Nothing But Blue Skies by Tom Holt

I’d guess he was either the managing director of a major bank or the Regius Professor of Logic at Oxford. But that’s not the point,’ he went on, taking a step closer to the dragon, as if about to fit him with a saddle and bridle. ‘They are the People, and they have a Right to Know. And I’m the one who’s going to tell them.’
    For the first time in his long and complicated life, the dragon felt panic starting to take hold. Mostly it was the incongruity - this pathetic specimen of a puny breed, advancing on him with a contemptuous grin on his ridiculous face, as if he was the one who could call down millimetre-perfect lightning strikes without even lifting a finger; in the face of such assurance, he couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t more to all this than met any of his three eyes. He resolved on a controlled strategic withdrawal, with strategic running like buggery held in reserve as a contingency plan. The question was how—
    And then he happened to look down and see, right there under his foot, a grating in the gutter. Some iron slats, a short drop, and below that a smart current of water running-off the recent heavy rain; too small for a human, let alone a dragon, but easily one small tail-flick for a goldfish.
    He smiled. ‘Goodbye,’ he said; then he turned himself into a fish, slid through the bars and went plop! into the water—
    â€”Right into the keepnet installed there by the little weedy man an hour before. Before the dragon realised what was happening to him he’d been scooped up out of the water and dumped, wriggling and thrashing, into a jam jar full of water. At once he tried to revert to his proper shape, but he couldn’t; in order to make the change he needed clear, empty space around him to grow into during that all-important first three milliseconds of the process. Trapped like this in water, with the walls of the jar hemming him in, he couldn’t do anything to free himself.
    â€˜Sucker,’ the man said; then he screwed the lid on the jar, and everything was silent.
    Â 
    â€˜Gordon?’
    Gordon hesitated, his tray gripped precariously in one hand while the other tried to fish coins out of his pocket past the big bunch of keys, and looked round. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’
    It was a risk he ran every time he had lunch in the canteen: a disconcerting ambush by a more or less irritating colleague. There was neither time nor an obvious vector for escape, so he accepted his fate as gracefully as he could. ‘How’ve you been, Neville?’ he asked, synthesising interest like Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold out of straw. ‘Haven’t seen much of you since you started on the six o’clock slot.’
    â€˜Marvellous,’ Neville replied, grinning. ‘Come over here and sit down, I want to talk to you.’
    My fault for not dying young while I had the chance , Gordon muttered to himself. He did as he was told, and started to disembark the contents of his tray onto the formica table. There weren’t many places left where you could still find the genuine, original, unspeakably naff 1970s formica in its natural habitat.
    â€˜You got my message, then,’ Neville said.
    Gordon frowned. ‘Did I?’
    â€˜Sorry for all the melodrama,’ Neville replied, opening up his grin to Insufferable Level 2. ‘But if I’d told you normally - you know, chatting like this - you wouldn’t have done anything about it. Which is understandable enough; after all, you’ve always thought of me as an annoying little shit—’
    â€˜No, no.’ Gordon frowned. ‘Well, yes. If it’s any consolation, I think of lots of people that way.’
    â€˜Me too. Doesn’t matter. The point is,’ Neville continued, spreading his skinny forearms across the table, ‘you did as you were told and looked at the website. That’s