Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  It was time to run for it, and John ran. He knew he'd have only minutes, maybe only seconds, before the demons had their first flush of greedy joy at tearing one another and turned to attack a human. He ducked between two stones as they went cherry-red with heat; they exploded behind him, the shock flinging him forward on his face. He scrambled to his hands and knees, caught up his sword, made for the point in the ring where it was possible to get closest at sunset.

  And Jenny was there. She had run up in the very wake of the demons and was now on her knees, huge swoops of her arm sketching a gate-sigil in red chalk on the ground. A silver shape struck at her from the air, and John slashed at it, the scream as it shredded away into fire making the demons still swirling around the outside of the Henge turn, aghast, then flee. But few noticed, for between the red-glowing stones John could see Folcalor like a lean silver-green tiger, shedding Goffyer's body as Adromelech's spells exploded it, plunging through the chaos of struggling shadows, plunging straight toward Adromelech.

  Jenny scrambled to her feet, looked around—stood still and looked around, and John knew she was looking for him. With what was about to happen, he thought, with what was already going on inside the Henge, she was standing still and looking for him.

  She yelled, “John!” and they grabbed hands like two children, plunged away from the stone circle as fast as they could run. Nauseating pain gripped and snapped at him, ripples and eddies of it, and of searing heat, the un-Limited side slips of the demon spells. Magic spread out through Prokep, toxic magic, madness and hate that could cover the world if unchecked. Handfast, John and Jenny plunged away from the Henge, toward the broken shaft of a pillar on whose top gleamed an ice-white crystal, that caught the light of the Dragonstar.

  Beyond that pillar they turned and looked back, in time to see Folcalor fall upon Adromelech in a windmill of adamant claws. The Arch-wight flung up his girlish little arms, cried something that John knew to be Folcalor's true name, the name Caradoc had whispered to the silver bottle.…

  And both were gone.

  Jenny cried, “Now!” her voice like silver lightning, slicing the night.

  At the top of the pillar, the crystal flashed. On a promontory of a broken wall, a second crystal caught the glancing reflection, and on a knee of half-buried stone, a third. In and around the Ring the demons were crying out, shrieking, some still tearing at one another and others casting about, seeking their lords. Around the outer perimeter of the burning stones, crystal to crystal, the icy light flashed, silver light licking across the intervening space, until the Henge was formed again, irregularly shaped and about a hundred yards beyond the original ring: crystals set in rune-written rock, an impassable, burning net.

  The whining vibration of ether-plasma stabbed through John's skull.

  “Dear gods, you didn't tell me about that!” gasped Jenny, pressing a hand to her head.

  “Sorry, love.” John wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his wrist, letting go of neither his sword nor her hand. He was trembling, sweat running down his face and so dizzy, he struggled only to stay on his feet, but could not take his eyes off the chaos within the Henge.

  Out of the red-chalked Gate that Jenny had drawn in the ground, Shining Things were coming. Drawn by the smell of demons, they rose from the rock, and from the Hell beyond that rock: flashing wheels of wings and eyes, which rolled about among the shattered menhirs, devouring whatever they found. John saw the gray shadow-creature flee wailing, to be caught by a creature like a huge glowing slug, of the kind that had once nearly killed Amayon when the demon was guiding him through that particular Hell. Saw it drawn slowly into the slug's round, dark mouth. Heard it scream, with the panic agony of the dying, and it died slowly and hard. Smaller things, like burning hoops scattering lightning, darted in packs, encircling groups of demons and shredding them with claws of flame. Demons fled toward the smoking pool of the Hell-gate, but the Shining Things cut them off from it, pitiless and cold. Others tried to escape the Henge and into the outer world, but fell back crying from the burn of the ether, whose Otherworld nature they did not know or understand, and the Shining Things devoured them.

  Jenny's hand closed tight over John's.

  “Jenny!” Amayon fell to his knees only feet away from them, ichor streaming from his ripped back. Amayon as John had first seen him, the beautiful youth with the curly black hair, berry-blue eyes stretched with genuine terror, unknowable pain. “Jenny, let me out! I promise you, I swear to you, I'll be your servant, your slave! My love, my love, don't let them—”

  Jenny turned her eyes aside, then a moment later looked back, in time to watch the great gleaming slug of silver take Amayon by the foot, and with inexorable leisure—one slow, terrible gulp at a time—draw him in.

  The demon felt himself dying. John could see that in his eyes, the expression he'd seen in the eyes of men he'd killed in battle, all those years of defending the people of the Winterlands. He put his arm around Jenny, wishing she didn't have to see. Knowing there had been a time when she had loved the demon, not because she'd wished to, but because that is the nature of the bond between demons and men.

  Jenny said nothing, but he felt her shudder as she pressed against his side.

  By the time Amayon was dead, the other demons were gone as well.

  The Shining Things rolled back and forth across the parched ground, like Snuff and Bannock hunting for the final crumbs of dinner. They paused, flickering, over the burned-out husks of the soul-jewels that had been crushed and exploded in the course of the fight, and passed on. They clustered briefly around the mirror, which lay knocked on its side between the stones of the old Henge and the chilly crystal lattices of the new, but did not seem to be able to pass through its gate. Nor did they enter the pool. Gleaming with a skeletal light, they flickered out of sight, but the ozone whisper of their presence remained in the air.

  Having been summoned to the Henge of Prokep, there they would remain.

  The heat that had flowed out of the Henge dispersed rapidly. John didn't think he'd ever felt so cold in his life.

  Jenny pressed her face to his shoulder, and brought up the end of her plaid, to cast around his shoulders to warm them both.

  Then her breath caught and she stiffened, and John turned his head, his aching hand tightening again on the hilt of his sword.

  He knew already what he'd see.

  The Demon Queen stood in the moonlight, just where the shadow of a pillar laid a band of black on the lifeless sand.

  John thought she'd been standing there for some time. She looked to him as she'd always looked: a tall, slim woman with an expression older than her face. Things moved in the dark chaotic coils of her hair. They stood up and hissed at him, exactly, he realized now, as had the worms in the black rotting hair of the graveyard wight that had slain King Uriens of Bel.

  The gold eyes met his, and smiled.

  She crossed the sand toward him, lazily, as if she had all the night before her. Though the air was still, all the smoky veils that wreathed her lifted and blew as if in some private atmosphere, as if she carried her own Hell about with her and was never completely free of it. She must have seen John use the demon sword, and knew its power, but she came straight up to him and stood before him, her smile lingering on her lips.

  Then her eyes went to the Burning Mirror, where it lay within the new Henge of ether-light. It was a distance of nearly a hundred feet, from the edge of the Henge to the smoking surface of the enameled glass, and though the Shining Things were not to be seen, their crazy humming blended with the whine of the ether. They were near.

  John smiled into her golden eyes and said softly, “Good luck, love.”

  And for a flickering instant her smile turned human, like a rueful girl's. “And you.” She put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed his lips. Then she walked quite calmly across the boundary of the Ether Henge. She seemed to melt into shadow as the Shining Things flashed into being, rolling and swooping
toward the place. John saw where her feet burned the sand in one place, two … a flicker of silver mist played over the cracked enamel of the mirror. By the time the wheels of fire reached the spot, it was gone.

  Long silence lay over the ruin of Prokep, broken only by the faint hum of the ether relays. Even the wind was still. The cold moon passed its zenith, and the Dragonstar slipped below the undulant dark horizon. For the last time, John knew from his calculations, in a thousand years.

  A thousand years from now would the demons evolve some other scheme? It was a good bet they'd do it without either Folcalor or Adromelech, neither of whom—being demons—would release the other, or release the comfort of triumph at being the other's jailer.

  As for the Demon Queen …

  Softly, almost below the level of the senses, music whispered in the night. Beautiful music, alien airs glowing like colors: blue and golden, pink and green … black in black in black …

  On their broken pillars, their stumps of stone, on the rim of the palace foundation and the ruin of the gate where the Garden of Souls had stood, the ten ether-crystals began to glow more brightly still. The white-green ether-light was swallowed up momentarily in colors, flashing like a rainbow of mirrors. At the top of the pillar beside them, John saw the ghost-shape of wings, the uncoiling glitter of razor spines, catching the spectral moonlight: opal eyes, and the firefly halo of antennae lights. The dragon emerged from the crystal like a butterfly, no bigger than a man's crossed thumbs—John couldn't imagine how he saw it as clearly as he did.

  But it grew like a silken cloud, rising above the pillar, weightless as shadow against the stars and beautiful beyond earthly conception of glory.

  From each ether-crystal a dragon emerged, sparkling as if each scale were a mirror to catch the light of the stars that had been their first home. The night sang the music of their names.

  Centhwevir blue-and-golden— John remembered, identified, the tune Jenny had long ago learned by rote upon her harp, in the days before she'd even known who Centhwevir was. Nymr blue violet-crowned— Ian's dragon partner. Hagginarshildim pink-and-green, and young Byrs of a thousand hues.

  The dragons who had been possessed by demons, in the high brightness of summer, when the Dragonstar's first head had glimmered in the sky.

  Morkeleb like a starry shadow, barely seen but in many ways more beautiful than all the rest.

  And Corvin black-and-silver, reaching down with his long hind-legs to settle on the earth, tucking his tabby-silk wings against his sparkling sides. From pillar to rock the ether-crystals continued to burn, green-white again, the stream of their alien light unflagging, once called through from its distant world.

  It is accomplished, said the dragon who had once been a scientist, and craned his bird-like head on the end of his long neck, surveying the ring of the Ether Henge. The ether-flow from crystal to crystal is stable now, and it should power the spells of Ward indefinitely. Demon magic can't touch it, since it isn't of this world, and I think it will be long before any of them dares emerge into the Ring to be devoured by the Shining Things. I did not think they would be able to stand against the combination of magic and science.

  It was not your magic, nor your science, Black-and-Silver One, that wrought the doom of the Hellspawn. Morkeleb tilted his head to one side, a characteristic gesture, and the starlight twinkled on the points of his invisible horns. What the Hellspawn could not fight against was the trust that our nestmates had in Mistress Jenny. The certainty that if they entered into the ether-crystals at her behest, to draw the ether from the Otherworld, that it was not a trap or a ruse to make them always slaves.

  Corvin's spines bristled and he said, Trust? as if the word were in an alien tongue. In saving each of them from Folcalor, she held each by his name. They had to do as she commanded.

  But she did not command, pointed out Morkeleb. She spoke no word of power, when she summoned each by his name.

  What are you saying? Corvin's nostrils rimmed with flame. That now we must … TRUST … mortal men? Things that are born and perish like the grass, and like the grass change with every wind that turns?

  I say nothing, replied the Dragonshadow. Only that trust is not a thing of dragons, and that tonight, it was the saving of us all.

  Wizard-woman, Dreamweaver, I shall be returning to the West, to the Skerries of Light. I have learned some things of humankind, and of the Hellspawn, and it is time for me to meditate upon that which I have learned. My nestmates and I shall bear you back to Bel, if you will, to wait upon the new King in his coronation. Or if you will, we shall carry you north to your Hold, if you have had your fill of Kings and demons, of war and grief and Hell.

  John started to speak, then glanced at Jenny. “What'll it be, love?” he asked. “Tea and cream cakes in Bel with old Ector, or Aunt Jane's bannocks and another six weeks of snow?”

  “Gar will need someone,” said Jenny, “to help him order the Realm, in the wake of the damage the demons caused.”

  “That's enough to make me run screamin' in the other direction,” John sighed, and dabbed a sword-cut tentatively on his shoulder with one hand. “I suppose you're right, love, if you can contact Ian by crystal, an' hear all's well there.” He sheathed the demon blade he still held, and extended his bare arm to the light of the Moon of Winds. Beneath the grime, the silver marks the Demon Queen had traced on his flesh had disappeared. Somehow, he did not feel surprised.

  He sighed, and turned back to Jenny. “Speakin' of cream cakes,” he added hopefully, “I don't suppose, you've any food left, before we start back?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The dragons flew together as far as the end of Nast Wall, with the exception of Corvin, who remained in Prokep, guarding the great treasure-hoard within the palace's crypt. “So much for the greatest scientist an' loremaster of the stardrakes,” John remarked, a little sadly, as he and Jenny climbed the wide stair to the top of the stone foundation and looked out for the last time over the ruins. “What good's his lore, an' all that he's learned an' known, goin' to do anyone now? He'll sink into his dreams with the gold, an' stay there forever, contemplatin' his magic dreams.”

  Never mind, said Morkeleb heartlessly, for he did not like the black-and-silver dragon. He waited for them at the top, sparkling like a mirror in the dry desert light and casting no shadow on the stones: barely more than a smoke-wraith himself. We could not have appointed a better guardian for the ether-ring than the great and mighty scientist who devised it. Should any come who might interfere with it, he will soon deal with them. And saying this, he spread his shadowy wings. The other dragons drew near the earth, weightless as flowers: Morkeleb gathered Jenny into his claws, and Centhwevir, an old and surprisingly sweet-natured drake, bore John up. Sometimes during the long flight to the West, Jenny would look across the distance that separated them and see her husband peering eagerly down through the winter clouds, taking notes on what he could see of the countryside beneath.

  The star-drakes sang as they flew, making music with their minds. They made a song about defeating the demons, passed from mind to mind with laughing melody like a universe of silver bells, and another about being within the crystals and drawing the ether from the other universe into their own, to power the crystals forever. Sometimes they flew close to one another, enameled colors brilliant against the gray mists of the clouds; sometimes they spread out, until they seemed no larger that gay-hued birds among those towering columns of white and silver. But always the music surrounded them, golden and wild and sweet.

  They sang older songs, too, the lore of ancient dragons, of things passed from mind to mind over the centuries, and Jenny heard again of the Dragonshadows who had been with them in the past, invisible and wise. She thought—but she was not sure—that the dragons regarded these creatures as curiosities, almost alien to themselves; creatures almost of jest, to be taken lightly. Yet, in flying, they gave Morkeleb wide berth.

  Only when that golden flight came to an end, late in the afte
rnoon on a deserted meadow high above the Clae woods within sight of the city walls of Bel, did Morkeleb speak of the Dragonshadows to her. The other dragons bade Jenny good-bye, their minds shaping Dragonfriend, dragonfriend. They rose into the air, circling, brilliant as flowers in the slanting gold light, and Morkeleb, who had faded in and out of visibility through the day, remained like a silken shadow on the earth. The snow had melted from this place not a day before, and still lay in patches in the shadows of the rocks. In places the thinnest fuzz of green showed among the flattened swathes of last year's brown grass.

  “We'd best be careful how we approach the city,” remarked John, seating himself rather shakily on a rock and pulling his plaids tighter about him. “They'll have us up as beggars.” And he grinned, bruised and filthy and tattered.

  “I'll speak to Miss Mab with the scrying-stone,” said Jenny. “She will know if all is well, and if the last of the demons have in fact left the Deep. If that's the case, she'll send someone to meet us.”

  “It twilkin' better be the case,” grumbled John. He took off his spectacles, looked around for a clean spot on his shirt to clean them with, and resignedly put them back on. “I can tell you now I'm gie wearied of adventures an' I will not appreciate another loose end to tie up.”

  All appears well within the city. Morkeleb settled on his haunches and tucked his wings close to his sides; Jenny could see through him, as if he were wrought of smoky glass. Farmers go about their business in the orchards outside the city gate, and within the walls men raise banners, and put up platforms draped in bright colors. Tables are being set out in the city squares, and tuns of wine brought in wagons to all the fountains. Your little Princeling's red house-banners still fly from the palace jacks.