The Dragon Charmer Read online

  It was easy to be a god, in the days of magic and superstition, when the immortals, greedy for power, fed on belief and grew strong, and only the Gifted gainsaid them. Now Science has reduced the world to a whirligig of molecules, and magic is driven into corners and over the edge of reality to the borderland of Being. But Azmordis—Azmordis thrives forever, changing with mankind, learning new ways to replace the old. Maybe it is harder for him, and the world’s weariness corrodes his dark heart, and a creeping despair contaminates all that he does, but if so, that will only make him the more vengeful and bitter—he who knows no pity, least of all for himself. And very briefly—in a vision, in a nightmare—Fern seems to glimpse the abyss of his spirit: an existence without fear of death or hope of life, aeons of nothingness to fill, every emotion, every passion turned to a bile that chokes him even as he spews it out. Envy consumes him—for the brevity of mortal lives, their freshness, their endless renewal. In the death of others he seeks his own. But the aftertaste of sweetness fades all too quickly, and there is only the void. In the spellfire, Fern sees idols and temples, ritual and sacrifice. Perhaps she is watching not fragments of the past but the memories of Azmordis, scenes from the days when his hunger was a new-kindled flame and his power over the early races still aroused him—the days before all was drowned in the dreariness of unending hate. She touches his unwary mind—and flinches away, lest he should feel her there. His souvenirs are too long ago and far removed for him to sense her gaze, but she knows now why the spell-scene shrinks from closer encounters. Like Ruvindra Laiï, he might be aware of the watcher, and seek her out. And suddenly she remembers how sometimes, in the world beyond, she felt herself observed, and how once she saw the eyes of Morgus staring at her from the depths of a mirror.

  She should have learned and been more vigilant. Too late now.

  The images grow smaller and are lost in smoke. The flames wither.

  “So what are you stitching, little witch? Simple Susan sewing samplers … What kind of a spell is this?”

  Kal.

  “There are many kinds of spells,” Fern says, ignoring sarcasm. “You might say this was a part of one.”

  “And does my dear mother know that you are embroidering a veil for her sight—or a net to snare her?”

  “Neither,” she retorts. “This is hardly embroidery. I am setting crooked stitches in old rags of material. I told Sysselore it was for an extra pillow. She laughed at me for needing to sleep soft.”

  “You always go softly, don’t you? Soft-footed, soft-voiced, weaving your enchanted webs so quietly that none will know they are there.” He crouches close to her, his breath warm against her cheek and sharp as the breath of a fox, his splayed hand beside her thigh, the long fingers probing the ground. “Come. What will you give me for my discretion? I see you clearer than Morgus, for all her power and her knowledge.”

  “What could you tell her?” Fern holds up her crude handiwork. “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Except a certain black plum that must be almost ripe now. Is it fat and sweet? Is it juicy? Would it tempt my appetite?”

  “It is food for pigs,” she says with a shrug, “if that is to your taste.”

  He draws back, his feral odor changing with anger. “You go too far, little witch,” he rasps.

  For the first time Fern turns to meet his eyes. “We play with words,” she says. “A game of insult and insinuation. What is there in a game to sting your pride? You wanted to bargain with me, or so you said: very well, we will bargain. But not in a game, not for trivia. We will bargain for life and death, for friendship in danger, for all things lasting and true. We will make a pact, you and I. Fernanda and Kaliban. Is that what you wish?”

  “Fernanda and Kaliban. Beauty and the beast.” He savors the words with a curious mixture of satisfaction and derision. “And what would my part be in this pact?”

  “To stand my friend, and aid me, even against Morgus.”

  “And yours?”

  “I would be your debtor, to pay however and whenever you choose, so long as it does not dishonor me, or cause me injury.”

  “A clever proviso!” The wolf’s smile splits his face. “You are indeed among the Crooked Ones, Simple Susan. No doubt you have a fine sense of dishonor.”

  “We bargain for your friendship. A friend would not injure or shame me. If you fulfill your part, there should be no qualification required.”

  “Cleverer and cleverer. You are far neater with words than with stitches.”

  “You can refuse,” says Fern.

  The ruby gleam flickers in his slanting orbs—flickers and dims, leaving pupil and iris altogether dark. Only the whites shine in the velvet shadows beneath his heavy brow. In the uncertain glimmer of the cave he seems a creature all darkness, an overpowering physical presence more sensed than seen, malicious, unchancy, but not treacherous. Fern gambles on that. Not treacherous. In the gloom she feels his festering unhappiness as a tangible thing, a rawness that must not be touched, a hidden wound, bleeding internally. Yet the night-black stare conceals all suffering, challenges, taunts.

  “No one has ever made me an offer so noble,” he drawls at last. “So high sounding! So gallant! So generous and so proud! We might be back in the days of chivalry.”

  “Were there any?”

  “So they say. All I remember of those knights and heroes was that they hunted me through the woods like the beast I resemble. They hunted me with hounds, and my scent drove them mad; with horses, and I dragged them into bogs; with men, and … I bit out their throats. But armored collars are hard on the teeth.” He grins a jagged grin. “So much for chivalry. And now you offer me not a thieves’ bargain, but a pact of honor. I give, you take, and we call it friendship. Some honor. Still, it might be sweet to have you in my debt, little witch. To hold you in the palm of my hand, to claim my price at my pleasure—at my leisure. What particular aid do you want, Fernanda?”

  “First, you must agree.”

  “Very well. It is agreed.”

  She extends her hand; he grips it lightly, withholding his strength. She feels the calluses on his fingers.

  “And now,” he says, “what do you want, Fernanda my friend?”

  “I have to return to the real world, the world of Time. You come and go without Morgus’s permission: you must know the way. Take me with you.”

  * * *

  Her sewing is finished, her plan almost complete. She sits beneath the boughs in her secretive hollow, waiting. The black fruit is ripe now; the long hair hangs down, veiling the ugly neck stump, the features are full-grown, the ebony skin gleams as if it has been waxed. Under oblique brows the eyes appear but lightly closed, as if in sleep. The mouth, too, slumbers, its subtlety and tension gone with the waking mind. She waits long, disciplining herself to patience; the Tree cannot be hurried. Sometimes a faint quiver contracts the muscles, and she starts up in eagerness, but always the dark face remains immobile, that flicker of motion merely an illusion, a trick of the light, at most a reflex of the growing process. Then at last, after too many disappointments to mention, a spasm comes that is more prolonged, and the eyes open. They are blue as the sky and crackling with a cold brilliance, like crystals of ice. Even though she has seen them in the spellfire, nothing has prepared her for their intensity, for the savage vital force that neither death nor the Tree can diminish. The mouth hardens into character, parts on a word.

  “You.”

  Not an accusation: an acknowledgment.

  “Yes,” she says. “I watched you in the spellfire. I have been a long time watching and waiting.”

  “I caught the old hags at it, once or twice,” he says, “peering through the smoke, spying out my ways. But you are young for a hag.”

  “I will grow older. One day I will be a hag in my turn.”

  “I think not. A hag is a predatory creature: a harpy without wings, a succubus without sex appeal. There is that in you that will never be predatory.”

  “You saw so muc
h, in one look?”

  “In the moment before death your vision is very clear,” he responds. “And now—now I am dead, and I must hang here till I rot. I have to pay the price for my life. It was not a life of virtue or principle, but I enjoyed it; so the price is high. Did you come to ease my purgatory?”

  “Not exactly. Before you pass the Gate, you have some unfinished business in the world. I… could help you finish it.”

  “What business is that?” asks the head, and the exprèssion shifts into skepticism, becoming at once guileful and discerning.

  “With the dragon.”

  “I am dead. I am sterile fruit on a fruitless tree. I am a voice without a throat, a mind without a heart. Hunger without a belly. Perhaps this is not really death but a state in between, unalive and undead. Mortification of the flesh. Refinement of the soul. Who knows? Anyway, the dragon is the business of others now. My connection with the world has been permanently severed. And why should you help me, witch-girl? Are you sure it isn’t my help that you need?”

  “Both,” Fern admits. She knows she cannot handle him as she handled Kaliban, hiding deviousness with candor, using another’s unhappiness and resentment for her own ends. Where Kal is cunning, mocking, suspicious, Ruvindra is acute, disconcerting, dangerously perceptive. For him, truth alone will serve. “We need each other. The dragon is in the power of the Oldest Spirit—”

  “That is impossible.”

  “A descendant of your kin has the dragon penned in a well—or at least in a pit or cave beneath a well. He calls himself Laye, Jerrold Laye. His heritage is corrupted, like his name. Whether he has any love for dragonkind I do not know, but he is greedy, greedy for power and life and the opportunities he thinks have passed him by. He has invited the Unnamed into his body, into his mind; I don’t believe he could eject him now even if he would. Through him, the Oldest has immediate contact with the dragon. He will use the dragon without regard for his true nature; you know that. He may slay him, or arrange for him to be slain, in order to obtain the splinter of Lodestone within. He has always lusted after it, though he cannot touch it or use it himself. You let this happen, Ruvindra Laiï. It is your business. You alone can put it right.”

  “That is fighting talk,” says the head, “from a stray spirit who has not even given me her name.”

  The blue of his gaze seems to enter her like a probing ray, penetrating to the back of her thought, to the nucleus of her soul, seeing what she is, and the truth in her heart. And Fern stares back, eye to eye, soul to soul, and in that mutual seeing she senses once more the link between them, the bond that is beyond mere understanding, beyond love. She needs no persuasion for Ruvindra, no bargaining. The necessity is enough.

  “I am called Fernanda,” she responds.

  “And your Gift name?”

  “I will be Morcadis, when I am ready.”

  “And did the old hag choose that?” he asks shrewdly. “The fat hag Morgus, who crowns herself a queen.”

  “Even she makes mistakes,” Fern says. “She has taught me how to use my Gift—given her slayer a name to live up to.”

  “So you hate her?”

  “Hate burns the heart away, leaving you with ashes. I will keep mine cold, until I want it.”

  For a minute he is silent, and the many angles of his face seem to tighten, concentrating on a focal thought, an instant of dark revelation. “Why do we meet now, who might have met in life? It is too late for me, witch-girl, too late for us both. My hour—if I had an hour—is long past. Go back to your spellfire and look for someone else to help you.”

  “There is no one else,” she retorts bleakly. “I will come again.”

  “You waste your breath.”

  “I am a spirit. I have no breath to waste.”

  He laughs a sudden harsh laugh, making the leaves dance. “Then we are two!”

  “Do not laugh so loud,” says Fern, “or you may shake loose from your anchorage, and the wild pig will find you, when next he roots here. Or Morgus may hear you. My spells divert her from this place, but they cannot make you either invisible or inaudible. She, too, wants your aid, and she is less patient than me.”

  The head does not answer, merely gazing at her through narrowed eyes. Unwillingly she moves away, and sets off back to the cave.

  In that timeless place, Fern senses that somewhere her Time is running out. The spellfire shows her an old house, grim visaged, hooded with roofs of stone, and at a casement she sees a pale face heavily curtained with hair. But the casement is barred, and the face alone and desperate. “Who is that?” asks Sysselore, leaning over her shoulder, cobweb tresses brushing her cheek.

  “I do not know. The magic is willful; it reveals nothing to the purpose.”

  But she knows.

  Now the fruit is ripe she fears to leave it, lest her fragile protection prove inadequate and the hog strays there, pounding at the Tree roots till it falls from the bough, or Morgus discovers it in her absence. Yet she is equally afraid to visit it too often, to arouse suspicion, to be followed unawares. She ventures out when the witches sleep, in the half-light before dawn, collecting fungi and wild herbs to excuse her roaming. Morgus has taught her much plant lore and she finds a use for some of her harvest beyond that of study. Outside the cave she wanders as if at random, watching and listening with all her senses, approaching the hollow only when she is confident of being unobserved. “We must go soon,” she tells the head.

  “I am going nowhere. I have finished with my life; only the Gate awaits me. Besides, this fruit would not last long in the real world. Two days at most.”

  “We don’t need long,” says Fern. “Here you may last awhile, but to what end? Morgus will suck out the pips of your thought and burrow like a worm into all your secrets. She, too, wants to harness the dragon’s power.”

  “Whatever she does, it will avail her nothing. That Gift is mine alone”

  “Yours and your descendant’s,” Fern reminds him. “Do not forget Jerrold Laye.”

  “A degenerate. You said so yourself. No other could understand dragonkind as I did. To touch the mind of a spirit all fire, to experience passion in the raw, hunger, rage, love yes, love—uncomplicated by the mazes of human thought, unchecked by meaningless scruples—only the strongest could survive such a contact. A weaker man would be driven mad.”

  “Maybe Laye is mad,” says Fern, “but he is still a vehicle for the Old One. He has no regard for the mental condition of his instruments.”

  The dark mouth twists in contempt. “Such a one as this Laye—corruptible and possessed—could never hold any true communion with a dragon. They perceive human reactions with an enhanced intensity, almost as if in color. A lie is dull, tainted, discolored. They see all the affectations of man, our morality, hypocrisy, deceit, as inhibiting the vital elements of nature—a wanton folly that is beyond their comprehension. To communicate, the dragon charmer must set aside all barriers, he must open his mind to that of the dragon. They do not speak as we do but their thought takes shape in your head, there is an intuitive understanding, a joining of two spirits. Once that bond is made, you are changed forever. The fire has entered you, and it will burn until you die.” He fixes her with the blue lance of his gaze, but she does not turn away. “It burns in me still, even here, but this is the last smolder. Soon it will be ashes.”

  “If you were so close to the dragons,” Fern asks hesitantly, “how could you have destroyed the other eggs? When you went to the dragons’ graveyard and robbed the nest, why not leave the ones you did not want?”

  “You don’t understand,” he says, and there is an edge in his voice sharper than a naked blade. “I left no rival, no possible threat for the future. I did as dragons do.”

  Fern absorbs this in silence. “This opening of the mind,” she says at last, “this conjunction of two spirits… did you try that with me, when our eyes met in the spellfire?”

  “No,” he answers. “But perhaps you did.”

  Later on, in
the daylight period, Fern watches Morgus. She is searching with increased determination, covering ground already explored, peering under every leaf, into every knothole. Soon she will pass close to the dell where only a thin film of magic and the convoluted ground hide the black fruit. She may sense the perimeter of the spell brushing her thought with an unfamiliar bewilderment. Fern, knowing her own inexperience, fears a possible clumsiness may betray her: Morgus’s perceptions are too acute to be easily bemazed. Fern observes the witch through a slit between root and earth, seeing her draw nearer to the hollow, moving slower with every step, as though conscious that somewhere close by there are shadows that have eluded her. Now she has almost reached the penumbra of the spell. Fern thrusts down panic, stretching out with her mind, probing the labyrinthine branches far overhead for inspiration for a creature she can use, a brain simple enough to be malleable. Somewhere above she senses a clot of matter sagging from a bough, a whining buzz of sound the drone of busy wings, the many-celled awareness of the swarm. Her thought quickens into recklessness, pushing self-doubt aside. Softly, softly the power flows from her, murmured words giving it direction and purpose. A hundred feet above, the swarm feels the menace.

  They swoop down on Morgus in a wedge-shaped arrow of rage, a multiple mind with but a single thought. Not bees, as Fern expected though the vicinity of the Tree is almost flowerless and she has only ever seen one, a cuckoo bee that hives alone but wasps. Fat black wasps with scarlet stings, zooming in on their target like a dive-bomber, whirling, darting, stabbing. Taken off guard, it is a moment before Morgus can protect herself—before the crack of Command that has her tormentors frying in midair, sizzling into cinerous particles that fall harmlessly to the ground. But she has been stung: there are pinpoints of red on her cheek and the flesh roll of her neck. Fern, sinking deep into the dead leaves, sees her turn toward the cave. She will be back, wanting to explore the reason for such an attack—knowing there may be no reason, since the denizens of the Tree are often wayward and savage—coldly curious, nursing, perhaps, a burgeoning suspicion. She will be back very soon. Even here, there is no Time left.