Act of Will

SCENE XIV The Hide

They were up at cockcrow. I lay in bed, a single sheet pulled up to my neck, and watched resentfully as Orgos shaved himself with the straight-bladed dagger he wore inside his tunic.

“Come on, Will,” he breezed. “There’s a lot to do and we are counting on you to prove yourself to Lisha.”

“Why didn’t you bloody tell me she was a woman?” I snarled at him.

“It’s a point of security,” Orgos said to the window as he parted the curtains and let the hazy morning sun fall on his face. His black skin was wet and he looked alert and energetic, curse him.

“So long as people presume the party leader is a man, she’s harder to trace. I didn’t want to deceive you unnecessarily, Will,” he said, turning back to me and smiling, “but Lisha is invaluable to our operations.”

“Why? What is so bloody special about her? She looks half my age and has a tenth of your strength. What use is she to you lot? I don’t see why you even have her on board, let alone take orders from her and-”

“Easy, Will,” he replied, sitting himself down on my bed so that I had to squirm to avoid getting my legs broken. “Just take it from me. She is the equal of Garnet or Renthrette in combat and can beat all of us with a spear or a rapier. Yes, even me. Her other gifts you’ll see if you are around long enough.”

I shrugged, something which is not easy to do horizontally with a heavy sword master sitting on you.

“She just wasn’t what I expected,” I muttered.

“What did you expect, Will? Some barbarian chief with a poleax and war paint?”

“No! Yes. I don’t know what I expected,” I protested, “just not. ”

“A woman?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point.”

“You sure?”

“Of course.” I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow. “I like women.”

“Then there’ll be no problem,” he said, giving me a significant look.

I breakfasted alone on eight rashers of bacon and fried bread. I couldn’t help thinking that this “operations base” wasn’t really much of a place. Sure, it was in a nice area, but it was just a house, and a largely empty one at that. So why the big deal? Why keep the place at all when it was surely safer for a group of outlaws like them to stay on the move?

Garnet and Renthrette were out, probably eyeing the markets for bargains, methodically moving from stall to stall in search of a better deal, tabulating every mind-numbing detail.

“Something to show you,” said Orgos, emerging from the kitchen.

He led me into a large room with a fireplace at one end, reached up, and snapped back a lamp bracket fitted to the side of the chimney breast. The entire chimney, including the dusty hearth, swung easily aside, revealing a heavy-looking door of dark wood on huge brass hinges.

“Operations base,” he said simply. “We call it the Hide. Don’t touch anything down here until I say you can. There are half a dozen trap devices designed by Arthen of Snowcrag. You’ve probably heard of him. He kept the Empire out of the mountain halls for six months virtually single-handedly. Anyway, Lisha had him defend this place for us when we brought him east.”

“You got Arthen out of Snowcrag before it fell?” I asked, staring. Arthen was the stuff of legend.

“Yes, though only Mithos and I were with Lisha then. There were others, of course, but they are no longer with us.”

He continued, barely missing a beat.

“In any case, there are ballistae down here that could skewer three armored men together so, like I said, touch nothing.”

“Sounds good to me.”

With a large steel key he opened the door, which, like the fireplace, slid easily aside despite its obvious weight. Inside I caught the acrid smell of oil lamps and found myself on a wooden landing atop a flight of stone steps spiraling into the earth. There was a lever by the doorframe. Orgos pulled it and, with a clanking of gears, the fireplace closed us in.

I moved to descend the stairs but Orgos caught my arm and held me back. Before he took another step he unhooked a lantern from the wall, turned up its flame, and groped under the wooden banister rail with his left hand. Again something clicked, and he smiled at me in the lamplight.

“Some of the stairs have special features,” he said cheerfully. I gave him a nervous smile and didn’t ask for details.

At the foot of the stairs was another armored door that was already open. Orgos showed me in.

“Welcome to the Hide,” said Lisha, who was sitting at a table in what appeared to be a library. Mithos was with her, consulting a stack of charts. He looked up and watched me as Lisha continued, “Orgos puts a good deal of trust in you, Will, considering how long he’s known you. I hope his faith is justified. You can never speak of this place to anyone. Many lives depend on us, and we cannot afford to be merciful to those who would expose us. Do I make myself clear?”

I nodded, and tried to count the number of death threats I had had since Rufus turned me in. Still, there was something slightly comic about all these grave and menacing words coming from the party’s girlish “leader.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said, playing along, trying to match the gravity and seriousness of her tone. Orgos and Mithos looked at me with small smiles of satisfaction. The impulse to pat me on the head or feed me an apple must have been almost overwhelming.

Lisha’s eyes met mine and I had the odd sensation of being somehow transparent, as if she could read my thoughts and my petty deceptions. I didn’t like the feeling.

“We will leave here next Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on when we can get a ship,” she said, rising to her feet and stepping lightly towards me, “so you have six days which you may use as you think best. If you need money for arms or other equipment, speak to Mithos. I suggest you do some riding, but don’t bother buying yourself a horse. We’ll have to get mounts in Shale. I’ve taken horses by ship before and it can take days for them to recover from the voyage.”

Whatever you say, doll. I glanced around the racks of books. There were texts from all over the world, written in a dozen different languages, though most were in my native Thrusian and its ancient forebear, Threshalt. The collection was not so much varied as wildly diverse. Cookbooks sat next to manuals on siege techniques and indexes of poisons. I lifted down something on “dialectal oddities” and gazed at it with mild revulsion.

“What would possess anyone to write anything this tedious?” I mused.

Orgos materialized at my elbow and looked at the book.

“Can Will borrow this?” he said.

“Certainly,” she said.

Orgos beamed and heaved it into my arms saying, “Something to keep you busy, Will. See what it has to say about Shale.”

“Thanks a lot, Orgos,” I muttered.

Mithos turned to Lisha and said, “I forgot to mention that Will has an ear for accents. Since Thrusian is the basic language of the Shale region, that may prove a useful skill.”

So I did have a role. A genuine useful function for humble Will Hawthorne? Will the linguist. Bill the talker. Will Hawthorne, leading authority on the world’s most boring two-foot-thick book. This was the literary equivalent of metal polishing. Still, it sounded a damned sight safer than swinging swords about, so I figured I’d go with it. I clasped the book to my chest, as if I couldn’t wait to curl up with it.

Lisha’s black eyes glittered at me and I felt my irritation and resentment shining through like torchlight.

“We’ll find something more exciting for you later,” she said.

“What?” I murmured, unconvincingly. “No, this is fine. Great. Right up my street, is this. Dialect books. Brilliant.”

She just nodded and I felt stupid again.

“Perhaps you can research those old tales of the lands we are visiting,” she said.

“All that magic and sorcery bollocks?” I said. “Sure. If you like.”

Keep me safe and fed and I’ll read whatever rubbish you like, I thought.

The next room was a gym, hewn out of the stone and running below the foundations of the houses above. As Orgos was to demonstrate over the next hour, you could tone and strengthen every major muscle in the body with the stuff they had in there, a pretty depressing prospect for a man like me, as was the announcement that I was to “eat more healthily” from here on. No more bacon, in other words. Probably leaves, and the odd handful of seeds.

“After lunch,” said Orgos, apparently unironically, “we’ll see if we can get you up on a horse for a while. Bring your crossbow and you can practice that too. If we have time, we could go for a quick swim in the harbor and then have one more workout before bed.”

Great. All my life I had avoided weapons, exercise, a sensible diet, horses, and water. Now they were all I had.

My book on dialects was dry as a Hrof well and turgid as. well, something very, very turgid that I can’t think of at the moment. One particularly riveting chapter was “Major Inflectional Features and Word Usage Common to Shale and Its Environs.” A real corker.

It was tough to believe, but I started to prefer the prospect of perching on the back of a horse to reading. At least up in the saddle I had the challenge of controlling my bowels as the beast started to move, and as the days went by and I continued to avoid some horrible, limb-mangling accident, it became, if not actually enjoyable, then at least less nauseating. A week wasn’t going to turn me into a rider (nor would it make me a weapon master) but I began to feel fractionally less terrified up there and that, Orgos assured me, was half the battle.

The swimming was a very different story. Only once in the whole week did I get out of my depth, and then I was so convinced that I was going to drown that I almost did. By the fourth day I had made no progress whatsoever and it seemed that my fear of water was actually increasing. I told Orgos that my body didn’t float. I wasn’t sure what the problem was but I just wasn’t a buoyant kind of person.

“Right,” he said unhelpfully, and pushed me off the dock. I yelled and gargled quite a bit, but when he showed no sign of coming in after me, I floated. Sort of. By the end of the week I still couldn’t swim a stroke but I didn’t automatically equate any body of water larger than a bath with certain death.

As for the Empire, things had been quiet. I was even getting used to seeing their casual patrols, which frequented the markets and dockyards. Down by the water there were always crowds of people hawking and trading their wares or their favors, and you could easily lose yourself in the crowds if panic set in. A pair of soldiers leaned on a fishing boat one day and laughed as I flailed about in the water. In Cresdon I might be a notorious rebel; in Stavis I was just some kid who couldn’t swim.

On Monday evening we had a meeting which began with Lisha checking off a list to see if they had missed anything. They hadn’t. Naturally. The boxes and crates and bags had been packed, transported to the harbor, and loaded aboard a light trading vessel with a cargo of mahogany. It was bound for shores east of Greycoast but would, for a fee already settled, deposit us in a serviceable port in southern Shale. We were to leave at seven the next morning, and should arrive by the end of the week, weather permitting.

They smiled and clinked their rare celebratory beer mugs with anticipation. They were excited. I was hungry and aching and dreading the journey, but when they grinned and drank, I joined them, as if I was one of them.