The Dragon Charmer (48 page)

Very little is known about when and how dragons originated. The manuscript Gaynor discovered stated that they were made by Shaitan, one of several names for the devil and a possible identity of Azmordis, but this may have been poetic license on the part of the writer. It is true that long ago many of the Old Spirits manifested themselves as pagan gods and demons, trying thus to gain ascendancy over Man or Nature, and in the earliest days “creating” beings of their own bodies of spell and substance, often combining anatomical details from several creatures, inhabited by primitive elementáis. As mentioned above, this was how many of the werefolk came into existence. Others were self-created, crude spirits strong enough to make themselves a physical image that expressed their essence. Windhorses, which occasionally metamorphose into unicorns, are among this latter group sprites of the moving air who have acquired a suitable form in which they can appear and fade at will. Most werefolk are far from solid, their shapes flickering in and out of reality according to the eye of the observer or their own uncertain moods.

Dragons, however, seem to be both more “real” and more potent, with a power that even the Oldest cannot control. If they were made by Azmordis or one of his ilk, then the fire-spirits summoned to possess them must have proved impossible to manipulate, and the creation escaped the yoke of the creator. Their curious affinity with humans—with all that is most cruel and savage in our nature, yet also all that is most passionate and free is well documented. Whether we invented dragons ourselves, calling them into being to fulfill some deep and dreadful need, we can only speculate.

There seem to be many kinds of dragons, with differing
temperaments and anatomical features—winged or wingless, some with feathery manes, others with many variations of color, horn, and scale. Not all breathe fire. Oriental dragons are frequently beneficent, while their northern kin are associated with hoarded treasure and appear to epitomize mortal greed. It is a significant fact that in our modern, high-tech world dragons have become the ultimate symbol of freedom—freedom not only from the laws of science but also from the laws of Man, a fierce amorality that recognizes no check or hindrance. In Tenegrys we are reminded that although dragons are beautiful and awesome, beyond the reach of the everyday world they are deadly, and without the skills of a dragon charmer would kill and burn without compunction.

How the line of dragon charmers acquired their extraordinary relationship with these monsters is a tale told elsewhere.

At this point it may be helpful to add a word or two about the power known as the Gift. Of its origins much is said in
Prospero’s Children:
how it was caused by the Lodestone, a ball of matter the size of a serpent’s egg coming from, or even composed of, another universe, a whole cosmos with different rules, different science. It was kept in Atlantis and those born in its immediate vicinity were genetically altered, giving them the ability to break the physical laws of this world. The Lodestone was destroyed, as was Atlantis and almost all its people, but the mutant genes had already been passed on and they spread throughout the human race, recurring down the centuries, often ignored or unused by the possessor, but never weakening or dying out.

Various powers can be produced by the Gift. The most common is the so-called sixth sense: telepathy, precognition, telegnosis—“the ability to know that which cannot be ascertained by normal means.” Gaynor, we are told, is a “sensitive”: she can see ghosts, and is peculiarly susceptible to atmosphere, another variant of the same. Most of us have a little of this talent, and it manifests itself in symbolic dreams, in a heightened awareness of the emotions and feelings of others, in instinct and intuition. The whole of our mystic self, though not dependent on the Gift, is strengthened and empowered by it. In its most potent form, as in Fern’s case, it gives you the capacity to influence both people and objects without physical contact, to create true-seeming illusions, to change your own shape or that of others in short, to break the rules. It can be transmitted as raw energy: light, heat, force. But without discipline it becomes as wayward and perilous as weather. Only through the ancient spell patterns and
the Atlantean language can it be shaped and directed, given meaning and purpose. Atlantean is an ancestor language of many European tongues, but it evolved within the Lodestone’s force field, attuned to its rhythms, and when the Stone was broken it is thought the power thus released passed into the speech to which it had given birth. Perhaps the energy it engendered was transmuted into sound and tone, a music from beyond the spheres. Whatever the truth, without Atlantean the most extreme form of the Gift, if used, will be out of control, and may be deadly both to the user and to anyone against whom they may lash out.

Read ahead for a taste of Jan Siegel’s
conclusion to the series. Ferns enemies have
found their way into modern-day London,
where she must face her greatest
challenge yet…

At Wrokeby, the house-goblin was no longer playing poltergeist. He lurked in corners and crannies, in the folds of curtains, in the spaces under shadows. The newcomer did not appear to notice him, but he sensed that sooner or later she would sweep through every nook and niche, scouring the house of unwanted inmates. He watched her when he dared, peering out of knotholes and plaster cracks. He was a strange, wizened creature, stick thin and undersized even for a goblin, with skin the color of aging newspaper and a long pointed face like a hairless rat. His name when he had last heard it was Dibbuck, though he had forgotten why. The piebald cat that prowled the corridors could either see him or scent him, and she hunted him like the rodent he resembled, but so far he had been too quick for her. He had known the terrain for centuries; the cat was an invader on unfamiliar ground. But the presence of Nehemet made him more nervous and furtive than ever. Still he crept and spied, half in fascination, half in terror, knowing in the murky recesses of his brain that the house in his care was being misused, its heritage defiled and its atmosphere contaminated for some purpose he could not guess.

The smaller sitting room now had black velvet curtains and no chairs, with signs and sigils painted on the bare floor where once there had been Persian rugs. A pale fire burned sometimes on a hearth long unused, but the goblin would avoid the room, fearing the cold hiss of its unseen flames and the flickering glow that probed under the door. Instead he ventured to the cellar, hiding in shadows as old as the house itself. The wine racks had been removed and shelves installed, stacked with bottles of unknown liquids and glass
jars whose contents he did not want to examine too closely. One bottle stood on a table by itself, with a circle drawn around it and cabbalistic words written in red along the perimeter. It had a crystal stopper sealed in wax, as if the contents were of great value, yet it appeared empty: he could see the wall through it. But there came an evening when he saw it had clouded over, filled with what looked like mist, and in the mist was a shape that writhed against the sides, struggling to escape. He skittered out of the room, and did not return for many days.

On the upper floors he found those Fitzherberts who had stayed this side of Death, their shrunken spirits rooted in age-old patterns of behavior, clinging to passions and hatreds whose causes were long forgotten. They dwelt in the past, seeing little of the real world, animate memories endowed with just a glimmer of thought, an atom of being. Yet even they felt an unfamiliar chill spreading through every artery of the house. “What is this?” asked Sir William, in the church tower. “Who is she, to come here and disturb us—we who have been here so long? This is all that we have.”

“I do not know,” said the goblin, “but when she passes, I feel a draft blowing straight from eternity.”

The ghost faded from view, fearful or ineffectual, and the goblin skulked the passageways, alone with his dread. At last he went back to the cellar, drawn, as are all werefolk, by the imminence of strong magic, mesmerized and repelled.

She wore a green dress that appeared to have no seams, adhering to her body like a living growth, whispering when she moved. There were threads of dull red in the material like the veins in a leaf. Her shadow leaped from wall to wall as she lit the candles, and her hair lifted although the air was stifling and still. The cat followed her, its skin puckered into gooseflesh, arching its back against her legs. There was a smell in the cellar that did not belong there, a smell of roots and earth and uncurling fronds: the goblin was an indoor creature and it took him a while to identify it, although his elongated nose quivered with more-than-human sensitivity. He avoided looking at the woman directly, lest she feel his gaze. Instead he watched her sidelong, catching the flicker of white fingers as she touched flasks and pots, checking
their contents, unscrewing the occasional lid, sniffing, replacing. And all the while she talked to her feline companion in a ripple of soft words. These herbs are running low … the slumbertop toadstools are too dry … these worm eggs will hatch if the air reaches them … At the end of one shelf he saw a jar he had not noticed before, containing what looked like a pair of eyeballs floating in some clear fluid. He could see the brown circle of iris and the black pupil, and broken fragments of blood vessels trailing around them. He knew they could not be alive, but they hung against the glass, fixed on
her
, moving when she moved …

He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelled the odor more strongly the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned toward him, screening much of the object from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn taproot, leaves that trembled at her caress. She moistened it with drops from various bottles, murmuring a singsong chant that might have been part spell, part lullaby. It had no tune, but its tunelessness invaded the goblin’s head, making him dizzy. When she had finished she covered the sapling again, taking care not to tear even the corner of a leaf.

He thought muzzily: It is evil. It should be destroyed. But his small store of courage and resource was almost exhausted.

“The workmen come tomorrow,” she told the cat. “They will repair the conservatory, making it proof against weather and watching eyes. Then my Tree may grow in safety once more.” The cat mewed, a thin, angry sound. The woman threw back her head as if harkening to some distant cry, and the candle flames streamed sideways, and a wind blew from another place, tasting of dankness and dew, and leaf shadows scurried across the floor. Then she laughed, and all was quiet.

The goblin waited some time after she had quit the cellar before he dared to follow.

He knew now that he must leave Wrokeby—leave or be destroyed—yet still he hung on. This was his place, his care, the purpose of his meager existence: a house-goblin stayed with the house until it crumbled. The era of technology and change had driven some from their old haunts, but such up-rootings were rare, and few of goblinkind could survive the subsequent humiliation and exile. Only the strongest were able to move on, and Dibbuck was not strong. Yet deep in his scrawny body there was a fiber of toughness, a vestigial resolve. He did not think of seeking help: he knew of no help to seek. But he did not quite give up. Despite his fear of Nehemet, he stole down his native galleries in the woman’s swath, and eavesdropped on her communings with her pet, and listened to the muttering of schemes and spells he did not understand. Once, when she was absent for the day, he even sneaked into her bedroom, peering under the bed for discarded dreams, fingering the creams and lotions on the dressing table. Their packaging was glossy and up-to-date, but he could read a little and they seemed to have magical properties, erasing wrinkles and endowing the user with the radiance of permanent youth. He avoided the mirror lest it catch and hold his reflection, but, glancing up, he saw her face there, moon pale and glowing with an unearthly glamour. “It works,” she said. “On me, everything works. I was old, ages old, but now I am young forever.” He knew she spoke not to him but to herself, and the mirror was replaying the memory, responding to his curiosity. Panic overcame him, and he fled.

On the tower stair he found the head of Sir William. He tried to seize the hair, but it had less substance than a cobweb. “Go now,” said Dibbuck. “They say there is a Gate for mortals through which you can leave this place. Find it, before it is too late.”

“I rejected the Gate,” said the head haughtily. “I was not done with this world.”

“Be done with it now,” said the goblin. “Her power grows.”

“I was the power here,” said Sir William, “long ago …”

Despairing, Dibbuck left him, running through the house and uttering his warning unheeded to the ghosts too
venerable to be visible anymore, the drafts that had once been passing feet, the water sprites who gurgled through the antique plumbing, the imp who liked to extinguish the fire in the oven. A house as old as Wrokeby has many tenants, phantom memories buried in the very stones. In the kitchen he saw the woman’s only servant, a hagling with the eyes of the werekind. She lunged at him with a rolling pin, moving with great swiftness for all her apparent age and rheumatics, but he dodged the blow and faded into the wall, though he had to wait an hour and more before he could slip past her up the stairs. He made his way to the conservatory, a Victorian addition that had been severely damaged fifty years earlier in a storm. Now three builders were there, working with unusual speed and very few cups of tea. The one in charge was a gypsy with a gray-streaked ponytail and a narrow, wary face. “We finish quickly and she’ll pay us well,” he told the others. “But don’t skimp on anything. She’ll know.”

“She’s a looker, isn’t she?” said the youngest, a youth barely seventeen. “That figure, and that hair, and all.”

“Don’t even think of it,” said the gypsy. “She can see you thinking.” He stared at the spot where the goblin stood, so that for a moment Dibbuck thought he was observed, though the man made no sign. But later, when they were gone, the goblin found a biscuit left there, something no one had done for him through years beyond count. He ate it slowly, savoring the chocolate coating, feeling braver for the gift, the small gesture of friendship and respect, revitalized by the impact of sugar on his system. Perhaps it was that which gave him the impetus to investigate the attics.

He did not like the top of the house. His sense of time was vague, and he recalled only too clearly a wayward daughter of the family who had been locked up there behind iron bars and padlocked doors, supposedly for the benefit of her soul. Amy Fitzherbert had had the misfortune to suffer from manic depression and what was probably Tourette’s syndrome in an age when a depression was a hole in the ground and sin had yet to evolve into syndrome. She had been fed through the bars like an animal, and like an animal she had reacted, ranting and screaming and bruising herself against the walls. Dibbuck had been too terrified to go near
her. In death, her spirit had moved on, but the atmosphere there was still dark and disturbed from the Furies that had plagued her.

That evening he climbed the topmost stair and crept through the main attics, his ears strained for the slightest of sounds. There were no ghosts here, only a few spiders, a dead beetle, a scattering of mouse droppings by the wainscoting. But it seemed to Dibbuck that this was the quiet of waiting, a quiet that harkened to his listening, that saw his unseen presence. And in the dust there were footprints, well-defined and recent: the prints of a woman’s shoes. But the chocolate was strong in him and he went on until he reached the door to Amy’s prison, and saw the striped shadow of the bars beyond, and heard what might have been a moan from within. Amy had moaned in her sleep, tormented by many-headed dreams, and he thought she was back there, the woman had raised her spirit for some dreadful purpose; but still he took a step forward, the last step before the spell barrier hit him. The force of it flung him several yards, punching him into the physical world and tumbling him over and over. He picked himself up, twitching with shock. The half-open door was vibrating in the backlash of the spell, and behind it the shadow bars stretched across the floor, but another darkness loomed against them, growing nearer and larger, blotting them out. It had no recognizable shape, but it seemed to be huge and shaggy, and he thought it was thrusting itself against the bars like a caged beast. The plea that reached him was little more than a snarl, the voice of some creature close to the edge of madness.

Let me out
…

Letmeout letmeout letmeout letmeout
…

For the third time in recent weeks Dibbuck ran, fleeing a domain that had once been his.