The Dragon Charmer (45 page)

The room felt suddenly very safe, a refuge rather than a prison cell. When they stepped out into the corridor its emptiness seemed somehow threatening, pregnant with the possibility of unseen watchers. Gaynor considered mentioning that
she was scared and then decided it was unnecessary. “Where’s this knife you found?” she asked.

“To hand,” said Will.

He led her to the top of the stairwell. There was plenty of light here, not wavering, sinister light from an era of gas lamps and candles, which Gaynor felt would be more appropriate, but the kind of light that had welcomed them on the afternoon of their arrival, with lavish wattage and a mellow tinge. Modern light in an old house, pushing the dark behind the window curtains, and sweeping it under the carpet. And there was a good deal of carpet, lapping at the walls, muffling the stairs, hiding the loose board that creaked treacherously at their descent. Will whisked Gaynor out of sight on the second-floor landing. They sensed rather than heard someone approaching below, the X-ray gaze upturned toward them, the listening of hypersensitive ears. “Harbeak?” Will held his breath. “Harbeak!” No answer. But the man below evidently did not feel the silence merited investigation. His departure was as noiseless as a cat, but they caught the sound of a closing door, sensed the withdrawal of his presence. Even so, Will waited for more than a minute before he would allow them to move.

They hurried down the last flight of stairs, headed for the front door. A clock began to strike, making them jump almost out of their skins. Midnight, thought Gaynor, glancing at the clock face. This was the hour when spells ran out, when rats left their holes, when graveyards disgorged their dead. The clock continued striking, loud and imperative as a summons. Any second, she expected someone to come running in response. She shivered with sudden cold.

Will was standing by the open door. “Hurry—”

And then they were outside.

Will shut the door as quietly as he could, closing off the light. They held hands, stumbling around the corner of the house, colliding with the parked car in a mess of shadows. Will found his key by feel, tugged at the handle. Moments later they were inside the car, looking out at the alien night, encased in a shell of metal, an illusion of security. There was no sound but the panting of the wind and clearer still, the
scratching of an ivy tendril on the rear windshield. “I wedged the gate,” said Will. “When we get there, you’ll have to jump out and pull it open. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“All right.”

“I won’t put the headlights on till we’re out of here.” He turned the key in the ignition. The car shuddered but the engine did not respond.

Gaynor thought: There’s no ivy nearby…

Will tried again.

“Switch on the light!” cried Gaynor. “I can’t see!”

“Of course you can’t. It’s dark.”

“No—I
really
can’t see. Something’s blocking the windows”

She flicked the switch for the interior light, and saw.

They were all around, piled on top of the hood, clinging to the bodywork, their mouths pressed hungrily against the glass. Like her dream the too-familiar nightmare—of hidden watchers now made visible, of mouths that clung like polyps, red holes full of tongues and teeth. “Morlochs!” cried Will, rattling the key in the ignition, but already they heard the sound of tearing metal as the hood was ripped away, glimpsed segments of internal tubing tossed into the air. Gaynor’s window broke first, and there were arms reaching in, prehensile hands, lizard claws. Will drew the knife and hacked at them, spattering blood over Gaynor, the dashboard, the seating, but there were too many, too many, and his window splintered, and the door was torn from its hinges, and he was rolling on the ground, stabbing at creatures he could hardly see. Gaynor had given only one short scream, and that frightened him most of all, because as long as he could hear her scream he knew she was alive.

“Enough!” It was the voice of Azmordis. Will had heard it just once, in a fantasy, in a trance, when he was a boy, but he knew it immediately. It was a voice of adamant, dark as dark matter, and as empty as space. “It is not yet time to feed. Bring them back into the house.”

Will managed to slide the knife out of sight before both his arms were seized in a dozen different grips. He felt the blood soaking through his jeans, and hoped it wasn’t his. The sound
of sobbing nearby must be Gaynor. He could not see Dr. Laye save as a deeper blackness against the night, but he appeared taller than any ordinary man and the aura of his occupant was as tangible as a smell.

Behind, they heard the clamor of destruction as the morlochs invaded the car, unraveling the wiring, rending both plastic and steel. My car, thought Will, and he felt as if they were wrecking one of his paintings, something intrinsic to himself, but there was no time for anger, no time for trauma. Their last chance was gone and he must think to save his life, because that was all he had left…

Harbeak was waiting for them in the entrance hall. The morlochs fell back from the light, becoming a part of their surroundings: an ornament with eyes, a pattern that moved. “Don’t try to run,” said Dr. Laye, his voice his own once more. “They’re still there.” And, to Harbeak, in a snarl: “How did this boy get out of the cellar?”

“He cut his way around the lock. It can’t have been done with a standard knife: he must have used a machine.”

“And where is this machine?”

“I don’t—”

Jerrold Laye rounded on Will, and he saw for the first time the gray face and the eyes that seemed to bleed around the rim. “How did you do it?”

“The Gift is hereditary,” said Will. “What makes you so sure it is only my sister who has it?”

“The Gift cannot cut through a solid door.”

“Have it your own way.” In one of his pockets he had a small penknife that he used occasionally for the application of oil paint. He took it out and tossed it on the carpet. It was an idiotic gamble, a preposterous bluff; but he did not want them to search him, and find the dagger. “You try hacking through a door with that,” he said with what he hoped would pass for scorn.

“Take it,” ordered Dr. Laye.

Harbeak picked it up and undipped the blade. It was short, and blunt, and red with paint, not blood. “This wouldn’t cut through paper!”

“Yet he got out… The Gift takes many forms. There are those who could make a sword out of such a knife, and pierce
a man’s heart with it. He has no aura of magic, but power can be hidden: I gather his sister has always hidden hers. Perhaps it would be prudent to kill him now…”

“Fern will never bargain with her brother’s murderer,” Will said.

Laye studied him for a long minute with baleful eyes. “Lock them both up! And try not to lose the key. As for you, boy, remember: the morlochs will be watching you every moment. They will be in the room with you, under the bed, behind the pictures, on the wrong side of the mirror. One stupid move, and they will be on you and then there will be nothing left for even a witch to find.”

“She will find
you”
said Will, “wherever you run to.” But his defiance was meaningless, and they both knew it. He was counting his survival by the minute; every breath, every heartbeat was a minor achievement.

Harbeak led them back to the upstairs room where Gaynor had been imprisoned before. Behind them, the walls rippled, the carpet crawled. The morlochs were following.

   There was no sound of any approach. Only the soft click as the handle turned, and the noiseless opening of the door.

Somewhere at the back of her mind Fern registered the warm electric light, the densely carpeted floor and picture-hung walls, but without surprise or interest. All her attention was focused elsewhere. She said: “I’ve come to see Dr. Laye.”

And: “I think he’s expecting me.”

It was Harbeak who betrayed surprise, a gleam of derision brightening the shadow band over his eyes. Perhaps, having been permitted a glimpse of his master’s schemes, he had been expecting a cliché of a witch, endowed with height and arrogance and a wild mane of hair. Not this waiflike creature, hardly more than a girl, with her straight bob and serious features in a small pale face. The contempt showed in his voice. “I’ll ask if he’ll see you.”

“He’ll see me,” she said, and stepped uninvited inside. Here the rules had already been broken, and she could trespass. Harbeak drew back from her, feeling a sudden cold: the cold of the Underworld where she had walked, of the River of
Death where she had dipped her hand. The chill of indrawn power, the ice in icy control.

“Take me to him.” Her eyes, too, were cold, green in the mellow light.

He gave a quick jerk of the head by way of assent, his customary façade of the perfect butler discarded or forgotten. Like Will and Gaynor before her, she followed him along the corridor and into the drawing room.

Dr. Laye was waiting for her. Dr. Laye, not Azmordis. She had seen the Oldest of Spirits before, across a restaurant table behind the face of Javier Holt, and in the dead blind gaze of Ixavo, ten thousand years ago in the ruin of Atlantis. But she knew more of him now: she had gazed into the spellfire and seen him worshiped, both as god and demon; she had glimpsed the void of his unsoul, and the horror of that void,
his
horror, and all the bitterness and cruelty and evil that it engendered. Hell is not other people, she thought. Hell is always and only yourself. And Azmodel was his vision of that Hell, a place of beauty and dread, where all color was poison, and every flower was deformed, and nothing grew save by enchantment; nothing was real, nothing died, nothing lived. His Eden, his nightmare concept of Paradise, not an embellishment of truth but a distortion, an illusion whose roots went deep in Time. He had grown for her, grown in stature and in terror, but her resolution, too, had grown. She looked into the gray countenance of Jerrold Laye and saw a pinpoint glimmer of a mind huge beyond imagining, an endless depth of evil, an unrelenting dark. It occurred to her that somewhere within himself Laye ‘s own mind and soul must be warped into madness from the sheer pressure of such an invader—even more than from contact with the dragon—and the man who spoke to her was a being from whom all normal human reactions had long been eradicated.

He said: “Welcome,” and smiled, a thin gray smile, red on the inside. “We have waited many years for you. It is good to see you come as a supplicant at last.”

Fern made no comment. Her right hand rested lightly on her bag but her thoughts steered away from it, lest he, or his cohabitant, should be able to read them.

“Take a seat.” He indicated a chair, and she sat down. “May I offer you a drink?”

“No.”

“I see. No doubt you would not touch my food either. How very
careful
of you, my dear. However, I trust you will overcome these prejudices in the immediate future. Once we have come to an agreement.”

“Where are my brother and my friend?”

“We will come to that in time. Try to cultivate patience. Firstly, we have important matters to discuss”

“Where are they?”
She was on her feet again, but he loomed over her, and the mellow light could not warm his ashen face. “Are they all right?”

“They are alive. For the moment, that will have to content you. Sit down.”

“Azmordis!” She gazed up into his eyes, saw the slow pale glimmer that suffused the blue, the gradual apparition of his other, his hidden partner, his master.

He repeated: “We have important matters to discuss,” but his voice had changed. A lean gray hand thrust her back into the chair with more-than-human strength. “You have come a long way since we last met. The power has grown in you: I can feel it. Your body is weary but the Gift is all you need it is the river in your veins, the engine of your spirit. Your so-called friends doubted you, did you know that? They thought you were lost forever. But I knew you would find a way back. I know you better than kith or kin certainly better than Caracandal Brokenwand, who would be your mentor. You have learned a great deal, I think, but not from him.”

“I learned from Morgus,” she said.

“So the old hag lingers still! It was she then who stole your spirit, that night in the snow … and now you are her pupil, her messenger perhaps. Running errands for a mad crone whose ambitions stretch no farther than the coastline of this petty isle. A waste of your talents, a misuse of your power. My vassalage would serve you otherwise.”

Fern said: “I am no one’s vassal.” She looked away from the baleful stare that sought to hold and mesmerize her, fixing her gaze stonily on chair, lamp, wall. “I came here to find
Will and Gaynor. I know you have them. I saw the wrecked car. I smelled the blood. Are they hurt?”

“You shall see them.” He went to the door, called for Harbeak. “Bring our guests.”

There was a wait that seemed interminable, though in reality it was only a minute or two, and then Harbeak, still in derisive parody of the perfect butler, ushered them in. Their clothes were torn, their exposed limbs marked with scratches and dried blood. Gaynor looked both desperate and wretched, Will warily alert. But their hands were not tied and they appeared to have suffered no serious injury. Fern fought the upsurge of relief and anger, hope and fear, keeping her expression still if not calm, showing nothing. She knew Azmordis would leave no obvious loopholes.

“Release them,” she said. “They have no part in this. Your business is with me.”

“You gave them their part,” he responded. She thought he was gloating; she felt he was implacable. “It is for you to release them.”

“How?”

She had spoken too quickly: her eagerness betrayed her.

He smiled, sure of victory.

“Ally yourself with me. Morgus, no doubt, has taught you much—and demanded a high price. Only through me can you be free of her, for all your proud words. You need my power, as I need yours. The Brokenwand cannot aid you. He has nothing to oifer but a cheap philosophy and the ethics of a hypocrite. His hands are empty. Without me, you are lost. Bind yourself to me: you have no choice. Once before we talked of these things, when you were too young to understand; you are wiser now. Give me your Gift, and I will restore it to you a hundredfold, I will set you among the great, the rare, the few. You will be more than Merlin or Nimuë, more than Zohrâne, the queen of Atlantis—”