Dragon’s Bane

by Barbara Hambly

“Is that why he rebelled?”

  “It might have had something to do with it. I don’t know.” He toyed wretchedly with a scrap of meal left in the bowl. “He—he tried to murder the King and—and the Heir to the throne, the King’s son. Polycarp is the next heir, the King’s nephew. He was brought up in the palace as a sort of a hostage after his father rebelled. Polycarp stretched a cable over a fence in the hunting field on a foggy morning when he thought no one would see until it was too late.” His voice cracked a little as he added, “I was the one who saw him do it.”

  Jenny glanced across at his face, broken by darkness and the leaping light of the flames into a harsh mosaic of plane and shadows. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  He managed to nod. “I think he was a better friend to me than anyone else at Court. People—people our age there—Polycarp is five years older than I am—used to mock at me, because I collect ballads and because I’m clumsy and can’t see without my spectacles; they’d mock at him because his father was executed for treason and because he’s a philosopher. Many of the Masters have been. It’s because of the University at Halnath—they’re usually atheists and troublemakers. His father was, who married the King’s sister. But Polycarp was always like a son to the King.” He pushed back the thin, damp weeds of his hair from his high forehead and finished in a strangled voice, “Even when I saw him do it, I couldn’t believe it.”

  “And you denounced him?”

  Gareth’s breath escaped in a defeated sigh. “What could I do?”

  Had this. Jenny wondered, been what he had hidden from them? The fact that the Realm itself was split by threat of civil war, like the Kinwars that had drawn the King’s troops away from the Winterlands to begin with? Had he feared that if John knew that there was a chance the King would refuse to lend him forces needed at home, he would not consent to make the journey?

  Or was there something else?

  It had grown fully dark now. Jenny picked the crisp mealcakes from the griddle and set them on a wooden plate at her side while she cooked salt pork and beans. While Gareth had been speaking, John had come to join them, half-listening to what was said, half-watching the woods that hemmed them in.

  As they ate, Gareth went on, “Anyway, Polycarp managed to get out of the city before they came for him. The King’s troops were waiting for him on the road to Halnath, but we think he went to the Deep, and the gnomes took him through to the Citadel that way. Then they—the gnomes—bolted up the doors leading from the Deep to the Citadel and said they would not meddle in the affairs of men. They wouldn’t admit the King’s troops through the Deep to take the Citadel from the rear, but they wouldn’t let the rebels out that way, either, or sell them food. There was some talk of them using blasting powder to close up the tunnels to Halnath completely. But then the dragon came.”

  “And when the dragon came?” asked John.

  “When the dragon came, Polycarp opened the Citadel gates that led into the Deep and let the gnomes take refuge with him. At least, a lot of the gnomes did take refuge with him, though Zyeme says they were the ones who were on the Master’s side to begin with. And she should know—she was brought up in the Deep.”

  “Was she, now?” John tossed one of the small pork bones into the fire and wiped his fingers on a piece of corncake. “I thought the name sounded like the tongue of the gnomes.”

  Gareth nodded. “The gnomes used to take a lot of the children of men as apprentices in the Deep—usually children from Deeping, the town that stands—stood—in the vale before the great gates of the Deep itself, where the smelting of the gold and the trade in foodstuff’s went on. They haven’t done so in the last year or so—in fact in the last year they forbade men to enter the Deep at all.”

  “Did they?” asked John, curious. “Why was that?”

  Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re strange creatures, and tricky. You can’t ever tell what they’re up to, Zyeme says.”

  As the night deepened, Jenny left the men by the fire and silently walked the bounds of the camp, checking the spell-circles that defended it against the blood-devils, the Whisperers, and the sad ghosts that haunted the ruins of the old town. She sat on what had been a boundary stone, just beyond the edge of the fire’s circle of light, and sank into her meditations, which for some nights now she had neglected.

  It was not the first time she had neglected them—she was too well aware of the nights she had let them go by while she was at the Hold with John and her sons. Had she not neglected them—had she not neglected the pursuit of her power—would she be as powerful as this Zyeme, who could deal in shapeshifting at a casual whim? Caerdinn’s strictures against it returned to her mind, but she wondered if that was just her own jealousy speaking, her own spite at another’s power. Caerdinn had been old, and there had been nowhere in the Winterlands that she could turn for other instruction after he had died. Like John, she was a scholar bereft of the meat of scholarship; like the people of the village of Alyn, she was circumscribed by the fate that had planted her in such stony soil.

  Against the twisting yellow ribbons of the flames, she could see John’s body swaying as he gestured, telling Gareth some outrageous story from his vast collection of tales about the Winterlands and its folk. The Fattest Bandit in the Winterlands? she wondered. Or one about his incredible Aunt Mattie? It occurred to her for the first time that it was for her, as well as for his people, that he had undertaken the King’s command—for the things that she had never gotten, and for their sons.

  It’s not worth his life! she thought desperately, watching him. I do well with what I have! But the silent ruins of Ember mocked at her, their naked bones veiled by darkness, and the calm part of her heart whispered to her that it was his to choose, not hers. She could only do what she was doing—make her choice and abandon her studies to ride with him. The King had sent his command and his promise, and John would obey the King.

  Five days south of Ember, the lands opened up once more. The forests gave way to the long, flat, alluvial slopes that led down to the Wildspae, the northern boundary of the lands of Belmarie. It was an empty countryside, but without the haunted desolation of the Winterlands; there were farms here, like little walled fortresses, and the road was at least passably drained. Here for the first time they met other travelers, merchants going north and east, with news and rumor of the capital—of the dread of the dragon that gripped the land, and the unrest in Bel due to the high price of grain.

  “Stands to reason, don’t it?” said a foxlike little trader, with his cavalcade of laden mules behind him. “What with the dragon ruining the harvest, and the grain rotting in the fields; yes, and the gnomes what took refuge in Bel itself hoarding the stuff, taking it out of the mouths of honest folk with their ill-got gold.”

  “Ill-got?” asked John curiously. “They mined and smelted it, didn’t they?” Jenny, who wanted news without irritating its bearer, kicked him surreptitiously in the shin.

  The merchant spat into the brimming ditch by the roadside and wiped his grizzled reddish beard. “That gives them no call to buy grain away from folks that needs it,” he said. “And word has it that they’re trafficking regular with their brothers up in Halnath—yes, and that they and the Master between them kidnapped the King’s Heir, his only child, to hold for ransom.”

  “Could they have?” John inquired.

  “Course they could. The Master’s a sorcerer, isn’t he? And the gnomes have never been up to any good, causing riot and mayhem in the capital...”

  “Riot and mayhem?” Gareth protested. “But the gnomes have been our allies for time out of mind! There’s never been trouble between us.”

  The man squinted up at him suspiciously. But he only grumbled, “Just goes to show, doesn’t it? Treacherous little buggers.” Jerking on his lead mule’s bridle, he passed them by.

  Not long after this they met a company of the gnomes themselves, traveling banded together, surrounded by guards for protection, with their wealth piled i
n carts and carriages. They peered up at John with wary, shortsighted eyes of amber or pale blue beneath low, wide brows, and gave him unwilling answers to his questions about the south.

  “The dragon? Aye, it lairs yet in Ylferdun, and none of the men the King has sent have dislodged it.” The gnome leader toyed with the soft fur trim of his gloves, and the thin winds billowed at the silk of his strangely cut garments. Behind him, the guards of the cavalcade watched the strangers in deepest suspicion, as if fearing an attack from even that few. “As for us, by the heart of the Deep, we have had enough of the charity of the sons of men, who charge us four times the going price for rooms the household servants would scorn and for food retrieved from the rats.” His voice, thin and high like that of all the gnomes, was bitter with the verjuice of hate given back for hate. “Without the gold taken from the Deep, their city would never have been built, and yet not a man will speak to us in the streets, save to curse. They say in the city now that we plot with our brethren who fled through the back ways of the Deep into the Citadel of Halnath. By the Stone, it is lies; but such lies are believed now in Bel.”

  From the carts and carriages and curtained litters, a murmur of anger went up, the rage of those who have never before been helpless. Jenny, sitting quietly on Moon Horse, realized that it was the first time she had ever seen gnomes by daylight. Their eyes, wide and nearly colorless, were ill-attuned for its glare; the hearing that could catch the whispers of the cave bats would be daily tortured by the clamor of the cities of men.

  Aversin asked, “And the King?”

  “The King?” The gnome’s piping voice was vicious, and his whole stooping little body bristled with the raw hurt of humiliation. “The King cares nothing for us. With all our wealth mewed up in the Deep, where the dragon sits hoarding over it, we have little to trade upon but promises, and with each day that passes those promises buy less in a city where bread is dear. And all this, while the King’s whore sits with his head in her lap and poisons his mind as she poisons everything she touches—as she poisoned the very heart of the Deep.”

  Beside her. Jenny heard the hissing of Gareth’s indrawn breath and saw the anger that flashed in his eyes, but he said nothing. When her glance questioned him, he looked away in shame.

  As the gnomes moved out of sight once again into the mists, John remarked, “Sounds a proper snakes’ nest. Could this Master really have kidnapped the King’s child?”

  “No,” Gareth said miserably, as the horses resumed their walk toward the ferry, invisible in the foggy bottomlands to the south. “He couldn’t have left the Citadel. He isn’t a sorcerer—just a philosopher and an atheist. I—don’t worry about the King’s Heir.” He looked down at his hands, and the expression on his face was the one that Jenny had seen in the camp outside Ember that night—a struggle to gather his courage. “Listen,” he began shakily. “I have to...”

  “Gar,” said John quietly, and the boy startled as if burned. There was an ironic glint in John’s brown eyes and an edge like chipped flint to his voice. “Now—the King wouldn’t by any chance have sent for me for some other reason than the dragon, would he?”

  “No,” Gareth said faintly, not meeting his eyes. “No, he—he didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  Gareth swallowed, his pale face suddenly very strained. “He—he didn’t send for you—for any other reason. That is...”

  “Because,” John went on in that quiet voice, “if the King happened to send me his signet ring to get me involved in rescuing that child of his, or helping him against this Master of Halnath I hear such tell of, or for his dealings with the gnomes, I do have better things to do. There are real problems, not just money and power, in my own lands, and the winter closing in looks to be a bad one. I’ll put my life at risk against the dragon for the sake of the King’s protection to the Winterlands, but if there’s aught else in it...”

  “No!” Gareth caught his arm desperately, a terrible fear in his face, as if he thought that with little more provocation the Dragonsbane would turn around then and there and ride back to Wyr.

  And perhaps, Jenny thought, remembering her vision in the water bowl, it might be better if they did.

  “Aversin, it isn’t like that. You are here to slay the dragon—because you’re the only Dragonsbane living. That’s the only reason I sought you out, I swear it. I swear it! Don’t worry about politics and—and all that.” His shortsighted gray eyes pleaded with Aversin to believe, but in them there was a desperation that could never have stemmed from innocence.

  John’s gaze held his for a long moment, gauging him. Then he said, “I’m trusting you, my hero.”

  In dismal silence, Gareth touched his heels to Battlehammer’s sides, and the big horse moved out ahead of them, the boy’s borrowed plaids making them fade quickly into no more than a dark, cut-out shape in the colorless fogs. John, riding a little behind, slowed his horse so that he was next to Jenny, who had watched in speculative silence throughout.

  “Maybe it’s just as well you’re with me after all, love.”

  She glanced from Gareth up to John, and then back. Somewhere a crow called, like the voice of that melancholy land. “I don’t think he means us ill,” she said softly.

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t gormless enough to get us killed all the same.”

  The mists thickened as they approached the river, until they moved through a chill white world where the only sound was the creak of harness leather, the pop of hooves, the faint jingle of bits, and the soughing rattle of the wind in the spiky cattails growing in the flooded ditches. From that watery grayness, each stone or solitary tree emerged, silent and dark, like a portent of strange events. More than all else. Jenny felt the weight of Gareth’s silence, his fear and dread and guilt. John felt it, too, she knew; he watched the tall boy from the corner of his eye and listened to the hush of those empty lands like a man waiting for ambush. As evening darkened the air. Jenny called a blue ball of witchfire to light their feet, but the soft, opalescent walls of the mist threw back the light at them and left them nearly as blind as before.

  “Jen.” John drew rein, his head cocked to listen. “Can you hear it?”

  “Hear what?” Gareth whispered, coming up beside them at the top of the slope which dropped away into blankets of moving fog.

  Jenny flung her senses wide through the dun-colored clouds, feeling as much as hearing the rushing voice of the river below. There were other sounds, muffled and altered by the fog, but unmistakable. “Yes,” she said quietly, her breath a puff of white in the raw air. “Voices, horses—a group of them on the other side.”

  John glanced sharply sidelong at Gareth. “They could be waiting for the ferry,” he said, “if they had business in the empty lands west of the river at the fall of night.”

  Gareth said nothing, but his face looked white and set. After a moment John clucked softly to Cow, and the big, shaggy sorrel plodded forward again down the slope to the ferry through the clammy wall of vapor.

  Jenny let the witchlight ravel away as John pounded on the door of the squat stone ferry house. She and Gareth remained in the background while John and the ferryman negotiated the fare for three people, six horses, and two mules. “Penny a leg,” said the ferryman, his squirrel-dark eyes darting from one to the other with the sharp interest of one who sees all the world pass his doorstep. “But there’ll be supper here in an hour, and lodging for the night. It’s growing mortal dark, and there’s chowder fog.”

  “We can get along a few miles before full dark; and besides,” John added, with an odd glint in his eye as he glanced back at the silent Gareth, “we may have someone waiting for us on the far bank.”

  “Ah.” The man’s wide mouth shut itself like a trap. “So it’s you they’re expecting. I heard ‘em out there a bit ago, but they didn’t ring no bell for me, so I bided by my stove where it’s warm.”

  Holding up the lantern and struggling into his heavy quilted jacket, he led the way down to
the slip, while Jenny followed silently behind, digging in the purse at her belt for coin.

  The great horse Battlehammer had traveled north with Gareth by ship and, in any case, disdained balking at anything as sheer bad manners; neither Moon Horse nor Osprey nor any of the spares had such scruples, with the exception of Cow, who would have crossed a bridge of flaming knives at his customary phlegmatic plod. It took Jenny much whispered talk and stroking of ears before any of them would consent to set foot upon the big raft. The ferryman made the gate at the raft’s tail fast and fixed his lantern on the pole at its head; then he set to turning the winch that drew the wide, flat platform out across the opaque silk of the river. The single lantern made a woolly blur of yellowish light in the leaden smoke of the fog; now and then, on the edge of the gleam. Jenny could see the brown waters parting around a snagged root or branch that projected from the current like a drowned hand.

  From somewhere across the water she heard the jingle of metal on metal, the soft blowing of a horse, and men’s voices. Gareth still said nothing, but she felt that, if she laid a hand upon him, she would find him quivering, as a rope does before it snaps. John came quietly to her side, his fingers twined warm and strong about hers. His spectacles flashed softly in the lanternlight as he slung an end of his voluminous plaid around her shoulders and drew her to his side.

  “John,” Gareth said quietly, “I—I have something to tell you.”

  Dimly through the fog came another sound, a woman’s laugh like the tinkling of silver bells. Gareth twitched, and John, a dangerous flicker in his lazy-lidded eyes, said, “I thought you might.”

  “Aversin,” Gareth stammered and stopped. Then he forced himself on with a rush, “Aversin, Jenny, listen. I’m sorry. I lied to you—I betrayed you, but I couldn’t help it; I had no other choice. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah,” said John softly. “So there was something you forgot to mention before we left the Hold?”

  Unable to meet his eyes, Gareth said, “I meant to tell you earlier, but—but I couldn’t. I was afraid you’d turn back and—and I couldn’t let you turn back. We need you, we really do.”