Hard Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  She reached to open the gate, but Emily stepped between her and me instead. “Are you serious?” she said. “You can’t let him in, Margrit. Our orders are clear.”

  The dwarf scowled at Emily as if she couldn’t believe those words had come from her mouth. Then she shouldered the human aside and opened the gate. She hauled back on it and held it open to let me in.

  “Our orders went out the window this morning,” Margrit said to her fellow apprentice, who gave her a scandalized gasp.

  “Master Danto is going to be furious when he hears about this!”

  “Will he now?” I said with a chuckle as I strolled onto his tower’s grounds.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Margrit said. “We have bigger concerns to deal with at the moment.”

  That got my attention. “Like what?”

  Margrit turned on her heel and led me toward the tower’s front door. Emily scurried along behind us, somehow still seeming offended without saying another word.

  “Like the fact that the master went into a meditative state this morning and still hasn’t come out of it yet.”

  I groaned. That wasn’t the kind of rookie mistake a wizard like Danto made. If he hadn’t been able to come back from his meditative excursion, something was wrong. If he was asking for me in the middle of that, it couldn’t be good.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The two apprentices led me into the tower proper, where a handful of people were zipping back and forth throughout the building, running around on errands or missions I’m sure they considered vital. Margrit formed a vanguard all by herself and shoved through the others, clearing the way for me. Emily dogged my heels.

  The building was larger inside than it looked from the outside. Real estate was scarce in Dragon City, and nowhere more so than on Wizards Way. Using a little mojo to make the most of your interior spaces only made sense.

  “He’s in his sanctum,” Margrit said, heading for the levitator that ran through the tower’s center, which stood open all the way from the ground floor to the highest reaches above. “He’s been there since he awoke this morning. He went straight from his bedroom. No breakfast or anything.”

  “And he’s been stuck in it ever since?”

  Margrit nodded. “He seems to be fighting his way back but can’t make the final leap home. We can’t figure out what could be stopping him.”

  “Or who.”

  Emily scoffed. “Why would anyone want to keep him from returning to consciousness?”

  I glared back at her. I could put up with a lot, but willful ignorance from an officious and self-important wizard’s apprentice seemed like too much at the moment. “Don’t you have a gate you should be guarding?”

  “The tower guards itself,” she said. “I just happened to be closest to the gate.”

  “Go get closer to it again then. The grown-ups are talking here.”

  Margrit stepped into the rising side of the levitator, and the invisible field there pulled her upward toward the hole in the high ceiling above. As she rose, she turned and looked back at Max and said, “You really shouldn’t talk to her that way.”

  I stepped into the levitator and let it haul me up. It felt like I was falling toward the sky, but slow enough to prevent any kind of panic. I still didn’t trust such things, but it was the easiest way to get around Danto’s tower without using either a lot of magic of my own, or a lot of rope.

  “Why not?” I knew Emily was only doing her job. That was the problem — that and the way she did it.

  “She’s Danto’s grand-niece.”

  Emily, who had stayed on the ground, looked up at me with a smug smirk. I shrugged. “Ellen’s daughter?”

  “Who else?”

  I rolled my eyes, Ellen had been a thorn in my side from the moment I’d first met her, always telling her rich and powerful uncle to keep away from me and my kind, ignoring the fact that I was one of the people who’d helped him get rich. “That gem didn’t fall far from the vein,” I said. Gütmann had taught me that phrase.

  We rode the levitator all the way to the top of the tower — or at least the last accessible floor. I knew there was an access hatch to the roof, but that wasn’t part of the levitator system. Unlike some of his neighbors, Danto cared a bit too much about his security to leave the top of his place open like that.

  I stepped off the levitator and onto the polished wooden landing on the top floor. Warm glowglobes lit the interior wall, and in their light I could see a few doors lining the walkway that ran around the hole in the floor. Without even looking back, Margrit headed straight for one on the right and opened it.

  As the door cracked open, I heard a low groan in a voice I recognized all too well. I braced myself for what awaited me beyond that threshold, and then I plunged straight in.

  Danto’s meditation chamber was just as goofy as I remembered it. Most of us who can work magic just tap into the mojo whenever we need it and do our work. It’s a simple and pragmatic thing. Sure, we don’t have a deeper understanding of what we’re doing when we cast spells, but you don’t need that to make them work.

  High-minded academics like Danto — theoretical wizards — spend hours in meditative trances, contemplating the mysteries of magic and how to wield its power in the universe. The things they think about, well, most of us gifted amateurs can’t really wrap our minds around such concepts. I can usually hold my own in a barroom conversation with Danto, but when he starts breaking out multidimensional notations to explain what he’s talking about, he loses me every time.

  Danto likes to be comfortable while he thinks, and he never knows when a creature from another plane might stick its own astral head through into his and take him over for a while. Because of that, he’d had large, overstuffed pillows stitched or bolted to every surface in the room, including the floor, walls, and ceiling, and even the inside of the door. The only other bit of furniture in the room was a silvery hookah he’d built himself out of a length of enchanted glass.

  From the smell of the place, Danto had been spending an awful lot of time in here lately. My eyes winced at the mixed stench of sweat and the sickly sweet tang of smoked dragon essence that clung to every surface.

  Danto lay in the center of the room, flat on his back like he was dead asleep, his halfling-sized hookah still sticking up from between his legs. His mouth lay open and foaming, and I could see that his open eyes had rolled back into his head. He grunted as we came into the room, but I don’t know if that was because he could hear us or he had just been doing that the entire time.

  I patted Margrit on the shoulder and then picked my way across the pillowed floor to kneel next to Danto and peer down at him. He’d been this way long enough that some of the froth from his mouth had dried on his lips and cheeks, and his eyes seemed like they might start wrinkling up like a grape left in the sun. The skin over his cheekbones had turned a fevered red, and sweat had darkened his long white mane of hair to straggly clumps of gray.

  He brought his lips together as if he meant to say something, but they parted again before any sound came out other than that of his labored breathing. I put a hand on his shoulder and leaned closer, and that seemed to bring him the focus he’d been looking for. His eyes stopped shaking in their sockets, and he managed to close his mouth all the way this time.

  He clutched at my arm with a claw-like hand and pulled me closer to him. I put my ear next to his lips and heard him say one distinct word among a barrage of hisses and wheezing.

  “Max.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Yeah, Danto,” I said. “It’s me, right here in your tower. Where are you?”

  “Max.”

  I squeezed his free hand. “Come on, pal. Come back home. We need you here.”

  “I found her. Moira.”

  I wanted to stand up and cheer, but I didn’t want to risk losing Danto either. He’d been out there wandering in the dragon-essence-drenched corners of his mind for too damn long. “Great. You can tell me
all about it when you’re home.”

  “She has it. The egg.”

  I didn’t have any idea what that meant at all. “Just come on back, Danto. Don’t make me go in there after you.” It was an idle threat. I couldn’t have managed that even if I’d wanted to, but maybe in his stupor he wouldn’t know that.

  His back arched then, and he started to hack hard enough I thought he might produce a piece of his lungs. He squeezed my hand so hard I worried for my fingers.

  “Stop him!” Margrit said. “He’s dying!”

  I reached into my shoulder holster with my free hand and stubbed my fingers against the gun there. Then I fished around past that and found my wand right where it was supposed to be. I hauled it out and pointed it at Danto, chanting the words to a familiar spell while his apprentice stood there petrified in terror behind me.

  I suppose I should give her credit for giving me the idea of what to do with Danto. I don’t know if I would have thought of it without her.

  “She’s with them now,” Danto said, his voice reduced to a raspy whisper. “She’s with the dead.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to hear, but it was going to be the last thing Danto could say for a while too. I cast the spell at him, and he instantly froze, paralyzed from head to toe. His struggling, his spasms, even his breathing and his heartbeat stopped.

  Any other day, I would never have been able to cast that kind of simple spell on Danto and have a prayer of having it work. He would be just too sharp for it. Down as he was, though, it wasn’t as much of a challenge as I’d feared.

  “You killed him!” a familiar voice said. I spun about to find Emily standing there in the doorway, her wand in her hand.

  Hey, I couldn’t blame her. If I was an idiot who didn’t know what was going on and what I was doing, I might have jumped straight to the same conclusion. The trouble was she was mistaken, and she was determined to make me pay for that.

  I tried to bring my wand around to defend myself, but Danto’s grip had frozen on my arm as well. I had planned to wrestle my way out of it gently, but Emily wasn’t going to give me the time to do that. I knew in an instant that I’d never be able to cast a spell to stop her in time. I could only brace myself for whatever it was she planned to unleash on me.

  Then the door into the room slammed shut, catching Emily right in the face as it pushed her out of the place. She howled in pain as it smashed her nose flat and loosened a number of her teeth.

  “And stay out!” Margrit said, stuffing her wand back into her sleeve with a flourish.

  I looked up at the dwarf and gave her a grateful smile.

  “Don’t mention it.” Margrit knelt down next to me. “After all, I’m the one who didn’t think to paralyze the master in the first place.”

  “It’s not all that smart to mess with someone in a trance like that until you’re desperate,” I said.

  Margrit helped extricate my arm from Danto’s frozen grasp. “I suppose we reached that point long ago.”

  “I’ve been desperate all damn day.”

  Emily screeched at the door in frustration from somewhere outside of it. I heard some kind of explosion then, but I knew it was magical and that Danto was no fool. He’d proofed most of the place against spells the moment it had been built.

  I stood up and looked down at Danto. He was just as he’d been at the moment I cast the spell: horrible. He looked like a statue of a man going through a dragon essence OD.

  I kicked over his pipe. It fell safely onto a cushion. Knowing Danto and the way he liked to protect his enchanted things, I could have stomped on top of it, and it wouldn’t have gotten a scratch. All the leftover dragon essence spilled out of it, though, so I took some comfort from that.

  “How much of that has he been smoking lately?” I asked. I reached down and pulled his lips back with a single hand. I could see his exposed teeth had all become narrow and pointed, much like those of a dragon, a telltale sign of longterm dragon essence abuse.

  Margrit froze almost as solid as her master. “I — I don’t know.”

  “You’re a rotten liar,” I said. “Danto’s smoked this crap since before I knew him. ‘Any edge against the elves,’ he always told me. I told him not to, but I suspect you know how well that worked.”

  “It’s gotten worse lately.” Margrit bowed her head in shame. “He smokes more of it than I’ve ever seen before. I don’t know where he gets it from.”

  I suspected I did.

  “Does he know about the Gütmanns?” I asked. “Is that what he was doing in here?”

  Margrit wrinkled her brow at me. “Did something happen to them?”

  I supposed that answered that question. He must have just been looking for Moira on his own then. Maybe she’d been scheduled to make another delivery to him this morning. When she’d not shown up with his shipment, he’d have gone looking for her by any means he had.

  But then he’d gotten caught out there. He’d found Moira, I guessed, but where?

  “We need to get him to a hospital,” I said. I slid my hands under him to pick him up. The lightness of his body surprised me. He must have been wasting away to nothing. It was like scooping up a child.

  “I don’t think he’d like that,” Margrit said. “They’ll figure out what he’s been doing. Won’t he go to the Garret for that?”

  I hefted him into my arms as I stood before her, and I gestured with my head for her to open the door. “Beats the morgue.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Yabair wasn’t impressed, and he burst into Danto’s hospital room to let me know. Margrit had taken Emily to get her nose looked at, and I was sitting there alone at my old friend’s beside, waiting for the doctors to return, when Yabair threw open the door instead.

  “I didn’t send you out to bring in doddering dragon essence addicts, Gibson,” he said. “I have a massacre on my hands. If you don’t figure out who did it soon, your Johan will fry for it.”

  “Good to see you too,” I said, slouching back further into my chair.

  He stood there just inside the doorway and fumed at me. “Perhaps you don’t understand the gravity of the situation.”

  I cocked my head at him. “You can’t tell me you’re all that interested in saving that dwarf’s life.”

  He glared at me. “What interests me is justice. I will not have the Guard’s reputation besmirched by bringing the wrong person in for execution.”

  I had to stifle a laugh at that. From where I stood, the Guard had a reputation for cruelty and brutality. I didn’t see how killing an innocent dwarf would change that. “Just like with what happened to Sig?” I asked.

  Yabair froze. “That was different.”

  I sat up. “Only because he was an orc. Johan’s a dwarf, and from a well-connected family, I hear. They must be pushing pretty hard for his release.”

  “No harder than the Dragon is pushing for a swift resolution to the situation. The fact that the Gütmanns were well loved in the Stronghold only magnifies that.”

  I pushed my hat back farther on my head. “The Dragon gives a damn about this?” I suppressed a shiver. That kind of attention almost never meant good things.

  “So I have been told. I can practically feel his talons squeezing me on this one, Gibson. I’m going to need to give him a guilty party, and soon.”

  “Even if it’s an innocent dwarf?”

  “I’d prefer to avoid that if at all possible.”

  I stood up and gazed down at Danto. I’d removed the paralysis spell as soon as we’d gotten him into the bed, and he looked like someone had melted his bones away and poured him between the sheets. I’d never seen him look so old.

  “You’re afraid of what the Dragon might do if you bring him the wrong person,” I said to Yabair, never taking my eyes off of Danto. “How do you think it’ll go down if thinks you tried to fool him?”

  I turned to watch Yabair bristle with both indignation and more than a hint of well-hidden fear. “Have you made no progres
s in your investigation at all?”

  “Since I found Stubby?” I shook my head. “A little. Maybe.”

  Yabair came around to the other side of the bed to glare down at Danto. “That halfling friend of yours is the key to this,” he said. “Find her, and you’ll find your killer.”

  I grunted. “You think she was in on it with that orc assassin?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe in fairy tales like the Black Hand. There are others who do, though, and I don’t think it’s beyond the capacity of opportunistic criminals to make use of such superstitions.”

  I grimaced. “It might be too late,” I said. “Danto here had a few last words before I had to haul him here. He said he’d found Moira and that she had the egg.”

  I watched Yabair for a reaction as I said that last part. “That mean anything to you?”

  The elf actually stiffened in front of me. If you’d have asked me before that, I would have hazarded that anything that caused Yabair to tighten up any more might cause him to shatter. I saw him survive it right there, and I still couldn’t believe it.

  He shook his head, of course, but he refused to meet my eye. “Perhaps it was something of the Gütmann’s,” he said. “Some family heirloom.”

  “I’ve never known them to be particular about birds of any kind.”

  Yabair shrugged. It was damned hard to read an elf, but he was trying to avoid telling me something, and he stunk at being nonchalant. I wished I could have strapped him to a rack in an inquisition chamber in the bowels of the Garret and pried whatever secrets he was holding out of him, but that wasn’t an option.

  “So why do you think she’s dead?” Yabair said. “If he found her, doesn’t that imply that she might be alive?”

  “Because of the last things he said about her,” I said. “‘She’s with them now. She’s with the dead.’”

  Yabair rubbed his chin with his thin fingers. “Have you checked with the morgue?”