Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  Garnet stepped behind the door, his ax drawn. I grabbed my crossbow but hadn’t had time to cock it when Mithos called, “Come in!”

  The door creaked open, admitting the inn’s serving boy with a large jug.

  “More beer,” he gasped, struggling to find a place where he might set it down. “It’s from the landlord. On the house.”

  “Thank you,” said Mithos as the boy left.

  “That was very civil of him,” I said, refilling my mug.

  “Well,” said Orgos, taking my beer before I could take a sip, “now we know how they plan to get to us.”

  “Hey, get your own-” I began.

  “Have you seen anyone give anything away in this town?” said Orgos. He took the jug and poured the beer into an empty chamber pot in one smooth motion. Then he put his hand into the jug, scooped out a thin smear of grainy sediment, and tasted it gingerly.

  “Not poison, but they’ll be expecting us to get a very good night’s sleep this evening,” he concluded, adding, “They’re going to be so disappointed.”

  SCENE XL The Assassins

  We slept two to a room as before, or rather, we sat up all night two to a room. I was with Orgos. Renthrette and Garnet had slipped out as soon as it got dark and were waiting for the Joseph wagons to move. The rest of us were to stay where we were and wait to be assassinated.

  Orgos sat in the corner, one sword across his lap. He had been absently polishing it but had begun to doze a little. I was wide awake, so I let him sleep and watched for both of us. We had a single oil lamp turned so low that you could see no more than shadows. I thought of the dark-eyed assassin who had shot at us in the bar and wondered if it would be him slinking in to finish the job he botched last time. Then I thought they might torch the whole building as they had fired the Sherwood, but that was a noisy and unreliable means of assault, even if we were supposed to be in a drugged stupor. I wondered why they hadn’t just poisoned the beer they’d sent up, but I suppose we had been there long enough for people to know that I was the only one who drank beer in any quantity and at least two of the party never touched the stuff (unless I was educating one of them in the delights of getting totally hammered). Time passed and Orgos began to snore softly. I began to think we had overestimated our peril.

  Fat chance.

  At about two o’clock, when the night was darkest, I was staring blankly into the middle distance when the dark frame of the door seemed to blur. I blinked. A thin mist was gathering in the center of the room.

  Staring at it, I poked Orgos. He grunted and continued to snore.

  It was getting colder and the mist seemed to be thickening.

  “Orgos!” I hissed, turning the lamp up and reaching for one of his swords, the one with the crystal in the hilt.

  I shook him again and this time his eyelids fluttered and opened, then tightened in confusion. The fog, which stood in a narrow, six-foot column in the center of the room, was no longer merely thick; it looked as if you could touch it. There was even some color in the greyness, as if the shape was becoming solid. A moment later the mist had coalesced further and it was now unmistakably a man, a man in the full helm and scarlet cloak of the raiders.

  Orgos snatched up his other sword and leapt to his feet as the mist seemed to blow away, leaving the raider-now solidly present-close enough for us to see the pale stone set between the eyes of his helm. For an uncanny moment we just stood there, and then his hands moved, and for the first time I noticed that he seemed to have no scyax or weapon of any kind.

  He was holding only a small wooden box. His first and only motion was to flip the lid open and dump its contents onto the floor, where it collected in three liquid puddles.

  I didn’t know what he was doing, but I was sure I had to stop him. I held up Orgos’s sword and focused my mind on bringing out that flash of light and power from the crystal.

  Nothing happened.

  By the time Orgos had pushed past me and crossed the room with his sword poised to strike, the mist was already gathering about the raider. Orgos swung his sword, but it passed through what was now only a column of smoke which blew away in the wind of the sword stroke.

  “What the hell was that?” I shouted.

  And then the lamplight picked up what I had taken to be the dark fluid which the raider had tipped out of his box, and I could see that it wasn’t fluid at all. It was legs: thin, spindly, and covered with short bristling hair, tentatively reaching and feeling their way around.

  Spiders.

  Now, spiders have never bothered me particularly, and although these were bigger than most, at five or six inches across, I can honestly say that my first sensation was one of relief. Given the strangeness of what had just happened-the mist, the menace of the raiders-spiders seemed like the soft option. I was wearing boots and would make short work of these three little assassins with a lot less trouble than I would a single crossbowman. I turned to Orgos and found him frozen to the spot with terror, his eyes wide.

  So Orgos was an arachnophobe! Perfect, I thought. Time to show a little courage of my own.

  I grinned at him but he was staring at the floor. When I took a step towards him, he raised a hand to stop me and hissed, “Yellow wolf spiders!”

  I selected one and raised my boot.

  “Piece of cake,” I muttered sotto voce.

  Then it jumped.

  As I’ve said, spiders, even big hairy ones, don’t really bother me. When those spiders launch themselves at your face, however, the matter takes on an altogether different complexion.

  I threw myself back, shutting my mouth as the spider hit me for fear of it getting inside. For a fraction of a second I felt its body, soft and warmish, those thin, clawed legs struggling for purchase on my face. Then Orgos was sweeping the thing to the ground with his hand and finishing it off.

  I backed away, stunned into inaction as Orgos expertly and stealthily lanced another with his sword and deflected the third as it jumped at him. It fell by the shuttered window and burst with a soft plopping sound.

  “Oh my God!” I gasped, panic and revulsion overcoming any pretense at courage. “What the hell are those? Those fangs were an inch long. And what kind of spider jumps at your head when you go near it?!”

  He approached me, examined my face, and then became quite still, staring at his right hand. He moved it into the lamplight and frowned.

  There was a thin cut just above his knuckles.

  “Yellow wolf spiders,” he said again, quietly, and with a resignation I didn’t like.

  “One bit you?” I whispered.

  “Let’s hope not,” he said in a voice no more than a breath. “If we’d been asleep, we wouldn’t have had a chance. Assassins in the Thrusian marsh villages use these things all the time. They are extremely reliable killers.”

  I just looked at him. He smiled, but it was a small, grim kind of smile.

  “But. I mean, you’re going to be all right, aren’t you?” I said.

  “I really don’t know,” he said.

  “Of course you will,” I said, with a breeziness I didn’t really feel. “You’re Mr. Adventurer, the battle-hardened weapon master. You’ve got a magic sword, for God’s sake. Supposedly. You can’t get killed by a spider! What kind of story would that make?”

  “The real-life kind,” he said, and there was no smile on his face now. “Wait here. I have to speak to Lisha.”

  I stared at him as he left, momentarily lost for words. There was a chill panic in the pit of my stomach and a desperate voice in my head.

  No. He can’t die. Not Orgos. He’s.

  What? My friend? I don’t think the possibility had occurred to me before now.

  It seemed he was gone for hours. When he crept back in, I stood up.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks like a bite, but it isn’t deep, so the venom might not have
got into my system. Lisha cleaned it up and. We’ll see.”

  He offered me a small glass bottle and said, “Drink this.”

  I uncorked it and smelled the contents.

  “Will it help?” I asked.

  “If you were bitten and we didn’t notice? No. Drink it anyway.”

  I did so and it went down warm with a sweet, citrusy aftertaste.

  “Now lie down and wait,” he breathed.

  “But what if that is a bite?” I hissed back, gesturing to his hand.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” he sighed, “or, at least, you will. In the meantime, you can give me my sword back.”

  I did. The thing was useless anyway.

  “You know, Orgos,” I began, unsure of where the sentence would end up, but sure I had to say something, “when I first met you guys, I felt totally. I mean, I think that you have-”

  “Tell me tomorrow,” he said.

  He glanced at me and the smile was back, a little wan, maybe even sad, but there nonetheless.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, then.”

  I think, even at the time, I knew that that wasn’t going to happen.

  SCENE XLI Rest in Peace

  It 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 g
rinned.

  “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.