by Matt Forbeck
“As long as you don’t say anything that would implicate you in any sort of a crime,” Yabair said. “Like treason.”
“Ah.” Danto turned to me again. “You’ll be safer here than anywhere else in town, and far more so than you would be in the Quill. Trust me on this.”
My father opened his mouth to offer what I’m sure would have been a full rebuttal on the topic of Danto’s trustworthiness. To his credit, he stopped himself before he got started.
The dragonet chose that moment to spread his wings and leap off my shoulder. He flapped hard, climbing higher into the tower and zipping in and out of the elevation field, letting it carry him for a while and then moving out of it again under his own power. He looked like he could play in it that way for hours, and he let out a little growl of glee.
“You heard him,” I said to Yabair and my father. “We’ve found a home.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“So, you hit the big time, and everyone wants a piece of you,” my old landlord Nit said between bits of bread he’d stuffed into his mouth. “What’s new?”
When Nit had gotten wind from his daughter Moira of the fact that I was now staying at Danto’s place with the dragonet, he’d decided to invite themselves to dinner. They’d brought Fergus O’Malley — the skinny, red-cheeked mayor of Big Hill — along with them. I’d not been too happy about that, but Nit and Moira had both sworn up and down that Fergus was a good halfling, someone I needed to know.
I’d like to say they’d never steered me wrong before, but it would be a huge lie. Still, while Nit and Moira sometimes put their trust in the wrong people, they always made for interesting dinner companions. I’d eaten more meals at the Barrelrider — Nit’s restaurant — than I could count, but the place was still being repaired after Fiera had destroyed my offices above it.
Eating with Nit proved to be just as entertaining as being served by him, maybe more so. Without having to worry about serving food or being interrupted by other patrons, he held forth on just about every topic that came his way, often at length. I’d had enough of a long day that I sat back with Moira — who’d just recently got out of the hospital herself, minus her left hand — and listened and laughed as he and Fergus ranted with and against each other in turn.
“Do you want me to try to come up with a replacement for that?” Danto said to Moira at one point when she reached for the salt with the stump of her left wrist.
She shook her head and blushed. “Not yet. The healers say it needs a few weeks before I can even think about that.”
“And even then, she’d have to be able to afford it,” Nit said. “Replacement limbs don’t come cheap.”
“I hear they work just about as well as the real thing,” Fergus said around a mouthful of wine. “Better even.”
Moira stared at the stump, her shoulders slumped. “That’s what I hear.”
She’d always been such a manic spigot of energy, and now she looked so defeated. I hated to see her that way, but I didn’t know what I could possibly do to cheer her up. She noticed me watching her and reached over with her good hand to pat me on the back of mine. She was lucky to be alive, and we both knew it.
The dragonet took that moment to swoop down out of the elevation fields outside of Danto’s dining room and snatch up half of a roasted chicken like it was a rabbit on the run. He hit it fast and then flapped away, seeking a private cornice on which he could perch while he devoured his spicy prey.
Someone yelped in surprise as the dragonet struck, and I know it wasn’t me. No one else confessed to it, but if I had to guess by how much redder his cheeks grew, it must have been Fergus.
“I don’t get it,” Fergus said with a chuckle as he poured himself another glass of wine. “How did you lot wind up robbing tombs with each other? I can’t imagine a more motley crew of adventurers.”
Danto smiled. “You should have seen us when we were in action: a disaster waiting to happen.”
“It just kept happening to the people who tried to stop us.” Moira’s eyes twinkled at the memories. Seeing that in her face made me smile.
“I met Danto when I was at the Academy,” I said. “I was looking for a way out, and I lured him into helping me find it.”
Danto snorted. “If you listen to your father, I was the one who did the luring. Did you see the way he shot daggers at me with his eyes? All for hauling you away from your studies long ago and into a life of peril and ill repute.”
I raised a glass to him. “And have I ever thanked you for that?”
“Many times.” Danto laughed.
“They met Moira while they were hanging out at my place,” Nit said with a wistful air. “I didn’t approve of it either. Not for my little girl.”
“Which is why we started meeting up at the Quill instead,” Moira said. “That’s where we met the rest: Kells, Cindra, Kai, Gütmann, Ames, Belle, and all the rest.”
“Belle.” I frowned. I’d been able to forget about her for a bit while I argued for staying with the dragonet at Danto’s place rather than the Academy, but her troubles came crashing back down on me again. I would have loved nothing more than to find my way to the guest room Danto had set aside for me and the dragonet and let sleep take me for the night. Instead, I pushed away the glass of wine in front of me and steeled myself to have to go out again.
“What’s wrong?” Fergus said.
“Belle’s sister died, and her body’s disappeared.”
“And she’s an elf,” Nit said. “You know what that means.”
Fergus let loose a low whistle. “Bad news. Which one of them’s going to pay the corpse-debt?”
“How did you know about this?” I said. “I’d never heard about this before today.”
Fergus shrugged. “In my position, it pays to know how to get rid of a body. Hard to do with elves. Almost impossible. They’re tight with those.”
Moira furrowed her brown in confusion. “I thought she landed in one of the trees below the Sanguignos’ place. How hard could it have been to find her?”
“They sent their human servant Ford down to get her. Found him dead the next morning, his eyes and tongue ripped out.”
Danto gave a sage nod. “Sounds like someone was trying to cover his tracks. That’s the kind of thing you do to keep a corpse from talking. The Guard’s got some great forensic wizards. With a little luck, they can read the images off the back of a cadaver’s eyes or get its tongue wagging about what happened to its owner.”
“But not without those missing parts,” I said, understanding. “Whoever took the body wanted to make sure it didn’t get found.”
“But apparently didn’t want anything to do with poor Ford,” said Moira.
“Right. If you’re just after bodies, why not take them both?” said Danto.
“Such lovely dinner conversation,” Nit said with a wry smirk I’m sure he meant only for Fergus’s benefit.
I ignored him. Fergus was a grown-up, despite his size, and he was as sharp as the razor he probably kept folded in his pocket.
“Who hates this Sanguigno family of yours?” Fergus said. “That’s who had good reason to take that body away, right?”
“They’re elves,” Moira said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
I shot her a dirty look, and she threw up her hand. “Not me, mind you. I always loved Belle. But you know, some people, they resent the wealth and the beauty and the immortality and all that.”
I glanced at Danto, Nit, and Fergus. They all shrugged at me in turn. “That’s not really enough reason to go steal a body,” Danto said. “I mean, what are the chances that someone — especially someone who’s not an elf — would happen to be wandering by when an elf dies? And then that they’d manage to make off with the corpse like that? Rapidly approaching zero, I’d say.”
“I’d have pinned it on the butler if he wasn’t dead too,” said Nit. “Maybe he had family that turned on him? Or friends?”
“Some friends.” I tried to remember Ford
ever mentioning anyone outside of the Sanguignos and came up empty. I hadn’t known him all that well, mostly because he hated me, but I knew he’d lived and worked for the Sanguignos for something like thirty years without much of a break. If he had a family — or any interests outside of his job, really — he’d kept them hidden well.
“Did you check the morgue?” Fergus said. “I know the people there. I could put in a good word for you.”
“Already been there. They weren’t much help.”
“Why would they know anything?” Moira asked. “Didn’t they not get the body?”
“Always good to double-check what you’re told,” I said.
Things had been simpler when we’d been out robbing tombs in the wild. The undead never lied to you. Sure, they tried to murder you, but you expected that and could deal with it. I’d gotten soft here in Dragon City since we’d given up that life, and I didn’t long for it often. Days like this, though, made me wish for the simplicity of a zombie shambling after me and groaning about my brains.
“I need to go back to the Sanguigno estate,” I said. “I need to inspect the scene of the crime.”
“And where’s that body supposed to be again?” Moira said, grim yet bemused.
“Caught in a tree halfway down the mountain.”
“And you think you’re going to find a cabbie to drop you off there?”
I groaned. “I’ll have to grab my old climbing gear, I guess.” It had been years since I’d scaled a sheer cliff like that. My muscles weren’t looking forward to it. Then I slapped my head. “And I had that in my office, of course.”
Fergus reached over and patted the table in front of me with a wide grin. “Don’t you worry about that, son. I know just the person to help you out.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“You sure about this?” Schaeffer Tolliver said as he brought his flying carpet right up to the ledge where Fiera’s body had landed. The gruff halfling kept it as steady as a rock despite the winds howling about the place. “It’s going to be dark soon.”
“I’m sure, Schaef.” The dragonet curled tighter around my shoulders as I stood up on the carpet and steadied myself to leap off of it. Up in the Elven Reaches proper, it always seemed temperate and calm — probably due to some kind of elven magic — but here on the exposed ledge, the wind howled and pulled at me like a demon trying to yank me to my death.
I wondered if the dragonet would try to save me if I fell. Were his wings strong enough to manage it, or would I drag him to his death too? I hoped to not have to figure that out.
“Wait here,” I said to the halfling. “I won’t be long.”
“The faster, the better,” the hack said, his gaze darting all about him. “If someone sees us out here and calls in the Guard, we’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
“You didn’t steal this carpet, did you?” I asked, joking.
Schaef didn’t laugh. “Let’s just say your friend Mr. O’Malley sold it to me used at a substantial discount.”
I tried not to goggle at him. “I’ll be quick,” I said. Then I leaped for the ledge.
The thick roots of the tree that Fiera’s body had gotten tangled in spanned the entire width of the ledge and spilled out over its sharp, rocky edge. Despite its inhospitable home, it had thrived here high on the mountain’s southern face, and it gave me an excellent handhold. I clung to it for support and resisted the urge to wrap my arms around it and close my eyes until someone came to pry me off of it.
Instead I set to searching around for signs of the mayhem that had happened here. As I did, I cursed Belle for not asking me to help her earlier in the week. By now, the wind would have torn from the tree and the ledge it speared out of just about every bit of evidence I could have hoped for. We’d had a storm a few days ago too, and I had expected that to have helped wash everything away too.
Despite that, I found splashes of darkness staining the rocky soil. From the way they splattered to either side of a relatively clean spot, I figured that this was where Ford’s head had rested before his body had been recovered. At least the morgue had gotten its hands on him. He’d bled a lot.
I looked up into the tree and spotted some broken branches in the upper reaches. That part of the tree had also been blackened and stripped of leaves. It had to be where Fiera’s burning body had landed.
I looked for Schaef and his carpet and saw that he’d moved several yards away from the wall. The sight of him hovering there in midair with the bulk of Dragon City falling away from him, spreading and sprawling along the mountain’s face as it went, stole the breath from my lungs and set my head spinning.
From up there, the city looked peaceful yet familiar. I had enough distance from it that I couldn’t hear or smell it much, and it felt like I was examining a detailed map of it rather than looking down at the real thing. I knew that if I toppled off that ledge, though, it would become all too real the closer I got to it.
I beckoned to Schaef, and he brought his carpet right over to me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I don’t like sticking too close to the walls here. Too easy for a good wind to come along and smash us against it.”
“Right,” I said. “Then you’re going to love this.” I pointed up to the blackened spot in the tree. “I need to get up there and get a better look.”
The halfling adjusted his cap, sucked at his teeth, and gave me a fatalistic shrug. “If you say so.”
Schaef brought the carpet up to the level of the burned-out part of the tree and then sidled it carefully over until I was within an easy arm’s reach of where Fiera had landed. Rather than take my chances in the broken and charcoal-dark branches, I laid down on the carpet on my stomach with my arms and head out over its side. Schaef edged me up as close as he could, holding it steady despite the buffeting winds.
The dragonet fluttered up into the breeze for a moment and then settled down on my back, his claws clenched around my belt. It tickled a bit but made me smile.
I spotted a shred of Fiera’s dress hanging from a snapped-off branch, and I reached out and grabbed it. It had been scorched good, but I still recognized it as having once been a part of her embroidered gown: blue with threads of silver stitched through it in a characteristic elfin pattern. I stuffed it into my shirt pocket while I poked around a bit more.
From up here, above the burned-out spot, I could see all the way down through the tree’s canopy, right to where Ford’s body had been. It didn’t line up with the hole in the tree’s branches, though, despite the fact that I could pick out an easy path by which he could have climbed straight up through the branches from the ground.
I pushed myself back into the center of the carpet. Without waiting for a request, Schaef pulled his ride away from the wall until we hung in the air a good fifty feet away from the cliff. The traffic up around this part of the mountain was light, nothing like the bustle of the bulk of the city below, and we had this section of the sky to ourselves, with the exception of a few golden eagles riding the updrafts nearby.
“Find anything interesting?” Schaef bent his neck around to inspect the bit of Fiera’s dress that I’d pulled out to inspect again.
“It wasn’t an illusion.” I held the cloth up as proof, then stuffed it back into my pocket. “Fiera really did fall into that tree.”
“I thought you were a witness.”
“More like a perpetrator. Yeah, I saw it all, but with all the magic floating around this city, you can’t always tell what’s real.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“Maybe that’s what someone used to get her out of that tree too,” I said. “Magic, I mean.”
“Wouldn’t it just be easier to wrap a rope around her and pull her down? She’s already dead.”
“Maybe, but you’d have been sure to break some branches doing that. Even if you climbed up there and carried her down, you’d still have snagged her on a few things, right?”
“But you didn’t see any of that?”
&
nbsp; I shook my head and pondered it. Something odd had happened here. Ford had paid for it with his life, and if I didn’t figure out how and why, Belle might be next.
I had lots of questions. I needed answers. The dragonet curled up in my lap, and I stroked his head.
“Not to push you along,” Schaef said, “but I’m freezing my hairy toes off out here. What’s our next stop?”
I craned my neck back and stared up at the still-scorched balcony from which Fiera had toppled. “Right there,” I said. “I need to talk to the Sanguignos.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“You can’t bring that thing in here,” Belle said when she found Schaef and me enjoying a glass of sunwine on her balcony.
I glanced down at the halfling. “He’s all right,” I said. “And he’s my ride out of here.”
“Not him.” Belle groaned, then pointed at the dragonet where he was hanging over my shoulders. “Him!”
The dragonet looked up at her and made a confused sound. “What’s wrong with him?” I said.
She gaped at me. “Don’t you remember what he did to my sister?”
I scratched the dragonet at the base of his skull. “You mean when he saved our lives?”
“That right?” said Schaef. He raised his glass toward Belle. “You got an odd way of showing your gratitude, lady.”
“If my parents come out here and find him — they blame him for Fiera’s death — it won’t go well.”
“Is there any chance of that?” I said.
“Have you made any progress in finding my sister’s body?” There was a desperate edge in Belle’s voice.
“Some,” I lied. “Are your parents around? I’d like to speak with them.”
“No,” Belle said a bit too fast.
“I suppose we don’t need to worry about them spotting the dragonet now, do we?” Schaef said. He grinned into his glass as he took a long pull from it.
“They’re here,” Belle said, exasperated. “But they’re not available to speak to Max or anyone else.”