Bad Faith Read online

  And so Will was done with waiting.

  He flew out the window as the club went up a second time. He landed awkwardly, struggled up. He yelled. And he could feel the surprise rippling around him. He could actually feel it, the part of the Deep One within him stretching out, probing and touching with unfingers. He knew through it that some of his followers felt shock, and some of them felt disappointment, and some of them felt red-hot rage that he feared might sear his mind, but he knew most of them felt excitement and pride in him, and that each and every one was ready to charge.

  And as he broke into a run, he felt their belief.

  The first Barphist aimed her club at Will. Will felt his body move at a speed that had nothing to do with his muscles. He felt reality part for him to proceed through it to where he wanted to be. The Barphist’s club struck air. Will’s elbow struck her jaw, spun her head around with enough force that there was a violent snap and the priest collapsed still on the ground.

  Will let out a yell. This might not be stealing belief from Barph, but it certainly would rob him of some believers.

  When it was done, Will stood before the gathered victors and licked the dried blood from his lips. There was, he thought, a chance that he should have washed the gore off before he gave this speech.

  “What does Barph promise you?” he shouted at them all. “Love? Safety? To hold you tender in the safety of his bosom? No. He promises you none of that. All he has ever promised you is the threat of force.”

  The dwarves looked vaguely shell-shocked by this idea. He suspected it had been quite the day for them. A lot of blood had been spilled in their streets. Likely, more of it was their own than they’d expected. The Barphists had fought with zealous fury.

  But the Barphists had lost, and Will had talked to Quirk and gotten the dragons up in the air above them, screaming and roaring, and excited to eat the corpses Will and his followers had provided. And all in all the victory felt impressive.

  “But what if you kowtow to Barph’s threats?” he shouted to the crowd. Most of them were his followers, and had heard this speech or some variant of it many times before. They didn’t seem to tire of it, though.

  “Are you saved?” he called. “Spared indignity and harm?” His derisive laugh was practiced.

  “What if, instead, you defied his threats?” he asked for the umpteenth time. “How exactly would life be worse?”

  He carried on with his message. He added a few new ideas here and there, but he didn’t truly tell the dwarves anything they didn’t already know. All he did was show them a crowd they could hide in.

  But that, he knew now, was enough. He could feel the rising energy in them. The hope. The mounting joy. The fierce rediscovery of pride.

  How many, though, would be dead after they found the next Barphian temple? And after the next once-dead attack? And after the food ran short again?

  But he didn’t ask them those questions. Because all the hope his words were giving them was being fed back to him, making him more powerful, making his chances of being one day able to take on Barph just a little better.

  And so, despite the coming death toll, he stood there, and he pontificated, and he shouted, and he insulted, and he joked and japed, and he brought them over. He convinced them to leave behind their lives and their homes and, above all, their worship of Barph.

  When he was done, he stumbled away, feeling spent, feeling overfull of other people’s energy. Foreign voices and emotions chattered in his head. He waited for them to settle, for his own voice to reestablish itself.

  Lette found him sagged over a barrel of water, trying to wash the gore and horror away.

  “Good speech,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “What am I condemning these people to?”

  “A life lived free of the yoke.” Her hand massaged tense muscles. “That’s not a bad thing.”

  Will chewed his lip. “Seventy-three dead, Lette.”

  She sighed. Then grabbed his chin forcefully and made him look her in the eye. “Are you seriously telling me,” she snapped, “that you want to stand up in front of this crowd and tell them that you’ve changed your mind, that it’s time to pack it in? Because I’m not mopping up that mess.”

  “No,” he said. Then he hesitated. Because …“I’m just … I don’t know.”

  Lette sighed. “Look, I know I told you I loved you, but that doesn’t mean that my tolerance for self-indulgent whining has abruptly increased.”

  Will smiled. She was right. If he was honest, he didn’t want her advice, he wanted to assuage his guilt, and she was far from being the right person for that. That was why he loved her, after all.

  And if she could condone his becoming something harder-edged, someone who didn’t feel bad about making the hard sacrifices, why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he just take the power and run with it? He had a cause, he had something bigger than himself to commit it to.

  He nodded. “You’re right.”

  Lette stepped in. “Now that’s romantic talk.” She stroked his brow.

  Will reached out to touch her cheek just in time to feel her body go completely rigid.

  “What?” he asked.

  Without saying a word she slowly pushed back a lock of hair. The look that crossed her face wasn’t one that one typically wanted to see on one’s lover’s.

  “What?” he asked again, at greater volume.

  “Will …” Lette’s voice was barely above a whisper. “You know how you were fairly convinced the purple stuff was okay?”

  “Are you trying to make sure I don’t anymore?” He was not handling this well, but she wasn’t either, and he hoped that gave him an excuse.

  “Well—” She hesitated, looked away. “Will, I think you’re growing an extra eye.”

  29

  The Pillage People

  Bellenet. It had been described to Gratt in so many ways. Batarra’s capital. Batarra’s pride. Its heart. Its soul. The jewel placed upon its crown.

  Gratt was going to have to slap someone’s jaw off.

  Bellenet was, as far as he could tell from this distance, a stinking midden heap surrounded by fields that lay either fallow or overgrown, providing feasts for rodents and insects alone.

  Then again, given what he’d seen of Batarra so far, perhaps this truly was what most of the citizens held as a treasure. For two weeks he’d marched his army through its collapsing countryside. For two weeks he’d kicked over collapsing farmsteads and burned tinder-dry towns. For two weeks the few who had survived these encounters had scrambled over the dead to pay obeisance at his feet. The Batarrans were a craven people, he had decided. A pathetic people. Perhaps it made sense that their capital was pathetic.

  It just also happened to make them a truly disappointing people to conquer.

  Still, Bellenet had walls. He could make out the people perched upon them, so it had defenders. This could perhaps provide an amusing distraction, if nothing else.

  He formed up his troops, bellowing at and bullying his lieutenants, who in turn bellowed at and bullied their sergeants, who in turn bellowed at and bullied and beat bloody the Batarrans until they stood in rough squares, gripping swords and pikes and knives bound to branches and bits of planking with nails jutting from them and pretty much anything else they had managed to seize.

  “Some of you think of this as your home,” Gratt growled as he stood at his army’s head. “Some of you think you have family in this city. Some of you think your loyalty should lie here.” He licked his tusks. “You are wrong.

  “Some of you think Barph is your god now. You are wrong.

  “Some of you think that death is the worst thing that could happen to you. You are wrong.”

  He stared them all down. A whole army. His whole army. And some of them, some who had been with him since the start, down in the Hallows when the opportunity to seize control had first come, some of them were grinning along with him, and he almost felt affection for those troops. He suspec
ted many of them would die today, but he felt no sadness at that. Everyone and everything here was a tool, and now all he had to do was hone it.

  “I am your god now!” he yelled at them. “I am your home and your heart and your mother and father and your family. I am everything you have. I am your will, and your hope. I am your home. When you breathe, it is because I will it. When you die, it is because I will it. And the only thing you need to fear, the thing worse than all other fates, is disappointing me.”

  His breath steamed in the air.

  “I want Bellenet!” he roared at them. “Give it to me.”

  His lieutenants roared. Their sergeants roared. His army moaned and shouted and screamed, and they moved, and all he cared about was that last. And they streamed across the battlefield toward his prize.

  The heart of Batarra. Its pride. Its soul. Its capital. And it would be his, and so would this land. The first country to fall, but far from the last.

  He watched as his troops tore across the fields toward Bellenet’s main gates. He waited to watch the arrows fall like rain. He waited for the sweet music of screams.

  And he was disappointed.

  As he watched, no arrows came. No pitch was poured from the walls. No calls of defiance were screamed. As he watched, he saw the gates of Bellenet open.

  He saw his army stumble to a confused halt.

  Gratt spat. If you wanted something done right …

  He strode across what should have been a battlefield, kicking his troops aside, toward the small delegation that wavered and waved at him from Bellenet’s gates.

  “Welcome!” a man was calling. He was short, and wearing a wig almost half his own diminutive height. It was made of curls, and mice ran in and out of them as Gratt watched.

  “Welcome, brave conqueror!” he called again. “Welcome to Bellenet!”

  Gratt stood before him. Towered over him. “What,” he said to one of his lieutenants, “is the meaning of this?”

  “They …” The lieutenant paused. He knew this tone well enough. He worked his jaw. “They have surrendered, General.”

  The bewigged man from the Batarran delegation took a few halting steps forward. “We cannot say how happy we are to see you, brave conqueror. We cannot say how difficult the past six months beneath the heel of Barph have been. Everything has gone …” The man’s voice broke. “They’re eating people in there. They’re fucking …” He tried to regain his composure. “We welcome you. Our city is yours. Everything. Our coffers. Our women. Our men. Whatever you want. Just … protect us. Please. Please protect us.” He was weeping openly.

  Gratt ignored the crying man. He fixed all the power of his stare upon his lieutenant.

  “You accepted his surrender?” he growled.

  “I …,” the lieutenant stuttered. “I … what?”

  “What?” echoed the weeping Batarran.

  “I said,” Gratt growled loud enough for half his army to hear, “that I want this city. Let me be clear.” He raised his voice. He roared. “I want this city’s bloody corpse! I want its beating heart in my hand! I want its gore upon my tongue. I do not want its limp fucking prick.” He turned and buried his claws in the chest of the weeping man. He hoisted his gurgling corpse aloft while the rest of the Batarran delegation cowered and screamed. While his army gasped. He flexed his fingers and the corpse came apart, wet and ragged.

  “Give me this city!” he screamed.

  After a moment his army poured in.

  Gratt stood in fire and rubble. Corpses stretched out all around him. He licked the blood from his claws. All in all, Bellenet had been less of a disappointment than he’d feared. Its citizens, once properly motivated, had provided a passable whetstone on which to hone his troops.

  “What does it feel like?” he asked.

  He’d had Lawl dragged here, to the heart of Bellenet, to the buildings that had once served as its halls of governance. The roof had gone from this room, the sky occluded only by smoke, not by delicate painted plaster.

  They’d found a cage down in the jails, and he’d had it dragged up here, installed his former master in it, away from the other gods. He turned and stalked toward the chained deity. “What does it feel like to be the lowest thing in this world? You created this place, and now it is simply rubble. How pathetic does that make you?”

  It was, Gratt suspected, shallow of him to derive so much pleasure from this. To make Lawl wallow in his misery. And yet … so what if he was shallow? Who would dare accuse him of being so? Whom would he let live if they said so?

  “Slightly less pathetic,” Lawl said, “than the man who claimed to be a god at the open gates of a broken city.” He turned a thin smile on Gratt. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  Gratt growled softly. Lawl was a proud one. But, he supposed, therein lay the pleasure in breaking him.

  “And yet you are chained by such a man,” Gratt pointed out. He reached down, snapped the leg off a corpse, started chewing on it.

  “And yet I know that as proud as you are now,” Lawl said, picking himself up off the floor of the cage, “as strong as you think you are, as powerful as you think you are, you are nothing before the bastard child of my loins. Your blood will never fill the font at the heart of the Summer Palace. The worst of us will crush you without even thinking twice about it. You are nothing to him.”

  Gratt ground his teeth. “And what about you, old man? What are you to him?”

  Lawl hesitated. The blow, Gratt saw, had landed. “He shall not kill me,” Lawl said stiffly. “I shall endure long after you are gone. Barph’s madness will end. He will see my rightful place.”

  Gratt just laughed at that. It was pathetic.

  But Lawl wasn’t quite broken. Not quite yet. “Your only chance to stand against him,” Lawl said, “has already slipped between your fingers. I gave you your only hope. Remember that. Remember that for millennia you were too afraid to seize the Deep Ones’ power. Willett Fallows, a mere mortal, exceeded you, and then he walked away. All you are doing now is marking time until Barph feels crushing you would be amusing.”

  Gratt suddenly was no longer having fun. He waved, and his men returned to haul Lawl back to the other gods.

  “Enjoy remembering what power was,” he called after the god. “Enjoy remembering mattering.”

  And still, as around Gratt Bellenet burned, all he could taste was ash.

  30

  The Passion of the Quirk

  Quirk was quite pleased that Will’s troops managed to avoid a battle for a full three days after the dwarven enclave. That was a pretty good stretch for them.

  They were skirting the southern border of Batarra, avoiding plummeting into Vinland and risking the wrath of a nation that had been zealously devoted to Barph’s worship even before his ascendancy to omnipotence. There were no recruits for Will’s cause to be found there. Instead they were angling toward the Vale and the elves, who were always a rebellious sort and more likely to be open to the message of kicking a god in the nuts.

  The land here was less populated than the rest of Batarra, and the tangled wilderness of bramble and scrub made a nice change from the desolation of wasted villages and farmsteads. It was more overgrown than the last time she’d been in this part of the world, but it wasn’t actively causing people to starve, or serving as a graveyard, so that was nice.

  And then, on the third day, as they were making their way through the tangle of a wood, Yorrax landed beside her and said curtly, “A small army ahead,” and then started to flap her wings.

  Quirk was walking with Afrit. They were holding hands, which was a thing Afrit liked to do, and a thing Quirk was acclimating herself to. Physical contact was still difficult for her, but she was working on it.

  She had seen Yorrax a few hours before—she was still nominally in charge of Will’s dragon contingent, and still seemed to command some respect there, but Quirk and Yorrax barely exchanged more than pleasantries anymore. Yorrax had been effectively cut out of
the dragon leadership, and was used by her brethren as little more than a messenger. Quirk felt bad about the whole situation, but the alliance with the dragons was fragile enough that she didn’t want to mess with it further.

  Still, she felt oddly embarrassed to be caught here, hand in hand with Afrit. Her time with Yorrax had been oddly intimate. They had shared a strength of commitment she had not shared with many others.

  She let go of Afrit’s hand.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  Yorrax snorted and took off back into the air.

  Quirk sighed, then left Afrit to go and find Will.

  Planning followed, and arguing, and Balur’s insistence that he be allowed to go “blade deep in the rectum of anyone who is putting himself in front of me,” and Lette explaining why that was a turn of phrase most people avoided outside of a particular sort of bordello, and Balur’s insistence that this was the fault of “stupid human language,” and then suddenly the dragons were all in the air, and fire was raining down, and as usual it was all rather academic and far too late.

  “To the front line!” Will grabbed Quirk and shoved her forward, in the direction of the screaming. “Get out there! Save people!”

  And Quirk ran. This was what she did now, after all. Academia was behind her. Saving the world was before her. This was what it took.

  And yet, as the two forces smashed together, mixed, mingled, and swirled about in a wild, bloody embrace, Quirk found that, as was increasingly the case these days, she was only truly interested in saving one person.

  Quirk pushed, and shoved, and burned her way through the chaotic tangle of bodies until she found Afrit.

  Afrit was standing on a fallen tree, gripping a short sword Quirk had scavenged for her from a Barphian temple. She was holding it in both hands, pointing it at anyone who came near. It was not a particularly threatening sight, but for reasons that would forever be beyond Quirk, it filled her heart with pride.