The Dragon Charmer (23 page)

Gus was still hesitating on the verge of departure, his raincoat hanging off one shoulder, the shabby satchel in which he had packed his Walkman dumped back on the floor. “Look, if you need me,” he said abruptly, “I can make other arrangements for the boys. This is more important. If there’s anything—”

“Do your job,” said Ragginbone with a sudden crooked smile. “Pray.”

When the vicar had gone Ragginbone bent over Fern for a while, adjusting the wisp of gossamer looped about her neck, lifting a fallen eyelid, studying the frozen features with the passionate absorption of an archaeologist poring over a vintage mummy. As the archaeologist seeks to reconstruct a long-forgotten life from a plethora of tiny clues, so Ragginbone sought to uncover not life but death, to follow the trail of the absent spirit through the gateway of a mind in stasis. It was more than an hour before he straightened up, his back stiff with bending, his face seamed with the lines of vain effort. He had caught only echoes of Fern, glimpses of dream and danger that did nothing to lighten his mood. He had wandered down long, dark tunnels of thought, calling her name, hearing his own voice coming back to him, seeing at rare moments a shadow slipping around a corner or an image of the tunnel’s end, too remote for certainty, too fleeting to pin down. Once he might have recalled her, even from the outer reaches of being; but he no longer had the power, and Moon-spittle, he knew, would be too ineffectual a tool for such a conjuration. “I can only watch,” he repeated, half out loud, and the nurse who had heard the murmur if not the words told a colleague she had always guessed he was a bit mad, dressing like a tramp and muttering to himself: she couldn’t understand why they allowed him to be left alone with the patient. But when another nurse went in to check on him, Ragginbone was sitting in silence, his face somber with thought, and she retreated without comment or question, feeling her presence an intrusion.

Robin arrived around three in the morning. “Mrs. Wicklow told me you were here,” he said. “Glad to see you. Don’t like Fern left alone.”

“She mustn’t be,” Ragginbone impressed on him. “Stay awake. Watch her constantly. I have a feeling something may happen soon.” What kind of a feeling it was, hope or fear, he did not specify.

But Robin had gone beyond optimism. “Will and Gaynor haven’t come home,” he went on. “Don’t remember them saying they’d be away for the night. Not too happy about that.”

“Lougarry will look after them,” said Ragginbone, but the cloud on his brow grew darker, and his eyes were anxious.

   Saturday made no difference to the sickroom: here, every day, every hour was the same. Dawn faded the lamplight: in the gray pallor of morning the face on the pillow looked more deathly than ever, and on the heart monitor the pulse beat seemed fainter and slower. Medical staff came and went with disquieting solemnity. Ragginbone snatched a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in the waiting area, Robin returned to Dale House for a hasty lunch; but most of the time they were both there, sharing the vigil as if by unspoken accord, one dozing, one waking, making no conversation, finding a meager solace in their tacit companionship. They made a strange couple, the old man and the middle-aged one, the mentor and the father, seated on opposite sides of the bed, and between them under the white coverlet the slight outline of the girl. Once Robin said: “She was never any trouble, you know. No drugs. No undesirable boyfriends. Studied hard at school, did well at college, successful at work. No trouble.”

“There are so many kinds of trouble,” sighed Ragginbone.

There was no word from Will and Gaynor, no sign of Lougarry. Shortly after five Marcus Greig telephoned at some length; Robin took the call in the nurse’s office. “Says he’s driving up tomorrow,” he reported afterward. “Bit of a token gesture, if you ask me. Gone one moment, back the next, just like a bloody jack-in-the-box. What I mean is, if he’d really cared, he’d have stayed. All along.” And, after a pause of several minutes: “He didn’t deserve her.”

“He didn’t get her,” said Ragginbone.

“Don’t want him here,” Robin said with less than his customary tolerance. “Bit of a bugger, having him faffing around all the time. Talks too much.” Another long pause. “Still, Abby’s coming, too. She’ll deal with him. Wanted to come sooner, but I said no. Got her job—house to run—all that. Didn’t think it was necessary to have both of us here. Suppose … I thought Fern would have come round by now.”

“She’ll come round soon,” said Ragginbone. He had never heard of positive thinking, but he knew when it was important to lie.

The change came suddenly, no slight twitching this time but a violent motion that brought both men to their feet. The body stiffened as if in a convulsion; a flush of scarlet stained the pale cheeks; beads of sweat burst from the skin. The bedding was soaked in seconds. On the monitor, the pulse line shot into overdrive, zigzagging wildly across the screen. Yet the face remained immobile, lifeless, as if Fern were a mere puppet, a thing of wood and string and paint, tormented by the manipulations of an invisible puppeteer. Beside Ragginbone the left hand clenched abruptly into a fist—spasms ran up the arm—there was a smell of singed flesh. Robin thrust his head into the corridor, calling for help, and when he looked back the body was still again, the limbs flaccid, and the pulse had decelerated to an occasional blip, and only the fist was left, knuckles locked into rigidity, to indicate the strength of the seizure. The nurse came running just as the Watcher prized the fingers open. Robin gave a cry of horror and distress; even Ragginbone was unable to check his instinctive recoil. For the exposed palm was burned—burned almost to the bone. Ragged ends of skin peeled away from the underside of the fingers; cracks split the flesh, filling with blood. The nurse went white and bolted in search of a doctor. Robin said: “Dear God. Dear God,” over and over again, and: “Water. We should get some water. She must be in agony—”

But Fern’s face showed nothing at all.

Part Two
        
Dragoncraft

X

There is no Time here, beneath the Tree. She has no memory of arriving, or of any journey in between; her memories belong all to that other place, the place where they lived by Time. Dimly she recalls growth, change, constant motion—the wearing out of the body, the swift onset of death. Nothing kills like Time. Here, day and dark are mere simulations, meaningless counterpoints in an endlessly repeated tune, and the many seasons of the Tree go around and around like a carousel, returning always whence they began. Sysselore tells her you can see the same leaves unfurling, fading, falling, season upon season, to the tiniest detail of the veins. Even some of the heads are the same, ripening only to rot, rotting only to swell and ripen as the wheel comes around again. There is no progress here, only stasis.

It is dark in the cave under the Tree, the cave of roots. Thick tubers form the walls, twisted into pillars, curling overhead to shape the irregular coves and hollows of the roof. In places the stems grope downward like stalactites, tentacles of living fiber, and everywhere they are covered with hair-thin filaments that suck nourishment from their surroundings, bristling if you pass too close as if sensing the approach of food. In the center is a giant radix, gnarled and convoluted like a fossilized serpent from a prehistoric age, its lower section split down one side to form a natural flue. The root is blackened from the spellfire but not damaged: the Tree is impervious to such things. Apart from the wan glimmer of the fire crystals that smolder almost continuously, there is little other light. Fluorescent growths cling to some of the tubers and squirming larvae are suspended in shallow bowls from hooks
on the walls, emitting erratic pulses of greenish wormshine. They are the caterpillars of an indigenous moth: Sysselore says you must remember to dispose of them at the chrysalis stage, otherwise the moths hatch out, as big as your hand, and fly into the spellfire and burn with a black malodorous fume that disrupts the magic.

Furniture is scanty: there are a few chairs and a table made of dead wood, their shapes following the original warp of bark and bough; blankets of coarse-textured cloth; cushions stuffed with dried grass. Beetles gnaw the wood, mites burrow in the cushions. In a niche between the roots there is a cooking fire of leaf mold and twigs, all but flameless. In another recess a trickle of water descends, more a drip than a spring, funneled from somewhere high up on the Tree where the rains can reach, collecting in a basin-shaped dip below. She washes there, though the others rarely do so. Their smell merges with the smell of the Tree, becoming a part of it, filling the cave with a dank vegetal fetor; but she is accustomed to it and hardly notices it anymore.

The gleam of the spellfire oscillates over the roots, folding the shadows into creases, making the walls writhe with a strange tuberous animation. A face looms over her, a pale moon face atop a swollen mound of anatomy, crested with thick clots and tangles of hair. The flesh has a semiliquid texture, rippling and bulging in search of a shape to which it can conform; somewhere within, there must be a substructure of muscle and bone, but the outer mass seems to bear no relation to it, enwrapping the skeleton like a vast unstable blancmange. The features are unfixed: the mouth is stretched into a rapacious hole bordered with lip; the nose is curiously flattened; the nostrils have sunk deep into the face. The thick-lidded eyes have a luminous quality like the eyes of an animal, the whites iridescent, the iris almost as dark as the pupil. The skin is perfectly smooth, pale as milk, glistening here and there with a thin sheen of mucus. Garments once rich and sumptuous billow around the monstrous figure: velvet molted into baldness, fraying clumps of embroidery. Their colors have dimmed to a murky sameness, their outline adapted to their occupant, sagging and shrinking with every movement. She is Morgus, witch queen, self-anointed the
greatest of her kind. Power oozes from her pores like perspiration, and the proximity of it is more stifling than any stench. But the girl does not shrink from her. Her hate is a minute red ember deep inside, something she feels but does not know, hiding it in the darkness of her heart, feeding it on morsels, until the moment comes when she is ready to blow it into a flame.

Together they watch the spellfire and study the ancient lore. They see the phantoms dancing in Azmodel; they see potbellied satyrs and fauns with whiteless eyes and nimble feet, winged sylphids clinging mosquitolike to their prey, and other creatures grotesque beyond the design of Nature or werekind. In the Garden of Lost Meanings, plant tendrils hook the ankles of unwary revelers, snapdragons nip their extremities, bee orchids unsheath deadly stings. Above the rainbow lakes a phoenix circles, shedding firedust from its wings; but it does not come down to feed. “See!” says Morgus.
“He
sleeps no longer. He has come back for his revenge: he wants you to die slowly, and suffer long. We were barely able to save you in time.”

“I do not fear him,” says the girl.

“That is well,” says Morgus. “The only person you should fear is me.”

His plans are deep laid, his nets spread wide. He has been plotting and weaving for thousands of years, shape-shifting from demon to deity, infusing his strength into a throng of ambulants, whispering his words through empty mouths. Some schemes are abandoned, leaving loose ends to unravel through history, others grow, becoming ever more intricate, meshing strand with strand in tortuous designs of inscrutable complexity. There is a pattern to existence, or so they say, a current of events; but Azmordis aims to direct the current and weave patterns of his own. And somewhere in one of those labyrinthine webs the girl senses there is a single thread that leads to her. It is a thing she feels without knowing, like the hate.

“He has always yearned to control the Lodestone,” says Morgus, watching the smoke. “Envy gnaws him, the sharp end of fear. Are we not Prospero’s Children, mortals with immortal powers? He shows wisdom in such envy if in nothing
else. He sought the key over many centuries, he seeks the other fragments even now. He cannot touch the Stone—it is alien to him—but he sought to dominate it through Alimond, through you. He has never understood its nature. It is a part of us, a force that runs in our
blood
. We do not need to rush around hunting the pieces like beggar brats looking for wishing pebbles.”