The Dragon Charmer (24 page)

“Has he found such a piece?” the girl asks. “A wishing pebble to play with?”

“Maybe. But even
he
will have trouble mastering the possessor. Look into the smoke!”

The visions of Azmodel vanish; the smoke spirals into a vortex, thins into clarity. The spellfire cannot be commanded but its shadow show can be nudged in a chosen direction, if you have the skill. Morgus’s willpower is a subtle instrument, with the driving force of a battering ram, the flexibility of a bullwhip. The fire quails before her.

Deep in the heart of the smoke they see a man climbing a wall. The wall appears at first sheer, then the improving focus shows it strangely curved, bulging toward them. The fascia is constructed of overlapping slates, irregular oblongs, many of them notched and dented, whose projecting edges offer precarious toeholds to the climber. Seen from the back all they know of him is that he is lean, perhaps tall, agile as a lizard, and the long fingers feeling for purchase on this curious surface are black. Not the chocolate or sable of the African races, which is usually called black, but true black unrelieved by any lightening, untinged by color. The climb is short; at the top, the wall is surmounted by a jagged rampart consisting of flat stone slabs, triangular in shape, each apex terminating in an oblique spike, a couple of which have been broken off. The climber pulls himself up between two of the slabs and sits astride, his legs dangling. The wall moves.

The image is expanding; now it seems to fill half the chamber. A seismic ripple heaves across the fascia; sound impinges, the scraping of slate on slate, a creaking as of some vast arthritic limb. And then they see a crumpled leathern structure, ribbed with slender poles like an enormous tent, unfolding slowly into a sweeping fan. The view broadens, and there is the foreleg, its crooked elbow higher than the rampart of spines,
the thick coiling neck, the ridged and battlemented head, sagging beneath its weight of bone. With distance comes a falling into place of details formerly misinterpreted: not slates, but scales, no wall, but the towering flank of the greatest monster of legend. Yet here there is no serpentine speed, no basilisk gaze; the movements are labored, the huge eye closed to a slit, its bloodred deeps glazed as if it is all but blind. The hues of life have faded from the leaden hide: the creature resembles a gigantic hunk of weathered stone, ancient beyond the count of years, crumbling, corroded, brightened only by the occasional patches of lichen that batten on its squamous back. The head swings ponderously from side to side, as if trying to catch a scent long forgotten. It pays no more attention to the invader straggling its spine than to some parasitic insect; possibly it does not even sense he is there. The wings that appear too stiff and venerable for motion, let alone flight, begin to beat, gathering strength from their own momentum, moving faster, faster. And then incredibly, impossibly, the whole massive cumbersome body lifts into the air. The watchers see it not as the dragon rising upward but as the ground falling away beneath: a rocky floor plunging behind obscuring cliffs, the humps and crags of a mountain range heaving in between, then dropping down abruptly to a ragged coastline with white foam frills bordering a cold blue sea. And all the while the stowaway clings on, a dark rider aboard a steed greater and more terrible than any myth could convey.

The picture shifts: they see now with his eyes, the nearest spinal ridge slicing the image in half. Ahead the sun is setting in a yellow smolder between long strips of cloud. Fire sparkles on the sea. They feel the rush of air, hear the booming surge of the wings. Night descends swiftly, and they are soaring higher and higher into a dreamworld of falling stars.

When the sky lightens there are other mountains ahead, the mountains of Elsewhere, snow dabbled, stone shouldered, cloven with hanging valleys, their lower slopes too far below to distinguish clearly, lost in a dizzying vista of height and space. These are the peaks no man has ever climbed, the aeries where no eagle makes its nest. They plummet suddenly into a sickening dive, traversing a natural gateway between two pinnacles of rock, slowing to a drift along the winding
passage of a high gorge delved by a torrent long run dry. Short grasses cling to the slopes like sparse hair, thin soil crumbles to show the bony ground beneath. The cleft widens into a valley with many arms branching to either side, a secretive maze of canyons surrounded by steeps that dwarf even the dragon. Animals do not graze here, nor insects breed, nor birds fly: there is only plant life and stone life. But on the floor of these hidden canyons there is death. For this is the dragons’ graveyard, the place where the old come to find rest, where the slain who have vanished from the world leave their last remains. No archaeologist ever came here to pick through the bleaching bones; the skeletons lie undisturbed, delicate sculptures of mythical proportions, wind cleansed, sun whitened, the eyeless skulls watchful even in their endless stillness. Here the dragon lands, settling into slumber, and the red fades from his orbs, and the quickened pulse beat of his final flight sinks to a flutter, and is lost. The rider scrambles down from his back and looks around, evidently searching for something. His gaze focuses on what appears to be the entrance to a cave on the far side of the valley. He makes his way toward it, surefooted and nimble as a chamois, ducking beneath a scaffolding of tibia and femur and descending a stepladder of tail vertebrae, leaping from rock to rock across the waterless valley bed, climbing the uneven incline to the cave mouth in hungry strides.

The vision follows him inside, down a narrow defile into absolute darkness. He gropes onward, staying close to the wall—they feel the grainy texture of granite under his hand, hear the soft hiss of his breath. It grows warmer. The dark acquires a rubescent tinge; there is a hot sulphurous smell. The passage debouches into a cavern so large the farther walls are lost to view: the floor immediately below curves around in a broad ledge overhanging an unseen chasm; the air trembles in the updraft of heat; wheezing jets of gas shoot toward the distant roof. The lip of the chasm is silhouetted against a burning glow. The intruder walks to the edge, peers over. They see the lake of magma beneath, its surface crawling with torpid ripples and heaving into bubbles that slowly distend and crack, spitting gobbets of fire. The man leans forward as if fascinated or compelled, apparently indifferent to the furnace heat on his
skin. At last he retreats, moving along the ledge to a point where it bulges out into a platform of rock. A giant skeleton is coiled here, the naked fretwork of bones lustered in the flame-light. The passage must have been wider once to admit such a creature, or maybe it found some other way in, now closed. The fragile barrier encircles a shallow depression where a clutch of eggs still remains, their soft shells hardened to porcelain, pristine, undamaged, as if viable life might yet endure within, incubating in the warmth of the earth’s fires. The man negotiates the trellis of ribs, slipping easily between curving struts, and crouches down over the hoard. His outstretched hands are black against their gilded pallor. For the first time the watching girl knows him for a thief.

She can see his face now, a concentration of angles focused into a hard, narrow beauty, intent, obsessive, devious; multiple expressions with but a single thought. His mouth is a compressed shadow; his bent gaze is hidden under the curve of lowered eyelids. He resembles a piece of cubist sculpture, the geometric lines of brow and cheekbone, nose and jaw catching the light like polished basalt. She sees his lips part; the background noise recedes and she hears, as if from very close by, the faint sibilance of escaping breath. His hands linger on one of the eggs, sensing by some specialized intuition its differentness from the others. He wraps it in a thick cloth that he has evidently brought for that purpose and places it in a leather pouch hanging from his belt. For a moment his gaze lifts, and she glimpses his savage exultation, and the eyes that burn with a cold blue flame, like crystals in a spellfire. Then he detaches a legbone from the skeleton, leaving the vestigial body to disintegrate in his wake, and with this makeshift weapon he smashes the remaining eggs. His ferocity is terrible to watch: he crushes the shells into fragments, beats each fetus to a bloody pulp. He shows no pity, no hesitation. When the massacre is over there may be a liquid brilliance in his eye, but the tear—if tear it is—is blinked away unshed. He is not a man for tears.

Observing him, the girl is both mesmerized and repelled. His magnetism is real and potent, reaching her from beyond the magic, yet she feels him to be not merely single-minded but controlled by a single passion, amoral, driven, ruthless in
the pursuit of his goal. He is a spirit of fire, tempered in the inferno, one of dragonkind made the more monstrous, not less, by his human guise, his mortal cunning. “He was clever,” remarks Morgus, as if assimilating her thought. “Clever, beautiful, treacherous. A black ape with a twisted soul and the face of a hero. Do not trust him. He could fool even the spell-fire, at need.”

“Do you know his name?” she asks.

“Ruvindra Laiï. The family was supposed to be an offshoot of one of the great Houses, the descendants of exiles who fled Atlantis during the Fall. They were the dragon charmers: that was their Gift. Monarchs propitiated them, wizards consulted them. Ruvindra was the greatest of his line, but when he knew the dragons were doomed to extinction he sold himself to the Oldest Spirit, or so it is said, that he might have long life and the opportunity to tame the last dragon on earth. With the Old One’s help he stole the egg and placed it somewhere for safekeeping. It did not hatch for many centuries and Ruvindra Laiï slept, waiting, like the princess in the story, for the spell to be broken.”

“Did he get a kiss?” the girl asks, but Morgus does not answer.

“In the world of Time,” she says, “the egg hatched. It might be recently. The charmer charmed, the dragon grew. But the Oldest One took it for his creature—his pet—and Ruvindra was slain: thus the reward for his perfidy.”

“Whom did he betray?”

“Himself. Who knows? Maybe we shall see him here, in next season’s crop of heads. Then you may kiss him, if you will.”

In the smoke he has emerged from the cave, the grave robber, nest raider, slayer of the unborn. Ruvindra Laiï. He stands on the mountainside, calling in Atlantean. A sudden wind arrives, blowing his long black hair. A vulture comes flying from the deeps of the sky, a night-plumed raptor with a twenty-foot wingspan and a purple nevus on its naked head. It lands in front of him, turning immediately into a small, crooked manikin with the same birthmark disfiguring face and scalp. Words pass between them. Then the shape-shifter resumes his bird form and the thief mounts, bearing his
stolen treasure. The vulture gives a harsh croaking scream before rising into the air, cruising the thermals until it is far above the ground, then heading away over the mountains, dwindling rapidly into the blue distance.

The picture changes. Very briefly they make out an old man moving through a vaulted chamber. Perhaps a wine cellar, though they cannot see any wine. His face is invisible in the darkness but the girl knows he is old because she can smell it: the musty, slightly sour smell of an aging body. His flashlight beam roves around, picking out the uneven flags of the floor, the patches of damp on the walls. He locates a cylindrical construction identifiable as a wellhead; it appears far more ancient than the room around it. It is covered with a heavy stone lid. He sets down the flashlight so the beam is pointing his way, though it offers no real illumination. Then he heaves the lid a little to one side, and a red glow spills through the gap, like the glow in the heart of the volcano, and there is a hissing, bubbling noise. For an instant they see him clearly, dyed in the scarlet light, and his face is the face of a corpse. Then the smoke obliterates him, and the images are gone.

The spellfire sinks; Morgus’s voice emerges from the gloom. “The dragon is in the egg,” she says, “and the Stone paring—the splinter that was an heirloom of the exiles—is in the dragon. In Time, it will grow beyond all other beasts. No prison will contain it. Even
he
will be unable to command its obedience. Only a charmer can speak to a dragon.”

But the girl is thinking of the old man, caught briefly in the ruddy glare: the angle of the head, gazing downward; the long-boned skull tapering from hollow temples to angular jaw; the predatory hook of the nose. And the ashen hue of the skin, unwarmed by the fire glow, surely not the result of age but some other factor, perhaps even the diluted effect of a throwback gene …

“Of what race was the dragon charmer” she enquires, “to make his skin so black?”

“It was not his race but his fate,” replies Morgus. “They say one of his forefathers was burnt by the first of the dragons—burnt but not killed—and the blackened hide of his kindred was fireproof ever after.”

“And was it?”

“Maybe,” says Morgus.

“Maybe not,” counters Sysselore, with a laugh coarsened to a cackle in the vacuum of Time. She passes a thin hand above the spellfire, and the flames shrink from her, until they are almost gone.

   Where Morgus is vast and bloated, Sysselore is skeletal. She resembles a mantis, an elongated, insectile creature whose tiny head and attenuated neck appear to have been extruded from her shoulders by a process of enforced growth. The contours of her face recede from the point of her nose toward the furtive chin and pale bulbous eyes. Her hair has thinned to a skein of woolly threads, clinging like a cobweb to anything it touches. Yet at times she retains the vanities of youth and beauty, reddening her lips with cochineal or wearing the rags of diaphanous dresses that reveal her torso: the breasts shriveled into flatness, sunken like empty pouches between ribs and sternum. She often wears two or three garments at once, crisscrossing them with cords and sashes in a far-off caricature of some classical style, braiding the long wisps of her hair and twisting them into haphazard coils on the crown of her head, as if she were a Pre-Raphaelite enchantress. She should be a figure of pathos, inviting pity; but the insect face is too devoid of humanity to inspire compunction and a degenerate soul looks out of her eyes. She is only less dangerous than Morgus as the viper is less dangerous than the black mamba: the one is large, aggressive, disdaining camouflage, the other may hide in a drift of leaves, and strike at you unawares. And the two are ill at ease together for all their long companionship. Sysselore fawns and needles, flatters and jibes, while Morgus appears virtually indifferent, dominating her coven sister without effort whenever necessary. Yet there is an underlying dependence, the need not merely for a confederate in power but a lesser rival, a cheek-by-jowl comrade, someone to impress, to browbeat, to goad and torment. A witch queen cannot rule in a void: she must have subjects. For time outside Time Sysselore has been courtier and counselor, sidekick and slave.