Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  He saw her then—as she had been then, with the midnight oceans of her hair lying over his shoulder where her head rested, and her small square face like a sunburned acorn looking up into his—as she said, I did not want to forget you, my love. I did not want you to grow old, with me not there.

  Her voice was deep, grained through with sweetness, like silver in rock. He couldn't imagine never hearing it again.

  Ah, love, if we either of us live to grow old, it'll be more than I'd bet on tonight.

  When he was young, and she would not come to the Hold to live with him, he used to scream at her, curse her, as he had wanted to curse the Icerider witch who had been his mother and who had left him, too: It's all you care about, isn't it? Your magic and your power.

  He couldn't imagine why she hadn't turned him into a toad, let alone why she'd borne him not one child in those days, but two.

  Let her be alive, he prayed to the Old God, watching the dim firelight shift over the shapes of the tribute-bearers on the walls. You can have all that tribute those fellers are carryin', I promise I won't keep a penny of it, if only she'll be alive when I get back.… If I get back.

  But he'd lived in the Winterlands too long to believe that things ended happily. He had seen too many people he knew die.

  The chap in the red boots there on the end, he thought, turning his eyes back to the wall. He has a wife who's a witch, and she loves her power—well, not more than she loves him, but as much. Yet she came to his life, and bore him two sons and a daughter, which has to have hurt … she loved him that much. Then one day she turned into a beautiful white dragon and flew away. And she was happy forever.

  John reached the Henge of Prokep the following day.

  It helped enormously, that time stood still in the enclaves. He could search patiently, drawing the sigil of the door over and over, until he got through; he'd learned to keep a torch burning in one hand the moment he stepped through a gate, and a drawn sword in the other, and—if nothing attacked him, and usually it did not—to immediately turn and mark where the gate lay. He brought water with him, too, in a clay jar slung over his shoulder on a strap of braided rags. At least, from enclave to enclave, there was no worry about whether it was half an hour after noon or not.

  The gate on the left, the one immediately to the right of the Gate of Dawn, passed him through into the Salt Garden: stone pavement, beds of glittering salt stretching hundreds of feet in all directions under a pitiless golden sky. There was no gate to be seen there, but at noon, when he had returned to Prokep and was investigating the other gate locations he'd found, he passed through one of them and found himself in the Salt Garden again, and spent a grueling eternity in the heat there until he found by sheer patience where the invisible gate was, that let him into the Maze beyond.

  Sometimes the walls of the Maze were hedges—knee-high in places, head-high in others. Sometimes they were stone: gray smooth river stones, or harsh hunks of black basalt like the garden wall. Sometimes the Maze itself was just a gravel path raised between mossy ditches where a little water glittered, curtained by a very fine scrim of mist. John knew better than to step off the path or touch the mist in any fashion. He didn't know what would happen if he did, but had an idea he wouldn't like it. From a number of points in the Maze it was possible to see the Henge, huge dark uneven stones showing through whitish fog. As he'd seen by moonlight, and again in Corvin's vision, they seemed to be about twice his nearly six foot height, rough-hewn and, as he drew nearer, he could see that some of them were embellished with the same crude carvings that he'd sometimes seen on standing-stones on the far northern moors in the Winterlands, spirals and rings and crosses. There were ninety of them, when he counted them from a break in the tall hedges of the Maze. When he came out to where the hedges were shorter and counted again, there were eighty-seven.

  Intrigued, he began to count from wherever he could see them, and quickly discovered that if he was on the correct path there were ninety; if the path was leading him to a dead end, or to one of those places where the level of the ground dipped down under sheets of still silvery water, there were either more or less. Why the makers of the Henge would have created a Maze in the first place, John wasn't sure—it was a far less effective form of defense than the nodes of choice in the gardens—but in two places mists covered the path, and he felt himself watched from the hedges by unseen eyes.

  Watching for demons, he wondered? Corvin had set electronic alarms on his Otherworld property that would be triggered by a demon's presence, and had spoken of such things still active in Prokep. Or was this only his own imagination, fueled by nerves and exhaustion?

  The Henge itself stood where it had stood for a thousand years, in the midst of the ruined city. Standing next to its stones, John could see across the barren ground, to the three pillars where a temple had stood, to the pit of the dry lake. To the palace foundation, where Corvin brought new gold every evening from other caches in the city to lie upon; where trib-ute-bearers walked eternally around the walls of John's painted room. Standing beside the circle of stones, John wondered if he would be invisible to someone standing in that sand-clogged doorway in the foundation, where he and Corvin had stood four days ago. Wondered if he would have to go back through the Maze to return to the place, and what would happen if he simply tried to walk cross-country to it.

  Would the Henge disappear behind him?

  Would he disappear?

  It was noon, the hour at which he had stepped across the threshold into the Salt Garden.

  At a guess, the third gate he'd detected could be opened at sunset. Would the Maze be the same?

  He peered cautiously between the stones, into the center of the Henge.

  He couldn't see the little flash of water at the center—probably in a depression in the ground. There was a slight distortion of the air over where it would lie, like a heat-dance. Corvin had told him he couldn't get into the Henge, and in any case John had been married to a witch far too long to casually step over the boundary of any magical enclosure, let alone one containing even worse demons than those he'd already met. Instead, he walked around it, keeping close to the stones where the air was still, counting the stones: There were ninety-three when he walked sun-wise; eighty-eight when he walked widdershins the first time. A second count yielded still different numbers, to his intense delight. As he'd seen at a distance the stones had been rough-hewn and some of them were carved—he made notes on the clay side of his water jar—and they were all of the same close-grained, faintly bluish stone. They bore no marks of weathering, and varied in height from about eight feet to over twelve.

  The sun was visible from beside the Henge, and the shadows of the stones crept out over the sand, but still John backtrailed his way through the Maze, through the Salt Garden and the Garden of Dawn, to reach the city of Prokep again. That night beneath the late-rising half-moon he stood on the great stone foundation and looked out toward the Henge, and saw it clearly, black shadows on the formless ivory of the land.

  And now what?

  He turned his palms up. In the moonlight the silver traces the Demon Queen had left gleamed thinly on his skin.

  You know the way through the Maze. You know what Folcalor has to be planning, you know what Adromelech has all these centuries been waiting to command his servants to do.

  You are here in Prokep, a prisoner, and you will die in the desert before you will escape.

  Grimly, John returned to his painted room, and by firelight cut the gems from the red velvet cloak, to sell for money should he ever reach human lands again. The tribute-bearers on the walls stalked impassively with the movement of the fire, and didn't offer him so much as a penny.

  In the days that followed, John explored the city, and the Maze, stubbornly turning his mind from the futility of what he did. In time, the demons would come, no matter what their fears of the city's ancient, hidden traps. Adromelech would bring them.

  Folcalor, greedy for vengeance and power, woul
d not stay away.

  In the night he dreamed, over and over, of walking that narrow, windless zone around the outside of the ring, and in his dreams he could see the demons inside.

  Adromelech, gross and savage, a silvery green shape whose belly moved with the dying remains of those lesser wights he'd devoured, who lived inside him, crying, still. The Arch-wight's silver eyes watched John as he walked from stone to stone, clever greedy unhuman eyes, with rectangular pupils like the Demon Queen's: watching and waiting. Sometimes in his dreams John could see Amayon in the ring, as he'd seen him in the Hell of the Shining Things, when terror of true death, real death, had broken his concentration from the illusion in which demons lived, and left him in his actual shape, wizened and shrunken and silver. Sometimes he saw the Demon Queen herself, smiling at him through the pyre-smoke.

  In the evenings, when Corvin returned from his flights, John would tell him, “The demons will come. The Dragonstar hasn't got that long to stay in the sky—accordin' to my calculations it'll be gone by the Moon of Winds. If Adrom-elech's had his goons out workin' to stir up whatever powersourcin' they can for this long, you can bet he's not gonna sit back an' say, Oh, too tough, well, let's just stay here for another thousand years.…”

  But Corvin, lying among his gold, only blinked sleepily at him and spoke in that whispery voice in his mind: They will not come. They cannot. The Henge was formed and sourced in the deaths of the ten greatest mages of that time, and there are traps in the city that make it perilous for them to linger here. They cannot find their way through the Maze before it destroys them. They will not come.

  And John learned that it was foolish, to try to speak to the silver dragon when he lay dreaming among the music that he called from the gold, even as he'd learned early never to argue with his father when Lord Aver sat late over his wine. He could only return to his chamber and lie awake, watching his painted friends march in their eternal procession, listening for the first sound of trouble and wondering what the hell he could do about it when it came.

  On a night of wind he dreamed of the Demon Queen. He saw the Burning Mirror in its chamber beneath the ruins of Ernine, the black enamel that covered it cracked, light and smoke streaming forth. The Demon Queen stepped out through those cracks as if through a door, and as she stepped, fire blasted all the chamber's rock to splinters. When she walked each step took her miles. She flew with her dark hair a tangled wrack in the night; she lifted from the ground, spread out her arms into the wind, and laughed. Wind and fire surged around her, the air a maelstrom of heat and carnage, and in it John heard a queer, musical zinging, a sigh and whisper, far-off silver chimes. Flying things moved in it, some formed of dust and others of fire; formed, and blended away to dust again.

  But fire flickered in the dust.

  And the Demon Queen quickened her stride to outrun the fire.

  John woke to the metallic whining, and the smell of dust in the wind.

  He slipped his makeshift spectacles on, and wrapped around him the cloak that he used as a blanket as well; he slept in his boots. From beneath the bracken he pulled the ancient sword he'd hidden there, and the dagger, hung on a sash of braided rags, though he knew the arms would do him no good against the things he'd sensed in his dreams. He strode down the passageway with the choke of dust in his nose and lungs, and the firelight glowing behind him in the painted chamber showed him the air filled with glittering black specks like blowing sand.

  When they struck his face they cut heavier than sand.

  Beyond the doorway the night was like falling into a bag of soot. Far off in the darkness he could see flecks of what looked like silver fire, and in the direction that he knew the Henge would lie, a single, tiny greenish flame. Wind lashed and tumbled the air, the grains that blew in it cutting his skin like tiny knives. When John retreated back into the passageway and touched his cheek with his fingers, he brought them away smudged with blood.

  Metal? he thought.

  And then, Dear gods.

  He bolted back to his own chamber, unearthed a torch, and lit it, strode for the Treasury as fast as he could go without killing the wavering flame. As a Dragonsbane, he knew that when you attacked a dragon in its lair, you had to reach him fast, reach him before he got clear of the covered place so that he could not rise in the air above you, either to attack or to get away. He shouted as he ran, “Corvin!” but knew he wouldn't be heard.

  Corvin would be dreaming, breathing his dreams of past joys into the ocean of gold and drinking back the beauty of them a thousandfold, magnified by the gold's music.

  The flying specks of sand in the air were gold.

  John knew it instinctively, guessed it. It was what he would do if he could, to trap a dragon and render it too drunk and confused to escape. No dragon could think clearly around large amounts of refined gold—Morkeleb was the only one he knew who had renounced gold completely.

  He knew, as Aohila knew, that a dragon's heart would follow gold, even unto doom.

  Dust and particles of sand—gold—hazed the air, even in the Treasury. Not being mageborn himself—or any more sensitive than an old boot, John would have added—he could not feel, as Jenny could, the sweet-singing emanations of the magic blended through and magnified by the gold. All he saw was the great black and silver shape curled on its bed of coin and gems and statuary, glittering in the lamplight like an extension of the treasure itself. Even the bobs of light that would flick and move on the ends of the dragon's antennae in normal sleep were dimmed, hanging like the grimed raindrops of the other world in which Corvin had hidden so long. The room was thick with the hot, faintly metallic smell of the dragon, and in sleep the hooked silver claws tightened spasmodically, reflexively, around the coins.

  “Wake up!” yelled John, walking over and kicking the dragon's nose. (Bet THAT's one the heroes of legend never got round to.) “Wake up, damn it, they're coming!”

  And how long's it going to take them to get round to me, after they've got Corvin all secure?

  He thought of the Demon Queen and went cold with panic. Even if the demons moving in the dust were not her minions but those of Folcalor, he'd seen demons turn aside from their intended task in order to disembowel bystanders simply for the immediate gratification of hearing them scream.

  Demons were dangerous, but they were sloppy hunters. Being deathless, they knew there was always time to go after escaped prey another day. They would not forgo the pleasure of another's pain, even for their own ultimate benefit.

  He'd met people like that as well, of course.

  He picked up a silver statue, whacked Corvin on the side of the face, on the blank dark purple-tinted eyelids, with all the strength in his arm. “Wake up, you brainless worm! Demons!”

  Still nothing. To the dragon the whole atmosphere must be a drowsy glory of happiness, drowning in gold, forgetting all other things.

  “Damn it,” John muttered, picked up the biggest and gaudiest piece of gold he could see—a lamp stand nearly his own height, wrought like a tree with crystal fruit—and, staggering under its weight, started to carry it to the door.

  And dropped it, ducking a cat-paw swat from the dragon's clawed forefoot that would have broken his bones against the wall if it had landed. “Demons!” he yelled, rolling out of the way of Corvin's slashing teeth. “Demons, coming here!” And fetched up, gasping for breath, against the jeweled back of a golden chair, sword in hand for all the good that was likely to do him.

  Corvin stared at him, blank with shock.

  “They're forming up from the dust, they've got gold dust in the air for miles! Damn it!” he added, looking down, for a trickle of dust was flowing into the room now, thin and swift as water pouring down the stair.

  Corvin seemed to shrink and elongate in size, slithering like a snake up the stairway that was the Treasury's only entry, moving with a dragon's terrible speed. John pulled the strip of rag he'd been using for a scarf up over his nose and mouth and followed, throwing aside the torch when t
he wind snuffed its flame, and ran up blind in the dragon's wake, one hand on either wall and praying nothing more solid than dust was waiting for him between the Treasury and the top.

  There wasn't, but the wind struck him as he emerged from the stairway onto the top of the foundation, taking him by surprise and spinning him around before throwing him to his knees. The night was utterly black, but above the howl of the wind he could hear a voice calling his name: Gareth's, he thought.

  What the hell was Gareth doing here?

  Orange light, like a wind-torn torch. Gareth's voice shouting again, with a desperate note of panic. “John? John! ” And something about Jenny.

  The white dragon that was Jenny's onetime dragon-shape could have brought him here.

  Or the demons could be toying with him, eating up the surging throb of his heart at the thought of rescue and waiting for him to run toward the phantom torch and pitch off the edge of the foundation. The cream of the jest would be that the fall wouldn't kill him. It would amost certainly break his legs, though, and he'd be weeks dying of thirst at the bottom.

  John crawled forward on his hands and knees, feeling the stone before him. Sure enough, the edge dropped off about two feet away, invisible in the gritty darkness. But having reached the edge he was able to grope his way along it, knowing there'd be a stairway eventually—there was one on each of the foundation's four sides. From there he'd be able to feel his way along the wall.…

  Aye, he thought, at the glimpse of a flash and flicker of silver-green. Could the demons counterfeit the silvery glow that rushed up from the pool in the heart of the Henge?

  He didn't know, but the wind and dust were hammering him harder, and if he stayed in the open he'd be blinded in no very long time and suffocated soon after that. If nothing else the air within the Maze would be still.