by Jon Hollins
It took two more ambushes for them to get the directions they needed to Turuck’s camp, but by the end Cois seemed to be taking the position of hostage as one of high esteem.
“Some of us have it,” zhe told Lette and Afrit, “and some of us don’t.”
When they finally got to it, Turuck’s camp was larger and better established than Will had expected. Some people lived in their own filth, for certain, but others had attempted to build solid structures, and many of the tents were relatively elaborate. Yes, the skull theme was hit a little too hard—Will could see Balur’s point there—but considering half the people he could see were dribbling on themselves and carving into their arms with knives, it was fairly impressive.
“Well, this should be fun,” Will lied as he led the group down the hill toward them.
“Not for me, apparently,” said Balur, who was still sulking.
Will had half suspected that they would be attacked on sight, but the inhabitants of Turuck’s settlement were apparently civil enough to just stare balefully at them all. However, their social skills seem to falter and die when it came to answering Will’s questions. “Where’s Turuck?” just resulted in people laughing manically, or in a few cases physically attacking him. He tried going with something he thought might be more in their parlance, but “Where’s Turuck, arsehole?” just got fewer laughs and slightly more violence. “I am here to kill Turuck,” got blank stares, as if what he was saying were utterly unfathomable.
Finally he went with, “I, Willett Fallows, do hereby call Turuck a coward, a weakling, and a monkey fucker who couldn’t battle his way out of his nursemaid’s arms, and I am here to swaddle his berry-bright arse so that the kicking I give it won’t damage his delicate feelings so badly that he goes crying to his mommy.” He even did it from astride a pile of three corpses that Balur had dropped at his feet. And that seemed to do it.
A hush fell over the crowd of figures that had gathered around them. They were almost universally big men, some lean, some bulky, some bright-eyed, some peering from beneath hulking brows. They were all armed, though sword care did not seem to be a common practice among them. The blades on display were rusty and crusted with blood. Some had resorted to carrying clubs. One or two just held large pieces of rock. And yet, in this crowd of psychopaths and killers, it seemed Will had found a subject that was taboo: Calling Turuck names was apparently not something you did, even if you were stone-cold crazy.
At the back of the crowd, a tent flap stirred. The tent was low, dirty, and generally to be considered a significant step down from a hovel. Will hadn’t paid it much heed. But then a man pushed back the tent flap and emerged. And emerged. It seemed to go on forever.
Muscles bulged off the man in a way that Will could hardly make sense of. He seemed a parody of anatomy. There was something deeply wrong with the man’s physiology. Some tumor planted deep within him, twisting him further and further out of true. As he moved, his skin rippled uncomfortably, veins pushing up against it from beneath the skin. He was perhaps even bigger than Balur. Will hadn’t realized that people came in that size.
“I am what?” he called. Turuck’s voice was pitched so low, Will almost had trouble picking out the words.
Will hesitated. He knew he was here to start a fight, but gods … just the sheer size of him.
He wanted to look at Lette, to run to her so she could tell him reassuring clichés about how the bigger they came the harder they fell.
He took a breath and looked Turuck in the eye.
“You’re my bitch,” he said. “My sniveling little bitch.”
Turuck grinned. “Many come to me to die, little man,” he said. “I shall not turn you away.” He reached over his shoulder and pulled out … Will tried to work out what it might have been in another man’s hands. Some sort of forge equipment, perhaps? Something trawled up from a dwarven mine?
It resembled a cleaver, but was surely almost six feet long. A massive chunk of sharpened metal streaked brown with blood and rust, but with an edge that still gleamed. There was no guard on the handle, just a ragged steel pipe roughly welded on and wrapped with rags. Turuck didn’t even hold it in both hands. He used his spare one to beckon to Will.
“Come on, little man. It will be over soon.”
The psychotics stepped back, made an oval in the mud. Turuck hulked at the apex of one curve. Will stood at the other, trying to remember where someone’s kidneys were.
“I was always saying this was a stupid plan,” he heard Balur mutter, which really didn’t help.
You’re cheating, Will said to himself. It’s going to be okay, because you’re cheating.
He fumbled for the tiny scrap of magical power still flickering in his belly.
He remembered what true power felt like. He remembered the days after he had slept with Cois, feeling hir power unfurling through his body, the slow realization that the world could be bent to his will. When anything seemed possible. He remembered standing in Vinter, watching the dragons fall, watching his dreams become reality.
This scrap of power was a mockery of that. A pittance. He had come to this fight as a magical pauper.
But it had to be enough.
See me elsewhere. He pushed the thought out into the world. Forced it into existence, hefting all his weight behind it. Just as he had done with Chev. And it had worked then, hadn’t it?
He stepped away, around the edge of the circle, focusing on maintaining the illusion that he was standing back where he had started, playing with his dagger, smiling at Turuck, utterly unconcerned.
The big man kept walking toward the spot Will had occupied, didn’t look away for a moment, and Will’s heart leapt. It was working. It was actually bloody working.
“Do not be shy, little man,” Turuck said. “It is too late for regrets now, you know.”
Turuck wasn’t in a rush either. Which was good considering the ground Will had to cover. He scampered as quickly and quietly as he could. His palm felt sweaty as it gripped the dagger. He’d scavenged it from a battlefield early in their stay down in the Hallows. It was nothing special. Just six inches of sharp metal on the end of an ivory handle. Walrus tusk from the Amaranth Ocean, had been Balur’s assessment. Will hadn’t given it much thought at the time. It had just seemed better to have something than nothing. Now … Gods, now a great deal depended on the knife.
He’d asked Lette about a sword. She’d told him there wasn’t enough time to get him familiar with the weight. “A knife will do all the work you need as long as you get close enough,” she’d told him, “and I think that’s the whole point of the magic in your plan, right?”
And yes, yes, it was … but now that he saw Turuck, Will wasn’t completely sure he wanted to get that close.
He took a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, forced the air to leave him slowly. This will be quick. This will be quiet. All these people will think I moved too quick for them to see. They will believe. They will fall in line while Turuck bleeds out on the ground. It will be fine.
His heart thundered back at the preposterousness of his rationalizations.
He let Turuck walk past him. He made himself count another beat. This wouldn’t work if Turuck sensed Will behind him and turned.
Turuck’s back was like a landscape. Contortions of muscle brutalizing the skin, rising in outlandish hills and valleys. Thick black plaques disrupting forests of hair. The scraps of armor looked pathetic in their attempts to cover that vast expanse, paltry when compared to the natural hide.
You know where the kidneys are. You can mark the spots on his back. And it was true. Higher than he’d ever struck before. But approximately five feet off the ground. Well within reach.
Turuck stopped five yards away from where the illusory Will stood. “Any last words, little man? Anything you want to whisper in my ear?”
Oh shit, thought Will. This is it. He concentrated on giving his illusion an insouciant look of indifference and on keeping his bladder from leaking. He
was two yards from Turuck’s back now, closing slowly.
“It is all right to weep.” Turuck’s voice had an almost lilting quality. “Many have before you. Some shit themselves. Some laugh. It is all right. It is important in these last moments to simply be yourself. To be honest with yourself and your world. That is what I give people, you see. These moments where pretense is no longer necessary. That is my gift. To lift away the veils so you can reveal yourself.”
There was, Will thought, a really special sort of crazy going on in Turuck’s head.
Turuck raised his monstrous cleaver. His back arched. Muscles in the small of his back bunched. The straps of his armor creaked. The crowd inhaled.
And Will pigstuck him like a motherfucker.
Again and again he plunged the knife into Turuck’s back. A flurry of blows he hadn’t thought himself capable of. Again and again, the knife flicked out of Turuck’s back, great red spurts spattering his face.
And then Turuck spun round and hit him with a hand that seemed to strike the entirety of Will’s torso with the force of a charging bull and sent him flying across the dirt circle and landing with a crash of jangled limbs and senses.
He tried to get his feet under him, failed, sprawled in the dirt. He managed to focus on Turuck. The big man was reaching around, feeling his back. He brought back fingers dripping red.
Will tried to focus, to get his bearings. He had stabbed Turuck. He had stabbed him a lot. Why wasn’t the man on his knees, bleeding and weeping and ruing the day he had laid his eyes upon Willett Fallows? Why was he advancing on Will with his quite frankly preposterous sword in his hand?
“Hmmm,” said Turuck, licking the blood off his fingers. “You are quick. But you are also making me angry. And that”—he hefted his blade—“is a mistake.”
Will focused. On staying alive. On being a horrendous cheat and liar.
He rolled desperately in the earth, while sending another illusion the other way.
Turuck’s blade came down and smashed into Will’s illusion, which burst apart in a puff of disproven air. Turuck roared.
Will kept on scrambling. Turuck swept the blade back, not quite able to turn the massive weight, so that the flat of the blade crashed into Will’s hip and sent him sailing to eat more mud.
He tried to turn it into a somersault, landed on his injured tailbone, howled, and lay flat on his back. Turuck lumbered around and looked down at him.
“Not quick,” he said. “Tricky.”
“Yeah,” Will huffed out. “Totally.” Summoning what little willpower remained to him, Will threw out another illusion, a version of himself standing a little way away. And then another, and another. A ring of illusory selves standing around Turuck.
“But which one am I?” he said.
Turuck looked at him, puzzled. “What? You are the one lying on the ground in front of me.” He shook his head. “That’s not even … What are you trying …?” He pointed at one of the illusions. “How could you have gotten over there?”
And as his eyes left Will to look at the stupid illusion, Will took his chance. One last illusion. One last scrap of effort, which made his skull throb and his mind feel as if it were being scraped raw. An image of himself lying defeated in the mud, while he himself scrambled away hidden from everyone’s eyes.
He went and stood panting in the ring while Turuck looked down at the illusory self still lying in the muck. Will could see the wound he had gouged in the giant’s back. He had made a mess of the skin and muscle, but Turuck’s immense physiology had rendered Will’s concerns about the knife actually relevant. He just had not penetrated the man’s hide deeply enough to do the damage required.
Turuck leaned down. “To be tricky, little man,” he said in a hushed voice, “you also have to be smart.”
Which seemed as good a moment as any for Will to launch himself out of the circle and slam onto Turuck’s back. Still yelling, he scrambled upward. The blade was big enough to get to the arteries in the man’s neck, at least.
He got a good one or two utterly bewildered seconds from Turuck, Will’s weight throwing the massive warrior off and sending him stumbling one step, then two. Will grabbed at armor straps, hair, trying to haul himself aloft. He used the knife to gouge a bloody purchase on the brute’s back.
Turuck howled in anger as around and beneath him illusory Wills vanished, all blowing silent raspberries. Will himself was grunting and cursing, fighting for an angle.
With a roar Turuck flung himself onto his back.
Will had about a nanosecond to appreciate that he was about to be sandwiched between the ground and several hundred pounds, and then he was. The air sprayed out of him. His ribs creaked. He screamed, and lost track of many of his other pains.
After a while he realized that Turuck wasn’t getting off him. Also he was wet. And warm.
Bugger, he thought, I think I’m bleeding.
Turuck was very still and very quiet. Everyone, Will realized as his awareness slowly grew to expand beyond his immediate body and situation, was being very quiet.
Grunting, cursing, and still in considerable pain, Will squirmed free.
Turuck lay on the ground next to him.
Turuck was very, very dead.
Will wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. He didn’t think anyone was.
Then Will started to wonder where his knife was …
He’d been holding it when Turuck flung himself backward. He’d had it lodged in the middle of the man’s back …
Turuck’s weight … Gods, when they landed it must have finally been enough to drive the blade deep enough to do … Gods, what had he hit? There was blood everywhere. The blade must have struck the man’s heart.
Everyone was staring at him. Everyone was staring at Turuck lying at his feet.
His feet.
He’d won.
“YES!” Will bellowed. Gods, he suddenly felt remarkably and miraculously alive. “COME ON!” he bellowed at the astonished crowd. “That’s what I’m fucking talking about.” He kicked Turuck. “Bring it on, you son of a bitch. Bigger they come!” He pounded his own chest with his fist. “Yeah!” He lifted back his head and whooped at the sky.
Everybody kept on just staring silently at him.
“Yeah!” he shouted again.
“Okay,” said Lette, stepping out of the circle of onlookers. “I think that’s enough now.”
“I—” Will started.
“Yes, yes. They know.” She was nodding.
Will held out a finger and pointed at every single member of the crowd he could see, circling so they all knew. “You listen to me now. You listen to me!”
“Settle down.”
But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He had them in the palm of his hand. They would take him to the gorge. He would steal the Deep Ones’ power. He would get out of here and get his revenge. And his revenge was closer than it had ever been before.
10
My Enemy’s Enemy
When Quirk came to, she was staring a dragon in the face. It was, it seemed, chewing on a dead body.
She flinched backward. Then she shouted in pain. She had injured her body well beyond the point where she should be flinching.
“What …?” Quirk managed, then ran out of words.
Then it came back to her. The utter and miserable failure of her attack on Barph. Fighting alongside the dragon. Killing alongside the dragon. And then …
Then she had passed out. In Tarramon. In her enemy’s stronghold.
The dragon swallowed the body, a flopping leg disappearing obscenely between its leathery lips. It belched. A flicker of flame leapt out of its nostrils. It didn’t apologize.
“What happened?” She managed the full sentence this time. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was asking the dragon. She supposed it was the only other living thing around.
The beast turned a great yellow eye on her. It had a more aquiline head than most of the creatures she had seen before. The scales around
its nostrils and eyes appeared fine and delicate, mottled blue and white. Its neck—almost as wide as its well-muscled jaw—was long, almost snakelike.
She should kill this creature, she thought. She was the leading expert on dragons in all of Avarra, after all. She knew exactly how beautiful, mesmerizing, and awful they were. To dominate and to enslave were as necessary to a dragon as breathing was to her. She knew it coveted all her wealth and could not help but do so. If human words could be applied to its bestial emotions, it was cruel, greedy, and more than a bit of a dick.
She should kill it. If she could. It was injured, if she remembered correctly. A broken wing. If she was ever to get an opportunity, this would be it.
But she was not uninjured herself.
“I failed,” the dragon said. “Barph lived.”
There was something odd about its voice, Quirk thought. It was not quite the bowel-quivering bass of some of the dragons she’d faced before.
Quirk tried to focus. “But …” She shook her head, regretted it as another spike of pain shot through her. “We’re still … We’re in Tarramon. No one’s killed us.”
The dragon looked back at the mostly collapsed archway that had once led into this courtyard. Burned wooden timbers jutted like ribs from piles of broken stone.
“Some people came,” the dragon said. “I killed them.” It turned its head away, started snuffing against the pile of rubble to its right, farther away from Quirk. “They stopped coming after that.”
The dragon nosed aside a section of wall. Its tongue snaked out of its mouth and snagged a protruding leg.
“Why didn’t you eat me?” she blurted. It was a little blunt perhaps, but Quirk’s social skills didn’t stand up well to stress, and that was the next question on her list.
The dragon turned its eye on her again. Then it rolled away again, went back to the severed leg. “You fought Barph. You can make fire. You are like a little dragon. A cub thing. You may be useful again if the humans come back.”
Useful. Yes. From what she knew of dragon psychology, that actually made sense. It felt honest.