by Jon Hollins
Then Balur was setting Lette down, and pointing to the table, and they were walking through the remnants of Balur’s wake back to where Will was standing, back toward his table. She was walking toward him.
“Will.” One of the whores pawed at him. “Come and sit down, Will. I want to have more to drink.”
Toward him and six whores.
“Get out,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
“Wiiiilllll.” A wheedling pleading in the whore’s voice.
“Get out!” he snapped. He wheeled on all of them. “Leave. Now. Go and ply your trade with someone else. You are not welcome at this gods-hexed table.”
Confusion. And again that hard glint beneath the softness of their eyes. Perhaps even desperation. This was, after all, how they earned their suppers and paid … gods, half of them probably had families at home.
“But Will,” one of them started, puffing out her ample chest.
“You still get paid,” he said, an edge of desperation creeping into his voice.
And like that they were gone.
And she was here.
“Will.” Lette’s voice was like a cold blade dragged down his spine.
He turned, and he didn’t know what he was going to do when he saw her. Weep? Scream? Rush forward to hold her? To kiss her? To throttle her?
And then he was facing her, and he had no thoughts left.
“Lette,” he heard himself say.
“Let us sit!” Balur was still shouting. “Let us drink!” He clapped them on the back, sent them staggering toward seats.
Will sat. He didn’t know what else to do. He had lived this moment over and over in his head, had rehearsed what to say a thousand times. But none of those imaginary meetings had quite managed to take this particular set of circumstances into consideration.
He couldn’t quite meet Lette’s eyes. He watched her hands exploring the deep grooves in the wood of the table.
He had to say something. Something more than just her name. Some acknowledgment of what they’d had. What she’d taken away. What he’d been through.
Balur was standing a yard away, yelling for more ale. This was as good an opportunity as he was going to get.
“I—” he started.
“I—” she said at the same time.
An embarrassed pause. His hands smothered each other in tiny acts of silent murder.
“You go,” he said.
“No—” she started.
“Please,” he pressed. This would be easier perhaps if she just explained, just told him what had been going through her head.
She shrugged. “It’s just … I’ve got to tell you—”
He leaned forward.
“—I’m fucking hammered right now. So, you know, if it’s important, you might want to wait until morning. I can’t guarantee I’ll remember anything right now.”
“The fuck?” It was out of him before he could stop it. Irresponsible, ill-timed frustration. And yet …? Gods, there was only so much of a beating his heart could accept. “A fucking whorehouse, Lette?” he said. “Of all the places?”
This was not how the conversation had gone in his head.
She burped into her cuff. “Yeah,” she said. “And were you planning to pine for me just before or after you went nuts-deep in a whore?”
“I wasn’t …” Will shook his head. “That’s not why …”
Lette laughed. “Well, why not, Will? Why not grab life by its balls for once? Why not be the man you were in Kondorra? Because I liked him. Not this boring, stunted fuck that dragged me off to the arse-end of Batarra.”
That had not been in Will’s imagined conversations either.
At that moment, Balur crashed back down at the table beside them. He wrapped an arm possessively around Lette. “So,” he said, “what are we talking about?”
Will’s mouth was open, but no sound was coming out. There was nothing to come. Or too much, perhaps—everything jammed in his throat. He looked about desperately for a bottle of wine, another jug of ale, but the whores had swept up everything in their departure.
He could feel Lette’s eyes on him. Balur’s. Waiting to see what he did. And what did she want out of him? What did she expect? And right now would he even give it to her, if he figured it out?
The bordello, he realized, had fallen silent again, as if his own paralysis had crept out to swallow the whole room. A few voices still rang out momentarily, their owners too drunk to pick up on the mood of the room, but one by one they died. And even Will managed to tear himself out of his own navel-gazing enough to notice where the attention of the room was focused.
A man wearing a long brown travel-stained robe had mounted a table. The hood of his robe was pulled up, his face buried in shadows. He carried a long oaken walking staff and was thumping its steel-shod base against the table’s surface.
With each blow, purple sparks rose into the air, and a sound like a gong rang out. The noise mounted, each blow louder than the last. The ringing filled the vacuum left by the voices, rose to dwarf it. The air vibrated against Will, blew at his hair as the figure tap-tap-tapped. No one moved.
Magic, Will thought. A curiously dispassionate appraisal. The encounter with Lette had left him hollow, it seemed.
A tiny fraction of a noise made him glance down at Lette’s hands, still resting on the rough surface of the table. Three throwing knives were balanced between her knuckles.
The man ceased his tapping. The depths of his hood surveyed the crowd. “A moment of your time,” he said, and his voice was deep, and coarse, with a quality that made Will think of gnarled wood, but it rang out clearly in the quiet room. A voice everyone would hear. “A moment,” he went on, “for your eternal souls. That is all I ask. Not much to ask for such a thing as eternity, is it not?”
He turned around, his robe billowing out, yet still nothing of his figure was revealed.
“Fuck off, preacher!” yelled some brave soul from the back of the crowd.
“Fuck a whore!” yelled another.
The robed man beat down with his staff. There was a quiver in the air. Nothing visible. No burst of light. But somehow a sensation of overwhelming disapproval was suddenly thick in the air. Laughter died before it even rose to lips.
“Preacher,” said the man, turning once more. “Preacher?” He tested the sound of it. “As if I am here to preach for the gods. As if I am going to tell you about the fine examples they have set for you. As if I am going to tell you to pour libations for the morally decrepit, whoring, raping deviants we have chosen to worship?” He stared around the crowds, eyes blazing. “Do they truly deserve that? The so-called gods? Do they truly deserve people who preach in their names? What have they done to deserve our worship? What do they promise us?”
Silence. Will was not sure if no one dared speak, or if it was simply an issue no one had ever considered before. He knew he hadn’t. Why did he worship the gods? Because his parents had. Because everyone else did. Because they were there. It was expected. Under the gaze of that shadowed hood, none of those felt like very good reasons all of a sudden.
“What even is our reward for worshipping them?” asked the robed man. “The Hallows? An eternity under the thumb of Lawl? Toiling for him in the land of the dead? Our will robbed from us? That is what we build toward, strive for? That is why we honor them?”
The man started to laugh, an awful, wet, rotten sound that creaked up out of his dry throat.
“They’re the gods!” someone else yelled. “We worship them because they’re massive, all-powerful beings who can crush us if we don’t.” And then, as an afterthought, “You fucking idiot.”
The man nodded slowly. “Fear,” he said. He whispered. And yet everyone heard. They could feel the menace of the word. “Fear. Yes. Exactly. That’s at the heart of it, isn’t it? You worship the gods because you fear what will happen if you don’t. You fear how bad the Hallows could be. You fear their intervention in your lives.” And then, sounding as
if he were almost licking his chops as he said it, “You fucking pussies.”
It was a bold claim in a room full of men awash in adrenaline and alcohol, but nobody shouted back at that. Will could feel it too. His own chagrin. His own inadequacy.
Why? asked a voice in the back of his head. Why in all the Hallows do I care what this man has to say? I just had my heart eviscerated by a woman I traveled leagues to find and spent months pining over. Why do I give the slightest shit what he has to say?
The memory of those purple sparks rose.
Glamour. Magic.
Shit.
He wanted to reach out, to grab Lette’s hand, and shake her. Make her see what he had just seen. But he couldn’t touch her. Not after what she had said. He just couldn’t.
“What if …” the man whispered as seductive as any whore in the place, “there was someone who could stand up to the gods? Someone who could fight for you? Someone who could promise something more than the chaos of uncaring deities? Someone who could throw them down from their vaulted heavens, grind them into the dirt, and take their place. What if there was someone who deserved your worship?”
One or two men made scoffing sounds but nobody dared more than that. Will dared do no more than that. He could feel the tension in him, like a physical force pressing on his chest. Some sort of suppression? He wished he knew more about magic. He wished Quirk were there. Even with the level of condescension she brought to almost every conversation, she might have at least known what was going on, and how to fight against it.
“Balur,” he hissed, not daring to raise his voice above the thinnest of whispers. “Balur.”
The lizard man ignored him.
“You doubt me?” said the man upon the table. “My truth? My words? Well, they are not my words. I am merely a prophet. Merely the shadow of that which is to come falling upon this nation, with the sun at his back.”
“Who?” rose one tremulous voice. “Who comes?”
The man paused, pushed back his hood. His head was bald and horribly burned. Flesh gathered in rivulets, twisting and pulling at the musculature beneath. His mouth was tightened in a permanent leer. One eye was milky white. The other was sharp and black as it stared out across the room.
“Theerax.” The word was almost a whisper, almost a moan, almost a prayer. “Theerax comes to this realm. He comes to liberate you all. He comes to tear down the gods.”
And just like that, the spell was broken for Will. He could feel the pressure on his chest shatter. A sudden lightness filled him. He felt almost giddy with indignation at this man’s ludicrous bullshit.
Theerax. A dragon’s name. That, he recognized. And he knew that the only thing dragons liberated was the coin in your pocket.
“What the actual fuck?” It was not the most elegant way to begin his counterpoint, but the urge to shut this man up was overwhelming, and if he had learned anything from Balur at all, it was that hitting hard and fast counted for a lot in a fight. “I mean,” he went on, “I’m a farmer, and I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my life, but that’s an impressive load even by my standards.”
The man on the table wheeled round, fury writ large in his lone dark eye.
“A dragon?” Will asked, then hawked and spat. “Like the ones the folk in Kondorra had to kill? One of those fat, flatulent, lazy lizards is going to save us from … what again? The fact that the gods leave us alone and let us get on with our lives? Yeah, that’s terrible that is.”
He could feel the energy in the room balancing on a knife edge. Because truly he was just saying what half or more of the room wanted to say. Wanted to say but couldn’t. This man’s glamour holding their will in check, pressing back against them.
The man raised his staff again, held it high, then brought it crashing down on the table. Wood splintered. A sound like cannon fire. A wave of purple erupted out from beneath the staff’s steel cap, flooded the room like a tidal wave. Will felt it break against him. Felt the force of it as it rushed around him, felt it blow his hair back. And yet he was left untouched. He walked toward the man easily.
The man snarled.
“What?” asked Will. “Don’t know what to do with a man whose spirit you can’t break by force? Don’t know how to mount a proper argument? Did Theerax not give you anything but lies and empty promises to sow?”
But the energy in the room was different this time. An ugly growl emitted from the crowds. And while Will seemed immune to this prophet’s powers, they did not.
“Who are you?” The man on the table was leaning forward. He seemed genuinely interested. “A Kondorran, I suppose. A fool, certainly. Someone who fought against his own best interests.”
Will tried to work out how to play it. How much time could he buy and what could he do with it? He was far too far from the exit, and there were far too many people in the way.
He glanced back toward Lette and Balur, the lizard man emerging like a pillar of yellow stone in a desert of angry faces. Will tried to read his expression. Was he under the man’s power? Was Lette? Did he have any allies here?
“Me?” Will shrugged as carelessly as it was possible to do while caring very much about appearing careless. “I’m just the voice of reason.” Mentally he added, and it’s a pretty messed-up day when I can say that.
“I’m the voice of experience,” he went on. “I’m the voice that’s going to rise up every time you open your stupid mouth.”
He was twenty yards away. Too far. And he wouldn’t call his current course of action a good plan, but at least it was a plan. He kept walking slowly. If only he could keep piquing the man’s curiosity.
“You pretend to be an enigma?” the man smiled. “You will beg to tell me everything before the end.”
Eighteen yards.
Will nodded. “Maybe. But I’m not the only reasonable man. I’m not the only one who will resist.”
“Resisting Theerax is a fool’s errand. Not even the gods will stand up to Theerax.”
“In my experience dragons can’t even stand up to a rabble of disorganized farmers. I think the gods will swat the dragons like the overgrown bugs that they are.”
Twelve yards now.
“You think angering me will make me sloppy.” The man twisted his head. “Will it make all of these other men sloppy?”
Ten yards. Come on. Come on.
“You assume I give a shit what a bug-worshipping turd like you actually thinks.”
He was actually proud of that one. And proud that his voice didn’t shake when he said it. It sounded like the sort of thing Lette might say. If she wasn’t too glamoured to pay attention.
Eight yards. He could probably rush him from three—close the last gasp of distance at a run.
“I will enjoy watching these men tear you apart.”
It was pretty tricky to think of a snappy comeback to that. It was probably true after all. Will went with just ambling quietly forward. Six yards now. Five. Four. He tensed the muscles in his legs.
And stopped moving.
He pushed hard, trying to force his legs to move. But something held him in place. He grunted with effort.
The man laughed. Slowly he raised his staff, and Will felt himself leaving the ground. He was floating.
“What did you think to do? Rush me? Wrestle my staff away? Did you think that would save you?”
“Well …” Will would have shrugged if he could. “Pretty much.”
The man sneered. “You know, perhaps I shall enjoy killing you myself rather than handing you to these men. Maybe I shall—”
He stopped talking abruptly, pivoted around with a cry, and collapsed to one knee.
Will flailed, landed in a pile. His vision flexed. He shook his head.
The man stood with a snarl. He was clutching at the hilt of a throwing dagger that emerged from one shoulder. He opened his mouth—
—and promptly let out a gasp as he took a step backward. A second hilt had appeared, this time protruding from his other shoulder.<
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“You know,” said Lette, and her voice was low and conversational, “you probably would have had me if you didn’t keep up with this whole ‘men’ shit. I really didn’t want to be left out of tearing him apart just because I’m not packing the right equipment in my britches.”
It was not, Will reflected, the most reassuring speech to deliver when you were saving someone.
The man let out a snarl, phlegm spraying from his mouth as he barked, “Kill them!”
That wasn’t overly reassuring either.
The room quaked. Will felt the pulse of movement in the floor, the air. A mass inhalation. A mass tensing of muscles. A mass bunching of legs.
It was all the time he had to react.
He flung himself forward as the crowd clenched around him like a fist. Hands scrabbled at his kicking heels as he put two hands on the edge of the robed man’s table and hauled himself up onto it.
The robed man was still on his knees, struggling to rise through his obvious pain. Will grabbed him by both shoulders, heaved against the force of the hands grabbing his shirttails, and for good measure slammed his knee into the man’s chest. The man brayed in pain, then began choking for air. Will pushed him off the table and down into the crowd. Then Will spun around and kicked the shirt grabber in the face.
Where was Lette?
He scanned quickly, caught sight of her, a tiny whirling dervish, surrounded by a blur of steel and blood as she beat drunk men back. But as warming as that sight was, it would only be moments before she was overwhelmed.
Which was approximately the same time frame he was on. He kicked another three men in the face. Someone grabbed at his ankle. He only just twisted away before being hauled off balance. He couldn’t keep this dance up much longer. Someone was grabbing the table and starting to tip.
Across the room, a roar crashed out like a meteor coming to earth. Ripples of reaction spread out through the crowd, people taking a momentary break from their desire to surge forward and rip him limb from limb, so that they could see what in the Hallows was making that noise, and were they in its way.