Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  He hesitated, his thin height drooping over her, gray eyes blinking nakedly, for it does not do for a commander to appear in spectacles before the assembled armies of his Realm. His shoulders, under the purple wool of the tunic, had lost some of the weediness Jenny had first known, and his arms had strengthened from diligent sword practice, but there was a terrible sadness in his face. “I wish it wasn’t like this,” he said softly. Then he turned away and made a business of fastening his sword-belt, stamped in gold and set with cabochon emeralds; of adjusting the elaborately dagged and ribboned mantlings that spread like a butterfly’s plumage over his back and made his shoulders seem wider. “I wish it was all as easy as it was when we only had to defeat and drive out a dragon. Like all the ballads, about Alkmar and the other heroes of old. I wish …”

  He half-turned back to her, gloves of bullion and velvet and agate in his hands, and she saw what he wished in the weary grief of his eyes. She smiled, as she would have smiled at Ian, encouraging him to go on when the road was difficult.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” He put his arm around her again in a bony hug. “I’ve missed you.”

  But as Gareth passed through the tent doorway for the procession to the altar of the Red God of War, Jenny sat on the bed again, the memory of her son piercing her heart.

  He was alive. Trapped in a jewel, as this boy was trapped in the gem of kingship, his will no longer his own.

  She pressed her hand to her mouth to stop her tears.

  “Shall I bring you gold?” she asked Morkeleb later. She lay against the curve of the dragon’s foreleg, a harp she had borrowed from Gareth resting on her shoulder. In its music, and in the magics the star-drake had shown her, she was able for a time to rest from the nightmare of Ian’s enslavement, to put from her mind Caradoc’s grim little smile as he thrust the jewel into the strangling Icewitch’s mouth. “There is gold in the camp. I can get Gareth to contribute a few golden plates and cups, so you can have the music of the gold.”

  I am aware, said Morkeleb’s dark slow voice above her, of the gold in the camp, Wizard-woman. He arched his long neck, and the night-breeze that trailed down from Nast Wall stirred the gleaming ribbons of his mane. There are days when I am aware of little else. I saw what gold could do to me four years ago, when the sorceress Zyerne trapped me through the gold in the gnomes’ deep. Sometimes it seems to me that if I accept even a cup or a chain, or a single coin, the longing for gold would conquer me, and I would not stop until I had devastated these lands.

  The glowing bobs of his antennae drew fireflies from the twilight woods, and the voice that spoke in her mind had a strangeness to it, as a man’s would have, did that man grope for words. But Morkeleb never groped for words.

  Gold laces the rocks of the Skerries of Light, Wizard-woman. Those of us who dwell there breathe our magic into that gold and bask and revel in the wonder that chimes forth. As we travel from world to world, gold is not the only thing we seek, but it is one of the things. When we come to a place that has gold, we remain a long while.

  On the Last Isle, there is no gold. I find that I think differently away from its presence, and meditations become possible to me that were not even conceivable before. This was something that the Shadow-drakes told me, years ago. They said that to become one of them one must put gold aside. I did not see why it was necessary that I should, and so I did not. But after Zyerne and the Stone in the heart of Ylferdun Deep made me a slave, I thought again.

  He fell silent, the run of his thoughts sinking down below words, like the heartbeat of the sea.

  Finally he said, The Shadow-drakes said also that they gave up their magic, as well as gold. This I do not understand. Magic IS the thing of dragons. Without magic, what would I be?

  Each night, and many times during each day, Jenny scried for sight of John. Frequently she saw him in the great library of Halnath, a maze of chambers and shelves that had been a temple of the Gray God lifetimes ago. Sometimes she saw the Dragons-bane with the Master of Halnath in the Master’s private study, a round chamber whose walls were lined with books and with lamps of pierced work, scrolls and tablets and books and bundles of pages spread out between them on the table. But sometimes, late in the night, she saw him alone, sitting on the floor, surrounded by volumes or scattered handfuls of notes in unreadable old courthand. Candles stood fixed in winding-sheets of drippings on the shelves or the floor, their light outlining his gleaming spectacles and making shadows in the quiet set of his mouth. Once she saw him press thumb and forefinger to the sides of his beaky nose, eyes closed and face still, as if even in solitude he would show no one what he felt.

  In the daytimes more often John and the Master were with the gnomes of Ylferdun Deep, who had for centuries maintained close ties with the Master and the university. Occasionally these glimpses were fragmented or obscured by scry-wards, for the exquisite stone chambers in the Deep of Ylferdun were guarded like those of Tralchet. She recognized Balgub, Sevacandrozardus the Lord of the Deep of Ylferdun; and others, too, of the gnome-kind, engineers by the way they looked at the drawings and diagrams John unrolled before them. They shook their heads and fingered their heavy, polished stone jewelry, and John hurled his diagram on the floor and stormed from the room. Later, she saw him half-naked and covered with grime in a deserted courtyard of Halnath Citadel, checking over the metal shell of a half-built Urchin. So they must, she thought, have come to a compromise. They guarded alloys and engines and secrets jealously, but dragons were dragons.

  One of the engineers was with him now, a tiny gnome-wife whose vast cloud of smoke-green hair was pinned up in spikes tipped with opal and sardonyx. She pointed out something in the coldly glittering engine and touched a crank. John shook his head. He asked about something, and held up his fingers to demonstrate an item the size of a gull’s egg. A hothwais, Jenny guessed, charged with some form of energy. The engineer glanced at the two gnomes with them—lords of high rank, whose jewels were even more ostentatious than hers—and all shook their heads again.

  John gave up, disgusted, and climbed into the interlocking double wheels of the steering cage. He hooked his feet into position and grasped the steering bars, and said something, gesturing, to the gnomes. The engineer patted the air reassuringly with her little white hands.

  John yanked off the brake.

  If it was power John was concerned about, he could rest easy on that score. The Urchin, which had a dozen small wheels instead of the four of the original design, leaped away like a racehorse from the starting-post, John clinging to the steering-bars with an expression of startled horror and the gnomes racing behind.

  John caught at a lever. By the way it simply gave, Jenny guessed at a serious design flaw. The Urchin whirled like a mad bull for the courtyard wall, and John twisted at the steering bars, sending it smashing into the gate instead. The gate crashed open in splintering gusts of wood; the Urchin rolled down the ramp beyond into the dairy yard, milkmaids and cows and chickens scattering in all directions. It crashed through the wooden water trough, hit a dropped dung fork just right, and sent it pin-wheeling through the air; John flung his weight against the steering cage in time to avoid a barrow full of milk buckets and then, with the Urchin headed full-bore for the dairy-house itself, wrenched the cage with all his strength as if to turn.

  The Urchin rolled, flipped up on its back with its twelve wheels spinning crazily in the air, and slid into the midden piles, with John hanging upside-down in the cage. Even after the thing came to a stop, half-buried in dung and soiled straw, the wheels continued to churn.

  John calmly unhooked his feet from the straps and turned in a slow somersault from the bent steering cage to sink knee-deep in muck. The gnomes ran up to join the ring of children, dogs, dairymaids, scullery help, and guards and the still enthusiastically whirring Urchin. John wiped the slime off his face and adjusted his spectacles.

  Jenny could read his lips as he said, “You’re right; works fine. Fix the brake, though.”


  “Which is as well,” she said, when she told Morkeleb of it later. Another evening, after another day of waiting, another day of scrying landmarks to the north and finding that she still could see them, which would be impossible when Rocklys’ legions approached. Though she would not use her magic against the soldiers of Imperteng—and indeed, Gareth never asked it of her—she did this for him and also laid spell-wards and guards on the new fortifications his men were building on Cor’s Bridge and the dugouts.

  With the coming of evening Jenny’s anxiety for Ian always grew. To assuage it she had climbed the hogback ridge behind the camp and sat gazing out over the slow-slanting smoke of the cookfires into the light-drenched distance of fading woodlands and shining streams, her fingers finding almost unthinking solace in the ancient tunes summoned from Gareth’s harp. Old ballads and old tears, the laments of ladies long dead for lords whose names were forgotten. Pain and sweetness rolled together like a southern candy. Darkness filled with the promise of light. In time, the dragon had come.

  “Spells of some kind must be laid on the Urchins,” she said at the conclusion of her tale, “if they’re to withstand the magic of the demon mages. The magic of the gnomes is different from that of humankind. It may serve …”

  It is not different. The dragon shifted his hindquarters and scratched like a dog at the cable of braided leather he had begun to wear about his body, just forward of the wings. Different to you, yes, as an ass differs from a horse, or a chicken from a hummingbird. But to a demon they are the same. And such a demon as I think these are will breathe them aside, as a child breathes away the flame of a candle.

  Sometimes she watched the affairs of Alyn Hold through her crystal; called the images of Adric and Mag while the boy trained in weapons and the girl plagued her nurse and John’s aunts half to death, slipping out to be with her friends or to rig elaborate experiments with pulleys and pendulums in the hay barns. At such times the pain was the worst, for the children were deep embedded in the pattern of her life, and it was hard to be away from them. Ian she tried and tried to see, using all the methods that Morkeleb could teach her. She knew that if she succeeded it would only hurt her worse, but still she made the attempt. Nor would she put it by with failure, but spent weary nights at it, until she fell asleep to the dawn-callings of the birds.

  Then one evening she summoned John’s image in the crystal and saw that he’d tied a red ribbon through the epaulet of his disreputable old doublet. She said to Gareth, “I have to go. He must have found something.”

  “I thought these all were burned.” Polycarp of Halnath unlocked the inner door of his study, revealing a secret chamber, furnished only with a chair, a small table over which a lamp hung, and two shelves of books, each volume chained to a ring in the wall. He cast a nervous glance at Morkeleb, who had reduced himself in size and perched like a jet gargoyle on Jenny’s shoulder. Morkeleb turned his snakelike head and returned his gaze: the Master quickly averted his eyes.

  “I came across them in a volume of Clivy.” John crossed to the table and lowered the lamp on its counterweighted chain. “Clivy’s the world’s prize idiot on the subject of farming and from what I read of this book he knew even less about women— it’s called Why the Female Sex Must Be Inferior to the Male— but it was one I’d never read before. These were stuck in the middle.”

  Four sheets of papyrus lay on the table, tobacco-colored with age and cracked down the center where they had been folded.

  “As far as I can guess from the date of the handwriting,” said Polycarp, closing the door behind them, “those have to have been written by Lyth the Demon-caller. He was a priest of the Gray God here at the time of the Kin-wars. The Master at the time had him carved up alive for trafficking with demons, and all his books and notes were thrown into the same fire with the pieces. According to the catalogs that particular volume of Clivy was one of the original manuscripts in the library, so it would have been there then.”

  “There was any amount of dust on it,” added John, and perched on a corner of the table. “No surprise, considerin’. If I had incriminating notes about me, Clivy’s where I’d stick ’em.”

  “And did this Lyth traffic with demons?” Jenny touched a corner of the papyrus. Caerdinn had taught her three or four styles of writing, including the runes of the gnomes as they were used in Wyldoom and in Ylferdun, but the old man’s own scholarship had been grievously limited. A word or two of the jagged script leaped clear to Jenny’s perusal—“gate” and “key” she knew, and “erlking,” a word sometimes used for the Hellspawn in the Marches. But more than those, she felt the paper itself imbued with a darkness, as if it had been in a room thick with the smoke of scorching blood.

  She drew her hand back, her question answered.

  “They kept the matter quiet because of the upheavals,” said Polycarp. “But yes. There were two gyre-killings here in the Citadel, and two recorded during that same time in Ylferdun Deep. One of those was after Lyth was taken prisoner, but when the Master’s men went through and smashed or burned everything in Lyth’s house, there were no more.”

  “So he used something in his house as a gate,” said Jenny.

  “By what it says here”—John nodded to the four sheets of paper—“it seems to have been a glass ball floating in a basin of blood, though God knows what the neighbors said about the flies. Not that they’d say much to his face, I don’t suppose. But he says as how there were other demon gates, and that one of ’em lay in a sea-cave on the Isle of Urrate …”

  “Urrate?” Jenny looked up sharply. “That’s the sunken island—”

  “Just north of Somanthus,” finished John. “Somanthus, as in where Caradoc hails from. Lyth—if it is Lyth—says that particular gate was blocked when Urrate sank in an earthquake, but it accounts for the things I saw comin’ out of the sea in me dream, and out of the well in Corflyn’s court. Anythin’ that’d hold water could be sorcelled into a gate.”

  Morkeleb had crept down Jenny’s arm and now crouched on his haunches on the tabletop, his head weaving above the papers like a serpent’s, the diamond reflections of his antennae making firefly spots in the ochre gloom. He hissed, like a cat, and like a cat his tail moved here and there, independent of the stillness of his body.

  “Sea-wights, Lyth calls them in his notes,” Polycarp said. “He doesn’t describe them—they weren’t the things that came to him out of the glass ball and the blood. And this is the only other mention I’ve ever seen of the Dragons of Ernine.”

  “It doesn’t give Isychros’ name,” said John. “But it says here that ’an ancient mage’ enslaved dragons—no mention of wizards—by a bargain he struck with demons he summoned out from behind a mirror. But this is the most interestin’ thing.” He propped up his spectacles again and hunted through the manuscript. “Here we go: Demons are ever at war with one another, for the demons of one Hell will torment and devour the demons of another Hell, even as they torment and devour men. Thus the magic of the Hellspawn can be used, one against another.”

  He looked across at Morkeleb. “Had you ever heard that before?”

  I had heard it, the dark voice of the dragon murmured in Jenny’s mind. The Hellspawn seek always to find ways into this world, for the hearts and the bodies of the living are to them as gold is to dragons, the medium of an art that gives them pleasure. They drink pain, as the dragons drink the music that dwells in gold. And I had heard also that the demons of one kind can— and do—drink the pain of the demons of another kind.

  “Then that may be what the mages of Prokep did, to defeat the dragon corps. Not used human magic at all, but made a bargain with …”

  The dragon’s antennae flicked forward, and his eyes were tiny opals, terrible in the gloom.

  Do not think, Songweaver, to ride to the ruins of Ernine and seek behind the mirror of Isychros. It is a bad business to have any dealings whatever with the darkling-kind. They give no help without the payment of a teind in return, and the teinds they req
uire imperil not only those who bargain but everyone whose lives they touch.

  “Ernine?” Polycarp turned his head sharply. “No one knows where Ernine lay. The records speak of it, but—”

  After the fall of the city to the dragons, it was destroyed, said Morkeleb. But later another city rose on its ruins. It was called Syn after the god that was worshiped there.

  “Syn? You mean Sine, the ruins where the Gelspring runs out of the hills?” Eagerness charged the Master’s voice. “That was Ernine? You’re sure?”

  Morkeleb swung his head around, and again Polycarp had to look aside quickly, lest he meet the dragon’s eyes. Jenny saw the ember-glare of Morkeleb’s nostrils and felt the heat of his anger pass like desert wind through her mind. This is what comes, said the dragon, of making myself the size of a ratting dog; grubs whose memories barely compass a single round of the moon’s long dance with the sun ask if I am sure of cities that I saw founded, and laid waste, and founded and laid waste again. Pah!

  Thoroughly embarrassed, Polycarp apologized, but Jenny barely heard. She had barely heard anything, beyond the words the magic of the Hellspawn can be used, one against another. Her breathing seemed to her to have stilled, and her heart turned cold in her chest.

  Ian.

  Quietly, John laid a hand on her arm. His voice was a murmur in her ear. “He’s right, love.”

  She looked up at him quickly.

  “Whatever we do to deal with Caradoc and his wrigglies, playin’ one tribe of demons off against another will only make it worse, for us and for everyone who comes after.”