Dragon's Bane
Page 23
the crawling greasiness of the bandit's hair under her fin-
gers as she had touched his temples. But they were not
like the dragon. They had chosen to be what they were.
Even as I have.
And what are you. Jenny Waynest?
But she could find no answer that fitted.
Gareth's voice drifted over to her from the other fire.
"That's another thing they never mention in the ballads
that I've been meaning to ask you. I know this sounds
silly, but—how do you keep your spectacles from getting
broken in battle?"
"Don't wear 'em," John's voice replied promptly. "If
you can see it coming, it's too late anyway. And then, I
had Jen lay a spell on them, so they wouldn't get knocked
off or broken by chance when I do wear them."
She looked over at the two of them, out of the con-
densing aura of death-spells and the slaughter of beauty
that surrounded her and her kettle of poison. Firelight
caught in the metal of John's jerkin; against the blueness
of the night it gleamed like a maker's mark stamped in
gold upon a bolt of velvet. She could almost hear the
cheerful grin in his voice, "I figured if I was going to break
my heart loving a magewife, I might as well get some
good from it."
182 Barbara Hambly
Over the shoulder of Nast Wall the moon hung, a half-
open white eye, waxing toward its third quarter. With a
stab like a shard of metal embedded somewhere in her
heart. Jenny remembered then that it had been so, in her
vision in the water.
Silently, she pulled herself back into her private circle
of death, closing out that outer world of friendship and
love and silliness, closing herself in with spells of ruin
and despair and the cold failing of strength. It was her
power to deal death in this way, and she hated herself for
it; though, like John, she knew she had no choice.
"Do you think you'll make it?" Gareth nattered. Before
them, the ruins of the broken town were purple and slate
with shadow in the early light. The war horse Osprey's
breath was warm over Jenny's hand where she held the
reins.
"I'll have to, won't I?" John checked the girths and
swung up into the saddle. The cool reflection of the mom-
ing sky gleamed slimily on the grease Jenny had made for
him late last night to smear on his face against the worst
scorching of the dragon's fire. Frost crackled in the weeds
as Osprey fidgeted his feet. The last thing Jenny had done,
shortly before dawn, had been to send away the mists
that seeped up from the woods to cloak the Vale, and all
around them the air was brilliantly clear, the fallow winter
colors warming to life. Jenny herself felt cold, empty, and
overstretched; she had poured all her powers into the
poisons. Her head ached violently and she felt unclean,
strange, and divided in her mind, as if she were two sep-
arate people. She had felt so, she recalled, when John
had ridden against the first dragon, though then she had
not known why. Then she had not known what the slaugh-
ter of that beauty would be like. She feared for him and
felt despair like a stain on her heart; she only wanted the
day to be over, one way or the other.
Dragonsbane 183
The mail rings on the back of John's gloves rattled
sharply as he reached down, and she handed him up his
harpoons. There were six of them, in a quiver on his back;
the steel of their barbed shafts caught a slither of the early
light, save for the ugly black that covered their points.
The leather of the grips was firm and tough under her
palms. Over his metal-patched doublet, John had pulled
a chain mail shirt, and his face was framed in a coif of
the same stuff. Without his spectacles and with his shaggy
hair hidden beneath it, the bones of his face were suddenly
prominent, showing what his features could look like in
an old age he might never reach.
Jenny felt she wanted to speak to him, but there was
nothing she could think of to say.
He gathered the reins in hand. "If the dragon comes
out of the Gate before I reach it, I want the pair of you
to leg it," he said, his voice calm. "Get into cover as deep
as you can, the higher up the ridge the better. Let the
horses go if you can—there's a chance the dragon will
go after them first." He did not add that by that time he
would already be dead.
There was a momentary silence. Then he bent from
the saddle and touched Jenny's lips with his own. His felt,
as they always did, surprisingly soft. They had spoken
little, even last night; each had already been drawn into
an armor of silence. It was something they both under-
stood.
He reined away, looking across the Vale to the black
eye of the Deep, and to the black thing waiting within.
Osprey fiddle-footed again, catching John's battle nerves;
the open ground of Deeping seemed suddenly to stretch
away into miles of enormous, broken plain. To Jenny's
eye, every tumbled wall looked as tall as the house it had
once been, every uncovered cellar a gaping chasm. He
would never cross in time, she thought.
Beside her, John leaned down again, this time to pat
184 Barbara Hambly
Osprey's dappled neck encouragingly. "Osprey, old
friend," he said softly, "don't spook on me now."
He drove in his spurs, and the sharp crack of iron-
shod hooves as they shot forward was like the chip of
distant lightning on a summer noon. Jenny took two steps
down the loose, rocky slope after him, watching the gray
horse and the pewter-dark shape of the man as they plunged
through the labyrinth of gaping foundations, broken beams,
standing water who knew how deep, slipping down drifts
of charred wood chips and racing toward the open black
mouth of the Gates. Her heart hammering achingly in her
chest, Jenny stretched her mageborn senses toward the
Gate, straining to hear. The cold, tingling air seemed to
breathe with the dragon's mind. Somewhere in that dark-
ness was the slithery drag of metallic scales on stone...
There was no way to call the image of the dragon in
her scrying-stone, but she sat down suddenly where she
was on the loose, charred rubble of the slope and pulled
the slip of dirty-white crystal upon its chain from her
jacket pocket. She heard Gareth call her name from the
top of the slope, but she vouchsafed neither answer nor
glance. Across the Vale, Osprey leaped the split ruin of
the demolished Gates on the granite steps, cool blue shad-
ows falling over him and his rider like a cloak as the Gate
swallowed them up.
There was a flick and a gleam, as the wan sunlight
caught in the facets of the jewel. Then Jenny caught a
confused impression of hewn stone walls that could have
encompassed the entire palace of Bel, a cavem-ceiling
brist
ling with stone teeth from which old lamp-chains hung
down into vast, cobalt spaces of air... black doorways
piercing the walls, and the greatest of them opening oppo-
site. ...
Jenny cupped her hands around the jewel, trying to
see into its depths, straining past the curtains of illusion
that covered the dragon from her sight. She thought she
Dragonsbane 185
saw the flash of diffuse sunlight on chain mail and saw
Osprey trip on the charred debris of blackened bones and
spilled coins and half-bumed poles that littered the floor.
She saw John pull him out of the stumble and saw the
gleam of the harpoon in his hand... Then something
spurted from the inner doors, like a drench of thrown
bathwater, splattering viscously into the dry ash of the
floor, searing upward in a curtain of fire.
There was a darkness in the crystal and in that dark-
ness, two burning silver lamps.
Nothing existed around her, not the cool shift of the
morning air, nor the sunlight wanning her ankles in her
buckskin boots where her heels rested on the chopped-
up slope of gravel and weeds, not the wintry smell of
water and stone from below, nor the small noises of the
restless horses above. Cupped in her hands, the edges of
the crystal seemed to burn in white light, but its heart
was dark; through that darkness only fragmentary images
came—a sense of something moving that was vast and
dark, the swinging curve of John's body as he flung a
harpoon, and the cloudy swirls of blinding fumes.
In some way she knew Osprey had gone down, smitten
by the stroke of the dragon's tail. She had a brief impres-
sion of John on his knees, his eyes red and swollen from
the acrid vapors that filled the hall, aiming for another
throw. Something like a wing of darkness covered him.
She saw flame again and, as a queer, detached image,
three harpoons lying like scattered jackstraws in the mid-
dle of a puddle of blackened and steaming slime. Some-
thing within her turned to ice; there was only darkness
and movement in the darkness, and then John again, blood
pouring through the rips in his mail shirt, staring up at a
towering shape of glittering shadow, his sword in his hand.
Blackness swallowed the crystal. Jenny was aware that
her hands were shaking, her whole body hurting with a
pain that radiated from a seed of cold under her breast-
186 Barbara Hambly
bone, her throat a bundle of twisted wires. She thought
blindly, John, remembering him striding with graceful
insouciance into Zyeme's dining room, his armor of out-
rageousness protecting him from Zyeme's claws; she
remembered the flash of autumn daylight on his specs as
he stood ankle-deep in pig muck at the Hold, reaching up
his hands to help her dismount.
She could not conceive of what life would be like with-
out that fleeting, triangular grin.
Then somewhere in her mind she heard him call out
to her: Jenny...
She found him lying just beyond the edge of the trap-
ezoid of light that fell through the vast square of the Gates.
She had left Moon Horse outside, tossing her head in fear
at the acrid reek of the dragon that pervaded all that end
of the Vale. Jenny's own heart was pounding, so that it
almost turned her sick; all the way across the ruins of
Deeping she had been waiting for the dark shape of the
dragon to emerge from the Gates.
But nothing had come forth. The silence within the
darkness was worse than any sound could have been.
After the brightness of the Vale, the blue vaults of the
Market Hall seemed almost black. The air was murky
with vapors that diffused what little light there was. The
trapped fumes burned her eyes and turned her dizzy, mixed
with the smoke of burning and the heavy reek of poisoned
slag. Even with a wizard's sight, it took Jenny's eyes a
moment to accustom themselves. Then sickness came
over her, as if the blood that lay spread everywhere had
come from her body, rather than John's.
He lay with his face hidden by his outflung arm, the
mail coif dragged back and the hair beneath it matted with
blood where it had not been singed away. Blood lay in a
long, inky trail behind him, showing where he had crawled
after the fight was over, past the carcass of the horse
Dragonsbane 187
Osprey, leading like a sticky path to the vast, dark bulk
of the dragon.
The dragon lay still, like a shining mound of obsidian
knives. Supine, it was a little higher than her waist, a
glittering blacksnake nearly forty feet long, veiled in the
white smoke of its poisons and the darkness of its magic,
harpoons sticking from it like darts. One foreleg lay
stretched out toward John, as if with its last strength it
had reached to tear him, and the great talon lay like a
skeleton hand in a pool of leaked black blood. The atmos-
phere all about it seemed heavy, filled with a sweet, clear
singing that Jenny thought was as much within her skull
as outside of it. It was a song with words she could not
understand; a song about stars and cold and the long,
ecstatic plunge through darkness. The tune was half-
familiar, as if she had heard a phrase of it once, long ago,
and had carried it since in her dreams.
Then the dragon Morkeleb raised his head, and for a
time she looked into his eyes.
They were like lamps, a crystalline white kaleidoscope,
cold and sweet and burning as the core of a flame. It
struck her with a sense of overwhelming shock that she
looked into the eyes of a mage like herself. It was an alien
intelligence, clean and cutting as a sliver of black glass.
There was something terrible and fascinating about those
eyes; the singing in her mind was like a voice speaking
to her in words she almost understood. She felt a calling
within her to the hungers that had all of her life consumed
her.
With a desperate wrench, she pulled her thoughts from
it and turned her eyes aside.
She knew then why the legends warned never to look
into a dragon's eyes. It was not only because the dragon
could snag some part of your soul and paralyze you with
indecision while it struck.
188 Barbara Hambly
It was because, in pulling away, you left some shred
of yourself behind, snared in those ice-crystal depths.
She turned to flee, to leave that place and those too-
knowing eyes, to run from the singing that whispered to
the harmonics of her bones. She would have run, but her
booted foot brushed something as she turned. Looking
down to the man who lay at her feet, she saw for the first
time that his wounds still bted.
CHAPTER X
"HE CAN'T BE dying!"- Gareth finished laying a heap
of fresh-cut branches beside the low fire and turned to
Jenny, his eyes pleading with he
r. As if. Jenny thought,
with what power was left in her numbed mind, his saying
could make it so.
Without speaking, she leaned across to touch the ice-
cold face of the man who lay covered with plaids and
bearskins, so close to the flickering blaze.
Her mind felt blunted, like a traveler lost in the woods
who returned again and again to the same place, unable
to struggle clear.
She had known that it would come to this, when first
she had taken him into her life. She should never have
yielded to the mischief in those brown eyes. She should
have sent him away and not given in to that weak part of
herself that whispered: I want a friend.
She stood up and shook out her skirts, pulling her plaid
more tightly around her sheepskin jacket. Gareth was
watching her with frightened dog eyes, hurt and pleading;
he followed her over to the heap of the packs on the other
side of the fire.
189
190 Barbara Hambly
She could have had her fill of lovers. There were always
those who would lie with a witch for the novelty of it or
for the luck it was said to bring. Why had she let him stay
until morning and talked to him as if he were not a man
and an enemy whom she knew even then would fetter her
soul? Why had she let him touch her heart as well as her
body?
The night was dead-still, the sky dark save for the white
disc of the waxing moon. Its ghostly light barely outlined
the broken bones of the empty town below. A log settled
in the dying fire; the spurt of light touched a spangle of
red on the twisted links of John's mail shirt and glimmered