The Dragon Lords: Fool's Gold, page 1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Part 1: A Job Done Right 1. Will
2. Lette and Balur
3. Ill-Met by Moonlight
4. Quirk
5. The Problem with Dissecting Dragons
6. Worst-Laid Plans
7. The Coup de Grâce
8. Morning Breaks
9. Strange Brews
10. Mugging Ethel
11. Nom Nom Prophecy Nom
12. The Great Big Flying Lizard
13. Ethel’s Party Invitation
14. Gaffes and Gatekeepers
15. The Belly of the Beast
16. Strong Drinks and Weak Minds
17. The Smartest Man in the Room
18. Nom Nom Ethel Nom
19. A Familiar Face
20. Ignorance Is Bliss
21. Something Going Right
22. The Beast Wakes
23. Hammer Time
24. Dragon Slayer
25. Prophecy’s Bitch
Part 2: A Job Done Wrong 26. Morning Worship
27. Mo’ Divinity, Mo’ Problems
28. Investigating His Burgeoning Manhood
29. Aftermath
30. Never Say Never
31. Shovel Loads of Straw and Shit
32. Where There’s a Will…
33. The Prophet of Profit
34. Dead Man’s Chest
35. Above It All
36. Liftoff
37. Rabble-Rousing
38. The Worst-Laid Plans
39. A Sinking Feeling
40. Waiting for Gods
41. Talking His Way into Trouble
42. Inferno Rodeo
43. A Burning Desire
44. God of War
45. What’s in the Box?
46. Open Your Eyes
47. Where There’s Smoke…
48. Far, Far Too Late
49. Dragons Come Home to Roost
50. Taking Flight
51. Totally Fucked
52. Hot-Tempered
53. Insult to Injury
54. We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat
55. Free Fall
56. Reaction Shot
57. Splashdown
Part 3: A Job Worth Doing Well 58. Love and War
59. Of All He Surveys
60. The Hand Inside the Puppet
61. A Tribe Called Dysfunctional
62. Planning for the Funeral
63. Making Like a Hooker and Blowing This Joint
64. The Sappy Romance Chapter
65. Fiery Indignation
66. The Dripping Jaws of the Future
67. One More Plan
68. According to Plan
69. Running on Empty
70. Hubris Is a Dish Best Served Charbroiled
71. The Third Day
72. Pressure Building
73. Lying Liars and the Lies They Tell
74. Money Makes the World Go Mad
75. Impatience
76. Hallows’ Mouth
77. The Center Cannot Hold
78. Conflict
79. Good, Honest Thievery
80. Sellout
81. The Midnight Ride of Lettera Therren
82. What the Lizard Man Saw
83. The Inevitable Cliffhanger Chapter
84. Financial Collapse
85. Flights of Fancy
86. Red of Tooth and Claw
87. Living the Dream
88. We All Fall Down
89. Apotheosis
90. Witness
91. The Morning After the Night Before
92. Excuses and Explanations
93. One More Thing
94. Being Better People
Acknowledgments
Extras A Preview of False Idols
A Preview of The City Stained Red
Orbit Newsletter
Copyright
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Preview of False Idols
A Preview of The City Stained Red
Orbit Newsletter
Copyright Page
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For Tami, Charlie, and Emma
“Oh, for a muse of fire.”
—Henry V
William Shakespeare
PART 1: A JOB DONE RIGHT
1
Will
It was a confrontation as old as time. A tale begun back when the Pantheon of old first breathed life into the clay mold of man and set him down upon the earth. It was the tale of the untamable pitted against the master. Of the wild tearing at the walls of the civilized. It was man versus the beast.
Will placed each foot carefully, held his balance low. He circled slowly. Cold mud pulled at his feet. Sweat trickled down the crease between his eyebrows. Inch by inch he closed the distance.
The pig Bessie grunted at him.
“Five shek says she tips him on his arse,” said Albor, one of Will’s two farmhands. A strip of hairy gut was visible where he rested it upon the sty’s rickety old fence. It was, Will had noted, significantly hairier in fact than his chin, which he scratched at constantly. Albor’s wife had just departed the nearby village for a monthlong trip to help look after her sister’s new baby, and Albor was three days into growing the beard she hated.
“I say it’s face first, he lands,” said Dunstan, Will’s other farmhand. The two men were a study in contrasts. Where Albor’s stomach swayed heavily over his gut, Dunstan’s broad leather belt was wrapped twice around his waist and still flapped loose beyond the buckle. His narrow face was barely visible behind a thick cloud of facial hair, which his wife loved to excess. She had a tendency to braid sections of it and line it with bows.
“You’re on,” said Albor, spitting in his muddy palm and holding it out to Dunstan.
Will gave a damn about neither beards nor wives. All he cared about was his father’s thrice-cursed prize sow, Bessie. She had been his dancing partner in this sty for almost half an hour now. He was so coated in mud that if he lay upon the sty’s floor, he would have been virtually invisible. He briefly considered this as a possible angle of attack, but the pig was as likely to shit on him and call it a good day’s work as anything else. There was an uncanny intelligence in her eyes. Still, she was old and he was young. Brute force would win the day.
He closed the distance down by another inch.
Bessie narrowed her eyes.
Another inch.
Bessie squealed and charged. Will lunged, met the charge head-on. His hands slammed down hard against her sides.
Bessie flew through his mud-slick palms and crashed all of her considerable weight into his legs. The world performed a sprawling flip around Will’s head, then hit him in the face.
He came up spluttering mud, and was just in time to hear Dunstan say, “That’s five shek you owe me then.”
Bessie was standing nonchalantly behind him, with an air of almost studied calm.
Will found his resolve hardening. Bessie had to die. With a roar, he launched himself at the pig. She bucked wildly. And yet still one of his hands snagged a bony trotter. He heaved upon it with all his might.
Bessie, however, had lived upon the farm longer than Will. She had survived lean winters, breeched piglets, and several virulent diseases, and was determined to survive him. She did not allow her limb to collapse under Will’s weight, advanced years or no. Instead she simply pulled him skidding through the mud. After several laps, he appeared to be done. With her free hoof, she kicked him in the forehead to emphasize the lesson, then walked away.
“I think you almost got her that time,” Albor called in what might be generously described as an encouraging tone.
Will did not respond. Personal honor was at stake at this point in the proceedings. Still, there was only so much mud a man could swallow. He clambered to his feet and retreated to consider his options.
Dunstan patted him on the shoulder as he collapsed against the fence. Bessie regarded him balefully.
“She’s too strong for me,” Will said when he’d gotten his breath back.
“To be fair, you say that about most girls,” Albor told him.
“I have to outsmart her.”
“That too,” Dunstan chipped in.
“Don’t usually work, though.” Albor chewed a strand of straw sagely.
“This,” said Will, his temper fraying, “is not so much helpful advice as much as it is shit swilling in a blocked ditch. That pig has to become crispy rashers and if you have nothing helpful to add you can go back to picking apples in the orchard.”
For a short while the only sound was Bessie farting noisily in her corner of the sty.
Above the men, thin clouds swept across a pale blue sky. The distant mountains were a misty purple, almost translucent.
Will softened. None of
But now Will’s parents were gone to an early grave, and Firkin had lost his mind. Bessie was old and would not sow anymore. And Will was the unwilling owner of a farm on the brink of ruin.
“Look,” he said, voice calmer, “I want Bessie dead no more than you do, but I am out of options. The Consortium increased taxes again, and paying them has left my coffers bare. If I am to have a hope of surviving another year, I need to put her to the knife and sell her pieces for as much as I can get. Next winter she’ll be blind and hobbled and it will be a kindness.”
Another silence.
“You can’t wait a little, Will?” said Albor, straw drooping in the corner of his mouth. “Give her one last good year?”
Will sighed. “If I do, then there won’t be anyone to slaughter her. This whole place will be gone to the Consortium and I’ll be in a debtors’ jail, and you two will be in old Cornwall’s tavern without any sheks to pay for his ale.”
At that threat, the two farmhands looked at each other. Finally Dunstan shrugged. “I never liked that fucking pig anyway.”
Albor echoed his sad smile.
“That’s more like it,” said Will. “Now let’s see if together three grown men can’t outwit one decrepit pig.”
Slowly, painfully, Will, Albor, and Dunstan hobbled back toward the farmhouse. Albor rubbed at a badly bruised hip. Dunstan was wringing muddy water out of his sodden, matted beard.
“It’s all right,” said Will, “we’ll get her tomorrow.”
Later, the farm’s other animals locked away for the night, straw fresh on the barn’s floor, Will stood in the farmhouse, heating a heavy iron pot full of stew over the hearth. A few strips of chicken roiled fretfully among vegetable chunks.
He never bothered naming the chickens. It was easier that way.
He sighed as he watched the stew slowly simmer. He should be checking the cheese presses, or scooping butter out of the churn and into pots before it spoiled, or possibly even attempting to tally his books so he could work out exactly how much money he owed folk. Instead he stood and stared.
The nights were long out on the farm. It was five miles through the fields and woods down to The Village. The distance had never seemed far when he was a child. But that was when his parents were alive, and when Dunstan and Albor, and even Firkin, would all have stayed to share the supper, with laughter, and jokes, and fiddle music lilting late into the night. That was when performing the chores around the house had never seemed exactly like work, and when stoking the fire so it warmed the whole room had never felt like an extravagance.
The firelight cast the heavy wooden cabinets and thick oak table and chairs in guttering light. Will tried to focus on that, not the shadows of the day. Maybe Bessie did have one more litter in her. Maybe he could give her one more year. A good litter would bring in enough coin. Or near enough, if the taxes didn’t go up again. And he could scrimp and save in a few places. Maybe sell a few of the chairs. It wasn’t like he needed more than one.
Yes. Yes, of course that would work. And Lawl or some other member of the Pantheon would manifest in the run-down old temple in the village below and shower them all with gold. That was what would happen…
His slow-bubbling thoughts were interrupted abruptly by a sharp rap at his door. He snapped his head to look at the thick oak slats. Outside, rain had begun to fall, tapping a complex undulating rhythm against the thatch roof above his head. It was over an hour’s walk from The Village. Who would bother dragging themselves out here at this hour?
He had half-dismissed the sound as a loose branch blowing across the yard when it came again. A hard, precise rap that rattled the door latch. If it was a branch, it was a persistent one.
Removing the stew pot from the fire, he crossed the room quickly, unlatched the door, and opened it onto a cold and blustery night.
Four soldiers stood upon his doorstep. Their narrowed eyes stared out from beneath the shadows of their helms, which dripped rainwater down onto their long noses. Swords hung heavily on their large belts, each pommel embossed with an image of two batlike wings—the mark of the Dragon Consortium. Sodden leather jerkins with the same insignia were pulled over their heavy chain-mail shirts.
They were not small men. Their expressions were not kind. Will could not tell for sure, but they bore a striking resemblance to the four soldiers who had carried off most of the coin he’d been relying on to get through the winter.
“Can I help you?” asked Will, as politely as he was able. If there was anything at which he could fail to help them, he wanted to know about it.
“You can get the piss out of my way so me and my men can come out of this Hallows-cursed rain,” said the lead soldier. He was taller than the others, with a large blunt nose that appeared to have been used to stop a frying pan, repeatedly, for most of his childhood. Air whistled in and out of it as he spoke.
“Of course.” Will stepped aside. While he bore the guards of the Dragon Consortium no love, he bore even less for the idea of receiving a sound thrashing at their hands.
The four soldiers tramped laboriously in, sagging under the weight of their wet armor. “Obliged,” said the last of the men, nodding. He had a kinder face than the others. Will saw the lead soldier roll his eyes.
They stood around Will’s small fire and surveyed his house with expressions that looked a lot like disdain. Large brown footprints tracked their path from the door. The fourth guard looked at them, then shrugged at Will apologetically.
For a moment they all stood still. Will refused to leave the door, clinging to the solidity of it. Grounding himself in the wood his father had cut and hewn before he was born. As he watched the soldiers by the fire, his stomach tied more knots than an obsessive-compulsive fisherman.
Finally he crossed to them, the table, and his stew. He began to ladle it into a large if poorly made bowl. He wasn’t hungry anymore, but it gave him something to do. These soldiers would get to their business with or without his help.
As he ladled, the lead soldier fiddled with a leather pouch at his waist.
“Nice place this,” said the fourth, seeming to feel more awkward in the silence than the others.
“Thank you,” Will said, as evenly as he was able. “My parents built it.”
“Keep saying to the missus we should get a place like this,” the guard continued, “but she doesn’t like the idea of farm living. Likes to be close to the center of things. By which she really means the alchemist. Gets a lot of things from the alchemist, she does. Very healthy woman. Always adding supplements to my diet.” He patted his stomach, metal gauntleted hand clanking against the chain mail. “Doesn’t ever seem to do any good.” He looked off into the middle distance. “Of course my brother says I’m cuckolded by a drug-addled harpy, but he’s always been a bit negative.”
The guard seemed to notice that everyone was staring at him.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Obviously none of that is related to why we’re officially here. Just wanted to, well, you know…” He withered under his commanding officer’s stare.
The lead soldier looked away from him, down to a piece of browning parchment paper that he had retrieved from his pouch. Then he turned the gaze he had used to dominate his subordinate upon Will.
“You are Willett Altior Fallows, son of Mickel Betterra Fallows, son of Theorn Pentauk Fallows, owner and title holder of this farmstead?” he asked. He was not a natural public speaker, stumbling over most of the words. But he kept his sneer firmly in place as he read.
Will nodded. “That’s what my mother always told me,” he said. The fourth soldier let out a snort of laughter, then at the looks from the others, murdered his mirth like a child tossed down a well.
The lead soldier’s expression, by contrast, did not flicker for an instant. Will thought he might even have seen a small flame as the joke died against his stony wall of indifference. The soldier had the air of a man who had risen through the ranks on the strength of having no imagination whatsoever. The sort of man who followed orders, blindly and doggedly, and without remorse.
