Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  Rocklys is right, Jenny thought. We do need more mages, trained mages, if we are to defend the Realm. She reached out to the calling.

  Yseult stood in the clearing beside the carven stone. The slanted light of evening brazed the unwashed seaweed tangle of her hair. She held her cloak about her, shivering, and glanced over her thin shoulder again and again. Outside her own window Jenny heard the outcry and cursing of the men on the walls, the bandits attacking—yet again, always again.

  “M’am Jenny, please answer me!”

  “I’m here.” Jenny brushed her hair from her eyes, reached her mind through the scrying-crystal, through the water in the stone.

  “I’m here, Yseult.” Sleepiness gritted on her like millstones; her eyes and skin and soul felt scorched with it.

  “Come here and get me!” the girl pleaded desperately. “I’m supposed to be sleeping—he only lets me sleep when I’m not with him, with the men attackin’. I said I felt sick, and I do feel sick. He kicked me and said I better not be ailing. I can’t stand it anymore!” She turned, scared, at a sound, eyes huge with terror and guilt. There was a fresh bruise on her chin, and the dark marks of love-bites on her neck.

  “M’am Jenny, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I called him after you!” Her voice was hoarse and shaking. “You got no idea what he’s like when he’s mad, and he’s mad all the time now. Mad that you folks are holding out like you are, and mad because Rocklys be sending patrols and killin’ his men, and spoilin’ it for him when he tries to take food and slaves and that. M’am Jenny, I know I was bad but I was scared!”

  “It’s all right,” said Jenny, her mind racing. By the noise outside it was a heavy attack, and Pellanor’s half-starved defenders were at their last strength. “There’s an old house where Grubbies used to live, on the edge of Black Pond, do you know it?” The girl nodded and snuffled, wiping her nose. “Can you get there? Did you take some food with you when you left?”

  “A little. I got bread in my pockets.”

  Probably too frightened to hunt for any, and small blame to her.

  “All right. When you get to the house, make these marks at the four corners. Make them slowly, and as you’re making them, here are the words to say, and the colors to think about, and the things to hold in your mind …”

  It was the simplest of ward-spells, the most basic cantrips of There’s-Nobody-Here and Don’t-You-Have-Pressing-Business-Elsewhere? Still, as Jenny outlined each guardian sigil, repeated the words of Summoning and the focus of power, she wondered despairingly how much of it Yseult’s untrained and undisciplined mind would hold. A word said wrong, a sigil misdrawn or misplaced, would invalidate the spell, and Balgodorus’ men, who surely knew the location of the ruined house as well as she and Yseult did, would find her. Jenny, worn down from battling the crazy effects of the girl’s wild spells, felt a weary urge to slap Yseult senseless, to scream at her for being such a cowardly little fool as to do whatever her master said.

  Of course she’s a cowardly little fool, thought Jenny tiredly. If you were unable to defend yourself with your magic two-thirds of the time, if you’d been convinced all your life that you needed a man, any man, to run your life and tell you what to do, how brave would you be?

  Where the hell was she going to get the strength to turn back the bandit attack enough to sneak out? How was she going to drive them away quickly enough that Balgodorus wouldn’t find Yseult?

  What had John learned, or guessed, or seen, that had sent him north in that crazy contraption to seek the dragons in their lairs on the Skerries of Light?

  Ian …

  She tried not to think about what might have become of Ian.

  First things first.

  “Mistress Jenny!” Someone pounded at the door of her room. “Mistress Jenny, I’m sorry to wake you, but you must help us!”

  Smoke stung her nostrils. Jenny wanted to lay one vast comprehensive death-spell on them all.

  First things first. She traced out a power-circle on the floor, shut her mind to the noises, the smoke, the cold tingling of fear under her breastbone. Brought to mind the place and phase of the moon, calling it clear in her heart and memory, circling it with runes. Brought to mind the magics of the three oak trees that lay due north of the manor, and the ash that stood due south, speaking their names and the names of their magics. Called on the silver energies of the stream, positioning it exactly in her mind, aligning it with the deep, still power of standing water, the courtyard well …

  A little here. A little there.

  The stars invisible overhead by day. The granite and serpentine of the rock beneath the ground.

  Her bones, and the gold ribbons of dragon-strength that wound around them and through them, legacy of Morkeleb the Black.

  The power of the earth and the stars, feeding the dragon-magic.

  First things first. Find the girl Yseult and strengthen the wards around her, so that she would not be found—always supposing this was not a trap in the first place. Then redouble the attack against Balgodorus, sure now that her magic would not be counterspelled. It wouldn’t be easy, and he’d be searching for Yseult. Too much to hope that Yseult would be strong enough to help them against “her man.” Her man forsooth!

  At least, without Yseult scrying the woods, a messenger could get through to Rocklys.

  Jenny drew a deep breath, the slow fire of power filling her veins. A false glitter, she knew, and one that would take its toll on her later, but later was later. “Mistress … !” cried the voices outside, urgent, desperate. Her consciousness, altered by the concentrations of magic, heard them seemingly from a great distance away. Cold, as if, like the dragons, she floated weightless in the air.

  She spun a final scrim of gold about herself, a protection and a balancing, a shawl of light. Reaching with her magic, feeling where the other woman’s counterspells protected scaling-ladders, weapons, armor, and men. They had been at this game for weeks, shoving and scratching one another like animals in a pen. Counterspells marked the horses’ bridles, the axles, triggers, ropes of the catapults.

  The spells, thought Jenny, would have to be placed in the ground, or in the air.

  This was more difficult, and far more complicated than the usual battle-magic; this was the point at which a mage of lesser strength, but greater lore, could win over a stronger but less skilled opponent. During all the years of knowing herself to be weak, Jenny had learned any number of work-around magics, in the knowledge that even the simplest counterspell could overset the best she could offer. She went back to them in exhaustion, calling images of the battle in her scrying-crystal and placing spells of fire or smoke or temporary blindness in the air where Balgodorus’ men would cross them in their rush to attack, rather than on the men or the horses or the tools they used. The spells themselves were weak. Even her calling of power had not yielded much to her spent body and fatigued mind. But in her crystal’s heart she saw one of the bandits spring back from the base of the wall as the scaling-ladder burst into flame in his hands; saw another go shrieking and waving his arms into the bloodied, ruin-choked slop of the moat.

  She felt no triumph. Poor stupid louts, she thought, and pitied even their chief. To live as they lived, surrounded by brutality and hardship, seemed to her almost punishment enough for being what they were. Many of them had to die, for this would not cease their depredations on the weak; it was all they understood. But her heart ached for the children they had once been.

  Not many minutes later Pellanor came to the door of her chamber. He was wounded in the head and blood smeared his armor, but he stopped, looking in silently, and made to silently go. Jenny raised her head from her scrying-stone, “No.” Her mouth and face felt numb, as if speech were a great effort through the thick haze of power-spells and concentration. She raised her hand.

  The Baron’s grizzled eyebrows bunched down over the hatchet of his nose. “Are you all right? Can I fetch you something?”

  She shook her head.

&nbs
p; “They’re wavering,” he said. “They’ve broken, on the south wall. I thought you were spent, you need rest …”

  “I did,” Jenny said thickly. “I do. Not now.” She got to her feet. “I must go. Outside.”

  “Now? Over the wall?”

  She nodded, impatient at the flash of disbelief and anxiety in his voice. Did he think that after all this she’d run away? “Yseult,” she said, hoping that would explain all this and then realizing that it didn’t even come close. If the attackers were wavering before her renewed defenses, it wouldn’t be very many minutes before Balgodorus went back to fetch his mistress; wouldn’t be many minutes before the hunt was on. She had to reach Yseult and renew the warding-signs before then.

  But she couldn’t say it, couldn’t say anything. Only shook her head and muttered with great effort, “I’ll be back.”

  If Balgodorus even suspected Yseult had taken refuge within the manor, or changed sides to betray him, he would redouble his attacks and would never forgo his vengeance. She barely heard Pellanor’s arguments and questions at her heels as she made her way outside. Only once or twice she shook her head and repeated, “I must go. I’ll be back.”

  Men milled about under the south wall. A siege ladder burned in the mud of the ruined moat. Arrows flew back and forth, not nearly as many as there had been earlier; one of the manor children scurried along under the protection of the palisade, pulling out stuck enemy shafts for use tomorrow. Some of those missiles had been back and forth between sides six or eight times. Jenny’s spells and Yseult’s both marked the feathers. In spite of her weariness Jenny had to smile. John would be amused by that.

  “They’re breaking.” Pellanor looked behind him across the courtyard, to a woman signaling from the opposite wall. “Old Grond Firebeard’s decided to give us victory at last. Can you tell me where you’re going?”

  “Later.” Jenny shut her eyes, called to mind the copse of trees just opposite the northeast watchtower and summoned to it a blinding burst of colored light, so sharp that the glare of it penetrated her eyelids even here. She heard the robbers yell— although both she and Yseult had used such diversions on and off for weeks—and opening her eyes, saw them running in that direction. “Now!”

  Pellanor dropped the rope. Jenny swung over the sharpened stakes, dragged around her the rags of concealing spells, and let herself down quickly. Someone cried out, and an arrow broke against the stone of the wall near her shoulder. Too much to hope the spells protected her, exhausted as she was. Rather than strengthen them, which wouldn’t work anyway as long as she was still in their sight, she called instead the easier illusion that she was an elderly man, low in value in the slave market and running for his life.

  Someone shouted, “Don’t let him get away!” and a couple of arrows stuck in the earth, wide of their mark. Jenny tightened her grip on her halberd and bolted for the woods.

  Nymr sea-blue, violet-crowned…

  And somehow the turn of that music, medium-swift, trip-foot yet stately, spoke of the shape of the dragon John saw before him, circling the bare pale spires of the rock near which the Milkweed hovered, sixty feet below. Not dark like sapphires, nor yet the color of the sea—not these northern seas at any rate—more was he the color of lobelia or the bluest hearts of blue iris. But he was violet-crowned. The long, curving horns that grew from among the flower-bed mane were striped, white and purple; the ribbon-scales streaming in pennons from the shorter, softer fur gleamed a thousand shades of amethyst and plum. Long antennae swung and bobbed from the whole spiked and rippling cloud, and these were tipped with glowing damson lights. The dragon swung around once and hung motionless on the air like a gull, regarding him. Even at that distance John knew that the eyes, too, were violet, brilliant as handfuls of jewels.

  Don’t look at his eyes, he thought, bending his head down over the ebon and pearwood hurdy-gurdy, the wind gently rocking the swaying boat. Don’t look at his eyes.

  He played the tune that was Nymr’s, fingers moving true with long practice over the ivory keys. A hurdy-gurdy is a street instrument, made to be heard above din and at a great distance in open air. The music curled from the rosined wheel like colored ribbon unspooling: blue and violet.

  Nymr hung in the air for a moment longer, then tilted those vast blue butterfly wings and plunged straight down into the sea.

  John saw the wings tuck back, cleave water. From overhead, for two days now, he’d watched the movement of the fish in the ocean, seeing down through the creeping waves to the schools of huge seagoing salmon, swordfish, and marlin, pale shapes that flashed briefly into view and sank away again. The gulls and terns, gray and white and black, that wheeled about the cliff-girt promontory scattered and circled, then returned to mew about the balloons. The dragon speared the deep, plunging away in a long spume of silver bubbles. Creatures of heat and fire, thought John. How did they not die in the water’s cold?

  Stillness and silence. The waves broke in ruffles of foam on the rocks, without the slightest roll that spoke of shelving shallows anywhere beneath. Rather the rock rose straight out of the water, all cliffs, line behind jagged line. Dwarf juniper, heather, sea-oats furred them with the occasional wind-crippled tree; birds nested among them casually, like chickens on the rafters of a barn. The wind moaned through the rocks and John turned the fans of the Milkweed to hold the craft steady. The next island lay ten miles to the northwest. The sea horizon was pricked with them, thumb-tiny in distance. The gulls all opened their mouths and screamed …

  Then the dragon broke the waves in an upleap of water, purple and flashing in the fountain brilliance directly under the Milkweed. John grasped and swung on the rigging, causing the fragile craft to heel, and the tourmaline wing knifed past close enough to douse his face with spray. It had only to spit fire at him and he was done, he thought, swiveling one of the small catapults to bear as the dragon vanished above the air bags. Sixty feet above water, any fight would be a fight to death. Shadow crossed him, light translucent through the stretch of the wings.

  Then it was hovering in front of him again, rocking on the air as a boat rocks at anchor.

  John stepped back from the weapon, picked up the hurdy-gurdy, and played again the pixilated threnody of the dragon’s name.

  The swanlike head dipped and angled. The eyes faced front, a predator’s eyes. The entire great dripping body, thirty feet from beak-tip to the spiked and barbed pinecone of the tail, drifted closer.

  John felt a querying, a touch and a pat, cold and alien as long slender fingers, probing at his mind. He concentrated on the music, wondering if indeed the dragon’s name would keep the dragon from killing him. One of Gar’s ballads had Selkythar the Golden writing the Crimson Drake Ruilgir’s name on his shield, so the dragon’s fire rebounded and consumed its creator—not a technique John was eager to put to the test.

  Query again, sharper, pricking. He kept himself from looking up, knowing the amethyst eyes sought to capture his.

  ????, Songweaver.

  His heart was beating hard. “I came to work no one’s harm,” he said, raising his head but keeping his eyes on the lapis claws, the beaded azure enamel of the leg-spines. “I’m here seeking Morkeleb the Black. Does he dwell on these isles?”

  The mind slipped aside from his, indifference succeeding a momentary spark of curiosity. Morkeleb the Black had spoken to him mind to mind, in human words or what had felt like human words at the time. All he sensed here was a tumbling surge of images that came and went. For a moment he seemed to see Morkeleb swimming in a thick green sea or flying in thick green air, Morkeleb indefinably different from his memory. Black wings, black mane, black horns; black scales like ebony spikes along back and joints and nape. Black claws reaching out, to slide through a thing that billowed in the water/air before him like a great gelid cloud of poisonous diamond.

  Morkeleb in darkness, outlined by the light of stars. Reading the stars, thought John. Weightless in the Night beyond Night and scrying their light,
seeing where each star lay and what it was made of.

  Then Nymr’s mind turned away, with an almost palpable shrug.

  “I need to find him,” John said and averted his eyes quickly as the dragon floated around to face him, reaching for him with those crystalline mulberry eyes. All that came to him through his mind was a sense of dismissal, contempt:

  Tiny, peeping—the image was of a bird-baby in its nest— nothing. A flower scent passingly pretty. Devoured.

  Nymr floated off. John saw the bird-head cock, rise, and fall on its neck. The star-drake studied the Milkweed, air bags and catapults and wheels and flashing fan-blades. He felt the traces and echoes of the dragon’s curiosity, as if the creature were trying to fit together pieces of a puzzle. He felt it also when Nymr shrugged it away. Nymr’s mind closed, indifferent again. No threat. Nothing that affected him. Not a thing.

  Meaning, as he had heard Morkeleb say, Not a thing of dragons.

  John leaned on the tiller and put the Milkweed’s fans over a few degrees, strengthening their beat until the craft moved off around the towering crags, toward the next promontory, many miles away. Nymr hovered for a time, watching him—he was aware of the creature’s eyes on his back as he had seldom been aware of anything. Then the dragon plunged down into the ocean again, to emerge a few minutes later with a twelve-foot swordfish struggling in its claws.

  Jenny circled the Grubbie house three times before going in. The wards she’d showed Yseult glimmered on the slumped stone and mud of the walls, surprisingly strong. The girl had talent, and a genuine feel for the sources of power, once she had an idea of what they were and how to find them. Casting her awareness through the woods all around, Jenny detected no trace of ambush, no scent of men in the trees, no boot-broken twig or trampled mud. Yseult’s tracks, too, had been eradicated where they crossed soft ground, or hidden in the leaves and stones. Crouched in the gathering gloom, Jenny breathed on her crystal and whispered, “Yseult?”