Dragon's Bane
Page 38
on's soul, for Jenny felt, even through the distant vision,
the radiant surge ofMorkeleb's annoyance. But the drag-
on'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 other dream coalescing
in her, suddenly hideously real.
"He said he'd escaped from Zyeme—he wanted sanc-
tuary here, and wanted above all to talk to Gar. They
went off together..."
"No!" Jenny cried, horrified, and the young philoso-
pher looked at her in surprise. She snatched up and flung
Dragonsbane 305
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 Mor-
keleb 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 novv, 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 for-
giveness 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 cyni-
cally. But Jenny did not stay to listen. She was already
306 Barbara Hambly
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 morning, 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 busi-
ness, 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 pos-
tern 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;
Dragonsbane 307
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 yes-
terday'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, ifZyeme reached the Stone. The
power and longing of the Stone were lodged in the drag-
on's mind. If she got lost, and Zyeme reached the Stone
and gained control of Morkeleb, there would be no day-
light for her again.
She hurried her steps, passing the doors that had been
raised for the defense of the Citadel from the Deep, all
unlocked now by Gareth and the one he supposed to be
the King. By the last of them, she glimpsed the sacks of
blasting powder that Balgub had spoken of, that final
defense in which he had placed such faith. Beyond was
a branching of the ways, and she stopped again under
an arch carved to look like a monstrous mouth, with sta-
lactites of ivory grimacing in a wrinkled gum of salmon-
pink stone. Her instincts whispered to her that this was
t
he place—two tunnels diverged from the main one, both
going downwards, both to the left. A little way down the
nearer one, beside the trickle of water from a broken
gutter, a wet footprint marked the downward-sloping stone.
John's, she guessed, for the print was dragged and
slurred. Further along that way, she saw the mark of a
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drier boot, narrower and differently shaped. She saw the
tracks again, dried to barely a sparkle of dampness on
the first steps of a narrow stair which wound like a path
up a hillslope of gigantic stone mushrooms in an echoing
cavern, past the dark alabaster mansions of the gnomes,
to a narrow doorway in a cavern wall. She scribbled a
rune beside the door and followed, through a rock seam
whose walls she could touch with her outstretched hands,
downward, into the bowels of the earth.
In the crushing weight of the darkness, she saw the
faint flicker of yellow light.
She dared not call out, but fled soundlessly toward it.
The air was warmer here, unnatural in those clammy
abysses; she felt the subtle vibrations of the living magic
that surrounded the Stone. But there was an unwhole-
someness in the air now, like the first smell of rot in
decaying meat or like the livid greenness that her dragon
eyes had seen in the poisoned water. She understood that
Miss Mab had been right and Balgub wrong. The Stone
had been defiled. The spells that had been wrought with
its strength were slowly deteriorating, perverted by the
poisons drawn from Zyeme's mind.
At the end of a triangular room the size of a dozen
barns, she found a torch, guttering itself out near the foot
of a flight of shallow steps. The iron door at the top stood
unbolted and ajar, and across its threshold John lay
unconscious, scavenger-slugs already sniffing inquiringly
at his face and hands.
Beyond, in the darkness. Jenny heard Gareth's voice
cry, "Stop!" and the sweet, evil whisper of Zyeme's laugh-
ter.
"Gareth," the soft voice breathed. "Did you ever think
it was possible that you could stop me?"
Shaken now with a cold that seemed to crystallize at
the marrow of her bones. Jenny ran forward into the heart
of the Deep.
Dragonsbane 309
Through the forest of alabaster pillars she saw them,
the nervous shadows of Gareth's torch jerking over the
white stone lace that surrounded the open floor. His face
looked dead white against the black, baggy student gown
he wore; his eyes held the nightmare terror of every dream,
every encounter with his father's mistress, and the knowl-
edge of his own terrifying weakness. In his right hand he
held the halberd John had been using for a crutch. John
must have warned him that it was Zyeme, Jenny thought,
before he collapsed. At least Gareth has a weapon. But
whether he would be capable of using it was another mat-
ter.
The Stone in the center of the onyx dancing floor seemed
to glow in the vibrating dark with a sickly corpse light of
its own. The woman before it was radiant, beautiful as
the Death-lady who is said to walk on the sea in times of
storm. She looked younger than Jenny had ever seen her,
with the virgin fragility of a child that was both an armor
against Gareth's desperation and a weapon to pierce his
flesh if not his heart. But even at her most delicate, there
was something nauseating about her, like poisoned mar-
zipan—an overwhelming, polluted sensuality. Wind that
Jenny could not feel seemed to lift the soft darkness of
Zyeme's hair and the sleeves of the frail white shift that
was all that she wore. Stopping on the edge of the flow-
stone glades, Jenny realized that she was seeing Zyeme
as she had once been, when she first had come to this
place—a magebom girl-child who had run through these
lightless corridors seeking power, as she herself had sought
it in the rainy north; trying, as she herself had tried, to
overcome the handicap of its lack in whatever way she
could.
Zyeme laughed, her sweet mouth parting to show pearls
of teeth. "It is my destiny," she whispered, her small
hands caressing the blue-black shine of the Stone. "The
gnomes had no right to keep it all to themselves. It is
310 Barbara Hambly
mine now. It was meant to be mine from the founding of
the world. As you were."
She held out her hands, and Gareth whispered, "No."
His voice was thin and desperate as the wanting of her
clutched at his flesh.
"What is this No? You were made for me, Gareth.
Made to be King. Made to be my love. Made to father
my son."
Like a phantom in a dream, she drifted toward him
over the oily blackness of the great floor. Gareth slashed
at her with the torch, but she only laughed again and did
not even draw back. She knew he hadn't the courage to
touch her with the flame. He edged toward her, the hal-
berd in his hand, but Jenny could see his face rolling with
streams of sweat. His whole body shook as he summoned
the last of his strength to cut at her when she came near
enough—fighting for the resolution to do that and not to
fling down the weapon and crush her in his arms.
Jenny strode forward from the alabaster glades in a
blaze of blue witchlight, and her voice cut the palpitant
air like a knife tearing cloth. She cried, "ZYERNE!" and
the enchantress spun, her eyes yellow as a cat-devil's in
the white blaze of the light, as they had been in the woods.
The spell over Gareth snapped, and at that instant he
swung the halberd at her with all the will he had left.
She flung the spell of deflection at him almost
contemptuously; the weapon rang and clattered on the
stone floor. Swinging back toward him, she raised her
hand, but Jenny stepped forward, her wrath swirling about
her like woodsmoke and phosphorous, and flung at Zyeme
a rope of white fire that streamed coldly from the palm
of her hand.
Zyeme hurled it aside, and it splattered, sizzling, on
the black pavement. Her yellow eyes burned with unholy
light. "You," she whispered. "I told you I'd get the Stone—
and I told you what I'd do to you when I did, you ignorant
Dragonsbane 311
bitch. I'll rot the stinking bones of your body for what
you did!"
A spell of crippling and ruin beat like lightning in the
close air of the cavern, and Jenny flinched from it, feeling
all her defenses buckle and twist. The power Zyeme
wielded was like a weight, the vast shadow she had only
sensed before turned now to the weight of the earth where
it smote against her. Jenny threw it aside and writhed
from beneath it; but for a moment, she hadn't the strength
to do more. A second spell struck her, and a third, cramp-
ing and biting at the muscles and organs of her body,
smoking at the hem of her gown. She felt something break
within her and tasted blood in her mouth; her head
throbbed, her brain seemed to blaze, all the oxygen in
the world was insufficient to her lungs. Under the ruthless
battering she could do no more than defend herself; no
counterspell would come, no way to make it stop. And
through it all, she felt the weaving of the death-spells,
swollen and hideous perversions of what she herself had
woven, returning like a vengeance to crush her beneath
them. She felt Zyerne's mind, powered by the force of
the Stone, driving like a black needle of pain into hers;
felt the grappling of a poisoned and vicious essence seek-
ing her consent.
And why nofi she thought. Like the black slime of
bursting pustules, all her self-hatreds flowed into the light.
She had murdered those weaker than herself; she had
hated her master; she had used a man who loved her for
her own pleasure and had abandoned the sons of her body;
she had abandoned her birthright of power out of sloth
and fear. Her body screamed, and her will to resist all the
mounting agonies weakened before the scorching onslaught
of the mind. How could she presume to fight the evil of
Zyeme, when she herself was evil without even the excuse
of Zyeme's grandeur?
Anger struck her then, like the icy rains of the Win-
312 Barbara Hambly
terlands, and she recognized what was happening to her
as a spell. Like a dragon, Zyerne deceived with the truth,
but it was deception all the same. Looking up she saw
that perfect, evil face bending over her, the golden eyes
filled with gloating fire. Reaching out, Jenny seized the