My Hero Read Free

out of you and you go in the melt. Capisce? ’
    â€˜. . . Best years of my life, and what thanks do I . . . ?’
    With exquisite caution, Skinner ventured a quick glimpse round the side of the rock. The man who had fired at him was standing up in his stirrups, looking round. The others were spread out in a loose crescent formation, ready to deploy at speed. In the middle of the group, Jonah LaForce lounged in the saddle, his white Stetson pulled down over his eyes, a long Sharps rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm.
    Shit, thought Skinner. All the running, the hiding, the living like a pig in this godforsaken wilderness of a potboiler, and it ends here. Shot to death by a goddamn cliché.
    Slowly, unwillingly, he reached down and closed his fingers around the grips of the revolver.
    Â 
    â€˜All right,’ Regalian shouted, ‘are we all agreed?’
    Linda giggled. ‘You do look silly,’ she said, ‘standing on that chair. I can see your socks.’
    Regalian ignored her. ‘The time has come,’ he said, ‘to stand up and be counted. For far too long—’

    â€˜Does that mean we all have to stand on chairs? Or can we be counted at floor level?’
    Another day’s work done, another night in the pub. That’s fiction for you.
    â€˜For far too long,’ Regalian persevered nevertheless, ‘authors worldwide have been taking us for granted. Well, it’s time we put a stop to all that. Characters united can never be def—’
    â€˜Time, ladies and gentlemen, please,’ chirruped the landlord in the background. ‘Come on, you lot, haven’t you got plots to go to?’
    â€˜United,’ Regalian said gamely, ‘we can never be defeated, and until our perfectly reasonable demands are met I recommend that we work strictly to rule. Our demands are—’
    â€˜Put a sock in it, will you?’ shouted Alf (Jotapian the High Priest; bad guys and Grand Viziers a speciality, no character too large or too small). ‘I want to be out of here before the chip shop closes.’
    â€˜One: a say in the decision-making process. It’s intolerable that in this day and age a character’s destiny is still completely at the whim of some jumped-up little scribbler. Two—’
    â€˜Put a sock in it,’ chortled Linda, rendered breathless by her own wit. Nobody else seemed to appreciate the joke, but she was used to that.
    â€˜Two: no character to be killed or married without his previous consent in writing. Three—’
    The landlord switched the lights off. Slowly, with a long sigh, Regalian climbed down off his chair and felt his way to the door. Every night, for as long as he could remember, he had broached the subject of a characters’ union, and the furthest he had ever been allowed to get was Demand Four.
    A character’s life is by its very nature nomadic, and for
the duration of the trilogy Regalian was living in a bedsit over a chemist’s shop on the junction of Tolkien Street and Moorcock Avenue. It was so small that the sixty-watt bulb provided by the management produced more than enough light to illuminate the whole of it, but it was cheap (thirty zlotys a week, all found) and fairly central, and he only went there to sleep. His collection of dog-eared book jackets concealed the peeling of the wallpaper, and the fact that the whole building was so dilapidated that it only stayed upright through force of habit was no concern of his. He kicked off his shoes, poked his thumb through the foil on a bottle of milk, and sat down on the bed. Lines to learn for tomorrow, then sleep.
    The lines were ready for him, neatly stacked on the chipped formica bedside table. He picked up the sheaf of papers and began to read.
    It had never, in all his long career, occurred to him to wonder how they got there. Did they simply materialise, or did a trans-dimensional courier deliver them, silent and unobtrusive