Will Power (41 page)

“But that would mean . . .”

“That Sorrail’s ancestors are the newcomers,” I said. “They took the city from the goblins and the goblins want it back. No wonder the goblins don’t know their way around the Falcon’s Nest. They may have carved it out of the rock generations ago, but they haven’t used it in just as long. The so-called fair folk know about its secret entrances because
they
moved into it. It was
their
fortress, their base when they first invaded. That’s what they do. They commandeer and appropriate, and when it’s theirs, they ornament. But they don’t build, not really. They don’t construct. They don’t have the skills. They capture or they con their way in and then they make everything theirs. You see? It
makes sense. That’s why the statues have been defaced. That’s why the library has been closed down while the books are edited for any reference to the goblin past.”

“But why?” demanded Lisha. “Why spend so much time and effort trying to convince the people of something they must know isn’t true?”

“They might not know,” I said. “I think the library, and that one room and whoever lives in it, is somehow affecting or altering the people’s memories of the past.”

“But you said these stories started cropping up long before you got near the city,” said Lisha. “Can his power have that kind of range?”

“What if the hammers and swords somehow do it, or focus his sorcery?” I said, thinking aloud. “They are all set with diamonds. We’ve seen stones that had power before. Maybe they serve as a kind of matrix for storing those bogus personal histories. But how he’s doing it is less important than what it all means. There were no great goblin invasions and no ‘fair folk’ builders, but the war and the city have to be explained, so history is being rewritten, even in the minds of those who live there. It’s the ultimate way to prop up their own sense of righteousness: Rather than feeling like the aggressor, the people of Phasdreille get to think of themselves as the victims, the righteous ones on the receiving end of evil and malice. I can’t think of a better way to make people fight than in defense of something they believe to be their ancestral home. Maybe this is what they expected me to realize earlier, though who the ‘they’ is, I couldn’t say. The king? Sorrail? Aliana? The hooded figure in the library? Him, at least.”

There was a long silence between us.

“And this would be enough to want you dead, I think,” said Lisha.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I see now. I seem to have become dangerous. Though what I could do with this knowledge, I really don’t know. Still, we can’t go back there now. I suspect that being caught by Sorrail and his fair-haired and perfectly attired men-at-arms would not be much better than being taken by goblins in these swamps.”

And before Lisha had time to agree, perfectly on cue, as if I had set the whole speech up just for dramatic effect, the swamp was swarming with them: goblins, gray and olive and yellowish and black, all snarling, all staring at us, all approaching cautiously with weapons at the ready.

Lisha leaped to her feet and swung her metal-shod staff up before
her. I drew my sword hurriedly and stood at her back. Together we rotated slowly in some absurd dance as goblins crept closer, sputtering their foul words at each other. I don’t think that holding a sword had ever felt so pointless. There were dozens of them emerging, as if from the vile pools themselves, and through a thicket of tangled vines a goblin the color of sandstone riding a great bear led a dozen wolves, heads low and menacing, toward us.

The goblins came on, creeping watchfully, as if making sure we had no escort, until they formed a rough circle around us and stood no more than twenty feet away. There was a good deal of shouting from outside the circle and some rapid movement, but I was watching those goblins that were closest to me, those near enough for me to see their ragged armor and gnarled hands; their twisted, skinny frames; their eyes. They were glancing from us back to each other, and they were talking. Something strange was happening, and my sense that they were about to rush us en masse and tear us to pieces faded. The confusion which replaced it was shattered when the circle broke and a great black goblin came bounding toward us, brandishing a long and lethal-looking sword.

“Lisha!” I cried and stepped around to block the brute’s assault. It came toward me, taking huge strides and shouting. Then my sword arm was seized and held, my weapon twisted from my grasp. I wrenched my head around and saw Lisha taking my weapon and tossing it on the floor as a scrawny goblin came from behind me and pulled my arms behind my back.

“You
are
one of them!” I screamed at her. “You are. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all!”

Lisha, or whatever it was that seemed to have taken her shape, stepped up to me so that her face was only inches from mine. She caught my face in her hands. I spat at her. “I’ll kill you, you foul bitch. What have you done with Lisha?”

“Will,” she said, and her voice was soft. “Will, look.”

She pointed me toward the huge black goblin who had almost reached us before stopping dead in his tracks. I looked.

It was Orgos. His armor was grimy and his tunic torn, but it was Orgos. I don’t know how I could have failed to recognize him.

“It’s all right, Will,” said Lisha. “You see? It’s all right.”

She broke from me and wiped her face.

My eyes fell on Orgos. He had dropped his sword, the one with
the yellow stone in the pommel. I think he had been running to embrace us, but now his eyes were full of doubt.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought . . . I saw the other goblins and I thought . . . Sorry.”

The goblin who had pinned my arms released me and Orgos stepped up to me.

“Hello, Will,” he said. And it was him: No goblin. No undead apparition. It was Orgos, my friend. Slowly, a smile as broad as only he could manage spread across his face.

“I missed you,” I said as he flung his great arms about me. Over his shoulder I saw Lisha embrace another large man: Mithos, still bandaged, but walking and well.

“And now you have to tell us how you come to be here,” Orgos said, still grinning, “and we’ll introduce you to our new friends.”

“Friends?” I spluttered.

“Friends,” said Mithos firmly.

The impact of the word put the finishing touch on all my former thoughts about Phasdreille, the rewritten history of the “fair folk,” and all the other suspicions which had been mounting in my head. I watched Orgos casually say something to one of the “goblins” in their own tongue and watched the listener smile with understanding. The goblin features shifted as easily as any human face and I found myself looking not at the spawn of hell, but at a person. The unavoidable conclusion came charging through with the rest of the wild horses that were my thoughts, and I grew instantly cold and struck with horror.

“My God,” I breathed aloud. “What have I done? Lisha . . .”

She turned to me and her eyes were full of a sad understanding. She wanted to make me feel better and knew it was futile.

As the full weight of my realization hit me, I felt my eyes well with tears, and, staring at her, I managed to say it.

“Lisha, I’ve been fighting on the wrong side.”

I was still cold, and evening was coming on. One of the goblins, a thin, gray creature with deep-set eyes and high, angular cheekbones, was adjusting a blanket strapped to a small backpack, using his long, bony fingers. The blanket was worn in places, but it looked clean and dry, unlike mine. A matter of hours ago I might have killed him for it, or tried to, but now I didn’t know what to do. I shifted uneasily, hardly daring to meet the creature’s eyes and fearful of what would follow if I did. I coughed. When his gaze fell blankly on me, I looked jealously at the blanket.

“You want this?” he said in perfect Thrusian. “Here. Dry yourself off. The swamp may freeze tonight.”

I gaped at him. It was as if I had sat down to milk a cow and the beast had turned to me at the first squeeze of its udders and said, “Gentler, if you don’t mind.”

There’s something about hearing words come out of someone’s mouth that changes the way you look at them. I guess it’s the casual ease with which the lips and tongue shape sounds so intimate and meaningful to you, putting the two of you on the same level, establishing an equilibrium of sorts. A talking cow, then, would not merely be a curiosity; it would violate your understanding of the universe and your place in it. It would force you, I suspect, to rethink every action you had ever performed. It would change more than your attitude to steak, I’ll tell you that.

This was where I found myself now. The goblin unfastened the buckled straps and tossed me the rolled blanket without another word. I stood there doing my world-famous impersonation of a fence post, waking only when the parcel hit me in the chest and fell into my hastily raised arms. It—or perhaps I should say
he
—grinned broadly and walked away. I watched him go.

His grin had been genuine and yet somehow alarming. It reminded
me that he was a goblin, for his jaw was heavy and his teeth were over-large, but it also seemed so ordinary, so human. Before I could take my eyes off him, Lisha appeared silently beside me.

“Will?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, my eyes still on the back of the receding goblin. “I . . . I’m really not sure.”

“We should talk,” she said.

“Yes, we should,” I echoed distantly.

“Will! Look at me!”

I turned slowly and met her eyes. They pooled at me in the twilight.

“We made a mistake,” she said. “That’s all. We were given false information and, without any reason to doubt it, we believed it.”

We
. The extent of her mistake was getting mistaken for one of them. I, however, had . . .

Don’t think about it.

I nodded and managed a smile, but it was a thin ruse. She knew as much, knew also that, for once, I didn’t feel like talking after all, and she respected that. She touched my cheek and walked over to where Mithos and Orgos were studying a map.

I sat on a log, dazed with shock. How could I have been so stupid? I had trusted my eyes and ears and, as a result, fallen for the oldest theatrical ploy there is. I was taken in by the desire to believe something preposterously convenient was real. I had forgotten to read between the lines. I had known something was wrong but I just went on standing there like the idiot in the pit who thinks everything on the stage is real because a few paid con men tell him it is. It had all been a show, just storytelling and spectacle, and I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I had risked my life for the “fair folk” and—and here was the scorpion in my underpants—I had killed for them.

Now morals aren’t my strong suit, and I still had a hard time thinking of the goblins as
people
exactly, but my glorious ride with the cavalry, my brave defense of the city, and my valiant raid on the Falcon’s Nest fortress were beginning to look a little tarnished, as if my heirloom silver tankard had turned out to be made of oven-baked cow dung. The “fair folk” had said that all the light-against-dark, good-against-evil rubbish that I’d been laughing at my entire life was actually true, and I had believed them. They had told me that every old tale, every fairy story about ogres and goblins, every half-baked
morality play aimed at children and the mentally deficient was right, and the world as I had always known it was wrong. Beauty (of the right kind) really
is
virtue, they had said, and ugliness (someone else’s)
is
evil. And I had believed them. Cynical Bill, Will the realist, had polished up his sword and gone out goblin slaying, glad to be doing his bit for goodness and light and fluffy bunny rabbits. I should have known Garnet couldn’t be right.

I
had
known, too. Kind of. A bunch of things had not seemed right. I should have just listened to my hunches and not to those dandified idiots in Phasdreille. Well, from here on it would all be Will Straight-from-the-Gut Hawthorne.

“Feeling better?” said Orgos.

“Yes,” I lied. “The blanket helps. How long did it take you to realize what was going on?”

“Not long,” said Orgos. “But that was because they told us and we believed them. Maybe we would have believed Sorrail if our positions had been reversed.”

“You don’t really think that,” I said.

Orgos shrugged. “Well, we also had the evidence of how they treated us,” he went on. “They were suspicious because we had been caught in the company of one of their greatest enemies, but we had our looks on our sides, which, frankly, helped.”

“They believed you because you’re black?” I asked, eyebrow raised.

“It made it a lot less likely that we were working with the so-called fair folk, said Orgos.

“But they kept you locked up,” I said, not sure who I was trying to convince or what I was trying to justify.

“Like I said, they were suspicious of us, and most of that fort hadn’t been lived in for decades. Their rooms weren’t much better than ours.”

I frowned and said nothing.