Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  47

  Where There’s Smoke…

  Lying, replete, upon his island, Dathrax raised his head. There was a strange smell upon the air. He was having trouble placing it.

  He had been thinking about Mattrax, about what had happened to him. Dathrax had never liked Mattrax. He wouldn’t have called him a rival exactly—that would have acknowledged that he and Mattrax existed in the same league as each other—but of the other members of the Consortium, Mattrax was the one with whom he had interacted the most often, and the most acrimoniously.

  In many ways he should be celebrating Mattrax’s death. They had had a number of competing trade agreements with Vinland and Batarra. And Dathrax’s highly profitable grape trade route had been consistently, even suspiciously, plagued with bandits where it had run through Mattrax’s territory.

  The problem was the manner of Mattrax’s death. If he had choked on an ox bone, or found some particularly inventive way to die of gout, if he had been crushed by the weight of his own stash of gold… well the merchant guilds of Vinland and Batarra could have understood that, respected it even. Death by indulgence was something they all secretly wished for as an epitaph. But Mattrax had not had the decency to die that way. As he had been in life, Mattrax was an insolent son of an iguana slut lizard.

  A popular uprising. It was almost enough to make Dathrax spit fire.

  Almost…

  This prophet. This popular fucking hero. They kept raising the price on his head. By the Hallows it was almost so high that he would consider hunting down the human stain himself…

  Dathrax snorted at his own joke. Two pathetic wisps of smoke rose from his nostrils, withered in the evening breeze.

  Smoke…

  That was what he could smell.

  And smoke meant…

  But he couldn’t… Well… he could. He just… He had a sore throat, probably. He would be breathing fire in no time.

  Dathrax was up on his feet. Sniffing the air, trying to trace the scent. Had one of the others in the Consortium found out about his temporary problem? Were they all holed up in the Hallows’ Mouth volcano mocking him?

  He scrabbled up one slope of the earthen bowl that contained his hoard. Coins and crowns shifted beneath his feet, making the going hard. He spread his wings, beat once, rose up into the air, scanned the horizon.

  And there, a red smudge on the horizon, in opposition to the setting of the sun: Athril itself. His stronghold. The seat of his power, his garrison, the home of all his gods-fucking-cursed taxes.

  His town burned. Its smoke drifting to him across the water.

  Curling his lip, Dathrax beat his wings, and went to rain down hell on whoever dared to disturb his evening’s repose.

  48

  Far, Far Too Late

  Will emerged from the ship’s hold into a world of flame and chaos.

  “Gods’ hex,” he whispered. “What did you do?”

  Athril was a burning shell of a town. Ash, smoke, and screams rose in equal measure. All around the garrison, guards and townspeople were twisted in thrashing, bleeding bundles of struggling limbs.

  “It was Firkin,” Quirk mumbled.

  “You were meant to be in charge!” Blame and horror were probably not the most helpful things to add to the situation, but Will couldn’t contain them. He just couldn’t. He couldn’t believe this situation.

  Again. Again everything had gone to shit. What had he been thinking? How had he allowed Lette to talk him into this?

  He looked at her. He saw his own look of horror in her eyes. Her lips made a small round O of shock.

  Those lips…

  That distracted him from his bewilderment for a moment. And no, he could not blame Lette. Not even if she did deserve some of it. He had known he didn’t know what he was doing. But he had gone ahead and laid out his plan anyway. Even knowing how many lives were on the line.

  Gods… How many bodies lined Athril’s streets tonight? How many deaths was he responsible for?

  “This isn’t a town,” he whispered. “This is a fucking funeral pyre.”

  Beside him, Lette shook her head. “No. It’s worse,” she said. “It’s a signal beacon to Dathrax that someone is screwing with his turf. We have to get out of here before he notices. Before he comes and roasts us alive.”

  Gods, yes. She was right, Will knew. But he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed by the enormity of this disaster.

  “Come on.” Lette grabbed his arm. “We have to move before it’s too late.

  “Hrm,” Balur rumbled. “About that…”

  49

  Dragons Come Home to Roost

  “Oh,” Quirk breathed. “Oh.” A sigh. An exhalation of breath to make room for her expanding wonder.

  She watched as Dathrax swept in over the waters of Athril’s Lake.

  He was majestic. He was a piece of the heavens peeled away from the sky and brought to life. His wingspan was as wide as a palace. His scales were the color of warming coals—charred black brushed with a deep burning red. His claws were the gray of polished steel, his teeth the yellow of old parchment. He rode the thermals over the lake like a king rode his charger to war. His sinuous tail lashed the air. Scales rose like the dorsal fins of a fish along his back. His head was massive, the size of an oxcart, the vast jaw occupying almost all of its length.

  And his eyes. His burning bright eyes.

  For a moment she believed their gazes met. Across the distance and the waters. Like lovers at their first dance. She felt his gaze boring into her, peeling away the layers, the carefully constructed armor of academia, of morality, of humanity, until she was just a flame dancing in the mote of his eye.

  But she was not alone in this nakedness of the soul. She saw him too. He shared his nature with her, in that brief but oh-so-eternal moment. She saw the fire in him as well. The bestiality, yes, but the majesty too. He ruled this valley because that was what he was. He was a ruler, a king, the apex of creation.

  And then he roared.

  She couldn’t breathe. She gasped. There was no room in her left for oxygen.

  The sound thrummed through her. Every part of her was alive to it. His roar was the unheard music of her soul.

  She tried to capture everything, commit every tiny detail to memory. The number of his teeth. Their estimated length, diameter. The breadth of his wingspan. The bones in each one. How they articulated against his back. The shape of the muscles working as he reared up at the shoreline, as he hung suspended in the air for a moment. How the fat deposits hung from the space below his rib cage. Even the dragon’s paunch was magnificent. Its size. Its audacity. Its grandeur.

  She tried to catalog these moments. To capture them now as she would capture them later.

  Around her she could hear people screaming, people dying. People she had cared for, had struggled to keep happy and healthy on their journey to this place. And she did not care. Everything was eclipsed by this moment.

  “Beautiful,” she breathed. “He’s absolutely beautiful.”

  Dathrax crashed down on the outer wall of the garrison, rear claws pulverizing the wood that he grasped. The wall struggled, sagged, collapsed.

  Dathrax landed heavily on all fours.

  “Meh,” said Balur, standing almost forgotten at her side. “He is a fat fucking lizard, and he is going to die.”

  50

  Taking Flight

  Well, thought Will, this is it. This is how I’m going to die.

  Dathrax roared again. Guards and citizens quailed. A circle of desolate ground opened up, as if blasted clear by the force of the dragon’s rage. People tripping in their haste to flee. Dathrax, bent, shoveled them up into his massive jaws. He bit down. Bodies exploded beneath his teeth. Organs were forced out between bones by the strength of the bite, flying through the crowd like bloody shrapnel.

  And then, still, madly persistent in the wake of Dathrax’s roar, voices rising up. “The prophet! The prophet!”

  Shut up, Will thoug
ht desperately. Stop saying my name.

  Dathrax advanced through the decimated garrison. People fled. He barked, and snapped, and roared. He bit through the corners of barracks. Blades shattered beneath his teeth.

  Why doesn’t he just set us on fire? Will wondered. He kept waiting for Dathrax to rear back, to see the light at the back of his throat. He was braced for a fireball that just wasn’t coming.

  They had to do something. Attack was futile. There was nowhere to hide. That left running.

  “A boat!” he shouted. “We’re on a boat!”

  “Yes.” Balur nodded calmly next to him. “That is being correct.”

  Will turned and punched him. His fist collided with something that felt like a cliff face. He bit back on his grunt of pain in order to bellow, “Cast off you, fucker!” instead. “Get us out of here. Out on the water.”

  Balur creased his brow. “Why?” He sounded genuinely confused.

  “Oh,” Will said through clenched teeth, “I don’t know. It just, you know, seemed absolutely fucking essential to the bit where we run away with all the money and don’t fucking die!”

  Balur look hurt in a way that Will’s punch had failed to achieve. “But I am wanting to kill it.” He pointed at Dathrax.

  Will nodded. “Okay, you stay here and do that while the rest of us run away.” He looked to Quirk and Lette. “Sound like a plan?”

  “Absolutely.” Lette was already moving toward one of the mooring ropes.

  Quirk just stood staring at Dathrax. Panic, Will assumed, had robbed her of her senses.

  “Hey!” Balur still looked hurt. But Will was too busy moving away from the pilot’s cabin and toward the mooring ropes to pay that much heed. He reached the first one, started to uncoil it from around the mooring post. A moment later Lette was there. She hacked through it with her short sword. The rope fell away.

  “Here.” She held the sword out to him. “Take this.”

  It was Will’s brows’ turn to furrow. “Why?”

  Lette cuffed him lightly. “All the obvious fucking reasons.”

  Dathrax was closing the distance. Whether he had truly spotted them, or if the gods were just pissing on Will from all the way up in the heavens, he wasn’t sure, but the end result was the same. They would die very soon unless they got the boat moving.

  He used Lette’s short sword to hack through another mooring rope. Lette was on the other side of the boat using her broadsword to set them loose.

  Will hacked at another line. It severed with an audible snap. The boat lurched beneath him, settling more firmly on the launch ramp. It began to slide toward the water. Slowly at first, picking up speed. The pitted steel hull screamed against the rough stone.

  And then with a crash of spraying water, they hit the lake, were free of the ramp, and were sliding through the water. Above Will, sails suddenly snapped taught. He looked up, saw Lette flinging herself through the rigging, snapping lines tight, looping knots.

  He breathed fully for the first time since standing upon the deck of the boat. They were getting away. They had a hold full of gold, and they were getting away.

  Gods, they were even getting away from Firkin and the crowds of worshippers.

  It might not have worked perfectly, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it had worked enough.

  Balur strode up to him. “I am still objecting to this fleeing nonsense. I am not liking to be turning and running.”

  Will just shrugged. He was not giving a shit what Balur liked.

  “Oh,” said Quirk, still standing at the edge of the boat, still staring back at the shoreline. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  Will turned, blanched.

  A roar reached out to them across the water.

  Dathrax, wings spread, was rising up from the ruins of Athril, and giving chase across the lake.

  51

  Totally Fucked

  Okay, Will thought to himself. This time we are definitely going to die.

  “Ballista!” The scream came from above. Will looked up again. Lette was descending through the rigging as fast as it was possible to do without just calling it “falling.”

  “Get to the fucking ballista!” she yelled, and even managed to point, though Will couldn’t work out how that was possible unless she’d had a third arm all along and just failed to mention the thing.

  He decided to hold that question for later.

  Instead he spun, saw the series of three ballistas lined up along the side of the boat. One even had a bolt loaded, a thick rope stretched taut behind it, ready to fling the spear-size bolt into the heavens.

  Or potentially into the underbelly of the enormous flying death-beast that was chasing them down.

  He scrambled toward the war machine, took hold of the massive stock. It was mounted on a steel column, able to pivot both vertically and horizontally. In a calmer moment, Will might have taken the time to be impressed by the workmanship and ingenuity. Or possibly to be disgusted by the fact that Dathrax would shell out top coin for something to defend his tax barge, but would leave the citizens beholden to him squatting in squalor. But things were not calm. So instead he screamed, “Fuck you!” and loosed a bolt at the beast.

  The whole ballista lurched in his grip. A great thrumming spasm that ran up his hands and made his teeth click. His feet skittered across the deck.

  The ballista bolt flew, arcing up into the night. Firelight glinted off its steel tip.

  It fell twenty feet short of Dathrax. The dragon screamed, swooped up, heading out of range, preparing for a plunge.

  “What is it you are doing?” growled a voice in Will’s ear.

  “I’m sorry,” Will babbled. “I didn’t know the range. Lette was saying… I thought she meant—”

  He was cut off by Balur’s powerful hand slamming into his chest, sending him to the floor.

  “You are trying to steal my kill!” Balur roared.

  Will’s head sang ribbons of light and pain through his skull from where it had hit the deck, but he still had the wherewithal to think, Oh for fuck’s sake.

  “We are meeting the beast on the deck. Like men,” Balur growled. “We are seeing then whose mettle is being a match for it. Then I shall be seeing if you can truly back up the claims of your followers.”

  “I never said I killed the dragon!” Will screamed, intimately aware that he was moments away from being killed by a dragon. “I tried to explain that to them very clearly. They won’t listen.”

  “Dathrax is being my kill!” Balur roared. “You are not to be stealing it from me.”

  Beside them there was another cracking twang as a second ballista bolt shot into the heavens. Will and Balur snapped their heads to stare.

  High above, Dathrax screamed.

  Lette stood there, cranking the rope back into place while Quirk fit another bolt back into the groove of the barrel.

  “Here’s a suggestion,” Lette said, without looking at them. “How about you two put your dicks back in your britches and actually help out.”

  Will felt his eyes go wide. “My dick. I didn’t…”

  Dathrax screamed again. And then the sound of beating wings dropped away. And then Will had more important things to do than protest his innocence.

  Dathrax dropped like a piece of flaming midnight. Rage, and claws, and jaws that opened like the gates of the Hallows. The pilot’s cabin exploded into splinters. Dathrax slammed through it, claws outstretched.

  Piloting, thought Will. One of us should have been doing that.

  He would have loved to have followed that up by thinking it was the first time their incompetence had saved them.

  Dathrax shot off, launching himself back up into the night. Within moments his massive bulk was just a shadow in a night sky.

  Will stared in horror. The devastation had been so absolute and so abrupt.

  “He’s trying to cripple the boat,” Lette called. She was leaning back on the stock of the ballista, angling it up as steeply as it
would go, hunting the heavens. “Kill our maneuverability. Someone get us to open water. Somewhere we can move.”

  “Let him be coming!” Balur bellowed. “Let him be tasting my hammer in his throat.”

  “Shut the fuck up and steer!” Lette yelled.

  “I’ll do it.” Quirk went to dart away.

  Balur caught her by the shoulder. “No,” he growled. “Burn him. Set him alight in the dark.”

  This was a double standard slightly too far for Will. “She’s allowed to try and shoot at him in the sky, but I get punched to the floor?” His ribs still ached from where Balur had pushed him.

  No one seemed interested in joining him in his outrage.

  “No,” Quirk said. She was staring at the ruined pilothouse. “I won’t do it. That’s not who I am anymore.”

  “We need to see,” Lette said from behind her. “We’re blind. We need to know where he is so we can shoot him.”

  Quirk still stared into space. She muttered something.

  “What?” Lette said.

  But Will had heard her. She had said, “He’s majestic.” He wished he hadn’t heard it, but he had.

  He was saved from working out what to truly think about that utterance and its implications by the dragon himself.

  Dathrax dropped, shrieking out of the night. He smashed into the front mast. The massive pillar of oak shattered like so much kindling beneath his claws. Rigging snapped, whipped the air. Sails flapped like writhing bodies. And then the mast was smashing down onto the deck, flipping end over end toward them.

  Balur bellowed, released Quirk, sent her flailing toward the edge of the boat, as he flung himself backward, sprawling back down the steps leading to the hold.

  “Cois’s syphilitic cock!” Lette screamed.

  Will stared as the shattered mast plunged down the deck toward them, digging a furrow through the decking. A ballista was flung away into the waters. The air was full of shrapnel.

  He dived toward Lette. She was hauling another of the ballistas, trying to line up a shot. A tangle of wood and rope was barreling toward her head.