Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  “After being fed chewed-up human essences instead of controlled spells, it would be a wonder if it didn’t become unpredictable,” John said, with his usual good-natured affability.

  The gnome’s high voice was scornful. “What can a warrior know of such things? A warrior hired to slay the dragon, who has,” he added, with heavy sarcasm, “signally failed in even that task.”

  “I suppose you’d rather he’d signally succeeded?” Gareth demanded hotly. “You’d have had the King’s troops coming at you through the Deep by this time.”

  “Lad.” John reached patiently out to touch the angry prince’s shoulder. “Let’s don’t fratch. His opinion does me no harm and shouting at him isn’t going to change it.”

  “The King’s troops would never have found their way through the Deep, even with the gates unbolted,” Balgub growled. “And now the gates are locked; if necessary we will seal them with blasting powder—it is there and ready, within yards of the last gate.”

  “If Zyerne was leading them, they would have found the way,” Polycarp returned. The links of the too-large mail shirt he wore over his gown rattled faintly as he folded his arms. “She knows the way to the heart of the Deep well enough from the Deeping side. As you all saw, from there to the underground gates of the Citadel it’s an almost straight path. And as for the Stone not having been affected by what she has put into it...” He glanced down at the stooped back and round white head of the gnome perched in the carved chair beside him. “You are the only Healer who escaped the dragon to come here, Balgub,” he said. “Now that the dragon is no longer in the Deep, will you go in and use the Stone?”

  The wide mouth tightened, and the green eyes did not meet the blue.

  “So,” said the Master softly.

  “I do not believe that Mab was right,” Balgub insisted stubbornly. “Nevertheless, until she, I, and the remaining Healers in Bel can examine the thing, I will not have it tampered with for good or ill. If it came to saving the Citadel, or keeping Zyerne from the Deep, yes, I would risk using it, rather than let her have it.” Little and white as two colorless cave shrimp, his hands with their smooth moonstone rings closed upon each other on the inkstained tabletop. “We have sworn that Zyerne shall never again have the use of the Stone. Every gnome—and every man...” He cast a glance that was half-commanding, half-questioning up at the Master, and Polycarp inclined his head slightly, “—in this place will die before she lays a hand upon what she seeks.”

  “And considering what her powers will be like if she does,” Poly carp added, with the detached speculation of a scholar, “that would probably be just as well.”

  “Jen?”

  Jenny paused in the doorway of the makeshift guest room to which she and John had been assigned. After the windy ramparts, the place smelled close and stuffy, as the Market Hall had last night. The mingled scents of dusty paper and leather bindings of the books stored there compounded with the moldery odors of straw ticks that had gone too long without having the straw changed; after the grass-and-water scents of the east wind, they made the closeness worse. The lumpish shapes of piles of books heaped along two walls and the ghostly scaffolding of scroll racks lining the third made her think of John’s overcrowded study in the north; several of the volumes that had been put here to make room for refugees trapped by the siege had been taken from their places and already bore signs of John’s reading. John himself stood between the tall lights of two of the pointed windows, visible only as a white fold of shirt sleeve and a flash of round glass in the gloom.

  She said, “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

  “I can’t be on the broad of my back forever.” Through his fatigue, he sounded cheerful. “I have the feeling we’re all going to be put to it again in the near future, and I’d rather do it on my feet this time.”

  He was silent for a moment, watching her silhouette in the slightly lighter doorway.

  He went on, “And for a woman who hasn’t slept more than an hour or so for three nights now, you’ve no room to speak. What is it, Jen?”

  Like a dragon, she thought, he has a way of not being lied to. So she did not say, “What is what?” but ran her hands tiredly through her hair and crossed to where he stood.

  “You’ve avoided speaking to me of it—not that we’ve had time to do so, mind. I don’t feel you’re angry with me, but I do feel your silence. It’s to do with your power, isn’t it?”

  His arm was around her shoulder, her head resting against the rock-hardness of his pectoral, half-uncovered by the thin muslin shirt. She should have known, she told herself, that John would guess.

  So she nodded, unable to voice the turmoil that had been all day in her mind, since the dragon’s flight and all the night before. Since sunset she had been walking the ramparts, as if it were possible to outwalk the choice that had stalked her now for ten years.

  Morkeleb had offered her the realms of the dragons, the woven roads of the air. All the powers of earth and sky, she thought, and all the years of time. The key to magic is magic; the offer was the answer to all the thwarted longings of her life.

  “Jen,” John said softly, “I’ve never wanted you to be torn. I know you’ve never been complete and I didn’t want to do that to you. I tried not to.”

  “It wasn’t you.” She had told herself, a hundred years ago it seemed, that it was her choice, and so it had been— the choice of doing nothing and letting things go on as they were, or of doing something. And, as always, her mind shrank from the choice.

  “Your magic has changed,” he said. “I’ve felt it and I’ve seen what it’s doing to you.”

  “It is calling me,” she replied. “If I embrace it, I don’t think I would want to let go, even if I could. It is everything that I have wanted and worth to me, I think, everything that I have.”

  She had said something similar to him long ago, when they had both been very young. In his jealous possessiveness, he had screamed at her, “But you are everything that I have or want to have!” Now his arms only tightened around her, as much, she sensed, against her grief as his own, though she knew the words he had spoken then were no less true tonight.

  “It’s your choice, love,” he said. “As it’s always been your choice. Everything you’ve given me, you’ve given freely. I won’t hold you back.” Her cheek was pressed to his chest, so that she only felt the quick glint of his smile as he added, “As if I ever could, anyway.”

  They went to the straw mattress and huddle of blankets, the only accommodation the besieged Citadel had been able to offer. Beyond the windows, moisture glinted on the black slates of the crowded stone houses below; a gutter’s thread was like a string of diamonds in the moonlight. In the siege camps, bells were ringing for the midnight rites of Sarmendes, lord of the wiser thoughts of day.

  Under the warmth of the covers, John’s body was familiar against hers, as familiar as the old temptation to let the chances of pure power go by for yet another day. Jenny was aware, as she had always been, that it was less easy to think about her choices when she lay in his arms. But she was still there when sleep finally took her, and she drifted into ambiguous and unresolved dreams.

  CHAPTER XVI

  WHEN JENNY WAKENED, John was gone.

  Like a dragon, in her dreams she was aware of many things; she had sensed him waking and lying for a long while propped on one elbow beside her, watching her as she slept; she had been aware, too, of him rising and dressing, and of the slow painfulness of donning his shirt, breeches, and boots and of how the bandages pulled painfully over the half-healed mess of slashes and abrasions on his back and sides. He had taken her halberd for support, kissed her gently, and gone.

  Still weary, she lay in the tangle of blankets and straw-ticks, wondering where he had gone, and why she felt afraid.

  Dread seemed to hang in the air with the stormclouds that reared dark anvil heads above the green distances north of Nast Wall. There was a queer lividness to the light that streamed through the na
rrow windows, a breathless sense of coming evil, a sense that had pervaded her dreams...

  Her dreams, she thought confusedly. What had she dreamed?

  She seemed to remember Gareth and the Master Polycarp walking on the high battlements of the Citadel, both in the billowing black robes of students, talking with the old ease of their interrupted friendship. “You must admit it was a singularly convincing calumny,” Polycarp was saying.

  Gareth replied bitterly, “I didn’t have to believe it as readily as I did.”

  Polycarp grinned and drew from some pocket in his too-ample garments a brass spyglass, unfolding its jointed sections to scan the fevered sky. “You’re going to be Pontifex Maximus one day, Cousin—you need practice in believing ridiculous things,” And looking out toward the road that led south he had stared, as if he could not believe what he saw.

  Jenny frowned, remembering the cloudy tangles of the dream.

  The King, she thought—it had been the King, riding up the road toward the siege camps that surrounded the Citadel. But there had been something wrong with that tall, stiff form and its masklike face, riding through the sulfurous storm light. An effect of the dream? she wondered. Or had the eyes really been yellow—Zyerne’s eyes?

  Troubled, she sat up and pulled on her shift. There was a wash bowl in a comer of the room near the window, the surface of the water reflecting the sky like a piece of smoked steel. Her hand brushed across it; at her bidding, she saw Morkeleb, lying in the small upper courtyard of the Citadel, a small square of stone which contained nothing save a few withered apple trees, a wooden lean-to that had once held gardening equipment and now, like every other shelter in the Citadel, housed displaced books. The dragon lay stretched out like a cat in the pallid sunlight, the jeweled bobs of his antennae flicking here and there as if scenting the welter of the air, and beside him, on the court’s single granite bench, sat John.

  The dragon was saying, Why this curiosity, Dragonsbane? That you may know us better, the next time you choose to kill one of us?

  “No,” John said. “Only that I may know dragons better. I’m more circumscribed than you, Morkeleb—by a body that wears out and dies before the mind has seen half what it wants to, by a mind that spends half its time doing what it would really rather not, for the sake of the people who’re in my care. I’m as greedy about knowledge as Jenny is—as you are for gold, maybe more so—for I know I have to snatch it where I can.”

  The dragon sniffed in disdain, the velvet-rimmed nostril flaring to show a surface ripple of deeper currents of thought; then he turned his head away. Jenny knew she ought to feel surprise at being able to call Morkeleb’s image in the water bowl, but did not; though she could not have phrased it in words, but only in the half-pictured understandings of dragon-speech, she knew why it had formerly been impossible, but was possible to her now. Almost, she thought, she could have summoned his image and surroundings without the water.

  For a time they were silent, man and dragon, and the shadows of the black-bellied thunderheads moved across them, gathering above the Citadel’s heights. Morkeleb did not look the same in the water as he did face to face, but it was a difference, again, that could not be expressed by any but a dragon. A stray wind shook the boughs of the cronelike trees, and a few spits of rain speckled the pavement of the long court below them. At its far end, Jenny could see the small and inconspicuous—and easily defensible—door that led into the antechambers of the Deep. It was not wide, for the trade between the Citadel and the Deep had never been in anything bulkier than books and gold, and for the most part their traffic had been in knowledge alone.

  Why? Morkeleb asked at length. If, as you say, yours is a life limited by the constraints of the body and the narrow perimeters of time, if you are greedy for knowledge as we are for gold, why do you give what you have, half of all that you own, to others?

  The question had risen like a whale from unguessed depths, and John was silent for a moment before answering. “Because it’s part of being human, Morkeleb. Having so little, we share among ourselves to make any of it worth having. We do what we do because the consequences of not caring enough to do it would be worse.”

  His answer must have touched some chord in the dragon’s soul, for Jenny felt, even through the distant vision, the radiant surge of Morkeleb’s annoyance. But the dragon’s thoughts sounded down to their depths again, and he became still, almost invisible against the colors of the stone. Only his antennae continued to move, restless, as if troubled by the turmoil in the air.

  A thunderstorm? Jenny thought, suddenly troubled. In winter?

  “Jenny?” She looked up quickly and saw the Master Polycarp standing in the tall slit of the doorway. She did not know why at first, but she shuddered when she saw hanging at his belt the brass spyglass he had used in her dream. “I didn’t want to wake you—I know you’ve been without sleep...”

  “What is it?” she asked, hearing the trouble in his voice.

  “It’s the King.”

  Her stomach jolted, as if she had missed one step of a stairway in darkness, the dread of her dream coalescing in her, suddenly hideously real.

  “He said he’d escaped from Zyerne—he wanted sanctuary here, and wanted above all to talk to Gar. They went off together...”

  “No!” Jenny cried, horrified, and the young philosopher looked at her in surprise. She snatched up and flung on the black robe she had been wearing earlier, dragging its belt tight. “It’s a trick!”

  “What...?”

  She pushed her way past him, shoving up the robe’s too-long sleeves over her forearms; cold air and the smell of thunder smote her as she came into the open and began to run down the long, narrow stairs. She could hear Morkeleb calling to her, faint and confused with distance; he was waiting for her in the upper court, his half-risen scales glittering uneasily in the sickly storm light.

  Zyerne, she said.

  Yes. I saw her just now, walking with your little prince to the door that leads down into the Deep. She was in the guise of the old King—they had already passed through the door when I spoke of it to Aversin. Is it possible that the prince did not know it, as Aversin said to me? I know that humans can fool one another with the illusions of their magic, but are even his own son and his nephew whom he raised so stupid that they could not have told the difference between what they saw and what they knew?

  As always, his words came as pictures in her mind— the old King leaning, whispering, on Gareth’s shoulder for support as they walked the length of the narrow court toward the door to the Deep, the look of pity, involuntary repulsion, and wretched guilt on the boy’s face—feeling repelled, and not knowing why.

  Jenny’s heart began to pound. They know the King has been ill, she said. No doubt she counted upon their forgiveness of any lapses. She will go to the Stone, to draw power from it, and use Gareth’s life to replace it. Where’s John now? He has to...

  He has gone after them.

  WHAT? Like a dragon, the word emerged only as a blazing surge of incredulous wrath. He’ll kill himself!

  He will likely be forestalled, Morkeleb replied cynically. But Jenny did not stay to listen. She was already running down the steep twist of steps to the lower court. The cobbles of the pavement there were uneven and badly worn, with tiny spangles of vagrant rain glittering among them like silver beads on some complex trapunto; the harshness of the stone tore at her feet as she ran toward that small, unprepossessing door.

  She flung back to the dragon the words, Wait for her here. If she reaches the Stone, she will have all power at her command—I will never be able to defeat her, as I did before. You must take her when she emerges...

  It is the Stone that binds me, the dragon’s bitter voice replied in her mind. If she reaches it, what makes you think I shall be able to do anything but her will?

  Without answering Jenny flung open the door and plunged through into the shadowy antechambers of the earth.

  She had seen them the previous morn
ing, when she had passed through with the gnomes who had gone to fetch John, Gareth, and Trey from the other side of the Deep. There were several rooms used for trade and business, and then a guardroom, whose walls were carved to three-quarters of their height from the living bone of the mountain. The windows, far up under the vaulted ceilings, let in a shadowy blue light by which she could just see the wide doors of the Deep itself, faced and backed with bronze and fitted with massive bars and bolts of iron.

  These gates were still locked, but the man-sized postern door stood ajar. Beyond it lay darkness and the cold scent of rock, water, and old decay. Gathering up her robes, Jenny stepped over the thick sill and hurried on, her senses probing ahead of her, dragonlike, her eyes seeking the silvery runes she had written on the walls yesterday to mark her path.

  The first passage was wide and had once been pleasant, with basins and fountains lining its walls. Now some were broken, others clogged in the months of utter neglect; moss clotted them and water ran shining down the walls and along the stone underfoot, wetting the hem of Jenny’s robe and slapping coldly at her ankles. As she walked, her mind tested the darkness before her; retracing yesterday’s route, she paused again and again to listen. The way through the Deep ran near the Places of Healing, but not through them; somewhere, she would have to turn aside and seek the unmarked ways.

  So she felt at the air, seeking the living tingle of magic that marked the heart of the Deep. It should lie lower than her own route, she thought, and to her left. Her mind returned uncomfortably to Miss Mab’s words about a false step leaving her to die of starvation in the labyrinthine darkness. If she became lost, she told herself, Morkeleb could still hear her, and guide her forth...

  But not, she realized, if Zyerne reached the Stone. The power and longing of the Stone were lodged in the dragon’s mind. If she got lost, and Zyerne reached the Stone and gained control of Morkeleb, there would be no daylight for her again.