She overtook the others in the gauzy boil of the mists in the Vale. They had slowed down as visibility lessened; she led them at a canter over the paths that she knew so well through the town. Curses and shouts, muffled by the fog, came from the Rise behind them. Cold mists shredded past her face and stroked back the black coils other hair. She could feel the spells that held the brume in place fretting away as she left the Rise behind, but dared not try to put forth the strength of will it would take to hold them after she was gone. Her very bones ached from even the small exertion of summoning them; she knew already that she would need all the strength she could summon for the final battle.
The three horses clattered up the shallow granite steps. From the great darkness of the gate arch. Jenny turned to see the mob still milling about in the thinning fog, some fifty or sixty of them, of all stations and classes but mostly poor laborers. The uniforms of the handful of Palace guards stood out as gaudy splotches in the grayness. She heard their shouts and swearing as they became lost within plain sight of one another in territory they had all known well of old. That won’t last long, she thought.
Moon Horse shied and fidgeted at the smell of the dragon and of the old blood within the vast gloom of the Market Hall. The carcass of the horse Osprey had disappeared, but the place still smelled of death, and all the horses felt it, Jenny slid from her mare’s tall back and stroked her neck, then whispered to her to stay close to the place in case of need and let her go back down the steps.
Hooves clopped behind her on the charred and broken flagstones. She looked back and saw John, ashen under the stubble of beard, still somehow upright in Cow’s saddle. He studied the Vale below them with his usual cool expressionlessness. “Zyeme out there?” he asked, and Jenny shook her head.
“Perhaps I hurt her too badly. Perhaps she’s only remaining at the Palace to gather other forces to send against us.”
“She always did like her killing to be done by others. How long will your spells hold them?”
“Not long,” Jenny said doubtfully. “We have to hold this gate here, John. If they’re from Deeping, many of them will know the first levels of the Deep. There are four or five ways out of the Market Hall. If we retreat further in, we’ll be flanked.”
“Aye.” He scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully. “What’s wrong with just letting them in? We could hide up somewhere—once they got to the Temple of Sarmendes with all that gold, I doubt they’d waste much energy looking for us.”
Jenny hesitated for a moment, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “If they were an ordinary mob, I’d say yes, but—Zyeme wants us dead. If she cannot break and overwhelm my mind with her magic, she’s not going to give up before she has destroyed my body. There are enough of them that would keep hunting us, and we can’t take a horse into the deeper tunnels to carry you; without one, we’d never be able to move swiftly enough to avoid them. We’d be trapped in a cul-de-sac and slaughtered. No, if we’re to hold them, it has to be here.”
“Right.” He nodded. “Can we help you?”
She had returned her attention to the angry snarl of moving figures out in the pale ruins. Over her shoulder, she said, “You can’t even help yourself.”
“I know that,” he agreed equably. “But that wasn’t my question, love. Look...” He pointed. “That bloke there’s figured out the way. Here they come. Gaw, they’re like ants.”
Jenny said nothing, but felt a shiver pass through her as she saw the trickle of attackers widen into a stream.
Gareth came up beside them, leading Battlehammer; Jenny whispered to the big horse and turned him loose down the steps. Her mind was already turning inward upon itself, digging at the strength in the exhausted depths of her spirit and body. John, Gareth, and the slender girl in the white rags of a Court gown, clinging to Gareth’s arm, were becoming mere wraiths to her as her soul spiraled down into a single inner vortex, like the single-minded madness that comes before childbearing—nothing else existed but herself, her power, and what she must do.
Her hands pressed to the cold rock of the gate pillar, and she felt that she drew fire and strength from the stone itself and from the mountain beneath her feet and above her head—drew it from the air and the darkness that surrounded her. She felt the magic surge into her veins like a reined whirlwind of compressed lightning. Its power frightened her, for she knew it was greater than her body would bear, yet she could afford no Limitation upon these spells. It was thus, she knew, with dragons, but her body was not a dragon’s.
She was aware of John reining Cow sharply back away from her, as if frightened; Gareth and Trey had retreated already. But her mind was out in the pale light of the steps, looking down over Deeping, contemplating in leisurely timelessness the men and women running through the crumbled walls of the ruins. She saw each one of them with the cool exactness of a dragon’s eyes, not only how they were dressed, but the composition of their souls through the flesh they wore. Bond she saw distinctly, urging them on with a sword in his hand, his soul eaten through with abscesses like termite-riddled wood.
The forerunners hit the cracked pavement and dust of the square before the gates. Like the chirp of an insect in a wall, she heard Gareth nattering, “What can we do^ We have to help her!” as she dispassionately gathered the lightning in her hands.
“Put that down,” John’s voice said, suddenly weak and bleached. “Get ready to run for it—you can hide in the warrens for a time if they get through. Here’s the maps...”
The mob was on the steps. Incoherent hate rose around her like a storm tide. Jenny lifted her hands, the whole strength of rock and darkness tunneling into her body, her mind relaxing into the shock instead of bracing against it.
The key to magic is magic, she thought. Her life began and ended in each isolate crystal second of impacted time.
The fire went up from the third step, a red wall of it, whole and all-consuming. She heard those trapped in the first rush screaming and smelled smoke, charring meat, and burning cloth. Like a dragon, she killed without hate, striking hard and cruel, knowing that the first strike must kill or her small group would all be dead.
Then she slammed shut before her the illusion of the doors that had long ago been broken from the gateway arch. They appeared like faded glass from within, but every nail and beam and brace of them was wrought perfectly from enchanted air. Through them she saw men and women milling about the base of the steps, pointing up at what they saw as the renewed Gates of the Deep and crying out in wonder and alarm. Others lay on the ground, or crawled helplessly here and there, beating out the flames from their clothes with frenzied hands. Those who had not been trapped in the fire made no move to help them, but stood along the bottom of the step, looking up at the gates and shouting with drunken rage. With the cacophony of the screams and groans of the wounded, the noise was terrible, and worse than the noise was the stench of sizzling flesh. Among it all. Bond Clerlock stood, staring up at the phantom gates with his hunger-eaten eyes.
Jenny stepped back, feeling suddenly sick as the human in her looked upon what the dragon in her had done. She had killed before to protect her own life and the lives of those she loved. But she had never killed on this scale, and the power she wielded shocked her even as it drained her of strength.
The dragon in you answered, Morkeleb had said. She felt sick with horror at how true his knowledge of her had been.
She staggered back, and someone caught her—John and Gareth, looking like a couple of not-very-successful brigands, filthy and battered and incongruous in their spectacles. Trey, with Gareth’s tattered cloak still draped over her mud-stained white silks and her purple-and-white hair hanging in asymmetrical coils about her chalky face, wordlessly took a collapsible tin cup from her pearl-beaded reticule, filled it from the water bottle on Cow’s saddle, and handed it to her.
John said, “It hasn’t stopped them for long.” A mist of sweat covered his face, and the nostrils of his long nose were marked by dints of pai
n from the mere effort of standing. “Look, there’s Bond drumming up support for a second go. Silly bleater.” He glanced across at Trey and added, “Sorry.” She only shook her head.
Jenny freed herself and walked unsteadily to the edge of the shadow gate. Her head throbbed with exhaustion that bordered nausea. The voices of the men and her own voice, when she spoke, sounded flat and unreal. “He’ll get it, too.”
In the square below the gates, Bond was running here and there among the men, stepping over the charred bodies of the dying, gesticulating and pointing up at the phantom doors. The Palace guards looked uncertain, but the laborers from the Dockmarket were gathered about him, listening and passing wineskins among themselves. They shook their fists up at the Deep, and Jenny remarked, “Like the gnomes, they’ve had their taste of poverty.”
“Yes, but how can they blame us for it?” Gareth objected indignantly. “How can they blame the gnomes? The gnomes were even more victims of it than they.”
“Whether or no,” John said, leaning against the stone pillar of the Gate, “I bet they’re telling themselves the treasures of the Deep are theirs by right. It’s what Zyeme will have told ‘em, and they obviously believe it enough to kill for them.”
“But it’s silly!”
“Not as silly as falling in love with a witch, and we’ve both done that,” John replied cheerfully. In spite of her exhaustion, Jenny chuckled. “How long can you hold them, love?”
Something in the sound of his voice made her look back quickly at him. Though he had dismounted from Cow to help her, it was obvious he could not stand alone; his flesh looked gray as ash. Shouting from below drew her attention a moment later; past the smoke still curling from the steps, she could see men forming up into a ragged line, the madness of unreasoning hate in their eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “All power must be paid for. Maintaining the illusion of the Gates draws still more of my strength. But it buys us a little time, breaking the thrust of their will if they think they’ll have to break them.”
“I doubt that lot has the brains to think that far.” Still leaning heavily on the pillar, John looked out into the slanted sun of the square outside. “Look, here they come.”
“Get back,” Jenny said. Her bones hurt with the thought of drawing forth power from them and from the stone and air around her one more time. “I don’t know what will happen without Limitations.”
“I can’t get back, love; if I let go of this wall, I’ll fall down.”
Through the ghost shape of the Gates, she saw them coming, running across the square toward the steps. The magic came more slowly, dredged and scraped from the seared core of her being—her soul felt bleached by the effort. The voices below rose in a mad crescendo, in which the words “gold” and “kill” were flung up like spars of driftwood on the rage of an incoming wave. She glimpsed Bond Clerlock, or what was left of Bond Clerlock, somewhere in their midst, his Court suit pink as a shell among the blood-and-buttercup hues of the Palace guards. Her mind locked into focus, like a dragon’s mind; all things were clear to her and distant, impersonal as images in a divining crystal. She called the white dragon rage like a thunderclap and smote the steps with fire, not before them now, but beneath their feet.
As the fire exploded from the bare stone, a wave of sickness consumed her, as if in that second all her veins had been opened. The shrieking of men, caught in the agony of the fire, struck her ears like a slapping hand, as grayness threatened to drown her senses and heat rose through her, then sank away, leaving behind it a cold like death.
She saw them reeling and staggering, ripping flaming garments from charred flesh. Tears of grief and weakness ran down her face at what she had done, though she knew that the mob would have torn the four of them apart and had known, that time, that she could summon fire. The illusion of the Gates felt as tenuous as a soap-bubble around her—like her own body, light and drifting. John stumbled to catch her as she swayed and pulled her back to the pillar against which he had stood; for a moment they both held to it, neither strong enough to stand.
Her eyes cleared a little. She saw men running about the square in panic, rage, and pain; and Bond, oblivion^ to bums which covered his hand and arm, was chasing after them, shouting.
“What do we do now, love?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered “I feel as if I’m going to faint.”
His arm tightened around her waist. “Oh, do,” he encouraged enthusiastically. “I’ve always wanted to carry you to safety in my arms.”
Her laughter revived her, as he had no doubt meant it to. She pushed herself clear of his support as Gareth and Trey came up, both looking ill and frightened.
“Could we run for it through the Deep?” Gareth asked, fumbling the maps from an inner pocket and dropping two of them. “To the Citadel, I mean?”
“No,” Jenny said. “I told John—if we left the Market Hall, they’d flank us; and carrying John, we couldn’t outdistance them.”
“I could stay here, love,” John said quietly. “I could buy you time.”
Sarcastically, she replied, “The time it would take them to pick themselves up after tripping over your body in the archway would scarcely suffice.”
“One of us could try to get through,” Trey suggested timidly. “Polycarp and the gnomes at the Citadel would know the way through from that side. They could come for the rest of you. I have some candles in my reticule, and some chalk to mark the way, and I’m no good to you here...”
“No,” Gareth objected, valiantly fighting his terror of the dark warrens. “I’ll go.”
“You’d never find it,” Jenny said. “I’ve been down in the Deep, Gareth, and believe me, it is not something that can be reasoned out with chalk and candles. And, as John has said, the door at the end will be locked in any case, even if they didn’t blast it shut.”
Down below them, Bond’s voice could be heard dimly, shouting that the Gate wasn’t real, that it was just a witch’s trick, and that all the gold that had been lost was theirs by right. People were yelling, “Death to the thieves! Death to the gnome-lovers!” Jenny leaned her head against the stone of the pillar, a bar of sunlight falling through the Gate around her and lying like a pale carpet on the fire-black rubble of the Market Hall. She wondered if Zyeme had ever felt like this, when she had called upon the deep reserves of her powers, without Limitations—helpless before the anger of men.
She doubted it. It did something to you to be helpless.
All power must be paid for. Zyeme had never paid.
She wondered, just for a moment, how the enchantress had managed that.
“What’s that?”
At the sound of Trey’s voice, she opened her eyes again and looked out to where the girl was pointing. The light filling the Vale glinted harshly on something up near the ruined clock tower. Listening, she could pick out the sound of hooves and voices and feel the distant clamor of anger and unthinking hate. Against the dull slate color of the tower’s stones, the weeds of the hillside looked pale as yellow wine; between them the uniforms of half a company of Palace guards glowed like a tumble of hothouse poppies. The sun threw fire upon their weapons.
“Gaw,” John said. “Reinforcements.”
Bond and a small group of men were running up through the rubble and sedge toward the new company, flies swarming thick on the young courtier’s untended wounds. Small with distance. Jenny saw more and more men under the shadow of the tower, the brass of pike and cuirass flashing, the red of helmet crests like spilled blood against the muted hues of the stone. Exhaustion ate like poison into her bones. Her skin felt like a single open, throbbing wound; through it, she could feel the illusion of the Gac fading to nothingness as her power drained and died.
She said quietly, “You three get back to the doors into the Grand Passage. Gar, Trey—carry John. Bolt the doors from the inside—there are winches and pulleys there.”
“Don’t be stupid.” John
was clinging to the gatepost beside her to stay upright.
“Don’t you be stupid.” She would not take her eyes from the swarming men in the square below.
“We’re not leaving you,” Gareth stated. “At least, I’m not. Trey, you take John...”
“No,” Trey and the Dragonsbane insisted in approximate unison. They looked at one another and managed the ghost of a mutual grin.
“It’s all of us or none of us, love.”
She swung around on them, her eyes blazing palely with the crystalline coldness of the dragon’s eyes. “None of you can be of the slightest use to me here against so many. John and Trey, all you’ll be is killed immediately. Gareth...” Her eyes pinned his like a lance of frost. “You may not be. They may have other instructions concerning you, from Zyeme. I may have the strength for one more spell. That can buy you some time. John’s wits may keep you alive for a while more in the Deep; you’ll need Trey’s willingness as well. Now go.”
There was a short silence, in which she could feel John’s eyes upon her face. She was conscious of the men approaching in the Vale; her soul screamed at her to get rid of these three whom she loved while there was yet time.
It was Gareth who spoke. “Will you really be able to hold the Gate against another charge? Even of—of my father’s men?”
“I think so,” Jenny lied, knowing she hadn’t the strength left to light a candle.
“Aye, then, love,” said John softly. “We’d best go.” He took her halberd to use as a crutch; holding himself upright with it, he put a hand on her nape and kissed her. His mouth felt cold against hers, his lips soft even through the hard scratchiness of five days’ beard. As their lips parted, their eyes met, and, through the dragon armor of hardness, she saw he knew she’d lied.
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