Will Power (18 page)

That was the last haven of civilization (if you could call it that) that we saw for ten days. Thereafter it was just us, the river, and the forest, and a right hoot that was.

We slept alternately during the deepest hours of the night, taking a couple of hours each to watch by the fire. It was cold, but there was no wind, and we had brought extra blankets from the inn. Strange birds called from the river at night, great booming rolls that didn’t sound like birds at all; Renthrette said they were bitterns and that I should go back to sleep and stop being so pathetically infantile. There were other noises that she said were birds, too, lunatic cries that came out of the darkness when you least expected it, chuckling and whooping insanely to themselves, then stopping abruptly. The sooner we got to this White City place, the better I’d feel.

Then the forest crossed the river. I don’t mean that the trees of Sarak-Nul uprooted themselves and splashed their way across, though I was beginning to think anything was possible in this land of goblins and their conversational pets. I mean that the forest spread onto our side as we had been told it would. This was Eventor, the wood which was supposedly still largely untainted by the black hand from the western bank. Still, it was a forest and, given recent associations, I was more than happy to give it a wide berth, and said so.

“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.

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.