Act of Will

SCENE XXXI



More Consequences

I came to my senses (if you can call them that) as I was pitched headlong into mud, total darkness, and appalling stench. I was lying facedown in the slime of a dungeon floor, my legs chained together. The dampness and cold suggested that I was underground, in the palace basement, perhaps: the lowest point of the citadel in more ways than one. I rolled over and tried to spit the filth from my mouth. I tried to sit up, but the mud squirmed beneath me and I fell back into it. The odor of excrement and decay was overpowering. A thin line of pale light showed under the door. Sliding up to it, hands sunk to the wrists in the ooze, I began to kick and shout.

My face was right up against the door when the jailer on the other side kicked it and sent me sprawling on my back.

“Shut up,” he shouted without looking in, “or I’ll come in and break your legs. Both. Several times.” Someone laughed, impressed with this display of wit.

Miserably I floundered across to the far wall—the cell was only about ten feet square—and sat against it trying to believe that they couldn’t keep me here long. Such thoughts led rather inevitably to the question of what would happen to me when they brought me out.

I went over the incident with the duke and replayed the scene in my mind a dozen times with a few more incisive remarks assigned to yours truly. I soon had a tidy little plot in which straight-from-the-shoulder Will scared the cruel despot into gross abuse of his power, but even as I was reflecting on how it would bring the house down, I knew it was false. Here was no honor, only misery and shame. But why should a lack of honor bother me, of all people? What was really bothering me was how stupidly pointless my outburst had been. It could never have gotten me anywhere other than here, something I had known before I started talking, but I started anyway. I enjoyed making speeches, but I had a sneaking suspicion that there had been something righteous in my motivation, something distressingly principled. Or, at the very least, something like guilt for the pretty shameful circumstances that had the people of Ironwall thinking of me as a hero. It was an alarming notion.

The time passed slowly. I called out for water, suspecting that beer wasn’t on the menu, but only got more abuse and distant laughter from the less hopeful inmates of other cells. I had to go to the bathroom and did so in a corner, then sat as far away from it as possible with my back against the scummy wall. Thick, foul-smelling liquid coursed down the mossy rock. It soaked my back and made me shudder with cold and a sense of contamination.

In another part of the subterranean jail someone was being whipped. Long, slow lashes rang out and cracked into agonized gasps. I thought I saw a rat slide in under the door but I never saw it leave. I wanted to block off the crack with my soiled shirt to keep them out, but if they were already in with me, then that would make the problem worse. I listened and heard their thin voices. One time I put my hand down on warm, matted fur and pulled myself away screaming as the creature’s thin, fibrous tail slipped through my fingers. I got to my feet and stood quite still. Hours passed.

When the door was abruptly kicked open, I leapt through it and sprawled into the relative light of a circular stone chamber. The jailer kicked me once with a heavy leather boot and then put his weight on the small of my back, making me gasp and splutter through the muddy straw in my face. Seizing me by the hair, he wrenched my head up into the light of a torch, and I caught its pitchy scent with something like relief.

“This one?” he said brusquely. I heard a murmur of assent from close by but could see nothing but the blinding flare of the torch. “Get out,” said the jailer. He kicked me squarely in the rear and added, “And get a wash.” The guard laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard for days.

The irons were stripped roughly from my legs, and a sack was tied over my head. I was dragged up a flight of steps by two men. A third followed, a spear point pressed against my spine. We passed through long, echoing corridors of cold stone and then, as I was steeling myself for whatever verbal reprimand I was about to get, we stepped out into the open air. I was flung hard onto a wooden platform of some kind and then, with sudden and terrified panic, I heard it: the familiar bustle of an expectant crowd. As the bag was dragged from my head I saw a sea of upturned faces and the chill shadow of a gallows.

You have got to be kidding, I thought.

They weren’t.

There was Duke Raymon, large and impassive, flanked by his counterparts from Shale and Verneytha, watching me from a throne ten yards away. He met my gaze and then bade the shirtless, hooded executioner begin. Two guards dragged me forward and forced my head through the noose as I struggled and kicked, tying my hands behind me as they did so. Arlest, the only one I could see showing any kind of concern, was muttering earnestly to Raymon, who ignored him, then said something to Treylen, who just smiled thinly and shrugged. When the count of Shale continued to talk, the duke turned and shook his head once, glaring and final. Whatever Arlest had been trying to do to stop this brutal farce, the duke was having none of it.

Arlest looked across the crowd and shook his head fractionally. I followed his gaze and saw Mithos watching. He looked down, then straightened up and began pressing his way through the people, making for where the duke was sitting. I wanted to see what happened, but there was a man in a black hood who had other plans.

The executioner took the slack out of the rope and stood before me, a viciously curved and jagged knife in his hands. I should have known that a simple hanging was too much to hope for. The brazier for my intestines was brought forward and, as the executioner began to unfasten my filthy shirt, a great hush descended on the crowd. Whatever Mithos was doing, it didn’t seem to be slowing things down.

I stood on my toes as they began to hoist me up, but in a second I felt all my weight on the rope which cut into my throat. My feet flailed for some purchase on the ground, but it was too late. I hung there for a long, sickening moment, and then dropped, gasping and retching on the floor. The executioner gave me a few seconds, and then hitched me up again. I looked up as the rope started to tighten and saw Duke Raymon.

He had left his throne and now stood next to me, center stage, as it were, switching his eyes from me to the crowd and back. Mithos—unarmed—was hovering behind him. Then he held up his hand and the world fell silent.

“Perhaps you would like to say something, Mr. Hawthorne?” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. I thought quickly, and for a split second Mithos’s eyes met mine. This was one of those key performances when you had to get the lines just right.

“I throw myself upon your gracious mercy, Lord Duke,” I managed.

A ripple went through the crowd and the duke’s lip twitched fractionally. This was what he had wanted. “Is that all?” he said indulgently, his voice louder. I gasped for breath and swallowed.

“I humbly beg pardon for offending your royal personage and can only plead unfamiliarity with the customs of your land and the great authority you so rightly hold. I throw myself upon your merciful generosity and—”

“Enough!” he shouted, and it was a call to the executioner and to the crowd. As the one cut me free, the other cheered rapturously, lauding the duke’s spontaneous and benign wisdom. He gestured expansively as they carried me away, and the audience—for that was what it was—applauded wildly.

But if he had emerged as the benevolent and omnipotent ruler, I had at least emerged, and that was more than I had hoped for. It took some time for the horror of it all to subside. I would never know how much of the outcome had been planned in advance or whether my apology had made any difference. Well, I thought, as I scrubbed myself down and chose a clean shirt, I had lost nothing by making it. After all, they were only words.

The only real catch was that my decision to leave the party had been temporarily stymied. The duke had cut off our expenses after my little outburst, and though he had forgiven me for my “treason,” he hadn’t renewed our funds. Mithos came to see me and made things clear: The party figured I owed them. I told him that I was the one who had talked my neck out of the noose, but he said he had been trying to talk Raymon round since the moment I was arrested, and that he had also got Count Arlest to petition on my behalf. Without his intercession, he said, I would not have been allowed to “talk my neck out of the noose.”

I wanted to argue because I didn’t want to feel dependent on him or the party, but he clearly had a point. So I shrugged and muttered a thank-you, and said I would stick around, help out, and so on. However, Mithos, who was apparently prepared for me to make conciliatory noises, was not to be fobbed off with platitudes. He announced that I could start by earning some money. How was up to me.

I grinned. War, honor, political decorum: these things were beyond me. But sing for my supper? That, I could do. And I knew just the song.