Fool's Gold (13 page)

“I know the cow better.” It was out of his mouth before he'd really thought about it.

Quirk struggled to respond to that for long enough to allow the guard to return above. “Oh good,” he said. “I was hoping you would have waited. Now let me see how I aim this thing again.”

“Will!” Quirk wasn't whispering anymore.

Will held Ethel's head. He thought about how she had supported his life for so many years. How she had helped bear the farm on her back.

But the farm was gone. And now there was only one way left she could serve him.

He pulled the sword free from its scabbard in a single fluid movement, and slashed at Ethel's throat.

The blade wedged into the flesh after about half an inch. He heaved. It jerked another quarter inch.

Ethel brayed, kicked.

Will jerked on the sword, horror mounting behind his eyes. If its previous owner had not been lying dead on a road, Will would have hunted him down and beaten the basics of blade maintenance into him. He'd owned sharper butter knives.

Ethel's wavering legs went out from under and she crashed to the ground. The weight of her slammed into Quirk, slapped the woman to the ground.

“Oh gods.” Will tugged the blade free. More blood sprayed up, coating his face. Ethel screamed, kicked. Quirk screamed along with her.

“Oh Lawl's black eye on all this shit.” Will brought the blade down with a dull thwack.

It took another minute of hacking and sawing before Ethel finally lay still, in a spreading pool of her own blood. Quirk had managed to extract herself from beneath the dying cow and was trying to wipe the worst of the gore off herself. Will just stood there dripping, trying to keep his gorge from rising. He failed.

Above them, the gate guard looked vaguely disappointed. “Fine then,” he said. “Come on in then. Welcome back to Castle Mattrax.”

Lette had lain hidden among the trees as Mattrax emerged from the mountainside. She was around two hundred yards shy of the portcullis, where the tree line ended and loose rock and shale began.

She had a rough idea of what to expect from a dragon, of course. Her childhood had allowed for some schooling. She had read some histories. She knew it would be large and powerful. And she had killed some large, powerful creatures herself. A wendigo in the mountains east of Saleria, tall enough that it made Balur look like a toddler. A wyvern in northern Vinter, although that was so drunk from eating fermented grapes that it was literally pissing itself in the battle. And there had even been the demigod in Batarra—some spawn of Toil's that had somehow made it to its early twenties, and blessed with the gift of compelling people to work themselves to death on a regular basis. Fortunately, when it turned its glowing eyes on Lette, her work had been to kill demigod arseholes.

Still, even when compared to the semidivine walking upon the earth, this was different.

Mattrax was not just large. A horse could be large. A tree. A house perhaps. These were simple things of a size the mind could grasp in a single glance. Mattrax was large in a far more complex and profound way. He was large in the abstract way that major pieces of a landscape were large. In the way countries were large, or rivers that took months to travel from their source to the ocean. He was so large that it was difficult for Lette to think of him as something truly alive. He had seemed more like some part of the mountain that happened to be able to leave and fly around for a bit.

And she was going to steal from him.

He would be right there next to her, and she would steal from him.

He would be drugged, of course. But could you really drug something that large? Could they really have assembled that much Snag Weed?

And more to the point, how in the name of each and every god of the Pantheon was she going to stop Balur from trying to kill it? The bigger the beast the more he seemed to want to test himself against it. He suffered from an almost suicidal form of machismo.

This, she thought, was going to be a very long and harrowing day.

But first Balur had to get up there, the villagers in tow. First they had to herd the drugged idiots onto the platform, to the pressure plate hidden there. First they had to open the way.

She heard them before she saw them. Her first impression of them was one of baying, braying, belligerent sound. It crashed and careened up through the forest toward her hiding spot, whooping and hollering as it came. She clambered a few branches higher into the pine tree she was using as a lookout, just in case.

Despite their vocal enthusiasm, though, when the Kondorran villagers came into sight, yelling and gnashing their teeth, they were also panting a bit. It was a good six or seven miles from the village on the valley floor to here, and the last two miles were nothing if not steep. It was difficult, Lette supposed, to keep up your deranged enthusiasm for murder when you had a forty-five-degree angle to conquer. When you stabbed a mountainside it would always resolutely refuse to bleed.

As the villagers hit the end of the forest, she could see they were definitely running out of steam. They stumbled out into daylight, started grinding to a halt.

Where the hell were Balur and Firkin? They should be here, driving this rabble on. She scanned the trees below. If Balur was late because he was busy digging a shallow grave for Will's drunkard friend, he was going to have to dig a second one for himself…

Then she spotted them, picking their way up the mountainside. For some reason, Firkin was perched between Balur's shoulder blades, slapping the top of his head and shrieking, “Gyah! Giddy up, you fine steed! Onward and upward, you magnificent beast of burden!”

Even as she clambered down the tree to meet them, she found she was actually impressed at Balur's restraint.

“Come on,” she called as she reached the pine-needle-littered floor, “they're flagging.”

“
They
are bloody flagging?” Balur groused as he reached her. “Have they been needing to carry a squirming gods-hexed fool up the mountain? Because I have not been seeing that.”

“You're eight feet of muscle and rage,” she said, reaching up to pat his arm. “Stop being such a complete pussy. It's unbecoming.”

Balur grunted.

Firkin for his part whipped repeatedly at Balur's head and neck. “What is this?” he shrieked. “Tally ho and sally forth! Tally forth to Sally the ho! Lovely girl. Very welcoming. Onward!”

“What exactly is his role being in this whole plan?” Balur asked. “Because I would be liking to change it to being a sack of bloody meat.”

“He's important to Will, and Will is important to the plan because he came up with it,” Lette said.

“But he was coming up with it already. What are we still needing him for?”

“For when you inevitably fuck it up.” Lette felt that this statement was not entirely without precedent.

Balur considered this for a moment and then nodded. “That is being fair enough.”

Lette grinned and turned back to pursue the swarming villagers. “Oh Betra's tits,” she swore.

The villagers had come to a halt just shy of the rocky lip that served as the entrance to Mattrax's cave. The fifteen or so guards who stood watch over the portcullis were eyeing them suspiciously, shifting spears and swords from hand to hand.

Overly aware of the guard's scrutiny, Lette scuttled out of the trees and toward the crowd. As she approached she was aware of a susurrating grumble rising up from it. She pushed into the edge of the mass.

“—no bloody prophet,” she heard someone grumbling.

“Not got any noshers now, have we?” said another.

“Not going up bloody there all by myself,” came another voice.

“Said we was going to get a bloody prophet.”

“I figured he'd be leading the bloody charge. Get himself in all the danger.”

A number of belligerent ayes came in response to this. Lette turned to Balur—bulldozing a path into the crowd behind her—and arched an eyebrow.

“Prophet?” she said as acidly as possible.

Balur shifted on his massive feet. “Ah,” he said. “Well.” And then, “You are seeing…”

“No, Balur,” she told him. “I am not seeing.”

“Firkin was using a little bit of artistic license when he be motivating the crowd…”

“Inciting!” Firkin screamed from his perch. “I do not motivate. I incite. I excite! I titillate! I ferment!”

“He is being difficult to keep on a strict party message,” Balur said with a shrug.

For her part, Lette did her best to maintain her frosty demeanor while again being impressed that Balur had not reduced Firkin to a messy stain on the Kondorra landscape.

“You could be being a prophet,” Balur suggested.

“I could not be being that, numbskull,” Lette snapped back, suddenly finding it easy to be frosty once more. “I am meant to be sneaking unnoticed into the gearworks of the door that your crowd is meant to have opened already. I can hardly be leading the charge and then hoping no one notices me.”

“Oi!” shouted one of the guards from the safety of the lip. “Fuck off!”

The time had come, Lette decided, for executive action. “You,” she snapped at Firkin, “you got us into this mess, get us out of it.”

Firkin stared at her wide-eyed for a moment, made a number of rude hand gestures, and then shrieked. “Crowd! Villagers! Mindless minions of the mighty word of the prophet! Mud pies and squat froglike fat faces! Inbred swine! Melting pot that was melted maybe just a little bit too much! I bring the word of the prophet unto you and thou shalt hear his command and say, why yes of course, that sounds like a reasonable course of action, I think I will do that right away pronto, thank you very much for providing my previously worthless existence with such outstanding advice, it is the lightness in my eyes and the breath in my heart. And thus shall I say to you as he said unto me—”

Here Firkin paused, and Lette was amazed to see that a hush had fallen over the crowd, as they all stared up at Firkin.

Firkin grinned savagely and thrust a gnarly finger at the guards. “Get those fuckers!” he yelled.

As one the crowd turned to face the guards—

—and hesitated.

“Erm,” said one loud voice.

“Yeah,” said another.

“About that…” supplied a third.

“Again,” added a fourth, “I don't mean to harp on this, but didn't it seem like the prophet was actually going to be here. I thought there would be more actual leadership.”

“He's the voice of the prophet,” said another, and the attention of the crowd shifted back to Firkin.

Lette hung her head.

“Why are we listening to Firkin anyway?” someone else chimed in.

A fine question,
Lette thought.

“You go ahead and attack if you're so bloody keen,” said someone else, clearly getting sick of this whole business.

“You know,” Balur said, “I am not hating that idea.”

Lette groaned. All they needed to do was get a bunch of villagers onto a pressure plate. That was it. Why was that so hard? Why did people have to die for that? Why couldn't anything just be clean?

But Balur was already off and running, leaving all her doubts in his dusty wake. Firkin yelled and screamed, flapping about on Balur's shoulders, clinging desperately as Balur shifted his war hammer from his back to his fists.

The crowd and the guards stared, stunned, as this lone, towering figure charged toward fifteen blades.

A guard captain was the first to recover. He started yelling. Soldiers stumbled into formation, tried to get their spears up.

Poor bastards,
Lette thought.

Balur hit the wall of guards like a battering ram. Spears snapped as points struck his armor, his thick hide. His hammer swung. A guard's chest shifted from concave to convex. The man brayed blood in a short coughing bark that signaled the end of his life.

This was it, Lette knew. This was the moment when the crowd would either move with them, or abandon them and flee. The tipping point.

“Gyah!” she yelled, as if driving a herd of horses into a gallop. “Get on with you! Get up there! Do your Lawl-hexed prophet some pissing good, you worthless sacks of shit!”

The crowd hesitated a moment longer, watched as Balur caught a sword in his fist, yanked the soldier on the other end of it toward him, and head-butted the poor bastard into oblivion.

“Do it!” Lette screamed. “Fucking move!”

And much to her shock they did.

A motivational speaker,
she thought.
Perhaps that's the path ahead
. Then she was running after the crowd, harrying and shouting as she did so.

The guard captain, it turned out, was not as stupid as Lette had hoped. Balur was, he recognized, not someone his troops were going to beat. He also recognized the weight of Balur's war hammer. Inhumanly strong, Balur might be, but he was not indefatigable. He would tire eventually. Until then containment was key. The crowd, on the other hand, was more easily handled. Rapidly he shouted orders, only two of his quickest soldiers dancing around Balur, poking and prodding at him and desperately flinging themselves out of his way. The rest of the guard simply swarmed round him.

The crowd clashed against the guards. They outnumbered them to be sure, but solid steel would take care of that quickly enough. Lette tried to get a good line of sight as she worked her way through the crowd. A dagger found its home in a soldier's throat. Another was backed into by a villager staggering away from a spear-wielding guard. He flung his arms up in shock and pain. The soldier took advantage of the villager's kind offer and gutted him.

Lette cursed. This was supposed to be clean. Hell, it still could be. All she needed was one big push, one surge up onto the lip. The pressure plate would be there. And then the villagers could scatter.

“Push!” she screamed. “Push!” She was at the far edge of the crowd now, up on the lip itself, where Balur had made a mess of one guard but was still being tormented by the other. “Push!” she yelled again.

A guard yelled. She flung a knife. It speared his eye socket and he dropped. She needed to be able to disappear, to drop from notice and be poised for the moment when the gate rose. But it was not coming. The moment was hung stubbornly in stasis.

The crowd quivered under the guard's onslaught. But then the guards were dropping back, regrouping. The villagers hesitantly, but undeniably, advanced. Lette realized this was going to work.

And then, all of a sudden it was not.

All of a sudden, everyone was standing still.

All of a sudden, there was the sound of wings beating in the sky.

Whoomph.

Whoomph.

Whoomph.

Mattrax landed with a crash of air and dust, wings spread, mouth wide, his snarl shaking the air. His massive head swung back and forth, looming over everyone. His tail lashed out, sent villagers flying.

The whole cliff side shook with the power and the weight of him. The world shrank down to the single point that was him, his eyes, his jaws, his teeth. All sound was the sound of his roar. All the wind was the beating of his wings. All the ground was the tremor of his footsteps. He defined the world.

In the face of this onslaught, in defiance of this oblivion of the senses, Lette saw Balur roar. It was a lost sound, hurled into the fury of Mattrax's roar and flung away. But it was his roar. His will. His refusal to bow. And Balur charged Mattrax.

Lette watched Mattrax, as the dragon watched Balur's approach. Together they both watched the lizard man as he raised his war hammer, watched him roar, veins standing out on his neck, as he gave the blow his all.

It never landed.

Mattrax flicked a forepaw at Balur, a small casual movement. Balur flew. He traced an arc through the sky, made contact with the trees, and crashed down through branches, a beaten, broken toy.