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.
In the gloom, the soft, childlike voice said, “Thy name is not unknown among us, John Aversin.”
“Well, that makes it easier,” John admitted, dusting off his hands and looking down at the round head of the gnome who stood before him and into sharp, pale eyes under the flowing mane of snowy hair. “Be a bit awkward if I had to explain it all, though I imagine Gar here could sing you the ballads.”
A slight smile tugged at the gnome’s mouth—the first, Jenny suspected, in a long time—as he studied the incongruous, bespectacled reality behind the glitter of the legends. “Thou art the first,” he remarked, ushering them into the huge, chilly cavern of the room, his mended silk robes whispering as he moved. “How many hast thy father sent out, Prince Gareth? Fifteen? Twenty? And none of them came here, nor asked any of the gnomes what they might know of the dragon’s coming—we, who saw it best.”
Gareth looked disconcerted. “Er—that is—the wrath of the King...”
“And whose fault was that, Heir of Uriens, when rumor had been noised abroad that we had made an end of thee?”
There was an uncomfortable silence as Gareth reddened under that cool, haughty gaze. Then he bent his head and said in a stifled voice, “I am sorry, Dromar. I never thought of—of what might be said, or who would take the blame for it, if I disappeared. Truly I didn’t know. I behaved rashly—I seem to have behaved rashly all the way around.”
The old gnome sniffed. “So.” He folded his small hands before the complicated knot of his sash, his gold eyes studying Gareth in silence for a time. Then he nodded, and said, “Well, better it is that thou fall over thine own feet in the doing of good than sit upon thy hands and let it go undone, Gareth of Magloshaldon. Another time thou shalt do better.” He turned away, gesturing toward the inner end of the shadowed room, where a blackwood table could be distinguished in the gloom, no more than a foot high, surrounded by burst and patched cushions set on the floor in the fashion of the gnomes. “Come. Sit. What is it that thou wish to know, Dragonsbane, of the coming of the dragon to the Deep?”
“The size of the thing,” John said promptly, as they all settled on their knees around the table. “I’ve only heard rumor and story—has anybody got a good, concrete measurement?”
From beside Jenny, the high, soft voice of the gnome woman piped, “The top of his haunch lies level with the frieze carved above the pillars on either side of the doorway arch, which leads from the Market Hall into the Grand Passage into the Deep itself. That is twelve feet, by the measurements of men.”
There was a moment’s silence, as Jenny digested the meaning of that piece of information. Then she said, “If the proportions are the same, that makes it nearly forty feet.”
“Aye,” Dromar said. “The Market Hall—the first cavern of the Deep, that lies just behind the Great Gates that lead into the outer world—is one hundred and fifty feet from the Gates to the inner doors of the Grand Passage at the rear. The dragon was nearly a third of that length.”
John folded his hands on the table before him. Though his face remained expressionless, Jenny detected the slight quickening of his breath. Forty feet was half again the size of the dragon that had come so close to killing him in Wyr, with all the dark windings of the Deep in which to hide.
“D’you have a map of the Deep?”
The old gnome looked affronted, as if he had inquired about the cost of a night with his daughter. Then his face darkened with stubborn anger. “That knowledge is forbidden to the children of men.”
Patiently, John said, “After all that’s been done you here, I don’t blame you for not wanting to give out the secrets of the Deep; but I need to know. I can’t take the thing from the front. I can’t fight something that big head-on. I need to have some idea where it will be lairing.”
“It will be lairing in the Temple of Sarmendes, on the first level of the Deep.” Dromar spoke grudgingly, his pale eyes narrow with the age-old suspicion of a smaller, weaker race that had been driven underground millennia ago by its long-legged and bloodthirsty cousins. “It lies just off the Grand Passage that runs back from the Gates. The Lord of Light was beloved by the men who dwelt within the Deep—the King’s ambassadors and their households, and those who had been apprenticed among our people. His Temple is close to the surface, for the folk of men do not like to penetrate too far into the bones of the Earth. The weight of the stone unnerves them; they find the darkness disquieting. The dragon will lie there. There he will bring his gold.”
“Is there a back way into it?” John asked. “Through the priests’ quarters or the treasuries?”
Dromar said, “No,” but the little gnome woman said, “Yes, but thou would never find it, Dragonsbane.”
“By the Stone!” The old gnome whirled upon her, smoldering rage in his eyes. “Be silent, Mab! The secrets of the Deep are not for his kind!” He looked viciously at Jenny and added, “Nor for hers.”
John held up his hand for silence. “Why wouldn’t I find it?”
Mab shook her head. From beneath a heavy brow, her round, almost colorless blue eyes peered up at him, kindly and a little sad. “The ways lead through the warrens,” she said simply. “The caverns and tunnels there are a maze that we who dwell there can learn, in twelve or fourteen years of childhood. But even were we to tell thee the turnings thou must take, one false step would condemn thee to a death by starvation and to the madness that falls upon men in the darkness under the earth. We filled the mazes with lamps, but those lamps are quenched now.”
“Can you draw me a map, then?” And, when the two gnomes only looked at him with stubborn secrets in their eyes, he said, “Dammit, I can’t do it without your help! I’m sorry it has to be this way, but it’s trust me or lose the Deep forever; and those are your only choices!”
Dromar’s long, outward-curling eyebrows sank lower over the stub of his nose. “So be it, then,” he said.
But Miss Mab turned resignedly and began to rise. The ambassador’s eyes blazed. “No! By the Stone, is it not enough that the children of men seek to steal the secrets of the Deep? Must thou give them up freely?”
“Tut,” Mab said with a wrinkled smile. “This Dragonsbane will have problems enow from the dragon, without going seeking in the darkness for others.”
“A map that is drawn may be stolen!” Dromar insisted. “By the Stone that lies in the heart of the Deep...”
Mab got comfortably to her feet, shaking out her patched silken garments, and pottered over to the scroll-rack that filled one corner of the dim hall. She returned with a reed pen and several sheets of tattered papyrus paper in her hand. “Those whom you fear would steal it know the way to the heart of the Deep already,” she pointed out gently. “If this barbarian knight has ridden all the way from the Winterlands to be our champion, it would be paltry not to offer him a shield.”
“And her?” Dromar jabbed one stumpy finger, laden with old-fashioned, smooth-polished gems, at Jenny. “She is a witch. What surety have we that she will not go snooping and spying, delving out our secrets, turning them against us, defiling them, poisoning them, as others have done?”
The gnome woman frowned down at Jenny for a moment, her wide mouth pursed up with thoug
ht. Then she knelt beside her again and pushed the writing things across the table at Dromar. “There,” she said. “Thou may draw the maps, and put upon them what thou will, and leave from them what thou will.”
“And the witch?” There was suspicion and hatred in his voice, and Jenny reflected that she was getting very tired of being mistaken for Zyerne.
“Ah,” said Miss Mab, and reaching out, took Jenny’s small, scratched, boyish brown hands in her own. For a long moment she looked into her eyes. As if the small, cold fingers clasping hers stirred at the jewel heap of her dreams, Jenny felt the gnome woman’s mind probing at her thoughts, as she had probed at Gareth’s, seeking to see the shape of her essence. She realized that Miss Mab was a mage, like herself.
Reflex made her stiffen. But Mab smiled gently and held out to her the depths of her own mind and soul—gentle and clear as water, and stubborn as water, too, containing none of the bitterness, resentments, and doubts that Jenny knew clotted the corners of her own heart. She relaxed, feeling as ashamed as if she had struck out at an inquiry kindly made, and felt some of her own angers dissolving under that wise scrutiny. She felt the other woman’s power, much greater than her own, but gentle and warm as sunlight.
When Miss Mab spoke, it was not to Dromar, but to her. “Thou art afraid for him,” she said softly. “And perhaps thou should be.” She put out one round little hand, to pat Jenny’s hair. “But remember that the dragon is not the greatest of evils in this land, nor is death the worst that can befall; neither for him, nor for thee.”
CHAPTER VII
IN THE WEEK that followed, Jenny returned many times to the crumbling house in the Dockmarket. Twice John accompanied her, but John, for the most part, spent his days in the King’s Gallery with Gareth, waiting for a sign from the King. His evenings he spent with the wild young courtiers who surrounded Zyerne, playing dancing bear, as he called it, and dealing as best he could with the slow torture of waiting for a combat that could cost his life. Being John, he did not speak of it, but Jenny felt it when they made love and in his silences when they were alone together, this gradual twisting of the nerves that was driving him nearly mad.
She herself avoided the Court for the most part and spent her days in the city or in the house of the gnomes. She went there quietly, wrapped in spells to conceal her from the folk in the streets, for, as the days ground by, she could feel the ugly miasma of hate and fear spreading through the streets like poisoned fog. On her way through the Dockmarket quarter, she would pass the big taverns—the Lame Ox, the Gallant Rat, the Sheep in the Mire—where the unemployed men and women who had come in off the ruined farms gathered daily, hoping for a few hours’ hire. Those in need of cheap labor knew to go there to find people who would move furniture or clean out stables for a few coppers; but with the winter storms making the shipping scarce and the high price of bread taking all the spare funds to be had, there were few enough who could afford to pay even that. None of the gnomes still living in the city—and there were many of them, in spite of the hardships—dared go by the Sheep in the Mire after noontime, for by that hour those within would have given up hope of work that day and would be concentrating what little energy they had on getting drunk.
So Jenny moved in her shadowy secrets, as she had moved through the lawless Winterlands, to visit the Lady Taseldwyn, who was called Miss Mab in the language of men.
From the first, she had been aware that the gnome woman was a more powerful mage than she. But, rather than jealousy and resentment, she felt only gladness that she had found someone to teach her after all those years.
In most things, Mab was a willing teacher, though the shape of the gnomes’ wizardry was strange to Jenny, alien, as their minds were alien. They had no Lines, but seemed to transmit their power and knowledge whole from generation to generation of mages in some fashion that Jenny did not understand. Mab told her of the healing spells for which the Deep was famous, of the drugs now sequestered there, lost to them as surely as the dragon’s gold was lost, of the spells that could hold the soul, the essence of life, to the flesh, or of the more dangerous spells by which the life-essence of one person could be drawn to strengthen the crumbling life of another. The gnome woman taught her other spells of the magic underground—spells of crystal and stone and spiraling darkness, whose meaning Jenny could only dimly comprehend. These she could only memorize by rote, hoping that with later meditation, skill and understanding would come. Mab spoke also to her of the secrets of the earth, the movement of water, and how stones thought; and she spoke of the dark realms of the Deep itself, cavern beneath cavern in endless succession of hidden glories that had never seen light.
Once, she spoke of Zyerne.
“Aye, she was apprenticed among us Healers.” She sighed, putting aside the three-stringed dulcimer upon which she had been outlining to Jenny the song-spells of their craft. “She was a vain little girl, vain and spoiled. She had her talent for mockery even then—she would listen to the Old Ones among us, the great Healers, who had more power at their command than she could ever dream of, nodding that sleek little head of hers in respect, and then go and imitate their voices to her friends in Deeping.”
Jenny remembered the silvery chime of the sorceress’s laughter at dinner and the way she had hurried her steps to make Dromar run after her if he would speak.
It was early evening. For all its cold, the great hall of the gnomes’ house was stuffy, the air stagnant beneath its massive arches and along the faded pavement of its checkered corridors. The noises of the streets had fallen to their dinnertime lull, save for the chiming of the clock towers all over the city and one lone kindling-peddler crying his wares.
Mab shook her head, her voice low with remembrance of times past. “She was greedy for secrets, as some girls are greedy for sweets—covetous for the power they could give her. She studied out the hidden ways around the Places of Healing so that she could sneak and spy, hiding to listen in darkness. All power must be paid for, but she took the secrets of those greater than she and defiled them, tainted them—poisoned them as she poisoned the very heart of the Deep—yes, she did poison it!—and turned all our strength against us.”
Jenny shook her head, puzzled. “Dromar said something of the kind,” she said. “But how can you taint spells? You can spoil your own magic, for it colors your soul as you wield it, but you cannot spoil another’s. I don’t understand.”
Mab glanced sharply at her, as if remembering her presence and remembering also that she was not one of the folk of the gnomes. “Nor should thou,” she said in her soft, high voice. “These are things that concern the magic of gnomes only. They are not human things.”
“Zyerne seems to have made them human things.” Jenny moved her weight on her heels, easing her knees on the hardness of the stone floor through the shabby cushion. “If it is, indeed, from the Places of Healing that she learned the arts that have made her the most powerful mage in the land.”
“Pah!” the gnome mage said in disgust. “The Healers of the Deep were more powerful than she—by the Stone, I was more powerful!”
“Was?” Jenny said, perplexed. “I know that most of the Healers in the Deep were killed with the coming of the dragon; I had thought none of sufficient strength survived to defy her. The magic of gnomes is different from the spells of men, but power is power. How could Zyerne have lessened yours?”
Mab only shook her head furiously, so that her pale, web-colored hair whipped back and forth, and said, “These are the things of the gnomes.”
In those days Jenny did not see much of Zyerne, but the enchantress was often on her mind. Zyerne’s influence pervaded the court like the faint waft of her cinnamon perfume; when Jenny was in the Palace confines, she was always conscious of her. However Zyerne had acquired her power and whatever she had done with it since, Jenny never forgot that it was so much greater than hers. When she neglected what tomes of magic John was able to pilfer from the Palace library to sit with her scrying-stone, watch
ing the tiny, soundless images of her sons skylarking perilously along the snow-covered battlements of the Hold, she felt a pang of guilt. Zyerne was young, at least ten years younger than she; her power shone from her like the sun. Jenny no longer felt jealousy and she could not, in all honesty, feel anger at Zyerne for having what she herself did not, as long as she was not willing to do what was needful to obtain that power. But she did feel envy, the envy of a traveler on a cold night who saw into the warmth of a lighted room.
But when she asked Mab about Zyerne—about the powers that had once been less than Mab’s, but now were greater; about why the gnomes had forbidden her to enter the Deep—the little mage would only say stubbornly, “These are the things of the gnomes. They have naught to do with men.”
In the meantime John went his own way, a favorite of the younger courtiers who laughed at his extravagant barbarism and called him their tame savage, while he held forth about engineering and the mating customs of pigs, or quoted classical authors in his execrable north-country drawl. And still, every morning, the King passed them by in the gallery, turning his dull eyes aside from them, and the etiquette of the Court forbade Gareth to speak.
“What’s his delay?” John demanded as he and Gareth emerged from the arched porticoes of the gallery into the chill, fleet sunlight of the deserted terrace after yet another futile day’s waiting. Jenny joined them quietly, coming up the steps from the deserted garden below, carrying her harp. She had been playing it on the rocks above the sea wall, waiting for them and watching the rainclouds scud far out over the sea. It was the season of winds and sudden gales, and in the north the weather would be sleety and cold, but here days of high, heatless sunlight alternated with fogs and blowing rains. The matte, white day-moon was visible, sinking into the cloud wrack over the sea; Jenny wondered what it was that troubled her about its steady waxing toward its half. Against the loamy colors of the fallow earth, the clothes of Zyerne and her court stood out brightly as they passed on down into the garden, and Jenny could hear the enchantress’s voice lifted in a wickedly accurate imitation of the gnomes’ shrill speech.
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