Dragon Precinct Read Free Page A

animals for which the inn was named, now much more sophisticated renderings of a canine and a waterfowl were carved directly into the wood.
    Another guard was standing at the perimeter of the crowd, and walked briskly over to meet Danthres and Torin. After a moment, Danthres recognized him as Jared, one of the brighter guards assigned to Dragon—which meant that he could occasionally, if absolutely necessary, form a complex sentence.
    “Mornin’, Lieutenants. C’mon, I’ll get you two inside.”
    “What’ve we got?” Torin asked as the guard started pushing the gawkers aside to clear a path so the two lieutenants could actually reach the front door.
    “Y’ever hear of a guy named Gan Brightblade?”
    “Who hasn’t?” Torin said, sounding impressed.
    “Me,” Danthres said, totally unimpressed. “Who is he?”
    Sparing Danthres an incredulous look as he pushed two tall men aside, Jared said, “He’s one’a the greatest heroes of our time, ma’am.”
    “I think Captain Osric served under him once, in the old days,” Torin added, referring to the current Guard captain, who had replaced Brisban. “He’s dead?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Remembering the report, Danthres asked, “But not in a bar brawl?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “You’re not getting out of those three coppers, Danthres,” Torin said.
    Most of the crowd’s utterings were white noise to Danthres. Years of living in the cacophony of Cliff’s End trained her to ignore most background noise for her sanity’s sake, as the elven half of her heritage gave her above-average hearing. But she did catch comments here and there: “Gan Brightblade’s dead!” “I hear tell ’twas those damned elves!” “Nah, it was Chalmraik the Foul! I heard ’em talkin’ about ’im!” “Chalmraik’s dead!” “Guard’ll take care’a it.” “Guard’s a buncha shitbrains!” “ You’re a shitbrain!” And so on.
    The noise died down as they crossed the threshold and Jared closed the large wooden door behind them. Danthres saw that the lobby remained more or less unchanged after three years, except perhaps that it was cleaner and there were a few more cushions against the wall. At present, the space was empty. Directly in front of her, parallel to the back wall of the room, was a large wooden desk, on which sat a fairly elaborate eagle quill that Danthres pegged as a total fake, a battered old ledger, an unnecessarily brightly polished bell, and an inkwell. Behind the desk was a pegboard, about half taken up with keys, and a doorway covered in a curtain, which Danthres assumed led to some kind of staff-only back room. To her left was the staircase leading up to the rooms on the second floor; to the right, the wide entrance to the bar/dining area. Danthres could only see partly into the latter—along with the kitchen and storage area that serviced it, the dining area took up almost the entirety of the ground floor—but what she saw were several people seated on the benches at the long wooden tables, who were more subdued than one would expect from patrons in a bar. Several guards from Dragon were visible around the perimeter of the room, as well.
    “I assume,” Danthres said, indicating the dining area, “that the patrons have all been gathered in there?”
    Jared nodded. “Except for a few we let go back to their rooms, yes, ma’am.”
    Danthres put her head in her gloved hand. “Go upstairs—take a couple of the bigger guards with you—and get everyone out of their rooms. Assuming, of course, they haven’t already jumped out the window and lost themselves in that mob out there. No one is allowed upstairs who isn’t employed by the Guard, is that clear?”
    Nodding so enthusiastically Danthres thought his head would fall off— which would not noticeably depreciate his brain power , she thought—Jared moved toward the staircase.
    “After you do that,” Torin called to him, “send someone back to Dragon—Sergeant Grint’s still running the