The Dragon Charmer (6 page)

   The owl woke Gaynor, calling in its half-human voice right outside her window. She had started up and pulled back the curtains before she really knew what she was doing and there it was, its ghost face very close to her own, apparently magnified by the glass so that its enormous eyes filled her vision. Its talons scrabbled on the sill; its wings were beating
against the panes. Then somehow the window was open and she was straddling the sill, presumably still in her pajamas, and then she was astride the owl, her hands buried in its neck ruff, and it was huge, huger than a great eagle, and silent as the phantom it resembled. They were flying over the moors, and she glimpsed the loop of a road below, and the twin shafts of headlights, and the roofs of houses folded as if in sleep, and a single window gleaming like a watchful eye. But most of the landscape was dark, lit only by the moon that kept pace with their flight, speeding between the clouds. Above the gray drift of cirrus the sky was a black vault; the few stars looked remote and cold. They crossed a cliff and she saw the sea wheeling beneath her, flecked with moon glitter, and then all detail was lost in the boom of wings and the roar of the wind, and Time rolled over her like waves, maybe months, maybe years, and she did not know if she woke or slept, if she lived or dreamed. At one point another face rushed toward her, a pale expanse of a face with a wide hungry mouth and eyes black as the Pit. There was a hint of smoke in the air and a smell of something rotting. “This is not the one,” said a voice.
“Not the one
…” The unpleasant smell was gone and she felt the plumage of the owl once more, and the wind and the cloud wisps and the dying moon flowed over her, and sleep came after, closing the window against the night.

She woke fully just before moonset, when its last ray stole across the bed and slipped under her eyelids. She got up to shut the curtains, and was back between the sheets when it occurred to her she had done so already before she went to bed.

   Fern, too, was dreaming. Not the dreams she longed for and dreaded—fragments of the past, intimations of an alternative future dreams from which she would wrench herself back to a painful awakening. This dream appeared random, unconnected with her. Curious, she dreamed on. She was gazing down on a village, a village of long ago, with thatched roofs and dung heaps. There were chickens bobbing in farmyard and backyard, goats wandering the single street. People in peasant clothing were going about their business. A quickfire sunset sent the shadows stretching across the valley until it
was all shadow. One red star shone low over the horizon. It seemed to be pulsing, expanding—now it was a fireball rushing toward them—a comet whose tail scorched the tree-tops into a blaze. Then, as it drew nearer, she
saw
. Bony pinions that cut up the sky, pitted scales aglow from the furnace within, blood-dark eyes where ancient thoughts writhed like slow vapor. A dragon.

Not the dragon of fantasy and storyland, a creature with whom you might bandy words or hitch a ride. This was a real dragon, and it was terrible It stank like a volcanic swamp. Its breath was a pyroclastic cloud. She could sense its personality, enormous, overwhelming, a force all hunger and rage. Children, goats, people ran, but not fast enough; against the onset of the dragon they might almost have been running backward. Houses exploded from the heat. Flesh shriveled like paper. Fern jerked into waking to find she was soaked in sweat and trembling with a mixture of excitement and horror. Special effects, she told herself: nothing more. She took a drink of water from the glass by her bed and lay down again. Her thoughts meandered into a familiar litany. There are no dragons, no demons … no countries in wardrobes, no kingdoms behind the North Wind. And Atlantis, first and fairest of cities, Atlantis where such things might have been, was buried under the passing millennia, drowned in a billion tides, leaving not a fossilized footprint or a solitary shard of pottery to baffle the archaeologists.

But she would not think of Atlantis…

Drifting into sleep again she dreamed of wedding presents, and a white dress that walked up the aisle all by itself.

   The images wax and wane like dreams, crystallizing into glimpses of solidity, then merging, melting, lost in a drift of vapor. Sometimes it seems as if it is the cave that drifts, its hollows and shadows vacillating in the penumbra of existence, while at its heart the smoke visions focus all the available reality, like a bright eye on the world. We, too, are as shadows, Sysselore and I, watching the light, hungering for it. But I have more substance than any shadow—I wrap myself in darkness as in a cocoon, preserving my strength while my
power slumbers. This bloated body is a larval stage in which my future Self is nourished and grows, ready to hatch when the hour is ripe—a new Morgus, radiant with youth revived, potent with ancientry. It is a nature spell, old as evolution: I learned it from a maggot. You can learn much from those who batten on decay. It is their kind who will inherit the earth.

Pictures deceive. The smoke screen opens like a crack in the wall of Being, and through it you may see immeasurable horizons and unnavigable seas, you may breathe the perfume of forgotten gardens, taste the rains on their passage to the thirsty plain—but the true power is here in the dark. With me. I
am
the dark, I am the heartbeat of the night. The spellfire may show you things far away, but I am
here
, and for now, Here is all there is.

The dark is always waiting. Behind the light, beyond reality, behind the visions in the smoke. Look now, look at the egg. It glows with cold, its white shell sheened like clouded ice, the velvet that wraps it crackling with frost. It is secreted in a casket of ebony bound with iron, but the metal is chilled into brittleness, the lock snaps even as the lid is shut, tampering fingers are frozen into a blue numbness. It has lain there for many centuries, a sacred charge on its caretakers, or so they believe, having no knowledge of what it is they cherish, or for Whom. The image returns often, its mystery still unrevealed. Maybe it is a symbol: the deepest, truest magic frequently manifests itself through symbols. Maybe it is just what it appears to be. An egg. If so, then we at least can guess what lies curled within, unhatching, sleeping the bottomless sleep of a seed in midwinter. The men who watch over it have gentle hands and slender, otherworldly features. They do not suspect the germ of darkness that incubates within the egg.

The picture shifts, pulling back, showing us for the first time that the casket stands on an altar of stone, and the altar is in a circular chamber, and the chamber … the chamber is at the top of a lonely tower, jutting like a tooth into the blue mountain air. A few pieces of the pattern fall into place. Others drift, disembodied, like jigsaw fragments from the wrong puzzle.

“Why
there?”
asks Sysselore, forever scathing. “A monastery, I suppose, remote, almost inaccessible—but
almost
is never enough. Why not hide it outside the world?”

“Magic finds out magic. Who would look for such an object in the hands of Men? It has been safe in ignorant hands, hidden in plain view, one of a thousand holy relics guarded by monks in a thousand mountain retreats. They will have cradled it in their own legends, endowed it with a dozen meanings. No one has ever sought it there.”

Somewhere in the tower a bell is struck, drowning out the rumor of the wind in the chimes and the rise and fall of the chant. The swelling of its single note fills the cave; the walls seem to shake; flakes of earth drop from above. The tower trembles in its sky gulf. Or perhaps it is the smoke that trembles, unbalancing the picture. We see the egg again, but it is no longer cold. Heat pulses from within, turning the thick shell to translucency. Bent over it is a dark face among the golden ones, dark as the wood of the casket, a face subtle as poison, sharp as a blade. The gaze is lowered: it does not seek concealed watchers now. Its whole attention is focused on the egg. The throb of the bell is a long time dying. And then comes another sound, a tiny crack, echoless, all but inaudible, yet the aftershock of that minute noise makes the very floor vibrate. The shell fractures, seamed by countless thread lines that glow with a red light as if from a fire in its heart. The ruby glow touches the dark face leaning closer, ever closer, fascinated, eager…

The egg hatches.

   “What now?” whispers Sysselore, and the quiet in her voice is almost that of awe. “Where will it go? They cannot call it holy now, and… it won’t stay hidden. Not long.”

“We shall see.”

   “What’s happening?” Will asked the darkness. “Even allowing for circumstances, I’ve never known Fern so on edge.”

“I dinna ken,” said the darkness, predictably. “But there’s Trouble coming. I can smell him.”

* * *

The smoke thins, swirls, re-forms, showing us great events and small. The moor unrolls like a carpet beneath a sky tumbling with clouds. The valley opens, the hillside plunges, the wind rushes in from the sea. And there is the house, lifting blind windows to the rain. Behind closed curtains there is firelight and lamplight, the murmur of conversation, the smell of roasting meat uncoiling from the oven. The sunless evening blurs gradually into night. When dinner is long over, feet climb the stairs to bed. A glass tumbler stands alone on a sideboard in the kitchen, containing a small measure of golden liquid. Not discarded or forgotten but placed there deliberately. A gesture. Presently the house-goblin materializes, sitting on the end of the table. He samples the leftover roast and drains the tumbler, declaiming an incomprehensible toast, probably to the red-bearded laird who swatted his foes with a tree trunk. Then he roams through the house, patrolling his domain.

In a bedroom on the second floor a girl is seated in front of an antique dressing table, studying herself in the mirror. There is no vanity in her contemplation: her expression is grave and unusually detached. She stares at her reflection, you feel, simply because it is there. Yet she might be termed beautiful, if mere youth is beauty, clarity of skin and eye, elfin slenderness of body. I was beautiful once, I and Morgun, my twin, but beauty alters with time, as all else, and in a different age Helen wears a different face. So maybe she is beautiful, this pale, dispassionate girl, with her gravity and her small breasts. Fashion is a poor judge of such things. The adjacent lamp puts a gloss on her short hair that it may not merit and shades the molding of invisible bones. But as we look closer I see
something
in her face, or in its reflection, something beneath the unblemished exterior. Imperceptible. Almost familiar. A secret too well hidden, a scar too perfectly healed. It shows in a certain fragility, a certain strength, a trace element of pain. But the image begins to withdraw from her, and the flicker of not-quite-recognition is gone.

The goblin, too, is watching her, just inside the door, his crouched body only a shadow in the corner to the discerning eye. Even the mirror cannot see him. She is still staring at her reflection but now the direction of her gaze switches to a
point beyond her shoulder. Her eyes widen; shock or fury expels the hint of color from her cheek. To us, the glass is empty, but
she
sees the intruder.
She sees him in the mirror
. “Get out!” She rounds on him, screaming like a virago. “Toad! Contemptible little sneak! Creeping in here, spying on me—how dare you! How
dare
you! Get out, do you hear? If I see even your
shadow
again, I’ll I’ll squeeze you to pulp I’ll blast you into Limbo—I’ll blow your atoms to the four winds! Don’t you ever—
ever!
—come near me again!” The unleashing of power is sudden and terrifying: her hair crackles with it, the air thickens around her outstretched fingers. The goblin vanishes in a flash of startled horror. She is on her feet now but her rage ebbs as rapidly as it came, and she casts herself facedown on the bed, clutching the pillow, sobbing briefly and violently. When the storm is over she lifts her head; she is red eyed and tearless, as if tears were a rain that would not come. Her expression reverts to a wary stillness: her gaze roves round the room. “It’s gone,” she murmurs, “I know it’s gone, but… there’s someone… somewhere… watching me.”

“She feels us,” says Sysselore. “The
power
. Did you see the power in her…?”

“Hush.”

The picture revolves cautiously as I lean forward, close to the smoke; the fire draft burns my face. I am peering out of the mirror, into the room, absorbing every detail, filling my mind with the girl. This girl. The one I have waited for.

Slowly she turns, drawn back to the mirror, staring beyond the reflections. Our eyes meet. For the second time, the watcher becomes the watched. But this is no threat, only reconnaissance. A greeting. In the mirror, she sees me smile.

She snatches something—a hairbrush?—and hurls it at the glass, which shatters. The smoke turns all to silver splinters, spinning, falling, fading. In the gloom after the fire dies, Sysselore and I nurse our exultation.

She is the one. At last.

I will have her.

IV