Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  The sky was bright. They’d all be waking soon.

  He hugged Adric tight, fighting desperately against the desire to take the boy with him. For he would need help, he knew. It was in his mind also that it was very possible he was seeing his son for the last time. Damn it, he thought, damn it, damn it, damn it…

  “Wherever she is, your mum’ll know where I’ve gone,” he said. His throat ached with the effort of keeping his voice from shaking. “We’ll make out all right.”

  The balloons were dragging hard on the tiny craft. It was time to go.

  “You pull that rope.” John took a deep breath. “All the moorings’ll let go at once.” He swung himself up the rope ladder, scrambled over the gunwale and caught his boot on a curved metal segment of the dragon-slayer’s steering cage, nearly precipitating himself ten feet to the ground. “You take care of your sister.”

  Adric raised his hand. “You take care of yourself.” “I’ll see you when I’m back.”

  A cock crowed in the village. All over the moor birds were crying their territories. The dawn bells rang, calling those few who were interested to the worship of the Lord of the Sun. Sarmendes, golden son of day… But all John saw, as Adric gave a mighty and delighted yank on the mooring rope, was the faded lettering of Juronal’s account that was embedded in his mind.

  The dragons all died, and the mages also.

  The Hold sank away below him. Wind took the sails.

  The dragons all died, and the mages also.

  John set the sails for the north.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Like its namesake, the Milkweed rode the silver dawn. Each tree and roof of Alyn Village passed beneath and John felt he could name every thatch and leaf. Fields he knew, walls, sheep and sheepdogs, the Brazen Hussy Inn, laundry, and cats on walls. Later he saw Far West Riding, and in the peat bogs that gleamed like flakes of steel farmers and peat-cutters shouted good-natured greetings: Would he need rescuing this time? Herd-boys pointed and stared, then cursed as their sheep fled. Later still, where the trees failed and only bogs and lichen and rocks rolled mile upon mile below, the great herds of reindeer and elk fled also, and hawks in flight circled near him to see, and then away.

  It was a shining time. John felt as if his whole soul and body were permeated in light.

  Early in the day, when the wind lay from the east, there was no sound at all save for the throb and crack of the sails, and the groan of the rigging in the gusts. Toward noon the wind came around from the west and the bitter north, and John let out some of his ballast—water from the barracks court well, dangling beneath the craft in rawhide sacks—looking for where the currents of the wind changed higher up, as eighteen months of experimental flights had shown him it did. He found enough of a difference high up that he could shift the sails to tack into it, for he was a good sailor, in water or in air. The beauty of the land below, dizzying and tiny, took his breath away.

  Had it been his first flight he knew he’d never have survived. Like a child he’d have stared at the ground or the hills or the wonderments of the birds hanging so close to him in the air, and so have come to grief a thousand times. Heronax’s notes about ballast and steering had been less than helpful. For most of the day he was able to pick out and name every stream and tor, every copse and ruined farm, but later he got out his parchments and drew maps with sticks of coarse charcoal and lead: silly and idiosyncratic, as were all his drawings, and he entertained himself by giving them absurd names.

  When the winds turned completely against him, he took in sail and dropped the anchor into the trees near Gagney’s Pond. He dragged the Milkweed down by main strength and a dozen pulleys and gears, for he didn’t dare let out any of the heated air. The atmosphere was still closer to earth. He took on as much ballast as he could carry, cranked the engine to life, and the fan-blades made a great clicking and whirring as they pressed the Milkweed forward.

  He anchored at what had been a watchtower on Cair Corbie, barely a ring of stone now, and climbed down the ladder to build a supper fire. Wrapped in plaids and furs he sat cross-legged on the stumps of old walls and ate burned barley-bannocks, and gazed north across treeless barrens where the King’s Law had never run, a million mosquitoes and gnats whining in his ears. According to Dotys’ Histories, Crow Tower had boasted woodlots around its base, and there was always a pyre standing ready to be kindled in warning, though, maddeningly, the part of the volume that spoke of what the tower watched against was missing. Few trees grew hereabouts anyway, and as far as John could see through the moonstone light, there was no sign there’d ever been a wood about the tower … Still, he looked north and wondered.

  Iceriders, probably. Or some of their long-forgotten kin. The Kinwars and the plague had drawn the King’s soldiers south long ago. Something had certainly destroyed this tower and emptied all the lands between it and Far West Riding, which still boasted a formidable wall.

  Probably, thought John, slapping for the thousandth time at a whining invisible attacker, the mosquitoes drove them back, or likelier ate them alive.

  Weary though he was, he lingered for a long while, watching the lands lose their color. It seemed to him that he could descry their shape, formed of every shade of translucent blue, until the late moon rose and washed all things in frost and magic. He fetched out his hurdy-gurdy and played its great wild wailing voice in a song he’d written for Jenny, wanting her with him, not only because of what he knew he must face but to share this beauty with her, this nightfall and these sights, and the wonder of the day’s flight. He touched the red ribbon, still bravely braided into his hair.

  From high up, just before dropping anchor, he’d seen the horns of the Tralchet Mountains, white-crusted and cloaked in glaciers whose arms ended abruptly in the green-black sea. It was a desperate distance for the second day of flight, with the heat-spells of the hothwais slowly failing. The gnomes who’d given them to him had said they’d last for three solid days, but he had his doubts.

  Still, there was nothing else for it. The gnomes of Tralchet Deep were his only hope of success in his quest, and he could only pray they’d heard his name from their kinfolk. In time he climbed the ladder, and with his telescope sought in the southern heavens the comet he’d calculated from ancient writings should be there but wasn’t. Then he put in as much cranking of the engine-machinery as he could manage before rolling himself in his plaids and bearskins to sleep. It seemed to him that he lay awake a long time, watching the seven moon-white balloons jostle in the night breeze and, over the wicker gunwales, the dim-shining glimmer of the northern lights, blue and purple and white, rippling in the opal sky.

  By morning the Milkweed had sunk a good twenty feet. This wasn’t as bad as John had feared, but it wasn’t good. Mist had come up in the night, so when he woke before dawn from exhausted slumber he had a moment’s panic, unable to see, as if he had been struck blind. But the next moment the comforting icy clamminess told him that it was only one of the killer fogs of the moors. Mooneaters, they were called, or kidth-fogs, after the three magic sisters—or priestesses, according to the Elucidus Lapidarius—who were said to travel in them seeking to devour travelers’ souls. In a way it was a comfort. He’d checked the vicinity of Cair Corbie very thoroughly for tracks and had found nothing more sinister than evidence of tundra wolves, but it would be a gie clever foe indeed who could find and climb the Milkweed’s anchor-rope in fog like this.

  He felt along the gunwale to the ropes of the ballast bags. Kidth-fog seldom lay more than thirty feet high—he’d taken measurements against the side of the Alyn Hold tower for many years—so he emptied a little water from two bags on opposite sides of the boat, turn and turn, until the dim gray moons of the air bags slowly materialized overhead. Then, suddenly, as if rising through water, he was above the fog, vapors billowing around the wicker hull, through which gray stone hills rose distantly, islands in a lavender world of fading stars.

  The black tusks of the mountains had become cliffs on
the far shore of that numinous ocean. He let the ladder overside long enough to climb down and disengage the anchor, the boat drifting a little as he scrambled up again. It meant last night’s cold burned bannocks for breakfast instead of something fresh and hot, but the thought of dawn over such a world of brume was worth the exchange, and he gave the engines a few final cranks and set the levers. The fan-blades turned, strangely flashing in the half-light.

  If I die in the north, he thought, at least I will have had this.

  He only wished Jenny were there to share it.

  If Jen were here to share it there’d be gie less chance of me dyin ’in the north, but there you have it.

  Sunrise among the columns of rising vapors. Birds shooting through the surface like flying fish. The day moon glowing like God’s shaving mirror. Beauty beyond beauty beyond beauty, as the mists thinned and lifted and then dispersed and all the lands lay untouched and unknown in the morning light below.

  During the day John mapped, once the kidth-fog cleared, and set the sails, and assembled the vessel’s weapons: five small catapults with crossbows of southern steel and horn, armed with six-foot harpoons. Some were poisoned, with the last of the batch he and Ian had made up. Others contained corrosives, or incendiaries such as he’d cooked up from his ancient recipes to use last year against the Iceriders. How much good they’d do he didn’t know. Maybe none. If he encountered the wizard who had taken his son, they’d be useless.

  Ian, he thought, I’m doing the best I can.

  Sometimes he was able not to think about Ian’s eyes as he came down the hill toward the dragon; was able not to think about the dragon’s terrible gold opal gaze that turned to meet the boy. Sometimes he could think of nothing else.

  He played the pennywhistle against the clicketing of the engines and the soft creak of the rigging. The twilight covered the mountains ahead in ghostly shadows, and in those shadows he saw spots of light, torches on the gates of Tralchet Deep.

  In the dark that dwelled in the hollows of the hottest fire, Jenny saw him anchor his ridiculous craft and climb the road to Tralchet Deep. Damn it, not NOW! she thought. Thrice in ten years rumor had reached them that it was the gnomes of Tralchet who were behind the bandits’ slave-raids on the farms, that the Lords of the Deep—Ragskar and Ringchin as they were known to humankind—used humans to work the deepest tunnels of the mines, where the air was foul and earth-skelks and cave-grues dwelled. John had not been reticent about speaking on the subject, even to the gnomes of Wyldoom whom he had served. It was this that had caused him to leave Wyldoom quickly and at night.

  So tired that she could barely sit up before the brazier of coals, she saw the gnomes come out of the gates, squat armored forms with their fantastic manes of pale hair drawn through the spikes of their helmets; saw them surround him with their halberds and their spears. John, not the least discomposed, brushed aside the blades with the back of his iron-spiked glove and strode up to the commander of the gate guards, grabbed his hand and shook it; she could almost hear him exclaiming “Muggychin me old wart …” or Mouldiwarp or Gundysnatch or whatever it was, “how is it with you? And are Their Majesties in? Would you let ’em know John Aversin’s here, there’s a good chap.”

  The gates shut behind him, a black steel maw. She had tried before to scry within Tralchet Deep in search of the slaves and had learned that the Deep was surrounded by scry-wards and gnome-magic. She lowered her forehead to her hand.

  John, she thought, I hope you know what you’re doing.

  All the day, and the day before, between bandaging men’s wounds and weaving healing magic yet one more time, she had returned to her harp and the spells of music that she channeled through it, through the water in the moss-grown stone in the ash grove, to the witch-girl in Balgodorus’ camp. The girl was still unconscious, she knew. Through the day she had glimpsed in her mind the orange smutch of torchlight on a tangle of thatch and poles, or in the midst of snatching a hasty meal of gruel and cheese had tasted in the cavities of her nose the harsh pong of smoke, and on her tongue a rude mix of herbs and cheap liquor. Then the vision would slip away, leaving her with a skull throbbing and a stomach queasy from shock.

  Now, with the night’s cool stillness whispering over the land, she put the vision of John aside, and with it all thought of him, as dragons did. Her harp slung over her back, she climbed down the rope on the wall and moved like a shadow into the woods.

  Beside the moss-grown stone she dipped her fingers into the dew, stroked moonlight into silky filaments, as if she were spinning thread. From those fibers she plaited again her web of power and cast it around her in a shining curtain: moonlight and stillness, starshine and peace. And when that web was woven she took up her harp and sang gently, softly, about hope, about longing; about a sweetness drowned and buried, forgotten for years.

  Child, she thought, it isn’t too late.

  Not long before dawn, she heard the whisper of rough wool against hazel branches and the tiny breath of grass beneath soft-booted feet. It was hard for her to bring her mind out of the music’s dark-shining depths. She timed the girl’s passage across the smaller spring, then the larger, heard when her jacket of pelts brushed the limbs of the birches just beyond the clearing.

  The music, funneled through the pool on the stone, drew the girl’s eyes to the stone first. Opening her own eyes, or rather adjusting them to common sight and common awareness, Jenny saw that she did not perceive her, thinking her only another tree, or a rock a little taller than the first.

  The witch-girl was tall for her age, thin with the thinness of those poor trappers and hunters who eked out livings in the deep woods, barely seeing any but their families from one season to another. These people, though not quite sunk to the level of Meewinks and Grubbies, were often brutish in the extreme. Jenny’s long acquaintance with their kind was studded with the knowledge of bestialities, of casual murder and incest, of almost unbelievable ignorance and want. The girl’s long, narrow face was marked with such crimes, sullen and dirty, great eyes peering from beneath the coarse tangle of her hair. Her heavy lips were soft and sad. She crossed the clearing to the stone and reached wonderingly to dip her fingers into the hollow with its water, bringing them up to touch the wet tips to her eyes, her mouth, her temples.

  Knowing the girl to be still dazed by the blow to her head, Jenny pitched her voice to the voice of dreaming, “What is it you want, child?”

  The girl shook her head. “Me ma,” she replied, the truth of her heart.

  “What is your name?”

  “Yseult.” She raised her head then, blinking at the dark small shape of Jenny in the darkness under the trees.

  As a mage herself the girl could see through illusion, and Jenny used none on her, only a gentleness she used for her own sons. “Is Balgodorus good to you?” She was not, Jenny thought, many years older than Ian.

  The girl nodded. Then she said, “No. Not no worse than Pa when he was liquored. Some of ’em’s worse.”

  “But you don’t have to let them hurt you,” Jenny reasoned softly. “That’s what magic’s for.”

  Yseult sniffled and rubbed her head, not the back of the skull where Jenny’s slung stone had cracked, but the temples. Jenny saw the girl’s days-old blacked eye and a triangular scar on the back of her hand where it looked like a hot knife-blade had been laid. There were older scars the same shape, and a mark on her chin such as a woman’s teeth make when a man punches her in the jaw. “I get scared,” she said. Her short square-ended fingers picked at the untied points of her shift. “Men starts yellin’ at me and knockin’ me about, and I can’t think. I get angry, like I could call down fire and fling it at ’em by handfuls, but then most times it don’t work. And Balgodorus, he says if any of the men, any of ’em, come to grief it’ll go the worse for me. I can’t make it work all the time.”

  The bitten nails twitched and pulled at the tapes, and the bruised dark eyelids veiled her eyes.

  Improper sourcing, thought
Jenny. No sense of where the power’s coming from, or how it changes, with the course of the moon and the movements of the stars. The poor child probably doesn’t even know how to track her own moon-cycles to take advantage of her body’s aura.

  “Would you like to leave him?”

  The lids flicked up, a glance like a deer seen in a thicket for an instant before flight. The girl’s body tensed, lifting on her toes.

  “What is it? Don’t go.” She put Power into this last, a gentle touch that could have been shaken off like the touch of a staying hand. The girl’s mouth trembled.

  “You’re from Rocklys.”

  Jenny shook her head. “I know Commander Rocklys,” she said. “I don’t work for her.”

  “You’re with her men, them in the fort. You came with her soldiers. You want to take me away. I got to go.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “You’re a witch.”

  “So are you.”

  “I ain’t! Not really.” She’d backed almost to the clearing’s edge. There were spells Jenny knew that might have constrained the girl, especially with her concentration shaken by fear and the dizziness of her wound. But Yseult would have felt them and known them for what they were.

  “Would you like to be?” she asked instead. And when Yseult’s eyes grew thoughtful, “Men don’t hurt witches.”

  Yseult came down off her toes, and her breath went out. One grubby finger explored her nostril.

  “You’re a witch?” It was a question now, and Jenny had the sense that the girl was looking at her for the first time. Seeing her as she was, not as her fears had painted her.

  Above the trees the dark was thinning. Jenny’s dragon-senses brought her a tangle of voices, tiny and sharp as images in far-off crystal: “I’ll teach the little bitch!” And, “You can’t trust ’em, Captain, not a one of ’em!”