Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  Balur shrugged. “I am liking being a mercenary.”

  “What about a butcher?” Lette suggested, a momentary flash of inspiration striking her. “You could still kill things if you were a butcher. Cattle. You’d be perfect for it. A swift blow to the skull, each one.”

  Balur cocked his head to one side. “Butchery is being mostly knife work,” he said.

  “I do knife work,” Lette said. Her fingers flickered, and a knife appeared there, skittered away, appeared in her other hand. “You just slaughter cattle.”

  Balur thought about it more. The slow gearwork of inhuman thinking. “Would the cattle be fighting back?” he asked eventually.

  Lette had to take a moment for that one. “Cattle?” she asked, double checking.

  Balur nodded. “Would they be being much of a challenge?” he said. “I am not wanting to go soft, being a butcher.”

  Lette blinked, once, twice. The question did not go away. “Cattle is fucking cows, Balur.” Lette clarified for him. “They do not fight back. They eat grass, get their heads caved in, and then become delicious meaty snacks.”

  Balur weighed this. “I am thinking I still prefer being a mercenary,” he said after a while.

  Lette resisted the urge to grab Balur and shake him. Though in fairness that was mostly because she couldn’t really reach his shoulders. Or shake him even if she could reach them. Instead she pulled the heavy bag of gold coins off her waist and thrust it at him. It was the only half-decent thing to come out of the disaster that lay behind them.

  “Look at this, Balur,” she said. “This is anything we want it to be. New lives. Better lives.”

  Balur’s eyes narrowed. “Is it also being wine and whores?” he asked.

  Lette shook her head. “You are a foreigner from a far-flung land. You are meant to be exotic and interesting.”

  Balur shrugged. “I am being eight foot tall and am possessing odd syntax. That is being interesting.”

  Lette considered whether to stab him in the crotch or the eye.

  She was saved from the agony of indecision by a small, screaming figure abruptly launching itself from a hiding place behind a rock and flinging itself at her. A goblin, she realized. It flew through the air and seized the purse from her hand.

  “Mine! Mine! Mine!” it screamed as it landed and tore off down the path away from them, short legs pumping furiously. “I gots it! I gots it! It’s mine!”

  The goblin got exactly one additional step farther before Lette’s dagger caught it in the back of its neck, neatly slipping between two vertebrae and making a mess of its cerebellum. The goblin was dead before it hit the ground.

  “See,” said Balur. “You are being good mercenary. You should be playing to your talents.”

  “My talents have caused a lot of human misery,” Lette said, walking over to the goblin and plucking the knife from its back. The body resisted giving it up. She disliked killing goblins. They were weirdly sticky creatures. She always had to spend forever afterward cleaning bits of them off her blades.

  She bent to pick up the purse—

  —only to have it snatched from before her, as another goblin hurtled out of its hiding place and took off across the path.

  “Barph’s hairy ball sack,” she cursed. “How many of these bastards are there?”

  Perhaps learning from his slowly cooling companion, this goblin did not scream. He just legged it. Unfortunately, any attempt to leg it when you are only four foot tall is significantly limited by stride length. Balur was not similarly restricted.

  His war hammer descended. The goblin stopped being a small, ugly humanoid and instead became a small, ugly bloodstain.

  “Gods’ spit, Balur, careful of the damned purse!”

  “It is being fine.” The lizard man rolled yellow eyes behind nictitating membranes.

  Lette sighed heavily. She might as well berate a rock. Instead she turned her attention to their surroundings. Woods had arisen almost as soon as the pass started to descend. A thick tangle of trunks and underscrub. It smelled damp and loamy. Too many hiding places.

  “I hope you spot a pattern developing!” she yelled to however many other goblins were left lurking around them. “You take the purse, you die messily.” Even goblins should be able to understand that sort of equation.

  Apparently not.

  A bush rustled. Then the goblin appeared, shrieking like a kettle on the boil. It grabbed the purse and hurtled off, still screaming, all flailing, gangly limbs.

  Lette sighed. This one was faster than the others. Its torso was a tiny round ball suspended between long knobbly legs and arms. Still, it was not faster than her dagger. The blade appeared again in her palm. She took aim.

  And then goblins fell like rain.

  They were in the trees. Ten, twenty, maybe more of them. All screaming. All leaping. All armed with jagged rusting knives.

  Lette loosed her dagger. It never made it to the one with her purse. Instead it caught a goblin in the neck as it leapt into the blade’s path. The screaming creature was pinned to a tree, went still.

  “Gods’ spit on all of them.”

  Then her sword was out. She cut the legs out from beneath another goblin even as it tried to land on hers.

  Balur’s war hammer whirled. Bodies impacted against its broad head fast enough that the sounds blurred together. Lette leapt into the space he’d opened.

  A goblin lunged at her. She turned the blade, slit its throat, but another had circled behind her, lunged for her hamstrings. Balur brought down his war hammer in a hard vertical arc. A goblin disappeared beneath its head. Lette wondered if the Analesians would describe the sound as more of a squish or a splat.

  She caught sight of the goblin running off with her purse. It was twenty yards away now, the distance increasing rapidly. An ugly little head bobbed about on its undersize body. Not a large target. Another dagger appeared in her hand. She breathed slow. Cocked her arm.

  Something hard and sharp impacted against the spiked pauldron protecting her right shoulder. Her arm jerked sideways. The knife flew wide. Cursing, she whipped round. Her sword blade buried itself in a goblin’s neck. Blood sprayed, it kicked, died.

  Lette tried to yank the sword free. It did not come. She shook the blade. The goblin flopped and spasmed but refused to come loose. He was a corpse puppet on the end of a single, very sharp string. She cursed again. Why in all of the Hallows were goblins always so damn sticky?

  Two goblins, sensing her slowness with the overburdened blade, circled to either side of her, closed in.

  Her sword shook. The corpse flopped. She cursed.

  Then at the same moment, the goblins leapt. They struck identical poses: great bounding arcs, knives clutched in both hands behind their heads.

  Lette wondered where they learned the move. It had to have been learned. The symmetry was too perfect. Did goblins run combat drills? If so, they shouldn’t. The move told her everything that was about to happen. It took half the fun out of combat.

  She pivoted on one heel, brought the other up and round in a short sharp circle. She caught one of the goblins in its midriff as it flew through the air. Its ribs cracked, the angle of its flight changing, becoming shorter and more terminal. It slammed into a nearby tree. The contents of its skull became a red smear.

  Lette had already moved on, using the momentum of her kick to whip her goblin-encased sword around. The second goblin slammed into its dead compatriot, sheathed the protruding sword tip in its gut. It screamed, jerked, and remained firmly lodged on the blade.

  “Oh gods’ piss on it!” The sword, now effectively a club made of small dying creatures, was too heavy to be practical. Four more goblins were closing fast.

  Balur’s hammer descended, one, two, three times. This time it was definitely more of a “squelch” sound, Lette thought. Balur caught the fourth goblin around the neck with his free hand. He held it aloft. It kicked futilely at the air.

  Lette looked around. The goblin with th
e purse was gone. She was surrounded by dead and dying bodies. She looked up, to the Pantheon Above. What had she done to piss them off? She said her prayers, paid her dues at temples. What sort of divine comedy had they devised for her? Assholes, all of them.

  She turned on the dangling goblin, another of her daggers in her hand. The blade was short and bright, catching the sun as she advanced. The goblin was momentarily distracted from Balur’s fist on its neck.

  “You,” she said, pointing at the spasming creature. “You are going to literally spill your guts. And as you do, you are going to tell me everything. Where in the Hallows is my purse?”

  “Thrasher,” the goblin gasped. “Thrasher took it. Ran with it.” The goblin was a potbellied thing. Its skin the same dirty greenish brown she associated with the gastrointestinal aftermath of one of Balur’s Analesian curries. Its eyes were large, round, and dark. Although there was the chance that Balur’s squeezing was altering their natural shape.

  “I don’t need his god’s-hexed name.” Lette advanced with the dagger. “I need his location.”

  “Needed the money,” the goblin continued gabbling. “For the down payment. Had to have it.”

  Lette closed her eyes. She didn’t want to know. She just wanted to know where the cursed creature with her purse had gone to. But…

  “Down payment?” Balur rumbled.

  The goblin twisted to look up at his captor. “For bakery,” he squeaked.

  A divine pissing comedy.

  “Bakery?” Balur repeated. He look at Lette. She refused to meet his eye.

  “Oh yes.” The goblin nodded, trying to smile through his evident pain. “We think there is a big market for goblin pastries. Very delicate. Melt in your mouth. We have very nimble fingers.” The goblin took a break from vainly trying to peel Balur’s fist open to wiggle a hand at him. The fingers were indeed long and slender.

  Balur nodded sagely. “That is being a good point, that,” he said. “Nimble fingers are being important for baking.” He looked at Lette significantly.

  “Oh give it a fucking rest.”

  “Yes,” the goblin jabbered, too preoccupied with its own survival to pick up on basic social cues. “You see. You see. But money, you see? Money is the problem. Need to have money to buy a bakery. For the down payment. High start-up costs for bakeries. Very high. And the Merchants Guild. They won’t lend us the money. Goblins have shitty credit record, they say. Cultural and historical activities not conducive to large-scale financial loans, they say. But we need money to make money. Financial trap, we say. Plutocratic bullshit, we say. Racist fucks, we call the Merchants Guild. And so they kick us out. And now we are here. Engaging in cultural and historical activities not conducive to large-scale financial loans. For your purse. For our bakery.”

  He stared at them wildly. Trying to stretch his squished face into a toothy, pitiful smile.

  Lette closed her eyes. “Why the hell do I still not know where this whoreson Thrasher is? Why do I not know where my fucking purse is?”

  She was shouting. This was her new start, gods piss on it. Her new beginning.

  The goblin swallowed. “He is,” he stuttered. “He is…” He started again.

  “Oh just get rid of it,” Lette snapped, her patience finally reaching its breaking point. “I’ll track the other one down and find our purse myself.” She could see the trail of broken branches and matted-down grass leading away from the skirmish. It would be an easy enough trail to follow.

  Balur gave a satisfied nod, and the muscles in its arm bunched. The goblin screamed.

  “Gods, Balur! Not like that!” He’d been about to crush the goblin’s skull. Lette pulled at her hair. “We are trying to be better people, remember?”

  “You are trying.” Balur was belligerent.

  “Just throw it away, and I will track this arsehole, Thrasher. You can kill him instead, all right?”

  Balur sighed heavily. “Fine.” With a casual sweep of his arm he flung the goblin away.

  Unfortunately, the parabolic flight of the goblin intersected directly with a tree trunk five yards away. There was an ugly cracking sound. What was left of the goblin slumped to the ground.

  Lette just looked at Balur.

  He opted for indignance. “What? What?” He rolled his eyes. “That was being a genuine mistake.”

  Lette sighed as she looked around her. Dead bodies. Blood and carrion. Crows already circling in the air above, their calls long and mocking.

  Her new start.

  As she stalked deeper into the woods, one word seemed to sum it all up.

  “Shit.”

  3

  Ill-Met by Moonlight

  Will stood, momentarily paralyzed by the vision of a cave full of goblins.

  Run! screamed a small and eminently sensible part of his mind, but for some reason his legs weren’t paying attention. They, it seemed, were more fatalistic. They would only carry him from so many attempts on his life in one day before simply giving up and accepting the fate as inevitable.

  “Sorry,” he heard himself say. “Wrong cave. My one’s a few entrances down.”

  He went to take a step away from the goblins but his cowardly legs were still not on the same page as the rest of him.

  A low growl seemed to rise from every small mouth in the room, a whisper brought to the volume of a roar by the sheer density of the bodies packed into the space before him.

  “I’ll be off then,” he said, more to his own anatomy than to the crowd. His knees shivered in response, but he thought the movement boded collapse more than any sort of horizontal traction.

  Suddenly a bloodcurdling howl rose through the night. It hollowed out all of Will’s resolve, left him a quivering shell.

  He found himself thinking of the Pantheon. Of Lawl, father of the gods. Of Lawl’s wife, Betra, mother to all. Of their children, Klink, Toil, and Knole—gods and goddesses of money, labor, and wisdom. Of Lawl’s daughter-wife Cois, goddess of lust and desire. Of Betra’s husband-son Barph, god of revelry. Who could he pray to? Who might, against all the odds, send him aid?

  Fuck it, he thought. I’ll slaughter a whole damn army of pigs to the first one of you lot who helps me out here.

  Apparently the Pantheon had about as much faith in him as he had in them.

  His arms, more cooperative than his legs, rose up over his head. His spirits almost rallied as he felt movement in his petrified legs, but it was only him sinking to his knees.

  Wait, said the small voice inside him, the one that had advised retreat, that howl came from behind you…

  Shut up! yelled the panicking component of his mind. I don’t have time for your shit. I’m busy dying, gods curse it.

  Something massive bowled past Will. He felt the wind of it as it passed him, the bass growl of its roar in his chest, the pounding of its feet through the rock beneath him.

  Then silence. A moment of absolute silence.

  Then wind. A violent swishing noise.

  And then the sound of death.

  Will had grown up on a farm. He had raised enough livestock to know that sound. The sound of flesh tearing, bones breaking.

  But it wasn’t coming from him.

  He dared to open one eye.

  Divine intervention. At first, that was the only explanation that came to his mind. That somehow his prayers had worked. That Lawl had really stepped down from the heavens and come to intercede on his part. That a divinity had finally come back to Kondorra. Just for him.

  And then, he got a look at the creature, and while there were stories of Lawl, and Betra, and Barph, and the rest of the Pantheon taking on some odd forms over the years, nothing he’d ever read was quite like this.

  It was a creature perhaps eight feet tall, made entirely out of vast slabs of muscle, and spackled with cobblestone-size scales that glistened bronze in the firelight. It wielded a massive war hammer, the head of which scythed through the pressed ranks like a blade through wheat. Small bodies flew, anatomy dis
torted, fluids flying in great spraying arcs. The scent of blood and shit filled the air.

  The goblins screamed, panicked, tried to flee back into the dull dead end of the cavern. A few brave souls leaked around the edge of the creature’s arc of death, fled toward the entrance. They raced past Will, and he tracked them as they hurtled toward the night.

  And that was when he saw her. The angel to pair with the demon deeper in the cave. She was etched in moonlight, sweat-slick hair pulled back into a haphazard ponytail, mouth set in a grimace of rage. She held a sword in one hand, a dagger in the other. She slit the throat of the first goblin that tried to get past her, cut the legs out from beneath the next. It collapsed on severed knees, screamed so hard it retched.

  The vast lizard demon waded into the cave, splashing death upon the walls and floor, and the woman followed, ending the lives of those initial survivors one by one with sharp, careful precision. Like a surgeon following in a butcher’s wake.

  Could they be demigods? When the gods manifested, they usually had just one thing on their mind. Anyone unfortunate enough to fall under their glamour and be impregnated was rarely allowed to go full term, though. The Pantheon’s offspring—demigods—simply sowed too much chaos in the world. They were too powerful, too unpredictable. The balance of nations could be knocked askew.

  This butchery, though. Its scale. Its efficiency. It still felt almost divine to Will. The pair were quiet in their work. After the initial howl of the charge, there were no more battle cries, no more declarations of righteousness. All around them the goblins screamed, but the pair worked with a grim set to their jaws.

  But as he watched, Will decided, no. Not divine. While the scale and the proficiency of this slaughter was a new vista for him, this was still quotidian butchery. There were no lightning bolts, no quakes of telekinetic power. Just blade, and blood, and bone.

  So who in the Hallows were they?

  Eventually the slaughter was done. All about them were the dead and dying. The pair stood, panting, looked at each other, sighed, and shrugged.

  “See,” said the lizard monster in a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together, “that is being more fun than baking.”