The Crawling Abattoir Page 3

  Trevor ducked, covering his face until the barrage ended. He opened his eyes and stared straight into the dragon’s face. The dragon cocked his head and opened his mouth.

  Trevor ran, unfortunately straight for the blocked entrance, that being the only way out. This was certainly a manifestation of the instinct that had gotten him shot down twice. This was definitely the very wrong stuff.

  The dragon coiled his tail around him three times. Trevor still tried to run, even after he was lifted off the ground and turned round to face the wide black eyes twenty feet above the floor.

  Trevor cringed.

  “Do you always flee in terror from superior officers?” asked the dragon.

  Trevor stopped cringing.

  “Excuse me?” he said. He tried wiggling his arms free of the coils, but failed. The dragon had long practice restraining squirming military types. “You can talk?”

  “Group Captains usually can,” said the dragon.

  “Group Captain?”

  “Group Captain Taximagulus Drake, to be precise.”

  Trevor’s right shoulder spasmed reflexively. This time the dragon loosened his coils. Trevor saluted.

  “Flying Officer Howard Trevor reporting for duty, sir!”

  Taximagulus held Trevor a bit further away, angling him under a lantern, squinting at him.

  “You’re my wingman? My executive officer, my number one, my deputy, my support staff, my ground crew, my first command? You’re my strong right arm? My sword and shield? You’re my aerial knight errant? What I mean to say is, you’re Flying Officer Howard Trevor? I was expecting someone taller, someone a trifle more… warlike. No offense, you understand.”

  “None taken,” said Trevor.

  The dragon smiled.

  Trevor fainted.

  Trevor woke up, but he didn’t open his eyes. He lay still. His bed was not money, a cushion of fifty-pound notes and French francs and wheelbarrows of worthless Weimar marks with more zeroes than a soccer tournament. He was not sleeping in a cave with a dragon who was his new Group Captain. He wasn’t learning to ride a dragon into combat.

  He wasn’t doing any of these things. Not at all.

  He was experiencing just a bit of mist and moss left over in his brain from a nightmare on the dreaming moors of his subconscious. That was all. Just a little slipperiness underfoot from the remnants of sleep condensing like dew as he awakened, a few dream-scratches still stinging from the brambles and thorns and sharp stones on which he had nicked himself as he fled a dream-dragon. That was all. The shrieking of the wind as the dragon carried him aloft was gone, and his stomach no longer inverted time and again like an hourglass during a long, dark night of dragon flight-training.

  He was sore. He was chafed, as if from sitting on scales for hours. His hands were cut and callused, as if from clutching horns and spikes for dear life during dragon-rolls and reptilian Immelmanns. He felt as if he actually had spent the last two days learning to ride a dragon, which would have been a damn fool thing to do, of course, as well as a damn sight more difficult than riding a Spitfire, because he didn’t have to swing a Crusader’s broadsword around inside a cockpit.

  So there wasn’t any dragon.

  He was happy to have got that all sorted out.

  He smiled and stretched and opened his eyes.

  Taximagulus loomed over him.

  “Rise and shine, Flying Officer. It’s dark, time to continue our training. Let’s hop to it.”

  Trevor closed his eyes.

  “It’s a dream. Really, it’s a dream,” he whispered.

  “No, no, it’s all quite real. Dragons, Nazis, magical swords, terrifying aerial warfare. Real down to the last swastika,” said Taximagulus, sounding irritated, rummaging through piles of treasure.

  Trevor sat up, every muscle in his body screaming.

  “Bloody hell,” he gasped.

  He clutched his left ribs, where a dragon-wing had slammed him. His waist and shoulders hurt where the leather harness cinched and buckled him secure during Taximagulus’ rolls and banks and inversions. His muscles felt like mercury from the weight of the sword, like an iron oar.

  He stood up, in stages, flexing one muscle at a time. A saber clanged onto the floor at his feet, and he hopped backwards. Another sword, a Japanese katana, dropped onto the banknotes.

  “Have a care,” he yelled. “You nearly spitted me.”

  Taximagulus fished another sword out of a pile and tossed it over his shoulder at Trevor.

  “Your sword was too big, you said. Too heavy, you said. I have others. I have smaller swords for smaller warriors.”

  “Where’d you get all these?”

  A ceremonial scimitar encrusted with diamonds landed at Trevor’s feet.

  The dragon eyed him and grinned.

  “Never mind,” said Trevor, picking up a Scottish claymore. “I don’t want to know.”

  A filigreed Spanish rapier stuck through a wad of francs near his feet, its hilt quivering.

  “That’s enough,” he called out. “This one will do nicely.”

  He waved the claymore over his head. He slashed and stabbed the air around him as if he had been set down in the middle of the German General Staff. Very warlike.

  “Why am I using a sword, anyway?” he asked. “Why can’t I just shoot this confounded German, and then you can do whatever it is you do to get rid of his dragon?”

  Taximagulus rolled his eyes.

  “Be my guest. Shoot the bloody German all you like, but it won’t do you any good. I’m immune to bullets, and when you’re touching me, you’re immune as well. The same goes for Tencther and his miserable German. Magic, you know.

  “Swords are different. I feel the warmth of the warrior through the steel; I feel the sinews that wrap around the handle; I feel the strength that animates the blade. That isn’t the way of things with machine-guns. Death isn’t mass-produced with dragons. It all comes down to blood and cracked bones and leaking marrow. The short answer is, you’re going to need a sword. Trust me.”

  “Who’s Tencther?”

  “Tencther is the black dragon, our malevolent antagonist. He’s an old acquaintance.”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course I know him. How many dragons do you think there are in the world?”

  “Two days ago, I would have said none,” said Trevor, swirling the razory claymore around his head.

  “Be careful with that thing,” said Taximagulus. “It’s not a toy. You’ll put somebody’s eye out.”

  The dragon ducked.

  Trevor stopped.

  “Why is it that swords can hurt you, but bullets can’t?”

  “That’s the bloody saint’s fault,” said the dragon. “Centuries and centuries ago, this short fellow, about your height, walks up to me and pulls out a sword. The name’s George, St. George, he says, and then he starts having at me without so much as a How Do You Do. I hadn’t done a thing to provoke him, either.

  “Did you know that saints don’t sweat? No fear. Makes them very nasty customers in a fight. Swords had never hurt me before. No weapon had, until this pissant little priest got his bloody spiritual hands on one.

  “Repent this, redeem that, and a whole lot of long-winded, Latin holiness, and just like that swords can cut me. Unpleasant surprise, I’ll tell you. The short of it was, I was so shocked that he won the fight going away. Very embarrassing, indeed.

  “He said he’d let me live, but only if I switched sides, renounced the Evil Warden of the Pits of Hell, helped out the little people, built a few interspecies bridges, that sort of thing. I joined up for the duration, you could say. I could only help the English, though. He wasn’t so much of a saint that he didn’t retain his national pride.”

  The dragon picked up the saddle and harness contraption that Trevor used to ride on his back, looking like it belonged on an octopus.

  “Do you absolutely require this thing?” he asked. “It chafes my shoulders terribly.”

&nbs
p; “I’m not happy about it either,” said Trevor, frowning. “But I don’t see any way around it. It’s practically impossible to fight even when I am strapped on. I don’t see how the wretched German does it.”

  Taximagulus swung the saddle around with his claw, upside-down, in circles, the leather straps flapping against each other.

  “I don’t suppose you would consider letting me grip you in my claw?” he said, looping the saddle around. “You’d be perfectly safe. Treat you like an egg, I swear. I could just sort of… shove you into the German’s face at the right moment.”

  The dragon practiced a little fencing with the saddle, in lieu of Trevor.

  “I’d rather not,” said Trevor.

  “It’s a brilliant idea,” said the dragon. “Really it is.”

  Trevor smiled, looking at the saddle and harness.

  “I’ve got a better one,” he said.

  “Very ingenious,” said Taximagulus, circling his hill at three hundred feet. “And comfortable. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “I hope it works in combat,” shouted Trevor over the wind.

  “Good point,” said Taximagulus. “And one we can test in a few minutes.”

  “You see Tencther?”

  “No, but I see German planes. Tencther will be around them somewhere. I would be.”

  Trevor loosened the claymore in its sheath. He checked his pistol carefully, useless or no, so it didn’t drop into the cold deep currents of darkness below.

  He had a sudden, uneasy thought.

  “What about RDF?” he shouted, meaning radar. “Won’t they see us? I don’t want to be fighting off Hurricanes and Spitfires as well as Germans.”

  Taximagulus laughed.

  “They’ll see us, all right, but I don’t fit any profiles. They think I’m a loose barrage balloon, or a gaggle of geese, or a gremlin. Which is nonsense, of course, since gremlins never fly this low. They’ll chalk us up to clutter or a burnt-out vacuum tube or eye-strain. Trust me.”

  Trevor nodded, but he felt naked.

  “There he is,” said Taximagulus.

  “Where?” yelled Trevor, swiveling his head, drawing his claymore.

  “Two o’clock low,” said the dragon. “There are two Messerschmitts, damaged by the look of them, and Tencther is playing rearguard, at a discreet distance. He hasn’t seen us yet.”

  Taximagulus banked right, slithering through air like oil through an S-shaped pipe.

  “Tally-ho,” said the dragon.

  Trevor gripped the claymore with both hands, a small tartan ribbon on the hilt fluttering in the dragon-wash.

  Trevor saw Tencther, bigger than Taximagulus, but that could have been because he was jet, obsidian, outer-darkness, Stygian black, and his serpentine edges disappeared into the folds of night. Trevor saw better than usual tonight. He saw with dragon-sight. He saw the tracery of veins under Tencther’s scales; he saw heat; he saw hot blood.

  They closed. Trevor felt Tencther’s blood like a hearth in the sky, warming the wind. He saw the German, leaning forty-five degrees forward against the wash of Tencther’s speed, sometimes obscured by wings, sometimes clear.

  Taximagulus charged, spinning his body like a bullet, boring in on Tencther’s wing-root. Trevor heard Tencther’s black wings beat, like sails bellowing against spars.

  Tencther finally saw the charge, the German a second later. The black dragon stopped, just stopped in mid-air. He backed his black wings and slowed to nothing, like a shred of black silk drifting through the air, but Taximagulus curved, flexed, crooked himself into a double-twist like a helix and countered Tencther’s maneuver.

  He flew over the black dragon, his spin perfectly timed to clear Trevor’s line of sight, to free his sword arm.

  Trevor hung below Taximagulus’ chest, suspended in a parachute harness like a net that supported his body and legs. He flew lying flat, like an American comic-book super-hero.

  The German was right in front of him, still hauling out his broadsword. Trevor swung the claymore and low-bridged the German with all his own force and Taximagulus’ momentum behind the blade, and he felt nothing but air.

  He missed.

  “Damn!” he yelled, and he heard a whipcrack and a thump behind him. “By God, I missed! Go back, turn around, make another pass, fast, faster, before they recover, as fast as you can.”

  Taximagulus banked right.

  Trevor brought the sword up to his face, as if it had a hole in it, as if it had betrayed him, but the blade was covered in blood from tip to tang. His hands were red, and his arms and chest were red, as if he’d been hit by a cannonball. The smell of blood bellied out his nostrils and lungs like sudden spring.

  “So that’s how a dragon kills,” he whispered. “I didn’t even feel it. So easy.”

  He whipped his head around, searching for the German. Tencther twisted in a mid-air tangle, dripping blood, some German, some dragon. Taximagulus had scored as well with claw and tail.

  Tencther curved his mouth around and ripped the pilot’s chair off his back and dropped it, along with what remained of the pilot. The top half of the German, apparently the Waffe half, because it obviously wasn’t the Luft half, tumbled to the ground, trailing a mist of blood like a blown-out, red parachute.

  The claymore had cut him clean in two.

  “Like a speech in a foreign language,” marveled Trevor. “Went right through him.”

  They flew straight at Tencther again, who ran after the Messerschmitts.

  “He’s getting away,” yelled Trevor, his blood up. The claymore trembled in his hands. His voice trembled in his throat. He trembled in his flying harness. “Faster. Go faster. Catch him!”

  “He’s not getting away,” said Taximagulus. “He’s wounded. We’re gaining, but we may not catch him before France. I haven’t been in France in years. They used to have damn fine virgins in France, you know, though virgin hunts are really a young worm’s game. And you, Flying Officer Trevor, haven’t been on nearly enough hunts of any sort if you can’t recognize desperation when you’re staring it in the tail. We have won, and all that’s left to decide is the final score.”

  Tencther slowed. His wings were out of synch, the right one no longer fully opening. He lost altitude. He trailed blood.

  Trevor was pelted with drops of it, hard as black hail, as if it had frozen in the merely sixty degree English air, once it was out of the dragon’s volcanic-flue veins. It hardened like magma into stone, but was still hot enough to smoke where it hit Trevor’s clothes.

  Tencther himself had cooled in Trevor’s infrared eyes, until he was little more than flying dust and ashes.

  He lost more altitude as he came up on the coast. He reached the Channel and turned, hovering just above the waves. The water darkened and grew choppy beneath him. He waited, bobbing slightly in uneven wing-beats, staring at Taximagulus.

  “Well, there it is,” said Taximagulus. “Now you get off, Flying Officer Trevor.”

  Taximagulus set down on a cliff, careful not to crush Trevor beneath his belly. Trevor unhoisted himself and his harness.

  “My sword could be useful,” he offered, his clothes smoldering from the fire of the dragon-blood.

  “I don’t want to risk losing you,” said the dragon. “Besides, you’ve already done your bit. This is worm to worm.”

  He rose into the air, and Trevor lost his razory vision, the magnificence of the dragons blurring in distance. Trevor couldn’t see their heat, and the night ran down into his vision like black sand into a hole.

  He saw a thunderstorm pile up over the Channel, black clouds lit red by lightning. Thunder skittered across the water and shook the stone beneath his feet. He watched for perhaps half an hour while clouds boiled and billowed and shook, but it seemed like all night long, like more than a night.

  He was glad he was no part of it, because he knew a sword wouldn’t cut clouds or thunder, but it would certainly attract the lightning.

  A wide bank of fog for
med on the water and spread to the cliffs, and Trevor couldn’t see anything. He waited another hour, but no dragons came out of the mist.

  He started walking home.

  He walked a mile inland, cold, sore, his clothes stiff from dried blood. He had about decided to chuck the claymore as deadweight when a shadow of moonlight covered him. Claws gripped him from behind and lifted him into the air. His heart gunned and he raised the claymore.

  “Do you always abandon superior officers on the field of battle, Flying Officer Trevor?” said Taximagulus.

  He began flying toward his cave.

  “Group Captain!” said Trevor, smiling. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Of course I’m not dead, but I can’t say the same for Tencther.”

  “You killed him?”

  “I did, and no worse than he deserved. Dragons don’t fight dragons, Flying Officer. Humans are proper prey, and cattle and griffins and horses and unicorns, leprechauns in a pinch.”

  Taximagulus landed in his meadow.

  “Some rest and recuperation is in order, I think,” he said, settling onto the grass and wildflowers.

  Trevor saw a long, glistening wound along the dragon’s side, another on his shoulder.

  “You’re wounded,” he said, inspecting the cuts, holding himself back from touching them. “Are you all right? What can I do?”

  “I’ll be fine,” said the dragon. “What I need is sleep and a good meal.”

  “But, the Germans…”

  “Are losing,” concluded Taximagulus. “Can’t you tell desperation when you look it in the tail yet, Flying Officer? As for your offer, however, there is one thing you can do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This,” said the dragon, and he bit Trevor’s head off. He ate the rest of his body before it hit the ground.

  He chewed for a moment, then fished around inside his cheeks with his tongue, his splendid, fiery-red, prehensile tongue. He spit a gold ring and a cheap pocketwatch and an Enfield .38 No.2 Mk.1 service revolver into his claw. He frowned.

  “Bloody war rationing,” he said, and he belched. “Hardly worth the trouble.”

  He picked up Trevor’s bicycle and looked it over.