The Dragon Done It (48 page)

The careless, matter-of-fact statement contrasted unpleasantly with the maid's timid voice.

"Well, perhaps in that case I should be in the lead," Delendor suggested. "Because my rank is—
drat
! Where do all these blackberry vines come from?"

If the prince had paid attention to what he was doing rather than to his concept of
noblesse oblige
, he'd've gone around those vines the way his companions had.

"You know," Delendor resumed a moment later, "this makes even less sense than I'd thought. We're making so much noise that we'll never sneak up on the—"

Joe froze with one foot lifted. He hissed, "Hush!"

"—dragon. I've done enough hunting to know—
ulp
!"

Mary had turned and clamped her hand over Delendor's mouth with surprising strength. "Oh, please, Prince!" she whispered. "
Please
obey Master Joe."

Joe put his foot down very carefully. Something that clanked and wheezed like a steam locomotive was coming up the road toward them. There wasn't much doubt about what the something was.

The dragon came around a sweeping bend only fifty yards away. Its color was the red of glowing iron.

The dragon probably wasn't any longer than the thirty-odd yards Ezekiel had claimed for it . . . but seeing a creature of the unimaginably great size was very different from hearing the words spoken.

No wonder the knights—and the crossbowmen—had been unable to harm the thing.

The dragon was covered with bony scutes similar to those of a crocodile, and the beast's general shape was crocodilelike as well: so low-slung that the long jaws almost brushed the cobblestones, with a massive body carried on four short legs. The upper and lower rows of the dragon's teeth overlapped like the spikes of an Iron Maiden.

The dragon's claws sparked on the roadway. Its breath chuffed out a reek of decay which enveloped Joe as he peered from the brush in amazement.

Well, he'd come to look at the dragon to determine what were its weak spots.

There weren't any.

They'd have to get back to Hamisch as fast as they could—making the necessary wide circuit to avoid the dragon. The beast would reach the city in a few tens of minutes, and the only hope of the people inside was to scatter. The walls wouldn't last a—

"
Kikikikiki!
" shrieked the monkey. It hurled a bit of seedpod as it charged the dragon.

"Kiki!" cried Delendor in a voice almost as high-pitched as his pet's. The prince whisked his sword from its sheath and crossed the expanse of brush between himself and the highway in three deerlike leaps.

With Mary running after him, an equally athletic, equally quixotic, demonstration.

"For god's sake!" Joe screamed. He tried to aim his arbalest. A loop of honeysuckle was caught around the right arm of the bow. "Come back! Come back!"

The dragon didn't charge, but its head swung with horrifying speed to clop within a finger's breadth of Kiki. The monkey's cries rose into a sound like an electronic watch alarm.

Kiki hurled himself back into the brush. Delendor continued to run forward, with Mary right behind him—casting doubt on the evolutionary course of intelligence.

"Get down!" Joe cried. "
Don't,
for god's sake—"

He slipped his bow loose of the vines and raised the weapon. He'd fired a rifle a couple times but the crossbow had a knob rather than a shoulder stock.

There weren't any proper sights. Joe tried to aim along the bolt's vertical fin, but the weapon's heavy muzzle wobbled furiously around a six-inch circle. The dragon was only twenty feet away, and Joe was going to miss it if he—

Delendor swung his sword in a swift, glittering arc. It rang on the dragon's snout as though it had struck an anvil. The blade shattered and the hilt, vibrating like a badly-tuned harmonica, flew out of Delendor's hand.

Delendor yelped and lost his footing. He hit the cobblestones butt-first, which was just as well in the short run because the dragon's jaws slammed where the prince's torso had been.

"
Get out of the—
" Joe shrieked.

"Take me!" Mary cried, waving her arms to catch the monster's attention as she stepped on Delendor's swordhilt.

Mary's foot flew in the air. She hit the ground in a flurry of skirts.

The dragon paused, faced with two victims ten feet apart. It opened its jaws wider. The maw was the size of a concert grand with the lid up. The interior of the dragon's mouth was as white as dried bone.

I'll never have a better chance,
thought Joe as he squeezed the under-lever trigger of his crossbow. The muzzle dropped as the cord slammed forward.

Joe whanged his bolt into the roadway in an explosion of sparks.

The dragon snorted. It started to—

For Pete's sake, it was arching its short neck, then its back. Its monstrous, clawed forelegs were off the ground—

The sight should've been as ridiculous as that of
Fantasia
's crocodiles doing
The Dance of the Hours . . .
but this close to the creature, it was more like watching an ICBM rising from its silo in preparation to launch.

The dragon was quivering in a tetanic arch, making little whimpering sounds. Its belly plates were red like the scutes of its back and sides, but there were fine lines of yellow skin where the plates met.

There was a hole where the lower jaw joined the first plate covering the underside of the neck. The hole didn't look large, but blood was bubbling furiously out of it.

Joe's quarrel had ricocheted into what might very well be the only vulnerable point in the dragon's armor.

The dragon rose onto the claws of its hind feet. Its tail was stiff. The beast's armor squealed under the strain to which convulsing muscles were subjecting it.

Mary and Delendor sat up, staring at the monster that towered above them. Their legs were splayed, and they supported their torsos on their hands.

"Wow!" said the prince. Joe, fifty feet back in the brush, couldn't come up with anything more suitable for the occasion.

Kiki hopped onto Joe's shoulder. He made what were almost purring sounds as he stroked Joe's hair.

The dragon completed its arc and toppled backwards. It hit the ground with a crash.

Its limbs and tail continued to pummel the ground for hours, like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

Though there were eight yoke of oxen hitched to the sledge, they wheezed and blew with the effort of dragging the dragon's head, upside down, into the palace courtyard. The beast's tongue lolled out to drag the flagstones, striking sparks from them.

Prince Delendor sat astride the stump of the beast's neck. He waved his swordhilt and beamed as he received the boisterous cheers of the crowd.

"Must be the whole city down there," Groag said glumly as he watched from one window of Ezekiel's laboratory.

"Must be the whole
country
," Glam corrected in a similar tone. " 'Cept us."

"
Lookit
that!" said Groag.

"Then get out of the way and I will," snapped the magician, tapping Groag on the shoulder and making little shooing motions with his hand. The big prince stepped aside, shaking his head.

The wreckage was gone from the laboratory, but neither the middle window nor the broken glassware had been replaced. A tinge of brimstone from the rocket still clung to the air.

The scene in the courtyard did nothing to improve Ezekiel's humor. King Morhaven was kneeling to Delendor, though the youth quickly dismounted as from a horse and stood Morhaven erect again.

The cheering rattled the laboratory's remaining windows.

"He'll make Delendor co-ruler as a result of this, you know," Ezekiel said. "And heir."

He turned and glared savagely at the two royal brothers. "You
know
that, don't you?"

Glam twisted the toe of his boot against the floor, as though trying to grind something deep into the stone. "Well," he said, "you know . . . You know, if the little prick killed the dragon, I dunno what else the ole man could do. Lookit the
teeth
on that sucker."

"Don't be a bigger fool than God made you!" Ezekiel snarled. "Delendor didn't have anything to do with killing the dragon. It was that magician of his! That
damned
magician."

He made a cryptic sign. A swarm of twinkling demons whisked out of their own plane. Their tiny hands compressed globes of air into a pair of shimmering lenses.

Ezekiel stared through the alignment, then stepped back. "There," he said to the brothers. "Look at that."

Glam looked through the tubeless telescope, despite an obvious reluctance to put his eye close to the miniature demons who formed it. The lenses were focused on the dragon's neck. The wound there was marked with a flag of blood.

"Well," said Glam as his brother shouldered him aside, "that's where he stabbed the sucker, right?"

"Idiot!" Ezekiel said. "The wound's
square,
from a crossbow bolt. And who do you see carrying a crossbow?"

"Oh-h-h," said the brothers together.

Behind the sledge, almost lost in the crowd that mobbed Delendor, was the prince's magician—carrying a heavy arbalest. A servant girl clung to him, squeezed by the people cheering their master.

"I don' get it," Groag said. "Lotsa guys shot it with crossbows before, din't they? I heard that, anyhow."

"Of course they did, oaf!" said Ezekiel. "This was obviously an enchanted arbalest which struck the one vulnerable part of the dragon's armor—even though a spot on the underside of the beast's throat
couldn't
be hit by a crossbow bolt."

He swung the telescope slightly by tapping the manicured nail of his index finger against the objective lens. Tiny demons popped and crackled at the contact.

Groag glared at the crossbow. "Don' look so special ta me," he said.

"I don' get it," Glam said. "If he got a crossbow ta kill the dragon, then what was all that stuff with the powder and fire t'other morning? Some kinda joke, was it?"

The magician grimaced. "I'm not sure," he admitted, glancing around his laboratory and remembering how it had looked
before
a rocket sizzled through the center window. "But I think . . ."

Ezekiel had been shrinking down into his velvet robes. Now he shook himself and rose again to his full height.

"I think," the magician resumed, "that Joe Johnson has been brought here from a very great distance by a—7th Plane inhabitant. He initially attempted to use the magic of his own region here, but the correspondences differed. Rather than work them out, he found it easier to adapt
our
magic to the task."

"You promised us," said Glam in a dangerous voice, "that there wouldn't be no problem with Delendor. An' now you say there is."

"I can take care of your brother easily enough," said Ezekiel in a carefully neutral tone. "But only after Joe Johnson is out of the way. Do you understand?"

Glam guffawed in a voice that rattled the window even against the cheering voices below. "You bet we do!" he said. "Cold iron's proof agin magic, right?"

"Ah, belt up," said his brother, staring through the telescope again. "You charge in like a bull in a boo-dwa, you just screw things up.
I'll
handle this one."

As he spoke, Groag marked carefully the servant to whom Joe Johnson gave his enchanted crossbow.

"And
you
said you weren't a magician!" Delendor crowed.

"Del, careful!" Estoril warned, but the prince had already jumped into a heel-clicking curvette too energetic for Joe's small room.

The feather in Delendor's peaked cap flattened against the ceiling. Kiki bounded from the prince's shoulder and caromed off the four walls before cringing against Joe's ankles.

Joe wrapped the quilt around him tighter. Servants had built up the fire next to which he huddled in his armchair. Despite that and the quilt, he still felt cold enough that the monkey's warm body was surprisingly pleasant.

He wondered where Mary had gone—and whether she'd be back tonight as usual.

He sneezed again.

"Bless you!" said Delendor, slightly more subdued. He sat down again on the cedar chest beside Estoril. "You know," he bubbled to the princess, "I just swung,
swish
!"

"I believe I heard that, yes," Estoril said dryly. Joe thought she winked at him, but he was blowing his nose and couldn't be sure.

Did Lancelot catch colds while carrying out deeds of derring-do? More to the point, did Lancelot's faithful servant catch colds?

"I didn't even know that I'd killed it until I saw it topple over backward!" Delendor continued, oblivious to everything but his own—false—memory. "Joe here's magic guided my thrust straight to the monster's throat! Except . . ."

Delendor's handsome brow furrowed. "You know, I thought I'd
cut
at the dragon instead of thrusting." He brightened again. "Just shows how memory can play tricks on you, doesn't it?"

Joe sneezed.

Maybe now that the dragon was dead, he'd be able to go back home . . . though somehow, after the primary colors of life in Hamisch, even the Senator and his shenanigans seemed gray.

"But here, I've been doing all the talking," Delendor said, showing that he had
some
awareness of the world beyond him. "Essie, what was it you came back from Glenheim to tell us?"

Estoril looked at her hands, laid neatly in a chevron on the lap of her lace-fronted dress. "To tell the truth," she began, "I'm not sure. . . ."

"You know," the prince resumed, as though Estoril had finished her thought instead of merely her words, "when Joe arrived here, I really wanted him to find my enchanted princess."

Delendor fumbled within his puff-fronted tunic. "But now that you're back, Essie, I—well, I don't think about it very much."

He opened the oval locket and handed it to Estoril. From the flash of lamplight as the object passed, Joe knew it was still a mirror so far as he was concerned. He roused himself to ask, "Princess, what do
you
see in it?"

Estoril smiled. "My face," she said. "But the locket is very old—and it belonged to Del's mother."