Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  After two hours, Hota’s panic lapsed into resignation. This, then, was the fate to which his violence had led him. Trapped in a magical circumstance that he could not hope to fathom, he would wander Griaule’s back until he grew too weak to walk and died of thirst and exposure. He would, he thought, have preferred to be hung. Yet he could not deny that he was deserving of worse and there was no defiance in him. He kicked broken branches aside, cleaning a spot where he could sit and wait for death; but upon reflection, he kept on walking, deciding it would be best to wear himself out and so hasten the inevitable. He hurried through the thicket, no longer trying to hide his presence, for he assumed that the second dragon had been an illusion, bait in the trap Griaule had set. He swatted boughs aside and shouldered through entangled places, forcing himself whenever possible into a lumbering trot. As he went, he began to feel exhilarated and it occurred to him that this might be because he finally had something meaningful to do. All his years of drinking and inept woodcarving, and all the years prior, the numbing labor, shabby, juiceless days and silent evenings spent staring glumly at his wife…it was right they should end here and now. They had profited no one, least of all himself.

  The longer he contemplated the prospect of dying, the more eager to have done with life he became. What did he have to look forward to? A few uneventful years followed by the loss of his physical powers? Assaults by younger, stronger men who would rob him and leave him destitute? And that would not be the worst of it. Exhilaration turned to something approaching glee and he increased his pace. Twigs stabbed at him, abrading his skin, but he ignored the pain. He remembered another occasion on which he had felt a similar measure of…what? Enthusiasm? Vitality?

  Delirium.

  That was the word, he thought.

  It was a feeling very like the one he had experienced at the harbormaster’s house in Port Chantay.

  Sobered by an awareness of this connection, he slowed to a walk, mulling it over, wondering if what he felt, then and now, might be an indication of mental infirmity or some physical ailment. He was still considering this notion when he slapped aside a pine bough and stepped into a clearing where stood a slender woman with bronze skin, long black hair falling to the small of her back, and wearing not a stitch of clothing.

  The woman was so startling a sight, Hota’s initial reaction was one of disbelief. He imagined her to be part of his delirium, or perhaps a further trick of Griaule’s. She was half-turned away, a hand to her cheek, as if she had been struck by a remembrance. A pattern of dark irregular lines covered her body. Like, he thought, a sketch of reptilian scales. He first believed the lines to be a tattoo, but then noticed they were growing fainter every second, and he recalled that the scales of the female dragon had been the exact shade of bronze as the woman’s skin. On hearing his choked outcry, she glanced at him over her shoulder, displaying no indication of fear such as might be expected of a naked woman alone when surprised by a man of his threatening appearance. She remained motionless, calmly regarding, and Hota, unable to accept what he was tempted to believe—that here stood the dragon he had sought, transformed somehow—was torn between the desire to flee and the need to know more about her. In a matter of seconds the lines on her skin faded utterly and, as if this signaled the completion of a process that had restrained her, she turned to face him and said in a dry, dusty voice, “Hota.”

  The sound of his name on her lips, freighted with a touch of menace, or so he heard it, spurred him to flight. Unwilling to look away from her, he took a backward step, tried to run, but stumbled, and went sprawling onto his belly. He scrambled to one knee and found her standing above him.

  “Are you afraid?” she asked, tipping her head to the side.

  Her eyes were dark, the irises large, leaving room for scarcely any white and her face, with its sharp cheekbones and full lips and delicate nose, was too perfect, lifeless, as might be an uninspired artist’s rendering. She repeated her question and, like her face, her voice was empty of human temper. The question seemed pragmatic, as if she were unfamiliar with fear and was hoping to identify its symptoms. Though she looked to be a mature woman, not a girl, her breasts and hips and belly betrayed no marks of age or usage.

  Hota sank back into a sitting position, dumbstruck.

  “There’s no reason to fear. We have a road to travel, you and I.” A cloud passed across the sun; the woman looked up sharply, scanning the sky, and then said, “I’ll need some clothing.”

  Somewhat reassured, Hota edged away from her and got to his feet. He gave thought again to running, but recalled being lost among the thickets and decided that running would probably do him no good.

  “Did you hear?” she asked, and again her words conveyed no sense of impatience or anger. “I need clothing.”

  Hota framed a question of his own, but was too daunted to speak.

  “Your name is Hota, isn’t it?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.” He licked his lips, tried to dredge up the courage to ask his question, failed, and succeeded only in making a confused noise.

  “Magali,” said the woman, and touched the slope of a breast. “My name is Magali.”

  He could detect nothing of her mood. It was as if she were hidden inside a beautiful shell, her true self muffled. She waited for him to speak and finally, when he kept silent she said, “You know me. Is that what’s troubling you?”

  “I’ve never seen you before,” Hota said.

  “But you know me. You saw me fly. You saw me while I was yet changing.”

  This, though it was the answer to his unasked question, only confounded him further and he merely shook his head in response.

  “How can you not believe it? You saw what you saw,” she said. “You have nothing to fear from me. I’m a woman now. My flesh is as yours.” She reached out and took his hand. Her palm was warm. “Do you understand?”

  “No…I…” He shook his head vigorously. “No.”

  “You will in time.” She released his hand. “Now can you bring me some clothing?”

  “There are no shops that sell women’s clothes in Teocinte.”

  “Borrow some…or bring me some of your own.”

  By agreeing to do her bidding, Hota thought he would be able to make his escape. “All right. I’ll go now,” he said.

  “You’ll come back. Don’t think you won’t.”

  “Of course I will.”

  She laughed at this—it was, he thought, the first purely human thing she had done. “That’s not what is in your mind.”

  “How can you know what’s in my mind?”

  “It’s written on your face,” she said. “You can’t wait to be gone. Once out of sight, you’ll run. That’s what you’re thinking, anyway. But later you’ll tell yourself that if you don’t return, I’ll come after you. And it’s true—I would. And you have deeper reasons for returning as well.”

  “How can that be?” he asked. “We have no history together, nothing that would furnish a depth of reason.”

  She moved away a few paces, turning toward the sun, and a pattern of leaf shadow fell across her hip, reminding him of the pattern that had faded from her skin. She arranged her hair so that it trailed across her breasts, dressing herself in the black skeins.

  “You’ll come back because there’s no other direction for you,” she said. “Your life until this moment has been empty and you hope I’ll offer fulfillment of a kind. You’ll come back because you want to. And because the road you and I must travel, we have already set foot upon it.”

  When Hota and Magali, clad in an unflattering ankle-length dress he had borrowed from a prostitute, arrived at Liar’s House that evening, Benno Grustark, portly and short-legged, his round, dark-complected face set in grouchy lines, framed by oily black ringlets, hurried out of his office and admonished Hota that if the woman were to spend the night, he would have to pay extra. However, after taking a closer look at Magali, after she turned her flat stare upon him, his delivery sputtered and he fell
silent. When they passed up the stairs, leaving Benno looking up from the dusty lobby, not offering, as was his habit, further admonitions, Hota suspected that the innkeeper was unaccustomed to having so beautiful a woman frequent his establishment.

  Ushering her into his room, Hota apologized for its sorry condition, but Magali paid no attention to the disarray and walked over to the wall beside his bed and began to inspect the weathered gray boards, running her forefinger along the black complexities of their grain, appearing to admire them as though they were made of the finest marble. Still daunted to a degree, Hota busied himself by straightening the room, picking up carved dragons and stowing them into drawers, dusting his rude furniture with a shirt. Glancing up from these chores, he saw that Magali had taken a seat on the bed and was picking at the folds of her skirt.

  “I’d like a green dress,” she said. “Dark green. Do you have a seamstress in the town?”

  Hota wadded up the dust-covered shirt and tossed it onto a chair. “I think so…yes.”

  She nodded solemnly as if he had imparted a great wisdom and then swung her legs up and lay back on the bed. “I want to sleep for a while. Perhaps we can have something to eat afterward.”

  “The tavern downstairs has food, but it’s not so good.”

  She closed her eyes, let out a sigh, and after a minute or two Hota assumed that she had drifted off; but then, with a sudden violent twisting of her body, she turned onto her side and said, her words partially muffled by the pillow, “Just so long as there’s meat.”

  Their first days together passed uncomfortably for Hota. Magali left the room only to visit the bathroom down the hall and spent much of the time sleeping, as if, he thought, she were acclimating to her new form. When awake she would peer at the boards or sit silently on the bed. Their infrequent conversations were functional, pertaining to things she needed, and if he was not off running errands for her, he sat in the chair and waited for her to wake. The town’s seamstress delivered two dark green dresses. Magali, without thought for modesty, would change from one to the other in full view of Hota and he would feel stirrings of desire. How could he not? He was not used to this sort of display. His wife had gone to bed each night swaddled in layers of clothing, and even the prostitutes with whom he slept would merely hike up their skirts. With its high, small breasts and sleek flanks and long, graceful legs, Magali’s body was a sculptor’s dream of unmarred sensuality. But desire would not catch in him. He was still afraid, his mind too full of questions to permit the increase of lust, and he never ventured near her, sleeping on the floor or in a chair. What, he found himself wondering, was the road they were to travel? Was she truly a dragon recast as a woman, or was this all the result of a trick, a conspiracy of event and moment? And, most urgently, why had any of this happened? How could it be happening?

  Sitting beside her day after day, week after week, Hota grew discontented with his surroundings and thought this might be because Magali’s presence pointed up their shabbiness. He became assiduous in his cleaning, brought in flowers, new cushions for the chairs, and purchased prints to hang on the walls, brightening the long gray space. The footsteps and voices that sounded from the hallway irritated him and to mute them he hung blankets across the door. He dispersed the room’s stale odor with cachets he bought in the market. None of these improvements registered with Magali. For no reason he could grasp, she seemed interested only in the boards. Then one night while she slept, as he was pacing about, he noticed that the grain of the planking looked sharper than before, considerably sharper than could be expected to result from his daily dusting. Curious, he examined them in the light of an oil lamp and discovered that the patterns of the grain had, indeed, grown more pronounced, forming intricacies of dark lines in which it was possible to see almost shape. At least this was his initial impression. As he continued to peer at them, certain shapes came to dominate. He saw narrow wings replete with struts and vanes, sinuous scaled bodies, fanged reptilian heads. A multiplicity of dragons. Every plank bore such images, all cunningly devised. And more were emerging all the time, as if they had been buried beneath gray snow that was now thawing. Holding the lamp above his head, he studied them and began to think he was not looking at many dragons, but at countless depictions of one. There were similarities in the architecture of the scales and the birdlike profile, the…

  “What do you see?”

  Given a start, Hota yipped and spun about to face Magali, who had padded up behind him. Her dress was unbuttoned to her navel, exposing the swell of her breasts, and though her hair was tousled from sleep, her usual neutral stare was not in evidence. She looked animated, excited, and this acted to suppress the anxiety her nearness inspired in him. She repeated her question and he said, “Dragons…or maybe one dragon. I’m not sure. Is that what you see?”

  She ignored the question. “Anything else?”

  “No. Is there more?”

  “There’s no end of things that can be seen.”

  She stepped up beside him and ran a hand along one of the boards, as if caressing it, then pointed at one of the images. “Here. Do you see the way this fang juts out at an angle? What does it remind you of?”

  Uncomprehending, he gazed at the board for the better part of a minute and then he saw it. “Griaule! Is it Griaule?”

  “All this”—she made a sweeping gesture, her voice quavering as with strong emotion—“it’s his life. Ingrained within the trees that sprouted from his back. The entire inn is a record. All his days are written here.”

  So, Hota thought, Benno had not lied. It was difficult to believe. In Hota’s experience, Benno had never exhibited an ounce of physical bravery, and the idea that he would chop down trees on Griaule’s back was laughable. It was equally unlikely that he could have hired anyone to do the cutting for him. Those few who claimed to have set foot upon the dragon spoke of climbing onto the tail—none had trespassed to the degree that Hota himself had. And yet he remembered the way Benno had gaped at Magali. Might that have been a recognition of sorts, evidence that Benno, being more familiar than most with dragons, had sensed her hidden nature?

  “Whatever else there is to see…” Hota said. “Will I see it?”

  “Who knows?” She returned to the bed and as she settled upon it, smoothing out her skirt beneath her, she said, “You’ve seen what’s necessary.”

  “Why’s it necessary for me to see this much and no more? What’s the point?”

  She reclined upon the bed, braced on an elbow. “So you’ll understand the extent of Griaule’s dominion. So you’ll accept it.”

  This half-answer irritated him, but he was not sufficiently confident with her to express anger. “Why is that important? I already know he shapes our lives to some extent.”

  “Knowing a thing is far from accepting it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She put an arm across her eyes and said nothing.

  “Are you saying I need to make an acknowledgment of some sort? Why? Explain it to me.”

  She would say no more on the subject and, shortly thereafter, she asked him to bring food from the tavern. Hota did not care to be treated like a child, given answers that suggested there were things he was better off not knowing—that was how he interpreted her responses—and as he waited for Magali’s food to be prepared, standing by the kitchen door, gazing through smoke and steam at the hubbub generated by two matronly cooks and several grimy children, he thought contemptuously of her. How could he doubt she was who she claimed to be? For all her good looks, the woman behaved like a lizard. Torpid the day long. Rising only to piss and stare at the boards. And the way she ate! She brought to mind geckos back in Port Chantay, clinging to the walls for hours, motionless, before finally flicking out their tongues to snag a mosquito, lifting their…One of the serving boys, carrying a plate of rice and shredded pork into the tavern, brushed against Hota’s hip. Hota snapped at him, then felt badly for having frightened the boy. What was he doing here? he asked
himself. Cohabiting with a woman who had some mysterious plan for him. Languishing in a room where pictures of dragons manifested upon the walls. He should have done with her. With Teocinte. The next time she asked for food, he should take his bag of gems and cash, and head inland. Make for Caliche or cross the country altogether to Point Horizon. But could he leave? That was the question. Would he wander the valley, confused, unable to find his way out, always winding up back in Teocinte? The answer to this question, he decided, was probably yes. He was still caught in the snare Griaule had set for him the day he met Magali. If he were ever able to escape it, he assumed it would be because the dragon was done with him.

  Despite his annoyance, that conversation marked a turning in their relationship. Though she remained less than talkative over the next month, now and then, in addition to asking him for things, she would inquire as to how he felt or, standing at a window, would offer comments on the weather, the unsightliness of the town, or laugh at, say, the misery of a carter whose wheels had gotten stuck in the mud. It appeared she was developing a personality. Mean-spirited, for the most part. Minimal. But a personality nonetheless. She continued her habit of disrobing in front of him and he noticed changes in her body: a faint crease demarking the lower reach of her abdomen; a hint of crowsfeet; the slightest sag to her breasts. Changes that would have been imperceptible to anyone else, but that to a man who had observed her for seven weeks, whose only occupation had been that observation, stood out like mountains on a plain. He wondered if these marks and slackenings signaled the ultimate stage of her transformation and, against the weight of logic, he began to think of her as a woman more often than not. As a consequence, his desire burned hotter, despite an apprehension that such feelings were touched with the perverse.

  During the eighth week of her stay at Liar’s House, Magali became more active, sleeping less, enjoining Hota in conversations that, albeit brief, served to grow the relationship. One night, rather than sending him for food, she suggested that they eat in the tavern. Her suggestion did not sit easily with Hota. Under the best of circumstances, he preferred solitude. Further, he worried that Magali might not react well to being exposed to a crowd. But when they entered the tavern, a low-ceilinged room with the same gray weathered planking, furnished with long benches and tables, lit by lanterns of fanciful design, each consisting of frosted panes held in place by ironwork dragons, they found only five patrons in the place: two prostitutes and their clients dining together, and a burly blond man with a pink complexion and a pudgy, thick-lipped face who was drinking beer from a clay mug. They stationed themselves well away from the others, close to the wall, and ordered wine and venison. Magali sat without saying a word, taking in the scene, and Hota watched her with more than his usual fixity. The din and angry shouts from the kitchen, the laughter of the prostitutes, all the sounds of the tavern receded from him. It seemed that a heartbeat was buried in the orange glow of the lamps, contriving a pulsing backdrop for the woman opposite him, whose bronze skin was in itself a radiant value. He gazed at her thoughtlessly, or else it was a single formless thought that uncoiled through his mind, imposing an almost ritual attentiveness.