by Jon Hollins
Gods, please, please, help them all. They were trying to help the gods after all. It only seemed fair.
And then the main chamber of this temple—dedicated to one of those distant deities—opened up around him. It was vast and cavernous and replete with a sense of decaying grandeur. Pillars trimmed in gold and draped in red velvet towered all around her. Moth-eaten tapestries hung on the walls. The three High Priests sat on imposing thrones, shrouded in red and cream. Ceremonial guards stood in crumbling archways. Children grasped massive, dented pitchers of wine.
“The fuck is this?” asked one of the priests, a crinkly old man who had the bloated appearance of a drowned corpse, and much of the same charisma.
“We bring you the rogue preacher, Firkin,” said one of the black-robed women, and kicked Firkin a full yard forward. He sprawled on the floor and promptly vomited all over it.
As one, the High Priests curled their lips.
“What about the rest of them?” The priest in the middle was a woman in her mid-fifties. Will had the impression she had been good-looking about five million glasses of wine back.
“His associates,” said the guard.
“Well actually,” Quirk cut in, trying to get things back on track, “we are political refugees seeking—”
A spear butt to the back of the skull cut her off. She sprawled forward as well, but managed to twist so that her cheek took the brunt of the impact against the floor instead of her nose.
“Gods!” she came up spitting. “What part of political refugee do you not understand?”
The High Priests all exchanged glances.
“Well, don’t look at me,” said drowned-corpse priest with a shrug.
And it was the same thing again. The same corruption. The same detachment. The same useless, stupid bastards in charge of everything.
“Dragons!” Will shouted. “There’s fucking dragons! They’ve conquered the entire world around you. Avarra has fallen to them. You’re the last holdout. Does any of this ring the slightest sort of bell? They’re coming here, you dullards!”
Afrit actually gasped at that. Will suspected he might not have earned a passing grade in Introductory Practical Politics.
A shocked silence permeated the moldering atmosphere of the great hall.
“We come to negotiate peace,” Quirk said into the pause. There was an element of desperation in her words now. “Our friend, Firkin”—she glanced at the old man who was writhing in his bonds and muttering some spectacularly vile curses—“has gotten himself embroiled in local politics he is not capable of handling, and we wish to extricate him from any misunderstandings to aid Vinland in meeting the dragon threat with a united face.” She smiled at the priests with hope she did not feel.
And that, Will supposed, was probably what he ought to have said.
The priests looked at each other. “She talks funny,” said the drowned-looking one. Quirk’s smile wilted.
Will glanced over at Lette to see how she was taking all this. The mercenary just rolled her eyes. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “You asked me to let them bind my hands. You have to live with that now.”
Will thought maybe there was a chance that shouting at the priests was a viable option after all. “If you don’t meet the dragons head-on, with everything you have, they will rip you and this kingdom apart.” He took a step toward the priests and was struck in the back of the knees for his trouble. He collapsed with a grunt, but he didn’t let it break his flow. This was too important. These idiots had to listen.
“Your only hope is unity,” he said. “Your only hope is desperate, thorough preparation. You have to take this threat seriously. Nowhere else did, and everywhere else has fallen. Now the dragons have united, and so—”
One of the priests nodded, and Will momentarily felt hope leap in his heart. He had—
Then he was struck in the side of the head with a spear butt.
Lette looked over at where Will found himself on the floor. “You did have a plan, right?”
“Can we execute all of them yet?” asked the wasp eater.
Will was saved from having to work out if he did still have a plan by a deep, gravelly voice from the other side of the chamber. It said, quite distinctly, “Be getting off me, you fucker of whores.”
Protecting the elves, thought Will, discovering that the sinking feeling in his chest hadn’t quite reached rock bottom yet. Yes of course that’s what Balur would be doing.
The lizard man had been chained hand and foot—not proper shackles, simply link after link of heavy steel wrapped around his wrists, and then inexpertly looped around his ankles. About fifteen more guards were surrounding him, hemming him in with spear points. One had evidently just pricked the lizard man, and the spear’s owner had gained his ire. He perked up, though, upon seeing Will and the others.
“Hello!” he called. “It is being good to be seeing you again.”
“Balur, you …” Quirk seemed to froth with expletives she didn’t quite have the ability to deliver.
“Drunks, Balur?” asked Lette. She shook her head. “You were captured by drunks. How in the Hallows are you meant to live this down?”
“In fairness, I was being unconscious, at the time,” Balur called across the hall.
The High Priests seemed more than a little annoyed by all this conviviality among their prisoners. “Shut him up!” screamed the wasp eater. “This is a hall of motherfucking worship!”
An eager-looking guard cracked his spear butt across Balur’s back. Balur turned and looked at him. “I am warning you,” he said. After consideration, the guard took a significant step back.
“What is the meaning of this interruption?” asked the female priest. Even she seemed bored by the roteness of the question.
“We bring before you the mercenary known as Balur, also as Balur the lizard man, Balur the Analesian, Balur the Whore-slayer, Balur the Tribeless, Balur the Fuck-monger, Throat-gargler, and That Big Lizardy Bugger,” intoned the guard, in a strident voice. Balur nodded, seemingly pleased by this list of titles. Quirk filed Throat-gargler away for later investigation.
“Who?” asked the bloated priest, and Balur seemed to sag a bit.
“One of the two mercenaries,” said the guard, also seeming a little deflated, “who attempted to steal Barph’s Strength last year. The ones you ordered hunted down to the ends of the earth and killed in as vile and painful a way as possible.”
“They remember us, Lette,” said Balur with a happy smile. “They are knowing our names.”
“Oh you stupid, silly …” Lette groaned.
The lead guard’s eyes bulged and he lunged toward Lette, but the black-clad women shook their spears at him and he retreated back.
“She’s the other!” the guard hissed. “I knew she had to be close. I knew it!”
And Will knew he should have been using this time to come up with a plan, but … seriously. He looked at the expressions on the priests’ faces. Indignation, perhaps, but not interest. Because they just didn’t care. Everything being performed before them was something that happened outside their holy walls. And that just didn’t interest them. Which meant they weren’t fit to rule.
Which meant perhaps he did have a plan after all.
But still, before he resorted to that …
“Dragons,” he tried one last, desperate time. “Dragons are coming, and they are coming to kill you all. You have to be united. If you kill Firkin then you’ll just be making a martyr of him. You’ll be dividing yourselves even more deeply, and making the dragons’ job even easier. You have to be united to face them.”
Nearby, Firkin rolled around on the floor muttering, “My head ain’t no shithouse.”
The female priest looked from Firkin to Will with nothing but contempt written on her face. “You come here,” she said, “in the company of a known agitator, and a mercenary who has tried to defile one of our most sacred treasures, and you have the gall to tell us what to do? To believe that we g
ive a shit about your advice? I commune with Barph himself. Your advice is so much piss in my wine.”
At this, Firkin suddenly came alive. “You commune with my arsehole!” he screamed. “Barph shits on you and your lies! Barph wouldn’t talk to you if you fermented your own corpse in a goblet made of virgin’s bones!” Which was about all he managed to get out before the guards kicked him into unconsciousness.
The female priest attempted to lift herself out of her throne, and on the third attempt actually made it. “All these arseholes. They’re all condemned to die.”
The third priest clapped his hands. “Yay!” he said, and upended his goblet into his face. “Executions!” Wine dribbled down his chin.
“No!” snapped the female priest. “Executions are too good for them. This will be messy, and painful, and very, very public. This will be a spectacle.” She drank very deeply from her goblet. “This will be holy rage.”
“Oooh,” said the third priest. “I like the sound of that.”
Well, Will couldn’t say he hadn’t tried.
Lette looked at him. “So,” she said, “now do we get to do things my way?”
Balur brightened. “I am typically liking Lette’s way.”
“No,” said Will. “That’s not the plan.”
Lette’s brow furrowed. “Really? Because this is typically the point where you lose patience.”
And Will had, but making the High Priests into martyrs wouldn’t help them any more than turning Firkin into a martyr would help the High Priests.
“Silence!” the female priest shouted in their general direction. Then she turned back to the guards. “To the dungeons with them,” she said. “Then prepare everything so we can defile them with goats tomorrow.”
The guards closed. Spears tickled Will’s skin, and together they were all dragged away down to the dungeons.
All in all, Will found he was quite relieved. He had really been hoping they wouldn’t have to kill the High Priesthood of a nation that day and he’d finally figured out a way to avoid it.
32
Temporary Accommodations
In Lette’s experience, most people tended to assume that there was a strong correlation between the state of a kingdom and the state of its dungeons. If a kingdom was well tended, then surely its dungeons would have fresh straw and few rats. As a woman who had spent slightly more than her fair share of time in a variety of dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and prisons, Lette also knew that most people were ignorant asses. The state of a cell was actually directly proportionate to the wealth disparity between the jailer and his master. The greater the gulf, the greater the squalor that prisoners would endure.
Thus, as she was shoved into a cell ankle-deep in rotten straw and other, far less pleasant things, Lette’s suspicion that the High Priests of Vinland were a bunch of stingy bastards was confirmed.
The cell door swung shut behind the six of them, and a heavy key turned in a heavy lock. A bar fell into place. Several bolts were slid home. Any hope Lette had of the Vinlanders being sloppy guards slipped away.
Lette looked around. Balur was busy assessing the cell, but looking far from hopeful. Firkin was sitting in the unspeakable mess on the floor, looking vaguely dazed. Will stood next to him. Quirk and Afrit were standing close together near the door of the cell, and in Lette’s opinion they did not look half scared enough.
And that swung the decision in her head about whether she would ream out Will or Quirk for this one.
“This is your fault, you realize?” she said to Quirk. “This whole captured-and-going-to-be-put-to-death thing. I try to be nice. I try to be a better person. I think twice, and I put my blade away. I really fucking try. And now I’ve got to come up with a way to kill everybody between us and the exit. And it’s all because you want to be the pacifist fucking war general. Every life we take in here is on your head. I want you to know that. I want it to haunt your gods-hexed dreams. That—”
Abruptly flame flared behind Quirk’s back. Ash and tattered rope fell to the floor. Quirk worked at the sore wrists of her freed hands, then seemed to notice Lette had stopped talking.
“You were saying?” she said innocently.
Lette took a moment to just fume.
“Not our first jailbreak,” said Afrit, who had decided to pause from staring lovingly at Quirk in order to feign an unconvincing apologetic tone. Quirk was going to have to put that poor girl out of her misery one way or another.
Will stepped in between her and the Tamathians. “Sorry,” he said, which was actually the first time in a while someone had said the right thing to Lette. Still, she wasn’t sure she forgave him. “I figured the High Priests didn’t know Quirk is a mage.”
“And if they had tried to kill us in the chamber upstairs instead of throwing us down here?” asked Lette, because she was pretty sure that couldn’t have been part of anyone’s plan.
“Then I would have tried to spare as many lives as possible.” Quirk was quite calm as she moved to set Will’s hands free. Lette tried reassessing the woman.
Quirk turned to look Lette directly in the eye. “I spent my whole childhood killing people, Lette. I spent most of my adult life trying to forget that. But you all took that hope away from me in Kondorra. Now the dragons have reminded me that I am actually very good at it. And I hate that, but in this world, in this time, that is the skill I have. And I will use it if necessary. Not wantonly like Balur, and not savagely, like you. But I will.”
Lette considered. “I’m not a fucking savage.”
Quirk didn’t even bother with an apologetic expression. “We had to try to talk everything through. If this could have been resolved peacefully then it would have been far, far better.”
“This is a nation run and populated entirely by drunk people,” Lette pointed out. “Balur has led a life of relative sobriety in comparison with them. And you were expecting rational conversation?”
“I was hoping,” said Quirk, reaching out and burning Afrit’s bonds. “Not expecting. Now, do you want me to free your hands or not?”
Reluctantly Lette held out her hands.
“Me too, please,” said Balur, holding out his chained fists.
Quirk cracked her knuckles. “This will take a moment longer.”
“Did one of you bastards shit in my head?” asked Firkin from the floor. “It feels like one of you shit in my head.” He tipped one ear toward the floor and tapped the other experimentally.
While Quirk grasped Balur’s chains and the links slowly started to glow, Will went over and knelt beside the filthy old man. “Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s going on with you?”
Lette understood loyalty. She knew its importance, its strategic value. And she knew her own loyalty to Balur could pass the boundary into unreasonableness. But still, she did not get Will’s dedication to the old man. She could smell his funk even above the fetid air of this dungeon. Why would you be loyal to someone it was difficult to approach too closely?
Firkin looked up at Will. And for a moment, Lette glimpsed something unexpectedly genuine in the old man’s eyes. Something that looked like desperation. Then he shook his head. “Just the drink,” he said.
Abruptly, Balur cursed and shook his hands. The chains fell away, spattering molten metal around the room.
“Okay,” said Quirk, “the lock’s next.”
“Can I be doing that, please?” asked Balur.
Afrit looked confused. “But …”
“He likes to punch locks,” Lette said, as Balur smiled smugly. “It makes him feel better about his tiny, useless genitals.”
“This is an escape,” Quirk said, ignoring any and all references to Balur’s genitals. “We are trying to sneak out. Punching a lock repeatedly does not seem entirely compatible with that plan.”
“There is one thing I’d like to cover,” said Will, still standing at Firkin’s side. “What in the Hallows are we going to do when we actually leave this cell? Our best shot was convincing the Hig
h Priests to make some sort of peace with Firkin. That’s clearly not going to happen.”
Quirk looked at him as if he were standing in the room speaking tongues. “We fight,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We tried peace. We failed. Now we fight, and we win. And then we muster the Vinland forces and march to meet the dragons.”
There had always been a streak of arrogance in Quirk, but Lette found it interesting to see it so close to the surface now. There would come a time when she would have to beat it out of the woman.
“And say we win,” said Will. “Say we pitch half of Vinter against the other, and our side comes out on top. What are we left with? An exhausted, depleted, demoralized excuse for an army?”
Quirk spread her arms. “What else would you have me do? What other options do we have?” She looked around the cramped cell. It appeared that other options were not leaping out of the shadows to embrace her.
“We’ll lose,” said Will plainly. And Lette had to agree.
“We might,” said Quirk. “We have to take that chance.”
Afrit nodded vigorously.
“So if we are fighting,” said Balur, “why are we not punching the lock already? I am thinking that was being the core of Will’s point.”
“Just be quiet for a while,” Lette told him. “The grown-ups are talking.”
Balur stopped pacing and turned to look down at her. “Just because I am preferring a straightforward approach to life does not mean I am appreciating being condescended to.”
“Then don’t make it so easy.”
“We need a better plan,” said Will, ignoring them both.
“Well, I am all ears.” Somehow, from the way Quirk said it, Lette doubted that she was.
“Barph’s Strength,” said Firkin from the floor.
Lette froze.
“What if we can get leverage on the priests?” Will said. “Something to force them to concede to Firkin’s will.”
“You mean like defeating their army?” Quirk wielded sarcasm like she wielded fire.
“Barph’s Strength,” Firkin repeated, his voice stronger.
