by Jon Hollins
Firkin bobbed his head. “Good to appreciate the little things,” he said. Then added as an afterthought, “and the big things too. People always go on about the little things, but big grand gestures deserve love too, I say.”
“That’s a good point as well,” said the second High Priest. She sampled her freshly filled goblet and smiled happily.
“Wait …” said the first. “So what do we do if we don’t know his title?”
“Well,” said the woman, “we’ll just have to ask him what it was. Find out.”
The first High Priest turned to Firkin. “All right then,” he said. “What was your title back in Kondorra?”
Firkin thought about that. “Just to be clear,” he said, desperately fighting for clarity in his foggy thoughts, “you can only kill me if you know my title?”
The spear enthusiast quivered. “Do not question—” he started.
“Shut up!” yelled the third High Priest. He rolled his eyes. “Can’t get the staff these days.”
“Well …” Firkin gave a sheepish grin. “Doesn’t lend me much incentive to tell you.”
“I could torture it out of him,” said the spear enthusiast, almost vibrating out his boots. His level of energy was really starting to irritate Firkin.
It also made him suspicious. Firkin turned accusing eyes on the guard. “Are you even drunk?” he asked.
The guard looked horrified. “I took my prescribed three shots of whiskey along with everyone else in the barracks. You ask any of them.”
“Torture would probably be a pretty quick solution to everything,” said the third High Priest.
The fourth kept up his dead-eyed stare.
Firkin thought desperately. “Wait!” he shouted. Then he tried to think of something that they should have waited for. He turned back to the guard. “So you had your three whiskeys, because that’s the rule? Because that’s what you were told to do? Because Barph just loves slavish following of rules. That’s what Barph is all about. Lawl’s little lapdog, isn’t he? Doing whatever he’s told!”
He glared daggers at the guard, while appreciating the way his voice bounced off the temple’s stone walls. The acoustics really were excellent.
“I …” the guard spluttered. “That’s not …”
“He does have a point,” said the first priest, who seemed interested in the whole exchange. “When I was in the guards I was always stealing other folks’ whiskey. Start off the day with a good buzz. If I had trouble tying my laces, I knew I was in a good spot.”
“I’ve got a buzz!” said the guard.
Firkin thought he smelled blood in the water. “I don’t think you do,” he said, as viciously as he could manage. “I think you’ve built up a tolerance. I think you’re almost entirely sober.”
“It’s a lie!” screamed the guard. “A vicious, ugly lie!” But his hand on his spear was shaking.
Three of the four High Priests looked at each other. The fourth remained resolute in staring at Firkin.
The first priest pursed his lips. The other two shrugged. The first turned to the guard. “You,” he said, “say the alphabet backwards.”
“What?” the guard looked confused. “You want me to … erm … Z, Y, X.” He looked about for help. The servants were all staring at their feet and shuffling. “W, V, U, erm, T, S.”
“Shut up,” snapped the priest. “I’ve heard enough.”
The guard sagged against his spear in relief.
“Come into this fucking chamber, and you’re so sober you can say the alphabet backwards. I can barely even remember what a letter is right now. You sicken me. Take him to the headsman’s block.”
“What?” said the guard!
But two of the other guards around Firkin sighed and grabbed their companion. He kicked and screamed, and the third smashed him in the mouth with the butt of his own spear. The guard sagged, then was unceremoniously dragged to the headsman’s block and held in place. The headsman gathered up his axe and quietly did his job.
The first priest clapped. “Lovely,” he said. “I love that part.”
The second priest was less easily distracted. “We still don’t know his title,” she said, pointing at Firkin.
“Weren’t we going to torture him?” said the third.
And the fourth stared.
“Is he all right?” Firkin asked, pointing.
The other three looked at the fourth. “Oh by Barph’s hairy balls,” said the second.
“Not again,” said the first.
“Somebody shake him,” said the third.
A servant ran forward and shook the priest. He slumped stiffly to the floor. The servant screamed.
“If they refuse to check their livers before they promote people,” said the second to anyone who would listen, “this is going to keep on happening.”
The first sighed. “Someone take him away and tell the clerics we need a fourth High Priest again.”
“Good spot,” said the third, nodding to Firkin. “The last one started to smell before anyone noticed.”
“What were we talking about, again?” said the first, who seemed distracted by the group of servants fussing around the dead priest.
“Torture, I think,” said the second, who was far more persistent on the subject than Firkin had hoped.
“My title,” he said, trying to ride over her.
“That was it.” The first clicked his fingers. “We don’t know it, and we’re going to torture it out of you.” He smiled. “It’s all coming back to me now.”
Firkin’s mind reached speeds that he usually tried to avoid. He could feel a violent hangover coming on. “What if …” he said, playing for time. “I … I didn’t have a title?”
The three surviving priests looked perplexed by this statement. “But you were in charge of Kondorra,” said the first. He sounded irritated. “Of course you had a title.”
Anger was not the reaction Firkin had been aiming for. He tried to steer them more toward sympathy, affecting a mournful air. “My lack of a title was a great tragedy,” he said, bullshitting wildly. “It was about to be enacted, but unfortunately—and I know you didn’t intend this—but you invaded before we could come up with a title.”
The three High Priests looked momentarily horrified.
“Well,” said the first, staring tragically into his empty cup. “That’s awkward.”
“Don’t think that’s happened before,” said the third.
“Men always say that,” said the second priest, waving her cup at more servants.
“I am terribly sorry,” said the third, addressing Firkin directly. Firkin shrugged, trying to suggest he understood, and felt bad that he’d raised such an awkward subject. But honestly it was getting increasingly difficult to work out what in the Hallows was going on.
He flailed for a plan. “What if,” he said, “you gave me a title?”
The priests looked at each other. “Us?” asked the first.
“Just something lowly in the priesthood,” Firkin suggested.
“Well that would be pretty decent of you,” said the second. “Help us out a lot.”
“Does that mean there won’t be any torture?” The third sounded sad.
“We could make him, erm …” The second drummed her fingers. “What do altar attendants do?”
“Blow me mostly,” said the first priest, with a bored look.
The third roused himself from his despondency long enough to nod.
“Maybe not that,” Firkin hazarded.
The second nodded. “Maybe something clerical. In the Third District?”
“That’s a shitty district,” said the third. “What’s wrong with an altar attendant?”
“Do you really want to be blown by him?” The second priest nodded at Firkin, who smiled, showing his haphazardly placed, browning teeth.
The third priest blanched. “The Third District then.”
“Seconded,” said the first priest.
The second priest no
dded. “And so it is writ.” They all went to take a sip from their glasses. Then there was a pause as servants rushed to fill them. Firkin shuffled a little more toward the back of the room.
“So,” he said, once the High Priests were settled, “I should probably be off to the Third District then.”
The second priest narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“Oh,” said Firkin as nonchalantly as possible, “I’m a cleric there. It’s a shitty district. Lots to sort out there. Wouldn’t want to trouble you with all the things going on there. Breakouts of sobriety. That sort of thing.”
The priests blanched. “Sobriety? Gods.”
The first shuddered. “I can’t even.” He drank deeply again.
“So I’ll be off then?” said Firkin. He grinned hopefully at his surrounding guards.
“Yes,” said the first. “Sobriety? Barph be pissed upon. Deal with that now. And wear gloves.”
“But weren’t we—” started the third.
“Sobriety, man!” shouted the first priest. And drank again. The second was still working through her recently filled glass and seemed on the verge of falling out of her chair.
Firkin took the opportunity to quietly step away.
11
Substandard Subterfuge
Lying on his stomach in the soft Batarran grass, the sun stretching lazy fingers over the horizon, Will wondered which God hated him so much.
Next to Will, lay Cyrill.
Cyrill was the independent observer that the Batarran High Council had provided to himself, Lette, and Balur. Cyrill was the man they had determined best suited to accompanying them on a mission to infiltrate the ranks of the Theerax worshippers and to elucidate whether the dragon had nefarious plans to take over the country.
Cyrill was approximately eighty years old, and it was not the good eighty years. It was not the spry, leather-skinned eighty that came with a dry wit and knowing ways. Not even the slightly delirious, flirtatious eighty that came with the joyful knowledge that here one had finally arrived at the stage of life where one no longer had to give a shit. Cyrill was the sort of eighty that looked like it had been arrived at through slow erosion, until all that was left was a papery rag of a human being. Internal structures seemed to be subsiding, the man collapsing in on himself, achieving a strangely bent and bloated configuration. And honestly, if Cyrill managed to actually observe anything at all, Will would be shocked. He peered out at the world through rheumy eyes mostly hidden behind thick, bulbous lids.
What was more—indeed, what was worse—Cyrill loved only one thing in life. And that thing was not task of observing the world. In fact, in the three days he had known Cyrill—and when Cyrill had not been rhapsodizing on the object of his desire—the old man had filled in the silences by talking about how much he disliked being an observer. “Sixty years of being passed over for promotion,” uttered in Cyrill’s dry, creaking tones, was a refrain that played in Will’s dreams now.
And still, so very much worse than this was Cyrill’s great love.
“You’re going to be observing Theerax!” Will had shouted at the old man back in his cramped office in the Batarran council buildings.
“Theerax?” Cyrill had whispered back, his voice drawn taut.
“He is being a big dragon arsehole,” Balur had explained. “He is trying to convince everyone else to be an arsehole too.”
Balur had been crammed into Cyrill’s office like a lion in a dog kennel. But Cyrill, it turned out, didn’t have much of a sense of self-preservation. Instead, at Balur’s pronouncement, Cyrill had begun to show signs of life Will had been worried simply weren’t present.
“You take that back!” he had screeched, waving a finger threateningly, and squinting. Because—and Will really had to take a moment to appreciate this—he was having trouble picking out the only eight-foot-tall lizard man in the room.
“Theerax is a prophet!” Cyrill had gnashed his teeth as he talked. “He is a glory! A masterpiece of scale and muscle!” He had waved his finger again. “You willfully ignorant Philistines!”
Looking back on it, that had probably been the point when Will had probably been most tempted to murder every Batarran in the Council Chambers. But his sanity had finally emerged—beaten and panting hard—to rein him in.
“Look,” he had said, imitating a placating voice. “You get to come with us and observe some people who are just like you. Who believe exactly what you do. It’s basically just socializing.”
Cyrill had sneered at him. “You think I’ll share anything with you? That I’ll take you to where Theerax himself has landed in Batarra? Where his worshippers are gathering at this very moment?” He stared at them defiantly.
And finally Will had smiled, because it turned out that when the gods shat on people, they at least shat on everybody equally.
“You know what?” he had said to Cyrill. “Now I do.”
And so with a little light encouragement, and with Will working out several of his anger issues, the old man had. And now Will lay in the grass, next to Cyrill, and Balur, and Lette, and he looked down on the encampment where Theerax was amassing his worshippers. And he had the distinct impression that the gods were not done messing with him.
He had known that Theerax was popular, that his followers were legion, but the scale of the encampment still caught him off guard. A city of white tents lay before them. A stockade had been raised around it, which meant that somewhere else a bunch of people must be wondering where their forest had gone. Guards in uniforms of black and red stood outside thick gates.
There’s a dragon in there, Will thought, and for a moment the world seemed to retreat as a scrim of red fell before his eyes and a roaring started to fill his ears. He was possessed by the urge to charge down the street, scale the walls, and go hunting. That victory was impossible without an army or two at his back seemed like a negligible concern.
He was brought back to reality by Lette’s hand on his arm. “Don’t make me have to go and find stones for your cairn,” she whispered.
Which was actually the sweetest thing she’d said to him in a while, and made him feel a little better about everything.
The road they had abandoned two miles back led to the gate a few hundred yards to their right. As they watched now, a wagon laden with a family’s worldly possessions rumbled toward the encampment. A couple sat at the front, she leaning her head on his shoulder as he held the reins. Two children sat on top of the piles of possessions, waving their arms and shouting happily. A third child scampered after the cart, while a dog yapped at her heels. The couple waved to the guards, who waved cheerily back. They pushed open the gates and the wagon rolled in.
“Very sinister,” Cyrill said, the sarcasm palpable.
“All right,” Balur said, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “Lette will be throwing her knives and taking out the guards, while I am charging the gates directly. We will be breaking through and carving a path—”
He cut off as he checked Will’s expression. On the other side of the lizard, Cyrill was turning unusual shades of purple and mauve.
Will grinned inanely. “He’s just joking.” And then, because he hadn’t even convinced himself: “You’re here to observe Theerax, remember. No need to observe us.” He hoped his smile was more winning than it felt.
Lette sighed. “Just …” She shook her head. “What’s the actual plan, Will?”
Will had not, he decided, been born with deceptive sweat glands. His heart and mind were willing and able when it came to subterfuge, but his sweat glands were scrupulously honest. The wind and weather were brisk, and yet as their cart rolled toward Theerax’s waiting encampment, he was slowly pickled in his own brine.
There were three guards at the gates, each holding a tall pike, each topped with a vicious-looking blade. But their faces stood in contrast to their weapons, broad and open, plastered with the sorts of smiles Will associated with the mothers of small children and village idiots.
“Welcom
e!” called one.
“May the wind of Theerax’s wings fill the sails of your life,” called another.
“And his flame warm your heart,” called the third.
From inside the cart and under several blankets, Balur snorted derisively. Which did nothing for Will’s sweat problem, and made Lette grind her teeth audibly.
“You are the thermals beneath his wings.” Cyrill surprised them by calling out to the guards. He seemed to have forgotten a lot of his trepidation as they had drawn closer and closer to the encampment. Perched on blankets in the back of their wagon, he was virtually giddy. Though perhaps that was just knowing that if he shifted his weight inappropriately, Balur would bite his balls off through the fabric.
“You are well met on the sky flight of your life,” said the tallest of the guards, apparently their leader, as they pulled up outside the gates. “Do you seek to open your lives to the glory and order of Theerax into your lives?”
“Yes!” Cyrill blurted, while Will shrugged and muttered, “Sure.”
“Not really,” Lette said, sotto voce. Will nudged her. She should be taking this more seriously.
“Then welcome to our humble encampment,” said the tall guard. His smile was so unmoving that Will was beginning to wonder if the man was seriously intoxicated.
Cyrill leaned forward and asked, “Is it true that Theerax himself is here?”
The guard’s smile widened, which Will would not have guessed was possible. There was something vaguely nauseating about the expression.
“All secrets will be revealed behind these walls,” he said with a dangerously delusional twinkle in his eye. Will started to question if the man was wholly sane.
Cyrill, independent observer that he was, clapped his hands in delight. Meanwhile the other two guards pushed the gates of the camp open.
“Lax security,” Lette muttered as she twitched the reins and their wagon rolled forward. And for the first time since his departure from the brothel in Pekarra, doubt entered Will’s mind.
Then the gates slammed shut behind them. Will looked around, startled by the volume of the sound. The gates, which had looked like loosely knit pilings from the outside, were bound with thick bars of black iron on the inside. Three great, iron-shod poles of wood now barred it. Twelve guards in full armor, wielding their pikes with significantly more menace than the ones outside, were leveling their weapons at them.
