Bad Faith Read online

  Yorrax snarled, but Pettrax’s attention was already back on Rothinamax. “We were victorious, but whom do the humans celebrate? Who claims the glory?”

  Pettrax leaned in close to Rothinamax. “It is as we always suspected. The humans can think of us only as tools. Will Fallows will betray all his promises to us. So we must betray him first. It is now only a question of when, and how to make it count the most.”

  “He is already too powerful—” Rothinamax started.

  “You have the balls of a gecko.” Pettrax cut him off. “The only reason you have survived today is you lacked the bravery to truly engage in the fight.”

  Rothinamax bared teeth. Pettrax didn’t waste a second. Flame engulfed Rothinamax’s face. There was a flurry of wings and talons, and then Rothinamax’s head was slammed to the ground, his neck pinned by Pettrax’s claw.

  “I yield,” the old dragon coughed. “I yield.”

  Pettrax sneered. “Of course you do.”

  But Yorrax was barely paying attention. She was no fool; she knew these power games were taking place far above her head. But perhaps now she had a path to the top that was more reliable than waiting for Barph to kill all her opponents.

  When, where, and how to betray Will Fallows. That was the key to it all. That was what would make the dragons dominant over all Avarra. And the dragon who provided the information on how to do that …

  Yorrax knew she was small. Knew she lacked the blunt power of many of her kin. But that was not the only path to supremacy.

  I swore, she thought, looking at Netarrax’s corpse, to kill Will Fallows while standing on your corpse and Pettrax’s. She stepped up onto Netarrax’s dead body and surveyed the land. Well, now I am halfway there, old beast.

  44

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

  Gratt roared. Gratt raged. Gratt swept his claws through the wall of a ramshackle barn. Rotten wood cracked and split. Gratt dropped his shoulder, burst through the ruined wall. Cattle were screaming and thrashing. He hoisted a cow aloft and hurled it into the crowd. More animal screams. Human ones too. He waded in. He waded out red with gore.

  He emerged from the barn and saw the rest of the farmstead in flame. A few people were running across the fields. His troops were in pursuit.

  His troops …

  Gratt roared. Gratt raged. But there was no one left to kill.

  He had held all of Batarra. He had seized a city and crushed its heart as if it were nothing. He had ripped the life from a country and taken it for himself.

  And then Barph. Barph casually stepping out of a tear in reality to rail at him about Klink. Barph screaming and frothing. Barph decimating his army. His troops.

  Half of his army had been killed in mere minutes. And almost as if Barph weren’t truly paying attention to it. A mere sweep of the hand and a third had died. A single volley of arrows that was turned back, each shaft burying itself in life after life. Half of them dead like that. As if it were nothing.

  And then the desertions. The despair. And all his acts of rage and discipline did was speed things up. His troops scattering into the night. Even his lieutenants, who had come out of the Hallows with him. His power sputtering away with each act of cowardice he couldn’t control.

  He still held a few hundred men and women to his cause. There were still those too loyal or too cowed to flee. But a few hundred troops could not take a country. They could not unseam Batarra and spill its wealth into his hands. The rest of Avarra was a joke.

  And so here he was, razing this farmstead to the ground. Here he was, seizing cattle and chickens and a handful of horses, all so … so what? So he could annex another farmstead somewhere else.

  It was pathetic. It was rage inducing. And here he was with no one left to kill.

  He picked up one of the panicking cows and killed it instead. It was about as satisfying as annexing a farmstead.

  “I keep telling you: It’s about faith.”

  Gratt honestly wasn’t sure why he still kept Lawl alive. They were long past the point where the gods’ subjugation was amusing. Toil still wept each morning, and there was something in that, but it had lost most of its edge through repetition. Knole was essentially catatonic these days, lost so thoroughly in her head that she was impervious to taunts. Betra was occasionally pliable, but her attempts to win favor through seduction were so painful that they had become more sad than anything else these days.

  And Lawl. Still offering advice. Still so convinced of his worth.

  “These people believe in you. These people are a start,” Lawl went on, sitting cross-legged in his cage. “Make it about faith. About belief. You can become the god you want to be through them.”

  The worst of it was the nagging doubt that perhaps Lawl was right. Perhaps that was what he should have done, and perhaps now things wouldn’t be so desperate. But to take his advice now. To go crawling to Lawl for advice. Just the thought of Lawl’s smug smile.

  Gods. Why hadn’t he killed Lawl yet?

  Why hadn’t he?

  Perhaps there was someone left to kill today, some violence that could still put a smile on his face.

  “Will Fallows could still be bent to your will.” Lawl was prattling on. “He has the right idea. He has a cult. Make him your creature, and the crowds are your creature. Do it now, before he tries to put his own blood in the Summer Palace’s font.”

  Gratt crossed to where Lawl’s cage sat on the edge of what he was charitably thinking of as the battlefield. He tore the door off it.

  “I’m glad to see—” Lawl started. Then Gratt’s fist was around his throat, yanking him out of the cage.

  “I have had enough,” Gratt spat, “of your advice, old man. You have not learned to curb your tongue, and so I must remove it from you. I think it starts somewhere around your neck.” He flung Lawl to the dirt, yanked out his sword, and yes, he was smiling again. This was a piece of bliss that could warm his heart.

  Lawl twitched and flailed and shrieked in the dirt. Gratt raised the sword, lined up his blow.

  And then he brought the blade down.

  And then the blade stopped.

  Lawl screamed again.

  The blade was three inches above his neck.

  The blade was resting in a man’s hand.

  A god’s hand.

  Barph was there. Barph holding the edge of Gratt’s blade. Saving Lawl’s life. Thwarting Gratt’s desire.

  “Tell me,” Barph said. “Tell me you weren’t just about to do that. We had words about this. I explained very carefully. You don’t get to kill these people. That’s a pleasure reserved for me. So tell me, very nicely, that you weren’t about to fuck that up again, Gratt.”

  Gratt decided to explain by screaming, “Die!” very, very loudly and ripping out Barph’s throat.

  It didn’t go as well as he had hoped.

  When he could sit up again, he did so. Barph and Lawl appeared to be yelling at each other.

  “—don’t need your help!” Lawl was yelling.

  “—so fucking proud!” Barph was yelling at the same time. “So petty and absurd. This is why you wallow, Lawl. This is why—”

  “There is no love for you in this land! You give people wine and still—”

  “—you are nothing to me. Why I let you twitch and twitch. Your inability to learn is my constant amusement.”

  “—they hate you! You are an empty impotent god unworthy of the name.”

  Barph backhanded Lawl across the face. The god flew like an arrow from a marksman’s bow. “I am twice the god you ever were!” Barph screamed. “I am seven times the god!”

  Barph was, Gratt noticed as his head cleared, not arrayed with his usual majesty. His beard appeared to have been burned off. He was missing an eyebrow. His clothes were ragged and slashed. Had Lawl done that? Lawl couldn’t have done that.

  “I am the god!” Barph was yelling. “I am your god!”

  Gratt picked himself up. Ba
rph had his back to him, was facing Lawl, utterly absorbed. Gratt licked his claws, stalked forward.

  “You shall worship me,” Barph howled at Lawl. “You shall bend your head and your knee, and you shall beg me for forgiveness!”

  “I would rather worship my own piss.”

  “You—” Barph started.

  Gratt leapt, claws outstretched, teeth bared, silent and deadly.

  Barph caught him in midair. Gratt wasn’t even sure the god had turned around. He had just simply been facing one way, and then he faced another. The intervening motion seemed to have been snipped out of reality.

  “I am having,” Barph growled, “a private conversation.”

  There was a pause after that. Barph seemed to notice for the first time that the few hundred troops Gratt still controlled had stopped in their wanton pillaging and were all staring at this exchange.

  “Fine,” Barph muttered. He swept a hand at the troops.

  And again. Again. How could it happen again?

  Half of them dead. Half of his men dead. Just dropped lifeless to the ground, their veins black and bulging. Gratt howled.

  Barph shook his head. “There,” he said, almost to himself. “Perhaps you’ll learn now.”

  He looked at Lawl, still lying on the ground, dirty and bloody, and with a face full of hate. He shook his head again. “I don’t …,” he started. “You don’t … You mean nothing to me.”

  And then he was gone.

  Gratt fell to the ground. He was still screaming. Half his men were screaming. Screaming at the dead half on the ground next to them.

  “You must …,” Lawl said, grabbing at Gratt, hauling on him.

  Gratt turned murderous eyes on him.

  “Will Fallows,” Lawl spat. “You have to turn him to your will.”

  And gods. Gods. It was all the fucking gods’ fault. Gratt wanted to tear this fallen creature’s throat out. He wanted to scatter his limbs across the world. But he could not. Because of another god.

  He couldn’t bear the sight of Lawl anymore. Not of any of them.

  “Get out!” he screamed at Lawl. Lawl stared at him. Gratt stalked toward the cage with the other gods, with Betra and Toil and Knole. “Get the fuck out!” he yelled. He couldn’t stand the sight of them. “You’re a fucking hex!” he bellowed.

  And it was true, he thought. It had to be true. It had to be someone else’s fault. Lawl’s fault. The former gods’ fault. The current god’s fault. Barph’s fault.

  He tore the roof off the cage holding the other gods, tumbled them out onto the dirt. They were all staring at him.

  “Go!” he roared. “Go! No more will I have you bring death to these people.” He had to make his troops see it as the former gods’ fault. That’s how low he was. He was pandering to these plebs.

  Slowly Lawl got up, started to stagger away. Then the stagger broke into a run. And the other gods stared for a moment and then finally got up and broke into their own running jogs, half falling over the landscape, mounting a rise and then disappearing over it as he watched.

  Gone. They were gone.

  He felt oddly relieved, oddly bereft. The two emotions wouldn’t reconcile, just swirled together inside him.

  He looked back to his troops. What was left of his troops. Just one lieutenant left to stare at all his dead compatriots. Gratt beckoned the man forward. He lowered his voice. Hopefully nobody else had really listened to his conversations with Lawl.

  “Okay,” he said. “We have a new objective. Every resource we have left now goes into finding and capturing Willett Fallows.”

  45

  Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

  “No,” Balur said.

  Everyone stared at him. He didn’t particularly care. Unless one of them had spent the entirety of their acquaintance hiding the fact that they were a basilisk in an extraordinarily convincing disguise, staring at him wasn’t going to do any damage.

  “But—” Afrit said.

  “No,” Balur repeated. He was thinking that he had been pretty clear the first time, but apparently it bore repetition.

  “But the Analesians are your own kind,” Afrit said, which Balur was forced to assume must be indicative of some sort of learning disability.

  Fortunately he had fists.

  Will, though, apparently wanted to be punched more than Afrit did. “It doesn’t matter what Balur thinks,” he cut into the conversation. “This isn’t a democracy. I have said we’ll go into the desert to try to recruit some Analesians, and now we’re going to do it.”

  “Is this not the point,” Balur asked, looking at Afrit, “where you are pointing out that he is being an asshole dictator, and that the geopolitical contours of Analesian society are not being conducive to recruitment?”

  “Geopolitical contours?” Afrit looked at Balur with an insulting amount of surprise.

  “Why don’t you want to go back to Analesia?” asked Cois, still with hir hand on his arm.

  “Which jackass brought up Analesia?” Lette walked into the impromptu discussion. They were all sitting around a table in a burned-out farmstead. The owners were long gone, but somehow a dining table had survived the worst of the blaze, and that had been enough to recommend the site as a camp for the evening.

  “The Analesians will make excellent shock troops, and supplement our numbers after the loss of our dragons,” Will said. Balur had the distinct impression he was talking at the air instead of to any of the individuals actually standing in front of him.

  “Oh, shit.” Lette’s eyes went straight to Balur. “Are you okay?”

  Balur shrugged and tried to pretend that he was.

  “Why should he not be okay?” It was sweet of Cois to worry, and also definitely not helping the situation.

  Will stood before Balur had to worry about an excuse. “I’m tired,” he said to Lette. “Let’s go to bed.”

  Lette sent another worried glance at Balur. He shook his head as fractionally as possible. He didn’t want Cois fretting over him. And Lette had enough on her plate with whatever Will was becoming without needing to worry about him.

  Lette hesitated, but then she and Will linked arms and headed back toward the door Lette had just appeared through.

  “We are all knowing you don’t sleep,” Balur called after Will. “We all know you’re just running away.”

  Then he waited until everyone else had left, just to make sure no one had a chance to accuse him of the same thing.

  Three days later, Cois walked with hir delicate hand in his clumsy one as they traipsed toward the Analesian Desert.

  “Are you going to do the strong brooding thing the entire way?” zhe asked.

  Balur thought about it. He supposed he hadn’t said much since Will had set them on this course. But he knew exactly what zhe wanted to talk about.

  “I am supposing so,” he told hir.

  “Hmm.” Zhe grimaced. “Well, then I suppose you’re lucky that it’s extraordinarily sexy on you.”

  Zhe grabbed his ass. He found it did raise his spirits a little.

  Since leaving the Analesian Desert, Balur had discovered that humans had a lot of poetic names for different parts of the world. Salera was the world’s gateway to the Amaranth Ocean. Atria was the Lost Island. Kondorra was, to a certain subset of tavern-goers, Avarra’s Cock.

  No one had a poetic name for the desert. There was nothing poetic about it. It did not have drifts of golden sand. It did not have sun-tarnished slopes. It was not Avarra’s heart, because if it were then Avarra would have a septic, necrotic heart that was rotting the rest of the world from the inside out.

  The Analesian Desert had only one purpose: to kill you and everyone else stupid enough to wander into it. It was a swirling wilderness of jagged rock, biting sands, razor-edged winds, and creatures either too stupid or too stubborn to go anywhere else.

  Balur didn’t know which category the Analesians fell into. Probably both.

  Most of Will’s followers,
in Balur’s estimation, fell into both camps as well. However, there were degrees of stubbornness and stupidity. After just four hours in the desert’s heat, Balur could sense that Will was losing some of his support.

  “You were raised here?” Cois’s voice was muffled by the makeshift scarf zhe’d pulled up over hir face to block the flying sand.

  “The brood mothers raised me,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Brood …” Cois shook hir head. “You know, I never paid much attention to the Analesians when I was divine. Your race was never truly interested in romance. Lawl was the one who cared for you. Lots of fighting and discipline, as I recall.” Zhe squinted at him, and not just because of the sand. “You don’t seem big on discipline.”

  “Once the birth mother’s eggs are hatching,” Balur told hir, choosing the focus of his reply carefully, “the young are being taken to the brood mothers. The brood mothers are being the females who are too old to be birth mothers. It is being them who are teaching the young Analesians what they are needing to know, how to be surviving in the desert. You are listening to them or you are dying. Many are dying. Those who are not dying are strong enough to be Analesians.”

  It was more than he’d ever told Quirk about Analesian society, he supposed.

  Cois weighed the information. “Living in the Analesian Desert is stupid,” zhe said.

  He nodded. “Yes. But it is making you strong.”

  Cois squeezed his bicep. “Yes indeed.” Zhe wiggled hir ass as zhe walked beside him.

  But Balur was thinking that he hadn’t lived in the desert for a long, long time.

  They came in the night, as Balur had known they would.

  Will’s followers had wasted an hour trying to set up their tents, trying to cook supper. In the end they had wrapped themselves in blankets and eaten what food they could manage raw. Conversation was muted. Will had walked among his faithful, seemingly unaffected by the biting sand and suddenly plunging temperatures. He had settled the few rumbles of resentment Balur had overheard. Still, no one was happy to be here.

  There were sentries now, walking their routes, blinking against the flying sand, calling out to the shadow shapes of those looking for a quick place to piss in peace.