Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  Her knee braced on the rock, she slipped the harp free of its casing: balanced it in her arm as she had balanced her children when they were babies. There were barely strings for her two hands. The spells she wove she had learned from the Dragon of Nast Wall, and scarcely knew what emotion she wove into tomorrow’s moonlight, tomorrow’s stars, as she had woven it last night into the slant of tonight’s milky shadows.

  Hunger for what was gone forever. Heart-tearing sweetness glowing in the core of a bitter fruit. A hand curved around the illusion of fire or a jewel; books hidden long in the earth.

  For two weeks she had come, while the silver coin of the moon swelled to fullness, then was clipped away bit by bit: the Gray God covering over with his sleeve the white paper he wrote on, they said, that men could not read what would work their ruin. For two weeks she had made this song of dreams of grief. Then in the silence that followed the song she waited.

  Far off to her right one of the watchers around the manor swatted a gnat and cursed.

  The stars moved. The moon rode high, singing its triumph. Bones and body ached. Moreover, the grief of the spell, as is the way of spells without words, was her own. Thin mists no higher than Jenny’s knees stirred among the trees, and in time she smelled the change in the air that spoke of dawn.

  She drew a mist about herself, and the changeable illusion of dreams. Like a deer wrought of glass, she picked her way back through thickets and dew-soaked ferns, through the dell where fey-lights danced among the mushrooms and the ringed stones. Those who crouched on picket, squinting across open ground to the new stone walls, the trash-filled moat and ruined outbuildings, didn’t see her when she paused between them, looking at Pellanor’s Hold.

  A rough square of stone walls, perhaps sixty yards to the side, floating in a milky drift of mist. Turrets at each corner and a blockhouse on the west. Gate and gatehouse. Stables and granaries. Three hundred and fifty people—men, women, and children …

  A gift, as Balgodorus would see it, of good southern weaponry and steel, of slaves for the selling and grain to feed his troops. And Jenny herself, a mageborn weapon in the Law’s hand.

  As this girl, whoever she was, was Black-Knife’s weapon.

  And against that she saw the burned-out havoc of Cair Dhû; Adric huddled alone among the sheepskins of the big curtained bed he and his brother shared. John in his study with his spectacles in his hand, reading one passage over and over, two times, three times, in the light of the candles, and then slowly leaning his forehead down on his hand.

  She closed her eyes. She had only to whistle up Moon Horse and ride.

  That fleck of light on the parapet would be Pellanor, waiting for her sign below to let down the rope.

  Dawn rinsed the blackness over the walls with the thinnest pallor of gray.

  Jenny sighed and wrapped invisibility around her. Like a shred of mist she moved among the ruins of the village, past the bandit watchers, to the beleaguered Hold once more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Maggots from meat, weevils from rye.

  Dragons from stars in an empty sky.”

  John Aversin sat for a long time with the second volume of The Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World open before him:

  “Dragons come down out of the north, being formed in the hearts of the volcanoes that erupt in the ice. The combination of the heat and the cold, and the vapors from under the earth, give birth to eggs, and the eggs so to the dragons themselves. Being born not of flesh, they are invulnerable to all usages of the flesh …”

  Among the green curlicues, gold-leaf flowers, and carmine berries of the marginalia could be found enlightening illuminations of perfectly conical mountains spitting forth orange dragon eggs as if they were melon seeds, accompanied by drawings of hugely grinning and rather crocodilian dragons.

  “Teltrevir, heliotrope,” whispered Jenny’s voice in his mind and behind it the braided threads of music from her harp, the tunes that were joined to those names. “Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Nymr sea-blue, violet-crowned; Gwedthion ocean-green and Glammring Gold-Horns bright as emeralds …”

  And each tune, each air, separate and alien and haunting. John closed his eyes, exhaustion grinding at his flesh, and remembered a round-dance he’d seen as a child. Its music had been spun from the twelfth of those nameless passages. The twelfth name on Jenny’s list was Sandroving, gold and crimson. The girls had called the dance Bloodsnake. He could still whistle the tune.

  Dotys had more to say. “The star-drakes, or dragons as such things are called, dwelt anciently in the archipelagoes of rock and ice that string the northern seas westward from the Peninsula of Tralchet, islands called by the gnomes the Skerries of Light. These skerries, or reefs, of rock are utterly barren, and so the dragons must descend to the lands of men to hunt, for they are creatures of voracious appetite, as well as archetypes of greed and lust and all manner of willfulness.”

  And they live on what between times? thought John.

  On the corner of his desk Skinny Kitty woke long enough to scratch her ear and wash, then returned to sleep with her paw over her nose. In the cinder darkness beyond the window a cock crowed.

  He touched the sheaf of parchment that the young Regent had sent him. The old ballads had been copied in beautiful bookhand by a court scribe. It was astonishing what coming to power could do for obsessions previously sneered at by the fashionable.

  “’For lo’she quoth, ’do dragons sing More beautifully than birds’ ”

  Who in their right mind would, or could, make up a detail like that?

  “Southward-flying shadows of fire.”

  “From isles of ice and rock beneath the moon.”

  A candle guttered, smoking. John looked up in surprise and groped around until he found a pair of candle scissors to trim the wick. The sky in the stone window frame had gone from cinder to mother-of-pearl.

  His body hurt, as if he’d been beaten with lengths of chain. Even the effort of sitting up for several hours made his breath short. Most of the candles had burned out, and their smutted light stirred uneasily in the networks of experimental pulleys and tackle that hung from the rafters. It would soon be time to go.

  “… isles of ice and rock…”

  The other volume lay in front of him also. The partial volume of Juronal he had found in a ghoul’s hive, near what had been the Tombs of Ghrai; the volume he had read on his return, two nights ago, as he searched for that half-remembered bit of information that told him what had become of Ian and why he could wait no longer to embark on his quest for help.

  North, he thought. He took off his spectacles and leaned his forehead on his hand. Alone. God help me.

  The key to magic is magic! Jenny flinched away from the hard knobbed hands striking her, the toothless mouth shouting abuse. The dirty, smoky stink of the house on Frost Fell returned to her through the dream’s haze. Caerdinn’s cats watched from the windowsills and doors, untroubled by the familiar scene. The key to magic is magic! The old man’s grip like iron, he dragged her from the hearth by her hair, pulled the old harp from her hands, thrust her at the desk where the books lay, black lettering nearly invisible on the tobacco-colored pages.

  The more you do, the more you’ll be able to do! It’s laziness, laziness, laziness that keeps you small!

  It isn’t true! She wanted to shout back at him, across all those years of life. It isn’t true.

  But at fourteen she hadn’t known that. At thirty-nine she hadn’t known.

  In her dream she saw the summer twilight, the beauty of the nights when the sky held light until nearly midnight and breathed dawn again barely three hours later. In her dream she heard the sad little tunes she’d played on her master’s harp, tunes that had nothing to do with the ancient music-spells handed down along the Line of Herne. Like all of Caerdinn’s knowledge, those spells of music were maddeningly ambiguous, fragments of airs learned by rote.

  In her dream Jenny thought she saw the black sk
eletal shape of a dragon flying before the ripe summer moon.

  The key to magic was not magic.

  Out of darkness burned two crystalline silver lamps. Stars that drank in the soul and tangled the mind in mazes of still-deeper dream. A white core of words forming in fathomless darkness.

  What is truth, Wizard-woman? The truth that dragons see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncomfortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You know this.

  The knots of colored music that were his true name.

  The kaleidoscope of memory that she touched when she touched his mind.

  The gold fire of magic that had flowed into her veins. Plunging herself, dragon form, into the wind …

  Mistress Waynest … !

  This love you speak of, I do not know what it is. It is not a thing of dragons… Mistress, wake up! “Wake up!”

  Gasping, she pulled clear of the mind-voice in the shadows. Raw smoke tore her throat; the air was a clamor of men shouting and the frenzied screams of cattle and horses in pain. “What is it?” She scrambled to a sitting position, head aching, eyes thick. Nemus, one of Rocklys’ troopers, stood beside her narrow bed.

  “Balgodorus …”

  As if it would or could be anything else. Jenny was already grabbing for her halberd and her slingstones—she slept clothed and booted these days—trying to thrust the leaden exhaustion from her bones. Her mind registered details automatically: mid-morning, noise from all sides, concerted attack …

  “—fire-arrows,” the young man was saying. “Burning the blockhouse roof, but there’s a storeroom in flames …”

  Fire-spells.

  “… as if the animals have all gone mad …”

  Curse, thought Jenny. Curse, curse, curse…

  The stables were in flames, too. She had no idea of the nature of the spell that had been put on the animals, but the horses, mules, and cattle were rushing crazily around the central court, charging and slashing at one another, kicking the walls, throwing themselves at the doors. Bellowing, shrieking, madness in their eyes. The smoke that rolled over the whole scene seemed to Jenny to be laden with magic, as if something foul burned and spread with the blaze.

  Damn her, she thought, who taught that bitch such a spell?

  Scaling ladders wavered and jerked beyond the frieze of palisade spikes. Arrows filled the air. On the north wall men were already being stabbed at and hacked by the defenders within. Slingstones cracked against the walls and an arrow splintered close to Jenny’s head. Someone was bellowing orders. She got a brief glimpse of Pellanor in his steel-plated armor swaying hand-to-hand at the top of the wall with a robber in dirty leathers, as she sprang down the steps to the court.

  “Watch out, m’lady!” yelled another soldier, racing along the catwalk. “Them horses is insane!”

  Curse it, thought Jenny, trying to concentrate through exhaustion and the blurring blindness of a too-familiar migraine, trying to snatch the form and nature of the spell out of the air. There were panic-spells working, too, a new batch of them …

  She banged on the shutters of the storerooms where the children hid during attacks. “It’s me, Jenny Waynest!” she called out. “One of you, any of you …”

  The shutters cracked. A girl’s face showed in the slit.

  “The names of the cows,” said Jenny. She’d have to do this the hard way, with Limitations, not a counterspell. “Quick.”

  The girl, thank God, didn’t ask her if she was insane, or if she meant what she said. “Uh—Florrie. Goddess. Ginger. You want me to point out which is which? They’re moving awful fast.”

  “Just the names.” Jenny already knew the names of the horses. “Give me a minute; I’ll be back. Be thinking of all of them.” She sprinted across the court, two cows and a mule turning, charging her. She barely reached the stair at the base of the east tower before them, leaped and scrambled up out of their reach, drew a Guardian on the stonework. Smoke poured like a river from under the eaves of the workrooms between the east tower and the north, but it was better than trying to get past the melee in the court. Jenny swung herself up, darted across the roof, forming counterspells to the fire as she ran and thanking the Twelve that the roof beneath her feet was tile. A man’s body plunged from above, spraying blood.

  Get the danger contained, thought Jenny. Madness-spells, fire-spells, get those taken care of first.

  And then, by the Moon-Scribe’s little white dog, you and I have a reckoning, my ill-instructed friend.

  The Limitations quieted the maddened animals, exempting them one by one from the spell. It made Jenny’s head ache to concentrate amid the chaos, the smell of smoke and the fear that any moment the bandits would come over the wall.

  From the top of the west wall Jenny picked out Balgodorus himself, a tall man, strong enough to dominate any of his men, dark and with a bristling beard. Men were rallying around him now, ready for another attack. They wound their crossbows, milled and shouted among themselves, working up their anger. Balgodorus was saying something to them, gesturing at the walls …

  “Probably telling them about all the food and wealth we have in here,” muttered Pellanor, his voice hollow within his steel helm as he came to Jenny’s side. He was panting hard and smelled of sweat and the blood that ran down the steel.

  Balgodorus gestured to the woman who stood near him.

  Jenny said softly, “That’s her.”

  “What?”

  “The witch. She’s wearing a skirt, and unarmed. Bandit-women dress as men. Why else would she be at the battle? I’ll need a rope.” Jenny strode along the palisade, dark hair billowing in a crazy cloud behind her, Pellanor hurrying after. “I don’t suppose there’s a scaling ladder still standing.”

  On all the walls the defenders were panting, resting their spears and their swords against the palisade, wiping sweat or blood from their eyes. Children ran along the catwalk with water; a man could be heard telling them sharply to get back indoors and bar themselves in. Below, in the court, the horses stamped, restless at the smell of smoke and blood, and all around could be heard the faint, frenzied squealing of the mice, the cats, the rats still under the influence of the mad-spell.

  “Great Heaven, no!”

  She felt for her stones and sling, shrugging her shoulder through the halberd’s strap. “Go back. They’re gathering for another try.” She stepped over a dead bandit, kilting up her skirts.

  “You can’t seriously think of leaving in the middle of an attack! You’ll be slaughtered!” Jenny had never used spells of illusion in or near the Hold, for fear of the effects they might have on the watchers on the wall, or on the counterspells against illusion with which she’d so carefully ringed the fortress. Last night she had renewed those counterspells after a scout told her there was untoward movement around the bandit camp. She’d had only time for a quick, disquieting glimpse of John, who should have been flat on his back in bed, loading provisions into that horror of an airship he’d built last spring. Muffle had been with him— Muffle, for love of the Goddess, knock some sense into his head!

  “An attack is the only time she’ll be concentrating on something else.” Jenny found the rope down which Pellanor had let her climb two nights ago, still coiled just inside the door of the north turret. She checked the land below, and the ruined and trampled fields that lay to the east. No bandits in sight on that side of the keep. Arrows littered the ground, floated in the moat like straws. A single body, the legacy of an attack three days ago, bobbed obscenely among the half-sunk timbers and boughs.

  “Whatever you do, hold them now,” she said. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  “What if she uses more spells?” asked the Baron worriedly. “Without you to counter them …”

  “I’m counting on her to do just that,” said Jenny. “It will give me a better chance at her. Hold fast and don’t let anyone panic. I can’t return until after the attack is driven off, but that shouldn’t be long.” She slithered under the dripping,
charred spikes of the palisade, hanging onto the rope. “I’ll be watching.”

  “May the gods of war and magic go with you, then.” Pellanor saluted and snapped his visor down again. “Damn,” he added, as the noise rose from the other side of the fortress. “Here they come.”

  Jenny dropped, playing the rope out fast, thankful that she and John still worked out against one another with halberd and sword. Still, she was forty-one and felt it. No sleep last night and precious little the night before, and when she did sleep, she saw in her mind what John was doing with that monstrosity he’d built …

  She pushed away the images, her frantic fear and the desire to break her beloved’s legs to keep him in bed until she got there, forced her thoughts to return to spells of protection, of concealment, as she ran for the fields. Broken crops offered some concealment from the men she could hear shouting beneath the walls.

  “At ’em, men!” Balgodorus’ voice clashed like an iron gong. “Make ’em wish they never been born!” He had come around with his forces, sword in hand, and now stood close to where Jenny lay in the broken stubble.

  “And you, bitch—” He grabbed the arm of the woman beside him. Girl, Jenny saw now. No more than fifteen. Snarled chestnut hair and the kind of ill-fitting gown common to bandits’ whores, expensive silk stamped with gold, black with sweat under the arms, kilted to show no petticoat beneath and quite clearly worn over neither corset nor shift. A thin little face like a shut door, dead eyes long past either tears or joy.

  “You do your stuff or you’ll feel it tonight, understand.”

  He thrust her off from him and ran to overtake his men, loping easily, like a big dark lion, sword raising high. A cheer greeted him. Some were already bracing themselves, letting fly arrows toward the walls, and the two or three warriors Balgodorus had left standing around the witch-girl watched, too, cursing and cheering and making jokes.