Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  Gareth laughed softly. “It’s funny, but I never thought about that. In the ballads, the hero’s horse never trips on the way to do battle with the dragon, though they do it from time to time even in tourneys, where the ground of the lists has been smoothed beforehand. I thought it would be—oh, like a ballad. Very straight. I thought you’d ride out of Bel, straight up here and on into the Deep...”

  “Without resting my horse after the journey, even on a lead-rein, nor scouting the lay of the land?” John’s eyes danced behind his specs. “No wonder the King’s knights were killed at it.” He sighed. “My only worry is that if I miss my timing by even a little, I’m going to be spot under the thing when it comes out of the Gates...”

  Then he coughed, fanning at the air, and said, “Pox blister it!” as he dashed back to pick the flaming meal-cakes off the griddle. Around burned fingers, he said, “And the damn thing is, even Adric cooks better than I do...”

  Jenny turned away from their voices and the sweetness of the night beyond the blazing heat of her fire. As she dipped the harpoons into the thickening seethe of brew in her kettle, the sweat plastered her long hair to her cheeks, running down her bare arms from the turned-up sleeves of her shift to the cuffs of the gloves she wore; the heat lay like a red film over her toes and the tops of her feet, bare as they often were when she worked magic.

  Like John, she felt withdrawn into herself, curiously separated from what she did. The death-spells hung like a stench in the air all around her, and her head and bones were beginning to ache from the heat and the effort of the magic she had wrought. Even when the powers she called were for good, they tired her; she felt weighed down by them now, exhausted and knowing that she had wrought nothing good from that weariness.

  The Golden Dragon came to her mind again, the first heartstopping instant she had seen it dropping from the sky like amber lightning and had thought, This is beauty. She remembered, also, the butchered ruin left in the gorge, the stinking puddles of acid and poison and blood, and the faint, silvery singing dying out of the shivering air. It might have been only the fumes she inhaled, but she felt herself turn suddenly sick at the thought.

  She had slaughtered Meewinks, or mutilated them and left them to be eaten by their brothers; she remembered the crawling greasiness of the bandit’s hair under her fingers as she had touched his temples. But they were not like the dragon. They had chosen to be what they were.

  Even as I have.

  And what are you, Jenny Waynest?

  But she could find no answer that fitted.

  Gareth’s voice drifted over to her from the other fire. “That’s another thing they never mention in the ballads that I’ve been meaning to ask you. I know this sounds silly, but—how do you keep your spectacles from getting broken in battle?”

  “Don’t wear ’em,” John’s voice replied promptly. “If you can see it coming, it’s too late anyway. And then, I had Jen lay a spell on them, so they wouldn’t get knocked off or broken by chance when I do wear them.”

  She looked over at the two of them, out of the condensing aura of death-spells and the slaughter of beauty that surrounded her and her kettle of poison. Firelight caught in the metal of John’s jerkin; against the blueness of the night it gleamed like a maker’s mark stamped in gold upon a bolt of velvet. She could almost hear the cheerful grin in his voice, “I figured if I was going to break my heart loving a mage wife, I might as well get some good from it.”

  Over the shoulder of Nast Wall the moon hung, a half-open white eye, waxing toward its third quarter. With a stab like a shard of metal embedded somewhere in her heart, Jenny remembered then that it had been so, in her vision in the water.

  Silently, she pulled herself back into her private circle of death, closing out that outer world of friendship and love and silliness, closing herself in with spells of ruin and despair and the cold failing of strength. It was her power to deal death in this way, and she hated herself for it; though, like John, she knew she had no choice.

  “Do you think you’ll make it?” Gareth nattered. Before them, the ruins of the broken town were purple and slate with shadow in the early light. The war horse Osprey’s breath was warm over Jenny’s hand where she held the reins.

  “I’ll have to, won’t I?” John checked the girths and swung up into the saddle. The cool reflection of the morning sky gleamed slimily on the grease Jenny had made for him late last night to smear on his face against the worst scorching of the dragon’s fire. Frost crackled in the weeds as Osprey fidgeted his feet. The last thing Jenny had done, shortly before dawn, had been to send away the mists that seeped up from the woods to cloak the Vale, and all around them the air was brilliantly clear, the fallow winter colors warming to life. Jenny herself felt cold, empty, and overstretched; she had poured all her powers into the poisons. Her head ached violently and she felt unclean, strange, and divided in her mind, as if she were two separate people. She had felt so, she recalled, when John had ridden against the first dragon, though then she had not known why. Then she had not known what the slaughter of that beauty would be like. She feared for him and felt despair like a stain on her heart; she only wanted the day to be over, one way or the other.

  The mail rings on the back of John’s gloves rattled sharply as he reached down, and she handed him up his harpoons. There were six of them, in a quiver on his back; the steel of their barbed shafts caught a slither of the early light, save for the ugly black that covered their points. The leather of the grips was firm and tough under her palms. Over his metal-patched doublet, John had pulled a chain mail shirt, and his face was framed in a coif of the same stuff. Without his spectacles and with his shaggy hair hidden beneath it, the bones of his face were suddenly prominent, showing what his features could look like in an old age he might never reach.

  Jenny felt she wanted to speak to him, but there was nothing she could think of to say.

  He gathered the reins in hand. “If the dragon comes out of the Gate before I reach it, I want the pair of you to leg it,” he said, his voice calm. “Get into cover as deep as you can, the higher up the ridge the better. Let the horses go if you can—there’s a chance the dragon will go after them first.” He did not add that by that time he would already be dead.

  There was a momentary silence. Then he bent from the saddle and touched Jenny’s lips with his own. His felt, as they always did, surprisingly soft. They had spoken little, even last night; each had already been drawn into an armor of silence. It was something they both understood.

  He reined away, looking across the Vale to the black eye of the Deep, and to the black thing waiting within. Osprey fiddle-footed again, catching John’s battle nerves; the open ground of Deeping seemed suddenly to stretch away into miles of enormous, broken plain. To Jenny’s eye, every tumbled wall looked as tall as the house it had once been, every uncovered cellar a gaping chasm. He would never cross in time, she thought.

  Beside her, John leaned down again, this time to pat Osprey’s dappled neck encouragingly. “Osprey, old friend,” he said softly, “don’t spook on me now.”

  He drove in his spurs, and the sharp crack of iron-shod hooves as they shot forward was like the chip of distant lightning on a summer noon. Jenny took two steps down the loose, rocky slope after him, watching the gray horse and the pewter-dark shape of the man as they plunged through the labyrinth of gaping foundations, broken beams, standing water who knew how deep, slipping down drifts of charred wood chips and racing toward the open black mouth of the Gates. Her heart hammering achingly in her chest, Jenny stretched her mageborn senses toward the Gate, straining to hear. The cold, tingling air seemed to breathe with the dragon’s mind. Somewhere in that darkness was the slithery drag of metallic scales on stone...

  There was no way to call the image of the dragon in her scrying-stone, but she sat down suddenly where she was on the loose, charred rubble of the slope and pulled the slip of dirty-white crystal upon its chain from her jacket pocket. She heard Gareth call her
name from the top of the slope, but she vouchsafed neither answer nor glance. Across the Vale, Osprey leaped the split ruin of the demolished Gates on the granite steps, cool blue shadows falling over him and his rider like a cloak as the Gate swallowed them up.

  There was a flick and a gleam, as the wan sunlight caught in the facets of the jewel. Then Jenny caught a confused impression of hewn stone walls that could have encompassed the entire palace of Bel, a cavern-ceiling bristling with stone teeth from which old lamp-chains hung down into vast, cobalt spaces of air... black doorways piercing the walls, and the greatest of them opening opposite...

  Jenny cupped her hands around the jewel, trying to see into its depths, straining past the curtains of illusion that covered the dragon from her sight. She thought she saw the flash of diffuse sunlight on chain mail and saw Osprey trip on the charred debris of blackened bones and spilled coins and half-burned poles that littered the floor. She saw John pull him out of the stumble and saw the gleam of the harpoon in his hand... Then something spurted from the inner doors, like a drench of thrown bathwater, splattering viscously into the dry ash of the floor, searing upward in a curtain of fire.

  There was a darkness in the crystal and in that darkness, two burning silver lamps.

  Nothing existed around her, not the cool shift of the morning air, nor the sunlight warming her ankles in her buckskin boots where her heels rested on the chopped-up slope of gravel and weeds, not the wintry smell of water and stone from below, nor the small noises of the restless horses above. Cupped in her hands, the edges of the crystal seemed to burn in white light, but its heart was dark; through that darkness only fragmentary images came—a sense of something moving that was vast and dark, the swinging curve of John’s body as he flung a harpoon, and the cloudy swirls of blinding fumes.

  In some way she knew Osprey had gone down, smitten by the stroke of the dragon’s tail. She had a brief impression of John on his knees, his eyes red and swollen from the acrid vapors that filled the hall, aiming for another throw. Something like a wing of darkness covered him. She saw flame again and, as a queer, detached image, three harpoons lying like scattered jackstraws in the middle of a puddle of blackened and steaming slime. Something within her turned to ice; there was only darkness and movement in the darkness, and then John again, blood pouring through the rips in his mail shirt, staring up at a towering shape of glittering shadow, his sword in his hand.

  Blackness swallowed the crystal. Jenny was aware that her hands were shaking, her whole body hurting with a pain that radiated from a seed of cold under her breast-bone, her throat a bundle of twisted wires. She thought blindly, John, remembering him striding with graceful insouciance into Zyerne’s dining room, his armor of outrageousness protecting him from Zyerne’s claws; she remembered the flash of autumn daylight on his specs as he stood ankle-deep in pig muck at the Hold, reaching up his hands to help her dismount.

  She could not conceive of what life would be like without that fleeting, triangular grin.

  Then somewhere in her mind she heard him call out to her: Jenny...

  She found him lying just beyond the edge of the trapezoid of light that fell through the vast square of the Gates. She had left Moon Horse outside, tossing her head in fear at the acrid reek of the dragon that pervaded all that end of the Vale. Jenny’s own heart was pounding, so that it almost turned her sick; all the way across the ruins of Deeping she had been waiting for the dark shape of the dragon to emerge from the Gates.

  But nothing had come forth. The silence within the darkness was worse than any sound could have been.

  After the brightness of the Vale, the blue vaults of the Market Hall seemed almost black. The air was murky with vapors that diffused what little light there was. The trapped fumes burned her eyes and turned her dizzy, mixed with the smoke of burning and the heavy reek of poisoned slag. Even with a wizard’s sight, it took Jenny’s eyes a moment to accustom themselves. Then sickness came over her, as if the blood that lay spread everywhere had come from her body, rather than John’s.

  He lay with his face hidden by his outflung arm, the mail coif dragged back and the hair beneath it matted with blood where it had not been singed away. Blood lay in a long, inky trail behind him, showing where he had crawled after the fight was over, past the carcass of the horse Osprey, leading like a sticky path to the vast, dark bulk of the dragon.

  The dragon lay still, like a shining mound of obsidian knives. Supine, it was a little higher than her waist, a glittering blacksnake nearly forty feet long, veiled in the white smoke of its poisons and the darkness of its magic, harpoons sticking from it like darts. One foreleg lay stretched out toward John, as if with its last strength it had reached to tear him, and the great talon lay like a skeleton hand in a pool of leaked black blood. The atmosphere all about it seemed heavy, filled with a sweet, clear singing that Jenny thought was as much within her skull as outside of it. It was a song with words she could not understand; a song about stars and cold and the long, ecstatic plunge through darkness. The tune was half-familiar, as if she had heard a phrase of it once, long ago, and had carried it since in her dreams.

  Then the dragon Morkeleb raised his head, and for a time she looked into his eyes.

  They were like lamps, a crystalline white kaleidoscope, cold and sweet and burning as the core of a flame. It struck her with a sense of overwhelming shock that she looked into the eyes of a mage like herself. It was an alien intelligence, clean and cutting as a sliver of black glass. There was something terrible and fascinating about those eyes; the singing in her mind was like a voice speaking to her in words she almost understood. She felt a calling within her to the hungers that had all of her life consumed her.

  With a desperate wrench, she pulled her thoughts from it and turned her eyes aside.

  She knew then why the legends warned never to look into a dragon’s eyes. It was not only because the dragon could snag some part of your soul and paralyze you with indecision while it struck.

  It was because, in pulling away, you left some shred of yourself behind, snared in those ice-crystal depths.

  She turned to flee, to leave that place and those too-knowing eyes, to run from the singing that whispered to the harmonics of her bones. She would have run, but her booted foot brushed something as she turned. Looking down to the man who lay at her feet, she saw for the first time that his wounds still bled.

  CHAPTER X

  “HE CAN’T BE dying!” Gareth finished laying a heap of fresh-cut branches beside the low fire and turned to Jenny, his eyes pleading with her. As if, Jenny thought, with what power was left in her numbed mind, his saying could make it so.

  Without speaking, she leaned across to touch the ice-cold face of the man who lay covered with plaids and bearskins, so close to the flickering blaze.

  Her mind felt blunted, like a traveler lost in the woods who returned again and again to the same place, unable to struggle clear.

  She had known that it would come to this, when first she had taken him into her life. She should never have yielded to the mischief in those brown eyes. She should have sent him away and not given in to that weak part of herself that whispered: I want a friend.

  She stood up and shook out her skirts, pulling her plaid more tightly around her sheepskin jacket. Gareth was watching her with frightened dog eyes, hurt and pleading; he followed her over to the heap of the packs on the other side of the fire.

  She could have had her fill of lovers. There were always those who would lie with a witch for the novelty of it or for the luck it was said to bring. Why had she let him stay until morning and talked to him as if he were not a man and an enemy whom she knew even then would fetter her soul? Why had she let him touch her heart as well as her body?

  The night was dead-still, the sky dark save for the white disc of the waxing moon. Its ghostly light barely outlined the broken bones of the empty town below. A log settled in the dying fire; the spurt of light touched a spangle of red on the twisted links of John�
�s mail shirt and glimmered stickily on the upturned palm of one blistered hand. Jenny felt her whole body one open wound of grief.

  We change what we touch, she thought. Why had she let him change her? She had been happy, alone with her magic. The key to magic is magic—she should have held to that from the start. She had known even then that he was a man who would give his life to help others, even others not his own.

  If he had waited for Zyerne...

  She pushed the thought away with bitter violence, knowing Zyerne’s magic could have saved him. All day she had wanted to weep, not only with grief, but with anger at herself for all the choices of the past.

  Thin and plaintive as a child’s, Gareth’s voice broke into her circle of stumbling self-hate. “Isn’t there anything that you can do?”

  “I have done what I can,” she replied wearily. “I have washed his wounds and stitched them shut, laid spells of healing upon them. The dragon’s blood is a poison in his veins, and he has lost too much blood of his own.”

  “But surely there’s something...” In the brief gleam of the fire, she could see that he had been weeping. Her own soul felt cold now and drained as John’s flesh.

  “You have asked me that seven times since it grew dark,” she said. “This is beyond my skills—beyond the medicines that I have—beyond my magic.”

  She tried to tell herself that, even had she not loved him, even had she not given up the time she could have spent studying, it would still have been so.

  Would she have been able to save him, if she had not given him all those hours; if she had spent all those early mornings meditating among the stones in the solitude of the hilltop instead of lying talking in his bed?

  Or would she only have been a little bleaker, a little madder—a little more like the worst side of herself—a little more like Caerdinn?

  She did not know, and the hurt of that was almost as bad as the hurt of suspecting that she did know.