The Dragon-Charmer. Jan Siegel

      THE

      DRAGON- CHARMER

      Jan Siegel

       Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents in are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      Harper Voyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published by Voyager 2000

      Copyright © Jan Siegel 2000

      Jan Siegel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780002258371

      Ebook Edition © MAY 2009 ISBN: 9780007321810 Version: 2016-10-24

      Contents

       Title Page Copyright After Blake: Dragon Prologue: Fernanda Part One: Witchcraft Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Part Two: Dragoncraft Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Epilogue: Morgus Glossary: Names On Dragons On The Gift Keep Reading Acknowledgements About the Author By Jan Siegel About the Publisher

       After Blake: DRAGON

      We dreamed a dream of fire made flesh –

       we gave it wings to soar on high – an earthquake tread, and burning breath – a thunderbolt that clove the sky – its belly seethed with ancient bile; its brain was forged in human guile and human strength with Vulcan’s art beat out the hammer of its heart.

      We dreamed a dream of hide and horn –

       the wonder of a thousand tales – we built from prehistoric bones – we armoured it in iron scales – and all our rage, ambition, greed re-shaped our dream into our need with mortal hands to seize the fire – to more-than-mortal power aspire.

      And when the heav’n threw down the sun

       and seared whole cities from the earth, when silence fell of endless death and wail of demons brought to birth – when far above the shattered skies the angels hid their rainbow eyes – did we smile our work to see? Did Man, who made the gods, make Thee?

       PROLOGUE

       Fernanda

      That night, she dreamed she was back in the city. It was not the first such dream: she had had many in the weeks since she left, some blurred, beyond the reach of memory, some clearer; but this was the most painfully vivid. She was standing on the mountainside wrapped in the warm southern dusk, in a blue garden musky with the ghosts of daytime flower-scents. Here were the villas and palaces of the aristocracy, set amongst their terraced lawns and well-watered shrubberies. There was a house nearby: she could see the golden arch of door or window floating somewhere behind a filigree of netted stems. Its light drew her; and then she was close by, staring inside.

      There were three people in the room: a woman, a young man, and a girl. They were sitting close together, deep in talk. She knew them all – she knew them well – so well that it hurt to look at them – the youth with his averted profile, just as he had appeared the first time she saw him properly, and the woman with silver glints in her long hair, though she was not very old, and the girl with her back to the window. Herself. She wore the veil she had been given on the last day, hiding her cropped head, but the colours and patterns which had always seemed so dim and elusive poured down her back like some inscrutable liquid script, tinted in rainbows. It had the power of protection, she had been told. Her unspecified anguish crystallised into the horror of imminent doom; she saw herself marked out by the veil, designated for a future in which the others had no part. She tried to enter through the glassless window, but an invisible barrier held her back; she cried out – Take it off! Take off the veil! – but her voice made no sound. The whorls and sigils of the design detached themselves from the material and drifted towards her, swirling together into a maelstrom, and she was rushing into it, sucked down and down into deep water.

      And now the blue which engulfed her was the ultramarine of an undersea world. Great weeds arose in front of her, billowing like curtains in the currents of the wide ocean. They divided, and she passed through into a coral kingdom. But beyond the branching fans of white and scarlet and the groping tentacles of hungry flowerets she saw isolated pillars, roofless walls, broken towers. She floated over gaping rooms where tiny fish played at hide-and-seek with larger predators, and the spotted eel and giant octopus laired in cellar and well-shaft. And ahead, in the shallows, the