Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  Jenny would have spoken. But John laid a hand on her lips and, pulling his doublet close around him, opened the door into the whirling night. “Aunt Rowe said she'd have a bath sent up to our room for us,” he said. “I think we deserve it. Let's hope the water's still hot.”

  With an end of her plaid wrapped over John's shoulders, they leaned and groped and stumbled their way across the courtyard to the lights of the kitchen, barely to be seen in the mealy scour of the snow. But Jenny could not rid her mind of the black spiky shape of the robot, crouching in the dark blacksmith shop. After bathing, and washing John's back, and lying together in the curtained warm dark of the bed, she dreamed of it: dreamed that the white moonstone eye watched her still.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Before John was awake, Jenny rose. The bedchamber was nearly as dark as the night before, though the innate sense of time that wizards must develop—if they are to source power from where the sun stands in the sky and from the phases of the moon—told her it was morning, an hour when a month ago the sky would have been pitchy black.

  The wind still groaned, that frigid northern storm-wind that flailed the Winterlands six months out of twelve: wind which had, two centuries ago, transformed the sweet-blooming heart of the Realm to a wasted backwoods province that not even the Kings thought it worthwhile to hold. The small stone room, its walls covered in smoke-darkened winter hangings that stirred uneasily with the drafts, was warm near the hearth and no place else. The bath and towels and jars of soap and oils remained before the banked embers, and on her way downstairs Jenny put her head in at the kitchen, to ask Aunt Rowe to get Bill to carry them away.

  Then she wrapped her plaids around her again, and crossed to the smithy.

  Generally the big doors of the workshop stood open, or were only latched against the wind. But when John and Muffle had started work on the robot, John had had a bolt added, and had looked out one of the padlocks his father had traded for from the gnomes. At Jenny's touch it opened, and she slid back the iron bolt.

  The low-vaulted stone room was dark. Its shuttered windows held in the heat, and admitted only grayish slits of light. Around the iron fire-bell the ashes in the forge radiated a dense white warmth. Last night when they'd passed Muffle in the kitchen—the blacksmith trying to pretend he'd been sitting there since they'd sent him away, and not keeping unobtrusive guard in the woodshed—John had warned him not to enter the smithy until Jenny had seen the place first. On this icy morning the big man was probably having a comfortable lie-in with Blossom.

  Jenny stepped quickly through the door and closed it behind her. She did not need light to see the robot. It seemed to her that shadow lay thicker about it, that the heat of the forge did not penetrate into that end of the room.

  “Caradoc?”

  The robot moved.

  Laboriously, painfully, one of the legs flexed. The cables creaked as they drew through pulleys, pistons grated as they rose. The wheels squealed, a horrible sound. The high kneejoint lifted, then fell as the limb straightened; then the next, and the next. Testingly, as a man will test broken fingers when they first come out of splints. From the gut strings of the voice-box came a deep humming, that scaled abruptly up into a furious insectile whine.

  The metal hand—twice the span of a human one—curled in a clumsy half-fist, then spread out wide. The pincers touched the tips of their metal crescent, and gaped with a brittle screech of ungreased rivets.

  Then with a mad, buzzing snarl of voicebox strings the robot lunged at her. It jounced across the uneven brick floor with the horrible speed and gruesome, scuttling motion of a bug, wooden feet scrabbling and knocking. Jenny leaped back and out the door, slammed it after her and sent the bolt crashing into place. She heard the robot smash into the thick oak planks, heard the squishy leathern squeak of its feet as it backed for another run, then the rattling, squeaking cacophony of attack again. The whine of its artificial voice boomed eerily from the soundbox, inarticulate, roaring, and at the same time Jenny heard Caradoc's voice shouting at her, shouting in her mind, like the voice in a dream.

  Bitch! Cheat! Hellspawn whore! The planks of the door started at the impact of hundreds of pounds of iron, and there was a crashing sound, as if a bench had been kicked or flipped against the nearest wall.

  Cheated me! Cheated me! Put me in prison! Bitch, bitch, you and your dunghill bullyboy pimp!

  Caradoc, she shouted at him, Caradoc …!

  But he was beyond listening, beyond framing words. The bolt jumped and jiggled as she slipped the padlock's crooked arm through the hasp. Spells of pain, of sickness, of blindness, of cramp flapped against her, ineffectual as moths on a glazed window, and the screams of the trapped wizard's rage redoubled in her mind as she flicked those crazed spells aside. Jenny pressed against the door, hearing the crash and clawing within, while over her consciousness sluiced the raw sewage of wrath and indignation and self-pity.

  Cheat, cheat, may you both die! Would that Folcalor had used my hands to choke you to death!

  More helpless whifflings of pain and ill luck, which whirled into the air and dissipated like a flatulent stink. She felt spells paw at the lock, but it held. Even had it not, she doubted the heavy iron could have been maneuvered out of the hasp that held the bolt. Jenny thought, It takes all the magic that he's capable of mustering, only to move his limbs.

  And maybe even that isn't enough.

  You call this a bargain? he screamed at her, trapped mind shrieking into hers. You call this LIFE, that you're offering me? Mute, nearly blind … I've been trying all night to reach out into the rest of the Hold, to hear, to sense, to know what's going on. Mumbling, confusion, clamoring far off … Is this what you think I'm worth? Is this the reward you give me, for putting Folcalor into your hands? Is this all you rate me, ME, Caradoc of Somanthus?

  What would you have, then, Caradoc of Somanthus? Jenny pressed her thoughts against the red raging stream of his fury. In her mind she could almost see him, for she had been where he was now, conscious of the iridescent lattices of the moonstone around him, as if he stood in a chamber of crystal, seeing the consciousnesses of others outside. Another corpse, and another, to stagger about in the snow until you rot? How long do you think you could keep that up, before your powers failed you utterly or Folcalor's servants found you? What John gave you was the best he had to give.…

  Your pitiful fancy-man cheated me, as I'm told he cheated the Demon Queen herself! Best forsooth! The best he had to give is his son, his son's body and his son's magic … yes, and why not? What has that worthless brat ever done of his own volition? What good could he be? Aversin owed me—still owes me! After what I've done …

  What you've done you did knowing exactly what you were offered.

  Faugh! There was another crash in the smithy, and the hard crash of metal striking stone. The anvil going over, Jenny guessed. Muffle would be furious. I knew nothing! Through the closed oak door Jenny heard the roaring boom of the voice-box that Caradoc had not yet learned to control. This—this THING is a deadweight, a useless chunk of iron! The human body, even dead, has some magic, some vibration, ever in its marrowbones. This thing is not human, never was human. It has no eyes to see, nor ears to hear.…

  You're aware enough of where I stood to spring at me, returned Jenny. I notice you have no trouble finding things to knock over.

  Bitch! He screamed at her again, and more iron crashed against the door. Hag! Slut! You owe me! You all owe me! I deserve more than this!

  The soft tread of boots in the sheltered porch—audible to Jenny's ears, even above the moaning of the winds—made her turn her head, though she recognized John's stride. He'd shaved, and wore one of Aunt Rowe's knitted tunics under his much-battered black leather doublet, a brown-and-white winter plaid wrapped around him for added warmth. “Caradoc,” she answered the lift of his eyebrow, though it was quite obvious what was going on. “He says he deserves more than you have given him.”

  “We all deserve more t
han the bodies that trap us, Caradoc,” said John, raising his voice to carry through the door. “We all deserve more than a hundredweight and a half of meat that has to be fed and kept warm; that drives us to do the damn-all stupidest things when it needs to seed itself, and tells us we're more special than the next man when there's not enough of somethin' to go around. And when all's said in the end none of it does any good, for it's still gonna die on us, no matter who we kill or what we do to prevent it. An' those around us are gonna die, too.”

  “He isn't listening, John,” Jenny said quietly, information that was scarcely necessary in the face of the roars, the crash of breaking benches and bins of charcoal hurled and smashed, the vicious clatter of iron limbs against the door. In her mind she could hear Caradoc shouting, Don't fob me off with your puling philosophy, you bumpkin nitwit! I've read everything worth reading on the subject and know more than you even imagine exists!

  And the crashing continued, like the fist of an enraged child.

  “Can he set fire to the building?” Jenny asked softly.

  John thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “Muffle banked the fire pretty good, after we were finished,” he said. “To get it goin' again needs a fine touch with kindlin', an' gentle blowin'. If Caradoc pulls down the forge itself it'll just go out. He hasn't lungs, an' if he did have, that hand isn't near as mobile as a human one, for all it was as fine as I could make it.”

  Jenny flinched, remembering her own rage and sorrow at summer's end, immediately after she had slain Caradoc's body, and the scarring from the steam-burns had crippled her hands.

  I was the lord of the dragons corps! Caradoc screamed in her mind. I mastered them, through life and death! I rode in triumph at the head of the most feared force in the world. I subdued and defeated every mage in the west of the world.…

  No, thought Jenny, though she did not project the thought into the maddened wizard's mind. No, you're forgetting. That was Folcalor who did and was all those things. Using your body, as you wish to use my son's.

  “I'm that sorry for him,” John went on. “I really am. I think he expected it would be sort of like the robots in the movies I saw. That it'd have balance, an' deftness—all those other things it takes a human mind five or seven or ten years to work up to, when it's born into a little lump of pink flesh called a baby—that it'd have 'em right away. It's got to be hard.”

  Only now, under the influence of the gentle magic of Ian and Miss Mab, was Jenny beginning to regain mobility in her fingers, and their joints still ached. Still, she had found she could weave a cat's cradle in play with her daughter Mag last night, and manipulate the tiny seed-pods of poppy and flax. Last night, while John had drowsed in the bath, she had taken her harp from the corner of the bedroom, tuned its strings, and played a simple air—played it very badly indeed. Still, it had given her joy.

  “He still wants Ian, more now than ever.”

  “Well, he won't have him. The children are safe enough with Sparrow, and I'm gie glad for this storm—not that I thought I'd ever say I was glad of any storm—because if anything could keep Adric away from comin' up here, it's that. I'll go in and have a word with Caradoc later, after he calms down some. Not that I think it'll do a twilkin' bit of good.” And he fingered the silver catch-bottle, strung on its red ribbon around his neck. He wore it, Jenny saw, outside his doublet, as if he wanted it to be seen, and it gleamed like far-off ice in the cold storm-light that leaked in under the smithy's porch.

  “He's got what he wanted, anyway,” Jenny said as John double-checked the door and the bolt, and the hinges as well, before putting an arm around her shoulders to lead her back to the kitchen to breakfast. “He is immortal—and probably indestructible, in that iron body. How long will he be able to keep it moving, do you know?”

  John shook his head. “He'll have to grease himself up pretty often—that's what I want to tell him, among other things—but there's a lot of weight to contend with. In damp weather like this, the friction'll build up fast. God knows how the folks in the Otherworld kept their robots from rustin'. It was damp there as a swamp, you know, an' now that I think on it I don't think I saw much rust anywhere, not even down the dead subway tunnels.” And he frowned, puzzling this over.

  Jenny said, “Without the residual magic he was able to glean from his corpses, Caradoc may very well lose any ability to move the robot's limbs at all.”

  “Leavin' him exactly where he was.” John bent his head, hunched his shoulders against the slashing wind as they struggled across the court. “Just in a bigger moonstone, that's all.”

  For a few minutes neither spoke, breathless with cold, until they fetched up in the kitchen. Aunt Jane was just taking the day's first bread out of the oven, and the whole long room smelled of it, and of the herbed ointment Cousin Dilly was daubing on the blisters Muffle had acquired during the construction of the robot. Snuff and Bannock thumped their tails and rolled on their backs, like small shaggy horses wanting their tummies scratched, which John obligingly knelt to do.

  “So what do we do,” asked Jenny, unwinding her sleetflecked plaids, “if this is the case? What do we do when he realizes this?”

  John glanced up from tussling with Snuff, and smiled. “We watch him.”

  The storm lasted another two days. Like John, Jenny could only be thankful for the hammering winds and sleet—like John, she knew their second son too well to think he'd be kept away from anything as fascinating as a robot by any lesser force. Her one fear was that the iron monster would, if it succeeded in escaping the smithy, make its way to the village in search of the boys, and she went to the smithy door a dozen times that first day, listening for the scrabble of wooden feet on the stone floor, the squeal of the pulleys and wheels.

  Sometimes she heard the angry clanging of Muffle's tools as they were thrown or kicked about.

  Sometimes she heard the buzzing of the voice-box, now loud, now soft, ranging up and down from shrill squeals to bass drones without ever coming into semblance of words.

  Sometimes she heard nothing.

  If there was punishment for the mage who had touched off the whole circle of horror, she thought—from the kidnapping of Ian through the possession of the wizards by demons, and so to the nightmare in Bel of the walking dead—this was close to what she might have envisioned. She wondered what was in Caradoc's mind now, and if he still thought he could bargain or think his way back to the true power he had always craved.

  She did not know, for after that first morning he made no further attempt to put words or thoughts into her mind, or to communicate with her in any way. Sometimes, when she stood next to the door, listening to the scrapings and draggings within, she would feel a sharp stab of cramp in her sore hip, or get a blurring glitter of migraine in the corners of her sight. She could always tell when these were Caradoc's doing, and was easily able to brush them off her like dust. Muffle sometimes came with her, asking worried questions about how much damage the robot could cause to his tools:

  “Anything else I can mend, mind, but if he breaks the anvil we're all in a fix.” He winced at the dull crack of charcoal or stones flung at the door. “And mind you, I'm not looking forward to putting the forge back together again.”

  In the nights Jenny would listen, bending her thoughts toward the courtyard and the forge, trying to hear under and through the shriek of the wind. By day she would talk to Ian, through the medium of a scrying-crystal and the mirror her sister's husband had bought from a trader, and her son reported one or two disquieting dreams that might have come from Caradoc: dreams of Jenny's death at the hands of demons, or of terrible misfortune falling upon the Hold.

  “Last night I dreamed of magic,” the boy told her on the second day. “Like when Black-Knife attacked the Hold: fires breaking out in the thatch and the wood-room, and people's clothing catching fire, and the animals going crazy in their stalls. I woke up positive that this was actually taking place, because in the dream there was the wind howling around
the walls, and I knew the only way any of you could be saved was by me going up there right then.”

  He grinned, sidelong and shy and heartstoppingly reminiscent of John. He was sitting in the kitchen of Sparrow's house, which had belonged to Sparrow and Jenny's mother before. Firelight flickered over his face, and Jenny could almost smell her sister's cooking. “He always overdoes it,” he said. “Caradoc. Because of course I scried the Hold and everything was fine. But you watch out for him, Mother. He's up to something.”

  During this time also Jenny tried to communicate with the Whalemages, sinking deep into meditation in the small, thickly curtained cubbyhole that was her own library and workroom off the bedchamber she shared with John. She reached out with her mind over the windblasted miles of the Winterlands, across the bare black of the rock and the scoured white of snow, to where the snow piled the brown margins of the sea and the foam pounded bleak miles of empty coastline. Reached into the waves opaque as obsidian, down into dark water, calling on those great gentle weightless lords in their murmuring kingdom, asking for news.

  She thought once Squidslayer answered her, though her power was not strong enough to make out such word-thoughts as the whales used. She had a glimpse of endless dreamy songs in which years and centuries blurred and it was impossible to determine whether one had come in at the beginning or not. She thought she recognized, as in a dream, the black rocks of those deep abysses that lay west of the Seven Isles of Belmarie, where Folcalor and his demons had concealed themselves for centuries in what appeared to be caverns but were in fact a separate Hell, an enclave in which they'd taken refuge a thousand years ago, separated from the real world by a gate they could not pass unless summoned by name.