The Disposable Page 13

  But that was the point, wasn’t it? He was only ordinary because that was all he’d ever been allowed to be. He’d never had the chance to show he could be anything else.

  And now the Taskmaster and The Narrative were trying to steal away his will—his choice—by planting a character riddled with self-doubt into his head.

  It was everything he’d started this to get away from.

  Clunny was wrong. And he’d been wrong too. He didn’t want to change the world. He just wanted to tweak it a bit. He wanted to make things optional.

  He dreaded to think what would have happened if he’d stepped into Narrative with this character still in his head. No doubt he would have given them up in despair, his will to fight drained by a planted personality that had no place in his life. But Cringe’s explanation had sent that spectre packing, loaded it off into the back of his mind and locked it firmly away like the invading force it was. He was not going to dance to the Taskmaster’s tune again! He was not going to dance to any tune but his own!

  And that was what mattered: getting people to accept that things could be seen differently. Cringe’s attitude boded well for that: the idea that change could be more interesting. And in a strange way, so did Clunny’s attitude, for all that it was negative, for it told Fodder something very significant.

  Clunny had got it.

  Last night, it had been clear that most of his friends hadn’t even been able to comprehend what he was saying, couldn’t grasp the idea of speaking out against the Taskmaster, couldn’t consider that the world could be any other way. But Fodder had seen in Clunny’s eyes that his friend had been thinking about it. He’d seen what had happened last night and realised it was possible that the Taskmaster’s way was not the only one. That he didn’t like it, and didn’t have the nerve to stand up against the status quo over it, was obvious. But he’d understood. He’d understood enough for it to scare him.

  And that was a big first step.

  Perhaps there was some hope for them yet. If they could sow the seeds of the idea, put it into people’s heads, make them look at the world that little bit differently…

  “Feeling reinvigorated, are we?” At some point while Fodder had been lost to his musings, Cringe had refilled and relit his pipe. “That often happens. Once you put down a clear line between yourself and what’s been planted, things tend to clarify. So.” He filled the air with smoke in one easy exhalation that set the weary-looking princess coughing beneath her gag. “Are you going to try and convert me now?”

  Fodder tried his best. He ran through his thoughts and arguments, explaining everything that had happened since last night—was it only this time yesterday that this had all begun? It felt like forever!—solidifying it all in his head as much for his own sake as for Cringe’s. He didn’t want to risk it being taken away from him again. It was just as well, since, in spite of his assistance to their cause, Cringe remained so firmly perched on the fence that Fodder was tempted to offer him a cushion.

  “I respect the nerve of what you’re doing, and I respect your right to do it.” The Dark Henchman was on his fourth helping of tobacco, whilst both Shoulders and the princess had long ago fallen asleep. Even Flirt’s eyelids were looking a little droopy. “But to be honest, I’m not fussed as to whether you get your way or not. My life doesn’t thrill me, but I can live with it. Given the choice, I’d probably give up lurking for a living, but it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t. I’m no rebel, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d much rather keep my nose clean.” He grinned cheerfully. “I don’t want to be in the thick of the chaos. I’d much sooner sit back and watch.” He raised his pipe in a mock salute. “Must be the influence of all the cowards I’ve played. I wish you the best of luck, though.”

  In spite of the yawn she was battling, Flirt stepped in. “Do you reckon any of the other Principals might be interested in helping us? Much as I hate to say it, more people would probably listen to them than to us.”

  “You mean you haven’t tried to convert the princess yet?” Cringe snorted at the looks on their faces. “You’re probably right. Every princess I’ve ever worked with has been a brat from start to finish. I swear they must breed them that way.” He grinned slightly. “I can’t even begin to tell you how good it feels to see one gagged. Marvellous! And as for the other Principals…” He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Trouble is, I don’t socialise with many of the others outside of a professional capacity. Mostly I just hang out with Doom and…hmmm.” He paused, his face pensive, tapping his pipe against his nose absently. “That’s a thought. I could take you to see Grim.”

  “The Dark General?” Fodder had never met him personally, although he had seen him from a distance during numerous Final Battles. “You think he’d listen?”

  Cringe waved one hand in an uncertain see-saw. “He might. He was bitching to me only last week about how tired he was of hanging around the Grim Fortress being hearsay. He’s grumpy about the fact he’s always name-checked much more than he’s featured. Our Grim’s a bit of a glory hound, and he never gets as much of it as he feels he deserves.”

  “Surely it’s the same for Doom the Dark Lord too,” Flirt piped in suddenly. “He’s never anything but hearsay for more than the last few chapters, is he? Maybe we could persuade them both?”

  Cringe laughed out loud. “Grim’s a maybe,” he conceded. “But Doom doesn’t give a steaming monkey’s about his lack of Narrative time. It gives him more time for his hobbies. Do you know he’s learning macramé?”

  Fodder’s mind deliberately shied away from the idea of the enormous armoured figure he’d seen striding through The Narrative crushing innocents by the horde sitting down in the Dark Citadel to play with yarn. It was just too disconcerting.

  “Doom’s content with his lot,” Cringe continued, “but Grim isn’t. He wants more.” His smile widened crookedly. “Tell you what,” he offered suddenly. “You could kill two birds with one stone. What if the High Lord of Sleiss actually got to marry the Princess Islaine? Would that mess up the Taskmaster’s plan enough for you?”

  Flirt and Fodder exchanged a long, thoughtful glance before looking over at the sleeping princess. The High Lord of Sleiss, played by Grim the Dark General, was the threat: the dark suitor lurking, threatening to steal away a precious rose from the humble Hero but never, ever meant to succeed. What if he did? How would the Taskmaster marry the Hero to someone who was married already?

  Easy. By making her a widow. She’ll even have a nice, tortured aspect after her terrible ordeal as the forced bride of pure evil.…

  Fodder shook his head wearily. Perhaps it was because The Narrative had gotten into his head so recently, but he was starting to get a better idea of the kind of mind he was up against. “It’s a nice idea, but I’ve seen how The Narrative works around these problems. It’d just have Bumpkin or Clank kill Grim off and rescue her nobly for an angst-riddled recovery in the arms of her true love.” He sighed profoundly. “There has to be something we can do that it can’t wriggle out of.”

  “I have an idea.”

  Fodder started. He hadn’t even realised that Shoulders had woken up until his friend’s voice cut into their conversation. The dim, moonlight-washed glimpse he caught of his fellow Disposable’s face as he pulled himself closer showed the faintest trace of the too-familiar maniacal grin.

  Oh, no.… Was it because I mentioned Clank? Am I going to want to hear this? It’ll be another half-tankard idea, I swear.…

  “Do you?” Flirt’s voice echoed the wariness that Fodder was feeling to the bone.

  “Oh, yes.” The grin was spreading; not a good sign. “You see, I’ve been hoisting brat-features over there around for a whole day, with her kicking and scratching and screaming in my ears, and that’s done wonders for my imagination. Because I was having a glorious dream about how I pushed her off a cliff and listened to the scream just fade away.…” His eyes drifted off dreamily for a moment before he snapped back to reality. “But
when I woke up and heard you lot pondering what we could do to mess The Narrative up, it occurred to me. Why can’t we do that?”

  “Throw the princess off a cliff?” Flirt retorted sceptically. “Shoulders, for goodness’ sake, she’d just bounce. The non-Narrative damage would heal or Strut would have Squick fix her right up and they’d insert her straight back into Narrative. It’d do nothing but make you feel better.”

  Shoulders actually rolled his eyes. “I’m not talking about picking a cliff at random for the fun of it. I mean, what if we killed the princess off? In Narrative?”

  Fodder paused, his mind seizing upon the suggestion and running it through in his head. Hmmm.… That’s not so half tankard after all.…

  “You see what I mean, don’t you?” Shoulders was gesticulating wildly, his face lit with enthusiasm in the pale moonlight. “Think what it would do to the story. Bumpkin’s inevitable romantic subplot would be shot! Only killing Bumpkin himself would make more of a mess! And it’s been a while since I read the full set of instructions for this Quest, but doesn’t the princess make the decisive difference in the Final Battle again this time round?”

  Cringe was grinning too—in spite of his refusal to become openly involved in their endeavours, his fence appeared to be wobbling slightly. “She disguises herself as a man and rallies the troops, I think. But she’s the only heir to her kingdom, and it’s that kingdom the Hero needs to marry into.”

  Fodder mulled it over. It was an idea with definite possibilities. But…Thud’s Halheid had been important to the Final Battle and romantically entangled too, and now he was coming back as his own twin brother. It would stretch Narrative believability to pull the same trick twice, but would that stop the Taskmaster from trying?

  But wait a minute. Hadn’t Cringe just said…?

  “She’s the only heir? No siblings?” he asked with sudden intensity. “Is that Narratively set?”

  Cringe nodded cheerfully. “In stone. They established it in her backstory through discussion amongst the Merry Band before she was introduced. That’s why Sleiss is so keen to marry her. He wants her kingdom. No brothers, no sisters, not even any close cousins. The absolute, very last descendant of a long and ancient line.”

  “So no magic twins this time.” Flirt was smiling with sudden grimness. “We’d have to do the thing properly,” she stated firmly. “We’d have to make absolutely sure—give her a death that there’s no wriggling out of with last-minute rescues or magical resurrection. And it’ll be tricky to do it In Narrative, with it doing everything in its power to keep her alive. But such a huge change to the Quest…” The smile slipped to a grin. “Everyone would notice, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t be able to just bundle us away and write off what we’ve done. They’d have to listen to us after that.”

  The idea was solidifying, becoming possible, becoming real. And it could work, it really could. Flirt was right; such a massive change to the plot could not be overlooked or brushed aside as random chance by Strut and his ilk.

  In the space of a day, their actions had made a few people understand that the world was not as set in stone as they believed. If they could make even more people realise that what they did could make a difference, there would be no hushing this up. Seeds planted, ideas dropped into Ordinary minds. The Taskmaster wasn’t the only one capable of that anymore. Even if they threw them in the dungeons, it would be too late to stop the idea.

  “We’d need to find The Narrative.” The thoughts tripped off Fodder’s tongue. “It’d need to be somewhere we could hide, somewhere it couldn’t see us until we wanted it to.”

  “With an escape route,” Shoulders added fervently. “I want a way out if this all goes wrong.”

  “We’d need to be quick too,” Flirt chimed in. “To make sure The Narrative has less time to stop us. Quick, decisive, and unavoidably dead.”

  “I know exactly what to do.” The mad gleam in Shoulders’s eyes showed Fodder the direction of his thoughts. “We chop her head off.”

  Flirt had seen it coming too, and it alarmed Fodder slightly that, just for an instant, she seemed to pick up the slightest edge of Shoulders’s gleam. “Yes! On a cliff! If the head went off a cliff but the body stayed at the top, there’ll be no undoing that.”

  Cringe tapped his pipe thoughtfully against his nose. “You know, I heard Strut saying when he rode past that if they didn’t catch the carriage, they’d be sending the Merry Band to besiege Lord Sleiss’s castle to kill time whilst they hunted you down. They’re probably on their way as we speak. And if you want a cliff, the Grim Fortress is on a pretty decent outcropping this time around. There’s a thousand-foot plunge into the Tumbling River from the walls. What if you put the two ideas together? You take the princess to Grim and have it declared that he’s married her. But since they’re married, he’s got his claim to her kingdom and so he doesn’t need her anymore. So what does he do? Kill her in front of her would-be saviours.”

  Flirt pulled a face. “Would Grim be able to defy The Narrative well enough to pull that off?”

  Cringe shrugged. “As long as Fodder is the executioner, what does it matter? If Grim falters, all you’d have to do is swing an axe. And if it does go wrong, the Grim Fortress has plenty of secret passages you could scarper down. If the worst comes to the worst, you could even jump into the river again.” He grinned once more. “It’s only a thousand-foot drop. No trouble.”

  Fodder nodded, ignoring Shoulders’s look of downright horror at the escape plan as his own grin matched those of his companions. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “this might just be worth a try.”

  * * *

  The Grim Fortress was truly grim. There really was no better word for it.

  Like the Archetypal Inn, Fodder knew that the Grim Fortress wandered between a few strategic locations in its chosen corner of the Least Savage Mountains, sometimes perched on top of the towering peak off to their left, at other times balanced on the narrow ledge that broke the otherwise sheer face of a massive cliff in the neighbouring valley, and occasionally lingering on the terrifying overhang that plunged down over the swirling white mass of the Wild Waterfall. The Grim Fortress could block off a whole valley mouth or loom over a gorge—it was versatile that way. On this particular occasion, as Cringe had said, it lurked on top of a jutting outcrop of sheer-sided cliffs that thrust out from the mountainside and pushed the turbulent white waters that gave the Tumbling River its name out and around it in a dramatic and highly describable curve. Say what you would about the Grim Fortress, it did a wonderful line in imposing.

  But as ever, the Fortress itself was unchanged. Heavy walls of dark, harsh stone were roughly hewn into giant blocks that seemed to grow out of the very rock upon which it happened on this occasion to be perched. The windows were high and narrow, the battlements blocky and solid, and the gatehouse, with its vicious-looking portcullis, gaped like a yawning maw exactly as it should. And finally, towering to exactly the right height to make a climb up its outer edge just terrifying enough, one enormous tower loomed over the walls, brooding with perfectly managed menace.

  It really was a masterpiece. It was a shame that it wasn’t used more often. Usually, it only showed up for a small siege, a raid and skirmish, or an early capture and flee, with the glories of the final confrontation inevitably going to the even-more-imposing Dark Citadel in the Barren Wastelands to the north. Judging by the scuffle of figures Fodder could see silhouetted on the battlements, hanging out the blue-and-red Sleiss livery and preparing to look threatening with pikes, the Grim Fortress had not been expecting to see action in this Quest and was being hurried into place. Fodder had Bulked Up here once or twice and was familiar with the Disposables who plied their trade inside. Dodge, Slump, Gurgle, and Thrash were renowned amongst their fellows for the ability to be snuck up behind and have their throats cut by the Merry Band with just the right level of dramatic thrashing. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded and, rebel or not, Fodder had to admire artistry when he
saw it.

  It did make one aspect of Fodder’s mission somewhat easier, though. The Grim Fortress Disposables were so used to being snuck past that getting inside unspotted via one of the numerous secret passages that honeycombed whatever bedrock the Fortress happened to be on probably wouldn’t prove particularly challenging.

  That prospect was something of a relief to Fodder. It had been a long morning.

  The most trying aspect of it had been just before they’d set out, when Pleasance had overheard them hammering down their plans to get her killed In Narrative and had gone up like the Brooding Volcano during a final confrontation. Since this had also coincided with feeding time, she had been unfettered in the venting of her spleen, and the aftershocks of her epic fury were still echoing in Fodder’s ears.

  “Kill me? Kill me? In Narrative??? You can’t kill a princess In Narrative! No one has ever killed a princess In Narrative! It’s unheard of! It’s wrong! I will not let you ruin my Quest and make me a laughingstock! I will not be the first princess ever to die! It’s vile! It’s crass! It’s undignified! Princesses don’t die!”

  Fortunately, further elucidation on the subject had been halted when Flirt had shoved the gag back in place, but Pleasance’s icy gaze had followed Fodder like a glacial stab for the rest of the walk upriver. Fodder was certain that she was plotting something.

  The second problem had been Shoulders’s sudden attack of paranoia, apparently stemming from the fact that they were headed to exactly the place that they had been trying to avoid. The Grim Fortress was, after all, the home of the dungeons and torture chambers, and the idea of walking right into his own potential life sentence was not sitting well with Shoulders.

  “Couldn’t I just wait outside?” he queried for the fifteenth time as he, Fodder, Flirt, and the princess lurked behind a rocky outcropping waiting for Cringe to return from checking whether the path ahead to his secret passageway was clear. “If this Grim doesn’t go for it, all he needs to do is have us bundled down a few flights of stairs, and it’s hello torture chambers! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life lying on a rack being bored out of my brain just because we trusted a stranger! Why do we have to go in there anyway? Why can’t Cringe bring Grim to do the execution out here?”