by Joan Lennon
When they turned to look again, Adagon was dead.
And ever since, the Crystal has fed our greatness. It is the source of our strength. We worship it as an emblem of the Path, and every time we take hold of it, we are made mightier than before.
There was a pause, followed by a great sigh of satisfaction that riffled round the room. Then, in a respectful silence, the class began to leave.
In the Gallery, Madlen started to stand up too, but Dagrod shoved her down again.
‘Not yet,’ she hissed. Even though they weren’t visible to the males, she had automatically adopted a subservient posture, head down, eyes down, until they had all gone out. Only then did she straighten and settle back again with a sigh.
‘Well?’ said Madlen, struggling to keep her voice down. ‘What are we waiting for now?!’
Dagrod gave her a superior look. ‘You don’t have any manners at all, do you,’ she commented coldly. ‘The Keeper of Memory may just be a female, but she is practically a male in status and you don’t go around waking up practically male dragons just because you want to talk to them.’
Madlen flounced and turned her back on dragons in general. Cam and Bryn grinned at each other, and made themselves comfortable against Dagrod’s flank.
After a bit, Bryn said, to nobody in particular, ‘You know, it makes you wonder what that Old Dragon meant. I mean, “Last Great Deed”. I know it’s supposed to be about the ultimate deed… but it could have been saying, “End of Great Deeds”. Game over. End of the road.’
He didn’t notice the mound that was the Keeper shift a little.
‘Path,’ murmured Dagrod. ‘Dragons have Paths. Humans have roads.’
‘Whatever. But it’s quite a sad story if you look at it like that, isn’t it.’
Dagrod was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, there was a puzzled note in her voice.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I never thought of that.’
‘Or anything else, I imagine.’
The voice from the far end of the Gallery was completely unexpected. Everyone tried to jump up and turn around at the same time –
– and Dagrod’s tail and Bryn’s feet became totally tangled.
With a yell, Bryn sprawled on to the Gallery floor; the backpack was sent flying; the detector started squealing; his sketchbook fell out; and a sheaf of papers, caught on an updraught of air, fluttered about like large, agitated snow.
He looked up to see one sheet being pinned to the ice by a long, ink-stained claw.
The Keeper was awake, and staring at him.
37
The Keeper…
Uncoiled, she was unlike any dragon they’d yet seen. She looked as if she had once been hugely fat, and then some force of time had stretched her out, elongating her until now she seemed to go on forever. Her scales were dry and dull; etiolated wings dragged a little along the floor beside her when she moved; her snout was long and twisted to the side. It would be easy enough to discount such a dusty bone-bag – until you saw her eyes.
‘Treasonous words. A box that screams. And… these little windows…’ The great lids dropped, hooding her eyes for a moment, setting the others free to speak.
‘They’re pictures…!’
‘It’s just…’
‘You see, I was fishing…’
‘So,’ the Keeper said, rearing up suddenly so that the Questors – and Dagrod – jumped back again. ‘You’d better bring your catch along then, young… Dagrod, isn’t it? Yes, of course it is. And tell them to bring their artefacts with them. Not the sort of thing to leave lying about…’ Her teeth showed slightly in an expression they really couldn’t read, and then she was gone.
‘The Keeper has doors to everywhere,’ said Dagrod, noticing their amazement. ‘We’ll be going the normal way.’
‘Going where?!’ demanded Cam.
To the Library of course. Where the Memory is kept.’
The Library probably wasn’t far from the Teaching Hall, but Dagrod took great care in keeping her ‘catch’ unseen, using back tunnels and ducking more than once into an empty chamber while other dragons paced unsuspecting by. At one point, however, they scurried past a pair of huge, important-looking double doors. Bryn found himself wanting to slow down, but Dagrod wouldn’t let him.
‘What was that?’ he hissed up at her.
‘The Great Hall,’ she answered. ‘Where we keep the Crystal. Why?’
Bryn shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I felt… something.’
Cam and Madlen exchanged looks.
‘Could that be it?’ Cam muttered to its sister. ‘Could the Crystal be what he needs to find?’
Madlen lifted one shoulder. ‘Pretty inconvenient if it is,’ she whispered back. ‘We walk off with something like that, they’re bound to notice…’
‘Yeah,’ said Cam. ‘Great.’
The Library was bewildering. It was a labyrinth of low, curving tunnels and unexpected nooks and crannies, strange corkscrew galleries and confusing translucent walls, packed full of a seemingly random collection of books, scrolls, carved cubes, tapestries, sheaves of strangely marked bones – all the ways dragons had stored information over the millennia.
‘You took your time.’
Even though they were expecting her, she still managed to make them jump.
It’s like she’s trying to prove something all the time, thought Bryn suddenly to himself. Keep us off kilter. Who does she remind me of?
He felt something shift inside him.
‘We’re here now,’ he said quietly. He spoke directly to her, as if no one else were there, as if what he really meant was, I’m here now.
For a moment, she tried to stare him down. Then, with a curious ripple along her body that must have been the equivalent of a shrug, she said, ‘So… show me what you’ve got. Show me… everything.’
And now he didn’t want to, out of sheer cussedness. Then the others saw him grin, as if something had all at once become clear. As he began to unload their belongings on to the table, he said cheerfully, ‘I’m not scared of you.’
The Keeper went still and watched him with those extraordinary eyes, as if trying to eat him with them.
‘Right,’ he said, giving the bag a shake. ‘That’s the lot. Travel rations. First aid kit. This box is probably not familiar to you.’ And he explained the dragon detector to her. ‘My sketchbook and drawing equipment. But I expect what you’ll really want to know is why we’re here in the first place.’ He took a breath. ‘We’re on a Quest.’
‘WHAT!?’ It was Dagrod. She seemed horrified.
‘We’re on a Quest,’ said Madlen.
Dagrod’s face crumpled. ‘You mean you’re not… No, look, you fell through the ice and then I brought you – that’s why you’re here… isn’t it?’
Cam patted her reassuringly. ‘That’s how we’re here,’ it said. ‘But the why is a bit more complicated.’
‘You never said anything about anything like that!’ she wailed.
‘Er… you never asked.’
Dagrod hung her head.
‘I didn’t think, at first,’ she murmured, ‘and then I wondered… and I thought… I hoped, just maybe, you were here to help us.’
The humans exchanged embarrassed glances. Then Bryn cleared his throat and tried to explain.
‘We are here to help you… too. You see…’
As the story of the imbalance of the Worlds and the search for the mythic objects unfolded, Dagrod’s eyes got bigger and bigger. The Keeper showed no obvious reaction, though she twitched from time to time.
Even when he’d finished, she didn’t speak right away. Instead, she turned her attention again to the objects on the table, touching them gently with her claws. With a delicate action, she flipped open Bryn’s sketchbook and began laying out the sheets, peering at each picture with great concentration.
The others made as if to look too, then stopped, unsure of Bryn’s reaction.
He’d stiffened, then he turn
ed half away and lifted his hand in a gesture that was part permission, part defeat. Dagrod gave the portraits of humans a quick once-over and then fixed on one of herself. Madlen and Cam moved gently from one picture to the next, aware of the privilege of seeing what their brother had always kept so carefully hidden.
‘You couldn’t draw me,’ the Keeper said suddenly. She twisted herself up, more than any of them would have thought possible, slitted her eyes and sneered at him down her warped snout.
Bryn turned back, but he didn’t answer. He just looked at her for a long time and then, still not speaking, he reached for his kit and chose a fresh page.
It was a test of some kind – that much was clear – and Madlen, Cam and Dagrod almost held their breath, willing Bryn to succeed. The Keeper, on the other hand, seemed determined to make his task as hard as possible. Along her great length, parts of her distorted and twitched as if with a life of their own. She changed shape like some sort of bad dream, as if she were defying Bryn to capture a likeness.
Finally, it became too much for Cam, who hissed suddenly, ‘Stop that! Hold still, can’t you?!’
But Bryn didn’t seem to notice, or mind. In fact, he didn’t look at the Keeper much at all after the beginning, and when he did, it was with such an abstracted expression that the others wondered what he was seeing.
Then he was finished.
The Keeper held out a claw to take the picture for herself, but Bryn shook his head and laid it out on the table instead where they could all see.
A dragon of flamboyant wings and ebony scales triumphed across a night sky, flaming silver against a full moon, so high above mountains of ice that they were merely suggestions and barely real.
It was everything the Keeper held behind her eyes, hidden inside her twisted form.
‘How did you do that?’ she breathed.
‘I draw what I see,’ he answered softly.
And, for a long time, nobody said a thing.
Then the Keeper turned her strange head towards Dagrod.
‘Well,’ she said huskily. ‘You’ve done well, young female. You’ve brought me a Spaener.’
38
… and the Spaener
‘You think I’m a what!?’ squawked Bryn.
The Keeper had disappeared deeper into the Library in search of documentation. Apparently dragon society had a very high regard for precedent – the old proverb ‘There’s nothing new under the ice’ was taken literally. No change in policy could be introduced that hadn’t been tested in the past. However, their understanding of what constitutes documentation was a good deal broader than anything Madlen’s World would have recognized. Stories, poems, songs, as well as accounts of battles, dynasties, debates and discoveries – over the millennia, the Keepers had accumulated a distinctively draconic Memory.
‘You’re a Spaener,’ said Dagrod calmly. ‘It means something like “Seer”. You know, like a prophet. They’re supposed to show up when we’ve come to the end of one Path and need to start on another. Otherwise, how would we know it was time to stop? All dragons are taught about the Spaeners.’
‘Dagrod! Get a grip!’ said Bryn desperately. ‘This is me you’re talking about. As you may have noticed – I’m not a dragon!’
‘Oh, it doesn’t have to be a dragon,’ Dagrod replied earnestly. ‘Could be anything. According to the Memory, one time it was even a puffin.’
They stared.
‘A puffin,’ Madlen said flatly. ‘You’re trying to tell me that the Great and Mighty Dragon Nation took orders from a puffin.’
‘Well, no,’ said Dagrod. ‘Puffins can’t talk. But, apparently, this one had the most penetrating stare. It was the time of the Short Rebellion and Gor the Eleventh – well, that’s what he became – he brought this puffin into the Assembly, and it stared. And it must have had the power to really see, because every dragon it stared at turned out to be a member of the cabal that was plotting to overthrow Gor the Tenth. They all confessed on the spot. It was incredible.’
‘No argument there,’ muttered Madlen.
‘Of course, the rebellion was a very long time ago. No modern dragon would consider ending a Path before it was over.’
There was a pause.
‘It’s usually a dragon,’ Dagrod continued. ‘The Spaener is, I mean. But this time it’s you! And I found you!’
She beamed at Bryn shyly.
Bryn looked sick.
‘But what about the Quest?’ Madlen muttered aside to Cam. ‘Bryn’s supposed to be looking for the thing, not messing about making a name for himself in dragon lore.’
Cam chewed its lip. ‘Let’s just hope he can do both,’ it answered softly. Then it perked up a bit. ‘And anyway, we’ve obviously come to the right place. If anybody’s going to know what and where our mythic object is, it’s bound to be somebody who knows everything!’
‘How wise, for one so short on legs. Currently, however, I have my mind on other things.’
The Keeper practically skipped up to them and tumbled a bundle of scrolls and cubes on to the table.
‘Yes… yes… I can work with these. Your Quest/Mythic Object Story is no use, of course – I could put my claw on a dozen versions but they’d just see it as confirmation of the Path we’ve already got. But the box… and the pictures… and a Spaener – now that’s promising.’ She scratched her twisted snout enthusiastically, like a human rubbing its hands together in anticipation.
The Questors lifted eyebrows at each other.
‘You seem different, Madam Keeper. More… cheerful?’ suggested Cam tentatively.
The Keeper barked a short laugh. ‘Of course I’m cheerful! Do you have any idea how long dragons live?’
‘No.’
‘Then you have no idea of the true meaning of the word boredom.’
They stared at her.
‘Look, I’m not just a librarian. Each new thing or bit of information that comes in interacts with all the other things in the Library, and I can see things in those relationships that mean something to us all. I can make a difference. But if nothing new comes in, what’s my job? Guaranteeing everything stays the same.
‘The thing about the Path of the Crystal, little humans, is the way it looks after itself. It’s no coincidence that the Separation Treaty happened when it did – and that was only one of many ways we’ve closed ourselves off, small ways, innocuous ways, introduced so delicately that no one could object –’
‘I don’t know anything about a Separation Treaty – we never got taught about that in the Females’ School,’ interrupted Dagrod.
The Keeper snorted. ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course they’re not going to teach you anything that might make you think!’
‘What did you mean,’ asked Cam, ‘when you said the Treaty wasn’t a coincidence?’
The Keeper narrowed an eye.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘The politician of the group. Well, think about it. If you have a status quo you’d like to stay status, what’s a good way of going about it? Cordon it off – impose a quarantine – keep out anything new and different that might mar the perfection. See?’
Cam nodded. ‘Makes sense,’ it said.
‘It would,’ said the Keeper. ‘That’s human thinking for you.’ When Cam looked puzzled, she continued, ‘After all, the Treaty was a human idea.’
‘Hang on,’ Bryn interrupted. ‘I always heard it was the dragons’ idea.’
The Keeper waved a claw dismissively. ‘Well, yes, it did originate from the City, but it was a human who drafted it for us – and suggested it in the first place too. Now who was that…’ She pulled a book towards her and flipped through some of the pages. ‘What was his name? Or rather, is. He’s still crawling about the place, on and off… keeps a low profile, but I’ve sniffed him coming out of private meetings with Lord Rad and his kind from time to time – here it is… Cor… dell.
Alpine Cordell. Extraordinary name.’ She pointed to the bottom of a page. ‘I remember not much liking the direct
ion it was all going in, even at the time. Seemed to me the more documentation we had of the proceedings, the less murky it might be later on. Important to have it all on record –’ she winked at Bryn – ‘but I would say that, wouldn’t I?’
‘Cordell?’ said Madlen. ‘Isn’t he…?’
‘Yeah,’ said Cam. ‘He’s all right, Ma’am. I’ve seen him at the London House. He’s just Secretary to the Council. They tell him what to do and he does it. No sinister motives there – unless being grey and boring is sinister!’
The Keeper turned her extraordinary eye towards the Dalrodian.
‘Are the young ever as clever as they think they are? I wonder.’
Cam scowled. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ it said huffily.
The Keeper laughed again and waved a dismissive claw at them.
‘Go away. I’ve got work to do. The Assembly sits tomorrow. Dagrod, keep them out of sight until morning. And then… we shall see…’
Then, noticing they were still there, she repeated gleefully, ‘Go away!’ and disappeared into the far reaches of Memory.
‘My Lord?’
Lord Rad couldn’t hide the shudder that the proximity of humans always gave him. Particularly when unprepared. This one, the London House one, had popped up out of nowhere, right under his snout.
‘My Lord, a word. I have information. About some thieves… and a Quest…’
The human was always appropriately subservient and, though he hated to admit it, he had been useful to Rad and his concerns. Perhaps that was putting it too strongly. He’d been not un-useful, might be closer to the mark. Best give the creature a moment. Nothing better to do…
‘Well?’ drawled the dragon lord. ‘You may proceed.’
The human’s bow was so humble that the thin smile on his face could not be seen.
‘You found them where?!’
Back in the London House, the Preceptor lunged out of the chair towards him, but Cordell did not step back or flinch. He didn’t repeat the information either. He knew he had been heard the first time.