Chapter 158: Dragon’s Bane
The bar was exactly the kind of place that did not have a name worth remembering.
The sign outside had rotted off its hinges long enough ago that nobody remembered what it used to say, and the building itself looked like it had been held together by habit and cheap nails for the last several decades. Inside, the noise hit before the smell did, and the smell hit hard, the particular combination of spilled wine, unwashed bodies, and something that had been burning on the stove long enough to stop being identifiable as food.
Every kind of person that a sensible individual would cross the street to avoid was represented somewhere in the room.
Ken pushed the door open.
Every head turned.
His boots hit the old wooden floor and the sound of them carried in the brief silence that followed his entrance, the particular silence of a room full of dangerous people deciding whether a new arrival was interesting or irrelevant. He held no weapon visibly. He did not look around the room the way someone nervous would look around a room.
The noise came back. People went back to their drinks.
He walked to the counter.
The woman behind it was middle-aged, broad-shouldered, the kind of person who had been running a place like this long enough that she had stopped being surprised by anything that walked through the door. She looked him over once and set down the cup she was cleaning.
"You don’t look like you’re from around here," she said. "Can I get you something?"
"I’m looking for Sinner," Ken said.
She shook her head and kept her hands moving on the cup. "No one by that name."
Ken put his hand on the counter.
"Give me a beer," he said. "And while you pour it, hear me out. I have business for Sinner. Something important." He paused. "I sent a message. Something about a dragon."
Her hands stopped.
She looked at him with different eyes than she had a moment ago.
"Oh," she said quietly. "So it’s you."
Before she could say anything else, the stool beside Ken scraped back and someone dropped into it with the particular heaviness of someone who had been waiting for an excuse.
The man was enormous in every direction.
"What’s a little man like you doing in a bar like this?" he said, his voice carrying the deliberate roughness of someone performing menace. "Get lost or something?"
Ken picked up the beer the woman had set in front of him and took a drink without looking at the man beside him.
"I am not in the mood for this," he said. "You do not have to act like a piece of shit just because you see someone new. Not everything is an opportunity."
The man’s face went through several stages rapidly.
His fist came down on the counter with a crack that rattled every glass within a meter.
"Are you talking to me?"
"There is nobody else talking to me," Ken said, "so it is surely going to be you. Please step off."
The fist came for his face.
Ken moved one hand and caught it.
He looked at the man for the first time, directly, and squeezed.
The cracking sound came before the scream, bones giving way under a grip that had no interest in being gentle about it, blood appearing at the knuckles. The man bent forward, his voice going high and desperate, and Ken held the pressure steady.
"I am seriously not in the mood," he said.
He looked at the woman. "Can I see Sinner?"
She nodded quickly and pointed to the door behind her.
Ken released the man’s hand, watched him crumple against the counter cradling what remained of it, and walked through the door. He found the hallway, found the door at the end of it, pushed it open.
The room inside was warm and cluttered, shelves packed with bottles of varying colors and books with cracked spines, the smell of something chemical underneath everything else. The woman seated at the center of it was dressed in purple and black, beautiful in the particular way that suggested it was deliberate and calculated, her eyes already on the door when he walked through it.
"Mister Ken," she said. "Seems you have come."
"We already had an agreement," he said. "I am here for what I came for."
"Please, at least sit. Have a drink."
"No," he said. "I do not trust your drinks and I do not trust you particularly. Let us keep this simple."
She clicked her tongue and produced a small vial from beneath her work surface, setting it on the table between them.
"Dragon’s Bane," she said. "Lace it on any weapon or mix it with a fog spell. Any dragon that inhales it will suffer heavily." She tilted her head. "I have not sold much of this in a long time. Dragons are hard to come by. Harder to kill, even with this."
"Not my problem," Ken said, and tossed a small cube onto the table.
She picked it up, examined it, her expression sharpening with genuine interest.
"You are certain this contains demon blood?"
"From my family’s collection," he said. "Hard to come by. Use it well."
"Oh, you do not need to tell me that." She slid the vial across to him.
He picked it up, opened it, took a careful sniff. The sharp burning smell matched what he had read about. He closed it and put it away.
"Thank you for the business," he said, and turned for the door.
"You should be careful," she said behind him. "I have an inkling which dragon you are after. I hear it is quite a dangerous one."
He looked back at her over his shoulder.
"None of your business," he said, and shut the door behind him.
He walked back into the bar.
Every person in it was standing.
Weapons out, expressions set, the collective posture of people who had been waiting for the man with the crushed hand to stop crying long enough to organize them into something resembling a response.
Ken looked at all of them.
He cracked his neck.
The first one came in from the left and Ken stepped inside his swing, drove an elbow into his jaw, and redirected his momentum into the man coming from the right. They went down together. Lightning crackled along Ken’s forearm without him reaching for it consciously, the way it always came when things moved fast enough, and the next two men who reached him caught a burst of it that threw them backward into the table behind them.
The table did not survive.
Three came at once from the front. Ken moved between them, not around them, finding the gaps, his hands and elbows doing what his sword would have done with more noise and more mess. One connected with his cheek and he turned with it, used the rotation to bring his knee up into the man’s midsection, felt the impact register, kept moving.
Lightning fired low, catching legs, dropping three at the edge of the group before they closed in.
Someone with a bottle caught him across the shoulder from behind. He turned, looked at the person holding the broken bottle, and hit them once. They sat down immediately and stayed there.
It was over in less than two minutes.
Ken walked through the aftermath to the counter, picked up his beer where he had left it, and took a long drink.
He set the empty cup down.
He walked out.