Fool's Gold (3 page)

No sooner was the prayer uttered than the rock gave way beneath his hand. He stumbled forward, almost cursing, before he realized that the opening was in fact a cave entrance.
Well, that's service for you,
he thought.
Thank you, kindly.

He stepped under the lip of the cave's entrance, the relief from the rain instant. He sighed, heavily, inhaled—

—and then rather wished he hadn't.

He'd never smelled anything quite like it. If a bear lived in this cave then it had died here. After a rather violent bout of diarrhea. Possibly brought on by the excess consumption of skunks. Who had also died of excess diarrhea. Several weeks prior.

He gagged slightly, and hesitated. But then, who was he to question divine providence? And while the smell of rot might normally attract predators, this was rancid enough that even a crow might decide it had too much self-esteem to stoop to the cave's contents. And it wasn't as if the world was overabundant with options for him at this moment.

Pulling a mostly dry rag from his pocket, he covered his nose and pushed deeper. Despite the rag, the stench grew with each step. When he could take it no longer—his revulsion a physical wall he could not push past—he backed up a step toward the cave entrance and simply lay down. The rock beneath him was cold and hard, but thankfully lacking in murderous intent. He looked back toward the cave entrance, the world outside. He could just make out the forest, a dark blue smudge in a field of black. He looked away, and rolled over, searching for a more comfortable way to lie—

—and collided with something small, furry, and warm.

Will shrieked.

He had always hoped that in a situation like this he would be able to describe the sound as a bellow, but it was definitely a shriek.

Fortunately, from his ego's point of view, whatever he had collided with let out an equally shrill noise. Less fortunately, something else echoed the sound. And then something else. And then ten more voices took up the cry. And ten more. A rippling wave of tremulous, unmanly sound, rushing back through the cavern.

And then, in response, a wave of light came flooding back. Torches flaring brightly in the dark. The light reached Will just as he made it to his feet.

He looked out onto a cavern packed from wall to wall with small, green figures. Feral faces with pointed snouts and pointier ears. Little black eyes screwed tight in anger. Teeth bared.

The shadows of Breccan Woods were not safe, he reminded himself. This one particularly so it seemed, housing as it did an entire fucking horde of goblins.

Lawl above,
Will thought,
you're an absolute bastard.

The problem with adventuring, Lette reflected, was that it was a crap way to make money.

She wiped sweat from her brow. Gods-hexed mountain pass. Weren't mountains supposed to be cold and snowy? What was she doing sweating her ass off this high up?

But she knew the answer to that question, and she didn't like it. Instead she turned again to the more nebulous arena of finance. Specifically, how it intersected with her chosen career path.

Adventuring had seemed such a good idea when she'd started out. Punching monsters for a living. Receiving riches and glory in return. And there really was glory. She knew at least three people who had had songs composed about their endeavors. Four if you counted “The Ballad of Fairthroat the Man-Whore” but that one didn't end with Fairthroat in possession of all of his anatomy, so the glory thing was questionable there.

And yet, even assuming you got a song, and that then someone managed to reconcile the sweaty, bloodstained social deviant in front of them with the shining idealized figure they'd heard songs about, you were still left with the fact that any riches coming your way would be the result of a significant amount of violence and personal harm. And violence and personal harm had a way of spiraling out of control. Very far out of control. Lette refused to look back over her shoulder. Instead she concentrated on the fact that she was ready for a steadier lifestyle.

“What about a bakery?” she said out loud.

Her traveling companion looked at her for a very long time.

Balur was approximately eight feet tall, lacked any body fat whatsoever, and owned a tail. He was an Analesian, one of the lizard men from the Western deserts. His yellow eyes regarded her narrowly from a broad, elongated face. They peered out from between large brown scales, thick and knobbly like fist-size stones.

“No,” he said after a pause. His voice sounded like rocks grinding. He shook his head slowly. “No,” he said again.

The Analesians were a hard people. Lette had heard a rumor that their language had forty onomatopoeias for the noise a man's head made when it was crushed beneath your war hammer. She had never quite managed to find the right time to ask Balur if this was true.

“You just say ‘No' automatically now,” Lette objected. “You didn't even think about it.” So far Balur had rejected swordsmithing, blacksmithing, farming, horsebreaking, and exotic dancing as potential career changes. To be fair, Balur's skill set was largely limited to hitting things very hard with a hammer, but that's why the smithing ideas had been so promising. To Lette's mind he was simply being obstinate.

“Look,” she said, pointing ahead, “see that?” The crest of the mountain pass was finally approaching. Beyond it lay the Kondorra valley, vibrant and fertile. “That's a fresh start. That's a new page in the story of our lives. We can be anything we want to be once we cross that line.
Anything
.”

Balur nodded. “Yes,” he said.

Lette's face lit up. Finally progress. Finally the thick-skulled oaf—

“I am wanting to be a mercenary,” Balur finished.

Lette groaned. “Oh yes,” she said. “Because that's working out
so
well.”

The wind shifted briefly, blowing up the mountain rather than down. For a moment, the smell of smoke and carrion filled her nostrils. She groaned again.

Eyes forward. A fresh start. A new beginning.

Balur strode on. Then on the crest, the liminal point, the start of something new, he paused. He held out a thick, four-fingered hand toward Lette. “I am not having the hands for baking,” he said. “I am having no nimble fingers.”

“You could just knead the dough,” Lette suggested. Balur required a more solution-oriented outlook in her view.

Then she was on the crest of the past beside him, and the whole of her future was spread out before and below her. The Kondorra valley.

The sun was low, on this early edge of autumn. Its glare was still partly occluded by the mountain peaks around her. It sent flat shafts of light streaking across the trees that flowed down the mountainside below them. Distant, at the valley's floor, the forest broke open into fields, a patchwork of farmland that stitched its way up the valley's far slope, until rock and scree took over at the hill's summit. In this light, the slow, sluggish river Kon marking the valley's base was transformed into a line of white fire.

It was a world to itself, the valley. A microcosm. She could see castles, like children's toys, lakes, a swamp, and even something that could conceivably be a volcano. It was all small and perfect from this distance, like a picture painted into a book. Nothing spoiled by the proximity of reality.

“Look at that,” Lette said again. She pointed. “We can be anything we like down there.”

Balur shrugged. “I am liking being a mercenary.”

“What about a butcher?” Lette suggested, a momentary flash of inspiration striking her. “You could still kill things if you were a butcher. Cattle. You'd be perfect for it. A swift blow to the skull, each one.”

Balur cocked his head to one side. “Butchery is being mostly knife work,” he said.

“I do knife work,” Lette said. Her fingers flickered, and a knife appeared there, skittered away, appeared in her other hand. “You just slaughter cattle.”

Balur thought about it more. The slow gearwork of inhuman thinking. “Would the cattle be fighting back?” he asked eventually.

Lette had to take a moment for that one. “Cattle?” she asked, double checking.

Balur nodded. “Would they be being much of a challenge?” he said. “I am not wanting to go soft, being a butcher.”

Lette blinked, once, twice. The question did not go away. “Cattle is fucking cows, Balur.” Lette clarified for him. “They do not fight back. They eat grass, get their heads caved in, and then become delicious meaty snacks.”

Balur weighed this. “I am thinking I still prefer being a mercenary,” he said after a while.

Lette resisted the urge to grab Balur and shake him. Though in fairness that was mostly because she couldn't really reach his shoulders. Or shake him even if she could reach them. Instead she pulled the heavy bag of gold coins off her waist and thrust it at him. It was the only half-decent thing to come out of the disaster that lay behind them.

“Look at this, Balur,” she said. “This is anything we want it to be. New lives. Better lives.”

Balur's eyes narrowed. “Is it also being wine and whores?” he asked.

Lette shook her head. “You are a foreigner from a far-flung land. You are meant to be exotic and interesting.”

Balur shrugged. “I am being eight foot tall and am possessing odd syntax. That is being interesting.”

Lette considered whether to stab him in the crotch or the eye.

She was saved from the agony of indecision by a small, screaming figure abruptly launching itself from a hiding place behind a rock and flinging itself at her. A goblin, she realized. It flew through the air and seized the purse from her hand.

“Mine! Mine! Mine!” it screamed as it landed and tore off down the path away from them, short legs pumping furiously. “I gots it! I gots it! It's mine!”

The goblin got exactly one additional step farther before Lette's dagger caught it in the back of its neck, neatly slipping between two vertebrae and making a mess of its cerebellum. The goblin was dead before it hit the ground.

“See,” said Balur. “You are being good mercenary. You should be playing to your talents.”

“My talents have caused a lot of human misery,” Lette said, walking over to the goblin and plucking the knife from its back. The body resisted giving it up. She disliked killing goblins. They were weirdly sticky creatures. She always had to spend forever afterward cleaning bits of them off her blades.

She bent to pick up the purse—

—only to have it snatched from before her, as another goblin hurtled out of its hiding place and took off across the path.

“Barph's hairy ball sack,” she cursed. “How many of these bastards are there?”

Perhaps learning from his slowly cooling companion, this goblin did not scream. He just legged it. Unfortunately, any attempt to leg it when you are only four foot tall is significantly limited by stride length. Balur was not similarly restricted.

His war hammer descended. The goblin stopped being a small, ugly humanoid and instead became a small, ugly bloodstain.

“Gods' spit, Balur, careful of the damned purse!”

“It is being fine.” The lizard man rolled yellow eyes behind nictitating membranes.

Lette sighed heavily. She might as well berate a rock. Instead she turned her attention to their surroundings. Woods had arisen almost as soon as the pass started to descend. A thick tangle of trunks and underscrub. It smelled damp and loamy. Too many hiding places.

“I hope you spot a pattern developing!” she yelled to however many other goblins were left lurking around them. “You take the purse, you die messily.” Even goblins should be able to understand that sort of equation.

Apparently not.

A bush rustled. Then the goblin appeared, shrieking like a kettle on the boil. It grabbed the purse and hurtled off, still screaming, all flailing, gangly limbs.

Lette sighed. This one was faster than the others. Its torso was a tiny round ball suspended between long knobbly legs and arms. Still, it was not faster than her dagger. The blade appeared again in her palm. She took aim.

And then goblins fell like rain.

They were in the trees. Ten, twenty, maybe more of them. All screaming. All leaping. All armed with jagged rusting knives.

Lette loosed her dagger. It never made it to the one with her purse. Instead it caught a goblin in the neck as it leapt into the blade's path. The screaming creature was pinned to a tree, went still.

“Gods' spit on all of them.”

Then her sword was out. She cut the legs out from beneath another goblin even as it tried to land on hers.

Balur's war hammer whirled. Bodies impacted against its broad head fast enough that the sounds blurred together. Lette leapt into the space he'd opened.

A goblin lunged at her. She turned the blade, slit its throat, but another had circled behind her, lunged for her hamstrings. Balur brought down his war hammer in a hard vertical arc. A goblin disappeared beneath its head. Lette wondered if the Analesians would describe the sound as more of a squish or a splat.

She caught sight of the goblin running off with her purse. It was twenty yards away now, the distance increasing rapidly. An ugly little head bobbed about on its undersize body. Not a large target. Another dagger appeared in her hand. She breathed slow. Cocked her arm.

Something hard and sharp impacted against the spiked pauldron protecting her right shoulder. Her arm jerked sideways. The knife flew wide. Cursing, she whipped round. Her sword blade buried itself in a goblin's neck. Blood sprayed, it kicked, died.

Lette tried to yank the sword free. It did not come. She shook the blade. The goblin flopped and spasmed but refused to come loose. He was a corpse puppet on the end of a single, very sharp string. She cursed again. Why in all of the Hallows were goblins always so damn sticky?

Two goblins, sensing her slowness with the overburdened blade, circled to either side of her, closed in.

Her sword shook. The corpse flopped. She cursed.

Then at the same moment, the goblins leapt. They struck identical poses: great bounding arcs, knives clutched in both hands behind their heads.

Lette wondered where they learned the move. It had to have been learned. The symmetry was too perfect. Did goblins run combat drills? If so, they shouldn't. The move told her everything that was about to happen. It took half the fun out of combat.

She pivoted on one heel, brought the other up and round in a short sharp circle. She caught one of the goblins in its midriff as it flew through the air. Its ribs cracked, the angle of its flight changing, becoming shorter and more terminal. It slammed into a nearby tree. The contents of its skull became a red smear.

Lette had already moved on, using the momentum of her kick to whip her goblin-encased sword around. The second goblin slammed into its dead compatriot, sheathed the protruding sword tip in its gut. It screamed, jerked, and remained firmly lodged on the blade.

“Oh gods' piss on it!” The sword, now effectively a club made of small dying creatures, was too heavy to be practical. Four more goblins were closing fast.

Balur's hammer descended, one, two, three times. This time it was definitely more of a “squelch” sound, Lette thought. Balur caught the fourth goblin around the neck with his free hand. He held it aloft. It kicked futilely at the air.

Lette looked around. The goblin with the purse was gone. She was surrounded by dead and dying bodies. She looked up, to the Pantheon Above. What had she done to piss them off? She said her prayers, paid her dues at temples. What sort of divine comedy had they devised for her?
Assholes, all of them.

She turned on the dangling goblin, another of her daggers in her hand. The blade was short and bright, catching the sun as she advanced. The goblin was momentarily distracted from Balur's fist on its neck.

“You,” she said, pointing at the spasming creature. “You are going to literally spill your guts. And as you do, you are going to tell me everything. Where in the Hallows is my purse?”

“Thrasher,” the goblin gasped. “Thrasher took it. Ran with it.” The goblin was a potbellied thing. Its skin the same dirty greenish brown she associated with the gastrointestinal aftermath of one of Balur's Analesian curries. Its eyes were large, round, and dark. Although there was the chance that Balur's squeezing was altering their natural shape.

“I don't need his god's-hexed name.” Lette advanced with the dagger. “I need his location.”