Dragon's Bane

by Dragon's Bane(Lit)

  stretched before her across the doors in the darkness. He

  had dislodged the harpoons from his throat and belly, and

  they lay blackened with his blood in the muck of slime

  and ash on the floor. The thorny scales of his back and

  sides lay sleek now, their edges shining faintly in the dim

  reflection of the moon. The heavy ridges of spikes that

  guarded his backbone and the joints of his legs still bristled

  like weapons. The enormous wings lay folded neatly along

  his sides, and their joints, too, she saw, were armored

  and spined. His head fascinated her most, long and narrow

  and birdlike, its shape concealed under a mask of bony

  plates. From those plates grew a vast mane of ribbonlike

  scales, mingled with tufts of fur and what looked like

  growths of ferns and feathers; his long, delicate antennae

  with their glittering bobs of jet lay limp upon the ground

  around his head. He lay like a dog, his chin between his

  forepaws; but the eyes that burned into hers were the

  eyes of a mage who is also a beast.

  J n'(7/ bargain with you, wizard woman.

  She knew, with chill premonition but no surprise what

  his bargain would be, and her heart quickened, though

  whether with dread or some strange hope she did not

  know. She said, "No," but within herself she felt, like a

  forbidden longing, the unwillingness to let something this

  beautiful, this powerful, die. He was evil, she told herself,

  knowing and believing it in her heart. Yet there was some-

  thing in those silver eyes that drew her, some song of

  black and latent fire whose music she understood.

  The dragon moved his head a little on the powerful

  Dragonsbane 199

  curve of his neck. Blood dripped down from the tattered

  ribbons of his mane.

  Do you think that even you, a wizard who sees in dark-

  ness, can search out the ways of the gnomes'?

  The pictures that filled her mind were of the darkness,

  of clammy and endless mazes of the world underground.

  Her heart sank with dread at the awareness of them; those

  few small images of the way to the Places of Healing,

  those fragmentary words of Mab's, turned in her hands

  to the pebbles with which a child thinks it can slaughter

  lions.

  Still she said, "I have spoken to one of them of these

  ways."

  And did she tell the truth? The gnomes are not famed

  for it in matters concerning the heart of the Deep.

  Jenny remembered the empty places on Dromar's maps.

  But she retorted, "Nor are dragons."

  Beneath the exhaustion and pain, she felt in the drag-

  on's mind amusement at her reply, like a thin spurt of

  cold water in hot.

  What is truth, wizard woman? The truth that dragons

  see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncom-

  fortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You

  know this.

  She saw that he had felt her fascination. The silver

  eyes drew her; his mind touched hers, as a seducer would

  have touched her hand. She saw, also, that he understood

  that she would not draw back from that touch. She forced

  her thoughts away from him, holding to the memories of

  John and of their sons, against the power that called to

  her like a whisper of amorphous night.

  With effort, she tore her eyes from his and turned to

  leave.

  Wizard woman, do you think this man for whom you

  risk the bones of your body will live longer than I?

  She stopped, the toes of her boots touching the hem

 

  200 Barbara Hambly

  of the carpet of moonlight which lay upon the flagstoned

  floor. Then she turned back to face him, despairing and

  torn. The wan light showed her the pools of acrid blood

  drying over so much of the floor, the sunken look to the

  dragon's flesh; and she realized that his question had struck

  at her weakness and despair to cover his own.

  She said calmly, "There is the chance that he will."

  She felt the anger in the movement of his head, and

  the pain that sliced through him with it. And will you

  wager on that? Will you wager that, even did the gnomes

  speak the truth, you will be able to sort your way through

  their warrens, spiral within spiral, dark within dark, to

  find what you need in time? Heal me, wizard woman, and

  I will guide you with my mind and show you the place

  that you seek.

  For a time she only gazed up at that long bulk of shining

  blackness, the dark mane of bloody ribbons, and the eyes

  like oiled metal ringing eternal darkness. He was a wonder

  such as she had never seen, a spined and supple shadow

  from the thomed tips of his backswept wings to the honied

  beak of his nose. The Golden Dragon John had slain on

  the windswept hills of Wyr had been a being of sun and

  fire, but this was a smoke-wraith of night, black and strong

  and old as time. The spines of his head grew into fantastic

  twisted homs, icy-smooth as steel; his forepaws had the

  shape of hands, save that they had two thumbs instead

  of one. The voice that spoke in her mind was steady, but

  she could see the weakness dragging at every line of that

  great body and feel the faint shiver of the last taut strength

  that fought to continue the bluff against her.

  Unwillingly, she said, "I know nothing of the healing

  of dragons."

  The silver eyes narrowed, as if she had asked him for

  something he had not thought to give. For a moment they

  faced one another, cloaked in the cave's darkness. She

  was aware of John and of time—distantly, like something

  Dragonsbane 201

  urgent in a dream. But she kept her thoughts concentrated

  upon the creature that lay before her and the diamond-

  prickled darkness of that alien mind that struggled with

  hers.

  Then suddenly the gleaming body convulsed. She felt,

  through the silver eyes, the pain like a scream through

  the steel ropes of his muscles. The wings stretched out

  uncontrollably, the claws extending in a terrible spasm as

  the poison shifted in his veins. The voice in her mind

  whispered. Go,

  At the same moment memories flooded her thoughts

  of a place she had never been before. Vague images

  crowded to her mind of blackness as vast as the night

  outdoors, columned with a forest of stone trees that whis-

  pered back the echo of every breath, of rock seams a few

  yards across whose ceilings were lost in distant darkness,

  and of the murmuring of endless water under stone. She

  felt a vertigo of terror as in a nightmare, but also a queer

  sense of deja vu, as if she had passed that way before.

  It came to her that it was Morkeleb and not she who

  had passed that way; the images were the way to the

  Places of Healing, the very heart of the Deep.

  The spined black body before her twisted with another

  paroxysm of anguish, the huge tail slashing like a whip

  against the rock of the wall. The pain was
visible now in

  the silver eyes as the poison ate into the dragon's blood.

  Then his body dropped slack, a dry clatter of horns and

  spines like a skeleton falling on a stone floor, and from a

  great distance off she heard again. Go.

  His scales had all risen in a blanket of razors at his

  agony; quiveringly, they smoothed themselves flat along

  the sunken sides. Jenny gathered her courage and strode

  forward; without giving herself time to think of what she

  was doing, she scrambled over the waist-high hill of the

  ebony flank that blocked the doorway of the Grand Tun-

  nel. The backbone ridge was like a hedge of spears, thrust-

  202 ' Barbara Hambly

  ing stiffly from the unsteady footing of the hide. Kilting

  up her skirt, she put a hand to steady herself on the carved

  stone pillar of the doorjamb and leaped over the spines

  awkwardly, fearing to the last that some renewed con-

  vulsion would thrust them into her thighs.

  But the dragon lay quiet. Jenny could sense only the

  echoes of his mind within hers, like a faint gleam of far-

  off light. Before her stretched the darkness of the Deep.

  If she thought about them, the visions she had seen

  retreated from her. But she found that if she simply walked

  forward, as if she had trodden this way before, her feet

  would lead her. Dream memories whispered through her

  mind of things she had seen, but sometimes the angle of

  sight was different, as if she had looked down upon them

  from above.

  The upper levels of the Deep were dry, wrought by the

  gnomes after the fashion of the tastes of men. The Grand

  Passage, thirty feet broad and paved in black granite,

  worn and runnelled with the track of uncounted genera-

  tions of feet, had been walled with blocks of cut stone to

  hide the irregularities of its shape; broken statues lying

  like scattered bones in the dark attested the classical

  appearance of the place in its heyday. Among the frag-

  mented whiteness of the marble limbs lay real bones, and

  with them the twisted bronze frames and shattered glass

  of the huge lamps that had once depended from the high

  ceiling, all scraped together along the walls, like leaves

  in a gutter, by the passage of the dragon's body. Even in

  the darkness, Jenny's wizard's sight showed her the fire-

  blackening where the spilled oil had been ignited by the

  dragon's breath.

  Deeper down, the place had the look of the gnomes.

  Stalagmites and columns ceased to be carved into the

  straight pillars favored by the children of men, and were

  wrought into the semblance of trees in leaf, or beasts, or

  Dragonsbane 203

  grotesque things that could have been either; more and

  more frequently they had simply been left to keep the

  original shape of pouring water which had been their own.

  The straight, handsomely finished water courses of the

  higher levels gave place to tumbling streams in the lower

  deeps; in some places the water fell straight, fifty or a

  hundred feet from distant ceilings, like a living pillar, or

  gushed away into darkness through conduits shaped like

  the skulls of gargoyles. Jenny passed through caverns and

  systems of caves that had been transformed into the vast,

  interconnected dwelling places of the great clans and fam-

  ilies of the gnomes, but elsewhere she found halls and

  rooms large enough to contain all the village of Deeping,

  where houses and palaces had been built freestanding,

  their bizarre spires and catwalks indistinguishable from

  the groves of stalagmites that clustered in strange forests

  on the banks of pools and rivers like polished onyx.

  And through these silent realms of wonder she saw

  nothing but the evidences of ruin and decay and the scrap-

  ing track of the dragon. White ur-toads were everywhere,

  squabbling with rats over the rotting remains of stored

  food or month-old carrion; in some places, the putrescent

  fetor of what had been hoards of cheese, meat, or vege-

  tables was nearly unbreathable. The white, eyeless ver-

  min of the deeper pits, whose names she could only guess

  at from Mab's accounts, slipped away at her approach,

  or hid themselves behind the fire-marked skulls and

  dropped vessels of chased silver that everywhere scat-

  tered the halls.

  As she went deeper, the air became cold and very

  damp, the stone increasingly slimy beneath her boots; the

  weight of the darkness was crushing. As she walked the

  lightless mazes, she understood that Mab had been right;

  without guidance, even she, whose eyes could pierce that

  utter darkness, would never have found her way to the

  heart of the Deep.

  204 Barbara HamUy

  But find it she did. The echo of it was in the dragon's

  mind, setting up queer resonances in her soul, a lamina-

  tion of feelings and awareness whose alien nature she

  shrank from, uncomprehending. Beside its doors, she felt

  the aura of healing that lingered still in the air, and the

  faint breath of ancient power.

  All through that series of caverns, the air was warm,

  smelling of dried camphor and spices; the putrid stench

  of decay and the crawling vermin were absent. Stepping

  through the doors into the domed central cavern, where

  ghost-pale stalactites regarded themselves in the oiled

  blackness of a central pool, she wondered how great a

  spell it would take to hold that healing warmth, not only

  against the cold in the abysses of the earth, but for so

  long after those who had wrought the spell had perished.

  The magic here was great indeed.

  It pervaded the place; as she passed cautiously through

  the rooms of meditation, of dreaming, or of rest. Jenny

  was conscious of it as a living presence, rather than the

  stasis of dead spells. At times the sensation of it grew so

  strong that she looked back over her shoulder and called

  out to the darkness, "Is someone there?" though in her

  reason she knew there was not. But as with the Whis-

  perers in the north, her feelings argued against her reason,

  and again and again she extended her senses through that

  dark place, her heart pounding in hope or fear—she could

  not tell which. But she touched nothing, nothing but dark-

  ness and the drip of water falling eternally from the hang-

  ing teeth of the stones.

  There was living magic there, whispering to itself in

  darkness—and like the touch of some foul thing upon her

  flesh, she felt the sense of evil.

  She shivered and glanced around her nervously once

  more. In a small room, she found the medicines she sought,

  row after row of glass phials and stoppered jars of the

  green-and-white marbled ware the gnomes made in such

  Dragonsbane 205

  quantity. She read their labels in the darkness and stowed

  them in her satchel, working quickly, partly from a grow-

  ing sense of uneasiness and partly because she felt timer />
  leaking away and John's life ebbing like the going-out of

  the tide.

  He can't die, she told herself desperately, not after all

  this—but she had come too late to too many bedsides in

  her years as a healer to believe that. Still, she knew that

  the medicines alone might not be enough. Hastily, glanc-

  ing back over her shoulder as she moved from room to

  dark and silent room, she began searching for the inner

  places of power, the libraries where they would store the

  books and scrolls of magic that, she guessed, made up

  the true heart of the Deep.

  Her boots swished softly on the sleek floors, but even

  that small noise twisted at her nerves. The floors of the

  rooms, like all the places inhabited by gnomes, were never

  at one level, but made like a series of terraces; even the

  smallest chambers had two or more. And as she searched,

  the eerie sense of being watched grew upon her, until she

  feared to pass through new doors, half-expecting to meet

  some evil thing gloating in the blackness. She felt a power,

  stronger than any she had encountered—stronger than

  Zyerne's, stronger than the dragon's. But she found noth-

  ing, neither that waiting, silent evil, nor any book of power

  by which magic would be transmitted down the years

  among the gnome mages—only herbals, anatomies, or

  catalogs of diseases and cures. In spite of her uneasy fear,

  she felt puzzled—Mab had said that the gnomes had no

  Lines, yet surely the power had to be transmitted some-

  how. So she forced herself to seek, deeper and deeper,

  for the books that must contain it.

  Exhaustion was beginning to weaken her like slow ill-