The New Hero Volume 2

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  Despite that, all of the guards had their weapons leveled at me.

  I ginned up my best grin. I knew I was doomed. If they couldn’t find Moira, they’d probably take out their frustrations on me. Hell, they’d probably do that either way. The only satisfaction I’d get at this point would come from helping her escape their claws.

  “Where is she?” Yabair said.

  “Who?” I did my best to look confused.

  “The halfling who dove back there with you.” The elf glared at me with perfect green eyes. They said, “I’ve already seen more years than you’ll ever see months, boy. You cannot fool me.” But I wasn’t so easily dissuaded.

  “Gone,” I said. “Slipped out through a trap door.”

  Yabair sneered at my lie. “And why did you not follow her?”

  I grimaced. “She locked it behind her. That little sawed-off bitch.”

  Moria kicked me in the shin for that one. I didn’t take offense. I’d only said that to see if she’d managed to find a hidey-hole. The pain in my leg said “Not quite yet.”

  “This ‘bitch’ of yours is implicated in the death of one Chiara Selvaggio. Anyone who stands between her and the swift prosecution of justice will share in her fate.”

  My breath caught in my chest. The Selvaggios were one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most powerful families on the planet. Chiara was the eldest daughter of Constantine Selvaggio, the clan’s patriarch.

  I heard a soft whimper, and I had to double check that it hadn’t come from me.

  “By now, this halfling you’re hunting must be halfway back to her burrow,” I said with a mouth gone dry.

  Yabair bared his teeth in what only his mother might have charitably called a smile. “If so she’ll find a cold reception waiting for her. But perhaps she is not so far gone as you say.”

  Yabair nodded to the elf with the wand. He made a smooth gesture that hurt my eyes to follow, and electricity arced from the tip of his wand, forking into several branches as it went. One of them speared me right in the chest, causing every muscle in my body to contract at once and nearly blanking out my brain. I collapsed over the bar an instant later.

  Other arcs from the wand crashed randomly into tables and bottles. A spectacular one lit up the cash register behind the bar and blew it wide open. The last one found Moira as she tried to cram herself into a small safe and zapped her good. She cried out in pain and surprise, giving herself away.

  With fingers still numb from the electric shock, I went for my wand.

  I never had a chance.

  The guard waved his wand at me again, and I froze. His spell had petrified me solid before my wand had even cleared its shoulder holster. I could feel everything—including Moira scrambling past my legs as she went to give the trapdoor one last desperate and futile try—but I couldn’t move a muscle, not even to blink.

  I didn’t see the guards grab Moira and haul her away. They never passed in front of me, and I couldn’t turn my head. She screamed bloody murder at them though and fought them all the way. She even managed to stab one of them in the gut with a hidden knife, but they shot her in the back as she tried to flee.

  “Quickly,” Yabair said as they carried her out of the tavern. “We need her alive for questioning. Not until then can you permit her to die.”

  Moira keened like a banshee as they took her, more from anguish than in pain, her voice fading with every step away. “Max!” she said. “Help me!”

  And then she was gone.

  By the time the petrifaction spell wore off, the squad of guards had long disappeared. Kai loosened up a moment before me, and he picked his way through the wreckage to come over and stare at my face.

  “Least you stood tall ’steada rabbiting like the rest,” he said with grudging respect. The fact that I couldn’t speak saved me from having to correct him. “Save yourself the grief though. She’s gone. Let ’er go.”

  The paralysis wore off then, and I lurched forward and stabbed my wand into the bar, nearly snapping it in half. Kai didn’t bother to conceal a snigger.

  I ignored him and headed for the door. He grabbed me by the shoulder and hauled me up short. The circulation was starting to return to my limbs, and it stung. It hurt worse where he touched me. I shrugged him off.

  “I said, forget it.” He shook his head at me, maybe out of pity, maybe out of disbelief.

  “If I can get to her before they lock her in the Garret—”

  “They’ll kill you.” Kai held up his hand to cut me off. “They took you right out, and that was after I softened ’em up for you.”

  I stared at him. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Then I figured it out.

  I had my wand out and at his throat in an instant. He glanced back at his shotgun, still sitting on top of his table, unloaded.

  He grunted at me. “You want to die, I can kill you right now.”

  “You sold her out.” I muttered a word that increased the heat coming out of the tip of my wand to an uncomfortable level. Kai squirmed against it. He knew better than to make a move though, at least if he wanted to keep his head above his shoulders.

  “I shot them!”

  “I saw Yabair after that. He didn’t have a scratch on him. That breastplate of his doesn’t cover everything. He knew you’d shoot at him. He was ready for it.”

  Kai snarled at me. For a second, I thought he might try to rip my throat out with his bare teeth, and I wondered just how smart I was to put this orc into a position in which all he had to do to save his reputation was murder me. I was too angry to think straight. I snarled right back at him.

  The fight drained out of him.

  “They came after me first,” he said. “Caught me in my home. I had to do it. I cut them a deal.”

  “You didn’t have to do anything.”

  “It’s a murder charge, Max. You know what they do to orcs charged with murder? They stake us down outside the gates and wait for the zombies to come eat us.”

  My guts somersaulted at the thought that Moira might share that fate. I must have twisted my wand farther into Kai’s throat. He winced in pain.

  “Come on, Max. She’s a halfling. They won’t do that to her. The Dragon thinks they’re ‘civilized.’ Worst they’ll do is electrocute her.”

  “You’re not helping!”

  I pushed him away and lowered my wand. I wanted to kill him. I needed him to give me a good reason not to.

  “What happened?” I said.

  Kai rubbed a reddening spot on his neck. “I just told you. They came after me for the murder.”

  “I meant the murder. What happened?”

  “I wasn’t there. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Dragonshit!” I shook my wand at him. “If you’re so innocent, why’d they come after you?”

  He put up his hands. “All right. They traced the stuff that killed Chiara back to me.”

  I jabbed my wand at him. “So. How can you say you didn’t kill her!”

  “I didn’t! I swear on my balls, I didn’t have anything to do with it. I only work with top-shelf dragon essence, and I cut it perfectly. There’s no way it was too pure.”

  I whistled at that. Dragonfire was one thing. Just about everyone drank that magical hooch. It wasn’t legal, sure, but the guard mostly turned a blind eye to it, especially the ones who were paid off well enough. Straight dragon essence, though, was much stronger stuff and much harder to come by.

  “She OD’d on it?”

  “Coulda happened, but I doubt it. Moira told me Chiara had been using for over 500 years. She knew her stuff. I set her up with her first hit from my supply a week ago, and she loved it.”

  That stepped me back. “Moira sold it to her?”

  Kai sneered. “Now you see. I had to give her up.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  I punched him in the face. He’d been watching my wand and didn’t see my incoming left until it was too late. He dropped to his knees and clutched at his
nose. When he brought his hand away, it was covered with blood.

  He looked up at me, something even uglier than his face burning in his eyes.

  “Give you that one, Max. Hit me like that again, though, I’ll kill you.”

  I grabbed him by the front of his ratty shirt and pulled him up so I could snarl in his face. “I put it on the streets that you snitched on one of your own people, and you won’t live long enough for me to worry about it.”

  Kai’s green skin went pale.

  I pushed him away, disgusted. As I headed for the door, I spoke at him over my shoulder. “Don’t come back here again. At least not until Moira’s out of trouble. I see you, I might forget how much I like you.”

  I didn’t wait for him to reply.

  I walked through the cobblestone streets of the city, people on brooms and carpets and in the occasional mini-blimp scudding overhead through the moonlit night sky, visible as silhouettes there, even beyond the light from the glow globes in the street lamps. I kept my head down and ignored them all as I thought about Moira.

  The damned thing about it was that Kai had been right. I had no chance of saving Moira now, short of mounting an armed assault on the Garret—the best-defended prison on the planet.

  I tried to tell myself to forget about her and just let it go. She’d have done the same for me, I’m sure. But I couldn’t manage it. Having started the night remembering the loss of one friend, I didn’t think I could stomach losing another.

  I legged it up the stairs to my rooms over the Barrelrider, the smell of halfling cooking wafting up from below. The letters painted in gold on my door read “Max Gibson, Freelance.” Freelance what, they didn’t go on to say.

  As I reached for the door, I saw that it was unlocked and that someone had uncapped the glow globes in my office. I drew my wand and braced myself to kick open the door and take out whoever was waiting there for me. Then I heard Nit’s voice call out.

  “Save the furnishings, Max. It’s just me.”

  I stifled a groan. I didn’t want to deal with the old halfling just then, but he wasn’t about to give me that choice.

  My door creaked open on hinges that hadn’t seen oil since before I was born. My desk sat directly across the floorboards, right in front of the one large circular window in the room, the top portion of which had been pivoted open, letting in the night air. Nit stood there in his bare feet, right on top of my blotter, which brought him up to eye level with me. He swirled a snifter of dragonfire about in his left hand, stirring tiny bursts of cold blue flames out of the mahogany liquid.

  “They got Moira,” he said.

  I moved into the room and glanced around. It didn’t seem like he’d brought any friends, but then Nit didn’t need them.

  He raised his voice. “Did you hear what I—?”

  “I was there,” I said.

  “And you didn’t save her.”

  “She’s a big girl.”

  “She’s my girl.”

  I shrugged at him. “Then you should tell your daughter to quit selling dragon essence to elves who turn up dead from it.”

  He didn’t flinch at that.

  “You knew about it.”

  He looked away. “Like you say, she’s all grown up. She heard this elf needed a new supply, and she wanted a piece of that action, some quick money. She could get into places that other people couldn’t touch, quiet and discreet. So that’s what she did.”

  “You could have stopped her.”

  “I’m here to hire you.”

  “She’s already in the Garret by now.”

  “To clear her name.”

  I allowed myself a bitter laugh.

  “This is important to me, Max. She doesn’t come home, her mother will kill me.”

  I shrugged at him again.

  “I’ll give you the deed to this place, Max. Your office. Your rooms. Your’s forever.”

  “She’s supposed have killed a Selvaggio. They invented the word for revenge.”

  “You think I don’t know that? They’ll come for me next, Max. And my wife. And the rest of my kids too. And if I’m going down, I’m taking everyone with me. Everyone.”

  At that moment, Nit seemed older than I’d ever seen him. Weak. Tired. He gave me a hard glare, then drained his glass and licked away the magic flames that danced along his lips.

  “You’re not asking me to help out here, are you?”

  “You’re the right man for the job, Max. The only man. She didn’t kill that elf, and you know it. Figure out a way to prove it, and we’re all in the clear.”

  “And if I screw it up?”

  “Then we’re all dead.”

  I got Nit to give me the key to Moira’s place, and I hoofed it over there, double time. She’d moved out of their family burrow ages ago and into a snazzy place upslope, on the edge of Gnometown. I’d never been inside before, but I’d carried her home to it more than once.

  It wasn’t just that her place wasn’t built for someone my size. It was actively hostile about it. To even get up to her apartment I had to crawl on my hands and knees through a twisting tunnel too narrow for me to turn around in. Fortunately, the key worked, and I got straight in.

  I’m sure Moira thought of her place as spacious and friendly, but she only stands a hair over three feet tall. The ceiling of her apartment was only five feet from the floor. I found it easier to remain on my hands and knees rather than try to walk hunched over through the place and smack my head on every lintel.

  I’d always thought of Moira as clean and neat, but her place was less of a burrow and more of a pit. Food containers from her parents’ restaurant stood arrayed on the dining table and around a sink stacked near to toppling with mold-crusted dishes. Dust stood thick on counters and sills, and the floor was sticky enough that I reconsidered my position and got back on my feet, back pains be damned.

  Scraping my scalp on the ceiling, I moved through the place slowly, looking for something—anything, really—that would give me a clue about what had really happened to Chiara Selvaggio. I didn’t have much hope that I’d find anything. I didn’t even know for sure how the elf had died. I wasn’t about to just take Kai’s word for how it had all played out.

  After a while, I gave up, unwilling to endure the filthy place any longer on the off chance that something useful would leap out at me.

  And then it did.

  Or rather, he did.

  He, in this case, was a fat, greasy, unshaven halfling with a rusty meat cleaver in his hand. He came at me with a strangled scream that sounded something like an elderly cat that had fallen into a blender. He swung the cleaver in front of him like he was shooing away a stubborn fly.

  I brought up my wand and pointed it at the cleaver. Its blade began to glow red, and the wooden handle started to smoke. The halfling dropped it with a yelp.

  “You bastard!” he said. “You’ll pay for that!”

  He started toward me again but hauled up short as I leveled the wand at his chest. “Back off, Stubby,” I said.

  “How did you know—?” He peered at me through greasy locks of hair that had fallen over his eyes. “Wait. You’re Gibson, aren’t you?”

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing! What do you mean?” He looked down at himself and seemed to realize how awful he looked. “I don’t—Ah, hell.”

  He slumped over, dejected. “I—I didn’t—I haven’t been out much lately. I’m sorry.” He picked up the cooling cleaver, considered it for a moment, then pitched it into the sink.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  Stubby flushed with embarrassment. I could barely hear his voice when he spoke. “She left me.”

  I sat down on the least sticky part of the floor I could find. I kept my wand out and ready though, just in case. “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. When I moved in here, I thought things were great. I mean, sure, she was always nagging after me to help clean up, but I figured we’d wo
rk it out. Instead, she just stopped coming home.”

  “What, at all?”

  “I think she snuck in sometimes when I was out. I never actually saw her though.”

  I nodded. “She’s good.” Not good enough to hide in plain sight from a squad of the Imperial Dragon’s Guard hunting for her, but sharp enough to get past this guy on his best day—something that had to sit in his distant past.

  “At least I know where she is now,” I said.

  Hope rose in Stubby’s eyes. “Where?”

  “The Garret.”

  His eyes widened far enough for all the hope to spill out of them.

  “She’s been picked up for the murder of Chiara Selvaggio.”

  Stubby growled. “I knew it. That bitch!”

  “Hey—”

  “I’m talking about that damned elf. I warned Moira about getting involved with her. I knew nothing good could come from it.”

  “Involved?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I shook my head. I’d always thought of Moira as interested only in male halflings, despite her tendency to wind up with winners like Stubby. The thought that she might have switched her tastes for both gender and race made my head spin.

  “She was selling her dragon essence,” I said.

  Stubby smirked at me, and I wondered which one of us was being willfully ignorant here. “That doesn’t explain where she’s been for the past few weeks. It doesn’t take that long to smuggle a little DE upslope. Not for someone like Moira.”

  I had to admit that Stubby had a point. The other possibility was that she hated his guts and was just avoiding a confrontation with him until he took the hint and left, but I didn’t want to raise that for fear that Stubby would go hunting for the cleaver again.

  Also, I’d never known Moira to avoid someone like that. She might flee from the guard, but Stubby wasn’t in the same class. I would have guessed she’d have slipped a knife into his back before she’d let him ruin her place like this.

  “Where’s her room?” I asked.

  Stubby jerked a thumb toward the back, and I hunkered over in that direction. The round door to the place stood open, and the smell from it hit me before I could see inside it. Breathing through my mouth, I poked my head in.