Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  Quirk nodded slowly. “You have a point.”

  “I think I’d like company,” he told her. It seemed a sensible step considering how solitude was working out.

  Quirk considered that. “I’m not sure I do.”

  He shrugged. “If it doesn’t work for you, I’ll clear off. I’m not making much progress up here.”

  “Progress on what?” She seemed to regret the question almost as soon as it was out of her mouth. But he wasn’t willing to let the opening go.

  “What to do next.”

  At first he thought she was smiling. But perhaps, upon closer inspection, it was more just a baring of teeth. “Trying to come up with a plan?”

  He shook his head. “Trying to come up with whether I should come up with a plan.”

  Some of the tension seemed to go out of Quirk’s shoulders. She sagged a little, stepped off the stairs, and walked toward him. She sat down on the creaking wooden floorboards. This place had been an attic once, he thought. Battered old possessions—the sort that nobody actually wanted, but didn’t want to throw away either; the ambivalent detritus of living—were scattered about them. Poorly executed oil paintings of people with buck teeth and mismatching eyes. Religious texts everyone owned but that no one read. Chests of clothes that were providing a good home for moths.

  “They’ve really got you all twisted up, haven’t they?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Lette.” Quirk looked at him flatly. “Balur too. And Firkin. All of them.”

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Balur and Firkin didn’t seem like the most adept schemers. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being called their patsy. And as for Lette…

  “What about you?” he said, a touch defensively. “You have no interest in what I do next?”

  The look she gave him was utterly unguarded. Utterly desolate. “Fuck you,” she said, and abruptly stood up.

  Will didn’t know what had just happened. He stared up at her. “What?” he asked. “What happened? What in the name of the Hallows did I just say?”

  “What happened? What happened?” Quirk’s eyes were wild as she looked down at him. The wind wafting through the town made her long dress billow around her. Her mouth became a rictus, not quite a smile, not quite a cry of anguish. “I chose, Will,” she said. “I made a decision.”

  Will remembered the events of the night before once more. Quirk standing there, just staring at Dathrax. The words “he’s magnificent” on her lips.

  “A good one?” he asked hopefully.

  He didn’t really feel hopeful.

  “A long time ago,” Quirk said, “I told myself I wouldn’t use my magic anymore. I had been used by a… He was called Hethren. He was… a bandit. Worse, I suppose. But he looked at me and all he saw was my magic. And when he looked at my magic, all he saw was a weapon. So that’s what he made me into: his weapon. He made me hurt a lot of people. He made me like to hurt people. With my magic.

  “But I was rescued, Will. I was saved. Not by any of the gods. Not by Lawl, sitting on high. Not by absent Barph, dancing and drinking his way in merriment. Not by Cois, fucking her way through immortality. Not by Knole, even though all the other academics I know worship her for her learning. Not by Klink, with all his wealth and treasure. Not by Toil, bringing life to our fields. Not even by Betra, mother to us all, who promises to hold us to her bosom even as Lawl judges us, each and every one. None of them took an interest in me.

  “No, it was a few good women and men. It was people who looked at me and didn’t see a weapon, who didn’t see my magic at all. It was people who just saw a damaged child. And they helped me find my way to be a better person. They helped me reach a point where I could promise to myself, ‘No more. I’m done with magic.’”

  She had a far-off look in her eyes. The wind billowed.

  “I loved being that person. I loved how happy it made them. My discoveries. My theories. I wanted to be the best thaumatobiologist in all the world. For them. And I had come so far. I hadn’t lost control in so long. So I came out here into the world. To achieve that dream. And, you know what?”

  She finally looked at him. There was a genuine smile on her face. He didn’t dare answer, dare break whatever spell this was.

  “I was awful,” she said. “I couldn’t even find a dragon. I didn’t really even know what I was looking for. But then I met you. And Lette. And Balur. And even Firkin. And stealing from a dragon wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but I thought it would get me close. And it did. I got so close. Close enough to touch a dragon.”

  She shook her head. “But I lost control. It had happened before. But this time I hurt so many people. And I was so upset with myself. With all of you. For putting me in that situation. But at least it was an accident. It just slipped out. An old trauma rising to the surface. I can understand that. I can excuse that.”

  All the mirth was falling away now—just more junk in the room. “But last night… Last night I chose. I made a decision. I didn’t panic. I had control. And I reached for my magic anyway. I… I…” She was struggling to get the words out now. “I chose to set fire to the world.” She shook her head. Let her eyes settle on him. They were as heavy as Balur’s war hammer.

  “You want to know what I think you should do next?” she asked. “I think you should go fuck yourself, Willett Fallows, and you should leave me alone to work out what to do with all the pieces of the person I thought I was.”

  She sat back down. Both of them stared off into space. The crowds were drawing closer, Will could see. Some were almost at the town gates now. The fact that they hung askew on their hinges didn’t seem to be dissuading anyone.

  “Sorry,” Quirk said after a while. “That probably wasn’t fair.”

  Will shrugged. “No,” he said, “I think it was.”

  Quirk nodded. “I know, but I was trying to be nice.”

  “Given how many people are dead because of me,” he said, “I’m not sure there’s much need to be nice to me.”

  She nodded again. Will had rather been hoping that she wouldn’t.

  “Do you worship the gods, Will?” she said apropos of nothing.

  “Erm,” he said, caught off guard. Then he said, “Yes,” because that was what you said. Then, “I mean, not religiously…” but that wasn’t right either. “Well, yes, religiously. Obviously. Sort of the definition of worshipping them. But, well, I don’t follow all their dictates to the letter. No one does really. Well, not many people anyway. I celebrate the major feast days. I offer up a few libations now and again. That sort of thing. Regular worship, I suppose.”

  Something in her look made him feel like he needed to defend himself, though he wasn’t sure why. “I mean,” he said, “they’re up there, aren’t they? Unless they’re down here, screwing your wife anyway.” That seemed to be most of what the gods did when they involved themselves with their creations. Quite often when disguised as an animal, which, he now thought, was a rather weird kink to be shared across the entire Pantheon. But he was wandering off topic. “It doesn’t seem to be worth pissing them off,” he finished. Not, perhaps, the most theocratically sound argument, but it was one that worked for him.

  “And how,” asked Quirk, “is all that worship working out for you?”

  The stink of blood and ash was thick in Will’s nostrils. “It’s had its ups and downs,” he said. Then a thought occurred to him. “Don’t you worship the gods?” That she might not seemed absurd. Dangerous in fact. Could all that have happened to him be because he’d fallen in with a heathen that the gods wished to smite?

  But Quirk said, “Yes, I do. Knole mostly. Goddess of wisdom, and all of that. She’s important to the university. There are a lot of statues of her saints watching over the libraries and laboratories. There’s a lot of beautiful architecture back there.” For a moment she had a wistful look on her face. “But that’s not really why I asked.”

  “So why?” Will was unsure about this whole line of
questioning.

  “You’re a god,” Quirk said to him.

  Will considered that. “Perhaps you should lie down,” he said.

  A small exhalation of amusement escaped her nostrils. “Not literally. I don’t mean that. Because I have not literally gone insane. I mean you’re a god to these people.” She nodded her head toward the open wall space before them; the ruined city and its ruined population beyond. “They think of you just the same way they think of their gods.”

  “Erm,” said Will. He was back to monosyllables.

  “When you pray to Lawl,” Quirk said, “when you pour a libation to Cois or Barph before a night down at the tavern, do you truly expect them to step down out of the heavens and intercede? Do you expect them to manifest at your beck and call? Do you expect them to truly consider you and your needs? Do they ever? Or do they come and go as they please, at their own selfish whims?”

  “Well,” Will said. This seemed like it was skirting very close to heresy and he had pissed off enough incredibly powerful beings that he didn’t feel the need to add the entire Pantheon to the list.

  “You don’t expect them to answer,” she answered for him. “You just hope. You just think, Well, maybe that will nudge them in the direction of doing something that will work out for me.”

  Will hesitated, then grudgingly nodded. That was, he supposed, completely accurate.

  “It’s the same with you,” Quirk said. “To them, you are a force in the world. Someone who can change things. And they are desperate for change. They don’t believe they can truly influence you, but they hope that when you change things it will work out in their favor. They’re desperate. It seems to them that any change at all will help them.”

  When he heard things like that, it was very hard for Will to regret the deaths of Mattrax and Dathrax, imminent death of his own or no.

  “So you’re saying,” he said, finally putting it all together, “that I’m like you. I have to make a decision.” Though he wasn’t sure if he knew what he was meant to be deciding anymore.

  Quirk was looking at him as if he had started to become blurry and had to be held in the clarity of sanity.

  “You’re not saying that?” Will checked.

  “There’s nothing even vaguely similar about our situations,” she said. “I’m having a moral and existential crisis. You’re trying to work out a way to dodge feeling responsible for the murder of thousands.”

  Well, when she put it like that… All the nascent hope that had been building in his chest went out of him in a single sighing breath.

  He put his head in his hands. “I just… I need to work it out. But you’re right, I’m a god. I can push them how I need them. I can… do… something…”

  He looked up at Quirk’s scoffing sound. “What?” he asked.

  She shook her head sadly. “You’re not a god,” she said, as if addressing a toddler trying to pick up his father’s sword and shouting that he was Lawl’s son upon the earth.

  “But you said…” Will protested. Because she really had.

  Quirk rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t have lasted a day at Tamathia,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to survive a day in Tamathia,” Will snapped. “I’m trying to survive a whole bunch of them right here in Kondorra.”

  “I said they see you as a god. They think of you that way.”

  “You said I was an agent of change,” he said, and he sounded petty even to his own ears.

  “How many times has that change been the one you wanted?” Quirk asked.

  She had a point there.

  He met Quirk’s eye. “How many times,” she asked him, “have they done what Firkin asked?”

  That was not math that Will enjoyed doing. But then a grim sense of satisfaction fell upon him. He had purpose once more. “So now,” he said, “I go find Firkin and tell him what to goddamn do.”

  Quirk let out her small chuffing laugh again. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  Will’s sense of satisfaction ebbed away, joined Quirk’s earlier mirth, and the household junk on the attic floor. “So what do I do?” he asked plaintively.

  “You go to Firkin,” Quirk said, “and you find out what he wants you to do, and then you pray you survive it.”

  60

  The Hand Inside the Puppet

  “Firkin,” Will said, “we’ve got to talk.”

  Firkin was sitting in a font in the middle of a burned-out temple to Lawl. The king of the gods was attempting to look down sternly upon them, but his statue had taken several serious blows, and looked a little cross-eyed. Above them, a crew of men were hard at work, stripping the lead tiles from the frame of the roof above. Dust, splinters, and nails rained down about them in small eddying showers.

  “Lip flappery!” Firkin announced to the empty room. “Tongue-smacking witchcraft. You come to weave it into my mind with your sound words. Get your thinking into my brain with your lexical magic-ery.”

  He grinned broadly at Will. “Won’t work,” he said with a grin. He turned the side of his head toward Will, pushed back the wild tangle of hair, and revealed a blackened chewed-up thing that could, possibly, be described as his ear. He had plugged it with something yellow and revolting.

  “Keeps out that word tomfoolery,” Firkin said with a knowing wink to Will.

  “But,” Will protested, “you can hear me.”

  Firkin’s grin disappeared like a cockroach scuttling for the shadows. “Prototype,” he grunted, then stared sullenly at his feet.

  Several pounds of lead crashed to the floor in the corner of the church. The tile floor cracked. “Sorry,” someone yelled halfheartedly from up above. Considering people had flocked to this place in his name, Will might have expected a little more regret.

  He took a breath. Tried to regain control of the conversation.

  “This prophet thing,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and starting to pace. “It’s really getting out of hand.”

  “Not hands,” said Firkin, leaning forward. There was still some water left in the font. It splashed over the sides. Firkin tapped the side of his head. “In heads, it is. Words put ideas in heads. Like little burrowing beetles. Yes.” He nodded to himself three times. “Words are burrowing beetles with idea seeds. And seeds grow. Grow in brains. And burst out of mouths.” He pantomimed vomiting. “Become words. Propagation that is. Big long word with lots of syllables. I know it. You know it. Because of the seeds.” Firkin’s eyes rolled. “In our brains.”

  “Right,” said Will, struggling through the analogy. “But I think that perhaps some pruning of this particular idea could be in order.”

  “What idea?”

  For just a moment, Firkin looked perfectly lucid. And perfectly confused. It was one of the most unsettling things Will had ever seen.

  “This idea that I’m a prophet,” he said, trying to find his footing.

  “You’re not a prophet?” asked Firkin, still looking perplexed.

  “No,” said Will. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but it seemed like Firkin was actually receptive to outside input for a moment. He needed to take as much advantage as he could.

  “Who said you were?” asked Firkin. He looked interested now.

  “You did,” Will pointed out.

  “Quite the bold statement on my part,” Firkin commented.

  “But false.” Will wanted to be clear on that point.

  “Well,” said Firkin, “I should clear that up then.”

  Will smiled. All of a sudden, this was going astonishingly well. Firkin stood up, looked around. His gaze fell upon the workers above him. “Oy!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

  Several of the group stopped, looked down. “What’s it?” yelled one.

  “This guy!” Firkin screeched back. He pointed at Will just to be clear. “He’s not the prophet.”

  There was a distinct pause at this. Will felt like he’d somehow been blindsided, even though this was exactly what he’d asked
for.

  “Erm, okay then,” called back one of the workers. “Good to know.”

  Firkin beamed. He turned to Will. “Well,” he said, “that seems to have cleared that up.”

  Which didn’t explain why Will felt more confused.

  “Hey,” called the talkative man from above. “Where do you want all this lead then?”

  “In the central square!” Firkin snapped back, a bark of authority suddenly slipping into his screeching voice. “The prophet compels you!”

  “All hail the prophet!” the men called back as one.

  Will stood and stared at Firkin. “I thought we just talked about this,” he said.

  “About what?” Firkin was all innocence and confusion again.

  “About this prophet stuff. The prophet doesn’t compel anyone to do anything.”

  Firkin’s face twisted through a variety of expressions Will could not entirely place. It seemed to settle on something between disgust and indignation. “How the fuck would you know?” asked Firkin. “You just told me. You’re not him.”

  61

  A Tribe Called Dysfunctional

  Elsewhere, Lette found Balur leaning against Athril’s broken town gates. The heads of a few city guards had been mounted on makeshift spikes. She arched an eyebrow at him.

  “I am getting fidgety when I am not having much to do,” he said by way of explanation.

  Next to them, a slow but steady stream of people was making its way into Athril. Farmers for the most part, Lette would say. Some alone, some dragging their families in their wake. A spattering of merchants in among them. More would follow. It would take a little longer to dislodge the more comfortable ones from their city homes. But they would come. From all over Kondorra. Eventually the weight of this human tide would force them out of their comfortable homes, make them wash up here at Will’s feet.

  Balur’s eye skipped over each and every one.

  “You’re keeping Will safe,” she said with a sudden smile. “You big softy.”

  “I am not knowing what you are talking about,” said Balur, not meeting her eye.