being shoved into a crate with an Empire soldier about to drag me off to torture and execution. That had to be it.

  But there was more. They were fighting. There was grunting and the unmistakable crash of metal on metal, and then a gasp of pain and the sound of a falling body.

  God! I was involved in a murderous brawl with Empire guards: a capital offense if ever there was one. I clambered out of the box and started to crawl away.

  Someone stepped over my back. I heard a weapon fall and then what sounded like cracking bone. I closed my eyes tighter till someone stood on my wrist and, with a yell of pain, I looked up. The pale kid who had been called Garnet faced a man who might have been the patrol officer. They had their fingers about each other’s throats and were fighting for control of the soldier’s shortsword. The other soldiers, astonishingly, seemed to be already dead. Or stunned, perhaps, since I could see no blood or wounds. The black man joined the last remaining fight, lending his considerable strength to wrenching the officer’s sword from his hand. The officer glared furiously as his strength gave out; then the kid freed himself, hit him once, very hard, in the face, and watched him crumple to the floor.

  I struggled to my feet, struck again by how light-headed and unsteady I felt. By the time I was upright the three soldiers weren’t, and my barbaric saviors were busy binding the innkeeper’s hands and gagging his mouth with a pillowcase. The girl was standing over the officer who had gone down the hardest with a broadsword pointed at his neck. Something in her eyes was as scary as the sword point. It was time for me to get the hell out.

  The pale man with the piercing green eyes was nursing his wrist, but the group was calm, businesslike despite their earnest speed and horrifying efficiency, as if this wasn’t the first time they’d dealt with Empire soldiers. I looked at the girl, half expecting to see her break down or scream hysterically, but she was as cool as the rest of them.

  I coughed and muttered, “I’m dead. I may as well hang myself right now. ‘Put him in the box,’ they said, Your Worship. That’s it. I’m dead.” With a miserable whine of despair I looked at the bodies and added, with what I thought to be unmistakable sarcasm, “Great. Thanks a lot. I don’t know who the devil you people are but you just did me a real favor.”

  The pale man looked at me with his homicidal green eyes and shrugged as if I had praised them.

  “It was nothing,” he said. “They were looking for you, not us. They were off their guard, their weapons were sheathed, two of them had their backs to us, and we had one extra pair of hands.”

  My disbelief found a new focal point. They were mad. They had to be.

  The girl caught my glance and her smile slipped away, her blue eyes freezing onto mine with undisguised indignation. I swallowed and looked down.

  “Time for some introductions and then a dressing of that wound,” said the olive-skinned man. I gave him a look of frank incredulity and bit my tongue. These maniacs had just casually assaulted three Empire guards, and were now going to invite me over for tea and crumpets.

  “You just killed three people!” I exclaimed, unable to restrain myself further. “You just bloody killed. I don’t believe this. You just killed three people! Don’t you get it? Three! Count them. Now what? Eh? Who should we kill next? The emperor? No. Here’s an idea: Kill me. Please, go ahead. I’d hate to hold you up. You must have some children to massacre or something, so come on and get it over with. Save the Empire a job.”

  “They aren’t dead,” said the black man.

  “What?” I muttered.

  “They aren’t dead,” he repeated. “Any of them. Though I thought that last one was going to give us no choice.”

  “No choice?” I said, incredulous. “He nearly forced you to butcher him in cold blood? If someone says hello to you in the street, is that grounds for garroting? I mean, you must have all kinds of interesting ways of killin
g people who-I don’t know-ask you what time it is, or offer you a piece of fruit or-”

  He clapped his hand over my mouth.

  Actually, I was surprised they’d let me go on as long as I had. The pale kid stepped towards me with the guard’s shortsword in his hand and hatred in his emerald eyes. I struggled in the black man’s grip but couldn’t move. I shut my eyes and waited for the thrust of steel through my stomach. It didn’t come and, after a moment of stillness, I opened my eyes.

  My would-be attacker had halted and turned his back on me, muttering his fury to the girl. More anxious glances were swapped, but the apparent leader stilled them with a gesture of his hand and a stern look at me. I swallowed hard and tried to regain composure.

  “This is Orgos,” he said, indicating the black man, who took his big hand away from my mouth and extended it, smiling.

  I stared at them in stunned silence as the introductions were concluded and my brain boiled softly. The pale savage who was no more than twenty was called Garnet, as I had already gathered, and the girl, who still hadn’t quite forgotten my look of distrust, Renthrette. I gave her a friendly smile and kind of wished I’d been more impressive during the fight. Kind of.

  “We do not use the names we were born with anymore, so I am taking no unnecessary risks,” their swarthy leader went on. “I am Mithos, and I-”

  “Mithos!” I bawled. “The Mithos! Oh God! Mithos the thief, bandit, cutthroat, and wholesale murderer?”

  “You should know better than to trust the Empire’s propaganda,” he remarked grimly.

  “All right,” I backpedaled, knowing the terms these psychopaths preferred to be known by, “Mithos the rebel and adventurer?”

  “The same,” he said.

  SCENE V Things Can Always Get Worse

  Adventurers” hired themselves out as investigators, guards, explorers, and specialists of various kinds, particularly if the assignment involved a balancing act between risk and profit. In effect they were burglars, thugs, murderers, and grave robbers. The Empire, in a rare moment of insight, had made the profession illegal. Adventurers were untrustworthy, and if they obeyed any laws at all, they were those of their own personal and erratic honor code. This made them dangerous people to have around and clearly a threat to the “peace” and solidity of the Diamond Empire. The Empire, moreover, had learnt that the likes of my dangerous saviors had organized much of the opposition during the initial invasion of Thrusia and continued to lead uprisings when the mood took them. “Adventurers” were rebels by any other name.

  As a result, the identity of adventurers was information much sought after by the Empire’s many spies and collaborators. One of the most notorious adventurers, a rebel whose name appeared on wanted lists all over Cresdon, was sitting three feet from me right now.

  Reports of Mithos’s physical appearance were fraught with contradictions, but I could think of half a dozen brutal attacks motivated solely by greed, the desire to eat small children, etc., that had been linked to his name. The knowledge did not make me comfortable.

  I should say that I do not much like the Empire. Thrusia, the mountain region in which Cresdon is situated, fought hard against the invaders but fell the year I was born. Since then we have paid for our defiance. It seems to me that the best policy is to keep your head down and say nothing, which, until today, and despite my somewhat checkered career in the theatre, is exactly what I had done.

  As ever, for those who can come to terms with the presence of an occupying force there is some profit. I have never actively collaborated with the Empire, but I have become, I must admit, a pretty passive subject. In truth I was-or assumed I was-too insignificant for them to take notice of me. I had lived like a flea on the carcass of their town and they had given me the attention a flea merits. Until about half an hour ago. And now I was sharing a room with the most wanted man in Cresdon and his conspicuously homicidal side-kicks.

  To cheer myself up I tried to sit next to the girl, Renthrette, who I figured was one of their girlfriends. It seemed fairly sure that I could make her like me for my wit if not for my physique, but, for the moment at least, she was doing a pretty convincing job of ignoring me completely. I found myself sharing a box with Orgos, the one who had sneered at me for being a petty criminal and then committed about half a dozen capital offenses in as many seconds. I looked at the girl for comfort and it cheered me up a little until I felt her acid eyes upon me. I gave her my long-practiced winning smile, but she met it with a look that would have leveled a small building and turned her back on me.

  God, what a fiasco.

  The four of them pumped me for information about myself. I repeated what I had told them already: who I was, where I lived, why I was running from the Empire, etc. I talked, gripped as I was both by fear of the Empire showing up at any moment and by fear of what this band of cutthroats would do to me if I didn’t humor them. Perhaps I could bolt for the door when they weren’t looking, get out and tell the first patrol I could find that I could hand them Mithos; that would get me off Whatever charges were leveled at me, wouldn’t it? Orgos laid his massive sword across his knees and watched me. Absently, he tested the edge with his thumb, his eyes on mine.

  I gave up the idea of running. For the moment.

  After I had finished my rather meager and somewhat edited life story and declared all I owned in the world (now down to four silver pieces, a single copper coin, the clothes I stood up in, and two bits of lead), Mithos motioned us into the corridor, out of earshot of the struggling innkeeper, and addressed the group. The bar was silent and there was no sign of other soldiers.

  “We have no choice but to leave. We can handle three light foot patrolmen easily enough, but they’ll have a platoon of hoplites after us within the hour. We must get out of Cresdon and quickly, or else we’d have to lie low for some time. And since we have an appointment in Stavis in less than three weeks, that gives us no time to hide from the Empire here. It will take at least a week of hard traveling to reach Stavis, so I suggest we move now, before the alarm has been raised.”

  “What about me?” I demanded, made angry by my panic. At the moment I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: the grinding judicial system of the Empire and the savages I was rooming with. I couldn’t decide which prospect was more terrifying.

  “You will have to come with us,” Mithos replied with a dissatisfied look in his dark eyes and a sigh in his voice.

  “What? He’s a child!” exclaimed the girl. “He will get us all killed! At best he’ll slow us down and risk exposing us. And if he decides to turn us in, what then?”

  “He won’t,” said Mithos grimly. It wasn’t so much a vote of confidence as a threat, and I recognized it as such. “You need us, Master Hawthorne,” he said with a half-smile. “And we can’t take the chance of leaving you behind to inform on us. If that offends you, consider us your ticket out of Cresdon. Your crime is a small one, but the Empire would brand you a rebel for it, and you know how they love to make examples of rebels. How many of the bodies that hang from the basilica gibbets are rebels, and how many are shopkeep ers, blacksmiths, and actors who the Empire decided were rebels?”

  “I try not to concern myself with politics,” I muttered, trying to stop my hands from trembling. He had a knack of saying all the things I didn’t want to think about and making them sound even worse than I had thought they were.

  “You are concerned with them now,” said the girl bitterly. “Would that you had been concerned about them before. Though what you could have contributed to the cause I don’t know.”

  “Renthrette,” said Mithos swiftly, “we have no time for bickering. The boy will leave Cresdon under our aegis whether he likes the idea or not.”

  “I’m not a boy!” I exclaimed. “I’m eighteen. A man.”

  The girl-who couldn’t have been more than a year older than me-snorted with disdain.

  Mithos, ignoring my indignation, told me my options in a matter-of-fact tone: “Sh
ould you decide, once we’re outside Cresdon, to ride with us to Stavis, you’ll come as one who must earn his keep and keep his place. Or we can part company when we are a comfortable distance from the city. It’s your choice. You will find us trustworthy unless you endanger our mission.”

  I nodded my agreement, anxious to go along with anything that would get me away from this inn. But as for trust, he could forget it. William Hawthorne trusted no one, and wasn’t about to start with a handful of murderous rogues he knew little-all bad-about. I figured I would have them get me clear of the city. Nothing more.

  My one anxiety-apart from the Empire, of course-was that they might feel obliged to do away with me to protect their precious identities before they headed for Stavis, the easternmost reach of the lands taken by the Diamond Empire armies. To seem keen to go with them might make me seem less of a security risk, though the journey itself, if it came to that, would probably kill me.

  The Empire had come from the northern mountains of Aeloria, financed by the precious stones mined in their homeland. They had clad their legions in white, their pennants, banners, and cloaks over-laid with the blue diamond motif. So had they acquired their name: the Diamond Empire, wealthy, cold, hard, sharp, and smugly eternal. They had crushed the lands that bordered Aeloria and pushed south to the kingdom of Thrusia. We had fallen hard and taken the edge off the Diamond’s advance for a while. Then greed set their eyes across the virtual desert plains of the Hrof wastes-a land drier than Thrusian grain whiskey or the wit of an Empire centurion-to Stavis in the east, a sickeningly prosperous port. They extended a thin finger of their force, unable to feed and water a more smothering movement in so harsh a region, took Stavis, and held it. The Hrof remained a wild place to this day, and you’d need a rollicking good reason to cross it. There was little Empire presence on the road, though the bandits, scorpions, and vultures had their own plans for you. If you make it to Stavis, you are back in proper Empire territory, but once you get through the town and head east, you are free. That might be the rollicking good reason I needed.