at them, then sliding back in surreptitious glances, and of
Gareth's face, as white as his collar lace.
A soft voice behind them said, "Please don't be angry
with him, Gareth."
Zyeme stood there, in plum-colored silk so dark it was
nearly black, with knots of pink-tinted cream upon her
trailing sleeves. Her mead-colored eyes were troubled.
"You did take his seal, you know, and depart without his
permission."
John spoke up. "Bit of an expensive slap on the wrist,
though, isn't it? I mean, there the dragon is and all, while
we're here waiting for leave to go after it."
Zyeme's lips tightened a little, then smoothed. At the
near end of the King's Gallery, a small door in the great
ones opened, and the Chamberlain Badegamus appeared,
quietly summoning the first of the petitioners whom the
King had acknowledged.
"There really is no danger to us here, you know. The
dragon has been confining his depredations to the farm-
steads along the feet of Nast Wall."
"Ah," John said comprehendingly. "That makes it all
right, then. And is this what you've told the people of
those farmsteads to which, as you say, the dragon's been
confining his depredations?"
Dragonsbane 125
The flash of anger in her eyes was stronger then, as if
no one had ever spoken to her so—or at least, thought
Jenny, observing silently from John's side, not for a long
time. With visible effort, Zyeme controlled herself and
said with an air of one reproving a child, "You must under-
stand. There are many more pressing concerns facing the
King..."
"More pressing than a dragon sitting on his doorstep?"
demanded Gareth, outraged.
She burst into a sweet gurgle of laughter. "There's no
need to enact a Dockmarket drama over it, you know.
I've told you before, darling, it isn't worth the wrinkles
it will give you."
He pulled his head back from her playful touch.
"Wrinkles! We're talking about people being killed!"
"Tut, Gareth," Bond Clerlock drawled, strolling
languidly over to them. "You're getting as bad as old
Polycarp used to be."
Under the paint, his face looked even more washed-
out next to Zyeme's sparkling radiance. With a forced
effort at his old lightness, he went on, "You shouldn't
grudge-those poor farmers the only spice in their dull little
lives."
"Spice..." Gareth began, and Zyeme squeezed his
hand chidingly.
"Don't tell me you're going to go all dull and altruistic
on us. What a bore that would be." She smiled. "And I
will tell you this," she added more soberly. "Don't do
anything that would further anger your father. Be patient—
and try to understand."
Halfway down the long gallery, the Chamberlain Bad-
egamus was returning, passing the small group of gnomes
who sat, an island of isolation, in the shadow of one of
the fluted ornamental arches along the east wall. As the
Chamberlain walked by, one of them rose in a silken whis-
per of flowing, alien robes, the cloudy wisps of his milk-
126 Barbara Hambly
white hair floating around his slumped back. Gareth had
pointed him out to Jenny earlier—Azwylcartusherands,
called Dromar by the folk of men who had little patience
with the tongue of gnomes, longtime ambassador from the
Lord of the Deep to the Court of Bel. Badegamus saw
him and checked his stride, then glanced quickly at Zyeroe.
She shook her head. Badegamus averted his face and
walked past the gnomes without seeing them.
"They grow impudent," the enchantress said softly.
"To send envoys here, when they fight on the side of the
traitors of Halnath."
"Well, they can hardly help that, can they, if the back
way out of the Deep leads into the Citadel," John remarked.
"They could have opened the Citadel gates to let the
King's troops in."
John scratched the side of his long nose. "Well, being
a barbarian and all, I wouldn't know how things are done
in civilized lands," he said. "In the north, we've got a
word for someone who'd do that to a man who gave him
shelter when he was driven from his home."
For an instant Zyeme was silent, her power and her
anger seeming to crackle in the air. Then she burst into
another peal of chiming laughter. "I swear, Dragonsbane,
you do have a refreshingly naive way of looking at things.
You make me feel positively ancient." She brushed a ten-
dril of her hair aside from her cheek as she spoke; she
looked as sweet and guileless as a girl of twenty. "Come.
Some of us are going to slip away from this silliness and
go riding along the sea cliffs. Will you come, Gareth?"
Her hand stole into his in such a way that he could not
avoid it without rudeness—Jenny could see his face color
slightly at the touch. "And you, our barbarian? You know
the King won't see you today."
"Be that as it may," John said quietly. "I'll stay here
on the off chance."
Dragonsbane 127
Bond laughed tinnily. "There's the spirit that won the
Realm!"
"Aye," John agreed in a mild voice and returned to the
carved bench where he and Jenny had been, secure in his
established reputation for barbarous eccentricity.
Gareth drew his hand from Zyeme's and sat down
nearby, catching his mantlings in the lion's-head arm of
the chair. "I think I'll stay as well," he said, with as much
dignity as one could have while disentangling oneself from
the furniture.
Bond laughed again. "I think our Prince has been in
the north too long!" Zyerne wrinkled her nose, as if at a
joke in doubtful taste.
"Run along, Bond." She smiled. "I must speak to the
King. I shall join you presently." Gathering up her train,
she moved off toward the bronze doors of the King's
antechamber, the opals that spangled her veils giving the
impression of dew flecking an apple blossom as she passed
the pale bands of the windowlight. As she came near the
little group of gnomes, old Dromar rose again and walked
toward her with the air of one steeling himself for a loathed
but necessary encounter. But she turned her glance from
him and quickened her step, so that, to intercept her, he
would have to run after her on his short, bandy legs. This
he would not do, but stood looking after her for a moment,
smoldering anger in his pale amber eyes.
"I don't understand it," said Gareth, much later, as the
three of them jostled their way along the narrow lanes of
the crowded Dockmarket quarter. "She said Father was
angry, yes—but he knew whom I'd be bringing with me.
And he must have known about the dragon's latest attack."
He hopped across the fish-smelling slime of the gutter to
avoid a trio of sailors who'd come staggering out of one
of the taverns that lined t
he cobbled street and nearly
tripped over his own cloak.
128 Barbara Hambly
When Badegamus had announced to the nearly empty
gallery that the King would see no one else that day, John
and Jenny had taken the baffled and fuming Gareth back
with them to the guest house they had been assigned in
one of the outer courts of the Palace. There they had
changed out of their borrowed court dress, and John had
announced his intention of spending the remainder of the
afternoon in the town, in quest of gnomes.
"Gnomes?" Gareth said, surprised.
"Well, if it hasn't occurred to anyone else, it has
occurred to me that, if I'm to fight this drake, I'm going
to need to know the layout of the caverns." With sur-
prising deftness, he disentangled himself from the intri-
cate crisscross folds of his mantlings, his head emerging
from the double-faced satin like a tousled and unruly weed.
"And since it didn't seem the thing to address them at
Court..."
"But they're plotting!" Gareth protested. He paused
in his search for a place to dump the handful of old-
fashioned neck-chains and rings among the already-
accumulating litter of books, harpoons, and the contents
of Jenny's medical pouch on the table. "Speaking to them
at Court would have been suicide! And besides, you're
not going to fight him in the Deep, are you? I mean..."
He barely stopped himself from the observation that in
all the ballads the Dragonsbanes had slain their foes in
front of their lairs, not in them.
"If I fight him outside and he takes to the air, it's all
over," John returned, as if he were talking about back-
gammon strategy. "And though it's crossed my mind we're
walking through a morass of plots here, it's to no one's
advantage to have the dragon stay in the Deep. The rest
of it's all none of my business. Now, are you going to
guide us, or do we go about the streets asking folk where
the gnomes might be found?"
Dragonsbane 129
To Jenny's surprise and probably a little to his own,
Gareth offered his services as a guide.
"Tell me about Zyerne, Gar," Jenny said now, thrusting
her hands deep into her jacket pockets as she walked.
"Who is she? Who was her teacher? What Line was she
in?"
"Teacher?" Gareth had obviously never given the mat-
ter a thought. "Line?"
"If she is a mage, she must have been taught by some-
one." Jenny glanced up at the tall boy towering beside
her, while they detoured to avoid a gaggle of passersby
around a couple of street-comer jugglers. Beyond them,
in a fountain square, a fat man with the dark complexion
of a southerner had set up a waffle stand, bellowing his
wares amid clouds of steam that scented the raw, misty
air for yards.
"There are ten or twelve major Lines, named for the
mages that founded them. There used to be more, but
some have decayed and died. My own master Caerdinn,
and therefore I and any other pupils of his, or of his
teacher Spaeth, or Spaeth's other students, are all in the
Line of Herne. To a mage, knowing that I am of the Line
of Heme says—oh, a hundred things about my power
and my attitude toward power, about the kinds of spells
that I know, and about the kind that I will not use."
"Really?" Gareth was fascinated. "I didn't know it was
anything like that. I thought that magic was just some-
thing—well, something you were born with."
"So is the talent for art," Jenny said. "But without
proper teaching, it never comes to fullest fruition; without
sufficient time given to the study of magic, sufficient striv-
ing ..." She broke off, with an ironic smile at herself. "All
power has to be paid for," she continued after a moment.
"And all power must come from somewhere, have been
passed along by someone."
It was difficult for her to speak of her power; aside
130 Barbara Hambly
from the confusion of her heart about her own power,
there was much in it that any not magebom simply did
not understand. She had in all her life met only one who
did, and he was presently over beside the waffle stand,
getting powdered sugar on his plaids.
Jenny sighed and came to a halt to wait for him at the
edge of the square. The cobbles were slimy here with sea
air and offal; the wind smelled offish and, as everywhere
in the city of Del, of the intoxicating wildness of the sea.
This square was typical of the hundreds that made up the
interlocking warrens ofBel's Dockmarket, hemmed in on
three-and-a-half sides by the towering, rickety tenements
and dominated by the moldering stones of a slate-gray
clock tower, at whose foot a neglected shrine housed the
battered image of Quis, the enigmatic Lord of Time. In
the center of the square bubbled a fountain in a wide basin
of chip-edged granite, the stones of its rim worn smooth
and white above and clotted beneath with the black-green
moss that seemed to grow everywhere in the damp air of
the city. Women were dipping water there and gossiping,
their skirts hiked up almost to their thighs but their heads
modestly covered in clumsy wool veils tied in knots under
their hair to keep them out of the way.
In the mazes of stucco and garish color of the Dock-
market, John's outlandishness hadn't drawn much notice.
The sloping, cobbled streets were crowded with sojoum-
ers from three-fourths of the Realm and all the Southern
Lands: sailors with shorn heads and beards like coconut
husks; peddlers from the garden province of Istmark in
their old-fashioned, bundly clothes, the men as well as
the women wearing veils; moneychangers in the black
gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wan-
derer's Children, forbidden to own land; whores painted
to within an inch of their lives; and actors, jugglers, scarf
sellers, rat killers, pickpockets, cripples, and tramps. A
few women cast looks of dismissive scorn at Jenny's
Dragonsbane 131
uncovered head, and she was annoyed at the anger she
felt at them.
She asked, "How much do you know about Zyeme?
What was she apprenticed as in the Deep?"
Gareth shrugged. "I don't know. My guess would be
in the Places of Healing. That was where the greatest
power of the Deep was supposed to lie—among their
healers. People used to journey for days to be tended
there, and I know most of the mages were connected with
them."
Jenny nodded. Even in the isolated north, among the
children of men who knew virtually nothing of the ways
of the gnomes, Caerdinn had spoken with awe of the
power that dwelled within the Places of Healing in the
heart of the Deep of Ylferdun.
Across the square, a religious procession came into
view, the priests of Kantirith, Lord of the Sea, walking
with their heads muffled in their ceremonial hoods, lest
an unclean sight distract them, the ritual wailing of the
flutes all but drowning out their murmured chants. Like
all the ceremonials of the Twelve Gods, both the words
and the music of the flutes had been handed down by rote
from ancient days; the words were unintelligible, the music
like nothing Jenny had heard at Court or elsewhere.
"And when did Zyeme come to Bel?" she asked Gar-
eth, as the muttering train filed past.
The muscles of the boy's jaw tightened. "After my
mother died," he said colorlessly. "I—I suppose I shouldn't
have been angry at Father about it. At the time I didn't
understand the way Zyeme can draw people, sometimes
against their will." He concentrated his attention upon
smoothing the ruffles of his sleeve for some moments,
then sighed. "I suppose he needed someone. I wasn't
particularly good to him about Mother's death."
Jenny said nothing, giving him room to speak or hold
his peace. From the other end of the square, another
132 Barbara Hambly
religious procession made its appearance, one of the
southern cults that spawned in the Dockmarket like rab-
bits; dark-complexioned men and women were clapping
their hands and singing, while skinny, androgynous priests
swung their waist-length hair and danced for the little idol
borne in their midst in a carrying shrine of cheap, pink
chintz. The priests of Kantiritfc seemed to huddle a little
more closely in their protecting hoods, and the wailing of
the flutes increased. Gareth spared the newcomers a dis-
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