Page 2 of Into the West

Steady now. I don’t want to tremble. Everyone gets the shakes, but I don’t want to look weak and undignified. Carefully, now. Don’t show anything wrong. Keep that appearance going for their confidence. He caught himself from tripping, twice, as he walked over to the helpless Doll, lying in a heap against a tree trunk. It wasn’t one he recognized, but it was wearing someone’s old shirt and trews, so old, patched, and threadbare that he was fairly certain they’d been taken from the common rag pile that had been established along with the other common supplies. All of the Dolls had discarded the Imperial tabards they wore as soon as they’d escaped to freedom, and the ones who had attached themselves to a particular individual or family generally wore clothing donated by that family. The rest wore whatever they could find. It hardly mattered if they wore nothing, really, but they seemed to sense that people found an unclothed ambulatory cloth creature much more unsettling than a clothed one, so the ones who weren’t given clothing generally found it for themselves somewhere.

He squatted down on his heels next to the poor thing. “Are you going to be all right?”

He wondered if the Doll had a name. Or if they had even decided to call themselves something. Some of the Dolls had taken the initiative to name themselves, and had put some sort of identifier on their person. They were, as best anyone knew, multiple genders—an easy enough concept that only the most superstitious of Valdemarans took issue with, out of fear—and were natively androgynous in voice and form. He couldn’t see anything on this one, but that didn’t mean the creep who had tortured it hadn’t torn off such a thing. This Doll also didn’t have anything in the way of features other than the stitched-in eyes and mouth all of them were given at their creation. With permission, some of the children and younger folks had been clothing and decorating Dolls as a sort of hobby when their work was done, but at the moment the majority were still in the state this one was. So far, only dense Imperial ink would stick to their sailcloth “skin.” Paint either didn’t stick at all, or peeled off when dry. The ones with painted faces had faces painted onto canvas, which was then stitched onto their heads.

“Thanks to your intervention, Baron, this one survives to be repaired,” they replied, politely, as if they weren’t in agonizing pain. They were, and he knew they were, because he’d asked Rose about injuries to the Dolls, and she had told him that yes, they did feel pain when they were injured, and that the mages who had stuffed the Air-spirits called vrondi into these very material Dolls had said they were supposed to feel pain to keep them from mangling themselves as they went about their duties.

Kordas doubted that. He thought that the mages had been ordered to make them capable of pain so that the plethora of sadists that inhabited the Imperial Court could get pleasure from torturing something that couldn’t fight back. So far as the courtiers were concerned, there was an endless supply of Dolls and no one cared about what you did to them or how you treated them. There would be more by day’s end. When it came to anything in the Imperial Court, the cruelty was the point.

The Doll clearly saw his concern. “Lord Baron, these injuries are less than the torment of enslavement. You put an end to the Capital and Court, and freed us from that suffering. It is well worth this sort of inconvenience to be here with you.”

And that just made Kordas feel worse.

This sort of inconvenience? Life-threatening assault, incomprehensible agony, and still they try to be positive. May I show that kind of bravery on my darkest days.

A fact of a noble’s life is the inevitability of harming others. All a noble could hope to do, were they so inclined, was reduce the amount of damage. At every turn since going to the Capital, Kordas had failed far too often at reducing damage. Thinking of his people, he turned thief, and escalated his grand larceny at every turn. Spying, conspiring. Distraction ploys turned lethal. A well-intended diversion tumbled downward in untold deaths, and the destruction of a place that represented centuries of history.

There was something malevolent about that place, he’d thought many a time. Environments change people. That deceit, madness, and cruelty seeped into me, too. Now, the Emperor and Court were ash, the Capital a debris-strewn lava plain—and that wasn’t guilt-free. The habitat, the wildlife, people’s pets, visitors. Probably a twenty-mile radius of the city was incinerated or boiled away. I only meant to trick and save. I wound up a destroyer for it. I can’t deny that. I can’t get away from those facts.

But I won’t let that be the sum of me.

He hadn’t meant to draw the attention of a massive Earth Elemental to knock the Palace to the ground and swallow what was left. He hadn’t meant to murder the Emperor—well, briefly he hadn’t. He’d only meant for a diversion, so he could escape with his people so far from the Empire that the Imperials would never be able to find them.

But on the whole, he couldn’t find it in himself to regret that it had all happened that way. The place had been a cesspit, fed by everything that was bad in humankind, embroiled in endless war, and led by a madman. There was no way to “reform” that place that he could conceive of, and no real way to reform the Empire. It had been that way for a very long time. Long enough that it had been his grandfather and father who started the plan to escape the Empire in the first place.

And I did give people enough warning to get out, even if all they escaped with was the clothing on their backs and their lives. Most of them didn’t end up at the Lake, but some did by accident. Now they’re far away by a lake and a forest, not cozy in their ancestral homes. And the same goes for my own people. No stability but what we can manage for them. Strange sounds, smells, unknown animals, even the weather is different. It’s a new kind of suffering, but they are alive.

Kordas got to his feet and faced the crowd, which had grown. “Since I don’t seem to have made myself clear before, the Dolls are to be treated as fellow human beings. Not your private servants. Not your personal set of pells when you are angry. Abusing them will get you the same sentence that abusing another person will get you. Exile!” He punctuated the word by pointing to the east with his red right hand. There were some gasps and murmurs, but as he scanned the faces around him, it didn’t look as if anyone disapproved. It was more as if they had been wondering what the bastard’s punishment was going to be, and “exile” surprised them a little.

Did they expect worse? I suppose I could get creative and make him take the place of the Doll he broke, but I don’t think he’d learn better behavior from the punishment, and someone who’ll do this to any other living thing is too dangerous to have around here. There are a lot of things we’re going to have to accommodate, because some of us aren’t fit twenty-year-olds with no health problems, but someone with a sick and twisted mind is not one of those things I am willing to have among us. Maybe later we’ll have the leisure to take someone like that aside and make him human again. Not now.

He turned back to his guards. “Load his personal items into his boat, and give him a fortnight’s worth of provisions. Make sure there is nothing on that boat that is from the common stores, only what he brought for himself when he joined us. Confiscate food and consumables like candles that are more than he needs for a fortnight. Make sure to look over his boat for anything reported missing, while you’re checking the provisions. Put him on the boat with his hands tied, and leave one knife where he can reach it—eventually. Then push the boat through the Gate.”

There was more murmuring. This time it sounded like people were coming around to his idea.

“Which Gate key do we use?” one of his men asked. It was a good question. The Dolls from the Palace had brought with them all the stamps for the Imperial Gate keys and a bewildering number of pre-made keys. Kordas could send him anywhere he chose.

And for one brief moment he was tempted to send the man to the Gate nearest the Southern warfront.

But he didn’t know which Gate key that was, and he didn’t want to bother to take the time to find out.

“None,” he said.

“But where will I end up?” the bastard wailed thickly. It sounded like Kordas might have broken his jaw.

Kordas’s anger flared up again, and he felt some crafty cruelty come out with it. “You’ll end up somewhere random. If you’re lucky, it’ll be where there isn’t any fighting or looting. If you’re not, well, you’d better cut yourself loose pretty quickly. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up in what’s left of the Capital, and you’ll fry in your boat. If you’re very unlucky, you’ll end up in what remains of a very fractured Imperial Army, who will certainly welcome you. They’ll even give you a uniform and a shiny little hat. And a job. I think they refer to people like you as ‘arrow-magnets’ and ‘Poomer-fodder.’” Kordas spat. “Wherever you end up, you’ll be out of our lives forever, and that’s all I care about.”

The sign that the blackguard had lost the sympathy of the crowd came when there was a chuckle at the term “arrow-magnet.” Satisfied, he turned back to the broken Doll and saw that they had been joined by three more whole ones—ones wearing vaguely blue tabards with a white “V” and a horse’s head on them, designating them as those who had assigned themselves to Kordas and his family. One was Rose, who had alerted him to what had been happening in the first place; the other two were one that had chosen the name of “Trout” and one called “Cobweb.”

“Thank you for coming,” he told them. “Can you three get this poor thing to the Mender?”

“Oh definitely, Baron,” Rose said, nothing at all in her voice betraying if she felt any emotion at seeing her fellow Doll in such dire straits.

Then again, the Dolls rarely displayed much of anything, and that was aside from the fact that their “faces” were, at best, painted or embroidered images on the canvas of their heads. They didn’t venture opinions on their own, and their voices were always even and pleasant. The perfect servants. Even the one that had been so terribly mistreated sounded as if they were prepared to have a lengthy conversation on the methods of brewing tea if he’d asked them to, regardless of how much pain they were in.

How can this moment become a memorable one? His tutors’ lessons replayed in his head. As a noble, every time you are seen is a performance of your role. Don’t miss chances for weighty statements, when they present themselves. Fate can call upon you for a witty, memorable, or daring show at any time. Puissant nobles have honed the skill of recognizing such moments.

“Thank you,” he said, very aware that after his little speech people were paying very close attention to how he himself treated the Dolls. “Please tell the Mender I will be there shortly.” He took a deep breath, stood, retrieved the offender’s kerchief, and ripped it into bandaging strips, using his teeth and left hand. He spoke a brief spell of healing to sterilize his wounds, and let its effects be visible. He wasn’t in the mood for finesse, just starting the repair.