The Dragon Book (10 page)

Bob Choi put the gun and sword-stick back in the pockets of his coat and stood watching the patterns of the crowd. Time passed. His gaze became unfocused. Turning away at last, he noticed that his right hand was still gloveless. Bob Choi did not instantly locate the spare gloves carried in his coat as regulations demanded, and his hand was still bare when he at last went back inside.

Well,
are
you? If so, Kage Baker would like you to know that there’s something you can
do
about it. Although the cure may be worse than the disease.

One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late nineties, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to
Asimov’s Science Fiction,
and has since become one of that magazine’s most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a high-fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in
Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing Stories,
and elsewhere. Her first Company novel,
In the Garden of Iden,
was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. More Company novels quickly followed, including
Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, The Machine’s Child,
and
The Sons of Heaven,
as well as a chapbook novella,
The Empress of Mars,
and her first fantasy novel,
The Anvil of the World.
Her many stories have been collected in
Black Projects, White Knights; Mother Aegypt and Other Stories; The Children of the Company;
and
Dark Mondays.
Among her most recent books are
Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key,
about some of the real pirates of the Caribbean, and the fantasy novel
The House of the Stag.
Her latest book is the novel
The Empress of Mars.
In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.

THERE must have been a dozen of the damned things up there.

Smith walked backward across the hotel’s garden, glaring up at the roofline. The little community on the roof went right on with its busy social life, preening, squabbling over fish heads, defecating, spreading stubby wings in the morning sunlight, entirely unaware of Smith’s hostile scrutiny.

As he continued backward, Smith walked into the low fence around the vegetable patch. He staggered, tottered, and lurched backward, landing with a crash among the demon-melon frames. Instantly, a dozen tiny reptilian heads turned; a dozen tiny reptilian necks craned over the roof’s edge. The dragons regarded Smith with bright, fascinated eyes. Smith growled at them helplessly as he flailed there, and they went into tiny reptilian gales of piping laughter.

Disgusted, Smith got to his feet and dusted himself off. Mrs. Smith, who had been having a quiet smoke by the back door, peered at him.

“Did you hurt yourself, Smith?”

“We have to do something about
those
,” said Smith, jerking a thumb at the dragons. “They’re getting to be a nuisance.”

“And possibly a liability,” said Mrs. Smith. “Lady What’s-her-name, the one with that pink palace above Cable Steps, had dinner on the terrace last night with a party of friends. I’d just sent Mr. Crucible out with the Pike Terrine when one of these little devils on the roof flies down, bold as you please, and lights on the lady’s plate. She screamed, and for a moment, everyone was amused, you know, and one or two of them even said the horrible little creature was cute. Then it jumped up on her shoulder and started worrying at her earring.

“Fortunately, Crucible had the presence of mind to come after it with the gravel rake, and it flew away before it could do Milady any harm, but she wasn’t pleased at all. I had to give them free pudding all around and two complimentary bottles of Black Gabekrian.”

Smith winced. “That’s expensive.”

“Not as expensive as Milady’s bullies coming down here and burning the hotel over our heads. What if the little beast had managed to pull out her earring and flown off with it, Smith?”

“That’d finish us, all right.” Smith rubbed his chin. “I’d better go see if I can buy some poison at Leadbeater’s.”

“Why don’t we simply call in an exterminator?” Mrs. Smith puffed smoke.

“No! They charge a duke’s ransom. Leadbeater’s got something; he swears it does the job or your money back.”

Mrs. Smith looked doubtful. “But there was this fellow in the marketplace only the other day, had a splendid pitch. ‘Are you afflicted with DRAGONS?’ he shouted. Stood up on the steps of Rakut’s monument, you know, and gave this speech about his secret guaranteed methods. Produced a list of testimonials as long as your arm, all from grateful customers whose premises he’d ridded of wyrmin.”

Smith grunted. “And he’d charge a duke’s ransom and turn out to be a charlatan.”

Mrs. Smith shrugged. “Have it your way, then. Just don’t put it off any longer, or we’ll be facing a lawsuit at the very least.”

LEADBEATER’S & Son’s was an old and respected firm, three dusty floors’ worth of ironmongery with a bar in the cellar. Great numbers of the city’s population of males of a certain age disappeared through its doors for long hours at a time; some of them practically lived there. Smith was by no means immune to its enchantment.

Regardless of what he needed, Smith generally began with climbing up to the third floor to stare at Bluesteel’s Patented Improved Spring-driven Harvester, a gleaming mystery of wheels, gears, blades, leather straps, and upholstery, wherein a man might ride at his leisure while simultaneously cutting down five acres of wheat. Mr. Bluesteel had assembled it there for the first Mr. Leadbeater, long years since, and there it sat still, because it was so big no one had been able to get it down the stairs, and the only other option was taking off the roof and hoisting it out with a crane.

Smith had a long, satisfying gawk at it, then continued on his usual progress: down to the second floor to browse among the Small Iron Goods, to see whether there were any hinges, bolts, screws, or nails he needed, or whether there might be anything new and stylish in the way of drawer pulls or doorknobs. Down, then, to the ground floor, where he idled wistfully among the tools in luxuriant profusion, from the bins full of cheap hammers to the really expensive patent wonders locked behind glass. At last, sadly (for he could not admit to himself that he really needed a clockwork reciprocating saw that could cut through iron bars with its special diamond-dust attachment), Smith wandered back through the barrels of paint and varnish to the Compounds area, where young Mr. Leadbeater sat behind the counter doing sums on a wax tablet.

“Leadbeater’s son,” said Smith by way of greeting.

“Smith-from-the-hotel,” replied young Leadbeater, for there were a lot of Smiths in Salesh-by-the-Sea. He stuck his stylus behind his ear and stood. “How may I serve? Roofing pitch? Pipe sealant? Drain cleaner?”

“What have you got for dragons?”

“Ah! We have an excellent remedy.” Young Leadbeater gestured for Smith to follow him and went sidling back between the rows of bins. “Tinplate’s Celebrated Gettemol! Very cleverly conceived. Here we are.” He raised the lid on a bin. It was full of tiny pellets in a riot of brilliant colors.

“It looks delicious,” said Smith.

“That’s what your wyrmin will think,” said young Leadbeater. “They’ll see this and they’ll leave off hunting fish, see? They’ll fill their craws with it and, tchac! It’ll kill them dead. How bad is your infestation?”

“There’s a whole damned colony of them on the roof,” said Smith.

“
Well.
You’ll want a week’s worth—I can sell you a couple of buckets to carry it in—and for that kind of volume, we throw in a statue of Cliba and the Cliba Prayer; put a shrine where the dragons can see it and keeps ’em from coming back, very efficacious—and then of course you’ll need new roofing and gutters once you’ve cleaned your dragon colony out—”

“What for?”

“Because if you’ve got that many of them on your roof, ten to one they’ve been prying up the leading to hide things under it, and once their droppings get underneath on your roof beams, they eat right through, and you don’t want that, trust me. Highly corrosive droppings, dragons. Just about impossible to get the stink out of plaster, too. Had them long?”

“There’d always been a couple,” said Smith. “We’re at the damned seaside, right? You expect them. But in the last month or two we’ve got some kind of wyrmin rookery up there.”

“Yes. I daresay it’s the weather. Lot of people coming in with the same trouble. Well, let me fetch you a pair of good big buckets …”

“Yes, but no roofing stuff just yet, all right?” Smith followed him over to the Containers section. “I’ll wait until I get up there and see how bad it is. And what do I do with it? Just scatter it around? We’ve got a baby at our place, and I wouldn’t want him picking it up and eating it.”

“Not at all. You’ve got a big tree on your grounds, haven’t you? Just hang the buckets in the tree branches. Neat and tidy. They’re naturally curious, see? They’ll fly down to eat it, and then all you’ll need to do is call the umbrella-makers,” said young Leadbeater, with a grin.

“What for?” Smith was mystified until he remembered the commercial uses for dragon wings. “Oh! Right. Will they come and collect the dead ones for us?”

“Usually. You can get a good price for them, too.” Young Leadbeater winked.

SMITH trudged home with two gallon buckets of Tinplate’s Celebrated Gettemol, and the little statue of Cliba—a minor god of banishments—with its prayer on a slip of paper, in his pocket. He set a ladder against the trunk of the big canopy-pine and, climbing the ladder, went up himself to hang the buckets where they would be clearly visible. While up there, he peered across at his roof but saw no gaping holes evident. Whistling, he climbed back down and spent the rest of the afternoon in the work shed making a shrine for Cliba out of an old wine jar.