by Jon Hollins
“Golden bull each,” said one of the guards as Quirk approached.
Balur let out a grunt of surprise that his bovine anatomy translated into a spray of bile into the back his throat. He gagged and coughed.
“That a sick bull?” asked another.
“Looks pretty majestic to me,” said a third with what could only be described as a leer.
A golden bull each? Each of these families was paying a golden bull a head to get into Vinter? It could take a family of farmers a month or more to earn a single golden bull. And here they were spending four or five to enter the city, sometimes more if they had been particularly enthusiastic in their worship of Cois.
“I am not here as a bystander,” Afrit insisted. “I am here to deliver cattle to be sacrificed for the dragons during the ceremony. I am as much a part of this as you.”
The guard spat. “One golden bull each,” he repeated.
“Sacrificed” said another. “That seems a shame.”
“Each?” Afrit sounded outraged. “You are charging me an entrance fee for my animals?”
“Pay up,” said the guard, without even the flicker of a smile or a conscience, “or step aside so you can start picking your teeth up off the floor.”
This was good, Balur thought. There was no way Afrit would be carrying six golden bulls on her. Violence was definitely going to happen.
“How about,” said one of the guards peripheral to the discussion, nudging his more authoritative friend, “we say we’ll skip the entrance tithe if you give us half an hour alone with your cattle?”
The first guard looked at his companion with genuine disgust in his eyes. It was the first appropriate emotion Balur thought he’d seen all day. Possibly longer.
“The fuck—” he started.
“Look, fine.” Afrit cut him off. She reached into a pouch at her belt, and much to Balur’s surprise retrieved a fistful of coins. She shoved it into the guard’s hand, and was then pushing past him, through the gates.
The guards stared after them, grumbling slightly as Balur and the others finally entered the city of Vinter, where they would make their final attempt to rip Avarra from the clasping grip of the dragons.
63
Buckling Under the Pressure of Thinking Up Funny Chapter Names
Of all the things Will liked about returning to a human form, the one he liked the most was that he regained the power of speech.
“Attractive cattle?” he shouted at Barph. “Cows that give people hard-ons? What in the Hallows is wrong with you?”
Barph spread his arms, all innocence and affront. “I thought you knew. That’s how the gods do it. It’s written into us. We are always desirable.”
“You,” said Will with considerable feeling, “are an arsehole of a deity. And I rather get where Lawl was coming from when he banished you.”
For just a moment, there was a flash of something cold and hard in Barph’s eyes. And despite it all, it was easy to forget that of all of them he was the true deity. He was the one born to these powers, who was as familiar with them as Will was with breathing.
“Sorry,” Will said quickly. “Eight hundred years was a dick move by Lawl.” He rubbed the back of his head. “But you’re still an arsehole.”
Barph’s smile was already back in place. “I never professed that I was not.”
Lette shrugged. “It wasn’t that different from being in a tavern for me.”
Balur made a scoffing sound.
Lette wheeled on him. “Oh, like you don’t paw at every girl who comes within arm’s reach after a few ales.”
“Maybe,” said Quirk, leaning in between the pair, “we should try to attract less attention?”
They were at the shadowed end of a blind alley they had ducked down to shed their bovine forms.
“It’s okay,” Afrit called back to them from where she stood at the alley’s entrance, keeping a weather eye out on the crowds passing by. “At this point you could all start having an orgy and I don’t think anyone would notice.”
“We could always be trying to have an orgy and testing the hypothesis,” Balur said.
“You aren’t helping,” Quirk called back to Afrit.
“Look,” said Lette, “this being the moment when we really do have to save the world from a bunch of arsehole dragons, maybe we can skip the whole banter bullshit and just move on to the next step in the plan.”
“Oh,” Balur grumbled. “I am always liking the banter part. It is sort of being a way to let off steam.”
Which was, oddly enough, perhaps the most personable thing Will had ever heard Balur say.
“How about,” he said to the lizard man, “I just call you a prick and then make sure we all know what’s happening next?”
“Fine,” Balur groused, but then he cracked a smile. “Arsehole.”
“Thank you,” said Will graciously, “you lover of leprous whores.” Balur’s grin widened and Will had to admit, he did feel better.
“Okay,” said Will, taking a breath and trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel. “This is where we split up. Remember, we need to get good views of the ceremony. We need to be where we can see what everyone else is seeing. So we’re on the lookout for vantage points. And once everything gets going then we’re going to want to be hard to find. So we try to make our vantage points as discreet as possible. Inside buildings and behind windows. Hidden in crowds if necessary.”
Barph nudged Lette and winked. “Don’t you just love him when he gets all bossy?”
Will half-expected a lightning bolt to smash into Barph’s body in that very moment.
“All right,” Lette said instead, “let’s get back out there and fuck some shit up.”
64
Live from the Vinland Bowl
Quirk knew she was about to risk her own life. She was indeed probably risking it at this very moment, in the crowded streets of Vinter. Eddying pools of guards swirled in the streaming crowds of dragon worshippers. She was a well-known agitator in the resistance that had … well that had essentially buckled and been crushed. Still, it was well within the realm of possibility that they should have descriptions of her, and of the others. Balur was hardly a subtle figure.
And even if they did survive their passage to wherever the dragons were having their ceremony, then the plan was for her to directly antagonize the creatures that had killed the gods of Avarra. Actual gods. And with some of their power inside her now, she knew exactly what the gods had been capable of. And they had been utterly defeated. Utterly. And now she was going to attempt to do what those divinities could not. Based on a plan Willet Fallows had concocted. Possibly while under the subversive guidance of a god who could best be described as a vengeful dickhead.
And yet, despite all of this, what she was actually thinking about was transmogrification.
She could be anything. She could appear as anything at all. She had seen Barph treat the physical limitations of his body as if they were negligible concerns. She could grow. Could shrink. She could be … gods … a dragon. A wyvern. A giant. An ogre. A chimera. Any megabiofauna she wished to be. She could insert herself into their societies, their social structures. She could move through them unnoticed. Not just an observer, but a participant.
The knowledge she could reveal. The papers she could write …
It always caught her off guard … the realization that that world was gone. That she had no one to publish her papers. No one to read them.
That was why, she supposed, she was here in the end. Stupid as it was, she was fighting to recapture a world where she could stand in a room and share her passion for large magical animals with poor, unsuspecting students. There were other reasons, like decency, and goodness, and a basic sense of what was morally right, mixed in there, but in the end, what it was all about was getting back to the university.
If Ferra hadn’t messed with her all that time ago, back in Tamathia … if he had just left her to her studies, would she be here now?
<
br /> She hoped so, but she wasn’t entirely sure.
The crowd was getting tighter and tighter. It was becoming harder and harder to maneuver. They were still at least a mile from the city center. Banners were flying in the streets. People were hanging from their windows, shouting and cheering, throwing loaves of bread and sacks of wine down to the crowds below. Children were perched on rooftops, dancing and spitting on the passersby.
She felt someone take her hand, looked over, half-expecting it to be some pickpocket or another, but it was just Afrit. Her friend made apologetic eyes. She said something but Quirk could hardly hear her over the increasing roar of the crowd. She leaned in closer.
“I don’t want to lose you.”
It was an innocent enough thing to say, and Quirk had to admit she was glad to hear it. She still wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about Afrit’s recent romantic revelation, about the emotions caught up in this friendship, but she saw the advantages of companionship more clearly now. Whether it was the divinity within her, or something Knole had said, or just … time, she wasn’t sure. So much had changed in such little time. She squeezed Afrit’s hand, but she turned away before she saw the smile she knew would come. She wasn’t ready for that yet.
They had not seen any dragons, she realized. The lizards had dominated the skyline for days. She had sat, writing notes when she could. Group behavior was something she still knew so little about. But this morning the beasts were absent. Where were they hiding? Could it be a calculated move to build the crowd’s anticipation?
They hardly seemed to need the help. Quirk could see some people visibly crying with excitement. One young man was letting out occasional screams, loud enough to cut through the hubbub of the crowd. Everything smelled of sweat and straw, shit and burned street vendor meat. Quirk was no longer making headway voluntarily so much as she was moving with the sway of the crowd.
Slowly she and Afrit forced themselves to the edge of the street.
“Where to?” Afrit was sweating, panting slightly. The heat of the crowd in the sun was immense.
“Up,” said Quirk, nodding at the rooftops.
They tried the first door they found. To her surprise, it was open, leading onto a cool dark corridor. Stairs lead up. Multiple families it seemed were living in the building. They could hear them shouting to each other from deeper within the rooms. They pressed up quietly. When someone caught sight of them, Quirk tensed, but the man just gave a friendly nod. He beckoned them and they followed him to a window where someone had lowered a rope for easier rooftop access.
They scrambled up onto tile roofs, the heat of the clay baking up through the battered soles of their shoes. What Quirk wouldn’t give for a new pair of shoes. She should have asked Barph about how he conjured things from nowhere. That knowledge, though, she suspected would have a price. The god still had clearly not told them everything. She would piece it all together though. Sooner or later.
The roofs were a little clearer than the streets, and the going not as hard as she had suspected. Makeshift bridges of planks and rope had been erected, providing access across the streets.
There was a makeshift quality to these celebrations. Homespun bunting dangled from windows. People were belting out hastily scribbled songs set to old tunes. They were genuinely excited, Quirk thought. They truly thought things were going to be better.
The willingness of the people to swallow the dragons’ lies should have been a clue, she thought. Will was right that they had to be cautious returning power to the gods.
She had just finished navigating a bridge that was nothing more than two ropes stretched taut—one to stand upon, the other to grip for balance—when finally she saw it. What the dragons had done.
The old High Temple still stood, crumbling upon its hill, looking down on the city. But everything beyond that had changed.
The dragons had systematically leveled every block in a half-mile radius of the temple, creating a vast, rubble-strewn bowl on all sides. Homes, livelihoods, statues, monuments, history—all of it had been erased. The dragons had no respect for what had been here. They simply needed space for their audience, for those they would dominate.
And how their audience had come. Every inch of space was covered with a vast, seething pack of humanity. And still more and more people streamed into the space. The crowd heaved and shrugged, sprawling and restless beneath them. Quirk could feel the building they stood upon shaking as the crowd moved.
She could feel more than that, she realized. She could also feel the power coming off them. Their desire. Their worship. Their desperation to believe in a savior. It was something palpable in the air, like a heat shimmer, like an elusive scent at the back of her throat.
“Gods,” Afrit breathed beside her.
“Yes,” Quirk agreed, “they will be soon.”
Some sort of critical mass was approaching, she knew. Whether it was divine knowledge or not she couldn’t be sure. But it felt as if a thunderhead were building somewhere just out of sight. Something she could almost glimpse out of the corner of her eyes. The moment—whatever it was—was almost upon them.
They were almost too late.
And then a roar came. Not from a dragon’s throat, but from a hundred thousand human ones. From half a million souls perhaps. All of them giving tongue to their joy, their rapture, their ecstasy. The building shook. Tiles slid loose. Afrit grabbed hold of Quirk, both of them fighting for balance.
Out of the heart of the old High Temple, the first of the dragons rose up. Then the next. Another, and another. They crawled up, like snakes boiling from the earth. Some slithered over the ruins. And slowly, looming over them all, dragons filled the sky.
65
Ready, Aim, Fire
Lette watched the dragons mount to the sky from her vantage point, hunched beneath the window ledge of an apartment overlooking the dragon’s most recent civic works project. The inhabitants of the building, along with an assortment of family members, friends, and overly forward strangers, were perched on the rooftop. She could hear the beams creaking as they moved about overhead. It would be in keeping with her general luck, she thought, if the whole structure gave way under the weight and she was literally buried in idiots before she could do her part in what was to come.
The sky was alive with lizards now, their vast bodies undulating through the air, their leathery wings clapping out long, slow beats. She shuddered. There was so much power out there. In the crowd and in the sky. She could feel it, like a physical presence, like electricity in the air pressing against her eyes and her sinuses. She took a long breath. It was far from being as calm as she would have liked.
She thought now that perhaps she had mishandled things with Will. He had been trying to be kind. He had, admittedly, done a fucking awful job of it. And he had deserved her scorn that night, had deserved more perhaps, the back of her hand or the taste of her steel to remind him to be a more mindful fucker with his words, perhaps. But after that … Maybe she should have made up with him at the end. Smoothed the air.
She had been going to tell him she loved him, for fuck’s sake. And now they were likely going to die without her having said it to him.
She looked down at the crowd. It was their fault. She was going to die without admitting her feelings to Will because of these people.
Would that mean that she had finally achieved her goal? Would she finally be a better person if she made that sacrifice? That was how all this had started, in the end. That one, stupid goal.
Of course, if she did, none of these people would care.
Except for Will, she supposed. Will thought she was a good person.
Will thinks I am a good person.
The thought caught her off guard. She went to throw it away, but she couldn’t dismiss it that fast. And the more she examined it, the truer it felt. Will really, truly believed she was a good person. Even when she had two blades in the guts of a man, deep down Will fundamentally believed she was trying to do the
right thing. Even as she had scorned him, she knew he had assumed that the fault had been his own, not hers. He’d been right, of course, but there were not many men she’d known who would have thought that way.
Plus, she could probably have got a good lay out of the whole thing if she’d just swallowed her pride.
She sighed. Regrets. The only way to beat them was to outlive them. If there’d been any gods left, she would have said that that was in their hands. Now … she supposed it was in hers.
Outside the dragons were flying in an approximate circle around the whole bowl. A second circle of figures in black robes had emerged from the High Temple. They were chanting something, but she could only just make out the murmur of it over the roaring of the crowd.
There was an ominous feeling in her gut. Why did people always choose to color-code their moral decisions with their robes? If it had been white robes she might have felt a little more confident about everything.
The crowd didn’t seem to care. They were in paroxysms of delight, hands and voices raised, writhing with joy. Every head was craned back, staring up at their new lords. Every mouth was open. Every hand grasped at the ineffable. The sound of the robed figures’ chanting rose.
Lette closed her eyes. It was time to begin.
Birds. She would start all of this with birds.
She pictured them, the way Barph had taught her. She pictured their beaks and feathers, their legs and claws. She felt the texture of them in her hands. She heard their cries. She smelled their musk, their shit drying in the sun. She tasted their feathers in her mouth. She felt their desires to soar, and to eat. She felt their fears, their joys. Everything in her mind was of birds. She was almost a bird herself. All that maintained the boundary between mental image and reality was her will. Because she did not want to be a bird. She wanted something else.
“Come,” she said. She said it with all her being. She said it in the language of the birds, though exactly how she did that escaped her. She said it and she knew every bird in the city heard her.