by Dante King
I exchanged nods and salutes with a cluster of brawny bastards gathered around a barrel of crossbow bolts to have their lunch.
“But those pricks aren’t going to be much good to me if they end up dangling from a gibbet somewhere.”
And with that cheerful thought, I started toward the barracks where I hoped to find my squad.
Chapter Six
I happened to cruise past Old Sleazy on my search for my squad, so I took the opportunity to grab some lunch to go. He had stationed his little BBQ stand elsewhere in the castle the last time I’d seen him, so I considered it fortunate to have found a familiar face—and some familiar food.
Old Sleazy was a crusty old gnoll, about four-feet tall with a physique like a slightly deflated balloon—the kind of sad balloons that you see the morning after a wedding or event like that, fat enough so that he could roll off both sides of the bed at once. He had the lumpy green skin of your average goblin, but with the added aesthetic touch of a fine downy hair that covered his whole body. The hair on his head was a thatch of white. He had cultivated himself the sort of horrific, drooping mustache that only the greatest, most venerable kung fu masters have ever thought were stylish.
He also prepared, cooked, and sold the best motherfucking barbecue I had ever tasted.
“Old Sleazy,” I said, using my new dragonmancer status to cheekily cut the long line, “do you remember me?”
Old Sleazy looked up from the large wheelbarrow that served him as kitchen, shop front, and office. Next to him, sizzling away on a grill set over a bed of white-hot coals, were strips and chunks of some marinated meat.
“‘Ello, ‘ello,” he said, “if it ain’t Michael Gilmore—Dragonmancer Noctis, I should say now. Course I remember you. With a mug like yours how could I not, eh?”
He began to have some sort of mild seizure, which I realized after a disconcerting moment or two was actually him laughing.
That was another thing about Old Sleazy; the old wheeler and dealer seemed to be the only humanoid in the Mystocean Empire that didn’t have a deep, respectful fear of dragonmancers built into them. A salesman through and through, who could probably sell hair care products to Bruce Willis, Old Sleazy wasn’t above giving dragonmancers a healthy bit of shit every now and again.
I liked that about him.
“You’re a funny guy, Old Sleazy,” I said. “You know, if you ran like your mouth, you’d be in pretty good shape.”
Old Sleazy clutched a three-fingered hand to his chest and grimaced. “You’re tellin’ me I don’t look like I’ve been runnin’ through the woods like you lot?”
“I’m telling you that you looked like you’ve been poured into that fucking apron,” I said.
Old Sleazy hit me with a baleful eye and then broke into a fit of chuckles.
“Ah, you’re a sharp one, Dragonmancer Noctis, I’ll give you that,” the gnoll said.
“I’d rather you give me a parcel of whatever the hell it is you’re cremating on that grill of yours,” I said.
“You ever ‘ad the pleasure of tuckin’ into one of my pieces of marinated mountain skunk?”
I made an involuntary face. “Fuck, I hope not,” I said.
“Spoken like a silly little lad with all the gastronomique experience of your average dungbeetle,” Old Sleazy retorted.
I sighed. “Man, I would love to spend some of my precious time insulting you, Old Sleazy, but I know I wouldn’t be able to do as good a job at it as nature has already done.”
A few soldiers behind me laughed at this.
Old Sleazy flipped some meat and said, “I’m just sayin’ that this mountain skunk was of the perfect size and weight for barbecuing when I saw it and chased it down with my hammer.”
I had to laugh at that one. “Chased it down? Is your ass jealous of the amount of shit that comes out of your mouth, pal?”
“When I trapped it, then,” Old Sleazy said grudgingly.
He procured a mysterious bottle of sauce from his apron and sprayed the meat liberally with it. It crackled and hissed and gave off a fine, toothsome smell that reminded my stomach that my whole body had been working hard that morning and could do with a fuel-up.
“It’s good is it?” I asked doubtfully, eyeing the strips of gleaming meat as they sizzled and spat above the coals.
“Course it is.”
“What d’you marinate it in?”
“Like, I’m goin’ to tell you that,” scoffed the gnoll, his chef’s toque wobbling on his head in his mirth. “You want me to tell you all about how I caught it and why? What it was eatin’ at the time and the way I prepared it—it ain’t easy to skin, bone and fillet a mountain skunk, you know. You need to stick a spoon up its—”
I held up my hand. “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure I could get a good look at a T-bone steak if I shoved my head up a cow’s ass, but I’d much rather just have faith that the butcher knew what he was doing.”
Old Sleazy spat with alarming accuracy at a passing fly, knocking it out of the air, and wiped his greasy hands on his apron. It was the same apron he had been wearing the last time I saw him. It had the slogan ‘Sex, Drugs & Sausage Rolls’ emblazoned across it.
I shrugged. “Fuck it, a parcel of your finest marinated mountain skunk then, please.”
“You got the scales, lad?” Old Sleazy said, eyeing me beadily.
I made a face. He’d put his finger on the sore spot.
“I’ve got no funds as of yet,” I admitted.
“Ahh, one of them customers, aye,” Old Sleazy said in a pained voice. “Like your mate Saya—though, to be fair, she does settle her tabs.”
“I haven’t been sent out on any missions yet. Nothing that has enabled me to pick up any treasure or loot,” I said.
Saying those sorts of words were what made this whole experience seem surreal. Treasure? Loot? When the hell did I ever get to use those words in a serious conversation back on Earth?
“And, what? You’re expectin’ Old Sleazy to reach into his own, pathetically threadbare and mostly empty pocket and cover your ass?” Old Sleazy said, hitting me with the poor, struggling entrepreneur schtick.
“I’m thinking that Old Sleazy is a crafty and shrewd enough old toad that he knows when doing a favor to the right person might pay off for him in the long run,” I said.
Old Sleazy nodded. He reached for one of the leaf wrappings sitting in a pile on one side of his cart-cum-barbecue.
“Hitch me wagon to a star sort of thing, is it?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said.
Old Sleazy considered this. “Yeah, all right then,” he said, and began fiddling about with a spatula, flipping a couple of juicy portions of meat. “But I want my money as soon as you get it, yeah?”
“Deal,” I said. “Also, you know most of the faces around here, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Maybe,” said Old Sleazy.
“I was wondering if you could help me locate some lads. One’s a big dude; pale white skin, covered in scars, red eyes, forked white beard—”
“Yeah, Bjorn, I know ‘im,” Old Sleazy said. “He’d eat everything I cooked every day if he had the funds.”
“Have you seen him today?” I asked.
“Nah,” said Old Sleazy. “I’ll tell you what though, if you get an eyeball on the fat bastard, tell ‘im that ‘e owes Old Sleazy four scales for a couple o’ very nice bullfrog liver skewers.”
Old Sleazy passed me my packet of barbecue and I bowed. “Cheers, Old Sleazy, I owe you one.”
“Yeah, and don’t you bleedin’ well forget it,” the crusty old gnoll said as I started to make my way out of the mess of people queuing for his barbecue.
I made my way around the barracks section of the lower bailey, eating from my packet of barbecue and keeping my eyes skinned for Bjorn, Gabby, or Rupert.
Goddamn, Old Sleazy might be the sort of character that made you wish you had a dozen more middle fingers, but the little devil sure could slow cook some meat. If I’d
been able to get his barbecue marinade recipe out of him and taken it back to Earth, I think I could have made millions.
After wandering about the barracks for a while, I managed to find someone who could point me in the direction of the private quarters of the three guys. Maybe they’d had a big night and forgotten all about their duties?
When I knocked on the door of the small, lime-washed Mediterranean-looking house, there wasn’t any response. It appeared that there was no one home.
Not no one home, I chided myself. No one answering the door.
I had had to lay low from the cops and even less savory individuals more than a few times in my streetlife in LA. I knew that my three squad members could very well just be hiding under their beds and hoping that whoever was rapping their knuckles on their front door would just piss off.
I tried the door handle, but my luck wasn’t that good, and I found it to be locked. Of course, now that I had my dragonmancer’s strength, I could probably have kicked the door off the hinges and through the far wall, but that would have just been rude.
I walked around the side of the house and down the alleyway that divided it from the house next door. I hopped over a five-foot wall and landed, with the softness of an extremely stealthy cat, in the back garden.
I wrinkled my nose. I had landed only a few strides away from the long-drop latrine. My dragon-boosted sense of smell told me that my squad had been making excellent use of it—and fairly recently.
There’s a not so delightful bonus to the Transfusion Ceremony, I thought.
“And there we have it,” I said to myself, smiling at the open window that looked out over the back garden.
I climbed through the open window and entered the main living area, which consisted of the kitchen, dining area, and lounge all encapsulated in one room.
I took a moment then to just listen. I closed my eyes and allowed my enhanced hearing to stretch into every corner of the building. The house was made of stone, so there were none of the creaks and groans that you’d get from a wooden residence. I held my breath and slowed my heart rate so as to hear all the better.
Nothing.
No sound of breathing hidden behind a cupped hand. Not a peep of a joint creaking as someone shifted just a little.
The only thing that I heard was the scuffling of a mouse upstairs at it chowed down on a crumb of something that had been dropped in one of the bedrooms. By the soft little scraping crunch it made while it nibbled, I thought that it might be a crust of bread.
I opened my eyes and looked around the room. I took a deep breath.
There was a vaguely alchemical stink, which coincided with a makeshift laboratory setup that had been erected in one corner. That would be Rupert’s doing, I had no doubt about that.
Rupert Dyer was my tweaked-out medic, who had won me over with his borderline inappropriate honesty during the Squad Trials. He was a scrappy fighter with a bevy of dirty tricks. He had innovative brain on him that I hoped would come in handy down the track.
I had a feeling that the consensus among many of the other soldiers at the Drako Academy was that Rupert’s dad should have wiped Rupert on the sheets, but I did not share this opinion. He was a nice guy—if somewhat eccentric—and gave me the impression that, now I had taken a chance on him, his loyalty was mine.
I just had to somehow break him of the habit of wearing the ridiculous Robin hood-style feathered hat that he never left the house without.
Even though I was ninety-five percent sure that no one was home, I headed upstairs.
On exiting the staircase, I was confronted by a bedroom that was as utilitarian and neat as any you might find in an open home. The bed had been made with such exactitude that I could have shaved with the creases on the sheets. I had a quick look and saw a cloak hanging on the back of the door. There was also a fine-looking bow—unstrung—in the corner of the room, along with a quiver of arrows.
“Gabby,” I muttered.
Gabby was the designated scout, hunter, and all-round silent assassin of my coterie. He was certainly more silent than the other two men, what with Rupert’s pockets being filled with bottles, flasks, and tins of potion ingredients—not to mention things that might spontaneously explode at any moment—and Bjorn having roughly the same grace and surreptitiousness as a pick-up truck being driven off a cliff and into a lake.
In the tradition of barracks the universe over, Gabby had been given his name by his fellow infantrymen since he had had his tongue cut out at some point in his past. No one knew why or when and, for obvious reasons, Gabby wasn’t telling.
Although he wasn’t the guy you wanted on your team for a game of ‘I Have Never’, when it came to tracking and shooting, Gabby let his yellow, hawk-like eyes and fingers do the talking. The man was said to be absolutely deadly with a bow and was raised to hunt and track from the moment he could walk. Much of this I had taken from Rupert and Bjorn during our night on the town, but I was sure I’d get the chance to verify the information before long.
I carried on down the short corridor and glanced into the jumbled abyss that was obviously Rupert’s room. It was like a larger version of the alchemical workshop downstairs, except this one look decidedly more. . . radioactive. I closed the door, not wanting to catch something, and then went to the room at the end of the hallway.
I opened the door carefully.
“Holy son of a bitch!” I said, taking a step back from the room and putting my hand over my mouth and nose.
This room was obviously Bjorn’s. The plate of carefully stripped ribs sitting on the windowsill proclaimed it, as did the naked ribcage of some large fowl sitting on a platter on the bedside table, the large bowl of gnawed chicken legs sitting by the bed, and the empty ale jug stuffed into one draw of the simple chest of drawers.
What had made me recoil in disgust wasn’t the food or bones—Bjorn never left enough food at the end of a meal to satisfy a peckish cockroach, let alone make a smell—but the pungent aroma of butt-whispers that filled the room.
It seemed to me that Bjorn, the seven and a half foot tall, four-hundred and fifty pound mean-machine, who would have filled the role of tank in anyone’s Wasteland 2 team and would eat anything so long as it stayed still long enough and didn’t wriggle too much, had systematically purged himself of every fart in his body. Then he had closed the window of his room and shut the door so that he could come back and enjoy it later.
I shook my head and walked away. I needn’t have worried about the guys hiding in there. If they had been foolish enough to take refuge under Bjorn’s bed or something the stink would have killed them within minutes.
I wondered why I hadn’t caught a whiff of this earlier, then I realized I hadn’t attempted to focus on my sense of smell. It seemed that my newfound dragonmancer senses weren’t always “on.” Which made sense, since I figured constantly being assaulted by all sorts of sounds, scents, and sights would probably drive someone insane pretty damn quickly.
I trooped back downstairs, puzzling over where they could be, when I heard a familiar voice outside the front door.
“Can you believe it? They’re r-real! The Bloodletters!”
It was Rupert. I would have known that excited stammer anywhere.
I heard the door swing open, the tramp of boots, and then the sound of the door closing again. There was a despairing groan from the simple sofa as Bjorn sat himself down on it.
“Of course they’re bloody real, Rupert,” the half-Jotunn rumbled, “you bloody well fought them just the other night, didn’t you? I know I did. I’m still getting the blood out from under my fingernails.”
“I know I d-did,” Rupert replied. “But I didn’t think they were really Bloodletters. Just some nasty, wannabe members of a thieves guild.”
There was a series of grunts from Gabby.
“There’s no thieves’ guild meaner, more ruthless or dangerous than the fucking Bloodletters,” said Bjorn as I eased myself silently down the last couple of steps. �
��Stealing dragon’s blood. It’s fucking sacri-sacra… Fucking sacrimonious if you ask me.”
“Sacrilegious,” Rupert corrected Bjorn. “You mean sacrilegious.”
Gabby grunted his agreement.
I stepped out into the room at that point and cleared my throat.
Bjorn jumped so mightily that the sofa he was sprawled on tipped backward, and he was thrown to the floor with a house-shaking crash. Rupert spun about, his eyes wide and a stiletto knife in his hand. Gabby, with his usual sangfroid, raised a hand in greeting without even turning to face me in the battered old armchair he was sitting in.
Enjoying the spectacle of Bjorn flailing on his back like a musclebound beetle, I said, “Hello, boys. I think you have some explaining to do.”
Gabby made an inquisitive noise in his throat.
“You lot are going to have to explain—not to me, but to those in charge—why it was that you weren’t up at the middle bailey at lunchtime today, when me and the rest of the dragonmancers came back from our little PT class.”
Gabby thumped the arm of his chair with a fist. From his place on the ground, Bjorn said, “Ah, troll tits! Are we in the shit?”
“I don’t really know honestly, but one of my fellow dragonmancers told me that you get one chance to fuck up and then you’re as good as buzzard bait. So, whatever the hell you three were up to, it better be a fucking good excuse. Life is full of disappointments as it is, and I refuse to add you guys to the list.”
Rupert stepped forward. He looked slightly awkward at having let his boss—me—down, but also brimming over with his usual manic excitement.
“What’s the excuse then, Rupert?” I asked.
“It’s airtight, Mike, I s-swear!” Rupert said. “When the higher-ups receive this information that we’ve gathered, they’re not going to give two sphinx shits that we weren’t where we were supposed to be!”
“All right,” I said, “that sounds promising. It’s got something to do with the Bloodletters I presume?”
