by Jan Siegel
“Yes,” she said, “Yes, I … It was in a manuscript in the museum.”
“I lent them that manuscript. From my earliest youth, I wanted to learn the truth behind the story, the real cause of a pigmentation that no dermatologist could explain. Was it a genetic freak, a rare illness, the mark of Cain—or of a hero? Surely you can appreciate my obsession.”
Gaynor nodded. For all her repulsion, she felt a stab of sympathy for this man disfigured from birth, marked out by he knew not what. He had slipped under her guard, stirring both her compassion and her curiosity. She found herself urging him to go on.
“I spent my life searching. There were no fossilized bones, no remains preserved in glacier or bog. Only written accounts, thirdhand, secondhand, a very few by genuine witnesses. I became a collector, a scholar with an established reputation. Yet the more I learned, the less I knew. My dreams told me more than any document dreams of fire and combat, of desperate valor culminating at last in a mind link with the monster itself. I was the dragon, I clove the skies in flight, I controlled its thoughts, wielded its power. For, as that manuscript you read had told me—and it took me thirty years to procure it—my ancestors were not slayers but tamers, the dragon charmers whose inherited talent set them above lords and kings, uniting them with the immortals. The discoloration of my skin, so often abhorred, was not a deformity but a gift, the greatest Gift of all.” Gaynor’s eyes widened at the word. “Yet there seemed to be no dragons left for me to charm. My search had become a quest doomed to unfulfillment.”
He paused as if awaiting comment or commiseration, but Gaynor’s momentary sympathy had dried up. Beyond the high-flown language she glimpsed an ego swollen with the lust of power and the cult of Self. She said, trying for a note of pragmatism: “If there ever were any dragons, there are none now.”
“So I thought.” He licked his lips. “So I feared. Yet the dreams still haunted me. I saw a dragon hatched in a high lonely place among men too simple and too foolish to do more than marvel at it; but the hands that held it were black. I knew this must be long ago, yet my heart swelled with hope. I saw the dragon grow in a hidden valley far from the farthest outposts of civilization. I saw it dance on the air above lakes of green and scarlet. I dreamed it was alone, the last of dragons, living while I lived yet forever beyond my reach, and I woke to disillusionment and an empty existence.” He paused once again, but this time Gaynor said nothing at all. “And then I had a visitor. He came in the night, nearly a year ago. He said he had felt me calling. He was—not like us.” The tongue reemerged, circling the moistureless mouth, a gross red thing against the monochrome flesh. “Would you like to meet him?”
“No!” Suddenly Gaynor noticed that the daylight had drained from the window. Jerked back to the terrors of the moment, she cried: “Will! Where’s Will? What have you done with him?”
But the face of Dr. Jerrold Laye had changed. His eyes were infused with a baleful phosphorescence; the voice that issued from his mouth was deeper, colder, and familiar. “We meet again, Gaynor Mobberley.”
“No,” she reiterated, but her tone had shrunk to a whisper. She tried to stand but her knees gave, and the quagmire of the cushions reclaimed her.
“You are not like your friend,” the voice continued. “Fernanda is Gifted, and strong; you are powerless, weak, afraid. Yet you came to me. I called you, and you came.” I chose to come, thought Gaynor; but she wasn’t sure. “And Fernanda will come for you, you and her brother. She will come to me at last.”
“She c-can’t,” Gaynor managed, though her lips shook. “She’s in a coma in hospital. Her spirit is lost”
“Fool! Do I not know her better than you better than that beggar Brokenwand whose wisdom has gone with his Gift? She is strong: strong and cunning. She will find a way back, no matter how perilous or how far. Danger draws her. Power guides her. She does not need your feeble assistance, or that of the vagabond who seeks to be her mentor. I understand her mind her spirit—as no other can. I have cast the augury, and seen her. She will come to me, and submit to me, or die, knowing that both you and the boy will perish with her. To lose all, or to gain all: there is but one choice. Love will betray her, and in my service she will be loveless forever.”
Gaynor wanted to cry out in defiance—She will fight you! You cannot win but her vocal cords were numb. The gray hand reached out toward her, the arm extended over an impossible distance; dust-dry fingers wound around her throat. Horror filled her, paralyzing struggle; but only for an instant. The strength of that hand was beyond Nature, and in seconds the room darkened, and went out.
“Harbeak!” The man’s voice had returned to its usual timbre, but his face was drawn as if in the aftermath of pain and his breathing came short and fast. The servant entered, saw the girl crumpled on the sofa. “What have you done with the other?”
“In the cellar, master.”
“Was that wise? He may be inquisitive.”
“That would be unfortunate.” The pallid features twitched involuntarily. “However, the cellar is secure. You wanted the special room for the girl; in one of the others, he might climb down from the window or break inadequate locks. Unless we put them together…”
“Apart. Together, they might encourage each other, console each other. Apart, they will have nothing but fear. By the time the witch arrives, he wants them I want them—to be very afraid. I want them begging her for mercy. She will never be able to refuse. We will have to risk the cellar. I thought this one would come alone. The boy was not called.”
“I could give him another dose of the soporific. The longer he sleeps, the less able he is to cause us any trouble.”
“It is well thought of. Do it. The girl, too.”
“Perhaps I should feed your little pet?”
“Not tonight. Tomorrow you may go hunting; it may need fresh meat. The witch will come after midnight. He has seen her. If she submits, it will be hungry still. If not…”
The butler responded with a gargoyle smile.
Jerrold Laye pointed to the unconscious figure. “Take that away. You know what to do with her. She will be watched.”
Harbeak lifted Gaynor without effort and carried her from the room. Behind him, the brief werelight flickered in Dr. Laye’s eyes, the other voice spoke through his stiffened lips. “I have you now, Fernanda. You can choose: the slow torment of a gradual enslavement or the swift anguish of a triple death. Either way, you cannot escape me. You will belong to me, or I will destroy you. Vengeance is mine, saith the lord, and what other lord is there for men to worship, save me?”
XIII
“It is a dark road for a mortal,” says Kal. “Dark and still deadly. Are you sure you wish to venture it?”
“I thought you said it was abandoned,” says Fern.
“The gods went away long ago. But a few spirits linger there, unable to move on, phantoms without shape or name craving anything that reminds them of the life they have lost. If you look back, they will seize on you.”
“I won’t look back.”
“It will be harder than you think. There may be pursuit. Morgus will not release you so easily and Sysselore, for all her gibes, will go where Morgus leads. A fat woman with a thin shadow. You must cross the river before you can turn to face them.”
“They cannot follow me,” she says, “if they do not wake.” And she crumbles the pale toadstools between her fingers, catching a whiff of their faint drowsy scent, the scent of moonbeams on a warm night. The silvery powder sifts into the mud-green depths of the brew that Sysselore always keeps at a simmer over the cooking fire.
“Is that poison?” There is doubt in Kal’s voice.
“No. These are slumbertops: they bring sleep, not death. I will not kill wantonly.”
Hatred can wait. That is not the way.
“They will suspect something if you don’t drink it,” Kal points out.
“I never drink it,” Fern replies. “Morgus would suspect something if I did. It tastes vile; I always
tip mine away.”
The potion bubbles up, absorbing the powder: the stink of pungent herbs boiled to liquefaction eclipses the aroma of moonbeams.
“How fast does it take effect?”
“Slowly,” she says. “Like natural sleep, only deeper. They say it brings sweet dreams to the weary.”
“Beware,” says Kal. “My mother distrusts sweet dreams. In any case, her mountain of flesh is too vast to succumb to the influence of any drug. Are you sure it will work?”
“No,” answers Fern.
She knows Morgus can see beyond the veil of expression, picking the thoughts from her mind. To deceive her, she must lie not only with her face but with every nuance of emotion: Morgus must detect no unnatural excitement in her apprentice, no hint of concealment. Fern creates an image in her head of the black fruit, not as it is now but unripe, a lumpen thing of half-formed features and petaled eyes—something new-discovered, still mysterious, hanging high in the leaves. She intends to give Morgus a distraction, a focus for her plans other than Fern herself. Above all, she must not think of wasps. But when the witch queen appears the angry stings seem to have already faded, as if no poison can penetrate far into that swollen flesh, so imbued with its own power that it has no space to absorb an alien substance. As the light fails they sit by the spellfire while the crystals crack in cooling, spitting blue sparks, and Fern accepts Sysselore’s herbal infusion out of custom, unwilling to offend, and she catches Morgus’s sly sideways glance as she pours it unobtrusively away. The liquid sinks into the earth, leaving a faint residue on the surface, the betraying glitter of powdered toadstool. She quells a sudden leap of panic, making herself ignore it, trusting that what she overlooks, Morgus, too, will not see. Fortunately, Morgus’s attention has shifted. Kal enters, taunting Sysselore for her witch’s brew, distracting both with an exchange of insults until the potion is drunk and he is driven back outside to sleep where he can. His mood is reckless; he seems wilder than usual, somehow less human, carrying with him an aura of primeval dark, the red smell of blood, the black smell of midnight. His ugliness is exaggerated by the wavering shadows, turning him into a being all monster, without hidden grief or sworn allegiance. Yet his arrival is well-timed, his departure prearranged. When he has gone, Morgus asks: “So what have you learned of late, little apprentice, and where did you learn it?” Fern answers lightly, letting the recollection of the black fruit slide through her mind, resolving to visit it by daylight, knowing Morgus will follow Morgus does not catechize her further. Fern yawns her way to her pallet and watches Morgus’s toying with the spellfire, whispering to Sysselore so that the cave is filled with furtive echoes. The fire is extinguished; the flickering wormshine dapples the walls with will-o’-the-wisps of light. The whispers merge into the roving shadows. The witches appear to be melded into a single figure, huge, distorted, many-limbed, the head dividing into two and then rejoining as more confidences pass between them. At last the amorphous blob separates into one thin shade and one bloated one, and they go to their beds. Presently, Morgus’s snore begins to rumble through the cave like a restless volcano.
Fern waits a long time before she moves.
As always, she is sleeping in her underwear; it takes her only a few moments to dress. Tight sweater, loose trousers, trainers: the clothes she has been wearing all along. Such garments are a habit, like her physical form, and in the borderland of reality that is enough to give them substance. Her head has been resting on the result of her sewing: she empties out the temporary stuffing of grass and dry leaves and hooks the strap diagonally across her chest so the pouch hangs on her hip. Belatedly she looks around for a weapon, but the cave offers little choice. The knives they use for eating are sharp but small, the blade barely a finger length, no more than a pinprick to Morgus, whose vital organs must be buried far beyond the reach of any dagger. Fern takes one for other purposes, slipping it into her bag, and, remembering her promise to Ruvindra, she snatches a handful of fire crystals and thrusts them into her left-hand pocket. Then she steals toward the exit, passing close to Sysselore, who moans as Fern’s shadow touches her face, moving as if to brush it away, relapsing into slumber. For an instant Fern freezes, tension seizing every muscle; then the dread releases her, and she is able to creep into the passage, feeling her way between the roots. Only the sudden sense of space and a thin drift of cooler air tell her when she is outside.
It is utterly dark. She has never ventured abroad before at this hour, the lightless time, when the Tree itself sleeps. The heads are silent, the birds roost; the very process of growing seems to stop. With a word and gesture she conjures a tiny ball of wereglow that hovers just ahead of her, its diminutive glimmer showing few details of her surroundings: a groping leaf, a shadow rearing behind a twisted root. She steps forward cautiously, still bruising herself against unseen hazards. The ground dips and rises, folds and writhes. Every so often a low-slung branch intrudes into the circle of light, a swath of foliage, the distorted globe of a head with closed eyes and slackened mouth. Once fraying hair strokes her brow like the strands of a spider’s web. She begins to feel imprisoned between the ceiling of leaves and the convoluted earthen floor. The darkness seems to be compressed into a greater density in that narrow space, crushing out any breathable air. Then: “Take my hand,” says a voice beside her, and Kal’s arm emerges into the light—the arm of a lycanthrope, thick with sinew, crackling with hair—and she puts her hand in his, warily reassured. With his help she travels faster: his eyes can see shadows at midnight, differentiating between dark and dark. His mockery is gone; he speaks only to guide her. “This is the place,” he says at last. “I cannot see the hollow: you must unbind the spell.” And, with a hint of his usual manner: “No doubt your black plum ripens best at midnight.”
The air glistens briefly as the magic dissolves. Fern descends into the dell, taking the knife from her pouch. The head sleeps. She reaches up to touch it, but the eyes open before she makes contact, blinking once in the wereglow, then becoming fixed and steady. “It is time,” she tells him. She cuts the stem at its junction with the main branch: it comes away easily, and the head is light in her grasp. She places it carefully in the pouch, pulling the ragged flap over the top. Then she turns to climb out of the dell. The noise behind her is very slight a rustle in the leaf mold, a snuffling intake of breath. There is nothing to prepare her for what she sees.
The hog. Standing on the lip of the hollow, glaring down not at her but at the bag on her hip and the bulge within it. Food. The fruit that is nourishment for the hog alone, its rightful diet. The wavering light shows it is far bigger than a pig should be: warty, many-jowled, covered in coarse bristles as thick as spines. Its upturned snout is squashed into a quivering oval of pinkish skin; the nostrils twitch and flex at every atom of scent. Fern can see the double tusks protruding on either side, discolored with the red-brown stains of dried sap, and the small round eyes like bloodshot beads. Rage emanates from it—rage at the theft and the thief and the fruit itself, a reasonless rage that turns its gut to acid and its brain to madness. It snorts, an ominous adenoidal rumble, and paws the ground with a trotter the size of a dinner plate. Kal has vanished. Shock holds Fern petrified, blanking out her knowledge of Atlantean. She stands rigid, helpless. Stupid. Her brain stalls. The hog charges.
Hands reach down from above, seizing her under the arms, swinging her clear of the ground. The hog hurtles beneath her; bristles brush her feet. And then she is lifted into the branches, the werelight soaring in her wake, and Kal is steadying her, and she finds herself sitting on a forked limb while her legs unstiffen into the inevitable trembling of reaction. Kal balances on a neighboring bough that is still vibrating from his acrobatics: he seems as much at home in the Tree as on the ground, with the agility and muscle power of a giant ape. Below, the pig rushes to and fro in fury and frustration, scouring the dell, too unintelligent to register bafflement, following the scent that is all that remains of its quarry in blind obsession. Presently the
snout lifts, locating their perch; Fern can see the red pinpricks of its eyes. Kal curses under his breath. “It won’t go away,” he says. “It smells the head. It will wait till we climb down. You’ll have to abandon your prize.”
“No.” Her nerve steadies. She struggles to marshall her thoughts, and her power.
“Your skills won’t help you here. It’s too late to conceal us, even if it were possible, and the pig is impervious to attack by magic. Spells bounce off it, like potting peanuts at an elephant. Throw down your black fruit.”
“No.”
Kal hears the finality in her voice, and says no more. They wait. The pig grunts and whiffles, churning up the earth, sucking at the air. “We can’t stay here indefinitely,” Fern says, and a picture rises in her mind of Morgus, her vast form heaving and tossing on her straw bed as she wrestles against clinging dreams of an unfamiliar sweetness. “Perhaps we could jump down and run for it…”
“Over this terrain?” He moves away without waiting for an answer, springing from branch to branch, setting the massed leaves shuddering and rustling in his wake. Fern looks down, but the hog does not stir. It is squatting on its haunches now, staring upward, the tiny mind in its huge body knuckled into a tight little knot of purpose. There is no way into that mind. It is too small, too limited, too clenched in upon itself to leave any chinks where she might insert a distraction. She murmurs a spell, hurling darts of fire that singe its bristles, but they cannot penetrate the thick hide. It squirms and bucks, yowling with pain, but it does not run away.
Kal returns just as she remembers the fire crystals. He is carrying another head. It is large, white-haired, the massive brow crushing the eyes deep into their sockets, the outthrust jaw set for ram. Once it must have been forceful and angry, someone of power and consequence; now, it is just a head among a hundred others, a fruit that ripens only to decay. Like so many of them, it talks incessantly, ranting at Kal in the language of arrogance and petty tyranny; but he ignores it. He leaps for the strongest of the low boughs, swinging down close to the hog with his legs twined around the branch. The head dangles just above the questing snout. The pig, diverted, veers toward it in a sudden rush, then circles below at manic speed, until vertigo brings it to a staggering halt. The tusked muzzle sways and jabs at the ground. Kal begins to rock to and fro, gaining momentum; the snout lifts again, swiveling to follow his movements. At the extreme point of the arc he releases the head, hurling it through the air. Fern hears the swish of leaves skimmed in its flight, the fading bellow of its voice. The pig races after it, squealing. The sound of its charge merges with the thuds as the head bounces over the ground. There is a screech, too deep to have come from the hog. From the subsequent crashing noises she deduces that the beast is wheeling again, bumping into protruding roots. The screams continue. In her mind’s eye Fern sees the head spitted on a single tusk, while the pig rampages around trying to shake it loose …