Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  ‘Yeah?’ Prodsnap replied eagerly. ‘When do we go home?’

  ‘Er. Soon.’

  ‘Great. How soon?’

  ‘Just as soon...’ No tactful way to say this. ‘As soon as we’ve killed that goddamn dragon.’

  Let’s just pause a while to nail a false, misleading anti-feminist maxim. It’s not true that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Scorned women are Mother Theresa on her birthday compared to demons duped. Or thinking they’ve been duped.

  ‘Told you!’ Slitgrind crowed triumphantly. ‘Told you no evil’d come of co-operating with the enemy. Crafty little angel got us to do his dirty work for him and then goes and welches on us. Typical!’

  ‘Now hang on a minute,’ Chardonay started to say, leaning forward and giving George a stern look; but he never got the chance to finish his sentence, because a split second later, Snorkfrod whizzed past him, making a direct course for George’s throat. Fortunately for George, she slipped on an empty Guinness bottle and ended up sitting in the coal scuffle, making the most ferocious noises. For his part, George took advantage of the brief lull to get a good, solid utility Chesterfield between himself and the scions of Hell.

  ‘All right,’ he said, as soothingly as he could. ‘Just calm down a second while I explain.’

  Snorkfrod, having extracted herself from the scuffle, tensed for another spring, but Chardonay’s gesture restrai­ned her. She remained crouched and ready to go, growling ominously.

  ‘We’d better hear what he’s got to say,’ Chardonay advised. ‘There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’

  George nodded like a frightened metronome. ‘There is,’ he said. ‘Look, we blew the statue up, but obviously we didn’t kill the dragon. God only knows how, but the little toe-rag somehow managed to clear off at the last minute.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ George replied, ‘the original plan holds good. Kill the dragon and there’s your passport home. It’s just that it’s not going to be quite so pathetically simple as we originally thought it would be.’

  There were snarls and grumbles as the logic soaked in, creosote-fashion. Chardonay rubbed his chin.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But how do we find him? That’s going to be the problem, isn’t it?’

  George allowed himself the luxury of a fresh lungful of air. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard,’ he said airily. ‘I mean, the sucker’s an enormous green flying lizard. You can’t keep something like that secret for very long. And besides,’ he continued, ‘we have something he’s bound to come back for. You know, irresistible bait.’

  ‘Yeah? What?’

  George beamed. ‘Us.’

  So they waited.

  True, the last thing they wanted to do was make themselves harder than necessary to find; on the other hand, they had to be practical. The last thing any of them wanted was a nasty theological incident, such as might be caused by the discovery that a saint and five devils were wandering around loose in the twentieth century, where they had no business to be. A certain measure of discretion was called for if there wasn’t going to be a massive row, severing of supernatural relations, tit-for-tat expulsions and a spate of films with names like Demons Vl and Return of the Saint.

  There was also one further practicality to be borne in mind, one whose importance grew steadily as the days passed.

  ‘I can’t stick this sodding place a second longer,’ Slitgrind growled, putting the problem neatly into words. ‘It’s bad enough being cooped up here with that pillock Chardonay and that murderous tart of his without that frigging saint and his wet sock of a priest.’

  ‘I know,’ Prodsnap replied quietly. In his case, he could hack Chardonay and Snorkfrod; with an effort and an advance on the next thousand years’ self-control ration he could even put up with George and Father Kelly (who had taken to carrying a bell and a candle round with him and reading a book while he did the washing up). What he couldn’t stand another day of was Slitgrind.

  ‘I quite like it here,’ said Holdall. On the second day, he’d discovered televised snooker and was addicted. It wasn’t that they didn’t have it back home, it was just that it was reserved for a small group of very, very special customers.

  ‘Look,’ Prodsnap said, ‘basically it’s very simple. We’ve got to get out of here before we all start climbing the walls. On the other hand, we can’t go very far, or the bloody dragon won’t know where to look for us.’

  ‘That’s your idea of simple, is it?’ Slitgrind jeered. ‘What d’you do for an intellectual challenge, bend spoons?’

  ‘Basically,’ Prodsnap repeated coldly, ‘very simple. What we need,’ he went on confidently, ‘is a miracle.’

  For the record, he’d got the technical term nearly but not quite right. What he meant was a Miracle Play, one of those rambling medieval verse dramas that have somehow eluded five hundred years of supposed good taste, and which get put on from time to time by over-enthusiastic amateurs, itinerant Volkswagen-camper-propelled bands of actors who aren’t so much the fringe as the frayed hem, and the National Theatre. Stood up on a stage in a Scout hut or church hall somewhere, Saint George, five demons and a priest in a cotton-wool beard calling himself God wouldn’t look too badly out of place; or at least no more than is usual under the circumstances.

  ‘The point being,’ Prodsnap explained to his fellow sufferers, ‘we can bumble round in a van or something and nobody’s going to take a blind bit of notice. But if Chummy really is out there looking for us, then a load of posters with SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON all over them ought at least to catch the bugger’s attention.’

  It went to the vote — five in favour, two (guess which) against. Carried. That, Chardonay explained naïvely, was democracy in action. He was puzzled slightly by the response he got to that, each side claiming that they knew all about democracy, and that it was a dirty trick developed by the Opposition which they had taken over and skilfully converted to peaceful, beneficial uses. In any event, the ultimate consensus ran, we’ve made a decision now; let’s do something. That, however, is as far as the consensus went.

  Proximity, however, is as great a negotiator as time is a healer. Forty-eight hours of each others’ company in a relatively small house managed to achieve what a thousand diplomats, with translators, fax machines and a warehouse­ful of heat’n’serve Embassy function canapés would have taken six months to obfuscate. Father Kelly got a book of miracle plays out of the library and spent a busy afternoon in the Diocesan office playing with the photocopier while the girls’ backs were turned. George hotwired an old Bedford van.

  The show hit the road.

  ‘Who are you?’ David repeated.

  Being number one on the Italian police’s Most Wanted list isn’t as much hassle as it sounds if they’re looking for a twelve-foot-high nude statue, and you’re actually six foot one and wearing jeans, a standard tourist issue aertex shirt and trainers. To be on the safe side, however, David was also wearing sunglasses, and it had cost his companion dearly in both time and eloquence to dissuade him from buying a false beard.

  ‘Me? Oh, that’s not important.’

  Context, not to mention the manner in which the words were spoken, belied this remark to such an extent that David risked raising his voice — he’d been talking in what he fondly believed was a conspiratorial whisper ever since they’d broken out of the museum, and kindly old ladies kept offering him cough sweets — as he insisted on a straight

  answer. His companion shrugged.

  ‘My name’s Kurt,’ he said. ‘I used to be a soldier of fortune. What’s that word you guys got? Condottiere. That was me.’

  ‘Used to be? Was?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Kurt nodded. ‘I’m dead. Or I was. Jeez, this is confusing. Okay, I used to be alive, then I was dead for a while, only not properly dead. There were reasons at the time.'

  David wrinkled his classically perfect brow. ‘You didn’t die thoroughly enough?’ he hazarded. ‘Skimped on the actual expiry?�
�

  ‘Something like that. A steam engine dropped on me. But that,’ he added, fending off any request for amplification with an eloquent waft of a finger, ‘doesn’t really matter. Before I died, or did whatever I did, I used to be a bounty hunter. And a mercenary,’ he added with pride, ‘and a contract killer, and all that sort of stuff. Man, I was the best.’ He frowned. ‘Maybe I still am, I dunno. I mean, am I still me, bearing in mind that this ain’t actually my body? In fact, I don’t have a clue whose body this is.’ He cranked the frown over into a scowl and finished his coffee. ‘The hell with it, anyway. The relevant parts are, I used to be a condottiere, then I was dead, then I think I was some kinda statue for a short while, and now I’m —‘ He glanced down at his arms, his expression implying that they weren’t quite a good fit ‘— whoever the hell this is.’ He glowered accusingly at David. ‘Man, this is your fault, you started this crazy subject.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Kurt waved his apology aside. ‘No worries,’ he said, and considered for a moment. ‘I think what happened to me was—’

  In actual fact, Kurt’s version was so completely wide of the mark as to be at right angles to it, and will therefore be suppressed in the interests of clarity. The truth is that, during his lifetime, an acute merchandising concern cashed in on his extreme notoriety by marketing the Kurt Lund­qvist All Action Doll — $15.99 for the basic doll, uniforms and accessories extra, for complete list write Jotapian Industries, P0 Box 666, Kansas City. Some time after his death, an unknown hand had smuggled one of these loathsome plastic objects into the Florence Academy and left it in a dark corner, ignoring the risk that a speck of stray dust from far-distant Birmingham might float in through an open window one sunny day and land on it.

  ‘I see,’ David lied. ‘How fascinating. So,’ he went on, sipping his glass of water. ‘What happens now?’

  Kurt shrugged. ‘I got a job to do,’ he replied. ‘You can tag along, I guess, or you can split. Up to you.’

  ‘Split?’ David looked down to check he was still in one piece. ‘You mean these body things tear easily, or some­thing? That’s another thing. How did we stop being statues and start being, um, people?’

  ‘Search me.’ Kurt shook his head. ‘It just kinda happens,

  - I guess. You can either stay in your statue, or you can bug out and wander around in the skin suit. Who cares how it works so long as it works?’

  That, David conceded, wasn’t something you could reasonably argue with. As far as he was concerned, he was living on borrowed time, although who he was borrowing it from, and whether they’d eventually want it back, was far from clear.

  ‘This job,’ he said tentatively.

  ‘Big job,’ replied Kurt with an expansive gesture, which a passing waiter took to be a request for the bill. ‘So important, I guess, they had to bring me back from the dead to do it.’ He grinned. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘that kinda suggests I

  still am the best, doesn’t it? That’s good to know.’

  ‘The job.’

  ‘What? Oh, yeah. The job is, to bring out the hostages.’

  David raised an eyebrow. ‘Hostages?’

  ‘Okay, so they aren’t actually hostages. More like key figures. And figurines, too. The idea is, there’s a lot of important statues gonna get...’ Kurt hesitated, searching for the right word. ‘Woken up, I guess. Liberated. Occu­pied. Possessed. Anyway, my part is, as soon as they wake up I gotta get ‘em out of wherever they’re at and turn ‘em loose. Tough assignment, yes?’

  ‘Very.’ David nodded emphatically. ‘Have you any idea why?’

  ‘Me? No way. The first thing you learn in this business is not to ask questions. Well, you gotta ask some questions, like Which guy’s the one needs wasting? and Where’s the goddamn safety catch on this thing? But apart from that, no questions. Especially no questions beginning with Why?’

  ‘Um.’ David looked at him through a purported smile. The man’s stark staring mad, he told himself. ‘Well, thanks for the job offer, I’ll give it some really serious thought. In the meantime, any idea what I’m supposed to do next?’

  Kurt shrugged. ‘Not in my brief, pal. Maybe you got a destiny to manifest, in which case go for it, do well; Or maybe you should just get a job in a sandwich bar somewhere and live semi-happily ever after, like regular people do. None of my goddamn business, either way.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘The other part of the job is,’ Kurt went on, ‘I gotta kill a dragon.’

  There are quite a few differences between statues and people. Bianca was learning about them.

  A few examples. Statues are beautiful. When a statue gets broken, you can glue back the bits with epoxy resin, rather than hang about waiting for bones to knit. Likewise, if you attempted to sign your name on the plaster cast of the Winged Victory, the next thing you’d see would be the pavement rushing up to meet you.

  The key difference, however, and the one which made Bianca realise just how lucky statues are, wasn’t something that had immediately sprung to mind. She had learned it by long, bitter experience.

  To wit: true, both statues and humans in hospital get people coming to see them. Statues, however, don’t get talked to.

  ‘No, Auntie,’ Bianca said, for the nineteenth time. ‘Thank you,’ she added, quickly but not quickly enough. When Aunt Jane went visiting, umbrage futures soared. By now, Bianca reckoned, Aunt Jane must have enough umbrage to start her own international bourse.

  ‘Suit yourself, dear,’ Aunt Jane replied, in a voice Bianca would have found useful for putting an edge on blunt chisels. ‘Only trying to help. I’ll leave them here anyway.’ Sigh. ‘You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to.’

  Exhibit One; a stack of women’s magazines, late 1 980s vintage. Recipes. Knitting patterns. Advice to the frustrated and the suicidal. Two of the three were unlikely to be much use to a girl in traction, but she was getting to the stage where she was quite interested in the third.

  ‘It’s very thoughtful of you,’ Bianca said. Who was the kid whose nose grew when he told lies? Much more of this and she’d make Cyrano look like an Eskimo. ‘I really appreciate it. You’re very kind.’

  Aunt Jane’s lips twitched in a tiny sneerlet. Gratitude fell into her without any perceptible effect, like matter into a black hole. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’d better be going, your uncle’ll be wanting his tea. I’ll try to come in

  tomorrow, though it’ll mean missing Weightwatchers. I’ll see if I can find you some more things to read.’

  As Aunt Jane waddled doorwards, Bianca resisted the urge to wish her a nasty accident. She meant well. More to the point, if she had a nasty accident, she’d probably end up in the next bed.

  The sad part about it was, Bianca knew, that in an hour or so, try as she might, she’d pick up one of those damned magazines and start to read. She’d already read all her own books — ever since school she’d been one of those people who zooms through printed pages like motorbikes through traffic — and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, else to do. If the loathsome things weren’t there, of course, she couldn’t read them. But since they were, she could. And, ineluctably as Death, she would.

  This time, she lasted forty-seven minutes and was just congratulating herself on consummate willpower when she realised that her usable hand had slithered treacherously and nipped a glossy from the pile. Ah well, she assured her soul, I tried. She brought the thing up on top of the sheet and opened it.

  Thinking it through afterwards, she worked out how it must have happened. Aunt Jane obtained her supplies of obsolescent opium-of-the-female-masses from the waiting room of the doctors’ surgery where she worked as recep­tionist (exceptionally effective in reducing waiting times; you had to be practically dying to want to make an appointment). From time to time, waiting rooms and other similarly depressing public places get leafleted by the keen and eager — bring and buys, craft fairs, save our derelict and unwanted civic amenities and, of course,
the amateur dramatics fiends. Easy enough to scoop up a few stray fliers along with the pulp.

  The playbill in front of her read as follows:

  FOR THREE NIGHTS ONLY!

  H & H Thespians present —

  SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON

  ORIGINAL CAST!

  JULY 17, 18, 19

  Sadley Grange Civic Centre

  Tickets £2 at the door.

  Reaction one: now there’s a coincidence.

  Reaction two: coincidence my foot...

  Reaction three: ... which is in plaster. Damn!

  Original cast? Surely not. One key player, she knew, was unavailable due to indisposition caused by having been blasted to smithereens.

  Unless...

  Hey! Calm down, Bianca, think it through. Just suppose for one moment that blowing up the statue hadn’t actually killed the dragon. Now, then; whoever wanted him dead —answers on a postcard, please — presumably would want to try again. First, however, catch your dragon. With his marble overcoat reduced to fine dust, the dragon would be walking the streets in human mufti, impossible to recognise. Hence the need for bait and heavy duty, industrial grade hints.

  Bianca sneezed; dust from the pile of magazines. Why do I get the feeling, she asked herself, that I’m witnessing the early stages of a major war?

  The irony of her situation made her wince, as if someone had just put a goldfish down her neck. All around her, the forces of weirdness were tooling up for a major confronta­tion. Somehow, she knew, she might be able to prevent it. Except that she was stuck here, as immobilised in her plasterwork as the dragon and the rogue saint had been in the stone bodies she’d made for them. Quite what the

  significance of that was, she didn’t pretend to understand. But she knew significance when she saw it; she knew it even better when it was forced down her throat with a hydraulic ram.

  ‘Great,’ she muttered aloud. ‘Just when I’m needed, I have to go and get plastered.’