The Dragon Tax - Excerpt
By Kenton PIper-Ruth
Steve Lentil wasn’t what you would call lucky. He’d survived for twenty-eight years, which is an achievement in itself when living alongside fire-breathing garbage disposals, but still, ‘lucky’ was pushing it. True to form Steve found himself yet again in a decidedly unlucky situation. You see every April he had to pay his taxes, to a dragon. Unfortunately, it was now March and Steve was still behind.
“I just need more time, please Dragon Tarq,” Steve pleaded. ‘Dragon’ was the appropriate honorific for the situation.
An eyelash melting wave of hot, dry air hit Steve in the face as the dragon responded. “More time?" Its powerful voice also caused fine rocks to bounce on the ground and dust to fall from the distant ceiling. "Mr. Lentil, it has been my experience that creatures of your economic status and race are rarely able to pay their taxes, regardless of time, but as this is your first offense, I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You have three months to settle your hmmh, debt. If you are unable to do so, hmmm, however, there will be" —the dragon paused to hum in a deep purr— “consequences." Saliva welled up at the creases between its sword-like teeth. Some of the saliva escaped and dripped to the ground in long, steaming strands.
Steve’s eyes watered and the intense heat of the cavern created a river of sweat down his back, but as he stood there, looking into the dragon’s merciless eyes a shiver went through his body.
“Mr. Lentil, do you understand?”
Steve experienced a movement that was one part nod, one part bow, and two parts uncontrollable tremor.
“Next,” the dragon growled.
Steve’s fast footfalls carried him toward the exit and through a dark passageway filled with creatures waiting for their conference with Dragon Tarq. The smell of sweat was powerful, but more powerful still was the smell of fear. Another, almost pleasant aroma sat upon the air, reminding Steve of exceptionally crispy bacon.
The Mansion
Steve exited the dragon’s den through a long tunnel, emerging to see the sky of Mastara, colored dark ochre by hundreds of different factories spewing out thousands of different pollutants. The angry orange haze submerged the tops of the surrounding buildings like dead trees in an aerosolized swamp. Each of the buildings’ walls played host to a war between advertisement and graffiti.
He adjusted his hat to cover up the marbled part of his head more adequately as he waited for a snake to come. He blamed his genes, his diet, his stress, and several deities for his lack of hair, and for the layer of fat that insulated him from the world.
A few minutes later and a snake headed his direction arrived with a hiss and he climbed on. The snake had a radius of six feet, and a diameter of twice that. There were many metal carts attached to it; Steve sat in one near the front. The first time he’d ridden a snake he’d been terrified of it—back when he was four or five he saw its ten-foot-forked tongue and ran the other direction—but now he knew that snakes were just as powerless and obedient as everyone else, and therefore not something to fear, at least not for passengers; drivers swerved out of the way and pedestrians cleared the sidewalk when they saw a snake coming. The streets of Mastara were strewn with the remnant debris of cars whose drivers lacked an adequate respect for the snakes.
Steve arrived home and walked down the dirty, eternally moist, and mossy stairs, coming to a scarred rectangle of cheap aluminum that passed for his front door. Steve had heard of robbers kicking in weak doors. Simply leaning on Steve’s door would probably do the trick. Thankfully nothing within Steve’s apartment would entice a hypothetical robber. Any career criminal worth their salt could take one look at Steve’s door and realize they were in the wrong neighborhood, and that dumpster diving would probably yield better results. In Mastara city, places worth robbing guarded their merchandise with several feet of concrete, multiple locks, hulking three-headed-dogs, and little black-and-white signs that read ‘Neighborhood Watch’. Steve had no such deterrents, for he had nothing in his apartment he was really afraid of losing. Buying a new door, new lock, and shatter proof windows would cost more than getting robbed.
He lived on the basement level of an apartment complex in the west ventricle of Mastara City. He’d lived in Mastara ever since he left home at fourteen. Good children did not burden their parents after all. Good children worked. Good children survived long enough to create dragon-tax paying children of their own.
He opened his apartment door, walked into his one-room residence and sat on his bed. He proceeded to get food from the fridge, start water boiling, clean and grate some tubers, all while still sitting on his bed. He had a convenient apartment.
There was one thing on his mind, and he was trying his hardest to focus on anything but that one scaly, ugly, pointy thing. Every time those yellow eyes came to the forefront, he pushed them away with the ‘chunk’ of a split carrot, or the ‘kshht’ of crushed garlic, or the sting of diced onion. Every time those glistening teeth reached for him, he reached for his favorite brand of grape soda.
“What’s cooking?” came a twangy voice, causing Steve to jump.
A cat sat on the top of his refrigerator, and the voice came from it. It wasn’t Steve’s cat. It was a magical cat: a chester. Most people thought that chesters were bad luck, especially the black ones. The one sitting on Steve’s fridge was blacker than a midnight stroll through a cave on a cloudy night.
“Oh, it’s just you.” Steve went back to his cooking, shaking off the slight scare.
“Just me? How hurtful. What a human thing to say.” The cat rolled over on its back and started pawing the air above Steve’s refrigerator. “It’s more than me, if you really think about it, because every day I strive to be more than me. Even the most basic of mathematicians can add my parts together and find that the sum is greater.”
Steve knew from experience that most of the things Todd said were utter nonsense.
“I am the shining light of your pedestrian existence. I grace you with my presence, day in and,” — Todd paused to stroke his whiskers — “well occasionally. You should be grateful. Some of my existential enlightenment gets passed unto you by proximity. You lucky dog. I have stories from the wonderfully wide world beyond.” The cat’s bright green eyes locked onto Steve. “Would you like to hear them?”
“No,” Steve said, continuing to chop up produce. Steve added some seasoning to the water and began washing some mushrooms. “Why is it that every time you show up something bad is bound to happen?”
Todd pursed his furry-black lips. “Coincidence?”
Steve snorted. “Remember the first time you came in here, and I chased you around with a butcher knife?”
“Fondly,” Todd said, smiling in the unnerving manner of chester cats—not even a dentist should have that many teeth.
Steve did not remember the occasion ‘fondly’. It had been back in the dark days of his youth. He didn’t like to think of those times. Of course, the dark days were looking quite a bit brighter in the light of his current situation, in the light of dragon fire. Steve didn’t like to think about the present either.
“You were quite energetic with that thing.” Todd gestured with a black paw toward the knife Steve held. “I remember applauding your efforts.”
Steve grunted and added a pinch of salt to his tuber stew. “Can you really blame me? One ear and I could pay my dragon fee and take a three-month vacation. One paw and I could retire early, one…” Steve trailed off. He was fantasizing about killing Todd and selling bits of him, and it felt weird to do it with Todd in the room. “How about the tip of your tail? You don’t need that.”
Todd looked at Steve with half lidded eyes and a sneering lilt to his whiskers. The tip of his tail flicked.
“Can you blame me?” Steve asked.
“No,” Todd sighed. “I can’t blame you. I’d do the same thing if I were in your place, if I were a lowly, pathetic, sad, fat, ugly, stupid, hopeless, beleaguered, incompetent, sickly, lonely, poor, bald—”
“Yes Todd!” Steve broke in. “I get it.”
“You didn’t let me get to the best part,” Todd said. “The noun that summarizes all of those adjectives: human. There I’m done, but it would have been polite of you to let me finish my sentence.” Todd hopped off the refrigerator and walked casually to the boiling pot, keeping his fluffy black tail pointed resolutely in the air. “What's in it?”
“Tubers,” Steve said.
“Yuuh.” Todd pursed his lips in disgust.
“Onions,” Steve said.
“Ouuh.”
“Garlic.”
“Yoow.”
“Cayenne.”
“Eeeh.”
“Mushrooms,” Steve said, continuing to ignore the exaggerated looks of disgust on Todd’s furry countenance.
“Gross.”
“Ginger.”
“Ok stop. Stop!” Todd mewled.
Steve stopped listing ingredients as he stirred the stew.
“Is there any meat in it?” Todd asked.
“Nope.”
“Then why,” asked Todd, sticking his furry head into the steam coming from the pot, “does it smell so goo-ood?” Todd made the word ‘good’ have two syllables.
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a special broth you use? Maybe that has something in it?”
“Mushrooms?”
"No, no.”
Steve took a spoonful of the broth out of the pot and blew on it. Todd watched with big green eyes, his black slits widening to ovals. Steve took a sip from the steaming spoon and nodded in agreement with the flavors, then turned his head slightly to look at Todd, who stood on the counter, frozen solid in some sort of vicarious anticipation of the stew’s flavor.
“Do you want to try some?” Steve asked.
Todd broke out of his frozen persona and quickly turned around, showing Steve his butt and flicking his tale. “I really shouldn’t. You could have poisoned it, drugged it. You humans are always so devious. The curse I bear for being so valuable. The curse I bear for being so, me.” Todd stuck his furry-black chest out.
\Steve wished he had drugged the stew. How could he have foreseen that Todd would want to eat his cooking? However, even if he had foreseen Todd’s interest, he had nothing to drug it with. He doubted a bottle of cold medicine would have done the trick, while utterly ruining his dinner. “You just saw me taste it; would I drug myself?”
“Don’t get me started,” Todd said. “You drug yourself all the time, with your headache medication, cold pills, your caffeine in the morning, all the drugs you take to combat the different side effects of pollution, inactivity, social isolation and poor diet, then all the drugs you take to combat the side effects of the drugs you take to combat the side effects of the drugs you take. You’re more drug than human at this point. You got a thousand other creatures telling you about some arbitrary problem that only their drug can fix, and then they list the side-effects and you really have to be psychotic to want those side-effects over—”
“Todd. Todd!” Steve yelled, interrupting the rant. “You’re doing it again.”
“What was I saying? Oh yes, you could have drugged the stew.
Steve sighed. “You don’t have to try it, Todd. I don’t care.” Steve poured himself a big steaming bowl of the stew.
Todd’s fluffy black head swiveled as it followed the spoon go from Steve’s bowl to Steve’s mouth, back and forth, over and over. “Oh, but I really do want to try it.”
“Then try it!” Steve pushed the bowl toward Todd.
“Oh, but I shouldn’t.” Todd backed up and his fur expanded to make him look larger than normal.
“For the love of… Just make up your mind,” Steve said, pulling his bowl back and taking a few more bites of the stew.
“Is it good?” Todd asked.
“I like it,” Steve said, with a shiver of suppressed fury.
“But is it really good?” Todd asked.
“I don’t know!” Steve shouted. More than a few violent impulses went through Steve’s head, but they were tempered by the knowledge that the cat was more or less invulnerable. Not truly invulnerable because chester parts had a price for a reason. If not invulnerable, definitely Steve-proof.
“You must think it’s really good; why else would you eat it with such relish?” asked Todd, lowering his head to the table to somehow get a better look at what Steve was eating.
Steve ignored him, slurping down the stew as loudly as he could.
“But is it like restaurant quality? How many creatures have you cooked for? Do only humans like your cooking?”
Steve ignored him.
'Sluuurp'
“Okay, okay. I’ll try it. Can I try it?”
Steve placed the bowl down hard in front of Todd. “Here!” None spilled from Steve’s exuberance because of the small amount of food left in the bowl.
Todd’s long fur swayed as he turned to point his butt at Steve again, saying loftily, “I can’t eat that.”
A calmness overtook Steve and he got up slowly, pulling a long knife out of the kitchen sink. He fell upon Todd, stabbing the furniture and hacking at the upholstery in his pursuit of the chester cat.
“I just need more time, please Dragon Tarq,” Steve pleaded. ‘Dragon’ was the appropriate honorific for the situation.
An eyelash melting wave of hot, dry air hit Steve in the face as the dragon responded. “More time?" Its powerful voice also caused fine rocks to bounce on the ground and dust to fall from the distant ceiling. "Mr. Lentil, it has been my experience that creatures of your economic status and race are rarely able to pay their taxes, regardless of time, but as this is your first offense, I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You have three months to settle your hmmh, debt. If you are unable to do so, hmmm, however, there will be" —the dragon paused to hum in a deep purr— “consequences." Saliva welled up at the creases between its sword-like teeth. Some of the saliva escaped and dripped to the ground in long, steaming strands.
Steve’s eyes watered and the intense heat of the cavern created a river of sweat down his back, but as he stood there, looking into the dragon’s merciless eyes a shiver went through his body.
“Mr. Lentil, do you understand?”
Steve experienced a movement that was one part nod, one part bow, and two parts uncontrollable tremor.
“Next,” the dragon growled.
Steve’s fast footfalls carried him toward the exit and through a dark passageway filled with creatures waiting for their conference with Dragon Tarq. The smell of sweat was powerful, but more powerful still was the smell of fear. Another, almost pleasant aroma sat upon the air, reminding Steve of exceptionally crispy bacon.
The Mansion
Steve exited the dragon’s den through a long tunnel, emerging to see the sky of Mastara, colored dark ochre by hundreds of different factories spewing out thousands of different pollutants. The angry orange haze submerged the tops of the surrounding buildings like dead trees in an aerosolized swamp. Each of the buildings’ walls played host to a war between advertisement and graffiti.
He adjusted his hat to cover up the marbled part of his head more adequately as he waited for a snake to come. He blamed his genes, his diet, his stress, and several deities for his lack of hair, and for the layer of fat that insulated him from the world.
A few minutes later and a snake headed his direction arrived with a hiss and he climbed on. The snake had a radius of six feet, and a diameter of twice that. There were many metal carts attached to it; Steve sat in one near the front. The first time he’d ridden a snake he’d been terrified of it—back when he was four or five he saw its ten-foot-forked tongue and ran the other direction—but now he knew that snakes were just as powerless and obedient as everyone else, and therefore not something to fear, at least not for passengers; drivers swerved out of the way and pedestrians cleared the sidewalk when they saw a snake coming. The streets of Mastara were strewn with the remnant debris of cars whose drivers lacked an adequate respect for the snakes.
Steve arrived home and walked down the dirty, eternally moist, and mossy stairs, coming to a scarred rectangle of cheap aluminum that passed for his front door. Steve had heard of robbers kicking in weak doors. Simply leaning on Steve’s door would probably do the trick. Thankfully nothing within Steve’s apartment would entice a hypothetical robber. Any career criminal worth their salt could take one look at Steve’s door and realize they were in the wrong neighborhood, and that dumpster diving would probably yield better results. In Mastara city, places worth robbing guarded their merchandise with several feet of concrete, multiple locks, hulking three-headed-dogs, and little black-and-white signs that read ‘Neighborhood Watch’. Steve had no such deterrents, for he had nothing in his apartment he was really afraid of losing. Buying a new door, new lock, and shatter proof windows would cost more than getting robbed.
He lived on the basement level of an apartment complex in the west ventricle of Mastara City. He’d lived in Mastara ever since he left home at fourteen. Good children did not burden their parents after all. Good children worked. Good children survived long enough to create dragon-tax paying children of their own.
He opened his apartment door, walked into his one-room residence and sat on his bed. He proceeded to get food from the fridge, start water boiling, clean and grate some tubers, all while still sitting on his bed. He had a convenient apartment.
There was one thing on his mind, and he was trying his hardest to focus on anything but that one scaly, ugly, pointy thing. Every time those yellow eyes came to the forefront, he pushed them away with the ‘chunk’ of a split carrot, or the ‘kshht’ of crushed garlic, or the sting of diced onion. Every time those glistening teeth reached for him, he reached for his favorite brand of grape soda.
“What’s cooking?” came a twangy voice, causing Steve to jump.
A cat sat on the top of his refrigerator, and the voice came from it. It wasn’t Steve’s cat. It was a magical cat: a chester. Most people thought that chesters were bad luck, especially the black ones. The one sitting on Steve’s fridge was blacker than a midnight stroll through a cave on a cloudy night.
“Oh, it’s just you.” Steve went back to his cooking, shaking off the slight scare.
“Just me? How hurtful. What a human thing to say.” The cat rolled over on its back and started pawing the air above Steve’s refrigerator. “It’s more than me, if you really think about it, because every day I strive to be more than me. Even the most basic of mathematicians can add my parts together and find that the sum is greater.”
Steve knew from experience that most of the things Todd said were utter nonsense.
“I am the shining light of your pedestrian existence. I grace you with my presence, day in and,” — Todd paused to stroke his whiskers — “well occasionally. You should be grateful. Some of my existential enlightenment gets passed unto you by proximity. You lucky dog. I have stories from the wonderfully wide world beyond.” The cat’s bright green eyes locked onto Steve. “Would you like to hear them?”
“No,” Steve said, continuing to chop up produce. Steve added some seasoning to the water and began washing some mushrooms. “Why is it that every time you show up something bad is bound to happen?”
Todd pursed his furry-black lips. “Coincidence?”
Steve snorted. “Remember the first time you came in here, and I chased you around with a butcher knife?”
“Fondly,” Todd said, smiling in the unnerving manner of chester cats—not even a dentist should have that many teeth.
Steve did not remember the occasion ‘fondly’. It had been back in the dark days of his youth. He didn’t like to think of those times. Of course, the dark days were looking quite a bit brighter in the light of his current situation, in the light of dragon fire. Steve didn’t like to think about the present either.
“You were quite energetic with that thing.” Todd gestured with a black paw toward the knife Steve held. “I remember applauding your efforts.”
Steve grunted and added a pinch of salt to his tuber stew. “Can you really blame me? One ear and I could pay my dragon fee and take a three-month vacation. One paw and I could retire early, one…” Steve trailed off. He was fantasizing about killing Todd and selling bits of him, and it felt weird to do it with Todd in the room. “How about the tip of your tail? You don’t need that.”
Todd looked at Steve with half lidded eyes and a sneering lilt to his whiskers. The tip of his tail flicked.
“Can you blame me?” Steve asked.
“No,” Todd sighed. “I can’t blame you. I’d do the same thing if I were in your place, if I were a lowly, pathetic, sad, fat, ugly, stupid, hopeless, beleaguered, incompetent, sickly, lonely, poor, bald—”
“Yes Todd!” Steve broke in. “I get it.”
“You didn’t let me get to the best part,” Todd said. “The noun that summarizes all of those adjectives: human. There I’m done, but it would have been polite of you to let me finish my sentence.” Todd hopped off the refrigerator and walked casually to the boiling pot, keeping his fluffy black tail pointed resolutely in the air. “What's in it?”
“Tubers,” Steve said.
“Yuuh.” Todd pursed his lips in disgust.
“Onions,” Steve said.
“Ouuh.”
“Garlic.”
“Yoow.”
“Cayenne.”
“Eeeh.”
“Mushrooms,” Steve said, continuing to ignore the exaggerated looks of disgust on Todd’s furry countenance.
“Gross.”
“Ginger.”
“Ok stop. Stop!” Todd mewled.
Steve stopped listing ingredients as he stirred the stew.
“Is there any meat in it?” Todd asked.
“Nope.”
“Then why,” asked Todd, sticking his furry head into the steam coming from the pot, “does it smell so goo-ood?” Todd made the word ‘good’ have two syllables.
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a special broth you use? Maybe that has something in it?”
“Mushrooms?”
"No, no.”
Steve took a spoonful of the broth out of the pot and blew on it. Todd watched with big green eyes, his black slits widening to ovals. Steve took a sip from the steaming spoon and nodded in agreement with the flavors, then turned his head slightly to look at Todd, who stood on the counter, frozen solid in some sort of vicarious anticipation of the stew’s flavor.
“Do you want to try some?” Steve asked.
Todd broke out of his frozen persona and quickly turned around, showing Steve his butt and flicking his tale. “I really shouldn’t. You could have poisoned it, drugged it. You humans are always so devious. The curse I bear for being so valuable. The curse I bear for being so, me.” Todd stuck his furry-black chest out.
\Steve wished he had drugged the stew. How could he have foreseen that Todd would want to eat his cooking? However, even if he had foreseen Todd’s interest, he had nothing to drug it with. He doubted a bottle of cold medicine would have done the trick, while utterly ruining his dinner. “You just saw me taste it; would I drug myself?”
“Don’t get me started,” Todd said. “You drug yourself all the time, with your headache medication, cold pills, your caffeine in the morning, all the drugs you take to combat the different side effects of pollution, inactivity, social isolation and poor diet, then all the drugs you take to combat the side effects of the drugs you take to combat the side effects of the drugs you take. You’re more drug than human at this point. You got a thousand other creatures telling you about some arbitrary problem that only their drug can fix, and then they list the side-effects and you really have to be psychotic to want those side-effects over—”
“Todd. Todd!” Steve yelled, interrupting the rant. “You’re doing it again.”
“What was I saying? Oh yes, you could have drugged the stew.
Steve sighed. “You don’t have to try it, Todd. I don’t care.” Steve poured himself a big steaming bowl of the stew.
Todd’s fluffy black head swiveled as it followed the spoon go from Steve’s bowl to Steve’s mouth, back and forth, over and over. “Oh, but I really do want to try it.”
“Then try it!” Steve pushed the bowl toward Todd.
“Oh, but I shouldn’t.” Todd backed up and his fur expanded to make him look larger than normal.
“For the love of… Just make up your mind,” Steve said, pulling his bowl back and taking a few more bites of the stew.
“Is it good?” Todd asked.
“I like it,” Steve said, with a shiver of suppressed fury.
“But is it really good?” Todd asked.
“I don’t know!” Steve shouted. More than a few violent impulses went through Steve’s head, but they were tempered by the knowledge that the cat was more or less invulnerable. Not truly invulnerable because chester parts had a price for a reason. If not invulnerable, definitely Steve-proof.
“You must think it’s really good; why else would you eat it with such relish?” asked Todd, lowering his head to the table to somehow get a better look at what Steve was eating.
Steve ignored him, slurping down the stew as loudly as he could.
“But is it like restaurant quality? How many creatures have you cooked for? Do only humans like your cooking?”
Steve ignored him.
'Sluuurp'
“Okay, okay. I’ll try it. Can I try it?”
Steve placed the bowl down hard in front of Todd. “Here!” None spilled from Steve’s exuberance because of the small amount of food left in the bowl.
Todd’s long fur swayed as he turned to point his butt at Steve again, saying loftily, “I can’t eat that.”
A calmness overtook Steve and he got up slowly, pulling a long knife out of the kitchen sink. He fell upon Todd, stabbing the furniture and hacking at the upholstery in his pursuit of the chester cat.
