Abruptly, the marker stone stopped humming. What if I had been wrong? Big Magic, Wizard Moobin had told me, has rarely more than a 20 per cent success rate. Maltcassion and the Dragons had staked their survival on that; pretty long odds but the best they could get. I had done my best for them but there was no magic. No high winds, no noises, no mysterious flashes of light, no ‘bzzz’ sounds – nothing. If this was Big Magic, it was a grave disappointment. I suddenly felt very small and solitary. One person alone in 320 square miles of disputed territory, sandwiched right between two huge armies with artillery and landships, and with only forty tons of dead Dragon for company. I apologised to the large beast but he could not hear me. It was over. The ancient order of the Dragons was dead.

Anger

Anger

I stood up and looked around at the forest, wondering what to do. Far in the distance there was the crack of an artillery piece. A few seconds later and a faint whistle preceded a shell that exploded somewhere in the Dragonlands. That was the sign. The war had begun. Everything that had happened over the past few days now seemed unimportant. I had failed Wizard Moobin and the Big Magic, I had failed Maltcassion and the centuries-dead Dragon Council. Maltcassion had suggested I was chosen for this task because of some kind of purity or moral rectitude that he thought I possessed. I was obviously not good enough. I had felt no remorse when Gordon of Stroud was vaporised and I felt nothing but disgust for ConStuff, King Snodd and the hordes of claimants that waited eagerly outside the Dragonlands. I had once tugged at the convent cat’s tail, too. Perhaps there had been a mistake; perhaps there was another Jennifer Strange somewhere. One with true purity and goodness. A Jennifer with nothing but forgiveness who had never tugged at a cat’s tail and led a blameless and charitable life. Perhaps she would have triumphed.

There was another distant crack and a second artillery shell came whistling over and exploded, opening up a hole in the fertile earth of the Dragonlands. I looked again at the old Dragon. He looked more like a huge pile of rubble than he ever had before. Perhaps in years to come someone would remember what had happened here and open a small museum that explained what the Dragonlands had been like, the treachery of the Mighty Shandar and the final effort of the Dragons to survive. On the other hand, perhaps they wouldn’t bother. They’d probably build a museum to Yogi Baird – and it would as likely as not be sponsored by Yummy-Flakes breakfast cereals.