oxen hitched to the sledge, they wheezed and blew with the effort of dragging the dragon's head, upside down, into the palace courtyard. The beast's tongue lolled out to drag the flagstones, striking sparks from them.
Prince Delendor sat astride the stump of the beast's neck. He waved his swordhilt and beamed as he received the boisterous cheers of the crowd.
"Must be the whole city down there," Groag said glumly as he watched from one window of Ezekiel's laboratory.
"Must be the whole country," Glam corrected in a similar tone. " 'Cept us."
"Lookit that!" said Groag.
"Then get out of the way and I will," snapped the magician, tapping Groag on the shoulder and making little shooing motions with his hand. The big prince stepped aside, shaking his head.
The wreckage was gone from the laboratory, but neither the middle window nor the broken glassware had been replaced. A tinge of brimstone from the rocket still clung to the air.
The scene in the courtyard did nothing to improve Ezekiel's humor. King Morhaven was kneeling to Delendor, though the youth quickly dismounted as from a horse and stood Morhaven erect again.
The cheering rattled the laboratory's remaining windows.
"He'll make Delendor co-ruler as a result of this, you know," Ezekiel said. "And heir."
He turned and glared savagely at the two royal brothers. "You know that, don't you?"
Glam twisted the toe of his boot against the floor, as though trying to grind something deep into the stone. "Well," he said, "you know . . . You know, if the little prick killed the dragon, I dunno what else the ole man could do. Lookit the teeth on that sucker."
"Don't be a bigger fool than God made you!" Ezekiel snarled. "Delendor didn't have anything to do with killing the dragon. It was that magician of his! That damned magician."
He made a cryptic sign. A swarm of twinkling demons whisked out of their own plane. Their tiny hands compressed globes of air into a pair of shimmering lenses.
Ezekiel stared through the alignment, then stepped back. "There," he said to the brothers. "Look at that."
Glam looked through the tubeless telescope, despite an obvious reluctance to put his eye close to the miniature demons who formed it. The lenses were focused on the dragon's neck. The wound there was marked with a flag of blood.
"Well," said Glam as his brother shouldered him aside, "that's where he stabbed the sucker, right?"
"Idiot!" Ezekiel said. "The wound's square, from a crossbow bolt. And who do you see carrying a crossbow?"
"Oh-h-h," said the brothers together.
Behind the sledge, almost lost in the crowd that mobbed Delendor, was the prince's magician—carrying a heavy arbalest. A servant girl clung to him, squeezed by the people cheering their master.
"I don' get it," Groag said. "Lotsa guys shot it with crossbows before, din't they? I heard that, anyhow."
"Of course they did, oaf!" said Ezekiel. "This was obviously an enchanted arbalest which struck the one vulnerable part of the dragon's armor—even though a spot on the underside of the beast's throat couldn't be hit by a crossbow bolt."
He swung the telescope slightly by tapping the manicured nail of his index finger against the objective lens. Tiny demons popped and crackled at the contact.
Groag glared at the crossbow. "Don' look so special ta me," he said.
"I don' get it," Glam said. "If he got a crossbow ta kill the dragon, then what was all that stuff with the powder and fire t'other morning? Some kinda joke, was it?"
The magician grimaced. "I'm not sure," he admitted, glancing around his laboratory and remembering how it had looked before a rocket sizzled through the center window. "But I think . . ."
Ezekiel had been shrinking down into his velvet robes. Now he shook himself and rose again to his full height.
"I think," the magician resumed, "that Joe Johnson has been brought here from a very great distance by a—7th Plane inhabitant. He initially attempted to use the magic of his own region here, but the correspondences differed. Rather than work them out, he found it easier to adapt our magic to the task."
"You promised us," said Glam in a dangerous voice, "that there wouldn't be no problem with Delendor. An' now you say there is."
"I can take care of your brother easily enough," said Ezekiel in a carefully neutral tone. "But only after Joe Johnson is out of the way. Do you understand?"
Glam guffawed in a voice that rattled the window even against the cheering voices below. "You bet we do!" he said. "Cold iron's proof