Andrew Hartley - Act of Will

Renthrette and I saw Arlest immediately before dinner and announced our intention to leave as soon as we had eaten, hoping to travel a few hours before stopping for the night. She thought this was too sudden, but what we had learnt had radically altered my perspective on the place and the people in it, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine speaking to Arlest at all without freezing up. The castle seemed still darker and colder, with longer, more eerily silent corridors and more guards than seemed necessary. The chancellor struck me as calculating and the pale, silent countess was positively sinister. It had become a place of strange shadows and howling winds: a castle of ghosts and vampires. Only Arlest himself remained oddly unblemished. I still couldn’t quite cast him as the villain, plotting and laughing up his sleeve as he ensnared his victims. I had seen too much death and misery to be able to pin it all on this weary, mild-mannered old man.

“Why the change of plan?” he asked with guileless interest.

“Well, sir,” I began.

“You needn’t call me sir, Will, you know that.” He smiled.

“Right,” I said, a little uncomfortably. “Well, we are moving off because we have vital information to pass on to our friends who are currently monitoring the movements of the raiders in northern Greycoast.”

I felt Renthrette shift anxiously. We hadn’t discussed my story.

“Information?” he said. “What information?”

“I know where the raiders come from,” I said.

Again Renthrette moved, fractionally. They were both still and tense, waiting to hear what I had to say. I swallowed hard to steady my nerves. “They come from the lost kingdom of Bangladeia across the sea.”

I paused for effect and the count sat down slowly, as did Renthrette. I doubted either had heard of Bangladeia, and both, for quite different reasons, were about to start doubting my sanity.

“Over two hundred years ago,” I went on earnestly, “the people of Bangladeia were beset by a terrible calamity which the books of your library here describe as a dragon.”

“A dragon?” said Renthrette, a little too dryly.

“Probably a poetic description,” I added with the indulgent smile of a teacher imparting knowledge, “for something far more mundane. A drought or famine, for example. The small kingdom of Bangladeia was unable to support itself, and many of its people died. From the dregs of their civilization they formed an army and set to wandering from place to place, taking from others what they could not grow or produce for themselves. Somewhere along the line, it seems,” I went on, quite reasonably, “they met Relthor the Necromantic Sage of the Western Mountains, and through him they traded their souls for life. After a hundred and eighty years of wandering, they have found their way to your lands. The warriors are vampires. We must completely rethink our approach, since I am in no doubt that we are facing the ranks of the Undead, who dwell in the darkness of centuries and survive by drinking the blood of their victims.”

There was a long silence and they both looked at me with wide eyes.

“You think the raiders are vampires?” said the count, cautiously.

“Certainly,” I replied with becoming gravity. “And have been for a hundred and eighty years. They turn into bats between attacks.”

Renthrette’s mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.

“So you’ll want to borrow some good horses,” said Arlest with a sort of resigned bewilderment. I couldn’t say if he was disappointed or just caught completely off-guard.

Renthrette found her voice and cleared her throat before saying slowly, “We are in no great hurry. Will has been working very hard over the last few days and is-” She paused for thought. “-rather tired. I will drive the wagon back to Greycoast and he can rest in the back.”

Now she was getting the hang of it. The two of them exchanged knowing glances, and Arlest nodded thoughtfully.

“I’ll provide some blankets,” he said kindly.

“That would be helpful,” I said, “and we will want as much garlic as you can get hold of.”

The count nodded slowly, his eyes wary. I tapped my finger on the side of my nose significantly and sidled over to the bar. I poured myself a very large glass of wine, downing it hurriedly as I muttered about sunlight and wooden stakes. Meanwhile, Renthrette and the count talked in concerned tones.

Fine. I get to be scapegoat again, but if it gets us out of this fortified charnel house in one piece, I’ll take it.

The rest of the dinner party arrived as I was conspicuously downing a third cup of wine, and they were informed of our decision to leave, along with a version of the reason. Nobody said too much about Bangladeia and its blood-swilling geriatrics. Renthrette didn’t speak to me until dinner was over, though she gave me a couple of long, blank looks while I was talking earnestly about vampire battle tactics and plotting the positions of certain ghoul units with pieces of cheese and cured ham. It was a quiet meal.

A couple of hours later we were on the road and Renthrette was driving. Once out of Adsine’s rutted and smelly streets I came up front and sat beside her. She turned a stony face on me and said, “What exactly were you trying to do, Will? Get us killed?”

“We were quite safe,” I answered cheerfully.

“I have never heard such rubbish in all my life,” she said, clutching her face in both hands for a moment. “I couldn’t believe my ears.”

“You told me to come up with a story. I did.”

“How could you come up with something so absurd? All that Bankle-Whatever-it-was rubbish-”

“Bangladeia,” I inserted.

“Whatever,” she snapped back at me. “If I hadn’t suggested you were going mad, he would have smelled a rat so fast that our heads would be on the block by now.”

“You’re a lousy judge of human nature.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” I said, “that so far they haven’t given us credit for discovering anything. They must believe that we’d fall for something utterly preposterous or they wouldn’t have invited us to share a castle with the raiders, would they? If Arlest really is responsible, then he brought us in on the assumption that we were too stupid to figure out the truth. They are dying for a chance to laugh at our stupidity, so I gave it to them, and they went for it. Hook, line, and sinker. You don’t have to be plausible. Just give them what makes them feel good about themselves.”

“Well, it seemed dangerous to me,” she said, a little less emphatically.

“A serious excuse would have made them analyze it seriously. In our position, our greatest strength is our ineptitude.”

She thought for a moment and said, “How on earth did you dream up all that garbage?” she said.

I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be praise, but I took it as such.

“Actually,” I said humbly, “most of it is from a legend I came upon in the library. As I said, it’s probably a reworking of that ghost army story. If you see it as just a small, ruined country trying to win itself some profits by force, then it seems kind of similar to Shale’s current position.”

“So you were deliberately sailing close to the wind.”

“If you have to sail at all, you may as well get a thrill out of it.”

“But,” she said, coming back to the matter in hand with a jolt, “the raiders have attacked villages and convoys in Shale as well as elsewhere.”

“True. But, as you said, they also seem to have staged an attack on Arlest in which their own people got killed. Maybe they wanted to divert suspicion, or thin out the population a bit. You know, make resources go further.”