The Dragon Charmer Read online

  Morgus is there, waiting. Her fat soft hands seize her victim, their flabby grip thewed with hidden strength. Fern is pressed against the wall: the huge body envelops her, overwhelming her slight figure so her very bones are crushed and her ribs squeeze at her heart. She can barely draw breath into constricted lungs. “What were you doing?” The words writhe from ragged lips; the hot red hole of the mouth is close to her face. “Creeping around outside like a spy on my heels. Why did you follow me? Why did you follow me?”

  Struggle is pointless. Fern blinks at her like someone emerging from sleep or trance. “You called me,” she says, her voice cramped into hoarseness. “You called me … and I came … but I couldn’t catch up with you. I was lost in a world of roots—you were always ahead of me, but I never seemed to get any nearer. Like a dream…”

  Her expression remains blank, tinged with the bewilderment of a sleepwalker too roughly awakened. Morgus knows well that the Gifted experience many things in dreams or dreamlike states; she must recall that she spoke Fern’s name. Fern sees the realization sinking in, permeating the many layers of her mind; she is sifting it, checking for any possible mendacity. But Morgus can perceive no slyness in her pupil, no deceit. She is flattered to believe that a name uttered in private musing could act as a summons, that the captive spirit is so well attuned to her command. She surveys the girl with a kind of drooling exultation. “So,” she says, “you belong to me completely now. You come at a murmur, trailing my footsteps even in sleep. It is well. It is very well. I shall give you a new name, neither Fernanda nor Morgun: a name for the future. Morcadis. You are my coven sister, my brood child, my handmaiden. Body and soul, you are mine. All mine.” The heel of her hand grinds into Fern’s breast; then the hand moves down, groping her abdomen, parting her clothes. She reaches for her sex, penetrating her with a bloated finger. Excitement heightens the sweat sheen on Morgus’s face; her irregular panting sends the breath blasting through her lips. Fern can feel no details of the vast anatomy pressed against her, only a surging tidal wave of flesh. She is helpless, powerless, smothered into submission. But the rape cannot touch her: it is only an illusion of her being that is invaded and mangled, her shape, not her Self. Her body is far away, lying in a pristine white bed under white sheets. Clean. Protected.

  When it is over she sinks to the floor, unable to speak.

  “Get to your bed,” says Morgus, and Fern obeys.

  Back on her pallet, she feigns sleep. Inside her there is a great stillness. Hate burns there with a bright, steady flame, filling her with a strange calm where her thoughts can evolve undisturbed, clear and sharp as steel. She needs Morgus. She must learn all her teachings, suck her dry of skill and knowledge. She must find out more about the dragon, the gray-faced Dr. Laye, the danger that threatens her friends and kindred in the world of Time. And then she must go back—back to reality, to life, to Self. I will take the name Morgus has chosen for me, Fern vows, and when my power waxes she will know what she has made. With all her wisdom, she is not wise. Blinded by ambition and pride, trapped within the confines of her own ego, she thinks to develop my Gift and use it for her own ends. But I will grow beyond her reach and when I am indeed Morcadis, Morcadis the witch, I will challenge her, and she will be destroyed. Fern has never thought of killing another human creature in all her life. Yet the decision is made, without effort or vacillation, as certain as fate. It is written, so they say, and that is how she feels. One day, she will kill Morgus. It is written.

  XI

  Fern sits alone, watching the spellfire. She sees visions too numerous to record, scenes from an age long gone: jousts, tourneys, ogres slain, knights triumphant. Then two sisters, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, playing with their newfound powers—plucking stars from the twilight, shedding leaves into a cauldron. One of them takes a live frog and drops it distastefully into a liquid that seethes and bubbles in its wake. Fern glimpses them romping together, exploring each other’s young breasts. They are twins, but not quite identical: one is thinner and sharper of feature, the other more rounded, more beautiful, but not more gentle. Their skin is milk-pale, their hair coal-black. “They are the witchkind,” says a female voice, and a serving woman in a wimple obliterates the picture, casting a nervous glance over her shoulder. “They had a nursemaid, but she scolded them, and then she died, though there was nothing amiss with her…” More images come and go. Fern sees one of the twins, older now, on a white horse. She rides astride, her skirt kilted, her black hair streaming out behind her. There is something in the hungry parting of her lips that is familiar. Her face comes closer, closer, filling the smoke, blurring until only the mouth and eyes remain, floating alone in a haze of vapor.

  The scene changes. Fern sees an island, bleached gold by the sun, cloud wreathing the summit of its single mountain like a whorl of whipped cream. There is a boat drawn up on the beach, a boat whose sail is patched and tattered, whose timbers are weather stained. Many footprints lead away from it across the sand. The eye of vision travels up the mountain to a pillared house overgrown with strange flowers, blood-orange trumpets from which stamens protrude like tongues. There are pigs in an adjacent pen, shaggy wild pigs with angry eyes. Unlike normal animals they stand very still, watching the man who has come for one of them. The picture changes: it is evening now, and in a lamplit kitchen there is a woman bending. Her hair is long and fine and greenish-fair, hanging down so straight it looks almost wet; her eyes are large under smooth eyelids. Although not dressed for cooking she is tending a spit that turns in the wide fireplace, licking a dainty fingertip where the juices have scalded her. A whole hog revolves over the fire. The flavor of the meat seeps into Fern’s mouth: not quite pork, something stronger … Then both taste and vision are gone; the smoke fades as she opens the flue. From somewhere up above she hears a pig snorting, rooting under the Tree for windfalls.

  Fern has heard about the pig from Sysselore. Both she and Morgus seem to be wary of it, perhaps because they do not know exactly what it is, or where it comes from. There is only one. It must live somewhere around the Tree—every creature here lives somewhere on or around the Tree—but it is usually seen only during the season of the heads. Even this early on fruit may fall, still unripe and shapeless, the stem pecked by birds or gnawed by insects. “They will come again,” says Sysselore. “Each head must ripen, and open its eyes, ere its time here is done with.” The pig, she relates, is very large, black bristled, double tusked, grown strong and fierce on its strange diet. “People eat pigs,” says Sysselore, “and pigs eat people. But there is always a way to vary the cycle.” And in her mind Fern sees again the young woman with green-gold hair, sucking the gravy from her finger.

  Sysselore is with her now, laying a hand on her shoulder. Her fingers are all bones; if you sucked them, you would taste marrow. “Did you see what you sought?” she asks.

  “No. It was just a jumble of images. None of them meant anything to me.”

  “You must use your power, but gently. It is like blowing on a small flame to fan it into fire. If you blow too hard, you will extinguish it. Watch. We will look for the dragon charmer, you and I. We will see how he died.” And a sudden lust flickers over her face, illuminating it with brief color. For an instant Fern glimpses in the flesh the far-off enchantress, her perfect cheek flushed from the fire glow. In front of them, the smoke re-forms. As before, phantom pictures come and go—tournaments and pageants, queens, vagabonds, assassins—but nowhere is the dark face of Ruvindra Laï. Sysselore’s thin mouth curls into a snarl of vexation. “The magic is wayward,” she mutters. “Sometimes it runs like meltwater down a mountain: the torrent is too swift to be nudged into an eddy.” It is an excuse, and she knows it, moving away in a flounce of moth-eaten rags, exuding ill temper.

  Fern says nothing. For reasons that she cannot explain, she feels Ruvindra’s death is her business and hers alone, a dark secret to be shared only between herself and him. When Sysselore is gone Fern releases her tenuous hold on the spellfire
. The quick-change tableaux decelerate, dissolving into vague shapes and hues that reassemble into a new scene, clear-cut and still. A scene of fantastic rocks, time-sculpted into a multiface of planes and ridges, pockmarked, scooped, jagged. On either side they rise into topless cliffs; ahead, they hold mirror-smooth waters, broken into a chain of pools and dyed with hot, vivid colors, bright as stained glass against a rockscape achromatized by the descending sun. Fern knows this scene; she feels she has known it agelong. This is Az-model, sometimes called the Beautiful Valley, the Valley of the Damned, the Valley at the Bottom of the World. But now she recognizes that, like the Tree, its very nature is unnatural, the time-sculpture is an illusion, the rocks are the rocks of dreams—the dreams of Azmordis, Oldest of Spirits, who has molded this place from his own thoughts and desires. And he is there: she feels the presence that she cannot see. He fills the valley like the sunlight; the indentations in the rocks are his fingerprints; every shadow is a sigil of one of his many names.

  The man begins as a black dot, the only moving thing in that petrified scene. Azmordis’s awareness surrounds him, at once focusing on him and enclosing him in menace, yet he is not a part of it, his blackness is alone and separate. He is climbing toward Fern, springing light-footed over the crooked rocks. The very way he moves is instantly familiar. He is predatory and solitary, unquestionably more evil than good, yet she is drawn to him, as if they are two points linked by the invisible leyline of their Gift. His clothing is tattered, too dark to show color, yet less dark than his skin. He halts on the edge of a pool whose emerald depths shade to shallows of acid-green. “Call it,” says the voice of one she cannot see. There may be a physical manifestation, perhaps human or humanoid, an image of the omnipresent Spirit, but all she can distinguish is a shadow on the border of the picture that might be the outline of a shoulder, the musculature of an upper arm. As in the room of books with Dr. Laye, the spell-scene avoids him. “Call it,” the voice repeats, and the cliffs give back the command in echoes and whispers. “It is time. It has played here too long. Summon your servant.”

  The dark face hardens, misliking either the tenor of the voice or the word “servant.” Nonetheless, he seems to acquiesce, bending over the pool, his eyes lowered. Fern can only guess at the intensity of his gaze. “Angharial!” he calls softly. “Inferneling! Little crocodile!” Fern guesses these must be pet names: the beast he coaxes is still young and nameless. For a while nothing happens, but he shows no impatience, though she can sense Azmordis’s frustration. Then something breaks the surface; a V-shaped ripple travels smoothly toward the bank. The creature emerges, half opening fragile wings to fan its lithe body, shaking the water from its scales in a storm of glittering droplets. It is perhaps twelve or fourteen feet long but serpent slender: at its broadest the trunk could be spanned by two hands. It still has the snub nose and overlarge eyes of the hatchling; its scales are shiny with newness, green-tinged with first youth; the skin of its unused pinions is barely thicker than tissue paper. It approaches the man with evident pleasure, as a beloved master long missed. Its forked tongue licks his outstretched hand, the twin prongs moving individually, twining his fingers like tentacles. The dragon charmer caresses its crested head with great gentleness, but the hardness of his face does not change.

  “Is it ready?” asks the voice of Azmordis.

  “He is ready,” says the dragon charmer. He begins to stroke its neck with slow rhythmical movements, and the beast rears up, arching its head back, a strange rippling motion appearing beneath the supple covering of throat and belly. Its tail lashes; the wings unfurl to their full extent and beat the air, sending the rock dust whirling. Its mouth gapes wide: needle fangs glint in the sunlight. Its gorge swells. And then with the cry of a thunderclap the firstfire comes, a bolt of flame shooting up fifty feet or more, flaming, fading, sucked back into the dragon’s body. The inner furnace flushes every scale so that its whole being becomes incandescent, gleaming red-hot, and the thrashing of its wings lifts it from the ground, its hind claws striking out in confusion. The eyes, formerly dark, fill with light like giant rubies. Then it subsides back to earth and begins to cool, its flanks dimming to bronze, much of the greenish luster of immaturity already gone. Its throat now pulses with a throbbing sound somewhere between a growl and a purr.

  “It is well,” says Ruvindra, looking at the dragon, not the demon.

  “Name him!” orders Azmordis.

  “This is not the time.”

  “Name him, and bind him to me. It was for this purpose only that I gave you deep sleep and long life. Fulfill your part of the bargain!”

  Ruvindra wheels to confront him with disconcerting speed. “I have more than done my part. I stole the egg for you and destroyed the rest, all the clutch of Senecxys save this one, the last of dragonkind. I found the monastery where I knew the egg might remain unsuspected and undisturbed. I was there for the hatching, and I took the infant and cared for him until—on your orders—I brought him here. He has breathed his firstfire at my touch, risen briefly in flight. All for you. It is enough. My debt is paid.”

  “Only I can declare when your debt is paid.” Azmordis’s voice grates with a stony dryness deadlier than any anger.

  “You cannot threaten me—no, not even you. You need me too much.” Ruvindra’s face is proud and impudent and cold. His boldness before this most powerful of adversaries is reckless to the point of madness, terrifying, wonderful. In this moment, Fern knows that she loves him, and her heart shrinks with the fear he does not feel. “The dragon cannot be bound. He is not a slave or a familiar: dragons are the freest of the free creatures. Only a true charmer may talk with them. And thanks to you I, too, am the last of my kin. I have outlived my descendants, and the blood of my family is muddied with lesser blends. You will not find another with my complexion and my skill. Slay me, and you will lose your mind link with the dragon, and all your scheming over the empty centuries will be in vain.”

  “Our bargain was that I should control the dragon,” says Azmordis, very softly. “Do you wish to… renege?”

  “You can control him—if that is the word—only through me. His name will be of my choosing, and the hour in which it is given.” And he reiterates, dispassionate even in defiance, hot blooded, cold tempered: “Our bargain is voided. I have paid my dues.”

  “So be it.” The huge whisper is bone deep, rock deep; the air shudders with it. “You made the covenant that cannot be broken, signed in your own blood, yet you would break it. Despite your Gift, you are as lesser mortals. You think to take and take and never pay the price. Be sure, in time I will claim all that is due to me. For now, the dragon shall remain unnamed, a hatchling still. Dismiss it.”

  “He is not a pet to be so lightly dismissed, as you will learn,” says Ruvindra. But he speaks to the dragon, and it stretches up to nuzzle his cheek before moving away, lifting now on a double wingbeat, hovering an instant as if in glee at its newfound ability, and then plunging into a lake of scarlet. The ripples hiss into steam at its entry, then the water smooths over it into immobility.

  “So be it!” says Azmordis, and his voice expands with the words, making the mountains resonate. The outline of arm and shoulder blurs, soaring upward into a cusp of darkness that leans over the recusant. The sun, sinking toward the pith of the valley, turns red; shadows reach out like spears from every jut of rock. “Our covenant is ended. The payment is all that you have, and all that you are. For I have found another of your kith to serve me in your stead: a degenerate whose blood is impure, yet his skill will suffice to finish what you began. His hunger is strong but his spirit is weak. He will open his mind to me, and I will bend his little will like pliant wood. The dragon will be his, and through him, mine. My weapon and my plaything. You will never give it a name or send it forth to ravage the world. Think on that, while thought endures. You broke a compact with Azmordis: your life is forfeit. All that you sought to gain I will take, and you will die in pain, knowing that where you sowed, your enem
y will reap. That is my price for oath-breaking.”

  The black figure stands motionless. “I could recall the dragon.”

  “It is young and still vulnerable, its flame uncertain. It would die with you—and believe me, I would rather see it dead than beyond my power. Recall it!”

  Laiï does not answer. His silhouette is straight and tall against the red sunlight. “So be it.”

  Then: “Come to me!” cries Azmordis. “Creatures of Az-model! Come to me and FEED!”

  Out of every shadow, every hollow, every wormhole they come, out of stillness and emptiness, wriggling and writhing into a multitude of unnatural forms. They are blotched and piebald, maggot white, scarlet speckled, slime green. Some are earless, some bat eared, eyeless or many eyed, some with rat’s whiskers, beetle’s antennae, the warts of a toad. They pour over the ground in a slow tide, skimming on lizard feet or pattering on cloven hooves, groping with fingers, talons, claws. They are too many and too diverse to identify species or similarity, creatures of drugged delusion or fevered fancy, but each has at least one mouth, and all are open, and the whole horde flickers with the darting of wet red tongues, and strands of saliva drool from every lip.

  Still Ruvindra Laiï does not move. He has drawn a knife from his belt, his only weapon: the naked blade is as black as the hand that wields it, and so held that it seems to be an extension of his arm. But it means less than nothing against the swarm now converging on him. The spell-scene closes in, until he is staring directly at Fern, his blue eyes burning all the more fiercely on the edge of despair. And in that instant she knows he sees through Time and Reality, past danger and death, across the dimensions—he sees her. She glimpses something in his gaze that is almost recognition. In that meeting of eyes there is a bond, like a sudden cord drawn tight around her heart, a bond stronger than all loves, deep as the roots of the Tree. I will know you again, says that look, though his final moment is come. And then the horde engulfs him like a wave, and the dance of the knife is black lightning, and grotesque fragments of anatomy are sent spinning through the air.