The Last Dragonslayer Read online

  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.

  Anger

  * * *

  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.

  The New Order

  * * *

  ‘Is it dead?’ said a voice.

  ‘Not it, she,’ said a second.

  ‘I can never tell the difference. Is she dead, then?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  I opened my eyes and found myself staring into the kindly face of not one but two Dragons. They were not that much different to Maltcassion except considerably smaller and a great deal younger. My temper had left me; all I was left with was an aching body and throbbing temples.

  ‘Have either of you a paracetamol?’ I croaked, my throat feeling as though I had slept with a toad in my mouth.

  The Dragon who had spoken first gave a sort of harrumphing cough that I took to be a snigger.

  ‘We are glad you still have your sense of humour.’

  I sat up.

  ‘My sense of humour I kept,’ I replied, clutching my head and groaning. ‘What I lost was Maltcassion, the Quarkbeast, the Dragonlands and most of free Wales.’

  ‘You could do with a drink,’ said the second Dragon. He nodded and a glass of water appeared beside me.

  ‘How did you do that?’ I asked suddenly.

  ‘Magic,’ replied the Dragon.

  I smiled and sipped at it gratefully.

  ‘Hmm,’ said the first of the Dragons as he unfurled his wings and looked at them thoughtfully, the same way a baby might examine its own foot and wonder what it was for.

  ‘Two of you?’ I asked. ‘Two from one? Is that how it works?’

  ‘Usually,’ replied the second Dragon. It sneezed violently and a small jet of flame leapt across the clearing and ignited a shrub.

  ‘W
hoops,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to get that under control.’

  The two Dragons sniffed around, eager to investigate their new world. Of Maltcassion there was no sign, just a forehead-jewel on top of a pile of grey ash that was being blown by a light wind into the Dragonlands.

  ‘Shh!’ I said. ‘Listen!’

  They both cocked an ear into the breeze and frowned.

  ‘We don’t hear anything.’

  ‘That’s exactly it!’ I replied. ‘The guns. They’ve stopped.’

  ‘Of course,’ countered the Dragon. ‘The Old Magic is unwoven. New Magic has taken its place. The force-field is back up but we may pass freely in both directions. The Dragonlands are still Dragonlands. But I have no manners. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Feldspar Axiom Firebreath IV, and this is Colin.’

  Colin the Dragon bowed solemnly and said:

  ‘We would like to thank you, Miss Strange, for without your fortitude and adherence to duty, dear Maltcassion really would have been the last Dragon.’

  I thought for a moment, trying to make sense of the strange course of events. I had lost my temper in a big way; I was confused.

  ‘I wasn’t chosen for my purity, was I?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ replied Feldspar. ‘But don’t be disappointed. It’s as well that true virtue is rare, for it would have to be balanced by the purest evil. The Dragon Council chose well. I would never have guessed in a million years that you were a Berserker.’

  I looked at them both in turn.

  ‘A Berserker? Me?’

  ‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’

  I had no idea, of course. How could I? Life at the convent had always been sheltered and happy. I had never had cause to lose my temper. Unbeknown to me I was a member of a rare class of fearless warriors – a person who could draw energy from those about them during uncontrollable bouts of rage and channel it with terrifying violence against a foe. If I let it be known I was a Berserker, I would either find myself inducted into the army or confined to a psychiatric hospital, my mind kept numb with marzipan. I shuddered at the prospect.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Berserkers have nothing to fear if they can control their anger, Jennifer. You would be surprised how many concealed Berserkers walk among the citizenry. You have a gift. Learn to use it wisely.’

  ‘So you planned all this?’

  ‘It was a grand plan, Jennifer, a plan forty decades in the making. When Shandar imprisoned us we knew that as individuals we could do nothing to unweave the strong magic. Dragons have always been renewed by death. Kill one and two rise in its place. Mu’shad Waseed didn’t know that but Shandar did. That’s why he didn’t want you to kill Maltcassion. A Dragon that dies of old age leaves no offspring.’

  ‘So any time in the past four hundred years a Dragonslayer could have killed a Dragon and added one more to the population?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have done much good. Two Dragons imprisoned instead of one? No; we needed to do more. We needed a spell to overcome all that Shandar had done and a little bit more besides. A spell of almost incalculable size and complexity. A spell that could release us and also recharge the power of wizardry, lest Shandar return to make good his promise to destroy the Dragons. He is an evil man, but an honourable one, and twenty dray-weights of gold is a sizeable chunk of change – and I’m not sure he’s the sort of Wizard who likes giving refunds.’

  ‘Big Magic.’

  ‘Precisely. But Big Magic is unpredictable stuff, and we were still without the vast quantity of raw wizidrical energy to make it work. Shandar cast the spell, so we would need more than the power of Shandar to undo it. Such a power is spread too thinly upon this planet to be useful – we needed to find a way to collect it.’

  ‘Like the grains of gold on the beach,’ I murmured, remembering Mother Zenobia’s words.

  ‘Just so. Valuable but essentially worthless since you can’t extract it. The power that comes closest to the energy that makes up what we call magic is human emotion. The power in one person is negligible, but a large group of people can generate an almost limitless amount of energy.’

  ‘Emotion? You mean like love?’

  ‘Powerful, I agree,’ conceded Feldspar, ‘but impossible to generate artificially. Avarice, on the other hand, is far more simple to create. All we needed to do was gather together a lot of humans and the tantalising possibility of something for nothing.’

  ‘The claims,’ I whispered. ‘The Dragonlands.’

  ‘Precisely. At eleven fifty-nine and fifty-five seconds there were eight million people staring anxiously at their watches, their hearts beating faster, the sweat raised on their brows in expectation of claiming enough land to retire. Greed is all powerful, greed conquers all. Greed channelled the Big Magic; greed set us free.’

  ‘But why leave so much to chance?’

  ‘Big Magic works in mysterious ways, Jennifer. If you push destiny it has a nasty habit of pushing back. All things must come together, in confluence. There had to be you, death by Exhorbitus and all that raw emotion. Once Maltcassion was sure you were ready, he used the last of the Dragon’s magic to send out the premonition of his own death and a broad feeling of greed that caught on like a virus. He knew a bit about ConStuff and a lot about human nature. Once the crowds were gathered the death of a Dragon would kickstart the spell, with you as the Berserker to draw the power from those around you and Exhorbitus to channel the power. I think you’ll agree that it all turned out rather well.’

  I digested what he had said. Maltcassion had sown, farmed and then harvested the emotional energy from eight million people. The Dragons had defeated the most powerful wizard the world had ever known, and taken over four hundred years to do it. Maltcassion had given his life to make it happen. I sighed.

  ‘We sense your sorrow, Jennifer. If it’s any consolation there is much in us that was Maltcassion. He hasn’t gone for good, just, well, fragmented slightly.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Well,’ said Colin, ‘the Dragonslayer’s work is done. We will live here and grow strong. We want only peace with humans and have much to teach you. You will come and see us, and you will be our ambassador. We thank you again for all you have done.’

  I picked up Exhorbitus from where it had fallen. It was a fine weapon, worthy of a Berserker if he or she were ever to have need of it. When I had grown older and was stronger, perhaps I might even learn to wield it with skill. I bowed to both Dragons using the traditional method of departure and they returned the compliment. I walked a few paces then turned back. There was still one question I wanted to ask.

  ‘Maltcassion used a word just before he died. He called me a Gwanjii.’

  ‘Ah,’ replied Feldspar solemnly, ‘that is an old Dragon word. A word that one Dragon might use to another perhaps twice in his lifetime.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means friend.’

  The End of the Story

  * * *

  I drove back to the marker stones to find that the avaricious spell had been broken. Everyone was packing up to leave, wondering why they had sat on a hillside for five days drinking stewed tea and eating stale cake. The landships and artillery stood silent, the soldiers waiting for orders to advance that never came. The Berserkers had stopped hitting each other with bricks and were calming themselves by doing tricks with yo-yos.

  Wizard Moobin met me as I stepped across the boundary. He was grinning wildly and shook my hand vigorously.

  ‘You did it!’ he shouted as he hugged me.

  ‘At a price, Moobin, at a price.’

  He guessed my meaning and wrapped a blanket about my shoulders. I was shaking badly and had a fever. My throat was badly inflamed; I was to sleep for almost three days.

  Within a week only a sea of wastepaper and acres of mud around the Dragonlands gave you any idea that eight million people had eagerly awaited an event that never took place. King Snodd and Brecon did not
go to war, or at least, not then. Magic had returned to the planet with added vigour; long-retired wizards came back to the calling and renewed their licences. Every one of the sorcerers at Zambini Towers found their powers increased dramatically and it consequently made it much easier to hire out their talents.

  I gave the entire Dragonslayer merchandising rights to the Troll Wars Widows Association, which made very good use of it. We often see the Dragons flying across the town as they explore the land, and I noted that the Consolidated Useful Stuff Land Development Corporation was made bankrupt a month later.

  After some legal wranglings and a week in prison I was granted a reluctant pardon by the King and returned to run the Kazam Magic Agency, where both Tiger Prawns and I remain – after several adventures – to this day. I keep the sword Exhorbitus in a cupboard in case I have any need for it in the future, and I am careful never to lose my temper. I give as much time and energy to the Berserkers’ Benevolent Fund as I can but never tell anyone why. It’s safer that way. I was delighted to speak at Mother Zenobia’s 182nd birthday two months later, although we told her it was only her 160th in case she got depressed. Transient Moose is still hanging around Zambini Towers, the Mysterious X became more mysterious and Lady Mawgon remains our most aggressive critic. The Great Zambini has still not reappeared and, luckily, neither has the Mighty Shandar – but we hold frequent strategy meetings on what to do if he does.

  As for the Quarkbeast, without whom there would be no Jennifer Strange and thus no Big Magic or Dragons, we thought it would be fitting to raise a large statue in his honour outside Zambini Towers. Several people screamed and fainted at the unveiling and it often frightens animals and small children.

  I think it’s what he would have wanted.

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