Fool's Gold (29 page)

Okay,
Will thought to himself.
This time we are definitely going to die.

“Ballista!” The scream came from above. Will looked up again. Lette was descending through the rigging as fast as it was possible to do without just calling it “falling.”

“Get to the fucking ballista!” she yelled, and even managed to point, though Will couldn't work out how that was possible unless she'd had a third arm all along and just failed to mention the thing.

He decided to hold that question for later.

Instead he spun, saw the series of three ballistas lined up along the side of the boat. One even had a bolt loaded, a thick rope stretched taut behind it, ready to fling the spear-size bolt into the heavens.

Or potentially into the underbelly of the enormous flying death-beast that was chasing them down.

He scrambled toward the war machine, took hold of the massive stock. It was mounted on a steel column, able to pivot both vertically and horizontally. In a calmer moment, Will might have taken the time to be impressed by the workmanship and ingenuity. Or possibly to be disgusted by the fact that Dathrax would shell out top coin for something to defend his tax barge, but would leave the citizens beholden to him squatting in squalor. But things were not calm. So instead he screamed, “Fuck you!” and loosed a bolt at the beast.

The whole ballista lurched in his grip. A great thrumming spasm that ran up his hands and made his teeth click. His feet skittered across the deck.

The ballista bolt flew, arcing up into the night. Firelight glinted off its steel tip.

It fell twenty feet short of Dathrax. The dragon screamed, swooped up, heading out of range, preparing for a plunge.

“What is it you are doing?” growled a voice in Will's ear.

“I'm sorry,” Will babbled. “I didn't know the range. Lette was saying… I thought she meant—”

He was cut off by Balur's powerful hand slamming into his chest, sending him to the floor.

“You are trying to steal my kill!” Balur roared.

Will's head sang ribbons of light and pain through his skull from where it had hit the deck, but he still had the wherewithal to think,
Oh for fuck's sake.

“We are meeting the beast on the deck. Like men,” Balur growled. “We are seeing then whose mettle is being a match for it. Then I shall be seeing if you can truly back up the claims of your followers.”

“I never said I killed the dragon!” Will screamed, intimately aware that he was moments away from being killed
by
a dragon. “I tried to explain that to them very clearly. They won't listen.”

“Dathrax is being my kill!” Balur roared. “You are not to be stealing it from me.”

Beside them there was another cracking twang as a second ballista bolt shot into the heavens. Will and Balur snapped their heads to stare.

High above, Dathrax screamed.

Lette stood there, cranking the rope back into place while Quirk fit another bolt back into the groove of the barrel.

“Here's a suggestion,” Lette said, without looking at them. “How about you two put your dicks back in your britches and actually help out.”

Will felt his eyes go wide. “
My
dick. I didn't…”

Dathrax screamed again. And then the sound of beating wings dropped away. And then Will had more important things to do than protest his innocence.

Dathrax dropped like a piece of flaming midnight. Rage, and claws, and jaws that opened like the gates of the Hallows. The pilot's cabin exploded into splinters. Dathrax slammed through it, claws outstretched.

Piloting,
thought Will.
One of us should have been doing that
.

He would have loved to have followed that up by thinking it was the first time their incompetence had saved them.

Dathrax shot off, launching himself back up into the night. Within moments his massive bulk was just a shadow in a night sky.

Will stared in horror. The devastation had been so absolute and so abrupt.

“He's trying to cripple the boat,” Lette called. She was leaning back on the stock of the ballista, angling it up as steeply as it would go, hunting the heavens. “Kill our maneuverability. Someone get us to open water. Somewhere we can move.”

“Let him be coming!” Balur bellowed. “Let him be tasting my hammer in his throat.”

“Shut the fuck up and steer!” Lette yelled.

“I'll do it.” Quirk went to dart away.

Balur caught her by the shoulder. “No,” he growled. “Burn him. Set him alight in the dark.”

This was a double standard slightly too far for Will. “She's allowed to try and shoot at him in the sky, but I get punched to the floor?” His ribs still ached from where Balur had pushed him.

No one seemed interested in joining him in his outrage.

“No,” Quirk said. She was staring at the ruined pilothouse. “I won't do it. That's not who I am anymore.”

“We need to see,” Lette said from behind her. “We're blind. We need to know where he is so we can shoot him.”

Quirk still stared into space. She muttered something.

“What?” Lette said.

But Will had heard her. She had said, “He's majestic.” He wished he hadn't heard it, but he had.

He was saved from working out what to truly think about that utterance and its implications by the dragon himself.

Dathrax dropped, shrieking out of the night. He smashed into the front mast. The massive pillar of oak shattered like so much kindling beneath his claws. Rigging snapped, whipped the air. Sails flapped like writhing bodies. And then the mast was smashing down onto the deck, flipping end over end toward them.

Balur bellowed, released Quirk, sent her flailing toward the edge of the boat, as he flung himself backward, sprawling back down the steps leading to the hold.

“Cois's syphilitic cock!” Lette screamed.

Will stared as the shattered mast plunged down the deck toward them, digging a furrow through the decking. A ballista was flung away into the waters. The air was full of shrapnel.

He dived toward Lette. She was hauling another of the ballistas, trying to line up a shot. A tangle of wood and rope was barreling toward her head.

Will collided with her just as she fired. The ballista bucked. Will's shoulder crunched into her midriff, sent her skidding. Wood smashed against the cross arm of the ballista, leapt up into the air. Will and Lette landed with a crunch. The bolt arced into the heavens. Ropes slashed the air above their heads.

Dathrax screamed. Not rage this time, but genuine pain.

Beneath Will, with satisfaction in her voice, Lette said, “Up your fucking arse.”

Will pushed to his feet, reached down a hand toward Lette, but she was already halfway up, ignoring it.

The ship was a mess of tattered cloth and limp ropes. The second mast bent at an odd angle.

“Shit,” Will said. “We'll just be sitting here.” He could see Dathrax in his mind's eye, lining up a run on their blind side. Circling above, picking out their positions. While they sat there and waited.

“All right, all right. I be fucking going to steer.” Balur's feet pounded toward the ship's wheel. It stood solitary and sullen in the tangled mess that had once been the pilot's cabin.

“Help me load another bolt!” Lette was already cranking back on the ballista. Bolts lay scattered on the ground. The war machine itself was still tangled in the detritus of the shattered mast.

Quirk stood silent, still, staring.

There wasn't time to snap her out of it. Will lunged for one of the ballista bolts, seized it up. He tried to fit it into the groove along the war engine's barrel, but too much half-smashed wood was in the way. He clawed at it, clumsily, off-balance as he tried to grapple with the weight of the bolt. It was as thick as his arm, over four feet in length.

“Come on!” Lette snapped. She was searching the skies. Will glanced up.

“Where is he?”

Quirk mumbled something else behind him. He had neither the time nor the inclination to decipher it this time.

“I can't see him.” Lette was panning the ballista back and forth, as Will desperately tried to set the bolt in the barrel.

“Come on,” he muttered to himself. “Come on.”

A single solitary flap of wings. The muffled clap of giant leathery sheets of skin. Nothing else, but distinctive enough to focus all of Will's attention.

The sound did not come from above them.

Will and Lette whirled around. Lette heaved on the ballista, but it was heavy, and the bearings rusted by years of spray from the lake.

Dathrax swept in low over the surface of the lake, wings spread, their trailing edges flapping in the night air.

He must have circled high then dived when out of sight. Reflected moonlight glimmering off the surface of the lake made the burnt charcoal scales of his underbelly seem to crackle with cold fire.

He opened his jaws. It seemed to go on for days. A great cavernous revealing of teeth. That jaw seemed to eclipse everything for Will. It swallowed the night, the boat, promises. Everything narrowing down to that ever-encroaching gullet. That single point of darkness, becoming the whole world.

And then light. Brilliant, blinding, as vast as that mouth. Flame that lit up the sky like a new sun. Consuming. Hungry. Deadly.

Will braced for that last painful moment. The one where he felt the skin and muscle peel back from his bones, the sharp scream of every fiber in his body, followed by—

And then it was over. The flame and the light faded. Dathrax was pulling up and away screaming. Will was alive.

And Quirk was standing beside him, arm outstretched, palm smoking.

Once, back at the Tamathian University, a young mage very interested in sight had informed Quirk that he had created a set of lenses that perceived the thaumatic world. They could, he had told her, see the invisible strands of power that the gods had used to stitch together reality. He wanted her to try them on and tell him what she saw. Later she realized that the mage had been making a clumsy pass at her, but she hadn't realized it at the time, and had simply been interested in the science.

She had sat in a wooden chair while the young mage perched a vast contraption upon her head. He had adjusted levers and fitted small round pieces of colored glass into slots in front of her eyes.

“Do you see it now?” he kept asking. “What does it look like now?”

“A bit purple,” she had told him. Then, “Just like your office except mauve,” another time.

He had grown increasingly frustrated, had appeared to be on the verge of saying it was all her fault, his nascent romantic intentions be damned, when all of a sudden, everything had aligned. He dropped a piece of what looked like perfectly clear glass before her right eye, and the world changed.

She had seen not just things, but the relationship between things. She had seen how one piece fit with another, and with the space between them. She had glimpsed, for just a second, the whole interconnected design of the world.

Then the machine had overheated, detonated, and set her hair on fire.

Quirk had very much the same experience as Dathrax swept down on the tax boat.

She had stood paralyzed by the glory of the beast. By the memories of fire. She had seen him in his entirety. She had not seen each interlocking piece of the puzzle. Not the muscle or the sinew or the blood vessel. Not the flight pattern, nor the physiognomy of his wings. Rather, she had seen it all. The whole perfect beast.

She had seen how its presence connected with the other thoughts chattering and skittering in the background of her mind. How the arc of its claws intersected with her fear for the citizens of Athril. How the arch of its neck encompassed her concerns for her own culpability in their collective demise.

And as Dathrax swept down upon them, she had realized that all the conflicting, nonsensical, potentially insane thoughts swirling in her head actually added up to one bright, clear, shining image.

She was afraid. She was piss-her-britches terrified.

She didn't know what she was doing. Not out in the field, away from her university. Not in this boat, taking part in what could optimistically be described as a crime. Not in this fight. She had no answers.

And she was very clearly about to die.

And when the world was reduced down to that moment, to that single truth, everything became very simple.

That fucker had to burn.

Fire? Fucking fire? They were trying to set fire to him now?

Dathrax screamed his rage.
How dare they? How dare they even conceive of such a thing? That was just… just…

Gods' piss on it. It was embarrassing was what it was. If he had to explain a burn to the other dragons at the next Consortium meeting… Well, if he had to do that, it was going to be with this hexed prophet's skull lodged between his teeth. Gods curse it.

He swept up into the sky, using his speed to put out the smoldering fires on his shoulders. With one claw, he pulled the ballista bolt out of his chest. He tried to make his scream sound more like the bellow of rage it ought to have been.

Dammit, he was out of practice at this. Thirty years ago, this sort of thing had been second nature to him. Now it all seemed distant and somewhat beneath him.

They were on a boat. He cast his mind back. Someone else in the Consortium… Kithrax perhaps… had always had a rule about boats. But was it to always land on them and devastate the troops or to never land…?

Why would you never land?

Fuck it. Dathrax had had enough of them taking potshots at him with those damn ballistas.
They were
his
ballistas! They protected
his
gold. His gold, which these bastards were stealing.

He folded his wings close to his body. He was taking the fight to these fucking thieves. And he was going to eat every last one of them alive.