I have been dead before. I would like it on record that it does not get better with practice.
There was nothing. Not dark, not cold, not a hallway with a light at the end of it — nothing I have a word for, and no sense of how long it went on. Then a voice, and it wasn’t in my ears, because I didn’t have ears. Friar Zeckus was talking straight into my soul. He wanted to know if I was willing to come back. I said yes before he’d finished asking. Then he told me the price.
Five thousand six hundred platinum. Fifty-six thousand gold. There was nothing left of me — I had come apart into ash inside my own boots and the dragon had beaten its wings over the pile on its way out — so there was no wound to close and no body to call back to. He would have to build me a new one from the ground up. That is the expensive kind.
So I haggled. Understand the position I was in: no body, no purse, no way to check my own accounts, and a priest who had every right to hang up on me. But I knew something. The Duke let slip last time we spoke that Zeckus is one of the people in on the quiet business under Elkenalden — the thing we do not write down and I am not writing down here — and I am, whatever else I am, useful to that business. I asked him first whether the line was secure. He said he was speaking directly to my soul and only a god could listen in. I asked whether the Empress counts as a god yet. He said not yet. Then I made my pitch: that I am imperative to taking out a certain piece of trash, that I hit the thing in question harder than anyone else we’ve got, that the nobility would take it poorly to learn I’d been left in a jar because I was short of coin, and that I did not ask to die — I was ignored by my own party at the worst possible moment and took the whole of it alone. Most of that was true. I oversold the parts that weren’t and I oversold them badly; I could feel him not believing me. He said so, politely.
But he came down. I opened at two thousand, he refused, and we walked it back and forth — twenty-five hundred, three thousand, four thousand, thirty-five hundred — and landed at three thousand two hundred fifty platinum. Two thousand three hundred fifty saved. I asked whether I could get that discount in writing. I asked whether he took IOUs. I asked about instalments, and about post-dating a cheque, and at that point I felt the connection to him start to thin out, so I told him to just bring me back and I’d sort the money on the ground.
And then a body assembled itself out of the air of that little cloister, tattoos and all, and a light came down through the ceiling and settled into the eyes, and the eyes were mine. Entirely naked, mind you. As I opened my mouth to say something, Friar Zeckus said: that’s the last time you’re getting a discount from me.
Here is what I missed, as Spesof tells it. With me in a heap and Momen reduced to a drooling child, he made one grab — one — at whatever of me and mine he could scoop off the floor, got it onto the flying carpet, flew through Momen to knock him aboard, and shouted at Ignis to follow. The dragon didn’t chase them. It spread its wings, beat them twice to scatter what was left of me across the flagstones, and smirked. Duergar were already massing on the pharmacy as they cleared the rooftops. The carpet carried them up out of Jurgetown and into the Imperial Plains in time for the sunrise, which Spesof reports was beautiful, and he cried the whole way to the capital with my belongings in his lap and an idiot dwarf slumped against his shoulder. The guards at the gate didn’t know him and made him state his name and business. His business, he told them, was that this friend is stupid and this friend is dead.
He got eight things out. The bag of holding, thank every god there is. The quiver, the immolator, my armour, the ring of water walking, the eyes of charming, the boots of the winterlands, and my thieves’ tools.
Everything else is on a floor in Jurgetown. Both slings — including the two birds sling, which I had only just gotten good with. The periapt of wound closure, which is a bitter joke on a corpse that had no wounds. The cloak of elvenkind. My spell scroll. My bag of tricks. My Uno deck. And my hats. All of my hats. I got out of bed as a brand new man, ran to the table where he’d laid it all out, swept my hands across it twice looking for something that wasn’t there, and went down on my knees. You couldn’t have gotten one hat. He said it was the best he could do. Momen said I could buy another hat, hire a tailor, as though a tailor can sew you a reputation. My pirate hat is gone. My identity is dead.
Then the bill. I put in two thousand platinum, and made them split the remaining twelve fifty between them, six hundred twenty-five each, on the argument that we were all standing in that pharmacy and it was Momen’s mouth that got us into a dragon fight in the first place. Spesof countered that I’m the reason we were in Jurgetown at all, chasing a wind-up toy, and that he’s the one who carried me out. Fair on both counts. He paid anyway. Zeckus had already brought him a receipt for the whole thing so we can invoice Jurge at the end of it, which is the funniest document I own. Momen’s cure came out of the same visit — Greater Restoration, eleven hundred twenty-five gold, hands on the head, a few quiet words, and the Professor could think again. He’d otherwise have stayed a blank-eyed child for a month at least.
I am down to five thousand platinum. That is what I have to show for years of this. Spesof told me to stop buying avocado toast. Neither of us has any further interest in the Wind-Up Merchant.
We went back to the palace to tell the Duke about the extra dragon living down the road from him. He listened to Momen’s account — the audience, the offer we couldn’t refuse, the hunt, my death, his uselessness — and then held up a stack of papers and said he’d been meaning to brief us. He had gone through the records to find the nearest adult dragon we could kill for its blood, on account of the plague, and the name that came up was Jurge. Spesof put his head in his hands. Momen shut his eyes. I asked if I’d heard that correctly or if I was still coming back to life wrong.
So the question is which dragon we kill. Momen laid it out plainly: the purple one is built to beat us. It goes through walls, it goes for the soft ones at the back, and it unmakes minds, and we have nothing to armour our heads with. Jurge is an adamantine dragon — the Duke knew the type. Imperious, rules with an iron fist, demands obedience beyond what even other dragons expect, and fiercely protective of anything he considers his, which includes his subjects. In a fight he simply walks at whoever hits hardest and trusts his hide to hold, and he’ll stand in front of his own soldiers. His breath is sound: thunder loud enough to shatter rock and split armour. A tough, beefy pain in the arse, as Momen put it, but one that doesn’t go for our weaknesses. Jurge it is. The trick is getting him without fighting an entire city of duergar to reach him — Momen wants him drawn up onto the surface, where he can’t hide, and there was some talk of getting Rafnar to haul a dragon out of his own hole against his will. The Duke, for his part, thinks Jurge poses little threat as things stand; his duergar can’t come up into the sun, and any that got near Elkenalden would freeze.
Spesof asked about the pardon, and got it, more or less. The Duke allowed that murdering a Count is difficult to overlook — but he also now has papers showing the Count in question was up to fraud and conspiracy, so if TM Opera O helps of their own free will, an arrangement could be reached. Not inside the capital, though. If that dragon sets foot in Elkenalden they will know, and they will arrest him.
So we walked an hour northeast, found a patch of forest, and Spesof looked up and said the name three times. You hear the wings first. Then a choir, from nowhere. Then a shaft of light, and laughter, and the dragon descending through it striking poses on the way down before landing neat as a dancer. Gentlemen. You have called for me.
Momen briefed him and got corrected twice, cheerfully. The plague isn’t at risk of crossing the border out of Torveldus — it is already across. And purple dragons are not mind readers, which was the whole basis of Momen’s plan; they are mind destroyers. A distinction, Opera said, often lost on the short-lived. Then Momen laid out the scheme — parley with Ursus, have him bait Jurge up out of the ground, kill him somewhere of our choosing — and Opera agreed it was very well thought out and had every chance of success, and then said it would not be honourable, and that in the face of evil we must do good, and that we should do away with these silly plans and simply charge in and take the thing by the throat. Momen observed that his hands are not sized for choking a dragon. Opera called this a minor trifling detail, put a fingertip on his head, said enlarge, and made him the biggest he has ever been in his life. Spesof shaded his eyes and asked how the weather was up there.
Opera took the pardon well — said it would make it easier to get into bars and talk to people — and took seriously Momen’s point that the duergar under Jurge aren’t evil, only loyal, and that we’d rather not cut through them. He admitted he doesn’t know Jurge, who hides from the light, and that a very strict ruler isn’t necessarily a wicked one. Momen offered the evidence for the prosecution: that during our audience even Jurge’s own captain of the guard was in fear for his life, and that somebody in that crowd shouted death to tyrants and threw a fireball at the stage, and that inspired revolutionaries are rarely a sign of good government. So Opera will go and have an audience with Jurge himself tomorrow and judge the man’s character, and we’ll meet him at the mouth of the cave at the same hour, after a day to put ourselves back together. We marked it for him on the map. Down Hamilton Road. Two beats of the wings and he was gone, choir and all.
Back to the palace for the third time in one day, which the Duke remarked upon. Spesof protested that the first visit only really counted as one of them, seeing as Momen was mentally elsewhere, and the Duke produced the guest book to prove otherwise — Spesof’s name in passable handwriting, and beneath it an unbroken scribble of ink that could not be called writing by anyone. And I will note that nobody signed me in. I was ash on a table.
The Duke asked what troops we want. Momen doesn’t want levies; they wouldn’t so much as distract the thing. What we need is anything that can punch through adamantine hide or magic enough to bind and slow him. Siege weapons exist, apparently. We’ll see what turns up.
One last piece of business, and it’s mine. My Uno deck is lying on a pharmacy floor in a duergar city, and I intend to build another. Momen tells me that if I wanted to make them by the hundred I’d need an engraver to cut the plates, a press, a man who knows how to run it, and proper cardstock so the things don’t fall apart in a week. All of which sounds like a lot of work when there are presses already standing somewhere in this city with idle capacity and owners who could be reasoned with. I only need five thousand platinum’s worth of good ideas to get back to where I was this morning. I’ve had worse mornings.