“It is, isn’t it? Gives us something new to think about, too,” Uluots said. “How do we go about catching one of these beasts?”
“Set out something they want to eat for bait,” Kyosti suggested. “We haven’t got a live unicorn—maybe one of the natives would do.” He was kidding—but, then again, he wasn’t. Killing a man to capture an animal was a bad bargain. Anyone could see that. Killing a worthless savage to gain precious knowledge of a fabulous, mystical creature … When you put it that way, how the pans of the scale balanced seemed less obvious.
Still, he and Uluots didn’t propose the arrangement to Baron Toivo. Kyosti didn’t know why the other savant didn’t. As for himself, he feared that the leader of the expedition might take them up on it.
Instead, the Mussalmians sacrificed the next unicorn they killed to the cause of learning, not to the stewpot. Several of their finest marksmen crouched downwind from the carcass, ready to open up on whatever came to investigate the bounty. Kyosti hoped something did before the carcass got high. He already knew more about vultures than he’d ever wanted to.
Nothing happened. More nothing happened. Still more nothing happened. And then, quite suddenly, something did. Two green-gray creatures leaped down from the green-gray rocks and ran toward the dead unicorn. Till they moved, none of the explorers had the slightest idea they were there. How long had they waited, watching, weighing, wondering? No way to know.
As Uluots had guessed they would, they ran on their hind legs. Had they stood erect, they would have been taller than men, but they didn’t. They leaned forward instead, their long, scaly tails counterbalancing heads and torsos.
They hissed and snarled at each other as they hurried toward the carcass. They might have been a couple of dogs squabbling over a bone in the street. A little to Kyosti’s surprise, they both reached the carcass. One at each end, they started tearing gobbets of meat from it with their great, tooth-filled jaws. Eating preoccupied both of them too much to let either stay angry at the other.
The marksmen opened up then. One of the—dragons?—sprang into the air in alarm as missiles cracked past it. Then it fled, dodging and jumping with what Kyosti would have called impossible agility had he not seen it for himself. And the other would have done the same, were it not down and thrashing with what was obviously a broken leg.
“We got it!” the marksmen cried. They ran forward with a net to immobilize the wounded creature. Kyosti loped behind them, with a spell ready to immobilize it for good. The beast’s hisses sounded like hot metal dropped into a cold sea.
It thrashed and hissed all the more when the explorers cast the net over it. The weights around the edges made sure the creature couldn’t get loose—its struggle only entangled it more thoroughly.
One of the savants bent toward it for a closer look at its head. That should have been safe enough. He still stood two or three feet away, and had the net’s stout fibers between him and those formidable jaws. Kyosti panted up just in time to see the creature’s catlike yellow eyes fix on the closest of its tormentors with a deadly glare.
Then … something shot from the beast’s jaws. The savant let out a horrible shriek and reeled away, both hands clutched to his face. “It burns!” he screamed. “It burns!”
“Preserve the beast!” Baron Toivo yelled at Kyosti. “Then it won’t be able to do … whatever the demon it just did.”
“Right,” Kyosti said tightly. And Toivo was right: no doubt about it.
Kyosti tried to make himself into a man of metal, casting his spell as if the burned savant’s cries and wails didn’t still echo in his ears. When he did, he felt a certain resistance to his magic—not nearly so much as he had from the tsaldaris in the jungle, but more than a simple animal should have been able to show. Which meant that the horrible thing under the net wasn’t only a simple animal. But it also wasn’t strong enough in spirit to withstand him. A last hiss cut off halfway, and it froze forever.
Then Kyosti could turn away from it and ask the question that really mattered: “How’s old Piip?”
One of the guardsmen crouching by the injured savant looked up and shook his head. “Not so good,” he answered. “It spat some kind of vitriol at him, I think. His eyes … His face …” He shook his head. Then he got up and walked over to Kyosti. In a low voice, so Piip couldn’t overhear, he went on, “If he lives, he’ll be a horror the rest of his days, but he’ll never see himself again, so that’s a mercy.”
Kyosti had got one brief glimpse of the curdled flesh running out between Piip’s fingers like soft cheese. It was a glimpse he would gladly have forgone, but the gods didn’t give choices like that. “Sorry devil,” he said, also softly. “Who would have thought …?”
“Piip sure didn’t,” the guardsman said. “One thing—he’ll never have the chance to make such a big mistake again.”
“These beasts, these terrible lizards, must be—must be, I say—the origin of the legend that dragons dwell in these mountains,” Baron Toivo declared. Sunila would have said the same thing: had already said it, in fact. Here, Toivo’d gone right on thinking about the expedition when everyone else’s mind was on Piip. Inexorable as a boulder crashing downhill, the baron continued, “They look much as dragons are said to look. And, just as dragons are said to do, they spit fire, or something all too much like fire. This we have discovered, to our distress.”
It wasn’t their distress. It was Piip’s. His shrieks went on and on. Did they sound strange, as if even his mouth …? Kyosti’s stomach lurched. He wished he hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t want to know.
Oblivious to it all, Baron Toivo blathered on: “Now we have at last captured and preserved one of the beasts the Emperor charged us to discover. Gentlemen, our mission is a success!”
He seemed offended when he got no cheers. Kyosti wondered whether Piip thought that their mission was a success. But he couldn’t ask the other savant now, and the question never crossed Toivo’s one-road mind.
PIIP died four days later. As far as Kyosti was concerned, that was a mercy. Piip could neither eat nor drink. By the time oblivion claimed him, he smelled bad, too.
They buried him in the rocky soil of the upper slopes and piled boulders on his body so the dragons could not disturb it. And then, with the preserved specimen they’d taken, they started downslope for home.
They were still in the foothills a couple of days after that. One of the marksmen brought down a unicorn. This one wasn’t a specimen—it was supper. While the savory aroma of roasted meat filled the air, Kyosti hunted up Sunila. “I want to talk to Galvanauskas,” he said. “Give me a hand.”
“What do you want to say to him?” Sunila asked. “Why do you want to say anything to him? He’s only a savage.”
“That’s why, and I want to rub his nose in it,” Kyosti said. “Come on.”
With a creaky sigh, the linguistic sorcerer climbed to his feet. “I suppose I’d better,” he said resignedly. He might have been a wife giving in to a husband of many years, knowing he would get to be unbearable if she didn’t.
Galvanauskas and the bearers he led shared food with the Mussalmians. But they ate apart from them and generally kept their distance unless they needed to deal with one of the men from the Empire. The skinny little blonds looked up in surprise as Kyosti and Sunila strode over to where they squatted.
“What do you want?” Galvanauskas asked, as they loomed over him. He stood up, but they both still overtopped him by a head.
“To show you something,” Kyosti answered through Sunila.
“Is that all?” The headman sounded apprehensive, even if Kyosti couldn’t understand his words without Sunila’s cantrip.
“By the gods, it is.” Kyosti raised his hand as if taking an oath in one of the Emperor’s courts.
Galvanauskas’ sigh might have been patterned on Sunila’s. “Well, I will come, then.”
They’d got halfway to where they were going when another earthquake struck. Even though Kyosti was ou
t in the open, where nothing bad was likely to happen to him, it was frightening enough and then some. Quakes were rare up in the Empire of Mussalmi. When they came, all too often they worked havoc; buildings of stone and brick crashed down in ruin, crushing some people and pinning others in the ruins. And the fires that followed could do as much harm as the quake itself—sometimes even more.
“The pranys stirs again,” Galvanauskas murmured after quiet returned. “One day, sure as sure, it will wake.”
If anything could have restored Kyosti’s courage, the native’s words were the tonic he needed. “That has to do with what I want to show you,” the Mussalmian said. “Come on.”
Galvanauskas let out another sigh. If this one wasn’t martyred, Kyosti had never heard one that was. “I have gone this far,” the native said, as if reminding himself. “I can go a little farther.”
“Oh, good,” Kyosti said. His sarcasm rolled off Galvanauskas like water off the oily feathers of a goose.
Kyosti stopped in front of the dragon. Though the creature wasn’t going anywhere, the net still wrapped it. None of the Mussalmians had shown the slightest interest in taking off the mesh. Kyosti’s preservation spell did almost too perfect a job. Hatred and ferocity still seemed to glitter in those golden eyes.
Pointing to the beast, Kyosti said, “There is a pranys.” To Sunila, he added, “Make sure your cantrip translates that most exactly.”
“The cantrip does … what it does,” Sunila said. Despite his improvements, he’d never been fully satisfied with it. Kyosti understood why not, too. But the other wizard went on, “Since you used the natives’ word for the thing, your meaning ought to come through.”
Galvanauskas looked at the dragon. At last, he seemed to realize that Kyosti was waiting for some kind of response. He came out with, “So you say,” which might have meant anything—or nothing.
“There is a pranys,” Kyosti repeated, louder this time. If you were going to get anything across to the tropical savages, you had to say it over and over, and shout yourself hoarse, too. “It is an animal. It is only an animal. Now it is a dead animal—well, an animal spelled into lifelessness. It is bigger and heavier than I am, but not much. You and your men have been carrying it—you know that. There are many more like it up there higher in the mountains. Even if they all thrashed in their sleep at once, they couldn’t make an earthquake. You know that, too.”
Galvanauskas looked at the dragon again. Then he looked at Kyosti. “So you say,” he said once more, and walked off without a backwards glance.
“Why, you—!” Kyosti started to storm after him.
Sunila set a restraining hand on the preservationist’s arm. “What’s the use?” he said. “You tried—and look what you got. There’s none so blind as the man who refuses to see.”
“Mrmm.” It was a rumble of discontent—of rage, really—down deep in Kyosti’s chest. But then he, too, sighed. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. I just get so sick of the way savages stick to their savagery and superstition even when you’ve got the proof that it’s nonsense right in front of their ugly faces!”
“That’s what makes them savages,” Sunila said reasonably.
“I know. I know. When we get down onto the flatlands, we’ll trade them in for another bunch, and then for another and another one yet while we go back through the jungle,” Kyosti said.
“Vampires,” Sunila remarked.
“We’ll be ready for them this time around,” Kyosti said. “And then …” He stared north like a lover looking longingly toward his distant beloved. “And then …” The words were so wonderful, he said them again. “A ship will be waiting in the harbor. We’ll climb aboard. We’ll load our specimens into the hold. And we’ll sail back to civilization!”
“Civilization!” Sunila echoed. “I can hardly wait. A chance to write up what I’ve learned. A chance to publish. A chance to be a bit famous, if only for a little while. I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Neither would I. And I wouldn’t mind a hot bath and smooth spirits and aged cheese and soft sheets and a softer mattress. And I sure as demons wouldn’t mind seeing a woman who speaks my language!” Kyosti said.
Sunila nodded eagerly. “That all sounds bloody good!”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Kyosti agreed.
The ground shuddered under their feet once more. Kyosti tensed, but it was only an aftershock from the previous quake, over almost as soon as it began. Just for a moment, he looked back at the smoking mountain that now lay behind the explorers. The plume rising from it seemed a trifle thicker than it had before, but that was probably his own fancy.
He snorted. Galvanauskas and the other natives from his tribe were the ones who let their fancies run wild. He was a sensible, rational Mussalmian—and cursed glad of it, too. Better yet, he was on his way home. As soon as he’d got clear of it, that mountain could go ahead and blow its top. It would be the dragons’ worry, and the unicorns’, and the natives’, but none of his. On my way home! What a marvelous phrase that was!
EVER so slightly, the dragon stirred in its sleep. Ever so slightly, it snorted. It had been sleeping, sprawled out across the middle of the tropical continent and under the warm, comfortable sun, for an age and an age and an age. The last time it woke to breathe fire here and there and everywhere, great scaly beasts on two legs and four ruled the world (or thought they did, or would have thought they did had they thought at all). The shrew-like, mouselike longfathers of the creatures that would eventually style themselves Mussalmians and their close relatives, natives and savages, skulked in the scaly beasts’ enormous shadows. But when resistless fire smote the great scaly beasts, the smaller ones no longer had anything to stop them from growing greater themselves …
One day soon, the dragon would wake again. It could feel that, even in its dreams. And when it did … Oh, when it did…!
A dragon’s soon is not the same as a man’s. It might come in twenty thousand years, or even ten thousand. It might be twenty years, or even ten. But it might come the year after next, or even next year. It might be tomorrow. It might even be … tonight.
JoBoy
DIANA WYNNE JONES
Adolescence is a time when we look within ourselves, trying to discover who we really are. Sometimes, though, it may be better not to know …
Raised in the village of Thaxted, in Essex, England, Diana Wynne Jones has been a compulsive storyteller for as long as she can remember, a habit that has made her the author of more than forty books and won her the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention. She’s perhaps best known for her Howl’s Castle series, consisting of Howl’s Moving Castle (recently made into an animated film by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki), Castle in the Air, and her most recent book, House of Many Ways. She’s also well-known for the six-volume Chrestomanci series, which includes Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona, Witch Week, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Conrad’s Fate, and The Pinhoe Egg; the two-volume Magids series; the two-volume Derkholm series; and twenty-two stand-alone novels, including Archer’s Goon, The Ogre Downstairs, Power of Three, and A Sudden Wild Magic. Her many short stories have been collected in Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories, Stopping for a Spell, Minor Arcana, Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories, and Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories. Almost as well-known as her fiction is her hugely entertaining The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel, and she has also written the nonfiction book The Skiver’s Guide. She now lives in Bristol, England, with her husband, a professor of English at Bristol University.
THIS is the story behind the recent swathe of destruction just south of London.
HIS name was Jonathan Patek, but his father, Paul, always called him JoBoy. Lydia, his mother, never called him that until his father was dead. Paul Patek, the offspring of an Englishwoman and an Asian father, was a tall, bulky, jovial man with a passion for cooking and eating curry, very much adhered to his Asian side, while working
as a GP from his very English house in Surrey. Lydia, who worked as receptionist for Paul, preferred to be English. She picked at the curries, made a roast every Sunday, and ensured that JoBoy had the most English education possible.
When JoBoy thought of his father, he always thought also of the lovely, hot, throaty feel of swallowing a good curry.
Paul’s death was a mystery. He set off one afternoon to visit a bedridden patient. ‘And I told him.’ Lydia said, ‘that doctors don’t do home visits these days. It’s a waste of their valuable time. And he simply laughed.’
Two days later, Paul’s body was discovered at the bottom of a nearby quarry. His car had been driven into gorse bushes at the top of the quarry and half overturned. It seemed to be suicide. Except, why was Paul’s body as dry and emaciated as if he had starved to death? Nobody ever answered the question.
This reduction of his father to skin and bone troubled JoBoy horribly. He always thought of Paul as ‘full of juice,’ as he put it to himself. He could not understand it. There had not been time for Paul to starve.
Lydia made the best of things by selling the large house to a partnership of doctors, where she continued to work as receptionist, and moving into a smaller house nearby. JoBoy, while he finished his education, had to make do with a small glum room at the top of the new house, from which he could see one frail, dusty tree and a patch of sky interrupted by television aerials. He was not happy, but this did not stop him growing taller and wider than his father before he had finished school.
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