Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  She slept that night uneasily, exhausted in body and troubled by strange shapes that seemed to slide in and out through the cracks in her dreams. She seemed to be able to hear the whistling chitter of the blood-devils as they flitted from tree to tree in the marshy woods across the stream and below them the soft murmurs of the Whisperers in the darkness beyond the barrier of spells. Twice she pulled herself painfully from the sucking darkness of sleep, fearing some danger, but both times she only saw Gareth sitting propped against a pile of packsaddles, nodding in the misty blackness.

  The third time she woke up, Gareth was gone.

  It had been a dream that woke her; a dream of a woman standing half-hidden among the trees. She was veiled, like all the women of the south; the lace of that veil was like a cloak of flowers scattered over her dark curls. Her soft laughter was like silver bells, but there was a husky note in it, as if she never laughed save with pleasure at something gained. She held out small, slender hands, and whispered Gareth’s name.

  Leaves and dirt were scuffed where he had crossed the flickering lines of the protective circles.

  Jenny sat up, shaking back the coarse mane of her hair, and touched John awake. She called the witchlight into being, and it illuminated the still, silent camp and glowed in the eyes of the wakened horses. The voice of the spring was loud in the hush.

  Like John, she had slept in her clothes. Reaching over to the bundle of her sheepskin jacket, her plaids, her boots and her belt that lay heaped at one side of their blankets, she pulled from its pouch the small scrying-crystal and angled it to the witchlight while John began, without a word, to pull on his boots and wolfskin-lined doublet.

  Of the four elements, scrying earth—crystal—was easiest and most accurate, though the crystal itself had to be enchanted beforehand. Scrying fire needed no special preparation, but what it showed was what it would, not always what was sought; water would show both future and past, but was a notorious liar. Only the very greatest of mages could scry the wind.

  The heart of Caerdinn’s crystal was dark. She stilled her fears for Gareth’s safety, calming her mind as she summoned the images; they gleamed on the facets, as if reflected from somewhere else. She saw a stone room, extremely small, with the architecture of some place half-dug into the ground; the only furnishing was a bed and a sort of table formed by a block of stone projecting from the wall itself. A wet cloak was thrown over the table, with a puddle of half-dried water about it—swamp weeds clung to it like dark worms. A much-bejeweled longsword was propped nearby, and on top of the table and cloak lay a pair of spectacles. The round lenses caught a spark of greasy yellow lamplight as the door of the room opened.

  Someone in the corridor held a lamp high. Its light showed small, stooped forms crowding in the broad hall beyond. Old and young, men and women, there must have been forty of them, with white, sloped, warty faces and round, fishlike eyes. The first through the doorway were the old man and the old woman, the Meewinks whom John had nearly shot that afternoon.

  The old man held a rope; the woman, a cleaver.

  The house of the Meewinks stood where the land lay low, on a knoll above a foul soup of mud and water from whose surface rotting trees projected like half-decayed corpses. Squat-built, it was larger than it looked—stone walls behind it showed one wing half-buried underground. In spite of the cold, the air around the place was fetid with the smell of putrefying fish, and Jenny closed her teeth hard against a queasiness that washed over her at the sight of the place. Since first she had known what they were, she had hated the Meewinks.

  John slid from his dapple war horse Osprey’s back and looped his rein and Battlehammer’s over the limb of a sapling. His face, in the rainy darkness, was taut with a mingling of hatred and disgust. Twice households of Meewinks had tried to establish themselves near Alyn Hold; both times, as soon as he had learned of them, he had raised what militia he could and burned them out. A few had been killed each time, but he had lacked the men to pursue them through the wild lands and eradicate them completely. Jenny knew he still had nightmares about what he had found in their cellars.

  He whispered, “Listen,” and Jenny nodded. From the house she could detect a faint clamor of voices, muffled, as if half-below the ground, thin and yammering like the barking of beasts. Jenny slid her halberd from the holster on Moon Horse’s saddle and breathed to all three mounts for stillness and silence. She sketched over them the spells of ward, so that the casual eye would pass them by, or think they were something other than horses—a hazel thicket, or the oddly shaped shadow of a tree. It was these same spells upon the camp, she knew, that had prevented Gareth from finding his way back to it, once what must have been the Whisperer had led him away.

  John tucked his spectacles into an inner pocket. “Right,” he murmured. “You get Gar—I’ll cover you both.”

  Jenny nodded, feeling cold inside, as she did when she emptied her mind to do some great magic beyond her power, and steeled herself for what she knew was coming. As they crossed the filthy yard and the strange, muffled outcry in the house grew stronger, John kissed her and, turning, smashed his booted foot into the small house’s door.

  They broke through the door like raiders robbing Hell. A hot, damp fetor smote Jenny in the face as she barged through on John’s heels, the putrid stink of the filth the Meewinks lived in and of the decaying fish they ate—above it all was the sharp, copper-bright stench of new-shed blood. The noise was a pandemonium of yammering screams; after the darkness outside, even the smoky glow of the fire in the unnaturally huge hearth seemed blinding. Bodies seethed in a heaving mob around the small door at the opposite side of the room; now and then sharp flashes of light glinted from the knives clutched in moist little hands.

  Gareth was backed to the doorpost in the midst of the mob. He had evidently fought his way that far but knew if he descended into the more open space of the big room he would be surrounded. His left arm was wrapped, shieldlike, in a muffling tangle of stained and filthy bedding; in his right hand was his belt, the buckle-end of which he was using to slash at the faces of the Meewinks all around him. His own face was streaming with blood from knife-cuts and bites—mixed with sweat, it ran down and encrimsoned his shirt as if his throat had been cut. His naked gray eyes were wide with a look of sickened, nightmare horror.

  The Meewinks around him were gibbering like the souls of the damned. There must have been fifty of them, all armed with their little knives of steel, or of sharpened shell. As John and Jenny broke in, Jenny saw one of them crawl in close to Gareth and slash at the back of his knee. His thighs were already gashed with a dozen such attempts, his boots sticky with runnels of blood; he kicked his attacker in the face, rolling her down a step or two into the mass of her fellows. It was the old woman he had kept John from shooting.

  Without a word, John plunged down into the heaving, stinking mob. Jenny sprang after him, guarding his back; blood splattered her from the first swing of his sword, and around them the noise rose like the redoubling of a storm at sea. The Meewinks were a small folk, though some of the men were as tall as she; it made her cringe inside to cut at the slack white faces of people no bigger than children and to slam the weighted butt of the halberd into those pouchy little stomachs and watch them fall, gasping, vomiting, and choking. But there were so many of them. She had kilted her faded plaid skirts up to her knees to fight and she felt hands snatch and drag at them, as one man caught up a cleaver from among the butcher’s things lying on the room’s big table, trying to cripple her. Her blade caught him high on the cheekbone and opened his face down to the opposite corner of his jaw. His scream ripped the cut wider. The stench of blood was everywhere.

  It seemed to take only seconds to cross the room. Jenny yelled, “Gareth!” but he swung at her with the belt—she was short enough to be a Meewink, and he had lost his spectacles. She flung up the halberd; the belt wrapped itself around the shaft, and she wrenched it from his hands. “It’s Jenny!” she shouted, as John’s swor
d strokes came down, defending them both as it splattered them with flying droplets of gore. She grabbed the boy’s bony wrist, jerking him down the steps into the room. “Now, run!”

  “But we can’t...” he began, looking back at John, and she shoved him violently in the direction of the door. After what appeared to be a momentary struggle with a desire not to seem a coward by abandoning his rescuers, Gareth ran. They passed the table and he caught up a meat hook in passing, swinging at the pallid, puffy faces all around them and at the little hands with their jabbing knives. Three Meewinks were guarding the door, but fell back screaming before the greater length of Jenny’s weapon. Behind her, she could hear the squeaky cacophony around John rising to a crescendo; she knew he was outnumbered, and her instincts to rush back to fight at his side dragged at her like wet rope. It was all she could do to force herself to hurl open the door and drag Gareth at a run across the clearing outside.

  Gareth balked, panicky. “Where are the horses? How are we...?”

  For all her small size, she was strong; her shove nearly toppled him. “Don’t ask questions!” Already small, slumped forms were running about the darkness of the woods ahead. The ooze underfoot soaked through her boots as she hauled Gareth toward where she, at least, could see the three horses, and she heard Gareth gulp when they got close enough for the spells to lose their effectiveness.

  While the boy scrambled up to Battlehammer’s back, Jenny flung herself onto Moon Horse, caught Osprey’s lead-rein, and spurred back toward the house in a porridgey spatter of mud. Pitching her voice to cut through the screaming clamor within, she called out, “JOHN!” A moment later a confused tangle of figures erupted through the low doorway, like a pack of dogs trying to bring down a bear. The white glare of the witchlight showed Aversin’s sword bloody to the pommel, his face streaked and running with his own blood and that of his attackers, his breath pouring like a ribbon of steam from his mouth. Meewinks clung to his arms and his belt, hacking and chewing at the leather of his boots.

  With a screaming battle cry like a gull’s, Jenny rode down upon them, swinging her halberd like a scythe. Meewinks scattered, mewing and hissing, and John wrenched himself free of the last of them and flung himself up to Osprey’s saddle. A tiny Meewink child hurled up after him, clinging to the stirrup leather and jabbing with its little shell knife at his groin; John swung his arm downward and caught the child across its narrow temple with the spikes of his armband, sweeping it off as he would have swept a rat.

  Jenny wheeled her horse sharply, spurring back to where Gareth still clung to Battlehammer’s saddle on the edge of the clearing. With the precision of circus riders, she and John split to grab the big gelding’s reins, one on either side, and, with Gareth in tow between them, plunged back into the night.

  “There.” Aversin dipped one finger into a puddle of rainwater and flicked a droplet onto the iron griddle balanced over the fire. Satisfied with the sizzle, he patted cornmeal into a cake and dropped it into place. Then he glanced across at Gareth, who was struggling not to cry out as Jenny poured a scouring concoction of marigold-simple into his wounds. “Now you can say you’ve seen Aversin the Dragonsbane run like hell from a troop of forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians.” His bitten, bandaged hands patted another cake into shape, and the dawn grayness flashed off his specs as he grinned.

  “Will they be after us?” Gareth asked faintly.

  “I doubt it.” He picked a fleck of cornmeal off the spikes of his armbands. “They’ll have enough of their own dead to keep them fed awhile.”

  The boy swallowed queasily, though having seen the instruments laid out on the table in the Meewinks’ house, there could be little doubt what they had meant for him.

  At Jenny’s insistence, after the rescue, they had shifted their camp away from the garnered darkness of the woods. Dawn had found them in relatively open ground on the formless verges of a marsh, where long wastes of ice-scummed, standing water reflected a steely sky among the black pen strokes of a thousand reeds. Jenny had worked, cold and weary, to lay spells about the camp, then had occupied herself with the contents of her medicine satchel, leaving John, somewhat against her better judgment, to make breakfast. Gareth had dug into his packs for the bent and battered spectacles that had survived the fight in the ruins up north, and they perched forlornly askew now on the end of his nose.

  “They were always a little folk,” John went on, coming over to the packs where the boy sat, letting Jenny finish binding up his slashed knees. “After the King’s troops left the Winterlands, their villages were forever being raided by bandits, who’d steal whatever food they raised. They never were a match for an armored man, but a village of ’em could pull one down—or, better still, wait till he was asleep and hack him up as he lay. In the starving times, a bandit’s horse could feed a whole village for a week. I expect it started out as only the horses.”

  Gareth swallowed again and looked as if he were going to be ill.

  John put his hands through his metal-plated belt. “They generally strike right before dawn, when sleep is deepest—it’s why I switched the watches, so I’d be the one they dealt with, instead of you. It was a Whisperer that got you away from the camp, wasn’t it?”

  “I—I suppose so.” He looked at the ground, a shadow crossing his thin face. “I don’t know. It was something...” Jenny felt him shudder.

  “I’ve seen them on my watch, once or twice... Jen?”

  “Once.” Jenny spoke shortly, hating the memory of those crying shapes in the darkness.

  “They take all forms,” John said, sitting on the ground beside her and wrapping his arms about his knees. “One night one even took Jen’s, with her lying beside me... Polyborus says in his Analects—or maybe it’s in that half-signature of Terens’ Of Ghosts—that they read your dreams and take on the forms that they see there. From Terens—or is it Polyborus? Or maybe it’s in Clivy, though it’s a bit accurate for Clivy—I get the impression they used to be much rarer than they are now, whatever they are.”

  “I don’t know,” Gareth said quietly. “They must have been, because I’d never heard of them, or of the Meewinks, either. After it—it lured me into the woods, it attacked me. I ran, but I couldn’t seem to find the camp again. I ran and ran... and then I saw the light from that house...” He fell silent again with a shudder.

  Jenny finished wrapping Gareth’s knee. The wounds weren’t deep, but, like those on John’s face and hands, they were vicious, not only the knife cuts, but the small, crescent-shaped tears of human teeth. Her own body bore them, too, and experience had taught her that such wounds were filthier than poisoned arrows. For the rest, she was aching and stiff with pulled muscles and the general fatigue of battle, something she supposed Gareth’s ballads neglected to mention as the inevitable result of physical combat. She felt cold inside, too, as she did when she worked the death-spells, something else they never mentioned in ballads, where all killing was done with serene and noble confidence. She had taken the lives of at least four human beings last night, she knew, for all that they had been born and raised into a cannibal tribe; had maimed others who would either die when their wounds turned septic in that atmosphere of festering decay, or would be killed by their brothers.

  To survive in the Winterlands, she had become a very competent killer. But the longer she was a healer, the more she learned about magic and about life from which all magic stemmed, the more she loathed what she did. Living in the Winterlands, she had seen what death did to those who dealt it out too casually.

  The gray waters of the marsh began to brighten with the remote shine of daybreak beyond the clouds. With a soft winnowing of a thousand wings, the wild geese rose from the black cattail beds, seeking again the roads of the colorless sky. Jenny sighed, weary to her bones and knowing that they could not afford to rest—knowing that she would have no rest until they crossed the great river Wildspae and entered the lands of Belmarie.

  Quietly, Gareth said, “Aversin—Lord John�
��I—I’m sorry. I didn’t understand about the Winterlands.” He looked up, his gray eyes tired and unhappy behind their cracked specs. “And I didn’t understand about you. I— I hated you, for not being what—what I thought you should be.”

  “Oh, aye, I knew that,” John said with a fleet grin. “But what you felt about me was none of my business. My business was to see you safe in a land you had no knowledge of. And as for being what you expected—Well, you can only know what you know, and all you knew were those songs. I mean, it’s like Polyborus and Clivy and those others. I know bears aren’t born completely shapeless for their mothers to sculpt with their tongues, like Clivy says, because I’ve seen newborn bear cubs. But for all I know, lions may be born dead, although personally I don’t think it’s likely.”

  “They aren’t,” Gareth said. “Father had a lioness once as a pet, when I was very little—her cubs were born live, just like big kittens. They were spotted.”

  “Really?” Aversin looked genuinely pleased for one more bit of knowledge to add to the lumber room of his mind. “I’m not saying Dragonsbanes aren’t heroic, because Selkythar and Antara Warlady and the others might have been, and may have gone about it all with swords in golden armor and plumes. It’s just that I know I’m not. If I’d had a choice, I’d never have gone near the bloody dragon, but nobody asked me.” He grinned and added, “I’m sorry you were disappointed.”