Fool's Gold (26 page)

Balur did not like to think of what he was doing as lurking exactly. Biding his time perhaps. A tactical pause in activities… maybe. If one was feeling fancy. An opportunity to drink far too much… Well, that went without saying.

Through the window of the tavern, he saw that the sun had dipped down to meet the surface of Athril's Lake. Murky brown water was transformed to blazing fire.

It was not the only fire alight in Athril that night.

Balur had first ascribed Firkin's success as an orator to the fact that the citizens of the Village receiving his message had been completely out of their skulls. His subsequent success as a preacher on the road… well, perhaps that was being because of the serious trauma that affected those accompanying them. Witnessing the murder of your lord and master, even an abusive lord and master… That could mess with a man's head. Balur could be seeing that. And those who chose to flock to Will, and to listen to Firkin… Well, they had clearly been abused by the Dragon Consortium. Balur could see them not being of a mind to listen to reason, and perhaps preferring Firkin's particular brand of insanity. But Athril was different.

Athril was, for the Kondorra valley, affluent. Athril was bustling. Athril, he thought while knocking back the second half of his pint, had pretty good beer. And unless his mark was very much off its aim, those three women over by the bar making eyes at him represented a well-established red-light district. What in the name of the Hallows the people of Athril had to complain about, he could not see. And yet they flocked to Firkin like flies to shit.

It had started almost as soon as they were through the gate. Firkin had begun to work himself up into a lather. There had been deep breathing, the beating of his pigeon chest.

“Citizens!” Firkin had shrieked. “Countrymen! Fellow oppressed people! I bring you the word of the prophet!”

For their part, the populace of Athril had shown a surprising willingness to listen to this twaddle. They had laid down their daily wares and left the comfort of their homes and shops and come out to listen, muttering in what sounded a lot like assent.

Balur had immediately put some distance between himself and Firkin. Quirk, he had been pleased to see, had stuck close to him.

He was well aware of everything he had said about keeping an eye on Firkin, about the promises he had made assuring Will that things wouldn't get out of hand. But there was keeping your word, and there was sticking your neck out and asking for a sword to fall upon it.

Balur wanted to get rich, no doubt. He particularly wanted to get rich through minimal effort, and the thieving of gold from Dathrax. However, he did not see that goal as being mutually exclusive with the long-term survival of Firkin and the populace of Athril. If they wanted to get themselves all worked up, and all stabbed by a bunch of guards, well, that was fine with him. In fact, the more of the populace the guards were busy stabbing, the less likely they were to be stabbing him as he broke into their garrison.

That particular chain of events had not, it seemed, percolated into the consciousnesses of Athril's populace. To be fair, they didn't know Will and Balur were using them as a distraction to break into the garrison, but they still showed remarkably little concern about abandoning their daily lives and throwing themselves into full-blooded rebellion.

Balur had not been entirely sure what he thought of that. On the one hand, it was good that the plan was proceeding so easily. But what such behavior promised beyond the short term… Balur was not entirely sure about that.

Balur did not like the long term. Thinking about the long term generally seemed to involve not doing what one wanted to do in the short term. Thinking of tomorrow's hangover took the joy out of tonight's drinking. Thinking of tomorrow's itchy red rash took all the fun out of tonight's whoring.

Balur was a creature of action, and the long term often seemed to demand inaction. Therefore, Balur was of the general opinion that the long term could go fuck itself. But Firkin and Will—and the fervor they both seemed to generate—were forcing him to think about it.

To ease his discomfort, Balur slammed his fist down upon the bar. “Beer!” he bellowed. And then, in case that had been unclear, he added, “Beer!”

“Wouldn't it be easier,” said Quirk from the seat beside him at the bar, “to go into this clearheaded?”

“Clearheaded?” asked Balur. He looked around the tavern. He cocked his head to one side. He could hear at least four conversations that included the word
prophet
going on at this moment. “If I was clearheaded, then I would be the only one in this town.”

Quirk graced him with a slight smile. “Yes,” she acknowledged, “but sardonic bravado aside, wouldn't be it be easier to break into the garrison if you were sober?”

“Sober?” asked Balur. The mental effort of trying to process that caused his face to scrunch up, eyes and nose swarming together. From Quirk's expression, he guessed she thought he was making light of her. But the idea had genuinely never occurred to him.

Liquid of any sort was precious in the Analesian desert. What liquids were available were rationed out in a manner largely determined by merit. Warriors merited fluid. And most of the fluids that the Analesians possessed were alcoholic.

Now, confronted with this new concept, Balur attempted to match his idea of sobriety to his idea of combat. The results were not appealing.

“No.” He shook his head violently. “No.” He said it again, hopefully this time with the emphasis he felt the words deserved. Just in case, he said it a third time. “No!” He shuddered. “You would do that sort of thing sober?” He looked at Quirk with horror. “You are being barbaric.”

Quirk looked at him quizzically, then shook her head. Balur started to make significant inroads into his next pint. He cast another look to the tavern window. A man was running by. It took Balur a moment to realize that he did not have flaming red hair.

His head was on fire. He was pinwheeling his arms, and screaming as he ran past.

Balur narrowed his eyes. He had not been to Athril before, and the ways of humans were still, even after all this time, somewhat foreign to him. However, in his experience, setting fire to your own head and then shrieking in horror at the experience was not the sort of thing humans tended to do for fun.

The man disappeared out of sight leaving only a trail of dissipating smoke. Still, if Balur cocked his head to one side he could make out distant sounds of shrieking, and of large, important pieces of architecture breaking.

He switched his narrowed gaze to Quirk. “Are you hearing this?”

“I was rather hoping,” said Quirk to the glass of white wine she had been nursing for the past hour, “that I might be imagining it.”

Balur set his many teeth into a savage grimace. There was but one explanation. And when Balur found him he was going to kill him.

Firkin was having fun. In fact, he had been having fun ever since they dosed the bread in the village. Truly it was difficult for him to remember the last time he had had this much fun. To be fair, he had difficulty remembering quite a lot of things. Including, from time to time, his own name. But he was fairly certain that his reduced circumstances had not allowed for this much fun in many a year. But here, now, praise be to all the whoreson gods in their mighty Pantheon, he was having so much fun he just might shit himself.

“Brothers!” he called. “Sisters! Very close cousins! Fathers! Mothers! Those who confuse the boundaries between them! The prophet has come!”

The thing he found utterly insane, beyond all possible reason, was that they listened to him. He could say pretty much anything that came into his head and they listened to him. All he had to do was tell them that the prophet had said it, or that the prophet was going to in a second, or that the prophet might say it someday soon, or that the prophet definitely hadn't said it but wanted it known all the same—and they listened.

“Tear down the old world! Toss out the old! Reclaim your truth!” They loved that one. He sometimes—often when being tended upon by young and nubile things—wondered what they imagined it to mean. Still, he thought as he watched a gaggle of teenage boys smash the windows in several stores and snatch goods into their pockets, there was little enough harm done. And the citizens, just like him, seemed to be having so much fun.

“Burn your wasted years! Set fire to the ashes of your history!” That one, he knew, definitely didn't make sense. You couldn't set fire to ashes. They'd already been set on fire. But nobody called him on it. No one told him to stop gibbering. Nobody called him an idiot. If he'd told them the prophet had said they should drown him in alcohol they would have complied. It was fucking brilliant.

“To the heavens! Mount to the skies!” That was a new one. He wasn't sure what they would make of it. It was fun to mix it up sometimes.

To the west, the dying light of the sun was being replaced by a new light as houses went up in flames. The heat rolled out across the streets toward him.

“Be reborn and usher in the new! Remake yourself in the prophet's image!” Across the street, at that very moment, he could see a man dousing himself in oil. He set a torch to his clothes and ran off screaming down the street, arms flailing, smashing into buildings, leaving a wake of fiery destruction behind him.

Firkin smiled. Yes, he was definitely having a tremendous amount of fun.

Balur watched as guards poured out of the garrison. The light of burning buildings fought off the encroaching night.

“You have to admit,” said Quirk at his side, “that he is very good at his job.”

Job. Balur considered that word. It implied a level of professionalism. A certain mindset and dedication to one's cause. He would not have wanted to consider Firkin as a professional anything. The best that could truly be said for him was that he was an enthusiastic amateur.

That said, there was no denying that he was effective. It was just, Balur thought, that his enthusiasm seemed to also make him side-effective. And it was those side effects—side effects like men setting themselves on fire and running screaming through the streets—that had pushed him out onto the streets. Yet he was effective enough that Balur would yet again have to delay killing the old man.

He had no doubt that his regrets would be both plentiful and profound.

Still, with Firkin's distraction fully under way, Balur knew that he and Quirk were now to break into the garrison, steal the armored ship, and sail out to meet Lette and Will on Dathrax's island. What was more, the stream of guards leaving the garrison had slowed to a trickle. Balur could still see a few armored men standing behind the wooden walls of the garrison, but now they seemed pitiable and few.

“It is being time,” he said to Quirk, hoisting his war hammer down from its clasp on his back. Quirk licked her lips.

“How many lives do you think have bought us this opportunity?” She was looking down at her hands. “It seemed so simple when Will said it. So clean and clinical. A distraction. Such a small, simple word. But what distraction really means is guards hacking down men and women in the street.”

Balur nodded. Personally, he had thought that that bit was obvious.

“This,” he said, “is seeming incongruous with your levity of a moment before?”

Quirk cocked her head to one side. “Incongruous?”

Balur fixed her with the same stare he liked to use on particularly cocky combatants. “Just because I am having a predilection for crushing skulls, is not meaning that I have not been having the time to improve my vocabulary.”

Quirk shook her head. “I think it's a syntax thing.”

Balur didn't let up on his gaze. “This is being another incongruity thing.”

Quirk's answering smile lacked mirth. “Haven't you ever heard of putting a brave face on things?”

Balur shrugged. A man bleeding profusely from a gash on his forehead ran past bellowing.

“There is no need to be being brave,” Balur said. “I am being confident in my ability to carve a path to the ship.”

Quirk couldn't even muster a smile anymore. “That's what I'm putting a brave face on about, Balur. I'm a pacifist. My childhood was a fucked-up nightmare of murder and bloodshed. And I put that away. I became a new person. I became someone better. Just an academic. And now, just so I can go and pursue that new passion, just so I can escape my past… everything around me is turning into a nightmare of murder and bloodshed.”

Mostly, Balur thought, it was low-grade vandalism and rioting, but he got her point. “Okay,” he conceded, “that is being a bit fucked up.”

Quirk let out a noise that might have been called a chuckle had it not sounded quite so much as if it had murdered all the other chuckles to ensure it was the one to escape. “No,” she said. “What's really fucked up is that I'm okay with it. This doesn't bother me. Not the way it should. Just this…” She hesitated, screwed up her face, as if trying to force some expression to the surface. “… mild regret. Nothing sufficient for…” She swept her hand at the town. Yells echoed out, screams. At the far end of the street, three silhouetted figures were beating a guard to the ground. “… this. It's chaos. It's madness.”

Balur nodded, feeling the grin spread across his face all of its own accord. “There is being something of a magnificence to it.”

“Magnificence?” Quirk blanched. “Gods, you better be drunk.”

Balur's grin stayed in place. “I am not believing that you have ever been seeing me wholly sober.”

That shook her out of it, for just a moment at least. She blinked several times very rapidly. “I don't know if I find that comforting, or that I'm just more upset that I find that comforting.”

At the end of the street, the figures finished beating the guard and moved on. Balur stepped out of the shadows he had been waiting in, and swung his hammer experimentally. “How about I am going and caving some heads in, and you are thinking about it.”

Quirk looked away from him, then back, down at her own hands. She closed them, but clenched them only loosely. Then she shrugged. “I guess that's as good as it's going to get.”

That was enough for Balur. He started to pace down the street toward the garrison. He swung the hammer as he went, letting its momentum transfer into him, its pendulum weight winding up the clockwork of his rage. He felt muscles loosen in his shoulders, the white rush of adrenaline in his veins, the sharpening of his vision. He licked the air, tasted blood, and sweat, and fear.

“Doesn't this…? Isn't there something about this…?” Quirk scampered along behind him. “There's something odd about this, right? I know things got out of hand back in the Village, but we were using the potions back then. Here… we haven't… I haven't…” She shook her head, plainly troubled. “Why are they acting like this?”

And, yes, it was a little odd. Balur had been thinking about just that. The people of Athril had leapt to violence with surprising alacrity. Had it been too quickly? Or was the populace's animosity toward the Dragon Consortium so great that it took but a single match to set the whole place aflame?

But only part of him was wondering that. A part of him knew that could wait until later. That could wait until his business with the town guard was done. The gates to the garrison were before him, and he was closing on them fast.

He let his war hammer knock for him. Boom, boom, splinter, crash. The gates flew wide. Guards wheeled around. Swords were drawn. But Balur was already upon them. His hammer descended. A skull cracked. A man fell.

“Kerunch,” Balur muttered to himself.

A guard ducked inside the circle of Balur's hammer head. He had a short sword drawn. Three scars made horizontal bars across his face. He thrust the point of his blade at Balur's ribs. Balur shifted his grip, brought the hammer's head up, the handle down. His hammer's hilt smashed into the guard's nose. The man careened back, collided with one of his fellows. They went down in a tangle of limbs. Balur's hammer chased them down.

“Twofer,” Balur said to the bloody mess at his feet.

Three guards circled nervously. Behind them, the rest of the garrison's numbers were thin. Reinforcements hung back, nervous about rioters finding other points of egress. Balur feinted one way. The guards fell back, nervous glances jumping between them like fleas. He swung experimentally with his hammer. Two guards fell back again, but one darted forward. Balur let go of his hammer with one hand and slammed his fist out, caught the guard around the neck. He hoisted the man aloft, hurled him at his fellows. Their retreat turned into a stumble. He showed them no mercy.

That was when the first arrow struck him.

It caught him in the shoulder, arcing in from the left. The point did not skitter off his scales, instead finding a soft spot at the juncture of three plates of his natural mail. He stumbled under the impact. Even over the cries and screams of the rioting, he still heard Quirk's inhalation of breath.

He turned, looked for the offending archer.

Arrows fell like rain. He cursed. Three archers at least. Perhaps four, or even five. He hesitated for a second, just long enough to take stock. Just long enough for them to pull new arrows from their quivers.

“Come on!” he yelled at Quirk, then dove for cover, running on all fours like a beast. He crashed into a wall, felt it sag under his weight. Arrows smashed into its far side. Quirk came running and screaming, crashed to earth at his feet.

“Knole's holy tits!” she screamed. “I thought we were meant to be sneaking in!”

“Well, now is being a good time to begin sneaking, I am thinking.” Balur was aware of an irritated snap to his tone but didn't really care about it. “Or,” he said, possibly a little vindictively, “maybe now is being a good time for you to be losing your shit and roasting all of those bastards alive.”

Too far. A glance at her eyes told him it was too far. Not far enough to push her into rage, to push her into setting
his
arse on fire, but too deep to avoid hurt. Deep, base hurt.

“Fuck you,” was all she muttered. But she was retreating, drawing in on herself, when she needed to be aware of the world, of everything, of all the pointy metal flying toward her head.

He took stock. The wall they were being behind would hold off the arrows, but it wouldn't be stopping the archers from circling around. They had to be moving, keeping their momentum. He poked his head up above the edge of the wall, got a quick sense of the lay of the land, ducked back down to avoid the three arrows racing toward his skull.

The garrison was built on the edge of the lake. Beyond them the ground sloped down and away toward a dock. Numerous low buildings were scattered between. Barracks, armory, canteen, storage huts. He could make out a few extra boats moored up at the dock.

He risked another look, felt an arrow glance off the top of his skull, score through a scale there, but he saw what he was looking for.

The heavily armored tax boat was surrounded by its own low stockade wall, spiked wooden pillars jutting up into the air. The boat beyond rose imperiously above them, an attitude mismatched to its pitted, rusted iron sides. Its prow was slung forward like an underbite, its cabin hunched low as if afflicted by some terrible curvature of the spine. The cloth of the sales looked greasy and stained.

Balur felt a strange affinity for it. It'd been built for power, and nothing else. It had a single purpose, a single focus. It would get its job done, beautiful or no.

Now all he had to do was steal it.