The pale savage who was no more than twenty was called Garnet, as I had already gathered, and the girl, who still hadn’t quite forgotten my look of distrust, Renthrette. I gave her a friendly smile and kind of wished I’d been more impressive during the fight. Kind of.
“We do not use the names we were born with anymore, so I am taking no unnecessary risks,” their swarthy leader went on. “I am Mithos, and I—”
“Mithos!” I bawled. “ The Mithos! Oh God! Mithos the thief, bandit, cutthroat, and wholesale murderer?”
“You should know better than to trust the Empire’s propaganda,” he remarked grimly.
“All right,” I backpedaled, knowing the terms these psychopaths preferred to be known by, “Mithos the rebel and adventurer?”
“The same,” he said.
SCENE V
Things Can Always Get Worse
A dventurers” hired themselves out as investigators, guards, explorers, and specialists of various kinds, particularly if the assignment involved a balancing act between risk and profit. In effect they were burglars, thugs, murderers, and grave robbers. The Empire, in a rare moment of insight, had made the profession illegal. Adventurers were untrustworthy, and if they obeyed any laws at all, they were those of their own personal and erratic honor code. This made them dangerous people to have around and clearly a threat to the “peace” and solidity of the Diamond Empire. The Empire, moreover, had learnt that the likes of my dangerous saviors had organized much of the opposition during the initial invasion of Thrusia and continued to lead uprisings when the mood took them. “Adventurers” were rebels by any other name.
As a result, the identity of adventurers was information much sought after by the Empire’s many spies and collaborators. One of the most notorious adventurers, a rebel whose name appeared on wanted lists all over Cresdon, was sitting three feet from me right now.
Reports of Mithos’s physical appearance were fraught with contradictions, but I could think of half a dozen brutal attacks motivated solely by greed, the desire to eat small children, etc., that had been linked to his name. The knowledge did not make me comfortable.
I should say that I do not much like the Empire. Thrusia, the mountain region in which Cresdon is situated, fought hard against the invaders but fell the year I was born. Since then we have paid for our defiance. It seems to me that the best policy is to keep your head down and say nothing, which, until today, and despite my somewhat checkered career in the theatre, is exactly what I had done.
As ever, for those who can come to terms with the presence of an occupying force there is some profit. I have never actively collaborated with the Empire, but I have become, I must admit, a pretty passive subject. In truth I was—or assumed I was—too insignificant for them to take notice of me. I had lived like a flea on the carcass of their town and they had given me the attention a flea merits. Until about half an hour ago. And now I was sharing a room with the most wanted man in Cresdon and his conspicuously homicidal side-kicks.
To cheer myself up I tried to sit next to the girl, Renthrette, who I figured was one of their girlfriends. It seemed fairly sure that I could make her like me for my wit if not for my physique, but, for the moment at least, she was doing a pretty convincing job of ignoring me completely. I found myself sharing a box with Orgos, the one who had sneered at me for being a petty criminal and then committed about half a dozen capital offenses in as many seconds. I looked at the girl for comfort and it cheered me up a little until I felt her acid eyes upon me. I gave her my long-practiced winning smile, but she met it with a look that would have leveled a small building and turned her back on me.
God, what a fiasco.
The four of them pumped me for information about myself. I repeated what I had told them already: who I was, where I lived, why I
“We do not use the names we were born with anymore, so I am taking no unnecessary risks,” their swarthy leader went on. “I am Mithos, and I—”
“Mithos!” I bawled. “ The Mithos! Oh God! Mithos the thief, bandit, cutthroat, and wholesale murderer?”
“You should know better than to trust the Empire’s propaganda,” he remarked grimly.
“All right,” I backpedaled, knowing the terms these psychopaths preferred to be known by, “Mithos the rebel and adventurer?”
“The same,” he said.
SCENE V
Things Can Always Get Worse
A dventurers” hired themselves out as investigators, guards, explorers, and specialists of various kinds, particularly if the assignment involved a balancing act between risk and profit. In effect they were burglars, thugs, murderers, and grave robbers. The Empire, in a rare moment of insight, had made the profession illegal. Adventurers were untrustworthy, and if they obeyed any laws at all, they were those of their own personal and erratic honor code. This made them dangerous people to have around and clearly a threat to the “peace” and solidity of the Diamond Empire. The Empire, moreover, had learnt that the likes of my dangerous saviors had organized much of the opposition during the initial invasion of Thrusia and continued to lead uprisings when the mood took them. “Adventurers” were rebels by any other name.
As a result, the identity of adventurers was information much sought after by the Empire’s many spies and collaborators. One of the most notorious adventurers, a rebel whose name appeared on wanted lists all over Cresdon, was sitting three feet from me right now.
Reports of Mithos’s physical appearance were fraught with contradictions, but I could think of half a dozen brutal attacks motivated solely by greed, the desire to eat small children, etc., that had been linked to his name. The knowledge did not make me comfortable.
I should say that I do not much like the Empire. Thrusia, the mountain region in which Cresdon is situated, fought hard against the invaders but fell the year I was born. Since then we have paid for our defiance. It seems to me that the best policy is to keep your head down and say nothing, which, until today, and despite my somewhat checkered career in the theatre, is exactly what I had done.
As ever, for those who can come to terms with the presence of an occupying force there is some profit. I have never actively collaborated with the Empire, but I have become, I must admit, a pretty passive subject. In truth I was—or assumed I was—too insignificant for them to take notice of me. I had lived like a flea on the carcass of their town and they had given me the attention a flea merits. Until about half an hour ago. And now I was sharing a room with the most wanted man in Cresdon and his conspicuously homicidal side-kicks.
To cheer myself up I tried to sit next to the girl, Renthrette, who I figured was one of their girlfriends. It seemed fairly sure that I could make her like me for my wit if not for my physique, but, for the moment at least, she was doing a pretty convincing job of ignoring me completely. I found myself sharing a box with Orgos, the one who had sneered at me for being a petty criminal and then committed about half a dozen capital offenses in as many seconds. I looked at the girl for comfort and it cheered me up a little until I felt her acid eyes upon me. I gave her my long-practiced winning smile, but she met it with a look that would have leveled a small building and turned her back on me.
God, what a fiasco.
The four of them pumped me for information about myself. I repeated what I had told them already: who I was, where I lived, why I
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