fragile wrists, the very bones of her hands hurting like an
old woman's on a winter night; but she forced her hands
to close.
Grandeur? her mind cried, slicing up once more through
the fog of pain and enchantment. It is only you who see
yourself as grand, Zyerne. Yes, lam evil, and weak, and
cowardly, but, like a dragon, I know what it is that I am.
You are a creature of lies, of poisons, of small and petty
fears—it is that which will kill you. Whether I die or not,
Zyerne, it is you who will bring your own death upon
yourself, not for what you do, but for what you are.
She felt Zyeme's mind flinch at that. With a twist of
fury Jenny broke the brutal grip it held upon hers. At the
same moment her hands were struck aside. From her
knees, she looked up through the tangle of her hair, to
see the enchantress's face grow livid. Zyeme screamed
"You! You..." With a piercing obscenity, the sorceress's
whole body was wrapped in the rags of heat and fire and
power. Jenny, realizing the danger was now to her body
rather than to her mind, threw herself to the floor and
rolled out of the way. In the swirling haze of heat and
power stood a creature she had never seen before, hideous
and deformed, as if a giant cave roach had mated with a
tiger. With a hoarse scream, the thing threw itself upon
her.
Jenny rolled aside from the rip of the razor-combed
feet. She heard Gareth cry her name, not in terror as he
would once have done, and from the comer of her eye
she saw him slide the halberd across the glass-slick floor
to her waiting hand. She caught the weapon just in time
to parry a second attack. The metal of the blade shrieked
Dragonsbane 313
on the tearing mandibles as the huge weight of the thing
bore her back against the blue-black Stone. Then the thing
turned, doubling on its tracks as Zyeme had done that
evening in the glade, and in her mind Jenny seemed to
hear Zyeme's distant voice howling, "I'll show you! I'll
show you all!"
It scuttled into the forest of alabaster, making for the
dark tunnels that led to the surface.
Jenny started to get to her feet to follow and collapsed
at the foot of the Stone. Her body hurt her in every limb
and muscle; her mind felt pulped from the ripping cruelty
of Zyeme's spells, bleeding still from her own acceptance
of what she was. Her hand, which she could see lying
over the halberd's shaft, seemed no longer part of her,
though, rather to her surprise, she saw it was still on the
end of her arm and attached to her body; the brown fingers
were covered with blisters, from some attack she had not
even felt at the time. Gareth was bending over her, holding
the guttering torch.
"Jenny—Jenny, wake up—Jenny please Don't make
me go after it alone!"
"No," she managed to whisper and swallowed blood.
Some instinct told her the lesion within her had healed,
but she felt sick and drained. She tried to rise again and
collapsed, vomiting; she felt the boy's hands hold her
steady even though they shook with fear. Afterward, empty
and chilled, she wondered if she would faint and told
herself not to be silly.
"She's going to get Morkeleb," she whispered, and
propped herself up again, her black hair hanging down in
her face. "The power of the Stone rules him. She will be
able to hold his mind, as she could not hold mine."
She managed to get to her feet, Gareth helping her as
gently as he could, and picked up the halberd. "I have to
stop her before she gets clear of the caverns. I defeated
314 Barbara Hambly
her mind—while the tunnels limit her size, I may be able
to defeat her body. Stay here and help John."
"But..." Gareth began. She shrugged free of his hold
and made for the dark doorway at a stumbling run.
Beyond it, spells of loss and confusion tangled the
darkness. The runes that she had traced as she'd followed
John were gone, and for a few moments the subtle obscu
rity of Zyeme's magic smothered her mind and made ali
those shrouded ways look the same. Panic knotted around
her throat as she thought of wandering forever in the
darkness; then the part of her that had found her way
through the woods of the Winterlands said. Think. Think
and listen. She released magic from her mind and looked
about her in the dark; with instinctive woodcraftiness,
she had taken back-bearings of her route while making
her rune-markings, seeing what the landmarks looked like
coming the other way. She spread her senses through the
phantasmagoric domain of fluted stone, listening for the
echoes that crossed and recrossed in the blackness. She
heard the muted murmur of John's voice speaking to Gar-
eth about doors the gnomes had meant to bar and the
clawed scrape of unclean chitin somewhere up ahead.
She deepened her awareness and heard the skitter of the
vermin of the caves as they fled, shocked, from a greater
vermin. Swiftly, she set off in pursuit.
She had told Morkeleb to stand guard over the outer
door. She prayed now that he had had the sense not to,
but it scarcely mattered whether he did or not.The power
of the Stone was in Zyeme—from it she had drawn the
deepest reserves of its strength, knowing that, when the
time came to pay it back, she would have lives aplenty
at her disposal to do it. The power of the Stone was lodged
in Morkeleb's mind, tighter now that his mind and hers
had touched. With the dragon her slave, the Citadel would
fall, and the Stone be Zyeme's forever.
Jenny quickened once more to a jog that felt ready to
Dragonsbane 315
break her bones. Her bare feet splashed in the trickling
water, making a faint, sticky pattering among the looming
shapes of the limestone darkness; her hands felt frozen
around the halberd shaft. How long a start Zyeme had
she didn't know, or how fast the abomination she had
become could travel. Zyeme had no more power over
her, but she feared to meet her now and pit her body
against that body. A part other mind thought wryly: John
should have been doing this, not she—it was his end of
the bargain to deal with monsters. She smiled bitterly.
Mab had been right; there were other evils besides drag-
ons in the land.
She passed a hillslope of stone mushrooms, an archway
of teeth like grotesque daggers. Her heart pounded and
her chilled body ached with the ruin Zyeme had wrought
on her. She ran, passing the locks and bars the gnomes
had set such faith in, knowing already that she would be
too late.
In the blue dimness of the vaults below the Citadel,
she found the furniture toppled and scattered, and she
forced herself desperately to greater speed. Through a
doorway, she glimpsed a reflection of the fevered daylight
>
outside; the stench of blood struck her nostrils even as
she tripped and, looking down, saw the decapitated body
of a gnome lying in a pool of warm blood at her feet. The
last room of the Citadel vaults was a slaughterhouse, men
and gnomes lying in it and in the doorway to the outside,
their makeshift black livery sodden with blood, the close
air of the room stinking with the gore that splattered the
walls and even the ceiling. From beyond the doorway,
shouting and the stench of burning came to her; and,
stumbling through the carnage. Jenny cried out Morkeleb
She hurled the music of his name like a rope into the
sightless void. His mind touched hers, and the hideous
weight of the Stone pressed upon them both.
Light glared in her eyes. She scrambled over the bodies
316 Barbara Hambly
in the doorway and stood, blinking for an instant in the
lower court, seeing all around the door the paving stones
charred with a crisped muck of blood. Before her the
creature crouched, larger and infinitely more hideous in
the befouled and stormy daylight, metamorphosed into
something like a winged ant, but without an ant's compact
grace. Squid, serpent, scorpion, wasp—it was everything
hideous, but no one thing in itself. The screaming laughter
that filled her mind was Zyeme's laughter. It was Zyerne's
voice that she heard, calling to Morkeleb as she had called
to Gareth, the power of the Stone a tightening noose upon
his mind.
The dragon crouched immobile against the far rampart
of the court. His every spike and scale were raised for
battle, yet to Jenny's mind came nothing from him but
grating agony. The awful, shadowy weight of the Stone
was tearing at his mind, a power built generation after
generation, fermenting in upon itself and directed by
Zyeme upon him now, summoning him to her bidding,
demanding that he yield. Jenny felt his mind a knot of
iron against that imperious command, and she felt it when
the knot fissured.
She cried again, Morkeleb and flung herself, mind and
body, toward him. Their minds gripped and locked.
Through his eyes, she saw the horrible shape of the crea-
ture and recognized how he had known Zyerne through
her disguise—the patterning of her soul was unmistaka-
ble. Peripherally, she was aware that this was true for
every man and gnome who cowered within the doorways
and behind the protection of each turret; she saw things
as a dragon sees. The force of the Stone hammered again
at her mind, and yet it had no power over her, no hold
upon her. Through Morkeleb's eyes, she saw herself still
running toward him—toward, in a sense, herself—and
saw the creature turn to strike at that small, flying rag of
Dragonsbane 317
black-wrapped bones and hair that she knew in a detached
way for her own body.
Her mind was within the dragon's, shielding him from
the burning grip of the Stone. Like a cat, the dragon
struck, and the creature that had been Zyerne wheeled
to meet the unexpected threat. Half within her own body,
half within Morkeleb's, Jenny stepped in under the sag-
ging, bloated belly of the monster that loomed so hugely
near her and thrust upward with her halberd. As the blade
slashed at the stinking flesh, she heard Zyeme's voice in
her mind, screaming at her the back-street obscenities of
a spoiled little slut whom the gnomes had taken in on
account of the promise of her power. Then the creature
gathered its mismated limbs beneath it and hurled itself
skyward out of their way. From overhead, Jenny felt the
hot rumble of thunder.
Her counterspell blocked the bolt of lightning that would
have come hurling down on the court an instant later; she
used a dragon-spell, such as those who walked the roads
of the air used to allow them to fly in storms. Morkeleb
was beside her then, her mind shielding his from the Stone
as his body shielded hers from Zyeme's greater strength.
Minds interlinked, there was no need of words between
them. Jenny seized the knife-tipped spikes of his foreleg
as he raised her to his back, and she wedged herself
uncomfortably between the spearpoints that guarded his
spine. More thunder came, and the searing breathlessness
of ozone. She flung a spell to turn aside that bolt, and the
lightning—channeled, she saw, through the creature that
hovered in the livid air above the Citadel like a floating
sack of pus—struck the tubular harpoon gun on the ram-
part. It exploded in a bursting star of flame and shattered
iron, and the two men who were cranking another catapult
to bear on the monster turned and fled.
Jenny understood then that the storm had been sum-
moned by Zyeme, called by her powers through the Stone
318 Barbara Hambly
from afar, and the Stone's magic gave her the power to
direct the lightning when and where she would. It had
been her weapon to destroy the Citadel—the Stone, the
storm, and the dragon.
She pulled off her belt and used it to lash herself to
the two-foot spike before her. It would be little use if the
dragon turned over in flight, but would keep her from
being thrown off laterally, and that was all she could hope
for now. She knew her body was exhausted and hurt, but
the dragon's mind lifted her out of herself; and in any
case, she had no choice. She sealed herself off from the
pain and ripped the Limitations from mind and flesh.
The dragon hurtled skyward to the thing waiting above.
Winds tore at them, buffeting Morkeleb's wings so
that he had to veer sharply to miss being thrown into the
highest turret of the Citadel. From above them, the crea-
ture spat a rain of acid mucus. Green and stinking, it seared
Jenny's face and hands like poison and made smoking
tracks of corrosion on the steel of the dragon's scales.
Furiously keeping her mind concentrated against the sear-
ing agony. Jenny cast her will at the clouds, and rain began
to sluice down, washing the stuff away and half-blinding
her with its fury. Long black hair hung stickily down over
her shoulders as the dragon swung on the wind, and she
felt lightning channeling again into the hovering creature
before them. Seizing it with her mind, she flung it back.
It burst somewhere between them, the shock of it striking
her bones like a Mow. She had forgotten she was not a
dragon, and that her flesh was mortal.
Then the creature fell upon them, its stumpy wings
whirring like a foul bug's. The weight of it rolled the
dragon in the air so that Jenny had to grasp the spikes on
either side of her, below the blades and yet still cutting
her fingers. The earth rolled and swung below them, but
her eyes and mind locked on the thing above. Its stink i^
was overpowering, and from the pullulant mass of its j||
&
nbsp; Dragonsbane 319
flesh, a sharklike head struck, biting at the massive joints
of the dragon's wings, while the whirlwind of evil spells
sucked and ripped around them, tearing at their linked
minds.
Ichorous yellow fluid burst from the creature's mouth
as it bit at the spikes of the wing-joints. Jenny slashed at
the eyes, human and as big as her two fists, gray-gold as
mead—Zyeme's eyes. The halberd blade clove through
the flesh—and from among the half-severed flaps of the
wound, other heads burst like a knot of snakes among
spraying gore, tearing at her robe and her flesh with suck-
eriike mouths. Grimly, fighting a sense of nightmare hor-
ror, she chopped again, her blistered hands clotted and
running with slime. Half her mind called from the depths
of the dragon's soul the healing-spells against the poisons
she knew were harbored in those filthy jaws.
When she slashed at the other eye, the creature broke
away from them. The pain of Morkeleb's wounds as well
as her own tore at her as he swung and circled skyward,
and she knew he felt the burning of her ripped flesh. The
Citadel dropped away below them; rain poured over them
like water from a pail. Looking up, she could see the
deadly purplish glow of stored lightning rimming the black
pillows of cloud so close above their heads. The battering
of Zyeme's mind upon theirs lessened as the sorceress
rallied her own spells, spells of wreckage and ruin against
the Citadel and its defenders below.
Mists veiled the thrusting folds of the land beneath
them, the toy fortress and the wet, slate-and-emerald of
the meadows beside the white stream of the river. Mor-
keleb circled. Jenny's eyes within his seeing all things
with clear, incredible calm. Lightning streaked down by
her and she saw, as if it had been drawn in fine lines
Dragon's Bane Page 39