With my mind full of Dragons and pacts and Shandars and slayers and marker stones and lunch, which I had forgotten to eat, I drove up to the Dragonlands near a picnic spot I knew at Dorstone. I parked up and walked across the turf to the humming marker stones that encircled the lands at twenty-foot intervals and looked about. Tents and caravans had sprung up everywhere as word had got about that Maltcassion was about to go belly-up. Small groups of people talked to each other while seated on folding chairs, sipping tea from thermos flasks. Everyone seemed to have a good supply of tent pegs and string with which to make their claim, and with the Dragonlands covering an area of almost 350 square miles, a lot was at stake. Several enterprising souls had even parked their Land Rovers pointing in towards the lands, ready to bounce into the interior and claim as large an area as they could before anyone else.

As Mother Zenobia had said, the last Dragon to die had been M’foszki, the Great Serpent of Bedwyn, whose lair was on what was then the Marlborough Downs. Quite suddenly the marker stones stopped humming and a daring lad named Bors stepped across into the Dragonlands, walked the empty hills until he entered the Dragon’s lair, a deep underground cave worn smooth by M’foszki’s hard skin. There he found a lot of cattle and sheep bones, some jewels and gold and a very large and dead Dragon. Bors took the Dragon’s head-jewel and swapped it for a handsome townhouse. As for the Marlborough Dragonlands, every square inch was claimed within twenty-four hours; a rare pair of Lesser-spotted Bworks were shot and stuffed by a passing hunter, and the land is now used for farming.

I stared into the empty Dragonlands, then at the people who were still arriving, following the call of cash as if in some deep-rooted herding instinct. The milk of human kindness was turning sour.

Patrick and the Childcatcher

Patrick and the Childcatcher

Tiger Prawns was in the lobby when I got back, and I asked him why he wasn’t manning the telephone as he had been told.

‘Very funny,’ he said.

‘I see you’ve met Patrick of Ludlow,’ I replied, trying to stifle a giggle, for Tiger was thirty feet up in the shabby atrium, perched high upon the chandelier. ‘How long have you been up there?’

‘Half an hour,’ he answered crossly, ‘with only a lot of dust and Transient Moose for company.’

‘You’ll have to suffer a few jokes in good humour,’ I told him, ‘and consider yourself lucky that you have witnessed both passive and active levitation in the same week.’

‘Which was which?’

‘Carpeteering is active; heavy lifting is passive. Could you feel the difference?’

He crossed his arms and sulked.

‘No.’

‘Did your fillings ache when he lifted you?’

‘I don’t have any fillings,’ he replied grumpily.