by Jon Hollins
She closed her eyes, saw it all in front of her again. “I figured it out when I heard them screaming in that fifth convent. That’s when it hit me. And I turned around, and gods, I prayed for them to get out before the flames took them. I got down on my knees and I implored Barph. Because they were his people. He should have cared, shouldn’t he?”
She pawed at her eyes. Gods-hexed tears were making it hard to see.
“So I said no more. I said I’d be a better person. I was going to make a better life for myself in Kondorra. And then some shitting goblin stole my gold and I got mixed up with you people.” She shook her head. “But I tried. I really did try. I’m still trying. And I don’t think I succeed very often, but I am trying.”
She sniffed. She felt stupid. Gods piss on them all for making her say it. She looked around the cell. Fucking typical. Here she was in Vinland and there wasn’t a drink in sight.
Of all of them, it was Balur who spoke. “The convents?” he said. “That was what was bringing all this better-person shit on? Those stupid convents?”
Gods curse her, she almost laughed. “Yes, Balur,” she said. “Burning several convents full of children did make me reevaluate my life choices. It really did.”
Balur cocked his head. “I was always thinking you just took that comment about your arse really badly.”
“If you say arse again, I will chop off your balls, gouge out your eyes, and shove your nuts into the sockets.”
“You … you …” Afrit seemed to be having a great deal of difficulty with this conversation. She looked at Quirk. “They’re killers of children. We can’t … They have to …” She looked around her.
“Be locking us in a jail cell and sentencing to death?” asked Balur. And gods she was smiling again. The big bastard was trying to cheer her up. Arsehole.
“I am so filled with fucking disgust at—” Afrit started, stalking toward Balur, stabbing a finger at him. Quirk caught her by the arm.
“Hush,” Quirk said. “It’s done.”
And there really was no judgment. Quirk just stared calmly into Afrit’s horrified eyes.
“Done?” asked Afrit. “This remorseless—”
“It’s done,” Quirk said with a sharp jerk of her head.
“We have to—”
“No,” said Quirk. “No we don’t. It’s done. It’s over. It has absolutely no bearing on this situation here and now.”
“No bearing?” Afrit stared around at them as if seeing them all for the first time.
Quirk licked her lips, but that was the only hesitation she allowed herself. “You know my past,” she said quietly. “We all have our convents.”
“I never burnt no gods-pissing convent,” said Firkin from the floor. “Don’t loop me in with you animals.”
Afrit was backing away from Quirk. And there went puppy love, kicked across the floor, whimpering all the way.
“The dragons,” Quirk said, speaking to the room at large. “That is honestly all that matters. Them and our ability to fight them. I cannot afford to give a thrice-cursed pig’s shit about anything else, right now. None of us can. So we must win this civil war, and we must retrieve Barph’s Strength. Everything else is negligible.” She looked around the room. “Would anyone care to disagree with me?”
And despite herself, despite the fact that her eyes stung and her nose still ran, Lette found she was impressed by Quirk. This was leadership. Cold and brutal, and everything it needed to be.
“No,” she said into the silence. “No, that sounds good.”
“Good.” Quirk nodded, and reached out a hand to the lock of the door. The metal glowed red and then fell to the floor. Quirk pushed it open. “Then let’s get out of here and do this.”
34
As Simple as Stealing Beers from a Drunkard
It was difficult, Will found as they left the High Temple behind, to figure out exactly what to say. The actual escaping part had been fine. That had all been creeping around and watching Balur punch people halfway across rooms. Not talking was kind of critical at that point. But then once they had hustled down the last corridor, and out of the final door, and stood blinking in the last rays of day’s light, words seemed inevitable.
They managed to put it off until they were several streets away, but then Quirk turned around. Everyone failed to meet everyone else’s eye.
“All right,” Quirk said, grabbing the verbal bull by the horns. “Given the brutally short timeline we have before us, I think we have to divide and conquer. Balur and Lette, you know about this wine and this goblet. You, I think, should try to retrieve it again. In the meantime we also need Firkin to stay up here as a figurehead of this war. So that’s three of you accounted for. Given everyone else’s emotional state, why doesn’t Will go with you two”—Quirk pointed at Lette and Balur—“while Afrit and I remain here to help guide Firkin and stop him from making this any more of a screwup than it already is?”
Still nobody seemed up to conversation. Balur shrugged. Will said, “Sure,” and then Quirk and Afrit pulled Firkin away. They seemed eager to get clear. Which was probably a good idea, Will thought, especially considering his suspicion that Afrit had been tempted more than once to scream at a guard to be rescued from them all.
In a way Will couldn’t blame her.
Convents. Convents full of kids.
Gods …
He had … with someone who had … And yet, as he looked at Lette, so broken and yet so defiant, he still loved her. He still wanted her. He was still desperately searching for a way to bring a smile back to her face. And he was trying to find ways to sanitize what she had done somehow. She had not known. She—
He stopped himself. Was that worse than what Lette had actually done? Just being okay with it?
Well … probably not. No kids got harmed in his mental processes.
And so … what to say?
The three of them stood staring at each other.
And then from somewhere, perhaps even due to the kindly intervention of some god, he found the right words.
“Well,” he said, “this is Vinter. We should be able to find a drink somewhere.”
Will watched as Lette slowly slipped off the bench and slid into an unconscious pile on the floor. The bartender, watching them carefully from behind the shelter of his bar, took half a step forward, then thought better of it and went back to polishing the pewter goblet in his hand.
Vinter seemed surprisingly functional considering the civil war. On their way from the temple to the tavern they had seen little evidence of the conflict, outside of the grim looks on the people in the streets. There had been a few shouting preachers on the street corners, but in this part of the city the soapbox speeches had all been in favor of the High Priests. At one point, they had heard shouts of panic from ahead, but when they had arrived, there had been no signs of anything amiss. Wherever the fight was truly being fought, the battle lines were stable for now.
Balur leaned down, picked Lette up by the back of her jacket, and dumped her sprawled across the table. He looked at Will, looking at Lette, and he smiled. Balur’s smile always struck Will as involving far too many teeth.
“You should just be saying it,” he said, breaking a silence that had lasted almost three hours now.
Will blinked. “Say what?”
Balur shrugged. “Whatever it is being. That you are loving her. That you are being horrified by her. That you have always been harboring secret fantasies of infanticide yourself and are wanting to go on a murder spree with her. I am not caring. What is being important is that it is said.”
Will thought about that. “It’s not that easy,” he said.
Balur thumped his goblet down on the table. Beer flew, and all the other goblets jumped. “Yes it is being simple,” he said with force. “You are opening your mouth and flapping your tongue. You are doing it all the time. You are just never saying whatever it is you actually need to be saying.”
Will sagged heavily on the table,
planting his elbows and putting his head in his hands. “It’s not. I don’t … I mean …” He stumbled for a phrase Balur might sympathize with. “She could do me serious physical harm” seemed safe.
“I am not giving a shit what she is doing to you,” said Balur, with so much scorn, Will thought he could almost taste it in the back of his throat. “I am caring about Lette. She is waiting for you to be saying whatever in the name of Lawl’s black eye it is that you are needing to say. She may not be knowing it, and she may be denying it if you are asking her, but she is waiting. She is as stuck as you are. So say it. Let her be sad, or happy, or enraged, or relieved, or murderous. I am not caring what it is, but let her be it.” He slammed his goblet down on the table again, then seemed to realize that he had said all he had to say. He settled for glaring at Will.
“What … What if I don’t know what to say?” Will ventured.
Balur threw his arms up in the air. His goblet went flying, landed with a crash ten yards away. The bartender flinched.
“What is that even meaning?” roared Balur. “You are not know what to say? You are not knowing what it is you are thinking?”
“I’m conflicted, okay?” Will felt like he deserved a little understanding here. “I love her. I don’t think she loves me. She’s apparently done some pretty monstrous things, but she’s striving for redemption. I don’t know what to think.”
“So be telling her that!” Balur looked exasperated.
“But—” Will said. And then he looked at the big, copper-colored Analesian sitting in front of him. And what did Balur know of love?
“Ale already!” Balur yelled at the barman, cutting Will off. He looked at Will and shook his head. “Was he not seeing me flinging my drink around the room?”
“I want her to love me again, Balur,” said Will, unable to contain the words any longer. “I don’t want to say something that’ll take that off the table. I want to say the thing that makes it more likely.”
Balur cocked his head to one side and waited until the visibly quaking barman slapped another beer down in front of him. He took a long sip, smacked his lips, and set the fresh goblet down. “So,” he said, “you are thinking that the best way to win back the affections of Lette is to be hiding your emotions away so that she cannot be seeing the true picture of you.”
“Erm …” said Will, because that didn’t sound like a tremendously good idea now that Balur put it that way. “I just want to present myself in the best light.”
“To be tricking her, in other words,” Balur went on.
“Well …” said Will. He felt decidedly uncomfortable now. “That’s not …”
Balur nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That would probably be working.”
“Wait. What?”
“Trickery,” said Balur. “It is being a thing you are good at. Which is being a pretty short list if you are not minding me saying. So really you are needing any advantage you have got.”
Will was beginning to think asking Balur’s advice on this was not a tremendously good idea.
“But you just said I should tell her what I’m thinking.”
“Yes,” Balur agreed, “but that was before I was knowing what horseshit you were thinking. Now I am thinking you should make up something better to be thinking and be telling her that.”
Will hesitated. Balur was much bigger than him. And maybe this particular situation was a good example of where the truth wouldn’t help. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.” He slapped the lizard man on the arm in as companionly a way as he could manage.
Balur stared at Will’s hand on his arm. Will removed it. He looked around the room. He leaned in closer. “So,” he said, lowering his voice, “now that’s sorted, maybe we should figure out how to raid this temple too. What do you know about it?”
Balur shrugged. “The entrance is being a temple in the Eighth District, which is mostly being abandoned ruins. Not much is going on there. It is being an unpopular relic. But it is being an important one. So mostly you are having a lot of bored guards. And lots of other bored guards nearby, guarding other artifacts. The Eighth District is big on artifacts. And Vinter is taking training its soldiers very seriously for a bunch of drunkards.”
“Which is why you tried to trick your way in,” said Will.
“Until pancake arse,” said Balur heavily.
Will thought about that. “That was the only reason your plan failed?”
Balur thought about that as he finished off his pint. “Maybe,” he said.
“So we could try it again,” Will said. “And we could talk to Lette beforehand so she takes any insults less personally.”
Balur nodded. “I could be seeing that. Then we get in the barracks, killing everyone quietly, and descending.”
“Descending?”
“The temple is being an entrance to catacombs,” said Balur. “Great, winding dungeons full of monsters and rage.” He grinned savagely. “And then at the base, the great guardian Lawl was setting to watch over Barph’s Strength for all eternity. His champion which any intruder must be defeating if he is wishing to return to the surface victorious.”
Will wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought Balur was flexing. He decided to move on.
“So,” he said, “you don’t happen to have a map of these catacombs, or a route to get to this champion?”
“Was I or was I not saying, ‘descend’?”
Will felt his eyebrows climb up his forehead. “Okay then. And are there any legends that tell of some special weakness that this champion of Lawl has?” In the tales his mother had told him as a child, the enemy and the hero always owned fatal flaws. Some weak point that you were always waiting to see exploited.
“I am knowing its weakness,” said Balur. “I am stabbing it in the crotch repeatedly until it falls over.”
Will tried to suppress his sigh. “You don’t know anything about it, do you?”
“There is not being one creature that does not fall down when you stab it repeatedly in the crotch,” said Balur obstinately. “That is being science. Ask Quirk.”
And that, Will realized with a small, sad sigh, was the plan.
35
Inaction Plan
Once, Balur had aspired to understand humans. When he had first met Lette she had seemed such a fascinating creature. The Analesian brood mothers had told him about humans, of course, but they had always spoken of weakness and frailty. But Lette—she had been fast, aggressive, almost as deadly as an Analesian. She had not been anything he had heard about before.
And then he had followed her out of the desert, and he had met other humans. He had met other human women, and discovered that not all were as flat and sharp as Lette. Some were curvaceous and bountiful. And they would do some quite frankly incredible things in return for coin.
To be sure, he also found the weak, fleshy humans, and they fell like so much wheat before his war hammer. But not all had been like that. There had been others like Lette. And others still not like the weak ones or the sharp ones. There had been clever ones, and funny ones, and conniving ones, and sneaky ones.
But still in the face of all this variety, Balur had thought that the sum of humanity would reveal itself to him. He got paid to kill all sorts of humans, after all, and noticed some clear common anatomical denominators.
And yet now, as he walked the streets of Vinland alongside two representatives of the human species, he decided he still knew almost nothing.
“You know,” said Will, “this plan seemed a lot better when I was drunk.”
Balur found this statement highly objectionable. “You are calling what you were drunk?” he said. “That is like telling me you were drowning in a piss puddle.”
Lette scowled at them both. Her hangover was clearly a thunderous one. “You’re telling me that there was a time when this seemed like a good plan?”
To be fair, Lette had changed the plan. There had been her flat refusal to dress as a ceremonial whore, for example. And her insistenc
e that she would kill Balur and pimp out his corpse until it garnered such a reputation that she could pass it off as the most popular whore in Vinter if he mentioned it again. Then she had made herself the master, and them her slaves, and stolen a barrel of beer. Still, given the corpse-pimping mood she was in, Balur decided to not point any of that out.
Will grimaced. “I just wish we’d thought of a plan that allowed us to wear swords and armor.”
Balur nodded. “You are meaning the sort of plan where we are posing as relief guards?”
Will ground to a stop. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “why in the Hallows didn’t you suggest that last night?”
“Because,” Lette cut in before Balur could fully express his disinterest in plans, “Balur didn’t want to pose as a relief guard. Did you, Balur?”
Balur shrugged. He knew she knew.
“Tell him the plan that you would have suggested, Balur,” she said.
Balur wondered if this conversation was worth it. On balance he decided it might get him out of future conversations about planning.
“My preferred plan,” he said, “is to be running in there and stabbing everyone repeatedly in the face until they stop breathing.”
“But …” Will cocked his head one way then the other. “That’s a terrible … You said … All the other guards … They’d … outnumbered by a factor of …”
The thought brought a smile to Balur’s face. “Yes,” he said. “But I cannot be dealing with all the stupid conversation, so I am letting you come up with silly bullshit like this.”
He started walking again. What a stupid conversation to have had. Personally, of course, he would rather eschew conversations in favor of working issues out through fucking or fighting, but it had always seemed to him that Will was ill-equipped to compete with Lette in either of those arenas. So, in this particular case, he was willing to concede the need for a discussion before Lette slew Will either with her blade or her loins. But this extended dialogic foreplay before they got to the conversational climax was not his style at all.
The land Vinter perched upon was steep and craggy on its northern edge. Here in District Eight, streets were hacked into the rock, creating a series of steps. Overhangs cast everything in shadow. Most buildings were abandoned, half-collapsed affairs. A few were still populated by destitute-looking families.
