Blade found he was going more and more slowly. He was—he admitted it—scared stiff. There seemed no reason why the dragon should agree it owed Derk’s family some help and every reason why it should eat Blade on the spot. From what Mara had said, it was an old, wild dragon, from the days when dragons and humans were natural enemies. Or it might simply be too ill and grumpy to help. But Blade could not think of any other way to get those soldiers moving, and he remembered the dragon had been prepared to listen to Mara, and he kept going. He rounded the crag that hid the side valley.
He had forgotten how big the dragon was. It filled half the valley. It was lying alongside the stream, with its head and huge talons not far from Blade, with one of the mayor’s cows clasped between those talons. It was peacefully munching on that cow. Beyond, by the stream, the bent coronet and the broken chain had been carefully laid out on a flat stone. Above Blade, the dragon’s wings came to two towering peaks, green as the surrounding hills. Behind those wings, Blade had glimpses of the huge body and then the spiked tail, tapering away nearly as far as the terrified huddle of the mayor’s remaining cows. There were a lot fewer cows than there had been.
The thing that impressed Blade most, however, was the way the dragon had changed since he last saw it. It glistened now, green all over, and the scales that had looked so loose and ragged had healed flat and whole again. The unhealthy white of its underside had turned a pale green. The great peaks of its wings were no longer tattered—Blade could see dark green veins in them, healthily pulsing—and the talons that were gripping the mayor’s cow had been trimmed back to the proper, lethally hooked shape. Mum had been right. This dragon had been ill when it first arrived.
The dragon looked up and saw Blade. Its eyes had lost their filmy look. They were now bright green-gold. And enormous. Blade felt he could drown in one. As it saw him, the dragon put one clawed paw protectively over the remains of the cow and reached out quickly with the other paw to drag the broken chain and the bent coronet safely under its green belly.
“What do you want?” it said. Its voice rumbled the ground under Blade’s boots and set the rest of the cows yelling with fear. “Do you people think I’m on show at a fair or something?”
“What do you mean?” said Blade. Oddly enough, he had forgotten how frightened he was. He still knew this dragon was the most dangerous creature in the world—if you didn’t count the blue demon or Mr. Chesney—but all he was thinking of was how best to talk to it.
“I mean the way people keep coming to stare at me,” the dragon rumbled. “I’ve had two little yellow cat-birds and one bigger brown one, and a stick-man and a stick-woman, and a little woman with yellow hair, and now you. Haven’t any of you ever seen a dragon before?”
“I’ve come to talk to you, not stare,” Blade said.
“That’s what they all said,” boomed the dragon. “And then they scolded me for roasting the wizard. If you’ve come to tell me off for that, too, consider it done.”
“Well, no, actually, I’ve come to ask you for help, Mr.—er—Scales,” Blade said boldly.
“Scales will do,” said the dragon. “What do you mean, help?”
“You owe me. You roasted my father,” said Blade.
“There. You see? You’re scolding,” the dragon rumbled.
“No, I’m not. I’m starting to explain.” Blade braced his feet and stared up into the dragon’s huge eyes. Despite the things Fran and Old George had said, this seemed the right thing to do. It had worked for Mara. “You see, because you roasted my father, we’re having to do his Dark Lord work for him. We’ve got his army—they’re six hundred murderers really, pretending to be soldiers—out in the middle of nowhere near the wastes, and we’re supposed to be moving them to a base camp in Umru’s country, so that we can park them there while we do the Wild Hunt and so on. But they won’t move. Today they just sat down and wouldn’t come out of the dome.”
“Leave them there then,” said the dragon.
“We can’t,” said Blade. “There’s a timetable, there’s a whole set of battles they have to fight in. Besides, if we did leave them, they’d probably all escape and start murdering everyone.”
“I thought murdering was what soldiers and battles did,” said the dragon. “Why have they got to go and murder people in a particular place at a particular time?”
“Because,” Blade said patiently, “Mr. Chesney has arranged for the tours to have a battle each.”
There was silence. All Blade could hear was the stream racing over stones. The dragon barely moved. A wisp of smoke blew from its great jaws and melted among the hairs of the carcass under its paw. There was a tinge of red in the one huge eye Blade could most clearly see. Somehow the wings above him seemed to be in sharper, crueler points, and Blade had a sense of muscles tensing all over the enormous body. He saw that the dragon had been having a joke with him, dragon fashion, but something Blade had said was not funny anymore, and he had made it very angry. He got ready to translocate in a hurry.
“Someday,” the dragon remarked in a croon, deep in its smoky throat, “I must meet this Mr. Chesney of yours. I ought to pay my respects to the one who rules the dragons of this world, ought I not? Very well then. I shall come and pay my debt to your father tomorrow at dawn.”
Blade relaxed. “Couldn’t you come today?” he asked pleadingly.
“I am not ready to travel today,” the dragon said. “I am still healing. Look for me after sunrise tomorrow. Are you and your murderers easy to find?”
“Awfully,” said Blade. “We leave a mile-wide trail the whole way. Thank you for agreeing—er—Mr.—er—Scales, I mean.”
The dragon snorted a big gobbet of blue smoke. “I won’t say it’s my pleasure. It sounds like a chore. I won’t even agree that I owe you. It’s just the only way I’m likely to get any peace here. Do you mind going away now and letting me finish my breakfast?”
“Yes, of course,” Blade agreed, and found himself very nearly calling the dragon sir, the way he used to have to call his grandfather sir. Mara’s father had been a tetchy old wizard with very old-fashioned ways. This dragon reminded Blade of his grandfather rather a lot.
He went away down the valley. Now he had time to think, he was highly surprised at how easily the dragon had agreed to help them. He hoped it was enough like Grandfather to keep its word. Grandfather always said, “A wizard’s word is his bond. He should die rather than break his word, child.” But the dragon could just have been trying to get rid of him. Grandfather hadn’t liked being disturbed either.
ELEVEN
DERK WOKE UP QUITE suddenly the afternoon of the fifth day, with a feeling that somebody was calling his name. He sat up, amazed to be so weak and breathless. His face felt sore. When he touched it, he found he had almost a beard and a large weeping burn on his cheek. That brought everything back to him.
“Gods and demons!” he exclaimed. “How long did they put me to sleep for?”
He got up. His legs tried to fold. He strengthened them sternly with a spell and floundered across to the bathroom, hanging on to chairs, doorknobs, walls, and finally the washbasin, where he grimly set about shaving. Elda came galloping upstairs a few minutes later to find him with his face covered with lather and smeary bandages hanging off all over him.