by Sam Sykes
The firelight cast the heavy wooden cabinets and thick oak table and chairs in guttering light. Will tried to focus on that, not the shadows of the day. Maybe Bessie did have one more litter in her. Maybe he could give her one more year. A good litter would bring in enough coin. Or near enough, if the taxes didn’t go up again. And he could scrimp and save in a few places. Maybe sell a few of the chairs. It wasn’t like he needed more than one.
Yes. Yes, of course that would work. And Lawl or some other member of the Pantheon would manifest in the run-down old temple in the village below and shower them all with gold. That was what would happen …
His slow-bubbling thoughts were interrupted abruptly by a sharp rap at his door. He snapped his head to look at the thick oak slats. Outside, rain had begun to fall, tapping a complex undulating rhythm against the thatch roof above his head. It was over an hour’s walk from The Village. Who would bother dragging themselves out here at this hour?
He had half-dismissed the sound as a loose branch blowing across the yard when it came again. A hard, precise rap that rattled the door latch. If it was a branch, it was a persistent one.
Removing the stew pot from the fire, he crossed the room quickly, unlatched the door, and opened it onto a cold and blustery night.
Four soldiers stood upon his doorstep. Their narrowed eyes stared out from beneath the shadows of their helms, which dripped rainwater down onto their long noses. Swords hung heavily on their large belts, each pommel embossed with an image of two batlike wings—the mark of the Dragon Consortium. Sodden leather jerkins with the same insignia were pulled over their heavy chain-mail shirts.
They were not small men. Their expressions were not kind. Will could not tell for sure, but they bore a striking resemblance to the four soldiers who had carried off most of the coin he’d been relying on to get through the winter.
“Can I help you?” asked Will, as politely as he was able. If there was anything at which he could fail to help them, he wanted to know about it.
“You can get the piss out of my way so me and my men can come out of this Hallows-cursed rain,” said the lead soldier. He was taller than the others, with a large blunt nose that appeared to have been used to stop a frying pan, repeatedly, for most of his childhood. Air whistled in and out of it as he spoke.
“Of course.” Will stepped aside. While he bore the guards of the Dragon Consortium no love, he bore even less for the idea of receiving a sound thrashing at their hands.
The four soldiers tramped laboriously in, sagging under the weight of their wet armor. “Obliged,” said the last of the men, nodding. He had a kinder face than the others. Will saw the lead soldier roll his eyes.
They stood around Will’s small fire and surveyed his house with expressions that looked a lot like disdain. Large brown footprints tracked their path from the door. The fourth guard looked at them, then shrugged at Will apologetically.
For a moment they all stood still. Will refused to leave the door, clinging to the solidity of it. Grounding himself in the wood his father had cut and hewn before he was born. As he watched the soldiers by the fire, his stomach tied more knots than an obsessive-compulsive fisherman.
Finally he crossed to them, the table, and his stew. He began to ladle it into a large if poorly made bowl. He wasn’t hungry anymore, but it gave him something to do. These soldiers would get to their business with or without his help.
As he ladled, the lead soldier fiddled with a leather pouch at his waist.
“Nice place this,” said the fourth, seeming to feel more awkward in the silence than the others.
“Thank you,” Will said, as evenly as he was able. “My parents built it.”
“Keep saying to the missus we should get a place like this,” the guard continued, “but she doesn’t like the idea of farm living. Likes to be close to the center of things. By which she really means the alchemist. Gets a lot of things from the alchemist, she does. Very healthy woman. Always adding supplements to my diet.” He patted his stomach, metal gauntleted hand clanking against the chain mail. “Doesn’t ever seem to do any good.” He looked off into the middle distance. “Of course my brother says I’m cuckolded by a drug-addled harpy, but he’s always been a bit negative.”
The guard seemed to notice that everyone was staring at him.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Obviously none of that is related to why we’re officially here. Just wanted to, well, you know …” He withered under his commanding officer’s stare.
The lead soldier looked away from him, down to a piece of browning parchment paper that he had retrieved from his pouch. Then he turned the gaze he had used to dominate his subordinate upon Will.
“You are Willett Altior Fallows, son of Mickel Betterra Fallows, son of Theorn Pentauk Fallows, owner and title holder of this farmstead?” he asked. He was not a natural public speaker, stumbling over most of the words. But he kept his sneer firmly in place as he read.
Will nodded. “That’s what my mother always told me,” he said. The fourth soldier let out a snort of laughter, then at the looks from the others, murdered his mirth like a child tossed down a well.
The lead soldier’s expression, by contrast, did not flicker for an instant. Will thought he might even have seen a small flame as the joke died against his stony wall of indifference. The soldier had the air of a man who had risen through the ranks on the strength of having no imagination whatsoever. The sort of man who followed orders, blindly and doggedly, and without remorse.
“The dragon Mattrax and by extension the Dragon Consortium as a whole,” the officer continued in his same stilted way, reading from the parchment, “find your lack of compliance with this year’s taxes a great affront to their nobility, their honor, and their deified status. You are therefore—”
“Wait a minute.” Will stood, ladle in his hand, knuckles white about its handle, staring at the man. “My lack of what?”
For a moment, as the soldier had begun to speak, Will had felt his stomach plunge in some suicidal swan dive, abandoning ship entirely. And then, as the next words came, there had been a sort of pure calm. An empty space in his emotions, as if they had all been swept away by some great and terrible wind that had scoured the landscape clean and sent cows flying like siege weaponry.
But by the time the soldier finished, there was a fury in him he could barely fathom. He had always thought of himself as a peaceable man. In twenty-eight years he had been in exactly three fights, had started only one of them, and had thrown no more than one punch in each. But, as if summoned by some great yet abdominally restrained wizard, an inferno of rage had appeared out of nowhere in his gut.
“My taxes?” he managed to splutter. He was fighting against an increasing urge to take his soup ladle and ram it so far down the soldier’s throat he could scoop out his balls. “Your great and grand fucking dragon Mattrax took me for almost every penny I had. He has laid waste to the potential for this farm with his greed. And there was not a single complaint from me. Not as I gave you every inherited copper shek, silver drach, and golden bull I had.”
He stood, almost frothing with rage, staring down the lean, unimpressed commander.
“Actually,” said the fourth soldier, almost forgotten at the periphery of events, “it was probably a clerical error. There’s an absolutely vast number of people who fall under Mattrax’s purview, and every year there’s just a few people whose names don’t get ticked. It’s an inevitability of bureaucracy, I suppose.”
Both Will and the commanding officer turned hate-filled eyes on the soldier.
“So,” said Will, voice crackling with fire, “tick my fucking name then.”
“Oh.” The soldier looked profoundly uncomfortable. “Actually that’s not something we can do. Not our department at all. I mean you can appeal, but first you have to pay the tax a second time, and then appeal.”
“Pay the tax?” Will said, the room losing focus for him, a strange sense of unreality descending. “I can’t pay the
fucking tax a second time. Nobody here could afford that. That’s insane.”
“Yes,” said the guard sadly. “It’s not a very fair system.”
Will felt as if the edges of the room had become untethered from reality, as if the whole scene might fold up around him, wither away to nothingness, leaving him alone in a black void of insanity.
“Willett Altior Fallows,” intoned the lead soldier, with a degree of blandness only achievable through years of honing his callousness to the bluntest of edges, “I hereby strip you of your title to this land in recompense for taxes not paid. You shall be taken from here directly to debtors’ jail.”
“Oh debtors’ jail,” said the fourth guard, slapping a palm to his forehead. “I totally forgot about debtors’ jail. Because,” he added, nodding to himself, “it’s not as if you can appeal the ruling while you’re in the jail. Nobody’s going to come down and listen to you down there. But when you get out, you can totally appeal. I think the queue is only four or five years long at that point. Though, honestly, I would have expected it to be shorter given the fairly high mortality rate among inmates in debtors’ jail …” He trailed off. “Don’t suppose that’s very helpful, is it?” he said to the room at large.
Will could barely hear him. This could not be happening. Every careful financial plan he had put together. Every future course he had plotted. Each one of them ruined, ground beneath the twin heels of incompetence and greed, became nothing more than kindling for his fury. Rage roared around him, filled his ears with noise, his vision with red.
He tried to say something, opened his mouth. Only an inarticulate gurgle of rage emerged.
“Chain his hands,” said the lead soldier.
Something snapped in Will. Suddenly the bowl of stew was in his hand. He flung it hard and fast at the lead soldier’s face. It crashed into his nose with a satisfying crunch, shattered. Pottery shards scored lines across the man’s face. He’d made that bowl as a boy, he remembered now. A simple pinch pot; a gift for his mother. He’d meant it as a vase but hadn’t been old enough to know what a vase had actually looked like. He’d flown into a temper tantrum when he first saw her eating from it. And now it was gone. Along with everything else.
The soldier reeled back, bellowed. Will was barely paying attention. He was already lunging for the larger pot, iron sides still scalding from the heat of the fire.
A guard beat him, steel-encased fist slamming into the pot, sending the contents flying.
Will could hear steel scraping against leather. Swords leaving their hilts.
He brought the ladle round in a tight arc, smashed it into the lunging guard’s cheek. The man staggered sideways. Will came up, was face-to-face with the fourth soldier. The soldier’s eyes were wide, panicked. Will stabbed straight forward, the spoon of the ladle crashing into the guard’s throat. The guard dropped to the floor choking, a look of surprise and hurt on his face.
And then the last guard’s sword smashed the ladle from Will’s hands and sent it skittering across the floor.
Out of daily kitchenware, Will reconsidered his options. The lead guard was recovering, snarling, red blistering skin bleeding openly. The fourth guard was still gasping, but the other two both had their swords up. They advanced.
As most other options seem to lead to rapid and fatal perforation, Will backed up fast.
“Not sure you’re going to make it to jail,” said one guard. He was smiling.
The other just stalked forward, weight held low, eyes narrowed beneath dark brows.
Will glanced about. But his mother had always been strict about leaving the farm outside of the house and that habit had died hard. There was no handy scythe, no gutting knife, not even a shovel. His foot slipped in one of the muddy footprints the guards had left on the tile floor. The grinning guard closed the gap another yard.
“Stop fucking about and kill the little shit stain already,” snarled the soldier with the blistered face.
The words were the catalyst. Will unfroze as the guards leapt forward. He tore out of the kitchen door, heard the swish of steel through the air, waited for pain, and found it hadn’t come by the time his feet carried him through the threshold and into the darkness.
He abandoned the spill of yellow light and tore toward the barn as fast as his feet would carry him. There was a way to fight back there. A way to stop this. There had to be.
“After the little fucker!” The rasping rage of the burned guard chased after him.
“He hit me.” The bewildered burble of the fourth guard.
“I’ll fucking hit you if you don’t bring me his spleen.”
The other guards were hard on his heels. Rain slashed at him. Will hit the door of the barn, bounced off, felt the sting of it in his shoulder, his palms. He scrabbled at the door, flung it open. A sword blade embedded itself in the frame as he darted through. A guard grunted in frustration.
Everything was shadows and the smell of damp straw. He could hear the cows, Ethel and Beatrinne, stamping and huffing. The soft lumbering snores of the two sheep, Atta and Petra. It felt like home. Except the guards behind him were some awful violation. Some tearing wound in everything he held dear.
He looked around, desperate, panic making the place unfamiliar. A blade. He needed a blade. The scythe—
“Torch it.” The words barely penetrated his consciousness. But then he heard the strike of a flint, the whispered roar of flame igniting. Yellow light blazed in the doorway. He watched the torch as it flipped end over end to land in the straw.
BY SAM SYKES
BRING DOWN HEAVEN
The City Stained Red
The Mortal Tally
God’s Last Breath
THE AEONS’ GATE TRILOGY
Tome of the Undergates
Black Halo
Skybound Sea
An Affinity for Steel (omnibus edition)
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