The Pitchfork of Destiny (12 page)

She stepped a bit closer and coughed from the thick tobacco smoke around the man. “Well, you see, Your . . . I mean . . .” Liz stopped and gathered herself, finally scolding her nerves, if not into submission, at least into a brief retreat. “How do I address a sorcerer?”

The tavern had been mostly silent since she'd entered, but now a murmur of shock and outrage filled the room. He held up a long, pale finger. “I am a Dracomancer, in fact, The Dracomancer, not a mere sorcerer or wizard.”

“The Dracomancer?” she asked, having a hard time keeping her tone measured. Up until this moment, she had been maintaining the earnest hope that the title Dracomancer was some kind of ill-­advised joke. It seemed too ridiculous.

“Yes, the Dracomancer,” he said with a significant flare of his eyes. “Through long study and dark sacrifice, I have harnessed the magical spirits of the dragons to my bidding.” To punctuate this statement, he placed his pipe on the table and traced a complicated series of symbols in the smoky air.

Liz didn't really know how to respond to this without giggling, which she knew would not go over well, so instead she asked, “So, should I call you Dracomancer?”

He laughed, a rich and hearty sound, and his laughter was echoed by his watching followers. “You may, if you wish.”

“Dracomancer, I need to know how to defeat the dragon.”

The room fell absolutely silent. Liz thought that she saw, just for a moment, the Dracomancer's gravitas break, and he appeared to nearly swallow the long stem of his pipe. He recovered himself by taking a few deep puffs and rebuilding the clouds of smoke around his head. When he finally spoke, his voice rang like a tolling bell. “To defeat the dragon, one must put aside all fear. Fear”—­he paused dramatically—­“is the ambrosia of the beast, consuming the soul even as surely as the dragon's flame consumes the body.”

Liz silently digested this obvious bit of advice, hoping that he would say more, but when he did not, she decided she would have to press him. “Yes, Dracomancer, I understand that fear would be . . . problematic, but do you have any
practical
tips, perhaps a weakness that we might be able to exploit?”

This time he was ready and, after a pregnant pause in which many smoke rings were blown, he said significantly, “The ancient sage, Lochnar Zagroot, teaches us that the Wyrm bathes in flame beneath the earth.”

“Is that a bad thing for them?” she asked in real confusion. “I mean, the bathing in flame? Do they do it every night? Do you know where the baths are? Are you suggesting that we attack the dragon while it's bathing?”

The Dracomancer's eyes widened at her questions, and when he responded, his voice had lost a bit of its timbre and much of his earlier cadence. “In . . . in the mad poet Mudthug's
Black Tome
, he writes, ‘A wet Dragon never flies at night.' ”

“What?”

The Dracomancer had recovered his earlier calm and leaned back comfortably in his chair. He took a deep puff on his pipe before responding quite solemnly, “A wet Dragon . . .” he paused significantly, his eyes wide with intensity, “never flies at night.”

Liz rubbed her temples, which were beginning to throb violently, and snapped in frustration, “What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”

“The wisdom is perhaps too deep for a layman, or even a laywoman.”

“No,” Liz snapped, and literally snapped as she punctuated her denial with a snap of her fingers. “I don't mean I don't understand it, I mean that's nothing but gibberish!”

A collective gasp erupted, and the Dracomancer rocked back so violently that his chair slipped out from under him, and he clattered to the floor in a flutter of robes and a cloud of blue-­gray pipe smoke. The two shadowy figures that had been standing to the sides of the Dracomancer quickly helped him up. The man wobbled a little as he tried to get his feet back under him in a way that made Liz think that he must be wearing very-­high-­soled boots if not actual stilts. The Dracomancer grasped the table to steady himself, exposing pale, rail-­thin arms that suggested much of his looming bulk was made up by the incredibly large cloak he was wearing. He leaned forward so that his face came out of the smoky shadows, his eyes ablaze with indignation.

“How dare you call my words gibberish?” he shrieked in a voice that had grown surprisingly squeaky. “Your ignorance of dragons is astounding! Have you never read the
Ars Dragonica
, or the collected works of Shuuman the Meddler, or Balgethar the Drunkard, or . . . or . . . um . . . well, anyone?”

It might have been a devastating rebuke if the Dracomancer's beard, which was now revealed to be at least partially a fake, had not taken this opportunity to slip down his face, exposing a weak chin and a mouth of yellowed teeth.

Liz was too angry to take any notice of the angry murmurs around her. She felt a tug at her sleeve and saw a very nervous Tomas, who had appeared out of nowhere, desperately gesturing toward the door. She shook him off and instead stepped closer to the Dracomancer, so that only the table separated them and pointed her own finger at him.

“I call it gibberish because it is gibberish. ‘A wet Dragon never flies at night'? ‘Bathing in flames in the earth'? ‘Ambrosia of the beast'? I defy you to tell me what any of it means. Personally, I don't think you know the first thing about dragons. Your prophecy about Lord Charming was proved false, and now you sit here spouting nonsense and drinking free ale. You are a charlatan, plain and simple.”

Shouts of indignation mixed with a few rumbles of tentative agreement, mostly about the amount of ale he consumed, spread through the tavern. The Dracomancer, perhaps sensing that the crowd was turning on him, gazed about anxiously and threw his arms out broadly. “Enough!” he roared, and resumed his overly emphasized speech pattern. “Having offended the dragon spirits I serve, you, Lady Charming, have sealed your own doom. The ancient flames that stir within my blood boil at your blasphemy! The spirits, they rage within me! I can no longer control them!”

Suddenly, he convulsed, his eyes closing and his arms opening wide so that his chest was thrown painfully forward. “I warn thee, flee while you can, the Dragon Spirit Comes . . . the Dragon Spirit Comes.”

After this pronouncement, Liz saw his eyes flicker briefly back to her. She frowned at him, put her hands on her hips, and began tapping her foot on the ground in irritation.

His eyes closed again, then opening wide, they rolled back so that only the whites could be seen. He began shaking, his mouth working spasmodically back and forth. Then a hideous throaty babble began to spew from his lips, along with a great volume of spittle. “
Dwarlivish canthon fraxus thrilbit quantrotont lishish, Lishish, LISHISH!
”

He was shouting and shaking so violently that many in the crowd began to draw back, likely in fear that such a dramatic display of madness might turn out to be contagious. Liz, however, stood her ground stoically, watching his performance with open disdain. She started to say, “When you are quite done,” but at that moment, the Dracomancer's body seemed to collapse in on itself. His arms and head rolled forward violently, and his legs bent under him so that he dropped to the ground, and nothing could be seen behind the table where the Dracomancer had formerly stood except a large bundle of deep purple robes.

Almost on cue, but a bit prematurely, one of the tall, shadowy shapes that stood in the darkness behind the table moaned, “Woe to us. The Dracomancer, who was our only hope, is now gone, consumed by the dread forces he once kept at bay.”

A stunned silence greeted this latest development, and someone by the bar shouted, “ 'E's dead?”

The other shadowy figure said, perhaps in reply, though it seemed too prepared for Liz's ear, “Who can say if he may die, when his spirit can with the dragons fly.”

A deep and deeply slurred voice behind an enormous tankard of ale said, “Lor' bless us all, 'e musta' been taken by da' dragon spirits!”

A particularly warty woman stomped toward Liz with an accusing finger, and shrieked, “It's ta witch what done it to 'im. I saw 'er a castin' a curse at 'im wit' her evil eye!”

“That's absurd,” Liz said stiffly, a little stunned at the Dracomancer's sudden collapse.

She knew that leaving—­and leaving now—­was the prudent thing to do, but she could not believe what had happened and continued to stare at the pool of gathered cloak where the Dracomancer had been.

“I don't understand,” she replied softly and mostly to herself. “He was a fraud. He had to be a fraud.”

She was about to turn away and follow Tomas when the Dracomancer's cloak rippled and pulsated like an animal had been trapped beneath it and was trying to escape.

There was a collective gasp as something crawled from among the folds of the cloth accompanied by a cloud of smoke. The shape, still only a silhouette in the dim light beneath the table, rose, serpent-­like, higher and higher, until it emerged into the oily orange light of the lanterns. Its head, for that was all they could see, was slightly larger than a man's hand, virulent red and covered here and there with mottled patches of black and blue. Wide, unblinking eyes stared, doll-­like, from beneath glittering metallic brows, and short, bristly green scales ran along the back of its skull, where two twisted brown horns sprouted from the sides of its forehead. An elongated snout jutted out of the middle of the face. Another puff of smoke surrounded it.

“Preserve us,” one of the men behind Liz shouted, “it's the Dragon Spirit come to life!”

At least two women fainted dead away, and several men ran screaming for the exit. Even Liz and Tomas took a few tentative steps back. The head took no notice of the commotion it was causing but began to move sinuously back and forth atop a skinny, oddly fuzzy red neck, now and again bathing in puffs of smoke that rose from the floor beneath it. It opened a wide mouth filled with crooked white teeth and a limply forked tongue. It hissed, and a sibilant voice issued from its general vicinity.

“I am the ssspirit of the dragon. From dark forcesss beyond mortal ken have I sssprung, and by dark powersss beyond human endurance or imagination hasss the Dracomancccer sssubdued me to hisss will. Who quessstionsss him, quessstionsss me.”

The voice was clearly that of the Dracomancer, only higher in pitch and slurred. Liz ducked her head and, as she expected, saw the dark shadowy form of the Dracomancer crouched beneath the table, pipe in his mouth and arm extended upward above the edge of the table. The illusion having been broken, Liz now recognized that the spirit of the dragon was a puppet. A puppet, it appeared, constructed of a pair of threadbare men's hose, bits and pieces of fabric, some beads and bobbles, and a ­couple of twigs. It was an effort the dwarves would have mocked mercilessly as amateurish. Liz started to laugh, but stifled it when she saw that, all around her, men and women, were prostrating themselves on the ground.

“Ssso,” the dragon puppet said, fixing its staring eyes on Liz, “thisss is the unbeliever.” Another puff of smoke rose up, this time accompanied by a cough from beneath the table.

Dozens of ­people around her all agreed, in various ways and varying degrees of profanity, that Liz was indeed the unbeliever.

“How ssshall we punisssh her?” hissed the Draco­mancer somewhat breathily between puffs on his pipe that threw more smoke into the air. Liz snuck a peek and watched as the Dracomancer twisted his arm about so that the puppet's head moved around as though calling for suggestions.

Even more ­people voiced their opinions, in remarkably colorful terms, as to what should be done with her.

“Excccellent sssugessstionsss all,” the snake snickered sibilantly, “but I think the Dracomancccer himssself ssshould pronounccce her doom. Ssshall I raissse him back from the deep placesss where now he liesss in ressst?”

Voices from all around begged the puppet to do this.

“Very well,” the puppet said, and started to say something else, but speaking in such a high pitch must have been taxing the Dracomancer's voice because he had to break off his speech and clear his throat before continuing. He took the moment to make the dragon spirit glare menacingly at Liz, but since there was no way for him to control the puppet's eyes, he did this by pointing the puppet's head at Liz and shaking it. It would have been comical had not everyone else in the tavern, including Tomas, been taking it so seriously.

The Dracomancer, his throat somewhat recovered, continued in a slightly lower pitch that was, Liz thought, more sustainable. “But I warn you, the Dracomancccer can travel through worldsss asss the common man might travel the road to Two Treesss. If you anger him again, he may flee thisss world onccce and for all and leave you all to the doom of the Wyrm.”

The ­people begged for his mercy, and the dragon spirit looked about in a pleased, almost smug manner, if you can judge smugness by the way his cloth snout wrinkled.

After a moment of preening, the puppet shouted, “Sssilenccce!”

Not a sound was to be heard, then a guttural scream began issuing from under the table, and the puppet dragon shook and danced at the end of its arm neck. The paroxysms of the puppet were so violent that one of the twig horns came flying off, though Liz doubted anyone but she noticed.

Then the Dracomancer stood up.

It was neatly done. One moment, only the dragon puppet was visible, then, with an upward swirl of his cape, the Dracomancer was standing in all his mysterious glory. The crowd roared in exultation, and the Dracomancer took a bow. He allowed the cheers to wash over him for a few minutes, the same smug, self-­satisfied expression on his face as he had mimicked on the face of the puppet earlier. Then he held up one hand for silence.

“Thank you my friends, my followers, my Dracolytes.”