by Jon Hollins
A quick run to the sties and the strapping of a saddle onto a belligerent monster. And now here she was, charging the fifty confused-looking once-dead recruits emerging from the farmhouse.
The tusks of her mount took the first of the once-dead in the gut. He was hoisted aloft in a spray of gore, sent flipping feet over arse, sprawling through the air.
Verran war pigs were, in Lette’s opinion, fucking brilliant.
The rest of the pigs came now, the farmhands on their backs armed with pitchforks and shovels, wielding them with wild abandon, screaming and shouting at the top of their lungs.
The rest of the camp started to wake to the danger.
But the once-dead in the camp weren’t alone.
One of the once-dead lifted a horn to his lips that seemed to be largely made of human tibias. He blew short panicked notes. Calls answered. And suddenly two hundred or so more troops were charging into the slowly rousing camp.
It might have been worse if it hadn’t been for the Analesians. They boiled out of their beds and directly into the face of the once-dead charge. It was as if Barph himself lowered a divinely sized hand drill into their enemies. Blood and gore seemed to fly away into the air, like discarded chaff.
It was short and bloody and vastly exhilarating. Lette’s beast galloped wildly through the camp, one enemy combatant caught on its tusk, the body flopping obscenely. By the time she got to the Analesians, it was a rout.
Lette threw a victorious fist into the air and shouted Will’s name to the heavens. People gathered around her and the Analesians as she dismounted, clapped them on the back, shouted with excitement and praise. The Analesians, after a moment of confusion, settled on looking supremely smug.
Balur was still nowhere to be seen.
The pigs tried to get a start on consuming the dead before the dragons did. The dragons, though, when they arrived, were in no mood to share. In all honesty, they had been in a vile mood since the encounter with Barph and their failure to do much but die at his feet. That the Analesian sands had grounded them and that they had slept through most of this fight did nothing to improve matters.
Lette found one riderless pig who seemed to be questioning whether the vast size difference between it and the dragon in front of it really mattered. It was the sort of idiocy she found charming in Balur. She did her best to push the huge animal back toward its farm.
“Thank you!” A farmer was running up from the newly liberated farmstead holding a brace of bridles. Five or six more men were coming up in his wake.
“Here, Alice!” the farmer called to the pig Lette was heaving against, and the slab of muscle abruptly moved, almost spilling her on her arse. “Thank you,” he said again to Lette.
“That’s our paladin,” said someone else. One of Will’s soldiers. Charliss, his name was. One of their better fighters, and a good-hearted man to boot. She liked him. He clapped her on the shoulder as he walked past, a broad smile on his face.
She’d been hearing the term paladin more of more of late. She wasn’t sure where it had come from. She certainly hadn’t started it. In her experience, people who called themselves paladins were the sort of people who liked to commit mass murder and then make excuses involving the gods. She took great pains to keep the divine out of her excuses.
Still, she couldn’t stop a smile from creeping up at the corners of her mouth when Charliss raised a fist to the sky and shouted, “Our paladin!”
“Our paladin!” cheered back those who had been fighting with her—bloody, sore, and victorious.
“Idiots,” she said, but she couldn’t put much feeling into the word.
“Not many who can inspire folk like that,” said the farmer, sharing her smile.
“Me?” Lette huffed a laugh. “Gods, I’m just the tip of the iceberg.”
Later she found Will down in the farmstead. He was leaning against the fence around one of the vast pigpens.
“So,” she said, running a hand up his spine, “did you come here for the fine aroma, or the stimulating conversation?”
He didn’t look over at her. “You know,” he said, “in my head all this … all this with the dragons, and you and me, and everything … It all began the day I tried to kill my pig. She was called Bessie. And, gods, she was nothing like these pigs. Just a regular sow. Old and tough and heading to the great trough below soon enough. And I needed to kill her and sell her parts. But I didn’t want to. My heart wasn’t in it. Not at all. So I failed. And she lived. And that night soldiers burned my farm to the ground. So I ran into the woods, took shelter in a cave—”
“And met me,” she finished the story.
“And met you,” he said.
She wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “A lot of miles traveled since then.”
“Yes.”
“How are you?” She didn’t like asking the question. She hated the answers more. But she knew it was important. She had to help keep Will grounded, keep him in the here and the now. With the people. She had to be their champion here more than on any battlefield.
Their paladin …
Will stayed staring at the pigs for a long time. Her heart prepared for the drop.
But then he leaned over and put his head on her shoulder and said, “Good. Today I’m actually doing good.”
And thanks be to all the gods. Even Barph, if that was what it took.
“That’s great, Will,” she said. She turned and kissed the top of his head.
He put his arm around her and squeezed. “I think I just like pigs,” he said.
“If that is in any way a comment on my eating habits, these people are going to be worshipping a man without genitals.”
“It’s weird, right?” he said. “The whole worshipping thing.”
“Deeply.”
The pigs shuffled around, grubbing in the ground for roots with their curiously mobile snouts.
“But,” he said, “eventually it’ll stop, won’t it? I mean … if we do everything right, if we kill Barph. If we succeed. Then … then it’s over. Then there’s peace.”
She thought about that. And to be honest it was a good thought. But …
“We didn’t do so well together last time there was peace,” he said so she didn’t have to.
Six months. Six months of living together on a farmstead like this, and she’d been going out of her mind. And rather than confront Will about it, she’d just fled. It wasn’t a high point in her life.
“I like pigs,” Will said again. “And you don’t.”
The pigs kept on shuffling around in their slow circles, grunting to each other.
“I do like riding them, though,” said Lette, finding a way back to happier thoughts. “I could do that again. That would be pretty gods-hexed brilliant. A whole cavalry charge of pigs. Nobody would know what to do.” She laughed to herself, and she felt Will laughing too. And it was nice to hear his slow chuckle once more.
“I bet,” she went on, “that a line of pig cavalry could take on an equal number of Analesians, just on the strength of absurdity alone. They wouldn’t know what to make of it.”
“You’re right,” Will managed between chuckles. “I am fully behind this plan.”
She squeezed him tight, felt the warmth of him, the humanity. But …
“You probably wouldn’t like riding war pigs into battle, would you?” she said.
“I think it might push the absurdity a little too far.”
She nodded. Still, it was nice to think of an afterward.
“But,” Will said, “a band of mercenaries riding war pigs would need someone to look after the pigs. They’d need somewhere to get new pigs if something happened to the old ones. I imagine there’s a lot of maintenance involved in war pigs.”
She pulled back a little, turned and looked at him.
“Are you,” she said with a soft smile climbing up the corners of her mouth and toward her eyes, “coming up with a plan, Willett Fallows?”
He grinned at her. And gods
, when the light hit him right, he was a pretty man, even now, even through all the changes wrought upon him. “I might be,” he said.
She kissed his forehead. “Tell it to me.”
Will smiled. A really genuine smile. The sun was on his face, and it seemed as if he was staring straight into it as he spoke. “Imagine,” he said, “riding off to war, your war pig between your thighs—”
“If you mention your cock next …”
“Let me finish.” He was still grinning. “You ride off, astride your pig, with your war band at your back. And you do whatever it is you do for money. Probably murderize people, but I’m going to pretend it’s for good reason. And maybe it takes a week, or two, or maybe even a month. But then you ride back. You come home. You saddle up your porcine steed and you ride back. To a farm in the hills. To a place where there are droves of pigs in their sties. Where grunts ring in the air, and the stink of shit is as thick as stew.”
“You’re losing me.”
“And me,” he said. “And me, waiting for you to return. Waiting with open arms. Waiting to share all the future with you.”
And his open arms folded around her, folded her into that future. And for a moment it felt real and possible, almost a certainty. For a moment she believed in it.
And for just a little while, that was enough.
47
With Friends Like These …
Back when he had had priests, Lawl had always been very clear with them that the whole “Pride is a sin” thing was bullshit.
Pride was what had gotten Lawl out of bed in the morning. It was what had helped him tolerate all the petty grievances of divinity. It was what had kept him from wiping away all of reality and starting everything over again. Pride had been air to him. He had been proud of what he had done, of what he had accomplished. He had been proud that he could look down every day and see a world that only he had created, that only he controlled. He had been proud of his physique, his position, his prowess.
Lawl was not proud anymore.
Lawl was footsore, body-sore, and gods-hexedly heartsore. He was bedraggled and hungry and exhausted. He was also thoroughly sick of what was left of his family.
“I can’t go on,” Betra bleated, which was what she said every five minutes despite the fact that she always seemed to eat twice as much as any of them and still maintained what could generously be called a svelte figure beneath her filthy robe.
“It takes forty days for the average mortal to starve,” Knole replied, as if that were somehow relevant.
“It will take a minute for me to murder you and gain meat enough for a week,” Toil snapped back, sounding as if that was distinctly within the realm of possibility.
Lawl debated for a moment and then backhanded his son across the face. Toil mewled and cringed.
“Shut up, all of you,” Lawl said. “We will not go to Will Fallows as beggars. I refuse.”
And yet, Lawl knew, that was exactly how they came. Cast out by Gratt, unable to support themselves in this new world, they were falling back on their protector from the Hallows. On the only viable challenge to Barph’s authority in Avarra. On Will Fallows.
And Lawl was not proud of that at all.
They finally caught up with Will deep in the Barrons of Verra. The hills rose and fell around them, steep and low, as if a storm-tossed ocean had come to a sudden halt and grass had crept up on it over time. Herds of the goats and sheep Verra was famous for dotted the slopes.
Lawl almost turned back when he first saw the crowd. If he had been on his own he would have. How could he face Will now? How, with a crowd that size? How, when he came with nothing?
How had Will even amassed that many followers? So paltry compared to what Lawl had once had, and yet so many more than he had now.
But with Betra and Toil and Knole clinging to him like the clap, how could he ever live down walking away?
He tried to hold himself erect as he entered the swarm of bodies. He ran his fingers self-consciously through the tangle of his beard. He tried to walk as if the broken figure of Toil weren’t really associated with him.
No one truly spared them a glance. They were just another group of weary travelers come to take refuge under Will Fallows’s protective wing.
And if he had been a less proud man, maybe Lawl could have lived with that. Maybe he could have just slipped into the crowd and clung to the little bit of peace that came with belonging.
But he was Lawl, and he had been king of all the gods, and he had made this world, and so he could not.
Lawl let his little entourage through the thickening crowd to the edge of a makeshift stage on which Will Fallows was pacing back and forth.
For a moment Lawl didn’t recognize the man. He had seen the purple blotching on the skin down in the Hallows, he had expected that, but the rest of it … Things had progressed.
Will was thinner than Lawl had ever seen him before. It was as if all the softness had been carved from him. Something of hard angles and lean muscle was left behind. He was taller too, maybe. Or was that an illusion due to the loss of weight? The time when Lawl would have known was lost to him.
The purple staining of the skin was more pronounced, and was offset by other, paler skin. It looked almost translucent in places, scaly in others. And for all that Will played with his hair and wore it long in the front, Lawl still saw something that looked like eyes bulging from his temples.
And, of course, there was the power. Lawl might no longer have access to it, but he had been around magic long enough to feel it coming off the man in waves. Will had an almost feverish heat emanating from him.
Lettera Therren was still with him as well, proving she had a stronger stomach than Lawl would have guessed.
Will didn’t look up at their approach. Lawl cleared his throat. “Fallows,” he said when that didn’t work.
It took Will a long time to react. And when he finally did, it took even longer for Lawl to realize that Will simply was not going to recognize him.
“We are returned,” he said, playing desperately for time. “Escaped from Gratt’s clutches.”
“Well …,” Toil began, but fortunately Betra was there to elbow their son in the ribs for him.
And then, finally, thankfully, Will figured it out. “Lawl!” he said. “Betra! Toil! Knole! You …” He looked at Lette. “You know,” he said, “I have to say I’d rather forgotten about you.”
Lawl ground his teeth together. “Well,” he managed, “we have not forgotten about you or the plight of the Avarran people, and we are here, and committed to this cause.”
He had fallen from grace for now, but grace could be reclaimed. If he positioned himself close to Will for now, he could grow to eclipse the little upstart once more. This would not necessarily be defeat.
Pieces of emotion seemed to flicker over Will’s face. Nothing quite readable or truly whole. He looked at Lette again, seemed to gather himself. “I have to speak to the crowd.”
Lette chewed her lip, looked at the gods. “They expect him,” she said. And she at least had the decency to sound apologetic. She knew her place.
“Perhaps I can assist you,” Lawl said. There was no time to work on his resurgence to power like the present.
Something that might have once been related to a smile appeared on Will’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, why don’t we do that?”
Lawl smiled.
“All of you,” Will said, and there was the snap of command to his voice now, “on the stage.”
It was not how Lawl wanted it, but Will’s back was already to them. Lette opened her mouth several times but said nothing. Then she slipped away.
The sun was fading as they mounted the creaking boards. Oil lamps had been lit around it, casting flickering illumination up at Will as he paced back and forth. It was harder to see the discoloration of his skin in this light.
“To throw down a god,” he boomed. His voice was amplified beyond the capacity of his lungs. “That’s wh
y we’re here, isn’t it? To reach up into the heavens and hurl him to the earth.” He paused, looked around. And it was a beautiful imitation of human emotion, Lawl thought. Pitch-perfect. He even puffed out his cheeks. “That seems like a lot, doesn’t it?” he said, almost conversationally. “A god. Us. Mere mortals. How can it be done?”
It was a good imitation of nerves, just enough to rile the crowd, safe enough because they knew Will would give them an answer.
“But of course,” Will said, “it’s been done before.”
He turned, and now he smiled at Lawl and all the other gods. The first genuine emotion Lawl thought he’d seen. Something wolfish and hungry.
“We have guests!” Will boomed. “Newcomers to our family! Visitors from distant times come to jog our memories.” He beckoned to the former gods with fake enthusiasm. “Come, come!” he called.
And if he could have walked away now, Lawl would have, but he had his pride. So with the others stumbling in his wake, Lawl stepped fully into the light.
“May I introduce Lawl!” Will cried. “Betra! Toil! Knole! Once gods of this world. Once our gods.”
A gasp, a silence, a moment of wonder. And could it be, Lawl knew they all wondered, could these figures truly be their former gods?
Well, all he could do was seize the moment. He flung his arms wide. “We are returned to you!” he called, his voice sounding small and empty in the wake of Will’s cries.
A flurry of activity in the front row, someone emerging, squealing with … Gods, was he about to be attacked? But then there was Cois leaping up onto the stage, seizing him and staring at him, smiling.
“You are an ugly, stupid old man,” zhe whispered to him, “but you are family.” And then zhe kissed him. Zhe kissed all of them. And Lawl found he might even be glad to see hir.
“Cois too!” Will yelled. “Truly a reunion to be remembered!”
Lawl stared out into the crowd, and he could see Balur there, standing in the front row, eyes narrowed. And it was a look of … Was it fear on the big lizard man’s face?
Lawl did not feel this was going to go well.
“Look at them!” Will cried. “Look at all of them here. Our gods!” The moment hung. The crowd just on the edge of uncertainty.