Goblintown Justice Read online

anything,” he said. “But as far as the Imperial Dragon’s Guard is concerned at the moment, we’ve found our killer, and he met justice at his own hand.”

  I thought about punching Yabair in his nose again, but Kai grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of the room. Yabair didn’t wish us farewell.

  On the street, Kai strode off, daring me to keep up.

  “What the hell was that back there?” I said, chasing after him. “Since when are you the one cooling me off?”

  He shrugged and kept walking. “You had it wrong, Max. That’s all.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He didn’t say a thing. I grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into a dirty alley, out of the way of the traffic on the street.

  “I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’”

  “Leave it alone, Max.”

  “You know me better than that.”

  Kai sagged against the wall. “He needed a fall guy. He got one.

  It’s over.”

  “He didn’t need a fall guy,” I said, pointing back toward the station. “He needed someone to stop killing guards.”

  “I’m not talking about the elf.”

  He shut his mouth then and waited for me to catch up with what he was saying. I stared at him.

  “You’re talking about the dwarf.”

  He nodded. “Bricht had some troubles with the Guard.”

  “Troubles he took into his own hands.” I wanted to smack someone in the head, but I was afraid I’d pick myself. The thought struck me that maybe Yabair had gotten the right culprit after all. “Did you kill those guards then?”

  Kai shook his head. “The first time it happened, we were as surprised as anyone. Bricht goes into a meeting with this guard, and he comes back covered up to his beard in blood. He swore Sig and me to secrecy and gave us a fat bag of coins to seal the deal.”

  “What about the other times?”

  Kai grimaced. “The second time he was meeting with the boss of the first guard he’d killed. They were dirty, he said, and he was paying them off. But they got greedy and asked for too much.”

  “And Cartucci was the boss’s boss.”

  “Yeah, but killing an elf was going too far. That’s when the real Guard started caring about it. We had to do something to take off the heat.”

  I glared at the orc. “Did you do it?”

  Kai put his hands in front of him, palms out. “Hey, no. Ames and I never got along that well, especially once she joined the Guard, but she always treated me decent. Bricht didn’t want to be anywhere near this one. He needed an alibi, so he had someone else do it for him. We got wind of it, and Sig ran off to warn her.” He grunted. “Guess he got there too late.”

  I clapped Kai on the back and guided him out of the alley and in the direction of the Quill. After this, I figured we both needed a stiff drink. Maybe four.

  “You going after Bricht?” I said as we squinted along the sunlit streets. “Take your revenge?”

  Kai chewed on his upper lip. “Sig and I weren’t that close.” “Really?”

  “Not close enough for me to take on someone like Henrik Bricht.” He gave me a sidelong look. “How about you?”

  To be honest, I considered it. Guys like Bricht were exactly what was wrong with this city. In the end, though, as long as I’d lived here, the city belonged to the Dragon, not me.

  “After everything Sig’s done, maybe we should count what happened to him as justice anyhow.”

  Kai’s lips curled up in a wry smile. “Haven’t we both done worse?”

  “Maybe,” I said as I opened the door to the Quill. “But justice will have to find us all by itself.”

  THE END

  Shotguns & Sorcery

  “Goblintown Justice” first appeared in the summer of 2011 in the Gen Con Writers Symposium's anthology Carnage & Consequences, edited by Marc Tassin. It’s actually the second story I wrote for this setting, which I call Shotguns & Sorcery. The first is “Friends Like These,” and it’s slated to appear in The New Hero 2, an anthology edited by Robin D. Laws and to be published by Stone Skin Press in 2012.

  Shotguns & Sorcery got its start as a roleplaying game world — called ShadowKnight back then — that I had created and licensed out to Mongoose Publishing back in 2001. After my wife became pregnant with quadruplets later that year, though, I had to drop the project, and I’m now finally getting back to it.

  I had such a great time writing stories in it that I’ve decided to use it for my second trilogy of 12 for ’12, my mad plan to write a dozen novels in a year. The Kickstarter drive for those three books should be up and running in February, 2012, so if you like this tale, be sure to head over to https://forbeck.com/12for12 for all the details when it’s ready to roll.