Paint Your Dragon Read Online Free

rather tend to resemble an ivory-hunter’s discount warehouse. It’d probably frighten the poor little box out of its wits.
    â€˜You talking to me?’ said the blue man, in a rather quavery voice.
    â€˜Yes,’ replied the dragon. ‘Bell’s Whisky. Is there any?’
    â€˜What you want whisky for?’
    Softly, softly is all very well, but the dragon was beginning to get impatient. ‘I’ll give you three guesses,’ he replied. ‘Look, either you have or you haven’t, it’s not exactly a grey area.’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ the blue man replied. ‘I’m a policeman, not a bartender.’
    â€˜I see. Would you know if you were a bartender?’
    â€˜I suppose so. Why?’
    The dragon sighed. If it had had a fuel gauge, it would be well into the red zone by now, but even so the flames that inadvertently ensued were four feet long and hot enough to melt titanium. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, observing that the policeman had gone ever such a funny colour, ‘you’d be terribly sweet and go and fetch me a bartender, so that we can get this point cleared up once and for all.’
    â€˜Um. Yes. Right.’
    â€˜Thank you ever so much.’
    â€˜Um. Don’t mention it.’
    â€˜Hope the flames didn’t frighten your box.’
    The blue man backed away, turned and ran; and for a long time, the dragon sat quietly where he was, conserving his energy and watching the pigeons waddling about on the grass. The whole area was empty by now, except for two or three of the blue men, huddled behind benches at the very back. It dawned on the dragon that something was going on. He frowned. It was, he felt, a bit much. Back in the old days, the humans hadn’t made this much fuss when he dropped in on cities demanding princesses to go, hold the onions.
    You’d think, he reiterated to himself, they’d never seen a dragon before.
    Hey!
    Maybe they hadn’t seen a dragon before.
    Anything’s possible. Perhaps, in this strange and rather down-at-heel century, dragons had become scarce. If this was a remote, out-of-the-way district (his exceptional eyes, scanning generally for a clue, picked out the name Old Trafford written on a board, but it didn’t mean anything to him) then it was conceivable that he was the first dragon they’d ever set eyes on. Reviewed in that light, the behaviour of the humans made some sort of sense. Rewind that and let’s think it through logically.
    Assume they’ve never actually seen a dragon. They will, nevertheless, have heard of dragons; everybody has. And, facing facts, he wasn’t so naïve as to imagine that what they’d heard was necessarily accurate. Humans, he knew, are funny buggers, delighting in the morbid and the sensational, eclectic in their selection of what to remember and what conveniently to forget. Quite likely, that was the case when it came to the popular image of dragons. If he knew humans, they’d ignore the ninety-nine per cent of its time a dragon spends aimlessly flying, basking in the high-level sunlight, chivvying rainclouds to where they’re needed most and persuading winds to behave themselves. More likely than not, the perverse creatures would focus on the five per cent or less of its life a dragon spends at ground level, ridding the world of unwanted and troublesome armour fetishists and saving kings the trouble of finding husbands for superfluous younger daughters.
    In which case ...
    Damn.
    What a time, the dragon reflected ruefully, to run out of gas. Because any minute now, some macho nerd on a white charger is going to come galloping up through the gate with an overgrown cocktail stick under his arm, hell-bent on prodding me in the ribs. Normally, of course, this wouldn’t pose any sort of problem; one sneeze, and all that’s left is some fine grey ash and a pool of slowly cooling molten iron.
    Without fuel, however, he was