Knights got . . . a little out of hand. We don’t do this any more, of course. Another slow change.”
“And too late,” I said, “for most of these creatures.”
“Pretty much everything on display here would have killed you quite cheerfully,” said Sir Perryvale. “Don’t get sentimental, Eddie. And, it has to be said, you’re not seeing the Hall at its best. Much of this place was destroyed during a recent elf attack. We had to rebuild the Hall and restore a great many of the exhibits . . . We lost quite a few specimens. Too damaged to be preserved. An irreplaceable loss.”
He walked on down the Hall, pointing out particular items of interest. A pure white unicorn’s head, with a vicious curlicued horn and crimson eyes blazing madly. It didn’t look like anything a maiden might want to ride. A gargoyle, with a bullet hole right in the middle of its flat, broad forehead. A basilisk with no eyes. (Obviously.) A dire wolf with moulting fur, its jaws still snarling defiance. And then I stopped and pointed at one particular head.
“What is that?”
“Ah,” the Seneschal said proudly. “That is the Questing Beast. You wouldn’t believe how many of us it took to track that down. It’s an old monster, not much valued and even less missed.”
The Questing Beast was an odd mixture of beast and bird. It looked . . . old and tired, and perhaps even a little resigned. As though it knew it had outlived the time it was meant for.
And finally . . . we came to the dragon’s head. Just the face, really. If the whole head had been there it would have blocked the Hall. The exhibit wasn’t very impressive. Its bottle-green scales were dull and dusty, and the eyes obviously glass. Some of the teeth were missing. It was just the preserved remains of something that had once been great. I looked at it and felt suddenly, coldly, angry.
“No wonder you want our dragon,” I said.
“Your dragon, by all accounts, has mellowed considerably since its time in the wild,” Sir Perryvale said evenly. “Having your head cut off, and then being left to think about things under a mound of earth for centuries, will do that to you. Your dragon is an almost civilised creature now. In their own time, dragons were nasty, vengeful, and quite deadly beasts. Killers of men, women, and especially children. Destroyers of whole communities. A lot of good Knights went to their deaths bringing this creature down. We thought the breed was extinct, until we learned of your find in Germany, out by Castle Frankenstein.”
“What do the London Knights want with our dragon?” I said. “To finish the job?”
“No,” said Sir Perryvale. “We wish . . . to honour it. If there’s one thing Knights understand, it’s the need to do penance.”
I looked up and down the Hall, taking in all the heads on display. “You know, in these days of DNA retrieval and forced cloning, it might actually be possible to bring some of these beasts back. Under carefully controlled conditions.”
“I’d like that,” said Sir Perryvale. “I think a lot of us would.”
“So you could hunt them again?”
“No, so they could be returned to the wild. It’s a terrible burden to know you’re responsible for the extinction of a species.”
“I think we could work something out,” I said.
“I’ll have a word with the Grand Commander when he returns,” said the Seneschal. “I think it would do both the Knights and the Droods good to have some project we could work on together.”
“It would be good,” I said, “to have something in common.”
“Oh, there are a few things we can all agree on,” said Sir Perryvale, setting off down the Hall again. “If only that the Nightside should be utterly wiped out.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Terrible place.”
“I don’t know what your uncle Jack saw in it,” said Sir Perryvale, “but he spent enough time there . . .”
* * *
In the end, the Seneschal led me up a long, winding stairway, with frequent rests for him to get his breath back. Finally, he unlocked a door at the very top of the stairs and led me into a great circular stone chamber. Something about the room made me feel as though I was at the top of a tower. Given that there were still no windows to show what was outside, there was no way of confirming it, but that was what it felt like to