End Times in Dragon City (10 page)

I spotted Yabair standing on the upslope side of the square, the angle of which gave him a clear line of sight all the way down to the Great Circle itself. In many parts of town, the narrow and curving streets made it hard to see long distances, and it was easy to forget you were standing on the side of a mountain. From the top of the Old Market Square, though, there could be no doubt. 

Kai got to one knee and brought his shotgun to bear on Yabair and the guards gathered around him. “Get me closer!” he said. “Now!” 

Schaef, I’m proud to say, didn’t hesitate for an instant. He zoomed straight for Yabair, consequences be damned. He’d heard us arguing about it. He knew what was at stake. 

The sniper bullet that went through him, though, didn’t care how determined or heroic he was. It killed him all the same. 

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Without Schaef at the controls, the carpet crumpled to a halt. His will had kept the carpet moving and stable. Without him, it lost all its speed at once and started to plummet toward the ground. 

The change in momentum threw us all forward. Belle and Danto and I managed to hold on. Moira had grabbed onto Schaef the moment the slug had hit him, and she clung to him now for her life. 

Kai went sailing right over our heads. I made a grab for him, but I didn’t really have a chance. My fingers brushed him as he went past, and that was all I could manage. Since I was falling too, along with everyone else, I wasn’t surprised. 

Danto had his wand out, though, and he was way ahead of me. He said a few quick words and flicked his wand down toward the ground below us. A glowing wash of fibrous strands of light blossomed from the ground there and caught us as if we’d fallen into a net. 

It wasn’t the first time Danto had saved my life like that. In fact, we’d drilled with that spell together before we’d started out as adventurers. We knew that we’d be running into things like perilous heights and deep pits, and there was nothing like a good spell to help cushion a fall. I might have managed to cast it myself if I’d had my wand at hand, but I was rusty as such things. 

Danto, though, had kept in practice, probably by teaching his apprentices tricks like that on a regular basis. I used my wand to blast things, clean myself up, and get me coffee. I kept to the kind of magic I needed. When it came to wizards, though, Danto was the real thing. 

The strands of the cushion held us up over the flagstones that lined the square and then let us down as if someone had let the air out of it. Moira grabbed Schaef to check on him, and her hands came away covered in blood. A lot of it had splattered Belle and me as well, but we were grateful the bullet that punched through the halfling hack hadn’t hit us too. 

As soon as I hit the ground, I somersaulted off the crumpled carpet and lurched forward, drawing the pistol from my belt as I went. I spotted Kai ahead of us, staggering to his feet. Danto’s spell hadn’t been able to spread wide enough to be any help to him, and he’d landed hard. His left arm hung limp at his side at an odd angle, but he still carried his shotgun his right hand. 

The guards standing at the high end of the square gaped at us, their weapons at the ready. I don’t think they’d expected any of us to survive being shot out of the air like that, and their surprise was probably the only thing that kept them from filling us all with lead. Their captain, though, knew us well, and he wasn’t so stunned. 

“Shoot him!” Yabair said. 

The elf had arrested me more times than I cared to count. Every time before this, he’d shouted at me to freeze or halt or whatever, giving me a chance to make things easy on everyone before it all spun out of control. 

Today, though, had started out of control and spiraled worse from there. We were in a state of war, and Yabair wasn’t in the mood to chat with anyone pointing a gun at him, no matter our intentions. 

Kai dropped his shotgun. He was too punchy to do much with it anyhow. He raised his good arm over his head in a gesture of surrender as the guards turned their weapons on him. 

I knew the orc’s gesture would be futile, and there was nothing I could do about it. Yabair had at least twenty guards and jailers arrayed around him, and not one of them saw any reason to argue with their leader’s order. 

The smart thing for me to do would have been to dive aside and cover up, hoping no stray bullets would find me. Instead, I charged Kai and tackled him flat as the square filled with the roar of gunfire. 

Kai howled in agony as we landed on his broken arm, but it would have been a lot worse if he’d stayed standing. Still, I knew the soldiers wouldn’t hesitate to adjust their aim and keep firing at us both. I flattened myself as close to the square’s cold stone floor as I could, buried my head between my arms, and hoped they were all rotten shots. 

A moment later, the gunfire stopped, and I realized I wasn’t dead. I wondered if I’d been hit but had gone into shock so fast I hadn’t felt it. When I opened my eyes to check, I saw a glowing blue shield standing between the soldiers and me. Every one of the bullets had bounced off it. 

I recognized the spell. Defensive formations had always been one of Belle’s specialties. We’d been good at this once, back when we’d been a team. 

“Stop!” I shouted, but the soldiers let loose another barrage at us, emptying their rifles at Belle’s shield. It would only hold up under so much abuse, I knew. After enough lead smacked into it, it would shred to pieces, no more solid than the imagination that had created it, and then Kai and I would die. “Yabair! Stop!” 

The bullets kept coming, and then a lightning bolt cracked out from the same direction and crackled around the shield, lighting Kai and me up like steel rods in a thunderstorm. Everything went white for a moment, and every muscle in my body tightened up at once. When it was over, I lay there exhausted and fried, just grateful I hadn’t bitten off my tongue. 

Spark dove down out of the sky then and let loose a blast of fire at the soldiers. I did my best to shout out for him to stop it, to run away and save himself instead, but the words escaped my lips in a thin whisper. 

From my vantage on the ground, I didn’t realize that Spark hadn’t attacked the Guard, not directly. Instead, he’d blasted his fire at the ground between us, fencing our attackers off from us.

A warning. Next time, maybe not. 

“Hold your fire!” My voice came out stronger this time, and I pointed up at Spark, who was circling around the edge of the square, getting ready to make another pass at Yabair and his compatriots. “Hold it, or next time the flames are for you!” 

The gunshots had already stopped, I realized then, but I hoped that the threat would at least keep them from starting up again. I heard worried murmurs from the jailers and the auxiliary guards standing with Yabair. “The heir,” they said. “The heir!” 

With no more shots fired, Spark completed his circuit around the square and landed by my side. I pushed myself up to a sitting position, and he nuzzled his way onto my lap. I rubbed his head as Belle knelt down behind me. 

“Can you stand?” she said in a whisper. 

“I think so.” I took Spark off my lap and set him down next to me. Then I picked up the pistol Kai had loaned me, and I pushed myself to my feet. “How’s Kai?” 

In the downslope distance, I heard gunshots cracking and people screaming. The zombies had gotten into Goblintown. I could barely imagine the chaos erupting there. 

I glanced behind me and saw Danto and Moira working on Schaef. The hack wasn’t moving, and the other two wore most of his blood. They were his best hope though. I had other things to worry about. 

I turned about on unsteady feet and scanned the line of soldiers in front of me until my eyes landed on Yabair. He had his pistol in his hand, smoke still curling from its barrel. 

“Go back to your cell, assassin!” he said. “We’re too busy to deal with traitors like you at the moment, and you’ll be safe there until we are.” 

“I killed one person. How many are you going to murder?” 

“You killed the Emperor!” 

I laughed. “You sound like that makes a difference.” 

The crack was a calculated risk. I meant for it to make Yabair mad. I just didn’t want him so angry he shot me on the spot. 

He stepped forward, out of the line that he’d ordered his soldiers into at the top of the square, his pistol out before him and pointed at my head. I was about to flinch from it when I felt Spark flap up behind me and land on my shoulder. He glared past me at Yabair, and the captain held his trigger finger steady for now. 

“Get out of here, Gibson,” Yabair said, his eyes still blackened and his nose skewed out of true. He’d not taken the time to visit a healer yet. “And take the heir with you. This is no place for him.” 

“You think he’s too young to see how many of his own people the Guard’s willing to slaughter in his name?” 

“You’re jeopardizing his life. If you cared about him half as much as you claim to, you wouldn’t have brought him here.” 

“If you have any advice for how to control a dragon, I’m all ears. He has a mind of his own.” 

Yabair’s shoulders sagged. “You’re wasting your time here, Gibson. The only thing you can get here is killed.” 

“We’re here to stop you from blowing up Goblintown, and we’ll kill every last one of you if we have to.” 

“You?” Yabair snorted. 

“And me,” Belle said as she strode up behind me. 

Yabair nodded at us both for a moment. “Out of respect for Bellezza and her family’s long friendship with mine, I’m going to spell this out for you. 

“First, we are at war, and I am one of the officers charged with coordinating the city’s defenses. My officers will kill you where you stand if you do not comply with my orders, and no one in the city will shed a tear. On top of that, we’ll be forced to incinerate your corpses on the spot. I will make sure there is not a grease stain left.

“Second, we don’t have any other choice. The Ruler of the Dead’s army has already breached the Great Circle. They are flowing into Goblintown unimpeded. They are already hauling the people you’re so concerned about out of their houses and murdering them, which adds even more numbers to their already swollen ranks. 

“Third, and perhaps most important from your point of view, I don’t have the power to stop this. You’re already too late.” 

I’d been preparing counterarguments up until that point, running through options from giving an impassioned speech that would cause Yabair’s soldiers to rise up against him all the way through to shooting him in the head with Kai’s pistol. They all scattered from my brain. 

“What are you talking about?” 

Yabair nodded toward where the last bits of Maurizzio’s flare were fading away into red and gold embers in the sky. “That signal put the plan into motion. Once Maurizzio fires a green one to follow it, the charges detonate.” 

“Those are signals, though.” Belle stepped forward, angry and ready to argue the point while I stood there dumbfounded. “Nothing more. They don’t trigger the explosions themselves.” 

“True,” Yabair said, “but I don’t have the trigger and cannot do anything to stop it from being used. In addition, if Maurizzio’s signal doesn’t come after a certain amount of time — because, say, he was killed or injured — the plan goes into effect automatically.” 

“There must be a failsafe signal,” I said. “A way to call it off.” 

Yabair gave me a wry look as he shook his head. “The first signal is meant as a warning. It tells the Guard to abandon Goblintown as fast as it can. There’s no turning back after that.” 

I cocked my pistol. “Who’s going to set off the explosives?” 

“Do you remember the Voice?” He knew I did. He turned his head to gaze up toward the top of the mountain. “His son stands on the edge of the Dragon’s Spire, the magical trigger in his hands.” 

The gunshots and screams from down Goblintown way grew louder and sharper. I turned that way and saw people streaming upslope into the square. No zombies came with them, but from the sounds I could hear, the creatures were not far behind. 

“You cannot make it up the mountain in time,” Yabair said. “Everything below Low Pavement will disappear before you could even reach Stronghold Square.” 

“Below Low Pavement?” I felt ill. For some reason I’d thought the Guard wouldn’t have dared to set the charges this far upslope. That would take out all of Goblintown for sure, plus a few places like — 

Oh, no. 

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I spun on my heel and grabbed Belle by the hand, dragging her after me as I raced back to Schaef’s carpet. 

They’re letting us go?

I reached up and patted Spark on one of his wings. “Why would they stop us?” 

“Where are we going?” Belle said. She pulled her arm from my grasp but kept following me. “You heard Yabair. We’re too late.” 

Danto and Moira had pulled Schaef off his crumpled ride so they could work on him. Danto glanced up as we approached and gave me a grim look. Moira didn’t pay a bit of attention to us, still concentrating on plugging the holes in Schaef instead. “If we could get him to a hospital,” Danto said softly. 

“Kells and Cindra,” I said to Belle as I sat down on the controller’s section of the carpet. I punched at it with my intent, and it unwrinkled itself and leaped upward, hovering a foot off the ground. 

“What about them?” Belle said as she scrambled on beside me. Then she figured it out and gasped in dismay. “Their place is just below Low Pavement.” 

“We need to get them out of there,” I said as I shoved the carpet into the air. “Them and their kids, before it all blows.”

I hadn’t flown many carpets in my life, but I had the principles down. I thought about going forward, and it went. I thought about going faster, and it complied — up to a point. 

“Hang on!” 

No matter how much I wanted the carpet to go faster than light, it had its limits. I pushed it as hard as I could, way more than I’d normally be comfortable with, and we lurched toward the buildings at the far end of the square.