The Tiger Dragon
The Black Dragon of Peking had unleashed a never-before-known hatred among serpentkind. It was well-known that he had helped the dragon killers and been instrumental in burying the Queen of Serpents.
So many had died in the Grand Battle of the Serpent Queen and the remaining dragons were now trying to take over their territories. The entire Serpentine world had been thrown into disarray, the hierarchies demolished; all over the map, serpents were fighting for new turf.
There were new avenues opening up in crime, terrorism, business and military dictatorships, and as always there were some who grasped the opportunities better than others.
One such creature was the Dragon of Bombay.
She was a tiger dragon, a shapely, female, humanesque form with a thin set of huge transparent wings, useless wings. They stretched down her back, pretty and striped, like a fashion accessory, like a mink coat or something wonderful and insolent.
In fact, fashion was her domain. In her human manifestation, she had made herself look like a beautiful East Indian model, so striking she had been on the cover of countless magazines, appearing as a youngish woman with mocha-cinammon skin, a tall frame, high cheekbones, sleepy eyes with long black lashes and a slender body. She had used her looks to earn a small fortune on the catwalk some years back, before an ugly argument with an American model caused her to lose her temper – and she had torched the Manhattan girl in a New York minute.
Several more of these arguments, usually over boys, resulted in more deaths – and dodging the police made the whole thing hardly worthwhile.
She decided to move into manufacturing, using sweatshop labour. Little girls and boys, and incredibly poor men and women, were chained to sewing machines for long hours so that she could make millions selling high fashion at shocking prices.
She had a formula. In the factories there was an ivory sculpture with a giant tiger’s eye painted on it on every floor. The eye hypnotised the workers. The workers never complained.
Each tiger’s-eye sculpture had a pupil like a giant pearl, which moved back and forth with a very slow, eerie clicking. At the same time, the sculptures gave off a low hum, like a growl, that would grow louder whenever the workers showed the slightest rebellion. Then the labourers would grow weak, uncertain, and decide not to challenge their masters.
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