by Jon Hollins
The thing he found utterly insane, beyond all possible reason, was that they listened to him. He could say pretty much anything that came into his head and they listened to him. All he had to do was tell them that the prophet had said it, or that the prophet was going to in a second, or that the prophet might say it someday soon, or that the prophet definitely hadn’t said it but wanted it known all the same—and they listened.
“Tear down the old world! Toss out the old! Reclaim your truth!” They loved that one. He sometimes—often when being tended upon by young and nubile things—wondered what they imagined it to mean. Still, he thought as he watched a gaggle of teenage boys smash the windows in several stores and snatch goods into their pockets, there was little enough harm done. And the citizens, just like him, seemed to be having so much fun.
“Burn your wasted years! Set fire to the ashes of your history!” That one, he knew, definitely didn’t make sense. You couldn’t set fire to ashes. They’d already been set on fire. But nobody called him on it. No one told him to stop gibbering. Nobody called him an idiot. If he’d told them the prophet had said they should drown him in alcohol they would have complied. It was fucking brilliant.
“To the heavens! Mount to the skies!” That was a new one. He wasn’t sure what they would make of it. It was fun to mix it up sometimes.
To the west, the dying light of the sun was being replaced by a new light as houses went up in flames. The heat rolled out across the streets toward him.
“Be reborn and usher in the new! Remake yourself in the prophet’s image!” Across the street, at that very moment, he could see a man dousing himself in oil. He set a torch to his clothes and ran off screaming down the street, arms flailing, smashing into buildings, leaving a wake of fiery destruction behind him.
Firkin smiled. Yes, he was definitely having a tremendous amount of fun.
42
Inferno Rodeo
Balur watched as guards poured out of the garrison. The light of burning buildings fought off the encroaching night.
“You have to admit,” said Quirk at his side, “that he is very good at his job.”
Job. Balur considered that word. It implied a level of professionalism. A certain mindset and dedication to one’s cause. He would not have wanted to consider Firkin as a professional anything. The best that could truly be said for him was that he was an enthusiastic amateur.
That said, there was no denying that he was effective. It was just, Balur thought, that his enthusiasm seemed to also make him side-effective. And it was those side effects—side effects like men setting themselves on fire and running screaming through the streets—that had pushed him out onto the streets. Yet he was effective enough that Balur would yet again have to delay killing the old man.
He had no doubt that his regrets would be both plentiful and profound.
Still, with Firkin’s distraction fully under way, Balur knew that he and Quirk were now to break into the garrison, steal the armored ship, and sail out to meet Lette and Will on Dathrax’s island. What was more, the stream of guards leaving the garrison had slowed to a trickle. Balur could still see a few armored men standing behind the wooden walls of the garrison, but now they seemed pitiable and few.
“It is being time,” he said to Quirk, hoisting his war hammer down from its clasp on his back. Quirk licked her lips.
“How many lives do you think have bought us this opportunity?” She was looking down at her hands. “It seemed so simple when Will said it. So clean and clinical. A distraction. Such a small, simple word. But what distraction really means is guards hacking down men and women in the street.”
Balur nodded. Personally, he had thought that that bit was obvious.
“This,” he said, “is seeming incongruous with your levity of a moment before?”
Quirk cocked her head to one side. “Incongruous?”
Balur fixed her with the same stare he liked to use on particularly cocky combatants. “Just because I am having a predilection for crushing skulls, is not meaning that I have not been having the time to improve my vocabulary.”
Quirk shook her head. “I think it’s a syntax thing.”
Balur didn’t let up on his gaze. “This is being another incongruity thing.”
Quirk’s answering smile lacked mirth. “Haven’t you ever heard of putting a brave face on things?”
Balur shrugged. A man bleeding profusely from a gash on his forehead ran past bellowing.
“There is no need to be being brave,” Balur said. “I am being confident in my ability to carve a path to the ship.”
Quirk couldn’t even muster a smile anymore. “That’s what I’m putting a brave face on about, Balur. I’m a pacifist. My childhood was a fucked-up nightmare of murder and bloodshed. And I put that away. I became a new person. I became someone better. Just an academic. And now, just so I can go and pursue that new passion, just so I can escape my past… everything around me is turning into a nightmare of murder and bloodshed.”
Mostly, Balur thought, it was low-grade vandalism and rioting, but he got her point. “Okay,” he conceded, “that is being a bit fucked up.”
Quirk let out a noise that might have been called a chuckle had it not sounded quite so much as if it had murdered all the other chuckles to ensure it was the one to escape. “No,” she said. “What’s really fucked up is that I’m okay with it. This doesn’t bother me. Not the way it should. Just this…” She hesitated, screwed up her face, as if trying to force some expression to the surface. “… mild regret. Nothing sufficient for…” She swept her hand at the town. Yells echoed out, screams. At the far end of the street, three silhouetted figures were beating a guard to the ground. “… this. It’s chaos. It’s madness.”
Balur nodded, feeling the grin spread across his face all of its own accord. “There is being something of a magnificence to it.”
“Magnificence?” Quirk blanched. “Gods, you better be drunk.”
Balur’s grin stayed in place. “I am not believing that you have ever been seeing me wholly sober.”
That shook her out of it, for just a moment at least. She blinked several times very rapidly. “I don’t know if I find that comforting, or that I’m just more upset that I find that comforting.”
At the end of the street, the figures finished beating the guard and moved on. Balur stepped out of the shadows he had been waiting in, and swung his hammer experimentally. “How about I am going and caving some heads in, and you are thinking about it.”
Quirk looked away from him, then back, down at her own hands. She closed them, but clenched them only loosely. Then she shrugged. “I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get.”
That was enough for Balur. He started to pace down the street toward the garrison. He swung the hammer as he went, letting its momentum transfer into him, its pendulum weight winding up the clockwork of his rage. He felt muscles loosen in his shoulders, the white rush of adrenaline in his veins, the sharpening of his vision. He licked the air, tasted blood, and sweat, and fear.
“Doesn’t this…? Isn’t there something about this…?” Quirk scampered along behind him. “There’s something odd about this, right? I know things got out of hand back in the Village, but we were using the potions back then. Here… we haven’t… I haven’t…” She shook her head, plainly troubled. “Why are they acting like this?”
And, yes, it was a little odd. Balur had been thinking about just that. The people of Athril had leapt to violence with surprising alacrity. Had it been too quickly? Or was the populace’s animosity toward the Dragon Consortium so great that it took but a single match to set the whole place aflame?
But only part of him was wondering that. A part of him knew that could wait until later. That could wait until his business with the town guard was done. The gates to the garrison were before him, and he was closing on them fast.
He let his war hammer knock for him. Boom, boom, splinter, crash. The gates flew wide. Guards wheeled around. Swords we
re drawn. But Balur was already upon them. His hammer descended. A skull cracked. A man fell.
“Kerunch,” Balur muttered to himself.
A guard ducked inside the circle of Balur’s hammer head. He had a short sword drawn. Three scars made horizontal bars across his face. He thrust the point of his blade at Balur’s ribs. Balur shifted his grip, brought the hammer’s head up, the handle down. His hammer’s hilt smashed into the guard’s nose. The man careened back, collided with one of his fellows. They went down in a tangle of limbs. Balur’s hammer chased them down.
“Twofer,” Balur said to the bloody mess at his feet.
Three guards circled nervously. Behind them, the rest of the garrison’s numbers were thin. Reinforcements hung back, nervous about rioters finding other points of egress. Balur feinted one way. The guards fell back, nervous glances jumping between them like fleas. He swung experimentally with his hammer. Two guards fell back again, but one darted forward. Balur let go of his hammer with one hand and slammed his fist out, caught the guard around the neck. He hoisted the man aloft, hurled him at his fellows. Their retreat turned into a stumble. He showed them no mercy.
That was when the first arrow struck him.
It caught him in the shoulder, arcing in from the left. The point did not skitter off his scales, instead finding a soft spot at the juncture of three plates of his natural mail. He stumbled under the impact. Even over the cries and screams of the rioting, he still heard Quirk’s inhalation of breath.
He turned, looked for the offending archer.
Arrows fell like rain. He cursed. Three archers at least. Perhaps four, or even five. He hesitated for a second, just long enough to take stock. Just long enough for them to pull new arrows from their quivers.
“Come on!” he yelled at Quirk, then dove for cover, running on all fours like a beast. He crashed into a wall, felt it sag under his weight. Arrows smashed into its far side. Quirk came running and screaming, crashed to earth at his feet.
“Knole’s holy tits!” she screamed. “I thought we were meant to be sneaking in!”
“Well, now is being a good time to begin sneaking, I am thinking.” Balur was aware of an irritated snap to his tone but didn’t really care about it. “Or,” he said, possibly a little vindictively, “maybe now is being a good time for you to be losing your shit and roasting all of those bastards alive.”
Too far. A glance at her eyes told him it was too far. Not far enough to push her into rage, to push her into setting his arse on fire, but too deep to avoid hurt. Deep, base hurt.
“Fuck you,” was all she muttered. But she was retreating, drawing in on herself, when she needed to be aware of the world, of everything, of all the pointy metal flying toward her head.
He took stock. The wall they were being behind would hold off the arrows, but it wouldn’t be stopping the archers from circling around. They had to be moving, keeping their momentum. He poked his head up above the edge of the wall, got a quick sense of the lay of the land, ducked back down to avoid the three arrows racing toward his skull.
The garrison was built on the edge of the lake. Beyond them the ground sloped down and away toward a dock. Numerous low buildings were scattered between. Barracks, armory, canteen, storage huts. He could make out a few extra boats moored up at the dock.
He risked another look, felt an arrow glance off the top of his skull, score through a scale there, but he saw what he was looking for.
The heavily armored tax boat was surrounded by its own low stockade wall, spiked wooden pillars jutting up into the air. The boat beyond rose imperiously above them, an attitude mismatched to its pitted, rusted iron sides. Its prow was slung forward like an underbite, its cabin hunched low as if afflicted by some terrible curvature of the spine. The cloth of the sales looked greasy and stained.
Balur felt a strange affinity for it. It’d been built for power, and nothing else. It had a single purpose, a single focus. It would get its job done, beautiful or no.
Now all he had to do was steal it.
43
A Burning Desire
The sound of arrows smacking into wood. The scent of burning flesh on the wind. The screams of women and children. Quirk closed her eyes and tried not to think of her childhood.
She had been seven when they came for her. Men on horses. Thick-limbed and savage. Their blond hair tied back in plaited ropes.
Those had been years of war, she had learned later. Hers was not an uncommon story. Many villages had been slaughtered. Many war bands vied for control of Tamathia’s outer reaches as civil war ripped through the capital.
None of that knowledge made any of what happened to her any better.
They had killed her parents. Killed her friends. They had been about to kill her. She hadn’t known telling them about her magic would save her. It was her habit not to tell people. Only her brother Andatte had known of it. Andatte—sweet, kind, beautiful Andatte. Two years older than she, so determined to protect her, to keep her safe from all the world. And it was he who had saved her from the horsemen’s blades. It was he who had told them about the magic.
She still thought it would’ve been better if he had just let them kill her then.
She and Andatte had been cowering back against the wall of the hut in which their mother and father had been killed. She could still remember the feel of the hot blood on her cheek. The coppery taste of it on her lips. She could still remember the way the stench of the horse’s sweat had cut through the smell of the slaughter. The man leering down at them. Andatte throwing himself down upon his knees.
“She’s been touched!” he had screamed. “The gods have touched her!”
The blade has hesitated in the air above him for a moment. The man’s leer had switched from Andatte to her.
There had not been belief in his eyes.
“Show him.” Andatte had turned to her, begging. “Show him or he’ll kill us.”
She had been scared of the magic even then. She had not understood it. What did it mean to be touched by a god? Why her? She had not wanted to show the man. She had never shown anyone. Had kept it hidden away. Her secret, her shame. Andatte only knew because he had spied. But she had not blamed him, because he spied only because he cared. And he cared now.
And so she had shown the horseman.
His shrieks had quickly drawn the others. They had found him, a living pyre atop a screaming horse. Quirk’s palms had still smoked. The horsemen had drawn their swords, but approached more slowly, more hesitantly. When Andatte had pled her case to them, they had believed him then.
They were dragged to meet Hethren, the monster in charge of this slaughter. He was eight feet tall, covered in muscles and scars. A corona of divine power blazed around his head. A demigod. Some half-divine brat come to tantrum through her world. And there covered in gore, and mud, and the ash of the first man she killed, they were introduced. Scared as she was, she had lashed out with her fire. He had laughed as it washed over his skin, leaving blisters that burst and disappeared. He had clapped his hands at her, and put a knife to Andatte’s neck, and made her kill another of his men. That was the beginning of the pattern.
Hethren had taken them both from that place, and he had broken them. When she killed his men, when she tried to break free, he rewarded her, and he punished Andatte. He had broken their will, broken their moral code, broken their humanity—torn it free from their guts.
She had trouble now remembering Andatte, as he had been. When he was kind and beautiful. Always the rabid horror of what he had become tore up through her memories. How Hethren had loved him. And he had loved to put the blade to Andatte’s neck, so he could tell her to burn the world. But long before some farmer had driven a pitchfork through Andatte’s stomach and torn the life and guts from him, she had not needed that encouragement.
She made Hethren strong. She had stopped trying to burn him, burn his people. She had made his whole tribe strong. She made them grow. She made the people cower in fear. She mad
e them burn instead.
And then eventually, because of her, Hethren had burned too bright. It had been ten years. The civil war was long since over. Order was being returned to Tamathia. And Hethren had grown too large to be ignored.
He was hard to kill. A demigod of the grassy waste. A creature who healed faster than anyone could hurt him. But Tamathia did not send just one. They sent a troop of five hundred, and he could not pick the arrows out of himself fast enough. They had found him, a twitching mass surrounded by dying men, and they had hacked off his half-divine head. There was no healing that.
All told, the whole thing was a slaughter. She was supposed to have been killed along with the rest. But a mage, even a rabid, mindless mage such as her, had been too precious to waste. Instead they had bound her hands in smother rags, kept her in a barrel of water, and flung her in the back of a cart to drag back to the capital.
Six years it had been before they had taken the smother rags off her. Before they were sure she wouldn’t try to burn them all alive. She remembered learning to use her hands again. The weakness in her fingers. Trying to grip her food. They still wouldn’t give her a knife. It was another two years before they gave her that.
Eight years. Eight years to find her way back to herself. Eight years of quiet cajoling, of unwarranted kindness, of endless patience. Eight years of putting up with her violence, her tantrums, her rage, her unquenchable fear. It had taken eight years, but she had found herself. She had made her way back. And at the age of twenty-five she had been admitted to the Tamathian University.
Quirk blinked and was back in the present. It would be so easy, she thought, to watch everything burn. To reach out and touch fire, the way the gods had reached out and touched her. These people were weak, and she was strong. In all rights she should burn them. That was what the world demanded, in the end. The sacrifice of the weak to the strong. That was what these dragons understood, creatures of fire that they were. They oppressed, because that was what the world demanded of them. And it demanded no less of her.
