Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “My children,” said the King, “the plague is ended.” He raised his hands, palms out, as if instead of making an announcement he was himself bestowing this healing on the shocked and ravaged city. To those who saw the tall, broadshouldered figure standing in the turret of lacework stone—the King's traditional pulpit above the market square—it was easy to believe.

  Five years of rumor and speculation, of fragmentary tales handed out by palace servants concerning His Majesty's “indisposition,” five years of an inexperienced Regency, high taxes, and murmurs of revolt—all these seemed sponged away by the sight of that grave gold-bearded face, and the ringing clarity of the beautiful voice that had always been one of Uriens II's greatest gifts.

  For nearly five years, since the year of the dragon, little had been seen of the King. Even when he'd been under the influence of the witch Zyerne, Uriens had made his appearances at festivals, had led the torchlight dawn processions to the Temple of the Red God of War, and had spoken to the people from this turret beside the door of the town's great indoor market. When the doctors said Zyerne's spells had affected his mind, a thousand contradictory tales had fleeted through the city's cobbled streets. The Regent Gareth was shy, and too many people had seen him hanging on the fringes of the mob of overdressed younger courtiers to take him really seriously. There had been many in the city who'd sided with the King's niece Rocklys, Commander of the Northern Garrisons, when she'd made her bid to take the throne, simply because she looked like she knew what she was doing.

  So the murmur that ran through the crowd in the square was one of relief.

  The King was himself again. The jaw under the golden beard jutted as of old, and the blue eyes that swept the crowd had their old hawk-bright glitter. The big hands rested firmly on the pierced stone of the turret's railing, and no longer fussed and picked like a child's. The tall, powerful body was clothed in decent mourning, for all the hundreds who had died of the mysterious fever that had swept the city, but it was a mourning of majesty, the restrained grief of a man who understands that there is work to do.

  “We have found the men responsible for it, the men whose evil machinations, whose bargaining with demons, brought all this to pass. They have been punished.” His booming voice carried clearly over the heads of the crowd and rang on the tall stone houses that bordered the square, and he struck his purple-gloved fist into his palm. “It grieves me to reveal to you, my friends, that they had allies in this city, in every neighborhood. But the traitors have been induced to name those who did their bidding, those who spread the plague among their neighbors in the hopes of weakening our Realm and leaving us prey to the rebels in Imperteng and the Marches. Those men—aye, and women, too—will be sought out and taken, however cleverly they think they have covered their foul tracks. They shall not escape justice! ”

  A cheer went up from the crowd standing shoulder to shoulder, where three days a week in summertime farmers set up barrows of fruit and milk and cheeses. Men and women forgot the cold slush underfoot and the colder wind, and raised their hands in salute to their reborn King. But near the corner of the market hall, where the Avenue of Kings ran back up the hill to the main palace gates, a woman covered her face with her veil and sobbed. Another, stout and tightly laced into the black of mourning, muttered under the din, “The plague may be done, but what about the killers in the streets, eh? What about those who wander in the night, without torches and seeing in the dark like cats, and kill those they meet? Yes, and climb over walls, to kill even those who think themselves safe in their own gardens! What about my daughter, then, that was found torn to pieces in her own house? Have you got the men who did that, Mr. Justice-Giving King?”

  And the beggar beside her in a coat of black and white goatskins cocked his stubbled head and asked, “Have the city guards all died off, then, ma'am?”

  A yard away a man in the crowd turned his head sharply: a yellow-skinned southerner in a traveler's leather tunic and hood, his face blue from hairline to lips with scrollwork tattoos. But though his eyes narrowed at the words, he said nothing, and made no approach, and the bereaved mother laughed, a barking sound like wood being chopped. “City guards! A man was killed behind my house—down in the Dockmarket we live—and half my neighbors say it was city guards who did it, and left the body bleeding in the street. Where have you been, Four-Eyes, that you don't know what's happening in this city? The plague isn't the worst of it by a long chalk.”

  “Those that spread the plague are the ones that're doing the killing, Mae,” protested a prosperous-looking man standing near, his cloak pulled up tight against the cold. “You heard the King. It's the rebels from Imperteng that started it, the rebels that slew General Rocklys, when she would have come down and restored order. That's when this all began. Thank the gods the King's recovered, and in time!”

  “Aye, now he'll take a hand,” agreed a fat man in a master goldsmith's apron and smock. “And not a moment too soon! We'd have had the gnomes running all of us out of business before long, friendly as the Regent got with them. Not that I've aught to say against the boy, of course, but boy is all he is—”

  “And too friendly with the Master of Halnath, for my taste. The Masters were always trouble. Changing things and making machines—I wouldn't be surprised to hear the plague started with some of their meddling.… What does Master Polycarp know of the plague, eh?”

  “What indeed?” John Aversin murmured, and slipped back from the crowd and along the cobbled street toward the palace gate. Behind him Uriens's voice sounded above the heads of the crowd like a gorgeous bronze bell, chiming out encouragement and hope:

  “… peace shall be reestablished, and prosperity return …”

  Thin sunlight gleamed through the clouds, silver on the garbage-boltered snow.

  The palace of the Kings of Bel—the House of Uwanë—stood on a low hill south of the river; the Avenue of Kings led to its newer front gate, brave with banners and gilt. The former processional way, the Queen's Lane, curved around south to the older precincts dominated by the big dungeon tower, and the gate that was now used primarily by petitioners for the King's grace. There weren't many of these today, with the King clearly occupied elsewhere, and the porter who generally sat in the lodge beside the open gate had retreated, like a sensible man, to the fireside of his inner chamber: John could smell coffee beans roasting as he walked quietly past into the court.

  Having seen the vision of Amayon as Trey speaking with the demon-ridden King, John hadn't been surprised to find the man back in apparent possession of his reason and command of the Realm. In fact, during Rocklys's rebellion, Uriens had led his own armies into battle and had done quite well as long as he had advisers to tell him where to dispose his troops. The erosion of mind and spirit that Zyerne had caused had not affected his courage or his sense of duty as King.

  Still, it had made John's flesh creep to see him, knowing what he knew.

  When John and Jenny first came south to deal with Morkeleb the Black—who had descended on the Deep of Ylferdun, driven out the gnomes, and made a lair for himself on their stolen gold—the witch Zyerne had been in power, and Uriens had refused to see them for many days. During those days of kicking his heels at Court, John had rambled a great deal about the palace, talking to servants and stable boys, insatiably curious about everything from the drainage system of the palace pig-yard to the distillation of perfumes in the stillrooms behind the kitchens.

  This curiosity stood him in good stead now. He knew where the door opened from the petitioners' court into the pages' room—vacant now, like the gatekeeper's lodge, with the absence of any petitioners—and how to get from there to the servants' wing. Though not a hairy man, John had grown enough of a beard in the twelve days since his capture so that he didn't look simply unshaven: At the inn outside the city walls, where he'd spent last night, he'd dyed the stubble black and trimmed it close. He'd also dyed his hair, what there was left of it, and his eyebrows, a
nd once he'd located the pages' storeroom and borrowed a footman's crimson hose and tunic, he pocketed his oddly particolored spectacles as well.

  His own clothes he rolled in a bundle, and stowed in one of the wicker baskets that servants used to bring garments from the wardrobe stores to their masters when they dressed in the morning. There was no telling when he might have to stop looking like a footman in a hurry. Hooking one arm through the basket's handle, he listened at the storeroom door to make sure the courtyard outside was empty, then slipped out and crossed to where a line of newly cleaned chamber pots sat neatly ranged on a bench to be taken back to their respective apartments. With one in either hand, his thumbs holding the lids in place, if anyone did meet him it was unlikely they'd demand that he stop.

  And in fact he encountered no one as he ascended the backstairs that he knew led to the former Regent's quarters.

  People disappearing. People being slaughtered wantonly, without reason, as he had seen a young girl with pink-dyed hair slashed to pieces in that other world where he'd found Corvin hiding: slain while those who heard her cries feared too much to even open their windows to see who was dying.

  The cancer of mistrust, that was one of the several horrors of demon incursion into the world of humankind.

  Everyone gathered in the muddy market square to hear the King's words was desperate with hope that all would be well again, that the wounded world would heal itself. And John knew that if in fact Folcalor managed to break the Henge at Prokep, what had gone before would seem laughably mild compared to the world where demons roved at large.

  Jenny didn't remember stoppering the catch-bottle. But she must have, she thought. For it was stoppered, and in her hands.

  She was no longer cold.

  That was the first thing she knew, through the shock of disorientation: almost before she understood that she was no longer on the hilltop in Ernine, no longer with Morkeleb. In tales and legends they spoke of someone being transported elsewhere “in the twinkling of an eye,” but she'd never had experience with such a thing, and neither, apparently, had the makers of tales and legends. None of them spoke of the breathless confusion of such a transportation, of the sinking sensation of the belly, of how the heart pounded and the brain swam with the change of light, the change of smells, the change of air.

  She felt panic and sickness and giddiness and terror and not the slightest particle of surprise. She didn't think there was so much as a half-second in which she wasn't aware of where she was, or what had happened to her.

  She was in the catch-bottle herself.

  There was no other place that she could be. Though there was no visible source of light, still she could see the dim quicksilver curve of the walls, ascending in the shape of the bottle upward to the round shadow, like a closed circular window, of its neck, high in the domed ceiling above her head. She knelt on the concave nadir of a silvery sphere perhaps fifty feet in diameter, with the catch-bottle itself—the metal hot now, as if warmed from within—cradled in her cupped palms.

  Jenny did what John would have done in the circumstances. She said, “Bugger.”

  And looked at the bottle in her hands.

  “You will have to let me out, you know.” Aohila's voice came, not from the bottle in Jenny's hands, but from overhead, from the window/neck of the bottle in which she was imprisoned. She recognized the voice, too, from her dreams. The Demon Queen spoke softly, but her voice echoed in the dim quicksilver sphere, and Jenny saw in her mind the image of that dark-haired beautiful woman holding the bottle in her hands, bending red lips to the red-stoppered neck, to speak to Jenny, trapped inside. “I certainly won't release you until you do.”

  “Can you release me?” Jenny didn't know whether to address the ceiling or the neck of the bottle in her own hands. Sometimes the Queen's voice seemed to be coming out of it, sometimes from above her.

  “Of course.”

  Demons lie.

  “The moment you release me.”

  “Never.” But Jenny's heart went absolutely cold as she said it. When you deal with demons, the word never takes on a terrifyingly literal meaning. Jenny recalled vividly her recent imprisonment in the green demon-crystal. She had felt no hunger there nor thirst, no weariness beyond that horrifying exhaustion of the spirit. No physical sensation or discomfort at all. She wondered if her physical body was imprisoned here or merely her spirit—Caerdinn had spoken of devices that worked either way—and pinched the back of her hand. It definitely hurt. But what did that mean?

  Can you really stay here FOREVER, with no one to speak to but the Demon Queen?

  Do not treat with demons. There wasn't a book in John's library on the subject that did not begin and end with that admonition, and all spoke with absolute truth. First, last, and eternally—DO NOT treat with demons.

  Dread was a lump of ice in her belly.

  “Never? And never get word to Gareth, that his wife is not his wife?”

  Don't answer her, thought Jenny grimly. Don't reply. They take you, not through your magic, but through your speaking with them. They draw you closer, coax you into a net of lies. “Morkeleb will tell him.”

  “You think so, dearest?” Her voice was that of a stylish woman confronted with a blond friend's determination to wear purple. “He may be interested in humankind these days—which quite frankly surprises me—but I think you know he's far more interested in you. I consider it likelier by far that he'll spend days—or weeks—tearing what's left of Ernine to pieces searching for you, or for some trace of this bottle, then fly east after Folcalor and his wights. As far as Morkeleb is concerned, Gareth is only slightly less worthy of notice than a squeaking wormling just out of the egg.”

  The only thing worse than a demon telling you lies, reflected Jenny, is a demon telling you the truth.

  “I will not let you out into the world of men.”

  “Oh, Jenny,” sighed the Queen patiently. “Listen to me. A thousand years ago, when the Star-Juggler made this trap, it made sense for him to be imprisoned here with me for eternity. He understood the principle on which the trap works, he had fitted his mind for the task, and there were other Masters in Prokep who would carry on the fight against Isychros. At the time, I was the most deadly threat against the world they wished to save. But that is not the case now. Folcalor is your enemy, as he is mine.”

  “The fact that you and I share an enemy,” replied Jenny, “does not make us friends.”

  And if she says that an enemy is not all that we share …

  But the Demon Queen said nothing. And Jenny thought again, Those were MY dreams. Not John's.

  What does John dream when he hears the sound of Morke-leb's wings?

  She drew a deep breath and let it out, trying to expel her jealousy with it. Trying to master her fear.

  “Where is John?”

  “My darling, would you believe anything that I told you?”

  “Is he behind the mirror?”

  “If I told you he was not, you would think, The hag lies, as all demons lie. And if I say, Yes, he is, you will think, She only says that so I will let her go, to keep him from being skinned alive in her absence by the demons that remain in her realm. For were he there I would be his only protection, you know.”

  “Is he there?” demanded Jenny, her voice trembling.

  “No.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “My dear Jenny, let's not start that again. In this bottle how would I know anyway? He may be Folcalor's prisoner by this time.”

  “And naturally you'll help me rescue him, if I let you out?”

  “Naturally.”

  Jenny was silent, shaking with anger. Anger at the Demon Queen, and anger at herself for entering speech with her at all. She found herself again that awkward, half-magic witchchild in a village of children who taunted her, who told her tales about sprites they'd seen in the woods only to follow her as she rushed to those places, grinning behind their hands.

  In time she drew anothe
r deep breath to steady herself. “And where has Folcalor gone?”

  “To Prokep,” Aohila answered promptly. “Where the gate into Adromelech's Hell of the Sea-wights stands, prisoned in a Maze of magic and a Henge of ensorcelled stones. It is why Folcalor has been gathering the souls of dead humans, you know—to source enough power to break the Henge. Such death-spells work best in the full of the moon, and the next full moon—the Moon of Winds—will be the last in which the Dragonstar will be in the sky. If Folcalor does not break the Henge then—and devour Adromelech's power, and mine if he can get it—the final setting of the Dragonstar will reduce him to being a minor wight of little power, hiding in swamps and puddles for another thousand years.”

  Her rich voice was almost gossipy, as if she were about to pass a plate of cream cakes. “Of course, Adromelech has agents in this world gathering soul-gems, too—I think you encountered some of them in the North. They'll be on hand in Prokep, too, at the full of the moon. Whether Folcalor wins that fight, or Adromelech swallows him, from what little I understand of human needs and human hearts and human flesh, I don't think any of your race is going to like what happens next.”

  Jenny was silent, seeing again the slow-spinning column of blackness and flame moving away over the lands, and the ground behind it strewn with cracked lifeless crystals.

  “Not that anything I'm telling you will do anyone the slightest bit of good,” added the Queen, “if you choose to spend the rest of conscious eternity here with me in boredom. Do you like games?”

  Games about where John might be, and what would be happening to him? Games about Amayon?

  Other games Jenny couldn't for the moment imagine, with Aohila placidly drinking in every flash of rage or grief or panic that kindled in her heart? Forever? “And if you're lying?”

  “Of course I'm lying, dearest—I'm a demon, aren't I? But only about some things. And you'll never know which, will you, if you stay here, grimly keeping an eye on me. So it scarcely matters, does it?”