Paint Your Dragon (38 page)

‘Clean up?'

The dragon started forwards, then caught sight of Kurt's gun and stayed where he was. ‘Nosher, you bastard,' he spat. ‘It was you.
You
fixed the bloody fight.'

‘Yes, but...' Bianca started to interrupt, and then realised that she had nothing to say. She shut her mouth and sat down on the edge of a desk.

‘You're welcome.'

Pity about Stevenson, I suppose.
The screen flickered for a moment.
I imagined that idiot Kortright would have whisked him off in his helicopter as soon as the dragon - sorry, George - started killing people. My mistake. Anyway, he was expendable. He helped with the plan - his artificial Time, the organisation he built up - but he was never part of it. Basically, his heart wasn't in it. His soul was, but only, if you'll pardon the expression, over his dead body. Anyway, all's well that ends well—as it has; perfectly, in fact - and like you always used to say, Fred; omelettes and eggs, eggs and omelettes.

‘Did I ever tell you I secretly hated you at school, Nosher? I thought you were a vicious little prick then, and I do now. Just thought I'd share that with you.'

The screen dimmed, then flared bright green.
Really? I'm sorry. All right, so perhaps I've made a lot of money along the way, but if it hadn't been for me, Evil would have triumphed over Good back then, and it'd have done exactly the same now. Which makes me the good guy, surely. Or do any of you have a problem with the logic of that?

There was a long silence, eventually broken by Kurt clearing his throat.

‘Shall I finish it now, boss?' he said, flicking off the safety catch.

The dragon tensed the muscles of his legs. He'd have only one chance to spring, and he was prepared to bet that Kurt's reflexes were a match for his, or better. But if he fell across Kurt, knocking him sideways, it might just give Bianca and Mike the chance to throw a chair through the screen, something like that. The whole thing was probably completely futile, but never mind. He was dead already and he was going to die again. At this precise moment, his subconscious was working on a brand new religion, the central fundamental doctrine of which was Third Time Lucky.

‘Pardon me?'

Kurt raised the gun, ever so slightly. He wasn't smiling any more. ‘Excuse me,' he said.
well?

‘Sorry to split hairs,' Kurt said, ‘but what our agreement actually said was, I was hired to kill
a
dragon. Not The. A.'

Lundqvist stood up in a single smooth movement. The muzzle of the gun traversed the room, covering Bianca, Mike and the dragon. Then it was pointing at the screen.

‘Only one dragon in this room, Nosher,' he said. ‘We got one female human, two male humans, a male saint and you. Reckon that makes you the last of your species.'

The shotgun boomed eight times, filling the air with broken glass as all the screens in the room disintegrated into powder. The printer in the corner screamed into action and had filled twelve sides of A4 in two and a half seconds before a blow from the stock of the Remington silenced it for ever.

‘Another species extinct,' Kurt grumbled, mopping a slight cut under his left eye. ‘Don't you just hate it when that happens?'

‘
T
axi!' Chubby said.

‘Yes, miss?'

Chubby winced. Not that it wasn't a very nice body - gorgeous was the word he'd have chosen - it was just that it wasn't, well,
him.
The tragedy of it was that under normal circumstances he'd have given anything to be this close to such a sensational-looking bird, but somehow he felt that fancying yourself wasn't a good idea. Made you go blind, he'd read somewhere.

‘The airport, please. Fast as you like.'

Not much to show for a life's work, he reflected, as he slung the Marks and Spencer bag which contained everything useful he'd been able to find in the studio onto the back seat of the taxi. All he'd been able to find to wear was an old overall of Bianca's. There had been enough money in the meter to cover a taxi fare. He'd have to think of some way of getting on and off the plane without a ticket or a passport, of course, but provided he could make it to Zurich, his problems should then be over. He could remember the access code to his safety deposit boxes, and for the first time he was in a position to test the hypothesis that diamonds are a girl's best friend. Personally he didn't believe it; where he came from, index-linked Government stocks were a girl's best friend and diamonds were just someone she occasionally had lunch with. But it would be fun researching the point.

There was a jeep following the cab.

Coincidence, Chubby assured himself, sliding down the seat. Must be thousands of jeeps in a city this size, and ninety-nine-point-nine of them must be owned by trendy young accountants. The chances of being tailed by - say, for the sake of argument, Kurt Lundqvist—must be so tiny as to be impossible to quantify in Base Ten. Your imagination will be the death of you, Stevenson.

In which case, he added, it'll have to get a wiggle on if it doesn't want to be beaten to it. The jeep had just overtaken the taxi and there was Lundqvist in the driver's seat shaking a fist at him.

Or was that meant to be a cheery wave?

Get real.

Shucks, Chubby told himself, I've been killed once already today. He craned his neck and told the driver to pull in.

 

‘Gone?'

The dragon nodded. He didn't want to speculate on where Saint George had gone ...

‘Chardonay!' he shrieked.
‘
Snorkfrod
!
Prodsnap
!
Tell these hooligans who I am, for pity's sake.'

‘Never seen this jerk before in my life,' they chorused.)
... But something told him that it wasn't going to be nice there. Oh well, it'd be a change for him, after all those years in the other place. If he behaved himself for a couple of million years or so, maybe they'd give him a job in the kitchens.

The dragon shook himself all over, like a dog. ‘Now what?' he demanded. ‘What I'd really like is an affidavit from the Holy Ghost saying the rest of my life's my own, but I'm not going to count my chickens till they've come home to roost.'

Bianca shrugged. ‘Kurt'll be back soon,' she said. ‘He'll probably know.'

They waited for two hours, which was, as it happened, two hours wasted. Then Bianca suggested that they take a walk.

‘A what?'

‘A walk. Out in the open air.'

‘Why?'

‘Fun,' Bianca replied. ‘It's something humans do. You'll have to learn these things if you're going to be a human the rest of your life.'

The dragon looked at her. ‘Much risk of that, is there?' he said. ‘In your opinion, I mean?'

‘What's wrong with being human?'

The dragon winced. ‘Give me a break,' he said. ‘Quite apart from the not flying and not breathing fire and not gliding effortlessly above the clouds, feeling the sun on your back and the wind in your scales, I think you humans have a really horrible time. And you're welcome to it. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Settle down somewhere and get a job?'

‘I don't know,' Bianca replied, as they stepped out into the street. ‘Maybe there's some sort of agency that resettles you. You know, flies you out to Australia, gives you a new identity, teaches you a useful trade ...'

‘Get stuffed: I don't want a useful trade. And where's Australia?'

‘I think you'd like Australia. It's big. And hot. You could be the flying doctor, or something.'

They walked in silence for a while, until the dragon sat down on a bench, complaining that his feet hurt.

‘Now,' the dragon said, ‘if I could only get my nice statue back.'

‘Oh no,' Bianca replied grimly. ‘Not again.'

‘But it's all in one piece,' the dragon replied, attempting a winning smile. ‘I saw it for myself, back on its plinth. Oh go on, be a sport. I promise to be careful with it.'

‘It's not the statue I'm worried about,' Bianca said. ‘Now, if you'd promise to be careful with the planet—'

‘Yes?'

‘I wouldn't believe you. Gosh, look where we are.'

In front of them, dominating attractive Victoria Square like a Rolls Royce Corniche in a Tesco's car park, was the statue. For all that it was the work of her own hands and every square inch of it was familiar to her as her own body, Bianca's heart stopped for a moment and her breath lodged in her throat like an undigested chunk of bread roll. It would be so easy to believe it was really alive.

‘Oh no you don't,' she said, grabbing at Fred and missing. ‘Come back here. Leave it alone!'

She was, of course, wasting her breath. The dragon had sprinted up to the statue, he was climbing onto it, scrabbling with his fingers ...

He was still there.

‘Bianca,' he said quietly. ‘It won't let me in. It's locked or something. It's ... dead.'

Bianca stood still. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘You shouldn't be allowed to have it, but truly I am sorry.'

The dragon looked up and met her eye. ‘Not to worry,' he said. ‘You can always make me another one.'

‘Over my dead body.'

‘If you insist,' the dragon replied. ‘A plinth like that one would do me fine, but you're the creative one, you have what you like.'

‘I am not,' Bianca said, ‘carving you another statue. You've already got a body. There's starving people in the Third World who'd be glad of a body like that.'

‘Cannibals, you mean?'

Bianca shrugged. ‘I could do you an owl,' she said. ‘Or a nice seagull. You'd suit a nice seagull.'

‘You know I wouldn't, Bianca. I'd pine away, or fly into a telegraph wire, or get my feathers covered in oil slick. I'm a dragon, Bianca. I need to be what I really am.'

‘Sorry,' Bianca replied, shaking her head. ‘If it's any consolation, you're not the only one. In point of fact, the number of people who're ... Dragon? Oh, for God's ...'

The dragon had clambered right up onto his own head. It was a long way to the ground from there, as the crow flies. Not so far as the human falls, but landing safely is more problematic that way.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing?' Bianca demanded.

‘I'm standing on my head. What does it look like I'm doing?'