by Jon Hollins
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Wood
Excerpt from The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn copyright © 2018 by Tyler Whitesides
Excerpt from Seven Blades in Black copyright © 2018 by Sam Sykes
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover illustration by Chase Stone
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Map by Tim Paul
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hollins, Jon, author.
Title: Bad faith / Jon Hollins.
Description: First edition. | New York : Orbit, 2018. | Series: The dragon lords
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014755| ISBN 9780316308311 (softcover) | ISBN 9780316308328 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dragons—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Fantasty fiction. | Epic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.O48487 B33 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014755
ISBNs: 978-0-316-30831-1 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-30832-8 (ebook)
E3-20180626-JV-NF
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Part 1: Bad Luck
1: Death and Other Minor Inconveniences
2: First in the Heavens, Last in Our Hearts
3: Fiery Zeal
4: Did I Stutter?
5: Party Planning
6: Look, Dragons Are in the Series Name, Okay?
7: In Which Lette Is Full of Shit
8: This Ain’t Your Father’s Negotiation Tactic
9: How to Make Friends and Influence Psychopaths
10: My Enemy’s Enemy
11: The Backstory I’ve Spent Three Books Getting Around To
12: The Downward Spiral
13: Never Go Full Lovecraft
14: Cultural Indifferences
15: The High-Stakes Art of Public Speaking
16: Anarchy in a Teacup
17: What Passes for Victory These Days
18: Dependency Problems
19: There’s No Place Like Home
Part 2: Bad Decisions
20: What the Hell Happened to Kansas?
21: The Only One Who Could Ever Reach Me
22: Stuck in the Middle with You
23: When Life Gives You Apocalyptic Disasters
24: Because We Haven’t Heard from Her in Nine Chapters
25: Death by Bear Hug
26: Because Burning Everyone and Everything Is Totally a Plan
27: The Man without the Plan
28: As Unstoppable as a Runaway Steamroller Heading Toward a Kindergarten
29: The Pillage People
30: The Passion of the Quirk
31: The Things We Do for Love
32: Fired Up
33: That Moment When Two Is a Crowd
34: Dead Man Talking
35: She Has Her Reasons, Dammit
36: Power Relations
37: Enhanced Interrogations
38: A Break from Your Regularly Scheduled Programming
39: Thunderstruck
40: He Who Controls the Past
41: Quitting Time
42: Compromising Situations
43: Halfway There
44: I Would Do Anything for Power, but I Won’t Be Allowed to Do That
45: Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
46: Can’t We Have an Upbeat Chapter?
47: With Friends Like These …
48: The Voyeur
49: Breaking Faith
50: Reptile Dysfunction
51: The Protestant
52: Causality’s Casualty
53: All the Usual Hazards of Playing with Fire
54: The Ants Go Marching Two by Two
55: The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled …
56: All the News That’s Fit to Shout Semiarticulately
57: Seeing Is Believing
58: Tricked Out
59: The Eternal Fate of Smug Bastards
60: Powerless
Part 3: Bad Mofos
61: Catharsis Through the Medium of Punching Dickheads
62: Loyalties and Lying
63: Prayers Answered
64: The Gratt in the Oyster
65: A Better Class of Hitchhiking
66: Castles in the Sky
67: Home Awful Home
68: Well, What Did You Expect?
69: Daddy Issues
70: This Hurts Me as Much as It Hurts You
71: Why We Fight
72: Going Down in Flames
73: Life Punches below the Belt
74: The Lesser of Two Evils
75: The Bigger They Are …
76: The View from the Cheap Seats
77: … The Harder They Fall
78: The Illusion of Victory
79: The Last Temptation of Willett Fallows
Coda: Good Times
80: The End of the Beginning
Acknowledgments
Extras
A Preview of The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn
A Preview of Seven Blades in Black
By Jon Hollins
Orbit Newsletter
For Tami, Charlie, and Emma. Their faith got me here.
“I’ll never pause again, never stand still, Till either death hath closed these eyes of mine Or fortune given me measure of revenge.”
—Henry VI, Part 3,
William Shakespeare
PART 1:
BAD LUCK
1
Death and Other Minor Inconveniences
Klink. A god named for the sound of two coins striking each other. A god of that very sound. A god of all things mercantile and profitable. The catalyst for coin moving from one man’s hand to another’s purse, where it could join its fellows and … clink.
Klink. A god. A being who had been old when the world was young. Worshipped by millions. Even loved by some of them. A being who had inspired hymn, and poem, and myth.
Klink. A god.
Will Fallows watched as Klink’s dirty, broken body was hoisted before the crowd and the weakly struggling deity’s throat was slit broad as a smile.
Things were definit
ely not going to plan.
To be fair, that was a statement that could be applied to quite a lot of Will’s life recently.
Six months ago, Will had died.
Actually, technically speaking—and Will was definitely willing to get technical over this particular point—he had been murdered. He had been on the verge of liberating the whole world of Avarra from tyrannical dragons—and, incidentally, tyrannical gods like Klink as well—when he had been metaphorically stabbed in the back, and literally stabbed in the throat, by Barph.
Barph was another of the gods, and one whom Will had previously judged to lack such despotic tendencies. It had been, Will was willing to concede, a fairly big miss on his part.
As was typical when such things occurred, Will subsequently found himself in the Hallows, the lands of the dead. Many of his friends arrived along with him. Barph, it turned out, was pretty liberal when it came to the whole murder thing. He was a god, after all. In fact, after this little coup d’état, Barph was the only god, because all the other gods had previously headed to the Hallows. They had been there under the impression that Will and his friends were going to rescue them. The whole overthrowing-their-tyranny thing hadn’t really been discussed with them at that point.
Anyway, as was also typical with such things, Will was pretty pissed about the whole affair. There had been a lot of clenched fists and passionately proclaiming revenge on Barph. Lette—a woman more poetic with her blades than most bards were with words, and therefore someone Will trusted on such issues—had informed him that it felt very epic. There had even been a ledge and wind-tousled hair involved.
Balur—a giant, mercenary lizard man and Lette’s usual traveling companion (although Balur had conceded that “into the Hallows” was further than he had intended to take things)—had possessed a differing opinion. As he put it, “Passionate words are being okay for getting bards laid, but they are killing about as many gods as my prick.”
Afrit—a former university professor, and therefore someone who Will actually thought might produce an intelligent thought once in a while—had disappointed him by agreeing “with the sentiment, if not the specific phrasing,” as she sanctimoniously put it.
Will had not been in the mood for his friends’ snark, and had immediately set about trying to prove the lizard man wrong by escaping the Hallows.
That had been six months ago.
To be fair, Will’s efforts had been hampered by a number of things. First, his friends’ snark. Second, in the wake of Barph’s takeover of the heavens, things in the Hallows had—not to put too fine a point on it—gone to utter shit. Previously the domain of Lawl, king of the gods and head cheerleader of rules and regulations, the Hallows had been a highly ordered domain. Tallies of sanctity and sin had been taken for each of the arriving dead, and appropriate afterlives delivered. Massive guardians—all muscles and no personality—had enforced these highly scripted hierarchies, and everything had been in its correct place. Barph, though, was not such a god. Barph was the god of revelry and anarchy and pissing in Lawl’s eye. Now he ruled the Hallows, and Lawl was in them, and so Barph was going to have fun.
All rules in the Hallows had been canceled. Anarchy reigned. And then, shortly after that, warlords did. All the guardians—all the massive, powerful enforcers Lawl had put in place—had nothing to hold them in check. And so they made armies of the dead, and went to war on each other.
That sort of thing tended to get in the way of one’s revenge, Will had found. And when you explained that to a massive undead general three times your height and weight, things tended to go badly. As Klink could attest.
Well … he could have about ten seconds ago.
The gods were another epic pain in Will’s arse. There were six of them. Five now. Lawl, the former ruler of the heavens. Betra, his wife, former goddess of hearth and home, and utter pissing harpy as far as Will was concerned. Klink’s twin brother, Toil, god of fields and farmers, and one of the biggest disappointments in a series of fairly massive disappointments in Will’s life. Will thought maybe he should be reconciled to them now, but it was still a hard thing to know that you had sacrificed a fatted calf to someone you had subsequently watched cry while he pissed.
After that there was Knole, who was reportedly the goddess of wisdom, although her primary field of expertise seemed to be being an absentminded stain in the britches of Will’s life.
Finally there was Cois. Oh, Cois. Will had slept with Cois. It was before either of them had been killed, back when zhe was the hermaphroditic god(dess) of love and lust. If Will were a bragging man and not hopelessly in love (in a more literal sense than normal) with Lette, then it would have been quite the conquest. However, the reasons for their union had been more rational than romantic, and the whole thing had been rather undercut by the fact that Balur had been in the Hallows only about three seconds when he hooked up with hir. What made it even worse was that they were a revolting couple. Will was fairly sure that that level of face licking was decidedly unhygienic.
Will and his friends had met the gods immediately upon their arrival in the Hallows. It turned out the gods had been waiting for them, full of expectations and eagerness, because they had been, at the time, still under the impression that Will was attempting to save them and deliver Avarra back into their greedy little hands. A rather uncomfortable conversation had followed, but Will had figured that would be the end of it. But oh no, instead they had decided to tag along until he fixed things, as if he had any intention of doing that. Still, to a former deity, killing Barph in an inventive and painful way apparently sounded close enough.
And despite all of this, despite the nagging and the bickering and the delays and his companions’ endemic lack of urgency, Will had come up with a plan. Will had figured a way out and back to Avarra.
It had been Cois who had told them about the Deep Ones.
They’d been in the Hallows about a month. The initial scrabble to survive, and to escape the collapsing power structures that had come with Barph’s rise to power, finally seemed to be over. They had scavenged enough food, wood, and clothing to be comfortable for the night. They had made a fire, roasted meat.
Will had been pacing in circles. It was his default setting at the time. Plans for revenge seethed beneath his skin.
Balur’s mind was elsewhere, though, because apparently Will was the only one of them who could focus.
“Who would be thinking,” Balur had said, pointing at Lawl, who’d been curled up in a corner muttering angrily to himself, “that that prick built the Hallows?”
“No, he didn’t!” Cois had sounded scandalized. “It existed long before he did.”
“What?” Afrit, sagging by the fire, had come alive with such ferocity, Will could almost believe she’d actually … well, come alive. “Before?” she’d said with wonder in her voice.
“Lawl repurposed this space,” Cois had said patiently.
“Silence, harlot!” Lawl had snapped. Though, to be fair, that was about 90 percent of what he’d said even when he was a god.
“Fine,” Cois had acknowledged. “Yes, he did expand upon it. And restructure it. And put in place a lot of the hierarchy you see now. But he didn’t build it from scratch.”
“But …” Afrit had pushed her hand through her growing nest of hair. “Before?”
“Is this being the first time you have been hearing that word?” Balur asked. “It is being to do with chronology.”
“I know what pissing before means, Balur,” Afrit had snapped. “The issue is that there isn’t meant to be a before. When it comes to Lawl, he and Betra are ground zero for divinity. They are the beginning.”
Cois had looked over at Lawl and squinted. “Is that what you’ve been telling people all these years?”
“Silence, harlot!” Lawl had said, taking his cue.
“Well then,” Cois had said, looking directly at Lawl while zhe spoke. “Let me dispense some truth. There was a before. There were the Deep Ones.”
“The who?” Afrit’s voice had scraped for octaves higher than the cavern ceiling above them.
“Seriously?” Cois had looked about at the surrounding mortals.
“Don’t be looking at me,” Balur had said. “Analesian religious education is stopping at, ‘And the gods were inventing punching people in the face.’”
Cois had shaken hir head minutely. “The Deep Ones. Our former masters. Vast, horrifying beasts beyond human ken. The infinite unknowable made flesh. Well … almost flesh. Or … something a lot like flesh, although also exactly the opposite of flesh. They’re hard to explain. Just assume they’re sort of like the inverse of sanity made into giant monsters, and you’re probably close enough. Total pricks.
“Anyway, they ruled the Hallows before we did. They also created Lawl and Betra. Who then birthed the rest of us one way or another. But we were all their slaves. And then Lawl led us in rebellion against them. And we defeated them. We condemned them to eternal sleep. We stole their divinity. Lawl reshaped this place, then got into the whole ‘divine ruler’ thing, and created the heavens and the mortal plane. Then humanity, and eons later … this mess.”
There had been silence then, except for the sound of Afrit hyperventilating.
And in that silence it had felt as if tiny slivers of glass were falling through Will’s mind—slashing through confusion and frustration and carving a shape.
Stole their divinity.
“The Deep Ones?” he had said. “They’re still down here?”
“I didn’t condemn them to be eternal sleepwalkers,” Lawl had barked.
Stole their divinity.
And for the first time since he had entered the Hallows, Will had smiled.
Will didn’t know much about how to escape the Hallows, but he did know that divinity sounded a lot like a way to achieve it. And apparently some of it had been left lying around. And so all he had to do was get to it. And as he had the very architect of the Hallows with him, that hadn’t seemed like too much of a problem.
Except Will Fallows was also the punch line of life’s little comedy.
“How should I know?” Lawl had said when Will had asked him where the Deep Ones lay.
“For all the obvious reasons,” Will had pointed out, while trying to ignore all the obvious reasons for punching Lawl in his obnoxious face.