by Tom Holt
Zelda was one of those people who calm down visibly, like a piece of hot metal gradually fading from orange to grey. ‘Probably,’ she said, ‘you did me a favour anyhow. If we had gotten married, we’d only have spent all the time fighting. I mean, how could anybody live with you and not fight? All right,’ she said, ‘here’s the deal.’ She turned to face the dragon. ‘It’s up to you. If I let you go so you can help him escape - God knows why you want to, but anyway you’ve got to promise me, on your word of honour as a dragon, that you’ll answer all my questions. Agreed?’
The dragon made a snorting noise, half annoyance, half amusement. ‘Now just a moment,’ he said. ‘The only reason I was going to help this imbecile was so he’d untie me and I could get out of here. If you’re going to - Oh, never mind. I suppose it’ll have to be my good deed for the day. Just think about this, will you? If you’d made me that offer a day or so ago, I’d have agreed, and you wouldn’t have had to sit through hours and hours of black-and-white snooker.’
‘And I’d have lost my job,’ Zelda sighed. ‘Just like I’m about to do now.’ She dipped her head in the direction of Neville, who was still fast asleep on the floor. ‘What about him?’ she said.
‘What about him?’ Gordon replied.
‘You’re proposing to leave him there, are you?’
‘Well, yes. No. I bloody well ought to, since he got me into this mess. But,’ he added quickly, ‘being a delusional moron isn’t a capital offence either, so I suppose we’d better take him along too.’
‘Besides,’ the dragon chipped in, ‘he wasn’t delusional at all. Everything he told you was perfectly true.’
Gordon made a soft, whimpering noise. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘don’t rub it in. Just because it happens to be true doesn’t make him any less of a nutcase for believing it. I mean to say,’ he added, ‘dragons. And talking goldfish. The whole idea is utterly ridiculous.’
Dragon laughter sounded unsettlingly like a bandsaw meeting a stray nail in the middle of a log of wood, but Gordon was getting used to it by now. ‘You know,’ the dragon said, ‘I can’t help but admire your attitude. It’s people like you who’ve made the human race so . . .’
‘What?’
‘Convenient.’ The dragon’s eyes sparkled. ‘If you didn’t exist, it’d have been necessary to invent you, as the old dragon saying has it.’
For some reason he couldn’t really fathom, Gordon found this extremely annoying. ‘Convenient? Necessary? What for?’
‘Straight men,’ the dragon replied. ‘After all, where would the fun be in raining if there was nobody underneath? Now then, somebody did mention something about undoing these confounded straps.’
‘All right,’ Zelda said. ‘But you’ve got to promise to be nice.’
This time the dragon’s laughter made the floor shake. ‘Young human female,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Zelda shrugged. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think you’re kinda cute. Like a cross between a four-year-old kid and a tyrannosaurus. A cuddly tyrannosaurus, naturally. All right, here goes.’ She released the straps, then jumped back quickly as if she’d just lit a fuse.
For three seconds the dragon didn’t move at all. Then, with a flick and a wriggle that was so fast as to be practically invisible, he flipped over from his back to his legs, hopped in the air like a frog off the table onto the floor, and bobbed up into the air like a balloon. ‘That’s better,’ he murmured, hovering three feet or so off the ground. ‘You have no idea how wearing resting your weight on something solid can be when you aren’t used to it. In case you’re wondering,’ he added, ‘it’s done by manipulating the effect of the Earth’s gravitational pull by means of a bioelectrical magnetic field generated by my central nervous system. In your science, it’d take forty pages of equations to describe it. Of course, the same goes for all the electrical impulses you have to send along your nerves to operate all the cogs and wheels and bits of sinew it takes for you to scratch your ear.’ He breathed in and out slowly. ‘The difference is,’ he said, ‘I know how I work. Which is what makes it possible for me to do this.’
Suddenly, he wasn’t a dragon any more. This time, there was no movement at all for the eye to struggle to follow. One moment there’d been a dragon, floating in the air; the next, it’d gone, and in its place was a tall, fat man with a bald, pointed head and thick tufty sideburns ending level with his ear lobes. He was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel in the Coldstream Guards, and holding a machine gun.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the ex-dragon said. ‘You’re thinking I’m going back on our deal. Certainly not. It’s just that if I break you out of here by bashing the wall down with my tail, then carry you on my back across the Atlantic to Bogota, there’s a risk I might make myself conspicuous. I wouldn’t want that. So I’ve decided to be you for a while.’
‘Fine,’ Gordon muttered. ‘Only, if you’ve dragged yourself down to our level, would you mind explaining just how you were planning to get us past all those locked doors and stuff?’
‘Ah.’ The dragon nodded seriously. ‘I was wondering about that. Fortunately, right here I’ve got a very precise, very specific tool that’ll have us out of here in no time. Interested?’
‘Well, of course.’
‘Here you are, then.’
The dragon moved, and there was something sort of round and sort of clunky lying on the flat of his outstretched hand. The humans gazed at it for quite some time.
‘I must be missing the point,’ Gordon said. ‘All I can see is a ordinary bunch of keys.’
‘For opening doors with, yes,’ the dragon said. ‘Well, what were you expecting, magic?’
Gordon breathed out through his nose. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, quite. Hold on, I’ll just wake up my friend.’ He lifted his left foot and kicked Neville hard on the left shin.
‘Huh? Wassa?’ Neville murmured, opening his eyes. ‘Mind what you’re doing with that—’
‘Neville, wake up.’ Gordon bent down and grabbed his collar. ‘Neville, you remember that goldfish?’
‘Hello,’ the ex-dragon said. ‘Remember me?’
Neville nodded, then squirmed. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘it’s you. Hey, look, it was a mistake, really. I never intended—’
‘Shut up,’ Gordon reasoned. ‘He’s going to get us out of here. Oh, and by the way, this is Zelda.’
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘Great.’ Gordon pointed to the dragon. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you’re on. Magic, maestro, please.’
The dragon dipped his head in acknowledgement, selected a key and turned it in the lock of the lab door. It opened.
‘Tra la,’ he said solemnly.
Neville grunted. ‘That wasn’t magic,’ he said. ‘All he did was—’
Gordon was shaking his head. ‘Humans,’ he sighed. ‘What do they know?’
CHAPTER TEN
Imagine Manchester. Sorry, had you just eaten? Let’s try a gentler approach. Imagine a place where it rains all the time. Imagine a place where baths are for drying off in, where you fill a kettle by holding it out of the window for a second and a half, where the current in the gutters is strong enough to turn hydroelectric turbines, where they thought Waterworld was a documentary, where Noah fortunately didn’t send out his doves (or he’d be sailing yet), where even the privatised water companies can only manage to cause a hosepipe ban one year in three.
There’s another place like that. It’s rather less well known, because it’s in the emptiest part of the Pacific, a thousand miles north of the Marquesas, a thousand miles east of Christmas Island, perched on the edge of the Clipperton Fracture, a tiny island not much larger than the average Asda car park that spends nine months each year completely submerged. It’s so remote that homo sapiens hasn’t got around to noticing it yet, so it doesn’t have a human name. Once a year, however, it hosts the biggest gathering of dragons in the world
, as the four dragon kings, their senior staffs and delegates from every lodge and eyrie meet to elect a management committee and discuss the leading issues of the day. Although the dragons go there ostensibly to work and be serious, putting several thousand dragons in a small area and expecting them not to party is rather like mixing nitric acid and glycerine in the same test tube and telling them to play nicely. In fact, it’s the nearest thing that dragons have to a bank holiday - which may explain why the weather is always atrocious; it’s the one weekend in the year when it hardly ever rains.
Because the dragon king of the north-west had further to come than his three colleagues, he and his contingent were always the last to arrive, and by the time they got there, the party’d usually been under way for at least six hours, at which point all the official business had been dealt with and the delegates were unlikely to notice anything less obvious than an active volcano they’d just flown into. Accordingly, the absence of the king’s adjutant-general and marshal of bank holidays wasn’t remarked upon until quite late in the proceedings; to be precise, in the awkward hiatus between the beer running out and the quartermaster-in-ordinary getting back from the liquor store in Vaskess Bay with 20,000 bottles of tequila.
‘I know who’ll know the answer,’ said the north-eastern pursuivant of tempests, as he floated on his back six feet or so above the bottle-strewn beach. (He’d been discussing continuity errors in the fourth season of I Love Lucy with the south-western captain-general of monsoons.) ‘You know who I mean.’
‘Who?’
‘You know. We’ve both known him for years.’
‘But I only just met you.’
The pursuivant of tempests frowned. ‘You sure?’
‘Dunno.’ The captain-general scratched his left eyelid with an eight-inch adamantine claw. He’d been aiming for his ear, but they’d both reached the stage in the proceedings where precision is for wimps. ‘Your face does ring a bell, now you come to mention it. I don’t know, though. You people all look the same to me.’
‘Huh?’
‘All right then, us people. Silly long noses. Little fiddly ears. Wings.’ He sighed. ‘I hate being a dragon,’ he said.
‘Oh. Why?’
‘Not sure, really. Partly it’s the looking-like-an-attack-newt. You feel so silly.’
‘I don’t.’ The pursuivant of tempests shook his head, something a friend would have tried to talk him out of. ‘Anyway, that’s beside the point. We were talking about - oh, you know.’
The captain-general scowled, then relaxed. ‘Oh, him,’ he said. ‘Got you, yes. Dammit, we were at school together.’
‘Were we?’ The pursuivant shrugged, first the forward shoulders, then the back. ‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘You sure we’re talking about the same bloke?’
‘Sure I’m sure. Old Tqpsb - Pqtzv - Tqgfd - old Snotface. Always top in maths and seismology, dreamy sort of kid, kept falling over his tail in PE. Him.’
‘No,’ the pursuivant said carefully, ‘I wasn’t thinking of him. But I was at school with him, yes. Used to hang out with that jerk Kjjdrlmqrspt a lot; boy, I hated that snub-eared little ponce, didn’t you?’
The captain-general thought for a moment. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘That’s me.’
‘What? Oh well, broad as it’s long. Old Snotface’d know, though. Used to know every bloody thing, Snotters did.’
‘Know what?’
‘What we were just talking about.’
‘Ah, right. Tangentially,’ the captain added, ‘is there anything left in that bottle?’
‘Which bottle?’
‘The one wedged behind your ear.’
‘Which - ah, yes, got it. Help yourself.’
Dragons, of course, very rarely drank alcohol, for the same reason they didn’t warm a bath full of cold water by dunking the electric fire in it. They have more sense.
‘Funny,’ the pursuivant added, taking the bottle back almost but not quite before the captain-general had finished with it. ‘Haven’t seen him around here today.’
‘Old Snotface?’
‘That’s right. Suppose he must be ill or someth—’ Suddenly the pursuivant cracked his wings open, like a gypsy dancer opening a fan, and launched himself, still upside down, out over the sea. ‘Knew I shouldn’t’ve mixed the beer and the quetila—’
‘’Snot called that. It’s called—’ The captain-general’s eyes closed for a moment. ‘Teliqua. Everyone knows that. You’re right, though. Where is old Snotface? Not like him to miss out when there’s a free bar.’
That, give or take a few slurred words, was the general theme of quite a few conversations on the island over the next six hours or so, for the north-western king’s adjutant was well known and well liked among his peers. It was quite some time, however, before any of them were in a fit state to send out search parties. In the meantime, all they could do was quiz his colleagues on the north-western staff to see if they could throw any light on the matter. For some reason, though, they weren’t particularly forthcoming with information.
‘Snotface?’ replied an inspector of drizzle, for example. ‘No, sorry, can’t say. Secret,’ he added, drawing a claw across his lips and accidentally laying his jaw open with the razor-sharp edge. ‘Not that there’s anything secret about it, just we’re not supposed to say. Security,’ he added. ‘Careless talk costs wives, that kind of thing.’
‘Don’t you mean ‘lives’?’
‘I know exactly what I mean, thank you,’ the inspector replied. ‘And I’m not supposed to talk about that, either. Orders.’
‘Ah. In that case, I’ll have another vodka. Unless there’s anything else.’
‘Nope. Just vodka.’
‘In that case, vodka will do just fine.’
Another unusual facet of the relationship between dragons and strong drink was the way dragons actually started to sober up faster the more they drank over a certain level. By dawn on Monday morning the disappearance of two high-ranking north-westerners was the main subject of discussion among representatives of the other three kingdoms.
‘And I’m telling you,’ grumbled the crown prince of the south-east, picking a seagull out of his glass and depositing it carefully on the rock next to him, ‘dragons don’t just vanish into thin air. Not unless they stop a direct hit from an atom bomb, at any rate; and I think we’d have noticed if they’d been loosing those damn’ things off again.’
The king of the north-west chewed a cocktail stick thoughtfully. ‘Something’s going on,’ he muttered, ‘and I can’t get anybody to tell me what it is. Which is bloody annoying when you’re a dragon king, let me tell you.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ the crown prince replied with more than a hint of bitterness. He’d been the next in line to the throne of the south-eastern kingdom since before the first dinosaur started shivering and suffering from goosebumps, and his prospects of ever actually becoming king were as slim now as they’d been then. For some reason, he was an expert on exactly what dragons can survive, in the way of poisons, explosions, contagious diseases, weapons attacks and freak accidents involving hot magma, tidal waves and meteorite strikes. ‘All I’m saying is, they’ll be down there somewhere, don’t you worry. And if I know them, they’ll be back in their own good time, and none the worse for wear, either. Known him since we were kids. I’m her godfather,’ he remembered. ‘Gave her a pewter mug for a christening present. ’
‘Hmmm.’ The dragon king sipped his vodka, noticed something odd about the taste, and surreptitiously dumped the rest. Chances were that, entirely out of force of habit, the crown prince had dumped enough refined white arsenic into his drink to depopulate California. Fortunately, the worst harm a dragon can come to from eating arsenic is a mild tummy upset, say 1.5 to 1.8 on the Itinerant Hot Dog Vendor scale. ‘I dunno. Stubborn, yes. Self-willed, likewise. But it’s not like either of them to bunk off work. Also, the way the rest of the staff ’s covering up for them suggests there’s definitely something wrong and they�
��re terrified of what I’ll do when I find out. Which is why,’ he added, reaching for an unopened bottle, ‘I’ve come here. I figure I stand a better chance of discovering what the deadly secret is here than I’d ever do back home.’
The crown prince, who was leaning against a rock he’d spent centuries wearing into the precise contours of his spine, nodded thoughtfully. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that if someone from another kingdom, say, were to buy a few drinks and loosen them up a bit, he might just overhear . . .’
‘Something like that. Of course, he’d have to be discreet.’
‘Naturally.’ The crown prince sniffed his drink - dragons consume strong liquor by breathing on it until it vaporises, then inhaling it - and smiled. ‘Well, quite,’ he said. ‘But I’m good at that. When you’ve been plotting to overthrow your head of state for two hundred million years, you get the hang of these things. Which reminds me—’
The dragon king sighed. ‘It won’t work, you know,’ he said. ‘What won’t?’
‘Whatever it is you’re considering doing. No disrespect, but just look at your track record. How many attempts has it been?’
‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ the crown prince replied. ‘No pun intended. Come on, I wouldn’t be a dragon if I gave up at the first sign of difficulty. And besides, I nearly had him. Twice.’
The dragon king favoured him with a conciliatory nod. ‘The Krakatoa thing, I’ll grant you, yes. If he hadn’t bent down at the last moment to sniff that orchid, it’d certainly have been interesting. The French nuclear-test business was a non-starter, though. He saw through that like a windscreen.’
‘Really? Then how come when he got the anonymous message he actually went there?’
‘He was just trying to be nice,’ the dragon king replied. ‘After all, you’re his son, he does his best to take an interest in your hobby. I remember him telling me, right here on this very beach, the year before last. Zzzx, he said, he’s a good kid, it breaks my heart not to be able to do more for him. After all, he works damn’ hard the rest of the year, and it’s his only real pleasure in life.’