Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  “And he came?” Greenhythe was a sleepy backwater of the southern Realm. Jenny couldn’t imagine a retired gentleman undertaking the perils and discomforts of the journey.

  “He took some persuading, and my cousin sent a decent escort.” Rocklys made a face. “His family didn’t want him to come—magic ’isn’t done’ by gentlemen.” Her voice flexed with scorn. “Which was why I told Gareth that Cair Corflyn is the only place we could have such a school, away from the prejudices of the south. Can you imagine trying to teach anyone anything of magic with imbeciles like Ector of Sindestray—that’s my cousin’s treasurer-general—whining like frightened slaves about the old laws?

  “The province of Imperteng in full revolt now—and that fool Gareth has taken the King with him to the siege camp at Jotham!—tax revolts in the Marches, upstart merchants in the Isles thinking they’re aristocrats, a pardoned traitor, if you’ll excuse me saying so, in charge of Halnath …” Her fist bunched in exasperation.

  Jenny toyed with the idea of objecting to the term pardoned traitor in reference to the Master of Halnath, who had revolted against the takeover of the old King’s mind by the witch Zyerne. Given Zyerne’s abuse of power, in fact, the prejudices of the south were understandable.

  Instead she said, as tactfully as she could, “Perhaps Prince Gareth thought his father would be safer with the army at Jotham if there are tax revolts along the Marches. The Marches aren’t that far from Bel.”

  Rocklys’ mouth hardened, but she said grudgingly, “Well, it’s an argument. More like some fool thought the Twelve Gods wouldn’t grant victory if his sacred hoary head wasn’t on hand for their silly rites every morning.” Her voice twisted with impatience and contempt. “The old man’s so fuddled these days all a rebel would have to do is lay hands on him to convince him to oust Gareth from the regency and appoint his captor in his stead.”

  Behind her, through the open shutters, Jenny watched the red-hooded priests of Grond Firebeard, the Lord of War, process slowly into the camp temple, three and three, with a crowd of men-at-arms in their train. Their candles showed pale in the gloom beneath the colonnade. “All the more reason for us to teach mages to use their powers and use them responsibly, for the betterment of the Realm. Thank the Twelve … Yes, what is it?”

  The red-robed priest in the doorway discreetly held out to her a beeswax taper, part of the ceremonial crossing the court: Jenny recalled that the Firebeard’s altars needed to be kindled by the commander of the company that guarded His temple. Father Hiero had long ago given up trying to get John to perform the chore. Evidently Rocklys’ Legalism was as entrenched as John’s belief in the Old God, for the Commander simply stuck the wick into the stove.

  “Well, mum for all that.” The Commander waved the priest brusquely from the room and turned back to Jenny. “You got her here, and you’ll be teaching her, and Bliaud … What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Yseult.”

  “Yseult.” The Commander dipped her hand into the tribute box, turned its stones over to catch the light. Jenny wondered what merchant she’d pried those gems out of. “If what your man told me was right, if there’s a mage abroad who’s managed to enslave a dragon to his will, we’ll need whatever help we can get.”

  Jenny listened to Rocklys’ account of John’s visit with a growing chill in her heart. She had watched John for days in her scrying-stone, in fire and in water, since she had seen him emerge unharmed from the Deep of Tralchet; had watched him turn, not south to Alyn Hold but west across the dark oceans, and guessed at last that he was bound for the Skerries of Light to seek Morkeleb for help or advice. Dear Goddess, does he think Morkeleb will help him? she’d wondered desperately. What had he read that made him think that was the only way?

  Save a dragon, slave a dragon.

  A wizard who had used John as a cat’s-paw to harm Centhwevir enough that the wizard could then save the dragon’s life. Who had enslaved Ian and carried him away.

  Rage burned her, prickling at her scalp. Rage and guilt that turned her sick.

  And because there was no other help, not even novices here at Corflyn, John had sought Morkeleb.

  Morkeleb would kill John on sight.

  Ian.

  She closed her eyes, the Commander’s voice running on past her, willing herself to hear and not to think about the past. Not to think about years spent seeking her own powers, leaving the boys—whom she had never wanted to bear—to be raised by John. The years spent putting her magic before her love of John. I want your children, Jen, she heard John’s voice. I want any child I have to be yours. It’s only nine months, not long… And her own fears, her hesitations; her unwillingness to take the time, to spare the energy she knew it would demand. She saw herself standing by the hearth at Frost Fell, her back to him, arms folded stubbornly, shaking her head.

  Oh, John. My beloved John.

  It had been nearly three weeks since she’d last seen him in the heart of the fire, leaning against the mast of that ridiculous flying boat, gazing across the waking sea where dragons circled the spires of the shining islands. After that the dragon-magic foxed and splintered the visions, vouchsafing her only an occasional glance: John alone, patiently cranking his engines; John patting bannocks together beside a fire; John playing the hurdy-gurdy where dawn-tinted water curled to a beach. And once, terrifyingly, John with one knee on the Milkweed’s railing as a star-drake leaped, blue as lapis, blue as cobalt, blue and violet as the summer sea straight up out of the waves, and dove toward him in a sparkling maelstrom of music and spray.

  “—be sending a messenger to Alyn Hold in the morning.”

  “What?” Jenny jolted back to the present, looked up to see Rocklys standing by her chair. “Oh, I’m … I’m sorry, Commander. I …”

  The general’s face, for a moment angry at her inattention, softened. “No. I’m sorry, Lady Jenny. I’ve been going on as if you weren’t soaked to the skin and probably off your feet with fatigue.” She flipped a pale green peridot in her fingers, tossed it sparkling back in the strongbox.

  “Gilver, show Mistress Waynest to the guest rooms. I hope that man of yours had the sense to take to his bed, and stay in it. If ever I saw a man done up …”

  “Don’t trouble with a messenger,” said Jenny, rising and gathering the blanket around her shoulders. “I’ll ride out tomorrow morning myself.”

  “Yourself? Have you seen a mirror? You look like …”

  “It doesn’t matter what I look like.” Jenny stood, the blanket drawn around her shoulders. She hesitated for a moment, on the brink of telling Rocklys what she had seen in stone and fire, and then said only, “I’ve been too long away. Yseult and I can be back …”

  “Yseult?” Rocklys was shocked. “You can’t be thinking of taking her with you! With Balgodorus still at large? Looking for her, belike? If you must go—and I don’t like the idea of it at all, though I’ll send a guard with you—by all means leave the girl here.”

  If she’ll stay, thought Jenny, wondering how that bruised and abused child would react to being told she must remain, without the woman who had saved her, in an army encampment full of men. She hesitated, trying to decide where the girl would be safest.

  “If she elects to stay here,” said Jenny, “please promise me this. Keep her safe. Not just from the men in the barracks …”

  “Of course she’ll have her own rooms,” protested Rocklys. “In the courtyard with mine. She’ll never come near the troops. You can’t …”

  “Not just from the men,” said Jenny quietly. “Whoever this dragon-wizard is, if he’s kidnapping mages it’s for a purpose. It may be we’ve brought Yseult here just ahead of his seeking her out himself. That goes for your little southern gentleman as well, and his sons. It may be best, until I return …”

  Rocklys opened her mouth to protest, and Jenny went on over her.

  “… that they don’t go beyond the fortress gates at all. I don’t want secret messages arriving with Bliaud’s son
s’ signet rings, and maybe their fingers, done up in parcels. With the revolt in Imperteng,” she went on, “and the King not in fit mind to rule, I’m very curious about who this dragon-wizard is working for, and what his intentions may be. At the moment I’m the only trained mage in the north, and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t been made a target before this. And maybe I have.”

  “And I sent you out with only twenty-five men. I’ll organize a more substantial guard …”

  Jenny shook her head. “I’ve traveled the length and breadth of the Winterlands alone all my life. By myself I can go quiet and unseen. An escort would just slow me down and tell Balgodorus, or anyone else, where I am. I should be back within a week, to begin teaching your little fledglings. But right now there’s something I need to learn at the Hold.”

  Though he laded it with every ballast-bag he had, it took all of John’s strength to winch the Milkweed down to the Urchin and lash the spiked machine to the empty wicker boat. He hunted gulls’ eggs and boiled them with rock-anise. Too long, he kept thinking, too long. The eggs were barely cooked when he pulled them from the water, scuffed out and buried his fire, and, climbing into the wicker boat, dumped ballast and set sail for the west.

  The winds were contrary but strong. He was awake, tacking patiently, through the night; he anchored at an islet that was barely a pinnacle sticking straight from the sea, slept an hour and woke to beat his way west again. He dumped ballast at noon and again a few hours later, but the Milkweed continued to sag. Then it rained, weeping gray into the empty sea, white bars of lightning leaping between the clouds and the waves, but the wind changed and drove him west through the night, and in the morning his telescope showed him the Last Isles rising through the lashing skirts of the foam.

  From the south he saw, too, the dragons coming. Centhwevir and Nymr, flashing like perdition in the newly freed sun.

  They must have seen him, but neither turned aside. The wind drove hard out of the northeast. John had to tack again, leaning on the ropes, watching the dragons ahead of him and dizzy with fatigue. He saw them dip and circle the birdless isle, then plunge suddenly down among the rocks. They’ll trap him in a cave, he thought, almost too tired to think anything, and the Milkweed swung in a long sickening arc against the veering wind. Dragons know what I know—that chances of a kill are stronger if the dragon you ’re attacking is on the ground.

  He yanked the air valve to bring the Milkweed down and cast anchor as close as he could, seeing among the rocks the sunburst and scramble of blue and gold. Nymr and Centhwevir, when he could see them through the blinding aura of lightning and illusion, had their wings folded close, necks striking in long fluid darts, and he could see that their prey was still trapped in its lair. For a moment John glimpsed Morkeleb himself, pressed back among the rocks. Bleeding—the black dragon’s neck and face were scored and torn, and the dark gloss of him seemed to have paled, gray as cinder and ash.

  He was fighting for his life. John could see that, in every desperate lashing of neck and claws. The two younger drakes seemed to appear and disappear in a chaos of demon-aura, and Morkeleb struck wildly, against air or rock or sand. With a prayer to the Old God, John swiveled one of the catapults and fired a harpoon into Centhwevir’s back.

  Centhwevir wheeled, mouth gaping, and John fired the second catapult. But the dragon seemed to split and whirl into three green-fire shadows, and the bolt went wild. Acid spattered on the wicker gunwale near John’s hand, setting the rail aflame. Without any seeming transition, the crazy burning wildness of the air was all around the Milkweed, and through the smolder John had a momentary glimpse of a cold square face and pale eyes somewhere close to him, like an image in a migraine dream. Then Centhwevir screamed, the high metallic shriek of a dragon, and whirled as Morkeleb, slipping past Nymr, seized his flanks with those great black-clawed hands.

  Centhwevir reversed direction like a cat, biting and lashing and spattering acid, but Morkeleb had hold of him, and that was not something that could be ensorcelled away. In that moment John flung himself over the Milkweed’s gunwale and slithered down the ropes to the Urchin, lashing and rocking below. He slashed the ropes and fell with the machine, grabbing the base of the nearest spike to keep from being jolted off; the drop was only a yard or so, but it jarred the bones in his flesh. Nymr and Centhwevir were fully occupied with their victim, whom they drove back against the cliff-face again. John slipped into the Urchin’s hatch and slammed it shut, kicked his feet into the braces of the wheel and slapped free the brake lever. The Urchin swiveled; John fired another harpoon, this time catching Nymr in the flank.

  He slammed his weight on the wheel to reverse direction but something smote it from the side; a tangled confusion of blue and gold all laced with green flame. He fired another harpoon but in that instant all the crystal ports that surrounded him shattered inward, tearing him with shards, and the pain of cramp and nausea seized limbs and throat and belly, as if he were being bitten by a thousand rats.

  Pox-rotted demons…

  The dragon smashed the Urchin again with his tail, splitting the casing, buckling the struts. John fired again, not letting himself think about where Ian was in this fray or what might happen to him. Panic filled him, as if he were in a nightmare—he seemed to hear his father screaming his name. More demon-magic, the kind of thing Whisperers did, only infinitely more powerful. Another blow flipped the Urchin off its wheels, slammed John hard against the hull. He yanked the last two harpoons free of their catapults and slithered through the broken hatch as Centhwevir seized the Urchin in his claws. The dragon dropped it immediately, and John clung to the edge of the trap for balance. It was impossible to aim—there seemed to be five Centhwevirs coming at him from all directions—but as soon as he was steady he flung the harpoon as the dragon dropped down over him to smash the machine with his tail again. The weapon missed, but Morkeleb, momentarily free from Nymr’s attacks, flung himself on Centhwevir’s back, raking again at his wings.

  Centhwevir writhed free, spitting acid, bleeding now from a dozen wounds. Morkeleb flung himself into the air with a great crack of dark wings, and as the two younger dragons whirled to meet him, wounded and more visible through the flak, John flung his last harpoon, lodging in Nymr’s shoulder.

  That seemed to decide the dragon-wizard. John heard him cry out an order and, through the splintering firefall, caught a brief glimpse of Ian clinging to Nymr’s spiked back. Nymr slipped from beneath Morkeleb’s attack and sprang skyward, wings flashing. Golden dragon and blue slashed the air, veering as they caught the wind. Then they were away, dwindling over the sea toward the skerries.

  Morkeleb hovered for a moment above the rocks, a floating shadow against the light, while near him the fire on the half-burned Milkweed flickered sullenly and went out. John lay in the sand, panting and half-blinded by the blood trickling from his forehead. At least the internal pain was gone. The Urchin resembled nothing so much as a walnut cracked by a child more interested in getting the meat than making a neat job of it.

  Three weeks chasing cave-grues at Wyldoom, he reflected, and dealing with the gnomes into the bargain. This dragon-slaying is getting just too bloody costly. I’ll really have to give it up.

  He came to choking, drowning. Ice-cold seawater engulfed him. As he tried to thrash to the surface, he felt the prick of iron claws closing around his body and the next second was dragged gasping into the air.

  Hold still or I shall drop you into the sea. I am weary enough.

  Though he knew perfectly well the dragon wouldn’t let him fall by accident, John hooked one arm around the black wrist nearest him, fitting his hand carefully among the blood-sticky spines. His spectacles had been knocked off: rocks, waves, and the great black dragon himself were blurred as Morkeleb circled back to the island and, stretching down his long hind-legs, settled on his haunches and laid John down on the sand.

  They drank my magic. The dragon crouched among the rocks, a movement stirring his bones. Then stilln
ess, and anger like the anger of a star. They drank the magic from me—ME, Morkeleb the Black, the most ancient and the strongest, Void-Walker, star-rover, destroyer of Elder Droon, and there was nothing I could do against them, no hold upon them that my power could take.

  The word that came into John’s mind as magic was not what Jenny meant when she spoke of it. It should, he thought, lying numb and dripping on the warm earth, be another word entirely, even as the word being that Enismirdal had spoken should have been something else. But he did not know what either of those words should be, and it might be that they were the same.

  Like the slow pull of dark tide, Morkeleb’s anger flowed through John’s mind and, under that anger, fear. Fear of what could not be touched. Fear of singing shadows that killed. The steel-thin hoops of Morkeleb’s ribs rose and fell, and the blood that trickled down his mane mingled with the dripping seawater, so the dragon seemed a black island in a lake of gore.

  This is a thing of utter abomination, a thing of illness, spreading and eating. This is a thing that swallows the core of magic and fills the empty place with madness and death.

  “Help me,” said John. He brushed salt-gummed, blood-gummed hair out of his eyes, and every cut and abrasion of him burned with seawater and sand. “I saved your life.”

  The long birdlike head swung around, and John looked down quickly, lest he be trapped in the crystalline maze of the dragon’s eyes. He could feel Morkeleb’s fury, the fury of trapped pride and of fear. The fury of scorn, for himself as much as for John; the fury that he should be beholden to anything, much less to a bird-peep of a human meddler who wasn’t even mageborn.