End Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  Today, though, had started out of control and spiraled worse from there. We were in a state of war, and Yabair wasn’t in the mood to chat with anyone pointing a gun at him, no matter our intentions.

  Kai dropped his shotgun. He was too punchy to do much with it anyhow. He raised his good arm over his head in a gesture of surrender as the guards turned their weapons on him.

  I knew the orc’s gesture would be futile, and there was nothing I could do about it. Yabair had at least twenty guards and jailers arrayed around him, and not one of them saw any reason to argue with their leader’s order.

  The smart thing for me to do would have been to dive aside and cover up, hoping no stray bullets would find me. Instead, I charged Kai and tackled him flat as the square filled with the roar of gunfire.

  Kai howled in agony as we landed on his broken arm, but it would have been a lot worse if he’d stayed standing. Still, I knew the soldiers wouldn’t hesitate to adjust their aim and keep firing at us both. I flattened myself as close to the square’s cold stone floor as I could, buried my head between my arms, and hoped they were all rotten shots.

  A moment later, the gunfire stopped, and I realized I wasn’t dead. I wondered if I’d been hit but had gone into shock so fast I hadn’t felt it. When I opened my eyes to check, I saw a glowing blue shield standing between the soldiers and me. Every one of the bullets had bounced off it.

  I recognized the spell. Defensive formations had always been one of Belle’s specialties. We’d been good at this once, back when we’d been a team.

  “Stop!” I shouted, but the soldiers let loose another barrage at us, emptying their rifles at Belle’s shield. It would only hold up under so much abuse, I knew. After enough lead smacked into it, it would shred to pieces, no more solid than the imagination that had created it, and then Kai and I would die. “Yabair! Stop!”

  The bullets kept coming, and then a lightning bolt cracked out from the same direction and crackled around the shield, lighting Kai and me up like steel rods in a thunderstorm. Everything went white for a moment, and every muscle in my body tightened up at once. When it was over, I lay there exhausted and fried, just grateful I hadn’t bitten off my tongue.

  Spark dove down out of the sky then and let loose a blast of fire at the soldiers. I did my best to shout out for him to stop it, to run away and save himself instead, but the words escaped my lips in a thin whisper.

  From my vantage on the ground, I didn’t realize that Spark hadn’t attacked the Guard, not directly. Instead, he’d blasted his fire at the ground between us, fencing our attackers off from us.

  A warning. Next time, maybe not.

  “Hold your fire!” My voice came out stronger this time, and I pointed up at Spark, who was circling around the edge of the square, getting ready to make another pass at Yabair and his compatriots. “Hold it, or next time the flames are for you!”

  The gunshots had already stopped, I realized then, but I hoped that the threat would at least keep them from starting up again. I heard worried murmurs from the jailers and the auxiliary guards standing with Yabair. “The heir,” they said. “The heir!”

  With no more shots fired, Spark completed his circuit around the square and landed by my side. I pushed myself up to a sitting position, and he nuzzled his way onto my lap. I rubbed his head as Belle knelt down behind me.

  “Can you stand?” she said in a whisper.

  “I think so.” I took Spark off my lap and set him down next to me. Then I picked up the pistol Kai had loaned me, and I pushed myself to my feet. “How’s Kai?”

  In the downslope distance, I heard gunshots cracking and people screaming. The zombies had gotten into Goblintown. I could barely imagine the chaos erupting there.

  I glanced behind me and saw Danto and Moira working on Schaef. The hack wasn’t moving, and the other two wore most of his blood. They were his best hope though. I had other things to worry about.

  I turned about on unsteady feet and scanned the line of soldiers in front of me until my eyes landed on Yabair. He had his pistol in his hand, smoke still curling from its barrel.

  “Go back to your cell, assassin!” he said. “We’re too busy to deal with traitors like you at the moment, and you’ll be safe there until we are.”

  “I killed one person. How many are you going to murder?”

  “You killed the Emperor!”

  I laughed. “You sound like that makes a difference.”

  The crack was a calculated risk. I meant for it to make Yabair mad. I just didn’t want him so angry he shot me on the spot.

  He stepped forward, out of the line that he’d ordered his soldiers into at the top of the square, his pistol out before him and pointed at my head. I was about to flinch from it when I felt Spark flap up behind me and land on my shoulder. He glared past me at Yabair, and the captain held his trigger finger steady for now.

  “Get out of here, Gibson,” Yabair said, his eyes still blackened and his nose skewed out of true. He’d not taken the time to visit a healer yet. “And take the heir with you. This is no place for him.”

  “You think he’s too young to see how many of his own people the Guard’s willing to slaughter in his name?”

  “You’re jeopardizing his life. If you cared about him half as much as you claim to, you wouldn’t have brought him here.”

  “If you have any advice for how to control a dragon, I’m all ears. He has a mind of his own.”

  Yabair’s shoulders sagged. “You’re wasting your time here, Gibson. The only thing you can get here is killed.”

  “We’re here to stop you from blowing up Goblintown, and we’ll kill every last one of you if we have to.”

  “You?” Yabair snorted.

  “And me,” Belle said as she strode up behind me.

  Yabair nodded at us both for a moment. “Out of respect for Bellezza and her family’s long friendship with mine, I’m going to spell this out for you.

  “First, we are at war, and I am one of the officers charged with coordinating the city’s defenses. My officers will kill you where you stand if you do not comply with my orders, and no one in the city will shed a tear. On top of that, we’ll be forced to incinerate your corpses on the spot. I will make sure there is not a grease stain left.

  “Second, we don’t have any other choice. The Ruler of the Dead’s army has already breached the Great Circle. They are flowing into Goblintown unimpeded. They are already hauling the people you’re so concerned about out of their houses and murdering them, which adds even more numbers to their already swollen ranks.

  “Third, and perhaps most important from your point of view, I don’t have the power to stop this. You’re already too late.”

  I’d been preparing counterarguments up until that point, running through options from giving an impassioned speech that would cause Yabair’s soldiers to rise up against him all the way through to shooting him in the head with Kai’s pistol. They all scattered from my brain.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Yabair nodded toward where the last bits of Maurizzio’s flare were fading away into red and gold embers in the sky. “That signal put the plan into motion. Once Maurizzio fires a green one to follow it, the charges detonate.”

  “Those are signals, though.” Belle stepped forward, angry and ready to argue the point while I stood there dumbfounded. “Nothing more. They don’t trigger the explosions themselves.”

  “True,” Yabair said, “but I don’t have the trigger and cannot do anything to stop it from being used. In addition, if Maurizzio’s signal doesn’t come after a certain amount of time — because, say, he was killed or injured — the plan goes into effect automatically.”

  “There must be a failsafe signal,” I said. “A way to call it off.”

  Yabair gave me a wry look as he shook his head. “The first signal is meant as a warning. It tells the Guard to abandon Goblintown as fast as it can. There’s no turning back after that.”

  I cocked my pistol
. “Who’s going to set off the explosives?”

  “Do you remember the Voice?” He knew I did. He turned his head to gaze up toward the top of the mountain. “His son stands on the edge of the Dragon’s Spire, the magical trigger in his hands.”

  The gunshots and screams from down Goblintown way grew louder and sharper. I turned that way and saw people streaming upslope into the square. No zombies came with them, but from the sounds I could hear, the creatures were not far behind.

  “You cannot make it up the mountain in time,” Yabair said. “Everything below Low Pavement will disappear before you could even reach Stronghold Square.”

  “Below Low Pavement?” I felt ill. For some reason I’d thought the Guard wouldn’t have dared to set the charges this far upslope. That would take out all of Goblintown for sure, plus a few places like —

  Oh, no.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I spun on my heel and grabbed Belle by the hand, dragging her after me as I raced back to Schaef’s carpet.

  They’re letting us go?

  I reached up and patted Spark on one of his wings. “Why would they stop us?”

  “Where are we going?” Belle said. She pulled her arm from my grasp but kept following me. “You heard Yabair. We’re too late.”

  Danto and Moira had pulled Schaef off his crumpled ride so they could work on him. Danto glanced up as we approached and gave me a grim look. Moira didn’t pay a bit of attention to us, still concentrating on plugging the holes in Schaef instead. “If we could get him to a hospital,” Danto said softly.

  “Kells and Cindra,” I said to Belle as I sat down on the controller’s section of the carpet. I punched at it with my intent, and it unwrinkled itself and leaped upward, hovering a foot off the ground.

  “What about them?” Belle said as she scrambled on beside me. Then she figured it out and gasped in dismay. “Their place is just below Low Pavement.”

  “We need to get them out of there,” I said as I shoved the carpet into the air. “Them and their kids, before it all blows.”

  I hadn’t flown many carpets in my life, but I had the principles down. I thought about going forward, and it went. I thought about going faster, and it complied — up to a point.

  “Hang on!”

  No matter how much I wanted the carpet to go faster than light, it had its limits. I pushed it as hard as I could, way more than I’d normally be comfortable with, and we lurched toward the buildings at the far end of the square.

  “Pull up!” Belle said as we barreled straight for the second story of a bookseller’s place.

  I hauled up on the front of the carpet with both hands and commanded it to rise with my mind. Maybe wrestling with the fabric like that didn’t help any, but it felt right anyhow. At that point, I was willing to try anything if it would let me handle the carpet half as well as a professional like Schaef.

  It worked. We rose fast enough that we skimmed over the edge of the bookseller’s roof and kept climbing until we topped all the surrounding buildings too. There weren’t many towers in this part of town, and I didn’t have to worry about moving upslope or downslope on our way to our destination. I just needed to get to the far end of Low Pavement as fast as I could.

  Below us, I could hear the sounds of battle ringing through the streets of Goblintown. Gunfire rattled here and there, and muzzle flashes lit up rooftops at random as people fired down at the zombies from their roofs.

  “Run!” Belle shouted at them all as we raced past. “Head upslope! Goblintown’s about to blow!”

  I don’t know if anyone listened to her, and I don’t guess they had enough time to do anything about it either way. She knew that too, but she kept on trying.

  “Run to the Village! Time is running out! Run!”

  I kept focused on the task at hand. I would have loved to have been able to dive into Goblintown and start ferrying people out on the carpet, but if I stopped to do that, I’d never reach Kells and Cindra in time. I hated to admit it, but if I had to make a choice, I was going with the people I cared about, so we flew on.

  Every second on that eastward dash along Low Pavement seemed like an hour. I pushed the carpet to its limits, right up to the moment I felt its edges start to flutter. If I shoved it any harder I might have lost the carpet’s internal integrity, the ability it had to straighten itself out in midair. If that happened, we’d have dropped like a stone.

  I kept it right there on the edge, hoping we wouldn’t tumble over by accident. It didn’t give us any margin for errors, but I was willing to risk it if it meant we’d reach our goal in time.

  After what seemed like the better part of a week, I spied Kells and Cindra’s rooftop at the far end of the street. They had it lit up like a theater’s stage, and I could see Kells standing on the downslope edge, blasting away at oncoming zombies on the street with his machine-gun. Cindra stood next to him, covering him with her pistols and picking off stragglers that moved outside of his arc of fire.

  Johan’s black palanquin — the one he’d borrowed from the Brichts and which he and Kells had outfitted for our fight with the Dragon — sat in the middle of the roof, its curtains drawn. As we got closer, I could see Johan sitting in the pilot’s compartment and Kells and Cindra’s kids peeking out through the open door on the side.

  “Run!” Belle shouted at them as we got closer. “I mean, fly! Fly!”

  The machine-gun made a horrible racket, though, and they couldn’t hear us over it. They didn’t even look our way.

  I can help!

  Spark leaped from my shoulder and zoomed ahead of us. When he wanted to move, he was damn fast, and he burst past us as if someone had lit his tail on fire.

  “Don’t surprise them!” I shouted after him. I couldn’t tell if he got that or not, but I heard his voice in my head an instant later.

  Why not?

  Fire leaked from his snout as he approached Kells and Cindra, and she must have spotted it out of the corner of her eye. As hopped up on the adrenaline of the battle as she must have been at that point, she didn’t think to wonder what it was that might be coming at her and her family from the sky. She just turned and fired at it.

  “That’s why!”

  It might have been the first time in my life I’d ever wished Cindra was a lousy shot. She’d been blasting away at so many zombies that the barrels of her guns were starting to steam in the night air. Turning and snapping off a shot like that at a half-seen target coming at her from out of the night sky, I could at least hope that she might be a little off her game.

  No such luck.

  I couldn’t see exactly what happened, but Spark’s angle of approach on the roof turned into free fall toward the streets below. I gasped in horror and the knowledge that there wasn’t anything I could do to help him. I was already going as fast as I could, and he was too far in front of me.

  “Spark!”

  He didn’t respond.

  Belle had her wand out and started to cast a spell, but she cut herself off with a curse. Spark had fallen too fast for her to react in time.

  I shouted at Cindra, who’d turned to look at us now, her pistols held out before her. “Hold your fire!”

  Whether she recognized my shape or my voice, I don’t know, but she put her guns up for a moment and peered into the sky. Then she tapped Kells on the shoulder and pointed up at us as we zoomed their way. He took his finger off the machine-gun’s trigger and squinted up at us.

  “Get out of there!” Belle shouted at them. “The entire neighborhood’s about to blow!”

  I think if anyone else had come screaming at them out of the sky, Kells and Cindra might have ignored them. Having been part of our team, though, they still trusted us. They didn’t ask any questions, and they didn’t hesitate for even an instant.

  Cindra started for the palanquin right away, shouting at Johan to get it into the air. Kells abandoned the machine-gun and sprinted straight after her, right for Johan’s borrowed ride.

  Just then
, the explosives underneath Goblintown went off.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I’d expected the blasts to be deafening — they were meant to bring down a large section of Dragon City, after all — but they sounded more like muffled thunder rolling in the distance, combined with corresponding earthquakes. The series of dull booms started near the wall and grew closer, with a distinct pause between each one.

  From up on Schaef’s flying carpet, I saw the first ones go off. The buildings crowded up against the inside of the Great Circle rose up as if a sleeping giant had bumped them from below. Then they collapsed, the lights scattered on, about, and through them all snuffing out at once and joining the growing darkness.

  The next closest row of buildings lurched up into the air then and fell back down, right in line with the first set of victims. Then the next and the next. They imploded in precise increments and exactly in order, just the way you’d expect the Guard to manage it.

  This made it seem as if the entire mountain was collapsing slowly into itself. I wondered if the wizards who’d come up with the system had engineered it well enough to ensure that they wouldn’t bring the entire city down in a landslide. The way Dragon City was structured, the Elven Reaches and the Dragon’s Spire would be safe no matter what, and probably the Stronghold would survive too. The Academy would be safe up on the crag along which ran Wizards Way. The rest of us, though, would be buried alive, all the way up to Gnometown.

  “Move!” I shouted down at Kells and Cindra. Kells had his duffel bag full of guns slung over his back, and the from the way he moved he must have stuffed an arsenal into it. “Johan! Get that thing in the air!”

  The dwarf snapped me a quick salute. He’d already gotten himself strapped in, and I could see the palanquin lifting clear of the roof by a foot or so.

  The kids screamed in panic. The girl, who had to be around nine, cried out, “Mama!” The boy leaped out of the palanquin, terrified that it might take off without his parents.