The Disposable Page 3

  “Tonight?” Shoulders sighed wearily as they pushed open today’s dark wooden creaky door and stepped into the long, low-beamed room with a flickering fire and broad counter that would be this evening’s local. “I’ve barely got my head back on!”

  The inn was quite busy, as it generally was when it was conveniently placed for the villagers, but a table by the fire with eight foaming tankards of ale had been left empty for them. A steaming stew pot was just being lifted from the fire by a woman dressed in a familiar white blouse and a long red skirt topped by a brown apron. Her hair, which changed as often as the inn she worked at, was dark and curly today, rather than the blonde or bright red The Narrative more often demanded, but as ever, there was no mistaking her.

  Fodder smiled. Good old Flirt. She knew what Disposables needed after a hard day of being slaughtered.

  The Barmaid of the Archetypal Inn grinned as the men filed over, professing various degrees of undying love for her as they took vast swigs of ale and savoured the stewy aroma. Fodder could see from the slight hint of glimmery pink around her cleavage that she had recently reduced the size of her chest back to normal—although The Narrative required that a Barmaid should be busty, Flirt had not been so endowed by nature and had to employ the services of Urk, the Duty Pixie in charge of Cosmetic Adjustment, for her hair and chest whenever the Quest required it of her. Thump had once dared to ask her, with a hint of a leer that certainly hadn’t helped, why it was that she didn’t leave her chest inflated between Quests and have done with it. The lengthy and irate lecture he had received on issues of weight, comfort, and balance had insured that the subject had not been raised again.

  “All right, boys,” she said cheerfully. “How far did Shoulders’s head go this time?”

  Thump rumbled a chuckle. “I think it was the record, actually. And it landed in a puddle.”

  Ignoring Shoulders’s irritable huff at the reminder of the indignity, Flirt started spooning stew into the bowls. “Any good swordplay, was there? Double reverses or half-moon crescents?”

  At the flurry of blank looks she received, Flirt sighed and deposited the stew pot on the floor. “You know!” she exclaimed, hauling the poker out of its cast iron support and flourishing it back and forth in what Fodder had noticed many times before was an alarmingly professional manner. “Like this!” She swept the poker back and forth in a complicated manoeuvre that Fodder was reasonably certain he couldn’t have achieved at his best. “Or this!” The curving sweep that followed nearly sent Midlin fleeing, albeit unnecessarily, under the table. “I know Clank’s been studying them both; I heard him telling Harridan so last night when they stopped here for an overnight paragraph. He said he was looking for a chance to use them.”

  “Sorry, Flirt.” Fodder smiled sympathetically as he took another swig from his tankard. “We were a bit busy getting chopped up to watch the swordplay.”

  Flirt gave a gusty sigh. “I wish I could come along,” she declared with palpable frustration. “If I was in full armour and just Bulking Up at the back, I know it wouldn’t affect The Narrative. And nobody would spot me, would they…”

  “Preen would never allow it.” Fodder felt himself squirm at the dying of the brief surge of light within her eyes. “You know what he’s like. Besides, if you went into battle against the Merry Band, you’d probably win.”

  There were guffaws around the table but the gratitude in Flirt’s smile was far more rewarding. Carefully, she lifted the pot back up and resumed her dishing out.

  “You lads are properly fixed, aren’t you?” she said as she watched Thump shovelling Stout’s best Bessie stew down his gullet with unseemly haste. “Only, I remember what happened last week with the vegetable soup…”

  “It was one little stab wound!” Clunny protested, his spoon halfway to his lips. “I didn’t notice, I swear, and I helped clean up the floorboards, didn’t I?”

  Flirt’s single raised eyebrow spoke volumes, but she chose not to comment on the previous week’s memorably messy evening meal. “I think I should warn you,” she said instead as she took Thump’s already-emptied tankard and gestured to Stout’s ever-growing adolescent son Lank for a refill. “I saw Preen outside talking with Bard the Minstrel. We may be in for a performance of the story so far again tonight.”

  A chorus of groans sounded around the table, and Fodder enthusiastically added his own. “Again?” he declared wearily. “What is it with Preen and this story so far business anyway? We’ve read the instructions. We spent half of them getting chopped up! It’s hardly as though we don’t know what’s been happening.”

  “Not to mention that Bard’s voice makes me want to smack him,” Tumble added matter-of-factly. “I think it’s all the unnecessary flourish. And the pose. There’s definitely something about the pose.”

  His companions nodded in sage agreement. No man who stood with one hand on his belt and the other extended flat towards the ceiling as he melodramatically recited things that they already knew did not deserve to have some manner of violence inflicted upon him.

  “We could pelt him,” Dunny suggested, waving his fork in an offhand manner that considerately splattered his companions with little bits of stew. “It worked over at the Farmstead during The Sword of Grul. Old Bumble—you know, the plump chap who always plays Doomed Uncles and the like? Well, he took offence at being described as rotund and foolish and threw a cabbage at Bard’s head. When we all joined in, Bard left in a huff.”

  “He is just doing his job.” It was Midlin who piped in. The Disposable from Fertile Fields was a quiet, bland, unremarkable man who spoke so rarely that Fodder, to his own acute embarrassment, often forgot he was there. If anyone had been born to be Ordinary, it was Midlin. “We shouldn’t grumble, really.”

  Clunny gave an undignified snort. “Wouldn’t that just take all the fun out of life? Not to mention that we’d never hear Shoulders speak again.”

  Shoulders’s mouth gaped indignantly, but, fortuitously or not—for Fodder couldn’t quite decide whether the grumbling would have been worse than the interruption—the creak of the door being opened and the audible groans of his companions at the sight of the foppish figure framed dramatically in the doorway cut him off.

  Bard the Minstrel was a relatively young man with shoulder-length blond hair that could only be described as flowing and a tiny blond beard clinging to his chin that could only be described as daft. His eyes, inevitably, were blue. His floppy scarlet hat, equally inevitably, was crowned by a plume of blue feathers. His doublet was a painfully fashionable mass of patched colours, and his hose were striped in purple and white. The toes of his shoes curled up so far that they touched the top of his feet. He had a green cape that whipped dramatically in the breeze. His hands rested upon his hips. His chin was raised. The smile on his face succeeded in being both facile and condescending.

  Fodder shook his head. One look at the man really did tell you everything you needed to know. Add the fact that he was a good friend of Preen, and you could virtually write his biography.

  “Good morrow, gentle village folk!” Bard strutted gamely inside, cheerfully allowing the door to slam in the face of Crook the Shepherd, who had been waiting impatiently for him to move aside so he could get inside for a quiet sit down and an ale. “A glass of your finest mead to wet my whistle, if you please, good wench! I will have much need of a well-lubricated voice before this night is done!”

  Once again, Flirt’s eyebrows did the talking for her. Wench had never been a term that sat particularly well on her shoulders, but she knew better than to offend a friend of Preen. With an expression that would have required whole pages of Narrative to do justice to, she left the resigned-looking Disposables and headed over to the counter. Her fists were powerfully clenched.

  “Told you,” Tumble remarked under his breath. “It’s the voice. Makes me want to smack his chops every time.”

  “Maybe we could chop his head off and get Squick to take his voice box out?” Dunny suggeste
d, with a gesture that sent ale slopping down his tunic. Fodder had always liked Dunny well enough, but he’d never been all that fond of his shocking table manners. “He probably would. I heard him say he thinks he’s a pillock.”

  “It wouldn’t stop him,” Donk remarked morosely. “He’d just write it down and get Preen to read it out for him.”

  “The trouble is, he thinks he’s The Narrative,” Fodder chimed in sourly, watching the pompous twerp with barely concealed dislike. “He doesn’t even know what half the words he uses mean. I mean, good morrow? It’s almost evening!”

  Tumble pulled a face. “It was probably the best he could come up with. I’m not sure there is a pompous, outmoded term for greeting someone after midday.”

  “Good affow?” Clunny offered with a hint of a grin.

  Several tankards of ale were snorted.

  Over by the counter, Bard finished wiping and smacking his lips with melodramatic pleasure, and placed down his barely touched mead with a thud. “Ah!” he proclaimed. “A fine and hearty brew indeed! I feel fortified, alive, and ready to entertain these good people with tall tales of faraway derring-do!”

  “Not that far away,” Thump muttered under his breath. “They’re only out in the Woods.”

  “And so!” His cape flaring, Bard proceeded forth with what Fodder could only assume was his best attempt at striding manfully across the room, to stand, head lifted and expression lofty, in the very centre of the floor. One hand, he rested firmly against his belt. The other, he raised towards the rafters—open to the heavens as though pleading for inspiration. Fodder always clung to a vain hope he’d be inspired to bugger off, but such had yet to come to pass.

  “Settle ye down, good people, and hearken well!” Bard’s fingers flared intently at the empty air. “For I shall tell you a tale—unfinished yet, but already teeming and riddled with emotion and adventure. For I am here to tell you of the Quest for The Ring of Anthiphion!”

  Like the air release from a punctured bladder, a great sigh of resignation settled across the inn. The men and women of Humble Village sagged wearily back in their seats and stared into their drinks as one, quietly trying to tune out a too-familiar horror.

  “The Ring of Anphithion! The mark of power of the greatest king the world had ever known! Legendary! Powerful!”

  “Pronounced Anthiphion,” Flirt added sardonically as she wandered over to rejoin the Disposables by the fire. “Even I know that.”

  With all due respect to him—which wasn’t that much, Fodder had to admit—Bard didn’t miss a beat. “But our hero, young Erik, an ordinary stable boy at his Uncle Alwin’s remote and lonely inn, knew nothing of such ancient folly. He lived an ordinary—such an ordinary—life in the peaceful farming kingdom of Doss, knowing nothing of the ancient legends and a magic ring that would cast his world asunder!”

  “What’s this Quest’s Boy of Destiny called?” Shoulders queried absently, paying scant attention to Bard’s performance. “I can never tell one from another.”

  “Bumpkin,” Thump submitted as he drained his second tankard of ale with barely a blink. “He’s old Magus the Sorcerer’s great-nephew. He’s not too bad—over-angsts a bit, but then don’t they all?”

  Clunny grinned suddenly. “You know how up himself old Magus is? Well, my grandpa says he was the Boy of Destiny back in Timoni’s Firebird. Back then he was known as Yokel, and he got dumped in a horse trough by a feisty princess. Sort of adds a new dimension to the wise-and-noble-guardian act, doesn’t it?”

  “…lonely and lacking in companions, Erik’s only true friend was the eccentric, mysterious but friendly old man known as Elder, who lived in his crumbling tower…”

  “It’s always a tower, have you noticed?” Tumble remarked clinically. “And a crumbling one at that. These mysterious, eccentric old men pretending not to be wizards always hang out in crumbling towers. You’d think they’d have enough time on their hands waiting for those Boys of Destiny to grow up to make a few repairs or move into a nice cottage somewhere.”

  “…these mysterious strangers, who seemed known to Elder and held him in strange regard. The first was introduced as Sir Roderick, first knight of the Kingdom of Nyolesse and legendary for both his skill and for his tragic love of a mysterious woman he could never have…”

  “Skill!” Shoulders all but spat the word, almost succeeding in drowning out the melodramatic monologue behind him. “Where’s the skill in chopping someone’s head off, hey? What’s legendary about that? That Clank is nothing more than a sword-wielding bully boy!”

  Bard was soldiering on, although his expression, Fodder noted with no little satisfaction, had become somewhat strained.

  “…Slynder, a thief renowned and resented for his skill throughout the Six Kingdoms…”

  “Swipe,” Clunny noted. “I had a drink with him once and he’s not so bad. He’s just a bit of a smug bastard. And he never shuts up.”

  “Wandering fingers, too,” Flirt inserted grimly.

  “…Gort, a dwarf miner, with a mysterious resentment of Slynder…”

  Donk chuckled slightly. “Gruffly,” he said. “Did you know he’s scared of enclosed spaces?”

  “…Halheid, a gruff barbarian from the northern reaches, brutish, uncivilised, and quick to anger…”

  “Thud.” Flirt’s expression was icily irritable. “Thick as two short planks, isn’t he? And he can’t hold his drink—I have to put cold tea in his tankard when he drinks In Narrative so he doesn’t fall off his chair and mess up the flow of the story.” She sniffed sourly. “He always pulls me onto his lap and gives me a chummy slap on my thigh and bloody hell, it bruises. And his beard smells like a badger’s backside when you kiss him.”

  Fodder felt a momentary surge of something he couldn’t quite define. Not exactly guilt, not exactly resentment, not exactly pity either but…something or other. He was no Minstrel, chucking a convenient word into a hole it barely fitted, but he did know that, as much as he had found himself resenting his lot as he’d sat in the mud with a spear through his chest, he’d never really considered before that it was as bad, if not worse, to have no choice about having your thigh slapped until it bruised and kissing someone with a beard that smelled like the hind end of a badger.

  “…and Zahora, a quick-tempered warrior woman who disliked Halheid the barbarian for his attitude that only men should fight…”

  “Harridan.” Flirt’s voice was vaguely wistful. “She gets to beat Thud up and anyone else who touches her. If The Narrative hadn’t decided she has to fall in love with the groping git, I’d love to have her job, wouldn’t I? I’d show the next sod who pinched my bum a thing or two…”

  And she deserves it too. She should have it, if life were fair. The thought popped into Fodder’s head almost before he realised it was there; and sternly, he told it to push off. It was stupid to have such thoughts, thoughts he had made himself abandon as an Urchin, thoughts about a different life and how things just weren’t quite right. There was no point to thinking like that. After all, there wasn’t exactly anything he could do about it.

  “…though he was banished from the room, Erik could not resist listening at the door. But the words were muffled by the sturdy wood, and he could make out only that something had been stolen and that someone called Myhessia was pleading for his aid, for the age-old prophecy of the Seeress Mydrella was finally coming to pass…”

  “There’s always a prophecy, have you noticed?” Dunny remarked with a casual chuckle. “These Narrative folk don’t seem to be able to cope without one. What do you reckon they’d do if it wasn’t there to shove them kicking and screaming in the right direction?”

  Fodder hadn’t meant to say anything. But Dunny’s simple observation struck an alarming chord, and the words popped out of his mouth almost before he’d had a chance to think about them. “Probably the same thing we’d do without instructions from the Taskmaster. Find out the future for ourselves.”

  “…in spite of the ob
jections of his comrades, Elder smiled in benediction at Erik and told him that he admired his spirit and that he could indeed be a part of their noble quest…”

  Except for the drone of Bard’s voice in the background, there was a sudden silence at Fodder’s table. The seven other Disposables stared as one, regarding Fodder with expressions that ranged from confusion to discomfort.

  “You what?” Clunny declared at length, his features twisted into an expression of outright incredulity. “Mate, you do realise what you just said is rubbish, right?”

  “Yeah, don’t be stupid.” Tumble gave a slightly edgy laugh. “A prophecy’s just a prophecy, a convenient shortcut for The Narrative. The instructions are life. You can’t find a future without them because there isn’t one.”

  “But what’s the difference?” To Fodder’s surprise, it was Flirt’s voice that softly intervened. “They both dictate our future, don’t they? Map it out? And if Dunny’s saying following prophecies is foolish…”

  “But it isn’t, though.” Once again, the quiet, unexpected voice was Midlin’s. “I’ve been in enough stories to know that bad things happen if a prophecy isn’t followed. It has to come true.”

  “But how do you know?” Flirt’s eyes were strangely intense. “How do you know that what’ll happen when a prophecy’s not fulfilled is bad when they always are?”

  “…found his uncle Alwin’s inn ablaze and there, nailed cruelly to the crumbling wall, his uncle’s brutally mutilated body! The strange, warped creatures surrounded them, teeth gnashing, eyes blazing like the fire that had engulfed all Erik ever knew…”

  “The good old AFCs.” Clunny’s overly cheerful intervention was more to break the uncomfortable moment, Fodder suspected, than out of any real desire to speak, and a part of him felt a profound relief at his friend’s change of subject. He didn’t want to consider the part that was feeling disappointment. “Bless them. I was talking to Fang and Gibber from the AFC camp a few days ago, and they were telling me about the Assorted Freakish Creature look that Urk came up with for this Narrative’s Quest. They’ve got these big bat-like ears, leathery grey skin and claws, not to mention two rows of teeth! Can you imagine having so many teeth that you have to take them out to eat?”