Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  Aohila.

  The Demon Queen.

  The dream of her returned, snake-like and sinuous in John's arms. Laughing at Jenny, and making him laugh at her. Saying things like old, and ugly, and spent. Heat rose in Jenny's flesh, the heat and the nausea and the wavering shadows of migraine reminding her that the Demon Queen was right.

  It was only a dream, she reminded herself. Only a dream, and MY dream at that. But every time she thought of the silvery serpent whorls and spirals of power on John's flesh, which showed up when the angle of the moonlight was right, every time she thought of the scar in the pit of his throat, as if a white-hot jewel had been pressed between the small points of his collarbone, she remembered those jealous dreams. He had never said so, but Jenny guessed that Aohila spoke to him in dreams, as Amayon sometimes spoke to her.

  She knew what it was that Amayon said. Knew the dreams that Amayon sent.

  And Folcalor is coming, she thought. Coming with spells of new power, to open the mirror. To trap the Demon Queen and devour her, as Adromelech, his own master, had for untold ages devoured and regurgitated him. Folcalor would eat her power before turning upon Adromelech to become the Sea-wights' lord. And from there, to hold sway over all the Realms of humankind, turning them into their hunting-ground and larder.

  And woe to any, thought Jenny, who were in the way when the demons fought their war of vengeance and power and pain.

  She untied her sash and knotted a loop of it around the silver bottle's neck, not sure exactly what she would do. As long as Aohila was within the Burning Mirror she was safe, from Jenny at least. Whether Folcalor would be able to pursue her into her own Hell, Jenny did not know.

  She went back into the mirror chamber and stood before the black-painted glass.

  Amayon is in there, she thought again.

  And then, with a sudden flinch of horror, JOHN may be in there. Morkeleb had spoken of the rumors in Bel, that the demons had sent a dragon to save him from the stake. Aohila had controlled dragons before, a thousand years ago. Was it inconceivable that she could exercise that power again? True, Jenny had seen no trace in the corridor of anyone coming or going after John's second visit, but would there be other ways into the Hell behind the Mirror? The urge overwhelmed her to call out Aohila's name, to demand …

  What?

  It is the nature of demons to lie.

  She closed her eyes for a time, silently praying only, Let him not be dead.

  Give us another chance.

  Then she drew her plaid close about her, and walked from the mirror chamber, Morkeleb drifting behind her like a shadow out into the light.

  The Lords of Ylferdun Deep established watch posts throughout these northeastern foothills, Morkeleb said, at the very fringe of their realm. Whatever might become of the roads of men, the gnomes do not permit their tunnels to decay. If Folcalor comes to Ernine, it will be through one of these. Especially if, as we suspect, he now wears the guise of a gnome.

  The dragon found a cave in the foothills that had been carved out as a stable for a villa whose very foundations had crumbled away. Snow lay thick outside, but the place was protected from wind and the hothwais of warmth quickly filled the smallest of the surviving rooms. Morkeleb glided away, like a great raven among the trees to hunt, and Jenny scouted for squirrel hordes and cattail roots, and for enough dried bracken, buried beneath the snow of the thickets, to make a bed and a fire.

  She knew better than to treat with demons in any fashion, neither to bargain with them nor listen to anything they said. The silver bottle nudged her hip bone whenever she bent or moved, reminding her again and again of its presence. It was still as cold as it had been when she picked it up, for it would not warm with the warmth of her body. She could not rid her mind of the image of the Burning Mirror, could not rid her thoughts of the impression that when she had stood before it, with the silver bottle at her belt, that behind the mirror, Aohila had looked out at her.

  And said … what?

  And thought … what?

  She cooked and ate the rabbit Morkeleb caught, and lay down to sleep, exhausted. Miss Mab's spells had saved her life, and to some extent healed her body, but exertion and cold still took their toll on her far more quickly than she was used to. She slept like a dead woman, and the darkness of the mirror chamber followed her into her dreams.

  She was back there again, watching as John set out the things he had been ordered to bring back for the Moon of the King's Sacrifice. A dragon's tears, contained in a bottle wrought of glass and alabaster that the tears would dissolve before they could be used. The softly shining hothwais that held the light of a star, rather than the iron thunderstone that the Queen had mistakenly thought was a piece of a star. An arrowhead stained with blood.

  And like a thirteenth doughnut or a flower seller's giftposy, John had added to his tithe smaller bottles, or stones, or shells, sealed with red wax. Eight glass spikes filled with something silver that moved like mercury in the wavering light of the lantern. Though the night had been silent, when Jenny had sat there in truth, in her dream she could hear the demons inside screaming. They knew what they were going to.

  Amayon's sobs especially rang in her mind. I never meant to harm you, Jenny my darling! Not you, not anyone! You don't understand what they do to you—Folcalor, and Adromelech.…

  If anyone could have saved me, it would have been you, my Jenny, my beloved.

  And by that wavery glow John's face was grim and quiet, the smudges of sleeplessness very dark under his eyes.

  It's the Moon of Sacrifice, love, he said to the mirror. And here I am.

  In Jenny's dream the mirror wasn't black, but showed the Hell beyond. A suggestion of pillars in darkness, a whisper of marble and gold. Instead of John's reflection, Jenny saw the Demon Queen, quietly beautiful, combing her long black hair. Meeting John's eyes and smiling, complicit as a lover. And you, beloved? she said, in a voice like roses and smoke.

  John came back here after leaving the North. Why?

  He had walked into the Wraithmire on foot, and three weeks later, in the worst season for traveling, had emerged in Ernine, not a hundred feet from the Mirror of Isychros. When he was in trouble, a dragon—or something that looked like a dragon—saved his life.

  In her dream, Jenny turned and fled the room. But it didn't keep her from seeing him still. He walked slowly toward the mirror, pressed his palms to the glass. On her side the Demon Queen did likewise, palms pressing. Lips pressing. Jenny ran down the corridor, endlessly long now, desperate with grief. The pounding of her heart sounded louder in her ears, but still she could see John standing against the mirror, and still she could hear the Queen's deep syrup-dark voice, murmuring words of love. Lightning flashed in the mouth of the tunnel, and Jenny ran toward that light, heart and mind bleeding-raw.

  She had been a dragon and had returned to mortal humanity for John's sake. She had had the form and the magic of those beautiful alien creatures, and had said to Morkeleb, Return me to being what I was.

  Nothing can ever return to being what it was, had been his reply.

  And then he had asked her—had asked another being, for the first time in his life—Is this what you truly want?

  From that asking, he had not been able to return, either.

  He was walking away from her, flying away through the columns of the clouds, through the flare of the lightning. Jenny ran down the miles of corridor with its painted gazelles, gasping for breath, desperate to catch him, her heart pounding louder and louder, or perhaps it was the crash of the thunder.

  But when she opened her mouth to cry out, she cried, John …!

  JENNY …!

  Light speared her eyes and she woke. Lightning outlined the mouth of the cave—in wintertime? Then darkness, but as she fumbled for the hothwais under the bracken another white glare illuminated the whole wall of snow-clotted bramble that fronted the cave and outlined Morkeleb's bony black shape in the tunnel he'd dug through it. Jenny scrambled to her feet
, nearly fell when her sore hip protested, and limped to the dragon's side.

  “Folcalor …”

  It must be, I think.

  She pulled her plaid closer around her, followed the dragon out through the snowy bracken, into the dark of the woods. Red light drenched the night's darkness, wildfire burning in Ernine. Morkeleb caught Jenny up in his claws, flattened his wings to his sides, and glided like some strange curving snake through and among the bare trees. There was a sort of bench of land above the valley in which the old city lay, just clearing the tops of the trees below, and from there Jenny looked across the dark lacework of bare crowns and snowy earth to the Temple of the Moon. Fires roared in the leafless trees around that tall knee of rock. Against the crazy orange glare Jenny could see broken columns, shattered walls, and it seemed to her that the shape of the hill itself had altered. The sky had been clear when she had lain down to sleep, marked with the fat pale crescent of a sinking day-moon. Now a pall of cloud roofed it to the horizon, split by lightning again and again, levin-fire that struck always at the same place.

  Smoke-wisp shrieks whirled away on the wind. Her hand closed around one of Morkeleb's spines.

  Nothing came down from the watch posts nearby, the dragon said. That I will swear.

  And Jenny saw the flicker of his memory, of lying in the cave-mouth while she herself slept. Listening, with the starlightfine net of his dragon-senses spread over the whole of the mountainside. She saw through his eyes that first flare of lightning from Ernine, heard that first crash of thunder. Felt the searing unheard cacophony of demon magic and demon rage.

  “The gnomes could have had some old way, straight into the Citadel of Ernine.”

  Men were more trusting in those days, then.

  Her mind on her own jealous dreams, Jenny replied softly, “Even so.”

  And she heard/saw in Morkeleb's mind the memories of other Deeps, delved before Ylferdun: the Great Droon and the Lesser Droon, tunnels reaching everywhere, turrets on the mountainsides not too far from Ernine. Miss Mab had led John to this place by those hidden roads, when first he sought the Demon Queen. There were any number of gates.

  A whirlwind rose up, trees creaking as their roots were pulled about in the earth. Fragments of twig and branch smote her out of the dark. Lightning blasted once more, and she saw that the whole side of the hill, where the Temple of Syn had stood, was split as though with a monstrous ax; fire spouted up through the cleft, sparks rivering into the wind. Shadows thrashed among the sparks, dissolved in smoke. Demons? Manifestations of some other sort of power? Voices yammered, a howling very different from the screams of before, and in Jenny's mind she made words of them, from the memories of when Amayon had dwelled within her, and understood those sounds.

  Terrible words, curses and evil laughter, hatred and pain. Spells that made her want to cover her ears, pull her mind away. She felt Morkeleb's disgust, like a dark ripple of anger, and the spines of his joints bristled like the hair of an angry dog.

  A booming crash, rocks and earth and fragments of masonry bounding out in a cloud of earth as the hillside split again. The glare made Jenny cover her eyes, and blink blinded for moments after. Dark shapes outlined in fire circled the city, moving like a whirlwind: She saw them in yellows and greens against her shut eyelids for a time as she crouched against the dragon's side, his invisible shadow covering them both. Near them a tree exploded into flame, showering her with burning fragments. When she opened her eyes again the first thing she saw was the stumps of pillars uprooted and hurled into the air, dragging hunks of foundation on their feet. All the clouds that swirled so thick about the city were rimmed in thin, deadly blue. In the heart of that chaos the whirlwind gathered itself, a dense column of red-shot smoke. It revolved slowly, burning shapes—souls? ghosts? demons?—visible in the circling wall of smoke, even at that distance, clear and small as if she still dreamed.

  Slowly at first, then faster, the cyclone moved away toward the east. The ground steamed where it tore through the snow. Jenny clung to Morkeleb, watching it pass through the wooded bottomlands, spreading fire through the bare ice-locked trees. Deer fled crazily before it across the snow. The burning crown of it remained in sight for a long time, stretching up to join the red-lit lour of cloud.

  Trembling, Jenny crouched against the dragon's dark body. The silence that lay upon the city was dreadful after the crashing and the shrieks. Smoke from the burning trees mixed with the steam from puddles of snowmelt, until everything blurred in a shifting cauldron of fog and through it she thought she heard voices still.

  Magic hung in the air. Not dissipating with the passing of the whirlwind but, it seemed to her, growing stronger. She passed this thought, this question, without even forming it into words into Morkeleb's mind, and the dragon's reply came to her: No. It is not over.

  Something was still in Ernine.

  Some terrible malevolence beaded like water from the wet choke of the air. Darkness waiting, watching as the firelight sank to embers and died.

  Blue light flickered on the brow of the broken hill.

  She is here. Jenny's hand went to the catch-bottle at her belt.

  She is here. And if she survived that attack by Folcalor, she will be at her weakest.

  She cast her mind out over the hillside, the dragon's senses twining with hers until she could not have said whether she heard with her own ears or his. She breathed, scenting like a beast for the smell of demons, a stink like scalded iron and blood. She smelled the burned flesh and hair of animals trapped by the fire, rabbits roasted sleeping in their holes and squirrels burned up in their nests; smelled the vast gritty stench of smoldering trees.

  But she did not smell demons, or hear their whispering laughter.

  Only that thin light that wasn't really light burned purplish on the hill's savaged crest. She followed the cliff 's edge to the path that led to the hill where the palace had stood. Morkeleb followed without a sound. The Demon Queen was there, and she was alone.

  The whole of the hill's top, where first the palace with its diamond-windowed library had stood and later the Temple of Syn, was sheared off and charred as if sliced by a monstrous blade. Pillars, walls, trees thicker than a man's body, all swept away into heaps of smoking rubble on the hill's flanks. What was left of the dead grass and wiry leafless ivy had burned under the snow, and the whole of the hilltop glistened with smoking patches of water, with smoldering sheets of ash and cracked paving-blocks tilted and thrown about on their sides. Vapors rose from the gaping clefts in the hill itself, and against that fume the Demon Queen burned with a sicklied light.

  She looked human, precisely as she had appeared in Jenny's jealous dreams. Tall and slender and heartrendingly beautiful, with her long black hair lifting around her as if she floated in water rather than in air. She had marked the ground all around her with charred circles of fire, embers still flickering in the sigils of power she had laid down, and the air was marked, too, in pale rising rings of blue-burning light. Beyond the circles the earth was dotted with gray shards of what Jenny at first thought was broken glass, burned nuggets of ash. Only when she picked one up and saw the rough facets of fire-scored crystal did she understand.

  The heat that filled her was more terrible than the worst the change of her womanhood could do. She recalled the family she had rescued from slave-dealers in the woods of the North only weeks ago, Dal and Lyra from Rushmeath Farm, and their children: people she knew, children she had helped to birth. Saw the faces of the crippled Layla Gorge and her frail niece, Ana, whose family had wanted gnomes' silver more than it had wanted them.

  The Demon Queen still gazed east. Only mageborn eyes could still have distinguished the red flicker of the retreating whirlwind. Her attention was focused there, and toward that diminishing light she made the gestures and passes of power, as if summoning great events infinitely far away.

  She hid from Folcalor, thought Jenny, trembling still with anger. Hid and waited until he went east. Only thus cou
ld she summon power from a distance without him trapping her through her own spells. All this went through her mind in a single word, knowledge like a drop of molten glass, and she crept forward, the red wax stopper of the catch-bottle cold even through the leather of her glove. She moved silent, fearing that the Queen would hear the beating of her heart. Fearing that the waves of her rage would heat the very air around her, and warn Aohila of her presence.

  But the Demon Queen only traced signs in the air, over and over, and they hung smoking in the cold for a few moments before dissolving. Like her hair, her garments drifted about her, thin veils of what sometimes appeared to be fire, sometimes smoke. But her white feet pressed the ground. They were large, the feet of a tall woman. Jenny saw the nails were curved and black like Morkeleb's claws.

  She is calling all her power, Jenny thought. Calling it, and directing it on Folcalor. Like a small cat hunting she shifted herself up the hillside through the steaming puddles, the burned and perished gems. Her hand around the catch-bottle grew cramped and cold, and exhaustion gnawed at her bones. The longer she waited, the more Folcalor in his turn, wherever he was, would be weakened. Her whole being concentrated upon stillness, as she had in those days when she was only a Winterlands hedge-witch, relying on her slender powers to keep herself safe from bandits and the Iceriders who came down in bad winters from the North. She smelled rain, though there was no rain in the sky; sometimes also the burning tang of desert dust. Then these things were gone, and all she smelled was burning and death.

  At last Aohila lowered her arms. She stood straight and tall, staring into the east, her dark hair floating about her like kelp. Only a rim of embers outlined the riven hill. Huge stillness covered the silent ruin of the city. Overhead the clouds broke, and stars gleamed coldly through.

  Jenny brought the catch-bottle from the folds of her plaid and, as if even at that distance, Aohila had heard the rustle of her clothing, the Demon Queen turned. Her gold eyes widened, and she raised her hand, and in that instant Jenny pulled the stopper from the bottle.