Dragon's Bane

by Dragon's Bane(Lit)

This is the realm of the dragons, Morkeleb's voice said

  within her mind. The roads of the air. It is yours, for the

  stretching out of your hand.

  In the slant of the light they laid no shadow upon the

  ground, but it seemed to Jenny that she could almost see

  the track of their passage written like a ship's wake upon

  the wind. Her mind half-within the dragon's, she could

  sense the variations of the air, updraft and thermal, as if

  the wind itself were of different colors. With the dragon's

  awareness, she saw other things in the air as well—the

  paths of energy across the face of the world, the tracks

  that traveled from star to star, like the lines of force that

  were repeated in the body, smaller and smaller, in the

  spreads of dealt cards or thrown runes or the lie of leaves

  in water. She was aware of life everywhere, of the winter-

  white foxes and hares in the patchy snowlines beneath

  the thin scrum of cloud below, and of the King's troops;

  camped far down upon the road, who pointed and cried

  out as the dragon's dark shape passed overhead.

  They crossed the flank of the mountain to its daylight

  side. Before and below her, she saw the cliff and hill and

  Citadel ofHalnath, a spiky conglomerate of thrusting gray

  ramparts clinging like a mud-built swallow's nest to the

  massive shoulder of a granite cliff. From its feet, the land

  lay crisscrossed with wooded ravines to the silver curve

  of a river; mist blended with the blue of woodsmoke to

  veil the straggling lines of tents and guard posts, horse

  lines and trenches raw with yellow mud, that made up

  the siege camps. An open ring of battered ground lay

  between the walls and the camp, ravaged by battle and

  bristling with the burned-out shells of the small truck farms

  that nestled around the walls of any town. Beyond, to the

  north, the green stretches of the Marches vanished away

  under a gauze of mists, the horse- and cattle-lands that

  were the Master's fief and strength. From the river marshes

  where pewter waters spread themselves, a skein of dan-

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  defoot herons rose through the milky vapors, tiny and

  clear as a pen sketch.

  There. Jenny pointed with her mind toward the battle-

  ments of the high Citadel. The central court there. It's

  narrow, but long enough for us to land.

  Wind and her long hair lashed her eyes as the dragon

  wheeled.

  They have armored their walls, the dragon said. Look.

  Men were running about the ramparts, pointing and

  waving at the enormous wings flashing in the air. Jenny

  glimpsed catapults mounted on the highest turrets, coun-

  terweighted slings bearing buckets that burst suddenly

  into red flame and massive crossbows whose bolts could

  point nowhere but at the sky.

  We'll have to go in. Jenny said. I'll protect you.

  By catching the bolts in your teeth, wizard womanf

  Morkeleb asked sarcastically, circling away as some over-

  eager slinger slipped his ropes and a bucketful of naphtha

  described a curving trajectory, flames streaming like faded

  orange pennants against the brightness of the new day.

  What protection can you, a human, offer me?

  Jenny smiled to herself, watching the naphtha as it broke

  into blazing lumps in falling. None of them landed in the

  town on the slopes below—they knew their mathematics,

  these defenders ofHalnath, and how to apply them to bal-

  listics. For herself, she supposed she should have been ter-

  rified, to be carried this high above the reeling earth—if she

  fell, she would fall for a long time before she died. But

  whether it was her trust in Morkeleb, or the dragon's mind

  that enveloped hers in the thoughts of those who lived in

  the airstream, she felt no fear of it. Indeed, she almost be-

  lieved that, if she were to drop, she had only to spread out

  her own wings, as she did in dreams of flight.

  Small as toys on the walls of the Citadel, the machines

  of defense were being cranked around to bear upon them.

  They looked, at this distance, like nothing so much as

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  John's little models. And to think I grew impatient when

  he insisted upon showing me how every one of them fired.

  She smiled, half to Morkeleb and half to herself. Swing

  north, Morkeleb, and come at them from along that ridge.

  The problem with machines has always been that it requires

  only the touch of a wizard's mind to fox their balance.

  There were two engines guarding the approach she had

  set, a bolt-firing catapult and a spring-driven sling. She

  had thrown her magic before, conjuring images within her

  mind, to foul the bowstrings of bandits in the north and

  to cause their feet to find roots as they ran, or their swords

  to stick in their sheaths. Having seen the mechanisms

  of these weapons in John's models, she found this no

  harder. Ropes twisted in the catapult, jamming the knots

  when the triggering cord was jerked. With a dragon's

  awareness, she saw a man running in panic along the

  battlements; he knocked over a bucket into the mecha-

  nism of the sling so that it could not be turned to aim.

  The dragon swung lazily from the weapon's possible path,

  guided by the touch of Jenny's mind within his; and she

  felt, like a chuckle of dark laughter, his appreciation for

  the ease with which she thwarted the mechanical devices.

  You are small, wizard woman, he said, amused, but a

  mighty defender of dragons, nevertheless.

  Throwing her streaming hair back from her eyes. Jenny

  could see men on the battlements below them clearly now.

  They were clothed in makeshift uniforms, the black, bil-

  lowing gowns of scholars covered with battered bits of

  armor, some of it stamped with the royal arms and

  obviously taken from prisoners or the slain. They fled in

  all directions as the dragon drew near, save for one man

  tall, red-haired, and thin as a scarecrow in his ragged black-

  gown, who was swinging something to bear upon them

  that looked for a moment like a telescope—a metal tube

  braced upon stakes. The walls swooped closer. At the last

  moment Jenny saw harpoons stacked beside him and,

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  instead of glass in the tube's mouth, the glint of a metal

  point.

  The lone defender had a burning spill in one hand,

  lighted from one of the naphtha buckets. He was watching

  them come in, taking aim—Blasting powder, thought

  Jenny; the gnomes will have brought plenty up from the

  mines. She remembered John's abortive experiments with

  rockets.

  The scene rushed to meet them, until every chipped

  stone of the wall and every patch on the scholar's ragged

  gown seemed within reach of Jenny's hand. As he brought

  the spill down to the touch-hole, Jenny used her mind to

  extinguish the flame, as she would have doused a candle.

  Then she spread out her arms and cr
ied, "STOP!" at

  the top of her voice.

  He froze in mid-motion, the harpoon he had snatched

  from the pile beside him cocked back already over his

  shoulder, though Jenny could tell by the way he held it

  that he had never thrown one before and could not have

  hit them. Even at that distance, she saw wonder, curiosity,

  and delight on his thin face. Like John, she thought, he

  was a true scholar, fascinated with any wonder, though

  it carried his death upon its wings.

  Morkeleb braked in the air, the shift of his muscles

  rippling against Jenny's back. All men had fled the long,

  narrow court of the Citadel and the walls around it, save

  that single defender. The dragon hung for a moment like

  a hovering hawk, then settled, delicate as a dandelion

  seed, to perch on the wall above the shadowy well of the

  court. The great hind-talons gripped the stone as the long

  neck and tail counterbalanced, and he stooped like a vast

  bird to set Jenny on her feet upon the rampart.

  She staggered, her knees weak from shock, her whole

  body trembling with exhilaration and cold. The tall, red-

  haired young man, harpoon still in one hand, moved for-

  ward along the walkway, black robe billowing beneath an

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  outsize hauberk of chain mail. Though he was clearly

  cautious. Jenny thought from the way he looked at Mor-

  keleb that he could have stood and studied the dragon for

  hours; but there was a court-bred politeness in the way

  he offered Jenny his hand.

  It took her a moment to remember to speak in words.

  "Polycarp of Halnath?"

  He looked surprised and disconcerted at hearing his

  name. "I am he." Like Gareth, it took more than dragons

  or bandits to shake his eariy training; he executed a very

  creditable Dying Swan in spite of the harpoon.

  Jenny smiled and held out her hands to him. "I am

  Jenny Waynest, Gareth's friend."

  "Yes, there is a power sink in the heart of the Deep."

  Polycarp, Master of the Citadel ofHalnath and Doctor of

  Natural Philosophy, folded long, narrow hands behind his

  back and turned from the pointed arches of the window

  to look at his rescued, oddly assorted guests. "It is what

  Zyeme wants; what she has always wanted, since first

  she knew what it was."

  Gareth looked up from the ruins of the simple meal

  which strewed the plain waxed boards of the workroom

  table. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  The bright blue eyes flickered to him. "What could I

  have said?" he asked. "Up until a year ago I wasn't even

  sure. And when I was..." His glance moved to the gnome

  who sat at the table's head, tiny and stooped and very

  old, his eyes like pale green glass beneath the long mane

  of milk-white hair. "Sevacandrozardus—Balgub, in the

  tongue of men; brother of the Lord of the Deep who was

  slain by the dragon—forbade me to speak of it. I could

  not break his confidence."

  Beyond the tall windows, the turrets of the lower Cit-

  adel, the University, and the town beneath could be

  glimpsed, the sunlight on them yellow as summer butter,

  Dragonsbane 293

  though the buildings below were already cloaked in the

  shadows of the mountain as the sun sank behind its shoul-

  der. Sitting on the end of the couch where John lay. Jenny

  listened in quiet to the debating voices. Her body ached

  for sleep and her mind for stillness, but she knew that

  both would be denied her. Neither the words of the

  impromptu council nor the recollection of the trip back

  through the Deep with Polycarp and the gnomes to fetch

  the others had eradicated from her thoughts the soaring

  memory of the dragon's flight.

  She knew she ought not to let it hold her so. She ought

  to be more conscious of her own gladness that they were,

  at least for the moment, relatively safe and more preoc-

  cupied with their exchange of information with the Master

  and with plans for how to deal with the Stone and its

  mistress. Yet the flight and the memory of the dragon's

  mind had shaken her to the bones. She could not put that

  wild intoxication from her heart.

  The old gnome was saying, "It has always been for-

  bidden to speak of the Stone to outsiders. After it became

  clear that the girl Zyeme had heard of it somehow and

  had spied upon those who used it and learned its key, my

  brother, the Lord of the Deep, redoubled the anathema.

  It has from the darkness of time been the heart of the

  Deep, the source of power for our Healers and mages,

  and has made our magic so great that none dared to assault

  the Deep of Ylferdun. But always we knew its danger as

  well—that the greedy could use such a thing for their own

  ends. And so it was."

  Jenny roused herself from her thoughts to ask, "How

  did you know she had used it?" Like the others, she had

  bathed and was now dressed like them all in the frayed

  black gown of a scholar of the University, too large for

  her and belted tight about her waist. Her hair, still damp

  from washing, hung about her shoulders.

  The gnome's light eyes shifted. Grudgingly, he said,

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  "To take power from the Stone, there must be a return.

  It gives to those who draw upon it, but later it asks back

  from them. Those who were used to wielding its power—

  myself, Taseldwyn whom you know as Miss Mab, and

  others—could feel the imbalance. Then it corrected itself,

  or seemed to. I was content." He shook his head, the

  opals that pinned his white hairflashing in the diffuse light

  of the long room. "Mab was not."

  "What return does it ask?"

  For a moment his glance touched her, reading in her,

  as Mab had done, the degree other power. Then he said,

  "Power for power. All power must be paid for, whether

  it is taken from your own spirit, or from the holding-sink

  of others. We, the Healers, of whom I was chief, used to

  dance for it, to concentrate our magic and feed it into the

  Stone, that others might take of its strength and not have

  their very life-essences drawn from them by it—the woman

  Zyeme did not know how to make the return of magic to

  it, did not even leam that she should. She was never

  taught its use, but had only sneaked and spied until she

  learned what she thought was its secret. When she did

  not give back to it, the Stone began to eat at her essence."

  "And to feed it," said Jenny softly, suddenly under-

  standing what she had seen in the lamplight of Zyeme's

  room, "she perverted the healing spells that can draw

  upon the essences of others for strength. She drank, like

  a vampire, to replace what was being drunk from her."

  In the pale light of the window, Polycarp said, "Yes,"

  and Gareth buried his face in his hands. "Even as she can

  draw upon the Stone's magic at a distance, it draws upon

  her. I am glad," he added, the tone of his lig
ht voice

  changing, "to see you're still all right, Gar."

  Gareth raised his head despairingly. "Did she try to

  use you?"

  The Master nodded, his thin, foxy face grim. "And

  when I kept my distance and made you keep yours, she

  Dragonsbane 295

  turned to Bond, who was the nearest one she could prey

  upon. Your father..." He fished for the kindest words to

  use. "Your father was of little more use to her by that

  time."

  The prince's .fist struck the table with a violence that

  startled them all—and most of all Gareth himself. But he

  said nothing, and indeed, there was little he could say, or

  that any could say to him. After a moment. Trey Clerlock

  rose from the couch in the comer, where she had been

  lying like a child playing dress-up in her flapping black

  robe, and came over to rest her hands upon his shoulders.

  "Is there any way of destroying her?" the girl asked,

  looking across the table to the tiny gnome and the tall

  Master who had come to stand at his side.

  Gareth turned to stare up at her in shock, having, man-

  like, never suspected the ruthless practicality of women.

  "Not with the power she holds through the King and

  through the Stone," Polycarp said. "Believe me, I thought

  about it, though I knew I truly would face a charge of

  murder for it." A brief grin flickered across his face. "But

  as I ended up facing one anyway..."

  "What about destroying the Stone, then?" John asked,

  turning his head from where he lay flat on his back on a

  tall-legged sleeping couch. Even the little he had been

  able to eat seemed to have done him good. In his black