Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  He turned and started toward the house, but a fireball neatly seared a stripe of lawn at his feet. The dragon said, “You stay. He goes.”

  The author looked down at the crumbling, crackling grass, then turned to Guerra. “Through the door—sharp left—turn right, straight through the other door. My office. Notebook beside the laptop, Betty Grable on the cover, you can’t miss it. Grab that, grab a couple of pens, get back out here before he trashes the landscaping. You know how much it cost to put this lawn in?”

  But Guerra was already at the door. He hurried through to the office as directed, snatched up notebook and pens, paused for a moment to marvel at the books and electronics, the boxes of paper and printer cartridges, the alphabetized manuscripts in their separate folders—this is how they live, this is a real writer’s workroom— and raced back out to the lawn, where the author and his creation were eyeing each other in wary silence. Guerra was relieved to see that the dragon’s head and neck were relaxed from the attack position, and horrified to realize that the neighboring family—with the addition of a smaller boy in Batman pajamas—were now standing at the edge of their lawn, while a girl coasting on in-line skates was gliding up the driveway, and a large man with a pipe in his mouth, who looked like a retired colonel in a movie, was striding across the street as though to direct the catapults. The larger of the two boys was telling his brother learnedly, “That’s a dragon. I saw one on the Discovery Channel.” I could have switched shifts with Levinsky, like we were talking about the other day …

  “Thanks,” the author said, taking the writing materials from Guerra’s hands. Ignoring the growing assembly on his lawn and his driveway, and the cricketlike chirps of cellphone cameras, he sat down cross-legged on his own doorstep and propped the open notebook on his knee. “I did this in Macy’s window one time,” he remarked conversationally. “For the ERA or the EPA, one of those.” He rubbed his chin, muttered something inaudible, and began to write, reading aloud as he went.

  Once upon a time, in a faraway place, there lived a king whose daughter fell in love with a common gardener. The king was so outraged at this that he imprisoned the princess in a high tower and set a ferocious dragon to guard her.

  The dragon slithered closer and craned its neck, reading over his shoulder. The author continued.

  But the dragon, fierce as it was, had a tender, sympathetic heart, greatly unlike the rest of its kind—

  “I don’t like that,” the dragon interrupted. “‘The rest of its kind’—it sounds condescending, even a touch bigoted. Why not just say family, or ‘the rest of its kinfolk’? Much better tone, I think.”

  “Everybody’s a critic,” the author mumbled. “All right, all right, kinfolk, then.” He made the correction. The man who looked like a colonel was standing beside another man who looked like a hungover Santa Claus, and the Indian mother was gripping her sons’ shoulders to hold both boys exactly where they were.

  The author continued.

  Now the dragon could not set the princess free against her father’s orders, but it did what it could for her. It kept her company, engaging her in cheerful, intelligent conversation, comforting her when she was sad, and even singing to her in her most depressed moments, which would always make her laugh, since dragons are not very good singers.

  He hesitated, as though expecting some argument or annoyed comment from the dragon, but it only nodded in agreement. “True enough. We love music, but not one of us can sing a lick. Go on.” Its voice was surprisingly slow and thoughtful, and—so it seemed to Guerra—almost dreamy.

  But what the princess valued most, of all the dragon’s kindnesses, was that when her gardener lover had managed to smuggle a letter to her, the dragon would at once fly up to her barred window and hover there, like any butterfly or hummingbird, to pass the letter to her and wait to carry her rapturous reply.

  He paused again and looked up at the dragon. “You won’t mind if I make you a little bit smaller? Just for the sake of the hovering?”

  With a graciousness that Guerra would never have expected, the dragon replied, “You’re the artist—do as you think best.” After a moment it added, a bit shyly, “If you wanted, you could do something with my crest. That would be all right.”

  “Easy. Might touch up your scales some, too—nobody’s quite as young as they used to be.” He worked on, still reading softly, as much to himself as to them. What struck Guerra most forcefully was that his was very nearly the only voice in the crowded darkness, except for one of the small boys—“Dragons eat people! He eat those men up!”—and the roller-skating girl sighing to a boy who had joined her, “This is so cool …” Guerra gestured at them all to move back, but no one appeared to notice. If anything, they seemed to be leaning in, somehow yearning toward the magnificently menacing figure that loomed over the man who still sat tailor-fashion, telling it a story about itself.

  Now when the king came to visit his imprisoned child—which, to be as fair to him as possible, he did quite often—the dragon would always put on his most terrifying appearance and strut around the foot of the tower, to show the king how well he was fulfilling his charge …

  To Guerra’s astonishment the dragon appeared not only somewhat smaller, but younger as well. Before his eyes, slowly but plainly, the faded greenish-black scales were regaining their original dark-green glitter, and the tattered crest and drab, frayed wings were springing back to proud fullness. The dragon rumbled experimentally, and the fire that lapped around its fangs—like the great claws, no longer worn dull—was the deep red, laced with rich yellow, that such fire should be. Guerra stared back and forth between this new glory and the ballpoint pen on the Betty Grable notebook, and no longer wished to have switched shifts with Officer Levinsky.

  But beyond such wonders, the most marvelous change of all was that the dragon was beginning to fade, to lose definition around the edges and grow steadily more transparent until Guerra thought he could see his car through it, and the lights of houses across the street, and the rising moon. After a moment, though, he realized he was wrong. The lights were plainly coming from a number of low-roofed huts that clustered in the shadows at the base of a soap-bubble castle, and what he had taken for his car was in fact nothing but a rickety haywagon. The vision extended on all sides: whichever way he turned, there was only the reality of the huts and the castle and the deep woods beyond. And one of the castle towers had a single barred window, with a face glimmering behind it ….

  “Yes,” said the dragon. For all its increasing dimness, its voice had grown as powerful and clear as a mountain waterfall. “Yes … yes … that was just how it was. How it is …”

  The sense of one common breath being drawn and exhaled was abruptly broken by a soft wail, “Dragon gone!” and the little boy in the Batman pajamas suddenly shrugged free of his mother’s grip and came racing across the street and the lawn. “Dragon gone!” Guerra made a dive for him, but missed, and was almost trampled by the boy’s father. The whiskey-faced Santa Claus came charging after.

  With the persistence and determination of a rabbit heading for his hole, the boy shot between several sets of legs straight for the splendid shadow that was fading so swiftly now. He tripped, skidded on his seat and looked up at the mighty head and neck, wings and crest, fading so swiftly against a sky of castles and stars. “Dragon gone?” It was a forlorn question now.

  The head came slowly down, lowering over the boy, who sat unafraid as the dragon studied him lingeringly. Guerra remembered—shadow or no shadow—the dragon’s comments on the heart-melting tastiness of children. But then the boy’s father had him in his arms and was sweeping him off, darkly threatening to sue somebody, there had to be someone. And the dragon was indeed gone.

  The castle was gone too; and so, in time, went most of the author’s neighbors, hushed and wondering. But some stayed a while, for no reason they could have explained, coming closer to the house merely to stand where the dragon had been. Several of those spoke diffidently
to the author; Guerra saw others surreptitiously pluck up grass blades, both burned and untouched, plainly as souvenirs.

  When the last of that group had finally wandered off, the author closed the notebook, capped the pen, stood up, stretched elaborately and said, “Well. Coffee?”

  Guerra rubbed his aching forehead, feeling the way he sometimes did when, falling asleep, he suddenly lunged awake out of a half-dream of stumbling down a step that wasn’t there. He said feebly, “Where did he go?”

  “Oh, into that story,” the author answered lightly. “The story I was making up for him.”

  “But you didn’t finish it,” Guerra said.

  “He will. It’s his fairy-tale world, after all—he knows it better than I do, really. I just showed him the way back.” The author smiled with a certain aggravating compassion. “It’s a bit hard to explain, if you don’t—you know—think much about magic.”

  “Hey, I think about a lot of things,” Guerra said harshly. “And what I’m thinking about right now is that that wasn’t a real story. It’s not in any book—you were just spitballing, improvising, making it up as you went along. Hell, I’ll bet you couldn’t repeat it right now if you tried. Like a little kid telling a lie.”

  The author laughed outright, and then stopped quickly when he saw Guerra’s expression. “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you. You’re quite right, we’re all little kids telling lies, writers are, hoping we can keep the lies straight and get away with them. And nobody lasts very long in this game who isn’t prepared to lie his way out of trouble. Absolutely right.” He regarded the ruined strip of lawn and winced visibly. “But you make the same mistake most people do, Officer Guerra. The magic’s not in books, not in the publishing—it’s in the telling, always. In the old, old telling.”

  He looked at his watch and yawned. “Actually, there might be a book in that one, I don’t know. Have to think about it. What about that coffee?”

  “I’m off duty,” Guerra said. “You got any beer?”

  “I’m off duty too,” the author said. “Come on in.”

  Humane Killer

  DIANA GABALDON AND SAMUEL SYKES

  International bestseller Diana Gabaldon is a winner of the Quill Award and of the RITA Award, given by the Romance Writers of America. She’s the author of the hugely popular Outlander series of time-travel romances, including Cross Stitch, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, and A Breath of Snow and Ashes. Her historical series about the strange adventures of Lord John includes the novels Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, a chapbook novella, Lord John and the Hell-Fire Club, and a collection of Lord John stories, Lord John and the Hand of Devils. She’s also written a contemporary mystery, White Knight. Her most recent book is a new Outlander novel, An Echo in the Bone. A guidebook to and appreciation of her work is The Outlandish Companion.

  Samuel Sykes is a relatively new author, having just been unleashed from Northern Arizona University. “Humane Killer” is his first publication worth mentioning and, he hopes, the first of many. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, he now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

  Here they join forces to describe an unlikely and accidental alliance between some very ill-assorted characters who find that they all have a common problem to solve—if they can.

  “SIR Leonard of Savhael is his name!”

  The young woman held her breath and was relieved to see that the crowd, for the moment at least, had stopped what they were doing and directed eyes in various states of bleariness and crustiness up toward her.

  “And he is, without a doubt,” she spoke rapidly, “the greatest of the Unanointed to have ever set foot back into the lands of civilized men!”

  The crowd shifted. Lips, occasionally decorated with warts, twisted into collective frowns at the mention of an Unanointed. She cleared her throat, bracing herself for their next reaction.

  “And while he is not pure enough to carry a mace”—she spoke louder to be heard over the disapproving moans—“his sword has spilled more heathen blood upon sand, stone, or stream than any instrument, blunt or otherwise!”

  A few stern nods from old men, most likely veterans, brought her a little hope. She straightened herself up as much as she could and spoke a little louder.

  “He has never set foot in any house of God”—she winced at their angry roar—“for the blood crusted there is so thick that it can never be washed from his boots!” She smiled, emboldened, at their morbid chuckles. “He swears to God with as much piety as any man of cloth and steel, but never once has passed judgment upon another, so humble is he.”

  They quirked a collective brow at that; she bit her lower lip. Such an expression was not what she had hoped to inspire. Finish it now, she told herself, end on a high note.

  “And so, I urge you, my dear friends”—she spoke as loudly and clearly as she could—“to consider his judgment, for he is so pure and clean that you cannot hear him vouch for me and yet remain convinced of my guilt!”

  The chaplain inclined his head to her, his powdered wig and sagging features drooping in a depressing display of age. He glanced to the altar boy beside him, who merely stared at her blankly. Slowly, white brow quirked, the chaplain turned to the crowd and, unhurriedly, spoke.

  “And what say you to this fevered plea, good gentlemen?”

  The old men glanced to the women, who looked to the old men with equal confusion.

  For such a decision, they would have surely looked to the young men. The young men, with their strong hearts and minds shaped by God’s grace, would look to her. They might nod sagely and suggest that they discuss the matter more earnestly. Or, even better, they might take one look at her face, unscarred and fair, and escort her to the nearest alehouse.

  Of course, she noted grimly, there were no young men left in the village. There were plenty of elderly and likely plenty of dead young men buried in the churchyard, but the living ones had undoubtedly followed their precious Crusade south.

  That left the women. No one ever listens to the women.

  Thus, it was no great surprise that it was one of the old men who raised both his voice and a withered fist to the sky.

  “BURN HER!”

  “BURN HER!” the cry was taken up, even by the children. “BURN THE WITCH!”

  “Oh, come on!” Armecia screamed back at them. She yearned to hurl one of the faggots heaped at her feet, but she supposed that was why they had bound her to a stake. “I didn’t even do anything!”

  “Lies!” one of the women, so sagging with age as to suggest she was more melted candle than woman, roared. “You used your black magic upon me gran’daughter!”

  To prove this, she tugged at the wrist of a young, fair-haired girl and shoved her to the fore of the crowd. The girl, apparently more befuddled than enraged, looked up at Armecia with a blank face, perfectly smooth and bright with a healthy pink.

  “She was scarred with the pox just this morning! One hour away from me sight, and I’ve got this!” The woman seized her granddaughter by the cheeks and shook roughly. “This! Smoother than her arse was when she was born!” She leveled a finger and a yellow-toothed snarl at Armecia. “Witchcraft! Heathenry!”

  “Are you serious? How can you be upset at your grandchild being cured of disease?” She gritted her teeth so hard they threatened to crack. “What makes you think I did it, anyway?”

  “You’re the only foreigner here,” the woman said, extending her arms to the crowd. “Everyone else is a decent devotee of the lord and His Order.”

  “Everyone, huh?” With no free hands to point, Armecia gestured to the old woman with her chin. “When was the last time you were at church? Maybe you used some kind of magic on her and are trying to foist the guilt on me.”

  She had to force herself to keep from smiling at the offended look of the woman. She had to strain much harder to keep an elated giggle behind her lips when the crowd parted warily, turning dozens of suspicious gazes up
on the accuser.

  “Oh, you can’t be seriously considering this,” the woman grunted, placing meaty hands on hips.

  “Witchcraft, Goodie Andor, is a very serious matter.” The chaplain stroked both his chins contemplatively. “Even the curing of a dreadful disease is but a ruse covering a far more dreadful taint. If we let but one”—he held up a finger—“bride of the Devil into this sanctuary of the lord’s people, it will infect far more than mere children.”

  “So say we all.”

  The crowd’s heads went low in what Armecia thought of, but did not comment upon, as being curiously similar to a mass of hens upon a heap of grain.

  As they made a unified sign of the Cudgel, it was with a grim smile and dozens of furious scowls, respectively, that Armecia and the folk noted Goodie Andor make the blessed gesture just a fraction slower than the rest.

  “You’ve known me for years!” She rose up with as much righteous indignation as sagging breasts and thick legs would allow. “I’ve prayed in the house of God alongside you! I am no sorceress!”

  “So she says!” Armecia assumed her own poise of righteousness, insofar as the ropes permitted. “Are not the Devil’s brides skilled with clouding the minds of reasonable men?”

  “It is true,” the chaplain muttered, fixing a wary eye upon Goodie Andor. “It is furthermore true that you did not consider the accusation to be serious.”

  “She’s the one trying to cloud your minds!”

  “With what? Logic? Big words?” Armecia leaned back against the stake and sneered. “Let us not abandon any precaution here, friends. If she can accuse me of witchcraft, then I can certainly accuse her of witchcraft.” She shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. “In the end, there’s really no way to prove that anyone’s a witch.”