Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  Jenny lay down on the curved bowl of the floor, and wrapped her plaid about her. She felt sick with exhaustion and dread. Could the Demon Queen see her, in this hollow sphere where there wasn't even a wall against which to prop her back? The Star-Juggler of ancient times, whoever he had been—the Arch-Seer the demons had spoken of—had been ready to spend the rest of an undying eternity here, rather than let Aohila roam at large in the realms of mortalkind.

  Can I be less willing than that?

  No one lasted long in the Winterlands who did not have a fairly good sense of direction. John knew which way he had to turn to get to the discreet passage that serviced the royal rooms. Gareth's chambers lay farther along the wing than Trey's, and his one fear as he slipped through the narrow doorway and up the short flight of dim-lit steps was that he'd open the wrong door and walk slap into Trey herself. Amayon would see straight through his simple disguise, and then the game would be over indeed.

  Because Corvin was absolutely right, reflected John, putting his makeshift spectacles on again to count chamber doors. I am a fool.

  The dragon had called him one again—with multiple variations of metaphor and emphasis—when he'd left him, at sunrise yesterday, in the Magloshaldon woods, where the River Clae ran down out of the foothills and turned toward the city walls. John had subsequently had a long, cold walk into Bel, but not a difficult one. The road wound through the woods that fringed the riverbank, ice-locked and silent at this season of the year. Through the trees John had occasionally glimpsed the rustically elegant hunting lodges built by the great families, and with winter and plague both gripping the land, the few caretakers came out no more than they had to. It had been a pleasure only to see trees again, and to read the signs of familiar beasts, deer and foxes and hares, in the snow. After a week in the desert's terrible silence even the winter-hushed woods had seemed lively.

  Toward sunset he'd reached the shabby cluster of inns, orchards, vegetable farms, and laborers' cottages that clumped like colonies of barnacles around the city's eastern gate. It had been good beyond speaking to sleep in a real bed again. People were still talking about his rescue by the black and silver dragon—not that they recognized in the ragged stranger the Demon Queen's knight who had supposedly been so instrumental in the Realm's recent woes—and John had experienced considerable qualms about passing through the city gate again that morning.

  But I can't leave Gar, if there's a hope of gettin' him clear.

  I can't leave his daughter, who'll be the next target of these things if they haven't got her already.

  And the part of him that was his father's son, the part of him that for twenty-three years had been Thane of the Winterlands dispensing the justice of an absent King, added: I can't leave the Realm.

  The passage by which footmen brought breakfast, washwater, and the day's wardrobe selection—and carried away night soil—for their betters was barely a yard wide and illuminated only through an occasional window high in the lefthand wall. These were of oiled linen, not glass, and the light they admitted was dingy at best. Without the plaster or paneling that finished the bedchambers and sitting rooms, the narrow space picked up sounds like a cave. John heard the steady scrape of a broom in Trey's quarters—Good, she's out and like to stay that way—and a woman say, “It isn't the poetry I mind so much, but he gave her the same poem with her name written in.…”

  Then, from somewhere far off, he heard a cry, a sharp sob of exhaustion mingled with agony, desperately protesting and fading suddenly in despair. He stopped in his tracks, listening, trying to trace the direction of the sound, but only knew that it came from somewhere ahead of him rather than somewhere behind. When he listened again, it was gone.

  But he knew what it was, and the shorn hair on his nape prickled with rage and fear.

  Trey, he thought. Or another demon. Amayon and whatever Hellspawn it was that now inhabited the body of the poor old King likely weren't the only ones in the palace.

  Like the demon who'd taken over the body—and the for-tune—of the Otherworld millionaire Wan ThirtyoneFourty-Four, Amayon would have a secret room, where she could feast and drink the pain of human prisoners uninterrupted. In that endless city where John had found Corvin, he'd seen how demons amused themselves: seen over and over in nightmares the bloodied walls, the crawling lines of ants, the crusted straps and fragments of skin and hair. Wan ThirtyoneFourty-Four, the first man to come back from the dead, had been wealthy enough to hire men who didn't care what he did so long as he paid them well. Presumably such men existed in this world, too. Though, at a guess, given the smaller community and chattier servants of Bel, John suspected Amayon's henchmen would be demons like herself.

  Any one of whom might easily recognize him.

  Cautiously he moved on, barely able to breathe with anger.

  Behind a door a girl was singing. A tiny girl, probably no older than his daughter, Maggie. He set down his chamber pots and his basket, and pushed on the panel such as all rooms had, doors concealed, not for any nefarious purpose but simply so that a servant could come and go without any chance of forcing a guest—or a member of the family—to confront the realities of the lower classes having access to their dirty underclothes and breakfast-leavings.

  Through the crack in the panel he saw a child who had to be Gareth's daughter, a solemn toddler of three, seated on a footstool singing to her doll. Millença was small and dark, as Trey had been, but with the gray eyes characteristic of the House of Uwanë. She, like the King, her grandfather, wore the somber purples and blacks of half-mourning, in sorrow for the griefs of the city. John had not seen her since he and Jenny had come south for her naming-feast, but her resemblance to Trey was striking, and he recognized the nurse who sat nearby on a low chair. Danis, or Danae, her name was … the widowed daughter of one of the great noble houses, with a round, cheerful face and eyes creased about with smiling.

  She was not smiling now, but had set down the smock she was making to watch the child with an expression of mingled grief and love. A girl who was almost certainly her daughter sat on the floor beside Millença's footstool—same pug nose, same sturdy build, the long braid hanging beneath her embroidered cap of the same strawberry-blond hue as the wisps visible beneath the nurse's starched linen coif. That child stated matter-of-factly, “That's enough. If Dolly had the plague she's dead by now.”

  “She's not.” Millença drew herself up with dignity. “Dolly was dead and then came back to life.”

  “Don't have it be that,” objected the child-in-waiting. “If she came back to life—”

  “Branwen,” said the nurse warningly, and her daughter turned her head protestingly.

  “But when people come back to life they're mean. Struval came back to life and he killed Bria's kitten.”

  “Dolly won't be mean when she comes back,” Millença said, and hugged her bisque-headed rag-baby close.

  “Yes, she will. And if you die, and come back, you'll be—”

  “Branwen!”

  John eased the panel shut. Voices sounded in the next chamber, Gareth's bedchamber, if John remembered how the royal rooms were disposed. “Is there no hope for her?” Gareth asked, and a gentle, rather prissy tenor replied.

  “Not through medicine, no.”

  “But she looks—”

  “It is the nature of this malady that the child does not appear to be ill, my lord. That is the—the terrible tragedy of it. Only last week, I witnessed a woman walking in the Street of Lanterns, holding her little boy by the hand. The child turned pale, and then crimson; he cried out, and blood poured suddenly from his mouth and nose.”

  John pushed the door, very gently, holding his breath, for he recognized the voice. He saw Prince Gareth sitting on the padded velvet lid of the chest at the end of the curtained bed, looking up into his visitor's face with ravaged eyes. In the young man's shock and despair John could see all his own weary pain of early in the winter, when he himself had searched desperately through every volume
in his own library, looking for some hope, some guidance in dealing with the darkness of soul that had come close to destroying his son Ian. And then again later he had searched for any reference to the demon plague that Aohila had threatened to call down on the people of the Winterlands, if John did not undertake the quest for the man she sought.

  “Of course I rushed over and did what I could,” the visitor went on. “But when the malady advances so far as to actually strike, it is far too late to save the patient's life.” His lined, gentle face was sad, framed in the close-fitting velvet cap of an old scholar, and the hands that clasped before the breast of his blue velvet robe were thin and stained with ink and decoctions of herbs. An old fuddy-duddy, I'd have said, seeing him on the street, John thought.

  Maybe a year ago I'd have been right.

  And a year ago he himself would have kicked through the doorway in the paneling and yelled, That's a lie and you know it.…

  In all his researches into plague and disease, he had never found anything remotely like what the fussy old gentleman described.

  Of the seven mages whom Folcalor's demons had possessed in the summertime—the mages of Caradoc's corps that had come so close to conquering the Realm of Belmarie in the name of Gareth's cousin Rocklys—only three now survived. At least, John prayed, Ian and Jenny survive.…

  And Bliaud of Greenhythe, whom Rocklys had lured north out of quiet obscurity. He looked much the same as he'd looked the first time John had seen him, in the courtyard of Caer Corflyn with his two sons, checking and double-checking everything in the baggage train and scribbling cantrips and sigils on all the packs, to the obvious disquiet of the guards. And it had been all an act, too, John thought. By that time Bliaud's soul and self were trapped in a shard of amethyst and the thing imitating his finicking mannerisms for the sake of his sons—Tundal and Abellus, their names were, he recalled, a stuffy merchant and a dandy in plumed hats—was a thing that later drew the entrails of captured soldiers like a housewife drawing chickens.…

  Well, not quite like, since most housewives killed the chickens first.

  After the demons had been driven forth, and sent to amuse Aohila behind the Burning Mirror, John had encountered Bliaud again. And like Ian and Jenny, in the wake of exorcism, when John had met the old man in the fog-shrouded ruins of Ernine, Bliaud had seemed lost in some desperate inner grief.

  Even at the time, John had thought, At least Ian and Jen have each other. Maybe each was sunk in darkness too thick to admit any word of comfort, but each would at least know that the other had walked that road, too.

  Bliaud had been alone. Every night, listening to Folcalor whisper little rhymes in his dreams.

  I don't ever listen, the old man had said.

  And John knew even then that he lied.

  There was a look in the eyes of the possessed, a look John had come to know hideously well. He'd seen it in his wife's eyes, and his son's. A kind of silvery glitter, and a way of looking around any room they were in, as if tracking the movement of invisible things.

  “The doctors will tell you there is no such ailment,” Bli-aud's voice went on, as if trying to hold steady in the face of terrible grief. “And indeed, I have never been able to ascertain whether it is a malady, or a spell. But its mark is on your daughter. She has very little time, my lord. Let me take her to my house—and I assure Your Highness it will be done in all discretion, in all secrecy—and let me see what I can do for her. There are spells, very long spells, very subtle, that can work wonders in cases like these.”

  I'll just bet they can, thought John, fury sweeping him again like storm-wind over a field of barley. And when she comes back—and her nurse, too, I'll bet—you'll spend the rest of your life wondering what was changed about her.

  Or what's left of your life until they get you, too.

  Gareth made no reply, only sat looking down at his big, awkward hands, and turning a ruby ring round and round on his thumb. Bliaud, who had had his back to John most of the time, now turned, and John drew the panel shut. He heard the mage's light steps cross the room to the communicating door—Am I going to have to take him on now, to keep him off the girl? Smash him over the head with a chamber pot? That'll work.—and his voice, addressing the nurse:

  “Send for me immediately, at once, at the slightest sign of fever or trembling.” And in a softer voice, presumably turning back to Gareth, “Not that there ever is. But please, if there is any change at all, let me know.”

  The Prince said nothing. The mage's footsteps retreated. John pushed open the panel a crack, to see Gareth lying stretched across the top of the chest where he had been sitting, his face hidden in the crook of his arm. He had taken his spectacles off, and they dangled from his fingers by one silver temple-piece, catching the light of the windows as he wept without a sound.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once entered into the world of men, demons have two goals: to cause pain and death for sport, and to open gates for others of their kind.

  Jenny couldn't remember which of John's crumbling old books those words had come out of. He had a scholar's magpie memory, and would argue for hours about who said what and where he'd read it—and whether the Gantering Pellus who wrote the Encyclopedia was the same one who'd written A Treatise Upon Brewing, and why he didn't think this was likely—if he could find anyone to discuss such matters with him.

  She closed her eyes, smiling at the recollection of her erratic spouse trading old lore and granny-rhymes with the dotards of every village within riding distance, or getting herself and everything in the Alyn Hold kitchen covered in soot while trying to design a better drawing chimney.

  What had he been doing in Ernine?

  How had he come there, and when?

  Where was he now?

  Was he trapped behind the mirror, a prisoner in the terrible, shifting Hell there without the Demon Queen's protection?

  Was he, as Aohila had said, Folcalor's prisoner, tortured and enslaved to force his help in trapping Ian? Folcalor had enslaved, and presumably could control, dragons, too. The thoughts went through Jenny like the cold scorch of the arrow poison, bringing sweat to her whole body and images that she could not force from her mind.

  She opened her eyes. It didn't matter whether they were open or shut. There was nothing to see. Only the silver walls of the catch-bottle, curving up to the dark, sealed neck overhead.

  Would Aohila let her out if she unstoppered the bottle she still held in her hand? Would she be freed automatically? Did the bottle somehow work by magic drawn from her?

  The fact that she was no threat to the Demon Queen—once she'd opened the bottle and dispelled the geas that had drawn Aohila into it—wouldn't matter, of course. The Demon Queen was perfectly capable of keeping her sealed in simply to torment her—and to gain leverage over John. John had first entered the Hell behind the Mirror—had first put his soul in pawn to the Queen who ruled it—to save Jenny.

  It is the whole aim and purpose of the Hellspawn to find in the world of the living a servant who will be theirs.…

  Would he do that again? Now, after what had happened in between then and now? Always supposing he wasn't a prisoner there already, always supposing he hadn't already had his soul enslaved.…

  Always supposing he wasn't dead.

  She didn't know. She thought of the white shell into which Amayon had been magically drawn, sealed with red wax. Remembered it lying in the midst of the dark-glittering power circle in the mirror chamber at Ernine. Remembered Amayon screaming.

  Closed her eyes. Opened them.

  If I don't get out of here I can never beg John's pardon, for turning from him in the depths of my own pain.

  He would never know. Gareth, and those in Bel who might save the Prince, would never know about the souls of the slaves, their deaths imprisoned in the crystals. How many more would be killed, with Trey's mind and body inhabited by a demon?

  And demons were haunting the Deep. Gareth needed to be told of that, as well.<
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  There is no lawful reason for humankind to touch, or speak to, or have traffic with the Hellspawnkind. Rather should that man perish, and suffer his wife, or his son, or his goods all to perish utterly, than that demons be given a gate into this world.

  Jenny leaned her head on her arm, stared at the curve of the wall, her heart pounding. The catch-bottle felt heavy now in her hand, and hot. What was Aohila thinking of, remembering?

  What had she thought of, all those years behind the mirror?

  The Star-Juggler, Aohila had spoken the name casually, as one who knew him well. Perhaps she had. Whoever he had been, he had learned somewhere the Demon Queen's secret name, the shape of the true essence of her secret self. That argued acquaintance.

  And knowing her that well, he had been ready to give up the remainder of his life to his empty, living Hell.

  Had given up his life, trying to rush the mirror chamber. Had he written down that name somewhere, so that it could be reapplied to the bottle…?

  Reappplied? If what? If I open it now … and she for whatever reason opens hers, and lets me free?

  Why would she do that?

  So she can use me as she tried to enslave John?

  To share an enemy does not make of her a friend.

  More memories. The Winterlands in summer, when the twilights dwindled endless and unextinguished and Jenny would lie on the thick turf below the harsh black rock of Frost Fell's north face, watching birds dart above the pools of the moor. Ian when he was a small child, a thin little black-haired boy following her about the herb garden, breaking off leaves and crushing them in slender fingers, ecstasy in his face at the scents. The way Adric's tongue protruded from the side of his mouth when he was concentrating on his shooting with that bow that was almost too big for a nine-year-old boy. Redhaired, black-eyed, silent Mag, sitting by a mouse-hole for hours, waiting for the mouse to emerge …

  A rush of anger filled her, the mad desire to lurch to her feet, to pace … but the spurt of energy was no more real, or physical, than hunger would have been in that place, and she remained where she was.