with a highly polished lacquer, and trimmed with delicate ropes of gold. A crest hung on the side doors, featuring a dragon and a lamb on an azure shield.
“Pretty flash,” I muttered to no one in particular, which was just as well since it was universally ignored.
A man in a dark and heavy overcoat who had been standing close to the coach knocked his pipe out against the wall and climbed up the stoop. Picking up his lash, he began cautiously walking the horses, all white geldings, until the coach was in the middle of the yard and ready to go. He leaned over the side and flipped a latch deftly with the butt of his whip. The carriage door swung open and Ambassador Linassi, with a small and wordless gesture, indicated that we should get aboard.
I glanced uneasily at Mithos, far from comfortable at the prospect of taking a spin in this glorified hearse with its questionable ambassador and his taciturn driver. Mithos’s eyes said nothing and he climbed in, sitting himself comfortably on the red velvet seats inside. I followed, gingerly, and perched on the opposite seat, facing him and looking for assurance. The ambassador sat beside him, and his sharp, blue eyes met mine for a brief, blank instant, before he pulled the door shut behind him and rapped on the roof. As soon as we began to roll off, he stretched across toward me. I, with a start of panic, recoiled.
“Relax, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said, his voice as smooth as before but touched with that same gentle amusement, “you are quite safe in here. For now.”
Then he continued to lean across and, with a sudden tug on a cord, pulled down the window shade. He did the same on the other side and we were plunged into absolute darkness. Only several minutes later did my eyes seem to adjust, and even then I could make out little beyond shadows.
The coach rattled out of the inn yard and onto the road.
“She gives a very smooth ride, does she not?” said the ambassador suddenly, his voice unwinding in the darkness like an unseen cobra.
“Very good,” I stammered, rather louder than I had intended, and was struck by the curious sense that I was alone in there, that I was talking to myself. Many moments passed before the ambassador added, “Steel sprung suspension. Nothing finer.”
I felt obliged to say something but could not think of the words. I found myself nodding agreement to the darkness and then, as the silence extended itself, I abandoned speech altogether, focusing instead on my own anxieties, all of which seemed to be amplified by being in this curtained box, this cave, this pit of darkness on wheels. Still, it was likely to be a short journey, even if it was into the arms of the Empire’s leading torturer. How bad could things get?
“Papers,” said an imperious voice outside, perhaps only a foot and a half from my head. With sudden insight I realized that things could get pretty bad.
Something touched my knee and I jumped, striking my head on the roof. Then it came again, more insistent this time. Putting out my hand, I found myself holding the ambassador’s documents. Barely daring to breathe, I pushed them through the crack in the window blind, leaning back in my seat to avoid being seen. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of steel helms plumed with white. Then the papers were snatched from my grasp by the invisible sentry and I flinched again.
“You have got to be joking,” growled the unseen soldier, inches from my right ear. I sat very still, muscles tight and bowels clenched.
There was one of those half-decade pauses that actually lasts about three seconds. Then we heard the sibilant hiss of exasperation that can only come from an Empire sentry foiled by red tape. The papers were stuffed back through the window in a fist that didn’t care if it caught one of the passengers on the jaw. Then it was gone, and a voice commanded the driver to “Move on” in a tone that left us in no doubt as to what the speaker thought about diplomatic immunity.
In a spasm of relieved joy I contemplated leaning out of the window and shouting something witty as the carriage rolled off. Something told me, however, that the one thing the guards would thank me for now would be the word or gesture that would lead to one of those unfortunate incidents which leaves huddles of troops standing over civilian corpses and muttering to their knowing superiors about how one of them had seemed to be brandishing some lethal, garrison-leveling weapon that had turned out to be a salt shaker. .
I considered Mithos, who was sitting silent as the grave in the darkness opposite me, and wondered if the guards would have had the chance to finish me off. He probably had his sword point poised for a discreet lunge at my liver in case of precisely such an eventuality. I figured I’d stay where I was and keep my mouth shut for once. We rolled off, smooth as ever, and I swallowed hard. Behind us the voices faded and we headed north.
“There now,” said the ambassador, as if he did this every weekend, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
If it was a real question, no one treated it as such. There was another long silence and then the ambassador added, in the absent tone of one remarking on the chance of rain, “You gentlemen seem to find danger wherever you turn.”
“Thus far our luck seems to have held out,” said Mithos. It was one of his usual faintly grim but otherwise toneless remarks, but the impenetrable darkness of the carriage lent it a certain low hostility.
“Indeed,” replied the elderly man, and his voice matched the other in its steely but otherwise unreadable quality. “Thus far.”
It could have been just the oppressive and disorientating blackness of the carriage, but, for whatever reason, I realized that my body had not relaxed one iota since we left the Empire guards and territories behind us.
SCENE III The Only Way to Travel
We sat like that, silent and edgy, for about two miles. The darkness in the carriage was thick and liquid, giving the slightest rustle of clothing or creak of its steel spring suspension an immediate and unnerving resonance. I almost leaped out of my seat several times at the sound of someone shifting fractionally in theirs. Eventually, I mustered the courage to squint through the window blind, only to find that the land beyond it was almost as dark as the inside of the coffin on wheels we were riding in.
I could just make out a line of tall and narrow trees running alongside the road and pointing up into the heavens like spear tips. Cedars, perhaps. A quarter moon had just begun to rise, casting no useful light, so even the trees had a slightly sinister aspect that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I noticed-from outside myself, as it were-that I was clinging to the edge of my seat with one claw of a right hand while the fingers of my left drummed silently, obsessively, on the seat cloth.
Mithos, his sheer grimness rivaled for once by Ambassador Death’s, reached across to hold the shade open. What little light there was fell on his dour features as he gazed out into the passing trees. “This is the Vetch road?” he said.
“Yes,” said the ambassador. “There is an inn where we can rest before we reach the village.”
“The Black Horse?” Mithos asked, turning from the window. “Good. We have companions to meet there.”
“That is most convenient,” said the ambassador. “Our roads lie together.”
“Perhaps your friends can join me on my road north,” ventured the ambassador.
Perhaps not. The sooner I got out of this mobile graveyard, the better.
“What is your destination?” asked Mithos, casually enough, though I guessed he was probing.
“North,” he said simply.
“Specific!” I muttered, my discomfort switching suddenly into irritation.
“No,” agreed the voice of the ambassador, calm and unoffended. “But accurate.”
“Just not very helpful,” I persisted.
“The ambassador has a right to keep his own business to himself,” Mithos remarked coolly.
“I can’t say it fills me with confidence, that’s all,” I said sulkily into the blackness. The hint of skeptical hostility this remark contained had not really been intended, but I was wound as tight as a Dranetian merchant’s
