stickily on the upturned palm of one blistered hand. Jenny
felt her whole body one open wound of grief.
We change what we touch, she thought. Why had she
let him change her? She had been happy, alone with her
magic. The key to magic is magic—she should have held
to that from the start. She had known even then that he
was a man who would give his life to help others, even
others not his own.
If he had waited for Zyeme...
She pushed the thought away with bitter violence,
knowing Zyeme's magic could have saved him. All day
she had wanted to weep, not only with grief, but with
anger at herself for all the choices of the past.
Thin and plaintive as a child's, Gareth's voice broke
into her circle of stumbling self-hate. "Isn't there anything
that you can do?"
"I have done what I can," she replied wearily. "I have
washed his wounds and stitched them shut, laid spells of
healing upon them. The dragon's blood is a poison in his
veins, and he has lost too much blood of his own."
"But surely there's something..." In the brief gleam
of the fire, she could see that he had been weeping. Her
own soul felt cold now and drained as John's flesh.
"You have asked me that seven times since it grew
Dragonsbane 191
dark," she said. "This is beyond my skills—beyond the
medicines that I have—beyond my magic."
She tried to tell herself that, even had she not loved
him, even had she not given up the time she could have
spent studying, it would still have been so.
Would she have been able to save him, if she had not
given him all those hours; if she had spent all those early
mornings meditating among the stones in the solitude of
the hilltop instead of lying talking in his bed?
Or would she only have been a little bleaker, a little
madder—a little more like the worst side of herself—a
little more like Caerdinn?
She did not know, and the hurt of that was almost as
bad as the hurt of suspecting that she did know.
But she had only her own small powers—spells worked
one rune at a time, patiently, in the smallest increments
of thought. She slowed and calmed her mind, as she did
when she worked magic, and realized she could not cure
him. What then could she do for him? What had Mab
said, when she had spoken of healing?
She ran her hands through her long hair, shifting the
weight of it from her face and neck. Her shoulders hurt
with cramp; she had not slept in two nights, and her body
ached.
"The most we can do now is keep heating stones in
the fire to put around him," she said at last. "We must
keep him warm."
Gareth swallowed and wiped his nose. "Just that?"
"For now, yes. If he seems a little stronger in the mom-
ing, we may be able to move him." But she knew in her
heart that he would not live until morning. Like a whis-
pering echo, the vision in the water bowl returned to her,
a bitter nightmare of failed hope.
Hesitantly, Gareth offered, "There are physicians up
at Halnath. Polycarp, for one."
"And an army around its walls." Her voice sounded
192 Barbara Hambly
very cold to her own ears. "If he's still alive in the morning
... I didn't want you to risk putting yourself once again
where Zyeme might reach you, but in the morning, I think
you should take Battlehammer and ride back to Bel."
Gareth looked frightened at the mention of Zyeme's
name and at the thought of possibly facing her alone, but
he nodded. Jenny was interested to note, in some detached
portion of her tired soul, that, having sought all his life
for heroism, while Gareth might now flinch from it, he
did not flee.
She went on, "Go to the house of the gnomes and fetch
Miss Mab here. The medicines of the gnomes may be
locked away in the Deep, but..." Her voice trailed off.
Then she repeated softly, "The medicines of the gnomes."
Like pins and needles in a numbed limb, the hurt of
hope renewed as a sudden wash of agony. She whispered,
"Gareth, where are John's maps?"
Gareth blinked at her uncomprehendingly, too preoc-
cupied for the moment with his own fears of Zyerne to
realize what she was getting at. Then he gave a start, and
hope flooded into his face, and he let out a whoop that
could have been heard in Bel. 'The Places of Healing!"
he cried, and threw his arms around her, sweeping her
off her feet. "I knew it!" he shouted, with all his old forlorn
cockiness. "I knew you could think of something! You
can..."
"You don't know anything of the kind." She fought
free of him, angry at him for expressing what was already
surging through her veins like a swig of cheap brandy.
She brushed past him and almost ran to John's side, while
Gareth, gamboling like a large puppy, began to ransack
the camp for the maps.
If there was anything worse than the pain of despair,
she thought, it was the pain of hope. At least despair is
restful. Her own heart was hammering as she brushed
aside the russet hair from John's forehead, almost black-
Dragonsbane 193
looking now against the bloodless flesh. Her mind was
racing ahead, ticking off the remedies Mab had spoken
of: distillations to slow and strengthen the thready heart-
beat; salves to promote the healing of the flesh; and phil-
ters to counteract poison and give him back the blood he
had lost. There would be spell-books, too, she thought,
hidden in the Places of Healing, words with which to bind
the soul to the flesh, until the flesh itself could recover.
She could find them, she told herself desperately, she
must. But the knowledge of what was at stake lay on her
heart like stones. For a moment she felt so tired that she
almost wished for his death, because it would require no
further striving from her and threaten her with no further
failure.
Holding his icy hands, she slid for a moment into the
outer fringes of the healing trance and whispered to him
by his inner name. But it was as if she called at the head
of a descending trail along which he had long since
passed—there was no answer.
But there was something else. In her trance she heard
it, a soft touch of sound that twisted her heart with fright—
the slur of scales on rock, the shiver of alien music.
Her eyes opened; she found herself shaking and cold.
The dragon was alive.
"Jenny?" Gareth came nattering over to her side, his
hands full of creased bits of dirty papyrus. "I found them,
but—but the Places of Healing aren't on them." His eyes
were filled with worry behind the cracked, crazy specs.
"I've looked..."
Jenny took them from his hand with fingers that shook.
In the firelight she could make out passages, caverns,
rivers, all marked in Drom
ar's strong, runic hand, and the
blank spots, unmarked and unlabeled. The affair of the
gnomes.
Anger wrenched at her, and she threw the maps from
her. "Damn Dromar and his secrets," she whispered
194 Barbara Hambly
viciously. "Of course the Places of Healing are the heart
of the Deep that they all swear by!"
"But—" Gareth stammered weakly. "Can you—can
you find them anyway?"
Fury welled up in her, of hope thwarted, first by fear
and now by one gnome's stubbornness, like molten rock
pouring through the cracks of exhaustion in her soul. "In
those warrens?" she demanded. For a moment anger,
weariness, and the knowledge of the dragon claimed her,
tearing at her so that she could have screamed and called
down the lightning to rive apart the earth.
As Zyeme did, she told herself, fighting for calm. She
closed her fists, one around the other, and pressed her
lips against them, willing the rage and the fear to pass;
and when they passed, there was nothing left. It was as
if the unvoiced scream had burned everything out of her
and left only a well of dark and unnatural calm, a universe
deep.
Gareth was still looking at her, his eyes pleading. She
said quietly, "Maybe. Mab spoke of the way. I may be
able to reason it out." Mab had also said that one false
step would condemn her to a death by starvation, wan-
dering in darkness.
Like an answer, she knew at once what John would
have said to that—God's Grandmother, Jen, the dra-
gon'11 eat you before you get a chance to starve.
Trust John, she thought, to make me laugh at a time
like this.
She got to her feet, chilled to the bone and feeling a
hundred years old, and walked to the packs once more.
Gareth trailed along after her, hugging his crimson cloak
about himself for warmth and chattering on about one
thing and another; locked in that strange stasis of calm,
Jenny scarcely heard.
It was only as she slung her big satchel about her shoul-
der and picked up her halberd that he seemed to feel her
Dragonsbane 195
silence. "Jenny," he said doubtfully, catching the edge of
her plaid. "Jenny—the dragon is dead, isn't it? I mean,
the poison did work, didn't it? It must have, if you were
able to get John out of there..."
"No," Jenny said quietly. She wondered a little at the
weird silence within her; she had felt more fear listening
for the Whisperers in the Woods ofWyr than she did now.
She started to move off toward the darkness of the shadow-
drowned ruins. Gareth ran around in front of her and
caught her by the arms.
"But—that is—how long..."
She shook her head. 'Too long, almost certainly." She
put her hand on his wrist to move him aside. Having made
up her mind what she must do, she wanted it over with,
though she knew she would never succeed.
Gareth swallowed hard, his thin face working in the
low ruby light of the fire. "I—I'll go," he volunteered
shakily. "Tell me what I should look for, and I..."
For an instant, laughter threatened to crack all her
hard-won resolve—not laughter at him, but at the wan
gallantry that impelled him, like the hero of a ballad, to
take her place. But he would not have understood how
she loved him for the offer, absurd as it was; and if she
began to laugh she would cry, and that weakness she knew
she could not now afford. So she only stood on her toes
and pulled his shoulders down so that she could kiss his
soft, thin cheek. "Thank you, Gareth," she murmured.
"But I can see in the darkness, and you cannot, and I
know what I seek."
"Really," he persisted, torn visibly between relief at
her refusal, awareness that she was in fact far better suited
than he for the task, a lifetime of chivalric precept, and
a very real desire to protect her from harm.
"No," she said gently. "Just see that John stays warm.
If I don't come back..." Her voice faltered at the knowl-
edge of what lay before her—the death by the dragon, or
196 Barbara Humbly
the death within the maze. She forced strength into her
words. "Do what seems best to you, but don't try to move
him too soon."
The admonition was futile, and she knew it. She tried
to remember Mab's words regarding the lightless laby-
rinths of the Deep and they slid from her mind like a
fistful of water, leaving only the recollection of the shining
wheels of diamond that were the dragon's watching eyes.
But she had to reassure Gareth; and while John breathed,
she knew she could never have remained in camp.
She squeezed Gareth's hand and withdrew from him.
Hitching her plaids higher on her shoulder, she turned
toward the shadowy trails through the Vale and the dark
bulk of Nast Wall that loomed against a sullen and pitchy
sky. Her final glimpse of John was of the last glow of the
dying fire that outlined the shape of his nose and lips
against the darkness.
Long before she reached the Great Gates of the Deep,
Jenny was aware of the singing. As she crossed the frost-
skimmed stones of the ruins, bled of all their daytime
color by the feeble wash of the moonlight, she felt it—a
hunger, a yearning, and a terrifying beauty, far beyond
her comprehension. It intruded into her careful piecing-
together of those fragmentary memories of Mab's remarks
about the Places of Healing, broke even into her fears for
John. It seemed to float around her in the air, and yet she
knew that it could only be heard by her; it shivered in
her bones, down to her very finger ends. When she stood
in the Gates with the blackness of the Market Hall lying
before her and her own shadow a diffuse smudge on the
scuffed and blood-gummed refuse of the floor, it was almost
overwhelming.
There was no sound to it, but its rhythm called her
blood. Braided images that she could neither completely
sense nor wholly understand twisted through her con-
Dragonsbane 197
sciousness—knots of memory, of starry darkness that
sunlight had never seen, of the joyous exhaustion of phys-
ical love whose modes and motives were strange to her,
and of mathematics and curious relationships between
things that she had never known were akin. It was stronger
and very different from the singing that had filled the gully
when the Golden Dragon ofWyr lay gasping its last. There
was a piled strength in it of years lived fully and of patterns
comprehended across unknowable gulfs of time.
The dragon was invisible in the darkness. She heard
the soft scrape of his scales and guessed him to be lying
across the inner doors of the Market Hall, that led to the
Grand Passage and so into the Deep. Then the silver lamps
of his eyes opened and seemed to glow softly in the
&n
bsp; reflected moonlight, and in her mind the singing flowed
and intensified its colors into the vortex of a white core.
In that core words formed.
Have you come seeking medicines, wizard woman? Or
is that weapon you carry simply what you have deluded
yourself into thinking sufficient to finish what your poi-
sons do too slowly for your convenience'!
The words were almost pictures, music and patterns
shaped as much by her own soul as by his. They would
hurt, she thought, if allowed to sink too deeply.
"I have come seeking medicines," she replied, her voice
reverberating against the fluted dripstone of the toothed
ceiling. "The power of the Places of Healing was every-
where renowned."
This I knew. There was a knot of gnomes that held out
in the place where they took au the wounded. The door
was low, but I could reach through it like a wolf raiding
a bury of rabbits. I fed upon them for many days, until
they were all gone. They had the wherewithal to make
poisons there, too. They poisoned the carrion, as if they
did not think that I could see the death that tainted the
meat. This will be the place that you seek.
198 Barbara Hambly
Because he spoke partially in pictures, she glimpsed
also the dark ways into the place, like a half-remembered
dream in her mind. Her hope stirred, and she fixed the
pictures in her thoughts—tiny fragments, but perhaps
enough to serve.
With her wizard's sight she could distinguish him now,
Dragon's Bane Page 24