Bad Times in Dragon City

by Matt Forbeck

  Benno’s beard widened at the sides, which I took to mean he was smiling under all those ancient whiskers. “Fair enough then. We’ll be brief so as not to waste too much more of your time. We wanted to meet with you and offer you an alliance.”

  That put me back a little bit. “I’m flattered that you’d make such an offer, but I don’t understand. I mean, I can see what the Stronghold has to offer, but what does the Stronghold want from me?”

  I had tried to live a quiet life in Dragon City ever since I’d given up adventuring over a decade ago. The kind of attention I’d earned myself back then hadn’t done me much good, and I’d learned to avoid it. Till now, that had served me well.

  “You underestimate yourself, Mr. Gibson. While you may not have the heir to the imperial horde draped over your shoulders at the moment, he spends plenty of time in your company.”

  “And you think that I might hold some influence over him? He’s a little young for that yet. He doesn’t even speak.”

  I wondered then if he would ever speak. The Dragon himself didn’t talk, not in the way that I understood it. He communicated through an elf proxy dressed in burning robes, known as the Voice of the Dragon. I assumed they had some kind of magical or at least telepathic link, but I didn’t know for sure. I’d only spoken with the Voice once, and drilling him about his relationship with the Dragon Emperor hadn’t seemed wise at the time.

  “That will come in time,” Benno said. “And we dwarves are as patient as we can be. When the day comes that your influence over the heir becomes more explicit and apparent, we want to make sure that we are in your good stead.”

  That got me suspicious. “And what do you want from me in return?”

  The other dwarves around the table chuckled at that. I wasn’t sure if I should join in with them or run.

  “Nothing.” Benno spoke with all seriousness, despite the laughter from the others. “We offer our assistance to you freely with no tethers attached.”

  “That’s direct,” I said. “And appreciated.”

  I rubbed my chin. I didn’t have anything I wanted from the Stronghold at the moment, but it was good to know I had them in my back pocket should something come up. Or at least for as long as the dragonet still enjoyed my company — and the Dragon Emperor didn’t incinerate me for it.

  “Our apologies for taking you away from your business for the day,” Benno said. “Ingo there will be happy to return you to wherever in the city you like. If and when you need anything from us, please contact Johan, and he’ll make sure to put our resources at your disposal.”

  Johan shuddered so hard at Benno’s words that I could feel him shaking through the stone floor between us. I suppose having the whole of the Stronghold to tap on demand on behalf of an outsider like me could put a dwarf in an uncomfortable position. I patted him on the shoulder and said to Benno, “My thanks, Mr. Bricht.”

  “Benno,” he said gesturing to himself. “We will become friends.”

  It was a statement of fact, and I didn’t care to argue it. Not in here for sure.

  I returned the kindness to him. “Max.”

  “We won’t keep you any longer from your pressing duties then, Max,” Benno said. “If there’s any way we can grease the gears for you — at this time or any other — be sure to let us know.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck as I considered this. Benno and the rest of the clan leaders arrayed around him leaned over the arched table, expectant looks in their eyes.

  I knew what this meant. As soon as I started accepting favors from the Bricht family, I’d become enmeshed with them. They might pave my way with bricks of gold, but somewhere along the path, they’d ask me to return a favor, whether I wanted to or not. I had no idea how high the price might be when that happened, but they weren’t the kind of people who took no for an answer.

  Of course, that was just as true now as it would be then. If I refused any help from them on principle they’d be sure to mark me as a potential foe rather than a friend, and they’d treat me accordingly. I didn’t like being obligated to anyone, especially in such a nebulous way, but I didn’t need any more enemies at the moment either. It would be a lot easier to just play along for now and only shatter that stone bridge if and when I came to it.

  At least that’s what I told myself.

  “Actually,” I said as I craned back my neck to look up at Benno, “I’m looking for a missing body.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’d never been to the Dragon City morgue before. I’d come close to being carted into it a few times — and I’d sent a few people there — but I’d managed to avoid it till now. When I stepped inside of it, I realized why.

  The morgue was located high in the Stronghold, on the edge of what would have been considered part of the Elven Reaches if it had been outside of the mountain rather than buried beneath it. It had an entrance that you couldn’t walk up to, although you could say that of lots of the structures this high up the mountain. The Stronghold Gate marked the end of what a person on foot could reliably reach, at least without a good deal of ambition and hopefully some climbing gear, and the way into the morgue sat high above that.

  Johan gave me a ride there in his palanquin, and I felt grateful to have the veils holding firm around us as we rose into the mid-morning sunlight. Yabair was sure to be on the hunt for me at the moment, hoping to drag me off to either the Academy or the Garrett, depending on his mood. If he or any other member of the Guard had spotted me inside the Brichts’ ride, it would have stopped my trip to the morgue cold.

  Ingo parked the palanquin on the wide ledge outside of the morgue. I let myself out and asked Johan to wait for me there. It was one thing to get to the morgue and another thing entirely to leave it. Not too many hacks brought their carpets out this way.

  Johan gave me a look of unabashed relief as I hauled my carcass out of the palanquin’s cabin. “I won’t be long,” I said.

  He just waved me off. “Take your time,” he said. “Take all the time you need.”

  I let myself in through the wide entrance and made my way into the foyer. A beautiful elf with dark hair and icy blue eyes looked up at me from behind a desk as I walked in. She wore a black outfit and long black gloves, and she had a black surgeon’s mask pulled down around her neck.

  “You here to make a deposit or a withdrawal?” she said. I froze for a moment, unsure of how to reply, but she let me off the hook with a warm smile.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We don’t permit withdrawals.” She peered around me. “But you don’t look like you have anything to deposit with us either. Unless you’re turning yourself in?”

  An edge of fear had worked its way into her mirth. “Does that happen often?”

  She grimaced in a way that made me regret asking the question. “What can I help you with?”

  “I’m here to check on the status of a body that was supposed to be delivered here a week or so ago.”

  The mortician nodded. “Name?”

  “Fiera Sanguigno.”

  The elf’s eyes widened at the mention of Fiera’s name. She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but we have yet to receive her remains.”

  I frowned. “Isn’t there some way we could double-check?”

  “We have a limited number of staff on duty here at any given time. We don’t take deliveries at night, so it’s almost always myself or Gilberto who handles the admissions.”

  “It’s possible she was brought here and not recognized. She was in awful shape.”

  The elf arched a perfect eyebrow at me. “They usually are. Sanguigno’s an elf name, right? Elves don’t die of natural causes.”

  “She wouldn’t have been recognizable.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “What happened to her?”

  I sighed. “Burned to death. In dragon fire. Then shot. And then she fell off a balcony and down the mountain.”

  The elf’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. “Well, I could understand ho
w you might think that would make her hard to identify. On the other hand, we don’t get too many customers in here like that. We haven’t had an immolation by burning dragonfire for months.”

  “Not dragonfire,” I said, enunciating the name of the drink. “A dragon’s fire.”

  “Like the Dragon?”

  “Close enough.”

  The elf stuck out a pouty lower lip. “I’m sure I’d have remembered that, but let’s go ask Gilberto.” She moved toward a swinging set of double doors in the back of the foyer and gestured for me to follow her.

  She pushed through the doors, and we emerged in a large chamber that glowed red with heat that emanated from a ribbon of molten lava that ran along the far wall. I gagged on the stench that suffused the place and did my level best to breathe only through my mouth.

  Deep shelves ran along the left and right walls, racks lined with black-bagged bodies lying on large metal trays. The shelves on the left were mostly empty, but those on the right — nearer to where the river of lava flowed into a tunnel and disappeared — were stacked full. Another elf dressed just like my escort stood at a table in front of the rack, inspecting a corpse laid out before him.

  “I thought the mountain was an extinct volcano.” I stared at the lava, wary of what it meant. Could the entire mountain erupt?

  “It’s dormant,” the elf I’d come in with said. “It’s been about a thousand years since it last blew. I think we’re safe.”

  The elf working on the body turned around and spoke to us through his black surgical mask. “Who do we have here, Elisabetta?”

  “He’s looking for Fiera Sanguigno,” the elf next to me said. “I swore up and down that I hadn’t seen her, but he wanted to ask you about it too.”

  Gilberto set down the wand in his hand, which he’d been using on the corpse on the table, and stripped off his gloves. He reached up to pull the mask down, revealing the grim look on his face.

  “I’ve already spoken with her family about it. The Guard confirms that she was killed, but we haven’t received her body. If the Sanguignos can’t produce a corpse soon, I’m afraid the Guard will be forced to do it for them.”

  “That’s just insane,” I said. I’d been hoping that Belle had been either wrong or telling me a joke in horrible taste. “One person’s dead, so the Dragon Emperor makes it two?”

  Gilberto smirked at me. “That doesn’t apply to everyone, you know, just elves. Can you imagine a horde of undead elves arrayed against the city?”

  Elisabetta nodded in agreement. “We haven’t seen trouble like that since the city was founded. The Dragon Emperor personally slaughtered every last one of them, along with anyone trying to protect them. That’s when he issued that decree, and it’s been our job to make sure it’s enforced ever since.”

  “You two?” I stared at them both in turn. They both looked younger than me, but of course every elf did. “How long have you been working here?”

  “Ever since it opened,” said Gilberto. “It gives me a reason to get up in the morning, which is more than most elves our age have anymore.” He didn’t bother keeping his disdain from his face.

  “How often does this kind of thing happen?”

  “More often than we’d care to admit,” Elisabetta said. “But it’s still pretty rare. It’s not often an elf dies, period, much less without leaving a body behind for cremation.”

  “What if a suicidal elf decided she wanted to take one of her family members with her?”

  Gilberto scoffed. “Elves don’t kill themselves. They’re too attached to life, even in its thinnest and least interesting forms.”

  “The ones who lose their taste for living don’t die,” Elisabetta said. “They don’t even fade away. They just seem to hang on forever. It’s sad.”

  “It’s pathetic,” said Gilberto. “If I ever get that tired of life, I’m going to walk in here and lay myself down on this river of magma and say good-bye.” The reddish glow on his face as he loomed over the lava lent his words more credence than I would have normally granted them.

  I turned to Elisabetta. “Is that what you were asking me about when I entered? Does that actually happen?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe five times in the past hundred years.”

  For an elf, I supposed, that might seem like a lot.

  “Any idea where a missing body might wind up?”

  “Anywhere but here.” Gilberto pulled his surgical mask back up over his face.

  “It’s a big city.” Elisabetta went back to the doorway and held it open for me. “Good luck.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Johan didn’t have much to say as Ingo flew us over to the Academy of Arcane Apprenticeship. He’d found a bottle of dragonfire tucked under the cushions near the divider between us and Ingo, and he’d sampled it several times. “Just to make sure it’s all right.”

  It was all right enough that it had him nodding off there in the middle of the day, the ends of his hair standing up with the magical energy he had crackling through him from the dragonfire. I felt tempted to take a belt of the stuff myself, despite the fact it was illegal, but I held off for two reasons.

  First, I had a reasonable expectation that Yabair would find me sooner or later, and I had no desire to have dragonfire on my breath when that happened. He would already have enough reasons to haul me in. I didn’t want to give him a legitimate one on top of all that.

  Second, if I was going to deal with the wizards at the Academy, I’d need all my wits about me. While the dragonfire might amplify my magical mojo, it would also cloud my judgment. Give the circumstances I was about to throw myself into, I didn’t see that as a wise trade-off.

  Ingo brought me to the main courtyard of the Academy, right at the very end of Wizards Way, high up atop the rocky promontory that stabbed out over the Village at an improbable angle that had made me steer clear of the part of town under it more than once. Most of the place was warded against flyers just zipping in as they liked, of course, but the courtyard outside the main entrance was a notable exception. I considered warning Ingo about the wards as we neared the place, but he skirted right around them without me having to say a word.

  I hadn’t been back to the Academy often since I’d left it more than fifteen years ago. Higher education and I hadn’t always gotten along, mostly because of my refusal to act as a slave for older magicians in the way the traditional master and apprentice system required. I’d left the school under a cloud, and my parents — who’d been so proud of me when I been admitted — had barely spoken to me since.

  That had hurt more than leaving the school. They’d been angry at me for “giving up on my education,” as my father called it, but we might have been able to get over that. I just needed them to swallow the lie that I wasn’t very good at magic and never would be.

  Then I’d started adventuring, and that had gotten me disinvited from every family gathering for the rest of my life. It was one thing to leave the study of magic behind. It was something far worse to use what magic I’d learned to line my pockets with the wealth of the dead.

  It wasn’t like I’d stormed out of the place and sworn that I’d never go back, but it had felt an awful lot like that. And now here I was again, but only at Yabair’s request.

  I’d learned one lesson the hard way, and not in any school. When the Imperial Dragon’s Guard requests something of you, it’s actually a demand, and you refuse it at your peril.

  I climbed out of the palanquin and stared up at the castle-like complex’s impossible architecture. Cut-stone towers stabbed out of it at unlikely angles, each one of them the remit of a tenured teacher who oversaw a department of his own until the day he died. Some of them floated in midair, connected to the rest of the building only by suspension bridges.

  I knew enough about magic that I didn’t entirely trust such structures, but I figured once the Wizards Council had decided to build the bulk of the facility on a magically reinforced stone pier jutting out from the promontory, the
y’d signed up for just about any other kind of insane building scheme the tenured wizards might come up with. If it all came down someday, at least it would look incredible right up until that point. I just hoped I’d be a long way away from it when it happened.

  I stepped up to the wide stone stairs that led to the waterfall that tumbled down over the otherwise doorless main entrance. As the sunlight caught the water, it sprayed little rainbows everywhere, all part of the illusion that the water was real. People walked straight through the sheet of fluid without getting wet, seemingly because the water parted before or even curled back from anyone moving toward it. In truth, there was no water, just a brilliant bit of imagination conjured up by the Academy’s finest illusory artists.

  I’d never cared much for illusions when I studied at the Academy. I could see the lure of tricking someone with light and wind and sound, but being able to zap someone with a bolt of lightning had always seemed a lot more useful. I left the decorations to others.

  In the end, I’d left the entire school.

  As I reached the top of the stairs, a woman with a wide, merry face, pink cheeks, and auburn hair stepped through the sheet of water, squealed with delight, and greeted me with her arms flung wide. She wrapped me up into a chest-crushing hug in an instant and held me there until I needed to push her away to get some air.

  “Hi, Celia,” I said. “You’re looking good.”

  “I bet you say that to all your old classmates.” She grinned at me so hard I thought her face might split.

  I shrugged. “I don’t see many of them these days. If you hadn’t noticed, I don’t spend much time around here.”

  She gave me a playful chuck on the shoulder. “Just glad to have you back. Even if only for a day.” Then she took me by the arm and led me into the Academy proper.

  Once inside, the noise of the place brought me right back to my student days. Students bustled back and forth on errands that meant a lot to them — and maybe even to their grades. They all seemed a lot younger than when I’d been a student there, and a lot more serious too.