The Dragon Lords: Fool's Gold, page 16
Joeth, it turned out, was not as stupid as Bevvan. It wasn’t that surprising. Will used to own stools that weren’t as stupid as Bevvan.
He got almost an entire stride before Joeth caught him by the shoulder and threw him to the ground. Will kicked out hard, felt a satisfying crunch as his heel connected with something hard, and then a less satisfying thump, as a wailing Bevvan collapsed on top of him.
“Joeth!” he howled. “What are you—?”
“He’s not a fucking soldier, you dim-witted son of Cois. He was condemned to debtors’ prison and burned off half of Kurr’s face. We tend not to enlist fugitives. If we tended not to enlist idiots then arseholes like him might not sneak in here to get up to whatever the fuck he’s been up to.”
Joeth, it turned out, was not a mumbler. Indeed he shouted this into Bevvan’s tear-streaked face with almost perfect diction, and at considerable volume. He attracted considerable attention. By the time Will had fought free of Bevvan’s weight, several pairs of hands were ready to help him to his feet. And then to help him slam face-first into the wall. And then to hold his hands at an excruciating angle behind his back while they were bound together.
Conversation had failed. Fleeing had failed. Will could only hope that when it came to dying painfully he would prove himself equally inept.
20
Ignorance Is Bliss
Always a light sleeper, Lette—who was at that moment sandwiched between a gear the size of a wagon wheel and a chain thicker than her own waist—had rarely been pleased to hear the sound of snoring. Balur was a snorer. His mouth would flop open as he slept, and from the back of his throat would emerge a sound that she could only liken to two mountains making love. A guttural gasping rasp that sawed through her mind and erased sleep from the list of options that the night held for her. She had once trekked an additional mile through a kobold-infested forest just to escape the sound.
This snore was different, though. This was a deeper, rumbling sound, like fresh earth settling itself. It made the rock reverberate around her, deep and sonorous. It was the sound of a dragon snoring.
Mattrax was drugged up to his eyeballs.
Slowly, with exaggerated care, Lette began to move. She had spent the first hour of her seclusion learning how to navigate the portcullis lock in the dark, charting out crawl spaces, gaps in the pressure plate’s mechanics. The next hour she had spent firming up her understanding of the mechanism, its operation, its critical junctures, its weak points. Then she had waited. She had expected to have heard Quirk’s and Will’s voices. But there had been simply the sound of Mattrax moving around, huffing and grunting to himself in injured tones. What in Toil’s name a dragon rolling in gold and food had to complain about escaped her, but at least the fat sack of fire had shown no sign of suspicion. All the job had really required so far was flexibility and patience.
Neither was she worried about the blow Balur had taken in the earlier confrontation. She had seen him shake off worse. The Batarran giant they once fought had literally picked him up and used him as a club to try to smash her. Right up until Balur had gotten an arm free, torn off the giant’s thumbnail, and used it to slit the giant’s wrist. Sailing a hundred yards or so into some trees was eminently survivable.
No, what worried her was that Balur’s part of the plan had already gone awry and he was the one other member of their current team who had professional experience. Now she was relying on a university professor and an angry farmer to keep her safe from being roasted alive.
What if Mattrax was not drugged? What if he was simply asleep? Rumor had it that dragons could detect the removal of even a single coin from their stockpile. Lette had her doubts about that, but removing several sacks full of gold and jewels could definitely tip the balance against them.
So she moved slowly, soundlessly, letting one movement flow into another—a slow, sinuous unfurling of her body as she emerged into the cave and the night.
She stood stock still—a shadow among shadows—and took stock of the cave. She had only glimpsed its contours in the mad dash to hide. It was larger than she had expected, the floor smooth and sandy. The bulk of the cavern was curled away from the portcullis, so she could see neither Mattrax nor his pile of gold, only a faint red-yellow glow smudging through the deepening shadows.
She herself stood near the cave entrance, within arm’s reach of the portcullis. Moonlight spilled between the iron beams, painting a chessboard on the floor before her. There were only two guards. That was a stroke of luck, at least. There had been far more earlier. Two guards simplified things considerably.
Moving at an almost imperceptible pace, she crossed the mouth of the cave. Her feet were silent on the sandy floor. Her shadow fell away from the guards. The rumble of Mattrax’s snores stayed constant. Neither guard turned around.
She let a knife drop into each hand. She cocked one arm. She threw.
The blade whistled between the grille of the portcullis and landed with a solid thwack in the back of the first guard’s neck. He dropped with a slight gurgle, and the heavy thump of lifeless limbs.
The second knife was already in her hand. She cocked her arm once more.
“Cois’s cock!” The second guard shrieked, jumped almost half a yard. Lette tracked her with ease.
Her?
She hadn’t had much time to observe Mattrax’s forces, but he seemed as blinkeredly misogynistic as the armies belonging to most rulers she’d met.
And didn’t she recognize that voice?
“Quirk?” she whispered.
“Lette?”
It was Quirk. Lette could even make out the bloodstains she had made when stealing the woman’s armor. But…
“What in the name of the Hallows are you doing outside the cave?” she said. “Wasn’t the whole plan that you’d be hidden in here helping me move the gold until Firkin and Balur arrived with the wagon?”
Quirk hesitated. Lette gathered breath for a whispered harangue. Then she noticed the other woman’s shaking hands, her ragged breathing. Quirk kept looking over at the dead guard, kept opening and closing her fists.
“It’s okay,” Lette said. She needed Quirk calm and functional. This wasn’t the end of the world. She could get Quirk inside easily enough. Then another thought struck her. She looked over at the body.
“Wait…” she managed. “Will?”
Quirk shook her head vehemently. “No. No,” she said. “He’s trapped inside.”
“Trapped?” That was not the sort of word Lette liked to hear when in the middle of a job.
“That’s not what I meant.” Quirk shook her head with the sort of violence Lette usually reserved for jobs that required particular prejudice.
“Maybe,” she said, “you should start at the beginning.”
So Quirk did. Then she jumped to the end. Then to some point in the story halfway through, and from there leapt about like some deranged jackrabbit until finally Lette could piece the whole mosaic of disaster together.
“But is Mattrax actually drugged?” she asked finally. Quirk had proven elusive on this one point.
Quirk worried her hands several times. Lette cranked up the intensity of her glare several notches. If Quirk couldn’t manage calm, then cowed would be a close enough approximation.
“I don’t know,” Quirk said miserably.
“And is Will inside this cave?”
“I don’t know,” Quirk said again, equally miserably.
Lette clenched her jaw tight and did not say a number of things that she would have liked to.
“Right,” she said eventually. “Well, in that case, the first thing to do is to get this portcullis up. You’re sure there are no other soldiers about?”
Quirk shook her head. “They seemed stretched a bit thin after Mattrax killed off the previous guards. They just put the two of us down here.”
“Okay. Let me get back down in the mechanism so I can open up this portcullis. That way if everything goes to shit, at least I have a way out of here.” And without waiting for a response, she slipped down the hole back into the portcullis’s inner workings. She wriggled forward until she found the fist-size gear she had identified earlier. Five swift blows with the hilt of her dagger and it fell out of alignment.
She threw herself backward as, around her, the mechanism blazed to life. Cogs whirled, chains shrieked, and counterweights fell with a resounding crash. A moment after it was all over, Lette heard Quirk’s shriek as a brief punctuation to the whole event. Alone in the darkness, she permitted herself a roll of her eyes.
Then she waited. Waited for the roar. For the crash of Mattrax’s feet as he descended upon the gate. For the heat of his flames roasting the rock around her.
But all she heard was the slow, steady rumble of his snores.
She smiled. Despite it all, something had actually gone right.
21
Something Going Right
High above Lette, in the belly of Mattrax’s castle, an alarm bell rang loudly.
“What’s that?” said a guard, looking up.
Much to Will’s chagrin, however, he did not remove his knees from Will’s kidneys.
“What’s his bloody nibs doing opening up the gate?”
Will thought this was an excellent question and one that the guards should probably go and investigate posthaste, and he would have happily offered up that opinion had not his mouth been, at that precise moment, pressed directly into the mud by several meaty hands.
“Who gives a fuck?” said the guard Will had come to identify as Kurr. He, Will had also discovered, was the guard whose face he had burned with soup. There were, he thought, extenuating circumstances surrounding that situation, which, again, he would have been willing to discuss at considerable length. The dialogue Kurr was more interested in, though, was the one going on between his steel toe caps and Will’s ribs. He kicked Will again. Hard.
Will brayed pain into the mud.
“If Mattrax wants to go flying, let him go. Give us another hour before he comes back and eats someone,” said one of the guards holding down Will’s legs.
Another kick. Tears ran down Will’s cheeks.
“He don’t go bloody flying about at night,” said the first guard. “Sleeps for bloody hours that bastard does.”
“That is true,” said another voice.
Another kick.
“I said, who gives a fuck?” Kurr was a man of narrow focus, Will was learning.
“Well,” said the first guard, “all I’m thinking is that here we are with this intruder—”
“This whoreson,” said Kurr, giving Will another kick. Will bucked ineffectually.
“Yeah,” said the first guard. “This whoreson. But he’s an intruding whoreson.”
“You got a point?” said the guard up by Will’s head.
“Well, it just seems,” said the first guard, “that here we are with this intruder—”
“Whoreson.”
“Intruding whoreson—”
“Seriously, just get to your fucking point already.”
Will couldn’t agree more.
“So here we are with this intruding son—”
“Yeah you said that already.”
At this point the first guard seem to lose his patience a bit. “I bloody know I’ve said it three times, but every time I say it you go and bloody interrupt about how you want to know more. If you shut your fucking trap you might actually learn something. Like how to wipe your arse probably, you smelly arsehole.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Uncalled for,” muttered the guard near Will’s head.
“So an intruding whoreson. And we know Mattrax sleeps through for a solid night’s sleep every night.” A pause, which allowed Kurr to get in another kick. “Except now the alarm is going off to say his portcullis is opening.”
Another longer pause. Will braced for the next kick.
“Oh,” said Kurr at last. “Balls.”
“Shit,” said the guard at his head. He let up with his hands. Will pulled his mouth out of the mud, gasping and gagging.
Kurr filled his vision. “Who did you come with, arse-wipe?” he spat. “Who’s down there?”
“There’s no bloody time for that!” yelled the first guard, grabbing at Kurr’s shoulder. “He’s tied up. Let’s just get down there, kill whoever is crapping on our evening’s entertainment, and then come back here and finish him off. He’s not going nowhere.”
Kurr’s face twisted in irritation. Then finally he spat in Will’s face and stood up. “Go anywhere,” he growled at Will, “and I’ll kill you.”
That, thought Will, was not much of an incentive considering his other option was to stay exactly where he was so Kurr could kill him.
He watched his trio of torturers run from him, heard other boots pounding past. Everyone heading to the portcullis.
Lette must have opened it, he realized. Because she hadn’t known about the alarm bell. Because he had never told her about the alarm bell. Though, to be fair, he’d never known about an alarm bell. Firkin had never mentioned it.
In the end, though, he was forced to conclude that trying to figure out his own level of culpability was probably less productive than actually sitting up, escaping, and attempting to rescue Lette from the castle’s-worth of guards that were about to descend on her.
On the other hand, his ribs were making a pretty convincing counterpoint about the merits of curling up into a fetal ball and sobbing.
The process of sitting up was long, laborious, and punctuated with curse words that he thought even Firkin might shrink from.
Getting from his arse to his feet was even worse. He tottered across the keep grounds, gasping, head spinning.
Lette. He needed to get to Lette. He wasn’t sure why, or what help he could offer, but surely… surely that was what he had to do. He couldn’t just leave her to die. Will didn’t know much about what was going on anymore, and perhaps the middle of a robbery was an odd time to find his moral compass, but still, he knew that you did not run from a fight and let your friend take all the blows.
More blows. He cringed inside. He wouldn’t be surprised if he pissed blood tomorrow. But he kept moving.
He staggered toward the keep, a plan forming in his mind. Inside the torchlit entrance hall, he searched desperately for a sharp surface. He found it in the form of an axe lying abandoned in a weapon rack against one wall. Carefully he backed up to it, then pushed his bound wrists against the blade.
A minute later, taking a break from massaging life back into his numb hands, he tried the pad of his thumb against the blade of the axe. It was far sharper than the sword his captors had confiscated from him. He hefted it, tested its weight. He nodded to himself. Perhaps not as good as his father’s old wood-cutting axe back on the farm, but he suspected it was good enough to do some damage, and it was light enough to be wielded single-handed.
So armed, he turned to the dark spiraling corridor and began to descend.
22
The Beast Wakes
Quirk stood in the depths of Mattrax’s cave and gaped. She had never seen anything like it before in her life.
“Betra’s sagging tits,” Lette breathed. “I’ve seen gold in my time, but this…” She trailed off with a small sigh of contentment.
Quirk took note of the gold for the first time. Yes, she supposed, there was a lot of it. Coins, crowns, medallions, necklaces, brooches, bracelets, scepters, gilt frames, earrings, emeralds, rubies, topaz, diamonds, pearls…
She looked away, disinterested. She looked back to him.
Mattrax slumbered atop his treasure trove. A vast coiling column of muscle and scale. His wings drooped down forming leathery blankets over the slopes of his hoard. His head was a vast angular wedge. Each nostril was wide enough that she could thrust a clenched fist into it and barely tickle the fine hairs that lined it. Each claw upon his foot was longer than her forearm.
She could hardly breathe. Her chest felt full of air, the confines of her ribs too tight for her lungs. The room was bright despite the cloying night. The edges of the world were fading to mist.
She walked toward the dragon as if in a dream. Coins and jewels gave way beneath her feet as she mounted the hills of his fortune. She stretched out her hand. She had to touch him.
Would he feel rough? Smooth? Warm? Hard or soft? Would the skin give beneath her hand?
She remembered the first time she had touched magic. A child in the dark of her parents’ hut. Hiding from her brother, Andatte. Curled up in a nest of dirty laundry while he tried to seek her out. Half-asleep. The heat of summer mounting where she lay. Becoming almost unbearable, almost beautiful. And then the sense of something pushing through that heat. Some vast, unknowable intellect manifesting in it. And it was reaching out to her. Pressing through layers of reality. And she had reached out, pushed back. And then… they had touched. Been briefly connected. She had touched something that had redefined her utterly. Left her branded. Left her different.
This felt like that moment.
She was vaguely aware of Lette scooping vast armfuls of wealth into her pockets, letting out small giddy noises.
Quirk was almost annoyed. Such petty concerns in the face of such… such… magnificence. Was the woman blind to the beauty of the world? Did she spit in its eye on purpose?
No. Quirk stilled herself. Nothing was going to spoil this for her. This moment would be pure, unsullied by the world, by her past, by her need for constant control. This was what she had worked so hard for, for all these years. She wouldn’t let anything ruin it now. She could feel the heat of Mattrax’s breath gusting over her hand, playing between her fingers—
A noise from the mouth of the cave. A shout. And another.
