Will Power by A. J. Hartley Page A

this was not my idea of a fun place to spend the evening. If I wasn’t going to spend the night wandering around this desolate hole in total darkness, stumblinginto bogs or the jaws of whatever nightmares lived in them, I was going to have to move quickly, goblins or no bloody goblins.
    I crawled out and up, conscious that the mud clotting on my skin was beginning to stink even more as it warmed to my body heat. Nice. Peering out and across the valley floor, I scoured the land for signs of the enemy, but could see little through the long, coarse grass. Bugger all, in fact. Nothing of friends or town, road or track. And as if on cue, it began to rain, a cold, misty drizzle which didn’t rinse any of the mud off, but did manage to make me just that bit more miserable.
    I clambered awkwardly to my feet and began, for want of a better idea, to move in the vague direction the path had been pointing before it petered out in this swampy wasteland. My mouth and nose were full of the pond’s stinking ooze and grit, and no matter how much I spat, there seemed to be more under my tongue or between my teeth making my drool brownish. I skulked forward, all hunched over, glancing furtively about and dropping to a hurried crouch in the long grass every few seconds like a crippled rabbit with a lot of enemies.
    This went on for about two hours. The light began to lessen perceptibly, though I have no idea how far I traveled or if I was still heading in the same direction. With dull alarm I began moving faster and less cautiously, knowing full well that with the grass this long I could slam into the side of a bear without seeing it until it was ready for a second helping. I kept going, pressed on by the swelling darkness, the growing chill, and the absolute certainty that if I had to spend the night out here
something
would get me.
    The ground began to dry out under my feet and the reeds thinned until I was crossing great fields of long tufted grass. Turning around, I thought I could make out the dim silhouette of the crags behind me in the far distance. Large insects, beetles, and some evil-looking form of cricket leaped and blundered out of my path as I sped away from the mountains and the creatures which lived there. I was filthy, miserable, and exhausted, but I picked up the pace, hoping against hope to find something more in my milieu, if you know what I mean. A pub with a friendly barmaid would be nice, but I’d settle for a house. And a beer. I could murder a beer.
    I rested on a fallen tree which had been lying in the grass donkeys’ years and was overgrown with moss and strange leathery fungi. Sitting on it, I wheezed heavily, sucking the air into my lungs like a man at a desert oasis gulping water. I had a stitch in my side from running, and Ifound myself wishing, ironically, that Orgos had made me exercise more in Stavis. But that was not the way to think now, for lots of reasons. I thought of one of the heroes I had played in those old Thrusian history plays and figured that if I could make two-and-a-half-thousand bitter Cresdonites believe that Will Hawthorne, scrawny and fat at the same time, was Lothar the Wanderer, scourge of the unchivalrous and iambic-pentametered all-round good egg, once a month for two years, I could do anything. I got to my feet and began to run again with new and grim determination.
    Ten minutes later, clutching my aching side and gasping with weariness, Lothar the Wanderer was flagging. I squatted in the grass and parted one great tuft (if “tuft” isn’t the wrong word for a clump of leaves twelve feet high), looking desperately around. There, directly ahead of me, I saw smoke: not the smoke of carnage and destruction, amazingly enough, but chimney smoke, hanging like a smudge of steely blue in the dark sky. Rising till I was almost vertical, I began, once more, to run, but this time I could see the audience admiring me. Lothar was doing the epilogue; I could smell it in the woodsmoke.
    At times