The Last Dragonslayer (24 page)

‘Don’t even think about it!’ he said angrily. ‘I never liked the little tyke anyway. Run along and do your duty or by King Snodd and St Grunk, I’ll shoot you where you stand and get Sir Matt Grifflon in here to do your work for you – I could even claim the reward on your life!’

I tried to find something to say but nothing came out.

‘Well!’ sneered Gordon. ‘Quite the Dragonslayer, aren’t you? I was wondering how you could possibly have handled this any worse. All you had to do was kill a Dragon, and instead we’ve got a major war about to break out. Destiny is unkind sometimes, isn’t it? How many deaths will you have on your conscience? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? How much are your fancy scruples worth now?’

‘Stop!’ I shouted angrily, but he wouldn’t.

‘Stop?’ he repeated as he smiled a triumphant smile. ‘Or what? What will you do?’

I suddenly knew
exactly
what I’d do.

‘Or I’ll fire you, Gordon.’

‘Well you can’t,’ he sneered. ‘I resign.’

‘You resign?’

‘Yes, I—’

‘You mean you’re
not
my apprentice?’

He clapped his hand over his mouth as he realised what he had just said, and his face drained of colour.

‘NO!’ he yelled, throwing the gun away and changing his tone to a mournful plea. ‘I don’t resign! I’m sorry,
please
take me on again, I don’t want to end like—’

There was a bright flash and a smell of burnt paper as Gordon was reduced to little more than the sort of powder you might find in a cup-a-soup sachet. Only his clothes, derby hat and a steaming revolver remained to show that he had ever been. None but a Dragonslayer or their apprentice could enter the Dragonlands. His arrogance had got the better of him; his thirty million meant nothing.

I walked over to where the Quarkbeast was lying still in the heather. I dropped to my knees and rested my hand gently on his forehead. His large eyes were closed; he might have been asleep. There is a legend about Quarkbeasts that tells they are sent by the spirits of dead relatives to watch over you in times of uncertainty. My father had sent the Quarkbeast, I was sure of it. The small animal, although repulsive to many and possessed of disgusting personal habits and, yes, a bit smelly, had done his duty without regard for his own safety. I moved his body to a hillock above a bend in the river and placed a pile of stones over his small form. I topped this with a larger rock upon which I scratched the word
Quark
and the date. In the warm summer sunshine I stood for a moment in silent contemplation. He was a good, loyal friend, and he gave his life to save me.

I returned to the Slayermobile and drove to Maltcassion’s lair, the clearing in the forest. I parked up and stepped out. The large marker stone was humming louder than usual. The Dragon was sitting up on his hind legs. He was far taller than I had supposed – at least the height of one of King Snodd’s landships. He sniffed the air and listened carefully with his finely tuned ears.

‘I am sorry for your small friend,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘He had a good soul, despite his appalling table manners.’

I thanked him, and he told me he knew I would come, despite my own misgivings.

‘The Mighty Shandar just spoke to me,’ I said. ‘He demanded that you were to be spared. How do you account for that?’

Maltcassion growled angrily.

‘Don’t you dare speak of that scoundrel in my presence!’

I was shocked.

‘Scoundrel? You mean Shandar?’

Maltcassion roared and a sheet of flame burst from his throat and shot across the clearing in front of me, where it ignited a mature Douglas fir. The tree went up like a Roman candle. I took a few hasty steps back from the heat.

‘I told you not to mention his name!’

‘I don’t understand,’ I yelled above the crackling of the burning tree. He beckoned me to move away and I joined him.

‘Why do you think you are the first Dragonslayer to ever come up to the Dragonlands?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then let me ask you something else. Why do you suppose you are here at all?’

I thought the question a bit obvious but answered nonetheless.

‘To slay any Dragons guilty of violating the Dragonpact?’

‘But in four centuries none of us has
ever
violated the pact. Have you any idea why?’

‘Because you respect the Dragonpact?’

‘No. I’ll tell you. Shandar suggested the use of a force-field surrounding the marker stones to keep humans out. Such an act of magic is vast; he requested that we help him and we readily agreed, binding the magic of the marker stones so tightly it could never be undone except by the death of the Dragon it was there to protect.’

‘And?’

‘He tricked us. The weave of the magic was tighter than we imagined. The marker stones don’t just keep humans out,
but us in
. These Dragonlands are not a safe haven but a prison!’

I digested this new information.

‘Then the Dragonpact wasn’t a pact at all!’

‘Exactly. Shandar earned his twenty dray-weights of gold, believe me. The first Dragon who tried to get out of his lands was vaporised instantly. We sent around a message warning of the danger, and here we have sat, dwindling in numbers, communicating rarely and watching our magic slowly siphoned out of us by the energy of the very force-field that was meant to protect us!’

‘So why have Dragonslayers at all?’

‘Window dressing,’ replied the Dragon. ‘The Dragonslayers, far from being a most noble profession, are really nothing more than a contractual obligation. In Shandar’s plan you would never have come up here at all.’

‘Then . . . I don’t have to kill you.’

The Dragon raised a claw in the air and wagged it at me.

‘Well, that’s the
wrong
answer, I’m afraid,’ he said reproachfully. ‘We’ve planned this for a long time. You were chosen by us to do this deed; at midday you
have
to kill me!’

I could feel large salty tears well up in my eyes. It all seemed so unfair.

‘But I’ve never killed anything in my life!’

‘Big Magic is by definition highly specific. Someone like you
must
do it.’

‘What’s special about me? Why can’t Sir Matt Grifflon do it?’

‘You are more special than you realise, Jennifer.’

‘
Tell me why it has to be me!
’

‘I am only the last in a long line of greater minds. Not even I have all the answers. All I know is that you have to discharge your duty using your own free will and judgement. It is your destiny, Jennifer. You
will
do it.’

I picked up Exhorbitus as a clock started to strike twelve somewhere in the distance, and Maltcassion lifted his chin to reveal the soft flesh beneath his throat. I started to cry, large drops that ran down my face and on to the soft earth. Sometimes your duty takes you to dark places that you’d rather not be, but duty, as they say, is duty.

I held the sword aloft as a light wind whipped the leaves and twigs into motion. I placed the tip against his skin and paused.

‘Goodbye, Jennifer,
Gwanjii
. I forgive you,’ he said.

I closed my eyes and thrust the sword upwards as hard as I could. The effect was immediate, and dramatic. Maltcassion shuddered and slumped to the ground with a mighty crash. A large cloud of dust was thrown up by his falling bulk and knocked me backwards into the dirt. I was momentarily winded and struggled to my feet, expecting some sort of magic to start happening. I stole a glance at Maltcassion then hurriedly looked away. The jewel in his forehead had stopped glowing and an unnerving silence invaded the forest.

Abruptly, the marker stone stopped humming. What if I had been wrong? Big Magic, Wizard Moobin had told me, has rarely more than a 20 per cent success rate. Maltcassion and the Dragons had staked their survival on that; pretty long odds but the best they could get. I had done my best for them but there was no magic. No high winds, no noises, no mysterious flashes of light, no ‘bzzz’ sounds –
nothing
. If this was Big Magic, it was a grave disappointment. I suddenly felt very small and solitary. One person alone in 320 square miles of disputed territory, sandwiched right between two huge armies with artillery and landships, and with only forty tons of dead Dragon for company. I apologised to the large beast but he could not hear me. It was over. The ancient order of the Dragons was dead.

I stood up and looked around at the forest, wondering what to do. Far in the distance there was the crack of an artillery piece. A few seconds later and a faint whistle preceded a shell that exploded somewhere in the Dragonlands. That was the sign. The war had begun. Everything that had happened over the past few days now seemed unimportant. I had failed Wizard Moobin and the Big Magic, I had failed Maltcassion and the centuries-dead Dragon Council. Maltcassion had suggested I was chosen for this task because of some kind of purity or moral rectitude that he thought I possessed. I was obviously not good enough. I had felt no remorse when Gordon of Stroud was vaporised and I felt nothing but disgust for ConStuff, King Snodd and the hordes of claimants that waited eagerly outside the Dragonlands. I had once tugged at the convent cat’s tail, too. Perhaps there had been a mistake; perhaps there was
another
Jennifer Strange somewhere. One with true purity and goodness. A Jennifer with nothing but forgiveness who had never tugged at a cat’s tail and led a blameless and charitable life. Perhaps she would have triumphed.

There was another distant
crack
and a second artillery shell came whistling over and exploded, opening up a hole in the fertile earth of the Dragonlands. I looked again at the old Dragon. He looked more like a huge pile of rubble than he ever had before. Perhaps in years to come someone would remember what had happened here and open a small museum that explained what the Dragonlands had been like, the treachery of the Mighty Shandar and the final effort of the Dragons to survive. On the other hand, perhaps they wouldn’t bother. They’d probably build a museum to Yogi Baird – and it would as likely as not be sponsored by Yummy-Flakes breakfast cereals.

I sat on the trunk of a fallen tree and listened as another shell was lobbed into the lands. Only a few more minutes and the battle would begin. King Snodd’s massive landships would lumber across the hills, churning up the ground with their heavy tracks, laying waste to all before them as they pushed their way towards the Duchy of Brecon and beyond in their campaign to conquer Wales. I ducked instinctively as a shell landed in the forest about a hundred yards away and felled an old Douglas fir, which crashed into the undergrowth with a tearing of foliage. But their aim was wild and erratic. The Hereford gunners were firing blind into the Dragonlands.

I noticed that my pulse had started to race, and I felt hot and angry. I pulled at the collar of my shirt as a bad feeling started to rise within me like a fever. I clenched my fists as a red veil of rage descended upon me. I tried to swallow the anger down but it was too strong. I simmered for a few seconds, then I boiled. All rational thought vanished. I was out of control. The image of the Quarkbeast and the leering face of Gordon assaulted my mind. I thought of the crowds around the Dragonlands, waiting for the moment of the Dragon’s death with greedy expectation. Suddenly, I wanted to run to the marker stones and attack and kill and maim as many of the greedy, bloodsucking, Dragon-hating people as I could. I leapt for Exhorbitus and grasped the hilt. My hand latched on to it with a tightness that made me cry out in pain. I felt strong enough to take on a landship, tear at its iron hull with my bare hands and face the guns with an iron resolve. I let fly at a boulder with the sword, hoping to release the rage that rose within me; the boulder fell neatly in two but I felt more angry, not less. A noise like a hurricane had started in my head and every muscle in my body tightened like a spring.

Then the pain started. It was like a burning sensation that attacked every nerve ending in my body. Instinctively I knew of only one form of relief; I opened my mouth and screamed. It was quite a scream. They heard it at the marker stones. They heard it in Hereford. Animals turned and fled and milk curdled in the churns. Babies cried in their cots and horses bolted. But it wasn’t just a scream. It was more. It was a pointer, a marker, a conduit for other energy to follow, like the small spark that precedes a lightning bolt. I pointed the blade of Exhorbitus at Maltcassion and from the blued steel there flowed a sinuous white source of energy that moved into the old Dragon’s body and made the lifeless husk squirm and dance. I carried on screaming, the noise dominating everything around me. The dust started to lift from the ground and the water began to steam. The trees shed their leaves and birds dropped unconscious from the sky. I saw more shells falling to earth in a slow and lazy arc, but I could not hear them. One of them exploded near by and I felt a piece of shrapnel pluck at my sleeve. A tree fell in the clearing but I didn’t flinch. All that mattered to me was the power of the scream, the uncontrolled rage that wrung the energy from the air. The sky darkened and a bolt of lightning descended to the marker stone, splitting it in two. But it couldn’t last. A darkness opened up in front of me as I screamed the last of the air from my lungs. I knew then that my scream was everything. It was all consuming. It was the scream of Dragons long dead, it was the collective emotion of millions of people. It was other things but most of all it was a scream of renewal. It was the Big Magic.

‘Is it dead?’ said a voice.

‘Not it,
she
,’ said a second.