The Dragon Lords--False Idols

by Jon Hollins

The bell tolled one final time.

  Gods.

  Quirk let her fire out. A rushing, roaring pillar of flame. It rose, thrusting up, up, up. She poured more and more of it up toward that beautiful, holy dome. She watched as her fire tore into it, pressing and pressing, smashing against that masonry. And then her column of fire ripped up through the temple roof and burst out into the Vinter sky.

  She was with it for a moment, up there reaching out to the heavens, arms spread wide. She could feel the sun calling out to her, the kinship of fire. She could see the city spread out below her, its thrashing humanity, its seething heat, and sweat, and dreams, and thwarted aspirations. She could see people all across the city turning to stare at this signal fire starting a revolution. For a moment she felt again like she had last night when Firkin had thundered and roared, with his voice roaring in her blood like wine. For a moment she felt the divinity in her magic.

  Then the blade struck her shoulder.

  She flew sideways, control lost. Fire bloomed and blossomed around her, petals of it unfurling into the screaming, scrambling crowd. She crashed to the ground, felt mosaic tiles crack beneath the heat of her.

  But it was too late. She had sent the sign. The rebellion was happening. Even as the guard stood over her, halberd held aloft, grip reversed, ready to punch the blade into her chest, Bebbel was there, red face contorted with rage, hacking and hacking at the man with a rusty old butcher’s knife.

  There were twenty-five of Firkin’s followers there, all scattered through the crowd, all armed. They ripped into the guards with unbridled ferocity.

  One man had claws strapped to the backs of his fists, and he tore around him, slashing and screaming. Then a halberd punched into his gut. He roared, smashed the haft with one claw, and tore out the guard’s throat. He leapt at another with the shaft still sticking out of his back, spitting blood as he went. The pair went down in a sluicing pour of red.

  Shock and awe. That was the goal here. Not death, not destruction, but rather a solid blow to the sternum of the guards’ will to fight. Leave them sitting on the ground, unwilling to get back up.

  Shock and awe. Yes, that, Quirk knew, she could do. That was what Hethren had bred her for.

  Look at you now, he crooned in her ear.

  But this was different. She hung on to that still. Hethren’s goals had been selfish. Hers were not. They were not. She had teetered on that precipice, but Afrit had pulled her back. Violence was a tool. It could be put to other uses than the ones Hethren had held for it.

  She told herself that again and again as she melted the face off a man whose only difference from her was that he was dressed in robes of red and gold.

  In the sky above, the sun rose, and the sun fell. Quirk fought. And fought. And fought. She left a massacre in her wake. The Callibian Temple had not gone as she had wanted. For long, murderous hours the guards had simply refused to just sit down and shut up. Her twenty-five Barphists had been reduced to three. At the last it had simply been her, holding back a wall of soldiers, with her own wall of fire. She had been trying to weep as she watched them immolate themselves, but her tears simply turned to steam and drifted away.

  Chaos and murder were rampant on the streets. And even though the Callibian Temple had been won, she still had work to do. Now she hurried uphill toward the High Temple and the High Priests it held.

  All across the city, small independent groups of Firkin’s supporters were in temples, all rising up as one, all seizing control, killing guards, barring doors, screaming sermons and Firkin’s praises from the rooftops. She passed some of them. On the walls of one both Barph’s and Firkin’s names had been written in … She prayed it was wine.

  The people’s dedication to him … It was even more rabid here than it had been in Kondorra. And after his display in the temple the previous night, it was getting harder and harder to dismiss his effect on people as a mere oddity. And this presence in his head he spoke about. What was it? Some buried aspect of his personality? Some dissociative fragment of his self? Was he simply becoming unhinged?

  And yet she had felt the power of that other personality. She could see right now everything it had inspired. The passion, yes, but also the violence. She had not wanted that for this revolution. An uprising—in her mind—had been a clean, simple thing, something tactical and precise. This massive upheaval … this had been beyond the scope of her imagination. And yet it had seemed so natural once Firkin had spoken. How had he done that?

  She saw signs of the uprising everywhere. Gored bodies lay scattered in the street. Afrit and several others had released the cattle from the temple slaughter yards, then sent a stampede sweeping ahead of them, bowling through the tight streets, mindless and angry.

  Some fights still raged. Knots of women and men, screaming and yelling. Quirk ended those where she could. She tried to spare life where she could. Often there was not fighting at all, just crowds screaming and shouting abuse at each other. She left those alone. Nobody wanted to die today. She would not risk pushing anything over the edge.

  In some places she saw the High Priests’ guards just sitting on the side of the street, or leaning against the side of buildings. They looked dazed, staring around, blinking at the sky, as if expecting an answer to fall upon them. They had not seen this coming. They had thought they had won.

  The cauterized wound in her shoulder throbbed. She did not have time to figure Firkin out. She didn’t have time for half the things she needed to do. She had to focus and prioritize. The dragons were coming. Vinter could become another Birchester—a hollow ruin of fire and burned bodies. She would not allow that. She would help Firkin even if this was the cost.

  The fight was going their way, but from the sound of things the High Temple still eluded their grasp. The crash and clatter of fighting grew louder as she got closer.

  Gods let her be on the right path.

  The front line of the fighting turned out to be a thrusting, shoving mass of bodies two streets from the entrance to the High Temple. They had pushed the guards back farther than she could have dared to hope.

  The High Temple guards were armed with halberds, encased in dented bronze armor. They pushed and prodded at the crowd in front of them. Glass bottles arced up, shattering on their helmets and breastplates, glass scouring exposed skin. Some in the crowd had brought genuine weapons, short swords and sickles. They ducked beneath the poking halberd blades, hacking and slashing at exposed thighs and calves. Temple guards were pulled away, howling, clutching at spurting wounds. More than one of Firkin’s supporters collapsed clutching at a gaping hole in his or her guts.

  There was a sense of frenzy and desperation. This was a brutal, bloody impasse. The smells of blood and shit were mingling in the street. Bodies lay trampled in among the broken glass.

  A few yards back from it all, Quirk hesitated. Firkin’s supporters would win, she thought. It might take a day, maybe two, but they would win. The tide of sentiment had turned. The guards had no reinforcements coming. Firkin’s supporters had a whole city. Eventually the guards would realize that.

  Eventually.

  She did not have the time.

  She was on the right path.

  She held on to that thought as she pushed through the crowd.

  The little lies we tell ourselves, Hethren’s voice whispered in her ear. Tell yourself the violence is a tool, and your goals are noble, but you’re still the creature I made you into.

  She closed her eyes. Everyone around her was thrusting and jostling. Bodies, and blood, and sweat pressing in. The stink and the crush of it.

  More lives would be spared this way. Fuck Hethren. Fuck his attempt to own her decisions, even from beyond the grave.

  She forced her way forward, eyes open. She screamed and yelled to be let through. And they didn’t know who she was, no one recognized her, but they recognized her passion.

  She stood in the face of the barking, braying Temple Guards. They were screaming insults and hate. They were
threatening to destroy everything these people loved and held dear. They would coat the streets with their entrails, and then hunt down their families and murder and rape until all their line had been extinguished. These were men with all the pretense of civility and civilization slashed away. These were animals, raw and screaming.

  Just like the people she stood with now.

  She let the fire fill her. Warmth spreading out from her stomach, filling her chest, her loins, her arms and her legs. It was beautiful and blissful. She exhaled. Steam and smoke swirled around her. She let the fire leak out, just a little, feeling it chafe at the bit she placed upon it. Fire wreathed her. It ran lover’s fingertips over her body, her face, her hair.

  Around her, people fell away. The guards stopped their jeers, hesitated.

  This was it. This emptiness. This calm. This was the moment before the storm, perfect and pure. And in it, she was gloriously certain. All doubt left behind, nothing more than ash in her wake.

  She slipped the leash from the beast’s neck.

  Then there was nothing. Beautiful oblivion. Flame, and dancing. She was sweating and panting, commanding the flame to go here, and here, and here. To twist, and kiss, and embrace.

  Women and men screamed. They dove free. She sent fire chasing after them. The guards fell back, scattering. One was too late. She gripped his wrist in her hand as he sent a flaming spear past her in a fumbling thrust. He screamed and the skin peeled off his bone. She dropped him. Pushed forward.

  The guards tried to use the length of their halberds, desperately hacking at her.

  The shafts of her weapons were made of wood. The fools.

  All around her people were dying. Their ash-streaked corpses falling to the floor. She could smell cooking meat. She could hear the fat boiling off them, hissing and spitting.

  More. The fire whispered. More.

  It was so hard to hold on to reality. Were the guards broken? She tried to look through the heat haze of her soul and actually assess the situation. Not yet, the fire roared in her ear. Push harder. But was that real? She didn’t know what she wanted to believe.

  More. More.

  With a gasp she shut down the sluice gate to the ocean of fire within her. She dropped to a knee, tried to take everything in.

  The street was a smoking ruin. Buildings were on fire to the left and the right. Wattle and wood crumbled and roared. Thatch went up like kindling. She tried to reach out, to pull the fire back and make it obey her, but she was momentarily spent.

  And there were the bodies. So many bodies again. So many screams. And so many not dead. So many just dragging themselves … what was left of themselves … across the blackened cobbles. The wet scrape of their bodies, and the huffing of their ragged breathing. She had done this. She had caused this devastation and suffering.

  Gods forgive her.

  Then, from behind her, came the sound of cheering, the sound of feet.

  The crowd crashed into her, an overwhelming wave of humanity bursting around her, knocking her stumbling forward, forcing her to grab on to thrashing arms as she tried to stay on her feet. Fear joined the mix of emotions swirling in her, and for a moment she almost summoned the fire again.

  No! screamed some last vestige of the academic in her. Never in fear! Never in fear! That had been drummed into her again and again. That was the moment when she failed, when she became nothing more than a rabid animal once more. Fire had to be a tool. She had to be its master, not the other way around. Never that way.

  She grit her teeth, heaved with aching arms on the belt of someone pushing past, kept her feet. Someone caught her beneath the shoulders, pushed her roughly forward.

  Sweat, and blood, and piss, and wine. Why does a revolution have to smell so bad? part of her mind burbled. Doesn’t that set things off on kind of the wrong foot?

  They were charging down the streets, up the steps that led to the huge temple edifice. She saw a lone guard running down toward them, a spear in his hands. He managed one thrust before the swarming crowd closed over him. When they moved on, their fists and sleeves were stained red.

  Remember what this is for.

  Feet pounding up the steps, breath coming fast and hard, Quirk felt the end coming closer. The temple would be theirs. It would be over soon. Everything would come to a halt. They could start to focus on the real enemy. Just a little more bloodshed. Just a little more killing.

  The arched temple entrance rose around her, and Quirk was blinking in the sudden shadows. Voices bounced off hard stone. Shouts of anger, and fear. Noises transformed into something unfamiliar.

  She was in a corridor, people were spilling left and right. There was no plan now, simply the desire to take, and tear, and punish, even if no one was clear on the actual transgressions. She tried to catch her breath, to take a moment, get her bearings in the maelstrom. But there was nothing to cling to. She was being pushed deeper and deeper in. She glimpsed more fighting, more travesties.

  Then before she had a chance to process anything she was back in the main chamber of the temple. There were the three thrones, the three High Priests. There was the last knot of guards standing in a circle around them, bristling with enough weaponry to buy them time, but not enough to buy their lives. People poured into the massive chamber around them, swirling like water poured into a bowl. The moat of open space around the priests and their guards grew smaller and smaller.

  Quirk could feel the tension in the room mounting, racing toward its breaking point. The violence and the hatred were about to spill over, and the final atrocities of the day were going to be committed.

  “No!” She screamed the word into the crowd. This wasn’t how things had to go. They had won. Gods, they had actually won. A small handful of them. In a single day they had taken this city. It had all worked. All of it. There needed to be no more bloodshed. Gods, the High Priests might even be an asset to them in the upcoming fight against the dragons. If she and Afrit handled things right, the High Priests could help unify the city, bring on board hard-liners reluctant to fight for Firkin even if it meant subjugation to the dragons.

  Violence was a tool they no longer needed.

  But her voice was lost in the echoing screeches of rage that filled the hall. She was just one voice among many and her words were lost.

  The crowd no longer swirled. It bulged. She had been pushed to the front line. She could see the High Priests’ guards. Young men. All in their twenties and thirties. Younger than her. Sweat dappled their foreheads. They gripped their weapons in white-knuckled hands, working their grips. Their eyes flicked back and forth around the room like flies trapped against glass.

  They were going to die, and there was nothing she could do to save them.

  Or was there …? What if she surrounded them with fire? A protective barrier … Would the crowd turn on her then instead?

  And then suddenly the energy in the room shifted. A moment of stillness. A change of focus. For a moment Quirk thought that this was the breaking point. The moment that violence erupted. But nothing happened.

  Then she saw Firkin striding through the crowd. He walked like a king, back straight, shoulders back, and chest thrust forward. Authority oozed out of him. She was leaning toward him, she realized. Everyone was. Even the High Priests’ guards.

  The volume of the crowd’s fury began to ease. A queasy sense of order arrived with him. She could finally make out the High Priests screaming curses and hate.

  Firkin could stop this. The thought came in a rush, certainty flooding her. She pulled away from the crowd, dashed across the no-man’s-land around the knot of guards, and toward him. One of the High Priests’ guards flinched, a spear point twitching toward her, but she didn’t have time to worry about it.

  Several large men and women had formed an honor guard around Firkin. She crashed into them. They pushed her back easily, as if she were nothing. She pressed against the broad barring arms of two large men. “Firkin!” she yelled. “You have to stop them. We’ve wo
n.” She felt a hand grab her by the scruff of her dress’s neck. “We’ve won!”

  Firkin’s eyes locked with her. “Stop this!” she screamed at him. “Shut it down. Take the victory. We need them.”

  Then a huge hand hurled her away. She sprawled into the crowd. They yelled, and pushed, and swallowed her whole.

  Scrambling to her feet, she pushed and shoved for a view of what Firkin was doing.

  “It’s over.” His voice boomed out. Everyone in the room heard it. Everyone. And the finality in his voice was undeniable. It was a fact in its purest form. And she saw the fight go out of the High Priest’s guards immediately.

  “Leave.” Firkin waved a careless hand toward the exits.

  He saw me, she thought. He heard me. He must have.

  The guards hesitated, but not for longer than a handful of seconds. Then the first dropped his sword and his ceremonial shield to the ground, pulled off his helmet, and walked toward the crowd. Then the next. Then all of them.

  The High Priests were screaming with impotent rage. “Traitors!” shrieked the woman in her mid-fifties. “Cowardly fuckholes!” yelled one of her less eloquent companions.

  “Silence!” intoned Firkin. His voice was a weapon. It smashed into the priests. They reeled.

  But they were not broken. “Fuck you!” screamed one of the priests. “We have been here for a thousand years. Our order was appointed by Barph himself. We have ruled for a millennia because of his blessing.” He spat as he spoke. “No jumped-up street-preaching shit is going to get rid of us. This isn’t a victory. This is a blip. A glitch. You will be a footnote in the history of our glorious reign. Barph spits on you. Barph loves us.” He looked away, out of the crowd. “All of you!” he yelled. “All of you will drown in Barph’s shit, you heathen fucks!”

  Firkin’s expression barely changed. He just cocked his head to one side. “Kill them,” he said.

  His voice didn’t boom. It did not fill the room. The tone was almost conversational. But everyone heard. Quirk heard. And her heart broke a little bit at that moment. Because for a moment she had hoped. And because she had put this power in Firkin’s hands. She had unleashed him. She had forced him past his breaking point. This was, at least in part, her fault.