Will Power (44 page)

“Did
you?
” he asked, his eyes still level on me.

“Did I what?”

“Did you take it seriously?”

I thought for a second, then hedged: “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Will,” Orgos replied, coming no nearer, and standing stiffer than ever. “Did you mean it? Any of it? Or was it just another bit of theater, a speech designed to manipulate?”

“Of course it wasn’t,” I said, but my voice had been hesitant.

“Of course it wasn’t,” he echoed, blankly. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

Had
I meant it? The damnedest thing was, I really didn’t know.
A good performer has to believe what he’s saying as he says it or the audience smells deception. It had made sense to me, and I knew it would make sense to them, but how much I thought all this cultural upbringing stuff was a sufficient excuse or explanation for what I had done, something that would rightly stop them from stringing me up and testing their spears on me, I couldn’t say.

But it did work. Kind of.

They didn’t string me up. Instead, they gave me a mission, which sounded like good news until I heard the details of what they wanted me to do.

Stringing me up would have been a lot quicker.

“The bridge guards bear out your story,” said Sorrail grimly, “but you can’t expect anyone here to believe that you have returned to Phasdreille of your own accord. Look at me when I speak to you!”

He took hold of my chin and yanked it up, slapping me hard as he did so. The guards around me hoisted me roughly into an upright, kneeling position, one of them dragging me by a fistful of hair. My cheek was so swollen with bruising that my left eye was a sightless slit. I looked at Sorrail with my right and gasped an attempt to speak. Blood spattered from my mouth in a fine spray, and a droplet fell on Sorrail’s white linen tunic. He scowled at it and then, almost casually, kicked me hard in the ribs. I collapsed onto the stone floor coughing and spitting blood.

I had no idea how long this had been going on: An hour? Two? I had been picked up by the bridge guard and brought directly to Sorrail who, assisted by his more enthusiastic troops, had beaten me periodically ever since. As I got my breath back and cleared my throat, I wheezed out my story again. “I told you already. I ran from the city and into the forest. I walked into a huge goblin army. Some of them saw me and came after me. I ran. I knew the city guards would take me in as a criminal and, with half a dozen bear-riding goblins on my tail, that seemed the best plan. I also thought that by bringing word of the enemy force, I might make up, at least in part, for my past crimes in the city. That’s all there is to tell.”

I sank to the floor again, coughing, exhausted by my narrative and feeling, more than ever, the ache in my jaw where I had been punched.

“These goblins,” Sorrail demanded, and as he came close to me I could smell his scrubbed body, still fragrant with the soap they made by boiling down goblin fat. “What standard did they bear?”

I thought for a moment. “A white half-moon—a crescent—on a red background.”

Sorrail looked at me, and though his gaze was hard and hateful as before, it held a hint of uncertainty.

“He could have seen that in the last attack on the city,” suggested a burly sergeant, scornfully.

“No,” said Sorrail, distantly. “That device is borne only by the mountain tribes to the north. They have not been seen here for many months, and certainly did not participate in any of our recent engagements. If they were here . . .”

His voice trailed off and he stood for a moment in silence. Then he squatted suddenly and spoke directly to my face. “These goblins, the ones riding the brown bears, were they—”

I cut him off, spotting the test. “The bears weren’t brown, they were black. Kind of charcoal but . . .”

“Kind of?”

“They looked black but they had, like, a sheen that was bluish and silvery, like steel.”

The guards looked at me, then at each other, then at Sorrail. His eyes burned into mine and he knew that I was speaking the truth. I could not have come up with that kind of detail unless I had seen them.

“And these were the only beasts they had with them?” he prompted.

“Yes. No. There were wolves, too, like the ones that attacked us when you found us in the mountains.”

He hesitated, caught slightly off-guard by this remark and the memories it evoked, perhaps because I had been unable to conceal the bitter amusement in my voice. Then I had taken him as a savior, someone who might keep the hand of evil from my throat. It was a nasty irony, but I think I was able to swallow that back before it showed in my face. As it was, he merely smiled darkly and said, almost comfortingly, “No one here need fear their wolves. They know me by the foul pelts I have flayed from their loathsome fellows, and have learned to avoid me in the mountains, no matter how many of them there are. They will learn to flee me on the battlefield also. But their goblin masters: You did not attempt to speak to them, or? . . .”

I gave him a wide-eyed stare. “They’re goblins!” I sighed. “I may not be one of you, but I am also not one of them. Do you think a race that lives by murder and destruction, creatures that despise all things including their own filthy kind, would suffer me to live? I saw them, and I ran. They came after me and they did not want to talk.”

And suddenly, it was over. Sorrail rose, turned, and stalked out of the chamber with his officers at his heels, muttering, “Clean him up,” to the guards left with me.

Cleaning me up was easier said than done. My lip was split, I had a long jagged cut over my right eye, and my left was no more than a thin, dark line across a plum-colored distention. I was fairly sure I had a cracked rib or two (they had kicked me repeatedly and struck me across the back and shoulders with thin but heavy clubs apparently designed for the purpose) and my entire body felt like one great bruise. Every touch of the guards’ sponge set me moaning and squirming like a dying eel, slow and agonized but too resigned to the pain to really fight it. Only when I caught the distinctive rose-petal scent and my mind flooded with images of the factories in the forest and what they did to make their soap and cosmetics did I recoil and insist on them leaving me alone. They went sheepishly, like bullies who had tried to make it up to their victim, failed, and now fear he will report all to his mother.

I crawled toward a couch, dragged myself painfully onto it, and lay there, throbbing. The door opened behind me. Turning toward it proved too painful, so I lay there and waited till my visitor came to me. For a split second I considered the possibility that it was an assassin or that Sorrail had changed his mind and sent some lackey to finish me off, but I did not move. Oddly, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I genuinely did not care. I waited, my good eye closed until I sensed a presence near me. Then I looked.

It was Renthrette. She stood there looking down on me, her face expressionless. By this I don’t mean impassive: She was clearly thinking, even feeling, a great deal as she looked at me, but exactly what was going on in her head was impossible to discern. I wondered if my assassin had indeed come—it would be ironic if all those poems about a distant beauty who kills her suitor with disdain turned out to be literally true. The idea made me smile, slightly, and the muscles of my face cried out with pain. “Hello, Renthrette,” I whispered, my eyes closed.

“What are you doing here, Will?” she replied. The last time I saw her, this would have been a rhetorical question which meant “get out of here before I use your intestines to string a lute,” but now her tone was not so much hostile as cautiously inquiring.

I opened my eyes. “I ran into the goblins in the forest and ran back here. . . .”

“I heard that version,” she said, quickly. “What is really going on?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just what I said.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No one is asking you to,” I answered, closing my eyes again.

She paused, turned, and, by the sound of her heels on the stone, I judged that she was leaving. The door closed firmly. Then she came back and knelt beside me.

“I don’t believe it,” she repeated. “This has all the marks of a Hawthorne scam and I will not be taken in by it. Why are you here? What is going on? What do you know?”

I was going to ignore her questions, but the last one sounded odd. I looked at her and saw something similarly odd in her face. There was an anxiety there which had been in her voice when she first came in: an anxiety which had replaced the hatred with which she had been brimming when last we met. I hauled myself onto my elbows painfully and looked at her. “What do I know?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated, shot a hasty look at the door, and lowered her face toward mine as if she was going to kiss me. When she spoke, her voice was almost inaudible, and halting, as if she was finding each word, each thought, as she spoke. “I feel that something is not right here. And you feel it, too—no, you
know
it. Since you left, Garnet and I have been, well, ignored, it seems. Everyone—I mean
everyone
—seems to have forgotten us. Garnet is happy. He rides against the goblins every day. I am a court lady and I do what they do, though not as well as they do it. Sorrail . . . I have barely seen Sorrail since you left, and when we meet at court he treats me exactly as everyone else. But it’s more than that. I think . . . there is something more, something much bigger.

“The people here don’t seem
real
. Different people have told me the same stories,
exactly
the same, word for word, and no one reacts. I have heard two different people in a group recite the same pieces of poetry and no one comments. It isn’t just politeness; it’s as if they
don’t remember
. They are like empty shells, going through the same actions day after day. The only thing they show any real passion for is their war against the goblins. I know the goblins are terrible, but their
passion . . . it doesn’t make sense to me. And when you ask about it, you get the same stories repeated verbatim. Like what they have done to you now: I don’t understand it. For a while, before you left, I thought I did. But that was when I was more like them—when I was
becoming
one of them.”

She paused, glanced over her shoulder again, and then breathed, “I also feel
watched
. Kind of like when we were in Harvest. I do not know by who, but there is someone or something here in the city trying to reach me: a mind stretching out to mine. I feel very sure that I do not want it to find me. I . . . I fear it may have already found Garnet.”

Not just a pretty face, Renthrette. Still, I wasn’t sure, but then she paused and spoke again.

“Back in the mountains,” she said, “the night this all began, you told a story about a girl whose family was attacked by Empire soldiers. Remember?”

I winced at the recollection and nodded fractionally.

“I think you owe me another story,” she said.

I told her everything. It might not have been wise, and I had been advised against it, but I trusted her—or, at least, I trusted my gut feeling that she wasn’t that good an actress. Anyhow, I found it hard to believe that she had been selected to wheedle the truth out of me, given the terms on which we had parted. No, the very fact that there had been no love lost between us made me take her revelations seriously. There was also a part of me which suspected that an agent of the “fair folk” would not be able to articulate the oddities of their city quite so baldly; they certainly didn’t seem too self-aware when cheerfully recounting by heart the history of some notched goblin-crushing weapon. And if they could identify the inconsistencies in their own tales, I doubted they’d announce them to Renthrette, even as part of some larger ruse.