Bad Faith Read online

  When it was done, there were double doors before Barph, and he opened them onto the gardens. The sun saw its opportunity to make a fresh assault on his eyes, so he rearranged some clouds, and then grew a few trees for shade and sent the clouds skittering away. The sun glowered at him, but could do no harm. Nothing could.

  Barph was a god.

  No. Not just a god. The god. Barph was it. The solo deity. Numero uno. The heavens, and Avarra, and all of creation were his and his alone.

  He pulled a chair into existence, and a table, and a large carafe of something red and exquisite. Then he reinvented the chair four or five times until he got the volume and consistency of the cushions just right.

  Yes. It was good to be god.

  Just because he was the only god did not mean he was alone, of course. Under Lawl’s rule the heavens had been populated with servants and guards and butlers and valets and kitchen maids and all sorts of creatures who had roles too obscure for anyone but them and Lawl to know. Barph had done away with all that. That wasn’t him. In fact, Barph was the exact opposite of what Lawl was. Now there were no longer servants or guards or butlers or valets or fucking kitchen maids. Now there were just very drunk, very happy people, most of whom would wake up with no idea of where they were because he’d just rearranged the architecture again. Ah well. Hopefully no one was trapped in a doorless room this time.

  Barph could see at least one of the heavens’ former guards lying unconscious in the middle of a gravel path. He thought about it and then reshaped the creature’s feet so that they were massive and splayed and waved in the breeze. He thought about the noise they would make slapping about as the thing walked, and giggled to himself.

  Yes, it was good to be a god. He could run things the way he wanted. And what he wanted was to make sure nothing really ran at all.

  One edict, that was all. He had issued just one command: Let there be disorder. No more hierarchies. No more rules. No more enslavement of the self to artificial strictures. He had freed all of Avarra.

  There had been a lot of bloodshed after that edict, but … omelet, eggs, and so forth.

  He emptied the carafe down his throat, felt the hangover retreat in fear of what else he might do to it. Reenergized, he decided to go and survey his kingdom. The world he’d liberated.

  He swayed through the gardens—once formal, now a riot of color and bramble that he remade just frequently enough to keep the former servants on their toes. He had half a memory of creating something vile and grisly and mostly made of mouths to wander around here at some point, but maybe that had just been a dream. Without Toil here, he couldn’t be sure. Toil had always been good for reminding him what he’d gotten up to the night before, mostly because he wouldn’t shut up complaining about it.

  But Toil, of course, wasn’t here. Toil was in the Hallows, whining and wallowing in misery. Because he fucking deserved to be. All the gods did. All the useless, worthless pricks who had made him suffer for eight hundred years. Piss on them. Piss on them all.

  Which, in fact, Barph now did, standing on the edge of the heavens and emptying his straining bladder onto the Avarrans below, who were free from everything except getting splattered by their only god’s urine.

  Satisfied, Barph stared contentedly at the world below.

  And then he stared less contentedly. Because … seriously … one edict. One. That was it. Was it confusing somehow? He had explained it very carefully. He had told his priests—who were now all the priests in Avarra—to take care of this, and yet still … still the mortals kept doing this. To themselves. To him.

  A trial. They were holding a pissing trial. They had a jury and lawyers and a bailiff.

  It was like they were openly mocking him.

  Barph was sick of this shit.

  Gathering himself, he leapt off the edge of the heavens and rocketed toward Avarra. He tore through the air with such ferocity that the air around him flamed and roiled, and a thin sheet of flickering plasma formed a corona around his body, and when he landed in the center of the jury-rigged court—assembled by some Saleran villagers disgruntled by their youths’ newfound freedom to steal and burglarize now that rules such as those governing ownership had been abolished by divine decree—most of the men and women gathered there were atomized instantly. Half the village blew apart, bodies and buildings flying about in a homogenized mass of debris.

  Barph straightened, stood in the smoking crater, and worked a crick out of his neck.

  He could hear a lot of screaming.

  He decided to go and see what he could do about it.

  “What did I tell you?” he asked as he strode up and out of the crater. “What did I explain? No rules! Two words! That’s it. Could I have made it simpler? I don’t know how, but I’m open to options!”

  Nobody offered up an option. Most of the surviving villagers were just crawling around, clinging to whatever limbs remained on them or trying to stem the bleeding on others who lost theirs.

  “Who did this?” he yelled at them. “Did I do this?” He was shouting at such a volume that he could see the survivors’ eardrums bursting with enough force to expel blood from their ears in a fine spray, but he couldn’t help himself. “Cause and effect, you idiots!” he bellowed. “You are the cause. I am the effect. You did this. All of you. And yet somehow, I’m the arsehole!”

  He spat at a woman who was wailing and flailing at him with one and a half arms. The phlegm blew a hole through her chest, and she collapsed backward.

  “Here,” he said, finally finding it within himself to lower his voice. “Let me explain it one more time.”

  Then he concentrated and wove his hands through the air and gathered up what was left of the village and its inhabitants and wrote in words of rubble and mud and stone and broken bodies that stood fifty yards tall: NO RULES.

  “A monument to your gods-hexed stupidity,” he told one of the screaming women, who was jutting out halfway up the edifice. “Maybe you’ll pay attention next time.”

  He walked away, out across the misty Saleran morning, waiting until the screams faded. As they did, so did his anger. Had that been too much? This was normally the point at which Cois would appear and tell him that it was too much.

  But zhe didn’t. Of course zhe didn’t. No one could spoil his fun anymore.

  It was good to be god.

  5

  Party Planning

  Quirk pushed back the ragged curtain that served as her door and hobbled out into the angry glare of the early-morning sun.

  These days she made her bed in a burned-out servant’s house. It was part of a small cluster of similar buildings on an abandoned estate perched on the dusty plains of southwestern Batarra. In its heyday the estate had belonged to a local magistrate. How much his particular brand of justice had depended upon the law, and how much had depended on hefty bribes, Quirk wasn’t sure, but given the extent of his estate, she was willing to guess that he had favored the latter. Still, the magistrate had been symbolic enough of law and order for Barph to manifest and reduce his life and his entire holdings to a large scorch mark.

  And that was why Quirk had picked the estate as the base camp for her resistance force. Not only was it isolated and quiet—the city of Tarramon, gateway to the Analesian Desert, was fifteen leagues north of them, and they had seen little evidence of its existence since arriving—but there was also symmetry to their occupation. Barph had cleared this place, as if preparing the field where the seeds of his own destruction would be sown. Every moment she spent here, planning Barph’s end, was a moment spent spitting in his eye.

  The encampment’s other inhabitants were milling about in the small courtyard formed by the old servants’ buildings. Tarryl, the reluctant archer, was in one corner distributing fistfuls of corn among a clucking mass of chickens and geese. Svetson, their Chatarran blacksmith, was busy hammering away, beating horseshoes into submission. Next to him Norvard, the blacksmith’s thickset son, held one of their horses steady using
a makeshift bridle of rope. Poll was lying on a wooden pallet, a bandage around his ribs, a hand shading his eyes. Ellabet was sitting with a gaggle of younger children at her feet, spinning a yarn about the old gods.

  One of the children had her hand raised. “What’s an orgy?” she was saying. “My momma is always talking about the old gods and orgies.”

  Others were out in the nearby fields trying to coax life back to the land. Quirk still felt ambiguous about that. It was good for them to be self-sufficient, to not need to go begging for food from the people they were trying to liberate. But it also meant putting down roots. It meant that this place would be harder to leave. And Quirk was certain that a time would come when how many of them lived would be directly proportional to how fast they fled this place.

  She started to hobble toward Ellabet. The wound in her arm throbbed angrily at her. She showed it the size of her own rage, and it backed off a little.

  “You shouldn’t be up.”

  She turned to see Gartrand coming up behind her holding a pail of water. The gash on his forehead had been inexpertly stitched. Still he seemed in good enough cheer.

  She scowled at him.

  “Those wounds need another day or two of rest,” he said without any trace of rancor. “Unless you have some healing magic you never mentioned before. Because if you do, then you and I need to have words.” He tapped his hand an inch below his head wound.

  Gartrand had been a grocer in his former life. His wife had been part of the Tarramon city guard. Then Barph had decided to step on the guard barracks when Gartrand’s wife was in them.

  “Barph doesn’t rest,” Quirk pointed out. She had spent four days on her back after the temple mission went so far awry.

  “Well,” said Gartrand, setting down his pail, “Barph is a divine being powered by the worship of millions. You’re …” He shrugged. “Well, you’re a whole lot more driven and powerful than I am, I suppose. But if you start stomping around today, I’m going to come and tell you I told you so when you’re laid up on your back again this afternoon.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something with that pail?” Quirk didn’t see how this conversation was helping her get her revenge.

  Gartrand shrugged. “Nothing urgent.” There was the slightest hint of insolence to his smile.

  She understood, of course. The attempt to bring levity. Gartrand knew how bleak life could be. He knew the importance of being able to glimpse the sun between the clouds.

  But she still couldn’t quite appreciate the gesture.

  “Are we free, Gartrand?” she asked. “Have we liberated people from Barph’s rule? Have we avenged our loved ones?”

  A cloud crossed Gartrand’s face for a moment, if only a moment.

  “No,” he said. “But we’re still alive, aren’t we, Quirk?”

  She didn’t answer. And she saw the point he was angling at, perhaps. But as well as she had come to know Gartrand, she did not know him well enough to discuss her own ambivalence toward life.

  “Anyway,” he went on in the face of her frosty silence. “You’re wrong. Barph does rest. In fact, he is mostly a god of leisure these days, it seems.”

  Confusion plowed a furrow in Quirk’s brow.

  “You ain’t heard?” Gartrand looked faintly amused. “Word is that for the past two days Barph’s been manifested in a suburb of Tarramon drinking his way through all of last summer’s vintages.”

  He smiled at her, an amused twist of his lips, a sparkle in his eyes. And he was utterly oblivious to the bomb he had just detonated in her mind.

  Barph. Fifteen leagues away. Barph, sitting in Tarramon, waiting for her. For her blade. For her revenge.

  “Quirk?” said Gartrand. He seemed to realize that he’d miscalculated somewhere along the way. “Are you—”

  “Get everyone ready to ride,” she said. “Now.”

  “What?” He just stared at her. Because for all his good heart and insurrectionist tendencies, he was apparently a complete fucking fool who wouldn’t recognize a golden opportunity should it sidle up to him in a bar and offer to fondle his manhood.

  “Everyone!” she snapped. “Everyone who can wield a blade, raise a club, form a fucking fist. Get them. Get them on a horse. We are riding to Tarramon!”

  She was vaguely aware that she was shouting. The others were gathering around.

  “Tarramon?” Gartrand stared at her stupidly.

  “A city. Near here. Containing our mortal enemy.” She turned to the gathering crowd. “Move!” she yelled.

  “Containing a god.” Gartrand was not moving. “Containing a being of unlimited divine power.”

  She stalked forward, grabbed him by the lapel. He looked at her, caught between surprise and bewilderment.

  “Six months,” she spat at him. “Six fucking months, waiting for this.”

  “What are you going to do?” He was almost laughing at her, and gods she wanted to roast the skin right off his face right then. She wouldn’t. But she wanted to.

  “He’s a god,” Gartrand repeated.

  “He’s Barph. And we are dedicated to ending him.”

  Gartrand shook his head as best he was able. “You’re serious?” He let out a huff of something that was not quite mirth. “I’m a resistance fighter, Quirk,” he said. She opened her mouth to answer, but he cut her off. “That’s what I signed up for. What we all signed up for. Because we saw your passion, and we saw a world gone to shit. And we wanted to fight against the tide. And we wanted to fight for something better than what we have.”

  “Then saddle the fuck up,” she hissed.

  “Shut up,” he snapped. And she suddenly saw how close to the edge she’d pushed Gartrand. She let go of his shirt. For all that she could melt him alive, the man had four inches and fifty pounds on her.

  “I signed up to fight back. But I never expected to win. He’s a god, Quirk. A god. We can’t kill a god. We can slow him down. We can make pockets of the world where he doesn’t crush us. But that’s it. That’s all. We’re resistance fighters. Not suicidal fuckwits.”

  And there was still heart in his words. Still that decent goodness. He was, he thought, trying to save her, to save them all.

  “Gods can die,” she hissed. “I was there. I saw it. It will happen again. I will make it happen again.”

  Gartrand’s anger seemed to ebb out of him. “I know you’re hurting,” he said. “We’re all hurting. We’re all a little broken. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t, but … gods, Quirk. We all lost people. Ellabet lost her gods-hexed kids. This is worth fighting for, yes. But it’s not worth dying for.”

  “She was.” It was out of Quirk before she caught the words. And may the gods piss on the man for making her say it. For even bringing Afrit up. She wasn’t his to talk about. And this wasn’t about Afrit. This wasn’t. This wasn’t.

  “This is about Barph,” she managed. Her voice wasn’t quite steady, but she tried to mask all the hurt under her anger. “This is about all the horror he has rained down upon this world.” She turned away from Gartrand. She turned to the crowd. She could play to them, even if she couldn’t play to him. She was the glue that had bound them all together.

  “Barph lies within hand’s reach. He is fat and exposed. He sits, ignorant and uncaring of all the pain and suffering he has wrought upon the world. Upon us. He flaunts his callousness. He celebrates this pain everyone feels.”

  They stared at her. Some chewed their lips. Some ducked their heads. Some had the same look of shock that she knew was on Gartrand’s face. Some even looked disgusted.

  But not all of them.

  Ellabet stepped out of the crowd. She had a hand raised. “I’m in,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Ell …,” Gartrand said. He was sweet on her, Quirk thought. She wondered if that would sway him.

  “I’ll come.” It was Norvard, the blacksmith’s son. She smiled at him, finding herself grateful.

  “And me.” Poll alread
y had his club ready.

  There were five of them in all. Five who would ride with her. Five who would fight at her side. Five of them who were actually worth her time.

  “Good,” she said to them, when it was clear no one else had the balls for this fight. “Now we ride.”

  Quirk had spent an inordinate amount of time over the past six months thinking about death. Afrit’s primarily. Barph’s second. Her own close behind that. She had spent a long night staring at a knife and wondering if she could be reunited with Afrit that way. In the end she simply could not take that plunge before she knew she had taken every step possible to stop Barph and his endless reign of bullshit.

  Right now all those deaths felt very close. Lying on her belly, creeping down an alleyway, approaching Barph.

  Unfortunately the waste matter of Tarramon also felt very close. Apparently Tarramon lacked a functioning sewage system, and its populace used the streets as public latrines.

  She set her jaw. She could take this. She could take whatever Avarra handed out. She had nothing left that could break.

  “I don’t know how we’ll get in.” Norvard was squatting on his haunches deeper in the alley’s shadows. “That crowd.”

  Barph was in a whorehouse. His presence was sending people mad, so the city was awash in stories of people dancing and drinking and screwing to death. And the square outside the whorehouse was so full of people, even the sane citizens were in danger of being crushed to death by the throng.

  “Crowds scatter,” Ellabet said. “They panic.” She was down on her belly beside Quirk. She tapped the steel tip of her staff against the ground. She was smiling.

  “That crowd,” said Quirk, “is perfect.”

  “It’s funny,” Norvard said, shaking his head. “The berserkers back home were normally much bigger than you.”

  Norvard had a hammer in each hand, both with heavy, well-worn heads. His father had pressed them into his hands, tears in the older man’s eyes. Now he worked them back and forth, as if practicing battles in miniature.

  “You don’t stab a god to death,” she told him.