by Matt Forbeck
Yabair pursed his lips as he considered me for a moment. “The land in the lower part of the city is riddled with tunnels, is it not? A network of subterranean passages that the people who live down there clamber through like rats. You should know it well. It’s where the Dragon found you.”
“So? You’re going to hide out there and force the zombies to come after you in narrow, dark passages from which there’s no easy way out? They’ll bury you — in corpses.”
Yabair shook his head. “Maurizzio has ordered those passages lined with enchanted explosives. If the Ruler of the Dead’s army breaches the wall and makes it into Goblintown, we will blow the entire neighborhood to the stars.”
I goggled at the elf and staggered back a few steps before I caught myself. “Are you insane? You’d murder thousands of people.”
“Only moments before the walking dead would devour them in any case. And it might give the rest of us a chance.”
“And what happens when the Ruler of the Dead takes control of all those people you just slaughtered? Have you thought this through at all?”
Yabair gave me a solemn nod. “The explosions won’t just kill. They’ll bury every moving thing in that section of the city. It’ll be over in seconds. It’ll leave a hole any creatures that follow after them will have to climb in and out of.”
“A murder pit.”
“If you wish. We won’t leave anything to chance.”
I gaped at him until the hypocrisy of what he was telling me smacked me in the face. “So, to defend yourself, you’re willing to take part in the murder of thousands of innocents, but when I take a single life in self-defense —”
“You assassinated the Emperor!”
“Let me out of here,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“And that’s exactly the reason you’re going to die here.” He glared at me like he wanted to put a bullet through my head himself, right there. Then he leaned in close to me and spoke in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
“I’m not sure what I’d prefer take you in the end: being torn to pieces by the walking dead or a slow death by dehydration. They’re both too good for you.”
He backed up then to sneer at me, and I just couldn’t take it any longer.
I broke his damn nose.
It happened before I could even think about it. If I’d tried to punch him, I’m sure he would have caught my arm by the wrist as if I’d been a child and then laughed at me as he threw me sprawling across the cell’s stone floor.
Instead, I just slammed my forehead forward and butted him right across the bridge of his long, thin, perfect nose. I felt the bones in it give with a sickening crunch that I’m not ashamed to say would have plastered a smile on my face if I hadn’t been so furious right then.
Yabair stumbled backward in pain and shock, and he landed on his butt in the hallway outside my cell. Blood spurted from his nostrils and cascaded down his face, coating his mouth and chin with the same crimson color as his Guard uniform. Some of the fluid stained the gold piping on his collar, but the rest just turned the fine fabric of his jacket darker.
I could have tried to press my advantage then, but I’d gotten away with a lucky blow and knew it. If I’d have come at him, he’d have taken me apart, broken nose or not. Instead, I stood my ground and put my hands up before me. If he came at me, I hoped I might be able to grab him, although I don’t know how much good that would have done.
That was one of the horrible things about elves: their inherent superiority. They didn’t just act like they were better than humans.
They were faster, and they were stronger. They formed the ideals of physical beauty and perfection. And they could damn well live forever.
At any point in any conversation with Yabair, I knew he could kill me before I had a chance to do anything about it. The only ways I had to even those odds were my wand and my gun and maybe a little bit of space between us. At that moment, I didn’t have any of those at hand.
It wasn’t fair, but then what in Dragon City ever was?
Yabair reached up and touched his nose with fingers shaking with rage. They came away wet and red, and his eyes — already turning black and blue — bulged with rage at the sight.
I braced myself for his counterattack. I’d taken a cheap shot at him, sure, but it was all I had. Now I was going to pay for it.
Instead, Yabair took his bloodied hand and waved it at my door, which shut with an echoing slam that sounded like the final sealing of a tomb. I threw myself at it as the lock slid home, and I pounded at the uncaring slab.
“Don’t do this!” I shouted at him through the grating in the door. “Don’t leave me here!”
Yabair stood up and pulled a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket. He wiped his face clean, taking care to work gingerly around his injured nose. He did so without a cry of pain, not even a word.
When he was done, he glared at me through his blackened eyes. “I should kill you for that,” he said. “But perhaps that’s what you want, I think.
“If I die out there, I want you to know this. The one thought that will give me cold comfort in my final moments is the knowledge that you will follow me soon after. Better yet, you will die in this room, alone and abandoned, with no one to save you and no one to mourn your passing.
“I only wish that I could witness that myself.”
With that, he turned on his heel and left.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I listened at the door until Yabair’s footsteps faded away. I gave it a moment longer and then called for the guard. No one answered.
I tried again and again, shouting myself hoarse, but I soon realized that Yabair hadn’t been bluffing. I’d been left in the top of the tallest tower in the Garret to die all by myself. Up here, I didn’t even have a fellow prisoner I could talk with to pass the time. I was utterly alone.
If what he’d said was true, he would collect all the guards and leave, locking the prison’s impregnable front door behind them. Having seen the army the Ruler of the Dead had assembled, I don’t know what a bunch of turnkeys would be able to do to help save the city, but I’d already lost that argument. They were going to follow this Maurizzio’s plan either way.
Maurizzio must have been the name of the captain of the Guard commanding the city’s forces atop the Great Circle. He seemed like a competent — even skilled — leader, but he simply didn’t have the numbers on his side. Unless he came up with a fantastic plan fast, the zombies would breach the wall well before dawn broke over it again. And the rest of the city wouldn’t last long after that.
I didn’t know if I could bear to stand watching the Guard lose control of the Great Circle, fall back beyond Goblintown, and then blow that entire section of the city to rubble. Maybe that would finally bury the Dragon’s corpse too, at least, but it would also mean the Guard would kill thousands of the citizens they were supposed to protect, all for the purpose of giving the remaining people a few more days — or maybe even mere hours — of life.
And the only thing I’d be able to do was bear witness to it through that crystal ball Alcina had given me.
That, and hope I’d get to die of thirst before the zombies came for me.
I sat there for a while trying not to feel sorry for myself. That was what Yabair wanted, after all: for me to fall into a bottomless pit of despair. I didn’t want to give him a win there, and at that point I was willing to take my victories wherever I could find them.
I thought about the crystal ball. I could use it to try to keep track of my friends. I could watch as each and every one of them fell victim to the Ruler of the Dead’s army of zombies. I could put myself through that for each and every one of them: Moira, Nit, Kai, Kells, Cindra, Danto, Johan, Schaef.
My dad.
Even Spark.
Even Belle.
Or I could throw the damn thing out the window instead.
I got up and fished the crystal ball out of my pocket, and I walked over to the lone wi
ndow in my cell. I could still see the black smoke billowing from the Great Gate up into the dusky sky. Without the ball, I’d be relegated to watching the city die from that vantage point, not one well-loved person at a time but as an aggregate whole.
Seeing the horrors unfold from that perspective might make the horrors bearable, I hoped. It could give me the distance I needed to hold myself together, at least until death came and claimed me too. That seemed a much more humane way to go.
I brought the ball up and cocked back my arm to throw it. I realized I wouldn’t be able to thread it through the bars that way, as satisfying at it would have been to see it sail out over the mountain before it disappeared into the doomed city below. Instead, I moved forward to shove it through the bars and simply drop it over the edge of my windowsill. Not as dramatic perhaps, but just as effective.
That’s when I heard the flapping of wings.
I put the crystal ball back in my pocket, and I grabbed the bars before me with both hands, pulling myself as close to them as I could get and craning my neck around to spot the source of that noise. An instant later, Spark soared down out of the darkening sky and alighted on my window’s sill.
I’ll admit I shouted in delight. I didn’t have much else left at that point.
“Glad to see you, Spark,” I said, hope rising in me for the first time that day. “The Guard abandoned the Garrett and left me here. We need to figure out a way to bust me out.”
I have brought help.
“Help?”
“Next time, try asking a little louder!” Moira said from the front of Schaef’s flying carpet as it rose into view behind Spark.
She crouched next to the halfling hack controlling the thing. Danto and Belle sat behind her, their wands out and ready, and Kai knelt behind them, scanning the skies around them, his shotgun at the ready.
I flat-out whooped with relief.
Get back.
“Wait!” I said to the people on the carpet. “This is the most impregnable prison in the entire city. The whole place is enchanted with all sorts of protective wards. You can’t just fly in here and grab me.”
“Why not?” Danto spoke with the kind of bravado I hadn’t heard from him since we’d given up adventuring a decade back. He’d taken Gütmann’s death as hard as anyone, scorning what we’d been doing as childishness and thrusting himself into his wizardly studies instead. The fact that he’d built his tower with the fortune we’d made during those adventures wasn’t lost on him, I’m sure. If anything that had made him more determined to make the best use of that money.
“Guards are gone,” Kai said, still glancing about everywhere as if one of them might pop up out of nowhere. “Otherwise we’d never get this close, right?”
“You have never convinced me to try,” Schaef said. “I don’t care what you got that gun of yours loaded with.”
“The Guard relies on the Garrett’s sentries and the place’s reputation as much as anything,” Belle said. She waved her wand at a thick chain pooled near her feet, and it snaked into the air with a clanking of its links. “We can do this.”
“These bars are enchanted,” I said. “You can’t just pull them out of the wall with a chain. Schaef’s ride doesn’t have that kind of power. Where’s Johan and that dwarf palanquin of his?”
“He’s busy with Cindra and Kells,” Moira said. “But it’s all right. We got this all planned out.”
“The dragonet is the key,” Belle said.
“His name’s Spark.” I reached out and rubbed the top of his head, and he leaned into it.
“How cute,” Moira said in a dry tone.
“Belle’s right,” said Danto. “Do you know why a dragon’s fire is one of the most powerful things on earth?”
“I must have dropped out of the Academy before we covered that bit.” I glanced back over my shoulder, but no one had come to the door of my cell to see who I was talking to. The jailers really were gone.
“It negates all magical protections. I don’t care how strong the charms might be, they’re as effective as a broken promise against the flames from a dragon’s breath.”
Step back. Please.
I looked up at Spark and rushed backward and then to the side. I didn’t want to be anywhere in the path of his breath. It might not have been nearly as powerful as the Dragon’s, but I’d seen what it had done to Fiera. I had no desire to share that fate.
Spark shoved off from the windowsill, flapping his wings hard. The updraft that chimneyed past the side of the Garret helped him hover just spitting distance from my cell. He hung there for a moment, then drew back his head then snapped it forward, unleashing a torrential gout of fire.
The flames licked at the wall around the window and flowed straight through the bars. The temperature in the room rose until I felt like I’d gone from living in an icebox to an oven. I raised my arms to shield my face from the roasting heat as Spark played his fiery breath back and forth, hosing down the entire window with his magical blaze.
“That’s good!” I heard Danto say. “Belle?”
I stayed back. The bars in my window glowed a bright red, and even the stones in the wall around that had changed color. I felt like if I touched them I might burst into flames too.
One end of the chain that Belle had been manipulating with her wand shot into the cell between two of the bars. It then snaked back out and came in again, wrapping itself around each of the bars with the confidence of a master weaver. Then it lanced back out toward the rest of its length and tied itself into a neat knot
“Keep back!” Schaef said as the chain drew taut. It strained there for a moment, the heavy links groaning with the effort of maintaining their hold on each other. Then the chain went slack.
I cursed as I moved to peek out through the window, wondering if the chain had pulled free from whatever mooring it had on the carpet or if the effort had just proved too much for Schaef’s trusty ride. I saw that Schaef had backed the carpet up almost to the windowsill. If the bars hadn’t been blazing hot, I might have been able to reach through them and grab the fringe flapping off the rug’s back end.
“Hold on!” Schaef said.
The carpet shot forward then, the chain bouncing back up behind it and drawing to a line as straight as a bullet’s path. I started to shout out a warning, to tell them to stop, fearing the chain would catch and their momentum would hurl every one of them off the carpet and into the open air below them.
The crash of the entire window tearing out from its moorings drowned out my words. Broken bits of stone and mortar flew everywhere, and the cool night air rushed in, unimpeded by the massive chunk of the wall that was no longer there.
I raced to the opening and watched as the carpet continued on, the glowing-hot window still attached to it by Belle’s enchanted chain. It had already started to angle toward the ground, gravity asserting its influence over it. I feared that the sudden shift in weight might haul the carpet out of the sky like a great anchor of iron and stone, but the chain undid itself and slipped free from the ruined window, then snaked back up to rest next to Belle once more.
Schaef took the carpet around in a wide circle, losing his extra speed as he angled back toward me. I shouted out a whoop of triumph that got cut short when Spark dove in through the window and landed on my chest, knocking me flat.
I fell sprawling back onto the rubble-covered floor, laughing and wrapping my arms around the dragonet for a massive hug. He rubbed the sides of his snout all over my cheeks, his tail wagging like a dog’s.
Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Freedom!
“Yes,” I said, letting go of him and hauling myself back to my feet. “Freedom.”
As I looked out past the oncoming carpet, I saw that night had fallen over the city in full. The stars sparkled down at us from the cold and distant sky as the moon rose in the east. Glowglobes and torches blazed all along the Great Circle, catching pillars of sooty black smoke rising from the far side of the wall.
“I’m free,�
� I said, “for now.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I leaped onto the back of the carpet as Schaef brought it back to abut against the hole where the window in my cell had just been. I landed next to Belle, and we wrapped each other in the kind of embrace you can only give a lover you think has been lost to you forever. The others cheered my departure from the Garrett, slapping me on the back and giving me wild grins.
Spark dragged his tail along my back as he zipped past us. I looked up to see him circling overhead in a burst of exuberant glee. A moment later, he landed on my shoulder and draped himself into a comfortable position across my neck. Belle gave him the room to settle in and then reached over and tried a tentative pat on his head. Too overjoyed to contest it, he tolerated it for my sake.
I heard another cheer go up behind and below me, and I looked back to see prisoners waving at me out of other windows set into the wall below my cell. Some of them called out for us to help them, but we were already zipping out into the night air, putting the legendary prison far behind us, fast.
“Shouldn’t we go back for them?” Moira said, peering back through the night sky at the prison’s illuminated facade. “I mean, we only have certain death ahead of us. What’s the rush?”
“The Great Circle is about to fall,” I said. “Yabair pulled all the jailers out of the prison to help with the city’s defense.”
“That doesn’t sound like a bad thing,” Belle said. “And since it gave us a chance to extract you from that horrible place, all the better.”
“They’re not going to help out on top of the wall,” I said. “They’re setting up a secondary line of defense for the rest of the Guard to fall back behind once the zombies enter the city.”
“Where?” Kai said. I could hear the suspicion in his voice. He knew what the answer had to be.
“In the Village,” I said. “At its downslope edge.”
Everyone on the carpet fell silent. They all knew what that meant. They just needed some time to absorb it.
“Those bastards.” Kai spat the words out like they tasted of poison. “They’re just going to give up Goblintown to the zombies? Without a fight?”