End Times in Dragon City (18 page)

I felt a few pangs of worry at giving high-caliber guns to hardened criminals, some of whom held long-standing grudges against me. I could only hope that they’d be willing to set all that aside until this was over, even if they kept the hardware then. I figured if they’d wanted me dead today, they could have torn me to pieces inside the Garrett already. Maybe giving them a means of fighting for themselves would earn me a bit of grace with them at least. 

As Kells and I slung out the guns and bullets, I split the prisoners into two groups and sent them each toward one side of the Great Circle or the other. The idea was to catch the zombies in a pincer move, hitting them on two fronts. 

If it worked, each of our forces would have a clear path of attack along the top of the wall, something otherwise hard to earn in all the chaos. Best of all, we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone flanking us and catching us from behind. Instead, we’d be surrounding our foes. 

I didn’t know for sure if this would work, but since Yabair and his guards had chosen to make their stand along Low Pavement, I wanted to make sure we avoided them too. While the prisoners might be willing to forgive me for the moment, I didn’t expect them to be so generous with the turnkeys who’d been abusing them in the Garrett right up until yesterday. 

This wasn’t the time for settling old debts, though, and I wanted to keep anyone from being too tempted to start a fight among the ranks of the living. We had plenty of targets for our bullets already. Despite the Brichts’ generosity with their stockpile of ammunition, I didn’t want any of it to go to waste.

I asked Alcina to lead the group taking the eastern side of the Great Circle, and I sent Stig to race down the west side with that crew instead. “And what about you?” Alcina arched an eyebrow at me. “You’re not taking a side yourself?” 

I looked up then and spotted Belle and Moira coming out of the sky at me with a load of passengers whose faces I couldn’t quite see. “I’m going right down the middle,” I said. “And I think that’s my ride.” 

Alcina glanced up and frowned when she spotted Belle. “Back with the elf who broke your heart? Seems a little too storybook, doesn’t it?” 

“Try to be happy for me,” I said. “She never tried to kill me.” 

Alcina arched a sculpted eyebrow along her porcelain brow. 

I shrugged. “Well, not really.” 

Alcina grabbed me and pulled me into a fierce kiss. I knew she didn’t mean it, that she was just doing it to make Belle jealous and make my life more difficult. 

She tasted like danger. There was a part of me that enjoyed it.

“Let me know when you get tired of immortal
breathing
perfection,” Alcina said as she turned to leave. “Or when she gets tired of you. Again.” 

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and decided to let her have that one. I had bigger things to worry about at the moment. 

Belle leaped off the carpet with the grace of a dancer. She sashayed over to me, brushing past Alcina without even a spare glance. As she reached me, she wrapped her arms around me and planted the most passionate kiss on me that I’d ever had in my life — and maybe all her centuries too. 

With Belle, I responded in kind, putting everything I had into it. It warmed every inch of me and set me tingling from my top to my toes. We generated so much heat even Spark couldn’t take it. He had to leap off my shoulder and flap away. 

“Now that,” I said as Belle and I parted, “is the way a man likes to be greeted when he breaks out of a prison.” 

She laughed, and my heart leaped at the melody. “I should slap you,” she said. “Jumping off the carpet like that?” 

I winced. “If I’d have set down, you and the others would have insisted on coming in with me.” 

She scowled at me. “And you think it would have been too dangerous for us?” 

“It was too dangerous for
me
, but no. I knew that if I brought a group of people in, the prisoners would have been spoiling for a fight. I had to go in alone to get their guard down long enough they’d let me talk to them.” 

She peered over my shoulder at Kells tossing a few boxes of shells to an orc with his arm in a sling. “It seems your play paid off.” 

“That’s just the opening act,” I said. “It gets harder from here.” 

“Where to next?” Moira said as she sauntered over to us, a pistol slung over her shoulder like an elephant gun in her one good hand. 

“That’s easy,” Danto said as he strolled up behind her. “We need to get down to the Dragon’s cadaver and protect it from the Ruler.” 

“Right.” I gave the wizard a sharp nod. “If we’re lucky, we’ll spot the Ruler and be able to stop her before she has a chance to take over the Emperor’s carcass.” 

“And if we’re not?” 

I struggled to come up with a snappy answer for that but failed. Fortunately, Kells and Cindra joined us then, walking up to us arm in arm. 

“Johan’s itching to get moving,” Cindra said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “He refuses to leave the driver’s compartment in that contraption despite that, but if we wait much longer, I think he might burst.” 

The injured orc moved around them and grinned at me with his sharp, pointed teeth. “Then what are we damn well waiting for?” he said. 

My jaw dropped, then drew back up into an astonished grin. “Kai? I thought you were dead!” 

I reached out and chucked him on the shoulder, not thinking about his injured arm. He flinched in pain, and I tried to apologize, but he forgave me with a curt nod. 

“I thought for sure you were right there for a while,” he said. “I was halfway to the Dragon when the whole place came tumbling down. I heard the explosions starting, and I dove into the first building I could find.” 

“And it didn’t just collapse on top of you?” 

He gave me a wry smirk. “I slipped down as deep into the thing as I could — deeper even than those explosions went. The wizards who set them up must have shaped the blasts to go upward and destroy everything above. The lower tunnels didn’t get touched.

“The blasts still knocked me flat though — which wasn’t much fun since I’d already broken my arm. Once I got to my feet, I realized I was trapped underneath all that rubble. Took me forever to find my way out of the place. I actually came up street-side near the Quill.” 

I reached out and squeezed the orc’s good shoulder and grinned at him. “It’s good to see you back here in the land of the living.” 

He frowned at that. “Here’s hoping it lasts.” 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

We piled most of us into the palanquin. Schaef’s trusty carpet was a great ride, faster and more nimble than you might guess, but in a situation like this the palanquin’s armor made up for its shortcomings in those other departments. We kept trusty Johan at the controls, and Kells and Cindra took up their stations on the roof, with Kells strapped in behind that machine-gun of his. Danto and Moira rode on the inside, with the curtains parted so they could fire out of the compartment at any targets they liked. 

Kai and Belle got onto Schaef’s carpet as I sat down to fly it, and Spark landed there on my back, peering out at the world over my shoulder like a reptilian lookout. I’m sure we would have all felt safer in the palanquin, but I liked keeping our tactical options open. I gave Johan a wave and rose into the sky, and he followed straight after me. 

We flew straight down the mountain, racing toward the Dragon’s corpse. I knew we didn’t have much time to spare, but I had no idea how little. As we neared the Old Market Square, I heard a great cheer go up from the walls of the Great Circle, and echoes of it sounded from up ahead too. 

Mystified, I brought the carpet low over the upslope side of the Old Market Square, and Belle, Kai, and I gasped in surprise. Zombies filled the square from one end to the other, but not one of them was standing. Each and every half-rotted one of them had fallen over as if someone had cut their strings all at once. 

I spotted a circle of guards standing on the upslope side of the square, cheering in relief. Many of them were bleeding, and a few of them seemed close to death themselves. Every one of them howled in triumph though. 

I spun the carpet around and brought it in to land on top of a pile of corpses a few yards off from them. Johan followed me down, but I signaled for him to remain aloft. I wanted to share in the guards’ celebration, but something about this struck me as horribly wrong. 

I scrambled off the carpet and found Yabair coming at me from the group of guards. He bore scratches on his face, including a deep gash across his left eye. Unlike the others, he neither smiled nor cheered.

“Did you have anything to do with this, Gibson?” he asked. 

I wasn’t sure if he want to hug me or shoot me. I don’t think he knew either. Either way, I put my hands up before me and shook my head. “The guards on the Great Circle were overwhelmed a few minutes ago,” I said. “I thought for sure this was the end.” 

Yabair glanced down at the dead bodies strewn all over the place, no longer threatening us with anything but their smell. “But someone besides us saved the day. Or so it would seem.” He lanced me with a uncertain glare. 

“After I saw Maurizzio fall, I figured it was all over but the —”

Yabair’s hand shot out, and he grabbed me by the front of my shirt. “Maurizzio is dead? How would you know that?” 

Spark snarled at the guard captain, but that didn’t faze him a bit. Kai stabbed out with his shotgun, handling it with one arm, and leveled it at Yabair’s head. “Lose the hand,” he said, “or I’m adding another corpse to the pile.” 

I edged my way between the orc and the elf and fished the crystal ball out of my pocket. Understanding dawned in Yabair’s eyes, but not surprise. He let me go, and Kai lowered his gun. Spark kept a wary eye on him though, smoke curling from the tip of the dragonet’s snout. 

“You knew Alcina gave this to me, right?” I said to Yabair. “You let me keep it so I could torture myself with it.” 

“Just show me what you saw.” 

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “I can’t use it to peer back through time.” 

“Show me the wall,” he said through gritted teeth. 

I held the crystal ball up between us and peered into it. The image inside it shifted from a warped vision of Old Market Square filled with downed zombies to show me the top of the Great Circle instead. Even more corpses covered its well-worn stones, leaving few bare spots between them. 

Nothing moved there. I spotted many guards in their crimson uniforms mixed in among the creatures that had come over the wall, but they all shared one thing in common. They were dead.

I moved in closer toward where I’d last seen Maurizzio, and I found what was left of him there. Unlike some of the other fallen guards who had stood back up to join the army of the dead, the zombies hadn’t left enough of the poor captain for his corpse to manage that trick. He’d been torn into gory, blood-soaked shreds. 

“That’s enough,” Yabair said. “I’ve seen enough.” 

“I haven’t,” said Belle. “If Maurizzio didn’t stop the zombies, then someone else did. We need to find out who.” 

Kai grunted. “Maybe someone finally got to the Ruler of the Dead.” 

“You really think we’d be that lucky?” I said. 

A horrible hunch began to grow in my belly, and I spun the point of view in the crystal ball around to turn it back toward the city, looking upslope. The destruction of Goblintown punched me flat in the chest again, and I fought the urge to take the crystal ball and smash Yabair in the face with it to make me feel better. A part of me was surprised Kai hadn’t already tried something like that, but we were all still shocked at the sudden end to the day’s horrors. 

I brought my vision down a bit, and I spotted the Dragon’s body right there below the spot where Maurizzio had fallen. The sight of the Emperor’s corpse reminded me that plenty of people would try to lay the blame for this disaster at my feet. At that point, having taken in all that carnage, I didn’t think I would have blamed them. 

It would have been a lot simpler to let the bastard eat me. 

Good riddance
. 

I reached up and stroked Spark’s neck with my free hand. It was the best way I could think of to show him how much better that made me feel. 

Then I spotted her standing in front of the Dragon’s corpse, right next to his head. She was slim and withered, her skin the color and texture of old parchment. Her eyes sat sunk deep into her skull, glittering orbs of utter blackness showing no white at all. Her mouth formed little more than a slit above her chin, as if someone had razored an opening in her papery face. She wore a tattered dress of lace the color of fresh-turned dirt, and in her hands she held a wand that looked like it had been fashioned from a child’s forearm. 

We all knew who it was, and we all gasped in horror, even Spark. 

The Ruler of the Dead had entered Dragon City. 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

“We’re too late,” Kai said, terror squelching his voice into a whisper. 

“That’s what’s happened here,” Belle said, nodding in agreement. “No one stopped her from controlling all these corpses around us. She gave that up voluntarily so she could focus all her power into taking over the Dragon’s remains instead.” 

I spun around and shouted up at Johan. “She’s there! She’s at the Dragon’s body! Go, go, go!” 

To his great credit, Johan didn’t ask who I meant or what I was talking about. He just spun that palanquin about and barreled it down the mountain at top speed. I heard Kells let out a loud whoop and fire a few rounds into the air as they shot off to save the city or face their doom. 

“Come on!” I charged back to Schaef’s carpet with Belle and Kai in tow. Just as I was about to sit down and zoom after the others, though, Yabair grabbed my arm and pushed me to the side.