My gut recoiled at the notion. Even though I knew what was at stake, my reflexive response could not be deterred. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m no assassin.”
“Nonsense,” said Reaver, as if I had just made some sort of joke. “Of course you are. You kill enemies all the time.”
“When they’re facing me. When they have weapons in their hands.”
“So this time you’ll do it from behind, and it doesn’t matter if the victim is holding a weapon or not. Either way, the target is going to be just as dead. Does it really matter, in the final analysis, whether you looked the person in the eyes and whether the person was trying to kill you at the time you killed your target? A life is a life, and the taking of it remains taking it. The only difference is that in this instance, it’s going to serve my interests rather than yours. Except even that isn’t entirely true, is it? Your interests will be served as well. You’ll get your brother back. Your brother in exchange for a single life, and not an innocent one at that, I can assure you.”
I didn’t know what to say. The notion of hunting someone down and taking the prey’s life with cold, malicious planning . . . inwardly, I rebelled at the idea.
But what choice did I have?
I had already agreed not to return to Blackholm. In so doing, I had consigned all those people to the nonexistent mercies of Droogan. Their blood, albeit indirectly, was still going to be on my hands.
But what choice did I have?
“Benny,” William said softly, yanking my attention to him, “you can’t do this. You can’t turn into a monster just so I can stop turning into one. You cannot do it, little brother.”
“Of course he can,” said Reaver with so much cheer that I desperately wanted to leap across his desk and plant my fist squarely in his mouth. If I’d thought it would have done the least bit of good, he would have been missing some teeth. “He’s clearly willing to do anything to save his brother. Obviously, he values you, values your life. So the only question before us is: What does he value more? You? Or someone who isn’t his last connection to his roots?”
Damnably, he was right. The question of who I cared about more was an easy one to answer even if I wasn’t willing to say it aloud or even to myself. My loyalties to my brother weren’t at issue; only my loyalties to my principles were.
“Who’s the target?” I said.
William looked stricken. “Benny, don’t—”
“Shut up.” I was taking out my anger and frustration on him, and it wasn’t fair. But fairness had nothing to do with it. “This isn’t your choice; it’s mine. I thought you were dead, and you had all this time to try to find me and let me know, and you didn’t. You got yourself into this mess, and now it’s up to me to clean it up. So I don’t need your second-guessing and your appeals to my better nature. I’ll do what needs to be done. Understood?” I didn’t wait for him to acknowledge me and, instead, turned back to Reaver. “I said, who’s the target?”
“The troublesome leader of the Bowerstone Resistance. Of course, it’s not resisting much these days since our fearless leader is in place. But Page still has an annoying habit of sticking her nose into my business. I would see that nose cut off, and the rest of her head along with it.”
I tried to keep my face as impassive as I could, but I saw the sly smile creeping across Reaver’s mouth. There was no way that he didn’t know what I was thinking. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past him to be something of an actual mind reader.
Page. Of course it was Page. It had to be Page. She had gone head to head against him in any number of confrontations involving various projects that needed to be approved by our heroic leader. Granted, no matter which way the decision went, Reaver somehow managed to turn a profit from it. But to someone like Reaver, being able to make the best of a decision that went against you wasn’t enough. The fact that someone stood up to him was an affront. The fact that someone occasionally managed to get her way against Reaver’s desires was simply unacceptable. In this instance, when the someone involved was Page, and he was confronted with someone who wanted something he had, naturally he was going to aim that supplicant at her with as much ease and as little thought as one would aim a gun at an oncoming monstrosity.
“Bring me Page’s head,” said Reaver in a slow, unyielding tone, turning the screws to my predicament, “and your brother’s fate is in his own hands. That is the offer. Take it or leave it.”
Trying to rally some manner of defiance, I said, “And if we decide to fight our way out of here?”
“Fight? On a lovely day like this?” Reaver chuckled patronizingly. “My dear fellow, the front door is open to you. Leave as you see fit. Go off and be brothers together. And just know that, sooner or later—and probably sooner rather than later—there will be nothing left of your brother, and you’ll be faced with nothing but a ravening beast that will rip you to pieces without a second thought. Good luck with that.” He gestured lazily to the far door. When I didn’t move, he interlaced his fingers and crossed his legs at the knees. “This is it, my dear Mr. Finn. This offer is on the table for exactly ten seconds, at which point it is withdrawn, and your brother remains as he is forever. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
He raised an eyebrow and chuckled once more. “You sure you don’t want to wait? It would be far more dramatic if I actually made it down to three or two or even one.”
“I could not care less about your sense of drama, your melodramatic flair. I said I’d do it. What more do you want?”
“Actually, as it so happens, there is one more thing.”
I felt myself dying inside even more than before. What more could he possibly want of me? How low was he determined to bring me?
Reaver gave a sharp whistle that obviously served as some manner of signal. A few moments passed, the doors at the far end to the room opened wide, and a couple of guardsmen entered. They were carrying a heavy wooden cage between the two of them, and inside it the gnome was angrily banging around, trying to bust through the bars and having no luck whatsoever in accomplishing it.
“Takes two big strong men to lug me around, does it? Then how come they have you two girls doing it instead?” he said derisively. Then he swung his attention to Reaver. “Love your outfit. Bet it looked even better when it was hanging up as a pair of drapes.”
Nodding toward the gnome, Reaver—unperturbed by the insults directed toward his ensemble—said coolly, “You brought this in with you, I assume?”
There seemed no point in denying it. “Yes.”
“Do be so kind as to take it with you on your way out. I can respect your breaking in here in order to try to retrieve your brother, but there’s no excuse for leaving vermin around the place.”
“Why you—!” The gnome was shaking with such anger that the cage itself was rattling.
“Are we done here?” I said, ignoring the gnome.
“I believe we are. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Finn.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
“Ohhh, don’t be like that, Mr. Finn.” Reaver spread his hands wide, like a barker at a carnival. “You’re going to get everything your little heart desires. All you have to do is keep out of my way and make sure that Page likewise is out of my way, permanently. That’s not much to ask in exchange for a brother, is it? Not much of a choice at all, really.”
It was at that moment that I was reminded of an old saying of my mother’s, and it seemed applicable there:
One choice is no choice.
LEAVING WILLIAM BEHIND WAS QUITE POSSIBLY the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life. This entire rescue attempt had gone about as wrong as it possibly could, and believe me when I say that the gnome made me as consistently aware of that as he could.
As I rode away from Reaver’s mansion, the gnome—perched on Clash’s haunches—peppered me with an onslaught of insults and complaints. If Clash could have thrown him clear, I?
??m sure he would have in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, as difficult as it might have been to believe, the gnome’s ire was understandable. I had made promises, and I had failed spectacularly when it came to keeping them.
The gnome made sure that I knew it.
“Where was the bloodbath? Where was the slaughter?! You promised me a pile of deceased humans whose death I could revel in, and what do we have instead? You killed absolutely nobody, and I wound up getting caught and in a cage! You useless twit! And now you’re going to keep your word to the idiot human who’s got his hooks into your brother? Because he’s blackmailing you into it, of course. As opposed to me, what made the mistake of trusting you—”
He went on like that for quite some time, with the mansion long behind us, before I finally said sharply, “All right. That’s enough. I let you down. I didn’t keep up my end of the bargain.”
“You’re damned right you didn’t—”
“You don’t understand.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Yes, you do.” I reined up and turned around so that I was looking at him. He was sneering at me, as usual. “Not a day has gone by in my life—not one single day—where I didn’t wish that I could have done something, anything, to save my family. They all died, and I lived, and I never understood why I was singled out to survive while the rest of them, who are no worse than me and in some measures better, met terrible ends. And no matter how many times I told myself that there wasn’t a damned thing I could have done, I always felt like I was lying to myself because there must have been something, should have been something. So here we now are, and my brother William is miraculously alive when I’d thought him dead all these years. I’m finally being given the opportunity to make up for all the years of feeling as if I should have done more. Now I can do more. And, truthfully, I don’t really expect you to understand, and at this point I honestly don’t care. What’s done is done. So now I have to move on to the next thing. I have to go and figure out what I’m supposed to do about killing a woman who I . . . have had a close relationship with. Someone whom I consider a friend.”
“Women aren’t for being friends to men. They’re useful for one thing and one thing only. Not that you’d know how to use ’em for that, in any event.”
“Drop dead.”
“You first.”
Turning away from him and shaking my head in disgust, I snapped the reins. Clash, apparently happy to have the chance to move freely, started in at a fast trot that I worked up in short order to a full gallop. Within seconds, we were barreling down the road, heading in the direction of Bowerstone.
Eventually it became too dark to travel, and I wound up setting up a simple encampment. I lay down and closed my eyes. I hoped that the gnome would continue the sour silence into which he had fallen since our last exchange. That did not turn out to be the case.
“Don’t tell me,” his voice came from the darkness, “that I don’t know about families or brothers. Don’t you dare tell me that. I lost more kinsmen then you’ll ever know when humanity was busy wiping us off the face of the land. Only a handful of us survive, and many of us have been returned to a state of petrifaction. I’ve seen them. They’re used as ornaments. Ornaments. To decorate houses or gardens. How would you like it if your precious brother’s head was severed and used to decorate some idiot’s home, eh? Well? It wasn’t rhetorical. How would you feel?”
“Bad,” I said.
“Bad,” he mimicked in a nasal voice. Then, in his normal tone, he continued, “So whatever you think you’re feeling, I guarantee that I’ve felt it way worse than you.”
“Well, excuse the hell out of me because I thought that gnomes didn’t have feelings.”
He raised his voice, and said angrily, “Well, you were wrong.”
Once more, the silence fell between us. I wasn’t sure at that point how to feel about the gnome, or my situation, or anything.
Abruptly, the gnome said, “So where are we going, anyway?”
I realized at that point that I hadn’t actually told him the specifics of my deal or my mission. He’d been too busy abusing me over the lack of body count during our most recent sojourn. My immediate inclination was to tell him to stuff it, roll over, and go to sleep, but I very much suspected that I wouldn’t be getting any sleep anytime soon if I took that approach. So, with a ragged sigh, I told him precisely what had been handed me, the big steaming pile of no-win scenario that I called my deal with Reaver.
He listened without interrupting, which was something of a first. After I fell silent, he seemed to be processing it. Finally, he made his pronouncement:
“So what’s the downside?”
“What’s the—?” I had been lying in the darkness, resting my hands on my palms, but I sat up and looked in the general direction from which his voice had come. “What do you mean, what’s the downside? The downside is that he’s asking me to kill this woman who was my ally!”
“Still not seeing the problem.”
“My ally!”
“You think that means anything?” he said dismissively. “When humans kill each other, the ones they’re most likely to kill are relatives. Husbands kill wives, wives kill husbands, both of them kill children. Friends and neighbors kill each other over petty jealousies, squabbles, who borrowed a horse from whom. A lad kills a lass because he didn’t like the way she was looking at another lad; a lass kills a lad because he jilted her. It’s amazing that any of you are still alive because you take the least excuse to snuff each other out like a candle. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I . . . wish that I could,” I admitted reluctantly.
“All right, then. So don’t go all soft and girlish—or at least more girlish than you already are—and tell me that you can’t kill her because she was an ally. Fact of the matter is, not only can you kill her, but if you want your precious brother back, you’re going to have to.”
“And you’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”
“Bloody right I would!” said the gnome. “So far you’ve been long on promises and short on delivery. It’s about time I got some of what you promised me. Or do promises in this case mean nothing because I’m not a precious human like you?”
“No, my promises mean something,” I assured him, “no matter who or what I make them to. And that includes gnomes, or just ‘gnome’ in your case.”
“All right, then,” he said guardedly. “You’d better not let me down again, or . . .”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll hound you into your grave.”
As I rolled over and closed my eyes, I said, “Frankly, at this point, that might well be a blessing.”
“And then I’d follow you beyond the grave.”
“You know,” I said, the last thing before I dropped off to sleep, “I suspect if anybody could, it would be you.”
Chapter 11
The Route to Bowerstone
I HAVE ALWAYS PRIDED MYSELF ON BEING able to think ahead, get a handle on a situation, and figure a way out of or around a trap before it’s even been sprung.
But this was a very different situation. Or at least it may well have felt that way because I had such a massive personal stake involved. It was one thing to be part of a cause, to feel a devotion or loyalty to some brave leader. Now, though, there was something personal and emotional at stake, and I couldn’t say for sure that I was thinking with a clear head.
I was not an assassin. Never had been, never wanted to be. But I was being presented with a cold equation, a scale that had to be balanced. On the one side, my brother. On the other side, Page. And even though scales had only two sides, there was a third aspect to be weighed and measured and judged, and that was my principles. I had killed far too many beings that walked the land, not to mention enemy soldiers, pirates, and the like, to start becoming faint-hearted about taking a life. But could I betray a friend? Could I kill a friend, at the command of Reaver, who was probably the person she hated more than anyone el
se alive?
The awful fact was that I didn’t know. I would have liked to be able simply to dismiss the notion out of hand, but I couldn’t. I would have liked to be seized with a steely resolve, and say, William’s life depends on this. Page has to die. But I couldn’t do that, either. The entirety of the trip back to Bowerstone, I kept waiting for some sort of hand of realization to reach down to me from on high, push aside the curtains of confusion, and guide me toward a resolution. Unfortunately, my mental skies, as it were, remained sunny and depressingly thunderbolt-free. So it was that, as I reached the outskirts of Bowerstone, I had no more idea what to do than I did at any point along the road.
Needless to say (but I shall anyway), the gnome was of no help whatsoever.
I was provided relief from his string of insults. Maybe he’d spent so much time with me that he’d simply used up all the ones in his repertoire. All I knew was that he spent most of the trip chortling over how much he was looking forward to watching me kill Page. He spent a good deal of time asking how I was going to go about it and, when I didn’t volunteer anything much beyond, “I haven’t decided yet,” the gnome proceeded to suggest a myriad of ways that she could be disposed of. I’m not talking about simply shooting or knifing her. Many of them were quite intricate, and in some cases the mere mention of them brought him to such extremes of demented passion that they bordered on the florid. I could recite them in detail because, I am sad to say, some were so vivid that they have emblazoned themselves permanently in my mind. But why inflict that on anyone.
Instead, feel free to imagine the worst, most tasteless, most awful means of demise that anyone could conjure, then multiply it by a factor of ten. That is what I had to listen to during the trip back to Bowerstone.
I was grateful that Clash could not understand English. Then again, Clash was a fairly bright horse, and deep down I’m concerned that perhaps he did indeed comprehend some, if not all, of the gnome’s rants and ended up scarred for life.