Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  Greed. A physical lust for wealth. That’s the traditional view, anyway. Times have changed. Maybe dragons have changed too.

  Suddenly, Chubby felt tired; more tired, even, than interested or frightened. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘How do I get in touch with this dragon? Can I talk to him? Will he accept Pay-As-You-Burn, or will he want a princess on account?’

  If you want me to answer that, it will count as a separate enquiry

  ‘Goodnight, machine.’

  Any time.

  The green light faded. Chubby stood up, found that his legs had somehow lost their rigidity and sat down again. Talking to that thing always made him feel like he’d been trapped in a spin-drier.

  Not so long ago, he’d passed a computer shop. Special deal, its window had shouted to him, part exchange, any model accepted. He’d been tempted. But would It let him? And even if It did, did he really want to? After all, the damage was probably done by now. Highly unlikely that you could regrow a damaged soul, like a slow-worm’s tail.

  Before he left the office he stopped in front of a mirror and looked in.

  ‘Hey,’ he asked. ‘Are you evil?’

  The picture in the mirror said nothing.

  ‘Lousy copycat,’ Chubby grumbled, and switched off the light.

  Halfway through his lamb pasanda, the dragon dropped his fork and choked.

  ‘Rice gone down the wrong way?’ Bianca asked with her mouth full. ‘Try a drink of water.’

  The dragon spluttered, convulsed and fell off his chair. Bianca, who usually had the lamb pasanda but this time had opted for a chicken korma, summoned a waiter.

  ‘I think my friend needs a doctor,’ she said. ‘Or maybe a vet. Call both. And,’ she added, ‘then get me another peshwari nan.’

  With a tremendous effort, the dragon hauled himself back onto his chair. Drawing in breath was as difficult as pulling in a trawl-net full of lead ingots, and his hands were shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ he gasped. ‘I feel like I’m being burned alive.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bianca, relaxing a little. ‘We call that lime pickle. It’s quite usual.’

  This time, the dragon’s spasm sent him rolling on the floor, taking the table and the coat rack with him. Smoke was pouring out of holes in his shoes and there was a quite repulsive smell. Bianca was on her feet, very much aware

  that there was absolutely nothing she could usefully do.

  ‘The statue,’ the dragon hissed, spending each atom of breath as if he was a dentist buying magazines for the waiting room. ‘Run. It has to be George.’

  Slamming her credit card on the next-door table — damn, she thought, forgot the tip; but the rice was stone cold, so what the hell? — Bianca ran out into the street and headed for Victoria Square. If anybody was fooling with her statue, there’d be hell to pay.

  It’s difficult, isn’t it, to do it to order. Think of the trouble you have filling a small bottle behind a screen at the doctor’s. Then imagine a life-size statue of a dragon.

  ‘I find it helps to think of running water,’ said Chardonay, his nose wrinkled against the offensive smell. ‘Gushing taps. Chortling brooks. Waterfalls.’

  ‘Shut up, Char, you’re not helping.’

  ‘Milky tea works best in my experience,’ said Holdall. ‘Goes straight through me, especially first thing in the morning.’ For what it’s worth, Holdall had contributed more than the others put together, thereby confirming the view that Prodsnap had formed of him a few moments after they’d first met. There was now a hole in the dragon’s back left paw you could have hidden a cottage loaf in.

  ‘This,’ George grunted, ‘is stupid. I’m going to get the explosives.’

  Chardonay looked down at the small crater in the marble directly underneath where he was standing. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘Otherwise, we’re going to be here all night. And it doesn’t seem like there’s much risk now of the horrid thing waking up.’

  Prodsnap nodded. ‘And what about the noise?’ he said.

  ‘Not that I’m arguing with you,’ he added quickly, for it wasn’t exactly a warm night and he was sure he’d pulled a muscle. ‘But if there is anything we can do to keep the volume down, it’d be worth the effort. Something tells me that passing it off as a car backfiring won’t really do.’

  ‘Cover it with the blast shield and hope,’ George replied. ‘In any case, so long as we don’t hang about too long afterwards, a bit of a bang’ll be neither here nor there. Trust me, I’m a saint.’

  It didn’t take the seven of them long to get the explosive in position, and George made light work of wiring up the detonators. Father Kelly, who hadn’t really been able to contribute to the previous attempt, helped by passing George screwdrivers and, to the great irritation of all present, praying.

  ‘Okay, lads,’ said George, lifting the plunger. ‘Firework time. Stand clear or prepare to fly.’

  ‘What the hell do you goons think you’re doing with my statue?’

  George looked over his shoulder to see a tall, angry-looking female with her hands on her hips and an expres­sion on her face you could have built a thriving yoghurt business around. He scowled.

  ‘Piss off, lady,’ he snapped. Then he remembered.

  ‘You!’ Bianca said. ‘Right.’

  Bear in mind that George was a saint and had been a knight. Saints and knights do not fight with women. It’s unchivalrous. More to the point, they generally lose. Still holding the detonator box by the handle, he started to back away.

  ‘Help!’ he said.

  Demons and the denizens of Hell, on the other hand, have no such scruples, particularly if they outnumber the woman five to one. The demons advanced.

  ‘Madam,’ said Chardonay, mister play-it-by-the-book, ‘I have to inform you that we are duly authorised law officers

  in the execution of our duty. If you obstruct us, you will be committing an offence punishable by — oh shit!’

  He had trodden on Slitgrind’s tail; a lanky, unpleasant object, having a lot in common with a banana skin. He wobbled and tried to grab hold of the fiend next to him, but he was standing beside Holdall, four foot one in his stocking talons. His heels slid out from under him, and he fell —

  — Heavily, against George, who was off-balance anyway trying to hide behind Snorkfrod. A moment later, there was a confused heap of demons, and a click. George would have landed awkwardly, but the plunger of the detonator box broke his fall.

  There was a very loud noise.

  Chapter 8

  'Where am I?’

  Chubby smiled. ‘You’re safe,’ he said. ‘I rescued you from certain death. Look upon me as your personal knight in shining armour.’ He checked himself. ‘Let me rephrase that,’ he said. ‘Your guardian angel.’

  ‘You mean you’re out to get me?’

  Chubby sighed. There are times when you want to have the niceties of combat theology explained to you, and there are other times when you just want to go to bed. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I want to offer you a job.’

  ‘We killed him,’ Chardonay said.

  ‘Apparently,’ George replied. ‘Calls for a celebration, I reckon. Hey, Padre, we got any bubbly?’

  ‘But that was murder,’ Chardonay replied uncomfort­ably. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Pesticide. Where the hell’s that bloody vicar got to with the drinkies?’

  ‘You’re a saint and you killed him. Without provocation.

  He wasn’t setting fire to anything or eating maidens, he was just sitting there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ George snarled, his feet up on the coffee table; size twelve Doc Martens resting on disused Catholic Her­alds. ‘Eating me in effigy. Charming. Anyway, bugger that. We’re on the same side, remember.’

  Chardonay shook his head. ‘I still don’t really buy that,’ he said. ‘That’s like saying good and evil are basically the same thing.’

  George, who had never been near a university common room bar i
n his life but could nevertheless sense the onset of one of those ghastly serious-conversations-about-the-meaning-of-Everything, got up and opened the drinks cabinet with his foot. ‘Bollocks,’ he said, knocking the top off a Guinness bottle against the mantelpiece. ‘That’s like saying Accounts is the same as the Packing Department. They’re different, yes, but part of the same firm.’

  ‘Oh. I thought we were, you know, at war, sort of thing. Evil versus Good. In competition for the soul of man.’

  ‘Listen, pillock. If Evil won, it’d become Good, like the opposition becomes the government.’ He glugged at the bottle until it was empty and dropped it in the fireplace. ‘Thought you were meant to be a management trainee, son. Don’t they teach you boys anything?’

  Father Kelly peered nervously round the door and whispered that he’d got a bottle of champagne, if that’s what they wanted. He looked nervous and semi-martyred; Terry Waite in his own home. Which suited him fine, because although he’d always reckoned he’d have made a cracking hostage he spoke no foreign languages and air travel gave him migraines. ‘And,’ he added, ‘there’s a devil in the washing machine.'

  ‘That’ll be that Holdall,’ George grunted. ‘I told him to search the place, see where you’re hiding the good stuff.’

  ‘Um.’ Father Kelly wasn’t sure what good meant any more, but from the context he guessed alcohol. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got any more. I can send out Mrs McNamara if you—’

  George made a scornful noise. ‘You don’t fool me that easily,’ he said. ‘In my day, first thing your priest did when he saw a gang of saints on the horizon, he put all the grog in a bucket and lowered it down the well. Always used to confess, though, specially when we told him we’d chuck him down after it. That,’ he added stonily, ‘is a hint.’

  ‘Actually, I haven’t got a well.’

  ‘I can improvise.'

  Father Kelly gulped and bolted. George listened after his retreating footsteps and winked.

  ‘He’ll be back in ten minutes with a couple of crates, you mark my words.’ he said. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Good and Evil.’

  ‘Yeah. Them.’ George yawned, stretched and kicked his shoes off. ‘All a bit academic, really. I mean, what it all boils down to is, you see a dragon, say, wandering about on your patch, you scrag it, job done. What more d’you need to know, for Chrissakes? I mean, it’s not exactly brain-bending stuff. Not like your angels dancing on the head of a pin — to which, in case you ever wondered, the answer is six, unless they’re doing the valeta, in which case eight. I don’t see what you’re making all this fuss about.’

  Chardonay shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’m not right for this line of work after all. When I joined, I thought there’d be something, you know, non­-controversial I could do, like keeping the books, doing budget forecasts, working out cost-efficiency ratios and calculating depreciation of fixed assets on a straight-line basis. Killing people...’

  George treated him to a look of contemptuous pity.

  ‘Wouldn’t do if we were all the same, son. I mean, if we were then the likes of me couldn’t kick shit out of the likes of you, for starters. Here,’ he added irritably, ‘this isn’t proper champagne, it’s that naff Italian stuff. When that dozy parson gets back, I’ve a good mind to pour the rest of it down his trousers. One thing I can’t stand, it’s blasphemy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Grapes,’ said Mike, smiling. ‘Flowers. Women’s’ maga­zines. I know you hate them all like the plague, so I’m building up an environment you’ll be desperate to leave. That way, you’ll get well faster.’

  Bianca tried to rub her eyes, but found she couldn’t, because her arm was cocooned in plaster and hanging by a wire from a frame above her head. ‘I’m in hospital, right?’ she said.

  ‘Huh.’ Mike scowled. ‘Someone must have told you.’

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘You got blown up,’ Mike replied through a mouthful of grape-pulp. ‘Along, I’m very sorry to have to tell you, with your statue. Note the singular, by the way. There’s bits of marble dragon scattered about as far as Henley-in-Arden, but no Saint George. They’re saying it’s the animal rights lot.'

  Suddenly there was something solid and awkward in Bianca’s throat; possibly a bit of dragon shrapnel. ‘The statue’s — gone, then?’

  Mike nodded. ‘All the king’s horses are reported to have packed it in as a lost cause,’ he replied. ‘All the king’s men are still at it, but only because they’re paid hourly. If it’s any consolation, you’re in all the papers and there’s a guy from Celebrity Squares in the waiting room right now.’

  What with the plaster and the wires, Bianca couldn’t sink back into the pillows with a hollow groan, so she did the next best thing and swore eloquently. Mike agreed that it was a pity.

  ‘A pity? They murdered the — my statue, and you say it’s a pity?’

  ‘These things happen. Is there anything else you’re particularly allergic to that I can bring in? I seem to remember you can’t stand chrysanthemums, but they’d sold out at the kiosk, so I got daffs instead.’

  ‘Mike.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ Mike said, and left.

  The dragon looked down, then back over his shoulder. Cautiously, he spread his wings and folded them again. Finally, he breathed out the tiniest, finest plume of flame he could manage, so as not to incinerate the extremely plush office he was apparently sitting in.

  ‘All present and correct,’ Chubby said. ‘Actually, in all the panic we knocked off a toe, but we put it back on with Araldite as soon as we got here and it seems to have taken okay. Grateful?’

  The dragon nodded. ‘Extremely,’ he said. ‘I had the distinct impression I was dying. I was in this restaurant, and then I was in the square again, inside the statue. I thought—’

  ‘They tried to blow you up,’ Chubby replied. ‘I got there just as a fat bloke with a moustache tripped over his feet and fell on the plunger. A sixth of a second later and all you’d have been fit for would have been lining the bottom of goldfish bowls.’

  The dragon narrowed his eyes. ‘So what happened?’ he said. ‘What did you do?’

  Chubby shrugged modestly and folded his hands in his

  lap. ‘A sixth of a second can be a very long time,’ he said, ‘especially if you boost another twelve hours into it using a state-of-the-art Kawaguchiya Heavy Industries Temporal Jack.’ He grinned. ‘At $3,000,000 per hour plus hire of plant and equipment, you owe me plenty, but we’ll sort that out later. Anyway, during that time we winched your statue up off the deck and into the cargo bay of the big Sikorsky, substituted a big chunk of solid marble, and legged it. That way, when the fireworks started, there were plenty of bits of flying rock to make them think they’d succeeded. To them, of course, the sixth of a second lasted a sixth of a second, thanks to the KHI jack and a quick whip round with the soldering iron. Neat, yes?’

  ‘Rather. I’m impressed. It was very good thinking.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chubby, ‘well. Some of us don’t go all to pieces at the first sign of trouble. And now, here you are, safe and sound. And, I sincerely hope, desperately anxious to try and repay the colossal debt of gratitude, ditto money, you now owe me. Correct?’

  The dragon nodded. ‘You said something about a job.’

  ‘Ah yes. Two jobs, really. Both of them right up your alley. Can I get you a drink, by the way? I’ve got four-star, diesel, aviation fuel or ethanol, and I think there’s a drop of turps left over from the Christmas party.’

  The dragon asked for a large ethanol, straight, no cherry. ‘Two jobs,’ he repeated. ‘Connected?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Chubby replied. ‘One, I want you to fry me some devils. Two, I — Don’t touch that!’

  He was too late. The dragon, a born fidget, had let his claws drift across the keyboard of the obsolete old PCW. The screen st
arted to glow.

  ‘Sorry,’ the dragon said. ‘Oh look, it’s gone all green.’

  Your wish is my — Well, hello, Fred.

  The dragon blinked. ‘Nosher?’

  Fred, mate, it’s great to see you again. Nice outfit.

  ‘Likewise.’ The dragon grinned, and only just managed to restrain a sigh of pleasure that would have melted the side off the building. ‘It’s been a long time, Nosher. What, three thousand years?’

  Easily that. How’ve you been keeping?

  ‘Well,’ the dragon replied, ‘most of the time I’ve been dead, though I’m better now. And yourself?’

  Chubby, his eyes round as tennis balls, could contain himself no longer. ‘Nosher?’ he demanded. ‘Your name is Nosher?’

  Zagranosz. And this is my old friend Fredegundar. We go way back.

  ‘I trust,’ said Chubby bitterly, ‘that none of this great-to-see-you-heard-from-Betsy-lately stuffs going on my account. I mean, I don’t mind soul-destroying work, but college reunions—’

  On the house. He worries, you know.

  The dragon nodded. ‘Weird sort of a bloke,’ he agreed, ‘although he did just save me from getting blown up. And now he wants me to go torching demons.’

  Ah.

  The dragon blinked. ‘You know about this?’

  Well, yes. Of course, I never guessed the dragon’d turn out to be you.

  Confused, and feeling as left out as an empty milk bottle, Chubby finished off the dragon’s ethanol and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘You guys,’ he said. ‘It’s no good, I’ve got to know. Where do you two know each other from?’

  The dragon turned his head and smiled. ‘Sunday school,’ he said.

  Drop a pebble in the sea off Brighton and the ripples will eventually reach California. Likewise, blow up a statue in

  Birmingham and you risk starting a revolution.

  A lot depends, of course, on the quality of the statue, because only the very best statues have the potential to be squatted in by unquiet spirits. The word unquiet, by the way, has been chosen with great care.