The Dragon Charmer (25 page)

“But now we have you,” says Morgus, drawing the girl to
her, and her fat soft hand cups the small face, travels down shoulder and arm, exploring her breast. It feels like the touch of some flabby undersea creature. “So small, so pretty … so
young”
There is a dreadful greed in the way she says “young.” “I’ve waited such a long, long while … It should have been my sister Morgun, my twin sister, my soul mate, but she betrayed me. She forfeited the chance of enduring power for the failure of the moment. She was in love with pleasure, with her own body, with a man she could not have. Her head rotted here long ago. There have been others since, but none who could take her place. They were weaklings, afraid of the Gift and all it endowed, or obsessives, chasing after petty revenges, petty desires. There was one you may have known, Alimond—the otherworldly Alimond—but she was haunted by imaginary ghosts. I let her go, and demons of her own creating drove her to her doom. But you… I can feel the power in you, like the first green tendrils of some hungry plant. I shall feed it and coax it, and it will grow and bind you to me, and we shall be three at last, the magic number, the coven number. You will be Morgun, my sister, and the name you had before will be as a dream dreamed out, remote as a fantasy.”

“No,” says the girl, not in defiance but uncertainty, reaching back into the blur of memory for the name they never call her, the identity she left behind. “I am not Morgun. I am Fernanda. Fernanda.”

“You are my sister!” orders Morgus, and her mouth writhes around the words. “I shall join you to my kindred, mix you in my blood. Hold her!” Her soft hand tightens, clasping the girl by the forearm; Sysselore seizes her from behind. Her bony grip has a hideous strength. Fern struggles, but it is no use, and now she is still, watching the knife. Morgus releases the slight wrist and pricks her own, pressing deep into the flesh before she draws blood. Then she grips Fern’s arm again, though she tries to pull it away. The knife slices across her skin, splitting it open. She experiences no pain, only horror. A ritual is about to be consummated that she senses will contaminate her forever: neither her blood nor her soul will be her own again. She cannot resist, cannot move. Even her mind is numb.

But the cut does not bleed. The wound closes by itself: the flesh around it is white and pinched. Not a drop escapes. “She is protected!” says Sysselore, and Morgus releases her with a curse, sucking thirstily at her own injury. When Sysselore lets her go Fern knows she must not run, must not shrink.

“They cannot protect you always,” says Morgus. “You are mine now. My way to reclaim the world.”

And then Fern knows what to say. “That world exists in Time. It moves through eternity like a fish through the ocean. Onward, not back. Fernanda is the future; Morgun is the past. Which way do you wish to go?”

Morgus makes no answer, but behind the glutinous mass of her face Fern can see the thought penetrating, traveling through the many recesses of her brain.

Morgus does not try to cut her again.

   The dark hours come, the phase of dreams and shadows. They eat, though Fern feels no hunger; sleep, though she is not tired. Morgus’s slumbering form is a massive tumulus, quivering with soft, subterranean snores. Sysselore lies under her blanket like a skeleton in a shroud. Sometimes the two of them wake and prowl around, poking the spellfire, muttering to themselves in a thin stream of sound that seems to incorporate many whispers, many tongues. Outside the context of time, Fern finds it difficult to be sure if she herself actually sleeps or how much. Only the dreams divide awareness from oblivion.

She dreams she is
inside
Time. The sensation of movement, growth, vitality fills her with a sudden dizziness, like strong wine on an empty stomach. She can hear clocks ticking, bells calling, the urgent revving of an engine. She is pulled and pushed, tugged and hugged, hurried, harried. The faces around her are anxious, happy, eager—all familiar, familiar and dear, but they come and go too quickly for recognition, and she snatches in vain at name and memory. “Don’t be late,” they say. “Go—go now—you’ll be late—don’t be late.” She is in what she knows to be a car, a metal cell, leather padded, hurtling forward. And then there is a church, a gray hunched building, towered and gabled, with tombstones crowding at the gate, and the insistent summons of the bells. The
faces attach themselves to bodies and go teeming through the doors, and she is left alone; but Time will not let her be. The church clock strikes, and she must go in.

She is walking up the aisle toward an altar decked with flowers. The sun pours in through a multicolored window, touching everything with dapples of rainbow light. Petals are falling on her, scattered by a stone angel somewhere up above. Her long dress sweeps the floor; the veil is blown back from her eyes. And there he is, waiting. He turns toward her, holds out his hand. Alone among all the faces, he is a stranger. “No!” she cries. “No! He’s not the one.
He’s not the one
—” A wind seizes the church and everyone in it, sweeping them like leaves into a heap, whirling them away. There are only the petals falling still, cold and white as snow. She is running through the snow in her long dress, and the skirts billow, lifting her up, and icy hands reach for her, but she slips away, floating skyward, and the bellying skirts have become beating wings, and she is riding the owl, on and on into the dark.

She wakes, remembering a name: not one of her friends but the stranger, the man who awaited her at the end of the aisle. Javier. Javier Holt.

   In the waking hours, Fern’s education progresses. Morgus is determined to shape her mind, to forge her Gift, to fashion her in her image—as if she has no mind, no will, no image of her own. The witch’s knowledge pours into her, flooding every level of her thought, so that sometimes the boundary between experience and learning becomes confused, and Fern fears to lose touch with her Self. But I am Fernanda, she resolves, in the dimness of the cave, in the quiet of her soul. I am Fernanda, not Morgun, and so I will remain. Morgus talks of the Gifted through the ages, both the great and the less: the petty alchemists and street witches whose type still exists, gabbling the future from a pack of cards, chanting spells long impotent in languages long dead, poring over antique grimoires where a grain of truth may hide amid a welter of occult window dressing. Atlantean, she says, is the only language of power, the language that evolved within the aura of the Lodestone, where each word can be a transmitter, controlling and
concentrating the Gift of the speaker. She does not know that Fern has visited the past, spoken Atlantean as she might speak in any foreign tongue, before the Stone was broken and the land devoured and the ancient power passed into words and lingered in genes, lest it disseminate forever. She repeats her lessons glibly, and Morgus believes she learns fast. Fern is merely a child to her, a student or disciple: she cannot credit her pupil with a talent for deceit.

“The legacy of the Stone is wayward but enduring,” she says. “It is passed from parent to child like eye color or an unusual shade of hair, missing one generation or many, yet recurring constantly. By now, there may be a little of it in most men. The Atlanteans conquered much of the world and spread their seed widely before Zohrâne, the last queen, issued an edict forbidding union with foreigners. Too late! They say my family can trace our ancestry back to a relative of hers, yes, even to the Thirteenth House, the House of Goulabey. We are Gifted indeed. There are many who have an atom or two of power, but few, very few, who can remold their environment, and bind lesser spirits to their will, and outface even the ancient gods. Such are we three, the chosen ones. The immortals have other powers, which the boldest of us may learn to use—if we have the wit and stomach for it—but the Gift is ours alone. Untutored, it may flare in the extremes of emotion, in anger or desperation, blazing out of control: only the words of Atlantis can direct it, shaping it with spells, giving it meaning and purpose. Remember that! It raised us higher than the little gods: it will take us there again. We are the rulers of Earth, the shapers of doom. Think of Pharouq and his daughter, of Merlin and Manannan, Ariadne—Arianrhod—Medea.” She thrusts her hand into the springlet and holds it out to Fern with a little water cupped in her palm. The faces slide over the mirror of the meniscus. Dark Merlin, silver-pale Arianrhod, sloe-eyed, sly-eyed Medea … “Their power was legend, they might have been all but immortal in their turn—yet they failed in the end. They fell into folly, and their spirits withered, or passed the Gate into eternity.” She lets the water run away; her palm is empty. When she speaks again, her voice is soft
and certain. “
We
shall not fail. I have waited as long as need. I will leave my mark upon the world of Time forever.”

“What of the Stone splinters?” Fern asks at last, feigning innocence. “Is there power in them still? Or are they truly no more than wishing pebbles—toys for children to play with?”

“Who knows? There was power in the key, perhaps—the kernel of the Lodestone—but it is lost.” She does not know that Fern held the key twice, that she touched the Stone in Atlantis long ago. “Something persists, no doubt—a few sparks of magic—but only a few. Had the exiles possessed the powers of yore they would have wielded them and conquered the world anew. Each of the twelve families took a splinter, but only three escaped the Fall; nonetheless, it should have been enough, if the magic was there. Instead the families dwindled into wanderers, rarely outliving their mortal span, passing on the scant relics of their history to their descendants. Now those treasures are mere curiosities with fragments of legend attached. Even their owners have forgotten what they truly mean.”

Fern is not convinced, but she keeps her doubts to herself. Maybe the exiles feared to use what remained of the Stone, remembering Atlantis in all its splendor and cruelty, a race of people warped with power, inbred by law, spawning mutants and madmen. But Morgus would not understand such restraint. Any fear she may feel is there to be hidden, overmastered, ignored, a tiny spur pricking her headlong into a ruthless course of action. She would not comprehend that fear can be a manifestation of intelligence. She has lived too long outside Time. But Fern remembers a war that was never fought, a war of weapons unused, horrors undefined: numberless casualties, corrupted earth, unbreathable air. There are times when it is wise to be afraid.

“What of the dragon?” Fern asks her. “Could
we
control it?”

“Only a dragon charmer can charm a dragon,” repeats Morgus.

“Find one,” mocks Sysselore.

   She sees him in the spellfire, the man with the gray face. He looks younger here, but she knows him at once, by his
ashen complexion, by the high prow of his nose. He is sitting in a room of books—a room not merely lined but apparently constructed of books. Chinks of bare wall show here and there, but the books are the building blocks: fat books, thin books, ancient calf-bound volumes, gaudy modern hardbacks, their spines crushed together so they can hardly draw breath, jostling and leaning, vertical and horizontal, like bricks stacked at random by a drunken bricklayer. And in the midst of the books the man sits on an upright wooden chair upholstered in studded leather, the light from a desk lamp falling sidelong on his face. The shadow of his own profile stretches across his left cheek, the nose elongated, the thin, pointed lips outthrust in speech, casting a mobile darkness in the hollow above the jaw. As his head moves the beam blinks briefly into his eyes, showing them pale, pale and cold, filled with a desire that is part avarice and part desperation. He might be a caricature of the dragon charmer, aged and flawed, the black purity of his skin dulled, the fine temper of his spirit blunted. Ruvindra Laiï was fearless, reckless, remorseless, a predator without morality or pity, but in this man those strengths appear shriveled, reduced to the littleness of mere evil.

He is talking to a chairback on the other side of the desk. The chair may or may not have an occupant: the spell-watcher cannot see. The back is unusually high, spreading out into a wide oval, the arms curving around to encircle the sitter. There might be a shadowy elbow resting there; it is difficult to be sure. Lower down, the vision blurs into smoke. Sound arrives slowly: the thin mouth tenses into stillness, and she hears the voice of the chairback—a voice from the abyss, deep and cold and familiar. She has heard that voice grating from a throat of stone, dripping like honey from stolen vocal cords; she has heard it harsh with power, cracked with death. But the essence is always the same. “You would not be an ambulant,” it is saying. “With an ambulant, the spirit is expelled from the body, to wait in Limbo until that body dies. You would remain in possession: I would lodge in your mind merely as a guest. A visitor. I would be yours to summon whenever you have need of power. Yours to summon, and to dismiss. I would be a djinn at your command.” She knows he lies. It is there in the softened tone, in the gentle slither of seductive
phrases. She knows it and his auditor knows it: loathing and longing vie for prominence in his gray face. She sees him push knowledge away, sliding toward a willing submission. “Together,” says Azmordis, “we can master the last of the dragons, and in so doing we will have mastery of the air, mastery of fire and magic. Forget the crude weapons of the modern age. With a dragon, we have a firebomb that thinks, the ultimate symbol of power. You have dreamed of it, I know you have. I have seen your dreams: the memories of your ancestors passed on in your sleeping thought. The skill is in your blood, too long irrelevant; you have it still, the Gift of the dragon charmers. But your body ages: you need vitality and strength. These things only I can give you. Invite me in!”

Invite me in
. The ancient laws forbid anyone to cross a threshold uninvited: the threshold of a house, the threshold of a mind. The door must be opened from within, the words of invitation uttered freely. Who made the laws no one knows: Morgus in all her teaching has not revealed it. Doubtless she is reluctant to admit that there are powers beyond her reach, rules that even she cannot break. The enforcers may be unknown and unseen but they never fail: the Ultimate Laws cannot be gainsaid. Even the weakest individual has this last protection against the invasion of the dark. Your soul is your own: it cannot be stolen from you. But it can be eroded, or sold, or given away.