“The raiders are out in force and moving this way,” said Orgos. “A lot has happened since last we spoke. Renthrette has told us of what you have discovered and we have the highest regard for you-”
“Save it,” I said, pretending not to care.
Orgos nodded and grinned before continuing his story. “When the raiders appeared in force on the Verneytha border a week ago, Mithos went to see the governor. Treylen authorized Mithos to take control of what troops were available, some two hundred light cavalry. We got word to Hopetown, where Garnet met with Duke Raymon. As the raiders moved out onto the moors of northern Greycoast, Mithos took command of the Verneytha cavalry and began to press them south. No blows have yet been struck, but we hope to join our small force with the armies of Hopetown and Ironwall to effect a pincer movement, trapping the raiders on the plains before the citadel. It will be a bloody encounter, but one which will end the threat of the raiders. We’ll need you to help organize our forces.”
I looked at them standing there, so brave and noble, and wondered if they’d forgotten the way the raiders had mauled us when we had crawled up from the coast with our cargo of coal. For a second I could smell the battle, see it, hear it, feel the sweat on my back and the blood in my eyes. I saw the raiders as I had first seen them in the flame and smoke of a sacked village, their lances lowered and bronze faces impassive. I pictured that crimson machine materializing out of the fog, biting through the untutored ranks of our boy soldiers and farmers, and my heart bled for them.
But most of all, it bled for me.
“I’m sorry, Orgos,” I said. “This is as far as I go.”
SCENE LII A Different Road
Well, do you blame me? Really? It was-had always been-hopeless. But calling Mithos’s name wouldn’t help now, and we weren’t facing a handful of them, stuck in the tight spiral of a lighthouse. We were facing an army, hundreds of them, appearing out of the mist on top of us. I knew what they were capable of (in every sense of that phrase) and no talk of principle could make a silk purse out of this particular sow’s ear. It would be a rout, and I would have no part in it.
I’m not sure when I made the decision to leave, though the possibility had been there since I first met them and had never completely gone away, even when things seemed to have been going well. But lately things hadn’t been going well and I had nearly wound up dead too many times. The idea that all those encounters had been mere rehearsals for the grand show itself was just too horrible. I couldn’t survive anything worse than I had already been through, and neither could they. Riding into certain death might be what they lived for. Not me.
Orgos was furious, of course, and my attempts to persuade him to come with me, to persuade all of them to quit now while they still could, just made him madder. Renthrette stared at me, her face flushed as if I’d slapped her very hard. As Lisha was saying that she understood my position and that I had more than repaid them for getting me out of Cresdon, she walked away and started messing around with her horse’s bridle, without looking back.
“You’ll need some expenses to get out of Shale,” said Lisha, handing me a small purse.
“I don’t need your money,” I said, suddenly feeling defensive.
“You earned it,” she said. “Though I wish you would reconsider.”
“You too,” I said. “And I’m no use to you anyway.”
She started to say something, but I waved it away. “You know what the odds are in this battle you’re walking into?” I said.
“Yes,” she answered. “But I know that without us, these people, Maia and the others you saved, have no chance at all. We have to try. Even if we can’t win, it is important to stand up to an enemy like this. I know you don’t think that ideas like that serve a purpose, but sometimes even destruction is better than compromise.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that. There are battles elsewhere you could win, causes you could champion. Why throw yourselves away in something so obviously futile?”
“Because this is where we are now,” she said firmly. “This is the injustice we are confronted with, and no fight is wholly futile.”
There was nothing to say to this. Orgos had been fuming up and down the makeshift campsite, but his anger had burned out. When I finally sidled up to him he just listened gravely and then smiled a sad, distant smile. “I had hoped you would ride into battle beside me,” he said.
“You’ll do better without me,” I said honestly. “It’s pointless to say otherwise, and it’s pointless to ask you to be careful and not take risks unnecessarily, but. Look after yourselves. Please.”
Lisha shook my hand and wished me well. Orgos clamped me to his chest and then, before releasing me, stared hard into my face.
“You’re a good man, Orgos,” I said, really believing it for the first time.
“So are you, Will,” he said. It was a kind of entreaty. I smiled and shook my head sadly, and walked away. I wasn’t a good man. I never had been. But I was a survivor, and that had to be worth something, to me if not to anybody else.
As I climbed into the saddle of my mare, I turned to look back at Renthrette. But I couldn’t place her among the crowd, and after a moment feeling foolish and indecisive as the villagers watched me, I rode away.
I figured I’d head west, mainly because it would be the shortest way out of the region, but also because it would take me back towards Stavis, which was at least familiar. I doubted I’d dare risk returning to Cresdon, even if I could find passage across the Hrof, but Stavis would serve as a place where I could gather my thoughts and look for options. Surely the Empire would have forgotten Will Hawthorne by now?
The downside of heading west was crossing Shale. Since I really didn’t want to ever lay eyes on the Adsine keep again, I figured I’d head north for a little ways, skirt the city, and then dip south and west again, wending my slow way across the two hundred miles of Targev coastline we had glimpsed from the deck of the
I had the whole day ahead of me and, with luck, I’d be out of Shale territory before I had to stop for the night. The light rain that had been hanging around the area like a pathetic friend you couldn’t get rid of finally pushed off, and even the scraggy hills and tussocky fields looked almost beautiful enough to put the past weeks out of my mind. By midmorning I had started cutting north. I trotted on, right through lunch, until Adsine was behind me and I was only a few hours from the edge of Shale. I ate in the saddle wondering how mobile I’d be the following day after all this riding. It was still light, and I could see the sea. After another hour or so I passed through a tiny hamlet and dismounted to ask how far it was to the border.
“The Shale border?” replied an old woman with a basket of pears on her back. “You passed it about a mile back. You’re in Targev now.”
I nearly kissed her, but reason won out (she was seventy-five if she was a day) and I opted to celebrate my departure from the life of an adventurer by booking a room in the local inn and washing down the best supper on offer with a few pints of strong brown ale. I was still too close to Shale to expect a real feast, but I booked into the imaginatively titled Red Lion with a light heart and a sense of real escape, and not just from the raiders. It was the entire world I had gotten away from, that universe where wrongs have to be righted at tremendous personal risk and no one ever gets a decent meal or curls up with a warm body beside them. I ordered two pints, then, as soon as I got my platter of potatoes and roast pork-studded with rosemary and lined with a perfect ribbon of soft fat and crunchy skin-asked for a third.
There was no one else staying at the Red Lion. The landlord said that traffic on the road to Shale had completely dried up since the raiders had become a feature in the region. He wanted me to swap theories and speculations about who they were and what they were after, but I wouldn’t be drawn.
“Just passing through,” I said. “Can’t say I’ve heard much about them.”
He would have told me all he knew (most of it rubbish) but the journey and my first decent meal in weeks had exhausted me, and I could honestly tell him that I was ready for bed. It was one of those rare nights when,
