Paint Your Dragon (32 page)

A lovely gesture, then; but completely pointless. Heroism is one thing, physics is something else. At the moment when the two demons threw themselves into the fire, only a miracle could have prevented the final cataclysm.

 

Define the term miracle.

It's got to be something Good - who ever heard of an Evil miracle? And it must be impossible or it doesn't count.

That leaves us with something nice that simply can't happen but does. Examples? Well, if we forget about tax rebates for the time being, how about a nuclear pile suddenly cooling down at the very last moment? Or two fiends from Hell giving their lives to save millions of innocent people?

Miracles do happen, but only very, very rarely; like the hundred-to-one outsider suddenly accelerating out of nowhere to beat the odds-on favourite. You could make an awful lot of money betting on miracles, provided you knew for certain they were going to happen. But that, too, would be impossible. Nice, but impossible.

Wouldn't it?

 

Unpalatable theological truth number 736: behind every miracle, there's usually an awful lot of syndicated money.

 

‘Just like that?' Chubby enquired.

Chubby sat still and quiet for a while, letting his mind skate round the implications. Just then, he'd have given anything for a simple pie-chart diagram showing how much of his soul was still his own. Not, he imagined, all that much.

‘So that's what we needed the dragon for,' he said. ‘God, I must be getting thick in my old age.'

It helped, Chubby found, to walk up and down, burning off a little of the surplus energy that his pineal gland was pumping into his system. ‘A dragon,' he said, ‘because nothing else on Earth would actually be crazy, wicked, stupid enough to torch a nuclear reactor and blow up a country.'

And even then I needed a pretext
,
so he wouldn't suspect what I was really up to. Hence putting a contract out on the demons. Rather neat, I thought.

‘Whereupon,' Chubby went on, ‘you laid a whopping great bet on the outcome. What odds did you get? Thousand to one?'

‘Splendid. I do so like a happy ending.' Chubby sat down behind his desk, broke a pencil and ground the bits into the carpet with his heel.

‘Fred? Oh sorry, I forgot.'

‘I did manage to remember, thank you.'

Dragons—
Impossible, of course, for glowing green words on a screen to have any expression. Any subtext has to come from the mind of the reader. In Chubby's eyes, at least, the words on the screen grinned.

‘I see.'

Chubby gave the screen a long, level stare. For some reason, he found he could, without wanting to look away. His mind searched for a word and a word came: alien.

Chubby shook his head. ‘Nah,' he replied. ‘You could get fond of little green men.'

 

‘Hello,' said Prodsnap, without looking up. ‘What kept you?'

Chardonay sat down in the seat next to him. ‘Had to save the planet,' he replied. ‘Any idea what sort of a mood He's in?'

Prodsnap shook his head. ‘I haven't heard any shouting,' he replied. ‘On the other hand, that's not necessarily a good sign.'

The five demons, wearing makeshift bodies issued to them from the huge wicker hamper colloquially known as the Dressing-Up Box, were sitting in a draughty corridor outside an office marked
Personnel Manager.
It isn't mentioned in Dante's
Inferno,
mainly because Dante had always hoped one day to sell the film rights and so he wanted to keep the whole thing basically upbeat and free from utterly negative vibes. The famous inscription about abandoning hope was nailed above the lintel.

Snorkfrod nudged Chardonay in the ribs.

‘We'd like you lot to be the first to know,' Chardonay said, saying it with all the passion and enthusiasm of the little voice in posh cars that tells you to fasten your seat belt. ‘Snorkfrod and I are engaged.'

‘Strewth.' Slitgrind pulled a face. ‘So you've been in already, have you?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

Slitgrind nodded towards the office door. ‘That's your punishment, is it, Char? I always knew he was a vindictive bugger, but ... Hey, Prozza, mind what you're doing, that was my shin.'

Prodsnap switched on a silly grin. ‘Congratulations,' he croaked. ‘I hope you'll both be very...'

The door opened. A secretary fiend, lump-headed and shark-jawed, beckoned them.

‘He'll see you now,' she said.

 

‘Sugar Fred Dragon?' Mr Kortright suggested.

‘Matter of opinion. All right then, Rocky Draciano. I like that. It's got class.'

‘Honey George Sanctus?' There was a slight edge of desperation in the agent's voice. Self-doubt wasn't usually a problem for Lin Kortright, in the same way that Eskimos don't lie awake at night fretting about heatstroke. This client, though, had him rattled.

‘I am.' He'd nearly said
I was.
The sweat from his armpits would have irrigated Somalia.

Kortright nodded, realised that the screen couldn't see gestures (or could it? He was getting distinctly offbeat vibes off this thing. As they say in the Business, never work with computers or children). ‘It's in the bag, Nosher,' he replied confidently. ‘All set.'

‘Set? Or set-set?'

‘Set-set. I got a signed agreement with the Mongolian Ministry of Tourism and War—'

‘Historical reasons, Nosher. Genghis Khan. The ultimate in encounter holidays, remember? Anyway, we've got a million-acre site between Mandalgovi and Dalandzadgad, they're gonna build us an airstrip—'

Kortright's brow creased. ‘Corners?'

‘Ah. Right. Got you. I'll fix that, no problem. Now then, the cola concession, I've got the Pepsi guys up to six million, but I'm expecting a fax any minute—'

The screen in Mr Kortright's office went dark. Another screen in Chubby's bunker (reinforced chronite, guaranteed to withstand anything less than a direct hit from a neutron star) flicked on.

‘Now what?'

‘All done.' Chubby frowned. ‘You got any idea how much a ship that size costs per day?'

‘Then you'd better - oh.' Chubby hesitated. ‘Any chance of a few quid on account?' he asked. ‘Only, what with one thing and another, all this is causing me slight cashflow problems, plus I'm neglecting my business. I've got orders to meet, you know.'

‘I'm sorry, I thought you just said lemons'

‘All right, Chubby replied, offended, ‘keep your keyboard on. I've got a containerload of lemons on their way from Australia, together with sixty gallons of aviation fuel for the dragon. Apple brandy for George. Not too much, don't want him falling over. Okay?'

Chubby smiled. ‘I'm way ahead of you there,' he replied. ‘How'd it be if we tried the old Ark routine? You know, a couple of days' synthetic rain beforehand, then I go around telling everybody I've had this message from God—?'

‘Yes?'

The screen went blank. Chubby stuck his tongue out at it. Obviously it knew, but Chubby no longer cared terribly much.

This, he said to himself, is getting out of hand.

It was something, he knew, with the big gambling syndicate. You didn't need to be Einstein or A.J.P Taylor to work out that Nosher had been behind the original syndicate, the one that persuaded the dragon to throw the fight first time round, back in the Dark Ages. And it was as clear as a lighthouse on a moonless night that this rematch was going to be a fix as well. The question was, which one was he going to fix this time?

And - big question, this—who did the syndicate bet with? It takes two to make a wager, and the last time he'd passed the local Coral office they hadn't been offering odds on the fight. So who was the mug punter the syndicate were fitting up? Who had that sort of money, anyhow?

God? No, strictly a matchsticks player. (And you thought all those forests in South America were just scenery?) Who, then? He shook his head. None of his damn business, anyhow.

Here's hoping, he muttered to himself, it stays that way.

 

I WON'T. JUST ENOUGH SO THEY WON'T SUSPECT.

YOU WIN THIS TIME, NOSHER. NEXT TIME, MAYBE YOU WON'T BE SO LUCKY. NOT, I SOMETIMES GET THE IMPRESSION, THAT LUCK HAS ALL THAT MUCH TO DO WITH IT. I MEAN, WHY EXACTLY
DIDN'T
THE FUCKING THING BLOW UP?

Outside, in the corridor, Chardonay and company could hear the thundering of the voice, but couldn't make out the words. Some other poor bastards getting their fortunes told, they assumed.

YOU'RE ON, NOSHER. HERE'S TO THE NEXT TIME, RIGHT?

 

After a hard afternoon's work in her studio - God, the Victoria Square project! Running about chasing the dragon was all very fine and splendid, but she had a commission to fulfil - Bianca had a quick sandwich and went straight to bed.

She slept badly.

Chasing the dragon - well, quite. There was still an influential part of her brain that wanted to treat the whole bloody mess as some sort of giant hallucination; bad dope, the DTs, cheese before bedtime, whatever. That was the comforting explanation. Untrue, of course. Whatever it was, it was still going on. In fact, she had an uneasy feeling it was approaching some sort of crisis. In which case, the sensible course of action would be to be standing outside the travel agents' when they opened tomorrow morning, asking for details of off-peak reductions to Alpha Centauri.

When a person starts worrying about something around half past three in the morning, she might as well let out Sleep's room and put his clothes in the jumble sale because he sure as hell isn't coming back. To take her mind off it all, she switched on the TV and hit the Satellite news.

... In Victoria Square, Birmingham might somehow be linked to the wave of spectacular art thefts in Florence, Rome and Venice. In addition to Ms Wilson's two monumental works for the Birmingham City Corporation, no fewer than seventeen major statues have vanished from Italian collections, including eight Berninis, three Donatellos, three Cellinis, a Canova, the Giambologna
Mercury,
and of course the priceless Michaelangelo
David.
The only lead that Interpol have so far is the discovery of fingerprints apparently resembling those of Kurt Lundqvist, a notorious mercenary and soldier of fortune, discovered at the scenes of all the robberies in Italy. Lundqvist, however, is believed to have been killed some time ago in Guatemala, although the only part of him actually recovered was his left ear. Counter-insurgency experts have pointed out that, to judge by his past record, Lundqvist would have been perfectly capable of carrying out this remarkable string of burglaries single-handed, not to mention single-eared; indeed, they claim, if there's anyone capable of shrugging off Death as a minor inconvenience, that man would be Kurt Lundqvist, believed by many leading experts to be the link between the former Milk Marketing Board and the Kennedy assassination. This is Danny Bennett, Star TV News, in Florence.

Bugger sleep. As far as Bianca was concerned, Macbeth had beaten her to it.