Fool's Gold (33 page)

Eventually, after what Balur referred to as “some light encouragement,” Firkin got up in front of the crowd and announced that the prophet “in his wisdom of prodigious length and most satisfying girth” had decreed that they “abandon the sight of this most holy battle and sally forth, questing for fresh combat.”

It was a little off script, and Lette had to spend five minutes restraining Balur from killing the filthy old man. They were moving, she told him, and that was enough for her.

Still, as she stood upon one of the remaining garrison walls to oversee the exodus, Lette couldn't help but feel that it was all too little, too late.

There were just so many of them. It was a crowd that no longer numbered in the hundreds but in the thousands. Every single man, woman, or child who had fallen in Athril seemed to have been replaced by at least ten newcomers. People had uprooted their entire lives. Herds of cattle, sheep, and goats all followed the crowd out of the town. People sat upon wagons loaded with chickens, turkeys, and other poultry that Lette would only have been able to discern by taste. Minstrels wandered, singing songs of the prophet, of his great feats, and of the dragons he had struck low. Soothsayers stood, causing eddies in the crowd, as they cast stones and predicted the downfall of the Consortium. Priests for all the various gods were scattered about, laying claim to the prophet. That Lawl had inspired him, or Toil, or that he was the herald of Barph's long-awaited return. Fistfights broke out between religious factions. They'd even picked up more than one string of whores, and there was one woman with a cart loaded with work shirts onto which she had crudely stitched the word “Profit.” From the looks of things, the one she was making was considerable.

The thing was, it was all so infectious. There was an air of revolution in the air. Watching them all, it would have been simple to buy into their hope, to relax and let confidence wash through her.

How many spies are already in the ranks?
the cold voice in the back of her head asked.
How many will sell you out as soon as the Consortium adds another zero to your Wanted poster? How many zeroes will they have to add before
you
sell Will out yourself? You're penniless now. All the gold is gone. There is no new life anymore. If you're the first to bail, there's a greater chance you'll survive.

She shook her head. There was no way she was surviving this.

And if that was true… What was there truly to consider? Simply how to spend the time remaining to her. What sort of legacy would she leave behind? How would she be remembered? Who would look back on her memory fondly?

Balur? Will? Maybe—but only for the seven or eight seconds before they joined her in the swirling guts of whatever dragon had consumed them all.

So if no one would remember, what then? She knew what Balur would say. It was carte blanche. Life without consequences. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted, as they wanted. There need be no fear of the consequences. They were already as dire as they could be.

What about the gods?

Fuck the gods,
came back Balur's voice.
If they are getting their heads out of their cups for longer than a second it's only so they can be burying them in the lap of the nearest partner. This is being a world that was being created by horrible degenerates.

All of which was true enough. But there was another voice too. One it took her longer to identify. And when she did, she wondered how it had got there.

Well, maybe no one will remember you for what you've done so far,
said Will's voice,
but what if you did something memorable before the end?

How had he managed to get so deep beneath her skin? He and she hadn't even…

She considered that. Maybe
that
was the real problem. And well… If one had limited time, there were worse ways to spend it…

At first, Will thought he was under attack. He tried to scream for help, was smothered. His limbs were pinned. His assailant was everywhere.

By the time he finally figured out what Lette was doing, he was reduced to just hanging on for dear life.

Deep inside the Hallows' Mouth volcano, the dragon Kithrax drew in his breath and snorted out a perfect smoke ring. It drifted away, perfectly symmetrical, glistening almost silver in the light.

He blew the ring for several reasons. Partly because he was very good at it, and he enjoyed the simple narcissistic pleasure of watching it float away. Partly because he was bored out of his considerable mind and at this point pretty much anything was a welcome distraction. But mostly, he did it because it really pissed Horrax off.

Horrax. That dirty, fetid, shit stain of a dragon. He squatted opposite Kithrax, brown plump body looking like something a swamp hawked up in revulsion. He scratched idly at himself with a long yellow claw, then stuck the tip in his broad flat jaw and slurped away.

“I think,” Horrax burbled, his voice such a wretched croak that at first Kithrax was convinced he was belching, “that I don't give a shit.”

Kithrax blew another smoke ring at him. It was a way to signify his rage, but he very much doubted that Horrax had the mental capacity to pick up on such a nuance. Of course, he could announce his rage in a more obvious way, something that even Horrax would understand—clawing out his throat, for example—but he simply refused to expend that much energy on something as worthless as the brown dragon.

“You don't care?
You don't care?
” Quirrax was working herself into a lather again. Lithe and green, Quirrax pawed at the ground with one forepaw and polished one of her golden horns with the other.

“Don't give a
shit
.” Even enunciating clearly, Horrax sounded like he was soiling himself.

Kithrax hated these meetings of the Dragon Consortium.

“The people of the valley are rising up against us and you don't care?” Quirrax spun on about, scattering golden coins in great flurries all around them. She scratched at the air. “This whole endeavor has been a disaster from beginning to end and now this. This! And you sit there and you don't care!”

Fire shrieked out of her mouth at the last, boiling to blue with the heat of her exasperation.

“Don't give a shit,” Horrax burbled again.

“Horrax has a point,” Bruthrax cut in. “This is simple. We crush them.”

Kithrax could appreciate Bruthrax. The massive red dragon was a blunt instrument. He was the hammer that saw every problem as a nail. He knew it. He didn't care. But if he was told to wait then he would bide his time. He acknowledged Kithrax's superiority without question.

“We fly out there, like we should have done a week ago,” Bruthrax went on, “and we devour them whole. And then we drop their rotting remains on anyone who thinks to try it again. We send a message.”

“Mmmm,” Horrax burbled in agreement. “You tasted good.” The sound of his laughter brought bile to the back of Kithrax's throat.

“And what about their taxes?” asked Quirrax. “What about their gold? What about our income streams? That's ten thousand people no longer lining our coffers.”

“Humans breed,” Horrax burbled, licking his lips lasciviously.

Kithrax blew another smoke ring directly at him.

“And you would do what, Quirrax?” Scourrax raised her sinuous yellow head from where it was resting on Kithrax's jet-black flank. She slithered forward. “You would talk them out of their madness?” She made a scoffing sound. “You would stand before them, and bend your head down to them, and plead oh so nicely that they understand you? That they see things from your point of view?”

Fire shot from Quirrax's mouth, shooting harmlessly over their heads. Scourrax laughed and the others joined in.

Kithrax permitted himself a momentary smile. Ever the voice of reason was Scourrax. Right up until her patience ran short and she clawed out your eyes. He felt his loins stir, and immediately the smile vanished. This fucking prophet forcing this absurd meeting of the Consortium. He'd been trying to wean the other dragons off this need to meet. He thought he had at least another year before he had to watch Horrax… exist in front of him.

The audacity of these people. These humans. To defy the Consortium. To defy
him
. He had come to this valley and blessed it with order. He had put humans in their rightful place, had shown them that they were nothing more than educated cattle. They should be grateful to have the responsibility of leadership—something they never had the capacity to truly deal with—lifted from their shoulders. And now they rose up, and shook their fists like angry children.

“This talking is wasting fucking time,” Bruthrax said. He shifted his weight on a pile of coins, gold reflecting against his red scales. “We go there and we raze them to the ground. We leave ash and bone. We make a grave that no one will ever forget. We make a desolation of their hopes, their dreams.”

“Don't need all of us to do that,” Horrax burbled, and then yawned massively at them all, as he lay down his fat head. Kithrax could never work out why he had been sent to the valley with the rest of them.

“We are here to rule,” Quirrax said tremulously. “We need people to rule. If we kill them all—”

“Shut up!” Kithrax roared. He could take it no longer. Curse them all for making him stir to life. He rose up, shaking Scourrax off his flanks once more, towering over them. “This pathetic bickering.”

He spat flame. It landed at Quirrax's feet, turned coins to golden slag. She shied back, hissing.

“We are here to rule. To show the viability of our rulership. And this act of defiance sets you to whimpering like children? You are unfit to rule.” He looked specifically at Horrax while he said this.

Burthrax was smiling. “So we—” he started.

“No,” Kithrax snapped. “
We
do nothing. This prophet, these people—they are beneath us. They are nothing to us. They are not worthy of our attention.”

“You just—” Quirrax started.

“Shut up,” Scourrax snapped at her, preening slightly, the way she always did when he took charge.

“The human rebels must die,” Kithrax went on. “But we will not sully ourselves with their deaths. We will not stoop to such things.
We are the Dragon Consortium
.” He ran his claws through the coins that sat all around them. “We have resources beyond their imagining.”

He lowered his head, looked at them each and every one. “We send an army and”—he permitted himself a savage smile—“we make the humans kill each other.”

Several days after their departure from Athril, Will found himself sitting down on a soft grassy slope, surrounded by a crowd of his own worshippers, watching Firkin preach.

“We stand upon the precipice!” the old man shrieked. “The edge! The lip—if it were a cup. That bit of the cliff your mother was always on about you not stepping upon, even though she did concede it would be one less mouth to feed, and if she'd known how much corn children consumed, she would have kept her legs together more often when she was younger.”

They had found a natural bowl in the landscape to make their camp in that night. A small rocky escarpment made a semicircle describing half the bowl. On the other side, the land sloped down to its base. A natural amphitheater. Alcohol may have robbed Firkin of many of the important parts of his mind, but it hadn't robbed him of his sense of drama. He stood on a barrel, letting his shrill voice bounce off the rock wall to the gathered masses. There must have been two or three thousand of them, sitting there listening, rapt.

“We stand and we stare at the future. We see it eyeballing us from across the room. And at first we are not sure if it wants to fuck us or fight us. And maybe we are scared. That little rumble in our guts that makes us squeeze our cheeks tightly and worry just a little about how we shall be explaining the state of our britches to our wives later. Or maybe we are a little bit excited and we want to give it a wink or two. But then there is a cursed missus again, and we have explaining to do again. Gods piss on it!”

The crowd murmured. As it didn't sound like a collective “What in the name of the gods is he talking about, and what are we doing here?” Will honestly couldn't think what they were saying.

“But what if the future is not unknown?” Firkin went on. “What if it is not some bloody dripping dragon's maw, our balls caught in the vise of its teeth? What if the future is the prophet, and our balls are cupped softly and protectively?”

Will shook his head. They had left Athril three days ago now, and every day the crowds had grown. Lette estimated their number was between five or six thousand by this point. She said that at the current rate of growth they'd be ten thousand in a day or two.

That was when she was talking, at any rate. But she didn't seem that interested in doing that with him these days.

Not that he was complaining.

A smile crept across his lips.

“The prophet caresses our future. He massages it gently. He treats it with the love and respect it deserves. He does that-thing-that-girl-from-the-edge-of-town-did-that-one-time to it.”

Will had started coming down to watch Firkin preach the night after they left the scene of Dathrax's death. Lette had been lying, snoring in his makeshift tent, and he had been staring up at the stained canvas, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to lead these people to anything but imminent death. And then he'd heard Firkin's preaching, and thought that maybe instead of figuring out what he should do for himself, he should just go and listen, find out, and then report back.

“Bathed in dragon's blood and dragon's gold, the prophet comes!” Firkin shrieked. “Smoking from their fire that does not touch him. And we welcome him into our lives, and he is considerate enough to bathe and change his clothes before he comes in!”

The trouble was, Will reflected, that Firkin's sermons were remarkably low on detail. There was no path to the future he described. It just happened, springing out of Firkin's mouth fully formed, with none of the intervening messy middle parts. Still, it was comforting to hear about a future where he succeeded, where whatever he did, he pulled off. And so he kept coming back, night after night. No one seemed to recognize him in the gloom. It was peaceful, meditative.

Still, it was getting on to be time to leave. No one had recognized him yet, but he made sure he left before the main assembly. He didn't want cries of “the prophet!” to lead to him being trampled to death by his own congregation.

So head down, he stood and slipped away. No one called out. No one hailed the divinely chosen man who walked among them. Well, all except for a middle-aged woman in a floral pattern dress who hissed at him to stop blocking her view.

When he was younger, his ma had told him stories of kings and sultans who would go out into their cities in disguise, to walk among their people. Typically, they would get themselves into trouble, learn great wisdom from simple people, reveal themselves to the great wonderment of all, and then return to be even more fabulous kings or sultans. In Will's experience, anonymity was pretty much identical to every other day of his life: He wandered around, felt slightly bored and impotent, learned no great wisdom, and returned to his tent the same useless arsehole he had been when he left it.

And yet, as he returned to his tent, he found he was still smiling.

The tents might be one of the best things that had happened to him since he'd lost his farm. A merchant had given them to him, bowing, and murmured a request that he “place them into the holy hands of the prophet,” which he still found amusing. There were three of them, vast and palatial. They were pitched at the center of the camp. Little flags blew from canvas crenellations around the rim: red on Balur's tent, green on Quirk's, and purple on the one he shared with Lette.

It was that last fact that truly had him smiling. In fact, if he was left alone with anyone for longer than ten seconds he liked to tell them that he shared his tent with Lette. Regardless of how many times he had told them before.

For her part, Lette seemed to be dealing with the encroaching disaster better than he was. Not that she talked about it much, but he assumed she was because most of her time was spent either using him for his body or sleeping.

Will cracked his knuckles, and kept on smiling.

A shape wrapped in white detached itself from the shadowy shape of the tent. From the dark skin he could tell it wasn't Lette. His smile faltered.

“I've been waiting for you,” said Quirk. “Where were you?”

“Sorry,” said Will. He didn't feel it, but he wanted to explain about Firkin's speeches even less. “If I'd known you wanted to talk then I'd have stayed here.”

“I didn't know,” said Quirk. She didn't snap, but she came as close as she could to the precipice of doing so without falling over. “But at least I was here to receive the news when it came in.”

“What news?” Will felt like this conversation was taking place out of order.

The flap of his tent pulled back, to reveal Lette, backlit by candles, wrapped only in a bedsheet. She rubbed at her eyes sleepily. “News?” she said, stifling a yawn.

“The news I was too busy not knowing about to stay here and receive,” said Will, a little testily. His peaceful mood was evaporating.

“Is it about the looting?” Lette said, rolling her neck from side to side, releasing a cascading roll of pops and clicks. “Because I think we established we don't give a shit.”

“The looting is an important issue,” Quirk snapped. “We have enough problems, without people who profess to worship Will looting actual gods' temples. Surviving is hard enough as it is without us prompting some deity to come down here and fling thunderbolts at us all.”

Will shook his head. This again. “I still don't understand why people keep taking the roofs off temples. It makes no sense.”

Quirk smacked her forehead in frustration. “How many times do I have to tell you? It's the gods-hexed lead.”

“Surely it's not gods-hexed if it's from a temple,” said Lette. Apparently she never grew tired of baiting Quirk.

Will held out a hand, trying to quiet her.
Because that's bound to work,
he thought. “Lead,” he tried to explain to Quirk, “isn't an explanation.”

“It's a soft metal.”

“You're a soft metal.” That, he knew for a fact, was childish. But how many times would they talk about this?

“A soft metal is one they can work on the road. We need so many things. Bowls, spoons, knives. You can fix pottery with it. It's something they can use on the road.”

“So let them take it!” Will said for the umpteenth time.

“The wrath of the gods,” Quirk snapped back.

“Be fucking the gods.”

They had woken Balur, it seemed.

The lizard man stumbled out of his tent. They all took a moment to take in the sight of him. Someone had started the rumor that small donations of gold and jewelry could curry favor with the prophet. Balur—probably the source of the rumors—had immediately set himself up as the person to whom all such donations should be given. Which went partway to explain the purple robe draped over his shoulders, the reams of necklaces around his neck, the bangles and baubles at each of his wrists, and the seven tiaras perched upon his broad, flat head. He looked like a cross between a king, a whoremonger, and a dragon's midden heap.

“The gods have been fucking with us, and been showing us no favors,” he said. “Why should we be showing any to them?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Quirk said with a shrug, “perhaps because of the
vast
power differential?”

“Two dragons are being down,” Balur said with a cocky grin. “And I am still standing.”

“One was unconscious while you bludgeoned it to death,” Quirk pointed out. “The other was eaten by mutant fish, and you only survived because Will saved you.”

Balur didn't actually redden—his scales were too thick for that—but there was a definite stiffening to his posture and a glare of outrage that seemed to suggest reddening would go on if it could.

“I will be looting some lead, and will be cramming it up your arse,” Balur spat back.

“Look,” said Will, throwing up his hands. “We've had this conversation thirty times so far, and every time we just insult each other, posture, and then realize that even if we did want to do something we couldn't because we're outnumbered almost a thousand to one. So,” he concluded, turning to Quirk, “if it's all the same to you, I'm going to go to bed.”

He stepped toward Lette's welcoming smile.

“Wait,” said Quirk with disappointing insistence. “That isn't the news.”

“It's not?” said Will, hoping he'd heard wrong.

“No,” said Quirk, from three feet away, and very clear indeed. “It's not.”

“Then why are we arguing about it?” Balur asked, not unreasonably.

“Because your
partner
—” Quirk said, acid on her tongue.

Will held up his hands. “Can't we just pretend we all argued for five more minutes and feel shitty about ourselves so we can skip to the bit where Quirk gives us the actual news?”

After much surreptitious glancing, the other three finally nodded. Will sighed.

“Quirk,” he said, “please, what is your news?”

She pushed both hands through her close-cropped curls. “So,” she said, “the Dragon Consortium is pulling together an army to destroy us.”

She delivered it like a tired waitress would deliver a mug of stout to a man who had ordered the same thing a thousand times before. Her tone was so flat it took a moment for the size of the news to sink into Will. And then he realized the news was so large that only the tip of it had soaked into him. The rest of it was still poised above his head, waiting to drown him completely.

“A fucking army?” He tried to double take but the moment had passed. He resorted to staring wildly around as if somehow the army would appear from nowhere, stand there, and let him gawp incredulously at it. “An actual army?”

For him? The Dragon Consortium was raising an army for him?
In a truly messed-up way, that was almost flattering.

“They're dragons,” Lette said. She was holding up her bedsheet with both hands now. Clearly she had not dressed for such a protracted discussion. “They're massive, fire-breathing lizards that could obliterate us as soon as look at us. Why in the name of the gods do they need an army?”

And then it hit Will.

“We've killed two of them,” he said quietly. “
They're scared of us
.”

“Yeah,” said Quirk. “That's great. You've scared them so much that now they won't be satisfied by just killing us, but only by raising an army to kill everyone whoever came within a one-mile radius of us all. That's brilliant. Very good job.” She spat onto the ground.

“How many dragons are there being left on the council?” Balur asked, staring off into the night. “I am always meaning to be asking that and I am never getting around to it.”

“Is now really the time?” said Quirk, at the same moment as Will said, “Five.”

Balur gave his iron clock hand an assessing look. “Their time has come…?” he said, tentatively.

“I will fucking gut you right here and right now,” Lette told him.

Balur shrugged. “That is being fair.”

Quirk grabbed her forehead. “Why in Knole's holy name did I even bother telling you? What did I expect? Why would an army marching down upon us be in any way galvanizing? Let's just sit around scratching our crotches for another few days. The imminent death of everyone here shouldn't be any cause for concern!” She spat again.

Will liked Quirk. She was smart and had a good moral compass that he could grab hold of at times when Balur and Lette were ganging up on him. But he had had enough of her right now. “Did you ever consider for a moment that the imminent death of everybody here might be what is causing some of the paralysis?” he barked. “That a little added pressure might not be exactly what is needed?”

Quirk actually hesitated there. Apparently she had not considered that.

“Look,” Will said to Quirk, “you want a plan, we stick to the one we've got. We keep running away. They're a big army, we're a small group. We can move faster and we're more agile than they are. We can outrun them indefinitely.”