by Clive Barker
“Shouldn’t we go back and get some help?” the Sea-Skipper said.
“There’s no time. You did hear that roar, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“It was a dragon, wasn’t it?”
“Um . . . maybe.”
“A very irritated dragon? And please don’t say maybe!”
“Possibly.”
“Then let’s go. Where there are dragons, we’ll probably find Finnegan Hob. And hopefully he won’t be alone.”
“All right,” said Deaux-Deaux. “Just give me a moment.” He went into the thicket and picked two very large thine nuts, which he cracked together. “This is hot weather for a Sea-Skipper to be without a little wet-down now and again.”
The nuts drizzled their cool clear milk on his face and shoulders.
“That’s better!” he said.
And he was off down the road, with Malingo following him.
“What a peculiar road,” Malingo remarked as they leaped. “These stones are—”
“Begging your pardon, Cap’n, but I don’t think these are stones.”
“What are they then?”
“They’re bones.”
“Dragon bones?” said Malingo.
“Of course. You’ve heard, surely, of the Dragon Road? It’s the skeleton of the enormous worm that murdered the Princess Boa. Its head lies no more than fifteen yards from the door where it had gained entry to the cathedral and unraveled its tongue—”
“How was it that nobody saw it?” Malingo said.
Both he and Deaux-Deaux were gasping now, from the effort of leaping from vertebra to vertebra, but Malingo wanted answers.
“A lot of people have wondered about that over the years. I think the people outside the cathedral were murdered by assassins so they could not raise the alarm when the dragon approached. As for the deed itself, the dragon was very sly. It didn’t enter the cathedral, you see. It pushed its snout against the door, and then its tongue, which was the true weapon in this murder, slid up the aisle. It was fully thirty foot long—”
“A tongue thirty feet long? Why didn’t it choke itself on the thing?”
“Who knows how these beasts live? Or why they do what they do? The point is that the creature was well informed. It knew that the Princess’ train reached to the door and that it could weave its tongue up through its folds, threading itself through the bows and the flowers. Nobody was looking down at the ground, you see. Everybody was watching Boa and Finnegan. They were just getting ready to exchange their vows.”
“Which they never got to do.”
“No. The creature waited until the very last moment—just before the Princess said: I do. The words were on her lips. But before she could speak, the dragon’s tongue slipped around her throat and—”
“Yes, yes. I can do without the details,” Malingo said.
“Sorry. You asked.”
“Tell me who was responsible for this. Somebody trained the dragon, presumably?”
“No doubt,” said Deaux-Deaux.
“So who?”
“Nobody knows. It would have taken a creature of great cruelty. Dragons only respond to hurt in their training, or so I’ve heard.”
“Huh. After all these years . . . nobody knows? Amazing. And what about the dragon? Was it interrogated?”
“No. Finnegan killed it in a fit of fury. Caught it before it could get ten yards.”
“How did he kill such a monster?”
“Oh, he was fearless. He leaped into the dragon’s throat and allowed himself to be swallowed. Then he stabbed all its vital organs from the inside and hacked a hole in its flank and exited the corpse that way! There was a lot of talk about what to do with the body, I believe, but in the end it was decided to leave it here to be picked clean. In time it became a road. And a kind of monument.”
“And nobody was ever brought to justice?”
“There was never proof enough to accuse anyone,” Deaux-Deaux said. “Though I don’t think there was ever much doubt of where the true guilt lay.”
“Where?”
“In the House of Carrion,” Deaux-Deaux replied. “The old woman, Mater Motley, was probably the chief culprit.”
“But she was never questioned?”
“No. And there wasn’t a judge on the Great Council who would dare stand up against Mater Motley. They’d be too afraid of waking up in the middle of the night and finding a stitchling sitting at the bottom of the bed, sharpening its tail.”
They were almost at the end of the Dragon Road now. Climbing a shallow ridge, they came in sight of the great mass of churned earth where Pejorius had appeared out of the ground and the pit, over which a pall of dirt hung.
“Well, well,” said Malingo. “Look at this. We’ve found who we were looking for. Now all we’ve got to do is stop them from being eaten alive.”
Deaux-Deaux drew a long, slim knife.
“Have you ever fought a dragon before?” Malingo asked him.
“No,” said Deaux-Deaux. “You?”
Malingo shook his head.
“But there’s a first time for everything,” he said, and letting out a bloodcurdling cry, he raced down the incline toward the pit and whatever had come up out of it.
Chapter 40
A Tale of Endless Partings
THE DRAGON, THOUGH HORRIBLY wounded, had not finished with her mischief. She continued to knot and unknot her body in its final convulsions, spitting out an insane catalogue of nonsenses, interspersed with eerie periods of lunatic laughter and speaking in tongues. Then, suddenly, she would recover her lucidity and lunge out at whoever was within range of her jaws. Mischief was the next victim. She snatched hold of the brothers and threw back her head so as to swallow them in a single gulp. But Mischief was in no mood to be swallowed. He braced his feet against the animal’s lower jaw and his hands against her upper, nicking fingers and toes on the teeth of the thing as he did so. Then, making his body as stiff as a board, he simply refused to let the dragon close her mouth.
Had Pejorius been completely healthy, this maneuver would not have carried the day. The worm would simply have snapped her mouth closed, cracking Mischief’s spine and swallowing him bent back in two. But the wound she had sustained from Geneva’s sword was weakening her. Now that the blade was no longer in the wound, the dragon’s blood ran freely from the hole, into which they had now all pitched themselves. The bitter stench of sin and corruption filled the air.
“We can’t hold on here forever!” Mischief hollered. “Will somebody please—”
The last word was uttered by Fillet, Drowze, Moot, Slop, Serpent, Sallow and Pluckitt at the same time as Mischief, a brotherly chorus of: “HELP!”
As they loosed this shout, Deaux-Deaux appeared at the edge of the pit, with Malingo at his side.
“Who are you?” Finnegan said to them.
“The Fantomaya sent us!”
“Then HELP US!” the brothers yelled again.
“Let’s just finish the beast!” Finnegan hollered. He waved to the newcomers. “If you’ve got a weapon, use it!”
Deaux-Deaux unsheathed his dagger and jumped down into the pit, and on a cue from Finnegan, the Sea-Skipper, Tom, Geneva and Hob pitched themselves at the dragon, thrusting their knives into her throat at the same time. There was no shriek, not even a sigh. The dragon’s eyes simply emptied of life, and she sank down on the ground in her own blood.
“Gone,” said Tria, very quietly.
Mischief’s body—which was still wedged between Pejorius’ lower and upper jaw—suddenly slipped, and for two or three fearful seconds it seemed the brothers would slip down the dragon’s dead throat. A chorus of cries came from the Johns. McBean was the first to their aid.
“Hold on, hold on!” he yelled, reaching down to catch hold of John Mischief’s arm. There was a second chorus (this of gratitude) from the brothers, and then applause from everybody when Mischief finally jumped down onto the ground.
“That was entirely to
o close for comfort,” John Moot remarked.
“What happened to the infant?” Finnegan said, looking around.
“He slithered away,” said John Fillet.
“You saw him go?” Finnegan went on. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“We were in the jaws of his parent at the time,” Fillet replied.
“He won’t get far,” Malingo replied. “Besides, what harm can he do? He’s alone.”
Finnegan looked grim. “I’ll tell you what he can do. He can make more of his species, when he comes to breeding age,” he said. “Dragons are hermaphrodite. As long as there’s one, there will be many again in time. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Malingo,” said the geshrat; so began a round of introductions and explanations and thanks and welcomings. By the time it was all over, the dust of conflict was beginning to settle. As it did so, a sprightly melody rose from somewhere in the thicket, which was picked up quickly from other places. The animal life in the vicinity was singing for joy, it seemed, now that the reign of Nythaganius Pejorius was over.
In fact, the real reason for this sudden chorus was rather more pragmatic; it was a summons to a feast of dragon flesh. In a matter of half a minute, birds came flying in from every direction: some as small as hummingbirds, some the size of vultures, some as elegant as herons, some as ungainly as penguins. Dozens at first, then hundreds, until there was a chattering assembly of several thousand birds covering the carcass of Pejorius from snout to tail; pushing their beaks under the scales of the beast to first fetch out the mites and lice which thrived upon the dragon’s body, and then pecking through the skin to get to the rich, gamy meat beneath.
The noise of their dinnertime conversation was so loud that it drowned out all possibility of any exchanges between the company, so at Finnegan’s suggestion they left the flocks to their gluttony and followed him to a small house made of white stone, which had been his residence while he was searching for the dragon. It was a spartan dwelling: a mattress on the floor, with a threadbare blanket and a comfortless pillow; a fire guttering in the grate with the remains of a pot of stew left on the hearth. A map of the Nonce was pinned up on the wall, with an extensive network of lines upon it, tracking Finnegan’s various journeys around the Hour. And in pride of place above that uncomfortable bed, a simple painting of a pale-skinned, dark-haired young woman in a turquoise and orange tunic, roughly nailed to the cracked plaster.
“Who is the lady?” said Deaux-Deaux. The question earned him a dig in the ribs from Malingo. “What did I say?” Deaux-Deaux asked.
“That’s my lady,” Finnegan replied, staring up at the picture. “My Princess Boa.”
“Oh . . . yes . . . of course,” said Deaux-Deaux.
“She’s beautiful,” said Tria.
“The painting shows nothing of her true beauty. It’s just an echo of an echo. She changed the air she breathed; she changed the earth she walked upon. She changed everything she saw, so that the world became new.” Finnegan looked away from the picture and out through the window, though the view was partially obscured by a mass of plant life that had sprung up after the last rains. “The only way I can make sense of her passing is to be the destroyer of the race that murdered her. Only when every dragon is dead will I let my life go.”
“Let your life go?” said Geneva, horrified at what Finnegan was implying. “How could you ever do such a thing; even think of it?”
“Because my life isn’t here, in the Hours. It’s with her. I want to be wherever my Princess is. I’m impatient to be gone, away, forever. But not until all the worms are cold.”
“Well, there can’t be many left,” said John Mischief brightly.
“You’re right,” said Finnegan, with something like pleasure coming into his voice. “The job’s almost done. I regret losing that infant . . . that was my stupidity. I should have known he would slip away. But if I go now, and quickly, the creature will not have grown too big.”
“But you’re injured,” said Geneva.
“I heal fast. And I’ve been dealt worse wounds than this and survived, believe me. There’s no time to be wasted. When dragons are high up the royal line, as that infant is, they grow fast. If they have the right nourishment, they can double their size in an hour.”
“You’re joking.”
“I don’t joke a lot any longer,” Finnegan said with a tone of regret in his voice. “Certainly not about worms.” He turned his sad eyes on the rest of the company. “Please rest here if you would like,” he said. “There’s food, which the Kadosh tribe who live hereabouts bring me: michelmas cake and curried meejab, in the pot. Plenty for all. You’ll forgive me if I do not play host.”
“Please wait a moment,” Malingo said as Finnegan went to the door. “I was given strict instructions to fetch everybody, including you, Mister Hob. The women of the Fantomaya led me to believe that you are vital to how things will go if war is declared.”
“I have already declared my war, Mister Malingo,” Hob said. “And I’ve been fighting it for the better part of fifteen years. I spent a year on the slopes of Mount Galigali, tracking the dragons that live in the laval rivers. That was a difficult campaign. I was almost fried on several occasions when the volcano vented its fury. But I killed the worms. Sixteen of them. And then at Spake, which is a green and beautiful place—like the Nonce without the strange evolutions every time it rains—I hunted the five members of the Kaziamia clan, wretched, murderous things. Small for dragons, but vicious. That took more than a year. On Autland there was only one, but it had taken possession of the ruins of a palace, and it was worshipped by the local peasants, who swore a drop of its blood cured just about every kind of sickness. All nonsense, of course. But they can be very clever, very deceitful. . . .”
“I should have thought by now you would have made your point,” said John Drowze.
There was a long silence. Very, very slowly Finnegan looked at the brothers.
“My point?” he said. “My point? And what, pray, do you imagine that might be? Would I have made it with ten worms dead? Ten times ten? Or would the death of one have sufficed, in your opinion, to make my point?”
Drowze opened his mouth to reply, but John Mischief quietly put his forefinger to his brother’s lips and very quietly said: “Be quiet, John.”
Geneva now stepped into the middle of the conversation.
“Mister Hob,” she said with great respect. “I think what we want you to hear is that we need you. Right now, there’s only us, and the women of the Fantomaya—”
“And Candy,” said Malingo.
“Well, perhaps,” Geneva said. “But we’re few, that’s my point. And Carrion is very strong.”
All eyes were on Finnegan, everyone waiting for him to give them an answer. He stared out of the window.
“Let me go and think on this for a little while,” Finnegan said. “Please, help yourself to the meejab and michelmas cake. . . .”
So saying, he inclined his head slightly, and left.
“Strange fellow,” John Moot remarked.
“He’s not going to come,” Tria said.
“He must,” Malingo said. “Diamanda was very insistent. I think she believes he’s the key to everything, for some reason.”
“Oh, look,” Tom said. “More rain.”
He was right. A few fat spots of rain were bursting on the windowsill, and the downpour could be heard on the roof as well.
Malingo went over to Geneva. “Do you think I should talk to him?” he said.
“To Finnegan?”
“Yes.”
“You could try. But I wouldn’t hope too hard.”
Malingo stepped out into the warm rain. Finnegan was standing several yards from the house, his face turned up to the downpour. He glanced around at Malingo for a moment, then went back to his rain bath.
“Do you know the legend of this Hour?” he said.
“No, I don’t believe I do,” Malingo replied.
“Apparen
tly, somewhere on the Nonce (though I’ve never seen them) is a tribe of winged creatures called the Fathathai. A gentle, shy people: almost like angels. There are very few of them on the island because”—he looked at his feet—“because they don’t find love very easily, and so a Fathathai wedding is a rare event. But anyway, the legend goes that there was one of these creatures by the name of Numa Child, who did fall in love.”
“Lucky him.”
“Well, yes and no. You see, he fell in love with a woman he met here on the Nonce, called Elathuria. She was, he thought, the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes on. There was only one problem.”
“What was that?”
“She wasn’t flesh and blood as he was.”
“What was she?”
“As you know, this island is home to some very strange life-forms. And Elathuria was one of these strangenesses.” He paused, then looked up at Malingo as he said: “She was a plant.”
Malingo only managed to suppress a laugh because there was such a look of deadly seriousness on the dragon killer’s weary face. And though he did manage to suppress it, Finnegan nevertheless said: “You think I’m joking.”
“No . . .”
“I’ve learned only two things in my life. One, that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two, that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.”
Malingo nodded. “I’ve had no . . . personal experience of this,” he said to Finnegan. “But . . . I’ve read books. And all the great ones agree with you.” Finnegan nodded, and for the first time since they’d met, Malingo saw something resembling a smile come onto the man’s face. “Please tell me the rest of the story,” the geshrat said.
“Well, when Numa Child first met Elathuria she was in full bloom. She was perfection. No other word for it.”
“Extraordinary.”
“It gets stranger still, believe me. Did I tell you Numa Child fell in love in a heartbeat? I mean, literally, it was that fast. He saw Elathuria, and that was it. His fate was sealed.”
“Love at first sight.”
“Absolutely.”