by Jon Skovron
But when the last rays of sunlight disappeared, the boat didn’t flip. Instead, Red watched with sick fascination as something pale and veiny began to ooze out through the small gap between the boat and the floor. It spread out across the wooden floorboards like a lumpy pool of flesh, only occasionally pushing the edge of the boat up as one of the larger chunks passed through.
Once it was completely free of the boat, Red realized that it wasn’t a blob or pool exactly. There was a shape to it. A human shape. But it was malleable, as if all the bones had been turned soft and pliable. This person lay on their belly, drooping and heavy, arms and legs bowing out to the sides like rubbery insect legs. Then Red saw the mashed-in face.
“Brackson?”
Red remembered Progul Bon casually mentioning that Brackson had been punished after prematurely revealing Red’s vulnerability to high-pitched sounds. Brackson and Red had clashed more than a few times back when they’d both been rash young toms in Paradise Circle. So when Brackson showed off his whistle that night, Red knew it was just a bit of payback. Indulgent, sure, but understandable.
Biomancers were not the understanding type.
The thing that used to be Brackson turned sluggishly when Red called out his name. Instead of walking, or even crawling, he had to squirm and undulate across the floor like some kind of human-octopus hybrid. With such a soft rib cage, the weight of his own flesh must be pressing down on his innards. Red guessed it had to hurt like all hells. And the way Brackson’s head sagged to one side like a deflated pastry suggested his brain wasn’t getting much protection either.
“Brackson, can you speak?” Red had always hated the gaf, but nobody deserved this. He pulled down his scarf to show his face. “Do you recognize me?”
Brackson made a grunt that didn’t sound particularly friendly. His mouth flapped around. Maybe he was trying to speak, but his jaw was too soft to form the words.
“Listen. I know we ain’t ever been wags, but what’s been done to you is wrong as wrong can be. Let me help you.” He had no idea how, but he knew the prince and the empress. There had to be something he could do.
Brackson shuffle-slithered toward the door like he was ignoring him. Or maybe there’d been so much brain damage, he didn’t understand. Either way, he seemed intent on getting out of the warehouse, probably back into town where he could mindlessly strangle anyone he came across with his rubbery arms.
Red sighed and pulled his scarf back up. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t make things easy for me even now.” He jumped down from the windowsill, blocking Brackson’s exit. “Sorry, old pot. Your murder spree ends tonight.”
Brackson’s rubbery face stretched into something that might have been a frown, and his grunt stretched out into a gurgling growl.
Red drew a throwing blade in each hand. Brackson paused when he saw the gleaming steel, scrunching back into himself.
“There, now,” said Red. “You may not understand much, but you still know danger when you see it. Maybe we can settle this peacefully after all.”
Brackson scrunched even further into himself. Then he shot forward like a spring, slamming into Red’s chest and knocking him over.
Brackson trampled over him, and would have escaped, but Red plunged one of his blades into the creature’s soft shoulder and used it as leverage to get on the creature’s back as it passed him. He then stabbed his second blade into the other shoulder and held on tight. He was grateful he still wore his fingerless leather gloves, or the blades might have cut right through his palms.
As Red tried to straddle him, Brackson made a warbling sound of protest and took off faster than Red thought possible. It was a strange sort of lurching gait in which Brackson compressed himself, then shot forward, his rubbery arms and legs scrabbling at anything in reach for additional purchase. Red wanted to put a blade or two in Brackson’s soft skull, but at their current frantic speed, it was all he could do to hang on.
Red and his unwilling ride smashed through the door and down the wagon path toward town. But town was the last place Red wanted this to go, so he leaned hard on the blades in Brackson’s shoulders, steering them in a wide arc through tall grass back toward the small docks along the west bank of Trader’s Fork. Brackson had some trouble moving in the grass, and Red thought he was about to get his opening. But before he could take advantage of it, they reached the docks. Brackson’s rubbery fingers and toes hooked onto the widely spaced planks of wood, and they lurched forward with even greater speed.
“Clear the way!” yelled Red as they neared a group of dockhands unloading something from a small sloop that, at this hour, was probably smuggled goods.
The dockhands dodged to the side and Brackson smashed through the crates, sending the fine pink powder of coral spice into the air.
“No loss there,” muttered Red. He still held a grudge against the drug that had claimed his mother and nearly killed him. He was sentimental that way.
The dockhands stared incredulously as the bizarre pair raced past them. The dock stretched along the banks of Trader’s Fork for a quarter mile or so. Red saw that there were four or five other groups of workers ahead of them, all blocking the way.
“How much smuggling goes on here?” he groaned.
He had to end this before every drug runner in Stonepeak saw it. It was time for some risky, and possibly ostentatious, acrobatics.
Red jerked his blades out of Brackson’s shoulders and jumped straight up. In midair, he threw the blades, which both sank into the base of Brackson’s soft skull. Red landed in a crouch on the dock and winced as the lifeless monstrosity was carried forward by momentum into another stack of crates on the dock. The angry shouts of the workers quickly turned to yelps of alarm when they saw what it was that had knocked over their cargo.
Red hurried over and shoved Brackson’s body off the edge of the dock into the water, where it quickly sank out of sight.
A proper spy probably would have slipped away right then, silent and mysterious. Well, a proper spy probably wouldn’t have allowed themselves to get into this mess in the first place. But seeing as how he was already in the muck of it, Red couldn’t resist a little flourish.
“Well, my wags,” he said to the smugglers, his red eyes gleaming in the moonlight above his gray mask. “I think that about takes care of your Stonepeak Strangler problem!”
He gave them a quick bow, and ran off, his laughter trailing into the night.
introducing
If you enjoyed
BANE AND SHADOW,
look out for
THE DRAGON LORDS: FOOL’S GOLD
By Jon Hollins
Guardians of the Galaxy meets The Hobbit in this rollicking fantasy adventure.
It’s not easy to live in a world ruled by dragons. The taxes are high and their control is complete. But for one group of bold misfits, it’s time to band together and steal back some of that wealth.
No one said they were smart.
1
Will
It was a confrontation as old as time. A tale begun back when the Pantheon of old first breathed life into the clay mold of man and set him down upon the earth. It was the tale of the untamable pitted against the master. Of the wild tearing at the walls of the civilized. It was man versus the beast.
Will placed each foot carefully, held his balance low. He circled slowly. Cold mud pulled at his feet. Sweat trickled down the crease between his eyebrows. Inch by inch he closed the distance.
The pig Bessie grunted at him.
“Five shek says she tips him on his arse,” said Albor, one of Will’s two farmhands. A strip of hairy gut was visible where he rested it upon the sty’s rickety old fence. It was, Will had noted, significantly hairier in fact than his chin, which he scratched at constantly. Albor’s wife had just departed the nearby village for a monthlong trip to help look after her sister’s new baby, and Albor was three days into growing the beard she hated.
“I say it’s face first, he lands,” said D
unstan, Will’s other farmhand. The two men were a study in contrasts. Where Albor’s stomach swayed heavily over his gut, Dunstan’s broad leather belt was wrapped twice around his waist and still flapped loose beyond the buckle. His narrow face was barely visible behind a thick cloud of facial hair, which his wife loved to excess. She had a tendency to braid sections of it and line it with bows.
“You’re on,” said Albor, spitting in his muddy palm and holding it out to Dunstan.
Will gave a damn about neither beards nor wives. All he cared about was his father’s thrice-cursed prize sow, Bessie. She had been his dancing partner in this sty for almost half an hour now. He was so coated in mud that if he had lain upon the sty’s floor, he would have been virtually invisible. He briefly considered this as a possible angle of attack, but the pig was as likely to shit on him and call it a good day’s work as anything else. There was an uncanny intelligence in her eyes. Still, she was old and he was young. Brute force would win the day.
He closed the distance down by another inch.
Bessie narrowed her eyes.
Another inch.
Bessie squealed and charged. Will lunged, met the charge head-on. His hands slammed down hard against her sides.
Bessie flew through his mud-slick palms and crashed all of her considerable weight into his legs. The world performed a sprawling flip around Will’s head, then hit him in the face.
He came up spluttering mud, and was just in time to hear Dunstan say, “That’s five shek you owe me then.”
Bessie was standing nonchalantly behind him, with an air of almost studied calm.
Will found his resolve hardening. Bessie had to die. With a roar, he launched himself at the pig. She bucked wildly. And yet still one of his hands snagged a bony trotter. He heaved upon it with all his might.
Bessie, however, had lived upon the farm longer than Will. She had survived lean winters, breeched piglets, and several virulent diseases, and was determined to survive him. She did not allow her limb to collapse under Will’s weight, advanced years or no. Instead she simply pulled him skidding through the mud. After several laps, he appeared to be done. With her free hoof, she kicked him in the forehead to emphasize the lesson, then walked away.
“I think you almost got her that time,” Albor called in what might be generously described as an encouraging tone.
Will did not respond. Personal honor was at stake at this point in the proceedings. Still, there was only so much mud a man could swallow. He clambered to his feet and retreated to consider his options.
Dunstan patted him on the shoulder as he collapsed against the fence. Bessie regarded him balefully.
“She’s too strong for me,” Will said when he’d gotten his breath back.
“To be fair, you say that about most girls,” Albor told him.
“I have to outsmart her.”
“That too,” Dunstan chipped in.
“Don’t usually work, though.” Albor chewed a strand of straw sagely.
“This,” said Will, his temper fraying, “is not so much helpful advice as much as it is shit swilling in a blocked ditch. That pig has to become crispy rashers and if you have nothing helpful to add you can go back to picking apples in the orchard.”
For a short while the only sound was Bessie farting noisily in her corner of the sty.
Above the men, thin clouds swept across a pale blue sky. The distant mountains were a misty purple, almost translucent.
Will softened. None of this was Albor’s or Dunstan’s fault, even if they did not want to see old Bessie taken to the butcher’s block. Deep down—deeper perhaps now than at the start of his ordeal—neither did he. Bessie had been part of this farm as long as he could remember. His father had sat him upon her back and had him ride around the sty, whooping and hollering, while his mother stood clucking her tongue. Dunstan and Albor had been there, cheering him on. Even old Firkin had been there.
But now Will’s parents were gone to an early grave, and Firkin had lost his mind. Bessie was old and would not sow anymore. And Will was the unwilling owner of a farm on the brink of ruin.
“Look,” he said, voice calmer, “I want Bessie dead no more than you do, but I am out of options. The Consortium increased taxes again, and paying them has left my coffers bare. If I am to have a hope of surviving another year, I need to put her to the knife and sell her pieces for as much as I can get. Next winter she’ll be blind and hobbled and it will be a kindness.”
Another silence.
“You can’t wait a little, Will?” said Albor, straw drooping in the corner of his mouth. “Give her one last good year?”
Will sighed. “If I do, then there won’t be anyone to slaughter her. This whole place will be gone to the Consortium and I’ll be in a debtors’ jail, and you two will be in old Cornwall’s tavern without any sheks to pay for his ale.”
At that threat, the two farmhands looked at each other. Finally Dunstan shrugged. “I never liked that fucking pig anyway.”
Albor echoed his sad smile.
“That’s more like it,” said Will. “Now let’s see if together three grown men can’t outwit one decrepit pig.”
Slowly, painfully, Will, Albor, and Dunstan hobbled back toward the farmhouse. Albor rubbed at a badly bruised hip. Dunstan was wringing muddy water out of his sodden, matted beard.
“It’s all right,” said Will, “we’ll get her tomorrow.”
Later, the farm’s other animals locked away for the night, straw fresh on the barn’s floor, Will stood in the farmhouse, heating a heavy iron pot full of stew over the hearth. A few strips of chicken roiled fretfully among vegetable chunks.
He never bothered naming the chickens. It was easier that way.
He sighed as he watched the stew slowly simmer. He should be checking the cheese presses, or scooping butter out of the churn and into pots before it spoiled, or possibly even attempting to tally his books so he could work out exactly how much money he owed folk. Instead he stood and stared.
The nights were long out on the farm. It was five miles through the fields and woods down to The Village. The distance had never seemed far when he was a child. But that was when his parents were alive, and when Dunstan and Albor, and even Firkin, would all have stayed to share the supper, with laughter, and jokes, and fiddle music lilting late into the night. That was when performing the chores around the house had never seemed exactly like work, and when stoking the fire so it warmed the whole room had never felt like an extravagance.
The firelight cast the heavy wooden cabinets and thick oak table and chairs in guttering light. Will tried to focus on that, not the shadows of the day. Maybe Bessie did have one more litter in her. Maybe he could give her one more year. A good litter would bring in enough coin. Or near enough, if the taxes didn’t go up again. And he could scrimp and save in a few places. Maybe sell a few of the chairs. It wasn’t like he needed more than one.
Yes. Yes, of course that would work. And Lawl or some other member of the Pantheon would manifest in the run-down old temple in the village below and shower them all with gold. That was what would happen…
His slow-bubbling thoughts were interrupted abruptly by a sharp rap at his door. He snapped his head to look at the thick oak slats. Outside, rain had begun to fall, tapping a complex undulating rhythm against the thatch roof above his head. It was over an hour’s walk from The Village. Who would bother dragging themselves out here at this hour?
He had half-dismissed the sound as a loose branch blowing across the yard when it came again. A hard, precise rap that rattled the door latch. If it was a branch, it was a persistent one.
Removing the stew pot from the fire, he crossed the room quickly, unlatched the door, and opened it onto a cold and blustery night.
Four soldiers stood upon his doorstep. Their narrowed eyes stared out from beneath the shadows of their helms, which dripped rainwater down onto their long noses. Swords hung heavily on their large belts, each pommel embossed with an image of two bat
like wings—the mark of the Dragon Consortium. Sodden leather jerkins with the same insignia were pulled over their heavy chain-mail shirts.
They were not small men. Their expressions were not kind. Will could not tell for sure, but they bore a striking resemblance to the four soldiers who had carried off most of the coin he’d been relying on to get through the winter.
“Can I help you?” asked Will, as politely as he was able. If there was anything at which he could fail to help them, he wanted to know about it.
“You can get the piss out of my way so me and my men can come out of this Hallows-cursed rain,” said the lead soldier. He was taller than the others, with a large blunt nose that appeared to have been used to stop a frying pan, repeatedly, for most of his childhood. Air whistled in and out of it as he spoke.
“Of course.” Will stepped aside. While he bore the guards of the Dragon Consortium no love, he bore even less for the idea of receiving a sound thrashing at their hands.
The four soldiers tramped laboriously in, sagging under the weight of their wet armor. “Obliged,” said the last of the men, nodding. He had a kinder face than the others. Will saw the lead soldier roll his eyes.
They stood around Will’s small fire and surveyed his house with expressions that looked a lot like disdain. Large brown footprints tracked their path from the door. The fourth guard looked at them, then shrugged at Will apologetically.
For a moment they all stood still. Will refused to leave the door, clinging to the solidity of it. Grounding himself in the wood his father had cut and hewn before he was born. As he watched the soldiers by the fire, his stomach tied more knots than an obsessive-compulsive fisherman.
Finally he crossed to them, the table, and his stew. He began to ladle it into a large if poorly made bowl. He wasn’t hungry anymore, but it gave him something to do. These soldiers would get to their business with or without his help.
As he ladled, the lead soldier fiddled with a leather pouch at his waist.