by Adam Roberts
Feeling abject, in great pain, and brimming with self-loathing at her cravenness, Lizbreath nodded.
‘You will come next week. We won’t need Human. I think we’d both welcome a little privacy. Of course, if you make trouble I’ll call him through. But I don’t think you will make trouble, will you. Because I think you have learned your lesson – haven’t you?’
Again: a shallow nod.
‘Very good. If you apply the clamps yourself, the flesh of the fire duct is less… inflamed afterwards.’
The shudder went through Lizbreath’s soul. Horror, and despair, and rage, and impotence – a hideous emulsion of feelings – filled her so completely that she couldn’t even manage a nod.
‘If you continue to please me, my dear,’ said Burnblast, stepping off Lizbreath’s back, ‘you’ll discover I’m a very useful ally. Personally friendly with two of the Dragonlords. With my help, you should have no difficulty in reintegrating yourself into dragon society.’
But Lizbreath had seized the moment. She scuttled through the open door and rushed up the stairs to the bright light outside.
7
Käal was shown to his chambers by a slender firedrake of indeterminate age. ‘Anything you need,’ croaked the creature. ‘Let me know.’
‘I’d like to take a look around,’ he said.
‘Go anywhere you like,’ said the firedrake, fluttering around Käal’s head in a tight circle. ‘Though I’d advise against poking around the chamber with my master’s hoard in. Without his express permission, that is. It’s right at the centre of the castle.’
‘Naturally!’ The idea of poking around another dragon’s hoard was anathema to Käal. He wasn’t a thief!
‘And below that,’ the firedrake said, ‘is the Vagner vault. Millennia of old Vagners are interred there, Nobody’s allowed inside. Apart from that, you can look anywhere you like.’
Käal flew out and made a general circuit of the whole island. He had to admit that Doorbraak was a beautiful place. The central castle sent graceful spires high into the sky, like tapering flames gorgonized into solidity. The high sunlight drew gleaming vertical bars of light along the pink and white stone towers. Indeed, the quality of light at this altitude was something special. Käal wandered through the impeccably kept gardens to the rim of the island and looked down. Clouds below, like bolts of close-packed cloth, reflected the sunlight up to meet the fall of natural light from above. It gave the air an unusual vividness, like a heightened reality.
He landed by the perimeter wall, and had a look down.
‘Referendum,’ said somebody, unpleasantly, right into Käal’s ear.
Käal leapt up onto his back limbs in fright. ‘Aargh!’ he squealed.
Standing beside him was a very broken-down, disreputable-looking elderly dragon. He was old: that much was obvious from the length of his talons and teeth, and the tatterdemalion nature of his half-folded wings. But he was neither broad nor tall, and looked, if anything, rather shrivelled. Käal felt an instinctive, gut-level revulsion.
‘Sometimes,’ this newcomer said, in a voice so grating it could have turned a hundredweight of cheese into shards merely by singing at it, ‘sometimes the thing yer looking for is right in front of ye. No?’
‘You startled me,’ said Käal, with rather undraconic wimpishness. Then, as anger flowed in to fill the space hollowed out in his mind by fear, he added: ‘I might have jumped right off the edge! What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘You’re the Saga writer?’ the newcomer snarled. ‘I heard about you. BALLOT!’
‘Käal Brimstön,’ said Käal, ignoring this last incomprehensible disyllable. ‘And your name is… ?’
‘Ghastly,’ snarled the dragon.
‘Oh! I’ve heard about you. You’re Helltrik’s older brother.’
‘So you heard about me, eh? I’ll wager they told you I was re-turn-ING OFF-CER mad, did they?’
Käal looked down at this withered relict of a powerful nest, and made a conscious attempt to temper his revulsion with pity. ‘Not mad, no. I did hear that,’ he said, ‘I did hear that you harboured political opinions considered by most right-thinking dragons to be…’
‘Democracy,’ said Ghastly, in a low voice.
‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, yes.’
‘You don’t know nothing abaaahht it!’ Ghastly wailed, in evident distress, the hot phlegm in his throat thrumming and bubbling. He writhed like a streamer in the wind, curling and uncurling his long scrawny body upon the lawn. ‘Electoral COLLEGE!’ he yelled. ‘I got a recognized medical condition checks-and-balances.’
‘A recognized medical… what, a sickness?’
‘I suffer from Democratourette’s. Can’t help myself. Can’t stop myself shouting out offensive single trans FUR!’ he wailed, ‘ABLE! VOTE! words all hours of the day and night constituency party selection parameters.’
‘Gosh,’ said Käal. ‘How extraordinary! And embarrassing – for you!’
Ghastly did not reply, as he was trying to stop himself from saying anything further by pressing his forelimbs down over the top of his snout.
‘Am I to understand,’ said Käal, with that sense of slow-dawning realization filtering through him. ‘That you do not actually endorse the politics of democracy?’
Ghastly mumbled something inaudible, rocking from flank to flank upon the ground in front of him.
‘That your condition has led people to the conclusion that…’
‘Mmm!’
‘I see.’
‘Oh there’s other reasons people don’t like me,’ said Ghastly, unclamping his mouth. ‘There’s some residual family prejudice grounded in the fact that I separate! shun! of! church! and! state! hate everybody and everybody hates me. They’re all bastards. But that has nothing to do with political opinion. I have no political opinions. I hate everyone. I hate you, and I’ve only just met you. BICAMERALISM!’
‘Oh,’ said Käal. ‘But why do you hate me? Why hate everyone?’
‘Why? Oh, because they’re all ba-bundesrat-ba-BASTards!’ stuttered the withered old dragon. ‘But don’t fret. It’s nothing personal. I know why you’re here, at any rate.’
‘You do?’
‘My bastard brother. He wants you to solve Hellfire’s disappearance.’
‘Officially I’m here to write a Saga of the Vagner family.’
‘Oh yers, oh yes! oh yerrrrs,’ said Ghastly, with perhaps over-telegraphed sarcasm. ‘I’m sure you are. Helltrik isn’t the only member of our family obsessed with the poor girl’s death, you know! We all are, in our way! We’ve all obsessed over it.’
‘Including you, Mon. Ghastly?’ Käal asked.
‘Mr Speaker!’ Ghastly yelped, in apparent assent.
‘And does that mean you have a theory as to what happened?’
Instead of answering immediately, Ghastly wriggled over to the low wall at the garden’s extreme edge. ‘Long way down, ain’t it?’ he said.
‘You think she went over the edge? You mean – she just flew away?’
‘No, I think she was gerrymandering killed,’ Ghastly barked. ‘I think she had her wings nobbled, and then she was pushed over the edge.’
‘There’s an eye directly underneath the island,’ Käal pointed out.
‘OH!’ exclaimed Ghastly, with enormous if murky significance.
‘If she fell, then the lower eye would have seen and recorded the fact. Surely!’
‘OH!’ exclaimed Ghastly again, with even greater vehemence.
‘Are you saying that the lower eye might have been… tampered with?’ asked Käal. But the disgusting old dragon was already writhing his way over the blond grass, towards the castle. ‘Wait,’ Käal cried. But the dragon hissed nastily, and vanished into a thicket of rattling bushes with an insolent wiggle of his withered hind hips. Looking down, Käal noted with some distaste that the old fellow had left a trail of slime behind him.
8
Käal looked around
some more, trying to make it look as though he were deploying his famous skills for finding stuff out. But since he had no idea how anybody actually found stuff out, this wasn’t easy. To be truthful he quickly grew bored, and was happy for the distraction when he chanced upon an attractive female dragon of mature years.
He had half-leapt, half-flown up from the garden to the castle’s main terrace – a beautiful expanse of dark pink marble, mottled with folds and curls of white like the best butchers’ meat. From there, the view over the early evening sky was breathtaking, or flametaking: the clouds, crusted with gold and pearl, blushing deeper by the minute; the sun settling over the dusty deserts of the long-dead western realms – Emberland, Scorchedland – and acquiring a deep cough-sweet-coloured ruby redness.
It took Käal a little while to realize that he was wasn’t alone. Another dragon was also admiring the view.
‘Hello,’ he said, twisting his head right around over his right wing. ‘How do you do?’
‘You’re Käal,’ said the female dragon, stalking seductively over. ‘My uncle Helltrik told me about you.’
‘I am indeed. And you are?’
‘I’m Asheila.’
‘So you’re Helltrik’s, um, sister’s cousin’s niece?’
‘Helltrik is my uncle,’ she said. ‘Are the rumours true? Has Helltrik hired you to write a Saga chronicling our family?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Hel-lo Saga,’ she said, flirtatiously. ‘So you’ll be staying in the castle?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I have an apartment in the castle myself – top floor, of course. In fact, I have the feeling that your rooms are just down the corridor from mine.’
‘Really? I thought I was in the middle of the castle somewhere.’
‘You were. But I’ve just had a word with my uncle,’ said Asheila, with a little squeal. ‘Aren’t I naughty?’
‘Naughty dragon!’ said Käal.
The two dragons circled one another in what might – just – have passed for the polite pas-de-deux of well-bred beasts meeting for the first time. But no experienced dragon watcher would have been fooled. This was something more atavistic. This was a male and a female attempting simultaneously to sniff each other’s rumps.
Käal could see straight away that Asheila was no spring chicken. Nor was she a summer chicken, nor even an autumn one. Indeed, there’s no need to prolong this, she wasn’t a chicken at all. She was a dragon. Let there be no mistake on that count. Nevertheless her non-chickenness was of an attractive, dragonly sort. But she had clearly looked after herself, that’s my point. A regimen of continual smoking and lots of harsh ultraviolet light had hardened and firmed up her scales, and brought out a beguiling greeny-yellow sheen in their predominantly pale purple coloration. Her eyes were a witty bright pink, and her tongue, as it lolled lasciviously between her two main fangs, was an attractive liver colour.
‘Is that really why you’re here though?’ Asheila said. ‘Is it truly to write a Saga?’
‘You think I have an ulterior motive?’
‘Ulterior!’ she said. ‘That means behind, doesn’t it? Get you! Oh, you’re saucy, Mon. Brimstön, with your talk of behinds. And me an unattached, alluring dragon whom age cannot wither nor custom stale? Bottoms!’
‘Well, ’ said Käal. ‘Um.’
‘You are naughty but I lick you. With flames, I mean. Flames licking over you.’
‘How naughty you are, Mis Vagner!’ Käal countered. He flicked his tail over his head, tapping her lightly on the small of her back, with the sound of a motor vehicle falling thirty feet onto a courtyard entirely coated in shellac.
‘You’re naughty, you mean,’ she returned.
‘Not as naughty as you!’ he countered, getting into the swing of things.
She simpered at him. ‘How old are you, Mon. Brimstön?’
‘I shall only answer,’ giggled Käal, ‘if you call me Käal.’
‘Very well, Käal. How old are you?’
‘I’m eleventy one.’
‘A mere pup! So, Käal. And how old do you think – I – am?’
Käal made a rapid calculation. His memory of the maze of Vagner family relations was not very clear, but he figured that Asheila must be the daughter of Hydra, Helltrick’s older sister. So: probably old enough to be Helltrik’s daughter, plus a few years. He calculated: two hundred and ninety. Then, for the sake of sparing a lady’s feelings, and, more to the point, of maximizing the possibility of him getting his end away, he said: ‘I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest – one ninety?’
Asheila’s eyes bugged, momently, and Käal realized that he had miscalculated the depth of her vanity. One fifty would have been a safer guess. But it was clear from her expression that wounded vanity was battling with randy enforced celibacy in her heart, and the latter won. ‘Spot on!’ she said.
‘I prefer a more mature dragon,’ said Käal, in a confidential tone of voice. ‘Those rope-thin Salamanders do nothing for me. You’re—’ They made another revolution around one another. ‘You’re a very attractive dragon, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Asheila. ‘You’re just saying that!’
‘I am saying that,’ replied Käal, mishearing slightly.
‘You’re just saying that,’ Asheila repeated, with an edge to her voice. That time, Käal heard her properly. ‘Not at all, not at all!
Not just saying that. I really mean it. You’re a very beautiful dragon.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m not blowing smoke up your arse, you know.’
‘Oh!’ said Asheila. ‘Would you like to?’
‘Well – obviously.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’
She scuttled rapidly through the doorway and into the castle. Käal’s out-of-shape draconic heart was pumping vigorously at the prospect of coitus. Asheila slithered very attractively up the wide curving stairway, and Käal followed. The stairs hugged the walls of the vaulted hallway before leading the two of them up through a dagger-shaped gap in the ceiling and into the upper floors of the castle.
‘My apartment is – through here,’ Asheila breathed.
Käal had not had sex for almost a month. For Asheila, the period of enforced unwilling abstinence had been considerably longer. Each found the other attractive; and neither was hamfast with any third party. Accordingly, they retired to Asheila’s apartment and engaged in sexual activity.
Asheila, in bed, was wholly conventional, even unadventurous. But Käal didn’t mind that. She liked having smoke blown up her arse, obviously. For, after all, who doesn’t? And, like everybody else, she enjoyed having a yard-long, scaly membrum virilis inserted enthusiastically and repeatedly into her back-passage, like the drive-shaft of some kind of meat traction engine. There was nothing more exotic about her sexual tastes than this, but Käal actually preferred his sex vanilla. He was secretly relieved that he wasn’t expected to do anything too weird.
The mating concluded with Käal thrusting into Asheila’s draginal canal, whilst biting down so hard upon the back of her armoured neck that he scratched his own dentine. At her climax she blasted a great plume of fire from deep in her throat, so extensive and so heated that the flame-proofed tapestry in her room showed, after the event, distinctive scorch-marks.
Afterwards they lay, side by side, on the asbestos mattress, their eight legs waggling slowly and contentedly in the air. ‘Smoke?’ Asheila asked.
‘Naturally,’ replied Käal.
Together, they opened their mouths and puffed great billows of contented white smoke at the ceiling.
They chatted, easily and fluently, as if they’d known each other for a long time. Käal opened up. Helltrik had told him to be discreet, but he hadn’t exactly sworn him to secrecy. And besides, Asheila was family. ‘My cover story is that I’m here to write the Family Saga. But in fact that story is actually covering up my real reason for being here. Your uncle Helltrik wants me to uncover the mystery of young
Hellfire’s disappearance. Her murder, he says.’
Asheila murmured understandingly. ‘It’s driven him mad, really,’ she said. ‘I love my uncle, but he has become increasingly obsessed with what happened to Hellfire. Erratic.’
‘A what?’
‘Erratic.’
‘What’s a rat-tick?’
‘Erratic. Up-and-down. It’s sad. And now he thinks you can solve the mystery?’
‘The way I see it: we need to think logically about things,’ said Käal. ‘The undisputable fact is that, three hundred years ago, young Hellfire disappeared. Either she was murdered, as Helltrik thinks; or else she was not. If she was murdered, it would explain her absence, although it raises a series of other problems. How was she killed? By whom and why? How was her body smuggled off Doorbraak? And so on. But if she wasn’t killed then there are just as many questions. Was she kidnapped, or did she herself steal away secretly? And in either case, how could she possibly have left the island? And why? And how has she kept out of the public eye for such a long time? A few years, maybe; but a fully grown, high-blood dragon? How could she possibly keep herself secret all this time in Scandragonia? So she must be in some other country, probably far away. And there’s the tongues…’
‘Ugh,’ said Asheila, shuddering with the sound of a mah-jong set being shaken in its box. ‘The tongues are so horrible! One a year for three centuries – imagine it! It almost makes me want to run away… all the way to Hostileia’
‘It is horrible.’
‘I don’t know what happened to my little niece,’ said Asheila. ‘But for all the reasons you mention, I believe that she is dead. Either she was murdered here, on the island; or else smuggled off and killed later. For if she were alive, why has she not been found? Helltrik has searched the whole island, and sent agents throughout Scandragonia – all over the world, in fact. He has offered rewards for information, fabulous rewards. He’s scattered eyes in myriad places. Nothing!’
‘If she is dead, then where do you think her body is?’