Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  Victorious in your seeking, Wizard-woman?

  “I was. The glassmaker should have it ready tomorrow. Is there something that can destroy a thunderstone in the same fashion, minutes after we render it over to them? Before they can use it for their own purposes? What destroys iron?”

  Water, said Morkeleb in her mind. Rust. Time.

  “It always comes back to time.” John picked out a fragment of pork from the stew and offered it to Morkeleb with his fingers. “If the Lord of Time were to return with a bag of the stuff for sale he’d make a bloody fortune.”

  Only among men, replied the dragon. It is said the Shadow-drakes play with it, make music from it, as we make music from gold. Keep your scorched and lifeless pap, Dreamweaver; it is not a thing of dragons to eat such stuff.

  “Polycarp’s cook’ll slit his wrists with grief if he hears.” John popped the meat into his own mouth. “Is it true thunderstones are bits of stars?”

  They are pieces of what men call Falling Stars, the dragon replied. No more true stars than this comet you have been seeking. In truth, they are balls and fragments of rock that float in the dark between worlds. Thus human magic cannot weave spells to destroy or change them, for you do not know the world whereof they come. Most are covered with ice; between worlds it is very cold. They drift in great shoals, like north-sea pack-ice in the spring. The young sport among them.

  Into Jenny’s mind came the image of drifting chunks and towers and fortresses of ice, glimmering in the starlight, and the rainbow shadows of dragons flickering among them, no bigger, it seemed, than dragonflies. In the void between worlds the dragons did not have the same shape that they wore in the world of ocean and trees, and this, too, she found troubling.

  Stars themselves are not what they appear. They consist solely of fire, and heat, and the light they emit. There is no “fragment ” of a star.

  “Aye, well,” said John softly, “she didn’t say ’fragment,’ now, did she? She said ’piece.’ Which could mean the star’s light itself, couldn’t it? Gathered in a hothwais, like the fire’s heat that kept the old Milkweed in the air, or like the air the gnomes use when they go into the levels where the air is foul.”

  They looked at each other, with uncertainty and hope. “Miss Mab will know,” said Jenny. “It would take the magic of the gnomes to prepare one. No line of human wizardry ever understood how to source magic to alter stone. What about the gift from an enemy?”

  “Well,” said John softly. “I’ve had a thought or two about that. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to break me out of here so I can collect that one meself.”

  The moon had long sunk below the citadel walls when Jenny emerged from John’s room. She nodded to the guards and felt their eyes on her the length of the battlement: the Demon-trafficker’s woman. Maybe a trafficker in demons herself. Like that woman a year ago in Haylbont Isle who cut her children to pieces.

  Jenny found herself praying that Miss Mab had returned with the spells against dreaming. The prospect of another night like the last made her frightened and sick.

  The narrow stair at the end of the gallery—the dark arched doors of the empty Scriptorium, then down the winding servants’ ways. Storerooms and kitchen wings. Gnomes never liked to be housed in towers. There was a small courtyard at the citadel’s lowest level, near the bronze doors that led to the Deep stairs. From the cobbled pavement Jenny descended a further half-dozen steps to an area barely larger than a closet, from which several doors let into a suite of subterranean rooms. She saw no light in the round window she knew was Miss Mab’s, but this meant nothing. Mageborn and a gnome, Miss Mab could read in the dark if she chose. When Jenny tapped at the door and spoke the gnome-wife’s name, however, she received no reply, and the door gave inward with her touch.

  “Miss Mab?” She stepped through, looking around at the darkened room. “Taseldwyn?”

  The cupboard stood open and empty; the blankets had been stripped from the bed. Where Miss Mab’s enormous jewel box had stood on the end of the table there was nothing, no combs or brushes, no blue satin slippers. Puzzled, Jenny stepped out into the areaway.

  “What is it? Who comes?” Light flared topaz behind the glass of another door. The door opened wider and revealed the wrinkled face of Miss Tee. “Ah, the magewife!” The door opened wider. The engineer was dressed for bed, in tucked and embroidered linen. Her pale-green hair lay braided on her thick breasts, and she had removed all her many earrings for the night. “Didst come for Arawan-Taseldwyn, dear? She has gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Miss Tee nodded. “The Lord of the Deep sent this morn, bidding her return to Ylferdun. Word of this traffic of demons reached him, I think. She has gone to be tested by the other Wise Ones of the Deep.” She clicked her tongue disapprovingly and shook her head. “Fools. As if any would think Taseldwyn would have aught to do with such, or that I wouldn’t know of it, I wouldn’t see it in her eyes.”

  “Tested?” Jenny’s heart turned chill. “You mean she’s a prisoner?”

  “They’re all fools.” Miss Tee shrugged. “And so they’ll find, the Wise Ones, Utubarziphan and Rolmeodraches and the rest of the mages, but only after they’ve wasted a year …”

  “A year?”

  The green eyes blinked up at her. They were the color of peridot, a stone Jenny had come to hate. “This is the length of time, they say, in which a demon’s influence will show itself.” She set down the lamp she carried and took and patted Jenny’s hand in her own hard muscular ones. “Worry not on this, child. She is only held in her own warrens on the Ninth level, under guard to be sure, but she will be well treated. Thou canst be sure of that. She is of the Howteth-Arawan, and they are powerful in all the Deeps of the Delver-Folk. Their Patriarch will never let the council condemn one of theirs. Even for humans a year can’t be that long. Sevacandrozardus, Lord of the Deep, is a fool and a twitterer on the subject of demons. Dost know he wished even to have the doors to the citadel shut, because of that vial, and the seal, and the box? Because thou who wert possessed of a demon still walked unhindered? Yes, great ill came of the demons in times past, but just because man or woman touched an object that was touched by Hellspawn does not mean they will become corrupt themselves.”

  Climbing the stair to the citadel’s upper levels, Jenny wasn’t so sure of that. Throughout the day, the reminiscence of Amayon had returned to her, over and over again, like an itch that could be neither scratched nor salved. It came back now, the frantic desire to know at least where the shell had been bestowed.

  She put it aside. It would do no good, she thought. She was reminded of her sister, when Sparrow suspected her husband of carrying on an affair with Mol Bucket: Sparrow had followed Trem one night and had seen him go into the bold-eyed cowherd’s house. There were some things it was better not to know.

  Miss Mab in prison. Even in her own chambers a year would be a long time. Would the Lord of the Deep or the gnome sorcerers whose magic was the true heart of the Deep permit Jenny to see Miss Mab? Would they even let her into the Deep?

  At the dark archways of the Scriptorium she paused. Jenny could see a line of brightness framing the door of Polycarp’s study. On impulse she hurried across the cold tiles. A thunder-stone that could be used to form a demon-gate was one matter. A hothwais, which, for all the understanding of the nature of stone that lay at its creation, was at bottom a low-level spell, was another. Even if it retained within it the light of the stars, it could not be used by the demons for any purpose whatever.

  When she reached the door, she found it open a little, the lamp inside sending a slice of yellow light across the octagonal tiles. Jenny touched the door, pushing it farther ajar. Within she saw Polycarp seated at the pickled oak table where she had so often scried him in conference with John. The fire burned low in the round hearth, mingling its glow with that of the pierced lamps to thread the Master’s mop of curls with amber, edge the bony arch of the nose, and tip the lashes of his shadowed eyes with
brightness.

  His arms were stretched out on the table and cupped in his palms he held a small white conch-shell, mottled with pink and stoppered with crimson wax. He bent his head, as if listening to a voice whispering almost too low to be understood. His eyes were half-shut, concentrating on everything that was being said.

  Jenny stepped back, cloaking herself automatically in darkness and glamour. She almost threw up with shock. No, she thought. Polycarp, no. Put it down. Put it away.

  She thought, No wonder the Lord of the Deep suspects Miss Mab as well. No wonder he speaks of having the Deep locked.

  No wonder they want to kill John.

  Morkeleb spoke truly. This is an infection spreading poison to whatever it touches.

  The Master’s thin fingers stroked the shell delicately. Then his mouth flinched in revulsion, and he put the thing on the table and pushed it away. He rose so suddenly that he nearly overset his chair, and stood for a time, breathing hard and shivering in every limb. With convulsive speed he snatched up the shell and carried it to the black iron cupboard on the wall. He thrust the shell inside and slammed the door with a clank. His fingers fumbled with the key, the brass glinting fiery in the lamplight. He twisted it hard and crossed the room in two strides to his desk, flipping open a box of carved black oak, as if he would put the key into it.

  But he didn’t. He put it in his pocket.

  Jenny melted into the shadows and fled to John’s room with cold dread beating in her heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Destroy her.”

  It was Ian’s voice.

  He lounged in a camp chair in Caradoc’s tent, though Jenny couldn’t see the rest of the tent; it was as though the wicked urlight shone sickly only around the table where the boy and Cara-doc sat. His long black hair was oily and unwashed, and his face was not the face of a child.

  “And find another wizard where?” Caradoc’s shirt was open and the silver bottle that he carried around his neck now lay on the table. Eight jewels were scattered across the table. Each flickered in the wasted light.

  “We can’t risk it.”

  “Scared?”

  Ian’s eyes narrowed. He turned his head and looked through the wall of green crystal that separated them from Jenny. The jewels on the table seemed more alive than his eyes. “Concerned,” he temporized, and through the double and treble meanings in his voice Jenny sensed—felt—remembered from Amayon’s mind the shape and terror and darkness of the Hell from which they’d come, a cold place where soft things shifted and mutated, feeding upon one another and living in fear of the formless awfulness in the Hell’s heart.

  “Don’t be.” Caradoc held up a bright green jewel and, with it in his hand, walked over to the crystal wall behind which Jenny crouched, naked and shivering.

  He smiled, his broad, clean-shaven face curved with contempt. She saw again, through the human arrogance, the face of the demon Folcalor: more intelligent than the others of his kind, sly and greedy and watchful. “It’s this easy.” He raised his staff with its moonstone head.

  Jenny cried, Don’t! No!

  He struck the wall, struck it on the great fire-rimmed flaw that ran from the floor to lose itself in the darkness above Jenny’s head, and at the blow she felt faint, as if she were bleeding.

  John! she screamed, but John was asleep—she could see him sleeping far off. Her own body lay curled at his side, the body she could no longer reach, no longer touch. Though the moon had set early, Jenny could see, as if by its pallid light, the patterns that traced his flesh like the slime-track of some unspeakable thing; the pale mark left in the pit of his throat. As she watched John turned his face away, his expression taut with pleasure: Aohila, he said.

  Help me!

  He reached out, and she heard the Demon Queen laugh.

  “Mother?” For a quick second she saw through the crack the bright summer night in the Winterlands, and Adric’s stocky form against the backdrop of battlements and stars. “Mother, is that you?”

  Then Caradoc’s staff smote the crack in the wall like an ore-crusher’s hammer, and Jenny staggered back and fell. Blood from a hundred painless cuts was sticky on her hands. She tried to crawl away from the wall, but the demon loomed there in the darkness, striking the crack again and again. Splinters burst and flew from his knotted staff and from the wall itself, like chips of glass. Rage contorted his face; when he opened his mouth, green light came out, and curls of smoke. Unable to breathe, Jenny crept toward the farthest wall, but her own flesh was too much for her to endure. She sank to the floor in her own blood, covered her head with her arms, and waited.

  She woke sometime after, exhausted.

  Caradoc was gone. The circles he had drawn glowed faintly still in the darkness. Something told her that it was mid-morning in the world outside, the world most people knew as real.

  Aching with weakness, she dragged herself to the flaw in the jewel and through it poured her consciousness into her distant body again.

  * * *

  There was a very old spell Jenny had learned from Night-raven—not that Nightraven had ever used such a cantrip herself. But the women of the Iceriders sometimes used it, in the places where their magic feathers told them their lovers were meeting with younger and better-favored girls. It was a spell that could be worked with very slight power.

  Exhaustion weighed her down, beyond anything she had felt in the hard days at Palmorgin. Food lay ready on a tray for her: John had used the bread, the boiled eggs, the fruits, and the salt fish to create a dumpy little lady all stuck together with jam, “I love you” squiggled in honey around the rim. But though she laughed, she was barely able to eat, and the bitter memory returned, of John whispering the Demon Queen’s name, oblivious to Jenny’s cries for help.

  She washed and dressed and collected what she would need for Nightraven’s spell: a curtain weight for a spindle and a basketful of weed-fibers, dust, lint, and the combings of her own hair. These she carried down to the Undermarket. Spreading her cloak in a corner behind the booth of a woman selling gourds— cut and glazed and painted as bottles and dippers—she began to spin thread, and with every turn of the spindle, with every twist of her fingers, she daubed a little magic into the air.

  Morkeleb joined her, guised as a gray-haired man. Jenny did not know when. Maybe some spell of unseeing cloaked him; she did not know. But none spoke to either of them, and when the town merchants packed up their goods and the market wardens came around the hall making sure the last stragglers departed, they passed them by as if they were not there.

  Once the hall was cleared, the bronze doors at its inner end opened. From the hall beyond those doors, carts were trundled out and loaded. Jenny used little magic, but only sat and spun and watched. And in time it was obvious that no one was looking at the end cart of the line, so she gathered her spinning into her basket and slipped into that cart, covering herself with her cloak.

  She didn’t know where Morkeleb hid, but after the carts had all been rolled into the inner hall and the doors closed and locked for the night, the dragon was there. Guards sat at a little table playing dominoes near the outer doors. The click of the dominoes sounded very loud, and the smell of the cocoa they drank filled the dark: rank, sweet, spicy. There were few lamps in the hall, and they hung on chains dozens of feet from the high stone ceiling. The night below the ground lay heavy on most of the chamber, among the looming shadows of the neatly packed carts. It did not take much magic to collect it a little thicker about herself as she crossed to the doors that led into the Deep.

  Morkeleb met her there. He seemed uneasy, drawn in on himself: It is troubling to me, he said, to become of humankind. The things of humans speak loudly in my flesh and my mind, anger and envy, sloth and fear—above all other things, fear. I ask myself things I would never ask: What if we cannot leave this place? What if I do not recall the turnings of the passageways and stairs? What if we are found, or my magic fails me, or we return to discover that this Mas
ter of Halnath has indeed listened to the demon in the shell and freed it to take over his flesh? Do men and women truly live in such fear?

  Most do, said Jenny. And most of the ills and griefs of humankind arise out of it. And at the bottom of all fears is the knowledge that all will one day end.

  Morkeleb said, Ah, and fell silent for a time. At the foot of the stair they crossed a bridge, lacy stone grown in a thousand turrets and columns. Water thundered far below them in darkness. And magic is the anodyne to those fears? The way to braid and weave air and fate and time? Or to give oneself the illusion that one does so?

  I suppose it is, said Jenny, startled. I had not thought of it before, but yes. Magic is the weapon we wield against chance and time. And does it succeed? asked the dragon. She said, I do not know.

  The world beneath Nast Wall was crossed and woven with rivers, gorges, and bridges where lamps of silver burned. Everywhere, as they descended deeper, Jenny saw latticework windows looking out into those gorges, or opening from smaller dwelling-caverns into larger. Each passageway, each stair, each road was dimly illumined with globes and tall thin chimneys of colored glass, and by the light they shed the gnomes passed by on their business, their long ghostly hair wound up in jeweled sticks and combs and frames, or else left to trail over their bowed shoulders like clouds. None spoke to Morkeleb and Jenny, or seemed to see them. The dragon’s cold hand, with its long claws, held Jenny’s, and he led her unerringly through the ways that he had traversed with his mind and his dreams, when four years ago he had lain in the upper reaches of the Deep on the far side of the mountains, whispering music to be whispered in turn from the gnomes’ gold.

  There is too much gold here, he said, pausing to get his bearings at the head of a road through a cavern where the very stones sparkled. The Shadow-drakes were right. I find now that its mere presence is a taste in my heart, a sweetness remembered, and it is difficult.