Paint Your Dragon by Tom Holt Page A

looked about.
    The surface of the brook, he noticed, was covered in dead fish.
    Half an hour of nosing about revealed a pile of empty Wormex™ cans, concealed under a thick mass of brambles half a mile downstream. For a long time the dragon lay beside the water, his brows furrowed in perplexed thought. Surely not, he kept saying to himself. Impossible. Out of the question. Absolutely no way. For pity’s sake, what was the point of arranging a contest between Good and Evil and then trying to cheat?
    Twenty-one empty cans and a streamful of dead trout.
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    The dragon had stopped speaking and was looking at her, one eyebrow raised. Bianca shook her head again.
    â€˜All right,’ she said. ‘But the survival of the human race was at stake. You said yourself—’
    â€˜No.’ The dragon’s voice was soft and reasonable, with just a dash of perplexity. ‘No, it wasn’t, that’s the whole point. What was at stake - as set out in black and white in the super limited edition official pre-fight souvenir brochure - was the contrasting merits of Good and Evil. And that’s what I simply couldn’t get my head around, try as I might. Of course,’ he went on, waving to the barman for another bottle, ‘if I’d been a cynic I’d have had no trouble explaining it away. You see, as a battle between species, survival of the fittest and all, it was a foregone conclusion. In the red corner, a huge, fire-breathing, flying, invulnerable dragon. In the blue corner, lots of little squishy things who fry if you sneeze on them and starve if you burn their crops. But as a contest between moral forces, it’d be a foregone conclusion the other way. Particularly if the bad guy forfeited the match by not showing up, on account of being home dead with severe gastritis. But that wasn’t the way I saw it.’
    â€˜No?’
    The dragon shook his head. ‘Still wouldn’t have made any sense,’ he said. ‘Think about it. Your entire species is wiped out, except for you. There’s got to be a reason, surely. If there wasn’t a reason, you’d go stark staring mad just thinking about it.’
    Bianca intercepted the fresh bottle and took a long, serious pull at it. ‘All right,’ she said, wiping off the neck and passing it over. ‘So then what happened?’
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    Well (said the dragon), I found another stream that didn’t smell of roast almonds, had a good long slurp and went to sleep.
    When I woke up, there were five humans standing over me. I took a deep breath, but they waved a bit of white rag on a stick at me. I believe that’s supposed to make you fireproof.
    They explained that they represented a syndicate of humans who earned their living by making bets on things - horse-races, chess matches, witch duckings and, apparently, confrontations between Good and Evil. They had a proposition to put to me, they said. Something, they said, to our mutual advantage.
    It was just as well they said the last bit, because if they hadn’t they’d have found themselves floating on the breeze like wee grey snowflakes two seconds later. As it was, for a moment I reckoned that at last the humans had finally got their act together and worked out some way dragons and people could share the same ball of wet rock without having to snuff each other out. Actually, I was wrong. But the proposition was interesting.
    They told me that the big fight had attracted a lot of interest in gambling circles. The trouble was, once the news broke that I hadn’t drunk the Wormex™ cocktail and was accordingly still somewhat alive, the odds had been redrawn on the basis that Saint George was going to be fondued and I would inevitably win. You could get two thousand to one on Cody, no trouble at all, but if you wanted to bet on me nobody was prepared to take your money. This, the betting men said, struck them as a wonderful opportunity cunningly disguised