Bad Faith Read online

  It was Ellabet’s turn to look confused, and more than a little angry. “Why are we here?”

  “Gods thrive on belief,” Quirk said. “We have to kill belief.”

  “Kill belief?” Poll, standing well back with the other recruits, looked as if someone had just punched him in the frontal lobes.

  Quirk took a breath. This was why they attacked the temples. They understood that, didn’t they? “We undermine his authority,” she said. “We make him look weak and stupid. And that makes him become weak and stupid.”

  “How do we do that?” Norvard had borrowed Poll’s look.

  “Don’t worry,” Quirk said. “This I have done before.”

  The flame was small at first. It sat in her palm and glowed. She felt the warmth of it in her chest. Something deep and profound. She felt possessive of it. This was her creation. It was from her body, her will. She wondered if this was how the mothers of murderers felt.

  She released the flame, watched it become a ribbon stretching across the ground of the square. Even this effort pushed at the walls of her control, so she kept the line small. Just a whisper of flame, enough to fight the breeze. And she pushed it out, around the edge of the crowd.

  A handful of people noticed it, shouted, jumped back. One tried to stamp it out. She felt the pounding of his foot as if it were beating against the inside of her skull. She redoubled her efforts.

  “Is she okay?” she heard Norvard ask.

  “Let her focus.” Ellabet had seen Quirk work before.

  “Looks like she’s going to shit.”

  Quirk wasn’t sure she would bring Norvard out on any missions again. Should it come up. Maybe, just maybe, if she controlled this fire correctly, there wouldn’t be a need.

  She pushed the fire farther, faster. It reached the wall of the brothel where Barph lurked. A swaying sign announced its name as the Parting Curtains.

  Letting the flame go was almost a relief, feeling it bloom and blossom and consume. Feeling the old paint and timber of the brothel wall feed it.

  But there was only so much freedom she could allow it to have. And now that the flame had broken free once, it fought harder and harder against her. And the limits she placed on it and herself became harder and harder to keep in place.

  More saw the flames now. More and more. She heard the gasps from the crowd, even as she closed her eyes, as she felt out the shapes the fire had to occupy with her will alone. It felt as if something were chafing inside her mind. Thoughts bent out of shape.

  Barph had taught her this, of course. And there was some justice in using the lessons against him.

  Sweat beading her brow, she made the fire obey her.

  “The fuck?” breathed Norvard.

  And this time she smiled. Because she heard the words on the lips of a hundred others gathered in the square.

  Written on the walls in fifty-foot flaming letters was a single three-word message:

  “Barph blows goats.”

  6

  Look, Dragons Are in the Series Name, Okay?

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Ellabet’s reaction was not, to be fair, the one Quirk had been hoping for.

  “Trust me,” she said through gritted teeth as the fire fought against her confining will. “This was how it was in Vinter. The dragons were poised to ascend to the heavens. I … We … we mocked the dragons mercilessly. We turned the people against them. You can’t worship someone you ridicule.”

  “We’ve come all this way to tell dirty jokes about him?” Ellabet was practically spitting. “We could do the same thing by painting graffiti on temple walls! I came here to make a god bleed!”

  Quirk so didn’t have time for this, as the fire desperately tried to consume the rest of the whorehouse and dissolve into nothing but chaos.

  “If he’s to bleed,” she managed, “the people have to see him as someone who can bleed. They have to see him as someone laughable. We have to make them laugh at him.”

  She forced the fiery words to twist and change.

  “Barph likes fat moms.”

  It was crude and stupid, but if life had taught Quirk anything, it was that belief, faith, and life itself were crude and stupid.

  “Then why aren’t you being funny?” Poll asked. He sounded genuinely confused.

  “I’m open,” Quirk hissed, “to suggestions.”

  She forced the flaming words to change: “Barph is so fat …”

  “This is not how anybody dies,” said Norvard, standing up. He was clutching the two hammers his father had given him, white-knuckled. “This is how someone is left with a bloody nose in a schoolyard.”

  How fat was Barph? She could feel the sweat steaming off her skin.

  “… he can’t fit back out of this whorehouse.”

  Even Quirk knew that was weak.

  “We’re going to die,” said Poll.

  But then, suddenly, there was laughter. Booming, riotous, and filling the square. And for a moment Quirk’s spirits lifted and raced for the sky. But there was something wrong with the laughter too. It was laughter at a volume that assaulted ears. It was laughter that could be felt rippling over the skin.

  It was not the crowd’s laughter.

  It was Barph’s.

  Quirk opened her narrowed eyes, and she saw him.

  Barph emerged from the whorehouse. Barph laughing. Barph laughing at her.

  He still looked a lot like the old man he had pretended to be for so much of their acquaintance. The village drunk. His beard was still a wild, untamed mat of hair that flapped and slapped at his bare pigeon chest. His hair was still gray and long, though now it was slicked close to his skull and plaited down his back. And the strange, magnetic energy was still there, though now it was amplified a thousandfold. Her eyes could not help but be drawn to him, track his every movement. His laughter, deafening as it was, was also somehow fascinating. She didn’t want to miss a moment of it. When he spoke, she would hang on his words.

  The crowd were on their knees. Some were prostrated, mumbling prayers, shouting their sins. Some had flung themselves to the ground so they could lie there quaking, slowly marinating in their own piss puddles. Others were running. Others standing bewildered, paralyzed.

  The fire tore free of Quirk’s control. Behind Barph the flames roared lasciviously, rushing up and over the whorehouse’s walls.

  “Quirk!” boomed Barph. “Quirk? Is that you?”

  “Oh gods.” Ellabet’s voice quavered. “We are so fucked.”

  “What do we do?” asked Norvard. His hammers hung slackly by his sides, and his eyes searched for exits.

  “I don’t know about you”—Poll stood up—“but I’m dying on my feet.”

  “Yes.” Barph’s voiced boomed out in answer. “Yes you are.”

  There was a flash of light, a crack of sound. It was so fast and so … absolute … so big and loud, it seemed to fill the world around Quirk utterly. And then it was over almost before it had begun, and Poll wasn’t there. There was just a wet red smear on the ground.

  “Am I not a bountiful god?” And there was still laughter in Barph’s voice. He was slurring noticeably. “Do I not give my people what they ask for?”

  He hiccupped.

  “Fuck you.” Quirk didn’t say it loud enough, she thought, for him to hear. But it wasn’t for him. It was for her. It was so she could hear her defiance. So she could know who she was, and why she was here, and what she was doing. It was to remind herself that he couldn’t break her anymore. That was already done.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed to the world, to the absent heavens, to the crowd who would not abandon their faith in this monster. “Fuck you!”

  Ellabet and Norvard and the others were staring at her. Which part of her knew was better than them staring at the mess that had been Poll.

  “Oh,” Barph said, “this is boring. He waved a hand at the alleyway where they were crouched. “They’re over there.”

  It took the crowd a mome
nt. It took Quirk a moment. But then the crowd turned and looked.

  “Come on,” said Barph. “Your god commands you and all that shit.”

  The first to pick himself up was a man in his fifties. He came charging at them, face contorted with hatred. “Unbelievers!” he screamed at them. “Filth! Deviants!” Anger and disgust poured out of him.

  He was also unarmed. And he was the sort of person they were meant to be liberating from Barph’s rule. Quirk pulled herself up out of the dirt, held up an arm to defend herself. But she didn’t set fire to him.

  The man plunged into her, fists slamming against her ribs. He drove her back against the alley wall as she fought for air. His hand found her throat. He pinned her there while she gasped.

  Ellabet was the first to recover. She cracked her steel-tipped staff over the man’s skull. There was a sound like a ripe watermelon being split open. Then the man’s fingers fell nervelessly away from Quirk’s throat, and he dropped bonelessly to the ground.

  And then a thousand of his friends seemed to arrive all at once.

  The alleyway was a bottleneck. It forced the screaming, gnashing horde to pile into each other, to push and heave, straining against its walls. The alleyway saved their lives.

  Yet still the weight of people bore down. Ellabet stood with her feet planted, whirling her staff in tight arcs, smashing at limbs and skulls. Norvard was beside her, swinging his hammers in wild, clumsy arcs. One of the women who had accompanied them had strung her bow and was firing arrows over the first few ranks, desperately trying to sow fear in their attackers. The other had a long polearm and was jabbing it to either side of Norvard and Ellabet, trying to keep the crowd at bay.

  And it was not enough.

  Men and women dropped to earth under the resistance fighters’ blows. But they were simply trampled by more and more and more and more people desperate to get at them. Even those still on their feet had people desperately clambering and leaping past them. The bottleneck would burst.

  “Help us!” Ellabet risked a look backward at Quirk. A dagger glanced against her cheekbone. Blood sprayed down her face in a red sheet. “Fucking help us.”

  Quirk was here to save these people.

  If she didn’t kill these people, they would kill her.

  And then fire. Great gushing sheets of fire. Fire that fell like rain. And the crowds screamed and flailed and finally thrashed back and away. And still fire roared at them, and consumed them.

  Quirk stood openmouthed. Because it was not her flame.

  A shadow in the sky. A flicker of swift wings. A roar, throaty and deep. The whistle of wind as the thing, the shape, the terror sped overhead. Fire fell from it as if it were some inverted cloud.

  People were on fire. Ellabet was flinching back from scorching heat. The wall of murderous people scrambling toward them was falling apart.

  Quirk looked up, wished she could will the walls of the alleyway farther apart so she could make out what in the Hallows was happening. Then she saw it again. Saw the shape of it clearly, its silhouette framed against the summer sky. The faint impression of color—blue flanks and a white underbelly blurring together. She saw its long neck. She saw its leathery wings. She saw its jaws open.

  She saw fire.

  “A dragon,” she breathed. “It’s a gods-pissing dragon.”

  No one else was looking. No one else cared. They just wanted to get away, to run screaming from this new and unexpected source of death. Norvard was cheering. He thought it was her.

  But the dragons are dead, thought the academic.

  Barph killed them, thought the realist.

  He’s fallible, thought the optimist.

  He’s going to kill this one, thought the pragmatist.

  And there Barph was. Still laughing, still smiling. He was growing, physically growing before her eyes. He was becoming larger and larger, a giant of a man, ten feet tall and growing.

  The dragon came round at him again, focusing its fire now. Barph was engulfed in an endless stream of destruction. Behind him the whorehouse, already trembling under the assault of Quirk’s flames, let out tortured cracking sounds as beams split and splintered. Walls started to collapse.

  And still Barph laughed. And still Barph grew.

  The dragon howled, slashed at Barph’s face as it danced past him.

  “Attack!” Quirk screamed to the others, shedding paralysis. They had to take advantage of this. “Now!”

  The crowd was scattering, fleeing from this apocalyptic newcomer to their party. And Quirk didn’t understand this dragon. She didn’t know what its motives were or its goals. But she recognized an opportunity when she saw one. She hurled herself forward.

  Norvard was the first to join her, whirling his hammers, punching a woman out of the way, making space for her. Ellabet was staring at them. But another resistance fighter had accompanied them, blood streaming from her face and from the two daggers she held in her hands as she charged after them.

  Barph was almost three stories now. Massive. His face contorted by insincere merriment.

  The dragon raced overhead. Quirk felt the heat of its lance of flame reaching out, lunging toward Barph’s face. She heard the dragon’s roar.

  Maybe. Maybe. With this unexpected ally on their side … maybe …

  Barph swept out a hand and backhanded the dragon. Its whole body crumpled around the blow. Its wings were fluttering rags. There was an audible crack as its tail flicked around the massive palm and slammed into its own skull. And then it was sailing away, a broken crumpled thing that smashed into the northern wall of the square like a catapult stone before falling limply to the ground.

  And even as Quirk skidded to a horrified halt, still Barph laughed.

  Quirk looked from the stunned, broken dragon twitching on the ground to Barph’s massive grinning head. His shirt was on fire, but his skin and hair were unmarked by the brutal assault.

  For a moment Barph focused solely on her. He ignored all the madness around him, the unfathomable dragon, all the people who worshipped him, all the other people caught midstride in a race to kill him. She felt the weight of his attention. His massive eyes met hers.

  “For you to be able to insult me, Quirk,” he said in a voice laden with disdain, “I actually have to give a shit about your opinion.”

  Then he shrugged. Then he was gone.

  Quirk blinked. And stared. And blinked. But he was … He had left. He had ascended to the heavens. As if this was … was …

  This was meaningless to him. This was nothing.

  She looked again at the dragon. At the crowds. All of it. All of it was nothing to him.

  Gartrand was right. This had never had a chance.

  What other choice had she had, though? What option had Barph left her with?

  The crowds were staring too. At the empty space where their god had been. At the broken dragon. At the collapsing whorehouse. At their friends and family, broken and charred on the ground.

  The crowd worked out what to do before Quirk did. They worked out that they were going to beat the ever-living shit out of the handful of surviving jackasses who had broken up their party.

  A man standing not five feet from Norvard leapt at the young man, clotheslining him around the neck and sending them both tumbling to the ground. He was howling, an animal sound. The man’s fists came down again and again. Norvard had his arms up trying to protect his face.

  The woman with the bloody knives lunged at Norvard’s attacker but never made it. A gaggle of three more Barphists intercepted her, and suddenly she was the nucleus of her own circle of violence, hacking and yelling, as more and more people closed in.

  “Ellabet!” Quirk yelled. She glanced back at the alleyway. Ellabet and two others were still there. And Ellabet was shaking her head.

  Shit. Shit and piss and fire. She turned back to the crowd. She didn’t want to burn them.

  She didn’t—

  A stone, flung from the crowd, smashed into her temple.
She staggered. Black spots exploded across her vision. The pain was like a needle in her thoughts.

  And her fire would not be extinguished.

  Fire raced out of her, smashed into the crowd in a wall. Women and men reeled back, screaming, arms pinwheeling.

  Forgive me, she thought, but she didn’t know whom she was praying to. Not anymore.

  Then something crashed into the back of her head. Pain exploded through her skull, drove her to her knees. She tried to get up, but her arm was made of rubber. She collapsed rolling. A woman stood over her, kerchief tied around her head, clutching a rolling pin. Flour and blood mixed on her smock.

  “Fuck you!” the woman screamed.

  A roar. A flash of light and heat. The woman staggered away. She was on fire.

  I didn’t …, Quirk thought. Because she hadn’t set the woman on fire.

  The dragon had. It wasn’t dead. It was down, but it was still fighting. It roared like thunder. People scattered. Fire raced over Quirk’s head. Half of the woman holding the rolling pin turned to ash. Her legs tumbled down, smashed into Quirk still smoldering.

  Quirk yelled, kicked spastically, still trying to get her body to work, still fighting through pain and confusion. She staggered to her feet. Someone came at her. She couldn’t see if he had a knife or a clenched fist. She reached out a hand to ward him off, and then she was burning him alive, melting the muscle from his bones. She was out of control. She was scared. And the dragon roared. And the crowds pulsed. And flame poured out of her. And she was struck. And she was bleeding. And she was struggling to her feet once more. And … and … and …

  Nothing made sense. There was just a string of moments before her. Brief scenes of horror and violence lit by the flicker of a guttering flame. She tripped over a body, and it took her a moment to realize the mess of meat had been Norvard just a few minutes before.

  The whole square was on fire now. The dragon was lunging and thrashing. One wing was broken, twisted beneath its body, and it howled every time it had to turn. But still it killed and killed. Bodies piled up around it.

  And then suddenly the crowds were gone. They had either fled or died. And Quirk was on her knees in a field of bodies, staring a barking, braying dragon in the face.