Act of Will

SCENE XLI



Rest in Peace

It was dark. I woke strangely, my senses seeming to revive one at a time. I felt numb throughout my body, and though I tried to move, it was as if my muscles were still asleep. I was lying on my back, arms formally by my side. It was an unnerving feeling, lying stiff in the blackness, listening to my heart quicken. I tried flexing each part—legs, shoulders, chest, straining against whatever invisible bond kept them so uncannily still—but nothing happened.

I’m dead, I thought. My body has shut down, and only my mind is still alive. Those hairy little bastards got me after all.

But then I could feel something near my fingertips: my shirt fabric. In a moment or two I could move my hands and wiggle my toes, and within another agonizing half-minute, life spread back up from my extremities and my body finally awoke.

I rolled to the right, or rather began to, and found I couldn’t. There was some kind of wall against my side. It smelled of pine. I rolled the other way with the same result. Panic seized me as, trying to sit up, I found the same solid restraint immediately above me. I was in a box.

Not just any box, though.

I clawed desperately at the wood with my fingernails as the awfully familiar shape of the thing registered: a coffin.

So I was either dead and having some kind of ghostly moment of consciousness, or someone had thought I was dead and I soon would be.

It was bloody typical that I should die, in this miserable fashion, through someone else’s stupidity. I drew up my forearms and attempted to bang on the underside of the lid, knowing immediately that it was a complete waste of time. I probably had about eighty cubic feet of dirt weighing down on me, slowly splintering the timber till the rats and worms got through.

Let’s hope I’m dead by then, I thought. This body might not be up to much, but I didn’t want to stand (or rather lie) by as it got stripped down (an eye here, a kidney there) by vermin even lower than I had been in life. I pushed at the lid again.

And against all the odds, it moved. The lid lifted perceptibly and a crack of light appeared at its edge. I gasped away my terror-stricken panic and pushed hard. It splintered and tore free. Laughing with relief and shielding my eyes, I sat up.

I was in the back of the wagon and we were moving. There were five other coffins, neatly stacked and completely filling the wagon.

Now, it could have been that morbid obsession that sometimes draws us to glimpses of death, or it could have been feelings for my comrades that I had not really admitted, but I grabbed a conveniently positioned crowbar and began to jimmy the sides of the nearest coffin.

Burning with a dreadful anticipation, I freed the lid and pushed it aside. Inside was Orgos. Any hopes that he had been placed here prematurely crumbled as I touched his cheek. He was stiff, unresponsive, and cold as the grave.

I studied his still, lifeless face and felt a sense of loss and failure. Orgos was dead, and the knowledge that he had taken the bite to save my hide made it worse.

“Afternoon, Will,” said a voice from the front of the wagon.

I turned to find a man smiling at me. His face was grubby and his clothes hung in rags, but there was something about the voice . . .

“Mithos?” I said.

“Who else?” he remarked. “So you hatched by yourself?”

“Orgos . . .” I faltered.

“Within the hour, I expect,” said Mithos, turning back to the road.

“What? You’re taking all this resurrection pretty damned calmly.”

He gave me one of those what-is-your-mental-inadequacy looks of his.

I crawled into the front.

“So Orgos isn’t dead?” I said. “Is this magic as well? Like the sword and the raiders who come in the mist and . . .”

He gave me that look again, confused but suspicious at the same time, as if he thought I was being stupid on purpose.

“Orgos isn’t dead,” he said, returning his gaze to the road.

“That’s good,” I replied, totally bewildered.

“Yes,” he agreed. After a moment he added, “Why would he be dead?”

I wondered which of us was the imbecile. It was usually me, but it seemed time to make that nice and clear one more time.

“Why would he be dead?” I repeated. “Well, when people get bitten by lethal spiders to which there is no known antidote, and shortly afterwards they stop breathing, go very stiff and cold, and people put them in coffins, that tends to be the first thing I think of. Stupid, probably, but there it is.”

“He didn’t tell you about the drink Lisha gave you?”

“What about it?”

Then there came one of those rare remember-it-for-prosperity moments: Mithos laughed. It wasn’t a guffaw or a full and throaty chuckle, but it was there, if brief. Not a smile, a laugh.

“It seems Orgos got the edge on you for once,” he said.

It turned out that Lisha brewed a species of potion for just such eventualities. It slowed the heart rate, shallowed the breathing, and induced a slumber that resembled death to all but the most thorough examination. Renthrette and Garnet had slipped away to follow the wagons. Lisha, Orgos, and I had been carried about publicly, to make people think that the raiders’ attack had been a success. It had all gone according to plan, except that no one had told me that there was a plan.

“We’re a day behind them,” said Mithos, “but the chalk device is working well. I think Renthrette took a leaf out of your book, Will.”

“My book?”

“She did something theatrical: distracted the driver while Garnet got under the wagon to fit the mechanism.”

“Distracted?” I repeated vaguely. “How?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She said something about exploiting her femininity, whatever that means.”

What did that mean? Selling fruit in a low-cut bodice? Hitching up her skirts and posing as a low-rent hooker? Doing exotic gypsy dances in the street with little cymbals on her fingers and tassels attached to her . . .

“You can start opening those coffins, if you like,” said Mithos.

I came back to reality, such as it was, and did so. Lisha lay quiet and peaceful in her small coffin, a strand of her long black hair across her face. I brushed it aside and looked at her. This deathlike trance didn’t look as bad on her as it did on the usually more animated features of Orgos. She looked as if she might open her eyes at any second and go about her business with a small nod of acknowledgment to me for not getting them all killed somehow. I was beginning to understand Garnet’s reverence for her. How could someone look so insignificant and make you feel so small and transparent?

I had to shift the top coffins to open those stacked underneath, which I couldn’t possibly have done except that Orgos had woken up. He looked dazed, but after stretching his broad shoulders he saw me and grinned.

“I guess you forgot to mention that we would all be sleeping for a while,” I said reproachfully.

“Guess so,” he said. “Help me up.”

I took his hand, and as he pulled himself upright he sort of half embraced me and slapped me on the back.

“Good to be alive,” he said, checking the slender cut on his arm.

I nodded. The things I had felt like saying before now seemed embarrassing and unnecessary, so I just said, “Make yourself useful and help me get these open.”

One of the coffins contained food and equipment, and the last two contained a pair of massive crossbows with slides that looked like they’d need a team of horses to draw them. They could probably skewer four men and their mounts at a hundred yards. I whistled, and Mithos called from the front, “They may help to even the odds a little if the raiders attack. The man who makes them called them scorpions.”

They’d pack one hell of a sting.

I said nothing as I climbed back through, one of the massive, brutal-looking bolts held loosely in my fingers. I wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of one of those. No worse than being killed any other way, no doubt. Better than some, probably.

“I want you to take charge of them, Will,” said Mithos. “When we stop for lunch you can set one up and familiarize yourself with how it works.”

“So now we blast our enemy out of the saddle from a hundred paces?” said Orgos with a scowl.

“The raiders aren’t going to line up and fight you in single combat,” said Mithos flatly.

“And their lack of honor means that we resort to . . . these?” Orgos demanded, with a nod at the colossal crossbows.

“Absolutely,” said Mithos.

Orgos scowled again and started polishing the blades of his swords, as if to make a point.

I was with Mithos on this one.

Still, my feelings were mixed. The crossbows (an inadequate word for those great, clanking death throwers) made me feel powerful, but what happened when the enemy came in close? What chance did I have face-to-face against men who had to be killed with machines like these? And what of Mithos’s new faith in me? Will the missile man? Bill the linchpin, cornerstone of the outfit? Someone to be relied on when the enemy charged? Suddenly I saw why they were all so earnest. It wasn’t about honor and virtue at all. They just couldn’t bear the thought of screwing up and having the deaths of their friends on their consciences. I looked at the scorpion crossbows and felt a gathering knot of cold somewhere between my stomach and my groin.

“The chalk marks are too close together,” Mithos said, looking at a pale blotch on the road. “I hope there’s enough dust.”

“Any theories?”

“About where they’re going? We’re heading north. I’d say Verneytha. Possibly the capital itself.”

“Well, at least we’re ready for the raiders now,” I said.

“The crossbows?” asked Mithos.

“No,” I replied, “the coffins. One each.”