Elizabeth Hopkinson is a writer from Bradford, West Yorkshire (UK), where she does all her best work in the old Wool Exchange, fuelled by the irresistible mocha/manga combination. Her work has appeared in various magazines, webzines and anthologies, including Interzone, Strange Horizons and Mslexia, and she was the winner of the 2005 James White Award. Her short story collection, My True Love Sent to Me is available online from Virtual Tales, and features knights and ladies falling in and out of love. This is her fourth story for Byzarium.

Visit Elizabeth's website.

If it was someone's idea of a practical joke, Antimony decided, then it wasn't very funny. By rights, she ought to have the creature quarantined immediately. Appearances of lizards (of any sort) needed clamping down pretty severely ever since the Projectors in Room 309 had got hold of that Escher print. One gecko out of place and the whole of Lagado's Old Quarter could be patterned over by suppertime. The public health risk didn't bear thinking about. But for some reason, she felt strangely sympathetic towards it. Maybe it was the signboard. Maybe it was the prospect of finally getting rid of all those ducks.

"I'm going soft, that's what it is," thought Antimony, stepping over the tail and easing her way towards the back door. "I'm becoming a Lagadan again."

Three months ago, when she had come back to take over her uncle's Academy, her inaugural pledge had been, "to bring this institution into the nineteenth century". (The year was 2007 at the time). Now she knew she'd be lucky to drag it towards the seventeenth. Having spent so much time away from the Islands, she'd forgotten just how insular and backward looking the people there could be. While she'd spent the last ten years lecturing in Kyoto and Yamagata, most of her colleagues couldn't point out Japan on a map if you showed them. Some of them couldn't point out their own house, for Lemuel's sake!

As Chancellor, she couldn't exactly say she was popular. She had instantly disbanded the longstanding Paper Bicycle Project and halved the budget on the Skinless Onion. They weren't keen on her attitude to the ducks either. It was a proven fact, the Vice-Chancellor had told her emphatically, that as a worm will form two worms when cut in half, so gardening activities with spades were projected to create a tenfold worm increase during the summer months alone. "A plague, Madam Chancellor." And as there was documentary evidence that, "ducks will come and eat up worms", so the only way to prevent this catastrophe was to provide each Lagadan household with a supply of ducks in proportion to their garden space. When Antimony had pointed out the plague of ducks now infesting Lagado, she had been met with a wall of silence. Nobody wanted the duck project to go the way of the Portable Plughole. In the end, Antimony had let it be, but not without conspicuously refusing to have a duck of her own.

"Not in my back yard, Professor Pooter," she had informed the chief Horticultural Projector, on being presented with a duck egg (on the grounds that prenatal bonding was essential for a good working relationship). And considering that her back yard was now almost entirely filled by a large Komodo dragon, she felt she had been quite right.

"Mrs Wiregauze," she called through the kitchen window, "could you bring some sort of…er…lead?"

She then turned back to face the dragon. It was greyish in colour, three metres long, and had a signboard round its neck saying Marry Me. Even by Lagadan standards, it was a curious thing to discover on one's doorstep in the evening.

"Perhaps the interns did it," Antimony thought. (The dragon: was that what they called her? She couldn't remember). Out loud she added: "And bring something we can use as a muzzle."

Mrs Wiregauze had been her uncle's housekeeper and had come with the house – one of the very few in Lagado that had all its storeys in the correct order. She was grimly capable and built like the side of a (non-Lagadan) barn. Between them, she and Antimony managed to capture and control the giant lizard with a length of washing line, a colander and a few spare belts from the back of the wardrobe.

"Where do you want it, ma'am?" said Mrs Wiregauze, as if it was a piece of antique laquerware that Antimony had ordered from Hong Kong.

"Oh, just in there will do for now." The Komodo's tongue flickered at Antimony insolently. There was something about the eyes that looked almost familiar.

"Very good, ma'am." Mrs Wiregauze paused to roll up her sleeves. "And if I might make so bold, may I offer my congratulations? We were starting to think you'd never find a husband."

"It's not a serious proposal, Mrs Wiregauze," said Antimony. "It's a Komodo dragon."

"Can't be too picky at your time of life." Mrs Wiregauze shook her head. "Don't want to be on the shelf forever. Are chops fine for dinner?"

"I'm thirty-three," Antimony muttered as the kitchen door closed. The Komodo licked its eyes.

It wasn't the interns. Antimony was fairly convinced of that. Practical jokes were generally followed up by messages in pigeonholes, or at least a certain amount of giggling and sideways glancing. All Antimony had received was another snide circular from the Love-A-Duck Campaign, and a request from the Political Projectors to simulate Prime Minister's Question Time on the archery range.

It wasn't a bi-product of the gherkin cheesecake either, although Antimony did wish someone had warned her that the kitchen staff had started getting their supplies direct from the labs again. That was another thing she'd have to get onto this afternoon. Right after she had walked her dragon.

She couldn't believe she was getting attached to it already. She'd had it sleeping at the foot of her bed last night. (Although, in all honesty, she had left it tethered in the dining room; the thing must have escaped). And now here she was taking it out for a stroll. An outbreak of tessellation could occur at any moment and she didn't seem to care.

"I must be mad," said Antimony to herself, steering the Komodo through the misshapen gates of Lagado Municipal Park. Several of the Lagadans who were out walking their ducks balked at the sight of a three-metre reptile approaching and reined them in pretty sharply.

"Don't worry, old chap." Antimony gave the Komodo a pat. "Enough of them have gone feral by now. There ought to be a decent meal for you up by the lake."

The Komodo seemed to look happy at this, although it was difficult to tell. Maybe it just had wind. Certainly, it became remarkably lively at the sight of half a dozen widgeon fighting over a stale crust beside the square roundabout. Antimony gave up hanging onto the lead and let it go. She hoped the signboard didn't get in its way too much; she hadn't yet had the courage to try taking it off.

Marry Me

. Huh! That would be the day. Antimony would have to teach Mrs Wiregauze when to keep her mouth shut in future. On the shelf indeed! A Chancellor needed a man like Lagado needed a paper bicycle. Men were nothing but a nuisance, and an inelegant one at that. Not that Antimony had much recent experience to go on. International lecturing hadn't left too much time for that sort of thing. In fact she hadn't been in a real relationship for… was it really twelve years?

It was. 1995: the year of her graduation. There had been a little gang of them, all the high flyers who had gone up to Laputa and come out with double firsts and enormous ambitions. It had seemed like a great idea at the time to celebrate their results with a tour of the Island of Sorcerers. After three years of advanced algebra and particle physics, a magical island where anything might happen sounded like pleasure on a stick.

Of course, they should have realised that anywhere with a name like Glubdubdrib and ruled by necromancers was bound to be as dull as tombs (literally). And then there was that little incident with the golem, and being amorously pursued by the undead. Not to mention the size of the cockroaches in the hotel room. But then if they hadn't ended up running through the Governor's water garden at four in the morning, it never would have happened. Antimony guessed she just got lucky.

His name was Quill. Black hair; black eyes; cheekbones like a couple of slashes. He also turned out to be cousin twice removed to the Governor, and the reason why Antimony's holiday went on a lot longer than it said on her Visa. It wasn't just the extradition, though; it never would have worked anyway. Oh sure, he was sweet and witty and could conjure blood roses under her feet. He even followed her to Nagaya once. She could see him now, standing under her apartment window, playing Tudor madrigals in the middle of the rainy season. But she had had to finish it in the end. Their lives were going in two completely opposite directions. A scientist and a magician was an illogical combination, and one she could do without. It just didn't fit.

Coming to think of it, nor did a pet Komodo dragon and a park full of feral ducks, but that was just the way things went. Hoping to goodness that her ex-Dean Mr Kimura would never see her like this, she stood up and whistled to the lizard.

"Come on, boy. Home time. Let's go and find Mrs Wiregauze."

The Komodo left three beaks and half a wing in the flowerbed and lumbered its way towards her. It really was remarkably tame for a carnivorous beast. Maybe it had escaped from the Escher Project after all.

"Who's a lovely boy, then?" said Antimony, ignoring the fact that it was butt-ugly.

It could have been the light, but she thought she saw it wink.

"I thought it might like chicken for a change tonight," said Mrs Wiregauze, bringing in a plate. She paused in the middle of the room and sighed. "I always think a June wedding is lovely. Ivory with your complexion though, ma'am. Nothing worse than looking washed out."

"Just put it next to mine," said Antimony distractedly, and went back to the anagram she was working on. Why she had thought the Tribnian Method of discovering plots and conspiracies would shed any light on the dragon situation she had no idea, but after a week she felt she had to do something, if only to prove she hadn't totally lost it. She had woken with her arm around the creature the other morning. So far, however, her efforts were proving as useless as the wedding dresses in the bride magazines Mrs Wiregauze kept leaving lying around. (Made of rice paper to save on throwing; could also double up as napkins for the cake if required). The only alternative messages she had discovered in Marry Me were Merry Ma, Mer-Ray M and Y am Merr. Not very promising. She had tried calling the dragon Merr, but it just waggled its tongue.

No one had reported anything missing from the Escher Project, Antimony was pleased to note. Not that she would have minded parting with the Komodo, of course not. But the stairs to Room 309 were a nightmare; you could be going up and down for half and hour without arriving. Antimony didn't have time for that.

"Do I, Merrsy-Werrsy?" she said, scratching the Komodo's head as it wolfed its chicken and knocked another ornament off the shelf with its tail. Was she cracking up, or was there a faint scent of dead roses in the air? She took another look at the sheet of anagrams and screwed it up.

"Doesn't matter, does it old chap? You're better than a poxy duck any day."

The Komodo put its head in Antimony's lap and looked up at her with those strangely familiar eyes. Quill used to do that, Antimony remembered, absently beginning to stroke it again. On those long summer afternoons when they used to sit in his cousin's Garden of Invisibility, watching the mist wreaths above them as they floated on a lawn you couldn't see, surrounded by crumbling gothic arches. There had always been that sparkle in his black eyes, that hint of a smile on his lips. Of course, Antimony hadn't realised at the time that her camisole was invisible too; no wonder he was smiling. But she had forgiven him in the end. She always did. It was just that last time - the time she had sent him away - that his eyes hadn't smiled again. When he had given her that final look, she had seen them, blank and glassy. Just like…

Antimony pushed the Komodo's head away from her with a start.

"No," she said. "It can't be."

It could be. It was ridiculous and went against everything Antimony had been trying to do with her life for the last twelve years, but it wasn't strictly impossible. Stranger things had happened on Glubdubdrib (most of them involving the Roman Senate, if she remembered rightly). Quill could have met with some sort of an accident while practising his art, she supposed. Did sorcerers practise transformation? It wasn't really something she knew about. She wouldn't even think about why he had arrived in Lagado with that signboard. The obvious explanation was far too childish and definitely beneath the Chancellor of the Academy.

As if there wasn't enough to deal with. Only this morning the projectors in Room 184 had proudly presented her with twenty-four Giant Bonsai Trees, followed rapidly by yet another illegal prototype for decoffeenated caffeine. And now a porter had arrived to tell her that the current political project had got out of hand again, and was bringing a new meaning to the term, "probing question".

"I'll be there in a minute," she said, sweeping the contents of her in-try into the recycling bin and trying not to trip over the actual cycle pedals attached to it. Poor Quill. He might have deserved some things (a slap round the face for what happened with that re-animated handmaid of Cleopatra, for example) but not this. Not life as some lumbering Indonesian reptile. Surely a sorcerer of his calibre deserved better. Antimony caught up a piece of paper she'd missed. Geckos. She ripped it up. No, she was not going to let herself be sucked in like this. Turning into a lizard was just the sort of impractical over-reaction she would expect from a man. Especially a magician. It had been twelve whole years. Twelve years. He should have got over it by now and moved on. Like she had.

"What are you looking at?" she said to half a paper gecko now stuck to the edge of her desk. Stupid thing. Antimony glared at it crossly. The two geckos glared back. Both had glassy black eyes, lonely eyes. "It's not like I couldn't get someone else if I wanted to," she said to the four geckos. "I just happen to value my independence." The eight geckos curled up their tails and aligned themselves in a symmetrical pattern. Antimony was almost sure it was a supercilious gesture.

"Sorry to bother you again, Madam Chancellor." The porter stuck his head round the door. "But do you own a Komodo dragon, by any chance? It's just that I think the Love-A-Ducks would like a word."

Antimony bristled. "What sort of word precisely?"

"Well, I think extermination was top of their list. Apparently, it's been seen in the park eating you-know-what."

There was a whiz of flying arrows outside the window and an angry shout ending in the words, "where you can stick your foreign policy."

"And I believe the Shadow Cabinet has arrived."

"Tell them I'm out." Between the slats of the blinds, a gang of protesters in Quack the System T-shirts could already be seen scavenging arrows, while the Shadow Home Secretary was engaged in a headlock with one of the research assistants. A sudden vision of a dead Komodo dragon, coupled with twelve more years of going to bed with a cup of cocoa and a fluffy cushion had flashed across Antimony's mind, and it was not pleasant.

She grabbed her coat and ran for the now gecko-patterned door.

"Hold the fort," she said to the porter. "I've got to find Quill – Merr – the dragon."

By the time she found the Komodo, it was shambling miserably towards the Gulliver Memorial with a truth-seeking arrow sticking out of one flank and a pro-duck flyer posted to the other. Antimony didn't think she'd ever seen a sadder sight, and that included the interns' end-of-term revue. She ran to catch up with it, and put her arm around its wrinkly neck.

"Hey, where do you think you're going, you poor old thing?" she said. "You're coming back home with me and…" And what? And I'll give you a nice leg of lamb and a sunbed? She should never have left it so long. At least the original Quill had only had two legs and you could look him in both eyes at the same time. Now all she was left with was this. Unless…

"Now I know I've taken leave of my senses," she said, clasping the dragon at the back of the neck with both hands. She would never be able to show her face in Kyoto again. So much for rationality. She looked into the giant lizard's face. "Just a quick kiss, that's all you're getting. And no tongues."

"By Lem, you're scraping the barrel these days, aren't you, Timmi?"

Antimony spun round in shock. The pale-skinned man leaning against the bandstand had his black hair cut much shorter than she remembered, and had also acquired a goatee beard and a pair of designer spectacles, but there was no mistaking the voice.

"Quill?" She looked back to the Komodo dragon. "But I thought…"

"Oh, you didn't," said Quill, sauntering over to the dragon and tickling him under the chin. "He's a silly old mutt, but you've got to admire his constancy. Loving this sign, by the way."

Antimony felt herself grasping for shreds of dignity, and failing. She raised herself to her full height, trying to ignore the effect of a full-length leather coat on Quill's lean figure. "And I suppose you think this is funny. Is this your alternative to saying it with flowers or are you just here for a gloat? How did you get here anyway?"

"Nice to see you again, too. Got here six months before you, actually. This place is a real inspiration to the creative spark. I take it you haven't made it to Room 308 yet? Physical Manifestations of Repressed Emotions. It's the Chancellor's privilege to trial the prototype: I think this one's passion."

"And repressed passion looks like a Komodo dragon, does it?" Antimony put on the tone she used to use with her students.

"Actually, it started out as a gecko." Quill scratched the back of his neck. "I guess you really missed me, Timmi."

"I missed you? That is such sorcerer's vanity. Do you honestly think anything in my emotional centre would look that ugly? Besides, it's got your eyes."

"Ah, same old Timmi." Antimony noticed he still had that dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. "Always so logical; has to have a good argument for everything." He tweaked her hair. "Let me buy you a coffee and we'll argue about it some more."

A little shiver went down Antimony's spine. She didn't let him see. "Quill, have you any idea what I have to deal with? Class One tessellation, murderous ministers and a Giant Bonsai forest hardly begins to cover it. I don't know where you've been hiding all this time, but…"

She would consider the conclusion of that sentence later, Antimony decided. It wasn't just that it was hard to talk while sharing an ardent kiss with her future husband. There was also the question of what they were going to do if the Komodo decided it liked being made manifest and decided to stay, how Room 308 had managed to slip past her appraisal, and whether she really could get away with a rice paper wedding dress. A team of ducks few serenely past as Quill managed to get a hand to Antimony's lower back. Perhaps tomorrow she would have the Vice-Chancellor round for tea and cakes. It was time they reconsidered the Paper Bicycle.