Act of Will

SCENE XXIV



Questions

I was more than a little unnerved by our first real encounter with the crimson raiders, but not in the ways you might expect. “Why did they let us go?” I demanded. We were back in our camp and trying, with no success whatsoever, to get to sleep.

“I don’t know,” said Mithos quietly.

“There were about fifteen of them at least,” I said. “Why didn’t they come after us? Why didn’t they kill me when they had the chance?”

“Good question,” muttered Renthrette. “Now go to sleep.”

“What?” I retorted. “Doesn’t this interest you? We interrupt these butchers in the middle of whatever the hell it is they do, they let us stroll away, and you don’t wonder why?”

“You want to know what I wonder?” she said, leaning towards me. “I wonder why you went wandering off and then started shouting names when you were about to get what you deserved.”

“I couldn’t see where I was for the smoke,” I protested, “and calling Mithos’s name seemed to help, wouldn’t you say?”

“It may have saved you,” she said with another half-grin, as if that was a minor point.

“It saved all of us,” I said.

She frowned thoughtfully, and looked to Lisha, who nodded.

“Will is right,” she said. “For whatever reason, the name of Mithos saved us. I saw them freeze as soon as they heard it. They were turning their horses around before Will could even start to run.”

“Perhaps they were afraid,” I suggested, shrugging off my irritation with Renthrette.

“Of what?” asked Mithos, rising up from his place by the fire and staring out towards the orange smudge in the sky above the village. “Of a word? Of my name? No. I may have acquired a bit of a reputation in Cresdon, but nothing to make a dozen or more heavily armed soldiers turn tail and run before they have even glimpsed me. And here, no one knows of us.”

“Then why? . . . ”

“I don’t know, Will,” Mithos answered hastily, adding with a touch of irritation, “Now go to sleep. We have another day’s ride ahead of us.”

Since I was avoiding Orgos (having nearly got us all killed earlier made me unwilling to deal with my combat instructor), I buried my face in a pillow of rolled-up tunics and tried to sleep. I knew that I would dream and I knew that there would be red-cloaked soldiers with featureless helms riding through the fire of those dreams. There would also be laughter and accusing fingers pointed at me. I’d been having dreams like that ever since I met these idiots.



The worst thing about sleeping outside is that you always wake at dawn when the sun hits your face. Orgos had been on the last watch and was now laying out a breakfast of the mediocre bits and pieces brought from Adsine augmented by wild blackberries and stream water which he had boiled over a tiny fire. After we had eaten we went to the still-smoldering village. We found a few charred arrows with traces of red flight feathers and a confused scattering of hoof-prints. Mithos crawled about for a while and then said, mainly to Orgos, “They came from the north end of the village, close to the forest line. I’d say there were about twenty of them but it’s hard to tell. They rode up and down the street and then some of them dismounted and entered the buildings.”

That, I didn’t want to think about. I was dealing with things rather better than I had expected, but I suppose that was because last night’s hellish encounter had taken place in a village full of red light, not this blackened ruin of frames and burnt corpses. Oh yes, there were plenty of those. I figured the count had another twenty-five to add to his death toll, and there wasn’t a hint that a single raider had fallen.

We tracked the hooves until they came to the edge of the wood, where the ground was too hard and cushioned with pine needles for there to be any further trail. The sun had shone steadily by all accounts for a week now and there had been no sign of rain for longer, so it was only the sand that the horses had kicked up that had enabled us to follow them this far. The horsemen had come and done what they obviously did so well, and then left without a trace.

Still, it was odd. Hard ground or no hard ground, there were tracks throughout the village, and there were occasional signs of where the raiders had come in and gone out, but a hundred yards or so beyond the village? Nothing. No sign that anyone had been there for weeks. It was as if they had just disappeared.

You’d think that this would have been a nicely ominous portent, an opportunity for the party to abandon the whole mission and slink quietly back to Stavis, but that didn’t seem to occur to anyone.