ACT OF WILL

by

                                                                                                    William Hawthorne

Translated from the Thrusian by

A.J. Hartley

Translator’s Preface

            Until a few years ago, the collection of manuscripts now known as the Hawthorne Saga had been sitting in a climate controlled case in an obscure English library for over a century, baffling all attempts to decipher the strange language in which they were written. We knew from library records that they were once part of the Fossington collection and that they were almost lost when the east wing of Fossington House was badly damaged by fire in 1784. Parts of the second manuscript showed some light scorching, and there was moderately severe water damage to much of the first book, but how they were originally acquired and from where remains a mystery. The eighteenth century records refer to the crate of Fossington manuscripts only as “hand written, very old, bound in calf, in indecipherable cursive: language unknown.”

            Being completely unreadable, the manuscripts would have remained no more than linguistic and historical curiosities were it not for the recent discovery of certain papers located in the attic of an Elizabethan manor house in Oxfordshire, the precise location of which I am not at liberty to reveal. I was first shown these papers eight years ago. Various experts concurred that the author was none other than the famous translator Sir Thomas Henby (1542-1609). The papers were all in Elizabethan secretary hand and difficult to read, which is the only explanation I can offer for not immediately recognizing that while some of them were in plain English, others were actually transcripts of the strange language featured in the Fossington House papers. Even after I had made the connection, it was another year before I realized that the English pages were actually translations of the so-called “indecipherable cursive” of the Fossington manuscripts, which actually turned out to be a previously undocumented language: Thrusian. How and with what assistance, if any, Henby accessed the key to this remarkable literary find, I cannot begin to imagine, but there is no question that he did, and left both direct translations of several dozen pages and notes by which the rest might be rendered into English.

            I have made up for my slowness to realize the significance of my find by diligent work on the manuscripts ever since. Using Henby’s translations and notes as a kind of Rosetta stone, I have been able to work out the grammar, diction and tone of the Fossington House papers, which I have renamed the Hawthorne Saga for reasons that will become apparent. In the translation, I have used a modern, colloquial style in an attempt to capture—or at least echo—the uniquely sprightly and energetic Thrusian used by the author. The book in your hands, faithfully translated from the original, is the result. I only hope that you find my labor in bringing this ancient text to light to be worth the reading. If this meets with sufficient approval and I encounter no serious hurdles in the translation, I plan to complete work on the second volume of the series approximately one year from now.

—A.J. Hartley, 2009

Chapter One: Show Business

            The day started quietly which, as it turned out, was not so much ironic as completely misleading. I had risen late after a long night memorizing speeches by the dodgy light of a cheap tallow candle. Mrs. Pugh—the miserable and vindictive woman who had been paid by the theatre to “look after” me since my parents died, which basically amounted to keeping me alive till my apprenticeship was done—had woken me at 11 o’clock, then forced me to eat what looked suspiciously like a bowl of fried porridge. Why anyone would do anything with porridge, let alone fry it, is a serious bloody mystery to me.

            It was my eighteenth birthday, which meant that my theatre apprenticeship was officially over: now the company would either take me on as a full member, or they would cut me loose. Either way, this would be my last day in a dress. Thank God.

            I’m not sure why the Empire doesn’t allow women on stage. It’s pretty stupid when you stop to think about it. But everyone is used to it and it keeps the likes of me in steady work, so I’m not complaining. Admittedly, most of the parts I got as a woman were comprised of simpering love poetry and vacant smiles, but once in a while I got to do a good death scene, or double as a nameless soldier in a battle, or something. That was pretty fun, and it got me out of those bloody corsets for ten minutes or so.

            But none of it equaled the time I got to play a prince. I had three long speeches and a fight scene and, best of all, I got to write some of my own lines. (All actors think they’re poets. Most of them aren’t.) I got a standing ovation at the end of each performance. Not all the boy actors graduate to men’s roles, but I was the best we had at the moment, so I figured there’d still be a job for me when I hung up my skirt for the last time. Probably. Not everyone in the company appreciated my talents, of course, least of all the really stupid ones, who—needless to say—had a lot of sway in the company. If they didn’t take me in as an actor, I’d probably be able to make a living writing for them, but it wouldn’t be much of a living, so I was a bit apprehensive about what they’d tell me after the show.

            That was when it would happen. After the stage had been swept and the taproom closed, before they got everyone back out to rehearse the next day’s show, they’d meet and vote and call me into the green room for their verdict. Then I’d be an actor, a writer, or both, or I’d be homeless with no source of income till I could cobble a play together and sell it.

            I should say that being an eighteen–year-old in Cresdon means that you’ve been a man for at least half a decade already, even if you’ve made your living in a dress. I can’t compare it to other places, and I’m sure there are kids my age whose comfort and happiness is still carefully engineered by other people, but unless you are gentry where I live, you pretty much have to claw your way into manhood by then, and there’s plenty who don’t make it. Kids starve, or they get beaten to death by their so-called benefactors, or they get sold into slavery. I’m not trying to shock you or convince you that I’m some kind of hero for making it this long; but I don’t want you thinking you’re going to get a tale about some blue-eyed tyke with a heart of gold in a world where good triumphs over evil. You’re not, I’m not, and in my experience it never does.

            Just so we’re clear.

            Anyway. I lived less than half a mile from the theatre, but one of those impromptu markets which Cresdon’s residents seem so fond of had spontaneously appeared right outside the blacksmith’s on Aqueduct street. I was soon up to my armpits in goats and cheese and bales of smelly wool imported by the equally smelly herders from the Ashran planes north of the city. By the time I reached the backstage entrance of the Eagle Theatre, I could already hear the bugles finishing up, which meant they were halfway through what passed for a musical introduction: a florid faced idiot called Rufus Ramsbottom and an instrument (in the loosest possible sense of the word) which he claimed was an Andastrian bagpipe but which sounded three cats and a chicken tied together in a sack. Not that anyone took any notice. This was strictly background noise to make the paying public feel that something was starting, thus encouraging them to focus on the crucial business of buying one last pint and fighting each other for seats.

            The Eagle sat at the end of a dim alley which, like all the others in the city at this time of year, was hot, muddy, and rank with the odors of wandering livestock and abandoned refuse. It was a typical Cresdon theatre: round (near enough), with a raised thrust stage, a pair of stage entrances, a balcony, a discovery space, and a trap door to the cellarage. The house held close to 3,000, packing 800 standing into the pit and seating the rest in three galleries, one on top of the other. The best view of the stage was from up top and would cost you three standard silver pieces, but you could get a good deal if you were prepared to stand down front. Some of the local aristos would pay six or seven silvers to actually sit on the stage and show off their fancy new duds, something all the actors hated with a passion. They never kept still and you were lucky if they did no more than yawn and wave to their friends. Sometimes they gave you acting notes or stopped the show to argue a plot point. Rich people always think they know best.

            I got into my dress and blond wig as quickly as I could, and took a last glance over the script. We were doing a pompous tragedy called Reynath’s Revenge, whose entire last act was a series of preposterously engineered assassinations. It wasn’t just the end that was stupid. The whole play was rubbish. We’d just put it back into the repertory because a new one by the same author had opened a week or so ago over at the Blue Lion. The only audience who bothered showing up to ours had probably seen it a dozen times. It had been crap every time, but they kept coming back.

            My dress was too tight around the throat because it had been made for Bob Evans, who had had the frame of a plucked chicken till he was about sixteen, when he had doubled in all possible dimensions, bursting every seam in every dress they put him in. By sheer surging hormonal bulk, combined with the timely death of old Silas Woods from the wheezing sickness, Bob attained what the kid actors all dreamed of: he had started playing men’s roles.

            I poured myself a small beer, lit a pipe, and joined the pre-show card game in the green room. I say “pre,” but it would go on through the show, pausing only when too many of us were on stage to continue.

            By the end of the second scene, the game was going badly. For me, I mean. It was going swimmingly for everyone else. I sipped my stale beer and tried to figure out how much I had lost so far.

            Like most Cresdon theatres, the Eagle did double duty as a tavern and was famed for its taproom, which served beer throughout the show. When there was nothing going on on stage, cards, dice, and darts were the rule. All of these humble pastimes could be turned to advantage by a perceptive and audacious actor-cum-gambler, storyteller, and performer: namely, me. William Hawthorne, known as Bill the Sharp or Quick Bill to the patrons of the Eagle Theatre and Tavern, at your service. Care to place a bet, sir, madam?

            Except that it was only me who used the epithets of Quick Bill or Will the Sharp, and if your ears were good enough you would be more likely to hear those good patrons announce me as Bill the Cheat, Lying Will, That-Kid-Who-Tried-To-Rip-Me-Off, etc. etc. In fact, Bill the Incompetent might be nearer the mark, as a quick tally of today’s winnings suggested.

            See, the taproom was, generally speaking, fairly easy pickings. Most of the people who came to play were either regulars (who you knew to avoid) or incompetents who couldn’t fork their cash over to you fast enough. But I wasn’t in the taproom now, I was in the green room. Normally I played conservatively here, but today I was nervous, perhaps a little too anxious to show how little I cared whether they gave me a job or not in a couple of hours. The combination had made me reckless.

            The problem with the green room games was that they were populated solely by theatre people, mainly actors. Here, the usual bluffs, prevarications, convenient fictions, and barefaced cheating would afford you little, because everyone there knew them of old. Rufus Ramsbottom, for example, was a lousy actor who could barely deliver a line without fumbling or dropping something, and he wasn’t a particularly good card player, but he knew a cheat when he saw one, and he was looking at one right now. He had mean little eyes and a fat pink face, producing the look of a rather slow but pathologically malevolent pig. Those eyes held mine, and he wasn’t giving me an inch.

            “Come on, Hawthorne,” he said. “I have to go on.”

            “I doubt they’d miss you,” I said. “The show’s better when actors do only their own lines.”

            This was a particular talent of Rufus’s. He couldn’t remember his own part if his life depended on it, but he would blurt out other people’s lines constantly. It was taxing for actors and audience alike.

            “Just play or fold, boy,” he said, glowering so that the red bristles on his forehead stood on end.

            “Blood and sand,” I muttered as I threw my cards down, abandoning the sorry bluff. “Fold.”

            He grinned, raked the coins into a pile, and then marched to the stage door.

            “I’ve counted them, Hawthorne,” he said warningly before disappearing through the door. He hadn’t, of course. That would have taken him, like, half an hour.

            You could always tell when Rufus Ramsbottom went on stage because there wasn’t a sound from the house, except maybe a few groans. Usually actors got a little patter of applause when they went on for the first time in a show, but Rufus was such a giftless swine that even the kids who only came to see the sword fights and pig’s blood started shifting in their seats and muttering darkly about getting their money back.

            I put my cards down and tipped my purse out onto the table. I considered the paltry pile of coins left to me, and it was like being punched in the gut by someone wearing (for reasons I can’t begin to guess) very cold gloves. Rufus, however, was positively flush and getting flusher as the game wore on. He had money. I needed money—possibly a lot of it if the post-show meeting went badly. There was a certain inevitability to the whole thing, really.

            The green room was momentarily deserted. Barring some clamorous fiasco in the present scene (always a possibility when Rufus trod the boards), I probably had about another thirty seconds before Jack Brundage, who had been sitting on my left, would get off stage and return to the game. I considered the pile of coins where Rufus had been sitting, took a deep breath, helped myself to two silvers, rearranged what was left, and then helped myself to another.

            If I’d stopped at two, I might have got away with it. But no. Brundage emerged at the stage door just I was withdrawing my hand. I grinned and blustered and asked him what the crowd was like, but it was no good. He’d seen.

            Brundage was a tall, slender man with a sardonic face that made him seem smarter than he was. He was a good minor bad guy, but didn’t have the stage presence to be a real villain, and though he had a loud voice that carried well in a brassy sort of way, he delivered every line at full volume. As a man and as an actor, he had no depth, no richness or complexity. He also didn’t like me very much and was a good friend of Rufus Ramsbottom.

            It was thus with some trepidation that I slipped past him, avoiding his eyes as I made for the stage door. He let me go, but he was smiling that slightly twisted smile of his, like he was sucking something very sweet and very sour at the same time. He wasn’t letting me off the hook; he was figuring out how best to twist it.

            I listened for the cue and strode out, but my heart wasn’t in it, and even the familiar patter of applause at my appearance didn’t still the wobble of my stomach. This was going to get worse before it got better.

            “Good day, my lord,” I said on cue. “I feared I’d come too late.”

            I was Julia, a minor-love interest in a play largely preoccupied with a series of bizarre poisonings. I’d played the part a dozen times, and though it was a smallish role by my standards, I had some speeches in the fourth act in which I whined about justice and honesty and got to rant and wail a bit. Sometimes the audience even cried.

            Not today, I thought. If there was any weeping to be done, it would be me, crying over an empty purse and being drummed out of the company for dishonesty. And it might be worse. Brundage and Rufus were men of little imagination, but they usually came up with something terse and painful in the way of punishment. Once when one of the prop boys had been caught listening in on some conversation they had wanted to keep to themselves, they had cut off his right earlobe to make the point. It was as close as they came to whimsy.

            Twenty lines into the scene, Rufus had an exit. Usually it was a relief to see him lumber out of sight, and the play as a whole picked up as those still on stage got to do more than navigate around his cluelessness, but not today. I knew that the moment he got off, Brundage would be waiting to tell him how I had adjusted his funds, and by the time I headed into the green room, they’d be ready to have a little word with me. Except that it wouldn’t be a word. It would be something altogether different involving an oak cudgel and a bit of lead pipe. Whether or not they would hand over whatever was left to the Empire, I couldn’t say, but being welcomed into the company after this seemed a long shot.

            I watched him go off, my guts hollow, and it was like I’d never been on stage before. I knew I had lines, but for a moment I just stood there, my mind blank, feeling the audience starting to watch me in that too curious way they have when they sense someone screwing up, like hyenas spotting a wounded gazelle. Rafe Jenkins glowered at me across the stage.

            “So, Lady Julia,” he said, completely buggering up the verse, “you already spoke to my lord Francisco?”

            “What?” I said, tearing my eyes from the stage door where Brundage and Rufus were whispering just out of the audience’s sightline. “Oh, right. Yes. I did.”

            Someone in the front row nudged her neighbor and giggled. Even in my stark, bewildered terror, a tiny part of me hated her for it.

            “And,” said Rafe, laboring and glaring still more pointedly, “Lord Francisco told you that—”

            “That,” I said quickly. “Something. Yes. He told me something.”

            It was like I was watching someone else, some stupid kid in a dress who had no right being on stage in public.

            A ripple of mirth coursed through the entire pit and I flushed. There was a long pause and Rafe glared at me. I had no idea what my lines were. I couldn’t remember the plot or who I was supposed to be. All I could see clearly was Rufus waiting for me in the green room with his cudgel. Then there was a bang at the back of the house and, for the briefest of moments, things seemed to be looking up.

            The bang came from the main street entrance into the theatre. I heard shouts, and the crowd standing in the pit began to part like sheep before a dog. Probably a rowdy drunk, I thought: just the excuse I needed to slip away until things cooled down a little.

            But it wasn’t a drunk. It was a man on a horse, riding right into the theatre. He wore silver plate armor and a white cape. Behind him were twenty foot soldiers: Diamond Empire guards. There was a murmur of discontent, but the air smelled of unease, even panic. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

            The mounted officer produced a roll of parchment and, as his horse skittered to a halt on the cobbles, started to read aloud in one of those voices that you can tell isn’t used to being messed about with.

            “On behalf of the Diamond Empire, governors of these territories,” he said, “I hereby declare this and all such theatres permanently closed as houses of rebellion and immorality. The building will be demolished by fire and the land impounded by the state. The following lewd and seditious persons are to be taken into Empire custody for their part in the playing and writing of plays and entertainments unbecoming to the dignity of an Empire territory.”

            I stared at him. He couldn’t be serious. Close the theatres? Arrest the writers? It was madness.

            The crowd thought so too. There was a surly grumbling from all over the building and a scattering of boos and hisses.

            The officer nodded as if this was to be expected, and the soldiers drew their weapons. They were serious.

            “William Hawthorne,” said the officer.

            “Hello?” I said, guilelessly. “Yes?”

            The officer paused.

            “I’m reading the list,” he said.

            “List?”

            “Of those who are to be arrested,” he added with steely patience.

            “Ah,” I said. “William who?”

            “Hawthorne,” said the officer. “Isn’t that you?”

            “Me?” I said. “No. Never heard of him. I’m just a kid.”

            “That’s Hawthorne, alright,” said a big, booming voice from the stage left side. It was Rufus. He took a step out onto the lip of the stage and pointed a thick finger at me. “William Hawthorne.” He added, in case anyone might have missed the gist of the chat thus far, “Actor, playwright, thief, liar, and all round snake.”

            It was his most flawless performance to date.

            The officer considered this. Then, returning his eyes to the list, he said simply, “Take him.”

Chapter Two: Making an Exit

            Immediately two of the foot soldiers plunged through the crowd toward the stage: I hesitated, but I had been visited by a sudden and violent conviction that being “taken” by these men would likely turn out to be a very bad thing indeed, something far beyond even Rufus’s mean little imagination.

            Sedition? I was an apprentice actor who had some small talent with a pen. How was that sedition?

            It made no sense, but the Empire tossed that word around with fond abandon, and anyone tarred by that particular brush wouldn’t see the light of day for some considerable time. Hadn’t a poet in Freescroft had a hand cut off only a couple of days ago? I wasn’t sure, but it suddenly seemed more than likely. And the fines! Why must authorities persist in thinking that actors have some secret treasure trove? At least if they demanded one of my hands I could oblige. If they wanted silver I was really screwed.

            All this mental rambling took about three seconds, during which the young troopers in the pit readied themselves as if they expected some monstrous grizzly to come crashing towards them. In fact, of course, I was an adolescent in a dress—a skinny adolescent at that, whose combat skills were limited to the ability to deliver heroic battlefield speeches from old plays.

            Panic set in. I had no choice but to turn myself over.

            Having reached that conclusion rather reasonably I cannot say exactly what it was that made me scale one of the pillars that supported the stage canopy and scramble over the rail onto the balcony. Maybe my simmering resentment of the Empire had finally taken over. Maybe I was standing up for the oppressed in the face of overwhelming force. Maybe I was outraged that the art of the theatre should be so demeaned by these thuggish philistines. Maybe, and this was more likely, I just hated the idea that Rufus’s limited intellectual abilities should so be so instrumental in bringing me to ‘justice.’ Yes, that was more like it. My pride was injured.

            Stick around, I thought, and they’ll wound more than your pride.

            Two of the soldiers had unslung bows and were training them in my direction. By the time I had hauled myself onto the balcony—and try doing that in a floor-length velvet gown—one white-feathered arrow had whistled over my head and another one had slammed into the oak rail just below my hand. The crowd murmured, coming to life as if the play had picked up where it left off. I gave a startled yelp, half a dumb realization of what I had begun to do, half sheer bladder-stretching terror.

            I glanced down. I always loved being up here in the balcony with the music rooms behind me and a sea of faces turned up and hanging on my every word. I’d had some of my greatest actorly moments from this very spot, a suitably dramatic place to go down in a hail of arrows.

            But the play wouldn’t end that way. Not today. No tragedies for William. I was in strictly comic mood, which is, I suppose, why I pulled the ladder over and started shinning up to the trap in the canopy. I started up, dodged another arrow, nearly fell to a messy death on the stage below, and wrenched the trap open. As the officer below started barking more orders and the crowd began to panic, I climbed, skirts hitched round my knees.

            Inside the roof canopy was what the company members mockingly called “the gods.” It was from here that we lowered some poor bastard in dreadful make up at the end of those awful the-plot-has-fallen-apart-and-only-some ludicrously-unrealistic-device-can-cobble-together-an-ending plays. There wasn’t much up there but rafters, a winch, and another ladder up onto the thatch. I was up it before you could say “death wish.” The audience, those who weren’t running to get out before they were held responsible for this little fiasco, applauded me. No one liked the Empire all that much.

            There was a chimney stack at one part of the thatched ridge, and I flung myself at it and clung on for dear life, wondering vaguely what lunatic scheme was likely to get me out of this unskewered. The roof ran only around a part of the stage and the perimeter galleries, so I could see the chaos in the yard below quite clearly. I leaned out to look down, and another arrow shot up and came within a cricket’s knee joint of finding my throat. Rufus was on the stage, shouting and pointing like the fool he was. And I was sitting on the roof in a dress being shot at by the Empire.

            Oh yes. Rufus is the fool here.

            Where the devil was I going? I looked around for the obligatory passing hay cart (a staple element of stories like the one I seemed to have wandered into) into which I could safely leap, but it had missed its cue. Five soldiers and the officer were on the stage now, all shooting and trying to shut Rufus up, while Brundage stood there like a sardonic angel of death, sending glances of bitter amusement up with their arrows. For the moment I was safe behind the chimney, but four of the troopers were on their way up after me.

            There was still no sign of the hay cart.

            There was, however, a house, its roof about ten feet away. The street was about thirty-five feet below. I released the chimney and let another arrow scud past me. Then I rose, setting one foot on each side of the sloping thatch, and began running or staggering to the far end, where I half-jumped, half-fell across the gap.

            The edge of the neighboring roof hit me in the stomach, drove the breath from my body, and almost knocked my wig off (don’t ask why I was still wearing it. I have no idea). There were shouts and the sounds of running feet below. I clawed myself up, that infernal dress making it almost impossible for me to get my legs up (how did women move in these things?). I hitched the skirt up around my waist and—as if they had been waiting for me to do just that—one of their arrows immediately found my thigh and stuck there like a firebrand.

            I rolled myself out of sight and stared with horrified fascination at the wooden shaft that grew out of the side of my leg, wagging about as I shifted to get a better look. Any sense of pain was temporarily stifled by disbelief. This was a new dimension to my life: Bill the Moving Target, Wounded Will. I pulled at it and gasped as it slid out easily, blood seeping out in a thin trickle. Not much of a wound, I pointed out to myself, vaguely disappointed. The flat arrowhead had gone in at an acute angle, barely under the skin really, but it hurt like…well, like an arrow in the leg, actually, and it served to remind me of what I was doing.

            I tore a strip off the hem of my dress and tried to bind it round my leg to staunch the blood, but it fell off as soon as I rose to a crouch (the bandage, not my leg). The pain, which had been dull and smoldering, suddenly reared like a small pony and kicked me irritably. For a second I just sat there, but I knew that while the wound in my leg was pretty minor, if I stayed where I was they’d give me something to be proud of.

            I started to crawl, swearing under my breath at Rufus Ramsbottom, the Empire, the patrons of the Eagle, and, without good reason, Mrs. Pugh. I passed three chimneystacks, my dress snagging constantly on the thatch, and kept going. I knew that this chain of mediocre dwellings led into one of Cresdon Town’s poorer market areas, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was at the end of the terrace. After half a dozen successful (well, reasonably) years as a theatrical manipulator of other people’s greed and stupidity, with hardly a brush with the authorities, I was reduced to dragging my bleeding self—in a dress—through filthy, nest-filled, spider-riddled thatch, while members of the dreaded occupation force tried to put pieces of steel through my windpipe. Nice job, Will Hawthorne, you finally got what you deserve. Good old Quick Bill. Another blinding success delivered by Will the Sharp. And all for three lousy silver pieces. Not enough to cover my funeral. Curse Rufus, curse the Empire, curse me.

            Then, without warning, the thatch became terra cotta tile. Now what? In the street below I could hear geese and housewives. I lifted my head a fraction, waited for an arrow through my throat and, when it didn’t materialize, looked about me.

            The town had not fared well since the Empire took control, and this was one of the poorer districts. There were puddles of stagnant, muddy water ranging from mere wheel ruts to large greenish pools across the street, all choked with refuse and buzzing with summer flies. Some of the soldiers were down there, their noses screwed up in disgust, their white, mud-spattered cloaks hitched up around their thighs, but they didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. I risked a glance back the way I had come and saw three more working their way across the roof. I had to get down.

            I leaned out over the edge wondering if I could survive the drop, and found myself looking upside-down into an open leaded window set in the plaster and timber wall below me. An elderly woman with a bucket of God-knows-what poised to be dumped into the street met my gaze and held it.

            Without a word she pushed the window wider and stepped back. I swung myself down and through in a single movement that only five minutes ago would have seemed impossible.

            The woman silently returned to the window, caught the eye of one of the soldiers and pointedly emptied her bucket into the over-flowing drainage ditch below. A waft of shocking stench reached us before she shut the window.

            “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I babbled.

            “Shut up,” she muttered, “you’re not safe yet. They aren’t that stupid. Get a move on. Don’t gape, you idiot, do something. What kind of a fool are you anyway, hopping around on the roof while they shoot at you?”

            I looked at her with more irritation than I would have thought possible in the circumstances, and wondered vaguely if she could be related to Mrs. Pugh.

            There was an open doorway that led into the house proper, a bed, a small table, and a wall of pine boards where the wing had been built out over the street so it butted up against a house on the other side.

            “Got a weapon?” she asked in a business-like tone. “Sword? Mace?”

            I shook my head, temporarily dumbstruck. Of course I didn’t. That would have been illegal. She tutted pointedly, a look of bored exasperation on her wrinkled features, and started rummaging in a battered armoire, from which she produced a heavy-looking felling axe. She heaved it at me haft first and it swung madly as I struggled to control its weight.

            “Go on, you idiot, go on!” she snarled, hobbling away from the swaying axe head, “cut it down before you kill us both.”

            She indicated the pine-boarded wall. I stared at her, wondering if she was serious, then heard the banging and shouting of soldiers downstairs. She made an impatient gesture as if she was dealing with a mentally sub-normal baboon and I, suddenly angry at her and pretty much everyone else in the world, swung the axe hard into the wood.

            It was faintly satisfying to see the splinters fly. I gritted my teeth and hacked away as the old woman behind me kicked my shins and told me to get a move on. For a moment I was tempted to swing the bloody thing at her, but that desire was replaced by surprise at seeing a middle-aged man on the other side of what was left of the wall, climbing hastily out of a tin bath and staring at me with terrified astonishment.

            I turned to thank the crabby old bag but found she was already descending to answer the door and deflect the Empire guards, clearly the only people she hated enough to be of such dramatic assistance to anyone. The man on the other side of the wall backed off with disbelief in his eyes as I set to climbing through the hole. He flashed a look of alarm at the axe, so I dropped it and made pacifying noises that in no way helped the situation. For about the fiftieth time since this nightmare began I wished I wasn’t wearing a dress and a cascade of blond curls. There was only one way out of the room, and I took it, blundering past him onto a landing and down a staircase, while he stood gibbering and staring as before. You couldn’t really blame him: it’s not every day that a cross-dressing axe murderer smashes his way into your bathroom. Not waiting to examine my surroundings, I found the back door and unbolted it.

            Probably the best thing to have done would have been to walk calmly and maybe put on a coat or something, but such composure was beyond me. I sprinted aimlessly out into the alley and down the first street I came to, heading as far away from my lodgings as I could.

            But where was I supposed to go? Cresdon just wasn’t that big and it was entirely walled, all gates heavily guarded. Everyone I knew worked at the Eagle, and those who might still have offered me protection were probably busy worrying about their own necks, possibly from the depths of some imperial dungeon. An unavoidable truth was settling like a rock in my gut, and though I had begun the day worried that I wouldn’t get my life on the stage, I was going to end it with a very different set of priorities. I had to get out of town, perhaps out of Empire territory altogether. I began to run.

Chapter Three: Desperate Times

            I stopped running outside an inn.

            It looked inviting: A board hung stiff in the still air proclaiming it, innocuously enough, The Silk Weaver’s Arms. I had passed it before but never been in, which was probably a plus. I was also thirsty and had detected a comforting smell of malt and hops from the door. I had run more this morning than in the last month. My heart seemed ready to burst, my muscles ached, and my thigh hurt and was still bleeding, however unimpressively. I had to calm down and think what I was going to do next. In short, I needed a beer.

            It was dark and cool inside. A handful of quiet drinkers sat at deal tables and didn’t look up as I came in. I stood there sweating heavily and tried to look relaxed as I moved to the bar to order.

            “Help you, er…miss?” said a big man in a stained leather apron. He looked like he could hump those beer barrels around on his back without losing his breath.

            I scowled at him.

            “Bitter,” I managed. “Pint.”

            His eyes narrowed. I flashed a ladylike smile and straightened my wig.

            “Right you are, my lady,” he said, still a little uncertainly, and began to pump a tankard full. I turned away, so that I wouldn’t die of thirst watching him.

            “Two bits.”

            “Cheers,” I said, pushing a couple of copper pieces across the bar at him.

            “Good health, Miss,” he said as I drank, “looks like you need it.”

            I gave a thin and lame-sounding laugh and fled into a dark corner by the fireplace.

            At the next table a couple of old men were playing dominos in absolute silence. I tried to think of nothing while my heart and breathing returned to something like normal. After a couple of minutes like this I drained my glass and instantly wanted to find the toilet. Under the strain, I was amazed that my bladder had held out this long. Hell’s teeth, I was a fugitive from the Empire! How could I have been so stupid? I had to get out of this dress and out of town, and perhaps a good deal further. It was a sickening thought. For all the tales of distant lands I’d acted in, I knew nothing about life outside Cresdon, and there was a part of me that found the idea of venturing beyond the city walls almost as terrifying as what the Empire would do to me if they caught me.

            Almost. I had been accused of sedition, and then resisted arrest and made the Empire—a small part of it at least—look silly. I would be proclaimed a rebel, and after that, all bets were off. There was only one punishment for rebels. Actually there were lots of punishments for rebels, many of them inventive and colorful. They just all ended up the same way.

            Well, I thought, trying to put a better face on things, putting some mileage between me and Mrs. Pugh’s odious house with its cockroaches and its mice and its alarming breakfasts wouldn’t be all bad. And I’d never have to listen to Rufus’ bagpipe again. Bright side, see?

            So, said a nasty voice in my head, that’s settled then. No problem. All you have to do is slip past the thousand armed guards who are currently looking for you specifically, and you’re golden.

            Another beer seemed in order.

            I got to my feet and looked toward the bar in time to see the street door kick open.

            Soldiers. Three of them. I looked for a back door and started moving, wishing I had got rid of the dress and wig the moment I came in.

            I made it across the room, staring ahead of me, waiting for an imperious demand to hold-it-right-there, and tried the door. It opened, but it didn’t get me outside, just into a corridor lined with more doors: guest rooms, no doubt. Then there was the sound of hurried boots in the barroom coming my way, and I knew that I had about fifteen seconds.

            Bolting down the corridor, I tried one of the doors, but it was locked. The second, likewise. The third swung open and I found myself stuttering apologies and scattering pleas for help at three men and a girl.

            They were perhaps as unlikely a group as Cresdon’s uncosmopolitan social milieu would ever see. The girl, who looked about my age, was fair, pale, and slim. I had some experience of looking at pretty girls, and there was no question that this one was a bit special. One of the men—actually, he couldn’t have been much older than the girl—was similarly pale of complexion, though his hair was short and brown and his eyes green as a cat’s. The other two were of foreign stock, one black, the other of a swarthy, olive complexion with dark hair and eyes. These last two had both drawn swords as I came in.

            “Help!” I squeaked.

            The men peered at me. I snatched my wig off and their eyes widened a little.

            “Empire guards!” I blurted, glancing over my shoulder.

            It was, apparently, the right thing to say.

            For a split second they looked at me, then at each other. Then the girl pulled one of several large trunks from the corner. Her pale male counterpart opened it and wordlessly motioned me over.

            Then they started arguing.

            “Garnet, are you mad?” hissed the black man, “It could be a trap!”

            “We can’t take that chance,” said the girl. “We have to trust her. Him. Whatever.”

            Even in my terror I managed an indignant glare.

            “It isn’t worth the risk,” replied the black man heatedly.

            “Who are you?” the olive-skinned man asked me quietly.

            I thought I could hear the guards forcing the door of the first guest room. My moments of liberty were numbered and I wanted to scream at them. The sweat broke out on my brow and my eyes widened with fear, but I restrained myself and gasped, “William Hawthorne. I’m an actor. And a playwright. And,” I added reluctantly, “I kind of cheated at a card game.”

            “A petty criminal,” said the black man, rising to his feet. He was impressively built and in alarmingly good condition. In fact, all of them were. He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on the bloodstained dress and then, as the door to the second guest room was audibly kicked open, flashed his eyes to the olive-skinned man who had demanded my name and who, I sensed, would have the last word.

            I was right. For a second he said nothing and then whispered, “Get in the box. Quickly!”

            The black man bundled me into the crate and sat on it.

            “Oh, brilliant,” I mumbled. “Put him in the box. They’ll never think to look there.”

            The room fell silent for a second and then, muffled slightly by the wood of the crate, I heard the door open and imperious footsteps enter.

            “Any of these?” demanded a soldier.

            “No,” replied a voice I took to be the innkeeper’s.

            “Has anyone been in here?”

            Muffled negations and murmured inquiries as to what the problem was.

            “Open those boxes!”

            Blood and sand!

            I heard movement and a creaking lid, then another, then I saw daylight, and the irritated face of a soldier peering in at me.

Chapter Four: Desperate Measures

            The soldier’s eyes lit up: He drew his sword swiftly and had begun to shout when something stopped him. There was a brilliant flash, yellowish: like firelight, but sudden and stark, so that everything solid went flat and pale, casting hard shadows. I think there was a sound, too—a bang? Or a sudden and powerful gust of wind? I wasn’t sure. And there was something else, something like falling asleep after too much beer and coming to again with a raging hangover, except that the entire process lasted no more than a few seconds. It was panic, I supposed, and some kind of weird head rush at being shoved into a crate with an Empire soldier about to drag me off to torture and execution. That had to be it.

            But there was more. They were fighting. There was grunting and the unmistakable crash of metal on metal, and then a gasp of pain and the sound of a falling body.

            God! I was involved in a murderous brawl with Empire guards: a capital offense if ever there was one. I clambered out of the box and started to crawl away.

            Someone stepped over my back. I heard a weapon fall and then what sounded like cracking bone. I closed my eyes tighter till someone stood on my wrist and, with a yell of pain, I looked up. The pale kid who had been called Garnet faced a man who might have been the platoon officer. They had their fingers about each other’s throats and were fighting for control of the soldier’s shortsword. The other soldiers, astonishingly, seemed to be already dead. Or stunned, perhaps, since I could see no blood or wounds. The black man joined the last remaining fight, lending his considerable strength to wrenching the officer’s sword from his hand. The officer glared furiously as his strength gave out, then the kid freed himself, hit him once, very hard, in the face, and watched him crumple to the floor.

            I struggled to my feet, struck again by how lightheaded and unsteady I felt. By the time I was upright the three soldiers weren’t, and my barbaric saviors were busy binding the innkeeper’s hands and gagging his mouth with a pillowcase. The girl was standing over the officer who had gone down the hardest with a broadsword pointed at his neck. Something in her eyes was as scary as the sword point. It was time for me to get the hell out.

            The pale man with the piercing green eyes was nursing his wrist, but the group was calm, businesslike despite their earnest speed and horrifying efficiency, as if this wasn’t the first time they’d dealt with Empire soldiers. I looked at the girl, half expecting to see her break down or scream hysterically, but she was as cool as the rest of them.

            I coughed and muttered, “I’m dead. I may as well hang myself right now. ‘Put him in the box,’ they said, your worship. That’s it. I’m dead.” With a miserable whine of despair I looked at the bodies and added, with what I thought to be unmistakable sarcasm, “Great. Thanks a lot. I don’t know who the devil you people are but you just did me a real favor.”

            The pale man looked at me with his homicidal green eyes and shrugged as if I had praised them.

            “It was nothing,” he said. “They were looking for you, not us. They were off their guard, their weapons were sheathed, two of them had their backs to us, and we had one extra pair of hands.”

            My disbelief found a new focal point. They were mad. They had to be.

            The girl caught my glance and her smile slipped away, her blue eyes freezing onto mine with undisguised indignation. I swallowed and looked down.

            “Time for some introductions and then a dressing of that wound,” said the olive skinned man. I gave him a look of frank incredulity and bit my tongue. These maniacs had just casually assaulted three Empire guards, and were now going to invite me over for tea and crumpets.

            “You just killed three people!” I exclaimed, unable to restrain myself further. “You just bloody killed…I don’t believe this. You just killed three people! Don’t you get it? Three! Count them. Now what? Eh? Who should we kill next? The Emperor? No. Here’s an idea: Kill me. Please, go ahead. I’d hate to hold you up. You must have some children to massacre or something, so come on and get it over with. Save the Empire a job.”

            “They aren’t dead,” said the black man.

            “What?” I muttered.

            “They aren’t dead,” he repeated. “Any of them. Though I thought that last one was going to give us no choice.”

            “No choice?” I said, incredulous. “He nearly forced you to butcher him in cold blood? If someone says ‘hello’ to you in the street is that grounds for garroting? I mean, you must have all kinds of interesting ways of killing people who—I don’t know—ask you what time it is, or offer you a piece of fruit or—”

            He clapped his hand over my mouth.

            Actually, I was surprised they’d let me go on as long as I had. The pale kid stepped towards me with the guard’s shortsword in his hand and hatred in his emerald eyes. I struggled in the black man’s grip but couldn’t move. I shut my eyes and waited for the thrust of steel through my stomach. It didn’t come and, after a moment of stillness, I opened my eyes.

            My would-be attacker had halted and turned his back on me, muttering his fury to the girl. More anxious glances were swapped but the apparent leader stilled them with a gesture of his hand and a stern look at me. I swallowed hard and tried to regain composure.

            “This is Orgos,” he said indicating the black man, who took his big hand away from my mouth and extended it, smiling.

            I stared at them in stunned silence as the introductions were concluded and my brain boiled softly. The pale savage who was no more than twenty was called Garnet, as I had already gathered, and the girl, who still hadn’t quite forgotten my look of distrust, Renthrette. I gave her a friendly smile and kind of wished I’d been more impressive during the fight. Kind of.

            “We do not use the names we were born with anymore, so I am taking no unnecessary risks,” their swarthy leader went on. “I am Mithos, and I—”

            “Mithos!” I bawled, “The Mithos! Oh God! Mithos the thief, bandit, cut-throat, and whole-sale murderer?”

            “You should know better than to trust the Empire’s propaganda,” he remarked grimly.

            “Alright,” I backpedaled, knowing the terms these psychopaths preferred to be known by, “Mithos the rebel and adventurer?”

            “The same,” he said.

Chapter Five: Things Can Always Get Worse.

            “Adventurers” hired themselves out as investigators, guards, explorers, and specialists of various kinds, particularly if the assignment involved a balancing act between risk and profit. In effect they were burglars, thugs, murderers and grave robbers. The Empire, in a rare moment of insight, had made the profession illegal. Adventurers were untrustworthy, and if they obeyed any laws at all they were those of their own personal and erratic honor code. This made them dangerous people to have around and clearly a threat to the ‘peace’ and solidity of the Diamond Empire. The Empire, moreover, had learnt that the likes of my dangerous saviors had organized much of the opposition during the initial invasion of Thrusia and continued to lead uprisings when the mood took them. “Adventurers” were rebels by any other name.

            As a result, the identity of adventurers was much sought-after information by the Empire’s many spies and collaborators. One of the most notorious adventurers, a rebel whose name appeared on wanted lists all over Cresdon, was sitting three feet from me right now.

            Reports of Mithos’ physical appearance were fraught with contradictions, but I could think of half a dozen brutal attacks motivated solely by greed, the desire to eat small children, etc., that had been linked to his name. The knowledge did not make me comfortable.

            I should say that I do not much like the Empire. Thrusia, the mountain region in which Cresdon is situated, fought hard against the invaders but fell the year I was born. Since then we have paid for our defiance. It seems to me that the best policy is to keep your head down and say nothing, which, until today, and despite my somewhat checkered career in the theatre, is exactly what I had done.

            As ever, for those who can come to terms with the presence of an occupying force, there is some profit. I have never actively collaborated with the Empire, but I have become, I must admit, a pretty passive subject. In truth I was—or assumed I was—too insignificant for them to take notice of me. I have lived like a flea on the carcass of their town and they have given me the attention a flea merits. Until about half an hour ago. And now I was sharing a room with the most wanted man in Cresdon and his conspicuously homicidal sidekicks.

            God, what a fiasco.

To be continued…