by Jon Hollins
Balur thought about that. “So we can be feeling his blood on our hands?”
“Attaboy.” Will smiled. Halfway there.
“What has any of this got to do with spies?” Lette was definitely hooked, but she was yet to be netted as well.
“Well,” said Will, “we’ve taken care of the fear, at least as much as we can. So now we take care of the gold.”
Quirk chewed her lip as she listened.
“We need to infiltrate the Consortium army’s camp. We need to start spreading rumors. We tell them that the Dragon’s wealth is a lie. That they’re actually out of gold and have been hiding it.”
“Who would believe that? How would that happen?” Lette was still skeptical.
Will’s mind whirred. And then the final pieces clicked into place. But he was careful to keep the smile off his face. “It doesn’t really matter,” he says. “We just need to put the thought in their heads. We tell them…” And then, as if it had just occurred to them, which he supposed it really had, “… that dragon’s fire turns gold into lead. That’s why they keep taxing people for more of it, why they seem unable to ever have enough.”
Lette still looked dubious.
“Then,” Will said, letting his smile out a little, “a wagon arrives. It’s a merchant. Except not really a merchant. It’s another of our spies. They say that they’re there to demand payment. That the Consortium hasn’t been good on its payments.”
“But why would a merchant come all the way out here?” Lette asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“They wouldn’t,” Will agreed. “But Hallows’ Mouth is only three days from here.”
“Hallows’ what?” Balur looked at him askance.
“Hallows’ Mouth,” Will repeated. “The volcano where the Consortium all meet. And if they’ve put an army together to hunt us down, you can be sure they’ve met.”
“Oh.” Balur nodded sagely.
“Remind me,” Lette said, “why they meet in a pissing volcano?”
“Because they are having style,” Balur said before Will could answer. In the end, he supposed that was pretty much the answer.
“And explain to me,” Lette went on, “why in all the Hallows you would want to do this on their doorstep?”
Will had done it. He had finally found something that made Lette go up an octave. Her demeanor of professional detachment shattered and spilled to the floor, in tiny shards of disdain and ennui. She stared at him incredulous.
He held firm. This would work, a voice inside told him. Because it had to work. It had to be flawless. Or they would all die.
“We have to do it there,” he said as calmly as he was able. “We have to appear fearless. That’s how we undermine our enemy’s fear of the Consortium, by not having it ourselves. By appearing utterly, unshakably confident.”
“But we are not being that,” said Balur. Even he seemed dubious about this level of audacity.
“Of course we’re not,” Will said. “But it’s a con. This whole thing is a con. If we don’t sell it, we don’t get the gold.”
And just like he knew it would, that drew them up short.
Balur cocked his head on one side. “We are getting the gold?”
Will grinned. “All the goddam gold.”
Balur looked at Lette. “Okay,” he said. “I am not knowing about you, but I am being willing to hear out the rest of the plan.”
Lette was looking at Will the same way a cat would look at a mouse that suddenly revealed it was brandishing a broadsword.
“So,” Will said. “That’s the scene. We’re parading about right before the Hallows’ Mouth, marching into their stronghold, bearing the decapitated head of one of their own at the front of our hugely outnumbered army. We officially don’t give a fuck. We are fearless. Why are we fearless? Is there nothing to fear?
“Meanwhile they’re hearing these rumors that all the gold is gone. A merchant even showed up demanding payment. The rumors are everywhere—”
“Stop painting the gods-cursed scene and tell us about the gold, Will.” But despite her tone, Lette was leaning forward. She wanted him to convince her.
“Suddenly the prophet’s line bulges,” he said. “Shouts go up. The tension has been unbearable. Everyone’s attention is drawn. I don’t care how disciplined a soldier you are. You look.
“But in the end it’s nothing. Just a feint, or night maneuvers. So you go back to what you were doing. But in the morning, all the gold in their pay wagons is gone.”
Balur clapped. “We are stealing the gold.”
Will nodded. “Right under their noses. Right during that feint, we take it and we run. And they find all their gold is gone in the morning. And there’s chaos. Because there’s no fear. There’s no gold. So there’s no army. There’s rioting.”
“And then,” Lette said, with a sour expression, “the dragons, who are right there, because we walked right into their laps, burst out and kill everyone.”
Will let himself smile one last time. “Well…” he said. “They come out certainly. They come out, and they face sixty thousand humans. All of us. My followers. Their own. And, yes, the dragons are powerful. But we really have seen they can be killed. We really have seen them die. We could have one of their heads at the front of our army if we wanted it. They take us on, and they lose.”
Silence. He waited. Waited for them to take it in. Waited for the challenges. He felt an odd sense of calm, sitting there in the flickering light of Quirk’s single flame. He was ready for this.
“Who are we sending?” Balur rumbled at last. “Who do we send to spy and steal? Who do we trust?”
“We trust no one,” Will said simply. “But remember, they don’t know what we look like. That spy didn’t even know I’m meant to be the stupid prophet in the first place. We can go.” He pointed. “Lette and I. We infiltrate. We spread the rumors. We steal the gold. Quirk”—he smiled at her—“shows up as the merchant. It’s low risk. Low violence. Just needs a trustworthy face.” He tried to read her expression, but despite the flame in her hand, she managed to keep to the shadows.
“And you.” Will nodded to Balur. “You stay here. Pretend you’re the prophet’s general. Or the prophet himself. I’m not sure. That might be more believable to most people here than it being me. You organize the feint, the distraction. You provide cover for Lette and myself to steal the gold. Simple.”
There was another pause. “Simple?” Lette asked.
Will considered. “Well, maybe not. But it’s about the only way I can figure that we might get out of this. We’re out of options. It’s all or nothing now. The dragons have to die. Or you’re right, they’ll hound us to the ends of the world.”
Lette and Balur exchanged a look. The lizard man shrugged. “I am liking the bit where I get disgustingly rich and kill dragons.”
Will for a moment worried that the reason all of his plans had gone so poorly was that they had been selected more for their optimism than their workability.
Lette shrugged back at Balur. “It’s not great, but considering the other option is to be chased until we’re exhausted and can be slaughtered like newborn lambs, then I’m willing to try it.”
Will tried to mask his relief. It was all about confidence now. All of it. He had two out of three. Which just left… “Quirk?”
Another pause. Quirk’s shadowy form staring back at him. Only her palm truly visible, the flame dancing there.
Then she closed her fist. “You’re kidding, right?” she said.
Crap sticks.
“No,” he said.
“Drag these people into a fight?” she said. And she did not sound happy when she spoke. “That’s your plan? Abandon them so you can play at thieving again, which, gods, you have proven yourself oh so adept at.” She would be scoffing, Will thought, had she not been so clearly choking on her own rage. “And assuming you don’t fuck that up, and leave them all alone to be slaughtered, then the whole idea is to pick a fight?”
“Who do you think will survive that fight, Will?” She shook her head. “I mean, suppose you’re right and eventually we might be able to bring the dragons down. The casualties will be horrific. Utterly, unspeakably awful. And when you’re tallying up those casualties, who do you think will die first? The heavily armored knights and soldiers chasing us down in this disaster? Or do you think it will be the unarmored, unarmed farmers and merchants who have given their all to the belief that you can help them?”
There were a lot of answers to that. He hadn’t asked anyone to follow him. They hadn’t even really followed him, just the idea of a man that had overlapped with him for a brief moment. That without his plan, they would die in exactly the same way, a worse way perhaps, cowering and on their knees. That at least his plan gave them a few more days of hope and a chance to die standing on their feet.
But he didn’t say any of that. Because Quirk wasn’t interested in hearing that. She was smart enough to have evaluated it all and found it wanting.
So instead he just said, “Yes, that’s the plan.”
And this was it. This was the moment when things would hold fast or break apart.
“Fuck you,” Quirk whispered. “Fuck all of you.” She shook her head. “I should burn you all.”
She turned, and walked out of the tent, leaving the fabric flapping in a cold breeze.
“Shit,” Lette swore.
“We are not needing her,” Balur said. “We can have someone else be a merchant. That is being the easy part.”
“Shit,” Lette swore again.
But Will was smiling. Not for them. To just himself this time. Because everything was going according to plan.
69
Running on Empty
Lette watched Will work the next day. Watched him walk through the camp.
“The prophet has a plan,” he would say, touching a man’s shoulder, a woman’s arm. “He’s seen a way forward. He’s seen a way for us to win.” Or he would pick up a young child, grin at them, and say, “The prophet is taking us to a field of victory.” He sang songs—silly tavern ditties that poked fun at the dragons. They brought smiles to the worried, harassed crowds. The smiles spread, little spots of warmth kindling through the crowd. Trudging footsteps gained a bounce to their strides. Chins were lifted a little higher.
Here and there he would meet with men. Hard men, by her professional assessment. And he would put his head close to theirs and whisper. And then they too would go off through the crowd, smiling, whistling, singing. By the afternoon the march felt less like desperate flight and more like a vigorous bit of exercise. They were not a baying, confident army yet but they were far more upbeat than they had any right to be.
For her own part, Lette had a harder time finding her confidence. All she had to do was look over her shoulder to receive a reminder of how close their pursuers were. Griffins were silhouetted against the skyline. Dust clouds kicked up by fifty thousand feet blurred the horizon.
All she had to do was look ahead and see the smudge of smoke rising from Hallows’ Mouth.
It was an insane plan Will had conjured up. If she was honest about it, it was borderline delusional. She could almost believe he had cracked under the strain.
But she was going along with it. She saw—and this was almost laughable—no better alternative.
If there was one thing that could be said for it, though—it was a plan that was, in the end, based on hope. Dangerous, irrational hope. But not greed. Not fear. Not anger. Hope. And it was a long time since she’d been motivated by anything that felt like that.
When they came to the crest of a hill she looked down, saw most of the crowd stretched out before her, and felt the old coldness rise within her. She could imagine where she would send her griffins if she were in charge of the Consortium’s forces. Diving into the weak spots, where the women and children were clustered around wagons. Where they would cause the most damage. Then when they had done their work, I would start up the trebuchets. I wouldn’t aim at anything in particular. Use loose shot, something that would maim more than kill. Until the screaming made the air ring. By then the trolls would have had time to maneuver, be ready for their charge. I would have them slam into the flank for maximum damage. Shock troops. Leave Will’s followers reeling, easy pickings for the rest of—
But then she was able to stop it, step away from that coldness. She was able to see something different. She was able to see not a disorganized rabble, but something else. Something motivated, angry, hopeful. She was able to see people who wouldn’t need to fight. People that Will would save.
That she would save.
That left another question, though. She had started sleeping with Will because it was better than descending into utter hopelessness. If she was to use this plan as a balm for her pessimism instead, then where did that leave her and Will? Did she need him anymore? And if she did, and it wasn’t simply that she needed him for a good lay, or as a place to drown her fears… then what did that say about who she was? About how she felt about him?
But rather than answer that question, she stayed back, and she watched.
The crowd marched on. They lost their lead little by little. And then as night fell, as they pushed on hard toward midnight, she saw the lead open back up once more. Not quite what it had been but enough for them to survive another day.
Two more, she reminded herself. Will said it to me himself. Three days to Hallows’ Mouth.
Could they make it that far? She honestly couldn’t tell.
She met him back at their tent as night fell.
“How are you?” she asked, peeling her travel-stained shirt from her body.
“Tired.” He wrapped thick arms around her. She resisted the urge to sink into them, to rest her head against his chest, and breathe in the heady musk of his scent.
“What about Quirk?” she said. She sounded more anxious than she would have liked.
His brow furrowed. The crease between his brows was adorable. She tried to murder the thought, scowled at him desperately.
“Are we all right without her on board with the plan?” she pressed.
“Oh.” Will shook his head. “That’s all right. I spoke to her, sorted everything out. It’s all okay. She’ll do it. Under a bit of duress, admittedly, but she’ll do it and that’s the main thing.”
He had? She did? Lette hadn’t had her eyes on Will all day, but this was a fairly major event for her to have missed.
“What did you say to her?” she asked. “She seemed pretty adamant last night.”
“Oh.” Will flapped a hand. “Some stuff about seeing how the dragons governed their armies and their troops up close. A different societal viewpoint other than oppressed peasants like me. That sort of thing. Just wore her down.”
Lette wished the light was better in the tent. She couldn’t tell how honest he was being with her.
Not that she could really complain about him finally developing a little guile. She just wished it wasn’t directed at her.
There was a knock on a pole near the tent’s entrance flap. She whipped around, a knife finding its way from her boot to her hand in the blink of an eye.
But it was not an assassin come in the night. Instead it was one of those hard men she had seen Will talking to in the crowd earlier.
“Begging your pardon,” he said.
Will released Lette from his embrace. “Sorry,” he said to her, and he genuinely sounded like he was. “This will only take a minute.”
She hesitated. Did she go to the tent flap and listen? Her instinct was to do so. She could not help but feel that Will was hiding something, after all. But was it as simple as self-preservation? Or was the impulse coming from the fact that she was, despite herself, increasingly attached to him?
She did not want to be one of those shrill waiflike women who clung to their man begging to know every detail. That horseshit was for people other th
an Lette. So in the end, she stayed by the cot, got undressed, and when he came back in simply raised an eyebrow and asked, “And?”
Will started, eyes still adjusting to the darkness. “And what?”
“And who was that?”
“Oh.” Will blustered a little. “That was Cattak.”
“Cattak?” She ratcheted her eyebrow up another notch. She wasn’t entirely sure what effect it would have in the dark, but it felt right.
“He’s, erm…” Will shuffled his feet. “He’s a friend of Quirk’s I suppose. Very efficient man.”
She waited for more. It did not come. “And?”
“And what?” asked Will, sounding about as innocent as a man elbow deep in another man’s intestines.
“And why the fuck is he knocking on my tent pole at midnight, Willet?” She wielded his full name like a bludgeon.
“Oh, he’s been…” Will hesitated, stepped forward, and whispered to her. “He’s in charge of creating the fake dragon head. He’s working with Quirk to get it right.”
“Why are you whispering?” she said out loud.
Will pulled back, gave her an injured look. “Spies,” he said, still in hushed tones. One was out there yesterday, there might be one again tonight.
It was, she supposed, a fair explanation. It did cover everything from his circumspect behavior to his whispered tones. After another moment, she decided to let it slide.
“You’re an idiot,” she said and ruffled his hair. “Now come and get into bed.”
The dragon’s head was revealed the next morning, and Lette had to concede she was quite impressed. While it wouldn’t hold up to close inspection, from a few yards away it gave a fairly good impression of a moldering, monumental skull. Bones and horns were knit together with white cotton. She wondered how many cattle had been slaughtered to create it.
As the morning sun rose, Firkin stood at the head of the camp beside the creation, and sold it all to the crowd.
“Behold!” he screeched. “The bit of our enemy that sits above the neck! Where all the thinky parts go! Except his thinky parts are gone! Rotted away! Because the prophet rotted them! By chopping them off his neck! And that’s what happens when you chop someone’s thinky parts off. You might think that the thinky parts would go on thinking and you could keep them with you, in a little jar or something, and pull them out when you were feeling a little lonely, or just needed someone to say, ‘It’s all going to be all right, you’ll find a new bottle of that whiskey somewhere else,’ but it turns out you can’t, and you’ll just stay lonely, and people will avoid you because of the head you’re carrying about in a jar. Such is the fate of all enemies of the prophet!”
