Goblintown Justice

by Matt Forbeck

go.” I struggled to come off as unconcerned. Up until that point, I’d been more worried about Sig than myself. That had just changed, but I wasn’t about to show it. “Come on. The suspense is killing me.”

  Yabair snorted. “It’s the suspense, is it?” he said. “I thought that might be me.”

  I felt the jab of a wand in my back, and then everything went black

  THE REGULATIONS for the Imperial Dragon's Guard insist that guards use non-lethal spells whenever possible. It’s one of the few concessions the mortals won as part of the Dragon City Compact, the agreement upon which our lonely metropolis was founded. In practice, the guards can abuse us all they want, but killing one of us generates a massive amount of paperwork and enough mandatory investigations to give even the oldest, most jaded elf reason to pause.

  I woke up in one of the dark and dirty holding cells that were stuffed under the foundation of the local precinct house. I’d been tossed in there enough times in the past that before I even opened my eyes I recognized it by its stench—an awful bouquet formed from a telltale blend of stale vomit, old urine, and spilled blood. My head pounded and my mouth felt as dry as a desert cave, a hangover effect from the spell that had shoved me straight into a dreamland where I’d been haunted by the demons of my past, both figurative and literal.

  I rolled over on the cheap excuse for a mattress and put my feet on the floor. The world swam around me, and I stared at the ground until it stopped moving. A pair of enchanted handcuffs dangled from my wrists, the chain between them softly glowing their threat to zap me senseless if I somehow summoned up the stupidity to try casting a spell. I didn’t bother checking for my wand.

  When the world finally stilled itself, I raised my head and spied Sig sprawled unconscious on a bloodstained bed across from me. We were in a stone-walled, windowless room, rather than in with the general population. It was a mixed blessing. It removed the threat of someone messing with us while we were unconscious, but it also meant that there would be no witnesses if someone decided to indulge in some vigorous interrogation.

  Through the barred cell door, I heard someone down the hall moaning in a combination of anguish and pain. A single glowglobe set in the wall opposite the door cast sharp shadows into our otherwise unlit cell. Although the dim light wasn’t done as a favor to us, my aching head counted it as a kindness.

  I creaked to my feet and walked over to Sig. He’d never been handsome, but his face had been beaten uglier than ever. Most of the blood on his mattress appeared to be his, but at least it had stopped leaking from the caked cuts—the ones I could see anyhow.

  Yabair appeared at the door. I hadn’t heard his footsteps approaching on the stone floor, but then I never did. “This is getting tiresome, Gibson,” he said. “Haven’t you spent enough time in my custody for your painfully short life?”

  I shrugged as I turned to face the sharp-nosed elf. “I heard if I get my card punched ten times, I get out of my next beating for free.”

  “How many cards have you gone through already?”

  “Lost count.” I raised my handcuffed wrists before me. “Call my bail bondsman yet?”

  Yabair shook his head. “There’s no point. Not today”

  I felt like he’d punched me in the gut. “Come on. It’s Nit. You know he’s good for it.”

  “A woman was murdered, Gibson.”

  “A guard, you mean. You couldn’t care less if a human was killed. I’ve watched you walk right past bodies in the gutter before.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “We found you standing over her body next to an orc covered with her blood.”

  “I’ll swear my innocence. Send one of your truthsayers down here to check me out.”

  “That won’t hold up in court, I’m afraid.”

  That word—court—stopped me cold. I’d had more run-ins with the Imperial Dragon’s Guard than I could count, but I’d rarely worried about their threats of hauling me before an arbiter. Downslope justice came fast and cruel, delivered mostly by the guards on the street. The courts were reserved for cases the people upslope cared about, either cases that involved them directly or the ones that scared them breathless.

  I squinted at Yabair. “What do you mean, ‘court’?”

  “You said it yourself. She was a guard. We protect our own.” My jaw dropped. “She was part of the Auxiliary.”

  Yabair blinked, something I don’t think I’d ever seen him do before. “She wasn’t the first.”

  “How many?” I said, just starting to get a glimpse how much trouble I’d staggered into. “How many others? Besides Ames?” Yabair opened his mouth and then closed it.

  “Come on,” I said. “If you really thought I’d had anything to do with it, I’d be in the morgue instead of checked in here.”

  “Try the Ash River. The morgue would be too good for you.”

  I shrugged that away. “So?”

  Yabair mulled it over for a moment. “Three.”

  “All guards?”

  Yabair nodded. “The Dragon is not amused.”

  My eyes widened at that. Most people in Dragon City went their entire lives without even edging up to something that might have caught the Dragon Emperor’s eye, and that’s the way we liked it. It didn’t take much of a dragon’s attention to prove fatal.

  “Who?”

  “Walt Danson, Andrew Conners, and Paolo Cartucci, in that order. Each one a week before the last.”

  I’d run into every single one of them at one time or another. Big as Dragon City was, the circle of guards I knew seemed small enough now to be constricting around my neck. Danson and Conners hadn’t been bad men—for guards. Sure, they were crooked, but at least they weren’t needlessly cruel.

  “Hadn’t heard about the elf,” I said. With a name like Cartucci, he had to be one of the pointy-eared long-timers.

  “It’s not the kind of thing the Guard would care to advertise,” Yabair said. “The other two were killed three weeks ago and two weeks ago. It wasn’t until Cartucci’s murder last week, though, that the investigation was handed over to me.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s one thing if a human gets offed, but once whoever’s killing guards reaches up and takes an elf, that’s when it gets serious.”

  Yabair scowled at me. At least he had the good grace to mind it when I called him a racist. With many of the other guards, it would have just sailed over their heads. “The other investigators were unable to produce much in the way of leads,” he said.

  “How about you?” I asked. The elf had me trapped here in a cell, but I knew the question would make him squirm. Given the circumstances, I needed to take my entertainment where I could find it.

  “I—” Yabair closed his mouth as fast as he had opened it. He took a long moment to consider what he wanted to say before he spat it out. “I could use some help with this.”

  I stared at him. “What could I do for you that the Guard couldn’t?”

  Yabair leaned forward. “I’m told that our killer may be closer to the Guard than we might hope.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I hadn’t thought my words through before I opened my mouth. The minute they left my lips, I realized what he had in mind. “You think a guard had something to do with this.”

  Yabair put a finger to his lips, begging for discretion. “I have no proof, but the circumstantial evidence suggests that this is the most likely solution to this particular riddle.”

  I rubbed my chin, trying to figure the angle here, but then I realized I didn’t know anything about what Yabair meant.

  “What evidence?”

  “The efficiency of the murders, for one. Then there’s the fact that every one of them was killed while on duty and in the exact same way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They had their hearts cut out.”

  I winced at that. Removing a heart wasn’t easy. All those ribs got
in the way.

  “Ames?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  Yabair nodded.

  I put my hand over my eyes as I tried to block out that image. I kept it there until I heard the cell door’s lock fall open.

  Yabair slid the door into its pocket in the wall, then stepped back and gestured for me to leave.

  “I’m free to go?” I knew it wouldn’t be as simple as that. It never was.

  “Find Ames’s killer. Do it fast.”

  I glanced back at Sig, who still lay there sawing wood. I’d known him since my adventuring days. We’d killed things. People too. Plenty of them deserved it, but I felt pretty sure Ames hadn’t.

  “What about him?”

  Yabair grimaced. “There’s too much evidence against him.” “But he’s innocent, and you know it,” I wanted to say, but I knew better. That didn’t matter, not one damned bit.

  “Find the killer, and your friend’s innocence will be obvious,”

  Yabair said.

  I snorted as I edged past him and out of the cell. “That doesn’t mean he’ll go free.”

  Yabair looked down his long, thin nose at me as he reached over and removed my handcuffs. The moment they released me, the glow drained out of them. “True.”

  “How about I prove he couldn’t have killed the others?” I said.

  Yabair ushered me down the long, dim hall toward an exit that gleamed with enchantments. “That doesn’t solve my problem.”

  “It’s a start. Otherwise, your investigation ends here.”

  Yabair considered this as he dismantled the magics on the door, magics that would have killed me for touching them. Once finished,