Bad Faith Page 25

  Barph was looking down at the ground, and Quirk could glimpse only the edge of his face, so his expression was hard to read, but for a moment she could have sworn it was one of sadness, or perhaps regret, and then it changed and was a look of perhaps the purest hatred she had ever seen. Something that put ice in her heart and made the words, “No! Come back!” form in her mind, but the dragons were already out of earshot. And anyway, as Barph looked round at the collective roars of the dragons, his face wore only a smile.

  And thank all the gods that Afrit had stayed back here with her, was not there in the vineyard.

  Then there was a shout from behind her. No. Shout was too insubstantial a word. Five thousand people shouted as one. Five thousand people charged.

  “No!” she screamed. “Don’t!” And then, because she felt someone should point it out, “It’s fucking moronic!”

  They ignored her. Of course. They had seen their cursed enemy, the renounced god, their own personal demon. Of course they charged, roaring up the hill, seizing what weapons they could, shaking fists against the heavens, full of the piss and vinegar that was about to be mashed out of their mangled bodies. They had to charge, no matter how stupid and suicidal it was. They had staked too much of their identities on it not to.

  The first dragon was almost on Barph now. Netarrax out in front, no longer the fat, heavy beast Quirk had found on Natan but a lean, sleek beast, scales shining in the sun, wings folded back, body angled like a lance, jaws stretching to encompass infinity. A world eater, a god eater, full of fire and rage, come to fulfill the very purpose for which he had been built. Death and absolute destruction.

  Almost lazily, Barph pointed a finger at him.

  Out of the clear, blue, cloudless sky a bolt of lightning came. More than a bolt. A cataract of electrical energy. A god’s fist of crackling white light. It smashed into Netarrax. It smashed through him.

  The dragon’s charge was utterly negated. All forward momentum obliterated in an inversion of flesh and bone as Netarrax’s face caved in. Caved in to his neck, which was sent smashing into his body, half disembowling the beast in midair and turning his charge into a tumbling, messy pratfall. And then what was left of a once-majestic beast was out of sight behind the crest of the hill, only the dull crash of bone and flesh against soil to mark his fate.

  Barph’s grin grew wider.

  The rest of the dragons shrieked and split apart, spreading out around Barph like a shroud, skimming past him.

  Barph closed one eye, narrowed the other, pointed his finger.

  Another thunderbolt smashed down through the sky. Another lance of divine rage. Another dragon’s head snapped viciously sideways, its body spinning limp and out of control. It plowed to earth out of sight.

  Another dragon dived, ducked beneath Barph’s outstretched arm, raked its claws across his chest, shredded his white robe, left streaks of red.

  Barph didn’t even flinch. He aimed again. A thunderbolt struck home.

  Quirk could hear the human contingent of Will’s army still charging, heedless and idiotic. She looked around. She was the only one left here. Everyone else was gone.

  Everyone.

  Afrit!

  She stared. And no, surely no, because Afrit was hers, and was beautiful and wise and full of intelligence, and she had too much to live for. She had Quirk to live for. She would not have … could not have …

  But she had. She had gone with the others. She had gone to immolate herself at the feet of a god.

  So now Quirk had to as well.

  She started running, pulled up her skirts in a fist and ran and ran. Above her head dragons were screaming. Lighting flared again, again, again. Fire blossomed in great red blooms, yellow petals curling away in wilting beauty. She crested the hill and saw Will’s army spread out in front of her. A great unorganized rabble. Dragons crashed to earth in the middle of the heaving mass of them—flesh bombshells kicking up earth and bodies in vast cresting sprays to spear those nearby with roots and bones.

  Barph had been slashed again and again. His robes were ribbons, his chest crosshatched with bloody gashes. His beard was on fire. And he was laughing, and murdering. Almost a third of the dragons lay dead on the ground.

  And Quirk ran. And she ran. Her breath came ragged and urgent, but she did not slow. A stitch clawed at her. The dead tried to trip her. And she did not slow. She fought through Will’s army as half of it broke in the face of such destruction, as half of it redoubled its efforts to murder this god of nothing, this unmaker of their happiness. And she did not slow.

  And above them Barph laughed and murdered and cackled. His massive feet came down, and lives ended beneath them. Bodies squashed flat, bones bursting their skin. People clung to his ankles, were shaken free, went sprawling. And still the people were undeterred. Still they rushed forward with knives and spears and swords, slashing uselessly at flesh as hard as iron. Arrows and crossbow bolts stood out like pins against his flesh—even provided handholds for some foolhardy assailants—but barely a trickle of blood flowed from the wounds. And Barph pointed again and again and again, and the lightning came down like rain.

  “Afrit!” Quirk’s cry came out as a wheeze, a whisper against the roar of the battle and the roar of the dragons overhead. It was inaudible. But she called out again. “Afrit!” Everything was chaos. Everything was madness. It was everything Barph could ever hope for. Utter anarchy. There was no way she could find Afrit in this.

  And then she did. Somehow. Impossibly.

  Afrit was standing atop a crest of dirt. Torn vines were all around her. And she held a kitchen knife clenched in one raised fist. Around her a crowd of archers were desperately seizing arrows from their quivers. To Quirk it looked as if Afrit were standing still. But that couldn’t be. That had to be a trick of adrenaline and fear and hope and the fact that she only glimpsed her for a moment, and then the world turned white.

  The thunderbolt crashed to earth, seared a hole in the earth and Quirk’s vision.

  She screamed. She found her volume then. Because … because … Gods …

  But there were no gods left to pray to.

  She was falling back, collapsing as the shock wave hit her. She was half-blind, her vision seared.

  And then she saw her. Afrit. Still there. Not obliterated. Out of the immediate blast zone of the lightning strike. But close to it all the same. Closer than Quirk. Up in the air now, rag-doll limp, spinning over and over. Flying. Falling. And Quirk would catch her, would cushion her, would protect her, but here she was flat on her back, pain only starting to stretch its fingers through her body and past the barriers of her shock.

  Afrit slammed to the earth two yards in front of her, skidded through the dirt, a tumbling, tangling pile of disjointed limbs. She was a blur, barely recognizable as human, whirling just out of reach of Quirk’s flopping hand.

  Quirk heaved herself over, found she could get to all fours. The world swam about her. She tried to focus. Afrit. Afrit needed her. She had to get up.

  She made it to her knees, to one knee. Then a final heave and she was on her feet, stumbling, staggering, but she could see Afrit lying in front of her. Afrit covered in blood. Afrit unmoving. Afrit twisted and broken.

  No. No. No. It could not be. It could not be.

  But gods, there was so much blood.

  The horror, the fear, the shock—it was all too big, too overwhelming. She felt crushed by it, unable to process it fast enough to stop it bearing her to the ground, destroying her utterly.

  And then it was gone, subsumed, sublimated. Then all it was was rage.

  She turned away from Afrit, unable to bear the sight of that beautiful, broken body. She turned away to see Barph, still towering, still huge, and she understood, she knew perfectly why that crowd was there, why they were hurling themselves futilely against his ankles.

  Barph had to die. Anything, no matter how small, she could do to hasten that fate, she had to do it. It was everything. It was all the meaning
in the world.

  She became fire and fury. She was not a conduit. She was not a gateway. The fire did not flow out of her. She was fire, utterly and purely. She was a torrent of endless rage pouring across the battlefield, ripping uncaring through Will’s troops and careening madly into Barph. She battered and battered against the seawall of his flesh, grinding and grinding away layers of divine protection.

  She could feel fire above her, the sympathetic call of elemental siblings. The dragons were pouring it onto Barph even as their numbers thinned yet further. They were diving through their own bursts of flame, risking scorched wings and burned flanks to claw more and more chunks of flesh from the god who had tricked them, who had slain so many of their brothers and sisters.

  And somehow, impossibly, Barph was staggering back, was being taken down by the ferocity of the assault on his body. Somehow he was yelling and flailing. His thunderbolts were going wide of their marks. The ferocity of the dragons’ assault seemed only to grow. A thunderhead of flame, claw, and rage tearing into Barph. Will’s human followers were at his feet, his ankles, his calves, carving and slashing their way into divine flesh.

  And for a moment, even with Afrit lying behind her, she exulted. She gloried. Because this was it. This was revenge. This was victory. This was all she had left to accomplish in the world. And then she could be done. Then she could rest. Then she could join Afrit.

  And then, as suddenly as he had appeared, Barph wasn’t there. He vanished into thin air. People who had been clinging to his body, climbing the great height of him, were suddenly hurtling to the ground. Ankles and legs snapped. People howled. Quirk howled. She howled in rage and frustration. He had fled. Her enemy had run from the battlefield to lick his wounds and fight another day. And another. And another. On and on, unending. Days empty and hollow of meaning.

  From the peaks of exultation, Quirk tumbled toward despair.

  And then, out of nowhere, someone caught her.

  As she knelt on the scorched earth, smoke still drifting from her shoulders, a heat shimmer above her head, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up. There, bloody, beaten, but still somehow alive, was Afrit looking down at her. And there was, it turned out, still a reason for being alive.

  40

  He Who Controls the Past

  Will stared around. Chaos and destruction. The villa was nothing more than a pile of rubble. A dragon’s corpse was draped across it. The vineyards were burning. The earth was churned. Bodies everywhere. The injured and the bereaved screaming. The scents of blood and smoke mixing in the air. All of the beauty and peace of this place were gone.

  For the first time, Will wondered if he could blame Barph for this. The god had come here in peace, after all. If Will and his followers hadn’t been here …

  But what choice had there been? This was why they were here: to defeat Barph, to take back their world. Could they have just sat by?

  He probably should have. He had known it even as he flung himself screaming across the villa’s courtyard. He had been too weak. He had the support of a few thousand. Barph had the support of a few million. He should have fallen back and bided his time. And still there had been no choice. If he had been seen to quail, to hang back and refuse to fight? It would have been a disaster. It would have undermined him utterly.

  But now? Here? In the middle of this death and destruction? In the middle of this unmitigated defeat? He wasn’t sure it was any better.

  He could feel the crowd’s loss of faith. He could feel their doubts. Their rising panic. He knew that already some of them were looking to the horizon with a sense of longing. The desire for anonymity and escape growing, taking them from him, stealing his power, undoing all the work he had done.

  He could feel the thing that was of the Deep Ones lying within him starting to panic too. He could feel its knowledge that its sustenance would be lost. And he tried to tell himself that all that fear and dread was alien to him, was being layered onto his thoughts by something that worked for him and that was within his control. And yet …

  His breath was starting to come hard. His skin felt fragile. He had to turn this around. Yet there was no way to turn this disaster around. There was …

  Unless …

  He looked again, tried to look closer. Almost half of the dragons lying dead. Several hundred humans. Some of them crushed by the dragons meant to be protecting them.

  Unless …

  He walked forward, walked toward the remains of one of the fallen villas, toward white rubble and black dirt. He stepped up on unsteady mounds of rubble, stood precarious before them all.

  They weren’t looking at him. He was the least of their concerns.

  “People,” he said. And they didn’t hear him. “People,” he said again, and he put power into the word. The power they gave him. The power he needed. Needed so much more of, if he was ever to finish this. And this time, for the first time in a long time, he felt the cost of its use. He felt the loss of power that this volume required. But they looked. They looked and they stared.

  “People!” he said. And he tried to force cheer into his voice, excitement. And gods, he was a farmer—or had once been a farmer—not an actor, but he did his best. “People!” for a fourth time. He raised his arms into the air. “See how Barph flees from us!”

  This was met by a rather incredulous silence. People continued to stare at him, but they did little else. There were no cheers here. No raised fists. There was … confusion. Confusion starting to coalesce into something harder and uglier. He had brought them to this.

  Will could feel his reserves dwindling even as he spoke, but it was either gamble everything or watch it trickle away. He had no appetite for the latter. Not anymore.

  “We fought a god today!” he roared. “We the people of Avarra! Not heroes out of legend. Not undying warriors bestowed with divine gifts. But you and I! Your neighbors. Your friends. Your brothers. Your sisters. We, the downtrodden, the dirty, the unkempt. We, the everyday citizens of this world. We took on a god!”

  And he knew that he was no longer any of the things he described. That he was somehow, now, special. That he had assistance that was more than a little divine. And that almost all the damage done to Barph had been done by the dragons. But truth wasn’t what mattered now. Hope mattered. Belief mattered. Belief in this fight. In him.

  “Did he hurt us?” Will asked them. “Did many of us die today?” He knew he could not appear too far out of touch with reality. “Yes.” Will nodded. “He did. And my heart bleeds with every victim out there. I mourn with everyone bereaved. I feel every loss.”

  And that was true, though perhaps not as they took it.

  “But what did we achieve?” Will asked them. “What did we do today? Who ran from this field of battle? Who stands proud at its end?”

  And, to be honest, he didn’t think many of them were sure of the answer to that question. Or why it was a question. But he could take that uncertainty. He could use it.

  “We stand here!” he bellowed. He felt the ground tremble at the force of his words. He felt his insides hollow out as the power rushed out of him with them. And he prayed desperately for it to come back. “We still hold this field! A god flees before us! A god tucks his tail and runs! From us! From the people of Avarra. We are here, and he is gone. For we have proven him what we know him to be: NOTHING!”

  And this was it. The last of it. The final scraps of his power. The final desperate lies. It felt as if something was thrashing in his mind. “Barph is nothing compared to us!” he yelled through the pain. “His power is nothing compared to ours! His might is nothing compared to ours! And in the end, his reign of a few months will be nothing to the reign of peace and prosperity we establish for this world! His future is nothing! Ours”—he swept his eyes over the broken and bedraggled crowd—“ours is everything.”

  And that was it. He was spent. He tried to stay standing there at least, to keep his chest puffed out and defiance in his eyes. He tried to not
visibly give in to the rising agony.

  The moment hung in the air.

  Come on. Come on, you little fuckers. Do something. React. Believe me. Give me what I need, you shits.

  He stared at them. Streaked with blood and dirt and tears. Sweating and panting. Their clothes ragged and torn after months on the road. Their hopes lying smashed into bloody pieces around them.

  Oh gods … what was happening to him? What sort of insane death march was he trying to force these people into? People had died here today. People were in mourning. And he was …Gods.

  He could feel the hunger inside him. The desperation for adoration. And what had he brought into himself in that space below the Hallows? What had his desperation driven him to do?

  He opened his mouth to take it all back. To tell them that this was a foolish, desperate fight. That he was a liar and a fool. That he was spelling out a death sentence for them. That they had to flee from this place.

  Then it hit him like a tidal wave. Their cheer. Their roaring, upraised voices. Their clenched fists hurled skyward.

  It flooded him. Parts of his brain felt as if they were detonating. Wave after wave of ecstasy breaking over him. Because, yes, yes, yes, they believed Will. They had fought a god today. And the price? Well, the price had been worth it.

  Will shook and shuddered, tried to contain all the power as it filled him. Each gasp of air he managed to suck down was a white-hot lance into his lungs. His eyes felt as if they were straining against the limits of their sockets.

  And still they cheered. And still they roared. And still they believed.

  41

  Quitting Time

  “I’m okay,” Afrit said.

  She was not okay.

  She repeated it anyway. When that didn’t help, she tried, “Please let go, Quirk. You’re hurting me.”