well through the town. Curses and shouts, muffled by the
fog, came from the Rise behind them. Cold mists shredded
past her face and stroked back the black coils other hair.
She could feel the spells that held the brume in place
fretting away as she left the Rise behind, but dared not
try to put forth the strength of will it would take to hold
them after she was gone. Her very bones ached from even
the small exertion of summoning them; she knew already
that she would need all the strength she could summon
for the final battle.
The three horses clattered up the shallow granite steps.
From the great darkness of the gate arch. Jenny turned
to see the mob still milling about in the thinning fog, some
fifty or sixty of them, of all stations and classes but mostly
poor laborers. The uniforms of the handful of Palace guards
stood out as gaudy splotches in the grayness. She heard
their shouts and swearing as they became lost within plain
sight of one another in territory they had all known well
of old. That won't last long, she thought.
Moon Horse shied and fidgeted at the smell of the dragon
and of the old blood within the vast gloom of the Market
Hall. The carcass of the horse Osprey had disappeared, but
256 Barbara Hambly
the place still smelled of death, and all the horses felt it,
Jenny slid from her mare's tall back and stroked her neck,
then whispered to her to stay close to the place in case of
need and let her go back down the steps.
Hooves clopped behind her on the charred and broken
flagstones. She looked back and saw John, ashen undei
the stubble of beard, still somehow upright in Cow's sad-
dle. He studied the Vale below them with his usual cool
expressionlessness. "Zyeme out there?" he asked, and
Jenny shook her head.
"Perhaps I hurt her too badly. Perhaps she's only
remaining at the Palace to gather other forces to send
against us."
"She always did like her killing to be done by others.
How long will your spells hold them?"
"Not long," Jenny said doubtfully. "We have to hold
this gate here, John. If they're from Deeping, many of
them will know the first levels of the Deep. There are
four or five ways out of the Market Hall. If we retreat
further in, we'll be flanked."
"Aye." He scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully.
"What's wrong with just letting them in? We could hide
up somewhere—once they got to the Temple of Sar-
mendes with all that gold, I doubt they'd waste much
energy looking for us."
Jenny hesitated for a moment, then shook her head.
"No," she said. "If they were an ordinary mob, I'd say
yes, but—Zyeme wants us dead. If she cannot break and
overwhelm my mind with her magic, she's not going to
give up before she has destroyed my body. There are
enough of them that would keep hunting us, and we can't
take a horse into the deeper tunnels to carry you; without
one, we'd never be able to move swiftly enough to avoid
them. We'd be trapped in a cul-de-sac and slaughtered.
No, if we're to hold them, it has to be here."
"Right." He nodded. "Can we help you?"
257
She had returned her attention to the angry snarl of
moving figures out in the pale ruins. Over her shoulder,
she said, "You can't even help yourself."
"I know that," he agreed equably. "But that wasn't my
question, love. Look..." He pointed. "That bloke there's
figured out the way. Here they come. Gaw, they're like
ants."
Jenny said nothing, but felt a shiver pass through her
as she saw the trickle of attackers widen into a stream.
Gareth came up beside them, leading Battlehammer;
Jenny whispered to the big horse and turned him loose
down the steps. Her mind was already turning inward
upon itself, digging at the strength in the exhausted depths
of her spirit and body. John, Gareth, and the slender girl
in the white rags of a Court gown, clinging to Gareth's
arm, were becoming mere wraiths to her as her soul spi-
raled down into a single inner vortex, like the single-
minded madness that comes before childbearing—nothing
else existed but herself, her power, and what she must
do.
Her hands pressed to the cold rock of the gate pillar,
and she felt that she drew fire and strength from the stone
itself and from the mountain beneath her feet and above
her head—drew it from the air and the darkness that
surrounded her. She felt the magic surge into her veins
like a reined whirlwind of compressed lightning. Its power
frightened her, for she knew it was greater than her body
would bear, yet she could afford no Limitation upon these
spells. It was thus, she knew, with dragons, but her body
was not a dragon's.
She was aware of John reining Cow sharply back away
from her, as if frightened; Gareth and Trey had retreated
already. But her mind was out in the pale light of the
steps, looking down over Deeping, contemplating in lei-
surely timelessness the men and women running through
the crumbled walls of the ruins. She saw each one of them
258 Barbara Hambly
with the cool exactness of a dragon's eyes, not only how
they were dressed, but the composition of their souls
through the flesh they wore. Bond she saw distinctly,
urging them on with a sword in his hand, his soul eaten
through with abcesses like termite-riddled wood.
The forerunners hit the cracked pavement and dust of
the square before the gates. Like the chirp of an insect
in a wall, she heard Gareth nattering, "What can we do^
We have to help her!" as she dispassionately gathered the
lightning in her hands.
"Put that down," John's voice said, suddenly weak and
bleached. "Get ready to run for it—you can hide in the
warrens for a time if they get through. Here's the maps..."
The mob was on the steps. Incoherent hate rose around
her like a storm tide. Jenny lifted her hands, the whole
strength of rock and darkness tunneling into her body,
her mind relaxing into the shock instead of bracing against
it.
The key to magic is magic, she thought. Her life began
and ended in each isolate crystal second of impacted time.
The fire went up from the third step, a red wall of it,
whole and all-consuming. She heard those trapped in the
first rush screaming and smelled smoke, charring meat,
and burning cloth. Like a dragon, she killed without hate,
striking hard and cruel, knowing that the first strike must
kill or her small group would all be dead.
Then she slammed shut before her the illusion of the
doors that had long ago been broken from the gateway
arch. They appeared like faded glass from within, but
every nail and beam and brace of them was wrought per-
fectly from enchanted air. Through them she saw men and
women nulling about the base of the steps, pointing up
at what they saw as the renewed Gates of the Deep and
crying out in wonder and alarm. Others lay on the ground,
or crawled helplessly here and there, beating out the flames
from their clothes with frenzied hands. Those who had
Dragonsbane 259
not been trapped in the fire made no move to help them,
but stood along the bottom of the step, looking up at the
gates and shouting with drunken rage. With the caco-
phony of the screams and groans of the wounded, the
noise was terrible, and worse than the noise was the stench
of sizzling flesh. Among it all. Bond Clerlock stood, star-
ing up at the phantom gates with his hunger-eaten eyes.
Jenny stepped back, feeling suddenly sick as the human
in her looked upon what the dragon in her had done. She
had killed before to protect her own life and the lives of
those she loved. But she had never killed on this scale,
and the power she wielded shocked her even as it drained
her of strength.
The dragon in you answered, Morkeleb had said. She
felt sick with horror at how true his knowledge of her had
been.
She staggered back, and someone caught her—John
and Gareth, looking like a couple of not-very-successful
brigands, filthy and battered and incongruous in their
spectacles. Trey, with Gareth's tattered cloak still draped
over her mud-stained white silks and her purple-and-wtute
hair hanging in asymmetrical coils about her chalky face,
wordlessly took a collapsible tin cup from her pearl-beaded
reticule, filled it from the water bottle on Cow's saddle,
and handed it to her.
John said, "It hasn't stopped them for long." A mist
of sweat covered his face, and the nostrils of his long nose
were marked by dints of pain from the mere effort of
standing. "Look, there's Bond drumming up support for
a second go. Silly bleater." He glanced across at Trey and
added, "Sorry." She only shook her head.
Jenny freed herself and walked unsteadily to the edge
of the shadow gate. Her head throbbed with exhaustion
that bordered nausea. The voices of the men and her own
voice, when she spoke, sounded flat and unreal. "He'll
get it, too."
260 Barbara Hambly
In the square below the gates, Bond was running here
and there among the men, stepping over the charred bod-
ies of the dying, gesticulating and pointing up at the phan-
tom doors. The Palace guards looked uncertain, but the
laborers from the Dockmarket were gathered about him,
listening and passing wineskins among themselves. They
shook their fists up at the Deep, and Jenny remarked,
"Like the gnomes, they've had their taste of poverty."
"Yes, but how can they blame us for it?" Gareth objected
indignantly. "How can they blame the gnomes? The
gnomes were even more victims of it than they."
"Whether or no," John said, leaning against the stone
pillar of the Gate, "I bet they're telling themselves the
treasures of the Deep are theirs by right. It's what Zyeme
will have told 'em, and they obviously believe it enough
to kill for them."
"But it's silly!"
"Not as silly as falling in love with a witch, and we've
both done that," John replied cheerfully. In spite of her
exhaustion, Jenny chuckled. "How long can you hold
them, love?"
Something in the sound of his voice made her look
back quickly at him. Though he had dismounted from
Cow to help her, it was obvious he could not stand alone;
his flesh looked gray as ash. Shouting from below drew
her attention a moment later; past the smoke still curling
from the steps, she could see men forming up into a ragged
line, the madness of unreasoning hate in their eyes.
"I don't know," she said softly. "All power must be
paid for. Maintaining the illusion of the Gates draws still
more of my strength. But it buys us a little time, breaking
the thrust of their will if they think they'll have to break
them."
"I doubt that lot has the brains to think that far." Still
leaning heavily on the pillar, John looked out into the
slanted sun of the square outside. "Look, here they come."
Dragonsbane 261
"Get back," Jenny said. Her bones hurt with the thought
of drawing forth power from them and from the stone and
air around her one more time. "I don't know what will
happen without Limitations."
"I can't get back, love; if I let go of this wall, I'll fall
down."
Through the ghost shape of the Gates, she saw them
coming, running across the square toward the steps. The
magic came more slowly, dredged and scraped from the
seared core of her being—her soul felt bleached by
the effort. The voices below rose in a mad crescendo, in
which the words "gold" and "kill" were flung up like spars
of driftwood on the rage of an incoming wave. She glimpsed
Bond Clerlock, or what was left of Bond Clerlock, some-
where in their midst, his Court suit pink as a shell among
the blood-and-buttercup hues of the Palace guards. Her
mind locked into focus, like a dragon's mind; all things
were clear to her and distant, impersonal as images in a
divining crystal. She called the white dragon rage like a
thunderclap and smote the steps with fire, not before them
now, but beneath their feet.
As the fire exploded from the bare stone, a wave of
sickness consumed her, as if in that second all her veins
had been opened. The shrieking of men, caught in the
agony of the fire, struck her ears like a slapping hand, as
grayness threatened to drown her senses and heat rose
through her, then sank away, leaving behind it a cold like
death.
She saw them reeling and staggering, ripping flaming
garments from charred flesh. Tears of grief and weakness
ran down her face at what she had done, though she knew
that the mob would have torn the four of them apart and
had known, that time, that she could summon fire. The
illusion of the Gates felt as tenuous as a soap-bubble around
her—like her own body, light and drifting. John stumbled
to catch her as she swayed and pulled her back to the
262 Barbara Hambly
pillar against which he had stood; for a moment they boih
held to it, neither strong enough to stand.
Her eyes cleared a little. She saw men running about
the square in panic, rage, and pain; and Bond, oblivion^
to bums which covered his hand and arm, was chasing
after them, shouting.
"What do we do now, love?"
She shook her head. "I don't know," she whispered
"I feel as if I'm going to faint."
His arm tightened around her waist. "Oh, do," he
encouraged enthusiastically. "I've always wanted to carr>
you to safety in my arms."
Her laughter revived her, as he had no doubt meant it
to. She pushed herself clear of
his support as Gareth and
Trey came up, both looking ill and frightened.
"Could we run for it through the Deep?" Gareth asked,
fumbling the maps from an inner pocket and dropping two
of them. "To the Citadel, I mean?"
"No," Jenny said. "I told John—if we left the Market
Hall, they'd flank us; and carrying John, we couldn't out-
distance them."
"I could stay here, love," John said quietly. "I could
buy you time."
Sarcastically, she replied, "The time it would take them
to pick themselves up after tripping over your body ic
the archway would scarcely suffice."
"One of us could try to get through," Trey suggesteu
timidly. "Polycarp and the gnomes at the Citadel would
know the way through from that side. They could come
for the rest of you. I have some candles in my reticule,
and some chalk to mark the way, and I'm no good to you
here..."
"No," Gareth objected, valiantly fighting his terror of
the dark warrens. "I'll go."
"You'd never find it," Jenny said. "I've been down in
the Deep, Gareth, and believe me, it is not something that
Dragonsbane 263
can be reasoned out with chalk and candles. And, as John
has said, the door at the end will be locked in any case,
even if they didn't blast it shut."
Down below them, Bond's voice could be heard dimly,
shouting that the Gate wasn't real, that it was just a witch's
trick, and that all the gold that had been lost was theirs
by right. People were yelling, "Death to the thieves! Death
to the gnome-lovers!" Jenny leaned her head against the
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