The Dragon Charmer Read online

  You let him live to torment him, Fern says, but only to herself. You take vengeance on him for your own aberration.

  “Did you ever try to love him?” she asks, as if in a spirit of scientific enquiry.

  “Love!” Morgus laughs again, but without sound. “What do you know of such things, beyond poetic sentiment and story? Listen: I will tell you of love. Love is a phantom of the mind, a famine in a hungry heart. To love is to go forever yearning and empty. It is a gift that cannot be given, a stone that weighs you down, incapacitating instead of conferring power. It was spawned as part of the machinery of nature, a wayward link in the reproductive chain; but we live outside the natural world, we do not need such bonds. Had this creature here fulfilled my hopes I would have used him and gloried in him, but never loved him. Why should I waste emotion on him now?”

  Kal gets to his feet, looking at Fern, addressing his mother. “I know many secrets,” he says. “Secrets you would give much to share.”

  “Droppings from a feast table where you will never have a seat,” retorts Morgus. “Keep them to yourself. I do not pick over other men’s crumbs.”

  He moves away from her crabwise, vanishing into the shadows around the exit, but for a long while Fern seems to feel his eyes, watching her from the dark.

  Fern does not sleep anymore, but sometimes she dreams. The same dream as before: a gray church, full of turning heads. From somewhere, there comes the boom of solemn music. This time she is watching, not taking part. There is a long white dress moving slowly up the aisle. It seems to have no occupant. The man is waiting for it beside a fountain of flowers: he is dark, stocky, slightly balding, with a clever, not-quite-handsome face, amusing and amused. She sees him vividly, and he is vividly familiar, spearing her with a strange kind of pain. She even knows his name: Marcus Greig. The dress places an invisible hand in his. “I’m not there!” Fern screams in a sudden panic. “Can’t you see I’m not there?” But the ceremony proceeds, and she wrenches herself back to consciousness, sweating as if from a fever, forgetful that her body’s trembling and the perspiration that soaks her are mere illusion. As she grows calmer, memories trickle back, details she has not thought of before, insignificant beside the greater priorities that burden her. She is supposed to marry Marcus; he may even be waiting at her bedside. Dimly she recalls that this was something she wanted, though her reasons for so doing have evaporated like raindrops in the sun. She knows now that she can take no such empty vows, that even to have considered it was a kind of madness that had nothing to do with either Morcadis or Fernanda. She reaches for another, older memory, a memory that has lain untouched at the back of her thought for what seems like aeons—a beach in Atlantis, golden with sunset, and waves breaking, and a man rising up out of the water to meet her like a sea god. But even as the image surfaces, it has changed. He is dark against the sea’s glitter, too dark, and as he comes toward her she sees his face is the face of Ruvindra Laiï.

  The fruit is ripening.

  Fern wanders beneath the laden branches with Sysselore observing the swelling globes, seeing the strands of hair dripping with moisture, the burgeoning of new colors beneath the skin. Already some of the faces begin to look faintly recognizable, as if she has seen them in the other world, on a square screen or a printed page. Once in a rare while there will be one that does reappear, season after season, fading a little with every fruiting. “Whatever the reason,” Sysselore says, “they cannot pass the Gate. Their soul may be eroded, or their will. They may be trapped by vain emotion, residue of a lost life—caught in a rut until their flame withers and vanishes utterly. Here is one.” The head hangs low, within easy reach. The cheeks have an unhealthy pallor, blotched here and there with red; greasy threads of hair slip forward across the brow; more hair sprouts over the upper lip. Eyes and forehead are scrunched together in a blind scowl, savage and meaningless. As they watch, the eyelids split, bursting open, the mouth begins to jabber. But the light-blue stare is unfocused, the voice curiously remote, like a radio with the volume turned down. The words pour out in an unceasing stream, vehement, passionate, raucous, with now and then the echo of an identifiable language, but for the most part incomprehensible, all gibberish. “In the first couple of seasons he was much louder,” says Sysselore. “He used to harangue us—Morgus understood him; she speaks many tongues. He doesn’t see us now. In a day or two his eyes will become bloodshot and he’ll start to rot from within.” It is a face Fern knows, though she cannot recall the name; names are unimportant here, except in conjuration. Yet somehow she remembers the face as fuller, stronger, more solid, whereas the fruit, though barely mature, seems already shriveled, decayed before its time. It has become a weak, pathetic, shrunken object, where the last flicker of a soul is imprisoned, gleaming fitfully ere it expires. The eyes shine with a dreadful ferocity of spirit, but they are the eyes of a madman, expending his enmity on monsters that only he can see.

  Most of the heads appear young, though they may have died old. “The sap of the Tree is strong,” says Sysselore. “Morgus believes it was a Spirit once, old as the Oldest: immortal ichor runs in every bough. At the very least it is—an entity, something with a power all its own. Many of the fruit will wither into age before they fall.”

  “There was a tree in Paradise,” Fern says. “Maybe this is the Tree of Purgatory.”

  “Paradise! Purgatory!” scoffs Sysselore. “You talk in clichés, like the old priests. Apples grew here once, so Morgus says, apples of gold whose juices were the nectar of the gods, conferring wisdom and youth. A serpent was coiled about the trunk to protect them, greater than all other serpents save only the Nenheedra; his venom was as deadly as the juice of the apples was sweet. Now—now the heads of the dead grow where golden apples once ripened, and a wild pig devours what the serpent used to protect. When the nature of Man changes, there may be apples here again. But I think you will wait a long time for another such harvest.”

  When she returns to the cave Fern remains, sitting astride a thick twist of root close to the bole. A part of the trunk is visible looming above her, like a tiny glimpse at the base of a gigantic tower—a construction of many towers welded together, living towers sprouting around a single core, curve melding with curve, growth with growth, to create a Babel among trees, clamorous with the din of birds and the gibbering of the heads. And all she sees are the lowest branches and the ground beneath; who knows what creatures may breed in the long, long journey toward the crown? It is a cold thought, like looking into eternity. She flinches away from it, shivering.

  No sun penetrates this close to the bole. Farther away there are hollows full of dancing light, green-gold flecks that have filtered through the endless leaves to make their way to the ground, where they cavort like fireflies in the strange breezes that circle the outer reaches of the Tree. Where such breezes come from even Morgus does not know; perhaps from the Tree itself, breathing to its own rhythm, swaying to some secret music in its dark heart. The very sun that shines on the upper branches may be an emanation of the Tree’s own thought, as unreal as the timeless pulse beat of day and night. Here below the bole, however, the hollows are forever sunless, overhung by shadowy clouds of foliage, encased in a permanent green twilight. She feels the Tree’s power not only in the groping tanglewood of roots but in the crumbling soil beneath her feet, in the leaf mulch of innumerable seasons, in the ripening and rotting of the heads. It is a gluttony that feeds on itself, a greed that has outgrown its reach and is now condemned to ingrowing. And Morgus has drawn on that power, nourishing her Gift from an alien source, fattening her spirit on the Tree that harbors her like a gross parasite engorged with the blood of its host. It is a thing Fern has long sensed, without understanding, but now at last it becomes clear to her. Morgus and the Tree are bound together in an unholy union: her vast storehouse of flesh is merely the physical manifestation of her leechdom. Her mind, too, must have absorbed its great appetite with its strength: in the horror of her embrace Fern felt its smother
ing hunger, and the lust for absolute dominion looks out of the witch’s eyes. But the Tree is fixed in a dimension of its own, outside reality, between worlds. Morgus is mortal, and mobile, and she would take her appetite into other realms, and feed there unsated, and spread the tendrils of her power through wider pastures. The Tree may be a monstrosity, but the thought of Morgus rampaging through Time and reality stabs Fern with a new and deeper dread. While the evil of Azmordis is a part of the world’s evil, something to be fought and resisted in an unending conflict on the edge of defeat that can never be won and must never be lost, Morgus would be a bane outside such reckoning, capable of tipping the balance into darkness. And Fern is the mechanism she needs for her return, completing the coven of three, connecting her with the long-lost thread of the present. The flame of Fern’s hatred chills inside her, becoming cold and hard as resolution. She has too many battles to fight and too little to fight them with. Morgus has taught her the ways of power; with her help Fern could forestall Azmordis. But she must do without help. She is trapped within the influence of the Tree, her body sleeps, and far away the dragon is stirring unrestrained, and there is danger to those she left behind. Faced with such need, her inadequacies no longer matter. She must elude Morgus, and find the way back, before the current of Time runs away from her forever.

  In its hidden dell, safe in a cocoon of spells, the black fruit is almost mature.

  * * *

  In the dark time Fern lies with her eyes closed, simulating sleep. But the lids have become almost transparent: she can still dimly perceive the root tracery of walls and roof, the erratic pulse of the wormshine, the bluish glow of the spellfire reflected on the glistening moon of Morgus’s face. Sysselore is at her shoulder, her long neck thrust forward, bulbous eyes agleam; Kal is nowhere to be seen. Fern can distinguish too much, and instinct or some deeper knowledge tells her why. Her spirit-body has been too long out of touch with its fleshly home; it is beginning to lose its shape, forgetting the precepts of physical incarnation. If she is not restored very soon she may become only an amorphous blob of ectoplasm, a phantom of half-remembered anatomy, unable to resume a garment that does not fit her degenerate form. But surely Morgus must have reckoned with such a possibility. Fern would be no use to her as a permanent ghost.

  “When? When?” It is Sysselore who speaks, eagerness and fear commingling in her voice.

  “When she is ready. When I am sure of her.” The pictures in the smoke are invisible, only a light that is not that of the fire passes over Morgus’s features, changing them. “Then I will pour her back into her mortal body and possess her utterly. But we must be diligent: she has more power than Alimond, perhaps more power than I have seen in any individual in a hundred centuries. Her Gift has been so long suppressed it is hard to measure, but I know it is strong. The spellfire has shown us none like her since I was last in the world. Small wonder the Old One seeks to destroy or ensnare her. When I can wield her Gift unhindered, I will know its limits.”

  “Alimond was obsessive—dangerous. How do we know this one is not the same?”

  “Alimond was a fool, blinkered by her own obduracy. Impetuosity and clumsiness hampered what Gift she had. She was not destined for us; indeed, I saw nothing in her future but futility and death: that was why I let her go. Fernanda is far more intelligent but she is still pliable, untried, untempered. The beggar Gabbandolfo has made no imprint on her soul. She is mine to shape: my creature, my creation. Her very destiny is mine, to rough-hew as I wish. Soon, the hour will come—the hour when Time begins again. The life of the Tree runs in us both: the changeless cycles without spring or winter, the leaves forever green, forever rotting. So will it be with us. We will slough off these worn-out chrysalids and appear as once we were, strong in youth and beauty. Through her, we will go back. I tell you, I have watched this modern world, and we will not need to rule by seducing kings or bewitching lost sailors. There are other ways now. There are crystal balls that operate without magic, visions without a spellfire, ships that fly, wires that speak. There are weapons our heroes never dreamed of, steel tubes that spit death, fireballs that could engulf a whole city. The human race has invented a thousand new forms of torment, a thousand new fashions on the road to suffering. Through Morcadis, we will learn them all—we will use them—we will reenter the world—taste it—dominate—live. The Unnamed has reigned many ages without rival. In any case, what has he ever been but a shadow in men’s minds, one who bargains for souls that we could reach out and take? We will be real. I will take back my island, the green island of Britain, and this time no one shall wrest it from me. No one.” Fern cannot see Morgus’s expression clearly through her eyelids but Fern can hear the relentless steamroller of Morgus’s voice, the insatiable lust, the implacable will.

  “We must hurry,” says Sysselore, injecting a tiny needle of doubt, maybe for provocation, maybe because of Morgus’s use of the final “me,” excluding her partner. “Sometimes I think she is starting to fade.”

  “She cannot,” says Morgus. “She does not appreciate her own condition. While she believes in her body, it will endure.”

  “Kal might have told her.”

  “If he did … I will fill his entrails with liquid fire. I will boil the blood in his veins. He will know what it is to burn from within. I do not tolerate treachery.”

  A red gleam strafes her face, coming from nothing in the cave. “So,” she murmurs, concentrating on images Fern cannot see, “the Old One has found another to charm his winged snakeling. Look at him!—a dotard, gray as dirt, a bastard unworthy of his forefathers. Laiï is dead indeed.”

  “Yet you have not found it.”

  “His season will come; it comes for them all. He is dead a week—a year—a day: what is Time to us? It was written in the ashes, whispered in the rainsong. Such a one cannot die unremarked. He must ripen here soon. And then—he will tell me his secrets. All his secrets. I shall suck the truth from him like juice, squeeze out his thoughts like seeds, till there is only the husk of his skull for the pig to chew on.”

  “All this for a wishing pebble!” Sysselore derides.

  “Imbecile. Your brain has rotted like the fruit. I should feed you to the pig—there would be a sweet justice in that—but I fear there is too little meat on your bones to interest him. I have no need of the Stone. But the dragon—that is another matter. The Old One knows the value of such a weapon, in any age. A flying steed that can outpace the wind, a firestorm with mind and magic. A dragon is not simply the manifestation of might but its living symbol: who since the dragon charmers has ever controlled one? Yet through this gray half-caste he seeks just such control. We have taken the girl from him; it would be more than satisfying to take the dragon, too. I will show him who is the true power on earth. When I find the head—”

  “Only a dragon charmer can talk to a dragon,” says Sysselore.

  “Do you dare to doubt me? Now, when we are so close?”

  Sysselore flinches from her, squeaking and cluttering in protest, and Morgus quenches the fire with a gesture. The smoke swirls in between them, and when Fern opens her eyes they are gone. She sees the witch dispassionately now, without hate, as a growing tumor that must be cut out to save existence itself. Not an enemy to be killed but a disease to eradicate. She lies there, between thought and oblivion, rerunning Morgus’s speech, dreaming of terminal surgery.

  It is time to plan. Fern watches the spellfire herself now, sewing with big, ragged stitches at a few scraps of old cloth. “I want another pillow,” she tells Sysselore, and the hag laughs as Fern knew she would, mocking her love of comfort, but she provides a needle made from the bone of a bird, unused pieces of clothing, unraveled strands of silk. But it is not a pillow that Fern is making. In the fire, she lets the images show what they will. The smoke fades into dust devils dancing across the surface of a desert. One of them assumes a specific shape, impossibly tall, manlike yet not a man, pacing the sand with a strange flowing motion. The face is a study in vapor
, the features blurring and re-forming, unable to maintain fixity, but the eyes gaze steadily out, narrowed against the sun, long slits too bright to look at. The smoky figure fills her with a grayness of fear, a sudden chill that stills her working hands. As it moves across the empty waste it grows in height and substance, drawing the dust into itself; its questing gaze mirrors the flames of sunset. Dusk steals like a cloud over the land, and in the distance there are campfires twinkling, and tethered animals, and the conical shapes of tents. The pacing figure halts, grown now to monstrous size. The stars shine through the shadow pattern of its ribs. It stretches out its arm, spreading wavering fingers, and the remote fires sink beneath the pressure of its hand. And far away Fern hears the voices of the nomads, calling on the God of the Dark in terror and worship. “Azmordias! Azmordias!”

  Night merges into night. The vast spaces of the desert close in; the dust whorls pale into snowflakes, whisked into a blizzard by a yowling wind. Beyond, she sees two—no, three—slots of yellow light, windows in a sheer wall. The shape of a roof looms above, with pointed gables and a shaggy outline suggesting thatch. The blizzard prowls around the building, plucking straw from the eaves and probing the unglazed window slots. Shutters slam against it. Within, there is the sound of carousing, of songs defying the winter cold. But outside the snowflakes are sucked into a column of storm and darkness, and a glance like white lightning flickers over gable and wall. The shutters are flung back, lamps and songs extinguished, and from those who cower at the invasion comes a single cry of fear and prayer: “Utzmord!”