Act of Will

SCENE XLVII



Alone at Last

It was noon. The sun was high and the air still and humid. The wagon felt slow and conspicuous, trundling along like a very large beetle, but I had left Harvest two days ago, had just crossed the border between Verneytha and Shale, and hadn’t so much as glimpsed a crimson cloak. Indeed, I hoped to catch sight of Adsine before sundown. Recently, sundown had become a big deal with me: it reminded me that another day had passed and I was still alive.

They had sent me ahead with the wagon figuring that the safest place for me to be was Shale, beyond the jurisdiction of Verneytha and Greycoast, whose leaders considered me a slightly less welcome visitor than, say, some unpleasant disease that made all your gristly bits fall off. This suited me just fine, because things were getting too grim by half for me to want to stay with the others. So far I’d been lucky and we’d survived all my cock-ups, but it was only a matter of time before something I did got Orgos stabbed or Garnet shot off his horse. The more I had come to like them, the more difficult it was to be Will the Weak Link. I moaned to Orgos that they were treating me like a child, sending me out of harm’s way and all, but secretly I was relieved.

Lisha was to ride south to the villages that had borne the brunt of the attacks. Garnet would ride Tarsha part of the way with her and then return to Hopetown and Ironwall. There he would fume and complain by himself about how little action he was getting while reinvestigating the Razor’s keep. Orgos was going back to Caspian Joseph’s warehouse by the Iruni Wood, the closest thing to progress we’d achieved so far, even if it was still a bit of a dead end. The house was indeed where the raiders had been hiding their loot, but it wasn’t the operations base we had hoped for. Orgos was to go back, skulk through the orchard, peer through windows, and generally creep about (in an honorable way, of course) in the ludicrous hope that someone would tell him, in passing, like, who the raiders were, where they lived, and so on. He was expressly ordered not to try to re-create my little jaunt via the stone circle.

Mithos had moved out of Harvest but he would be back with a different name and face to learn what he could about Verneytha without Treylen’s spies monitoring him. It seemed to me that he was the only one doing anything useful. It seemed that way to Garnet also, who complained loudly about being gotten out of harm’s way. But in one week, barring significant events (which I felt we could rule out), we would all meet again in the Adsine keep.

I was glad to be out from under Verneytha’s watchful gaze. Though I had been there only a couple of days, I still found myself looking over my shoulder to see who was taking notes on the way I ordered a beer. It would wear off in time, no doubt, but at the moment I was as jumpy as a gazelle in lion country. Still, I was away from both Duke Raymon and Governor Treylen, there was no sign of the raiders, and Renthrette was currently asleep in the back of the wagon.

Realized that she wasn’t accounted for, had you? She hadn’t been much fun so far, to tell you the truth. Like her brother, she felt she was being protected, and that we had seen all that needed to be seen in Shale. Lisha corrected her, reminding us about the catacombs near Ugokan to the north of Adsine, which we had been told about when we first arrived. It was probably a blind alley, but we were used to those by now. After we had snooped around the deserted caves for a while, we were to meet with the count in Adsine and be the party’s goodwill ambassadors, hopefully countering whatever tales of our incompetence had found their way over the border.

I slid the hatch open and peered into the back. Renthrette was curled up on a sheepskin rug, her sun-touched hair carelessly strewn across the pillow—though she’d tie it back as soon as she woke lest I thought she was making herself look good for my sake. Her brow was creased into a frown. Above her, one of the scorpion bolt throwers was set up on its tripod. If we were attacked, it might prove essential. Then all I had to do was turn the winch a few dozen times, find the groove, put a bolt in, take the safety off, turn it round, aim, miss, and hope the raiders laughed themselves to death. Still, this little study in futility was, they assured me, a gesture of defiance and therefore valuable. So calling them names ought to help too.

By late afternoon we had reached the village of Ugokan, where we saw little more than a few shells of timber and stone: no people were left. A handful of children had gone missing in the ancient caves and the search party never made it out. Other villagers vanished after that, and finally the rest just packed up and left. A century ago, said local stories, the caves had sheltered an army that had ravaged the entire region. We were about to see what they sheltered now.

Renthrette was always irritable when she woke up. She particularly didn’t like to see my face as soon as she opened her eyes, since it reminded her that she had been sent off on a wild-goose chase with the apprentice, especially since we had already decided there was nothing in the catacombs but ghost stories. They were just too far west to be a useful base for the raiders. In any case, turning this pointless excursion into a romantic trip was going to be tough. Maybe I could set up a candlelit dinner in the caves and get the fruit bats to serenade us. Or maybe it would be so hot inside that we’d have to strip down to the bare essentials and we’d be rolling on the ground before you could say “Wake up, Hawthorne, you pathetic loser.”

We had left the fertile ground back in Verneytha and the earth had been getting steadily more dusty and worthless ever since. As we passed through the empty village, sand swirled in our faces, and there in a group of smooth, yellowish rocks was the opening to the caves.

“At least it’s shady,” I said as we approached. Renthrette sighed. We had shared a room in an inn the previous evening and that had been one of my life’s more major anticlimaxes. She had “kept watch” (on me) from midnight till dawn, intending to sleep in the wagon today. Now she was tired and sulky.

“After you.” I smiled as we neared the entrance.

“Please,” she muttered, pushing past me into the cave, adding, “Light?”

That was a request of sorts, so I struck my flint against the wall and onto an oil-soaked rag. From that she lit her lantern, and we advanced.

The cavern was large and smooth-sided. It looked like a natural formation, but I couldn’t be sure. The rock was pale.

There was only one way through and we took it, feeling the air chill as we pressed on. She shivered and I tossed her a blanket.

“Thank you,” she said distantly, wrapping it around her shoulders, listening. Somewhere in the tunnels beyond, water was dripping. We followed it. I wondered if we should have been unraveling a ball of string behind us, but it was too late now. I hoped that Renthrette knew where she was going, because I hadn’t been paying much attention.

The path, such as it was, descended slowly until the walls were cream-colored. Running water had cut little rivulets and channels into the floor, but there were hard angles down here unlike anything at the entrance: these passages were man-made. We passed small chambers cut into the rock, each bare as if it had been brushed clean. After another hundred yards or so, we came upon the first cache of bodies.

They were adults and they had been down here some time, but were far from completely decayed. The smell was bad, though not as bad as you might expect. Fungus grew on their faces, and in places where their flesh had gone, their rat-nibbled bones showed through. I didn’t look too closely. Renthrette did, but I sensed that it was for my benefit, to show what a strong stomach she had. As if I needed to be shown that.

The bodies obviously belonged to the search party who had gone looking for the missing children. What bewildered me was how they had died.

“They seem to be holding their throats or covering their faces,” said Renthrette. “I can’t see any wounds or broken bones. You think this could be part of the chamber you were in when you were with the raiders?”

We hadn’t spoken for a while and her voice echoed in the confined space so suddenly that I looked around me uncertainly, as if afraid of offending someone. “No,” I whispered. “That was a building. This is quite different.”

We moved on, stepping through a doorway into a cavern. It was huge, and vaulted like a temple. Renthrette held up her lantern, and as the light splashed across the floor, we froze. On the far side of the cave were four seated figures, armored with bronze and cloaked in scarlet. They were facing us.