Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  With blood on her face, on her breasts and garments, she asked him, “Is there anything else?”

  “And I want a spell that will heal them of any damage they’ve taken.”

  “Well.” Her red lips curved in scorn. The dead thing in her hand had ceased to twitch, but the blood still ran out of it over her fingers. “Done.” She dropped the dead wight to the floor, and something ran out from under the divan and began to gnaw it with thick little ripping sounds. With sticky hands she produced a blue stone box, soapy to the feel and heavier than it should have been as he took it in his hand. “Now let us talk of the teind you will pay me in return.”

  His hands closed around the box, the seal, the vial; he could not stop them shaking. He got to his feet and backed from her, and she lay back along the divan and smiled.

  “I’ll even let you out of here, for as long as it takes for you to take my revenge on the sea-wights,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Afterward …”

  “No afterward,” said John. “I’ll pay whatever price you ask of me, but I won’t be your servant in my own world. I hired my sword to the gnomes for a price, but when that price was paid I went my way. Sooner than that I’ll remain here.”

  She sat up, angry, her lip raised a little to show a fang. He saw now that things lived in her hair—or maybe they were a part of the hair: eyeless, darting, toothed. I don’t think you’ve thought about what that will be like, o my beloved.

  Sweat stood cold on his face, because like the dragons her mind spoke in images and sensations, and he could see what it would be: agonizing and without any end. Ever. He made himself meet her eyes, and though the runes and sigils she’d traced on his flesh began to burn with the memory of the poison, he did not look away.

  God of Time, don’t let her take me up on it, he pleaded, in the deepest hollows of his heart. I don’t think I could do it…

  They faced one another for some minutes in silence.

  Very well, she said softly. We shall speak of terms, then.

  The walls behind her shifted, and he could see the Hellspawn through them, like fish in murky water. He recognized the two with the whips. Others held bits and pieces of a man’s body— entrails, a hand, a foot. A long hank of bloodied brown hair with a faded red ribbon braided into it. A pair of spectacles. He looked back at the Demon Queen’s eyes and saw lazy amusement in them, and something else that frightened him badly.

  Since you will not be my servant, in exchange I will ask that you bring us rare and precious things.

  His mouth felt like flesh long dead. “Name ’em.”

  Her smile widened, as if he had walked into a trap. “Even so. You’re a scholar, Aversin. You found the mirror here; you make machines that will slay dragons or fly with them across the skies. Therefore I name as your bond that you bring here a piece of a star, a dragon’s tears … and a gift given to you freely by one who hates you. That is your teind. If you do not redeem it by the last full moon of the summer, the one they used to call the King’s Moon, then you will return to this place and come through the mirror again, to become my bondsman indeed.”

  Bugger. Dizziness swept him, and the knowledge of what she was asking, of what she would do. Dragons don’t shed tears. Not a thing of dragons, Morkeleb would say…

  “And if I don’t come?”

  She got to her feet. He could not tell if she were clothed or naked, but only sheathed in moving light. He had backed to the wall and felt behind him sometimes plaster, sometimes picking, bony hands that caught his wrists when he tried to sidestep her languid advance. She had a jewel in her hand, small and coldly sparkling, he could not tell its color. He tried to flinch aside but could not move in the grip of the things behind him, only turned his face away. For a moment he felt it burning in the pit of his throat. Then it was gone.

  Her hand crept down the side of his face, along his throat, and he felt the scratch of her nails on his breast.

  “If you don’t come,” she said softly, “we will assume that it is not your intention to redeem your bond. Then we will take you, wherever you are. Your flesh will be our gate. Living or dead.”

  His mouth was dry. He felt Mab’s spells fading, colder and colder in his flesh. His breath dragged in his lungs. Too soon, he thought desperately, too soon …

  He only said, “Done,” forcing his voice to remain as level and calm as he could. Turning, he reached over and took the spectacles from the demon that held them. There was blood on them, and from the thing’s mouth dangled strings of sinew and part of a hand whose scarred fingers he refused to recognize. “Now I’ve taken up enough of your time …”

  It was getting hard for him to see, his vision tunneling to gray. In the mists that parted before him he saw black glass, and tiny in its midst the inverted silvery sigil of the door. “Until the King’s Moon, then.” The Demon Queen drew him back to her and pressed herself to him, kissing his lips. The desire to stay with her, to throw her to the iron earth and take her then, rushed back onto him, consuming him like a flame.

  To hell with Jenny, to hell with Ian, to hell with the outer world …

  He thrust her from him and walked toward the sigil, with the wailing sweetness of her singing in his ears.

  “Better than your little brother, aren’t I?” whispered Jenny into the ear of the man who grunted on top of her and laughed as she felt his body tense, chill in horror as he reared back from her, whiskered face aghast. How she knew about the incident she didn’t know—the distant, locked-up part of her assumed it to be some knowledge of Amayon’s—but she saw that the clear tiny incident was in fact true. The guilt of it had driven this poor soldier all his life, and lived, cruel as a snake in his vitals, even after all these years.

  “What was it he said to you?” she purred, as the man tried to throw himself from her couch. “Bultie—he did call you Bultie, didn’t he? Bultie, don’t hurt me anymore, don’t hurt me …” Her mimickry was flawless; it was as if the seven-year-old’s voice flowed out of her throat as she held onto Bultie with iron strength.

  “Whore bitch!” he yelled at her, struggling, and Jenny laughed again at the comical revulsion and nausea that contorted his face.

  “What, can’t take it?” She shook back her hair, lovely and thick as a cat’s pelt. All around the canvas walls the camp echoed with men’s voices, jesting and laughing over the latest triumph, and saying it won’t be long now. The dragons had burned the Regent’s camp and scattered most of his men into the woods. The Regent himself, and his father, and a small remnant held out in the devastated fort. In celebration Rocklys had distributed an extra rum ration to the men. Jenny hadn’t found it difficult to entice them one after another to her tent. Stupid fools.

  “You know what happened to him, to little Enwr, after you were done? When he ran to your papa and tried to tell on you? Oh, don’t worry, Bultie, your papa didn’t believe him—”

  “Stop it, whore!”

  She raised her perfect eyebrows mockingly. “What, didn’t you pick Enwr because you knew your papa wouldn’t believe him?” Her perfect fingers toyed with the silver collar about her throat, a silver and crystal dew-spoon hanging like a gem below. “After your papa beat him—”

  “Stop it!”

  “—little Enwr ran away—”

  “Be silent or I’ll kill you!”

  “—and met some bandits in the road …”

  With an inarticulate cry the man dragged his hand from her, bloodied from the grip of her nails, and stumbled toward the door, sobbing. He didn’t make it, but fell to his knees vomiting wine onto the carpets, cursing weakly and weeping while Jenny crooned in little Enwr’s voice, “Oh, Bultie, that hurts! Oh, it hurts!”

  She nearly rolled off the divan, laughing, as Bultie crawled out of the tent. And turning her head, saw a man standing nearby, half in shadow.

  She knew him. She’d never seen him before, but she knew him.

  She held out her hand—Amayon held out her
hand—and said, “What, you’ve never seen a woman before, handsome?”

  For he was handsome, in a curious thin-boned way. Long gray hair framed a narrow face marked with fresh cuts, as if he’d seen recent battle. Shadow concealed his eyes, but in the dark under those brows she thought there were stars shining far off. His long thin hands were folded under a cloak like a black silk wing. He said, “You can call fire with your mind, Wizard-woman, and salt with your mind. Call them through the flaw in the jewel and ring the flaw with them, to guard you as you reach through it, and to sustain you there.”

  She heard Amayon scream, felt the stab of pain, the flush of heat, rising and rising …

  “You are dragon as much as you are woman,” said the stranger, and his voice was dark echoes in her mind. “There is a dragon within you …”

  “Pig! Bastard! Catamite!” It was Amayon screaming, Amayon who flung Jenny’s body against the stranger, clawing, biting, gouging.

  But the stranger was strong, astonishingly so. He caught her wrists, held her hands from his eyes, eyes that, she saw now, were white as stars. “You are dragon,” he repeated, and the words shone through the flaw in the jewel, through into her heart. “You have no shape, no body of this world. Slip through that flaw as water slips through the crack in a jar.”

  Nausea gripped her, wrenched her; nausea and pain, pain that took her breath. She—Amayon—began to scream at the top of her lungs: “Rape! Murder! Help! Save me!” And outside the tent men cried out, running.

  The stranger flung his cloak around her, dragged her through the tent’s postern door. Frenzied, Jenny sought to break his hold on her, flung out a wailing, desperate cry for Mellyn, for Folcalor, for anyone to help her … And at the same time, gasping in pain, deep in the lightless jewel’s heart, Jenny gathered the dragon-strength, drew and drew at the essences of fire and salt. Though the pain hammered her, she formed them in her mind, and they whispered through the flaw in the jewel, real, as she was real, only without physical body, as she had no physical body …

  The strength of a dragon stirred in her, reached out to fight Amayon …

  Water, whispered the voice in her mind. Become water, Wizard-woman. Do not fight him but flow away. Turn to steam and let the wind take you.

  Men ran from the tents to drive them back from the camp’s palisade. Jenny saw with her wizard’s sight the rope that hung down against the logs. The soldiers didn’t. Laboriously, as if gathering seeds of millet with hands stiffened by cold, she formed spells of Look-Over-There, spells of Kill-Fire that doused the torches among the tents, spells of clumsiness, of inattention, of trailing bootlaces and dropped weapons. Smoke from the snuffed campfires mingled with white wet unseasonable fog that lifted from the river …

  And she felt Folcalor’s spells. The demon-spells of the gross, great thing that rode Caradoc like a dying horse, the thing that she had come to hate in these past five days only slightly less than she hated Amayon—that she loved with Amayon’s bizarre and carnal passion. Spells dispersing the fogs and the smokes, illuminating cold flares of marshlight around them.

  “Stop them!” Rocklys pounded out among her men, her great black-horned bow in her hands and Caradoc at her heels. Soldiers fell on them, soldiers whom Jenny had taken into her bed for four nights now. The gray-haired stranger was armed with a staff; he used it to fell the first man, and Jenny caught up the soldier’s fallen halberd and dagger. Spells tangled like glowing wool around her, and she fought them off; opened one man’s face from brow to chin, reversed the halberd and broke the jaw of another, clearing the path to the wall.

  Overhead she heard the soft deadly beating of wings and knew the dragons were coming.

  Up the rope, said the voice within her mind.

  Kill him! screamed Amayon, and the muscles of her arm cramped with the effort not to drive a blade into the stranger’s back. Arrows thudded into the wall. Mellyn’s voice cried Jenny! despairingly as Jenny groped through the flaw in the peridot, grasped the rope, the silk cloak whirling about her as she climbed. Her rescuer struck and slashed with his staff, and looking down, she bent her aching concentration against his enemies. He would, she knew, have to turn his back on them to climb.

  She stayed her climb, sweating, shaking, forming in her mind all the limitations, all the power lines, all the runes of a spell of fire and lightning. She felt the demons drag and drink at the magic, tearing at the spells even as she formed them; saw Caradoc, on the edge of the phosphor-lit clearing among the tents, raise his hand.

  Unarmed men, she thought; if not unarmed, at least not ready for magic…

  Still she flung her power down on the circle of soldiers around her rescuer, and even with Folcalor’s power fighting hers, even with Amayon dragging and tearing at her mind, fire exploded from the air. Men screamed and fell back, dropping their weapons to claw at their burning clothes. The gray-haired man leapt for the rope, and Jenny saw him climb behind her, bony and lean as if his body had no weight at all. Rocklys’ black-feathered arrow slammed into his shoulder, hurling him hard into the wall. Jenny reached down, grasped his hand, and dragged him up beside her to the top of the wall. Wind slashed and tore at her hair, at the swirling black silk cloak, and she barely dodged aside as a greenish gout of acid splattered on the wall, the wood hissing as it began to burn. Another arrow struck inches from her knee, and Mellyn’s voice cried to her mind in music that ripped her with grief. “Jump!” Jenny said.

  But the stranger caught her around the waist and threw himself not down from the wall but up. And up, wings cracking open, bones melting and changing. The hands that held her turned to claws. Above her Jenny saw the black glister of scales, the swirl of stars and darkness, mane and spines and iron-barbed tail.

  The campfires fell away. They plunged up and still up, into the lightning-pregnant clouds, arrowing away to the east.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was like being pregnant with some carnivorous thing that gnawed at her womb, seeking to eat its way out.

  It was like standing guard on some rocky place alone in the freezing rain, on the second night without sleep, knowing there would be no relief.

  It was like lying in bed with a lover in the hot flush of first youth, knowing that to embrace him would be death.

  Amayon knew her very well. He had had time to familiarize himself with every flaw in the imprisoning jewel that was Jenny’s heart and body, and it was only a matter of time, she knew, before he triumphed.

  The Lord of Time was her enemy, as he was of all men. He was the demons’ friend.

  Thunder ringed the citadel of Halnath. Jenny felt in the rain that sluiced her face the Summonings of wizards and welcomed the protection of the lightning and the storm. As Morkeleb descended to the wet slates of the topmost court through the flaring glower of morning, the soldiers around the wall looked askance, but they raised their spears in salute as she walked past them. Someone gave her a cloak, for she wore only the silken rags of her nightgown.

  The Master waited in his study. “Jenny—” He held out his hand. He wore battered mail over a black scholar’s robe and didn’t look as if he’d slept the previous night.

  She gestured him back. The wet wool cloak stuck to her bare flesh underneath, and her wet hair to her face. She must, she knew, look every day of her forty-five years and more, haggard and puffy-lipped with debauchery, weary, soiled. It was hard to bring out the words. “The demon is still in me,” she said. “Don’t trust me. Don’t trust what I say.” “It takes one to know one, love.”

  She turned, startled, at the voice, and fought to maintain the uncaring dragon-calm that did not release its hold on power for anything. Don’t let yourself feel, she commanded, but it was the hardest thing she had ever done. Amayon is there waiting for you …

  John went on, “I’ll know if it’s you talking, or him.” He sat slumped in a chair by the hearth. He looked more tired than she had ever seen him, even more weary than when he returned from the Skerries of Light. The skin at
his throat was marked, as if hot metal had been laid there, and deep slits and scratches etched his hands and neck. But it was in his eyes themselves, half-hidden by his straggling hair, that the real damage showed.

  They lightened and brightened when they met hers, however; the old gay madness, and the trust of love. He was glad to see her, and it made her want to weep with shame and joy.

  “They told me you were dead.” She did not add that it was Ian who had said so. She thought about the way she had dealt with that grief, losing her mind to the demon, uncaring.

  Then, “You went to the ruins.” She didn’t know how she knew it.

  “I couldn’t think what else to do, love.” He got to his feet and came to her, carefully, not trusting himself nor wanting to break her concentration. His fingers shook as they touched hers. She knew her own were cold, after the long flight over the bitter mountains, but his were icy against them.

  She thought about the things she’d seen, gathered behind the mirror in her dreams. Thought about what she’d read of demons in his books.

  “He lay unconscious in the mirror chamber for many hours.” Miss Mab rose from her little tussock before the fire, her thick exquisite jewelry flashing like a dragon’s scales. “Barely was the spell I laid upon him sufficient to bring him forth again.” She glanced back at Polycarp, who looked quickly away.

  “I made the best bargain I could.” John propped up his spectacles. “I never was any damn good at the market—you remember that time I bought the stone nutmegs from that feller with the monkey?—but I did try. Miss Mab’s been tellin’ me what exactly I’ve got myself into, and all I’ve got to say is, that Demon Queen ought to be ashamed of herself.”