Heroics for Beginners Page 10

“Well, for his brother Reginald, we lost three out of seven. For his sister Evelyn, we lost four out of nine. For his sister Bernice we did pretty well—killed eight out of the ten. The other two were at band camp. But then for his brother Art . . .”

  “Just give me the final tally, Cameray.”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Thirty-four including the seven here?”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “I’ve got thirty-four rightful heirs to the throne of Rockhadden out there somewhere, waiting for the chance to ambush me?”

  “Yes, sire.”

  There was silence for long minutes. Cameray waited, trying not to show the nervousness he felt. The Overlord’s face went from pink to red to purple to red again. He clenched and unclenched his fists, and for a moment Cameray thought he was going to milk the giant cow. But he just exploded.

  “Kill them,” he screamed. He drew his sword and hacked savagely at a bedpost. “Kill them all! Let my edict go out. Kill every newly born child in the duchy of Rockhadden. My men will sweep through the town and villages like locusts, destroying every child they find, leaving nothing behind but corpses and grieving mothers. Death will spread from this castle like a poisonous cloud. I will not be thwarted, do you hear! Kill them all!”

  Cameray cleared his throat. “Er, sire? They’re not all newborns.”

  Riddance gave another whack at the four-poster. “Yes, right. I knew that. Kill all the children then.”

  “Some of them are pretty old.”

  “How old?” Riddance was looking speculatively at the bedpost, as if waiting for it to attack.

  “They range in age from two months to nineteen years.”

  “Oh, damn it to hell,” said the Overlord in a much calmer, and slightly exhausted tone of voice. He decided to let the bedpost escape. “And what’s the life span here in Rockhadden?”

  “The median life expectancy is forty-seven,” said Cameray. Before becoming a minion, he had worked in insurance, so he knew all sorts of actuarial statistics. “So we’d have to kill . . .”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Riddance. “I can work it out. Nineteen out of forty-seven, right? So that’s—um.” Cameray could see his lips moving slightly as he did the long division in his head. “So if we killed everyone under the age of twenty that would be forty percent of the population?”

  “Roughly, yes.”

  There was a long silence while the Overlord thought this over. He looked thoughtfully at Cameray, but the Minion avoided his eyes. Even the bodyguards looked down and shuffled their feet. There was more silence.

  “Well, it’s doable,” Riddance said finally. “I mean, it sounds like a lot, but it’s really not that big a country. The trick is not to try and do it all at once. Just work at it steadily, you know, even if you just murder a few score a day, and over the long run, they add up. We could probably get it done in a year or so.”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t want people to think I was getting soft.”

  “No, sire.”

  “Nothing is worse for a man’s reputation than to announce that he’s going to slaughter forty percent of the population and then quit at, say, thirty-two percent. People lose respect for you. They say, ‘Oh, you can’t count on that guy. He starts projects and doesn’t finish them.’”

  “I quite agree, sire.”

  There was more silence. Cameray had been with Riddance for a long time. The Evil Overlord knew what his Chief Minion was thinking, and the Chief Minion knew that Riddance knew this. But he waited for Riddance to speak first.

  “On the other hand, Cameray.”

  “Tax base,” said Cameray promptly.

  “Exactly. Wipe out forty percent of the population, and your economy goes all to hell. What’s the sense of capturing a country, going through all that work and risk and expense, if you’re going to impoverish yourself?”

  “Especially if you take out the teens,” said Cameray. “Sure, if we could stop at age twelve, maybe we’d be all right. But when you lose the teenagers, you lose your waitresses, your busboys, your salesclerks, your fry cooks—the whole service sector goes right out the window.”

  “You couldn’t go out at night, either,” put in one of the bodyguards. “How are you gonna get a babysitter?”

  “We could expand our base of operations,” said Cameray. “Attack another country and loot it.”

  Riddance winced. “Worse and worse,” he said.

  “Right,” agreed his second bodyguard. “Because we’d have lost our draftees, you see. The seventeen-to-nineteen-year-olds, they’re prime recruiting material.”

  “Exactly. It would be just the luck to draft one of those kids. Then we’d have an enemy right in our midst, and we’d even arm him. Now that would be cutting our own throats.”

  “I got it,” said the first bodyguard. “We don’t have to kill them all. We just check for the birthmark.”

  The other men stared at him. “What?”

  “The royal birthmark. Or the noble birthmark, in this case. You see, when the rightful heir comes to claim the throne, how do you know he’s the real heir? It’s because he’s got a birthmark in a special shape. All the noble families have them.”

  “That’s just a myth,” said the second bodyguard.

  “The hell it is,” said the first bodyguard. “What about Lady Wheatfell? She had a birthmark in the shape of the family crest.”

  “Probably a tattoo,” said Cameray.

  “No, it was a birthmark. It was on her bottom.”

  “Then how would you know about it?” said the second bodyguard.

  “I was bodyguard for Duke Tencere. He told me she showed it to him.”

  “Yeah, right. Everyone knows Tencere was full of jackal kidneys. He’d have you think he made it with every babe from Rockhadden to Estervan, if you believed his stories.”

  The first guard bristled. “You think you’re so goddamn smart . . .”

  “Enough of that,” said Riddance. He put a hand on each man’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you lads thinking outside of the box, but birthmarks are not hereditary. Cameray!”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “Cameray, I am not a man who flinches from danger.”

  “Certainly not, Your Lordship.”

  “I fear no man. I set a course of action, and I stick to it. I don’t let threats or intimidation deter me from my path.”

  “No, sire.”

  “And I do not worry about a handful of renegade heirs. So what if they’re out there, thirsting for vengeance? I am the Lord of Rockhadden now, and no one will stop me in my ruthless quest for power! I’ll take care of these heirs when the time is right. The first one that dares show his face will immediately suffer my wrath.” He plunged his sword back into his belt and strode out the door, past Cameray and down the stairs, leaving his bodyguards behind.

  “Very good, sire,” Cameray called after him.

  Riddance came back up the stairs. “Nonetheless, Cameray, double the guard around the castle.”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “Hire extra bodyguards. Change the locks. Repair the drawbridge, install bars on the doors and windows, and get some dobermans.”

  “Yes, sire. Anything else? Sharks in the moat, perhaps?”

  “No, that ought to do it. No point getting paranoid about the situation. Oh, and get a food taster.”

  In fact, Lord Riddance did get progressively more paranoid about the situation—surrounding himself with bodyguards, looking over his shoulder constantly, and starting at sudden noises. Periodically he would hire private investigators to track down some of the missing heirs, and he actually found and executed a few, but eventually he gave up the job as futile. He grew to distrust his bodyguards and began spending more of his time locked in his study, passing written orders under the door. He became more and more suspicious of his food, ate less and less, and drank only rainwater he collected himself in a cistern on the roof. Eventually he left Rockhadden altogether
. He had a castle specially built, a fortified stronghold constructed on the edge of a sheer cliff, hidden in a remote mountain valley, above a tiny village called Angst. It was a forbidding place, black and gloomy, designed to be as impregnable as the architecture of the day could make it. There he spent the rest of his reign, surrounded by soldiers and guards, until he suffered a fatal stroke, a mere seven years after his conquest. The castle passed into the hands of others, mostly rich families that wanted a summer retreat. Some halfhearted attempts were made to brighten it up with gardens. Or tapestry, artwork, knotty pine paneling, and avocado green appliances. But there was little improvement. The atmosphere of threatening and desperate hostility seemed built right into the stone, and no set of matching end tables could change it. Eventually it was abandoned. For long periods of time the castle sat empty. Occasionally there was talk of turning it into a museum or perhaps a community college, but nothing ever came of this. And then Lord Voltmeter arrived.

  It was a furious young princess who stamped into the Anxiety Armor Works of Angst that morning. She had waited for Kevin to return. She had dawdled before her mirror, spending extra time brushing her hair so that she wouldn’t seem like she was waiting for him when he showed up. She had lingered over breakfast at the inn, drinking a whole pot of tea and eating an extra muffin, quietly seething over the fact that he had gone without telling her. It was true she’d had no intention of being left behind at the tavern. And obviously he realized it. But that was no excuse. Becky firmly believed that for a romance to succeed, a boy had to be open, honest, and truthful to his girlfriend. It was all right for women to deceive men, because they only did it to help make the relationship better. Everyone knew that. Clearly, Kevin was not playing by the rules.

  Finally, she admitted he wasn’t coming back that morning, picked up her shoulder bag, and went into the village. As Kevin had predicted, there was an armorer not far away. Despite her anger, she kept her voice under control when she entered the shop. “I’d like to purchase a steel breastplate, please. Nothing too heavy. Perhaps with a floral-pattern.”

  The proprietor sized up the situation and reacted instantly. “Right,” he said, grabbing a measuring tape. “A breastplate. I’ll just get a few measurements here.”

  Becky slapped his hands away. “I’ve already written down my measurements for you,” she said sweetly. She handed him a slip of paper. “What have you got in this size?”

  “I’ll make any size you want, miss. Same for the design. We do custom lacquer, engraving, and even filigree, although that will take quite a bit longer.”

  “You don’t have anything in stock?”

  “Stock?” The armorer looked puzzled. “Miss, I don’t know anybody who keeps plate armor on the shelf, except to display his handiwork. It’s all custom-made to order. A plain steel breastplate won’t take very long. Then I got a nice piece of bronze here. Excellent quality—feel the material. You can decorate it with strings of teeth and little skulls—gives it that barbarian look that’s so popular nowadays. I can fit you this morning and you can pick it up in a fortnight.”

  “Ten days? I don’t suppose you have dressing rooms either?”

  “No, miss.”

  “You didn’t happen to see a young man come by this morning. Tall, rather good-looking, nice clothes?”

  “The stranger who rode into the village yesterday?”

  “Could be.”

  “He didn’t come in here. But I saw him riding to . . .” Here the armorer lowered his voice and glanced fearfully toward the door. “To the Fortress of Doom. They say he’s scouting the place out for Lord Logan.”

  Fine, thought Becky. Good for him. If that’s the way the Prince wants to play it, then I can do the same. Back at the inn she changed clothes. She decided against the boy’s jacket and instead wore a divided riding skirt tucked into ankle boots, and a loose blouse that covered the Barbarian Swordswoman outfit. Then she slung her bag over one shoulder, Thunk’s sword belt across the other, and took her horse from the stables. She was still seething when she approached the Fortress. There was no back entrance. The front gate was heavily guarded. So were the walls, which couldn’t be climbed without special equipment. Becky forced herself to calm down and assess the situation. She hid her horse in a copse of trees and approached the Fortress on foot. This made for a hot walk, but she was rewarded with a series of signs that revealed the location of an unguarded ventilation shaft. A wide drainpipe led to the roof, so easy to climb it was almost like a ladder. On top, she slipped a tuppence into a turnstile and lowered herself into the shaft.

  It wasn’t difficult for an athletic young woman to work her way down the shaft. Nor did she feel any concern when the light above her faded. Quite the contrary; she regained her normal good humor as she sank into the darkness. So far everything had been easy. And she didn’t expect the rest of the quest to be any more difficult. Most of the guards, she thought, would be on the outside of the castle. Or perhaps manning the walls. She was confident that once inside, she would have little problem searching for the Ancient Artifact.

  This was the true beauty of her plan, the real reason she came to Angst. Her father had promised Becky’s hand in marriage to whoever recovered the Ancient Artifact. But what if Becky brought the Ancient Artifact home herself?

  What then? Becky knew the answer. She’d insist that she be allowed to choose her own husband.

  That would still be Prince Kevin, of course, but she wouldn’t let him know right away. Ha! She’d put him off, make him sweat a little, while she pretended to consider other guys. Maybe she’d flirt a little with Logan, or that other prince, Bigelow. Kevin would go crazy with jealousy. It would serve him right for deceiving her. Eventually she’d relent and marry him, but first she’d make it clear that he still owed her a shopping trip.

  She became aware that the shaft was dimly lit. A red glow emanated from the bottom. That made climbing down even easier. In fact, she was amazed at how simple it was to get into this so-called Invincible Fortress. She had heard plenty of tales about this sort of thing. Getting into the fortress was supposed to be a big deal. Of course, she thought, it was just like men to say so. They were always trying to impress you with their feats of valor, making them seem more difficult than they actually were. They never realized that a woman could always do a better job. Becky figured she’d have this wrapped up in no time.

  In fact, there was really no reason to go home right after it was over. She was rather enjoying this Barbarian Swordswoman gig. Maybe she’d stick with it for a little while. Recovering the Ancient Artifact would start her off with a reputation for daring. Then she could add to it with a quest or two. Before long she’d be famous throughout the country. Rebecca the Bold, Barbarian Princess! She drew a mental picture of herself striding into a tavern, clad in chain mail and leather, her sword in hand. All voices would stop when she entered. Instantly, a space would clear for her at the bar. Every eye would fix on the wild, fierce beauty, the one woman that all men desired but none could ever tame. The bravest would try to talk with her, but she would toss her head proudly and look right through them. She gave her head an experimental toss and banged it against the shaft wall. “Ow.”

  Maybe she’d better concentrate on getting out of this shaft first.

  At the bottom was a piece of red glass set into the stone, a candle behind it, and some sort of map she couldn’t read. The shaft branched horizontally in four directions, each extending out into darkness. She gave it a little thought, while catching her breath, but she couldn’t think of any reason to choose one over the other. So she picked one at random and drew the sword, waving it in front of her to feel for obstacles.

  Or whatever lay in wait.

  She traveled only a few yards before the bottom dropped out of the shaft.

  “Ooof.” She landed on a pile of sand, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. It was some minutes before she was able to raise her head. She was in a small square room, lit by torches, with a door o
n each wall. Her sword lay beside her. She stood and picked it up. Above her head, the trapdoor was just out of jumping range. She tried a few jumps to verify this. She was about to try the doors when they all opened, simultaneously, and two armored soldiers, black visors pulled over their faces, swords in hand, entered from each door. The eight men spread out and surrounded her.

  The Princess Rebecca said a most unladylike word. Then she swung the sword.

  “Follow me,” Valerie told Kevin. “The first thing we have to do is set you up with a pass. Then you can go to any room you want, except the restricted areas.”

  “Fine,” said Kevin. He was pushing a circular cart filled with long-handled brushes and brooms. “I don’t expect this to take too long. No more than a few days.” He followed her down the hall. It was not an unpleasant task. She was wearing a very short black leather skirt and strappy patent heels, and her firm little bottom swayed when she walked. She was also wearing studded leather wristbands and a choker, but not a leather bustier. Today she wore a tight, cropped blouse with the words KISS ME, I’M EVIL embroidered in red across the front. Kevin had no problem following her. While her back was turned he quickly checked his mustache. It was still firmly glued in place.

  From the inside, the Fortress of Doom was every bit as forbidding as it looked from the outside. It was dark, damp, and a bit smoky. The walls were mostly bare black stone, rough and unfinished, which swallowed the light from the oil lamps. The corridors were narrow and had only the minimum amount of headroom. The doorways were even lower and the stairs even narrower. You could tell it was a place that was built for strength, not comfort. Soldiers, always armed, passed them at a steady rate, although they always turned aside to let Valerie through. From time to time Kevin would look into open doors, to see officers sketching out maps and battle plans, working on makeshift tables cobbled together from boards and sawhorses.

  Valerie was tossing out vague directions. “The kitchen and the mess halls are over that way. The officers’ quarters are along this hall, and the barracks are that way. It’s very confusing. Don’t be afraid to ask directions. Everyone gets lost the first few weeks. There’s no pattern to any of it.”