Fine.
They wouldn’t get that chance again.
Towards the bottom of the chest in his room he found it. The single, totally blank, piece of copper that he owned. It was cut into a small, notched rectangle, just like all the poison detectors were. That would work well enough. The field he put on it was just like the explosive he’d made before, except about ten times stronger, maybe a lot more than that, A hundred times? A thousand? He wasn’t really certain. The field was strong, from his rage. It took extra effort and nearly fifteen hours, but the focus that he’d needed to cut the stone earlier served him well. The work left him cold inside, without much emotion.
That suited him; he had the personality of a doorstop, didn’t he? He’d never known how angry and rage filled doorstops were before. It made sense, with everyone constantly bashing them in the head with doors like that.
Rolph didn’t come back to the room, at least not that Tor noticed. He wasn’t there in the morning either.
Probably off with his girlfriend counting Tor’s money and laughing about him with his cousin. Maybe not. She’d called the Prince a doof after all. To him that was probably the same as being called a moronic child abuser, wasn’t it? As the heir he probably didn’t have people mocking him like that to his face very often. Tor was just about to go out and see about getting the coin and gear from them when Rolph came back. He had a chest nearly as big as the one Tor used for clothes. It had a float plate on it, one of the flying kind, not a follow along. After a few seconds he understood what he was looking at, it was the trunk that he’d been tied to when he’d gone into that cesspit for those two kids. It even had rope marks on it from the day, strong as it was.
“Look, Tor, she was drunk and trying to act big for her friends, she didn’t mean-” The giant redhead looked at him and stopped speaking all together.
“She didn’t mean it? Funny, you get drunk all the time, but you never accuse me of liking little boys, do you? You don’t say a fraction of the things she did, and when you do say anything, you make sure I know it’s just a friendly joke. And that’s on the rare occasion that you can hardly walk on your own, not just being a little tipsy. I should have known better than to trust a woman. I won’t make that mistake again. What’s in the box?” His voice sounded flat and angry still. Oh, well.
Tor pointed with the little copper piece.
“Oh, this is the gold and gear you requested last night. Sara asks that you take it, but hold off on going after Debri. She’s afraid that if you do, you’ll bankrupt them. I get that you’re mad right now, but that won’t help things, not really.”
Tor didn’t move as a wave of anger washed over him so deep, so bitter, that he wondered for a second if he’d ever liked or trusted anyone really. It took nearly a minute to pass totally. It didn’t leave him feeling any better, just more tired.
“I should trust her… why? She’d been keeping gold from me and helping Trice do… I don’t even know what she’s been doing. Using me? Well, that ends now. She’d better tell them to have everything ready, because I’m coming for what’s owed, and if they don’t have it, I won’t just be putting them into bankruptcy.” He tapped the side of the little rectangle with a half smile.
Rolph’s eyes went cold. “Shit. Is that one of those explosives that shouldn’t be allowed to exist?”
“Not even close. It’s so much more powerful that I don’t think I can really describe what it will do. Except destroy, I mean, duh, kind of the point, no?”
Tor laughed hard.
“Don’t worry, now that I have this stuff, I’ll have more soon. A lot more. Devices that will do things that no one should have ever bothered thinking of. Trice thinks I’m too soft and sappy? To stupid and that it would be better if I were dead? Well, I’m sure she’ll get her wish, but you know what I’m wondering right now?”
Rolph sat down on his over sized bed hard.
“No… No, Tor, I really don’t know what you’re thinking about at all.”
Tor grinned wildly.
“How many of the bastards can I take with me?”
Chapter seven
The Prince stared hard at Tor for about half a minute, then looked away, staring at the wall for a while. After a bit the much smaller man shrugged and went to the chest that had just been brought in. Popping the top of it he noticed that it wasn’t, as he’d imagined, filled with gold coins or even with amulets like in some kind of fairy story. It was filled, instead, with various kinds of cloth bags.
Some were simple canvass, about the size of his hand, each seeming to have about a dozen gold coins in them. Others were fatter, but held more silver and even some copper coins, the amounts varied in each wildly. One of the nicer bags, a blue silk, a color that would have made a pretty dress for Trice, held nearly a hundred gold coins all on its own. In the upper left hand side of the trunk there was a bag that held plates and amulets. It didn’t look right to him at first, since he knew that he’d given them both more than that over the last months.
It took a second, but he finally got it.
“They kept the flying gear and shields?” His fingers shook as he pointed at the pile of devices. “And the poison detectors?” Tor heard his voice break, crack and pop, both from the damage of nearly dying and because he just sounded like a little kid whose puppy had died.
“Even after all this… they still try and rob me?”
Closing his eyes he took a deep breath, dropping into a deeper mental state than he normally maintained while trying to interact with the world. Those were just things. Junk, he’d heard it called. Let it go, he told himself — several times — inside his head.
Be at peace.
He didn’t open his eyes until his breathing had slowed to something approaching normal and his mind had — cleared was an overly ambitious description — but become something less volatile and potentially violent. A little less.
“Tor… I need you to promise me something.” Rolph’s voice was more serious in that moment than Tor had ever heard it before. Darker. Even when he’d been in a near combat rage he’d sounded happier somehow.
“What would that be?”
“Don’t… don’t kill anyone over this. Not for at least a month. After that, if you have to… promise me you won’t let any innocent people die because of it. Please.” There was clear pleading in the prince’s voice. Simple and raw.
He didn’t answer right away. Sitting on the edge of his bed it felt like he was going to fall through the bottom of the world. It was a place that he didn’t even know could exist, that place so deep inside of him it would have been frightening if Tor could have cared anymore.
The end of everything.
Tor nearly told Rolph that he couldn’t do that, couldn’t promise not to simply kill the whole world in his rage. It was that close. A hair breath away from losing everything and simply taking out all the people that had hurt him, which in that moment, felt like the whole world, even though that really couldn’t be the case. Most people in the world hadn’t even heard of him, and he’d only met a tiny portion of them. The world was big and he was small. People were many and he was just one.
That thought, that he wasn’t that important, that the world didn’t know, or care, about him that much at all, that’s what did it. He felt like he hit the bottom of himself then. But rather than crack into a million pieces, or even rise and start killing everything around him like a spoiled child with too much power breaking all the world’s toys, Tor felt himself sink through it.
It was an odd, gradual feeling. It really felt like the bottom of the universe was passing through him, slipping past him somehow. Then, without warning, the world, the universe itself, opened up inside him.
It was huge. Vast and important. He almost laughed with awe and relief. His problems hadn’t gone away, of course, but he could see how unimportant they really were now. He sighed and opened his eyes.
“Right. Well, I’m not going to hurt anyone over being put down. Not even by someone I kind of loved and
