The Dragon Lords: False Idols

by Jon Hollins

  “Why did you leave the university and go out into the field?” asked Knole. She had a quiet, lilting voice. Her hair was back in her eyes again and she did not push it away. “When you first went in search of dragons. Why was that?”

  Quirk was caught off guard. She stumbled over her hurt. “You … You know about that?” And she did not want to be in awe of this goddess. She did not want to feel pride that she actually knew her. But she did.

  “You have prayed to me,” said Knole. “And I have heard you even if I have not answered. I remember.” She looked away into the distance, smiled to herself. “I remember everything.” Her gaze flicked back to Quirk. “So tell me. Why did you leave?”

  Afrit was stroking her arm, and she wanted to pull away, but Knole’s gaze pinned her as certainly as any wrestler’s hold would have done.

  “I wanted …” Quirk’s mouth was dry. She licked her lips. “I wanted to see dragons with my own eyes. I wanted to know them truly. I didn’t want it to simply be writings in books. I wanted it to live and breathe.”

  Knole nodded. And she understood. She truly did. Quirk knew that. She was only a few steps away now.

  “This is like that,” she said. “This is closing the distance between you and knowledge.” She reached out a hand toward Quirk. “Not all flesh is burned. Not all of it rots. Do you not deserve to know that?”

  And there was a promise there. Even a kindness. But Quirk felt something else behind it. She could not help but be aware in this moment, with the goddess’s psyche pressed up against her own, that for Knole there were no limits to the search for knowledge. The goddess would know everything if she could. She would want to know how a beggar would feel if she poured a million golden bulls into his lap, just as she would want to know how a mother would feel as she twisted her infant’s head from its body. And this moment, right here and now, was just the same thing. It was a chance to learn, to add another drop to the infinite ocean of information that lived within her.

  But there was some comfort in that thought too. And Quirk felt that, despite the clear inhumanity of the woman before her, the offer of intimacy was meant with that spirit. There was a concept of kindness within her goddess. Knole understood it even if she did not experience it.

  Knole’s hand was on her wrist. Afrit was still stroking her other arm.

  And, yes there was comfort here.

  Slowly, Quirk sank to her knees and allowed them to teach her.

  58

  In the Afterglow

  Well, thought Will when it was all said and done and he had pieced back together most of his sanity, that was a lot better than I thought it might be, but I’m still not going to tell a single gods-hexed soul about it.

  59

  Changing Plans Like Diapers

  The sun filtered slowly into the copse of trees. Birds called back and forth to each other. On the horizon, Will could see the ruined city of Vinter smoking gently. Disheveled and disarrayed, the gods of Avarra and his dazed-looking companions gathered around the dead remains of a campfire.

  “So!” Barph clapped his hands. Of all of them, he looked by far the best. His beard was groomed for the first time that Will could ever remember. His hair was slicked back, and braided. “Morning, everybody.” He beamed.

  “Fuck you, Barph,” Toil muttered.

  “Ready to die, Father?” said Barph, the force of his smile not wavering for a second.

  “I believe,” said Betra, voice haughty despite the fact that her dress was torn almost to the point of indiscretion, “that some breakfast might be in order before we address the necessities of the day.”

  Will wasn’t sure where the sausages came from. Or the potatoes. Or tea. Or even the plates and cutlery. But he didn’t complain.

  Nobody said much.

  When they were done—Barph the last to finish, licking his plate clean with his tongue—the gods stood, looked at each other.

  “The dragons are in Vinter,” said Barph helpfully. “I’d suggest trying there.” He smiled.

  “You don’t have to enjoy it so much,” Cois said to him. Zhe looked surprisingly dreary to Will this morning. There was nothing physically different about hir that he could tell, but whatever had lit a fire in his britches was absent now.

  Will watched them walk away, stumbling slightly, a little unsure of themselves. Toil stubbed his toe, bent and rubbed it.

  “Shit,” he heard the god say. “Never done that before.”

  And then they were out of earshot, and the five mortals and one smug deity were standing watching as they slowly trudged back toward the ruins of Vinter.

  Did he feel divine? Will wondered. Mostly he felt like shit. His broken leg was throbbing fit to burst. The rigors of the previous night had not been good for it. That didn’t seem very godlike.

  “Did it work?” he said, turning to Barph. “Are we …? Did they …?” He really, really wanted to avoid anyone using the word deposit again.

  “Did you cause Cois to …” Barph waggled his eyebrows at Will.

  “Erm …” Will spluttered. He tried really, really hard not to look at Lette. He failed miserably. “Well …”

  Barph was grinning almost as much as when he sent Toil off to Vinter. “If your evening’s pleasure was successful then the magic I wove should have been as well.”

  “Pleasure,” Quirk muttered to herself, almost contemplative. Afrit turned away.

  Will looked at the pair. But he didn’t have time for the vagaries of Quirk and Afrit’s ever-more-complicated relationship. Instead he turned back to Barph and asked, “So, what can we do?”

  “Okay,” said Barph. “You’d like to heal your leg, wouldn’t you? So … think about your leg. How you want it to be. Close your eyes. Picture the ideal state of your leg. Think of bone knitting, and skin meshing. Think of pain floating away.”

  Will was dubious, but he also wanted his leg to feel better. He closed his eyes. He pictured things. His leg still throbbed. He opened his eyes. Barph was grinning at him.

  “Fuck you,” Will told him.

  “I just wanted to know what you’d look like,” said Barph.

  “So we are not being divine?” asked Balur. “I was … I was … Last night I … for nothing?” His fists were balled.

  “Oh stop crying,” said Barph. He sounded bored. He pointed at Will. “Just put your hand over the wound and tell it to heal.”

  “Tell it to heal?” Will looked at him skeptically. “If you’re messing with me …”

  “Then you’ll be able to do nothing, because I’ll still be divine and you won’t be. But if you are then we can have a much more interesting conversation.”

  Will still hesitated. Firkin had always enjoyed a good practical joke, but there was a streak of cruelty in Barph’s humor that had never been so prominent in the old man’s jests.

  Still, what did he have to lose but pride? And he had precious little left of that this morning anyway. He bent awkwardly, put his hand on his leg. He winced as he did so.

  “Heal,” he told it through gritted teeth.

  Nothing happened.

  “Not like that.” Barph sounded slightly disgusted. “Mean it.”

  “Mean it?” Will hoped someone besides Barph was enjoying this. Sighing, he reached down to his leg once more. “Heal,” he said, more forcefully this time.

  Barph’s slap caught him entirely off guard. It was a full palm to his cheek. He reeled, stumbled on his injury, bellowed.

  “Mean it!” yelled Barph. “Believe it!”

  Will looked up at him, and thought about murder. But even if he was divine he still had no way to actually back up his threats until he mastered this.

  “Heal,” he said.

  Barph’s slap was no less hard the second time. “Mean it!” shouted the god.

  “Heal,” he said.

  Another slap.

  “Gods, is this really—” Quirk started.

  “Heal!” shouted Will.

  And then he felt it. Warm
th and liquid pleasure rolling through his leg. Bone knitting together. Skin meshing over the wound. The relief was incredible. He stood up with a gasp, tested his weight on his leg. The others stared at him. He stood one-legged before them. He hopped. He laughed.

  “Gods,” breathed Afrit.

  “Yes,” said Lette. “That’s actually right.”

  “What can I be smiting?” asked Balur. He was almost jumping up and down. “I am wanting to smite something!” He pointed at a lone cow that had wandered into the half-burned field that surrounded the copse. It was picking at odd stands of grass that had survived the passage of the dragons’ army. “Smite!” he yelled. Nothing happened. He turned to Barph. “How am I smiting things?”

  “Oh good,” said Barph. “It worked. I wasn’t sure it would. I’ve never taken the divinity from another god and shoved it into a mortal before.”

  “You …?” Will managed. “You weren’t sure …?”

  Barph shrugged again. “What was the worst that could happen?”

  “Smite!” Balur shouted.

  “We all die horrible messy deaths,” Lette hazarded.

  Barph nodded. “Yes. But that was probably going to happen anyway.”

  “But you said …” Will couldn’t believe it. Except he could. Of course he could. Take Firkin’s bullshit, and mix it with a divinely cavalier disregard for human life … Gods. Fucking gods.

  His jaw worked. And now that he did have divine powers he could teach Barph a lesson. He could …

  Have a much more interesting conversation. That was what Barph had said.

  “Are we immortal?” he asked. Because suddenly his anger was drowned out by all the questions shouting in his head.

  “Why don’t you have Balur smite you and find out?”

  Balur beamed. He pointed at Will. “Smite!” he yelled.

  Will leapt back. “Gods, Balur!” But lightning did not strike. Life did not end.

  Balur grunted, evidently disappointed, and went back to pointing at his cow. “Smite!” he shouted. The cow continued to quietly chew her cud.

  “You seem to know very little,” said Quirk. She, of them all, seemed the calmest this morning. A little more detached perhaps, but calm. Will wondered why Afrit had such a sour expression.

  “Oh good,” said Barph. “Did Knole deposit her supercilious condescension in you as well? That’s fantastic.”

  Quirk narrowed her eyes. “You have a plan, though,” she said. “You weren’t sure if this would work, but you had contingencies for either scenario.”

  “I plan,” said Balur, “far less than people seem to imagine. I merely improvise well.”

  Quirk shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s not it.” She sounded quite sure of herself.

  Barph rolled his eyes. “There is no getting through to some people,” he said with a sigh.

  “Smite!” shouted Balur to no avail.

  “What is next in the plan anyway?” asked Lette. “And why isn’t Afrit saying anything?”

  Afrit shot Lette a look that Will would have expected on a cornered and injured badger. “I’m fine,” Afrit barked.

  Quirk, Will noticed, didn’t even spare Afrit a glance. She stayed intent on Barph.

  “You said we’d go to the Hallows,” she said. “You said we would return their divinity.”

  “I did,” Barph admitted.

  “But that’s not it,” said Quirk. There was the hint of a smile etched on her lips. A look of slight satisfaction.

  Will totally got what Barph had been saying about supercilious condescension.

  “Smite!” shouted Balur.

  This was abruptly followed by a violent cracking sound, a wet splat, and the sound of thunder. A hundred yards away, lightning struck, and a tan-colored cow burst apart like a sack of wet meat. Blood and offal sprayed, and bone fragments rained down, little yellow hailstones smashing through the grass.

  “Oh,” breathed Balur. “Oh, I could be getting used to that.”

  For a moment, Will stared in horror. And then, slipping through his thoughts, the question … Could he do that now? Could he turn his enemies to …

  The possibilities stretched out before him. But had he ever heard a story of Cois smiting anyone? He had assumed divine powers were a rather uniform package, but the gods each had their own realms, their own areas of influence. Did having Cois’s divinity within mean that he was attuned to … to … fertility? Could he make crops grow? Could he encourage farm animals to breed?

  Could he make someone feel desire?

  Could he make Lette …

  No. Gods, no. A thousand times no.

  “When do we go to the Hallows then?” Lette asked, and Will almost jumped. “If that’s still the plan.”

  Gods, Will hoped she couldn’t read minds now.

  “Tomorrow,” said Barph. “Once the gods are dead.” He reached behind the spot where he was sitting on the grass and produced a vast wineskin from nowhere. He unstopped it, spilling fluid liberally over his hands, and took a long slurp. “Anyone else?” he asked.

  “Where will we be finding the entrance to the Hallows?” asked Balur, taking the wineskin.

  “The Atrian Waste,” said Barph nonchalantly.

  Which caused Will to pause. “That’s four hundred leagues north of here,” he pointed out. “As the crow flies. And we have to go through the Spatters and likely the Osten Jungle to get there. Not to mention that every inch of ground between here and there is now controlled by the dragons.” His voice, he noticed, was getting a little high-pitched.

  “Yes,” Barph sighed. Then he added, “Tomorrow,” as if that somehow magically solved everything.

  “Except,” Quirk said, “tomorrow the gods will be dead, and the dragons will be divine. Won’t us working miracles draw them like flies?”

  All eyes fell upon Barph, who was, for better or worse, the closest thing they had to an expert on these matters.

  Barph cocked his head. “They are not gods yet,” he said. “They will need to ascend to the actual heavens first. There is ritual to these things. It is based upon worship.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “They’ll need the will of the people to take them there.”

  “I think they have that,” Will said. “I still don’t honestly know why, but they have almost three hundred thousand supporters gathered in Vinter now.”

  “And more are still coming,” said Lette. On the horizon they could all see the dust of carts and foot traffic as people slowly came in pilgrimage to the site of the dragons’ final victory.

  “That might be enough to do it,” Barph said, nodding slowly. “They all gather in Vinter. The people worship them. They ascend.” He nodded more definitively. “Yes, I imagine we’ll be seeing all the other dragons assemble here soon enough.”

  “So that’s our grace period then,” Will said, his brain churning furiously. “That’s how long we’ve got to safely travel … gods, four hundred leagues.” His heart sank. He turned to Quirk. “How long do you think it’ll take the dragons to get here?”

  Quirk puffed out her cheeks. “Well,” she said. “The Fanlorn Empire is probably the farthest from here. She cocked her head to one side. “From there … if my estimations of their airspeed velocity hold true … perhaps four or five days.”

  “Gods,” breathed Will as his heart went into a nosedive, dragging all his hopes along with it. “Is that all?”

  “Could we be beating one of the dragons in Vinter into submission and riding it as a steed into Atria?” Balur asked, eyes gleaming.

  “No, you jackass.” Lette spoke for the group. “We could not.”

  “Wait,” said Will, because what Balur said was clearly the product of balls too large and thoughts too small, but there was perhaps a nugget of an idea hidden in there. “We can smite things now … Or …” He considered. “Balur can anyway.” He looked at Barph. “I don’t know about the rest of us.” Barph gave him a poker face that Firkin would never have been able to sustain. Will moved o
n. That wasn’t the crux of his concern now. “But what if Balur smote a dragon? What if lightning reached down and slammed into one? We saw magicians do that in Kondorra and it hurt that dragon. Hurt it badly.”

  “I think I should do that,” said Balur, nodding sharply. “That should be being part of all our plans going forward. Regardless.”

  “So,” said Quirk, “you think we should attack the dragons now?” She had her disapproving schoolmarm face on.

  Will ignored her. He wasn’t ready for that step yet. “What would happen, Barph?” he pressed.

  Barph shrugged. But Will called bullshit on that shrug. Barph knew something. “What would happen?” he pressed.

  Barph shook his head. “It wouldn’t work. People believe in the dragons and their invulnerability too much. They’re not gods yet, but they’re very close. Remember when you saw me fight the dragons. You saw me in the heart of my own city, in the heart of my worshippers. You saw me shrug off wounds that should have killed me a thousand times. It would be the same with them.” He gave a sour smile. “One does hate being the bearer of bad news all the time.

  “Belief protects them?” Will asked.

  “Why are you asking about attacking the dragons?” Quirk said again, a hard edge to her voice now.

  “You have a plan,” said Lette, catching on. She looked at Will. “Don’t you?”

  “And I smite dragons in it?” asked Barph.

  “No,” said Afrit, but no one was really paying attention to her.

  “That isn’t what you agreed to do, Will,” Barph said. But his smile was back.

  “Oh?” said Will. “Like you’re the god of keeping your word? Like you don’t have some sort of betrayal in your heart? At least this way it’s our betrayal.”

  “No,” Afrit said again, louder this time. “We have a plan. We stick to it.”

  Lette gave Afrit a look that Will thought was far more offended than he would have expected. “Hear him out,” she said. “You might even get to fuck Quirk again.”

  Will’s eyes flew to Quirk. But the academic-cum-resistance-leader hadn’t even batted an eyelid. All her attention, it seemed, was on Barph. Afrit, though, when Will looked, was white-faced and pink-cheeked. There was a look like murder in her eyes. And, of all the people in the group, it was Balur who was subtly shaking his head at Lette.