Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  ‘Hey,’ George drawled. ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘It’s where it isn’t that’s pissed me off, man,’ Kortright replied. ‘C’mon, get your tail in gear, we got people waiting.’

  ‘People?’ George hovered, his front claws folded, a what-time-of-night-do-you-call-this expression on his face. ‘What people?’

  Stevenson, he noticed, was looking a little sheepish as he leaned over and whispered something in Kortright’s ear. The agent stepped back and stared at him.

  ‘You arrange the biggest fight of all time,’ he said, ‘and you never get around to telling the contestants?’

  George quivered; the word fight had hijacked his imag­ination and was demanding to be flown to Kingdom Come. ‘What fight?’ he asked.

  ‘You and Saint George,’ Chubby replied. ‘The rematch. I was, um, planning it as a surprise.’

  ‘You succeeded.’

  Chubby scowled. ‘Dunno why you’re sounding all snotty about it,’ he replied self-righteously. ‘That is what you want, isn’t it? A chance to sort that little shit out once and for all? I mean, that is why you came back in the first place, right?’

  ‘Sure thing.’ George nodded vigorously. ‘Teach the little toe-rag a lesson he won’t live long enough to forget.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  A smile swept across the dragon’s face, in the same way that barbarian hordes once swept across Europe. ‘I call that very thoughtful of you,’ he said, ‘going to all that trouble just to please me. But what makes you think the little chickenshit’ll have the balls to show up? If I was him, the moment I heard about the fight I’d be off.’

  ‘He doesn’t know about the fight, stupid.’

  ‘You mean,’ said George, grinning cheerfully, ‘you set him up?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Look—’

  ‘From the outset?’

  ‘Sure.’ Chubby looked at him strangely. ‘What’s got into you all of a sudden?’ he demanded.

  ‘Not what. Who. But that’s beside the point, we’ll sort it out later. So, where should I go?’

  Kortright pointed due north. ‘You’ll know what it is as soon as you see it,’ he said. ‘Hang round just out of sight till we show up with George. Then it’ll be over to you, okay? And don’t say I don’t find you quality gigs, you ungrateful asshole.’

  George nodded gravely. ‘I think I’ll be able to handle it from then on,’ he said. ‘Be seeing you.’

  Not long afterwards, Chubby’s helicopter landed beside the huge artificial mountain of packing cases that had appeared overnight in the middle of the desert, and two men climbed out, crouching to avoid the spinning rotor blades.

  ‘George,’ they were yelling. ‘George! Where is the god­damn..

  They found him fast asleep in a sort of masonry igloo he’d made for himself at the foot of the mountain. This made their job much easier. Chubby slipped the handcuffs into place while Kortright woke him up.

  ‘Hi, George,’ Chubby said. ‘Look, no need for alarm, but we need you to do something for us and we really haven’t got time to convince you it’s a good idea before we set off for the venue. This way, we can convince you as we go, and you won’t waste time by running away and hiding.’

  ‘Suits me.’

  The two men looked at each other. ‘Good of you to be so reasonable,’ Chubby said. ‘This way, then.’

  In the chopper, Chubby explained that when he’d rescued George from the police in Birmingham, he’d had an ulterior motive.

  ‘You rescued ... Yes, sorry, me and my tea-bag memory. Do forgive me, carry on.’

  ‘Yup.’ Chubby had a vague feeling that something was going wrong, but that was so close to his normal mental state that he ignored it. ‘You see, it’s this damn dragon.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Sure.’ Chubby sighed, his face a picture of frustration and annoyance. ‘The bloody thing is starting to be a real pest, you know? Something’s got to be done about it, before it ruins my business and destroys a major city or some­thing.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ said the dragon, nodding. ‘This planet ain’t big enough for the three of us, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Three? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, of course, I don’t have to tell you, you want to see the fucker gets what’s coming to him as badly as I do. Well, now’s your chance.’

  ‘Really and truly?’

  ‘Really,’ said Chubby, smiling, ‘and truly. That’s why Mr Kortright here —‘

  Kortright smiled. ‘Hi, George.’

  ‘Hi, Mr Kortright. Haven’t we met somewhere?’

  ‘Quite possibly, George, quite possibly.’

  ‘Mr Kortright,’ Chubby went on, ‘and I have arranged this, um, fight to the death. You and Mr Bad Guy. We built you an arena and everything. You’re gonna love it.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the dragon. ‘Only, and I hate to seem downbeat here, don’t you think the fight’s going to be ever so slightly one-sided? I mean, him with the wings and the tail and the fiery breath, me with a sword? Not that I’m chicken or anything, but...’

  Kortright chuckled. ‘Tell him, Chubby.’

  ‘We’ve sorted all that,’ Chubby said. ‘We’ve got you some back-up. The best, in fact. The name Kurt Lundqvist mean anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  Chubby shrugged. ‘After your time, I guess. Well, just as the dragon comes hell-for-leather at you out of, so to speak, a cloudless sky, Kurt “Mad Dog” Lundqvist’ll be poised and ready in a concealed bunker under the press box with a very nasty surprise for Mr Dragon. He won’t know what hit him. And neither, more to the point, will the punters. They’ll think it was you. Neat trick, huh?’

  ‘Chubby.’ The dragon looked shocked. ‘Surely that’s cheating.’

  ‘Yes. You got a problem about that?’

  The dragon’s eyes gleamed, and if Chubby failed to notice, consciously at least, that they were yellow with a black slit for a pupil, that was his fault. ‘Ignore me,’ the dragon said. ‘I think it’s a wonderful plan. Thank you ever so much for arranging it all. You must let me find some way to pay you back.’

  ‘George,’ Chubby said, ‘my old pal, forget it. I mean, what are friends for?’

  The dragon shook his head. ‘Chubby,’ he said, ‘and Lin. This is one favour I won’t be forgetting in a hurry, believe me. Okay, let’s go. I can hardly wait.’

  Chapter 19

  Kurt had allowed himself twenty minutes to get from Birmingham to the heart of the Gobi Desert. Thanks to the small flask of concentrated Time which Chubby had issued him with, it proved to be ample.

  An imposing figure was waiting for him round the back of the gents’ lavatory. It was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit over its lurid, misshapen body, and a pair of dark glasses perched on the bridge of its beak.

  ‘Hi,’ Kurt said. ‘Sorry if I kept you waiting.’

  ‘Bang on time, Mr Lundqvist,’ replied the Captain of Spectral Warriors, handing over a suitcase. ‘Here’s the doings. Best of luck.’

  Kurt grinned. ‘Luck,’ he said, ‘is for losers. You got your boys standing by?’

  ‘In position. You can rely on them to do a good job.’ Kurt picked up the suitcase. ‘Be seeing you, then.’ He started to walk away, but the Captain stopped him.

  ‘Mr Lundqvist,’ he said. ‘I’m curious.

  ‘Yeah, but don’t let it get to you. The shades help. A bit.’

  ‘I’m curious,’ the Captain went on, ‘about which of them you’re gonna take out. Yeah, sure I got my orders, I don’t actually need to know at this stage. I was just wonder­ing...’

  Kurt grinned, a big, wide grin that’d make a wolf climb a tree. ‘Watch this space,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll know for sure.’

  George circled, keeping high.

  Born yesterday? Not him. Came down in the last shower? You must be thinking of somebody else. He hadn’t slashed a path through the red-clawed jungle of combat theology to a Saintship without knowing when a situation was well and t
ruly hooky; and if ever a set-up stank, it was this one. Souls don’t just float up out of bodies for no reason; it takes big medicine to work a trick like that. And for it to happen just before a major set-piece battle between Good and Evil? Some of George’s best friends were coincidences, but that didn’t mean he trusted them as far as he could spit.

  Well, he said to himself. And what would I do if I were fixing this fight?

  Easy, I’d position a sniper somewhere in the arena. That way, when I come rushing in to scrag my enemy, the sniper blams me just as I’m about to put my wings back and dive. It looks like Saint George has killed me. Good triumphs over Evil for the second time running. Yeah. Well, we’ll see about that.

  He gained a few thousand feet and looked down. Below him, the huge arena looked like a tiny scab on the knee of the desert. It was packed with people; high rollers and fight aficionados from the length and breadth of Time. George chuckled. The way he saw it, spectator sports are at best a rather morbid form of voyeurism. So much better if you can participate directly in the action.

  He started to dive.

  The joy of it was that the deaths of all the people he was going to incinerate, by way of a diversion, would be blamed on the dragon (representing Evil, and doing a pretty spectacular job) rather than noble, virtuous Saint George (representing po-faced, one-hand-tied-behind-its-back Good). Given the dragon’s track record, nobody would have the slightest problem in believing that he’d decided to zap a whole stadium full of humans for the sheer hell of it.

  He took a deep breath.

  In the white corner, the dragon lifted his helmet, blew dust from the liner and put it on. It was hot and stuffy and smelt of mothballs, and it wasn’t made of asbestos. Bloody silly thing to wear in a dragon-fight, he couldn’t help thinking.

  With a sharp pang of anger and loss, he saw a familiar shape, far off in the harsh blue sky. Here he came, the bastard.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to the armourer. ‘I’ll have the sword now, please.’

  The armourer grinned at him. ‘Get real, buddy’ he said. ‘You gotta try and kill that thing, and you’re planning on using an overgrown paperknife? Man, you’re either stupid or crazy.'

  The dragon was about to speak, but decided to look instead.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’

  ‘You may have heard of me,’ the armourer replied. ‘My name’s Kurt Lundqvist.’

  The dragon stared at him. ‘But aren’t you meant to be down there somewhere? With a gun or something?’

  Kurt shook his head. ‘That, my friend, would be a bad move. I’d hate my last thought before I die to be, God how could I be so fucking stupid? I’m gonna stay right here, where it’s safe.’

  ‘Safe?’

  Kurt nodded. ‘Because,’ he went on, ‘if I’ve sussed that bastard George, he’ll start off by zapping the audience, just to make sure there’s nobody like me in there waiting to take a shot at him. That sound like the George you used to know?’

  The dragon nodded. ‘I won’t ask how you know who I am,’ he said. ‘But we can’t actually let the bloodthirsty lunatic kill fifty thousand people. What are we going to-?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ The dragon gawped, gobsmacked. ‘For Christ’s sake, you idiot, that’s people out there, it’s your bloody species. And you stand there like a bloody traffic light saying Why not?’

  Kurt nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Think about it. Nearly all these guys are playing hooky from their own time, right? And what sort of guys are they? You don’t know? I’ll tell you.'

  The dragon grabbed his arm. The flying shape was getting closer. ‘Not now, you bastard. Do something!’

  ‘Those guys,’ Kurt continued, calmly unhooking the dragon’s hand from his arm, ‘are your aristocrats, your statesmen, your notable public figures, captains of industry and generally mega-rich citizens. Now then, think open spaces. Town squares. Piazzas. Pigeons sitting on...’

  Suddenly the dragon relaxed and began to laugh. ‘Sta­tues,’ he said.

  ‘Eventually the penny drops. Yeah, man, statues.’ Kurt shook his head and sighed. ‘Jeez, for a superior intelligence, you must be just plain dumb,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you worked it out for yourself yet? You’ve been cruising around breathing fire, torching buildings, all that kind of crap, and

  nobody’s really died. Even those —‘ Here Kurt shuddered, recalling his own sufferings. ‘Those ladies,’ he spat, ‘in that hall in Birmingham didn’t actually die. Nobody actually dies because of you, you moron. And you know why? Because you’re the good guy.’

  ‘I am?’

  Kurt indulged himself with a theatrical gesture of con­temptuous despair. ‘Man,’ he said witheringly, ‘you are dumb. Look,’ he went on, ‘when you’re the good guy, however hard you try to do Evil, you just can’t hack it. Unfair, sure, but that’s the way it goes. There’s always someone trailing along behind you — in this case, me —sorting out the mess and bringing the dead back to life. Kinda goes with the territory.’

  ‘I see,’ the dragon lied. ‘Just a second. This thing with the bodies; him getting mine, me getting his...’

  Kurt nodded. ‘I hired a witch-doctor to make the switch,’ he said. ‘Even a dumbo like you should’ve been able to work that one out. I mean, how can Good triumph over Evil if the goddamn dragon kills Saint Fucking George?’

  The dragon’s reply was drowned out by screams. George was killing the audience.

  When he’d finished doing that, he hovered for a moment above the centre of the arena, waiting for the smoke to clear so that he could see (time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted). When he was satisfied that everything was okay —nothing on the benches but charred bodies, smoking corpses, horribly twisted and distorted shapes that had once been people — he climbed, circled twice, put his wings back and came in on the glide, letting his own momentum carry him in.

  Chubby Stevenson, who wasn’t quite dead yet, watched him slipping gracefully through the sky, no sound except the whistling of the air, and reflected that he had never seen anything quite so beautiful in his life before. And, he concluded, since it was extremely unlikely that he was going to get a better offer in the few seconds that remained of his life, what better way to go than feasting his eyes on beauty? With luck, it might help take his mind off the agonising pain.

  Beside him where it had fallen, his Kawaguchiya Perso­nal Electronics LFZ6686 laptop computer, which had somehow not been melted into a shapeless plastic blob during the firestorm, switched itself on and cleared its screen.

  Did you remember to get my bet on?

  ‘What?’ The effort of speaking racked Chubby’s body with pain. ‘Oh, God, yes, your bet. No, I forgot, Sorry.’

  What? You idiot! You stupid, careless, good-for-nothing...

  ‘Only kidding,’ Chubby said. ‘I got you twenty-five to one. The slip’s in the asbestos wallet in my inside pocket. Hey, computer.’

  Well?

  ‘When I die, who gets my soul? I mean, I think I still own the majority of it, so surely—’

  You did when this conversation started. When you said the word ‘majority’, though, you just tipped the scale in my favour. So long, sucker.

  ‘Bastard,’ Chubby said and died.

  The dragon watched as the shape grew. Seeing himself for the first time through mortal eyes, he realised just how enormous a dragon is. That’s what makes the difference, he realised. Dragons are so much bigger than people, not to mention faster, stronger, tougher, more intelligent; only a complete idiot could expect them to live by the same rules. Sure, George, the psychopath, had just killed fifty thousand people. So what? Dragons are different from you and me. You have to make allowances.

  ‘Wake up, cretin,’ Kurt hissed in his ear. ‘C’mon, you got work to do.’

  ‘Have I? Oh, sorry, yes. How do I work this thing?’

  Kurt clicked his tongue. ‘You haven’t been listening, have you? Look, all you gotta do is look through the little black tube.
When the red dot’s on the middle of the dragon’s chest, press the button.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The dragon studied the device in his hands; basically a big grey tube with a smaller black tube perched on top. There was a serial number and the words MADE IN HELL stencilled on the back end. He peered through the ‘scope, lined up the sights, and...

  George exploded.

  Kurt later explained that he’d missed the heart-lung area and hit the stomach instead, hence no instantaneous kill. Not that it mattered, because the rocket detonated inside the fuel reserves in the beast’s intestines. This was why, for perhaps as long as two seconds, the poor bugger hung there in the sky, head and tail writhing sickeningly while the whole centre section became a huge orange fireball. Two seconds later, the whole lot went up with a heavy thump! noise, which made the ground shake and sent charred bits of dead spectator flying round like dried leaves in a sharp dust of wind. An enormous blob of fire hung on in the air for maybe a second and a half longer, and then the whole lot sank slowly, like a burning airship, to the ground. The smell was probably the nastiest thing ever to happen on the surface of the planet.

  ‘Gosh,’ the dragon said, ‘I’ve always wondered what the triumph of Good over Evil looks like and now I know.’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘On the whole,’ he continued, ‘I think I can take it or leave it alone. I mean, it’s all right for a change, but I wouldn’t pay money to watch it.’

  At his side, Kurt was impatient. ‘What is it with you goddamn heroes?’ he demanded tetchily. ‘Never knew a hero but he bust out soliloquising when there’s still work to be done. So when you’ve quite finished...’

  ‘Sorry,’ the dragon said, ‘I was miles away. Now what?’

  ‘Now,’ said Kurt, ‘we gotta go to Birmingham, which is currently the most important place in the Universe. Prob­ably just as well they don’t know that, it’d really play hell with property prices. Usually,’ he went on, unzipping a pocket of his fiendishly expensive Kustom Kombat survival jacket, ‘the journey takes nine hours, and that’s if you include in-flight refuelling. Fortunately...’ He held up a small bottle to the light. ‘Looks like we got a good nine hours left.’ He unscrewed the cap. ‘C’mon, fella, let’s move it. My jet’s this way.’