The Disposable Read online

  “And if we get lost down there, I’ll kill you. Repeatedly. With a stick.”

  “Understood.” Fodder believed it. “From what Flirt’s said about you decking Cringe, I’ve no intention of getting on your—”

  “Oh!”

  It was Fodder and Shoulders’s turn to be bewildered as Flirt inexplicably and rather worryingly began to claw at the neck of her mail shirt.

  “I forgot!” she exclaimed, her eyes finding Shoulders as she dragged a small velvety purse out of her front. “I never looked at what this thing was!”

  Shoulders’s eyes had also widened, but Fodder remained emphatically none the wiser. “What the heck is that?” he asked, moving closer as Shoulders did as Flirt groped at the drawstrings of the purse.

  Flirt glanced up briefly. “Cringe gave it to us just before he told Shoulders to punch him,” she declared. “He said if we didn’t get the princess back, we’d still be able to mess up the story with it.”

  Shoulders was shaking his head as Flirt tipped the purse over her hand. “I think he was having us on,” he exclaimed. “I don’t see how anything so small could possibly…”

  His voice tailed away as a shining object dropped into Flirt’s palm.

  Even by twilight, it glittered. The gold band was engraved with a tangled array of beautifully twisted mystic symbols. Two snake-like rivers of gold curled up to embrace the multi-faceted ruby that gleamed within its grasp, shifting shades of crimson and scarlet dancing beneath the crystal depths. It was a ring born to be lovingly described and gazed upon with awe.

  Flirt was gaping appropriately. “This is the Ring of Anthiphion,” she said softly. “The Ring of Destiny! This is the object of the Quest!”

  Shoulders’s eyes were huge. “Why did Cringe have it?”

  Fodder actually laughed, fighting the bubble of euphoria that was threatening to break through. “Maybe you should have listened to Bard’s story so far after all. He was supposed to have it. His character stole it, remember? The Merry Band have been chasing him down.”

  “But they need this.” Flirt’s smile was blossoming too. “They can’t finish the Quest without it. It’s vital to the Final Confrontation!”

  Fodder didn’t miss the hope that bloomed in Shoulders’s eyes. “Wait a minute. Does this mean we don’t need the princess back? We can ruin the story without her, can’t we? There’s no need to crawl into the City through the sewers!”

  But as Fodder stared at the glistening prize that had dropped so unexpectedly into their laps, his mind was already running through what he knew of the Quest to come. The euphoria bubble burst with a weakly plop.

  “We still need the princess,” he said quietly. Both Flirt and Shoulders’s grins froze on their faces as they stared at him in bewilderment.

  It was Shoulders who voiced the mutual incredulity. “Why?”

  Fodder sighed. “Because they don’t need this until the end, and that’s ages away. We can’t sit around and wait the whole length of a Quest to sort this out. Do you really think we’ll be able to stay out of sight for that long?” The looks he received in return were answer enough. “Besides, they have the Artisans. Who’s to say they won’t be able to make a new Ring of Destiny as soon as they find out this one’s gone? We’ll be okay as long as we keep it out of sight, but Cringe probably won’t stay quiet about losing it forever.”

  Flirt grimaced. “He was protecting his own backside. If he holds true to that, he may have told them already. Otherwise, they’d be asking awkward questions about why he didn’t tell them sooner that we’d stolen it.”

  Fodder stared at the Ring once more. “We’ll keep it,” he said firmly. “It’s good to have a backup plan if this doesn’t work out. But we still need to get the princess back.”

  Flirt nodded. “I’ll look after this,” she said, yanking awkwardly at the drawstrings as she reached down and started to unwind a strip of leather from the hilt of her sword. “I’ll hang the purse around my neck.” She grinned slightly. “Then if anyone wants it back, they’ll have to fight me for it!”

  “Heaven help them!” Shoulders exclaimed with sincerity. He glanced towards the City and sighed vehemently. “I suppose my saying anything else about this wouldn’t be appreciated, would it?”

  “Well, we’d appreciate it more if you didn’t,” Fodder admitted. “And with that, I think we’d better hurry up and get inside. The Narrative will probably be along in a day or so, which means we won’t have much time to find her and get her out.”

  “Happy days.” Shoulders was staring with distinct resignation at the distant grate that covered the large drain. “Crawling through waist-deep sewage into a city full of enemies to retrieve a princess who doesn’t want to be retrieved any more than we want to retrieve her, and for what? The vague hope that we might get some attention? That people might like the idea of things being different?”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Fodder conceded.

  “Yeah, well,” Shoulders muttered, staring at the slow drift of lights spreading through the windows of the streets below. “It’d be nice to think that there’s some bugger down there who’d appreciate it. Because right now, it’s the three of us against the world, and I can’t see how the world’s not going to win.”

  And at that moment, Fodder couldn’t help but feel that listening to Shoulders might be a mistake, because unfortunately, he’d just made rather too much sense. Grim and Cringe had raised their hopes and let them down. But on the other hand, surely, somewhere there had to be someone who’d see the value of what they were doing. Once word was out, surely everyone would.

  He hoped.

  Well, now was not the time for this. They had a princess to retrieve.

  Darkness had all but fallen. Sneaking to the drain via the cover of the reeds along the river probably wouldn’t prove too challenging. It wasn’t as though out-of-Narrative guards were actually doing any guarding.

  He turned to his two friends and mustered a smile. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve been in the metaphorical sewage for this long. Time to try out the real thing.”

  * * *

  Prince Dullard of the Other Kingdom was, he was frank enough to admit, just a little bit bored.

  Shifting his feet for the third time that minute, he gave a rather perfunctory glance to the character sheet he’d been presented with by Strut right back before this new Quest had begun. It was an unnecessary act, since he had committed it to memory on the day he had received it, but it passed as something to do, and Dullard couldn’t bear pointless inactivity. Prince Tretaptus of Mond, he was to be called, a pompous, arrogant buffoon betrothed to the gracious and lovely Princess Islaine. His general instructions were to strut around being obnoxious until the princess fled at the prospect of marrying him, and then to show up again as a terrible commander who got his men killed before being saved by the princess in the Final Battle. As his Narrative roles went, it was fairly standard fare. And that was to be expected.

  With his rather indulgent chin and slightly outsized overbite, not to mention a highly interesting if not particularly flattering nose, Dullard had never been destined for heroic greatness. The role of the Rejected Suitor—the less appealing but mostly harmless alternative to Evil Lords, Heroes, and Boys of Destiny—was the best he could have reasonably aspired to; and though it generally involved some degree of personal humiliation and shameful cowardice In Narrative, Dullard was very much aware that things could have been worse. After all, at least he had plenty of time to himself—and to Dullard, that was what really mattered.

  For, like many characters whose Narrative time was reasonably limited, Dullard had developed a certain obsession with hobbies. He’d been a frequent visitor to the University library even before his elevation to Principal, and the leisure time provided by his new status as the Rejected Suitor allowed him the liberty of finally indulging himself in certain areas that had always held his interest. Although he was the first to admit that his dabbling in various areas of science, na
ture, and craftsmanship was of little distinction and valuable only in the sense that it kept him amused, he still took much pleasure from it. Even the simple satisfaction of recording what he learned filled him with the warm glow of achievement. That was why knowing that more than a dozen of the rock and ore samples he’d gathered on his most recent trip to the Savage Mountains were waiting on his desk to be catalogued made being forced to stand around pointlessly feel all the more frustrating.

  But word had been received that The Narrative was finally likely to be heading in their direction, and the hive of preparations around the Palace and the City had left Dullard with minimal opportunity for privacy. One of Strut’s priestly minions from the Grand Temple had rounded him up late that morning and shuffled him out into the Narrative-prepared areas of the Palace to await further instructions. Since said instructions had been less than forthcoming in all but generalities, the result was that Dullard and the entire cast of the Royal Palace had been left to cool their heels together for the whole of the afternoon and he was now, as mentioned, just a little bit bored.

  Then again…observing the uncharacteristic twitchiness of the Priests who’d gathered them and the fact that nobody seemed quite sure what schedule they were supposed to be working to, Dullard couldn’t help but feel that something or other seemed to be wrong.

  In the absence of Strut, it was Quibble, the Officious Courtier who dealt with non–Merry Band nobility, who was directing events. Higgle, the Duty Pixie in charge of Landscape and Architecture, had been nothing more than a green blur as he’d hurtled around at the Courtier’s direction and redressed the Palace as instructed. But there was a distinctly manic nervousness to Quibble’s usually haughty demeanour. His little silver instruction book glowed gold with fresh instructions every other minute, and at every tinkle, he seemed to lose yet another precious iota of composure. Even as Dullard watched, Quibble’s eyes widened almost comically at the latest words to fill the page, and without a word to his charges, he grabbed a Priest by the front of his robes and bolted from the room.

  Dullard frowned to himself. Now, that really was most unusual.

  A simple glance around told him that no one else seemed to have noticed the odd atmosphere pervading the Palace on this particular day. But that was hardly a surprise. Most of the other members of the Royal and Noble Families were simply wandering around the throne room, adjusting their bodices, strapping on their swords, and gossiping as they always did.

  And although Dullard was always loath to speak ill of anyone, he was frank enough to admit in the silence of his mind that the only way to get an intelligent conversation in the Royal Palace these days was to talk to himself.

  Because the trouble was that life in the Royal Palace was just so…vapid.

  There was nothing to it. As was so often expected of their Narrative counterparts, certain areas of the Royal Family had raised idleness and pointless activity to a fine art. They drifted impressively through corridors. They gazed into mirrors. They practiced gracious smiles or swashbuckling, dancing and archaic pronouncement, gay laughter and soaring song. They never picked up so much as a goblet if a Servant could do it for them, and they fully expected that everything they should happen to need in order to wander through their lives should be provided without the slightest effort on their parts.

  Dullard’s loping, awkward stride was singularly unsuited for drifting. He rarely gazed in mirrors as no one, least of all himself, was much impressed by what stared back. And he’d never, ever understood the appeal of just sitting around and being waited on hand and foot. Where was the pleasure in that? Where was the stimulation? The other Royals lived for nothing but The Narrative, and all The Narrative did was guide them mindlessly in the direction chosen. They passed their entire lives without even once troubling to activate their brains. It was the most heinous waste of a life.

  And no one else seemed able to see that.

  He’d tried to explain it to some of them once, at the celebration ball for Vanity’s marriage to the newly appointed Duke Valiant after the conclusion of The Sword of Grul. The husband of former Princess Sweetness, Count Bold—who happened to be a distant cousin of his on his father’s side and for whom a slightly indulgent chin had worked out a great deal more beneficially—had taken to baiting him. Bold hadn’t been happy since his Hero days had wrapped up after The Vile Rose, and had never settled well into the cast of supporting Nobles. Most of the more recent senior Royals had been present—Queen Eminence and King Paragon with their daughter Pleasance, Vanity and her clique, and a few others—when Bold had made a scathing comment about Dullard wandering off to visit the Artisans. So Dullard had decided to give them a chance to see how different things could be. He’d explained his point of view in intricately polite detail, being careful not to give offence and trying to ensure that they understood he really was trying to help them to lead richer and more fulfilling lives by stretching themselves and experimenting with their potential.

  The mockery had lasted for days. It still hadn’t fully died down.

  Because they were Royalty, with the blood of generations of Narrative Kings and Queens, Heroes and Heroines flowing within their veins. They were honoured, unique, special. What need had they to prove anything?

  Dullard’s father had been a King, long ago, albeit a vain and foolish one beguiled by the Enchantress he’d later married. But Dullard had never really felt that that made him special. Until he’d taken up his hobbies, mostly what it had made him was bored.

  Dullard had found the other Royals’ treatment of his suggestions more than a little unreasonable. But he had founded his life on the idea of respecting common courtesy, and he always made the effort to be kind and polite to every person he met, no matter how obnoxious they might be in return. Kindness bred kindness, his mother always said, and he had stuck to the maxim vigorously, even in the face of the distinctly unkind behaviour of his peers. As a result, he was far too polite to turn back on his distant relatives and tell them he considered them to be a bunch of stuck-up, selfish prigs with as much human feeling as a dead squirrel and the collective mental capacity of a lobotomised goldfish. He was polite enough that he even felt guilty thinking it.

  It didn’t stop him, though.

  It just didn’t seem right that life was like this, that people so mindless and lazy got all the rewards both in and out of Narrative. But there wasn’t exactly anything he could do about it, and no one around the Palace was likely to give him a sympathetic ear on the subject. They were far more likely to get the Servants to tar and feather him and hang him from the battlements.

  And since he utterly refused to be drawn into the clusters of vapid gossip and preening around him, Prince Dullard’s natural state in social situations was to be stood off to one side, twitching his feet and suffering intensely from boredom.

  He gave a weary sigh. His musings had only killed a small amount of time. Botheration.

  A flash of green distracted his attention. Above his head, Higgle, his tiny emerald wings working at blurring speed, was opening out the walls between the newly gleaming buttresses into long, elegant stained-glass windows. The darkness beyond the panes told Dullard that evening had snuck up whilst they had been hanging pointlessly around in the throne room. It was a shame really, as he was sure that with the sun behind them, those fine long windows would have flooded the room with lovely colourful patterns that would certainly dance nicely over the marble floor.…

  Dullard narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. Glass. That was something he’d never really considered before. It was superheated sand, essentially, and he knew plenty about sand from his rock studies. But what kind of sand would work best? What intensity of temperature would be sufficient to make it melt and be malleable? What manner of elements or chemicals other than pixie dust would create such vibrant colours? And glass could be blown, of course, into all manner of vessels and bottles and vials—he’d seen it done at a distance during his foray into the Artisans District, although it hadn�
��t much troubled his mind until now. It would be fascinating to learn how it was done and see what he could make of it. Maybe between his rejection by the princess and the Final Battle, there would be time to…

  “Pleasance! Oh, my baby, what on earth has happened to you?”

  The mindless background hum of gossip died in an instant. Jerked out of his glassy reverie, Dullard followed the shocked gazes of his fellow Royals towards the door through which Quibble had vanished a few minutes earlier and found himself staring along with them.

  It was Princess Pleasance. But not as he’d ever seen her before.

  Her perfectly coiffured mass of blonde curls was a tangled wreckage, reminiscent of a bird’s nest after the passage of a tornado. Her face was smeared with grime and greenish algae, and the evidence of several nasty cuts and bruises was fading against her usually alabaster skin. Her clothing was a ruin: ripped, torn and battered, and smeared with mud, dirt, and what looked like a species of river weed that, if he was not mistaken, mostly grew in the swirling pools of the upper reaches of the Tumbling River. It had always made good soup stock when mixed with cumin and a hint of—

  “Mother!” The distressed wail that erupted from Pleasance’s lips almost shattered Higgle’s newly created windows. Queen Eminence had wafted elegantly down from the dais towards her daughter’s side, but the sight of her filthy state stopped her cold in her tracks. Even as Pleasance threw off the blanket that the nervous Priest had wrapped around her shoulders and plunged into her mother’s arms, Dullard could see the Queen struggling to keep her nose as far away from her daughter as she could. Pleasance had flung her arms around her torso as she burrowed her head against her mother’s chest, but the Queen’s hands snapped onto Pleasance’s shoulders as she struggled at fingertip point to keep her traumatised child from messing up her clothes. She failed miserably.

  “Oh, Mother!” Pleasance seemed to be utterly oblivious to Eminence’s increasingly fervent efforts to pull out of the embrace. “It’s been so horrible! It’s all gone wrong, and I’ve had a terrible, terrible ordeal! I’m so happy to be home!”