by Adam Roberts
‘Of course!’ she howled. ‘I want you both buried in Antarctic ice! I want her drowned in the ocean! Oh woh-woh-woh!’
‘Asheila, it’s not like that. She’s not my girldragon. I’m not interested in her… like that at all.’ Not exactly a lie, this last one, and so not a violation of his draconic integrity. ‘She’s only here for one reason… to help me solve the mystery!’
‘You’re in such a hurry to solve this sludging mystery!’ she howled. ‘So you can leave Doorbraak and go back to Starkhelm with your skinny little girldragon!’
Käal tried again. ‘For the last time – she’s not my girldragon! She’s a researcher. You do want me to solve your family’s plaguey mystery, don’t you?’
‘I don’t want you to solve the mystery,’ she screamed. This pronouncement was followed by various tantrum sounds, vividly suggestive of a forty-tonne dragon thrashing with furious abandon about her rooms, indifferent to the damage she might cause on her furniture or furnishings.
Käal thought this a good moment, quietly, to withdraw.
Coming back down the stairway, he had an epiphany. Suddenly, like a lightning strike to the top of his head, he understood what the mystery was all about.
I don’t want you to solve the mystery, Asheila had said. The words clanged a gong inside Käal’s mind. Why didn’t she want to solve the mystery?
There were two possible answers. Because she was the murderer, and didn’t want to be exposed. Or because Hellfire was still alive – and she was protecting her secret location!
Of those two possibilities, only one made sense to Käal. Whatever else she might be, Asheila was no killer.
Things Asheila had said came back to him. It almost makes me want to run away, she had told him: all the way to Hostileia.
Or that other time when she had said: to be in a separate room from you feels like I have been banished to Hostileia!
How could Hellfire have remained undiscovered all these centuries? What better hiding place than… the opposite side of the globe?
It all clicked in Käal’s head.
Of course Asheila had access to the vault. She had been resident on Doorbraak throughout the previous three centuries. She could have been going down, once a year, to cut out the tongues and send them to her uncle, in mute, symbolic rebuke. Why? And why had she never left the island?
Why else but to protect her niece?
Käal felt the intense, brain-buzzy feeling of having solved the problem. Of having – himself, unaided – found the stuff out. Not every detail was in place yet. For instance: why had young Hellfire felt she needed to leave? (Something to do with the family’s dark secret, probably.) How had Asheila smuggled her out past the Eyes? Perhaps she had cached her in her rooms whilst the searches were made, and then smuggled her out in the mouth of a cargo Skylligator. But the missing details did not diminish Käal’s giddy sense of joy at having seen through the murk. ‘With what splendour,’ he said aloud, ‘it all coheres.’
He had to tell Asheila that he knew the truth. Her door was obviously a no-go. So he hurried across the main hall and outside. He flew up the side of the building, looking for her balcony. This proved harder than he first imagined it would: it was difficult to correlate the outside of the castle with its interior layout.
He picked a balcony and landed on it, only to see Asheila emerge on a completely different balcony, away to his left and two floors down.
He almost called to her, but something in her demeanour held him back. She no longer seemed upset. Indeed, she possessed an unusual purposefulness. Creeping to the edge of his vantage point, he watched her bring a raven out of a cage. Then she released it.
The revelation broke in his mind like a sunburst. ‘She’s warning Hellfire!’ he gasped.
Käal knew it was time to act. He waited until Asheila had gone back inside again, and threw himself into open space.
It was a bright day, and the sky was littered with numerous plump white clouds, like scatter cushions. Visibility was good: Käal could see the raven soaring its way south. There was no time to lose. Now, Käal was not the fittest or fastest flier in the world, but he reasoned he could catch up with a small bird if he put his wings into it. And in fact he covered the first stretch easily, disguising his approach as best he could by flying from cloud to cloud. One minute the bird was a diacritical mark, nothing more, shifting regularly from V to V. Then, with a gasping swoop, Käal dived down out of the sun. The bird turned its raveny (‘ravenous’, should that be?) head, its inkdrop eyes wide. Then Käal had him, in a swirl of squawking and threshing feathers.
‘Got you!’ cried Käal, in triumph. Attempting to turn and rise holding the bird in his claws, he immediately dropped it.
‘Awwwk!’ said the raven, falling straight down. With a yelp of fright Käal tucked his wings back and fell after him, grabbing the bird with his teeth, and straining to pull out of the dive. It was the kind of descent that dragons called the Stuka. Because it was the sort of downwards trajectory one was liable to get stuck in.
With a mighty heave, Käal flattened his trajectory, pulled up, and was finally able to fly more calmly on. He picked the raven from his jaw with his left hindleg.
‘Hey!’ the raven said. It did not sound happy.
‘You were sent with a message,’ said Käal, gasping a little, for the rapid flight had taken his puff away, rather. ‘Admit it!’
‘Nay,’ said the raven.
‘Don’t play the innocent with me,’ gasped Käal. ‘I know all about it! Tell me the truth.’
‘Go drown yourself in the sea,’ cawed the bird, unhelpfully.
‘You don’t need to tell me the whole message,’ Käal said, finding it hard to fly, hold the wriggling bird still and speak all at once. ‘Neither do you need to tell me who sent you. You don’t even need to tell me who you’ve been sent to. I know all that.’
Quoth the raven: ‘Nay! Vamoose!’
‘Don’t be unreasonable!’
‘Push-off! Yar! Boo!’
‘The game is up,’ said Käal. ‘I’ve found out all the stuff. I know everything except one piece of the puzzle. I need to know where you were going.’
‘Hostileia,’ said the bird, with a frantic wriggle to get free.
‘I knew it!’ cried Käal. ‘It is exactly as I suspected. But where exactly – Malborn? Sadney?’
‘The moon!’ spat the bird.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where in Hostileia?’
‘The North Pole!’
‘I’m warning you!’ The bird hissed, and wriggled, but when Käal added ‘I’ll release you if you tell me’ it conceded: ‘Tssa! Nay!’
Sadney?’ cried Käal. He opened his claw, and the bird lurched and flapped away, its feathers disarrayed, uttering a frankly disrespectful sentiment as it departed. Käal did not care. He was filled with dragon-glee, for he, he, the Käal Brimstön everybody underestimated, had solved the mystery.
18
He made it back to Doorbraak, and alighted on his own apartment’s balcony gasping like a displaced fish. It took a while to get his breath back. Lizbreath had seen his approach, and flew up to him from the garden. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’ve solved it,’ he said. ‘I’ve solved the mystery! Me! I did it! You stay here. I need to get to Hostileia.’
‘Hostileia?’ Lizbreath asked. ‘Why?’
‘You’ll see!’ said Käal.
‘Don’t be tedious, Käal. Just tell me. Why do you want to go all the way to Hostileia? It’s on the other side of the planet!.’
‘I’ll be back in a couple of days. And I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.’
‘Don’t tell me that Hellfire has been alive all this time and now is living in Hostileia?’ groaned Lizbreath, her wings drooping. ‘How rubbish is that?’
‘Don’t say it’s rubbish!’ said Käal, crestfallen, something literally possible for dragons. ‘Why is it rubbish? It’s brilliant. It’s certainly brilliant that I’ll get the Siegfried treasur
e. And it’s especially brilliant that I worked it all out for myself.’
‘Is that what you worked out?’
Käal felt a spurt of annoyance. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, stubbornly. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
Lizbreath looked as though she was going to press him for the answer, but then seemed to change her mind. ‘OK,’ she shrugged, and went back into the apartment.
Käal had got his puff back. He fetched his purse and attached it to his dragon belt. Then he slipped back into the broad sky, and flew in a leisurely helix down to the ground. The floating island was near the Fangland now, and it was a short hop by Skylligator to the Fangland capital city, Sink-of-Hell. There, pausing only to eat a single bleating sheep from a roadside booth, Käal made his way to the International Airport.
It was busy. Whilst he queued to buy a ticket, he had second thoughts. More specifically, he wondered whether he shouldn’t have gone first to Helltrik, explained the situation and got the old dragon to pay for the flight. But it would work much better as a dramatic reveal. Doubt reasserted itself when he actually bought the ticket, for it was very expensive indeed. But he consoled himself with the thought that, after all, he had solved the mystery. That meant that the Siegfried treasure would soon be his, and he would be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
He took his ticket to the waiting area, and sat with the other passengers in a tall crystal-walled room that overlooked the runway. The International Skylligator was being readied, and fuelled: two Airsprites were pouring great buckets of small fish into its maw. Even Käal, who had travelled by Skylligator many times, was impressed by the size of this one. Specially bred for its business, its pale green body with the crenellated spine and fat body was no more than eight hundred yards long. But its prodigious jaws were half as long again, and wide enough to accommodate three dozen adult dragons in comfort.
Finally it was time to board. Käal queued, presented his ticket, and flew down the loading chute to take his seat on the plump red flesh of the beast’s upholsteryish tongue. Excitement was growing in his belly. The chute was withdrawn and the jaws slowly closed, whilst flight attendants (all firedrakes) lit the glowglobes and passed amongst the passengers settling everybody for take-off. Up at the tongue-tip, the pilot was making the usual safety announcement:
‘… and as I’m sure I don’t need to remind frequent fliers, soot from your nostrils can irritate the sensitive mucus membrane and linings of the Skylligator, so please keep your sootbelts fastened over your snouts during take off and landing. Thanks for flying Brutish Airways…’
He was barely listening. In his mind, he was already arriving in the glory of a Hostileian morning, stepping from the opening jaw into antipodean sunlight, ready to complete his brilliant investigation.
The Skylligator rumbled, loped down the runway and lifted into the air. Impatience made Käal fidgety, and elongated the first hour or so of the flight prodigiously. But food was served, which helped; and an in-flight play (a puppet production of Dragon with the Wind) began. Worn out with his own excitement, Käal dozed. He woke after an indeterminate time, and lay still, soothed by the whooshing sounds of flight, and almost monkish murmuring of the crew and passengers. Around him, most people were sleeping. It was all so soothing that Käal fell back asleep. He woke only when the Skylligator began its final descent.
Sadney airport was a bigger structure than Sink-of-Hell, although there were far fewer people around. Indeed, Hostileia had always been a relatively underpopulated country, for reasons Käal had never quite understood. Because – he stepped into the air and flew leisurely over the city, glad to be able to stretch his wings after the long confinement – it seemed at first blush little short of paradisical. It was very hot and dry, with enormous skies and wide open countryside. Better still, it was possible to farm sheep on a large scale. Why did so few dragons choose to live there?
Käal moved through this new country and was amazed. The sun was ferociously bright and hot. Dust blowzed over the road in spectral tan-coloured folds. The mountains tucked their tips into the pleats of bleach-white clouds. Beautiful!
Hostilea! He was really there!
He took a room for the night in a hotel whilst pondering how best to track his target. In the bar that night he struck up an interesting conversation with the bardragon. ‘Why do so few dragons live here?’ he asked, with tourist ingenuity. ‘It’s my first visit, but it looks to me pretty much perfect.’
‘It’s a good question, mate,’ said the bardragon. ‘My theory – it’s too happy here.’
‘Too happy?’
‘Sure, cobber. The entire population of Hostileia comes from the northern hemisphere. This was wholly open territory, mate, with only a very mild hömös infestation. And like you say: paradise for dragons.’
‘“Cobbler”?’ Käal queried, weakly. The bardragon didn’t seem to hear.
‘The thing is, dragons are a gloomy bunch. They don’t know what to make of contentment. They’d rather mope around Scandragonia – tell me it ain’t so.’
‘But I can’t tell you so,’ said Käal, with a serious expression on his face. ‘It clearly is so. Is it in our genes, this addiction to gloom?’
‘Nah,’ said the bardragon. ‘Look at me. I’m perfectly well adjusted.’
‘Tell me,’ said Käal, ‘have you heard of the… Vagner clan?’
‘I read the Sagas, just like anybody,’ said the bardragon, cleaning the used crystal goblets by breathing fire into them and rubbing the soot off with a rag.
‘So you have heard of them?’
‘They’ve got that Floating Island, yeah? A-may-zing, that. How does it stay up?’
‘Magic,’ said Käal, ‘so I’m told.’
‘That’s a crap kind of answer, though, mate, ain’t it? Magic is fair enough, for day-to-day getting-along. But keeping millions of tonnes of rock and earth in the air, year in, year out? That’s something more than magic, I reckon.’
‘I daresay you’re correct,’ said Käal, vaguely. ‘But I have a question for you. Have you heard of any members of the Vagner clan settling over here?’
‘Over here? What? In Hostileia?’
‘Yes. Specifically, here in Sadney.’
‘Nah, mate. They all live on their island. You should check that out.’
Käal thought to himself: but of course she would be here under a false name. ‘Nevertheless, I heard that one of that clan came down here to live – several centuries ago.’
‘Nobody’s come to Sadney for half a millennium, mate,’ said the bardragon. ‘Back of beyond, down here.’ For a flickering moment Käal’s confidence wavered. What if he was wrong? But then the bardragon added: ‘Apart from that one woman. What was she called? Firehell, that’s it.’
‘Who?’
‘She’s called Firehell. Came down about three hundred years back. She runs a sheep factory, just north of the city, if memory serves. Came down under slightly mysterious circumstances, in fact. But she’s a nice enough bird. Why?’
Käal’s heart caught fire, and joy danced in his eyes. ‘I need to pay her a visit tomorrow. That’s all.’
‘Owes you money, does she?’
‘Nothing like that!’ said Käal; and then, thinking of the Siegfried treasure, effectively his own possession now, he added: ‘Although money has something to do with it.’
He went to bed intoxicated with firewater and slept heavily. The sun had been up for a long time when he eventually emerged from his room and settled his bill. He asked the desk clerk, a strangely grinny firedrake, about the sheep factory north of the city, run by the she-dragon who’d arrived in town three centuries before.
‘You mean Firehell’s place?’
‘That’s the one. What’s it called?’
‘It’s called the I Was Betrayed By My Pig Of A Brother farm. Funny name, really.’
Käal flew into the bright sunshine and took a bearing straight north. It didn’t take him long to find the factory: a complex of large sheds a
nd a single tall house in the middle. He circled it, noticed activity in the loading area, and flew down.
He landed beside a great heaving mass of sheep, all being directed along penned ramps into the large body of a food cart. Three dragons were occupied thuswise; one of them clearly the driver of the cart. Of the other two, one was a young male dragon; the other a mature female dragon. Just looking at her, Käal could see the family resemblance.
Looking up from her work, she asked Käal, in none too friendly a voice: ‘Can I help you?’
‘I hope so,’ said Käal. ‘I’ve travelled a long way to see you.’
‘To see me?’ She stood tall on her hind legs, stretching high. ‘Why?’
‘Because, Hellfire, it’s time to come home. Time to stop hiding down here.’
The woman looked at him. ‘Say what?’
‘You are Hellfire Vagner. It’s all right, I know the whole story. I was hired by your granduncle to find out the requisite, er, stuff. And I did.’
‘You’re one coal short of a whole fire, mate,’ said the woman. ‘My name’s Firehell.’
‘You can drop the pretence anymore, Hellfire. It’s all over.’
‘You’re bonkers, cobber.’
‘Come! Why carry on this fruitless charade?’
‘Shall I wring his neck, Ma?’ said the young hedragon, coming alongside.
‘Is this your son? How wonderful! Helltrik will be delighted.’
‘Who?’ said the woman.
‘Your granduncle. He’s been obsessing over your disappearance for three hundred years. There’s only one part of this whole mystery that I still don’t understand: why did you send him the tongues?’
For a long minute nobody said anything. There was no sound at all except the massed bleatings of the sheep. ‘Tongues?’ she said, eventually.
The he-dragon took a step towards Käal.
‘You, er,’ said Käal, watching the young male dragon approach with some small trepidation. ‘You know what I mean. You… shall we say removed the tongues of three hundred dragons and posted them to your granduncle on Doorbraak, one a year. I still don’t understand why.’