ness. Last night's watching and the night's before weighed
her bones, and she knew she would have to abandon her
search. But knowledge of her own inadequacy drove her,
206 Barbara Hambly
questing inward into the forbidden heart of the Deep,
desperate to find what she might before she returned to
the surface to do what she could with what she had.
She stepped through a door into a dark place that echoed
with her breathing.
She had felt cold before, but it seemed nothing now;
nothing compared to the dread that congealed around her
heart.
She stood in the place she had seen in the water bowl,
in the visions of John's death.
It shocked her, for she had come on it unexpectedly.
She had thought to find an archive there, a place of teach-
ing, for she guessed this to be the heart and center of the
blank places on Dromar's ambiguous maps. But through
a knotted forest of stalactites and columns, she glimpsed
only empty darkness that smelled faintly of the wax of a
thousand candles, which slumped like dead things in the
niches of the rock. No living thing was there, but she felt
again that sense of evil and she stepped cautiously forward
into the open spaces of black toward the misshapen stone
altar.
She laid her hands upon the blue-black, soapy-feeling
stone. In her vision the place had been filled with mut-
tering whispers, but now there was only silence. For a
moment, dark swirlings seemed to stir in her mind, the
inchoate whisperings of fragmentary visions, but they
passed like a groundswell, leaving no more aftertaste than
a dream.
Still, they seemed to take from her the last of her
strength and her will; she felt bitterly weary and suddenly
very frightened of the place. Though she heard no sound,
she whirled, her heart beating so that she could almost
hear its thudding echo in the dark. There was evil there,
somewhere—she knew it now, felt it close enough to leer
over her shoulder. Shifting the bulging satchel upon her
shoulder, she hastened like a thief across the slithery dark-
Dragonsbane 207
ness of the gnomes' dancing floor, seeking the ways that
would lead her out of the darkness, back to the air above.
Morkeleb's mind had guided her down into the abyss,
but she could feel no touch of it now. She followed the
marks she had made, runes that only she could see, drawn
upon the walls with her forefinger. As she ascended through
the dark rock seams and stairs of amber flowstone, she
wondered if the dragon were dead. A part of her hoped
that he was, for the sake of the people of these lands, for
the gnomes, and for the Master; a part of her felt the same
grief that she had, standing above the dragon's corpse in
the gully ofWyr. But there was something about that grief
that made her hope still more that the dragon was dead,
for reasons she hesitated to examine.
The Grand Passage was as dark as the bowels of the
Deep had been, bereft of even the little moonlight that
had leaked in to illuminate it before; but even in the utter
darkness, the air here was different—cold but dry and
moving, unlike the still, brooding watchfulness of the heart
of the Deep.
Her wizard's sight showed her the dark, bony shape
of the dragon's haunch lying across the doorway, the bris-
tling spears of his backbone pointing inward toward her.
As she came nearer she saw how sunken the scaled skin
lay on the curve of the bone.
Listen as she would, she heard no murmur of his mind.
But, the music that had seemed to fill the Market Hall
echoed there still, faint and piercing, with molten shivers
of dying sound.
He was unconscious—dying, she thought. Do you think
this man will live longer than I? he had asked.
Jenny unslung her plaid from her shoulder and laid the
thick folds over the cutting knives of the dragon's spine.
The edges drove through the cloth; she added the heavy
sheepskin of her jacket and, shivering as the outer cold
208 Barbara Hambly
sliced through the thin sleeves of her shift, worked her
foot onto the largest of the spines. Catching the doorpost
once again for leverage, she swung herself nimbly up and
over. For an instant she balanced on the haunch, feeling
the slender suppleness of the bones under the steel scales
and the soft heat that radiated from the dragon's body;
then she sprang down. She stood for a moment, listening
with her ears and her mind.
The dragon made no move. The Market Hall lay before
her, blue-black and ivory with the feeble trickle of starlight
that seemed so bright after the utter night below the ground.
Even though the moon had set, every pot sherd and skewed
lampframe seemed to Jenny's eyes outlined in brightness,
every shadow like spilled ink. The blood was drying,
though the place stank of it. Osprey still lay in a smeared
pool of darkness, surrounded by glinting harpoons. The
night felt very old. A twist of wind brought her the smell
of woodsmoke from the fire on Tanner's Rise.
Like a ghost Jenny crossed the hall, shivering in the
dead cold. It was only when she reached the open night
of the steps that she began to run.
CHAPTER XI
AT DAWN SHE felt John's hand tighten slightly around
her own.
Two nights ago she had worked the death-spells, weav-
ing an aura of poison and ruin—the circles of them still
lay scratched in the earth at the far end of the Rise. She
had not slept more than an hour or so the night before
that, somewhere on the road outside Bel, curled in John's
arms. Now the drifting smoke of the low fire was a smudge
of gray silk in the pallid morning air, and she felt worn
and chilled and strange, as if her skin had been sand-
papered and every nerve lay exposed. Yet she felt strangely
calm.
She had done everything she could, slowly, meticu-
lously, step by step, following Miss Mab's remembered
instructions as if the body she knew so well were a strang-
er's. She had given him the philters and medicines as the
gnomes did, by means of a hollow needle driven into the
veins, and had packed poultices on the wounds to draw
from them the poison of the dragon's blood. She had
traced the runes of healing where the marks of the wounds
cut the paths of life throughout his body, touching them
209
210 Barbara Hambly
with his inner name, the secret of his essence, woven into
the spells. She had called him patiently, repeatedly, by
the name that his soul knew, holding his spirit to his body
by what force of magic she could muster, until the med
icines could take hold.
She had not thought that she would succeed. When
she did, she was exhausted past grief or joy, able to think
no further than the
slight lift of his ribcage and the crease
of his blackened eyelids with his dreams.
Gareth said softly, "Will he be all right?" and she nod-
ded. Looking at the gawky young prince who hunkered
at her side by the fire, she was struck by his silence.
Perhaps the closeness of death and the endless weariness
of the night had sobered him. He had spent the hours
while she was in the Deep patiently heating stones and
placing them around John's body as he had been told to
do—a dull and necessary task, and one to which, she was
almost certain, she owed the fact that John had still been
alive when she had returned from the dragon's lair.
Slowly, her every bone hurting her to move, she put
off the scuffed scarlet weight of his cloak. She felt scraped
and aching, and wanted only to sleep. But she stood up,
knowing there was something else she must do, worse
than all that had gone before. She stumbled to her med-
icine bag and brought out the brown tabat leaves she
always carried, dried to the consistency of leather. Break-
ing two of them to pieces, she put them in her mouth and
chewed.
Their wringing bitterness was in itself enough to wake
her, without their other properties. She had chewed them
earlier in the night, against the exhaustion that she had
felt catching up with her while she worked. Gareth watched
her apprehensively, his long face haggard within the
straggly frame of his green-tipped hair, and she reflected
that he must be almost as weary as she. Lines that had
existed only as brief traces of passing expressions were
Dragonsbane 211
etched there now, from his nostrils to the comers of his
mouth, and others showed around his eyes when he took
off his broken spectacles to rub the inner corners of the
lids—lines that would deepen and settle into his manhood
and his old age. As she ran her hands through the loosened
cloud of her hair, she wondered what her own face looked
like, or would look like after she did what she knew she
must do.
She began collecting medicines into her satchel once
more.
"Where are you going?"
She found one of John's plaids and wrapped it about
her, all her movements stiff with weariness. She felt
threadbare as a piece of worn cloth, but the uneasy strength
of the tabat leaves was already coursing through her veins.
She knew she would have to be careful, for the tabat was
like a usurer; it lent, but it had a way of demanding back
with interest when one could least afford to pay. The moist
air felt cold in her lungs; her soul was oddly numb.
"To keep a promise," she said.
The boy watched her with trepidation in his earnest
gray eyes as she shouldered her satchel once more and
set off through the misty silences of the ruined town toward
the Gates of the Deep.
"Morkeleb?"
Her voice dissipated like a thread of mist in the stillness
of the Market Hall. Vapor and blue morning shadow
cloaked the Vale outside, and the light here was gray and
sickly. Before her the dragon lay like a dropped garment
of black silk, held to shape only by its bonings. One wing
stretched out, where it had fallen after the convulsions of
the night before; the long antennae trailed limp among the
ribbons of the mane. Faint singing still lay upon the air,
drawing at Jenny's heart.
He had given her the way through the Deep, she
212 Barbara Hambly
thought; it was John's life that she owed him. She tried
to tell herself that it was for this reason only that she did
not want that terrible beauty to die.
Her voice echoed among the upended ivory turrets of
the roof. "Morkeleb!"
The humming changed within her mind, and she knew
he heard. One delicate, crayfish antenna stirred. The lids
of silver eyes slipped back a bare inch. For the first time
she saw how delicate those lids were, tinted with subtle
shades of violet and green within the blackness. Looking
into the white depths they partly shielded, she felt fear,
but not fear for her body; she felt again the cross-blowing
winds of present should and future if, rising up out of the
chasms of doubt. She summoned calm to her, as she sum-
moned clouds or the birds of the hawthorn brakes, and
was rather surprised at the steadiness of her voice.
"Give me your name."
Life moved in him then, a gold heat that she felt through
the singing of the air. Anger and resistance; bitter resis-
tance to the last.
"I cannot save you without knowing your name," she
said. "If you slip beyond the bounds of your flesh, I need
something by which to call you back."
Still that molten wrath surged through the weakness
and pain. She remembered Caerdinn saying, "Save a
dragon, slave a dragon." At that time, she had not known
why anyone would wish to save the life of such a creature,
nor how doing so would place something so great within
your power. Cock by its feet...
"Morkeleb!" She walked forward, forgetting her fear
of him—perhaps through anger and dread that he would
die, perhaps only through the tabat leaves—and laid her
small hands on the soft flesh around his eyes. The scales
there were tinier than the ends of needles. The skin felt
like dry silk beneath her hand, pulsing with warm life.
She felt again that sense, half-fright, half-awe, of taking
Dragonsbane 213
a step down a road which should not be trodden, and
wondered if it would be wiser and better to turn away
and let him die. She knew what he was. But having touched
him, having looked into those diamond eyes, she could
more easily have given up her own life.
In the glitter of the singing within her mind, one single
air seemed to detach itself, as if the thread that bound
together the complex knots of its many harmonies had
suddenly taken on another color. She knew it immediately
in its wholeness, from the few truncated fragments Caer-
dinn had whistled for her in a hedgerow one summer day.
The music itself was the dragon's name.
It slid through her fingers, soft as silken ribbons; taking
it, she began to braid it into her spells, weaving them like
a rope of crystal around the dragon's fading soul. Through
the turns of the music, she glimpsed the entrance to the
dark, starry mazes of his inner mind and heart and, by
the flickering light of it, seemed to see the paths that she
must take to the healing of his body.
She had brought with her the medicines from the Deep,
but she saw now that they were useless. Dragons healed
themselves and one another through the mind alone. At
times, in the hours that followed, she was terrified of this
healing, at others, only exhausted past anything she had
ever experienced or imagined, even in the long night
before. Her weariness grew, en
compassing body and brain
in mounting agony; she felt entangled in a net of light and
blackness, struggling to draw across some barrier a vast,
cloudy force that pulled her toward it over that same
frontier. It was not what she had thought to do, for it had
nothing to do with the healing of humans or beasts. She
summoned the last reserves of her own power, digging
forgotten strengths from the marrow of her bones to battle
for his life and her own. Holding to the ropes of his life
took all this strength and more that she did not have; and
in a kind of delirium, she understood that if he died, she
214 Barbara Hambly
would die also, so entangled was her essence in the starry
skeins of his soul. Small and clear, she got a glimpse of
the future, like an image in her scrying-stone—that if she
died, John would die within the day, and Gareth would
last slightly less than seven years, as a husk slowly hol-
lowed by Zyeme's perverted powers. Turning from this,
she clung to the small, rock-steady strength of what she
knew: old Caerdinn's spells and her own long meditations
in the solitude among the stones of Frost Fell.
Twice she called Morkeleb by his name, tangling the
music of it with the spells she had so laboriously learned
rune by rune, holding herself anchored to this life with
the memory of familiar things—the shapes of the leaves
of plants, gentian and dog's mercury, the tracks of hares
upon the snow, and wild, vagrant airs played on the
pennywhistle upon summer nights. She felt the dragon's
strength stir and the echo of his name return.
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