The Disposable Page 21

  When he’d imagined meeting members of the Royal or Noble families, he’d assumed they’d all be Pleasance-like in their attitudes and personalities: obnoxious, self-obsessed and superior snobs, talking down to him, sneering and threatening him with multiple unpleasantness for the crime of being Ordinary. Nice, gullible, and completely barmy had never even entered the equation.

  He’d been braced for disdain. He was used to it. But how the heck was he supposed to handle friendliness?

  “Ummm…” he stammered.

  The man’s hopeful grin was spreading. “Honestly, it wouldn’t take a minute! So few people ever take an interest in my hobbies! And besides…” His expression wavered slightly as he bit his lip carefully. “While you’re waiting, it might be a good idea for you and your friends to make use of my…facilities.” With an awkward flick of one hand, he gestured to the pail of water and forlorn bar of soap resting next to the wooden basin by the narrow window. An immaculately folded towel rested beside them. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so, the three of you do…pong, rather.”

  “Ummm…okay.” Faced with such glittering sincerity, Fodder really didn’t know what else to say. “Thanks.”

  The man beamed. “The pleasure’s all mine, I assure you! Help yourselves to soap and water, and I’ll go and see what geological delights I can find!”

  In the same odd, lolloping gait with which he’d entered, the man turned on his heel and hurried away down the corridor, apparently oblivious to the moment of stunned silence left behind in his wake.

  Three jaws gaped. Three sets of eyes blinked.

  Shoulders was the first to recover enough wit to speak, and Fodder felt his words were spoken on behalf of them all:

  “Who the ruddy hell is that nutter?” he exclaimed with feeling.

  To Fodder’s other side, Flirt had turned and lifted the label dangling from the hideous costume hung ready and waiting on the wall.

  “This says his name is Prince Dullard,” she told them. “He’s playing Tretaptus of Mond.”

  “He’s the Rejected Suitor?” Fodder raised an eyebrow. It was no wonder he’d never met him—Rejected Suitors rarely had much to do with rural guards. “A Principal?”

  “Well, that nails it.” Shoulders squared his shoulders as he cast his eyes hurriedly around the little room in which they had been left ensconced. “We have to clobber him!”

  “What?” Fodder was surprised to find that the oddly aghast look on Flirt’s face reflected his own feelings on the matter. “We can’t do that!”

  Shoulders gave an incredulous snort. “Why not? He’s a Principal! One word to an Officious Courtier, and it’s the torture chambers for us! We have to clobber him and tie him up before he has the chance to turn us in!”

  “But we can’t!” Flirt looked genuinely indignant. “You saw him, didn’t you? He’s harmless and nice and hasn’t a clue who we are! If he heard us now, he’d probably offer to help us find a good stick to whack him with! It’d be like clobbering a happy puppy in a box!”

  Shoulders huffed loudly. “Well, I for one don’t want to risk your happy puppy peeing on my shoes. We need time to find the princess, and I don’t want to leave some daft barmpot wandering around blathering to anyone who’ll listen about the three folks he found down his loo. Because maybe he’s too thick to twig that’s dodgy, but one word to Strut or the princess herself…”

  Reluctant though he was to admit it, Fodder had to concede that Shoulders had a point. It was not so much Dullard himself who was a danger but what he might inadvertently blurt out to anyone else.

  “He’s right,” he admitted with a sigh. “Sorry, Flirt, but he is. Cruel as it sounds, we have to wallop him, tie him up, and hide him in here.” He pulled a face. “It’s a shame he’s not more important. If he had a bigger role, we could take him instead of Her Royal Obnoxiousness, but a Rejected Suitor can be written out in a snap. We have to get him out of the way.”

  Arming themselves was tricky, given where they were, and Flirt and Fodder did not succeed. Preferring not to leave it in the sewer alcove where they’d concealed the rest of their kit, only Shoulders had kept his sword belt on for the climb up the garderobe. He therefore took the lead as they moved quickly down the narrow corridor towards the chamber beyond. As they approached, Fodder could hear Dullard’s already-familiar voice still chattering away, apparently under the impression that they’d been listening to him.

  “…so rare I really get the chance to talk to anyone about any of my interests. Most people here in the Palace don’t really think that much of me having outside pursuits, you see. They think it’s silly to want to know about anything that’s not part of The Narrative and how to do this, that, or the other when all they have to do is click their fingers and have it done for them! I honestly don’t know how they manage without getting bored out of their minds.…”

  As they stepped into the chamber, Fodder forced himself to blink. Beyond lay quite the most eclectic room he’d ever laid eyes on, immaculately tidy and yet filled to the brim with curiosities and contradictions. Immediately in front of them was a broad wooden desk piled high with scrupulously organised notebooks and papers, the row of neat quills slotted precisely in their pots to one side. A collection of small chips of rock had been laid out in tidy lines across the open patch of surface in the centre beside a small pile of blank labels. A strange diagram, layered like a crooked cake in different colours, was half inked beside them. Beyond, the near wall, half the far wall, and the corner were lined with a huge collection of leather-bound books, some professionally produced, others more loosely bound and apparently homemade, a repository of completed notes filed away for reference. On a slightly raised dais in the opposite corner, a gilt-edged harpsichord nestled by a large four-poster bed, and an incongruous rack of the finest collection of swords that Fodder had ever laid eyes on lined the wall below.

  The underside of the vast bed appeared to be crammed with an assortment of sturdy wooden chests. It was here that Dullard was foraging, one chest dragged out and flung open as he crouched beside his sword rack, pawing through neatly labelled boxes of rocks with an intent expression on his face. A moment later, he shifted position as he delved ever deeper into his samples.

  His back was turned towards them.

  “And of course, they expect the Servants to do everything for them. I honestly don’t see why. Aside from the fact they’re perfectly capable of looking after themselves, it’s not as though rank means much once we get out of Narrative. It’s always seemed a little unfair to me.…”

  In deference to his companions’ steely looks, Shoulders turned his sword carefully to angle the flat edge towards his oblivious victim. And then, on stealthy feet, he started forwards.

  Dullard continued to root through the wooden chest, his eyes never lifting from his task as Shoulders moved quietly across the floor, gently, softly, step by step, edging closer and closer to the man he was about to clobber, his sword slowly raising in preparation for a knockout blow. Flirt and Fodder, in deference to their unarmed state, hung back, although Fodder did spot Flirt eyeing up the poker in the fireplace to their right.

  “But I still can’t quite believe what they had you three doing! The things they make the Servants in this Palace do these days!” Three steps away now. Almost there… “Honestly, it’s quite absurd. They just don’t think these things through properly!” Two steps away, the flat of the sword held high, both hands wrapped around the hilt. “I do tell them, but no one ever seems to pay much attention to me; they just look at me and see the same buffoon I have to turn into when I’m In Narrative!” One step, a shadow looming, muscles bunched, the distance almost closed… “Just once, it would be nice to have someone listen to what I’m saying and take me seriously.…”

  The sword whipped back. But in that instant, Dullard’s nostrils flared. His head rose slightly, eyebrows bunched as he started to turn.

  “Did you not find the soap—aah!”

  The sword plunge
d down. But with an agility that Fodder, in spite of only a few minutes’ acquaintance, would nevertheless have classed as uncharacteristic, Dullard dived out of the way, rolling off the side of the dais as he scrambled to his feet. Even as Shoulders wheeled, sword raised, for a second attempt, Dullard’s hand whipped out, closing around the ornate handle of one of the swords glittering in the rack and dragging it smoothly free. He caught Shoulders’s second blow easily against the blade, swirling it round with a casual grace that even Flirt would envy. The point plunged down, stinging Shoulders’s fingers harshly and sending his blade flying away across the bed.

  Eyes wide and utterly incredulous, Shoulders staggered back. His feet caught against the raised step of the dais and sent him sprawling to the ground. With a simple flourish, Dullard lunged in and pressed the tip of his sword gently but decisively against his throat.

  Both Fodder and Flirt had half-started forwards, their moment of stunned astonishment finally shaken off, but Dullard had seen them too. With a quick lunge, he reached back, hauling a second sword out of the rack and whipping it in their direction. Fodder froze in his tracks a mere yard from the point; and Flirt, in spite of her acquisition of the poker, did the same.

  There was a long moment of silence. Dullard’s eyes were flitting frantically from one sword tip to the other, his expression a turbulent cocktail of anxiety, annoyance, and bewildered hurt as he raked his gaze over the three intruders in his chamber. His jaw visibly hardened.

  “What did you have to go and do that for?” he snapped suddenly, although there was a plaintive note to his tone that almost overrode the irritation that was driving it. “I hadn’t done anything to you! I helped you! I knew you were talking nonsense, all that cleaning business! Who cleans a toilet by climbing up it? But I was prepared to believe you because I like to think the best of people! But now, you see—now I’m going to have to go and call the guards! And you’ll probably try to stop me, and I’ll have to hurt you and chop you up and I really don’t want to have to do that! I don’t want to hurt anyone and I hate having to see people in bits!” His head was whipping back and forth, his chin trembling slightly as he worked himself up.

  Flirt’s cheery puppy, it seemed, had a little more bite than they’d thought. “You could have just gone, you know!” he wailed. “I wasn’t going to stop you! I probably got a bit carried away with the rocks and everything, but you did seem sort of interested, and I get so few chances to talk about my hobbies without people sneering at me! I try so hard to be nice and polite and look for the good in everybody and all I get in return is sneers and put-downs and brush-offs! Everyone’s like that with me! Everyone! Even you! Complete strangers and you just assumed…”

  His two swords were shivering slightly, to the visible anxiety of Shoulders, who was in far greater proximity to his blade than Flirt and Fodder were to theirs. “You just assumed I’d be a pushover, didn’t you? Some silly fool you could just clout over the head without any problems? Well, I am tired of it! I am not the useless idiot everyone seems to take me for! Maybe I’m not a great swashbuckler or a talented artisan, but at least I give things a try! At least I want to learn! I’m not content to sit around being my character and I don’t see what’s so bad about that!”

  Fodder could feel discomfort prickling down his spine. Dullard was right. He had assumed he’d be nothing more than he’d appeared to be on a brisk, brushed-off first impression—naïve, a bit thick, and patently useless. But forced by an alarmingly proficiently held sword tip to stop and think, he realised just how little attention he’d been paying. Coldly and with shame, Fodder realised that he’d looked at Dullard in the same way that the rest of the world looked at him. He’d seen what he expected to see and dismissed him without even looking twice.

  He’d watched the oddly fashioned face and the ambling walk and hadn’t even tried to see past them. He’d seen odd and taken it for stupid, and that had been a big mistake. Dullard’s stream of chatter flooded back into his head, and this time he actually acknowledged the words for what they truly were: This was a man who had apparently shinned up a fifty-foot rock chimney and was bright enough to figure out how it was made—not the act of either a weakling or an idiot. Every book in the room looked worn and well-thumbed—not the books of a man who kept a library to simply appear academic. The sword collection, with its variety of shape, edge, and form, was the mark of a connoisseur. And what were the odds that someone who knew enough to spot a damned good sword when he saw one wouldn’t know how to use it too? Just because he looked like the kind of man to trip over his own scabbard didn’t mean that he would do so.

  And as for his words as they entered the room…

  This was a man who had seen past the life that was laid out for him and was not happy that no one else could. A man who was tired of being treated like his Narrative role. Just once, he recalled he’d said, it would be nice to have someone listen to what I’m saying and take me seriously.…

  Fodder could have spoken those words himself. They certainly summed up his feelings. And yet, faced with an apparent kindred spirit, he’d ignored him, brushed him off, and gone along with a plan to bash him over the head.

  His stomach felt like a solid ball of ice had lodged there. Had they just thrown away the chance of a new recruit?

  “Nothing!” he said hurriedly, extending his hands before him in a placatory manner. “There’s nothing bad about that! In fact, it’s good!” He swallowed hard as Dullard’s eyes switched sharply to his face, his grip on his sword hilt tightening, and fought the urge not to gabble. It wasn’t easy. “We’ve obviously misjudged you very badly, and we’re really sorry for that, but we’ve got kind of used to being ignored ourselves—and, well, I guess we weren’t really paying the right kind of attention.”

  Dullard’s eyes were narrowing slightly as he stared at him. Now he was looking at the Rejected Suitor through clearer eyes, Fodder could see that wheels were working inside his head.

  “The thing is, you and us, we’re kind of in the same boat,” Fodder continued hurriedly. “Nobody ever listens to us either, and everyone expects us to take what we’re given for Narrative use and be happy, regardless of what we’re actually capable of. And that’s why we’re here. We’re trying to make people see what we can do.”

  Fodder could feel the burn of Shoulders’s glare from where he lay sprawled on the dais; he could almost hear his friend’s voice chiming in his head and grumbling that this was not the time to go on a recruitment drive. But he was determined to plough on regardless. Dullard was clearly a clever man dissatisfied with his life, and if they couldn’t make someone like him see their point of view, they might as well pack up and throw themselves into the dungeons right away, because the entire cause was hopeless.

  But Dullard, it seemed, was already ahead of him. The prince’s gaze flickered from Fodder to Flirt to Shoulders in one swift motion and then his mouth dropped into a wide O as his eyebrows rocketed up his forehead. Dawning realisation flooded into his eyes and, to Fodder’s distinct surprise, his face lit up like a sunrise breaking through the clouds.

  “Wait a minute,” he breathed, his voice an inexplicable mixture of happy incredulity and excited joy. “I think I’ve just realised what’s going on here! Are you the two Disposables and the Barmaid who kidnapped Pleasance?”

  Fodder blinked. It was hard to know what to say. On the one hand, Dullard certainly did seem distinctly happy to see them, but admitting their culpability still didn’t necessarily seem prudent with a sword blade levelled at their throats. Who was to say the prince wasn’t considering the kudos he would get for bringing to justice the tormentors of his kinswoman?

  Dullard, however, took their silence to be an affirmative. “You are, aren’t you?” he exclaimed, all hint of the anger and frustration of moments before wiped from both his face and his voice in an instant. “Oh my goodness me! This is…this is just…perfect!”

  It wasn’t a word that Fodder would have chosen. But he found himself
able to think much better of it when Dullard stepped back and abruptly plunged both his sword points into the floorboards with a grin that could have illuminated several dozen manuscripts.

  “Oh my goodness me!” he repeated giddily. “This is just… You have no idea, I was just thinking about this before I came in and how much I’d like to…oh!” He extended his hands before him, palms outwards, half crouching as he stepped back. “Just…stay there! Hang on for a moment; I need to get a piece of paper!”

  Fodder and Flirt exchanged a wide-eyed look as Dullard bolted abruptly for his desk, leaving Shoulders to unfurl and haul himself to his feet, staggering over to join his companions with lip curled and eyebrow raised. He rubbed his neck irritably.

  “What the hell’s he doing now?” he muttered under his breath, watching as Dullard rooted around his desk, apparently in search of an empty notebook to judge by his mutterings as he thumbed through several that were clearly already in use. “That man’s more changeable than a ruddy weathervane!”

  “Aha!” With a wild flourish, Dullard whipped a notebook out of his drawer. Grabbing a quill from the desktop, he turned sharply and rushed back across the room to where his three bewildered ex-prisoners were waiting.

  “Now!” he exclaimed enthusiastically, his eyes shining as he juggled his notebook awkwardly and braced his pen against the parchment. “Tell me everything!”

  Fodder tried to shake away his sudden bewilderment. He failed miserably.

  “Everything?” he echoed weakly.

  “Yes!” Dullard’s grin, impossibly, stretched even wider as his eyes flicked excitedly from one face to another like an over-eager spaniel in search of a playmate. “Everything! About what you’ve done and how you did it! I want to know everything there is to know about how you’ve managed to do the impossible. I want to know how to defy The Narrative!”