by Jon Hollins
“Well,” he said, with a savage smile. “Now you get to meet the fucking dragons.”
She shot a glance at Cattak as her captor started to haul her away from the crowd, and from the army’s camp, and toward Hallows’ Mouth. But six of the men in black armor had pulled crossbows from their backs and he sat quite still, arms raised.
“Merchant, my arse,” said the guard as he pulled her stumbling through the fields. “You’re a spy. And I’m going to enjoy watching everything the Consortium does to you.”
75
Impatience
Meanwhile, back in the prophet’s camp, Firkin was getting sick of being Balur’s whipping boy. Do this, Balur would say, and because Firkin didn’t want to taste the lizard man’s fist at the back of his throat, he did it. Say this, Balur would tell him, and he would say it.
It was taking all the fun out of being the voice of a nonexistent prophet.
Under different circumstances, he thought he would have quite enjoyed Balur’s company. The lizard man had the right priorities in life: fighting, drinking, and women. Firkin might not have put them in that order, but at least Balur had picked the right top three. Not like those others. Will with all his concerns about the right thing to do, and his head being stuck in Lette’s britches. Quirk with her conflicts, and her desire to learn shit. What did learning shit ever do but fill up space in your head that could be taken up with little black circles of swirling beer? Lette… well, Lette could have been fun except she seemed far too preoccupied with Will’s head and her britches these days.
The whole thing was a gods-hexed shame. There was an army at his back, a dragon’s skull being paraded before him, another army to attack. He should be up there, preaching, yelling, baying for blood to be spilled. It could all have been so fucking beautiful.
But no. No. Will had told Balur, and Balur had told him, don’t flap your trap. Keep your tongue still and be a good little priest. Well, if he’d known he’d have to be good, Firkin would never have become a priest in the first place.
And who was Will anyway? He’d told Firkin he wasn’t the prophet. And then that he was. Or that he wasn’t but he said that he was. Firkin was very unclear on the whole issue.
All he knew was that he wanted to watch a really big fight through the gentle glaze of blind drunkenness and he wasn’t.
But Balur was a reasonable lizard. A god-fearing lizard. So maybe if a prophet went to have a word in his ear…
Balur was standing in Quirk’s thaumatic cart, occasionally striking his chest, and turning to give various elements of the assembled crowd a view of his best side.
“You!” Firkin shouted. He had decided to play it gently. He didn’t want to piss Balur off. Balur was, after all, very large. “You don’t have any balls!”
Balur looked down at him. Firkin did his best to focus.
“Great big lizard.” Firkin hiccupped. “Great big fists. All that…” He waved his hands vaguely, forgot what point he was trying to make, hiccupped again. “And where do you have your fists?” he asked.
“They are about to be being around your throat,” Balur told him.
“Jammed right up your arse!” Firkin told him, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Because little old Will told you to put them there. Takes your… your woman… your little Lette, and then he tells you to stick your hands right up your arse and you do it.”
“You better be watching your tongue,” Balur growled. “I have been killing holy men before.”
“Go ahead!” Firkin spat. “Least be better than you…” He lost his train of thought again, fought to find it again, grabbed on to the slippery little bastard with both hands. “Be better than watching you parade about like a peacock with no cock.”
That he thought was clever. A well-landed blow. He thought it for all the time it took for Balur to punch him hard in the face.
76
Hallows’ Mouth
Quirk stumbled yet again, scraped her knees yet again, was dragged to her feet yet again. The man from the pay wagons was unrelenting. His arm was a steel bar, his fist a vise that held her, heaved her inexorably upward. She had clawed at both hand and arm and achieved nothing. She had pushed the man too far, well beyond his breaking point, and she could not pull him back.
Fear thrummed through her. Her legs shook uncontrollably, threatened to send her tumbling again. She tried to breathe, tried to find her center.
They spiraled up. The path wove its way around Hallows’ Mouth, twisting through arches of heat-scorched stone, narrowing to thin precipices, weaving around vents that bubbled and belched foul sulfurous smoke. She tried to keep her free hand pressed to the side of the volcano, but as their elevation increased, the stone became too hot to touch. Above her, the sky grew darker.
She had a good view of the battlefield now, could see how paltry Will’s forces looked against those of the Consortium. Any tiny flaw in the plan and they would be utterly obliterated. And there were so many flaws.
Right now, Quirk felt like she was the largest one.
Eventually, the path twisted through an archway leading into the craggy cliff face. They were halfway up the volcano’s side. By Quirk’s estimate she had been climbing for almost two hours. Her breath was ragged, her legs shook. She was having trouble distinguishing terror from exhaustion.
The tunnel closed over her like a clenching fist.
“Like I explained, I’m completely willing to take an IOU,” she said between gasps, but the man had long since stopped paying attention to her.
The heat rose. Sweat stuck her colorful robes to her body. She felt too exposed. She should have argued with Will for the role of a soldier. At least she would have gotten some armor that way.
The tunnel sank deeper into the rock. The walls took on a twisted, jagged look, as if the path had been forced into the volcano against the rock’s will. Torches gave off a smoky red light.
A pair of doors emerged from the gloom. They were massive, painted the same black as the pay wagons. A single leathery wing carved into the surface of each. She was dragged unceremoniously to their foot. They towered over her. Doors for giants. For gods. For dragons.
The man banged hard on the door, the steel knuckles of his gauntlet booming off the wood. The sound echoed down the empty stone corridor.
There were no guards here. She supposed she knew why. She supposed she knew exactly what was behind those doors. You didn’t need guards when anyone smarter than a particularly blunt rock knew to stay away.
The man dropped her to the ground. She cried out as she struck the unforgiving stone once more. But this time he didn’t pull her to her feet. This time he walked away.
She watched him leave, too exhausted to beg anymore. This wasn’t how it had all been meant to happen. Not at all.
Behind her, the door creaked open.
She tried to take stock, to get a grip on herself. She knew what was behind that door. She knew who was behind it. They were why she had gone on this stupid gods-hexed escapade in the first place. Just two days ago she had been explaining how seeing them was one of the few important things left to her in the world. And now she couldn’t move.
She was surrounded by fire. She could feel it pulsing through the mountain. She could feel creatures defined by it waiting for her. She tried to take strength from that.
I should be as at home here as they are.
Which was great, and everything, but even if she was as at home as they were, they still outnumbered and outweighed her to a laughable degree.
“Enter.” The single word boomed out. More of a growl or a roar than a word. She felt her sternum vibrate with the force of it.
Her fear. The heat. The power of that voice. Her desire to immolate herself against the flame of a dragon, a real true dragon… It all twisted inside of her. It all came together and made that voice utterly compelling, utterly irresistible. She knew she could run, yet she found herself clambering to shaking feet, leaning on the black door for support as she pushed her
way into the room.
She had to see. She had to.
The chamber beyond was vast in the same way that a mountain is vast. Quite possibly because the chamber occupied almost all of a mountain. Its ceiling arced up to the crater far above. Its walls tumbled down toward the smoking pit of lava far below. Heat clogged the room, pressed against Quirk like a physical force. She had to push through it to get into the room. She blinked her suddenly dry eyes, tried to take everything in.
Around a central column of smoke that plumed toward the distant crater, the central crags of Hallows’ Mouth had been cut into flat tiers.
Each and every one dripped with absurd wealth.
She scrubbed at her eyes several times waiting for the heat-induced mirage to fade away, but it did not. It stayed resolutely, stubbornly there. And for the first time, Quirk truly understood why Lette and Balur would go to such great lengths to try to steal this wealth.
In Tamathia, the university was considered one of the wealthiest institutions in the country. It had an endowment that would last it generations under even the worst financial climates. It owned significant parts of large cities, and counted as the largest landowner shy of the emperor.
All of the university’s wealth would perhaps have counted for one of the tiers she could make out now.
As she watched, a small cascade of coins tumbled from the edge of one tier. They crashed and clattered down onto the one below, dislodged a small mountain of necklaces. They went spilling down toward the edge. Enough gold to feed a midsize village for a year spilled into the volcano’s burning magma.
Quirk tore her eyes away from the obscene waste of wealth and back to the movement that had started it all. Slowly, uncoiling at a leisurely pace, the dragon emerged.
It was sixty yards long from nose to tail. Its body was jet black, sinuous. Golden eyes glittered in a fine-boned, elegant head. Nostrils flared red, then yellow, then blue. Flames jetted out as it stretched wings like silken expanses of midnight. It opened its mouth slightly and a bright red, forked tongue tasted the air.
Quirk was frozen. Mattrax and Dathrax both had been majestic, titans of the air, but this creature, this was… was…
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
It beat its wings once, twice. The swirling thermals from the volcano caught it and bore it up easily. As it rose into the air, other dragons appeared. A bloodred beast with a white underbelly, wings disproportionately short against the vast tube of its frame. A sinuous yellow dragon that moved in writhing coils through the air, barking and yipping in a curiously canine manner. A majestic green creature with golden horns that preened its way through the air. And finally a squat, dirty brown creature who appeared as ungainly and uncomfortable in the air.
One by one they landed, the black coming down last of all, circling twice about the column of smoke above the heads of all the others before deigning to grace the earth with his presence.
Quirk would have staggered back if she could. Would have dropped her jaw open. But she could do nothing. She was paralyzed, overcome by the enormity of the moment. They were so close to her, so massive. Fear and desire tore at her in equal measure.
She could touch them.
They could kill her.
She could ask them everything she could think of.
They would roast her alive long before they gave an answer.
But what it would be to die that way, to be immolated in the purity of their fires.
She shook her head. She was the enemy of these creatures. They were selfish and brutish. They wanted to kill everyone.
She was a scientist, a thaumatobiologist. This was everything she had ever dreamed of.
They were killers.
She was here to deceive them.
And if they discovered that deception… then their nature would take over and they would kill her.
Her thoughts turned to every other thaumatobiologist who had left the safety of their academic towers to study the beasts of which they dreamed. She thought of their corpses. Of the plaques in the hall of remembrance listing out their demises.
Edmondel Allaband—Speared by Unicorn
Carped Metheril—Trodden upon by Giant
Robart Pondra—Head mounted upon wall by Wyld Huntsman
Fettrick Battar—Wished away by Djinn
She didn’t want to be another memory, another failure.
“So,” said the black dragon in the same titanic voice that had brought her into the room. It was the voice she imagined Lawl used to call dead warriors from the Hallows into battle. It crashed through her, left her body feeling scoured clean. “You are the spy the prophet has dared to send. His saboteur.”
She and Will had talked about this. There were things she was meant to say in this scenario.
Quirkelle Bal Tehrin—Hubris and dragons
Gods, as selfish and ugly as it was, she wanted to live. She wanted to write of this moment, of all the moments and scraps of information she had gathered. She wanted to teach all the world of these creatures. And she wanted to see the world learn from her.
Ten thousand lives had been placed on her shoulders.
Will’s life. Firkin’s. Balur’s. Lette’s. All the rest.
She knew what she was supposed to say.
She made a decision.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am, and I want to tell you everything I know.”
77
The Center Cannot Hold
If you had asked Lette the day before what she might change about Will, and if she could change just one thing, she would have been tempted to reply that it was his professionalism. There might have been a few more base, physical improvements to contend with, but professionalism would have definitely been in the mix. He was too easily swayed by his emotions. He had not found the calm, quiet place it was necessary to visit when circumstances called for hard decisions and clear thought. She would have wished for him to have a still place to visit, an inner core of peace to lend him strength in what was to come.
Today she would like to rip Will’s inner core right out and use it to beat him to death.
Quirk had been arrested and was now—mostly likely—being merrily tortured to death, while giving up every intimate detail about them and their plan. Their descriptions would be disseminated quietly and efficiently throughout the army, and just before the battle broke out, they would be seized, and stripped, and then their flayed corpses would be displayed for everyone to see.
There was, of course, the chance of escape, but even if that happened, how far would they truly get? Without Quirk to rile them up any further, the Consortium troops were back to looking for just the sort of distraction two renegade soldiers would provide. Their concerns about pay had ebbed to a belligerent murmur. Lette had tried to kindle the flames with a few more incendiary dice games, but all she had to tell them was yesterday’s news.
Now she and Will were no better off than they had been a few days ago. In fact they were worse off, because all the opportunities to survive, to truly get away, had fled with them.
They should have sent Firkin and his followers off to Hallows’ Mouth as a sacrificial tribute while the rest of them headed for the coast. They should have stuck with enlisting in the Consortium army, and lived out their days as well-paid soldiers. But instead they had run headlong into this dead end. It was inescapable.
And did any of this bother Will? Did any of it seem to put a single concern in his head? Did his guts quiver, his bowels loosen, and his food rebel in his stomach?
No. Not for a single fucking second. He just sat there with mooncalf eyes, waiting for the world to come crashing down on them.
“We should leave,” she told him. “Just leave now. Get as much of a head start as we can. Forget the gold. It’ll just slow us down and we’ll never have a chance to spend it anyway. If we’re lucky—stupidly, insanely lucky—we might make it to the coast, and we can sign up for some navy, and die of scurvy on an ocean somewhere. At least that’ll give us
a few more months.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “Have a little faith. Please.”
“Faith?” If she ground her teeth any harder she was going to be left with blunt stumps in her mouth. “You’re going to pull the religious leader now? You know where I’m going to shove your fucking faith?”
He put his arms around her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The plan is going to work.”
“Was it working when Quirk was carried away?”
They were still at the back of the Consortium camp, the stretch of dirty grass between the black pay wagons and Quirk’s brightly colored ones. The angry mob of soldiers was reduced to a few belligerent souls, probably more interested in being in the army’s rear ranks than they were in ensuring fair pay for all their fellows.
“Balur will make his feint soon. Quirk will find a way out. Everything will work.”
Perhaps, she thought, it was a coping mechanism. A way of dealing with the stress. Absurd blind faith was the only way he could keep putting one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t face the dream crumbling around him, couldn’t take the tastes of the ashes in his mouth.
She put his head in both her hands, pulled him gently toward her, until their faces were level. “We have to go, Will,” she whispered, trying to drive the words into his head, so that he would see the truth. See reality. “We have to leave.”
“Trust—” he started.
She head-butted him. Hard.
“Ow!” he yelled, as he fell down hard. “Fuck!” He grabbed his nose. Blood streamed down his chin. “Has Barph got your brains? What the fuck did you do that for?”
He clambered to his feet, blood still flowing from his nose.
“Are you fucking listening to me, Willett Fallows?” she asked him. “Because I am saying this only once more. I am fucking going. I am escaping this rattrap of a future. And I am running out of fucks to give about whether you accompany me or not. So either start moving your arse toward the horizon, or I shall leave you here to burn along with the rest of your Barph-addled dreams.”