Balur watched as guards poured out of the garrison. The light of burning buildings fought off the encroaching night.
“You have to admit,” said Quirk at his side, “that he is very good at his job.”
Job. Balur considered that word. It implied a level of professionalism. A certain mindset and dedication to one’s cause. He would not have wanted to consider Firkin as a professional anything. The best that could truly be said for him was that he was an enthusiastic amateur.
That said, there was no denying that he was effective. It was just, Balur thought, that his enthusiasm seemed to also make him side-effective. And it was those side effects—side effects like men setting themselves on fire and running screaming through the streets—that had pushed him out onto the streets. Yet he was effective enough that Balur would yet again have to delay killing the old man.
He had no doubt that his regrets would be both plentiful and profound.
Still, with Firkin’s distraction fully under way, Balur knew that he and Quirk were now to break into the garrison, steal the armored ship, and sail out to meet Lette and Will on Dathrax’s island. What was more, the stream of guards leaving the garrison had slowed to a trickle. Balur could still see a few armored men standing behind the wooden walls of the garrison, but now they seemed pitiable and few.
“It is being time,” he said to Quirk, hoisting his war hammer down from its clasp on his back. Quirk licked her lips.
“How many lives do you think have bought us this opportunity?” She was looking down at her hands. “It seemed so simple when Will said it. So clean and clinical. A distraction. Such a small, simple word. But what distraction really means is guards hacking down men and women in the street.”
Balur nodded. Personally, he had thought that that bit was obvious.
“This,” he said, “is seeming incongruous with your levity of a moment before?”
Quirk cocked her head to one side. “Incongruous?”
Balur fixed her with the same stare he liked to use on particularly cocky combatants. “Just because I am having a predilection for crushing skulls, is not meaning that I have not been having the time to improve my vocabulary.”
Quirk shook her head. “I think it’s a syntax thing.”
Balur didn’t let up on his gaze. “This is being another incongruity thing.”
Quirk’s answering smile lacked mirth. “Haven’t you ever heard of putting a brave face on things?”
Balur shrugged. A man bleeding profusely from a gash on his forehead ran past bellowing.
“There is no need to be being brave,” Balur said. “I am being confident in my ability to carve a path to the ship.”
Quirk couldn’t even muster a smile anymore. “That’s what I’m putting a brave face on about, Balur. I’m a pacifist. My childhood was a fucked-up nightmare of murder and bloodshed. And I put that away. I became a new person. I became someone better. Just an academic. And now, just so I can go and pursue that new passion, just so I can escape my past… everything around me is turning into a nightmare of murder and bloodshed.”
Mostly, Balur thought, it was low-grade vandalism and rioting, but he got her point. “Okay,” he conceded, “that is being a bit fucked up.”
Quirk let out a noise that might have been called a chuckle had it not sounded quite so much as if it had murdered all the other chuckles to ensure it was the one to escape. “No,” she said. “What’s really fucked up is that I’m okay with it. This doesn’t bother me. Not the way it should. Just this…” She hesitated, screwed up her face, as if trying to force some expression to the surface. “… mild regret. Nothing sufficient for…” She swept her hand at the town. Yells echoed out, screams. At the far end of the street, three silhouetted figures were beating a guard to the ground. “… this. It’s chaos. It’s madness.”
Balur nodded, feeling the grin spread across his face all of its own accord. “There is being something of a magnificence to it.”
“Magnificence?” Quirk blanched. “Gods, you better be drunk.”
Balur’s grin stayed in place. “I am not believing that you have ever been seeing me wholly sober.”
That shook her out of it, for just a moment at least. She blinked several times very rapidly. “I don’t know if I find that comforting, or that I’m just more upset that I find that comforting.”
At the end of the street, the figures finished beating the guard and moved on. Balur stepped out of the shadows he had been waiting in, and swung his hammer experimentally. “How about I am going and caving some heads in, and you are thinking about it.”
Quirk looked away from him, then back, down at her own hands. She closed them, but clenched them only loosely. Then she shrugged. “I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get.”
That was enough for Balur. He started to pace down the street toward the garrison. He swung the hammer as he went, letting its momentum transfer into him, its pendulum weight winding up the clockwork of his rage. He felt muscles loosen in his shoulders, the white rush of adrenaline in his veins, the sharpening of his vision. He licked the air, tasted blood, and sweat, and fear.
“Doesn’t this…? Isn’t there something about this…?” Quirk scampered along behind him. “There’s something odd about this, right? I know things got out of hand back in the Village, but we were using the potions back then. Here… we haven’t… I haven’t…” She shook her head, plainly troubled. “Why are they acting like this?”
And, yes, it was a little odd. Balur had been thinking about just that. The people of Athril had leapt to violence with surprising alacrity. Had it been too quickly? Or was the populace’s animosity toward the Dragon Consortium so great that it took but a single match to set the whole place aflame?
But only part of him was wondering that. A part of him knew that could wait until later. That could wait until his business with the town guard was done. The gates to the garrison were before him, and he was closing on them fast.
He let his war hammer knock for him. Boom, boom, splinter, crash. The gates flew wide. Guards wheeled around. Swords were drawn. But Balur was already upon them. His hammer descended. A skull cracked. A man fell.
“Kerunch,” Balur muttered to himself.
A guard ducked inside the circle of Balur’s hammer head. He had a short sword drawn. Three scars made horizontal bars across his face. He thrust the point of his blade at Balur’s ribs. Balur shifted his grip, brought the hammer’s head up, the handle down. His hammer’s hilt smashed into the guard’s nose. The man careened back, collided with one of his fellows. They went down in a tangle of limbs. Balur’s hammer chased them down.
“Twofer,” Balur said to the bloody mess at his feet.
Three guards circled nervously. Behind them, the rest of the garrison’s numbers were thin. Reinforcements hung back, nervous about rioters finding other points of egress. Balur feinted one way. The guards fell back, nervous glances jumping between them like fleas. He swung experimentally with his hammer. Two guards fell back again, but one darted forward. Balur let go of his hammer with one hand and slammed his fist out, caught the guard around the neck. He hoisted the man aloft, hurled him at his fellows. Their retreat turned into a stumble. He showed them no mercy.
That was when the first arrow struck him.
It caught him in the shoulder, arcing in from the left. The point did not skitter off his scales, instead finding a soft spot at the juncture of three plates of his natural mail. He stumbled under the impact. Even over the cries and screams of the rioting, he still heard Quirk’s inhalation of breath.
He turned, looked for the offending archer.
Arrows fell like rain. He cursed. Three archers at least. Perhaps four, or even five. He hesitated for a second, just long enough to take stock. Just long enough for them to pull new arrows from their quivers.
“Come on!” he yelled at Quirk, then dove for cover, running on all fours like a beast. He crashed into a wall, felt it sag under his weight. Arrows smashed into its far side. Quirk came running and screaming, crashed to earth at his feet.
“Knole’s holy tits!” she screamed. “I thought we were meant to be sneaking in!”
“Well, now is being a good time to begin sneaking, I am thinking.” Balur was aware of an irritated snap to his tone but didn’t really care about it. “Or,” he said, possibly a little vindictively, “maybe now is being a good time for you to be losing your shit and roasting all of those bastards alive.”
Too far. A glance at her eyes told him it was too far. Not far enough to push her into rage, to push her into setting his arse on fire, but too deep to avoid hurt. Deep, base hurt.
“Fuck you,” was all she muttered. But she was retreating, drawing in on herself, when she needed to be aware of the world, of everything, of all the pointy metal flying toward her head.
He took stock. The wall they were being behind would hold off the arrows, but it wouldn’t be stopping the archers from circling around. They had to be moving, keeping their momentum. He poked his head up above the edge of the wall, got a quick sense of the lay of the land, ducked back down to avoid the three arrows racing toward his skull.
The garrison was built on the edge of the lake. Beyond them the ground sloped down and away toward a dock. Numerous low buildings were scattered between. Barracks, armory, canteen, storage huts. He could make out a few extra boats moored up at the dock.
He risked another look, felt an arrow glance off the top of his skull, score through a scale there, but he saw what he was looking for.
The heavily armored tax boat was surrounded by its own low stockade wall, spiked wooden pillars jutting up into the air. The boat beyond rose imperiously above them, an attitude mismatched to its pitted, rusted iron sides. Its prow was slung forward like an underbite, its cabin hunched low as if afflicted by some terrible curvature of the spine. The cloth of the sales looked greasy and stained.
Balur felt a strange affinity for it. It’d been built for power, and nothing else. It had a single purpose, a single focus. It would get its job done, beautiful or no.
Now all he had to do was steal it.