The Dragon Charmer (19 page)

“What do you want of me?” she said.

“Hexaté,” Moonspittle began, but the crone mumbled on.

“I was sleeping—I sleep a lot now. Why did you disturb
me? I am no longer young; I need my sleep. I will wake at the full of the moon.”

“Ask her,” said Ragginbone, “if she has the girl.”

“What girl?”

“Ask her.”

But Hexaté only licked her lips with a tongue like cracked leather. “A girl? What kind of a girl? Give me a girl, let her be plump and toothsome. I will roast her over a slow fire and suck the youth from her sweet flesh—”

Ragginbone made an impatient gesture, and the hag was gone, diminishing into her own ramblings like a leaf whirled away on a muttering wind. Others followed her into the circle: an antlered man dressed only in a doeskin; a child with the face of a celestial choirboy and the eyes of a satyr; a blind woman, veiled in red, holding a small bright sphere little bigger than a marble, marked with staring circles like the patterns on a sardonyx.

“We are seeking a girl,” said Moonspittle. “One of Prospero’s Children. New to her Gift. Her spirit wanders. Can you see her?”

The seeress lifted her veil. Beneath, the bones of her skull shone white through diaphanous skin. Her eye sockets were empty. She lifted the sphere and inserted it into the right-hand cavity where it glowed into life, roving to and fro, the lone ray of its gaze reaching out into a great distance, though it did not appear to pass the boundary of the circle.

“What do you see, Bethesne?” Moonspittle said.

“I see the Present.” Her voice sounded hollow and full of echoes. “She is not there. She has gone beyond my Sight.”

“Is she in the Past?” Ragginbone prompted. Elivayzar repeated the question.

“The Past is a busy place,” said the sibyl. “We have all been there, including the one you seek. But she is not there now.”

“Dragons,” said Ragginbone, thinking of Will’s dream, groping for further questions, for a hint, a clue, a spoor to follow. “Can she see
dragons?”

The seeress was silent a while; the questing ray focused on some far-off vision. “The last dragon hatches. One is there to charm him, a man with a burnt face that is the stigma of his
kindred. A burnt face that will not burn, legacy of that ancestor who was tempered in dragonfire. The burnt man lifts his hand. The descendant of Fafhir, the spawn of Pharaïzon dances at his word.”

“The line of the dragon charmers is extinct,” said Ragginbone. “Ruvindra Laiï died long ago. Ask her—”

But the seeress continued. “One made a bargain with he who is not named. Ruvindra Laiï slept the sleep of deep winter, until the fetus stirred in its egg. He sold his soul to tame the lastborn of dragonkind.”

“Why would the Unnamed have struck such a bargain?” said Moonspittle.

“For the dragon. In selling himself, Laiï has sold his Gift and his creature. He has bound the firedrake to the service of the Oldest Spirit. It is a weapon long sought.”

“A clumsy weapon for the times,” said Moonspittle. “Unpredictable—overheated—excessive. What use is a dragon nowadays? This is—” he hazarded a guess “—the eighteenth century.”

“The twentieth,” sighed Ragginbone. “The wheel has turned full circle. Dragon or firebomb: who will know the difference? Besides, the Oldest is not only of our time but of all Time, and in the domination of a dragon there is a prestige and glory unique to history.
He
would never resist flaunting such a symbol of his might in the face of the otherworld. However, there might be another reason…”

“For what purpose does the Old Spirit covet the last of dragons, Bethesne?” Elivayzar asked.

“This was the sole remaining egg from the clutch of Senecxys after her mating with Pharaïzon. Within the body of the dragonet is the spearhead that entered his father long before. When he was dying, Pharaïzon instructed his mate to devour his heart, that the splinter of the Lodestone that had made him lord of fire and air might be passed on to one of his offspring. Afterward, Senecxys fled to the dragon’s graveyard, laying her eggs there in a chasm of flame ere she expired. But Ruvindra Laiï found them, even there where no man had ever been, and he took the most precious and destroyed the rest, breaking the shells with a hammer, crushing the skulls of the unborn young.”

“He loved dragons,” objected Moonspittle. “That was the obsession of his house.”

The seeress’s tone did not alter. “Laiï had given himself to him who is without pity,” she said. “Though he may have wept, he could not disobey. That was the price he paid.”

“And now?” said Ragginbone. “Does the dragon charmer still live? Ask her.”

“One lives,” said the sibyl. “Ruvindra Laiï is slain, but another of his line has taken his place. Yet he is of corrupted race, and both his blood and his Gift are diluted. He needs the Old Spirit to increment his powers; thus the Unnamed has gained a foothold in his soul.”

“And the dragon?” said Ragginbone. “What of the dragon? It would be difficult to hide such a creature in
this
world.”

“Where has he hidden the dragon?” asked Moonspittle. “Is he in the Here and Now, or Beyond?”

“I—cannot tell.” For the first time, the sibyl faltered. Her single eye wandered; the attenuated beam flinched and receded, withdrawing as if from a great depth of darkness. “It is … too well concealed. There is a mist over both dragon and demon.”

“Will it manifest itself soon?”

“I do not know. I can see what was, and what is, but not what will be. There was only one of our sisterhood whose gaze could penetrate the future, and the dread of her visions weighed heavy on her heart. She foresaw too many horrors that could not be averted, and so she lost faith in the idle hand of Providence—she lost faith in Time itself—and now she sleeps too deeply ever to reawaken. Her spirit is gone, and her body molders. Even a necromancer could not summon Skætha again.” She paused, and when she resumed the echoes were fading from her voice, leaving it cold and thin as an arctic breeze. “I grow tired now; I can see no more. Release me.”

“Not yet.” Ragginbone loomed behind Moonspittle like a venerable Mephistopheles: an insistent murmur in his ear, an iron pressure on his neck. “Ask her about the owl.”

“The
owl?”

“An owl bigger than an eagle, swifter than the beat of time. An emissary perhaps… a thief of spirits…”

When Moonspittle repeated the question, the seeress turned her solitary eye on him: a lidless orb pink veined and sheened with blue, where the double circles of iris and pupil stood out against the white like the center of a target. A target that might shoot back. The searching ray had dwindled to a nimbus around it; the transparent features were barely visible against the ivory perfection of the bones. “I am tired,” she reiterated. “I have no strength for
bird-watching.”
A faint contempt tinted her colorless monotone.

“Try.” Ragginbone’s voice spoke through Moonspittle’s lips, hand followed hand in duplicate motion, tightening the perimeter, sealing the boundary against any departure. The muted fire glimmer crackled and grew.

The eye of the pythoness moved again, sending its piercing glance into some other dimension, a realm of distant night or twilit day. “The owl roosts,” she said, and there was effort in the words. “It is far away… on the edge … the very edge of things … The Tree stands there forever, in a forest of its own shadows. Its topmost branches are above the stars…”

“How may I reach it?” Moonspittle’s question was still in the harsher accents of Caracandal.

“There is no way there, no way back. Only the birds may come and go. The eagle and the owl fly where they will…”

“Look closer. There are other things than birds in the Eternal Tree.”

“The heads of the dead ripen there in season, like hanging fruit… I can see no more. Release me!”

“Look closer!”

“I can … no more.
Release me!
” The shadowy mouth strained into a rictus over pearl-pure teeth; the skull glowed with an opalescent luster. But on the eyeball the blood vessels had darkened, standing out in ridges; the pupil was a black hole; the bluish nimbus had turned red. The lone ray was clouded, a murky fume reaching from another place to choke its radiance, forcing it back onto its source. The orb grew hot, throbbing visibly. Smoke rose from the socket. The seeress screamed, plucking at her head with skeleton fingers. And then the eye burst from its anchorage, arcing through the air on a trail of sparks, bouncing once before sailing over the outline of the circle—

Like a glittering marble it rolled across the floor. The cat Mogwit pounced upon it, entranced by this new plaything, patting it from paw to paw, evidently oblivious to the heat of its touch. In the circle the seeress howled with rage and agony, her empty socket weeping tears of blood. And around the periphery Moonspittle crawled on hands and knees, coaxing, threatening, wheedling, while the cat ignored his blandishments and slipped through his grasp, nudging the trophy so it was always just out of his master’s reach. In the end it was Ragginbone who caught Mogwit by the scruff of the neck, plucking him into the air while Moonspittle retrieved the eye and passed it to its custodian. Her hand closed upon it; she pulled the veil over her face. Cursing him in a voice like the hiss of cold fire, she faded from their sight.

“The circle is broken,” said Ragginbone, tossing his burden floorward. “We must start again.”

“He might have
eaten
it,” said Moonspittle, stroking his pet with unsteady fingers. Mogwit was still peering from side to side, clearly wondering where the fascinating bauble had gone. “He does, you know. Eat things. Rats, mice, cockroaches. Once it was a butterfly. I don’t know where he found a butterfly in Soho. And things out of dustbins. His constitution is very strong—like a goat, or do I mean an ostrich?—but… Dear knows what
that
would have done to him.”

“We must start again,” said Ragginbone.

Outside, afternoon had flowed into evening, the uniform daylight giving way to the jumbled illuminations of the city dusk. Streetlamp and headlamp, arc light and neon, all competed for airspace, jostling the shadows out of existence, splashing reflections on paintwork and windowpane. The screams of the seeress must have been lost in the beat of music from the basement club, the cacophony of small talk spilling out of a neighboring bar. In the cellar room the flames hovered over the candle stumps, each sustaining its own diminutive zone of light, while in between the darkness thickened into that unrelieved midnight peculiar to caves and dungeons, places where neither moon nor star ever penetrate. The circle sprang into fire again, its wan glimmer very bright now against the increased gloom. This time, on Ragginbone’s instructions, Moonspittle had traced runes of protection around the circumference. But
when his confederate told him whom to summon he seemed startled, faintly disdainful.

“Why waste the power? Her little brain is full of trivia. She talks of nothing and knows less. She will be no use to you.”

“That depends on what I wish to learn.”

The words of summoning were spoken: at the center of the circle a cone of vapor, less than three feet high, swirled, shuddered, condensed into solidity. And there was a tiny creature—pixie or pygmy, leprechaun or homunculus—perched on a toadstool. Not an attractive picture-book toadstool, red capped and white spotted, but one of the noxious variety, a parasitic growth sprouting from an unseen tree trunk, its lip frilled into an alligator grin, its underparts emanating a sickly phosphorescence. It was leaking spores that drifted across the circle, and a smell came from it so unwholesome that Moonspittle almost gagged and Mogwit backed away, his fur on end. But the figure seated on the top, attenuated limbs curled beneath her, seemed untroubled by the stench. Standing, she might have reached the height of a four-year-old child, though she was far thinner, her jutting bones like flower twigs, her cunning hands and splayed feet adorned with more than the usual complement of digits. Many of them were twined with knotted tendrils and old-man’s-beard like rustic jewelry, outward stigmata of a primitive vanity. She wore a misshapen garment that passed for a dress, woven of cobwebs and grasses, stuck with torn petals and iridescent fragments of insect wings that glinted in the furtive light. Other wings sprouted from her shoulder blades, bird’s wings with many-shaded feathers, ripped from their original owner and rooted in place with goblin magic. Too inadequate to carry her in flight, they merely fluttered uselessly behind her, as though trying to break free of their moorings. Her small broad head was set on a neck so supple that she could twist a hundred and eighty degrees in either direction. Her skin was smooth, nut brown, and almost completely hairless, save for a short growth like mouse fur on her scalp; her ears were mobile and pointed; her slanting eyes utterly black from edge to edge, lustrous as polished coals. Across her brow she wore a chain of berries and daisy heads, like a woodland crown; but the berries were
shriveled, last autumn’s crop, the daisies molting. Nonetheless she seemed pleased with her appearance, as a child is pleased with fancy dress, admiring herself at intervals in a mirror chip held in one hand, virtually oblivious of her audience.

“I have some questions for you, Mabb,” said Moonspittle.

She noticed him then; her chin lifted with exaggerated hauteur. “I am the goblin queen. You will address me correctly, or not at all.” Her voice was half child, half woman, playing on every note from the shrillness of petulance to a husky effect intended for seduction. “Why have you summoned me? I am no antiquated spirit, to be at the beck and call of wizards. I have my own dominion. You have no right—”

“Right or wrong, you are here, the circle holds you, you may not depart until I give you leave,” snapped Moonspittle, adding, belatedly: “Your Majesty.”

“Highness,” said the queen. “I am a Highness now. I have decided. What do you want?”

“Information,” said Elivayzar, nudged on by his alter ego, “on one of your subjects.”

“My subjects are legion, scattered throughout the north,” said Mabb, preening herself in the glass. “How should I know one individual among so many?”