The sack smelled old and fusty but it somehow helped my breathing to steady. Gradually those shallow, wheezing gasps were replaced by deeper breaths that filled my lungs. I felt a weight lift from my chest and, as my temperature rose perceptibly, the shuddering and trembling eased to nothing. Orgos sat in the ditch beside me and put a strong arm about my shoulders. It was all crushingly embarrassing, and I was just considering the idea of keeping the bag in place for the rest of the day when there was a stutter of horse hooves on the road.
The redhead I had shot had dragged himself back onto his horse and kicked it into motion. They watched him go and looked back at me emerging sheepishly from my bag.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” I demanded.
“Why should we?” said Orgos quietly. “What would we do with him? Take him prisoner and lug him all the way to Stavis? Execute him? We would not.”
I caught a flicker of a glance between Garnet and Renthrette and wondered if they were all of the same mind. I was, for some reason, outraged. I clawed for some answer that would satisfy me.
“You could have found out who they were and why they attacked. They were probably working for the Empire,” I insisted, unsure why my voice sounded so unstable.
“The Empire does its own dirty work,” answered Garnet briskly. “They were bandits, no more. They keep watch for small trading caravans from Cresdon and hit them before they enter the Hrof wastes. It is not uncommon. There is no mystery about it. They just thought that attacking a couple of traders and three hired escorts would have been made worth the risk by whatever was in the wagon. It wasn’t. End of story.”
Close to the wagon, two horses strayed aimlessly and their riders lay on the hot road, the dusty stone beneath them stained red. I stared at them again and tried to batter the anger, depression, and exhilaration I felt into some more familiar emotion. The bearded man Mithos had killed lay on his stomach. His helm had slipped off and his long blond hair spilled onto the road like blood. He looked quite young. I turned quickly away.
We buried them some yards off the road at my insistence, but for me it was a matter of closing the incident rather than anything to do with the dignity of the dead. Garnet said we were wasting time and Renthrette looked at me as if I was some peculiar museum piece in a case: not a very interesting or valuable piece, of course, but the kind of thing that you look at sideways and try to figure out what the hell it was used for. Mithos didn’t object, and said that if Empire troops saw the graves, they might just think we were dead. It was unlikely but it couldn’t do us any harm. Garnet, already forgetful of who had saved his neck, muttered that if it did do us harm, he’d know whom to thank.
We rode for an hour, until we came to a grove of shady trees, and there, in relative silence, we made lunch and rested for a while. They all thought I was still suffering from some kind of trauma. Each of them circled me warily like dogs gauging a bear. It was starting to get on my nerves.
“You did fine,” said Mithos for no good reason.
“Thanks,” I muttered, wishing they could find something else to talk about.
“Doing all right, Will?” asked Orgos.
“Look,” I blurted suddenly, “I’m not used to being attacked or to watching people get killed, all right? Sorry. I’ve thrown the odd punch in my time, even the odd chair, but shooting people in the back is a new one on me. I realize that you lot have been skewering passersby since before you could walk, but some of us haven’t. Most of the people I know actually get through the day without complete strangers trying to kill them. You seem to think it perfectly normal that you get attacked by bunches of homicidal maniacs. It’s not! It rarely happens, except to people like you. You’re some kind of disaster magnet. Everywhere you go, death and destruction alight on your wagon like a pair of bloody homing pigeons, and you don’t seem to think it’s odd. Let me just say it again: It
There was a momentary silence that felt particularly empty after my rather shrill explosion.
“Done?” asked Mithos, looking at the ground.
“Done,” I said.
SCENE XII The Desert
We’d chosen our lunch spot well, for I think we saw no more trees that day. The scent of wild herbs never left our nostrils but the heather disappeared, and though the gorse persisted, it seemed to get thinner, until it was just a tangled mass of brownish thorns. We were on the edge of the Hrof wastes by four o’clock and I was startled to look up and see huge vultures, grey and pink as dead flesh, the fingers of their wings spread wide as they soared their slow circles above us. I watched them to take my mind off the Empire patrol that was likely to appear on the road at any minute.
“Those things give me the willies,” muttered Orgos. We had barely spoken since my last little rant. “Great winged rats,” he went on. “In the morning you see them sitting in trees with their wings hanging in front of them, like dead men in rags. You can feel them waiting for you to die. They belong here in the Hrof. This is their territory.”
Well, that was nice to know. The vultures drifted slowly overhead and watched us with the critical gaze of someone inspecting a forkful of pork pie whose origins had been called into question. It was disconcerting, but somehow not entirely inappropriate. The Empire, some of my old acting companions at the Eagle, and, most recently, Renthrette, had always regarded me as something resembling carrion. If I died of exposure in the next ten minutes, the world wouldn’t miss me and the vultures would get a meal. I could picture the great scrawny birds squatting on my remains, spitting gristle and complaining to themselves about the poor quality of the meat coming through these days.
Orgos was right. This was their land, and the only way to avoid finishing up lightly roasted and serving six was to get the hell out of here as soon as possible. The vultures circled on anyway, smugly sure that they’d be dining shortly, tucking into Bill the Succulent any day now. I shot them a defiant scowl, but riding into a desert wasn’t the best way of staying alive, and given the day’s events and the dubious nature of my traveling companions, I could sort of see their point.
On each day of our passage across the Hrof, the party rotated their traveling positions to ease the tedium. On one day Mithos would drive the wagon, the next he would ride at the rear, the next he would lead, and so on. Everyone would change, that is, except me. I was to sit on the front of the wagon with my crossbow, polishing armor, making idle conversation, studying maps of the area, and getting very, very hot and very, very bored.
Garnet’s face was pink and peeling by the third day despite his best efforts to keep the sun off. From the morning of day four onwards he put his helm in the wagon and swathed himself from head to toe in a pair of white sheets like the swaddled corpse of some barbarian chieftain. Only his green eyes and the dark pits of his nostrils could be seen. His sunburn and his sense of how ridiculous he looked did nothing to improve his temper, so I avoided him. Most of the time he rode by himself, sulking and flaking quietly.
That said, he had warmed to me fractionally since my little meltdown with the bandits. I had been a good little apprentice, or whatever the hell they thought I was. To be honest, I had nightmares about shooting that crossbow for three nights afterwards, but I wasn’t about to mention that to him. In any case, he seemed rather more content to have me around and less likely to kill me than he had before, except when he caught me looking at his sister.
Renthrette was, as you might have guessed, a very different story. She took every available opportunity to treat me with the contempt one normally reserves for bawds, tax collectors, and other social lepers. Once I had been relating some snippets of my life in Cresdon and my activities down at the Eagle. Orgos laughed at my ineptitude. Mithos complimented me on my impersonations. Even Garnet smiled and made some roughly complimentary remark about mine being an uncertain way to make a living. She looked at me with the mild revulsion you might show to a large beetle, and turned away.
One day we had to ride together. When she came to the wagon, I had already climbed aboard and extended
