Pure Dead Frozen (6 page)

That Ring Thing

F
fup knocked respectfully on Mrs. McLachlan's bedroom door and, without waiting for an invitation, barged straight inside, in her haste allowing the door to slam behind her. Sitting at her dressing table, pinning up her long silver hair, Mrs. McLachlan sighed. In over six hundred years, Ffup's grasp of the rudiments of etiquette had not improved one whit. The dragon
still
behaved like an untamable teenager, despite being a parent herself. Wondering what had brought her upstairs, Mrs. McLachlan poked a final pin into her hair and turned to face her visitor. Clearly nervous, Ffup clasped and unclasped her front paws, her golden eyes fixed on the floor and little puffs of steam coming from both nostrils.

“Er,” she began, “it's great to see you're back on your, um…We're so delighted that you're feeling, er…I was wondering if now would be a good time, ah—” She broke off, embarrassed, as her stomach gave a loud roar of complaint, its digestive chorus running to several verses, each one longer and more embarrassingly loud than the one before.

What
had the dragon had for breakfast? wondered Mrs. McLachlan. Or did her ridiculous diet forbid breakfast, along with every single food substance known to man or beast—with the sole exceptions of grapes and strawberries, neither of which were in plentiful supply this far into a Scottish winter? Ffup had, in fact, breakfasted well. She'd sneaked out of the house with a twelve-pack of tuna, three tins of anchovies, two jars of salmon in aspic, and a defrosted packet of fish sticks, taking this fishy feast down to the lochside to share with her husband-to-be, the gigantic sea serpent the Sleeper. When the loch waters had parted to reveal the huge head of her beloved, they also unfortunately exposed the undulating form of a smaller, perfectly formed, dainty
female
sea serpent, her coils coyly intertwined with those of Ffup's so-called fiancé.

Ffup's initial reaction had been to hurl tins of tuna at her faithless Sleeper, but as three tins sank without trace several hundred yards shy of their target, the betrayed and weeping dragon decided not to waste any more food on such a scumbag. Stomping off into the privacy of a vast rhododendron bush, Ffup indulged in a spot of comfort eating, wolfing down every last flake of fish, drop of oil, and blob of aspic in between floods of tears and howls of outrage. By the time the last fish stick had slid flabbily down her throat, she had come to a decision. The engagement was off. The wedding was canceled. She'd phone the florist, the caterers, the dressmaker, the printer, the coach hire company, the minister, the marquee people, the chandlers, and the firework display designers, and at the same time cancel her subscriptions to
Bridal Beast, Dragon Damsels,
and
Weight Wibblers Anonymous
…tomorrow. First of all, and most important, she had to go through the time-honored tradition of removing her engagement ring and flinging it back in the face of the…the faithless, lying, two-timing, slimy toad who…who had broken her poor innocent little dragon heart.

But before
that,
she had to find her engagement ring. Four months ago, when the Sleeper had slid the colossal diamond onto her talon, Ffup had been ecstatic. So ecstatic that, in all the girly froth of showing off her new engagement ring to her admiring family, she hadn't noticed Mrs. McLachlan drawing back from the ring with a gasp of horror. For Mrs. McLachlan had recognized the stone in Ffup's ring. She alone had realized that it was no diamond, no matter how brightly it seemed to glitter. She knew that the stone was older than a mere prehistoric lump of compressed carbon, older than Time itself. Unfortunately, she also knew that the stone was a prize that certain Hades-spawned entities would stop at nothing to acquire. When Ffup's talon had turned a hideous corpse-gray beneath the ring's embrace, Mrs. McLachlan had seized the opportunity to protect those she loved. On the pretext of allowing Ffup's talon time to recover, she had taken the ring, removed the stone from it, and thrown both herself and the stone into Lochnagargoyle in the hope of putting it beyond the reach of the Dark Side.

Poor Ffup had been devastated—losing both nanny
and
engagement ring had been hard for the dragon to bear—and she had turned to the contents of the pantry for comfort. Now, with Flora safely returned to StregaSchloss and no longer so frail after her near-drowning in the loch, Ffup had been waiting for a suitable moment to find out if her ring had also survived its immersion. Since Mrs. McLachlan had been the last person to lay hands on it, asking her appeared to be the logical first step toward its recovery. Hence Ffup's presence in her bedroom, an event whose significance was not lost on the nanny.

“Ffup, dear—you'll have come about your engagement ring? Och, I'm terribly sorry, pet, but I must confess that, yes, I do know where it is, but alas, I cannot find it for you.”

Ffup frowned mightily. This was
not
the response she'd expected from the perpetually organized Mrs. McLachlan. Ffup had confidently assumed that the nanny would immediately turn to her wardrobe and, from a drawer labeled
R,
tucked in amongst an assortment of rose petals, rickrack, recorders, ropes, razors, reels, revolvers, reticules, retorts, and remedies, would retrieve Ffup's ring, wrapped in tissue paper for safekeeping.

“Huhnnn?” The dragon's jaw dropped.

“Ffup, pet lamb, that stone, the enormous diamond in your engagement ring…it's not what you think it is—”

“WHATTTT?” Ffup couldn't believe what she was hearing. “Don't tell me it's not even a
real
diamond? Like, he was faking that as
well
?” A bolt of flame shot out of her mouth before she could clamp her lips together.

“Try to calm down, dear.” Mrs. McLachlan reached out to pat the dragon's wildly flapping paws. “You're setting my lampshade on fire.”

Ffup looked up to the ceiling, where the silk shade was blazing merrily. “Sorry. But…but…my
ring
. What d'you mean, it's not what I think? What
is
it, then? And, for that matter,
where
is it? If you know where it is, why can't you find it?”

“Och, pet…so many questions. It's on an island. I hid it there amongst other stones just like it, and—”

“You
lost
it?” Ffup shook her massive head from side to side, trying to make sense of this, trying to reconcile her image of Mrs. McLachlan, the perfectly organized nanny, with her new picture of Mrs. McLachlan, the totally disorganized space cadet who'd effectively flung a needle into a haystack. Deliberately. Dazed and confused, Ffup could only repeatedly bleat, “You
lost
it?”

“Sort of, dear, but not
exactly
. I was trying to protect you from it. You see, Ffup, dear, it's not really a diamond engagement ring, your ring. It's a…” The nanny faltered. She wanted to say it was a liability, a poisoned chalice, a magical artifact so powerful that it destroyed everything and anyone with whom it came into contact…but that would have only been part of the truth. Whatever she said, she had to discourage Ffup from trying to find it. Ever. Wrongly assuming that the dragon wanted her engagement ring back in order to wear it, Mrs. McLachlan unknowingly said the one thing guaranteed to whet Ffup's revenge-fueled appetite.

“You see, pet, the stone in your ring acts like a magnet, attracting only unhappiness to itself and to whoever might seek to possess it.” So intent was she on alerting Ffup to the dangers of the ring that she failed to notice the odd smile playing around the dragon's mouth. “You're far better off without it, dear,” Mrs. McLachlan continued, thinking to herself that this truism could have been applied to everyone who had ever been in contact with the stone.

Before Ffup had become its temporary owner, the stone had been locked away in the custody of the Etheric Library; before that, it had hung unnoticed for hundreds of years in the chandelier in the great hall of StregaSchloss. Now the chandelier was history—smashed to atoms—and the Etheric Librarian was missing, presumed dead. In a desperate attempt to put the stone out of harm's way, she, Flora McLachlan, had tried to hide it on the mythical island that lay on the outermost rim of Death's realm. Tried…and failed. True, the stone was hidden, safe from any casual search, but a determined or desperate seeker would eventually find some way of sifting through the millions of pebbles on the island's fringe and thus uncover the stone. Backbreaking as this would undoubtedly be, the stone was well worth the effort; some would go so far as to say that finding the stone was worth far more than mere human lives.

The stone was like nothing else on Earth. It was immeasurably ancient; had, in fact, always been in existence. It predated the planets but contained no carbon itself, which meant it was un-carbon-datable. It appeared to be made of nothing that could be analyzed or attributed to one of the elements in the periodic table. Furthermore, the stone's mere proximity made human clocks and compasses run awry, as it appeared to transmit an untraceable signal that jammed radio waves and caused mobile phones to hiss like enraged serpents. Interesting as these properties were, they were not the source of the stone's fascination for mortals, angels, and demons alike. The stone's allure lay in its being more than a lapidary anomaly, for what it represented was raw power in its most elemental form. Raw power of an order utterly beyond the grasp of human intelligence. Raw power that made the combined outputs from every single one of Earth's power stations look, by comparison, like a last gasp from a dying glowworm.

The stone was like a vast battery of the type that a planet could use to run its central heating—exactly the kind of battery that could be used, by those who knew how, to power a spell, multiply the effect of an incantation a thousandfold, or tip the wobbly balance between the powers of light and darkness and forever throw a shadow of evil around the world—

“So…let me get this straight—it's like a magnet for deep poo?” Ffup interrupted Mrs. McLachlan's meditations on the true nature of the stone. The dragon's mind was conjuring up several scenarios, all of which involved bucketloads of deep poo happening in the general vicinity of her about-to-be exfiancé, the faithless, lying, two-timing—

“Ffup, dear. The
carpet
.”

Ffup snapped back to the present, where she found she'd accidentally set fire to a corner of Mrs. McLachlan's rug. Horrified, she apologized profusely, smothering the flames with her tail and vowing to herself that this simply
had
to stop. She had to get a grip. At this rate, if she continued to wallow in such vengeful fantasies, she ran the risk of burning StregaSchloss to the ground. If Mrs. McLachlan wouldn't help her find the ring, Ffup had a pretty good idea who else might.

Play to Death

T
he weak winter daylight that had shone over Argyll was fading rapidly as a curtain of gray clouds drew over the west coast of Scotland. Weather forecasters upgraded vague prophecies of wintry showers to far more serious predictions of severe blizzards, with major disruption to traffic across the entire western seaboard of Britain. Within half an hour, supermarkets the length of the U.K. had run out of bread, potatoes, pasta, and rice—the panicked citizens presumably intent on burying themselves up to their collective necks in white carbohydrates to mirror the whiteness piling up outside their windows. Airports shut down, flights were diverted to Holland, and a dimly remembered form of Second World War siege mentality seized the nation.

Watching the meadow disappearing beneath a mantle of snow, Pandora wondered if Titus might feel in the mood for a game of Monopoly for real money. In the past, they had played game after game, their tournaments spanning several weeks and causing them to rack up enormous debts to each other. They had both vowed to honor these debts, to pay them off in hard cash in a not-too-distant future when they were both not only older but richer as well. Titus's habit of offering Pandora seemingly generous terms of repayment—terms like double or quits—had resulted in Pandora's owing her brother the dizzying sum of twenty-eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-six pounds. All to be repaid in twenty-pound notes, except for the last forty-six pounds, which she swore she'd repay in single pennies. Four thousand, six hundred of them, to be precise. Pandora used her index finger to write on the steamed-up library window, calculating that at 3.4 grams per penny, her repayment would weigh in at more than twice Titus's own body weight. Heaving a huge sigh, Pandora erased all evidence of her calculations from the window with her fist. A far better plan would be for her to
win
the game. With Dad gone to the hospital to pick up Mum and the new baby, and hours to go before they returned, Pandora had time to kill. There was something deeply satisfying about being snug and warm, tucked up inside, playing pointless board games with your brother while the world turned white outside the windows. If Titus was willing to play another game of Monopoly, she could either erase the debt completely or increase it by a factor of one hundred percent to an eye-watering fifty-seven thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two pounds. It was a tough call, Pandora thought, leaving the window seat to huddle next to the fire, wondering if the Monopoly had been put away in the game room after her last disastrous attempt to wipe out the comparatively paltry debt of fourteen thousand, four hundred and seventy-three pounds. She'd been so ridiculously sure of winning last time, each throw of the dice transporting her little metal boot round a series of highly profitable circuits of the Monopoly board, her hoard of paper money piling in front of her in a most satisfactory fashion. Dizzy with amassing such wealth, she once, fatally, omitted her ritual of crossing fingers and kissing the dice three times for luck, and
that
was when she landed slap-bang on Titus's hotel on Park Lane. Next turn, despite multiple kisses and fingers crossed so tightly they hurt, she'd thrown snake eyes (a two) and capped her previous misfortune by landing on Titus's other hotel on Mayfair. That had wiped her out completely, doubled her debt to her brother, and made her almost radioactive with fury.

Maybe
not
Monopoly, then.

Pandora turned the handle and pushed open the door to StregaSchloss's game room. A scuttling sound gave away the whereabouts of the tincture squaddies, a battalion of hundreds of tiny warriors in kilts who had taken up residence on the billiard table after their arrival at StregaSchloss the previous year. None of them stood any taller than Pandora's thumb, and all were the result of the accidental spillage of a vial of dragon's-tooth tincture that Baci had brought back from the Institute for Advanced Witchcraft during the Christmas holidays. Baci had been vaguely intending to conduct an experiment with the tincture in the comfort of her own kitchen, but had completely forgotten about it until Titus had removed it from the back of the fridge in the hope that it might be not only edible but delicious. Fortunately, he was never given the opportunity to find out, since dragon's-tooth tincture was renowned in magical circles for being the single most effective method for creating an instant army. Once decanted, Baci's forgotten tincture mutated from a puddle of coffee-colored liquid into a seething mass of tiny limbs, which gradually unraveled, dusted themselves off, stood up, and announced themselves to be soldiers of the Fifth Dragon's-Tooth Engineers.

The vial of tincture had smashed across StregaSchloss's stone kitchen floor the previous winter, and now, holed up for the best part of a year upstairs in the game room, the tiny warriors had made the best of their bizarre billet and had put some of the Strega-Borgias' hoard of games to good use. Thus, the green baize of the billiard table became a parade ground; single playing cards folded in half were used as two-man tents; Scrabble tiles were employed as shields; and pickup sticks sharpened to lethal points made highly effective spears with which to catch dinner. To Tarantella the tarantula's disgust, she found herself now in direct competition with the wee warriors for StregaSchloss's limited fresh fly supply; fortunately, it hadn't occurred to the teeny tribesmen to try and hunt the spider, otherwise Tarantella might have found herself speared on a pickup stick, spit-roasted, and dished up in slices for high tea.

From the billiard table, the tincture squaddies kept a covert watch on Pandora as she hunted for a suitable game that might allow her to win her fortune back. Aware that she was under observation, Pandora wondered out loud if the tiny warriors were in good health. On several occasions over the previous year, both she and Titus had served as battlefield surgeons to injured members of the bonsai battalion—splinting broken legs with matches; administering minute crumbs of aspirin for sprains, migraines, and mystery fevers; once, unforgettably, performing an emergency amputation when an unfortunate warrior had his foot crushed under a falling mahjong tile. And yet, despite Titus's and Pandora's obviously kind intentions toward the tiny warriors, the appearance of any humans in the game room always caused a mass squaddie exodus, and hours could pass before they would reappear to negotiate favors from their giant benefactors. Today, with the temperature in the game room hovering around zero, the squaddies were caught out in the wide-open spaces of the billiard table, where they had been vigorously drilling, marching, and exercising, presumably in an attempt to stop themselves from freezing to death. When Pandora turned away to the glass-fronted cabinet where hundreds of games were haphazardly stacked, she could see masses of tiny kilted men reflected in its doors. Had there not been ripples of movement among their ranks, the squaddies might have been mistaken for model soldiers laid out prior to an adult war game. Plucking a battered Cluedon't set from a tottering pile, Pandora turned round to lay it down on the table in front of a group of suddenly statue-still warriors.

“Don't panic,” she muttered. “I just need to check if all the bits are in the box….”

“Er, yes.” One of the tincture squaddies stepped forward, wringing his hands in apology. “I regret to have to tell you that the flask of botulinum toxin and the dodgy hair dryer have gone.”

“And Sergeant Macdui took the concrete overshoes with him,” added another squaddie, his long face arranged in such a sorrowful expression that Pandora wondered if a comforting hug would be in order. On reflection, she decided not, realizing she might do more harm than good by accidentally squashing the sad little squaddie. With the poison, the electrocuting hair dryer, and the Mafia shoes gone, it was becoming obvious that Cluedon't wasn't going to provide the perfect solution to her current financial crisis. The casual placing of the lethal hair dryer in the bathroom or the unobserved decanting of the toxin in the kitchen had been two of her favorite methods to dispatch Titus's pieces in previous games, with the concrete overshoes in the ornamental pond as backup if all else failed. Since these murder weapons were missing, there was little point in continuing. In front of her, the tincture squaddie shuffled his bare feet and coughed.

“Your Vast Giganticness,” he began respectfully, bowing several times before continuing. “As you know, we soldiers of the Fifth Dragon's-Tooth Engineers have been camped here for almost twelve months….” He paused, allowing Pandorato agree that yes, this was so. “And very nice it has been too, Your Epic Enormousity,” the little squaddie hastily assured her, in case she thought he wasn't eternally grateful for the benefits of life in the game room of StregaSchloss. “Very nice indeed. Warm, cozy, comfortable, safe…” Here he emitted a sigh that sounded like the dying wheeze from a pair of ruined bellows. “Problem is, Your Humungous Mountainosity, we're not built for comfort. We're warriors, fighting men, gladiators.” Here he flexed his diminutive biceps and took a deep breath. “We're growing soft, Your Immense Colossalness. With no enemies to kill, no battles to fight, and no
danger
in our lives, we've lost our reason for existence. Our days have become about as perilous as a game of tiddlywinks, and while you'd think that would make us happy, I have to tell you that all it's doing is making us fat and miserable. We used to be a lean, mean fighting machine, but these days we've become a bunch of flabby couch potatoes. We've lost our edge, begging your pardon, Your Titanic Magnificence. But it's been very nice. Really…” Behind him, the tincture squaddies nodded in agreement. From somewhere in their massed ranks came a ghastly scream, followed by a little thud.

Pandora gasped, “What on earth…?”

“Pay no heed, Your Monumental Mightiness. I imagine that was poor Corporal Braeriach. I'm afraid he must have lost the bet. If I'm not mistaken, I think he was going to use the box jellyfish from Cluedon't.”

“Pardon?” Pandora frowned. “What bet? What is going on?”

The tincture squaddie put his finger to his lips and motioned Pandora to follow him over to the window, out of earshot of the rank and file. Framed by a wintry view of the meadow and Lochnagargoyle, he whispered so quietly that Pandora had to practically invite him to crawl into her ear to make himself heard.

“My men are losing the will to live, Your Towering Immeasurability. They gamble from dawn to dusk, but lacking money with which to gamble properly, they use their lives as currency instead. It's…ochhh—” Here he appeared to struggle to explain himself. Then, inspiration dawning: “They play a form of Russian roulette. Only we're not Russians, we're Celts. And it's not roulette we're playing, it's Cluedon't. So, in short, we play Celtic Cluedon't, and losers lose all.”

Pandora was aghast. “WHAT?” she squeaked. “But…but that's
sick
! You play to the death? Urrrghhh. That's
horrible
. No game is worth
that
.”

“But
war
is a game, Your Whopping Extensiveness,” the tincture squaddie interrupted, his face arranged in a sad little smile. “A game we play for the highest stakes, but a game nonetheless.” Seeing Pandora's face, he continued, “Imagine: one day you see your opponents as your worst-ever enemies. You are determined to destroy them—their wives and children; their homes, lands, and oceans—as they are determined to destroy yours. Time passes and now you're trading with them, marrying their children with yours, and fighting alongside them against another, newer enemy. If you think about it, Your Gargantuan Jumboness, warfare and games have the same objective in mind—the purpose of both is to win. Once you have won, you shake hands, draw up treaties, execute a few scapegoats, and then your leaders sit down together and drink a toast to the health of your nations. If
that's
not a game, I'll eat my shield.”

Pandora shook her head. For once, she had nothing to say. She loathed war; to her it seemed like a vast adult conspiracy designed to propel a nation's teenagers out of their beds and off to foreign lands from where, all too frequently, they would return in plastic bags. She gazed at the little warrior in dismay: war was too visceral, too bloody, and far too dangerous to be likened to a
game
.

Seeing the girl's obvious distress, the squaddie leaned in close to her ear again. “I don't mean to say that war is for
fun,
Your Himalayan Hugeosity. My men regard going to war as the highest calling; they believe it to be a sacred duty to protect and serve our masters and”—he bowed deeply, the hem of his kilt sweeping across his bare toes—“our Mondo Mistresses.” Crossing one of his arms diagonally across his chest, he leaned back to stare into Pandora's eyes and said, “We pledge ourselves to protect you to the death, Your Ultimate Thuleness. To. The. Death.” Then he lowered his voice and added, “So, if you could possibly pick a fight quite soon with some neighboring giants, my men and I would be awfully grateful.” And using his pickup-stick spear as a pole, the warrior vaulted off Pandora's shoulder, ran across the floor, and, in seconds, had vanished down a crack in the floorboards.