Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  Will collided with her just as she fired. The ballista bucked. Will’s shoulder crunched into her midriff, sent her skidding. Wood smashed against the cross arm of the ballista, leapt up into the air. Will and Lette landed with a crunch. The bolt arced into the heavens. Ropes slashed the air above their heads.

  Dathrax screamed. Not rage this time, but genuine pain.

  Beneath Will, with satisfaction in her voice, Lette said, “Up your fucking arse.”

  Will pushed to his feet, reached down a hand toward Lette, but she was already halfway up, ignoring it.

  The ship was a mess of tattered cloth and limp ropes. The second mast bent at an odd angle.

  “Shit,” Will said. “We’ll just be sitting here.” He could see Dathrax in his mind’s eye, lining up a run on their blind side. Circling above, picking out their positions. While they sat there and waited.

  “All right, all right. I be fucking going to steer.” Balur’s feet pounded toward the ship’s wheel. It stood solitary and sullen in the tangled mess that had once been the pilot’s cabin.

  “Help me load another bolt!” Lette was already cranking back on the ballista. Bolts lay scattered on the ground. The war machine itself was still tangled in the detritus of the shattered mast.

  Quirk stood silent, still, staring.

  There wasn’t time to snap her out of it. Will lunged for one of the ballista bolts, seized it up. He tried to fit it into the groove along the war engine’s barrel, but too much half-smashed wood was in the way. He clawed at it, clumsily, off-balance as he tried to grapple with the weight of the bolt. It was as thick as his arm, over four feet in length.

  “Come on!” Lette snapped. She was searching the skies. Will glanced up.

  “Where is he?”

  Quirk mumbled something else behind him. He had neither the time nor the inclination to decipher it this time.

  “I can’t see him.” Lette was panning the ballista back and forth, as Will desperately tried to set the bolt in the barrel.

  “Come on,” he muttered to himself. “Come on.”

  A single solitary flap of wings. The muffled clap of giant leathery sheets of skin. Nothing else, but distinctive enough to focus all of Will’s attention.

  The sound did not come from above them.

  Will and Lette whirled around. Lette heaved on the ballista, but it was heavy, and the bearings rusted by years of spray from the lake.

  Dathrax swept in low over the surface of the lake, wings spread, their trailing edges flapping in the night air.

  He must have circled high then dived when out of sight. Reflected moonlight glimmering off the surface of the lake made the burnt charcoal scales of his underbelly seem to crackle with cold fire.

  He opened his jaws. It seemed to go on for days. A great cavernous revealing of teeth. That jaw seemed to eclipse everything for Will. It swallowed the night, the boat, promises. Everything narrowing down to that ever-encroaching gullet. That single point of darkness, becoming the whole world.

  And then light. Brilliant, blinding, as vast as that mouth. Flame that lit up the sky like a new sun. Consuming. Hungry. Deadly.

  Will braced for that last painful moment. The one where he felt the skin and muscle peel back from his bones, the sharp scream of every fiber in his body, followed by—

  And then it was over. The flame and the light faded. Dathrax was pulling up and away screaming. Will was alive.

  And Quirk was standing beside him, arm outstretched, palm smoking.

  52

  Hot-Tempered

  Once, back at the Tamathian University, a young mage very interested in sight had informed Quirk that he had created a set of lenses that perceived the thaumatic world. They could, he had told her, see the invisible strands of power that the gods had used to stitch together reality. He wanted her to try them on and tell him what she saw. Later she realized that the mage had been making a clumsy pass at her, but she hadn’t realized it at the time, and had simply been interested in the science.

  She had sat in a wooden chair while the young mage perched a vast contraption upon her head. He had adjusted levers and fitted small round pieces of colored glass into slots in front of her eyes.

  “Do you see it now?” he kept asking. “What does it look like now?”

  “A bit purple,” she had told him. Then, “Just like your office except mauve,” another time.

  He had grown increasingly frustrated, had appeared to be on the verge of saying it was all her fault, his nascent romantic intentions be damned, when all of a sudden, everything had aligned. He dropped a piece of what looked like perfectly clear glass before her right eye, and the world changed.

  She had seen not just things, but the relationship between things. She had seen how one piece fit with another, and with the space between them. She had glimpsed, for just a second, the whole interconnected design of the world.

  Then the machine had overheated, detonated, and set her hair on fire.

  Quirk had very much the same experience as Dathrax swept down on the tax boat.

  She had stood paralyzed by the glory of the beast. By the memories of fire. She had seen him in his entirety. She had not seen each interlocking piece of the puzzle. Not the muscle or the sinew or the blood vessel. Not the flight pattern, nor the physiognomy of his wings. Rather, she had seen it all. The whole perfect beast.

  She had seen how its presence connected with the other thoughts chattering and skittering in the background of her mind. How the arc of its claws intersected with her fear for the citizens of Athril. How the arch of its neck encompassed her concerns for her own culpability in their collective demise.

  And as Dathrax swept down upon them, she had realized that all the conflicting, nonsensical, potentially insane thoughts swirling in her head actually added up to one bright, clear, shining image.

  She was afraid. She was piss-her-britches terrified.

  She didn’t know what she was doing. Not out in the field, away from her university. Not in this boat, taking part in what could optimistically be described as a crime. Not in this fight. She had no answers.

  And she was very clearly about to die.

  And when the world was reduced down to that moment, to that single truth, everything became very simple.

  That fucker had to burn.

  53

  Insult to Injury

  Fire? Fucking fire? They were trying to set fire to him now?

  Dathrax screamed his rage. How dare they? How dare they even conceive of such a thing? That was just… just…

  Gods’ piss on it. It was embarrassing was what it was. If he had to explain a burn to the other dragons at the next Consortium meeting… Well, if he had to do that, it was going to be with this hexed prophet’s skull lodged between his teeth. Gods curse it.

  He swept up into the sky, using his speed to put out the smoldering fires on his shoulders. With one claw, he pulled the ballista bolt out of his chest. He tried to make his scream sound more like the bellow of rage it ought to have been.

  Dammit, he was out of practice at this. Thirty years ago, this sort of thing had been second nature to him. Now it all seemed distant and somewhat beneath him.

  They were on a boat. He cast his mind back. Someone else in the Consortium… Kithrax perhaps… had always had a rule about boats. But was it to always land on them and devastate the troops or to never land…?

  Why would you never land?

  Fuck it. Dathrax had had enough of them taking potshots at him with those damn ballistas. They were his ballistas! They protected his gold. His gold, which these bastards were stealing.

  He folded his wings close to his body. He was taking the fight to these fucking thieves. And he was going to eat every last one of them alive.

  54

  We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat

  “Starboard!” Will yelled.

  Lette glanced at the direction he was pointing. “That’s port,” she said.

  Quirk sent a jet of fire up int
o the sky. There was a flashing glimpse of scales, then it whipped out of sight, into the dark of the night.

  Another blast of flame arced up. There was another glimpse of Dathrax on the other side of the boat. Lette hauled on her ballista, but she was too slow, Dathrax too quick.

  Will finally forced the ballista bolt through the mess of netting and wood to sit flush in the war machine’s barrel. His palms were drenched with sweat. His knees were shaking.

  Then Dathrax came, dropping out of the sky like a meteor. He screamed toward the heart of the boat. He would tear the thing apart just with the force of his landing.

  Beside him, Lette grit her teeth, sighted. “Got you,” she said. Given that there was about two seconds before Dathrax smashed into them, Will wasn’t sure that taking the time to try to sound intimidating was really well advised.

  Lette fired. The bolt thundered skyward. But it did not fly free. Instead it snagged with the mess of ropes still twisted around the ballista. It wasn’t a bolt they flung at Dathrax’s heart, but instead a sprawling mess of tangled wood, and sails, and cord.

  The bundle sagged through the air, missed Dathrax’s skull by inches. It smacked into his right wing, near the massive knot of muscle that joined it to his oversize frame. The bundle flew open like an exploding bedsheet. Ropes and sails wrapped around Dathrax’s body, tangling and snagging.

  Dathrax screamed, knocked off course at the last moment. He spun out of control. His body crashed into the edge of the boat. The ship lurched sideways, kicked up a vast wave. Dathrax’s tail lashed out. It slammed into the second mast. Wood splintered, gave way.

  The mast came crashing down. More ragged cloth and rope slashed the air. Will dived for cover, ballista bolts forgotten. Shrapnel exploded around him.

  Dathrax bounced off the boat, flapped dizzily through water. He limped upward.

  Quirk sent fire chasing after him, great gouts thrusting out of her palms, blooming in the night. Flames raced over the deck of the boat.

  Not everything, it turned out, was soaking wet.

  Fire mixed with the chaos on board the boat.

  Will picked himself up. Something massive was pounding across the deck. He braced for a grisly reptilian death.

  The grisly reptilian in question, however, was Balur. “Be coming back!” he yelled at Dathrax’s retreating form. He spun his hammer above his head. “Be coming back and be fighting me like a man!”

  Will blinked, tried to get his bearings. If Balur was over there… He turned to look at the wheel standing in the shattered pilot’s cabin. It was alone again. And on fire.

  The boat was by now about halfway between the shoreline and Dathrax’s island. With both its masts gone, and its wheel on fire, it seemed inclined to stay there.

  Something large smashed into the boat. The flames that increasingly coated the deck flickered as the deck rocked back and forth.

  “The water!” Lette yelled. “Dathrax is in the water!” She was pulling herself to her feet using what was left of the ballista. It wasn’t very much of the ballista, truth be told. Just the stump of its pivoting mount. The other siege machines were in similar states of disarray.

  Will was halfway to the ship’s rail before he realized Dathrax couldn’t be in the water if he was flapping awkwardly in the air above them. He could hear the dragon’s angry roaring.

  Something hit the hull again. Hard. The boat rocked. Will staggered. The hull was struck again, and again. Will pitched forward. The rail struck his midriff. He sagged over it, stared down into the water, felt his breath tumble away from him to be swallowed by the churning water.

  Why, he found himself thinking, does Dathrax need state-of-the-art ballistas mounted on his tax boat anyway?

  The answer leapt out of the water and tried to bite his face off.

  Lette, whom Will was, at that moment, willing to sanctify as the patron saint of just-in-fucking-time, caught him by the back of his collar and heaved him away from the rail.

  The Leviathan—one of the mutant fish grown fat and wrong on the bloody runoff from Dathrax’s diet—was ten feet long from nose to tail. At least six feet of that length appeared to be taken up by its mouth. Its jaw was a prodigious unwieldy thing that lent the creature a blunt, squat appearance despite its length. Teeth jutted from it at angles that suggested whatever god was responsible for its creation had been at the end of a long shift and had just jammed a fistful of the things in to be done with it so he could go home for a cup of tea and a bit of a kip. Its scales had the rainbow glisten of a moldering corpse, and its fins resembled tumors far more than any physiological adaptation to an aquatic lifestyle.

  The Leviathan rocketed past Will’s face, stinking and snapping, stunted body thrashing furiously. For a moment Will was eye-to-eye with it, staring into a gelatinous orb the size of his head, and brim full of insane hatred. Then gravity claimed it and it smashed back down into black water.

  Blows to the ship’s hull were coming from all sides now. The ship didn’t so much rock as it did quiver. Suddenly the ballistas made so much more sense.

  In the prow of the boat, Balur was still calling challenges to Dathrax.

  “Your mother was thinking you were a shit stain on the floor!” he bellowed. “She was being impregnated by iguanas! If she could be holding her liquor you would not be existing!”

  A Leviathan fish leapt up out of the water at him, for a moment hung in the air above his head. It opened its jaws.

  Grabbing his hammer, Balur smashed the Leviathan in the side of its head.

  “You are having the genitals of a field mouse!” he went on without pausing as the Leviathan sagged back to the water.

  Quirk was running, and screaming, aiming streams of fire at the water, sending up clouds of scalding steam all around them.

  And above, Dathrax was circling around, and coming back for more.

  55

  Free Fall

  With a final deafening roar, Dathrax plunged out of the sky and smashed into the boat. This, though, Will had time to recognize, was not the lightning raid of claws and teeth that had come before. This was not deft destruction. The knot of sails and rigging had worked itself even more completely around Dathrax’s body. His right wing was hopelessly tangled with his back leg, and his neck was being pulled brutally to the left. He came at the boat sideways, almost skidding through the air.

  Balur still stood in the prow, hammer raised high above his head, mouth pulled back in a monstrous grin, howling in joy.

  Dathrax struck him full force. The front of the boat disintegrated, so much wood pulp and flotsam. Balur sailed through the air, his flight actually gaining momentum from the hammer still clutched in his hand. The Analesian cleared the full length of the hold, came down on the ruins of the wheel, and lay there quite still.

  Will had all of half a second to take that in before Dathrax claimed his attention once more. The vast dragon was writhing on the deck, trying to right itself. As it did so, the boat dipped violently, the smashed prow sinking toward the waterline.

  Shattered planking, bits of broken mast, knots of ropes, rolling ballista bolts, actual ballistas—all went tumbling down the length of the boat, toward Dathrax. Desperately, Will flung himself sideways to escape a deluge of barrels crashing past him, rolling toward the dragon.

  Dathrax flailed again, snagging more of the ruined ship around his limbs. He tried to get a foot steady beneath him, but with his weight, and the ship’s impaired structural integrity, the limb shot through the deck, to be mired in the hold below.

  The boat was tilting even farther now. Balur’s body was sliding back toward the prow. Will, lying prone, started to slide as well. He managed to brace his foot, caught hold of one of the ship’s rails that was still intact.

  The thing he was bracing his foot on yelled. It turned out to be Lette’s face. She was hanging grimly to the ship’s rail directly below him. Quirk was another yard farther down. The wooden rail she was holding on to was smoking.

  Beyo
nd Dathrax’s increasingly desperate flailing, he could see the water churning as the boat sank deeper and deeper below the waterline. Vast aquatic bodies writhed. Fins sliced the water’s surface into finer and finer froth.

  “Balur!” yelled Lette. “You have to get Balur!”

  The lizard man was almost parallel with Will, and picking up speed.

  Isn’t he your partner? Will almost said, but didn’t. The things I do for infatuation.

  He planted his legs against the rail and before he could think about it much, he leapt. Whether he traveled horizontally or vertically he was no longer sure. He smashed through tumbling piles of detritus, closed the distance between himself and Balur.

  He crashed back onto the deck, landing woefully short. He scrabbled for a handhold, found none. He plunged down, slipping and sliding. On the plus side, he was careening toward Balur on a pretty decent intercept trajectory. On the more negative side of the equation, Dathrax’s jaws—stretched wide in a scream of frustration—were waiting for them both just beyond that.

  Will could see panic in Dathrax’s fiery eyes now. The dragon lunged his massive jaws at the stump of a mast, bit down, searching for any purchase it could get. The mast splintered and shattered. Dathrax spat a mouthful of splinters and smoke, let out a bellow of despair.

  Something in Will—no matter that he was falling down the deck of a near-vertical ship, no matter that he could see his imminent death waiting for him—took flight at Dathrax’s plight. He might be about to die, but so would this tyrant, this despot, this arsehole.

  In the abrupt warmth of this hope, a plan flashed into Will’s mind. Suicidal. Idiotic. Foolish beyond imagining. But the same could be said of all his plans so far, and they’d gotten him this far.

  If he’d had time, he would have laughed at that.

  But there was no time. He simply reacted. He bunched his legs and kicked off from the surface of the deck. He flew out into space. Then he was in pure free fall. No safety net beneath him. No deck. Only the writhing, snapping head of Dathrax the dragon.