Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  And not just one dragon. Not even two. But five. Five dragons. No, that he was entirely unprepared for.

  Balur was aware that he could be a prideful creature. It was not his finest quality. And if he was honest—truly honest with himself in a way that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable—he knew that he had not killed a dragon. What was more, he could not kill a dragon. Not truly. Yes, he had been caving in Mattrax’s skull but that was not being full-blooded combat. No one was being red of tooth and claw in that encounter. He had just been committing murder. Very slowly. And his arms had ached at the end of killing Mattrax. If the dragon had not been drugged into oblivion then he would not have stood a chance.

  One dragon was beyond him.

  And five…

  A pox upon the cocks of all the gods.

  What was more, Balur saw, he was not alone in his doubts. The charge of the prophet’s army, his ten thousand women and men, fueled by rage and holy ardor, stumbled and stopped. They stood hesitating, wondering if they still held on to their courage.

  Even the Consortium army stopped, stood, and stared. Even though these were the dragons they fought for. Even though these were their lords and masters. Balur thought he tasted their fear upon the air.

  These dragons were not mere mortals. They might not be gods, but they were surely halfway there.

  Balur looked at the fake skull held aloft at the head of his army. It seemed such an absurd thing now. Such a ridiculous pretense.

  And then, for a reason he could not fathom, the dragons turned away. Everyone watched as they flew behind their own army, as their flame fell upon the ground in great obliterating sheets. For a moment the whole Consortium army had their back to the prophet’s forces. And no one moved to take advantage. The thought didn’t even enter Balur’s mind.

  Then the dragons were racing back toward their own army. They roared, screamed, fell from the heavens, raked the ground with claws and fire. For a mad moment Balur thought the Consortium was going to tear apart the very men and women committed to defending them. Perhaps they were done with humanity entirely, were going to raze every creature from that place and live free from the irritations of lesser beings.

  Then shouts came from the Consortium army, yells. Confusion and panic joined the tastes on Balur’s tongue. It tasted of battle, yet robbed of the blood. And still Balur did not understand.

  And then he saw, and he did.

  Two wagons, both streaming fire, tore through the Consortium forces. Soldiers danced out of the way. The wagons’ horses screamed as they fought desperately to escape, rearing, kicking, stamping forward.

  But more than that, Balur understood the significance of those wagons. He knew who drove them.

  They were the Consortium army’s pay wagons. A week’s worth of gold for fifty thousand soldiers. The pay that was supposed to disappear. The pay they were meant to steal.

  Lette sat at the head of one of those wagons.

  Balur’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. And yes, yes, he had understood the risks. And yes, he had known their chances this day. And yes, he had been fully aware. And yet he had never truly believed that Lette could die. That idea could never truly take root in him. Because she was his tribe. He was hers. They were inseparable halves of a single whole. They would die together. Back-to-back in the thick of bodies and blood.

  He leapt clear of Quirk’s thaumatic cart, forced his way through the ranks of troops. He swept his broken clock hand back and forth, cleared a path with the flat of the blade. People fell back. He ignored them. They were nothing to him. He just had to get to Lette. He had to die with Lette.

  In the chaos and the dark he couldn’t make out which wagon she drove. He could just see the wagons’ flaming outlines thrashing through the enemy forces. He saw a troll take a swing at one cart with a club, lost sight before the beast made contact. He swore aloud as he broke free of his own ranks. He started to run.

  The dragons circled above, five vast beasts hanging in the night sky. They dived and roared, but they held their flame. While the wagons were mired in their own troops, they did not set the night on fire. They screamed and slashed the sky, but the wagons plunged on.

  For a moment, Balur dared to hope. Somehow the moment would be drawn out. The flipped coin landing on its edge and staying, spinning forever.

  Then the wagons were bursting free of their lines, heading into the quarter mile of grass between the two opposing lines of troops. A last, mad, impossible, stupid dash for the cover of their own troops. As if that would somehow stop these dragons, as if that would somehow not herald the beginning of the slaughter.

  Balur redoubled his pace. He would get to Lette. He would—

  He would do no such thing.

  With the wagons finally exposed, the dragons dropped from the sky as one. A writhing tumor of scales and wings. And as one, they unleashed their fire.

  Balur threw up a hand, blocked his eyes. Afterimages flashed against his eyelids. Two wagons standing in the exact spot where a new sun crashed upon the earth.

  He stood alone, between the two armies, scraping at his eyes.

  When he could see again, he howled.

  Two wagons stood still in the center of the plains.

  Two wagons wreathed in flame.

  Two pyres.

  Two graves.

  83

  The Inevitable Cliffhanger Chapter

  Inside Hallows’ Mouth, it took Quirk a while to realize that the dragons were simply not coming back. She had told them that Will was stealing their gold, and their collective roars of rage had knocked much of the sense out of her for a while. But she remembered them taking off, remembered them wheeling away toward the crater.

  And they had left her here all alone inside the volcano.

  And she was, somehow, against all the odds, still alive.

  She stood up. She took stock. And a realization fell upon her. This was her chance to study a dragon’s lair. This was her chance to examine their most intimate abode. Who knew what traces they left beneath the gold. Scales? Picked-over meals? Scat?

  She could take the risk. She could learn so much.

  After careful consideration, she reached down, grabbed as much gold as she could shove into her pockets, and legged it as fast as she could out the door.

  84

  Financial Collapse

  Balur stared. He felt the skin of his face stretching, muscles in his cheeks and forehead tightening, his slit eyeballs dilating. He felt his eyes pushing forward, testing the limits of their sockets, all in an attempt to express the depth of his horror.

  Before him, one by one, the Dragon Consortium landed on the dull burnt grass of the plain. Beneath his feet, the ground shook with each impact. They stood in a circle around the flaming ruins of the pay wagons.

  Around the ruins of Will and Lette.

  There was a great tearing inside him, an agonizing ripping of self; pain and sorrow and hate all fracturing in his guts. He wanted to drop to his knees, to scream at the night. He wanted to charge forward, to smash into those dragons, to bore into their hearts and drink their blood. He wanted to be immolated in their fire, a blazing signal fire for Lette’s memory.

  Slowly, piece by piece, the wagons fell apart. A slab of paneling fell away. A wheel collapsed. An axle finally, inevitably shattered. A wagon dropped to the ground. Its roof caved in, slumped away. The blazing walls collapsed.

  The fire was bright, a crackling yellow and white, hard to look at in the smothering darkness of the night and the clouds of Hallows’ Mouth. The dragons were brightly lit, their bellies glistening, their snaking necks shimmering. The scene was perfectly clear.

  And so it was that everyone saw when the walls of the pay wagon collapsed, not golden coins spilling out into the night, not wages ready to be paid, not jewels sparkling in the gloom.

  Instead they saw nothing but dull chunks of lead scattering across the landscape.

  A great inhalation of breath. A gasp so great, so collec
tive, that the wind actually caused the flames to flicker. Even the dragons seemed to gasp in that moment.

  Quietly, ignorant of the attention placed upon it, the second wagon collapsed.

  Dull chunks of lead rolled loose.

  Balur didn’t understand. It made no sense to him. Why were the dragons paying their troops in lead?

  But only a tiny piece of him cared. And it was too easily obliterated by the war raging in him between grief and hatred.

  Murmurs arose from the Consortium army. A few shouts. Then cries of outrage. Anger.

  “It was true!” cried out a voice, carried on the night’s wind.

  Inside Balur, hatred won the war.

  He let out a howl of rage, the purest, greatest battle cry of his life. A scream that ripped up through his gut and left him hollow. Then all that space filled with fire, with bile, with bloodlust. He charged. He charged still screaming, still doomed, not giving a single fuck. He was going to die, but he was going to die maiming the fuck out of some dragons.

  One beast turned to look at him. An arrogant sneer on its face, marred only by the disbelief that something this insignificant, this profane should dare to challenge it. It sucked in its breath. Fire sparked at the back of its throat.

  And then, falling out of nowhere, as inexplicable as a thunderbolt from the gods, a bronze spear sailed out of the air, and smashed into the scales above the dragon’s golden, glittering eye. A spark flared in the night where it struck. The spear sailed harmlessly away, glancing off the thick scale. But the dragon jerked its head. The storm of fire aimed at Balur became a stuttering, sparking cough, billowing harmlessly into the night.

  Above the dragon a griffin rider wheeled his beast around. He was shaking his fist. His beast screamed. He seized another bronze spear, hurled it. It slashed down the dragon’s side, tearing a ragged hole in its wing.

  The dragon screamed. A sound of shock. A sound of pain.

  Balur stumbled to a halt. A Consortium soldier was attacking his masters. Balur didn’t understand what was happening.

  Neither, it seemed, did much of the Consortium army. They all stared at the skies. And then there was another griffin rider beside the first. She swooped around the dragons. Her spear flashed through the air. A spark flared just above the dragon’s eye where it struck. The dragon roared again.

  Then an arrow loosed suddenly out of the crowd, borne aloft by shouts of rage and anger. It punched a tiny hole in the wing of a black dragon. And while it couldn’t have felt like more than a gnat’s sting, that dragon too roared. Almost as much outrage as pain.

  And then more arrows. Like the start of a rainstorm—those few drizzling drops. And then a lightning bolt, flung by one of the Consortium mages. And shouts of outrage and anger were the booming thunder that followed.

  And the dragons roared, and twisted, and seemed to try to understand what was happening.

  And then, suddenly, like a cresting wave breaking, the Consortium troops surged forward. There was no discipline to the charge. There was no cry from the sergeants, no long blast on the trumpet. And yet, as one, the entire Consortium army put their heads down and hurled themselves forward.

  For a moment the dragons stood stunned. They did not—could not, perhaps—understand what was happening. For thirty years they had reigned with absolute power. Their citizens had been absolutely cowed, controlled through poverty and fear. For thirty years they had been untouchable. Monarchs. Despots. Gods.

  And now they were not.

  Around Balur, a cry arose. “For the prophet!” seemed to echo from every lung. A wave of sound smashing around Balur. And then the sound of feet. Ten thousand pairs of feet. His army swarmed around him, charged for the dragons.

  Bronze spears flew through the air, punctured wings. Griffin’s smashed down against dragons’ backs, claws slashing. Lightning bolts crackled down, charring and hissing

  But the Consortium’s hesitation lasted only a moment. The Dragons of Kondorra had not won this valley through backdoor deals, through mergers, or through buying out their competition. They had fought for this place. They had ripped it free of its formers owners. And they would not go down now without a fight.

  Flames dug a trench through the oncoming troops. The red dragon opened its mouth and spewed an obscenity of roaring death that left crumbling black bodies in its wake, filling the air with the scent of roasting meat. The green dragon sprayed a wide arc of flame. Soldiers, unable to halt their charge, piled into the wall of fire. Nothing but ash emerged from the other side. The brown dragon vomited up great smoking balls of greasy fire that it hawked across the field of battle like catapult stones. They crashed down flinging burning bodies about like children’s toys.

  Not all were killed outright. Some took a few moments, lying gasping as their skin sloughed off, melted anatomy exposed. Balur could see one woman reeling back, her forearm seared off, the wound neatly cauterized at the elbow. He couldn’t hear her screams over the cacophony of the battle.

  He tried to work it all out. Everything that had happened. Everything that had led to here. The dragon’s wealth had been revealed as a lie. Every soldier in their army had seen it. They had seen it after a day of seeing the skull of a dead dragon paraded before him.

  Gold and fear. Both removed. Just like Will said. The Consortium troops rising up against their masters. Just like Will had said.

  And then it struck him. Really struck him. Like a punch to the solar plexus. No. Not as Will had said.

  As Will had prophesized.

  “Holy shit,” he said to himself.

  And then he threw himself into the battle. With a smile on his face. With his teeth bared. With the broken arm of a clock raised high above his head. For the memory of Lette. For the promise he had made her that he would end a dragon. And ripping, and tearing, and snarling, he lost his perspective on the battle, became only a raging, ripping participant.

  The fighting had intensified around the brown dragon. Its bloated body shortened the range of its sweeping claws. Its fire, lobbed away, let the soldiers get close. Plus it was an ugly motherfucker, squat body the color of excrement, with a sickly white underbelly. Balur tore toward it.

  A griffin smashed into the back of the brown dragon’s head. Its beak slashed at one of the dragon’s massive eyes. Blood bloomed in the socket. Then the dragon clawed the creature free, disemboweled it with one long slash of its claws.

  The brown dragon spread its wings, shrieked a roar so loud that men nearby dropped to the ground and clutched their helmets. Then a storm of spears fell. A contingent of soldiers cheered until the black dragon fell about them, ripping and tearing, gathering mouthfuls of them, scattering chunks around the battlefield.

  But it was too late for the brown one. Its wings were a ruin. It beat the air with ragged flaps of flesh, and went nowhere. Troops were already climbing over each other to mount its back. They hacked at its flesh with swords, pikes, axes.

  The brown howled, rolled over, crushed lives with its bulk. Armor was flattened. The men inside simply burst, a mush of muscle, bone, and blood squirting between the seams of plate mail. But the dragon’s white belly was exposed now, and men, undeterred climbed up, hacking, sawing.

  The dragon’s flesh ruptured massively. It contained an ocean of blood, a mile of spilling slippery guts. Its screams sounded like the sky tearing. Flame gushed out of its mouth, spilled out the spreading seam in its stomach. Its bowels burst into crackling fire. Men fell to the floor screaming, covering in flaming shit. The brown dragon writhed, its death throes ending yet more lives.

  And then suddenly it was still. Suddenly it was dead.

  For a moment the whole battlefield seemed to quake with the impact of the moment. The dragons—mouths full of flame and blood, claws in the guts of their foes; the soldiers—spears poised ready for launch, blades caught in scales; they hesitated for a moment. Battle cries and roars died away.

  It had happened. The unthinkable, the impossible.

  The
people of Kondorra had risen up and killed a dragon. They could all see it. They all knew it. Man and dragon alike. It could be done.

  Balur felt it like electricity. A tremble in his legs, his guts. He could feel the blood pulsing faster in his veins, racing toward some crescendo. Some howl of rage, and fear, and joy.

  Then the battle was rejoined, harder and faster, and more ferocious than before. The dragons battling for their lives, the men fighting for lives they thought they’d already lost.

  Flame lit the night. Claws rent the air. The heavens spat lightning. The trolls made it to the circle of battle, closed around the yellow dragon. Their massive clubs fell, smashing through pale scales, making black blood spit up from ruptures in the flesh. The dragon rose spitting and yipping, letting out curiously canine barks. It hissed out flame in white-hot, scorching streaks, fire that ate through flesh and bone, slicing through bodies like a blade six feet wide.

  It took to the air, the yellow dragon, rising on broad wings, shrieking in outrage and pain, black blood streaking down its pale sides, falling like rain on the troops below. A few men still clung to its sides, still hacking away, futile and mad. One by one they lost their grip, fell to the ground like bombs full of meat.

  Fire lanced down, scribbled murder on the battlefield. Soldiers flung spears. They fell harmlessly short. The dragon bellowed victory.

  The catapult stone caught it completely unawares. Launched recklessly out of darkness and into darkness, the vast chunk of stone sailed through the air, then smashed into the neck of the beast, ripping through scale, muscle, bone, tearing a great gaping hole in its throat.

  The writhing dragon went limp instantly. Blood poured in great gouts, steaming and spitting, a waterfall bursting forth from the night sky. Below, the weight of it smashed men to the ground, turned earth to mud.

  And then it fell. All its glory and grace gone. A sack of meat and shit—the dragon smashed into the ground. Dirt and mud and the broken bodies of soldiers flew, all caught in its collapse. A great tidal wave of its own blood sprayed in all directions.