Paint Your Dragon by Tom Holt

its defenders, the dragon was pleased to discover that doing good can be fun. Virtue, he’d heard humans say, is its own reward. Yes. He could relate to that. And there were an awful lot of cities left; so much thatch, so little time. By the time he’d torched Caerleil, Caermerdin, Caerusc and Carbolic, he reckoned he’d probably earned a medal, maybe a bishopric - not that he knew exactly what a bishopric was. If asked to venture a guess, based on recent experience, he’d have said it was probably like a hayrick but easier to ignite.
    Imagine his distress, therefore, when he learned, during the final carbonisation of the beautiful Midland city of Rhydychen, that he wasn’t doing good at all, but rather the opposite. At Rhydychen, they sent out the archbishop and an even score of priests in purple dressing gowns, all of whom tried to dispose of him by swearing a lot and ringing little bells. In the few seconds before they faded away and were replaced by a residue of light grey ash, he distinctly heard them refer to him as the Evil One, the Spawn of Satan and all sorts of other unsavoury names. It almost (but not quite) took his breath away.
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    The dragon paused. He was aware that Bianca was staring at him, her mouth open.
    â€˜Sorry,’ he said, ‘am I going a bit fast for you? Stop me if I am.’
    â€˜All those ... people,’ Bianca said quietly. ‘You killedthem.’
    â€˜To a certain extent, yes. If only someone had had the common sense to explain the rules to me earlier, none of that would have happened. I must say, for a dominant species your lot can be thick as bricks sometimes.’
    Bianca shook her head as if trying to wake up. ‘Hundreds of thousands of human beings,’ she said. ‘And you—’
    â€˜Ants.’
    â€˜I beg your pardon?’
    â€˜I’ve seen you do it,’ the dragon replied. ‘Not you personally, of course, but humans in general. What you do is, you boil a kettle, you stand over the nest the ants have thoughtlessly built under your kitchen floor, and you—’
    â€˜That‘s-’
    The dragon nodded. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘You forget, I’m from a different species. And I didn’t make the rules. More to the point, I didn’t even know what the rules were until I found out, quite by chance. And once I’d found out, of course, I stopped.’
    â€˜You did?’
    â€˜Well, of course. Back then, you see, all I ever wanted to do was the right thing.’
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    In response to his polite request for a copy of the rule book, the dragon got three cartsful of angry letters from the Pope (which he dismissed as a load of bulls) and a challenge to single combat. Good versus Evil. The big event.
    The dragon thought about it and then scorched his reply in fifteen-foot letters on Salisbury Plain: It’s a deal.
    Humanity nominated its champion: Dragon George Cody, Albion’s premier pest control operative, recently dubbed Saint by His Holiness in Rome. Naturally, the dragon knew Cody. In fact, it was Cody’s absence from Caerleon, Caerusc, Tintagel and Caerdol that had spoiled four otherwise perfect barbecues.
    During the week between the issue of the challenge and the date fixed for the fight, the dragon camped out in a pleasant little valley in the Brecon Beacons. There was a nice roomy cave, a cool, fresh brook and a little grove of trees to lie up in during the warm afternoons. George, no doubt, was frantically training somewhere, but the dragon couldn’t be bothered with all that stuff. After all, this was the showdown between the two diametrically opposing principles of the Universe. Doing anything to influence the outcome struck the dragon as faintly blasphemous.
    Two days before the fight, the dragon left the shade of the trees and waddled down to the brook for a drink. Just as he was about to take a long, cool suck, he noticed a funny, familiar smell. He hesitated. He