Read Online Fool's Gold by Jon Hollins - Free Book Online Page B

The sheer mass of them speaks against it. The ideal of course would be to get to dissect one—”
    â€œDissect one?” Will wasn’t sure if he should laugh or shout in anger. “Of course. Just walk right up to a member of the Consortium and ask if you can slit them up the belly.” He put a hand to his head. “Gods. Study them? Have you ever even seen one? You don’t…”
    He trailed off as Quirk avoided his eye.
It couldn’t be…
But the facts were there in front of him, writ large in her body language.
    â€œWait,” he said. “You study dragons and you’ve never even seen one?”
    â€œWell, I’ve seen… drawings,” said Quirk defensively. “And I have read some very detailed, albeit partial, descriptions of them. Though some did seem like they exaggerated a little.” She chuckled slightly to herself. “One of them described a creature over twenty feet long. Can you imagine? I mean, the flight mechanics are improbable enough for a creature half that size—”
    â€œTwenty feet?” Will cut her off again. “You think twenty feet is improbably long for a dragon?” His laughter felt almost hysterical. This was deranged.
    â€œWell, obviously,” said Quirk, shuffling back from the fire a little. “I mean just think of the thrust needed to get something…” And then she finally caught on. “You’ve seen a dragon? Actually
seen
one? Living?”
    â€œSeen one?” Will spat. “I’ve had my whole fucking life ruined by one.”
    â€œAnd it was over twenty feet long?” Quirk asked with, Will thought, a certain amount of callousness.
    â€œGreat big varmints.” Firkin decided to chime in. “Rats of the sky, I say. If rats breathed fire and ate cattle, like.” A dreamy look entered his eyes. “Oh that’d be a rat, that would. I’d like one of those rats. Keep him as a pet and call him Lawrence.”
    The time had come, Will decided, to reveal certain truths to Quirk. “Mattrax,” he said, “the dragon who governs this northern tip of the Kondorra valley, which we are oh so lucky to be in right now, is fifty yards from snout to tail and considered runty for his kind. It gives him a shitty attitude, but it’s hard to pick out because all the dragons in the Consortium have shitty attitudes. They live in vast fortresses, surrounded by guards picked from the arse-end of humanity, who love nothing more than to go around beating their arbitrary rules into the people who live near them. And then every year they send out tax collectors to steal as much of your coin as they can simply so they can sit on it and feel fucking pretty. The only time they drag their sagging guts out of their caves is so they can steal a few cattle for a midafternoon snack, and literally shit on the people whom they govern. That is, in fact, a little game for Mattrax. To see how many people he can hit with a single bowel movement. As a species they are so comfortable with the idea of being evil overlords that they actually hold gatherings from time to time in the core of an active volcano. That is who you study. Tyrants. Arseholes with wings.”
    He was he realized, leaning forward into the fire. Spittle sprayed with his words, the rage in his gut boiling hotter than the flames.
    â€œThey took my farm,” he said, and he felt his eyes sting. “They took everything from me. Everything. The farm my mother and father had built with their own hands.” The thought was almost too raw for him to utter. “And now I’m sitting in a cave that smells of dead bodies and shit.”
    Balur shifted uncomfortably. “Being sorry for that,” he said, tapping his stomach. “Raw goblin… Never be sitting well.”
    There was nothing but silence for a long time.
    â€œWell, the problem is,” Quirk said, sounding apologetic, “thaumatobiologists