The Dragon Charmer (16 page)

“Only the very young and the very old love madly,” sighed Ragginbone. “Enjoy it while you can. In old age love becomes embarrassing, often pathetic. The doter in his dotage. Don’t be too hard on Marcus Greig. He’s reached the years of caution: he loves carefully, grieves privately, and refuses to put either emotion on show. You shouldn’t condemn him for reticence.”

“Anyway, I thought you liked him,” Will interpolated from the backseat.

“I did,” said Gaynor. “I do. I just feel he’s picked the wrong time to make himself likeable.”

They had arranged to visit Fern at an hour when she would be alone: Robin was at home catching up on sleep, Marcus was working in his hotel. She lay on her back in the high white bed, her head raised up on the pillows, her arms at her sides. The fold of the sheet across her breast was immaculate, the plumpness of the pillows undented save for the slight pressure of her skull. Electrodes attached to her chest monitored her heart rate: they could see the thin green line on screen, broken here and there into the hiccup of a pulse beat. “It’s very slow,” said Ragginbone. Transparent plastic tubes pumped essential nutrients into her at one end and removed waste products from the other. A video camera kept a mechanical eye on her. She looked shrunken, scarcely bigger than a child, and very fragile, a doll-like thing animated only by the machines to which she was wired. Life was fed through her automatically, its passage recorded, alarms poised to go off at any significant change. But there would be no change.
They could see that. Her face was white, and very still. Ragginbone lifted an eyelid: her eyes were turned up so hardly any iris showed. The three of them found chairs and seated themselves on either side of the bed. Herself horribly distressed, Gaynor saw Will had shed his customary laid-back attitude: he was shaking and seemed close to tears. Tentatively she took his hand.

“Is it my fault?” she said after a while, guilt returning. “Was there… something more… I should have done?”

“No.” Ragginbone emerged briskly from some faraway place to which his thoughts had strayed. “When the Oldest One comes, there is nothing to be done. You showed great courage under difficult circumstances; somewhere, Someone takes note. Or so I have come to believe. As it is, we have no time for the indulgence of what-ifs and maybes. What matters is how we act now.”

“Where is she?” asked Will, his voice sharpened with bitterness or pain. “She isn’t here.” He did not appear to notice how tightly his fingers gripped Gaynor’s.

“Where indeed?” said Ragginbone.
“That
is the question. The
tannasgeal
drew her from her body, but it seems clear if Gaynor’s recollection of events is accurate—that the owl intervened. But who would send the owl? There are many evil creatures in the world, some less than human, some… more. Fern is the first in a long while to manifest the Gift so strongly. That might attract the attention of other Old Spirits: the Hag, the Hunter, the Child. Even She Who Sleeps. And there are too many among the Gifted who have turned to the cult of Self, to strange obsessions, ancient lusts: they, too, would be interested, though few remain who have not passed the Gate. I have been trying to remember…”

“Fern was always afraid it would send her mad,” Will said. “Like Alison. Or Zohrâne.”

“They made their own madness,” Ragginbone responded. “The Gift only gave them the power to exercise it.”

“She’s never used it,” said Will. “Not since Atlantis.”

“It would not take much to be noticed,” said Ragginbone. “If someone was watching.”

Will frowned suddenly. “I know she lost her temper with Bradachin, when he first came to us. He said you could
see
the power, like lightning stabbing from her hand. But he wouldn’t—”

“You cannot trust a malmorth. Remember Pegwillen.”

“He’s different.” Will was decisive. “Stronger. He’s talked to me more than once about the honor of the old lairds—the McCrackens of Glen Cracken. He says they can trace their kinship to Cuchulain of Ulster. He sees their honor as his. I know he would never betray us.”

“Maybe.” Ragginbone looked unconvinced. “I… advertised … for him; when he arrived, I checked his references. It is unusual for a house-goblin to change his residence, all but unthinkable for one to travel so far. The goblinkind are not like people: their behavior patterns do not alter. None of the werefolk are subject to evolution.”

“He’s spent a lot of time in human company,” said Will. “He might have picked up a few bad habits.”

“I believed him capable of loyalty,” Ragginbone conceded, “up to a point. But such elemental spirits have no moral fiber; their substance is too slight for it. Treachery comes easily to them: a little bribe, a little threat, and the thing is done. They care for humans as we care for pets. One dead goldfish can always be replaced by another.”

“You’re wrong,” said Will doggedly. “You’re often wrong.”

Ragginbone darted him a swift, sharp glance before returning to his contemplation of Fern. “It’s possible. It may have been … bad luck. The spellfire shows many things, if you know how to look. I have always guessed that was how Alimond first traced the key to Dale House, all those years ago. But the fire is wayward, like all magics; what you see is not always yours to choose. Still, the searching eye will always find what it seeks, in the end.”

“If someone other than the Oldest Spirit found out about Fern and wants to use her,” Will said rather desperately, “you
must
have an idea who it is.”

There was a silence while Ragginbone’s face seemed to fold in on itself, the furrows drawing together, closing over his features, until eyes and mouth were mere slits of concentration in a nest of woven lines. Gaynor imagined him reaching far and deep into the wells of memory, sorting through the
jumbled experience of centuries, through moments of hope and joy and pain and sorrow, looking for the lost connection, the forgotten image. She wondered how it must feel to live through so many lifetimes, to store so much, to
know
so much, until the great weight of that knowledge sank without trace into the depths of the soul. When Ragginbone’s eyes reopened their expression was bleak. “As you remarked,” he said, “I am often wrong.” He would not venture any more on the subject, though Will pressed him. “At least her body is safe,” he pointed out. “I feared, at first, that
he
might have entered her, taken possession of her. She had called him, on territory with which he was familiar; the alcohol had numbed her brain; she had laid herself wide open to him. He would have made her an ambulant, his instrument, her spirit lost or trapped in some corner of her mind, aware but powerless. That would have given him both vengeance and control. Fortunately, her Gift—or some other factor protected her. Even her emptiness is barred to him.”

“Fern would never let herself be possessed,” said Will. “With or without the Gift, she’s as strong as steel.”

The sudden movement caught them all off guard. Discussion and argument were both forgotten; all their attention was focused on the patient. The motion had been very slight, a barely perceptible twitch of the right arm, perhaps nothing more than a muscular reflex. But in Fern’s inert condition even so tiny an indication of life was somehow shocking, as unnerving as a gesture from a corpse. “Look!” Will cried. “Her heart rate’s up.” On the monitor, the blips became more frequent. Will bent over her, calling her name, but her face remained blank and empty. It was Ragginbone, on her right, who first saw the cut. Her arm stiffened, shuddering, though the rest of her body stayed utterly limp. A thin line of red appeared on the underside, between elbow and wrist, fine and shallow as a paper cut. It was as if someone was drawing an invisible knife across her flesh. Ragginbone pinched the wound shut, demanding gauze, bandages, Elastoplast. “She mustn’t bleed!” he said, his tone so fierce that neither Will nor Gaynor questioned him. “Call a nurse!”

The next half hour was an ordeal. Staff agreed that the injury was trivial; it was its origin that puzzled them. Initially
Ragginbone was regarded with deep suspicion, an officious ward nurse muttering: “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” but the videotape bore out the story related by all three witnesses. Robin arrived opportunely, and was taken aside by a senior doctor and asked if Fern had any history of what he described as “unusual psychosomatic phenomena.” Robin admitted reluctantly that some twelve years earlier there had been an incident that had been labeled at the time “post-traumatic amnesia,” but although he detailed everything he knew about it, and the doctor agreed there must be some connection, they were no further on. “The video camera is a very inadequate guardian,” Ragginbone said to Will. “One of us should be with her at all times. I fear she is in great danger. Persuade your father.” But Robin needed little persuasion. The weekend had turned from romance into tragedy and overnight his habitual expression of slight anxiety had evolved into one of chronic stress. No amount of care was excessive for his little Fernanda. The fact that Fern, although built on the small side, had never been petted and protected as her father implied, somehow made her present plight yet more pathetic and difficult to endure. She had bossed, bullied, and manipulated Robin from the time of her mother’s death, delegating only a few such duties to Abby over the years, and he could hardly bear to see her lying there, so deathly still, neither dead nor alive. Her motionless figure appeared somehow broken, defenseless, drained of all that was Fern.

“You must let us take turns on watch,” Will said to him. “This could go on for some time, and you’re worn out already. As long as there’s
one
of us here … It would be awful if she were to wake and find only the nurses and a rack of machines.”

“Awful,” Robin echoed automatically. The fact that she might never wake eclipsed such minor horrors.

Convincing him to accept Ragginbone was harder. However, by dint of dramatizing the latter’s prompt action when the cut appeared, and hinting at a superior knowledge of medical arcana (Robin had always suspected the old man, whom he knew as Mr. Watchman, of being a scientist or professor fallen on hard times), Will won his point. Before Robin quite understood how, it had been agreed that Ragginbone
would relieve him at eleven o’clock. They left him as another doctor arrived, joining what was rapidly becoming a symposium around Fern’s bed. “They think she’s an ‘interesting case,’” Will muttered angrily. “Not just an ordinary coma. ‘Many unusual features’ I heard one of them say it. As if he was an estate agent selling an awkward house.”

“Stop it,” said Gaynor. “They’ll look after her. That’s what matters.”

“Precisely,” Ragginbone affirmed. “Her body, at least, is in good hands. As for her spirit: that’s for us to locate. If we can.”

“Where do we start?” asked Will.

“Nowhere,” said Ragginbone. “You can only look for a spirit in a spiritual dimension. Feel for her with your intuition, seek her in your dreams. Nowhere is the only place to begin. Remember, there is a little of the Gift in most of us. Gaynor has already shown herself sensitive to both influence and atmosphere. As for you, Will, you are Fern’s brother in blood: you share the same heritage, kindred genes. Your spirit can call to hers wherever she is.”

“What about you?” said Will. “What will you do?”

“Think,” said Ragginbone.

   The Watcher shared their supper and then left to return to the clinic, declining a lift. “I can get about,” he said, “as fast as I need to.” Lougarry went with him, though she knew the clinic permitted no animals on the premises.

“He may hitch a ride,” said Will. “Or he might walk it. He can walk very quickly when he wants to. Much quicker than me.” He and Gaynor ran through the events of the past few days for the fourth or fifth time, winding up with a recap of the incident that afternoon, coming to no new conclusions, seeing nothing at the end of the tunnel but more tunnel. Will had opened a bottle of wine and they finished it slowly, unwilling to go to bed, though they were both tired and there was little to be gained by staying up and recycling their problems. Eventually Will poured a dram of whiskey for Bradachin and the two of them went upstairs.

“Maybe we will dream of Fern,” said Gaynor, “if we concentrate.”

“You might,” said Will. “I never dream of anything. I’m always too busy being asleep.” He did not want her to see how frightened he was by his sister’s condition, or how much his own helplessness galled him. When he and Fern had first met Ragginbone and become involved in the search for the key, he had been twelve years old, too much a child still to prevent his sister taking the lead and assuming responsibility. Now that he was an adult he felt he should be sharing her danger, not watching it; acting, not dreaming. He knew it was she who had the Gift—he knew at least a part of his attitude might be frustrated machismo—but he was not one to probe his motives or prove his New Manhood by waiting on the sidelines. He had sensed the proximity of the shadow world and its denizens for too long now to regard it with a child’s formless dread; his fear, too, was an adult thing, intelligent,
knowing
. Knowing too much for comfort, too little for action. In bed he lay sleepless, listening for the owl’s hoot, hearing only wind murmurs, and the soft creakings of an old house twitching in its slumber. A bird called, but it was not an owl. Oblivion crept up on him unawares.

He dreamed. It was a nightmare from infancy, when he had first heard about dinosaurs, and their hugeness, their monstrous teeth, their tiny glittering eyes had dominated his terrors. The slightest bump in the night would be translated, in his dreams, into the distant tread of thunderous feet. When he saw the skeletons in the Natural History Museum, taking them out of the domain of imagination and into reality and science, they became just big lizards, manageable and not so awesome, and his nightmares had ceased. But now the horror returned.

The gigantic head was resting on the ground beside him, so close he could have reached out and touched it. He saw it in extraordinary detail: the elongated jaw with reptilian fangs extruding beyond the lip, the gaping trumpet of the nostril, the eye, not tiny now but a huge bulbous sphere, lidded with horn, lashed with spines; its murky colors, all red, swirling like gasoline on water, its slitted pupil a crevasse opening onto the abyss. The body was layered thickly with scales that shone with a dull metallic luster; the armored brow was jagged and
spiked and notched; a ridge of triangular bone plates extended down the spine, vanishing into the darkness. Nearby he could see the outline of a foreleg, the crooked elbow higher than the creature’s back, and an outstretched claw the length of an elephant’s tusk, gleaming in the half-light. It couldn’t be a tyrannosaur, he thought, with the small part of his brain not paralyzed with terror. The teeth were wrong, the foreclaw too big. It must be some species of crocodile, an antique behemoth from the vast swamps of prehistory. He could see little in the gloaming, but they seemed to be hemmed in between low cliffs, perhaps leading to a cave mouth. The sky above was evening-blue, still sparsely starred; the bloodstained traces of sunset lingered somewhere on the edge of his vision. When he dared to turn his head, he saw the cliffs opening out before them to show a broad valley, dimly patterned with fields, and very far away what looked like city walls and a tall spire like a black needle against the dying glow in the west. It took a dreadful effort to turn back. He knew now the monster beside him wasn’t a dinosaur. He saw the smoke trail rising from its nostril, thin and somehow oily, like the fume from some slow-burning pollutant. The nostril itself was as blackened as an ancient chimney, but somewhere deep in its cavern he glimpsed a tiny red smolder, an ember that would not go out. He had realized by then that it could not see him—he was trapped in a fantasy of his sleeping mind or someone else’s memory of the distant past—yet he felt horribly visible, flattened against the cliff face, cowering from the basilisk gaze of that enormous eye.