Now staring in horror, he watched the flock move closer, revealing red scales and leathery wings, smoke curling from their nostrils. He made a small cry, like a rabbit in extremis, and struggled to stand. But the movement that had come so easily just moments ago was a trial now. His limbs cried in protest and refused to budge. Despite straining and sweating, he’d only achieved an ungainly half crouch when the dragons were upon him.
The lead dragon swooped in low and swatted him aside with its fore-foot. He went skittering across the ice, feeling his ribs shatter. Crawling for the shore, he dragged himself along far too slowly, and his fingernails broke on the ice. Finally—finally—he was able to shiver. But this was in fear. He no longer felt cold. Terror rushed hot in his blood.
A shadow enveloped him, and he looked up into the black eyes of a hovering dragon. Before he could react, the dragon’s talons shot toward him, and one long claw pierced him through the chest, pinning him to the ice. It looked as if it were laughing at him, its teeth filling its horrible great mouth. He tried to scream, but suddenly he had no breath. Lungs pierced, he could only stare stupidly as the dragon’s wing beats slowed and it landed on the ice beside him, as gently as any songbird.
But the dragon was no songbird, and the ice shattered under its weight. Water splashed the beast’s belly, and it roared its displeasure, flapping madly, trying to get aloft. Then it belched out a lash of fire, which further melted the ice around itself and the ice below Rasputin. When the dragon managed to lift out of the water, it slowly shook itself free of water and prey at the same time. The wind from the dragon’s wings was so strong that it pushed Father Grigori Rasputin over the melting edge of ice and down into the dark water.
We have put a rope through the nose of Leviathan, he thought as the waves closed over his head. He could still see the dragons, distorted by the water, hovering over the hole in the ice like terns. But he is king over all the sons of pride.
And then, like his sister, Maria, so many years before, Father Grigori drowned.
I did not wake Ninotchka. All was falling apart. She would need her sleep.
Prying open the old desk where I keep my treasures—the key was long lost—I filled my pockets with gold coinage, my real certificate of birth, my other papers, several strands of rare pearls, my mother’s diamonds, my father’s gold watch and fob. I would leave my wife with what paltry jewels she had. She would need them. Alas, the Tsar would not look kindly on me and mine once the story of the mad monk’s death came out. And come out it would. Servants can be forced to tell what their masters will not. Better that I leave Ninotchka to what fate her beauty could buy her.
As for me, I would cross the line, find the men who held the new reins of terror. Who knows if the Tsar will even last through this time? The wheel turns and turns again. Revolution is a messy business. Yet, there is always a need for a good functionary, a secretary, a man of purpose. I’d always known I was the first two, and now I know I can be hard, too. I can kill. My hand can wield a knife. Yes, I am someone who has much to offer, to muzhik or Tsar. And I will let it be known—I work equally well with men and with dragons.
The Dragon of Direfell
LIZ WILLIAMS
Vanquishing a dragon is a big job but may turn out to be not as straightforward a job as it appears—and the dragon may turn out to be the least of your problems.
British writer Liz Williams has had work appear in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Visionary Tongue, Subterranean, Terra Incognita, The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere, and her stories have been collected in The Banquet of the Lords of Night & Other Stories. Her books include the critically acclaimed novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, The Poison Master, Nine Layers of Sky, Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, and Darkland. Her most recent novels are The Shadow Pavilion and Winterstrike. She lives in Brighton, England.
IT was not fire-breathing, nor did it boast claws. It lay coiled neatly around the hill, its long head resting near the summit. For something so large, it was curiously difficult to see in the twilight: a thin, whiplike body, tapering to a tail like that of some fluke. We were, I was relieved to note, closer to the tail than to the head. Above, near the summit of the hill, there was the sudden glittering glint of a green eye, an emerald star.
I nudged Parch. “I’m assuming that’s the dragon you were talking about?”
“Please keep your voice down, Lord Cygne! These devils have the ears of a hunting dog.”
Parch, I observed with a modicum of scorn, was prone to nerves. I’d already taken the precaution of casting a concealment spell, a small guise only and too basic to attract the attention of a magic-using creature. We would not be overheard, but Parch was too anxious to listen to me. His plump face was agitated; a faint sweat had broken out across his brow. One must make allowances, I told myself. It had been immediately evident back at the mansion that John Parch, steward to the ninth Duke of Direfell, was not a man of action.
The worm was shifting position, perhaps spotting some unwary prey down in the vale. From the movements of its serpentine head, I knew that the prey was not ourselves; we were perfectly safe beneath our guise in the bushes. But Parch looked so frightened that I thought he might be about to do something stupid. Correspondingly, I suggested that we make a strategic withdrawal, and, with alacrity, he agreed.
I had come to Direfell in late summer, under a cloud-riding moon. The mansion, and its dependent villages, lay to the south of my own home of Burnblack, some handful of days distant. As I approached the mansion, riding up over a low roll of hills, I caught sight of corn-lecks whisking out of sight behind the stacked stooks of hay, golden-skinned in the light of the moon, with their wild hair streaming behind them. The hedges were starred with roses, and beech woods billowed across the hills. Direfell did not live up to its name, I thought as I approached the house.
I had never met the ninth duke, Richard Porthlois, though I knew that his ancestor had been granted the holding by Queen Lune, herself the ancestor of our own monarch, Aoife. Faeries being long-lived, there had only been one queen in between, so it may well be that Aoife herself remembered the first duke: rumour said that he’d often ventured beneath the hollow hills of Albion, a risky undertaking for any except the most advanced or foolhardy magician. I considered this as I rode, weighing up political likelihoods: the duke had hired me, for a purpose hinted at but not fully explained, and I had heard nothing from Aoife for over three months. Indeed, I had not set foot in London for nearly a year. This in itself was not unusual. The Queen had a tendency to leave me alone at Burnblack for long periods of time, then snap her green-tinged fingers and expect me to come running. It was a pattern to which the majority of the court (to which, as minor nobility and a major magician, I was only lightly attached) had long since become accustomed. I could hear Aoife’s voice now, cold as a wind-chimed icicle: “You think too much, my lord Cygne!”—followed by her chilly, merry laughter.
Perhaps so. But I’d survived, when many of those around me had not. If that was where thought led, I’d go on thinking.
The mansion of Direfell itself squatted in a dip in the hills, a sprawling construction that had clearly been accumulating over the last five hundred years. As I drew closer, I saw that the main house was built of mellowed brick, half-covered in a suffocating blanket of roses. Nothing too dire about that—but in faery-ruled Albion, you learn early to see what lies beneath the glamour, or do not learn at all. No one was waiting for me, and there was no sign of any guards, magical or otherwise—a far cry from my own home of Burnblack, where conjure-shucks prowl the grounds and rend trespassers to ribbons. Frowning, I tethered my horse to a column on which reposed a stone pineapple, and went up the steps to knock upon the door.
It took some while to open, and, when it did, the Duke of Direfell was not the one who stood there. Instead, I saw a young girl, perhaps fifteen, with a pale face like the crescent moon and a long fall of golden
hair.
“Lord Cygne?” she said, in a whispering little voice, and gave a curtsey.
“None other.”
“My father will be pleased to welcome you,” she murmured, and drifted within. It crossed my mind that the duke might have a marriage proposal in mind—it had happened before. If so, this young lady would be safe from the ravages of matrimony, at least as far as I was concerned: I’m not a one for delicate and frail. But magicians, especially aristocratic ones, like forming dynasties. Wondering, I followed her into the parlour, where, despite the warmth of the evening, the ninth duke was stretching his legs in front of a roaring blaze.
“Lord Porthlois?” I asked, repressing the urge to reach for a kerchief to mop my suddenly dripping brow.
“The same. Lord Cygne?” Porthlois, the ninth Duke of Direfell, rose languidly from the fire and took my hand in a limp grip. Had I seen him at the Queen’s court in London, I would have him down for a fop, all powders and primping, but this did not quite sit with the country seat or the presence of the girl, since he added, “My eldest daughter, Rose. There are three of them—you’ll find her sisters around somewhere.”
“And Lady Porthlois?”
“My first wife is no longer with us,” the ninth duke explained with a sigh. “You will meet the girls’ stepmother in due course. We’ve put you in the Blue Chamber. I trust you’ll find it to your liking. Perhaps you’d care for a small glass of wine after your journey?”
I stifled the inclination to reply, No, a large one, and assured him that this would be delightful. Rose slipped away and returned with a bottle. The wine, when it was poured, turned out to be thick and dark and redolent of hedgerows, rather than the Italian vintages preferred by the court.
“Our own,” Porthlois informed me, with a negligent wave of the hand. “Elderberry, mainly.”
“Most—unusual.” It didn’t taste quite like elderberry to me, and with the warmth of the parlour, I decided to pretend to sip. Capturing rival magicians wasn’t an unknown phenomenon, either. But thus far, I had no sense that Porthlois was a mage.
“So,” I said, taking a seat as far from the fire as possible, “you wrote to me, Lord Porthlois.”
“Indeed, indeed.” Porthlois appeared to go off into a reverie. I waited, with increasing impatience. At last, he said, “We have a small local difficulty.”
“Oh?”
“We have a dragon.”
“Oh dear.”
“Hasn’t been a problem for the last couple of hundred years, but recently, we seem to have acquired one. Been taking sheep, frightening villagers.”
“The usual things that dragons do, eh? What kind is it?”
“A laidly one.”
“Ah. A worm.”
“Did you see the hills on your journey?”
“I did.” I’d noted the coiled mazes that striped some of the hillsides, had speculated as to their origins.
“We had a worm plague some three hundred years ago. My ancestor called in a foreign knight—man with a beard, there’s a portrait of him on the stairs. He did a good enough job of getting rid of them.”
“Dragon slaying’s rather gone out of fashion,” I mused.
“Due to the lack of dragons. But things change.”
“Any notion as to why they’ve returned?”
“None. They come from stagnant pools, growing from stones laid in the mud, everyone knows that. As to why this particular time—I do not know.”
The duke evidently subscribed to one of the popular superstitions regarding the origin of dragons, but I decided to keep my more extensive knowledge to myself for the moment.
“Well,” I assured him. “I shall see what can be done.”
NEXT morning, I woke early and drew the curtains to see a sylvan landscape unfolding before me. It did not, on the face of it, look like the kind of terrain favoured by dragons—but then, that was the point. Such worms are attracted to fat pickings: the cattle and sheep mentioned by my host, the flesh of human farmers, and something more—the spirit of abundance that pervades such a place, off which the worms may leech.
But Porthlois had been wrong. Laidly worms don’t come from ponds; they are not frogs. They are conjured from the Eldritch Realm, from moondark and shadow, their spirits summoned forth to infest a par-worm or lizard, which then grows to monstrous lengths, bloated by borrowed power.
To conquer a worm, you must first find its master, or failing that, its spirit. Porthlois was the obvious candidate, given that no other magi lived in the vicinity of Direfell—at least, as far as I was concerned, and I’d long ago made it my business to keep up with the mage registers of Albion. But I did not think that the duke was a mage, and besides, Porthlois was unlikely to have summoned a worm to ravage his own lands unless there was some subtlety here of which I was unaware. That left an unknown mage at work, and that was worrying. I also couldn’t understand why Porthlois had left his mansion unwarded, when there was a worm slithering about the landscape. It was rare for such beasts to attack the homes of men, but it did happen, and I’d have thought that the duke would be unwilling to take any chances.
Taking the opportunity that early morning afforded me, I dressed, then slipped from the chamber and began to explore the house. It proved to be a typically ancient family seat, with a great deal of oak panelling and stone flags, a general air of slight neglect. I might have said it lacked a woman’s touch—but then, there were the three daughters, and the stepmother, to whom I had still not been introduced.
As I came out onto the terrace, I saw to my chagrin that I was no longer alone: I would have liked to have explored the immediate grounds unhindered. The three girls were coming up across the lawns, threading their way through a motley collection of topiaried yew. They sang and laughed as they came—clearly, thoughts of marauding worms had failed to trouble them.
“We have been collecting the morning dew!” Rose informed me as she came up the steps. “These are my younger sisters—Lily and May.”
Evidently, one of their parents had enjoyed a floral bent. All the girls looked the same, with the long, gilded locks and pale faces. Not unlike flowers, I supposed; it was a pretty enough conceit. I surmised that they took after their mother, since, beneath the powdered wig, Porthlois’s hair was dark. As Rose held out the pail of dew for me to admire, I saw that her fingernails, too, had a slight golden tinge. Odd, though not unattractive.
“You’re not worried about the dragon?” I asked.
“Oh, it keeps to its hill,” Rose explained, though she cast a somewhat nervous glance over her shoulder as she spoke. “Our father has had a protection put on the grounds.”
“Indeed? I noticed no such.”
“Father is a man of great subtlety,” Lily explained, and an expression that almost amounted to worship crossed the features of all three girls. I smiled in as benign a manner as I could manage.
“Wonderful! I have not yet met Lady Porthlois …”
At once, the worship soured. “Oh, her,” May remarked.
No love lost, then. Hardly an uncommon occurrence.
“Girls!” The duke ambled down the steps with a clap of the hands. “Kindly leave the poor man alone. Don’t you have things to do?”
The three golden-haired girls trooped meekly into the house, and Porthlois and I sat over ale and bread for the next hour and made plans. It was not immediately obvious to me how to approach the laidly worm. I’d never dealt with dragons, but I wasn’t going to tell Porthlois that. As a magus, one must guard one’s areas of inexperience with care.
“The first thing must be the study of the beast,” I told the duke.
“Quite so. As you know, they tend to go to ground during the day, appearing as soon as the dusk falls over the land.”
This was so: dragons, for all their fiery reputation, are not solar creatures, preferring the shadows from which their spirits emanate. I had some thoughts of locating the thing’s nest and burning it out at noon, but first I needed to see exactly wh
at I was dealing with.
“I shall send you out with my steward, Parch,” the duke said.
“In the meanwhile, I should like to see a little more of the estate, the terrain …”
“I will arrange it.”
As he was doing so, I took the chance to explore Direfell Hall itself, wandering down panelled corridors patterned by uncertain shafts of sun, into a book-lined room that bore an astrolabe upon a small table, its captive planets set to spinning by the touch of my hand.
Up a narrow flight of stairs, onto a landing that smelled of beeswax and age. I was about to turn on my heel and return to the parlour, when a voice said, “Who’s there?”
It had come from behind a closed door, across the landing. I went to it, and answered, “My name is Lord Cygne.”
“Ah, the magician?”
A gratifying enough response.
“Just so.”
“Come in, Lord Cygne.”
Entering, I found myself in a long chamber, and blinked. A shaft of sunlight had blinded me. I ducked my head, avoiding the light, and eventually my vision cleared to reveal a room hung with mirrors, turning gently in the draught. One of these had directed the blinding sunlight towards me. At the end of the chamber was a bed. A monstrously corpulent woman reposed within it. “I am Lady Porthlois,” the woman announced. Her voice was well modulated, even hypnotic. She held out a hand, and I drew closer. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Positively, I hope.”
Lady Porthlois grinned, displaying white teeth within the expanse of her face. Yet despite her size, I could see that she had once been a handsome woman: there were the vestiges of angularity beneath the flesh, and her eyes were large and hazel in colour. I wondered about the mirrors. “More or less. You’re a favourite of Her Majesty, aren’t you?”
Dragon Book, The Page 14
