Then sometimes he’d eat them. In summer he sold poisoned flowers on the streets of Zurich just to talk to people.
Loneliness had driven him to find human companions, but eventually they disgusted him. And he was losing grip on his own powers. One woman he rather liked had turned to ice before his eyes when he touched her and her arm fell off with a clunk, her blood frozen inside like an ice lolly. Things he touched would often freeze. Nothing could be done about it. He found ways to fill his time without friendships.
He was a fan of the TV show Columbo. He generally watched it in a smoky café on the tiny black and white television set he carried with him everywhere. It was the only thing that ever played on the television. He was watching it now.
He spent his nights on the tops of buildings under the stars, next to the stone gargoyles. He would read them poetry. They said nothing back to him. They had no opinions and he liked that.
His poems were bleak and made sense only to him. He thought of them when he was burning people or freezing them to death, when his mind would think in dreamy, rattled words:
Dark. The Souls of the People.
White. The Art of the People.
Kiss the rage, and kill it if it doesn’t look like us.
Fold the riddle over, and the riddle stays the same.
Howl and fight and it does you no good.
Eat of this darkness and I’ll give you dessert.
There were others, worse than that. Hundreds of them, written over two centuries in many languages. He wrote the poems on pages that were half black and half white – the same shades as his dirty apartment in Zurich and his dirty office at the University.
People hated the poems. He’d tried to get them published for centuries. No magic he could conjure could get people to like them. And people hated him, no matter what disguise he took on. People hated him. And dragons hated him.
And this was who he was.
Maybe the lady wanted to know these things about him, maybe he would tell her. Maybe he would tell her that he was going to die in a blaze of immeasurable glory and her world would grow very dark after that, for the only books that would be read would be his.
There were pieces to put in place first, however. Finding the Black Dragon was possible now, for he had torn a bit from the old lizard’s mind and knew his immediate destination. He would go after him soon. That was the simple part. Far more challenging would be to bring the hunters all together and have them die in a single blow. There’s your fame. There’s your poetry. Dead together, all at once, and you to plan it, witness it, put it into your book.
He would write his own place in history as the killer of the hunters.
It ought to have been a triumphant thought, but the Ice Dragon’s eyes came to rest on a heap of little beetles outside the window, dead from the frost. He liked to keep the beetles and gnats and bugs alive in the cold, and sometimes he’d even keep them warm in his mouth.
It struck him that if he couldn’t keep his own collection of insects alive, he hardly had the strength to kill the Dragonhunters himself. Pathetic little thing I am, he thought. He’d require help to destroy them, but who could he turn to? The new Russian beast, fresh from Chechnya? An Arab Sand Dragon? The two strongest in Asia, the Japanese dragon and the Bombay serpent, would have nothing to do with him. Would they? Now there’s an interesting thought. Lots of potential there. But he’d need to move fast.
Suddenly, he heard the waitress laugh and he spun round to see her standing there, reading his book.
My book.
“What’s the big deal? I just wanted to look,” said the woman, noticing his eyes. “I don’t have anything to do around here. What’s wrong with you?”
“Wrong with me?” said Visser, his lips trembling.
“This is not scary,” said the woman. “It’s just random notes and …”and poetry. Poetry about snakes. Is that what you write?” She was bewildered.
“Not snakes,” said Visser through clenched, yellowish teeth. “Serpents. Dragons.”
Nothing seemed funny to the woman any more.
The other two customers looked over, alarmed.
Visser rose. Now he towered over the woman, almost two metres tall, his skin rippling as heat waves passed over him, and her jaw dropped as she realised she was staring at a black and white beast with eyes like yellow marbles.
“True poetry is not written in ink,” said the Ice Dragon, “but in fire.”
And he set the woman ablaze in the colours of good and evil, a black and white fire that matched his own skin. The fire leaped into the air and carried her up to the ceiling, dropped her ashes in a split-second and then spread to the photographers. One burned away in white fire, the other burned away in black.
Burn a little hope, today, snuff out a little light.
Ebony doesn’t burn, my friend, it only turns to white.
Die, die, and learn to like it, child …
It only stings a little while, it’s really very mild …
His Serpentine mind was humming. But he found himself abruptly disappointed, for the fire he had made was turning to ice. It behaved like fire, flickering and moving about, but it was ice, no doubt about it. He had no control.
The ice-fire stopped its quivering, the sharp spires of ice stilled and the moving mass of crystalline flames ceased their crunching, breaking passage. The serpent was left alone with frost-filled walls and ceilings.
His fire had gone cold.
Gloomily, he watched the rest of his TV show in the frigid ruins. Then he left the lonely café in the mountains and headed for the sea to set his plans in motion.
CHAPTER NINE A Loneliness of a Great Ship
Simon St George and his father had found their way to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where the globe had showed Alaythia, but there had been no sign of her. Simon began to have serious doubts they would find her even with the tracer device because they could never quite catch up.
“If she took a plane, she would be in China by now,” commented Simon.
“Yes, but if she took a boat,” said Aldric, “she would be closer to the ocean and she’d have a better chance of sensing the Black Dragon. He may very well be on the sea, on the move.”
Simon frowned, considering the predicament.
They were at the table near the galley and the stove began belching black smoke. Aldric cursed and tried to save his stew. Nearly everything they cooked went bad now; it was as
