“Erm, I can’t remember what she said.” I knew full well that the side effects included turning his brain to porridge if the spell was used too much. I wasn’t entirely sure how that might manifest, other than some ear-seepage. It was a risk I was willing to take.

  “And how do we get him out of here? Waking up with no memory of how he got here… He’s going to ask the obvious questions,” Jenny muttered after downing her glass. “I don’t think I want to be involved in turning a Quaestor Chapter Master into a vegetable. I’m going to go clean up the kitchen. Looks like there won’t be many covers tonight.” She stomped through the bead curtain and disappeared.

  “We need a cover story as well,” Esme said.

  “Could we say he blasphemed, and it offended me? Or he hit on Jenny and she frying-panned him?” I suggested.

  “He’s a damn eunuch!” she snapped, and I winced. “Not literally! Well, maybe literally. It depends on which god he likes the most. But the Quaestors don’t really have libidos. They reproduce asexually.” That hit a little too close to home. I opened my mouth to explain my egg situation, then thought better of it. Time and a place, Bob. Time and a place. No need to tell your girlfriend she’s going to be a mum, kind of, at this particular moment. There’d been a few times I was worried when a girlfriend sat me down because she wanted ‘a talk.’ Fortunately, those had all been me getting dumped, not the ‘you’re going to be a dad’ speech.

  “Where’s the cheap whisky?” I asked, having experienced what is known as a lightbulb moment.

  “Now is not the time to get shitfaced!”

  “It’s for him! We splash some booze over him and say he fell over. If we douse him, I’ll carry him to the chapter house and drop him off. Might even get him fired!” I explained.

  “He’s sober. As in never touches a drop.”

  “So we say he fell off the wagon. It’s happened to better eunuchs!”

  “I don’t know, Bob.”

  “You guys have a god of pissheads, right? A god of drunks,” I clarified when she looked confused at the term.

  “Ebrius. Or JD to his followers.” Esme mimed quaffing a drink in what I took to be a religiously significant way. “I think you’d like him.”

  “I don’t really get drunk. Draconic constitution, or the gods taking the piss, one or the other. First name Jack?” I asked after a short pause. She nodded.

  “I never understood the initials. It’s reserved for the inner inebriates,” she said.

  “OK. So we douse him in whisky, blame Ebrius, then I dump him outside his chapter like a teenager on their first bender.”

  I located a bottle of the cheapest whisky I could, and liberally splashed the stuff over his armour, making sure to trickle a good amount under the breastplate like he dribbled it down himself. I am a very clever dragon, but I was still annoyed at wasting so much booze rather than selling it. I lost out in direct revenue and taxation. Sometimes sacrifices had to be made.

  I pecked Esme on the cheek after heaving the man over one shoulder, regretting it the instant the whisky started trickling out between the plates of his armour and staining my good suit. Laundry. The Dungeon must have something set up for that. I sure as hell wasn’t going to wash my own mammal-disguise.

  The streets were quiet, but a few people were out. I got more than a few funny looks as I wandered towards the centre of town with my unconscious package. No one approached me until I reached the Chapter House, just down a back alley from the bank.

  “Halt!” said a voice from the shadows. A woman in full plate materialised and strode towards me, one hand resting on the hilt of her sword. Just what I bloody needed. Ninjas in the Mill. Evicting the Inquaesition from my town rose a few places on my list of urgent priorities. Commercial expansion, the slavers, and war still kept it out of the top three.

  “The Chapter Master was a bit too enthusiastic when he was celebrating Ebrius earlier!” I said cheerfully, swinging my burden around to present him to the Quaestor. “I think he needs a glass of water and whatever this world's equivalent of a hangover cure might be in the morning.”

  “Light Invincible?” she gasped. “He always feared Ebrius would come for his soul. It’s why he went so hard on the brothels and bars! He spent so much time in them, it was like he had a passion for saving the lost souls that haunt such places!”

  “Can I leave him with you?” I asked, holding him out for the Quaestor to take. Good news. He had a history.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “You’ll need to file a report, I’m afraid, sir. His alignment may well have changed, and we’ll need all the information we can get. Please follow me.”

  I trailed after her with a sigh. She led me to a secluded section of the wall and pushed gently on several bricks in sequence. With a grinding noise, the wall slid back and to the side, letting light spill out into the dim alleyway.

  “Secret entrance? Cool.” I needed to get something like that for the lair. If the dungeon was going to be a transit hub, I wanted something a bit better than a wooden hatch between the hordes of thieving strangers and my shinies.

  “If you’ll come this way, sir. Evening, Pilot Harbinger! Light Invincible has switched his allegiance from Sobrii to Ebrius! Can you get me the forms?” said the first Quaestor. The room was brightly lit and felt sterile, like a husk of a reception. There was a noted lack of motivational posters sharing “our values”, but otherwise, I could have been in the reception of any medium-sized business back home. Bar the magical lights, and the bloke in armour sat behind the desk facing the door.

  A man in light chainmail jumped up from his seat behind a desk and looked aghast. “I… I can’t Hairpin Volumnant! Brother Invincible told me… he told me he’d never fall off the wagon. If he did, then that meant something wasn’t right. He swore in the old way!” Pilot babbled. “The old way!” he wagged his eyebrows up and down as though I was supposed to know what the hell he was talking about. Clearly, Hairpin understood. She winced and clasped her hands over her stomach.

  “Why do you have a receptionist sitting behind a secret door? You know what, never mind, I’ll just drop him off here and get out of your hair,” I offered, but I was roundly ignored.

  “So, it’s a conclave then. Blood and fire. How long has it been? Forty years since the last one?” she wondered. This was not going as I had planned. Some once-in-a-generation ritual wasn’t part of my plan to say he got pissed rather than he pissed me off, so I punched him.

  “It will take a while to organise. Three gods actually showed up at the last one! I need to orb the HQ in the city. Sobrii’s parched throat, this could end up involving the Prelate! Light Invincible is his favourite nephew!” Pilot was doing his best to make my day worse.

  “Look, he just had a few drinks and bumped his noggin. I’m happy to attest to that, but I’m a busy dragon and I’ve got places to be, people to eat. You know how it is,” I said, lowering Light to the ground and backing away slowly.

  “You’re the Baronet? You don’t look like much, and you smell really bad,” Hairpin muttered. I scowled in response.

  “Pretty sure Light pissed himself on the walk over here, and he was trying to use his armour to smuggle liquids, which are now all over my suit. I’m going to be sending you a bill for the cleaning.” Greed-goblin always had the best ideas at just the right time.

  “Fine. Of course. Sir Bob, please could you come through into interrogation room… Room seven is free at the moment. One to six are occupied. We just need the basic report documents completed today so we can start the ball rolling on the Conclave,” Pilot stood and pointed me towards a door behind him. Dammit.

  “I’ve got five minutes,” I growled.

  I followed Pilot, Hairpin being left to drag Light Invincible along behind us, down a much darker corridor. The smell of sweat, fear, and shit was overpowered by the red taste of blood in the air. It seeped out from under the doors we passed like a miasmic mist, invisibly filling the clean, neat corridor with a sense of pain and doom.

  I cocked an ear as we passed interrogation room number six and paused.

  “Not like that! You’re hitting at the wrong angle! You need the flat of the paddle to strike my buttocks. You’re rolling it on and spreading out the force! Look! I’m hardly even pink, and you’ve been at this for half an hour! Bloody amateur!” I reached out to try the door, but it was locked.

  “Sir Bob, that’s the wrong room. It’s over here!” Pilot said brightly. I ignored him and twisted the handle hard, hearing a satisfying crunch. I shoved in and found Tex spreadeagled naked, dangling from four chains so that he floated above hot coals. Sweat dripped down his bright red face.

  “Do you mind? I’m trying to teach this idiot how to properly paddle someone! Oh, hi, boss. Look, I know this looks bad, but…” Tex began before trailing off.

  “Boss?” asked Pilot, glancing at me and reaching for the mace swinging at his hip.

  “Missa Somnambulis!” I snapped, and the Quaestors all collapsed. I poked Tex until he woke up. “What the fuck is going on? You were supposed to sell all the smut on the way to the Mill. Not turn this place into the Boons and Mill!”

  “They didn’t all sell! I may have bought a few more copies than I needed… What did you want me to do? Use them as firelighters?” he replied. “Look, Bob, any chance you could make all this go away? Maybe give me half an hour with Pearlescent Peach behind me. I reckon she’s got a good arm, she just needs practice.”

  “No.” I shaped a finger into a claw and slid it between the links of the chain holding his right arm up. A twist and a pull, and the metal parted, leaving him dangling from only three points over a bed of hot coals.

  “Bob, think you can swing me to one side before–” I sliced the chain on the opposite leg, and his two free limbs dangled towards the heat. Among other things. Jesus, Tex really did enjoy being spanked.

  “Brace yourself!” I grinned as I freed his other foot. He displayed impressive agility in his quest to avoid walking on hot coals, landing awkwardly with one arm held behind him by the final chain. “How long have you been here?”

  “About an hour. You can’t just break me out. They’ll know it was you! Look, if you just put the coals out and strap me back in place, then wake Pearlescent up from the spell, and let her work on her form–”

  “No, Tex. Get your shit and let's go.” I was pretty proud of my first jailbreak; it had been completely unplanned, and nothing at all had gone wrong.

  “But they’ll know it was you anyway, so why not let her finish me off–”

  “Oblivastur Recentis!” I pointed at the now-sleeping woman, who was cuddling the long, leather-wrapped wooden paddle like a teddy bear. “She won’t remember a thing. Nor will the others. Where’s your stuff?”

  “It’s all out in Larney’s Wood, I just came into town for a beer. They only got a few gold, no big deal.”

  “No big deal?” Mammals were so disgusting sometimes. “It’s coming out of your share. Let’s cheese it before anyone comes along. I don’t have infinite mana, and I already used the memory-scrubbing spell on Light Invincible a lot.”

  “Oh dear,” Tex said as he found his trousers and started getting dressed. “How much is a lot?”