Fool's Gold (9 page)

Quirk was dreaming. Something to do with a cat, and research papers, and a dragon telling her that the average feline academic record was pitiable. And Quirk kept trying to tell both of them that the room was on fire, and they had to get out. But the dragon told her he was an expert on combustibles and she was talking nonsense. And the cat just kept on trying to tell her about how conflicting models of the universe could be unified by its yarn theory. And all the while heat and light was growing.

She came awake sweating. The sun was in her eyes, lancing between treetops, thrusting into the cave entrance, and landing with a crash at the back of her eyes. She rolled away, blinking and groaning. Her head felt foggy. She had vague memories of Balur's flask, which, in the startling light of morning, she was convinced had contained some form of liquid fire.

From behind the shelter of her eyelids she cursed herself. She shouldn't have drunk anything. That was a mistake. Drink made your control slip. And she could not afford to let that happen. Not again.

But she had been excited. She remembered that. Almost celebrating.

What had she been excited about again?

She experimented with opening her eyes again. Her hypothesis that now she was facing away from the entrance of the cave would lead to a more muted, digestible visual palette bore fruit.

Unfortunately it was Firkin's fruit. He squatted, stark naked three yards from her, scrubbing himself vigorously with a pinecone.

“Taking care of them varmints,” he said with a cheerful smile. It revealed fewer teeth than it should.

Quirk closed her eyes again. Fast.

“It's easier to let him just get it over with.” Will's voice was apologetic. “Otherwise he'll just do it later somewhere far more public.”

Quirk didn't really care if it would have been more public. It wouldn't have been so close to her face.

She pushed the thought down, inhaled calming breaths, ran the mantra through her mind.
Be the surface of the lake,
she told herself.
Be the absence of the wind.

Slowly she went through the exercises she had been taught by a priestess of Knole, goddess of wisdom. She found the inner font of quiet. And encased in the silence of her mental oasis, she put the pieces of the previous evening back together. Will. Lette. Firkin. Balur, the Analesian. It came back to her. The whole night. The whole plan. The dragon.

The surface of the lake tremored, then boiled, exploded.

She sat up hard and fast.

The dragon.

She could see one. Touch one. She could poke it, and prod it, and measure it. She could assess the texture of each scale, could see how each limb articulated. Each aspect of it could be a paper she would publish. The sharpness and position of it claws. The contents of its spoor. The girth of its loins.

Her breath was coming fast, her heart thumping a syncopated beat against the battering-ram rhythm of her hangover. A dragon. She would see a dragon.

Be the surface of the lake. Be the absence of wind. The absence of sound. Be the lacuna in the world.

No. Fuck the lacuna in the world.
She was going to see a dragon.
A fucking dragon
.

She fought for control. She had known this was coming. This was why she had come to Kondorra in the first place. This was the valley's promise. Cut off from the rest of Avarra except for a few profitable trade routes. And full of dragons. Dragons risen out of history that was almost legend. Only here in all the world, in a southeastern spit of land shielded off by low mountains. Keeping themselves to themselves. Waiting. Waiting for her to come and reveal all their secrets.

Be calm,
she demanded of herself.
Be detached. Be the academic. And if you can't be detached, then you must abort. Walk away from this.

She tried not to laugh at that. Walk away. As if she could.

You have to,
insisted the quiet voice of reason.
You have fought too long and too hard for this to throw it away now.

She stood slowly, calmly, moving her limbs with a dancer's precision. She could feel the Analesian watching her. Another reason to go outside, to refresh herself away from stale air and the corpses of goblins. She could already hear flies buzzing.

She walked toward the light of day, feeling the kinks of a night on a stone floor slowly starting to come out of her limbs.
Think this through. Be rational.

First there was the fact that this was a criminal undertaking. She had not expected that. She'd known the dragons played some sort of social role in Kondorra, but sovereign lords? She supposed she must have heard that somewhere between Tamathia and Kondorra, but she had heard so many things. Gods. Overlords. Predators. Myths. Livestock. War beasts. And one woman who insisted at great volume that they were all her lovers and had curious peccadillos concerning goats' milk. Picking the truth out of guesses would be like reaching into the Tamathian library and at random trying to pick out the exact book you wanted. The only people who could have told her the situation for what it was were the merchant guilds that regularly interacted with Kondorra. But they and their numerous guards had made it abundantly clear that they had had no time for an itinerant scholar.

So here she was, helping thieves and rogues plan to rob a dragon. Here she was fully intending to participate in a crime. She had devoted herself to a life of learning and quiet worship of Knole.

Oh to the Hallows with it! She would be getting to poke a dragon in its gods-hexed belly and seeing if it giggled in its sleep! Knole—goddess of wisdom, knowledge, insight, and academia that she was—would give her right tit for an opportunity like that.

The surface of the lake, when she summoned it, was rippling with motion. She breathed slowly, walked out of the cave, let the heat of the sun sink into her aching body.

Next was the fact that people's lives would be put in danger by this undertaking. Not just hers but the lives of everyone she had said she would give Fire Root potion.

Gods, she had said that. How much had she had to drink?

But she could give it to them. She really could…

Lette had promised to save the villagers' lives. Well… sort of. But even that thin promise still left her conscience with the guards who served Mattrax. All of them. Balur had said he wanted to kill them. Of course he had. That was his people's way. She had read about Analesians. A hard people growing up in an even harder land. Scrabbling for survival among the cliffs and sands of the Analesian desert. Creatures that fought for every moment that they drew breath, killing their food, killing each other, right up until the moment they were killed themselves.

She could not be party to that sort of violence.

Could she?

The dragons' soldiers were villains. The dragons were villains too. She could excuse the reptiles though. They were not human. You couldn't apply human rules to them. They had their own rituals and needs that were not necessarily compatible with those of human life. That was simply how thaumatobiology worked. But the guards… The guards chose to steal and to kill. So didn't they deserve…?

Not by her hand. That she had sworn. That was inviolable.

But by her will…?

No. She couldn't be responsible for that either.

Poke! Poke! Poke!

She clenched and unclenched her hands. Started to go through the ritual stretches, each one designed to bring body and mind into closer alignment. Each one stilling the surface of the lake inside. Each one canceling out a breath of wind that disturbed its silence. Each one making the calm more perfect.

“What in the name of Lawl's black eye is this thing?”

Quirk was yanked from spiritual and physical alignment back to earth. Her psyche landed with a bump. Lette was standing a few yards away. She was pointing at Quirk's cart.

“That's my cart,” Quirk said. Because it was.

Lette appeared unsatisfied by this answer. “And how in the name of all the gods did it get here?”

The surface of the lake was not smooth. Not at all.

“I had it with me last night,” Quirk said. She could feel heat of the sun on the side of her face.

“So where in the Hallows is your horse?” Lette asked. “Where's the gods-hexed yoke for a horse? Where's the bridle and tack? Where are the fucking reins?”

The heat of the sun, and the heat of her dream. The heat of fire, balling, collecting in her palms, her fingertips.

Quirk breathed slowly, clenched her fists. She hoped the mercenary didn't notice the wisps of smoke escaping between her fingers.

“It's a thaumatic wagon,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “It runs on a thaumaturgic engine.”

“That being,” Lette said, “the thing in the middle that looks like the offspring of an oven that got drunk and opened its doors to an alchemist's toolkit?”

“Yes.” Quirk kept her answers simple, her exterior calm.
Imitate what you shall become
.

She could hear feet behind her, Lette's… exuberance… attracting attention. From the slight wince she saw cross the mercenary's face she assumed Firkin had refrained from adding clothes to his morning ensemble.

Still Lette was not distracted. “What happened,” she hissed, “to the bit where you said you don't practice magic anymore?”

Another calming breath. It was easier to achieve this time. Quirk understood people's distrust of magic. She distrusted magic and she was a practitioner of the art. Nobody liked being proven wrong, and that was doubly the case when you were dealing with the fundamental laws of the universe.

“I don't practice magic,” she said. “The person who created the engine does. I simply bought the engine from him, and now employ it.”

“You employ magic?” Lette said. She did not sound impressed.

“Like a small business owner,” Balur said from over Quirk's shoulder, in a poor imitation of helpfulness.

Quirk took the moment of Lette's distraction to further cement her serenity. “I'm not entirely certain,” she said, “that I understand your concern.”

That brought Lette's attention back to her. “My concern?”

Quirk was fairly sure that Lette's laugh was not genuine.

“My concern,” Lette said, “is that I spent the night sleeping a few handful of yards from a magical bomb you did nothing to warn us about.”

“It's not a bomb,” Quirk said as reasonably as she could manage. “It's an engine.”

“An engine is just a bomb that hasn't happened yet.”

Quirk opened and closed her mouth. She wasn't quite sure what to make of that. And yet that phrase “a bomb that hasn't happened yet” struck a little close to home.

“Life experience is coloring the world a shade not everyone is seeing for Lette,” Balur supplied.

“Shut up, Balur.” Lette's anger was not ebbing away.

Quirk thought she should tell Lette about the mantra, and inner calm, about the surface of the lake, and the absence of the wind. But she thought she should do it at a more opportune moment when she was less likely to be gutted for it.

There again, this seemed like the approximate point in proceedings when Will—

“Maybe we should all just take a moment,” Will said.

Quirk smiled. He was a good man. Naïve, and likely to die soon, but good. And that counted for something.

“It is quite safe,” Quirk said. “I assure you. And it has made transporting all of my equipment much easier. But it has traveled three hundred and fifty leagues without the slightest glitch. I am sure it will be fine now.”

Lette curled her lip. “I do not like magic.” She said it quietly. Because it was close to what Quirk knew she really meant. She was scared of magic.

“Me too,” Quirk replied.

Balur laid a hand on Lette's shoulder, rubbed it almost affectionately. “There is being no magic in Kondorra. The gods have all been buggering off and leaving it to the dragons.”

Quirk cocked her head to one side. “Is that true?” she said to Will, unable to restrain her curiosity. “I hadn't thought of that. Is there magic here?”

Will's look of conciliatory patience slipped several notches closer to frustration. “We haven't been abandoned by the gods. Is that what people outside of Kondorra think? No, they didn't come to our aid in the dragon wars, and no, admittedly none have manifested here in a long time, but the seasons still come as Lawl dictates them, the crops still come just as Cois and Toil command them, babies are still born healthy and whole just as Betra would have them, coin still flows as Klink desires, the skies don't fall. Knole does whatever she does. All the god stuff takes care of itself. And we don't get them coming down making demigods, and causing chaos and wars.”

“But,” Quirk pressed, still not quite able to stop, “what about mages?”

Will threw up his hands. “Fine. I don't know about bloody mages.”

Balur shrugged. “I was hearing that you were all worshipping the dragons instead of the gods, and that you were all having orgies with virgins, and that then you were sacrificing them.”

Lette looked at Balur like he was something diseased. “Where in the Hallows did you hear that?”

Balur shrugged uncomfortably. “Was being some guy in some bar.” He rubbed the scales on the back of his head. “Was being half the reason I was suggesting we were coming.”

Lette shook her head. “I should have fucking known.”

Will was looking at them all, slightly aghast. “Don't you know anything about Kondorra?”

Lette gave him a mildly pitying look. “This is the arse-end of Avarra. Who do you think is out there talking about it?”

Will shook his head. Quirk doubted he had ever seen much outside of this tail end of the valley.

Lette affected a sympathetic look. “Don't feel bad about it. At least it means that there's no one out there talking about what an oppressive shithole this place really is.”