by Jon Hollins
“Well,” said the man, “if we run now it will be hard going. Have to leave a lot of the wagons and the livestock behind.”
“And if we stay.”
“Probably harder going,” said the man, “considering how their outriders will be finding us and we’ll be busy fighting a battle we can’t hope to win.” He cracked a grin at Will. Most of his teeth were missing. Will suppressed the urge to knock out a few more.
“Give the signal and let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What signal?” asked the man.
“Don’t we have a signal?” Will looked to Quirk. She seemed like she was vaguely in charge of these sorts of things.
Quirk shrugged. It was at least a very official-seeming shrug.
In the end they settled on the signal being somebody telling people to leave, and telling them to tell everyone else. It was surprisingly effective. A few minutes later they were all heading for the forest that they’d kept at their back. The going would be slow, but Will prayed it would be slower for the people who had to drag a bunch of trebuchets after them.
It was almost midnight when they all staggered to a stop. There was no sermon from Firkin. There were no campfire songs. There were no campfires. Women, men, children—they simply collapsed to the ground, pulled up blankets if they had the energy, and fell asleep.
It had not taken the Consortium outriders long to find the remains of their camp. It had taken them even less to figure out what it meant and where their enemies were going.
Fortunately mobilizing fifty thousand troops took a considerable while, even if some of them did ride griffins. And the woods had worked as Will had hoped. Still, in the end Will’s troops were a bunch of farmers, merchants, and craftsmen, who had spent their lives being worked to the bone, beaten down by fear and exhaustion. Their pursuers were trained soldiers, well paid and well equipped. Will’s followers had maintained their lead over the course of the day, but not by much.
Somewhat to Will’s embarrassment, he found that someone had taken the time to erect the prophet’s tent. It felt like an undeserved privilege. All he had done was lead these people into this trap. All he could do now was drag them around the countryside until finally they were too exhausted to do even that, dropped to the ground, and were put to the sword.
Lette, though, was of another mind. “Get your arse in there,” she told him.
“What?” he said. “No. Please. I’m too tired.”
Lette rolled her eyes. “Not that, you pervert. I’m knackered and I want to sleep.”
“Oh.” Will wasn’t sure why he felt mildly offended. Still, he allowed Lette to push him into the tent. He was just about to remove his shirt when Quirk joined them.
“Hey!” he said.
“What do you want?” asked Lette.
“A rational fucking plan,” Quirk said, without the slightest hesitation.
Will wondered if just tearing his hair out and flinging it at her would get her to let it go. There was no plan.
Balur shoved into the tent after Quirk. “What is going on?” he asked. “Is it that we are all going to sleep in here?”
“No,” said Lette. “It is definitely not. It is being that you and Quirk are getting the hell out so I can sleep, wake up early, and abuse Will’s body.”
“Hey,” said Will, then wondered what he was objecting to.
“A plan!” Quirk almost shrieked. She was, Will realized, genuinely furious. She quivered from rage. Smoke slowly drifted up from her palms.
Beside him, Lette went very still. All softness forgotten, as if it had never existed. Balur shifted his weight slightly.
“There are,” Quirk hissed, “ten thousand men, women, and children here. They are for some un-fucking-known reason paying attention to what you say, and specifically to what you badger Firkin into saying. Now when it comes to robberies, to getting all these people into this horrifying bloody mess, you are willing to sit all night figuring everything out. But, here, now, when it finally actually fucking matters, when lives are actually at fucking stake, you dodge the whole fucking question. And I will not have it any longer. You will think. You will make a plan. You will execute it. And knowing you bunch of half-witted morons you will almost certainly fuck it up, but at least, as I die in a painful and pathetic bloody mess, I will know that I kicked your arses into just fucking trying. To giving these people the leadership they are asking for, even if you are fundamentally incapable of providing the leadership they truly deserve.”
She stood panting slightly, staring at them each in turn, daring them to speak against her. A dull red light was shining from her palms.
The moment hung, absolutely silent.
Will tried. He truly did. He wanted so badly to have a plan. For there to be a way to fix this. But he hadn’t spent years fantasizing about this. He had never spent his idle hours wondering what he would do if he were the head of a cult being chased by an opposing army sponsored by rich, murderous dragons. It was, he realized, a critical flaw in his imagination.
“I want to tell you I have something,” he said. “I truly do.”
“Not good enough!” Quirk yelled, shoving her hand out at him.
Will saw red. Bright, burning red, pointing straight at him. He flinched away, squealing in embarrassing fright.
Lette moved, lunging forward, a dark shadow in the gloom of the tent, the blade in her hand reflecting the red light of Quirk’s palms. Even stumbling back, Will made out Quirk’s surprised yell. A gout of yellow fire flared over his head. He yelled again, tripped on something. Balur yelled. There was another yell he couldn’t place. Then he couldn’t place much because he was on his arse, feet in the air, head buried in the sheets of his cot. He twisted, tangled further, sat up, head wreathed in sheets.
Everyone around him was yelling, shouting. Too many voices. A scuffle. Something slammed into his legs. He yelled, clawed at the blankets.
When he finally got himself free, Lette, Balur, and Quirk were standing in a semicircle before him. Quirk had her palm held out in front of her, a yellow flame dancing in her hand, casting a flickering light about the scene.
There was a tear in the tent wall. A chest lay, overturned, its contents spilling out. And lying on the floor, with Balur’s not-inconsiderable foot planted in his back, was a young man.
Will stared at the man and tried to figure out where he had come from.
Through the tear in the tent wall, he supposed.
Lette was holding her short sword. It was pointed at the tiny part of the young man’s neck that was visible between Balur’s taloned toes.
He remembered her leaping between him and Quirk. Between him and magical fire. “You saved me,” he said, somewhat bewildered, but deeply touched.
“What?” said Lette, looking up at him confused. “No I didn’t.”
Which was not exactly the tender message of love Will had been hoping for. “But…” he floundered. “You leapt. At the fire. Between me and it.”
“No I didn’t,” Lette said again. “Quirk lit up the tent, I saw this tool’s shadow through the fabric.” She indicated the young man on the ground. “So I slit the tent flap and grabbed him.”
“But…” Will kept coming back to that word. He looked at Quirk. The fire…
“She leapt at me!” Quirk protested. “It was self-defense!”
“I didn’t leap at you!” Lette looked outraged by the very suggestion.
“Well, two of us clearly thought you did.” Quirk put her free hand on her hip.
“Well, two of you are clearly idiots.”
This had gotten very far away from tender messages of love. Will found he didn’t have much left to say.
“Can I get up?” the young man on the floor said into the silence. His voice was muffled by the mouthful of dirt Balur was forcing him to eat.
“No, you cannot get up,” said Lette, her voice full of disgust. “We just caught you spying on us. What do you think we are, idiots?”
The spy s
aid nothing.
“Well,” said Balur after a moment. “He is having a point.”
“Shut up,” Lette told him. She poked her short sword into the nape of the spy’s neck. “Now talk. What are you doing here?”
More silence. Lette pressed harder with the sword. The young man yelped. “Spying!” he shouted. “What do you think?”
“Why is it you were spying?” Balur rumbled. He leaned forward slightly, adding pressure to his foot.
The spy’s yelp was even more muffled this time. “You know the prophet,” he managed.
“We know the prophet.” Will rolled his eyes. “Well obviously…” Then a thought brought him up short. He considered it, tossed it away, and it bounced off an imaginary wall and hit him in the side of the head. He winced. “Wait,” he said. “Who do you think the prophet is?”
The spy spasmed on the floor. It took Will a moment to realize he was trying to shrug beneath Balur’s crushing weight. “What I was trying to find out, weren’t it?” he managed between mouthfuls of sod.
“Wait,” said Lette, prodding the man with her sword again. “You don’t know who the prophet is?”
“You fancy telling me?” asked the spy hopefully.
“No,” said Lette, “because we’re not—”
“Me,” Will shouted. “It’s bloody me!” He couldn’t believe this.
“—idiots,” Lette finished.
And perhaps, on second thought, Will could believe it. Firkin telling the looters in Athril that he wasn’t the prophet. Their nonresponse. His ability to wander to Firkin’s speeches unmolested. Cattak’s nonchalance at his name. The man telling him to give the tent to the prophet…
The crowds had grown so fast, had amassed so many people who not been there that night at Mattrax’s cave, that he had become lost in the crowd.
“Nobody knows who I am,” he whispered.
“What?” said the spy, trying to twist on the floor to get a better look at Will. “That guy? Are you serious?”
Lette reached out a hand, touched Will on the arm. “I know who you are,” she said softly.
And there it was, that tender message of love. So unexpected in this moment, and all the sweeter for it. But for Will it barely even registered. He was already miles away, staring into space, feeling the fireworks explode against the confines of his skull, a chain reaction of destruction and insight, everything suddenly falling into place.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh no. Oh Betra’s sagging gut.”
Lette removed her hand.
“What is it?” Quirk asked.
“Oh, we are so screwed,” Will said.
“What?” Quirk pressed.
He looked up at her, despair in his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I have another plan.”
68
According to Plan
The effect, Will thought, would have been much the same had he, at that moment, torn off all his clothes and started to whirl his member in a circle while shouting “Look at me, I’m a windmill!”
Quirk took a step back. “What?” she said. Despite it being everything she’d been asking for, she seemed totally unprepared for the eventuality.
Lette cocked her head to one side, contemplating, calculating. “What?” she asked, not surprised, though, just asking for detail.
Balur simply nodded.
“What?” echoed the spy from the floor. He sounded hopeful.
Balur applied pressure. The spy gurgled. There was a wet cracking sound. The spy spasmed and lay still.
“Gods!” Will shouted, stepping back from the sudden spray of blood that spattered his legs.
“Knole’s knockers,” Quirk swore, wiping as blood spatter hissed in the heat of her flame.
“What?” Balur’s face was the picture of innocence. At least, it was as innocent as a giant, blood-spattered lizard man’s face can look while it’s smiling at you with a mouth of razor-sharp teeth.
“The plan!” Lette snapped. “Focus on the fucking plan.”
“He just killed someone,” Will pointed out. Not unreasonably, he thought. “All over my feet.”
“He does that sort of thing all the time,” Lette said, and from her tone it sounded like this was indeed not the first time Balur had forced a man’s intestines out of his anus in front of her. “It’s like leaving a dog near a tree. Eventually something’s going to get sprayed. We’ll clean it up later. Now tell us what the plan is.”
“Well, I’m distracted now.” Again, Will was confident he hadn’t wandered into the realm of unreasonableness.
“Look,” said Lette, mimicking a reasonable tone in much the same way that a shapeshifter would mimic a man before gutting him and stealing his family, “I have grown very fond of you these past weeks on the road, and I very much enjoy your, erm, swordsmanship. However, if you don’t tell me this plan I will carve the tendons from your arms and use them to hang you from the nearest tree. Am I clear?”
Will swallowed very hard. “Yes,” he muttered. “Totally clear.”
“Good.”
“I don’t know,” Balur rumbled. “Maybe we should be clearing it up now. Folk are always smelling a bit of shit when they are dying this way.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” Lette said.
Balur shrugged ruefully. Still he bent down, peeled what was left of the body off the floor, and threw it out of the hole Lette had cut in the tent wall.
That, Will supposed, was as close as he was going to get to a cleanup job.
“Okay.” He sat down on the edge of the cot. “Let me think this through.”
“Talk it through.” Lette was insistent. Beside her Quirk nodded.
“Okay.” Will nodded. “So I’m thinking… spies. It’s obviously easy for them to get spies into our camps.” He looked off through the now bloodstained slit in the tent wall and grimaced. Lette nodded in agreement. “That’s not really a surprise,” he went on. “There’s ten thousand of us. That’s an impossible number to really keep track of. But,” he said, feeling the first edge of a smile grace his lips, “the Consortium army has five times that number.”
“I’m having trouble seeing that as a positive,” Quirk said.
“My point is,” Will said, “is it would be easy to get people into their camp.”
“So your idea is we slowly slip ten thousand people into their army and hope they don’t notice?” Quirk looked more than a little dubious.
“No!” Will was a little disappointed that that was the response. Certainly his plans had had flaws, but… Screw it. He tried a different tack. “Look, why does anyone work for the Dragon Consortium?”
“Because they are being actual men, who know that life is only being lived to the fullest when your blade is sunk into the chest of another man, and his blood is spilling over your hands and onto your feet?” Balur hazarded.
“No,” Will told him categorically. “The Consortium is in fact incredibly stable. Nobody really wants to attack a nation run by dragons, and the dragons sweeten that pot by being fantastic merchants.”
“Then they are signing up because they are being lazy cowards?” Balur tried again.
“They’re bullies,” Quirk put in.
Will had to concede those two points. “Well, okay, yes, those are good reasons. But not the ones I was thinking of.”
“This is a being a guessing game now?” Balur said. “We are going to be irritating the Consortium army with brain teasers until they go home?”
“Money,” Will said irritably. “Money and fear. That’s why you work for the Dragon Consortium. Because it’s about the only way to make real cash in this stupid, bloody valley, and because you’re scared that if you don’t work for them you’ll end up on the wrong end of a three-foot-long canine.”
“I am still saying it is because of the cowardice,” said Balur.
“I just said fear,” Will said. “Like just now.”
Balur grunted.
“If this goes any slower,” Lette told him, “I’m
removing a few tendons on principle.”
“Gods,” Will swore. Why did everyone think additional pressure was helpful? “Okay, listen. They rule with fear and coin. So what if we take those away from them?”
“Then we’d be killed in the attempt because of the army of fifty thousand heavily armed troops we’re facing?” Quirk suggested. “This is seeming recursive.”
“Just listen,” Will said.
“Stop asking us questions then,” Quirk snapped back.
Lette started dragging the flat of a knife’s blade back and forth along the leg of her britches.
“Okay, fine then.” Will took a breath. “We don’t have to actually take the gold and the fear away. We just have to make the troops think that they’re gone.”
“How are we—” Balur started.
“I’m getting to that,” Will almost shouted. He pushed hair away from his forehead. It was slick with perspiration. “They already think we’re led by a powerful dragon slayer. But there’s a difference between having heard that, and actually seeing it. For decades, no one in Kondorra has truly believed, deep down, that the dragons can be killed. That’s part of the Consortium’s strength: our despair. Anyone who’s bought into the idea that a dragon really can be killed—they’re with us now. The people who need more proof—we’re fighting them.”
“What proof?” Lette asked. She was more caught up in it now. “We left the bodies weeks back on the road.”
Will smiled. “Well… maybe we’re not entirely honest about what we show them.” He looked at Quirk. “You’ve studied Mattrax and Dathrax enough to know what a dragon skull might look like. I figure, we kill a few cows, mash their carcasses together, and parade our decapitated dragon’s head around in front of them. We make them see what we’ve done.”
“We have not been decapitating a dragon, though,” Balur said.
“I know.” Will reached out and patted Balur’s arm. Despite his exhaustion, he was caught up in this now. “But we trick them.”
Balur narrowed his eyes. “Trickery,” he said as if the word left a bad taste.
“Think of it like sneaking up on them then,” Will said. “We’re sneaking up on the enemy so we can stick our blade in his back.”
