The Whim of the Dragon (34 page)

“I found it not,” said Shan. “Nor, they tell me, did any Red Sorcerer ever lay eyes on’t.”

There was a brief silence. Ted, looking around, saw that most of the crowding ghosts had dispersed. Andrew still stood with the King and the five royal children, but their voices were subdued. Ted was cold, and very tired. He pulled his cloak more tightly around him, and his hand brushed Shan’s brooch. He unpinned it hurriedly and held it out. It blazed like the ocean under a noonday sun.

“Is this yours?” he said.

“It was,” said Shan. In the rich blue light his face was thoughtful.

“Then take it back again,” said Ted.

“I’d not thought,” said Shan, not taking it, “that it would prove so potent below the earth.”

“You could use some power around here,” said Ruth.

Shan said to Ted, “These things do not fall out by chance.” “Well, maybe I found it so I could give it to you. You take it.”

“An I may hold it,” said Shan. He took it from Ted’s fingers, and it lay on his small, wavery hand and did not fall to the ground.

“My thanks to you,” said Shan. “May it be long ere I see you again. Or thou,” he added, to Randolph.

Ted looked at Randolph, but Randolph only smiled. He looked back at Shan, and for a moment saw through him Randolph’s hand and arm.

“My lord, you look tired,” said Ted to Shan.

“The blood runneth dry,” said Randolph.

“Where’s your dagger?” said Ted.

“No,” said Shan. “You’ll need a whole skin and all the blood that’s in you. Quickly, have you any questions more?”

“How did Melanie get hold of your sword?”

“Melanie!” said Shan, scrambling to his knees and staring.

“She left it for us to stumble on,” said Ted. He added, “And she left her own for some friends of ours. Did you know she had one that would do similar work?”

“Of what color?”

“Green,” said Randolph.

Shan slapped his hands down on his knees, a violent motion that made hardly a whisper of sound. “Oh, I’m justly served,” he said. “I should have stayed. I am sorry, that I left this menace to ravage you. My lords and ladies, beware that sword of green. It will show you your own hearts in such a guise you’ll cut them out.”

He stood up, an agitated, wavering figure fading rapidly into the gray land and the gray sky.

“Where’s the dagger?” shouted Ted, leaping up himself.

“No,” said Shan; he was gone.

L
AURA could tell from Fence’s face that he wished Ellen had not asked where Matthew was. Patrick seemed to see it too; and as Patrick terrifyingly sometimes did, he took his own advice.

“What the hell,” said Patrick, walking up to the two tall men and looking from one to the other, “do you think you’re doing?”

There was a petrifying silence. Laura considered her cousin, in his stained jeans and filthy tennis shoes and his dusty black cloak, and was stricken with admiration and jealousy. She looked at the two identical faces. One of them was grinning; the other wore an expression as of patience come abruptly to an end, like Laura’s teacher just before he sent somebody to the principal.

The grinning Prospero spoke over Patrick’s head to Fence. “You come carefully upon your hour,” he said.

“I do not,” said Fence. “I come abominably late.”

“Not so late as we’d have made you,” said the tall man, smiling still. There was something about the smile that oppressed Laura.

Michaelmas had been leaning in the doorway between the two Prosperos and preserving a perfectly blank expression. This latest remark, however, or perhaps that smile, appeared to stir him to wrath. “If that’s a threat, my lords,” he said, “go make it otherwhere.”

The smiling Prospero and the frowning one both swung on him.

“Doubt you our word?” said the smiling one.

“No,” said Michaelmas. “But I do doubt your manners. Having sworn to do no harm in Heathwill Library, it will behoove you not to threaten none. And concerning harm—what have you done with my colleague Prospero?”

“Why, nothing, save to look upon him in admiration,” said the frowning man.

Michaelmas made an impatient motion with his hand. “Go in,” he said; “sit down; and answer the boy’s question.”

The two men came in. Every cat in the room leapt up, sniffed the air, and curved across the floor to purr at the Prosperos. Michaelmas rolled his eyes at them, and sat down behind his desk.

The two Prosperos sat where Patrick and Ellen had been. Patrick and Ellen sat on the table. Celia and Chalcedony stood in the doorway.

“And for the love of mercy,” said Michaelmas in a tone of profoundest irritation, “do you, one of you, or both of you, take some form other. And do you not,” he added sharply, as the two men turned and smiled at each other, “assume some other, horrible form which might deprive our sovereignty of reason, and then say in innocence, I did bid you do’t. Take you,” said Michaelmas, breathing hard through his nose, “some harmless and inoffensive form that can speak with us, and leave your frivolings for but five minutes.”

“You’ve dealt with us before,” said the austere Prospero.

“And to my sorrow,” said Michaelmas.

“Wizard, have a care,” said the smiling one, and stopped smiling.

“Oh, go to,” said Michaelmas. “You’re as slippery as a mess of eels, but you do not break your sworn word.”

“No,” said the once-smiling Prospero, “but our memories are as long as time.”

“Peace; make thy change,” said the austere one.

The once-smiling one looked at him, and shrugged; and by what means Laura could not see, by the time his shoulders had leaned back on the cushion again, he was a little dark woman dressed in an infinity of layers of pink gauze. In a voice melodious as a flute, she said, “Will this serve?”

Behind Laura, Chalcedony made a muffled exclamation. Michaelmas, who appeared to be of a ruddy complexion and who had been growing ruddier in his exasperation, turned stark white, leaned forward, leaned back again with great deliberation, and swallowed hard. “It will serve,” he said. “But I say to you now, my memory is long also.”

“So,” said Patrick, insouciantly but with a strained look on his sharp Carroll face, “is anybody going to answer my question?”

“We are come,” said the dark woman, “to ask it of you, or of some minion of the Hidden Land. Something is amiss there.”

“Took you long enough to notice,” said Patrick.

“Patrick,” said Fence, mildly but definitely. He turned his head and addressed the two shape-shifters. “Well, great ones, what amiss is this, and how may we mend it?”

“We look to you to tell us of the first,” said the one who still looked like Prospero. “Michaelmas hath given us some clue. Is it true that you have dabbled with Shan’s Ring?”

“It is,” said Fence.

“That did awake us from our dreaming,” said the dark woman. “But ere our start was o’er, before we could settle again, we did hear something other.”

“A great shearing and clashing of swords,” said the man.

“There was a battle in the south,” said Fence.

The dark woman laughed. “We who slept through the ten years’ agony of Owlswater, the twenty-five years’ tossing of Feren atween Fence’s Country and thine, to wake at that?”

Fence was silent. Laura knew what these two had heard. They had heard Ted and Patrick, practicing with Shan’s and Melanie’s swords in the rose garden.

“There are few sorceries,” said the dark woman at last, “so potent as Shan’s Ring.”

“No doubt,” said Fence. “Seek you the list of th’others in this admirable library, and come to me again when you have a more particular question. I’d tire the moon with talking, to tell you all our petty deeds since first we wielded Shan’s Ring.”

The tall man said, “Have you the swords of Shan and Melanie?”

“What is their fashion?” said Fence.

“Little one,” said the man, in a clam voice infinitely worse than any angry tone could have been, “my patience hath an end.”

“The swords are small,” said the dark woman, laying her hand on the man’s arm. He went on looking at her, as if the sight of Fence would be too much for him, all the time she was talking. She said, “Small, as for a Dwarf, or a child. Their hilts are black, and set with stones, Shan’s with blue, Melanie’s with green. Their blades from time to time do glow, with the colors of their several stones. They send a kind of tingling into the hand that toucheth them. Now, Fence, give us answer.”

“I have a milliard such,” said Fence. “How shall I tell the sword of Melanie from any that gloweth green?”

“Have you,” said the tall man, still looking at his companion, “the swords of Shan and Melanie?”

“It may be so,” said Fence. “You have not told me sufficient that I may mark them.”

“They’ll take you, an you carry them aright,” said the dark woman, “almost as far as I’d send you, an I could.”

“Have you,” said the tall man, turning his cold yellow eyes on Fence again, and speaking in a deadly monotone, “the swords of Shan and Melanie?”

And Fence said, “Yes.”

“Third time pays for all,” said Patrick.

“We do require,” said the tall man, “that you deliver them to us.”

“By what right?” said Fence.

“None,” said the dark woman, crisply. The tall man turned and glared at her. She said to Fence, “’Twill serve if you but promise to employ them no more.”

“I do so promise,” said Fence, without hesitation. He did not even glance at Ellen or Patrick or Laura, whom he had just condemned to the vagaries of Apsinthion.

“For your little lifetime,” said the tall man. “A catnap; the space of a snore. What’s that to us?”

“All you may have from so paltry a creature as I am,” said Fence, looking right back at him. His hands were gripped hard on the carved arms of the chair and his jaw was rigid, but he sustained the look of the tall man, and it was the tall man who suddenly jerked his head around and said to Michaelmas, “Choose thy guests better.”

Whereupon he and the dark woman got up and went out, closing the door behind them with a solid and unfriendly thud.

“Could I choose my guests at all, I know whom I’d un-choose first,” said Michaelmas. He wiped his sleeve over his forehead. “Fence, you harrow me with fear and wonder.”

“They are not in agreement,” said Fence. “Had they been so, I do assure you, I had trod far softlier.” He stood up, carefully. Laura suspected him of having shaky legs, but he spoke steadily enough. “Now,” he said. “Let’s find Matthew, and the true Prospero, and ask our riddles, and get us gone.”

“You’re better here,” said Michaelmas. “Outwith these precincts they are bound by no oath.”

“Can we but travel quickly, they’ll have Chryse and Belaparthalion to deal with,” said Fence. “’Twere a very great pleasure, Michaelmas, but no profit at all, to bide here.”

“No pleasure, either, with the pair of them huggermuggering about,” said Michaelmas.

Fence, who had turned for the door, looked around. “Which of them were those?” he said.

“Nay, I know not. Chalcedony?”

“They’re strange to me,” said Chalcedony. “Do you think, Michaelmas, that they may be some species other than the usual? There was something in their eyes; and the cruelty that took your daughter’s form is of a different brand than what we’re used to.”

Laura wondered who Michaelmas’s daughter was, and what had happened to her.

Michaelmas rubbed his forehead again, scowling at the drifts of paper on his desk. “I’d thought we had seen them all.”

“I know,” said Chalcedony. “But this troubleth me.”

“Well,” said Fence, “let’s to Prospero’s chamber, an you will.”

Chalcedony and Michaelmas both came, leading the rest of them down the bright-lit hall and the narrow, winding stair and along yet another hall to a closed door. Michaelmas knocked at it. Nobody answered. Michaelmas rattled the handle, and then stood aside for Chalcedony, who took a key from her bunch and unlocked the door.

Prospero’s room was the same size as Michaelmas’s, but sparser in its furnishings. He had a bed, a table, a chair, a wardrobe, and many shelves crammed, but neatly, with books. If there was a bed in Michaelmas’s room, thought Laura, it was well buried. Prospero’s room was empty, though all its lights blazed and on the table were a half-written sheet and an uncapped bottle of ink. From the smooth bed a white cat blinked at them.

“Where would Matthew seek him next?” said Fence to Michaelmas.

Michaelmas looked helpless; Chalcedony said, “The Index Room; and then in the Special Collection. I’ll go seek them; you stay here should they return.”

She jingled off down the hallway. Michaelmas walked into the room, and after a moment of hesitation the rest of them followed him. There wasn’t really anywhere to sit, and none of them, it appeared, felt comfortable wandering around looking at the books and other possessions of someone who had not invited them. Laura looked at the cat; that was not an invasion of privacy. The cat was large and clean, like the room, and well brushed. It wore a green collar with gems in it. Laura walked across the room, and the cat lifted its head.

Gold light flashed off the stones in the collar, and ran like water over rock, and dimmed and dulled until she saw a small bare room lit with cloudy light from one round window. A young man in a red robe sat on the floor, leaning forward over his crossed legs to write on a large sheet of waxy paper. He looked uncomfortable, but his voice when he spoke was pleased. He said, “Never go down to the end of town if you don’t go down with me.” Something tapped at the window; Laura looked at it, and saw a flash of red.

Ellen shook her arm. “Wake up, Laura, here’s Matthew and Prospero.”

The real Prospero looked just as the false one had. Laura received her introduction to him rather absently, and only just remembered to do him a courtesy.