Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  He tried to say something, opened his mouth. Only an inarticulate gurgle of rage emerged.

  “Chain his hands,” said the lead soldier.

  Something snapped in Will. Suddenly the bowl of stew was in his hand. He flung it hard and fast at the lead soldier’s face. It crashed into his nose with a satisfying crunch, shattered. Pottery shards scored lines across the man’s face. He’d made that bowl as a boy, he remembered now. A simple pinch pot; a gift for his mother. He’d meant it as a vase but hadn’t been old enough to know what a vase had actually looked like. He’d flown into a temper tantrum when he first saw her eating from it. And now it was gone. Along with everything else.

  The soldier reeled back, bellowed. Will was barely paying attention. He was already lunging for the larger pot, iron sides still scalding from the heat of the fire.

  A guard beat him, steel-encased fist slamming into the pot, sending the contents flying.

  Will could hear steel scraping against leather. Swords leaving their hilts.

  He brought the ladle round in a tight arc, smashed it into the lunging guard’s cheek. The man staggered sideways. Will came up, was face-to-face with the fourth soldier. The soldier’s eyes were wide, panicked. Will stabbed straight forward, the spoon of the ladle crashing into the guard’s throat. The guard dropped to the floor choking, a look of surprise and hurt on his face.

  And then the last guard’s sword smashed the ladle from Will’s hands and sent it skittering across the floor.

  Out of daily kitchenware, Will reconsidered his options. The lead guard was recovering, snarling, red blistering skin bleeding openly. The fourth guard was still gasping, but the other two both had their swords up. They advanced.

  As most other options seem to lead to rapid and fatal perforation, Will backed up fast.

  “Not sure you’re going to make it to jail,” said one guard. He was smiling.

  The other just stalked forward, weight held low, eyes narrowed beneath dark brows.

  Will glanced about. But his mother had always been strict about leaving the farm outside of the house and that habit had died hard. There was no handy scythe, no gutting knife, not even a shovel. His foot slipped in one of the muddy footprints the guards had left on the tile floor. The grinning guard closed the gap another yard.

  “Stop fucking about and kill the little shit stain already,” snarled the soldier with the blistered face.

  The words were the catalyst. Will unfroze as the guards leapt forward. He tore out of the kitchen door, heard the swish of steel through the air, waited for pain, and found it hadn’t come by the time his feet carried him through the threshold and into the darkness.

  He abandoned the spill of yellow light and tore toward the barn as fast as his feet would carry him. There was a way to fight back there. A way to stop this. There had to be.

  “After the little fucker!” The rasping rage of the burned guard chased after him.

  “He hit me.” The bewildered burble of the fourth guard.

  “I’ll fucking hit you if you don’t bring me his spleen.”

  The other guards were hard on his heels. Rain slashed at him. Will hit the door of the barn, bounced off, felt the sting of it in his shoulder, his palms. He scrabbled at the door, flung it open. A sword blade embedded itself in the frame as he darted through. A guard grunted in frustration.

  Everything was shadows and the smell of damp straw. He could hear the cows, Ethel and Beatrinne, stamping and huffing. The soft lumbering snores of the two sheep, Atta and Petra. It felt like home. Except the guards behind him were some awful violation. Some tearing wound in everything he held dear.

  He looked around, desperate, panic making the place unfamiliar. A blade. He needed a blade. The scythe—

  “Torch it.” The words barely penetrated his consciousness. But then he heard the strike of a flint, the whispered roar of flame igniting. Yellow light blazed in the doorway. He watched the torch as it flipped end over end to land in the straw.

  He rushed toward it. Flames raced toward him. He stamped desperately at them.

  The second torch hit him heavily in the chest. He staggered backward, slapped desperately at the flame that started to lick at the front of his jacket. In the handful of seconds it took to extinguish, two more torches had arced into the barn. One landed in the hay pile. It flared like kindling. By the time Will was halfway to the pile, the smoke already had him hacking and coughing.

  The cows were awake now, starting to realize they should panic. The guards shouted to each other outside the door.

  This was his home. This couldn’t be.

  But it clearly was.

  He stopped, stood still, fire and smoke swirling about him, the cries of panicking animals filling the air. He was frozen between the future that he had held and the shattered pieces of the present at his feet.

  Something splintered. He looked up, fearful of a falling beam. Then the sound of skittering hooves made him realize it was the gate of the pen that he’d been meaning to fix for more than a month now. And then Ethel’s shoulder checked him as she scrambled out of the door.

  Cursed cow, said some part of his mind. When she comes back tomorrow she’ll be full of rage that she hasn’t been milked and her udders are heavy.

  But there wouldn’t be a tomorrow. Not if he didn’t get out.

  He started to move again, to look for a way out that was not blocked by soldiers and swords.

  For the first time ever, he was glad that the farm overwhelmed him. That there were rotten boards up in the hayloft that he hadn’t got round to fixing.

  He dashed to the ladder, threw open the door to the sheep pen as he went past it. The rungs were rough, slightly spongy with rot. He climbed upward into clouds of smoke that drove him to his knees, hacking, coughing.

  He scrambled forward, elbows and knees supporting his weight. He thumped his head against the barn roof, felt his way along the wall, until the wood bowed beneath the pressure. His lungs burned. Bracing himself, he kicked once, twice. The boards gave way on the third heavy kick. He cleared a wider space with the fourth and fifth, shoved through the gap, grabbed the edge with his fingertips.

  He hung in the darkness for a moment, smoke pouring out around him, obscuring his vision. How close had he put the vegetable cart to the back wall? The last thing he needed now was to break his neck on its edge. But there was no time to dredge for the memory.

  He kicked off blindly, flailed through space.

  He landed on the cart’s wooden boards with a crash that jarred him from head to heels. His teeth clacked shut so hard he thought he heard his gums groaning. Spots of light danced in the night sky.

  A shout crashed into his swampy thoughts. A guard had circled around the barn, seen him jump. He didn’t have time to get his bearings, only to run. So he put his head down and did just that.

  A fence lurched at him out of nowhere. The rain was coming down hard now, and the wood was slick as he tumbled over into a field. Wheat slapped at him, tall enough to get lost in.

  He tumbled forward, barely thinking, just putting one foot in front of the other, simply getting away, and leaving all his hope behind.

  In the end, a tree put paid to his flight. Not one to suffer fools or hysterical men lightly, it hit him forcefully with its trunk. Will took the opportunity to sit down heavily and not think about much at all for a while.

  Eventually he came back to himself. Not fully. Not enough to totally take in the events of the evening. But enough to know that he was lost, that it was raining, and that home was not an option.

  A moment of confused and painful thinking followed. His home was gone. Irretrievably, irreconcilably. The culmination of the bad luck that had begun with Firkin losing his mind, and moved on with the death of his parents. His future was gone. His dreams too. He would not find a way to make the farm profitable. He would not find a good Village girl to bring back. There would be no one to fill the old farmhouse with light, and love, and song. He had failed his fath
er and his mother both in a single night. The chance to achieve their dreams for him had been stolen from him.

  As for the future… That was beyond him. Instead he aimed for something less ambitious. Like where in the Hallows he had ended up. When he solved the problem, he did not arrive at a particularly reassuring answer.

  He’d headed into the Breccan Woods—the vast tangle of untamed forest that lay to the north of his farm. It was a hard enough place to navigate in the bright of day, with a known trail beneath his feet. It was a downright foolish place to be at night. The shadows were not safe—every mother told her child so. Goblins, ogres, and worse called this place home. And yet, he had apparently decided that a headlong dash for the hills superseded anything resembling common sense.

  He shivered. He needed shelter. He needed rest. He needed time to come to terms with a torched home and a warrant for his death. Because that was what it would be. Gentle and understanding were not the words one usually used when describing the soldiers employed by the dragon Mattrax. If you resisted their edicts, they would not simply sit you down with a warm cup of mead to gently explain the misunderstanding. They were generally recruited more from the stick-a-sword-in-your-guts-and-kick-you-into-a-ditch mold. On a good day, at least, your friends would find you before the rats did.

  This did not feel like a good day.

  His body ached, but—given the trouble he’d been through to keep it in one piece that evening—Will decided to stumble forward, and look for a place where he could avoid freezing to death.

  The going was slow. Trees hid most of the moonlight, and what came through seemed reluctant to show him where any obstacles might lie. Stones stubbed his toes, tangles of roots and vines tripped his heels. Rain dripped onto him, seeking out the gap between his collar and his neck with unerring accuracy.

  He was shivering hard when he came upon the rock face. A ragged wall of granite twenty yards in height, where the land stepped up toward the mountains at the valley’s edge. Such diminutive cliffs were a common enough feature of the landscape, often forming natural boundaries between farmsteads. More to Will’s purpose, they tended to contain caves.

  All he had to do was find one that didn’t contain a bear.

  Lawl—father of the Pantheon Above, lord of law and life, he prayed silently as he felt his way along the rock, I don’t know what I did to make you piss in my stew tonight, but I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

  No sooner was the prayer uttered than the rock gave way beneath his hand. He stumbled forward, almost cursing, before he realized that the opening was in fact a cave entrance. Well, that’s service for you, he thought. Thank you, kindly.

  He stepped under the lip of the cave’s entrance, the relief from the rain instant. He sighed, heavily, inhaled—

  —and then rather wished he hadn’t.

  He’d never smelled anything quite like it. If a bear lived in this cave then it had died here. After a rather violent bout of diarrhea. Possibly brought on by the excess consumption of skunks. Who had also died of excess diarrhea. Several weeks prior.

  He gagged slightly, and hesitated. But then, who was he to question divine providence? And while the smell of rot might normally attract predators, this was rancid enough that even a crow might decide it had too much self-esteem to stoop to the cave’s contents. And it wasn’t as if the world was overabundant with options for him at this moment.

  Pulling a mostly dry rag from his pocket, he covered his nose and pushed deeper. Despite the rag, the stench grew with each step. When he could take it no longer—his revulsion a physical wall he could not push past—he backed up a step toward the cave entrance and simply lay down. The rock beneath him was cold and hard, but thankfully lacking in murderous intent. He looked back toward the cave entrance, the world outside. He could just make out the forest, a dark blue smudge in a field of black. He looked away, and rolled over, searching for a more comfortable way to lie—

  —and collided with something small, furry, and warm.

  Will shrieked.

  He had always hoped that in a situation like this he would be able to describe the sound as a bellow, but it was definitely a shriek.

  Fortunately, from his ego’s point of view, whatever he had collided with let out an equally shrill noise. Less fortunately, something else echoed the sound. And then something else. And then ten more voices took up the cry. And ten more. A rippling wave of tremulous, unmanly sound, rushing back through the cavern.

  And then, in response, a wave of light came flooding back. Torches flaring brightly in the dark. The light reached Will just as he made it to his feet.

  He looked out onto a cavern packed from wall to wall with small, green figures. Feral faces with pointed snouts and pointier ears. Little black eyes screwed tight in anger. Teeth bared.

  The shadows of Breccan Woods were not safe, he reminded himself. This one particularly so it seemed, housing as it did an entire fucking horde of goblins.

  Lawl above, Will thought, you’re an absolute bastard.

  2

  Lette and Balur

  The problem with adventuring, Lette reflected, was that it was a crap way to make money.

  She wiped sweat from her brow. Gods-hexed mountain pass. Weren’t mountains supposed to be cold and snowy? What was she doing sweating her ass off this high up?

  But she knew the answer to that question, and she didn’t like it. Instead she turned again to the more nebulous arena of finance. Specifically, how it intersected with her chosen career path.

  Adventuring had seemed such a good idea when she’d started out. Punching monsters for a living. Receiving riches and glory in return. And there really was glory. She knew at least three people who had had songs composed about their endeavors. Four if you counted “The Ballad of Fairthroat the Man-Whore” but that one didn’t end with Fairthroat in possession of all of his anatomy, so the glory thing was questionable there.

  And yet, even assuming you got a song, and that then someone managed to reconcile the sweaty, bloodstained social deviant in front of them with the shining idealized figure they’d heard songs about, you were still left with the fact that any riches coming your way would be the result of a significant amount of violence and personal harm. And violence and personal harm had a way of spiraling out of control. Very far out of control. Lette refused to look back over her shoulder. Instead she concentrated on the fact that she was ready for a steadier lifestyle.

  “What about a bakery?” she said out loud.

  Her traveling companion looked at her for a very long time.

  Balur was approximately eight feet tall, lacked any body fat whatsoever, and owned a tail. He was an Analesian, one of the lizard men from the Western deserts. His yellow eyes regarded her narrowly from a broad, elongated face. They peered out from between large brown scales, thick and knobbly like fist-size stones.

  “No,” he said after a pause. His voice sounded like rocks grinding. He shook his head slowly. “No,” he said again.

  The Analesians were a hard people. Lette had heard a rumor that their language had forty onomatopoeias for the noise a man’s head made when it was crushed beneath your war hammer. She had never quite managed to find the right time to ask Balur if this was true.

  “You just say ‘No’ automatically now,” Lette objected. “You didn’t even think about it.” So far Balur had rejected swordsmithing, blacksmithing, farming, horsebreaking, and exotic dancing as potential career changes. To be fair, Balur’s skill set was largely limited to hitting things very hard with a hammer, but that’s why the smithing ideas had been so promising. To Lette’s mind he was simply being obstinate.

  “Look,” she said, pointing ahead, “see that?” The crest of the mountain pass was finally approaching. Beyond it lay the Kondorra valley, vibrant and fertile. “That’s a fresh start. That’s a new page in the story of our lives. We can be anything we want to be once we cross that line. Anything.”

  Balur nodded. “Yes,” he said
.

  Lette’s face lit up. Finally progress. Finally the thick-skulled oaf—

  “I am wanting to be a mercenary,” Balur finished.

  Lette groaned. “Oh yes,” she said. “Because that’s working out so well.”

  The wind shifted briefly, blowing up the mountain rather than down. For a moment, the smell of smoke and carrion filled her nostrils. She groaned again.

  Eyes forward. A fresh start. A new beginning.

  Balur strode on. Then on the crest, the liminal point, the start of something new, he paused. He held out a thick, four-fingered hand toward Lette. “I am not having the hands for baking,” he said. “I am having no nimble fingers.”

  “You could just knead the dough,” Lette suggested. Balur required a more solution-oriented outlook in her view.

  Then she was on the crest of the past beside him, and the whole of her future was spread out before and below her. The Kondorra valley.

  The sun was low, on this early edge of autumn. Its glare was still partly occluded by the mountain peaks around her. It sent flat shafts of light streaking across the trees that flowed down the mountainside below them. Distant, at the valley’s floor, the forest broke open into fields, a patchwork of farmland that stitched its way up the valley’s far slope, until rock and scree took over at the hill’s summit. In this light, the slow, sluggish river Kon marking the valley’s base was transformed into a line of white fire.

  It was a world to itself, the valley. A microcosm. She could see castles, like children’s toys, lakes, a swamp, and even something that could conceivably be a volcano. It was all small and perfect from this distance, like a picture painted into a book. Nothing spoiled by the proximity of reality.

  “Look at that,” Lette said again. She pointed. “We can be anything we like down there.”