darkened with stubborn anger. "That knowledge is for-
bidden to the children of men."
Patiently, John said, "After all that's been done you
here, I don't blame you for not wanting to give out the
secrets of the Deep; but I need to know. I can't take the
thing from the front. I can't fight something that big head-
on. I need to have some idea where it will be lairing."
"It will be lairing in the Temple of Sarmendes, on the
first level of the Deep." Dromar spoke grudgingly, his
pale eyes narrow with the age-old suspicion of a smaller,
weaker race that had been driven underground millennia
ago by its long-legged and bloodthirsty cousins. "It lies
just off the Grand Passage that runs back from the Gates.
The Lord of Light was beloved by the men who dwelt
within the Deep—the King's ambassadors and then-
households, and those who had been apprenticed among
our people. His Temple is close to the surface, for the
folk of men do not like to penetrate too far into the bones
of the Earth. The weight of the stone unnerves them; they
find the darkness disquieting. The dragon will lie there.
There he will bring his gold."
"Is there a back way into it?" John asked. "Through
the priests' quarters or the treasuries?"
Dromar said, "No," but the little gnome woman said,
"Yes, but thou would never find it, Dragonsbane."
"By the Stone!" The old gnome whirled upon her, smol-
dering rage in his eyes. "Be silent, Mab! The secrets of
the Deep are not for his kind!" He looked viciously at
Jenny and added, "Nor for hers."
John held up his hand for silence. "Why wouldn't I
find it?"
Mab shook her head. From beneath a heavy brow, her
round, almost colorless blue eyes peered up at him, kindly
and a little sad. "The ways lead through the warrens,"
Dragonsbane 141
she said simply. "The caverns and tunnels there are a
maze that we who dwell there can learn, in twelve or
fourteen years of childhood. But even were we to tell thee
the turnings thou must take, one false step would con-
demn thee to a death by starvation and to the madness
that falls upon men in the darkness under the earth. We
filled the mazes with lamps, but those lamps are quenched
now."
"Can you draw me a map, then?" And, when the two
gnomes only looked at him with stubborn secrets in their
eyes, he said, "Dammit, I can't do it without your help!
I'm sorry it has to be this way, but it's trust me or lose
the Deep forever; and those are your only choices!"
Dromar's long, outward-curling eyebrows sank lower
over the stub of his nose. "So be it, then," he said.
But Miss Mab turned resignedly and began to rise. The
ambassador's eyes blazed. "No! By the Stone, is it not
enough that the children of men seek to steal the secrets
of the Deep? Must thou give them up freely?"
"Tut," Mab said with a wrinkled smile. "This Dragons-
bane will have problems enow from the dragon, without
going seeking in the darkness for others."
"A map that is drawn may be stolen!" Dromar insisted.
"By the Stone that lies in the heart of the Deep..."
Mab got comfortably to her feet, shaking out her patched
silken garments, and pottered over to the scroll-rack that
filled one comer of the dim hall. She returned with a reed
pen and several sheets of tattered papyrus paper in her
hand. "Those whom you fear would steal it know the way
to the heart of the Deep already," she pointed out gently.
"If this barbarian knight has ridden all the way from the
Winterlands to be our champion, it would be paltry not
to offer him a shield."
"And her?" Dromar jabbed one stumpy finger, laden
with old-fashioned, smooth-polished gems, at Jenny. "She
is a witch. What surety have we that she will not go
142 Barbara Hambly
snooping and spying, delving out our secrets, turning them
against us, defiling them, poisoning them, as others have
done?"
The gnome woman frowned down at Jenny for a
moment, her wide mouth pursed up with thought. Then
she knelt beside her again and pushed the writing things
across the table at Dromar. "There," she said. "Thou may
draw the maps, and put upon them what thou will, and
leave from them what thou will."
"And the witch?" There was suspicion and hatred in
his voice, and Jenny reflected that she was getting very
tired of being mistaken for Zyeme.
"Ah," said Miss Mab, and reaching out, took Jenny's
small, scratched, boyish brown hands in her own. For a
long moment she looked into her eyes. As if the small,
cold fingers clasping hers stirred at the jewel heap of her
dreams, Jenny felt the gnome woman's mind probing at
her thoughts, as she had probed at Gareth's, seeking to
see the shape of her essence. She realized that Miss Mab
was a mage, like herself.
Reflex made her stiffen. But Mab smiled gently and
held out to her the depths of her own mind and soul—
gentle and clear as water, and stubborn as water, too,
containing none of the bitterness, resentments, and doubts
that Jenny knew clotted the comers of her own heart.
She relaxed, feeling as ashamed as if she had struck out
at an inquiry kindly made, and felt some other own angers
dissolving under that wise scrutiny. She felt the other
woman's power, much greater than her own, but gentle
and warm as sunlight.
When Miss Mab spoke, it was not to Dromar, but to
her. "Thou art afraid for him," she said softly. "And per-
haps thou should be." She put out one round little hand,
to pat Jenny's hair. "But remember that the dragon is not
the greatest of evils in this land, nor is death the worst
that can befall; neither for him, nor for thee."
CHAPTER VII
IN THE WEEK that followed. Jenny returned many times
to the crumbling house in the Dockmarket. Twice John
accompanied her, but John, for the most part, spent his
days in the King's Gallery with Gareth, waiting for a sign
from the King. His evenings he spent with the wild young
courtiers who surrounded Zyeme, playing dancing bear,
as he called it, and dealing as best he could with the slow
torture of waiting for a combat that could cost his life.
Being John, he did not speak of it, but Jenny felt it when
they made love and in his silences when they were alone
together, this gradual twisting of the nerves that was driv-
ing him nearly mad.
She herself avoided the Court for the most part and
spent her days in the city or in the house of the gnomes.
She went there quietly, wrapped in spells to conceal her
from the folk in the streets, for, as the days ground by,
she could feel the ugly miasma of hate and fear spreading
through the streets like poisoned fog. On her way through
the Dockmarket quarter, she would pass the big taverns—
the Lame Ox, the Gallant Rat, the Sheep in the Mire—
where the unemployed men and women who had come
143
144 Barbara Hambly
in off the ruined farms gathered daily, hoping for a few
hours' hire. Those in need of cheap labor knew to go
there to find people who would move furniture or clean
out stables for a few coppers; but with the winter storms
making the shipping scarce and the high price of bread
taking all the spare funds to be had, there were few enough
who could afford to pay even that. None of the gnomes
still living in the city—and there were many of them, in
spite of the hardships—dared go by the Sheep in the Mire
after noontime, for by that hour those within would have
given up hope of work that day and would be concen-
trating what little energy they had on getting drunk.
So Jenny moved in her shadowy secrets, as she had
moved through the lawless Winterlands, to visit the Lady
Taseldwyn, who was called Miss Mab in the language of
men.
From the first, she had been aware that the gnome
woman was a more powerful mage than she. But, rather
than jealousy and resentment, she felt only gladness that
she had found someone to teach her after all those years.
In most things, Mab was a willing teacher, though the
shape of the gnomes' wizardry was strange to Jenny, alien,
as their minds were alien. They had no Lines, but seemed
to transmit their power and knowledge whole from gen-
eration to generation of mages in some fashion that Jenny
did not understand. Mab told her of the healing spells for
which the Deep was famous, of the drugs now sequestered
there, lost to them as surely as the dragon's gold was lost,
of the spells that could hold the soul, the essence of life,
to the flesh, or of the more dangerous spells by which the
life-essence of one person could be drawn to strengthen
the crumbling life of another. The gnome woman taught
her other spells of the magic underground—spells of crys-
tal and stone and spiraling darkness, whose meaning Jenny
could only dimly comprehend. These she could only mem-
orize by rote, hoping that with later meditation, skill and
Dragonsbane 145
understanding would come. Mab spoke also to her of the
secrets of the earth, the movement of water, and how
stones thought; and she spoke of the dark realms of the
Deep itself, cavern beneath cavern in endless succession
of hidden glories that had never seen light.
Once, she spoke of Zyeme.
"Aye, she was apprenticed among us Healers." She
sighed, putting aside the three-stringed dulcimer upon
which she had been outlining to Jenny the song-spells of
their craft. "She was a vain little girl, vain and spoiled.
She had her talent for mockery even then—she would
listen to the Old Ones among us, the great Healers, who
had more power at their command than she could ever
dream of, nodding that sleek little head others in respect,
and then go and imitate their voices to her friends in
Deeping."
Jenny remembered the silvery chime of the sorceress's
laughter at dinner and the way she had hurried her steps
to make Dromar run after her if he would speak.
It was early evening. For all its cold, the great hall of
the gnomes' house was stuffy, the air stagnant beneath
its massive arches and along the faded pavement of its
checkered corridors. The noises of the streets had fallen
to their dinnertime lull, save for the chiming of the clock
towers all over the city and one lone kindling-peddler
crying his wares.
Mab shook her head, her voice low with remembrance
of times past. "She was greedy for secrets, as some girls
are greedy for sweets—covetous for the power they could
give her. She studied out the hidden ways around the
Places of Healing so that she could sneak and spy, hiding
to listen in darkness. All power must be paid for, but she
took the secrets of those greater than she and defiled
them, tainted them—poisoned them as she poisoned the
very heart of the Deep—yes, she did poison if—and
turned all our strength against us."
146 Barbara Hambly
Jenny shook her head, puzzled. "Dromar said some-
thing of the kind," she said. "But how can you taint spells?
You can spoil your own magic, for it colors your soul as
you wield it, but you cannot spoil another's. I don't under-
stand."
Mab glanced sharply at her, as if remembering her
presence and remembering also that she was not one of
the folk of the gnomes. "Nor should thou," she said in
her soft, high voice. "These are things that concern the
magic of gnomes only. They are not human things."
"Zyeme seems to have made them human things."
Jenny moved her weight on her heels, easing her knees
on the hardness of the stone floor through the shabby
cushion. "If it is, indeed, from the Places of Healing that
she learned the arts that have made her the most powerful
mage in the land."
"Pah!" the gnome mage said in disgust. "The Healers
of the Deep were more powerful than she—by the Stone,
/ was more powerful!"
"Was?" Jenny said, perplexed. "I know that most of
the Healers in the Deep were killed with the coming of
the dragon; I had thought none of sufficient strength sur-
vived to defy her. The magic of gnomes is different from
the spells of men, but power is power. How could Zyeme
have lessened yours?"
Mab only shook her head furiously, so that her pale,
web-colored hair whipped back and forth, and said, "These
are the things of the gnomes."
In those days Jenny did not see much of Zyerne, but
the enchantress was often on her mind. Zyeme's influence
pervaded the court like the faint waft of her cinnamon
perfume; when Jenny was in the Palace confines, she was
always conscious of her. However Zyeme had acquired
her power and whatever she had done with it since. Jenny
never forgot that it was so much greater than hers. When
she neglected what tomes of magic John was able to pilfer
Dragonsbane 147
from the Palace library to sit with her scrying-stone,
watching the tiny, soundless images of her sons skylarking
perilously along the snow-covered battlements of the Hold,
she felt a pang of guilt. Zyeme was young, at least ten
years younger than she; her power shone from her like
the sun. Jenny no longer felt jealousy and she could not,
in all honesty, feel anger at Zyeme for having what she
herself did not, as long as she was not willing to do what
was needful to obtain that power. But she did feel envy,
the envy of a traveler on a cold night who saw into the
warmth of a lighted room.
But when she asked Mab about Zyeme—about the
powers that had once been less than Mab's, but now were
greater; about why the gnomes had forbidden
her to enter
the Deep—the little mage would only say stubbornly,
"These are the things of the gnomes. They have naught
to do with men."
In the meantime John went his own way, a favorite of
the younger courtiers who laughed at his extravagant bar-
barism and called him their tame savage, while he held
forth about engineering and the mating customs of pigs,
or quoted classical authors in his execrable north-country
drawl. And still, every morning, the King passed them
by in the gallery, turning his dull eyes aside from them,
and the etiquette of the Court forbade Gareth to speak.
"What's his delay?" John demanded as he and Gareth
emerged from the arched porticoes of the gallery into the
chill, fleet sunlight of the deserted terrace after yet another
futile day's waiting. Jenny joined them quietly, coming up
the steps from the deserted garden below, carrying her
harp. She had been playing it on the rocks above the sea
wall, waiting for them and watching the rainelouds scud
far out over the sea. It was the season of winds and sudden
gales, and in the north the weather would be sleety and
cold, but here days of high, heatless sunlight alternated
with fogs and blowing rains. The matte, white day-moon
148 Barbara Hambly
was visible, sinking into the cloud wrack over the sea;
Jenny wondered what it was that troubled her about its
steady waxing toward its half. Against the loamy colors
of the fallow earth, the clothes of Zyeme and her court
stood out brightly as they passed on down into the garden,
and Jenny could hear the enchantress's voice lifted in a
wickedly accurate imitation of the gnomes' shrill speech.
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