The Dragon Book (12 page)

“There’s something gold in here—” Smith reached for it, but Crankhandle whirled around with the tank in his hands.

“Ah-ah-ah! That’s my perquisite, sir. ‘Contents of said nests or caches,’ I said, didn’t I? Anything I found up there’s
mine
, see? Or I can just let the little dears loose again, and I shouldn’t think you’d want that, not with the spiteful mood they’re in.”

“All right, all right,” said Smith, but he brushed aside the rubbish for a better look anyway. His jaw dropped. In the bottom of the basket was a clutch of gold crown-pieces, a gold anklet, a silver bracelet set with moon-stones, a length of gold chain, three gold signet rings, the brass mouthpiece from a trumpet, assorted earrings …

“Wait a minute.” Smith grabbed out a gold stickpin, a skull with ruby eyes. “This is mine! Went missing from my washstand!”

“Mine now, mate,” said Crankhandle, shaking his head. “Those were my terms. Wyrmin steal bright metal; everybody knows that. Anyplace they nest, there’s going to be a hoard. Now you know how I can afford to do this free of charge.”

“Well yes, but …” Smith turned the stickpin in his fingers. “Come on. This was a gift. A gift from a demon-lord, if you want to know, and I wouldn’t want to offend him by losing it. Can’t I keep just this pin? Trade you for it.”

“Such as what?” Crankhandle was busy fastening the tank’s harness on his back.

“Lady of the house is a gourmet cook. Seriously, the Grandview’s restaurant rated five cups in the city guide. Exclusive, understand? All the lords and ladies are regulars here, so you can imagine the wine cellar’s stocked with nothing but the best. We’ll give you the finest table and serve you the finest meal you’ll ever eat in your life, eh? And whatever you like to drink, as much as you can hold!”

“Really?” Crankhandle’s eye gleamed. “Right, then; you get the table ready. I’m just going up to finish the job. I warn you, I’ve got a good appetite.”

HE wasn’t joking. Crankhandle set his elbows on the table and worked his way through a whole moor-fowl stuffed with rice and groundpeas, a crown roast of venison with a blackberry red wine reduction sauce, golden-fried saffron crab cakes, two glasses of apricot liqueur, and a quart and a half of porter. Smith played the companionable host and took his dinner of fried eel at the table with his guest, watching in awe as the man ate and drank. He took it on himself to have some fried eel sent out to Arvin as well, marooned in the garden keeping watch over the cages.

Refilling Crankhandle’s glass, Smith inquired: “How did you get into this line of business, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ha-ha!” Crankhandle belched, grinned, and placed a slightly unsteady finger beside his nose. “That’s the story, isn’t it? What’s for pudding? Got any fruitcake?”

Smith waved down one of the waiters and told him to bring out a fruitcake.

“How’d I get into my line of business. Well. Always interested in dragons, from the time I was a kid. I grew up back in the grainlands, see, way inland. Way upriver. And the dragons, you know, they’re bigger there—twice the size of these little buggers. I remember standing on the tail of my father’s cart and watching ’em cruise across the sky, just gliding, you know, on these scarlet wings. Most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. Ah!”

The waiter brought the fruitcake to the table. It was dark, solid, drenched in liquor, heavy as a couple of bricks and covered in molten sugar, and the mere sight of it was enough to give Smith indigestion. The waiter deftly set out a plate and took up his cake knife, poised to serve. “How big a slice would Sir like?”

“Leave the whole thing,” said Crankhandle, a bit testily. The waiter looked sidelong at Smith, who nodded. The waiter set the fruitcake on the table and left. Crankhandle seized the knife and, a little unsteadily, sawed out a slice. Gloating, he held it up to the candle, so the light shone through the red and amber and green fruit. “Look at that! Looks like jewels. Looks like a dragon’s trove. Nothing about them isn’t beautiful, dragons.” He stuffed the slice of cake in his mouth and cut himself another.

“So anyway—I wanted to know everything about ’em, growing up. Asked everybody in my village what they knew about dragons. Nobody knew much. Used to watch the dragons dive in the river for fish. Found out the sorts of things they like to eat when they can’t get fish, found out what they physic themselves with when they’re ill, that sort of thing.

“And then, one time, I followed one back to the cliffs where it nested and climbed up there to have a look, and that was when I found its hoard. All this gold! Nobody in my village had any, you can be sure. I reached in and grabbed this goblet with rubies on it—got my arm bitten pretty badly too—and carried it home.

“The schoolmaster had a look at it and said it was
old
. Come out of some old king’s tomb somewhere, he said. The mayor said it likely had a curse on it and he confiscated it, to keep the curse off me, he said, but he was a greedy bastard and I knew he wanted it for himself. Pour me some more of that apricot stuff, eh?”

Smith obliged him. Crankhandle grinned craftily, took a mouthful of liqueur, and leaned quickly toward the candle. He swallowed, belched. The candle flame shot out sideways for a second, a jet of fire.

“Is that how dragons do it?” said Smith.

“No. See, that’s a popular misconception about dragons, that they breathe fire. I’m here to tell you they don’t, and I’d know. Been studying ’em my whole life. I know more about dragons than anybody else in the world, now.” Crankhandle cut himself a huge slab of cake, took half of it in one bite, and chewed thoughtfully.

“Such as?”

“Such as, they’re smart. They can learn things. I learned to train ’em. Mind you, it isn’t easy”—Crankhandle pointed at the patch covering his eye socket—“because they’re willful, and temperamental, and quick. You have to want them more than an eye, or a fingertip, or an earlobe. The boy’s learning that. The other thing is, you can only really train wyrmin to do better what they already want to do anyway.” He reached for the knife to cut the last quarter of fruitcake into eighths, changed his mind, and simply picked up the whole wedge and bit into it.

“Well. So I learned all there was to know about dragons, see? Discovered a secret, and I didn’t learn it from any priests or mages either, I worked it out for myself. There’s something dragons need in their diets—and I’m not telling you what it is, but it’s either animal, vegetable, or mineral, ha-ha—and if they don’t get it, they don’t grow. That’s why they’re so puny, here by the sea. Lots of fish, but no Mystery Ingredient. So I worked out a special food formula for dragons, right? A little of this, a little of that, a lot of the Mystery Ingredient, and that’s my bait.

“Not even the boy knows the recipe. I make it up myself, in a locked room. And the little bastards love it! Can’t get enough of it. Have to be careful doling it out to them, because they do get bigger when they eat it, and you can spend a fortune on cages. But oh, how they come to the bait!”

“So … you travel around with this stuff, cleaning out wyrmin colonies, and collecting all the gold they’ve stolen and hoarded,” said Smith. “You must have earned a fortune by now! But if it’s that dangerous, why don’t you retire?”

“Haven’t made enough yet,” said Crankhandle, pouring himself some more liqueur. “I’m saving it up. You might say I’ve got a hoard of my own. Besides, this isn’t where the real money is!”

“Oh no?”

“No indeed. Rings and pins and bracelets … ha. That’s the petty stuff the little ones bring in. They’re not strong enough to lift anything bigger. You don’t get a real payoff until you’ve got the big ones troving for you.”

“Troving?”

“Going out looking for gold. It’s instinctive. The big dragons where I grew up, they could tell where there was old gold. Tombs, mounds, other dragons’ hoards. You should see
their
nests! I told you how I got this, didn’t I?” He rolled up his oilskin sleeve to reveal a brawny arm, tattooed with swirling patterns, and a distinct U-shape of white, scarred tooth marks.

“You did. Stealing a cup.”

“Right, well, I learned that what you do is, you get ’em when they’re little enough to be easily managed, and you
train
’em, see? You get ’em used to you. You get ’em so they believe they’d better do what you want ’em to do, to get those lovely wyrmin treats. And then you feed ’em so they get of a bigness to raid tombs and such, and you take ’em back into the inlands where the old places are and you let ’em go.

“Then it’s just a matter of making a chart of where they build their nests and going around every now and then to see what they’ve collected for you. They remember
me,
old Uncle Treats, and I dump out a great sack of special formula for ’em, and while they’re busy gobbling it down, I can take what I like out of the hoard. Works every time!”

“You ought to be stinking rich pretty soon, all the same,” said Smith in awe. “Going to retire and pass your secret on to the boy?”

Crankhandle made a face. He drained his glass and shook his head. “No. He’s a bit of a fool, really. Good enough for pulling the cart, but he’s too soft for the work. He
loves
dragons, like they were people. And, you know, you really can’t love, in this business.” He reached for the emptied bottle and tilted it, sticking his tongue up the neck to get the last drops.

“You’re a lot like a dragon, yourself,” said Smith.

Crankhandle belched and grinned, and his gold teeth glinted in the candlelight. “Why, thank you,” he said.

THAT night, Smith put his stickpin away in a drawer. It had occurred to him that there was another thing Crankhandle might have trained his wyrmin to do, and that was to fly through open windows and rob houses. The more he thought about it, the more he wondered whether the sudden infestation at the Grandview had happened entirely by chance.

But the dragons did not return, at least. When next Milady from the pink palace stopped in as one of a party ordering lunch on the terrace, she asked, with an unpleasant smile, whether she was likely to be attacked by an animal again. Smith assured her that all the dragons had been exterminated, which seemed to please her.

SIX months later, Smith had business down in Rakut Square. He glanced at the base of the monument as he walked by, and saw no cart. He thought to himself that Crankhandle must have moved on to another city.

He was a little surprised, therefore, as he walked back toward the Grandview, to find the boy Arvin mending a fishing net. The little dragon was still perched on his shoulder, sleepily basking in the sunlight. She opened one slit-pupiled eye to regard Smith, and then closed it, dismissing him as not worth her attention.

“Hello!” said Smith. “Where’s your master these days?”

Arvin looked up at him. He shook his head sadly. “Dead,” he replied.

“Dead! How?”

“He t-told you about the b-bait we used, how it m-makes dragons bigger?”

“Right, he did.”

“It makes them s-smarter, too.”