Jason Hightman - The Saint of Dragons

“And if I had any proof with me,” Aldric continued, calming, “it could prove deadly to you. Why do you think I haven’t been able to talk to you all these years?”

“I figured you didn’t want to.”

Aldric St George looked very upset for a moment. “Of course I wanted to talk to you,” he told Simon, “but it wasn’t safe. I’ve been wondering about you since the day we said goodbye.”

“You said goodbye. I was too little to talk,” Simon said plainly.

Aldric didn’t like to be corrected. “There was no other way,” he said, and then his anger came back a bit. “The Lighthouse School had the best reputation anywhere. I trusted Denman. Didn’t that school take care of you?” At this he seemed to lean forward, worried about the answer.

“I guess,” the boy admitted.

“Well, all right then,” said Aldric, relieved.

“But I would have liked it if someone had told me who my mother and father were,” Simon grumbled, not wanting to let his father off the hook so easily. “I would have liked it if I knew where they had gone. And why.”

“The ‘why’ is easy,” said Aldric. “You’ll understand all that soon enough. It’s the reason I’m here now. I need you to join me on my quest to fight the evil that dwells among us. It has been with us for centuries. It was with us when you were born. We had to send you away to protect you from it.”

“From what?”

“From the serpents. From the Draconians. Whatever name you choose to use.”

“Choose a name I can understand,” begged Simon.

“Dragons.”

There was a moment now when no one said a word. It was such a bizarre thing to say, Simon almost laughed. But his father said it with all the truth he had in him, he said it with such fear and disgust and such wildness in his eyes that it was clear he truly meant what he said.

“You were protecting me from dragons?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Aldric. “I am telling you the truth. A truth few people in this world have ever heard.”

“I’m listening,” said Simon.

“The dragon is a creature of unspeakable evil. It is a monster. A wretched liar, an insatiable thief and a despicable killer. I say ‘is’ because this creature isn’t an animal made up out of the imagination, or from the distant past. It is real, it is alive, and it is at work in the world today. Living out there somewhere in the shadows.”

He pushed away his plate. “Fact is, up until recent times, there were great numbers of them. I’ve spent my life hunting them down, one by one.”

“You hunt down dragons,” said Simon doubtfully. “The giant scaly reptiles. With big wings and huge teeth.”

“No,” said Aldric. “They haven’t looked like that for centuries.”

“What?”

“Well, dragons haven’t stayed the same since the dawn of time,” he explained. “They’ve moved on like everything else. They’ve changed, evolved. They look like men now, mostly. They stand two or three feet taller than an average fellow, unless they’re hunched over. They walk like men do, on two feet. They have two heavy, muscular arms. Their bodies are smaller than they used to be, so they can hide under a big coat, but their skin is reptile skin and their blood is green, and warm to the touch. Their heads are man-sized and their faces reptilian. Their eyes are glassy green or yellow or pitch-black ugly.

“We don’t even call them dragons, that’s how different they are now. They’re more like Dragonmen. We call them Draconians, or Reptellans. Some people call them Serpentines, or Pyrothraxes.”

“Pyro …?” Simon tried to say it.

“Pyrothraxes. Pyro, meaning fire,” Aldric rattled on, as if all of this was everyday knowledge. “They use fire as their chief weapon, but not because they need to. These days, dragons have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of ordinary people working for them. Dragons can be found in business, in politics; most are in charge of organised crime at the top levels. They can be found in every country on Earth. Their men do their bidding now with knives and guns and bombs just like all criminals, but the dragon has a special place in his heart for fire. They simply love fire and can never get enough of it. You can never be sure what they’ll do with it. You’ll learn about that.

“Most of them are rich too. That makes it hard to find them, to catch them. But they like to walk the streets – most people have walked right past one without knowing it – and sooner or later I pick up on where they’ve been. Their magic leaves behind unwanted side effects. Wherever there are strange things going on, you can bet a dragon has been in the vicinity.”

“And you destroy them?” asked Simon.

“Every single one of them I find,” said Aldric, with a gleam in his eye. “In fact, I think I’ve found just about the last of them.”

“Sounds like you’ve done pretty well out there on your own,” said Simon, trying to humour him. “What do you need me for?”

“You,” said Aldric, “are about to join the family business. Dragonhunting.”

“Some things you’ll learn on the job,” said Aldric, and he took out an old curly pipe, relaxing for the first time since Simon had met him. “And some of it you need to know right away.”

Simon reclined against the wall. The ship swayed gently and pipe smoke filled the room with a pungent smell.

Aldric began. “Nobody knows when the first dragon was sighted, but it must have been a very long time ago. They began their lives right after man began to walk the earth. They were born when the first man had his first evil thought. They grew like a tiny worm in his head, and when the man died and was buried, they went into the ground and spread. From this tiny beginning, many more of them grew from tough, leathery eggs hidden deep in the earth. White, like a spider’s eggs they were, but giant. When the young dragons hatched, they crawled their way to the surface. They have caused constant trouble for humankind ever since.

“What does a dragon want? It wants nothing more than to cause people pain, fear and sadness. The dragon feeds on these things. It is attracted to human misery – it thrives on it, in much the same way that plants need sunlight and water.

“Whenever a person feels down, the dragon wants to be nearby. It crawls underground and feels with its tongue for vibrations of sadness. It sucks up the sadness right through its skin and this makes the creature stronger. In turn, a dragon through its magic can make people more unhappy. Whenever a person feels self-doubt, whenever a person thinks he or she cannot succeed, that life is not worth a penny, it’s a good bet a dragon is the reason. Nothing causes more evil in the world than self-hatred. When a person hates himself, he will do terrible things. He wants everyone to feel as bad as he does. A dragon loves to make people hate themselves.”

And does a dragon make people go mad? wondered Simon, still looking at Aldric with distrust. The man went on raving, and when Simon tried to interrupt, he only raised his voice.

“Dragons have always wanted to dominate mankind. They need us, but they see us as pests. Vermin. There are so many of us that the serpents have never been able to wipe us all out. But they try. They try to thin our numbers. They try to get us to wipe ourselves out by tricking us into hating each other. There were only two thousand dragons at the height of their power and they could never get rid of the millions and billions of people in the world.

“You see, Pyrothraxes see themselves as better than humans, superior in intelligence. Stronger. They cannot stand humans because, to them, humans are weak.