Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  Jenny had a clear picture in her mind of the place where she lay, though she had not the strength to open her eyes. It was a cavelet barely larger than the smokehouse at Alyn Hold, a nodule deep in the rock of the mines. Air flowed through it, tracking across the stubble that was all that was left of Jenny's hair after the fight with Folcalor. So the cave must be near the ventilating shafts that riddled all the gnomes' workings like worm-tunnels. Reaching out with her other senses, she smelled water not far off. Miss Mab had brought blankets and sheepskins as well as her medicines. Even large burdens were of little account to a gnome. She laid some of these down as a bed for Jenny, and moved her onto them. From a box she took a stone as big as a man's fist, and set it beside her. Passing her fingers across it she whispered the True Name of heat. The stone gave forth no light, but the chill of the cave, and the bitter cold in Jenny's flesh, grew less.

  Will she live? asked Morkeleb. Jenny heard the slosh of water in a gourd, smelled it as it dripped on stone. In her halfdreaming state she could not tell whether the dragon wore his human guise or the serpentine semblance of a dragon in miniature as he sometimes did. He might even have been completely invisible, a state he had returned to more and more since giving up his magic lest the demons take hold of him. In the darkness Jenny was aware of his diamond eyes, no more.

  She could see Miss Mab, in any case, a bent little gnome woman with a round face seamed with wrinkles, and eyes the color of sunset beneath a jutting brow. Her pale gold hair she wore dressed in elaborate rolls and bands over a padded frame, and she was dressed in silky trousers, tunic, and a quilted jacket, as both males and females among the gnomes clothed themselves. Only her family's influence with Balgub King of the Deep had kept her from being killed for abetting John's quest for the Demon Queen. As it was, she had been imprisoned for a year and a day.

  Demons could, of course, being deathless, wait far longer than that to make their presence known in one they possessed. But they never did. Like children they were impatient, and greedy about their pleasures, even to their own detriment. If one immediate plan failed, there was always another.

  The Lady Trey is dead, Jenny tried to say. Prince Gareth is sending for one in the city who is said to raise the dead.

  But all she could do was whisper, “Dead,” in a voice no louder than the scrape of dried leaves blown across a marble floor. Human ears would not have heard her, but she felt Morkeleb draw near.

  Is this what you learned when you went into the city, my friend? Claws touched her, light as spider feet. Tender.

  She gathered images together like a sheaf of dried flowers. Herself at Trey's bedside, and Gareth stretched weeping over his wife's body. The stink of pyre smoke on the rainy air and Polycarp, Master of Halnath, saying, I don't like it, as they sat in the Long Garden. Like flowers she handed them to the dragon, thankful that she need do no more than that.

  She had been a dragon, once upon a time, transformed into that shape by Morkeleb's power. For a time the magic of a dragon had filled her veins and her flesh. She remembered how dragons spoke.

  With those images, others: the horror of the drowned sailor rising from the water of Eldsbouch Harbor, with the soul of the wizard Caradoc glaring hungrily from its ruined eyes. The tall, gray-haired form of the Baron Pellanor, leading bandit slave hunters through the Winterlands months after his death in battle. Trying to trap her sons.

  They are raising the dead. Tell Miss Mab. The demons are raising the dead.

  She slipped away into sleep.

  She lay for a long time in the cave, like a child in the womb. Morkeleb never left her side. Miss Mab came and went, bringing water sometimes, or gruel, or once another hothwais, this one imbued with white light so strong, she kept it wrapped in several layers of leather sacking. With a silver knife barely as long as a finger, she cut Jenny's wrist and drew sigils around the cut in ocher and ink. The spells of healing were a whisper rather than a shout, for demons still lurked in the mine. In her dreams, Jenny felt them, slipping green and shining far away among the rocks. Mab was forced to work slowly, dispensing tiny sips of magic, drawing forth the poison a little at a time. In the long periods between, Morkeleb's smoky presence wrapped Jenny around, and held her in life.

  Sometimes Mab spoke to her as she worked, gentle words like a mother, telling her about the road back to healing and life. “Power lies in thee still, child; in thy heart, in thy bones. Call it from what thou art, what thou truly art NOW, not from anything thou wert before.”

  When I had the magic of the dragon in me, I had power, thought Jenny. That dragon power was all that I saw. What am I, truly, now? A woman who formerly had the power of a dragon: This I am. A woman who has borne three children, and who loves them now more than she did at their births: This I am.

  She took even the headaches and the little spurts of nausea that had tormented her for years, the flushes of heat and the migraines of her changing body, and sought in them for power instead of calling on the power of her youth to suppress them: This I am.

  She laughed in her dreams, to feel that power respond.

  Once she even called on the power of the poison itself, slowly working out of her body: from death and pain whose name and nature she now understood, weaving strength. This I am.

  Opening her eyes she looked up at Mab and though she could not speak, she smiled. The pale golden eyes smiled back.

  “Walks the plague still in the City of Men?” Jenny heard Mab ask later, through the dim shadow of sleep.

  So deep lies this place within the stone of the mountain, even I cannot hear. Morkeleb's voice sounded in Jenny's mind, as she knew it would sound in Mab's. When I reach forth to listen to those who walk the thoroughfares of the Deep, the rumor is confused. Some say the plague there is ended, and the man who brought it upon the city was killed. Others say no, the demons saved him from the fire, sending a dragon to snatch him away. Others yet say stranger things. The old King who was ill and broken in his mind is now restored, they say, and takes up the reins of power again in his hands. The Warren of your Clan lies closer to the ways of your brethren than this hiding-place, Gnome-Witch, and the tongues of servants are ever ready to gossip. Surely you have heard?

  “I listen in the stillness of the nights.” Mab's warm, stubby fingers paused in drawing the sigils of healing along Jenny's veins. Her voice was barely a murmur, as though she feared who might overhear. “These rumors have I heard, and others as well. In the City of Men, they say, evildoers rove the streets killing men in their own gateways without reason, without concealing themselves from the justice of the King's guards. No man now trusts another, nor children their parents, nor wives their husbands. Those whose loved ones were resurrected from the dead try to pretend that the ones who were restored to them were indeed those who were taken away, but they weep in their fear, and dare not speak. All this I have heard.”

  Ah, said the dragon softly. This is as it was a thousand years ago, in the Realm of Ernine.

  And having been a dragon once herself, Jenny saw into the dragon's mind, as he had been able to see into hers. She saw the columns of smoke that rose above the walls of that lost golden city, seeing in its prime what she had only glimpsed as ivy-smothered ruins. She saw flame and smoke rising from the roofs in Morkeleb's memory, and no one came to put out the blazes for fear of the demons they might meet. She saw the bodies of young girls and children left mutilated by the waysides, and how, in time, gangs in the streets would kill without a hand raised against them, until at last barbarians swept in from the East and looted the undefended town.

  “Were you there?” asked Mab, and she used the form of words that gnomes use to address Kings, or gods. Somehow to Jenny this did not sound strange.

  The dragon replied, I was there.

  Then he was silent. Jenny saw the mad wizard Isychros riding at the head of his corps of dragons and wizards, demon light burning from his eyes, as Caradoc later had ridden. The possessed dragons sparkled in the sunshine, crimson and golden
and blue and bronze, their magic transfigured by the magic of demons. The wizards scried in water and glass and crystal with fivefold power for any who would plot against them, and those plotters came to terrible grief.

  Polycarp, Jenny thought. Fear sliced her at the thought of the Master of Halnath, who had sent her here to the Deep to tell Miss Mab of Trey's death. Polycarp knew too much of demons for his own safety. Had he been able to escape from Bel, Jenny wondered, before things came to the pass there that they had all those centuries ago in Ernine?

  The High King of Ernine had become the pawn and slave of the demons, she remembered, seeing through Morkeleb's eyes. His two daughters had killed him, but too late to save the Inland Realm from the terrible cancers of mistrust and blood-feud. Even the destruction of the dragon corps, and the death of the wizards whom the demons had taken, came too late. Working against them with demon magic, further damage was done, though no human magic was found that would prevail.

  “How was it ended, in the end?” asked Miss Mab at length. She sat on a corner of Jenny's sheepskins, and Jenny could smell in her clothing the scents of lamp oil from the Warren of Arawan, and the dried herbs of healing. “How were the demons—and the other demons who helped to defeat those called up by Isychros—finally bound?”

  That I know not, returned Morkeleb. It was nothing to me, these squabbles of men. In those days I had the sense not to remain in a place of danger, no matter how much gold there was for the taking. I followed the dragon corps south and east, to gather up the gold of men.… And in his thoughts Jenny felt the warm, deep strength of that love for gold that is the heart of every dragon, the intoxication of the magic that dragons can breathe through the refined metal, and drink back again in almost unbearable ecstacies of dreams.

  When I saw what the demons did, that dwelled within the dragons, I was disgusted, and came away. I returned to the Skerries of Light, to the islands in the western sea where the dragons dwell. I had no more to do with them, nor with the wars of men.

  “Were you not concerned,” asked Mab, “to help your fellows among the dragons, who were enslaved?”

  Morkeleb did not reply for a long while. Jenny saw them sitting together, though her eyes were closed in sleep: Miss Mab in her green velvet jacket and bright pink trousers, her curly-toed blue slippers glinting with jewels. The dragon curled near the hothwais of heat, like a great half-visible dog before invisible flames. He had been black as a thing of carven coal when first Jenny had seen him, and huge, forty feet from the tip of his nose to the cruel spiked club of his tail. She had not known then that the great dragons, the mages and loremasters among that kind, were capable of changing their size. Among the dragons Morkeleb was foremost in lore, in the spells and wisdom passed along from mind to mind for centuries and millennia, wisdom and power growing in him until at last he had given up his magic, and passed entirely beyond dragon shape.

  Now he had the semblence of a dragon, insofar as he had any semblence at all—or perhaps, thought Jenny, it was only her perception in dreaming that saw him thus. The shape of him that she saw was the thin, snake-like body of a dragon, with its long tail like a muscled whip and great thin-boned silken wings folded along his sides. All his joints and spine bristled with spikes, and great scales like razor-edged fans. In the narrow, beaked head burned crystal eyes, mazes of diamonds that you could fall into forever. Among long horns and tufts of mane, antennae flicked lazily, the points of light at their tips the only thing about him that could be clearly seen.

  Not human, she thought. But not a beast, as so many humans considered dragons. The young among dragons were beasts. But they grew, and passed on, with the years, to become other things.

  As Morkeleb had.

  A man would have gone back for fellow men, replied the dragon slowly. Indeed I have met a man who would go back for them, though they were no kin nor friends of his. It is not a thing of dragons, to concern oneself overmuch with the safety of others. I knew their minds were enslaved, and there was little that I could do. We are creatures who look after ourselves.

  Jenny opened her eyes at that. Turning her head, she saw the dragon regarding her with his diamond gaze. “Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” she murmured, and held out her hand. “You saved me in the North, when I was in dragon form, as once I saved you.”

  He did not ask her how she was. He knew that—better than she knew herself: She felt the chill scrutiny of his consciousness touch her bones. But she thought the shadowy outlines of his form became more distinct with the passage of thoughts in his mind. To Mab, he said, She must be moved as soon as may be. And yourself also, Gnome-Witch. Sense you not the passage of demons within these mines? Hear you not, in the still of the night, the scratch of their glass shells upon the rocks as they emerge from whatever pool hides their gate? Smell you not the stink of them, like blood poured onto hot iron? They wait and they listen, and they are strong. Soon or late they will find this place, and take you in the darkness.

  “They are strong,” agreed Miss Mab, rising. “This was the question a thousand years ago, Dragonshadow, and is the question again. That they are strong. Ward-spells that once defeated them, and held them in check, now leave them untouched. Are these new demons, then, bred somehow from the old who destroyed Ernine?”

  Jenny said, “No,” with such conviction that both gnome and dragon turned to look at her in surprise. “No. Amayon remembers the Fall of Ernine. He was there.” It surprised her that she could name the demon who had possessed her without a break in her voice. Without wondering where he was, and what had become of him after John had given him over to the Queen behind the mirror. Without a pang of concern as to whether he was in pain. Perhaps the poison had burned the longing out of her, or the healing had strengthened her heart. She did not know.

  “In possessing me,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “he not only occupied my body, while my mind was imprisoned elsewhere in a green jewel. He occupied my mind itself, the portions of my mind that remained in my body, side by side with his. That—that portion of me shared his thoughts. Some nights I have dreamed his dreams.…”

  She grimaced at the dirty memories, the hellblaze of passions and power that still could heat her flesh if she let them. Yet she realized that in her poisoned dreams she had not once dreamed of him. Only weeks ago she had been literally incapable of dreaming about anything else.

  “He was there.” She struggled for breath to speak. “He was one of Adromelech's demons, that devoured and defeated those of Aohila of the mirror.” She drew the fleece up close, though the cave was warm now, the warmth kept in it by a straw mat hung over the door. A feather of light was allowed to leak from the wrapped hothwais, just enough that she could see. Farther off, on the flowing draft that everywhere ventilated the Deep and the mines below it, she smelled water and stone, and farther off other fires, where the gnomes dwelled, or their slaves who worked the mines.

  Morkeleb tilted his narrow head—he had shrunk himself to little larger than a stag, and sat coiled in the shadows like a gleaming skeleton of diamonds and pitch. Then were I—or another—to search deeply enough in your dreams, it might be that we could understand how the demons were in the end defeated?

  Miss Mab raised her brows, turned her golden eyes to Jenny. “Is this so, child?”

  “Maybe.” Jenny shivered, not liking the hidden suspicion about what she would see.

  “I will search, then,” the old gnome said, and stood, “for spells of dream reading. For spells, too, to guard your mind, child, from too close a sight of the demon's heart.” When she put her hand on Jenny's shoulder, Jenny felt how sharp her own bones were under the gnome's thick palms. Even in the warmth of the cave she felt chilled, as though she had barely any flesh left to her. Her combat with Folcalor beneath the sea, near the gate of the Sea-wights' hidden realm, had left her scarred, her long black hair burned away and her hands crippled and twisted. As she fumbled weakly to return Mab's clasp she saw that though her short fingers, her brown sq
uare wrinkled palms, were still marked by the blasts of steam and fire, they were no longer drawn together like claws, but able again to spread and flex.

  There was a touch of arthritis in the joint of her right thumb, where for years she had ground pestle to mortar in preparing herbs for medicine. That was all.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “When Morkeleb takes me from here, you will come? He's right, my lady. It isn't safe for you anywhere in the Deep.”

  “And how safe will any be,” asked the gnome. “Did I leave the heart of the Deep, and flee away to a place where I could not hear what passes beneath the earth? I can come and go from my prison if I am careful, enough to send thee word. I am not in a cell. It is true that there are demons here in the Deep, Dragonshadow”—she turned to Morkeleb—“it is true, that I hear them chitter and scrape in the night. And my question is, What do they hear? What seek they in the Deep, that they cannot have in the City of Men?

  “This would I learn. King Sevacandrozardus has sent for Goffyer, the greatest of the mages of the gnomes and my own old teacher, from Tralchet Deep, in the North. If any will know how to look into your dreams for the memories of the demons, my child, it will be he.”

  Jenny nodded, but shivered again as Miss Mab gathered up her medicines and took her departure. The thought of delving into that part of her consciousness, her memories of Amayon, filled her with a sickened dread. She lay among the sheepskins and tried to sleep, with Morkeleb stretched across the foot of the pallet, chin upon his paws. The last she saw was the lights of his antennae, flicking back and forth in the dark.

  CHAPTER THREE

  John woke in panic, thinking, Jenny!