by Matt Forbeck
he pushed the door open on creaky hinges and held it wide for me. With his other hand, he produced my wand from a pocket inside his coat and handed it to me.
“It’s a start,” he said.
DAWN HAD BROKEN over Dragon City by the time I emerged from the precinct house. I wanted nothing more than to head back to my place and grab some sleep, but I knew that Sig’s hours were numbered. The Guard didn’t take much of a shine to those suspected of killing their own, and he’d be lucky to make it through the first interrogation session with any higher functions of his brain intact.
I hailed a carpet flying overhead, and when it dropped down to street level I hopped on. “Where to?” the hack asked as the carpet lifted into the air.
“Skinned Cat,” I said.
He craned his neck to look back at me. “Where’s that?” “Goblintown.”
He brought the carpet back down to the street. “Forget it. I don’t bring my ride there.”
I understood his reluctance. Goblintown was the roughest spot in all of Dragon City. Because it squatted right up next to the city’s outer wall, there wasn’t a part of it in which you didn’t hear the hungry moans and incessant scratching of the zombie hoard clustered on the other side of that massive stone curtain. Some people figured that was what made everyone so damned nasty in Goblintown. I suppose it was that and the fact that the people there sat at the absolute lowest point in the city, both literally and figuratively. All the shit in the city ran downhill.
“It’s broad daylight,” I said. “What kind of coward are you?” “The kind who won’t go into Goblintown,” he said. “Get off.” I fished a gold coin out of my pocket and flashed the side with the Dragon’s head embossed on it. “What if the Emperor asks you nicely?”
The man grimaced as if he knew better than to take the money, but he still put his hand out. I laid the coin into it.
“All right,” he said, urging the carpet back up into the sky. “But I’m not waiting around for you. You don’t have that kind of money. Nobody does.”
Once we were in the air and scudding over the city’s rooftops, I guided the hack toward our destination. Up here, in the sun’s warming rays, I could see all the way from the snowcapped top of the mountain to the ravaged swamps beyond the city’s walls. As we eased our way downslope, the rooftops became cheaper and rottener, and the streets became narrower and darker. By the time we reached the Skinned Cat, we’d lost the rays of the sun to the mountain’s bulk again.
I pointed out an open square, and the hack set me down there. He barely slowed to a stop as I leaped from the back of the carpet, and an instant later he soared back into the sky. As he zoomed away, I wondered how I was going to get back home without him.
The Skinned Cat sat on the other side of the square, a ramshackle, hardbitten joint that looked awful and had never seen better days. Someone had slapped it together with bits of scrap lumber, damaged shingles, and leftover plaster long before I’d been born, and it had somehow held together over the years despite looking every day of its age. Rumor had it that an orc shaman blessed the place as his dying act—after the barman had refused to charge him for his last drink—and that the force of his spirit was the only thing that kept the massive, hut-like excuse for a building from falling over.
I walked up to the Cat, ignoring the fact that every eye in the square was trained on me. A crew of kobolds braced the sides of the door, their hands on their daggers. A hard look from me kept their blades in their sheaths, and I shoved past the runts with my thighs.
I’d been in the Skinned Cat before, but always with an orc at my side, usually Sig or his cousin Kai. The drinks were cheap, and the cuisine was the best of its kind, by which I mean it smelled like it came from the freshest side of the garbage dump. I spent most of my nights at the Quill, which featured more of a mixed crowd, rather than trek down here where I stuck out like a dragon’s egg in a chicken’s nest.
Even this early in the morning, the Cat’s main room was packed and roared with conversation. The tone was belligerent enough that I figured it came from people who hadn’t yet bothered to go home from the night before. It ground to a complete halt as I walked into the room, and every head turned and shot me a sullen stare.
The times I’d been here before, I’d known that the patrons had tolerated my presence only because of the friends I was with. Without anyone at my side, I felt the full brunt of the murderous hatred I inspired in them. In other circumstances, it might have humbled me, but I hadn’t walked in there as some sort of lost tourist. I had a job to do.
My hand twitched from the urge to grab my wand and start blasting away. If I gave into that, though, I knew I’d never make it out of the room alive. Giving myself a generous benefit of the doubt, I might have been able to take on two or three of the people in the room—tusks, fangs, and all—but I wouldn’t stand a chance against so many angry foes at once.
Instead, I strode right up to the bar and said, “Gimme a dragonfire.”
The Dragon may have outlawed the stuff, but that didn’t stop any bar worthy of the name from keeping some of the magically enhanced liquor on hand. I figured if everything went wrong, I’d need the little boost the drink would give me. And if it didn’t, at least I’d get a stiff drink out of it.
The bartender—a massive hobgoblin missing both a tusk and an eye on one mangled side of his face—stared me down with his one good eye. He looked so friendly I thought he might smash me over the head with the mug in his hand. Instead, he finally broke his steely gaze from mine and set about getting my drink.
Everyone in the room spun back around to whatever they’d been doing before I’d walked in. A stub-fingered group to my left played mumblety-peg with the rustiest knife I’d ever seen. Another group set to tearing apart an unidentifiable small mammal that the cook had run through with a skewer and then barbecued. For the most part, they ignored me, which I knew was about the best I could expect.
When I turned back to the bartender, he held an overfull glass of dragonfire. As I reached for it, he threw the liquor at me, and it splashed across my chest.
“What was that for?” I complained. Then I saw the lit match in his other hand. I held up my hands to ward it off, but he flicked it right past them. It hit me square in the center of my shirt, which burst into flames.
Shouting in panic as the blaze spread, I tried to beat out the flames with my open hands. This lasted until a pair of the stubby- fingered orcs smashed into me, spun me around, and slammed me to the ground, face first.
The impact with the filthy dirt floor put out the flames. Normally, I would have counted that as a blessing, but I had smacked into the ground hard enough that it knocked the wind out of me. Before I could catch my breath, the two orcs hauled me to my feet and lifted me up onto the bar.
One of them set a knife against my throat while the other held me down. I struggled against them, but a dozen other hands grabbed me and held me fast. I had nowhere to go.
“You’re not welcome here,” the bartender said, snarling into my face. His breath came out hot and rancid through the rotting holes where his missing teeth once sat. “Thought you should know.”
“I didn’t come here for the watered-down drinks,” I said. “I’m trying to help Sig.”
The bartender laughed as he brought a straight razor up in front of him. With his other hand, he produced a basin, and I knew all too well what it was for. “Too bad he’s not here to help you then, in’nit?”
“You don’t understand.” I struggled against the hands holding me, even though I knew it was pointless. “The Guard tossed him in jail. I’m trying to get him out before they kill him.”
“Sig’s in jail?” The bartender stuck out his tongue and licked the side of his blade. He nicked the tip of his tongue as he did, and a patch of blood appeared on it. He spat it out. “Good.”
“They picked him up for murder,” I said. “They think he’s been killing guards.”
The bartender froze in the middle of reaching fo
r my throat with his razor. Then he threw back his head and let loose a guffaw. “Sig? They think Sig did that?”
The others holding me down joined in. The moment I tried to test their resolve, though, their hands clamped right back down on me. The joke over, the one-eyed hobgoblin brought the razor toward my neck, and I decided to put everything I had into one last desperate attempt to get free. Magic, bullets, or plain dumb luck: whatever it would take, I tried to call on it.
But nothing happened. The rough hands shoved me down harder, and someone punched me in the jaw, sending stars shooting through my eyes. The razor glittered in the light of the grimy glowglobe behind the bar, and I figured, with more than a little disappointment, that it would be the last thing I’d ever see.
Then the glowglobe exploded.
The razor fell away, along with the hands holding me down, as everyone who’d been assaulting me ducked for cover. Spitting blood, I rolled off the bar and onto my feet. An orc, one I knew well, stood in the doorway to the bar with a smoking, rune- crusted, double-barreled shotgun in his hands. It was Sig’s cousin, Kai.
“Back off!” Kai snarled, waving his weapon at anyone who dared to look at him. “The jackass says he’s here about my cousin, I’m going to hear him out.”
I nodded my thanks at him. Kai and I hadn’t always seen eye to eye. In fact, with