Bad Faith Read online

  Lette chewed on that. “Couple of points,” she said, counting off on her fingers. “Firstly, I personally think it’s a little bit on these people for not having a good exit plan. The very first thing you do in any situation, from sitting in the office of a Verran merchant to settling down as his wife, is make sure you have an exit strategy. That’s just basic common sense. Secondly, we didn’t have shit to do with that portal. That’s on you, and I will not have you include me in it. And thirdly, and most importantly, shut up, you numbskull. Do you want someone to overhear and kill us both?”

  Will’s eyes went wide, and he looked around furtively. That last point was a very, very good one.

  “Subtle,” Lette said, standing, then helping him to his feet. “Come on, it could get cold tonight.”

  They walked through the crowds that were starting to mill about and congregate like lumps in one of Balur’s traditional Analesian sauces. Will looked around, trying to pick the lizard man out of the crowd, but the darkness masked his distinctive bulk.

  They settled by one of the larger fires. People were coming up, throwing more and more sticks on it. Someone else appeared with several rabbits. Another woman had had the foresight to bring down a bird earlier in the day and was now steadily plucking it. A parchment parcel of salted meat was passed around. There was a wineskin.

  “This is surprisingly civilized,” Will said to the man sitting next to him, the owner of the salted meat.

  “My mother was killed today,” the man said.

  Will shut up.

  “Then again,” the man went on, chewing and staring at the fire, “it was my brother two weeks ago, my wife three, my father a month back. My sister before that. So for life under Barph … I suppose.”

  When the wineskin reached him, Will passed it straight to the man. Some, it seemed, had a need far greater than he did.

  “It’s really that bad?” he asked after a while, unable to hold the question inside.

  “Where in the Hallows you been the past six months?” the man asked with something dangerously similar to clairvoyance.

  Will’s smile felt forced. “Sort of all over them,” he said.

  The man let out a humorless laugh. “Haven’t we all? Haven’t we all …” He looked at Will and blinked. “Why are you so purple?” he asked.

  “Erm …” Will examined his hands. His nails on three fingers had turned black. When had that happened? “Birthmark,” he said.

  “I just thought—” A woman cut into their conversation. “I just thought … even with everything else. At least I had my home. The whole world around me fell apart. People were torn down in the street. The stalls were looted. We scavenged for water just to stay alive … But my home … At least I had my home. I had somewhere that was still mine. I still had a piece of … of …” She broke down sobbing. The man put his arm around her.

  Will felt numb. I did this, part of him thought, but it was too big an idea to hold. I did this because of Barph was easier. It’s Barph’s fault lacked the ring of truth to it, but was tempting all the same.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and couldn’t help but flinch.

  “There you are,” Afrit hissed. Will turned. The Tamathian stood between himself and Lette, leaning down. Her face was a mask of fury. “Have you heard what has happened?”

  “Will took a bludgeon and a rusty spoon to his conscience, and will never sleep well again?” Lette asked.

  Which was a little on the gods-hexed nose, if anyone cared to ask Will.

  “What?” Afrit took a break from looking furious to look merely confused and annoyed. “Will …? No.”

  Which, considering Afrit’s usual unbending sense of morality, and Will’s eminent culpability in the current disaster, rather caught him off guard.

  “Barph has … He has …” Afrit seemed to be struggling with her words. And Will suddenly realized that the brightness in her eyes was not fury, but actually tears, trembling on the edge of capitulation to gravity. Fury was what was holding them back.

  “A genocide,” Afrit managed. “But not of any one race or creed or … or … He’s just torn down all the structures of civility and order. Just insisted that people behave like beasts. Just enacted inhuman cruelty on a scale that encompasses all of Avarra. The sick, the elderly … fucking children. He has seen to it that … Gods.”

  She spat again, and again. “I feel sick,” she said.

  “We’re going to die out here,” said the man who had taken the wineskin from Will. He sounded quite matter-of-fact. Beside him the woman started sobbing loudly.

  I did this. Barph did this, Will thought. We did this. I’ve united us in something. Will felt a sense of greasy nausea.

  “We have to end him,” Afrit was muttering. “We have to mount to the heavens and end him. I don’t know how. I don’t think it’s possible. But we have to.”

  “Fuck Barph,” someone said from the other side of the fire, plucking the thought—it felt—directly out of Will’s mind. He made out a silhouette as it stood and shook an angry fist at the sky. “Fuck you!” the figure screamed, shaking an angry fist at the sky.

  “What had we done to deserve this?” someone else said, a few yards off to Will’s left. “We’d done what he said. We followed his stupid gods-hexed edicts. Everything, and now …” Whoever was speaking let out an inarticulate sound, something made of anger and grief.

  I did this. Barph did this, Will thought. But people don’t know about me. And they know about Barph. And they blame Barph for what I did here today. A thought was taking root in Will’s mind, sinking its tendrils into him, and he didn’t think he liked it, but he wasn’t sure if that mattered.

  “We have to flay his pissing corpse,” Afrit was muttering. “Drag him down from the heavens …”

  Worship, Will thought. Barph had taught him that. A god’s power depended on worship. And of course everyone worshipped Barph. He was all knowing, all seeing, all powerful. You had to worship him or risk his wrath.

  Except …

  What if you didn’t care about his wrath anymore? What if you were standing in a field at night, shaking your fist angrily at the sky, and screaming at him to go fuck himself? What then?

  Anger could outweigh fear, Will knew. He knew it well.

  “Barph,” he said. Not loud enough yet. Just loud enough to get Lette to look up at him, a question in her eyes.

  “Barph,” he said again, getting a feel for the word. For the thoughts behind it.

  “What’s that?” said the man with the salted meat and the murdered family. The woman beside him was still sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Barph!” Will was brought to his feet by the force of the word. He bellowed it, howled it across the night. “Barph!” he screamed.

  People were looking at him. Even the sobbing woman.

  “Barph did this to us!” he yelled.

  He could feel the bitterness of the lie in his mouth. He could feel the weight of it in his gut. And this was compounding his crime—this lie, this blasphemy. But he believed in it too. He believed in the value of this lie, of what it could do for them.

  The people gathered round the fire started to rumble. Not quite questions, and not quite denials. A susurration of uncertainty.

  “Oh gods,” he heard Lette mutter.

  He had been sitting on a boulder; he stood on it now, put himself head and shoulders above the others.

  “Barph did this to us!” he shouted again. “He sits in the heavens, and he calls himself a god, and he demands our worship, but what do we get in return? What does he do that rewards our worship? He does not give us great bounty. He does not protect our homes. He does not bring good health to our children. He does not defend us from our enemies. He does none of these things. He is no god. No savior.”

  The murmur had died away this close to the fire; it was rippling out, people coming to look and to stare.

  “We worship him for one reason,” Will said. “Simple and clear. We worship him because we fea
r him. Because what will the consequences be if we don’t? What death and destruction will he wreak upon our lives? Will he …” Will cast about as if searching for inspiration, a rough pantomime at best. “Will he open a portal to the fucking Hallows in our city?”

  A grunt, a groan from the crowd. It was too close a blow, too soon for a rueful smile. It made them angry. And that was good, Will thought. He needed them angry.

  “We worshipped him!” he shouted. “We got down on our knees and offered up our prayers. We poured our libations. We followed his directives. And what happened? What happened today? What did he do?

  “Barph betrayed us today!” he shouted. “He said that we and our worship mean nothing to him. And so I say that he is not the god of revelry, nor of joy, nor even of anarchy. He is the god of meaninglessness. He is an empty and hollow god! He is the god of nothing!”

  It was not a handful of people around a fire now. He had the attention of the masses. And not all of them could hear him, he knew, but he also knew his words were being relayed, whispered back, a rustling echo weaving in among all the gasps and murmurs of agreement.

  And he felt sick. And he felt giddy. And he felt powerful. And he felt that maybe, just maybe he could make a difference. One that mattered.

  Maybe if a lie ended genocide, it was worth it. Even if it masked his own crime.

  “Today,” he shouted, “I stood upon the summit of the Barphetic Cathedral, at the peak of his highest temple in this land, and I was beset on all sides by madness and horror. I was drenched in blood. And I looked out and I saw this world he had created—this world that he had uncreated.”

  More gasps from the crowd. Someone … the man with salted meat and no family, stepped forward slightly. “Who are you?” he asked. And there was something like wonder in his eyes.

  “I am a man,” Will said. “I’m a farmer. I am Willett Fallows. I am the prophet of Kondorra who threw down the dragons from those skies. And I am here, and I have returned, and I have come to tell you one simple thing: Barph is no god of mine! I am nothing to him, and so he is nothing to me! You are nothing to him! He should be nothing to you! From this day forth, from this travesty onward, I say this: BARPH IS NOT OUR GOD!”

  Silence. Absolute. Every last murmur laid to rest. Eyes everywhere were on him.

  And then he felt it. Before they even said a word, he felt it, and he knew.

  Power rushed into him like a drug. He could feel it shuddering through him in waves. He felt light-headed from it. The other—the part of the Deep Ones he had taken into himself, that had lain desiccated and spent inside him—suddenly filled, swelled inside him, buoyed him up.

  And then the noise hit him. The cheer, the cry, the affirmation, the defiance. And he knew: He had spoken, and they believed.

  22

  Stuck in the Middle with You

  Lette stared at Will as he stumbled down from the boulder he’d been standing on. She held out an arm, and he caught hold of it, leaning more weight on it than she’d expected. He was unsteady, blinking, and still she just stared at him.

  How did he do it? How did the stupid bastard manage it? How did he know? How could this idiotic, foolheaded numbskull of a man reach into the ether and find the words that undid her? How did he make her care?

  Because she did. She stood here and now, surrounded by men and women who meant nothing to her, by absolute strangers, and yet when Will spoke, she wanted to save them. She wanted to unite with them. She wanted to wield her middle finger at the night sky and shout, I am here, and I am human, and I reject you, for you care nothing for us. For us. Us.

  Us.

  That word. That sense of community. Creating that was a magic far greater than any Lette had ever seen Quirk manage.

  Will was trying to pull away from her, from the crowds and the light. People pushed toward him, but he kept pulling away, and then she was propelling him out of the circle, off into the shadows.

  We’re getting away, she thought. We are. We have one purpose. We do. Us.

  He sagged to the ground in a small hollow, and she sat beside him.

  “What did I just say to those people?” he asked her. “What shit did I just fill their heads with? I can’t believe …” He buried his head in his hands. “I’m the one responsible. I—”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. And for a wonder, he did. He stared at her, and he looked utterly lost. But she … she felt as if she’d come home.

  And suddenly, just like that, the words were so easy to say.

  “I love you, you idiot.”

  He opened his mouth. And so she kissed it. And after a moment he kissed her back. And they kept on that way while all around them, the fires died.

  23

  When Life Gives You Apocalyptic Disasters

  Gratt smiled. It was not, he knew, an attractive look on him. He was not good at smiling. His maker had not gifted him with a mouth designed for smiling. It was a mouth made for biting and rending. And yet still he smiled. Because Gratt quite honestly didn’t give a shit what anyone else thought.

  Gratt was looking at his city. His Avarran city.

  He did not know its name. It lay half in ruins, and the other half was soaked in blood. He had lost tens of thousands of men in claiming it, and yet he smiled. This was a good day.

  He heard scurrying behind him. He turned, ready to wet his claws in some misguided attacker’s blood. To his disappointment it was just one of his messengers, one of the once-dead, scrambling toward him on all fours.

  The messenger bobbed his head one-two-three times in deference. “A message from the portal general,” he said in a voice as twisted as his body had been by Lawl’s punishments in the Hallows. “General Earrah is dead.”

  And Gratt’s smile forced itself wider.

  The portal was still vomiting up souls from the deepest caverns of the Hallows. They came through bewildered, weakened, and confused, which was why Gratt had placed a circle of troops around it with simple instructions. Anyone under seven feet tall was to be forcefully recruited. Anyone over seven feet was to be forcefully murdered on sight.

  Gratt had taken this city and murdered every single one of his rival generals from the Hallows all in one day. He had folded their armies into his own, and he stood unopposed.

  It was a good day.

  The thought of escaping the Hallows had been beyond the limits of his ambition—a dream that had never entered his skull. And yet here he was. Here he stood. In a world ripe for plucking.

  And all because of Will Fallows.

  Even he could not have predicted how wise an investment that man had proven to be. He was certainly not the first to come to Gratt begging for the route to the Deep Ones. But Will Fallows was the first one either insane or desperate enough to go through with everything and take part of the Deep Ones into himself.

  Gods … the things that would happen to … Was Will even a man anymore? He was certainly less of one. Would become even less than that. Would become …

  Gratt suppressed a shudder.

  Still, there would be a process of becoming, a time when someone as efficacious as Will Fallows could be useful to Gratt. And a time after that when it would be good to know where he was so he could be put down easily.

  He turned back to the messenger. “Has any word come of Will Fallows?”

  The messenger bobbed his head seven or eight times, which meant Gratt knew the answer before the man even opened his mouth. So Gratt punted him ten yards before he delivered it.

  He turned to another minion standing nearby. “We establish order. We establish a hierarchy. Bring my lieutenants to me; I will have them impose order, structure. This rabble becomes an army tonight. Bring me locals. Make me maps. We will plan our campaign. We will chart the cities through which we will march and pillage.”

  He smiled once more. “And then,” he said, “send more men to bring me what’s left of Will Fallows.”

  24

  Because We Haven’t Heard from Her in Nine Chapt
ers

  Quirk knew that riding at the head of an army of dragons was the sort of thing that bards would get very worked up over. There would be refrains and choruses and more synonyms than any good sentence could handle. However, she also found that doing it with a concussion rather took the romance out of it. Yes, there were sweeping vistas, but there was also the pounding headache, and the roiling sense of nausea that the whirling landscape did nothing to still.

  The dragons made slow progress. They were, in the end, the elderly, the sick, and the runts. The crossing from Natan to the Avarran coastline had been harrowing as they sank closer and closer to the chop of the waves, as their wingbeats had seemed more and more labored. Eventually they had sagged to the coastline, terrorized a herd of cattle, and then collapsed for the night.

  Now they rumbled cross-country, making as direct a line for Batarra as Quirk could manage. That country, she felt, was still the heart of the resistance. She would rekindle the flames she had once stoked there. Begin again.

  She tried to herd the dragons away from the major cities, to stick to the farmlands and forests. She knew what the sight of her new companions would do to people. Trying to introduce a hundred or more dragons as a group of saviors had to be done gently, and by degrees. She had to demonstrate their intent, make the people come to her.

  She could not hide her army completely, though. She saw shepherds in the Rosalian hills beneath her pointing up and screaming. She saw farmers gibbering on their knees. She saw some road-weary travelers drop to the ground and pray. She could not blame them. There was something apocalyptic about this force she headed. It excited her as much as it caused her fear. This was the end of something.

  In the afternoon of the third day, her headache had eased to a dull throb, and the Batarran border was in sight. The sun was low on the horizon as they cleared the trees of the elven Vale and swept up into the rolling lowlands and increasingly scrubby trees.