Hard Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  I almost never visited her at her place, preferring to meet her in her parents’ restaurant instead. For one, Moira was a lousy cook, which maybe explained why she’d not gone into the family business. For two, her parents took pains to accommodate guests of all sizes at their tables, but Moira’s apartment had been built long ago by reclusive gnomes. Its architecture was actively hostile toward anyone taller than a dwarf.

  Despite that, I headed over to her home to knock on her door. It was possible that Belle hadn’t bothered to check there, and that would have been the simplest solution to finding Moira. To even reach the short blue door of her apartment, though, I had to worm my way up a twisty stairwell so tight and narrow that I couldn’t turn around in it once I started through it.

  When I got to the door, I gave it a sharp rap, but no one answered. Her father had let me keep a key to the place the last time I’d helped her out of a jam, so I tried it and found that the door was unlocked anyhow. That put my senses on a sword’s edge. Moira might have been many silly things, but she knew how to protect her belongings. She never left her door open.

  I pushed the door open on its creaky hinges and regretted it the instant the stench from inside stung my nostrils. Moira had never been much of a housekeeper, but she’d gotten much worse about it since her on-and-off boyfriend Stubby had moved in with her. I’d have thought she’d have dumped him long ago, but for some reason she just couldn’t bring herself to kick the pathetic slob out.

  From what I could see as I nosed my way through the foyer and into her living space, the place had only gotten worse since the last time I’d been there. I saw mold growing in the sink and maggots crawling in the rotten food there, and the floor had gotten so damn sticky I might have thought it was a glue trap.

  I struggled to my feet and walked through the place hunched over, trying not to scrape the top of my head on the five-foot ceiling. I hoped I wouldn’t have to touch anything. I’d have preferred to be robbing a tomb in the plague pits to being forced to spend much more time in there.

  “Moira?” I called. “Stubby?”

  From the state of the place, I guessed that Moira had officially left it to Stubby. They’d been having problems, I knew, from the last time I’d been there. The depressed halfling hadn’t made even the slightest pretense of trying to keep her home clean for her, and I’d figured it would only be a matter of time before the Auxiliary Guard ordered the place cleaned or condemned. I’d rarely seen a home in such need of a good, cleansing fire.

  I found Stubby in the bedroom he’d once shared with Moira, lying in a pile of greasy, twisted bedding and a large stain formed by his own blood. Someone had sliced open his neck, leaving him to clutch at his throat in open-mouthed surprise until the light drained from his glassy eyes. I knelt down and closed his eyelids. His flesh was cold.

  Whoever the killer was, it didn’t seem like he’d taken a trophy from Stubby. Of course, halflings didn’t have the same cultural associations with their hair that dwarves did. They bled out just the same though.

  I knew I needed to alert the Guard to this right away. Yabair might try to finger Moira for the crime, but if that meant that we found her before the same thing happened to her, I was willing to risk that.

  I could see why she might want to kill Stubby. If I came home to find my place like this, I might have been tempted too. Even so, I didn’t think she’d done it.

  Moira was handy with a knife, but I’d always known her to prefer pistols and wands to blades. Besides, the method of dispatching him matched up a bit too well with what the Gütmanns’ killers had used on them: single, precise strokes designed to kill with the minimal fuss. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Whoever had murdered the Gütmanns had done in Stubby too.

  I looked around the rest of the place, wondering if the killer had found Moira here too. I didn’t find any trace of her. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t been here for weeks if not months.

  I saved checking into Moira’s office for last. It lay behind a green door in the back of the place, with a golden knob set into the center of it. She’d put a charm on it that would give a vicious shock to anyone who touched it without her permission. Fortunately, I was one of those rare souls she trusted with such things.

  I tapped my wand against the door, and the whole thing glowed a faint blue, showing me that the charm was still in place. Whatever the killer was after, he hadn’t taken the time to dismantle the door’s magic. It would have taken forever, even for someone with the right skills, and I don’t think he could have had that much time.

  Unless he was still here.

  I have to admit, that thought hadn’t occurred to me until that moment. If the killer was determined to get into Moira’s office, though, he might have come in here in the middle of the night, killed Stubby, and then set to work on the door. Or maybe he’d just given up on it and decided to wait for her to show up instead.

  Then I’d come knocking on the door and calling out for Moira and Stubby. That would have given the bastard plenty of time to find a good hiding place or even just scoot out one of the windows overlooking the street.

  I reached for the doorknob, and the blue glow pulled away from my fingers as they approached, retracting to the edges of the doorframe. I twisted the golden knob and pushed and then slipped in to the subterranean darkness beyond.

  As I did, I heard the killer coming up behind me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When I decided to slip into Moira’s office, I had two thoughts in mind. First, I couldn’t rule out the fact that she was in there, hiding out from the killer. Second, knowing Moira, she might have all sorts of illegal things stashed there.

  If I’d brought Yabair into her home, he’d have seen the office door for sure, and he’d have had the Guard’s mages figure out a way to remove the charms Moira had placed to protect it. Once they managed that, they’d find enough things in the room to toss her in the Garret for life. I didn’t want to see her beat the murder rap only to rot in prison for her other crimes instead.

  As I moved into the room and heard someone coming up behind me, I realized I could use the office for that first purpose myself. All I had to do was get inside the office and slam the door shut so that the charm could extend itself over the door again. Of course, the killer — if that’s who it really was lurking outside — wasn’t about to make it that easy for me.

  I didn’t get a good look at the bastard, I have to admit. Between having to move around on my knees to get through the door and wanting to put it between me and the killer right away, I only got a glimpse of him. Still, that was enough.

  He moved like a soldier, whoever he was — lithe and agile, even in the gnomish apartment’s cramped quarters — but he was covered in black from head to toe, including gloves and boots and a cloth mask over his face that only left his eyes exposed. From just that little bit, though, I could see the slitted yellow pupils that told me he was an orc.

  I slammed the door shut behind me, or tried to at least. The orc stabbed at me with his sword as I shoved the door at him, and the damn thing got caught between the door and the jamb. The bastard smashed into the door with his shoulder then, and would have bowled me straight over if I hadn’t gotten my foot in the way and braced it against the bottom of the wooden slab.

  If I hadn’t already known my attacker was an orc from his furious eyes, the way he snarled at me as he tried to push his way into the office would have laid any doubts to rest. That only made me redouble my efforts to keep him out.

  I’d seen what he’d done to the Gütmanns and to Stubby. This wasn’t someone who wanted to have an angry word with me. If he’d had his way, I’d already be run through and bleeding out on the floor. Probably the only thing that had saved me was that he hadn’t expected the charm on the door to give way for me. That may have surprised him enough that he struck at me just a moment too late.

  I pushed hard against the door, but the assassin’s sword held. It might have been razor sharp, as the cuts I�
�d seen it inflict already would attest, but it was also a well-made length of steel. I’d hoped that it might have been thin or brittle enough to snap off in the doorway. Instead, it not only held, but the orc was able to use it as a lever to force the door open wider.

  I knew what came next if I let the bastard into the pitch-black office. He’d slice me just enough to make me dead, ransack it, and maybe spit on my corpse on his way out for giving him so much trouble about it. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  I shoved the tip of my wand out through the crack in the door that the sword had made, and I let loose a good zap. This was the equivalent of sticking a pistol around a corner and firing blind. It was impossible to see what I was attacking, but there were only so many places an orc on the other side of the door could be, right? What did I have to lose?

  For my efforts, the orc rewarded me with a yelp of pain, and the blade disappeared from the doorway. I slammed it shut by instinct more than anything else, and the blue glow that had been lurking in the frame zipped forward and encapsulated the door again.

  Something heavy smacked into the door from the other side, and the orc cried out in agony again as the charm gave him a good shock. That had to smart, I knew, but I wasn’t sure what to do next. Just because the killer had taken a couple sharp zaps didn’t mean he was any less dangerous than before. He might be more.

  I backed off from the door and muttered a spell that made my wand glow from one end to the other with a bright white light. It lit up the tiny room which more resembled a vault cut from the mountain’s living rock than any sort of office. There were no windows or glowglobes in the place, just a few things set on shelves carved into the rock or simply leaned against the walls.

  I didn’t see anything in there that might be of use against an orc assassin, which meant my choices were to wait it out in here and hope that someone came to find me, or to open up the door and see if that damn orc was still there.

  I’d never been one for sitting and waiting. I thought up an especially vicious spell that would be sure to ruin the orc’s day, and I recited most of the incantation, leaving only the last word to go. Then I crept forward and opened the door, my still-glowing wand at the ready.

  I waited there in the doorway for a long moment, wondering if the orc might jump out at me at any moment and impale me upon his blade. He was good with that sword, I knew, but he had a temper on him. I wondered if I could use that against him.

  “Come on out you, green-skinned bastard!” I said. “I got something for you and your little butter knife right here. Or do you save your talents for taking on old ladies and little girls?”

  Nothing. Not even a grunt. I took off my hat and threw it out into the room. It landed there without incident.

  After a moment, I strode out and picked it up. The killer, whoever he was, had fled.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I slouched past Stubby’s body and stuck my head out of the bedroom’s lone open window. As I did, I noticed a few drops of blood spattered on the sill, and I allowed myself a short moment of satisfaction at the thought that I might have nicked that damn orc good.

  Then I opened my mouth wide and shouted bloody murder until a passing gnome on the street below looked up at me and said, “What, are you serious?”

  “That’s what the body I just found up here says, pal! Go get the Guard for me, fast!”

  I knew I didn’t have much time, so I went back into Moira’s office and cleaned up a bit before the Guard got around to showing up. In some parts of town, mostly downslope from here, they would have taken their time, but up here on the edge of Gnometown, they’d come quick.

  I used an old trick Moira had shown me once upon a time, and I magically shrunk down every one of the items in the place until they were small enough to fit into a pocket. They were still heavier than you would have thought, but I could tote them around without a noticeable limp. Once I’d gathered everything up, I wiped the place down to make it look like this was the one place in the apartment that Moira had actually taken care of, then shut the office’s door behind me.

  I didn’t relish the idea of being caught with several tiny bars of gold, small sacks of coins, and a bag of little diamonds on me, much less shrunk-down versions of a few paintings that had once hung in the Imperial Dragon’s Museum, but I couldn’t let Moira be caught with that stuff in her apartment either. Of course, if I stuck around I was betting on the fact that whichever of the Guards showed up wouldn’t just arrest me for Stubby’s murder and toss me in jail. If it was Yabair, I might be able to talk him out of it, but I didn’t know every elf on the Guard, not by a long way.

  It seemed like too much of a gamble to bet on random hospitality while standing next to a dead halfling, so I decided to leave the scene of the crime as fast as my feet would carry me. Yabair would have to hear about Stubby’s death and find me on his own time.

  I wound my way through some back alleys as I left, hoping to lose anyone that might have spotted me coming out of Moira’s place. Once I was sure no one had followed me — and I hadn’t picked up a phalanx of Guards chasing me to ground — I turned south and headed for the Barrelrider again.

  The sun had ridden high in the sky while I’d been in Moira’s apartment, and its rays had burned the morning chill from the air. The city streets bustled with foot traffic, and private riders and hacks zipped overhead on their brooms and flying carpets. I thought about hailing one for a ride, but I didn’t want to attract any attention. The fewer people who could track my movements at the moment, the better, so I kept to my boots instead.

  When I entered the cool, wood-paneled darkness of the Barrelrider, I signaled for Nit to meet me in one of his private spots in the back. I took a load off my feet in a booth and drew a heavy curtain across the face of the alcove in which it sat. While I waited, I removed Moira’s belongings from my pocket and arranged them on the table in front of me, inspecting them in the warm light of the glowglobe hanging over the table.

  Within moments, Nit slipped in through the curtain, bearing a plate full of food and a healthy snifter of dragonfire. After the magic I’d worked earlier, I needed it. I had to give it to Nit, he was a true halfling. To his mind, there were few things you couldn’t fix with a good meal and a belt of magically enhanced hooch.

  Sure, dragonfire was prohibited inside Dragon City, but it was one of those crimes where the only possible victim was the Dragon Emperor himself. The mana juice was distilled from high-grade whisky mixed with a tincture made from shavings from a dragon’s scales. The straight stuff was known as dragon essence, and it was the kind of thing that could grow flowers on your scalp or put an flameless fire in your pants. It gave you the kind of magical boost that took lots of work otherwise, and all it cost you was a mint.

  That and the fact that possessing dragon essence came with the stiffest penalties in the land kept it out of the hands of most people, especially those of us who lived downslope. Even if we’d been willing to risk being caught with it, few of us could have hoped to afford it.

  Instead, we got by with dragonfire, which burned down our thirsty throats two ways: from the alcohol and from the magic. That second part was just the thing for someone like me who’d just worked a number of spells. It washed that drained feeling right away.

  “What’s up, Max?” Nit said. He stared at the miniaturized things on the table. “You into playing with kids’ toys these days?”

  I shoved the tiny pieces across the table toward Nix. “These aren’t toys,” I said. “They’re the real thing, just smaller. Can you find a safe place for them?”

  “For you? Sure thing.” He scooped them off the table and into a pocket on the front of his grease-spattered apron.

  “Actually, they’re Moira’s,” I said. “Seen her lately?”

  “You don’t think these would be safer at her place?” He gave me a quizzical look. “That vault of hers is locked up as tight as the Emperor’s hoard.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to st
ay that way for long. I just found her boyfriend dead in her bed.”

  Nit’s jaw dropped in surprise. Then he grimaced and shook his head. “That can’t be her fault, Max. You know her better than that. Her mother and I, I know we screwed up with her something awful. I still don’t understand how. Her brothers and sisters are all doing fine, staying on the straight and narrow. That girl, though —”

  He got a distant look in his eyes for a moment, then snapped back to focus on me. “She’s no murderer though. You know that as well as anyone.” He clapped me on my forearm.

  “You know that, and I know that,” I said. “Explaining it to the Guard, that’s something else.”

  Nit shook from his nerves as he nodded in agreement with me. For all his talk about how good the rest of his kids were, we both knew that Moira got her flair for the illicit lifestyle from him. Nit was as connected to the underground economy in this city as anyone. He’d mostly gone legit these days, just supplementing his restaurant’s income by laundering a little money on the side.

  Still, when it came to the Guard, he knew the score. We both did. That’s why neither one of us so much as blinked when Yabair threw the privacy curtain aside and barged into the middle of my lunch.

  “Max Gibson?” The red-garbed elf stared down his thin nose at me. “You’re under arrest.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Can it wait until I’m done with my meal?” I picked up the snifter of dragonfire and swirled it around until I could see the little sparks of blue flame circling through it. Then I knocked it back in a single slug. It was a crime to guzzle good hooch like that, but if Yabair had his way, I wouldn’t be seeing any of it for a long while.

  “Was that what I think it was?” Yabair lanced me with a humorless glare.