Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  ‘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 of blurs 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 1 960s 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.

  ‘Eeek!’ he said.

  The woman at the ticket desk gave him an impatient, Not-you-as-well look, held up a slip of paper with a seat number on it, and said, ‘Two pounds, please.’ She was holding the piece of paper in what could only be described as a talon.

  ‘Er, you in the show?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘Costume startle you, did it?’

  Mike nodded. ‘It’s very, um, realistic.’ ‘How would you know?’

  ‘All right, I don’t. Can I go in now, please?’

  He found his seat (one of those bendy bucket-shaped plastic chairs which you’re convinced is going to break when you sit on it, though it never does) and took a long look at the stage. There was no curtain. The usual amateur dramatics set, all black-painted hardboard, silver paper and things borrowed from people’s homes. Mundane. Prosaic. Everyday. Like, in fact, the woman at the door had been, except that she was obviously a...

  Another look round, this time at the audience. There were fifteen or so people scattered about the hall, eating boiled sweets and reading the photocopied programme. Either they hadn’t noticed that they’d just been sold their tickets by a ... or else they didn’t care. Possible, Mike told himself; very tolerant people, Midlanders. But — my God, those fangs — improbable.

  He looked at the programme. Cast list, as follows:

  GEORGE (a saint) Himself

  CHARDONAY (a demon) Himself

  SLITGRIND (a demon) Himself

  PRODSNAP (a demon) Himself

  HOLDALL (a demon) Himself

  SNORKFROD (a demon) Herself

  THE DRAGON Members of the cast

  Ah well, Mike said to himself, leaning back as far as he dared and opening his bag of Maltesers, I expect I’ve been to worse. Most of them, he remembered, at the Barbican.

  The lights went down. The chattering almost stopped.

  Play time.

  ‘Found them!’ Chubby yelled.

  The dragon looked up from the encyclopaedia he’d been reading and grinned. ‘Splendid. Where?’

  ‘Wherever the hell this is.’ Chubby handed him a creased playbill and a map. ‘Ready to go?’

  The dragon grinned.

  Anybody ever wondered, Mike asked himself a quarter of the way through the first half, why so much of medieval literature is anonymous? Answer, easy. Who’d want to own up to having written this?

  At least there hadn’t been Morris dancing. Not yet. That, he admitted to himself, was like saying that nuclear bombs are safe because the world’s still in one piece. That aside, it had set his mind at rest on one score. No question but that these people were in the everlasting torment business; the cream, in fact, of their profession. Solemnly and with the utmost sincerity, Mike resolved that from now on he was going to be very, very good, for ever and ever.

  So deep was he in silent repentance that he didn’t notice that someone was now sitting in the seat next to him, until that person leaned across and whispered a request to look at his programme.

  ‘Sure,’ Mike whispered back. He passed over the sheet. As he did so, he became aware of an oppressive heat and a smell like petrol. He glanced out of the corner of his eye.

  Perfectly ordinary bloke. All his imagination. Except— The bloke had yellow eyes. Round, golden eyeballs, with a narrow black slit for a pupil. And no eyelids.

  Midlanders (see above) are tolerant folk, and Mike was from Brierley Hill where they don’t care who you are or what you do so long as you leave the buildings still standing afterwards. Devils; no problem, after all, we’re all God’s creatures. But, as soon as he’d recovered the use of his momentarily paralysed limbs, he was out of his seat, through the door and running like a hare. Sensible chap.

  Because, while he was still running, there was a horrible dull bang! followed by a whooshing noise, broken glass music and the very distinctive sound of fire. Instinct sent Mike sprawling on the ground, his head shielded by his elbows, as the first few bits of masonry and timber started to hit the ground all around him. And oh Christ, the smell...

  Late change to the cast as advertised. Whoever was playing the dragon tonight had just brought the house down.

  The dragon opened his eyes.

  There was, he observed, a large steel girder lying across his back. He shook himself like a wet dog, sending it spinning off into the rubble.

  He appeared to have made rather a mess.

  The drip-drip-dripping noise was still-molten steel; wire reinforcements in the concrete. The groaning sound was material contracting as it cooked, rather than an indication that there was still anything else even temporarily alive in the ruined building. No chance of that, whatsoever.

  In the distance, the mechanical wailing noise the dragon had come to associate with impending public attention. He spread his wings, flapped them and rose in a cloud of dust and sparks. Job done, time to go home. Five wingbeats lifted him into the upper air; five more and he was cruising through the sound barrier, heading west.

  As he flew, he couldn’t help reflecting that, in exacting his entirely justifiable revenge on George, he’d also killed five demons — well, so what? The worst that can happen to anything mortal is that it dies and goes to Hell; he’d saved them a bus fare — and fifteen or so innocent human beings who happened to be there. Hmm.

  No, the hell with that, it was a matter of omelettes and eggs. They belonged to a different species altogether and were none of his concern. To feed those fifteen, and all the others like them in this city alone, a million chickens a day ride to their deaths on a conveyer belt. And, emotive reactions aside, there was nothing wrong with that either because of a hard but fair rule of Nature called Survival of the Fittest. It was a rule he’d never really had a problem wit
h, even when he’d been hiding in the rocks watching all the rest of his kind being exterminated by these people’s great-to-the-power-of-twenty-grandfathers. Plenty more where those came from; and who’s the endangered species around here, anyway?

  As he flew, feeling the almost infinite power of his body, acknowledging the potential of his lazy but undoubtedly superior intellect, he sensed that maybe the jury was still out on that one.

  They brought the woman down from intensive care at about half past three that morning and put her in the bed next to Bianca. Superficial burns, light concussion, shock. She’d live. She’d been lucky, the ward sister explained. She’d only been passing outside the Sadley Grange Civic Centre when it blew up. Those poor souls inside never stood a chance.

  What caused it? Nobody knew, as yet. They’d said on the news that the whole building suddenly burst into flames; not like an ordinary fire, which starts somewhere and gets steadily hotter, more like a firebomb attack, except who’d want to firebomb amateur dramatics?

  ‘Nurse,’ Bianca said, ‘I think I’m going to be—’ And she was right.

  ‘They’re saying it was the Libyans,’ Chubby reported, topping up the dragon’s cup with lighter fuel, ‘God only knows why. I s’pose they’ve got to blame somebody, or what are foreigners for?’

  ‘Don’t go on about it,’ the dragon said. The bread was stale. He breathed gently on it and had toast, instead.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ Chubby replied. ‘You did good. Neat job, in and out, nobody saw you; or if they did, they’ve got too much common sense to stand in front of a microphone and say they’ve been seeing dragons. You could make a good living if you ... Sorry, I’ll shut up. Pass the marmalade, there’s a good fellow.’

  ‘Were there any survivors?’

  Chubby laughed. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just not within a two-hundred-yard radius. Actually, there’s an interesting side­light to the story, because that whole area’s up for redevelopment, except that there was that tatty old hall bang in the middle of it and absolutely no way of getting rid of it. Now, of course, bulldozers may safely graze. In fact, we could get seriously rich if ever you felt—’