Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  Then the opening came. The other woman couldn’t bluff for shit, was grinning at her dice, and throwing gold bulls at the pot as if they were going out of style. Lette rolled, put her cup facedown, went all in.

  A hush fell.

  The other woman stared at her with hate.

  She felt bad for the woman in a way. In other circumstances they might have had a lot in common. It was not easy to be a woman in this line of work. It required more skill, more dedication, and more strength of will than it required in men. As a rule, she generally liked women of the blade. But today she didn’t need a friend. She needed all eyes on her.

  The others ducked out of the hand. The woman pushed her stash of coin into the center of the ring with a curl of her lip. She lifted her cup. Three kings. A good roll.

  Lette allowed her face to fall, picked up her cup.

  Silence. Absolute and utter.

  An emperor. A king. A queen.

  The woman’s specific accusation was lost in her scream of anger. The generalities were very clear, however. Lette was a cheat, and a whore, and had to die.

  She had a knife out, was lunging across the circle. Dice, pots, and coins went flying.

  Lette waited calmly. As the woman was about to strike she flowed to the left, caught the arm holding the blade by the wrist, twisted hard. The woman pivoted through the air, landed hard on her back. The snap of her wrist was audible to all. So was her scream.

  Lette allowed the woman to scramble away, then calmly she took her seat and gathered her winnings.

  All in absolute silence.

  Then the man beside her clapped her on the back so hard her teeth snapped together. “That,” he said, “is how you play a fucking dice game.”

  Laughter, cheers, someone passed her a drink. And now, now she had them.

  As other soldiers gathered, brought there by the commotion, she started to talk.

  “Good thing I found this game,” she said, taking a swig from her ale. “Not so many anymore. Folk getting worried.”

  The man with quick eyes looked at her sharply, but didn’t say anything. Another man took the bait, though.

  “What you talking about?” he said. “Can’t piss in this place without it landing in a dicing circle.”

  She looked at them all, painting her face with confusion. “Ain’t you boys heard?” she asked.

  “Heard what?” rumbled one of the men beside her.

  She shrugged. “Here I was thinking I was playing with some proper, hard-core gamblers, and instead I’m just playing with a bunch of deaf bastards.”

  “Heard what?” the man rumbled again. The bass was deeper, and the goodwill was draining out.

  She took a sip from her ale, dragged it out.

  “Pay ain’t coming,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “The fuck you say?”

  A chorus of questions, expletives, and denials broke out at her statement. She took another sip, waited for them to die down. She could see what Firkin liked about having an audience.

  When the general hysteria had softened to a dull murmur, she rolled her dice, tossed in a few silver drachs. She was planning on losing this hand.

  The man next to her caught her arm in his giant mitt of a hand. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  She shrugged. “All everyone’s talking about over on the east side of camp. The Consortium. They’re almost out of coin. We’re getting stiffed next payday.”

  “The dragons are bloody minted,” said another soldier.

  There was enthusiastic agreement.

  The next part made no sense to her, but Will had been insistent she make this detail very clear. She was tempted not to include it just to punish him for being a cryptic bastard, but the stakes were too high for pettiness now.

  “You don’t know?” she said looking round, incredulous. “You didn’t hear?” And of course they hadn’t. There was nothing for them to hear. “You know what happens when a dragon breathes fire onto gold?”

  Shrugs, laughter, confusion.

  “You get hot fucking gold,” said one man.

  She shook her head, as if saddened by his naïveté. “Lead,” she said, dropping the word like the metal itself. “It all turns to lead. Worthless shit.” She shook her head as if disgusted. “And they try not to do it, but they’re fucking dragons. They breathe fire in their sleep the same way we snore.” She was embellishing now, but they seemed to need more convincing. “And so it’s taken a while, but now it’s all lead. Why do you think they need to collect more of it each year?”

  The volume of the murmuring dropped down a note at that. People shifting their gaze. Reconsidering their bets. And perhaps, just perhaps, reconsidering what the hell they were doing here.

  And right on cue—

  “You see that bloody great dragon’s head they were parading about?” Will’s voice rang out clearly in the crowd. “Didn’t even know you could kill a dragon. Let alone chop its bleeding head off.”

  The murmur was back twice as hard and fast as before.

  “You can’t kill a dragon.”

  “Why the fuck we here then, if that prophet bloke didn’t kill one?”

  “Killed two, I heard.”

  “Three, I heard.”

  “Three?”

  “I can’t go without pay for another week. I already owe those fucking whores more than a month’s worth. They’ll chop my hand off.”

  “They’ll chop off worse than that.”

  “Gold to lead. That’s alchemy. That bitch is talking shit.”

  “Alchemy is lead to gold. Gold to lead is all fucked is what it is.”

  “The dragons have got to be good for it. Always are.”

  “Always said we couldn’t kill them, but look what’s happened here.”

  “Come on, ladies!” Lette bellowed through the crowd’s confusion. “We playing dice here or what?”

  But they weren’t playing dice anymore. They were questioning everything. She took them all in the next two rounds, pocketed her winnings, and headed off to find the next set of dice players.

  By early evening they were hearing the story back themselves. The pay wagons were full of lead, the dragons were full of shit, and the prophet and his band of nutcases were going to chop the balls off the Consortium dragons tomorrow.

  “You know what?” said Will, leaning down to whisper in her ear. “I don’t think Firkin could have done better than this.”

  They had discussed bringing the old man over, but it hadn’t seemed worth it from a number of angles. He was unpredictable at the best of times, even if he was curiously efficacious. And he was needed back with Balur to help keep the crowds in line and inspired. Plus not having him here meant they could avoid seeing, smelling, or hearing him.

  “That is,” Lette told him, “honestly the only time I will ever allow myself to be compared to Firkin.”

  Will grinned. “You’re amazing. Where did you learn to roll dice like that?”

  She smiled back. “A lot of people can roll like that,” she told him. “It’s just not many who can roll like that and never get caught.”

  “You were cheating?” He looked genuinely shocked.

  “No, Will,” she deadpanned. “My life might be a shit show of death threats and madness right now, suggesting that all the gods in heaven hate me and everything I stand for, but actually I have been blessed by lady luck.”

  His smile faltered. “Oh,” he said.

  She patted him on the back. Given the scale and audacity of what they were trying to pull off, things were indeed going surprisingly well. Certainly people had told them they were full of shit, but nothing had come to blows yet. The plan to steal the gold would be looking considerably harder if they had been slapped in irons and were being pelted with rotting food matter.

  Not insurmountable, but harder, to be sure.

  “Quirk should be here shortly,” she said, glancing at the sun in the sky.

  “Which is
why,” Will said, “we are here.” They rounded a corner, leaving one row of tents for another, and saw a substantial crowd gathered about a hundred yards away.

  “Oh by the gods,” Will breathed. “It’s working even better than I thought it would.”

  The crowd, from what Lette could tell, did not look like a happy one.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “That,” he said, with a look of distinct satisfaction, “is a bunch of pissed-off people all around the pay wagons.”

  “What?” Lette’s eyebrows went up. She liked, at this point in her career, to think that she had more than a little experience in the fine art of purloining shit. And in her not inconsiderable experience, surrounding the aforementioned shit with an angry mob was not a great way to set yourself up for success. She explained this to Will using a significantly larger selection of curse words.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We need this crowd. Quirk has to have an audience. Balur’s distraction will pull them away. He’s been milking that skull all day.”

  Lette tried to look confident. The feint. Except, now that it came down to it, she couldn’t help but think that Balur was not really the feinting sort. He was more the full frontal bludgeon to your face sort. Perhaps though, if he wasn’t drinking, he would resist.

  If he wasn’t drinking…

  Gods. They were so screwed.

  And then beyond the crowd, two brightly colored wagons rolled into sight.

  74

  Money Makes the World Go Mad

  The first thought to enter Quirk’s head as she rounded the bend in the road and found herself staring into a crowd of belligerent, shouting soldiers was I have made a terrible mistake.

  Cattak had scouted ahead, told her the route to take. Now he sat at the reins of the wagon behind her. He was posing as her guard, he had told her. Will had organized everything.

  And apparently Will had instructed Cattak to point her at the biggest shit show in the camp and send her on her way.

  She heaved on the reins of the horse that was pulling her wagon, felt the wheels trundle toward a stop yet never quite reach it, the cart still carried forward inch by inch by momentum. In the back of her head, she heard an unwelcome voice spurring her forward—There’s nothing you can do except go forward now. You’re in too deep.

  Was that true? Was this the only way?

  Maybe it didn’t even matter. Maybe it would be easier to just surrender to the gravity of fate. Walk in the direction she’d been pointed, find out what waited along that path. Other directions… she’d have to figure things out for herself. Have to face the consequences.

  What would her friends at the university think if they could see her now? What would they tell her to do?

  Their voices seemed very far away.

  “What’s going on?” Cattak had rolled to a stop beside her.

  “You know something,” she said. “Some plan of Will’s I’m not privy to.” He hadn’t told them everything. That much was obvious. But why not? Paranoia? That had never plagued him in the past. Though Balur had never had to kill a spy at his feet in the past either…

  Was coming to the Consortium’s camp—embedding himself in the enemy—the only way to win? She couldn’t believe that it was. But she didn’t have any other plans.

  “I have my instructions,” Cattak said. “But I have no fucking clue what he’s up to.”

  She looked at Cattak. A hard man devoid of romance. That’s what she’d liked about him. A man with an entirely practical imagination. If she wanted an answer grounded in reality, he seemed like the person to provide it. “So,” she said to him, “why in the names of all the gods are you here?”

  Cattak shrugged. “Well, Will’s the prophet, isn’t he?”

  Quirk honestly didn’t have much of a comeback to that. “If this works?” she said. “Then maybe. Just maybe.”

  She flicked the reins, felt the horse gain speed.

  “Just be loud,” Cattak said beside her. “Boisterous. Like you’re the most important person in the world. They won’t like you, but they’ll believe you.”

  The twitch of Quirk’s lips was very far from a smile.

  “Ho!” she yelled as she drew closer. “Ho! Who here speaks for the Dragons of Kondorra?” She dropped her voice an octave or so, tried to insert an arrogant swagger into it. She might not like Cattak’s advice, but it did seem likely to keep her alive.

  A harassed-looking man in his mid-forties and drenched in sweat pushed through the crowd toward her.

  “Where are you going?” called more than one voice in the crowd.

  “Come back!” demanded more.

  “Pay us!” became a popular refrain.

  The man caught the bridle of her horses. “I don’t give Lawl’s left nut for who you are, get you and your wagons the fuck out of here.”

  Quirk felt her resolve quaver. This was an ugly crowd. She didn’t know what hornet’s nest Lette and Will had stirred up, but she was not excited about jamming her hand into it.

  Cattak drew his wagon up beside her. Why hadn’t Will asked him to do this ridiculous task?

  She glanced over at him. Saw the steel fully exposed in his gaze. And she knew. They would never have believed Cattak. He was too obviously a spy. She… She was the worst person for the job, and that made her the best.

  “I’m not going anywhere until I get my pay!” she yelled. Just stick to the script. The words Will had given her became a plank to hold on to in the rapidly switching currents of her fear. “I sold the dragons good hard steel and I expect to be paid. Four gods-hexed months I’ve been waiting for my pay, and I ain’t waiting anymore.”

  Her words dropped into the crowd like stones into water. Silence splashed through it, rippled out slowly, stilling every tongue, bringing every pair of eyes to bear on her.

  She felt the sweat rolling down the back of her neck in a thick sheet. The guard holding her horses released them so that he could claw his hands down his face.

  “Someone”—Quirk raised her voice, which to her only seemed to emphasize the tremor in it—“get me to those gods-hexed dragons so I can get paid before that prophet fucker opens all their bellies and defrauds me of good coin.”

  “You fucking—” the man started, but the end of the insult was lost in the eruption from the crowd. They surged forward. Quirk flinched backward, scrambling toward her wagon bed, feeling the brightly colored silk flapping at her back. But the crowd was not aimed at her. Instead they lunged at two black, heavily barred wagons parked at the edge of the crowds. Horses stood tethered, whinnying as the crowd encroached. One reared, kicked large gray feet into the air.

  Very large men in very large black armor, wielding very large maces, surrounded each cart. As the crowd rushed them they set about themselves. Black steel rose and fell, and red painted the air. Shouts of rage turned to howls of pain and fear. The soldiers beat back the crowd.

  “You!” spat the man, who was back hanging on to her horses for support. “You keep your fucking gob shut!” Froth sprayed from his mouth. He turned on the crowd. “You’ll get your fucking pay!” he bellowed. “I don’t know what piss-hexed beer put this stupid fucking idea in your head, but there’s gold. And you’ll get paid end of the week. Same as fucking always. So fuck off and go back to having whores poxing your cocks before I have my boys kill more of you than that prophet wanker will ever manage.”

  “Ain’t no gold!” shouted some anonymous body in the crowd. “Them dragons all gone turned it to lead.”

  Lead? Quirk was forced to admit that she still didn’t know much about dragons, but she did know a lot about alchemy and more than she would like to know about magic. There was no way she was aware of to turn gold into lead.

  But she kept her mouth shut.

  “You’re a stupid fucker, aren’t you?” the man by her horses yelled back into the crowd. “Those wagons are full of the shiny stuff, and if you ever want to see any of it, you’ll keep your mouth shut, and fuck off, a
nd do your job.”

  “Show us!” yelled a woman’s voice. It sounded familiar to Quirk’s ear. Lette?

  “I ain’t showing you shit, because I don’t have to show you shit,” the man told them.

  “He ain’t got it!” yelled another familiar voice close to where maybe-Lette’s voice had come from. Will?

  “Who said that?” yelled the man. “Show yourself, so I can carve your heart right out of your chest, you fucking coward.” He was a big man, and his hand was on a short sword in his belt.

  Whoever the speaker was—Will or no—he wisely kept himself hidden.

  Quirk knew she had to speak, but she was still staring at that hand on that sword. She did not want to speak, did not want to commit to the next step. Surely enough had been done, enough had been asked of her.

  Next to her, Cattak cleared his throat.

  She closed her eyes. She had come this far.

  “Shut up, you fat fuck,” she said, every word feeling wooden in her mouth, every one of them sounding like her own death sentence. “Take me to the dragons. You’re going to be one of the first the prophet kills, and I don’t want to be stuck trying to talk some sense into your bloated corpse.”

  Gods, the man wasn’t even fat. It was all muscle. Quirk could tell because everything in the man had suddenly gone tense.

  The crowd was laughing now. But it was an ugly laugh. Soldiers near the black pay wagons were still on the ground, bleeding, weeping, groaning. The tethered horses whickered, and stamped, trying to get away from the stink of blood.

  The man turned on her slowly. He cocked his head to one side. “You want to see the dragons?” he asked her. His voice was low and dangerous.

  It took every ounce of willpower Quirk had to keep from shaking her head desperately. The fire buried in her heart had never felt so far away. Her palms were icy with fear.

  The man moved with a sudden speed that belied the bulk of his muscles. He leapt up, bounced off the wooden tongue between her wagon’s two horses, landed on the toe board, and towered over her. He reached down, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck.

  A moment later she was lying in the dirt, trying to focus, tailbone, back, and jaw aching from the force of her impact on the ground. The man jumped down, dragged her to her feet.