Fool's Gold (39 page)

Lette tried to look confident. The feint. Except, now that it came down to it, she couldn't help but think that Balur was not really the feinting sort. He was more the full frontal bludgeon to your face sort. Perhaps though, if he wasn't drinking, he would resist.

If he wasn't drinking…

Gods. They were so screwed.

And then beyond the crowd, two brightly colored wagons rolled into sight.

The first thought to enter Quirk's head as she rounded the bend in the road and found herself staring into a crowd of belligerent, shouting soldiers was
I have made a terrible mistake.

Cattak had scouted ahead, told her the route to take. Now he sat at the reins of the wagon behind her. He was posing as her guard, he had told her. Will had organized everything.

And apparently Will had instructed Cattak to point her at the biggest shit show in the camp and send her on her way.

She heaved on the reins of the horse that was pulling her wagon, felt the wheels trundle toward a stop yet never quite reach it, the cart still carried forward inch by inch by momentum. In the back of her head, she heard an unwelcome voice spurring her forward—
There's nothing you can do except go forward now. You're in too deep.

Was that true? Was this the only way?

Maybe it didn't even matter. Maybe it would be easier to just surrender to the gravity of fate. Walk in the direction she'd been pointed, find out what waited along that path. Other directions… she'd have to figure things out for herself. Have to face the consequences.

What would her friends at the university think if they could see her now? What would they tell her to do?

Their voices seemed very far away.

“What's going on?” Cattak had rolled to a stop beside her.

“You know something,” she said. “Some plan of Will's I'm not privy to.” He hadn't told them everything. That much was obvious. But why not? Paranoia? That had never plagued him in the past. Though Balur had never had to kill a spy at his feet in the past either…

Was coming to the Consortium's camp—embedding himself in the enemy—the
only
way to win? She couldn't believe that it was. But she didn't have any other plans.

“I have my instructions,” Cattak said. “But I have no fucking clue what he's up to.”

She looked at Cattak. A hard man devoid of romance. That's what she'd liked about him. A man with an entirely practical imagination. If she wanted an answer grounded in reality, he seemed like the person to provide it. “So,” she said to him, “why in the names of all the gods are you here?”

Cattak shrugged. “Well, Will's the prophet, isn't he?”

Quirk honestly didn't have much of a comeback to that. “If this works?” she said. “Then maybe. Just maybe.”

She flicked the reins, felt the horse gain speed.

“Just be loud,” Cattak said beside her. “Boisterous. Like you're the most important person in the world. They won't like you, but they'll believe you.”

The twitch of Quirk's lips was very far from a smile.

“Ho!” she yelled as she drew closer. “Ho! Who here speaks for the Dragons of Kondorra?” She dropped her voice an octave or so, tried to insert an arrogant swagger into it. She might not like Cattak's advice, but it did seem likely to keep her alive.

A harassed-looking man in his mid-forties and drenched in sweat pushed through the crowd toward her.

“Where are you going?” called more than one voice in the crowd.

“Come back!” demanded more.

“Pay us!” became a popular refrain.

The man caught the bridle of her horses. “I don't give Lawl's left nut for who you are, get you and your wagons the fuck out of here.”

Quirk felt her resolve quaver. This was an ugly crowd. She didn't know what hornet's nest Lette and Will had stirred up, but she was not excited about jamming her hand into it.

Cattak drew his wagon up beside her. Why hadn't Will asked him to do this ridiculous task?

She glanced over at him. Saw the steel fully exposed in his gaze. And she knew. They would never have believed Cattak. He was too obviously a spy. She… She was the worst person for the job, and that made her the best.

“I'm not going anywhere until I get my pay!” she yelled.
Just stick to the script
. The words Will had given her became a plank to hold on to in the rapidly switching currents of her fear. “I sold the dragons good hard steel and I expect to be paid. Four gods-hexed months I've been waiting for my pay, and I ain't waiting anymore.”

Her words dropped into the crowd like stones into water. Silence splashed through it, rippled out slowly, stilling every tongue, bringing every pair of eyes to bear on her.

She felt the sweat rolling down the back of her neck in a thick sheet. The guard holding her horses released them so that he could claw his hands down his face.

“Someone”—Quirk raised her voice, which to her only seemed to emphasize the tremor in it—“get me to those gods-hexed dragons so I can get paid before that prophet fucker opens all their bellies and defrauds me of good coin.”

“You fucking—” the man started, but the end of the insult was lost in the eruption from the crowd. They surged forward. Quirk flinched backward, scrambling toward her wagon bed, feeling the brightly colored silk flapping at her back. But the crowd was not aimed at her. Instead they lunged at two black, heavily barred wagons parked at the edge of the crowds. Horses stood tethered, whinnying as the crowd encroached. One reared, kicked large gray feet into the air.

Very large men in very large black armor, wielding very large maces, surrounded each cart. As the crowd rushed them they set about themselves. Black steel rose and fell, and red painted the air. Shouts of rage turned to howls of pain and fear. The soldiers beat back the crowd.

“You!” spat the man, who was back hanging on to her horses for support. “You keep your fucking gob shut!” Froth sprayed from his mouth. He turned on the crowd. “You'll get your fucking pay!” he bellowed. “I don't know what piss-hexed beer put this stupid fucking idea in your head, but there's gold. And you'll get paid end of the week. Same as fucking always. So fuck off and go back to having whores poxing your cocks before I have my boys kill more of you than that prophet wanker will ever manage.”

“Ain't no gold!” shouted some anonymous body in the crowd. “Them dragons all gone turned it to lead.”

Lead?
Quirk was forced to admit that she still didn't know much about dragons, but she did know a lot about alchemy and more than she would like to know about magic. There was no way she was aware of to turn gold into lead.

But she kept her mouth shut.

“You're a stupid fucker, aren't you?” the man by her horses yelled back into the crowd. “Those wagons are full of the shiny stuff, and if you ever want to see any of it, you'll keep your mouth shut, and fuck off, and do your job.”

“Show us!” yelled a woman's voice. It sounded familiar to Quirk's ear. Lette?

“I ain't showing you shit, because I don't have to show you shit,” the man told them.

“He ain't got it!” yelled another familiar voice close to where maybe-Lette's voice had come from. Will?

“Who said that?” yelled the man. “Show yourself, so I can carve your heart right out of your chest, you fucking coward.” He was a big man, and his hand was on a short sword in his belt.

Whoever the speaker was—Will or no—he wisely kept himself hidden.

Quirk knew she had to speak, but she was still staring at that hand on that sword. She did not want to speak, did not want to commit to the next step. Surely enough had been done, enough had been asked of her.

Next to her, Cattak cleared his throat.

She closed her eyes. She had come this far.

“Shut up, you fat fuck,” she said, every word feeling wooden in her mouth, every one of them sounding like her own death sentence. “Take me to the dragons. You're going to be one of the first the prophet kills, and I don't want to be stuck trying to talk some sense into your bloated corpse.”

Gods, the man wasn't even fat. It was all muscle. Quirk could tell because everything in the man had suddenly gone tense.

The crowd was laughing now. But it was an ugly laugh. Soldiers near the black pay wagons were still on the ground, bleeding, weeping, groaning. The tethered horses whickered, and stamped, trying to get away from the stink of blood.

The man turned on her slowly. He cocked his head to one side. “You want to see the dragons?” he asked her. His voice was low and dangerous.

It took every ounce of willpower Quirk had to keep from shaking her head desperately. The fire buried in her heart had never felt so far away. Her palms were icy with fear.

The man moved with a sudden speed that belied the bulk of his muscles. He leapt up, bounced off the wooden tongue between her wagon's two horses, landed on the toe board, and towered over her. He reached down, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck.

A moment later she was lying in the dirt, trying to focus, tailbone, back, and jaw aching from the force of her impact on the ground. The man jumped down, dragged her to her feet.

“Well,” he said, with a savage smile. “Now you get to meet the fucking dragons.”

She shot a glance at Cattak as her captor started to haul her away from the crowd, and from the army's camp, and toward Hallows' Mouth. But six of the men in black armor had pulled crossbows from their backs and he sat quite still, arms raised.

“Merchant, my arse,” said the guard as he pulled her stumbling through the fields. “You're a spy. And I'm going to enjoy watching everything the Consortium does to you.”

Meanwhile, back in the prophet's camp, Firkin was getting sick of being Balur's whipping boy.
Do this,
Balur would say, and because Firkin didn't want to taste the lizard man's fist at the back of his throat, he did it.
Say this,
Balur would tell him, and he would say it.

It was taking all the fun out of being the voice of a nonexistent prophet.

Under different circumstances, he thought he would have quite enjoyed Balur's company. The lizard man had the right priorities in life: fighting, drinking, and women. Firkin might not have put them in that order, but at least Balur had picked the right top three. Not like those others. Will with all his concerns about the right thing to do, and his head being stuck in Lette's britches. Quirk with her conflicts, and her desire to learn shit. What did learning shit ever do but fill up space in your head that could be taken up with little black circles of swirling beer? Lette… well, Lette could have been fun except she seemed far too preoccupied with Will's head and her britches these days.

The whole thing was a gods-hexed shame. There was an army at his back, a dragon's skull being paraded before him, another army to attack. He should be up there, preaching, yelling, baying for blood to be spilled. It could all have been so fucking beautiful.

But no. No. Will had told Balur, and Balur had told him, don't flap your trap. Keep your tongue still and be a good little priest. Well, if he'd known he'd have to be good, Firkin would never have become a priest in the first place.

And who was Will anyway? He'd told Firkin he wasn't the prophet. And then that he was. Or that he wasn't but he said that he was. Firkin was very unclear on the whole issue.

All he knew was that he wanted to watch a really big fight through the gentle glaze of blind drunkenness and he wasn't.

But Balur was a reasonable lizard. A god-fearing lizard. So maybe if a prophet went to have a word in his ear…

Balur was standing in Quirk's thaumatic cart, occasionally striking his chest, and turning to give various elements of the assembled crowd a view of his best side.

“You!” Firkin shouted. He had decided to play it gently. He didn't want to piss Balur off. Balur was, after all, very large. “You don't have any balls!”

Balur looked down at him. Firkin did his best to focus.

“Great big lizard.” Firkin hiccupped. “Great big fists. All that…” He waved his hands vaguely, forgot what point he was trying to make, hiccupped again. “And where do you have your fists?” he asked.

“They are about to be being around your throat,” Balur told him.

“Jammed right up your arse!” Firkin told him, as if he hadn't spoken. “Because little old Will told you to put them there. Takes your… your woman… your little Lette, and then he tells you to stick your hands right up your arse and you do it.”

“You better be watching your tongue,” Balur growled. “I have been killing holy men before.”

“Go ahead!” Firkin spat. “Least be better than you…” He lost his train of thought again, fought to find it again, grabbed on to the slippery little bastard with both hands. “Be better than watching you parade about like a peacock with no cock.”

That he thought was clever. A well-landed blow. He thought it for all the time it took for Balur to punch him hard in the face.

Quirk stumbled yet again, scraped her knees yet again, was dragged to her feet yet again. The man from the pay wagons was unrelenting. His arm was a steel bar, his fist a vise that held her, heaved her inexorably upward. She had clawed at both hand and arm and achieved nothing. She had pushed the man too far, well beyond his breaking point, and she could not pull him back.

Fear thrummed through her. Her legs shook uncontrollably, threatened to send her tumbling again. She tried to breathe, tried to find her center.

They spiraled up. The path wove its way around Hallows' Mouth, twisting through arches of heat-scorched stone, narrowing to thin precipices, weaving around vents that bubbled and belched foul sulfurous smoke. She tried to keep her free hand pressed to the side of the volcano, but as their elevation increased, the stone became too hot to touch. Above her, the sky grew darker.

She had a good view of the battlefield now, could see how paltry Will's forces looked against those of the Consortium. Any tiny flaw in the plan and they would be utterly obliterated. And there were so many flaws.

Right now, Quirk felt like she was the largest one.

Eventually, the path twisted through an archway leading into the craggy cliff face. They were halfway up the volcano's side. By Quirk's estimate she had been climbing for almost two hours. Her breath was ragged, her legs shook. She was having trouble distinguishing terror from exhaustion.

The tunnel closed over her like a clenching fist.

“Like I explained, I'm completely willing to take an IOU,” she said between gasps, but the man had long since stopped paying attention to her.

The heat rose. Sweat stuck her colorful robes to her body. She felt too exposed. She should have argued with Will for the role of a soldier. At least she would have gotten some armor that way.

The tunnel sank deeper into the rock. The walls took on a twisted, jagged look, as if the path had been forced into the volcano against the rock's will. Torches gave off a smoky red light.

A pair of doors emerged from the gloom. They were massive, painted the same black as the pay wagons. A single leathery wing carved into the surface of each. She was dragged unceremoniously to their foot. They towered over her. Doors for giants. For gods. For dragons.

The man banged hard on the door, the steel knuckles of his gauntlet booming off the wood. The sound echoed down the empty stone corridor.

There were no guards here. She supposed she knew why. She supposed she knew exactly what was behind those doors. You didn't need guards when anyone smarter than a particularly blunt rock knew to stay away.

The man dropped her to the ground. She cried out as she struck the unforgiving stone once more. But this time he didn't pull her to her feet. This time he walked away.

She watched him leave, too exhausted to beg anymore. This wasn't how it had all been meant to happen. Not at all.

Behind her, the door creaked open.

She tried to take stock, to get a grip on herself. She knew what was behind that door. She knew
who
was behind it. They were why she had gone on this stupid gods-hexed escapade in the first place. Just two days ago she had been explaining how seeing them was one of the few important things left to her in the world. And now she couldn't move.

She was surrounded by fire. She could feel it pulsing through the mountain. She could feel creatures defined by it waiting for her. She tried to take strength from that.

I should be as at home here as they are
.

Which was great, and everything, but even if she was as at home as they were, they still outnumbered and outweighed her to a laughable degree.

“Enter.” The single word boomed out. More of a growl or a roar than a word. She felt her sternum vibrate with the force of it.

Her fear. The heat. The power of that voice. Her desire to immolate herself against the flame of a dragon, a real true dragon… It all twisted inside of her. It all came together and made that voice utterly compelling, utterly irresistible. She knew she could run, yet she found herself clambering to shaking feet, leaning on the black door for support as she pushed her way into the room.

She had to see. She had to.

The chamber beyond was vast in the same way that a mountain is vast. Quite possibly because the chamber occupied almost all of a mountain. Its ceiling arced up to the crater far above. Its walls tumbled down toward the smoking pit of lava far below. Heat clogged the room, pressed against Quirk like a physical force. She had to push through it to get into the room. She blinked her suddenly dry eyes, tried to take everything in.

Around a central column of smoke that plumed toward the distant crater, the central crags of Hallows' Mouth had been cut into flat tiers.

Each and every one dripped with absurd wealth.

She scrubbed at her eyes several times waiting for the heat-induced mirage to fade away, but it did not. It stayed resolutely, stubbornly there. And for the first time, Quirk truly understood why Lette and Balur would go to such great lengths to try to steal this wealth.

In Tamathia, the university was considered one of the wealthiest institutions in the country. It had an endowment that would last it generations under even the worst financial climates. It owned significant parts of large cities, and counted as the largest landowner shy of the emperor.

All of the university's wealth would perhaps have counted for one of the tiers she could make out now.

As she watched, a small cascade of coins tumbled from the edge of one tier. They crashed and clattered down onto the one below, dislodged a small mountain of necklaces. They went spilling down toward the edge. Enough gold to feed a midsize village for a year spilled into the volcano's burning magma.

Quirk tore her eyes away from the obscene waste of wealth and back to the movement that had started it all. Slowly, uncoiling at a leisurely pace, the dragon emerged.

It was sixty yards long from nose to tail. Its body was jet black, sinuous. Golden eyes glittered in a fine-boned, elegant head. Nostrils flared red, then yellow, then blue. Flames jetted out as it stretched wings like silken expanses of midnight. It opened its mouth slightly and a bright red, forked tongue tasted the air.

Quirk was frozen. Mattrax and Dathrax both had been majestic, titans of the air, but this creature, this was… was…

“Beautiful,” she whispered.

It beat its wings once, twice. The swirling thermals from the volcano caught it and bore it up easily. As it rose into the air, other dragons appeared. A bloodred beast with a white underbelly, wings disproportionately short against the vast tube of its frame. A sinuous yellow dragon that moved in writhing coils through the air, barking and yipping in a curiously canine manner. A majestic green creature with golden horns that preened its way through the air. And finally a squat, dirty brown creature who appeared as ungainly and uncomfortable in the air.

One by one they landed, the black coming down last of all, circling twice about the column of smoke above the heads of all the others before deigning to grace the earth with his presence.

Quirk would have staggered back if she could. Would have dropped her jaw open. But she could do nothing. She was paralyzed, overcome by the enormity of the moment. They were so close to her, so massive. Fear and desire tore at her in equal measure.

She could touch them.

They could kill her.

She could ask them everything she could think of.

They would roast her alive long before they gave an answer.

But what it would be to die that way, to be immolated in the purity of their fires.

She shook her head. She was the enemy of these creatures. They were selfish and brutish. They wanted to kill everyone.

She was a scientist, a thaumatobiologist. This was everything she had ever dreamed of.

They were killers.

She was here to deceive them.

And if they discovered that deception… then their nature would take over and they would kill her.

Her thoughts turned to every other thaumatobiologist who had left the safety of their academic towers to study the beasts of which they dreamed. She thought of their corpses. Of the plaques in the hall of remembrance listing out their demises.

Edmondel Allaband—Speared by Unicorn

Carped Metheril—Trodden upon by Giant

Robart Pondra—Head mounted upon wall by Wyld Huntsman

Fettrick Battar—Wished away by Djinn

She didn't want to be another memory, another failure.

“So,” said the black dragon in the same titanic voice that had brought her into the room. It was the voice she imagined Lawl used to call dead warriors from the Hallows into battle. It crashed through her, left her body feeling scoured clean. “You are the spy the prophet has dared to send. His saboteur.”

She and Will had talked about this. There were things she was meant to say in this scenario.

Quirkelle Bal Tehrin—Hubris and dragons

Gods, as selfish and ugly as it was, she wanted to live. She wanted to write of this moment, of all the moments and scraps of information she had gathered. She wanted to teach all the world of these creatures. And she wanted to see the world learn from her.

Ten thousand lives had been placed on her shoulders.

Will's life. Firkin's. Balur's. Lette's. All the rest.

She knew what she was supposed to say.

She made a decision.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am, and I want to tell you everything I know.”