Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  And he spit acid at him, flame hissing in the ocean inches from him, and wheeled in the air, then winged like a thrown spear to the south.

  When he was out of sight, John became aware of the smoke from his campfire and the familiar smell of scorching barley. Shaking with shock he got to his feet, holding his arm where the blood ran down and limped up the beach to his camp. At least, he thought, shivering as he worked himself out of jacket and doublet and shirt to bind up the cuts the dragon had left on his arm and side, he didn’t destroy the Milkweed.

  But the incident brought home to him again the terrible fragility of his mission. As he packed up his camp—and ate the last of the stale bread he’d pilfered from the gnome-king’s table—he found himself scanning again and again the horizons, knowing he was a fool and wondering whether he’d passed the degree of foolishness where it becomes not laughable but fatal. Long ago, son, he thought, resigned. Long ago.

  He wrapped the gull meat in kelp from the beach and threw the burned bannocks to the dummies, who pecked at them once or twice and waddled disgustedly away. Though the sun was dipping toward the sea he unhooked the Milkweed’s anchor and climbed the ladder as the wind took the silvery air bags, swinging out over the ocean. Once his engine was set he got out his charts again and scanned the sea with his telescope, sketching in the islands of the archipelago. He tried to give each its shape: domed skulls, spiring cliffs, here and there a shallow beach or the bright spangle of a spring. Between the islands the sea plunged blue-black, fathomless. Sometimes he could discern rock ridges joining one island to another: deadly reefs, ship-killers.

  Whales sounded and played among the reefs and between the islands, great slate-blue shining backs arching clear of the water. Sometimes with them, and more often swimming alone, he saw other shapes, sinuous and snakelike, but it wasn’t until one of these broke the surface with a long swan-neck and swam for some distance beneath the Milkweed that he realized these, too, were dragon-kind.

  He dropped anchor at a small peak and spent the last of his strength winching the Milkweed down between the horns of its cleft. There he ate and in a cave in the rocks slept like a dead man; waking at noon, he brought down the telescope from the vessel and sat on the high cliff with it. Around a cliff-girt island not far off a dozen of the seagoing dragon-kind played. They were luminous dark purples and greens. Only when another dragon, black-figured crimson and gorgeous as a midnight rainbow, appeared in the sky and plunged down into the water with them did John realize that these were the females of the dragon-kind.

  He journeyed on, following the Skerries west and north. In the light-drenched northern nights he traveled, searching at sunrise and sunset for the elusive comet Dotys had described. By day he slept, with the Milkweed drawn down as close to the rocks as he could force it so their shadows would render the craft less noticeable from a distance. Once he thought, looking through his spyglass at evening, that he saw Centhwevir, and discerned what might have been a man riding on his back. Once, making camp on an islet so isolated that the nearest neighbor was visible only when the Milkweed rode high above the crags, he found tracks: a dragon’s claws, and a man’s bootprints near the chewed and gull-torn bones of a couple of sheep. There were fragments of what looked like two seashells wrought of blown glass, but finer than any glass he’d ever seen, and near the remains of a fire carefully concealed with brush, a smaller print, a boy’s boot with the nail-pattern characteristic of Peg, Alyn Hold’s cobbler.

  At last he came to the end of the Skerries and set out west over the open sea. For a day he was without any mark at all, as he had been when leaving the peninsula, and swept the horizon with his glass in vain. On the second day he saw peaks in the distance, wind-scoured, tiny, ringed all around with cliffs. When he came nearer, he saw that one of these islets had water, and it was there that he cast the Milkweed’s anchor and winched the craft down close to the blue-black rocks.

  He rested, and ate, and searched until the light grew too dim for safety—the island was all rocks and little of it even flat enough to sit on. Nothing grew there. Not even birds nested on the high crags, though the big and the small islands to the south were alive with them. Only the keening of the wind in the rocks, and the gurgle of the stream, and the slow hammer of the waves broke the silence, and yet it seemed to him that he was never alone. At times this frightened him, at other times he felt he had never been in a place so peaceful in his life. In the morning he saw something like a shadow pass over the water, a gray flickering ghost that circled the rocks where the Milkweed was anchored. When he tried to look at it, there was nothing there.

  Later he played on his hurdy-gurdy the tune Jenny had taught him, the air of the dragon’s name, and the yowling voice of the instrument flung the notes against the cliffs and into the sky. Shadow covered him.

  He looked up and saw Morkeleb the Black hanging above him like a nightmare kite.

  John set down the hurdy-gurdy and shaded his eyes. The black dragon was not as large as some he had seen: forty feet from the smoking nostrils to the tip of the iron-barbed tail, and wings something close to twice that, outspread in the shining air. Mane, horns, streamers, and fur-tufts, scales above and below— all the things that on other dragons were saturated with color— were black, as if through the endless years the color had wearied him and he had put it aside. His eyes were white and silver, Jenny had said, colorless as diamonds. He was careful not to look at them, or let them meet his.

  He said, “Morkeleb,” and the dragon reached down with its claws and settled, clinging to the rocks.

  Dragonsbane. The voice that spoke in the hollows of his mind was such a voice as might speak omens in dreams. Has someone paid you with books to seek me here, or with promises of men-at-arms? As the dragon tilted his head to the side the whole lank rangy frame of him shifted, balanced on the rocks. The half-spread wings folded and tucked themselves against his sides, the long tail wrapped around the spire.

  Though there was no particular inflection in the dragon’s words—far more clearly articulate as words than any other dragon’s John had encountered—he felt the simmer of irony and anger beneath them. The indifference and pride of the dragons, which had protected him thus far, was no protection here.

  “No one paid me. I came of me own.”

  Seeking after knowledge, that you may better slay other dragons?

  “Seeking after knowledge, anyroad, ” replied John. “But then I’m forever doin’ that—and there’s knowledge and knowledge. What I’m seeking is help.” He raised his hand to shade his eyes, his spectacle lenses flashing in the sun.

  “Well over a thousand years ago, it says in Juronal’s Moralities—or anyway I think it’s the Moralities, I’ve only got the back half of it—there was this wizard, see, named Isychros saved the life of a dragon. Now savin’ a dragon’s life involves learnin’ its True Name—the true music of it, not the sort of tunes I’ve learned to play—and with that True Name, that true music, Isychros made the dragon his slave.”

  I am aware, Dragonsbane, how dragons are enslaved by their names. The anger in the air seemed to thicken, as if it were about to bead on the rocks.

  John wet his lips. “Well, it seems Master Isychros didn’t let it go at that. He sounds like one of those people that you lend him a horse to ride home on and he butchers it, sells the meat, sells the skin, stuffs a mattress with the hair, sells the mattress, and a year later sends you a silver piece to pay for it all—less interest, of course. This Isychros drove what Juronal calls a glass needle into the back of the dragon’s head, which made the dragon Isychros’ servant. And Isychros got a couple of pals of his—mages, they were—and ganged up to defeat and enslave other dragons as well, quite a lot of ’em in fact. He ended up with ten or fifteen mages, each of ’em holding sway over a dragon, and the lot of ’em went on to conquer the Kingdom of Ernine. Any of this familiar to you? I know Ernine was destroyed, way back in the days, but I don’t know how.”

  What makes you think,
Dragonsbane, that I was not there?

  “Ah.” John scratched his jaw, a scrubby brush of rusty red. “Well, it’s good to know I haven’t wasted the trip. It did happen, then?”

  Silk-fine lids lowered over crystal eyes, and without actual words he felt the assent ripple and shiver in the air.

  “And I read—at the end of Juronal’s account—that they were defeated in the end, though it doesn’t say how. Juronal wrote five centuries after all the shoutin’ was over, and maybe all sorts of other stuff got mixed in with the story. But what Juronal says is that the wizards and the dragons all died.” His heart was pounding, looking up at the dragon above him on the rocks. “Is that part true?”

  That part is true, Dragonsbane.

  A wave curled around the rocks below the snip of ledge on which he had slept. The rock feet, exposed by the retreat of the tide, were bearded with weed, alive with silver crabs. Turning his head, the dragon regarded the distance as though to scry the air.

  It was not this wizardling’s healing that bound Ramasseus and Othronin, Halcarabidar and Idironapirsith and the other star-drakes to the mages who rode on their backs. In his mind John heard the music of the dragons’ names, beautiful and archaic as the songs of the stars, and knew without Morkeleb speaking of it that Ramasseus had been dark purple and green, Idironapirsith banded like a coral snake with salmon, yellow, and black.

  This Isychros had a mirror, whose surface burned in darkness with a terrible light. Demons lived behind the mirror, and Isychros called them forth and put their power into devices of crystal and quicksilver, which he drove into the dragons’ skulls. The demons entered into Isychros and burned out his heart, the core and essence of his being, and dwelled there instead in his flesh. Using his magic as a puppeteer in the marketplaces of men uses a puppet, they drove the souls out of the other mages whom Isychros touched, so that the mirror-demons could enter into their bodies and dwell there in their turn. Thus mage and dragon fused under the power of demons. This is the story of Isychros.

  John’s throat seemed to close, suffocating him, and he thought Ian, no. It isn’t true.

  His voice sounded like someone else’s to him. “This isn’t … isn’t possible, is it? I mean, mages can deal with demons. Jen does. I’ve seen her.”

  There are demons and demons, Songweaver, as there are mages and mages. I only know that this was true, in that time and in that place.

  “But he was defeated in the end, wasn’t he?”

  Some of the mages they cut to pieces alive and burned in fire, that the Hellspawn could not use the dead flesh as they had used the living. The mages of the city of Prokep in the desert found magic that would work against demons, withering them where they abode. When the demons were shriveled inside them, the dragons also died. The mirror was destroyed.

  John found himself fighting for breath, as if he’d taken a blow to the pit of the stomach. “And was there no saving of any of them? No way to … to catch back the souls of those the demons had driven out? Or find them again where they’d been pushed out into the air?”

  What is the way to catch back the souls of those that disease drives out, Dragonsbane? Or the violence that you practice against one another for sport?

  No. No. No. He pressed his hand to his mouth as if trying to control his breath, or perhaps only to cover it from sight. When he took his hand away and spoke again, his voice was completely steady. “They’ve taken my son.” He told what had happened at Cair Dhû, and what he thought he’d seen; the tracks at Frost Fell, and Rocklys’ tale of a wizard with an outlaw band. “Centhwevir was bad hurt and came back here, I think, to recover. I saw Ian’s tracks on an island three days’ flight east of here, and those of this wizard with his bloody glass needles. There has to be a way to fetch Ian’s soul back. I need your help, Morkeleb. I need it bad. And not only me.”

  And your Wizard-woman? The air rang with his irony and his anger, a cold sound like slips of glass breathed upon by wind.

  John said nothing, but it was as if something inside him bled. Not a thing of dragons anymore, Enismirdal had said of the black dragon, and looking up at that cut-jet glitter John was suddenly reminded of his mother in her exile, alone on this birdless isle with whatever he had brought with him inside.

  All that vast anger, colored by, John thought, years of silence and sea-winds, coalesced in that quiet level voice that spoke in the hollows of his mind.

  I told her, when she turned from me, that there was a price for the loving of mortal things. This is that price. Had she remained with me—had she remained a jere-drake… John heard and understood the word, a nonbreeding female—you would not now need to seek me out. Were her son a dragon, there would not be this trouble.

  The dragon’s anger was chill as flaying glass. John scratched his beard again, and said, “Well, at the risk of another dunking in the sea, I think you’re wrong about that. If it was an accident that Centhwevir chose that time and that place to come raiding, I’ll eat me gloves. This bloke in the pretty cap was Johnny on the Spot, waiting for me to do his job. It seems to me it won’t be long before dragons’ll be having as much of a problem as ever I am.”

  Dragons look after themselves. Morkeleb shifted his wings again and the early sunlight glistened on the bones of his pelvis, the ebon forest of spikes along joints and spine and skull. In the days when Isychros formed his corps, we dwelt in the Mountains of the Loom, and in the caves of the mountains they called the Killers of Men; we dwell there no longer.

  Men are weak, Dragonsbane. When a man has been beset by a stronger man, he can run down the street of his smelly village crying, and others will come out of their doors and strike that strong man, for the weaker’s sake. This is the way of men, who are always afraid.

  John said nothing for a time, hearing on the rocks below him the voice of the surf. Trying to summon what to say that would draw this alien creature; trying with all the desperate knowledge that if he spoke wrongly, Ian was gone indeed. But all he could find to say was, “Don’t let your hate for me rob her of the son she loves.”

  The dark head came swiftly around; John had to look aside fast, to avoid the diamond scintillance of the eyes. You forget that it is not a man to whom you speak. Hate is not a thing of dragons. John said, “Nor is love.”

  No. With a snap like the strike of lightning the silken wings spread, catching the ocean wind. The dragon uncoiled his tail from the rocks. It is not.

  A moment before the dragon had perched on his pinnacle, like some great glistening bird. Now it was as if muscle and scale and sinew had become shadow only, with no more weight than a scarf of thinnest silk. The wind lifted him easily, and he rose out of the shadows of the peak and seemed to flash all over with jewels as he came into the sun. John watched him with his whole heart crying out, No! The dragon’s wings tilted; he swooped low over the waves, then climbed fast and steep, like a falcon rising above his prey. But he did not stoop like a falcon. He gyred again, high, high against the bright air, and flew west, dwindling to a speck and vanishing into the light.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I’ll have to tell Jen.

  The thought was almost more than he could bear.

  And then: I’ll have to get the Milkweed back to land.

  In a kind of blank numbness John refilled every water container on the little craft at the spring, folded his blankets, and scattered the ash of his fire.

  Ian was gone.

  The demons entered into Isychros and burned out his heart … Using his magic as a puppeteer uses a puppet.

  John touched the fading ache in his ribs.

  Whatever was happening—whyever the demon mage had taken the mageborn boy—it was inevitable that they’d show up somewhere: demons, mages, dragon.

  And at the moment, only he, John Aversin, knew.

  He checked the Milkweed’s air bags and found them buoyant still. Scrambling up the ladder and over the withy gunwale as the craft lifted above the shadows of the surrounding cliff, he felt a curi
ous sadness at leaving the birdless isle.

  There was little charge in the engine, and he cranked for some time before it grew strong enough to turn the vessel’s bow toward the largest of the three Last Islands. His first desire was to head east immediately: If the Milkweed came down halfway between the Skerries and the Tralchet peninsula he supposed he could sail her in to the sorry little cluster of huts and ruins on the estuary of the Eld River, but it wasn’t anything he wanted to try. Yet his store of food was low. On the largest island he shot gulls and cooked them, gathered eggs to boil, and set forth again in the westering light. Mind and heart felt blank. He wondered if Jenny could see him in these dragon-haunted isles, and if so whether she knew what he did and what he had learned.

  Ian was gone.

  He closed his eyes and saw his son’s boot-track, and the tracks of the man in the embroidered cap.

  They were in the islands somewhere. I could find them…

  He thrust the thought away. They’ll turn up, he thought. In the Winterlands, in the south, in the air above Cair Corflyn or Bel, spitting smoke and fire… They’ll turn up.

  He prayed he could reach Commander Rocklys with the warning before they did.

  In the pewter twilight of the northern midnight he saw a boy’s face desperate with worry, dyed by the firelight and smoke of the lower court of the Hold: I’m not inexperienced. Saw a red baby’s face no bigger than his own fist, ugly and frowning under a fuzz of silky black hair.

  Oh, my son.

  Demons.

  His heart twisted inside him.

  According to Dotys in his Histories, and passing references in Gorgonimir, the penalties for trafficking with demons in past times had included being skinned, boned, and burned alive. Gorgonimir listed an elaborate hierarchy of the Hellspawn ranging from simple marsh-wights, Whisperers, gyres, pooks, house-hobs, and erlkings to the dark-wights that bored their way into men’s souls. There are demons and demons, Morkeleb had said. Reading the ancients, John had gotten the impression that most of them didn’t know what they were talking about.