Dragon's Bane

by Dragon's Bane(Lit)

  darkened with stubborn anger. "That knowledge is for-

  bidden to the children of men."

  Patiently, John said, "After all that's been done you

  here, I don't blame you for not wanting to give out the

  secrets of the Deep; but I need to know. I can't take the

  thing from the front. I can't fight something that big head-

  on. I need to have some idea where it will be lairing."

  "It will be lairing in the Temple of Sarmendes, on the

  first level of the Deep." Dromar spoke grudgingly, his

  pale eyes narrow with the age-old suspicion of a smaller,

  weaker race that had been driven underground millennia

  ago by its long-legged and bloodthirsty cousins. "It lies

  just off the Grand Passage that runs back from the Gates.

  The Lord of Light was beloved by the men who dwelt

  within the Deep—the King's ambassadors and then-

  households, and those who had been apprenticed among

  our people. His Temple is close to the surface, for the

  folk of men do not like to penetrate too far into the bones

  of the Earth. The weight of the stone unnerves them; they

  find the darkness disquieting. The dragon will lie there.

  There he will bring his gold."

  "Is there a back way into it?" John asked. "Through

  the priests' quarters or the treasuries?"

  Dromar said, "No," but the little gnome woman said,

  "Yes, but thou would never find it, Dragonsbane."

  "By the Stone!" The old gnome whirled upon her, smol-

  dering rage in his eyes. "Be silent, Mab! The secrets of

  the Deep are not for his kind!" He looked viciously at

  Jenny and added, "Nor for hers."

  John held up his hand for silence. "Why wouldn't I

  find it?"

  Mab shook her head. From beneath a heavy brow, her

  round, almost colorless blue eyes peered up at him, kindly

  and a little sad. "The ways lead through the warrens,"

  Dragonsbane 141

  she said simply. "The caverns and tunnels there are a

  maze that we who dwell there can learn, in twelve or

  fourteen years of childhood. But even were we to tell thee

  the turnings thou must take, one false step would con-

  demn thee to a death by starvation and to the madness

  that falls upon men in the darkness under the earth. We

  filled the mazes with lamps, but those lamps are quenched

  now."

  "Can you draw me a map, then?" And, when the two

  gnomes only looked at him with stubborn secrets in their

  eyes, he said, "Dammit, I can't do it without your help!

  I'm sorry it has to be this way, but it's trust me or lose

  the Deep forever; and those are your only choices!"

  Dromar's long, outward-curling eyebrows sank lower

  over the stub of his nose. "So be it, then," he said.

  But Miss Mab turned resignedly and began to rise. The

  ambassador's eyes blazed. "No! By the Stone, is it not

  enough that the children of men seek to steal the secrets

  of the Deep? Must thou give them up freely?"

  "Tut," Mab said with a wrinkled smile. "This Dragons-

  bane will have problems enow from the dragon, without

  going seeking in the darkness for others."

  "A map that is drawn may be stolen!" Dromar insisted.

  "By the Stone that lies in the heart of the Deep..."

  Mab got comfortably to her feet, shaking out her patched

  silken garments, and pottered over to the scroll-rack that

  filled one comer of the dim hall. She returned with a reed

  pen and several sheets of tattered papyrus paper in her

  hand. "Those whom you fear would steal it know the way

  to the heart of the Deep already," she pointed out gently.

  "If this barbarian knight has ridden all the way from the

  Winterlands to be our champion, it would be paltry not

  to offer him a shield."

  "And her?" Dromar jabbed one stumpy finger, laden

  with old-fashioned, smooth-polished gems, at Jenny. "She

  is a witch. What surety have we that she will not go

  142 Barbara Hambly

  snooping and spying, delving out our secrets, turning them

  against us, defiling them, poisoning them, as others have

  done?"

  The gnome woman frowned down at Jenny for a

  moment, her wide mouth pursed up with thought. Then

  she knelt beside her again and pushed the writing things

  across the table at Dromar. "There," she said. "Thou may

  draw the maps, and put upon them what thou will, and

  leave from them what thou will."

  "And the witch?" There was suspicion and hatred in

  his voice, and Jenny reflected that she was getting very

  tired of being mistaken for Zyeme.

  "Ah," said Miss Mab, and reaching out, took Jenny's

  small, scratched, boyish brown hands in her own. For a

  long moment she looked into her eyes. As if the small,

  cold fingers clasping hers stirred at the jewel heap of her

  dreams, Jenny felt the gnome woman's mind probing at

  her thoughts, as she had probed at Gareth's, seeking to

  see the shape of her essence. She realized that Miss Mab

  was a mage, like herself.

  Reflex made her stiffen. But Mab smiled gently and

  held out to her the depths of her own mind and soul—

  gentle and clear as water, and stubborn as water, too,

  containing none of the bitterness, resentments, and doubts

  that Jenny knew clotted the comers of her own heart.

  She relaxed, feeling as ashamed as if she had struck out

  at an inquiry kindly made, and felt some other own angers

  dissolving under that wise scrutiny. She felt the other

  woman's power, much greater than her own, but gentle

  and warm as sunlight.

  When Miss Mab spoke, it was not to Dromar, but to

  her. "Thou art afraid for him," she said softly. "And per-

  haps thou should be." She put out one round little hand,

  to pat Jenny's hair. "But remember that the dragon is not

  the greatest of evils in this land, nor is death the worst

  that can befall; neither for him, nor for thee."

  CHAPTER VII

  IN THE WEEK that followed. Jenny returned many times

  to the crumbling house in the Dockmarket. Twice John

  accompanied her, but John, for the most part, spent his

  days in the King's Gallery with Gareth, waiting for a sign

  from the King. His evenings he spent with the wild young

  courtiers who surrounded Zyeme, playing dancing bear,

  as he called it, and dealing as best he could with the slow

  torture of waiting for a combat that could cost his life.

  Being John, he did not speak of it, but Jenny felt it when

  they made love and in his silences when they were alone

  together, this gradual twisting of the nerves that was driv-

  ing him nearly mad.

  She herself avoided the Court for the most part and

  spent her days in the city or in the house of the gnomes.

  She went there quietly, wrapped in spells to conceal her

  from the folk in the streets, for, as the days ground by,

  she could feel the ugly miasma of hate and fear spreading

  through the streets like poisoned fog. On her way through

  the Dockmarket quarter, she would pass the big taverns—


  the Lame Ox, the Gallant Rat, the Sheep in the Mire—

  where the unemployed men and women who had come

  143

  144 Barbara Hambly

  in off the ruined farms gathered daily, hoping for a few

  hours' hire. Those in need of cheap labor knew to go

  there to find people who would move furniture or clean

  out stables for a few coppers; but with the winter storms

  making the shipping scarce and the high price of bread

  taking all the spare funds to be had, there were few enough

  who could afford to pay even that. None of the gnomes

  still living in the city—and there were many of them, in

  spite of the hardships—dared go by the Sheep in the Mire

  after noontime, for by that hour those within would have

  given up hope of work that day and would be concen-

  trating what little energy they had on getting drunk.

  So Jenny moved in her shadowy secrets, as she had

  moved through the lawless Winterlands, to visit the Lady

  Taseldwyn, who was called Miss Mab in the language of

  men.

  From the first, she had been aware that the gnome

  woman was a more powerful mage than she. But, rather

  than jealousy and resentment, she felt only gladness that

  she had found someone to teach her after all those years.

  In most things, Mab was a willing teacher, though the

  shape of the gnomes' wizardry was strange to Jenny, alien,

  as their minds were alien. They had no Lines, but seemed

  to transmit their power and knowledge whole from gen-

  eration to generation of mages in some fashion that Jenny

  did not understand. Mab told her of the healing spells for

  which the Deep was famous, of the drugs now sequestered

  there, lost to them as surely as the dragon's gold was lost,

  of the spells that could hold the soul, the essence of life,

  to the flesh, or of the more dangerous spells by which the

  life-essence of one person could be drawn to strengthen

  the crumbling life of another. The gnome woman taught

  her other spells of the magic underground—spells of crys-

  tal and stone and spiraling darkness, whose meaning Jenny

  could only dimly comprehend. These she could only mem-

  orize by rote, hoping that with later meditation, skill and

  Dragonsbane 145

  understanding would come. Mab spoke also to her of the

  secrets of the earth, the movement of water, and how

  stones thought; and she spoke of the dark realms of the

  Deep itself, cavern beneath cavern in endless succession

  of hidden glories that had never seen light.

  Once, she spoke of Zyeme.

  "Aye, she was apprenticed among us Healers." She

  sighed, putting aside the three-stringed dulcimer upon

  which she had been outlining to Jenny the song-spells of

  their craft. "She was a vain little girl, vain and spoiled.

  She had her talent for mockery even then—she would

  listen to the Old Ones among us, the great Healers, who

  had more power at their command than she could ever

  dream of, nodding that sleek little head others in respect,

  and then go and imitate their voices to her friends in

  Deeping."

  Jenny remembered the silvery chime of the sorceress's

  laughter at dinner and the way she had hurried her steps

  to make Dromar run after her if he would speak.

  It was early evening. For all its cold, the great hall of

  the gnomes' house was stuffy, the air stagnant beneath

  its massive arches and along the faded pavement of its

  checkered corridors. The noises of the streets had fallen

  to their dinnertime lull, save for the chiming of the clock

  towers all over the city and one lone kindling-peddler

  crying his wares.

  Mab shook her head, her voice low with remembrance

  of times past. "She was greedy for secrets, as some girls

  are greedy for sweets—covetous for the power they could

  give her. She studied out the hidden ways around the

  Places of Healing so that she could sneak and spy, hiding

  to listen in darkness. All power must be paid for, but she

  took the secrets of those greater than she and defiled

  them, tainted them—poisoned them as she poisoned the

  very heart of the Deep—yes, she did poison if—and

  turned all our strength against us."

  146 Barbara Hambly

  Jenny shook her head, puzzled. "Dromar said some-

  thing of the kind," she said. "But how can you taint spells?

  You can spoil your own magic, for it colors your soul as

  you wield it, but you cannot spoil another's. I don't under-

  stand."

  Mab glanced sharply at her, as if remembering her

  presence and remembering also that she was not one of

  the folk of the gnomes. "Nor should thou," she said in

  her soft, high voice. "These are things that concern the

  magic of gnomes only. They are not human things."

  "Zyeme seems to have made them human things."

  Jenny moved her weight on her heels, easing her knees

  on the hardness of the stone floor through the shabby

  cushion. "If it is, indeed, from the Places of Healing that

  she learned the arts that have made her the most powerful

  mage in the land."

  "Pah!" the gnome mage said in disgust. "The Healers

  of the Deep were more powerful than she—by the Stone,

  / was more powerful!"

  "Was?" Jenny said, perplexed. "I know that most of

  the Healers in the Deep were killed with the coming of

  the dragon; I had thought none of sufficient strength sur-

  vived to defy her. The magic of gnomes is different from

  the spells of men, but power is power. How could Zyeme

  have lessened yours?"

  Mab only shook her head furiously, so that her pale,

  web-colored hair whipped back and forth, and said, "These

  are the things of the gnomes."

  In those days Jenny did not see much of Zyerne, but

  the enchantress was often on her mind. Zyeme's influence

  pervaded the court like the faint waft of her cinnamon

  perfume; when Jenny was in the Palace confines, she was

  always conscious of her. However Zyeme had acquired

  her power and whatever she had done with it since. Jenny

  never forgot that it was so much greater than hers. When

  she neglected what tomes of magic John was able to pilfer

  Dragonsbane 147

  from the Palace library to sit with her scrying-stone,

  watching the tiny, soundless images of her sons skylarking

  perilously along the snow-covered battlements of the Hold,

  she felt a pang of guilt. Zyeme was young, at least ten

  years younger than she; her power shone from her like

  the sun. Jenny no longer felt jealousy and she could not,

  in all honesty, feel anger at Zyeme for having what she

  herself did not, as long as she was not willing to do what

  was needful to obtain that power. But she did feel envy,

  the envy of a traveler on a cold night who saw into the

  warmth of a lighted room.

  But when she asked Mab about Zyeme—about the

  powers that had once been less than Mab's, but now were

  greater; about why the gnomes had forbidden
her to enter

  the Deep—the little mage would only say stubbornly,

  "These are the things of the gnomes. They have naught

  to do with men."

  In the meantime John went his own way, a favorite of

  the younger courtiers who laughed at his extravagant bar-

  barism and called him their tame savage, while he held

  forth about engineering and the mating customs of pigs,

  or quoted classical authors in his execrable north-country

  drawl. And still, every morning, the King passed them

  by in the gallery, turning his dull eyes aside from them,

  and the etiquette of the Court forbade Gareth to speak.

  "What's his delay?" John demanded as he and Gareth

  emerged from the arched porticoes of the gallery into the

  chill, fleet sunlight of the deserted terrace after yet another

  futile day's waiting. Jenny joined them quietly, coming up

  the steps from the deserted garden below, carrying her

  harp. She had been playing it on the rocks above the sea

  wall, waiting for them and watching the rainelouds scud

  far out over the sea. It was the season of winds and sudden

  gales, and in the north the weather would be sleety and

  cold, but here days of high, heatless sunlight alternated

  with fogs and blowing rains. The matte, white day-moon

  148 Barbara Hambly

  was visible, sinking into the cloud wrack over the sea;

  Jenny wondered what it was that troubled her about its

  steady waxing toward its half. Against the loamy colors

  of the fallow earth, the clothes of Zyeme and her court

  stood out brightly as they passed on down into the garden,

  and Jenny could hear the enchantress's voice lifted in a

  wickedly accurate imitation of the gnomes' shrill speech.