Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  To found the Dragon Corps.

  Only after the last of the army passed through the thick-planked double gate of the fort, and the gate shut behind it, did the two watchers move. Stealthy as hunters, they wriggled their way down the slope and into the trees, concealed under every ward-spell and guard and Word of Invisibility that Jenny could conjure around them.

  “Where are they, anyway?” asked John, as he and Jenny worked their way through the undergrowth toward their camp. “I mean, it’s a bit of a trick to hide a full-grown dragon.”

  “Morkeleb doesn’t seem to have any trouble.”

  Morkeleb awaited them in the deep hollow where they’d hidden the blankets and food they’d taken from Corflyn in departing, though Jenny could see no trace of any living thing. Then something whispered in her mind, and what had been a spiky growth of holly was suddenly revealed, as if by a mere shifting of perception, to be blacker, glossier, harder than holly ever grew. What seemed to be tree branches took on the shape of tall spines and the bristling armory of joints and wing bones and tail. Two flashes of will-o’-the-wisp resolved themselves within a thicket of saplings, and the fireflies that had bobbed there took on the curious unholy glitter of the dragon’s jewel-cold antenna lights. The smell of the pines and the water seemed to blow away, though there was no touch of wind, and the acrid, metallic stink they had veiled gleamed through like the blade of a concealed knife.

  And so, Wizard-woman. Did you see your son?

  “Ian doesn’t ride with them. But Rocklys has taken two prisoners, Icewitches, to add to Bliaud and poor Yseult. That means Caradoc must make slaves of four more dragons or has already done so. I don’t think Gareth and all the forces of his father can withstand a corps like that.”

  Jenny felt the heat of his anger again, rising through the accretions of shadow.

  Not of dragons, he said. And not if they are allied with the Hellspawn.

  “Can you bear us south?” she asked. “Take us to Jotham, where Gareth mounts siege before the fortress of the Prince of Imperteng? From him we can gain access to the archives of the Realm and the University at Halnath. Surely there is something that speaks of demons.”

  Do not count upon even that to help you, Wizard-woman, said Morkeleb. Do you not know how it is among the Hellspawn? You, and cats, and whales, and ants, and every other being that has life: You are all beings of flesh in this world. And we, the star-drakes, we are beings of magic, beings unlike your flesh, bone unlike your bone… but still of this dimension, this plane of existence. We live and we die, and our magic is drawn from this fact.

  The Hellspawn are Other. Each Hell, each world, each of those separate and several planes from which they come is Other, from ours and from one another as well. All power is sourced from the things that surround us: Moon and Sun, the patterns of the stars and the way trees grow, our very flesh and the beat of our blood. They have Things in their worlds that are not stars. They have Things in their worlds that are not heat or cold, and to strike flint and steel in one of them will not make flame, though in another perhaps it will. There is neither life nor death in some of those Hells, and in some there is, and in some there is something Else that has its own laws. Thus to do the great magic here they must work through humans who have that magic in their flesh, through dragons who are wrought of magic—through those things attuned to the patterns of power in this world.

  There was silence. Jenny touched with her mind the kindling in the firepit, calling a small blaze to being. Though the sky would hold light for hours, it was inky-dark under the trees, and the damp close cold of the low ground rose about them. She unpacked the food while John went down to the spring. Morkeleb backed himself still farther into the dark woods, his thin bird-beak laid upon his claws, and it seemed to Jenny that for a time he ceased to be visible at all.

  “I don’t like it, Jen,” said John when he came back. “And I’ve been fair crippling meself tryin’ to find another way. But I think you’ll have to go back into Corflyn Hold tonight.”

  Jenny was silent, gazing into the fire. Thinking of Nightraven standing on the walls of Alyn Hold, gazing away toward the north on nights of storm. Of the two little Icewitches bound on their horses with silver chains. Ian running toward her through the poppies that carpeted Frost Fell in the spring, and John’s face in the morning sunlight as he held his newborn son.

  “And do what?” she asked softly.

  “See the lie of the land.” John set down the dripping water-skin. “And that only. See who this Caradoc is when he’s at home, and how he and Rocklys get along these days. Any money she’s not twigged that it isn’t him anymore? She may have her doubts but not want to know it. It fair kills me to think Ian was in the fortress when we were there this afternoon, but he must have been. See if there’s anythin’ about the demon that would tell us what counterspells to use, always supposing we find counterspells. If there’s a book that says, ’Oh, yeah, Muckwort Demons make their victims turn three times clockwise in a circle before they fall asleep, and they can be exorcised by dandelion juice,’ we’re gonna feel like a fair couple of clots for not countin’ how many times Caradoc and Yseult and Bliaud turned in a circle, and which way they turned.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do, love,” he added softly. “I’d go meself—since I’m of no use to Caradoc if he does catch me—but he’s sure as check got some kind of magic guard round the place and I’d never get past it. You can.”

  “Morkeleb? I’ll go, but I will need all the help you can give me, to pass unseen. Will a demon be aware of me?”

  Of you, Wizard-woman? Yes. Wind began to creep through the trees, a curious icy tugging, and beneath it the frightening undercurrent of heat that accompanies spells of transformation and change. They smell blood. They feel the presence of human minds and human souls through the roots of their teeth.

  Leaves jerked and threshed on the trees. The fire in the pit leaned, flattened, stretching yellow fingerlets over the ground as if trying to creep forth from its prison. Rags of mist and smoke whirled among the tugging branches of the trees.

  Only a few thousand of us made the journey from our home to this place, this world, to the Skerries of Light. We can ill spare the wisdom of their songs, and still less can we risk giving over those songs to those that dwell on the Other Plane.

  The heat was suffocating, worse than the heat of age that periodically seized her flesh. The wind ripped at Jenny’s hair and clothing, freezing where it touched, but doing nothing to dispel the brimstone in the air.

  They will be aware of you. It may be that in spite of all that I can do to turn their thoughts aside, they will be aware of me. Wizard-woman, stretch out your hand.

  The wind ceased. Fog rose out of the ground, black and impenetrable. Night-sighted, Jenny was barely aware of John’s form beside her, and she saw by the way he reached out his hand that he was totally blind. She caught his groping fingers in hers, then extended her other hand, her left, to where Morkeleb’s silver eyes had gleamed in the dark.

  Something flashed and whirled in the mist, and hard strong claws closed around her wrist, dug into her shoulder. She half-felt, half-saw the dark beat of wings near her face. It seemed no bigger than a peregrine but sinuous and glistening as a snake.

  Though gripping thorns pricked her wrist, there was no weight on her arm at all.

  Give me your name, Wizard-woman, the voice said in her mind, as once I gave mine to you when in the Deep of Ylferdun you saved my life.

  And she spoke it in her mind. There was a dragon-name, which he had called out of her four years ago, when she had taken on dragon form and flown away with him from Halnath Citadel, but that was not the name she now spoke. Around the spine of that music were woven other memories: Caerdinn cursing her, and John’s hand lifting her hair; the lance of pain through her bowels when she bore Ian, and her laughter when lying in her bed in the house at Frost Fell, with her cats and her harp and the sunlight of a hundred summer mornings. The smell o
f roses. Autumn rain.

  Pain in her wrist, then blood-heat on her arm.

  Wizard-woman, what do you see?

  Her eyes changed. She saw John.

  Bent nose, round spectacles silvered over with mist, the alien contours of his face. A different perspective, like a doubled vision …

  The mists dissolved. Perfect, glistening, deadly as a tiny knife of chipped obsidian and steel, Morkeleb sat on her forearm, no bigger than a hawk, silver eyes infinitely alien in the dark.

  His voice was the same as it had always been, speaking in the abyss of her mind. Open your mind to me, he said. Empty your mind to my voice. If I do not return, at least you will have knowledge of what it is that I see.

  He lifted his wings and, releasing her arm, rose like a scarf of black tissue on an updraft, hanging before her face.

  What do you think dragons are made of, Wizard-woman? he asked. Does magic have a shape, or a size? Can the will be bottled in a flask?

  Then he was gone into the dissipating vapors.

  Jenny settled herself beside the fire to wait.

  She had been a dragon. She knew what Morkeleb meant when he told her to open her mind to his, for it was a thing of dragons: One did not have to look into a dragon’s eyes to hear its voice, or see what it saw. She waited, and her thoughts—which had circled a little around Nightraven, and Ian, and the old worn-weary track of her grief—settled, jewel-clear as a dragon’s, interested without love or grief. She was aware of John sitting by the fire, drawn sword across his knees. Aware that his face was half-turned away, watching her, but watching also the woods all around.

  She was aware of the forest, of the foxes creeping cautiously out, wondering if the dangers of evil heat and evil smell were gone; of the stupid, timid rabbits coming to feed. Of the smell of the pine-mast and the movement of the stars.

  She saw Corflyn Hold from above, a quick glimpse of molten amber light cupped in lapis lazuli, and men moving about. Smoke and horses. Then gone.

  Stronger to her nostrils came the smells of wood, dust, and mice; water and mold. She became aware of mouse-magic—she hadn’t even known such a thing existed—and the darker stench that was the magic of rats. Morkeleb’s spells, to keep even rodents from fleeing his approach and so alerting Caradoc.

  Dark and mildew.

  Firelight. The tawny radiance of pierced clay lamps, and the smell of burning oil. The room lay below her, foreshortened and changed but recognizable as the one in which she and John had been that day. Morkeleb must be lying along a rafter, she thought, with the same detachment she experienced when it crossed her mind to wonder whether John had remembered to put Caradoc’s golden cup back exactly as he’d found it. Question and observation simply came and went.

  Dragon-sight—mage-sight—showed her three-quarters of the room encircled by a spell-diagram, a vast sigil of power of a kind she had never seen. The glowing lines of it extended up onto the walls and, in a curious way, past the walls, through them, and down through the floor, visible for some distance into the foundations and the earth. Instead of Guardian Wards, thin wisps of greenish light burned at the diagram’s five points, reflected in the frightened eyes of the black-haired boy and girl who sat bound in chairs within one of the figure’s three circles.

  Yseult, Bliaud, and Ian were there, standing behind the young Icewitches’ chairs. It was as if their eyes had been replaced with colored glass. Jenny observed this with a dragon’s heart, the only way her own concentration would not be broken by the life-in-death of her son. On the table beside the box of jewels two more glass shells lay, broken and empty. Jenny understood without knowing how that demons wore those shells when they crept into this world through the Gate to their Hell.

  Caradoc wore the embroidered cap that the laundress had brought in clean that afternoon. Interlocking circles of satin-work; stylized lilies. He’d bathed and washed his hair; Jenny could smell the camomile. Rocklys, standing before him, still wore her red military tunic and her riding boots, and her hair was flattened and matted from her helmet.

  She said, “What is it that you don’t want me to see?”

  Caradoc sighed. “We’ve been through this before, Ro… Commander.” His voice was a pleasant baritone, but the voice of a man not only used to having his own way but to being always right. “I told you at the outset that the presence of the untrained and uninitiated can completely nullify the effects of a spell.”

  “And I’ve heard since then that that isn’t the case.” Her colorless level brows pinched above her nose. She studied his face. Wondering, as John had said, and not really wanting to know.

  “From whom?” His gesture of scornful impatience was, Jenny guessed, a perfect counterfeit of a familiar human mannerism, and one moreover with which Rocklys was well acquainted, for she seemed to relax. “One of the local hedge-witches? The only spells they ’re capable of wouldn’t be affected by a brass band and a wrestling-match going on in the room. We’re not charming warts here, Roc. We’re not casting spells to win some bumpkin’s heart. If you want my help, well and good, but you must accept that there is a reason for everything I tell you. There is a reason for every request I make. You don’t explain everything to your troops—you can’t, nor should you.” He used the informal “you,” as to a family member, and Rocklys’ shoulders stiffened again, this time with familiar annoyance.

  “Please understand that my wishes must be followed to the letter, else I cannot help you accomplish what you seek to accomplish.”

  For a time their eyes held, and the part of Jenny’s heart that was human still saw the virile impatient merchant, newly come to court, and the granite-hard angry princess he had courted but could not win. It was an old clash of wills, and it served to convince Rocklys, had she in fact harbored doubts, that there was nothing amiss in this man she once knew.

  Caradoc held out his hand peremptorily, and after a moment the Commander placed in it two jewels, dark faceted stones. The Icerider boy twisted against the bonds that held him to his chair, bonds twined with spell-riddled chains that glowed faintly to Jenny’s mageborn perceptions, and began to weep. The girl, younger, round-faced, and cold-eyed, stared stonily before her, but behind her gag her breath was coming very fast.

  “Were these the best you could get?”

  “I have to send some taxes to the south, to justify our presence here.” Rocklys’ voice was cold, angry at being bested. “And I have to pay my men, and feed them, and keep the horses in oats. If word got to that bunch of painted twits the Regent keeps about him that I was purchasing gemstones, do you think”—and the pronoun she used was one of formal usage, of master to servant—“they’d leave me in command?”

  “They wouldn’t even care.” Caradoc, who had glanced up in anger at her choice of address, turned with elaborate unconcern and held one of the jewels up, calling a spot of brilliant light into being, so that lozenges of pale purple were thrown onto his chin and brow.

  “No,” murmured Rocklys. “No, I think you’re right. It would pass unnoticed in their silly quibbling about jurisdiction and whose rights overlay whose.”

  “So why trouble yourself?” Caradoc shrugged. “Amethysts are all right—these are of good quality and strong color—but if you could get another couple of rubies or emeralds we’d do better. They hold—” He hesitated, trying to answer the question that was in Rocklys’ eyes without, it was clear, really telling her anything. “They hold certain spells more strongly. I’m not sure about that peridot—I think you were cheated by the merchant, but we can probably make do with it if we have to. And now, Commander …”

  He walked to the door, only a step or two, and opened it to look outside and up at the sky. “The timing of these spells is very precise, particularly this close to mid-summer. It’s full dark now, and barely time until midnight to do what must be done. Commander,” he added, as she nodded brusquely and turned to go.

  She turned back. The lintel of the door hid her face from Morkeleb’s watching gaze, but e
very line of her body seemed to radiate discontent.

  “Remember what I said about these practices remaining utterly unobserved. Neither of us can risk having one of these wizardlings incompletely given either to my will or to the bonding with the dragon. I tell you, if you or anyone watches what is done in this room or in the courtyard, I cannot promise that you will be able to conquer and hold the south.”

  The woman nodded and made again to go. Then she looked back. “And I have told you, Sorcerer.” Again she addressed him as she would a servant. No wonder, thought Jenny, that wealthy suitor had gone away unwed. “I do not seek to conquer. Nor to wrest control of the Realm from its rightful King for my own pleasure or to satisfy some greed. I only seek to bring order. To make things as they should be.”

  Caradoc bent his head, and the lamp flames slithered along the embroidered lilies and across his silvery hair. “Of course.”

  She’s lying to herself. The thought floated through Jenny’s mind as Rocklys closed the door. As he to her.

  And the thoughts were gone, put away to be regarded at leisure another time. Morkeleb’s dragon-senses followed the Commander’s boots across the court, hearing even the opening and shutting of her own door, and the creak of her desk chair as she sat. Aware, but setting the sounds aside.

  Caradoc walked carefully through the gate in the magic circle and stood before the two young Icewitches. Morkeleb—and through him, Jenny—could feel the spells that Bliaud, Yseult, and Ian kept over them, spells worked through them, like magics worked through the bones of the dead. Caradoc asked, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The boy nodded. The girl said nothing, nor did she move. But she could not control her ice-gray eyes, and the sorcerer nodded briefly, satisfied that she could.

  “I’m going to put one of these in each of your mouths.” He held up the gemstones, burning purple in the lamplight. “If you swallow them, I’ll take a knife and cut them out of your bellies and stuff the cavities with live rats. Do you understand?”