The Disposable Read online

  “There, there, dear.” Concluding that her outfit was now a lost cause, Eminence patted her daughter sparingly on the head as she turned her awkwardly and hurried her up the dais to the thrones with Paragon, Sweetness, Vanity, and a cluster of other intensely curious Royals and Nobles hard on her heels. “Come and sit down. You!” One finger snapped towards a gaping Servant whom Dullard recognised as Pleasance’s Maid, Menial. “Run upstairs immediately and prepare my daughter a bath and a set of clean clothes. Tell the kitchen staff to bring food and wine immediately. Snap to it!”

  With a startled nod, Menial bolted. Maintaining a careful arm’s length, Eminence manoeuvred her daughter onto the King’s throne before shooing back the curious crowd that had followed her up the steps.

  “Give her some room, for pity’s sake!” she snapped, absently brushing down the discoloured front of her bodice as she dropped into her own throne beside her. “Can’t you see she’s traumatised?” She turned to Pleasance, her eyes raking over her grimy form with shocked disgust. “My dearest, what’s happened to you? Surely you should be safely In Narrative by now!”

  Pleasance’s lower lip was quivering like a grounded fish. “It’s all gone wrong!” she repeated with a shrill, tremulous sob that drifted through a good couple of octaves. “They ruined everything! I was kidnapped!”

  “Kidnapped?” Paragon boomed from the side of the dais as Dullard curiously drifted closer to the throng. “But the instructions said the kidnap attempt was thwarted!”

  Pleasance gave another brief wail of distress. “I know! But they ignored the instructions! They kidnapped me! Kidnapped me and refused to give me back! They tied me up and gagged me! They dragged me up trees and down holes in the ground! They threw me into a river not once but twice! And they tried to chop my head off!”

  Gasps of shock and disbelief shuddered through the horde of Nobles as hurried whispers broke out in the little clumps throughout the pack. Valiant and Bold, former Heroes both, exchanged a look of indignant fury as they grasped their swords and rushed forwards.

  “Who did this?” Valiant proclaimed furiously. “Who perpetrated this indignity? I will track them down and rend the flesh from their bones for a thousand days! They will pray for the mercy of a death that will not claim them!”

  “Disposables!” Pleasance spat out the word like a curse. “It was a pair of filthy Disposables and a shrewish Interchangeable Barmaid! They’ve disrupted my entire story! They dragged me off into the woods and made the Merry Band chase them; they married Islaine to Sleiss; and then they tried to kill me In Narrative! And do you know why?” She gave a histrionic laugh. “Because they think that they should be the Heroes! They want our jobs!”

  Incredulous laughter punctuated the renewed surge of gasps. Sweetness was staring at her sister with her mouth hanging open.

  “You can’t be serious!” she exclaimed. “Two Disposables and a Barmaid want to be Principals?”

  Pleasance was shaking her head wildly. “It’s better than that! They want The Narrative to listen to them! They want the Taskmaster to do what they say! They think they can change the story! They actually think they can alter the plot!”

  “It sounds to me like they’ve lost the plot,” Vanity drawled dryly. “Are they completely insane? Who do they think they are? No one can change the story but the Taskmaster!”

  “But…haven’t they already? I mean, hasn’t the story already changed?”

  The long and deathly silence told Dullard that he should not have spoken that statement out loud. But he simply hadn’t been able to help himself.

  As those around him had ummed and ahhed in sympathy and repulsion at Pleasance’s words, Dullard had been listening to the toll of a very different set of bells. At first he had wondered if Pleasance had somehow been mistaken, but the state of her and the very fact that she was here rather than riding into the city at the side of the Merry Band was enough to make him pause. Because, surely, no one could disobey the instructions. No one could defy The Narrative.

  Could they?

  But the story had changed. That was what no one else seemed to be grasping. No one was asking “How is this possible?” or “Why has it happened?” They were too busy revelling in the horror of Pleasance’s ordeal. But Dullard’s analytical mind had seized at once upon the big question, the matter of mechanics: “How could this be done?” And “What did it mean for them all that it could?”

  Narrative word was law. The rules of the Taskmaster could only be obeyed. Except that two Disposables and a Barmaid had defied that. They had changed what was to be written. There was no kidnap in the instructions he’d skimmed through, no marriage to Sleiss for Princess Islaine or near miss with decapitation. But if Pleasance was telling the truth—and, aside from natural histrionic exaggeration, there was no reason to assume she wasn’t—then the ultimate, inescapable lore of the land wasn’t ultimately inescapable at all.

  So surely the important matter in hand was not that Pleasance had had a nasty few days, but how she managed to have those few days in the first place.

  Answers like that would do more than fill time. They’d change the world. Surely anyone could see that.…

  One glance at the faces of those around him, however, told Dullard that, as ever, anyone couldn’t.

  Bold fixed his distant cousin with a steely glare. “What’s that got to do with anything?” he retorted crossly.

  In spite of the fact that he could tell he was wading into a veritable quagmire of hostility, Dullard’s common courtesy nevertheless required that he try and answer the question.

  “Well,” he managed, uncomfortably aware of the burn of eyes. “It’s that it shouldn’t work, should it? Those Disposables shouldn’t be able to just change the direction of The Narrative. I’m very sorry for Pleasance and everything, but surely there’s a bigger picture we need to consider.”

  “Bigger picture?” The words slithered from Pleasance’s lips like venom. “I’ve been kidnapped, mistreated, hurled around, and humiliated! What exactly is bigger than that?”

  Dullard pulled a face. “Well, if these Disposables have really got the power to change the course of The Narrative, that would make a fundamental change in both our thinking and our way of life. They’ve done something that shouldn’t be able to happen, and that’s significant. Your inconvenience may have uncovered—”

  “Inconvenience?!” Pleasance’s shriek could have cut through solid lead. “Inconvenience?! The only difference they’ve made to my way of life is to ruin it! They’ve delayed my entry into this story, and the sooner they are caught and locked away, the better! I have been brutally mistreated, and all you care about is whether they should have been able to do it? What does it matter if it should or shouldn’t work when I’ve been treated like that?”

  The cacophony arose then, soothing voices telling Pleasance that of course it didn’t matter and that Dullard was an idiot who didn’t know what he was talking about. Bold and Valiant fixed him with glares of doom. Then the Servant reappeared to usher Pleasance, her mother, and her sister away for a cleansing bath and a change of clothes. Quibble fussed around them like a hungry fly until the Queen chased him away. Grasping his book, he instead scampered back into the throne room.

  “My Lords and Ladies,” he declared, his high-pitched voice teetering slightly. “I’ve just received word that The Narrative will be here in the morning to collect the princess. As far as is possible, events will proceed from there as planned. You’ll find your usual chambers prepared and your costumes hung out in your garderobes. Please check the fittings before tomorrow—we don’t want anyone looking awkward!” He smiled fleetingly. “So bright and early here tomorrow morning. Thank you!”

  In an elegant, gossipy hustle, the remaining Nobles and Royals headed en masse towards the door. As Dullard turned wearily to join them, he felt a heavy slam against his shoulder that sent him staggering.

  Bold gave him a cold grin as he sauntered past, his own shoulder flexing from the i
ntentional barge. “You think too much, Dullard,” he told his distant cousin sourly. “You need to sort out your priorities. You don’t seem to realise you’re not the only unattractive buffoon this family has turned out. You wouldn’t be hard to replace.”

  He was always polite. That was just who he was. In the face of all insults and all mockery, Prince Dullard always replied with a kind rebuff or graceful retreat. But for some reason, just this once, the smug look on Bold’s blond goateed face as he turned away hit a previous untapped vein of spirit.

  “Neither were you,” he murmured under his breath.

  Bold’s head snapped back in Dullard’s direction, his hearing worryingly better than anticipated. He scrutinised his cousin’s immediately friendly smile for a moment, trying to establish in the tumult of the room if he had heard what he had heard; but then, with a final suspicious look, he swivelled on his heel and stalked out, sending several background Nobles flying as he barrelled through the door.

  Dullard paused, considering the rather unexpected satisfaction that his retort had generated. That hadn’t been as bad as he’d thought it might be.

  But this place…

  As he wandered off down the Palace corridors and up the winding stairs, watching as the herd peeled off around him to their chambers to primp and preen for a Narrative visit, his mind couldn’t help but mull over the questions raised down in the throne room. If it was possible for an Ordinary Disposable to alter the course of The Narrative, did that mean that anyone could do it? But how would anyone possibly go about it? How would they resist the honey-like flow of the Narrative guidance in their minds? But if it could be done, if The Narrative could be defied and disrupted, then that might give the characters themselves the Narrative power. Why, almost anything might be possible.…

  Still ruminating, Dullard pushed open the door to his chambers. He glanced around at the scatter of half-catalogued rock samples piled on his desk, at the row of swords propped up in the rack near his bed and the cooking cauldron he’d borrowed from the kitchens and still needed to drop back some time propped next to the hanging cluster of herbs drying by the fire. Well, he’d better take a look at his costume, he supposed, left in the garderobe as usual to keep the moths away. The question was, would it be ridiculous lace this time or a ruff that made him look like he’d swallowed a plate?

  With a gentle shove, he opened the door to the small side chamber that was home to both his wardrobe and his personal facilities and moved quickly down the narrow corridor into the garderobe chamber. There, as he had expected, hung his Prince Tretaptus costume: a green-and-blue clashing brocade doublet and hose with a huge, terrifying ruff and a quite embarrassingly snug-looking codpiece.

  A little less expected, however, was the man’s head sticking up from the open bowl of his privy chute and gazing at him with the kind of horror one usually reserved for the coming of a Dark Lord.

  Dullard stared at the man. Open-mouthed, the man stared back.

  “Fodder!” The female voice that rose from somewhere below was more than a little strained. “Why have you stopped?”

  “I can’t hold on!” The second, more distant voice belonged to another man. “I don’t want to go back down into that stuff again! Hurry up!”

  It seemed that three strangers were climbing up his garderobe chute. Well, it was a little unusual, Dullard had to admit. But, as ever, common courtesy won out.

  “Hello there,” he greeted in a friendly, if rather bemused, manner. “If you don’t mind me asking…what are you and your friends doing in my toilet?”

  * * *

  He had walked through several miles of foul and stinking sewer under the weight of Shoulders’s grumbling. With legs that were screaming at him in pain, he had taken the lead on a perilous climb up seven storeys of garderobe braced for the horror that could at any moment have dropped from above. But nothing could have prepared Fodder for what he found at the top of it.

  He didn’t know the man. That was something at least; if they’d never crossed paths, it meant there was a remote chance that they could bluff their way past him. And, in all fairness, the man standing before him had the look of someone who could definitely be bluffed past. He was slender, but awkwardly so, his limbs gangly, his hair a lank brown-black crowning a narrow face dominated by a highly distinctive nose and finished off with a not inconsiderable chin. Add in the impressive overbite and the vaguely bewildered air, and the distinct impression was of somebody who would probably take just about any hogwash offered at face value.

  He hoped.

  Fodder smiled back at the man, though with both his desperation and his pain, the expression was somewhat strained. Need a story, need a story, need a…

  Inspiration struck like a bolt of lightning. “Cleaning it!” he exclaimed. “We’re cleaning it! Me and my friends!”

  The eyebrow continued its ascent. “Cleaning it? From…within?”

  Fodder suspected his grin was a little manic, but he was clinging on for his life at the top of a seven-storey drop down into a world of misery, and it really was the best he could do. “Best way to do a thorough job!” he declared heartily. “How else would you make sure it’s all cleaned out?”

  The man tilted his head alarmingly thoughtfully. “Well, I’d use wet rags on a long stick,” he informed Fodder, tapping one finger against his chin. “That way, you see, you could reach down without getting yourself dirty and scrub away to your heart’s content!” His grin was absurdly helpful. “And if you used a nice springy wood like birch, you could probably even work it down those angled chutes they use in the garderobes on the lower floors and have a good go at those hard-to-reach places.”

  Oookay. “Brilliant!” Fodder exclaimed frantically. “Why didn’t we think of that? I do feel silly now; don’t we all feel silly?”

  The chorus of “Yes!” that arose from below was distinctly half-hearted.

  The man, however, was smiling self-effacingly. “I do like to think I have a knack for solutions,” he said modestly. “I’m always keen to help out where I can. Oh and speaking of which…” His brow furrowed slightly. “You must be terribly sore and cramped up in there. Would you like me to help you get out?”

  The grin was straining Fodder’s cheeks. “That’d be nice!” he managed, his voice a thin, unflattering squeak. “Much appreciated!”

  “Of course, of course!” The man hurried forward with an odd sort of lollop. He lifted the short wooden plank that covered all but the necessary round entry over the drop quickly and carefully away from Fodder’s head. Fodder’s hands lashed out at once to grasp the stone rim as the man’s fingers dug into the back of his padded tunic and assisted him in his clambering. After a few awkward moments of joint effort, Fodder hauled his screaming legs safely over the parapet and staggered out onto the stone floor.

  “Ow,” he managed, his fingers drifting to the agonising mass of bone and tissue that he had once called his knees.

  The man gave an odd little chuckle as he leaned down into the unappetising hole once more, grabbing hold of Flirt’s arms and hauling her upwards too. “Sore knees?” he offered rather wryly. “I know the feeling! Back in my early caving days, there were times I had trouble walking in a straight line after squeezing my way through some tight chimneys up in the Savage Mountains. There was this one fault line I was following, trying to trace this particularly remarkable vein of feldspar—” He broke off as he and Fodder heaved together to haul the red-faced and shaky-looking Flirt out into the chamber, but the flow of inexplicable words was dammed only briefly. “And I ended up having to shimmy about fifty feet up a narrow chimney that really could only have been formed by some manner of water seepage, perhaps during a flood period, when the water table was raised slightly.” Smiling and apparently oblivious to the bewildered expressions that Fodder and Flirt were now sharing, the man turned a final time and leaned down the hole once more to offer a hand to Shoulders.

  “My goodness me, it was tricky! Water-smoothed rock offers les
s variety of grip and, of course, it narrowed significantly in the higher reaches. Why, by the time I reached the top, I was starting to think I might need to pay a visit to the Duty Pixies and get my knees replaced!” His eyes widened as he stared down the garderobe to where Shoulders was shuffling frantically upwards towards him. “Goodness me, it is quite a long way down there, isn’t it?” He apparently took Shoulders’s whimper as an affirmative. “I hadn’t realised Higgle had made the Palace so high today! I’m sure there weren’t all that many floors when I walked up here. It does put me in mind of that rock chimney I was just talking about.…”

  The babbling man caught Shoulders firmly by the armpits as Flirt and Fodder scrabbled for his hands. Leaning back with a grimace, the man heaved, hauling a distinctly bemused-looking Shoulders up to join them in the garderobe chamber. Shoulders’s feet scrabbled for a moment against the stone, but he managed somehow to find purchase and a moment later was staggering sideways into Fodder. Dusting off his hands, the man then reached swiftly down and with one easy motion, deposited the toilet seat back in place.

  “But it was all worth it, of course!” he declared cheerfully. “The rock climb, I mean! I happened across a series of pressure chambers brim full with a fascinating selection of igneous rocks. There was a wonderful vein of quartz running through the ceiling. It was quite a challenge to clamber up there and get my hands on it, especially after what I’d already put my knees through that morning, but I gathered some of my best samples that day!” There was something bizarrely endearing about the suddenly hopeful look that crossed his face. “You wouldn’t happen to be interested in seeing them, would you?”

  Fodder stared at him, this nameless stranger who, when faced with three persons unknown climbing up his privy, had not shoved them back down into the wasteland below or called the guard to thump them repeatedly at his behest but had offered friendly cleaning advice, helped them out of the aforementioned loo, and was apparently offering, quite sincerely, to show them his rock collection. He hadn’t a clue what to say.