Sellsword- the Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  There were people scuttling around this area in matching uniforms of ragged pale shirts under tattered dark trousers with suspenders and shapeless caps and worn black boots. Both men and women wore more or less the same clothes, so that it took me an extra minute to realize that there were women mixed in with this working population. They all carried pickaxes or shovels or buckets or pushed wheelbarrows full of rocks. Their faces were gaunt and smudged, their eyes lifeless, and their mouths grim.

  It was a mine, presumably a potencium mine, on a greater scale than any I had ever witnessed before.

  What made the scene look even more nightmarish and surreal was the fact that, beyond this pitted black scar on the landscape, the white domes and spires of what looked more like a palace than a castle rose up dreamily like a mirage on the horizon. It was surrounded by a lovingly manicured garden visible from the other side of the mine which featured a maze of green hedges and ponds of the sort that were probably graced by swans. It couldn’t have been more than a mile away from the mine, but it was a whole other world, and the contrast couldn’t have been more stark.

  “I don’t care how big of a boomtown you come from, I don’t care how lucky you struck it, ain’t no one in the West with the coin to build something like that,” I muttered to Theo.

  “Where would you even get the marble?” he agreed. “Or the water to irrigate a garden like that?”

  “Nothing about it looks real,” I said. “The Savajun sorceress did tell me not to trust my eyes.”

  Before we could go up to investigate the palace further, we had to cross through the mine, or go around it. I led Theo around the edge of the area. We tried to stay out of the miners’ way, but came close enough to observe them.

  “Miss,” I called out to a young woman whose red hair caught my attention and reminded me of Lucinda, although this girl’s face was plain. “Good afternoon, Miss. May I have a word with you?”

  She was pushing a wheelbarrow full of rocks in front of her. She paused to turn toward me but instead of looking relieved for a brief reprieve from the heavy labor, she looked irritated.

  “What?” she demanded. “I have work to do.”

  “Work to do for whom?” I asked her. “Who owns this mine?”

  “Lord Gorander is my master,” she said.

  “Your master, not your employer? You do not choose to work for him?”

  “Lord Gorander is my master,” she repeated without any emotional inflection.

  “Is he kind to you?” I tried again. “Do you like working for him? Do you enjoy, er, mining?”

  “He is my--”

  “Master, I know,” I interrupted. I decided to change the subject. “There used to be a town here. Called Fairhollow. Is that where you’re from? Do you remember living in a town called Fairhollow, before this mine existed?”

  “I do not know,” she said placidly. “Perhaps. But it does not matter anymore. Now, I serve Lord Gorander.”

  The situation looked dire indeed. So, all this hadn’t just been a tall tale told by ranchers deep in their cups, or a superstitious myth invented by Savajuns who believed that my horse was a demon, just because he happened to be able to talk.

  The girl wasn’t a very good conversationalist at all, so I moved on to a lad who only looked about fifteen. He had a pickaxe slung over one shoulder and was carrying a bucket full of rocks in the other.

  “Young man,” I said.

  His head swiveled toward me.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied dully. It didn’t sound like a joke. And he didn’t sound concerned by the fact that he apparently couldn’t recall his own name.

  “… What are you doing here?” I asked. “What is your task?”

  “Mining potencium for Lord Gorander,” he replied immediately. So that, at least, he knew.

  “You got hired for this job?” I continued. “When was that?”

  “… I think I have always done this job,” he said with an air of faint confusion. “Pardon me, Mister, but I must get back to work. I have an important job to do.”

  And with that he walked off and lugged both his pickaxe and bucket.

  After that I questioned a balding middle-aged man about who his parents were, and whether he’d been born on the frontier, or traveled out west. He couldn’t recall the names of his mother or father or their occupations, and seemed confused by the very idea that other places existed at all, beyond this particular potencium mine.

  I tried questioning a matronly woman about how many lovers she’d had. Instead of being outraged by the question or giving any sign that she considered it out of the ordinary in the least, she just said she didn’t know. She didn’t seem to recognize the implications of not knowing the answer to that particular question. In fact, I wasn’t convinced that she understood the concept of what a lover was in the first place. But she didn’t seem interested in learning more about it. All she wanted to do was go and shovel rocks.

  “This is horrible,” I said to Theo as we reached the far side of the mine. “They’ve completely lost their minds. How could any sorcerer maintain a spell on this scale? Do you think they’re real people? What if they’re some sort of phantoms or automatons?”

  “I don’t know, but they make me shudder,” Theo replied.

  As we were about to walk away from the mine, a voice called out from behind us,

  “Are you the servant of Lord Gorander?”

  I turned to see a freckled young woman holding a shovel gazing at me earnestly as she awaited the answer to her question.

  I was about to make a sarcastic reply, but then I saw several of the nearby miners pause in their work to cock their heads and watch me expectantly.

  “… Yes,” I said in a monotone that mimicked hers. “Of course I am the servant of Lord Gorander.”

  The girl nodded in satisfaction and returned to her work, with no further interest in me. Her fellow paused automatons restarted too.

  Theo picked up into a bit of a trot as we headed across the field that lay between the mine and the dreamlike white palace.

  Halfway there, we spotted two figures, those of a man and a mule harnessed to a cart. The cart contained shimmering pale purple nuggets of raw unprocessed potencium, and the man was driving the mule toward the palace.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked Theo.

  “Only if you’re also thinking that that’s a cart full of wealth right there, and we should take it, head back across the river, and sell it off in the first town we come to, and call our account with Fairhollow settled,” Theo replied.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “I was afraid of that,” Theo said. “You’d better watch out, you know. You’ve been taking a lot of unnecessary risks lately, I’d almost say you’re starting to act like a hero.”

  “On the contrary, I just happen to be a mercenary of ambition,” I said.

  We rode up alongside the man, who wasn’t paying us any attention.

  “Hey you, servant of Lord Gorander,” I said.

  He turned to face me, and I cracked him across the head with the handle of my tomahawk. He crumpled into the grass without a peep, but the mule kept walking for a few steps and then shuffled to a stop. It lowered its head to munch on a clump of grass. I guess maybe the mule hadn’t been enchanted in the way the humans had and still had a mind of its own.

  Then I dismounted and patted the mule to reassure it as I set about unharnessing it from the cart of potencium.

  “I’d run far away from here, if I were you,” I advised it. “This isn’t the same Fairhollow it used to be. It’s not safe for you here. You can go be a free mule now, or if you prefer to be cared for by humans, there’s a town called Bluegarden not far from here.”

  “He’s too stupid to understand you,” Theo informed me in a rather superior tone. As a talking animal, he didn’t seem to understand or sympathize with the human compulsion to speak to non-talking animals in the leas
t.

  When I had finished unhooking the harness completely, I patted the mule on the rump to try to give it a nonverbal hint to run away as fast as its stumpy legs could carry it, but it just snorted and carried on gnawing at the clump of grass. Well, that was its own choice.

  “Come over here,” I said to Theo.

  “It won’t fit,” he said.

  “The harness is adjustable,” I said. “Do you want to get in the palace, or don’t you?”

  “I wasn’t bred to be a cart horse,” he groaned.

  “No, you were bred to charge into battle,” I said. “And this is the only form of battle that I fight.”

  Theo huffed, but he allowed me to hitch the cart to him in the mule’s place, while the mule nonchalantly continued to munch on grass a few feet away from its driver’s unconscious body. Then, the change successfully made, I dismounted and walked along Theo to lead him as the hapless driver had been doing with the mule.

  As we approached, the palace seemed, if anything, to loom up even bigger and more splendid. New turrets and windows and balconies came into view. I could see details like tiles and carvings. But a quarter mile of gardens still separated us from Gorander’s stronghold.

  There were beds of lilies and groves of orange trees, but the central feature was the hedge maze. It surrounded the entire palace, so that there didn’t seem to be any way to reach it without going through the maze.

  “Do you have any idea how undignified it is for a horse of my stature to drag a cart?” Theo demanded mournfully.

  “You look very handsome doing it, now hush,” I said, as I led him into the maze.

  Chapter 13

  I didn’t know the way through the hedge maze, but I found that if I climbed onto Theo’s back and stood up in the stirrups, I became just barely tall enough to crane my head over the top and see which of any two given paths led to a dead end, and which led to another opening. So in that way, we managed to navigate our way through the maze without incident. No one confronted us, except for a few peacocks that strolled by preening their tail feathers.

  “Look Theo, it’s your cousin,” I said to him the first time a peacock strutted by.

  A crow flapped by not long after that.

  “Hey look Hal, it’s your cousin,” Theo told me.

  All in all, that was a fair enough comparison. I didn’t think that any of the animals in the area seemed to have had their minds enslaved the way the humans had been. I wondered if the sorcerer simply hadn’t found that measure necessary, or if for some reason it wasn’t possible for him to apply the same spell to them. I wondered if that meant that Theo would have some kind of natural immunity. Or if he were human enough that he would be as susceptible as I was.

  Soon, we found ourselves at the front gates of the palace. I didn’t know if that was where potencium deliveries from the mine would typically be made, but I figured I’d probably run into more enslaved humans inside, and I could just tell them I was a fellow “servant of Lord Gorander” and ask them for directions. Strangely enough, no one was posted on guard outside the palace, no one seemed to be watching us from the windows, no one had yelled down at us yet demanding to know our business. Didn’t Gorander have any idea how a palace was supposed to be managed?

  We walked up to the doors. Still no challenge came. I set my shoulder against one of the heavy oak doors and pushed, and more strangely still, it simply swung open.

  Inside, the entrance hall was a dizzying checkerboard of black-and-white tiles. Both sides were lined with potted trees. The trees were topiaries, and they were carved into busts, with vague, leafy green features. I couldn’t tell whom any of them were intended to represent, if anyone. Above, there were chandeliers made of broad hoops of gold with hundreds of flickering candles set in holders.

  The place was dead silent. Despite the lit candles and the freshly trimmed topiaries, which indicated some kind of intelligence present, there was no one in view besides Theo and myself. The wheels of the cart, when we dragged it in with us, were deafening upon the tiles.

  I’d only brought it with us because I believed that it would be easier for Theo and I to gain access to the palace if we disguised ourselves as servants with a delivery task to perform, but under the circumstances, the cart of potencium actually seemed likely to draw more attention than it deflected. So I told Theo to stop and unhitched it from him and left the mule’s harness tucked under the rocks of potencium. Then, with all the stealth that a thirteen-hundred-pound Friesian could muster, we continued on our way.

  At the end of that topiary-lined, checkerboard hallway, we found ourselves with the option of a red velvet-lined hallway to the left, or an empty feasting hall with two enormous trestle tables that must have been fifty feet long and a dais with another table to the right. We turned down the red velvet-lined hallway. My reasoning was that it would muffle the clopping of Theo’s hooves.

  It also occurred to me, as we walked down the hallway which had walls of dark wood, that the dark red carpet beneath our feet was the exact right color to mask spilled blood. I didn’t know whether that was intentional or not, but the whole palace felt distinctly eerie. I hoped that strolling in like this, sword at belt and tomahawk in saddlebag, looking for what had to be the most powerful sorcerer in the West, if not in the world, wouldn’t turn out to be the dumbest thing I’d ever done.

  Maybe I should have stuck to the rule that Theo and I had prospered by all these years. The rule that payment had to be upfront, or there was no deal.

  On the other hand, a palace like this was sure to contain treasures beyond my wildest dreams, treasures worth more coin than I could ever spend in a lifetime even if I tried. Surely that was worth the risk?

  And although I never would have admitted it, the sunken eyes of those soulless miners haunted me. The ranchers in Bluegarden had already alluded to the plight of the people of Fairhollow, but having seen it for myself convinced me that for them to continue on in that way, as nothing more than hollow shells of themselves animated only by the directives of the sorcerer, was a fate worse than death.

  Theo and I reached the end of that hallway, and at the end there was a door. I opened it, and then I gasped aloud.

  As if in answer to my wishes, the room was crowded with treasures of the most obvious variety. It glittered with gold and gems. There were coins, jewelry, scepters, girdles, and statues; tables and chairs, a four-poster bed; goblets and vases; all kinds of things. More wealth than I could ever spend in a lifetime, all crowded into that one room, just piled carelessly on the floor as if the owner had forgotten all about it.

  I walked through touching things and wondered if this was a sign that I should just grab all I could carry and skedaddle before it was too late, but just like the idea of tackling a job before I’d received payment upfront made me uneasy, the idea of taking payment for a job that hadn’t been done also didn’t sit right with me. The treasures belonged to a megalomaniacal tyrant of a sorcerer who deserved every bad thing coming to him, yes. But stealing from an evil victim didn’t make you any less a thief, did it?

  I ran my hand along an urn set with gems that was big enough for a man to fit inside. Then I went to get a closer look at a round golden shield that clearly must have been forged for ornamental purposes. Theo trotted after me and gingerly picked his way through the countless trinkets that littered the floor. He leaned over my shoulder and snuffled the shield curiously.

  Then, I heard the creak of the room’s other door across from the one we had entered through.

  I did the first thing that came to mind, and enlarged the shield to about eight feet in diameter, so that it concealed not only me but also Theo from view. As long as you walked straight from one door to the other, that is. If you meandered at all, you were bound to notice a muscled black horse rump sticking out where you surely weren’t expecting one.

  Theo and I both froze in place, with me straining to prop up the shield in place and him probably trying to think small thoughts, as the door o
pened.

  The figure that entered was robed in dark red, with a cowl so that I couldn’t see its face at first. It glided toward our hiding place. I didn’t like the way it moved, with barely a whisper, so fluidly that it almost seemed to float. Then when it came within a few yards of us I was able to see its face beneath the shadow of the cowl and almost dropped the shield.

  Its skin was white and grub-like, with shreds peeling from it, like something dead that had been floating underwater. Its eyes were pure black without any pupils or irises. And its mouth gaped hugely, an array of spindly, rotting, needle-like teeth that stretched from ear to ear.

  I wondered if this horrible creature was Gorander himself. I wondered if it could even be killed by conventional methods. If I leapt out from my hiding place and plunged my sword through its breast, would it bleed and die? Or would my blade find nothing in the robes but wind?

  The hideous mummified grub of a creature paused just steps away from the shield as if sensing my presence and Theo’s. A forked tongue flickered out as if tasting the air.

  I thought it was about to find us. I didn’t particularly fear death, but I did fear whatever that creature would do to us. My hand tightened about the hilt of my sword.

  But then, the red-robed nightmare glided onward, reached the opposite door, opened it, and slipped from the room.

  I restored the shield to its usual size and left it propped against the wall. Then I laid my hand on Theo’s back and felt that it was soaked with clammy sweat.

  Once again it was only the two of us in a room full of dazzling treasures, but after that visitor, the room no longer looked the same. It didn’t look like a joyous gift anymore. It looked like a menacing trap.

  And there was something else that bothered me, too.

  “This isn’t gold,” I said to Theo.

  “What isn’t gold?” he asked, a bit hoarsely.

  “The shield for starters,” I said, “but probably none of it.”

  To test that theory, I grabbed the nearest object, which happened to be a crown lying by my feet. I expanded it until it was big enough to fit over my shoulders. Then I shrank it down to the size of a ring. Then I set it back down and allowed it to resume its true dimensions.