Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  ‘I guess,’ Kurt said slowly, ‘in situations like this, all you can do is to try and do the right thing. Shit, did I really say that? This stinking job really is getting to me.’

  ‘A statue’s gotta do what a statue’s gotta do?’

  ‘Sure. Now, what you gotta do is like this.’

  Thank you for calling Acropolis Marble Wholesalers Limited.

  Unfortunately there’s no one here to take your call, so please leave a message after the tone.

  Beep. ‘Hello, Bianca Wilson here. Could I have seventeen seven by three by three Carrara white blocks, immediate delivery, COD Birmingham. Thank you.’

  Thank you for calling Hell. Unfortunately there’s no one here to take your call, so please leave a message after the tone. Alternatively, for reservations and party bookings, please dial the following number. Thank you.

  Thank you for calling Nkunzana Associates. Unfortunately there’s no one here to take your call. Don’t bother to leave a message; I know perfectly well who you are and what you want, I’m a fully qualified witch-doctor. Thank you.

  ‘Have you ever,’ Chubby said, apropos of nothing, ‘been to Mongolia?’

  The dragon looked at him. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I’ve been virtually everywhere, I think, but usually I don’t stop and buy a guide-book. What’s Mongolia?’

  Chubby shrugged. ‘Desert, mostly. Very empty, not many people. Barren, too; large parts of it have as close to a zero per cent fire risk as it’s possible to get on this planet. The sort of place where you could have a sneezing fit without burning down six major cities.’

  ‘Sounds a bit dull,’ the dragon said.

  ‘It is. Very.’

  ‘I could use a little tedium right now,’ the dragon said, scratching his nose with a harpoon-like claw. ‘I take it you’re working round to suggesting that I go there.’

  ‘Hate to lose you,’ Chubby replied. ‘It’s been great fun having you here and all that. But, with all due respect, you’re a bit hard on the fixtures and fittings.’

  ‘True. Actually, it beats me how you people can live in places like this without dying of claustrophobia.’

  ‘We’re smaller than you are. We find it helps.’

  The dragon yawned and stretched, inadvertently knock­ing an archway through the wall into the next room. ‘Mongolia, then. What’s your ulterior motive? Something to do with your Time business?’

  ‘You know your trouble? You’re cynical.’ Chubby frowned. ‘Usually with good cause,’ he added. ‘As it so happens, there is a small job you could do for me while you’re there. Nothing heavy. You might find it helps stave off death by ennui. Entirely up to you, though.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Well.’ Chubby leaned back in his chair and hit the light switch. A projector started to run, covering the opposite wall (the only one still intact) with a huge, slightly blurred image of a vase of flowers, upside down. Chubby clicked something, and the picture changed into a view of the Great Wall of China.

  ‘Familiar?’

  ‘Seen it before,’ the dragon replied. ‘Doesn’t mean any­thing to me, though. A wall is but a wall, a sigh is but a sigh.’

  ‘Ah.’ Chubby clicked again. The Great Wall came closer. ‘This, my old mate, is no ordinary wall. It’s big, it’s famous and — now here’s where my interest in the damn thing lies

  — it’s very, very old.’

  The dragon smiled in the darkness. ‘Steeped in history, huh?’

  ‘Positively saturated. Now, I got to thinking; sentiment aside, what does that lot actually do that a nice modern chain-link fence couldn’t do, for a fraction of the main­tenance costs? Whereas to me—’

  ‘I get the picture,’ the dragon interrupted, amused. ‘You want me to steal it.’

  Chubby clicked again. This time, the wall was covered in a view of the planet, as seen from space. The Great Wall was dimly visible, a thin line faintly perceptible through wisps of untidy cloud. Either that, or a hair in the gate.

  ‘As you can see for yourself,’ Chubby went on, ‘it’s the only man-made structure visible from outside the Earth’s atmosphere. An eyesore, in other words. If Mankind ever gets round to colonising the moon, I’ll be doing them a favour.’

  ‘Quite. What do you want me to do with it after I’ve nicked it?’

  Click. View of a completely barren area of desert. ‘Just leave it there. One of my people will deal with it.’

  The dragon smiled. ‘A receiver of stolen walls? A fence?’

  ‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

  Half an hour later, the same picture show, the same basic introduction.

  ‘Let’s just make sure I’ve got this straight,’ George said. ‘Your organisation’s going to steal the Great Wall of China?’

  ‘Mphm.’

  ‘And then they’re going to dump it, out there in the wilderness.’

  ‘Not wilderness, George. Prime development site. We paid top dollar for that land. It has the advantage of being as far from anywhere as it’s possible to get without having to wear an oxygen mask.’

  George shrugged. ‘You know your own business, I s’pose. What do you need me for?’

  ‘Caretaker, basically,’ Chubby replied. ‘I was just think­ing, since your friend with the wings and the bad breath is still very much on the loose, you might quite fancy a month or so in the last place anybody would ever think of looking.’

  ‘Good point.’ George nodded decisively. ‘Much obliged to you. It’ll be a pleasure.’

  The lights came back on.

  ‘Pleasure’s all mine,’ said Chubby.

  A bit over-complicated, surely?

  Chubby scowled. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I hate to bother you with silly mundane things like the way I earn my living, but for the last couple of months my business has been at a complete standstill. I’ve got orders I can’t fill and staff on full wages sitting around with nothing to do. Two birds, one stone, and everybody’s happy.’

  The screen went blank and the little red light, whose purpose Chubby had never been able to work out in all the years he’d had the wretched thing, blinked twice.

  I’m not happy about this.

  ‘Tough. Sorry, but you said to find a way to get them both to the venue without arousing their suspicions and that’s what I’ve done. And now, if you don’t mind. I’ve got work—’

  The pain hit him like a falling roof. The intensity of pain largely depends on which part of the victim it affects. Chubby’s soul hurt. Toothache is nothing in comparison.

  ‘Fuck you, genie,’ he moaned. ‘Let go, will you?’

  Inside his head, Chubby could hear laughter. It was a very frightening sound.

  Chubby, please. After all we’ve been to each other, I think you can start calling me Nosher. All my friends do.

  ‘Then fuck you, Nosher. And now will you please stop doing that, before you break my id?’

  Any idea how much of your soul I now own? I know you’re curious. Go on, ask me.

  The pain stopped and Chubby collapsed into a chair. ‘Let me see,’ he said, once he’d got his breath back. ‘Well, for one thing, we haven’t had nearly as much of the your-wish - is - my - command - it’s - my - pleasure - to - serve -you bullshit lately, which I find rather significant. And all these cosy chats we’ve been having recently must be taking their toll. I’ve been trying very hard indeed not to think about it.’

  Forty-two per cent.

  ‘Shit.’

  No reason why that should be a problem, surely. We’ve always got on well enough, you and L

  ‘Like a house on fire,’ Chubby replied. ‘With you as the fire and me as the house. What happens to me when you get a majority stake? Do I die, or vanish, or what?’

  Perish the thought. It’s just that we’ll see even more eye to eye, that’s all.

  ‘And when it reaches a hundred per cent?’ Then I shall be free.

  ‘Hooray, hooray. And what about me?’

  You’ll be on
e of the lucky ones. Like Mr Tanashima.

  Chubby frowned. ‘Don’t know him. Who he?’

  Mashito Tanashima. Born 1901, died 1945. He worked in a bicycle factory in Hiroshima, Japan. Seven minutes before the atomic bomb exploded, he was killed in a road accident.

  ‘Gosh.’ Chubby smiled bleakly. ‘Lucky old me, huh?’

  The screen flickered. The red light came on and, this time, stayed on.

  Yes. Let nobody say I’m not grateful.

  Bianca stepped back to admire her work. A masterpiece, as always. Three down, fourteen to go.

  The biggest problem had been getting hold of the photographs. First, she’d tried the local paper, but they’d got suspicious and refused to co-operate. The victims’ families had virtually set the dogs on her. Finally, she’d hit on the idea of sending Mike round pretending to be the organiser of a Sadley Grange Disaster Fund. She’d felt very bad about that, but he’d come away with all the photo­graphs she needed.

  The walls of her studio were covered in them; enlarged, reduced, montaged, computer-enhanced, until the very sight of them gave her the creeps. Sixteen very ordinary people who happened to have been in the Sadley Grange Civic Centre when it blew up. The victims.

  So far she’d done Mrs Blanchflower, Mrs Gray and Mr Smith, and she was knackered. Straight portraiture, no dramatic poses or funny hats; they had to be as lifelike as possible or the whole thing would be a waste of time. The worst part of it all was the responsibility, because she wasn’t the one who was going to have to live with the consequences for the rest of her life if she made a mistake. Accidentally leave off a toe, or get an arm out of proportion, and she’d be ruining somebody’s life.

  The hell with that, she told herself. Makes it sound like they’re doing me a favour.

  Yes. Well. And whose dragon caused all this mess in the first place?

  ‘Mike,’ she croaked, ‘I need a brand new set of the big chisels, another hide mallet and coffee, about a gallon and a half. Would you..

  ‘On my way.’

  ‘Mrs Cornwall’s nose. Could you do me a six by four enlargement of the wart? I can’t see from this whether it’s a straightforward spherical type or more your cottage loaf job.’

  ‘No problem.'

  She sighed, wiped her forehead with her sleeve. ‘And when you’ve done that,’ she said, ‘if you could see your way to making a start on roughing out Mrs Ferguson with the angle grinder. I’ve marked her up, and it’d save ever such a lot of time.’

  ‘Mrs Ferguson, angle grinder. Right you are.’

  ‘Oh, and Mike.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Mike laughed, without much humour. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘After all, what are friends for? Apart, that is, from heavy lifting, telling lies to next of kin, basic catering and other unpaid chores?’

  ‘Dunno. Moral support?’

  Mike shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘my morals collapsed years ago. Be seeing you.’

  Left alone, Bianca tried to clear her mind of everything except the technicalities of sculpture. Easier said than done; it was like clearing a pub on Cup Final night, only rather more difficult. The hardest part, unexpectedly enough, was the way the faces from the photographs stayed in her mind, plastered across her retina like fly-posters, even when her eyes were tight shut. That meant something, she felt sure, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Kurt stopped dead in his tracks, closed his eyes and counted to ten. Once upon a time, that particular ritual had been a foolproof method of keeping his temper. Now all it meant was that he lost his rag ten seconds later.

  ‘Hi,’ he replied, cramming a smile onto his face, which had never been exactly smile-shaped at the best of times. These past few days, however, cheerful expressions tended to perch apprehensively on his features, like a unicyclist crossing a skating rink.

  ‘Mr Lundqvist.’ It was the Canova again. ‘May I have a word with you, please?’

  ‘Lady...’

  Inside the Classical perfection of the Canova bivouacked all that was immortal of Mrs Blanchflower. By a prodigious effort of his imagination, Kurt had worked out a scenario where he would actually be pleased to see Mrs Blanch-flower, but it involved her being in the water and him being a twenty-foot-long Mako shark. The only reason why he hadn’t yet mortally insulted her was because he never seemed to be able to get a word in edgeways.

  ‘Mr Lundqvist,’ said the Canova. ‘Now, as you know, I’m the last person ever to complain about anything, but I really most protest, in the strongest possible...’

  Getting past Mrs Blanchflower, of course, was the beginning, not the end, of the aggravation. She was the worst individual specimen, yes, the gold medallist in the Pest Olympics, but there were fourteen others right behind her sharing silver. And it’s no real escape to elude one Mohammed Ali only to be set upon by fourteen Leon Spinkses.

  ‘SHUTTUP!’ Kurt therefore bellowed, as he shouldered past the Canova into the main area of the Nissen hut. That bought him, albeit at terrible cost, a whole half second of dead silence.

  ‘And LISTEN!’ he said. ‘Thank you. Now then, folks, gather round. And you better pay attention, ‘cos this is important.’

  Fifteen statues all started to complain at once.

  ‘Okay.’ Kurt backed away and climbed onto a chair. ‘Okay,’ he repeated, just loud enough to be audible. ‘If you guys don’t want to go home, that’s up to you. Well, so long. It’s been...’

  Silence. Well, virtual silence. Mrs Hamstraw (by Bernini) finished her sentence about the sultanas in her muesli (she’d told him, three times, the doctor had told her no sultanas) and Ms Stones reiterated her threat of writing to Roger Cook for the seventy-eighth time, but apart from that there was a silence so complete, Kurt felt he knew what it must have been like at five to nine on the first day of Creation.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he went on, calm and quiet as the Speaking Clock, ‘anybody who wants out had better listen good. Now, then...’

  ‘I still say that, after last time...’

  The Great Goat turned his head about twenty-seven degrees and scowled.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, in a voice you could have freeze-dried coffee in. ‘Shall we proceed?’

  A nice man, Dr Thwaites; all his patients would have agreed, likewise his colleagues, his neighbours, even some of his relations. A kind man, for whom nothing would ever be too much trouble. A patient man, prepared to listen politely and attentively to every hypochondriac who ever thought mild indigestion was a heart attack. But flawed, nevertheless. Albert Schweitzer was the same, and likewise Walt Disney.

  ‘If you insist,’ muttered the Lesser Goat. ‘Now then, where’s that wretched skull?’

  Because Dr Thwaites, having paid Farmer Melrose six months’ rent for conjuring rites on Lower Copses Meadow, was damned if he was going to forfeit half his money — thirty pounds, fifty pence — with three months still to run. It was, as far as he was concerned, a matter of principle.

  ‘When you’re ready, Miss Frobisher. Now then.’ He cleared his throat. ‘By Asmoday and Beelzebub I conjure you, spirits of—’ He stopped. If someone had just popped an apple in his mouth, they couldn’t have shut him up quicker or more effectively.

  ‘Don’t mind us,’ said the Captain of Spectral Warriors, in a soft, speaking-in-church voice. ‘Just pretend we aren’t here, okay?’

  The Great Goat would dearly have liked to do just that, but unfortunately it was out of the question. It takes a special sort of mental discipline to ignore five hundred of Hell’s finest, in full battledress uniform, all displaced heads, unexpected limbs and weird appendages, creeping stealth­ily past you in the early hours of the morning.

  “Ere, doc,’ said the thurifer at his elbow. ‘You’re really good at this, aren’t you?’

  The Great Goat swallowed hard. ‘Apparently,’ he said. In his subconscious he was wondering whether he could persuade Mr Melrose t
o impose a retrospective rent increase, because the thought of performances like this every week for the next three months was enough to drive a man insane. He’d have to rethink all his cosy preconcep­tions about anatomy, for a start.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The Captain was talking to him. He forced himself to listen.

  ‘Sorry, I was, um, miles away. Can I, er, be of assis­tance?’

  ‘We’re trying to get to—’ The Captain consulted a clipboard. ‘Place called Birmingham. Would you happen to know where that is?’

  ‘Birmingham.’

  ‘That’s right. I’ve got this map here, but it hasn’t photocopied terribly well, so if you could just set us on the right track, we’d be ever so grateful.’

  His disbelief suspended on full pay, the Great Goat felt in the pockets of his robes and produced a pencil and the back of an envelope.

  Chapter 18

  The Big Fight.

  Seen purely from the viewpoint of logistics and administration, it was the greatest show in history. Every­body who was, had been or would be anybody was there, and the complexities of setting up a switchboard for the retrospective booking office had taxed Mr Kortright’s ingenuity to its fullest extent. Or take the popcorn conces­sion, a chronological disaster poised to happen. Any popcorn eaten by visitors from the past or the future would leave a serious imbalance in the fabric of reality, particularly after it had passed through the visitor’s digestive system and entered the ecology of his native century. In order to compensate, Kortright had had to estimate the amount of popcorn likely to be eaten and arrange for compensatory amounts of matter to be removed from/added to a whole series of past and future destinations. As for the envelope of artificial Time in which the auditorium was contained, it had cleaned out Chubby’s stocks down to the last second. God only knew what would happen if the fight lasted beyond the twelfth round.