Bad Faith

by Jon Hollins

“You have no plan,” Will said, blood dribbling down his chin. “You have no way to defeat Barph. You’ve been flailing around in a land grab like this is the pissing Hallows!” The color was rising in his cheeks, cords starting to stand out in his neck. “You don’t even know what sort of fight you’re in! You don’t have the imagination to fight a god, and you know it. Well, I do. But I don’t have an army anymore. And you do. So either you kill me and keep pissing in the sand until Barph gets around to crushing you, or you do something that actually makes sense, and you help me kill him.”

  Will stood. And for a moment it was as if he were the one who was twenty feet tall.

  Gratt worked his jaw. Savage teeth showed.

  “And after that?” he asked, his voice full of false refinement.

  “The heavens. They’re yours.”

  “Just like that?”

  Will shrugged. “How could I stop you?”

  Gratt looked at them all one by one. For a moment he and Balur locked eyes. And then Gratt sneered. Every tooth showed. His long black tongue licked his tusks. “A deal then,” he said.

  Balur could almost hear Lette telling him she found that smile as trustworthy as a sailor promising to guard a princess’s virginity.

  Lette …

  And before he killed Will, Balur was going to make sure that part of Will’s plan involved him murdering the shit out of Gratt.

  65

  A Better Class of Hitchhiking

  Will just about managed to meet Gratt’s eye as the general asked, “So, how exactly are we getting to the heavens?”

  Gratt’s eye was honestly one of the few he could meet now. The enormity of what he’d done—the disaster that he had personally orchestrated—still weighed around his neck like a millstone. More than the destruction of the Hallows, this was an obscenity too far. Indeed, his previous actions only compounded this final error. None of the dead from the field outside Essoa now rested in the Hallows. None found second chances in the plane below the world. It was straight to the Void with them. Straight to their unmaking.

  Lette was there. Lette was lost in that black oblivion. Irretrievable. Lost forever.

  Was that true? Everything he had ever been told said that was true. The Void was the last resting place. It was beyond the end of things. But he had seen so many impossible things come to pass now … He had made so many impossible things come to pass.

  Shouldn’t that be where his energies lay? With Lette? With finding some path to rescue her? To defy the laws of reality one more time and bring her back to life?

  Except wasn’t that what had gotten him here in the first place? That sort of hubris? And didn’t he owe something to all the countless dead? Not Lette alone?

  There were no answers, of course. He was no longer so deluded as to think there was a single certain path he must walk. Or to think that anyone distracting him from his current path was trying to undermine him. There was only his best hopeless guess. And right now, all he had was this one last best guess at how to take down Barph.

  It would kill him, he thought. He hoped, almost. The Void seemed like a blessing now. Oblivion. Free from the weight of the guilt and the grief. He hadn’t earned such an ending. But perhaps, if everything went well, he would achieve it.

  And so this was the path he walked, narrow as a tightrope, and with the end shrouded in mist.

  “The answer,” he said, “will come to us, as long as we light a big enough fire.”

  It had been Cois’s idea, whispered to him before zhe left. And it was risky, but it carried a certain amount of poetry to it as well. And so Will led them all to the peak of the tallest hill they could find, and there they lit a vast inferno of a bonfire.

  Nothing happened.

  Gratt grew impatient, but Will found he still had some stoicism left. Of all the people left in Avarra, he owed Gratt nothing, at least. He owed so much to so many people, but Gratt was as big a murderer as he was. Gratt he could betray happily.

  On the evening of the second night, with the fire raging even higher, he saw shadows on the horizon.

  “They’re coming,” Will said.

  There were just six of them. But it was more than Will had thought were left. Some must have hidden from the final fight with Barph.

  They blotted out the setting sun as they flapped across the sky. The last dragons of Avarra.

  They landed on the hilltop, wings held high and imposing, mouths open and fire in their throats.

  Will reminded himself that he deserved this.

  Yorrax landed at the head of the group of dragons. So she was still alive. That surprised Will at little. And it reminded him of Quirk, so it hurt him as well.

  “We are here to kill you,” Yorrax told him.

  “I know.” He nodded.

  This seemed to be a little disappointing to Yorrax. She reared slightly, trying to make more of her bulk, despite the fact that she was dwarfed by her five companions.

  “We fear you no longer, betrayer,” she roared.

  Will honestly wasn’t sure that was true. The other dragons had a lost, vacant look in their eyes. Gods, they were allowing Yorrax—the runt—to lead them. Barph’s devastation had unmoored their certainty in their own dominance. They were as lost as he was.

  “And I do not fear death.” He spread his arms, a welcoming gesture.

  He could feel his own companions’ hesitation, their doubt. And it was more than a little tempting to just leave it at that. To let Yorrax recover from her confusion and remember that other species had the word surrender in their vocabulary. It was more than a little tempting to give in to the inevitable end of things.

  Except he hadn’t earned that peace. Not yet.

  So instead he said to Yorrax, “We are the same, you and I.”

  “We are noth—” Yorrax started to snarl.

  “We are creatures of violent purpose,” he said. And he had no magic left to amplify his voice. He could not shout her down. But she listened all the same. She was wrong-footed and uncertain, and he could keep her that way. Yorrax had never been as strong as she thought she was.

  And he was telling the truth anyway.

  “We have launched ourselves at Barph’s heart twice,” he shouted. “Together we have gone to tear him down. And twice we have missed. But now a new path is open. A path straight to Barph’s exposed underbelly.”

  Glory. Dominance. Her own chance to rule the heavens. That was what Yorrax wanted. What they all wanted in the end. He could use that, take advantage of it. And it would be another betrayal, one to add to his betrayal of Gratt and his betrayal of ten thousand others, and his betrayal of Quirk and of Lette, but all his life dragons had been the oppressors, the aggressors. He could find little sympathy for them.

  It was the people still left in this place. The people he hadn’t killed yet. The Salerans, the Batarrans, the Verrans, and the Vinlanders. The people of the Five Duchies and the Fanlorn Empire. It was all Avarrans. That was whom he owed. And if it took the lives of Gratt and the dragons …

  Gods, hadn’t he been a farmer once? When had he become this heartless broken thing? He kept blaming the Deep Ones, but had it just been that? Or had it just magnified something that was already within him?

  He could still feel it with him, that piece of the Deep Ones. It was a rotten weight in his gut and his mind now. A starving creature, licking its wounds and twitching in pain. But he would not feed it again. And any pain it caused him, he deserved.

  Yorrax was staring at him.

  “A path …,” Yorrax said. The other five dragons were staring at them, dead-eyed. All pretense of fury gone now. They had subjugated their will to Yorrax. She at least still pretended to have purpose, but she was conflicted now.

  “A gate straight into the heavens,” he said to her. To her violent, narcissistic heart. “A path to the Summer Palace. So we can catch Barph in his very home. So we can tear the heavens from him, just as the dragons were torn from the heavens. So we break his spirit and his will
. So we leave him weak, easy prey.”

  Yorrax lowered her head. And small as she was for her kind, she could still have ended him with a single snap of her teeth, a single exhalation of flame.

  “Another betrayal,” she said. “Another lie.”

  “Perhaps,” said Will. “I can’t prove that it’s not. I can only ask you how I could betray you again. I am stripped of my powers. I am weak. I cannot overpower you. What could I do?”

  There were no answers. Just doubts, fears, uncertainties, and ambition. And a heartless bastard willing to take advantage of them.

  Just him.

  “Take us to the heavens,” he said to Yorrax. “Fly us into the sky. Let us be pathfinders for you. And once we’re there, do as you will. Perhaps we will try to betray you. Perhaps you will try to betray us. Perhaps we will work together and destroy Barph as one. Perhaps we shall fail. But this is our last, best shot. And we can only take it together.”

  And before she even spoke, Will could see that the last piece of his plan had fallen into place.

  66

  Castles in the Sky

  Yorrax almost abandoned the plan as soon as Willett Fallows climbed upon her back. It would be so easy to reach back, to separate his head from his body, to end the lies spilled by his treacherous tongue. Saliva flooded her mouth at the thought.

  But killing Will Fallows had seemed so easy ever since they had tracked him down, she and the five others: Blottax the idiot, Gerrax the frail, Terrax the coward, Chessax the child, and Flerrax the doddery old bastard. All who were left. All who had survived the encounter with Barph either through luck or through fleeing the battlefield and their pride. The dregs of dragon kind.

  Her perfect five.

  There wasn’t a complete backbone between them. They barely had functioning minds. They were utterly lost. They kowtowed to her completely. Her will became theirs.

  It was perfect. And in some ways, she supposed, she should thank Will for this. For her moment of dominance.

  Yet in every word he uttered, and in every turn of his body, she could sense his rejection of her authority. She could smell his insolence hanging around him like a cloud. He was one who never bent his knee.

  This assault on the heavens was another betrayal, of that she was sure. He had as much as said so. Last time, his betrayal of dragon kind had been preemptive, and had undermined their own attempt to betray him. That, though, was under the leadership of Pettrax, and Pettrax was bloated, and weak of mind and loins. She would not make the same mistakes as him.

  She did believe in Will’s promise of a gate leading to the heavens, though. That was too absurd a promise for it to be false. And she saw Gratt at Will’s side. He had bought into this promise too. So, yes, that part, she suspected, was true. The hook supposed to dazzle and blind her to everything else. The betrayal would come afterward.

  But she was not blind. All she had to do was bide her time and spot the opening when it came.

  So she bore Will Fallows’s weight. And she bore the weight of Quirk’s mate, Afrit. And she bore the weight of the little lizard man and the angry former god. She spread her wings and took to the sky, careful not to show the strain it took for her to lift all four of them. Her compatriots were laden down with twenty or more of Gratt’s soldiers each. Gratt had pushed for more, but he had been barked back into his place. He was large, yes, but he was no dragon, and he did not know where the gates to the heavens were. He could be expended. And once he understood that, he had stopped his hollering and his demanding, and Yorrax had established her position with him.

  Now up they went. And up. Avarra dropped away below them, the fields and farms become toy versions of themselves. Animals that she would have feasted upon became specks, then negligible afterthoughts. Cities sketched themselves in rough oblongs and jagged triangles over the landscape. The coastline became visible, a scribbled line of yellow and blue up against the vibrant green of the Saleran plains. The Broken Peaks were visible through a haze to the east. The world was a playground.

  Soon it would be hers.

  “Up!” Lawl called from her back. “Up still!”

  The muscles in her back strained. The air was thin and chill. She could hear the labored breathing of the other flimsy creatures.

  “Up!” the former god called again. She wondered if someone else knew the directions and she could eat him.

  Her own breathing grew heavy. She fought to keep ahead of large, lumbering, spectacularly stupid Blottax. The big dragon was still beating away at the air, seemingly unaware of both the soldiers on his back and the fact that they were going nowhere. Her lips curled back in a snarl of frustration and effort.

  Could this be the ploy? Were Will and his fellows somehow more resistant to these elements than she and the other dragons?

  “There!”

  She glanced back. Lawl was standing between her wings, pointing toward a single cloud floating in the field of scattered gray above her head. It was a small cloud. Yorrax could barely discern it from all the others, except perhaps there was a slight golden hue to it, as if a forgotten ray of sunlight had somehow picked it out.

  But a cloud? It was small and pathetic, and made of water vapor. It did not seem to possess many heavenly attributes.

  “It is the portal,” Lawl shouted over the wind whipping around them, as if reading her thoughts. “It hides the gates to the heavens.”

  “‘And gold shall be their fabric, and glory shall be their name, and destiny shall be their intent,’” Afrit said. “At least that’s what it says in the First Book of the Law.”

  “To be fair, I might have been a little drunk when I dictated those.” Something in Lawl’s tone made Yorrax snicker despite the effort.

  “There will be defenses, won’t there?” Will called over the wind.

  “Guards,” Lawl shouted back. “Divine warriors. Creatures created without a will of their own, driven to obey the masters of the Summer Palace. Creatures both restless and tireless.”

  “Gods, you were being a paranoid bastard,” said Balur.

  “So that’s our first hurdle.” There was something like eagerness in Will’s voice.

  Yorrax didn’t care. All she wanted was the gates. That was the promise, the deal. She would get him there. Then all agreements were off.

  She kept her eyes wide open as she entered the clouds, the gray-golden mist folding over her. She would not show fear. Not even to these idiots.

  The mists went on and on. They went on longer than they should have. It had been a small cloud hanging just below the body of the main bank above. And yet she had been beating her wings for a minute or more now. The exertion of each stroke seeming to grow exponentially.

  “Hold the course!” Lawl shouted. “Hold the course!”

  And then suddenly there was light. Suddenly there was heat and warmth, and updrafts beneath her wings. She almost sagged with relief, caught herself only just before she fell.

  “Oh,” she heard Lawl say. “Oh no.”

  And then Yorrax truly took in her surroundings.

  The gates lay before her. They were massive things, imposing even to a dragon. Wrought iron curled in ever more intricate curves and spirals. Images of the gods had been rendered in exquisite detail. Eyes seemed to shift and move with the viewer. Muscles seemed to ripple with continued exertion. Gold and jewels were intertwined with everything, shimmering and glittering in the rays of sunlight that backlit the entire creation.

  On the flip side, the gates had also had the shit beaten out of them.

  They hung askew from their frame. Their carvings were bent and deformed. Deep scratches had been gouged through the faces of many of the figures, obscuring their identities. “Lawl gargles goat balls” had been painted over them in red, along with other, similar claims suggesting the former king of the gods should never be left unattended in a farmyard. Vines and brambles had wound their way through the lower reaches, snarling the gates in a tangle of leaves and thorns.

  “
What has he done?” Lawl said. There was anger rising in his voice. “What has he done?”

  “Cois said Barph was losing it,” Afrit said.

  Personally, Yorrax didn’t see what they were all getting their underwear knotted about. The gates were big, yes, but what did it matter what state they were in? They could enter through them. What else was important? Humans got caught up on the stupidest of details.

  “There are supposed to be guards.” Lawl sounded pathetically appalled.

  “Supposed to be,” she couldn’t help but growl. “What does that matter when we are here now?”

  “But …,” Lawl said. “He’s ruined everything.”

  The space beyond the gate was a riot of vegetation. Plants grew out of control, sprawling over broken pathways. Yorrax smashed through the twisted gates, landed on cracked flagstones. Weeds and thistles were crumpled by her feet. Will was the first to slip from her back as she looked back and forth taking it all in.

  A creature lay on the ground, vaguely humanoid, but built on too big a scale, the limbs with an odd rough-hewn quality. The skin was ochre, and slightly furry. Heavy sheets of armor were strapped to the creature. Its broad red gash of a mouth was open, and it was snoring loudly.

  “There,” Yorrax said, “are your guards.”

  Lawl was on the ground now. He knelt beside the figure as the other dragons landed around them.

  “Pollark?” Lawl said. “Oh, Pollark, what has he done to you?”

  The figure belched and Lawl reeled back, bringing up a hand to cover his mouth.

  “I believe he has gotten him horribly drunk,” said Gratt without a note of sympathy in his voice for either Lawl or the spread-eagled creature. Then, to reinforce this unsympathetic impression, Gratt pulled out a sword and jammed it through the creature’s throat.

  Lawl gasped as blood sprayed upward. Then he gagged and spat out the blood he’d just inhaled. “What are you—”

  Gratt wheeled on Yorrax. “You,” he barked, “beast of burden—”

  Yorrax growled.

  “No!” Will was shouting into the chaos. “This is not the way. This needs to be controlled and tactical! We need to draw any fighting away from the Summer Palace. We need to keep the attack contained. We need—”