Dragon’s Bane

by Barbara Hambly

  “I don’t understand it,” said Gareth, much later, as the three of them jostled their way along the narrow lanes of the crowded Dockmarket quarter. “She said Father was angry, yes—but he knew whom I’d be bringing with me. And he must have known about the dragon’s latest attack.” He hopped across the fish-smelling slime of the gutter to avoid a trio of sailors who’d come staggering out of one of the taverns that lined the cobbled street and nearly tripped over his own cloak.

  When Badegamus had announced to the nearly empty gallery that the King would see no one else that day, John and Jenny had taken the baffled and fuming Gareth back with them to the guest house they had been assigned in one of the outer courts of the Palace. There they had changed out of their borrowed court dress, and John had announced his intention of spending the remainder of the afternoon in the town, in quest of gnomes.

  “Gnomes?” Gareth said, surprised.

  “Well, if it hasn’t occurred to anyone else, it has occurred to me that, if I’m to fight this drake, I’m going to need to know the layout of the caverns.” With surprising deftness, he disentangled himself from the intricate crisscross folds of his mantlings, his head emerging from the double-faced satin like a tousled and unruly weed. “And since it didn’t seem the thing to address them at Court...”

  “But they’re plotting!” Gareth protested. He paused in his search for a place to dump the handful of old-fashioned neck-chains and rings among the already accumulating litter of books, harpoons, and the contents of Jenny’s medical pouch on the table. “Speaking to them at Court would have been suicide! And besides, you’re not going to fight him in the Deep, are you? I mean...” He barely stopped himself from the observation that in all the ballads the Dragonsbanes had slain their foes in front of their lairs, not in them.

  “If I fight him outside and he takes to the air, it’s all over,” John returned, as if he were talking about backgammon strategy. “And though it’s crossed my mind we’re walking through a morass of plots here, it’s to no one’s advantage to have the dragon stay in the Deep. The rest of it’s all none of my business. Now, are you going to guide us, or do we go about the streets asking folk where the gnomes might be found?”

  To Jenny’s surprise and probably a little to his own, Gareth offered his services as a guide.

  “Tell me about Zyeme, Gar,” Jenny said now, thrusting her hands deep into her jacket pockets as she walked. “Who is she? Who was her teacher? What Line was she in?”

  “Teacher?” Gareth had obviously never given the matter a thought. “Line?”

  “If she is a mage, she must have been taught by someone.” Jenny glanced up at the tall boy towering beside her, while they detoured to avoid a gaggle of passersby around a couple of street-corner jugglers. Beyond them, in a fountain square, a fat man with the dark complexion of a southerner had set up a waffle stand, bellowing his wares amid clouds of steam that scented the raw, misty air for yards.

  “There are ten or twelve major Lines, named for the mages that founded them. There used to be more, but some have decayed and died. My own master Caerdinn, and therefore I and any other pupils of his, or of his teacher Spaeth, or Spaeth’s other students, are all in the Line of Herne. To a mage, knowing that I am of the Line of Heme says—oh, a hundred things about my power and my attitude toward power, about the kinds of spells that I know, and about the kind that I will not use.”

  “Really?” Gareth was fascinated. “I didn’t know it was anything like that. I thought that magic was just something—well, something you were born with.”

  “So is the talent for art,” Jenny said. “But without proper teaching, it never comes to fullest fruition; without sufficient time given to the study of magic, sufficient striving ...” She broke off, with an ironic smile at herself. “All power has to be paid for,” she continued after a moment. “And all power must come from somewhere, have been passed along by someone.”

  It was difficult for her to speak of her power; aside from the confusion of her heart about her own power, there was much in it that any not mageborn simply did not understand. She had in all her life met only one who did, and he was presently over beside the waffle stand, getting powdered sugar on his plaids.

  Jenny sighed and came to a halt to wait for him at the edge of the square. The cobbles were slimy here with sea air and offal; the wind smelled offish and, as everywhere in the city of Del, of the intoxicating wildness of the sea. This square was typical of the hundreds that made up the interlocking warrens of Bel’s Dockmarket, hemmed in on three-and-a-half sides by the towering, rickety tenements and dominated by the moldering stones of a slate-gray clock tower, at whose foot a neglected shrine housed the battered image of Quis, the enigmatic Lord of Time. In the center of the square bubbled a fountain in a wide basin of chip-edged granite, the stones of its rim worn smooth and white above and clotted beneath with the black-green moss that seemed to grow everywhere in the damp air of the city. Women were dipping water there and gossiping, their skirts hiked up almost to their thighs but their heads modestly covered in clumsy wool veils tied in knots under their hair to keep them out of the way.

  In the mazes of stucco and garish color of the Dockmarket, John’s outlandishness hadn’t drawn much notice. The sloping, cobbled streets were crowded with sojourners from three-fourths of the Realm and all the Southern Lands: sailors with shorn heads and beards like coconut husks; peddlers from the garden province of Istmark in their old-fashioned, bundly clothes, the men as well as the women wearing veils; moneychangers in the black gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wanderer’s Children, forbidden to own land; whores painted to within an inch of their lives; and actors, jugglers, scarf sellers, rat killers, pickpockets, cripples, and tramps. A few women cast looks of dismissive scorn at Jenny’s uncovered head, and she was annoyed at the anger she felt at them.

  She asked, “How much do you know about Zyeme? What was she apprenticed as in the Deep?”

  Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. My guess would be in the Places of Healing. That was where the greatest power of the Deep was supposed to lie—among their healers. People used to journey for days to be tended there, and I know most of the mages were connected with them.”

  Jenny nodded. Even in the isolated north, among the children of men who knew virtually nothing of the ways of the gnomes, Caerdinn had spoken with awe of the power that dwelled within the Places of Healing in the heart of the Deep of Ylferdun.

  Across the square, a religious procession came into view, the priests of Kantirith, Lord of the Sea, walking with their heads muffled in their ceremonial hoods, lest an unclean sight distract them, the ritual wailing of the flutes all but drowning out their murmured chants. Like all the ceremonials of the Twelve Gods, both the words and the music of the flutes had been handed down by rote from ancient days; the words were unintelligible, the music like nothing Jenny had heard at Court or elsewhere.

  “And when did Zyeme come to Bel?” she asked Gareth, as the muttering train filed past.

  The muscles of the boy’s jaw tightened. “After my mother died,” he said colorlessly. “I—I suppose I shouldn’t have been angry at Father about it. At the time I didn’t understand the way Zyeme can draw people, sometimes against their will.” He concentrated his attention upon smoothing the ruffles of his sleeve for some moments, then sighed. “I suppose he needed someone. I wasn’t particularly good to him about Mother’s death.”

  Jenny said nothing, giving him room to speak or hold his peace. From the other end of the square, another religious procession made its appearance, one of the southern cults that spawned in the Dockmarket like rabbits; dark-complexioned men and women were clapping their hands and singing, while skinny, androgynous priests swung their waist-length hair and danced for the little idol borne in their midst in a carrying shrine of cheap, pink chintz. The priests of Kantirith seemed to huddle a little more closely in their protecting hoods, and the wailing of the flutes increased. Gareth spared the newcomers a di
sapproving glance, and Jenny remembered that the King of Bel was also Pontifex Maximus of the official cult; Gareth had no doubt been brought up in the most careful orthodoxy.

  But the din gave them the illusion of privacy. For all any of the crowd around them cared, they might have been alone; and after a time Gareth spoke again.

  “It was a hunting accident,” he explained. “Father and I both hunt, although Father hasn’t done so lately. Mother hated it, but she loved my father and would go with him when he asked her to. He teased her about it, and made little jokes about her cowardice—but he wasn’t really joking. He can’t stand cowards. She’d follow him over terrible country, clinging to her sidesaddle and staying up with the hunt; after it was over, he’d hug her and laugh and ask her if it wasn’t worth it that she’d plucked up her courage—that sort of thing. She did it for as long as I can remember. She used to lie and tell him she was starting to learn to enjoy it; but when I was about four, I remember her in her hunting habit—it was peach-colored velvet with gray fur, I remember—just before going out, throwing up because she was so frightened.”

  “She rounds like a brave lady,” Jenny said quietly.

  Gareth’s glance flicked up to her face, then away again. “It wasn’t really Father’s fault,” he went on after a moment. “But when it finally did happen, he felt that it was. The horse came down with her over some rocks—in a sidesaddle you can’t fall clear. She died four or five days later. That was five years ago. I—” He hesitated, the words sticking in his throat. “I wasn’t very good to him about it.”

  He adjusted his specs in an awkward and unconvincing cover for wiping his eyes on his sleeve ruffle. “Now that I look back on it, I think, if she’d been braver, she’d probably have had the courage to tell him she didn’t want to go—the courage to risk his mockery. Maybe that’s where I get it,” he added, with the shy flash of a grin. “Maybe I should have seen that I couldn’t possibly blame him as much as he blamed himself—that I didn’t say anything to him that he hadn’t already thought.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I understand now. But when I was thirteen, I didn’t. And by the time I did understand, it had been too long to say anything to him. And by that time, there was Zyeme.”

  The priests of Kantirith wound their way out of sight up a crooked lane between the drunken lean of crazy buildings. Children who had stopped to gawk after the procession took up their games once more; John resumed his cautious way across the moss-edged, herringbone pattern of the wet cobbles toward them, stopping every few paces to stare at some new marvel—a chair-mender pursuing his trade on the curbstone, or the actors within a cheap theater gesticulating wildly while a crier outside shouted tidbits of the plot to the passersby around the door. He would never, Jenny reflected with rueful amusement, learn to comport himself like the hero of legend that he was.

  “It must have been hard for you,” she said.

  Gareth sighed. “It was easier a few years ago,” he admitted. “I could hate her cleanly then. Later, for a while I—I couldn’t even do that.” He blushed again. “And now...”

  A commotion in the square flared suddenly, like the noise of a dogfight; a woman’s jeering voice yelled, “Whore!” and Jenny’s head snapped around.

  But it was not she and her lack of veils that was the target. A little gnome woman, her soft mane of hair like an apricot cloud in the wan sunlight, was making her hesitant way toward the fountain. Her black silk trousers were hitched up over her knees to keep them out of the puddles in the broken pavement, and her white tunic, with its flowing embroideries and carefully mended sleeves, proclaimed that she was living in poverty alien to her upbringing. She paused, peering around her with a painful squint in the too-bright daylight; then her steps resumed in the direction of the fountain, her tiny, round hands clutching nervously at the handle of the bucket that she inexpertly bore.

  Somebody else shouted, “Come slumming, have we, m’lady? Tired of sitting up there on all that grain you got hid? Too cheap to hire servants?”

  The woman stopped again, swinging her head from side to side as if seeking her tormentors, half-blind in the outdoor glare. Someone caught her with a dog turd on the arm. She hopped, startled, and her narrow feet in their soft leather shoes skidded on the wet, uneven stones. She dropped the bucket as she fell, and groped about for it on hands and knees. One of the women by the fountain, with the grinning approbation of her neighbors, sprang down to kick it beyond her reach.

  “That’ll learn you to hoard the bread you’ve bought out of honest folks’ mouths!”

  The gnome made a hasty scrabble around her. A faded, fat woman who’d been holding forth the loudest in the gossip around the fountain kicked the pail a little further from the searching hands.

  “And to plot against the King!”

  The gnome woman raised herself to her knees, peering about her, and one of the children darted out of the gathering crowd behind her and pulled the long wisps of her hair. She spun around, clutching, but the boy had gone. Another took up the game and sprang nimbly out to do the same, too engrossed in the prospect of fun to notice John.

  At the first sign of trouble, the Dragonsbane had turned to the man next to him, a blue-tattooed easterner in a metalsmith’s leather apron and not much else, and handed him the three waffles he held stacked in his hands. “Would you ever hold these?” Then he made his way unhurriedly through the press, with a courteous string of “Excuse me ... pardon...” in time to catch the second boy who’d jumped out to take up the baiting where the first had begun it.

  Gareth could have told them what to expect—Zyeme’s courtiers weren’t the only ones deceived by John’s appearance of harmless friendliness. The bully, caught completely off guard from behind, didn’t even have time to shriek before he hit the waters of the fountain. A huge splash doused every woman on the steps and most of the surrounding idlers. As the boy surfaced, spitting and gasping, Aversin turned from picking up the bucket and said in a friendly tone, “Your manners are as filthy as your clothes—I’m surprised your mother lets you out like that. They’ll be a bit cleaner now, won’t they?”

  He dipped the bucket full and turned back to the man who was holding his waffles. For an instant Jenny thought the smith would throw them into the fountain, but John only smiled at him, bright as the sun on a knife blade, and sullenly the man put the waffles into his free hand. In the back of the crowd a woman sneered, “Gnome lover!”

  “Thanks.” John smiled, still at his brass-faced friendliest. “Sorry I threw offal in the fountain and all.” Balancing the waffles in his hand, he descended the few steps and walked beside the little gnome woman across the square toward the mouth of the alley whence she had come. Jenny, hurrying after him with Gareth at her heels, noticed that none followed them too closely.

  “John, you are incorrigible,” she said severely. “Are you all right?” This last was addressed to the gnome, who was hastening along on her short, bowed legs, clinging to the Dragonsbane’s shadow for protection.

  She peered up at Jenny with feeble, colorless eyes. “Oh, yes. My thanks. I had never—always we went out to the fountain at night, or sent the girl who worked for us, if we needed water during the day. Only she left.” The wide mouth pinched up on the words, at the taste of some unpleasant memory.

  “I bet she did, if she was like that lot,” John remarked, jerking his thumb back toward the square. Behind them, the crowd trailed menacingly, yelling, “Traitors! Hoarders ! Ingrates!” and fouler things besides. Somebody threw a fish head that fucked off Jenny’s skirts and shouted something about an old whore and her two pretty-boys; Jenny felt the bristles of rage rise along her spine. Others took up this theme. She felt angry enough to curse them, but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater curse upon them than to be what they already were.

  “Have a waffle?” John offered disarmingly, and the gnome lady took the preferred confection with hands that shook.

  Gareth, carmine with embarrassment, said nothing.<
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  Around a mouthful of sugar, John said, “Gie lucky for us fruit and veggies are a bit too dear these days to fling, isn’t it? Here?”

  The gnome ducked her head quickly as she entered the shadows of a doorway to a huge, crumbling house wedged between two five-storey tenements, its rear wall dropping straight to the dank brown waters of a stagnant canal. The windows were tightly shuttered, and the crumbling stucco was written over with illiterate and filthy scrawls, splattered with mud and dung. From every shutter Jenny could sense small, weak eyes peering down in apprehension.

  The door was opened from within, the gnome taking her bucket and popping through like a frightened mole into its hill. John put a quick hand on the rotting panels to keep them from being shut in his face, then braced with all his strength. The doorkeeper was determined and had the prodigious muscles of the gnomes.

  “Wait!” John pleaded, as his feet skidded on the wet marble of the step. “Listen! I need your help! My name’s John Aversin—I’ve come from the north to see about this dragon of yours, but I can’t do it without your aid.” He wedged his shoulder into the narrow slit that was all that was left. “Please.”

  The pressure on the other side of the door was released so suddenly that he staggered inward under his own momentum. From the darkness beyond a soft, high voice like a child’s said in the archaic High Speech that the gnomes used at Court, “Come in, thou others. It does thee no good to be thus seen at the door of the house of the gnomes.”

  As they stepped inside, John and Gareth blinked against the dimness, but Jenny, with her wizard’s sight, saw at once that the gnome who had admitted them was old Dromar, ambassador to the court of the King.

  Beyond him, the lower hall of the house stretched in dense shadow. It had once been grand in the severe style of a hundred years ago—the old manor, she guessed, upon whose walled grounds the crowded, stinking tenements of the neighborhood had later been erected. In places, rotting frescoes were still dimly visible on the stained walls; and the vastness of the hall spoke of gracious furniture now long since chopped up for firewood and of an aristocratic carelessness about the cost of heating fuel. The place was like a cave now, tenebrous and damp, its boarded windows letting in only a few chinks of watery light to outline stumpy pillars and the dry mosaics of the impluvium. Above the sweeping curve of the old-fashioned, open stair she saw movement in the gallery. It was crowded with gnomes, watching warily these intruders from the hostile world of men.