Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  She looked aside. “I know.”

  But through supper and into the night, reading the scrolls and tablets and books of the library of Halnath, she could not dismiss those words from her mind, nor the thought of Ian, a prisoner in his own body and in a sapphire in Caradoc’s strongbox. When she slept, the thought of him, the image of him, followed her down into her dreams.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In her dreams Jenny came to Ernine, the yellow city where the Gelspring ran out of the mountains, where orchards flowered in the fertile lands of the river’s loop. In her dreams she saw it as it was in the time of the mage Isychros and the heroes Alkmar the Godborn and Öontes of the singing lyre. She passed through the market that lay before the citadel hill and climbed the curved path to the palace of sandstone and marble, where the Queen’s ladies with their gold-braided hair wove cloth among the pillars.

  It seemed to her that someone who walked at her heels asked her, “Did you ever wonder who this Isychros was, Pretty Lady? Where he lived, and what kind of a man he was? He was a prince of the royal house, you know. And his eyes were like bright emeralds that catch the sun.”

  When she turned to see who spoke there was no one there. Nevertheless, as she hurried on, Jenny felt a hand brush her arm.

  She was afraid then and wanted John. But John lay asleep beside her, far away in their borrowed bed in Halnath Citadel, and she was here in Ernine, a thousand years ago, alone.

  She passed down shallow steps and saw the plastered stone blocks of the walls give way to the raw hill’s bones. Gazelles were painted on the plaster, the big black Royal gazelles with six-foot back-curving horns, the kind that were never seen close to Nast Wall anymore. Somehow she knew that herds of them roved within a few miles of the city walls. Close by, someone played the harp, a gentle tune that made her want to weep. As the hotness welled behind her eyes she heard a soft chuckle behind her, laughter at her weakness, and something more. She put the tears away.

  A corridor was cut in the rock, constellations painted on its ceiling. A comet hung among the stars, trailing its harlot’s hair. Curtains covered the corridor’s entrance, and others blocked it a few feet farther on; still more covered the door at the end, layer on layer. The round chamber beyond was draped with them, all save the ceiling, where the night sky again was painted, and the comet, brighter and colder than before.

  The mirror was in the chamber. It was bigger than she’d thought it would be, five feet tall at least. It was wrought of the curious blue-pink opaline glass that one found in the oldest ruins of cities in the south, and what it was backed with she did not know. Whatever it was, it seemed to burn through the glass, so threads of steam rose from the surface, though when she came near there was no feeling of heat. The mirror’s sides were framed in soapy-looking silver-gray metal—it had a disturbing sheen in the dark. Curves and angles drew the eye in an unfamiliar fashion, as if to darkness previously unseen.

  The flamelets of the bronze lamp that hung from the ceiling’s center doubled in the burning depths. Beneath them she saw reflected the table under the lamp, and the chair that faced the mirror across the table, and Jenny herself in her borrowed red and blue dress. Though she heard the chuckle of laughter again, close to her ear, the mirror reflected no one else.

  But someone said—or she thought someone said—Put out the lamps, Jenny. You know mirrors turn back light and blind those who look in them to all but themselves and what they think they know.

  She reached with her mind and put out the lamps.

  Then she saw, in the darkness, what crowded against the glass on the other side. Watching, and smiling, and knowing her name.

  She awoke screaming, or trying to scream, muffled incoherent whimpers, and John shook her, pulled her out of her terror and her dreams. She clung to him in the darkness, smelling the comforting scent of his bare flesh and hearing his voice say softly, over and over, “It’s all right, Jen. It’s all right,” as his hand stroked her cheek.

  But she knew that it wasn’t all right.

  In the morning, after scrying deep and long in crystal, water, wind, and smoke for any sign of Rocklys’ army advancing beyond the Wildspae, she flew with Morkeleb south to the Seven Islands. Because they passed over the heart of the Realm, Jenny cloaked herself and the dragon in spells of inconspicuousness, something humans were better at than dragons; Gareth had problems enough. In the Wildspae Valley, and the green lands of Belmarie, where the Wildspae and the Clae joined, the farms were rich and the harvest ripening, and Jenny compared them to the Winterlands with bitterness in her heart. Then they passed over the sea to the six fertile islands that constituted the greatest wealth of the Realm, and the spine of gray rocks that marked what had been Urrate.

  Morkeleb lighted among the broken pillars of a shrine, all that was left of Urrate’s acropolis. Waves crashed barely a dozen yards below. Seabirds wheeled and yarked about their heads, and perched again on the lichen-cloaked shoulders of the Great God’s statue. Poppies and sea grass swayed in the wind. Jenny could see the gleam of marble for some distance under the dark of the sea, white as old bones.

  The dragon rocked on his tall haunches, swaying his head back and forth above the waves, balancing with wings and tail. Jenny kicked her feet free of the cable around his body, slid from his back, and settled herself in the chill sunlight. She closed her eyes, listening with the deep perceptions of the dragon-mind beneath the surge of the waters. Feeling, scenting, following Morkeleb’s mind deeper and deeper, among the waving leathery kelp forests and the shards of the city’s drowned temples and walls. Scenting for the stink of infection.

  But there was nothing. Above her she heard Morkeleb singing, stretching luminous blue music into the abyss where the sunshafts faded, and in time she heard music answer him. Pipings and hoonings, deep echoing throbs. With Morkeleb’s mind she saw shapes rising, black-backed, white-bellied, wise ancient eyes glittering in pockets of leathery flesh. Great fins stroked the water, guiding as Morkeleb used his wings to guide; great tails that could smash a boat thrust and drove. They all breached at once, fourteen slate-dark backs curving out of the sea, fourteen plumes of steam blown glittering in the sun. Then they rested on the surface, rolling a little, loving the warmth after the cold currents below, perhaps thirty feet from the rocks where the dragon sat, and the eldest of them asked Morkeleb why he had called.

  Demons—Morkeleb framed them in his mind. Jenny, watching and listening, absorbed the images and the way the black dragon arranged them: different, very different from the dark voice that spoke to her in her mind. Long slow images of ugliness and hate, of bitter green magic like poison spreading in the water. Sickness, pain, blindness, death. Soul-drowning as a trapped porpoise drowns among the deep kelp. Dark rocks far down under the isle? Heat without light? Steam pulsing out into the sea?

  The calves of the abyss replied. Not on Urrate but under Somanthus, far down where the western side of the isle fell away into a great deep: There was the burning gate. Dreams of wisdom for the taking. Dreams of power to summon at will the great warm shrimp-tides, and promise of new stories to tell, rich new songs beautiful and strange. Dreams rising to the men of Somanthus. A man used to walk on the shore to study the waves, or to learn the ways of the dolphins, or with a little sky-tube gaze at the stars. The whalemage Squidslayer did not know what to do, but it was clear, he said, that something must be done, lest greater ill befall.

  Will you come, Wizard-woman, and see these things?

  She surrounded herself with a Summoning of Air and clung to the leather cable around his body as he slid from the rocks. The water was colder than she’d expected. Her hair floated behind her like the kelp, and the whalemages surrounded them, not ponderous at all in their element but weightless as milkweed and swift as birds. They passed through the avenues of the sunken city, where weeds reached up through windows of toppled houses and the marble door-guardians gazed sadly through masks of barnacles and snails. The deeps beyond were icy, and very dark.<
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  They did not go too near the abyss where the demons dwelled. Jenny could smell them nevertheless, feel them through the water, and her flesh crept on her bones with loathing and terror. Far down the endless cliff-face a kind of greenish light played around the rocks. On rock-ledges all the way down she could see the little glass shells that the sea-wights shed, and she thought she could see things moving, bloated and spiky, very different from the shapes they took in the upper world.

  Chewing through the rocks, she heard Squidslayer’s thoughts in her mind, like slow silvery bubbles. All the underpinnings of Urrate, cut, eroded, dissolved. Years on years on years. Island falling, shutting dark within. Vast ecstatic sobbing of sea-wights at the deaths.

  And Jenny felt its echo, through the whalemages’ minds, the thunderclap of pleasure at devouring such terror and pain.

  Morkeleb turned beneath her like an eel. Surrounded by the whales they gained the surface again, and the wind dried her clothing as they flew through gathering dusk to Jotham. Neither spoke. That night Jenny dreamed again of the vault below ruined Ernine, seeing the things that watched from the other side of the burning mirror. Waking alone and cold with sweat in her little tent, she rose and climbed the hill behind the camp in the warm summer darkness, until against the blue-black sky a blacker shape loomed. She lay down between his great claws and slept, and the dreams of the things behind the mirror left her in peace.

  John came into camp two mornings later, driving a flatbed wagon drawn by ten mules with the first two Urchins. He was accompanied by the little green-haired engineer Jenny had seen in her scrying-stone—Miss Tee was her name among humankind—and by the gnome-witch Taseldwyn, called Miss Mab among men. Gareth’s treasurer, Ector of Sindestray, accompanied them, bearing documents any courier could have delivered, and also a very young warrior of Polycarp’s guard who’d been trained, more or less, to operate an Urchin.

  From the edges of the woods the warriors of Imperteng watched with suspicion as John and Miss Tee and Elayne the Halnath guard demonstrated the Urchins to Gareth. Probably still believing, Jenny thought, that these things concern them. The horses snorted and pulled at their tethers as the squat, spiked oval whirred and clicked around the parade ground, firing harpoons in all directions: Gareth flinched and ducked down beside Jenny in the shelter of the heavily fortified earthwork, then emerged to touch the tip of the harpoon. It had pierced two layers of target planking, thicker than the length of Jenny’s finger.

  “Ingenious, of course,” approved Lord Ector temperately, “but expensive.” He was a small man, stout and dark, and younger than his defeated hairline led one to think at first, and he wore a courtier’s blue and white mantlings even in the camp’s dirt. There was about him, though, none of Gareth’s air of loving display for its own foolish gorgeousness. He was one, thought Jenny, who sought by the courtier’s garb to establish birth and rights beyond all possible questionings of lesser men.

  “Cheap at the price, though.” John swung himself out of the Urchin’s hatch and slithered rather gingerly to the ground among the spikes. “Long as we can keep the things wound, we’re fine.” After him came the young Halnath archer. At Polycarp’s suggestion, the Urchins had been made large enough to accommodate a second person, both to fire the harpoons and, if necessary, to crank the engine. “And you can just hike the taxes on the Winter-lands a little higher for ’em, can’t you?” he added maliciously and flicked Ector’s mantlings.

  Ector glared.

  “We have people working on poisons for the harpoons,” said Gareth rather quickly, nodding back toward the camp. “I’ve sent two messages to Prince Tinán, warning him about an attack by wizards and dragons, and offering a truce in exchange for help, but I’ve heard nothing.”

  “Stubborn bumpkins,” said Ector.

  “Have they been lured into traps before?” John smote the dust from his patched sleeves, and the Thane of Sindestray fanned irritably at the billowing dirt with a circle of stiffened silk. “You have to admit that with garrisons from everyplace in the Realm on the march for here, professions of friendship don’t have much of a true ring.”

  “It wasn’t me who went back on the last truce,” blurted Gareth, flushing. “That was—”

  “And it wasn’t Tinán, probably, who burned out the farms that got his dad killed,” John pointed out. “In my experience, anyway, that’s how these things work, son. Jen,” he went on, “can you and Mab lay death-spells on that many harpoons?”

  Jenny nodded, cringing inside at the thought.

  Like Gareth, she thought—like Ian, like John—she, too, was trapped in this jewel of necessity.

  She drew a deep breath. “This morning when I scried the fords of the Catrack River I saw nothing: fog, broken images, the woods ten miles away. They are close. And she’ll send the dragons ahead.” Ector looked skyward as if expecting to see it filled with fire-spitting foes.

  “You’d better send for all the Urchins Polycarp has in readiness.”

  While Gareth dealt patiently with the council’s messages, Jenny drew circles of power around the Urchins themselves in the parade ground, under the distrustful and disapproving eye of the troops. She summoned what power she could from the earth, and from the pattern of the waters below—from river’s currents and the exact combinations of rocks in the hills—from the turning of the unseen stars. These spells she imbued meticulously in the stubby little machines. Her spells of human and dragon power she braided with the gnomish wyrds of Miss Mab, both on the machines themselves and then on the fierce barbed points of the poisoned harpoons.

  “I always hate the death-spells,” said Jenny, straightening her aching back and brushing aside the tendrils of her hair. Sunset turned the air to copper around them and the poison smoke burned her nostrils; the anger of the sullen soldiers who brought up wood for that endless boiling muttered at the back of her mind like the pull of an unseen stream. “And it seems like the older I get the more I hate them. And yet”—she gestured wearily at the pile of iron bolts—“and yet here I am working them again.”

  Her hands trembled as she spoke. She had returned twice in the last hour to the sanded flat behind Gareth’s dugout to remake her own circles of power and draw into herself, and into her spells, more of the strength and magic she needed. Mab had worked her magic all afternoon without pause. Jenny couldn’t imagine how she was doing it.

  The gnome-witch, seated on a firkin, tilted her head a little, looking up at the woman with one round hand shading her pale-blue eyes. “It is because thou lovest,” she said simply. Her hand was smaller even than Jenny’s, smaller than Adric’s, but thick and heavy as a miner’s. Both women had shed all jewelry, braided up their long hair, and changed for the work into coarse linsey-woolsey shifts that could afterward be burned. Beneath the hem the gnome-woman’s bare dangling feet were like lumps of muscled rock.

  “The more years thou see, the greater grows thy love: for this John, for thy children, for Gareth; for thy sister and her family and for all the world. And as thy love grows, so grows it for every woman and man, for gnomes and whales and mice and even for the dragons.” Miss Mab set aside the harpoon she had held on her knees and reached for another. They were stacked all around the two women like corn, tips and edges black with the sludge of the poison dip.

  Jenny’s voice was unsteady, remembering John between walls of fire, the black horn bow steady in his hands. Aiming at their son. “Is there another way?”

  Mab’s wide mouth flexed in what might have been a smile. “Child, there is,” she said. “But not for a woman of bare five-and-forty, standing at this crossroad. Time is long,” she said. “Love is long.” And looking up, she smiled and waved as John strode across the sanded death-field in his shirtsleeves, a clay pot of lemonade in his hands.

  The dragons dropped from the sky in the dead of the night.

  Knowing that mages and dragons both could see in darkness, Gareth kept the men standing to in shifts through the night. Bending sweat-soaked
over the reeking harpoons, Jenny heard in the dark of her mind Morkeleb’s voice: Wizard-woman, they come, and a moment later saw the black soaring shape of him against the stars.

  “They’re coming,” she said, her tone perfectly calm. Miss Mab looked up. Jenny was already turning to the nearest wood-bearer. “They’re coming. The dragons. Now. Tell His Highness to alert the camp.”

  The boy stared at her, openmouthed. “What?”

  “Tell His Highness—now. I’m going up.”

  “What?” Then he swung around, fist to his mouth in shock and horror, “Beard of Grond!”

  Morkeleb hung, a nightmare of firelit bones, above the smoke-wreaths.

  “Uwanë!” The young soldier snatched at the nearest harpoon— Mab yanked it impatiently out of his hand.

  “Not that dragon!”

  “Get His Highness!” repeated Jenny and gave the youth a shove. “Now! Run!”

  Wordlessly Mab gave her the harpoon and caught up two others in a leather sling. Men were already running about, crying and snatching up weapons; the cry of “Dragons! Dragons!” and “Uwanë!” fractured the black air. At least, thought Jenny, Morkeleb’s appearance would rouse the camp.

  Then the dark claw reached from the darkness, closed around her waist.

  See, to the northeast, said Morkeleb as they rose, and the hot circle of smoke and fire around the cauldrons shrank to the red heart of a burning flower, ringed with circles of tinier lights. Along the rim of the Wall.

  And Jenny saw.

  There were seven of them, seven dragons, hugging close to the shape of the mountains, taking advantage of shadows. With the far clear sight of the dragons she saw them, even in darkness knowing their colors and the music of their names: Centhwevir blue and golden, Nymr blue upon blue, Enismirdal yellow as buttercups, Hagginarshildim green and pink. The other three were too young to have their names in the lists, but she recognized the white and crimson jere-drake Bliaud had ridden to attack the camp in the Wyrwoods. The other two, younger still, were marked by gorgeous rainbow hues, not yet having begun to shape and alter the colors of their scales to chime with the inner music of their hearts. It seemed to her, even miles away, that she could see their eyes, and their eyes were dark, like filmed and broken glass.