End Times in Dragon City (3 page)

“I’ve been stuck in this prison for years now, Max,” Alcina said, a vicious smile on her face. “How long did you think it would take until I was running things here?” 

I shrugged. “To be honest, I hadn’t given it — or you — much thought.” 

“That’s so human of you.” She pulled a glassy globe from a pocket in her skirts, where she must have been holding it the entire time, and she gazed into it, watching the moonlight catch and refract in it. “You people never think of the long-term effects of your actions, do you? It’s always about what works for you at the moment instead.” 

“That’s hardly fair. Weren’t you human once too?” 

“That was a long time ago, love, but that’s why I know.” 

“Maybe it’s been too long,” I said. “It’s been so many years since you drew your last breath you’ve forgotten what it’s like.” 

I’d meant that as an insult, but from the way Alcina smiled at my words, you’d never have guessed it. 

“Isn’t that exactly how you got yourself tossed in here in the first place? Thinking for today, and tomorrow be damned?” 

“You’d rather I thought like an elf? Or a dragon?” 

“They’ll all likely live a lot longer than you.” 

“Tell that to the Emperor. I’m sure he’d love to hear it.” 

She peered at me, curiosity dancing in her eyes. She’d looked at me like that back when we’d been dating too. It had taken me a long time to realized that she’d been sizing me up for a meal. The only thing that had saved me then was that she liked to play with her food. 

“Are you saying you’ll live longer than the Dragon?” She giggled. “Such bravado.” 

“I’m here, and he’s not.” I shrugged. “Those two facts are tightly connected. I may not live longer than him by the number of years, but I’ve already lived later. Since I was never going to rival the centuries he spent here, I’ll have to satisfy myself with that.” 

She twirled the glassy ball between her fingers, and it sparkled in the moonlight. 

“What’s that?” I asked, which I knew was just what she wanted me to do. 

“A present,” she said. “From Yabair.” 

That got my attention. “Couldn’t he just give it to me himself? He knows where I am.” 

“He could have,” Alcina said, “but he left it to me.” She tossed me the ball. 

I caught it, grateful I was able to react fast enough, before it landed on the stone floor and shattered into a million useless pieces. Wary of what it might be and what it could do, I refused to look into it and kept my eyes trained on Alcina instead. 

“Don’t you want to use it?” 

I shook my head. “I don’t think I need anything you or Yabair is willing to offer me.” 

“Hold on to that thought,” Alcina said. “You’ll come to regret it.” 

I hefted the globe in my hand. It was bigger than my fist, and I could barely fit my fingers around it. I had an idea what it was and why she’d given it to me, and if I was right I didn’t want to mess around with it. I whipped it at her head instead. 

She dodged out of the way with inhuman speed. She was fast enough to avoid the incoming globe, but not to catch it. It zipped straight past her and smacked into the stones of the far wall. 

Rather than shatter, though, it bounced off the wall with a clunk and dribbled back in my direction. Alcina laughed at me as she threaded her way back out through the door behind her. 

I leaped for the door as it closed, but I wasn’t able to get my foot wedged between it and the jamb before Alcina yanked it shut. I heard the thick sound of its the lock’s bolt being thrown. 

“Be careful of what you toss aside, Max,” she said to me through the cell door’s bars — which made me feel safe from her for the first moment since she’d arrived. “You never know how useful it might prove. You have a hard road ahead of you, and you’re bound to need all the help you can get, no matter from which quarter it might come.” 

With that, she melted away into the darkness of the hallway beyond, leaving me there alone with my thoughts and that damn crystal ball on the floor. 

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

I resisted picking up the crystal ball for as long as I could. The noises continued to rise up from the city though and kept me awake, and my mind kept concocting all sorts of wild stories about who or what had made the noises and why. After fighting it for the better part of an hour, I gave in. 

It wasn’t that I was afraid of the crystal ball itself. They were hard to come by, sure, especially ones as sturdy as this particular model, but I knew how to operate it just fine. That was the kind of thing they taught first-year apprentices at the Academy, and while school might have been a distant memory for me, I recalled enough of what I’d learned there to be able to fire the damn thing up and get it working. 

What bothered me, though, was why Alcina had given me the crystal ball and whether or not she’d really done so with Yabair’s blessing or that of the Garrett’s jailers. The fact that she could just walk in and out of my cell with impunity put me on edge. I’d figured at that the least I’d be safe inside the Garrett — at least from everyone except Yabair and the jailers. I’d never guessed I might have to worry about the other inmates. 

I’d put a fair number of people in this place over the years, and I didn’t relish the thought that any of them might be able to take advantage of the confusion and terror gripping the rest of the city to take their revenge on me. It was bad enough just having to deal with Alcina. As Yabair had intimated, he’d have to look long and hard to find anyone in the city who would miss me if I died tonight, and I can guarantee you he could skip right over the Garrett to save himself time. 

So I put my back against the door and sat down in front of it, then gathered the crystal ball into my lap and peered into it. 

Some people liked to lock their crystal balls with catchphrases you had to mutter to get them going. Most of them were things like “Show me” or “Let’s see what we can see” or some other abracahooey, but this one hadn’t been magically locked. As soon as I concentrated on its darkened surface, a light grew inside of it, beckoning to me. 

I concentrated on what I wanted to see most, and nothing happened. I’d hoped to have Belle’s face leap into focus inside the glass, but the ball wasn’t attuned to her — and I didn’t have enough control over it to force it to find her — so it came up blank. I’d have to try something else. 

Rather than think of a person — which was hard to find because they rarely stayed in one place — I mentally conjured up an image of the Quill instead. This time, the light that glowed inside of the crystal changed to the color of the glowglobes I had hanging all around the bar, and the main room snapped into sharp focus. I spotted Thumper behind the bar, right where he was supposed to be, but the place stood mostly empty. 

At this hour, the bar should have been hopping with activity. It would have been on just about any other night. Today, though, most of the chairs remained resting upside down on their tables, indicating that Thumper had never opened the bar up to the public today. 

I couldn’t say I blamed him. We’d had a terrible day there, and by the time he would have been thinking about opening up the Quill’s doors for the evening, word should have reached him of the Dragon’s death and at whose hand the Emperor had died. I mentally moved the viewpoint about the room and saw that he’d barred the doors from the inside. 

I turned the viewpoint back to the bar area, and I saw Thumper talking to someone. The ball didn’t allow me to listen in on the conversation, but that was probably by design. For one, it was damned hard to create a crystal ball that could not only spy on anyone in the city but listen in on them as well. They were rarer than tombstones around here. 

For two, I felt sure that Alcina didn’t want me to be able to set up communications with anyone outside of my cell. It was one thing to let me watch my home city burn. She knew how that would tear me up inside. But if I could hear my friends’ voices, I might have taken some kind of comfort from them, and that was something that Alcina couldn’t tolerate. 

Despite that, my heart leaped when I saw that Thumper was talking to a group of people sitting at my table in the bar. They included Moira, Kells, Cindra, Kai, and — best of all — Belle. They looked grim as they discussed topics I could only guess at. They were battered, scratched, and muddy, and some of them had been badly bloodied, but they were there. 

And they were alive — at least for now. 

They spoke to each other with purpose. Belle seemed angry about something, but I could only guess what it might be. Moira looked as scared as I’d ever seen her. She kept massaging the stump of her wrist and glancing at the thick length of wood that barred the front door, as if it held both promise and peril. Cindra moved her arms with energy and abandon as she spoke, only settling down for a moment when Kells reached out and took her hand in a tender grasp. 

Kai looked pissed. I’d known him for years, and I’d often seem him angry about one thing or another. When you’re an orc living in Dragon City, there’s plenty to be mad about. Right then, though, he looked like he wanted to snatch up his shotgun, march down to the Great Circle, and take on every last member of the Guard there, just to prove a point. He seethed with fury that he couldn’t begin to comprehend how to control, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before he gave up trying. 

I wondered where the rest of them were. Danto was missing, as were Johan and Schaef. I wasn’t surprised about the dwarf and the halfling. They weren’t part of our original crew, after all, as much help as they’d been over the past couple weeks. 

Danto’s absence, though, worried me. I’d expected him to be with the others. Had he been hurt while escaping from the Guard? Had the Dragon killed him without me noticing it? Or was he just busy somewhere else? 

I decided to take a peek into his tower, and with a few mental acrobatics, the viewpoint inside the crystal ball shifted to the main room of his place. I didn’t see him there, but I spied his apprentices rushing back and forth, shouting at each other about all sorts of things. I recognized the looks on their faces right away: determined yet scared. They were preparing for a fight, perhaps even war. 

Danto had shielded the rest of his tower from prying eyes like mine. Even with as wonderful a specimen of a crystal ball as this, I couldn’t spy any further into his place. After casting around for him on the lower floor for a few minutes, I gave up. 

I decided to try the Wizards Council instead, but the Academy had just as many seals protecting it as Danto had placed upon his home, perhaps more. Still, I was able to peer into the main courtyard, where I could see seasoned wizards shouting at green apprentices, ordering all sorts of preparations to be made. The young wizards there — the students — wore the same looks of terrified stubbornness that I’d seen among Danto’s apprentices. 

The older wizards, though, all looked plain terrified instead. They knew all too well what they were about to face, and from the pain on their faces, I could tell that few of them believed the city would survive. The best they could do was delay the inevitable, if only for their students’ sakes. 

These were only the wizards charged with supervising the apprentices. The wisest of their kind were missing, probably sequestered in the council’s chambers, arguing about what to do. I wondered if my father was among them and if he’d heard that it was me who’d killed the Dragon. 

I didn’t know what he might think of that, but I suspected if he’d been able to visit me, he’d have shaken his head and given thanks that my poor mother hadn’t survived long enough to witness this horrible disaster their only child had heaped upon the Gibson family name. That might sound harsh, but he’d done that exact thing the day I’d left the Academy, ignoring the question of whether I’d quit or been expelled, much less the reasons why. That had been the final wedge driven between us: the idea that I was such a rotten son that it was a good thing that my mother was dead. 

We hadn’t spoken much since. Despite that, I found myself worrying about what might happen to him now. Would the rest of the council find some way to lay the blame for my actions at his feet, no matter how unfair that might be? Would he join the fight against the Ruler of the Dead’s army of the unliving, or would he figure out a way to get ferried to the coast instead? Not that it would be much safer there in the long-abandoned seaside village of Watersmeet, but with the Ruler rallying her forces around Dragon City, there might be a chance to find a half-rotted boat there and escape. 

What kinds of plans would the Wizards Council explore? Would they stand and fight? Would they reinforce the Great Circle with their might? Or would they send a desperate plea for help to one of the rare skyships that sometimes brought visitors and trade from distant lands to our ravaged shores? 

Could they amass a shred of hope in their collective heart, or had they already given up? 

Either way, it seemed the fates of both Danto and my father would remain a mystery for now. Frustrated, I decided to do what I’d been trying to avoid ever since Alcina had left me alone with the crystal ball. I turned my attention to the Dragon’s corpse and the Great Circle just beyond. 

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

I found the Dragon’s body right where I’d left it, the massive corpse sprawled out across the lip of the gash that he’d torn into the city’s flesh. The Guard had set up a perimeter around the cadaver and marked it off with extra-bright glowglobes, defying the shroud of night that would have otherwise enveloped it. From above I could see that it covered more than a city block, which even down in Goblintown made for a lot of ground for a single creature. 

The Guard had roped off the Emperor’s corpse with a silver chain I’m sure was enchanted from one end to the other. Maybe it was there to keep the Ruler of the Dead from taking over the Dragon’s corpse. Or it could have been some kind of elf idea of funeral decoration.