Act of Will

by A. J. Hartley

  “They can’t see you,” he said. “Special glass. We can see in, but they can’t see out.”

  At the top, in a sparse, aggressively functional chamber lined with windows, scribbled Governor Treylen. There was something furtive about his long hands and yellowing nails as they flashed among his papers, and I couldn’t shake the wary distrust I felt when his black, shiny eyes flicked onto mine. He nodded us into chairs and consulted a clock, assessing how much time he could spare us.

  “You are later than I expected,” he said, fixing his beady gaze on Mithos. “I thought we would be getting more regular progress reports for our money, particularly since the attacks seem to have increased in daring. You had better have good tidings.”

  I told him everything, and he listened, clenching and flexing his bony, spider-leg fingers, fixing me with a glassy stare.

  “So the raiders can appear and disappear by magic?” he said as I finished.

  “I’m not sure that it’s magic,” I said, faltering. “I mean, it’s something to do with those rocks and . . . I can’t think of another word for it, though. Yes, they’re using magic.”

  “I have lost thirty-two wagons since you took this job,” he said, his thin lips pulling back from his long yellow teeth. He was smiling, but it was a smile that held no joy or amusement, unless it was at our expense. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but disbelieving contempt hadn’t been high on the list.

  “Three villages have been destroyed,” he went on evenly, “their wheat fired, their hands slain, and their ploughs destroyed. In one attack alone I lost two hundred head of cattle, sixty pigs, and a hundred and fifty sheep, roasted alive as they waited for market. A forty-man cavalry unit was wiped out as they gave chase, and a total of fifty-five other Verneytha soldiers have been killed while acting as escorts or patrols. This report of yours with its fanciful tales of stone circles and disappearing raiders does little to restore my confidence in your abilities. If I’d wanted children’s stories—”

  “You wanted to know the truth,” I said, “and I’ve told it to you. If you want to fight the raiders, I suggest you pay more attention to what I’m telling you.”

  Mithos gave me a quick look, but I had no intention of saying any more, so I shut up and waited to crush whatever the governor said next: improvised dialogue, I could do.

  “Ah, Mr. Will Hawthorne,” said the governor in his smuggest, oiliest tone. “Yes. The party’s mouth. The party’s braggart and fool. The last time we met, you had to throw yourself on Raymon’s mercy to avoid a particularly unpleasant and degrading death, earned by your inability to keep your tongue in check. Of course, talk is what you do, isn’t it?” he said, gazing thoughtfully at me. “We thought we had hired soldiers and investigators, but if the rumors are true, you are no more than an actor! A storyteller. No wonder your lies come so fluently. What sewer did you crawl out of, Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “If I’m a sewer rat, I should fit right in here,” I returned. “I might even run for public office.”

  There was a long silence. The governor just sat there and looked at me until I felt embarrassed and flushed.

  “Step this way, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said suddenly. “Come; don’t be afraid, I shall not hurt you. That is not our way here.”

  He had risen from his seat and stepped back a few feet behind the desk. I glanced at the others uncomfortably. There was something cold and collected about his manner that filled me with panic. He crooked a long, pale index finger and oozed, “Come, William, I have something to show you.”

  With a swift movement he kicked open the cover of a circular, well-like hole in the floor.

  “Come,” he repeated, and his voice was disarmingly gentle. “The rest of you stay exactly where you are. There are guards watching you everywhere.”

  I couldn’t see any, but there were windows everywhere, and I didn’t doubt him for a second.

  He stepped into the hole and began to descend a spiral staircase, while looking up at me and grinning. His fingers clutched my wrist and pulled me down quickly after him. I recoiled from the strong, fibrous fingers, stumbling down after him until we reached a wooden scaffold from which four evenly positioned staircases descended. Each wound down in a spiral and each was surrounded, all the way down so far as I could see, by softly lit rooms: cells.

  “You see, Mr. Hawthorne,” he whispered, “there are no torture chambers or disemboweling knives here such as you would have experienced in Greycoast. No rack, branding irons, or manacles.”

  He said each word with relish as if imagining them in use. The hair on my neck rose and for a second I thought he was quite mad.

  “But there are no criminals, either,” he said. “All due to potentially continual surveillance. The people never know when they’re being watched, so they have to behave as if they always are. And not only our prisons have glass walls. Offices. Schools. Markets. Brothels. Everyone monitored. All monitors monitored in turn. Field laborers paid to watch each other. It’s a self-policing society, Mr. Hawthorne. A perfect economy made secure by a myriad interconnected eyes and ears. A society where the police are in here”—he smiled, tapping his temple—“so it becomes impossible to even think criminally. You are never alone in Verneytha. Never.

  “So you see, Mr. Hawthorne, how careful you have to be when you enter a new land. Perhaps you hated Greycoast’s dungeons, but believe me, for a free man like yourself, there is nothing more terrible than continual surveillance. Nothing. In time you would yearn for the rack and the gallows, Mr. Hawthorne. You would plead for a torturer to let you pay your penalty and cover those awful, lidless eyes that watch you day and night. A few months in my cells, and you would never know what it was to be alone again. Even when no one was there you would feel them, watching, listening. Controlled madness, Mr. Hawthorne. Regulated insanity for the good of the state. Go and tell your stories about that, and leave the magic for the children and the very, very stupid.”

  He gave me a long, hard look and then snapped, “Upstairs! Quickly!”

  I stumbled blindly back up the spiral. The others stared at me when I emerged. I must have looked pretty haggard.

  “Now leave me,” snarled the governor, his tone suddenly harsh. “I will summon you after I have decided what is to become of you.”

  “We are staying—” offered Mithos.

  “I know where you are staying, you idiots. Now get out.”

  I tried to tell the others what I had seen in the tower but I couldn’t convey its awfulness. Garnet had just looked bemused and shrugged it off as something that “didn’t sound too bad.” He told rival tales of dismemberment in Thrusia that once would have made me sick. But he understood with his gut what he didn’t grasp with his conscious mind. He developed a new irritation at the way people watched us pass. We all did. Even at night, from time to time, lying there in the darkness of your bed, you thought you could feel the eyes.

  It was impossible to tell who was in the pay of the governor, so we locked ourselves in our tavern room and tried to decide what we were supposed to do next. To my mind it was clear: “We’ve got to split up and spread out. We can’t move around Verneytha as it stands. It’s a waste of time. There are people watching everywhere I look. When I go to the bathroom I feel like I’m playing to a capacity crowd.”

  “Will’s right,” said Lisha. “We should leave quickly, before the governor decides he wants us to stay in one of his little windowed prisons.”

  “But where do we go?” said Garnet to himself.

  “God, this is a mess,” said Mithos. Since the meeting with the governor, he had grown dour and unapproachable. “They’ve probably been watching us since we left Adsine. What a bunch of amateurs we must look like! We do have to leave, but I’m coming back, and they won’t see me this time. Will, check the corridor.”

  We were all getting a little paranoid. I stood outside, eyes skinned for anyone who could be a spy. There was no one about, so this was one conversation the enemy wouldn’t hear. Come to
think of it, neither would I. That was bloody typical of them. They would send me into the line to prove what an integral member of the party I was, but when it came to making decisions, good old integral Will had to check the corridor.

  Garnet flung the door open suddenly, and it was obvious that he was unhappy with whatever had been decided.

  “Come in, Will,” he sighed.

  SCENE XLVII

  Alone at Last

  It was noon. The sun was high and the air still and humid. The wagon felt slow and conspicuous, trundling along like a very large beetle, but I had left Harvest two days ago, had just crossed the border between Verneytha and Shale, and hadn’t so much as glimpsed a crimson cloak. Indeed, I hoped to catch sight of Adsine before sundown. Recently, sundown had become a big deal with me: it reminded me that another day had passed and I was still alive.

  They had sent me ahead with the wagon figuring that the safest place for me to be was Shale, beyond the jurisdiction of Verneytha and Greycoast, whose leaders considered me a slightly less welcome visitor than, say, some unpleasant disease that made all your gristly bits fall off. This suited me just fine, because things were getting too grim by half for me to want to stay with the others. So far I’d been lucky and we’d survived all my cock-ups, but it was only a matter of time before something I did got Orgos stabbed or Garnet shot off his horse. The more I had come to like them, the more difficult it was to be Will the Weak Link. I moaned to Orgos that they were treating me like a child, sending me out of harm’s way and all, but secretly I was relieved.

  Lisha was to ride south to the villages that had borne the brunt of the attacks. Garnet would ride Tarsha part of the way with her and then return to Hopetown and Ironwall. There he would fume and complain by himself about how little action he was getting while reinvestigating the Razor’s keep. Orgos was going back to Caspian Joseph’s warehouse by the Iruni Wood, the closest thing to progress we’d achieved so far, even if it was still a bit of a dead end. The house was indeed where the raiders had been hiding their loot, but it wasn’t the operations base we had hoped for. Orgos was to go back, skulk through the orchard, peer through windows, and generally creep about (in an honorable way, of course) in the ludicrous hope that someone would tell him, in passing, like, who the raiders were, where they lived, and so on. He was expressly ordered not to try to re-create my little jaunt via the stone circle.

  Mithos had moved out of Harvest but he would be back with a different name and face to learn what he could about Verneytha without Treylen’s spies monitoring him. It seemed to me that he was the only one doing anything useful. It seemed that way to Garnet also, who complained loudly about being gotten out of harm’s way. But in one week, barring significant events (which I felt we could rule out), we would all meet again in the Adsine keep.

  I was glad to be out from under Verneytha’s watchful gaze. Though I had been there only a couple of days, I still found myself looking over my shoulder to see who was taking notes on the way I ordered a beer. It would wear off in time, no doubt, but at the moment I was as jumpy as a gazelle in lion country. Still, I was away from both Duke Raymon and Governor Treylen, there was no sign of the raiders, and Renthrette was currently asleep in the back of the wagon.

  Realized that she wasn’t accounted for, had you? She hadn’t been much fun so far, to tell you the truth. Like her brother, she felt she was being protected, and that we had seen all that needed to be seen in Shale. Lisha corrected her, reminding us about the catacombs near Ugokan to the north of Adsine, which we had been told about when we first arrived. It was probably a blind alley, but we were used to those by now. After we had snooped around the deserted caves for a while, we were to meet with the count in Adsine and be the party’s goodwill ambassadors, hopefully countering whatever tales of our incompetence had found their way over the border.

  I slid the hatch open and peered into the back. Renthrette was curled up on a sheepskin rug, her sun-touched hair carelessly strewn across the pillow—though she’d tie it back as soon as she woke lest I thought she was making herself look good for my sake. Her brow was creased into a frown. Above her, one of the scorpion bolt throwers was set up on its tripod. If we were attacked, it might prove essential. Then all I had to do was turn the winch a few dozen times, find the groove, put a bolt in, take the safety off, turn it round, aim, miss, and hope the raiders laughed themselves to death. Still, this little study in futility was, they assured me, a gesture of defiance and therefore valuable. So calling them names ought to help too.

  By late afternoon we had reached the village of Ugokan, where we saw little more than a few shells of timber and stone: no people were left. A handful of children had gone missing in the ancient caves and the search party never made it out. Other villagers vanished after that, and finally the rest just packed up and left. A century ago, said local stories, the caves had sheltered an army that had ravaged the entire region. We were about to see what they sheltered now.

  Renthrette was always irritable when she woke up. She particularly didn’t like to see my face as soon as she opened her eyes, since it reminded her that she had been sent off on a wild-goose chase with the apprentice, especially since we had already decided there was nothing in the catacombs but ghost stories. They were just too far west to be a useful base for the raiders. In any case, turning this pointless excursion into a romantic trip was going to be tough. Maybe I could set up a candlelit dinner in the caves and get the fruit bats to serenade us. Or maybe it would be so hot inside that we’d have to strip down to the bare essentials and we’d be rolling on the ground before you could say “Wake up, Hawthorne, you pathetic loser.”

  We had left the fertile ground back in Verneytha and the earth had been getting steadily more dusty and worthless ever since. As we passed through the empty village, sand swirled in our faces, and there in a group of smooth, yellowish rocks was the opening to the caves.

  “At least it’s shady,” I said as we approached. Renthrette sighed. We had shared a room in an inn the previous evening and that had been one of my life’s more major anticlimaxes. She had “kept watch” (on me) from midnight till dawn, intending to sleep in the wagon today. Now she was tired and sulky.

  “After you.” I smiled as we neared the entrance.

  “Please,” she muttered, pushing past me into the cave, adding, “Light?”

  That was a request of sorts, so I struck my flint against the wall and onto an oil-soaked rag. From that she lit her lantern, and we advanced.

  The cavern was large and smooth-sided. It looked like a natural formation, but I couldn’t be sure. The rock was pale.

  There was only one way through and we took it, feeling the air chill as we pressed on. She shivered and I tossed her a blanket.

  “Thank you,” she said distantly, wrapping it around her shoulders, listening. Somewhere in the tunnels beyond, water was dripping. We followed it. I wondered if we should have been unraveling a ball of string behind us, but it was too late now. I hoped that Renthrette knew where she was going, because I hadn’t been paying much attention.

  The path, such as it was, descended slowly until the walls were cream-colored. Running water had cut little rivulets and channels into the floor, but there were hard angles down here unlike anything at the entrance: these passages were man-made. We passed small chambers cut into the rock, each bare as if it had been brushed clean. After another hundred yards or so, we came upon the first cache of bodies.

  They were adults and they had been down here some time, but were far from completely decayed. The smell was bad, though not as bad as you might expect. Fungus grew on their faces, and in places where their flesh had gone, their rat-nibbled bones showed through. I didn’t look too closely. Renthrette did, but I sensed that it was for my benefit, to show what a strong stomach she had. As if I needed to be shown that.

  The bodies obviously belonged to the search party who had gone looking for the missing children. What bewildered me was how they had died.

&nbs
p; “They seem to be holding their throats or covering their faces,” said Renthrette. “I can’t see any wounds or broken bones. You think this could be part of the chamber you were in when you were with the raiders?”

  We hadn’t spoken for a while and her voice echoed in the confined space so suddenly that I looked around me uncertainly, as if afraid of offending someone. “No,” I whispered. “That was a building. This is quite different.”

  We moved on, stepping through a doorway into a cavern. It was huge, and vaulted like a temple. Renthrette held up her lantern, and as the light splashed across the floor, we froze. On the far side of the cave were four seated figures, armored with bronze and cloaked in scarlet. They were facing us.

  SCENE XLVIII

  The Secret of the Caves

  I gasped and turned to flee, pulling Renthrette after me. I blundered against the wall but managed to stay upright, and began stumbling back the way we had come, blinded by terror and sudden claustrophobia. I had barely gotten out of the corridor when a strong hand seized my wrist and pulled me sharply backwards. The shock felt like it would tear my arm out of its socket. Stopped in my tracks, I twisted round to face my captor.

  A lantern shone in my face and Renthrette whispered, “Get back in there.”

  I stared at her in amazement as she walked back down the stone corridor and into the great chamber.

  “You want to take them on by ourselves?” I hissed. “Good luck.”

  “I think even you could handle this fight,” she answered without looking back.

  She strode away, not even trying to be quiet. I waited where I was, considering her composure and the sudden darkness. (She had, of course, taken the lantern with her.) As I started cautiously after her, she called back, her voice booming from wall to wall, “They’re dead, Will. See for yourself!”

  She was right. The raiders were sitting against the wall, their weapons on the floor in front of them, their hands and faces leathery. Across the cavern lay several more. All dead.