Bazil Broketail by Christopher Rowley Read Free Book Online

rustled through a spell book and a directory and then informed him that she had nothing that specifically addressed the problem of re-growing a dragon’s tail. She had a good dragon liniment that would cure the pox and a great tonic for a piqued dragon that was made from mandrake root, but neither of these would do much for a severed tail.
    However, she did have a spell and the recipe for an unguent that would grow new branches on a tree, and she offered to try it on Bazil for six Marneri ducats.
    Relkin said he’d think about it. He went out and strolled on down Sick Duck Street, stopping to look into a few more shop windows. The old buildings here were made of wood and lathe covered in white plaster and roofed in black slate. The walls bulged and curved in near organic disorder. Many of the shops were very old, run for decades by their current proprietors.
    Six ducats! He had scarcely two left in the world, and he and Baz needed to eat. Baz had been good, but he was tiring fast of the horses oats that were the free ration in the Dragon House.
    On the corner with Hag Street, Relkin stopped in to see Old Rothercary, a country
brujo
with a million herbal remedies and potions in bottles and tubes in the back of his narrow shop.
    Rothercary was an enormous grey-haired man with ruddy cheeks and a big red nose. He roared with laughter at Relkin’s request and rummaged around in the back parlor before producing a small bottle containing a tiny quantity of a viscous red fluid.
    “This’ll do the trick!” he pronounced. “The blood of a Cunfshon steerbat that’s been waned nine times to boiling by the concentrated light of the moon. The price is ten ducats.”
    Relkin’s jaw dropped at the sight of the small phial of dark red fluid.
    “But what does it do?”
    “Do? Why it, grows things back, like the limbs and sex organs and so on. It’s very popular among the castrati in Cunfshon, they say, though whether it really works on that area I cannot report for sure, but I’ve sold it a few times to unfortunates here in Marneri. Just paint it over the stump and in a matter of days there is fresh growth. It’s wonderful stuff, which is why it’s so expensive.”
    But ten pieces of silver was an impossibly huge amount.
    Relkin went back to the Dragon House rubbing his chin, lost in thought.
    At the notice board he found a special note. A rematch in the first combat had been sought by Smilgax, in protest at the awarding of a draw in his fight with Bazil of Quosh.
    The rematch had been granted. Bazil would have to fight Smilgax again, on the morning of the day of the final combats. The winner of the bout would then perform against Vastrox.
    This negated Vastrox’s noble attempt to give the dragon from Quosh at least one moment of glory, by taking him on, even without a functioning tail tip, before the big audience of the final day.
    Instead Smilgax would grab that opportunity. Smilgax’s action was contemptible, but apparently the hard green did not care about opinion. All that mattered was getting into the Legion, even if he had to trample over his own honor and the Quoshite leatherback in the process.
    Relkin reeled along the passageway to the infirmary and collected fresh supplies of liniment, disinfectant and talon restorer. Then he went on down to the stalls and their temporary home, a stall with a worn stone floor, beam and plaster ceiling and heavy curtain instead of a door across the front. There was a small, potbellied stove, a human cot and a large oak beam crib for a dragon set across one end.
    Bazil was sitting on the crib, attempting to shave a damaged claw with a knife made for human hands. Relkin winced at the sight of all the bandages and abrasions on his dragon’s head and shoulders. Smilgax had done evil work with the mace in his effort to capitalize on his ill-famed lucky blow.
    “Give me that,” he said, snatching the paring knife out of the big dragon’s paw. Baz barely seemed to respond. Relkin sensed