Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  Ian was riding Nymr. The knowledge went through her heart like a spear.

  Do not think the boy on the Blue One’s back is your son, Wizard-woman, said Morkeleb. It is only a demon that wears his flesh.

  If the house is burned, said Jenny, with her harpoon resting upright on her thigh and the other two heavy on her shoulder, the traveler will have no home to return to.

  There was no time for further words or further thought. She locked her mind and heart together with the dragon’s, fusing the iron and the gold of their joined powers, and so fused, they attacked.

  Jenny flung about them both the spells of concealment, of remaining unnoticed and unseen. But Centhwevir and the others split and fell upon Morkeleb from all directions, clearly able to see. The young fry hung back—Jenny wondered what wizard Rocklys had found to give to Caradoc as the seventh rider— letting the larger and stronger drakes, Centhwevir, Nymr, and Enismirdal, take on Morkeleb. Centhwevir was larger than the black dragon, but Morkeleb much the swifter and more agile. Morkeleb spat fire at the riders, forcing the star-drakes to back and veer to protect them, himself looping and diving to rip and tear at their underbellies, where no spikes protected the shining scales.

  Clinging among the spikes herself with her feet hooked through the leather cable, burned by the acid of the other dragons, Jenny watched and waited, drawing power around herself and trying to use it as a shield and a blind. But every spell of evasion and concealment she used slid away like water, as if she only threw handfuls of leaves and dirt at the other dragons. Through Morkeleb’s eyes she saw the dragons fragment into whirling flames of color, arcs of burning motion that were now here, now there, impossible to see. With Jenny concentrating, drawing on all her power, she resolved them now and then into their true shapes, allowing Morkeleb to attack, but he was only fending them off and falling back.

  Behind them, below them, the camp was arming. Men’s voices cried out, tiny as insects’ on the walls. How long had it been? And how long would they need? Time dissolved and fractured, whirled like the attacking dragons.

  And she felt in her mind, gripping and scratching, the strange wailing strength of the sea-wights, drawing at her, tearing at her thoughts. Wanting her. Knowing her.

  And the worst of it was that in the depths of her bones, she knew them, too.

  She called on her power, summoning it from her heart and marrowbones. But the magic only seemed to feed that need, and the demon songs grew all the sweeter, waves of sleepy strength. Brilliant wings sheared out of the blackness, claws raked down. Once she saw a pink dripping mouth snatching at her and thrust a harpoon into it with all her strength, but as if a veil dropped over her head she did not see whether she wounded the dragon or not. She only knew she was still alive afterward, and the harpoon gone from her hand.

  The camp was under them. Fire and men shouting, arrows flying up, falling back spent. Her mind burned with the effort of calling up power, drawing on her own strength, on Morkeleb’s strength, all the magic of their joined souls a wall of holed and acid-eaten bronze. The world swung sickeningly, and she clutched tight at the cable. Wheeling stars, smoke and the reek of death-spells biting at her lungs. She glimpsed the Urchins below, saw their harpoons slam upward as the dragons descended on the camp—saw by the way the harpoons went that the men inside the machines struggled too against demon-glamors and spells of ruin.

  Blue on blue, drenched and dyed with firelight, firelight reflected in dead golden eyes. Wings hammering, claws descending, then the still white face, black hair like her own flying, blue dead eyes in which a single frantic spark remained.

  His heart was locked in the dragon’s heart, his mind in the dragon’s mind. And with her dragon mind Jenny called out to him, Ian! Desperately willing that he hear. Ian!

  And like hooks in her mind she felt the demons catch her. Through all her wardings, through all her defenses, as if they had not been there. Like nothing she had expected, nothing she had prepared for even in her craziest dreams, a power sourced from something she did not understand. Like nothing she had ever heard spoken of.

  As love had been.

  That was what they never told you about demons. In her flesh.

  In her mind. Drinking her magic and Morkeleb’s magic like maniac glutting swine. Without pain.

  No one had ever told her, no account had ever hinted, how deep the pleasure of it went. How utterly right it felt.

  Somewhere she heard Morkeleb cry, Let go! Jenny, let go!

  And she felt his magic vanish. It dissolved and dispersed like smoke, leaving him defenseless—Without my magic, he had asked, what am I? As the magic swirled away it was as if he turned first to smoke and glass, and then winked utterly from sight.

  She cried out again, Ian! Reached with all her magic, all her strength, all her will. Trying to grasp and hold the boy’s mind and drag it to her, to safety.

  And the demons inhaled her strength like smoke, swallowing it away.

  The last thing she heard with her own thoughts was their laughter.

  Pretty Lady, he said. I am Amayon. And he possessed her, in spite of herself, for there was nothing that she could touch or thrust from her. Those who saw her later described the rips and scratches where she had tried to gouge and dig the thing she felt spreading through her flesh, but of course she could not. She could no more excise it thus than she could have picked one drop of her blood away from another drop. It was a heat devouring her. All she knew was that flame overwhelmed her body as if she burned with fever, and when the flame reached a certain hotness, silvery explosions of what she could not identify as either pleasure or pain: the intensity of sensation on that borderline where the two fuse. And Amayon, like the odor of brimstone and lilies.

  She was aware, later, of being with Ian, beside him with the wind slashing and streaming through her hair. She felt wild and light and mad, like the young girl she had never truly been allowed to be, watching hilariously as men below poured out of a burning bunker. The white and scarlet dragon Yrsgendl slashed at them with his iron-spiked tail as they stumbled and fell. One of the spiny Urchins raced and trundled toward the dragon, firing its harpoons, silly as a toy. The air seemed colored to Jenny’s eyes, rich greens and purples, luminous, everything edged with colored flame. She could see her own spells woven around the Urchin, a net of dancing light. Pain rose from below, a shiveringly glorious song: music and warmth and love and well-being and power, heady beyond any joy she had ever known.

  “I’ll bet they’d run if we pulled those spells away,” she laughed, and Ian joined in her laughter. His eyes were no longer dead, but aglow with lively fire, more alive than she’d ever seen him before. She sensed his forgiveness for all the years of her neglect, sensed his admiration, his approval, his love.

  “How about it, Nymr?” he called down to the dragon, and the dragon—both were mounted on the same one, Jenny didn’t remember how—stooped like a falcon. Snatching away the net of spells was as easy, and as fun, as whipping a string away from a cat. The gnome-wardings tangled in the spellwork raveled away as well, and with a whoop of glee Bliaud—or Bliaud’s demon, mounted on Yrsgendl—tossed a Word of Heat at the lumbering machine.

  It lurched to a stop, whirled, and rocked comically as smoke poured from every vent and crack. Jenny, clinging to her son’s shoulders, hooted with laughter, mirth that was echoed from the others: Bliaud, Yseult, Werecat, and Summer … A man tried to get out, and Yseult drove Hagginarshildim in close, spitting fire at him as he was caught in the hatch. It was like tormenting a snail, distant and ridiculous in its futile tininess: “Whoa, that’ll cook his cockles for him!” whooped Ian, and Jenny laughed until she ached. Firelight flashed on the man’s harpoon-tip and spectacles as he struggled to get free.

  The second Urchin was flipped on its side, wheels spinning helplessly. Enismirdal and Centhwevir had ripped the earthen roofs from the bunkers, the men inside churning about like maggots doused in salt, terror and agony billowing up like the bouquet of a
summer garden. Laughing, calling out to one another, the raiders spiraled upward into the night, gaudy leaves borne by the updraft of fire.

  “We’ll be back!” yelled Yseult, at the confusion of the camp. “Don’t go anywhere!”

  And pleasure washed over Jenny, deep caressing waves that penetrated the most secret caves of her body and her mind: contentment, belonging, the promise of reward and the drunken hilarity of power. Power and pain. This, truly, was life. The men in the broken camp raced madly here and there, funny as ants when the nest drowns, trying to put out fires or pulling vainly at the arms and legs of the injured. Dozens more of them simply fled toward the hills— “Do they think the fell-men are going to let them through?” shouted Bliaud, his long gray curls whipping. “I’d like to be there when they try!”

  One man, the man who had wrenched himself free from the burning Urchin, got slowly to his feet, leaning on his broken harpoon. Jenny was aware of him watching the dragons as they swirled triumphantly away into the night.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They gave her a young girl, all for her own; probably one of the camp servants or whores. By being judicious in her applications of pain and terror, Jenny managed to keep her alive most of the night.

  Deep inside, Jenny was aware of her own horror, aghast, disgusted, sickened at what she saw herself doing to the weeping child. But she was aware that Amayon supped and munched and reveled in her emotions, her revulsion and pity, as much as in the victim’s uncomprehending agony. And Amayon—as is the way of demons—routed his pleasure and delight back into Jenny’s body and mind. Riven and battered, Jenny tried to find some way to fight, but it seemed to her that she could only watch herself performing upon the girl a violent parody of what Caerdinn had done to her when she was that age; watch herself as if she were someone else.

  But you’re not someone else, whispered Amayon. That’s you, Pretty Lady, my dearest Jenny dear. I don’t make anything from whole cloth. No demon does. Admit it. Ever since Caerdinn beat you and harried you and demanded of you that you do what you couldn’t do—

  “What do you want from me?” the girl was crying, blood coursing down her face. “What do you want?”

  —you’ve wondered how it would feel to have that kind of power. You wanted to be him then. And now you are.

  I’m not! screamed Jenny desperately, her voice tiny as the peep of a cricket in a crack. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!

  And the demon drank up her tears, mixed with the little whore’s blood, and smacked his lips in delight.

  The girl died toward dawn. The sensation was beyond description, a ringing climax of physical pleasure and emotional satisfaction that left Jenny shattered, confused, wrung out like a rag washed up on an unknown beach.

  The dragon-mages had tents set a little apart from the rest of Rocklys’ forces, in the camp where the Wildspae curved through the bare gray hills. Lying on the soaked carpets of the tent floor, breathing in the thick blood-odor that permeated them, Jenny— the tiny part of Jenny that huddled weeping like a ghost still clinging to her own flesh—wondered what else had gone on in the mages’ compound, what rewards they had been given for their nights’ work. What Ian had done.

  The blue and yellow curtain rippled back. Bland and fresh-bathed, Caradoc stood in the opening, his hard mouth relaxed a little as if even he had been pleased and sated in the night. He went for a minute to the body of the girl, turning it over with the goblin-curved tip of his staff. Jenny heard Amayon—or maybe it was herself—chuckle, and sat up, aware that her face wore the smile of a woman yawning tousled in the bed of a hated rival’s husband or son.

  “What a little spit-cat she was.” She stretched luxuriously and shook back her matted hair. “Have they got the balneary set up? I’m absolutely sticky.”

  Caradoc grinned with the side of that grim mouth, and impure fire flickered in his eyes. It crossed Jenny’s mind, Jenny’s own ousted and terrified mind, to wonder how long the real Caradoc had lasted, held by slow-dissolving ghostly bonds to his own flesh and screaming with horror that this wasn’t what he’d meant when he asked the demons to give him power.

  Or maybe it was. Maybe after enough time passed you could no longer tell the difference.

  He chucked Jenny under the chin, as a man would a whore in a tavern. “How’d you like it?”

  Monster, Monster! she screamed at him, or maybe at herself, desperate and tiny and unheard. Except, of course, by Amayon, who giggled in sated delight that she was still capable of emotion, and savored her horror like a piquant dessert. The demon in her laughed for answer to Caradoc’s question, and Jenny’s hand stroked down her own body in a caressing expression of total satisfaction. Somewhere she heard Amayon reply to the demon— its name was Folcalor, she somehow knew, a bloated thing in which struggled the half-digested whimpering remains of a dozen other imps—that lived behind Caradoc’s eyes. You know how delicious it is, to bring a new one to it for the first time.

  And Caradoc—Folcalor—laughed appreciatively. “Roc’s getting on the road soon,” he said. “We’ll hit them again tonight.” Something changed, shifted in his expression, and with a casual air he took from his pocket a green gem, a polished peridot the size of a quail’s egg, which he held out to her like a sweet to a child.

  Bastards, bastards! Jenny cried, trying to summon even a fingerhold of power over her own body, trying to thrust Amayon out of her self, her heart, her mind. Though she knew that without this she, the Jenny part of herself, would die, long before anyone could exorcise Amayon, if in fact anyone could do such a thing, still terror gripped her at the thought of being forever their prisoner.

  Amayon did something to her, almost thoughtlessly, as a man would strike a child to hush it, something that left her gasping with pain. And what’s this? he asked, eyeing Folcalor, eyeing the jewel.

  “I have my reasons,” the dragon-mage replied, and flipped the jewel in his palm.

  All the teasing, playful cruelty vanished, and Amayon was suddenly cold and deadly as a cobra. Reasons that the Lord of Hell knows about?

  The demon-light changed and flickered in Caradoc’s dead eyes. “My dear Amayon …” The voice was a tiger’s purr in her mind, velvet sheathing the threat of razor-clawed violence. “You don’t think I’d do anything here without Lord Adromelech’s knowledge? He is my lord, as he is yours—and if he hasn’t opened his mind and his plans to you, he has at least to me. Adromelech has his plans. Now here, precious”—he held out the stone to Jenny again—“have a little sweet.”

  Jenny blew a kiss at him (Filth! she screamed at him, at them both, at them all), opened her mouth to receive the stone, and sat smiling and making little faces and playing with it with her tongue while the dragon-mage made magic circles around her, and drew together the curves of power. Inside herself Jenny wept, with what last strength was in her, trying to call together enough power to resist.

  She felt herself go into the stone.

  Rocklys’ army broke camp with the coming of full light and marched through the day under the wood of Imperteng’s somber boughs. Caradoc, and Jenny, and the other mages summoned an unseasonable fog to cover the land to the foot of Nast Wall. Through this the dragon-mages glided silent as shadow, just above the trees, gray cold wetness hemming them in. Through the latticed structure of the jewel Jenny felt the touch of magic trying to disperse the fog, and she and the others renewed their spells, drawing the vapors thick. When the dragon she rode, a lovely green and gold youngling named Mellyn, descended, Jenny could see with her demon eyes the Commander herself, riding fully armored on her sleek bay stallion, with Caradoc at her side. Now and then they spoke, Caradoc explaining matters in the smooth comforting voice that Rocklys had known for all those years, little realizing that it was the demon Folcalor who actually did the talking.

  “This is the way many wizards are, Commander.” The moonstone flashed softly on his goblin-carved staff. “You have to humor them if you want their help. Of course I’m as appalled as y
ou are, but …”

  Two or three times in the course of that morning Jenny was troubled by something, some watchfulness she felt turned upon them; she didn’t know what. Scanning the fogs around her, with the magic of the demons that now filled her heart and body, she detected nothing. Yet in that separated part of her, that heart imprisoned within the pale-green crystal in the flat silver bottle that hung around Caradoc’s neck, she knew, and whispered the name.

  Morkeleb.

  He was there. Somewhere. She had seen him vanish, dissolve into smoke, even as her knees and thighs had still felt his scales and spines.

  And her imprisoned heart, looking out through her own eyes in the fog as she had once looked out through Morkeleb’s, knew something else as well: the jewel in which she was imprisoned was flawed.

  Through the long day she grew to know that jewel as intimately as she knew her own body. In a sense, this was now what it was. She remembered seeing it in the strongbox in Rocklys’ chamber at Corflyn, and she familiarized herself with every molecule of carbon, every milky impurity, every fracture line and energy fault. Knew them and hated them. These were the best you could do? Caradoc had complained to Rocklys. And, I think you were cheated…

  Caradoc was right. Rocklys was a warrior, not a mage. Faced with the need to conserve money for her soldiers’ pay, faced with a clever gem merchant and a handful of brilliant stones, she wouldn’t have known how to check each jewel.

  Jenny could not have said exactly why a diamond or a ruby was better for the imprisonment of a disembodied spirit than a topaz or a peridot. Nor could she have explained to a layperson why magic must be worked with pure metals and flawless gems in order to be itself flawless. But within her crystalline prison she was able to move a little, and carefully—gently—she began to draw power through the stone’s threadlike fault.