Jenny understood then that the storm had been summoned by Zyeme, called by her powers through the Stone from afar, and the Stone’s magic gave her the power to direct the lightning when and where she would. It had been her weapon to destroy the Citadel—the Stone, the storm, and the dragon.
She pulled off her belt and used it to lash herself to the two-foot spike before her. It would be little use if the dragon turned over in flight, but would keep her from being thrown off laterally, and that was all she could hope for now. She knew her body was exhausted and hurt, but the dragon’s mind lifted her out of herself; and in any case, she had no choice. She sealed herself off from the pain and ripped the Limitations from mind and flesh. The dragon hurtled skyward to the thing waiting above. Winds tore at them, buffeting Morkeleb’s wings so that he had to veer sharply to miss being thrown into the highest turret of the Citadel. From above them, the creature spat a rain of acid mucus. Green and stinking, it seared Jenny’s face and hands like poison and made smoking tracks of corrosion on the steel of the dragon’s scales. Furiously keeping her mind concentrated against the searing agony. Jenny cast her will at the clouds, and rain began to sluice down, washing the stuff away and half-blinding her with its fury. Long black hair hung stickily down over her shoulders as the dragon swung on the wind, and she felt lightning channeling again into the hovering creature before them. Seizing it with her mind, she flung it back. It burst somewhere between them, the shock of it striking her bones like a Mow. She had forgotten she was not a dragon, and that her flesh was mortal.
Then the creature fell upon them, its stumpy wings whirring like a foul bug’s. The weight of it rolled the dragon in the air so that Jenny had to grasp the spikes on either side of her, below the blades and yet still cutting her fingers. The earth rolled and swung below them, but her eyes and mind locked on the thing above. Its stink was overpowering, and from the pullulant mass of its flesh, a shark-like head struck, biting at the massive joints of the dragon’s wings, while the whirlwind of evil spells sucked and ripped around them, tearing at their linked minds.
Ichorous yellow fluid burst from the creature’s mouth as it bit at the spikes of the wing-joints. Jenny slashed at the eyes, human and as big as her two fists, gray-gold as mead—Zyeme’s eyes. The halberd blade clove through the flesh—and from among the half-severed flaps of the wound, other heads burst like a knot of snakes among spraying gore, tearing at her robe and her flesh with sucker-like mouths. Grimly, fighting a sense of nightmare horror, she chopped again, her blistered hands clotted and running with slime. Half her mind called from the depths of the dragon’s soul the healing-spells against the poisons she knew were harbored in those filthy jaws.
When she slashed at the other eye, the creature broke away from them. The pain of Morkeleb’s wounds as well as her own tore at her as he swung and circled skyward, and she knew he felt the burning of her ripped flesh. The Citadel dropped away below them; rain poured over them like water from a pail. Looking up, she could see the deadly purplish glow of stored lightning rimming the black pillows of cloud so close above their heads. The battering of Zyeme’s mind upon theirs lessened as the sorceress rallied her own spells, spells of wreckage and ruin against the Citadel and its defenders below.
Mists veiled the thrusting folds of the land beneath them, the toy fortress and the wet, slate-and-emerald of the meadows beside the white stream of the river. Morkeleb circled. Jenny’s eyes within his seeing all things with clear, incredible calm. Lightning streaked down by her and she saw, as if it had been drawn in fine lines before her eyes, another catapult explode on the ramparts, and the man who had been winding it flung backward over the parapet, whirling limply down the side of the cliff.
Then the dragon folded his wings and dropped. Her mind in Morkeleb’s, Jenny felt no fear, clinging to the spikes while the wind tore her sopping hair back and her bloody, rain-wet robes plastered to her body and arms. Her mind was the mind of a stooping falcon. She saw, with precise pleasure, the sack-like, threshing body that was their target, felt the joy of impending impact as the dragon fisted his claws...
The jar all but threw her from her precarious perch on the dragon’s backbone. The creature twisted and sagged in the air, then writhed under them, grabbing with a dozen mouths at Morkeleb’s belly and sides, heedless of the spikes and the monstrous slashing of the dragon’s tail. Something tore at Jenny’s back; turning, she hacked the head off a serpentine tentacle that had ripped at her, but she felt the blood flowing from the wound. Her efforts to close it were fogged and slow. They seemed to have fallen into a vortex of spells, and the weight of the Stone’s strength dragged upon them, trying to rend apart the locked knot of their minds.
What was human magic and what dragon she no longer knew, only that they sparkled together, iron and gold, in a welded weapon that attacked both body and mind. She could feel Morkeleb’s growing exhaustion and her own dizziness as the Citadel walls and the stone-toothed cliffs of Nast Wall wheeled crazily beneath them. The more they hacked and cut at the awful, stinking thing, the more mouths and gripping tentacles it sprouted and the tighter its clutch upon them became. She felt no more fear than a beast might feel in combat with its own kind, but she did feel the growing weight of the thing as it multiplied, getting larger and more powerful as the two entwined bodies thrashed in the sea of streaming rain.
The end, when it came, was a shock, like the impact of a club. She was aware of a booming roar somewhere in the earth beneath them, dull and shaking through her exhausted singlemindedness; then, more clearly, she heard a voice like Zyeme’s screaming, multiplied a thousandfold through the spells that suffocated her until it axed through her skull with the rending echo of indescribable pain.
Like the passage from one segment of a dream to another, she felt the melting of the spells that surrounded them and the falling-away of the clinging, flaccid flesh and muscle. Something flashed beneath them, falling through the rainy air toward the wet roof crests of the Citadel below, and she realized that the plunging flutter of streaming brown hair and white gauze was Zyeme.
The instantaneous Get her and Morkeleb’s Let her fall passed between them like a spark. Then he was plunging again, as he had plunged before, falcon-like, tracking the falling body with his precise crystal eyes and plucking it from the air with the neatness of a child playing jacks.
Charcoal-gray with rain, the walls of the Citadel court rose up around them. Men, women, and gnomes were everywhere on the ramparts, hair slicked down with the pouring cloudburst to which nobody was paying the slightest attention. White smoke poured from the narrow door that led into the Deep, but all eyes were raised skyward to that black, plummeting form.
The dragon balanced for a moment upon the seventy-foot span of his wings, then extended three of his delicate legs to touch the ground. With the fourth, he laid Zyeme on the puddled stone pavement, her dark hair spreading out around her under the driving rain.
Sliding from the dragon’s back, Jenny knew at once that Zyeme was dead. Her mouth and eyes were open. Distorted with rage and terror, her face could be seen to be pointy and shrewish with constant worry and the cancerous addiction to petty angers.
Trembling with weariness. Jenny leaned against the dragon’s curving shoulder. Slowly, the scintillant helix of their minds unlinked. The rim of brightness and color that had seemed to edge everything vanished from her vision. Living things had solid bodies once more, instead of incorporeal ghosts of flesh through which shone the shapes of souls.
A thousand pains came back to her—of her body and of the stripped, hurting ruin of her mind. She became aware of the blood that stuck her torn robe to her back and ran down her legs to her bare feet—became aware of all the darkness in her own heart, which she had accepted in her battle with Zyeme.
Holding to the thorned scales for support, she looked down at the sharp, white face staring upward at her from the rain-hammered puddles. A human hand steadied her elbow, and turning, she saw Trey beside her, her frivolousl
y tinted hair plastered with wet around her pale face. It was the closest, she realized, that she had seen any human besides herself come to Morkeleb. A moment later Polycarp joined them, one arm wrapped in makeshift dressings and half his red hair burned away by the creature’s first attack upon the door.
White smoke still billowed from the door of the Deep. Jenny coughed, her lungs hurting, in the acrid fumes. Everyone in the court was coughing—it was as if the Deep itself were in flames.
More coughing came from within. In the shadowy slot, two forms materialized, the shorter leaning upon the taller. From soot-blackened faces, two pairs of spectacle lenses flashed whitely in the pallid light.
A moment later they emerged from the smoke and shadow into the stunned silence of the watching crowd in the court.
“Miscalculated the blasting powder,” John explained apologetically.
Chapter XVII
IT WAS NOT for several days after John and Gareth blew up the Stone that Jenny began to recover from the battle beneath and above the Citadel.
She had cloudy recollections of them telling Polycarp how they had backtracked to the room by the gates where the blasting powder had been left, while her own consciousness darkened, and a vague memory of Morkeleb catching her in his talons as she fell and carrying her, catlike, to the small shelter in the upper court. More clear was the remembrance of John’s voice, forbidding the others to go after them. “She needs a healing we can’t give her,” she heard him say to Gareth. “Just let her be.”
She wondered how he had known that. But then, John knew her very well.
Morkeleb healed her as dragons heal, leading the body with the mind. Her body healed fairly quickly, the poisons burning themselves out of her veins, the slashed, puckered wounds left by the creature’s mouths closing to leave round, vicious-looking scabs the size of her palm. Like John’s dragon-slaying scars, she thought, they would stay with her for what remained of her life.
Her mind healed more slowly. Open wounds left by her battle with Zyeme remained open. Worst was the knowledge that she had abandoned the birthright of her power, not through the fate that had denied her the ability or the circumstances that had kept her from its proper teaching, but through her own fear.
They are yours for the stretching—out of your hand, Morkeleb had said.
She knew they always had been.
Turning her head from the shadows of the crowded lean-to, she could see the dragon lying in the heatless sun of the court, a black cobra with his tasseled head raised, his antennae flicking to listen to the wind. She felt her soul streaked and mottled with the mind and soul of the dragon and her life entangled with the crystal ropes of his being.
She asked him once why he had remained at the Citadel to heal her. The Stone is broken—the ties that bind you to this place are gone.
She felt the anger coiled within him stir. I do not know, wizard woman. You cannot have healed yourself—I did not wish to see you broken forever. The words in her mind were tinted, not only with anger, but with the memory of fear and with a kind of shame.
Why? she asked. You have often said that the affairs of humankind are nothing to dragons.
His scales rattled faintly as they hackled, then, with a dry whisper, settled again. Dragons did not lie, but she felt the mazes of his mind close against her.
Nor are they. But I have felt stirring in me things that I do not understand, since you healed me and shared with me the song of the gold in the Deep. My power has waked power in you, but what it is in you that has waked its reflection in me I do not know, for it is not a thing of dragons. It let me feel the grip of the Stone, as I flew north—a longing and a hurt, which before was only my own will. Now because of it, I do not want to see you hurt—I do not want to see you die, as humans die. I want you to come with me to the north. Jenny; to be one of the dragons, with the power for which you have always sought. I want this, as much as I have ever wanted the gold of the earth. I do not know why. And is it not what you want?
But to that, Jenny had no reply.
Long before he should have been on his feet, John dragged himself up the steps to the high court to see her, sitting behind her on the narrow makeshift cot in her little shelter, brushing her hair as he used to at the Hold on those nights when she would come there to be with him and their sons. He spoke of commonplaces, of the dismantling of the siege troops around the Citadel and of the return of the gnomes to the Deep, of Gareth’s doings, and of the assembling of the books they would take back to the north, demanding nothing other, neither speech, decision, nor thought. But it seemed to her that the touch of his hands brought more bitter pain to her than all Zyeme’s spells of ruin.
She had made her choice, she thought, ten years ago when first they had met; and had remade it every day since then. But there was, and always had been, another choice. Without turning her head, she was aware of the thoughts that moved behind the diamond depths of Morkeleb’s watching eyes.
When he rose to go, she laid a hand on the sleeve of his frayed black robe. “John,” she said quietly. “Will you do something for me? Send a message to Miss Mab, asking her to choose out the best volumes of magic that she knows of, both of the gnomes and of humankind, to go north also?”
He regarded her for a moment, where she lay on the rough paillasse on her narrow cot which for four nights now had been her solitary bed, her coarse dark hair hanging over the whiteness of her shift. “Wouldn’t you rather look them out for yourself, love? You’re the one who’s to be using them, after all.”
She shook her head. His back was to the light of the open court, his features indistinct against the glare; she wanted to reach out her hand to touch him, but somehow could not bring herself to do so. In a cool voice like silver she explained, “The magic of the dragon is in me, John; it is not a thing of books. The books are for Ian, when he comes into his power.”
John said nothing for a moment. She wondered if he, too, had realized this about their older son. When he did speak, his voice was small. “Won’t you be there to teach him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, John,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
He made a move to lay his hand on her shoulder, and she said, “No. Don’t touch me. Don’t make it harder for me than it already is.”
He remained standing for a moment longer before her, looking down into her face. Then, obedient, he silently turned and left the shed.
She had come to no further conclusion by the day of their departure from the Citadel, to take the road back to the north. She was conscious of John watching her, when he thought she wasn’t looking; conscious of her own gladness that he never used the one weapon that he must have known would make her stay with him—he never spoke to her of their sons. But in the nights, she was conscious also of the dark cobra shape of the dragon, glittering in the moonlight of the high court, or wheeling down from the black sky with the cold stars of winter prickling upon his spines, as if he had flown through the heart of the galaxy and come back powdered with its light.
The morning of their departure was a clear one, though bitterly cold. The King rode up from Bel to see them off, surrounded by a flowerbed of courtiers, who regarded John with awe and fear, as if wondering how they had dared to mock him, and why he had not slain them all. With him, also, were Polycarp and Gareth and Trey, handfast like schoolchildren. Trey had had her hair redyed, burgundy and gold, which would have looked impressive had it been done in the elaborate styles of the Court instead of in two plaits like a child’s down her back.
They had brought with them a long line of horses and mules, laden with supplies for the journey and also with the books for which John had so cheerfully been prepared to risk his life. John knelt before the tall, vague, faded old man, thanking him and swearing fealty; while Jenny, clothed in her colorless northlands plaids, stood to one side, feeling queerly distant from them all and watching how the King kept scanning the faces of the courtiers around him with the air of one who seeks someo
ne, but no longer remembers quite who.
To John the King said, “Not leaving already? Surely it was only yesterday you presented yourself?”
“It will be a long way home, my lord.” John did not mention the week he had spent waiting the King’s leave to ride forth against the dragon—it was clear the old man recalled little, if anything, of the preceding weeks. “It’s best I start before the snows come on heavy.”
“Ah.” The King nodded vaguely and turned away, leaning on the arms of his tall son and his nephew Polycarp. After a pace or two, he halted, frowning as something surfaced from the murk of his memory, and turned to Gareth. “This Dragonsbane—he did kill the dragon, after all?”
There was no way to explain all that had passed, or how rightness had been restored to the kingdom, save by the appropriate channels, so Gareth said simply, “Yes.”
“Good,” said the old man, nodding dim approval. “Good.”
Gareth released his arm; Polycarp, as Master of the Citadel and his host, led the King away to rest, the courtiers trailing after like a school of brightly colored, ornamental fish. From among them stepped three small, stout forms, their silken robes stirring in the ice winds that played from the soft new sky.
Balgub, the new Lord of the Deep of Ylferdun, inclined his head; with the stiff unfamiliarity of one who has seldom spoken the words, he thanked Lord Aversin the Dragonsbane, though he did not specify for what.
“Well, he hardly could, now, could he?” John remarked, as the three gnomes left the court in the wake of the King’s party. Only Miss Mab had caught Jenny’s eye and winked at her. John went on, “If he came out and said, ‘Thank you for blowing up the Stone,’ that would be admitting that he was wrong about Zyeme not poisoning it.”
Dragon’s Bane Page 31
