approving glance, and Jenny remembered that the King
of Bel was also Pontifex Maximus of the official cult;
Gareth had no doubt been brought up in the most careful
orthodoxy.
But the din gave them the illusion of privacy. For all
any of the crowd around them cared, they might have
been alone; and after a time Gareth spoke again.
"It was a hunting accident," he explained. "Father and
I both hunt, although Father hasn't done so lately. Mother
hated it, but she loved my father and would go with him
when he asked her to. He teased her about it, and made
little jokes about her cowardice—but he wasn't really
joking. He can't stand cowards. She'd follow him over
terrible country, clinging to her sidesaddle and staying up
with the hunt; after it was over, he'd hug her and laugh
and ask her if it wasn't worth it that she'd plucked up her
courage—that sort of thing. She did it for as long as I
can remember. She used to lie and tell him she was starting
to leam to enjoy it; but when I was about four, I remember
her in her hunting habit—it was peach-colored velvet with
gray fur, I remember—just before going out, throwing up
because she was so frightened."
"She rounds like a brave lady," Jenny said quietly.
Gareth's glance flicked up to her face, then away again.
"It wasn't really Father's fault," he went on after a moment.
"But when it finally did happen, he felt that it was. The
horse came down with her over some rocks—in a side-
Dragonsbane 133
saddle you can't fall clear. She died four or five days later.
That was five years ago. I—" He hesitated, the words
sticking in his throat. "I wasn't very good to him about
it."
He adjusted his specs in an awkward and unconvincing
cover for wiping his eyes on his sleeve ruffle. "Now that
I look back on it, I think, if she'd been braver, she'd
probably have had the courage to tell him she didn't want
to go—the courage to risk his mockery. Maybe that's
where I get it," he added, with the shy flash of a grin.
"Maybe I should have seen that I couldn't possibly blame
him as much as he blamed himself—that I didn't say
anything to him that he hadn't already thought." He
shrugged his bony shoulders. "I understand now. But when
I was thirteen, I didn't. And by the time I did understand,
it had been too long to say anything to him. And by that
time, there was Zyeme."
The priests of Kantirith wound their way out of sight
up a crooked lane between the drunken lean of crazy
buildings. Children who had stopped to gawk after the
procession took up their games once more; John resumed
his cautious way across the moss-edged, herringbone pat-
tern of the wet cobbles toward them, stopping every few
paces to stare at some new marvel—a chair-mender pur-
suing his trade on the curbstone, or the actors within a
cheap theater gesticulating wildly while a crier outside
shouted tidbits of the plot to the passersby around the
door. He would never, Jenny reflected with rueful amuse-
ment, leam to comport himself like the hero of legend
that he was.
"It must have been hard for you," she said.
Gareth sighed. "It was easier a few years ago," he
admitted. "I could hate her cleanly then. Later, for a while
I—I couldn't even do that." He blushed again. "And
now..."
A commotion in the square flared suddenly, like the
134 Barbara Hambly
noise of a dogfight; a woman's jeering voice yelled,
"Whore!" and Jenny's head snapped around.
But it was not she and her lack of veils that was the
target. A little gnome woman, her soft mane of hair like
an apricot cloud in the wan sunlight, was making her
hesitant way toward the fountain. Her black silk trousers
were hitched up over her knees to keep them out of the
puddles in the broken pavement, and her white tunic, with
its flowing embroideries and carefully mended sleeves,
proclaimed that she was living in poverty alien to her
upbringing. She paused, peering around her with a painful
squint in the too-bright daylight; then her steps resumed
in the direction of the fountain, her tiny, round hands
clutching nervously at the handle of the bucket that she
inexpertly bore.
Somebody else shouted, "Come slumming, have we,
m'lady? Tired of sitting up there on all that grain you got
hid? Too cheap to hire servants?"
The woman stopped again, swinging her head from side
to side as if seeking her tormentors, half-blind in the out-
door glare. Someone caught her with a dog turd on the
arm. She hopped, startled, and her narrow feet in their
soft leather shoes skidded on the wet, uneven stones. She
dropped the bucket as she fell, and groped about for it
on hands and knees. One of the women by the fountain,
with the grinning approbation of her neighbors, sprang
down to kick it beyond her reach.
"That'll leam you to hoard the bread you've bought
out of honest folks' mouths!"
The gnome made a hasty scrabble around her. A faded,
fat woman who'd been holding forth the loudest in the
gossip around the fountain kicked the pail a little further
from the searching hands.
"And to plot against the King!"
The gnome woman raised herself to her knees, peering
about her, and one of the children darted out of the gath-
Dragonsbane 135
ering crowd behind her and pulled the long wisps of her
hair. She spun around, clutching, but the boy had gone.
Another took up the game and sprang nimbly out to do
the same, too engrossed in the prospect of fun to notice
John.
At the first sign of trouble, the Dragonsbane had turned
to the man next to him, a blue-tattooed easterner in a
metalsmith's leather apron and not much else, and handed
him the three waffles he held stacked in his hands. "Would
you ever hold these?" Then he made his way unhurriedly
through the press, with a courteous string of "Excuse me
... pardon..." in time to catch the second boy who'd
jumped out to take up the baiting where the first had begun
it.
Gareth could have told them what to expect—Zyeme's
courtiers weren't the only ones deceived by John's
appearance of harmless friendliness. The bully, caught
completely offguard from behind, didn't even have time
to shriek before he hit the waters of the fountain. A huge
splash doused every woman on the steps and most of the
surrounding idlers. As the boy surfaced, spitting and gasp-
ing, Aversin turned from picking up the bucket and said
in a friendly tone, "Your manners are as filthy as your
clothes—I'm surprised your mother lets you out like that.
They'll be a bit cleaner now, won't they?"
He dipped the bucket full and turned back to the man
who was holding his waffles. For an instant Jenny tho
ught
the smith would throw them into the fountain, but John
only smiled at him, bright as the sun on a knifeblade, and
sullenly the man put the waffles into his free hand. In the
back of the crowd a woman sneered, "Gnome lover!"
"Thanks." John smiled, still at his brass-faced friend-
liest. "Sorry I threw offal in the fountain and all." Bal-
ancing the waffles in his hand, he descended the few steps
and walked beside the little gnome woman across the
square toward the mouth of the alley whence she had
136 Barbara Hambly
come. Jenny, hurrying after him with Gareth at her heels,
noticed that none followed them too closely.
"John, you are incorrigible," she said severely. "Are
you all right?" This last was addressed to the gnome, who
was hastening along on her short, bowed legs, clinging to
the Dragonsbane's shadow for protection.
She peered up at Jenny with teeble, colorless eyes.
"Oh, yes. My thanks. I had never—always we went out
to the fountain at night, or sent the girl who worked for
us, if we needed water during the day. Only she left." The
wide mouth pinched up on the words, at the taste of some
unpleasant memory.
"I bet she did, if she was like that lot," John remarked,
jerking his thumb back toward the square. Behind them,
the crowd trailed menacingly, yelling, "Traitors! Hoard-
ers ! Ingrates!" and fouler things besides. Somebody threw
a fish head that fucked off Jenny's skirts and shouted
something about an old whore and her two pretty-boys;
Jenny felt the bristles of rage rise along her spine. Others
took up this theme. She felt angry enough to curse them,
but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater
curse upon them than to be what they already were.
"Have a waffle?" John offered disanningly, and the
gnome lady took the preferred confection with hands that
shook.
Gareth, carmine with embarrassment, said nothing.
Around a mouthful of sugar, John said, "Gie lucky for
us fruit and vegies are a bit too dear these days to fling,
isn't it? Here?"
The gnome ducked her head quickly as she entered the
shadows of a doorway to a huge, crumbling house wedged
between two five-storey tenements, its rear wall dropping
straight to the dank brown waters of a stagnant canal.
The windows were tightly shuttered, and the crumbling
stucco was written over with illiterate and filthy scrawls,
splattered with mud and dung. From every shutter Jenny
Dragonsbane 137
could sense small, weak eyes peering down in apprehen-
sion.
The door was opened from within, the gnome taking
her bucket and popping through like a frightened mole
into its hill. John put a quick hand on the rotting panels
to keep them from being shut in his face, then braced with
all his strength. The doorkeeper was determined and had
the prodigious muscles of the gnomes.
"Wait!" John pleaded, as his feet skidded on the wet
marble of the step. "Listen! I need your help! My name's
John Aversin—I've come from the north to see about this
dragon of yours, but I can't do it without your aid." He
wedged his shoulder into the narrow slit that was all that
was left. "Please."
The pressure on the other side of the door was released
so suddenly that he staggered inward under his own
momentum. From the darkness beyond a soft, high voice
like a child's said in the archaic High Speech that the
gnomes used at Court, "Come in, thou others. It does
thee no good to be thus seen at the door of the house of
the gnomes."
As they stepped inside, John and Gareth blinked against
the dimness, but Jenny, with her wizard's sight, saw at
once that the gnome who had admitted them was old
Dromar, ambassador to the court of the King.
Beyond him, the lower hall of the house stretched in
dense shadow. It had once been grand in the severe style
of a hundred years ago—the old manor, she guessed,
upon whose walled grounds the crowded, stinking tene-
ments of the neighborhood had later been erected. In
places, rotting frescoes were still dimly visible on the
stained walls; and the vastness of the hall spoke of gra-
cious furniture now long since chopped up for firewood
and of an aristocratic carelessness about the cost of heat-
ing fuel. The place was like a cave now, tenebrous and
damp, its boarded windows letting in only a few chinks
138 Barbara Hambly
of watery light to outline stumpy pillars and the dry mosa-
ics of the impluvium. Above the sweeping curve of the
old-fashioned, open stair she saw movement in the gallery.
It was crowded with gnomes, watching warily these
intruders from the hostile world of men.
In the gloom, the soft, childlike voice said, "Thy name
is not unknown among us, John Aversin."
"Well, that makes it easier," John admitted, dusting off
his hands and looking down at the round head of the
gnome who stood before him and into sharp, pale eyes
under the flowing mane of snowy hair. "Be a bit awkward
if I had to explain it all, though I imagine Gar here could
sing you the ballads."
A slight smile tugged at the gnome's mouth—the first,
Jenny suspected, in a long time—as he studied the incon-
gruous, bespectacled reality behind the glitter of the leg-
ends. "Thou art the first," he remarked, ushering them
into the huge, chilly cavern of the room, his mended silk
robes whispering as he moved. "How many hast thy father
sent out. Prince Gareth? Fifteen? Twenty? And none of
them came here, nor asked any of the gnomes what they
might know of the dragon's coming—we, who saw it best."
Gareth looked disconcerted. "Er—that is—the wrath
of the King..."
"And whose fault was that. Heir ofUriens, when rumor
had been noised abroad that we had made an end of thee?"
There was an uncomfortable silence as Gareth red-
dened under that cool, haughty gaze. Then he bent his
head and said in a stifled voice, "I am sorry, Dromar. I
never thought of—of what might be said, or who would
take the blame for it, if I disappeared. Truly I didn't know.
I behaved rashly—I seem to have behaved rashly all the
way around."
The old gnome sniffed. "Soi" He folded his small hands
before the complicated knot of his sash, his gold eyes
studying Gareth in silence for a time. Then he nodded,
Dragonsbane 139
and said, "Well, better it is that thou fall over thine own
feet in the doing of good than sit upon thy hands and let
it go undone, Gareth ofMagloshaldon. Another time thou
shalt do better." He turned away, gesturing toward the
inner end of the shadowed room, where a blackwood table
could be distinguished in the gloom, no more than a foot
high, surrounded by burst and patched cushions set on
the floor in
the fashion of the gnomes. "Come. Sit. What
is it that thou wish to know, Dragonsbane, of the coming
of the dragon to the Deep?"
"The size of the thing," John said promptly, as they all
settled on their knees around the table. "I've only heard
rumor and story—has anybody got a good, concrete mea-
surement?"
From beside Jenny, the high, soft voice of the gnome
woman piped, "The top of his haunch lies level with the
frieze carved above the pillars on either side of the door-
way arch, which leads from the Market Hall into the Grand
Passage into the Deep itself. That is twelve feet, by the
measurements of men."
There was a moment's silence, as Jenny digested the
meaning of that piece of information. Then she said, "If
the proportions are the same, that makes it nearly forty
feet."
"Aye," Dromar said. "The Market Hall—the first cav-
ern of the Deep, that lies just behind the Great Gates that
lead into the outer world—is one hundred and fifty feet
from the Gates to the inner doors of the Grand Passage
at the rear. The dragon was nearly a third of that length."
John folded his hands on the table before him. Though
his face remained expressionless. Jenny detected the slight
quickening of his breath. Forty feet was half again the
size of the dragon that had come so close to killing him
in Wyr, with all the dark windings of the Deep in which
to hide.
"D'you have a map of the Deep?"
140 Barbara Hambly
The old gnome looked affronted, as if he had inquired
about the cost of a night with his daughter. Then his face
Dragon's Bane Page 17