The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘It must be under here,’ said Lizbreath, scouting the design. ‘I’d say that Reggie’s head lifts up.’

  ‘Don’t call him Reggie!’ squeaked Käal, genuinely spooked by the offhanded ease of his companion’s disrespect for the pieties of dragon tradition.

  ‘He’s long dead,’ Lizbreath said, peering closely at the image. ‘He doesn’t care. Here! Look! The old boy’s right nostril is a keyhole.’

  ‘Don’t call him the old boy – he is the pater draconis,’ Käal started saying, until he was distracted by the oddity of the set-up. ‘Seriously? His nostril?’

  ‘I’d say: insert the key and turn it, and the whole thing lifts up. To reveal steps down to the Clawsoleum.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have the key,’ Käal noted. ‘So that’s where this trail ends. I can’t pretend I’m sorry… it saves us from committing terrible sacrilege.’

  From her reticule Lizbreath brought out a tapering sliver of stone. There was no mistaking what it was.

  ‘Where,’ Käal demanded, ‘in the name of wild Woden did you get that?’

  ‘Hellfire’s room.’

  ‘Well that could be any key, to any room! It probably opens her secret diary.’

  ‘It has Vagner Clawsoleum written along the shaft, in small runes.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Käal sat back on his tail. ‘What was she doing in her bedroom with a key to the family tomb?’

  ‘That’s a good question. Shall I try it?’

  ‘No!’ said Käal, looking guiltily around.

  ‘Come on, Käal! Don’t you want to see the last resting place of all those legendary dragons? Regin’s son, Deas, is down there, you know.’

  ‘Helltrik specifically said we were not permitted to – Lizbreath I forbid you to put that key in that keyhole.’ She slid the key into its slot. ‘Liz! Lizbreath Salamander, I forbid you from turning that key in that…’ She turned the key.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Oh,’ said Käal, disappointed despite himself. ‘It’s not the key, after all.’

  ‘No,’ said Lizbreath, thoughtfully. ‘It went into the mechanism. I think it is the right key. It just won’t turn. I wonder why?’

  ‘Maybe the mechanism is stiff? After all, it’s not often used.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that,’ said Lizbreath. ‘I think it’s one of those magic locks. I think the key only works if it is being held by a certain person. Presumably somebody with Vagner blood in their veins.’

  ‘Well that’s that! Nothing more we can do!’

  ‘We need to find a family member who will help us,’ said Lizbreath. ‘We absolutely have to get down there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Käal, listen to me. I am convinced the solution to this whole mystery is there, just beneath our feet. There’s a secret at the heart of the island, of the Vagners – and if we can get down there we’ll understand everything.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Käal, picturing himself that very day claiming the Siegfried treasure, achieving personal wealth, saving the Köschfagold Saga and redeeming himself in the eyes of Beargrr. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could ask Asheila?’

  ‘Asheila Vagner?’

  ‘Yes. She and I have become – shall we say friendly.’

  ‘Friendly? Do you mean what I think you mean?’

  ‘That depends on whether you’re thinking what I think you think I mean when I mean that.’

  ‘You and Asheila Vagner – you’ve been drilling the dragon with her?

  ‘We have something rather special,’ said Käal, awkwardly.

  ‘What about the special thing you’ve got going with that she-dragon in Starkhelm?’

  ‘Look, the point of me mentioning it wasn’t to give you the chance to make fun of me,’ said Käal, stiffly. ‘It was to suggest a way of getting into the Vagner tomb.’

  ‘Excellent idea, Clawsanova. Let’s nip upstairs and see if the lady can be persuaded.’ Lizbreath tried to take hold of the key and remove it from the keyhole, but it would not budge. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s awkward.’

  ‘Give it a proper yank.’

  ‘That would only break it. I’m certain, now, that this is a magical device. Now that it is engaged, it will only move if a Vagner touches it. Come on! No time to lose! We need to try and persuade your girldragon to help us.’

  Having suggested this way forward, Käal was now having second thoughts. He could almost hear Asheila’s voice saying ‘No!’ in that implacable way she had. On the other hand, the thought of solving the Vagner mystery that very day was too intoxicating for him.

  The two dragons had only just started up the stairway when a loud click behind them, like the bolt sliding across on a rifle, stopped them. Slowly they both snaked their necks so as to bring their heads right around. The hallway was empty.

  A line of shadow had appeared, haloing Regin’s mosaicish head.

  They went back down. By grasping Regin’s ear it was possible to swing the whole portion of floor up and round, revealing a curl of downward stone steps. ‘I don’t understand,’ said Lizbreath.

  It was the first time since meeting her that Käal had seen her completely wrongfooted. ‘I guess it wasn’t a magic lock after all,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was just a little stiff.’

  ‘It can’t be that.’

  ‘You must have turned it almost enough to spring the mechanism, then it got stiff so you stopped. But us walking away must have shaken it past its tipping point, and spung! There you go.’

  She looked at him. ‘Spung?’

  ‘As in, the noise a lock makes when it is opened.’

  ‘Except that it wasn’t stiff,’ she said. ‘It was completely motionless.’ She looked puzzled. ‘I could have sworn it was a magic key!’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Käal. ‘It’s good news. We can go down, sort this mystery out, and I don’t have to try and recruit the, to speak frankly, unstable Asheila.’

  Lizbreath didn’t lose her puzzled expression, but she said: ‘True. Well, let’s go down.’

  The stairs were small, and curved sharply round; they had to proceed by walking awkwardly on their back legs only. ‘It must be quite a squeeze getting the corpse of a full-grown dragon down here,’ Lizbreath noted.

  There were seven turns in the stone stairway, and finally they emerged into a vast space, as wide as was the main trunk of the castle itself. Tiny windows sparsely arranged around the edge of the space admitted a thin, chill light, unpleasantly blue in tint. The sepulchre was a huge circular space, and around the edge were arranged the bodies of great Vagners of the past.

  Käal and Lizbreath alit upon the white marble flags. ‘How many did Helltrik say?’ Lizbreath said, in a hushed voice. ‘Fifteen score?’

  ‘It’s amazing!’ whispered Käal.

  All the dragons were interred, according to dragon tradition, laid upon stone pyramidic structures meant to represent their hoards. They were not otherwise enclosed. In the few days after death, the ferocious internal chemistry of any given dragon parched and mummified the majority of the softer flesh; and the outer scales were, of course, perfectly imperishable. So these once great figures looked in death pretty much as they had done in life, save only their eyes, which melted from their sockets during the first year or so postmortem.

  They were laid snout inward, and their names were inscribed in gold letters upon the cold marble of their monuments. Käal felt the awe of their presence. Hundreds of dead Vagners! Thousands of years of family lineage!

  ‘Right,’ said Lizbreath, brightly, clacking her fore-claws together. ‘It must be in here somewhere!’

  ‘It?’ repeated Käal. ‘What?’

  Lizbreath went low on all fours and made a complete circuit of the space. She darted from tomb to tomb, tapping each monument in turn with the hard point of her tailend.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Käal hissed.

  ‘It’s not here!’ she replied. ‘But it must be! Hidden… hidden… But where? Not inside the mo
numents… that wouldn’t work at all.’

  Doubts about what they were doing were starting to intrude into Käal. ‘What are you talking about? And, wait a minute. You said the solution to the mystery would be down here! There’s no solution to the mystery here! It’s just a ring of mummified dragon corpses!’

  With increasingly frantic motion, Lizbreath ran from monument to monument. ‘It must be here!’ She eeled to the centre of the room, and fished some device or other from her reticule.

  ‘I think we should leave,’ said Käal, his anxiety getting the better of him. ‘Before somebody finds us down here.’

  Lizbreath angled her handheld whatever-it-was in a sweep all about the room. ‘Nothing!’ she said, as if it were a swear-word.

  ‘There’s nothing here! Come on, Liz, I don’t like this… not at all.’ Käal made his way back towards the central stair-stem.

  Lizbreath hurried back to one of the monuments. It was the corpse of Deatheagle: scowling and eyeless, his bulky tail coiled round to lie across his neck, he glowered down at her. She took hold of the creature’s upper lip, and levered open its mouth.

  ‘Liz! What are you doing?’ Käal cried. ‘That’s tantamount to desecration!’

  ‘Well well,’ she said.

  ‘What? What is it? Have you found what you were looking for?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I have found a clue.’

  ‘What clue?’

  ‘The tongue has been cut out of this dragon.’

  ‘No way!’ said Käal, his excitement overriding his apprehension. ‘Is that where all the tongues came from?’

  Lizbreath went along to the next dragon, and pulled open its mouth. ‘Looks that way,’ she confirmed.

  Between them, they checked a dozen or so of the illustrious corpses. Every single one had its tongue removed. ‘Extraordinary!’ said Käal. ‘Wait until we tell Helltrik that this is where his tongues have been coming from!’ Then he added, second-thoughtishly: ‘Wait, if we tell him, he’ll know that we’ve been inside his family’s Clawsoleum.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘That’s awkward. He specifically told us not to.’

  ‘I suggest we don’t tell him. Let’s solve the whole mystery, first. This is an important clue, after all. Let’s assume that whoever cut out Hellfire’s tongue is the same dragon who cut out all these other dragon tongues. That means it must be somebody on the island! If the entrance had been guarded with a magic lock, like I thought, that would have narrowed it down to a Vagner family member. But,’ the puzzled expression crossed her eye again, ‘I guess it’s a regular lock, so it could be anyone. But somebody on the island!’

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘Good question. Answer that, I’d say, and we’ll be able to wrap this mystery up.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What were you looking for?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were looking for something, and you didn’t find it. You waved that strange device about, from your reticule – what was that? What were you looking for?’

  ‘You really want to know?’ said Lizbreath.

  There was a loud bang, a burst of smoke, and the dragon’s corpse beside them exploded. Käal yelled out sheer terror. Lizbreath’s reactions were quicker. She threw herself into her companion’s torso with such force that, though she was much smaller than he, Käal was bundled out of the way. They skidded together along the marble, both got their footing and leapt as one for cover behind a funerary monument. From the corner of his eye Käal glimpsed a blast of fire stretch from the staircase towards them – but it was a strange fire, unlike any he had seen before: an oddly muted shade of red, thin as a blade of metal. He pulled his head down and the fire collided with the monument podium. Chunks of stone flew outwards through a swelling cloud of masonry dust. Shards clattered against Käal’s scales. ‘What is that?’ Käal asked.

  ‘It’s something not to get hit by,’ said Lizbreath, pulling Käal by his left wing. Together they ducked behind the nearest memorial.

  ‘I’ve never seen fire like that! Who’s blasting it?’

  There was a third clunking explosion, an instant rosebloom of pale pink smoke and the sound of debris spattering to the stone floor. ‘How does he keep the stream of fire so thin?’ Käal wondered aloud. ‘I saw a dracrobat from the Fangish Circus last year blow some amazingly-shaped smoke rings. Is it a trick like that?’

  ‘It’s not coming from any dragon’s nostrils,’ hissed Lizbreath, trying to peer round the memorial.

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘It’s from a device! Now be quiet!’

  ‘Like – a flame-thrower?’ said Käal, disbelieving. ‘I still don’t see how it keeps the line of flame so skinny, though. Or that colour. And why is whoever-it-is trying to shoot us…’

  ‘Shh!’ said Lizbreath again.

  Käal pushed one eye around the edge of the funeral monument. He caught a glimpse of somebody scuttling from the base of the stairs away to the left; but through the slowly drifting rags of smoke, and in the dim blue light, he couldn’t make out who it might be.

  ‘When I say go,’ whispered Lizbreath, who was bracing her back against the rump of the mummified remains of an ancestor Vagner dragon, ‘go.’

  ‘What do I do?’ asked Käal, slightly wild-eyed.

  She paused. ‘What?’

  ‘What do I do when you say go?’

  ‘Go!’ she hissed.

  ‘Yes, go, I got that bit. But what do I do when you say go?’

  ‘Go!’she hissed.

  ‘Do you think I’m deaf?’ he snapped back, crossly. ‘I heard that bit. When you say go – right, sure. But when you say it, what are you expecting me to do?’

  ‘When I say go – go! It’s not a complicated utterance.’

  ‘Oh, so now you’re going to say go-go? Make up your mind.’

  Lizbreath looked at Käal very closely. ‘I’m amazed your brain hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own colossal idiocy,’ she whispered.

  ‘Charming!’ he said.

  ‘Go – now!’ she yelled, suddenly, pushing her hind legs with all her might and leaping into the air, flinging her wings wide at the same time. The mummified body of Bullar Vagner was propelled into the air – much larger than she of course, but lighter too. It flew through the air, caromed off the ceiling and started falling. Its dead wings fluttered, caught the air and opened wide. The corpse glided lurchingly forward in a grisly approximation of life.

  Lizbreath ran-flew straight for and up the stairs. Käal was a heartbeat behind. As he crossed the floor he caught sight of one, then two, then three of the strange lines of red light blasting at the freakily airborne corpse. The lights played upon the body, and then Käal saw something impossible. He saw the flame break through the scales that lined Bullar’s vacant body.

  But of course, he couldn’t have seen that. You know as well as I that no fire can penetrate the scales of a dragon.

  It was so incomprehensible a sight that it almost stopped Käal on the spot. But the instinct for self-preservation carried him on. He reached the foot of the stairway just as the corpse of Bullar crashed enormously into the floor. He threw himself up, and a moment later he was in the hallway above.

  16

  ‘Keep going,’ Lizbreath hollered at him. ‘That weapon is not to be trifled with!’

  They dashed up the main stairway, through corridors, past a startled firedrake carrying a shovel. They did not stop until they burst out through the main entrance and into the gardens.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Käal gasped. ‘That burst of fire broke straight through the scales on that old dragon!’

  ‘Unless you want,’ Lizbreath snapped at him, grabbing his wing-elbow, ‘to explain to all the Vagners that you’ve just desecrated their Clawsoleum, I suggest you keep your voice down.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Käal, looking around. ‘But,’ he went on, in a quieter tone, ‘that guy was trying to kill us… wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he was,�
� said Lizbreath, looking carefully around her.

  ‘I saw his fire go straight through the scales of that dead dragon’s body!’ Käal said. ‘I must have hallucinated that. Nothing goes through dragon scales.’

  ‘Käal—’ Lizbreath started to say. But she was distracted. ‘There!’ she cried, pointing.

  A dragon was spying on them, from the shrubbery by the main entrance. Both Käal and Lizbreath turned to look, and the creature knew itself observed, and got spooked. It broke from the foliage and dashed for the castle entrance.

  There was no mistaking who it was. ‘Asheila!’ Käal called. ‘Asheila!’

  She vanished inside the building.

  Käal made to go after her, but Lizbreath held him back. ‘She might be armed.’

  ‘Asheila?’ he said, astonished. ‘You don’t think she was the one who blew fire at us, down there, do you?’

  ‘She was following us!’ said Lizbreath. ‘She was spying on us. All I’m saying is – she might be armed.’

  ‘Armed?’ said Käal, breaking way. ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘Somebody was shooting at us, Käal!’

  ‘Asheila? No.’ He hurried inside the castle.

  17

  Asheila was nowhere to be seen, but Käal guessed that she had gone back to her room. He raced up to her apartment and knocked on the door. ‘Asheila?’ he called. ‘Asheila!’

  ‘Go away!’ she replied, through the closed portal. Her voice sounded tearful. ‘Just go away! Go all the way to Hostileia for all I care!’

  ‘Asheila, were you… following us?’

  ‘You and your girldragon!’ she wailed.

  ‘Asheila, open the door! It’s daft trying to have a conversation this way.’ Nothing. ‘You know, she’s not my girldragon. Really!’

  After a pause, Asheila said: ‘You seem very intimate.’

  ‘Is that why you were following us?’ He thought back to the Clawsoleum, and tried to think of a way of asking her about it without tipping his hand. ‘Did you… wish us harm?’