The Dragon Charmer (37 page)

At last they enter a large grotto where the river cleft broadens to form what must have been a pool. Fountains of petrified carbonate spill over the rim; the walls are ribbed with cascades of thick pale stone. Above the center of the pool, the roof swoops downward into a single massive stalactite, many-tiered and gleaming like a huge natural chandelier. And there is sound—real sound, not the subsilent mutterings of voices
long stilled. Soft but very clear, filling the endless quiet of the Underworld. The sound of water.

On the farther side of the pool a small spring bubbles out of the rock, spilling into a basin hollowed out over the ages from which it must formerly have overflowed into pool and river. Now there must be a fissure in the basin through which it drains away, for little collects there although the flow appears constant. Its few pellucid notes seem to Fern, in that place where Death himself has moved out, to be the most beautiful sound she has ever heard.

They skirt the pool, drawing nearer. The water is unclouded, pure and clear as liquid light. “May we drink?” she asks Kal.

His dark ugliness softens briefly with a kind of saturnine amusement. “No! Have you forgotten all you ever knew? You should neither drink nor eat here, if you would leave. Next you will be demanding a pomegranate to nibble. But in any case, this is no ordinary spring. It is the Well of Lethe, the waters of Oblivion. One drink, and your spirit will be cleansed of care and sorrow, love and hatred and pain. A second, and all memory will be drained; a third, and your soul is suspended in nirvana. Long ago, many drank deep from the spring and bathed in the pool, washing away the burdens of the past, and their vacant minds were filled with the gentleness of death. Only so could they pass the Gate, and hope for rebirth, or so I was told.”

“Is
there rebirth?”

His face twists into a scowl. “Who knows? Ask of the Ultimate Powers, not of me. If they exist. Mortals have hope. I—do not.” He pauses beside the spring, turns toward her with a sudden change of mood. “One drink to erase all griefs, to ease heartache, and loneliness, and loss. Does it tempt you, Fernanda? Has grief ever marked that cold little face? Do you indeed have no heart to ache?”

“Grief is easy to recall,” she answers. “Is there a drink to blot out the memory of happiness? The human heart is strong to bear all things, save only that.”

Kal stares at her, baffled, but says no more. They enter a crooked passage leading out of the cave, and the music of Lethe fades behind them.

The passage descends in an erratic series of inclines, awkward and hazardous. The light has been squeezed out and only its dregs remain, insufficient to show the fluctuations in the slope. Fern misses her footing often, blundering against the walls. She may be spirit, not substance; yet she still seems to feel the bruises. Beyond the tunnel there is another cavern, another ravine. Already she is disorientated by the vastness of the place—by the sourceless light that blurs outlines and confounds distance, by the quiet, more a lull than a silence, pregnant with the unheard voices of the dead. She peers into the ravine, expecting another dry riverbed, but instead there is a black torrent of rock, its surface swollen with misshapen waves, seamed with the cracks of long cooling. Rags of vapor issue from these cracks, white foggy wisps that hang motionless on the air or are tugged hither and thither by intangible drafts. Some begin to assume forms that are blown away before they come to completion, not horses or trees but other things less pleasant. The chasm is bridged by a single arch, apparently man-made, its stonework inset with carvings that echo the unfinished shapes in the mist, grasping hands and half-formed faces whose lineaments are twisted with pain. The bridge is broad and easily crossed, though there are gaps among the stones where fragments of masonry have broken away. On the far side two tall pillars stand sentinel, black and ominous against the paler gloom beyond. They resemble the trunkless limbs of some vanished colossus. The ruins of what might have been a wall extend along the border of the ravine; between the pillars, the remnants of great gates sag from their hinges, shrunken to calcined panels, warped in fires now withered to ash. Strands of mist vacillate toward the columns and spiral around them.

“This was the River of Fire,” says Kal. “It has been cold now for many ages, though somewhere far below, maybe, you might still feel the heat of the ancient world. The bridge leads to the Region of Hel, by some called Tartarus, the Dungeons of Death. The wall is fallen now, the gates rusted. Only the ghosts remain. Be wary, little witch. They are strongest here, strong with remembered pain. Most of the spirits have departed from the Gray Plains, but few of those who were bound in the pits of Hel could ever leave. Their souls are
rotted with evil: the phantoms that endure are empty of all but hunger and the memory of torment. Close your ears and your heart against them; this is no place for pity.”

They pass between the twisted gates; ahead, the way lies through a complex warren of caves. The light is diminished here, as though shrinking from sights it has no wish to illuminate, and shadows cluster thickly on either side. The roof is obscured; the occasional stalactite extruding from the darkness like an accusing finger. As they approach one of them it writhes into serpentine life, rearing its head and hissing; but Kal ignores it and Fern follows his example, walking on by with only a sidelong glance. The whispers have started again, nudging at the outer limits of hearing. And gradually she begins to fancy she hears footsteps, hurrying, hurrying on their trail. She is seized with a desperate urge to turn, neither a reflex nor the prompting of her own will but a feeling that seems to come from outside, insinuating itself into her brain, pulling her like compulsion. She thrusts it away, using her Gift, forcing it to relinquish its grip on her thought. For a brief space the tongueless voices dwindle as if disheartened; but the footsteps do not relent. She says nothing to Kal, trying to convince herself they are an illusion that only she can hear.

Now they are traversing one of the larger caverns. Mist devils chase after them, hovering beside their path, and there is a sound of sighing, a thin gray noise somewhere between a breath and a moan, inexplicably malevolent. “Look!” says Kal. “This was the chamber of punishment. There is the Chair, the Well of Thirst, the Wheel.” Fern sees them indistinctly among a bewilderment of shadows: the looming contours of an empty seat, the mouth of a pit, the wheel’s giant arc. The sighing intensifies, becoming a mournful buzz that bores inside her head, and suddenly she can make out the torn flesh and bone adhering to the arms of the Chair, the glint of undrinkable water in the Well, the blood dripping down the spokes of the Wheel. “There’s nothing here now,” Kal says, and she rubs her eyes to dispel the fantasy, and when she looks again there is only a crumbling stone slab, a primitive hub ringed with broken prongs, a hole in the ground. As they move on the footsteps resume, nearer now and louder, almost as if they were in the next cave. Fern can distinguish two different
sets: a light, uneven pattering and a smoother, more regular pace, swift as the wingbeats of a bird. A picture comes into her mind, unwanted and disturbing: Morgus, striding along with her rapid, gliding motion, and the mantislike figure of Sysselore following at her heels. “Kal,” she murmurs hesitantly, “can
you
hear footsteps?”

“I heard them a way back, when they left the first passage. My ears are sharper than yours, and I haven’t let them become clogged with sounds that aren’t there. I didn’t think sweet dreams would hold my mother long. They have already crossed the Gray Plains; they are gaining on us.” His tone is flat, devoid of expression, but the set of his mouth is taut.

“They sound so
near”
Fern says, wishing she hadn’t. More than ever she needs to turn, and see …

“The acoustics are strange here. Don’t let them deceive you.” He adds, with what might be incredulity: “Morgus heard you laughing. I think—it
hurt
her. It really hurt.”

They leave the cave via an archway partially blocked by a rockfall. Kal slides like a snake through the narrow gap; Fern wriggles after him. “Morgus will never get through there,” she says.

“Don’t believe it,” Kal responds. “She could pour herself through a keyhole, if she wished.”

The footsteps are always with them now.

   The path ascends steeply until it becomes an actual stair, winding upward. On either side infrequent apertures reveal slender vistas of the caves beyond, clumps of stalagmites like sprouting forests, the dried-up cavities of long-lost pools. Once, near at hand, the furtive light touches a hook embedded in the rock above a curved recess. “A cauldron hung there,” Kal says, following the direction of Fern’s gaze, “but it was stolen many ages ago. All stories meet here. This is the realm of Annwn, Hades, Osiris, Iutharn. You find here the myths you expect, or so it used to be.”

“So why do we find—all this?” Fern enquires.

“These are the relics of other people’s dreams,” Kal answers. “The dreams of the dead.”

They enter another cavern, vaulted like a great hall, lofty and long. At the far end the floor rises into a curiously shaped
outcrop: as they advance Fern sees steps etched deep in the rock, and above them a structure that appears to be made of four or five huge slabs, piled together in the form of a throne. The slabs resemble rough-hewn sarsens; the throne itself is massive, crude, like something not carved but riven from the earth’s core, ancient beyond the annals of history, impregnated with forgotten potency. Rock dust sifts across the pedestal; mist ghosts drift around the high back, avoiding the emptiness that sits between its stony arms. It generates an awe that even abandonment cannot disperse. In its vicinity the whispers die away, and despite the pursuing footfalls Fern halts and gazes, half in fear, half in wonder, until Kal’s impatience drives her onward. “We cannot linger,” he says. “The dark king is long gone; he has not been worshiped for a thousand generations. Come!”

“Ah, but we remember,” she says. “Not all immortals were like Azmordis. Legend says he weighed the truth of the soul on his enchanted scales.”

“He is gone,” Kal reiterates, “and so must we, if you would live. Morgus is on the bridge over the Fiery River; I hear the echo of her footfalls in the ravine. Hurry!”

They hurry. Cavern leads into cave, passage into passageway. The following steps grow ever closer; now it seems to Fern they are only yards behind. It requires a constant effort of will not to turn and look. At last they emerge from a broad tunnel into a space without visible roof or farther wall. The last of the light is spread thinly through its vastness. Below them stretches the still expanse of a river—the boundary of the Underworld, the final barrier on their journey to reality. The watermark on the rocks shows the level has sunk, but it remains wide and deep, colder than ice, though Kal says it never freezes, with a cold that bites not merely to the bone but to the heart. The surface is the color of iron; ponderous ripples travel slowly downstream, barely touching the nearer bank.

But immediately before them the darkness lies across their path in a solid bar. Haste makes Fern incautious: she brushes against it, and feels coarse fur; belatedly she recognizes an outstretched forelimb, thick as a young tree, a giant paw with claws twisted from the creeping growth of centuries in hibernation.
To the right she can distinguish a looming mass the size of an elephant: the mound of a head, the slumped ridge of a body. It might be one of the hounds of Arawn, grown to impossible proportions, bound forever in enchanted sleep. But as she touches it she seems to hear a sudden intake of breath, the mound shifts a fraction of an inch, a faint muscular spasm quickens the extended leg … “Don’t do that!” hisses Kal. “This is the Guardian. Time was, not an ant might have passed him by. Walk softly; he may hear you in his dreams.”

They steal around him, down to the river. There is no bridge, but a narrow boat is drawn up in the lee of the rock. The footsteps accelerate: Fern hears the scratching of cloth on stone, the whisper of gossamer. An eager panting is hot on the nape of her neck. Involuntarily, she starts to turn…

But Kal holds her, hands clamped around her skull, his eyes red with a dull anger.

“She’s there! She’s behind me! I can feel her!” I can
feel
her, very close to me, a dreadful gloating presence, fat slug fingers reaching toward me. She’s there.
She’s there
. I
know
it

“They’re in the last tunnel. Get in the boat, and don’t look back. Not now, when we’ve come so far. Not till the other side.
Don’t look back!”

He jumps down into the boat, half lifting, half pulling her in after him. She folds up in the bow, weak and stupid with panic, keeping her gaze fixed desperately on the farther bank. She hears the creak and splash of the pole, senses the drag of the current against the prow. The chill off the water makes her muscles ache. As they move forward, the footsteps recede a little. Ripple by ripple, the bank draws nearer.

And then at last the boat is nudging against rock, and she is scrambling ashore, but the low overhang defeats her, and her knees give. She can see her hands, clutching safety, but they have not the strength to draw her body after them. Then Kal is there, seizing her by the arms, swinging her onto the bank, and for a moment she is pressed close to his chest, feeling matted hair and knotted sinew, inhaling the animal odor that was stifled in the Underworld, the smell of sweat and life and warmth. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I lost my head.”

“Morgus got inside it.”

Morgus…

Now
Fern can turn and look, and there she is, poised at the river’s edge, her figure diminished with distance but no less grotesque, her robes molting embroidery, her black hair raveled into a corona. Even at that range Fern can see the wet glistening of her skin, like the sheen on an oyster. Her lower lip moves though the upper is frozen in a snarl; one outflung hand points to the river just below the bank in a gesture that is vaguely familiar. Sysselore crouches at her side, like a bundle of twigs wrapped in cobwebs. Fern’s start of warning comes too late: the painter unwinds from the rock where Kal had looped it and slips like an eel into the stream, and the boat retreats steadily away from them. The pole is still shipped; the leaden waters divide reluctantly in its wake. There is a long moment while they stand as though mesmerized. Already Sysselore is reaching for the prow. Fern thinks: I am Morcadis, Morcadis the witch, but all her witchcraft is drained from her, and she searches in vain for the inspiration of power, for a spell, a word…