Andrew Hartley - Act of Will

“Three villages have been destroyed,” he went on evenly, “their wheat fired, their hands slain, and their ploughs destroyed. In one attack alone I lost two hundred head of cattle, sixty pigs, and a hundred and fifty sheep, roasted alive as they waited for market. A forty-man cavalry unit was wiped out as they gave chase, and a total of fifty-five other Verneytha soldiers have been killed while acting as escorts or patrols. This report of yours with its fanciful tales of stone circles and disappearing raiders does little to restore my confidence in your abilities. If I’d wanted children’s stories-”

“You wanted to know the truth,” I said, “and I’ve told it to you. If you want to fight the raiders, I suggest you pay more attention to what I’m telling you.”

Mithos gave me a quick look, but I had no intention of saying any more, so I shut up and waited to crush whatever the governor said next: improvised dialogue, I could do.

“Ah, Mr. Will Hawthorne,” said the governor in his smuggest, oiliest tone. “Yes. The party’s mouth. The party’s braggart and fool. The last time we met, you had to throw yourself on Raymon’s mercy to avoid a particularly unpleasant and degrading death, earned by your inability to keep your tongue in check. Of course, talk is what you do, isn’t it?” he said, gazing thoughtfully at me. “We thought we had hired soldiers and investigators, but if the rumors are true, you are no more than an actor ! A storyteller. No wonder your lies come so fluently. What sewer did you crawl out of, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“If I’m a sewer rat, I should fit right in here,” I returned. “I might even run for public office.”

There was a long silence. The governor just sat there and looked at me until I felt embarrassed and flushed.

“Step this way, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said suddenly. “Come; don’t be afraid, I shall not hurt you. That is not our way here.”

He had risen from his seat and stepped back a few feet behind the desk. I glanced at the others uncomfortably. There was something cold and collected about his manner that filled me with panic. He crooked a long, pale index finger and oozed, “Come, William, I have something to show you.”

With a swift movement he kicked open the cover of a circular, well-like hole in the floor.

“Come,” he repeated, and his voice was disarmingly gentle. “The rest of you stay exactly where you are. There are guards watching you everywhere.”

I couldn’t see any, but there were windows everywhere, and I didn’t doubt him for a second.

He stepped into the hole and began to descend a spiral staircase, while looking up at me and grinning. His fingers clutched my wrist and pulled me down quickly after him. I recoiled from the strong, fibrous fingers, stumbling down after him until we reached a wooden scaffold from which four evenly positioned staircases descended. Each wound down in a spiral and each was surrounded, all the way down so far as I could see, by softly lit rooms: cells.

“You see, Mr. Hawthorne,” he whispered, “there are no torture chambers or disemboweling knives here such as you would have experienced in Greycoast. No rack, branding irons, or manacles.”

He said each word with relish as if imagining them in use. The hair on my neck rose and for a second I thought he was quite mad.

“But there are no criminals, either,” he said. “All due to potentially continual surveillance. The people never know when they’re being watched, so they have to behave as if they always are. And not only our prisons have glass walls. Offices. Schools. Markets. Brothels. Everyone monitored. All monitors monitored in turn. Field laborers paid to watch each other. It’s a self-policing society, Mr. Hawthorne. A perfect economy made secure by a myriad interconnected eyes and ears. A society where the police are in here”-he smiled, tapping his temple-“so it becomes impossible to even think criminally. You are never alone in Verneytha. Never.

“So you see, Mr. Hawthorne, how careful you have to be when you enter a new land. Perhaps you hated Greycoast’s dungeons, but believe me, for a free man like yourself, there is nothing more terrible than continual surveillance. Nothing. In time you would yearn for the rack and the gallows, Mr. Hawthorne. You would plead for a torturer to let you pay your penalty and cover those awful, lidless eyes that watch you day and night. A few months in my cells, and you would never know what it was to be alone again. Even when no one was there you would feel them, watching, listening. Controlled madness, Mr. Hawthorne. Regulated insanity for the good of the state. Go and tell your stories about that, and leave the magic for the children and the very, very stupid.”

He gave me a long, hard look and then snapped, “Upstairs! Quickly!”

I stumbled blindly back up the spiral. The others stared at me when I emerged. I must have looked pretty haggard.

“Now leave me,” snarled the governor, his tone suddenly harsh. “I will summon you after I have decided what is to become of you.”

“We are staying-” offered Mithos.

“I know where you are staying, you idiots. Now get out.”

I tried to tell the others what I had seen in the tower but I couldn’t convey its awfulness. Garnet had just looked bemused and shrugged it off as something that “didn’t sound too bad.” He told rival tales of dismemberment in Thrusia that once would have made me sick. But he understood with his gut what he didn’t grasp with his conscious mind. He developed a new irritation at the way people watched us pass. We all did. Even at night, from time to time, lying there in the darkness of your bed, you thought you could feel the eyes.

It was impossible to tell who was in the pay of the governor, so we locked ourselves in our tavern room and tried to decide what we were supposed to do next. To my mind it was clear: “We’ve got to split up and spread out. We can’t move around Verneytha as it stands. It’s a waste of time. There are people watching everywhere I look. When I go to the bathroom I feel like I’m playing to a capacity crowd.”

“Will’s right,” said Lisha. “We should leave quickly, before the governor decides he wants us to stay in one of his little windowed prisons.”

“But where do we go?” said Garnet to himself.

“God, this is a mess,” said Mithos. Since the meeting with the governor, he had grown dour and unapproachable. “They’ve probably been watching us since we left Adsine. What a bunch of amateurs we must look like! We do have to leave, but I’m coming back, and they won’t see me this time. Will, check the corridor.”

We were all getting a little paranoid. I stood outside, eyes skinned for anyone who could be a spy. There was no one about, so this was one conversation the enemy wouldn’t hear. Come to think of it, neither would I. That was bloody typical of them. They would send me into the line to prove what an integral member of the party I was, but when it came to making decisions, good old integral Will had to check the corridor.

Garnet flung the door open suddenly, and it was obvious that he was unhappy with whatever had been decided.

“Come in, Will,” he sighed.

It was noon. The sun was high and the air still and humid. The wagon felt slow and conspicuous, trundling along like a very large beetle, but I had left Harvest two days ago, had just crossed the border between Verneytha and Shale, and hadn’t so much as glimpsed a crimson cloak. Indeed, I hoped to catch sight of Adsine before sundown. Recently, sundown had become a big deal with me: it reminded me that another day had passed and I was still alive.