Fool's Gold (4 page)

“Needed the money,” the goblin continued gabbling. “For the down payment. Had to have it.”

Lette closed her eyes. She didn't want to know. She just wanted to know where the cursed creature with her purse had gone to. But…

“Down payment?” Balur rumbled.

The goblin twisted to look up at his captor. “For bakery,” he squeaked.

A divine pissing comedy.

“Bakery?” Balur repeated. He look at Lette. She refused to meet his eye.

“Oh yes.” The goblin nodded, trying to smile through his evident pain. “We think there is a big market for goblin pastries. Very delicate. Melt in your mouth. We have very nimble fingers.” The goblin took a break from vainly trying to peel Balur's fist open to wiggle a hand at him. The fingers were indeed long and slender.

Balur nodded sagely. “That is being a good point, that,” he said. “Nimble fingers are being important for baking.” He looked at Lette significantly.

“Oh give it a fucking rest.”

“Yes,” the goblin jabbered, too preoccupied with its own survival to pick up on basic social cues. “You see. You see. But money, you see? Money is the problem. Need to have money to buy a bakery. For the down payment. High start-up costs for bakeries. Very high. And the Merchants Guild. They won't lend us the money. Goblins have shitty credit record, they say. Cultural and historical activities not conducive to large-scale financial loans, they say. But we need money to make money. Financial trap, we say. Plutocratic bullshit, we say. Racist fucks, we call the Merchants Guild. And so they kick us out. And now we are here. Engaging in cultural and historical activities not conducive to large-scale financial loans. For your purse. For our bakery.”

He stared at them wildly. Trying to stretch his squished face into a toothy, pitiful smile.

Lette closed her eyes. “Why the hell do I still not know where this whoreson Thrasher is? Why do I not know where my fucking purse is?”

She was shouting. This was her new start, gods piss on it. Her new beginning.

The goblin swallowed. “He is,” he stuttered. “He is…” He started again.

“Oh just get rid of it,” Lette snapped, her patience finally reaching its breaking point. “I'll track the other one down and find our purse myself.” She could see the trail of broken branches and matted-down grass leading away from the skirmish. It would be an easy enough trail to follow.

Balur gave a satisfied nod, and the muscles in its arm bunched. The goblin screamed.

“Gods, Balur! Not like that!” He'd been about to crush the goblin's skull. Lette pulled at her hair. “We are trying to be better people, remember?”

“You are trying.” Balur was belligerent.

“Just throw it away, and I will track this arsehole, Thrasher. You can kill him instead, all right?”

Balur sighed heavily. “Fine.” With a casual sweep of his arm he flung the goblin away.

Unfortunately, the parabolic flight of the goblin intersected directly with a tree trunk five yards away. There was an ugly cracking sound. What was left of the goblin slumped to the ground.

Lette just looked at Balur.

He opted for indignance. “What? What?” He rolled his eyes. “That was being a genuine mistake.”

Lette sighed as she looked around her. Dead bodies. Blood and carrion. Crows already circling in the air above, their calls long and mocking.

Her new start.

As she stalked deeper into the woods, one word seemed to sum it all up.

“Shit.”

Will stood, momentarily paralyzed by the vision of a cave full of goblins.

Run!
screamed a small and eminently sensible part of his mind, but for some reason his legs weren't paying attention. They, it seemed, were more fatalistic. They would only carry him from so many attempts on his life in one day before simply giving up and accepting the fate as inevitable.

“Sorry,” he heard himself say. “Wrong cave. My one's a few entrances down.”

He went to take a step away from the goblins but his cowardly legs were still not on the same page as the rest of him.

A low growl seemed to rise from every small mouth in the room, a whisper brought to the volume of a roar by the sheer density of the bodies packed into the space before him.

“I'll be off then,” he said, more to his own anatomy than to the crowd. His knees shivered in response, but he thought the movement boded collapse more than any sort of horizontal traction.

Suddenly a bloodcurdling howl rose through the night. It hollowed out all of Will's resolve, left him a quivering shell.

He found himself thinking of the Pantheon. Of Lawl, father of the gods. Of Lawl's wife, Betra, mother to all. Of their children, Klink, Toil, and Knole—gods and goddesses of money, labor, and wisdom. Of Lawl's daughter-wife Cois, goddess of lust and desire. Of Betra's husband-son Barph, god of revelry. Who could he pray to? Who might, against all the odds, send him aid?

Fuck it,
he thought.
I'll slaughter a whole damn army of pigs to the first one of you lot who helps me out here.

Apparently the Pantheon had about as much faith in him as he had in them.

His arms, more cooperative than his legs, rose up over his head. His spirits almost rallied as he felt movement in his petrified legs, but it was only him sinking to his knees.

Wait,
said the small voice inside him, the one that had advised retreat,
that howl came from behind you…

Shut up!
yelled the panicking component of his mind.
I don't have time for your shit. I'm busy dying, gods curse it.

Something massive bowled past Will. He felt the wind of it as it passed him, the bass growl of its roar in his chest, the pounding of its feet through the rock beneath him.

Then silence. A moment of absolute silence.

Then wind. A violent swishing noise.

And then the sound of death.

Will had grown up on a farm. He had raised enough livestock to know that sound. The sound of flesh tearing, bones breaking.

But it wasn't coming from him.

He dared to open one eye.

Divine intervention. At first, that was the only explanation that came to his mind. That somehow his prayers had worked. That Lawl had really stepped down from the heavens and come to intercede on his part. That a divinity had finally come back to Kondorra. Just for him.

And then, he got a look at the creature, and while there were stories of Lawl, and Betra, and Barph, and the rest of the Pantheon taking on some odd forms over the years, nothing he'd ever read was quite like this.

It was a creature perhaps eight feet tall, made entirely out of vast slabs of muscle, and spackled with cobblestone-size scales that glistened bronze in the firelight. It wielded a massive war hammer, the head of which scythed through the pressed ranks like a blade through wheat. Small bodies flew, anatomy distorted, fluids flying in great spraying arcs. The scent of blood and shit filled the air.

The goblins screamed, panicked, tried to flee back into the dull dead end of the cavern. A few brave souls leaked around the edge of the creature's arc of death, fled toward the entrance. They raced past Will, and he tracked them as they hurtled toward the night.

And that was when he saw her. The angel to pair with the demon deeper in the cave. She was etched in moonlight, sweat-slick hair pulled back into a haphazard ponytail, mouth set in a grimace of rage. She held a sword in one hand, a dagger in the other. She slit the throat of the first goblin that tried to get past her, cut the legs out from beneath the next. It collapsed on severed knees, screamed so hard it retched.

The vast lizard demon waded into the cave, splashing death upon the walls and floor, and the woman followed, ending the lives of those initial survivors one by one with sharp, careful precision. Like a surgeon following in a butcher's wake.

Could they be demigods? When the gods manifested, they usually had just one thing on their mind. Anyone unfortunate enough to fall under their glamour and be impregnated was rarely allowed to go full term, though. The Pantheon's offspring—demigods—simply sowed too much chaos in the world. They were too powerful, too unpredictable. The balance of nations could be knocked askew.

This butchery, though. Its scale. Its efficiency. It still felt almost divine to Will. The pair were quiet in their work. After the initial howl of the charge, there were no more battle cries, no more declarations of righteousness. All around them the goblins screamed, but the pair worked with a grim set to their jaws.

But as he watched, Will decided, no. Not divine. While the scale and the proficiency of this slaughter was a new vista for him, this was still quotidian butchery. There were no lightning bolts, no quakes of telekinetic power. Just blade, and blood, and bone.

So who in the Hallows were they?

Eventually the slaughter was done. All about them were the dead and dying. The pair stood, panting, looked at each other, sighed, and shrugged.

“See,” said the lizard monster in a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together, “that is being more fun than baking.”

“Shut up and start looking for the purse,” said the woman. She wheeled round suddenly, stabbed a finger out at Will. “You,” she said. “Have you seen a purse?”

Will stared at her. His life did not make sense to him anymore. He remembered a metaphor his father's old lost farmhand Firkin had said to him, in one of his increasingly rare sober moments. He said it was as if the narrator of his fate had needed to step away for a moment and handed the reins to an angry toddler—a god's hand sweeping through the bricks of his life and knocking everything to the floor.

“Me?” Will said, to the woman pointing to his chest.

“No,” said the woman, shaking her head, “the other helpful bystander standing just behind you.”

Caught off guard, Will looked over his shoulder. There was no one there. Then his mind processed. He looked back to the woman embarrassed.

He could see her better now. The goblins' torches littered the floor. Her face was angular, hard, flat planes coming to abrupt angles at her cheekbones and jaw. She was dressed in boiled leathers studded with steel. A hodgepodge of plate mail was strapped to her shoulders, arms, and shins. The sharpness of her features carried through to her eyes, bright and alive in this field of death.

Behind her, the massive lizard man was holding two dead goblins aloft by their ankles and shaking them. A few scraps of leather and dirt fell from them, along with a fairly large quantity of blood. There was no purse, though. The lizard man grunted and slung both bodies toward one corner of the cave. They landed with a crack of breaking bone that made Will wince.

A hint of sympathy entered the woman's face. “Not how you spend your typical evening?” she asked.

Will shrugged helplessly. “Not even a typical day.”

The woman cracked a smile at that. The hard planes of her face transformed, curves appearing out of nowhere at her cheeks, and even a small dimple revealing its presence.

“I'm Lette,” she said. “That's Balur.”

Will stared at the lizard man. Balur. The word sounded foreign. He had the feeling that this was a moment when curiosity might equate to a feline fatality, but he couldn't quite help himself. “What is he?” he asked.

“An obstinate idiot,” Lette said without a pause.

Balur shook out two more goblins and flung them at the corner. “You being flirting is not helping us find our purse any faster,” he said without looking up.

“At least,” she spat back, “my version of flirting is a little more sophisticated than whipping my britches off and proffering some coin.” Without pausing for breath she turned to Will and said, “Get any ideas and I shall feed you your own testicles.”

Will was still watching events through a thin haze of confusion. His head still hurt from running into the tree. He wanted to sit down and ignore everything in the hopes that it would go away. Except Lette. He thought Lette could stay.

He realized he had not introduced himself. “I'm Will,” he said. “I'm a farmer.”

Lette nodded. She looked back at Balur. “How about farming?” she asked the lizard man, apropos—as far as Will could tell—of nothing. “Working with your hands. Very physically demanding, farmwork can be.”

Balur grunted. “Bad for reflexes. Ruin muscle memory,” he said, leaving Will none the wiser.

Lette sighed, sank to her knees, and started rummaging through the possessions of the nearest corpse. Behind her, Balur had moved on to a different part of the cave. He shook out two more goblins, then, disappointed, flung them away to start a new pile.

As they landed there was a muffled yell.

Balur hesitated, arm still outstretched from his throw. “Got a live one,” he said.

Will's stomach tightened, a sharp knot lodging near his kidneys. He looked back at the entrance to the cave. He could slip away. They wouldn't notice. He could…

He could what? Run into more trouble? It was unlikely he would come across any other well-armed strangers to brutally slaughter all of his problems. Given the many and various ways the world had tried to screw him over this night, staying with Lette and Balur actually seemed the safer option.

Lette had her short sword out once more and was advancing on the source of the sound, Balur by her side. They slowed as they came close. Then with a speed that surprised Will, Balur darted forward and grabbed something. It wriggled and writhed in the lizard man's massive hand as he held it aloft.

It was bigger than the goblin corpses littering the ground. And it was wrapped in ropes. Balur had it by its ankles, but it still took Will a moment to realize the massive scruff of hair at the bottom was a man's hair and beard.

“That's not a goblin,” Will said, just in case stating the obvious would help.

“Might be in league with them,” Balur said, eyes narrowed at the struggling form. Grunts and squeaks emerged, and Will realized that one of the ropes had firmly gagged the man. “Maybe be killing it just in case.”

“In league?” Will said incredulously. “He's tied hand and foot.”

Lette nodded. “Farm boy makes a compelling case.”

“I am still thinking I should perhaps be squishing it. Just in—”

“I'm still thinking about spaying you,” Lette cut in. “Put the poor bugger down.”

Grudgingly, Balur lowered the man to the ground. Lette's knife appeared in her hand, apparently without having traveled through the intervening space between it and the sheath at her waist. The knife flashed in a single stroke, and the bonds fell away.

A dirty, disheveled man emerged from the looping mass of rope, shouting as he came. He was naked except for a pair of discolored undershorts, and a fairly thick coating of mud. He was rail thin, but with a small potbelly sticking out, as if he had at some point in the past swallowed a child's ball and it had obstinately stuck in his system. His arms too were more muscular than his frame might suggest, and his hands were disproportionately large. His face was almost entirely lost in a shock of hair and beard, long, tightly curled bristles standing out in wild clumps.

“Varmagants!” he was screaming. “Barph-cursed wotsits! Menagerie! Cursed and hexed vermin! Thy cannot prevent me. I am the inevitable! I am the word of the future that shall come! I am the inescapable odor!”

Both Lette and Balur took a step away from the man. Lette's sword was up once more.

It was rather a shock to Will that he recognized the man.

“Firkin?” he said.

Lette glanced at Will, quick and darting. “You know him?” she said fixing her attention back on the raving, half-naked man.

Will took a step toward him. And, yes. Yes he did. It was indeed his father's old farmhand, Firkin.

Memories flooded Will. Sitting with his father and the farmhands on a summer's day, all of them laughing at Firkin's tall tale. Up on Firkin's shoulders, his mouth full of stolen apple flesh, racing across a field, his father chasing and cursing. Watching Firkin tell jokes as his father branded the pigs. Passing bread out of a kitchen window while his mother's back was turned, Firkin gathering the rolls up in a fold of his shirt. Sitting and talking about dragons and dreaming of revolution. Watching Firkin tickle the cow's backside with a porcupine quill and then watching as the cow's kick sent him halfway across the yard. Laughing so hard he thought some part of him might rupture. Firkin and his father standing in the yard, yelling at each other, red-faced. Will and Firkin sitting slouched beneath a tree, daydreaming about stealing a dragon's gold from beneath his nose. Firkin drinking so much he fell off the table, and his father, not far behind him, laughing so hard he joined him on the floor. His mother slapping Firkin full across the face, the red handprint standing out stark on his pale skin. Firkin telling him that he didn't want company right now, and the first feeling of utter rejection in his life. Then riding a cow, madcap down a hill, Firkin running behind full tilt, switching its behind. His mother holding him, sobbing and shouting at the same time. Asking his father where Firkin was. Days spent listless and wandering. Then a meal interrupted by a knock at the door, his father rising, words exchanged with an unseen man, voices rising, the scuffle of violence, and then Firkin framed in the doorway, his father on the floor, lip bloody, horror in Firkin's eyes. Then Firkin from a distance, a shadow shape that haunted distant fences. Riding with his father into town and seeing a man shouting at people who weren't there—he only recognized him as Firkin as they passed him on the way home. The moment when he realized he was used to that sight, not bothered by it anymore. His father's funeral—seeing that familiar shadow that used to haunt the fences. Watching Firkin being thrown out of the tavern again. Again. Again.