This is the realm of the dragons, Morkeleb's voice said
within her mind. The roads of the air. It is yours, for the
stretching out of your hand.
In the slant of the light they laid no shadow upon the
ground, but it seemed to Jenny that she could almost see
the track of their passage written like a ship's wake upon
the wind. Her mind half-within the dragon's, she could
sense the variations of the air, updraft and thermal, as if
the wind itself were of different colors. With the dragon's
awareness, she saw other things in the air as well—the
paths of energy across the face of the world, the tracks
that traveled from star to star, like the lines of force that
were repeated in the body, smaller and smaller, in the
spreads of dealt cards or thrown runes or the lie of leaves
in water. She was aware of life everywhere, of the winter-
white foxes and hares in the patchy snowlines beneath
the thin scrum of cloud below, and of the King's troops;
camped far down upon the road, who pointed and cried
out as the dragon's dark shape passed overhead.
They crossed the flank of the mountain to its daylight
side. Before and below her, she saw the cliff and hill and
Citadel ofHalnath, a spiky conglomerate of thrusting gray
ramparts clinging like a mud-built swallow's nest to the
massive shoulder of a granite cliff. From its feet, the land
lay crisscrossed with wooded ravines to the silver curve
of a river; mist blended with the blue of woodsmoke to
veil the straggling lines of tents and guard posts, horse
lines and trenches raw with yellow mud, that made up
the siege camps. An open ring of battered ground lay
between the walls and the camp, ravaged by battle and
bristling with the burned-out shells of the small truck farms
that nestled around the walls of any town. Beyond, to the
north, the green stretches of the Marches vanished away
under a gauze of mists, the horse- and cattle-lands that
were the Master's fief and strength. From the river marshes
where pewter waters spread themselves, a skein of dan-
Dragonsbane 289
defoot herons rose through the milky vapors, tiny and
clear as a pen sketch.
There. Jenny pointed with her mind toward the battle-
ments of the high Citadel. The central court there. It's
narrow, but long enough for us to land.
Wind and her long hair lashed her eyes as the dragon
wheeled.
They have armored their walls, the dragon said. Look.
Men were running about the ramparts, pointing and
waving at the enormous wings flashing in the air. Jenny
glimpsed catapults mounted on the highest turrets, coun-
terweighted slings bearing buckets that burst suddenly
into red flame and massive crossbows whose bolts could
point nowhere but at the sky.
We'll have to go in. Jenny said. I'll protect you.
By catching the bolts in your teeth, wizard womanf
Morkeleb asked sarcastically, circling away as some over-
eager slinger slipped his ropes and a bucketful of naphtha
described a curving trajectory, flames streaming like faded
orange pennants against the brightness of the new day.
What protection can you, a human, offer me?
Jenny smiled to herself, watching the naphtha as it broke
into blazing lumps in falling. None of them landed in the
town on the slopes below—they knew their mathematics,
these defenders ofHalnath, and how to apply them to bal-
listics. For herself, she supposed she should have been ter-
rified, to be carried this high above the reeling earth—if she
fell, she would fall for a long time before she died. But
whether it was her trust in Morkeleb, or the dragon's mind
that enveloped hers in the thoughts of those who lived in
the airstream, she felt no fear of it. Indeed, she almost be-
lieved that, if she were to drop, she had only to spread out
her own wings, as she did in dreams of flight.
Small as toys on the walls of the Citadel, the machines
of defense were being cranked around to bear upon them.
They looked, at this distance, like nothing so much as
290
Barbara Hambly
John's little models. And to think I grew impatient when
he insisted upon showing me how every one of them fired.
She smiled, half to Morkeleb and half to herself. Swing
north, Morkeleb, and come at them from along that ridge.
The problem with machines has always been that it requires
only the touch of a wizard's mind to fox their balance.
There were two engines guarding the approach she had
set, a bolt-firing catapult and a spring-driven sling. She
had thrown her magic before, conjuring images within her
mind, to foul the bowstrings of bandits in the north and
to cause their feet to find roots as they ran, or their swords
to stick in their sheaths. Having seen the mechanisms
of these weapons in John's models, she found this no
harder. Ropes twisted in the catapult, jamming the knots
when the triggering cord was jerked. With a dragon's
awareness, she saw a man running in panic along the
battlements; he knocked over a bucket into the mecha-
nism of the sling so that it could not be turned to aim.
The dragon swung lazily from the weapon's possible path,
guided by the touch of Jenny's mind within his; and she
felt, like a chuckle of dark laughter, his appreciation for
the ease with which she thwarted the mechanical devices.
You are small, wizard woman, he said, amused, but a
mighty defender of dragons, nevertheless.
Throwing her streaming hair back from her eyes. Jenny
could see men on the battlements below them clearly now.
They were clothed in makeshift uniforms, the black, bil-
lowing gowns of scholars covered with battered bits of
armor, some of it stamped with the royal arms and
obviously taken from prisoners or the slain. They fled in
all directions as the dragon drew near, save for one man
tall, red-haired, and thin as a scarecrow in his ragged black-
gown, who was swinging something to bear upon them
that looked for a moment like a telescope—a metal tube
braced upon stakes. The walls swooped closer. At the last
moment Jenny saw harpoons stacked beside him and,
Dragonsbane 291
instead of glass in the tube's mouth, the glint of a metal
point.
The lone defender had a burning spill in one hand,
lighted from one of the naphtha buckets. He was watching
them come in, taking aim—Blasting powder, thought
Jenny; the gnomes will have brought plenty up from the
mines. She remembered John's abortive experiments with
rockets.
The scene rushed to meet them, until every chipped
stone of the wall and every patch on the scholar's ragged
gown seemed within reach of Jenny's hand. As he brought
the spill down to the touch-hole, Jenny used her mind to
extinguish the flame, as she would have doused a candle.
Then she spread out her arms and cr
ied, "STOP!" at
the top of her voice.
He froze in mid-motion, the harpoon he had snatched
from the pile beside him cocked back already over his
shoulder, though Jenny could tell by the way he held it
that he had never thrown one before and could not have
hit them. Even at that distance, she saw wonder, curiosity,
and delight on his thin face. Like John, she thought, he
was a true scholar, fascinated with any wonder, though
it carried his death upon its wings.
Morkeleb braked in the air, the shift of his muscles
rippling against Jenny's back. All men had fled the long,
narrow court of the Citadel and the walls around it, save
that single defender. The dragon hung for a moment like
a hovering hawk, then settled, delicate as a dandelion
seed, to perch on the wall above the shadowy well of the
court. The great hind-talons gripped the stone as the long
neck and tail counterbalanced, and he stooped like a vast
bird to set Jenny on her feet upon the rampart.
She staggered, her knees weak from shock, her whole
body trembling with exhilaration and cold. The tall, red-
haired young man, harpoon still in one hand, moved for-
ward along the walkway, black robe billowing beneath an
292 Barbara Hambly
outsize hauberk of chain mail. Though he was clearly
cautious. Jenny thought from the way he looked at Mor-
keleb that he could have stood and studied the dragon for
hours; but there was a court-bred politeness in the way
he offered Jenny his hand.
It took her a moment to remember to speak in words.
"Polycarp of Halnath?"
He looked surprised and disconcerted at hearing his
name. "I am he." Like Gareth, it took more than dragons
or bandits to shake his eariy training; he executed a very
creditable Dying Swan in spite of the harpoon.
Jenny smiled and held out her hands to him. "I am
Jenny Waynest, Gareth's friend."
"Yes, there is a power sink in the heart of the Deep."
Polycarp, Master of the Citadel ofHalnath and Doctor of
Natural Philosophy, folded long, narrow hands behind his
back and turned from the pointed arches of the window
to look at his rescued, oddly assorted guests. "It is what
Zyeme wants; what she has always wanted, since first
she knew what it was."
Gareth looked up from the ruins of the simple meal
which strewed the plain waxed boards of the workroom
table. "Why didn't you tell me?"
The bright blue eyes flickered to him. "What could I
have said?" he asked. "Up until a year ago I wasn't even
sure. And when I was..." His glance moved to the gnome
who sat at the table's head, tiny and stooped and very
old, his eyes like pale green glass beneath the long mane
of milk-white hair. "Sevacandrozardus—Balgub, in the
tongue of men; brother of the Lord of the Deep who was
slain by the dragon—forbade me to speak of it. I could
not break his confidence."
Beyond the tall windows, the turrets of the lower Cit-
adel, the University, and the town beneath could be
glimpsed, the sunlight on them yellow as summer butter,
Dragonsbane 293
though the buildings below were already cloaked in the
shadows of the mountain as the sun sank behind its shoul-
der. Sitting on the end of the couch where John lay. Jenny
listened in quiet to the debating voices. Her body ached
for sleep and her mind for stillness, but she knew that
both would be denied her. Neither the words of the
impromptu council nor the recollection of the trip back
through the Deep with Polycarp and the gnomes to fetch
the others had eradicated from her thoughts the soaring
memory of the dragon's flight.
She knew she ought not to let it hold her so. She ought
to be more conscious of her own gladness that they were,
at least for the moment, relatively safe and more preoc-
cupied with their exchange of information with the Master
and with plans for how to deal with the Stone and its
mistress. Yet the flight and the memory of the dragon's
mind had shaken her to the bones. She could not put that
wild intoxication from her heart.
The old gnome was saying, "It has always been for-
bidden to speak of the Stone to outsiders. After it became
clear that the girl Zyeme had heard of it somehow and
had spied upon those who used it and learned its key, my
brother, the Lord of the Deep, redoubled the anathema.
It has from the darkness of time been the heart of the
Deep, the source of power for our Healers and mages,
and has made our magic so great that none dared to assault
the Deep of Ylferdun. But always we knew its danger as
well—that the greedy could use such a thing for their own
ends. And so it was."
Jenny roused herself from her thoughts to ask, "How
did you know she had used it?" Like the others, she had
bathed and was now dressed like them all in the frayed
black gown of a scholar of the University, too large for
her and belted tight about her waist. Her hair, still damp
from washing, hung about her shoulders.
The gnome's light eyes shifted. Grudgingly, he said,
294 Barbara Hambty
"To take power from the Stone, there must be a return.
It gives to those who draw upon it, but later it asks back
from them. Those who were used to wielding its power—
myself, Taseldwyn whom you know as Miss Mab, and
others—could feel the imbalance. Then it corrected itself,
or seemed to. I was content." He shook his head, the
opals that pinned his white hairflashing in the diffuse light
of the long room. "Mab was not."
"What return does it ask?"
For a moment his glance touched her, reading in her,
as Mab had done, the degree other power. Then he said,
"Power for power. All power must be paid for, whether
it is taken from your own spirit, or from the holding-sink
of others. We, the Healers, of whom I was chief, used to
dance for it, to concentrate our magic and feed it into the
Stone, that others might take of its strength and not have
their very life-essences drawn from them by it—the woman
Zyeme did not know how to make the return of magic to
it, did not even leam that she should. She was never
taught its use, but had only sneaked and spied until she
learned what she thought was its secret. When she did
not give back to it, the Stone began to eat at her essence."
"And to feed it," said Jenny softly, suddenly under-
standing what she had seen in the lamplight of Zyeme's
room, "she perverted the healing spells that can draw
upon the essences of others for strength. She drank, like
a vampire, to replace what was being drunk from her."
In the pale light of the window, Polycarp said, "Yes,"
and Gareth buried his face in his hands. "Even as she can
draw upon the Stone's magic at a distance, it draws upon
her. I am glad," he added, the tone of his lig
ht voice
changing, "to see you're still all right, Gar."
Gareth raised his head despairingly. "Did she try to
use you?"
The Master nodded, his thin, foxy face grim. "And
when I kept my distance and made you keep yours, she
Dragonsbane 295
turned to Bond, who was the nearest one she could prey
upon. Your father..." He fished for the kindest words to
use. "Your father was of little more use to her by that
time."
The prince's .fist struck the table with a violence that
startled them all—and most of all Gareth himself. But he
said nothing, and indeed, there was little he could say, or
that any could say to him. After a moment. Trey Clerlock
rose from the couch in the comer, where she had been
lying like a child playing dress-up in her flapping black
robe, and came over to rest her hands upon his shoulders.
"Is there any way of destroying her?" the girl asked,
looking across the table to the tiny gnome and the tall
Master who had come to stand at his side.
Gareth turned to stare up at her in shock, having, man-
like, never suspected the ruthless practicality of women.
"Not with the power she holds through the King and
through the Stone," Polycarp said. "Believe me, I thought
about it, though I knew I truly would face a charge of
murder for it." A brief grin flickered across his face. "But
as I ended up facing one anyway..."
"What about destroying the Stone, then?" John asked,
turning his head from where he lay flat on his back on a
tall-legged sleeping couch. Even the little he had been
able to eat seemed to have done him good. In his black
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