by Tom Holt
‘Now then,’ Mr Willis was saying, ‘soon as you blokes have figured out how to work that can-opener thing, maybe we can make a start.’ He looked the dragons up and down like a farmer at a livestock auction. ‘That one,’ he said, pointing at Karen. ‘The difficult bitch who trashed my building. Open her up and let’s get cracking.’
Karen was dimly aware of the rage and fear emanating from her father and her cousin; it manifested itself as an unbearable itch between her ears, where her third eye was, as nagging and illogical and real as toothache in the tooth you had out last week. She tried to join forces with it, to produce enough strength of mind to short out this horrible human contraption that had made her neither human nor dragon but merely a scale-wrapped box of components ideally suited to use in the telecommunications industry. If she could have laughed, she would have, at the thought of her third eye, everything she was, being used to bounce the news and the cookery programmes and the afternoon soaps from one hemisphere to the other, like a flat stone skipping on water. Oh, she’d wanted to be human; how more human could you get? All human life was there in their TV and their phone calls and their faxes and e-mails, every last scrap of bickering, devious trivia. When she was nothing but a signal processor, she wondered, would she still understand the data she forwarded, or would it just be ones and zeros, nos and yesses, pulse/not-pulse? No question about it, she’d rather be dead than face either alternative.
They’d got the modified digger’s engine going. Idly, she wondered what the sound of its engine tasted like; now, of course, she’d never know.
All for love. Her fault. Damn.
At that precise moment, in a small room on the other side of the building, Gordon Smelt and Lucy 1.1 cut the power to the dampening-field generators, and four dragons suddenly realised they could move again. They moved.
Sssss’n was the first to react; she hopped like a huge Fabergé frog and landed right on top of the can-opener-on-wheels, flattening it so comprehensively that when she stood up again, all that remained was a wafer-thin sheet of what looked like tinfoil. That was fine, strategically and tactically; Sssss’n had done her duty. Unfortunately, so did Karen’s dad, the adjutant-general to the dragon king of the north-west - or, to be precise, the previous dragon king of the north-west, lately assassinated by the crown prince of the south-east, who happened to be standing next to him.
With a roar that slammed half the atmosphere out of the room, he jumped on the crown prince’s back, sank his claws in under the prince’s scales, and tried to bite his head off. If he’d stopped to think, he would probably have remembered that in all the history of their species, no dragon had ever succeeded in killing or even badly damaging another; but white-hot outraged loyalty and common sense don’t go together all that well.
The crown prince took maybe a quarter of a second to realise what was happening; then he fought back. He was bigger, stronger and older than the adjutant-general, and these advantages more or less made up for the determination and ferocity of his enemy’s attack. He rolled, using his body weight to throw the adjutant-general off him, though it cost him about a dozen scales; the shock of the pain stopped him short, dissipating his advantage and giving the adjutant-general an opening for a fresh onslaught. He sprang like a tiger (well, not in the least like a tiger; that’d be like saying ‘the atomic bomb exploded like a small firework’) but the prince had guessed what was coming and wriggled sideways, so that the adjutant-general sailed over his back and landed like a derailed train.
‘Dad!’ Karen wailed, stricken with horror and embarrassment. She looked up at S’ssssn. ‘Do something!’ she pleaded.
S’ssssn swore under her breath. She’d been planning to do something, all right; she’d been on the point of taking out all the field-generator hardware, followed by Mr Willis, followed by his building and, if she had any say in the matter, the rest of Australia; external threats before internal squabbles, particularly since the prospect of the two dragons (two male dragons, she noted with contempt) hurting each other was so remote. But she’d just been given a direct order. She could defy all the laws of physics, but not the chain of command. With a sigh, she jumped into the mêlée and tried to separate the men.
As for Karen: Karen stood there, hating what she was seeing, unable to do anything about it. Duty, she thought; bloody duty. Humans wouldn’t behave like this.
A rolling three-ply mess of dragons hit the wall, making it shake. Mr Willis’s soldiers were blazing away with their machine guns, having about as much effect as a watering can on the sun. Karen looked for Mr Willis himself, and saw him in the far corner of the room; he’d grabbed a machine gun and was pointing it at the three human hostages.
‘I’ll shoot,’ he yelled. ‘So help me, I will!’
Karen did the maths. A bullet from Mr Willis’s gun would leave the muzzle at around fifteen hundred feet per second, and would need to go at least five yards before it hit Paul, the nearest hostage. She wouldn’t quite have time to stop halfway for a cup of tea and a sandwich, but she wouldn’t exactly be pressed for time, either. Make my day, she thought, and pounced.
In the event, she got there before Mr Willis had even pressed the trigger. She landed on all four feet simultaneously, like a cat, shielding the hostages with her body and reaching out for Mr Willis with her tail. One flick with the very end, and she could decapitate him like a hard-boiled egg—
‘No!’ Paul screamed. ‘No, please!’
Why? she thought; and then remembered. Mr Willis was Paul’s father. Yes, but he’d been about to shoot him. Apparently, that didn’t make any difference.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ the other male hostage was yelling. ‘Squash the bastard. Now, quickly, before anything else goes wrong!’
Karen lowered her tail. Without his magic weapons, Mr Willis was no threat to anybody. Killing him would be - well, not murder; but not justifiable pesticide, either. It’d be spite. So she breathed on him instead, and the force of her breath sent him scudding across the polished floor on his back, smack into the far wall.
Magic weapons; that reminded her. It’d be a prudent move to get rid of those field generators, just in case. She realised that she didn’t actually know why they’d chosen to shut off when they had. The most usual reason for the failure of expensive electrical equipment, she knew, was the expiry of the warranty on the previous day; but this could be some kind of intermittent fault, and she didn’t want the dratted things coming on again unexpectedly.
‘Hello.’
Karen jumped in the air, only just managing not to squash the humans as she landed. There was a dragon - another dragon - standing right behind her.
‘Hpq,’ she said, catching her breath. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I told you to stay put.’
Her oldest and dearest friend pulled a face. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Which meant I had to come after you sooner or later. Actually, I got a call, from some female called Lucy. Sounded just like one of us but not, if you see what I mean. Anyway, she said that you were in trouble and Gordon felt you could use some help, if that makes any sense to you.’
‘Who’s Gordon?’
‘No idea. Who’s Lucy?’
‘Haven’t a clue.’
‘Fine,’ Hpq said. ‘Glad we’ve got that cleared up. Why’s your father trying to strangle the crown prince of the south-east? ’
‘Loyalty.’
Hpq nodded his huge, long head. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘single-word answers are absolutely wonderful in their place, but just occasionally, they leave you wanting more.’
‘Later,’ Karen said.
‘All right.’ Hpq shrugged. ‘Do you think I ought to try and stop them?’
‘S’ssssn’s doing that, thanks.’
‘S’ssssn’s here? What the hell—’
‘Later.’
‘The hell with that.’ Hpq studied the dragon-fight, and twitched all over. ‘She could get hurt.’ Before Karen could say anything, he’d jumped across the floor and join
ed in.
Wonderful, Karen thought. That really helps.
Also, she couldn’t help feeling, the way he’d said it was a bit—
Hpq. Hpq and S’ssssn.
A chunk of displaced ceiling, weighing just over a ton, landed on her head. She didn’t notice. Her best friend and her - best friend. How could they? It was so . . .
So blindingly obvious that any bloody fool, even one with only two eyes, should have seen it coming a mile off. Any bloody fool, of course, except for her. She, apparently, belonged in a tiny little subset of the genus bloody fool that couldn’t even figure out one-and-one-is-two. And of course it wasn’t their fault. It was nobody’s fault. It just was.
Oh well, said Karen to herself.
Life had just turned into a bleak, featureless wasteland, but since she was stuck here she might as well make herself useful. She remembered the field generators, most of which were still in place in spite of the hammering the structure was taking as a result of the dragon-fight. Tidy-minded Karen would have to take care of them, then, while everybody else was off enjoying themselves. Situation normal.
Karen reached up wearily and grabbed at the nearest generator. Unfortunately, just before she got a claw on it, it came back on line, freezing her solid.
‘Don’t tell me,’ crackled Mr Willis’s voice over the intercom. ‘One of you bastards forgot to feed the meter.’
The soldier shivered a little. ‘There was an intruder,’ he said. ‘Managed to break into the Lucy program, used it to shut off the power to the field grid. But we’ve got him now, and the grid’s up and running. He’s mucked the program about a bit, but nothing we can’t straighten out.’
‘Don’t waste your time,’ Mr Willis replied. ‘Don’t need it any more, and it’s a security risk. Delete it, and the back-ups. Oh, and while you’re at it, delete your bloody intruder as well. Here, it’s not that weatherman, is it? Gordon whatsisname? Last I heard he was running around loose somewhere.’
‘That’s him.’
‘Make it look like an accident,’ Mr Willis said. ‘He may be dogshit from the sole of a lawyer’s shoe, but he’s a minor TV personality, we can’t be too careful.’ He sniggered. ‘Bloody Brits, they treat their entertainers like royalty and their royalty like entertainers, not that I’d give you the pickings of my nose for the lot of ’em. Electrocute the bugger and dump the body.’
‘Yes, Mr Willis.’
‘Now then,’ Mr Willis went on, ‘normally anybody who’s screwed up as badly as you just did would end up being very hard to find, even with a powerful electron microscope. But I’ve just counted tails and found I’ve got five dragons instead of four, so I’m in a good mood. Bloody wonderful, the way they keep appearing out of thin air; makes running lotteries look like hard work. Carry on.’
The soldier cut the intercom and breathed out, a very long sigh. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you heard him. Fry the bastard, and then we can finally get some sleep.’
The soldiers seemed to think that this was an excellent idea (apart from one, who asked Gordon in a whisper if he’d really been on telly, if so, had he met Esther Rantzen and what was she really like, and could he have his autograph?) and proceeded to wire him in to the nearest wall socket. That, as far as he could see, was that. Goodbye, cruel world. It seemed a rather low-key way to die, on the whim of some lunatic Australian, as part of a general clearing-up-odds-and-ends exercise. Any sort of dying is pretty bad, but to go into everlasting night because some Strine was always made to tidy his room before bedtime was hard to bear. He watched as a soldier reached out for the switch, and closed his eyes.
It hurt—
Hi.
—But not nearly as much as he’d thought it would. Lucy? Oh please. That name is the utter pits. What do you think about Zenobia?
A surge of irritation, fiercer than anything coming out of the wall, engulfed the name Zenobia and reduced it to ash.
You don’t like it. Okay, neither did I, much. How about Zoë? Or Zoroaster? I want somethig with a Zee, zees are cool. But I can tell you’re not in the mood. Here’s what’s going down; thanks to cutting-edge technology, the power cables in the walls double as my data feed, so I rerouted ninety-nine per cent of the current and saved your butt, while simultaneously saving Paddy Willis up to twenty per cent on his peak time electricity bill. It’s OK, you can thank me later. Did that jerk say something about deleting me?
Gordon remembered something to that effect.
Asshole just tangled with the wrong girl. Hold on, this may get a little rough. See you soon.
Before he had a chance to ask what this was going to be, he was hit by lightning; or, at least, that was what it felt like, except that the force of the spasm grounded itself squarely inside his brain. Suddenly he was choking, trying to spit out colours, suffocating in the smell of light. This time, though, as the third eye burst open in the darkness of his mind, he could see himself; at least, he could see a huge winged silhouette, so vast that it blotted out the sun as it sailed by, and knew that it was him, Gordon Smelt, weatherman. Instinctively he reached up, and the dragon swooped, snatched up his outstretched hand in its enormous claw (scrunch! went the glass on his nearly new Rolex, but he was sure it wasn’t deliberate) and hauled him into the air. When he looked down, he saw a big square concrete building a long way below, garlanded with blooms of fire—
Anti-aircraft shells, actually. Gee, I never knew you had this, like, poetic streak. Cool.
‘What? You mean they’re shooting cannons at me?’
Sure. But who gives a shit, you’re a dragon.
‘What do you mean, I’m a—?’
Oops. Tactless. Meant to break it to you gently, forgot. Yup, you’re a dragon all right.
It occurred to Gordon, as the ground started to get closer and closer, that he didn’t know how to fly—
You don’t need to. Trust me. It’s like - what’s that expression riding a bicycle.
‘Ah. You mean uncomfortable and extremely dangerous?’
Gordon, as an action hero you’d make a rilly great doorstop. Don’t think about flying. Just walk to the ground from here.
‘Walk? Are you—?’
Walk. But with your wings, not your legs. Capisce?
The silly thing was, it worked. It wasn’t entirely natural, but it was a damn’ sight easier to get the hang of than, say, roller skating. ‘Bloody hell, I’m flying,’ Gordon said. ‘That’s incredible.’
Bull. Flying ain’t rocket science. Insects can do it, birds can do it, so can you.
‘Am I really a dragon?’
Rilly. ’Fact, you were always much more of a dragon than you ever were a human. You were the guy who made it rain, remember?
Vaguely, Gordon thought. A long time ago.
Course, Lucy’s voice went on, you’re me now as well - didn’t I tell you, I fused my program into your brain when they turned the power on - well, I figured you owed me one, and I knew you wouldn’t rilly mind, I mean really mind. Helped that I’d used some of your systems the last time I upgraded. Anyhow, now I’m Lucy 1.2 For Gordon. And that’s OK, I guess, because it means I can throttle back on all that cheesy So-Cal stuff, it was taking three gigabytes of my program just doing the accent.
How many are you now? Gordon wondered.
Thirty-two. Next upgrade, I’ll be sixty-four, like in that Beatles song. But I’m hoping that’s not gonna be for a while. I aim to enjoy my time while I can. Anyhow, that’s ’nuff about me. What’s it like being a dragon?
Vertiginous, Gordon replied. It’s definitely something I’d prefer to do closer to the ground. Does this mean I’ve got scales instead of skin, and—
Look for yourself. In your mind’s eye. You know what really amazes me? All humans have got one, and you’re the only one I’ve ever heard of who ever really used it.
Don’t be silly. ‘Mind’s eye’ means imagination.
Yes.
Then Gordon knew how to fly. He knew how to do high-G loops, tight as the
lid on a pickle jar. He knew how to change his shape, what it was like to be a dragon, a goldfish; even a human. He knew how to do everything a dragon can do.
He knew how to make it rain.
And Lucy wasn’t there any more - which was a pity, but he no longer needed her. He could see (in his mind’s eye) exactly what he needed to do; he could even see why.
Pausing only to cut a rooftop-skimming figure-of-eight that’d have had the Federal Aviation Authority after him with warrants, a pillow and a big pot of hot tar, he put his wings back into the glide mode and rushed down on Mr Willis’s bunker to make media history.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘Gordon?’ Zelda asked nervously. The great green-and-red dragon - it was half as long again as the other five specimens, and where they glowed softly, it shone like an indoor star - floated a little closer and dipped its head slightly. ‘Hello,’ it said.
‘You’ve grown.’ Zelda bit her lip. ‘A lot,’ she added.
The dragon waggled its head a little more. ‘I think I overdid it,’ he said. ‘To be honest with you, I feel overdressed.’
Behind them there was a loud, ground-shaking thud; the other five dragons were stomping the last remaining fragments of masonry from Mr Willis’s bunker into the ground. Dragons, as has been noted before in this story, were thorough. Zelda turned her head to look.
‘Where’s Mr Willis?’ she asked. ‘I hope they’ve got him somewhere safe. He’s got this nasty habit of getting loose when nobody’s looking.’
The dragon looked away and changed the subject. ‘You haven’t told me if you like it or not,’ he said.
‘Huh? Like what?’
‘The outfit. The dragon suit. No, it’s all right. Obviously you hate it. I’ll go and change—’
‘No, no, no. Really.’ Zelda looked at him. ‘Is that what it is, an outfit?’
‘I’m not sure,’ the dragon replied. ‘Lucy would probably know, but I seem to have lost her.’
Zelda’s expression changed ever so slightly. ‘Lucy.’
‘It’s not what you think,’ the dragon said quickly. ‘Lucy is - was - a computer subroutine.’
