Bad Faith

by Jon Hollins

  Someone stumbled into her. A woman. For a moment Quirk’s heart leapt. But no. No, she didn’t know this woman. She was just one of many, almost collapsing from exhaustion. Blood and tears streamed down her face. “Please,” she begged Quirk. “Please help me.”

  And Afrit was in there somewhere. In the maelstrom of death.

  But this woman was here. Her desperation was here. And Quirk was not yet someone who could ignore that.

  “Come on,” she said. She grabbed the woman, hauled her up toward the crest of the slope, pitched her over its edge, toward the possibility of safety.

  Someone else was there, scrabbling and slipping. “Come on!” she took a step forward, grabbed him by the arm, propelled him upward. “You can make it! You’re almost there.”

  She waded into the crowd, into the storm, armed only with platitudes and the last scraps of her energy. And perhaps, perhaps it was enough. Perhaps she would find Afrit this way. Perhaps she would haul her to safety and this nightmare would be over.

  And yet she also knew it was nothing but a drop in the ocean. For everyone whose hand she held, two were blown apart. Two were turned inside out. Another was set on fire and sent screaming to pinwheel into a friend, a father, a mother.

  Above them all, Barph was become something else. Not just a god of chaos. Not just a god of drunken revelry. Barph was become death itself. A conduit to the Void. Because there were no Hallows left for these people to be condemned to. No. This was an undoing complete and utter. And who had seen to that? Who stood paralyzed by his own culpability on a hill behind her?

  Barph and Will. Neither was any better than the other, she thought. Petty, powerful men, sacrificing thousands of others to satisfy nothing but their own egos.

  Lightning smashed into the ground beside her. She felt the heat of it slap at her, couldn’t hold back her cry of fear. Flying mud stung her face. She scraped it away, staggered on. She grabbed someone’s outstretched arm, heaved, trying to pull them to their feet. Was it Afrit? No. She didn’t recognize this face. Then, under her efforts, the woman’s torso slithered free, while her legs stayed lying on the ground. Quirk gagged.

  Something touched her arm. She flinched away.

  “Quirk! Quirk!” It took her a moment to recognize her own name. Someone was shaking her arm and shouting her name over the fury of the storm.

  Could it …? She spun ready to embrace Afrit. But no. No. It was not her.

  Still she did recognize this woman.

  “Lette?” The mercenary’s presence caught Quirk utterly off guard.

  “Having fun yet?” The mockery of a smile on Lette’s lips was a horror to behold.

  “We have to … we have to save these people!” Quirk screamed. And it was an absurd thing to say. Nothing could save these people. But they had to.

  “I know!” Lette shook her head. “That’s all I know! I don’t know how. I don’t … I don’t …”

  Quirk stared about. The sky seemed to have closed over them. A solid fist of clouds wearing lightning as knuckle-dusters pounding the ground over and over, grinding the people upon it into nothing. Nothing at all.

  “We have to do something!” Quirk felt the emptiness of her words.

  “Come on then!” Lette heaved Quirk toward an injured woman with a wound in her chest leaking blood into the mud of the hillside. Lette grabbed one of the woman’s arms, looked at Quirk. Quirk stared down at the woman. She was barely alive.

  “Come on!” There was steel in Lette’s voice.

  Lightning slammed into the ground to their left. Quirk flinched. Someone else screamed. Afrit was in here somewhere. Afrit alone. Perhaps dying. Perhaps in need of help.

  But so was everyone else.

  “What would Afrit want you to do?”

  And of all the questions. Of all the times to be asked it. She grabbed the woman’s arm anyway. It was as good as anything.

  They heaved. They struggled. Their feet slipped in mud and rain and blood. Lightning struck the ground again, again, again. People died all around them.

  They were almost at the crest of the hill when the woman they were heaving on started to spasm wildly. She bucked, and Quirk lost her grip, slipped and fell. When she picked herself up, the woman was dead.

  Lette was panting, wiping her brow. She looked at Quirk. Her jaw was set. “Another one then.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  They went back into the heart of it. Into thunder so loud Quirk couldn’t hear herself think. The air tasted of ozone. Her hair stood on end. They found a young man missing one arm, screaming. They grabbed him by the legs started to pull.

  The world in front of them was a solid wall of white. There was no path forward.

  Quirk looked back. Barph was a barely distinguishable shadow above them. She screamed at him. She flung fire at him. It disappeared into clouds and rain. She fell to her knees. She screamed again.

  “Come on!” Lette’s voice was barely audible over the storm.

  Quirk stared at her. Because what the fuck was the point? What was the madness driving this woman?

  Lette shrugged. “We either die on our knees or on our feet.”

  And maybe, in the end, that was really all there was to it. Maybe that was what Afrit had been trying to tell her all along.

  So Quirk picked herself up. She seized the one-armed man by the leg. And then she walked into the storm.

  60

  Powerless

  Will flung everything he had at the bleeding, tattered body of Barph. But all he had was less and less.

  His people were dying. They were dying faster and faster. Barph’s desperate, hate-fueled storm scoured them from the earth. It undid lives. It undid faith. It undid Will.

  And as the dragons fled, as Will’s people died, the citizens of Essoa did not come to his aid. They had doubted Barph, yes, but that momentary flicker of unbelief was gone. Their god had stumbled, yes, he had been injured, yes, but he was still a mountain of a man, he was still vast beyond imagining, he was still breathing. He was still there.

  They almost couldn’t help but believe in him. And with every moment that Will failed to finish the job, it got worse, and victory slipped further and further away.

  And then, suddenly, it was over.

  Suddenly the lightning stopped. Suddenly the skies cleared. Suddenly Barph was gone.

  Will stood alone on the hillside.

  Will stood alone with the dead.

  Will wept.

  There were so many. So very many. The dead were everywhere. They were fused with the land. Their hands reached up, imploring him. And he had … he had …

  Nothing.

  It was gone. All the power was gone. Everything he had been. He had spent it all. He had wasted it all. All in this gambit. And everyone … everyone was dead. All his followers dead. No one believed in him anymore. Even the handful who had survived had no belief left for him.

  He was … human. Nothing but human.

  And the enormity of what he had done hit him. The sheer scale of his hubris, his vanity, his recklessness, the totality of his idiocy.

  And all the words were too small.

  Ten thousand had died in Kondorra. Ten thousand had died fighting against the dragons. But fifty thousand had survived. Fifty thousand had emerged from that fight victorious and free. Ten thousand had died for something.

  Ten thousand had died here for him. And that was just another way of saying that they had died for nothing at all.

  He had not freed Avarra. He had not defeated Barph. He had just murdered all these people. And now, without the defense of even his own ego, he could not deny it.

  So he wept.

  He walked through this garden of the dead, with its reaching black-and-red limbs and its blooms of gut and bone. He walked, putting one foot in front of another, not sure what else he could do. He felt … not numbness, exactly. His horror was simply too monumental, too encompassing. There was no room for the flavor of other emotions that would give i
t contrast. It was everything he saw and heard and tasted and knew. The whole color of the world had changed.

  And then, finally, near the top of the hill, near the edge of the vast field of the dead, he found two bodies he recognized, two bodies whose forms were not bent so far out of true as to spare him this final piece of knowledge. Two bodies. Two women.

  Quirk was dead.

  And …

  He swallowed. He swallowed again. His mouth was dry. His lips were coated with ash. His knees were betraying him. He was falling. He thought perhaps his throat was closing. Maybe he would die as well. Maybe that would be a good thing. The Void this time. An end to him and his hateful anger. His stupid, useless mind finally finding the simple pleasures of oblivion.

  Quirk was dead.

  Lette was dead.

  PART 3:

  BAD MOFOS

  61

  Catharsis Through the Medium of Punching Dickheads

  Afrit sat up. Her head hurt. She put her hand to it and winced. When she pulled the palm away, flakes of dried blood were there.

  It came back to her then. The whole ugly mess of it. Balur on the stage baring his heart and Will convincing the crowd to step on it. The charging chaos afterward, getting knocked down, getting trodden upon. Quirk finding her. The fight … Oh shit, the fight.

  She couldn’t believe Quirk had walked away. Had she never …? But of course she had never been in a fight with a lover before.

  But Afrit had been in no mood for being understanding last night, with her wound and her emotions raw. Instead she had been in the mood to collapse and cry and sleep.

  And now …

  She poked her head out of her tent flap, looked out onto a gray day. The camp was … ghostly. Nothing moved. There was no sound. There was a smell in the air as if a thunderstorm had just passed through.

  She clambered out of the tent, careful to hold her head as still as possible. She looked around. Smoke drifted from a few fire pits, but no food bubbled over them. No people gathered around them, laughing or talking.

  How hard had she hit her head?

  They were marching to war today. Was everyone already gathered to march?

  She went blearily up the hill, rubbing sleep from her eyes, her sense of dread growing. Everything was abandoned. As if life had been paused, but now seemed uncertain if it could ever return.

  A tent flap twitched open, and she stifled a scream. A head emerged, and after a moment of almost blinding panic, she realized she recognized it.

  “Lawl?” she managed.

  The former deity looked up at her. He looked old and haggard. “Is it over?” he hissed at her.

  She looked around, looked up to where the knot of clouds had been. “Is what over?” she asked. “What happened here?”

  But Lawl just grunted and retreated back into his tent. She looked from the rough canvas to the suddenly blue sky, uncertain what to do next. But any answers from Lawl would be hard-won.

  She walked faster now. Lawl was proof of life. The pall of death was just an illusion, was just—

  She reached the crest of the hill.

  Her breath left her. She tried to catch it, but it was racing away, fleeing from the horror before her. She felt the strength go out of her knees.

  How could there be so many dead?

  She couldn’t take in the scope of it. It was too much. All of it. The slope went on for … gods, it must be miles. A city at the bottom of it, untouched. But all that space in between …

  It was covered with the dead, matted with them, their twisted bodies burned and blackened. Already birds were starting to land among them—crows and gulls and vultures. A few feral dogs were slinking among the bodies, their mouths and fur smeared obscenely with black.

  She looked back at the abandoned camp.

  “All of them …,” she whispered. And she had … she had … slept through it? Grief and head trauma had left her unconscious, and she had …

  This was her fight. This was the fight she had sacrificed Quirk to be a part of. And she had … she had fucking missed it?

  For a moment the image of Quirk down in the twisted mess of all those bodies flashed through her mind, and she thought she was going to throw up. But, no, Quirk had fled all of this. She had left. Quirk was alive.

  Surely some of these others had survived. Surely someone down there was still moving. Still needed her help.

  Despite her desperate urge to look away, Afrit scanned the crowd for any sign of human life. She felt the tears leaking down her face.

  Finally movement caught her eye. She stared. A figure on their knees. Bringing their hands up to their face.

  She tried to run, but the bodies were too thick on the ground. She picked her way, ghoulish limbs reaching up toward her.

  And still part of her somehow thought she was going to see Quirk there. Somehow. Impossibly. Thoughts of reunion dancing in the back of her head. Hope against a backdrop of defeat.

  But it was not Quirk. It was Will.

  She barely recognized him. Last time she had seen him he had seemed almost to glow. He had been sickly looking, yes, but he had also seemed taller, broader, radiant … Now his hair was dull, matted to his head by rain. His clothes were mud streaked and tattered. The purple on his cheeks looked like a dull stain. The almost translucent patches just looked pale and washed out. This was the abandoned husk of the man Will had been the day before.

  “I didn’t know,” he said to her. “I wasn’t myself. I thought I could … I could …” He didn’t make it through the last sentence. His words dissolved into his tears.

  “What happened here?” she asked. And she didn’t know why she asked, because once she’d said it, she was certain she didn’t want to know the answer.

  “All I ever wanted to do was protect them.”

  All the bodies. All the dead stretching away around them. And those were not the words of an innocent man.

  “You,” she said, her mind grappling with the edges of the concept. “What did you do?” And still she didn’t want to know. But she had to know.

  “It wasn’t me.” Will was begging her to believe something she already couldn’t. “It was Barph. It was the other thing. The thing inside me.”

  And then she realized that Will was holding on to something. A body. His hands were covered with ash and smeared fat and blood. He was gripping a blackened, tortured arm. And she stepped to get a better view even as her horror grew, even as a voice inside her head screamed, No! No! Turn and run!

  And she recognized …

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Will, I’m so …”

  “No!” His voice was harsh, and he moved, shifting his weight, almost as if to block her view.

  She reached out to him. No matter what the surroundings … she knew what Lette had meant to him. “It’s okay.” She took a step toward him.

  And then she saw the second body. The one Lette’s corpse was gripping. Their fused limbs. She seemed unable to focus on anything else for a moment. That one detail was more than she could handle. It obsessed her—the blackened, stunted fingers seeming to almost flow into the ugly raw flesh of the burned arm. The red wounds where the nails might once have been. The fact that she could no longer determine exactly where the knuckles had existed.

  Then the whole of it flashed into her mind. The whole of that body and a single word.

  Quirk.

  No. No. She rejected that. That wasn’t what she was seeing. That couldn’t be what she was seeing. Quirk wasn’t here. Quirk was miles away. Obstinate and stupid, but alive.

  Afrit’s gaze went back to the arm, traced its way up. The muscles twisted, curling, the shape only just recognizable. So much of the skin gone …

  Her beautiful skin.

  No. No. That wasn’t … That couldn’t …

  The angle of the shoulder had become something foreign, almost something unnatural. Everything was fused and melted. Afrit’s gaze ran along what must have been the shoulder blade. What was left of the
neck seemed almost impossibly thin, parts of it carved away by whatever horror had been … had been …

  She couldn’t get the air into her lungs. Will was saying words that bounced off her consciousness. There was no room in her head to process them.

  Because the face … She couldn’t look at the face. She couldn’t. It was too … It couldn’t … She couldn’t … It wasn’t …

  And then she was looking at the face. And even like this, even with the skin peeled back, the muscles contorted, the hair gone … Even like this …

  She remembered her laughter. She remembered the way her gaze fell on you, so intense, so unafraid, peeling you open, searching for your secrets. She remembered the feel of her hand twining fingers with her own, palm pressed to palm. She remembered the softness of her lips. She remembered her hair—her trimming it as she stared intently into a mirror, eyes narrowed with self-criticism. She remembered sharing wine, sharing bread. She remembered seeing her again after all the time apart, after escaping the Hallows themselves.

  She remembered.

  And then memory faded, and she stared at reality once more. She stared at Quirk’s crooked, burned corpse before her.

  “I didn’t,” Will was saying. “I didn’t.”

  She didn’t know what he was denying. She didn’t care.

  “You.”

  Her voice sounded strange to her. It was distant, choking, as if something were throttling her.

  “You.”

  She was pointing her finger at Will. An accusation. An attempt to discover within herself the gift of fire that had always been Quirk’s. That had always made her skin run hot and left Afrit sweating on the nights when they shared a bedroll. When she was alive. When she was alive. When …

  “I didn’t,” Will said again. He was backing away from her.

  But he had. She heard it in his voice. This was his fault.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do about it. She just stood there like a revenant, finger outstretched, while Will backed away, arms raised defensively, hands stained gory black with his guilt.

  “DIE!”