Fool's Gold Page 13

  Then she spotted them, picking their way up the mountainside. For some reason, Firkin was perched between Balur’s shoulder blades, slapping the top of his head and shrieking, “Gyah! Giddy up, you fine steed! Onward and upward, you magnificent beast of burden!”

  Even as she clambered down the tree to meet them, she found she was actually impressed at Balur’s restraint.

  “Come on,” she called as she reached the pine-needle-littered floor, “they’re flagging.”

  “They are bloody flagging?” Balur groused as he reached her. “Have they been needing to carry a squirming gods-hexed fool up the mountain? Because I have not been seeing that.”

  “You’re eight feet of muscle and rage,” she said, reaching up to pat his arm. “Stop being such a complete pussy. It’s unbecoming.”

  Balur grunted.

  Firkin for his part whipped repeatedly at Balur’s head and neck. “What is this?” he shrieked. “Tally ho and sally forth! Tally forth to Sally the ho! Lovely girl. Very welcoming. Onward!”

  “What exactly is his role being in this whole plan?” Balur asked. “Because I would be liking to change it to being a sack of bloody meat.”

  “He’s important to Will, and Will is important to the plan because he came up with it,” Lette said.

  “But he was coming up with it already. What are we still needing him for?”

  “For when you inevitably fuck it up.” Lette felt that this statement was not entirely without precedent.

  Balur considered this for a moment and then nodded. “That is being fair enough.”

  Lette grinned and turned back to pursue the swarming villagers. “Oh Betra’s tits,” she swore.

  The villagers had come to a halt just shy of the rocky lip that served as the entrance to Mattrax’s cave. The fifteen or so guards who stood watch over the portcullis were eyeing them suspiciously, shifting spears and swords from hand to hand.

  Overly aware of the guard’s scrutiny, Lette scuttled out of the trees and toward the crowd. As she approached she was aware of a susurrating grumble rising up from it. She pushed into the edge of the mass.

  “—no bloody prophet,” she heard someone grumbling.

  “Not got any noshers now, have we?” said another.

  “Not going up bloody there all by myself,” came another voice.

  “Said we was going to get a bloody prophet.”

  “I figured he’d be leading the bloody charge. Get himself in all the danger.”

  A number of belligerent ayes came in response to this. Lette turned to Balur—bulldozing a path into the crowd behind her—and arched an eyebrow.

  “Prophet?” she said as acidly as possible.

  Balur shifted on his massive feet. “Ah,” he said. “Well.” And then, “You are seeing…”

  “No, Balur,” she told him. “I am not seeing.”

  “Firkin was using a little bit of artistic license when he be motivating the crowd…”

  “Inciting!” Firkin screamed from his perch. “I do not motivate. I incite. I excite! I titillate! I ferment!”

  “He is being difficult to keep on a strict party message,” Balur said with a shrug.

  For her part, Lette did her best to maintain her frosty demeanor while again being impressed that Balur had not reduced Firkin to a messy stain on the Kondorra landscape.

  “You could be being a prophet,” Balur suggested.

  “I could not be being that, numbskull,” Lette snapped back, suddenly finding it easy to be frosty once more. “I am meant to be sneaking unnoticed into the gearworks of the door that your crowd is meant to have opened already. I can hardly be leading the charge and then hoping no one notices me.”

  “Oi!” shouted one of the guards from the safety of the lip. “Fuck off!”

  The time had come, Lette decided, for executive action. “You,” she snapped at Firkin, “you got us into this mess, get us out of it.”

  Firkin stared at her wide-eyed for a moment, made a number of rude hand gestures, and then shrieked. “Crowd! Villagers! Mindless minions of the mighty word of the prophet! Mud pies and squat froglike fat faces! Inbred swine! Melting pot that was melted maybe just a little bit too much! I bring the word of the prophet unto you and thou shalt hear his command and say, why yes of course, that sounds like a reasonable course of action, I think I will do that right away pronto, thank you very much for providing my previously worthless existence with such outstanding advice, it is the lightness in my eyes and the breath in my heart. And thus shall I say to you as he said unto me—”

  Here Firkin paused, and Lette was amazed to see that a hush had fallen over the crowd, as they all stared up at Firkin.

  Firkin grinned savagely and thrust a gnarly finger at the guards. “Get those fuckers!” he yelled.

  As one the crowd turned to face the guards—

  —and hesitated.

  “Erm,” said one loud voice.

  “Yeah,” said another.

  “About that…” supplied a third.

  “Again,” added a fourth, “I don’t mean to harp on this, but didn’t it seem like the prophet was actually going to be here. I thought there would be more actual leadership.”

  “He’s the voice of the prophet,” said another, and the attention of the crowd shifted back to Firkin.

  Lette hung her head.

  “Why are we listening to Firkin anyway?” someone else chimed in.

  A fine question, Lette thought.

  “You go ahead and attack if you’re so bloody keen,” said someone else, clearly getting sick of this whole business.

  “You know,” Balur said, “I am not hating that idea.”

  Lette groaned. All they needed to do was get a bunch of villagers onto a pressure plate. That was it. Why was that so hard? Why did people have to die for that? Why couldn’t anything just be clean?

  But Balur was already off and running, leaving all her doubts in his dusty wake. Firkin yelled and screamed, flapping about on Balur’s shoulders, clinging desperately as Balur shifted his war hammer from his back to his fists.

  The crowd and the guards stared, stunned, as this lone, towering figure charged toward fifteen blades.

  A guard captain was the first to recover. He started yelling. Soldiers stumbled into formation, tried to get their spears up.

  Poor bastards, Lette thought.

  Balur hit the wall of guards like a battering ram. Spears snapped as points struck his armor, his thick hide. His hammer swung. A guard’s chest shifted from concave to convex. The man brayed blood in a short coughing bark that signaled the end of his life.

  This was it, Lette knew. This was the moment when the crowd would either move with them, or abandon them and flee. The tipping point.

  “Gyah!” she yelled, as if driving a herd of horses into a gallop. “Get on with you! Get up there! Do your Lawl-hexed prophet some pissing good, you worthless sacks of shit!”

  The crowd hesitated a moment longer, watched as Balur caught a sword in his fist, yanked the soldier on the other end of it toward him, and head-butted the poor bastard into oblivion.

  “Do it!” Lette screamed. “Fucking move!”

  And much to her shock they did.

  A motivational speaker, she thought. Perhaps that’s the path ahead. Then she was running after the crowd, harrying and shouting as she did so.

  The guard captain, it turned out, was not as stupid as Lette had hoped. Balur was, he recognized, not someone his troops were going to beat. He also recognized the weight of Balur’s war hammer. Inhumanly strong, Balur might be, but he was not indefatigable. He would tire eventually. Until then containment was key. The crowd, on the other hand, was more easily handled. Rapidly he shouted orders, only two of his quickest soldiers dancing around Balur, poking and prodding at him and desperately flinging themselves out of his way. The rest of the guard simply swarmed round him.

  The crowd clashed against the guards. They outnumbered them to be sure, but solid steel would take care of tha
t quickly enough. Lette tried to get a good line of sight as she worked her way through the crowd. A dagger found its home in a soldier’s throat. Another was backed into by a villager staggering away from a spear-wielding guard. He flung his arms up in shock and pain. The soldier took advantage of the villager’s kind offer and gutted him.

  Lette cursed. This was supposed to be clean. Hell, it still could be. All she needed was one big push, one surge up onto the lip. The pressure plate would be there. And then the villagers could scatter.

  “Push!” she screamed. “Push!” She was at the far edge of the crowd now, up on the lip itself, where Balur had made a mess of one guard but was still being tormented by the other. “Push!” she yelled again.

  A guard yelled. She flung a knife. It speared his eye socket and he dropped. She needed to be able to disappear, to drop from notice and be poised for the moment when the gate rose. But it was not coming. The moment was hung stubbornly in stasis.

  The crowd quivered under the guard’s onslaught. But then the guards were dropping back, regrouping. The villagers hesitantly, but undeniably, advanced. Lette realized this was going to work.

  And then, all of a sudden it was not.

  All of a sudden, everyone was standing still.

  All of a sudden, there was the sound of wings beating in the sky.

  Whoomph.

  Whoomph.

  Whoomph.

  Mattrax landed with a crash of air and dust, wings spread, mouth wide, his snarl shaking the air. His massive head swung back and forth, looming over everyone. His tail lashed out, sent villagers flying.

  The whole cliff side shook with the power and the weight of him. The world shrank down to the single point that was him, his eyes, his jaws, his teeth. All sound was the sound of his roar. All the wind was the beating of his wings. All the ground was the tremor of his footsteps. He defined the world.

  In the face of this onslaught, in defiance of this oblivion of the senses, Lette saw Balur roar. It was a lost sound, hurled into the fury of Mattrax’s roar and flung away. But it was his roar. His will. His refusal to bow. And Balur charged Mattrax.

  Lette watched Mattrax, as the dragon watched Balur’s approach. Together they both watched the lizard man as he raised his war hammer, watched him roar, veins standing out on his neck, as he gave the blow his all.

  It never landed.

  Mattrax flicked a forepaw at Balur, a small casual movement. Balur flew. He traced an arc through the sky, made contact with the trees, and crashed down through branches, a beaten, broken toy.

  The crowd watched him, turned back to Mattrax, took stock of exactly how fucked they were, and ran like Lawl had set all the demons of the Hallows upon them. Lette could see Firkin bobbing and flailing in their midst, howling along with all the rest of them.

  But she did not run. She did not even back carefully away from the stone ledge.

  Because the cave was open. Mattrax stood directly atop his pressure plate, screaming and roaring at the retreating villagers. Behind him the cave entrance was wide open. The portcullis that guarded it stood wide open, a beckoning black maw.

  She could see the black iron chain that held the gate to its counterweights, each link thicker than her waist, disappearing down through a hole carved into the rocky floor. She could fit in there. She could do exactly what she had come here to do.

  She just had to get past the notice of Mattrax and the guards first. And there was no time to sneak, no time for subtlety, no time for anything but putting her head down and running hard.

  The only real drawback of the plan that she could see was that it was complete and utter suicide.

  She pressed into the cliff face. In a moment it wouldn’t matter anyway. The guards were going to spot her, point her out to Mattrax, and she would be looking at the inside of his gullet within moments.

  All because I trusted a plan a farmer came up with. She shook her head. I should have told him to shove his plan, and whisk me off to some new farm so we could roll in the hay and raise pigs.

  The thought came unbidden, but before she had a chance to beat it back into whatever dark corner of her subconscious it had crawled from, a noise came from above like a pair of massive bellows filling. She glanced up. Mattrax was breathing in, the air seeming to catch in his gullet.

  Oh, all the gods’ hex upon it, she knew what happened next.

  Mattrax exhaled.

  A roaring sheet of flame filled the world, whistling past her, scorching her skin. It raced after the fleeing villagers. It smashed through Mattrax’s own guards. She heard screams, saw someone staggering out of the blast, skin sloughing away from bone.

  For a moment she was paralyzed, held in place by the horror of it, the magnificence. So much power. Such raw rage excising life from the land. And then she realized: This was it. This was the moment she was waiting for.

  She put her head down. She ran. She shot past Mattrax, past the cave entrance, and straight to that dark, dank hole into which the portcullis chain disappeared. No guard cried out. No guard pointed and screamed. They were all too busy being roasted alive by their infuriated master.

  She slammed into the chain, grabbed a handhold. And then, lithe as an eel, slipped down into darkness and safety.

  15

  The Belly of the Beast

  Like all castles, Mattrax’s mountain fort had been constructed with one goal in mind: to repel attackers. A series of walls surrounded the keep, each protected by a gate offset from the one before, the layout of which would force assailants to zigzag back and forth, taking the longest path possible, all the time suffering the withering blows of the castle’s defenders.

  An additional consequence of this strategy, Will discovered, was that it made it painfully difficult to drag a dead cow through the place. The experience, he was finding, was making him significantly less fond of Ethel.

  “Thrice-cursed daughter of a cow whore,” he muttered as he tried to get a better grip on her hoof. “Why did I ever feed you any single extra grain of corn? You fat fucking…” He descended into muttered curses.

  “I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Quirk grumbled, shoving her shoulder into Ethel’s dragging arse once more. “You’re a farmer. Physical labor is what you do all day. I’m built for academia.”

  “Aren’t you a wizard or something?” Will was increasingly skeptical of this. He’d seen her brew her potions, to be sure, but alchemy and a working knowledge of herbalism was not summoning mystical forces and spitting in the eye of the gods’ immutable laws. Still, it seemed like the sort of thing that could really help them out now. “Can’t you cast a spell and make the cow float or something?”

  “I am trying,” Quirk said, face buried in Ethel’s backside as her feet dug at the ground, “to give that up.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” Will asked. “What sort of wizard doesn’t want to cast spells? Isn’t that the whole point? Power and riches summoned by eldritch forces?”

  “The sort,” Quirk snapped, “that has a functioning moral compass.”

  “You’re here to rob a dragon!”

  Quirk popped her head up over Ethel’s rump and eyeballed him very hard indeed.

  Will became abruptly aware that he was wearing a dead man’s armor, standing beside a dead, drugged cow in the center of the enemy’s castle, surrounded by guards armed with a large assortment of pointy metal. Quirk’s eyebrow slowly inched its way up her forehead.

  Will ducked his head and started heaving on Ethel’s forehoof.

  They had navigated the second of the three gates that led to the keep when it became abruptly apparent that something was very much awry. Will’s first clue was a roar so loud that the ground shook. Ethel’s dead flesh quivered with the force of it.

  Will and Quirk locked eyes immediately. Barely controlled panic reflected barely controlled panic. Will took a breath, did a quick mental inventory of the steps in his plan. And yes, he was sure. There was no point that called for the bello
wing of an enraged dragon. In fact almost every step of the plan was aimed at completely avoiding that outcome. Something was very, very wrong.

  “Do we bail?” Quirk whispered, once whispers were audible once more.

  Before he could answer, there came a rushing, whispering, roar. The sound of fire. The sound of Mattrax incinerating someone.

  Lette!

  No. He shook his head. No, she couldn’t be dead. She was too smart, too tough for this.

  It’s your fault, said a small voice in the back of his head. This is your plan.

  No. He shook his head. I was trying to talk them out of it.

  Yeah, great job you did there. The way you told them the exact plan that you and Firkin used to discuss. That was a great way to tell them not to do it. And now Lette’s dead. You should have told her to shove the plan, and then whisked her off to some new farm so you could roll in the hay and raise pigs.

  She’s not dead.

  “Will!” Quirk’s whisper forced its way into his consciousness. “Do we bail?” She looked down at the cow, back at the gate.

  Will hesitated.

  “Gods’ hex on it,” said Quirk, “this isn’t worth it. I’m—”

  “No,” Will snapped. Quirk froze.

  “We have to leave,” she implored him. “Something has gone very wrong.”

  Will nodded slightly. That did seem like the most likely turn of events. “But,” he said, “I’m not sure how us dropping everything and running screaming for the hills makes us seem less suspicious.”

  Quirk chewed on her lip.

  “We stick to the plan,” he said. “We feed Mattrax Ethel. We hide in the vault while he passes out, and we see if we can still meet up with Lette.”

  “And if we can’t?” Quirk’s wide eyes and skittering fingers made it clear she didn’t really think that this was a question.

  “Then,” Will hissed, “we’re still in a vault full of gold with an unconscious dragon.” He tried to keep his temper under control. He wanted to be the one panicking. It wasn’t fair that Quirk was taking up all the panicking time that they had. “We shove our pockets full of coin, you take your measurements, or whatever it is you want, and we sneak back out through the castle under cover of darkness.”