Weird Tales, Volume 350

by Norman Spinrad

  The thunderhead spreads out to blacken the sky and turn day into something like night over the now darkling plain to oohs and ahs from the hillside spectators behind you, but only for a moment. Then there is an immense explosion in the heavens that strobes a whited-out vision of the plain, with its huts and villages, its corrals and farm yards, its fields of grain and orchards of fruit, and then the vision vanishes as a rich sunset-colored mushroom pillar cloud forms out of the cloud-deck.

  And out of it the Dragon arises in fire and brimstone to an ear-splitting peal of thunder in counterpoint to the church carillon orchestra.

  A scaly green bat-winged pterodactyl bigger than a jumbo jet, with a long sinuous snaky tail ending in an ace-of-spades arrow-point soars up the mighty thermal of the dissipating mushroom pillar cloud, and as the sky returns to blue, it does a couple of loops, and a series of aerobatics that takes it to the far horizon, and then it power-dives from on high into a low glide towards you, its wings painting onrushing jagged shadows over the plain, its sonic boom flattening fields of crops, raking orchards of tree-crowns bare.

  It alights on taloned feet about a football field’s length downfield from you with a ballet dancer’s grace. Now it’s an enormous thunder-lizard, Godzilla out of Tyranno-saurus Rex, but it’s so enormous that even from this far away, you can clearly see that it has a crocodile’s head breathing fire and yellow fumes around a flickering serpent’s tongue, that it has the compound insect eyes of twin military radar-domes done in black, that its wings have become a score or so of writhing green tentacles thicker than fire hoses, each ending in the headless jaws of a tiger shark.

  Even from this far away, the stink of fire and brimstone is almost overwhelming, and they can probably smell it all the way up to the city walls, choking sulfur fumes and tangy gunpowder burn, and riding beneath it, rotting meat in wet places, turtle tanks gone to thick algae, better you don’t know.

  This hideous and hideously lethal reeking monster does not lumber, but saunters agilely toward you to loud applause from behind you, and stops at midfield, where it goes through a series of instantaneous transformations while retaining its behemoth scale and its gunpowder, brimstone, and rotten slime body-odor.

  An immense thing that might be a spider, if spiders had eighty legs instead of eight, tipped with hypodermic claws dripping venom, a razor-sharp beak lined with tiger’s teeth, and were thirty yards tall.

  Something like a glob of living Vaseline or an amoeba, larger than a whale, an otherwise featureless slime oozing along the ground, freckled and pocked and pimpled with hundreds of gnashing bear-trap mouths spitting napalm.

  An immense mobile dung-pile with claws, and tentacles, and anal orifices clacking chitonous bills like the maracas of hell.

  A pullulating mound of writhing white maggots, millions of little horrors adding up to a living communal organism even more ghastly than the sum of its parts.

  All these and more, not quite rapidly enough to not be seen, but too rapid for the eye to really grab hold of, though the nose knows all too well on a deeply nauseating level that they’re all somehow the same being.

  The Dragon, something like the maggot pile only much more so, is the sum of many parts, is all of them and none of them, and is shuffling its avatars in front of you like a card-shark inviting a rube to play, strutting its demonic stuff.

  This boastful display goes down well with the audience, after a fashion. There are boos and hisses from the grandstands, but they are well-mixed with cheers and applause; like a wrestling arena crowd, they can’t root for the villain, but every show needs a villain you can love to hate, besides which it is, to say the least, quite a preliminary crowd pleaser.

  “I am the knight who will slay you, Dragon,” you declare, wondering if the spell can possibly work that far, “and I have a voice of thunder.”

  The first remains to be seen, but the latter seems to work as your next words roar into the Dragon’s face as if through an amplifier and bank of stadium speakers.

  “I also have an impenetrable suit of light-weight Kevlar armor with Mylar insulation.”

  And you do. You’re still a knight in still-shining armor, but the heavy steel armor has been replaced by a feather-light silvered suit and helmet that turns you into the Silver Surfer in his kendo practice gi.

  The Dragon morphs into classic form. It’s now standing on a pair of mighty but gracile legs like those of an ostrich, but green-scaled and with splayed multi-taloned feet, and it’s about as tall as Godzilla, with huge leathery bat-wings casting a somber shadow of doom over you, with a head off a Tyrannosaurus Rex on steroids, a mouth full of silver teeth and red forked serpent’s tongue, eye-holes that are black tunnels into deep pits where fires are burning far far away. It roars like a chorus of hoarse lions and spits a ball of flame that envelopes you in burning fire.

  From which you emerge unconsumed and spreading your arms wide in silvery triumph to a great breath of awe from the crowd.

  The horse you have been riding, however, has not been so lucky. Burned to a mouth-watering barbecue smelling turn, he’s a rack of roast meat collapsing under you. The Dragon reaches down with clawed hands on the tips of its wings, snatches the roast horse out from under you, spilling you on the ground as it deposits it in its gaping maw, and chews it down with much cracking and slavering and smacking by the time you’ve gotten to your feet.

  After which it leans down its long serpentine neck so that its awful rotten-egg reeking mouth and black pit eyes are right in your face. There are things moving around way down there in the darkness, things writhing in red torment, you can’t make them out and you certainly don’t want to join them, but the Dragon is clearly proclaiming that you are about to with its confident reptilian shit-eating grin.

  The mouth widens, and widens, and widens, like that of a python preparing to swallow a goat whole, but displaying dentition that will allow it to chomp you down in marginally smaller chunks, and moves forward to envelope you.

  “I am more than you can swallow, demon,” you proclaim to the wide open spaces. “I am the Terminator.”

  The mouth becomes a roof above you as it descends, and the world entire as it closes on you, but you are the quickest of quicksilver, you ooze out through the teeth, reassemble human form, and take a bow to thunderous applause, like a matador whose cape has transfixed the bull.

  The Dragon regards you with a certain lidded respect now perhaps. But there’s something angry and enormous stirring down there at the bottom of those eyes of void, something red and fiery and fuming out sulfur. Crawling up towards you and coming ever closer.

  Exploding up and out and around into a fiery wicker man huge as the Dragon had been, an enormous humanoid flame, its incandescent silhouette the body shape of a man with the feet of a lizard, the wings of bat, the neck of a brontosaur, and a head that might be human save for the horns above the sharp heavy brow, burning yet unconsumed like the Biblical Burning Bush but with a very bad attitude.

  And from this fiery whirlwind a great and terrible voice doth speak, a voice like great rocks cracking under irresistible heat, like the roar of a furnace and the hiss of a concentration camp gas oven.

  “I am come. Not my minions. I am come. I tire of this game. I am come to put an end to it. I am come to put an end to every-thing. I am come and this time I am come to stay. Glad to meet you, hope you guess my name.”

  The plain behind it splits in half as if this flaming demon were an anti-Moses parting not waters but dry land to reveal a fiery pit billowing choking radioactive yellow smoke and bubbling out all-consuming lava flowing slowly in all directions, including towards the crowd on the hillside and the city atop it.

  It would seem that this apparition has never been part of the tourist attraction, is a lot more than anyone bargained for, as the crowd on the hillside grandstand scatters in all directions save toward the expanding lake of fire oozing up from the infernal depths. The wizards atop the wall towers who have unknowingly summoned His Sata
nic Majesty Himself now peer down fearfully from the parapets making furious passes with their hands that seem to accomplish nothing, while the mages supposedly guarding the lower slope of the hill abandon their posts at flank speed.

  With every passing moment, it becomes clearer and clearer that the Dragon that has been devouring the flower of knighthood annually all these centuries in all its shapeshifting morphs has been the shadow-puppet show of the Prince of Liars, and now there are vague demonic forms coalescing and dissolving and coalescing again in the lava, like red hot molasses flowing down a creekbed.

  And its equally clear that holding back the forces of Hell is entirely up to you. “I am the knight come to slay you, and I have the power to command you to tell me how this may be done.”

  Sardonic laughter explodes from the flaming giant that shakes the heavens and rumbles the earth. “You cannot slay me,” says that immense and immensely reptilian voice. “But you might slay this Dragon.”

  And in an eyeblink it is a Dragon towering before you, its feet placidly planted in the burning lava, a huge scaly saurian with the night-thing wings of a giant vampire bat and a neck like the body of a python. But the head on that slowly curling and uncurling neck is that of a man.

  Well, not exactly.

  It has the general shape of a human head except for the small horns growing out from above prominent brows as sharp as scimitars, and its mouth and the sardonic smile there are entirely human, but its ears are large and pointed and mobile, and its complexion is fire-engine red.

  But the least human aspect of this demonic visage is the eyes, the black pits of non-being, of void, more terrible still than before with what had lurked there now emptied out into the world as the neck of the Dragon curls down to confront you at close quarters with its grinning demonic face.

  “I can only be prevented from working my will and making the world my own,” he tells you in a soft serpent’s voice that only you can hear. “My Dragons can be slain. You may notice that the world does not abound in them.” He laughs. “But you may also notice that noble knights in shining armor are an equally endangered species. And if the Last Dragon slays the Last Knight I will end my lonely exile in the flaming pit and be released at last upon the world.”

  “But if the Last Knight slays the Last Dragon?”

  “The world will never know what it has been saved from. But he will know. As you now know. And perhaps they will be one and the same. Every knight who has tried to slay this Dragon has fought in the faith that it might be the last one. For who knows but me, he might be. You might be.”

  Again that sarcastic laugh right in your face.

  “But of course this Dragon slew them all. It too has fought as if it were the last of its kind. For a thousand years. Those are the rules of my game. And if you should win it, without a Dragon to open it, this gateway will be closed. That is the nature of my game.”

  “I am the man who will kill this Dragon,” you declare, hoping your single spell will hold.

  “Are you now?”

  “I have the power to command you to reveal to me how it may be done.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Yes.”

  The strangest expression warps that satanic visage even further. Shock? Surprise? Rage? Amusement? Somehow it seems to be all of them.

  “I do believe you do,” it hisses with much the same unreadable bad attitude, and manages to shrug the coils of its sinuous neck. “It might even improve my game. It has become boringly predictable for the last millenium or so.”

  Another sulphurous laugh right in your face.

  “Only a Dragon can slay this Dragon.”

  The loudest, most sardonic, and hot wet laugh of all in your face, no doubt intended to be the last. “So the only way you can kill this Dragon is to persuade this Dragon to kill itself.”

  And the Dragon reels in its serpentine neck, spreads its leathery wings, and springs up out of the lake of lava into the air, climbs to a hundred meters or so, flies a lazy circle, and comes back and down at you shouting “And I don’t think this Dragon is going to do that? Do you?”

  “I am Godzilla, I am Tyrannosaurus Maximus, I am the Heavyweight Champion Dragon of the World, and a Black Belt in Street Fighting too!” you roar back.

  And you are.

  The previously fearsome Dragon making its death swoop towards you becomes something you swat out of the air with one clawed fist like King Kong swatting an unfortunate biplane atop the Empire State Building. You catch it with your other great claw before it can fall into the lake of fire in which you stand, and which means nothing to you. You hold it up before you by the edges of its wings, crucifying it in mid-air.

  “I am become a Dragon to slay the Dragon!” you roar on a wind of flame. And you grab it round its scrawny neck like a chicken and hold its little face up to your immense iron-jawed mouth.

  “And therefore the Dragon you slay cannot be the last,” the head laughs as you bite it off the Dragon’s neck. “And you cannot be the noble knight who slew it, now can you Sir Hero?” the severed head continues to taunt you even as you spit it out. “And so, if not here, I will return somewhere and the game goes ever on.”

  The lake of fire is suddenly gone. The fiery gash in the body of the earth is healed without a scar as if it has never been. The corpse of a giant winged lizard with a lance through its heart is gathering the attention of the vultures and crows.

  You are wearing a suit of steel armor gleamingly with shining silver plating. The visor of your helmet to match is open to the sweet smell of righteous victory and after a long uncertain gaspy silence, your ears inside it echo with the music of thunderous applause and joyous church-bells.

  You turn to regards the hillside grandstands, now filled with orderly ranks of applauding spectators, once again neatly assorted by class, and you take your bow.

  The theatrical private box atop the most luxurious level of pavilions is empty however. Neither the Princess nor the Black Knight has stuck around to pay you homage. But then a wizard commands a previously invisible door in the wall separating the hillside stands from the plain of battle.

  And out strides not the naked Virgin Princess but the Black Knight.

  He strides up to you like some sort of perfected robotic Darth Vader. Completely enclosed in finely articulated black armor. Faceless behind the black helmet’s mask whose only features are a pair of nostril holes, a thin lipless slit for a mouth, and the hint of an abstract browridge shadowing a smaller slit for each eye.

  “You have slain the Dragon, and gained the right to deflower the Virgin Princess, who is thinking of naught but her own erotic satisfaction at last, but first you must get through the Black Knight, who is not wriggling in horny anticipation.”

  The voice that issues from those immobile metal lips is not robotic by any means, it is all too human in its anger, but the tonalities of it have been flattened and coldened to metal as if by a vocoder.

  “And I am not at all pleased,” the Black Knight tells you, as if you couldn’t already guess. “And neither will the denizens of my city be when the applause dies down and the tourist trade does a slow slide into the jakes. Eros might be pleased for a night that you slew our Dragon, but Mammon wakes up in the morning when she remembers that it was her Dragon too that you slew, and her hotel business with it.”

  The Black Knight whips off one steel glove with the other and slaps you gently across the face with it.

  “The Black Knight challenges you to a duel to the death, Sir Hero of Eros and Villain of Mammon, you don’t get anywhere near her, except by getting through me.”

  “The Black Knight’s on to you, my Hero,” says the voice of the Princess behind you.

  You turn, and as you do, you are no longer on the battle plain, you are in the boudoir of the Virgin Princess, and your prize is stretched out longingly naked and spread-eagled on her bed with a long contract scroll draped like a flag over her most private parts.

  “Believe me I like this
less than you do, hon,” she tells you, pointing a finger at a locus on the scroll, “but it says so right here, the victorious knight must best the Black Knight in unarmed free form wrestling.”

  “I have no problem with that,” you say, “I have a black belt in every martial art on Earth.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t this time, hon,” the Princess croons. “Sez right here in the rules, no biting, no blows to the crotch … and no magic spells.”

  “And those are the only rules,” says the Black Knight. “We fight each other until one of us gives up or dies.”

  When you turn this time, you are no longer in the boudoir of the Princess, you’re standing on the canvas of a wrestling ring pinned in bright yellowish white light so that nothing can be seen beyond the ropes as if there is nothing there but the void. No spectators, no referee, just you and the Black Knight, together and alone in the ring.

  Now the Black Knight has shed metal armor for a black karate suit and black fencer’s helmet that reveal nothing more than before. But you reveal almost everything, naked save for a silvery bikini jockstrap suitable for Muscle Beach and a gauzy standard of rosy cloth tucked into it.

  What is revealed is a body that would stand out from the gym rats anywhere, as if the Princess has slipped you one more minor spell under wish fulfillments, clause four b paragraph 2a.

  Thus emboldened, you bow lightly and very briefly, the Black Knight does likewise, and you are upon each other.

  You reach out to conquer the Black Knight with the sheer might of your irresistible bear-hug, but the Black Knight summersaults forward, and rolls out with a kick that just misses your head as you duck under it, drop to the canvas, and roll like a barrel into the legs of the Black Knight, bringing your opponent tumbling down over your back.

  But tumbling down in good order, for the Black Knight rolls once, twice, thrice, across the ring while you’re bouncing up again, and rockets off the ropes with an open-legged forward dive rather than a kick which clamps your waist in strong muscular thighs, and rolls you over into a take-down.