The Dragon Charmer Read online

  Robin arrived around three in the morning. “Mrs. Wicklow told me you were here,” he said. “Glad to see you. Don’t like Fern left alone.”

  “She mustn’t be,” Ragginbone impressed on him. “Stay awake. Watch her constantly. I have a feeling something may happen soon.” What kind of a feeling it was, hope or fear, he did not specify.

  But Robin had gone beyond optimism. “Will and Gaynor haven’t come home,” he went on. “Don’t remember them saying they’d be away for the night. Not too happy about that.”

  “Lougarry will look after them,” said Ragginbone, but the cloud on his brow grew darker, and his eyes were anxious.

  Saturday made no difference to the sickroom: here, every day, every hour was the same. Dawn faded the lamplight: in the gray pallor of morning the face on the pillow looked more deathly than ever, and on the heart monitor the pulse beat seemed fainter and slower. Medical staff came and went with disquieting solemnity. Ragginbone snatched a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in the waiting area, Robin returned to Dale House for a hasty lunch; but most of the time they were both there, sharing the vigil as if by unspoken accord, one dozing, one waking, making no conversation, finding a meager solace in their tacit companionship. They made a strange couple, the old man and the middle-aged one, the mentor and the father, seated on opposite sides of the bed, and between them under the white coverlet the slight outline of the girl. Once Robin said: “She was never any trouble, you know. No drugs. No undesirable boyfriends. Studied hard at school, did well at college, successful at work. No trouble.”

  “There are so many kinds of trouble,” sighed Ragginbone.

  There was no word from Will and Gaynor, no sign of Lougarry. Shortly after five Marcus Greig telephoned at some length; Robin took the call in the nurse’s office. “Says he’s driving up tomorrow,” he reported afterward. “Bit of a token gesture, if you ask me. Gone one moment, back the next, just like a bloody jack-in-the-box. What I mean is, if he’d really cared, he’d have stayed. All along.” And, after a pause of several minutes: “He didn’t deserve her.”

  “He didn’t get her,” said Ragginbone.

  “Don’t want him here,” Robin said with less than his customary tolerance. “Bit of a bugger, having him faffing around all the time. Talks too much.” Another long pause. “Still, Abby’s coming, too. She’ll deal with him. Wanted to come sooner, but I said no. Got her job—house to run—all that. Didn’t think it was necessary to have both of us here. Suppose … I thought Fern would have come round by now.”

  “She’ll come round soon,” said Ragginbone. He had never heard of positive thinking, but he knew when it was important to lie.

  The change came suddenly, no slight twitching this time but a violent motion that brought both men to their feet. The body stiffened as if in a convulsion; a flush of scarlet stained the pale cheeks; beads of sweat burst from the skin. The bedding was soaked in seconds. On the monitor, the pulse line shot into overdrive, zigzagging wildly across the screen. Yet the face remained immobile, lifeless, as if Fern were a mere puppet, a thing of wood and string and paint, tormented by the manipulations of an invisible puppeteer. Beside Ragginbone the left hand clenched abruptly into a fist—spasms ran up the arm—there was a smell of singed flesh. Robin thrust his head into the corridor, calling for help, and when he looked back the body was still again, the limbs flaccid, and the pulse had decelerated to an occasional blip, and only the fist was left, knuckles locked into rigidity, to indicate the strength of the seizure. The nurse came running just as the Watcher prized the fingers open. Robin gave a cry of horror and distress; even Ragginbone was unable to check his instinctive recoil. For the exposed palm was burned—burned almost to the bone. Ragged ends of skin peeled away from the underside of the fingers; cracks split the flesh, filling with blood. The nurse went white and bolted in search of a doctor. Robin said: “Dear God. Dear God,” over and over again, and: “Water. We should get some water. She must be in agony—”

  But Fern’s face showed nothing at all.

  Part Two

  Dragoncraft

  X

  There is no Time here, beneath the Tree. She has no memory of arriving, or of any journey in between; her memories belong all to that other place, the place where they lived by Time. Dimly she recalls growth, change, constant motion—the wearing out of the body, the swift onset of death. Nothing kills like Time. Here, day and dark are mere simulations, meaningless counterpoints in an endlessly repeated tune, and the many seasons of the Tree go around and around like a carousel, returning always whence they began. Sysselore tells her you can see the same leaves unfurling, fading, falling, season upon season, to the tiniest detail of the veins. Even some of the heads are the same, ripening only to rot, rotting only to swell and ripen as the wheel comes around again. There is no progress here, only stasis.

  It is dark in the cave under the Tree, the cave of roots. Thick tubers form the walls, twisted into pillars, curling overhead to shape the irregular coves and hollows of the roof. In places the stems grope downward like stalactites, tentacles of living fiber, and everywhere they are covered with hair-thin filaments that suck nourishment from their surroundings, bristling if you pass too close as if sensing the approach of food. In the center is a giant radix, gnarled and convoluted like a fossilized serpent from a prehistoric age, its lower section split down one side to form a natural flue. The root is blackened from the spellfire but not damaged: the Tree is impervious to such things. Apart from the wan glimmer of the fire crystals that smolder almost continuously, there is little other light. Fluorescent growths cling to some of the tubers and squirming larvae are suspended in shallow bowls from hooks on the walls, emitting erratic pulses of greenish wormshine. They are the caterpillars of an indigenous moth: Sysselore says you must remember to dispose of them at the chrysalis stage, otherwise the moths hatch out, as big as your hand, and fly into the spellfire and burn with a black malodorous fume that disrupts the magic.

  Furniture is scanty: there are a few chairs and a table made of dead wood, their shapes following the original warp of bark and bough; blankets of coarse-textured cloth; cushions stuffed with dried grass. Beetles gnaw the wood, mites burrow in the cushions. In a niche between the roots there is a cooking fire of leaf mold and twigs, all but flameless. In another recess a trickle of water descends, more a drip than a spring, funneled from somewhere high up on the Tree where the rains can reach, collecting in a basin-shaped dip below. She washes there, though the others rarely do so. Their smell merges with the smell of the Tree, becoming a part of it, filling the cave with a dank vegetal fetor; but she is accustomed to it and hardly notices it anymore.

  The gleam of the spellfire oscillates over the roots, folding the shadows into creases, making the walls writhe with a strange tuberous animation. A face looms over her, a pale moon face atop a swollen mound of anatomy, crested with thick clots and tangles of hair. The flesh has a semiliquid texture, rippling and bulging in search of a shape to which it can conform; somewhere within, there must be a substructure of muscle and bone, but the outer mass seems to bear no relation to it, enwrapping the skeleton like a vast unstable blancmange. The features are unfixed: the mouth is stretched into a rapacious hole bordered with lip; the nose is curiously flattened; the nostrils have sunk deep into the face. The thick-lidded eyes have a luminous quality like the eyes of an animal, the whites iridescent, the iris almost as dark as the pupil. The skin is perfectly smooth, pale as milk, glistening here and there with a thin sheen of mucus. Garments once rich and sumptuous billow around the monstrous figure: velvet molted into baldness, fraying clumps of embroidery. Their colors have dimmed to a murky sameness, their outline adapted to their occupant, sagging and shrinking with every movement. She is Morgus, witch queen, self-anointed the greatest of her kind. Power oozes from her pores like perspiration, and the proximity of it is more stifling than any stench. But the girl does not shrink from her. Her hate is a minute red ember deep inside, something she feels but does
not know, hiding it in the darkness of her heart, feeding it on morsels, until the moment comes when she is ready to blow it into a flame.

  Together they watch the spellfire and study the ancient lore. They see the phantoms dancing in Azmodel; they see potbellied satyrs and fauns with whiteless eyes and nimble feet, winged sylphids clinging mosquitolike to their prey, and other creatures grotesque beyond the design of Nature or werekind. In the Garden of Lost Meanings, plant tendrils hook the ankles of unwary revelers, snapdragons nip their extremities, bee orchids unsheath deadly stings. Above the rainbow lakes a phoenix circles, shedding firedust from its wings; but it does not come down to feed. “See!” says Morgus. “He sleeps no longer. He has come back for his revenge: he wants you to die slowly, and suffer long. We were barely able to save you in time.”

  “I do not fear him,” says the girl.

  “That is well,” says Morgus. “The only person you should fear is me.”

  His plans are deep laid, his nets spread wide. He has been plotting and weaving for thousands of years, shape-shifting from demon to deity, infusing his strength into a throng of ambulants, whispering his words through empty mouths. Some schemes are abandoned, leaving loose ends to unravel through history, others grow, becoming ever more intricate, meshing strand with strand in tortuous designs of inscrutable complexity. There is a pattern to existence, or so they say, a current of events; but Azmordis aims to direct the current and weave patterns of his own. And somewhere in one of those labyrinthine webs the girl senses there is a single thread that leads to her. It is a thing she feels without knowing, like the hate.

  “He has always yearned to control the Lodestone,” says Morgus, watching the smoke. “Envy gnaws him, the sharp end of fear. Are we not Prospero’s Children, mortals with immortal powers? He shows wisdom in such envy if in nothing else. He sought the key over many centuries, he seeks the other fragments even now. He cannot touch the Stone—it is alien to him—but he sought to dominate it through Alimond, through you. He has never understood its nature. It is a part of us, a force that runs in our blood. We do not need to rush around hunting the pieces like beggar brats looking for wishing pebbles.”

  “Has he found such a piece?” the girl asks. “A wishing pebble to play with?”

  “Maybe. But even he will have trouble mastering the possessor. Look into the smoke!”

  The visions of Azmodel vanish; the smoke spirals into a vortex, thins into clarity. The spellfire cannot be commanded but its shadow show can be nudged in a chosen direction, if you have the skill. Morgus’s willpower is a subtle instrument, with the driving force of a battering ram, the flexibility of a bullwhip. The fire quails before her.

  Deep in the heart of the smoke they see a man climbing a wall. The wall appears at first sheer, then the improving focus shows it strangely curved, bulging toward them. The fascia is constructed of overlapping slates, irregular oblongs, many of them notched and dented, whose projecting edges offer precarious toeholds to the climber. Seen from the back all they know of him is that he is lean, perhaps tall, agile as a lizard, and the long fingers feeling for purchase on this curious surface are black. Not the chocolate or sable of the African races, which is usually called black, but true black unrelieved by any lightening, untinged by color. The climb is short; at the top, the wall is surmounted by a jagged rampart consisting of flat stone slabs, triangular in shape, each apex terminating in an oblique spike, a couple of which have been broken off. The climber pulls himself up between two of the slabs and sits astride, his legs dangling. The wall moves.

  The image is expanding; now it seems to fill half the chamber. A seismic ripple heaves across the fascia; sound impinges, the scraping of slate on slate, a creaking as of some vast arthritic limb. And then they see a crumpled leathern structure, ribbed with slender poles like an enormous tent, unfolding slowly into a sweeping fan. The view broadens, and there is the foreleg, its crooked elbow higher than the rampart of spines, the thick coiling neck, the ridged and battlemented head, sagging beneath its weight of bone. With distance comes a falling into place of details formerly misinterpreted: not slates, but scales, no wall, but the towering flank of the greatest monster of legend. Yet here there is no serpentine speed, no basilisk gaze; the movements are labored, the huge eye closed to a slit, its bloodred deeps glazed as if it is all but blind. The hues of life have faded from the leaden hide: the creature resembles a gigantic hunk of weathered stone, ancient beyond the count of years, crumbling, corroded, brightened only by the occasional patches of lichen that batten on its squamous back. The head swings ponderously from side to side, as if trying to catch a scent long forgotten. It pays no more attention to the invader straggling its spine than to some parasitic insect; possibly it does not even sense he is there. The wings that appear too stiff and venerable for motion, let alone flight, begin to beat, gathering strength from their own momentum, moving faster, faster. And then incredibly, impossibly, the whole massive cumbersome body lifts into the air. The watchers see it not as the dragon rising upward but as the ground falling away beneath: a rocky floor plunging behind obscuring cliffs, the humps and crags of a mountain range heaving in between, then dropping down abruptly to a ragged coastline with white foam frills bordering a cold blue sea. And all the while the stowaway clings on, a dark rider aboard a steed greater and more terrible than any myth could convey.

  The picture shifts: they see now with his eyes, the nearest spinal ridge slicing the image in half. Ahead the sun is setting in a yellow smolder between long strips of cloud. Fire sparkles on the sea. They feel the rush of air, hear the booming surge of the wings. Night descends swiftly, and they are soaring higher and higher into a dreamworld of falling stars.

  When the sky lightens there are other mountains ahead, the mountains of Elsewhere, snow dabbled, stone shouldered, cloven with hanging valleys, their lower slopes too far below to distinguish clearly, lost in a dizzying vista of height and space. These are the peaks no man has ever climbed, the aeries where no eagle makes its nest. They plummet suddenly into a sickening dive, traversing a natural gateway between two pinnacles of rock, slowing to a drift along the winding passage of a high gorge delved by a torrent long run dry. Short grasses cling to the slopes like sparse hair, thin soil crumbles to show the bony ground beneath. The cleft widens into a valley with many arms branching to either side, a secretive maze of canyons surrounded by steeps that dwarf even the dragon. Animals do not graze here, nor insects breed, nor birds fly: there is only plant life and stone life. But on the floor of these hidden canyons there is death. For this is the dragons’ graveyard, the place where the old come to find rest, where the slain who have vanished from the world leave their last remains. No archaeologist ever came here to pick through the bleaching bones; the skeletons lie undisturbed, delicate sculptures of mythical proportions, wind cleansed, sun whitened, the eyeless skulls watchful even in their endless stillness. Here the dragon lands, settling into slumber, and the red fades from his orbs, and the quickened pulse beat of his final flight sinks to a flutter, and is lost. The rider scrambles down from his back and looks around, evidently searching for something. His gaze focuses on what appears to be the entrance to a cave on the far side of the valley. He makes his way toward it, surefooted and nimble as a chamois, ducking beneath a scaffolding of tibia and femur and descending a stepladder of tail vertebrae, leaping from rock to rock across the waterless valley bed, climbing the uneven incline to the cave mouth in hungry strides.

  The vision follows him inside, down a narrow defile into absolute darkness. He gropes onward, staying close to the wall—they feel the grainy texture of granite under his hand, hear the soft hiss of his breath. It grows warmer. The dark acquires a rubescent tinge; there is a hot sulphurous smell. The passage debouches into a cavern so large the farther walls are lost to view: the floor immediately below curves around in a broad ledge overhanging an unseen chasm; the air trembles in the updraft of heat; wheezing jets of gas shoot toward the distant roof. The lip of the chasm i
s silhouetted against a burning glow. The intruder walks to the edge, peers over. They see the lake of magma beneath, its surface crawling with torpid ripples and heaving into bubbles that slowly distend and crack, spitting gobbets of fire. The man leans forward as if fascinated or compelled, apparently indifferent to the furnace heat on his skin. At last he retreats, moving along the ledge to a point where it bulges out into a platform of rock. A giant skeleton is coiled here, the naked fretwork of bones lustered in the flame-light. The passage must have been wider once to admit such a creature, or maybe it found some other way in, now closed. The fragile barrier encircles a shallow depression where a clutch of eggs still remains, their soft shells hardened to porcelain, pristine, undamaged, as if viable life might yet endure within, incubating in the warmth of the earth’s fires. The man negotiates the trellis of ribs, slipping easily between curving struts, and crouches down over the hoard. His outstretched hands are black against their gilded pallor. For the first time the watching girl knows him for a thief.