The Dragon Charmer Read online

  Ragginbone, who had determined to seize control of the encounter, was startled. Spirits who come to the circle can normally see little beyond the rim and should hear only the voice of their interlocutor. “Did you come merely to bandy words with an old man?” He spoke directly to the unwelcome visitant. “That was kind of you: we have so little to entertain us. How is your mother?”

  The ugly face grew a shade uglier. “As ever.”

  “Really? I had heard she was dead, but obviously rumor lied. They said she had eaten herself in her insatiable voracity, poisoned herself with her own bile. One should never believe all one hears. Is she still pleased to see you, best-beloved of her children?”

  “As ever.” This time, it was little more than a snarl.

  “Ah, well, blood is thicker than water, is it not? Even when diluted with the unholy ichor of the immortals. You have your mother’s beauty, your brother’s charm. What did your father bequeath to you?”

  The figure in the circle, needled beyond detachment, gave way to rancor. “I do not have to listen to this!”

  “Then go.”

  Immediately the circle was empty. Moonspittle sank back into his chair; his wan face looked ghostly with fatigue. “It is enough,” he insisted. “More than enough. You spoke rashly there—you often do. That one can be dangerous. He has no… proper… limitations.”

  “He was badly brought up.” Caracandal allowed himself an unpleasant smile.

  “I don’t understand how he came here.”

  “I have an idea about that. Clearly his mother lives. I assumed the world’s weariness had drained even her, and she had passed the Gate at last; but I was overoptimistic. Somewhere—somewhere she must be hiding—waiting—chewing on her old plots like a jackal with a carcass of bones. I knew she had tutored Alimond, doubtless for her own ends—but that was long ago. I wonder…”

  “Let me close the spell,” begged Moonspittle, uninterested in such speculation.

  “Not yet. There is one more question to be asked.”

  “Of whom?” Moonspittle’s tone was dark with foreboding.

  “Place the crowned toad in the circle.”

  “No!” The little remaining color quitted his face, leaving the small features looking uncomfortably isolated in a waxen façade. “You cannot—the risk is too great. I will not do it!”

  “Fear clouds your judgment. The toad is a little god, a thing of few powers and forgotten myth. Only a handful ever worshiped it. He must be bound by that.”

  “I will not—I cannot—”

  “Why keep the thing,” said Ragginbone, “if you do not mean to use it?”

  “A curiosity. I am a collector…”

  “So I see,” Ragginbone said dryly. The gloom hid the lewd prints, the ill-assorted books, the jetsam littering and lining the room. “There are people who might be interested, if they knew of this place. Perhaps you should open the shop…”

  “No—no—” Moonspittle’s voice shriveled to a whisper; he huddled into himself, deep in the chair, a shivering bundle of terror. “Not people—not customers—” The word was pronounced with an inexpressible loathing. “I never open … I never open.”

  Ragginbone did not smile. The Gifted have their own bogeymen, feeding on the imagination that is the source of all magic. In a lifetime lasting centuries, on the borderline of reality, such fancied demons may outgrow their more tangible rivals, dominating every nightmare.

  “I opened once … I forget the date. I always forget dates. It was the last time … The city was burning. My city. A man came in without his wig. I knew him even so: he was a duke—a lord—a wealthy merchant—whichever. He carried a child in his arms with its face burnt off. ‘Give me a potion,’ he said, ‘to heal my son,’ but I sent him away. The dead are beyond healing. I shut the door, and locked it, and bolted the bolts, and chained the chains, and came down here until the fire was gone. Maybe it passed over me: I do not know. When I next went upstairs—it must have been a century or more later—the city had grown again as if it had never been lost. I could feel the busyness of it, the life. Heaving and bustling like an anthill. But I don’t go out. Not now. And I never open.”

  The ensuing pause signified Ragginbone’s understanding. Now he was calmer, Moonspittle seemed to have acquiesced, resigned to his visitor’s recklessness. He placed the jade image at the heart of the circle.

  “What of its name? Do you know it?”

  “I hope so,” said Ragginbone.

  “I fear so,” sighed Moonspittle.

  He was back in his chair; Ragginbone’s hand was on his shoulder; the wizard’s voice spoke with his mouth. At the ominous words the darkness seemed to grow denser; the cat shrank into stillness. One by one the candle flames dwindled and went out, as if snuffed by damp fingers. There was no smoke. In the circle, the squat figurine began to glow with a green nimbus, like marsh light. Awareness grew in its crystal eyes, filling them with a baleful glare, sending spiked rays darting round the room. “Agamo—” Elivayzar’s lips moved helplessly “—swamp god, mud god. Eater of the moon. In this name I conjure you, in this form I bind you. Come to me!”

  The toad’s throat flexed: the sound that issued from its mouth squeaked and crackled like a badly tuned radio. “I hear you. Who has—the insolence—to call me thus? Agamo—is long forgotten. I am no more—in this guise.”

  “It will suffice for my purpose.”

  “Your purpose!” Rage distorted the voice still further; the word cracked, ending on a shriek. “I serve—no man’s purpose. Who are you? I will remember—your impudence.”

  “Caracandal.”

  “You lie. The Brokenwand—has sunk—to the level of a vagrant—a starveling beggar—homeless—powerless—dispossessed. He could not summon—the ghost—of a flea.”

  “I take my power on loan. I too have my instruments. Enough of this ranting. There are things I must ask you.”

  “I will not—be questioned by you!” Fury stretched the toad’s mouth too wide: resistant to the pressures of spell and Spirit, the corners began to split.

  “You are Agamo,” his challenger intoned. “A lesser god of mangrove and marshland. There is no belief left to uphold you, no lingering myth to keep your memory green. Only the image in which you are bound. You must answer me.”

  “No—NO—”

  “You sent the tannasgeal to take the girl, but her phantom eluded you. Where is she?”

  “NOOO—”

  The statuette shuddered as if in an earth tremor; the room rocked; books fell from the shelves. The Watchers saw the cracks widening, dividing, spreading; snakes of lightning flickered from the crystal eyes. Then the mouth gaped to an impossible extent, wrenching the head in two, and with a report like a small bomb the image exploded. Jade fragments flew like shrapnel. Ragginbone ducked; Moonspittle scrunched himself into a ball, crossed arms screening his face. Silence came with the patter of the last few flakes of stone, the slither of a dislodged print descending the wall. On the narrow window the blind had been torn away, and remote streetlighting filtered through the shattered pane. They saw the circle quenched and scattered, pictures crooked, books tumbled. On the table at the far end of the room, several of the retorts were broken. A husk of ragged glass rocked on the carpet.

  “Someone will have heard,” Ragginbone remarked.

  “Oh, no,” said Moonspittle, plucking a splinter from his outermost cardigan. “They never do.” For a moment, his button eyes shone dimly with the afterglow of power. “They never do.”

  Ragginbone stayed long enough to help Moonspittle clear up, offering to replace the shattered windowpane. Moon-spittle was vaguely philosophical about the breakages, making temporary repairs to the window with tape and carefully collecting the segments of the smashed retorts in order to reconstruct them later with an ancient and evil-smelling pot of glue. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “People bring me things. Deliveries. There’s a little shop round the corner…”

  “How do you know? I t
hought you didn’t go out.”

  “It was there when I did. Maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago. I suppose it might have different owners now. I saw the boy once, when he came round. Through the grille, of course: he didn’t see me. He looked very dark. Hobbs, the name was. He didn’t look like a Hobbs. I’ve wondered if the new people might be Welsh” He made it sound impossibly exotic. “They’re always dark, the Welsh. Little and dark. I never heard him sing, though.”

  Ragginbone considered explaining about the twentieth century, and abandoned the idea on the grounds that it would take most of the twenty-first.

  “I send Mogwit round there,” Moonspittle went on, “with a note on his collar. He’s very intelligent, Mogwit.”

  “He must be,” said Ragginbone. “He hasn’t got a collar.”

  “Of course he has a collar!” Moonspittle was startled into indignation. “I’ll put my hand on it in a minute…”

  Eventually the collar was found, dangling from the corner of a bookshelf.

  “See?” said Moonspittle proudly. “Now, you thought I’d forget… Didn’t you? My payment—my city in a snowstorm. You thought you were going to keep it, but you shan’t. Give it to me. You promised.”

  Ragginbone gave him the trinket and left him gazing raptly into its depths. No one saw him go. There was activity in Selena Place, very different from its daytime business: but the night people paid no attention to a stranger. The vast metropolis, with its motley inhabitants, its eccentric fashions, its myriad lives and lifestyles, seemed to absorb all comers into its shifting patterns: it had stood too long and seen too much ever to be surprised by anything. Wizards and warlocks, demons and dervishes might have passed unremarked in the crowd. Ragginbone strode off down the street and merged into the wilderness of the city.

  IX

  Gaynor was in Fern’s room at Dale House looking for her night cream when she found the Atlantean veil. At the hospital, she would rub moisturizer into her friend’s face herself, as if in this act of touching, caring, performing Fern’s own daily ritual, Gaynor would draw closer to Fern, hoping against hope that the gentle pressure of her fingertips might somehow reach into lost consciousness, lost mind. The body of an absentee remains a point of contact, a dear familiar thing, even when the spirit has strayed too far ever to return. When Gaynor came across the veil she held it up to the light, trying to catch the pattern, seeing only faint spectral shapes that seemed to melt and change even as she gazed at them. On an impulse, she thrust it in her bag to take with her.

  That afternoon at Fern’s bedside she pulled it out and folded it as best she could, though the gossamer was too soft to crease, too tissue-thin for her to make out where the creases should be. Then she draped it carefully around the sleeper’s neck, tying the ends in a loose knot, feeling suddenly certain that in this futile gesture she had done something inexplicably significant, as if this silken bond might somehow protect its wearer from further harm and bind the distant spirit to its long-lost home. The nurse on duty said: “What a beautiful thing.”

  “Isn’t it?” Gaynor glanced up, snatched from her reverie. “I don’t suppose she knows it’s there, but…”

  “We can’t tell what she knows,” said the nurse. “Coma patients tell strange stories when they return to consciousness. Touch her, talk to her, go on hoping. She may hear you.”

  Gaynor sat clasping the limp hand as the long hours dragged past. She had brought a book but it could not hold her attention: her gaze and her thought kept returning to Fern’s face. Sounds of activity reached her now and then from the corridor: the rattle of a trolley, a fragment of conversation, rarely medical in content. (“Where did you get that? It can’t be true—” “Of course it’s true: it was on the telly.”) Birdsong came from the garden outside. A bee drifted through the window and began to investigate the vase of freesias on the table. Yet these small noises merely punctured the silence within the room, dimpling its surface, unable to penetrate the nucleus of quiet where Gaynor sat with Fern. Gaynor’s mind planed, soaking up irrelevant details. On the telly… it was on the telly… And suddenly the elusive recollection clicked into place. The story about the dragon—the story she knew she had seen somewhere—had been in one of the manuscripts that came under the scrutiny of the camera on that television program. The program about the museum in York, the one with Dr. Jerrold Laye… She had tried very hard not to dwell on the incident—the elastic distortion of the screen, the horror of that beckoning finger—which was perhaps why she had mislaid the connection. But now the knowledge was there, in the forefront of her brain, and it could not be ignored. The core of quiet was broken, without the impact of sound. Her thoughts seemed to clatter in her head; her stomach quailed in advance of terror. They would have to follow up the clue—they would have to visit the museum. (I look forward to meeting you, he had said.) She found she was shaking and her grip had tightened on Fern’s hand; hastily, she forced herself to relax. “It was a nightmare,” she said aloud. “A nightmare in three-D.” But she had moved into the borderland of a world where nightmares walked, and she could find no easy comforters. Instead she gazed at her friend’s face, remote and aloof in its stillness, and at the drips that fed her and the catheter that purged her and the steady green line of her heartbeat, slow as a hibernating animal, and Gaynor knew that whatever her fears, she must do what she could.

  It seemed an interminable length of time until Will arrived. She wanted to telephone him, but Ragginbone’s instructions had been clear and she was loath to leave Fern. She told Will all she could remember of the few lines she had glimpsed so briefly: “It was the story of your dream, I know it was. The spearhead was mentioned specifically: a thyng of grate power and magicke. I can picture the words now…”

  “Hmm.” Will was frowning. “Odd, isn’t it? One moment forgotten, then vividly clear. The clue materializes, just when we need it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s too neat,” he said. “Too pat. We’re desperate—snatching at straws—and suddenly there’s an obvious trail to follow. Even if it leads into a dragon’s den—literally, perhaps—we can’t afford to neglect it. I don’t like it at all.”

  “You think it’s some kind of a—what do you call it?—a plant?”

  “I think … it’s very convenient. Like the cigarette butt at the scene of the crime. The Old Spirit can send dreams, manipulate your thoughts… Did you get around to checking up on this Dr. Laye?”

  Gaynor shook her head. “I meant to,” she said, “but with everything that’s been happening, I suppose it slipped my mind.”

  “Make a start when you get home,” said Will, “if it’s not too late to call people. Any background information would be useful. Here—I came in Dad’s car, you take it.” He handed her the keys. “I’ll get a taxi back.”

  Gaynor drove home to Dale House—it was curious how she had begun to think of it as “home”—feeling increasingly ill at ease. Overhead, a heavy sky seemed to reflect her sense of foreboding: clouds dark as indigo were rolling in from the sea, advancing rain obliterated the horizon. Trees lashed out in erratic gusts of wind and then were suddenly still, their new leaves shivering as if with cold. When she came to the barren moor the gale tugged and pummeled the car as if trying to push her off the road. It reminded her too much of the eve of Fern’s wedding, and she was thankful to see the drive to Dale House approaching on her left. Indoors, there was a welcome smell of cooking emanating from the kitchen; Robin descended briefly from the study, his expression of forlorn hope dying as Gaynor shook her head. When she was able, she appropriated the telephone and sat down to make her calls.

  * * *

  “I didn’t have much luck,” she told Will the next day. “Several people had heard of the museum but no one seems to have visited it. Ditto Dr. Laye. He’s supposed to be a private collector with academic pretensions—a doctorate from somewhere or other, an obscure publication or two. No known source of income but they say he has money, a b
it too much money to be perfectly respectable. This morning I managed to get hold of the producer of that TV program. She can’t have known what happened—his talking to me, I mean—but she said he was very manipulative about which manuscripts they showed, what questions they asked, that sort of thing. She obviously didn’t like him. I said was his skin that awful gray color in real life and she said yes, if anything worse, they’d tried to do something with makeup but it didn’t help much. Apparently they’d been warned by the curator not to mention it to him: it’s a sensitive subject.” She added after a moment’s hesitation: “I feel it’s important—this business of his skin color—but I don’t know why.”

  “Hmm.” Lost in reflection, Will made no comment. “We should talk to Ragginbone,” he concluded eventually, “but God knows when he’ll get back. As it is, we can’t afford to wait. Fern’s in danger—wherever she is—and we have to help her. We can’t ignore a clue when it’s the only one we’ve got—even if it means walking into a trap. I’d better go to York and take a look at this museum.”

  “Walking into a trap?” Gaynor echoed faintly. “That doesn’t sound like an awfully good idea.”

  “So we walk warily. Anyway, you’re staying with Fern. She can’t be left alone.”

  “N-no,” Gaynor demurred. “You need me. I’m the expert on ancient manuscripts.”

  After some argument, he conceded her point. “Someone has to stay with Fern, though. Dad can’t be there all the time. I could ask Gus, I suppose…”

  “Won’t he think it odd,” said Gaynor, “the two of us going off on a wild-goose chase in the middle of a crisis?”

  “Not necessarily. I’ll tell him the truth, or some of it. He’s a vicar: belief in unearthly powers goes with his job. Demonic possession—or dispossession, in this case—should be something he can take in his stride. It won’t be the first time he’s known us to get mixed up in matters … outside normal experience.”