stretched before her across the doors in the darkness. He
had dislodged the harpoons from his throat and belly, and
they lay blackened with his blood in the muck of slime
and ash on the floor. The thorny scales of his back and
sides lay sleek now, their edges shining faintly in the dim
reflection of the moon. The heavy ridges of spikes that
guarded his backbone and the joints of his legs still bristled
like weapons. The enormous wings lay folded neatly along
his sides, and their joints, too, she saw, were armored
and spined. His head fascinated her most, long and narrow
and birdlike, its shape concealed under a mask of bony
plates. From those plates grew a vast mane of ribbonlike
scales, mingled with tufts of fur and what looked like
growths of ferns and feathers; his long, delicate antennae
with their glittering bobs of jet lay limp upon the ground
around his head. He lay like a dog, his chin between his
forepaws; but the eyes that burned into hers were the
eyes of a mage who is also a beast.
J n'(7/ bargain with you, wizard woman.
She knew, with chill premonition but no surprise what
his bargain would be, and her heart quickened, though
whether with dread or some strange hope she did not
know. She said, "No," but within herself she felt, like a
forbidden longing, the unwillingness to let something this
beautiful, this powerful, die. He was evil, she told herself,
knowing and believing it in her heart. Yet there was some-
thing in those silver eyes that drew her, some song of
black and latent fire whose music she understood.
The dragon moved his head a little on the powerful
Dragonsbane 199
curve of his neck. Blood dripped down from the tattered
ribbons of his mane.
Do you think that even you, a wizard who sees in dark-
ness, can search out the ways of the gnomes'?
The pictures that filled her mind were of the darkness,
of clammy and endless mazes of the world underground.
Her heart sank with dread at the awareness of them; those
few small images of the way to the Places of Healing,
those fragmentary words of Mab's, turned in her hands
to the pebbles with which a child thinks it can slaughter
lions.
Still she said, "I have spoken to one of them of these
ways."
And did she tell the truth? The gnomes are not famed
for it in matters concerning the heart of the Deep.
Jenny remembered the empty places on Dromar's maps.
But she retorted, "Nor are dragons."
Beneath the exhaustion and pain, she felt in the drag-
on's mind amusement at her reply, like a thin spurt of
cold water in hot.
What is truth, wizard woman? The truth that dragons
see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncom-
fortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You
know this.
She saw that he had felt her fascination. The silver
eyes drew her; his mind touched hers, as a seducer would
have touched her hand. She saw, also, that he understood
that she would not draw back from that touch. She forced
her thoughts away from him, holding to the memories of
John and of their sons, against the power that called to
her like a whisper of amorphous night.
With effort, she tore her eyes from his and turned to
leave.
Wizard woman, do you think this man for whom you
risk the bones of your body will live longer than I?
She stopped, the toes of her boots touching the hem
200 Barbara Hambly
of the carpet of moonlight which lay upon the flagstoned
floor. Then she turned back to face him, despairing and
torn. The wan light showed her the pools of acrid blood
drying over so much of the floor, the sunken look to the
dragon's flesh; and she realized that his question had struck
at her weakness and despair to cover his own.
She said calmly, "There is the chance that he will."
She felt the anger in the movement of his head, and
the pain that sliced through him with it. And will you
wager on that? Will you wager that, even did the gnomes
speak the truth, you will be able to sort your way through
their warrens, spiral within spiral, dark within dark, to
find what you need in time? Heal me, wizard woman, and
I will guide you with my mind and show you the place
that you seek.
For a time she only gazed up at that long bulk of shining
blackness, the dark mane of bloody ribbons, and the eyes
like oiled metal ringing eternal darkness. He was a wonder
such as she had never seen, a spined and supple shadow
from the thomed tips of his backswept wings to the honied
beak of his nose. The Golden Dragon John had slain on
the windswept hills of Wyr had been a being of sun and
fire, but this was a smoke-wraith of night, black and strong
and old as time. The spines of his head grew into fantastic
twisted homs, icy-smooth as steel; his forepaws had the
shape of hands, save that they had two thumbs instead
of one. The voice that spoke in her mind was steady, but
she could see the weakness dragging at every line of that
great body and feel the faint shiver of the last taut strength
that fought to continue the bluff against her.
Unwillingly, she said, "I know nothing of the healing
of dragons."
The silver eyes narrowed, as if she had asked him for
something he had not thought to give. For a moment they
faced one another, cloaked in the cave's darkness. She
was aware of John and of time—distantly, like something
Dragonsbane 201
urgent in a dream. But she kept her thoughts concentrated
upon the creature that lay before her and the diamond-
prickled darkness of that alien mind that struggled with
hers.
Then suddenly the gleaming body convulsed. She felt,
through the silver eyes, the pain like a scream through
the steel ropes of his muscles. The wings stretched out
uncontrollably, the claws extending in a terrible spasm as
the poison shifted in his veins. The voice in her mind
whispered. Go,
At the same moment memories flooded her thoughts
of a place she had never been before. Vague images
crowded to her mind of blackness as vast as the night
outdoors, columned with a forest of stone trees that whis-
pered back the echo of every breath, of rock seams a few
yards across whose ceilings were lost in distant darkness,
and of the murmuring of endless water under stone. She
felt a vertigo of terror as in a nightmare, but also a queer
sense of deja vu, as if she had passed that way before.
It came to her that it was Morkeleb and not she who
had passed that way; the images were the way to the
Places of Healing, the very heart of the Deep.
The spined black body before her twisted with another
paroxysm of anguish, the huge tail slashing like a whip
against the rock of the wall. The pain was
visible now in
the silver eyes as the poison ate into the dragon's blood.
Then his body dropped slack, a dry clatter of horns and
spines like a skeleton falling on a stone floor, and from a
great distance off she heard again. Go.
His scales had all risen in a blanket of razors at his
agony; quiveringly, they smoothed themselves flat along
the sunken sides. Jenny gathered her courage and strode
forward; without giving herself time to think of what she
was doing, she scrambled over the waist-high hill of the
ebony flank that blocked the doorway of the Grand Tun-
nel. The backbone ridge was like a hedge of spears, thrust-
202 ' Barbara Hambly
ing stiffly from the unsteady footing of the hide. Kilting
up her skirt, she put a hand to steady herself on the carved
stone pillar of the doorjamb and leaped over the spines
awkwardly, fearing to the last that some renewed con-
vulsion would thrust them into her thighs.
But the dragon lay quiet. Jenny could sense only the
echoes of his mind within hers, like a faint gleam of far-
off light. Before her stretched the darkness of the Deep.
If she thought about them, the visions she had seen
retreated from her. But she found that if she simply walked
forward, as if she had trodden this way before, her feet
would lead her. Dream memories whispered through her
mind of things she had seen, but sometimes the angle of
sight was different, as if she had looked down upon them
from above.
The upper levels of the Deep were dry, wrought by the
gnomes after the fashion of the tastes of men. The Grand
Passage, thirty feet broad and paved in black granite,
worn and runnelled with the track of uncounted genera-
tions of feet, had been walled with blocks of cut stone to
hide the irregularities of its shape; broken statues lying
like scattered bones in the dark attested the classical
appearance of the place in its heyday. Among the frag-
mented whiteness of the marble limbs lay real bones, and
with them the twisted bronze frames and shattered glass
of the huge lamps that had once depended from the high
ceiling, all scraped together along the walls, like leaves
in a gutter, by the passage of the dragon's body. Even in
the darkness, Jenny's wizard's sight showed her the fire-
blackening where the spilled oil had been ignited by the
dragon's breath.
Deeper down, the place had the look of the gnomes.
Stalagmites and columns ceased to be carved into the
straight pillars favored by the children of men, and were
wrought into the semblance of trees in leaf, or beasts, or
Dragonsbane 203
grotesque things that could have been either; more and
more frequently they had simply been left to keep the
original shape of pouring water which had been their own.
The straight, handsomely finished water courses of the
higher levels gave place to tumbling streams in the lower
deeps; in some places the water fell straight, fifty or a
hundred feet from distant ceilings, like a living pillar, or
gushed away into darkness through conduits shaped like
the skulls of gargoyles. Jenny passed through caverns and
systems of caves that had been transformed into the vast,
interconnected dwelling places of the great clans and fam-
ilies of the gnomes, but elsewhere she found halls and
rooms large enough to contain all the village of Deeping,
where houses and palaces had been built freestanding,
their bizarre spires and catwalks indistinguishable from
the groves of stalagmites that clustered in strange forests
on the banks of pools and rivers like polished onyx.
And through these silent realms of wonder she saw
nothing but the evidences of ruin and decay and the scrap-
ing track of the dragon. White ur-toads were everywhere,
squabbling with rats over the rotting remains of stored
food or month-old carrion; in some places, the putrescent
fetor of what had been hoards of cheese, meat, or vege-
tables was nearly unbreathable. The white, eyeless ver-
min of the deeper pits, whose names she could only guess
at from Mab's accounts, slipped away at her approach,
or hid themselves behind the fire-marked skulls and
dropped vessels of chased silver that everywhere scat-
tered the halls.
As she went deeper, the air became cold and very
damp, the stone increasingly slimy beneath her boots; the
weight of the darkness was crushing. As she walked the
lightless mazes, she understood that Mab had been right;
without guidance, even she, whose eyes could pierce that
utter darkness, would never have found her way to the
heart of the Deep.
204 Barbara HamUy
But find it she did. The echo of it was in the dragon's
mind, setting up queer resonances in her soul, a lamina-
tion of feelings and awareness whose alien nature she
shrank from, uncomprehending. Beside its doors, she felt
the aura of healing that lingered still in the air, and the
faint breath of ancient power.
All through that series of caverns, the air was warm,
smelling of dried camphor and spices; the putrid stench
of decay and the crawling vermin were absent. Stepping
through the doors into the domed central cavern, where
ghost-pale stalactites regarded themselves in the oiled
blackness of a central pool, she wondered how great a
spell it would take to hold that healing warmth, not only
against the cold in the abysses of the earth, but for so
long after those who had wrought the spell had perished.
The magic here was great indeed.
It pervaded the place; as she passed cautiously through
the rooms of meditation, of dreaming, or of rest. Jenny
was conscious of it as a living presence, rather than the
stasis of dead spells. At times the sensation of it grew so
strong that she looked back over her shoulder and called
out to the darkness, "Is someone there?" though in her
reason she knew there was not. But as with the Whis-
perers in the north, her feelings argued against her reason,
and again and again she extended her senses through that
dark place, her heart pounding in hope or fear—she could
not tell which. But she touched nothing, nothing but dark-
ness and the drip of water falling eternally from the hang-
ing teeth of the stones.
There was living magic there, whispering to itself in
darkness—and like the touch of some foul thing upon her
flesh, she felt the sense of evil.
She shivered and glanced around her nervously once
more. In a small room, she found the medicines she sought,
row after row of glass phials and stoppered jars of the
green-and-white marbled ware the gnomes made in such
Dragonsbane 205
quantity. She read their labels in the darkness and stowed
them in her satchel, working quickly, partly from a grow-
ing sense of uneasiness and partly because she felt time
leaking away and John's life ebbing like the going-out of
the tide.
He can't die, she told herself desperately, not after all
this—but she had come too late to too many bedsides in
her years as a healer to believe that. Still, she knew that
the medicines alone might not be enough. Hastily, glanc-
ing back over her shoulder as she moved from room to
dark and silent room, she began searching for the inner
places of power, the libraries where they would store the
books and scrolls of magic that, she guessed, made up
the true heart of the Deep.
Her boots swished softly on the sleek floors, but even
that small noise twisted at her nerves. The floors of the
rooms, like all the places inhabited by gnomes, were never
at one level, but made like a series of terraces; even the
smallest chambers had two or more. And as she searched,
the eerie sense of being watched grew upon her, until she
feared to pass through new doors, half-expecting to meet
some evil thing gloating in the blackness. She felt a power,
stronger than any she had encountered—stronger than
Zyerne's, stronger than the dragon's. But she found noth-
ing, neither that waiting, silent evil, nor any book of power
by which magic would be transmitted down the years
among the gnome mages—only herbals, anatomies, or
catalogs of diseases and cures. In spite of her uneasy fear,
she felt puzzled—Mab had said that the gnomes had no
Lines, yet surely the power had to be transmitted some-
how. So she forced herself to seek, deeper and deeper,
for the books that must contain it.
Exhaustion was beginning to weaken her like slow ill-
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