John went on, “I think what the gnomes were guarding—what lies in the heart of the Deep—is a power sink.”
“The Stone,” Jenny said, knowing it for truth. “They swear ‘by the Stone’ or ‘by the Stone in the heart of the Deep.’ Even Zyerne does. In my vision, they were dancing around it.”
John’s voice was soft in the velvety darkness. “And in that case, all Zyerne would have needed to steal was the key to unlock it. If she was apprenticed in the Places of Healing near there, that wouldn’t have been hard.”
“If she’s mentally in contact with it, she could use it somewhat, even at a distance,” Jenny said. “I felt it, when I struggled with her—some power I have never felt. Not living, like Morkeleb—but strong because it is dead and does not care what it does. It must be the source of all her strength, for shapechanging and for the curse she sent to the gnomes, the curse that brought you here from the north, Morkeleb.”
“A curse that’s still holding good whether she wants it to or not.” John’s spectacles flashed in the starlight as he grinned. “But she must not be able to wield it accurately at a distance, even as Miss Mab can’t use it against her. It would explain why she’s so wild not to let them get even a chance of going back.”
So what then? demanded Morkeleb grimly. Did your estimable Dotys, your wise Polyborus, speak of a way to combat the magic of these stones?
“Well,” John said, a faint grin of genuine amusement touching the corners of his mouth, “that was the whole point of my coming south, you see. My copy of the Elucidus Lapidarus isn’t complete. Almost nothing in my library is. It’s why I agreed to become a Dragonsbane for the King’s hire in the first place—because we need books, we need knowledge. I’m as much a scholar as I can be, but it isn’t easy.”
With the size of a human brain, it would not be! Morkeleb snapped, irrationally losing his temper. You are no more scholar than you are Dragonsbane!
“But I never claimed to be,” John protested. “It’s just there’s all these ballads, see...”
The jet claws rattled again on the pavement. Jenny, exasperated with them both, began, “I really am going to let him eat you this time...”
Trey put in hastily, “Could you use the Stone yourself, Lady Jenny? Use it against Zyerne?”
“Of course!” Gareth bounced like a schoolboy on the hard step. “That’s it! Fight fire with fire.”
Jenny was silent. She felt their eyes upon her—Trey’s, Gareth’s, John’s, the crystal gaze of the dragon turned down at her from above. The thought of the power stirred in her mind like lust—Zyerne’s power. The key to magic is magic...
She saw the worry in John’s eyes and knew what her own expression must look like. It sobered her. “What are you thinking?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, love.”
He meant that he would not stand in the way of any decision she made. Correctly interpreting his look, she said gently, “I would not misuse the power, John. I would not become like Zyerne.”
His voice was pitched to her ears alone. “Can you know that?”
She started to reply, then stilled herself. Shrill and clear she heard Miss Mab’s voice saying, She took the secrets of those greater than she, defiled them, tainted them, poisoned the very heart of the Deep... She remembered, too, that sense of perverted power that had sparkled in the lamplight around Zyerne and the luckless Bond, and how the touch of the dragon’s mind had changed her.
“No,” she said at last. “I cannot know. And it would be stupid of me to meddle with something so powerful without knowing its dangers, even if I could figure out the key by myself.”
“But,” Gareth protested, “it’s our only chance of defeating Zyerne! They’ll be back—you know they will! We can’t stay holed up here forever.”
“Could we learn enough about the Stone for you to circumvent its powers somehow?” Trey suggested. “Would there be a copy of the Whatsus Howeverus you talked about in the Palace library?”
Gareth shrugged. His scholarship might extend to seven minor variants of the ballad of the Warlady and the Red Worm of Weldervale, but it was a broken reed insofar as obscure encyclopedists went.
“There would be one at Halnath, though, wouldn’t there?” Jenny said. “And if it didn’t contain the information, there are gnomes there who might know.”
“If they’d tell.” John propped himself gingerly a little higher against the granite of the gate pillar, the few portions of his shirt not darkened with bloodstains very white in the rising moonlight against the metallic glints of his doublet. “Dromar’s lot wouldn’t even admit it existed. They’ve had enough of humans controlling the Stone, and I can’t say as I blame them. But whatever happens,” he added, as the others subsided from their enthusiasm into dismal reflection once more, “our next move had better be to get out of here. As our hero says, you know Bond and the King’s troops will be back. The only place we can go is Halnath, and maybe not there. How tight are the siege lines, Gar?”
“Tight,” Gareth said gloomily. “Halnath is built on a series of cliffs—the lower town, the upper town, the University, and the Citadel above that, and the only way in is through the lower town. Spies have tried to sneak in over the cliffs on the mountain side of the city and have fallen to their deaths.” He readjusted his cracked spectacles. “And besides,” he went on, “Zyerne knows as well as we do that Halnath is the only place we can go.”
“Pox.” John glanced over at Jenny, where she sat against the alien curves of the dragon’s complicated shoulder bones. “For something that was never any of our business to begin with, this is looking worse and worse.”
“I could go,” Trey ventured. ‘The troops would be least likely to recognize me. I could tell Polycarp...”
“They’d never let you through,” John said. “Don’t think Zyerne doesn’t know you’re here, Trey; and don’t think she’d let you off because you’re Bond’s sister or that Bond would risk Zyerne so much as pouting at him to get you off. Zyerne can’t afford even one of us returning to the gnomes with word the dragon’s left the Deep.”
That, Morkeleb said thinly, is precisely our problem. The dragon has NOT left the Deep. Nor will he, until this Zyerne is destroyed. And I will not remain here docile, to watch the gnomes carrying on their petty trafficking with my gold.
“Your gold?” John raised an eyebrow. With a swift gesture of her mind Jenny stilled Morkeleb again.
Nor would they allow it, she said, for the dragon alone. It would only be a matter of time until their distrust of you mastered them, and they tried to slay you. No—you must be freed.
Freed! The voice within her mind was acrid as the stench of vinegar. Freed to be turned like a beggar onto the roads? The dragon swung his head away, the long scales of his mane clashing softly, like the searingly thin notes of a wind chime. You have done this to me, wizard woman! Before your mind touched mine I was not bound to this place...
“You were bound,” Aversin said quietly. “It’s just that, before Jenny’s mind touched yours, you weren’t aware of it. Had you tried to leave before?”
I remained because it was my will to remain.
“And it’s the old King’s will to remain with Zyerne, though she’s killing him. No, Morkeleb—she got you through your greed, as she got poor Gar’s dad through his grief and Bond through his love. If we hadn’t come, you’d have stayed here, bound with spells to brood over your hoard till you died. It’s just that now you know it.”
That is not true!
True or not, Jenny said, it is my bidding, Morkeleb, that as soon as the sky grows light, you shall carry me over the mountain to the Citadel of Halnath, so that I can send Polycarp the Master to bring these others to safety there through the Deep.
The dragon reared himself up, bristling all over with rage. His voice lashed her mind like a silver whip. I am not your pigeon nor your servant!
Jenny was on her feet now, too, looking up into the blazing white deeps of his eyes. No
, she said, holding to the crystal chain of his inner name. You are my slave, by that which you gave me when I saved your life. And by that which you gave me, I tell you this is what you shall do.
Their eyes held. The others, not hearing what passed between their two minds, saw and felt only the dragon’s scorching wrath. Gareth caught up Trey and drew her back toward the shelter of the gateway; Aversin made a move to rise and sank back with a gasp. He angrily shook off Gareth’s attempt to draw him to safety, his eyes never leaving the small, thin form of the woman who stood before the smoking rage of the beast.
All this Jenny was aware of, but peripherally, like the weave of a tapestry upon which other colors are painted. Her whole mind focused in crystal exactness against the mind that surged like a dark wave against hers. The power born in her from the touch of the dragon’s mind strengthened and burned, forcing him back. Her understanding of his name was a many-pointed weapon in her hands. In time Morkeleb sank to his haunches again, and back to his sphinx position.
In her mind his voice said softly, You know you do not need me, Jenny Waynest, to fly over the mountains. You know the form of the dragons and their magic. One of them you have put on already.
The other I might put on, she replied, for you would help me in that, to be free of my will. But you would not help me put it off again.
The deeps of his eyes were like falling into the heart of a star. If you wished it, I would.
The need in her for power, to separate herself from all that had separated her from its pursuit, shuddered through her like the racking heat of fever. “To be a mage you must be a mage,” Caerdinn had said.
He had also said, “Dragons do not deceive with lies, but with truth.” Jenny turned her eyes from those cosmic depths. You say it only because in becoming a dragon, I will cease to want to hold power over you, Morkeleb the Black.
He replied, Not ‘only,’ Jenny Waynest.
Like a wraith he faded into the darkness.
Though still exhausted from the battle at the Gates, Jenny did not sleep that night. She sat upon the steps, as she had sat awake most of the night before, watching and listening—for the King’s men, she told herself, though she knew they would not come. She was aware of the night with a physical intensity, the moonlight like a rime of molten silver on every chink and crack of the scarred steps upon which she sat, turning to slips of white each knotted weed-stem in the scuffed dust of the square below. Earlier, while she had been tending to John by the fire in the Market Hall, the bodies of the slain rioters had vanished from the steps, though whether this was due to fastidiousness on Morkeleb’s part or hunger, she wasn’t sure.
Sitting in the cold stillness of the night, she meditated, seeking an answer within herself. But her own soul was unclear, torn between the great magic that had always lain beyond her grasp and the small joys she had cherished in its stead—the silence of the house on Frost Fell, the memory of small hands that seemed to be printed on her palms, and John.
John, she thought, and looked back through the wide arch of the Gate to where he lay, wrapped in bearskins beside the small glow of the fire.
In the darkness she made out his shape, the broad-shouldered compactness that went so oddly with the whippet litheness of his movements. She remembered the fears that had driven her to the Deep to seek medicines— that had driven her first to look into the dragon’s silver eyes. Now, as then, she could scarcely contemplate years of her life that did not—or would not—include that fleeting, triangular smile.
Adric had it already, along with the blithe and sunny half of John’s quirky personality. Ian had his sensitivity, his maddening, insatiable curiosity, and his intentness. His sons, she thought. My sons.
Yet the memory of the power she had called to stop the lynch mob on these very steps returned to her, sweetness and terror and exultation. Its results had horrified her, and the weariness of it still clung to her bones, but the taste that lingered was one of triumph at having wielded it. How could she, she wondered, have wasted all those years before this beginning? The touch of Morkeleb’s mind had half-opened a thousand doors within her. If she turned away from him now, how many of the rooms behind those doors would she be able to explore? The promise of the magic was something only a mageborn could have felt; the need, like lust or hunger, something only the mageborn would have understood. There was a magic she had never dreamed of that could be wrought from the light of certain stars, knowledge unplumbed in the dark, eternal minds of dragons and in the singing of the whales in the sea. The stone house on the Fell that she loved came back to her like the memory of a narrow prison; the clutch of small hands on her skirts, of an infant’s mouth at her breast, seemed for a time nothing more than bonds holding her back from walking through its doors to the moving air outside.
Was this some spell of Morkeleb’s? she wondered, wrapping the soft weight of a bearskin more tightly around her shoulders and gazing at the royal blue darkness of the sky above the western ridge. Was it something he had sung up out of the depths of her soul, so that she would leave the concerns of humans and free him of his bondage to her?
Why did you say, “Not ‘only,’” Morkeleb the Black?
You know that as well as I, Jenny Waynest.
He had been invisible in the darkness. Now the moonlight sprinkling his back was like a carpet of diamonds and his silver eyes were like small, half-shut moons. How long he had been there she did not know—the moon had sunk, the stars moved. His coming had been like the floating of a feather on the still night.
What you give to them you have taken from yourself. When our minds were within one another, I saw the struggle that has tortured you all your life. I do not understand the souls of humans, but they have a brightness to them, like soft gold. You are strong and beautiful, Jenny Waynest. I would like it if you would become one of us and live among us in the rock islands of the northern seas.
She shook her head. I will not turn against those that I love.
Turn against? The sinking moonlight striped his mane with frost as he moved his head. No. That I know you would never do, though, for what their love has done to you, they would well deserve it if you did. And as to this love you speak of, I do not know what it is—it is not a thing of dragons. But when I am freed of the spells that bind me here, when I fly to the north again, fly with me. This is something also that I have never felt—this wanting of you to be a dragon that you can be with me. And tell me, what is it to you if this boy Gareth becomes the slave of his father’s woman or to one of his own choosing? What is it to you who rules the Deep, or how long this woman Zyerne can go on polluting her mind and her body until she dies because she no longer recalls enough about her own magic to continue living? What is it to you if the Winterlands are ruled and defended by one set of men or another, or if they have books to read about the deeds of yet a third? It is nothing, Jenny Waynest. Your powers are beyond that.
To leave them now would be to turn against them. They need me.
They do not need you, the dragon replied. Had the King’s troops killed you upon these steps, it would have been the same for them.
Jenny looked up at him, that dark shape of power— infinitely more vast than the dragon John had slain in Wyr and infinitely more beautiful. The singing of his soul reechoed in her heart, magnified by the beauty of the gold. Clinging to the daylight that she knew against the calling of the dark, she shook her head again and said, It would not have been the same.
She gathered the furs about her, rose, and went back into the Deep.
After the sharpness of the night air, the huge cavern felt stuffy and stank of smoke. The dying fire threw weird flickers of amber against the ivory labyrinth of inverted turrets above and glinted faintly on the ends of the broken lamp chains that hung down from the vaulted blackness. It was always so, going from free night air to the frowsty stillness of indoors, but her heart ached suddenly, as if she had given up free air for a prison forever.
She folded the bearskin, laid i
t by the campfire, and found where her halberd had been leaned against the few packs they had brought with them from the camp. Somewhere in the darkness, she heard movement, the sound of someone tripping over a plaid. A moment later Gareth’s voice said softly, “Jenny?”
“Over here.” She straightened up, her pale face and the metal buckles of her sheepskin jacket catching the low firelight. Gareth looked tired and bedraggled in his shirt, breeches, and a stained and scruffy plaid, as unlike as possible to the self-conscious young dandy in primrose-and-white Court mantlings of less than a week ago. But then, she noted, there was less in him now than there had been, even then, of the gawky and earnest young man who had ridden to the Winterlands in quest of his hero.
“I must be going,” she said softly. “It’s beginning to turn light. Gather what kindling you can, in case the King’s men return and you have to barricade yourselves behind the inner doors in the Grand Passage. There are foul things in the darkness. They may come at you when the light is gone.”
Gareth shuddered wholeheartedly and nodded.
“I’ll tell Polycarp how things stand. He should come back here to get you, if they didn’t blast shut the ways into the Deep. If I don’t make it to Halnath...”
The boy looked at her, the heroically simple conclusions of a dozen ballads reverberant in his shocked features.
She smiled, the pull of the dragon in her fading. She reached up the long distance to lay a hand on his bristly cheek. “Look after John for me.”
Then she knelt and kissed John’s lips and his shut eyelids. Rising, she collected a plaid and her halberd and walked toward the clear slate-gray air that lay like water outside the darker arch of the Gate.
As she passed through it, she heard a faint north-country voice behind her protest, “Look after John, indeed!”
CHAPTER XV
LIGHT WATERED THE darkness, changing the air from velvet to silk. Cold cut into Jenny’s hands and face, imbuing her with a sense of strange and soaring joy. The high cirques and hanging valleys of the Wall’s toothy summits were stained blue and lavender against the charcoal gray of the sky; below her, mist clung like raveled wool to the bones of the shadowy town. For a time she was alone and complete, torn by neither power nor love, only breathing the sharp air of dawn.
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