End Times in Dragon City (9 page)

“Sacrifices sometimes have to be made,” Danto said. 

“Right.” Moira’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Just as long as it’s Goblintown making them.” 

“We can’t control the geography of the city,” Belle said. “It’s been set this way for hundreds of years.” 

“It’s set the way you set it up,” Kai said. “Not you personally, Belle, but your parents and all their friends. Them and the Dragon made the city this way, and they damn well did it on purpose.” 

Belle’s cheeks flushed at that. She and Kai had been through this conversation countless times back in the day, and I don’t think she’d missed it one bit. She hated feeling like she was being held responsible for things that happened before she was born. Despite that, Kai had a good point. 

“It’s worse than that,” I said. “They’ve planted explosives in the tunnels that run under Goblintown. They’re going to drop back, corral the zombies into that part of town, and then blow it all to pieces.” 

Kai’s eyes bulged out. He screamed at me in utter fury and frustration. “I knew it,” he said. “I damn well
knew
it!” 

Belle clung to me in some combination of fear and shame. I put an arm around her to comfort her. As an elf, she had a natural tendency to side with the Guard. They had, after all, always been there to protect her. 

That had been the opposite of Kai’s experience though. The Guard only rarely entered Goblintown and never to help the people there. They had a long record of treating Goblintown as an open-walled prison into which they tried to keep the people that troubled them corralled. They might show up to quell a riot, but only if and when it looked like it could spill out into other parts of town. 

I’d spent time with Kai down there. I knew his family and his friends. Most of them were hard people living in a hard part of town, and there wasn’t an innocent among them. 

But none of them deserved to die like that. 

No one did. 

“We have to do something,” Kai said. “We have to stop them.” 

“How?” said Danto. 

“How?” Kai stared at the wizard as if he’d gone mad. 

“Yes, how? I don’t want this to happen any more than you do, but —”

“Ha!” Kai put every bit of his bitterness about this into that laugh, but Danto sloughed it off. 

“But what kind of options do we have? What choice does the Guard have for that matter?” 

“They could stop the zombies at the wall! They could refuse to slaughter thousands of innocents to make it easier on themselves!”

Danto arched an eyebrow at that. “Come on now. Innocents?” 

I tried to get between Kai and Danto, but Belle still held me tight. I didn’t blame Kai one bit for wanting a piece of Danto for that comment, but I couldn’t let him kill the old wizard over it. 

Kai swung his shotgun around like a club and clipped Danto just over the ear with the steel barrels. The wizard fell over, clutching his head, and Kai pointed those barrels between his eyes and cocked his weapon’s triggers. 

“Hey!” Schaef said. “None of that here. Not on my ride!” 

At that point, I gave up on trying to get free of Belle and wrapped my arms around her and Spark instead. The orc was so mad I didn’t think he’d stop with the wizard. He was sure to want more blood than that. I braced myself for the blast. 

Before Kai could squeeze his shotgun’s triggers, though, Moira vaulted over me on her one good hand and landed front of the barrel of the orc’s gun. 

Kai snarled at the halfling. “Stay out of this!” he said. “This is between the wizard and me.” 

Moira didn’t back down an inch. “Knock it off, you idiot! We’re on the same side!” 

“Tell
him
that,” Danto said. 

Moira cuffed the wizard on the other side of his head. “You shut up. I don’t blame him for wanting to kill you, you jackass.” 

I let go of Belle and Spark and moved up onto my knees next to Moira. “Don’t do this, Kai,” I said. “It won’t help.” 

“Why not? We’re all going to die anyway, right? So what’s the difference?” He tried to find a clean angle he could fire his weapon past Moira and me, but Danto squirmed around to make it impossible for him to get a shot off without hurting the rest of us. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t deserve it!” 

“Stop it!” Moira let loose a scream that didn’t seem like it could have fit inside her tiny frame. Kai flinched in pain and lowered the barrels of his shotgun enough to show that she’d gotten his attention. 

“We can’t do this again.” Tears welled in Moira’s eyes, threatening to tumble down her reddened face. “This is just like after Gütmann died, remember?”

Kai lowered his eyes in shame at that. I would have too, but the fact he still had his shotgun pointed in my direction helped me fight the urge. 

“We got along fine until then. We had our differences, but we were able to laugh them off at least. But after Anders died, that’s when we turned on each other.” She glared up at Kai. “That’s when we forgot we were friends.”

Danto lowered his head in shame. Kai stared down at him for a long moment, then shouldered his shotgun. “We’re not done with this,” he said to the wizard, “but we got other business to take care of first.” 

Danto nodded up at the orc. “Fair enough.” 

“We need to stop them,” Kai said, kneeling down next to Belle and me. 

Moira put her arms around the orc’s shoulders and held him tight. “Thank you,” she said. 

He ignored her and looked at me. “Whatever it takes, whoever we need to kill, we have to keep them from doing this. You got that?” 

I reached out and clasped his hand. “Let’s get to work.” 

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

I moved up behind Schaef and pointed out where he should go. “Head right for the lower edge of the Village,” I said. “Follow along there until you spot a group of guards or jailers in uniform. That’s where we need to be.” 

“Got it,” he said with a firm nod. The first time I’d asked Schaef to take me downslope, he’d complained about it, but the fate of the entire city hadn’t been at stake then. This time, he didn’t gripe a bit. That impressed me to no end. 

As Schaef got us where we needed to go, I pulled out the crystal ball and peered into it. I had it show me the battle at the wall. I wanted to know how much time we had to put a stop to Yabair’s plan to destroy Goblintown, and that all depended upon the fate of the Guard atop the Great Circle. 

“Where did you get that?” Danto asked. “Do they just hand those out to every prisoner in the Garrett these days?” 

“They took everything else I had,” I said. “My gun, my wand, my flask. Oh, and my freedom. I don’t think I got the best part of that trade.” 

Kai fished around behind his back and pulled a revolver out of his waistband. He hefted it up for me to see and then pitched to my way. I snagged it in midair. 

It was less of a pistol and more of a handheld cannon. I dropped the crystal ball into my lap and checked the gun’s weight and action. The cylinder held six bullets, but the chamber under the hammer was empty. Kai had been around long enough to know better than to leave a bullet where it might go off accidentally in a gun he was toting around. 

“Ammo?” I asked as I stuffed the pistol into the back of my belt.

“It’s one of Kells’ special jobs. Just tap the barrel on something, and it should load right up for you. The rounds aren’t anything special like you had in that scattergun of yours, but they pack a better punch.” 

Kai liked talking about guns. He used them a lot and knew them well. Plus, I could feel his relief at being able to discuss something besides his neighborhood’s impending massacre. I thanked him for the gun and turned my attention back to the crystal ball as Schaef piloted us through the blackened sky. 

The Guard had fought well against the zombie horde. I peered down over the shoulder of Maurizzio, the captain commanding the forces on the wall, and I could see gangrenous body parts and black-rotted blood splattered all about the place. One part of the wall’s facade had been blown off in a large explosion, presumably to destroy a large force of undead that had managed to top it there. The cavity that had formed there still smoked from the violent blast. 

Maurizzio had a rifle at the ready, and he and the contingent of guards around him were busy picking off the zombies as they crawled into that crater in the wall, realized the hole didn’t go all the way through, and then kept climbing toward the top. The elves seemed to have unlimited ammunition, as I never saw one of them pause to reload, but from the way they conserved their shots, I guessed that the charms on their weapons were burning through their mojo fast. Or maybe those guards were such great shots they didn’t see the need to waste anything. 

Either way, it didn’t look good. I pushed the viewpoint up higher and out over the Great Circle to peer down the full height of the wall, and what I saw churned my stomach. 

After being burned so badly by the flaming oil, the zombies had concentrated their efforts on the soaking wet area around the Great Gate. While this allowed the Guard to concentrate its fire on that point, it also meant the zombies could pile their forces in there faster than they had when they’d stretched their numbers along the front of the wall. They had already reached the top of the Great Gate, and some of them had started to scale the gratings through which the Crystal River’s waterfall flowed. 

If the Ruler of the Dead’s army had been outfitted with weapons other than hands and teeth, the zombies would already have shot their way into the city. The threat they posed didn’t arise from their armament, though, but their sheer numbers and their absolute lack of fear. No living soldiers would have pushed on so hard in the face of such terrible firepower as the Guard brought to bear on them. The sight of the Great Circle alone would have daunted them. 

The zombies were as unrelenting and inescapable as death itself. Struggle against them as you might, fight them as long as you could, but in the end they would triumph. Time always sided with the dead. 

Try explaining that to an immortal elf though. They’d always been on the winning side of that battle, and it was part of a war few of them ever expected to lose. Faced with the greatest threat the city had ever seen, though, they stood there on the front lines, leading the fight to protect their home. 

If only they hadn’t been willing to sacrifice the rest of us to win it. 

Even elves got tired, though, and the soldiers on that wall had been battling the dead for hours with no respite in sight. The dead might pull back at the break of dawn, but they just as well might not. If they managed to get inside the city before that, I couldn’t imagine they’d retreat just to get some relief from the sunlight. At that point, they’d just charge all the way up the mountain, no matter how bright the light might be. 

“There they are!” Schaef said. 

I tore my gaze away from the crystal ball and looked to where the halfling was pointing. There on the street in front of us — I recognized it as Low Pavement — stood a line of guards. The majority of them hailed from the Auxiliary Guard but some wore the blue garb of the city’s prison guards too. They all had their weapons out and ready, mostly rifles, although I saw many brandishing pistols and wands instead, which would prove more useful in the house-to-house battles sure to happen in this part of the city. 

Low Pavement marked the unofficial border between Goblintown and the Village. The city started to get sketchy here, at least by human standards, and it slid into downright slummy as it ran downhill. Kells and Cindra’s place sat just south of it, but on the far east side of town. The Quill was only a stone’s throw from here, on the better side of the border, but not by much.

I lived just past the upslope edge of the Village, in the Big Hill district, the halfling part of town — or I had until Belle’s sister Fiera destroyed my place. It was a wonderful part of the city, quiet and homey and filled with people who spent more time enjoying good food and drink than worrying about how they might find their next meal in the first place. I’d been comfortable there, but Low Pavement was where I felt most at home. 

That’s why I’d started hanging out at the Quill after I’d dropped out of the Academy. That’s why I’d bought the place when I had the cash to manage it. And that’s why I spent most of my evenings down here. 

It wasn’t a safe place. It wasn’t even always fun. But wow, was it alive. It felt like it had a pulse. 

Compare that to the Elven Reaches, a distant place of cold and purposeful beauty. I’d only been there a few times, not because I couldn’t wrangle an invitation but because it had always felt like a well-appointed waiting room for the city morgue. The Guard could fight to protect that. I’d put my life on the line for this. 

“Find Yabair!” I said. “He won’t be the one to give the order — that’ll come from Maurizzio out on the wall — but he’ll be the one to carry it out.” 

“Low Pavement’s a long street,” Schaef said. “Cuts across the entire city.” 

“Then fly faster.” I glanced down at the crystal ball again. “We don’t have any time to waste.” 

As I watched the action at the Great Circle, I saw the zombies had managed to top the wall. For all the effort the Guard had put into stopping them, they hadn’t done more than slow them down. 

Maurizzio shouted at his soldiers to keep firing as he hauled back from the Great Gate. As he did, he turned and drew his wand. He held it up into the air, and he loosed a spell into the sky with a sharp snap of his wrist. 

I could see the results of that spell without the benefit of the crystal ball. It lit up the night with a gold and crimson burst of light, flaring for a moment like an angry sun before gently fading away. 

“There he is!” Moira shouted. She’d moved up to sit next to Schaef and help spot for him so he could concentrate on his flying. She stabbed her index finger straight out ahead of us, right at a group of guards that had gathered in the Old Market Square, an open plaza slapped almost in the dead center of Low Pavement.