Hard Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  “Have you?”

  “Of course, I have,” he said. “I’ve spent a good portion of my day in and out of that damn place.”

  “And did you see her there?”

  He realized that this is what I’d been asking him by implication and sighed. “No,” he said. “But it’s a big place. Many people die in Dragon City every day, Gibson. It’s one part of what makes my job so hard.”

  “I don’t think she’s there,” I said. “I’m guessing someone would have told you by now.”

  He shrugged at that, but in a way that let me know I was right. After what had happened at Stubby’s, I’m sure he had every guard in the city on the lookout for Moira and had put the morgue and the hospital on high alert as well. He wasn’t the kind to leave that sort of order left unsaid.

  “‘With the dead,’ though,” he said. “What else might that mean?”

  I stared out the room’s lone window. We were up on the edge of the Reach, the lowest elf part of the city, and that gave us a phenomenal view of the city below us and the darkening plains beyond. “All sorts of things, I suppose. There are a lot of alleys a dead body can disappear into in this city.”

  I ought to know. I’d had to get rid of a body or two myself over the years.

  As I gazed out over the city I called home, whether it was mine or not, I spied a horde of undead gathering against the southwest part of the wall. They seemed more agitated than usual, and if I concentrated, I felt like I could almost hear their collective howls and groans, even all the way upslope in Danto’s hospital room.

  Then I knew where Moira was and how little time I had to get to her before it was too late. I didn’t bother with saying good-bye to Danto or Yabair. I just left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I didn’t have much time to get to where I was going, so I raced out of the hospital and flagged down another carpet. I jumped on before the hack could ask me where we were headed. He was a dark-haired halfling in threadbare but presentable clothes, and he gave me a bewildered look as I sat down behind him.

  “You’re in a big rush for someone getting out of the hospital,” he said with what I’m sure was meant to be a charming smile. “Where are we off to?”

  “You know where the Barrelrider is?”

  “One of my favorite places,” he said, his smile never wavering.

  He got me back home in nothing flat. The way the sun lowered in the west like a slow-motion curtain on this particular day drove home the sharp point of how little time I had left before night fell though. At that point, doing what I had to do would become a lot harder.

  I asked him to wait for me as I rushed into my place, and he agreed with a sanguine nod. I charged up the stairs and spotted a note tacked to my door frame. It read, “Any luck?” Bellezza had signed it.

  I stuffed it in my pocket and ducked into my office. I went straight for my desk and tore open the bottom drawer. I snatched up the rune-coated flask sitting there and slipped it into my jacket’s inner pocket, opposite my shoulder holster.

  The flask didn’t look like much, but Danto had given it to me years ago. He’d enchanted it to hold far more dragonfire than it should have been able to. I don’t usually carry it with me, but my mojo was already running low. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d need a belt or three to fortify me.

  I patted my shoulder holster and pockets to make sure I had everything I needed. Nothing worse than reaching for a wand that you left behind. Satisfied I was as ready as I could be, I raced back down the steps and found Nit chatting with my cabbie.

  As I slid back onto the hovering carpet, Nit grabbed my sleeve and leaned toward me, worry pressing deep lines into his face. “Any word about Moira?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “I’m just off to find her now.”

  He let me go and stepped back. “Well, don’t let me stand in your way then. Off with you!” He wagged a finger at the cabby. “Take good care of this one, Schaef.”

  The shaggy halfling turned and flashed me an easy smile. “But of course. Where are we off to now, sir?”

  “How close can you get me to the wall?”

  Schaef narrowed his eyes at me. “Which wall do you mean exactly?”

  I knew what he meant. He wanted me to pick a different wall, like the one around the Academy, or maybe even the Imperial Palace. Much as I’d have preferred those destinations myself, I had one wall in mind: the big one that ran all the way around the city.

  “The Great Circle,” I said. “I need to get to the Night Tower as fast as I can.”

  The merry color drained from Schaef’s face. The Night Tower sat in the most southwesterly part of the Great Circle. It served as the watchtower on the leading edge of the city’s defenses against the undead hordes that ruled the untamed lands to the west. When the Ruler of the Dead finally launched her next inevitable assault against the city, it would come from that direction, and the sharp-eyed guards in the Night Tower would be the first to see it on its way.

  “What in the bottom of the Dragon’s horde would you want to do there?” Schaef said. “All good, sensible people stop at the edge of Goblintown if they can help it.”

  This kind of conversation made me wish I’d taken up flying a broom or a carpet myself at one point. I hardly ever needed the damn things. For all its faults, Dragon City had lots of ways to get to the places I wound up most. But when I wanted to get someplace dangerous fast, I hated wasting time arguing with a driver about how much was on the line.

  “He wants you to take him to the Night Tower, then you damn well fly him to the front door.” Nit gave Schaef a grim glare. “He’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Nit!” Schaef said. “Have you ever been down there yourself? It doesn’t matter how high I fly, some orc or goblin or other nasty will be down there on a rooftop taking a potshot at me to see if he can knock me from my ride.”

  Nit put both his hands on the edge of the carpet and frowned at the hack. “Now you listen to me, Schaeffer Tolliver. This man here’s trying to help my daughter. Anyone that balks at the chance to give him as much help as he can will be on my rotten side for every moment of the very short time left to him in his accursed life. Do I make myself clear?”

  I’d always known that Nit played a strong role in the Big Burrow, as the halflings called their part of town. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t exactly dirty, but he peddled more influence than pies out of his restaurant. And he’d been known to take a meat cleaver to those who threatened him or his family.

  If I’d ever doubted Nit’s pull among his people, it disappeared along with the fight in Schaef. The hack swallowed hard and gave Nit a horrified nod. “All right,” he said, smearing a weak smile across his lips. “Of course, Nit. Anything for an old friend.”

  Nit released his white-knuckled grip on the edge of the flying carpet and gave Schaef a friendly chuck on the shoulder. “Good on you, Schaef,” he said. “I won’t forget.”

  Without another word, Schaef coaxed his carpet up into the air. I held on tight, wary of my reluctant driver letting me slide off. I glanced back at the Barrelrider and spotted Nit standing there in the early evening light, giving me a salute for luck.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The guards of the Night Tower include some of the sharpest-eyed people in all of Dragon City. It’s their job to warn their fellow citizens as early as possible of any assault on our walls, after all, and they take their duty seriously. Because of that, though, they don’t pay nearly as much attention to what’s happening behind them.

  Schaef was absolutely right, of course. Flying over Goblintown to get to the Night Tower was dangerous and dumb, and I wouldn’t have put him through it if I hadn’t been in a real hurry. As we moved downslope and toward the harder parts of town, I drew my wand and had it at the ready to defend us against any attacks.

  Everything in Dragon City ran downhill: water, garbage, and things far more foul. The higher you were up the mountain, the less of that shit you had t
o deal with. The lower downslope you lived, the fewer choices you had.

  Goblintown stretched along much of the area nearest the Great Circle, but it clogged up into a giant, growing knot of misery closer to the Night Tower. This is the part of the town where no one wanted to live, after all, so the only people who did had no recourse. Not only was it in the lowest stretch of land around, but it would be the first place to be subject to an attacking army’s assault. Also, when you got that close to the wall, you couldn’t escape the groans of the undead creatures massed up against it, trying to scratch their way in with only their well-worn bones as tools.

  And those were just the stragglers from the Ruler of the Dead’s army, the ones that she didn’t care enough about to bother keeping track of. They mindlessly clawed at the fortifications, only breaking through or climbing over the wall on a rare occasion guaranteed to spike panic through the entire city. Everyone in this part of town knew they were doomed when the real attack came and they’d just be fodder used to form a second barrier between the undead horde and the people fortunate enough to live in Dragon City’s higher reaches.

  Schaef yelped in terror as the first arrow whizzed past him and into the open sky. “I told you!” he said as he hauled the carpet higher into the air, arcing away from the direction from which the shot had come. To his credit, he kept on a course toward the Night Tower, which kept me from having to threaten him to keep him on track.

  I wondered who was attacking us. Could it be a member of the Black Hand? Maybe the orc who’d tried to kill me once already that day? Or maybe it was my old pal Kai, out drumming up some business for himself. How ironic would it be to have a friend shoot me down like that, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  The next arrow stabbed up through the carpet right between us. It caught on its feathers, or it would have sailed all the way through. This time, it was me who yelped.

  “Hold on!” I said.

  “You hold on!” Schaef shouted, not bothering to look back at me. “I’m flying!”

  I held up my wand, said a few choice words, and tapped the carpet. It went stiff as a board, and just in time. I felt an arrow smack into the carpet’s underside right below where I was sitting on it. I hate to think what would have happened if the damn thing had gone right on through.

  The carpet wobbled a bit before Schaef regained control of it again. “What did you do?” he asked in an unhappy way.

  “Battle-hardened the carpet,” I said. “It’s more solid than armor now.”

  “And about as easy to fly!” he said. “Warn a guy next time, won’t you?”

  Despite his complaints, Schaef managed to get his reinforced carpet all the way to the Night Tower without any more troubles. The tower, cut from black stone, stabbed into the sky over the wall, standing head, shoulders, and waist above anything nearby, other than the mountain itself. It featured arrow slits cut into its sides, all the way from the top of the wall on up. An unlit bonfire stood stacked on top of it, waiting to be ignited at the first real sign of danger, to alert the rest of the city to its impending doom.

  I spotted a pack of guards standing on top of the tower. These were members of the real thing, the Imperial Dragon’s Guard, not the Auxiliary Guard. While the Guard mostly stuck to the part of the city from Gnometown on up, they didn’t trust something as vital as the Night Tower to their junior team.

  “Where do you want me to set you down?” Schaef asked as the tower loomed larger before us.

  “I don’t suppose I could convince you to take me beyond the Great Circle,” I said. “There’s a small sack of gold in it for you.”

  He glanced over his shoulder to goggle at me. “Nit may be — don’t get me wrong — the kind of halfling I don’t want to disappoint, but he’s not half as scary as what goes on beyond that wall. I’ll take you right up to it. I’ll even set you down right on top of the Night Tower if you like, but there’s no way I’m going past it.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I pointed to an open spot on the wall that didn’t seem to have anyone patrolling it at the moment, just out of bowshot from the Night Tower. “How about right there?”

  Schaef sighed in relief. “You’ll tell Nit I did my best, right?”

  I clapped the halfling on the shoulder. “Assuming I make it back alive.”

  “Ah,” Schaef said in a woeful tone, “then I’m still doomed.”

  Despite his misgivings, Schaef did as I asked and put me down on that open stretch of walkway atop the Great Circle. The moment he did, I heard shouts ringing out from either direction on the wall. Low as the sun might be getting, Schaef had still set me down in broad daylight, and the Guard wouldn’t miss something like that.

  “Get out of here.” I slipped off the carpet and waved Schaef away. “Quick.”

  Schaef didn’t waste any time with a long good-bye. “Good luck to you!” he said as he spun his carpet about and zoomed back upslope, toward the safety of the heart of the city again. “You’re going to need it.”

  I glanced both ways along the wide stone walkway that ran atop the Great Circle. Guards raced toward me from both directions, already shouting at me to put down my wand and surrender. I ignored them. Instead I leaped up between a couple of the crenellations on the outside edge of the wall and stared down into the darkening plains beyond.

  From up here, it didn’t look so bad. The Guard had taken the measure of clearing the encroaching forests away from the wall long before I was born, to make sure that the army of the Ruler of the Dead wouldn’t have cover to hide under before it launched its attack. The plains beyond showed some signs of life: trees, scrub, even the Crystal River snaking away from where it fell from the city in a stunning cataract near the Great Gate, growing as it fled from the mountain, racing for the open sea, the shore of which I could see reaching away in the dimming east.

  I could spot clusters of the walking dead roaming about here and there, groaning around their rotting tongues, but none stood on the ground stretched a dizzying fifty feet straight below me. They would be more active as soon as the darkness fell, but for now they shuffled about without purpose or fight. I took that as a good sign and cast a short quick spell on myself, the kind that I’d trained myself to be able to use at a moment’s notice, with little to no thought required beyond a self-preservation reflex.

  Then I took one large step forward and leaped from the wall out into the open space beyond.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The guards shouted out to me the whole way down, but none of them loosed an arrow at me. I suppose they wanted to save their ammunition. Why waste it, after all, on a man who seemed determined to kill himself all on his own?

  My spell kicked in and stole away a good deal of the momentum from my fall. Instead of plummeting to my death, I spread open my arms and settled into a gentle glide toward the ground. As I landed, feet first, I kept my eyes peeled for zombies or worse heading my way. I didn’t spot any close to me, but it was the ones I couldn’t see that I worried about.

  I kept the scattergun in its holster for the moment, but I had my wand at the ready. I’d go for the gun if I needed it, but I knew the crack of the gunshots would bring any undead in the area coming for me as sure as if I’d doused myself in a bath of fresh blood. Better to be quiet for as long as I could.

  I shielded my eyes with my hand and looked at the setting sun. Judging by how close it had gotten to the tree-lined horizon beyond, I didn’t have much time before it dipped down beyond the edge of the world, and when that happened, my job would get a lot tougher.

  I made a beeline for a small woods straight to the west. That’s where I hoped Moira might be. I marched along at top speed, jogging until I was winded and then walking until I had my breath again. It was already dark under the forest’s canopy, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about that. I just kept my head up to look for trouble and continued moving.

  Soon enough, I reached the edge of the wood. Once there, I went to the right unti
l I spotted an old willow tree a bolt of lightning had split in half. If you guessed that only nature could have done that kind of damage, I wouldn’t blame you, but it had been Danto’s handiwork back at the start of our adventuring days. We’d needed a way to mark our path, something easy to notice but which most people wouldn’t give a second glance, especially with the threat of roaming zombies everywhere.

  It served just as well now as it had back then. I found the path just inside the edge of the woods, overgrown but still visible to someone who knew what he was looking for. It snaked back into the darkness until it disappeared from sight.

  It was harder to spot a zombie coming at you in the woods. Turn around any tree, and you might find one waiting for you right there. I set my ears to listen hard instead, reaching out to try to hear any kind of crack or rustle caused by something other than myself or the wind rushing through the boughs high above.

  By this point, I was pretty sure I was being followed, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t spot my tail. Hearing nothing odd either, I set down the path, following it until it came to stand of birch, in the center of which towered the thick stump of a long-dead oak. It wasn’t until you got close to it that you might be able to see that the oak was in fact a pillar of cut stone covered with treated bark to make it look a lot like the stump of an old tree that had cracked off about ten feet above the ground untold years ago.

  As soon as I reached the stump, I knew Moira was there. I hadn’t been out this way since I retired from adventuring, along with the rest of the group, and I doubted that many of us had come back out here in the meantime. It was just too dangerous to brave on your own — unless you were desperate.

  Someone had stripped the bark off the plate in which sat the mechanism that opened the door. I suspected it had gotten stuck over the years, and Moira had been in enough of a hurry to solve the problem with her knife. Either way, from the scratches around the plate, I could see it hadn’t happened by accident.