by Jan Siegel
She can see his face now, a concentration of angles focused into a hard, narrow beauty, intent, obsessive, devious; multiple expressions with but a single thought. His mouth is a compressed shadow; his bent gaze is hidden under the curve of lowered eyelids. He resembles a piece of cubist sculpture, the geometric lines of brow and cheekbone, nose and jaw catching the light like polished basalt. She sees his lips part; the background noise recedes and she hears, as if from very close by, the faint sibilance of escaping breath. His hands linger on one of the eggs, sensing by some specialized intuition its differentness from the others. He wraps it in a thick cloth that he has evidently brought for that purpose and places it in a leather pouch hanging from his belt. For a moment his gaze lifts, and she glimpses his savage exultation, and the eyes that burn with a cold blue flame, like crystals in a spellfire. Then he detaches a legbone from the skeleton, leaving the vestigial body to disintegrate in his wake, and with this makeshift weapon he smashes the remaining eggs. His ferocity is terrible to watch: he crushes the shells into fragments, beats each fetus to a bloody pulp. He shows no pity, no hesitation. When the massacre is over there may be a liquid brilliance in his eye, but the tear—if tear it is—is blinked away unshed. He is not a man for tears.
Observing him, the girl is both mesmerized and repelled. His magnetism is real and potent, reaching her from beyond the magic, yet she feels him to be not merely single-minded but controlled by a single passion, amoral, driven, ruthless in the pursuit of his goal. He is a spirit of fire, tempered in the inferno, one of dragonkind made the more monstrous, not less, by his human guise, his mortal cunning. “He was clever,” remarks Morgus, as if assimilating her thought. “Clever, beautiful, treacherous. A black ape with a twisted soul and the face of a hero. Do not trust him. He could fool even the spell-fire, at need.”
“Do you know his name?” she asks.
“Ruvindra Laiï. The family was supposed to be an offshoot of one of the great Houses, the descendants of exiles who fled Atlantis during the Fall. They were the dragon charmers: that was their Gift. Monarchs propitiated them, wizards consulted them. Ruvindra was the greatest of his line, but when he knew the dragons were doomed to extinction he sold himself to the Oldest Spirit, or so it is said, that he might have long life and the opportunity to tame the last dragon on earth. With the Old One’s help he stole the egg and placed it somewhere for safekeeping. It did not hatch for many centuries and Ruvindra Laiï slept, waiting, like the princess in the story, for the spell to be broken.”
“Did he get a kiss?” the girl asks, but Morgus does not answer.
“In the world of Time,” she says, “the egg hatched. It might be recently. The charmer charmed, the dragon grew. But the Oldest One took it for his creature—his pet—and Ruvindra was slain: thus the reward for his perfidy.”
“Whom did he betray?”
“Himself. Who knows? Maybe we shall see him here, in next season’s crop of heads. Then you may kiss him, if you will.”
In the smoke he has emerged from the cave, the grave robber, nest raider, slayer of the unborn. Ruvindra Laiï. He stands on the mountainside, calling in Atlantean. A sudden wind arrives, blowing his long black hair. A vulture comes flying from the deeps of the sky, a night-plumed raptor with a twenty-foot wingspan and a purple nevus on its naked head. It lands in front of him, turning immediately into a small, crooked manikin with the same birthmark disfiguring face and scalp. Words pass between them. Then the shape-shifter resumes his bird form and the thief mounts, bearing his stolen treasure. The vulture gives a harsh croaking scream before rising into the air, cruising the thermals until it is far above the ground, then heading away over the mountains, dwindling rapidly into the blue distance.
The picture changes. Very briefly they make out an old man moving through a vaulted chamber. Perhaps a wine cellar, though they cannot see any wine. His face is invisible in the darkness but the girl knows he is old because she can smell it: the musty, slightly sour smell of an aging body. His flashlight beam roves around, picking out the uneven flags of the floor, the patches of damp on the walls. He locates a cylindrical construction identifiable as a wellhead; it appears far more ancient than the room around it. It is covered with a heavy stone lid. He sets down the flashlight so the beam is pointing his way, though it offers no real illumination. Then he heaves the lid a little to one side, and a red glow spills through the gap, like the glow in the heart of the volcano, and there is a hissing, bubbling noise. For an instant they see him clearly, dyed in the scarlet light, and his face is the face of a corpse. Then the smoke obliterates him, and the images are gone.
The spellfire sinks; Morgus’s voice emerges from the gloom. “The dragon is in the egg,” she says, “and the Stone paring—the splinter that was an heirloom of the exiles—is in the dragon. In Time, it will grow beyond all other beasts. No prison will contain it. Even he will be unable to command its obedience. Only a charmer can speak to a dragon.”
But the girl is thinking of the old man, caught briefly in the ruddy glare: the angle of the head, gazing downward; the long-boned skull tapering from hollow temples to angular jaw; the predatory hook of the nose. And the ashen hue of the skin, unwarmed by the fire glow, surely not the result of age but some other factor, perhaps even the diluted effect of a throwback gene …
“Of what race was the dragon charmer” she enquires, “to make his skin so black?”
“It was not his race but his fate,” replies Morgus. “They say one of his forefathers was burnt by the first of the dragons—burnt but not killed—and the blackened hide of his kindred was fireproof ever after.”
“And was it?”
“Maybe,” says Morgus.
“Maybe not,” counters Sysselore, with a laugh coarsened to a cackle in the vacuum of Time. She passes a thin hand above the spellfire, and the flames shrink from her, until they are almost gone.
Where Morgus is vast and bloated, Sysselore is skeletal. She resembles a mantis, an elongated, insectile creature whose tiny head and attenuated neck appear to have been extruded from her shoulders by a process of enforced growth. The contours of her face recede from the point of her nose toward the furtive chin and pale bulbous eyes. Her hair has thinned to a skein of woolly threads, clinging like a cobweb to anything it touches. Yet at times she retains the vanities of youth and beauty, reddening her lips with cochineal or wearing the rags of diaphanous dresses that reveal her torso: the breasts shriveled into flatness, sunken like empty pouches between ribs and sternum. She often wears two or three garments at once, crisscrossing them with cords and sashes in a far-off caricature of some classical style, braiding the long wisps of her hair and twisting them into haphazard coils on the crown of her head, as if she were a Pre-Raphaelite enchantress. She should be a figure of pathos, inviting pity; but the insect face is too devoid of humanity to inspire compunction and a degenerate soul looks out of her eyes. She is only less dangerous than Morgus as the viper is less dangerous than the black mamba: the one is large, aggressive, disdaining camouflage, the other may hide in a drift of leaves, and strike at you unawares. And the two are ill at ease together for all their long companionship. Sysselore fawns and needles, flatters and jibes, while Morgus appears virtually indifferent, dominating her coven sister without effort whenever necessary. Yet there is an underlying dependence, the need not merely for a confederate in power but a lesser rival, a cheek-by-jowl comrade, someone to impress, to browbeat, to goad and torment. A witch queen cannot rule in a void: she must have subjects. For time outside Time Sysselore has been courtier and counselor, sidekick and slave.
“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 betray
ed 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 n
ot 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?”
