Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  The dragon sighed. His eyes, as he glowered at the screen, were case-hardened with contempt. ‘You know something, Nosher?’ he said. ‘You’re evil.’

  You reckon? Sending you out to do battle with the forces of darkness and you say I’m evil?

  ‘I do.’

  The screen flickered, by way of a dry chuckle. Evil schmevil, old pal. Go out there and fry some fiends.

  With an effort, Mike stopped screaming and pulled himself together.

  It took some doing. Sixty per cent of him was slowly drifting away through space. Forty per cent of him was slipping unobtrusively into the future. It was like trying to impose your will on seven over-excited Highland terriers.

  Heel, Mike commanded. And toe. And leg. And arm. Oh Christ, and head too.

  You know the bit in all the films where they’ve just found the suitcase full of the money from the big heist; and suddenly the wind gets up and the air is full of flying banknotes; and first they all caper frantically around trying to catch them; and then they realise it’s hopeless and collapse laughing to the ground while the credits roll all round them? Well, it was rather like that, hold the laughter. All Mike could manage (particularly since his face was now —thirty yards and four hours away from the majority of him) was a wry grin.

  The hell with it. Why bother? He was just about to relax and finally let go when...

  Oh my god, a statue! Where the hell did that come from?

  Look gift horses in the mouth if you must, but when confronted with a wholly unlooked-for, vacant, unlocked, fully furnished statue just when you’re on the point of

  dissolving into space and time, you look for the little hatch between the shoulder-blades, you grab as much of you as you can reach, and you jump.

  ‘And this,’ said the Council spokesman, ‘is where the fountain was to have gone, and here’s where we would have put the floral clock, and here’s where we’d planned to have the big brass plaque recording the munificent generosity of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits (UK) plc.’ He paused and drew breath. ‘And here...’

  Five pairs of impassive Japanese eyes followed his point­ing finger and fixed on another part of the bomb crater.

  ‘Here,’ continued the spokesman, ‘we intended to have the centrepiece of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits Plaza, the staggeringly impressive statue of Saint George and the Dragon, by possibly the world’s most talented living sculp­tress, Bianca Wilson.’ Time for another breath; a deep one. ‘Instead...’

  He stopped. He blinked, rubbed his eyes. It was still there. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  He touched it; solid. As a rock, you might say. Just to be sure, he kicked it, hard. Ouch!

  ‘Instead,’ he went on, ‘we have no dragon, but now we do seem to have got St George back. About three seconds ago, to be precise. Don’t ask me how we did it, but we did it.’ He sat down and removed his shoe. ‘Clever old us, eh?’

  If the KIC people had noticed anything odd, they didn’t let it show. Two of the younger ones whispered to the grey-haired type who seemed to be the delegation leader. He nodded and whispered something back.

  ‘Very big statue,’ he said.

  ‘It is, yes,’ the spokesman agreed. ‘And, um, solid. Made of solid stone, all the way through. Yessiree, this baby’s here to stay.’

  (Because, at the moment when George entered the newly completed statue of Mike, he broke the morphological link with his own former statue. No longer caught up in George’s anomalous timestream, it went back to where it had come from; once again, just a statue, lifeless and inert.)

  The Council spokesman pulled his shoe back on, stood up and assumed a didactic pose. ‘You will observe,’ he said, ‘the remarkable use of line which Ms Wilson has managed to achieve; the dynamic tension implicit in the composition of this masterpiece; the impression she conveys of desper­ate, headlong motion frozen for all time in the...

  Slowly, as if it had the cramp in its left leg, the statue got up, winced, swore and hobbled away down Colmore Row.

  Yes, Bianca said, she’d accept the charges. ‘Mike, where the hell. ...‘

  ‘In a call-box just off Pinfold Street,’ Mike replied. ‘Can you come and pick me up? Only...’

  ‘Well?’

  Mike glanced over his shoulder. Because it was only an ordinary-sized call-box, he was on his knees with his nose pressed right up against the glass. People outside were staring.

  ‘Just hurry, will you? And bring a lorry.’

  He put the receiver down, breathed out hard. Someone was hammering on the door. Edging round carefully, he opened it and scowled.

  ‘What’s the matter, you daft bitch?’ he growled. ‘You never seen a statue before?’

  By coincidence, at precisely that moment another lorryload of statuary chugged round junction four of the M42, taking the exit signposted to Birmingham. In the back were eight Berninis, three Donatellos, three Cellinis, a Canova and the Giambologna Mercury. Michaelangelo’s David sat next to a harassed-looking man in a black jump-suit in the cab.

  ‘Sorry,’ David admitted. ‘I’ve never been much good at map-reading. Well,’ he amended, ‘this is actually my first attempt, but if I’d ever tried it before, I don’t suppose I’d have made much of a fist of it then, either.’

  Kurt muttered something under his breath. ‘We’re on the right road now, huh?’

  ‘I think so. We want to go to the big sprawly grey blob, looks like a squashed spider, name of Birmingham, right?’

  Kurt swore and hauled on the wheel. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ve turned right. Now what?’

  David bit his lip. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I meant right as in okay, not right the opposite of left. I think actually we wanted to go straight on.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Kurt had strong views on the subject of suffering fools gladly. It made him glad if fools suffered a lot. ‘Now we’ve gotta go miles out of our way. Concentrate, dammit.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They drove on in silence for a while; Kurt sulking, David feeling guilty. When they were safely back on the right road, however, David turned to Kurt and said, ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Well?’

  Difficult to find a tactful way of putting this. ‘What are we, like, doing here exactly?’ David asked.

  ‘The job,’ Kurt replied. ‘You realise they drive on the wrong side of the road in this faggot-ridden country?’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘The job. Deliver the statues, snuff the dragon, and then we’re outta here. Not the weirdest thing I ever got hired to do,’ Kurt added. ‘In the top twenty, maybe even the top ten, but not in at number one. Still, it ain’t exactly difficult. And it sure beats what I was doing before.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Being dead.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  Kurt frowned, detecting a certain lack of awe in his companion. After all, not many people come back from the dead. Even fewer come back from the dead and walk straight into a plum job in their chosen profession, as though they’d never been away. Jesus Christ and maybe Sherlock Holmes — Kurt, who’d been around and heard a thing or two, knew all that stuff about surviving the Reichenbach Falls was just a tax dodge — but that was it.

  ‘You ever been dead, son?’ he queried.

  ‘Not to the best of my knowledge.’

  ‘Give it a miss,’ Kurt advised. ‘Don’t get you anywhere.’

  ‘Who’re we working for, then?’

  Kurt’s spasm of impatience nearly caused an accident. ‘You don’t ask questions like that in this man’s business, boy. You can come to harm asking questions like that.’

  True, David reflected, we nearly did. We only missed that car by an inch or so. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But I’m really curious.’ He paused; a thought had struck him. ‘You do know, don’t you?’

  Kurt avoided his eye. ‘Of course I frigging well know,’ he snapped.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Read the damn map.’

  They drove on in sil
ence, if you could call it that, because Kurt was convinced that the sound of cogs turning in his brain was probably audible in Connecticut.

  It had been a good question.

  Just who was he working for?

  George stopped running, ducked down behind a dustbin and froze.

  Debits and credits time. On the negative side, he was lost, confused, penniless, naked, in an unfamiliar and distinctly economy-class body and on the run from a livid sculptress and a fire-breathing dragon. On the positive side, he was alive. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to relax. On balance, he was further up the ladders than down the snakes, by something in the order of a thousand per cent.

  About four minutes later, he solved the clothing and money problem by jumping out on an unsuspecting passer-by, knocking him silly with a broken bicycle pump he’d found in the dustbin and helping himself to his victim’s personal effects. Fortunately, he and his unwitting bene­factor were more or less the same size, although personally George wouldn’t have chosen a lilac shirt to go with a navy blue jacket. But there; muggers can’t be choosers. The shoes hurt his feet, but not nearly as much as the pavement would have done.

  An appropriate moment, he told himself as he sauntered down the alleyway into New Street, to draw up an agenda. It went as follows:

  1. Find and scrag that bastard dragon.

  2. Easier soliloquised than done, of course. He still wasn’t a hundred per cent at home in this century and maybe he was missing a trick somewhere, but he had arrived at the conclusion that the old WormexTM -in-the-water-supply tactic was going to be out of place here; although, to judge by the stuff he’d had in his whisky, a stiff dose of dragon powder could only improve the taste.

  The basic principle, however, was surely a good one: get the dragon to drink something that’d disagree with him. The recipe ought not to be a problem. The ancient proverb stuck in his mind: you can lead a dragon to water, but you can’t make him drink. How did you go about conning a dragon into slaking its thirst from your specially prepared homebrew; leave a big bowl with DRAGON on the side lying about in a public place? Unlikely to work.

  Hold that thought. Since he was now wearing a whole new body, the dragon wouldn’t know who he was. All he had to do, given the element of disguise, was walk up to the dragon in a bar and offer to buy him a drink.

  The ugly snout of practicality intruded into his plans. As far as he could tell, this was a liberal century, uninhibited, where anything went (so long as you weren’t fussy about it coming back again afterwards), but even so, you’d probably be pushing your luck sidling up to strangers in bars asking if they were a dragon and wanted a drink. On the right lines, he decided, but could do with a little bit more fine tuning.

  Still, at least he had a plan now, which was something. Next step, food. It had been a long time since breakfast and the body that had eaten the breakfast was now cinders and ashes. He pulled out his victim’s wallet and opened it up; a nice thick wad of notes reassured him. Grinning, he crossed New Street, heading for the big McDonald’s.

  ‘Wotcher, Mike.’ A hand clumped down between his shoulder-blades, momentarily depriving him of breath. Before his instincts — well, they weren’t his instincts of course — had time to send the kill message down to his arms, he cancelled the instruction. Whoever this body was, it had friends. And dragon hunters need friends, the way fisher­men need maggots.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ he replied, and turned to face whoever it was. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Not so bad.’ His friend, a tall, gangling bloke with round bottle-end glasses, was giving him a funny look. ‘Heard you were, um, dead,’ he said. ‘Like, blown up or something.’

  ‘Not as such,’ George replied. ‘What you probably heard was that I was slowly dying of hunger and thirst, which is true. Of course, you can help me do something about that.’ The stranger laughed. What had he called him? Mike?

  Good old Mike, always cracking jokes.

  ‘Good idea,’ the stranger went on. ‘We could have a couple of pints, then maybe go for a Balti. Suit you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Mike’s friend started to walk, presumably knew where he was going. George fell into step beside him.

  ‘Haven’t seen you about for a while now,’ said Mike’s friend.

  ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘So what’s it like, working with the great Bianca Wilson?’ George put two and two together, and got a mental picture of a fast-swinging lump hammer narrowly shaving his ear. ‘Eventful,’ he said. ‘Quite an education, in fact.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’

  In front of them, a pub doorway. Oh good, we seem to be going in here. I could just do with a— He stopped dead. Ah shit!

  Sitting at the bar, staring at him, were Bianca and— ‘Christ, Bianca, there’s my body. Hey, grab him, some­one. That’s the bastard who stole my body!’

  It’s mortifying enough to be loudly accused of theft in a public place. To be accused by yourself ... George, as always in such circumstances, gave serious thought to running away, but his erstwhile friend was standing between him and the door, giving him ever such a funny look.

  ‘You bastard!’ Bianca was yelling at him too. ‘Don’t just stand there, Peter, grab the swine!’

  Who the hell was Peter? Oh, him. The treacherous bugger who’d brought him here. Stronger than he looks, our Peter. George’s arm was now twisted up behind his back and there was very little he could do about it. Behind the bar, an unsympathetic-looking girl was muttering something about ringing the police.

  ‘Let go of me,’ he grunted. ‘I’m a saint.’ Peter tightened his grip. ‘You’re a what?’ ‘A saint. You deaf or something?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bianca, grimly, ‘he is. If he tries to make a run for it, break his sodding arm.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Peter was saying. ‘If he really is a saint—’

  ‘That does it,’ said the barmaid. She picked up the phone and started pressing buttons.

  George struggled, painfully. ‘You realise this is blas­phemy,’ he gasped — breath is at a premium when you’re being half-nelsoned over a bar. ‘You’ll fry in Hell for this!’

  ‘You bastard!’ His body — Saint George’s body — had a hand round his, Mike’s, windpipe. ‘Give me back my body now, or I’ll bloody well throttle you. It.’ The significance of his own words struck him and he relaxed his hold slightly. ‘Here, Bee, is there any way of getting him out of it?’

  ‘We could try death,’ Bianca replied icily. ‘Seems to work okay.’

  The other occupants of the pub, though interested, seemed to regard saint-bashing as primarily a spectator sport. Wagers were being exchanged, theories aired. The barmaid had got through to the police and was giving what George felt was a rather one-sided account of the proceed­ings. It was time, he reflected, for a brilliant idea.

  Available options; not an inspiring selection. Be muti­lated by Peter, strangled by — who was that guy? Mike, presumably, whoever the hell he was, surgically dissected by the snotty sculptress or arrested by the cops. None of them, George admitted, felt intuitively right.

  ‘Help,’ he croaked.

  The prayers of saints seldom go unheard. Just as Mike was saying that maybe Bianca’s suggestion had something going for it, and the distant sirens were coming closer, there

  was a refreshing sound of splintering glass, the thump of an unconscious body hitting the deck and a familiar voice at his side.

  Father Kelly. And about bloody time, too.

  ‘Of course he’s a friggin’ saint,’ the priest was yelling. ‘Can’t ye see his friggin’ halo, ye dumb bastards?’

  ‘Keep out of this, vicar,’ Mike said angrily. Fortunately, Father Kelly took no notice, or perhaps he was just enraged at being confused with an Anglican. More broken glass noises, Father Kelly proving he knew the uses of empty Guinness bottles. He’d apparently used one on Peter, because George could now move his arms. He straightened up, to see Bianca swinging a bar stool at him. Fortunately,
he had just enough time to thrust Father Kelly into the path of the blow — loud thunk, priest drops like stone, never mind. Leaving Bianca holding a broken stool and looking bemused, he jumped nimbly over the dormant Peter, shoved open the door, kicked an advancing copper squarely in the nuts and legged it.

  God, he couldn’t help thinking, looks after his own.

  Chapter 14

  ‘It’s not on the map,’ Slitgrind protested.

  The van stood on the hard shoulder of the M6. In the front, Prodsnap and Slitgrind were poring over the vintage road atlas they’d found in the glove compartment.

  ‘There it is, look,’ said Prodsnap, pointing.

  ‘No, you fool, that’s Hull.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just lousy spelling.’

  Slitgrind closed the atlas with a snap. ‘Stands to reason,’ he said. ‘They don’t put it on mortal maps, ‘cos otherwise we’d have hundreds of bloody tourists blocking up the front drive all the time.’

  It occurred to Prodsnap that maybe his colleague was being a trifle alarmist, but he didn’t say anything. It was true, Hell wasn’t on the map. He tried hard to remember the route the coach-driver had taken, but it had all been homogeneous motorway, with no landmarks whatso­ever.

  ‘We’ll have to ask someone, then,’ he said.

  Slitgrind scowled. ‘Don’t be thick,’ he replied.

  ‘Someone who knows, obviously,’ Prodsnap said. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard.’

  ‘But ...‘ Slitgrind was about to protest, but the penny dropped. ‘Do we have to?’ he objected. ‘Those people always give me the shivers.

  ‘Me too.’ Prodsnap suited the action to the word. ‘But they’ll know the way and we don’t. Looks like we don’t have much choice.’

  His colleague grimaced, acknowledging the logic. ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘s’pose they’re on our side. In a way.’

  ‘Better the colleague you know, huh?’

  Slitgrind shrugged and turned the ignition key.

  ‘Give me the deep blue sea any time,’ he muttered, and indicated right.