Act of Will

by A. J. Hartley

  “Good people of Greycoast! Worthy residents of Ironwall! I bring you the elixir of Sensenon! After years of study and penitent worship, the council has permitted me to sell a small amount of the elixir to the world, the place commanded by divination and the drawing of numbers. You, proud Ironwall in the land of Greycoast, have been selected!

  “Oh, Sensenon, after these long centuries your people will finally be satisfied! No more will they suffer the chills of winter or the fevers of summer. No more will their skin age and their eyes fail! Lo, it says in the book of Onthrast: ‘Their cheeks shall be as babes and they shall see ants on the horizon and count their legs.’

  “It will build your muscle and lose your fat. See the results in less than a week! It will make you potent and fertile, witty and intelligent. Yes, madam, it cures piles. Certainly, it straightens bones, enlarges the brain, strengthens nails, gives sheen and body to hair, beautifies complexion, and richens eye color. Ladies, apply it your skin and body hair falls away. Gentlemen, do likewise for a full and lusty beard. Can you afford to turn away?

  “Across continents I have searched for the ingredients and measured them out as Sensenon prescribed. For each vial, a blend of badger bile and seven hairs from the snout of a grizzly bear are added to the ground beak of a Hrof ostrich, a sliver of the bamboo found only in the rain forest of the Xeltark, and a pinch of the moss that grows above the snow line on Mount Valten. These are simmered for three years in a special distillation of Thrusian brandy and Stavissian hemlock, and into them are stirred powdered pearls and emeralds. The whole is seasoned with bee urine and shaken in a cup of purest gold lined with leaves of the screaming mandrake. It is brought to a boil for exactly thirty-seven seconds in the dragon-breath furnace of Salhayazim, and stirred with the fibula of a ruby-throated leaping wombat as the secret words of completion are breathed into it. At last, it is ready and I present it to you, Sensenon’s all-natural elixir—yours, for a limited time only, for just two gold pieces.”

  That last part was true, at least, for I always drop the price by half after five minutes, once the real morons have gone home satisfied. Ten minutes after that I’d drop it by half again. In a country village I might go lower, but in a worldly-wise hub of commerce like this place, they won’t buy if you go too cheap. They figure that expensive means good.

  The party arrived halfway through. I ignored them and sold my wares, figuring their speeches about truth and virtue and how naughty it was to tell fibs would be shorter and easier to ignore if I’d made them a potful of money. This turned out to be right.

  But as I was packing up, having made a tidy twenty-eight gold pieces and a handful of change, Garnet said, “Have you got any left?”

  “Any what?”

  “Any of the elixir.”

  I gave him an odd look. “Why?”

  “Well,” he said, “if it does only half the things you said it does, then—”

  “It doesn’t,” I said quickly, with something like shock. “Why should it?”

  “Well,” he said guilelessly, “your learning, and the special ingredients . . .”

  “Learning have I none,” I said, smiling. “As for the ingredients, well, it’s mainly puddle water, clay, and something a little special of my own that you don’t want to hear about. There are a few flower petals in there, but not enough to make it palatable.”

  Garnet looked at me in silence. I’d just sold the last bottle to one of the guards, who now leaned against a gibbet holding a corpse labeled cutpurse. I shrugged and slid the gold through my fingers into Lisha’s bag.

  “Well done, Will,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” I replied honestly.

  SCENE XXXIII

  Romance

  In the Eagle, tales of adventuring had always been stuffed full of colossal dragons, all insatiable greed, murderous fury, and breath that would singe your eyebrows at four hundred yards: absolute evil in physical form. I’d never believed that rubbish, of course—nobody did—but even a hard-line realist like me would like to be proved wrong from time to time. Not too often, mind. I don’t know what I’d do if I met some hulking troll in a dark alley. A smallish goblin would be all right, I suppose: something I could kill without too much effort or qualms of conscience. That had always seemed the core attraction of life wearing a sword in stories: You could hack and slay all day and then put the pile of corpses down to honor, the triumph of goodness, the protection of puppies, and so on.

  It didn’t seem to work like that in reality, though I wasn’t sure Garnet and Renthrette had figured that out yet. For them, there was always a line drawn, and they were on the side of truth, justice, and sunshine. There were a lot of people on the other side of the line, and once you were over there you could very easily became ax meat. This was disturbing for someone like me, who frequently wandered from one side of the line to the other without even realizing it.

  Lately I’d been on fractionally better terms with Renthrette, though that wasn’t saying much, and even that limited progress had less to do with her feeling more comfortable with me and more to do with feeling less comfortable with the mission, if you see what I mean. She had made her disdain for my moral status clear after my conciliatory words to the duke (the fact that he had been ready to execute me did not strike her as relevant) and had referred to my money-raising methods as “snakish and deceitful,” so we weren’t exactly ready for candlelit dinners, but she called me stupid less often and always seemed to be weighing the things in my character that nauseated her (most of them) against my undeniable, if erratic, usefulness to the party. Whenever I did something right she would give me a long look of muted surprise, as if she were watching a camel say the alphabet at high speed: unexpectedly praiseworthy but somehow suspect. I’d bought her a drink a few nights before and she gave me that very look when I didn’t try to weasel my way into her affections and/or underwear. Even I wasn’t certain what I was doing, since I’d pretty much given up hope of progress in that direction. Pretty much.

  I hadn’t met many women lately, because the party members always seemed to be watching me like the vultures we’d seen in the Hrof, their faces heavy with sermons on virtue or equality. I watched keenly for signs of romantic goings-on amongst the group, but everything seemed cerebral and professional, curse them. I had thought people went into adventuring for romance (sex) and excitement (sex). It was just my luck to hitch up with the only celibate mercenaries in Thrusia. I started saying what a good physique Lisha had to Garnet, but his green eyes started to get that cold, homicidal look, so I dropped it. I said nothing of Renthrette, fearful that Mithos or Orgos would show interest and then I’d really be screwed. Or, rather, I wouldn’t. I liked to pretend I had a chance, even if she was only just getting over the impulse to put a dagger through my windpipe every time she saw me.

  A sample piece of recent dialogue: “You have beautiful eyes,” I said to her, very smooth over the top of my tankard. We were sitting in a tavern waiting for the others to join us and she was drinking tea (for God’s sake!).

  “Oh right,” she said with the smallest of smiles that turned into something grimmer around the edges. “I’m supposed to be flattered. You can compliment me on my eyes because that’s classy, whereas to refer to my breasts would be crude.”

  “But your eyes, er . . . show your personality,” I faltered.

  “I might not know the theatre, but I’ve seen the poetry, Will. Eyes are just part of the catalogue. Eyes like crystal, isn’t it? Ruby lips and ivory skin. Then ankles, thighs, and so on, down the list. The composite woman. A collection of parts for your pleasure.”

  “It’s not as if I’m not attracted to you as a person,” I said.

  “Meaning what, Will? I pour nothing but derision on you all day, but if I came to your bed at night, you’d be all over me like sauce on one of your succulent entrees.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” I lied.

  “Oh, please.”

  “Well, all right. Maybe so,”
I confessed, trying to smile in a winningly flirtatious way. “So what?”

  “So ‘as a person’ doesn’t extend beyond this body, which happens to fit all your little criteria?”

  “Most of them,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Your nose is a little . . .”

  “Thanks, Will.” (That was sarcastic, in case you missed it.) “But at least you’re being honest, for once. Fortunately, I am feeling charitable and will refrain from going through the list of ways in which you, physically, don’t make the grade.”

  That stung.

  “What is your problem, exactly?” I said irritably. “What is it that got so stuck up you that you can’t get it out?”

  “How apt.” She smiled. “I must have something stuck up me because it isn’t you. How like a man.”

  I was, for once, speechless. She was quite calm, even amused, which was new for her. The worst part was that she was right. A million times I’d heard some oaf lumber back to his barroom mates and tell them that the girl who had just blown him off was “a right bitch” or “not that pretty when you got close” and I had always smiled knowingly to myself. Now I was the oaf, and there was no dark corner and group of friends to bring me solace. I felt like the fox scowling up at the grapes he couldn’t reach. What a bitch.

  The upside, however, had been the ease—even the enjoyment—with which she had rejected my oafish advances. There had been no vitriolic screaming, no threats of evisceration, no torrents of frosty contempt, and when I had abandoned the chase she had actually smiled, as if it had been a kind of game we were playing and she had won a round. Later, when the others did show up to make plans for whatever new madness we were to embark upon, I caught her looking at me. When I turned my sulky face towards her, her grin had been so open and knowing that I found myself returning it.

  Since we would learn nothing in the palace, we had decided to split the party and stay in inns scattered about the city. Lisha and Orgos would be in the Silversmith’s Arms, an upmarket place for traders and the local gentry. Garnet and Renthrette went to a middle-class tavern called the Bear’s Paw. I got the cheap end of town (surprise, surprise), and would spend the next night in the dubiously titled Swan with Two Necks, dodging cutthroats and pickpockets. The fact that I was sharing a room with Mithos didn’t especially cheer me up, since he tended to be a sort of portable storm cloud: largely dark and silent, occasionally brightening up to flash lightning and thunder at you. Still, maybe I’d get a game of cards.

  Just before I left with Mithos, I made a point of examining Lisha’s black-shafted spear. I hadn’t forgotten that odd blue lightning flash. I was unsurprised to find that the silver metal of the spear’s fer-rule, where the shaft fit into the tip, was set with a large irregularly shaped blue stone. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  SCENE XXXIV

  The Ritual

  Mithos and I walked our horses down to the eastern edge of the city. Much of the second level, below the palace and public buildings, was a walled enclosure of public grazing land and private crop fields that were designed to keep the citadel going in times of hardship. Since the majority of the region’s agricultural produce came from Verneytha by road, this was going to be one of those times. Below the cobbled, narrow, and spiraling streets were vast water cisterns, cut out of the rock and fed by springs. If need be, this place could close its gates for a very long time.

  The citadel made up in fortifications what it lost in military presence. Soldiers patrolled the walls, but there weren’t many of them for a city this size: just four hundred. Garnet and Renthrette had it all penciled out: half infantry, half local militia. The latter were mainly city police and would not be called upon in the event of a military confrontation. That was what Shale was for. Still, with fortifications like this, Greycoast didn’t need much to defend the place.

  Our tavern lay up against the far eastern wall of the citadel in a maze of narrow streets with butchers’ shops on every corner. Greying meat was laid out on stone slabs in the sun where old women fanned at flies as they haggled over prices. Rabbits were suspended from poles, and cow heads, as yet unskinned or de-eyed, watched us from the gloomy interiors.

  The Swan with Two Necks was the kind of hole you might have expected it to be, so I won’t waste time telling you about its various surprisingly unpleasant aromas and their close relationship with the clientele. It was the kind of place you went armed to and carried only as much as you intended to spend. Its menu was miserable but it had, as a house special, a dish intriguingly named after the tavern itself. We ordered this with cheerful expectation, but the “swan with two necks” turned out to be a scrawny chicken with two hopefully positioned blood sausages. Delightful.

  “How long do we have to stay in this dump?” I wanted to know.

  “A night or two,” said Mithos, pulling gristle balls from his teeth and pushing them to the side of his plate. “No more. We just have to ask around. See if anyone can tell us anything interesting.”

  “Is that likely?” I asked, regarding the bar’s dodgy-looking patrons.

  “No,” said Mithos shortly, “though I expect everyone has a theory.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” I said, cheerfully producing a pack of cards.

  Mithos gave me a look and said, “Be careful, Will. There aren’t enough of us to bail you out tonight.”

  “Come now, Mithos,” I said, “Cautious Will?”

  We spent the next two hours moving around the tavern individually, asking leading questions about raider attacks. Not subtle, I confess, but fairly safe, since it seemed that the inn was holding a Village Idiot convention. An eager young man told me that the raiders were a fiction created by a top-level group of conspirators whose motives were obliquely linked to a suppression of the lower social orders. The barmaid had it on good authority that they were ghost riders who vanished at dawn. One genius produced a matchbox from an inside pocket and confided that he only let the raiders out when his wife beat him for coming home drunk. . . .

  The less hopelessly moronic people that I spoke to presumed I was an adventurer wanting to hire myself out as a guard. A fur trader offered me fifty silvers to ride with him to the Hopetown market. I tried to get him to pay me in advance but he wasn’t that stupid. I made friends with a couple of young ladies and introduced one of them to Mithos. He just shook his head and moved away. The ladies, irritated at his lack of interest, doubled their prices, and that was my night blown.

  Close to midnight the room was starting to empty. All around us people were pushing clubs and daggers into conspicuous scabbards to deter attackers in the dark streets. Only then did the barman come over and tell us we had a guest. He was sitting by the empty fireplace, a heavy and moth-eaten cloak drawn about him. We approached and he rapped on a pair of chairs with a stick. We sat and listened.

  “Been asking about the raiders? Not adventurers neither, else you’d have taken up with the fur man. So, different interest. Like me.”

  He looked at us suddenly and his face was sweaty and scarred, ugly in the lamplight. His eyes had a mad, sightless look.

  “Yes,” said Mithos simply, leaning closer to him. I had begun to notice something about him that I didn’t like, a smell not unlike the rancid butchers we had passed earlier. Dirt and blood, caked and drying. Foul.

  “You want to taste the power,” he rasped. His voice had a thick, sluggish quality that made me faintly nauseated. Mithos nodded and drank from his mug.

  “Drink,” said the man significantly. “Drink ale till you can get something better.”

  I stared hard at Mithos. I had a very bad feeling about this.

  “Drink of the destroyer and you’ll never be destroyed,” rasped the voice. “I know where it is, if you want it. Though it will cost you.”

  “How much?” said Mithos mechanically.

  “A little gold.” He shrugged. “Maybe more. But you know it’s worth it.”

  “What is it?” Mithos asked, and I saw a
tension in his shadowed face.

  “The ritual,” he answered, “the blood charm. The life of a raider engorged with the lives of his victims. Yours for the drinking. Yours for life.”

  He leaned close to me and smiled. Something black and coagulated stuck between his rotten teeth. His breath smelled like decaying flesh. I turned away, suppressing the bile in my throat.

  “Take us there,” said Mithos, rising.

  The stranger rose and lurched towards the door, swaying strangely, his dark, decrepit cloak trailing through the sawdust. We followed.

  He led us through the streets, through alleys I wouldn’t have dared to pass at this time of night in other circumstances, though I was too focused on the shambling figure in front of us to worry about anything as mundane as a mugging.

  “What are we doing?” I whispered to Mithos.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied, “probably nothing of any use. Still, we’ve nothing better to do.”

  I could think of a hell of a lot of things that were better than wandering the lightless streets with this foul-smelling maniac, but I said nothing.

  All of a sudden we came to an unmarked doorway. He led us inside and up a narrow, creaking stairway. I put a hand into my cloak and gripped the hilt of my shortsword. At the top of the stairs was a big man with a shaved head and a spiked mace. I let go of my sword. Behind him was a curtain of wooden beads, and as our guide muttered to him, he stepped aside and we passed through.

  On the other side we found ourselves in a small room dimly lit with thick candles that made the walls flicker madly. The bead curtain rattled behind me and I felt eyes turn upon us. There were people arranged in a circle around what looked like an altar stone. The stone was at least six feet long and on it rested the body of a headless man. He was naked, and a similarly naked but ancient woman was chanting over his corpse, opening his veins with a large knife. There was blood all over her.