by Jon Hollins
That was what Hethren would say.
She thought she had silenced him, drowned him in the years and the academia. But she heard him now, his voice low and throaty, hovering somewhere between seduction and threat.
And he was right. It would be so easy. She could feel the flame tickling the backs of her palms, begging to be let loose. The flame spoke with Hethren’s voice.
Which is why she took such pleasure in denying it. She would be better than that voice. Better than she had been. She was a professor at the Tamathian University. She was an ambassador of knowledge, and culture. And she would not retaliate. She would not escalate this madness. Instead she would indulge in her gods-given right to freak the fuck out.
“Shiiiiit!” she shrieked as she hurtled between the covering wall and a barracks ten yards away. Arrows thrummed through the air around her. She could hear them clicking off Balur’s scales.
He crashed against the wooden wall beside her. Planks cracked and splintered. She spared him a glance. Not all the arrows had skittered off. Arrows peppered his shoulders and one protruded from his chest.
Her glance registered with him. He shrugged. The shafts of the arrows rippled. “Not deep,” was all he said.
All of this. All of this so she could see a dragon.
And yet even as she tried to question her motives, a thrill of excitement ran through her. He would be out there now, the dragon, the beast. The fumes of her Snag Weed potion would have conquered his flames, laid him out. He would be lying there, waiting for her. Like a virgin on his wedding night.
This was her fire now. This was what she would bring to the world. Intellects would ignite, not bodies.
And what if the world burns so you can get that knowledge? Hethren whispered in her ear. Better to cauterize the wound now. Staunch the flow.
That had been one of his favorite games. He would slice Andatte’s neck—not deeply, but just deep enough—and have her cauterize the wound.
“That’s all you are doing,” he would tell her just before he sent her stumbling into the heart of a village. “Just cauterizing a wound; stemming the flood of chaos. We are control, you and I. We are saviors.”
But she never just cauterized. It was always a lie.
“Go!” Balur bellowed beside her. “Move!”
His arm sent her flying forward, catapulted down a muddy track between low buildings. She tried to hunker down, but there was not enough cover in all the world. She could hear Balur grunting as the arrows struck him.
“We are still not sneaking!” she screamed.
Then he was shoving her sideways, back into cover.
“We are getting to that,” he said, panting and bleeding.
She reached out, tentatively. “You can’t keep on like this.” She wanted to do something. To bind those wounds.
Like she had bound the wounds of the people she had then marched to this death trap.
Something was wrong with her. Very, very wrong. Something was still wrong.
“Am being okay,” Balur grunted.
She tried to grin. “Just a flesh wound?”
He shook his head. “Being muscle mostly. Being painful, but not be doing much actual damage in the long term.”
She opened her mouth, processed that. Just painful. He had to have at least twenty arrows protruding from him. “Oh,” she said at last.
“Pain is being the thing that gets in the way of what we are needing to do. Pain is being up here.” He tapped the side of his head. “What we are needing to do is being out here.” He swept his arm at the shit storm of a garrison. “This is not being a time for being in one’s own head. Now is a time for being out in the world. The time for being in one’s own head will be coming later.”
It was the most she thought she had heard him ever speak at once. Considering what was going on, it seemed an odd moment for him to choose.
He shrugged. “That is being all warrior code and bullshit. Analesians who cannot be killing enough people are talking too much. I am thinking it will be helping you now. Personally, though, I am not being bothered with the being in my head bit at all, and I am doing fine.”
Quirk blinked twice. There was actually good advice in there. Perhaps now—with shouts pursuing them and arrows falling about their heads—was not the best time to plumb the shadows of her soul. Perhaps now was a better time to haul arse and try to stay alive long enough to contemplate her navel later.
“All right,” she said nodding. Then, “Does this mean we can sneak now?”
“Yes,” said Balur gruffly. “We are beginning to be sneaky now.”
44
God of War
Firkin sat back and took a moment to enjoy a job well done. The bleeding town guard he happened to be sitting back on groaned slightly. Firkin cracked a looted wine bottle on the back of the man’s skull and he lay still. Firkin held the leaking bottle over his face, and let the wine trickle over his mouth and chin. It tasted good.
He was satisfied. “Go and preach my name in Athril,” Will had told him, and preached he had.
“The prophet!” people screamed. In every street. In every town square. “In the name of the prophet!” The cry was borne forth from every corner of the town, carried on the billows of smoke from a hundred fires.
And the people shouting it even seemed to be winning. He hadn’t really put much faith in the town rabble at the beginning of the fight. Not nearly as much as they had put in him. But over the course of the past few hours they had slowly made a believer out of him.
He knew the people were angry. He had heard every iteration of their story. Stolen livelihoods. Stolen lives. He had heard every nuance of their rage. But he had not seen how that could overcome actual training and sharp steel.
In the end, though, it was simple. The Dragon Consortium had ensured the subjugation of these people by making sure they had nothing to live for. But now, with the idea of the prophet burning bright in their minds, they had something to die for.
They hurled themselves at the guards. They blunted blades with their bodies. They swarmed and overwhelmed. They attacked with a ferocity that not even Dathrax with all his wealth could afford to buy.
Firkin had watched a tavern cook throttle a guard with her own braid, even as he hacked at her arms with a short sword. He had seen six men kick a heavily armored guard to death, and only one had been able to walk away. He had watched men set themselves on fire and charge into guard towers never to emerge.
For the prophet.
Not for Will. No. No one screamed Will’s name. It was for the prophet.
He felt the shift in the city, the change in the power balance. The guards felt it too.
“Retreat!” shouted their commanders. “Fall back! To the garrison!”
And suddenly the town’s citizens were standing in empty streets. Were pushing forward with no resistance.
For a moment, he felt them stumble, and he felt them hesitate.
He stood up, started running, started shrieking.
“Forward!” he screamed. “The prophet commands it! He commands you to take this town! He compels you to strike down your enemy!”
And they did it. Not for Will. But because it was the word of the prophet. Because the voice of the prophet told them so.
And, running through the streets, potbelly swaying with the weight of the wine in it, Firkin smiled.
45
What’s in the Box?
Everything was chaos. Everything was confusion. Guards were running every which way that they could, shouting, desperately calling out for information. Smoke was everywhere. Those who had ventured into the town seemed to be retreating, but no one inside the garrison knew from what.
This sort of thing totally gave Balur a hard-on.
He stroked at the frills of his neck self-consciously, and hoped Quirk was too focused on avoiding imminent death to notice.
They crouched in the shadow of the armored tax boat. A guard ran past, did a double take, opened his mouth,
and died as Balur jammed the claw of his thumb through the man’s Adam’s apple.
“Almost there,” he whispered.
Quirk nodded. She seemed to have pulled herself together a bit since he had given her his little pep talk. Motivational speaker—Lette had never suggested that career path for him. That was showing a lack of foresight on her part. Still, if she had, he might not have been ending up here, about to line his pockets with the gold of two dragons.
He wondered what she was doing now. Hauling sacks of gold down to the island’s coast, he hoped. Not getting too preoccupied with the bulge in Will’s britches.
Though perhaps a good tumble in the grass next to an unconscious dragon would get her head straight again. Off all this “better life” crap, and back on track with the good thing they had going. Get back to being each other’s tribe.
He took that anger and put it into launching himself onto the armored boat with a roar. He caught the rail, heaved himself up one-handed, feet clearing the boat’s sides with ease. They smashed down on the wooden deck with the crack of splinters.
A ballista was mounted upon the deck’s boards next to the spot where Balur had landed. A lone guard stood there, pointing it off over the surrounding garrison. He started, squeaked, then began to haul the massive siege crossbow around to face Balur.
“Do you really think that’s going to work?” Quirk asked the guard, as she bodily heaved herself up behind Balur. “I mean really?” She pivoted herself over the edge of the boat, half-tumbled to the floor. She looked at the guard from where she sat. “He’s got to walk about two paces before he drives you down to the harbor floor with his hammer. Just jump overboard and try to survive till the morning.”
Balur turned round and furrowed his brow at her. She was spoiling his fun.
Fortunately the guard—a skinny redheaded fellow, whose face was spattered with freckles like bloodstains—seemed to take this as an invitation to haul once more on the ballista.
Balur took three steps—not two—and backhanded the guard into oblivion. His limp rag of a body sailed over the ship’s rail and landed with a wet crack.
Quirk grunted. “Well, at least I tried to save one.”
Balur nodded. “I am thinking we can call your conscience spotless.”
Quirk stared at him for a moment. “I can never tell if you’re being sarcastic,” she said.
Balur didn’t bother to let her know; instead he turned and set off to find the mooring ropes.
He was happily experiencing great success in this task when Quirk took it upon herself to interrupt him with a shout of “Knole’s tits!”
Considering that the goddess of knowledge was generally considered an asexual creature and that nobody was currently trying to kill them, this exclamation gave Balur pause. First he double-checked his assumptions. No—Knole had not descended from the heavens to earth and proceeded to get busy with anyone. Neither had any of the guards appeared to have noticed their presence yet. Instead the garrison’s defenders were still largely preoccupied by the mass of deranged rioters trying to claw their hearts from their bodies.
These eventualities accounted for, Balur went to investigate. It did not take long and concluded with him barely managing to breathe out the words, “Knole’s sweet apple arse.”
Next to the pilot’s cabin was a set of stairs down into the hold. And at the base of those steps was Gold. Not just gold, but Gold. Sacks upon sacks of it. Sacks stuffed so full that they ripped and coins burst eagerly forth. Coins so deep a man could wade through them. Coins that filled the full length of the boat’s not inconsiderable hold.
“The hoard?” he breathed. “Here?”
Quirk shook her head. “No. It can’t be. If the hoard was here, then Dathrax would be here. Dragons sleep with their hoard.”
That exhausted the depth of Balur’s guesses. “So…?” He tried to turn to her, but had trouble taking his eyes off the gold.
“It’s the taxes,” Quirk said. “This is just one year’s taxes. Dathrax lets it collect here all year before the guards take it to his island.”
Balur felt his eyes growing wider. Wider. “This is being just one year’s worth?”
Quirk nodded.
“And the Dragon Consortium are being in power for how long?”
“Thirty years at least.”
Balur let his tongue taste the air. Let the flavor of all that gold wash through him. He felt his neck frills extend almost painfully. He did not care.
“Oh,” said Quirk, looking at his neck. “I didn’t know you could do that. They’re pretty.” Which, all in all, did not help. Balur buried his face in the one sack, inhaled deeply.
Something caught at the back of his throat. Something familiar. He cocked his head to one side, sniffed the sack again, scenting deeply.
“Quirk?” he said finally.
“Yes?” She had wandered deeper into the hold.
“Why is this sack of gold smelling of Lette?”
Quirk’s finger had been tracing the latticework of a large chest half-buried in the center of the room. “Because…” she started, then trailed off. “Are you sure?”
“Lette is being my tribe,” he said with impatience. “I am thinking that I would be recognizing her scent.”
“Are…” Quirk started, then stopped. “Couldn’t…” She looked around them, as if expecting to see Lette leap out from one of the chests and shout, “Surprise!” She scratched at her short brown hair. “Might one of us have brought the smell in? We hang around with her.”
Balur shook his head. He could smell the way Lette’s scent mixed with his own, with Quirk’s. This was not that. This was distinctly and definitively Lette.
He looked around, trying to figure it out. But she was not here.
“Oh fuck.” Quirk said.
“What?”
“It’s our gold,” Quirk said. “It smells of Lette because it’s our gold.” She sat down heavily on the large chest whose scrollwork she had been tracing. “Because Dathrax didn’t bring it to his island. He was too lazy a bastard, and he brought it here to his garrison so they could bring it over for him. That’s why the boat’s so full. Because it’s full of Mattrax’s gold. Not just his year’s taxes. Oh shit. Oh god fuck.”
Balur looked around, all his happiness hemorrhaging away, and bleeding out around his feet.
“Then…” he said, trying to put it all together. “What about Lette and Will? How were they getting to the island to knock out Dathrax?”
“Ohhh…” Quirk dragged out the word, adding horror in increasing waves to the sound. “Ohhhhhhh…”
She stood up, stared in horror at the chest she was sitting on.
“What?” Balur asked. The tension was killing him.
“The chest,” she said. “Inside the chest.”
Still it eluded him. “What?” he asked. “What’s in the chest?”
46
Open Your Eyes
Will had been having a rather pleasant dream. It involved him, Lette, and a fairly promiscuous cheddar.
Being slapped awake made for a rather disappointing finale.
“Uh?” he said groggily to the blurry figure holding him by the scruff of his neck. “We there yet?”
“No!” bellowed Slappy Slap-Pants, and Will found he’d been hit in the face again.
Balur came into sharp focus. He dropped Will. Will landed hard. His mouth felt like it was full of blood, and his head full of bear shit. He groaned, spat, and took hold of his temples.
He said, “What’s going on?” Except it sounded like, “Wha-suh-guhn?”
Balur provided no answers. He had moved on, was holding someone else aloft, was slapping them.
Lette. It was Lette.
Will tried to put the pieces back together. There had been a plan. There had been a plan because they had been planning something. Something…
Gold. Stealing from Dathrax. Stealing his hoard.
He became aware that he was sitting on a pile of gold. Wh
ich suggested that must be going fairly well.
He tried talking again. “What’s going on?” It came clearer now.
Quirk looked at him. “Why in Knole’s holy name do I listen to you?” she asked. It seemed rhetorical, which was lucky because Will really wasn’t up to answering her. “We’re still on the boat, Will,” she said when he failed to respond. “The fucking boat!”
A boat. That meant his plan had involved a boat…
Lette landed with a thud beside him. Balur stood over her looking mildly disgusted. She rolled a sleepy head bearing a bewildered expression in Will’s direction. “Wha-suh-guhn?” she asked him.
And then it came back to him. All of it. The whole plan. The idea that he should be on an island with a drugged dragon right now. That he should not have been heavily sedated. That Quirk and Balur should be on this boat alone, piloting through monster-infested water to him. To gold.
He stood up, adrenaline burning the last of his stupefaction. “Are we on the lake?” he asked. “Did you get out of the town?”
“No!” Quirk almost shrieked. “We only just got on board and found you and all our gold here.”
Their gold. Will tried to fit that to the known facts.
“Oh fuck,” he said, as the pieces slotted home. “That lazy fucking dragon.” Dathrax hadn’t taken them across the lake. He’d dropped the gold off at the garrison for them to transport.
Dathrax.
“Oh shit.” He looked up, stared at the others’ faces.
“What?” Lette asked, apparently having failed to develop telepathy while she was unconscious.
“Dathrax,” he said. “He’s still conscious.”
Lette shrugged. “So? We haven’t done anything to attract his high and mighty bullshit attention.” She yawned.
But Will was looking at the glance Balur and Quirk were exchanging. Lette followed the direction of his gaze. “What?” she asked. Then again into the awkward silence, “What?”
“So…” Quirked resumed her nervous pacing. “About that…”