by Matt Forbeck
And now I’d never get a chance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I yanked a box of shells from my pocket and came up with silver. While I fumbled with them though, the Dragon reared back his head. He’d given up on grabbing me first and had decided to go straight to biting me in half instead.
“Wahoo!” someone shouted from high above, but I didn’t look that way. I couldn’t pull my gaze from the forest of teeth coming at me.
Then the air filled with the sound of continuous gunfire, as if an army of angry dwarves had fanned their pistols at once. Bullets stitched a line across the Dragon’s snout, and he recoiled in pain.
I braved a glance up and saw Johan sitting in the front of Ingo’s glossy black palanquin. Kells perched in a chair he’d bolted to the top of the ride, his hands wrapped around the handles of a larger version of that submachine-gun he’d showed me in the Quill. He’d mounted it on a tripod in front of himself, bolting it to the top of the palanquin and giving him a clear field of fire at everything in front of him, which at that moment meant the Dragon.
As many bullets as the machine-gun could fire, though, the slugs didn’t do much more than annoy the Dragon. They put pockmarks in his scales and made him furious, but not one of them punched through to the flesh beneath.
I had to turn over the box of silver shells to get one of them out of it, and every last one of them spilled out. I managed to snag one of them with a desperate grab, but the rest scattered into the air and rained into the pit below me. Cursing, I slammed the single slug home into my shotgun and then slapped the weapon back together with a snap of my wrist.
Meanwhile, Kells kept spraying the Dragon down with bullets, feeding a belt of them through his magnificent machine. The ammunition never seemed to run out, but it just bounced off the Dragon’s hide like hail on a tin-roofed shack.
I drew a bead on the big bastard, knowing I would only get a single shot at him. Once I pulled the trigger, I was done. I had to not only pick my target well, I had to make sure I hit it.
If I couldn’t get through the Dragon’s scales, I needed to shoot him someplace softer. I figured his eyes would be the weakest spot, but that meant I had to get him to look at me. I wasn’t sure I wanted that.
The dragonet dived back into the battle then, soaring up over the Great Circle and zooming straight down at me. He gave out a high-pitched roar that would have sounded cute if it hadn’t been filled with so much rage. He hauled up at the last moment and perched on my shoulder. I worried that his weight might pull me from the wall, but he kept his wings wide and beating hard enough that he only felt like a feather wobbling there.
Hey! I heard a voice echo in my head. Hey! Hey! HEY!
I glanced up at the dragonet. He had his eyes fixed hard on his father, screeching at him like a bird of prey trying to flush a meal from cover. That was his voice in my head.
If the Dragon could hear him, though, he ignored him to concentrate on the palanquin instead. He spread his mighty wings wide, and I thought that he might take off into the air and chase down Johan and Kells before I could get my shot in at him. Instead, he beat his wings hard and fast, buffeting the palanquin with a blast of wind stronger than a tornado.
Johan hollered in surprise and terror as the Dragon-made gale took the palanquin and tossed it about like a leaf in a thunderstorm. In a panic, he brought his ride back and up, trying to escape from the creature’s wrath. Still strapped into his seat on top of the palanquin, Kells stopped firing, unable to keep a bead on the beast for now.
Hey! Face me! Coward! BULLY!
The dragonet’s voice echoed in my head again, louder now, and this time the Dragon spun about to focus his wrath on his thankless child — who hovered over my shoulder.
The Dragon’s voice boomed in my skull then, almost stunning me blind.
How dare you? You are but a little error, a minor mistake. One that I will correct right now.
The Dragon moved toward us, and I brought my shotgun up to bear on him. He spotted it right away, and he froze. The Voice of the Dragon lay slumped over the edge of the basket hanging beneath him, bleeding from a dozen bullet wounds.
You cannot harm me. You wouldn’t dare.
“Let’s see about that.”
I am the check on the Ruler of the Dead. The bulwark behind the Great Circle. If I am gone, who will keep my city safe? You?
His laughter echoed in my head. This was the same argument he’d used to get the city’s founders to sign the Imperial Pact. They’d battled long and hard against the Ruler of the Dead, and they’d decided they couldn’t manage it on their own. They had thought their only chance for survival rested with feeding their dead into that damned lizard’s stomach.
I answered the Dragon with my last damn bullet.
The silver shell smashed into his left eye and drove straight through his brain. Once the bullet got past his scales, their strength worked against him. They kept the slug ricocheting inside his skull until the charge inside it went off, turning the contents into blasted jelly.
The great beast toppled over backward then, his wings collapsing in toward him as he went. For a moment, I feared he might slide all the way down into the pit and crush Danto, Cindra, and Belle, but his wings caught on the rim of the great hole he’d made. He came to a rest there, his gigantic carcass suspended over the cavern floor, only his limp tail flopping into it.
I looked down at Belle, my shotgun still smoking in my hand, to make sure she was all right. She gaped up at me and my imperial victim, stunned at what I had done.
It shocked me more than a little too. The whole world seemed to have gone silent, although I swore I could still hear the echoes from my gun’s report ringing in my ears.
I gazed past Belle there and spotted what was left of her sister lying sprawled in pieces just beyond her. Through Fiera’s remains, the Ruler of the Dead opened up her mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed until her jaw fell from her face.
THE END
The tale concludes in End Times in Dragon City.
Special Thanks
This book — this entire series — would not have been possible without the support of the many people who backed the Kickstarter drive for the trilogy of Shotguns & Sorcery novels. Each and every one of you has my gratitude for your faith in this project.
Zombies ($25 or more)
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The Origin of 12 for ’12
Back in October of 2011, I announced the 12 for ’12 project, in which I planned to attempt to write a short novel every month in 2012. It was a huge success. I broke the dozen books up into four trilogies and ran a Kickstarter drive to fund each. Those drives each smashed through their initial goals and brought in loads of backers. I set off to write them, starting in January.
You’re holding the fifth book in the series — Bad Times in Dragon City, the second book of the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy — in your hands.
About These Novels
As I mentioned, these novels are a little short. For purposes of 12 for ’12, I defined “novel” as a work of fiction that’s at least 50,000 words. The Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards each define a novel as anything over 40,000 words, but I wanted to be a bit more ambitious.
Fifty thousand words may seem like a lot, but most of my previous novels ranged from 80–100,000 words, so that makes these substantially shorter, more in line with the size of novels that used to get published before the publishing industry made the push for doorstop-sized tomes we see on shelves now that take years to write and months to read.
That’s also, not coincidentally, the number of words writers shoot for during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which happens in November every year. Last year, over 340,000 people gave it a shot, and more than 38,000 actually crossed the finish line on time.
What’s Next?
It’s February of 2013, and I’m still writing the books. In the strictest sense, I missed my goal. As of December 31, 2012, I had managed to write ten novels, nine of which were part of the 12 for ’12 project. The extra one was Leverage: The Con Job, which hit stores at the very end of the year.
The Leverage book clocked in at 80,000 words, so that wound up taking a bit more time than the regular 12 for ’12 books. On top of those, I wrote nine comic book scripts for the Magic: The Gathering comics I write for IDW. I also:
Wrote an unannounced tie-in novelette (10k words)
Finished off a massive story bible for an unannounced game (30k words)
Wrote a short story for the Don’t Rest Your Head anthology Don’t Read This Book (3k words).
Wrote an even shorter story for The Lion and the Aardvark anthology (600 words)
Wrote pitches and samples for new books for which I’m waiting on imminent offers.
All told, that’s well over half a million words of fiction, plus the comic books. Beyond that, I produced and shipped the first four books in the 12 for ’12 series. As you might imagine, there was a bit of a learning curve there.
While I’ve published many books before, that was all in the days before ebooks, so that was a bit of a new world for me. A lot of the skills from the old ways carry over to the new, but I put a lot of trial and error time into getting things exactly right.
If anything, this is where the 12 for ’12 plan fell down. I didn’t estimate the time that book revisions and productions would take very well, and that ate into my writing time. Between that and conventions and spending time with my kids while they were out of school, I didn’t write any books in the middle of the summer, which put me way behind come fall.
Plus, the one time sink I really forgot to think about was running the Kickstarters. They take a tremendous amount of time to do well and sucked up every available brainwave I had while they were going on.
Still, I made a game attempt to catch up, ending the year on a strong note. I stopped producing the books so I could write them, which allowed me to catch up a bit. As you can see by what you’re reading, I’ve started back up on that again now.
To reward my backers for their patience, I’ve been sending them PDFs of my first drafts, something that would normally be reserved for those who backed my Kickstarter drives at higher levels. So far, everyone’s been wonderfully understanding, despite the delays, and I’m grateful for that, as I want to make sure that the final books are as good as they can be. As my friend Mike Selinker says, “It’s late once, but it’s bad forever.”
It seems crazy to say I wrote that much in a year and strictly speaking failed to hit my goals, as insane as they might have been. As of this moment, I still have a book and a half left to write, plus seven more (including those) to polish, produce, and release.
Wish me luck.
About the Author
Matt Forbeck has been a full-time creator of award-winning games and fiction since 1989. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, board games, and toys, and has written novels, short fiction, comic books, motion comics, nonfiction, essays, and computer game scripts and stories for companies including Adams Media, Angry Robot, ArenaNet, Atari, Boom! Studios, Del Rey, Games Workshop, IDW, Image Comics, Marvel Comics, Mattel, Penguin, Playmates Toys, Simon & Schuster, Tor.com, Ubisoft, Wired.com, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids.
