Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  But she had only her own small powers—spells worked one rune at a time, patiently, in the smallest increments of thought. She slowed and calmed her mind, as she did when she worked magic, and realized she could not cure him. What then could she do for him? What had Mab said, when she had spoken of healing?

  She ran her hands through her long hair, shifting the weight of it from her face and neck. Her shoulders hurt with cramp; she had not slept in two nights, and her body ached.

  “The most we can do now is keep heating stones in the fire to put around him,” she said at last. “We must keep him warm.”

  Gareth swallowed and wiped his nose. “Just that?”

  “For now, yes. If he seems a little stronger in the morning, we may be able to move him.” But she knew in her heart that he would not live until morning. Like a whispering echo, the vision in the water bowl returned to her, a bitter nightmare of failed hope.

  Hesitantly, Gareth offered, “There are physicians up at Halnath. Polycarp, for one.”

  “And an army around its walls.” Her voice sounded very cold to her own ears. “If he’s still alive in the morning... I didn’t want you to risk putting yourself once again where Zyerne might reach you, but in the morning, I think you should take Battlehammer and ride back to Bel.”

  Gareth looked frightened at the mention of Zyerne’s name and at the thought of possibly facing her alone, but he nodded. Jenny was interested to note, in some detached portion of her tired soul, that, having sought all his life for heroism, while Gareth might now flinch from it, he did not flee.

  She went on, “Go to the house of the gnomes and fetch Miss Mab here. The medicines of the gnomes may be locked away in the Deep, but...” Her voice trailed off. Then she repeated softly, “The medicines of the gnomes.”

  Like pins and needles in a numbed limb, the hurt of hope renewed as a sudden wash of agony. She whispered, “Gareth, where are John’s maps?”

  Gareth blinked at her uncomprehendingly, too preoccupied for the moment with his own fears of Zyerne to realize what she was getting at. Then he gave a start, and hope flooded into his face, and he let out a whoop that could have been heard in Bel. “The Places of Healing!” he cried, and threw his arms around her, sweeping her off her feet. “I knew it!” he shouted, with all his old forlorn cockiness. “I knew you could think of something! You can...”

  “You don’t know anything of the kind.” She fought free of him, angry at him for expressing what was already surging through her veins like a swig of cheap brandy. She brushed past him and almost ran to John’s side, while Gareth, gamboling like a large puppy, began to ransack the camp for the maps.

  If there was anything worse than the pain of despair, she thought, it was the pain of hope. At least despair is restful. Her own heart was hammering as she brushed aside the russet hair from John’s forehead, almost black-looking now against the bloodless flesh. Her mind was racing ahead, ticking off the remedies Mab had spoken of: distillations to slow and strengthen the thready heartbeat; salves to promote the healing of the flesh; and philters to counteract poison and give him back the blood he had lost. There would be spell-books, too, she thought, hidden in the Places of Healing, words with which to bind the soul to the flesh, until the flesh itself could recover. She could find them, she told herself desperately, she must. But the knowledge of what was at stake lay on her heart like stones. For a moment she felt so tired that she almost wished for his death, because it would require no further striving from her and threaten her with no further failure.

  Holding his icy hands, she slid for a moment into the outer fringes of the healing trance and whispered to him by his inner name. But it was as if she called at the head of a descending trail along which he had long since passed—there was no answer.

  But there was something else. In her trance she heard it, a soft touch of sound that twisted her heart with fright— the slur of scales on rock, the shiver of alien music.

  Her eyes opened; she found herself shaking and cold.

  The dragon was alive.

  “Jenny?” Gareth came nattering over to her side, his hands full of creased bits of dirty papyrus. “I found them, but—but the Places of Healing aren’t on them.” His eyes were filled with worry behind the cracked, crazy specs. “I’ve looked...”

  Jenny took them from his hand with fingers that shook. In the firelight she could make out passages, caverns, rivers, all marked in Dromar’s strong, runic hand, and the blank spots, unmarked and unlabeled. The affair of the gnomes.

  Anger wrenched at her, and she threw the maps from her. “Damn Dromar and his secrets,” she whispered viciously. “Of course the Places of Healing are the heart of the Deep that they all swear by!”

  “But—” Gareth stammered weakly. “Can you—can you find them anyway?”

  Fury welled up in her, of hope thwarted, first by fear and now by one gnome’s stubbornness, like molten rock pouring through the cracks of exhaustion in her soul. “In those warrens?” she demanded. For a moment anger, weariness, and the knowledge of the dragon claimed her, tearing at her so that she could have screamed and called down the lightning to rive apart the earth.

  As Zyerne did, she told herself, fighting for calm. She closed her fists, one around the other, and pressed her lips against them, willing the rage and the fear to pass; and when they passed, there was nothing left. It was as if the unvoiced scream had burned everything out of her and left only a well of dark and unnatural calm, a universe deep.

  Gareth was still looking at her, his eyes pleading. She said quietly, “Maybe. Mab spoke of the way. I may be able to reason it out.” Mab had also said that one false step would condemn her to a death by starvation, wandering in darkness.

  Like an answer, she knew at once what John would have said to that—God’s Grandmother, Jen, the dragon’ll eat you before you get a chance to starve.

  Trust John, she thought, to make me laugh at a time like this.

  She got to her feet, chilled to the bone and feeling a hundred years old, and walked to the packs once more. Gareth trailed along after her, hugging his crimson cloak about himself for warmth and chattering on about one thing and another; locked in that strange stasis of calm, Jenny scarcely heard.

  It was only as she slung her big satchel about her shoulder and picked up her halberd that he seemed to feel her silence. “Jenny,” he said doubtfully, catching the edge of her plaid. “Jenny—the dragon is dead, isn’t it? I mean, the poison did work, didn’t it? It must have, if you were able to get John out of there...”

  “No,” Jenny said quietly. She wondered a little at the weird silence within her; she had felt more fear listening for the Whisperers in the Woods of Wyr than she did now. She started to move off toward the darkness of the shadow-drowned ruins. Gareth ran around in front of her and caught her by the arms.

  “But—that is—how long...”

  She shook her head. “Too long, almost certainly.” She put her hand on his wrist to move him aside. Having made up her mind what she must do, she wanted it over with, though she knew she would never succeed.

  Gareth swallowed hard, his thin face working in the low ruby light of the fire. “I—I’ll go,” he volunteered shakily. “Tell me what I should look for, and I...”

  For an instant, laughter threatened to crack all her hard-won resolve—not laughter at him, but at the wan gallantry that impelled him, like the hero of a ballad, to take her place. But he would not have understood how she loved him for the offer, absurd as it was; and if she began to laugh she would cry, and that weakness she knew she could not now afford. So she only stood on her toes and pulled his shoulders down so that she could kiss his soft, thin cheek. “Thank you, Gareth,” she murmured. “But I can see in the darkness, and you cannot, and I know what I seek.”

  “Really,” he persisted, torn visibly between relief at her refusal, awareness that she was in fact far better suited than he for the task, a lifetime of chivalric precept, and a very real desire to protect her f
rom harm.

  “No,” she said gently. “Just see that John stays warm. If I don’t come back...” Her voice faltered at the knowledge of what lay before her—the death by the dragon, or the death within the maze. She forced strength into her words. “Do what seems best to you, but don’t try to move him too soon.”

  The admonition was futile, and she knew it. She tried to remember Mab’s words regarding the lightless labyrinths of the Deep and they slid from her mind like a fistful of water, leaving only the recollection of the shining wheels of diamond that were the dragon’s watching eyes. But she had to reassure Gareth; and while John breathed, she knew she could never have remained in camp.

  She squeezed Gareth’s hand and withdrew from him. Hitching her plaids higher on her shoulder, she turned toward the shadowy trails through the Vale and the dark bulk of Nast Wall that loomed against a sullen and pitchy sky. Her final glimpse of John was of the last glow of the dying fire that outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness.

  Long before she reached the Great Gates of the Deep, Jenny was aware of the singing. As she crossed the frost-skimmed stones of the ruins, bled of all their daytime color by the feeble wash of the moonlight, she felt it—a hunger, a yearning, and a terrifying beauty, far beyond her comprehension. It intruded into her careful piecing-together of those fragmentary memories of Mab’s remarks about the Places of Healing, broke even into her fears for John. It seemed to float around her in the air, and yet she knew that it could only be heard by her; it shivered in her bones, down to her very finger ends. When she stood in the Gates with the blackness of the Market Hall lying before her and her own shadow a diffuse smudge on the scuffed and blood-gummed refuse of the floor, it was almost overwhelming.

  There was no sound to it, but its rhythm called her blood. Braided images that she could neither completely sense nor wholly understand twisted through her consciousness—knots of memory, of starry darkness that sunlight had never seen, of the joyous exhaustion of physical love whose modes and motives were strange to her, and of mathematics and curious relationships between things that she had never known were akin. It was stronger and very different from the singing that had filled the gully when the Golden Dragon of Wyr lay gasping its last. There was a piled strength in it of years lived fully and of patterns comprehended across unknowable gulfs of time.

  The dragon was invisible in the darkness. She heard the soft scrape of his scales and guessed him to be lying across the inner doors of the Market Hall, that led to the Grand Passage and so into the Deep. Then the silver lamps of his eyes opened and seemed to glow softly in the reflected moonlight, and in her mind the singing flowed and intensified its colors into the vortex of a white core. In that core words formed.

  Have you come seeking medicines, wizard woman? Or is that weapon you carry simply what you have deluded yourself into thinking sufficient to finish what your poisons do too slowly for your convenience?

  The words were almost pictures, music and patterns shaped as much by her own soul as by his. They would hurt, she thought, if allowed to sink too deeply.

  “I have come seeking medicines,” she replied, her voice reverberating against the fluted dripstone of the toothed ceiling. “The power of the Places of Healing was everywhere renowned.”

  This I knew. There was a knot of gnomes that held out in the place where they took all the wounded. The door was low, but I could reach through it like a wolf raiding a bury of rabbits. I fed upon them for many days, until they were all gone. They had the wherewithal to make poisons there, too. They poisoned the carrion, as if they did not think that I could see the death that tainted the meat. This will be the place that you seek.

  Because he spoke partially in pictures, she glimpsed also the dark ways into the place, like a half-remembered dream in her mind. Her hope stirred, and she fixed the pictures in her thoughts—tiny fragments, but perhaps enough to serve.

  With her wizard’s sight she could distinguish him now, stretched before her across the doors in the darkness. He had dislodged the harpoons from his throat and belly, and they lay blackened with his blood in the muck of slime and ash on the floor. The thorny scales of his back and sides lay sleek now, their edges shining faintly in the dim reflection of the moon. The heavy ridges of spikes that guarded his backbone and the joints of his legs still bristled like weapons. The enormous wings lay folded neatly along his sides, and their joints, too, she saw, were armored and spined. His head fascinated her most, long and narrow and birdlike, its shape concealed under a mask of bony plates. From those plates grew a vast mane of ribbonlike scales, mingled with tufts of fur and what looked like growths of ferns and feathers; his long, delicate antennae with their glittering bobs of jet lay limp upon the ground around his head. He lay like a dog, his chin between his forepaws; but the eyes that burned into hers were the eyes of a mage who is also a beast.

  I will bargain with you, wizard woman.

  She knew, with chill premonition but no surprise what his bargain would be, and her heart quickened, though whether with dread or some strange hope she did not know. She said, “No,” but within herself she felt, like a forbidden longing, the unwillingness to let something this beautiful, this powerful, die. He was evil, she told herself, knowing and believing it in her heart. Yet there was something in those silver eyes that drew her, some song of black and latent fire whose music she understood.

  The dragon moved his head a little on the powerful curve of his neck. Blood dripped down from the tattered ribbons of his mane.

  Do you think that even you, a wizard who sees in darkness, can search out the ways of the gnomes?

  The pictures that filled her mind were of the darkness, of clammy and endless mazes of the world underground. Her heart sank with dread at the awareness of them; those few small images of the way to the Places of Healing, those fragmentary words of Mab’s, turned in her hands to the pebbles with which a child thinks it can slaughter lions.

  Still she said, “I have spoken to one of them of these ways.”

  And did she tell the truth? The gnomes are not famed for it in matters concerning the heart of the Deep.

  Jenny remembered the empty places on Dromar’s maps. But she retorted, “Nor are dragons.”

  Beneath the exhaustion and pain, she felt in the dragon’s mind amusement at her reply, like a thin spurt of cold water in hot.

  What is truth, wizard woman? The truth that dragons see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncomfortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You know this.

  She saw that he had felt her fascination. The silver eyes drew her; his mind touched hers, as a seducer would have touched her hand. She saw, also, that he understood that she would not draw back from that touch. She forced her thoughts away from him, holding to the memories of John and of their sons, against the power that called to her like a whisper of amorphous night.

  With effort, she tore her eyes from his and turned to leave.

  Wizard woman, do you think this man for whom you risk the bones of your body will live longer than I?

  She stopped, the toes of her boots touching the hem of the carpet of moonlight which lay upon the flagstoned floor. Then she turned back to face him, despairing and torn. The wan light showed her the pools of acrid blood drying over so much of the floor, the sunken look to the dragon’s flesh; and she realized that his question had struck at her weakness and despair to cover his own.

  She said calmly, “There is the chance that he will.”

  She felt the anger in the movement of his head, and the pain that sliced through him with it. And will you wager on that? Will you wager that, even did the gnomes speak the truth, you will be able to sort your way through their warrens, spiral within spiral, dark within dark, to find what you need in time? Heal me, wizard woman, and I will guide you with my mind and show you the place that you seek.

  For a time she only gazed up at that long bulk of shining blackness, the dark mane of bloody ribbons, and the eyes like oiled me
tal ringing eternal darkness. He was a wonder such as she had never seen, a spined and supple shadow from the thorned tips of his backswept wings to the horned beak of his nose. The Golden Dragon John had slain on the windswept hills of Wyr had been a being of sun and fire, but this was a smoke-wraith of night, black and strong and old as time. The spines of his head grew into fantastic twisted horns, icy-smooth as steel; his forepaws had the shape of hands, save that they had two thumbs instead of one. The voice that spoke in her mind was steady, but she could see the weakness dragging at every line of that great body and feel the faint shiver of the last taut strength that fought to continue the bluff against her.

  Unwillingly, she said, “I know nothing of the healing of dragons.”

  The silver eyes narrowed, as if she had asked him for something he had not thought to give. For a moment they faced one another, cloaked in the cave’s darkness. She was aware of John and of time—distantly, like something urgent in a dream. But she kept her thoughts concentrated upon the creature that lay before her and the diamond-prickled darkness of that alien mind that struggled with hers.

  Then suddenly the gleaming body convulsed. She felt, through the silver eyes, the pain like a scream through the steel ropes of his muscles. The wings stretched out uncontrollably, the claws extending in a terrible spasm as the poison shifted in his veins. The voice in her mind whispered, Go.

  At the same moment memories flooded her thoughts of a place she had never been before. Vague images crowded to her mind of blackness as vast as the night outdoors, columned with a forest of stone trees that whispered back the echo of every breath, of rock seams a few yards across whose ceilings were lost in distant darkness, and of the murmuring of endless water under stone. She felt a vertigo of terror as in a nightmare, but also a queer sense of déjà vu, as if she had passed that way before.

  It came to her that it was Morkeleb and not she who had passed that way; the images were the way to the Places of Healing, the very heart of the Deep.