Dragon's Bane
Page 1
Dragon's Bane
Barbara Hambly
Copyright 1985 by Barbara Hambly
CHAPTER I
BANDITS OFTEN LAY in wait in the ruins of the old
town at the fourways—Jenny Waynest thought there were
three of them this morning.
She was not sure any more whether it was magic which
told her this, or simply the woodcraftiness and instinct
for the presence of danger that anyone developed who
had survived to adulthood in the Winterlands. But as she
drew rein short of the first broken walls, where she knew
she would still be concealed by the combination of autumn
fog and early morning gloom beneath the thicker trees of
the forest, she noted automatically that the horse drop-
pings in the sunken clay of the roadbed were fresh,
untouched by the frost that edged the leaves around them.
She noted, too, the silence in the ruins ahead; no coney's
foot rustled the yellow spill of broomsedge cloaking the
hill slope where the old church had been, the church sacred
to the Twelve Gods beloved of the old Kings. She thought
she smelled the smoke of a concealed fire near the remains
of what had been a crossroads inn, but honest men would
have gone there straight and left a track in the nets of
dew that covered the weeds all around. Jenny's white
2 Barbara Hambly
mare Moon Horse pricked her long ears at the scent of
other beasts, and Jenny wind-whispered to herfor silence,
smoothing the raggedy mane against the long neck. But
she had been looking for all those signs before she saw
them.
She settled into stillness in the protective cloak of fog
and shadow, like a partridge blending with the brown of
the woods. She was a little like a partridge herself, dark
and small and nearly invisible in the dull, random plaids
of the northlands; a thin, compactly built woman, tough
as the roots of moorland heather. After a moment of
silence, she wove her magic into a rope of mist and cast
it along the road toward the nameless ruins of the town.
It was something she had done even as a child, before
the old wander-mage Caerdinn had taught her the ways
of power. All her thirty-seven years, she had lived in the
Winteriands—she knew the smells of danger. The late-
lingering birds of autumn, thrushes and blackbirds, should
have been waking in the twisted brown mats of ivy that
half-hid the old inn's walls—they were silent. After a
moment, she caught the scent of horses, and the ranker,
dirtier stench of men.
One bandit would be in the stumpy ruin of the old tower
that commanded the south and eastward roads, part of
the defenses of the ruined town left from when the pros-
perity of the King's law had given it anything to defend.
They always hid there. A second, she guessed, was behind
the walls of the old inn. After a moment she sensed the
third, watching the crossroads from a yellow thicket of
seedy tamarack. Her magic brought the stink of their souls
to her, old greeds and the carrion-bone memories of some
cherished rape or murder that had given a momentary
glow of power to lives largely divided between the giving
and receiving of physical pain. Having lived all her life
in the Winteriands, she knew that these men could scarcely
help being what they were; she had to put aside both her
Dragonsbane 3
hatred of them, and her pity for them, before she could
braid the spells that she laid upon their minds.
Her concentration deepened further. She stirred judi-
ciously at that compost of memories, whispering to their
blunted minds of the bored sleepiness of men who have
watched too long. Unless every illusion and Limitation
was wrought correctly, they would see her when she
moved. Then she loosened her halberd in its holster upon
her saddle-tree, settled her sheepskin jacket a little more
closely about her shoulders and, with scarcely breath or
movement, urged Moon Horse forward toward the ruins.
The man in the tower she never saw at all, from first
to last. Through the browning red leaves of a screen of
hawthorn, she glimpsed two horses tethered behind a
ruined wall near the inn, their breath making plumes of
white in the dawn cold; a moment later she saw the bandit
crouching behind the crumbling wall, a husky man in greasy
old leathers. He had been watching the road, but started
suddenly and cursed; looking down, he began scratching
his crotch with vigor and annoyance but no particular
surprise. He did not see Jenny as she ghosted past. The
third bandit, sitting his rawboned black horse between a
broken comer of a wall and a spinney of raggedy birches,
simply stared out ahead of him, lost in the daydreams she
had sent.
She was directly in front of him when a boy's voice
shouted from down the southward road, "LOOK OUT!"
Jenny whipped her halberd clear of its rest as the bandit
woke with a start. He saw her and roared a curse. Periph-
erally Jenny was aware of hooves pounding up the road
toward her; the other traveler, she thought with grim
annoyance, whose well-meant warning had snapped the
man from his trance. As the bandit bore down upon her,
she got a glimpse of a young man riding out of the mist
full-pelt, clearly intent upon rescue.
The bandit was armed with a short sword, but swung
4 Barbara Hambly
at her with the flat of it, intending to unhorse her without
damaging her too badly to rape later. She feinted with the
halberd to bring his weapon up, then dipped the long blade
on the pole's end down under his guard. Her legs clinched
to Moon Horse's sides to take the shock as the weapon
knifed through the man's belly. The leather was tough,
but there was no metal underneath. Shs ripped the blade
clear as the man doubled up around it, screaming and
clawing; both horses danced and veered with the smell
of the hot, spraying blood. Before the man hit the muddy
bed of the road, Jenny had wheeled her horse and was
riding to the aid of her prospective knight-errant, who
was engaged in a sloppy, desperate battle with the bandit
who had been concealed behind the ruined outer wall.
Her rescuer was hampered by his long cloak of ruby
red velvet, which had got entangled with the basketwork
hilt of his jeweled longsword. His horse was evidently
better trained and more used to battle than he was: the
maneuverings of the big liver-bay gelding were the only
reason the boy hadn't been killed outright. The bandit,
who had gotten himself mounted at the boy's first cry of
warning, had driven them back into the hazel thickets that
grew along the tumbled stones
of the inn wall, and, as
Jenny kicked Moon Horse into the fray, the boy's trailing
cloak hung itself up on the low branches and jerked its
wearer ignominiously out of the saddle with the horse's
next swerve.
Using her right hand as the fulcrum of a swing. Jenny
swept the halberd's blade at the bandit's sword arm. The
man veered his horse to face her; she got a glimpse of
piggy, close-set eyes under the rim of a dirty iron cap.
Behind her she could hear her previous assailant still
screaming. Evidently her current opponent could as well,
for he ducked the first slash and swiped at Moon Horse's
face to cause the mare to shy, then spurred past Jenny
and away up the road, willing neither to face a weapon
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that so outreached his own, nor to stop for his comrade
who had done so.
There was a brief crashing in the thickets of briar as
the man who had been concealed in the tower fled into
the raw mists, then silence, save for the dying bandit's
hoarse, bubbling sobs.
Jenny dropped lightly from Moon Horse's back. Her
young rescuer was still thrashing in the bushes like a stoat
in a sack, half-strangled on his bejeweled cloak strap. She
used the hook on the back of the halberd's blade to twist
the long court-sword from his hand, then stepped in to
pull the muffling folds of velvet aside. He struck at her
with his hands, like a man swatting at wasps. Then he
seemed to see her for the first time and stopped, staring
up at her with wide, myopic gray eyes.
After a long moment of surprised stillness, he cleared
his throat and unfastened the chain of gold and rubies that
held the cloak under his chin. "Er—thank you, my lady,"
he gasped in a slightly winded voice, and got to his feet.
Though Jenny was used to people being taller than she,
this young man was even more so than most. "I—uh—"
His skin was as fine-textured and fair as his hair, which
was already, despite his youth, beginning to thin away
toward early baldness. He couldn't have been more than
eighteen, with a natural awkwardness increased tenfold
by the difficult task of thanking the intended object of a
gallant defense for saving his life.
"My profoundest gratitude," he said, and performed a
supremely graceful Dying Swan, the like of which had
not been seen in the Winteriands since the nobles of the
Kings had departed in the wake of the retreating royal
armies. "I am Gareth of Magloshaldon, a traveler upon
errantry in these lands, and I wish to extend my humblest
expressions of..."
Jenny shook her head and stilled him with an upraised
hand. "Wait here," she said, and turned away.
6 Barbara Humbly
Puzzled, the boy followed her.
The first bandit who had attacked her still lay in the
clay muck of the roadbed. The soaking blood had turned
it into a mess of heel gouges, strewn with severed entrails;
the stink was appalling. The man was still groaning weakly.
Against the matte pallor of the foggy morning, the scarlet
of the blood stood out shockingly bright.
Jenny sighed, feeling suddenly cold and weary and
unclean, looking upon what she had done and knowing
what it was up to her yet to do. She knelt beside the dying
man, drawing the stillness of her magic around her again.
She was aware of Gareth's approach, his boots threshing
through the dew-soaked bindweed in a hurried rhythm
that broke when he tripped on his sword. She felt a tired
stirring of anger at him for having made this necessary.
Had he not cried out, both she and this poor, vicious,
dying brute would each have gone their ways...
... And he would doubtless have killed Gareth after
she passed. And other travelers besides.
She had long since given up trying to unpick wrong
from right, present should from future if. If there was a
pattern to all things, she had given up thinking that it was
simple enough to lie within her comprehension. Still, her
soul felt filthy within her as she put her hands to the dying
man's clammy, greasy temples, tracing the proper runes
while she whispered the death-spells. She felt the life go
out of him and tasted the bile of self-loathing in her mouth.
Behind her, Gareth whispered, "You—he's—he's
dead."
She got to her feet, shaking the bloody dirt from her
skirts. "I could not leave him for the weasels and foxes,"
she replied, starting to walk away. She could hear the
small carrion-beasts already, gathering at the top of the
bank above the misty slot of the road, drawn to the blood-
smell and waiting impatiently for the killer to abandon
her prey. Her voice was brusque—she had always hated
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the death-spells. Having grown up in a land without law,
she had killed her first man when she was fourteen, and
six since, not counting the dying she had helped from life
as the only midwife and healer from the Gray Mountains
to the sea. It never got easier.
She wanted to be gone from the place, but the boy
Gareth put a staying hand on her arm, looking from her
to the corpse in a kind of nauseated fascination. He had
never seen death, she thought. At least, not in its raw
form. The pea green velvet of his travel-stained doublet,
the gold stampwork of his boots, the tucked embroidery
of his ruffled lawn shirt, and the elaborate, feathered
crestings of his green-tipped hair all proclaimed him for
a courtier. All things, even death, were doubtless done
with a certain amount of style where he came from.
He gulped. "You're.—you're a witch!"
One corner other mouth moved slightly; she said, "So
I am."
He stepped back from her in fear, then staggered,
clutching at a nearby sapling for support. She saw then
that among the decorative slashings of his doublet sleeve
was an uglier opening, the shirt visible through it dark
and wet. "I'll be fine," he protested faintly, as she moved
to support him. "I just need..." He made a fumbling effort
to shake free of her hand and walk, his myopic gray eyes
peering at the ankle-deep drifts of moldering leaves that
lined the road.
"What you need is to sit down." She led him away to
a broken boundary stone and forced him to do so and
unbuttoned the diamond studs that held the sleeve to the
body of the doublet. The wound did not look deep, but
it was bleeding badly. She pulled loose the leather thongs
that bound the wood-black knots of her hair and used
them as a tourniquet above the wound. He winced and
gasped and tried to loosen it as she tore a strip from the
hem of her shift for a bandage, so that she slapped at his
Barbara Hambly
fingers like a child's. Then, a moment later, he tried to
get up again. "I have to find..."
"I'll find them," Jenny said firmly, knowin
g what it
was that he sought. She finished binding his wound and
walked back to the tangle of hazel bushes where Gareth
and the bandit had struggled. The frosty daylight glinted
on a sharp reflection among the leaves. The spectacles
she found there were bent and twisted out of shape, the
bottom of one round lens decorated by a star-fracture.
Flicking the dirt and wetness from them, she carried them
back.
"Now," she said, as Gareth fumbled them on with hands
shaking from weakness and shock. "You need that arm
looked to. I can take you..."
"My lady, I've no time." He looked up at her, squinting
a little against the increasing brightness of the sky behind
her head. "I'm on a quest, a quest of terrible importance."
"Important enough to risk losing your arm if the wound
turns rotten?"
As if such things could not happen to him, did she only
have the wits to realize it, he went on earnestly, "I'll be
all right, I tell you. I am seeking Lord Aversin the Dra-
gonsbane. Thane of Alyn Hold and Lord of Wyr, the
greatest knight ever to have ridden the Winterlands. Have
you heard of him hereabouts? Tall as an angel, handsome
as song... His fame has spread through the southlands
the way the floodwaters spread in the spring, the noblest
of chevaliers... I must find Alyn Hold, before it is too
late."
Jenny sighed, exasperated. "So you must," she said.
"It is to Alyn Hold that I am going to take you."
The squinting eyes got round as the boy's mouth fell
open. "To—to Alyn Hold? Really? It's near here?"
"It's the nearest place where we can get your arm seen
to," she said. "Can you ride?"
Had he been dying, she thought, amused, he would