Will Power

by A. J. Hartley

  “No,” said Renthrette in that apprentice-party-leader way she sometimes had. “We have to stick to the riverbank, and the forest is big. To go round it would take us twenty, thirty miles out of our way.”

  “To go through it could cost us a good deal more than time,” I pointed out.

  “Eventor is not Sarak-Nul. We’ve been told . . .”

  “We were told the goblins wouldn’t be living in the southern chambers of the Falcon’s Nest,” I reminded her.

  “This is different,” she said, coming close to me and speaking straight into my face. “The sooner we reach the White City, the sooner we can come back with a force to help us get Mithos and Orgos out. We can’t take the chance of another two or three days on the road.”

  “And if we don’t get through?”

  “We don’t get through,” she said, shrugging. “But at least we tried.”

  And there it was, Renthrette’s good old lust for glory and honor, that never-say-die spirit that led her to endure, no, to seek out, against-all-odds situations where she could put her neck on the line for a righteous cause. Unfortunately, there always seemed to be other necks involved, the owners of which (take me, for example) were less convinced of the value of principled martyrdom. Not that this ever mattered to her.

  “Then let’s start moving,” I said, knowing better than to keep backing a three-legged horse. Her eyes held mine and a flicker of doubt rippled across them. Then she smiled, pleased—impressed, even. And then she walked away, a little spring in her step as I, knowing that my resignation had somehow been misread as resolve akin to her own, felt unaccountably guilty for not clarifying matters. But she didn’t smile at me that often these days, and when she did, it usually meant she was thinking about something else and I had just happened to be there, so I let it go.

  Four days after passing through the Hostile Hamlet, we stepped into the forest of Eventor. I wished Orgos was with us, for his smile and his singing voice as much as for his sword. But Eventor wasn’t all bad. The night had been colder than before and the wind had picked up so that even I was glad of the shelter the trees gave us. The grass in the open had been frosty this morning, but the forest was dry and felt warm by comparison. While many of the trees were hardwoods and therefore bare, there were enough conifers of various shapes and sizes to keep the forest green and touched with life in defiance of the winter. The horses snorted and steamed softly with what I took to be pleasure or a sense of relief. Overhead in the canopied air, songbirds fluttered about, twittering to themselves. No maniacal starlings, hawks, or lunatic cries—just birds, small and pretty and generally barely worth noticing. I, with my new appreciation for wildlife that didn’t approach with vast, slavering jaws, noticed.

  That evening we rested in a glade where copper beeches stood, still clinging to their oddly metallic leaves. The horses had browsed happily, and we had made a fire (or Renthrette had), cooked (likewise), and eaten (I helped). We were now sitting quietly as the last light dwindled and the stars, just visible glinting through the sparser branches above, came out cold and clear.

  I told a story. She didn’t ask for one, and the last time I had told one she had come as close as ever before to slitting my throat, but we had been getting on better of late, so I gave it a shot. I chose something that would appeal to her, all knights and monsters, chivalry, and tests of loyalty and truth. She sat silently and watched the fire as I spoke—listening, I think, though she may have been thinking of other things. When I finished, she didn’t move for a while, then she wished me good night and got ready for bed. I hadn’t leaped to the front of her list of personal heroes, but seemed at least back in favor. For reasons I was not exactly sure of, this pleased me.

  Renthrette had wrapped herself tight in a blanket and curled up like a kitten by the fire. Her hair fell across her sleeping face and, touched as it was by the flame-light, flickered like molten brass and copper running together in the finest streams imaginable. A little overly lyrical, perhaps, but not an altogether inappropriate image, since she had a good deal of fire about her even when just walking around in broad daylight. She could stand in a drenching rain and still light a fire with her glance. I felt it constantly, and while it could be appealing in a hopelessly unattainable way, the version I got was usually the red-hot-plowshare-on-the-bum kind of heat.

  I was ruminating on this, and considering the heat that might break out of her if I could somehow convince her that I was her long lost handsome prince and not the septic rat-tail she had taken me for, when I heard the distinctive sound of whistling. It was a musical whistle, a snatch of an old Thrusian melody delivered with expert and easy confidence. I wheeled, pulled up my crossbow, and stared into the darkness of the wood, locating the sound at the same moment that I saw the man stepping unhurriedly toward me. I raised my weapon and he came on unabashed. Then the firelight picked him out.

  “Orgos!” I exclaimed. “What the? . . .”

  “Sorry to surprise you, Will,” said the black man, smiling broadly so that his teeth shone. And there he was, large as life, tall and strong as ever, clad in his black armor with russet tunic and trousers beneath, his two long cutting swords strapped across his back so that their hilts stood proud on his shoulders like horns. He was the original sight for sore eyes.

  “How the hell did you get out?” I began, approaching him quickly and slapping my hand into his. “God, it’s good to see you!”

  “You, too, old friend,” he replied, laughing.

  “How’s Mithos?” I spluttered, swallowing back something almost like the proverbial lump in the throat. Probably a remnant of dinner.

  “Almost completely recovered,” he beamed, slipping a casual arm about my shoulders with that familiar ease of his. Relief and the courage which had always emanated from him blended and coursed through me.

  “I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed, hugging him again. “I thought . . .”

  “What?”

  I laughed and shrugged it off.

  “So what are you doing here and how did you escape?” I demanded again, smiling wide.

  “Sorrail sent a cavalry unit to get us out and I immediately came looking for you. Fortunately you aren’t too tough to track, and I knew where you entered the forest and when. It was just a matter of time before I found you.”

  “What’s the hurry?” I said, observing the concern in his face.

  “We have to get out of here. Not just the wood, the whole country, the region itself. We have to get back on the road and head south for as long as it takes, and we must leave this place to its own troubles.”

  “But the goblins . . .”

  “There are dark forces at work here, Will: things we cannot comprehend and are too feeble to influence. Our first encounter with the goblins should have told us that much. There is power here, the kind of power we might call magic, and those who live here wield it. We don’t. We are just people, and our blades are insufficient. We must leave while we still can.”

  I sat down by the fire to think, glancing over to where Renthrette lay motionless.

  “Let her sleep,” said Orgos, as if reading my thoughts. “She needs the rest. We have a long journey home ahead of us.”

  He was quite right, of course, and I was, I confess, relieved to hear him say it. The idea of leaving had been in the back of my mind since we arrived, but it didn’t appear to have occurred to anyone else. I kept it quiet because from me such a remark would mean cowardly flight, while from the others it was tactical withdrawal.

  And I, who have spent my life fleeing, was suddenly unsure. Orgos wanted us to run for our lives because we were less powerful than our enemies? Since when? I thought for a moment, and something struck me.

  “When we left Stavis,” I said, my eyes fixed on the dying fire, “you were virtually unarmed. Your equipment was back in the Hide. You had one of your swords. Now you have both of them again.”

  I looked at him quickly and his expression was blank. “I don’t have them,” he
said, apparently confused. “This is all I have, the blade I had when you saw me last.”

  And sure enough, there was no sign of the second sword he had been wearing at his back.

  “You did have them,” I said, getting to my feet, my body feeling like it had been plunged into icy water. “I saw them. Only a moment ago you had them.”

  “No,” he said, his expression as before, “you are mistaken. I have only this.”

  “Where did you get it?” I spluttered, nodding at the sword.

  “What?”

  “Where did you get it? Tell me about the first man you killed with it.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He was quite calm, but his face had changed. A grayness had come into his eyes and his features had grown hard and implacable.

  “I do,” I shouted. “I remember but you don’t? Does that strike you as terribly likely, swordsman?”

  I turned hurriedly and kicked at Renthrette. There was a pause, and then his voice—or a voice like his but quite changed now—came low and cold as a mountain ice storm.

  “You cannot wake her,” it said.

  I spun and found that Orgos had risen silently and now loomed over me, all semblance of my friend running from him like melting wax. The grayness I had seen in the eyes was spreading cloud-like throughout his features, and with it came an odor, increasingly foul and pungent, but dry as old bones. It was decay.

  “You are not Orgos,” I announced, somewhat redundantly in the circumstances, hoping that this would dispel whatever it was that was materializing.

  “I am what is left of him,” the creature rasped. The cloud dissipated and the blasted corpse was revealed, desiccated and crumbling. The lipless jaws parted, but the sound that came out was more an emanation of the whole body than it was a voice:

  “Fly, William, or perish utterly. Fly, or cower in despair. Fly, or have your body rent by pain, your mind by terror, and your heart by misery. Fly, or learn to wish for death and grieve unceasing that it never comes.”

  The specter’s sightless eyes held me fast and, as its lower jaw fell away completely, its fleshless arms rose and bony fingers closed hard about my shoulders, pinning me to the spot. A new coldness, like the moist chill of grave earth, seeped into my body. I screamed, a long wail of horror, right into the skeletal face which closed on mine like some deathly suitor. One of its fingers splintered. Then another. Part of the face collapsed into the hollow skull, and the forearms snapped abruptly. The ribcage caved in, and in less than a few seconds, the entire corpse had crumpled in a shower of dust. It fell in a pile at my feet, dwindling still, fragmenting, disintegrating, reducing to powder.

  And still I screamed.

  SCENE IX

  The White City

  An hour had passed, an hour in which I talked a skeptical Renthrette through the details of my ghastly encounter bit by bit, over and over, as I worked to convince her that this wasn’t some bizarre prank. As the incident faded I expected to rediscover my sanity and find some ingenious way to dismiss it, but I didn’t. The visitation had happened and it had been a conscious force, not the product of some hallucinatory mushroom accidentally included in dinner: a dubious claim which was impossible to substantiate, of course, but one I was sure of nonetheless.

  Renthrette was equally certain that this was a none-too-clever ruse on my part to justify fleeing for Stavis as the apparition had instructed. I told her that even if I did want to leave this bloody place—which, obviously, I did—we still had no idea how we would actually do that, so conjuring this spectral advisor just to change her mind made no sense. Go back to Stavis? Fine. How exactly? Which direction was it in? Did I have to summon a storm and a black carriage like the one which had brought us here in the first place, and, if so, how precisely was I supposed to do that? She grudgingly backed off, which was just as well, because I was on the verge of telling her that the thing which had come walking up to me in the forest had claimed to be what was left of Orgos, which would mean that he was already dead. If that was true . . . Well, there seemed little point in confronting that possibility right now.

  And there was one bit of evidence on my side. The bones hadn’t all collapsed into dust, and those fragments that remained—including part of the skull—looked to me more goblin than human.

  “So what does it mean?” I asked, staring into the fire. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling of a deep cold in my bones.

  “Mean?” said Renthrette distractedly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not everything means something, you know.”

  “Yes, it does,” I insisted. This was the one thing I had learned from my years in the Thrusian theater. Everything means something, even if you can’t control what that meaning is. If you ever doubt that little unimportant-seeming things mean something, try farting on stage during a tragic death scene. Trust me on this. “This means something.”

  “Then, what?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll make a guess,” I said, fiddling with a stick which had caught fire at one end. “Some goblin force, a spirit or something, crossed over from the other forest, from Sarak-Nul, I mean, and came looking for us. It was very specific in its choice of identity and there has to be a reason for that. It animated a goblin corpse, perhaps, and used my thoughts to clothe it, as it were, as a person I knew. I had been thinking of Orgos earlier—missing him, I guess—and it somehow seized my mental picture of him and fashioned its form accordingly. Something like that. It chose a person I respect, a person whose company I missed, and presented him as he exists in my head, which is why it got the swords wrong. When that mistake was revealed, the spell (or whatever it was) fell apart for some reason, as if the controlling force couldn’t sustain the illusion once I became suspicious. The question is, why go to all that trouble?”

  “Maybe it was just some wandering ghost—” began Renthrette.

  I cut her off, swallowing back the now ludicrous urge to say that I did not believe in ghosts. “No,” I said. “It had a purpose. It was trying to get rid of us by saying that we were in danger, out of our element, guaranteed to fail. . . .”

  “Whatever it was, it read you like a book,” Renthrette remarked, a sly little smile crinkling the edge of her mouth.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But my point is that it was willfully misreading the Orgos in my head. He never would have said all that stuff about running away. That suggests real purpose. It wanted us gone enough to violate the disguise in a very risky fashion. There is more to this than meets the eye. If we are so impotent, why did it want us out of the way? If we are so obviously doomed, why go to the trouble of trying to get rid of us? Maybe we actually aren’t completely out of our element. Maybe we can do something aside from getting ourselves killed. . . . Tough to believe, but there it is.”

  We continued our trek across the forest for the rest of the day. Renthrette led, sedate and watchful. I followed, glancing behind me from time to time in case that rustle of wind in the trees was actually the corpse of an old mate coming to share some thoughts on what we should do next.

  The air was moist and cool, and wisps of mist still trailed along the forest floor and over the still, dark surface of the river. Then a rocky escarpment rose up on the bank and we had to turn from the water and into the forest to get round it. It was about thirty feet high, irregular, and creviced in ridges and craggy, tuber-like growths. A few withered bushes and weeds struggled out of the thin soil in its cracks, and boulders dropped from God knew where were scattered among the undergrowth. And in one horseshoe hollow was a cave. Its mouth was tight, only a few feet across, and inside was a dark tunnel that burrowed back toward the river.

  Renthrette brought her horse to a standstill and I looked from her to the cave and back. “You must be joking,” I muttered.

  “Quiet, Will.”

  “Can we just get on and leave this adventurer stuff for the people with nothing better to do? Remember the last cave we spent the night in? Or our little jaunt through the cistern at the Falcon
’s Nest? Two words: talking bears. And goblins. No, four words: talking bears and goblins. Riding them. OK, six words. . . .”

  She had already dismounted and was approaching the cave mouth cautiously, bent over to peer in. I stayed in my saddle.

  “Don’t expect me to come,” I began. “Don’t expect me to help pull you out when a great set of grinding incisors grips you round the waist and . . .”

  But I had already dismounted, had even begun to follow, so this show of defiance had become futile even by my standards. She paused at the dark entrance, adjusted her grip on the axe I had given her, stooped further, and was gone. I hesitated, looked down at the crossbow in my hands, cocked it, and fitted a bolt into the slide. Then I bent over and stepped inside.

  The cave was shallow and only the very back was completely dark. There was ash and charred sticks on the ground and, as I turned them over with the toe of my boot, I saw what looked like chicken bones.

  “Here,” said Renthrette, from my left. She was holding a satchel made of coarse, olive-colored fabric. She upended it and a series of small packages spilled out onto the floor. I was stooping to pick one up when I caught a sharp aroma, momentarily unpleasant, then wonderfully familiar.

  “Cheese!” I exclaimed. “Thank God. Look at this, Renthrette. Cheese. Good cheese at that. Real cheese that tastes of cheese, not that petrified rubber they gave us in the pub the other night. There’s a strong, crumbly white; a smoked; and, what’s this? Oh God . . . a blue. Oh yes. Taste this, it’s superb!”

  She gave me a superior look and I scrambled to my feet.

  “Nothing else?” she said.

  “Nothing else?! Taste this!”