Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  The boy was crying. The girl, bound and ringed and crippled by the spell-wards upon her, flung her hatred at the man, since it was all she had to fling.

  Caradoc’s broad shoulders tightened. Clearly he hated having his will crossed. “I see we’re going to have to do this the hard way.” He took the smaller of the two amethysts, a crystal the size of the end of his little finger, and, removing the boy’s gag, put it into the boy’s mouth, afterward gagging him again. The other stone was perhaps twice the size of the smaller, and a few shades paler in color. Caradoc handed it to Ian, who stood nearest him, as if the boy were no more than a table to hold things. Then he took a scarf of thin silk from his pocket and tied it around the girl’s throat, pulling tighter and tighter until her back arched and thin, desperate noises issued from her throat. Leaving only the barest passage for air, he knotted it, then pulled down the gag. Her mouth dropped open, her chest heaving, and he dropped the jewel onto the protruding tongue. The girl moved her head as if in spite of all she would spit it out, but he shoved the gag into place again.

  “One thing you will learn,” said Caradoc, looking down for a moment into the bulging, frantic eyes and for a clear moment Jenny saw, not the man, but the demon that dwelled inside. “I will be obeyed.”

  Did he do that to Ian?

  Jenny let the thought go.

  The rite was surprisingly short. Jenny watched, dispassionately, through the incense-smoke and mists, recognizing more of the gestures and devices than she expected. There was a Summoning of some sort, but the Limitations set carefully around the two chairs seemed wrong to her. They were signs of protection, of the preclusion of demons rather than their calling. The power seemed wrongly centered, drawn in on the two children rather than on the sorcerer.

  It was only when, in less time than it would take a loaf of bread to bake, Caradoc brought the rite to a conclusion and walked across the fading lines of the sigil to the young Ice-witches again, that Jenny realized what she had seen done. The boy had ceased his tears. The girl, though her eyes followed the blocky form of the man, showed no more hate, no more emotion of any sort, passive and empty.

  Empty.

  Caradoc removed the gags, took the amethysts from the mouths of each child, then walked to a strongbox. Lamplight flashed on its contents when he opened it, and with Morkeleb’s eyes, Jenny saw what it contained.

  Two rubies and a sapphire dark as the sea, clear, strongly colored, and without flaw. And in each jewel, it seemed to her, though they lay in the shadows, there burned a tiny, infinitely distant seed of light.

  But only when she saw him pick up his cup of crystal and nacre and go to the door, only when she heard the chains of the well-cover clatter back, did realization strike her. She cried out, darkness swallowing the vision, the bridge between her mind and the dragon’s collapsing. She cried out again, inarticulate, and felt warm strong hands grasp her arms—

  “Jen!”

  Her eyes opened and she saw John’s face. “Jen, what is it?”

  She was trembling, breathless with shock. Having laid hope aside, she had no idea how painful it would be when it rushed back in; the agony of knowing that there might be something that she could do.

  “Ian!” she said.

  “Was he there?”

  “Ian …” She swallowed. “The wizard—Caradoc—he didn’t bring the demon into him, to drive out his soul and his mind. John, he took the soul of him—the heart of him—out first, and stored it in a jewel. Then he let the demon in. Ian’s still there, John. We can still get him back.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Why would he do it?” John spoke over his shoulder, not looking toward the fire that would dull his night-vision, keeping his eyes turned toward the dark woods. “Why would he want their souls kept around, once he’s taken their flesh?”

  “I don’t know.” Jenny glanced up from staring into the fire, from trying to reconnect her spinning mind with Morkeleb’s. “It’s a thing I never heard of. Usually, according to Caerdinn, anyway, the smaller pooks and wights don’t … don’t completely expel the mind, the soul, of their victim. Sometimes that soul can return when the demon is exorcised, if too much time hasn’t passed. With the Great Wights it’s different, of course. But this …”

  She fell silent, remembering the demon blazing in Caradoc’s eyes. The hell-light in Ian’s.

  “It was midnight when he met with the demons before, I think,” John said, after a time. Jenny had opened her eyes, unable to find the dragon’s mind with her own. “They came up out of the sea, silver and shining. Salamanders I thought they looked like, or toads, creeping out of little glass shells. Water must be one of their Gates.”

  They come from another place, Caerdinn had muttered to her, when they’d stood together on the edge of the Wraithmire watching the ghostly flicker of the fen-wights in the dark. Since ancient days there have been men that would open Gates into Hell, in the hopes of finding power for themselves.

  They had been watching, Jenny recalled, for a wight that had seized a simpleminded woman, entering into her mind and dreams and causing her to kill and cut up her husband, children, sister, and father before the villagers had summoned Caerdinn. Together, she and her master had exorcised the woman, but her own mind never returned. Perhaps that, thought Jenny, recalling the silent, bloodied hut, the creeping lines of ants and humming of flies, had been just as well.

  Though she knew the presence of wizards in Corflyn Hold would almost certainly make it impossible to scry within its walls, Jenny took the finger-sized sliver of white quartz from her pouch and tried to summon images: the courtyard, Caradoc’s chamber, the strongbox in its niche above the bed. But the place was written over with scry-wards, as she had written them everywhere on the manor walls at Palmorgin. All she could see was the dark bulk of the walls themselves, from a great distance off, and she realized from the look of the sky that what she saw was another night, another season, another year. An illusion.

  Caradoc was in the courtyard, she thought. Summoning the Hellspawn from that other plane of existence. Summoning them through that distant Gate, through their medium of water, across whatever space lay between. Summoning them into the emptied minds, the emptied hearts, of those two poor children.

  Yseult saying, “Yes, m’am,” and “No, m’am,” with that evasive, casual brightness, not meeting her eyes.

  Yseult sending Bliaud’s sons away, lest they see how their father had changed.

  Rocklys asking her to stay, demanding that she take an escort.

  “So it’s been Rocklys all along.” She folded her plaid around her shoulders and looked up again at the sky. The red star called the Watcher’s Lantern stared back at her. Midnight chimed like cold music on her spine. All doors open at midnight, Nightraven had said to her once, separating her hair with a comb of silver and bone and plaiting the power-shadows called to being by that simple act. All doors open at moments of change: from deepening night to dawning day, from fading winter to the first promises of spring.

  All doors open.

  “I should have guessed it.” Flames made slabs of fire in John’s spectacles as he turned the log.

  Jenny looked up, startled. Sometimes it seemed impossible to her that this man was Nightraven’s son.

  “The Realm as it’s constituted drives her mad, you know. Each fief and deme with its own law, most of ’em with their own gods as well, not to speak of measurements. Everybody drivin’ in all sorts of directions and not much of anythin’ gettin’ done, while them at Court make up songs and moon-poems and theological arguments these days, I’m told. Look at the books in Rocklys’ library, the ones she keeps by her: Tenantius. Gurgustus. Caecilius’ The Righteous Monarch. All the Legalists. Of course she’s got no patience with Gar trying to do the right thing by old bargains and old promises. Of course she wants to step in and make it all match at the edges.”

  “’I only seek to bring order,’ ” Jenny quoted softly, “’to make things as they should be.’ Ga
reth has to be warned, John. She has the biggest army, probably, in the Realm right now, even including the one he’s taken to Imperteng with him. And whatever he has will be no match against dragons and wizards and demons working in concert.”

  “What I’m wondering”—John propped up his spectacles with a bandaged forefinger—“is what in the name of God’s shoe-buckles makes Rocklys think she can control Caradoc? Even given she doesn’t know he’s possessed by a demon, doesn’t this woman read?”

  “No,” said Jenny. “Probably not. All her life she has wielded her own strength successfully, to her own ends. She is used to the struggle for mastery with Caradoc. If he appears to yield to her, do you think it’s likely to occur to her that it’s a trick? She …”

  She raised her head, hearing the whisper of vast silken wings. “Here he comes.”

  And then, realizing that at no time had she ever been able to hear Morkeleb’s approach, “The trees!”

  At the same instant she hurled a spell of suffocation onto the fire and flung every ounce of strength she had into a great whirling tornado of misdirection and illusion around herself and John as dragons plunged out of the sky.

  Lots of dragons.

  John shouted, “Fire!” as he grabbed her arm, and claws raked and seared through the canopy of leaves above them. Snakelike heads shot through the branches, mouths snapping; green acid splashed a great charred scar in the pine-mast and Jenny cried out the Word of Fire, hurling it like a weapon at the rustling roof of the trees. The crown of the forest burst into flame, illuminating for a refulgent instant the primitive rainbow colors, glistening scales: pink and green and gold, white and scarlet. One of the dragons screamed as the long scales of its mane caught and the scream was echoed, terribly, from the girl on the other dragon’s back, Yseult with her skirts and her hair on fire. Then the two dragons were gone, and John and Jenny were running down the path to the spring, while all around them smoke billowed, flaming twigs and branches rained, and acid splattered in from above.

  John dragged them both down into the water, the heat already blistering on their faces. The spring slanted away southeast to join the Black River two or three miles below Cair Corflyn. Jenny shucked off her wet plaids and heavy skirt, pulled her petticoats up high and began to crawl with the sharp stones digging and cutting at her knees and palms. John was behind her, holding his bow awkwardly over his back. Jenny drew the fire after them, Summoned the smoke to lie in a spreading pall over the whole quarter of the forest; it stung and ripped at her lungs, gritted in her eyes.

  “Morkeleb will see the fire,” she gasped.

  “If he’s alive.” John slipped on a stone and cursed. The water was freezing cold underneath, though it had begun to steam on top. “If he thinks it’s worth his while to take on four other dragons … Well, three, with the girl out of action …”

  “He’ll come.”

  Acid splashed into the glaring water in front of them. Through the steam Jenny saw the huge angular shape of a dragon framed in fire, crouched before them in the bed of the stream.

  John said, “Fester it.”

  It stood just beyond the ending of the trees, where the spring ran into a marshy meadow. Wings folded close it bent down, darting its head under the fiery canopy. The flames gilded its scales, blue on blue, an iridescent wonder of lapis, lobelia, peacock; outlined the small shape on its shoulders, among the spines. It opened its mouth to spit again and John, knee-deep in the steaming water, already had his arrow nocked and drawn when Jenny saw the rider’s face.

  She screamed “No!” as John loosed the shaft. “It’s Ian!” She flung a spell after the arrow, but it was an arrow she had witched herself, months ago. Ian rocked back as the bolt hit him; caught at the spikes around him and slowly crumpled. The dragon backed into the darkness.

  “Now!” John grabbed her wrist, dragging her. “There’s caves along the river.”

  “Morkeleb …”

  “What? You don’t think I can take on two dragons by myself?”

  And Jenny heard it, the dark dream-voice calling her name.

  They stumbled from the burning woods and saw him, a whirl of sliced firelight edging blackness in the air, tearing, snapping, swooping at the gaudy barbaric shapes of the red and white dragon and a sun-yellow splendor that Jenny thought must surely be the dragon Enismirdal. Morkeleb was faster and larger than either, but as the other two rose toward him, fire and darkness seemed to swirl up with them, splintering image and illusion into threes and fours. Jenny narrowed her mind, focused it to a blade of light, and flung that blade toward Morkeleb in spells of perception, of ward.

  She saw, for a flashing instant, through his eyes. Saw the other dragons fragment and scatter, now into five or six discrete attacking shapes, now into rainbows of horrific color—maddening, camouflaging—and shot through with splinters of a ghastly and wicked greenish flame. Jenny redoubled her concentration, drawing power from the unchecked rage of the fire, from the granite and dolomite deep beneath the stream’s bed. Through the dragon’s eyes she saw the shape of an attacker come clear, and Morkeleb struck, black lightning, raking and tearing.

  Then the image splintered again, and Jenny gasped at the sudden cold terror that took her, as if a silver worm had suddenly broken through her flesh, creeping and reaching for her heart and her brain. She called on all her power, guarding herself, guarding Morkeleb, but it was as if something within her were bleeding, and the power bleeding away with it. The discipline that Caerdinn had beaten into her took over, systematically calling on the other powers alive in the earth—moonlight, water, the glittering stars—and her eyes seemed to clear. Morkeleb had gotten in another few telling rakes with claws and teeth, driving them back. Blood rained down onto Jenny’s face, and droplets of searing acid. The silver hemorrhage within her did not stop.

  Morkeleb plunged down, black claws extended. She felt herself seized, ripped up from the earth. Her head snapped back with the shock of the parabola as he swept skyward again, a razoring cloud of wings. Around them both Jenny flung the holed nets of her guardian-spells and felt as her magic locked and melded with his that his power, too, had been drained and drunk away. They were flying east, flying fast, and she was aware of wings storming behind them, of a madness of pursuing color and rage. Rain clouds draped the high bleak shoulders of the Skepping Hills.

  Into these Morkeleb drove, and Jenny reached out with her mind, Summoning the lightning and drawing around them the wardingspells to prevent their pursuers from doing the same. In the event there was nothing to it: Caught between conflicting powers, the lightning only flickered, sullen glares illuminating the cottony blackness around them.

  In time the dragon gyred cautiously to earth.

  “John?” Jenny rolled over, wet bodice and petticoat sticking to her limbs. The cave the dragon had brought them to was so low-roofed that only Jenny could have stood upright in it, and narrowed as it ran back into the hill. Rain poured bleakly, steadily down on the slope outside. She could hear the purling of what had to be Clayboggin Beck somewhere close and almost subconsciously identified where they were, and how far they had flown.

  Witchlight blinked on glass as John turned his head. She marveled that in the midst of the chaos of fire, blood, and magic, Morkeleb had managed to seize them both.

  “I’m sorry about Ian, love.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Did you know when you shot?”

  “Aye.” He sat up cautiously. The tiniest blue threads of light showed her the glint of old metal plated onto his doublet. Behind him, flattened unbelievably, like a bug in a crevice, Morkeleb lay at the back of the cave, a glitter of diamond eyes and spines. “I knew he would be riding Nymr, see.”

  Jenny turned her face away. The knowledge that Ian was alive, and could be brought back, burned in her: rage, resentment, horror at what John had done.

  “Caradoc won’t let him die, you know,” John went on. “There’s too few mages in the world, and he had to pull both of ’em, Nymr and
Ian—all three, I should say, if you count whatever goblin’s riding ’em—out of the fight, as he pulled Yseult.”

  “And if your arrow had killed him on the spot?” Her voice was shaky. “We can bring him back, John, but not from the dead.”

  “If we’d died then,” said John softly, “d’you think Ian would ever have been anything but a slave to goblins, a prisoner helpless in that jewel, for as long as his heart kept beating and his lungs kept drawing air? Watchin’ what they did, while they lived on his pain? Sometimes an arrow to the heart can be a gift, given in love.”

  Jenny looked away. He was right, but she hurt so deeply that she had no words for it. John took off his doublet and lay down, pillowing his head on a soggy wad of plaids. His shirt steamed faintly in the heat-spells Morkeleb called to dry their clothing. There was only the sound of breathing in the cave, while the gray light struggled outside. In time Jenny got up and went over to lie beside him, holding his hand.

  Given the rugged and heavily wooded terrain of the Fells of Imperteng, and the possibility of rebel guerrillas there, neither John nor Jenny considered it safe to be put down in the dark several miles from the camp of the King’s men. Moreover, as John pointed out, there was no telling whether one of the dragons had followed them, waiting to pick him and Jenny up the moment Morkeleb was out of sight.

  Thus the dragon flew straight to the camp below the walls of Jotham and circled down from the evening sky on the second day after their escape. Jenny spread out around them a great umbrella of Lousy Aim to deal with the consequences.

  It was necessary. Men came running, shouting, from all corners of the camp—camps, for it was clear from above that each of the King’s vassals pitched his tents apart, and there was no intermingling of the striped tents of Halnath with the cream-white if grubby shelters of the Men of Hythe. Jenny saw them clearly, as a dragon sees, the cut and color of their clothing as diverse as the variety and size of their bivouacs. Their voices rose to her, along with the wild neighing from the horses and the frantic bleat of sheep, racing in wild circles in their pens. Arrows soared in a futile cloud. Then spears, brushed aside by Jenny’s spells. Then men ran away in all directions as they had run in, pointing and crying out as they saw that the dragon clutched a human being in either claw.