by Adam Roberts
Firehell put her head on one side. ‘You’re off your chump,’ she opined. ‘You must have ice for brains. Sling him, Brute.’
The young male – this, evidently, was Brute – took hold of Käal’s neck. He didn’t, humiliatingly enough, use his hindleg. His forelegs were muscled enough to turn Käal’s well-modulated voice into something that sounded more like a sheep. ‘Wait! Wait!’ he gasped. ‘Don’t be hasty! Let me explain!’
Firehell nodded at her son, and the grip was released just enough for Käal to be able to say: ‘This farm is called the I Was Betrayed By My Pig Of A Brother farm, yes?’
‘Check the main gate,’ said Firehell. ‘It’s called the My Brother Has Pigs So I Thought I’d Trade Sheep farm.’
‘Ah,’ said Käal. ‘Conceivably I misheard. But you did come here three hundred years ago, in slightly mysterious circumstances?’
‘Three hundred years? How old do you think I am?’
‘Erm,’ said Käal, his own feeble foreclaws gripping Brute’s long, muscular forearm and feeling the hold on his throat tighten. ‘Ah, I thought that…’
‘I wasn’t alive three hundred years ago! Came here a hundred and ninety year ago – from Faraway Land.’
‘From Faraway Land? Not from Scandragonia?’
‘Never been to Scandragonia in my life.’
Now that he listened, he could hear a distinctive West Coast Faraway-Landish accent to Firehell’s words. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘That’s – ah. Look,’ he added, trying for a mollifying grin, ‘it is just conceivable that I’ve somehow got hold of the wrong end of the stick. If I may summarize: you’re a successful sheep farmer, who came to Hostileia a little under two centuries ago from Faraway Land. Which would mean, logically, aha! Ha-ha-ha. Which would mean, you’re not Hellfire Vagner living in Hostileia under an assumed name having fled Scandragonia three centuries ago for shameful and terrible reasons, and that you haven’t sent three hundred severed tongues to your granduncle by post.’
‘Brute,’ said Firehell, to his son. ‘Chuck him in the midden.’
The midden, it turned out, was a reservoir of sheep dung. Since sheep dung is fairly dry, being chucked into it was not quite the dangerously humiliating experience it might otherwise have been. Still, it was pretty humiliating, as I’m sure you can imagine.
‘You come back here,’ said Brute, ‘or bother my ma again in any way, I’ll chain you at the bottom of the midden for a week.’
‘I believe you,’ said Käal, brushing as much of the ordure from his scales as he could, and flying away.
Käal went back to his hotel and moped for a long time in his room. Eventually he went back down to the bar. The bardragon recognized him at once. ‘Did you find the bird you were looking for? The one at the My Brother Has Pigs So I Thought I’d Trade Sheep farm?’
‘Didn’t you tell me,’ he replied, ‘that it was called the I Was Betrayed By My Pig Of A Brother farm?’
‘Nah, mate. That doesn’t sound like a farm name at all.’
‘I must have misheard you. It turns out the owner came over here about two hundred years ago, from Faraway Land.’
‘I could have told you that, mate. She came over with her brother when they were both Salamanders.’
‘Were there any other females, who came to Sadney from… and this part is quite important… from Scandragonia maybe three – rather than two – hundred years ago?’
‘Nah, mate.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘You could check the public records office. But I don’t reckon you’ll find anything.’
The following day, Käal proved the correctness of the bardragon’s reckoning; he spent half an hour in the public records office with a sinking heart. That evening he boarded the return Skylligator, a night flight back to Starkhelm, in a state of considerable mental discouragement.
19
He arrived at Sink-of-Hell airport, feeling foolish and grumpy. His own flat was cold and damp, which did not enhance his mood. He lit a fire, and broodily stared at the flames for a long time. He tried not to think about the enormous dent he had made in his hoard, buying a short-notice first-class return Skylligator ticket to Hostileia for no reason. But, as you’ll have observed yourself, trying not to think about something is an excellent way of focusing your thoughts precisely upon that something.
There was no avoiding his return to Doorbraak. He sent a raven to Lizbreath saying he was on his way back, and got himself a drink. His annoyance and embarrassment was pricked by the realization that the mystery remained unsolved. It seemed that Hellfire had not snuck away from the Floating Island, made her way to Hostileia. So what had happened to her?
He decided he was too exhausted and despondent to fly himself to Doorbraak. So outside Sink-of-Hell airport, he hired a sedangerous chair, pulled through the air by a muscular young workwyrm. It took nearly half an hour to reach Doorbraak, travelling slowly and inexorably south over Fangland.
Käal paid the chair with a resentful sense of how depleted his funds now were. He jogged through the air on aching wings, and landed – finally – on his apartment balcony with a sigh.
He stepped through the door ready to lie down and sleep. But the chamber was crowded with dragons. Somebody at the back called ‘here he is!’ and a great, flame-garnished cheer burst from those assembled. Käal was so startled he tripped backwards, fell over, knocking the sideboard over with a snare-drum clatter with his tail as he struggled to get back to his feet. When he got himself upright again, Old Helltrik Vagner was standing right in front of him.
‘What?’ said Käal.
‘Well done, my boy!’ the old dragon said. There were tears in his eyes – actual, hot-phlegm tears.
‘What?’ said Käal. He looked at Helltrik, and then at the crowd of other dragons in the chamber: Asheila was there, looking tenderly at him; Lizbreath was clinging easily to the frame of the kitchen door. Marrer was there, and Redsnapper, and four or five other inhabitants of Doorbraak that Käal, his mind jangled, recognized but couldn’t immediately name. He looked at Helltrik. ‘What?’ he asked that august dragon.
‘My trust in you has been well repaid,’ said Helltrik. ‘Where is she? Out on the balcony?’
‘She?’ said Käal, not quite grasping what the old dragon meant, but with a sinking sense of the situation. ‘What?’ He looked around, tried, ‘she’, and then reverted to ‘what?’
‘Hellfire,’ said an elderly female dragon, whom – as she spoke – Käal recognized as Greendragon. Helltrik’s venerable older sister.
Käal understood what had happened. Lizbreath must have told them that he, Käal, had located Hellfire, alive after all these years and living in Hostileia. More, she must have passed on the information, somehow, that he was bringing her back. The full sickening weight of his circumstances hit him. He looked about, tried to formulate a sequence of words that would communicate to this roomful of expectant dragons that they were mistaken, that he had not located Hellfire, that the mystery was as far from being solved as ever. The sequence of words refused to coalesce in the speech centres of his dragon brain.
‘What?’ he said, instead.
Marrer went out onto the balcony, and came back a moment later looking puzzled. ‘She’s not there.’
The mood in the room shifted, marginally, but palpably.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Greendragon.
‘What? Right,’ said Käal. ‘It looks like you’re expecting something. I’d say that you’re all expecting… something.’
‘We are expecting,’ said Helltrik, looking hurt, ‘you to arrive here having brought back Hellfire from Hostileia. Did you leave her in that country?’
‘Right, well I don’t know why,’ Käal said, ‘you might expect such a bizarre thing.’
‘Because your researcher told us that was what you were doing,’ said Helltrik.
Everybody twisted their heads about to look at Lizbreath. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘You told me you have discovered that Hel
lfire was in fact living in Hostileia.’
Everybody turned their heads back to face Käal.
‘Well, all right, that’s true, I did,’ he admitted. ‘I reasoned that Hellfire must have survived. If she were dead, then she couldn’t move her body, so she would have been found. The fact that she hadn’t been found must mean that she did move her body – so as to avoid being found, you see. That must mean she wasn’t dead.’
The looks in the eyes surveying him did not seem as persuaded by his logical inference as he was himself. He tried again. It was important to convey to them how watertight his logic was on this. ‘If she died, then how did her body move? A third party? But who would move a dead body? Nobody would! Anybody would notify the authorities!’
‘Unless,’ said Asheila, as if to a child, ‘you had just murdered the person, and didn’t want the body to be found?’
Käal pondered this. ‘Well, that makes sense, I suppose,’ he conceded.
The room was filled with groans. ‘You idiot!’ snarled Greendragon. ‘I knew it!’ said somebody else.
‘Now, look,’ said Käal, trying to muster a small quantity of his own outrage. But it wasn’t easy. ‘I didn’t ask you to gather here, in my apartment…’
‘You went all the way to Hostileia?’ asked Marrer, incredulous.
‘I did, yes,’ said Käal.
‘And it was a dead end? A wasted journey?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose you’d have to say it was.’ Käal was conscious that this made him look foolish, so he added: ‘I paid for the ticket with my own money, too.’ Once he had said this, he realized that it made him look more, not less, foolish.
‘You consummated berk!’ fumed Greendragon.
‘Why did you think she was in Hostileia in the first place?’ Marrer asked.
‘Well, I saw somebody send a raven. I thought it was a message for Hellfire, so I intercepted it. When I asked it where it was going, it…’ He trailed off. He could see, in retrospect, how stupid this sounded.
‘And it said it was going to Hostileia?’ Marrer finished.
‘Yes.’
‘And you,’ said Marrer. He paused in the middle of utterance, paused for long enough to look slowly around the room and note every single dragon inside it. The silence stretched. ‘Believed it?’ he finished, eventually.
‘Well…’ said Käal.
‘Was it a long-distance raven?’ asked Helltrik, in a baffled voice.
Käal made the sort of face you make if you have bitten into what you thought was an orange only to discover that it is actually a lemon. ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘Also, when I asked it where it was going, its full answer was: go drown yourself, nay, never, Hostileia, the moon, the North Pole.’
‘You are a proper fool,’ said Asheila with tremendous and perhaps excessive vehemence.
The room broke into uproar. Everybody was talking at once. Everybody except Lizbreath, who clung comfortably to her doorframe, watching everybody with sardonic pleasure.
‘I knew it!’ cried one elderly female dragon voice, piercingly enough to silence the rest. ‘I knew this – fraud – would not return with my daughter.’ Käal recognized Isabella, Marrer’s mother. The old she-dragon was coming to the front, poking out her wings to shove dragons out of the way. She stood next to him. ‘Do you know how I knew?’
Nobody took the cue, so Käal felt obliged. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because I have proof my daughter is dead.’
Everybody was staring at her. For a moment, Käal thought she was about to confess to murdering her own offspring. But instead she said: ‘I know this because she has communicated with me – from beyond the grave.’
‘Oh!’ said Käal. It was more of a squeak than anything. ‘No? Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, yes, right,’ said Käal. ‘But, you know. Really?’
‘Really, young dragon. There are more things in heaven and earth,’ she said, in a thrumming, uppy-down voice, opening her wings and putting her throat up like a thespian, ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horror-show!’
‘Oh,’ said Käal again. ‘Horror-show? Really? Me?’
‘Stop a moment,’ said Asheila. ‘Aunt Bella, are you saying that you have had communication with Hellfire from the other side?’
‘Oh we all know the island is haunted!’ said the old she-dragon, dramatically. ‘We pretend it isn’t, we avert our eyes, we go about our ordinary lives. But we know it is! We’ve all seen the poltergeist evidence!’
‘Horrow-show just seems,’ said Käal, to nobody in particular, ‘a little – harsh.’
‘Come now, Mother!’ said Marrer. ‘That’s just superstition, and you know it. Firedrakes and workwyrms might believe in all that bells-and-whistles… ghosts and charted-accountants and the boogeydragon, but we are above it, surely! You’ll be telling me next that you believe in Santa Claws!’
‘Hush!’ said Isabella, turning on the spot and sweeping her still-open wings around the room with a great rustling sound. Several dragons had to pull in their heads to avoid being struck. ‘Hush, my foolish son. I have spoken to my daughter! Nobody here can deny that I have. Nor can they deny that this means she is dead!’
‘Isabella, my dear,’ said old Helltrik, mildly. ‘We’ve all been very upset by Hellfire’s passing. We all know I have! Could it be that, in your grief, you have imagined speaking to the dear girl? Perhaps imagined it so vividly that…’
‘Helltrik, you old cinder,’ snapped Isabella. ‘Shut your snout. You really don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t imagine it! I spoke with her.’
‘But… how?’
‘I used a “yes-yes” board. Sometimes called, by more linguistically cosmopolitan dragons, a Ouija board.’
‘Mother!’ said Marrer, astonished. ‘Really?’
‘It’s not the horror part, I suppose,’ said Käal, despite the fact that nobody was listening to him. ‘Horror is a reasonable draconic quality. It’s the show part. As if I’m just a sort of play-actor.’
‘Through the medium of the yes-yes,’ Isabella announced to the room, ‘I have communicated with my daughter! She has told me that life on the far-side is nothing to be afraid of! When we die, there is a bright point of heat – we must go into the heat! There is peace and contentment in…’
‘Mother,’ snapped Marrer. ‘Stop all this nonsense.’
‘Nonsense? Nonsense!’ said Isabella. ‘By which I mean,’ she clarified, looking a touch flustered, ‘that nonsense is a nonsensical thing to say. It is nonsense to call it nonsense. Because it’s not nonsense.’ She addressed the room as a whole. ‘Hellfire spoke to me. She told me she was dead – and that she had been murdered!’
This created a small sensation. Voices clamoured together: ‘No!’ ‘I can’t believe it!’ ‘Beyond the grave?’ ‘I knew it!’
From her reticule, Isabella brought out a piece of paper. ‘In my last communication with the dear departed dragon, she gave me the following message.’ She held the piece of paper up. On it, in quavery letters, was written the following:
A FINGER THE HINGE OF WORLDS! BURNT FINGER!
It took a moment for everybody in the room to read this. Then it took another moment to digest it, and perhaps half a moment before they realized that it was gibberish. ‘What on earth does that even mean, Mother?’ demanded Marrer, in an exasperated voice.
‘What’s a finger?’ asked Käal.
‘It’s an antique word for claw,’ the old she-dragon explained. ‘I looked it up.’
‘It’s gibberish,’ said Helltrik, firmly. ‘That’s the basic problem with all Ouija technology. You get a lot of words and letters randomly assembled, and they tend to make gibberish. Why would you think this garbled message came from Hellfire in the first place?’
Isabella turned the paper over. ‘I asked,’ she said, ‘and I wrote down the answer.’ On the verso of the scroll was written:
HI THIS IS HELLFIRE EVERYTHING FINE HERE HOW R U? THE SILENCE
MUST STOP, MURDER AND LIYS, LIES, NO, LIYS, AGH!! SPELLING!!! ANYHOW THERE’S A MESSAGE AND IT IS IMPORTANT! I FOUND OUT THE TRUTH!
‘So,’ said Käal, ‘you got this message, and then the other one?’
‘Yes.’
‘Turn the scroll over, and let’s have a look at the second message again.’
Isabella did so.
‘I think it’s the “hinge” that throws me,’ said Asheila, after a while. ‘Looks almost but not quite like “finger”. Should it be “hinge”?’
‘What else would it be?’ snapped Isabella.
‘Maybe “hinger”?’ said Asheila.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. “A finger the hinger of worlds”? That doesn’t make any sense at all.’
‘Oh, when “finger the hinge of worlds” does?’
‘If she means claw, why doesn’t she say claw?’ asked Greendragon.
‘Finger doesn’t mean claw,’ said a voice from the back of the room. It took a moment for Käal to realize that this was Lizbreath, contributing to the discussion for the first time. Several dragons turned to look at her.’
‘The young Salamander is correct,’ said Isabella, stiffly. ‘“Fingers” is a technical term, to describe the claw-like digits of certain reptiles and squirrels.’
‘And these squirrel claws are the “hinger”,’ said Käal, pronouncing this last word with a hard ‘g’. ‘What’s a hinger again?’
‘No, no!’ said Isabella. ‘You’re getting distracted.’
‘Is it a misprint for “hunger”?’ asked Asheila. ‘That would make more sense.’
‘“Squirrel claws are the hunger of worlds” makes more sense?’ asked Marrer.
‘Well, it’s no more nonsensical than the original message!’
‘It doesn’t say anything about squirrels!’ said Isabella, crossly. ‘Squirrels are not mentioned.’
‘Reptiles, then,’ said Old Helltrik. ‘What else has fingers?’
‘Bats have fingers,’ said Greendragon, displaying a surprising knowledge. ‘I happen to know quite a lot about bats. They have fingers. Their wings are attached to them.’