Andrew Hartley - Act of Will

“I really don’t know,” he said.

“Of course you will,” I said, with a breeziness I didn’t really feel. “You’re Mr. Adventurer, the battle-hardened weapon master. You’ve got a magic sword, for God’s sake. Supposedly. You can’t get killed by a spider! What kind of story would that make?”

“The real-life kind,” he said, and there was no smile on his face now. “Wait here. I have to speak to Lisha.”

I stared at him as he left, momentarily lost for words. There was a chill panic in the pit of my stomach and a desperate voice in my head.

No. He can’t die. Not Orgos. He’s.

What? My friend? I don’t think the possibility had occurred to me before now.

It seemed he was gone for hours. When he crept back in, I stood up.

“Well?” I said.

“Well, what?”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It looks like a bite, but it isn’t deep, so the venom might not have got into my system. Lisha cleaned it up and. We’ll see.”

He offered me a small glass bottle and said, “Drink this.”

I uncorked it and smelled the contents.

“Will it help?” I asked.

“If you were bitten and we didn’t notice? No. Drink it anyway.”

I did so and it went down warm with a sweet, citrusy aftertaste.

“Now lie down and wait,” he breathed.

“But what if that is a bite?” I hissed back, gesturing to his hand.

“We’ll know soon enough,” he sighed, “or, at least, you will. In the meantime, you can give me my sword back.”

I did. The thing was useless anyway.

“You know, Orgos,” I began, unsure of where the sentence would end up, but sure I had to say something, “when I first met you guys, I felt totally. I mean, I think that you have-”

“Tell me tomorrow,” he said.

He glanced at me and the smile was back, a little wan, maybe even sad, but there nonetheless.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow, then.”

I think, even at the time, I knew that that wasn’t going to happen.

It was dark. I woke strangely, my senses seeming to revive one at a time. I felt numb throughout my body, and though I tried to move, it was as if my muscles were still asleep. I was lying on my back, arms formally by my side. It was an unnerving feeling, lying stiff in the blackness, listening to my heart quicken. I tried flexing each part-legs, shoulders, chest, straining against whatever invisible bond kept them so uncannily still-but nothing happened.

I’m dead, I thought. My body has shut down, and only my mind is still alive. Those hairy little bastards got me after all.

But then I could feel something near my fingertips: my shirt fabric. In a moment or two I could move my hands and wiggle my toes, and within another agonizing half-minute, life spread back up from my extremities and my body finally awoke.

I rolled to the right, or rather began to, and found I couldn’t. There was some kind of wall against my side. It smelled of pine. I rolled the other way with the same result. Panic seized me as, trying to sit up, I found the same solid restraint immediately above me. I was in a box.

Not just any box, though.

I clawed desperately at the wood with my fingernails as the awfully familiar shape of the thing registered: a coffin.

So I was either dead and having some kind of ghostly moment of consciousness, or someone had thought I was dead and I soon would be.

It was bloody typical that I should die, in this miserable fashion, through someone else’s stupidity. I drew up my forearms and attempted to bang on the underside of the lid, knowing immediately that it was a complete waste of time. I probably had about eighty cubic feet of dirt weighing down on me, slowly splintering the timber till the rats and worms got through.

Let’s hope I’m dead by then, I thought. This body might not be up to much, but I didn’t want to stand (or rather lie) by as it got stripped down (an eye here, a kidney there) by vermin even lower than I had been in life. I pushed at the lid again.

And against all the odds, it moved. The lid lifted perceptibly and a crack of light appeared at its edge. I gasped away my terror-stricken panic and pushed hard. It splintered and tore free. Laughing with relief and shielding my eyes, I sat up.

I was in the back of the wagon and we were moving. There were five other coffins, neatly stacked and completely filling the wagon.

Now, it could have been that morbid obsession that sometimes draws us to glimpses of death, or it could have been feelings for my comrades that I had not really admitted, but I grabbed a conveniently positioned crowbar and began to jimmy the sides of the nearest coffin.

Burning with a dreadful anticipation, I freed the lid and pushed it aside. Inside was Orgos. Any hopes that he had been placed here prematurely crumbled as I touched his cheek. He was stiff, unresponsive, and cold as the grave.

I studied his still, lifeless face and felt a sense of loss and failure. Orgos was dead, and the knowledge that he had taken the bite to save my hide made it worse.

“Afternoon, Will,” said a voice from the front of the wagon.

I turned to find a man smiling at me. His face was grubby and his clothes hung in rags, but there was something about the voice.

“Mithos?” I said.

“Who else?” he remarked. “So you hatched by yourself?”

“Orgos. ” I faltered.

“Within the hour, I expect,” said Mithos, turning back to the road.

“What? You’re taking all this resurrection pretty damned calmly.”

He gave me one of those what-is-your-mental-inadequacy looks of his.

I crawled into the front.

“So Orgos isn’t dead?” I said. “Is this magic as well? Like the sword and the raiders who come in the mist and. ”

He gave me that look again, confused but suspicious at the same time, as if he thought I was being stupid on purpose.

“Orgos isn’t dead,” he said, returning his gaze to the road.

“That’s good,” I replied, totally bewildered.

“Yes,” he agreed. After a moment he added, “Why would he be dead?”

I wondered which of us was the imbecile. It was usually me, but it seemed time to make that nice and clear one more time.

“Why would he be dead?” I repeated. “Well, when people get bitten by lethal spiders to which there is no known antidote, and shortly afterwards they stop breathing, go very stiff and cold, and people put them in coffins, that tends to be the first thing I think of. Stupid, probably, but there it is.”

“He didn’t tell you about the drink Lisha gave you?”

“What about it?”

Then there came one of those rare remember-it-for-prosperity moments: Mithos laughed. It wasn’t a guffaw or a full and throaty chuckle, but it was there, if brief. Not a smile, a laugh.

“It seems Orgos got the edge on you for once,” he said.

It turned out that Lisha brewed a species of potion for just such eventualities. It slowed the heart rate, shallowed the breathing, and induced a slumber that resembled death to all but the most thorough examination. Renthrette and Garnet had slipped away to follow the wagons. Lisha, Orgos, and I had been carried about publicly, to make people think that the raiders’ attack had been a success. It had all gone according to plan, except that no one had told me that there was a plan.

“We’re a day behind them,” said Mithos, “but the chalk device is working well. I think Renthrette took a leaf out of your book, Will.”

“My book?”

“She did something theatrical : distracted the driver while Garnet got under the wagon to fit the mechanism.”