“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.