by Matt Forbeck
End Times
in
Dragon City
Shotguns & Sorcery Novel #3
By Matt Forbeck
Also by Matt Forbeck
Hard Times in Dragon City (Shotguns & Sorcery #1)
Bad Times in Dragon City (Shotguns & Sorcery #2)
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 always remind me that even the end times mean new beginnings too.
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
“Well done, Gibson. You’ve killed us all.” The immortal Captain of the Imperial Dragon’s Guard sneered at me through the iron bars set in the wizard-locked door of my cold stone cell lodged in the highest reaches of the Garrett, the most impregnable prison in Dragon City. He was so angry at me that the tips of his pointed ears burned a bright red.
“I think we’ve known each other long enough now, Yabair. Feel free to call me Max.” I kept my back to him as I stood on the far side of the cell and gazed down through the single barred window set deep into its yard-thick walls, looking over the city splayed out below me. I might have been beaten bloody after my arrest and all the way up the mountain until Yabair and his subordinates had thrown me into this unforgiving cell, but I had to admit, it had a damn fine view.
I could see the distant spot where I’d killed the Dragon Emperor from here, a gigantic gash that he’d torn out of the rotting flesh of Goblintown, right there up against the massive stone wall known as the Great Circle. It had been a crystal-clear act of self-defense, but I knew that wasn’t going to fly with the Guard. If the Dragon Emperor wanted you dead, that superseded any other concerns. You just let it happen, laws or rights or other useless words be damned.
Not that you usually had much of a choice. I’d gotten lucky. I’d been in the right place at the right time with the right weapon in my hand, and I’d shot him in the right spot.
The fact that he’d been distracted by his son — the young dragonet who’d imprinted himself on me at the moment of his accidental hatching — had helped. The Guard couldn’t haul in the heir to the throne, of course, even if they could have caught him, but with me they had a much wider slate of options. To my own benefit, they’d skipped over instant execution — which I’d been half expecting — and chosen to throw me into prison instead.
What that meant for my ultimate fate, I couldn’t say. I suspected the only reason I could still breathe at all was because of the dragonet’s affection for me. Without that, I’d have been hauled off to the morgue instead.
Yesterday, that meant my remains would have wound up in the Dragon’s stomach, part of a secret agreement he’d made with Dragon City’s founders to protect them from the undead hordes of the Ruler of the Dead. Today, we’d entered new lands, and none of us had any maps nor even as much as a decent rumor of a path to go on. That meant I got tossed into the Garrett instead, at least for now.
“I didn’t pick out this cell for you by accident, Gibson,” Yabair said. “I want you to be able to look out there. I want you to be able to see what you’ve done, to bear witness to the ramifications of your crimes.”
“I shot someone who was about to eat me.” I searched my heart once more and found the same thing as I had every time since that fateful moment: not one crumb of regret.
I had some legitimate fears about what would happen next, but not only had the Dragon been about to eat me but also devour just about everyone else I’d ever cared about in the city that bore his name — or at least the name of his kind. Should I have let that happen? Would it have been better for everyone else if I had?
I couldn’t say for sure. It meant big changes ahead, the kind that could shake the mountain to its roots, but at least I stood a decent chance of being around to see them. Yabair might be able to take that away from me, but at least the Dragon couldn’t.
And he couldn’t eat any more of his loyal subjects. Not ever again.
“Look out there,” Yabair said. “Tell me what you see.”
From his vantage point at the door of my cell, the elf couldn’t enjoy the vista with me, so I decided to grant his request. “There’s smoke curling up from the spot where I shot the Emperor. Is his body hot enough that he’s self-incinerating upon his death?”
Yabair gave a cold and unfriendly laugh. “Those are rioters in the streets of Goblintown. They’re falling in on themselves in terror.”
I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what they could be afraid of. After all, the Dragon Emperor was dead, and he’d been eating their bodies for generations — although they didn’t know that last part, of course. But I only had to let my gaze wander past the Dragon Emperor’s open grave to know what put such fear in the hearts of the toughest and most hard-bitten people in all of Dragon City.
As the sun set in the west, just beyond the stolid lines of the Night Tower that marked the far edge of the Great Circle, the undead creatures that formed the ever-hungry army of the necromancer who called herself the Ruler of the D
ead gathered. I couldn’t see the base of the wall from my vantage point, but from the trails of zombies shambling toward us from the wilderness, there must have already been hundreds if not thousands of the creatures massing against the cut-stone barrier that towered above them. The wall had protected the people of Dragon City for hundreds of years, but that was because the threat of the Dragon’s wrath had kept them from coming at us in large numbers.
And now that threat — and the protection that went with it — was gone. I’d removed it myself.
“Don’t you think the wall will hold on its own?” I turned back to Yabair.
He grimaced, his anger at me sliding away as he considered the threat against our common home. “I don’t know,” he said. “The Dragon helped keep the army of dead away from us long enough for the dwarves to build the Great Circle. It’s possible it could hold on its own. Or maybe it could have back then.”
I could hear a “but” attached to that statement, and I decided to supply it. “But now?”
“Now the Ruler of the Dead has had centuries to prepare for this moment. The only thing that kept her in check to this date was the presence of the Dragon. She has more minions than ever to hurl against us, and there’s little we can now do to stop her. To my mind, it’s not a matter of if the Great Circle will fall but when.”
“Don’t you think you ought to let me out of here then?” I put up a hand to stave off his reflexive protest. “No matter what I’ve done — whether you honestly think I doomed us all or not — I’m not doing anyone any kind of good trapped in here. Why not put me on the front lines of this battle, someplace where I could help?”
Yabair gave a soft grunt at this notion and seemed to take a moment to consider it in depth before he spoke. “If the Great Circle falls,” he said, “there’s little that you or anyone else will be able to do to stop the destruction of everything we’ve built here over the centuries.”
“But doesn’t it make sense to let me at least try?”
Yabair shook his head with menacing purpose. “You don’t know what you’ve done here.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he waved me silent.
“You are too young. You humans — all of you together — are too young. The eldest among you has lived, what? Perhaps a hundred years. You’re children, every last one of you, and you act like it, like petulant, spoiled youths who have no way to even start to comprehend what your elders and your betters sacrificed to bring you the comforts that you enjoy.
“You think that it’s hard in the Village? Or atop the Big Hill where you reside in that office of yours above that fat halfling’s restaurant? Or even down in Goblintown where we let the dregs of our society drain?”
He granted me a bit of the truth to that with a nod before he continued. “Sure, life there can be a challenge. It can be brutal and all too short. It’s unfair.
“But at least it’s life. When the Ruler of the Dead arrives — when her unstoppable armies come marching through our streets, working their way up the side of the mountain until they can claim every inch of it from its swampy foothills to its frozen peak — then you’ll understand. Then you’ll realize how good you had it here under the Dragon Emperor’s rule for so long.
“Not only that, you’ll thank his memory for how many generations of you wouldn’t have even been whelped if it hadn’t been for him. You’ll weep for his loss. And every damn one of you — even you, Gibson — will curse the bastard that took him from us and left us all exposed to the horrors of the wider world.”
I laughed at him, and I saw his anger well up inside him and threaten to burst forth again. The only thing that prevented it from boiling straight over was the door that stood between us, protecting me as much as it kept me captive. That just made me laugh harder, so hard that I could barely breathe.
“What’s so funny?” he said, his eyes blazing, his nostrils flaring. “I put you in this cell so you can be the last of your people to go. So you can hear them curse you and your entire bloodline from one end to the other, right up until the moment some zombie tears out your throat, and you laugh?”
I wiped my eyes as I caught my breath. “The joke’s on you,” I said. “You and everyone last one of us. We think it makes a difference that we had an Emperor rather than a Ruler, right?”
He nodded at me, unsure where I was heading with that.
“They both wind up devouring us, defiling us. They don’t want us. They don’t care about us. All they need are our bodies, our remains. We’re just grist for their mills. Chickens for their pots.”
“The Dragon gave you safety. He gave you society. He gave you life.”
“My parents gave me life. My friends gave me what excuse for society I could find.”
I turned back to the window to watch the zombies herd against the wall as if someone had rung the dinner bell for them, and to see Goblintown burn. Lights from uncapped glowglobes had appeared all throughout the city to fight the coming darkness, and the streets arrayed before me sparkled like constellations in the night sky. War was coming to my city, and I wanted to be out there to fight it.
“The Dragon just failed to kill me before I killed him,” I said. “And I can’t see how I should feel bad about that, not even for an instant.”
CHAPTER TWO
Yabair left me then with nothing more than a snarl. I kept staring out the window and wondering what was happening down there, not just to Goblintown or to the Great Circle, but to my friends and family, as scattered about the place as they might be.
After I’d shot the Dragon and Yabair had arrested me, we’d sat there for a few moments, taking it all in. Belle, Cindra, and Danto had somehow escaped from the pit the Dragon had dug to get at us. Moira had slipped back into the surrounding wreckage above, disappearing into Goblintown too. Kai, now that I thought about it, had vanished in the middle of the fight.
Kells and Johan had hovered overhead for a moment in that well-armed palanquin they’d rigged together, but Yabair had started firing on them the moment they got close. I knew they meant to rescue me, but I waved them off despite that. Enough people had died that day already. I didn’t need them getting added to that total — or even Yabair for that matter.
I didn’t blame any of them for getting away. I would have done the same myself. It was one thing to take on the Dragon — who’d literally dug up a full city block to pull us out of a sub-basement. It was something else to voluntarily fight the Guard, a foe from which you could actually get away.
I hadn’t even argued the point myself. When Yabair had flown his chariot down to grab me, I’d dropped my gun and let him take me in. Sure, the fact that I’d run out of bullets and had been clinging to the side of that fresh-dug pit had more than a little to do with that.
I had thought perhaps Yabair would just haul me straight off to the Garrett, but he hadn’t been quite ready for that yet. The Dragon was inarguably dead, but there might have still been a chance for the Voice of the Dragon, the flame-robed elf who’d rode into battle in a basket suspended from a chain around the Emperor’s neck. He’d taken a number of bullets from Kells’ machine-gun, but he’d been alive enough to shout at me after that — right up until he succumbed to his wounds.
Yabair had sent his chariot’s driver off to check on the Voice while he cuffed me and slapped me around. By the time the other elf got to the Voice though, he was long past anyone’s help.
I didn’t know that just from the way he didn’t move or the fact he’d stopped breathing though. I figured it out from how he stood straight up in that damned basket of his like there wasn’t a thing wrong with him. And then, as if that hadn’t been enough, he’d opened his mouth and laughed.
I recognized that horrible sound right away: dry and triumphant and devoid of life. I’d heard it just moments ago, emanating from the remains of Belle’s dead sister Fiera. It belonged to the Ruler of the Dead.
The guard had already recoiled from the Voice as he rose in his basket. Now the hapless basta
rd scrambled back so fast that he tripped over his own feet while trying to get away. He stumbled down off the pile of rubble on which the Dragon rested and tumbled head over heels all the way down into the bottom of the pit I’d just climbed out of myself.
I would have laughed that that if the sight of the Voice standing up and staring out at Yabair and myself hadn’t been so horrifying. And then the Voice opened his mouth and spoke in the tone and words of the Ruler of the Dead.
“I hope you didn’t think this was over, son of Gib,” the Ruler said. “Oh, no no no. I’m afraid it’s just beginning. As I speak through this shell — through the former voice of your Emperor — I’ve already begun to summon my armies to Dragon City.”
“The wall still stands,” I said, summoning up every bit of defiance I had left in me to keep from crumbling into a trembling heap. “We’ll fight you until our last breath.”
“Oh, I’m depending on that,” the Ruler said, curling up the corners of the Voice’s mouth in a disgusting sham of a smile. “But my army will be like the tide: powerful and ceaseless. We will pound against your bulwarks, chipping away at your defenses day by day, hour by hour, until we erode them away. And the moment your insignificant levee gives way, we will rush into this pathetic settlement of yours, and we will wash you away on a tide of mayhem and blood.”
Yabair pointed his pistol at the Voice then and fired. The bullet caught the creature in the chest and knocked it back against the dead Dragon’s scaly chest.
I glanced at the Captain of the Guard. “Thanks.”
He didn’t look at me, keeping his eyes fixed on the basket into which the Voice’s body had slumped. “I didn’t do it for you.”