Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  She hitched her shawl up over her shoulders, a thin and glittering spiderweb of South Islands silk, the thick masses of her hair lying over it like a second shawl. Cold seemed to breathe through the window at her back.

  Gareth went back to pacing, his hands shoved in the pockets of the old leather hunting breeches he’d put on to go burgling.

  “But she didn’t know its name, did she?”

  “No,” replied Jenny. “And in that case...” She paused, then frowned, dismissing the thought.

  “What?” John wanted to know, catching the doubt in her voice.

  “No,” she repeated. “It’s inconceivable that at her level of power she wouldn’t have been taught Limitations. It’s the first thing anyone learns.” And seeing Gareth’s incomprehension, she explained. “It’s one of the things that takes me so long when I weave spells. You have to limit the effect of any spell. If you call rain, you must specify a certain heaviness, so as not to flood the countryside. If you call a curse of destruction upon someone or something, you have to set Limitations so that their destruction doesn’t come in a generalized catastrophe that wipes out your own house and goods. Magic is very prodigal in its effects. Limitations are among the earliest things a mage is taught.”

  “Even among the gnomes?” Gareth asked. “You said their magic is different.”

  “It is taught differently—transmitted differently. There are things Mab has said that I do not understand and things that she refuses to tell me about how their power is formed. But it is still magic. Mab knows the Limitations—from what she has told me, I gather they are more important in the night below the ground. If she studied among the gnomes, Zyerne would have to have learned about them.”

  John threw back his head and laughed in genuine amusement. “Gaw, it must be rotting her!” He chuckled. “Think of it, Jen. She wants to get rid of the gnomes, so she calls down a generalized every-worst-curse she can think of upon them—and gets a dragon she can’t get rid of! It’s gie beautiful!”

  “It’s ‘gie’ frivolous,” Jenny retorted.

  “No wonder she threw fire at me! She must be that furious just thinking about it!” His eyes were dancing under his singed brows.

  “It just isn’t possible,” Jenny insisted, in the cool voice she used to call their sons back from skylarking. Then, more seriously, “She can’t have gotten to that degree of power untaught, John. It’s impossible. All power must be paid for, somehow.”

  “But it’s the sort of thing that would happen if it hadn’t been, isn’t it?”

  Jenny didn’t reply. For a long time she stared out the window at the dark shape of the battlements, visible beneath the chilly autumn stars. “I don’t know,” she said at last, stroking the spiderweb fringes of her gauze shawl. “She has so much power. It’s inconceivable that she hasn’t paid for it in some fashion. The key to magic is magic. She has had all time and all power to study it fully. And yet...” She paused, identifying at last her own feelings toward what Zyerne was and did. “I thought that someone who had achieved that level of power would be different.”

  “Ah,” John said softly. Across the room, their eyes met. “But don’t think that what she’s done with her achievement has betrayed your striving, love. For it hasn’t. It’s only betrayed her own.”

  Jenny sighed, reflecting once again on John’s uncanny ability to touch the heart of any problem, then smiled a little at herself; and they traded a kiss in a glance.

  Gareth said quietly, “But what are we going to do? The dragon has to be destroyed; and, if you destroy it, you’ll be playing right into her hands.”

  A smile flicked across John’s face, a glimpse of the bespectacled schoolboy peeking out from behind the complex barricades raised by the hardships of the Winterlands and his father’s embittered domination. Jenny felt his eyes on her again—the tip of one thick reddish brow and the question in the bright glance. After ten years, they had grown used to speaking without words.

  A qualm of fear passed over her, though she knew he was right. After a moment, she drew her breath in another sigh and nodded.

  “Good.” John’s impish smile widened, like that of a boy intent on doing mischief, and he rubbed his hands briskly. He turned to Gareth. “Get your socks packed, my hero. We leave for the Deep tonight.”

  CHAPTER IX

  “STOP.”

  Puzzled, Gareth and John drew rein on either side of Jenny, who sat Moon Horse where she had halted her in the middle of the leaf-drifted track. All around them the foothills of Nast Wall were deathly silent, save for the trickle of wind through the charred trunks of what had once been woods to either side of the road and the faint jingle of brass as Osprey tugged at his leading-rein and Clivy began foraging prosaically in the sedges of the ditch-side. Lower down the hills, the woods were still whole, denuded by coming winter rather than fire; under the pewter-gray trunks of the beeches, the rust-colored underbrush lay thick. Here it was only a tangle of brittle stems, ready to crumble at a touch. Half-hidden in the weeds near the scorched paving stones of the road were the blackened bones of fugitives from the dragon’s first attack, mixed with shattered cooking vessels and the silver coins that had been dropped in flight. The coins lay in the mud still. No one had ventured this close to the ruined town to retrieve them.

  Up ahead in the weak sunlight of winter, the remains of the first houses of Deeping could be seen. According to Gareth the place had never been walled. The road ran into the town under the archway below the broken clock tower.

  For a long while Jenny sat listening in silence, turning her head this way and that. Neither of the men spoke— indeed, ever since they had slipped out of the Palace in the small hours before dawn, Jenny had been acutely conscious of John’s growing silence. She glanced across at him now, where he sat withdrawn into himself on his riding horse Cow, and remembered for the dozenth time that day Zyerne’s words—that without her assistance, neither he nor Jenny would be capable of meeting the dragon Morkeleb.

  Beyond a doubt John was remembering them, too.

  “Gareth,” Jenny said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, “is there another way into the town? Some place in the town that is farther from the Gates of the Deep than we are now?”

  Gareth frowned. “Why?”

  Jenny shook her head, not certain herself why she had spoken. But something whispered across her nerves, as it had all those weeks ago by the ruins of the nameless town in the Winterlands—a sense of danger that caused her to look for the signs of it. Under Mab’s tutelage she had become more certain of trusting her instincts, and something in her hated to go closer than the ruined clock tower into the sunlight that fell across Deeping Vale.

  After a moment’s consideration Gareth said, “The farthest point in Deeping from the Great Gates would be the Tanner’s Rise. It’s at the bottom of that spur over there that bounds the town to the west. I think it’s about a half-mile from the Gates. The whole town isn’t—wasn’t— much more than a quarter-mile across.”

  “Will we have a clear view of the Gates from there?”

  Confused by this bizarre stipulation, he nodded. “The ground’s high, and most of the buildings were flattened in the attack. But if we wanted a lookout on the gates, you can see there’s enough of the clock tower left for a...”

  “No,” Jenny murmured. “I don’t think we can go that near.”

  John’s head came sharply around at that. Gareth faltered, “It can’t—it can’t hear us, can it?”

  “Yes,” Jenny said, not knowing why she said it. “No—it isn’t hearing, exactly. I don’t know. But I feel something, on the fringes of my mind. I don’t think it knows we’re here—not yet. But if we rode closer, it might. It is an old dragon, Gareth; it must be, for its name to be in the Lines. In one of the old books from the Palace library, it says that dragons change their skins with their souls, that the young are simply colored and bright; the mature are complex of pattern and the old become simpler and simpler again, as th
eir power deepens and grows. Morkeleb is black. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like what I think it implies—great age, great power—his senses must fill the Vale of Deeping like still water, sensitive to the slightest ripple.”

  “He pox-sure heard your father’s knights coming, didn’t he?” John added cynically.

  Gareth looked unhappy. Jenny nudged her mare gently and took a step or two closer to the clock tower, casting her senses wide over all the Vale. Through the broken webs of branches overhead, the massive darkness of the westward-facing cliffs of Nast Wall could be seen. Their dizzy heights towered like rusted metal, streaked with purple where shadows hit; boulders flashed white upon it like outcroppings of broken bone. Above the line of the dragon’s burning, the timber grew on the flanks of the mountain around the cliffs, up toward the mossed rocks of the cirques and snowfields above. The ice-gouged horns of the Wall’s bare and ragged crest were veiled in cloud now, but beyond its hunched shoulder to the east a thin track of smoke could be seen, marking the Citadel of Halnath and the siege camps beneath it.

  Below that wall of stone and trees, the open spaces of the Vale lay, a huge well of air, a gulf filled with pale, sparkly sunlight—and with something else. Jenny’s mind touched it briefly and shrank from that living consciousness that she sensed, coiled like a snake in its dark lair.

  Behind her, she heard Gareth argue, “But the dragon you killed up in the gully in Wyr didn’t know you were coming.” The very loudness of his voice scraped her nerves and made her want to cuff him into silence. “You were able to get around behind it and take it by surprise. I don’t see how...”

  “Neither do I, my hero,” John cut in softly, collecting Cow’s reins in one hand and the charger Osprey’s lead in the other. “But if you’re willing to bet your life Jen’s wrong, I’m not. Lead us on to the famous Rise.”

  On the night of the dragon, many had taken refuge in the buildings on Tanner’s Rise; their bones lay everywhere among the blackened ruin of crumbled stone. From the open space in front of what had been the warehouses, it had once been possible to overlook the whole thriving little town of Deeping, under its perpetual haze of smoke from the smelters and forges down below. That haze was gone now, burned off in the dragon’s greater fire; the whole town lay open to the mild, heatless glitter of the winter sunlight, a checkerwork of rubble and bones.

  Looking about her at the buildings of the Rise, Jenny felt cold with shock, as if she had been struck in the pit of the stomach; then, as she realized why she recognized the place, the shock was replaced by horror and despair.

  It was the place where she had seen John dying, in her vision in the water bowl.

  She had done divination before, but never so accurately as this. The precision of it appalled her—every stone and puddle and broken wall was the same; she remembered the way the looming line of the dark cliffs looked against the sky and the very patterns of the bones of the town below. She felt overwhelmed by a despairing urge to change something—to shatter a wall, to dig a hole, to clear away the brush at the gravelly lip of the Rise where it sloped down to the town—anything to make it not as it had been. Yet in her soul she knew doing so would change nothing and she feared lest whatever she did would make the picture she had seen more, rather than less, exact.

  Her lips felt stiff as she spoke. “Is this the only point in the town this far from the Gates?” She knew already what Gareth would reply.

  “It had to be, because of the smell of the tanneries. You see how nothing was built near it. Even the water tanks and reservoirs were put up in those rocks to the north, rather than here where the better springs were.”

  Jenny nodded dully, looking out toward the high rocks to the north of the town where he was pointing. Her whole soul was crying No! No...

  She felt suddenly hopeless and stupid, overmatched and unprepared and incredibly naive. We were fools, she thought bitterly. The slaying of the first worm was a fluke. We should never have been so stupid as to presume upon it, never have thought we could do it again. Zyerne was right. Zyerne was right.

  She looked over at John, who had dismounted from Cow and was standing on the rocky lip of the Rise where the ground fell sharply to the dale below, looking across toward the opposite rise of the Gates. Cold seemed to cover her bones like a vast, winged shadow blocking the sun, and she heeled Moon Horse gently over beside him.

  Without looking up at her, he said, “I figure I can just make it. The Temple of Sarmendes is about a quarter-mile along the Grand Passage, if Dromar was telling the truth. If Osprey and I go full-pelt, we should just about be able to catch the dragon in the Market Hall, just within the Gates. Saying he’s able to hear me the minute I start down the Rise, I should still be able to catch him before he can get out into the air. I’ll have room to fight him in the Market Hall. That will be my only chance.”

  “No,” Jenny said quietly. He looked up at her, eyebrows quirking. “You have another chance, if we ride back now to Bel. Zyerne can help you take the thing from behind, deeper in the caves. Her spells will protect you, too, as mine can not.”

  “Jen.” The closed wariness of his expression split suddenly into the white flash of teeth. He held up his hands to help her down, shaking his head reprovingly.

  She made no move. “At least it is to her advantage to preserve you safe, if she wants the dragon slain. The rest is none of your affair.”

  His smile widened still further. “You have a point, love,” he assented. “But she doesn’t look to me like she can cook worth a row of beans.” And he helped her down from her horse.

  The foreboding that weighed on Jenny’s heart did not decrease; rather, it grew upon her through the short afternoon. She told herself, again and again, as she paced out the magic circles and set up her fire in their midst to brew her poisons, that water was a liar; that it divined the future as crystal could not, but that its divinations were less reliable even than fire’s. But a sense of impending doom weighed upon her heart, and, as the daylight dimmed, in the fire under her simmering kettle she seemed to see again the same picture: John’s shirt of chain mail rent open by claws in a dozen places, the broken links all glittering with dark blood.

  Jenny had set up her fire at the far end of the Rise, where the wind would carry the smoke and the vapors away from both the camp and the Vale, and worked throughout the afternoon spelling the ingredients and the steel of the harpoons themselves. Miss Mab had advised her about the more virulent poisons that would work upon dragons, and such ingredients as the gnome wizard had not had among her slender stocks Jenny had purchased in the Street of the Apothecaries in the Dockmarket in Bel. While she worked, the two men prowled the Rise, fetching water for the horses from the little well some distance into the woods, since the fountain house that had served the tanneries had been crushed like an eggshell, and setting up a camp. John had very little to say since she had spoken to him on the edge of the Rise; Gareth seemed to shiver all over with a mingling of excitement and terror.

  Jenny had been a little surprised at John’s invitation that Gareth join them, though she had planned to ask John to extend it. She had her own reasons for wanting the boy with them, which had little to do with his expressed desire—though he had not expressed it lately—to see a dragonslaying close at hand. She—and undoubtedly John as well—knew that their departure would have left Gareth unprotected in Bel.

  Perhaps Mab had been right, she thought, as she turned her face from the ghastly choke of the steam and wiped it with one gloved hand. There were worse evils than the dragon in the land—to be slain by it might, under certain circumstances, be construed as a lesser fate.

  The voices of the men came to her from the other side of the camp as they moved about preparing supper; she had noticed that neither spoke very loudly when they were anywhere near the edge of the Rise. John said, “I’ll get this right yet,” as he dropped a mealcake onto the griddle and looked up at Gareth. “What’s the Market Hall like? Anything I’ll be likely to
trip over?”

  “I don’t think so, if the dragon’s been in and out,” Gareth said after a moment. “It’s a huge hall, as Dromar said; over a hundred feet deep and even wider side to side. The ceiling’s very high, with fangs of rock hanging down from it—chains, too, that used to support hundreds of lamps. The floor was leveled, and used to be covered with all kinds of booths, awnings, and vegetable stands; all the produce from the Realm was traded to the Deep there. I don’t think there was anything there solid enough to resist dragon fire.”

  Aversin dropped a final mealcake on the griddle and straightened up, wiping his fingers on the end of his plaid. Blue darkness was settling over Tanner’s Rise. From her small fire, Jenny could see the two of them outlined in gold against a background of azure and black. They did not come near her, partly because of the stench of the poisons, partly because of the spell-circles glimmering faintly in the sandy earth about her. The key to magic is magic—Jenny felt that she looked out at them from an isolated enclave of another world, alone with the oven-heat of the fire, the biting stench of the poison fumes, and the grinding weight of the death-spells in her heart.

  John walked to the edge of the Rise for perhaps the tenth time that evening. Across the shattered bones of Deeping, the black skull-eye of the Gates looked back at him. Slabs of steel and splintered shards of burned wood lay scattered over the broad, shallow flight of granite steps below them, faintly visible in the watery light of the waxing moon. The town itself lay in a pool of impenetrable dark.

  “It isn’t so far,” said Gareth hopefully. “Even if he hears you coming the minute you ride into the Vale, you should reach the Market Hall in plenty of time.”

  John sighed. “I’m not so sure of that, my hero. Dragons move fast, even afoot. And the ground down there’s bad. Even full-tilt, Osprey won’t be making much speed of it, when all’s said. I would have liked to scout for the clearest route, but that isn’t possible, either. The most I can hope for is that there’s no uncovered cellar doors or privy pits between here and the Gates.”