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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Wood

  Excerpt from The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn copyright © 2018 by Tyler Whitesides

  Excerpt from Seven Blades in Black copyright © 2018 by Sam Sykes

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover illustration by Chase Stone

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map by Tim Paul

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: August 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hollins, Jon, author.

  Title: Bad faith / Jon Hollins.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Orbit, 2018. | Series: The dragon lords

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018014755| ISBN 9780316308311 (softcover) | ISBN 9780316308328 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dragons—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Fantasty fiction. | Epic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.O48487 B33 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014755

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-30831-1 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-30832-8 (ebook)

  E3-20180626-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Part 1: Bad Luck

  1: Death and Other Minor Inconveniences

  2: First in the Heavens, Last in Our Hearts

  3: Fiery Zeal

  4: Did I Stutter?

  5: Party Planning

  6: Look, Dragons Are in the Series Name, Okay?

  7: In Which Lette Is Full of Shit

  8: This Ain’t Your Father’s Negotiation Tactic

  9: How to Make Friends and Influence Psychopaths

  10: My Enemy’s Enemy

  11: The Backstory I’ve Spent Three Books Getting Around To

  12: The Downward Spiral

  13: Never Go Full Lovecraft

  14: Cultural Indifferences

  15: The High-Stakes Art of Public Speaking

  16: Anarchy in a Teacup

  17: What Passes for Victory These Days

  18: Dependency Problems

  19: There’s No Place Like Home

  Part 2: Bad Decisions

  20: What the Hell Happened to Kansas?

  21: The Only One Who Could Ever Reach Me

  22: Stuck in the Middle with You

  23: When Life Gives You Apocalyptic Disasters

  24: Because We Haven’t Heard from Her in Nine Chapters

  25: Death by Bear Hug

  26: Because Burning Everyone and Everything Is Totally a Plan

  27: The Man without the Plan

  28: As Unstoppable as a Runaway Steamroller Heading Toward a Kindergarten

  29: The Pillage People

  30: The Passion of the Quirk

  31: The Things We Do for Love

  32: Fired Up

  33: That Moment When Two Is a Crowd

  34: Dead Man Talking

  35: She Has Her Reasons, Dammit

  36: Power Relations

  37: Enhanced Interrogations

  38: A Break from Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

  39: Thunderstruck

  40: He Who Controls the Past

  41: Quitting Time

  42: Compromising Situations

  43: Halfway There

  44: I Would Do Anything for Power, but I Won’t Be Allowed to Do That

  45: Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

  46: Can’t We Have an Upbeat Chapter?

  47: With Friends Like These …

  48: The Voyeur

  49: Breaking Faith

  50: Reptile Dysfunction

  51: The Protestant

  52: Causality’s Casualty

  53: All the Usual Hazards of Playing with Fire

  54: The Ants Go Marching Two by Two

  55: The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled …

  56: All the News That’s Fit to Shout Semiarticulately

  57: Seeing Is Believing

  58: Tricked Out

  59: The Eternal Fate of Smug Bastards

  60: Powerless

  Part 3: Bad Mofos

  61: Catharsis Through the Medium of Punching Dickheads

  62: Loyalties and Lying

  63: Prayers Answered

  64: The Gratt in the Oyster

  65: A Better Class of Hitchhiking

  66: Castles in the Sky

  67: Home Awful Home

  68: Well, What Did You Expect?

  69: Daddy Issues

  70: This Hurts Me as Much as It Hurts You

  71: Why We Fight

  72: Going Down in Flames

  73: Life Punches below the Belt

  74: The Lesser of Two Evils

  75: The Bigger They Are …

  76: The View from the Cheap Seats

  77: … The Harder They Fall

  78: The Illusion of Victory

  79: The Last Temptation of Willett Fallows

  Coda: Good Times

  80: The End of the Beginning

  Acknowledgments

  Extras

  A Preview of The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn

  A Preview of Seven Blades in Black

  By Jon Hollins

  Orbit Newsletter

  For Tami, Charlie, and Emma. Their faith got me here.

  “I’ll never pause again, never stand still, Till either death hath closed these eyes of mine Or fortune given me measure of revenge.”

  —Henry VI, Part 3,

  William Shakespeare

  PART 1:

  BAD LUCK

  1

  Death and Other Minor Inconveniences

  Klink. A god named for the sound of two coins striking each other. A god of that very sound. A god of all things mercantile and profitable. The catalyst for coin moving from one man’s hand to another’s purse, where it could join its fellows and … clink.

  Klink. A god. A being who had been old when the world was young. Worshipped by millions. Even loved by some of them. A being who had inspired hymn, and poem, and myth.

  Klink. A god.

  Will Fallows watched as Klink’s dirty, broken body was hoisted before the crowd and the weakly struggling deity’s throat was slit broad as a smile.

  Things were definit
ely not going to plan.

  To be fair, that was a statement that could be applied to quite a lot of Will’s life recently.

  Six months ago, Will had died.

  Actually, technically speaking—and Will was definitely willing to get technical over this particular point—he had been murdered. He had been on the verge of liberating the whole world of Avarra from tyrannical dragons—and, incidentally, tyrannical gods like Klink as well—when he had been metaphorically stabbed in the back, and literally stabbed in the throat, by Barph.

  Barph was another of the gods, and one whom Will had previously judged to lack such despotic tendencies. It had been, Will was willing to concede, a fairly big miss on his part.

  As was typical when such things occurred, Will subsequently found himself in the Hallows, the lands of the dead. Many of his friends arrived along with him. Barph, it turned out, was pretty liberal when it came to the whole murder thing. He was a god, after all. In fact, after this little coup d’état, Barph was the only god, because all the other gods had previously headed to the Hallows. They had been there under the impression that Will and his friends were going to rescue them. The whole overthrowing-their-tyranny thing hadn’t really been discussed with them at that point.

  Anyway, as was also typical with such things, Will was pretty pissed about the whole affair. There had been a lot of clenched fists and passionately proclaiming revenge on Barph. Lette—a woman more poetic with her blades than most bards were with words, and therefore someone Will trusted on such issues—had informed him that it felt very epic. There had even been a ledge and wind-tousled hair involved.

  Balur—a giant, mercenary lizard man and Lette’s usual traveling companion (although Balur had conceded that “into the Hallows” was further than he had intended to take things)—had possessed a differing opinion. As he put it, “Passionate words are being okay for getting bards laid, but they are killing about as many gods as my prick.”

  Afrit—a former university professor, and therefore someone who Will actually thought might produce an intelligent thought once in a while—had disappointed him by agreeing “with the sentiment, if not the specific phrasing,” as she sanctimoniously put it.

  Will had not been in the mood for his friends’ snark, and had immediately set about trying to prove the lizard man wrong by escaping the Hallows.

  That had been six months ago.

  To be fair, Will’s efforts had been hampered by a number of things. First, his friends’ snark. Second, in the wake of Barph’s takeover of the heavens, things in the Hallows had—not to put too fine a point on it—gone to utter shit. Previously the domain of Lawl, king of the gods and head cheerleader of rules and regulations, the Hallows had been a highly ordered domain. Tallies of sanctity and sin had been taken for each of the arriving dead, and appropriate afterlives delivered. Massive guardians—all muscles and no personality—had enforced these highly scripted hierarchies, and everything had been in its correct place. Barph, though, was not such a god. Barph was the god of revelry and anarchy and pissing in Lawl’s eye. Now he ruled the Hallows, and Lawl was in them, and so Barph was going to have fun.

  All rules in the Hallows had been canceled. Anarchy reigned. And then, shortly after that, warlords did. All the guardians—all the massive, powerful enforcers Lawl had put in place—had nothing to hold them in check. And so they made armies of the dead, and went to war on each other.

  That sort of thing tended to get in the way of one’s revenge, Will had found. And when you explained that to a massive undead general three times your height and weight, things tended to go badly. As Klink could attest.

  Well … he could have about ten seconds ago.

  The gods were another epic pain in Will’s arse. There were six of them. Five now. Lawl, the former ruler of the heavens. Betra, his wife, former goddess of hearth and home, and utter pissing harpy as far as Will was concerned. Klink’s twin brother, Toil, god of fields and farmers, and one of the biggest disappointments in a series of fairly massive disappointments in Will’s life. Will thought maybe he should be reconciled to them now, but it was still a hard thing to know that you had sacrificed a fatted calf to someone you had subsequently watched cry while he pissed.

  After that there was Knole, who was reportedly the goddess of wisdom, although her primary field of expertise seemed to be being an absentminded stain in the britches of Will’s life.

  Finally there was Cois. Oh, Cois. Will had slept with Cois. It was before either of them had been killed, back when zhe was the hermaphroditic god(dess) of love and lust. If Will were a bragging man and not hopelessly in love (in a more literal sense than normal) with Lette, then it would have been quite the conquest. However, the reasons for their union had been more rational than romantic, and the whole thing had been rather undercut by the fact that Balur had been in the Hallows only about three seconds when he hooked up with hir. What made it even worse was that they were a revolting couple. Will was fairly sure that that level of face licking was decidedly unhygienic.

  Will and his friends had met the gods immediately upon their arrival in the Hallows. It turned out the gods had been waiting for them, full of expectations and eagerness, because they had been, at the time, still under the impression that Will was attempting to save them and deliver Avarra back into their greedy little hands. A rather uncomfortable conversation had followed, but Will had figured that would be the end of it. But oh no, instead they had decided to tag along until he fixed things, as if he had any intention of doing that. Still, to a former deity, killing Barph in an inventive and painful way apparently sounded close enough.

  And despite all of this, despite the nagging and the bickering and the delays and his companions’ endemic lack of urgency, Will had come up with a plan. Will had figured a way out and back to Avarra.

  It had been Cois who had told them about the Deep Ones.

  They’d been in the Hallows about a month. The initial scrabble to survive, and to escape the collapsing power structures that had come with Barph’s rise to power, finally seemed to be over. They had scavenged enough food, wood, and clothing to be comfortable for the night. They had made a fire, roasted meat.

  Will had been pacing in circles. It was his default setting at the time. Plans for revenge seethed beneath his skin.

  Balur’s mind was elsewhere, though, because apparently Will was the only one of them who could focus.

  “Who would be thinking,” Balur had said, pointing at Lawl, who’d been curled up in a corner muttering angrily to himself, “that that prick built the Hallows?”

  “No, he didn’t!” Cois had sounded scandalized. “It existed long before he did.”

  “What?” Afrit, sagging by the fire, had come alive with such ferocity, Will could almost believe she’d actually … well, come alive. “Before?” she’d said with wonder in her voice.

  “Lawl repurposed this space,” Cois had said patiently.

  “Silence, harlot!” Lawl had snapped. Though, to be fair, that was about 90 percent of what he’d said even when he was a god.

  “Fine,” Cois had acknowledged. “Yes, he did expand upon it. And restructure it. And put in place a lot of the hierarchy you see now. But he didn’t build it from scratch.”

  “But …” Afrit had pushed her hand through her growing nest of hair. “Before?”

  “Is this being the first time you have been hearing that word?” Balur asked. “It is being to do with chronology.”

  “I know what pissing before means, Balur,” Afrit had snapped. “The issue is that there isn’t meant to be a before. When it comes to Lawl, he and Betra are ground zero for divinity. They are the beginning.”

  Cois had looked over at Lawl and squinted. “Is that what you’ve been telling people all these years?”

  “Silence, harlot!” Lawl had said, taking his cue.

  “Well then,” Cois had said, looking directly at Lawl while zhe spoke. “Let me dispense some truth. There was a before. There were the Deep Ones.”


  “The who?” Afrit’s voice had scraped for octaves higher than the cavern ceiling above them.

  “Seriously?” Cois had looked about at the surrounding mortals.

  “Don’t be looking at me,” Balur had said. “Analesian religious education is stopping at, ‘And the gods were inventing punching people in the face.’”

  Cois had shaken hir head minutely. “The Deep Ones. Our former masters. Vast, horrifying beasts beyond human ken. The infinite unknowable made flesh. Well … almost flesh. Or … something a lot like flesh, although also exactly the opposite of flesh. They’re hard to explain. Just assume they’re sort of like the inverse of sanity made into giant monsters, and you’re probably close enough. Total pricks.

  “Anyway, they ruled the Hallows before we did. They also created Lawl and Betra. Who then birthed the rest of us one way or another. But we were all their slaves. And then Lawl led us in rebellion against them. And we defeated them. We condemned them to eternal sleep. We stole their divinity. Lawl reshaped this place, then got into the whole ‘divine ruler’ thing, and created the heavens and the mortal plane. Then humanity, and eons later … this mess.”

  There had been silence then, except for the sound of Afrit hyperventilating.

  And in that silence it had felt as if tiny slivers of glass were falling through Will’s mind—slashing through confusion and frustration and carving a shape.

  Stole their divinity.

  “The Deep Ones?” he had said. “They’re still down here?”

  “I didn’t condemn them to be eternal sleepwalkers,” Lawl had barked.

  Stole their divinity.

  And for the first time since he had entered the Hallows, Will had smiled.

  Will didn’t know much about how to escape the Hallows, but he did know that divinity sounded a lot like a way to achieve it. And apparently some of it had been left lying around. And so all he had to do was get to it. And as he had the very architect of the Hallows with him, that hadn’t seemed like too much of a problem.

  Except Will Fallows was also the punch line of life’s little comedy.

  “How should I know?” Lawl had said when Will had asked him where the Deep Ones lay.

  “For all the obvious reasons,” Will had pointed out, while trying to ignore all the obvious reasons for punching Lawl in his obnoxious face.