Will Power (22 page)

Anyway, the announcements started echoing down the halls and through the palace’s sumptuous chambers. “Garnet and the Thrusian wanderers,” they called us.

“We sound like a pub act,” I remarked, with bitter amusement. And all at once I could see the three of us playing for a crowd in Cresdon’s Eagle Tavern: Renthrette with a lute, Garnet with a bloody big drum, and me with a pair of bent spoons, dodging insults and rotten fruit. But before I could share this little vignette with my companions, we were hustled down yet another corridor, through three more antechambers and, with a silvery fanfare, into the presence of King Halmir, son of Velmir, lord of Phasdreille.

He was seated in an alabaster throne padded with purple velvet at the end of a long chamber with high windows along the walls. A
narrow carpet of the same rich purple led up to it, and on each side stood guards and courtiers, their eyes turned toward us. The king himself was pale and blond, perhaps forty, his hair breaking around his shoulders in luxuriant ringlets, but these were details I noticed later. My first impression of him was one of spectacle. He was dressed from head to foot in cloth-of-gold, and the early afternoon sun splashing down in great diagonal shafts through the windowpanes picked him out and made him shimmer astonishingly, like a man seated amidst flames. We faltered, our eyes on him, and Garnet gasped audibly.

“Approach his majesty the king,” said the lackey, a smug smile sprawling across his plump face as he took in our response.

There was a fluttering of fans from the female courtiers as the king inclined his head fractionally: a tiny nod which sent the light in the room dancing, as if a thousand burnished mirrors had been flashed toward the sun.

We began to edge forward, onto the carpet and down it, Garnet leading, then Renthrette, then me, all half-blinded by his brilliance. He did not move, but a ripple passed through the crowd as we approached and a number of men gathered at the foot of the throne: councilors and private secretaries, no doubt. Some were clad as the rest in bright, expensive fabrics and jewels, others wore the somber black of the archetypal civil servant. I noted that Gaspar, the middle-aged courtier I had seen earlier trading metaphors as proof of his love, was in the latter group. He was changed out of his finery now and looked positively funereal. Sorrail was among the courtiers. His eyes fell on Renthrette in her borrowed finery, and he smiled, pleased.

I had tried to wash my clothing for the event, but still looked like something dragged in by the proverbial cat: dragged, I might add, through hedges and waterlogged ditches, and then partly eaten. This had not gone unnoticed. While Renthrette got glances of quiet, polite admiration from the men and equally quiet, polite malice from the women, and Garnet got an inverted version of the same thing, the whole assembly found common ground once they’d looked me over: I was a scumbag. My shirt was yellowed with age and sweat, my breeches were stained disturbingly, worn at the seat, torn at the knee, and shredded altogether at the hem. It had been a tough journey, all right? If my comrades hadn’t been so lovingly supplied with fresh and dazzling attire, they would look no better. Well, not much. The point is that I was an adventurer (I had just decided), not a fop. And anyway, I wasn’t the
least bit interested in people who would evaluate me according to what I looked like. Who did they think they were?

The problem was that all this elegance and spectacle was getting to me, and the truth was that, yes, I did feel a bit awkward and out of my element. I once witnessed a frog race in Cresdon years ago. (Bear with me, and the relevance of this will become clear). Some idiot had marked out a little course and people were expected to place bets on which of the five uninterested frogs would finish first. People did, too. When the “race” started, the frogs either sat where they were, went in the wrong direction, hopped out of the course altogether, or tried to make friends with the other frogs. The idiot organizer was press-ganged into paying the gamblers as if everyone had won, and finished the afternoon badly out of pocket and looking like a complete prat. Anyway, being before the king reminded me of that, though I couldn’t decide if I, surrounded by courtly leers and polite smiles, felt more like him or one of his stupid frogs. (See? I told you it was relevant. Sort of.)

While I was musing on my frog-like status, we had reached the dais where King Halmir, son of Velmir, sat like a human sunbeam. He looked us over, opened his mouth pensively, and said nothing. Not a sausage. So we stood there looking deferential, and lowered our eyes as his gaze strayed over our clothes, lingering significantly on mine. I felt my beard growing. Nothing happened and there was, for a moment, total silence. I felt . . .
something
, like I was being held under a lens like a bug, an odd sensation that was more than being simply looked at. I was being studied, evaluated, but since no one said anything I had no idea whether or not I had passed whatever test I seemed to be taking. Then Gaspar, who was standing beside the king’s throne, no expression on his austere privy-councilor face, coughed politely. We looked up and he bowed fractionally.

“Thank you,” he breathed. “That will be all.”

My jaw dropped. I looked from him back to the king, whose attention had turned to his finger ends in a manner which said that our presence in his was no longer required. Garnet and Renthrette bowed and turned. With a rushed and halting movement, I followed suit, glancing back at the king, too bewildered to speak. He was conversing in hushed tones, his mouth barely moving, to Lord Gaspar, who was nodding thoughtfully. We got about a third of the way down the carpet before the crowd began to buzz with chatter as their ordered ranks collapsed. Suddenly there was a throng of people about us, milling
here and there and taking no notice of us whatsoever. The king, I discovered, had left the room through a door at the far end. We were propelled out by the lackey, whose manner was now casual to the point of brusqueness, and dismissed. The frog race had been abandoned.

“Excuse me?” I gasped, as we were virtually ejected from the inner chambers and directed toward the street entrance. “Could someone tell me please what the bloody hell just happened?”

“What confuses me,” said Garnet, pushing ornate little pastries around his bowl sullenly, “is why we were presented to His Lordship in the first place.”

“Especially since he was just going to look us up and down like we were maggots in the dregs of his salad,” I added, taking one of the elegant little pies and sampling it.

“What do you mean
we?”
asked Renthrette, spitefully.

“Oh, it was
my
fault,” I exclaimed, incredulous, spitting crumbs. “I should have known.”

“Couldn’t you at least have changed your clothes?” she spat like an alley cat disputing ownership of a fish head.

“Into what?” I shouted back. “This is it, my entire wardrobe, right here on my back. I’m sorry, but all my golden suits are being polished and I haven’t found some horny courtier to buy me another, all right?”

At this last she wilted a little and turned irritably away.

“Have you any idea how much that little get up must have cost?” I went on, pushing the point home and flicking my finger accusingly up and down her dress and jewelry. “More money than I’ve seen in a long time, that’s for sure. Don’t start with me because I don’t look like what happens when you tie a tailor to a goldsmith and ply them with cash. And what the hell is in these pies?” I said, studying Garnet’s ornamental lunch. “They taste of nothing at all. Why can’t we go somewhere where people know how to cook? . . .”

“Shut up, Will,” said Garnet, flaring. “I should have known you’d humiliate us just by being here.”

“Listen . . .” I began.

“I said,
shut up!”
he roared, his hand straying for his axe with that just-try-me gleam in his eye. It was a familiar gesture, but it was one of those that never got stale, somehow. It was sort of like watching a favorite play: I always got a little something new out of it, something
I’d not seen before. This time it was a hot flush that rushed through me like a bison with its tail on fire and almost made me stain my britches. All right, stain them
some more
. Happy?

That night I sat in my room for a while and sulked. Our meeting with the king had turned into another of those “adventurer” games which I always seem to lose, at least partly because I’m the only one who doesn’t know the rules. More to the point, I was no nearer to figuring out the real burning question: What the hell was I doing here? This was followed by a question which didn’t so much burn as rage like some apocalyptic furnace: How could I get back home?

Home. An odd word, that, always brimming over with unsaid promise of comfort and a sense of ease, a removal of fear and pressure, a restoration of the familiar and the reassuring. Yet, for all these associations to kick in effectively, it helped to know where exactly home was. For me, home had been Cresdon, though it had never been especially comforting or reassuring under the guardianship of Mrs. Pugh—particularly when the Empire found my name on their “top ten seditious actors and playwrights” list and, more dramatically, tried to put arrows through my gizzard. So home had become a concealed fortification in Stavis where the company of my new friends had taken the place of the homely hearth and steak and kidney pie with the family that I’d never really had. But now I was hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away, with the two “friends” most likely to slit my throat for belching at table, and a growing suspicion that all my other friends were dead. To top things off, there was a race of sinister goblins and specters who thought I was darkly important, and a race of handsome, sophisticated hero-types who thought I wasn’t.

This last raised another question. If we were so clearly worthless, if we were the kind of human refuse you could glance over in a second and completely get the measure of, if we were such slime that we could be dismissed without a word in our defense, why the bloody hell had they wanted to see us in the first place? Garnet was probably making a name for himself as Goblin Slayer Extraordinaire, and Renthrette was, shall we say,
connected
by way of Sorrail, but so what? In a city full of would-be ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting, why had we been so quickly pushed to the head of the list for an audience with his royal goldness? And impressive as the city was, why were Garnet and
Renthrette sitting around instead of moving heaven and earth to rescue their friends? I mean, I was in no hurry to go crawling about goblin-infested caves, but for Orgos and Mithos I would at least consider it. Shouldn’t Renthrette, champion of the oppressed whatever the odds, be promising to charge back for her friends—by herself if no one would come with her—rather than sitting around the court playing fancy dress? The answer to all these questions was the same, and it came in a pint glass with a foaming head. I went out.

We were still residing in the palace, for reasons unknown, and our little suite of rooms had a tall and slender guard not unlike Garnet in physique but blond and quiet in that removed, dignified manner all the people around here seemed to have when they weren’t improvising love poems to their mistress’s eyebrows. I hadn’t seen much in the way of passionate outbursts since I’d been here, now that I thought of it. Yes, the waiting rooms had been awash with wry chuckles and other forms of polite amusement, but there had been no real laughter, per se. I mean no side-splitting, eye-watering, thigh-slapping laughter, the kind people make when they think something is
really funny
, as opposed to, you know, amusing. Everyone was so controlled, so restrained. It was beginning to get me down.

So I had a word in our guard’s shell and asked for directions to the nearest tavern. Nothing fancy, I assured him, in case he hadn’t got a good look at my britches lately, just somewhere I could get a good beer. He gave me a blank look, one of many I had been getting lately.

“You mean, an inn?” he said uncertainly.

“Spot on, mate. Good shot,” I encouraged him.

“The closest is some distance from this part of the city. Perhaps half an hour on foot.”