The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  They pass between the twisted gates; ahead, the way lies through a complex warren of caves. The light is diminished here, as though shrinking from sights it has no wish to illuminate, and shadows cluster thickly on either side. The roof is obscured; the occasional stalactite extruding from the darkness like an accusing finger. As they approach one of them it writhes into serpentine life, rearing its head and hissing; but Kal ignores it and Fern follows his example, walking on by with only a sidelong glance. The whispers have started again, nudging at the outer limits of hearing. And gradually she begins to fancy she hears footsteps, hurrying, hurrying on their trail. She is seized with a desperate urge to turn, neither a reflex nor the prompting of her own will but a feeling that seems to come from outside, insinuating itself into her brain, pulling her like compulsion. She thrusts it away, using her Gift, forcing it to relinquish its grip on her thought. For a brief space the tongueless voices dwindle as if disheartened; but the footsteps do not relent. She says nothing to Kal, trying to convince herself they are an illusion that only she can hear.

  Now they are traversing one of the larger caverns. Mist devils chase after them, hovering beside their path, and there is a sound of sighing, a thin gray noise somewhere between a breath and a moan, inexplicably malevolent. “Look!” says Kal. “This was the chamber of punishment. There is the Chair, the Well of Thirst, the Wheel.” Fern sees them indistinctly among a bewilderment of shadows: the looming contours of an empty seat, the mouth of a pit, the wheel’s giant arc. The sighing intensifies, becoming a mournful buzz that bores inside her head, and suddenly she can make out the torn flesh and bone adhering to the arms of the Chair, the glint of undrinkable water in the Well, the blood dripping down the spokes of the Wheel. “There’s nothing here now,” Kal says, and she rubs her eyes to dispel the fantasy, and when she looks again there is only a crumbling stone slab, a primitive hub ringed with broken prongs, a hole in the ground. As they move on the footsteps resume, nearer now and louder, almost as if they were in the next cave. Fern can distinguish two different sets: a light, uneven pattering and a smoother, more regular pace, swift as the wingbeats of a bird. A picture comes into her mind, unwanted and disturbing: Morgus, striding along with her rapid, gliding motion, and the mantislike figure of Sysselore following at her heels. “Kal,” she murmurs hesitantly, “can you hear footsteps?”

  “I heard them a way back, when they left the first passage. My ears are sharper than yours, and I haven’t let them become clogged with sounds that aren’t there. I didn’t think sweet dreams would hold my mother long. They have already crossed the Gray Plains; they are gaining on us.” His tone is flat, devoid of expression, but the set of his mouth is taut.

  “They sound so near” Fern says, wishing she hadn’t. More than ever she needs to turn, and see …

  “The acoustics are strange here. Don’t let them deceive you.” He adds, with what might be incredulity: “Morgus heard you laughing. I think—it hurt her. It really hurt.”

  They leave the cave via an archway partially blocked by a rockfall. Kal slides like a snake through the narrow gap; Fern wriggles after him. “Morgus will never get through there,” she says.

  “Don’t believe it,” Kal responds. “She could pour herself through a keyhole, if she wished.”

  The footsteps are always with them now.

  The path ascends steeply until it becomes an actual stair, winding upward. On either side infrequent apertures reveal slender vistas of the caves beyond, clumps of stalagmites like sprouting forests, the dried-up cavities of long-lost pools. Once, near at hand, the furtive light touches a hook embedded in the rock above a curved recess. “A cauldron hung there,” Kal says, following the direction of Fern’s gaze, “but it was stolen many ages ago. All stories meet here. This is the realm of Annwn, Hades, Osiris, Iutharn. You find here the myths you expect, or so it used to be.”

  “So why do we find—all this?” Fern enquires.

  “These are the relics of other people’s dreams,” Kal answers. “The dreams of the dead.”

  They enter another cavern, vaulted like a great hall, lofty and long. At the far end the floor rises into a curiously shaped outcrop: as they advance Fern sees steps etched deep in the rock, and above them a structure that appears to be made of four or five huge slabs, piled together in the form of a throne. The slabs resemble rough-hewn sarsens; the throne itself is massive, crude, like something not carved but riven from the earth’s core, ancient beyond the annals of history, impregnated with forgotten potency. Rock dust sifts across the pedestal; mist ghosts drift around the high back, avoiding the emptiness that sits between its stony arms. It generates an awe that even abandonment cannot disperse. In its vicinity the whispers die away, and despite the pursuing footfalls Fern halts and gazes, half in fear, half in wonder, until Kal’s impatience drives her onward. “We cannot linger,” he says. “The dark king is long gone; he has not been worshiped for a thousand generations. Come!”

  “Ah, but we remember,” she says. “Not all immortals were like Azmordis. Legend says he weighed the truth of the soul on his enchanted scales.”

  “He is gone,” Kal reiterates, “and so must we, if you would live. Morgus is on the bridge over the Fiery River; I hear the echo of her footfalls in the ravine. Hurry!”

  They hurry. Cavern leads into cave, passage into passageway. The following steps grow ever closer; now it seems to Fern they are only yards behind. It requires a constant effort of will not to turn and look. At last they emerge from a broad tunnel into a space without visible roof or farther wall. The last of the light is spread thinly through its vastness. Below them stretches the still expanse of a river—the boundary of the Underworld, the final barrier on their journey to reality. The watermark on the rocks shows the level has sunk, but it remains wide and deep, colder than ice, though Kal says it never freezes, with a cold that bites not merely to the bone but to the heart. The surface is the color of iron; ponderous ripples travel slowly downstream, barely touching the nearer bank.

  But immediately before them the darkness lies across their path in a solid bar. Haste makes Fern incautious: she brushes against it, and feels coarse fur; belatedly she recognizes an outstretched forelimb, thick as a young tree, a giant paw with claws twisted from the creeping growth of centuries in hibernation. To the right she can distinguish a looming mass the size of an elephant: the mound of a head, the slumped ridge of a body. It might be one of the hounds of Arawn, grown to impossible proportions, bound forever in enchanted sleep. But as she touches it she seems to hear a sudden intake of breath, the mound shifts a fraction of an inch, a faint muscular spasm quickens the extended leg … “Don’t do that!” hisses Kal. “This is the Guardian. Time was, not an ant might have passed him by. Walk softly; he may hear you in his dreams.”

  They steal around him, down to the river. There is no bridge, but a narrow boat is drawn up in the lee of the rock. The footsteps accelerate: Fern hears the scratching of cloth on stone, the whisper of gossamer. An eager panting is hot on the nape of her neck. Involuntarily, she starts to turn…

  But Kal holds her, hands clamped around her skull, his eyes red with a dull anger.

  “She’s there! She’s behind me! I can feel her!” I can feel her, very close to me, a dreadful gloating presence, fat slug fingers reaching toward me. She’s there. She’s there. I know it

  “They’re in the last tunnel. Get in the boat, and don’t look back. Not now, when we’ve come so far. Not till the other side. Don’t look back!”

  He jumps down into the boat, half lifting, half pulling her in after him. She folds up in the bow, weak and stupid with panic, keeping her gaze fixed desperately on the farther bank. She hears the creak and splash of the pole, senses the drag of the current against the prow. The chill off the water makes her muscles ache. As they move forward, the footsteps recede a little. Ripple by ripple, the bank draws nearer.

  And then at last the boat is nudging against rock, and she is scrambling ashore, but the low overh
ang defeats her, and her knees give. She can see her hands, clutching safety, but they have not the strength to draw her body after them. Then Kal is there, seizing her by the arms, swinging her onto the bank, and for a moment she is pressed close to his chest, feeling matted hair and knotted sinew, inhaling the animal odor that was stifled in the Underworld, the smell of sweat and life and warmth. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I lost my head.”

  “Morgus got inside it.”

  Morgus…

  Now Fern can turn and look, and there she is, poised at the river’s edge, her figure diminished with distance but no less grotesque, her robes molting embroidery, her black hair raveled into a corona. Even at that range Fern can see the wet glistening of her skin, like the sheen on an oyster. Her lower lip moves though the upper is frozen in a snarl; one outflung hand points to the river just below the bank in a gesture that is vaguely familiar. Sysselore crouches at her side, like a bundle of twigs wrapped in cobwebs. Fern’s start of warning comes too late: the painter unwinds from the rock where Kal had looped it and slips like an eel into the stream, and the boat retreats steadily away from them. The pole is still shipped; the leaden waters divide reluctantly in its wake. There is a long moment while they stand as though mesmerized. Already Sysselore is reaching for the prow. Fern thinks: I am Morcadis, Morcadis the witch, but all her witchcraft is drained from her, and she searches in vain for the inspiration of power, for a spell, a word…

  They are getting into the boat, pushing off from the bank. Sysselore poles with unexpected vigor, her thin arms moving like wires.

  “You’ll have to run for it.” Kal grasps Fern by the elbow, pointing her to the farther limits of the cave where a faint leakage of light shows the mouth of a tunnel yawning in the distant wall. “That’s the way out. Just follow it up and up till you get where you want to be. Go now! I can’t hold her.”

  “But you—”

  “She won’t harm me: I am her son. Go!”

  Fern takes a few steps, falters, spins at a cry. Kal is doubled over as if with a sudden cramp; in midstream, Morgus sways in the boat, words bubbling from her mouth, soft, ugly words, shaping pain. Even as Fern reaches him he falls, writhing. His body jerks and arches out of control; violent shudders batter him against the rock. “Run!” he gasps through a rictus of agony. “She can’t—reach you. Run!”

  But she pledged friendship, though not from the heart, manipulating him, seducing him to her will…

  She says in a shaken voice: “I won’t leave you.”

  She struggles to focus her mind, to locate the nucleus of pain and fight it. The distraction is fatal. A moment slips away and Morgus is on her.

  There is a hand around her throat: its boneless grip has the strength of an octopus. Her lungs tighten, the voice is squeezed from her mouth. As she looks into those luminous eyes she knows it will not be quick. Morgus wants to kill slowly, slowly, savoring every second, every tiny increase of torment, aroused to the verge of ecstasy, until her whole vast bulk is vibrating with pleasure and she is filled and sated and glutted with death. Her other hand caresses Fern’s face, fumbling for a nostril to rip open, an eyeball to pluck out. At her side, Sysselore clings like a leech, throbbing with shared rapture. And in a cold small corner of her brain Fern registers the weight of the head, bounced against her hip, and on the left side, forgotten throughout the journey, the contents of her pocket, pressed into her thigh. Morgus has left Fern’s arms free, enjoying her ineffectual scrabbling at that deadly grip. Fern reaches into the pocket, closes her fist tight on the fire crystals. Then she withdraws it, and thrusts it deep into the quagmire of the witch’s bosom. Fern’s voice is gone but her lips move and her mind speaks, her will speaks, and the buried hatred rises, transmuted into raw power. “Fiumé! Cirrach fiumé!” Her hand bursts into flame.

  There is an instant of hideous anguish then Fern stumbles backward, suddenly released, and the pain is gone. In front of her, Morgus begins to scream. Her mouth opens into a gaping red pit, her teeth rattle like pebbles in the wind of her shrieks. Those tentacle fingers wrench at her clothing and tear her own skin, but the crystals cling, eating into her breast, and the dry garments blaze like tinder. Sysselore pulls back quickly, but not quick enough: she is engulfed in flame like a sapling in the path of a firestorm, bucking and twisting with the force of the conflagration. She seems to be trying to reach the river, but there is no time, no time at all. Paper skin and cotton-wool hair crumple into ash, and the charred sticks of her bones fold up and disintegrate, broken into fragments that scatter as they hit the rock. Morgus is still moving, a blackened formless mass crawling in a pool of molten fat toward the bank. Crisped flakes peel away from her, lumps that might be cloth or hide or flesh. She has no face left, no hands, only a blind groping of fingerless stumps, the slow agonized heaving of what was once a body. Fern watches in a sort of petrified horror, wanting it over. Convulsions rack her that must surely end it, but somehow Morgus impels herself forward, covering the ground in millimeters, until at last she reaches the edge, and very gradually topples down into the water. The river swallows her, hissing. Icy steams rise into the air.

  “Quickly!” Kal urges, on his feet beside her, his pain gone even as Morgus’s agony began. “Put your burned hand in.”

  “But I can’t feel anything—”

  “You will, if you don’t treat it now. This is the Styx: it may heal you. But don’t leave it there more than a second or two—”

  She needs no such admonition. The cold sears; a moment longer, and it might have taken her hand off at the wrist. As she withdraws she looks for Morgus’s body, but it does not reappear.

  “When you came back for me,” Kal says abruptly, “did you plan this?”

  “No.”

  He scans her face, looking for truth, unsure of what he finds. “You still owe me. Remember that, little witch. I’ll collect one day.”

  “I know.” She reaches up to kiss his cheek, unnerving him. “Thank you.”

  “Now go. Follow the tunnel. Uphill, always uphill…”

  And now she is running, over the rocks, up the slope, pouring out the dregs of her energy in one final spurt. There is a stitch in her chest crushing the breath from her lungs, and the light is growing, brighter and brighter, until she can no longer see the ground beneath her feet, but still she goes on, dazzled, sightless, until the ground vanishes altogether, and she is falling, falling, into the light.

  XIV

  Fern dragged herself laboriously from a sleep so deep it was bottomless. Even as she struggled toward consciousness the thought reached her that never before had she slept so profoundly; trying to reawaken was like swimming through treacle, a desperate floundering in clinging blackness. In that last, interminable second before she opened her eyes it occurred to her that she had had too much to drink, and this must be a hangover the hangover to end all hangovers. She couldn’t remember what had happened, but Gaynor must have taken care of her. Then Fern lifted her eyelids. She was in a room she had never seen before, in a white clinical bed with a rail across the bottom. There were soothing blue walls, dawn light streaming through the window, an unnatural quantity of flowers. Hospital. The shock was so great her stomach jolted. She tried to sit up, but her limbs felt weighted and she could barely raise her head. She saw the tubes surrounding her, invading her, the plastic chrysalis of the drip, the dancing line on the monitor. And lastly, to her overwhelming relief, Ragginbone. His hood was pushed back and he was surveying her with an expression she had never seen before, a strange softening that made him appear old like any other old man, tired and weak and human. His scarecrow hair stood up as if it had been kneaded, and there were more lines on his face than a thousand-piece jigsaw.

  “I must have been awfully drunk,” she said. Her voice sounded very faint, hardly more than a whisper.

  “Awfully,” echoed Ragginbone.

  After a minute, she asked: “What am I doing here? Was there a car accident?”

  “You’ve been ill,�
� said the Watcher.

  “Ill? But—” memory returned, in fragments “—I’m supposed to be getting married. I’m getting married today.”

  “That was last week.”

  “Oh.” She digested this. “Did I get married?”

  “No.”

  For no reason that she could analyze, she felt comforted. Her brain tried to grapple with the situation, but it was too much for her, and she lay inert, letting her thoughts float where they would. Ragginbone knew he ought to call a nurse, but he saw no immediate need, and his instinct told him she was best left to herself. The green line on the heart monitor had accelerated to normal, causing the machine no particular concern. He was a little surprised she seemed to feel no pain from her burnt hand; however, the doctor said the nerve endings had been destroyed, and presumably it was still numb.

  Some time later, she said: “What a mess.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about it.”

  She turned her head on the pillow, looking toward him. “Where is everyone?”

  “Well, your father was here last night, but he went home for a few hours’ sleep. He’ll be back soon. I believe Miss Markham is at Dale House now, Will and Gaynor are … somewhere, and Marcus Greig is in London, though he’s due here later today.”

  “Marcus?”

  “Your groom-to-be,” Ragginbone supplied.

  “Of course,” Fern murmured. “I’d forgotten … How dreadful.”

  He wasn’t sure if her last comment referred to her forgetfulness or Marcus’s absence, but on the whole he favored the former.