Fool's Gold (40 page)

If you had asked Lette the day before what she might change about Will, and if she could change just one thing, she would have been tempted to reply that it was his professionalism. There might have been a few more base, physical improvements to contend with, but professionalism would have definitely been in the mix. He was too easily swayed by his emotions. He had not found the calm, quiet place it was necessary to visit when circumstances called for hard decisions and clear thought. She would have wished for him to have a still place to visit, an inner core of peace to lend him strength in what was to come.

Today she would like to rip Will's inner core right out and use it to beat him to death.

Quirk had been arrested and was now—mostly likely—being merrily tortured to death, while giving up every intimate detail about them and their plan. Their descriptions would be disseminated quietly and efficiently throughout the army, and just before the battle broke out, they would be seized, and stripped, and then their flayed corpses would be displayed for everyone to see.

There was, of course, the chance of escape, but even if that happened, how far would they truly get? Without Quirk to rile them up any further, the Consortium troops were back to looking for just the sort of distraction two renegade soldiers would provide. Their concerns about pay had ebbed to a belligerent murmur. Lette had tried to kindle the flames with a few more incendiary dice games, but all she had to tell them was yesterday's news.

Now she and Will were no better off than they had been a few days ago. In fact they were worse off, because all the opportunities to survive, to truly get away, had fled with them.

They should have sent Firkin and his followers off to Hallows' Mouth as a sacrificial tribute while the rest of them headed for the coast. They should have stuck with enlisting in the Consortium army, and lived out their days as well-paid soldiers. But instead they had run headlong into this dead end. It was inescapable.

And did any of this bother Will? Did any of it seem to put a single concern in his head? Did his guts quiver, his bowels loosen, and his food rebel in his stomach?

No. Not for a single fucking second. He just sat there with mooncalf eyes, waiting for the world to come crashing down on them.

“We should leave,” she told him. “Just leave now. Get as much of a head start as we can. Forget the gold. It'll just slow us down and we'll never have a chance to spend it anyway. If we're lucky—stupidly, insanely lucky—we might make it to the coast, and we can sign up for some navy, and die of scurvy on an ocean somewhere. At least that'll give us a few more months.”

He patted her on the shoulder. “Have a little faith. Please.”

“Faith?” If she ground her teeth any harder she was going to be left with blunt stumps in her mouth. “You're going to pull the religious leader now? You know where I'm going to shove your fucking faith?”

He put his arms around her. “Don't worry,” he said. “The plan is going to work.”

“Was it working when Quirk was carried away?”

They were still at the back of the Consortium camp, the stretch of dirty grass between the black pay wagons and Quirk's brightly colored ones. The angry mob of soldiers was reduced to a few belligerent souls, probably more interested in being in the army's rear ranks than they were in ensuring fair pay for all their fellows.

“Balur will make his feint soon. Quirk will find a way out. Everything will work.”

Perhaps, she thought, it was a coping mechanism. A way of dealing with the stress. Absurd blind faith was the only way he could keep putting one foot in front of the other. He couldn't face the dream crumbling around him, couldn't take the tastes of the ashes in his mouth.

She put his head in both her hands, pulled him gently toward her, until their faces were level. “We
have
to go, Will,” she whispered, trying to drive the words into his head, so that he would see the truth. See reality. “We
have
to leave.”

“Trust—” he started.

She head-butted him. Hard.

“Ow!” he yelled, as he fell down hard. “Fuck!” He grabbed his nose. Blood streamed down his chin. “Has Barph got your brains? What the fuck did you do that for?”

He clambered to his feet, blood still flowing from his nose.

“Are you fucking listening to me, Willett Fallows?” she asked him. “Because I am saying this only once more. I am fucking going. I am escaping this rattrap of a future. And I am running out of fucks to give about whether you accompany me or not. So either start moving your arse toward the horizon, or I shall leave you here to burn along with the rest of your Barph-addled dreams.”

“No.” Will shook his head. Blood flew from his injured nose. “Lette, please. Just a little more time. You'll see.”

“You're fucking mad,” she told him. And she turned away. It hurt. It hurt more than she expected it to, and she could see in her mind's eye the wounded, pleading expression he would be wearing at this exact moment. But she did not turn back to him. She just took a step away. And the step hurt too, but she kept on moving.

The roar, though—that stopped her dead in her tracks.

At first she thought it was the dragons, finally roused from their nest in Hallows' Mouth, coming down to see to them personally. She could see them clearly in her mind's eye as well, rising from the crater, the greatest force of destruction that volcano could ever spew, arcing down, wings spread, lungs full of fire…

But then it came again, and it was a sound she knew, a sound she was intimate with, that could lull her to sleep in times of trouble. It was the sound of men mobilizing for war.

Men yelled, trumpets blared, feet drummed against the ground, armor shook, weapons rattled, dogs barked, griffins cawed, trolls roared, captains called for order, and none came.

Someone put a hand on her shoulder and she spun, knife already in her hand, pressing it to the jugular.

Step back to avoid the spray. Don't be blinded.

But it was Will. Just Will.

“Balur,” he said.

But she looked at the chaos, and the way the whole of the camp pulsed with sudden energy, the way it surged, like a hound that has finally torn through its leash. “No,” she said. “This isn't a feint. This is more.”

She fought the knowledge for a moment, but in the end she knew Balur. He wouldn't… simply couldn't just feint.

Will saw it on her face, and before she could stop him he was taking off through the camp, running toward the front line.

“No!” she tried to call, but her shout was lost in all the other shouts of soldiers readying for war.

“The pay wagons,” she muttered to herself. “The fucking pay wagons.” For now was the time to strike, to steal, and to run, and to hide, and to maybe have a celebratory quickie in a copse of trees for at least getting that far before the inevitable capture, torture, and death.

She could run at that moment, she thought. She could just turn tail and run for herself, try to save her skin.

But was that who she was anymore? That was certainly the woman she had been when she entered the Kondorra valley. A survivor. Self-interested, perhaps. Uncaring, perhaps. Vicious, definitely. But a survivor.

Hadn't she wanted to leave that woman behind, though? Hadn't she wanted to be a better person? Someone who didn't just survive, but lived?

She hesitated. Then, suddenly she was running after Will, pushing through bustling men and women. A sergeant yelled at her to stop. She almost forgot herself and planted a dagger in his skull. The blade was in her palm, then she remembered how she hadn't been killing people here, because that was the definition of suicide. So she ran on, ignoring his increasingly angry yells. Will had a good fifty yards on her. Had his head down, was barreling forward.

“The prophet!” people yelled all around her. “The prophet is coming! The mad bastard is attacking.”

Mad bastard?
Yes, that seemed appropriate.

I could probably catch Will with a dagger in his calf, even at this distance, at this pace. Probably. Bring him down, drag him away. People would think the kicking and screaming was the injury.

Griffins were taking to the air, screaming. Their riders yelled to each other, bronze spears gripped tight. The trolls were bellowing, beating on their war drums, a solid bass line of anger and rage starting to build under the chaos of the camp. Starting to give it direction. More and more soldiers were running to the front. She was losing Will in the crowd.

She pressed closer, faster, closed the distance. She could outrun some gods-hexed farm boy. The blade still in her hand called out to her to be thrown. Just enough to spin him around, slow him down. A flesh wound.

Just a little closer. Just to be sure.

And then suddenly Will ground to a halt. Her hand was cocked but she never threw. She stumbled up to him, panting hard. And there was no more crowd. She and Will stood at the front of the camp. Squares of women and men were forming to their left and right, but the plain ahead of them was utterly empty.

And across the field, they saw Balur and his army march to war.

The sound of war filled Balur's vision. The sound of
his
army.
His
to command. Their adoration had grown with each pass of the fake dragon skull. Their ardor for
his
words. He was their prophet now.

A feint. To stall and to feint. That was what Will had asked him in that tent, that night. And he had stalled. He had burned with frustration. Until Will was nothing but a distant memory to these people.

And now he unleashed his rage.

Lette pulled desperately at Will's shoulder.

“We have to go,” she implored him. “Now.”

He pulled away from her, stared. “They're really marching,” he said. “All of them. Against the dragons. They really believe they can win.”

“Yes,” Lette agreed. “And they're fucking idiots. Can we go now?”

He turned to her. Finally. And his eyes were shining.

“We made that,” he said. “We made that belief. We made all of that hope.”

“Yes,” she said again. “We deceived a whole shitload of people and now their deaths will be on our consciences for the next seven or eight minutes before we die ourselves. Now let's get the fuck out of here so we can let that reality sink in for a bit. Oh, and yes, steal the fucking gold, as that's the one tattered remnant of this plan that is still standing.”

She seized his wrist, pulled him. He came stumbling, a man in a daze. And yes, she supposed, there was some glory to it all. A crushed people, rising up, rediscovering their will, refusing to take the oppression anymore. Even if it was a futile gesture, there was a certain grace to it. But honestly, she would much rather wait until the threat of death was just a little less imminent before she sat back and appreciated it.

The going was harder this time. They were fighting the tide of the crowd. Soldiers yelled at them to get out of the way. Someone called out, “Deserter!” She threw her dagger that time, and he ate the blade. There was no time to retrieve it. She would miss that dagger. She had won it in a knife-throwing contest in Batarra against a drunken minotaur. Oh well.

The troll's war drums picked up tempo. The lighter snare of human drummer boys picked up the beat, sent battalions out into flanking maneuvers. The griffins formed up in the sky, wings beating the air hard. The numbers were absurd. The Consortium's army would swallow the prophet's. It was going to be a massacre. The sergeants and lieutenants were shouting out the orders to form up with relish.

Above them, Hallows' Mouth boomed and roared. Black smoke obliterated the burgeoning night. No stars would shine down on this slaughter.

Then they were at the rear of the camp. She pitched left, course-correcting toward Quirk's colorful wagons. Beyond those, the guards had pulled the pay wagons farther back, the black-painted walls receding into the darkness. The soldiers who had been guarding them were gone, called away to war.

Because all concerns about gold, about lead, about bankrupt dragons… all that was gone now. All this army cared about was the slaughter to come. Will's plan had been a nice dream, a good last-ditch attempt, but they had failed.

She crossed the final fifty yards to the pay wagons at a flat sprint. Her legs ached, lungs burned. There was nothing left to do now. Just run, and run until they could run no more, and pray that was enough.

Quirk had been right, they should have left the lead on the temple roofs. They needed all the divine luck they could get.

That thought almost made her laugh, as she leapt into the seat, flicked the reins at the still-tethered horses. Behind her, she heard Will scrambling up into the second wagon.
This at least,
she thought,
is some good honest thievery. No deception. No deceit. Simply taking what I want and then fleeing into the night.

Quirk just wished the trembling would subside. She was alive, wasn't she? She was not stuck between any creature's teeth. They were listening.

“Will,” she said, the quaver evident in just that single syllable. “That's his name. The prophet's Willett Fallows. From the north of the valley.” She looked from massive leering head to massive leering head. “That's what you want to know about, right? Who he is? How he did this?”

The black dragon—sinuous, beautiful, deadly—lowered its enormous head until she was eye-to-eye with it. She could drown in those eyes, she knew. Their gold was the only wealth she desired.

“You will tell us everything, little spy,” it said. The force of the words blew her back. She staggered under their impact. “You will give up everyone and everything. And then as we devour you, you will thank us.”

She dropped to her knees. She felt bruised from the impact of his breath.

And yet there was so much majesty in him. So much she wanted to study. If only she could measure, observe, so much more.

But they were not creatures of patience, she knew.

“He's not a prophet,” she said. “That's just bullshit. Some lie that was told, and took hold, and became… well, not useful, really. But the people wanted it to be true. I don't think he ever did. Will that is. But others did. There's this man, Firkin, you see.”

She was gabbling, she realized, but she could hardly think straight. Not here and now. There was too much fear. Too much excitement.
To be this close to them
. It was madness. It was divine.

“But it's a lie he used in the end. Will did. To come here. To try to kill you. That's what he really wants. He hates you, you see. He thinks you're just… well, he calls you fat, lazy lizards. That's what he tells people. That you just lie around getting fat on the backs of other people's work, that you're like a plague. He has nothing but hatred for you. I think, if you peel back everything else that he is, that's what remains. That hatred.”

Her words, she could see, were having a poor effect on the dragons. The black's lips were peeling back from its teeth.

A completely different jaw structure from the other two,
one part of her mind said.
Though the teeth look the same. Could it be some subspecies? The result of interbreeding? Or just a natural variation?

A different part of her mind just said,
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

The red dragon leaned down, snuffed at her. Even kneeling she was almost bowled over.

“Pathetic,” it said.

“Yes.” Quirk nodded. “That's exactly what he says about you.”

The dragon roared.

And roared.

And roared.

The world around Quirk became a liquid oozing thing, running out of focus into a messy slop in the back of her quivering mind. It took a while for it to stop. Her nose was bleeding, she realized. There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears.

“He insults us,” said the black. Every word made Quirk's skull ring with pain.

“Yes.” She nodded, wished she hadn't. “The whole fat, lazy, ugly, diseased, diminutive genitalia thing—”

“Enough!” bellowed the dragon.

Quirk clutched her head and fought the urge to vomit.

“We do not need to know his history,” hissed the squat brown dragon. Mercifully, its voice was quieter than the other's. “We do not need to hear his crimes. We do not need to know his plans. We need nothing but one thing. So you will tell us where he is if you have any desire to see the sun again.”

Quirk nodded desperately. Fear held her as strongly as their claws. It was ice, stifling her fire. She looked up, toward the distant crater, the distant sky, toward the false promise of escape. She would love to see the stars one last time. But there was only smoke, leaving everything gray and obscure.

And then, drifting down from that distant window on the world, filtering in between the ringing in her ears, and the hot huffing of the dragon's breath, and the clinking of their claws on the coins at her feet, she heard the sound of drums, and the call of trumpets, as an army mobilized for war.

And despite herself, she smiled.

“Where is the prophet?” she said. “Well, right now, I think he's stealing your army's gold.”