Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  John's boots made barely a sound on the halved logs that made up the steps.

  “It's no gie wonder a great realm like Ernine fell to pieces and couldn't defend itself against foes that were no more than the Icerider tribes are to us.” He groped his way along the gallery, and Jenny threw an end of her plaid around his shoulders as he joined her on the rustic bench on which she'd been sitting, and crouched close over the hothwais. He wore a coat of green wool, like a merchant's, and an assortment of scarves tucked around his neck, under a sorry hand-me-down cloak that smelled of dogs. “It's clear to me we need to send someone out here to keep guard over 'em, an' everyone I think of I think, What if they're a demon these days? ”

  He passed her a substantial chunk of cheese wrapped around in a couple of hot griddle cakes, and a handful of dried apricots. Despite the supper they had shared a few hours ago, the cold and the walk and the setting of the ward-signs had left Jenny ravenous.

  “I don't even trust those little girls, though Danae swears she's kept 'em both at her side since first Milla started havin' her sick fits … which'll be no more than a pinch of dried tansy in her food. Branwen says, I'm cold, Mama, an' I think, Is that the kind of thing a little girl would say when she's cold? Why doesn't Milla complain of the cold? This all looks very suspicious to me. It's enough to send you barkin' mad.”

  “And it did,” Jenny said softly, and their eyes met with the same ruefulness of shared folly, of disaster somehow survived.

  “Aye, well,” said John. “That it did. But accordin' to Danae, Gar's been missin' since he said he'd go speak to Bliaud, who I'll swear is demon-ridden these days.…”

  “He is,” said Jenny. “He's the one who's been raising the dead in the town.” She pulled her coat tighter about her, thinking of the long walk back to the city in the predawn's icy cold. “But I think Danae and the girls are safer here than either of us would be if you or I tried to go back to Bel to look for Gareth alone.”

  On the walk back to Bel, with the slow gray of winter dawn creeping between leafless wind-combed trees, John asked Jenny for more details of all that had happened that winter: How close had Folcalor's baskets of jewels lain to the inhabited Warrens of the Deep; how many of the burned-out husks of them had scattered the split and smoking hillslope in Ernine? Was she sure it was Caradoc she and Ian had spoken with on the crumbling breakwater at Eldsbouch, and not a demon?

  “It was Caradoc,” said Jenny. “Squidslayer and the Whalemages brought me Caradoc's staff—do you remember it? A demon's head carved in wood, with a moonstone in its mouth. Caradoc's soul was imprisoned in that moonstone. When I took the staff from the ocean it burst into flames, soaking wet as it was, and I let it fall again. Presumably it fell into the corpse of a drowned sailor—there had been a shipwreck only days before on those rocks—and with the moonstone inside it, that sailor's corpse first tried to drown Ian, then escaped into the wastes.”

  Jenny kept her voice even, but the recollection of the sailor's rotting eyes disturbed her profoundly, the memory of how the worms had moved beneath his wet clothes. “I spoke to him. It was Caradoc.”

  “He'll have his work cut out for him, dodgin' wolves.” John tucked his gloved hands into his armpits. “An' him doin' that good an imitation of carrion. What do we do if we can't find the jewel containin' Bliaud's soul anywhere in his house? Always supposin' we make it that far. He was rid of one demon, an' let another in of his own free will, remember.”

  “You don't understand what it's like.” Jenny hugged close to John under the shared wrap of her plaid. “I'm not saying that to mitigate what Bliaud did, or to argue that we give him clemency beyond reason. But … when you've had a demon within you, there's a part of you that wants it back. I'm fairly sure that I would, but I can't be absolutely positive that I'd turn Amayon away if he took me unawares.”

  “Meanin' if we find a jewel in Bliaud's house, an' somehow manage to force the current demon out of him … he might still take on the next one he meets, even after the Dragonstar's gone from the sky. They'll no longer be able to force their way in past a mage's ward-spells then, but that doesn't mean they can't seduce a mage the way they seduced Caradoc.”

  “They need our bodies,” Jenny said quietly. “Magic is partly a thing of the mind, but a good deal of its essence lies in human flesh, and in the flesh of some more than others. Now that Rocklys is defeated, and her corps of mages and dragons is broken up, there are fewer mages than ever for demons to seek. Sometimes when I slept in the Deep, after I was wounded, I would dream of Ian in danger, dreadful dreams.”

  “It's a two-edged weapon,” said John, and they paused to rest in the lee side of a house near the road, until the barking of the dogs in the farmyard drove them on. “Magic, I mean. If it isn't demons comin' after a mage for his power, it'll be a King, you know. Or a friend. Or the part of your soul that thinks it's entitled to whatever fate's denyin' you that week. You can only do what you can.”

  Maybe Morkeleb had the right idea, reflected Jenny, when he'd surrendered his power, and moved on to something else.

  For his part, John told Jenny more of the Hells through which he had traveled on errantry for the Demon Queen: Hells that looked like Paradise, where the butterflies spat poison and the milkweed-puffs sowed twisting hookworms into human flesh; Hells where gales scoured barren cliffs and flames burned in ravines forever; Hells where the voices of the dead cried from the darkness. Hells where shining things roved, that devoured human and demons alike. And beyond those Hells, a world of human beings where the dragon Corvin had hidden himself for unimaginable years, masquerading as a scientist and shifting from identity to identity as the people around him aged, and he did not. “There's no magic there, but there's this thing called ether, this sort of … of power that made lights in the darkness for everyone, an' hot water to bathe in, an' computers an' Personal Ambient Sound Systems that're enough to drive you screamin'.…”

  “What are computers?”

  “I dunno, really,” said John. “It was all in writin', which I didn't understand, of course—nor the language, bar what was spoken to me. Everyone there seemed to set great store by 'em, though, an' it was out of one that I found out all that guff about what the Dragonstar's actually made out of. I took notes.…” He patted the front of his ragged coat, which bulged with his customary wad of drawings and jottings, and tried to keep his cloak from tangling his feet in the wind. “I'll be years figurin” em out. I copied things you'd want to know of, too, love—the sigils of the gates from world to world, an' what was writ on the silver bottles an' boxes that Aohila used for a soul-trap. Some of it's demon magic, but other things you might be able to make work. It'll come in gie handy,” he added, “when you and I go back there together to have a look about.”

  They entered the city with the farmers who brought dried apples and thin winter milk to the markets. The day was a foul one, and spits of sleet stung Jenny's face; there would be little, she guessed, for anyone to sell or buy. She and John divided as they neared the gate, and passed through this crowd some thirty feet apart, watching each other's backs. Now and then Jenny would see a face in the streets that made her flinch inside, demon-eyes burning in a human countenance.

  Could there be people who did not know, who could not see? Apparently—Jenny had to remind herself that most people did not have her gruesome wealth of experience. Even after the King's reassurances of yesterday, the men and women in the streets looked frightened and cold, and clumped to whisper outside the doors of the shops. When she reached out to touch their conversations, Jenny heard muttering about people who had disappeared, or tales of random murders. Everywhere she felt the fear and mistrust, and the panic smoke-whiff of rumor. A child had killed both her parents, in the neighborhood of the Temple of Cragget, and afterward threw herself in the icy river. A woman had gone to the palace to petition the King, and had not been seen again. People whispered of demons, of who was in league with them, and who was not, or probably was not.…


  Being a member of the old Greenhythe nobility, the wizard Bliaud had a town house in the quiet districts south of the river. Dwellings there stood in their own walled grounds, and even the shops had trees growing beside them, to shade their doors in summer. Jenny asked a girl hawking hot pies in one of the mews that ran behind the great houses; the girl looked at her strangely and said, “Don't go to him, sweetheart. I went—I paid him everything I had, to bring my boy back from the plague. But when they come back, they ain't the same. Death takes whom She wills, and I've learned now it's best to let Her be the judge of it, not me. When they come back, they ain't the same.”

  “Aye,” whispered John, when he and Jenny reunited briefly in an alleyway. “And we want to be careful, because I suspect at least one of Bliaud's sons is demon-ridden, too, or in league with 'em, anyway. Abellus, the one with all the hats. Anyroad, he was with this tattooed southern feller who tried to catch me in the palace. I didn't go up and look close, but watch out.”

  They divided again, making their way around two sides of a quiet square where an enormously tall fountain stood bearded fantastically in icicles. Their goal was the alley that backed the stables of several town villas, Bliaud's among them. While still in the nearly empty shopping arcade that fronted all four sides of the square, Jenny heard the measured tread of feet in the nearby lane: chair-bearers, and the armed footmen who habitually protected the rich from those who were desperate and poor. Looking back, she saw a covered chair emerge from the Avenue of Limes that led toward the palace precincts, borne by eight gnomes and guarded by eight more in mail that bristled with spikes. She glanced across the square and caught John's eye for the fleetest moment as he melted out of the shadows of the opposite arcade; they both hastened their steps.

  Jenny didn't think for a moment that either of them doubted what gnome would be visiting whom at this early hour of the day.

  Or why.

  As she passed a woman bundled in a red coat selling coffee from an urn on her back, Jenny overheard her mutter to a customer, “You can't tell me they don't have men working in their mines. My cousin's husband claims my cousin died of the plague, but I've heard they're buying slaves.…”

  The alley was puddled with dirty snow and slick with dropped straw and frozen horse dung. She and John counted back gates. Most of the servants would be turned out to prepare for visitors in the front part of the house. Another time, Jenny thought, she'd have to try operating the gate's bolt by magic, as she'd used to do, but wasn't sure enough of her powers, or of how great a strain she'd have to put on them in the immediate future, or of what Bliaud could detect. She listened at the stable gate until she heard the voices dim away toward the kitchen, then John boosted her over as if they were children going to thieve apples. She slipped the bolt, and let him inside.

  Like most of the great town villas, this one was separated from its stables by the snow-covered square of a kitchen garden, onto which looked the kitchen, laundry, stillroom, dovecote, and offices. A strip of orchard lay beyond, and greenhouses for forcing grapes.

  Jenny's scalp prickled at the disorder she saw in the stables and in the garden as she and John ducked and crept from hedge to hedge, freezing into hiding as servants emerged to hurry along the paths toward the house. The dirt everywhere, the stinks of garbage and of stalls weeks uncleaned, were more than the slovenliness of a household in upheaval. Being deathless, and having no care for the humans they rode, demons are careless. They are lazy, shrugging away the tedious chores that hold starvation and sickness and sores and bugs at bay. Why keep a body from being consumed with festering flea bites if one can always possess another? Why take time to grow food to eat, or to clean away stable waste? If the horse stumbles from thrush, well, there are other horses.

  Around the dovecote a dozen birds lay dead. At first glance Jenny might have attributed this to rats or a dog, except that their heads had all been wrung from their bodies, the snow pink with blood.

  The house was rank with demons.

  And there was neither cat, nor dog, nor even evidence of mice and rats to be seen.

  Servants were carrying trays of sweetmeats and wine to the main block of the house, three storeys of tall-ceilinged reception chambers, of glass windows warm with candlelight in the gray bluster of the overcast morning. A dilapidated wing stretched back from it, half-timbered wood rather than stone, and isolated by overgrown trees from both the outer world and from the servants' portion of the property. From the unkempt orchard Jenny reached with her thoughts into that wing, calling on the power that she had felt all night taking shape inside her.

  Nothing. In the main house, shadows crossed back and forth over the windows, and she could now and then catch fragments of voices. A human voice, and a gnome's, but speaking in the tongue of the demons. No sound in the long, narrow wing; no sound but a single sleeper's stertorous breath.

  A small door looked out into the shaggy wilderness of bushy hedges: John slipped his knife under the bolt. Once Jenny heard what she thought was the crunch of a footfall in the orchard behind them, but looking back saw only a servant hunting for last autumn's windfalls. One of the few, she guessed, unpossessed by demons in that house. She wondered what sort of rumors the girl passed among the neighbors. The smell of the wing struck her like that of a shambles, a stink of blood and filth, of old smoke and chamber pots either uncleaned or unused.… The place was freezing cold, too.

  The room they entered from the garden was clearly Bli-aud's workroom, the smallest chamber at the end of the wing. Windows on three sides admitted clear snowy light that bathed the paraphernalia of a scholar and a naturalist. Flowers pressed or dried strewed the long tables under the windows, reminding her of John's study at the Hold. Bunches of herbs hung on strings close by the hearth where the rising warmth would desiccate them, and jars containing the embryos of birds or pigs, preserved in brandy or honey, stood on shelves. Cupboards of books. Pestles and mortars and sieves of hair or bolting-cloth; bone knives; pots of gum or charcoal; a green glass jar of quills.

  But all of it dusty and disused. The specimen jars were broken or opened, the curiosities within them rotting in the air. Jars of various types of poisons stood open on one worktable, with a scatter of packing-straw. Beyond that, little looked as if it had been used for months. Directly beneath the room's central lamp stood a small table, a chair thrust back from it with such violence that it had tipped on its side, never picked up. On the table a porcelain bowl held blood, clotted with exposure to air but still fairly fresh. Jenny recalled a vision she had had—when? Back at her home in Frost Fell, during those hellish winter weeks of sickness and grief and self-pity?

  A vision of a man's hand, dipping into a basin of blood and bringing out the little glass shells in which the Sea-wights hid themselves.

  Blood in the bowl, peace in your soul.

  She had heard the demon Folcalor whisper that simple, logical-sounding rhyme.

  Blood in the bowl, all will be whole.

  “He may have meant it for the best,” she breathed, looking up into John's impassive face. “Bliaud, I mean. He may have seen the plague break out, and have thought that he could make a bargain with Folcalor, to obtain the power to fight it.”

  “Aye.” John's expression did not change. It was for precisely that reason, Jenny recalled, he had twice treated with the Demon Queen.

  And what had Caradoc thought when he first opened the demon-gate? What rhyme had Folcalor sung to him?

  Gareth lay in the room beyond.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The chamber had been a bedroom once. There was still an old bedstead there, a canopy-ring depending from the faded red-and-blue stampwork of the ceiling. Gareth lay on the bare ropes, his hands and feet manacled to the wooden bedframe. Jenny heard his breathing change as they came into the room, and the thin, desperate sound that came from his throat. He twisted his head around, as if he could see them through the blindfold that covered his eyes. He was gagged, too, but he struggled to pull aw
ay from them as he heard their footsteps approach. Jenny knelt beside him, pushed the blindfold up as John bent to examine the chains.

  “Bugger it, we'll have to cut your hands and feet off, lad.”

  Gareth gasped, “Do it if you have to,” though he'd heard the jest in John's voice. His shortsighted gray eyes were wide with terror and shock. “Millença—”

  “Is safe.” John was already looking around the room for something to pry the chain links with. “How's your lockfoxin', love?”

  Jenny ran her fingers over the wristlets. “I can try. These aren't spell-warded.”

  “Gie sloppy of somebody.”

  “John, there's a lot I can't …” She raised her head sharply at the far-off closing of a door. Voices …

  “… Sindestray will preside. But I'll give a lot to be there when our boy here confirms the sentence.”

  Jenny's eyes cut to John, saw his face blank, uncomprehending. Demon voices, speaking demon speech. Gareth gasped, “Don't leave me!” frantic as John caught Jenny's wrist and pulled her to her feet. The feet were near, and the guttural foulness of a demon's gloating laugh nearer still. John dragged Jenny behind the great cascade of rotting silk that dangled from the canopy ring to the floor behind the bed, instants before the door opened and the wizard Bliaud entered, followed by a hard-faced, pink-haired gnome.

  Jenny recognized the gnome at once, though she had never seen him before. In a way even the seamed face was familiar. A vision, she thought, a dream she had had while in her dragon form. She remembered the twist of his heavy lips, the thickjeweled rings that studded his fingers. Fingers she'd seen turning over and over the blue jewel in her dream, the jewel in which Ian's soul had been imprisoned.