by Adam Roberts
‘So you recognize my little toy?’ Helltrik asked.
‘I know enough to take it seriously,’ said Lizbreath.
‘Good. Because you should take it seriously.’
‘Through my scales?’ said Käal.
‘Käal, think back,’ said Lizbreath. ‘Back in the Clawsoleum?’
‘I’d hardly forget that!’ Käal said. ‘Oh, wait a minute. Was that what was fired at us? One of those?’
‘And by me, yes,’ said Helltrik. ‘You were profaning our most sacred space! Defiling the tomb of my ancestors! I couldn’t have you poking around down there, pushing the corpses of my noble dragon-ancestors off their pedestals.’
‘But it’s not down there, is it?’ said Lizbreath. ‘I know. I looked.’
‘Oh you’re a clever girl,’ said Helltrik, disdainfully.
‘Not clever enough, it seems,’ Lizbreath replied, grimly. ‘I thought it would be there, but it wasn’t. So where is it?’ A look of revelation passed across her face. ‘Your hoard! Of course!’
‘It seems I was right. You’re clever enough,’ said Helltrik. He was aiming his peculiar device directly at Lizbreath’s forehead.
‘But why the hoard? Is it… wait, shielding?’
‘Very good. You’ve done a lot of work on this, haven’t you? It’s a shame to have to kill you. Shielding. It emits a great quantity of quantum radiation, as you might expect. A human would use lead to shield it. But you can’t very well imagine me, the head of the Vagner nest, sleeping on a hoard of lead, now, can you?’
‘What are you both on about?’ asked Käal. ‘I’m utterly and completely baffled.’
‘Mon. Vagner,’ said Lizbreath, ignoring him. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think that if you were going to kill us with that, then you would have done it already. I think you want to keep us alive for something. So perhaps we should get to it? What do you want?’
‘Ah,’ said Helltrik; and there seemed genuine sorrow in his voice. ‘I’m afraid there you are wrong. I don’t want to keep you alive. I am going to kill you both, now. I pause only for one thing. And that, because I am not a cruel dragon – precisely because I am not a human. It is because I wish to apologize. I’m sorry for what I am about to do. I wish it could have been otherwise. Believe me, I take no pleasure in this. But, believe me: there is no other way.’
He raised the device in his hand, and aimed it directly at Lizbreath’s face. Käal had time for only one thing: a yell of ‘Wait!’ and then—
Then several things happened at once. Helltrik’s device discharged its weird fire – a bright plumb line of ruby-red brilliance – but not at Lizbreath. Helltrik yelled in surprise. The ceiling exploded into big chewy chunks of stone that clattered all about them as an indoor hailstorm. Käal felt an impact from the side, and it was Lizbreath. She had launched herself at him with such energy that he was almost bowled over. ‘Come on,’ she gasped, her mouth right up against his head, pushing with her legs. Wide-eyed, Käal looked back and got one last glimpse of Helltrik: he appeared to be dancing, or perhaps having a conniption fit. The forearm that was holding the device pointing straight up, the other forearm gripping the wrist, the hindlegs thrashing, incoherent bellowing noises coming from his mouth. Then, with one last heave of her legs, Lizbreath managed to push Käal onto the balcony, and a moment later they were out in the plain air.
‘Up!’ Lizbreath called. ‘Don’t fly straight or you’ll be an easy target! Up the castle, and curve round.’
He was so discombobulated he almost didn’t follow her advice. But she slithered away through the air, sticking close to her own shadow on the wall, and her tail tapped him on the head as she went; and, for some reason, this prompted him to action. He pointed his head straight up, thrust his wings back with one powerful stroke, lunged forward, smacked his belly against the stonework of the castle wall. With a ‘hurr!’ he flapped again, and then again, and oared himself upwards. Below, on the receding balcony, he saw Helltrik emerge and lift his device towards him. Exactly enough dragon-sense remained in his brain for Käal to jink sharp right. A perfectly straight red-gleaming pole appeared in the air where he had been, and then vanished. A piece of the castle’s exterior stonework the size of a Moomin broke away just above and to the left of Käal, and fell away in a mist of masonry dust.
That put vim into Käal’s flight. Adragoline surged through his bloodstream, and he flapped vigorously, hurtling upwards and following Lizbreath’s path. In moments they were round the other side of the tower. Lizbreath alighted on the intersection where one of the smaller towers jutted from the main central structure, like a branch from a treetrunk. Gasping for breath, Käal landed beside her.
‘What is that device?’
‘It’s a laser pistol,’ said Lizbreath, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, looking behind her, and in front, above and below.
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing!’
‘Then you’re not reading the right Sagas – look out!’
Helltrik came rearing up through the air, his wings broad behind him, the fire tugged into downward tendrils coming out from his nostrils by his upward momentum. The device was in his outstretched claw. Lizbreath leapt straight up. Käal, though, panicked somewhat. He tried to jump to the side, banged his head against the tower, half-fell from his perch, and went head-over-rump. There was a sharp pain in the end of his tail, and simultaneously the crump of masonry breaking. And then, out of control, he banged into Helltrik. The old dragon cried in alarm. Käal, in pain from his tail, and disoriented, thrashed his wings to right himself. When he got upright again he saw Helltrik, empty-handed. They looked down together. The device, turning over and over, was falling through the sky.
‘You fool!’ cried Helltrik. ‘You complete fool!’
He lowered his head and pushed off, flying hard straight down, beating his wings desperately to try and catch the falling artefact.
Treading air, Käal watched his descent feeling stupid. Lizbreath was at his shoulder. ‘You knocked it out of his claw with your tail! What a hero!’
‘I’m afraid my heroism was entirely inadvertent,’ said Käal. ‘And my tail—’ he brought the tailend round to where he could see it. ‘My tail hurts.’
‘He shot through the tip of it,’ Lizbreath observed.
‘Through my scales! Right through, and out the other side! It’s incredible!’ Black blood oozed from a tiny hole, welling into inklike droplets and falling singularly into the wide air.
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Lizbreath. ‘There are no vital organs in the very end of your tail.’
‘It hurts!’ said Käal, again.
‘I have friends who did that to themselves. For fun,’ said Lizbreath.
‘What? Shot themselves?’
‘Not shot. But drilled holes in their scales, using a laser.’
‘In the name of Woden, why?’ Käal cried.
‘Body adornment. You can put metal pins and hoops through the hole you make. It looks hot.’
‘This is just – insane! I never heard of such a thing!’
‘Oh we don’t have access to laser pistols. Nothing so powerful as Mon. Vagner’s little toy.’ Helltrik was still visible, below them, much diminished in size. Then the low-lying cloud swallowed him. ‘Nothing so compact. I have a device – though I need a large satchel just to carry the generator around in. It’s how I made my tattoo. The difference between a tattoo and body-painting is that painting just goes over the surface of the scales, where a tattoo puts pigment actually into them. If people stopped to think for a minute, knowing what they know about dragon scales, they’d realize that we’re talking about more-than-draconic technology.’
‘Where did you get your tattoo machine from?’
‘A friend of mine built it. But he was working on a blueprint. And the blueprint came from the same place that Helltrik got his device. And that place is not the world of dragons. Come on!’
‘But,’ spluttered Käal. ‘But �
� with a device like that… if it fell into the wrong talons… think of the damage it could do! Lizbreath, it shot a beam of fire right through my scales!’
‘I saw.’
‘Nothing goes through scales! Scales are impenetrable! If there’s a weapon that just slices through them, like an incisor through a sheep – well, wow! Wow! This changes everything!’
‘Belatedly,’ said Lizbreath, ‘you are starting to get it. Come on!’
21
‘We need to get inside Helltrik’s hoard chamber,’ Lizbreath said, as they alighted on the balcony to Käal’s chamber.
‘Helltrik aimed that device, his… lazy piston…’
‘Laser pistol.’
‘Exactly. He aimed that right at your head! He aimed at your head and fired the weapon. You should be dead. That beam would have gone right through your skull! It would have killed you.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that.’
‘So why didn’t he shoot you? He shot the ceiling. Why spare you?’
‘I don’t think he intended to spare me.’
‘So what happened?’ Käal asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lizbreath. ‘But I’ve got a notion. Come on, though. We haven’t much time. Helltrik is doubtless on the ground below, right now, retrieving his weapon. And when he finds it, he will be back. And when he comes back, he will shoot to kill. Make no mistake, he means to kill me and to kill you too.’
‘I don’t want to be killed! Being killed would be very inconvenient indeed!’
‘Then we’d better get a move on.’
They scuttled through the inner door and down the main castle corridor. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I thought it was in the Clawsoleum! Stupid of me, really. Of course it’s in the hoard chamber! They’ve been using his huge pile of gold to mask its output.’
‘“It”?’
‘It’s – complicated. A kind of hole. A sort of doorway.’
‘OK. So that’s it. And… “they”?’
‘The Vagners. More specifically, Helltrik and that grandnephew of his, the one he’s appointed his heir…’
‘Marrer!’ shrieked Käal.
‘I know his name,’ Lizbreath snapped back. ‘You don’t have to scream.’
‘No – I mean – there’s Marrer!’ Not only was Marrer there: he was holding in his foreclaw another one of the freaky dragonscale-piercing weapons! Käal didn’t get all this out before the wall-tiles broke into pieces and scattered in all directions. ‘Down!’ This time Käal got a close look at the beam of the device’s weird fire, straight as a painter’s line. It chopped a triangle off the end of one of Lizbreath’s spinal plates and gouged a hole in the far wall with a bang and a blurt of stone pieces. Lizbreath, pressing her belly to the floor, slid his way with remarkable celerity. Not the vegetable; that’s celery. Celerity. It means rapidity.
The two snuck round the corner as a third blast of the mystery weapon turned a portion of wall into a tumbling risotto of stone.
You know: quickness.
‘Whichever dragon clan invented that weapon will surely conquer the entire world!’ gasped a hyperventilating Käal.
‘No dragon invented it,’ said Lizbreath, laying her long face lengthwise along the corner-edge of the wall, so as to angle her eyes just enough to see round the corner.
‘No dragon? Did it just tumble, fully formed, out of the lap of the gods?’
‘It was made by humans.’
‘By,’ said Käal, ‘humans? Did I hear you say humans? The vermin that used to infest the world, a sub-species renowned for their cruelty and barbarism? The creatures that lived in wooden houses that were effectively unlit bonfires, that ate vegetable slime and spent their time mocking one another? Those humans? Yes. That makes sense. So, I suppose, the apes somehow mocked up a superweapon capable of punching right through dragon scales, and then just forgot to use it during the Scorch Wars, eh? And it’s lain unnoticed in one of the desert lands until the Vagners came across it? Pull the other one.’
Lizbreath pulled her head back in. ‘It’s the truth. But never mind about that now. Marrer has gone. But he won’t have gone far. In fact, he wouldn’t have fired at us unless he’d spoken to Helltrik first. That means that the old dragon is back on the Island. Probably he retrieved his weapon. If he didn’t, well… well, obviously Marrer has got one as well. Either way, we’re in trouble. They’ll be back, and they intend to murder us both.’
‘But why?’
‘Because we saw the diagram.’
‘Well thanks a lot for scratching that into the crystal, for me to see,’ said Käal with what he hoped was ‘pointed sarcasm’ but suspected was actually ‘whiny dickishness’. ‘That was very thoughtful of you. Now they’re going to kill me!’
‘They don’t want the secret of this place getting out. That makes it even more pressing. We need to get into that hoard chamber.’
‘The most solidly locked and inaccessible room in the whole of Doorbraak,’ said Käal. ‘It’s a stupid plan. And why do you want to get in there, anyway? You itching to steal some of the Vagner gold?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’said Lizbreath. ‘Who can help us? What about your girldragon?’
‘Asheila? She won’t help us.’
‘You’re sure? We need a hand.’
‘I’ll help you,’ said a creaky voice behind them. For a heartstopping moment, Käal thought that Marrer had crept up behind them and was about to drill dirty big holes through their body with his miracle weapon. But it wasn’t Helltrik: it was his battered-old-bird of a brother, Ghastly.
‘Who are you?’ Lizbreath.
‘Ghastly Vagner,’ said Ghastly, ‘party CONFerence.’
‘What?’
‘Couldn’t help but notice that my bound-ary commISSION brother and grandnephew are trying to kill you.’
‘Er,’ said Käal. ‘Yes. They do seem to be trying to… eh, kill us.’
‘Is that because – CAUCUS – you’ve stumbled across the secret at the heart of my sorry family?’
‘You know about that?’ asked Lizbreath.
‘Of course,’ said the wizened old dragon. ‘I’ve been trying to tell the world for centuries; but because of my – grassroot-party-activISTS! – little problem, nobody takes me seriously.’
‘Democratourette’s,’ said Lizbreath, wonderingly. ‘I’ve read about it, never seen an actual case in the flesh.’
‘Might I just say,’ Käal put in, ‘that I’m still not sure what’s going on… except that two leading members of dragonkind’s wealthiest family are trying to kill me.’
‘We have to get to the vault where Helltrik keeps his hoard. Can you help us?’
‘Is that where it is?’ Ghastly asked. ‘I’ve lived here all my life and never known. Ma-a-a-a-anifesto!’
‘I think so. We need to get in there, to be sure.’
‘Why do we need to get in there?’ Käal asked. ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to fly far away from Doorbraak? They are trying to kill us, in case you’ve forgotten. And in case you’ve forgotten, my tail hurts.’
‘Oh!’ said Ghastly, noticing the hole in Käal’s tailend for the first time. ‘Well – look at that!’
‘We need to get into the chamber so that I can record what is inside with this eye.’ She pulled a small eye from her satchel. ‘Nobody will believe my word, or yours, but if we can give them ocular proof, then we can tell the whole of dragonkind about the secret at the heart of the Vagner hoard.’
‘You want to break into the chamber and record Helltrik’s pile of gold – with an eye?’
‘No. I want to record what the pile of gold is hiding.’
‘You’re crazy. We need to get out of here, not go deeper.’
‘Believe me Käal,’ said Lizbreath, ‘we will not be safe until this is made public. Where would we fly? Starkhelm? Back to Hostileia? Wherever we went, assassins would follow. This goes right to the top! Even the Dragonlords know about, and are complicit in, t
his conspiracy! Only by breaking the story public can we keep ourselves safe; because then there would no longer be a secret that killing us would protect.’
‘Well,’ said Käal, uncertainly. ‘Even if I agreed with that logic, and I’m not sure I do, I don’t see that we can do any good going for the vault where Helltrik keeps his gold. It will be locked. And we don’t have the key. Your computers won’t help you there.’
‘I have a key to the chamber,’ said Ghastly, clacking his jaw startlingly and adding, ‘first nationwide then on a constituency by constituency basis.’
‘Thank you!’ said Lizbreath, embracing him. ‘Thank you!’
‘Oh,’ the dragon replied, taken aback by this expression of gratitude from an attractive younger creature. ‘Don’t mention it.’
‘It will be dangerous, down there,’ said Lizbreath. ‘Do you want to give me the key, and stay out of it?’
‘That won’t work, I’m afraid, it’s a magical key. It must be placed in the lock by a member of the Vagner family, or it won’t work first past the post.’
‘Will you do it?’
‘Of course I will. All this secrecy hasn’t been good for our family. Get it out in the open once upon a time famous for radical legislation elevated debate forensic scrutiny of laws turned to giant franking machine that stamps whatever Acts the government wants sometimes hardly even.’
‘I’m really not convinced that I,’ Käal started to say. Then, without warning, the wall beside them exploded: fire, dust and stony shrapnel filled the air. The dust sizzled as the laser-beam zapped through it. The beam missed Käal’s head by a talon’s-width. ‘Let’s go,’ he yelled.
The three of them ran, all-fours, down the corridor, their necks low and level with the floor. The air over Käal’s ears was disco-crisscrossed with two red lights. Behind him he heard a voice calling: ‘Ghastly?’ It was Helltrik, calling at the top of his voice: ‘Ghastly! Get out of the way!’
‘Looks like he found his device,’ Käal called to Lizbreath. She was at the downward spiral of stairs. ‘This way,’ she cried.
‘Ghastly, what are you playing at!’ yelled Helltrik. And Marrer’s voice could be heard too: ‘Granduncle, be careful! You might get hit!’