by Adam Roberts
‘You know what happened to her,’ said Lizbreath, vehemently. ‘You know because you killed her.’
There was a moment of silence. When Helltrik’s voice was heard again, through the closed door, it sounded wounded. ‘No I didn’t,’ he said.
‘She found out about the apehole, didn’t she?’ said Käal, with sudden insight. ‘She discovered that you had a secret apehole you didn’t want the world to know about! She threatened to shine a light on your secret apehole, didn’t she?’
There was a second pause. Finally, Helltrik’s voice came back, sounding more baffled than anything else. ‘What?’
‘She found out about the wyrmhole,’ said Lizbreath.
‘She did,’ said Helltrik. ‘The clever little creature. I tried to talk to her – to convince her to keep the family secret. I thought she might do it, as well. She was a sensible young dragon, at heart. But she grew upset… ran off.’
‘So you killed her!’
‘No! It might have come to that – I’ll admit that much. But it hadn’t yet.’
‘So—’ said Käal, genuinely puzzled. ‘If that’s so, then… where is she?’
‘I don’t know!’ barked Helltrik. ‘That’s what you were supposed to find out!’
‘Oh,’ said Käal. ‘Right.’
‘But I doubt she is alive,’ boomed Helltrik. ‘If she was, then I have to believe she would have gone public about the wyrmhole.’
‘If she were,’ shouted Käal, through the door.
‘What?’
‘You said “if she was”, but that’s incorrect.’
A pause. ‘What?’
‘It’s the subjunctive. Unfulfilled wish or condition. You said “if she was”, when the grammatically correct idiom is “if she were”.’
‘I must say you’re making the decision to kill you much easier for me,’ said Helltrik, through the door,
The door shook. Käal couldn’t help but leap back. ‘It won’t be long now,’ Helltrik boomed. ‘I’ve called in reinforcements. We’ll soon have this door down – and then it’s curtains for the lot of you!’
‘Oh Uncle!’ wailed Asheila.
Lizbreath was scuttling, head down, all the way round the inside of the broad circular wall. The many chuckling torches played games with her shadow as she moved, casting it wide from her back like a black cloak, drawing it in tight as she came under the light and then drawing it out on the far side. Several half-shadows accompanied the main one. Having completed a circuit at the bottom, she jumped in the air and flew round the room again higher up. Asheila and Käal watched her with fascination.
The door boomed again, and shook in its stony frame.
‘What are they doing?’ said Asheila. ‘Are they headbutting the door?’
‘Shooting it with their guns,’ said Lizbreath, alighting beside them. ‘It’ll take them a long time to break through like that. If that’s the best they’ve got, then maybe there’s time. But I tend to believe Helltrik has summoned heavier ordnance.’
‘So we’re trapped in here. Like rats in an, uh, bucket, or something. There’s no other exit?’
‘I was wondering if any of the keystones could, perhaps, be dislodged,’ said Lizbreath. ‘But it’s very solidly built, all round. Unsurprisingly.’
‘So there’s only one exit,’ said Asheila. ‘If we opened it, suddenly, perhaps that would give us the element of surprise…’
‘Helltrik and Marrer both have laser pistols,’ Lizbreath reminded her. ‘They have them trained on this door. We wouldn’t get four steps into the antechamber.’
‘We can’t just wait here! Wait to die like rats in a cage?’
‘There’s another way,’ said Lizbreath. She looked at the hoard of gold. The other two dragons followed her gaze. ‘Underneath all that gold, in fact, I’d wager, right in the middle of it, is…’
‘The apehole!’ cried Käal, with sudden joy.
‘Oh,’ gasped Lizbreath, exasperatedly.
‘No – you’re right, that’s brilliant!’ said Käal. ‘We can climb up the apehole! I assume it can fit three dragons, up there, can it? Maybe it’ll be a tight squeeze, but… well it’s a matter of life or death, isn’t it? It might not be my first choice, but I’d rather force myself up an apehole, however uncomfortably, than die. Who’s with me?’
Asheila was looking at him with an expression that could best be described as aghast.
‘There is the slight problem that the wyrmhole,’ Lizbreath put particular emphasis on the word, ‘is presently blocked by several thousand tonnes of gold.’
‘Well, let’s clear it out of the way!’ said Käal, filled with sudden eagerness. He scampered over to the hoard, and began picking up goblets, crowns, doubloons, triploons and swords, chucking them one after another in the direction of the door.
‘It’ll take us too long doing it by claw, like that,’ said Lizbreath. ‘They’ll break through the door and kill us before we get anywhere near the hole itself. We need a quicker way! We need to clear all this junk out of the way in one giant… blast…’
‘But how?’ asked Asheila.
‘How indeed? I don’t know! There must be a way…’
‘Explosives?’ said Käal, from the hoard.
And as he said so, with rather nice timing, the door broke from its frame and clattered into the room, propelled by a massive blast, an ear-dinning roar, and a roiling sphere of fire. Flame bulged through and sank back, leaving behind huge gouts of smoke. The massive door, flying free, tipped right over, bounced on the granite floor and embedded itself a third of its length into the pile of gold. Käal reacted instinctively as it caromed towards him, darting backward, losing his balance and falling completely off the hoard. He scrambled to his feet, the high-pitched mosquito whine of tinnitus in his ears, and looked for his companions. It was not easy to see, since the space was full of smoke, but after a moment he saw Asheila lying, prone, on the floor. He looked frantically about and saw Lizbreath curled in a heap beside the heap, her tail straight up. ‘Are you all right?’ he called, but he couldn’t hear his own voice, and that meant that he wasn’t sure if he had spoken at all.
The naked doorway sent a shaft of light through the dust; and through it came three large dragons. Small fire licked around their feet as they moved. Lizbreath stirred, dropped her tail and sat up. Asheila lay motionless.
24
‘Asheila!’ cried Käal, in dismay. The whistle inside his ear went up a tone, then a semitone, and then it popped and the sounds of the outside world flooded in.
‘Look what you made me do!’ declared one of the dragons by the door. It was Helltrik, and he was holding his lazy pistol in his right claw. ‘You made me break my own door! It’ll be a major job repairing this – I hope you realize that.’
‘Sorry,’ said Käal, automatically.
‘Not to mention the expense,’ said Helltrik.
Käal looked at the other two dragons. The smaller was Marrer, and he too had his lazy pistol. But the third was a stranger to Käal: a very large, evidently old and important beast. He was not carrying a weapon, but – oddly for a dragon – he was dressed in a waistcoat. In fact, it was so odd to see a dragon not obviously suffering from Pernicious Dragnemia wearing clothing that the sight of it left Käal boggled. Helltrik and Marrer had their deadly weapons aimed right at his head; he was moments away from death; there was no chance of escape, nowhere to run to and nothing to be done. But all Käal could think of was this strange piece of exterior clothing.
‘You’re wearing a waistcoat,’ he said to the stranger. ‘That’s odd.’
When the stranger spoke, it was with a deep and resonant authority. ‘Oh don’t think I haven’t tried washing it off,’ he growled. ‘Don’t think I haven’t tried every cleaning product imaginable, up to and including bleach. But it just won’t come off!’
‘The waistcoat won’t?’
‘No!’ snapped the stranger. ‘Not the waistcoat, you idiot. This.’ The dragon unbuttoned his coverin
g and slipped it off. On his chest was written: I A FOUL OLD DRAGON WHO ENDULGES IN ORAL SEX PERVERSION.
Käal stared at this. He blinked, and he stared some more. Dust was settling all around. Finally he spoke. ‘That’s not how you spell “indulges”, you know,’ he said.
‘I KNOW!’ exploded the dragon, rage evident in every scale of his body. ‘Do you think I don’t know? Of course I know! Why do people always say that? It wasn’t my bastard spelling! I didn’t choose to have this legend inscribed on my bastarding chest! But it means that not only do people think I’m a bastarding sex pervert, they think I can’t even spell correctly!’
‘My,’ said Käal, shaking his head to clear the dust from his ears. ‘You are cross.’
‘OF COURSE I AM CROSS!’ screamed the dragon, fire spurting in curt, incandescent white-violet gusts from his mouth as he spoke. ‘Look at me! I can’t get it off. It won’t come off! I don’t know what magic paint she used to write it, but nothing I do gets rid of it!’
Lizbreath stirred, pulled herself round and sat up. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello Burnblast,.’
‘There she is!’ howled the foul old dragon who once upon a time, but in all likelihood no longer, endulged in oral sex perversion. ‘There! The only reason I don’t tear you limb from limb, Salamander, right now – the only reason I don’t peel your skin scale by blood-soaked scale and eat you raw! – is this writing! You have one chance, and one chance only. Tell me how to get it off, and I shall,’ he looked at Helltrik, ‘shall make sure your death is painless, at any rate.’
‘You can’t get it off,’ Lizbreath said, mildly. ‘It’s a tattoo.’
‘Arrrrr!’ screeched Burnblast. ‘I’ll chop you into a thousand pieces! Helltrik, I want you to slice her into ten thousand chunks with that magic firestick of yours!’
‘Calm down, Burnblast,’ said Helltrik. ‘Let us not lose our heat.’
‘Arrrrr!’ Burnblast said again, thrashing his tail and blowing great angry blasts of fire.
‘Burnblast? Burnblast!’ called Helltrik. ‘Calm yourself! Be the Dragon Fonz! You know the Dragon Fonz?’
Burnblast looked at his companion. ‘Yes?’
‘What is the Dragon Fonz?’
‘Hot.’
‘There you go!’ Burnblast did seem to be calming down. ‘You’re hot,’ said Helltrik. ‘We’re all hot. None of us are going to lose our hotness. Calm, now!’
‘All right,’ said Burnblast in a steadier voice. ‘I have regained my temper. But I still want that Salamander dead.’
‘They’ll all be dead in a moment. But there’s no need to make more of a mess. This is still my hoard! We’ll get them to move the pieces back, the ones they moved. When they’ve tidied up a little, we’ll take them outside and kill them. The island will cross the Sea of Bothnia in a few days. We’ll fill their bellies with concrete and dump them there.’
‘Remember the deal, that’s all,’ said Burnblast. ‘I came straight here, with all explosives, to help you. In return, you let me kill the Salamander.’
‘Sure. Stay hot, Burnblast. Just stay hot. It’s all going to happen, as we agreed.’
‘I tried bleach!’ Burnblast burst out. ‘Have you ever tried to wash yourself with bleach? I’ll tell you what happens! It seeps round the side of your scales, that’s what, and works like acid on the flesh beneath!’
‘Bleach won’t get rid of it,’ said Lizbreath. ‘It’s a tattoo. You seem to have difficulty understanding this. It’s not painted on top of the scales.’
All through this conversation Käal was having an idea.
Now, Käal was not a coward, exactly; except, perhaps, by the rather exacting standards of dragons. Certainly he did not think of himself as a coward. But he did think: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I escaped from this situation alive, instead of dying ignominiously?’ And he was aware that there was a magical portal of some sort buried in the centre of Helltrik’s hoard. He hadn’t entirely grasped the principle on which this hole was supposed to work, but he comprehended that it was his only hope of survival.
As Burnblast ranted at Lizbreath, a thought germinated inside his dragon brain. I say, thought: it was more like an image, a mental picture of him diving into the flank of the golden pile, like a puffin dives into water. He saw himself moving with barely an effort through the granulated heap of gold objects, wriggling with powerful strokes, until his snout touched the apehole and he slid through into safety. This image grew quickly in strength until it assumed a kind of inevitability. His heart began to speed, and the thought fleetingly crossed his consciousness – what about the others? – but, although it was clearly a shame that Lizbreath and Asheila would die, it was by any metric better that than Lizbreath, Asheila and him dying.
‘Dragons!’ Helltrik said, in a conciliatory tone, though his weapon was still aimed at Lizbreath. ‘Dragons, please! This is a sombre moment; for death always is. Can we not – all of us – agree to meet it with a modicum of dignity?’
‘Stuff that,’ Käal yelled, suddenly. ‘I’m going up the apehole!’
He launched himself at the hoard, pushing off with his muscular hindlegs and thrashing his wings furiously to generate as much velocity as possible. His head hit the heap of gold with considerable momentum. Of course the stacked gold, pressed down by its own weight, was as hard as if it had been a single gigantic piece of granite. There was no way that ramming it at speed was going to penetrate it. Käal bounced off it as from a concrete wall, and landed on his ample draconic backside.
He sat there, half-stunned, looking from dragon to dragon blinking slowly. There was a sudden new great ache inside his skull. ‘Owwww,’ he drawled, putting both foreclaws to his brow. ‘Wwwwww.’
‘Enough idiocy! You three – put those pieces of gold back on the main hoard.’
‘Why should we labour like firedrakes for you, when you’re going to kill us anyway?’ asked Lizbreath, reasonably enough.
‘Because,’ snarled Burnblast stepping forward intimidatingly, to tower over the diminutive she-dragon, ‘he can kill you quickly – a swift chop to the neck – where I will kill you very slowly, with icicles in your eyes and cold mud down your throat!’
‘It’s all throats with you, isn’t it, Burnblast?’ Lizbreath drawled, with just a hint of amused contempt. The old dragon howled with rage, and would have launched himself straight at Lizbreath if Helltrik and Marrer hadn’t grabbed hold of his wings to restrain him.
‘We will not lose control!’ Helltrik gasped. ‘We will remain civilized dragons! We are not apes after all! Come! Come!’
For the first time since entering the vault, Burnblast showed something akin to contrition. ‘You’re right, you’re quite right.’ He snuffled, coughed out some smoke, and drew back to the door. ‘Let’s stop this charade. Give them a clean death and be done with it.’
‘Owww,’ said Käal, rubbing his head. ‘Wwww.’ He looked up. ‘That really hurt. I dinged my skull quite badly, actually.’ He stretched his neck and aimed his head in the general direction of his executioners. ‘It’s like I can see two of you, Helltrik.’
Helltrik looked sorrowfully down at him.
‘And now!’ said Käal. ‘And now it’s like you’re pointing two laser pistols at me! It’s quite a… thing… oh,’ he added, realization dawning. ‘You’re going to shoot me?’
Helltrik nodded.
‘Right now?’
‘Burnblast is right,’ he said. ‘A clean death is right.’
‘I know where the tongues came from,’ said Lizbreath. ‘They were cut out of the mouths of your dead ancestors. They’re from your own Clawsoleum.’
Helltrik swung his pistol round to point at Lizbreath. ‘You’re sure of this?’ he asked, shortly.
‘If you’d searched the room properly yourself, you’d have seen it.’
‘I shall enter that sacred space when I am dead,’ said Helltrik, in a resonant voice. ‘And not before.’
‘You entered it a few days ago!’ said Käal. �
�To try and carve Liz and myself into pieces with your crazy pistol!’
‘That,’ said Helltrik, furiously, shifting the aim of his weapon from Lizbreath’s head back to Käal’s. ‘That was to chase out two sacrilegious animals, blaspheming the holiest arena in my family! You forced me to it! You knocked Bullar off his pedestal! Death is the very least of what you deserve.’
‘I didn’t know anything about that, Uncle,’ said Asheila, hopefully. ‘Desecrating the Clawsoleum? This is the first I’ve heard of it!’
‘I know, my dear,’ said Helltrik, smoothly, his temper tucked neatly away again. ‘I don’t doubt it. Whilst killing these two interlopers will be a pleasure, you can rest assured that killing you will be a painful and unpleasant duty.’
‘Oh,’ said Asheila.
‘I don’t think you understand the implications of what I’m telling you,’ said Lizbreath. ‘All those tongues were taken from your own family sepulchre! What does that mean?’
‘It means it must have been done by a member of the family,’ said Marrer. ‘Since the key only works if turned by a somebody with Vagner blood in their veins.’
‘Interesting,’ agreed Helltrik, dispassionately.
‘Wait a minute—’ said Lizbreath,
‘Since, Granduncle, we can obviously eliminate you and I,’ mused Marrer. ‘That leaves a limited pool of suspects…’
‘… and once we have disposed of these evil-doers,’ said Helltrik, firmly, ‘we shall track down the perpetrator.’
‘But Granduncle,’ said Marrer, lowering his gun. ‘It means that it was a member of our family that murdered my sister!’
‘Come, Marrer – raise your weapon! We always knew that such a thing was possible – likely even. We have business to attend to here.’