by Jon Hollins
Balur’s tongue tasted the air. There was fear in the crowd, yes, but not as much as the slaughter might suggest. There was … anticipation also. People were waiting for what came next. They wanted to know what would happen. There was eagerness even. They were excited.
“Taunt them,” Will had said. “So we can kill them all.”
Kill Theerax now, or kill Gorrax, and Theerax, and all the others later?
Balur cursed and closed his eyes.
“Who?” Gorrax roared. His words were hurricane blasts of sound ripping through the crowd. “Who does this?” He turned about. The crowd ducked his spinning tail. One daredevil even turned a cartwheel in its wake. “Show yourselves!”
Sparks spat from his mouth as he spoke. He was furious. A living testament to impotent rage. The anger almost crackled off him.
Balur concentrated. “Wind,” he said. “Cloud. Weather.”
“Who?” Gorrax bellowed once more. “Cowards!”
There was a fluttering of wings. The crowd gasped. Lette was playing her part. He knew the birds would be sweeping upward through the ring of still-circling dragons, spiraling up, drawing the crowd’s gaze.
And then he heard the second gasp. Louder. He heard the mirth at the edges. They had seen what he had done.
Far above Vinter, spelled out so all could see for miles around, written in clouds, were the words, “Up here, dumbarse.”
Gorrax roared. He leapt up into the sky. Birds shrieked and scattered.
“Wind. Water. Condense.” Balur did not know how he had been ending up with the weather portion of things. Stupid Lawl and his control of thunderbolts. There were so many commands to be remembering.
“Oh,” said the clouds, “you shall be smiting the clouds now?” The others had argued about syntax for a long time, though not for quite as long as Balur had been ignoring them.
“Weather. Wind. Blow.” Balur panted.
“Such a powerful little dragon, aren’t we?” said the clouds.
Gorrax strove higher. Balur could hear the roar of his flame. The other dragons were bellowing. But beneath it all, the robed figures around the temple were still chanting.
But there was another sound too. Muttering in the crowd. And yes, there it was, laughter.
“Wiggle that arse for the crowds,” said the clouds. “Give them a thrill.”
And then the crowd broke. The first big laugh. It ripped out of them, almost reluctantly. A snickering, snorting sound, given volume through the hundred thousand throats that gave it tongue.
The world laughed at the dragons.
Balur felt it almost immediately. A sudden rush of power. An electrifying, galvanizing crackle, like electricity down his spine, tingling in his limbs. And gods, he could be doing anything. He could be smashing these dragons. He could be tearing their heads from their limbs.
He could be losing his concentration completely. The clouds he had been carefully gathering above Vinter were evaporating. He cursed, redoubled his will. And suddenly this felt easy.
“Come on,” the clouds said. “You can do it. You can make it.” Clouds flexed and flashed, bustling across the sky. “A real god could do it,” mocked the heavens. “Though not the misbegotten spawn of weak iguana ejaculate.”
Gorrax was still struggling upward. But the clouds Balur had summoned were a mile up. They were great towering ziggurats of dust and water vapor. They rolled and whirled up in the sky. And they were emphatically out of Gorrax’s reach.
The dragon screamed in frustrated rage. “Bye-bye, little dragon,” said the clouds. Gorrax swept down. “Don’t let the door hit your arse,” said the clouds.
“Spark,” said Balur with all his body and mind.
The lightning lanced down, a little piece of punctuation that smashed into Gorrax’s hind limbs and sent him howling and spiraling down.
The dragons roared. And the crowd roared right back. Fear sublimated into mirth. Laughter tumbled out of them. Unstoppable. A dam bursting.
The dragons screamed. Power danced through Balur.
One last thing. One last message Will had insisted upon. “You think you killed us?” the clouds demanded of Gorrax’s tumbling body. “We’re the fucking gods.”
And as the crowd roared, Balur believed that it was actually true. It felt as if a heat shimmer was coming off him. Power evaporating out of his pores, his body trembling to contain it.
And yes, yes, some dragons were going to die today.
69
Hilarity Ensues
Balanced on the smoking ruins of a roof, Quirk surveyed the scene. The dragons triumphant ascension to the heavens was in disarray. Instead of shock and awe, there were dead bodies and laughter. Something like hysteria was gripping the crowd. With each fresh insult the gales of their laughter grew ever more desperate.
Somewhere beyond the view of the Vinter bowl, Gorrax crashed to earth. A great cloud of dust and ash rose up. How many lives had he just smashed, Quirk wondered? How many people just died that we do not care about?
The clouds of dust Gorrax’s body had kicked up swirled in foreign winds. The word Parp! floated off into the skies. Giggles chased it upward.
The energy being given off by the crowd was changing too. When Quirk had arrived there had been a sense of imminence in the people. The dragons’ ascension had been almost palpable. An inevitability. Now it was different. The energy was swirling about wildly. She could feel the power she wielded growing inside of her, heady and potent. It was like when she took hold of her own magic, but the sluice gate was so much harder to control. She could feel her body filling with power that was desperate for an escape. She felt like she could do anything she wanted. She could reshape the world, make it the better place she always knew it could be.
“Gods,” she said.
“What?” Afrit was still beside her, still balanced on the roof. A lot of the people who had not been dealing with serious burns after Theerax had passed by had scrambled for freedom in the aftermath. Those who had stayed were dealing with a distinct reduction in the building’s structural integrity.
“This power,” Quirk gasped. “It’s toxic.” She could imagine the whole bowl burning. She could imagine this whole city as a university. She was inches away from trying to force one of those futures into being. “No one should wield this.”
Afrit flashed something that could have been mistaken for a smile. “We’ll make a practical politician of you yet.”
Quirk dropped down, squatting on her haunches, resting her hands lightly on the roof tiles beneath her. She wanted to stay grounded, to not be too caught up in this. But there were tides in the power surrounding her, ripping at her, pulling back and forth. Power filled her, lifted her high above reality, then ebbed away, sending her crashing back down.
And still at the old High Temple, the robed figures chanted. Was Ferra in among them? Her old foil from the Emperor’s court back in Tamathia. Was he full of fear now? Did he wonder at the might of his masters? Did he fret it had all been for naught?
She had her part to play now, she knew. And she could do it. Easily, she suspected, as another tidal shift of power flooded through her.
People would die because of this, but she had made her peace with that a long time ago. Many people had died, and only a handful at her hands. And she had been fighting for something she still believed in when they had.
No, what worried her was that she would enjoy it.
Violence is a tool.
Except power was just a tool as well, and she could feel the corruption of that tool scouring at the edges of her morality already.
Afrit put a hand on her shoulder. “The one thing I ever really wanted to teach my students back at the university was that they would all make mistakes, and they’d all have regrets,” she said. “But,” she went on, catching Quirk’s look, “that they’d only ever truly fail if they let those failures define them. If they stopped fighting to be better. Better than themselves. Better than the systems they were operat
ing within. They always had to be fighting.”
Quirk felt something swelling in her chest. Something more than gratitude. But she didn’t have time to work out what it was. Instead, she took a breath and committed herself.
“Fall.”
The crowd felt it before she did. She heard them react. A cry caught between eagerness and fear. What was next? they wanted to know. Would it make them laugh or scream? Then the rumbling earth reached Quirk’s own building. Tiles fell from the already damaged roof. Afrit yelped, crashed down to all fours beside Quirk. Precariously perched though she was, Quirk kept her eyes open, fixed on the spot where her will became reality.
The dust cloud came from the center of the bowl this time. It obscured the central temple. People in the crowd started to spot it, pointed, and yelled. Quirk could see their arms gesticulating.
An unexpected breeze caught the clouds and blew them away up into the sky. Balur doing his bit to help. To reveal that the façade of the temple had partly collapsed and that a message written was now in masonry.
“Shut up, you pricks,” it said.
She had objected to the cursing, but Will had insisted. “It’s funnier if you swear,” he had said.
Apparently he was right. The crowd were chuckling to themselves.
But far, far more important, the chanting was beginning to quaver. It droned in and out. Some of the robed figures were fleeing. Some were lying dead and buried beneath piles of masonry. Others were merely injured, clutching at their wounds and screaming.
“Explode,” Quirk told the world.
She saw the detonation a moment before the sound reached her. It was like a thousand kettles reaching the boil at the same moment. The sound, though, was a sharp, flat crack that ripped through her abdomen.
Some people in the crowd, she could see, were actually clapping at the carnage.
When the smoke cleared the temple was barely standing. The façade was gone. Most of the structure was gone. Only a few internal walls were standing. And the message they spelled was clear.
“Roses are red, violets are blue, this is our city, and we say fuck you.”
If she was going to curse, Quirk figured, she was going to do it in style.
Some people laughed. Some people clapped. A few actually whooped and threw up their hands. A few shouted the gods’ names. Some were shouting angrily that the gods’ time was over, that they were here for the dragons now. A handful had even dropped to their knees and begun to pray to Lawl, and Betra, and the rest of them. But, Quirk noted with a satisfied smile, not a single gods-hexed one of them was chanting.
70
Oh My God
“Gods,” Will breathed. Because it had worked. It had actually worked. He had had a plan, and it had actually fucking worked. Everything he had suggested, it had played out as he had imagined it. Every nuance. Every consequence. The dragon’s ceremony was a shambles. He could feel the shifting tides of the crowd’s loyalty washing into him faster and faster. They had ruined the day. He had ruined this day. On purpose.
And none of them had died. Not even once. It was incredible. More than the power of the gods thrumming through him, it was that knowledge that left Will hardly able to breathe.
He had beaten the dragons. His plan had laid them low. His.
He wanted to shout obscenities at them. He wanted to lord it over their heads. He wanted them to know it was him, just him. This poor farm boy from Kondorra that they’d shit on since the day he’d been born. He’d seen dragons die in Kondorra, and now he’d see them all die all over Avarra. They could not stop him. Fuck them.
But, of course, if he did start shouting, then they would find him, and then all his plans would be naught. So he kept his mouth shut.
And yet … he could not just slip away. Not now. He could not let this moment become a memory just yet.
Will closed his eyes, hesitated, and then for just a moment, he committed all his will to the world.
“Belief,” spelled the clouds.
“Worship,” spelled the branches of the tree he had grown next to Theerax’s comatose body.
“The dragons demand it,” spelled the birds swirling in the sky.
“If it is not given willingly,” spelled vines sprouting around the bowl, “then they take it by force.”
“But,” spelled the clouds.
“Worship cannot be demanded,” sang the birds, alien sounds being forced into their throats; “it is earned.”
“We,” said the branches of the tree, “are your gods.”
“We,” said the vines, “serve you.”
“For so long you have believed in us,” said the clouds.
“But now,” sang the birds, “we believe in you.”
“Avarra does not belong to tyrants,” spelled flowers bursting out of the vines on the house fronts.
“It belongs to you,” the birds spelled in the sky.
“Don’t give it to bullies,” said the clouds.
“Even if they do breath fire,” spelled the tree.
“Hold on to it with both hands,” sang the birds.
“Because it’s yours,” said the flowers.
“And you deserve it,” said the whole world. Everything within Will’s span of control singing and spelling it out. Cats in the streets, rats in their jaws. The wind howling down streets. Piles of trash in the streets. Dust clouds. Scattered roof tiles.
“Avarra is not for them,” said the world. “It’s for all of us.”
71
Lette There Be Blood
Lette had been called a cynic many times in her twenty-eight years upon Avarra. She didn’t mind the name. She had been called worse. When pressed on the matter she had occasionally admitted that she would prefer the term realist, but people seemed to just take this as further evidence of her cynicism.
And, having heard the term bandied about so much, Lette was willing to admit that she was perhaps a little more willing than most to declare a cup half-empty, and the fluid within tainted by piss. She knew what degenerates she was forced to share this world with. But for her that just confirmed she had a greater grasp on reality than most people. And for its part, the world rarely took the opportunity to prove her wrong.
And so, Lette was not entirely prepared for the moment when Will broke from his script. Because they were not simply words in the sky, and voices in the throats of animals. They were emotions. They were ideas writ into the psychic landscape of the earth. They were a plea, a hymn, a prayer. They were a desperate pledge to the best parts of humanity.
And she was moved. She was unprepared for the experience, for the sheer genuine wave of emotion that went through her. Because in that moment, she did so very desperately want to live up to everything that Will asked of her. She wanted to be the person he wanted everyone in the world to be. She wanted to be a better person with her whole heart. And more than that, right now, it actually seemed possible.
She felt dampness on her cheeks, reached up. She expected to find blood. The echo of Will’s psychic plea, she supposed, must have caused something to rupture. But no, it was simpler, and somehow far more startling.
She was crying.
“Oh, Will,” she breathed.
Then she realized that there was absolute silence from the crowd below. All the mirth and rebellious joviality of a moment before was gone. All that was left was a collective inhalation. A sucking in of breath. A wondering.
“Oh,” she said again, putting a hand to her temple, wonder sublimating to exasperation. “Will. You just had to—”
Outside the window of the apartment where she was hiding there was a sound like the world exploding. She grimaced, put her hands on the hilts of her knives. Then she realized what she was hearing.
Everyone was cheering. Everyone was bellowing out their worship and their praise. Everyone was screaming, screaming for Will and for his message. They were screaming their support for the old gods.
Power slammed into Lette like a sledgehammer. She was phy
sically lifted off the floor by it and flung backward across the room. She smashed through furniture, leaving tattered chairs and tables in her wake. Her body slammed like a rag doll into the wall behind her. Stone cracked.
And she barely felt it at all. She stepped down. Dust blasted away from her, blown back by the power coming off her in waves. She could feel it crackling at the back of her mouth. She could taste it, like a copper shek in the back of her throat. She gasped and the air felt ice-cold in her mouth. When she exhaled, the world seemed to bend around the heat of her breath.
A face appeared at the window. A startled-looking figure peering into the room. “Hey!” he shouted at Lette and scrambled in to face her.
Lette was studying her hands. They felt so … so … powerful. She thought she could … what? Anything? Everything?
“What the fuck you doing in my house?” yelled the man. “What you been doing to my furniture?”
Lette made a brushing motion with her hand, as if sweeping aside a cobweb. The man flew through the air, crashed through an open doorway, and disappeared with a scream and a thud. She barely paid him any heed.
She could feel something happening outside. She couldn’t see it. But it was important somehow. Sounds … it felt like they were taking place at the periphery of her awareness. She couldn’t quite focus on them. The power was … gods, there was so much of it. She could barely hold on to herself. She blinked, found herself at the window, staring out. How had she …
Chaos. She saw chaos. She saw murder. She saw the city running red.
The great, tangled knot of dragons in the sky had broken apart. Vast silhouettes were distant no longer. They were plunging, roaring, screaming fire. They were rage, and fear, and frustration writ in flesh, and when the gods had made the dragons, they had been using their broadest brushes.
Because the dragons knew. Because they were fully aware of what was happening. They had felt the power ebbing, abandoning them and returning to …