The Dragon Lords: False Idols

by Jon Hollins

  Quirk was just left blinking in her water. She’d had … No, it just … Could this all be true? And yet, it did all make sense as well. The way Afrit had treated her …

  Could she have been such an entitled fool?

  “So,” said Afrit, “I thought you’d left the pamphlets for me. I thought you knew I sat there. That I’d agree with you. I thought we were …” Another chuckle. “Gods, I thought we were conspirators. And you must have … Gods know what you thought. But I helped pass them out. And I organized meetings. And we talked. And other people wrote responses to your pieces. And we distributed them. And we organized. Because of you. We preached against Diffinax. Because of you. You were the core of everything. You were our rallying cry. We need you. There is no resistance without you.”

  “No,” Quirk said. Denial was the only recourse left to her. This had to be some trap. Some appeal to her vanity. Some … thing. Gods, she didn’t know. “No, that’s not true.”

  There was silence from Afrit. Quirk waited. Nothing. “Hello?” she said.

  “What?” asked Afrit. She sounded defeated. There was a new note of resignation in her voice. “I don’t have any proof. I’m chained up in a cell. I can’t go and get a witness. You either believe me or you don’t. You either have the will to get out of here or you don’t. I can’t … I’d love to say I picked the wrong hero, but I don’t think I did. I just … I don’t know if I screwed it up, or something else did. But …” She sighed. “The world is waiting for you, Quirk. For you to burn it down, or build it up, or … something in between. I don’t know. But I can’t make you do it. That’s up to you.”

  “No,” Quirk said. And she felt that it was suddenly very important that she convince this shockingly earnest young woman of that truth. “It’s not up to me. That’s the point. It should never be up to one person. It should be the group. When one person decides, then despotism happens. I won’t be that. My youth was defined by a despot, and everything I have done has been to avoid that.”

  The silence that greeted her went on so long, she thought Afrit wasn’t going to speak again. But then finally the other woman said, “I was a professor of practical politics. I know how despotism happens. I just … I wish the world was as pure as your intentions.”

  And after that, the silence did last.

  Quirk woke, limbs aching. Her chin was soaking wet, and she could smell the water going stagnant. She blinked, trying to work out what had woken her.

  Steps. Metal-clad feet on stone stairs. The jailer was coming back. When he appeared, the guard was with him. They went to the door of Afrit’s cell. Afrit let out another short, shrill scream. The jailer unlocked the door.

  The screaming went on for a long time.

  When Quirk heard the door of Afrit’s cell swing shut, she also heard sobbing.

  Burn them, whispered a muted voice.

  She opened her eyes. The jailer was walking toward her grinning. As he reached for the keys at his belt, she could see that his knuckles were covered with fresh blood.

  Burn them.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said, as keys rattled in the door to her cell. “You can reject Diffinax. You can see through his lies. You can look at history. You can look at biology. He is a beast driven to dominate. A beast driven to control. To consume and burn.”

  The door to her cell swung open and the jailer crossed her cell in a few short strides. He smashed a gauntleted fist into her mouth. She reeled backward. For a moment her barrel rocked backward, teetering on its rim before settling back down. Her lip was broken, blood smeared across her face. “I told you to shut your whore mouth!” the jailer shouted.

  And the lake was not calm. And the lake was full of fire.

  No, she told herself. That is not me. I am not a god. They judge life. Not me. I do not decide. All the old lessons. She repeated them all to herself.

  The jailer looked to his companion, then back to her grinning. “Not so lippy now, are you?” he said.

  She ground her teeth. She could feel something breaking inside of her. Some rage she had not known she possessed.

  “What’s that?” he said, cocking his ear toward her. “Want to say something?” His grin widened. He cavorted toward her—a parody of a jester’s step. The guard had his sword drawn, but managed a nervous laugh.

  Quirk’s teeth worked. She flexed her arms in the water. And the smother rags were bound tight. And at her straining the fog grew in her mind. But was there a fraction of give in her bonds? She strained and she strained.

  “Got some sweet nothing you want to whisper to me?” said the jailer, still grinning. He was walking around her now. He reached out and stroked her cheek. “Oh I bet your tongue could be so pretty.”

  Rage and frustration and hate were screaming inside her. They were a fire obliterating all her resolve.

  She opened her mouth.

  “Come on.” He leaned closer still. His face an inch from hers. She could smell his breath.

  And she fought it down. She fought through the rage, and she triumphed. She emerged on the other side. And the surface of the lake was calm.

  And then she remembered Afrit’s sobbing. And the lake, calm as it was, was full of fire.

  And Quirk made a decision. She came to a realization of who she was. Who she wanted to be.

  “Come on,” breathed the man.

  Quirk closed her mouth. Hard. Directly onto the fucker’s nose.

  He screamed, writhed. He tried to pull away but she held on tight, ripping and shaking, fighting against her gag reflex as his blood filled her mouth.

  She could hear the guard yelling. Felt something jar against her barrel. The man’s sword surely.

  She bit harder, deeper. Her teeth tore. The man squealed, and shook, and screamed. She wrenched her head backward. And she ripped half of his nose free from the mooring of his face.

  The jailer reeled away. Blood was fountaining from his ruined features. He clutched at the ragged wound, letting out high-pitched screams. The guard was just repeating the word fuck, over and over again.

  She spat the man’s nose out of her mouth. It slapped wetly against the wall, slid to the floor, leaving an obscene crimson trail behind it. She grinned redly at them.

  “Bet you wish you had a god you could pray to now,” she said.

  The noseless jailer let out an inarticulate gurgling scream of rage and came at her, braying blood. His massive gauntleted fist came back.

  She braced for the blow. She knew this was coming. She knew this was necessary.

  His fist landed like a sledgehammer. Her head slammed back. Pain rattled inside her skull. She rattled inside the sloshing barrel of water. The barrel rattled on the floor, rocked back under the momentum of the blow, of her weight slamming back. It rocked back on its rim. Quirk fought to hold on to her senses, to throw her weight in that direction.

  The barrel teetered. The barrel fell.

  Water sluiced across the room. Quirk went with it, sloshing out of the barrel in a sodden spilling mass of limbs and hair. The chair cracked beneath her, sodden wood no longer up to the task of holding up to strain.

  “Oh fuck!” the guard shouted. “Oh fuck!”

  A life of academia had not been kind to Quirk’s muscle mass, but she had always been limber. She curled her legs up to her chest in a tight ball, swung her bound hands over her arse. For a moment she thought that she wasn’t going to manage it, that she was going to be caught there, hands jammed in her own arse crack, and skewered by some blinkered slackwit. Then with a wrench her hands were in front of her.

  “Fuck!” screamed the guard again, but then he managed to gather himself enough to lunge at her with his sword. Quirk rolled desperately sideways. Even as she moved she was bringing her hands up to her mouth, tearing at the smother rags with her teeth.

  She heard the guard’s sword clatter against stone, another bellowed curse. She rolled more, hit the bars of her cell, cursed herself. She looked up, saw the guard coming at her again
. She bunched her legs, kicked out, pushed herself beneath his swing.

  Which whoreson tied these cursed wraps so tightly?

  The jailer was straightening, blinking around the room. Blood soaked his chin and shirt.

  She scrambled to her feet, then immediately danced left as the guard swung his sword once more. It was increasingly clear that he’d been given it in the strict understanding that he’d only have to use it against people bound hand and foot.

  Come on. Come on. Come on. She bit and bit and ripped at her bindings. You can bite a man’s nose off but not some simple rags? And then on the heels of that thought. Gods, I bit a man’s nose off.

  And then finally, as the guard took another swing at her, she felt some give in the rags. Thank you, she muttered to the heavens.

  And the guard swung his sword again. Quirk danced away. But she had misjudged the space, bounced off one of the cell walls, and then was suddenly screaming as the sword bit into her arm.

  The guard yelled too, almost as surprised as she was. For a moment they stood there staring at each other, the side of his sword slicing into her arm. “Gods,” he said, eyes wide, and then jerked his sword free. Quirk bellowed, her arm spasmed, and blackness swam at the edges of her vision. But there was a ripping from her wrists. In a moment of hope she looked down. But she was not free yet. She tried to pull her arms apart, but the pain in her bicep almost made her drop to her knees.

  “Get her!” screamed the noseless jailer, barely articulate through the film of blood still dripping down his face. The guard set his feet, prepared a lunge. She bit at her wraps again. The guard closed his eyes.

  Frayed cloth parted in Quirk’s mouth. Fabric and fog dropped away. Pain rushed in to fill the void. She gasped, barely able to focus in the cold shock of it.

  She blinked desperately, heard a howl from the guard as he drove his sword forward in a savage lunge.

  In desperation she flung out a hand toward him.

  And the world filled with fire.

  13

  Sacrilege for Fun and Profit

  “That Lawl chap. He’s a bit of a bastard, isn’t he?”

  Silence. Someone coughed. Someone else shuffled her papers. Others scuffed their feet.

  Firkin cleared his throat and looked out at the small crowd.

  The temple was cramped and smelly and appeared to be mostly constructed from sweat stains. How, Firkin was not entirely sure, but he admired the ingenuity. That, though, was pretty much all he admired. The crowd was lackluster, the holy wine was sour, and he was confined in so many reams of fabric that he could barely move. The whole religious getup he’d been wrapped in seemed antithetical to his brand of preaching, and, what was more, didn’t seem to match his recollection of Barphist priests’ brand of worship at all.

  To be fair, Firkin’s recollection of Barph worship was hazy at best, but Firkin was used to describing pretty much everything as hazy—from yesterday to his current view of his own feet. Still, as he stood upon the temple altar and cast his memory back, it was as if he felt something stir inside his mind. An almost-physical presence shifting inside his skull. And memories flaked from it like silt stirred by some vast aquatic presence.

  So, standing there, unsettled as he was, he did suddenly quite clearly remember a group of Barph’s priests standing in a circle, stark-ball naked, soaked in blood and wine. No robes required.

  When had that happened? Had that happened to him?

  He had not actually intended to get embroiled in the Vinland priesthood. Saying he would had just seemed like a convenient excuse to get out of the High Priesthood’s presence. But the guards he’d been with at the time seemed to know the shit he’d been pulling even if the High Priests didn’t, and they were of a mind that if he had made a bed, he should lie in it. So off to Vinter’s Third District it had been. There the guards had told the altar attendants that Firkin was to be given clerical duties.

  Unfortunately, it turned out that the last priest had been set upon by a drunken mob after one of his sermons had taken a lecherous turn, and so Firkin had received a rapid promotion.

  Now here he was, watching an ugly crowd get uglier. He took a pull on a bottle of the sour wine he’d grabbed from the temple’s altar.

  “Lawl,” he tried again, shaking his head. “All those rules and restrictions.” He pointed at them with the wine bottle, and he found himself saying with far more vehemence than he had expected, “Enough to drive a good god to drink. Am I right?”

  Somewhere, miles away out in the wilderness surrounding Vinter, a cricket chirped.

  Firkin considered a moment, then drank from the bottle again. He was decidedly off his game.

  There was a disgruntled rumble from the crowd. Someone smacked their fist into an open palm. Apparently, while disparaging Lawl was not a favorite pastime in the Third District, priest beatings were.

  Firkin shuddered. Screw this. He started scrabbling at his priestly wrappings. He needed to get away from this confining bullshit, get back to that unexpected memory of naked dancing priests. Back to blood and wine. The desire was sudden and urgent.

  “Can’t blame you for being more boring than a drunk uncle,” he said, thinking more freely as the fabric dropped away. “All this bullshit that surrounds you.”

  District Three was not even the armpit of Vinter. It was the sweaty, diseased crotch of the place. The part even a whore would think twice before touching. When the rest of Vinter had finished gathering up all the shit from last night’s bender, District Three was where they dumped it all.

  Vinter generated a lot of shit.

  These people had grown up knee-deep in the filth of the rest of the city, and waist-deep in its scorn. And everyone who lived here knew it.

  And here he was, foisted upon them, come to tell them to be better than who they were. Come to tell them, yet again, that they weren’t good enough.

  No wonder a man had just pulled out a club with nails driven through it.

  He managed to get the top half of his robes off, stood there bare-chested, scratching his navel, and contemplated the room.

  “Look at you,” he said again. “Just look at you.”

  The man with the club stood. He was not the only one. They were surprisingly well armed. Firkin admired that.

  “You’re a bunch of magnificent bastards,” he said in the same tone. The people standing hesitated. They had not, it seemed, expected that. Then again, he wasn’t sure that he had been either. Again there was that sense of detachment, of not being fully in control.

  And gods it felt like fun.

  “All this shit,” he said. “All around you. This city. A giant wobbling testament to a god who never gave a shit for giant wobbling testaments. For a god who just wanted to kick shit over. And you hate it. You absolutely hate it.” He nodded. “That’s brilliant,” he said.

  They had, he noted, still not clubbed him to death. He took that as a good sign.

  “Because you get it,” he went on, developing this theme now. “Of all the million souls in this sweaty arse crack of a city, the only ones who really get it are you.” And they seemed to like that too. That struck a chord.

  Firkin had never been one to plan out what to say. It was hard to prepare a speech when you couldn’t remember you were meant to give one. The words just tended to come when he needed them. But for the first time, standing there, he wondered where it was they came from.

  There again, he was still alive, and momentum seemed to be of the essence right now. Self-reflection could wait perhaps until he had time to take a breath and scratch his nuts.

  “They crap on you, all these other idiots, don’t they? They talk about District Three as if it’s worthless. As if it’s lost its way. But it’s the only place that has held on to the right way of doing things. This is the only district with a true Barphian ethos. Fuck this! Fuck that! Let’s get drunk, and piss on the rest of it!”

  “Preach!” yelled a voice in the crowd. Some people looked around in surp
rise, but others nodded their heads.

  “You!” Firkin shouted. “You grab life by the balls, and you shake them. You shake them hard. Just like Barph would have done. You spit in life’s eye. Because your hands are busy with all that grabbing. Because life has a sizable pair and you need both of your hands. But you spit. You’re the sort of people willing to hold on with both hands if that’s what it takes. You’re the sort of people who don’t care about sweat, or rashes, or dangerously contagious infections. You’re Barph’s people. Ball grabbers!”

  “Ball grabbers!” yelled a few people at the front. Someone else whooped.

  “These others …” Firkin took a slug of wine, then spat it into the corner. He felt drunker than he had in ages. “These high-and-mighty priests who sit on their high thrones casting down judgment on folk. Did Barph judge people?”

  “No!” someone yelled out, and which Firkin was suddenly sure was the wrong answer, but he didn’t think now was the right time to point it out.

  “No!” he yelled. “Which is why we’re judging them. I think.” He waved a hand. “They’re arseholes, just go with it.”

  And that did get a laugh, and a cheer. Firkin grabbed one of the bottles of holy wine off the altar and tossed it into the crowd. Someone caught it, whooped.

  “Worship.” Firkin spat. “They tell us how to worship. How to commune.”

  There was a scuffle at the edge of the altar. Firkin looked round. One of the altar attendants was shaking his head violently and making stopping motions with his hands.

  Firkin started to walk toward him. “We worship how we like!” Firkin yelled, yanking free of the last of his priestly wraps, standing before them in just his moldering yellow loincloth. And that felt right. And he felt the thing in his head stir again, and there was pain with that, but joy too.

  Blood and wine.

  “They shout chaos at us like it’s an accusation. We …” He lost his train of thought. The attendant was drawing his finger across his neck in a cut-throat gesture.