فصل شانزدهم

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Dragon at the Bar

Dragons come in all shapes and sizes, from vast nightmares whose wings unfold with a thunderclap and block out the sky, to tiny furry mascots that dangle in a harmless but irritating way from people’s rearview mirrors. The first thing George and Edie noticed was that the dragon that guards Fleet Street is not one of the fuzzy cuddleable ones. Its wiry body looked like that of a lion crossed with a muscular greyhound, and then covered in scales like chain mail.

The thin spiny tail cracked like a whip and the wings snapped wide as it reared back on its hind legs. The front claws—and these were proper cut-you-to-shreds claws with talons like curved daggers on them—picked up the large shield it rested on and clashed it twice on its chest scales, making a warning sound George could feel vibrating the ground he stood on.

But its head was the nastiest thing about it. It sat on top of a long reptile neck that grew out of the lion’s body, with a crest of spikes bristling along its top side. The head had ears pricked like a horse’s and a snarling mouth that showed a lot of hooked fangs as it looked right at George and Edie. And the eyes that it was doing the looking with glowered out from under angry brows with a heat and an intensity that seemed to weld George to the spot. The eyes were like looking into the heart of a banked-up fire. They were the deep red of burning coal, and as George watched the intensity of the red fade into a hotter, white heat, black tendrils of smoke whisped out of the eye sockets and rolled up and over the jutting brows into the night sky.

Edie tugged at him.

“I can’t move,” George said.

“Neither can I.”

The dragon’s head snaked back, turning its whole body into a coiled S shape. The narrow chest expanded and the scales on the neck stuck out in angry spikes. George had once seen film of a frilled lizard expanding its neck in anger. This looked like the grown-up end-of-the-world version of that.

And then the Gunner was skidding to a halt in front of them, between them and the dragon.

“Don’t look into its eyes! It’s got you stuck! Don’t look into the—”

Whoomf.

The dragon’s head struck forward, the mouth opened, the barbed tongue jabbed out like a sword, and then the flame jetted out, and there was no question, no way in the world that George and Edie or anyone who could see it wouldn’t watch it.

The flame hit the street in a twisting spiral of wildfire, ropes of red and orange and purple and yellow blaze twining together before slapping into the ground with the massive controlled force of water from a fire hose. The flames spread wide across the street and rushed toward them like a building wave.

Still rooted to the spot, George and Edie could do nothing but shield their heads from the wall of heat racing ahead of the flaring crest.

The Gunner spun and knelt in front of them, pulling his rain-cape wide, trying to protect them from the rolling incineration slamming toward them. There wasn’t enough cape to block out the sight, and George couldn’t tear his eyes away from the inevitable conflagration anyway.

“Get down!” shouted the Gunner.

George couldn’t move. Couldn’t even shut his eyes. He knew he was a heartbeat away from ignition and conflagration, but he didn’t blink. He felt the heat hit his eyeballs and dry them out in an instant. Then he blinked reflexively to wet them, and when his eyes opened, he saw the flames stop dead, as if they had hit an invisible wall ten yards in front of them.

The Gunner looked at George’s face, at his reaction, then turned to look behind him. Flames lapped up against the invisible barrier like water hitting a glass wall.

“Bloody hell!”

The fire built up behind the wall, rising higher and higher, taking shape as if filling a mold. And as they watched, they saw that in the midst of all this, London carried on. Cars drove through the wall of flame without noticing. A cyclist wove around a taxi, his whistle shrieking angrily, unaware that he’d missed the cab by inches but ridden straight through a studded gate of fire.

Whatever was happening was happening to George and Edie and the Gunner but not to the rest of London, not to normal everyday London. Normal everyday London just got on with getting home and going out and not making eye contact with anyone else, in case something odd happened.

Something odder than everyday odd was happening, of course. The flames were building a gate spread from side to side of Fleet Street. Or rather, they were swirling into a sharp-edged flame sculpture of a gatehouse with three openings underneath it. There was a wide central gate, with two narrow man-size arches on either side. Above the main gate rose a flattened classical arch with blocks of stone sharply outlined by different colored streaks of flame. On top of this arch was a gatehouse room, with an elegant window flanked by two alcoves, and on top of that a shallow arched roof. Even though he was terrified and obviously going mad again, George couldn’t help noticing that it was beautiful.

An ugly single-decker bus with a jointed middle drove through the side of the flame gatehouse, the driver blankly chewing gum with a sour expression on his face, unseeing eyes fixed on the back of the car in front.

“What is it?” Edie asked, eyes transfixed by the barrier.

“Temple Bar,” whispered the Gunner.

“What’s Temple Bar?”

“One of the old gates to the city. They took it down, hundred, more’n a hundred years ago. Put up that dragon instead. Same purpose though, I reckon—”

There was a crash from behind the gatehouse. The flames blurred and jumped, then sharpened their edges again. You could even see the studded panels in the sturdy gates.

“What purpose?” George croaked out of a dry throat.

“Guard the ways into the city. Keep out the unwanted.”

The wide gates beneath the central arch shook. Something reached over the spiked top and pulled angrily.

It was the dragon’s claw.

“Move!” shouted the Gunner, hand scrabbling for his holster.

And then all the magic and the beauty of the fire-building was gone, and terror returned as the gates wrenched open and the dragon stepped through the arch.

The building heat inside the beast had turned it from a dull metal monster to a shining white-hot dragon.

Its head swung hypnotically as it searched for someone, and then it stopped, finding George. The neck was swollen as the fire-crop beneath bulged the scales into an angry frill framing the burning, unavoidable eyes.

Everything in George’s body tried to run, but everything in his mind stopped sending the right signals. The Gunner grabbed him and pulled—and nothing happened. George seemed to have become as immovable as a rock, even to the Gunner’s great brass-bound muscles.

“Bloody hell!” said the Gunner again, this time with more disbelief in his voice.

The dragon’s head cocked back. Its mouth opened. The fangs sparkled like blue diamonds.

“No, you don’t,” growled the Gunner.

His gun hand snapped out, cocking the heavy revolver in one determined movement.

The dragon didn’t even look at him.

Blam!

The revolver bucked in his fist.

Splat.

The bullet hit the white-hot dragon where its heart might be, and melted on impact, splashing a darker color over the creature’s skin.

“Ah,” said the Gunner.

Blam! Blam! Blam!

Splat. Splat. Splat.

Three more bullets splashed across the dragon’s front, with as much effect as paintballs on a tank. The dragon looked down on the molten lead hissing across its chest, noticed the Gunner as if for the first time, and spat flame.

The Gunner spun and tried to grab George and Edie before the lance of fire hit. His sweeping fingertips grazed George but scooped up Edie just as the flame-burst punched into his shoulder and sent him spinning and rolling across the street, curled around her in a protective ball.

George couldn’t imagine the power behind a fire jet that could send a bronze man skittering across the ground like a crumpled paper cup being hosed into the gutter.

And he didn’t want to imagine what that felt like, because the dragon flamed again, and this time the fire was a different color—a kind of shimmering violet—and he had time to decide on the exact color because the flame didn’t go away but stood like a fiery wall, bisecting the road between him and Edie and the Gunner.

A lorry overtook a cyclist and drove right down the center of the wall of fire, which closed in behind it as it passed. The driver’s head turned and grinned toward George.

“Oi oi!” he shouted, and stuck out his tongue, making a rude licking motion.

“Arsehole!” replied a girl’s voice on the other side of George, and he dragged his eyes away from the dragon for a flicker, long enough to see a pretty blond girl smoothing a wind-caught dress back down over her legs as she struggled to control her cycle in the evening traffic that, horribly and inexplicably to George, seemed to be going about its own business and ignoring the dragon in their midst.

The dragon wasn’t ignoring George. It was watching him intensely. George still couldn’t move his legs. He had to shade his eyes to see the dragon, but when he did he was sure it looked different. Still angry, because that’s the way dragons are made, but something else. The heat shimmer coming off the creature made it hard to be sure, but it seemed to be raising an eyebrow. He didn’t know what that meant. It was probably trying to make its mind up on how to roast him, George decided bitterly—and then there it was again. The unwanted bit of himself, the black, biley-treacle taste in his mouth, the prickling behind his eyes, the dark cable that seemed to twist through him, the thing he didn’t think about, the thing he usually forgot was inside him, the thing he didn’t understand. The thing that made him angry.

“What?” he shouted.

The dragon’s eyebrow was definitely raised.

“What are you waiting for? Cooking instructions? Medium-rare or well-done? Make it well-done then, get it over faster!”

And then the dragon cocked its head, looked at him, and spat fire. It spat fire into its own front claws, which twisted and tumbled and turned the fire into a ball, and then it spun the fire in one claw, looking at George.

He breathed again. Maybe it wasn’t going to roast him. Maybe things were, unbelievably, going to be all right.

The white dragon cocked its arm and hurled the ball of wildfire straight at George.

Time seemed to go slow—or maybe, because George knew that time was about to be up for him, he savored the microseconds more and it just seemed like time was going slowly. He saw the bolt of flame spinning toward him in a long arc, and he knew from the rooted feeling of his feet that he was never going to be able to dodge it. And for a reason that had nothing to do with logic or sense, but everything to do with a lifetime of being the last boy picked for football and always being the goalie, he bunched his hands into fists and, throwing his shoulders one way, lashed out at the ball. He hit it a glancing blow, felt the hiss of fire as it made contact, a moment of searing heat, and then saw it spin away behind him.

The dragon roared and slashed a claw toward the ball, which spun faster and continued to curve, tighter this time, looping behind George and coming back around the other side of him in a gravity defying orbit.

And as it began to circle him, faster and faster, it leaked flame from where he had hit it, and where it leaked, the flame stood in the air and stayed, so that he found himself at the center of a rising cone of fire.

And very quickly he could see nothing of the rest of London beyond the flames, and was alone, trapped in a fiery tornado that whipped at his clothes and lashed at his hair, and sounded like an express train full of screaming people thundering around and around him. And despite himself, he jammed his hands over his ears and shut his eyes and added his own scream to the rising crescendo.

Upside down on the other side of the road, beyond the wall of violet flame, Edie opened her eyes. She was jammed under the hunched body of the Gunner, like the victim in a car crash. The Gunner’s helmet had come off and rocked upturned on the pavement in front of her like a black bowl. She shifted a little and saw his face was shmooshed on the concrete. She struggled to free herself. He turned and looked at her. She stopped struggling.

“You see what he did? The boy?” There was something like wonder leaking through the pain in his face. She shook her head.

“He was a goner. Dragon threw a fireball with his name on it, and he”—the Gunner winced—”he done something. . Dunno what, but he dodged it.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t sound convincing. He looked even less so as he painfully lifted his head from the ground and unkinked himself to let her free.

As soon as she rolled to her feet she saw what had changed.

The flame-built Temple Bar was fading in jerks, like a candle guttering out. All the fire was now concentrated on a vortex whirling around a small figure she knew was George. And standing in front of the blazing cone, claws raised to the sky, was the white dragon, somehow controlling and molding the fire, with its shield slung over its shoulder, flashing a blood-bright red cross over the road at them.

She turned to the Gunner, who was staggering to one knee. A jangling line of Hare Krishnas jogged between them, chanting and smiling and banging tambourines, oblivious of the cone of fire or the Gunner or Edie. She pointed at George.

“Can you save him?”

“Yes.”

He still didn’t sound convincing. His shoulder hung low and unmoving, still smoking from where the dragon had hit him. He winced as he fumbled his rain-cape over one shoulder and fumbled at the jangling bridle chains hanging there.

“You’re hurt!” she said, sounding strangely betrayed, somehow not wanting to believe it was possible.

“Yes,” he growled, this time convincingly. “Help get these bloody chains off me. …”

She saw he had only one hand that worked properly. Without thinking, she clambered up on his knee and reached under the folds of his cape, surprised at the way what looked like metal moved and felt like material. She tugged at the chains.

“What are you—?”

“Don’t talk. You talk too much. Listen.”

She was about to fire back an answer, when she saw his face. It was hurt, but he wasn’t looking at her angrily. For a moment he even looked kind.

“He’s got to get to the Black Friar. He’s in a pub at the end of Blackfriars Bridge.”

She kept looking at the cone of flame across the street.

“You’ll take him—” Edie said.

“No. I won’t. I don’t even know if this’ll work, but if it does I won’t be able to and you will. Your problem is the dragons.”

“There’s more than one?”

“There’s one guarding every street that leads into the City. And the problem—one of the problems—with the Black Friar, is that he’s in the City. So you can’t take the streets—”

“We can take the Underground—”

He clasped her arm.

“No. I dunno what or who George is, but if he’s who or what I think he might be, the only place more dangerous for him than aboveground is under it. Never, ever go underground, you got it? I done it once in the parking garage and we got away with it by blind luck and ruddy ignorance, but don’t do it again!”

Edie nodded.

“So if we can’t go by streets …”

He took the chains from her and looped them around his good fist, eyes on the fire and the dragon as he spoke.

“There was a road here before there was streets. It’s a wet road, but you take it. There ain’t much can save you once a taint’s got your number, but what’s uncanny and evil’s always hated two things: cold iron and running water. So your way ain’t by land. And one more thing—”

Edie pointed. Across the street, the dragon had lowered its arms. It flicked out a claw and gently sliced an opening in the cone of fire. They saw a brief image of George standing in the middle of the fire, and then the dragon stepped inside the burning wall, and the opening slapped shut behind it.

George felt a blast of cold air suck inside the cone and opened his eyes. And of course once he did, he wished he hadn’t, because the dragon was towering over him—and he would have screamed, but he was all screamed out; so he shut his mouth and clenched his teeth and all the screaming stopped at once, and he was alone in the spiral of flame with the dragon.

As he looked up, he saw its white head outlined against the disk of night sky at the top of the cone. And behind the head he saw the flashing light of a jet flying across London, and somehow the fact that there were still jets full of people being told to fasten their safety belts and eating airline food off those tiny trays made him shake his head in wonder.

The dragon mirrored his movement with its own head.

George shook his head again to see if that was what was happening. The dragon copied him. George found he was laughing, at least part laughing, part crying. And as he choked and snuffled, the dragon did the same, soundlessly pantomiming his motions.

George looked at the friendly blinking airplane light just about to leave the circle of normality above him, and tried very hard to wake up. He didn’t, and he got angry again.

“You’re not real!” he spat at the dragon, who was watching him very closely. He pointed at the sky.

“That’s real, that’s a plane and it’s real and science is real and jet engines and crappy food and pepper and salt in little packets and seat belts and bad movies with the cool bits taken out and boiled hard candy when you land and ears popping anyway and everything about that is real and NOT YOU!”

The dragon’s eyes changed and it roared something that might have been a wordless screech, but sounded a little like a hot metal throat trying to shout.

“RRREAL—”

The noise bounced around George and made him flinch. He looked into the creature’s mouth and saw a flame at the back of the throat, behind the tongue with its flat spear-tip end, like a pilot light waiting to ignite the stream of wildfire brewing inside the dragon’s fire-crop.

“NOT REAL!” shouted George, and spat—spitting being all that he could do in defiance of the inevitable. The spit sizzled and instantly evaporated off the chest of the dragon. He held his hand up to ward off the heat.

And the dragon suddenly snaked out a claw like a switchblade and jagged it over George’s outstretched hand so fast he couldn’t avoid it.

George had never felt pain like it. But he had imagined pain like it. It was as if all the bone-snapping, hand-shattering pain that he had expected, but miraculously not felt when he’d hit the head off the tiny dragon at the Natural History Museum was suddenly happening, only a thousand times more intensely. He felt his body spasm, totally out of his control, as he curled over his injured hand.

His mouth rictussed wide and wider, and his neck tendons snapped tight as whipcords, but no sound came out. It was pain past screaming. It was pain so bad that it became suddenly dull and distant, as if happening to someone else; and as darkness crept in on the edges of his sight, he welcomed it like a friend, though he knew he shouldn’t. And where he had felt fear and anger, he felt more sadness than he knew there had ever been in his life, and his heart slowed and shriveled under the world-crushing weight of it.

He sensed the dragon stepping over him, and then the last thing he saw—as his brain decided to focus on self-preservation and close down his eyesight—was a darkness that burst through the wall of fire in the shrinking center of his vision. And the final bit of George that was George, and not just the pain and the sadness, thought he recognized the shape of the darkness and wished he could remember why it wore a tin hat.

The Gunner leaped through the wall of flame and found himself on the dragon’s back. Before it could turn and throw him off, he scrambled as high as he could using the ladder of spines, his hobnailed boots kicking sparks off them as he pushed higher up the dragon, which was nearly twice his height.

It jerked around and roared.

George had tumbled to the ground in a motionless heap. The Gunner swung his good hand, and the chains of the bridle lashed down and around the muzzle of the dragon just as it puffed its neck out to blast him off it with a torrent of flame.

“No, you don’t!”

Grimacing with pain, he cinched the chain and pulled hard, muzzling the dragon. As it realized what was happening, the dragon tried to get a claw under its chin to rip the chain off, but the Gunner yanked harder, trapping the claw under the dragon’s jaw and jamming its mouth shut as the chain tightened.

The dragon flailed lopsidedly at the man on its back, and now it was its turn to buck and struggle. Its wings beat at the Gunner, but he rode it like a man in a rodeo trying to break a horse.

He gripped its shoulders with his knees, pressing down hard, pulling back on the bridle chains. The sharp scales beneath his legs began to spang upright as the pressure from the fire-crop built, like a boiler about to burst. The whole body of the dragon began to bristle like a porcupine as its scales all stood up. It shook more and more savagely. The Gunner arched back, hands grinding on the chains, pulling the dragon, like a man bending a bow.

Which was a mistake. He leaned so far back that the dragon’s tail was able to whip around the Gunner’s neck from behind him, and pull at him in turn, whipping him in different directions, trying to pull him apart.

He saw a small figure dart between the dragon’s legs and crouch over George.

Then the dragon staggered backward, and the Gunner couldn’t see George and Edie anymore. The dragon’s strategy of pulling the Gunner backward was a bad one in the end, because of course in trying to strangle the Gunner, he was adding his own strength to the Gunner’s pull on the muzzle, and the dragon desperately needed to open its mouth and relieve the pressure of its swollen fire-crop.

They crashed to the ground and scrabbled at each other. The Gunner’s grip slipped a little. Sparks shot out from between the dragon’s clenched teeth. One of the chain links melted on one side—the O of the link becoming a C, whose gap got wider as the dragon struggled to open its jaws and point its head toward the children.

The Gunner saw a round metal manhole cover in the road beside them. He jabbed his two fingers into the holes on it, and ripped it out of the tarmac.

“No you bloody don’t, snakey”

He wrenched the dragon’s head away from the children and forced it down into the manhole. Metal shrieked on metal as the two of them writhed against each other, and then there was a distinct ping as the C-link gave way and became an I, and the pent-up flame burst out of the dragon in an uncontrolled magma jet of pure wildfire, straight down into the sewer beneath the street.

The Gunner felt the back blast slam out of the manhole, searing at his face.

The jet of flame filled the sewer and raced along the main drain, spilling sideways, up and down into the pipes and drains that fed it. It traveled like the pressure wave in front of an explosion, swelling and finding new ways to burst out and spaces to expand into.

On the surface, still wrestling to keep the struggling dragon’s head underground, the Gunner had a street-level view of the fire’s progress. Flame gouted from drains all the way down each side of the street, and a hundred yards down the road, another manhole cover popped into the sky on top of a geyser of wildfire.

A truck’s front wheels bounced into the hole and out again, making the driver spill the packet of chips he was eating all over himself. Then there was a clang as the manhole cover landed in the back of his truck.

The Gunner turned back to look at George and Edie.

They were gone.