The Dragon Lords: Fool's Gold, page 17
Quirk froze.
“Shit,” Lette cursed.
And no. No. This couldn’t be happening. This was her moment.
Another shout.
“Balur,” Quirk breathed. “It’s Balur. And Firkin. With the wagon and the sacks. That’s all.”
She reached once more for the beatific peace of biological rapture. Toward epiphany. Toward Mattrax.
From the cave entrance came the sound of steel clashing against steel.
“Lawl’s balls!” Lette cursed again. Then the mercenary was moving. She dashed along the contours of the golden hoard, heading back toward the cave entrance. Rivers of coins tumbled and tinkled in her wake.
As she dashed past Quirk, the ground gave way.
No. No!
Quirk lunged, desperate, grasping. Her fingers were almost there, almost touching Mattrax’s skin. But there was nothing to gain purchase on. She felt herself falling. She screamed. Everything was slipping away from her. Epiphany fluttered away.
Then she was tumbling, arse over heel, landing unceremoniously, feet in the air, hands splayed and empty.
For a moment, Quirk lay and seethed. She recognized the signs, felt the mask of control slipping away. No! screamed some last rational part of her. No! That’s not what this is. Not what this was meant to be! This was my moment.
She picked herself up. Her teeth gritted. Her palms hot. Steam rising from between her fingertips.
Someone was running around the corner of the cave. A guard, chain mail glinting in reflected moonlight, mouth open in a yell, sword raised. He saw her, let loose a fresh howl, and charged.
Quirk did not see the man. Not as he was here and now. She did not see the cave around her. She did not feel the hot breath of Mattrax gusting over her.
Instead, she felt the hot breath of the Tamathian scrublands blowing at her back. She saw the shallow sloping hills of her childhood, dotted with scrubby bushes that held more thorns than leaves. She saw a bandit dressed in tatters charging, scimitar raised above his head, the desperation of a starving man glinting in his eyes.
No! screamed the voice. This is over. This is past. This is not who you are.
But the mask of control was slipping, almost gone. And in her rage, her frustration, her fear, Quirk reached up and tore it away.
She reached out her hand. Heat rose in her palm. She felt divine power within her. She felt words she had never learned forming on her tongue, words that pushed back at the skin of reality stretched over the world. Felt them punch through.
The guard was almost on her. His sword hung above her head.
The heat in her palm became a physical pain. A scalding, searing expression of hate and rage. She howled, loud enough to match the guard’s battle cry.
And then, there, in the darkness, she gave birth to fire.
23
Hammer Time
Fire Root, Balur thought in one of his increasingly rare lucid moments, is being the absolute shit. He had heard certain whores discussing the improvements certain herbs and powders could bring to their area of expertise. But, honestly, they were going to have to try mass murder while high on this stuff. This was being absolutely fucking great.
“Whee!” he cried, spinning in a circle, war hammer held out at full stretch, feeling his shoulders take the weight, his heels spinning on the sandy floor, watching the bodies flying through the air. Their blood painted the air in spiraling arcs, glistening like streams of rubies. He could smell it, like a shooting star exploding in the back of his throat.
He hadn’t expected to find guards here. He was unsure what he had expected now. But it hadn’t been them. Not that he was sad about it. Rather, when he had come running out of the woods below the cave and seen them streaming out of the castle gates, he had let out a howl of joy. At his back, the villagers had echoed the sound.
The guards had turned, seen them, charged. The two forces had crashed into each other like newlyweds.
Balur reached out, grabbed someone nearby, bit their face off, and laughed giddily as blood ran down his chin.
This was what he lived for. This moment. This surrender. To say farewell to thought, to morals, to civility. To live beyond the boundaries of culture, and societal norms. This was life at its most pure, its most bestial. This was life without pretenses. All masks removed. Life reduced to meat, and bone, and fury.
He pirouetted, brought his hammer up, clean through the body of… someone. Factions were meaningless at this point in the fight. The head of the hammer glistened above the fray, dripped blood. He brought it down and listened to the meaty crack of impact.
Someone stabbed him. He felt the blade find a spot where his scales met, its tip slide inside him, puncturing muscle. He felt the pain, bright and hot. He laughed again, grabbed the sword blade, and then its owner. The sword wielder’s neck snapped in Balur’s fist.
He descended into a bloody haze. The world was red and wet for a while. When he emerged he was, for a moment, disoriented. He pummeled a man in the face, trying to get his bearings.
People were screaming, running, pushing to get past him. Villagers and guards alike. “Dragon!” they screamed. “Dragon! Mattrax wakes!”
And then Balur saw it, bright and beautiful, blossoming in the back of the cave. Great gouts of fire that sparkled yellow and red in his dilated pupils.
The dragon. That was why he had come here. To show the world that he could defeat a dragon. To make the dragon know his name even as he took its life.
Some small, sobering part of Balur saw that fire and questioned if, just this once, wisdom shouldn’t be prevailing over bravado. A larger, drunker part of his mind shouted at that part to be fucking off. He was totally knowing what he was doing. Why was the other voice always nagging at him with its rational good sense? He was being a warrior, gods’ hex upon it. He was having to do certain things because they were being there. His actions were not having to make sense.
He set his shoulder and charged into the depths of the cave, toward heat, fire, rage, and glory. Bodies bounced off him, scrambling to get away. All around him screams rose.
“The dragon!”
“The dragon!”
“It’s going to kill us all!”
No, thought Balur with a drunken grin. I am.
He rounded the bend in the cave, skidded to a halt.
Quirk stood there.
No, floated there.
The thaumatobiologist’s feet were a clear foot off the floor. Her robes billowed around her, rippling through the heat haze. She held her arms out, palms raised.
And she was beautiful.
Ribbons of fire danced from her hands. They wove together in complex patterns of slaughter. A hapless guard was caught in a stream of liquid flame. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. His blackened body skittered and danced. The dead lay all around her.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t fix her gaze on anyone. She just wove her ribbons of fire back and forth in front of her. Where they struck the floor, explosions bloomed, spattering the bodies with glowing shrapnel.
I, thought Balur, taking the scene in at a glance, would be totally hitting that. Then his eye fell on the dragon beyond her.
Mattrax lay slumped over a vast hoard of gold and jewels, wings splayed in a sloppy half-collapsed pile. Drool was spilling from one corner of his mouth in a thick, ropy stream.
Momentarily, Balur lost the power of speech. All he could utter was a single, guttural roar of hate. Rage. Bloodlust. Desire. He wanted that dragon. He wanted its blood on his skin. Its bone shards stuck into his cheeks.
Waves of rage carried him forward, a misty cloud of hallucinogenic fury. He ducked and darted through Quirk’s tapestry of fiery destruction. Mattrax loomed in his vision, the vast face eclipsing everything else. The dragon was his world. Its death at his hands was as inevitable as the turning of the sun in the heavens. His hammer was above his head. His muscles burned with power, with the churning potential of death.
He brought the hammer down, felt the impact run up his arm, felt the hammer head glance off the scales. He stepped back, slipping in the piles of coin that mired his feet.
For a moment he thought he had achieved nothing. That this was all just a paltry lie, some drug-addled fantasy he had concocted to make himself feel better about the ignominy of his earlier defeat.
But then he saw it. The thin hairline crack that ran down the scale he had struck, the clear fluid seeping out. Mattrax’s hide was not impenetrable. The dragon could be defeated. All that was needed was time.
Balur brought his war hammer down again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.
24
Dragon Slayer
Gripping his axe in both hands, Will crept into the antechamber before Mattrax’s cave. His heart sank. He had been hoping that the guard would be asleep, head sinking into his own obscene folds of blubber, soft as a down pillow. Instead, though, the guard was on his feet. Will had had difficulty imagining it before. He just hadn’t been able to work out the mechanics of those legs supporting that much bulk. And yet here it was before him.
The guard had his back to Will, was leaning toward the door, head cocked to one side, listening. Despite the thickness of the metal, sounds of utter chaos rang out clearly: roars, screams, howls, the clash of steel, something wet and squelching. The smell of copper was ripe on the air.
All in all, it rather reminded Will of a stag party he’d been to down in The Village. He’d stopped agreeing to go to them after that.
Gods, what was happening down there? He didn’t know for sure, only that it was not in any part of what he had once laughingly called a plan. In fact, to the best of his memory the sound of bloody slaughter was the exact thing the plan had been supposed to avoid.
There again, the plan had also meant to keep him out of situations like being alone in a room with one of Mattrax’s guards and an axe.
Then Will realized that the guard hadn’t even twitched as Will entered the room. He was utterly focused on the door.
The axe felt heavy in Will’s hands.
Could he do it? Could he bury a blade in a man when his back was turned?
Yes, he decided, I could. The gods killed, did they not? Hadn’t Lawl himself murdered thousands of men in fits of jealous rage? That said, Lawl had slept with Toil, his own daughter, and then Toil had married Cois, the child, so perhaps the gods didn’t always set the best example…
Still, it was the sort of brutally practical thing that he could imagine Lette doing, and he was fairly sure this was a moment for brutal practicality.
His palms slick with sweat, he took a step forward.
“What do you think it is?”
The guard’s voice rooted Will to the spot. The guard didn’t turn around, didn’t look at him. He spoke in a soft, almost conversational way.
“Erm,” Will managed. He cleared his throat. What did you say to someone you were planning on murdering? That was a piece of etiquette his mother had never covered with him.
“I thought it was a revolt at first,” the guard went on. “Them up top finally had enough and decided to do something about it. Happens every once in a while. Then the boss man, he cleans house. Spring cleaning, I call it.” He laughed softly to himself. A low, burbling sound like a spring brook trying to force its way through a block of lard. Then the sound skewed sideways into something less cheerful.
“The thing is,” the guard went on, “I don’t hear Mattrax. There ain’t no roaring. There ain’t the crackle of corpses burning.” He shook his head. “No. I hear something else.” He reached back a stubby arm and beckoned to Will. “Come listen. See what you think.”
Will hesitated. He was still holding the axe aloft. Except now that the conversation had started he didn’t feel murderous. Instead he felt terribly, terribly awkward.
He let the axe sag, took a tentative step forward. He could get past this man some other way. Hell, he could probably open the flap and be through before the other even reacted. And with his girth, the guard certainly couldn’t follow that way.
“Listen,” whispered the guard, still not looking at him.
“Erm,” said Will, still not entirely sure what to say. He really had no desire to get much closer to the man.
“I said,” the guard started, his voice rising in volume, “come here and—” He started to turn. His arm started to swing around. Will caught a glimpse of flashing steel. “Listen!” the guard bellowed.
Will flung himself backward just as the fat guard lunged. The blade swished through the space that was until recently home to his stomach and its assorted bevy of essential organs.
He reeled back, off-balance.
“My house!” the guard screamed. “You bring drugged meat into my house! Feed it to my master! On my watch!”
He was surprisingly fast for such a big man. His arm whipped back and forth, the blade a blur, slicing at Will’s stomach. Will backed up as the guard advanced, trying to get the axe in between them.
“You tricked me,” spat the guard. His face was transformed, no longer morose, but instead contorted with rage. “It was my job to protect him. To feed him. And you poisoned him. Right in front of me!”
The guard, Will realized, had at some point—sitting all alone in the dark and the heat—gone entirely insane.
“Mattrax is a dragon,” he pointed out. “He controls the whole valley. I think he can get by without you.”
This, it turned out, was not the right thing to say.
“He needs me!” screamed the guard, and he lunged.
Fast though he might be, the guard’s weight betrayed him in that moment. The lunge was pathetically short. Will, caught flat-footed by the abruptness of the move, felt only the slightest pinprick of the sword’s weight as it glanced off his chain mail.
He brought his axe across his body in a short, sharp chopping motion. The blade crashed into the inside of the guard’s elbow. There was an ugly crunching sound. The guard screamed. His blade clattered flatly as it bounced on the flagstone floor.
Will stood panting. The guard clutched at his injured arm, sprayed spittle and curses.
Will for his part was quite proud of himself. The fourth fight in his life—the first one involving real weapons—and it had gone significantly better than the first three.
“All right,” he said. “Sorry about that. But if you could just step aside so I can go and rob your master blind.”
It was, he thought, a rather snappy thing to say. It had… what was the word? Panache. He wished Lette could have seen him in that moment.
With a murderous growl, the guard flung himself upon Will.
Although years of working in the fields had ensured that Will was not an entirely insignificant young man, he stood about as much chance as a reed before a stampeding bull. He was bowled backward, crashing into the room’s far wall. His head cracked off hard stone, the world exploded with light, and his balance pirouetted around the confines of his skull.
As his senses returned, he became very aware of the guard’s hands around his throat. Just as his vision was starting to clear, it was blurring again.
He was pinned to the floor. He started to thrash back and forth, trying to work himself free, but the guard’s weight was implacable and unshakable.
His lungs were burning now, his vision narrowing down to a point that seemed to be mostly taken up by the guard’s red, spittle-splattered face.
“He needs me, see?” hissed the guard. “Needs me to protect him from little shits like you.”
Will thrashed harder, managed to pry an arm free. He grasped desperately about himself. His palm hit cold metal.
Cold metal.
And connected to it… a shaft of cold wood.
With the last of his strength, he smashed the axe handle into the side of the guard’s head. There was a satisfying crunch.
For a moment the weight lifted. Will gasped. Air rushed into his burning lungs so fast he almost choked on it.
Then the guard’s weight crashed back down on him again. Will thrashed again, but this time with even less success. The axe blade was caught flat between their bodies. Fat fingers closed upon Will’s bruised larynx.
Will fought for air, for leverage. He could feel the warm flesh of the guard’s exposed gut pressed against his knuckles. The exposed strip of skin where the guard’s chain-mail shirt did not reach all the way to his britches. His soft exposed underbelly.
Will twisted desperately, freed one leg. He kicked out, hit the inside of the guard’s calves. Achieved nothing. His vision shrank to nothing more than a blurred pinprick.
He bucked, fought for leverage, won it, and brought his whole leg up fast and hard between the guard’s legs. The guard gasped in pain. His fingers flew from Will’s neck.
In the brief moment that pressure relented, vision still nothing more than a field of winking lights, Will turned the axe blade north. He sliced. He felt flesh give way. He dragged the blade along the great length of the guard’s stomach.
Warmth spilled over him. Blood and offal splashing over him with heavy wet thuds. The guard gasped, gurgled, clutched at the spilling ropes of his intestines. And then, quite noisily, and very messily, he collapsed and died on top of Will.
25
Prophecy’s Bitch
Upon further consideration, Will thought, working himself free from the guard’s very literal deadweight, I’m quite glad Lette wasn’t there to see that.
He emerged from beneath the corpse victorious and covered with blood and offal. He bent and retrieved his axe from beneath the guard’s bulk, his boots squelching as he did so.
He felt better with the axe in his hands. He turned it over. It had saved his life. You should have a name, he thought. In the legends, heroes’ weapons always had a name.
“I shall call you,” he said in the empty room, “the Sense of Imminent Disaster.” That seemed fitting enough.
Thus armed, he turned his attention to the door.
It was, he soon discovered, not actually a door. There was no handle, and no hinges. It was simply a flap down which meat was poured to fill Mattrax’s gullet. He cranked the lever, the flap lifted, the ramp—slick with blood and grease—was revealed.
“Shit,” Lette cursed.
And no. No. This couldn’t be happening. This was her moment.
Another shout.
“Balur,” Quirk breathed. “It’s Balur. And Firkin. With the wagon and the sacks. That’s all.”
She reached once more for the beatific peace of biological rapture. Toward epiphany. Toward Mattrax.
From the cave entrance came the sound of steel clashing against steel.
“Lawl’s balls!” Lette cursed again. Then the mercenary was moving. She dashed along the contours of the golden hoard, heading back toward the cave entrance. Rivers of coins tumbled and tinkled in her wake.
As she dashed past Quirk, the ground gave way.
No. No!
Quirk lunged, desperate, grasping. Her fingers were almost there, almost touching Mattrax’s skin. But there was nothing to gain purchase on. She felt herself falling. She screamed. Everything was slipping away from her. Epiphany fluttered away.
Then she was tumbling, arse over heel, landing unceremoniously, feet in the air, hands splayed and empty.
For a moment, Quirk lay and seethed. She recognized the signs, felt the mask of control slipping away. No! screamed some last rational part of her. No! That’s not what this is. Not what this was meant to be! This was my moment.
She picked herself up. Her teeth gritted. Her palms hot. Steam rising from between her fingertips.
Someone was running around the corner of the cave. A guard, chain mail glinting in reflected moonlight, mouth open in a yell, sword raised. He saw her, let loose a fresh howl, and charged.
Quirk did not see the man. Not as he was here and now. She did not see the cave around her. She did not feel the hot breath of Mattrax gusting over her.
Instead, she felt the hot breath of the Tamathian scrublands blowing at her back. She saw the shallow sloping hills of her childhood, dotted with scrubby bushes that held more thorns than leaves. She saw a bandit dressed in tatters charging, scimitar raised above his head, the desperation of a starving man glinting in his eyes.
No! screamed the voice. This is over. This is past. This is not who you are.
But the mask of control was slipping, almost gone. And in her rage, her frustration, her fear, Quirk reached up and tore it away.
She reached out her hand. Heat rose in her palm. She felt divine power within her. She felt words she had never learned forming on her tongue, words that pushed back at the skin of reality stretched over the world. Felt them punch through.
The guard was almost on her. His sword hung above her head.
The heat in her palm became a physical pain. A scalding, searing expression of hate and rage. She howled, loud enough to match the guard’s battle cry.
And then, there, in the darkness, she gave birth to fire.
23
Hammer Time
Fire Root, Balur thought in one of his increasingly rare lucid moments, is being the absolute shit. He had heard certain whores discussing the improvements certain herbs and powders could bring to their area of expertise. But, honestly, they were going to have to try mass murder while high on this stuff. This was being absolutely fucking great.
“Whee!” he cried, spinning in a circle, war hammer held out at full stretch, feeling his shoulders take the weight, his heels spinning on the sandy floor, watching the bodies flying through the air. Their blood painted the air in spiraling arcs, glistening like streams of rubies. He could smell it, like a shooting star exploding in the back of his throat.
He hadn’t expected to find guards here. He was unsure what he had expected now. But it hadn’t been them. Not that he was sad about it. Rather, when he had come running out of the woods below the cave and seen them streaming out of the castle gates, he had let out a howl of joy. At his back, the villagers had echoed the sound.
The guards had turned, seen them, charged. The two forces had crashed into each other like newlyweds.
Balur reached out, grabbed someone nearby, bit their face off, and laughed giddily as blood ran down his chin.
This was what he lived for. This moment. This surrender. To say farewell to thought, to morals, to civility. To live beyond the boundaries of culture, and societal norms. This was life at its most pure, its most bestial. This was life without pretenses. All masks removed. Life reduced to meat, and bone, and fury.
He pirouetted, brought his hammer up, clean through the body of… someone. Factions were meaningless at this point in the fight. The head of the hammer glistened above the fray, dripped blood. He brought it down and listened to the meaty crack of impact.
Someone stabbed him. He felt the blade find a spot where his scales met, its tip slide inside him, puncturing muscle. He felt the pain, bright and hot. He laughed again, grabbed the sword blade, and then its owner. The sword wielder’s neck snapped in Balur’s fist.
He descended into a bloody haze. The world was red and wet for a while. When he emerged he was, for a moment, disoriented. He pummeled a man in the face, trying to get his bearings.
People were screaming, running, pushing to get past him. Villagers and guards alike. “Dragon!” they screamed. “Dragon! Mattrax wakes!”
And then Balur saw it, bright and beautiful, blossoming in the back of the cave. Great gouts of fire that sparkled yellow and red in his dilated pupils.
The dragon. That was why he had come here. To show the world that he could defeat a dragon. To make the dragon know his name even as he took its life.
Some small, sobering part of Balur saw that fire and questioned if, just this once, wisdom shouldn’t be prevailing over bravado. A larger, drunker part of his mind shouted at that part to be fucking off. He was totally knowing what he was doing. Why was the other voice always nagging at him with its rational good sense? He was being a warrior, gods’ hex upon it. He was having to do certain things because they were being there. His actions were not having to make sense.
He set his shoulder and charged into the depths of the cave, toward heat, fire, rage, and glory. Bodies bounced off him, scrambling to get away. All around him screams rose.
“The dragon!”
“The dragon!”
“It’s going to kill us all!”
No, thought Balur with a drunken grin. I am.
He rounded the bend in the cave, skidded to a halt.
Quirk stood there.
No, floated there.
The thaumatobiologist’s feet were a clear foot off the floor. Her robes billowed around her, rippling through the heat haze. She held her arms out, palms raised.
And she was beautiful.
Ribbons of fire danced from her hands. They wove together in complex patterns of slaughter. A hapless guard was caught in a stream of liquid flame. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. His blackened body skittered and danced. The dead lay all around her.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t fix her gaze on anyone. She just wove her ribbons of fire back and forth in front of her. Where they struck the floor, explosions bloomed, spattering the bodies with glowing shrapnel.
I, thought Balur, taking the scene in at a glance, would be totally hitting that. Then his eye fell on the dragon beyond her.
Mattrax lay slumped over a vast hoard of gold and jewels, wings splayed in a sloppy half-collapsed pile. Drool was spilling from one corner of his mouth in a thick, ropy stream.
Momentarily, Balur lost the power of speech. All he could utter was a single, guttural roar of hate. Rage. Bloodlust. Desire. He wanted that dragon. He wanted its blood on his skin. Its bone shards stuck into his cheeks.
Waves of rage carried him forward, a misty cloud of hallucinogenic fury. He ducked and darted through Quirk’s tapestry of fiery destruction. Mattrax loomed in his vision, the vast face eclipsing everything else. The dragon was his world. Its death at his hands was as inevitable as the turning of the sun in the heavens. His hammer was above his head. His muscles burned with power, with the churning potential of death.
He brought the hammer down, felt the impact run up his arm, felt the hammer head glance off the scales. He stepped back, slipping in the piles of coin that mired his feet.
For a moment he thought he had achieved nothing. That this was all just a paltry lie, some drug-addled fantasy he had concocted to make himself feel better about the ignominy of his earlier defeat.
But then he saw it. The thin hairline crack that ran down the scale he had struck, the clear fluid seeping out. Mattrax’s hide was not impenetrable. The dragon could be defeated. All that was needed was time.
Balur brought his war hammer down again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.
24
Dragon Slayer
Gripping his axe in both hands, Will crept into the antechamber before Mattrax’s cave. His heart sank. He had been hoping that the guard would be asleep, head sinking into his own obscene folds of blubber, soft as a down pillow. Instead, though, the guard was on his feet. Will had had difficulty imagining it before. He just hadn’t been able to work out the mechanics of those legs supporting that much bulk. And yet here it was before him.
The guard had his back to Will, was leaning toward the door, head cocked to one side, listening. Despite the thickness of the metal, sounds of utter chaos rang out clearly: roars, screams, howls, the clash of steel, something wet and squelching. The smell of copper was ripe on the air.
All in all, it rather reminded Will of a stag party he’d been to down in The Village. He’d stopped agreeing to go to them after that.
Gods, what was happening down there? He didn’t know for sure, only that it was not in any part of what he had once laughingly called a plan. In fact, to the best of his memory the sound of bloody slaughter was the exact thing the plan had been supposed to avoid.
There again, the plan had also meant to keep him out of situations like being alone in a room with one of Mattrax’s guards and an axe.
Then Will realized that the guard hadn’t even twitched as Will entered the room. He was utterly focused on the door.
The axe felt heavy in Will’s hands.
Could he do it? Could he bury a blade in a man when his back was turned?
Yes, he decided, I could. The gods killed, did they not? Hadn’t Lawl himself murdered thousands of men in fits of jealous rage? That said, Lawl had slept with Toil, his own daughter, and then Toil had married Cois, the child, so perhaps the gods didn’t always set the best example…
Still, it was the sort of brutally practical thing that he could imagine Lette doing, and he was fairly sure this was a moment for brutal practicality.
His palms slick with sweat, he took a step forward.
“What do you think it is?”
The guard’s voice rooted Will to the spot. The guard didn’t turn around, didn’t look at him. He spoke in a soft, almost conversational way.
“Erm,” Will managed. He cleared his throat. What did you say to someone you were planning on murdering? That was a piece of etiquette his mother had never covered with him.
“I thought it was a revolt at first,” the guard went on. “Them up top finally had enough and decided to do something about it. Happens every once in a while. Then the boss man, he cleans house. Spring cleaning, I call it.” He laughed softly to himself. A low, burbling sound like a spring brook trying to force its way through a block of lard. Then the sound skewed sideways into something less cheerful.
“The thing is,” the guard went on, “I don’t hear Mattrax. There ain’t no roaring. There ain’t the crackle of corpses burning.” He shook his head. “No. I hear something else.” He reached back a stubby arm and beckoned to Will. “Come listen. See what you think.”
Will hesitated. He was still holding the axe aloft. Except now that the conversation had started he didn’t feel murderous. Instead he felt terribly, terribly awkward.
He let the axe sag, took a tentative step forward. He could get past this man some other way. Hell, he could probably open the flap and be through before the other even reacted. And with his girth, the guard certainly couldn’t follow that way.
“Listen,” whispered the guard, still not looking at him.
“Erm,” said Will, still not entirely sure what to say. He really had no desire to get much closer to the man.
“I said,” the guard started, his voice rising in volume, “come here and—” He started to turn. His arm started to swing around. Will caught a glimpse of flashing steel. “Listen!” the guard bellowed.
Will flung himself backward just as the fat guard lunged. The blade swished through the space that was until recently home to his stomach and its assorted bevy of essential organs.
He reeled back, off-balance.
“My house!” the guard screamed. “You bring drugged meat into my house! Feed it to my master! On my watch!”
He was surprisingly fast for such a big man. His arm whipped back and forth, the blade a blur, slicing at Will’s stomach. Will backed up as the guard advanced, trying to get the axe in between them.
“You tricked me,” spat the guard. His face was transformed, no longer morose, but instead contorted with rage. “It was my job to protect him. To feed him. And you poisoned him. Right in front of me!”
The guard, Will realized, had at some point—sitting all alone in the dark and the heat—gone entirely insane.
“Mattrax is a dragon,” he pointed out. “He controls the whole valley. I think he can get by without you.”
This, it turned out, was not the right thing to say.
“He needs me!” screamed the guard, and he lunged.
Fast though he might be, the guard’s weight betrayed him in that moment. The lunge was pathetically short. Will, caught flat-footed by the abruptness of the move, felt only the slightest pinprick of the sword’s weight as it glanced off his chain mail.
He brought his axe across his body in a short, sharp chopping motion. The blade crashed into the inside of the guard’s elbow. There was an ugly crunching sound. The guard screamed. His blade clattered flatly as it bounced on the flagstone floor.
Will stood panting. The guard clutched at his injured arm, sprayed spittle and curses.
Will for his part was quite proud of himself. The fourth fight in his life—the first one involving real weapons—and it had gone significantly better than the first three.
“All right,” he said. “Sorry about that. But if you could just step aside so I can go and rob your master blind.”
It was, he thought, a rather snappy thing to say. It had… what was the word? Panache. He wished Lette could have seen him in that moment.
With a murderous growl, the guard flung himself upon Will.
Although years of working in the fields had ensured that Will was not an entirely insignificant young man, he stood about as much chance as a reed before a stampeding bull. He was bowled backward, crashing into the room’s far wall. His head cracked off hard stone, the world exploded with light, and his balance pirouetted around the confines of his skull.
As his senses returned, he became very aware of the guard’s hands around his throat. Just as his vision was starting to clear, it was blurring again.
He was pinned to the floor. He started to thrash back and forth, trying to work himself free, but the guard’s weight was implacable and unshakable.
His lungs were burning now, his vision narrowing down to a point that seemed to be mostly taken up by the guard’s red, spittle-splattered face.
“He needs me, see?” hissed the guard. “Needs me to protect him from little shits like you.”
Will thrashed harder, managed to pry an arm free. He grasped desperately about himself. His palm hit cold metal.
Cold metal.
And connected to it… a shaft of cold wood.
With the last of his strength, he smashed the axe handle into the side of the guard’s head. There was a satisfying crunch.
For a moment the weight lifted. Will gasped. Air rushed into his burning lungs so fast he almost choked on it.
Then the guard’s weight crashed back down on him again. Will thrashed again, but this time with even less success. The axe blade was caught flat between their bodies. Fat fingers closed upon Will’s bruised larynx.
Will fought for air, for leverage. He could feel the warm flesh of the guard’s exposed gut pressed against his knuckles. The exposed strip of skin where the guard’s chain-mail shirt did not reach all the way to his britches. His soft exposed underbelly.
Will twisted desperately, freed one leg. He kicked out, hit the inside of the guard’s calves. Achieved nothing. His vision shrank to nothing more than a blurred pinprick.
He bucked, fought for leverage, won it, and brought his whole leg up fast and hard between the guard’s legs. The guard gasped in pain. His fingers flew from Will’s neck.
In the brief moment that pressure relented, vision still nothing more than a field of winking lights, Will turned the axe blade north. He sliced. He felt flesh give way. He dragged the blade along the great length of the guard’s stomach.
Warmth spilled over him. Blood and offal splashing over him with heavy wet thuds. The guard gasped, gurgled, clutched at the spilling ropes of his intestines. And then, quite noisily, and very messily, he collapsed and died on top of Will.
25
Prophecy’s Bitch
Upon further consideration, Will thought, working himself free from the guard’s very literal deadweight, I’m quite glad Lette wasn’t there to see that.
He emerged from beneath the corpse victorious and covered with blood and offal. He bent and retrieved his axe from beneath the guard’s bulk, his boots squelching as he did so.
He felt better with the axe in his hands. He turned it over. It had saved his life. You should have a name, he thought. In the legends, heroes’ weapons always had a name.
“I shall call you,” he said in the empty room, “the Sense of Imminent Disaster.” That seemed fitting enough.
Thus armed, he turned his attention to the door.
It was, he soon discovered, not actually a door. There was no handle, and no hinges. It was simply a flap down which meat was poured to fill Mattrax’s gullet. He cranked the lever, the flap lifted, the ramp—slick with blood and grease—was revealed.
