Dragonwitch

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  From the look on that tortured, broken face, Mouse expected the Dragonwitch to burst with fire, to consume the high priestess in her agonized frustration. Instead, she stood, and the smoke from her hair and skin was black as it rose to the darkening sky. Without another word to the priestess, without a look, she raised her arms and cried out in a pain-filled voice, for it hurt her to speak at all.

  “Yaotl! Eztli!”

  The blaze of sunset vanished. Howling Midnight fell upon the world as the noise of War and Blood rose up from where they had hidden themselves and appeared in dark-bound flesh.

  Mouse screamed and fell to her hands and knees, but her voice was unheard in the din. She saw the Black Dogs, beasts she had glimpsed only twice before, when they brought the Silent Lady to the temple and when they swept down upon the Chronicler. Creatures of nightmares made real, they stood one on either side of the altar, and they could not be told one from the other. Even when they closed their great gaping mouths and swallowed their baying, the echoes rang through the Midnight, and Mouse scarcely could hear the voice of the Dragonwitch saying:

  “He’s escaped! The heir has fled into the darkness. Find him! Fetch him back to me!”

  First one, then the other raised its ugly head and howled a joyous, bloodthirsty howl, the deadly song of the hunt. Then eyes like meteors streaked past Mouse. Though neither Dog could possibly fit through that narrow doorway, they vanished, dragging their Midnight behind, disappearing down and down, mad for their quarry.

  The remnants of Midnight lingered. The bonfire itself had expired, and only the light of the Dragonwitch’s eyes shone through the gloom. Any moment now she would turn to either Mouse or her high priestess and doom would fall upon them.

  But then a voice spoke from the doorway.

  “That was an unnecessary bit of dramatics.”

  It was a voice Mouse knew well.

  She spun about where she crouched and saw the tottering figure emerge from the stairway to stand before the altar of the Flame at Night. A figure who leaned upon his mop handle as a magician of yore might lean upon his staff, though with perhaps less dignity.

  “But then again, dear queen, you always were one for a bit of drama, weren’t you?”

  The Dragonwitch shrank back, nearly tripping over her own feet, and her flaming eyes narrowed. She could not see, so great was the fire burning her from the inside out. But she stood, her head to one side, listening to the echoes of a voice she knew. Her shriveled nose sniffed, and a long forked tongue slid between her teeth as though to taste something on the air.

  Then she spoke, and her agonized voice caught and tore at her throat.

  “So,” she said. “You have returned to me at last.”

  The Chronicler fled.

  How long ago had he escaped the procession and dashed down a narrow passage so small that it must have been dug by children? A fortunate discovery; he’d had no difficulty slipping through its opening, his fingers feeling the shadows ahead, unable to take precautions in his haste to slip away. He didn’t think the eunuchs would fit through, but he must hurry, for other passages might connect to this. He must lose himself, and fast, if he hoped to escape the clutches of the Citadel folk.

  The passage ended, opening into a wide cavern. His every footstep echoed, and somewhere far away water dripped. He still heard the indistinct shouts of his captors, and when he looked back along the passage, his blind eyes played tricks enough on him that he believed he saw torches gleaming. But no one could have pursued him. For once in his life, he thanked whatever fate had seen fit to let him be born malformed.

  He turned toward the empty cavern, half wondering if another step or two would bring him to an endless chasm, so great were the echoes, so complete was the darkness. But what choice had he now? He could not go back, not that way. They would force him to take the sword, should it exist, and as soon as he had delivered it to their wretched goddess, they would kill him.

  If he must die, he wanted to die on his terms. If he must die, he would die a man not a mistake.

  So he stepped forward and heard the ghosts whispering.

  They surrounded him, though unaware of his presence. In the deepness of the Netherworld, they were lost to all but themselves. And yet he heard them weeping, wailing, sighing for dreams dashed and dreams achieved, calling out the names of those they had once loved or hated.

  One whispered close to his ear in a voice of tortured agony, “Starflower, my love!”

  The Chronicler turned.

  He could see nothing in the darkness, but the voice revealed all. A wolf. The Chronicler smelled the stench of fresh blood, and his mind saw blood-matted fur, felt the brokenness of spirit.

  Then the creature was gone, moved on its blind, wandering way. But the Chronicler, horrified, sensed the nearness of many more straying souls.

  “I have earned the right!”

  The Chronicler whirled about to face that voice and thought he saw (though he couldn’t have seen) the staring eyes of a warrior going to her death. But though her face was turned to him with an intensity of desperation, she did not see him. She moved toward him, her hands outstretched, each clutching brutal weapons. “The honor is mine! Open the door!”

  Her powerful form overwhelmed the Chronicler, and he thought she would slay him. But she passed through him with a coldness like bitter winter. For a moment he felt the beat of her sorrowing heart, and when she had gone, disappearing into the shadow realm, he wept for her though he did not know why. All around him, the voices of the lost ones cried.

  Then suddenly another sound echoed down from the realm above. It must have been a great noise indeed to sound so loud even here in the Diggings. The baying of the Black Dogs.

  They were on the hunt.

  Somehow the Chronicler knew they were coming for him.

  9

  IN THE BODY OF A WOMAN I FELL, wingless, upon a cloud. I lay in hideous pain, uncertain what had happened. The fire still roiled within me, but my dragon form had vanished, and without it the furnace inside was too hot! I could not support such pain! Even now, though I have lived with this burning for generations of mortals, it hurts me more than you can know. It hurts like first love rejected. It hurts like jealousy eating me away from the inside out.

  So I lay in the presence of Hymlumé. When at last I dared raise my face, I found her looking down upon me, shining and luminous. And she said to me:

  “Poor thing.”

  I cast myself from the cloud. I fell all that long, long way, streaking like a comet to earth, trailing fire in my wake. I hoped it would burn this frail woman’s form to ashes and that I would die my final death, more painfully even than in the blaze of Halisa. I would die and then I would burn no more.

  “I will kill you,” the Dragonwitch said to the scrubber. Fire spilled from her lips, so keen was her hunger. “I will kill you at last.”

  “Maybe,” the scrubber replied. “But you want my sword to do it, don’t you?”

  She could not answer. Her mouth contorted and fire bellied up from her throat, but she gnashed her teeth and would not let it spill forth. Slithering down from the altar, more snakelike than womanly in that moment, she crawled to the scrubber. In a sinuous movement, she stood up, towering above him.

  “I will have your sword!” said she.

  The scrubber grinned up at her, his cloudy eyes foolish. But his voice was sharp. “You’ve lost my heir,” he said. “Not a good start to your plan.”

  “I will recover him. I have sent my children.”

  “So I saw,” said the scrubber. He leaned more heavily on his mop, which was leaving a wet patch on the rooftop. “But you know,” he continued, “they won’t stand a chance of finding him. Not against the bonds of kinship.”

  “What?” The Dragonwitch stared down at him, spraying sparks in his face when she spoke. “What do you say?”

  “The bonds of kinship. Surely you know what I mean. There was a time you felt those bonds yourself, Hri Sora. Before you
took the flame.”

  She said nothing. So the scrubber, waving smoke from under his nose, persisted. “The bonds of kinship are never stronger than in the Netherworld. If my heir’s own kin goes searching for him in the dark, even your Black Dogs will find it difficult to catch him first.”

  Suddenly that ancient face turned, and Mouse, lying near the rooftop door, was caught in the gaze of the old man who had taught her the scouring of pots and floors. It was a gaze far deeper, far older, and—oddly enough—far younger than she had ever dared imagine, and she gasped at the potency of it.

  He was telling her, she realized, what she must do.

  But her limbs were weak as water. For the moment, at least, she could not move.

  “Your own Father,” the scrubber continued, turning back to the Dragonwitch, “was unable to call me to the darkest place once my brother had set out to hunt me down. There is power in blood ties. Power you would do well to recall.”

  The Dragonwitch’s face convulsed. What memories coursed through her brain just then to cause her such torment? But when she spoke, her tongue was a whip. “No hunter, no matter how skilled, is a match for my children!”

  “He doesn’t have to be a match,” said the scrubber. “Not for this task. You know that well enough.”

  He leaned his mop handle away and stepped around it to approach the burning creature before him. And she, though she could have broken him in two, stepped back, avoiding his touch.

  “You cannot count on my heir to bear Halisa up from the darkness to you,” the scrubber said. “Prophecies and chosen ones can hardly be trusted in any case.” He sighed heavily and passed a hand across his brow. “Indeed, dear queen, there is only one thing to do.”

  “What is that, Murderer?” the Dragonwitch hissed.

  “I shall have to fetch it for you.”

  Waiting was not among Eanrin’s more developed skills.

  As a cat, of course, he had a certain amount of experience sitting before the mouse hole, every sense keen even as his eyes seemed to glaze over with disinterest. But though a cat at a mouse hole might look as lazy as a tub of lard, he was no less alert, no less purposeful.

  This was different. This was waiting without apparent purpose. This waiting required patience. Eanrin was rarely game for patience.

  He sat in cat form on the edge of the gorge, his outer eyelids mostly closed, but his third eyelids still open so that he might observe the world without the world being quite aware of his observation. He particularly observed Alistair. The poor young lord had paced himself to the point of exhaustion and now lay on his back, staring up at the sky. It was a fixed stare, not the vague gazing into nowhere one might expect. Curious despite himself, Eanrin glanced up to see what so fascinated the young lord of Gaheris.

  Above them gleamed the blue star.

  “Starlight, star bright, guide her footsteps through the night,” Eanrin chanted, but his voice was acidic. “Don’t put too much hope in those old nursery rhymes, mortal man. They mean little in the end.”

  “Maybe.” Alistair shrugged without looking around. “Or maybe they have meaning beyond your knowledge.” Perhaps he didn’t intend to be heard, but Eanrin’s pricked ears picked up every word.

  Irked, the cat stood and trotted a little along the gorge, looking out across the long plain to where the fire of the temple burned. He had seen the second gathering of the Midnight in the distance and wondered what poor soul now had the Black Dogs on his trail. Could it be Etanun himself, fleeing along his chosen Path?

  Could it be Imraldera?

  Eanrin, as merry a man as ever sprang from the gardens of Rudiobus, growled bitterly. “This dragon-blasted waiting is more than I can stand,” he muttered. But he must stand it. Until some guidance or grace was given him, he must sit here on the edge of the Dragonwitch’s poisoned realm and do nothing, and it was the hardest task he had ever been given.

  The evening passed. Alistair slept at last, the cat noticed and was glad of it. Who knew what the following day would bring? Possibly danger, possibly death. So let the lad sleep while he may. The blue star had danced its measure and descended below the horizon with its brethren, and the sun was beginning to rise. Otherwise, the world was still and hot, only to get hotter. And they must wait.

  Then suddenly, there was Mouse.

  The cat, dulled by the labor of doing nothing, didn’t see her at first. Then he realized that the little figure on the edge of his vision, moving with the mind-numbing plod of mortality, was familiar. He leapt to his feet, meowling, “Get up, Alistair! It’s the girl!” Away he streaked across the dust toward that distant image.

  Disguised once more in her slave boy’s rags, Mouse hastened along, head down, her mind full of the things she had seen and learned. Her ears were ever strained for the sound of pursuit, and though it never came, she expected it nevertheless.

  The high priestess may have allowed herself to be deceived once. But she surely would not blind herself to Mouse’s treachery a second time.

  So Mouse fled, her one thought to reach the gorge and, if the cat-man and Alistair waited there, to tell them all she knew. Perhaps in this small way she might undo some of the evil she had worked.

  When she at last saw the cat swiftly approaching, she stopped and her face went slack, almost dead. Eanrin saw enough in that expression to confirm his worst suspicions. Even so, as he halted at her feet, his ears back and his tail lashing, he asked, “How did you escape the Black Dogs?”

  “I didn’t,” said Mouse.

  The cat growled. Then he was a man towering over her, his hands clenched into fists. “You were sent by the high priestess, weren’t you, to find Etanun’s heir. Not by my lady Imraldera.”

  Still she did not avert her eyes, though her face was pale beneath the layer of gray dust. “I betrayed you all,” she said. “I was sent to retrieve the heir to Fireword for the Flame at Night, and that is what I have done.”

  By this time Alistair was approaching. “Mouse!” he cried, but the girl did not shift her gaze from Eanrin’s furious face.

  “I betrayed you for the sake of my goddess,” she said. “But my goddess does not exist. There is nothing but a dragon.”

  “Learned that a bit late, didn’t you?” said Eanrin.

  Her breath came in a shudder. “I freed the heir. He has fled into the Diggings. Lost. She cannot use him to retrieve the sword.”

  Alistair reached them and stood panting, his face, unlike the cat-man’s, full of a surprised smile. “Mouse, you’re alive! You’re alive and whole, and I thought for sure you’d had it! How’d you get here? How did you—”

  Mouse, who could not understand him anyway, interrupted. “Tell him,” she said to Eanrin. “Tell him what I did. Tell him what I am.”

  Eanrin licked his dry lips slowly, his eyes narrowed. Then he turned to Alistair. “She’s a traitor. She brought us here so that the Black Dogs could snatch your cousin for the Dragonwitch.”

  All trace of a smile fell from Alistair’s face. He wiped dust from his eyes with a quick, annoyed gesture, turning away as he did so. Then, his head low like an angry dog’s, he looked at Mouse again. This time she felt the force of his gaze and felt herself obliged to meet it. Her eyes swam, and she hated herself for allowing any trace of emotion to show.

  “Is it true?” Alistair asked.

  She did not need to understand his language to know his meaning. She said, “It’s true,” and he understood her as well.

  “Dragon’s teeth,” he growled, and turned his back on her and the cat. She addressed herself to Eanrin, hoping she would be able to suppress the sob in her throat before it broke.

  “The Chronicler is gone,” she said, “down into the Diggings. The Dragonwitch sent the Black Dogs after him, but I don’t know if they’ll catch him. I don’t know if it even matters.”

  “What are you doing here?” Eanrin demanded. “Why have you come? If you have some brilliant little scheme to save the day up your sleeve, do you really think
we’re going to listen to you a second time?”

  “I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try,” she replied, her resolve much firmer than her voice. “Etanun came to the Dragonwitch. He has offered himself in his heir’s place, to go down to the chamber and retrieve the sword. Tomorrow night, he said.”

  “Traitors abound,” Eanrin said. “And what, pray tell, is an honest man to do?”

  “What is she saying?” Alistair demanded.

  Mouse persisted. “We must find the Chronicler. We must find him and get him to take the sword before Etanun can.”

  “The Black Dogs have been sent for him.” Eanrin sighed heavily and shook his head. “They always catch their prey. We’ll never find him.”

  “That’s not what Etanun said.”

  “Really?” Eanrin ground his teeth. “Go on, turncoat. I’ll hear you out. But make it fast.”

  Mouse quickly related the conversation she had overheard on the rooftop—the power of blood ties that even the Dragonwitch could not deny. And she expressed that she believed Etanun was telling them how to prevent the disaster about to fall.

  “I don’t believe it,” Eanrin said. “Not from the Murderer.”

  “Alistair is the Chronicler’s cousin,” Mouse said. Alistair, who had understood none of their conversation, half turned to her at the sound of his name, then looked away again. “If anyone is to find the heir in the Diggings, it would be him.”

  “Yes,” Eanrin acknowledged grudgingly. “I know about kinship bonds. So what are you suggesting? That we sneak our redheaded hero into the Diggings right under the noses of your priestesses?”

  Mouse shook her head. “The opening to the Diggings is too heavily watched. You as a cat might be able to slip through, but I could not get Alistair even within the temple limits.”

  “It would seem a hopeless business, then, wouldn’t it?”

  Here Mouse bit her lips, afraid of the reaction to what she was about to say. After all, why should they trust her? She scarcely trusted herself anymore.