Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  “He returned to warn you, son,” John murmured, and glanced back over his shoulder at the younger man. “He sent you word asking you to meet him in the wood-court that opens onto the Cooksway, and of course Trey intercepted the message. He was taken yesterday, just after I talked to you.”

  Like hunters in the Winterlands, they probed down the narrow streets behind the palace, made cautious expeditions along mews. They followed the distant line, glimpsed beyond turnings, of the old palace's tall, moss-smeared wall. Intermittent flurries of sleet kept them from meeting anyone, but at the same time made them conspicuous to whatever guards might glance their way. Jenny's hip ached, from the night's long walk, and sleepiness chewed at her bones. She wondered where Morkeleb might be, and what was happening to Ian and Adric in the north. Fleeting thoughts, fleetingly put aside.

  Then she would look ahead of her at John's familiar wide shoulders and the way he turned his cropped bristly head, and her heart would turn over in her breast.

  In Bliaud's workshop she could have kissed the flesh of his arm, when she bared it to daub on the poultice, and the memory of his kiss in the alley behind the Silver Cricket's stable-yard was a sunrise, through all the morning's blustery, brutal cold.

  Whatever happens, she thought, I have that kiss. And I was able to tell him I love him. That even at my worst, I was doing the best that I could.

  They were in the slightly shabby district behind the old palace, with its little shops and ateliers, its lines of laundry hung between the projecting fronts of those splendid decrepit town houses. All around them lay that silence still. Sometimes a woman would pass them on her way to a fountain, or a man carrying a delivery would go by in the lane. But no vendors' cries sounded in the street, no singsong wails of Applepie, penny a pie, sweet as summer honey …

  “There's a man watching the end of the lane.” She touched John's shoulder, halting him. “Not a guard.” She listened, getting her bearings: The palace wall lay past a line of houses to their left, and she knew there were guards at the petitioners' gate, about a hundred feet down the Queen's Lane from where they stood. The Cooksway cornered around a tower to join the Queen's Lane, and as far as she could tell there was no one near the wood-yard gate, save for that single man standing just out of sight where the cramped lane turned into the wider way. The Cooksway was, of course, the main one into the kitchen quarters. She could smell the dung churned into the snow, and over the gray wall the warm scents of baking and brewing.

  “Bugger.” John slipped the sword from its sheath beneath his cloak. “Whereabouts …? I see him.” He nodded toward the end of the lane, where a cart had been unharnessed and left to stand by the corner of the wall. “Can I circle back and around?”

  “Yes—no.” Jenny listened hard. Her concentration wasn't what it had been twelve hours ago, but still she was able to sift out the muted babble of servants' voices—scullery maids, wood-haulers, watermen—from the palace itself. She heard the wind groan around the corner of the alleyway a few yards behind them, heard a woman in one of the houses say to her child, “All the little birds will be back in the spring.…”

  “Someone's just past the turning behind us,” she breathed. “Two of them …” A boot crunched in the frozen muck as someone shifted his weight.

  “Not a guard, either. At least he's not wearing a guard's armor or harness.” She half-shut her eyes, breathing deep. The last time she had slept, she realized with a kind of wonderment, had been in the snow-cave in Ernine, with Morkeleb crouching outside the door. She had dreamed of the mirror chamber. Dreamed of Amayon crying to her from his prison.

  And the time before that, she had slept in the Deep, to be waked by demon voices whispering of slaves.

  “I'm sorry. I can't …”

  “It's all right, love, you're doing champion.” John touched a hand to her shoulder, then slipped away. She wondered where and when he'd last rested. The man behind the cart in the lane continued to watch the gate. Somewhere in the Dockmarket a clock struck the hour, answered by the bronze chime of the palace carillon, and Gareth's breath hissed. The fourth hour of the morning.

  “All Ector will need is someone accusing Polycarp of collusion with demons,” the young man whispered desperately. “His father was a traitor—he was brought up a hostage in the palace, with me and Rocklys. All winter there's been unrest in the Citadel, and in the Marches it rules. We can't let them kill him—put him to the Question …”

  Jenny lifted her hand for silence, hearing John's feet stop. There was a quick scrunch—feet moving in snow?—and John said, “Don't try it. Put that down where I can see it.”

  And a deep voice said, “Lord Aversin?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “You won't recognize me.” The voice at the end of the lane was so soft, Jenny could tell, glancing sidelong at Gareth, that he heard nothing but a murmur. But to her ears, the accent of the South was strong.

  “I do, though,” said John's voice, and Jenny heard the metallic hiss of his sword being sheathed. “You'll be Brâk, won't you? You didn't ever walk all the way from the mountains of Tralchet here by yourself ?”

  There was the whisper of a deep bass laugh. “We cannot all ride flying machines, lord.”

  Brâk, thought Jenny. Chief of the escaped slaves in the Tralchet mines, to whom John had given poppy powder from Jenny's medicine bag to knock out the guards at the outer gates. Later John had left maps of the territory between the Tralchet mines and the northernmost of the King's small Winterlands garrisons, so that the southerner could lead the escaped slaves to safety.

  They had never seen one another's faces, but knew one an-other's voices, from the speech they had exchanged in the dark.

  John stepped briefly from the shadow to snap his fingers twice, signaling Gareth and Jenny to come. Behind them, Jenny heard boots in the mud and turned to see the other watcher emerge into the lane as well. His drab clothing caught in the wind to reveal a flash of exquisite lace at sleeves and throat. Even as he came near she recognized Bliaud's younger son, Abellus, no demon glint in his somewhat mild brown eyes but a grimness to his mouth that hadn't been there when he and his older brother, Tundal, had parted company from their father at the fortress of Caer Corflyn in the summer.

  “My family is a powerful one among the merchant guilds of the South,” Brâk was saying as Jenny, Gareth, and Abellus came close. In the shadowy slot between the buildings the dark lines of his facial tattoos formed a mask through which his eyes glinted like a beast's in darkness. “I was all the summer making my way south to them again. Then this winter I heard rumor concerning you, Lord Aversin, and concerning the gnomes buying or stealing human slaves, even from the Far South where they no longer dwell. I came to Bel with my uncle's next shipment of coffee and silk, and since I have been here I have seen evil things.”

  “What, evil things comin' in an' out of the kitchen gate of the palace?” John gestured down the Cooksway, to where the gate of the wood-court could be just seen, in a sort of turret in the palace wall. “Don't tell me their cook is possessed as well.”

  Brâk chuckled again, the unvoiced breath of one who has lived for years in fear of making a sound. Jenny guessed he was in his forties, with the first brush of frost on the long black braids, and beneath the line of the tattoos, a mouth both sensual and firm. He was well dressed against the cold, in quilted wool, and his boots were unobtrusively expensive.

  “This is me lady Jenny Waynest,” John said, taking her hand and presenting her to the merchant, who salaamed deeply and made a motion as if to lift and kiss the hem of a nonexistent skirt. “And this's me lord Gareth, Prince of Bel, who was Regent for the old King.”

  “My lord.” The merchant bowed again, though not so deeply, and pressed his fist to his brow. “We heard you had gone to the mage Bliaud's house—”

  “Who's ‘we’?” asked John, and Gareth said, “What's happening? They're trying the Master of Halnath this morning.…”

  “It is why we're here.” Br
âk glanced up the lane as Abellus salaamed first to Jenny, then, deeply, to the Prince.

  “Everyone's always complaining how servants gossip,” said the wizard's son. “Well, they might be servants, but they ain't stupid—fact is, my valet's a dashed sight more brainy than I am, not that that's praising him to the stars.… Never was one of the clever sorts, you know.” He tapped his temple and shook his head. Like Gareth, he dyed his curled love-locks—the two that escaped his velvet hood were a lively green. “The aunts always said I was the fool of the family—well, me and Papa, anyway. But nobody ever said you had to be able to run up double-column accounts to see when someone you know isn't someone you know anymore. 'Specially now. Papa”—he paused—“where was I? Oh, the servants.”

  “There are those—in the palace and out,” said Brâk, “who, if you will forgive my saying so, my lord prince, never trusted this ‘recovery’ of your father's. Or that of your poor lady wife. And the things that have been rumored about her, and about what servants have witnessed in the palace and especially in this private quarter she has lately had set aside for her, sound too much like other rumors concerning those who, like her, suffered death from the plague, and later … came back.” His dark eyes met Gareth's. “She died,” he asked softly, “did she not?”

  Gareth looked aside. Then, after a moment's silence, he drew a deep breath and returned the merchant's compassionate gaze. “Yes. I … did a foolish thing. I should have known better.”

  Brâk held up his hand, and shook his head. “There are many in the city,” he said, “who could not accept, and who made the choice you made. Who among us who loves would not do the same? Many in the city have come to the conclusion that you did since then. And many still fight that conclusion with all that is in them, not wanting to understand what they know in their hearts to be true.”

  “That my wife is a demon?”

  “That all those who return are demons. I don't know how many I've spoken to in the streets who say, ‘It may be true that some are, but my beloved is one of the true resurrections.…’ And there have been no true resurrections. Only more careful demons.”

  He glanced across the lane at the gate to the wood-court. It opened a crack, and a white cloth waved twice, as if a servant shook out a rag. Then it closed, but Jenny could see that it did not close all the way.

  “So.” Brâk touched the short-sword he wore beneath his quilted cloak. “Where can we find you, my lord, after we come out—if we come out?”

  “You can find me in my father's hall,” Gareth said quietly, and fell into step with Brâk as he moved down the lane toward the little door. “Or my father's prison.”

  “She said her illness had made her think about how she had used her life, and what she owed to the gods,” recounted Gareth as Brâk closed the postern behind them. They were a goodly company by that time, for while Brâk spoke nearly a dozen men and women had melted like ghosts from the surrounding lanes, grim-faced and quiet and armed with the weapons of their trades, butcher knives and hammers and knots of lead. There were hasty introductions, clumsy salaams among the wood-piles, the whispered names of husbands or children or wives vanished or killed. Gareth's hands were kissed and John's shoulders slapped encouragingly.

  “We were in the market square, lord, a fortnight ago, but there were too many guards for us to rush the stake.…”

  “Just as well, as it turned out,” said John. “Though I didn't think so at the time.” Inside the court another dozen servants waited, and nearly a score of the Palace Guard, led by the dark-browed Captain Tourneval who'd arrested John on his return to Bel, and whom later Gareth had spoken of as a loyal man. He bowed to John—Jenny saw no trace of the demon in his eyes.

  Only a man doing as he was ordered, she thought, and loyal to his King.

  Gareth led the way, up an enclosed stair and then right, through a pillared gallery beneath a hall and thence into a cloistered garden, snow glimmering wanly among uneven mats of neglected hedge and mounds of overgrown vine. “She asked for the whole of the old Queen's tower, the keys to all its doors and rooms, because it was closed off from the storerooms. Even the servants never come.” There was a gateway of wrought-iron openwork, locked, leading into a second, smaller garden. One of the town conspirators was a blacksmith who'd brought tools.

  “She didn't know much about the ways of servants, then,” Brâk remarked dryly as the blacksmith forced open the gate. “Nor did the demon who took her know a great deal of how humans will take advantage of any place where they can meet their lovers, or hide stolen tablecloths, or take a few minutes to rest between scouring pans and carrying wood.” A couple of the red-liveried servants traded glances and embarrassed grins.

  “I'm sorry no one came to you before this, m'lord,” added a man in the rough garb of a stable-hand, speaking to Gareth. “Seems like everybody whispered about the sounds we'd hear, coming from the old Queen's chapel, but nobody'd talk about it out loud. Nobody'd admit of being there, for fear she'd hear—”

  “She showed you a gentle face, lord,” Tourneval said, striding beside Gareth, his sword drawn.

  “She was gentle,” Gareth said softly. His voice cracked a little, then steadied. “Gentle and loving and kind. And kindness … isn't something that can be counterfeited. Not even when the one you're deceiving desperately wants to see it.”

  “We only feared that in your indignation, you'd speak of it to her. Or to one who might get word back to her.”

  They crossed the second garden, still more overgrown. The day's intermittent flurries of sleet had blurred away any tracks from the unkempt mounds and hummocks of snow in its center, but where the surrounding colonnade sheltered a long crescent of old snow Jenny saw a woman's tracks, small feet in the tall-soled shoes fashionable at Court, and mingled with them the heavier tracks of a man. Man and woman had come and gone this way many times since the snow first fell, tracks over one another, and always those same two. In one place the snow was rucked up and stained brownish with old blood, as if someone had knelt there and used it to wash her hands.

  Gareth halted, looking down at the scraped muck. From the door opposite, decorated with exquisite carvings of the Twelve Gods, came the foetor of old blood, the lingering pungence of charred meat. Jenny, standing among the group of servants and guards, met John's eyes. All her own horrendous memories passed in a nightmare stream through her mind. She tried the door, and it was locked. John would have drawn Gareth away, but the young man said, “No. I need to see.” The blacksmith—his name was Dor—came forward again with his tools.

  The Chapel of the Twelve was dark, and not very large. Pendant vaulting, delicate as lace, lost itself in blackness overhead. Only the extreme cold kept the air even remotely breathable. In summer, the place would have been a hell of flies. Jenny looked at the chains, and the bloodstains, and the things all laid out on what had been the altar-table of the Twelve, implements uncleaned after their last use and ready for their next. There were a few crystals left, flawed topazes, and a number of low-grade opals in a dish. Jenny's own eyes were mageborn, and she hoped the dense shadows hid at least some of this from Gareth, but looking up into his face she couldn't tell, in the sickened light, what he felt or thought. There was a smell, too, of turned earth, coming from a small door half-hidden behind the altar: turned earth and rot. Behind her, one of the guards flinched aside, gagging.

  Before she could stop him, Gareth walked past her into the desecrated chamber, and Jenny hurried at his heels. “You don't need to see that.”

  “I need to see all,” he said, his voice quite calm. “I'll need to charge her with it.” But she sensed that what he sought was enough anger to turn him against one who looked so much like Trey.

  From that half-open door by the altar a stair no wider than a man's shoulders led down to what had been a crypt. Tourneval and Brâk had lanterns. The grubby light showed a floor dug up, tiles thrown carelessly in heaps along the walls, with no attempt at tidiness or thought to replace them. Mixed
with the tiles were clots of dirt, smelling of mold and worms and worse things. Whatever was buried there hadn't been buried deep. From the wet black earth hands stuck out, and here and there parts of skulls. One of them still trailed long black goreclotted hair.

  Behind her on the stair Jenny heard the shocked whispers as guards and servants passed word back of what they saw, or struggled to come forward to see, or back to seek the outer air.

  “So this is how they make the crystals you spoke of ?” Gareth asked her, still in that voice of unnatural calm. “With magic raised from deaths like these?”

  “I think so, yes,” said Jenny. “But were there no need for them to raise such power, I think they would still kill thus, for sport.”

  When they came up the crypt steps and out of the chapel into the raw cold of the garden, Gareth said to Brâk, “Of the others in the city, the other women who were resurrected by demons, were any with child? Have any given birth, since their resurrection?”

  And Brâk shook his head. “None that I've heard of, Prince.” He looked around him, at the servants, and the rabble of artisans and laborers and merchants whose beloveds had died and returned. But they all shook their heads, men and women both.

  The young dandy Abellus said, “M'father went to see women who were with child, I know that, but none so far advanced as … as your lady was.”

  Gareth pushed up his spectacles and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. “Come, then,” he said. “I've seen what I needed to see. They'll have Polycarp in the council chamber. We can charge them with this there.”

  When they reached the King's council chamber, however, they found the room empty, and not even pages in the antechamber to tell them what was happening. “That doesn't look good,” John remarked, ambling into the vaulted and tapestried round room with his air of deceptive laziness, his hands tucked into his belt. “When the servants are keepin' their distance you know there's trouble. They expected to try him here this mornin', though—” and he nodded at the logs and kindling laid ready in the clean-swept fireplace, the longlegged silver braziers standing behind the chairs and the cloths laid over the tables. “Which means Goffyer reached 'em with word—”