The Redundant Dragons

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  “An avid gardener, Adaham Warlock was noted for his ability to gather and hold energy gleaned from the ground, plants, water and sunlight. He was fond of planting, fertilizing, watering, and weeding but not much for harvesting. His energies were always held in check, waiting for just the right time to bloom.”

  The second shell proclaimed in a rather nasal female voice, “Oh, good with plants, ’e were, but not so much with people. Time was I’d have married him in a heartbeat. Thought he was the perfect man, so smart, so learned, handsome he was and strong too, from all that weedin’, no doubt. He seemed real down-to-earth too, sensible but with an earthy, lusty humor, you know. But alas, turns out he had feet of clay, preferrin’ women he made up himself to the real thing…”

  Verity wondered what on—earth—that meant. Obviously, this part of her collection knew of the local wizard.

  The last one was the most poignant. It was the voice of one of the few remaining witches who remembered the lost wizards.

  So these unremarkable remarks were supposed to hold clues to unlock the magic in the bead, according to Ephemera? Verity wished the descendants the very best of luck with that.

  She stepped into the office again and asked, “Can you at least show me on a map where he was supposed to live and recommend the best way to get there?”

  “There isn’t really a good way, except on horseback, and some places on foot. The Heart Hills lie between here and there and they’re a good deal steeper than the name suggests. At one time it looked as if the railroad would come past there almost to our door, but the company decided expanding east was more important than toward the Horn, as they didn’t figure many sailors, fishers and the assorted folk needed to support them would provide as much commerce as Brazoria and Glassovia.”

  Erotica, rummaged in a desk drawer, extracted a map, and handed it to her before disappearing into the parlor again. The tinkling sound of the pianoforte and laughter penetrated the door.

  Once Erotica left, the ghost cats made themselves at home on the map, the table, the fainting couch and other surfaces. Verity stuck the beads and shells in a little pouch and spread the map out on the table where she’d helped Erotica with the love elixir.

  Studying a map through the haze of feline ectoplasm was unproductive until, as if a breeze had blown them away, the cats crowding the table evaporated.

  Before Verity’s sigh of relief escaped her lips, screams erupted from the upper regions of the house, accompanied by hearty swearing.

  Chapter 9: Feet of Clay

  The cats had found a target.

  Verity poked her head out of the office in time to see Bretwen Bowen, his feet bare and his undone trousers flapping at the waist, running down the stairs followed by Fiona, now perilously robed in a loose garment with leaves embroidered in vinelike patterns all over it. They were being chased by three of the ghost cats, a faded gray tabby, a very pale black, and a diluted ginger, all trying to trip them. Fortunately for the pair, the cats were too insubstantial to present actual obstacles.

  “Brown, call off your beasts!” Mr. Bowen called to her in the loudest voice she’d ever heard him use.

  “They’re not mine,” she called back, turning to pick up a broom she’d noticed propped in a corner beside what she assumed was a water closet. “They don’t obey me or anybody else, as far as I can tell.” She intercepted her crewmate, Fiona, and the cats, and brushed right through the gray and the black with the broom.

  They gave her reproachful glances that clearly said, “Really?”

  “There’s one on my head,” Bowen said, swiping both hands through the ginger one as it clung to his skull and tried to lick him between the eyes. “Get it off.”

  “You can see them?” she asked.

  “I can feel this one!” he said.

  “Stop clawing my gown!” Fiona told the cats, slapping at her skirt in an attempt to disperse them.

  Mr. Bowen, still swiping at his head, told her, “I’ll make it up to you, darlin’, I will, as soon as she,” he swiped his head in Verity’s direction while his cat chapeau, she could have sworn, grinned at her, “rids us of them.”

  Verity shrugged, “Sorry, Mate, they may be ghosts, but they’re cats and neither you nor I will make them go where they don’t want to go. I don’t suppose you have relatives from this area, do you, Mr. Bowen?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m guessing then that the cats are wanting introductions.”

  Cousin Clodagh

  The cats hadn’t bothered Mr. Bowen while on shipboard, nor had they previously paid much mind to Fiona, but suddenly the phantasmal felines haunted both of them with such relentless pestering that both parties agreed to go with Verity.

  “What is it the kitties know about you two that I don’t?”

  “Er—well—” Fiona began, when the three of them were tucked away in Aunt Erotica’s business drawing room, tastefully decorated with red brocade wall coverings and gold painted babies with wings and archery equipment. “I suppose you’re wondering how I came to be here.”

  “It had crossed my mind,” Verity said. “I wondered if one of my royal cabinet might have gotten you in a family way.” Which was a polite way of asking if she were pregnant.

  “No, though not for want of trying. But actually, I grew up around here. My mother worked here before she met my father and became the lady of the manor. We have a castle-y sort of house back in the Horn Heart, but since my parents died it’s gone to ruin. I thought the job at the palace would help me get it in shape to either live there or sell, but repairs are very expensive. This job is the quickest way to earn a new roof and modern plumbing I know of.”

  “Besides, you saw me around sometimes when we were younger and liked the cut o’ me jib, didn’t you, Lady?” Bowen asked, teasing.

  “That and your modest demeanor,” Fiona agreed.

  “So you come from this area too, Mr. Bowen?” Verity asked. It was hardly surprising that one of the crew and one from the palace might be from this place. Argonia was a large land; except for Queenston, it was not heavily populated. The few habitable places held small families or small communities, in some cases business interests, but sooner or later, the people from those places ended up in Queenston, at least once, at least for a short time.

  “Aye. This was my Da’s homeport ‘til he stopped coming home at all. Lost at sea, we figured, Ma and me. Now she’s gone too, him returned to the water and she to the soil so I haven’t been back until this trip. I’ve got only one odd cousin remaining somewhere in the Horn Heart.”

  “The cats seem inclined to go there,” she said, and explained about the beads, shells and cats. Before she was halfway through her explanation, they both agreed to go with her and by the end of the following day, their rented horses were picking their way along snow-choked mountain trails.

  The ghost cats seemed somewhat mollified to be moving in what they appeared to consider the right direction, but nonetheless they continued to make general nuisances of themselves, weaving through the horses’ hooves, sitting between their ears, and trotting off the trail to sit in mid-air and stare at the travelers.

  “Tell me more about this relative of yours,” Verity said.

  Bowen scratched his chin, recently relieved of the brushy beard he’d sported on shipboard. “My cousin Clodagh. Bit of an embarrassment to the family, what’s left of it. Daft as a brush. Supposed to be the offspring of the wizard who was skipper of all wizardly things around here.”

  “But people say that wizards are a thing of the past,” Verity said, wondering if that opinion was quite as widespread as she’d supposed it to be. Perhaps magic was not quite so out of fashion here as in the city?

  “Officially, Missy, but wizards don’t care about official.”

  “Really?”

  “One of my great-aunties married one, and I could tell you stories…”

  “Oh, I wish you would!” Verity said.

  “Well, I could if I re
membered half of them. I left home and shipped aboard a freighter when I was fifteen, after my poor widowed mam remarried a scoundrel who had no use for an extra mouth to feed. She it was who knew of the cousin, but when I was small, I had a granny on her side of the family too, and she always told me when I got dirty or muddy that I reminded her of great-uncle Adaham. She never said why actually. Just give me these side-eyed knowin’ looks and nodded to herself.”

  Verity wondered why the cats hadn’t bullied him before if he was one of the people they were looking for. Did they realize he was of no use to them on shipboard?

  “That’s funny,” Fiona said. “I’ve a daft cousin of the same name who lives out here, too.” She and Bowen exchanged an alarmed look, and both said, “Ewwww.” A mutual cousin, however distant, was not quite distant enough for the activity that had brought them together.

  “How so?” Verity asked.

  “I’m told she lives alone in a cottage outside the village. She’s not a blood cousin, of course, but I suspect I’ve run out of that kind.”

  When at last they beheld the village and ventured into it, they found that their mutual Cousin Clodagh was held in less than high esteem. People spat over their shoulders or wrinkled their noses before speaking about her.

  “Her’s peculiar,” the blacksmith confided. “Comes from magical doings, her does. Not that her’s the sparkly type.”

  “No?” Verity asked. “What type is she, then?”

  The blacksmith grinned, his teeth white as bleached bones against his sooty, sweaty face. “The earthy type, I’d say, Missy. Very down-to-earth is our Clodagh. Takes after the old wizard, they do say, him that disappeared at the end of the Great War. Made her first, though. And here her stays, lookin’ no older now than she did when I were a lad.”

  The blacksmith directed them to the edge of town where foothills backed up against the mountains on the opposite side of the basin cupped in the heart of the peninsula called the Horn.

  They were still a quarter of a mile from the entrance when the ghost cats streaked off and disappeared into the hill.

  The heiress apparent to great wizardry emerged from the interior of the hill looking as if she were carrying a large portion of it in the form of stacks of plates held by each hand, cups dangling from her fingers by their handles, and a pyramid of bowls on her head. They rattled with a deeper and more resonant rattle than the shells.

  “Cousin Clodagh?” Fiona said. “You may not remember me, but I used to live nearby as a girl. This is our cousin Bowen. You won’t know him. He’s never lived here, but him and his crew are moored up at our place in the port. This is Miss Verity, a friend of his.”

  “Perhaps your cousin would like to relieve herself of her wares before we talk, Fiona,” Verity suggested, while Clodagh stared wordlessly at them.

  Without acknowledgment or invitation from Clodagh, they followed her into a mud brick house, where she proceeded to divest herself of the pottery. Fiona stepped forward, taking a stack of plates from the woman, and plucking cups from her fingers. Verity followed suit by removing the bowls from her head, revealing plastered looking ditchwater-brown hair. It was dim inside the house, but Clodagh’s appearance was remarkable, though her features were somewhat blunted, and she was uniformly brown. The Brown side of Verity’s family had a penchant for the color, but no one Verity had ever heard of was brown in the way Clodagh was. Brown as mud, as dirt, as clay.

  “You’ll have to do the talkin’, dearie,” Fiona told Verity. “Clodagh’s mute, aren’t you, love?”

  Verity looked reproachfully at Fiona. She might have thought that worth mentioning at some previous point in their journey.

  Clodagh evidently remembered Fiona, but looked askance at Verity and Bowen, plainly waiting for them to state their business and leave. She wasn’t exactly unfriendly. She left no impression of a personality at all, actually. Verity had never encountered anyone like her. She sensed something was quite wrong with her, apart from her inability to speak, but since she did not know what that was, and everyone seemed agreed that she was Adaham Warlock’s heir, Verity took the bead and the string of shells from her pocket.

  “Mistress Clodagh, some time ago I was captured by dragons—well, I won’t go into that—and subsequently found a cave in swampland that proved to be both crime scene and final resting place of your kinsman, Adaham Warlock. As a result of these experiences, I have with me a bead that contains some of the remnants of the Wizard Warlock’s magic. I’ve been entrusted with the task of returning his legacy to you, and…”

  Clodagh stuck out her hand. Verity dropped the bead and the shells into it. Clodagh dropped the shells into a pocket and stuck the bead in her mouth.

  Then she said, “How good of you to come so far to bring this to me. I have not until now had need of food or drink, but perhaps you would be my guests at our little inn? I need to deliver some of these dishes to them and feel sure that they would be glad to barter a few plates and bowls for our meals.”

  “I guess you weren’t joking about that bead being magic!” Fiona said with a low whistle.

  At the one small table the inn offered its customers, Clodagh treated them to food and drink and explained. “Had you not brought my master’s magic home to me, I would have remained a mute brute forever, without purpose or guidance. I have lived so long among humans that it has long been a matter of wonder to me that I am not one—and how I am not one. The bead informs me that I am a creature of clay—a golem, but by its power, I am now a truly living creature.”

  “I knew you were old, but I thought you were one of our ancestors somehow or other, even though you’re a cousin,” Bowen said.

  “In truth, I am no cousin to either of you, and am blood kin only because my maker’s blood, blood he shared with your line, was used in my creation. I was a golem, a magically mechanized servant, if you will. I served my master while he was here and his family when he was gone. Since his wife died some years before he made me, when I appeared most folk thought he had taken me as his second wife, but that was not the case.”

  “The shells tell us a little about the wizard,” Verity said. “Could you perhaps tell us more?”

  That proved to be the wrong thing to ask, as the former golem, who had heard speech and ideas expressed all around her for generations, could not stop talking once she started.

  She talked until the innkeeper moved them out, and long after Verity, Fiona and Bowen fell asleep from the exhaustion of their trip, she continued talking. Just before she lost consciousness, Verity had enough presence of mind to hand her unrecorded shells and urge her to speak into them, recording her information for the Seashell Archives.

  The Golem’s Story

  “I have sometimes heard foolish women say that they live for a man and for him alone, as if it was a good thing or a noble thing. They have no idea what they’re talking about. I was made to live for one man and him alone, to do his bidding, to do his work, to protect him and his family, by a human woman. No thought was given to me, to what I wanted or needed. I was expected to have no desires or needs, except to serve.”

  “I’m sure you were very good at it,” Bowen said, not a bit helpfully. Verity felt Clodagh bridle.

  “What was it that you wanted?” Verity asked.

  “What all the others had from him—if not love, affection—or at least, appreciation. I tried to tell him not to go to that so-called conference, the one he never returned from, but although he knew how to tell me what he needed from me, he didn’t seem to understand what I needed from him when I needed him to do it. He ignored my pleading as if I were a broom or a mop.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Fiona said sympathetically. “You mustn’t take it personal, like. They are all like that with us, even if we talk.”

  “Hey!” Bowen protested.

  “It’s true. Even with Mistress Erotica’s elixir, it still never occurs to them to wonder what they might do for us other than pay—and payment should be enough.”

 
; “I never was paid,” Clodagh said. “Never until now, when you brought me this bead, girl.”

  “I’m—er—glad it’s what you needed. And perhaps what the wizard needed.” She noticed that one of the ghost cats had curled up in Clodagh’s lap where she sat on the earthen floor that matched the rest of her so well.

  “Does my speech sound stiff—rusty, perhaps?” Clodagh asked. “I’m surprised to find I have a voice at all.”

  “It’s a good voice,” Verity assured her. “A bit deep as a lady’s voice goes, throaty, perhaps that is from the disuse, but not unpleasing. I wonder—can you sing?”

  “How would she know?” Fiona demanded. “We just now heard her first words ever. You heard her say as clear as I did.”

  “True,” Verity said. “But singing is very important in record-keeping and spell casting and you might do well to try it.”

  “You can do it, cousin,” Bowen said encouragingly. “Everyone in our crew of uneducated louts sings. It’s easy. Here, I’ll start one:

  “Wind or steam, sail or fire

  “Sail or fire, wind or steam,

  “Dragon boiled, or tempest tossed

  Our ship will ply the seas.”

  “Deep inside the Belle’s own shell

  The dragon made a living hell

  To haul our cargo for to sell

  And keep us sailors well.”

  Clodagh caught the second chorus and sang along like a schoolgirl repeating something she had learned by rote, her tone flat and monotonous.