Fool's Gold (30 page)

“Starboard!” Will yelled.

Lette glanced at the direction he was pointing. “That's port,” she said.

Quirk sent a jet of fire up into the sky. There was a flashing glimpse of scales, then it whipped out of sight, into the dark of the night.

Another blast of flame arced up. There was another glimpse of Dathrax on the other side of the boat. Lette hauled on her ballista, but she was too slow, Dathrax too quick.

Will finally forced the ballista bolt through the mess of netting and wood to sit flush in the war machine's barrel. His palms were drenched with sweat. His knees were shaking.

Then Dathrax came, dropping out of the sky like a meteor. He screamed toward the heart of the boat. He would tear the thing apart just with the force of his landing.

Beside him, Lette grit her teeth, sighted. “Got you,” she said. Given that there was about two seconds before Dathrax smashed into them, Will wasn't sure that taking the time to try to sound intimidating was really well advised.

Lette fired. The bolt thundered skyward. But it did not fly free. Instead it snagged with the mess of ropes still twisted around the ballista. It wasn't a bolt they flung at Dathrax's heart, but instead a sprawling mess of tangled wood, and sails, and cord.

The bundle sagged through the air, missed Dathrax's skull by inches. It smacked into his right wing, near the massive knot of muscle that joined it to his oversize frame. The bundle flew open like an exploding bedsheet. Ropes and sails wrapped around Dathrax's body, tangling and snagging.

Dathrax screamed, knocked off course at the last moment. He spun out of control. His body crashed into the edge of the boat. The ship lurched sideways, kicked up a vast wave. Dathrax's tail lashed out. It slammed into the second mast. Wood splintered, gave way.

The mast came crashing down. More ragged cloth and rope slashed the air. Will dived for cover, ballista bolts forgotten. Shrapnel exploded around him.

Dathrax bounced off the boat, flapped dizzily through water. He limped upward.

Quirk sent fire chasing after him, great gouts thrusting out of her palms, blooming in the night. Flames raced over the deck of the boat.

Not everything, it turned out, was soaking wet.

Fire mixed with the chaos on board the boat.

Will picked himself up. Something massive was pounding across the deck. He braced for a grisly reptilian death.

The grisly reptilian in question, however, was Balur. “Be coming back!” he yelled at Dathrax's retreating form. He spun his hammer above his head. “Be coming back and be fighting me like a man!”

Will blinked, tried to get his bearings. If Balur was over there… He turned to look at the wheel standing in the shattered pilot's cabin. It was alone again. And on fire.

The boat was by now about halfway between the shoreline and Dathrax's island. With both its masts gone, and its wheel on fire, it seemed inclined to stay there.

Something large smashed into the boat. The flames that increasingly coated the deck flickered as the deck rocked back and forth.

“The water!” Lette yelled. “Dathrax is in the water!” She was pulling herself to her feet using what was left of the ballista. It wasn't very much of the ballista, truth be told. Just the stump of its pivoting mount. The other siege machines were in similar states of disarray.

Will was halfway to the ship's rail before he realized Dathrax couldn't be in the water if he was flapping awkwardly in the air above them. He could hear the dragon's angry roaring.

Something hit the hull again. Hard. The boat rocked. Will staggered. The hull was struck again, and again. Will pitched forward. The rail struck his midriff. He sagged over it, stared down into the water, felt his breath tumble away from him to be swallowed by the churning water.

Why,
he found himself thinking,
does Dathrax need state-of-the-art ballistas mounted on his tax boat anyway?

The answer leapt out of the water and tried to bite his face off.

Lette, whom Will was, at that moment, willing to sanctify as the patron saint of just-in-fucking-time, caught him by the back of his collar and heaved him away from the rail.

The Leviathan—one of the mutant fish grown fat and wrong on the bloody runoff from Dathrax's diet—was ten feet long from nose to tail. At least six feet of that length appeared to be taken up by its mouth. Its jaw was a prodigious unwieldy thing that lent the creature a blunt, squat appearance despite its length. Teeth jutted from it at angles that suggested whatever god was responsible for its creation had been at the end of a long shift and had just jammed a fistful of the things in to be done with it so he could go home for a cup of tea and a bit of a kip. Its scales had the rainbow glisten of a moldering corpse, and its fins resembled tumors far more than any physiological adaptation to an aquatic lifestyle.

The Leviathan rocketed past Will's face, stinking and snapping, stunted body thrashing furiously. For a moment Will was eye-to-eye with it, staring into a gelatinous orb the size of his head, and brim full of insane hatred. Then gravity claimed it and it smashed back down into black water.

Blows to the ship's hull were coming from all sides now. The ship didn't so much rock as it did quiver. Suddenly the ballistas made so much more sense.

In the prow of the boat, Balur was still calling challenges to Dathrax.

“Your mother was thinking you were a shit stain on the floor!” he bellowed. “She was being impregnated by iguanas! If she could be holding her liquor you would not be existing!”

A Leviathan fish leapt up out of the water at him, for a moment hung in the air above his head. It opened its jaws.

Grabbing his hammer, Balur smashed the Leviathan in the side of its head.

“You are having the genitals of a field mouse!” he went on without pausing as the Leviathan sagged back to the water.

Quirk was running, and screaming, aiming streams of fire at the water, sending up clouds of scalding steam all around them.

And above, Dathrax was circling around, and coming back for more.

With a final deafening roar, Dathrax plunged out of the sky and smashed into the boat. This, though, Will had time to recognize, was not the lightning raid of claws and teeth that had come before. This was not deft destruction. The knot of sails and rigging had worked itself even more completely around Dathrax's body. His right wing was hopelessly tangled with his back leg, and his neck was being pulled brutally to the left. He came at the boat sideways, almost skidding through the air.

Balur still stood in the prow, hammer raised high above his head, mouth pulled back in a monstrous grin, howling in joy.

Dathrax struck him full force. The front of the boat disintegrated, so much wood pulp and flotsam. Balur sailed through the air, his flight actually gaining momentum from the hammer still clutched in his hand. The Analesian cleared the full length of the hold, came down on the ruins of the wheel, and lay there quite still.

Will had all of half a second to take that in before Dathrax claimed his attention once more. The vast dragon was writhing on the deck, trying to right itself. As it did so, the boat dipped violently, the smashed prow sinking toward the waterline.

Shattered planking, bits of broken mast, knots of ropes, rolling ballista bolts, actual ballistas—all went tumbling down the length of the boat, toward Dathrax. Desperately, Will flung himself sideways to escape a deluge of barrels crashing past him, rolling toward the dragon.

Dathrax flailed again, snagging more of the ruined ship around his limbs. He tried to get a foot steady beneath him, but with his weight, and the ship's impaired structural integrity, the limb shot through the deck, to be mired in the hold below.

The boat was tilting even farther now. Balur's body was sliding back toward the prow. Will, lying prone, started to slide as well. He managed to brace his foot, caught hold of one of the ship's rails that was still intact.

The thing he was bracing his foot on yelled. It turned out to be Lette's face. She was hanging grimly to the ship's rail directly below him. Quirk was another yard farther down. The wooden rail she was holding on to was smoking.

Beyond Dathrax's increasingly desperate flailing, he could see the water churning as the boat sank deeper and deeper below the waterline. Vast aquatic bodies writhed. Fins sliced the water's surface into finer and finer froth.

“Balur!” yelled Lette. “You have to get Balur!”

The lizard man was almost parallel with Will, and picking up speed.

Isn't he your partner?
Will almost said, but didn't.
The things I do for infatuation.

He planted his legs against the rail and before he could think about it much, he leapt. Whether he traveled horizontally or vertically he was no longer sure. He smashed through tumbling piles of detritus, closed the distance between himself and Balur.

He crashed back onto the deck, landing woefully short. He scrabbled for a handhold, found none. He plunged down, slipping and sliding. On the plus side, he was careening toward Balur on a pretty decent intercept trajectory. On the more negative side of the equation, Dathrax's jaws—stretched wide in a scream of frustration—were waiting for them both just beyond that.

Will could see panic in Dathrax's fiery eyes now. The dragon lunged his massive jaws at the stump of a mast, bit down, searching for any purchase it could get. The mast splintered and shattered. Dathrax spat a mouthful of splinters and smoke, let out a bellow of despair.

Something in Will—no matter that he was falling down the deck of a near-vertical ship, no matter that he could see his imminent death waiting for him—took flight at Dathrax's plight. He might be about to die, but so would this tyrant, this despot, this
arsehole
.

In the abrupt warmth of this hope, a plan flashed into Will's mind. Suicidal. Idiotic. Foolish beyond imagining. But the same could be said of all his plans so far, and they'd gotten him this far.

If he'd had time, he would have laughed at that.

But there was no time. He simply reacted. He bunched his legs and kicked off from the surface of the deck. He flew out into space. Then he was in pure free fall. No safety net beneath him. No deck. Only the writhing, snapping head of Dathrax the dragon.

He slammed bodily against the dragon's skull. He felt scales rip at his skin. But there was no time for pain. Even as he skidded over the dragon's brow, even as he felt the raw heat of Dathrax's breath blasting up at him from outraged nostrils, even as he planted one foot in one of Dathrax's yellow eyes, he reached out a hand for Balur just as the lizard man plunged toward the dragon's jaws.

And caught him.

That was,
he thought,
pretty fucking magnificent.

Then the pendulum weight of Balur tore through Will's precarious balance, pivoted them like ballerinas, Will's heel slip-sliding over Dathrax's eye, both of them flailing in the air. Then, hand in hand they went tumbling toward the water below.

Okay,
Lette thought,
that was pretty impressive. Incredibly stupid. But impressive.

The only thing that saved Will was that just before he hit the water, Dathrax did.

The dragon finally lost his fight with the disintegrating surface of the boat, and fell, flailing and tangled into the waters below.

Will struck one half-stretched wing, felt a lot of important organs slam into each other, tasted his spleen, felt Balur's weight tear his arm out of its socket, and was sent flying out across the lake.

The dragon, at the mercy of momentum as it had been at the mercy of few other things during its long and repulsive life, went straight down and landed in the dark waters of the lake.

The Leviathans lost their shit entirely.

Even as Will fought to stay above the surface of the water, the dragon's screams made him shudder.

Suddenly a powerful hand caught him by the neck, hoisted him upward. He yelled, but then found he was staring into Balur's face. The lizard man was floating on his back, legs kicking powerfully, tail wriggling sinuously. He seemed to be staying afloat effortlessly. Despite this, his slit eyes were crossed and he was bleeding from a considerable gash in his forehead.

“We are being in the water,” he said thickly. “How are we getting in the water?”

“Oh,” said Will, still getting his own bearings. “Usual way. Attacked by a dragon. Had our boat torn apart. Were sent flying into a lake populated by giant mutant fish.”

Balur's eyes focused a little at that. He managed to fix Will with a narrow stare. “Dragon?” he said. “I must be killing it.”

Another scream tore through the night.

“Sorry,” said Will. “I think the Leviathans have beaten you to it.”

Dathrax was still struggling, but more in the way that a well-flayed steak struggles when repeatedly beaten with a large machete, than in any sort of coordinated, I-might-survive-this kind of way. The boat was a rapidly diminishing pyramid of wood.

“Fucker of whores!” Balur yelled. “That is being my kill! Those fish are stealing it from me!”

Will, however, was more concerned with other issues.

“Lette,” he said. Lette had still been aboard that boat. She had no flailing dragon to knock her free. She was there, in that mess of jaws and death.

“What about her?” Balur had caught the tone in his voice. The bloodlust momentarily drained away. He pawed at the blood trickling down in his face and into his eyes.

Will wasn't sure how to put it. Lette and Balur were…
Close
didn't seem to be the exact word. It held implications of intimacy that didn't fit.
Integral
fit the bill perhaps. They were lopsided halves of some indivisible unit. And they had just been divided.

However he put it, it would need to be delicate.

“She's dead,” he said.

Balur went totally still. His legs did not kick. His tail did not slide from side to side. Slowly they began to sink.

“Quirk too,” Will added as an afterthought.

Water lapped higher.

“She is being dead?” Balur's growl was so deep that Will barely caught it.

He opened his mouth to reply.

“Who's dead?” said someone behind him. They sounded rather curious.

Will twisted in Balur's grip, felt his jaw go slightly slack. “You are,” he said.

Lette, treading water, managed to give a small shrug. “I've had worse,” she said.

“Fuck all of you.” Quirk, paddling to catch up with Lette, seemed to be taking things with less calm.

“If you are ever telling me she is being dead again,” Balur said to Will, “then I will be seeing how hard I am having to squeeze to make you vomit up your intestines.”

That, Will found, took a lot of the wind out of his sails. His thoughts turned to darker territory.

“How come we aren't being eaten alive?” he asked.

“The Leviathans,” Lette said, “seem more preoccupied with Dathrax. Guess he's tastier. Or just bigger.” Her breath was punctuated by a slight panting as she kept up her strokes.

“How about,” Will suggested, “we head to shore before they finish him off and go looking for dessert.”

“Sounds good,” Lette said.

“Fuck all of you,” Quirk said again.

And so they swam through the dark waters back toward the burning town of Athril, as behind them, the bloody remains of the dragon Dathrax sank beneath the waves.