The Dragon Lords: False Idols

by Jon Hollins

  “Give us shelter, recruit us in your highly coordinated and efficient efforts to fight the dragons, and explain what you meant about the war in the capital?” Which probably didn’t help her sound any more conversational.

  “I was thinking,” said the captain, wrapping his arm more tightly around Quirk’s shoulders, “that I’d drag your arses to Vinter and then pass the buck. How does that sound?”

  Considering how inebriated they were, the Vinlanders set a harsh pace to Vinter. It was the evening of the third day when they stumbled through the thick, tumbledown walls of the capital and into the sweating, stinking heart of the country. They’d been able to smell it coming for miles, the reek of stale alcohol, urine, and vomit, mixed with hops and sour grapes.

  As they progressed through the city, the roads changed from dirt to straw-strewn cobbles. Buildings were made of clay bricks. A pall of smoke lay across the sky like a blanket. The sun winked redly through. Ramshackle houses gave way to ramshackle warehouses and workshops. Armed gangs crowded inside warehouse doorways, watching them while fingering cudgels and short swords. Their guards kept their heads down and gripped their swords tighter.

  If Vinter was a drunken city, it did not feel to Quirk like it was one of those happy, relaxed drunks. Instead there was a sense of building, belligerent violence to the place, as if at some point the whole city would unfurl and start yelling incoherently about that one time you borrowed its mother’s best china and never gave it back, despite the fact that you’d never borrowed any china, and their mother had never owned any in the first place.

  Quirk leaned over to Lette, who was walking alongside her, behind their captain of the Vinland guard. “Something very bad is going on in this city.”

  Lette nodded. “In other news, the sky is blue.”

  Which, considering Quirk had chosen not to roast Lette alive after her defense of Balur, seemed a little uncalled for.

  Lette rolled her eyes. “Look,” she said. “I was a mercenary for ten years before you knew me. If you can sense trouble in a place, then rest assured that not only do I know about it, but I have met it, gotten on a first-name basis with it, and been introduced to its mother.”

  Quirk decided to ignore that and push ahead with what she actually wanted to talk about for once. “We’ll need a plan.”

  Lette shrugged. “We’re where we want to be. So if there’s trouble here, we try to dodge it as soon as we see it coming. And if we’re not fast enough, we hope we’re strong enough to take the punch. Then, assuming we’re still alive, we kill the trouble, piss on it to let it know who’s boss, and get what the fuck we came here for.” She smiled sweetly. “That’s my plan anyway.”

  Quirk sighed. “I always thought you were more nuanced than Balur.”

  Lette kept right on smiling. “There is a time for nuance, Quirk. The moment before a fistfight is not it. And Balur is like a stopped clock. He’s still always right when it’s time to punch someone in the face.”

  Abruptly the Vinlander captain raised a hand, and their troupe came to a halt. Caught off guard, elves stumbled into each other, then looked around blinking. The house they were standing beside was perhaps a little larger and more ostentatious than the others about, but that was a little like saying one cow’s pile of dung was larger than another’s.

  “All right,” said the captain, who then hiccupped into his fist one more. He looked the street up and down, then seemed to sigh in relief. “Whoever’s in charge of you tossers, let’s go have a natter with the boss man, shall we?”

  “The boss man?” It was Afrit who spoke up. She pointed back up the slope. “Why didn’t you take us to the High Priesthood?”

  In response, the captain rolled his rather bleary eyes. “What part of civil war was confusing to you?” he said, sounding tired.

  “You never mentioned a civil war!” Will couldn’t quite keep the volume of his voice within normal limits.

  The captain looked at him cross-eyed. “Really?” He shrugged. “Well, we’re here now, aren’t we?”

  Quirk took a breath. If there’s trouble we hope we’re strong enough to take the punch. She looked to the elves. They were looking at her. That still felt wrong.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” she said. “Lorell, Forette, Nottram, Collabell, Rickert, come with me.” She pointed at the elves one by one. Will forced his way into her field of vision, making puppy-dog eyes at her. She sighed inwardly. “Afrit, Will, Lette, you too.”

  “What about me?” said Balur, looking hurt.

  But there was no way Quirk was letting Balur near anyone referred to as a “boss man.”

  The lizard man was still grumbling as she followed the Vinter captain through the house’s doors and into its hot, humid interior. About ten guards came too, crowding around them.

  Inside, the house opened up in large, well-appointed spaces. Books lay scattered everywhere, and delicate paintings in gilt frames hung from the walls. If it hadn’t been for the empty bottles and stench of stale alcohol, Quirk might even have called the place nice.

  This was, she thought, the abode of someone important in whatever civil war was going on. And that war was more than a small hiccup in their plans. Hopefully this leader, whoever he was, would prove themselves intelligent and strong-willed enough to look past factionalism in the face of the larger Dragon enemy. Or, she supposed, someone drunk and weak-willed enough that they could manipulate and bully him easily.

  Ahead of them, in a doorway, a small boy appeared. He wore a loincloth, and a halo of yellow curls surrounded his dirt-smeared face. He peered at them from behind an enormous wine pitcher that he carried.

  “What you want?” he asked with a level of imperiousness that his loincloth did not seem to support.

  “We are here to see your master,” said the captain with a dutiful nod of his head.

  Would the boy be drunk? Quirk wondered. How young did they start them here?

  “Oi!” yelled the boy over his shoulder.

  “Wotsit?” came back the slurred reply from deeper in the bowels of the house.

  “Folk,” yelled the boy.

  “What they want?” The voice of the boy’s presumable master was high, reedy, and so thick with drink a spoon would stand up in a tankard of it.

  “You!” the boy yelled back.

  There was a sound of exasperation. “I fucking … I know me, you daft bugger. Not here to see you, are they? Why are they here to see me?”

  “Didn’t say that,” said the boy, sounding sullen.

  “I just … literally just … just now. I said it to you just now.” The boy’s master didn’t sound like his mood was improving.

  “Before that,” said the boy.

  “It was implied!” roared his master. There was the sound of someone stumbling into something.

  Quirk’s hopes, which had not been high, pulled out a shovel and started digging for rock bottom.

  Next came a long sequence of grunting, and then finally silence. The boy rolled his eyes. Then his master’s high, screeching voice came once more. “Well, come and get me out of this gods-hexed chair then!” he yelled.

  The boy sighed, rested his pitcher against the door frame, and scampered away.

  The guard captain glanced back at them, looking vaguely apologetic. “He’s a very great man,” he said, sounding more than a little defensive. He tapped the side of his head. “Up here.”

  Which, considering the captain had been drunk most of his life, was probably not the endorsement he meant it to be. Still, someone who could unite such a drunken and disparate populace as the Vinlanders surely had something going for him.

  Then the boy’s master appeared in the doorway, and all of Quirk’s hopes abruptly came crashing to a halt, fell to the floor in pieces, and drowned in spilled wine.

  30

  … The Utterly Obliterated Man Is King

  Firkin stood in his mansion and tried to work out how two Wills had gotten in there. Then he blinked, focused, and tri
ed to work out how one Will had gotten in there, and where the other might have gotten to.

  He was vaguely aware that being this drunk was probably not completely advisable. There was a civil war on, and he was fairly sure that most days he played a pretty important role in it. On the other hand, staying this drunk made it easier to explain the blackouts and the moments of dissociative thought.

  He stumbled, managed to find a seat, collapsed into it.

  “You,” he managed, pointing at Will. “You.” He nodded. “Yes.”

  That seemed a sufficient greeting for now.

  “Gods,” said Will from what sounded like a very great distance. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Firkin really hoped someone answered before he did. Unless it was the whisper. He tried to distract it by pouring wine down his throat.

  “He’s holy,” said his houseboy, displaying unexpected loyalty.

  “He looks half-dead,” said a woman behind Will. She had red hair, and Firkin was pretty sure they had shared a major life event together.

  “We never …?” he said to her and made vague, suggestive motions with his fingers.

  “Gods no!” The woman recoiled. “I have things like self-respect, and a memory that is hard to scrub clean.”

  “Don’t fancy …?” he hazarded.

  “Fuck off, Firkin!” the woman snapped.

  “Someone sober him up so we can end this absurd civil war already,” said another familiar-looking woman. She had dark skin and close-cropped, tightly curled hair. Her name started with Q or Kw or something of that sort.

  “Shh!” he hissed, pressing his fingers to somewhere vaguely proximal to his mouth. “He doesn’t like that talk.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Will asked, looking around the room like the idiot he was.

  “Him,” Firkin said with the degree of urgency everyone seemed to be failing to realize the situation demanded. He tapped the side of his head.

  “He hears voices,” said the houseboy. “Barph speaks through him.”

  “He speaks through his arse,” snapped the redhead. Firkin was beginning to understand why he hadn’t slept with her.

  “Don’t wake it up,” he hissed at Will. Will was a sympathetic ear. “Let it sleep.”

  “This is bad.” Will wasn’t talking to him anymore. “Even for Firkin, this is bad.”

  “Knole’s knockers, it’s bad.” Quirk had apparently learned to curse properly since Firkin had seen her last. Quirk, that was her name. “He’s managed to incite a civil war in the one country that could actually help us.”

  Inside his head, the whisper twitched in its slumber.

  “Shh,” he said again, almost a crooning this time.

  “The only way to end the civil war is to kill the High Priests and take this city.” Another fervent voice. He thought he recognized it as one of his captains. He’d glimpsed the man along with Will and the others. They must have become friends. It was a terribly small world after all.

  “Is that even viable?” asked Quirk.

  The captain’s response took so long to come that even Firkin was a little disappointed in the man.

  “Right, then,” said Quirk. “We sue for peace.”

  “They’ll kill Firkin,” said the houseboy.

  “Not necessarily a bad thing,” said … said … Lette! That was the redhead’s name. Lette. He knew that. Nobody could say he didn’t know that. Shut up.

  “Can the High Priests win the civil war?” Will asked the question Firkin had rather been hoping no one would ask.

  “Well …” said his captain.

  But it was too late, the whisper was awake.

  “We will paint the streets with their blood!” it said, snapping Firkin’s eyes open. It stood him up and filled him with thunder that crashed out of his mouth and boomed around the room. “And we will drink it! And we will feel its fire in our balls! And we will spill our potency on the world and seed it in grapes and ruin!”

  The long silence that followed this was only punctured by his houseboy saying, “I bloody told you he was holy.”

  31

  With Friends Like These

  Will stared at … Firkin? At the thing talking through Firkin? At whatever trick Firkin had figured out to convince the world to give him an obscene amount of alcohol this time?

  And yet there was an unfamiliar power to his old friend’s voice as it boomed through the cluttered room. And Will did feel some rebellious urge stir in his gut, because screw these High Priests. It would be good to drink their blood …

  “Shut up, Firkin,” said Lette, “you’re drunk.”

  Will shook his head. And he was standing in the same stagnant room, and Firkin was staring at him, and the old man looked … He looked genuine. And that was not a tool he expected to find in Firkin’s armament. Will examined his old friend. And there was something else in Firkin’s manner he saw now. He had seemed … nervous. Uncertain. The veneer of slick bullshit was gone from him, and up until a moment ago he had looked exposed. “I really think there’s something wrong with him.” Will was more convinced of it than ever.

  “Look,” Quirk snapped, “I genuinely do not care what is wrong with Firkin. He’s embroiled this city in a war neither side can win, and we need unity. All of Avarra does. We need him sober, and sitting in front of the High Priests suing for peace.”

  “You don’t care?” That had genuinely caught Will off guard. He knew Quirk had hardened since Kondorra, but part of what had made it feel good to follow her was that there was a moral compass still intact somewhere inside her.

  Quirk closed her eyes, and Will honestly wasn’t sure what he’d see when she opened them. Then her face softened. She looked at him. “I do care, Will. I’m sorry. There’s just …” She shook her head. “We’re losing. You get that, right? And all we have is this place. These people. And Firkin’s ruined it. Because that’s what he does. And I’m very stressed right now. And I want to make sure he’s okay, but partly it’s so I can yell at him for an hour and be sure he understands me.”

  “The question is,” Lette said as if none of this had taken place, “how do we get him in front of the High Priests?”

  “You—” started the captain, but whatever wisdom he had was never shared, because at that moment an unfamiliar voice from behind them said, “Like this.”

  They all turned, and it turned out the unfamiliar voice had an unfamiliar owner, and she was dressed in black, and held two swords, and she had lots of friends, and they were all charging into the room.

  And then Will watched as Lette killed.

  She wasn’t the only one, of course. There were others. The elves reached for knives and short blades. And the Vinter guards who weren’t abruptly bleeding from the neck got their swords up as well. But Will watched Lette.

  She whipped her short sword from its blade, hacked upward, and cut one of their swarming attackers from crotch to breast. Her blade lodged into the sternum. She kicked the lifeless legs out from the corpse, wrenched. The blade came free just in time for her to catch the blows of a woman swinging two blades at her skull.

  And part of Will had realized by then how counterproductive this was. How actually they wanted to go with these people, that this was the perfect way to get in front of the priests, but … he watched.

  Lette grunted, kicked out, aimed for her opponent’s midriff. The woman fighting her grunted, staggered back. Lette closed, thrust her blade after the kick. Flesh gave way.

  “Hold! Hold!” Quirk started shouting. She’d got there too. She knew that this was a mistake.

  Blows were still coming at Lette, though, and she ducked low, and threw her body into the thighs of another of the black-clad figures, tossed him over her shoulder. He landed on the ground with a crack and an expulsion of air. She thrust down, skewered his throat, straightened, looked for another victim.

  “Hold!” Will finally found his tongue. He was breathing as hard as if he had been fighting at Lette’s side, but …

&nb
sp; Something Firkin had been shouting about blood was in the back of his heads, and gods … gods …

  Lette finally held. Will raised his hands, kneeled. Quirk and three of the Tamathian guards did the same. The guard captain who had accompanied them from the Vinter border was on the floor, bleeding out, gasping feebly. One of the elves, Nottram, was already dead. Five of the black-clad attackers were dead, to their two, but twenty more were still standing.

  “We surrender,” Will said.

  Just one of Lette’s eyebrows rose.

  “We want to meet their masters,” Quirk said slowly. “We were literally just saying that. We want them to take us.”

  “Remember,” said Will, “when you said you wanted to lead a better life? One where you chose the path less bloody just a little more often?” And maybe, just maybe she had shared the moment of connection he had felt.

  “I did choose those paths,” said Lette. “They led here.” Then she threw her sword down on the ground.

  Much to Will’s shock, it turned out that not all of Vinland was a decrepit shithole. Some of it was a quite well-constructed shithole. The High Temple, which held the High Priests, for example, had clearly been a fairly significant edifice before nobody had bothered caring for it for the best part of a millennia.

  He did worry about where the several hundred elves they’d left cluttering the streets had gone, but he was sure he would have noticed if they’d been slaughtered and left on Firkin’s doorstep. Plus Balur was with them, though Will wasn’t wholly sure if that was a source of reassurance or not.

  He glanced at the others as they were dragged into the High Temple’s stone confines. Lette looked almost bored, but her professional nonchalance was a point of pride. Afrit was surely at the opposite end of the spectrum. Will had expected her to be in free-fall freak-out but instead her fear seemed muted. She had her eyes on Quirk. And she assumed Quirk had a way out. A plan. Will looked to Quirk too, hopeful. But all he saw was the same fear he felt. Because she didn’t have a plan either, and she was having as much trouble coming up with one as he was.