The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  Back in her room Harbeak brought her lunch consisting of thick vegetable soup, brown bread, cheese. “I want to see Will,” she said, as he set down the tray. “Where is he?”

  “Somewhere less comfortable than here,” Harbeak responded, ignoring her request.

  The day passed with horrible slowness. Prison must be like this, Gaynor decided, dull, dull, dull, but without the edge of fear to sharpen the tedium into regular bouts of panic. She had no television, no book, nothing to do but think, nothing to think about but her current predicament. Thinking sent her pulse into a crescendo and drove her to beat on the door, crying to be let out, finally controlling herself with an effort that seemed to drain all her willpower. But no one answered, no one came. At other times she stood by the window, trying to bend or dislodge the bars, but they were cemented in, and the iron was rigid and immovable. And if I could shift them, she thought, how would I get down? In stories, heroines made use of knotted sheets; but although sheets were available they were too strong to tear, and she had neither knife nor scissors to help her out. In any case, she had never been any good at rope climbing when she was at school, and she saw no likelihood of dramatic improvement now. But I suppose it would be worse, she concluded, if I made the rope, and knew how to climb, and still couldn’t get between the bars.

  Periodically she checked the mirror, made wary by experience, looking for reflections that should not have been there, lifting it clear of the wall to search for technological devices. But it remained just a mirror, glossy, limpid, as if any memories it might have retained had been polished out of existence. You are watched, Harbeak had said, and she went frantic investigating portraits for eyeholes, examining light fittings and the knobs on drawer and cabinet for miniaturized cameras. He said it to frighten me, she decided, as if that were necessary. He was probably watching her now, enjoying her fear, savoring it—but from where? She had turned over every wood louse. She tried hate instead of fear not for Dr. Laye, who was too potent, too awesome a figure, far beyond any passion of hers but for Harbeak, Harbeak with his impeccable suit and his façade of courtesy and his elusive resemblance to Goebbels. But she was no better at hating than she was at rope climbing. Her enmity was a poor, weak thing, an ember that never grew into a flame, and the thought of what Harbeak might have done to her in her sleep—what he might yet do only filled her with horror and disgust. Disgust not only at him but at herself: her fear, her vulnerability, her helplessness, her sheer imbecility for being here. We should never have come, she thought. Fern will return to her body without our help. What did the Spirit say? I have cast the augury, and seen her. She will awaken, and come here to find us, and it would be better if she had stayed in a coma forever.

  A depression crept over her that was worse than panic, gray and hopeless. In the late afternoon Harbeak brought her a cup of tea and a plate of cookies. She looked at him with dull eyes. “Your friend will be here soon,” he said, not to encourage her but to goad. “She will want you to live. The master is sure of it.”

  “Which master?” said Gaynor, and for a moment he looked afraid. He withdrew without further comment.

  After dark he brought her supper, and took her for the obligatory visit to the toilet. There was an air of repressed excitement about him, like a habitual wife killer who plans to spend the evening sawing up the corpse. Gaynor thought: I must do something. I must do something. A different kind of fever gripped her; she had passed through despair into desperation.

  Left alone, her vague resolution crystallized. Fortunately, she had read plenty of the right sort of books—not “serious” literary fiction where the heroines have single-parent status and unsuccessful love affairs and Angst, but the kind where they have to escape from locked rooms on ropes of knotted sheets, or by hitting an unwary jailer over the head with a convenient blunt instrument. When Fern arrives, Gaynor reasoned, he’ll come to escort me downstairs. He won’t expect an attack: he believes me too cowed, too terrified, incapable of action. And he was shorter than her; the blow would be easy. She could hide behind the door and he would walk into the room … She needed something to lull him, to draw him in and keep him off guard. If she plumped up the duvet, bunched her sweater on the pillow—it was maroon, and a smooth knit, but in a bad light it might pass for brown, and hair. She would have to wait in the dark but no, that wouldn’t do, he would switch on the main light. Better to leave the lamp on beside the washstand: that cast a restricted glow floorward that did not reach the bed. She took off her sweater, began to arrange the bedding. All she needed now was a blunt instrument.

  But there were few to choose from. She considered unscrewing a leg from the bedside table, but the legs were fixed in place and a lopsided table would have looked suspicious. Pictures, she knew, were only used in comedy: you can’t knock someone out with a sheet of canvas. Finally she settled on her old friend the china bowl. It was large, and should be heavy enough, even if it broke. Besides, she felt it was somehow appropriate. She sat on the nearest chair, clutching the bowl, listening for an approaching footstep, the rattle of a key. She was trembling, but she told herself it didn’t matter. You don’t need a steady hand to hit a man on the head.

  She sat there for what seemed like hours. Her trembling increased to teeth-chattering spasms and then diminished to a gentle shiver as the tension mounted and ebbed inside her. At long last, when she had almost gone beyond anticipation, she heard footsteps in the passageway. She darted behind the door, gripping the bowl in both hands. He took a long time with the key and she began to tremble again: when she glanced down she saw her arms shaking like jelly in an earthquake. The door opened; she lifted the bowl. A dark figure strode toward the bed—

  A tall dark figure, in jeans. The bowl dropped from Gaynor’s slackened fingers and spun on the carpet.

  “Will!” she cried. “Oh, Will!” And even as he turned she grasped his sweatshirt, tears starting in her eyes, and buried her face in his chest.

  XVI

  The wolf appeared very suddenly in the middle of the road. Fern saw the flash of its eyes in the headlights and swerved violently, ending up on the opposite verge. Bradachin was flung across the passenger seat clutching the bag with the head; from within it came a muffled oath. Fern did not stop to apologize. She jerked on the hand brake and shot out of the door in a single movement. She was almost certain she had missed it but the wolf was lying on the tarmac: the light from the interior of the car was just sufficient to show the pattern of ribs in its panting flank, the clumsy bandage that bound one leg. “Lougarry?” Fern gasped. “What’s happened to you?” The she-wolf half raised her head, then let it fall back on the ground. But Fern felt the heartbeat in her side, saw the straining breath come and go. Carefully she lifted the injured leg, made out the blood on the cotton, and other stains, not darkly red but blue and yellow. Paint. “Will did this,” she said. “Only Will would use paint rags … I’ve got to get you into the car. Bradachin! Can you open the back door? Leave—that. Is he all right?”

  “He’s a mickle bruised and no very blithe, but aye, we’re baith right enough. I didna ken ye would drive the carriage in sae hellirackit—”

  “Never mind all that. Get the door open and help me.”

  Between them, they managed to lift Lougarry into the back of the car. “I think that leg’s broken,” said Fern. She heard the faint confirmation in her mind. “Try not to jolt it. We need to get her to a vet—”

  “I’m no sae partial tae werebeasties,” Bradachin was muttering. “Even if they canna change themselves. She and I, we’ve always walked round one another. It would be mair healthsome if we didna get too close. That road, we’ve rested friendly…”

  Trapped, said the whisper in Fern’s head. Will released me. Went back—for Gaynor. The leg… will keep. Caracandal…

  “No time,” said Fern. “Where are they? At—what’s the name of it?—Drakemyre Hall?”

  She sensed rather than heard the warning. Danger. Azmodel.

  “Azmode
l?”

  What is here, is also there. The power of the Old One…

  “You mean—” Fern struggled for comprehension “the dimensions overlap? The world we know, and—the world beyond?”

  Azmodel is his place. His lair. Wherever he is, it is. The house. Maybe the museum. He is there. He must be.

  “Dr. Laye,” said Fern. “I know.”

  As he can possess the human mind, so Azmodel… can possess the place. There is … great danger. The she-wolf’s unheard voice was getting weaker and weaker. Morlochs…

  “What are morlochs?” asked Fern.

  It was Bradachin who answered, his grumbles forgotten. “Pugwidgies.”

  As she drove away it took an effort of self-discipline for Fern to keep her speed down. She found her pressure on the accelerator pedal was increasing almost in spite of herself and her lips clenched as she eased her foot upward; minutes later a police car passed her, traveling in the other direction. She allowed herself a fleeting vision of what might happen if she was stopped, with all her Gift channeled into maintaining her own strength. Bradachin would be able to fade from the picture, but that would still leave an injured wolf on the backseat and a disembodied head in front. For a moment, the specter of a smile relaxed her taut mouth.

  “What amuses you, Fernanda?” asked the head. Bradachin had left the bag open and the ice-blue eyes watched her as she drove.

  “Nothing,” she answered. “Nothing I can explain, anyway.”

  “I heard you laughing in the Underworld,” he said, “down among the ghosts where no laughter has sounded since time began. And now now you are heading for a confrontation with powers far beyond your scope, and your own life and the lives of those you love are at stake, yet you smile. But I do not believe you smile carelessly or laugh lightly, witch-maiden.”

  “Maybe not,” said Fern. “But when everything is dark it is important to smile, or to laugh, if you can. Laughter has a power of its own. It’s a human thing—or have you forgotten so soon?”

  “Dragons do not laugh,” the head replied. “That was the only power I knew. It is late to learn of laughter, when you are dead.”

  “It’s just—unusual,” said Fern.

  She pulled over briefly to consult her map of the Dales, on which Drakemyre Hall featured by name. The road was empty now and when she calculated they were drawing near she switched off the headlights. The crest of the ridge became visible, black against the pale underbelly of the clouds. Farther on, she made out the pointed spines of rooftops, the spiky silhouettes of clustered bushes and trees. Still some way from the entrance she stopped and began to reverse, maneuvering the car until it was right on the verge. “Stay here,” she told Bradachin, and, with a glance at the wolf: “Look after her.”

  “I’m coming wi’ ye—”

  “No. You know what she said. You wouldn’t stand a chance against these … pugwidgies. Wait here.”

  “And who will be protecting ye? Yon heid?”

  “I’m a witch,” Fern said. “I can take care of myself.” She picked up the bag. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” said the head.

  She hooked the strap over her shoulder and slid out of the car, closing the door as softly as she could. The automatic light was extinguished and the night enveloped her, a huge night of empty hillside and silent road and broken clouds chasing across a star-ridden sky. Her eyesight adjusted, absorbing details no ordinary human would have seen, shadows within shadows, tiny crawlings and creepings in the darkness of the grass. She followed the road to the gate, saw the tracery of ironwork athwart her path and the paler line of the driveway beyond, curving up toward the irregular outline of the house. The stone was still in place, wedging the gate open: Fern squeezed through the gap. Immediately her witch senses prickled at the change. She felt displaced, as if she had crossed an invisible threshold into a dimension that, though it might appear the same, was altogether different. Here, the night was not merely alive but aware, sapient, an entity made of the dark itself. She felt it watching, perhaps for her, though it had not yet seen the slight intruder flitting from bush to bush. The very ground seemed sensitive, like skin, and she trod lightly, trying not to bend a single blade of grass, merging herself into the quiet and the gloom more by instinct than power. And there were moments when the actual stuff of the land became insubstantial, and she felt rock beneath her feet, and the crest of the ridge soared into a measureless cliff, imprisoning her in a valley crack too deep for normal reckoning. She fought against the incursion of that other place, pushing it away, focusing on the uncertain reality all around her. And somewhere below the thin crust of solid ground she detected a faint seismic stirring, and a pulse beat that was not that of the earth.

  As she approached the house she saw the steely glimmer of the Mercedes, and another vehicle drawn up beside it. Coming nearer, she made out something that had once been a car. But the doors had been wrenched and twisted from their hinges, the hood buckled, disemboweled ends of piping protruded from the engine. Inside, she registered pale stuffing leaking from ripped seats, ragged wires sprouting where the dashboard had been. Even so, she did not need to see the paintings on the residual bodywork to recognize it. For a second, her control failed: she was on the edge of screaming challenge and defiance. The soft tones of the head checked her.

  “Morlochs’ work,” it said. “What was it?”

  “My brother’scar.”

  “I smell blood.”

  With her heightened sensitivity, Fern, too, could smell it—a hot, sharp, angry smell that sent the adrenaline pounding through her veins and made the tiny hairs rise on her neck. She had never been able to smell blood before, yet she recognized it at once. She had hoped to get Will and Gaynor away from the house before any confrontation, but she realized now there was no chance. They were prisoners still, or worse. She was too late for a rescue, too late, perhaps, for anything, except a last stand, a final gamble. Further caution was futile; she could feel the watching eyes. “Stay quiet,” she admonished the head, and pulled the flap down to cover it. Then she walked up to the front door and pressed the bell. Within the house, she heard it echo through the hallway like a gong. There was no sound of any approach, only the soft click as the handle turned, and the noiseless opening of the door.

  It was like being trapped in a dream, Gaynor thought, one of those dreams where, just when you hope everything is going to work out well, the old familiar nightmare intrudes, and you are sucked back into darkness. With the advent of Will she experienced an illusory return to normality, a feeling that it would be all right, they would come through, the horrors of her captivity would fade into unreality; but it could not last. They compared notes, speaking softly and urgently. Gaynor knew she must be terrified at the idea of the dragon, seething like a potted volcano beneath the house; yet it seemed all a part of the inevitable, another aspect of delirium. “They can’t have checked the cellar,” Will said. “At a guess, they won’t go near it unless they have to, so they don’t know I’ve escaped. I’m not important; you are. You’re the hostage they wanted. This room must’ve been prepared for you. I was just rubbish to be dumped out of the way.”

  “But how did you get in here?”

  “Keys.” Will patted his pocket. “After I left Lougarry I sneaked back in past the kitchen. The butler—what’s his name? Harbeak? was in there. It must be his domain. I’m not sure what he was doing—preparing meat, I suppose; I could see blood on his arms—but he’d taken his jacket off to do it. It was hung up by the door. While his back was turned I went through the pockets. Then he washed his hands and started moving about the place. I waited ages before I could get upstairs.” He took her arm. “Come on. It’s time to leave.”

  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 thi
s 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.”