Will (Book 2)

by S. F. Burgess

  Principles

  Pandral marched straight through the Central Tower gate, unchallenged by the same guard who had watched them leave earlier in the day, while Harper increased his stride to keep up. Once they reached his office, the Lord tore off his Protector’s uniform. The shirt underneath was sweat dampened and creased. With distaste, he dropped the heavy tunic onto a chair and began pacing backwards and forwards, hands clasped behind his back, a frown upon his face.

  “Pandral…?” Harper asked, unsure of himself. The Lord appeared to be furious, but not having encountered Pandral in such a mood before, Harper did not know the best way to respond.

  Pandral moved to the window, his body stiff, his back to the room. For a long time he stared out at the Protectors in the training yard. My old unit getting knocked about by the Elite Protectors, Harper thought as guilt flared through him. When Pandral finally spoke, his back still to Harper, his voice was the hard, cold steel that came from tempering anger with determination.

  “I spoke with Lady Rebeca. She says that Rodin had started sleepwalking in the last year and had been found in the garden and around the house with dirty feet. Recently it seemed to have stopped.”

  “Rodin has been sneaking out of the house at night for a year,” Harper deduced. “I found a ladder hidden in the boundary wall, and a bag containing his sleep shirt. I doubt he ran off into Hemtark naked, so I would think he kept a change of clothes in it. Perhaps it took him a while to perfect his route, and when he got caught sneaking back into the house he pretended to be sleepwalking?”

  “Logical,” Pandral agreed. “Something tells me Rodin does not want to be found.”

  Harper nodded. “Perhaps, but Pandral—he is just a child. We need to find him and make sure he is well.”

  “Then what? Deliver him back to Miraway Gee for more brutality?” Pandral asked, bitter disgust running through the Dwarfish. “The man beat his children’s nurse to death; I fear Rodin will carry the guilt for that when he finds out.”

  Harper knew what response was expected of him as a Protector, so he played his part, hating the words as he uttered them, but wanting to know what Pandral’s response would be.

  “A man has a right to give judgement in his own house. The boy disappeared under the nurse’s watch, so Miraway Gee needed to punish the woman. It can hardly be blamed on him if she was not healthy enough to take it. As for the boy, a father must ensure his son grows strong and fearless, to walk the path that has been selected for him.”

  There was a freezing silence and slowly Pandral turned to face him, his expression empty.

  “Do you believe that, Harper?”

  That is a dangerous question… Did he trust this Lord?

  “Does it matter?” Harper asked.

  Pandral stared at him, disappointment creeping into his eyes. “What you believe matters a great deal to me. I believe that the innocent should be defended and that those with abilities and position should use their good fortune to stand up for those who have no voice. More importantly, I believe there are other Lords who think as I do. I just have to find them.”

  Shocked, Harper stared. These were words that could get Pandral killed—words that could have come just as easily out of Conlan’s mouth. While he had known that Pandral was different from a normal Lord, this bold vision he spoke of was downright revolutionary—and, in Harper’s experience, it went against everything for which the Lords of Mydren stood. The trust Pandral was showing him by revealing this, after only one day of knowing him, was both immense and imprudent. It was an act of desperation. Harper could see it in the Lord’s expression. It’s the act of a lonely man.

  Something in Harper drove him to meet and acknowledge the risk Pandral had taken, to be the friend and sounding board that this conflicted Lord seemed to need.

  Who’s the reckless one now? What if this is just a trap?

  Harper held Pandral’s gaze as he spoke. “I believe that children have the right to grow up safe and loved. I believe that servants and Protectors have the right to work without fear of being beaten or killed for their mistakes.”

  “These are fine words, but like me, you do not have the true courage to live your beliefs,” Pandral said. “The boy, this morning. You could have reprimanded Aldrich, demanded he keep his hands to himself, but instead you salved your conscience by giving the boy food.”

  Harper stared at Pandral, open-mouthed. “You could have reprimanded Aldrich too.”

  Pandral shrugged. “Like I said, I do not have courage either. It has taken me thirty years of planning, scheming and hard work to become a Lord. I thought that, once I made it here, the rest would be easy—but being a Lord is not enough. Oh, I can enact small changes—make the lives of the people around me a little better—but I cannot step out of character too far. There are levels within levels; the Lords are not equal and I am still at the bottom of the pile, my position precarious. That is where you come in.”

  “Me?” Harper asked, confused and worried about the guilt he saw in Pandral’s eyes.

  “I need to get higher up the levels. I need to be noticed and to find out, carefully, if there are others who think as I do. Being in charge of the Hemtark Protectors makes me little more than a Protector myself in the eyes of the other Lords,” Pandral said. “I need your help, Harper. I have been looking for someone like you for a long time. While your arrival before me was timely, I had been watching you for a while. Your lack of talent in some areas puzzled me. I now understand better why you chose not to excel. However, it was your skill with a bow that caught my eye. I knew as soon as I saw it that you were not what you were pretending to be.” He paused. “There are a lot of cases out there that can be solved with the application of logical thought, awareness and intelligence. I do not have the time for these myself, but if you can convince me that you are the man for the job, I will assign these cases to you for solving. This will bring me to the attention of those who can promote me.”

  Cases like the missing grandson of a Lord! Was this ever about Rodin?

  “Yes,” Pandral said, answering Harper’s unspoken question, and turning his head away from Harper’s accusing look. “I took the case to gain favour with Lord Tarplan, but now I am torn. Rodin deserves better from me; Braylee deserves better. What do I do?”

  “You do what your heart tells you, Pandral, not your head,” Harper said.

  There was silence and Pandral turned back to look out of the window. Tired and knowing the day was nowhere near over, Harper sat and waited.

  “We need to find Rodin,” Pandral said eventually. The statement did not speak to the Lord’s intentions once he had found the boy, but it was still a step in the right direction.

  “We should start by visiting the warehouse Rodin drew. But we cannot go dressed as Protectors,” Harper replied. “And we need more people looking. If I copied Rodin’s picture, we could hand it out to the Protectors and then send them off to ask around.”

  “We do not have Protectors sat around waiting for us to find them things to do, you know,” Pandral replied, turning back to face Harper.

  Harper smiled. “Actually in this instance, we do. My captain punished my entire unit before he brought me to you. They are currently not scheduled into street patrol; we could use them and stop an unfair punishment at the same time.”

  A cunning smile spread across Pandral’s face. “Very well. I will get us outfits to visit this warehouse; you start making copies of the drawing. There is fresh paper in that drawer,” he added, pointing at his desk as he rose and moved to pull a long cord by the door.

  Harper pulled the breakfast table to the window for the better light, and with a stack of new paper he began making copies of the child’s portrait. He had nearly finished the second copy when Aldrich finally turned up in answer to the servant’s bell Pandral had pulled. The grouchy old man had seemed more surprised by the lunch order for the two of them than we was by the request for him to obtain everyday clothes. Once he had shuffled off mutte
ring to himself again, Pandral walked over to the window and picked up the pencil drawings.

  “You have a lot of talent,” Pandral mused, holding the images out before him.

  “But again not the courage to be true to it,” Harper said, with lines that sprang from Davlin’s back story and a bitterness that came from personal experience. Harper could feel Pandral’s inquisitive gaze, but kept his head down and continued his work. ‘Be elusive and mysterious’, Davlin had said, ‘Imply, do not tell. People are more apt to believe conclusions they have reached themselves than they are outright lies you have told them.’ Harper felt the fear deep in his soul swirl and rip at him as his guilt stirred it up. He liked Pandral; there was an easy companionship between them. The man did not take himself too seriously, he wore his mantle of authority with an easy control, and his intelligence was obvious. In beliefs and aims he was not that different from Conlan. Their methods, however, were almost exactly opposite. Where the Lord had seen the problem and sought to remedy it subversively, Conlan had seen the same problem and decided to bring everything to the ground in order to start again with something different. Harper had a feeling that Pandral’s slow, steady, careful climb to power, while it might afford him the luxury of making some of the changes he wanted, would eventually grind down his integrity and determination as he was forced to make sacrifices of his ideals for the ‘greater good’. Conlan, on the other hand, while finding his principles challenged, was in far less danger of straying from them. Harper wondered if that was the crux of the problem: that even when Lords of Mydren took the reins of power in the hopes of doing good with it, over time they had to betray their principles so often—to maintain the small amount of power they had and to climb up the echelons—that by the time they got there they could remember only that they wanted power, not their original reasons for wanting it.

  Harper found that the desire to tell Pandral who he really was, who Conlan was, to tell him about their plan and perhaps bring him to their side, was incredibly tempting. He struggled to resist. He had known Pandral for one day, and while the Lord might appear to have faith in his loyalty, he was not naïve enough to have the same expectation without a lot more evidence upon which to base it. He would save the truth for when he was certain he had completed his mission and had nothing to lose.

  Harper had nearly finished the tenth and last portrait of Rodin when Aldrich knocked on the office door and entered, carrying clothes over his arms. Behind him was the same boy who had delivered breakfast, straining once again under a large food tray. The smell of warm bread filled the room and Harper’s stomach grumbled. Pandral stopped Aldrich from leaving while he wrote orders to go to Sergeant Fergus and the captain, explaining that he would need Harper’s old unit for the foreseeable future. While Pandral and Aldrich were distracted, Harper engaged in a little more cake theft, receiving another big smile from the boy as he and the old man left.

  The stairs to the fourth floor of his unit’s tower were a little less of a strain than they had been the day before, but he still took a few minutes to wait at the top of the steps for his body to stop trembling so noticeably and his breath to even out. As he rested, he heard voices.

  “… what is going on,” Fergus was saying, his voice muffled behind the closed door. Inching closer on silent feet, Harper listened.

  “Well I am not taking orders from that drollup!” It was Marit’s voice, and a murmur of approval followed his declaration.

  “Idiot,” Fergus snapped, and Harper heard the dull slap of someone being struck. “Harper has the ear of Lord Pandral. Refuse to work with him and I will be giving more lashes by the end of the day. Whatever is going on, you will all do as you are told.” There was a short silence and Harper could imagine Fergus giving his men his best stern look. Then Fergus added, “Unless you would rather go back to the daily beatings the Elite Protectors have been giving you? Which, by the way, these new orders have just saved you from…” There was more silence. “No,” Fergus said. “I did not think so.”

  Stood in front of the door, Harper hesitated. Do I knock? Or do I just walk in? This action could set the whole tone for how the Protectors responded to him. Realising his dithering was indicative of precisely the sort of weakness he did not want them to see, Harper took a deep breath, pushed the door open and walked confidently into the room. Fergus and twenty Protectors turned to stare at him, and Harper felt a sudden regret that he had not put a little more effort into getting to know these men while he was still one of them. Hostility sat in many eyes, although curiosity and interest softened others. Only one face, sporting the fresh bruises they all carried, held a smile. Rudd seemed genuinely pleased to see him, but not wanting to single the boy out, Harper pretended not to notice.

  “I have been sent with a task for you,” Harper said, getting down to business. Moving into the room, he held up one of the pictures he had drawn. “This is Rodin; he is eight and he is missing. He ran away from home three moons ago. We do not know if he is still in Hemtark, but this is where we are going to start. Break into pairs, take a picture between each two and head out onto the streets. Ask people if they have seen the boy; make sure you ask those who live on the street too. If Rodin has joined them, they might be wary of giving information to Protectors, so please impress upon them that Rodin’s mother is worrying herself sick over her missing son.”

  “Or we could just beat the information out of them,” Marit said with a condescending sneer.

  Harper glared at him. “No, I do not want to frighten these people off with violence. We might need their help to find Rodin.”

  Marit snorted his disgust but did not speak further.

  “Any information you find, bring it back to Sergeant Fergus,” Harper added. “I do not want bodies, injuries or arrests—I just want information.”

  “You want… or Lord Pandral wants?”

  The speaker was a Protector called Hadley, and his tone was sly. His name only stuck in Harper’s mind because he was Marit’s friend. An uncomfortable silence followed the question. Harper turned to look at the man, letting his gaze drill into him until Hadley gulped and dropped his head.

  “Lord Pandral and I both want the same thing—to find Rodin. If the orders sent to your captain and sergeant are not enough, if you require to hear these orders directly from Lord Pandral, I shall report that back. However, I do not expect his response to be accommodating.” Hadley shook his head, his face pale. “Very well,” Harper continued, trying to look them all in the eye in turn. “You have your orders. Are there any more questions?”

  “What was the boy wearing when he disappeared?”

  It was a sensible question asked by a short, stocky man with dark brown hair. Harper did not remember his name, but Marit saved him the embarrassment of having to ask.

  “What does it matter what the boy was wearing three moons ago, Patryk?” he spat. “I doubt he is wearing the same thing now.”

  “Perhaps not,” Patryk said with a defiant glare at Marit. “Unless we find a dead body. But people will remember certain things better than others. Expensive clothes on a small boy who is somewhere he should not be, for instance.”

  “Patryk is correct,” Harper said, impressed with the Protector’s thought processes. “However, we do not know what Rodin was wearing.”

  No further questions were asked, and Harper gave a respectful nod to Fergus, who offered a knowing smile in return. The efficient sergeant had started pairing his Protectors up even before Harper had left the room.

  Dressed in inconspicuous, everyday clothes, Pandral was sat at his desk writing with a rapid, steady script. He did not look up as Harper entered the room.

  “Change into the clothes Aldrich brought you,” Pandral ordered. “I wish to leave as soon as possible.”

  Harper nodded, quickly stripping out of his Protector’s uniform, wincing when the material—matted to his back with blood—tore open several wounds as he removed it. Thankfully, the clothes Aldrich had brought were looser and
lighter; walking around Hemtark in them would be far more comfortable than wearing his uniform.

  When he slipped his boots back on, Harper made sure his two knives were secreted away before he stood and turned to Pandral. He found black eyes observing him thoughtfully. Feeling self-conscious, but not wanting the Lord to know that, Harper gave him a bold stare. A smile tugged at Pandral’s lips as he stood, heading for the door. Relived at not having to lie about the burns and scars on his body, Harper followed him.

  The gate guard was surprised when they walked past him for the third time that day, this time wearing civilian clothes, but again he said nothing, merely watching them disappear into the noise and crowds. Taking the lead, Harper took Pandral back to the warehouse, questioning his sanity the whole way. The place had made even Davlin uneasy; walking in with a Lord of Mydren was beyond dangerous. I really hope Mittal doesn’t do business there regularly, or if he does, he has the sense to ignore me.

  The dilapidated building was as he remembered it, and stepping through the door, Harper heard the sharp intake of breath from Pandral as the beautiful garden opened up before him. Leaving the Lord to admire the horticulture for a moment, Harper turned to the door guard. A lump of a man, he stood at Harper’s height, but his head disappeared into the muscles of his shoulders without the benefit of a neck. However, sharp eyes watched as Harper approached.

  “I need to find this boy,” Harper said, holding the original picture he had drawn of Rodin in front of the guard’s face. “Have you seen him?”

  Gently but firmly, the guard pushed Harper’s hand and the picture out of the way. It was the movement of a man who knew he had the strength to cause harm, but only when he deemed it necessary.