The Half Dwarf Prince (6 page)

Jerrie was just a few inches above five and a half feet tall. His face was mildly sca
rred from acne and fighting, but he didn’t have any big, noticeable scars. He had dirty blond hair that was cut in a straight line at the top of his ear. It looked like someone had set a bowl on top of his head and just shaved all the hair off up to the edge of the bowl. He had actually tried doing that once. It hadn’t worked out near as well as he had planned. It had looked bad enough that people took notice. And being noticed was one thing Jerrie wanted avoid.

Jerrie
had avoided attention all of his life. He had found it was much easier to accomplish things and to stay alive if he looked like everyone else. The bowl cut was a common hair cut in Ambar. He wore plain cotton and linen shirts. He had even learned to fight with knives only. People took notice of a man with a sword, but knives were easy to conceal, and even unconcealed they were so common they did not attract a lot of attention. Galen had taught him to use the knives. Galen had taught him everything.

His mother died giving birth to Jerrie, and when he was only six years old, a Black Dragon assassin murdered his father out of hand. His father hadn’t done anything to provoke the assassin; he had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The neighbors quickly turned Jerrie, now an orphan, over to the city. He found out later that they had also taken what little he and his father had owned. He was left with nothing but a burning desire to avenge his father.

Jerrie
ran away from the orphanage, and when he left he took a knife from the kitchens. It wasn’t a big knife; it was one the cook used to cut vegetables. He wandered the city for days before he finally saw his first Black Dragon. He followed the man in the black robe for hours, until the man went inside a building in the nicer part of Ambar. It was dark when the man came out. Jerrie walked up behind him and brought his little knife down toward the man’s back. The knife stopped just before it touched the man's robes. The Black Dragon turned around and smiled.

“You foolish, foolish boy. Do you know what this robe means?”

“It means you’re a Black Dragon,” Jerrie said, his anger building. He hadn’t been scared that day, only angry. Looking back he realized he should have been afraid, but he had been too young to understand the severity of the situation.

“So you knew what I was and still you tried to rob me. You are more foolish
than I thought,” the man said, still wearing that big, stupid smile.

“I wasn’t trying to rob you, I was trying to kill you. You killed my father,” he
said.

The man in the robes lost his smile and raised an eyebrow. “It is possible that I did, but maybe it was another. How do you know I killed him?”

“A Black Dragon killed him. I will kill all of you,” Jerrie said, as he tried to get his wrist free of the man's grasp.

“
Well in that case, I think it would be best if I sent you to meet your father,” the man told him, his smile returning. He had raised a hand toward Jerrie’s face, but then his head had jerked back. He fell to his knees.

Jerrie was looking the man in the eyes
now. Behind the Black Dragon stood another, much bigger man. The man held the Black Dragon’s hair in one hand. His other hand came out from behind the Black Dragon’s back. In that hand was a knife, and the hand and blade were covered in blood.

The bigger man looked down at him. “Well
, you came to kill this man. Go on. Finish the job.” The man held the Black Dragon’s head back.

Jerrie looked from the big man who had just saved him to the Black Dragon on his knees in front of him.
The Black Dragon was already dying. He was gasping for air, and Jerrie could see that he was only staying on his knees because the big man was holding him up. He hesitated only a second before running his little blade across the man’s throat. Blood sprayed all over the front of his clothes. The big man let the Black Dragon fall to the ground.

“What’s your name
, boy?”

“Jerrie. What
’s yours?”

“I am Galen. You got guts
, kid, I’ll give you that. You need to get some brains, though. You want to kill Black Dragons?”

“I want to kill them all,” Jerrie bravely replied.

“Were is your momma? I heard what you said about your pa.”

“My momma died making me
.”

The man nodded. “Who takes care
o’ ya now? Where do you stay?”

“I ran away from the orphanage. That place ain’t for me.”

The big man stared at him for a while. “Well, come along then. If you want to kill Black Dragons you’re going to have to learn how to kill first. You gotta learn to use your head. Now search that man. Whatever he has is yours. You killed him. That was a wizard, by the way. Maybe he’s got something magic. That’s how I got this magic blade. It cuts through their magic shields.”

Jerrie searched the body and found one of the most useful items he would ever
own in his life. He still carried it today. When he held the wizard’s ring in his hand, Galen’s blade began to glow. He didn’t tell Galen about that. He didn’t want him to take the ring, and Jerrie knew he couldn’t stop Galen if he tried. He also took a small bag of silver and coppers from the wizard. That was how Jerrie had begun his time with Galen.

Galen was a bodyguard for merchants and nobles. For ten years Jerrie lived with Galen, and during that time Galen taught him how to fight. Galen taught him how to fight with sword, spear, and shield, but Jerrie always went back to the knives. Galen said that his ability with the knife was amazing. Galen forced him to practice fighting with another bodyguard who worked with him. Each of them had a different fighting style, and each of them helped Jerrie develop his. He learned that initially the man with the longer weapon had the advantage, but once Jerrie got inside that reach, he just needed one well-placed cut or stab, and the other man would be done.

The hardest part was the hits he would take on his forearms deflecting the swing that always came to keep him back. Galen had bracers made for him
—thin steel bracers that protected his forearms from just above the wrist to just below the elbow. They slowed his arms down at first, but eventually he got used to them. He never tried to block a blow with the bracers. The metal was very thin—it was more to protect him from cuts then anything else—so he used the bracers to deflect and redirect blows as he made his way inside his opponent’s guard.

When he was seventeen
, Black Dragon assassins came to their home. They had somehow discovered that they had killed the wizard years ago. Things like that had a way of coming out in the city. Usually someone who saw something years ago and was down on his luck sold the information to whoever might be interested. People died everyday because of money.

How the Black Dragons found out didn’t really matter. One day Jerrie was training with Galen. When they took a break the other bodyguards
who worked for Galen were standing around them. Galen looked around, realizing that nearly half of them were missing. He raised the sword in his hands. It was a dulled practice sword, but Galen was far better than any of the others. He would be able to use it to get one of their swords from them.

“So who was it? Who has enough pull to turn my own men against me
?” Galen asked the seven men standing around them.

“It was the Black Dragons
,” one of the men said as he stepped forward. “They gave us two choices: kill you and get paid, or die for you. Five of us died. Seven chose to live.”

Galen looked at Jerrie
, then pulled his magical dagger from inside the back of his waist and tossed it on the ground in front of Jerrie. Then he turned back to the men and smiled. “When you came here, you chose death.” Then he was running toward the man who had stepped forward to speak for the others.

Jerrie saw
another of the bodyguards start forward toward Galen, who was still about six steps away. Jerrie threw the dulled dagger in his right hand. It flew between Galen and the man he was charging and buried itself in the throat of the man who’d begun to try and gang up on Galen. Jerrie had known that the dagger wasn’t sharp enough or pointed enough to punch through the man's chest so he had aimed higher.

The
first bodyguard had turned his head as the blade flew past his face. He looked only long enough to see that it had hit the man stepping up beside him, but that was all the distraction Galen needed. When the man turned back to face him, Galen had leapt forward, his sword already out in front of him. The man tried to block. He was almost fast enough. Galen’s sword hadn’t buried in his gut, but the first inch or so had punctured the stomach, and when the man’s sword knocked it away, it tore open his stomach. He fell to the ground, trying to cover the huge wound. He was already dying, his intestines creeping out of the wound around his hands.

Jerrie had grabbed Galen’s magical dagger in his right hand. He had
another dulled training dagger in his left. It wouldn’t do much damage slashing, but he could still stab with it. He ran to the man on the far right. Galen had already picked up the fallen man’s sword and was moving to the left. They would have a better chance if they didn’t let themselves get surrounded. In reality, the other men didn’t have much of a chance, but anything could happen in a fight. A piece of gravel could turn an ankle and change the whole dynamic of a fight. That was one of Galen’s many lessons.

T
wo of the five remaining men came at Jerrie while the other three turned toward Galen. The first man thrust his sword straight at Jerrie’s stomach. Jerrie was at a full sprint, so he didn’t have time to counter. He threw his head back, falling to his knees. He slid under the blade on his knees, the blade an inch from his face. Jerrie raised his blade up into the man’s groin as he barreled into his legs. They rolled away together. When Jerrie came to his feet the other man did not. Jerrie turned and ducked as the other swordsman, who had crept up behind, tried to decapitate him. Jerrie leapt back out of range of the backswing and was heading back towards the man the moment his feet touched the ground. The man had barely started bringing his sword back in front of him when Jerrie grabbed his wrist and slid Galen’s magical dagger between the man’s ribs and into his heart.

When he pulled the dagger free he looked toward Galen. He had already put one man down. He was about to put the second one down, just as the third pulled a small crossbow from his hip and fired. Jerrie was already sprinting to help, but he couldn’t get there in time.

The bolt had buried deep in Galen’s thigh. It wasn’t fatal, but it had been enough to drop him to his knees. The man who had been on his heels before quickly went on the offensive. Galen tried to dodge the thrust aimed at the center of his chest, but he wasn’t able to move fast enough. The sword buried into his shoulder. He pulled the bolt out of his thigh and buried it in the man’s stomach. Then he turned around to the crossbowman, who was now coming at him with a sword raised over his head. Then the man’s head suddenly jerked back, and his sword fell out of his hands. A dagger came around and slid across the man’s throat. Blood spayed all over him. Galen wiped the blood from his eyes and looked up at Jerrie as he let the man fall. “Don’t forget, I taught you that.”

Jerrie tried to help Galen, but the blade had severed the artery in his armpit. Jerrie held him in his arms and watched as the life left his eyes. He looked around at the men they had killed. They weren’t Black Dragons, but they had
been sent by them. For the second time in his life the Black Dragons had taken a father from him.

He knew he couldn’t stay here. The Black Dragons didn’t leave loose ends. He was an orphan again. He took Galen’s knife. He went inside and filled a shoulder pack with simple clothes
, three pouches of silver, and two pouches of gold. He would have to be careful with the gold. Gold might attract attention. He washed himself, changed, and headed out into the streets.

That had been six years ago. Since then he had killed at least a hundred Black Dragons. He stayed to himself. He had lived in a small hovel. People in the poorer areas didn’t ask many questions. No one bothered him. That was what gave him the opportunity to hunt the Dragons.

But i
t had been harder lately. The mage Anwar had killed a lot of them, according to rumors, so most of the Black Dragons were in hiding now. He had heard that Vingaza’s personal assassins were back in town. It had taken him a couple of days to track them down. Neither of them wore the Black Dragon clothing, and they had avoided the popular locations of their guild, but he had found them. He didn’t know if this meant that Vingaza was back, but those two assassins were two of the most feared Black Dragons alive. Now he was hunting them.

Jerrie knew that these two were dangerous, but he was a master at not being seen. He would walk along in crowds. He would duck behind buildings or into alleys, where he could scurry up onto a roof in seconds. He would intersect his targets or lead them. Right now, he just followed. The last thing he wanted was to try to square off against both of them in the open. He was good, but even he couldn’t win that fight. He had to surprise them. He had to take out one of them before he even knew Jerrie was there. Then he could face off against the other. That would likely be the fight of his life, and for his life.