Fool's Gold (6 page)

Lette did not allow her arm to slacken for an instant. “Being a magician,” she said, “is not exactly something one can give up.” It would be like giving up being someone who breathed air, or who ate food with their mouth. Magicians just were. Sometimes some member of the Pantheon, be it Lawl, or Cois, or Klink, or Toil, or any other of the fickle bunch would reach down their divine finger and plant it in a mother's swollen belly. And the child was touched, and would be forever. That was not a palm print that simply washed away.

“I am,” Quirk spoke awkwardly, “reformed. I have stepped away from practicing the magical arts, and now simply study the phenomena in other creatures.”

Balur hefted his hammer up onto his shoulder. “You are saying that you can be doing magic, but that you are choosing to not be doing it?” To describe his tone as dubious would be like describing the Cois—hermaphroditic god(dess) of love, fertility, and loose morality in general—as being a little bit forward with the ladies.

Quirk straightened, pushed her shoulders back, held her chin high. Lette thought she was probably trying to appear defiant. Unfortunately all she was really achieving was to remind people of how haughty magicians were said to be.

“That,” said Quirk in an austere tone, “is exactly what I chose. I chose to be in control of who I am and what I do.”

Three hundred and sixty-nine leagues. On her own. Without a single spell? Lette wasn't sure she quite believed that. But she did believe that Quirk wanted it to be true. The question was how in control the woman was. And how much warning would there be before she slipped?

Balur was shaking his head. “That is like owning a hammer and trying to put in nails with your hand.”

Quirk didn't let go of her rigid pose for a second. “The problem arises,” she said, “if every time you use the hammer you accidentally bludgeon three or four people along with the nail.”

And suddenly, without warning, she won Lette over. A chord ringing out that was too much in tune with the one thrumming in her own breast. That desire to be better. That struggle.

“Come on,” Lette said, stepping toward Quirk, the weight of the blade strapped to her wrist suddenly forgotten. “I thought the whole point of this fire was to make sure you didn't freeze. Get that cloak off and come closer.”

Will watched Lette approach Quirk, watched her shoulders finally relax. A letting go of some inner tension. For some reason she had switched from treating Quirk as if she was some barely contained bag of knives and ferrets, to more like she was the poor, cold woman she appeared to be.

He was making the opposite journey.

Study dragons?
The only reason Will could think of for that was if you were looking for weak points. And this woman seemed to be missing both the army and the suicidal tendencies that usually accompanied that exercise.

Quirk shrugged off her cloak, then searched for a patch of floor relatively clear of intestines and bodily fluids where she could lay it out to dry. Beneath the cloak she wore a simple pale green dress bound with a blue cord. It was not much drier than the cloak.

Without her hood to hide her face, Quirk looked to be in her early forties, curly black hair cropped close to her skull. She was broad-featured—wide nose and lips. A line of gold studs stitched its way up her right ear. There was a direct, no-nonsense quality to her gaze, though the lines around her eyes seemed to suggest a smile was not hidden too deeply.

She settled herself down by the fire, Lette beside her. Firkin ambled over from the cave entrance, all joints and gangling limbs. Then came Balur. The lizard man at least still seemed to be nursing the suspicions Lette had released.

Study dragons
. Will felt his knuckles clench, unclench. Clench again.
Study the fuckers that took my farm from me.

He breathed steadily, waited for his vision to broaden back from the pinpoint it wanted to become. He opened his hands, joined the others at the fire. Staring at this woman suspiciously wouldn't help much. It was like his father used to say: A breeched calf didn't turn itself around just because you gave it the stink-eye. You wanted to sort out a problem, you better just get elbow deep in cow vagina.

His father, Will reflected, had not had much poetry in his heart.

Still, the advice was sound enough. “I'm sorry,” he said, to Quirk, doing his best to keep his voice calm. “I'm still having some trouble with the bit where you actually study dragons.”

“Really?” Quirk's eyebrows lifted in what appeared to be genuine surprise. “Well, they're fascinating creatures. And we still know barely anything about them. We haven't a clue how they generate the fire they breathe. Some sort of flammable fluid secreted from a sac inside the cheeks or throat is the most likely explanation, but then how do they light it? And how do they even get off the ground? The sheer mass of them speaks against it. The ideal of course would be to get to dissect one—”

“Dissect one?” Will wasn't sure if he should laugh or shout in anger. “Of course. Just walk right up to a member of the Consortium and ask if you can slit them up the belly.” He put a hand to his head. “Gods. Study them? Have you ever even seen one? You don't…”

He trailed off as Quirk avoided his eye.
It couldn't be…
But the facts were there in front of him, writ large in her body language.

“Wait,” he said. “You study dragons and you've never even seen one?”

“Well, I've seen… drawings,” said Quirk defensively. “And I have read some very detailed, albeit partial, descriptions of them. Though some did seem like they exaggerated a little.” She chuckled slightly to herself. “One of them described a creature over twenty feet long. Can you imagine? I mean, the flight mechanics are improbable enough for a creature half that size—”

“Twenty feet?” Will cut her off again. “You think twenty feet is improbably long for a dragon?” His laughter felt almost hysterical. This was deranged.

“Well, obviously,” said Quirk, shuffling back from the fire a little. “I mean just think of the thrust needed to get something…” And then she finally caught on. “You've seen a dragon? Actually
seen
one? Living?”

“Seen one?” Will spat. “I've had my whole fucking life ruined by one.”

“And it was over twenty feet long?” Quirk asked with, Will thought, a certain amount of callousness.

“Great big varmints.” Firkin decided to chime in. “Rats of the sky, I say. If rats breathed fire and ate cattle, like.” A dreamy look entered his eyes. “Oh that'd be a rat, that would. I'd like one of those rats. Keep him as a pet and call him Lawrence.”

The time had come, Will decided, to reveal certain truths to Quirk. “Mattrax,” he said, “the dragon who governs this northern tip of the Kondorra valley, which we are oh so lucky to be in right now, is fifty yards from snout to tail and considered runty for his kind. It gives him a shitty attitude, but it's hard to pick out because all the dragons in the Consortium have shitty attitudes. They live in vast fortresses, surrounded by guards picked from the arse-end of humanity, who love nothing more than to go around beating their arbitrary rules into the people who live near them. And then every year they send out tax collectors to steal as much of your coin as they can simply so they can sit on it and feel fucking pretty. The only time they drag their sagging guts out of their caves is so they can steal a few cattle for a midafternoon snack, and literally shit on the people whom they govern. That is, in fact, a little game for Mattrax. To see how many people he can hit with a single bowel movement. As a species they are so comfortable with the idea of being evil overlords that they actually hold gatherings from time to time in the core of an active volcano. That is who you study. Tyrants. Arseholes with wings.”

He was he realized, leaning forward into the fire. Spittle sprayed with his words, the rage in his gut boiling hotter than the flames.

“They took my farm,” he said, and he felt his eyes sting. “They took everything from me. Everything. The farm my mother and father had built with their own hands.” The thought was almost too raw for him to utter. “And now I'm sitting in a cave that smells of dead bodies and shit.”

Balur shifted uncomfortably. “Being sorry for that,” he said, tapping his stomach. “Raw goblin… Never be sitting well.”

There was nothing but silence for a long time.

“Well, the problem is,” Quirk said, sounding apologetic, “thaumatobiologists stopped going out in the field a hundred years ago or so. Self-preservation, really. There was a high propensity for them to be consumed by the subjects they were studying. In fact, if my research is correct, I'm the first thaumatobiologist to attempt the field study of dragons in approximately two hundred years.”

There was, Will thought, an unwelcome note of pride slipping into her voice at the end.

“No,” he said. “The problem is that you're studying them, when really what we should be doing is killing them and selling them for parts.” The laugh that came up from him was an ugly, unfamiliar thing. That was something else Mattrax had given him. Bitterness. “At least,” he said, “that way I'd have enough money to pay off my taxes and get my farm back.”

“In my experience,” Balur said, pulling a small steel flask from his belt, “if you are needing coin, it is best to be just taking it.”

Will heard his bitter laugh again. It sounded no better this time around. “The only one with any coin around here is Mattrax.”

Balur unstoppered his flask, swigged, and smiled, showing every one of his stained yellow teeth. “So be stealing from Mattrax.”

Steal from Mattrax.

Memory rushed over Will like a wave, carried him to another time, another place.

It was a sunny afternoon. His back was pressed against a tree. There was a blue sky above his head. Birdsong and laughter. The memory was a collage of details scattered over a sketched in world. He was young. What…? Six? Perhaps seven? His father had sent him to pick up apples in the orchard before they rotted but he was shirking his duties. So was Firkin.

The man was… Was he so different back then from the man Will had met in the cave? His beard was cropped more closely, perhaps. But his hair was still wild, though perhaps more in the way a hare is wild than a wolf. And the potbelly was yet to fully manifest. There was less gray and more brown about his temples. And the eyes… They stood out clear in the memory. There was a calmness there that no longer existed.

Eighteen years ago. Barely any time at all, and somehow a lifetime as well.

“It's good here, Firkin,” Will had said, his voice reedy with youth, the words spat around a mouthful of apple.

Firkin had nodded, taken the time to swallow his own mouthful before replying. “You da runs a good place.”

“No.” That wasn't what Will had meant. “This place.” He swept his arm expansively. “Kondorra. The valley.”

He expected Firkin's smile. Firkin had a smile that shone in rooms like the sun shone through the window. He had a smile that got in your belly and lifted it up like it could carry you away over the hills.

But Firkin didn't smile. Firkin grimaced instead. “She's seen better days, Will. This valley has.”

Will didn't understand. But he didn't want Firkin to know he didn't understand. Firkin didn't treat him like he was little. Firkin treated him like he was big. And Firkin was funny too. He told jokes that made Ma cluck her tongue. Will didn't want Firkin to start thinking he was little and stop telling jokes.

“Yeah,” he said instead. “But the dragons keep it nice.”

He'd seen Mattrax once. And if he was honest it had been terrifying. The crashing of his wings. The roar of his voice. The panic of the animals. His mother's sharp shriek. The tightness in his father's eyes. But afterward… Afterward there had been something magnificent about the vastness of the dragon, of knowing that he was
theirs
. Of knowing that he had chosen to take Kondorra and make it his special place.

He knew about the gods, of course. His ma and pa had taken special care to make sure he knew Lawl, and his wife Betra, and their children, Toil, Klink, and Knole. But the gods got confusing with Cois who was Lawl's daughter and Toil's sister-daughter. And then there was Barph, the absent god, who was Cois's son, but also her lover, and who was Betra's daughter too.

Will really didn't understand Cois at all.

But in the end it all came to the same thing: No god had manifested in Kondorra in years. That was what everybody had said. In contrast, Mattrax was
real
.

Which all added up to considerable confusion on his part when Firkin cuffed him on the back of the head. “Don't you ever be saying that. You hear me, boy?”

Firkin's eyes were glittering hard, and there were no smiles in him as he glared at Will.

Will felt his lip start to tremble, felt tears pushing up behind his eyes.

“Oh Cois's cock,” Firkin said, rolling his eyes. “I didn't mean…” He pulled Will to him in a rough hug. “And pretend I didn't say that about Cois and her… his… pissing god. Oh and pretend I didn't… You know what?” He held Will by the arms, and held him so he could look him in the eye. “The gods have abandoned this valley, so as long as you don't tell your mother I said so, piss on the gods. Even though Cois would probably enjoy it.”

Will didn't know exactly what Firkin was talking about, but he knew his ma would do more than cluck her tongue at that. He giggled through his tears.

“I'm sorry I had rough words for you,” said Firkin. “But you've got some things backwards there, and they rubbed me backwards, and some beasts don't like that, if you follow me.”

Will sniffed, and nodded. “I follow.” And that was mostly true.

“You weren't here before the dragons,” Firkin said. “And sometimes I forget that.” He let Will go, and grabbed another apple off the ground. He took a bite. “Not that it were all that,” he said, still chewing and spraying chunks of white apple flesh across the orchard in a way that kept Will smiling. “Lords will always be lords, and taxes will always be taxes, and nobles will always be colossal bastards all the world over.” He leaned in and nodded sagely. “They say you're a bastard if you don't know who your pa was, but if a man can tell you who his pa was eight generations back… that's when you know you've got a real bastard.”

Will's tears were long forgotten by now.

“No,” said Firkin. “It weren't perfect, but it worked. People bitched and moaned. I bitched and moaned, for that matter. But we got by. Wasn't no golden-age bullshit, like some will tell you—”

Will giggled again.

“—but it were all right.”

Another grimace. “Then Mattrax and the rest of those…” He hesitated. “Well,” he said with another knowing nod, “maybe you're not quite old enough for me to use the word that really describes those dragons. But they came along. And there was a fight.”

Will was old enough to know that there had been a war. He'd seen the grave markers around the temple in the village. He'd heard the scraps of stories his ma exchanged with those who came to buy eggs and milk each morning.

“Why'd folk fight, Firkin?” asked. He'd never quite understood that bit.

“Well.” Firkin shrugged. “The nobles may be bastards, but they also know that if some great fire-breathing beast out of legend lands himself in the middle of a field that you should probably go stab him before he eats up too many of the farmers. That's the idea about taxes, you see? The farmer pays them, and the noble uses them to pay the soldiers to stab stuff before it eats the farmer. We've lost that idea since Mattrax and his lot came along. Now the soldiers are more likely to stab the farmers. But that was the original idea.”

“The dragons ate farmers?” Will had definitely never heard that before.

“Mostly they ate the soldiers actually.” Firkin shrugged. “Touch of irony there.”

“So what if they hadn't attacked?” It seemed to Will that if this whole attacking thing happened then everyone would be happier, along with Firkin.