The Disposable Read online

  It could have been worse, he told himself sharply. And he’d had the ironic death. It had been Narratively memorable and nothing to be ashamed of. It had been a while since he’d died ironically. He supposed he must have been due.

  And it hadn’t been a bad skirmish: fairly standard and run-of-the-mill for a Disposable on duty. Limbs had flown, though luckily not his, since hunting for limbs after a skirmish wasn’t the most interesting way to pass the time. They had impeded the Merry Band briefly but in a lively manner, just as they had been told. He’d gotten to leer and everything. There wasn’t anything to moan about.

  So why did he feel so…so Shoulders-y about it all?

  Because it was always the same. Every time. A lonely road, a pass, a gatehouse—they’d stand there, make threats for a bit, and then start the fight because it was inconceivable that the Merry Band would spill blood without provocation. And then they’d get chopped to pieces, wait for Squick to show up and fix them, and head off to the pub.

  That was his life. It had been his life ever since he’d been old enough to graduate from Village Urchin, and it would be his life until he either achieved Garrulous Old Man status and got to hang out in the pub for the rest of his days or retired to being a simple Background Villager.

  He remembered the day that, back when he was an Urchin, he’d asked his father if he could join the Merry Band and ride around on Quests In Narrative when he grew up. And his father had looked him straight in the eye and said no.

  Patting his little arm, his father had sat him down and explained once and for all how the world worked and why he’d never be anything but Fodder of Humble Village. Members of the Merry Band came from specific families, specially bred and trained. The many branches of the Royal Family provided all Kings, Queens, more mature Heroes and Heroines, and any spare Princes who happened to be required for the Quest. The even vaster Noble Family offered up Knights required for the Merry Band, as well as the Swooning Ladies, Noble Generals and Significant Nobles, and the occasional injection of breeding stock that prevented the Royal Family from producing eight-toed Princes and Princesses with three-and-a-half noses. The Mage Family dealt with Sorcerers, Sorceresses, Crones, and Boys of Destiny. The latter had two career choices on passing out of adolescence: either to join the Royal Family and wait to mature into a King or to grow a grey beard to the right kind of length to become a Sorcerer. The Dark Family dealt with Dark Lords, Dark Generals, Dark Henchmen, and Evil Enchantresses. There were clans who bred Barbarians, Warrior Women and Noble Mercenaries, Thieves and Courtesans, Gods and Deities, Dwarves and Elves, and Assorted Freakish Creatures. There was a whole Family of Officious Courtiers, Scholars and Priests and Priestesses who, out of Narrative, were responsible for ensuring that the Taskmaster’s every instruction was distributed and obeyed.

  And then, there was everyone else. Some families provided Interchangeables—Minstrels, Assassins, Seadogs, Merchants, Innkeepers and Barmaids, Doomed Relatives, Servants and Maids, Trappers, and other small but regular Narrative Roles. The remaining people were Ordinary; background noise in busy scenes, having maybe one line, a brief description or an exclamation, if they were lucky. And there was always plenty of demand for young men to be guards, ruffians, soldiers, and bandits in the Disposables, provided you didn’t mind picking up your own limbs afterwards. Why, his father had declared proudly, Fodder’s great-grandfather, after whom he’d been named, had been disposed of sixteen times in the Quest in which the current Sorcerer had been the Boy of Destiny.

  Since dying had seemed like the most excitement he was going to get, Fodder had applied to join the Disposables as soon as he was old enough. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time. He’d always taken pride in his work. Even Preen respected him in his own pretentious way, making sure that, more often than not, the role of Lead Guard for skirmishes scheduled in the regions of Humble Village and Rambling Woods was handed to him. Fodder had always made sure that the one line of regular writing that made up his lethal instructions was executed with efficiency and interest. The Narrative guided him in the right direction, of course, flowing around him like honey, suggestions for words and actions popping unbidden into his head; but whereas some Disposables grunted their lines and acted as wooden as blocks In Narrative, Fodder prided himself on instilling just that little bit of character.

  But deep inside, something had always nagged at him. Those brief minutes of character had never quite been enough. The voice of the Urchin he had been, sitting on his father’s knee, still echoed with a single question:

  “But why not me?”

  And his father’s answer reverberated in reply:

  “Because that’s just the way it is.”

  And so, here he was, sitting in the mud with a spear in his chest and surrounded by the assorted remains of his comrades while the likes of Thud the Barbarian, Swipe the Thief, Clank the Knight, Harridan the Warrior Woman, Gruffly the Dwarf, Bumpkin the Boy of Destiny, and Magus the Sorcerer rode off merrily unscratched In Narrative.

  Fodder allowed himself one brief sigh and then, as practicality set in, he let it go, just as he always did, every time. He was only a Disposable. And as things stood, that was all he’d ever be.

  Glancing around, Fodder called out to his friends. “Everyone else all right?”

  It was a daft question and they all knew it, but they always felt better somehow for knowing someone had asked. There was a chorus of shouts, mutters, and gargled spitting. To his left, Clunny had wrapped his hands around Swipe’s dagger and was slowly drawing it out of his throat, whilst Thump rubbed the fingers of his remaining arm against the substantial hole in the side of his head. To his right, Dunny was amusing himself by making the arrow sunk deep into his right eye waggle up and down, whilst Midlin and Tumble compared torso slices. Donk was wearily reaching for his legs, which lay alongside his head, and squinting into the mud in search of missing organs. And Shoulders…

  Lying in the mud, half a tankard had been split cleanly into quarters. One half of its owner lay beyond. And as for the other…

  A protracted and indignant gurgling came from the muddy puddle that Fodder knew, with grim certainty, had filled the bottom of the ditch that ran by the road. Well, at least it wasn’t up a tree. It had taken them two hours of poking with their halberds to dislodge him from that branch the last time, and Shoulders had used up so many swearwords that he’d had to start inventing his own.

  With a muddy slurp, the headless body of Shoulders lurched unsteadily to its feet. Clumsily reeling in the way that only a body separated from the part of it giving instructions can, it lurched towards the ditch, slipping and sliding but fortunately remaining upright. It reached down and groped uncertainly around for a moment. And then, awkwardly, its hands lifted something out of the puddle and into breathable air.

  The hitherto unintelligible gurgling all at once became extremely clear.

  “Bloody Clank! Bloody, bloody, bloody Clank!”

  Shoulders’s fingers were making some effort to wipe the worst of the mud away from his face, but the inevitable loss of motor control that came from having one’s head cut off resulted in him mostly poking himself in the eye. With an irate huff, Shoulders abandoned that task and instead lifted his head by his bedraggled hair and twisted his hands to wring it out. His dangling face continued its tirade unbroken.

  “Every time! Every bloody time! He doesn’t have to hurl it so damned far; he does it on purpose, I swear he does! If he had a sense of humour, I’d think he was trying to be funny!”

  Fodder sighed. Generally, he preferred those days when Clank sliced his friend’s head off above the voice-box. Then the moaning was deferred until they were all on their way to the pub.

  His hair wrung out, Shoulders lifted his head to a more normal vantage height.

  “Six Quests! Six Quests and in every bloody skirmish, he’s cut my head off! Ever since he took over Knight duties from old Gallant…oh, now, he was a gentleman, if he took your head off, he always
made sure it landed somewhere soft and dry! But oh no, not Clank, not Mr Heads-Are-My-Signature-Move! This is a vendetta, it’s personal, I know it is!”

  “Well, you did go up to him after the third time it happened and call him a pillock,” Thump remarked fairly. “But there’s no point in moaning about Clank. He’s in the Merry Band; he’s not going to change to convenience a Disposable. He’s doing his job, same as the rest of us.”

  The raspberry sound that Shoulders retorted with was made doubly unpleasant by the fact it came out of both ends of his throat. “Doing his job? Right. Of course… Because it’s not like he hadn’t already done me in with that belly swipe, was it? No, he had to go for the head as well! Just for the show of it! Utterly unnecessary! He’d already cut me open, and…oh, speaking of which…”

  Carefully tilting his wrists, Shoulders angled his head so that his eyes were pointing down the length of his body. His face fell as he sighed with plaintive irritation.

  “Perfect,” he muttered mordantly. “Has anyone seen my entrails?”

  Donk gestured from his prone position. “There’s some over there.”

  “Nah, those are mine.” Tumble scrambled to his feet, grasping his open belly protectively as he hurried over to retrieve them. “They got caught on Thud’s axe.”

  “Gup gat gree?” Clutching his damaged throat, Clunny pointed to the branches of a nearby oak where something purple was dangling and swaying slowly in the breeze. “Gook gike gengrails gu gee.”

  Shoulders gave a gusty sigh. “They’ll be full of splinters! My guts will be woody for days.” He pulled a muddy face. “Where’s Squick? That bloody pixie should be here by now!”

  Grasping the shaft firmly in both hands, Fodder slowly pulled the spear out of his chest, trying to ignore the tingling itchy sensation that he’d come to associate with Narrative damage. Dropping the spear on the muddy ground with a splat, he pulled himself up and wandered over towards his friend.

  “Don’t start on Squick or he’ll put your head on backwards again,” Fodder remarked as he leaned down to pick up Thump’s arm, tossing it over to him as he passed. “And we’d better have all our bits and pieces to hand when he gets here or he might decide he can’t be bothered.”

  Shoulders was still staring forlornly up at his entrails. “How am I supposed to get those down?” he asked plaintively. “If I yank them, they’ll get torn, and you know that Squick gets sniffy about fixing the damage if it didn’t happen In Narrative!”

  Rubbing the tingling, gaping wound in his chest, Fodder halted beside his headless friend. “I think that’s more to do with being a clumsy oaf by falling downstairs and breaking your leg out of Narrative than fishing your entrails out of a tree after a Narrative battle,” he pointed out reasonably. “If it happens in the course of the Quest, I’m sure he won’t mind.”

  “If he ever turns up.” Shoulders rolled his eyes. “Grumpy little—”

  “You want those entrails back in your belly, laddie, you’d do best not to finish that sentence!”

  Fodder’s eyes snapped up. Hovering about a yard above their heads was a little man perhaps a foot tall, his face gnarled and twisted like an excitable fungus beneath his loose green hat, his legs crossed and arms folded as the nearly transparent silvery-purple wings that sprouted from his back worked at impossible speed to keep him hovering in midair. Contrary to what one might expect of someone who was, in point of truth, a pixie, he was wearing a tiny leather jerkin, canvas workman’s trousers, and worn but practical boots. A glittering needle, a spindle of dusty purple thread, and two small pouches hung at his waist.

  Fodder smiled in genuine relief. “Hi, Squick. What kept you?”

  The potato-like face of the Senior Duty Pixie in charge of Human and Animal Repairs scrunched as his shoulders gave a wild approximation of a shrug that pitched his hovering position about a foot off to the right. “I was at Humble Village, putting the haunches back on Bessie.” He huffed loudly. “I told Stout, I said, that ain’t a job for a Senior Duty Pixie on his way to a skirmish, not when there’re limbs hanging off in the Rambling Woods, but would he have it? He would not! Fix my cow back up, he says; I need another helping of good stewing steak or the veg I’ve cooked will spoil! I ask you!”

  “Beef stew tonight, is it?” Thump looked happy as he wandered over, cradling his loose arm. “Great! And Bessie’s haunch is always the best; old Daisy’s getting a bit stringy.”

  Fodder grinned to himself. He remembered the time, a couple of Quests ago, when a Princess named Sweetness had stopped the night off Narrative with the Merry Band at the Archetypal Inn and had refused to eat the roast on the grounds it had once been a living thing. He could vividly recall the look on her porcelain face when Stout the Innkeeper had respectfully pointed out, in deference to the fact that the Royal Family clearly had people to deal with butchery for them and obviously had no idea how real life worked, that actually the cow still was a living thing. All the beef in the village came from the same four cows, which were knocked out, butchered, and then fixed up with their bits replaced by the Duty Pixies on a regular basis. In fact, he’d told her, he was pretty certain that the cows had no idea that they were eaten once a week.

  “Can we not talk about food?” Donk requested. “It’s really disconcerting to feel your stomach rumble from three feet to your left.”

  Squick had apparently forgotten his Bessie-related grump as he surveyed the scene before him with a professional eye. “Quite a skirmish you lads had,” he remarked thoughtfully, jerking the silvery needle out of his belt and deftly threading it. “An arm, a pair of legs, and…hah, of course, a head needing reattachment. A few organs to patch up and put back in place, one skull, one windpipe, an eye and a heart in need of reassembling, and three torsos to close up. Anyone reckon they need any replacements?”

  “I think my entrails might have had it,” Shoulders remarked, gesturing to the tree with a kind of doleful hopefulness. “I wouldn’t mind trading them in.”

  “Hmmm…” Squick sucked thoughtfully at his teeth. “I think we may be lacking a bit in entrails—we ain’t finished restocking after the Final Battle for The Sword of Grul. Hold up, I’ll check.”

  Pulling open the first of his two pouches, Squick shoved his arm inside up to the shoulder and rooted around. “Hmmm,” he said again. “I’ve got some, laddie, but I don’t think they’re your size. Young Offle’s doing his best to whip up some more supplies, but it ain’t quick or easy to conjure up a decent organ out of nowt. I could put an order down for next time, get Thud or Clank to do the honours In Narrative when the new entrails are ready…?”

  Shoulders’s sigh could have blown down a small village. “No, it’s fine,” he said wearily. “Just do your best with the ones in the tree.”

  Squick gave an earthy chuckle as he opened his second pouch. Purplish pixie dust glittered as he dipped his needle into the pouch and withdrew it shimmering. “Well, if it makes you feel better, my best is better than most. Get your bits together, lads. I’ll have you good as new in no time.”

  * * *

  In spite of having lived in Humble Village all his life, Fodder often had trouble finding his way to the Archetypal Inn. It had a tendency to wander.

  The layout of Humble Village was very rarely mentioned In Narrative and was, as a result, relatively stable. The Archetypal Inn was the one feature that most often merited a description and hence, Fodder had, over the course of the last few Quests, drunk in the Lion Inn, a sturdy, stone-built building at the foot of the hills leading to the Bandit Pass; the Rose and Crown, a friendly wooden building next to the fishing pond with a broad veranda and a stable yard to the rear; the Slaughtered Lord, a rather creepy two-storey construction made of dark, tarred wood half hidden at the edge of the trees; and even in the Hunter’s Horn, a lonely inn on a remote hillside with a squalid fireplace and a broken sign, a good mile up the road towards Bandit Pass and almost beyond the village’s designated limits altogether. The latter had not gone down
well with the village’s drinking population.

  But luck was with the Disposables today. As they arrived at the small, scrubby village green, they found the Archetypal Inn parked up not off towards the cattle pen where they’d left it, but on the opposite side of the green. Today, it was a wood-and-stone construction all under the name of the Good Shepherd. The slight greenish twinkle settling across the neatly carved eaves implied that Higgle, the Duty Pixie in charge of Landscape and Architecture Alterations, had only just finished work.

  “So, are you lads sticking around for the night?” Shoulders had cheered up a great deal now that his head had been efficiently reattached, although he remained apparently oblivious to the fact that his left hand, as it had done for most of the time since Clank had joined the Merry Band on a regular basis, was rubbing along the line of his neck rather rabidly. “Or are you hopping a cart back to Fertile Fields and Provincial Town?”

  Donk smiled down at him. Shoulders was by no means short, at least with his head attached, but Donk was one of those enormous, friendly gentle giants who simply towered over everyone. He was vast enough that he generally got described In Narrative as such, in a passing word or two, even when on Bulking Up duty. “Preen’s asked us to stick around for a day or so,” he replied cheerfully. “On the instructions it says there’ll be a bandit ambush up in Bandit Pass tonight, and it’ll probably be more than Lurk, Pounce, and Twister can handle on their own. I think we’ll be Bulking Up.”