Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  He slammed bodily against the dragon’s skull. He felt scales rip at his skin. But there was no time for pain. Even as he skidded over the dragon’s brow, even as he felt the raw heat of Dathrax’s breath blasting up at him from outraged nostrils, even as he planted one foot in one of Dathrax’s yellow eyes, he reached out a hand for Balur just as the lizard man plunged toward the dragon’s jaws.

  And caught him.

  That was, he thought, pretty fucking magnificent.

  Then the pendulum weight of Balur tore through Will’s precarious balance, pivoted them like ballerinas, Will’s heel slip-sliding over Dathrax’s eye, both of them flailing in the air. Then, hand in hand they went tumbling toward the water below.

  56

  Reaction Shot

  Okay, Lette thought, that was pretty impressive. Incredibly stupid. But impressive.

  57

  Splashdown

  The only thing that saved Will was that just before he hit the water, Dathrax did.

  The dragon finally lost his fight with the disintegrating surface of the boat, and fell, flailing and tangled into the waters below.

  Will struck one half-stretched wing, felt a lot of important organs slam into each other, tasted his spleen, felt Balur’s weight tear his arm out of its socket, and was sent flying out across the lake.

  The dragon, at the mercy of momentum as it had been at the mercy of few other things during its long and repulsive life, went straight down and landed in the dark waters of the lake.

  The Leviathans lost their shit entirely.

  Even as Will fought to stay above the surface of the water, the dragon’s screams made him shudder.

  Suddenly a powerful hand caught him by the neck, hoisted him upward. He yelled, but then found he was staring into Balur’s face. The lizard man was floating on his back, legs kicking powerfully, tail wriggling sinuously. He seemed to be staying afloat effortlessly. Despite this, his slit eyes were crossed and he was bleeding from a considerable gash in his forehead.

  “We are being in the water,” he said thickly. “How are we getting in the water?”

  “Oh,” said Will, still getting his own bearings. “Usual way. Attacked by a dragon. Had our boat torn apart. Were sent flying into a lake populated by giant mutant fish.”

  Balur’s eyes focused a little at that. He managed to fix Will with a narrow stare. “Dragon?” he said. “I must be killing it.”

  Another scream tore through the night.

  “Sorry,” said Will. “I think the Leviathans have beaten you to it.”

  Dathrax was still struggling, but more in the way that a well-flayed steak struggles when repeatedly beaten with a large machete, than in any sort of coordinated, I-might-survive-this kind of way. The boat was a rapidly diminishing pyramid of wood.

  “Fucker of whores!” Balur yelled. “That is being my kill! Those fish are stealing it from me!”

  Will, however, was more concerned with other issues.

  “Lette,” he said. Lette had still been aboard that boat. She had no flailing dragon to knock her free. She was there, in that mess of jaws and death.

  “What about her?” Balur had caught the tone in his voice. The bloodlust momentarily drained away. He pawed at the blood trickling down in his face and into his eyes.

  Will wasn’t sure how to put it. Lette and Balur were… Close didn’t seem to be the exact word. It held implications of intimacy that didn’t fit. Integral fit the bill perhaps. They were lopsided halves of some indivisible unit. And they had just been divided.

  However he put it, it would need to be delicate.

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  Balur went totally still. His legs did not kick. His tail did not slide from side to side. Slowly they began to sink.

  “Quirk too,” Will added as an afterthought.

  Water lapped higher.

  “She is being dead?” Balur’s growl was so deep that Will barely caught it.

  He opened his mouth to reply.

  “Who’s dead?” said someone behind him. They sounded rather curious.

  Will twisted in Balur’s grip, felt his jaw go slightly slack. “You are,” he said.

  Lette, treading water, managed to give a small shrug. “I’ve had worse,” she said.

  “Fuck all of you.” Quirk, paddling to catch up with Lette, seemed to be taking things with less calm.

  “If you are ever telling me she is being dead again,” Balur said to Will, “then I will be seeing how hard I am having to squeeze to make you vomit up your intestines.”

  That, Will found, took a lot of the wind out of his sails. His thoughts turned to darker territory.

  “How come we aren’t being eaten alive?” he asked.

  “The Leviathans,” Lette said, “seem more preoccupied with Dathrax. Guess he’s tastier. Or just bigger.” Her breath was punctuated by a slight panting as she kept up her strokes.

  “How about,” Will suggested, “we head to shore before they finish him off and go looking for dessert.”

  “Sounds good,” Lette said.

  “Fuck all of you,” Quirk said again.

  And so they swam through the dark waters back toward the burning town of Athril, as behind them, the bloody remains of the dragon Dathrax sank beneath the waves.

  PART 3: A JOB WORTH DOING WELL

  58

  Love and War

  Exhausted, limbs shaking from exertion, Lette dragged herself up onto the dock of Athril’s Lake. She flopped onto her back, tried to get her breath back, failed, waited to gather the energy necessary to try again.

  Balur came next, rising, dripping out of the water like some protean beast leftover from a mythic age. He dragged Quirk in one hand, Will in the other. He dumped them unceremoniously. They collapsed, shivering and gasping, on the cold cobblestones. They had almost drowned a hundred yards from shore and Balur had dragged them bodily through the water from there. The lizard man managed to keep his feet, but even he was hunched over, breathing hard. The gash in his forehead was still dripping blood onto the edge of the dock.

  They were miserable, they were exhausted, but they were alive. The attention of the Leviathan fish had been wholly focused on Dathrax’s bloated corpse. They had been left unmolested in the waters.

  Lette’s mind went back to those final moments. The pivoting boat, everything collapsing, tumbling away. Balur pitching down toward death and dismemberment. And then Will. Why had she asked him to help? Why hadn’t she done it herself?

  She remembered again how it had felt to be hanging there. Dathrax and the Leviathan fish below her. Everything burning. Being able to smell the smoke as the rails burned in Quirk’s grip, only a few feet away.

  She had been afraid. She had asked Will because she had been struck with a moment of weakness. There was no other way to put it.

  Lette did not like that memory. She was a warrior, a rogue, a scoundrel, a pirate. She had a gods-hexed reputation to maintain.

  But Will had not hesitated. He had leapt out, had careened toward death. And he had done it for Balur.

  What was Balur to Will? The lizard man was tribe to her. Family. Partner. Home in some messed-up kind of way. But to Will? To Will he was probably just some giant, some barbarian. Which, she supposed, was what Balur was. He was a simple creature. A war hammer smashing without apology into the face of life.

  Who would risk their life for that?

  In the end, of course, the answer was simple, but she waited for a while before she faced it. Will had saved Balur because of what the lizard man meant to her.

  It was an act of… what? Love? A shudder mixed with the shivering. She was not someone to love. Not unless love meant a bottle of spirits and a tavern bed rented by the hour. And yet replacing the word with lust left something hollow in her gut.

  Infatuation perhaps? She thought she could live with that word.

  Such a fucking stupid thing to do. And yet impressive in its boldness. In the grandiosity of its dumbness. I will be this st
upid for you, it said. And there was something very flattering in that.

  She dragged herself that much closer to Will, reached out and squeezed his hand. He looked over at her. A smile started to form. Then it turned into a gagging sound. He turned away just in time to miss her.

  “The sound of victory?” she managed.

  He looked up at her, grinned queasily, wiped his chin with the back of his free arm. There have, Lette thought, been more romantic moments charted in the annals of history.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re alive. I guess that counts for something.”

  She nodded. “Something.”

  He hesitated. “I quite want to kiss you again,” he said. “But I just…” He nodded in the vague direction of the vomit.

  “We can hold hands,” she said.

  “Could you just, please…” Quirk’s voice was no stronger than Will’s. “Shut up,” she said. “I’m begging you.”

  Lette looked at the woman. Part of her was still calculating the angle to drive the blade into Quirk’s ribs, so the thaumatobiologist’s heart would empty its contents into her lungs. But bedraggled and exhausted, Quirk didn’t look much like a threat. She looked instead like the mast of the boat that now lay at the bottom of the lake. Shattered and broken.

  “I am being with Quirk on this one.” Balur nodded.

  “You too,” Quirk told Balur. The academic seemed to have drowned much of her stoic calm in the lake.

  It was a sign of his exhaustion that Balur complied. They all just drooped there, panting, waiting for someone else to break the moment, to force them into the next decision, into the next step of whatever fresh hell they had just created. Lette just didn’t have the energy to focus on anything other than the next moment.

  She should have predicted that Will wouldn’t have the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

  “Wasn’t there fighting going on when we left here?” he said. “Where is everybody?”

  Reluctantly Lette raised her head. The stubborn fragment of her will to live refused to give in. The city was quiet. Dying fires still crackled. The occasional bit of building frontage collapsed. But no one was mounting anyone else’s head on a pike. It made for a much quieter scene compared to her last visit to Athril.

  “Should probably check it out,” Will said.

  “How hard did you get hit on the head?” she asked him. “The last thing we should be doing is seeking out other people.” She pulled her hand out of his. “What we should be doing is running quietly into the night before anyone notices we’re here. We just killed another member of the Consortium.”

  “And buried every coin we had at the bottom of that lake,” Quirk added.

  The silence that followed that statement was briefer than the one before, but so much more profound. When Lette broke it, there was an almost tangible sensation of rending.

  “We did what?” Her voice reached for an octave it couldn’t reach and scraped along its breaking point.

  But she knew. Of course she knew. She just hadn’t allowed the information to make it to shore with her. But now it came clambering out of the lake like a dragon’s diseased zombie corpse come to pursue her forever.

  Dathrax had taken the bait, their wealth, and he had put it on his tax boat. And they had put his tax boat at the bottom of a lake.

  A lake infested with giant mutant fish who would soon be very hungry indeed.

  “No,” she said to herself. “No. No.”

  They were back to square one. Except now square one held an entire Consortium of incredibly powerful, incredibly motivated dragons all looking to kill her.

  She looked at Will.

  This was him. His fault. It had been his plan. And she had…

  Gods…

  He was the only way out of this she could think of.

  “What do we do?” She hated herself for asking it. Hated him for holding the only hope she had.

  “Run,” he said, echoing her own advice back to her. “We have to run.”

  “Too late.” There was fatalism in Balur’s voice. “I am hearing footsteps. Many of them.” He stood straight, reached back, hesitated as his hand closed on nothing.

  “Where the fuck is being my hammer?” he said quietly.

  Oh shit. As if they didn’t have enough problems.

  Will wouldn’t know a warning sign if it chatted him up at a tavern, took him up to its room, drugged him, and robbed him blind. “The bottom of the lake,” he said.

  Lette watched as reality ruptured somewhere in Balur’s stomach and all the bile and hatred of the Hallows poured into him, puffing him up. He towered over Will, apocalyptic.

  The serendipitous arrival of a large crowd broke the moment. Balur didn’t deflate but he was frozen as, from a cross street at the top of the docks, Firkin appeared. He was at the head of a much battered, bleeding, bedraggled, but undeniably triumphant crowd.

  “Prophet!” Firkin cried.

  Will winced.

  “Lord! Master! Utterer of the words that fall upon the ears of the people who have ears! We have come to utter words to you! To deliver to your ears the words of the people with ears! Words and ears are very much involved. They are being of critical importance! Thus you have spaken, and thus I spake again. And thus it was spaked.”

  Firkin seemed to be struggling with his oratory. He tugged angrily at his beard.

  “Firkin,” Will said wearily. “I don’t—”

  “Prophet!” Firkin screamed over him. “The people of Athril come bearing you a great gift.”

  A great cheer arose at this. Firkin beamed. Lette didn’t see why. Unless they were giving Will a crap ton of sweat and grime, they had come remarkably empty-handed.

  “I don’t want—” Will started again, just as ineffectually as before.

  “The people of Athril,” Firkin screeched on. “The people with words and ears for your ears. Except for the ears part. Their ears. Your ears are still definitely a part of this. They come with a great gift for your ears.” Here he hesitated. “And eyes. And legs. Pretty much all of your body.” He hesitated again. “Definitely all of your body. The people of Athril bring you a great gift for your body, even the bits of it that might cause you shame, and you generally find unappealing to the eyes of others. Because we do not care about their eyes. Just their mouths. And their words. And the gift that the people of Athril have for you. In their hands. So their hands too. Except the hands are metaphorical.”

  There was a rumbling behind Firkin. He finally, finally seemed to be losing the crowd. Lette settled back. After a long evening, watching Firkin torn limb from limb by an angry mob might make for quite a pleasant distraction.

  And then Will went and saved him by asking, “What is it?”

  Lette clawed at her face.

  Firkin smiled as the crowd cheered once more.

  “The people of Athril,” he said, still grinning, “present to you: Athril!”

  59

  Of All He Surveys

  The sun seemed reluctant to rise over the devastation that had once been the town of Athril. When it did so, it stared down sullenly upon events, half-hidden by a slowly dissipating scrim of smoke.

  Judgmental bastard, thought Will.

  He had found a building that was at least two-thirds intact. Its stairs had let him up to a third floor. The roof had collapsed into the street below, and torn away a good chunk of the wall along with it, affording him a good view of the city and the fields beyond.

  He could see the crowds coming.

  The sun was barely up and already the crowds came; came to see what the prophet had done.

  And when they found out? He had no idea. He would need to tell them something probably. Have some words of wisdom.

  “Hello, everybody,” he rehearsed in his head. “Welcome to what used to be a bustling, functional town. Don’t mind the dead bodies. That’s just because of everybody going insane once my name was mentioned. And don’t worry about the shit storm of dragons that is almost cert
ainly descending upon this place. From what I’ve seen so far, the ensuing death, while violent, is pretty quick. There’s not much of that flailing around in agony involved. You may shit yourself in terror, of course, but everyone else will be dead in a few moments so there won’t be much for you to be embarrassed about. Any questions?”

  No. That probably wouldn’t do. Still, he was hard-pressed to think of anything else to tell them. He missed the days when his biggest problem was whether or not to kill his father’s old pig.

  What had happened to Bessie? He hoped she had escaped the guards. She likely had. She was a wily old thing. Smarter than he was, that was for sure. Lette, Balur, Quirk, even Firkin—they’d have done better if they’d had her lead their merry band. Maybe they should track Bessie down, find out if she would lead them to safety.

  Except Bessie was probably smart enough to turn the offer down at face value.

  He chuckled to himself.

  “Oh,” said a voice behind him. “You’re here.”

  He flinched around. Quirk was standing at the top of the stairs that had brought him up here. He hadn’t heard her approach.

  “Sorry.” Will found himself apologizing.

  Quirk shook her head. She had found a clean dress from somewhere. Something silvery-white, made of linen. She looked almost priestly. “I was just looking for somewhere quiet,” she mumbled. “Away from it all.”

  Will let a smile ghost across his face. “So was I,” he said. “It doesn’t help as much as you’d think.”

  “You were laughing,” Quirk said. She looked suspicious. It was a very different look from the one she had worn when she had wandered into a cave in the middle of a rainy night. Will had the impression that the events of the past two weeks had cracked the veneer of professional reserve. Something more feral was peeking through those cracks.

  “You know who sits alone, laughing to themselves?” Will asked her.