Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  “Favourite” didn’t quite cover it. “Queen Aoife has been kind enough to grant me a few small boons, yes.”

  “And Richard has called you in on account of our dragon?”

  She might be fat, confined to her bed, and wearing a mob-cap, but there was something about her that captured my interest. “What do you know about dragons?” I asked.

  “The usual manner of things. They snatch cattle, occasionally require maidens.”

  “Have they required maidens?”

  “Not yet. My stepdaughters are not fond of me, Lord Cygne. You may have observed this. But it may surprise you to learn that I am fond of them. Their only sin in my eyes, if sin it can be called, is that of missing their mother. And the callowness of youth.”

  “A commendably forgiving attitude,” I said, recalling the sourness of May’s expression as she mentioned her dead parent.

  “The first lady Porthlois was a beauty,” the current incumbent said, “but as poisonous as a serpent. Richard was lucky to lose her as early as he did. But the girls were quite young at the time—no more than children—and her beauty blinded them. All they saw was the sweetness. When Richard married me, three years ago, I was not as you see me now.” She gave a grim laugh. “Sometimes I think I have absorbed all the bitterness in this unhappy household, and it has bloated me like a toad.”

  “Such things have been known,” I agreed. “It sounds as though you knew Lady Porthlois.”

  “Why, so I did. I am her cousin. I knew her from a child, and she was always the same—the first to suggest a trick, then, when the adults found out, the first with tears and a trembling lip and a ready tongue to blame.”

  “You said you were fond of them. Do any of the girls take after her?”

  She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “No, they have all the sweetness and none of the bile, I am thankful to say. Just like her own sisters. Well, Lord Cygne, as you can see, I am not well, and I grow weary.” She reached out and patted my hand with a beringed finger. “I should like to talk with you again, though. Perhaps when you have experienced our dragon.”

  It was as effective a dismissal as any I have known. I touched my lips to her hand, a gesture which I could see pleased her. “Until then, Lady Porthlois.”

  And then I took my leave, wondering as I did so what the exact nature of Lady Porthlois’s ailment might be, and why a woman confined to her mirror-ringed bed in a bucolic part of the shires should be wearing on her finger a ring of the Grand College of Magi, an organisation notably opposed to the admission of women.

  LATER that evening, the steward, Parch, and I found ourselves crouching in a bush and observing a dragon. As we hastily departed, I reflected that the beast I had seen did indeed possess all the characteristics of a laidly worm: it was legless, fireless, and watery in humour, most probably grown from a newt or sluggard-worm. The size, however, appalled me.

  “Are they always that big?” I wondered aloud.

  “I do not know.” Parch shuddered. “The others, all those years ago, were reputedly not so large; but one, at least, appears to have been venomous.”

  “How deadly did it prove?”

  “It dispatched one of the Queen’s own knights.”

  By this, I knew, Parch meant one of the human knights attached to the Royal household, not one of Aoife’s fairy kindred. Aoife liked to be surrounded by young gentlemen.

  “The Queen sent a knight?” Porthlois had said nothing about this.

  “No, no, he did not come from Her Majesty. He was the son of a local family, distant relatives of the duke, and visiting them. Naturally, he felt obliged to do something about the dragon.”

  “Yes. Young knights usually do.”

  “The consequences were hideous. It burned him with an acid slime.”

  “Nasty. I wonder if this is of the same kind?”

  In the moonlight, Parch’s round face bore an expression that suggested that he was not particularly interested in my biological speculations.

  “No doubt. Lord Cygne, I think we should go back to the mansion now.” Parch cast a nervous glance at the beast on the hill. There was little more to be gained from lingering, it was true. I could glean no sense that the dragon was particularly magically imbued, at least, not more so than usual. I’d come across cases in which they were predominantly supernatural, more than their souls conjured through the portals between this world and its dark twin, but this was just a large worm. A large, hungry worm, I reminded myself as a cow bellowed beyond the hill and fell abruptly silent.

  On the way back, swiftly leaving the worm behind us, Parch cursed as a shadow ran through the cornfields to our left.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Damnable lecks,” the steward grumbled. “Running riot in my corn.”

  “Do they do much damage?” There weren’t many cornfields around Burnblack: it wasn’t the land for it.

  “Most certainly. They riffle the ripening grain, leach it of its vital substance, until it yields not flour but dust.”

  What with dragons preying on his flocks and corn-lecks poisoning the fields, the steward of Direfell had his work cut out. Parch’s face grew yet more sour as I said, “What measures do you take against them?”

  “The fields are warded, but somehow they always manage to evade them, no matter what I do.”

  “I will give the issue some consideration,” I promised the disconsolate steward, as the Hall came into view. “There may be something that can be done, for lecks as well as for dragons.”

  MY reassurances to Parch had been simply that. I had been hired to deal with dragons, not unruly corn spirits, and so the main thrust of my deliberations over the next day was to prepare an antiworming spell.

  Conjuring dragons is tough, but it’s simple. If you cannot find their master, then dispatching them to their point of origin is also tough, also simple. Whereas a worm’s soul, if one might call it such a thing, is brought through from the dark, to remove a worm from one’s vicinity, one reverses the process. Once the animating force, the vital essence, is gone, the dragon itself will shrink back to its natural par-worm or newtlike state.

  It was this that I proposed to do. To prepare for any magical procedure of this nature is exhaustive—and exhausting—work, and I thus made my requirements very clear to Porthlois.

  “A room, set apart from any other. You need not worry about equipment, beyond a brazier—I have brought my own implements. But I shall need a measure of charcoal, if you have it, and also a black cockerel.” This last was a relatively modern piece of magic, popular in France. I am not a man to turn to fads and fancies in the matter of necromantic practice, but occasionally even the French come up with something worthwhile, and experiments based upon a recently acquired Continental grimoire had convinced me that this could be useful.

  Porthlois grew a little paler when I mentioned the cockerel.

  “You plan to make a sacrifice?” he faltered. It never ceases to astound me how men accustomed to the butchery of their own cattle—and not infrequently, of one another in the course of battle—become as squeamish as maidens when confronted with what they imagine to be the bloodier side of the esoteric. I sighed.

  “Not at all. Indeed, I trust it will not be necessary and that the bird will be strutting about your barnyard on the morrow as confidently as before. The cockerel is there as a safeguard, to direct eldritch forces from me should anything go awry. Unless, of course, you would prefer to dispense with the risk to the bird and have any dire entities fall upon a member of the household? No? I thought as much.”

  The black cockerel was waiting for me when I entered the chamber: a small attic annexe. I had not yet quite got my bearings in this maze of a mansion, but I estimated that this room lay not far from the mirrored gloom of Lady Porthlois’s own chamber.

  Interesting. Lord Porthlois had not taken the trouble to introduce me to his wife, and so, correspondingly, I had not seen fit to mention that we’d already met. An invisible presence, a
nd yet, as unspoken influences often do, that intelligent bulk somehow seemed to dominate the proceedings in a way that I did not thus far comprehend.

  Once within the chamber, I locked the door and sealed it magically behind me. No one could get in, and, perhaps more importantly, nothing could get out, either. The cockerel clucked nervously within its iron cage. I took a look out of the small window before warding that, as well.

  The long summer evening had not yet drawn to a close, and a smoky dusk lay across the landscape. Just before the rise of the hills, I could see the cornfields, a paler expanse against the dark mass of beech wood. Sparks flitted amongst the stooks: lecks, perhaps, or something even more arcane. A thin moon hung above them upon its back, a sickle smile. It was not far off Lammas, and I could sense the thick tides of the land running sluggishly beneath the surface of my mind. Peasant magic is not for me—my path is the ceremonial one of necromancy—and yet it is irritatingly impossible in this faery-ruled realm to avoid the wheel of the seasons, their inevitable turn, and the nature of the days that they bring. I turned from the window and brought my attention back to the chamber.

  A chalice, of black glass and old gold. A wand, with an amber tip. A small bottle of blood: my own, used in the conjuration of shucks. A knife, obsidian-handled.

  I took the knife and, murmuring a familiar invocation, cut a circle in the air around me. Now, I stood in the centre of a circle, gleaming black-red.

  I began the familiar conjuration of a shuck, dropping blood onto a glass, imbuing it with a snatched fragment of my own essence, concentrating hard upon the invocation. Within the hour, a shuck stood before me in the circle, congealing like fog. Crimson eyes glared from the baleful wedge of its head, and it shook itself once, as if rearranging itself into being.

  “Go forth,” I told it. “Go forth, and bring me a scale from the worm that coils around the hill.” For a moment, I thought that the shuck might disobey me—far from the magical solidity of my own mansion, it had an unfamiliar aspect—but eventually, it gave another shake, and its dark dog shape bounded through the window and out upon the air.

  I did not know whether it would be successful. I was forced to wait, watching through the eyes of the shuck as it ran through the cornfields, scattering the smaller spirits, heading for the hill. Once, passing by a hedge, a corn-leck sprang out at it: I glimpsed the sharp teeth, the little yellow eyes. But the leck thought better of it and fell back into the ripening corn.

  When the shuck reached the worm, it paused, and I could feel it assessing its various opportunities. It came close to the tail, hunched close to the ground. But the worm sensed that something was amiss. It stirred uneasily, and its great head shifted above that of the shuck. I felt the shuck’s sides heave in and out in a mimicry of breath. It sidled forward, towards the worm. Above, I once more saw that emerald glint of eye against the swimming summer stars. The shuck leaped, knowing caution but not fear: it was not, after all, a living thing, and its dissolution meant no more to its consciousness than the passing of a shadow. It snatched at the tail, and its jaws connected with a sudden, jarring sensation on gristle and bone. I started back, within the confines of the circle, and my elbow knocked against a candle. Cursing myself for my clumsiness, I righted the light. The circle had not been broken, but the shuck was in flight: leaping and bounding through the narrow lanes between the beech trees, already far from the hill.

  Even all the way in Direfell, I heard the worm’s hiss, like a star sizzling out. A moment later, snapped back by the thread of magic, the shuck stood in front of me. A single scale, blue-green as captured water, clung to its gaping jaw.

  The conjuration of shucks is a lesser effort, a small part of magical acts. That this episode had drained me made me nervous, more so than I cared to admit. A wiser man might have rested before making the greater part of the spell; but wise men do not become magicians, and I was running out of time. On the stroke of midnight, I lit a candle of black fat, made sure the cockerel was safely in his cage within the circle, and placed the scale upon my tongue.

  How to depict the Eldritch Realm, the world beyond the world, where the essences of dragons roam freely? It is far from the world of Earth, and far, too, from the Otherlands from which our rulers come: the faery realms of the Hollow Hills are still a part of our own world, after all. But the Eldritch Realm is otherwhere, a vast darkness shot with crimson light and the giant clouds which birth suns. I spun through a world of stars, not knowing whether I saw a constellation or the eye of some god. Presences too immense for me to comprehend swam past, as if within some infinite sea.

  There are colours there for which we have no words, and a sense that one’s spirit is stretched to the point of snapping. I have never dared to travel too far within the Eldritch Realm, and yet I had to find the point of origin of the worm: the residual element of its soul, which tied it to its home and so lent it its power. The scale took me, obliging, spiralling down into billows of aquamarine and jade, past sparkling jewelled cliffs and waterfalls of living crystal. There, at the bottom of a crag, was a tiny point of light with a thread snaking from it.

  I knew how this was done. Find the start and pull back the thread, reeling it in like the capture of some monstrous fish. Unable to resist a tug from the Eldritch Realm, the worm’s soul would recede, coiling back inwards, and ready to be tethered.

  It was supposed to be relatively straightforward, or so I’d heard. But magicians are like fishermen: they lie about such things as ease and length. I would just have to give it a go. So, with the scale still resting in my spectral mouth like some unnatural tongue, I put my shimmering hand to the point of origin of the worm’s soul and spoke the words to bring it back again.

  You may not be entirely surprised to learn that I was not successful. Instead of reeling inwards, the spark that was the worm’s soul clung to my hand and pulled. I found myself shooting back through the Eldritch Realm, with the heavy airs of Earth a palpable presence up ahead. I tried every incantation I could think of to break free, but without avail. As the wall that indicated the magical boundaries of Albion shot towards me, I had a sudden, unwelcome vision of what the immediate future was about to bring: myself, hurtling out of a summery sky and dropping beneath a worm’s jaws. Attached to the line of its soul, I could not break free.

  I crashed through the boundary and cried out, an infant reborn, as the air of my own world tore into my lungs. But it was not the dragon-infested hillside on which I found myself. Instead, it was the interior of Lady Porthlois’s mirrored chamber.

  This would not, I am sad to say, be the first time in which I’d proved to be an uninvited guest in some lady’s boudoir. Sometimes it turned out rather better than anticipated, sometimes not. But my intentions in entering the room of Lady Porthlois were, on this occasion, entirely inadvertent, and I experienced a moment of wholly social panic.

  I need not have worried. Her ladyship neither simpered, screamed, nor demanded an explanation. As I stumbled to my feet and fell back against the wall, I saw Lady Porthlois sitting up in bed. Her mouth and her eyes were wide open, and a blue-black light streamed from them, reverberating from the mirrors and illuminating the room like the interior of a thundercloud. Her fists were balled at her sides, and the chamber echoed with magic.

  I see no shame in admitting that I tried to run. My efforts were, however, doomed. My movements resembled those of someone caught in a spider’s web, a net of treacle in which magic ran so thick and closely packed that there was barely sufficient air to breathe. I fell to my knees, choking, and the magic picked me up and carried me to a nearby chest, made of oak banded with iron. I was deposited within it, the lid slammed shut, and there I lay, gasping for breath, while the spells of another mage boomed and crashed above my uncomprehending head.

  EVENTUALLY, it ended. I felt the coming of dawn rather than witnessing it, for no light penetrated the depths of my box. But a true magician always knows what time of the day or night it might be: the presence of the decans of
each hour change with their own curious precision as the wheel of the sun turns towards night and back again. Three o’clock, and all was not well. I was expecting my captor to open the lid and gloat over her prize; but she let me be, and that was more galling than anything. I was beginning to suspect that rather than being some special captive, I had simply gotten in her way.

  During my time in the box, I had been able to get some measure of her magic, and this was unusual. I had met female magicians before, and some were powerful, some merely cunning. All illicit, borrowed power, of course, for the College will not train those of the female sex: the result of years of jealous rule by faery women, who know what sometimes mortal men do not—that the talent of the fair human sex outstrips that of the male. Small wonder that Aoife and her predecessors have not been able to face the competition. But as it is, the College guards its secrets with close attention: Lady Porthlois wore a mage’s ring, but where had she obtained it? From a father, or from her husband? It could not be hers by right, and yet her magic was, I sensed, intimately bound together with the ring, just as mine was bound to the old silver band bearing the black dog’s seal, which I wore upon my third finger. And there was something else besides, an immensity of power reaching far beyond the normal skills of mortal humanity. A stout, sick woman in a mob-cap, confined to her bed? Lady Porthlois was far more than this. One never likes to think that one might have met one’s match; but lying there in the dark oak box, surrounded by the odours of magic and cedar, I was beginning to feel that this hour, for me, may finally have come.

  I lay there for another four hours, listening intently to the sounds from the chamber beyond: a heavy creaking, as if of great steps upon ancient floorboards. I’d already run through all the incantations I could think of, and it would have been just as efficacious if I’d babbled nursery rhymes: it wasn’t just that nothing had worked, as that my efforts simply held no power at all. Nothing I’d ever encountered, not even the Faery Queen herself, had so comprehensively stripped me of my abilities.