by Tom Holt
‘Search me.’ Kurt shook his head. ‘It just kinda happens, I guess. You can either stay in your statue, or you can bug out and wander around in the skin suit. Who cares how it works so long as it works?’
That, David conceded, wasn’t something you could reasonably argue with. As far as he was concerned, he was living on borrowed time, although who he was borrowing it from, and whether they’d eventually want it back, was far from clear.
‘This job,’ he said tentatively.
‘Big job,’ replied Kurt with an expansive gesture, which a passing waiter took to be a request for the bill. ‘So important, I guess, they had to bring me back from the dead to do it.’ He grinned. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘that kinda suggests I still am the best, doesn’t it? That’s good to know.’
‘The job.’
‘What? Oh, yeah. The job is, to bring out the hostages.’
David raised an eyebrow. ‘Hostages?’
‘Okay, so they aren’t actually hostages. More like key figures. And figurines, too. The idea is, there’s a lot of important statues gonna get...’ Kurt hesitated, searching for the right word. ‘Woken up, I guess. Liberated. Occupied. Possessed. Anyway, my part is, as soon as they wake up I gotta get ’em out of wherever they’re at and turn ‘em loose. Tough assignment, yes?’
‘Very.’ David nodded emphatically. ‘Have you any idea why?’
‘Me? No way. The first thing you learn in this business is not to ask questions. Well, you gotta ask some questions, like Which guy’s the one needs wasting? and Where’s the goddamn safety catch on this thing? But apart from that, no questions. Especially no questions beginning with Why?’
‘Um.’ David looked at him through a purported smile. The man’s stark staring mad, he told himself. ‘Well, thanks for the job offer, I’ll give it some really serious thought. In the meantime, any idea what I’m supposed to do next?’
Kurt shrugged. ‘Not in my brief, pal. Maybe you got a destiny to manifest, in which case go for it, do well. Or maybe you should just get a job in a sandwich bar somewhere and live semi-happily ever after, like regular people do. None of my goddamn business, either way.’
‘Quite.’
‘The other part of the job is,’ Kurt went on, ‘I gotta kill a dragon.’
There are quite a few differences between statues and people. Bianca was learning about them.
A few examples. Statues are beautiful. When a statue gets broken, you can glue back the bits with epoxy resin, rather than hang about waiting for bones to knit. Likewise, if you attempted to sign your name on the plaster cast of the Winged Victory, the next thing you’d see would be the pavement rushing up to meet you.
The key difference, however, and the one which made Bianca realise just how lucky statues are, wasn’t something that had immediately sprung to mind. She had learned it by long, bitter experience.
To wit: true, both statues and humans in hospital get people coming to see them. Statues, however, don’t get talked to.
‘No, Auntie,’ Bianca said, for the nineteenth time. ‘Thank you,’ she added, quickly but not quickly enough. When Aunt Jane went visiting, umbrage futures soared. By now, Bianca reckoned, Aunt Jane must have enough umbrage to start her own international bourse.
‘Suit yourself, dear,’ Aunt Jane replied, in a voice Bianca would have found useful for putting an edge on blunt chisels. ‘Only trying to help. I’ll leave them here anyway.’ Sigh. ‘You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to.’
Exhibit One; a stack of women’s magazines, late 1980s vintage. Recipes. Knitting patterns. Advice to the frustrated and the suicidal. Two of the three were unlikely to be much use to a girl in traction, but she was getting to the stage where she was quite interested in the third.
‘It’s very thoughtful of you,’ Bianca said. Who was the kid whose nose grew when he told lies? Much more of this and she’d make Cyrano look like an Eskimo. ‘I really appreciate it. You’re very kind.’
Aunt Jane’s lips twitched in a tiny sneerlet. Gratitude fell into her without any perceptible effect, like matter into a black hole. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’d better be going, your uncle’ll be wanting his tea. I’ll try to come in tomorrow, though it’ll mean missing Weightwatchers. I’ll see if I can find you some more things to read.’
As Aunt Jane waddled doorwards, Bianca resisted the urge to wish her a nasty accident. She meant well. More to the point, if she had a nasty accident, she’d probably end up in the next bed.
The sad part about it was, Bianca knew, that in an hour or so, try as she might, she’d pick up one of those damned magazines and start to read. She’d already read all her own books - ever since school she’d been one of those people who zooms through printed pages like motorbikes through traffic - and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, else to do. If the loathsome things weren’t there, of course, she couldn’t read them. But since they were, she could. And, ineluctably as Death, she would.
This time, she lasted forty-seven minutes and was just congratulating herself on consummate willpower when she realised that her usable hand had slithered treacherously and nipped a glossy from the pile. Ah well, she assured her soul, I tried. She brought the thing up on top of the sheet and opened it.
Thinking it through afterwards, she worked out how it must have happened. Aunt Jane obtained her supplies of obsolescent opium-of-the-female-masses from the waiting room of the doctors’ surgery where she worked as receptionist (exceptionally effective in reducing waiting times; you had to be practically dying to want to make an appointment). From time to time, waiting rooms and other similarly depressing public places get leafletted by the keen and eager - bring and buys, craft fairs, save our derelict and unwanted civic amenities and, of course, the amateur dramatics fiends. Easy enough to scoop up a few stray fliers along with the pulp.
The playbill in front of her read as follows: FOR THREE NIGHTS ONLY!
H & H Thespians present -
SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON
ORIGINAL CAST!
JULY 17, 18, 19
Sadley Grange Civic Centre
Tickets £2 at the door.
Reaction one: now there’s a coincidence.
Reaction two: coincidence my foot ...
Reaction three: ... which is in plaster. Damn!
Original cast? Surely not. One key player, she knew, was unavailable due to indisposition caused by having been blasted to smithereens.
Unless ...
Hey! Calm down, Bianca, think it through. Just suppose for one moment that blowing up the statue hadn’t actually killed the dragon. Now, then; whoever wanted him dead - answers on a postcard, please - presumably would want to try again. First, however, catch your dragon. With his marble overcoat reduced to fine dust, the dragon would be walking the streets in human mufti, impossible to recognise. Hence the need for bait and heavy duty, industrial grade hints.
Bianca sneezed; dust from the pile of magazines. Why do I get the feeling, she asked herself, that I’m witnessing the early stages of a major war?
The irony of her situation made her wince, as if someone had just put a goldfish down her neck. All around her, the forces of weirdness were tooling up for a major confrontation. Somehow, she knew, she might be able to prevent it. Except that she was stuck here, as immobilised in her plasterwork as the dragon and the rogue saint had been in the stone bodies she’d made for them. Quite what the significance of that was, she didn’t pretend to understand. But she knew significance when she saw it; she knew it even better when it was forced down her throat with a hydraulic ram.
‘Great,’ she muttered aloud. ‘Just when I’m needed, I have to go and get plastered.’
‘Sorry?’ She looked up, but it was only Mike, squeezing in for the last five minutes of visiting time with his no longer quite so funny comedy props; grapes, lemon barley water, more bloody magazines.
‘Just muttering,’ she said. ‘Mike, find out how much longer I’m going to be stuck inside all this masonry
There’s all sorts of things I ought to be doing.’
Mike shrugged. ‘Anything I can help with?’ he asked.
‘N—’
On the one hand, if Mankind was a stockroom, you’d find Mike on the shelf marked Amiable Idiots. On the other hand ...
‘Yes,’ she said.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Clever,’ muttered the dragon, with obvious distaste.
The storage unit, or dungeon, in which his statue was kept had obviously cost someone a lot of money. You reached it by walking down a long, dragon-sized tunnel, a bit like a torpedo tube, which led from an iron porthole in the side of a very tall cliff something like a quarter of a mile through solid rock to a big chamber. The chamber door was marble, two feet thick, mounted on chrome molybdenum steel hinges and opening inwards.
‘Who knows?’ Chubby said, indicating all that workmanship and expense with a dismissive wave. ‘For all I know, you could smash and burn your way out through that, eventually. But by the time you’d got halfway, we’d have flooded the chamber with gas and you’d be off to Bedfordshire up the little wooden hill.’
The dragon shrugged. ‘Pity,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Chubby agreed, ‘it is. It’s like ...’ He closed his eyes to help his concentration. ‘Although your mum and dad don’t mind you borrowing the car, it’s irksome having to ask permission and say where you’re going every time you fancy a spin. Please note,’ he added, ‘the little metal box round its, I mean your, neck.’
‘I was going to ask.’
‘A bomb,’ Chubby sighed. ‘I know, I feel awful, but what can I do? We’re businessmen, not conservationists. Look, there’s no nice way to say this. If you muck us about, anywhere in the inner solar system, inside the dragon cozzy or out of it, then a button gets pressed and goodbye dragons for ever. Clear?’
‘As crystal,’ the dragon grunted.
‘No hard feelings?’
‘Get real.’
Chubby’s round face showed a smile with turned down ends. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘If I was in your position, I’d sulk like hell. Actually, what I’d probably do is scrag me in the erroneous belief that I’ve got the button about my person. Just as well for you you’re not me, really. From both sides, as it were.’
The dragon did some mental geometry. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘And on general principles, too. What about some lunch?’
Over the Scottish salmon and aviation fuel, Chubby delicately raised the issue of timescale.
‘Not that we want to hurry you or anything,’ he added quickly. ‘Pleasure having you about the place and all that. It’s just that time, if you’ll excuse the context, is getting on, I can’t earn a bent cent while those goat-hooved buffoons are in this dimension - I know because I’ve tried, God knows - and your old school chum’s starting to get on my wick. Every time I go in my office, his blasted screen winks at me.’
The dragon laughed. ‘He used to do that when he was a kid,’ he replied. ‘Just when you’d got up to answer the teacher’s question, he’d wink at you or pull a face. Made you forget what you were going to say. He only does it for wickedness.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Chubby replied morosely. ‘Look, I don’t like to ask this, but who the fuck is he? I just know him as the genie of the PCW’
The dragon grinned and helped himself to a tumblerful of liquid propane. ‘Guess,’ he said.
‘Oh come on,’ Chubby replied.
‘No, three guesses. Odd how guesses come in threes, by the way. Like wishes. And, as far as I can judge from a very limited observation of your culture, petrol-driven public transport vehicles.’
‘All right. He’s a djinn.’
‘Close but no cigar.’
‘Evil spirit?’
‘Yes, but that’s not a proper guess because so am I. And so,’ he said, wrinkling his nose and emptying his glass into a flower pot, ‘is this. Haven’t you got any of that decent stuff we had the other night?’
‘You drank it all. Try some of this liquid nitrogen. An insouciant little concoction, but I think you may be frozen stiff by its presumption.’
‘Better,’ agreed the dragon. ‘Two more guesses.’
‘Okay. How about a god?’
The dragon shook his head. ‘There is no god but God,’ he replied. ‘Nice phrase, that. Read it on the back of a cornflakes packet.’
‘All right. A devil.’
‘Wrong third time.’ The dragon swilled the dregs of his glass round to make the vapour rise. ‘He’s a dragon.’
Chubby’s eyebrows rose, like the price of gold in an oil crisis. ‘Straight up? I thought you were the only one?’
‘Far from it.’ The dragon frowned. ‘Lord only knows what he’s done with his body, but my old mate Nosher is, or was, a dragon, same as me. Little, weedy chap he used to be, we called him Nosher the Newt. If he ever reached fifteen feet nose to tail, I’d be surprised.’
Chubby let that pass. ‘So what’s he doing in my computer?’ he asked. ‘Or didn’t you get around to catching up on life stories?’
‘No idea. I did ask him, but he didn’t actually seem to answer. He was always good at that, too, specially when you were asking him to pay back a loan or something. Bright lad, Nosher, but you wouldn’t trust him as far as you could sneeze him. Something tells me that hasn’t changed terribly much.’
‘We’re drifting,’ Chubby pointed out, ‘away from the subject under review. Namely, when can you start?’
‘Not bothered,’ the dragon replied. ‘It’s more a case of where rather than when, isn’t it? It’s all very well to talk blithely about carbonising these goons, but I don’t actually know where to find them. I’d have thought you, with all those resources and instruments and things ...’
Chubby looked embarrassed. ‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ he replied through a mouthful of Stilton. ‘And it’s bloody curious, I don’t mind admitting. Look, every time I’ve tried taking the crones out to do a spot of rustling, it’s been a complete washout because of diabolical interference. Static so thick you could spread it on bread. But can I pinpoint the wretched critters? Can I buggery. It’s almost as if the negative vibes are being masked by something else.’
‘What, you mean like virtue?’
Chubby shook his head. ‘Not virtue, chum. That’d counteract it and there’d be no interference. No, it’s like a very strong signal on an adjacent wavelength that sort ofblurs out the devils so you can’t actually hear them.’ He wanted to light a cigar, but thought better of it. ‘Which implies it’s a very similar sort of signal, though different enough not to jam up my old biddies. It’s a bugger, it really is.’
The nitrogen cylinder fizzed again, until the dragon’s glass was replenished. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘That sounds to me like that bastard George. He’s a saint, remember, so he’s probably got vibes of his own. And he’s an evil little sod but officially Good, which’d account for similar but not identical signals.’ He scowled at the thought of George, and the glass shattered in his hand. He didn’t notice. ‘Sounds to me like George and those demons of yours are still mobbed up together, presumably so that they can have another crack at me. I’ve got no idea, by the way, why a bunch of devils should wish me any harm. As far as I know I’ve never done anything to offend their outfit. In fact, since I’m officially Evil they should be on my side.’
Chubby wisely said nothing. A certain overtone crept into the dragon’s voice when he spoke of George; the sort of nuance you’d observe in a conversation between authors about book reviewers. All to the good, as far as Chubby was concerned.
‘Funny bloke, by all accounts,’ the dragon went on. ‘Oddly enough, I knew a man who was at school with him, that training college for saints they used to have out Glastonbury way.’
Chubby, who’d been doing his background reading, nodded. ‘You mean the old Alma Martyr?’
‘Right little tearaway he was, by all accounts. Bottom of the class in everything, failed all his Inquisitions, always in detention
, doing lines. Never even turned up to heresy-detection classes. Nearly got expelled for refusing to shoot arrows at Saint Sebastian.’
‘Fancy,’ Chubby said.
‘Always up to that sort of thing. You know, untying Catherine from her wheel, stuffing the lions in the Amphitheatre full of Whiskas so they wouldn’t eat the Christians. Must’ve been a right pain in the neck.’
‘Absolutely,’ Chubby agreed. But he was secretly thinking: Hey, what’s so terrible about trying to stop people from getting shot, burnt and eaten? Well, different strokes and all that.
‘Be that as it may.’ The dragon stood up, untucked his napkin from his collar and finished the last of the nitrogen. ‘Soon as you get a fix on these jokers, let me know and they’re firelighters. See you at dinner.’
Chubby stayed where he was, waited for the extractor fans to clear the nitrogen fumes and lit his cigar.
So the genie of the PCW was a dragon. Well, that explained absolutely nothing at all. As a clue, it made The Times crossword seem like an exploded diagram. But that, surely, was because he was being too thick to see the point. If there was a point.
Probably all a coincidence.
Absolutely. All a coincidence. Like the remarkable coincidence whereby whenever someone falls off the top of the Sears Tower they die shortly afterwards. You can get paranoid, thinking too hard about coincidences.
Mike looked at the address written on the back of his chequebook and then at the building in front of him.
Well, yes. It was the sort of place, by the looks of it, where you had to abandon all hope before entering. But a resort of demons? Surely not. If demons lived here, then Hell was a neat row of 1960s spec-built terraces, with open-plan front gardens and a Metro outside each one.
Good point. Yes. Muttering all he could remember of the Hail Mary (which was, as it happens, Hail Mary), he pushed the front door and went in.