Paint Your Dragon

by Tom Holt

  ‘Wouldn’t fancy it myself,’ the angel replied. ‘The reason being, you don’t go back into HMS time, so you can’t be a human or a cat or a golden eagle or stuff like that. Returns go in HIA time, and that’s - well, weird, really. Look at me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me. HIA; Human Irregular Anomaly. We exist in all timescales simultaneously. We’re in some more strongly than in others, true, and in practice you ignore everything except HMS, HDS and a few others because - come on, let’s ride this radio analogy until it falls to bits - the signals are faint, crackly and in Norwegian. Anyway, that’s what happened to me. I came back as a statue. No bloody fun at all.’

  ‘A statue?’

  ‘That’s right. More of us about than you’d think.’ The angel’s voice was getting softer and softer, slower and slower, as though its batteries were running down fast. ‘The thing to remember about HIA is, it’s very, very...’

  ‘Yes? Yes?’

  ‘Boring.’

  A fraction of a second later, the statue was just a statue; you could tell just by looking at it that it was no more alive than a cellarful of coal. Run down? Asleep? Switched off? No way of knowing. Mike stood up, felt pins and needles from his knee to his ankle.

  Four days ...

  Ninety-nine per cent light speed!

  Head forward, wings back, tail streaming behind him, the dragon bulleted on through the murderous slipstream. His scales glowed cherry-red, and the tears streaming from his eyes boiled before they ever reached his cheeks. His eardrums, at a guess, were halfway down his throat. It was just as well he couldn’t open his mouth, because air pressure would have snapped his lower jaw off at the hinge.

  Ugh, he thought -

  wwhhyyyy aaammm IIIII ddoooiiiiiinngg tthhiiiiissssss?

  Because if I don’t, that creep Chubby will blow me to Kingdom Come (or, relatively speaking, quite possibly Kingdom Went; wherever, I don’t want to go there).

  And because there’s a certain unbelievable thrill in peeling back the final frontier; shit-scaredly going where everybody else has already gone before, but not yet. As it were.

  And, last but not least, because I’ve got nothing better to do.

  BANG!

  Light speed ...

  One very pertinent fact about travelling faster than light—

  ‘Ouch!’

  - is that it’s bloody dark and you can’t see where you’re going. And, at that sort of speed, even a collision with a high-flying clothes moth takes on the stature of a major railway accident.

  Fortunately, he regained consciousness just in time to pull out of his headlong spin, wrench his battered and groaning body up out of the way of mountains and airliners and jack-knife agonisingly back to straight and level. It was still as dark as thirty feet down a drain, which meant he hadn’t lost speed. What he needed now was lots and lots of height.

  Hey though, he crowed in the back lots of his subconscious, this is quite something. No way those two-legged groundling midgets could do this, for all their precious technology. For a dragon, however, it’s just a matter of flying. You do know how to fly, don’t you? You just put your wings together and go ...

  ‘Help!’

  Going this fast, you lose all track of Time. Or Time loses all track of you. The only semi-constant is the pain; you’re being beadblasted with photons, every square millimetre of your body surface is white hot, a grain of dust hits you like a cannon shell. You only continue to exist because entropy hasn’t caught up with you yet. But it will.

  Beeeeep!

  What? Oh, Christ, yes, Chubby’s idiotic signal. I can slow down now, just when I was beginning to enjoy myself.

  The lights came back on, and then the dragon was no longer faster-than-light, just very fast; racing, but no longer against the clock. Now then, the trick is, decelerate slowly. In this context, sudden slowth would hit like a brick wall.

  The sound came back on. The vertical hold adjusted itself. God had fiddled with the aerial.

  Congratulations! We all knew you had it in you!

  What the hell? The dragon’s brain cleared and he realised it was a pre-recorded message, playing tinnily and at not quite the right speed through a miniature speaker inside his ear. He slowed down a little more.

  Please proceed to the following co-ordinates. Longitude ...

  ‘Fuck you!’ the dragon howled. ‘I haven’t got a map!’

  ... Sixteen minutes west; or, in layman’s terms, the bookstall in Rockefeller Plaza. You will there buy a copy of the New York Times and turn to page four. Estimated you will arrive in nine, repeat nine, minutes.

  High over New York, the dragon found out what the parcel was for. As his dragon body suddenly vanished and he felt a rather different, more vindictive slipstream tearing at his human incarnation, he realised that it was a parachute.

  New Yorkers are hard to faze. A windswept man with streaming eyes and untidy hair parachuting down onto the concourse at Grand Central is, to them, just another guy trying to beat the rush hour. So finely tuned is the New Yorker’s inbuilt radar that they got out of his way as he landed without even looking at him.

  He picked himself up. No need to dispose of the parachute; in the second and a half during which he’d been rolling on the ground feeling acute pain in both knees, the parachute had been unbuckled, stolen and spirited away. By now, it’d probably been converted into three hundred silk handkerchiefs in a lock-up somewhere in Queens.

  Feeling slightly shaky and, for once, almost out of his depth, he tottered to the bookstall, picked up a newspaper and looked at the date. All that trouble and effort, and he’d fast-forwarded six lousy weeks.

  He turned to page four, as ordered, jotted down the closing prices. Then the sports pages, then the lottery results. Then, out of curiosity, he glanced to the front page.

  And saw a headline.

  The Times, which isn’t your run-of-the-mill sensationalist fishwrap, had let its hair down. There were screamingly vivid action pictures, BIG headlines, interviews with witnesses, angles, turn to page six, continued on page seven. It was a BIG story, full of twists, nuances, implications. There was even a three-column feature by one D. Bennett, linking the bizarre events to Contragate, the Bermuda Triangle and the assassination of Abe Lincoln.

  The gist of the story, however, was straightforward enough.

  Twelve hours ago, in Mongolia, Saint George had killed the Dragon.

  Mike didn’t sleep well.

  For one thing, since he was going to die, fast-forward, phut, whatever, in four days, he begrudged the time. Also, although he’d never been particularly superstitious, kipping down in a graveyard didn’t appeal to him, particularly since he now had the feeling that he’d be able to see his fellow deadies and maybe they weren’t very nice to look at ... Mostly, though, he couldn’t sleep because he was worried.

  Four days to find a - what the hell was it he was looking for? An anomaly, he supposed, but what the hell does an anomaly look like? Apparently, like a statue.

  Not any old statue, though; he’d already tried that. There were plenty of statues in the graveyard and he’d knocked loudly on each one, prodded them for disguised doors and escape hatches, even tried climbing in through ears and open mouths. Failure. By the time he’d finished, he was beginning to hallucinate No Vacancies signs.

  A statue.

  A statue.

  Jesus, yes, a statue! Piece of cake, surely, because wasn’t the most gifted living sculptress (despair is the mother of exaggeration) a personal friend of his, who also happened to owe him one hell of a favour?

  By the time he’d worked that out, it was half past six and the buses were starting to run. He caught the thirty-seven, which went to the hospital. Buses are inanimate (although they’re capable of malice; ask anybody who’s run after one, only to watch it draw away from the kerb at the last minute) and accordingly was solid and real enough for him to get on board without falling through the floor. He had no trouble finding a seat, in spi
te of the fact that there was standing room only.

  But.

  All right, so Bianca can sculpt me a statue to live in; central heating, air conditioned, all mod cons. First, though, I’ve got to find a way to get a message through to her. How the hell do I do that, exactly?

  By the time the bus drew up outside the hospital gate, the only answer that had occurred to him was, improvise. Well, he could do worse.

  Bianca stirred.

  Precisely one second ago, she’d been very ill; Bianca the human jigsaw, held together with skin, plaster and force of habit. Now, though, she could feel the integrity of her newly restored bones. She was fit, strong, ready to face the incredibly daunting task now facing her. She was also, of course, covered from head to foot in plaster and her limbs were tied to the ceiling with thick wire.

  ‘Hello!’ she shouted. ‘Nurse! I think I’m better now, can I get up?’

  Needless to say, they ignored her, and an alarming thought walked flat-footed across the wet concrete of her mind. Maybe they wouldn’t believe she was better and were going to keep her like this for another six weeks anyway?

  It was then that the table began to move.

  At first, Bianca put it down to a heavy lorry trundling by in the road below. When it stopped simply wobbling and began to tap-dance, she began to wonder.

  ‘Mike?’ she whispered.

  Grimly, Mike lifted the chair and tapped out a phrase: ‘cos I’ll be there, puttin’on ma top hat, tying up ma white tie—

  ‘Mike,’ Bianca said sternly, ‘stop making that awful noise, you’ll disturb the other patients.’

  The table stopped moving. Feeling very foolish—girl gets bang on head, starts talking to thin air, and you’re saying she’s ready to go home? Get real, nurse, please - she whispered, ‘Mike.’

  No reply.

  ‘Mike, if you want to, er, communicate ...’ God, how? ‘Don’t try and answer. Look, I’ll think of something.’ What? Hell. She looked round. Lying at the foot of the bed was one of those horrid comics.

  ‘Can you pick up that magazine?’

  The pages riffled.

  ‘Good. I’ll pretend to be reading it.’ She picked it up. ‘To answer, turn the pages till you find something that’s as close as you can get to what you want to say.’

  Riffle. The magazine was now open at the agony column. ‘You’ve got a problem you want help with?’

  Riffle. In front of her was a feature, Mortgage Repossession Left My Family Homeless.

  ‘You’re in financial difficulties? Mike, you’re dead, how can you be in ...?’

  Riffle. Exchanging Contracts: Part Four in our series on moving house.

  Bianca thought for a moment. ‘You’re homeless? You’ve got nowhere to go?’

  Riffle. She looked down and saw the front cover. The name of the magazine was Yes!

  ‘I see,’ Bianca said, inaccurately. ‘So how can I help?’

  Riffle. Article on improving your garden. Photograph; petunias, flowering cherry, crab apple tree, herbacious border, garden gnomes ...

  ‘You want me to plant a tree for you? Is that it?’

  Riffle. Another photograph; view of Piccadilly Circus. Further riffle. View of Trafalgar Square. Further riffle. For Only £99.99 You Can Own This Beautiful Porcelain Figurine...

  ‘A statue? You want me to carve you a statue?’

  Riffle. Front cover.

  ‘But...’ Bianca was going to say Why? Then she thought of the dragon, and George, and she knew why.

  . ‘Mike, I’m sort of busy right now, can it wait? You see, first I’ve got to get out of here, then I’ve got to find that dragon - you know, my statue - and stop him blowing things up, so if you could give me six weeks or so ...’

  Furious riffles. Advertisement. Flabstrippers’ Guarantee : Lose Six Pounds in Three Days or Your Money Back.

  ‘Three days?’ Front cover. ‘Mike, that’s impossible, I—’

  The magazine flew from her hands, soared up into the air and parachuted down, pages flapping like the wings of a shot crow. The table rocked violently and fell over. The chair began to tap out Dancin’ Cheek to Cheek.

  ‘All right,’ she hissed, as the sister came running. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘It’s obvious what we’ve gotta do,’ Kurt replied impatiently.

  ‘We’ve gotta leave the country.’

  Seventeen former statues looked at him as though he were mad, making him grateful his band wasn’t a democracy. He did his best to ignore them.

  ‘Leave the country?’ David asked. ‘Why?’

  David had, somehow, been elevated to the rank of spokesman-cum-courier; that is to say, the other ex-statues tended to hem him in and hiss, ‘Go on, you tell him,’ in his ear. They also complained to him about the food, the transport and the accommodation; remember, although their outward husks were Italian, inside they were British.

  ‘Because,’ Kurt replied, still wondering what in blazes had led him to go back for this miserable lot, ‘we’ve got this job to do. And we can’t do it here. Okay?’

  ‘Don’t think we can leave the country,’ muttered the Giambologna Mercury. ‘We’d need special export licences, surely.’

  ‘Stolen property,’ agreed a Bernini bronze. ‘They got these computerised lists, international, worldwide. I saw it on Lovejoy. We’d never get past the duty-free lounge.’

  Amateurs, muttered Kurt to himself. ‘Absolutely right,’ he sighed, the sarcasm going so far over his listeners’ heads that you could have bounced radio signals off it. ‘That’s why we’ve gotta hijack a plane.’

  That left them speechless; but not for long enough. A Donatello Crucifixion objected that surely hijacking was illegal. The Canova demanded to speak to the manager. Kurt bashed the packing case with his fist for silence.

  ‘Okay,’ he snarled, ‘that’s it. I’ve had enough of this goddamn whimpering out of you guys. The next one of you I hear any shit from ends up at the bottom of the Arno with a human being tied to his ankle. You got that? Good. Now then, this is the plan.’

  In the shocked silence that followed, it occurred to Kurt that he hadn’t yet formulated a plan. Kurt Lundqvist without. a plan; impossible. Easier to imagine a Tory minister without a mistress. Something would occur to him, it always did.

  ‘The plan,’ he went on, ‘is, naturally, top secret. I’ll announce the various stages in due course, on a strictly need-to-know basis. The first stage is getting to the air terminal. This is what we do.’

  Kurt spent the rest of the day shoplifting, hotwiring vehicles, breaking into police station armouries, mugging tourists for their passports, faking photographs, wiring up al fresco bombs and generally relaxing after all the strain he’d been through lately dealing with objects only one step away from being people. By one o’clock in the morning, he felt refreshed and invigorated. He now had at his disposal a carabinieri armoured van, eighteen assault rifles, ditto Beretta 9mm handguns, three cases of grenades, five twenty-pounder bombs, flak jackets, black balaclavas, matching ski-suits, two-way radios, state-of-the-art communications and radio jamming equipment, sandwiches, chocolate and a thermos flask of decaffeinated coffee.

  At three am precisely, air traffic control received an ominous message on the security hotline. Flight TCA8494 from Istanbul, scheduled to refuel before heading on to London, due to arrive at 03.24, had armed hijackers on board. They’d wired up bombs, and were demanding the release of prisoners and a huge cash ransom. A special security team was on its way; in the meantime, act naturally, refuel the plane, pretend nothing untoward is happening. Message received and understood.

  At 03.34, the carabinieri van drew up at a side gate. Kurt flashed an impressive-looking pass (actually an Academy Museum season ticket, but it was dark and Kurt kept his thumb over the words) under the sentry’s nose, hissed a few words in his ear and was let through. At 03.40, eighteen shadowy, ferociously armed figures scrambled up the gangway into the plane and burst
into the passenger compartment.

  ‘Okay!’ Kurt roared. ‘Nobody move!’ He paused, for effect. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘where’s the hijackers?’

  The cabin staff stared at him. They were just rewinding the in-flight movie, handing out the freeby glossy magazines. ‘What hijackers?’ they said.

  Kurt assumed a pained expression. ‘Jesus, not another false alarm,’ he sighed. ‘You sure there hasn’t been a hijack?’

  The purser nodded. ‘We’d have noticed,’ he said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Kurt replied, motioning to his team to fan out, start frisking the passengers. ‘Like, there’s these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim’s to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects. We’d better check things out, just to be sure.’

  The purser, who had the muzzle of a Heckler & Koch G3 sticking in his ear - not because he was a suspect, it was just rather a cramped aircraft - shrugged and nodded. ‘Suit yourselves, guys,’ he said. ‘Better safe than sorry, I guess. While you’re at it, would you mind taking round the duty-frees?’

  Kurt’s men duly searched; wonder of wonders, they found no fewer than five twenty-pound bombs wired up to the doors, fuel lines and in-flight catering packs. Gee, muttered Kurt, just as I thought. We’d better stay with this flight till it gets to London. What a truly splendid idea, the captain replied, his subconscious wrestling with the problem of where he’d seen some of these guys before (you don’t like to say to a SWAT team officer that you’re sorry, you didn’t recognise him with his clothes on). While they were at it, he added, maybe they could help out with serving the meals and checking the seat-belts.

  As the plane took off, a Bernini took Kurt aside and asked him to explain something.

  ‘Thought we were meant to be hijacking the plane,’ he said.

  Kurt nodded. ‘Neat job, huh?’

  ‘But we’re pretending to be the army. The good guys.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Does that mean we’re the good guys or the bad guys? I’m confused.’