Dark Fire Read online

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “How do you feel?”

  “To be back in Cambridge?”

  He nodded.

  “Odd.”

  He raised his head. “I can hear the river.”

  “Don’t,” she said, pulling him closer, plucking graying hairs off his jacket lapels. “All that was a long time ago.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “But it does have some relevance to what we were talking about in the car.”

  “Oh?” She walked him forward a pace.

  “I didn’t answer your question. Why Alexa chose me to find the claw. Why she went to the trouble that she did.” He reached for Liz’s hand and rested it across the slight curve of her pregnant stomach. “When Gwilanna forced us apart back then, she broke up a chain of events that the Fain had been nurturing for centuries. You and I were supposed to have a child long ago, born of genius and the auma of Gawain.”

  Liz shook her head, perplexed. “What are you saying?”

  “David should have been our son,” he said.

  3 A MESSAGE FROM GADZOOKS

  If Liz was discomfited by Arthur’s revelation, she showed no outward sign of it. She merely folded the words away behind her eyes and said, “Come on. We’d better catch up with Lucy, before she starts spouting about the dragons.”

  Rupert Steiner was waiting at the top of the steps with a hand to guide Arthur down a hallway narrowed by two walls of bookshelves, into a room that smelled densely of tobacco. “Please, sit down. Would anyone like a window open? It can get a little stuffy in here.” He hurried across the room and forced a window open anyway, fixing it on a latch heavily eaten by rust. “I’ve arranged for tea to be brought to us at six.”

  Liz glanced at the Napoleonic clock above the fireplace. Its face looked as jaded as the whites of Professor Steiner’s eyes. Five thirty-five. They had made good time. She helped Arthur to a seat on a green leather sofa and sat down beside him. Lucy had taken up residence in a hand-carved chair covered loosely with an Aztec-style throw and was peering around the room as if a parakeet had escaped. A soft rebuke in dragontongue from her mother made her turn and fix a visitor’s smile to her face.

  “If it’s not too impertinent a question, how long have you had your condition, Arthur?” Rupert Steiner returned to the fireplace and rested his elbow against the wooden mantel. A small depression in its outer edge suggested this was a favorite position. Liz wondered idly how many students he had spoken to from there.

  “Five years,” Arthur replied.

  “Is it incurable?”

  “The medical profession have no answers.”

  “What a dreadful inconvenience,” Professor Steiner muttered. He flapped his handkerchief like a magician. “But you’re still lecturing?”

  “In physics, yes.”

  “Good man. Good man.” Steiner plunged one hand into his pocket and with the other, plucked a pipe from a nearby stand. Using its barrel as a pointer he said, “Well, now. Introductions. Elizabeth you mentioned on the telephone, of course. So I assume that this charming young lady is your daughter?”

  “My daughter,” said Liz.

  Steiner nodded and glanced at the girl. The teenager’s gaze was wandering again, rippling the spines of uncountable books. She was holding Gwendolen like a statue in her lap. Liz watched the professor’s gaze settle on the dragon and noticed the apple in his neck take a pulse. “Her name is Gwendolen,” she said.

  That brought Lucy quickly to attention. Throughout her life it had always been taboo to talk about the dragons as anything other than ornaments. Yet here was her mother using an introductory tone of voice. She ran a finger down Gwendolen’s ear. Gwendolen did as she’d always been instructed and kept to her solid pose.

  Professor Steiner filled his chest with air. “Yes … it’s remarkably like …” He sighed and touched one hand to his forehead.

  “It’s all right, Rupert,” Arthur came in. “Elizabeth and Lucy can be absolutely trusted. They won’t be shocked by anything you say and they won’t attempt to ridicule you. Why don’t you tell them what you told me on the telephone?”

  A late spring breeze found its way through the window. Rupert Steiner stared at the pale pink clouds and the roofs of the colleges beyond. He put his pipe down and wiped his hand against the fabric of his trousers. “Very well. But I beg you to appreciate what a challenge this is for me. I’ve traveled to many exotic places and heard a great number of intoxicating stories, but that’s all they’ve ever been before this incident: stories. What happened in this room has left me quite shaken, which is why I’ve sought advice from the most rational but freethinking mind I know.” He glanced at Arthur briefly and then he began: “I was working at my desk a few nights ago …”

  He nodded at it, making Lucy glance over her shoulder. It was antique, like the rest of the furniture, strewn with books, files, and manuscripts. An under-watered spider plant was throwing trails of baby spiders almost to the floor. A candleholder occupied the farthest corner, hidden by a fungal coating of wax.

  “… when, suddenly, the candle went out. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that; I often work with these windows ajar, but the way the light extinguished was extremely strange. There was no flicker. The flame seemed merely to lean toward the night then disappear in a snap, as if it had been swallowed.” (Lucy gave a knowing grunt.) “When I relit the wick, there was … the creature. A dragon, almost identical in shape and color to the one that Lucy is holding. It was sitting on the windowsill, looking like a hungry bird.

  “At first, I naturally thought it was a prank. A clever stunt arranged by one of my students. I stood up to look into the quad and the next thing I knew the dragon had flown to the edge of my desk.”

  “I can’t believe you saw him move,” gasped Lucy. The dragons, when active, generally flew too fast for the human eye to follow.

  Professor Steiner funneled his gaze. “It was blurred, but I definitely saw its wings spread, yes.”

  Liz waved Lucy quiet. “Please go on, Professor. What happened next?”

  “Well, it was quite extraordinary. From somewhere — beneath a wing, I think — it produced a notepad and a pencil.” Lucy gulped. She felt Gwendolen’s heartbeat start. “By now I’d begun to imagine that what I was seeing was a very sophisticated radio-controlled toy, especially when it touched the pencil to the pad and appeared as though it would write something down. It had been my birthday the day before and I was expecting a fatuous greeting to appear on the pad. But then the creature changed its mind and did the most astonishing thing. It looked around the desk, raised its eye ridges, blew a rather enviable smoke ring, then put its notepad away and walked across the desk to my ink pen and blotter. It then lifted the pen, two-handed, from its stand and wrote on one of my favorite parchments.” He pointed to a small stack of paper in a gilded box. “In all my years of archaeological research, in all the artifacts I’ve seen in Egyptian tombs and the treasures I’ve discovered in Turkish catacombs, I have never come across anything quite so incredible.”

  “Show me,” Lucy demanded impatiently. “Where is it? What did he write?” She ran a hopeful eye across the desk, but saw nothing that might have come from Gadzooks.

  “Lucy.” Her mother’s voice was soaked in fury. “You’re in someone’s house.”

  “But it’s our dragon,” Lucy countered. She slumped back in her chair, knocking her knees together in frustration.

  Arthur quickly cleared his throat. “Elizabeth, I think now might be an appropriate moment to tell Rupert about your connection to these dragons.”

  Liz met the professor’s gaze. “I make them,” she said. “I mold them from clay. I have the ability to animate them, some of them at least. I can’t and won’t explain how it happens; you’ll have to take that on trust. The one you saw is called Gadzooks. He was made for the young man who was my tenant for a while. You may have heard of him. His name is David Rain.”

  The professor fumbled through his thoughts for a
moment. “No, I’m not familiar with …”

  “He’s an author, Rupert,” Arthur filled in. “He writes about the environment.”

  “White Fire,” said Lucy. “That’s his famous book.”

  “Ah, is this the young man who made newspaper headlines when he disappeared in the Arctic?”

  “He’s back now,” Lucy said, bluntly.

  “And so, it seems, is his dragon,” said Arthur.

  Professor Steiner touched his temples as if he might be trying to unlock a memory. He gave up after a couple of seconds and wagged a finger at Gwendolen. “And does she …?”

  “Move?” said Liz. She gave a short instruction in dragontongue. Gwendolen softened her scales and turned a full circle with her wings extended.

  Steiner ran a finger underneath his collar. “Miraculous,” he muttered, turning dumbstruck to Liz. “Are you some kind of …?”

  “Potter,” she said. “I’m some kind of potter. That’s all that matters.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose I should answer Lucy’s question and show you what your dragon wrote — though I warn you, it may not make much sense.” He crossed over to his desk and unlocked a drawer. From it he withdrew a single sheet of paper. It appeared to be made of thick gray cotton, like a small hand towel stiffened with starch. He passed it first to Lucy, who glanced at the pen marks and said, with disappointment, “It looks like a doodle.”

  “Many ancient languages do,” said Arthur. “If you’d never seen Japanese or Arabic writing you would probably not associate the characters with words at first. What do you make of it, Elizabeth?”

  She took the paper and examined it. “I see what Lucy means. There doesn’t appear to be a formal phonetic structure. Though the strokes suggest it. They’re very deliberate.”

  “I agree,” said Rupert Steiner, buoyed by her assessment, “but it’s quite unlike anything I’ve interpreted before. I couldn’t even guess at its country of origin. The frustrating thing is, I’m sure I’ve seen another example of this, but I can’t place it.”

  “Could it be a drawing, perhaps?” Arthur asked.

  The professor rubbed the question into his cheek. “The recording of history through storytelling and drawings was prevalent in our earliest ancestors, but even the wildest imagination couldn’t pull these marks into a meaningful picture. No, I’m convinced it’s a text of some kind.”

  “Can I have another look?” Lucy took the page onto her knees again, turning it through several angles. “It reminds me a bit of the marks I saw on a wall in that cave on the Tooth of Ragnar.”

  “The Tooth of Ragnar?” Steiner jerked back as if he’d been shot. “You’ve been there? But that island is — or rather was — in one of the remotest parts of the Arctic. Were you taken there on a school trip or something?”

  “Erm … something,” Lucy replied, putting the sheet down on the coffee table. Her mind flashed back five years to when she’d been abducted by Gwilanna and taken to the island as part of the sibyl’s bungled attempt to raise Gawain from the dead. Many times she’d been left to fend for herself, with nothing but wild mushrooms to eat and a female polar bear for company. That had been one heck of a “school trip.”

  “How extraordinary,” Rupert said. “You must have been awfully young. You were lucky to visit it before it was destroyed by volcanic activity. The Tooth of Ragnar is a fascinating place, steeped in all sorts of Inuit myth. Why —”

  “Just a moment, Professor.” Liz cut him off and turned her attention to Gwendolen, who’d just given out a startled hurr. The little dragon was on the coffee table, standing by the sheet of paper.

  “What’s the matter?” Liz asked her.

  The professor steered his gaze between the dragon and the woman. “Goodness! Can you converse with it?”

  “Yes,” said Liz, without looking up. “Go on, Gwendolen.”

  Gwendolen stepped forward and pointed to the writing. I know how to read it, she hurred.

  “How?” said Lucy.

  It’s dragontongue, Gwendolen said (rather proudly).

  Lucy moved her aside. “Dragontongue? I didn’t even know you could write it down.”

  “Me neither,” Liz admitted, sitting back, stunned. She glanced at Arthur, who was stroking his chin in what she always called his “pondering” mode.

  “Elizabeth’s dragons speak a language roughly akin to Gaelic, Rupert. It’s possible to learn it, given time.”

  Steiner bent over the coffee table and peered at Gwendolen as if she were a prize. The dragon warily flicked her tail. She hurred again at length.

  “Did she speak then? I thought I saw smoke. And did her eyes also change color?”

  “You’re making her nervous,” said Liz. “She wouldn’t normally be allowed to act this freely in human company and you shouldn’t, by rights, be able to see her. Somehow, Gadzooks must have made that possible.”

  “Speaking of which …” Lucy gestured a hand.

  Liz glanced at the writing again. “Gwendolen has just explained that the curves on the paper are like the way she moves her throat to make growling sounds.”

  “Yeah, but what does it say?” pressed Lucy.

  Gwendolen gathered her eye ridges together and frowned at the markings again. It was not a word she recognized, she said, but she thought she could speak the pronunciation correctly. She cleared her throat and uttered a long, low hurr.

  Lucy glanced at her mother, who gave the translation. “Scuffenbury,” said Liz. She ran her fingers over the marks. “The message Gadzooks left is ‘Scuffenbury.’”

  4 ABOUT A HILL

  Professor Steiner’s sallow face blossomed with surprise. “Scuffenbury? Why, that’s —”

  “A hill,” Lucy muttered, shadowing his thoughts.

  “In Maine, yes. You know of it, Lucy?”

  Lucy played one by one with her fingers. “It’s that place where there’s a white horse carved out of the grass.”

  “Indeed it is,” Professor Steiner said, smiling. “The structural composition of Scuffenbury is a unique geological phenomenon in this part of the world. Its chalk-based foundations are far more common in England, I believe. Wouldn’t you say so, Arthur?”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But what’s even more interesting is that a few miles from Scuffenbury is Glissington Tor, a man-made structure that looks like a large steamed pudding from the road. It’s popularly known as ‘dragon hill.’ People say it’s the burial site of a dragon.”

  Gwendolen pricked her ears.

  “Complete nonsense, I’m afraid,” Steiner laughed. “During the nineteen fifties, a large tunnel was dug into the heart of Glissington at ground level, but it revealed nothing. No bodies. No artifacts. No weapons of any kind. Certainly nothing large and scaly. Archaeologically speaking it was more lame duck than dead dragon.”

  “But if it’s man-made, why was it constructed?” asked Liz.

  “Good question,” said the professor, ruffling his hair. (To Lucy’s disgust, a shower of dandruff tumbled out.) “There have been many theories. A monument to celebrate an ancient deity. A lookout for encroaching raiders. A sacrificial site — in the old religions, horses were often given up to the gods. A center of natural power — it’s said to lie at a vast intersection of ley lines. Or possibly just a gift to the Scuffenbury horse.”

  Lucy sat forward, hands between her knees. “Gift? What for?”

  Professor Steiner drummed his fingers on the wall for a moment, then went to retrieve an atlas from his shelves. He flicked through it to a map of New England. “If you stand by the horse and look across the valley, you can see Glissington very easily.” He turned the map and used a finger to demonstrate. “At certain times of the year, the morning sun sits on the peak of the Tor. Legend has it there was a cairn up there with some sort of keyhole structure or circle at its zenith which focused the sun on the third eye of the horse.”

  “Here,” said Arthur, demonstrating for Lucy. He put a finger to his forehead just above the bridge
of his nose.

  “Quite,” said Steiner. “It’s what scientists call the pineal gland, often thought of as a channel of creative energy; the focus of the so-called ‘sixth sense.’” He snapped the atlas shut. “There’s no hard evidence to suggest the cairn actually existed, though people still climb the Tor year after year searching for fragments; the stones are supposed to have healing properties. The myth, of course, was that at certain times of the year the sun would pour through the eye of the cairn and breathe life into the horse, which could then rise up and be ridden across the hills. Some authors even claim it could fly.”

  “And the dragon?” asked Liz. “Where does that come in?”

  “Well, the popular fable, the one you’ll find in most of the textbooks, is that the dragon died at Glissington, slain by a virtuous warrior who rode the white horse against it in battle. But those of a more spiritual disposition believe the dragon was actually a protector of the horse and that when the dragon died of natural causes, the heartbroken horse lay down on Scuffenbury and simply refused to get up again.”

  “It’s often described as ‘grieving,’” said Arthur, “because of the way it holds its head low. Do you have a picture of it, Rupert?”

  “I do.” Steiner quickly pulled down another large book with several colored plates of the white horse and Tor.

  Lucy studied it carefully. The horse wasn’t what she’d expected to see. Long and graceful, its body almost flowed like a ribbon through the grass. Only one spindling leg was attached to the body and its tail dipped down out of sight into the hillside. Its head carriage, as Arthur had said, was very low. Just below the figure was an artist’s impression of the Glissington cairn and the likely pathway of the sun to Scuffenbury, striking the horse in the region of its eyes.

  Glissington. The name began with a G. Could there be a dragon in the ground under there?

  As if he could read the girl’s thoughts, Professor Steiner said, in a reverent tone of voice, “In the latter version of the myth, the one where horse and dragon are allied, the dead dragon was buried under mounds of earth freshly dug from the Vale of Scuffenbury and carried there by the local community. In the slaying account, Glissington Tor simply is the downed dragon, hidden by thousands of years of blown soil and grass seed. Fascinating, don’t you think?”