robe, he looked like the corpse at a wake, washed and
tended and cheerful with his specs perched on the end of
his long nose. "I'm sure you could find a good Stonebane
someplace..."
"Never!" Balgub's wrinkled walnut face grew livid. "It
is the source of the healing arts of the gnomes! The source
of the strength of the Deep! It is ours..."
"It will do you precious little good if Zyeme gets her
hands on it," John pointed out. "I doubt she could break
through all the doors and gates you locked behind us on
our way up here through the Deep, but if the King's troops
296 Barbara Hambly
manage to breach the Citadel wall, that won't make much
difference."
"If Jenny could be given the key to the use of the
Stone..." suggested Gareth.
"No!" Balgub and Jenny spoke at once. All those w
the Master's long, scrubbed stone workroom, John
included, looked curiously at the witch of Wyr.
"No human shall touch it!" insisted the gnome with
shrill fury. "We saw the evil it did. It is for the gnomes,
and only for us."
"And I would not touch it if I could." Jenny drew her
knees up close to her chest and folded her arms around
them; Balgub, in spite of his protest, looked affronted that
the greatest treasure of the Deep should be refused. Jenny
said, "According to Mab, the Stone itself has been defiled
Its powers, and the spells of those that use it, are polluted
by what Zyeme has done."
"That is not true." Balgub's tight little face set in an
expression of obstinancy. "Mab insisted that the Stone's
powers were becoming unpredictable and its influence
evil on the minds of those who used it. By the heart of
the Deep, this is not so, and so I told her, again and again.
I do not see how..."
"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, "sig-
nally failed in even that task."
"I suppose you'd rather he'd signally succeeded?" Gar-
eth 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
Dragonsbane 297
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 Zyeme 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 Zyeme 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 Zyeme 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
298 Barbara Hambly
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," Polycarp 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 com-
pounded 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 over-
crowded 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
Dragonsbane 299
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
&nbs
p; 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 every-
thing that I have wanted and worth to me, I think, every-
thing that I have."
She had said something similar to him long ago, when
300 Barbara Humbly
they had both been very young. In his jealous posses-
siveness, 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 blan-
kets, 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 pain-
fully over the half-healed mess of slashes and abrasions
on his back and sides. He had taken her halberd for sup-
port, 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 narrow windows, a breath-
less sense of coming evil, a sense that had pervaded her
dreams...
Her dreams, she thought confusedly. What had she
dreamed?
301
302 Barbara Hambly
She seemed to remember Gareth and the Master Poly-
carp 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 won-
dered. Or had the eyes really been yellow—Zyeme'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 noth-
ing 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.
303
The dragon was saying. Why this curiosity. Dragons-
bane? 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 bet-
ter. 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 nos-
tril 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
<
br /> 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 pave-
ment of the long court below them. At its far end. Jenny
could see the small and inconspicuous—and easily defen-
sible—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
304 Barbara Hambly
is a life limited by the constraints of the body and the
narrow perimeters of time, if you are greedy for knowl-
edge 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 answer-
ing. "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 drag
Dragon's Bane Page 37
