The Dragon Book (21 page)

Evidently, one of their parents had enjoyed a floral bent. All the girls looked the same, with the long, gilded locks and pale faces. Not unlike flowers, I supposed; it was a pretty enough conceit. I surmised that they took after their mother, since, beneath the powdered wig, Porthlois’s hair was dark. As Rose held out the pail of dew for me to admire, I saw that her fingernails, too, had a slight golden tinge. Odd, though not unattractive.

“You’re not worried about the dragon?” I asked.

“Oh, it keeps to its hill,” Rose explained, though she cast a somewhat nervous glance over her shoulder as she spoke. “Our father has had a protection put on the grounds.”

“Indeed? I noticed no such.”

“Father is a man of great subtlety,” Lily explained, and an expression that almost amounted to worship crossed the features of all three girls. I smiled in as benign a manner as I could manage.

“Wonderful! I have not yet met Lady Porthlois …”

At once, the worship soured. “Oh,
her
,” May remarked.

No love lost, then. Hardly an uncommon occurrence.

“Girls!” The duke ambled down the steps with a clap of the hands. “Kindly leave the poor man alone. Don’t you have things to do?”

The three golden-haired girls trooped meekly into the house, and Porthlois and I sat over ale and bread for the next hour and made plans. It was not immediately obvious to me how to approach the laidly worm. I’d never dealt with dragons, but I wasn’t going to tell Porthlois that. As a magus, one must guard one’s areas of inexperience with care.

“The first thing must be the study of the beast,” I told the duke.

“Quite so. As you know, they tend to go to ground during the day, appearing as soon as the dusk falls over the land.”

This was so: dragons, for all their fiery reputation, are not solar creatures, preferring the shadows from which their spirits emanate. I had some thoughts of locating the thing’s nest and burning it out at noon, but first I needed to see exactly what I was dealing with.

“I shall send you out with my steward, Parch,” the duke said.

“In the meanwhile, I should like to see a little more of the estate, the terrain …”

“I will arrange it.”

As he was doing so, I took the chance to explore Direfell Hall itself, wandering down panelled corridors patterned by uncertain shafts of sun, into a book-lined room that bore an astrolabe upon a small table, its captive planets set to spinning by the touch of my hand.

Up a narrow flight of stairs, onto a landing that smelled of beeswax and age. I was about to turn on my heel and return to the parlour, when a voice said, “Who’s there?”

It had come from behind a closed door, across the landing. I went to it, and answered, “My name is Lord Cygne.”

“Ah, the magician?”

A gratifying enough response.

“Just so.”

“Come in, Lord Cygne.”

Entering, I found myself in a long chamber, and blinked. A shaft of sunlight had blinded me. I ducked my head, avoiding the light, and eventually my vision cleared to reveal a room hung with mirrors, turning gently in the draught. One of these had directed the blinding sunlight towards me. At the end of the chamber was a bed. A monstrously corpulent woman reposed within it. “I am Lady Porthlois,” the woman announced. Her voice was well modulated, even hypnotic. She held out a hand, and I drew closer. “I’ve heard of you.”

“Positively, I hope.”

Lady Porthlois grinned, displaying white teeth within the expanse of her face. Yet despite her size, I could see that she had once been a handsome woman: there were the vestiges of angularity beneath the flesh, and her eyes were large and hazel in colour. I wondered about the mirrors. “More or less. You’re a favourite of Her Majesty, aren’t you?”

“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, and 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.