spoken. But something whispered across her nerves, as
it had all those weeks ago by the ruins of the nameless
town in the Winteriands—a sense of danger that caused
her to look for the signs of it. Under Mab's tutelage she
had become more certain of trusting her instincts, and
something in her hated to go closer than the ruined clock
tower into the sunlight that fell across Deeping Vale.
After a moment's consideration Gareth said, "The far-
thest point in Deeping from the Great Gates would be the
Tanner's Rise. It's at the bottom of that spur over there
that bounds the town to the west. I think it's about a half-
mile from the Gates. The whole town isn't—wasn't—
much more than a quarter-mile across."
"Will we have a clear view of the Gates from there?"
Confused by this bizarre stipulation, he nodded. "The
174 Barbara Humbly
ground's high, and most of the buildings were flattened
in the attack. But if we wanted a lookout on the gates,
you can see there's enough of the clock tower left for
a..."
"No," Jenny murmured. "I don't think we can go that
near."
John's head came sharply around at that. Gareth fal-
tered, "It can't—it can't hear us, can it?"
"Yes," Jenny said, not knowing why she said it. "No—
it isn't hearing, exactly. I don't know. But I feel some-
thing, on the fringes of my mind. I don't think it knows
we're here—not yet. But if we rode closer, it might. It is
an old dragon, Gareth; it must be, for its name to be in
the Lines. In one of the old books from the Palace library,
it says that dragons change their skins with their souls,
that the young are simply colored and bright; the mature
are complex of pattern and the old become simpler and
simpler again, as their power deepens and grows. Mor-
keleb is black. I don't know what that means, but I don't
like what I think it implies—great age, great power—his
senses must fill the Vale of Deeping like still water, sen-
sitive to the slightest ripple."
"He pox-sure heard your father's knights coming, didn't
he?" John added cynically.
Gareth looked unhappy. Jenny nudged her mare gently
and took a step or two closer to the clock tower, casting
her senses wide over all the Vale. Through the broken
webs of branches overhead, the massive darkness of the
westward-facing cliffs of Nast Wall could be seen. Their
dizzy heights towered like rusted metal, streaked with
purple where shadows hit; boulders flashed white upon
it like outcroppings of broken bone. Above the line of the
dragon's burning, the timber grew on the flanks of the
mountain around the cliffs, up toward the mossed rocks
of the cirques and snowfields above. The ice-gouged homs
of the Wall's bare and ragged crest were veiled in cloud
Dragonsbane 175
now, but beyond its hunched shoulder to the east a thin
track of smoke could be seen,'marking the Citadel of
Halnath and the siege camps beneath it.
Below that wall of stone and trees, the open spaces of
the Vale lay, a huge well of air, a gulf filled with pale,
sparkly sunlight—and with something else. Jenny's mind
touched it briefly and shrank from that living conscious-
ness that she sensed, coiled like a snake in its dark lair.
Behind her, she heard Gareth argue, "But the dragon
you killed up in the gully in Wyr didn't know you were
coming." The very loudness of his voice scraped her nerves
and made her want to cuff him into silence. "You were
able to get around behind it and take it by surprise. I don't
see how..."
"Neither do I, my hero," John cut in softly, collecting
Cow's reins in one hand and the charger Osprey's lead in
the other. "But if you're willing to bet your life Jen's
wrong, I'm not. Lead us on to the famous Rise."
On the night of the dragon, many had taken refuge in
the buildings on Tanner's Rise; their bones lay every-
where among the blackened ruin of crumbled stone. From
the open space in front of what had been the warehouses,
it had once been possible to overlook the whole thriving
little town of Deeping, under its perpetual haze of smoke
from the smelters and forges down below. That haze was
gone now, burned off in the dragon's greater fire; the
whole town lay open to the mild, heatless glitter of the
winter sunlight, a checkerwork of rubble and bones.
Looking about her at the buildings of the Rise, Jenny
felt cold with shock, as if she had been struck in the pit
of the stomach; then, as she realized why she recognized
the place, the shock was replaced by horror and despair.
It was the place where she had seen John dying, in her
vision in the water bowl.
She had done divination before, but never so accu-
rately as this. The precision of it appalled her—every
176 Barbara Hambly
stone and puddle and broken wall was the same; she
remembered the way the looming line of the dark cliffs
looked against the sky and the very patterns of the bones
of the town below. She felt overwhelmed by a despairing
urge to change something—to shatter a wall, to dig a hole,
to clear away the brush at the gravelly lip of the Rise
where it sloped down to the town—anything to make it
not as it had been. Yet in her soul she knew doing so
would change nothing and she feared lest whatever she
did would make the picture she had seen more, rather
than less, exact.
Her lips felt stiff as she spoke. "Is this the only point
in the town this far from the Gates?" She knew already
what Gareth would reply.
"It had to be, because of the smell of the tanneries.
You see how nothing was built near it. Even the water
tanks and reservoirs were put up in those rocks to the
north, rather than here where the better springs were."
Jenny nodded dully, looking out toward the high rocks
to the north of the town where he was pointing. Her whole
soul was crying No! No...
She felt suddenly hopeless and stupid, overmatched
and unprepared and incredibly naive. We were fools, she
thought bitterly. The slaying of the first worm was a fluke.
We should never have been so stupid as to presume upon
it, never have thought we could do it again. Zyeme was
right. Zyeme was right.
She looked over at John, who had dismounted from
Cow and was standing on the rocky lip of the Rise where
the ground fell sharply to the dale below, looking across
toward the opposite rise of the Gates. Cold seemed to
cover her bones like a vast, winged shadow blocking the
sun, and she heeled Moon Horse gently over beside him.
Without looking up at her, he said, "I figure I can just
make it. The Temple of Sarmendes is about a quarter-
mile along the Grand Passage, if Dromar was telling the
Dragonsbane 177
truth. If Osprey and I go full-pelt, we should ju
st about
be able to catch the dragon in the Market Hall, just within
the Gates. Saying he's able to hear me the minute I start
down the Rise, I should still be able to catch him before
he can get out into the air. I'll have room to fight him in
the Market Hall. That will be my only chance."
"No," Jenny said quietly. He looked up at her, eye-
brows quirking. "You have another chance, if we ride
back now to Bel. Zyeme can help you take the thing from
behind, deeper in the caves. Her spells will protect you,
too, as mine can not."
"Jen." The closed wariness of his expression split sud-
denly into the white flash of teeth. He held up his hands
to help her down, shaking his head reprovingly.
She made no move. "At least it is to her advantage to
preserve you safe, if she wants the dragon slain. The rest
is none of your affair."
His smile widened still further. "You have a point,
love," he assented. "But she doesn't look to me like she
can cook worth a row of beans." And he helped her down
from her horse.
The foreboding that weighed on Jenny's heart did not
decrease; rather, it grew upon her through the short after-
noon. She told herself, again and again, as she paced out
the magic circles and set up her fire in their midst to brew
her poisons, that water was a liar; that it divined the future
as crystal could not, but that its divinations were less
reliable even than fire's. But a sense of impending doom
weighed upon her heart, and, as the daylight dimmed, in
the fire under her simmering kettle she seemed to see
again the same picture: John's shirt of chain mail rent
open by claws in a dozen places, the broken links all
glittering with dark blood.
Jenny had set up her fire at the far end of the Rise,
where the wind would carry the smoke and the vapors
178 Barbara Hambly
away from both the camp and the Vale, and worked
throughout the afternoon spelling the ingredients and the
steel of the harpoons themselves. Miss Mab had advised
her about the more virulent poisons that would work upon
dragons, and such ingredients as the gnome wizard had
not had among her slender stocks Jenny had purchased
in the Street of the Apothecaries-in the Dockmarket in
Bel. While she worked, the two men prowled the Rise,
fetching water for the horses from the little well some
distance into the woods, since the fountain house that had
served the tanneries had been crushed like an eggshell,
and setting up a camp. John had very little to say since
she had spoken to him on the edge of the Rise; Gareth
seemed to shiver all over with a mingling of excitement
and terror.
Jenny had been a little surprised at John's invitation
that Gareth join them, though she had planned to ask John
to extend it. She had her own reasons for wanting the
boy with them, which had little to do with his expressed
desire—though he had not expressed it lately—to see a
dragonslaying close at hand. She—and undoubtedly John
as well—knew that their departure would have left Gareth
unprotected in Bel.
Perhaps Mab had been right, she thought, as she turned
her face from the ghastly choke of the steam and wiped
it with one gloved hand. There were worse evils than the
dragon in the land—to be slain by it might, under certain
circumstances, be construed as a lesser fate.
The voices of the men came to her from the other side
of the camp as they moved about preparing supper; she
had noticed that neither spoke very loudly when they were
anywhere near the edge of the Rise. John said, "I'll get
this right yet," as he dropped a mealcake onto the griddle
and looked up at Gareth. "What's the Market Hall like?
Anything I'll be likely to trip over?"
"I don't think so, if the dragon's been in and out,"
Dragonsbane 179
Gareth said after a moment. "It's a huge hall, as Dromar
said; over a hundred feet deep and even wider side to
side. The ceiling's very high, with fangs of rock hanging
down from it—chains, too, that used to support hundreds
of lamps. The floor was leveled, and used to be covered
with all kinds of booths, awnings, and vegetable stands;
all the produce from the Realm was traded to the Deep
there. I don't think there was anything there solid enough
to resist dragon fire."
Aversin dropped a final mealcake on the griddle and
straightened up, wiping his fingers on the end of his plaid.
Blue darkness was settling over Tanner's Rise. From her
small fire. Jenny could see the two of them outlined in
gold against a background of azure and black. They did
not come near her, partly because of the stench of the
poisons, partly because of the spell-circles glimmering
faintly in the sandy earth about her. The key to magic is
magic—Jenny felt that she looked out at them from an
isolated enclave of another world, alone with the oven-
heat of the fire, the biting stench of the poison fumes,
and the grinding weight of the death-spells in her heart.
John walked to the edge of the Rise for perhaps the
tenth time that evening. Across the shattered bones of
Deeping, the black skull-eye of the Gates looked back at
him. Slabs of steel and splintered shards of burned wood
lay scattered over the broad, shallow flight of granite steps
below them, faintly visible in the watery light of the wax-
ing moon. The town itself lay in a pool of impenetrable
dark.
"It isn't so far," said Gareth hopefully. "Even if he
hears you coming the minute you ride into the Vale, you
should reach the Market Hall in plenty of time."
John sighed. "I'm not so sure of that, my hero. Dragons
move fast, even afoot. And the ground down there's bad.
Even full-tilt, Osprey won't be making much speed of it,
when all's said. I would have liked to scout for the clearest
180 Barbara Hamhty
route, but that isn't possible, either. The most I can hope
for is that there's no uncovered cellar doors or privy pits
between here and the Gates."
Gareth laughed softly. "It's funny, but I never thought
about that. In the ballads, the hero's horse never trips on
the way to do battle with the dragon, though they do it
from time to time even in tourneys, where the ground of
the lists has been smoothed beforehand. I thought it would
be—oh, like a ballad. Very straight. I thought you'd ride
out of Bel, straight up here and on into the Deep..."
"Without resting my horse after the journey, even on
a lead-rein, nor scouting the lay of the land?" John's eyes
danced behind his specs. "No wonder the King's knights
were killed at it." He sighed. "My only worry is that if I
miss my timing by even a little, I'm going to be spot under
the thing when it comes out of the Gates..."
Then he coughed, fanning at the air, and sa
id, "Pox
blister it!" as he dashed back to pick the flaming meal-
cakes off the griddle. Around burned fingers, he said,
"And the damn thing is, even Adric cooks better than I
do..."
Jenny turned away from their voices and the sweetness
of the night beyond the blazing heat of her fire. As she
dipped the harpoons into the thickening seethe of brew
in her kettle, the sweat plastered her long hair to her
cheeks, running down her bare arms from the turned-up
sleeves of her shift to the cuffs of the gloves she wore;
the heat lay like a red film over her toes and the tops of
her feet, bare as they often were when she worked magic.
Like John, she felt withdrawn into herself, curiously
separated from what she did. The death-spells hung like
a stench in the air all around her, and her head and bones
were beginning to ache from the heat and the effort of the
magic she had wrought. Even when the powers she called
were for good, they tired her; she felt weighed down by
Dvagonsbane 181
them now, exhausted and knowing that she had wrought
nothing good from that weariness.
The Golden Dragon came to her mind again, the first
heartstopping instant she had seen it dropping from the
sky like amber lightning and had thought. This is beauty.
She remembered, also, the butchered ruin left in the gorge,
the stinking puddles of acid and poison and blood, and
the faint, silvery singing dying out of the shivering air. It
might have been only the fumes she inhaled, but she felt
herself turn suddenly sick at the thought.
She had slaughtered Meewinks, or mutilated them and
left them to be eaten by their brothers; she remembered
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