Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  But those who called upon demons to aid them frequently did so out of the best of motives.

  Such as now.

  It was Amayon, bright-clothed in garnet velvet and sparkling with jewels and malice, who handed Ector the torch which he drove into the kindling.

  At this distance John couldn't see clearly, and the crowd beyond that flame-like crimson form was only a blur. But he heard their voices, wild over the cracking of the fire. Furious voices, relishing as Ector did the vindication of themselves. They'd been told that the plague was his doing, or the doing of the demons he'd worked for, and they were doubly angry, for there had been a time when he'd been popular in Bel. Dragons-bane— the only man living who had slain a dragon. He had fought the demon-possessed dragons that flew down at the command of the demon mage Caradoc; he had defeated them.

  “… pawn of the Hellspawn,” Ector was shouting above the rushing crackle of oil-soaked tinder. “Author of the plague that has swept this land …”

  The smoke billowed thick and greasy. The heat was suffocating, and in the smoke she took shape. Beautiful and hideous, wrought of fume and fire, she held out her hands to him, waiting for him to call her name.

  I won't. He closed his eyes—not that that did a lot of good; he knew she was still there—and turned his face aside. Airless, all-encompassing heat and pain. I won't. I will die, and Jen and the boys and all the Realm die with me.…

  Someone screamed.

  He thought, Do they see her? and someone else took up the shriek. More howls—terror, panic. Wind bent the flame around him, whirled the smoke, and he opened his eyes and saw a dragon, huge, fifty feet or more and with a wingspan twice that, silver-streaked and tabbied with black and opalgreen blazing eyes. It was almost on top of him already, and he could do no more than stare up at it in shock as the silver claws lashed down, caught him up, stake, ropes, and all, scattering burning hunks of wood and hay over the heads of the trampling crowd. The beating shadow of wings, the flash of the winter sunlight as they rose above the city's walls and the bitter, freezing cold after the fire's heat. With his hands still tied, John felt a stab of pure dread that the dragon would drop him—Fat lot of difference that would make, given the day I've had so far—and turning his head he saw the city fall away, mossy ice-slicked roofs and bare trees; city fields and the silver loop of the River Clae, shining in the Magloshaldon woods. Brown fields, then brown steppe, then gray sheets of cloud that enveloped them like damp muslin and cold that shredded his bones.

  The dragon carried him tucked up under its breast, and without the heat of its flesh John thought he probably would have slipped away into death from the cold, Which I wouldn't have bet two coppers on last night …

  Weightless exhaustion. Consciousness that came and went, slipping away to drop him suddenly back to an awareness of hanging suspended in damp gray clouds, over a barely glimpsed landscape of formlessness below. He was only marginally conscious when the dragon descended to a gray-yellow desolation of sand and scattered boulders, of flint hills without vegetation and of twisting scoops of pebble-filled stone that had been watercourses long ago. These he saw only dimly, for the gray light was fading, and his eyesight wasn't good enough to discern details. On a wide plateau in the desolation stumps of pillars marked where a city had stood. Crumbled foundations and lines of broken walls surrounded a stone platform two hundred feet by nearly five, a square rock island in the sand—even he couldn't miss it.

  The dragon balanced in the air like a kite and, reaching down, laid John on the ground before the remains of the plat-form's wide stair. Evening turned the vast sky yellow, lilacstained and fading. John felt the stone under him chill as snow through the torn rags of his shift, and knew the night would be brutal. He couldn't imagine where he was, or how far they had come:

  Please don't make me walk home.

  Still hovering weightless above him, the dragon extended its swan-like neck and with a bill like Death's scythe bit through the ropes that bound him, the chains that fastened his wrists. Then it ascended with no more flurry than a cloud of smoke, wheeled on its silken wings, and flew away toward the west.

  Aching with cold, with bruises, with hunger and exhaustion, John raised himself to one elbow and shouted, “CORVIN!” His voice echoed hoarse in the emptiness, not loud enough to startle rabbits, had there been any. The ancient authorities—Dotys, and Gantering Pellus, and others who'd written of dragons—said that to name a dragon's true name would call it, though these true names were in fact airs of music.…

  Save a dragon, slave a dragon, went the ancient grannyrhyme: To rescue it from death put it in bondage to its rescuer.

  John had never quite known whether this applied to ordinary people—he'd only ever seen wizards do it—and he prayed his guess about the dragon's name was correct. “Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, by your name I charge you, come back!”

  He saw the flash of distant silver in the last western sunlight, and the glittering shape of the dragon returning. But before it reached him he fainted from exhaustion and cold.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the dark beneath the earth, Jenny Waynest dreamed of the Dragonstar.

  John had told her about it, on and off, for three years, and in her dream they lay together on the platform he'd built above the moss-fouled leads of the Alyn Hold tower, on one of those hot summer Winterlands nights when the whole world breathed magic and the stars leaned down close over the desolation of moor and stones. “A thousand years ago was the last time it showed up, when Ennyta the Great was the King of Ernine,” John was saying to her. The starlight flashed in the round lenses of his spectacles, and his voice was deep and velvety with odd undertones of huskiness to it, like rocks in a plowed field. Jenny would know it in her dreams, she thought, until she died. In this dream he had half a dozen of his crumbling old volumes scattered about him: He'd spent a lifetime ferreting them from the ruins of old fortresses and towns. The lantern he'd brought up to read them by had gone out.

  “Accordin' to Dotys, anyway—if that thing I have really is a fragment of his Second History—it reads like Dotys, no error, the fussy old prig. He claims he was writin' from the Golden Chronicle of the Kings of Ernine, but—”

  And Jenny asked, “What does he say about it?” because even in her dream John was apparently ready to explain at vast and meticulous length why he thought the author of the forty or so sheets of mildew-stained vellum he'd bought from a peddler were in fact Dotys's Second History and not one of the other ancient authors' and she wanted to hear about the star.

  “Well, anyway, it's a double-headed comet,” John said, called back from historical exegesis that could easily have taken the remainder of the night. “The first comet showed up in spring, and the second, in the same place in the sky, in fall. The dragon's head an' his tail, they said.”

  On the southern horizon a pale streak showed where the sun was dozing, and all around them the cornfields of Alyn Village resounded with the twitter and warble of sleepless summer birds. In her dream, Jenny still had magic. She could feel the radiance of it, glowing golden in her bones.

  “Accordin' to my calculations …” He rolled over and grubbed among his books for a much-scratched wax tablet. Only Jenny's mageborn eyes could have made out the scribbles on it, in the starlight. “… the first head should show itself, the year after next, right there in the Sign of the Dragon.…” He put his head close to hers so that she could site along his pointing finger at the cluster of stars hanging low above the toothed black notches of the Wolf Hills. They had been together a dozen years on this particular night, but she still loved the smell of his flesh, and was deliciously conscious of the warmth of his shoulder against hers.

  Oh, my love, how could I have turned away from you?

  Shadow folded around her, like cradling hands. Morkeleb the Dragon had said to her once, Endure, and she now tried to say to him, I will, my friend. The dream faded away. She became aware that she was underground, in darkness, in the gnomes' Deep at Ylfe
rdun. That she was dying. Around her the darkness of the Deep was very cold. She was conscious—from what felt like a great distance away—of lying on stone. Gritty dust clogged her throat and her nose, and a small star of cold pain radiated from her left shoulder, pain that no longer seemed to be part of her body. She had been shot with a poisoned arrow, she remembered. Morkeleb had come to save her, whipping down through the passageways of the mines that lay below and to the north of Ylferdun Deep. But it had been a trap, and the gnomes had set off an explosion, caving in the tunnel around him with the blasting powder.

  She felt his mind reach out to hers.

  Endure till I come. He had said that to her before, when they had parted after the loss of her magic, in those terrible days when she could meet John's silences and anger with nothing more than silence of her own.

  No, she thought now. Morkeleb would try to use magic, the strange powers of a Dragonshadow, to save her and himself. Magic is the heart and the flesh of dragons, and she knew there were demons in the Deep, waiting for him to do just that. In the summer just past she had seen how the demons could use the magic of a wizard as a bridge into that wizard's mind and flesh, thrusting aside all protective spells as they had never done before. Thus the demon Amayon had entered her. Back when I HAD power, she reflected, without even bitterness, now. The demon lord Folcalor had come close to conquering the Realm of Bel through the wizards he had seized. Had he not, for reasons of his own, chosen to imprison the souls of the mages thus possessed rather than simply drive them out to dissolve, Jenny knew she would never have regained her body and her life.

  Better that she herself should die, she thought, than that demons seize Morkeleb's mind and power to use as their own.

  Nightmares pulled her back into darkness. The memory of what Amayon had done with her magic tormented her, acts of cruelty and wantonness. The memory of being trapped in her green crystal prison, feeling the hot brilliant rush of demon magic, pain, and shame. The memory of what the world had looked like when Amayon had been within her mind.

  In nightmare she heard, too, Amayon's screams when John had turned him over to the Demon Queen behind the mirror, to be tormented forever. Felt anew the blasting shock of utter grief, when in killing the wizard Caradoc—in driving Folcalor from his body—her own magic had been seared away to ashes.

  Desolation and cold washed over her, the recollection of having nothing left of the power that had been hers.

  She wondered, as she sank into deeper darkness, whether death would liberate her from those nightmares. Or was that what death consisted of: helplessly reliving horror, over and over again?

  “Jenny my child,” a soft old creaky voice whispered in her ear, “thou art what thou art.” Someone was with her in the darkness, someone whose strength touched that cold, disembodied pain and slowly melted it into nothingness. Someone whose strength kept her from sinking beneath those black waters.

  “Past and present and yet to come, this thou art. All of it, fire and water, earth and air. All of magic ariseth from understanding this.”

  The voice was familiar, and Jenny thought, Ah.

  Her past was clear to her, as clear as the old scars on her back. Caerdinn, the bitter old wander-mage who had taught her spells, had often struck her in his anger, but it was he who had made her a wizard. He who had taught her the uses of power.

  She had been a witch-child, knowing from earliest awareness that magic was in her. She could look at a lamp and call flame to its wick, or find her mother's thimble when the cat had knocked it under the wood-box. She could see in the dark, while others groped and blundered in that gloomy little house in the lower village, beneath the walls of red-bearded Lord Aver's Hold. Lord Aver had had a prisoner at the Hold when Jenny was small, a black-haired Ice-witch he'd captured in a raid on an Icerider camp one year when those nomads had come raiding down from the North. This Ice-witch was a shaman among those northern nomads, she had told the child Jenny, and had been cast out from her people. She could not go back.

  Kahiera Nightraven had been Jenny's first teacher.

  Past and present and yet to come, this thou art …

  Sweet incense and warmth slowly returning to the innermost hollows of her flesh. The cold star of poison pain slowly fading. The sweetness of herbs.

  The Nightraven had not been a good woman, or an easy teacher. Coldhearted and beautiful, she had laid spells over her captor, so that Lord Aver had loved her even when they fought. His sisters, Jane and Rowan, had hated her like death. When she had disappeared, leaving behind her a son, a puzzled, wary toddler who never quite trusted the world, the spells on Lord Aver had remained: He had never loved another woman, not even his former longtime mistress Hollyberry, the town blacksmith's wife.

  Jenny, too, had been left with a hole in her heart.

  It was old Caerdinn, the half-mad and rage-filled old hedge-wizard Lord Aver got for his son John's tutor, who took Jenny as a pupil when she was thirteen. Caerdinn took her into his crumbling stone house on Frost Fell, and taught her how magic was organized. Showed her how to draw power from the sun and the earth and from her own flesh and bones and blood. How to observe, and to name each tiniest flower and grass blade by its true name so that they would be within her power: how to call power from these true names. How to weave Limitations on each spell, so that cows would not run mad, nor birds forget how to fly, nor thatch roofs take fire two villages away when she summoned Power; and how to harmlessly disperse the power she'd called, after her spells were accomplished, lest it linger in the place where she'd raised it and mix with later spells. This was how Spaeth, his master, had taught him, and all the wizards of their Line back to the shadowy ancient warlock Herne.

  All magic comes from understanding, Caerdinn had told her, staring at her with his huge pale blue eyes, like a demented goat's beneath white brows. He seized her by the shoulder, small hands but terribly strong. The long nails stained yellow with the herbs he smoked dug into her flesh. Know the names of each pebble underfoot, and you can call even their tiny magics from them at need. The more of them you know, the more accurately you know their nature, the greater will be your power.

  In the darkness, in her pain, in her forty-sixth year, she thought now, There is power in me still.

  She breathed in deep, feeling the demons nearby. Their minds circled hers like ravens. She felt the presence of Morkeleb the Dragonshadow, who in his days as a dragon had nearly destroyed this Deep. He had dwelled here for a time after driving the gnomes forth, and knew its every passageway and chamber. His calm strength upheld her, flowing into her lungs and blood.

  As her mind and body relaxed she felt the warmth return. Past and present … the glimmer of cold disdain that had been the Nightraven, who had given her the first knowledge of what power was.

  Caerdinn's resentment and bitterness, that had not stopped him from teaching her all the little he knew. Even though they were dead—Caerdinn for certain, and Nightraven for all she knew—Jenny felt them still, a part of her body, her self as surely as Morkeleb's magic had once been a part of her bones and blood.

  And a farther mind, that sweet creaky little voice again, said, Linger till we come, child. Hold my hand.

  Mab, thought Jenny, clasping that strong, gentle shadow. Miss Mab, the men of Bel called her: Taseldwyn of the House of Howeth-Arawan, the tough little gnome-wife whose spells had enabled John to pass through the Burning Mirror at Er-nine—to survive his first encounter with the Demon Queen.

  Mab was still far away. The Wise Ones of the Deep had put her under house arrest in the warrens of her own clan, but in her dream Jenny felt her hand. It was no bigger than a child's and hard-muscled like a blacksmith's, thick with the gaudy rings in which the gnomes delighted. There was comfort in her grip, reminding Jenny of all those nights when she'd gone to sleep holding John's hand.

  John, she thought, giddy and frightened. Where is John?

  She saw him riding away from her through the blowing snow of a coming storm. Ri
ding down Frost Fell after they'd found their son, Ian: The boy had taken poison, to keep the demons from returning to his flesh. She saw John ride away and felt the darkness that she'd felt then, too despairing even to speak to him or to anyone of her pain.

  Morkeleb lifted her. She heard the slither of boulders pushed aside, smelled the brimstone residue of blasting powder and the choke of rock dust. From a great distance she heard the dragon speak her name in that voice like the dark behind the stars, and though she'd already wandered a long way into a quiet gray country beyond the borders of sleep, she could still speak to him, for she was still holding Mab's hand. I'm here, she said.

  His body was warm. Like sleeping near a stove on a freezing night. It flashed through her how cold she was, and she tightened her grip on Mab's hand: I'm cold, she said.

  Endure. The word flowed over her like the tides of the sea.

  She didn't know how she would, but she thought again, There is power in me still. Not really magic, she thought, but power of a kind. She tried weaving a little skein of magic from the name of that black-haired girl-child, running after Kahiera Nightraven along the battlements of Alyn Hold. To that she added a thread of power from the awkward, un-pretty thirteen-year-old who had fetched Caerdinn's breakfast porridge for him all those mornings when he'd been too crippled with arthritis to rise from his bed. Who had endured his slaps and curses because he was the only one who could teach her spells.

  She colored the magic with her endurance then: If I could stand living with him, I can surely stand this.

  Magic from understanding. Know the names of each pebble.…

  The name of this pebble was Jenny Waynest, she thought. What I am is that person who was.

  She breathed a little easier, and some more of the coldness in her limbs seemed to abate.

  After a long time—more dreams—she smelled herbed smoke and sheepskins. Much closer now she heard Miss Mab say, “Lay her down. A well lies farther along that passageway. Fetch water. I brought a hothwais of heat.…” She named the spell-stones of the gnomes, which could be charged sometimes with heat, as if they'd been baked in fire, and sometimes with glowing light: sometimes with other things. “She must be kept warm.”