Dark Lord of Derkholm (15 page)

They watched until the dragon was a seagull-shaped speck in the distance. “You know,” Shona said, suddenly and unexpectedly, “I didn't like her very much. She was so artificial.”

“That's rich, coming from you!” Kit said.

“But she
was,
” Callette agreed, equally unexpectedly. “I didn't like her either.”

Everyone except Blade turned to disagree loudly with Shona and Callette. “Please!” Derk shouted. “No arguments! Next one to argue gets made into a statue and I grow vines up them. Dragons are strange people. These days they think of themselves as highly virtuous. I suspect this one was disgusted at having to pretend to be bad and guard treasure. I'm told they practically fight not to have to do it.”

“Then why do they do it then?” said Elda.

“No idea. More of Mr. Chesney's persuasive arts, I suppose,” Derk said. “Now, is there any chance of any lunch?”

There was a long, reluctant silence.

“I'll do it,” Blade said at last.

He wished he had not said it when he was drudging in the kitchen. It was all so complicated, Kit wanting raw steak and garlic, Callette raw duck and herbs, Don raw anything, and Elda wanting cooked meat for a change. That meant five lots of bacon and fried bread, the way Blade cooked. He was getting out the biggest frying pan, sighing, when he heard the dogs and the geese yelling again and Big Hen clucking her head off. Shortly the Friendly Cows and the horses joined in. The pigs squealed blue murder. What's the matter
now?
Blade wondered.

Elda appeared in the doorway, her wings mantled with excitement. “The dragon's coming
back!
Kit says it's flying wrong. Something's hurt it. Where's Dad?”

Derk was already running toward the gate when Blade and Elda reached the terrace. Shona and the other griffins were there already. Derk went out beyond the gate and stood on the grass, shading his eyes with both hands. Blade and Elda wedged themselves into the gateway.

The large black seagull shape was definitely coming toward Derkholm again, out over the plains. Even at that distance they could see something was wrong. It was sort of staggering in the sky, Blade put it to himself. One wing seemed to be damaged. The dragon would tip that way, then overcompensate and tip the other, and then right itself with much ungainly flapping, so that it came nearer and bigger in jerks.

“Distressing to watch,” said Derk. “But I don't think this is the same dragon.”

“Are you sure?” asked Shona.

“Yes,” said Derk. “This one's a male, and I'd say it was a good deal bigger.”

“How do you tell their sex?” Don wanted to know.

“The males don't have that long, lizardy look,” Derk said absently, staring outward at the unsteady shape in the distance. It was odd to have two dragons here on the same day. The only explanation he could think of was that there had been some misunderstanding—or maybe even a fight—over who was to guard the gizmos.

It slowly became clear that the injured dragon was very much bigger than the first one. They kept expecting it to reach the valley any moment, only to find it was still some miles off, still approaching and still getting larger. Finally it seesawed in across the ruins of the village.

“It's blinking
enormous!
” said Don.

It was so enormous that its ruined wings—they could see slits in them now—were truly in danger of brushing the hills on either side. The dragon had to struggle into an updraft—while they all held their breaths, expecting it to crash—in order to find room, and then manage to right itself and glide above the crests of the hills, still coming toward Derkholm. As its vast shadow blocked the daylight, everybody flinched. Then they ducked and tried to hide behind the gateposts as the tattered wings folded and the dragon came down like a meteor. It had clearly decided that a crash landing was the only possibility in the space available. Derk jumped backward as the mountainous body hurtled down, hit like an earthquake, seemed unable to stop, and continued uphill, plowing four large grooves in the turf. By some miracle, it came to rest quite neatly in front of Derk in a cloud of grass bits, clods of soil, and brownish, nasty-smelling smoke.

“Where's Wizard Derk?” it demanded in a further roll of smoke. It had a deep, windy voice, like somebody blowing across the top of a very large bottle.

“That's me.” Derk coughed in the smoke and stared up at it. It was at least as large as a house. And there was something very wrong with it. Where the first dragon had been sleek and glistening, this one was dull, jagged, and stringy. Many of its dingy green scales were split, or peeling, and they hung in ridges over the sharp bones beneath. Its eyes were filmy. One wing—the bad one—was literally in tatters, with pieces of membrane fluttering loose, and the other wing was only a little better. The part of the dragon that Derk could most easily see was its underside, hollow and sagging and a queer, unhealthy-looking white. There was a piece of gold chain and a bent coronet caught among the broken scales there. When Derk looked down at the nearest huge foot, he saw it was knotty and bent, with the claws growing out and upward like the untrimmed hoof of a horse. “Do you,” he said politely, “perhaps need medical aid?”

“Don't be impertinent,” the hollow voice boomed. The sick-smelling smoke that came with it made Derk choke. “I've come to join your side.”

“Sorry?” said Derk.

“You're the Dark Lord, aren't you?” the dragon demanded.

“For this year, yes,” Derk agreed.

“Then I've come to join the Forces of Evil as any right-minded dragon should,” the dragon boomed impatiently. “Can I put it any plainer? I've come to kill your enemies.”

“Er—” said Derk. There was something even wronger with this dragon than he had thought. Possibly it was insane. He threw his head back and looked into its filmy green eyes. Under the green and behind the film, red flickered. Red in the eyes of a dragon, he remembered learning as a student, meant that it was angry. He said, very carefully and calmly, “That is extremely kind of you, but I think someone has misrepresented the position to you.”

“How so?” boomed the dragon.

“Because my post as Dark Lord means simply that I pretend to be evil for the benefit of tourists who come from a world next door to this one,” Derk explained. “I'm just an ordinary wizard really. And I'm only allowed one dragon, and she—”

That was as far as he got before the dragon gave way to rage. Its eyes became wholly a cloudy red.
“So it's all a stupid GAME!”
it thundered. Derk backed away from the roar with his hands over his ears, surrounded in wet brown smoke. “You've dragged me all this way to
pretend!
What are dragons coming to, letting humans make fools of them like this?”

“I assure you I'm not trying to make a fool of you,” Derk managed to say. The smoke was making his lungs sore. He felt dizzy.

“YES, YOU ARE!” bellowed the dragon. The force of the bellow sent Derk reeling away.

This was more than Kit could take. He plunged forward. “Will you stop that!” he screamed, standing rampant under the dragon's huge muzzle. “It's nothing to
do
with him!”

The muzzle swiveled down so that the red eyes could look at Kit. “Just get out of my way, little cat-bird,” the dragon said, quite mildly.

“Little!”
choked Kit.
“Cat-bird!”
He had never been so insulted in his life.

“I don't know what else you are,” the dragon said. “Move. Leave this game-playing wizard to me.”

“No,” said Kit. “Over my—”

The dragon swung one huge, gnarly foot and simply batted Kit aside. Kit went head over heels, rolling downhill in an undignified muddle of legs, wings, tail, feather, and fur. He came to a stop sitting in a heap with his wings in two different directions, looking shattered. He had never, ever thought of himself as smaller and weaker than
anything
before.

“You'd no call to do that,” Derk choked, feeling for Kit.

“I haven't hurt him. Only his pride,” the dragon rumbled. “You're the one I mean to hurt.”

“Now listen—” Derk began.

But the dragon opened its mouth and bellowed rage and smoke at him. Derk felt his skin begin to boil. His lungs went from sore to agonizing so quickly that he could only put up the feeblest of shields against the blast. And the dragon was clearly a magic user. Derk felt the shield ripped away and more rage and smoke pour over him. He fell to the ground, trying to breathe, and trying not to breathe because of the pain. He had never felt pain like it. He wanted to scream, but that was another thing he could not do. The burning brown smoke continued to pour at him and around him, and he could hear it frying the grass he rolled on. Somewhere in the distance he could also hear griffins screaming, and Shona and Blade, too.

Blade began screaming at the point when the grass caught fire. By that time he had tried to put deep cold on the dragon's breath and then, when that had no effect at all, to translocate the dragon elsewhere. After that, he tried to do the same with Derk. And it was as if he was doing nothing. He felt weak and strange and belated—as if it took five minutes for him to realize what was happening, anyway—and totally helpless. The dragon seemed to be able to cancel anything Blade did. It swiveled a red eye toward him every time he tried to help Derk and then went on calmly trying to kill his father.

“Make it
stop!
” Shona screamed at him.

“I
can't!
” Blade screamed back.

There was a thundercrack of displaced air that blew the scalding smoke sideways over Kit—who opened his beak and made desperate noises—and Mara was suddenly standing between the gate and the dragon, wearing a dress that consisted mostly of small amounts of pink silk and black lace, which she had evidently been in the middle of trying on. “I felt something happen to Derk!” she said. “What—? Oh, ye gods!” She took one glance at Derk rolling on the burning grass and dashed in under the dragon's great smoking nose. “Stop that at
once!
Do you hear me?” She stood with her hands on her pink silk hips, glaring up at the dragon.
“Stop it!”

There was the fizz of strong magics clashing. Then the dragon took its snout back a foot or so. Its mouth shut, cutting off the hideous smoke. “This is wrong?” it said.

“It certainly is! Don't you
dare
do that again, unless you want to be half an inch long!” Mara shouted.

“Then explain why I shouldn't,” said the dragon.

“So sit down and
listen!
” Mara bawled up at it.

To everyone's great surprise, the dragon doubled its scrawny back legs under itself and sank down on its mangy haunches. “I'm listening,” it thundered in a new cloud of brown smoke. “It's about time someone explained this mad world to me!”

“All right,” said Mara. “All
right!
Just stop blowing smoke at me!”

“It comes out when I breathe,” the dragon growled.

“Nonsense,” said Mara.

Callette waited to see that the dragon did indeed stop blowing out smoke and then took off in a mighty clap of wings. “Where are you off to?” Don shrieked.

“Healer!” Callette screamed over her shoulder, making her fastest wing strokes toward the hills.

“Oh. Gods. Yes,” Don said, and took off after her, going so hard to catch Callette up that he was flying like a sparrow, in swoops and furious flutters.

“Blade,” said Mara, “get your father to the house.”

Blade always found it easier to translocate someone if he was touching him. He did not dare touch Derk. Derk was writhing about in the cinders of the grass, blue-purple in the face and hideous red in most other places. Most of his clothes were still smoking. The way much of his skin had gone into yellow streaks and blisters made Blade hurt, too, in sympathy. Blade stood himself gingerly astride him and translocated both of them to the living room sofa. The dragon rolled an eye at them as they went but did not try to stop them. Next instant the griffin fur and dog hairs on the sofa sizzled. The translocation somehow tipped Derk on his side, which made him give a horrible hoarse yell. This so appalled Blade that he simply stood astride his father on the sofa and wondered what to do.

Lydda shot into the room. “Make him cold. Quick. First aid for burns. Freeze him!” she panted.

“Oh, yes.” Thankful to be told, Blade concentrated until he could feel his own feet ache with cold. Derk stopped writhing, but he was still boiled red and streaked oozing yellow, and he was not breathing properly. “Where's Mum?” Blade said desperately.

“Talking to that beastly dragon,” Lydda said, sounding quite as desperate. “I suppose she has to keep it under control.”

As Blade was carefully climbing off the sofa, Shona and Elda arrived. The slightest jolt made Derk utter more of those terrible hoarse noises. Blade was shaking when Shona helped him finally climb to the floor. “He's lost half his hair!” Elda wailed. “And Mum's just standing there giving that dragon a history lesson on how the tours started!”