Bad Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  Kai’s shotgun blast bounced off the chariot’s armor, and Yabair and the guard driving the thing ducked down lower to keep safe. Danto hit them with a ray of heat that lanced out from his wand to catch the chariot’s face. He kept it focused there, the Yabair and his pal in the chariot yelping in pain as the metal of their vehicle reddened from the heat.

  The last I saw as I ushered Moira and the girl with her into the apartment building, Yabair leaped out of the chariot to land hard on a nearby rooftop. The guard who’d been driving the chariot tried to dart it out of Danto’s sight, but he must have been flying in blind pain at that point. He only managed to ram the chariot straight into the side of the apartment building instead.

  I swept Moira and her girl through the doorway as the chariot tumbled down behind us. It hit the street outside with a massive crash and burst into flames. I hated for that to happen to the guard inside it, but we hadn’t any choice. With luck, at least, the chariot’s wreck might seal the entrance to the building and slow down any more pursuit. It had also blocked off Danto and Kai, but I had to trust they could find their way in here on their own.

  The goblin mother and her children raced up the stairs to their apartment, wherever it was. I headed downward instead. “This way!” I shouted to the others, my wand lighting the way.

  Belle hustled straight after me as I all but tripped down the stairs. Moira came right after her, and Cindra brought up the rear, tapping her guns’ barrels to each other to make sure they were fully loaded as we headed down. Every time I came to a new landing and faced the choice of entering one of the building’s subbasements or heading farther down, I chose the stairs, and we kept moving down, down, down.

  “This is insane,” Belle said. “What are we doing here?”

  “We’re in the belly of the wall beneath the Night Tower,” I said. “Just where Ferd said Fiera would be.”

  “Let’s hope he was telling the truth,” Moira said with more than a bit of fear in her voice.

  I couldn’t think about that now. If the ogre had lied to us, there was little I could do about it. Moving deeper into the labyrinth of tunnels that riddled the base of the wall seemed right. It was the kind of place in which an undead elf possessed by the Ruler of the Dead could hide for a week or two at a time. Even if I was wrong, though, it at least brought us farther away from Yabair and the rest of the Guard that had to now be racing to support him.

  “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” Belle asked as the way became darker and tighter.

  I didn’t know how to answer that any more. I just knew I had to keep moving. If I slowed down, the Guard would catch and probably kill us all. If I kept going, I might find what I needed, or maybe a way out.

  And then we ran straight into death.

  The stairwell we were in took a corner and opened up into a cavern. I kept going, knowing that this change meant something, hoping it would be for the better. As I reached the floor of the cavern, I saw several passages that led out of chamber in at least six different directions. I stopped in the center of the place, trying to decide which way looked like our best bet.

  They all seemed awful. I couldn’t tell which ones climbed upward and which plunged downward. Any of them might lead to our salvation — or to our doom.

  I paused there and raised my wand high, hoping that its illumination would show me a sign of which way to go. That was when Fiera stepped out of the gloom near one of the exits.

  The dragonet’s fire had burned every inch of her skin, turning it a charcoal black. Bits of rotting putrescence showed through the cracks that covered her flesh like the mud in a dried riverbed. Her eyes, shot through with enough red to seem filled with blood, glared at us unblinking, the lids having long since fried and flaked away. When she moved, her bones creaked loud enough for me to hear, and bits of her skin rubbed and rustled against each other, shedding soot wherever she went.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” she said. Her voice sounded like the dry croak of some desert beast dying for a drink. “I’ve been waiting here all week.”

  “Fiera!” Belle stalked toward her lost sibling, her wand held before her like a gun.

  “Ah, sister,” Fiera — or the thing wearing her body — said. “I had thought you’d be in the Emperor’s belly for sure by now, one more corpse tossed on the feed pile for him. How interesting that you’re still alive.”

  “You set me up,” Belle said, her voice filled with shock and horror. “You planned it all.”

  Fiera smirked, the remnants of her lips pulling back from the only part of her that still seemed its original color: her snow-white teeth. “Of course I did. And you played along with it so well until you came to that human’s defense.”

  She gestured in my direction as she said that. “If you’d joined me then instead of siding with him, you might have been able to survive all of this. As it is, I’m afraid it’s far too late for that, no matter how I grateful I am for you bringing me exactly what I wanted.”

  She glared at me with hungry eyes, and it took me an instant to realize she wasn’t looking at me but the creature wrapped around my shoulders. I knew then that I should have sent the dragonet off again before we’d rushed into the building. I don’t know if he’d have listened to me, but I should have tried. I should have smacked at him and threatened him with my wand and my gun and whatever else I had handy to get him to go back to his father. Instead, I’d dragged him down here — right where Fiera wanted us.

  Kai stepped forward then and blasted at Fiera with both of his shotgun’s barrels. The pellets caught her in the side and tore the blackened flesh from her ribs, exposing the rotting meat beneath. She kept her feet though and gave the orc a curious look, the kind you might give an insect just before you squashed it flat.

  “Stop!” Belle said, pushing herself between Kai and Fiera.

  “We just need her body, right?” the orc said, breaking open his shotgun to reload it. “The deader the better. Let’s blow her head off and get out of here!”

  An arrow zipped out of the darkness then, from one of the other exits, and stuck itself into Kai’s forearm. He dropped his weapon to the cut-stone floor and bellowed in pain.

  The rest of us spun to face this new threat, ready to unload upon it until it was paste. I flared up the light from my wand until it shone like a tiny sun in that cavern, and I gasped in horror at what it showed me.

  The arrow had come from the bow of a black-suited assassin who now stood framed in the exit from which the shot had hailed.

  “It’s the Black Hand!” Moira said, her voice shrill and rising.

  “Not just one!” Cindra said, peeling my attention to her right, where I saw another assassin creeping in through one of the exits there.

  “Shit!” Danto said. I chanced a look in his direction, off to the left, and almost wished I hadn’t. The last two members of the Black Hand had appeared there, each entering the chamber through their own tunnel.

  “You’re not getting out of here alive,” Fiera said to us. “As your orc there said, ‘The deader the better,’ right?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Moira — tiny little terrified, one-handed Moira — stepped forward then. I suppose she figured she had nothing to lose. “Isn’t there a way we can work out some kind of deal?”

  Fiera stared at her for a moment with her blood-red eyes, then threw back her head and laughed. “To cut a bargain, you must have something I want. You’ve already brought me every bit of that. For free.”

  Cindra made her move then. She’d been pretty quiet since we’d left Ferd in his shack. I had thought she’d just been taking the job more serious than the rest of us, much like she had in the old days. In a sense, that was true. She’d always been great at seeing the possibilities before us and figuring out which one of them offered the best way out of whatever predicament we’d worked ourselves into.

  I’d forgotten, though, that she’d changed over the past decade. We all had. She’d gone from being
a fearless fighter — the best shot with a gun I’d ever seen — to a wife to Kells and the mother of their kids. She had different priorities than mine, and so she took what she saw as the best and most logical step toward getting what she wanted, which was to get out of there alive so that she could take care of her children again.

  She grabbed the dragonet by his snout, dragged him off my shoulders, and put one of her pistols to the creature’s head.

  I cried out in protest, but I’d been paying more attention to Fiera and the Black Hand assassins than I had to my friends, trusting them to have my back. If I’d spent any time second-guessing that, I’d have been killed already today, a few times over.

  Cindra took advantage of that, and because I’d trusted her, I couldn’t move fast enough to stop her.

  “Back off!” Cindra said, the dragonet squirming in her grasp. “We’re all walking out of here in one piece, and if anyone — and I mean anyone — tries to stop me, I’ll put a hole right through this little bugger’s brains!”

  She stared right at me in the middle of that, and I have to admit, I considered it. I could have turned my shotgun on her and tried to blow her head off but for two things.

  First, I might have hit the dragonet, and I didn’t want him hurt at all. Much as I loved my sawed-off shotgun in the middle of a tight fight, it was crap for something like this. Any shot I took was almost guaranteed to hit them both.

  Second, this was Cindra. I’d know her for the best part of my life. I’d fought alongside her for years, and we’d saved each other’s lives countless times. Even if she was doing something horrible here, something absolutely wrong, I didn’t want to be the one who took her down.

  I thought about going for my wand instead, trying something nonlethal against her, but she was no idiot. She’d see what I was doing right away. She had me. She had us all, Fiera included.

  Or so a part of me hoped.

  I wouldn’t have threatened the dragonet, I realized. Not even if my life depended on it, but if it got us out of this situation, I supposed I shouldn’t complain too much about it. I made a mental note to never leave the dragonet with Cindra for babysitting though.

  Fiera grinned at us, her mouth so wide that I feared her jaw might drop off. “An excellent gambit,” she said to Cindra. “I suppose you think this should make us feel cornered, stuck here inside of the Great Circle with nowhere to turn.”

  “I don’t care what you feel like,” Cindra said. “I just want you to let us go. You do that, and I’ll give you the damn heir to the throne. But if you hurt us, I’ll kill him.”

  The Black Hand assassins stayed where they were, framed in their individual doorways, covering us with their weapons. Danto and Belle had their wands out and at the ready, the final syllables of spells held there on the tips of their tongues. Moira had a pistol in her good fist. She’d braced it on her stump and had it leveled straight at Fiera’s head.

  Me, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to knock Cindra flat and snatch the dragonet from her hands, but I wondered if I’d be better off blasting away at Fiera or maybe one of the assassins before they decided that we were just as good to them dead as alive.

  Fiera stood there frozen for a moment. It stretched out so long that I wondered if she’d died and forgotten to let anyone know.

  I felt my trigger finger starting to itch, and I knew it would be worse for the others. Danto wasn’t as young as he had been the last time we’d done something like this, and I could see his wand trembling in his hand. Moira was as flat-out spooked as I’d ever seen her, and I was happy that she hadn’t just cracked and started shooting at anyone who looked at her wrong. Belle seemed as solid as ever, but she was facing down her undead sister, something I wouldn’t have wished on anyone.

  It was Belle who broke first. She took three steps toward Fiera and spoke to her in a vicious whisper. “Let her go.”

  The assassins moved out of their doorways as Belle grew closer to Fiera. When she stopped in her tracks, though, the killers did the same. Moira and I had taken on a single one of these Black Hand assassins before, and we’d been lucky to get away alive, even it had cost Moira her hand. we’d only managed to kill him because he’d stormed our fortified hideout, and we had no such advantage here.

  Fiera didn’t say a word, but her eyes rolled back into her head. They rotated so far that it seemed like she must be looking straight back at her own brain. Then she opened her mouth and spoke in a voice that sounded nothing like her own.

  The words were clear and forceful, the voice low and smooth, almost seductive. It bore an odd accent that seemed at once both ancient and foreign.

  “I do not care about the dragonet or my Black Hand or even the elf through which I speak. They are but ashes in a storm to me. There is only one creature in the whole of Dragon City that serves as a check to my will, and all my efforts have been bent toward his destruction.”

  Belle gasped in horror. Danto quivered worse than he had before. Although she would have denied it, I think I heard Moira actually whimper.

  Cindra, though, snarled at the dragonet as it tried to squirm free from her grip. She’d been terrified before, and she’d reached her limit. Nothing could make it worse for her. Not even this. I had to admire her for that.

  After all, we all knew we were hearing from the Ruler of the Dead.

  “Then you can let us go,” said Cindra. “Let us go, and we promise not to interfere in whatever plans you have for the Dragon. We may only be insects compared to the two of you — we’re that far beneath your notice, I’m sure — but even insects want to live.”

  The Ruler nodded. “You sell yourself short. Even giants care about the hornets that can sting them, and you and your friends here carry the most bitter of venoms.”

  “We just want to take my sister’s body and leave,” Belle said. “My life depends on it.”

  “Of course it does,” the Ruler said. “Your sister knew this when she sold herself to me many months ago.”

  I cursed. “She planned it. The whole damn time. That’s how she got one of the Black Hand to kill the Gütmanns.”

  “Of course, I did,” Fiera said in her own voice again. “I didn’t plan on being killed though. You and your damn dragonet did that.”

  Then the Ruler of the Dead’s voice kicked in again. “Death is not something to be so afraid of. I have been dead for longer than any of you have been alive. You may find it liberating.”

  “Being made into a puppet like my sister?” Belle scoffed at the creature controlling Fiera. “You call that liberating?”

  Fiera spoke to Belle in her own voice then, wearing a wicked smile I recognized as hers as well. “You don’t agree? Joining the Ruler of the Dead guarantees me one thing at least. I won’t be eaten — not by zombies, nor by the Dragon.”

  As if on cue, a horrible roar shook the entire room, from ceiling to floor. It was all I could do to keep my feet.

  Without anyone saying a word, we all knew what had made the sound and what that meant for us. The Dragon had come down from the mountain’s peak to find his offspring and to claim his due from the Sanguignos too, and he was furious.

  The dragonet stopped trying to squirm away from Cindra and clung to her instead. She soothed the creature with the hand she’d been using to hold him, still keeping her gun trained on his skull. “He can’t, right?” Cindra said. “I mean, we’re buried deep underground. Even he couldn’t haul us out of here. We’re safe, right?”

  The ground shook again, harder this time. The dragon hadn’t just roared at the building this time. He’d slammed into it.

  Mortar and chunks of stone fell from the ceiling. Dust shuddered through the air. I wondered then if the Dragon would bury us alive, burn us to cinders, or pull us out of here with his teeth. Maybe all three.

  I glanced around and saw the Black Hand assassins had disappeared back into the passages from which they’d come. The Dragon was too much for even them, or maybe they were just smarter than they were loy
al — especially considering the Ruler of the dead wasn’t really in here with us. It was just Fiera channeling her voice.

  Either way, I knew a golden opportunity when I saw one, and I took it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I leveled my sawed-off at Fiera and fired. Kai did the same with his shotgun, letting loose with both barrels. Still holding the terrified dragonet tight, Cindra emptied her pistol into the undead elf too, round after round slamming into her.

  Danto did something I didn’t expect. Rather than cast a spell at Fiera, he turned and sprayed one at the rest of us. It didn’t hurt a bit, although it made me feel a little greasy. I might have chalked that off to the adrenaline racing through me at the moment, but Danto cleared up the mystery by shouting, “Fireproofing!”

  Talk about an optimist. If we survived until the Dragon got close enough to incinerate us, I’d have to thank that crazy old wizard.

  The bullets and buckshot smacked into Fiera, tearing her to pieces. She’d been mostly charcoal before that anyhow, and the impact knocked huge chunks of that away from her. Kai’s double-barreled blast actually cut her in half, her upper torso tumbling away from her legs.

  Ready as Belle had been, her spell went off after all the guns. Our barrage had caught her off guard, and she’d had to rework the spell from scratch. Blue tendrils curled out from her wand and lashed themselves around Fiera’s remains, wrapping her in a net of smoky lights that lifted her up from where she’d fallen on the ground and spreadeagled her in the air before us.

  Leave it to Belle to show her sister mercy right up until the end. The rest of us had been trying to blast Fiera to dust, and she cast a spell designed to capture her instead. Then she screamed at the rest of us to stop.