Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  She had been reaching toward the spoon but now stayed her hand. In Morkeleb’s star-dark eyes she saw the echo of her own thought. And because she had lived many years with a naturalist who tinkered with flying machines and chemicals and clock-spring toys, she asked, “Exactly how much time?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “My only love,” breathed the Demon Queen, and her mouth, like a black blood-ruby, touched and traced John’s lips, the shape of his nose and the oval scar in the pit of his throat. “My servant and my love.” Her hand slipped down his arm, his flank; her skin under his answering caress was pale pink as the hearts of lilies, flawless as that of a young girl, and scented of sweet-olive and jasmine. Her hair was a coiled ocean of sable silk.

  She had the look, Jenny realized, of Kahiera Nightraven.

  Her body laid over John’s in the ember-cave of red velvet and candle flame, sinuous as a snake’s. Jenny tried to shut her eyes and look away. Warm arms embraced her, and Amayon’s voice breathed in her ear, I had to show you this, my darling. For your own good I had to show you. He turned from you, the moment he entered her realm.

  You are lying. Jenny tried to call to her memory the image of John dying in the rain, run through by Ian’s spear. She couldn’t. It had never happened and the lie had never been told.

  You are lying.

  But her body ached with the memory of Amayon’s pleasure-heat within her, with the gold-stained glory of domination and power. She struggled to wake but sank into memories of other embraces, delicious and degrading, and through them heard Amayon’s voice calling her name. Calling from the white shell where he was imprisoned, as her own heart was imprisoned in the flawed jewel in Caradoc’s silver bottle.

  I can still come back to you. I can still love you, as he never loved you. How could he love you, he who never understood?

  “Love?” came John’s voice softly through the haze of the dream. “Love?”

  She woke up with tears on her face and a desperate urge to know where exactly Amayon’s white shell was being kept. John was bending over her. And her first thought, swiftly shoved aside, was rage that John was there to keep her from going to search.

  His finger brushed her face. “You’re crying.”

  I’m crying because you lay with the Demon Queen!

  But that had been her dream, not his. Or maybe not his. Or she could not prove it had been his.

  She drew a shaky breath and wiped her face, which was indeed wet with tears. John had kindled the lamp beside his narrow bed, but the heavily latticed square of the chamber window— he was not yet being kept in a barred cell—was cinder-gray with dawn. “I’m beginning to understand why dealing with demon-kind is always an ill thing,” she said. “They don’t leave you alone. Not in sleep, not in waking, not in death.”

  His jaw tightened, and she saw the oval scar where the Demon Queen had marked him. Last night, after he had fallen asleep, she had turned back the blankets, and it had seemed to her that his body was marked with half-visible silvery traces that disappeared when she leaned close to look. The marks of the Queen’s lovemaking. The lines of possession.

  “We’ll get through this.” He cupped the side of her face in his palm.

  But in her heart she thought—or perhaps Amayon whispered to her, sometimes it was not possible to tell—They’re only waiting for you to leave, to get out the acid and the ax.

  “Miss Mab’s outside,” John said softly. “She says she’s sorry it’s so early, but she’s got word calling her back into the Deep.”

  Jenny pulled a voluminous robe over her head and sat up as the gnome-witch came in, followed by a servant. The servant bore a tray of braided breads, honey, clotted cream, and apples. “You lads all right out there?” John put his head out through the door to address the guards in the gallery. “Gaw, Polycarp should at least send you what I get in here,” he added, inspecting the bowls of porridge the men had before them. He went back and fetched a couple of apples from the tray.

  “No, thank you, sir,” said one of the soldiers, studying the fruit with a wary eye.

  John stood for a moment, the apple in his hand; Jenny saw the change in his eyes.

  Demon-caller. Trafficker with the Spawn. Helltreader.

  “Aye, well, then,” he said. And then, “I’m not their servant yet, y’know.”

  “No, sir,” said the man stolidly.

  John returned quietly to the room and bit into the apple himself.

  Miss Mab had opened the blue stone box. It contained white powder, which she touched with her spit-dampened finger and used to mark Jenny’s wrists, eyelids, and tongue. “How well this may work I know not,” said the gnome-witch, brushing back Jenny’s hair to peer into her eyes. “Thy heart is still prisoner within the talisman jewel, and it may be that nothing can be cured until it be freed.”

  Jenny nodded. She didn’t think she could endure another night of Amayon whispering to her in her dreams. Of the knife-crystal visions that had visited her: her own drunkenness, cruelty, and rut; Ian grosser, more sarcastic, more filthy of mind and more ingenious at the giving of pain to people and to animals as each day passed. Ian trapped in a jewel as she was still trapped, weeping in agony and humiliation, begging his demon to let him die.

  John in the arms of the Demon Queen.

  She shut her teeth on the pain and made herself nod.

  “Perhaps you can apply it again tomorrow,” she said. “With some spells I’ve found repeated applications to have effect when a single occasion has not the strength.”

  “Indeed I have so found,” replied the old gnome, carefully closing up the box. “I shall try again at sunset, if thou feel no better through the day. I should return from the Deep by that time. And in my home warren I shall try to weave other spells for your comfort, until such time as the healing takes hold. The Talking River beneath the ground is a stream of power, and its power grows as it flows deeper into the earth. By the time it passes singing over the Five Falls on the ninth level, where my warren lies, its influence can be woven into wreaths and braids, and such I will bring to you, to help you sleep without dreams, and Aversin also.”

  Jenny glanced quickly at those wise old pale eyes, praying that the gnome-witch could not read those dreams, but she could not interpret what she saw in Miss Mab’s wrinkled face.

  A guard came to fetch John, for the half-made Urchins were being brought into the courtyard. Jenny, who had dressed by that time in a plain brown and yellow dress such as servants wore, gathered her magic within her, to witch the senses of the guards that none might see her pass. But as she did so she felt Amayon’s mind, the strength of his will, redouble within her, in response to her calling of power. She felt, too, that curious dislocation, as if all things were seen through a fragment of glass—through the green crystal of the imprisoning jewel.

  Morkeleb had spoken of the Shadow-drakes putting aside their magic. It was hard to do. She simply walked as quietly as she could from the room in John’s wake, and the guards, having had no instructions concerning her, let her pass.

  It was said in the north that everything that could be bought and sold, was bought and sold in the Undermarket beneath Halnath Citadel, where the Marches of the Realm met Ylferdun Deep. The giant cavern, cut into the cliff on which the citadel stood, was the gate-court of the gnomes. Legend said they could seal that opening with a stone wall in the space of a night. The gates at the inner side of the huge chamber were certainly solid, closed fast night and day and guarded from four turrets. As she entered the Undermarket, Jenny could see in the stone floor the metal tracks on which the little gnome carts ran to carry goods in and out of the cavern.

  The gnomes mostly sold silver and gold, gems and objects wrought of rare alloys, or ingenious machines produced by their incomparable skill. In exchange, merchants brought spices and herbs, rare chemicals and salts. There was silk from the Seven Islands and the stiffer, drier silks of Gath and Nim; rare birds and the feathers of birds completely unknown in the nor
th; jade and porcelain and musk. In another part of the market oxen, pigs, and sheep were penned. These the gnomes bought with silver and copper, for they were fond of meat and in their caverns had only white cave-fish and mushrooms.

  The merchants set up tables in long rows, their wares laid out on blankets or bright cloths. Some erected booths or pavilions of wood, with flowers or bundles of fresh greens tied on the posts. Others put up tents, and near the front of the cavern, where the wind drew off the smoke, hawkers fried sausages and river fish or steamed sweet dumplings and custards. Thus the whole vast gloomy space smelled of hot fat and fresh flowers, of crushed greens, spices, sweat, stone, lamp oil, animals, dung, and blood. The noise in the vaulted space was terrific.

  Jenny walked from dealer to dealer in vessels of stone and glass, and finally settled on a snuff-bottle of alabaster as thin and brittle as paper—“So fine you can tell whether it contains nut-brown or betel, my lady!” enthused the huckster. Then she found a worker in colored glass who, after turning the bottle over in her calloused fingers, nodded and said, “Aye, I can enclose it in a vial, though the work of it’s so fine t’ were a shame to hide it.”

  “It’s a riddle,” said Jenny. “Designed for one who is clever enough to remove the glass without damaging the alabaster inside.”

  She paid for it in silver that Miss Mab had given her—neither she nor John had a penny of their own—and promised to return the following day for the finished vessel. Then she ascended the endless wearying flights of stairs, pausing to rest on the frequent landings where benches were set and vendors of lemonade and felafel plied their wares. At the citadel again she sought out the courtyard where John and Miss Tee, the gnome engineer, were instructing several dozen of the Master’s warriors in the use of the dragon-slaying Urchin machines.

  “It doesn’t need a deal of strength to haul the cage around,” John was saying. He stood on the wheeled engine platform surmounted only by the steering cage itself, stripped like his audience to singlet and breeches. Miss Tee—Ordagazedgwyn was her name among her own folk—worked among the craftsmen at the side of the court, assembling the other machines.

  “Keep your arms and legs soft—it’ll gie kill you if you go heavin’ about with all your might when you don’t have to. Just swing your body’s weight, and harden up at the end, like this …” He moved, the characteristic shift of weight necessary to guide the cage, and as he positioned each soldier, made sure they understood the balance necessary, the peculiar use of momentum.

  Watching him, Jenny’s soul seemed to knot itself behind her breastbone. He bore the demon’s mark in the pit of his throat, and the knowledge in his heart of what humankind would do to him before the ripening of the moon. But he was making sure these children—in their youth they seemed no more— understood enough about the machines that they’d stand a chance against dragons and magic.

  Jenny crossed to him, through the dust and clanging of hammers. She was half the courtyard away when he turned his head, his eyes seeking hers. It was as if his whole face grew light. “Jen.” He stepped down and took her hands and kissed her. “Miss Mab was out here before daybreak, Miss Tee tells me, markin’ each of our Urchins with magic chicken-tracks in whatever was in that red vial.” He gestured toward the dusty confusion of machinery. “She left the vial with me, for you to finish up. We’ve gie little time.”

  He glanced past her at the two bodyguards, leaning stolidly against the wall. Polycarp himself stood in the colonnade, blue eyes bright and filled with envy. Jenny felt it when John’s gaze crossed that of the Master. For a moment it seemed to her that she could see, with the thin slip of the waxing day-moon over his shoulder, the marks of the Demon Queen’s patterns down his arms and across his shoulders: Runes spelling out words that she could almost read. They faded the next instant, but his face looked as if he had not slept.

  But he asked her only, “How is it with you?”

  “Well.” She made herself smile.

  Shadow fell over the court; soundless dark wings. The students looked up, crying out and reaching for swords that no longer hung at their belts. Someone made a move for one of the catapults set up nearby, and John said, “Don’t shoot at your dancing-master, son; y’know how far in advance I had to book us the lesson?” He swung up into the unprotected cage and settled his feet into the straps. “You, Blondie. Up here with me, and hold tight. We’ll make the lot of you Dragonsbanes before the full moon.”

  Morkeleb circled high once, then dropped, striking and snatching. John whipped and jerked on the steering cage, spinning the platform clear of the blow. “You got to watch for his tail,” he called to the students who scattered in a wide, fascinated ring. “Head and tail, like right fist and left fist. Don’t waste your shots on his sides.” Morkeleb dove and snatched, slashed and hissed, and beside her, Jenny felt Polycarp shiver with awe and delight.

  It was, as John had said, a dancing lesson, a game of cat-and-mouse: graceful, deadly, and astonishingly agile and swift. Once Morkeleb got his claws under the platform and flipped it; John kicked his feet free, swung his weight on and under the cage, and with a lurch and a jerk got the platform on its wheels again. They must have counterweighted it, thought Jenny, after the battle at Cor’s Bridge. “Watch how the dragon moves,” panted John, waiting while the tall blond girl scrambled back onto the platform. “They have no weight, but they use their wings to balance and turn, see? When they shift, that’s when to try to get a shot off under the wing.” Only Jenny felt the steaming mental ripple of Morkeleb’s ire and felt in her mind the unspoken words that he did not send to John:

  Beware, little Songweaver I teach you that the demons’ hold may be broken, but I learn from you, too.

  She remembered his human face in the starlight, the lonely grief in his labyrinthine eyes. And it seemed to her that as the dragon passed before the afternoon sun, bone and muscle and sinew were momentarily only a trick of the light. She seemed to see not the black steel and enamel of muscle and bone, but only smoke shot with starlight, half-visible.

  Not human, she thought, and now not of dragons either. But he understands. Sometimes there is no way …

  Only trust in the mad Lord of Time to sort it all out.

  Oh, my friend, she thought. Oh, my friend.

  “Up you get.” John slapped the blond girl’s flank. “Feet in the straps. Grab the handles—one of you, get up here and let me show you how to crank the engine. They need a deal of that. There. Now. Off we go.”

  Polycarp crossed to where Jenny stood, slipping the black robe from his shoulders to stand in his singlet and hose. “I have to learn this,” he said, breathless with delight. “I have to try.”

  His young soldiers applauded wildly when they saw him coming, laughed and called out. Spread-eagled motionless in the Urchin’s cage against the pale sky, John regarded him in silence, then tilted his head a little and said, “You’ve your nerve.”

  The Master of Halnath looked away. The two bodyguards glanced at one another, started to speak, and then stopped. There was a silence, too, among the young warriors. Obviously none of them knew that John stood under sentence of burning alive the hour before the teind came due.

  Polycarp looked up again. “Do you understand?”

  “Aye. I understand.” John stepped from the cage and handed the Master up onto the platform, to the soldiers’ renewed cheers. Only afterward, when Jenny was examining the spell-wards Miss Mab had laid on the other Urchins, did John come over and take her aside. Morkeleb was patiently working with another pair of students, slowing his slashes and feints; Jenny could hear the rumble of his thoughts in the back of her mind, like a wolf-killer hound grumbling about being put to watch pups. The liquid in the Demon Queen’s vial, like the vial itself, was dark red, shiny, and thick. Miss Tee told her it had been thinned with water and painted on the frames with a doghair writing-brush, but the liquid did not thin. Rather, it seemed to convert the water into itself. It was as if the runes of safeguard and countermagi
c, traced up the ribs and across the spiked plates of the Urchins, were drawn in blood.

  “Are you all right, love?” John took off his spectacles and with the back of his arm wiped the sweaty dust from his face. “Listen. Don’t be angry at the Master—about those two blokes, I mean.” He jerked his head at the bodyguards. “And don’t …” He hesitated. “Spells or no spells, they’re going to need all the help they can against Rocklys and her dragons.” His eyes met hers, peering and naked without the protective lenses; made as if to flinch away and then returned. Knowing she knew. “It’d be good if you went with them.”

  Don’t fight him, she saw in them, behind the fear of what he knew would happen when she left the citadel. Don’t widen the gap, for demons to come into the world. Don’t leave yourself open to them by craving power or revenge.

  “It was stupid of me, bargaining with the Demon Queen. It’s not like I hadn’t read a thousand books and scrolls and legends sayin’ This is a bad idea. I”—he swallowed hard—“I’ll pay this teind somehow. I won’t go back and be her servant, you know.”

  “No,” Jenny said, “and I think I’ve found the way.”

  While they ate supper in John’s chamber and waited for Miss Mab, Jenny told John of what Morkeleb had said the previous night, and what she had purchased that day. “According to Morkeleb, a dragon’s tears are corrosive. They combine with glass, volatilizing both, so neither the glass nor the tears remain. The alabaster they’ll eat through in, I calculate, about thirteen days—the time that lies between now and the full moon. We can …”

  There was a scratching at the shutters of the chamber’s single window. Jenny went to open it; Morkeleb slipped through. Strangely, Jenny found the sight of him in miniature more disturbing than at his true size, like jeweler’s work come alive. He spread his wings and floated to the back of her abandoned chair, wrapped his long tail about one of the back-supports and cocked his glittering head.