by Jon Hollins
Lette rolled her shoulders in what might have been a shrug. “Always a way,” she said.
Will felt his jaw tighten. He was terrified that they’d actually try it. That they would think that their competence with goblins was somehow enough to let them pull it off. Then not only would he be running for his life from the Consortium, but he’d be doing it with all this guilt on his hands.
He tried to lay out the impracticalities for them. “The only way to get that portcullis open would be to get everyone from the village to go up into the mountains and stand on it.”
Lette nodded. “Yes,” she said. “That would work.” There was a matter-of-factness to her tone that worried Will.
“No,” he said, “it wouldn’t.” But he could almost see the set of scales behind Lette’s eyes, weighing the opportunity. “The villagers would never go. They have this silly little thing called a desire to live through to tomorrow.”
“We could be inciting them.” Balur nodded to himself.
Will laughed. “With what? There’s no money to tempt them. That’s why we’re talking about robbing a dragon in the first place.” He shook his head. “Unless you know someone who can cook up enough Fire Root potion to drive an entire village into a homicidal rage.” He snorted.
Quirk straightened suddenly. “I could do that,” she said. She sounded surprised. Then she caught Balur’s expression. “Alchemy,” she said quickly. “It’s sort of a hobby for me. I find it… relaxing.” She checked Balur’s expression again. “It’s not magic!” she said defensively. “I told you. I swore that off.”
“No!” Will managed. What had he done? Somehow everything had gotten worse.
“Oh,” Quirk said quickly, “I’m not advocating for any of this, of course. All just a thought experiment, of course. Except it really would be fascinating to see what sort of lair a dragon has. What it collects. That really would be a coup.”
“A coup?” Will clutched at his head. He’d had Quirk marked as the sane one, despite her odd notions about the local overlords. She had exuded an aura of intelligence. But it turned out that what she really was, was a carefully created human mask over a sack full of crazy.
“You’re all mad.” Will pawed at his forehead. “You think you can feed an entire village fermented Fire Root? I mean what in all the Hallows is your plan for that? Are you going to mix it with the bread?”
Lette and Balur exchanged a glance. “That,” said Lette, a note of admiration in her voice, “is a really good idea.”
“No!” Will screeched again. He looked around for a safe harbor in the shit storm of madness. Firkin was still snoring on the floor. And Will knew that when he was looking to Firkin for sanity then things had really gone awry.
“Say…” He could barely get the words out, but he forced them. “Say that all works. What do you then do about the giant fucking dragon that would notice his front door being forced open?” He pointed at Quirk. “What do you do about all the people you just sent to their deaths? Do you have a potion to fix that too?”
Quirk shrugged. “Well, it depends how much Snag Weed grows in these woods, I suppose.”
Will reeled. Sitting down as he was, he reeled. “Oh.” He threw up his hands. “We’re poisoning Mattrax now, are we?” He shook his head. “Of course we are. And how are we doing it? I suppose we’re drugging some oxen he’s been given to eat, and having him chow down on that. Just smuggling it into the castle disguised as guards or something?”
Silence followed this. Will took a breath, let it out as a sigh. Finally.
“Gods,” Lette breathed. “You really have thought this all out, haven’t you?” she said.
Balur was nodding. “You are being really very good at this,” he said.
No. No. No. No. No. Will clutched his temples.
“Why?” he asked them. He was begging them, really. He grasped around for something they couldn’t twist. “You’re talking about poisoning the villagers’ morning bread. Mattrax doesn’t eat until the evening. So your plan requires him to hold off on killing the villagers stomping around on his pressure plate all day?”
Balur looked to Quirk. She shook her head. “On a creature that big, Snag Weed would give you a few hours at the most.” She caught herself. “I mean, academically speaking. Obviously a few hours to study an unconscious dragon would be amazing, but I’m not condoning any of this.” She sounded neither convincing nor convinced.
Balur’s shoulders slumped. “Goddess Betra’s saggy tits,” he said finally.
Will knuckled his forehead, trying to push the tension out of it. He was done. He should let it go.
When he opened his eyes, Lette was looking at him intently. “How would you deal with that, Will?”
There was an edge to her look, almost a hunger. It gave him pause.
“How would I…?” he started. “By not trying to rob a dragon in the first place.” How had she not picked up on that?
But Lette wouldn’t stop looking at him, wouldn’t stop smiling. “You already know the answer,” she said. “I know you do. You’ve already figured it out.”
Will clamped his lips shut very tight indeed.
Irritation flicked across Lette’s face. Her eyes narrowed. “Okay,” she said. “We bring the villagers up to the portcullis, open the door. The dragon comes, and scatters the villagers. So”—she turned and smiled at Quirk—“no one is killed.”
“No one?” Balur cut in. “What is being the point of this plan?”
Lette closed her eyes, took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said, “probably some guards,” she said.
“Guards?” said Quirk.
Lette’s breath was considerably deeper this time around. “They’re arsehole guards,” she said. “They took Will’s farm from him. Now can I get back to figuring this out?”
Will felt like saying, “No,” but he wasn’t sure about the wisdom of that.
“Okay,” Lette said. “We’ve opened the door. The villagers have fled. And…” She thought. “Okay, we’ve got to poison the dragon later. So…” She pointed at Will. “Someone hides inside the cave. So they can wait for the dragon to be poisoned, for it to fall asleep.”
Balur nodded. “I am liking this.” Then his almost-eyebrows furrowed. “Where are you hiding?”
Lette looked at Will expectantly. “I don’t know,” she said. “I should be able to find some shadow in a cave to hide in…”
Will tried to keep his lips shut. He really did. But he honestly wasn’t sure if she was bluffing. And he knew, knew for a fact, that there were no safe shadows in Mattrax’s cave. Mattrax wasn’t stupid enough to leave any, gods’ hex upon him. If she went in, she would die.
He looked at her.
She would die.
Bugger it.
“The locking mechanism,” he finally blurted.
Lette cocked her head. “The locking mechanism?” she said. “How would I get in there?”
“Well…” Will sighed. But he couldn’t have her life on his hands. “To operate a portcullis that size you need a very large chain, so there’s a very large hole cut into the rock for it. It leads down to the locking mechanism that’s buried beneath the plate. That’s the weak point in the whole setup.” He looked at her, grimaced. “You can slip through that hole and hide down there.”
Balur clapped his hands. Slowly a broad, beatific grin spread across Lette’s face. “Of course,” she said, still grinning. “Of course.” Her grin was still getting broader. “The coup de grâce.”
7
The Coup de Grâce
Will was grimacing again.
“That’s it,” Lette said. “That’s the whole plan, isn’t it? The one you and Firkin came up with.” She didn’t wait for any acknowledgment from him. “We drug the villagers. We take them up the mountain. They open the portcullis. Mattrax comes bellowing. They scatter. But before they do, I sneak in, hide in the locking mechanism. And I can pick it. I know how to do that. So I sit there. Everything s
ettles down. And then I set to work on the mechanism. Rig the counterweights so all it needs is a small weight, not a big one. In the meantime, someone sneaks a drugged cow to the dragon. Night falls. Mattrax falls over unconscious. You guys sneak up the mountain, step on the sabotaged pressure plate, waltz in, and clean out the dragon. Done.”
Will hung his head. But there was no getting away from it now. “It’s Firkin’s plan,” he said. He pointed at the messy sprawl of a human being. “You’ve seen him. You know what he’s like. It won’t work.”
But Lette shook her head. “It wouldn’t work. Because you didn’t know how to drug the dragon. Because you didn’t know how to pick the lock. Because you had to worry about the guards. Because you’re a farmer. But,” she said grinning, “we aren’t.”
And for a moment, just a brief instant, something like hope flickered in Will’s chest. A momentary glimpse of the future that might be. As quickly as he could, he blew that flame out.
“I am seeing a three-person plan,” Balur was saying. He pointed to Lette. “We are needing you to be up there and be hiding in the mechanism. We are needing someone to herd up the villagers. And we are needing someone to be taking the drugged cow into the fortress and to be feeding the dragon.”
“And someone to drug the cow,” said Lette, looking at Quirk.
Quirk looked like a deer caught in the glare of a midnight torch.
“Who is saying the alchemist cannot be pulling double duty?” asked Balur. “It would be good to be having her in the fortress so she can be making sure that the drugging is going as planned.”
“Wait,” Quirk managed. “This was all just an academic exercise.”
Lette arched an eyebrow at her. “This works,” she said, “and you get undisturbed access to that dragon for as long as he’s unconscious.”
Will had to say it would have been more reassuring if Quirk had not licked her lips at that point.
“I don’t—” Quirk started.
“Yes, you do.” There was no give in Lette’s voice.
Balur smiled. There were far too many teeth involved. “So that is being it,” he said. “Three people for a three-person plan.”
“I want Will,” Lette said.
Will felt his heart stop in his chest for one beat, two. He tried to speak. To tell them this was all madness.
But the vision of that beautiful future he and Firkin had imagined was flickering in the back of his skull again, like a candle fighting a hurricane of common sense.
“Why are you wanting the farmer?” Balur asked. “He is being just a farmer.”
“It’s his plan,” Lette pointed out.
“What?” scoffed Balur. “It is not seeming fair to you to take his plan from him?”
They were, Will thought, discussing him as if he were a chicken sitting on a table, neck snapped, and feathers plucked.
“I don’t—” he started, but they ignored him.
“It’s not fairness,” Lette said. “It’s practicality. Plans change. They adapt on the fly. He knows the most about the dragon. He’s a virtual dragon-thieving savant. I want that in our back pocket.”
Balur still looked as skeptical as it is possible for an eight-foot-tall lizard to look. “It is not even being his plan. He is saying it’s the drunk’s plan.”
“Fine.” Lette was unperturbed. “We bring the drunk too. We have to split up anyway. Best we both have access to this information.”
Balur arched an eyebrow. “Access to diseases and halitosis?”
“Don’t I get a say in this?” Will finally said.
Lette looked at him. He felt she would look at him the same way if he challenged her to see who could kill the most goblins in a minute.
“Really?” she said. “You really don’t want this? You don’t want everything you ever dreamed of as a child to come true? You don’t want Firkin to finally have his day in the sun? You don’t want Mattrax to look around his bare cave and see all his wealth, his power stolen from him? Stolen by you?”
Lette’s voice was low, seductive. Will was slightly aware of Balur, behind Lette, rolling his yellow eyes. But he didn’t care.
“And,” Lette went on, “when you’ve taken everything from him—just the way he took everything from you—you’ll have enough money to buy ten farms. You’ll be absolutely, absurdly rich. You can leave this whole valley. You can walk away from the shadow of every dragon if that’s what you want. Be your own man, free from debt, from worry. A young man with the means to cut his own path in the world.”
How did she know him so well? How could she land words with the same accuracy as she flung her blades? But he knew resisting this now would be like resisting the ground when you fell from a tree. She had done it. She had delivered the coup de grâce.
He looked down at Firkin. At his old friend. Maybe not his friend for a long time now. But if he could recapture the magic of those summer afternoons, planning and laughing… Could Firkin recapture something of the man he had once been?
Finally he nodded. Lette smiled.
“Well,” said Quirk, “I suppose if everyone is getting involved…” No one was paying her any attention, though.
Abruptly, Firkin sat up, stared about wildly. He pointed at Balur. “Dibs on inciting them there villagers,” he said blearily. “All about the inciting, I am, so I am.” And with that he collapsed back to the ground and began to snore.
8
Morning Breaks
Quirk was dreaming. Something to do with a cat, and research papers, and a dragon telling her that the average feline academic record was pitiable. And Quirk kept trying to tell both of them that the room was on fire, and they had to get out. But the dragon told her he was an expert on combustibles and she was talking nonsense. And the cat just kept on trying to tell her about how conflicting models of the universe could be unified by its yarn theory. And all the while heat and light was growing.
She came awake sweating. The sun was in her eyes, lancing between treetops, thrusting into the cave entrance, and landing with a crash at the back of her eyes. She rolled away, blinking and groaning. Her head felt foggy. She had vague memories of Balur’s flask, which, in the startling light of morning, she was convinced had contained some form of liquid fire.
From behind the shelter of her eyelids she cursed herself. She shouldn’t have drunk anything. That was a mistake. Drink made your control slip. And she could not afford to let that happen. Not again.
But she had been excited. She remembered that. Almost celebrating.
What had she been excited about again?
She experimented with opening her eyes again. Her hypothesis that now she was facing away from the entrance of the cave would lead to a more muted, digestible visual palette bore fruit.
Unfortunately it was Firkin’s fruit. He squatted, stark naked three yards from her, scrubbing himself vigorously with a pinecone.
“Taking care of them varmints,” he said with a cheerful smile. It revealed fewer teeth than it should.
Quirk closed her eyes again. Fast.
“It’s easier to let him just get it over with.” Will’s voice was apologetic. “Otherwise he’ll just do it later somewhere far more public.”
Quirk didn’t really care if it would have been more public. It wouldn’t have been so close to her face.
She pushed the thought down, inhaled calming breaths, ran the mantra through her mind. Be the surface of the lake, she told herself. Be the absence of the wind.
Slowly she went through the exercises she had been taught by a priestess of Knole, goddess of wisdom. She found the inner font of quiet. And encased in the silence of her mental oasis, she put the pieces of the previous evening back together. Will. Lette. Firkin. Balur, the Analesian. It came back to her. The whole night. The whole plan. The dragon.
The surface of the lake tremored, then boiled, exploded.
She sat up hard and fast.
The dragon.
She could see one. Touch one. She could poke i
t, and prod it, and measure it. She could assess the texture of each scale, could see how each limb articulated. Each aspect of it could be a paper she would publish. The sharpness and position of it claws. The contents of its spoor. The girth of its loins.
Her breath was coming fast, her heart thumping a syncopated beat against the battering-ram rhythm of her hangover. A dragon. She would see a dragon.
Be the surface of the lake. Be the absence of wind. The absence of sound. Be the lacuna in the world.
No. Fuck the lacuna in the world. She was going to see a dragon. A fucking dragon.
She fought for control. She had known this was coming. This was why she had come to Kondorra in the first place. This was the valley’s promise. Cut off from the rest of Avarra except for a few profitable trade routes. And full of dragons. Dragons risen out of history that was almost legend. Only here in all the world, in a southeastern spit of land shielded off by low mountains. Keeping themselves to themselves. Waiting. Waiting for her to come and reveal all their secrets.
Be calm, she demanded of herself. Be detached. Be the academic. And if you can’t be detached, then you must abort. Walk away from this.
She tried not to laugh at that. Walk away. As if she could.
You have to, insisted the quiet voice of reason. You have fought too long and too hard for this to throw it away now.
She stood slowly, calmly, moving her limbs with a dancer’s precision. She could feel the Analesian watching her. Another reason to go outside, to refresh herself away from stale air and the corpses of goblins. She could already hear flies buzzing.
She walked toward the light of day, feeling the kinks of a night on a stone floor slowly starting to come out of her limbs. Think this through. Be rational.
First there was the fact that this was a criminal undertaking. She had not expected that. She’d known the dragons played some sort of social role in Kondorra, but sovereign lords? She supposed she must have heard that somewhere between Tamathia and Kondorra, but she had heard so many things. Gods. Overlords. Predators. Myths. Livestock. War beasts. And one woman who insisted at great volume that they were all her lovers and had curious peccadillos concerning goats’ milk. Picking the truth out of guesses would be like reaching into the Tamathian library and at random trying to pick out the exact book you wanted. The only people who could have told her the situation for what it was were the merchant guilds that regularly interacted with Kondorra. But they and their numerous guards had made it abundantly clear that they had had no time for an itinerant scholar.
