Bad Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  Bad Times

  in

  Dragon City

  Shotguns & Sorcery Novel #2

  By Matt Forbeck

  Also by Matt Forbeck

  Hard Times in Dragon City (Shotguns & Sorcery #1)

  Leverage: The Con Job

  Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revolution

  Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revelation

  Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Resolution

  Amortals

  Vegas Knights

  Carpathia

  Magic: The Gathering comics

  Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon (with Jeff Grubb)

  Mutant Chronicles

  The Marvel Encyclopedia

  Star Wars vs. Star Trek

  Secret of the Spiritkeeper

  Prophecy of the Dragons

  The Dragons Revealed

  Blood Bowl

  Blood Bowl: Dead Ball

  Blood Bowl: Death Match

  Blood Bowl: Rumble in the Jungle

  Eberron: Marked for Death

  Eberron: The Road to Death

  Eberron: The Queen of Death

  Full Moon Enterprises

  Beloit, WI, USA

  www.forbeck.com

  Shotguns & Sorcery, Dragon City, and all prominent fictional characters, locations, and organizations depicted herein are Trademarks of Matt Forbeck.

  © 2013 by Matt Forbeck.

  All Rights Reserved.

  12 for ’12 logo created by Jim Pinto.

  Shotguns & Sorcery logo created by Jim Pinto.

  Cover illustration by Dvarg.

  Cover design by Matt Forbeck.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Dedicated to my wife Ann and our kids Marty, Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen. They make sure I have many more good times than bad.

  Thanks to Robin D. Laws, who encouraged me to write the first Shotguns & Sorcery story, and to Marc Tassin for asking for the second. Also to Matthew Sprange and the rest of the crew at Mongoose Publishing for chatting with me about this setting when I thought it might make a decent roleplaying game.

  Extra thanks to Ann Forbeck for serving as my first reader and constant motivator.

  Huge thanks to all the readers who backed this book and the rest in the trilogy on Kickstarter. See the end of the book for a full list of their names. Each and every one of them is fantastic, and I can only hope that this book justifies the faith they showed in me.

  12 for ’12

  This is the standard edition of a book first released as a reward for the backers of my second Kickstarter drive for my 12 for ’12 project, my mad plan to write a novel a month for the entirety of 2012. Together, over 330 people chipped in almost $13,000 to successfully fund an entire trilogy of Shotguns & Sorcery novels.

  Thanks to each and every one of you for daring me to take on this incredible challenge — and for coming along with me on the wild ride it’s been. And thank you to all my readers, whether you’re backers or not. Stories have no homes without heads to house them.

  CHAPTER ONE

  As a rule, I don’t play cards with wizards. They cheat, which I understand. Everyone wants an edge. But they think they’re too clever to get caught, so they cheat badly, and that never ends well.

  That’s why Kai had hauled me down into Goblintown, to get into a game where no one knew me and where even a whiff of magic about you during a hand would earn you a stiff beating and maybe even a fatal dip in the Ash River. “It’ll be fun, Max,” the orc told me. “It’ll take your mind off Belle.”

  That sold me on it. That and the fact that Goblintown was too damn dangerous for me to take along the dragonet that had imprinted itself on me. Not that I hadn’t grown attached to the little guy, but I didn’t much care for the attention that having him with me brought. It’s hard for people to not gape at us when they know that the father of the creature draped over my shoulders is the Dragon Emperor himself.

  Most people were smart enough to leave the dragonet alone. He was tough enough on his own, but toss in the fact that his daddy would destroy you and everyone you’d ever cared about if you tried to pluck a scale from his kid’s tail, and even the thickest-headed folks in Dragon City were wise enough to give the creature a wide berth.

  When it came to me, though, that was another story. The dragonet’s messed up biology might have convinced him I was his real papa despite my distinctive lack of scales, but I don’t think the Dragon Emperor would have been too saddened if I got myself hauled out of his family portrait by a lethal and messy means. So when I informed the members of the Imperial Dragon’s Guard assigned to watch over me that I wanted some time to myself, they were only too happy to volunteer to keep an eye on the dragonet while I wandered off and hopefully got myself killed.

  That wasn’t on my agenda, of course. I just wanted a little time out of the public eye, a chance to blow off some steam without everyone in the room giving me a wary eyeball. I’d had a rough few weeks since Belle had jilted me — again — and I wasn’t all that welcome at the Quill these days.

  The fact that I owned my favorite bar didn’t mean much to Thumper, the bartender there. “You’re driving away the regulars, Max,” he’d said to me. “And you’re bringing in gawkers instead.”

  “A little fresh coin in the coffers never hurt anyone.”

  He’d snorted. “Gawkers don’t drink.”

  So I’d banished myself from the crowd at my watering hole and spent most of my nights holed up in the storage room on the second floor instead. I’d have preferred to flop down in my office over the Barrelrider in the Big Hill part of town, but it still hadn’t been repaired since Belle’s crazed and bigoted sister Fiera had blown her chance to murder me in it. She’d done a number on my place though.

  I’d have taken out my headaches on her if I hadn’t already killed her. I hadn’t gone to the Sanguigno estate meaning to, sure, but once she’d been engulfed in a dragon’s flames like that, it had seemed like the merciful thing to do. Belle maybe hadn’t seen it that way.

  So instead of spending any time with her, I’d moped around in the upper part of the Quill for weeks, barely ever leaving the place. It wasn’t until Kai had come up to check in on me that I realized how bad I’d let myself get.

  “Smells like the zombie traps outside the Great Circle in here,” Kai said when he entered, wrinkling his green-skinned nose in disgust. “You sure one of those rotters didn’t crawl in here with you?”

  “Good to see you too,” I said. “Get out.”

  The dragonet perched on the back of a cracked wooden chair opposite mine at the little table in the center of the room, flexed its wings, and hissed at the newcomer. He didn’t like strangers much, and he’d not yet met Kai. I’d known the orc for well over a decade, and I didn’t much like him either.

  “Thumper says you need to get out of here.” Kai’s yellow eyes flickered about the place, taking it in. His nose didn’t unwrinkle. He pulled back his lips, exposing his jagged teeth.

  “I suppose he said it’s for my own good.”

  Kai shook his head. “I think he just wants to clean the place. The customers are starting to complain, I hear.”

  I glared at him. “About what?”

  Kai wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his sleeve. “It’s a little ripe in here.” He gave the dragonet a sidelong glance. “How much heat does that thing give off?”

  I gazed at the dragonet, and it stared back at me with wide green eyes and slitted pupils. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Kai glanced at the door. “Do you ever let it out?”

  “It�
�s not a pet,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I looked down at myself. He was right. I looked filthy and smelled awful. “Like this?”

  He let out a low, rough laugh. “Where we’re going, no one will care.”

  I was too wrung out to argue, and a belt of dragonfire sounded like a good bet right then. I nodded at him and pushed myself to my feet. The dragonet slipped around my shoulders before I could protest, and I wound up carrying him out with me.

  It only took me a few moments to get the Imperial Guards stationed across the street from the Quill to take custody of the dragonet, but it took far longer to get the creature himself to agree. Young as he was, he was still a dragon, which translated into “not to be trifled with.” Fiera had found that out the hard way when he’d found her holding a wand on me.

  Once I finally convinced the dragonet that I wasn’t abandoning him forever — just for the night — Kai led me downslope through Dragon City, from where the Quill sat the edge of the Village to the neighborhood in which he lived: Goblintown. I thought about hailing a ride, but few of the hacks flying carpets around the city cared to risk their rides by taking fares into the lower parts of the city. I’d forced the issue before, but this wasn’t any kind of emergency. I figured I could use the walk to clear my head, so we hoofed it down through the benighted streets, watching the glowglobes on the street posts become farther and farther apart as we went.

  “Why don’t we try somewhere upslope?” I said. My last few experiences in Goblintown hadn’t been stellar.

  “Don’t worry about it, Max,” Kai said. “I got your back, and I know just the place.”

  I should have known better than to trust the orc. I didn’t doubt he had the best of intentions. He always did.

  Still, Kai was what our mutual friend Cindra had always liked to call “charitably incautious.” Her husband Kells often added “criminally optimistic.” On some level, he just trusted it would all work out, whether he had any reason to or not.

  That’s how we wound up in a private card game down in the dim and dank back room of some nameless shack that made the Skinned Cat — Kai’s regular joint — look like a sunny resort high in the Elven Reaches. The liquor they served there tasted like it had been strained through a goblin’s dirty underwear, but in the state I was in I didn’t much care. It did make me wonder if Kai had brought me here to poison me in front of his friends, but it seemed like it would have been a lot simpler for him to knife me in an alley on the way here instead, or so I told myself.

  I only had to suffer through one greasy glass of that homemade hooch before Kai wrangled us an invite to the card game. I knew the people there didn’t like me at all — I was the only human around within a crossbow’s range, I was sure — but they put trust in my coins if not in me. Kai vouched for me too, but I’m sure even they knew better than to trust him.

  Maybe that’s what got me into trouble.

  I lost the first few hands on purpose, just to get a sense of the people I was playing with. As long as they were able to take my money, they were happy to have me in the game and have the tubby hobgoblin waitress ply me with drinks even worse than the first. It was when I started winning that they turned against me.

  Besides Kai and me, there were three other people at the table: a twig of a goblin missing all his upper teeth, a young orc thug with a nose ring that would have looked better on a bull, and a fat ogre opposite me, who seemed to take up most of the room.

  The goblin didn’t worry me much. I could throw him through the nearest window with my left pinky. I’d lay good odds on me being able to take out the orc easily too. He was all bluster, but the lack of scars that hadn’t been self-inflicted told me he got by on that far more often than he relied on his knuckles.

  The ogre worried me. A nasty, cunning smarts glittered in his suspicious, beady eyes, and he glared at me over his cards like their presence between us was the only thing that kept him from spitting in my face.

  I decided to fold my next three hands. I barely looked at my cards. I hadn’t come here for a fight, and if I had to lose a few coins to keep that from happening, I considered that a part of the price of the evening’s entertainment.

  Then I glanced down at the hand the ogre had just dealt me, and I saw the best lineup of cards I’d ever had the privilege to hold in my life. I kept my face as stony as heart of the Stronghold, the part of Dragon City the dwarves had carved out for themselves.

  “Well?” The ogre glared at me over his own cards. His voice sounded like millstones grinding diamonds. “You in?”

  I looked down at my cards and considered my options. The orc gave the ogre a knowing chuckle, and the goblin tittered in tandem with him.

  I glanced at Kai. He pursed his lips and gave his head an inquisitive jerk toward the table.

  I threw my cards down in front of me.

  “I fold.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The orc and the goblin froze, caught in the middle of a cackle. Kai found something riveting to pay attention to off to his left, away from me. The ogre slapped his ham-sized hand flat into the middle of the table, his nostrils flaring wide as he sneered across the table at me.

  “Dragon’s balls, you do.”

  I put my shoes flat on the floor and got ready to leap to my feet. With luck, I’d be able to clear my wand from its holster before the ogre could wrap his hand around my head and crush it, but I didn’t think I could manage to recite the spell’s words with his meaty fist squeezing the life out of me. I decided I’d go for the sawed-off shotgun nestled next to my wand instead, if it came to that.

  I only had one shell in the shotgun, of course, but it was a doozy. I wouldn’t have a chance to reload it — not in here — but it might make a big enough statement that I wouldn’t have to.

  “Take the pot,” I said to the ogre in as steady and even a tone as I could manage. “It’s yours.”

  The ogre sneered at me. “You think I just want your ante? Pick up those damned cards and play them, you cave slug.”

  I glanced over at Kai, but he sat there looking away, still pretending to be more interested in signaling the waitress for another round than in the angry ogre across the table from us.

  I shook my head. “You don’t want that.”

  The ogre snickered at that. “You’re some kind of wizard, eh? Reading my mind now, are you?”

  The goblin found his laugh and giggled at me, his eyes glinting with bloodlust. “We don’t much care for wizards around here, do we, Ollie?”

  “I don’t mind them myself, Wint.” The orc licked his upper lip. “Delicious when done proper. Ain’t that right, Ferd?”

  The ogre didn’t answer. He just kept staring at me, waiting for me to make my move.

  I put my hands on the edge of the round table in front of me then, and I pushed myself to my feet with the kind of slow deliberation that seemed prudent when every set of eyes in the room except Kai’s were trained on me.

  “I don’t know what your problem with me is,” I said to the ogre. “I came here to play cards, not kill fat bastards like you, no matter how bad they might have it coming.”

  The collective breath of the entire tavern seemed to catch in its patrons’ chests. I ignored everyone else but Ferd. I might have to deal with the rest of them soon enough, but if I didn’t get the ogre to back down, that would all be moot.

  Ferd’s gaze flickered toward Kai, and right then I knew. I spoke to my old friend without taking my eyes off the ogre for an instant.

  “How much you into these guys for, Kai?”

  Kai turned toward me and coughed. “What are you talking about, Max?”

  “How much?”

  “Enough.” Ferd gave me a wide grin that showed off gaps in his teeth that I could have shoved my fist through.

  I looked at Kai then, and he gave me a helpless shrug. “You know me, Max.”

  I did, and I was sorry about it right then. After Kai had
saved me from Fiera destroying my office, I figured he had my back, much like we’d done for each other in our adventuring days. While that might have been true most of the time, it didn’t mean he wasn’t willing to sell my backside to someone for the right price, especially if it meant getting himself off the hook for a large gambling debt.

  It’s a lot easier to stay on the same side, it seems, when everyone else nearby is a zombie that wants to feast on your brains. Just being breathers lumps you all together, and it’s not hard to find some kind of common ground upon which you can build a united front from there. In Dragon City, with the undead hordes well beyond the massive wall that encircles the Dragon Emperor and his grateful subjects, that’s a lot harder to pull off.

  I leaned forward on my edge of the table and braced myself on it, then let out a weary sigh.

  “You going to play that hand?” Ferd said. He scooped up my cards and flipped them over with far more deftness than I would have given him credit for.

  The goblin gasped. “Look at that hand!” He pointed at me. “You cheat!”

  “I folded.”

  “We don’t much care for wizards around here,” Wint said, repeating himself. “At all.”

  Ferd leered at me over the table, a wet guffaw rumbling between his thick lips. “I don’t know,” the ogre said. “I think we might be able to find some kind of use for him.”

  I shoved down on my side of the round table as hard as I could. The far side of the table’s scarred and stained surface snapped up and caught Ferd square in his massive chin, sending blood and teeth flying. If I hadn’t caught him by surprise, I don’t doubt the wood would have splintered against his granite jaw, but as it was the impact knocked him backward in his chair. He fell sprawling into the table behind him.