Fool's Gold (5 page)

And now here. Firkin. The village drunk. The village crazy. A man who seemed to be waiting for everyone to forget why they gave him the dregs from their plates, the spare copper sheks they couldn't spare.

Firkin chose that moment to vomit noisily and messily over the floor. It was a practiced movement—tip and pour. He straightened, wiping his mouth. “Darn varmints,” he said. “Gone went fed me some of the pootin'.”

Nobody seemed up to the task of asking him what “pootin'” was.

Balur regarded the filthy, scrawny man and then shrugged. “Is looking goblin-y to me.” He hefted his hammer.

“No!” Will yelled, darting toward the old farmhand. “No, he's not. He's a friend.”

Firkin narrowed his eyes at Will. “I don't like you and your bunk,” he said with surprising clarity.

“I am saving you from poor taste in friends,” Balur said, not relaxing his grip on the hammer.

Firkin assessed the massive lizard man, stuck out his lower lip, and squinted with one eye. “You's a biggun,” he said. “I like the bigguns. Carry more of the ale for me. Down to the merry lands, and we all drown happy like.” He smacked his lips twice.

“We can't kill him, Balur,” said Lette from behind Will and Firkin, sounding slightly exasperated. Will felt a wave of gratitude flood through him.

“We can be,” said Balur matter-of-factly, causing the wave to break. “Be being simple. I be bringing down this hammer with speed of a certain amount. His head is going crump, and we are having a dead man there.”

“Well, I know literally you can kill him…”

“Thank you,” said Balur, readying himself once more.

“No!” Will shouted again. “He's my friend. He helped raise me.”

Balur gave Will a skeptical look. “Maybe I should be killing him to be saving you from your poor taste in friends, then I should be killing you to be saving Lette from her poor taste in men. Everybody be being happier then.”

“No!” Will said, starting to feel repetitive, but not sure what other words might save him from a homicidal lizard man at this point in the proceedings.

“If we're saving me from my taste in friends,” said Lette to Balur, “maybe I should be killing you then.”

The hammer blow continued to fail to fall.

“Look,” said Will, reaching out to Balur, imploring, “he's just an old drunk, who the goblins found and tied up. Who knows how long he's been captive? He needs some kindness, not death threats.” That, at least, seemed obvious to him. A little piece of the world he could have make sense.

“Was all part of my plan,” said Firkin, tapping the side of his nose. “Right where I wanted them.”

“You're not being where I want you,” Balur groused, but he finally put down the hammer. The head rung as it struck the stone ground, a sonorous bass note. Will had no idea how he'd been able to hold the weight of it for so long.

“Let Firkin just stay for the night,” Will said, turning to Lette, now that yet another threat had been averted. “He'll catch his death out in the rain, and you only just saved his life from the goblins.”

Lette nodded. “Be a shame to put good work to waste. He sleeps downwind of me and there'll be no complaints.”

Balur grunted. Possibly in agreement.

“Hey,” Lette said as if struck by a sudden thought, putting a hand on Firkin's shoulder. “Don't happen to have seen a purse, have you?”

“I seen the world,” said Firkin, eyes fixing on some far-off point. “I seen the plans. I seen the writing on a turtle's back. I seen the insides of a cow.” He nodded, self-satisfied. “It was warm in there,” he added.

“Right,” said Lette. “I'll just look over here then.”

As the search continued, Firkin drifted away toward the cave entrance. Will was worried he might wander into the rain, but he stayed standing there, half-sketched in moonlight, staring out into the night, muttering obscenities to himself.

Behind him, Lette and Balur seemed to be losing what little good temper they'd had.

“Where in the name of Cois's cursed cock is it?” Lette spat. “Where did that little fucker put it?”

“Maybe you were tracking him wrong. Maybe this is being the wrong cave.”

“Oh, it's insulting my professional skill set is it now? That's how you're going to fix this situation? By pissing me off so much that I gut and skin you and sell your hide. Except, oh wait.” She struck the side of her head with the heel of her palm. “It's fucking worthless. If I just hung a ball sack from a stick and carried it about with me it would be very little different from having you around.”

Balur shrugged. “Be being a better conversation starter too.”

Joining the conversation, Will realized, would be a little bit like holding his hand in a flame to see how it felt. Lette captivated him, but the piles of corpses around the room were a useful reminder that she could back up her threats if she wanted to. And then, despite all this sensible thinking, he found his jaw starting to move

“Could he be right?” he said, pointing to Balur. “Could there be another cave?”

Lette rolled her eyes and set her jaw. “Look around you,” she said. “There are sixty-four corpses here. We left eighteen others back up at the mountain pass. That means they need to scavenge enough wildlife to support eighty-two souls. That means a range of twenty or more miles in any direction from here. That means that if any other tribe came within that distance they'd fight until the others were dead and their eyes boiled down to surprisingly tasty after-dinner snacks. Which means that unless I'm a complete fucking idiot who couldn't track her own grandmother from the bedroom to the privy, then this is the only fucking place the goblin that stole my purse could have gone. And yet that fucking purse is not fucking here.”

Another dagger appeared as if by magic in her hand, and she flung it at one of the piles of corpses. It buried itself up to the hilt in a dead goblin's back. She spat after it.

There was, Will thought, something very sexy about Lette's competence. The area of expertise was utterly terrifying, but, on the other hand, it was significantly more exciting than butter churning, or animal husbandry, or any of the other interests the Village girls usually pursued.

“Could the thief have dropped it?” he said somewhat against his better judgment. He was trying to keep in mind that the moth tended to come out of confrontations with the flame rather the worse for wear, but it wasn't helping much.

Lette closed her eyes.

Balur grunted again. “Running pretty hard, it was,” he said. “And it was being focused on not dying more than it was on being rich.”

Lette groaned.

“It was being easy enough for us to miss,” Balur continued. “We were being focused on the beast instead.”

Lette clawed her hands down her face.

“Might be a drop even,” Balur went on. “Someplace special hidden like. Be dumping the stuff there and be returning for it later when the coast has been cleared. Be throwing it up in a tree even. Makeshift drop.”

“Shut up,” said Lette. “Just shut up.” She sank to her knees. “Gods' hex on it all.”

Will almost reached out to her, to put a hand on her shoulder, but he saw Balur shaking his head.

“I had a coin once,” Firkin commented from the front of the room. “But she left me. Cantankerous bitch.”

It happened so fast, Will almost missed it. A roar of rage from Lette. The blur of her limbs. And then she was across the room, knife in hand, holding Firkin's collar by the other, pressing him up against the wall.

“You fucking—” she started to snarl.

“Excuse me?”

A new voice—the tone deep but feminine—brought Lette to an abrupt halt.

They all stared at the newcomer standing in the entrance of the cave. She wore a gray traveling robe, hood pulled up to obscure her features. Dark-skinned, long-fingered hands were clasped in front of her. Looking at them, Will found himself thinking of small blackbirds.

For a moment everything was very still.

“By Barph's ball sack,” Lette said, not letting go of the squirming Firkin. “How many people are going to wander into this cursed cave tonight? Is there some gods-hexed sign I missed?”

“Like you were missing a goblin tossing all our gold,” Balur murmured.

Lette whirled, pointed the dagger. “Don't you even fucking start.”

“You know,” said the figure, “I think this is the wrong cave after all.” There was a tone of refinement to her voice that made Will straighten up a little, and run his hands down his shirt to smooth it. The action mostly served to spread the bloodstains out.

“I'll j-just be going,” said the robed woman, and stepped away, back toward the sheets of rain that blanketed the night.

The tremor in her voice caught Will's attention, though. He saw water dripping from the front of her hood in an almost steady stream. Her robe swung heavily. She was soaked to the bone.

“Wait,” he said. “You can't go out.”

The others looked at him. Even Firkin, still pressed up against the wall.

“She's soaked to the bone.” He pointed out to the room at large. “She'll catch her death.”

“You be saying that a lot, I think,” Balur said. “Unhealthy obsession.”

Will stared around at the sixty-four goblin corpses. But, yes, of course, he was the one with an unhealthy obsession. Though, given the size difference between him and Balur, he decided to keep that opinion quiet.

Instead he just said, “It's been that sort of night.”

Lette let out a small huff of laughter. She let Firkin go. The disheveled man collapsed away from her. “Come in then,” she said to the woman in the cave's entrance. “Let's get a fire going and try to salvage what's left of this shit show of a day.”

Lette studied the woman in the cave's entrance. The way she held her weight on her feet. The position of her hands as they hung at her sides. The way her eyes moved.

Lette relaxed. Whoever this woman was, she was not someone who carved her way through life with steel. She had taken Lette's words of invitation at face value, rather than as an invitation to remain somewhere Lette could keep an eye on her. She was another one like the farm boy, Will.

Well… not exactly like him.

There was something to the farm boy. She could not put her finger on it exactly. Though she thought perhaps she would like to. He was not thick in the chest and arms the way she had liked in some of the mercenaries she had known. But there was none of their preening pride in him either. And he was lean, and had the hard, flat muscles of a man who worked with his hands for long days and nights. She had known a boy like that once, a long time ago. He had been sweet. And when she had left him he had borne the same utterly idiotic expression as well. As if her kicking him in the balls was the first time he'd realized he had them.

And still, despite her assessment, when the woman in the cave entrance finally started to move, Lette instinctively dropped a blade into her palm. Then, grimacing, she slipped it back into its sheath.

Maybe Balur was right. Maybe the only thing she was suited to was death and mayhem. It would be hard to explain away the maim-first-and-use-torture-to-ask-questions-later instinct if she was trying to live the life of a seamstress.

She was not the only one watching the newcomer. Balur had narrowed his eyes. “Why were you hesitating before you were coming in?” he growled.

The woman froze once more. Lette could just make out her eyes beneath her hood, large and brown. There was a fright in them, yes, but it was not alone. Curiosity lingered there as well. Not exactly what Lette expected.

She could feel the weight of the blade in her sleeve.

“Had it crossed your mind,” Will said stepping forward, utterly oblivious to danger, “that she might be intimidated by the large lizard man covered with other people's blood?”

Balur shrugged. “Goblin blood. Goblins are not being people.”

“Well actually—” the woman in the cloak said, then hesitated. Her gaze flicked out from beneath her hood, nervous and quick.

Could it be a ruse? It was difficult to mask the signs of readiness, but it was possible. Lette was doing it herself now. Long days of practice and punishment let her hold her shoulders loose, keep her fingers curled slightly.

Yet with one flick of her wrist…

She found herself thinking of Will. The look of horror that would be on his witless face if a blade buried itself in the woman's throat. That shouldn't bother her, but it did. A bit. Well, a very little bit. But even that infinitesimal hesitation was new.

Maybe it was change. Maybe she was changing.

She risked giving the farm boy an appraising look.

Balur's attention hadn't wavered. “Actually what?” he growled at the woman.

“Well,” she said again. Lette saw her lick her lips. “All I really meant was that there was an interesting treatise written in the previous century by Friar-Abbot Matteson about whether goblins were intelligent enough to be qualified as people, or whether they were a lower life-form more akin to animals. He, you'll probably be glad to know, agreed with you. That their personhood was negligible. But on the other hand, he was also a big proponent of using broccoli as a siege engine. That's pushed a lot of the current academics in the other direction. The current wave of thinking is that if goblins were treated civilly they would behave in a more civilized way. The trouble is, of course”—she laughed slightly, a nervous chuckle—“finding a town that wants to make that gamble should we prove to be wrong.”

Considerable silence met this statement. Firkin seemed to have no patience for it.

“Knew a goblin once,” he said. “Called himself Marvin.” He nodded a few times. “Lots of bones in him,” he added after a moment's thought.

The silence decided to hang around a little longer.

“You are talking a lot,” Balur said eventually. His eyes were still suspicious slits.

“Yes,” the woman agreed. “As the young man pointed out, I'm rather nervous. And I do tend to ramble when I feel that way.” And then with absolutely no segue whatsoever, “You're an Analesian, aren't you?”

Lette noticed that Balur's hammer's head had left the ground. Not by more than half an inch, barely enough to be noticeable, but enough to make the mask of nonchalance that much harder to maintain.

“How are you knowing that?” Balur sounded belligerent. Lette knew he could get terribly precious about his exotic mystique.

“Well,” the woman coughed twice, “the Analesians are pretty much the only race of eight-foot-tall sentient lizards, which does narrow it down a bit.”

“She's got them smarts,” said Firkin, still lingering by the wall where Lette had pinned him. “All in her head and coming out her mouth.” He nodded. “Like when you squish them ants' heads.”

“Look.” Will tried to step between Balur and the woman. Lette couldn't decide if he was brave or stupid. Or possibly a dangerous mix of both. “I don't think we need to threaten violence to anyone just because they read a book once in their life. Can't we just make a fire, and all dry out so we make it to the morning?”

For a moment, Lette allowed herself to step away from herself. Step away from her frustration, the tired ache in her bones, the girlish intrigue in Will and what he could do with those heavy callused hands. For a moment she was nothing but steel. A blade.

Firkin was at the cave entrance. He was slow, but unpredictable. He should be the first to go. The knife in her hand loosed at his neck. Will was the next threat, young and strong as he was. But Balur would move before Will did. The farmer would be stuck staring at the blood fountaining from Firkin's neck, aghast. Balur would turn him into a stain on the ground before he figured out what he wanted to do. That left the woman. Also unpredictable, but off-balance now. Lette could close the distance, sweep a knife blade across her eyes, slow her down, then she and Balur could deal with whatever she threw at them. It would all be over in seconds. And then…

No.

Lette stepped back into herself. Away from the cold analysis of murder. That was not who she was going to be here. There was, she was beginning to realize, a point when paranoia stopped being a helpful survival tool, and became more of a social impediment.

“Yes,” she said to Will, forcibly ungritting her teeth. “A fire. That sounds lovely.”

Balur looked at her perplexed. She tried to look at him with the daggers she was restraining herself from throwing.

Several of the goblins' torches were still burning. She started to pick them up, pile them together in the center of the room. Will, though, stepped toward the woman.

“I'm Will,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

Lette hesitated, watched the woman's hand snake out to meet Will's. She could throw the torch, strike the woman in the face…

The woman's grip looked frail in Will's big hand. “My name is Quirkelle Bal Tehrin,” she said. She had a slight accent. Southern, and unless Lette missed her mark, Western as well. “People in this part of the world tend to call me Quirk. Very nice to meet you.”

They shook hands. Lette watched their palms. But Will didn't convulse. Didn't pull his hand away with a cry. Didn't start to choke on his tongue or grab his arm in sudden agony.

Lette gently set down the torch she was gripping.

“I'm a farmer,” Will continued. “That's Lette”—he pointed toward her—“and that's Balur. They're…” He hesitated. “Very nice but violent strangers.” He shrugged nervously. Lette found she could live with the description. “And that's Firkin,” he said, and hesitated, “he's… erm…”

“I am the moonlight's breath,” said Firkin. “The shadow and the blade. The voice of the one to come charging out of the night cloaked in red, and fire, and death! I am the sound that cannot be unheard! I am—”

He interrupted his own diatribe with a resounding belch, then stared off into space.

“Yes,” said Will, “he's that.”

The woman, Quirk, nodded, taking it all in. She was still wearing her soaking-wet cloak. Still shivering.

“So who are you?” Lette asked, gathering up another pair of torches. She was aware of Balur standing between them and the cave exit, appearing to be at rest, and actually being very far from it.

“She just said,” said Will. Lette briefly wondered how he'd managed to make it this far through life without dying. Perhaps she wasn't the first kindly stranger to stumble into his life and save him from impaling himself on his own guilelessness?

“I'm a thaumatobiologist,” said Quirk, who was apparently quicker off the mark, “if that's what you mean. I'm based out of the Tamathian University.”

Tamathia. South and West. Lette kept her smile from her lips, but it was there all the same.

“You gonna talk,” Firkin spat from where he sat at the cave's mouth, “use them real words.”

Balur grunted. “May all the Pantheon be helping me, I am agreeing with the crazy man.”

Firkin stopped staring at the night, turned back to them. “Get out of my brains, monster man,” he growled. “Leave them be.”

Balur cocked his head. He was not, Lette knew, used to people taking that tone with him. Still, she was less interested in Firkin's ability to shorten his life expectancy than she was in Quirk's brief autobiography.

“Tamathia?” she said. “That's a few hundred leagues from here.” She was reassessing the woman yet again. No one came a few hundred leagues without a few tricks to keep them safe.

“Three hundred and sixty-nine as near as I can estimate,” Quirk said in agreement. “But the Kondorra valley is the only place with dragons on the continent, so it was the place I had to come.”

Will actually stepped away from her. There was a look on his face… Lette tried to evaluate. Was it disgust? It seemed out of place on his simple face.

“The dragons?” he said. And there was definitely an edge to his voice now. “You wanted… You came from far away to see… The gods-hexed
dragons
?”

No, Lette thought, it wasn't disgust. It was hatred—a sword hidden in this haystack of a man. And maybe Quirk wasn't the one she should be reassessing.

What did she know about Kondorra? That a loose association of merchant dragons ruled over it. That they ran some of the most successful trade routes on the continent. That you only attacked their caravans when you were desperate or very sure they couldn't track you down and use your intestines to string you up from the nearest hanging tree.

Quirk, it seemed, was also having trouble reevaluating Will after this abrupt emotional turn. “Yes,” she said, a touch of defensiveness in her cultured voice. “Well, I think I said I was a thaumatobiologist.”

Will stared at her blankly.

“I think,” Lette said, voice held steady as a dueling blade, “that perhaps that word needs a little more explanation.”

Quirk looked at them, for all the world like a kicked puppy. “Thaumatobiology?” she said. Then with a note of pleading. “You don't…? Not one of you has ever heard of the field?”

“I know what a field is,” said Firkin, a touch indignantly. “Took a shit in one just the other day, so I did.”

“You work for the dragons?” Lette saw her own slow-growing suspicion writ large on Will's features.

Quirk shook her head violently. “For…?” she managed. She still seemed bewildered by this line of questioning. “I
study
dragons.”

Again the room seemed to stop, everyone trying to process. The fire crackled in the middle of the room now, heat starting to rise.

“
Study?
” Will still seemed uncertain as to whether he should exchange his hatred for incredulity.

“Yes.” Quirk was earnest. “Thaumatobiology. The study of magical flora and fauna.” She looked around at them, seemed to resign herself. “Plants and animals,” she said, a little sadly.

“You have been studying plants?” Balur seemed outraged by the idea.

“Well, yes.” Quirk nodded. “Very useful area, actually. I mean, if you just talked to Will here, I'm sure he would be full of all sorts of valuable information about crop rotation, and what fields are best for which sort of planting. That sort of information is invaluable. Not to mention the healers who use plants in their poultices. And the dye makers who need to collect the right types of berry. All of them are expert biologists in their own fields. My field just happens to be magical plants. Though really my main interest is thamatofauna… well megathaumatofauna.”

It was very quiet, but Lette could just make out Balur's growling. He did not do well with polysyllables. It made him feel like people were trying to get one past him on the grounds that he was foreign.

“So… really big magical creatures,” Lette hazarded.

“Yes,” Quirk said. Lette couldn't help but feel the woman's smile was a little patronizing.

Magical.
Lette thought of those 369 leagues the woman had crossed.

“So,” said Lette, allowing the dagger to once more slip from its sheath into her palm. “You're a magician.”

It made sense now. Quirk wasn't balanced because she didn't need to be balanced. She wasn't quick because she didn't need to be quick. Her weapon moved as quick as thought, as swift as a whispered word. She could flay them all with her mind.

Lette's only hope was a dagger thrown fast enough, unexpected enough.

“Oh.” Quirk almost seemed to stumble without actually going anywhere. “No. No not at all. Not in any way, shape, or form. Well, I mean… not anymore anyway. Not now. No.”