Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  What is that to you, wizard woman?

  What was it to me that I returned here to save your life? It would have served me and mine better to have let you die.

  Why then did you not?

  There were two answers. The one she gave him was, Because it was understood between us that if you gave me the way into the heart of the Deep, I should heal you and give you your life. But in that healing you gave me your name, Morkeleb the Black—and the name she spoke in her mind was the ribbon of music that was his true name, his essence; and she saw him flinch. They have said, Save a dragon, slave a dragon, and by your name you shall do as I bid you.

  The surge of his anger against her was like a dark wave, and all along his sides the knifelike scales lifted a little, like a dog’s hackles. Around them in the blackness of the Temple, the gold seemed to whisper, picking up the groundswell of his wrath.

  I am Morkeleb the Black. I am and will be slave to no one and nothing, least of all a human woman, mage though she may be. I do no bidding save my own.

  The bitter weight of alien thoughts crushed down upon her, heavier than the darkness. But her eyes were a mage’s eyes, seeing in darkness; her mind held a kind of glowing illumination that it had not had before. She felt no fear of him now; a queer strength she had not known she possessed stirred in her. She whispered the magic of his name as she would have formed its notes upon her harp, in all its knotted complexities, and saw him shrink back a little. His razor claws stirred faintly in the gold.

  By your name, Morkeleb the Black, she repeated, you shall do my bidding. And by your name, I tell you that you will do no harm, either to John Aversin, or to Prince Gareth, or to any other human being while you remain here in the south. When you are well enough to sustain the journey, you shall leave this place and return to your home.

  Ire radiated from his scales like a heat, reflected back about him by the thrumming gold. She felt in it the iron pride of dragons, and their contempt for humankind, and also his furious grief at being parted from the hoard that he had so newly won. For a moment their souls met and locked, twisting together like snakes striving, fighting for advantage. The tide of her strength rose in her, surging and sure, as if it drew life from the combat itself. Terror and exhilaration flooded her, like the tabat leaves, only far stronger, and she cast aside concern for the limitations of her flesh and strove against him mind to mind, twisting at the glittering chain of his name.

  She felt the spew of his venomous anger, but would not let go. If you kill me, I shall drag you down with me into death, she thought; for dying, I shall not release your name from my mind.

  The strength that was breaking the sinews of her mind drew back, but his eyes held to hers. Her thoughts were suddenly flooded with images and half-memories, like the visions of the heart of the Deep; things she did not understand, distracting and terrifying in their strangeness. She felt the plunging vertigo of flight in darkness; saw black mountains that cast double shadows, red deserts unstirred by wind since time began and inhabited by glass spiders that lived upon salt. They were dragon memories, confusing her, luring her toward the place where his mind could close around hers like a trap, and she held fast to those things of her own life that she knew and her memory of the piping of old Caerdinn whistling the truncated air of Morkeleb’s true name. Into that air she twisted her own spells of breaking and exhaustion, mingling them with the rhythm of his heart that she had learned so well in the healing, and she felt once more his mind draw back from hers.

  His wrath was like the lour of thunder-sky, building all around her; he loomed before her like a cloud harboring lightning. Then without warning he struck at her like a snake, one thin-boned claw raised to slash.

  He would not strike, she told herself as her heart contracted with terror and her every muscle screamed to flee... He could not strike her for she had his name and he knew it... She had saved him; he must obey... Her mind gripped the music of his name even as the claws hissed down. The wind of them slashed at her hair, the saber blades passing less than a foot from her face. White eyes stared down at her, blazing with hate; the rage of him beat against her like a storm.

  Then he settled back slowly upon his bed of gold. The tang of his defeat was like wormwood in the air.

  You chose to give me your name rather than die, Morkeleb. She played his name like a glissando and felt the surge of her own rising power hum in the gold against his. You will go from these lands and not return.

  For a moment more she felt his anger, resentment, and the fury of his humbled pride. But there was something else in the hoarfrost glitter of his gaze upon her, the knowledge that she was not contemptible.

  He said quietly, Do you not understand?

  Jenny shook her head. She looked around her once again at the Temple, its dark archways piled high with more gold than she had ever seen before, a treasure more fabulous than any other upon earth. It would have bought all of Bel and the souls of most of the men who dwelled there. But, perhaps because she herself had little use for gold, she felt drawn to ask again, Why gold, Morkeleb? Was it the gold that brought you here?

  He lowered his head to his paws again, and all around them the gold vibrated with the whisper of the dragon’s name. It was the gold, and the dreams of the gold, he said. I had discontent in all things; the longing grew upon me while I slept. Do you not know, wizard woman, the love that dragons have for gold?

  She shook her head again. Only that they are greedy for it, as men are greedy.

  Rose-red light rimmed the slits of his nostrils as he sniffed. Men, he said softly. They have no understanding of gold; no understanding of what it is and of what it can be. Come here, wizard woman. Put your hand upon me and listen with my mind.

  She hesitated, fearing a trap, but her curiosity as a mage drove her. She picked her way over the cold, uneven heaps of rings, platters, and candlesticks, to rest her hand once more against the soft skin below the dragon’s great eye. As before, it felt surprisingly warm, unlike a reptile’s skin, and soft as silk. His mind touched hers like a firm hand in the darkness.

  In a thousand murmuring voices, she could hear the gold pick up the music of the dragon’s name. The blended nuances of thought were magnified and made richer, distinct as subtle perfumes, piercing the heart with beauty. It seemed to Jenny that she could identify every piece of gold within that enormous chamber by its separate sounding, and hear the harmonic curve of a vessel, the melding voices of every single coin and hairpin, and the sweet tingling locked in the crystal heart of every jewel. Her mind, touching the dragon’s, flinched in aching wonder from the caress of that unbearable sweetness as the echoes awoke answering resonances within her soul. Memories of dove-colored dusks on the Fell that was her home pulled at her with the deep joy of winter nights lying on the bearskins before the hearth at Alyn Hold, with John and her sons at her side. Happiness she could not name swept over her, breaking down the defenses of her heart as the intensity of the music built, and she knew that for Morkeleb it was the same in the chimeric deeps of his mind.

  When the music faded, she realized she had closed her eyes, and her cheeks were wet with tears. Looking about her, though the room was as black as before, she thought that the memory of the dragon’s song lingered in the gold, and a faint luminosity clung to it still.

  In time she said, That is why men say that dragon’s gold is poisoned. Others say that it is lucky... but it is merely charged with yearning and with music, so that even dullards can feel it through their fingers.

  Even so, whispered the voice of the dragon in her mind.

  But dragons cannot mine gold, nor work it. Only gnomes and the children of men.

  We are like the whales that live in the sea, he said, civilizations without artifacts, living between stone and sky in our islands in the northern oceans. We lair in rocks that bear gold, but it is impure. Only with pure gold is this music possible. Now do you understand?

  The sharing had broken something between them, and she felt no fear
of him now. She went to sit close to the bony curve of his shoulder and picked up a gold cup from the hoard. She felt as she turned it over in her hands that she could have chosen it out from a dozen identical ones. Its resonance was clear and individuated in her mind; the echo of the dragon’s music held to it, like a remembrance of perfume. She saw how precisely it was formed, chastened and highly polished, its handles tiny ladies with garlands twined in their hair where it streamed back over the body of the cup; even microscopically fine, the flowers were recognizable as the lilies of hope and the roses of fulfillment. Morkeleb had killed the owner of this cup, she thought to herself, only for the sake of the incredible music which he could call from the gold. Yet his love for the gold had as little to do with its beauty as her love for her sons had to do with their—undeniable, she thought—good looks.

  How did you know this was here?

  Do you not think that we, who live for hundreds of years, would be aware of the comings and goings of men? Where they build their cities, and with whom they trade, and in what? I am old, Jenny Waynest. Even among the dragons, my magic is accounted great. I was born before we came to this world; I can sniff gold from the bones of the earth and follow its path for miles, as you follow ground water with a hazel twig. The gold-seams of the Wall rise to the surface here like the great salmon of the north country rising to spawn.

  The dragon’s words were spoken in her mind, and in her mind she had a brief, distant glimpse of the Earth as the dragons saw it, spread out like a mottled carpet of purple and green and brown. She saw the green-black pelt of the forests of Wyr, the infinitely delicate cloud shapes of the crowns of the tall oaks, fragile and thready with winter, and saw how, toward the north, they were more and more replaced by the coarse spiky teeth of pine and fir. She saw the gray and white stones of the bare Winterlands, stained all the colors of the rainbow with lichen and moss in summer, and saw how the huge flashing silver shapes of eight- and ten-foot salmon moved beneath the waters of the rivers, under the blue, gliding shadow of the dragon’s wings. For an instant, it was as if she could feel the air all about her, holding her up like water; its currents and countereddies, its changes from warm to cold.

  Then she felt his mind closing around hers, like the jaws of a trap. For an instant she was locked into suffocating darkness, the utter darkness that not even the eyes of a wizard could pierce. Panic crushed her. She could neither move nor think, and felt only the acid gloating of the dragon all around her, and, opening beneath her, a bottomless despair.

  Then as Caerdinn had taught her, as she had done in healing John—as she had always done within the circumscribed limits of her small magic—she forced her mind to calm and began to work rune by rune, note by note, concentrating singly and simply upon each element with her whole mind. She felt the wrath of the dragon smothering her like a hot sea of night, but she wedged open a crack of light, and into that crack she drove the music of the dragon’s name, fashioned by her spells into a spear.

  She felt his mind flinch and give. Her sight returned, and she found herself on her feet among the knee-deep piles of gold, the monstrous dark shape backing from her in anger. This time she did not let him go, but flung her own wrath and her will after him, playing upon the music of his name and weaving into it the fires that scorched his essence. All the spells of pain and ruin she had wrought into the poison flooded to her mind; but, like her fury at the bandits at the crossroads these many weeks ago, her anger had no hate in it, offering him no hold upon her mind. He shrank back from it, and the great head lowered so that the ribbons of his mane swept the coins with a slithery tinkle.

  Wrapped in a rage of magic and fire, she said, You shall not dominate me, Morkeleb the Black—neither with your power nor with your treachery. I have saved your life, and you shall do as I command you. By your name you shall go, and you shall not return to the south. Do you hear me?

  She felt him resist, and drove her will and the strength of her newfound powers against him. Like a wrestler’s body, she felt the dark, sulfurous rage slither from beneath the pressure of her will; she stepped back, almost instinctively, and faced him where he crouched against the wall like a vast, inky cobra, his every scale bristling with glittering wrath.

  She heard him whisper, I hear you, wizard woman, and heard, in the cold voice, the resonance not only of furious anger at being humbled, but of surprise that she could have done so.

  Turning without a word, she left the Temple and walked back toward the square of diffuse light that marked the outer hall at the end of the Grand Passage and the Great Gates beyond.

  CHAPTER XII

  WHEN JENNY CAME down the steps of the Deep she was shaking with exhaustion and an aftermath of common sense that told her that she should have been terrified. Yet she felt curiously little fear of Morkeleb, even in the face of his treachery and his wrath. Her body ached—the power she had put forth against him had been far in excess of what her flesh was used to sustaining—but her head felt clear and alert, without the numbed weariness she felt when she had overstretched her powers. She was aware, down to her last finger end, of the depth and greatness of the dragon’s magic, but was aware also of her own strength against him.

  Evening wind dusted across her face. The sun had sunk beyond the flinty crest of the westward ridge, and though the sky still held light, Deeping lay at the bottom of a lake of shadow. She was aware of many things passing in the Vale, most of them having nothing to do with the affairs of dragons or humankind—the skreak of a single cricket under a charred stone, the flirt of a squirrel’s tail as it fled from its hopeful mate, and the flutterings of the chaffinches as they sought their nighttime nests. Where the trail turned downward around a broken pile of rubble that had once been a house, she saw a man’s skeleton lying in the weeds, the bag of gold he had died clutching split open and the coins singing softly to her where they lay scattered among his ribs.

  She was aware, suddenly, that someone else had entered the Vale.

  It was analogous to sound, though unheard. The scent of magic came to her like smoke on the shift of the wind. She stopped still in the dry tangle of broomsedge, cold shreds of breeze that frayed down from the timberline stirring in her plaids. There was magic in the Vale, up on the ridge. She could hear the slither and snag of silk on beech mast, the startled splash of spilled water in the dusk by the fountain, and Gareth’s voice halting over a name...

  Catching up her skirts, Jenny began to run.

  The smell of Zyerne’s perfume seemed everywhere in the woods. Darkness was already beginning to collect beneath the trees. Panting, Jenny sprang up the whitish, flinty rocks to the glade by the fountain. Long experience in the Winterlands had taught her to move in utter silence, even at a dead run; and thus, for the first moment, neither of those who stood near the little well was aware of her arrival.

  It took her a moment to see Zyerne. Gareth she saw at once, standing frozen beside the wellhead. Spilled water was soaking into the beech mast around his feet; a half-empty bucket balanced on the edge of the stone trough beside the well itself. He didn’t heed it; she wondered how much of his surroundings he was aware of at all.

  Zyerne’s spells filled the small glade like the music heard in dreams. Even she, a woman, felt the scented warmth of the air that belied the tingly cold lower down in the Vale and sensed the stirring of need in her flesh. In Gareth’s eyes was a kind of madness, and his hands were shaking where they were clenched, knotted into fists, before him. His voice was a whisper more desperate than a scream as he said, “No.”

  “Gareth.” Zyerne moved, and Jenny saw her, as she seemed to float like a ghost in the dusk among the birch trees at the glade’s edge. “Why pretend? You know your love for me has grown, as mine has for you. It is like fire in your flesh now; the taste of your mouth in my dreams has tormented me day and night...”

  “While you were lying with my father?”

  She shook back her hair, a small, characteristic gesture, brushing the tendrils of it away
from her smooth brow. It was difficult to see what she wore in the dusk— something white and fragile that rippled in the stirrings of the wind, pale as the birches themselves. Her hair was loosened down her back like a young girl’s; and, like a young girl, she wore no veils. Years seemed to have vanished from her age, young as she had seemed before. She looked like a girl of Gareth’s age, unless, like Jenny, one saw her with a wizard’s eye.

  “Gareth, I never lay with your father,” she said softly. “Oh, we agreed to pretend, for the sake of appearances at Court—but even if he had wanted me to, I don’t think I could have. He treated me like a daughter. It was you I wanted, you...”

  “That’s a lie!” His mouth sounded dried by fever heat.

  She held out her hands, and the wind lifted the thin fabric of her sleeves back from her arms as she moved a step into the glade. “I could bear waiting no longer. I had to come, to learn what had happened to you—to be with you...”

  He sobbed, “Get away from me!” His face was twisted by something close to pain.

  She only whispered, “I want you...”

  Jenny stepped from the somber shade of the trail and said, “No, Zyerne. What you want is the Deep.”

  Zyerne swung around, her concentration breaking, as Morkeleb had tried to break Jenny’s. The lurid sensuality that had dripped from the air shattered with an almost audible snap. At once, Zyerne seemed older, no longer the virgin girl who could inflame Gareth’s passion. The boy dropped to his knees and covered his face, his body racked with dry sobs.

  “It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” Jenny touched Gareth’s hair comfortingly, and he threw his arms around her waist, clinging to her like a drowning man to a spar. Oddly enough, she felt no fear of Zyerne now, or of the greater strength of the younger woman’s magic. She seemed to see Zyerne differently, even, and felt calm as she faced her—calm and ready.