Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  He turned away from her, fumbling with the battered pouch at his belt. When he turned back, he had something that looked like a seal in his hand, wrought of crystal or glass. At the same moment Miss Mab came from the other side to take Jenny by the wrist.

  It was well she did. Within her jewel-bound mind Jenny felt Amayon drag and lurch at her arm, and she was overwhelmed with the desire to flee the room, to hide, to use her will and her magic and never be found. She twisted, pulled away, and other hands caught her from the other side. She had a glimpse of the gray-haired stranger’s pale face, the eyes that were nothing but shadow and starshine: Morkeleb in his human guise, stepping through the terrace doors.

  She understood—Amayon understood—what the crystal seal John held was.

  Hatred, treachery, poison, murder, pain…

  The demon’s voice screamed in her, and like a dragon, she sheathed her mind in diamond and steel.

  Leave you, leave you, leave you…

  Waves of unbearable pleasure, indescribable pain, swept her. She clutched at John’s arm, at the corner of the table, as she doubled over, sweating, nauseated.

  “Hold on, love.” His hand touched her chin, raising her head; she saw he had a white shell in his hand, a common one from the beaches of Bel, and Amayon’s voice within her rose to a shriek.

  DON’T LET HIM…

  A child within her. A desperate, terrified lover-child …

  Her mind shut hard, Jenny opened her mouth as the shell was put against her lips. Closed her eyes on the sight of Polycarp, holding a candle to an ensorcelled stick of crimson sealing-wax. Held out her hand obediently, for Mab to slash her palm and smear the crystal seal with blood. The little gnome-witch had to step up onto a chair to press the bloodied sigil to Jenny’s forehead.

  THEY WILL TORTURE ME THROUGH ETERNITY!

  Jenny remembered the nights of her own torment and replied calmly, Good.

  And Amayon was gone.

  Desolation swept her. She was barely aware of Mab taking the shell from her mouth. Jenny turned away and put her hands over her face, brokenhearted, and wept.

  “The demons have asked of Aversin that he bring them certain things.” Miss Mab sat forward in the Master’s big chair, and Poly-carp, seated on the floor beside her, brought up a footstool again.

  Nearly twenty-four hours had passed. The gnome-witch wore silk slippers of an astonishing shade of blue, emblazoned with rosettes of lapis and gold and bearing on their toes little golden bells. They jingled when she crossed her ankles. “That was the price he paid for these.”

  On the study table the crystal seal lay, cold greenish-white, as if wrought from ice. Indeed, by the frost upon it, in which any human touch left a print, it might have been so. The vial beside it had a slippery feel, and Jenny could see that it had burned rings in the tabletop. Now it rested on a saucer of glass. The blue stone box between them, though more prosaic, seemed somehow darker and heavier than any stone of the world she knew, and it was difficult to look at it for long at a time. Dark marks crusted it. Blood, she thought.

  The white shell should be there, too, Jenny thought. Amayon’s prison. She was ashamed of her desire to see it. To know if he were comfortable.

  Absurd, she thought, burning with embarrassment. Absurd. As if John were not in desperate peril, as if Ian were not still a demon’s slave …

  After leaving the study last night she had slept and wakened to find John lying beside her. He had cupped her cheek in his hand and touched his lips to hers, and it was as if all the filthiness and cruelty and lust Amayon had dragged her through were washed from her body and her mind. She wasn’t beautiful—she knew this and had always known it—but she saw her beauty in his eyes, and that was enough.

  Her mind still felt detached, as it had when she saw Cair Corflyn through Morkeleb’s eyes. She dwelt still, she knew, within the ensorcelled peridot, and that jewel lay in the silver bottle around Caradoc’s neck. Her hold on her flesh, she sensed, even without Amayon in occupation, was tenuous. The difference was that no demon dwelt in her abandoned flesh, and she could operate herself, like one of John’s machines, through the flaw in the jewel. The relief was greater than anything she had known.

  Later they’d slept again, but John still looked tired. There was a haunted look in his eyes, as if he glanced always over his shoulder for something he expected but never saw.

  “There shouldn’t be much of a trouble about the first.” Sitting on the floor at Jenny’s feet, John squeezed her hand. “There’ll be thunderstones in the treasuries of the Deep, won’t there, M’am?” He glanced over at Miss Mab. “I’ve heard as how the gnomes treasure ’em up. I reckon me credit’s good enough with old Balgub after this that he’d sell me one for not much more than a couple pounds of me flesh.”

  He spoke with a quick grin, but the gnome-witch looked away. Jenny felt John’s sudden stillness through her knees against his back.

  “No thunderstones lie in the Deep of Ylferdun,” said Miss Mab and looked away from his eyes.

  “Don’t be daft, M’am,” said John. “Your old pal Dromar spoke of ’em to me, four years ago …”

  “He was mistaken,” said the gnome-witch. “All have been sent to Wyldoom, in payment for a debt. And such things are far less common than rumor makes them. And in any case,” she added, as John drew in his breath to speak, “none would they surrender to thee for this matter.”

  Her old pale eyes met John’s squarely. Silence fell like a single water drop in a dream that spreads out to form a pond, and then a lake, and then an ocean that swallows the world.

  “It is from the metal of the thunderstones, you see,” she said, “that the Demon Gates are wrought. The metal from the stars holds spells as no other can, to render the Gates impervious to harm.”

  “As for a dragon’s tears,” said Polycarp, “I think that’s simply fanciful, for dragons do not weep.”

  Did Mellyn weep, Jenny wondered, when I escaped from Rocklys’ camp?

  And from that her mind turned again to Amayon, and she averted her face, ashamed that the others would see her own eyes fill.

  The silence in the small library was like crystal poison in a cup. The pierced lamps salted the Master’s foxy, pointed face, the old gnome-witch’s wrinkled one, with patterns of topaz flecks.

  John took a deep breath. “I see.” His voice was deadly level. “I’d thought to pay the third part of the teind with me own hair and nails, they bein’ the gift of me mother, who, barrin’ Rocklys herself, probably hated me most in the world. Everybody always tells me I have me mother’s nose but I need it meself to keep me specs on. Or do you plan to take that away from me as well?” His glance cut to Polycarp.

  The Master met his eyes squarely. “If we have to.”

  “Thy hair and nails will confirm the Demon Queen’s hold upon thee, Aversin,” said Miss Mab, turning the rings on her stubby fingers. “She counted upon just such a reading of the riddle, I think, divining as demons do in the shadows of thy mind the hatred thy mother bore thy father’s son. Of them could she fashion a fetch, to send into this world in thy stead. Perhaps use them to control thy heart and thy mind as well.”

  “Ah.” Jenny felt the tension in all of John’s muscles. Anger first, and then fear.

  “Was that somethin’ you knew, when you made me the spells to pass into the world behind the mirror?” he asked at last. “What they were likely to ask of me? Or that nobody here had the slightest intention of helping me pay this teind?”

  “I told thee they would trick thee, John Aversin,” Miss Mab said steadily. “And that it was not likely that thou wouldst leave the mirror with thy life.”

  “But you didn’t bother mentionin’ that all anyone would say about it was, Oh, sorry, son, can’t pay your teind, bit on the steep side.” He stood, dragonlike himself in his spiked rusty doublet. “But we’ll take the protection and the freedom and the healin’ nonetheless, thanks ever so, and we’ll see to it that your name lives forever. So just la
y right down there and wait while I get the ax.”

  He swung angrily to face the Master. “Tell me one thing. Those guards who’ve been hangin’ about every time I turn around today—they’re to make sure I don’t leave this place, aren’t they?”

  Polycarp looked away.

  Face rigid, John looked down at Jenny, who had half-risen in shock and horror and rage. He bent to take her hands, his fingers like ice, and kissed her lips. To her he said, “Well, and they’re right, love.” There was a scathe of bitter rage in his voice. “Can’t let the demons into this world, but somebody’s got to go in and get the things to fight them with, for the sake of the King, and for Gar, and for the Law and all me friends. But it was for you, love. It was all for you.”

  He strode from the chamber, and the blue wool curtains lifted and swung with his passing. Polycarp rose at once and went to the door, and Jenny, reaching with her mind, heard him say to the men outside, “Go after him. You know what to do, but be quiet about it.”

  The Master caught Jenny by the wrist as she tried to follow. For a moment they looked into one another’s eyes, bright blue into blue, understanding and not wanting to understand. “They won’t hurt him,” said Polycarp. “Just escort him to his room. Please understand, Lady Jenny. We cannot let him go free. No one who has had dealings with the Hellspawn, who owes a teind to any of that kind, can go free.”

  She jerked her arm against his grip, but he did not let go. Furious, she demanded, “Or me either?”

  His blue eyes were sad. “Or you either, Lady Jenny. Think about it.”

  She pulled away and stood in the lamplit study, trembling.

  “The Law holds harmless those who have been possessed,” said Polycarp, “because in any case they seldom survive. But those who go willingly to the Hellspawn and bargain with them cannot be trusted, nor let to live. It is the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a man do, but it remains that he owes them a teind he cannot pay, and in the end he must be theirs. That we cannot allow. Not in life, and not in death.”

  Jenny looked back helplessly at Miss Mab, but the gnome-witch met her eyes with calm pity and grief. “Thou knowst it for truth, Lady. I helped him, that they would have one less mage within their thrall, knowing that you, as mage, would understand. With the King’s Moon he is theirs; when the breath goes out of his ribs he is theirs; and by the demons that seized thee, the demons that hold thy son, thou knowst that he cannot pay them what it is they ask. This is how demons work, child. Through terror, and love, and fear to let the worst come to pass.”

  “There has to be a way.”

  The last New Moon of summer had set almost three hours ago. Even so far to the south the sky held a lingering indigo luminosity in which each star, like a dragon, sang its own name in music undecipherable to the human heart. From the battlements Jenny looked up at them in a kind of horror, and then beside her, into the white eyes of the gray-haired man who had come silently to her side.

  Her voice sounded steady, detached, unreal to her own ears. “John tells me that the King’s Moon was what they called the season when the King of the Long Strand, where Greenhythe is now, and the lords of the little realms of Somanthus and Silver and Urrate Isles were killed to pay a teind to the gods for harvest.”

  I know. The dragon tilted his head a little to one side, a characteristic movement. She could almost see the glowing bobs of his antennae. I was there. His gestures were not human, nor was there anything resembling humanity in the structure of the narrow, odd-boned face. It was curious to see him as a man, though no stranger, she thought, than the days she had passed in the form of a dragon. If he could transform himself into a dragon no larger than a peregrine, surely this matter was little to him.

  Yet still it gave her a strange feeling, looking into those diamond-crystal eyes, alien and without pity.

  She repeated, “There has to be a way.”

  It would be ill done, Wizard-woman, to cheat the demons, as though we were petty gamesters plying ruses with fake gems in the marketplace. Morkeleb laid his long white hands on the stone of the parapet. Only his nails were unhuman, black curving claws like enameled steel. His shoulders seemed stick-thin, like a doll wrought of bird-bone.

  Honor is honor, whether one bargains with the honorable or the dishonorable. This is what the Shadow-drakes said. Once I did not think so. But to take freedom and healing, and return to them only charred bones; this is theft. Moreover, I do not think demons would be deceived even by the slyest of illusion. Sometimes, Jenny, there is no way.

  “Easy words,” she cried, thinking of the means by which demon-callers were killed. And her mind formed the shape, if not the words: You do not love.

  The white eyes regarded her, and hers fell before them.

  It is true that loving is not a thing of dragons. Yet sometimes we do not only because we do not know how. I would not have entered the Hell behind the mirror, Jenny, because I know the hopelessness of it. Yet he, too, knew, and here you stand in the hope of being freed. I could never have done such, for I did not— I do not—know how to perform acts of such foolishness. Yet I am grateful to him that he did what I, Morkeleb the Black, the Destroyer of the Elder Droon and the greatest of the star-drakes, what I could not and would not have done because it is not a thing of dragons.

  He turned his eyes from her, to the velvet gulfs of Nast Wall and the thin red flicker of John’s comet burning low above its ridges. His brows pinched above the thin birdlike nose.

  Now I am not even a thing of dragons, for I surrendered my will—surrendered my magic—that the demons should not trap me through it, and I do not understand now what it is that I am.

  Morkeleb, my friend… She touched his shoulder, and he regarded her with eyes that were no longer a crystalline labyrinth, but a straight road infinitely distant, vanishing into colorless air.

  Morkeleb, my friend, you are what you are. I treasure you as you are, always. Whatever you do and are, or whatever you become, I will be your friend. Maybe not what you wanted, once on a time, but the best that is in me to give.

  Not once on a time, he said, and not always. And she saw on his face the cold crystal track of tears. For you will die, Wizard-woman, as humans die, and I will become what I will become, and what will exist of what lay between us?

  He looked away, unwilling that any should see his tears or his heart. He had loved gold with a deep and terrible covetousness, and he had loved power and the knowledge that power opened to him. She sensed in him the grief of knowing, as she did, that there was no going back to what he had been.

  She put up her hand to brush away his tears, and he stayed it with his long cold-taloned grip.

  Touch them not, Wizard-woman; they would burn your hand.

  So she took the crystal dew-spoon from around her neck and caught the tears in its bowl, and set it aside on the parapet.

  What exists of the worlds that once you visited? she asked him, and gestured to the darkness and the stars. They are still there, living in your heart.

  The hearts of dragons are not as the hearts of men. They are of a different composition, like their tears. I can return unto those worlds whensoever I choose. But you will be lost to me in the dark oceans of time, and there will be no calling you back. It was for this reason that I sought the Birdless Isle, and for this reason that I remained.

  Nothing is ever lost, said Jenny. Nor ever forgotten. And who knows what lies in the hearts and the dreams of the Dragon-shadows? When the Twelve Gods drove the Lord of Time away from them into exile, it was because they had forgotten that they were only things that he had himself dreamed. Nevertheless he let them drive him away and surrendered his godhood to them. He knew that they would always have existence in his heart for as long as it mattered either to him or to them.

  He said nothing for a time, but wept, and she stood silent beside him, holding his hand, and now and then gathering his tears in the crystal spoon. And it was true what he had said, that they blackened the silver handle where they t
ouched it, as if, though the body he wore was that of a man, it was like his dragon-shape, formed of elements unknown on the planet of oceans and trees.

  In time he looked at her with a glint of his old amused irony and said, Vixen, that you turn even my grief into a present for your husband’s sake, and she heard under his wryness a new understanding of what it is to be human.

  She picked up the spoon, which had a pool of tears in the bowl perhaps the volume of the first joint of her thumb. I will throw this over the parapet, then, she said, willing in her heart that she would have the strength to do as she said. I would not rob you of your grief, my friend.

  Nor I rob you of your husband, he said, my friend. And he took the spoon from her hand and laid it carefully down on the stone once more. Nor yet would I rob my friend of his wife, for whom he did what I have neither the courage nor the foolishness—love, as you term it—to know how to do. He touched her cheek and her hair, as John did, and looked into her eyes with eyes that were not human and had never been. I understand now why we startreaders do not take the semblance of humankind more often.

  She shook her head, not understanding, and he drew her to him and kissed her lips.

  Because it is not a semblance, he said. And we are not fools. There. Now I have done. He reached up one hand with its long black nails and touched aside the tears that ran down her own face. Is this why the God of Women is also the Queen of the Sea? Because tears are as the ocean is, salt?

  She smiled a little. I do not know. Maybe because they are as the ocean is, endless.

  As is all human grief that waters the roots of loving. And his words in her mind encompassed the great stretches of time he had seen, before her birth or her mother’s birth, and long after she and John and Ian would be dead. He nodded toward the spoon with its thin, glimmering pool. “If you will send that to the Demon Queen, look that the vial you choose is wrought of crystal, not glass.” He spoke now as men speak, though in her mind she still felt the moving currents of his thought. “The tears of dragons are dangerous things. They will consume ordinary glass. Even crystal they will burn away in time.”