Fool's Gold (28 page)

Will had been having a rather pleasant dream. It involved him, Lette, and a fairly promiscuous cheddar.

Being slapped awake made for a rather disappointing finale.

“Uh?” he said groggily to the blurry figure holding him by the scruff of his neck. “We there yet?”

“No!” bellowed Slappy Slap-Pants, and Will found he'd been hit in the face again.

Balur came into sharp focus. He dropped Will. Will landed hard. His mouth felt like it was full of blood, and his head full of bear shit. He groaned, spat, and took hold of his temples.

He said, “What's going on?” Except it sounded like, “Wha-suh-guhn?”

Balur provided no answers. He had moved on, was holding someone else aloft, was slapping them.

Lette. It was Lette.

Will tried to put the pieces back together. There had been a plan. There had been a plan because they had been planning something. Something…

Gold. Stealing from Dathrax. Stealing his hoard.

He became aware that he was sitting on a pile of gold. Which suggested that must be going fairly well.

He tried talking again. “What's going on?” It came clearer now.

Quirk looked at him. “Why in Knole's holy name do I listen to you?” she asked. It seemed rhetorical, which was lucky because Will really wasn't up to answering her. “We're still on the boat, Will,” she said when he failed to respond. “The fucking boat!”

A boat. That meant his plan had involved a boat…

Lette landed with a thud beside him. Balur stood over her looking mildly disgusted. She rolled a sleepy head bearing a bewildered expression in Will's direction. “Wha-suh-guhn?” she asked him.

And then it came back to him. All of it. The whole plan. The idea that he should be on an island with a drugged dragon right now. That he should not have been heavily sedated. That Quirk and Balur should be on this boat alone, piloting through monster-infested water to him. To gold.

He stood up, adrenaline burning the last of his stupefaction. “Are we on the lake?” he asked. “Did you get out of the town?”

“No!” Quirk almost shrieked. “We only just got on board and found you and all our gold here.”

Their
gold. Will tried to fit that to the known facts.

“Oh fuck,” he said, as the pieces slotted home. “That lazy fucking dragon.” Dathrax hadn't taken them across the lake. He'd dropped the gold off at the garrison for them to transport.

Dathrax.

“Oh shit.” He looked up, stared at the others' faces.

“What?” Lette asked, apparently having failed to develop telepathy while she was unconscious.

“Dathrax,” he said. “He's still conscious.”

Lette shrugged. “So? We haven't done anything to attract his high and mighty bullshit attention.” She yawned.

But Will was looking at the glance Balur and Quirk were exchanging. Lette followed the direction of his gaze. “What?” she asked. Then again into the awkward silence, “
What?
”

“So…” Quirked resumed her nervous pacing. “About that…”

Lying, replete, upon his island, Dathrax raised his head. There was a strange smell upon the air. He was having trouble placing it.

He had been thinking about Mattrax, about what had happened to him. Dathrax had never liked Mattrax. He wouldn't have called him a rival exactly—that would have acknowledged that he and Mattrax existed in the same league as each other—but of the other members of the Consortium, Mattrax was the one with whom he had interacted the most often, and the most acrimoniously.

In many ways he should be celebrating Mattrax's death. They had had a number of competing trade agreements with Vinland and Batarra. And Dathrax's highly profitable grape trade route had been consistently, even suspiciously, plagued with bandits where it had run through Mattrax's territory.

The problem was the manner of Mattrax's death. If he had choked on an ox bone, or found some particularly inventive way to die of gout, if he had been crushed by the weight of his own stash of gold… well the merchant guilds of Vinland and Batarra could have understood that, respected it even. Death by indulgence was something they all secretly wished for as an epitaph. But Mattrax had not had the decency to die that way. As he had been in life, Mattrax was an insolent son of an iguana slut lizard.

A popular uprising. It was almost enough to make Dathrax spit fire.

Almost…

This prophet. This popular fucking hero. They kept raising the price on his head. By the Hallows it was almost so high that he would consider hunting down the human stain himself…

Dathrax snorted at his own joke. Two pathetic wisps of smoke rose from his nostrils, withered in the evening breeze.

Smoke…

That was what he could smell.

And smoke meant…

But he couldn't… Well… he could. He just… He had a sore throat, probably. He would be breathing fire in no time.

Dathrax was up on his feet. Sniffing the air, trying to trace the scent. Had one of the others in the Consortium found out about his
temporary
problem? Were they all holed up in the Hallows' Mouth volcano mocking him?

He scrabbled up one slope of the earthen bowl that contained his hoard. Coins and crowns shifted beneath his feet, making the going hard. He spread his wings, beat once, rose up into the air, scanned the horizon.

And there, a red smudge on the horizon, in opposition to the setting of the sun: Athril itself. His stronghold. The seat of his power, his garrison, the home of all his gods-fucking-cursed taxes.

His town burned. Its smoke drifting to him across the water.

Curling his lip, Dathrax beat his wings, and went to rain down hell on whoever dared to disturb his evening's repose.

Will emerged from the ship's hold into a world of flame and chaos.

“Gods' hex,” he whispered. “What did you do?”

Athril was a burning shell of a town. Ash, smoke, and screams rose in equal measure. All around the garrison, guards and townspeople were twisted in thrashing, bleeding bundles of struggling limbs.

“It was Firkin,” Quirk mumbled.

“You were meant to be in charge!” Blame and horror were probably not the most helpful things to add to the situation, but Will couldn't contain them. He just couldn't. He couldn't believe this situation.

Again.
Again everything had gone to shit. What had he been thinking? How had he allowed Lette to talk him into this?

He looked at her. He saw his own look of horror in her eyes. Her lips made a small round O of shock.

Those lips…

That distracted him from his bewilderment for a moment. And no, he could not blame Lette. Not even if she did deserve some of it. He had known he didn't know what he was doing. But he had gone ahead and laid out his plan anyway. Even knowing how many lives were on the line.

Gods… How many bodies lined Athril's streets tonight? How many deaths was he responsible for?

“This isn't a town,” he whispered. “This is a fucking funeral pyre.”

Beside him, Lette shook her head. “No. It's worse,” she said. “It's a signal beacon to Dathrax that someone is screwing with his turf. We have to get out of here before he notices. Before he comes and roasts us alive.”

Gods, yes. She was right, Will knew. But he couldn't move. He was paralyzed by the enormity of this disaster.

“Come on.” Lette grabbed his arm. “We have to move before it's too late.

“Hrm,” Balur rumbled. “About that…”

“Oh,” Quirk breathed. “Oh.” A sigh. An exhalation of breath to make room for her expanding wonder.

She watched as Dathrax swept in over the waters of Athril's Lake.

He was majestic. He was a piece of the heavens peeled away from the sky and brought to life. His wingspan was as wide as a palace. His scales were the color of warming coals—charred black brushed with a deep burning red. His claws were the gray of polished steel, his teeth the yellow of old parchment. He rode the thermals over the lake like a king rode his charger to war. His sinuous tail lashed the air. Scales rose like the dorsal fins of a fish along his back. His head was massive, the size of an oxcart, the vast jaw occupying almost all of its length.

And his eyes. His burning bright eyes.

For a moment she believed their gazes met. Across the distance and the waters. Like lovers at their first dance. She felt his gaze boring into her, peeling away the layers, the carefully constructed armor of academia, of morality, of humanity, until she was just a flame dancing in the mote of his eye.

But she was not alone in this nakedness of the soul. She saw him too. He shared his nature with her, in that brief but oh-so-eternal moment. She saw the fire in him as well. The bestiality, yes, but the majesty too. He ruled this valley because that was what he was. He was a ruler, a king, the apex of creation.

And then he roared.

She couldn't breathe. She gasped. There was no room in her left for oxygen.

The sound thrummed through her. Every part of her was alive to it. His roar was the unheard music of her soul.

She tried to capture everything, commit every tiny detail to memory. The number of his teeth. Their estimated length, diameter. The breadth of his wingspan. The bones in each one. How they articulated against his back. The shape of the muscles working as he reared up at the shoreline, as he hung suspended in the air for a moment. How the fat deposits hung from the space below his rib cage. Even the dragon's paunch was magnificent. Its size. Its audacity. Its grandeur.

She tried to catalog these moments. To capture them now as she would capture them later.

Around her she could hear people screaming, people dying. People she had cared for, had struggled to keep happy and healthy on their journey to this place. And she did not care. Everything was eclipsed by this moment.

“Beautiful,” she breathed. “He's absolutely beautiful.”

Dathrax crashed down on the outer wall of the garrison, rear claws pulverizing the wood that he grasped. The wall struggled, sagged, collapsed.

Dathrax landed heavily on all fours.

“Meh,” said Balur, standing almost forgotten at her side. “He is a fat fucking lizard, and he is going to die.”

Well,
thought Will,
this is it. This is how I'm going to die.

Dathrax roared again. Guards and citizens quailed. A circle of desolate ground opened up, as if blasted clear by the force of the dragon's rage. People tripping in their haste to flee. Dathrax, bent, shoveled them up into his massive jaws. He bit down. Bodies exploded beneath his teeth. Organs were forced out between bones by the strength of the bite, flying through the crowd like bloody shrapnel.

And then, still, madly persistent in the wake of Dathrax's roar, voices rising up. “The prophet! The prophet!”

Shut up,
Will thought desperately.
Stop saying my name.

Dathrax advanced through the decimated garrison. People fled. He barked, and snapped, and roared. He bit through the corners of barracks. Blades shattered beneath his teeth.

Why doesn't he just set us on fire?
Will wondered. He kept waiting for Dathrax to rear back, to see the light at the back of his throat. He was braced for a fireball that just wasn't coming.

They had to do something. Attack was futile. There was nowhere to hide. That left running.

“A boat!” he shouted. “We're on a boat!”

“Yes.” Balur nodded calmly next to him. “That is being correct.”

Will turned and punched him. His fist collided with something that felt like a cliff face. He bit back on his grunt of pain in order to bellow, “Cast off you, fucker!” instead. “Get us out of here. Out on the water.”

Balur creased his brow. “Why?” He sounded genuinely confused.

“Oh,” Will said through clenched teeth, “I don't know. It just, you know, seemed absolutely fucking essential to the bit where we run away with all the money and don't fucking die!”

Balur look hurt in a way that Will's punch had failed to achieve. “But I am wanting to kill it.” He pointed at Dathrax.

Will nodded. “Okay, you stay here and do that while the rest of us run away.” He looked to Quirk and Lette. “Sound like a plan?”

“Absolutely.” Lette was already moving toward one of the mooring ropes.

Quirk just stood staring at Dathrax. Panic, Will assumed, had robbed her of her senses.

“Hey!” Balur still looked hurt. But Will was too busy moving away from the pilot's cabin and toward the mooring ropes to pay that much heed. He reached the first one, started to uncoil it from around the mooring post. A moment later Lette was there. She hacked through it with her short sword. The rope fell away.

“Here.” She held the sword out to him. “Take this.”

It was Will's brows' turn to furrow. “Why?”

Lette cuffed him lightly. “All the obvious fucking reasons.”

Dathrax was closing the distance. Whether he had truly spotted them, or if the gods were just pissing on Will from all the way up in the heavens, he wasn't sure, but the end result was the same. They would die very soon unless they got the boat moving.

He used Lette's short sword to hack through another mooring rope. Lette was on the other side of the boat using her broadsword to set them loose.

Will hacked at another line. It severed with an audible snap. The boat lurched beneath him, settling more firmly on the launch ramp. It began to slide toward the water. Slowly at first, picking up speed. The pitted steel hull screamed against the rough stone.

And then with a crash of spraying water, they hit the lake, were free of the ramp, and were sliding through the water. Above Will, sails suddenly snapped taught. He looked up, saw Lette flinging herself through the rigging, snapping lines tight, looping knots.

He breathed fully for the first time since standing upon the deck of the boat. They were getting away. They had a hold full of gold, and they were getting away.

Gods, they were even getting away from Firkin and the crowds of worshippers.

It might not have worked perfectly, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it had worked enough.

Balur strode up to him. “I am still objecting to this fleeing nonsense. I am not liking to be turning and running.”

Will just shrugged. He was not giving a shit what Balur liked.

“Oh,” said Quirk, still standing at the edge of the boat, still staring back at the shoreline. “I wouldn't worry about that.”

Will turned, blanched.

A roar reached out to them across the water.

Dathrax, wings spread, was rising up from the ruins of Athril, and giving chase across the lake.