Dragon Charmer by Siegel Jan

Author:Siegel, Jan [Siegel, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345442581
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

She sees him in the spellfire, the man with the gray face. He looks younger here, but she knows him at once, by his ashen complexion, by the high prow of his nose. He is sitting in a room of books—a room not merely lined but apparently constructed of books. Chinks of bare wall show here and there, but the books are the building blocks: fat books, thin books, ancient calf-bound volumes, gaudy modern hardbacks, their spines crushed together so they can hardly draw breath, jostling and leaning, vertical and horizontal, like bricks stacked at random by a drunken bricklayer. And in the midst of the books the man sits on an upright wooden chair upholstered in studded leather, the light from a desk lamp falling sidelong on his face. The shadow of his own profile stretches across his left cheek, the nose elongated, the thin, pointed lips outthrust in speech, casting a mobile darkness in the hollow above the jaw. As his head moves the beam blinks briefly into his eyes, showing them pale, pale and cold, filled with a desire that is part avarice and part desperation. He might be a caricature of the dragon charmer, aged and flawed, the black purity of his skin dulled, the fine temper of his spirit blunted. Ruvindra Laiï was fearless, reckless, remorseless, a predator without morality or pity, but in this man those strengths appear shriveled, reduced to the littleness of mere evil.

He is talking to a chairback on the other side of the desk. The chair may or may not have an occupant: the spell-watcher cannot see. The back is unusually high, spreading out into a wide oval, the arms curving around to encircle the sitter. There might be a shadowy elbow resting there; it is difficult to be sure. Lower down, the vision blurs into smoke. Sound arrives slowly: the thin mouth tenses into stillness, and she hears the voice of the chairback—a voice from the abyss, deep and cold and familiar. She has heard that voice grating from a throat of stone, dripping like honey from stolen vocal cords; she has heard it harsh with power, cracked with death. But the essence is always the same. “You would not be an ambulant,” it is saying. “With an ambulant, the spirit is expelled from the body, to wait in Limbo until that body dies. You would remain in possession: I would lodge in your mind merely as a guest. A visitor. I would be yours to summon whenever you have need of power. Yours to summon, and to dismiss. I would be a djinn at your command.” She knows he lies. It is there in the softened tone, in the gentle slither of seductive phrases. She knows it and his auditor knows it: loathing and longing vie for prominence in his gray face. She sees him push knowledge away, sliding toward a willing submission. “Together,” says Azmordis, “we can master the last of the dragons, and in so doing we will have mastery of the air, mastery of fire and magic.

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