The Dragon Book (22 page)

The long summer evening had not yet drawn to a close, and a smoky dusk lay across the landscape. Just before the rise of the hills, I could see the cornfields, a paler expanse against the dark mass of beech wood. Sparks flitted amongst the stooks: lecks, perhaps, or something even more arcane. A thin moon hung above them upon its back, a sickle smile. It was not far off Lammas, and I could sense the thick tides of the land running sluggishly beneath the surface of my mind. Peasant magic is not for me—my path is the ceremonial one of necromancy—and yet it is irritatingly impossible in this faery-ruled realm to avoid the wheel of the seasons, their inevitable turn, and the nature of the days that they bring. I turned from the window and brought my attention back to the chamber.

A chalice, of black glass and old gold. A wand, with an amber tip. A small bottle of blood: my own, used in the conjuration of shucks. A knife, obsidian-handled.

I took the knife and, murmuring a familiar invocation, cut a circle in the air around me. Now, I stood in the centre of a circle, gleaming black-red.

I began the familiar conjuration of a shuck, dropping blood onto a glass, imbuing it with a snatched fragment of my own essence, concentrating hard upon the invocation. Within the hour, a shuck stood before me in the circle, congealing like fog. Crimson eyes glared from the baleful wedge of its head, and it shook itself once, as if rearranging itself into being.

“Go forth,” I told it. “Go forth, and bring me a scale from the worm that coils around the hill.” For a moment, I thought that the shuck might disobey me—far from the magical solidity of my own mansion, it had an unfamiliar aspect—but eventually, it gave another shake, and its dark dog shape bounded through the window and out upon the air.

I did not know whether it would be successful. I was forced to wait, watching through the eyes of the shuck as it ran through the cornfields, scattering the smaller spirits, heading for the hill. Once, passing by a hedge, a corn-leck sprang out at it: I glimpsed the sharp teeth, the little yellow eyes. But the leck thought better of it and fell back into the ripening corn.

When the shuck reached the worm, it paused, and I could feel it assessing its various opportunities. It came close to the tail, hunched close to the ground. But the worm sensed that something was amiss. It stirred uneasily, and its great head shifted above that of the shuck. I felt the shuck’s sides heave in and out in a mimicry of breath. It sidled forward, towards the worm. Above, I once more saw that emerald glint of eye against the swimming summer stars. The shuck leaped, knowing caution but not fear: it was not, after all, a living thing, and its dissolution meant no more to its consciousness than the passing of a shadow. It snatched at the tail, and its jaws connected with a sudden, jarring sensation on gristle and bone. I started back, within the confines of the circle, and my elbow knocked against a candle. Cursing myself for my clumsiness, I righted the light. The circle had not been broken, but the shuck was in flight: leaping and bounding through the narrow lanes between the beech trees, already far from the hill.

Even all the way in Direfell, I heard the worm’s hiss, like a star sizzling out. A moment later, snapped back by the thread of magic, the shuck stood in front of me. A single scale, blue-green as captured water, clung to its gaping jaw.

The conjuration of shucks is a lesser effort, a small part of magical acts. That this episode had drained me made me nervous, more so than I cared to admit. A wiser man might have rested before making the greater part of the spell; but wise men do not become magicians, and I was running out of time. On the stroke of midnight, I lit a candle of black fat, made sure the cockerel was safely in his cage within the circle, and placed the scale upon my tongue.

How to depict the Eldritch Realm, the world beyond the world, where the essences of dragons roam freely? It is far from the world of Earth, and far, too, from the Otherlands from which our rulers come: the faery realms of the Hollow Hills are still a part of our own world, after all. But the Eldritch Realm is otherwhere, a vast darkness shot with crimson light and the giant clouds which birth suns. I spun through a world of stars, not knowing whether I saw a constellation or the eye of some god. Presences too immense for me to comprehend swam past, as if within some infinite sea.

There are colours there for which we have no words, and a sense that one’s spirit is stretched to the point of snapping. I have never dared to travel too far within the Eldritch Realm, and yet I had to find the point of origin of the worm: the residual element of its soul, which tied it to its home and so lent it its power. The scale took me, obliging, spiralling down into billows of aquamarine and jade, past sparkling jewelled cliffs and waterfalls of living crystal. There, at the bottom of a crag, was a tiny point of light with a thread snaking from it.

I knew how this was done. Find the start and pull back the thread, reeling it in like the capture of some monstrous fish. Unable to resist a tug from the Eldritch Realm, the worm’s soul would recede, coiling back inwards, and ready to be tethered.

It was supposed to be relatively straightforward, or so I’d heard. But magicians are like fishermen: they lie about such things as ease and length. I would just have to give it a go. So, with the scale still resting in my spectral mouth like some unnatural tongue, I put my shimmering hand to the point of origin of the worm’s soul and spoke the words to bring it back again.

You may not be entirely surprised to learn that I was not successful. Instead of reeling inwards, the spark that was the worm’s soul clung to my hand and pulled. I found myself shooting back through the Eldritch Realm, with the heavy airs of Earth a palpable presence up ahead. I tried every incantation I could think of to break free, but without avail. As the wall that indicated the magical boundaries of Albion shot towards me, I had a sudden, unwelcome vision of what the immediate future was about to bring: myself, hurtling out of a summery sky and dropping beneath a worm’s jaws. Attached to the line of its soul, I could not break free.

I crashed through the boundary and cried out, an infant reborn, as the air of my own world tore into my lungs. But it was not the dragon-infested hillside on which I found myself. Instead, it was the interior of Lady Porthlois’s mirrored chamber.

This would not, I am sad to say, be the first time in which I’d proved to be an uninvited guest in some lady’s boudoir. Sometimes it turned out rather better than anticipated, sometimes not. But my intentions in entering the room of Lady Porthlois were, on this occasion, entirely inadvertent, and I experienced a moment of wholly social panic.

I need not have worried. Her ladyship neither simpered, screamed, nor demanded an explanation. As I stumbled to my feet and fell back against the wall, I saw Lady Porthlois sitting up in bed. Her mouth and her eyes were wide open, and a blue-black light streamed from them, reverberating from the mirrors and illuminating the room like the interior of a thundercloud. Her fists were balled at her sides, and the chamber echoed with magic.

I see no shame in admitting that I tried to run. My efforts were, however, doomed. My movements resembled those of someone caught in a spider’s web, a net of treacle in which magic ran so thick and closely packed that there was barely sufficient air to breathe. I fell to my knees, choking, and the magic picked me up and carried me to a nearby chest, made of oak banded with iron. I was deposited within it, the lid slammed shut, and there I lay, gasping for breath, while the spells of another mage boomed and crashed above my uncomprehending head.

EVENTUALLY, it ended. I felt the coming of dawn rather than witnessing it, for no light penetrated the depths of my box. But a true magician always knows what time of the day or night it might be: the presence of the decans of each hour change with their own curious precision as the wheel of the sun turns towards night and back again. Three o’clock, and all was not well. I was expecting my captor to open the lid and gloat over her prize; but she let me be, and that was more galling than anything. I was beginning to suspect that rather than being some special captive, I had simply gotten in her way.

During my time in the box, I had been able to get some measure of her magic, and this was unusual. I had met female magicians before, and some were powerful, some merely cunning. All illicit, borrowed power, of course, for the College will not train those of the female sex: the result of years of jealous rule by faery women, who know what sometimes mortal men do not—that the talent of the fair human sex outstrips that of the male. Small wonder that Aoife and her predecessors have not been able to face the competition. But as it is, the College guards its secrets with close attention: Lady Porthlois wore a mage’s ring, but where had she obtained it? From a father, or from her husband? It could not be hers by right, and yet her magic was, I sensed, intimately bound together with the ring, just as mine was bound to the old silver band bearing the black dog’s seal, which I wore upon my third finger. And there was something else besides, an immensity of power reaching far beyond the normal skills of mortal humanity. A stout, sick woman in a mob-cap, confined to her bed? Lady Porthlois was far more than this. One never likes to think that one might have met one’s match; but lying there in the dark oak box, surrounded by the odours of magic and cedar, I was beginning to feel that this hour, for me, may finally have come.

I lay there for another four hours, listening intently to the sounds from the chamber beyond: a heavy creaking, as if of great steps upon ancient floorboards. I’d already run through all the incantations I could think of, and it would have been just as efficacious if I’d babbled nursery rhymes: it wasn’t just that nothing had worked, as that my efforts simply held no power at all. Nothing I’d ever encountered, not even the Faery Queen herself, had so comprehensively stripped me of my abilities.

So I remained, alternatively seething and plotting, until a faint tapping on the lid of the box attracted my attention. I wasn’t able to speak—she had taken that, too—but I uttered a grunt, and it seemed that was enough. The lid opened, letting in a shaft of blinding sunlight. It made me blink, but I knew her all the same: Porthlois’s eldest daughter, Rose.

As soon as she saw me, she gave a gasp of horror.

“Lord Cygne!”

“Indeed.” As if the sunlight had brought back my powers, I could speak again. Experimentally, I flexed small magical muscles. All seemed once more intact.

“Whatever are you doing in that chest?”

I hauled myself out of the box with what I felt to be a lamentable lack of dignity. “Where are we?”

The chest was no longer in Lady Porthlois’s mirrored chamber. Instead, I looked out onto a cobwebbed cellar, near a rack on which reposed many bottles of wine. Rose was clutching one of them, like a club.

“In the wine cellar. My father sent me to fetch a bottle of porter, for luncheon. We were wondering where you were.”

“How did you know someone was in the box?”

“I–” Rose seemed somewhat at a loss. “The chest should not be here. It belongs upstairs; my stepmother asked Parch to have it moved this morning. I confess, I did not think anyone might be inside it: I was merely curious. What on earth were you doing within it?”

“I think,” I said grimly, “that it is time I spoke to your father.”

The Duke of Direfell seemed utterly at a loss when I recounted recent events.

“But what does this all mean? You sought a dragon, and found my wife?”

“I will tell you what I believe to be the case,” I said. I poured us both another glass of the porter: I needed it after my ordeal, and Richard’s own was just beginning. “I went in search of the origin point of the dragon’s soul, to bring it fully back into what we call the Eldritch Realm, there to secure it. Once this is done, the body inhabited by the draconian spirit will simply dwindle, becoming perhaps no more than a newt, or a worm in truth. This is normally,” I remarked with some grandeur, “a simple enough procedure, both in its concept and its execution. As I instructed your steward, had anything attempted to return with me, it would have passed into the body of the black cockerel and slain it, rather than latching on to I myself. However, on this occasion, something went badly awry. Rather than dispatching the worm’s soul to its original home, I found my spirit returning out of the sanctuary of a protective circle and being hauled into the presence of your wife.”

“My wife has been very ill,” Richard said, frowning. “She has a case of malignant dropsy, which the doctors seems unable to cure. She cannot even stir from her bed. We have tried everything. But she is a woman of the best heart and soul, despite her ailments. I cannot believe that she is some kind of—well,
what
?”

“She wears a mage’s ring,” I told him.

“That signet ring? That is a legacy of her poor father, who died in a pilgrimage to the Outer Isles.”

It was my turn to frown. “Her father was a devotee of the island gods?”

“Quite so. His ancestors came from the furthest north of Albion; sea priests of a cult of Manannan mac Lir.”