Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  The fourth gate that he'd found—the one that could be opened at midnight—had been in the palace itself, and stood just on the edge of the foundation platform not far from the northeast corner.

  Dust-devils tore him, wind raking his face and his stubbled scalp. Sometimes he thought gritty hands pawed him, seized him, hands wrought of silver fire and dust. He slashed once with his sword, barely able to see, and of course the great looming things in the darkness simply dissolved, to re-form instants later, green phosphor glimmering in their eyes. Once he thought he saw Corvin, or what would have been Corvin, illuminated by the ocherous flare of the burning slime that the dragon spit. Saw a writhing shape high in the air, muffled in a cloud of blackness—dust in his eyes, in his nostrils, the singing hum of the gold confusing his senses, demon-voices ripping through his brain to his heart.

  Waiting for him to use magic, so they could seize him through it.

  Then darkness again, and John saw no more. But the wind grew stronger, driving him to his knees on the broken stone of the platform. If Corvin had any sense—if he could break free of the demons at all—he'd rise straight up over the dust storm like a balloon and head away fast toward the North. He'd done his duty, fulfilled the geas that binds dragons to their saviors.…

  Blinded, John lost sight of the Henge, then saw it again, mercifully in the same place and at the same distance, which unless the demons were being clever with him probably meant it was actually the Henge he saw.…

  He fell again, groping at the stone underfoot—the gate was almost exactly at the edge of the platform and you stepped through it as if you were stepping off into thin air. The first time he'd tried it, the night before last, he'd had a braided rope around his waist, which had impeded him severely when he'd stepped through onto the solid ground of an orchard of savagely animate thorned trees. It had been midnight there, too, and if he hadn't had a torch with him he'd have been cut to pieces before he saw the path away from the gate.

  But better that than this, he thought now. In any case, he knew the path ran away to the right and the thorned trees could be dodged, to get to the next gate into the Maze. Monstrous shapes loomed and dissolved in the whirling dark around him, reached ephemeral hands for him, and smiled with malicious, glittering eyes. And why not smile? he thought. From being a prisoner in all the city of Prokep he was now a prisoner on the foundation, and if Adromelech in fact guessed that he knew the way through the Maze, it wouldn't be long at all before they'd be on him.

  Quicker, if they could run him off the edge of the foundation and break his legs for him. After about a week of lying at the bottom he'd probably be pretty happy to talk about which door to choose and where it lay.

  Jenny's voice cried to him, trapped in the hammering storm. Crying his name, crying “I forgive you …,” in a voice that tore his heart. “Please—John, please …!”

  He groped along the edge of the platform, sighting on the blurred silver fire of the Henge, wondering how long it would be till midnight or if it was already past. He didn't think so, but there was no way to tell, and he didn't think he'd make it until dawn even if he could get down to where the other gate was. Dust smothered him, trapping him in a vortex of winds that circled him like a dust-devil, sucking the air from his lungs. Flecks of flying metal tore his face, and he staggered, feeling hands catching at him, claws cutting his flesh.

  The wind changed notes. Lightning split the darkness, the crack of thunder like an ax cleaving the bellow of the wind, and a cold, hard blast of rain struck John in the face. Wind drove the rain, wind straight out of the north, shattering the circling column around him, and lightning struck again, spearing from clouds to earth. Its purple glare showed him the rain, hammering the dust back into the ground; the darkness afterward was like being struck blind.

  The next flash showed John the wet shining black and silver shape of the dragon plunging down from the pouring heavens through the rain. He stepped to the edge of the platform and held up his arms; all the demon-light within the Henge had died. The dragon's claws snatched him hard around the ribs in the darkness, and the ground jerked away beneath his feet. Lightning rimmed Prokep one last time, a skeleton city in blackness.

  Then they were flying west under the streaming rain.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For close to a thousand years—according to John's copy of the third volume of Juronal, admittedly incomplete—the Realm of Ernine had dominated the meadowlands along the River Gelspring and the prairies that stretched east to the sunrise. In those days the city of Bel had been a fishing village, subservient to the vassal kings of the Seven Islands, whose true wealth lay in trade from the south. Through Ernine, amid its luxuriant hinterland of crops and cattle, had flowed the gnomes' silver from the Deep at Droon, and the furs of the northern forests; the Kings had raised palaces there pillared in the golden sandstone of the eastern deserts, and the priests worshiped unremembered gods in marble temples open to the sky. Long after Ernine had fallen to raiders from the steppe, a second city was built on the low knees and foothills above the Gelspring: Its foundations stood on the more ancient stone, but few recalled what it had been named or how it had met its end.

  Descending with the dragon through the pink-gold radiance of morning, Jenny Waynest could make out the outlines of this second city's temples, tangled in brush and thickets of pine all powdered with snow. She'd seen them before only at night, when in the autumn Moon of Sacrifice John had come here to pay his teind to the Demon Queen, the tithing that would purchase back his soul.

  On that occasion Jenny had been too shaken, too sick from the wresting-away of her own demon, to remember much of the city's appearance. But she recognized now the long stair-way that curled up the low hill's flank, and that inconspicuous cave under the vines. She'd sat on the marble step at the top, shivering uncontrollably in the autumn night, hating John and hearing Amayon scream in her mind. Above the stair a hollow square of pillars crowned the hill, their decorated capitals broken and white as the lingering snow patches among the brown of last year's sodden bracken.

  This, the Master of Halnath had told her, had been the temple of the Moon-God Syn, who was worshiped in the North in the form of a black sow.

  After long days underground Jenny's eyes ached in the glory of morning light. Everything seemed to sparkle and shout with color, even in these leaden weeks of granny-winter. Rowanberries on branches a hundred feet away blazed like fire. Wood that to ordinary view would have been silver-gray appeared to her as a mottling of a thousand subtle hues, lavender and snuff and cobalt. Among the bare trees she glimpsed broken pillars, pink porphyry and marble, and the flash of ice in what had once been ornamental fountains and ponds.

  Morkeleb spread his dark wings to circle above the Temple hill, Jenny leaning from his back. She traced the descending stairs and the courtyard near at hand with its frozen pool. “Would the mages—this Arch-Seer the demons spoke of—have come up by the main stair to attack Isychros?”

  The palace stood on the hill in those days. In her mind she saw the stair as it had been in her earliest dream of the place—her earliest dream of Amayon. Saw the rich pillars of sandstone and marble that ringed what had then been the Queen's Court, where ladies wove bright-colored cloth and sang among the colonnades. Isychros was the King's Mage, helping the Most High Lord Ennyta to keep his vassals on a leash by means of scrying and cantrips and blackmail. The chambers cut from the hillside were traditionally given to the Court Mage.

  Had the dragon walked those courts? she wondered. Climbed that long footworn stair in human guise? How long had he been in the custom of walking in the shape of humankind?

  “Would there be a back way in?” she asked. “When Isychros took over power in Ernine, with both mages and dragons at his beck, I can't imagine even an Arch-Seer coming at his stronghold from the front.”

  Images shifted in her mind. She saw the palace again as it existed in Morkeleb's memory, like an image painted on silk and hung before present reality.
Strange-shaped roofs with painted rafter-ends rose above red-flowering trees whose names she did not know. The shape of the land had not changed much, though the profusion of flowers spoke of warmer summers. Ernine spread farther down the Gelspring Valley than the city that had subsequently covered the spot. The pillared hall that reared on the hillcrest above the Court Mage's chambers—where the Moon-God's temple later would stand—had wide windows on all walls glazed in small panes of clearest glass, so that the building glittered like a heap of diamonds. Jenny smelled the cook fires of the town, and heard an ass bray far off.

  “Any wager you like,” said Jenny, shifting her balance between the spiked scales of the dragon's shoulders. “There was a stair coming down to his quarters from the hall above. That was the library, wasn't it, with all those windows? Were I Court Mage it's what I'd have. By the foliage it rains a good deal here.”

  And she felt the ripple of Morkeleb's amusement as he banked low over the tops of the bare trees. It is a thing of men, to put themselves in danger by leaving a back way into their dwellings, only to avoid a little water. See where there was a fountain even in those days, hard by the stair? It was out of that water the Sea-wights came, when the mages of the city of Prokep reached a bargain with Adromelech, to drive back Ao-hila's demons behind the mirror.

  Wind snapped in the baggy folds of the trousers Miss Mab had brought Jenny in the mines, and in the thick fluttering ends of the plaid she'd worn down from the North. After the warmth below the ground the air stung her face. Morkeleb turned above the higher flank of the mountain, and Jenny saw behind the jumbled roofs of glowing red and gilt the exquisite manicured wilderness of the garden, and all around its edges the workaday buildings of stables, servants' quarters, kitchens.

  They would have come in through the kitchen gate—the path up from the town was even in those days much overgrown with trees. She could see where the back ways among the storage quarters provided a safe, quick route from the kitchen to the library.

  Then she was seeing the ruin again, the palimpsest of old walls and foundations cloaked in leafless vines.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “If a way down to the Court Mage's quarters existed from the library, it would have been somewhere there.”

  When the forehead of the palace hill had been cut back, to build the later crypt of the Temple of Syn, the sealed door of the Court Mage's quarters had been covered over by a wall. Only the subsequent razing of Syn's city had opened the way again. Jenny and Morkeleb picked their way down the curving slope that turned into the old sandstone stair, and from there descended to the door behind its curtain of blackened vines flanked by the faded ghosts of frescoed gazelles still dimly visible on the face of the rock. Jenny's own footsteps, and John's, scuffed the corridor's dust.

  The doorway from the corridor into the round mirror chamber had been bricked shut in ancient times, the brickwork later stove in by who knew what impulse of foolishness and greed. The hothwais Jenny carried shed a wan light, in which the stars painted on the ceilings of corridor and chamber seemed to dance.

  A second set of tracks obscured those she and John had left last autumn. John's again, and recent. There was no mistaking the patched boots.

  He'd been here—why? Morkeleb had said he'd been in Bel. When she'd gone to the Hold only a few weeks ago, Sergeant Muffle—John's blacksmith and muster-chief and illegitimate brother—had told her John had gone scouting in the Wraithmire marshes, after first burning his workroom and taking with him only a few days' food. He'd left his horse with old Dan Darrow at the marshes' edge, had gone into the snowy mire on foot. Only ten days ago Jenny had talked to Darrow himself, and the old farmer had been sure of what he saw. Given the nature of the Wraithmire, and Dan's watchfulness of those evil lands, he'd have seen John's tracks emerging from the marsh, and he hadn't.

  It was conceivable—barely—that in a few weeks John could have reached Belmarie on horseback. But there had been no word of him in the countryside between. And even such a turn of cross-country speed didn't explain why he'd come here, of all places, before going to Bel and being arrested, sentenced to death, and rescued … by another dragon, according to Morkeleb.

  So what had he been doing here?

  Visiting the Demon Queen? Jealousy stirred in Jenny's heart like steam on a winter bog. For months now her dreams had been a torment of fantasies of John's infidelity, of John lying in the Demon Queen's arms.…

  The mirror stood silent where last Jenny had seen it, its glass painted over black. Framed by the pinkish-blue alien metal of a thunderstone, the long glass itself—a pane some six feet tall by a foot and a half wide, three times the size of any that Bel's craftsmen could produce nowadays—seemed enigmatic under its coating of black enamel, a shut door through which it was possible only to guess at sounds. In the bright light of the hothwais it looked harmless enough. By lantern light it had seemed to smoke or steam. A piece of paper, charred nearly to illegibility, still clung to the matte glass: the sigil Miss Mab had made for John, by which he had passed through into Hell.

  Jenny shivered, remembering the silver marks on his flesh, the burn at the pit of his throat. The Queen had marked him, as if claiming him as her own. Deeper still was the shadow that lurked in the back of his eyes Curious, Jenny thought, stepping close to the glass. She had never actually seen the Queen, though she felt as if she knew her well. Now she realized that the image she had of her—tall and black-haired, slender and coldly beautiful—she had only from her own dreams, in which John and the Queen lay together and giggled their derision of Jenny herself. At one time those dreams had been so real, she had been unable to separate them from reality, and had hated John for the pictures that arose out of her own mind.

  Perhaps the hatred had sprung in part from the Demon Queen taking Jenny's own demon Amayon away, to torture forever behind the Mirror.

  She put out her hand to the black glass, not daring to touch, and thought, He is THERE.

  And remembered again how it had felt, to love Amayon.

  All those things the demon had whispered to her—his love for her, his need for her, the trust and dependence he placed on her love … Even as they rang false and absurd in her mind, her heart pinched with the poison of that clinging, childlike profession of absolute love.

  She turned her head and saw Morkeleb, falcon-sized in the darkness of the round chamber, hanging close to her shoulder with wings spread like a hawk in the air. The hothwais of light made him sparkle, as if carved by a master-craftsman of jet. His eyes caught the light, and the jewel-like bobs on the ends of his antennae flickered in the dark.

  The touch of his mind on hers was warm as the comforting pressure of a hand.

  Why is it so hard to believe that demons lie? she asked him. It is their nature to lie.

  It is their nature to be believed, replied the dragon. And he called on a spell of light, blazing to fill all the chamber. On the other side of the room, a door showed up, which the shadows had hidden before.

  Jenny crossed the room to it, walking wide around the mirror. Everywhere she felt the malice of demons. She had assumed—she did not know why—that the circular chamber in which the Burning Mirror stood was the farthest it was possible to penetrate into the hill. When she had gone there with John to pay his teind, and turn over to the Demon Queen the demons they had extracted from the minds of the possessed mages, her powers had already burned away. The door was bricked shut, the lintels remaining but the bricks painted like the rest of the wall. Only magelight would have shown it up, or a mage's ability to see in the dark.

  Morkeleb shifted in size, as a shadow alters with the retreat of light. But his claws and muscle were no shadow. He tore the brickwork as if it had been dry wattle. Jenny flinched at the noise of rubble and mortar crashing to the floor and she glanced back at the mirror as if she expected something to come forth angry. Absurd, she thought. If it has held them all these years, why expect they could emerge now? Behind the broken wall a stair ascended, narrow and d
eeply worn. The sandstone was pitted, and stained black in great pools and dribbles. Walls and stair were charred, as if swept with fire.

  They tried this first, she thought, quite calmly, standing at the foot of the stair. The wizards who sought to defeat Isy-chros's dragons and demons. Rubble blocked the ascent no more than a few yards above her. Only after the Arch-Seer—whoever he was—failed to destroy the mirror did they call on the Sea-wights for help. They, or those of their friends who survived them.

  This she knew as if she had heard their ghosts telling of their hopeless attack in the dark of the stair.

  She stepped through the crack Morkeleb had made, and held the hothwais up, to shed its unveiled light in every corner and cranny.

  Just where the lowest step and the wall came together a silver bottle was wedged. Shadow would hide it when torches were borne down the stairs, or carried in from the mirror crypt itself. After the Arch-Seer and his mages attacked Isychros here, she thought, Isychros must have had little leisure to ascend to the library. And after Isychros's defeat the two daughters of the King who succeeded their father must only have wished to have the whole place sealed, with everything inside.

  A catch-bottle, the demons had called the thing Folcalor sought. Surely the same object that Caerdinn had told her of, the trap inscribed with the true name of its intended victim, woven with certain spells. It would draw the soul into it like smoke.

  She picked the bottle up. It was just larger than the hollow of her hand, and very light. The silvery bulb of it was a globe, the thin neck stoppered tight with something that looked like a crystal, embedded in a petaled rose of hard crimson wax.

  We know she was never trapped in it. The name within it will still be the same. The spells will be waiting.

  Her heart pounded in her chest, so that she could scarcely breathe.