Bad Faith

by Jon Hollins

  And of course he knew why. He saw this place just as they did. He understood why someone might have reservations. But this was all part of the bigger picture.

  He pushed on.

  Slowly Will became aware that it was getting colder, that the glow of the fungus was growing dimmer. He was forced to walk more and more slowly. The ground was uneven. He could not afford to break his ankle now. Not down here.

  He tried to suppress a shudder.

  An hour later the darkness was almost complete. He heard someone approaching him from behind.

  “I think—” It was Lette.

  “Wait,” he cut her off. There was something on the floor ahead of him. Something …

  He stepped closer, stooping down to see it.

  “Will …”

  Will was vaguely aware of Lette’s rising anger, but he paid it no heed. In the floor ahead of him … there was … something his mind wanted to call light. Something glowing. But … He cocked his head to one side, trying to see it more clearly, reaching out a hand. And his hand was no more visible in whatever it was that was glowing from …

  A hole. There was a hole in the floor.

  He held out his hand over it and felt … He felt … the absence of a feeling. That he was somehow not feeling something he should be. Something that wasn’t heat, or cold, or fear, or dread. Something he wasn’t equipped to feel. Something utterly other.

  “Oh shit.” He glanced back. Cois was grabbing at hir stomach, a queasy expression on hir face. “I can feel them.”

  A moment of indecision. Then Will hardened his resolve. He turned back to the hole, reached out to feel the edges. It was approximately four feet in diameter, and the walls were far from smooth. He could climb this.

  “You want to go down there?” Afrit sounded as if she was trying to avoid simply asking outright if he was crazy.

  “I have to,” said Will.

  “You don’t even know what to do when you get down there.” Lette sounded as if she wasn’t fully reconciled to his dismissive tone.

  Will ignored them. He ignored the basic, animal part of his mind that was starting to scream. He lowered himself into the hole.

  “I won’t go down there.” Cois was shaking hir head emphatically. “You can’t make me.”

  “I won’t,” Will said. “I don’t need you from here.”

  It was a cold thing to say, but he felt cold now. He was close. Power lay below him. So much power.

  “I will be staying with you,” Balur grunted to Cois.

  “No.” Cois didn’t sound as if zhe meant it.

  Will left them behind, went down hand over hand. The hole’s walls felt slimy, and his heart beat faster as he thought his hands would slip. But when he wiped his palms against his thighs, they felt dry.

  He heard people lowering themselves into the hole above him. He didn’t look up.

  Down. Down into darkness, greasy handhold by greasy handhold. The strange not-light swelling around him, becoming not-brighter. His stomach roiled. Strange strands of emotion whispered through his mind. His face contorted into smiles and grimaces without his conscious effort. He could hear Afrit praying to gods that she knew full well were useless, dead bastards.

  And then suddenly he found solid ground beneath his feet. His ankle jarred and he swore. But the hole had leveled out, had become a tunnel again. He felt his way forward, crawling as the ceiling became lower and lower.

  Still the ceiling descended. He was forced onto his belly.

  What if Gratt had betrayed him? What if this had all been an elaborate trick? What if he would be trapped down here in this tunnel … this hole … this ugly dead end of hope that he was crawling through?

  Rock seemed to press in on him from every side. The space was too narrow to get a full breath.

  And then suddenly he was through. Suddenly he was in space. Vast, cavernous space. Suddenly he could see. The whole world around him was flooded with blue light.

  He gasped. He felt as if he were falling into space. He staggered, trying to steady himself even as he crawled up off his knees. He tried to understand everything he was seeing.

  A cavern. He was in another cavern. There was a roof. He could … Yes, he could see that. But it was distant. So very distant. Because of all the caverns he had been in in the Hallows, all the enclosed spaces that had taken days or weeks to cross, this was by far the largest. This went on forever.

  And it was full. Full of …

  His brain struggled. Gears churned.

  “Fuck this.” Behind him, still in the tunnel, he heard Balur come to the narrow exit.

  Then there was scrambling and Lette emerged. Then Afrit.

  “I’m not doing it,” said Balur. “I won’t.”

  “Oh,” breathed Lette, standing beside Will. “Oh. I don’t … I can’t …”

  Then Afrit was there. She kept rubbing her eyes and her head alternately.

  It was … They were …

  There was something in front of Will. That was for certain. Something vast. Impossibly vast. It was a body in the same way that a country is land. But it was more than just its size that made it hard to grasp. As Will looked from one part of the mass to another, it seemed to shift in the corners of his vision, and when he looked back it was as if he had never seen it before. And yet he couldn’t precisely say what had changed. And as he stared at one part, looking for evidence of the motion he’d glimpsed, everything was perfectly still, and more and more things seemed to churn just where he couldn’t see them.

  “Oh, that is fucked up.” Lette turned away. “Gods, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “My head.” Afrit dropped to her haunches, clutching her temples, and closed her eyes. “I can’t look at …”

  “What?” called Balur, still inside the tunnel. “What are you talking about? I cannot be seeing anything in here.”

  Will didn’t say anything. He just walked toward it. His goal. His purpose. He didn’t know how far away it was. The size of the … being … twisted space around it so that distance no longer had the meaning it used to possess. But still he walked. He had come this far.

  “No,” said Lette. “I don’t think … You shouldn’t.” But Will ignored her.

  “Gods, my head.” There was genuine pain in Afrit’s voice. “I think it’s going to split.”

  Will ignored her.

  “Maybe I shall be going back up,” said Balur. “Make sure Cois …”

  “You can’t, Will.” Lette’s voice was getting more insistent. “That’s not … We shouldn’t … That isn’t safe. Isn’t …”

  Will was still walking. He wasn’t sure he could do anything else. He’d been walking for so long now. To this place. To this time. It felt as if the creature had its own gravity.

  “Wait.” Afrit still managed to be shocked through her gritted teeth. “You’re still planning on drinking that thing’s blood? That’s still your plan?”

  And Will didn’t know anymore. He just didn’t know. Where did he end and his purpose begin? Or was it the other way around? Who belonged to whom here?

  And then it was in front of him. A cliff of flesh that wasn’t flesh. A gelatinous, craggy, writhing, static wall of other. He reached out, and then couldn’t quite touch it. All the hairs on his arm were standing on end, straining to get away from this thing, this being, this Deep One.

  He could feel the strange not-light blasting off it, like not-wind, not-causing his hair to billow.

  “You can’t, Will.” There was desperation in Lette’s voice. “You can’t. You mustn’t. Not even for Barph. It’s not worth it. He’s not worth it. Whatever it is. Nothing is worth it.”

  And part of Will knew she was right. That in a life full of spectacularly stupid things, this was by far the stupidest he had ever contemplated.

  And part of Will knew she was wrong. Because part of him simply hated Barph too much.

  He reached down to his belt, pulled out a knife.

  “Oh gods.” He thought
perhaps Lette was crying.

  He wasn’t sure the knife would be able to cut the Deep One, but it sliced through the not-flesh easily. As if it were a thousand whisper-thin sheets of gelatinous membrane, stretched taut and ready to rupture. Clear, gelatinous fluid burst over him, and yet he stayed perfectly dry. And this was not its blood. Somehow he knew that, though he wasn’t sure how.

  He cut deeper, working his way into the flesh. He was wrist deep, elbow deep, shoulder deep. His cuts became larger and wider, ripping the not-flesh farther and farther apart, trying to get in, to get deep enough. He was leaning his whole face into the Deep One’s side. There was no smell to the creature, no taste. And yet still his stomach churned and roiled.

  And then his blade met resistance. Something thicker and meatier beneath his blade. He couldn’t see it, but he felt it. And he wrestled and jabbed with the knife, forcing it into the creature.

  Something convulsed. Nothing physical. The sagging gelatinous walls of not-flesh stayed perfectly still, but suddenly he was staggering back, barely clutching on to his knife.

  And standing there in the blue light of this impossibility, he saw violet blood on the blade of his knife.

  It was in his hands.

  Lette was sobbing. Afrit was retching.

  He lifted the blade toward his mouth. All he had to do was lick the blade.

  He thought he was going to be sick.

  He thought he was about to scream, to laugh, to cry, to run away, to walk straight back into the wound he’d slashed and never come out again.

  He thought he’d never been closer to his revenge.

  His tongue slipped out between dry lips and touched the blade.

  Fish, and metal, and fear, and hate, and endless, endless years of sleep.

  It was in his mouth. His mouth was full of … of …

  And this was a mistake. Such a stupid fucking mistake. What the fuck was he doing? What was he thinking?

  He tried to spit it out. He couldn’t. It cloyed to the back of his mouth. He gagged. But he couldn’t vomit.

  And then it moved. He felt it very distinctly in his mouth. Even as his whole being tried to reject it, it clawed into his gullet and down. Down. Down. Down. Deeper than he was. Boring into him. Into his very core. Into the very essence of who he was.

  And there it sank its barbs.

  14

  Cultural Indifferences

  Quirk couldn’t help but feel that her triumphant return to the estate would have gone better if so many people hadn’t screamed and run away. On the one hand, there was a certain sense of imperious potency as she swept in on Yorrax’s back and all fled before her. On the other, this probably wasn’t giving Yorrax the impression that she was at the head of a band of cutthroat desperados.

  “Come back!” she shouted as she slipped from the dragon’s back and onto the dry earth of the courtyard. “Find your balls and get out here.”

  Svetson the blacksmith, Norvard’s father, was staring at her slack-jawed, a hammer held loosely in his fist. She thought she caught sight of Gartrand ducking behind a doorway. Children were diving through windows, screaming in absolute terror.

  Yorrax preened, clearly enjoying the effect she was having. She snorted blue-white jets of flame from her flaring nostrils.

  Svetson dropped his hammer.

  Quirk grunted in frustration. “Come out!” she yelled again. She felt impossibly stupid standing in the middle of the courtyard shouting at nobody in particular. “I gathered you together so we could fight Barph. So we could fight alongside each other, protect each other. I’m not just going to have a dragon come here and kill you. And, quite frankly, Tarryl,” she said, spotting the old archer where he was hiding, “if Yorrax here wanted to kill you, I’m not sure the pigs’ slop trough would stop her.”

  It still took the old fellow another thirty seconds to sit up, dripping potato peelings and celery stalks.

  Quirk tapped her foot as slowly, hesitantly her force of hardcase resistance fighters shuffled out of their various hiding spots.

  They still seemed to be trying to hide behind Gartrand, though. The former grocer looked at her with more than a little suspicion.

  “Gartrand,” she said impatiently. The man had something to say, and the sooner he spat it out so she could step on it, kill it, and kick it away, the better.

  He licked his lips, folded and unfolded his hands into each other. “Ellabet told us what happened at Tarramon,” he said. “What happened with …” His eyes flicked to the heavens. “When you confronted Barph.”

  Quirk nodded. “And what did she tell you?”

  Gartrand sighed. “She said—”

  “Where’s my son?” Svetson suddenly shouted. The blacksmith had picked the hammer back up. “Where’s my gods-hexed son?”

  Quirk nodded. She would not hide from this. “I am so sorry, Svetson,” she said. “Barph killed him.”

  The blacksmith was not a small man. But he was quivering as he pointed his hammer at her. “You killed him.”

  Quirk weighed that. And in the end, she did not believe that. She would not accept that guilt.

  “No,” she said. “I took him to fight. And he fought. He fought for what he believed in. He fought for a better world. He died because the forces that would prevent that better world from coming into being killed him. Not me.”

  “He died”—and suddenly there was Ellabet pushing to the front of the crowd, and finally Quirk saw someone here with a bit of spine—“because you led him into a fool’s battle, with a fool’s plan. He died because you promised us you knew what you were doing.”

  Quirk weighed that. And that she could not so easily shrug off. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, that’s true.”

  Another noise from Yorrax behind her. But she wasn’t looking to the dragon for leadership advice. And the crowd was not, it seemed, particularly happy with either of her answers.

  She spread her arms. “What did you expect? Did you think that this would be easy? We are trying to defeat a god. He could crush us all without a second thought. That has always been true. I never promised you that it wouldn’t be. You are free to delude yourselves, but I won’t take the blame for that.”

  Gods, there was a time when she would have been on her knees begging for their forgiveness. But that was from another life.

  Ellabet, though, didn’t seem to be coming around. She was shaking her head. “You’re a gods-hexed psychopath.”

  And some of the crowd, it seemed, agreed with Ellabet. Quirk thought that perhaps it was time for some more obvious truths.

  “We have a dragon!” she bellowed into their shouts, just in case the giant blue-white beast standing just over her shoulder had slipped their minds.

  Yorrax snorted fire again.

  “We are more powerful now than we have ever been,” she said as their attentions all flicked to the dragon once more. “And yes, I miscalculated when I led people into Tarramon. But the whole point of mistakes is to learn from them. We are too weak to take on Barph head-on. I see that now. But Barph has been trying to build something. He wants something. We can take it away. We can hurt him now. More than ever.”

  She smiled at them all. Yorrax’s head snaked forward to hang beside hers, a wicked grin on the dragon’s face.

  “So,” said Ellabet, “burn the world? That’s your plan.”

  Quirk nodded. Because now they saw. Now they would understand.

  “Gods piss on you and your madness,” said Ellabet, and she stalked away.

  Quirk paced in circles out in the fields, away from the old servants’ buildings, as evening fell. The rest of the afternoon had not gone well. There had been shouting, accusations, and threats of violence, and that had just been her part in the proceedings.

  They did not want to fight. They had said they did, but they had lied. To themselves mostly, but to her as well. They wanted a different world, yes, but would someone else please go out and do all the hard work of making it happen?

  S
he sat staring out at the fields of wheat her fighting force had been busy cultivating in her absence. She could hear children playing in the courtyard now that all the adults had stopped shouting at each other. Domesticity. That was what these people really wanted. Even domesticity as fragile as an eggshell.

  She heard heavy footfalls behind her. The huff of bellows breath.

  “I know,” she said without turning to look at Yorrax. “You’re going to leave.” She looked at her hands in her lap. She couldn’t blame the dragon. She thought she was going to leave too. What she would do then … the gods knew. Except the gods didn’t know. The gods were as dead as her plans.

  “They are not how you described them,” said Yorrax in her baritone rumble. Which was, Quirk thought, quite diplomatic.

  “No,” she was forced to agree. “Because I’m pretty sure I didn’t describe them as a bunch of pathetic …” Her voice was rising, and she was half turning, ready to shout insults back at the houses. She choked herself off. “I deluded myself about a lot of things,” she said finally. “And because I misled myself, I misled you.”

  “You are a rare human, I think,” said Yorrax.

  Which was borderline nice. Alarm bells sounded in Quirk’s skull. Maybe Yorrax was going to do more than just leave. Maybe she was going to ask forgiveness for eating one of the children.

  She turned to face the dragon, eyes narrow. But there were no prepubescent limbs stuck between the dragon’s teeth.

  “Back in the square,” Yorrax said, “you asked …” She hesitated, cocked her head to one side, then the other. “You asked if I had a horde of dragons hidden anywhere who were poised to rain destruction down on Barph.”

  Quirk knew the hope that leapt in her was ridiculous, but still she couldn’t quite stop herself from saying, “Wait … you do?”

  “No.” Yorrax’s head shook on its serpentine neck. “All the dragons are back on Natan.”

  “So …?” Quirk was still a mental lap behind Yorrax.

  “I came from Natan,” said Yorrax. “It is not a difficult flight.”