Bad Times in Dragon City (17 page)

I started back up the ladder, but Moira grabbed me by the leg and hauled me down again. “He’ll be fine!” she said in a harsh whisper. “He did that to make sure you got away. Don’t waste that!”

Much as I hated to admit it, I knew she was right. I pulled the hatch shut and latched it from the inside, then said a quick spell over it and tapped it with my wand. It would be impossible to see from above now, and even if Yabair figured out where it was, he wouldn’t be able to open it with anything shy of the kind of blast that might bring the entire bar down on his head. 

I almost wanted to see him try. Instead, I lit the tip of my wand with a spell so I could see where we were going, and I let Moira tug me down the tunnel. 

The tunnel wound around a bit and slipped down a ladder before it twisted around a bit more. It soon came out in the face of a cliff that looked over the top of Wall far below it, which made for a wonderful view of the countryside, if you could ignore all the hungry dead roaming across it. 

An illusion covered the exit, which came out behind a lush tree that seemed too large to be able to cling to the mountain’s rocky face. We slipped out of the tunnel and down the tree, then swung over onto the street below, which put us straight into the upper edge of Goblintown. 

Since I knew where we were going, I moved into the lead. Belle followed right behind me, her wand at the ready. Danto limped after her as fast as he could, with Moira grabbing his hand and tugging him along, cursing at him the entire time for being even slower than her little legs could manage. Cindra brought up the rear, her guns out and ready for action.

It was early afternoon, which found Goblintown at its most sedate. Those who had legitimate jobs had already found their way to them, and the people who were most active at night were still in their beds, hiding from the sun. A few people gawked at the well-armed group of outsiders — three humans, an elf, and a one-handed halfling — loping through their grimmer part of town, but as long as we weren’t coming for them, they weren’t concerned enough to raise an alarm. 

I led us in the straightest way I knew to our destination, but it still meant cutting through a series of odd-shaped plazas, narrow streets, and surprising turns. Soon enough, we emerged into the square out of which Yabair had flown Kai and me the other night. 

A grubby halfling stood in the middle of the open area, next to a small, dirty fountain, waving us in. His left arm ended in a special pistol Kells had fitted him with a long while back. It attached to the stump he had there, and he could fire it by flexing the ends of the muscles in his arm. 

“Long time, no see, Righty,” I said. “Kai got our guy?” 

The halfling jerked a thumb on his good hand in the direction of the shack I’d been playing cards in the other night. “He’s waiting for you. Better hurry though. No telling how long that’ll last.” 

I thanked him with a nod and hurried on. As we went past, Moira gave Righty’s weaponry an approving nod. “I need to get set up with one of those when this is over,” she said. 

“I’ll have Kells cut you a special survivor’s deal,” Cindra said. 

“What do you have to do to qualify for that?” Danto said. 

Cindra gave him a wry, joyless smile. “Live.” 

I worked my way down that slender alley to the card-game shack, my wand out and ready before me. I ducked into the place and found Kai there waiting for me, standing on Ferd’s neck, the tips of his shotgun’s barrels in the center of the ogre’s broad and flat forehead. An orc I thought looked like Wint laid sprawled on the floor nearby, his head and shoulders frozen into a large and I assumed fatal block of ice. 

There was no one else in the entire place, not even a bartender. Some of the shutters on the windows had been smashed outward. A chair or two had been rendered to splinters. Blood spray coated one wall, but no body lay fallen beneath it. 

“Hey, Ferd,” Kai said as I entered the place, ignoring me. “You know why ogres have flat foreheads?” 

“No,” the ogre said in a small voice, making sure not to shake his head at all. 

“Because they keep slapping them with their palms!” Kai illustrated the move with his free hand and laughed. 

The ogre thought he saw his shot there and reached out to slap Kai’s shotgun away. Kai kicked off his neck and danced away from him, still cackling. Ferd got to his knees and found himself facing the tip of my wand. 

“Don’t go anywhere quite yet,” I said to him. “We have a few things to talk about first.” 

Ferd glared at my wand as if that alone could peel the varnish off it. The others filed in behind me and surrounded him, their weapons all leveled at his chest. The scowl on his face softened a bit with each entry, and by the end he’d sunk to the floor and started to beg for mercy. 

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said to me. “Give you whatever you need, but I can’t talk about her.”

We might be looking for Fiera, but I knew he meant the Ruler of the Dead. We all did. 

“You afraid of dying?” Kai poked the ogre with his shotgun again.  

Ferd shuddered as he shook his massive head. “I’m afraid of what comes after that.” 

“You don’t think that’s going to happen if she gets her way?” Moira said. “That happens, and the whole city goes down.” 

Cindra grunted. “And Goblintown will feel it first.” 

“You help us now,” Danto said, “and we might be able to keep that from happening.” 

I reached down and found Ferd’s chin, then lifted it until I could see into his eyes. “Otherwise, you’re going to become the biggest, freshest zombie wandering around this part of town, eating your family’s brains.”

The ogre’s defiance crumbled at that thought, and his massive shoulders sagged in defeat. “She wanted us to deliver Gibson to her, at the base of the Wall, right under the Night Tower. There’s a subbasement under the buildings there.” 

“She might still be there waiting,” Belle said. “There aren’t too many places a creature like that can wander inside Dragon City.” 

I nodded at her and headed for the exit. I didn’t want to think about what we maybe should do with Ferd. If we left him behind, alive, would that come back to haunt us later? The smart thing would be to just kill the fat bastard, but such things were never easy. 

As I left the shack, I decided I needed to turn around and make sure that neither Kai nor anyone else shot Ferd dead on the way out. Right then, the dragonet came flying down out of sky at me and landed on my shoulders. 

He was breathing hard, smoke curling from his nostrils as he dug his claws into my shoulder for support. I reached up to pet him with a comforting hand. It was then that I realized that if the dragonet was here that Yabair and the guards who’d busted into the Quill couldn’t be too far behind. 

“We have to go!” I said to my friends still in the shack. “Now!” 

I glanced back toward the square where we’d landed, and I heard a gunshot crack from that direction, followed by a report that sounded like thunder. An instant later, I spotted Righty sprinting toward the alley’s opening, his gun-hand smoking. Before he reached the alley, though, the ground behind him exploded into a massive ball of fire that silhouetted him against it and sent him flying toward us. 

Moira tried to shove past me and go help him, but I knew he was beyond our aid. Even if he’d survived that, to grab him we’d have to run straight toward the oncoming Guard. 

“Our fight’s not with them,” I said as I picked her up and tucked her under my arm. “Not today.” 

With that, I spun on my heel and sprinted as fast as I could in the other direction, hoping the others would keep up. 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

“Halt! By the authority of the Imperial Dragon’s Guard!”

Yabair’s amplified voice rang out over Goblintown’s roofs as I weaved and dodged through the twisted maze of alleys that ran between its ramshackle shanties and huts. I ignored him, and I hoped the others would follow my example. If we let Yabair stop us, even for questioning, he’d wind up arresting us for sure. 

That would mean, at the least, that I’d be hauled off to live in the Dragon’s Spire — if the Dragon didn’t just decide to eat me for leading his son into danger on a regular basis. Assuming that Belle’s parents hadn’t had a severe and sudden change of heart about her fate, she’d join me in the big bastard’s belly soon after that. I’d often dreamed about spending the rest of my life with her, but that hadn’t involved being digested alive. 

Gunfire rang out overhead, and bullets pinging and panging off the roofs and walls around us. I kept my head low and raced on, charging for the wall beneath the Night Tower. I would have tried to shift my route back and forth as I went, but the streets — such as they were — demanded that anyhow. Doubling down on that would just have twisted me back in the wrong direction. 

As we neared the Great Circle, the territory began to seem more and more familiar. I didn’t spend a lot of time in Goblintown — not like Kai, who lived here — but I’d been here just over a week ago, when I’d saved Moira from that Black Hand assassin out in the wild and brought her back home. Up there in a narrow slice of sky I could see between eaves crowded so close they almost touched, I spotted the apartment building I’d half-slid, half-leaped down that night, and I charged toward the base of it. 

I reached the building’s main doors just as a goblin mother emerged from it with a crowd of children arrayed about her. They looked like they were heading somewhere for lunch or maybe just to get out of the stench-ridden place they called home. 

“Run!” I said, hoping they’d listen.  Instead, the mother and her kids froze at the sight of an armed human charging straight at them, with a young dragon on his shoulder and an elf, a wizard, a two-gunned woman, a shotgun-toting orc, and a one-handed halfling following in his wake. 

I can’t say I blamed them. 

Then Yabair’s flying chariot appeared in the sky above us. “Halt, or you will be executed!” he shouted over us all. 

That got the goblins to scatter. Unfortunately, they went to the one place their instincts told them might be safest: back into their home. 

The mother grabbed as many of the kids as she could reach and hauled them into the apartment building with her. I swept up a pair of them with my arms as I rushed after her, and I saw Belle and Danto do the same. Cindra and Kai turned around and opened fire on the chariot above us instead, covering Moira as she tugged the last goblin kid along after her with her one good hand, a little girl who’d tripped and skinned her knees while trying to chase after her mother. 

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.