Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jenny wove the wards of protection around them, listening for the first beating of dragon wings in the dark.

  Put all of your magic into it, whispered Morkeleb’s voice in her mind. Leave none for yourself, none in your flesh, your bones, your heart. It will do you no good in any case, and the demons will take you again through it. That is the secret of the Shadow-drakes.

  Jenny said, I can’t. We’ll be in danger…

  Trust, said Morkeleb. The whalemages have laid on us spells of warding as well, as good as yours or mine.

  Jenny’s hands shook, and the circles of power and energy and Limitation with which she had surrounded herself and him waned in the jumping torchflare. The crossbows hung on their straps from the cable that ringed the dragon’s body, the spiked and terrible shape of them blending with his spines. She tried to call on the dragon within her soul, but since her escape from Rocklys’ camp, it seemed to her that that portion had been left behind. I can’t.

  Trust.

  She thought she saw the flares and torches through his body, as if he were insubstantial, wrought of smoke himself. His eyes, and the bobs on the ends of his antennae, were a glitter of stars in the darkness that thinned away like smoked glass.

  But his voice remained strong in her mind. Trust.

  She surrendered the last of her magic, pouring it into the spells that would guard them both from delusion and panic. Without it she felt empty, cold, and naked as she climbed onto his back.

  His wings unfurled without a sound. He lifted as the fire showed them the first of the attackers. It was Yrsgendl, white and scarlet, with Bliaud on his back. Silently they rose, higher and higher, fading into the dark.

  Jenny saw the dragons winging from Rocklys’ camp: pink and green, gold and green, yellow, rainbow … blue. Oh my son, she thought, as she hooked her feet hard through the cable and slung the first of the heavy crossbows into the cradle of her arms. Oh my son. Only the discipline of having studied magic let her close her mind.

  Yrsgendl plunged, spitting fire and acid onto the camp. From all around the redoubt, from every trench and dugout, arrows spired up, fell back … And a single black heavy javelin slammed up straight and hard from the trundling Urchin that suddenly swung to life, pinning the dragon through the left wing.

  It was a lucky shot, taking him through the widest portion of his silhouette against the dark. Morkeleb plunged from above, and Jenny swung the crossbow to her shoulder and fired downward, and that arrow pierced the younger dragon’s back among the spines. Yrsgendl whipped around, mouth opening in a furious hiss, and Jenny felt/saw the demon illusions shiver and spatter around the wardings laid by the Demon Queen’s vial. She fired again, driving the red dragon down, and a second harpoon from the Urchin knifed upward, burying itself in Yrsgendl’s breast.

  Yrsgendl wheeled, heading for the darkness, and again Morkeleb drove him down. Spitting, hissing, Enismirdal and Nymr plunged out of the sky above Morkeleb, but he slithered unseen from beneath their attacks, snapped and fastened on Yrsgendl’s wing, dragging him back. Yrsgendl flapped and fluttered, weakening, and the Urchin, breaking through the damaged redoubt, trundled with surprising speed toward where the injured dragon would fall. Hagginarshildim, green and pink, and the surviving rainbow drake swooped on the machine, but John whipped and dodged, ducking from under the lashing tails, and the rainbow drake tore its own flesh open on the Urchin’s spines. When Hagginarshildim attacked a second time, she received a harpoon in her foreleg; Morkeleb drove her down, too, forcing her to remain at the scene of the action.

  Yrsgendl was on the ground, sick with the effects of the drug on the harpoon’s tip. This, Jenny knew, was the tricky part, for the harpoons were tipped not with poison but with a powerful serum of poppy, and the dragons would be able to shake it off quickly. The rainbow drake spat fire at John as he rolled free of the Urchin, dived across the intervening ground to where the red and alabaster shape lay. Jenny saw firelight flash in the crystal seal that John pulled from his doublet.

  Then Nymr was attacking, and Morkeleb whipped around to evade, and Jenny saw nothing of what passed below. But a moment later, as her own drugged crossbow bolt sank into the flesh of the blue dragon’s neck, she saw from the corner of her eye a slither of dark-red flame, and as Nymr lashed at Morkeleb, teeth and tail gleaming, Yrsgendl whirled up from below and sank his teeth into the blue dragon’s tail, wrenching and tearing at the flesh.

  Jenny heard a dim shrieking in her mind, the cursing and wailing of a demon disembodied, but could not spare a thought to the matter. Nymr was a big dragon, too big to be easily driven into range of the Urchin’s bolts. As he fought, Yrsgendl released him, only to circle and plunge on him from above as Morkeleb held him in combat. By the glinting torchlight Jenny saw who rode the white and scarlet dragon, and her heart stood still. Had she had any magic remaining she would have stretched it forth—

  Don’t do it! she thought wildly. Don’t do it!

  John unhooked his feet from the braided cable around Yrsgendl’s body, and as the younger dragon fastened for a third time on the spiky ridge of Nymr’s spine, he slid down and caught his footing among the bristling spears.

  John…!

  Ian swung around, the thin hollows of his face transformed by exhaustion into a man’s. The blank blue eyes widened as he raised his hand, but John was quick and very strong. He caught the boy’s wrist, and Jenny saw, lashed to his palm by a thong, the pale cold seal of the Demon Queen.

  Ian screamed and gasped, his head falling back; Nymr gave a great frenzied thrash in the air, and John grabbed the cable, hooked his arm through it as he swung free and fell. Below them whirled darkness, flares, and the spinning shapes of dragons: Morkeleb said, Stay where you are, Wizard-woman! I’ll catch him should he fall.

  But John didn’t fall. Entangled in his two captors, Nymr could only thrash, and Ian reached down, grabbing his father’s arm, dragging him back onto the blue dragon’s back. He moved clumsily, for it took far greater effort for him to reach out from an un-flawed crystal, but he managed at least to hang on. Dimly, Jenny could hear Morkeleb calling out instructions to Yrsgendl, or rather using the younger dragon as another limb of himself, so powerful were the wordless impulses of his mind. Morkeleb’s teeth shifted from Nymr’s foreleg to his neck, and held the bigger dragon immobilized while John worked his way, hand over hand, to Nymr’s head. In her mind Jenny could hear the screaming of demons, furious, dispossessed, thick as whirling leaves in the air: Gothpys, and Bliaud’s demon Zimimar, and the one that had held sway over Yrsgendl. Among the torrents of cobalt and peacock Jenny glimpsed silver, like a ball of glass, and this ball John seized and drew out, dripping with the dragon’s blood.

  Then he flung his other arm around Nymr’s neck, pressed his face into the swirling ribbons of the mane, and held on, as Morkeleb and Yrsgendl released their hold and floated back, and the blue dragon began to circle, slowly and carefully, to the earth.

  Jenny could hear Ian crying out, “Father! Father!” Desperate, terrified, but with enough sense to simply hold fast to the cable and let Nymr bring them both to ground.

  John and Ian were clinging together, the boy weeping, John stroking black handfuls of his son’s hair, when Morkeleb lit nearby and Jenny all but fell from his back. “It’s all right,” John whispered to the boy’s frantic sobbing, “it’s all right, you’re all right now,” as Jenny threw her arms around them both.

  “It’s all right,” she said—foolish, she thought, but the only thing she could say, “Ian, the demon is gone …”

  “You saw,” he whispered, choked. “Mother, you saw … I … I …”

  And he had seen her.

  Above! cried Morkeleb, and Nymr and Yrsgendl launched themselves skyward again, as the rainbow drake and the surviving Icerider gyred down on them, spitting and slashing.

  Jenny flung herself back to Morkeleb, a barely visible star-wraith in the smoke and dark, and John dragged his dazed son to the protection
of the Urchin, half-lifting him through the hatch. Then the Shadow-dragon leaped skyward again, with Jenny slinging to her shoulder another of the double-weight crossbows, and Nymr and Yrsgendl sweeping out under Morkeleb’s command to gather in the next dragon to be driven into the Urchin’s line of drugged fire.

  Together they drove down Mellyn, numbed with poppy. The screams of the demons echoed in Jenny’s mind when she heard a hissing shriek above her and, turning, saw Caradoc himself and the golden drake Centhwevir streaking down on them like aureate lightning. Below her, from every ravine of the hills, rose the throbbing of drums and the braying of Rocklys’ trumpets as her forces advanced.

  They had, Jenny thought, intended to hold off their attack till dawn, when the dragons would have reduced Uriens’ camp to confusion. But with the dragons slipping out of her grasp, it was now or never, and she threw her forces toward the fortress wall. As the other dragons closed protectively around Morkeleb’s flickering shape, Jenny heard the deep battle-cry, “Uwanë! Uwanë!” and knew that Gareth had been ready, waiting for this.

  John, get Ian out of there! It occurred to her to wonder where Bliaud—as clumsy at working from his prison as Ian—had hidden himself, and if they could get themselves out from between the hammer and the anvil in time.

  Then dragons closed around Centhwevir, catching and dragging at him, trying to force him to earth. The rainbow drake was down, twitching faintly on the ground—Jenny got the barest glimpse of him as Hagginarshildim, green and pink, circled back from spreading havoc on the camp, and Enismirdal winged out of the passes of the mountains at Caradoc’s call. Jenny wasted two of her three remaining shots trying to hit Centhwevir but buried the third bolt in Enismirdal’s primrose neck. In the vast rout of slashing wings and snapping teeth that followed, she saw the yellow dragon veer and falter as the drug took its effect. Dimly she could hear Folcalor calling on his forces, trying to rally the remaining dragons and wizards, while the furious shouting of men in battle rose from beneath them.

  A heaving sea of forms struggled blindly in darkness below. Blood on steel, and now and then pale faces contorted in pain. Flares threw some light, but mostly it was primal chaos, the confusion as legend said had reigned upon the waters of the ocean before the Old God sang sea and sky apart. On a hill above the road a ring of fire had been established, and in its golden crown she glimpsed Rocklys on her horse, her standard-bearers around her signaling the corps commanders to their positions. Then the rainbow drake rose, with more crossbows, more heavy drugged bolts, and two of the great dragon-killing harpoons in her claws.

  An outcry from below made Jenny look down again. Through the striving knots of warriors the Urchin was moving, cutting down all in its path with its spikes, and Jenny saw it was heading straight for the lighted knoll where Rocklys sat. The Commander turned her head. She said something to an aide, who handed her her bow, and the men afoot closed up around her with their spears. Still the Urchin advanced, and there were soldiers running behind it, slipstreaming through the carnage where none dared stand in its way. Jenny was aware of Caradoc hurling spells at it, spells that glanced off the Demon Queen’s wards.

  Bolts shot from the Urchin’s forward ports, striking among Rocklys’ guards. Still she remained where she was, watching it come, mechanical and strange. She had chosen rocky ground, too steep for the Urchin to climb readily, though Jenny thought later that it could have done so.

  But it stopped. The hatch flipped open, and John emerged, his bow held in hands bloody from Nymr’s spines. He nocked an arrow, but he was slow—exhausted, Jenny thought.

  And Rocklys was not slow. She never was.

  Her arrow took John in the chest, the impact of it jarring him back, out of the Urchin’s hatchway. He fumbled, caught at the spines behind him, trying to get down unhurt. Jenny saw the blood, saw the fire gleam on his spectacles.

  Then he fell. With a roar of rage, the men who had run behind the Urchin surged up around it, cutting and slashing their way through Rocklys’ guard.

  Centhwevir wheeled and fled.

  Take him! Jenny cried. Follow him! Stop him! He has the prison-jewels!

  But the other dragons—Yrsgendl and Nymr and the young rainbow drake—circled and turned to the business of driving to ground Enismirdal and Hagginarshildim; Jenny thought she heard a voice in her mind say something about Time. Time. Follow and time.

  The prison-jewels, the talismans! Folcalor can still use them!

  Ian, and Bliaud, and the other mages—and she herself—were still prisoners.

  But Morkeleb was streaking after, leaving the battle behind in the night.

  We can’t let him land! How long, she wondered, could Ian maintain the connection between his imprisoned self and his body? Could his demon retake him before it was trapped, as Amayon had been trapped? Could another demon step into its place?

  Would he be strong enough to use magic to save his father’s life? John falling with an arrow in his heart … She thrust the thought aside.

  The demons would not have John’s body—Lord Ector would certainly make sure it was burned before it could be put to demon service—but his mind, his consciousness, would be forever behind the mirror, the prey of the vengeful Demon Queen.

  But of course, she seemed to hear Amayon saying it, of course, she herself could save him, if she turned back.

  Centhwevir winged on into the night, with Morkeleb and Jenny hard on his track. They passed over the wood of Imperteng and the Wildspae’s ebon curve; passed over the formless lands of Hythe and Magloshaldon and the farms of Belmarie. The sea, Jenny thought. They are going to the sea. To the Gate of Hell that lay below Somanthus Isle. She was desperate, terrified, when she felt the alien consciousness of Squidslayer and the other mages of the deep, rise out of that blue-black abyss.

  Rims of silver on the black waves and rocks. Centhwevir striking water, gold and blue shining for a moment. Then gone, and a moment later Morkeleb, plunging from the sky like invisible lightning, and the cold living impact with the sea.

  The spells of the whalemages enveloped her in air. She saw Centhwevir, wings and legs folded flat, a vast sea serpent lashing sideways as he dove.

  Frantic with horror, Jenny saw the Gate, the green glow deep within the rocks; saw herself, prisoned in the talisman jewel. All of them—Ian, Bliaud, Yseult … And deep in her mind the memory rose of the half-glimpsed horrors of that lightless watery Hell, of the thing the other demons called Adromelech, a silent, terrible darkness at its core. …

  Jenny sensed the whalemages following but afraid to reach forth with their magic lest they be taken, too. Green things, vile and deformed, floated in the water or reached from holes in the rocks: endlessly long tendrils of seaweed that finished in grasping hands, fish with glowing mouths and twisted, vestigial wings. These swarmed around Morkeleb, biting at him, tearing at Jenny’s shoulders and arms.

  Among the rocks, a hundred yards above the Gate, Morkeleb cornered Centhwevir, cutting him off from the sicklied glow beyond.

  The blue and gold dragon belched fire—not the acid of true dragons but demon-fire that enveloped witch and dragon in a searing cloud. Morkeleb rocked back, then attacked again, lashing and snapping, quicker than the larger drake and more able to slither through the holes and canyons. The deformed fish of the deeper trenches near the Gate rose up, but the whalemages and the dolphins formed a protective ring around the struggling dragons, driving the infected monsters back.

  Jenny fired her crossbow bolts into Centhwevir’s breast and neck, but the bubbles in the threshing water spoiled her aim, and the water itself slowed the missiles. At last she kicked her feet free of the cable, and with one harpoon in hand and the other slung on her back she launched herself across the black space toward the dragon and the demon-ridden mage.

  Caradoc saw her coming. She felt the burning weight of the spells that for three nights had dragged her strength. His shirt was torn, and his cap gone; the silver bottle floated behind him on its ribbon, and his gra
y hair lifted like seaweed in the swirling water. His eyes opened wide, and there was in them nothing but greenish light; his mouth opened, and like the dragon he blew fire out of it, transforming the water around her to searing steam.

  Illusion, pain, death, like the illusions of a dream. The demon Folcalor reached into her and tore at the roots and stumps of her magic for a handhold, but these she let go of, dragon and human alike, trusting only in the whalemages’ spells. With vicious demon wisdom it snatched at her dreams, the ancient longings and fears, and these, too, she released, letting them go. There was nothing in her mind, and only a clear whiteness in her heart, as she drove the harpoon with all her strength into Caradoc’s body, pinning him to the rocks against which Morkeleb had forced Centhwevir. Then, while Caradoc thrashed and picked at the harpoon and blood poured from his working mouth, she turned like a fish in the water and plunged her hands into the waving particolored glory of Centhwevir’s mane.

  As she drew out the crystal spike, the demon behind her hurled lightning, power, blasting her body away and against the rocks, driving the breath from her lungs. Cold claimed her, heat and cold together, and then falling darkness that seemed to stretch to the abyss beneath the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  She came to herself with the sounding of the ocean in her ears. She lay on a bed of something soft and damp and smelling of fish; morning sun sparkled in her eyes.

  Is it well with you, Jenny?

  Well? asked a number of other voices in her mind. Well?

  She sat up, and something rolled off her chest and plopped onto the stuff on which she lay—seaweed, she saw. When she reached down for it, she saw that her hand was crinkled and shiny, red with the scarring of burns. Though the pain was suppressed by spells of healing and of nepenthe, she was aware of it, as if her very bones had been cored with a red-hot rod.

  Everywhere that the rags of her burned clothing did not cover, her skin was the same, wrinkled and stiff with scars.