Bad Faith

by Jon Hollins

  “I didn’t want Lette to die!” Will roared it. There was something of the old arrogance there. The last flickering embers of power. “If I had anything left to give, I would be pouring it into Lette now. I would chase her into the Void if it could do her any good. I loved her. I loved every part of her. Even at my most fucking lost, I loved her. Truly. Fucking purely, Balur. That was the pure part of my life. The one thing all this shit didn’t touch. All the corruption inside of me. It couldn’t get to that. And so I would give anything to get her back. Your grief is not larger than mine. It is not better than mine. It is not more earned than mine. You want to kill because she is dead. So do I. I just want it to be Barph. I just want it to fucking matter.” He spread his arms. “But if you don’t, come do your worst. Come kill me and pretend it’s in her memory. Pretend it’s what she would have wanted. Pretend she wasn’t a better person than either of us. Pretend we had a right to have been … to have …” He could go no further. Tears choked him off.

  And whatever else Will Fallows might be—and Cois happened to think he was many, many things—Will always managed to be genuine. And if he ever failed at that, then perhaps he would stop being so compelling. But zhe was not entirely surprised when Balur hesitated.

  “But Cois said the heavens will kill us,” Afrit said. “So this is all pointless. So …” She looked around. “So why don’t we just kill you?” And perhaps the little Tamarian was more bloodthirsty than Cois had given her credit for.

  “Lawl built the Summer Palace,” Will said, without ratcheting back his intensity even a single notch. “He built the font. Lawl is still alive. He can be our guide. He can minimize the danger.”

  And piss on him, Will was surprisingly thorough when it came to his plans.

  “There are other guardians,” Cois said, although zhe knew zhe was grasping at straws at this point. “An army. We are just four—”

  “We’ll be three,” Balur growled, but he made no move toward Will now.

  “Gratt,” Will said. “Gratt has an army. Gratt hates Barph as much as we do. His war has been as much against Barph as us up here. We bring him in. Bring his army in. We promise them the heavens.”

  “Aren’t we taking the heavens?” Afrit looked confused.

  “We lie!” Will snapped. There was a slightly manic edge to him now. “We betray him. When our blood goes in the font, and his doesn’t, the Summer Palace rejects him for us.”

  “More betrayals,” Balur said. “More deaths.”

  And Will stopped. The air seemed to go out of him. He looked around. The whole field of dead around him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  He looked as if he were collapsing in on himself, the energy and life slowly going with him too.

  For a moment Balur looked triumphant, standing over Will, towering massive and brutal. For a moment he shone.

  But then … then zhe saw the hurt setting in. The realization that it was over. That this was reality now: loneliness and hurt.

  “You would need to get to the heavens too,” zhe found herself saying. “And that isn’t a place you simply follow a map to. It isn’t a place you can just walk to and knock on the door.”

  “No,” Will said. And he seemed to diminish even further. And it was like a disease, an infection spreading through Afrit and Balur.

  Zhe hesitated then. Where did hir loyalties lie? What lines would zhe cross?

  Who was zhe now?

  Zhe licked dry lips.

  “But,” zhe said into a silence punctuated only by the calls of carrion birds, “I might know a way for us to get there.”

  63

  Prayers Answered

  Afrit showed the others where she had last seen Lawl. The tent was shabby and dirty and, Afrit thought, potentially made out of a much-stained bedsheet.

  Will cleared his throat. Lawl appeared at the tent flap. His hair, Afrit noticed, was gray and matted. His robes were pockmarked with food and filth. And there was a sharp ammonia-laced smell that accompanied the opening of the tent flap.

  “Piss off,” the old man spat, then ducked back into the tent.

  Will cleared his throat again.

  Lawl reappeared. “Did I stutter?”

  “Oh, Lawl.” It sounded as if there was genuine sorrow in Cois’s voice.

  “We have a plan,” Will said. “You can help.”

  Lawl started to laugh. “Is it going to go as well as the one you just fooled around with?”

  Afrit saw Will’s fists ball. “Listen,” she said quickly.

  Lawl looked up at her. “No,” he said.

  For a moment she feared there would be violence, but then Will just started talking. In the end, the easiest thing to do was to ignore Lawl’s petulance. If he retreated back into his tent, he would still be forced to listen to the plan. Its cloth walls offered no privacy at all.

  When Will was done, Lawl’s expression was as dark as one of the thunderheads that used to make him famous. “You fucking traitor,” he spat at Cois.

  Balur stooped, caught Lawl by the throat, hauled him bodily out of the tent. “You will be speaking nicely to Cois,” he informed Lawl, “or you will be shitting your own teeth. Which I am hearing is not the most fun in the world.”

  “You overgrown—”

  Lawl didn’t get to finish the insult. Balur threw him onto the ground. Lawl landed flat on his back with a grunt. Balur raised his foot to stomp.

  “Don’t.” Cois spoke quickly, stepping forward. “He’s just …” Zhe shook hir head. “I’m not the traitor, Lawl. I’m not even the dreamer. Or the idiot. I’m just the only one who’s accepting what’s actually happened. I’m mortal, Lawl. You’re mortal too. And so are Toil and Betra and Knole. All of us are. And we can’t change that. We can only figure out a way to live with it. So that’s what I’m doing.”

  “There is no living with mortality,” Lawl sneered from the ground. “That’s the whole point of it.”

  “He’s never going to take us back,” Cois said.

  Afrit tried to follow the change in conversational tack.

  “He was never going to come back to power,” Lawl snapped. “Never going to kill us all and imprison us in the Hallows. But he did.”

  “He’s losing it,” Cois said. And there was information here that Afrit hadn’t fully grasped. Cois saw things through different eyes. Barph had been, she remembered, Cois’s son, hir lover.

  “Look at this place,” Cois swung a hand at the world. “Look at what he’s done. This carnage. This isn’t Barph. Gods, this whole world isn’t Barph. He was the god of revelry, Lawl. The god of good times. And yes, he was always callous, and callow, but not vindictive. He was anarchic, yes, but always with a playful edge.”

  Zhe leaned in close. “We broke him, Lawl. We did this. You did. His exile made him unravel, and this power is accelerating the process. Things are only going to get worse.”

  And something about that seemed to perhaps have penetrated Lawl’s thick skull. For a moment his stare seemed to lengthen to encompass the infinite time he had once expected to live. Then he shook his head. “Worse for the mortals,” he said.

  “Worse for the mortals?” Cois stared at Lawl. “What do you think we are?”

  In the end, Lawl’s best comeback was just spitting on the ground and ducking back into the tent.

  The four looked at each other.

  “It is striking me,” Balur said, “that Lawl is overly confident about the structural integrity of his tent.”

  Then Balur started stomping.

  A lot of yelling followed, and the snapping of tent poles. Balur had a savage grin on his face as he kicked. Cois stood back next to Afrit.

  “We all grieve differently,” zhe said.

  Finally Lawl emerged from beneath the trampled scrap of cloth. Then others appeared too. Betra was there, and Toil, and even Knole. Afrit found herself wondering if Lawl truly did possess a few remaining scraps of magic. How had they all managed to fit in
to one tent?

  But no. It was not magic. Just squalor. They were all as bedraggled as Lawl. All as dirty and wretched.

  “Gods …,” Cois breathed. “Once you were gods.”

  “Him”—Lawl pointed angrily at Will—“and him”—he pointed up at the heavens. “They are why we are reduced to this.”

  “We need a guide.” Will was still focused at least.

  Cois shook hir head. “We don’t. Lawl knows the tricks of the Summer Palace far better than I do, but I will suffice. I will get us where you need to be.”

  Afrit watched Will as he looked over the collection of former deities arrayed on the ground before her. His expression of distaste mirrored her own. “Fine,” he said.

  A noise that had been almost subsonic slowly made its way into the audible range. Everyone looked at Balur. He was growling again.

  Cois sighed. “What is it, love?”

  “I,” he said gruffly, “am not wishing to be one of those overprotective people. Because those people are idiots and deserve to have their heads used for target practice by people perfecting the fine art of shovel throwing—”

  “Of course they do, love,” Cois said soothingly.

  “But it is striking me that if the Summer Palace is going to be attacking us as we go through it, then the situation is going to be one that could loosely be being assessed as a combat situation. And while you, Cois, are having many fine features, not all of which are being physical, although as you are knowing there are being some physical features of which I am being very fond and would be liking to spend considerable time—”

  “Today, love,” Cois said, slightly less soothingly.

  “It is striking me,” said Balur, still gruff, “that the chance of dying in the Summer Palace will be being higher than it is normally being. And I am generally being of the opinion that of all the people I know, I am wanting you to die the least. And so I was thinking perhaps—”

  Cois stepped up to Balur, wrapped hir arms around his leathery shoulders, and—as he hoisted hir aloft—whispered into his ear.

  Lawl made a gagging noise.

  And it was all so stupid and petty. And Afrit was still ravaged by grief, and if there was a plan, then gods, she just wanted to get it over with.

  She leaned down, looked Lawl in the eye. “What exactly,” she said, “do you think will get worse if we get rid of Barph? If you help us with that?”

  And Lawl shook his head, but he couldn’t meet her eye.

  “Please,” Afrit said, because honestly, no one had tried that yet.

  Lawl hung his head. “Fine,” he said, and his voice was that of a broken man. “Fine. I’ll do it. If there’s one person I hate more than all of you combined, it’s Barph. So if you can get me to the Summer Palace, I will take all of you bastards right to its heart, so you can rip it away from him. Because that’s one of the few things left in this world that might cause me to smile.”

  And that, Afrit found, she honestly did believe.

  “Sold,” said Will. “Now let’s keep moving.”

  64

  The Gratt in the Oyster

  Very rapidly, Balur came to wish that he were more willing to spend Cois’s life like a copper shek. Or, alternatively, that he were allowed to cut Lawl’s tongue out. And potentially cut his arms off too, so that he couldn’t gesticulate in a sullen, miserable, pain-in-the-arse way. And perhaps put a bag over the former god’s head so he couldn’t give anyone any of his excessively annoying stares or rolls of the eye.

  Neither Will nor Afrit would allow Balur to do this. Not that he was exactly willing to concede that anyone had authority over him, least of all Will, but they both made it clear that they would go on and on about it if he did give in to his baser instincts, and then he’d have to listen to them. So in the end Balur decided it was easier to simply club Lawl around the ears every time he was irritating. And nobody seemed to object to that. Well, nobody who wasn’t Lawl, anyway.

  Even more galling was the next part of Will’s plan: waiting.

  Still, they didn’t have to wait long. It was evening when Gratt arrived.

  Rumors and talk of the once-dead had pursued them throughout their journey around Avarra. Word of travesties performed by a slathering horde of dedicated warriors. And when Balur had matched that image to Will’s proposal to storm the heavens … Well, it had been a fine image. It was also an image that did not match the sorry bunch of soldiers that dragged themselves over the Saleran slopes and down onto their little assemblage.

  They did not seem much recovered from the beating Will and the others had dealt them in Verra with Lette on the back of a war pig. At the time Balur had assumed that was some extrusion of Gratt’s forces, an army grown so large that it could send expeditionary forces out across the world to try to rein Will in. Now he wondered if it had been something more desperate than that. If it had been more of Gratt’s army than he had anticipated.

  There were perhaps two hundred or so men, road-stained and battle weary. And yet, as hunchbacked as they were, Balur did not think that they were broken, not yet. These last who clung to Gratt had steel in them.

  The massive general himself—now striding at the head of his forces—had grown no less ugly since they had last seen him. His skin was still red, pockmarked with calluses and horns. His face was still a half-formed blasphemy. He was still monumental, built from solid slabs of muscle that rippled and stretched as he paced back and forth between his army and Will.

  Balur generally didn’t trust anyone bigger than he was. Anyone bigger than he was was, in Balur’s humble opinion, asking to be cut down to size. The knee was always a good joint to start on for that, although with one particular giant, Balur had needed to start halfway through the midriff.

  Lette had given him absurd amounts of grief for that. They’d been supposed to be asking the giant about some kidnapped girls.

  They never did find those girls after that.

  Gods … Lette.

  He should be killing Will. No matter what Cois was saying. Lette should matter more to him than Cois, should she not? Her memory. Her need for vengeance.

  Except Barph also needed to die. He was as responsible for Lette’s death as Will. More so perhaps. And if Balur was to kill Barph, he would need Will. And the gods alone knew, if anyone could work out how to bring Lette back from the Void, it would be Will. And while Will could be trusted for little else, Balur was sure that he could trust Will to try to recover Lette.

  So he would just have to wait to kill Will until all that was done.

  But he would kill Will.

  For now, though, he would stand here in the mud and dirt of an abandoned camp, and watch Gratt strut toward them like a pompous motherfucker.

  “We surrender!” Will yelled back, hands raised high in the air.

  “Well,” Gratt said in his gravel-pit voice. “Well, well, well.”

  Generally, in Balur’s experience, saying well a lot meant you didn’t have a clue what to say. Which meant that despite Gratt’s specifically coming here to try to capture them, he still hadn’t figured out how to start this conversation. Which meant he hadn’t grown much smarter since they’d last seen him either.

  Balur found that he had, much to his surprise, some faith in Will.

  “You have lived longer than I expected,” Gratt told Will.

  “I’m lucky that way.”

  Gratt tsked as best as his malformed lips allowed him. “Still with the mouth.” He looked around. “But no longer with your army. No longer with your power base. Now only with …” He looked at the small gathering. Will and Afrit, Balur and Lawl. Cois had led the other gods away down into what was left of Essoa before this confrontation could happen.

  “Only with dregs,” Gratt said finally. “Word of your disaster is already reaching out across Avarra. Word of it has reached me. And so I know that no matter how fast that jaw works, you have no words left to stop me.” And he smiled a savage smile.

  “I have bargai
ning chips.”

  It was remarkable to Balur that Will could find such unadulterated confidence within himself. It seemed absent so much of the time. So much had to be done to him to drag it out. He could never understand how Lette had been able to put up with it.

  Lette …

  He should kill Will.

  Gratt raised something that might have been supposed to be an eyebrow. He looked around. “Where?”

  Will just tapped the side of his head.

  Gratt strode forward toward Will and put two massive hands on his shoulders. He bore Will to the ground, and then kept on pushing. The pain stood out bright and bold on Will’s face.

  “You seem to think you have some kind of value to me as entertainment,” Gratt said. “Let me disabuse you of that notion.”

  “I can get you into the heavens,” Will grunted. “I can get you the keys to the Summer Palace. You can own the heavens.”

  And for just a moment Gratt hesitated. He didn’t release his pressure, but he didn’t increase it either.

  “You know I’ve delivered before,” Will said through gritted teeth.

  Gratt licked one of his tusks. He stared over Will’s head at the horizon. “I know you are a liar and a deceiver,” he said. “I know you model yourself after the trickster god, who seeks to rule Avarra.”

  For a moment Balur actually thought Will was going to manage to surge to his feet. There was a look of the purest hatred on his face.

  “I know,” Will grunted, “that you’ve been nothing but a fucking sideshow compared to me for months. I know that the only reason Barph hasn’t scrubbed you from the face of the earth is because you haven’t been interesting enough. I’ve been busy capturing all his attention. But now I’m gone. So I know exactly how fucked you are. But I’m beginning to question if you’re smart enough to realize it.”

  Gratt was clearly not the type to suffer such abuse gladly. The mask of civil words slipped, and he backhanded Will clear off his feet. Blood and teeth flew. Will landed on his back, spitting out molars.

  “You will not—” Gratt started.