“Wiping out villages in Shale was your masterstroke,” I said with an admiring smile. “Who would suspect a man would butcher his own people? Brilliant. Your men must be disciplined, but the real credit goes to you. How do you get a soldier to slice open his own neighbors, maybe even his own family? How many of your men’s wives and girlfriends have had their heads and limbs hacked from them by their own comrades-in-arms? And all because you told them to!” I said, with the same note of amazed admiration. “This is your world now, Arlest. Orgos’s world bleeds and dies with him. Yours is the world of might and expedient atrocity, and principles cannot hold out against it.”
A curious ripple had been building amongst the ranks of the regular Shale soldiers. Perhaps it was because I knew they had played no part in the earlier raids, perhaps it was just because I could see their faces: in any case, it was them that I had been speaking to, not to the Empire troops. Certainly not to the bronze-masked raiders or to Arlest, the controlling monster.
He spoke hurriedly, then, conscious that something was happening around him. “This has wasted time enough. I see what you are trying to do, but, like your dead friend, you will achieve nothing.” He looked past me at the gate, but there had been another ripple, and I saw in his face the knowledge that he should not have mentioned Orgos again.
“Orgos could not believe someone like you existed,” I said. “Yet I doubt he would have shot you down, even now. He’d wait for you to attack and then he would respond on even terms.” I smiled sadly. “He taught me many things, but I have something of your realism after all. Orgos would not cut you down, but I will.”
I don’t know if he didn’t believe me or if he just wasn’t listening. He muttered to the chancellor at his side and thirty soldiers came forward and assembled at the end of the bridge, bows poised and arrows in place. I thought of swinging the crossbows onto them and firing, but for once the leader needed to take responsibility for his orders. The chancellor spoke to the platoon commander and the archers drew back their bows and waited for the order.
Behind me, Mithos, Lisha, Renthrette, and Garnet stood shieldless, disdaining to flee or take cover. I looked along the faces of the archers, their eyes narrowed and their forearms tight with the strain.
Arlest’s eyes met mine and held them. He smiled, a tiny rippling of the corners of his mouth and a spot of light in his eyes. Then he opened his mouth to give the word. On impulse-though what that impulse was, I couldn’t really say-I put one hand to the hilt of Orgos’s sword, which hung at my side.
I touched the pommel stone and, for once, I felt its power. I saw my purpose and its value with absolute clarity. There was a great flash of pale light that began at the sword and spread outwards like ripples on the surface of a pond. I felt the energy leave the sword, passing through me, but some of that energy came from me too, and the sensation was powerful and draining. As the wave of light passed over Dathel’s poised archers, their eyes flickered, their taut arms relaxed, and their arrows fell to the ground. They blinked in their confusion and I pulled the trigger.
Arlest pitched forward, blood spurting from his nose and mouth as he died. I wheeled the other crossbow, sighted, and shot the countess from her horse. There was no other movement or sound. Very slowly the archers relaxed their arms.
I wasn’t sure what had happened, and I didn’t care.
A long, disbelieving silence followed. I sat on the wagon and put my face in my hands for a moment as relief gave way to grief. I was suddenly too tired to stand, and all I wanted to do was go to sleep and wake up in Cresdon, playing cards with Orgos in a quiet tavern.
Then, out of the stillness, came footsteps. The chancellor had walked onto the bridge. His expression was stern and somehow weary, but he had barely opened his mouth to speak when a handful of the raiders charged him with their scyaxes drawn. In a fraction of a second he was surrounded by a group of Shale infantry in their black and silver, their shields locked about him and their spears turned out like the spines of a porcupine. The small cell of raiders attacked them, but they didn’t last for more than a few seconds. When the skirmish stopped, another dozen or so of the crimson raiders had been slain. The rest threw down their arms and plucked off their helms. The monstrous machine suddenly had faces, many of them uncertain, embarrassed, or even ashamed. It was over.
The Empire troops seemed to recognize as much. They had no interest in taking on whoever would stand against them now that it was no longer clear who would come down on which side. I didn’t notice when they started to move, but they withdrew as one, and by the time I started looking for them, they were a thousand yards away and riding west.
Curiously, it was me Chancellor Dathel addressed when he approached us. As ever, his tone was as dark and serious as his robes.
“On behalf of Shale, and as one now taking control of that county on the demise of Arlest the Second, I submit my land, army, and people to your control. I regret the destruction our land and leader have caused and I can only ask that our current surrender be taken into account in the trials that will inevitably follow. I can only say that I am extremely sorry.”
Sorry?
I could think of nothing to say to that. I knew most of it was just political rhetoric, but I suppose that was the name of the game now. Raymon would have a field day. I only half believed Dathel: I would never know exactly what command he gave to those archers, but they had not shot even after the power of Orgos’s sword had passed. Perhaps he had been disobeyed. Perhaps he had picked up a new mood in the ranks that he hadn’t dared to contradict. I wondered if my words had made a difference and thought that they probably hadn’t. Not in the long term, anyway; words never do.
“How much of what you said did you believe?” asked Renthrette, appearing suddenly at my elbow.
“My little speech?” I asked. “I’m not sure. Does it matter?”
She thought for a moment and then smiled very slightly, a smile so small and so sad that you had to be looking for it to notice it at all.
“I suppose not,” she said.
It was a comic situation, of course, and quite implausible, this sudden surrender by the obvious victors. If I’d seen it onstage or read it in a book I’d say it was fiction at its most ridiculous, though fiction has that privilege. But, oddly enough, I had known it would work. I knew the instant Arlest started to talk to me as I lined him up in the crossbow’s grooves, because it was clear then that he didn’t understand the game. He thought it was a debate, an attempt to sway his troops with logic. It had been no debate; it had been theatre.
Mithos gave the responsibility for disarming the Shale forces to Raymon, who was suddenly anxious to please. Then he slipped away with the rest of the party. He was going to find Orgos’s body, and I was going with him.
SCENE LX The Curtain
Orgos lay in a dark, candlelit chamber that smelled of the wildflowers and incense on the table by his bed. Lisha had bandaged him and prepared a poultice. Some local wise woman had sung low incantations around the bed and anointed him with oils. Between them they had set his broken ribs and stopped the wound in his abdomen, but he had bled copiously, and they were unsure of what had been ruptured inside. It was unlikely that he would make it through the hour.
The bandages about his stomach were soaked through with blood, but that was somehow less disturbing than the greyish hue his whole body had developed, like a deep, inner pallor. From time to time his eyes opened slightly, but they were pale and sightless. Several times I found myself feeling desperately for his pulse, convinced that he was already dead.
The air was thick with the aroma of candle wax and petals. It was like a sanctuary or a crypt. I thought of the battle, of the pain in his face when the enemy had come at us in spite of our numbers. I thought of our flight to the citadel and his single-handed defense of the bridge, and suddenly I knew what I had to do.
Moving close to his bedside, I knelt beside him, took one of his large dark hands in mine, and began to talk.
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br /> I talked of honor and heroism. I told him what had happened after he was cut down by the raiders, how we had taken his position and held them off. I told of how the Shale soldiers had turned on their leaders and on the raiders themselves. I told him how we had thwarted the Empire, who was retreating back to Stavis even as we spoke. I told him everything and I thanked him for it. It was, after all, his victory.
I looked at his still face and his half-open eyes and, charged with emotion, I said, “So you can’t die! We need you to champion the things you fought for and you can’t do that on your back in some cemetery. You held off an army, damn it! There’s too much for you to do here. You have to come back and finish the story.”
His eyes closed for a second and their lids rippled. When he opened them again, he could see me. His mouth moved, but at first no words came out. Renthrette gave him water and he drank it, looking at me. He mouthed something that I couldn’t catch and I had to lean in close while he tried again. “Will Hawthorne. ” he gasped, “you talk too much.”
I shrieked with joy as the others clustered around the bedside. Mithos looked at him and remarked, “I should have known Will could talk you round.”
“He’s better with words than he is with a sword,” Orgos said softly.
“Tough to imagine,” I said.
“Now that we have our swordsman back,” said Lisha, “Will is welcome to stay our wordsman.”
Words, like swords, have a way of getting people in and out of trouble. Morality was never my strong point, but I suddenly saw the attraction of being in the right and knowing it. Orgos always had, but for once this knowledge hadn’t been enough and he had to be reminded. In this, I suppose, we were similar after all. A writer like myself doesn’t pen plays just for the hell of it. There always has to be a sense that his audience, for the briefest moment and in some infinitesimal degree, are changed by what they hear onstage. It’s the same for swordsmen: When the opposite of your values rides at you hacking and spearing, grinning through their bronze helms, you need a little more than principle to keep your hopes for humanity alive. Orgos had needed to see victory more than ever before. He needed to know he could change the world.
I suppose there is an arrogance there, but I could relate to it. The fighter and the writer struggle with the balance of absolute omnipotence and total impotence that are intrinsic to their media. It’s that balance that keeps them on their toes. Yes, Orgos and I were more alike than I had ever suspected.
Orgos rose from his bed three days after the battle and within another week was recovered enough to walk around the citadel walls by himself. The bandages stayed on. During his recovery, Maia often came to sit beside him and hold his huge hands in hers. Maybe that did some good. He had become to her, and many of her friends and relatives, something of a hero-and by that I mean a real hero, not the actor I had been. I didn’t resent this. It seemed only right and proper that the latest act of heroism should banish all previous acts from the audience’s mind. I had been a hero because they had needed to see me as one. He was the genuine article.
Orgos and I spent a lot of time together and I noted in him a quietness that had been less evident before. It was a long time before I saw him polish and sharpen his swords again, and when he did, it was with a caution that verged on mistrust. When he grew sad or talked of the death and injury he had seen over the years, I would remind him of the battle on the bridge. Eventually the weariness and resignation left him and he grinned at me and said I’d been stupid to take them on by myself. Like he hadn’t, right?
We had gotten lucky. It doesn’t usually work like this, as we well knew, but for the moment, everything was on our side. We spent a few anxious days watching Greycoast’s western border but the Empire never came back. I guess there were too many troops still intact for them to risk achieving by force what they had hoped to win by guile. We sat at the head table of a banquet of roast beef loins and exotic game birds and laughed with relief. We were cheered in the streets and people bought us drinks wherever we went. Women hung about me with glazed eyes. Gorgeous women. I was the conquering hero (one of them, anyway), and everyone wanted to know me. Funnily enough, I didn’t want the attention so much, now that I had it. I spent a lot of time with the other party members and Renthrette smiled knowingly at both my offenses and my triumphs.
“I knew she’d appreciate me in the end,” I lied.
“I don’t know why I believe a word you say,” Orgos laughed.
Verneytha and Greycoast divided Shale between them. The Adsine keep and the Razor’s fortified home became infantry forts that kept a watchful eye on the roads and borders. It took several weeks to divide up the goods and treasure from Caspian Joseph’s warehouse, and the roads were continually dotted with heavy wagons of silks, silver, iron, and so on, all under cavalry escort en route to Ironwall. Mithos and Lisha used the gratitude of the governor of Verneytha and duke of Greycoast to force their hands a little, and much of the revenue from the stolen goods was kept in a fund for retraining and housing the survivors from Shale and the villages hit hardest by the attacks. Shale’s debts would be forgiven and its people would learn new skills, fitting comfortably into Greycoast’s and Verneytha’s economic success stories. That was the plan, at least. We had played our part and now we could only hope.
We never found out exactly who knew what within the government of Shale. There had been no vampire lord, no intrinsically evil force behind them, and I found myself in some sympathy with the land that had resorted to such desperate and unconscionable methods to get back on comparable economic footing with its rich and self-interested neighbors. That was, of course, the wrong way to think about it. Arlest and his Empire-supported raiders were the bad guys and had needed to be destroyed. It would have been easier if they had merely wanted to enslave the world, or if the victors had been a little more appealing. But Shale had lost and, in any future discussion of the matter, its people would turn into demons whether they had been so before or not. Alas, the victors write more than history books.
Dathel, chancellor of Shale, was taken off to be a guest of the glass tower in Harvest, where he would feel the eyes of the governor on him for the rest of his life. Greycoast took on the surviving raiders and the officers of the Shale regular army. Some were “educated” (tortured) and released. Others never came out or were executed, their heads displayed on the walls. As if there hadn’t been enough blood spilled. We went to protest, but it was weeks since we had been instrumental in their capture, and our influence no longer extended into such “domestic affairs.” It was time for us to leave.
We were paid double the original offer, a little reluctantly, by Governor Treylen of Verneytha, who thanked us for the revenue we had saved and the commerce which could begin again. We remained politely silent. Greycoast loaded a pair of wagons with our share of the bounty, which must have come close to four thousand silvers. I would have got into this business a lot sooner if I’d known this kind of money could be made legally. Or, do I mean “honestly,” or something equally dubious?
I think both of the surviving local leaders were quietly glad to see us go so they could get back to their own squabbling and financial one-upmanship. Their farewell speeches had all the right words in them, but their eyes said that they were delighted to be back in control. We saddled up and headed west through colorful banners and cheering crowds of happy subjects, who no longer remembered searching through the corpse wagons for missing relatives or weeping from the battlements as the flowers of three lands were speared and hewn to pieces. That was the past and they had come through victorious, for which they thanked us and sang our praises.
From time to time I found myself inexplicably close to tears in the midst of the rejoicing and cheering faces, my mind full of blood and the dreadful, bellowing chaos of battle. Then it would pass and I would laugh and sing and play the hero again. We took our bows and smiled upon them as they fought to get close to the stage and shake our hands, but we avoided each other’s eye
s when we did so. I knew that this pageantry and carnival would not have been altered one iota by the death of Orgos, and that thought stayed with me like the cold steel of a blade against my skin.
We rode out of the city, across the Downs, and into the forest, then farther west into what had been Shale. We avoided Adsine and went west into Targev, working our way back towards Stavis at our own pace. We rested for a few days when we came upon a nice inn that served decent food. When I asked Renthrette if we might go riding together one day, Garnet smiled.
Mithos and Lisha relaxed visibly, like a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders. I don’t mean that they suddenly started doing stand-up comedy in the taverns; they just lost some of their sternness and distance. They smiled more at my attempts at humor, and didn’t lecture me for telling some rustics that I was the king of Bangladeia, out with my vampiric warrior escort. It was all a far cry from my first meeting with them in a Cresdon pub, when they had shut me in a box and thrown insults at me. I thought of that time less and less these days.
The Eagle was distanced from me by more than miles, and I doubted I would go back, even if I could. Where exactly I would go, I couldn’t say. We would reach Stavis soon. Then what? Lisha had asked if I wished to stay with them. I was flattered but remained evasive. I didn’t know what I wanted. Like Orgos, I sometimes felt I’d seen enough blood for one lifetime; but also like him, I couldn’t quite withdraw from it completely.
As we came close to Stavis one evening and the sun was setting low above the white buildings of the city, I knew I had to decide. Like most decisions, this one would be made on impulse and then stuck to until it had become the only conceivable course. We had stopped on a hillock with a view of the town sprawling down to the ocean. I looked at my companions one at a time, regarding them slowly and with care as they took in their destination. Orgos caught my eye and beamed. I smiled despite myself and looked from him to Renthrette, who rode pale and beautiful by my side, to the scarlet and bronze of the clouds that hung heavy over Stavis. Memories spiraled through my head, thoughts of the triumph, terror, and despair of the last months, and I found myself looking down the dark, featureless corridor of the life I had lived-or half lived-before I met them.
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