by Jon Hollins
This was his revenge.
“People of Avarra,” he said, and the whole world spoke with him. Every bird, and every beast spoke with his voice. The wind howled it. The tree branches creaked it. Babies breathed it, pressed against their mothers’ chests. “People of Vinter. I am Barph, and after eight hundred long years I am returned to you. After eight hundred years, my rule begins once again. After eight hundred years, I am your god. Bow to me, and know your place.”
And every single head bowed. And every knee was bent. Mortals, and beasts alike.
“You came here,” he told them, “to watch dragons ascend to the heavens. To see pretenders to my throne.” He let the violence build in his voice, felt them quake. He fought to keep the smile off his face. “But I shall be merciful, and today you shall watch me take my rightful place instead.”
He breathed in their worship, felt it swirl heady in his head. Felt it lift him up. He felt the call of his old home, stolen from him for so long. He could feel the high of it rushing in his veins. And he was laughing uncontrollably. It was his, all his. The heavens. The world. The people. Everything they had tried to take from him. He had outsmarted them. He had seized it. He had taken it back. He was going home.
It was good to be king.
CODA:
WHAT IN THE HALLOWS WAS THAT?
77
Soul Survivor
Standing alone, in a street full of mud and corpses, Quirk stared up at the skies above Vinter. The clouds were whirling, whisked upward in an inverted tornado. A tiny spot of impossibly distant sun was visible … or perhaps it was not the sun. Perhaps it was the heavens themselves. Perhaps it was where Barph had just disappeared to.
Rain still fell. Quirk was soaked to the bone. She felt numb.
Afrit was dead.
The others were too, she supposed, but that didn’t seem to matter as much. Afrit was dead.
She didn’t know how Barph had made the mistake, but he had. He had kicked her away into the crowd, grabbed Afrit by the ankle, and … and …
She broke down crying. Perhaps she was not so numb after all.
She had searched for Afrit’s head. She couldn’t tell yet if she was glad she hadn’t found it or not. The crowd either had kicked it away so far she could not find it, or had simply trampled it into oblivion.
Sacrifice. Afrit had sacrificed herself for Quirk. Barph had grabbed her instead of Quirk and she could have screamed out, could have howled that the god had the wrong woman. But she hadn’t. She had lain still and waited for the blade to come. She had tried to buy Quirk the gift of anonymity.
Quirk had thought that, in the moment of death, Barph would know it wasn’t her. She had thought he would be able to tell when Knole’s power hadn’t flowed into him. But he had seemed satisfied. And then Quirk had realized. Because Afrit had slept with Knole too. Perhaps the god’s divinity had not come to her alone, but had instead been divided between them both. Afrit had been quiet about it, but she had also been horrified at the thought of using the god’s power.
And now she never would.
Another sob went through her.
They had all been such fools. Such utter fools.
It had all been so obvious to her when she had seen Barph standing there in the street. Their deaths had been the god’s plan all along. But he had played so carefully at making it seem like their plan. He had only given them the very slightest of nudges. So that they had always felt in control. So that when they looked back at the chain of decisions, they felt that they had guided their own fate.
But of course he had wanted them to reject the gods’ offer. He had set it all up so that of course they would make that decision. Barph had known what arseholes his fellow gods were. They could not have endeared themselves to her, or to Lette, or to anyone. And Barph had known too the corrupting influence of power. He had known they would not give it up.
And Will had known how to steal the faith from the dragons. And gods, oh gods, they had been so close. She had been so excited. And Afrit had been beside her, cheering her on. They had been hand in hand. And even though they had been fleeing in a crowd of panicked strangers at the end, it had somehow felt as if she was finally experiencing the childhood she’d never had. She had felt giddy, and carefree, and …
And Afrit was dead. And that feeling, that lightness in her bones, was gone.
Around her, the crowds were starting to emerge from the smashed houses and piles of rubble where they had been sheltering. They blinked as if dazed, as if the nightmare were somehow over. Quirk knew it was not.
Barph had taken all the gods’ power. Lawl’s. Betra’s. Toil’s. Klink’s. Knole’s. Cois’s. All the power of all the gods resided within him. He was the sole deity. The others were trapped in the Hallows, which now, thanks to his capturing of Lawl’s power, he controlled. The gods had walked into the jail, and Barph had calmly picked the pocket of the key keeper.
And the situation was no different for the mortal populace of Avarra. All of them now sat in a jail of Barph’s making. When Lawl raged at the world, then Betra raged at him. When Klink was a miser and spendthrift, then Toil rubbed largesse in his face. The gods balanced each other out. It might be dangerous and petty, but it was balanced.
Barph had no balance. Whatever he demanded, they must obey. No one would come to their rescue. Barph’s deification was absolute.
And he had killed Afrit. He had killed … what? How had he killed Quirk’s hope? Her joy? How had he killed her passion?
Standing in the blasted ruins of Vinter, Quirk knew that just like Knole, Barph had taught her something. He had taught her that though it might take time, though it might take planning beyond all conceivable measure, though it might take murder and bloodshed on inhuman levels … despite all these things, revenge was possible.
And she would have hers upon Barph.
78
Time for a New Plan
Down.
Down.
Down.
Through earth and soil. Past roots and worms. Down beneath the clay and stones. Beneath rock and burrowing things. Beneath geological strata. Beneath the shambling, crawling things the gods had discarded at the making of the world. Down. Deeper and deeper. Traveling to the very core of the earth.
And deeper still. Deeper in more than physical dimensions. A sinking into the reality of the world. Past despair. Past pain. Past death.
Deeper.
Down.
Down.
Down.
And there at the bottom, beneath all other things, a blasted plain of rock and scree. A dead land. No plants. No creatures. Nothing lived. Wind was the only thing that moved across that place, slowly etching a landscape of pain. The sky was the flat, dead purple of a corpse left weeks too long in the sun. But there was no sun here. No birds. No clouds. No weather. Not even hope.
Mountains rose from this landscape. Teeth that tore impotently at the impossible sky. And set into the face of one of those mountains, lost in among a million other identical mountains, were two doors. They were made of a wood that had never grown in this place, or anywhere else. They were black as pitch and hard as iron. Studs of a metal whose ore was not found here, or anywhere else, stitched the outside of that door. And the doors never opened, and no one ever, ever came out.
But souls entered. Souls entered all the time.
These were the gates to the Hallows.
Down. Inside. Past the doors’ guardians, all lined up one after another. Down farther still. Into the bedrock. Into a steadily rising heat. Down past infinite fields of infinite labors. Into unchanging plains that slowly broke the will of women and men over the course of eternity.
Down. Through layers of these fields, these wastelands of futile activity. Down to where the memory of the sun was a memory itself.
There. There stood four figures.
A mercenary, face etched in hard plains, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail. An eight-foot-tall lizard man, scales like fist-sized cobbleston
es. A Tamathian professor, delicate hands worrying in front of her like a pair of blackbirds. And facing them, a farmer. A farmer with a face full of fury and a heart full of revenge.
“Okay,” Will said. “So this is how we’re going to con our way out of death.”
The story continues in …
BAD FAITH
Book THREE of the Dragon Lords
Coming in August 2018
extras
if you enjoyed
THE DRAGON LORDS:
FALSE IDOLS,
look out for
THE FIFTH WARD:
FIRST WATCH
by
Dale Lucas
Humans, orcs, mages, elves, and dwarves all jostle for success and survival in the cramped quarters of Yenara, while understaffed Watch Wardens struggle to keep its citizens in line.
Enter Rem: new to Yenara and hungover in the city dungeons with no money for bail. When offered a position with the Watch to compensate for his crimes, Rem jumps at the chance.
His new partner is less eager. Torval, a dwarf who’s handy with a maul and known for hitting first and asking questions later, is highly unimpressed with the untrained and weaponless Rem.
But when Torval’s former partner goes missing, the two must consort with the usual suspects—drug-dealing orcs, mind-controlling elves, uncooperative mages, and humans being typical humans—to uncover the truth and catch a murderer loose in their fair city.
Chapter One
Rem awoke in a dungeon with a thunderous headache. He knew it was a dungeon because he lay on a thin bed of straw, and because there were iron bars between where he lay and a larger chamber outside. The light was spotty, some of it from torches in sconces outside his cell, some from a few tiny windows high on the stone walls admitting small streams of wan sunlight. Moving nearer the bars, he noted that his cell was one of several, each roomy enough to hold multiple prisoners.
A large pile of straw on the far side of his cell coughed, shifted, then started to snore. Clearly, Rem was not alone.
And just how did I end up here? he wondered. I seem to recall a winning streak at Roll-the-Bones.
He could not remember clearly. But if the lumpy soreness of his face and body were any indication, his dice game had gone awry. If only he could clear his pounding head, or slake his thirst. His tongue and throat felt like sharkskin.
Desperate for a drink, Rem crawled to a nearby bucket, hoping for a little brackish water. To his dismay, he found that it was the piss jar, not a water bucket, and not well rinsed at that. The sight and smell made Rem recoil with a gag. He went sprawling back onto the hay. A few feet away, his cellmate muttered something in the tongue of the Kosterfolk, then resumed snoring.
Somewhere across the chamber, a multitumbler lock clanked and clacked. Rusty hinges squealed as a great door lumbered open. From the other cells Rem heard prisoners roused from their sleep, shuffling forward hurriedly to thrust their arms out through the cage bars. If Rem didn’t misjudge, there were only about four or five other prisoners in all the dungeon cells. A select company, to be sure. Perhaps it was a slow day for the Yenaran city watch?
Four men marched into the dungeon. Well, three marched; the fourth seemed a little more reticent, being dragged by two others behind their leader, a thickset man with black hair, sullen eyes, and a drooping mustache.
“Prefect, sir,” Rem heard from an adjacent cell, “there’s been a terrible mistake …”
From across the chamber: “Prefect, sir, someone must have spiked my ale, because the last thing I remember, I was enjoying an evening out with some mates …”
From off to his left: “Prefect, sir, I’ve a chest of treasure waiting back at my rooms at the Sauntering Mink. A golden cup full of rubies and emeralds is yours, if you’ll just let me out of here …”
Prefect, sir … Prefect, sir … over and over again.
Rem decided that thrusting his own arms out and begging for the prefect’s attention was useless. What would he do? Claim his innocence? Promise riches if they’d let him out? That was quite a tall order when Rem himself couldn’t remember what he’d done to get in here. If he could just clear his thunder-addled, achingly thirsty brain …
The sullen-eyed prefect led the two who dragged the prisoner down a short flight of steps into a shallow sort of operating theater in the center of the dungeon: the interrogation pit, like some shallow bath that someone had let all the water out of. On one side of the pit was a brick oven in which fire and coals glowed. Opposite the oven was a burbling fountain. Rem thought these additions rather ingenious. Whatever elemental need one had—fire to burn with, water to drown with—both were readily provided. The floor of the pit, Rem guessed, probably sported a couple of grates that led right down into the sewers, as well as the tools of the trade: a table full of torturer’s implements, a couple of hot braziers, some chairs and manacles. Rem hadn’t seen the inside of any city dungeons, but he’d seen their private equivalents. Had it been the dungeon of some march lord up north—from his own country—that’s what would have been waiting in the little amphitheater.
“Come on, Ondego, you know me,” the prisoner pleaded. “This isn’t necessary.”
“’Fraid so,” sullen-eyed Ondego said, his low voice easy and without malice. “The chair, lads.”
The two guardsmen flanking the prisoner were a study in contrasts—one a tall, rugged sort, face stony and flecked with stubble, shoulders broad, while the other was lithe and graceful, sporting braided black locks, skin the color of dark-stained wood, and a telltale pair of tapered, pointing ears. Staring, Rem realized that second guardsman was no man at all, but an elf, and female, at that. Here was a puzzle, indeed. Rem had seen elves at a distance before, usually in or around frontier settlements farther north, or simply haunting the bleak crossroads of a woodland highway like pikers who never demanded a toll. But he had never seen one of them up close like this—and certainly not in the middle of one of the largest cities in the Western world, deep underground, in a dingy, shit-and blood-stained dungeon. Nonetheless, the dark-skinned elfmaid seemed quite at home in her surroundings, and perfectly comfortable beside the bigger man on the other side of the prisoner.
Together, those two guards thrust the third man’s squirming, wobbly body down into a chair. Heavy manacles were produced and the protester was chained to his seat. He struggled a little, to test his bonds, but seemed to know instinctively that it was no use. Ondego stood at a brazier nearby, stoking its coals, the pile of dark cinders glowing ominously in the oily darkness.
“Oi, that’s right!” one of the other prisoners shouted. “Give that bastard what for, Prefect!”
“You shut your filthy mouth, Foss!” the chained man spat back.
“Eat me, Kevel!” the prisoner countered. “How do you like the chair, eh?”
Huh. Rem moved closer to his cell bars, trying to get a better look. So, this prisoner, Kevel, knew that fellow in the cell, Foss, and vice versa. Part of a conspiracy? Brother marauders, questioned one by one—and in sight of one another—for some vital information?
Then Rem saw it: Kevel, the prisoner in the hot seat, wore a signet pendant around his throat identical to those worn by the prefect and the two guards. It was unmistakable, even in the shoddy light.
“Well, I’ll be,” Rem muttered aloud.
The prisoner was one of the prefect’s own watchmen.
Ex-watchman now, he supposed.
All of a sudden, Rem felt a little sorry for him … but not much. No doubt, Kevel himself had performed the prefect’s present actions a number of times: chaining some poor sap into the hot seat, stoking the brazier, using fire and water and physical distress to intimidate the prisoner into revealing vital information.
The prefect, Ondego, stepped away from the brazier and moved to a table nearby. He studied a number of implements—it was too dark and the angle too awkward for Rem to tell what, exactly—then picked something up. He hefted the object in his hands, testing its
weight.
It looked like a book—thick, with a hundred leaves or more bound between soft leather covers.
“Do you know what this is?” Ondego asked Kevel.
“Haven’t the foggiest,” Kevel said. Rem could tell that he was bracing himself, mentally and physically.
“It’s a genealogy of Yenara’s richest families. Out-of-date, though. At least a generation old.”
“Do tell,” Kevel said, his throat sounding like it had contracted to the size of a reed.
“Look at this,” Ondego said, hefting the book in his hands, studying it. “That is one enormous pile of useless information. Thick as a bloody brick—”
And that’s when Ondego drew back the book and brought it smashing into Kevel’s face in a broad, flat arc. The sound of the strike—leather and parchment pages connecting at high speed with Kevel’s jawbone—echoed in the dungeon like the crack of a calving iceberg. A few of the other prisoners even wailed as though they were the ones struck.
Rem’s cellmate stirred beneath his pile of straw, but did not rise.
Kevel almost fell with the force of the blow. The big guard caught him and set him upright again. The lithe elf backed off, staring intently at the prisoner, as though searching his face and his manner for a sign of something. Without warning, Ondego hit Kevel again, this time on the other side of his face. Once more Kevel toppled. Once more the guard in his path caught him and set him upright.
Kevel spat out blood. Ondego tossed the book back onto the table behind him and went looking for another implement.
“That all you got, old man?” Kevel asked.
“Bravado doesn’t suit you,” Ondego said, still studying his options from the torture table. He threw a glance at the elf on the far side of the torture pit. Rem watched intently, realizing that some strange ritual was under way: Kevel, blinking sweat from his eyes, studied Ondego; the lady elf, silent and implacable, studied Kevel; and Ondego idly studied the elf, the prefect’s thick, workman’s hand hovering slowly over the gathered implements of torture on the table.