by Matt Forbeck
I didn’t get seven steps away before the door to the Sanguigno estate opened on hinges as quiet as a mountain breeze. I didn’t hear it so much as feel how it changed the air behind me. Then she called my name.
“Max?” Belle spoke in a voice hoarse with emotion. “Is that you?”
She knew it was me, of course. How many other people might be loitering on her doorstep at this hour?
“Hi, Belle.” I stopped, but I didn’t turn around, not yet.
She sighed in relief. “I’m glad you got my message. Please, come in.”
I spun to look at her framed in her doorway, the soft light of the small glowglobes that lined the entryway bringing out every curve in her sweet, pale face. She looked just as young as the day I’d met her some fifteen years back. Not a damn thing about her had changed. She was just as heart-stoppingly gorgeous as ever.
“I didn’t think I was welcome around here anymore.”
Belle frowned, wrinkling her porcelain forehead. “I need you, Max,” she said. “You’re the only one who can help me.”
I winced at that. “Isn’t that the way it always is?”
“Don’t be like that,” she said. “I can’t help the position I’m in — that you helped put me in. I can only deal with it the best I can.”
“Then do that.” I still hadn’t taken a step toward her.
“I wish I could. I’ve tried, I really have. I just don’t know where else to turn.” She moved a little closer to me with every sentence, hauling up just out of arm’s reach.
I wanted to scoff at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I may not have seen much of Belle over the past decade, but I could hear in the rawness of her voice and see from the tears welling up in her eyes that she was on edge. She’d been crying already, and it wouldn’t take much from me to push her back right over into that. I knew what that would do to whatever small bits of resolve I could muster when it came to her.
I decided to focus on the business at hand. “What’s this all about, Belle?”
She glanced around as if there might be listeners lurking in the bushes, then gestured back toward her door. “Wouldn’t you like to come in?”
I grunted. I wanted that more than just about anything else. I wanted her. I wanted us, the way we used to be, much as I knew that was impossible. She might not have changed, but I had.
I couldn’t help it. I was only human.
I nodded, and she led me into her home.
The first thing I noticed when I entered the place was that someone was missing. “Where’s Ford?” I asked.
The Sanguignos’ butler had greeted me at the door every other time I’d visited. He’d always had a sneer and a snide comment to make sure I knew I wasn’t welcome here. Despite the fact he was as human as I was — no elf would ever live as a servant, not for long — he went out of his way to make sure I felt out of place here, even more than any elf I’d ever met had.
“He’s not here,” she said, an odd distance in her voice.
She led me out onto the balcony, and I made my way straight for the bottle of sunwine they always seemed to have set out on a table there. The golden liquid actually glowed faintly in the darkness, which at least made it easy to find. I poured a few fingers for Belle, and then I fixed myself a double.
Belle stood waiting for me at the railing, right about at the spot where her sister had been standing when I shot her. I could still see the scorch marks from the dragonet’s flames darkening the wood there.
I brought her the wine, and she accepted it with a grateful smile, then downed half the glass in a single gulp. I sipped at mine. Sunwine didn’t quite have the kick of dragonfire, the magic-enhancing hooch I usually preferred, but it tasted so much better. Where dragonfire burned, sunwine healed, and the way my chest still felt, I knew I could use some of that good stuff.
“So tell me,” I said. “What is it that brings me here in the dead of night?”
Belle gazed up at me with her wide blue-gray eyes, her blond hair framing her perfect face. She chewed her lower lip for a moment, afraid to speak. As I took a good belt from my glass, she summoned her courage.
“It’s about Fiera,” she said.
That surprised me. I glanced out over the railing, where my gunshots had knocked the already blazing elf to her death. Could anyone have come back from something like that?
Seeing the confusion on my face, Belle laid a delicate hand on my chest. “No,” she said. “My sister is very much dead. There’s just one monumental problem.”
“Which is?”
“We cannot find her body.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I downed the rest of my drink, stared at my empty glass for a moment, then walked back over to the table with the bottle of sunwine on it for a refill. Belle dogged my steps. As I reached for the bottle, she grabbed my arm.
“Don’t you understand what that means?”
I nodded at her, then reached for the bottle with my free arm and tipped some more of that glowing sunwine into my glass. She removed her hand from me and waited.
We took our bodies seriously here in Dragon City. Although the Guard liked to pitch it as a tradition steeped in some sense of reverence for those who’d shuffled off this mortal coil — or been shoved — the truth was it had nothing to do with respect for the deceased.
It had to do with the Ruler of the Dead.
As soon as someone died in Dragon City, the corpse left behind became instant fodder for the Ruler of the Dead’s army. If left lying around, she would sooner or later find it with her powers and imbue the empty shell with her magic, turning it from a rotting sack of meat into an undead horror. I imagine in the early days around here that was a terrible problem, but Dragon City had figured out an easy way around it centuries ago.
You just burn the bodies — and not the way Fiera had gone up like a torch. She’d have gone out eventually and left a charcoaled corpse behind. No, we incinerated them until there was nothing left but ashes.
I don’t know if the Ruler of the Dead’s magic could seep into a pile of ash, but I knew the ash couldn’t hurt you, no matter how malevolent its intent. It might make you sneeze, but that was a long way from having your brains torn out of your head for a feast.
“What happened to it?” I asked. “The body, I mean.”
I sipped at my wine while Belle spoke. I could feel the warmth working its way into my ribcage, and I found I could breathe a lot easier again.
“After the incident on the balcony, I went down with Ford to recover Fiera’s remains. We found her easily enough, lodged in a tree just below here. Her body was still smoldering though, too hot to remove — as was the tree, which had burned a bit too — so we decided to leave it there until it cooled and we could bring it down out of the tree.”
“You left it there unguarded?”
“Of course not! Ford volunteered to stand guard at the base of the tree. After the day’s events, I was —” She gave me a pained look. “Exhausted. Wrung out. I came back here to rest.”
She moved back over to the railing, and I followed her. “I rose with the dawn, and I left home straight from my bed, still in my clothes from the night before. I went down to check on Fiera’s body, only to find it gone.”
She peered over the balcony’s edge, down toward where Fiera had landed. Enough glowglobes illuminated the mountainside below us that I thought I might be able to the tree there, standing on a ledge not too far down. Instead, I could identify the spot in question only by how dark it was in the middle of all that light, like a missing tooth in an otherwise perfect smile.
“So you didn’t find a body at all?”
Belle shook her head. Her voice trembled when she spoke. “I found a body all right, but it was Ford’s. He’d had his head turned all the way around and his eyes and tongue had been plucked out of his face.”
I winced at that, not out of any sympathy for Ford, who’d always hated the sight of me, but for Belle.
“Why didn’t
you call the Guard to remove Fiera’s body for you?”
Belle shrugged. “We thought we could handle it ourselves. We wanted to have our final moments with her remains before they took her away for cremation. By custom, we had a week to bring her body in, and we intended to make use of it.”
I shook my head in disbelief. I’d never paid much attention to elven customs, to be honest, mostly because they didn’t ever seem to make sense. Plus, most elves didn’t care to share much of their lives with outsiders, keeping an icy distance between themselves and the other races. Belle had been a refreshing change from that, which was one of the reasons I’d fallen so hard for her.
Still, in all our time together, we’d not discussed much about burial arrangements for her — or for any of us really. Out in the untamed lands beyond the Great Circle, death may have been an ever-present threat, but we all understood that none of us would risk our own lives to go back to retrieve a corpse. The Dragon’s laws didn’t apply beyond the Wall.
“It’s been longer than a week.” I pulled myself back from the railing to look into her eyes.
She didn’t meet my gaze, looking back toward the darkened interior of her family estate instead. She set her jaw tight and nodded.
“Can’t you just give them Ford’s body instead?”
She scowled at me. While I might not have cared for the man, she’d known him for years, and he’d lived in her home and served her and her family. I could see she didn’t care for this callous side of me, but I preferred to think of myself as pragmatic.
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “The rules are especially stringent when an elf dies. It’s a rare event, and the Dragon takes notice.”
That almost made me shudder. Having recently come under the Dragon’s attention myself, I knew what an uncomfortable position that was to be in.
I shrugged at her. “What’s the big deal? It’s a missing body. Even if Fiera shows up as some kind of bloodthirsty zombie, it’s not like it would be the first time it’s happened.”
Belle made a pained sound and gave me a half-hearted backhand across the chest. “When it comes to elves, it would be the first time it’s happened in over a hundred years. The penalties are far worse than you could imagine, and we take them very seriously.”
“What? Do they send you down to have to sully yourselves with the rest of the city? Is that how Yabair wound up in the Guard?”
The fear painted on Belle’s face melted into anger. She curled up her lips and spit out the answer at me. “If the family cannot produce the body of the deceased, they must then produce another body from the family to take its place.”
That stopped me cold. “You can’t be serious.”
She glared at me with eyes that demanded to know if she looked like she was joking.
I opened my mouth to say something sharp, but nothing came out. I tried again. “Isn’t there any way around that?”
“The decree comes from the Dragon himself, and he has been known to enforce it personally.”
“Not in my lifetime,” I said. “Not even in my grandfather’s.”
She gave me a pitying shake of her head, the kind I’d have used with a dull child who just couldn’t keep up. “And you think that’s a long time?”
“You don’t?”
“For you, sure. For me, not very. For the Dragon?” She grunted in disdain. “It’s like yesterday.”
“What do they do if they don’t know she’s dead?” I said. “It’s not like they monitor the heartbeat of every elf in the city. Right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Right?”
She gritted her teeth at me, her eyes blazing like twin suns. “You shot her blazing body over that balcony!”
She had a point. “Right.”
“While she was burning to death in a fire started by the heir to the Dragon Throne!”
“Got it.”
Her voice rose in pitch and volume with every word until she was screaming. “And the Guard came here to take you away!”
I put up my hands in defeat. “All right!”
She turned away from me then and wrapped her arms around her chest to hug herself tight.
“So the Guard knows,” I said. “Have they said anything to you about it?”
“Why do you think Captain Yabair brought you straight here tonight?”
That did explain a lot. I had been surprised to see Yabair blow off a request from the Council of Wizards to bring me to Belle’s place. It made sense if he knew that she was in serious trouble.
Mortal trouble.
“So what happens if you can’t find Fiera’s body?” I reached toward her but came up short of actually putting my hand on her shoulder.
“Then another member of my family must die.”
I grimaced. “I take it you don’t have any fatally depressed cousins.”
She spun on me then and stabbed a finger at me. “You think this is some kind of joke? We’re talking life and death here, Max. And not for some distant relative either. It has to be someone as close to the dead person as possible.”
I ran through Belle’s family tree in my head, which didn’t take but a few seconds. She had her father and her mother, and other than her dead sister Fiera, that was it. Despite how long I’d known Belle, I’d never met her parents. She’d assured me more than once that they wouldn’t like me. That sort of thing had never bothered me — I was used to it — but she made a point of never bringing us together because of it.
For a while I’d thought that she was just ashamed of me, of having an affair with someone so far below her station. Elves did that sort of thing all the time though. They called it “stepping out for a smoke.” Something that you did for a short break, that wasn’t good for you in any way, but that you enjoyed enough to indulge in anyway.
I’d always wanted to ask her about that, if I was just a smoke break for her. I never did though. I don’t think I wanted to know the answer.
“I’m sorry, Belle.” I knew it wasn’t enough, but it was all that I had. If someone had to pay the price for losing Fiera, I wasn’t going to mourn the loss of either her father or her mother, but I could sympathize with Belle at least.
“That’s it?” Her jaw dropped. “That’s all you can say?”
“I’m sure your parents will work out which one of them has to deal with the Dragon —”
Her mouth opened even wider. “You don’t get it, do you?”
And then I did. I’d been thinking like a human. If something like this had happened to my family, we’d have picked the oldest member of it to put forth, I like to think. Someone who’d had a full life and was closer to death already in any case.
But elves never grew closer to death, did they? To them, longevity was to be prized over youth. The loss of an elder would mean a terrible blow to the family’s continuity, to its position within the city, and ultimately to its power. Forced to make a choice, they’d sacrifice the youngest member of the family instead.
Back before her death, that person would have been Fiera. Now, though, it was Belle, the elf standing right before me and glaring up at me.
“If I don’t find Fiera’s body soon, the Guard will come knocking on our door, looking for a replacement. If I can’t produce my dear sister’s corpse before that happens, I’m dead!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Someone started pounding on the Quill’s front door way too early the next morning, and whoever it was just wouldn’t quit. I lay there in the spare room on the second floor for a good five minutes, awakened by the rude and persistent knocking, hoping that the person would get frustrated, give up, and go away. It didn’t happen.
My first instinct was to look for the dragonet, who had taken to perching on the headboard of my bed at night. I wasn’t sure if he meant to keep watch over me or just wanted to make sure I didn’t try to sneak off without him, but since he spent most of his time there asleep, it wasn’t all that effective either way. I had a moment of panic when I saw
he was missing, but then I remembered that he’d gone to spend the night with the Dragon Emperor instead.
As my head cleared, I realized I didn’t have time to deal with whoever had woken me up. I needed to get cleaned up and hustle over to the Academy as soon as I could, or Yabair would break down the Quill’s door to haul me off to that mysterious appointment.
It struck me that it might be Yabair or another guard banging on my front door. I threw on a shirt and stumbled over to the room’s lone window and pushed its shutters wide. Blinking in the bright morning sun, I shaded my eyes and stared down toward the street to spy a well-dressed dwarf standing on the Quill’s front stoop.
“We’re closed!” I said to the dwarf.
As I reached out to grab the shutters and pull them back in to blot out the annoying sun, the dwarf shouted back at me. “Max? That you?”
I recognized the voice and froze. I squinted down at the dwarf squinting up at me in his fine clothes and braided beard.
“Johan?”
He took off his hat and nodded up at me. “Let me in, Max? I’d like to talk.”
I’d known Johan for a few years. He’d married Dorthë Gütmann, the eldest daughter of my old adventuring pal Anders Gütmann. And when Belle’s sister Fiera had hired an assassin to slaughter the entire Gütmann clan, Johan had not only lost Dorthë but also been the prime suspect for the crime.
I hadn’t seen him since I’d helped clear his name. That had only been a week ago, but he looked like he’d mostly healed from the bruises the Guard had given him during his interrogation. They weren’t all that gentle with suspected murderers, I knew.
I didn’t have time to deal with Johan right now. “Can it wait?”
He frowned an apology at me and wrung the brim of his hat in his thick hands. “I’m afraid not.”
I masked my eyes with my hand so I could shut out the sun for a moment and think. Belle needed me. If I didn’t find her sister’s corpse soon — or at least figure out what happened to it — she’d be dead.
And if I didn’t make my way up to the Academy soon and check in with the Wizards Council, Yabair would find me and throw me in jail. That would put a real crimp in my attempts to save Belle.