Dragonstar

4

Jenny listened to the demons as they whispered in the dark.

So tangled were the passageways of the mines, the narrow tunnels that supplied ventilation and water, that near sounds and far were confused. Even a trained mage like Miss Mab had trouble casting her senses very far into the darkness of the mines. Sometimes a chance whisper near a ventilation shaft a half-dozen levels down would repeat a word nearly in Jenny’s ear, startling her to sweat-drenched alertness. Other times the sheer cold massiveness of the mountain’s rock deadened even the footfalls of the slave-gangs barely a hundred yards away.

Lying in the darkness, Jenny had a long time to accustom herself to the tricks and echoes of the mines.

Long ago, as a girl-child in the bandit-haunted Winterlands, she had learned to still herself to nothing. To listen, and sort sound from sound, until on summer nights in the attic of her house on Frost Fell she could tell the difference between the rustle wind made in the big hand-shaped leaves of the solitary oak on the south slope of the hill, and the lighter hissing of the birch leaves to the north. Just that sound would tell of the weather for days to come. In those days her powers were slight—this had been before the time of the dragon, before Morkeleb had transformed her into dragon form to fly with him, and in doing so had given her a strain of dragon magic. She had made up for her lack of ability by the most painstaking attention, by long meditation, the study of each star and pebble and raindrop. As Caerdinn had said, the more she knew, the greater would be her power.

This attention, this meditation, returned to her now in the dark. She sorted sound from echo, built words from inflection and rhythm of speech. The stillness in which she listened was like a dream, as if, in sleeping, she passed into the nothingness of the darkness itself. From this nothingness she reached toward the demon voices, bodiless as smoke.

She understood them. That was another thing that the demon Amayon’s possession had left in her mind.

“… seven hundred slaves here.” A gnome’s voice, deep and vaguely familiar. She thought it might be one of the guards who had shot her when she’d fallen into the pit-trap in the mine. He spoke in the tongue of the demons. “Folcalor will bring another two hundred at least.”

Two hundred? Jenny gasped, appalled. All through the North she had heard rumors for weeks of gnomes buying slaves. Not, as they usually did, to work in the deeper levels of the mines, but paying good silver for children too young to work, cripples whose families wanted to be rid of their upkeep, grandparents who could no longer contribute to the harsh endless work of the Winterlands farms. The gnomes, as usual, denied these rumors as they denied all rumors of ever having human slaves. John had freed a band of them when he’d passed Tralchet Deep in the North—they’d warned him then of more sinister goings-on. The days were long gone when the King could send men into the mines to investigate—or do anything about whatever he might find.

But two hundred slaves? And seven hundred … where? In the Deep? The tunnels, Jenny knew, extended much farther north than most people knew, and there were entrances scattered through the great jagged mountain range of Nast Wall. With the Realm’s northern province of Imperteng in rebellion against the King all last summer, it would have been easy, of course, to bring in any number of such slaves. But seven hundred …?

How would they even move them unseen?

Morkeleb, she thought. He would know how far the tunnels of the Deep extended to the north; Morkeleb or Miss Mab. The dragon had gone to the surface, to lie on the black rocks far above the tree line, scrying the wind. Would he take note of a coffle that large coming out of the Wyrwoods? Or a succession of such trains? Or would he consider it not a thing of dragons, to care whether gnomes enslaved humans or not?

“And no luck with the dragon?” A man’s voice this time. Again, the timbre was familiar, as if Jenny had heard it before, speaking human words. The gnome must have shaken his head, because the man added a curse. “Unless we find the dragon, we’re wasting our time. All this …” By the flex in his voice Jenny knew he gestured to something—what? “… won’t give us a toad’s spit without her secret name. And you know Folcalor won’t listen if we say we can’t find him.”

“We’ll find him. Stinkin’ snake. Even if we don’t, those’ll give us power to find the catch-bottle that old Arch-Seer made.”

Those what? Surely if they’d blasted a tunnel to trap Morkeleb, they’d have known he escaped.…

“What, in Ernine? With her power over all that land?”

Catch-bottle? The phrase was an old one, a spell Jenny had only heard of in the lore handed down by the Line of Herne. Since Caerdinn hadn’t been clear himself what it meant or how it worked—his master Spaeth having left the North with the last troops of the King’s last garrison—Jenny didn’t know, either.

“Her power can only reach so far. We know the bottle was lost when the mages went into the mirror-chamber. For certain she was never trapped in it, the bitch. So all we have to do is find it. How far can it have rolled?”

The man’s voice cursed again. “I’m not going after it, I can tell you.…”

“Folcalor will go, and you’ll go with him or I’ll know why. With these here and the ones he’ll bring, that should give him the power to see through whatever blinds she can weave.”

These what? Jenny’s mind groped, and she wondered if she’d missed something in the shifting echoes, and the voices faded as the speakers moved away.

“… two days …” and “… Kings … damned glad to get the gnome-witch at last …”

Folcalor.

Jenny sat up, straining to follow the voices, but only the whisper of air moving in the vent shafts met her ears, and the cluck of subterranean streams.

Two days.

She felt absolutely cold.

Another two hundred slaves … seven hundred HERE. Here in the mines? Obviously in concealment with the collusion of one or several of the Lords of the Deep, but … seven hundred?

Those will give us power …

Those what?

Shakily, Jenny pulled on her skirt and her boots. To get to her feet she had to lean on the curve of the wall. The hip she’d twisted when she fell in the pit-trap twinged hard, making her stagger, but that, too, was already responding to the spells of healing Mab and Morkeleb had laid. Mab had brought a staff so that Jenny could limp as far as the latrine-bucket. Its tip was muffled in leather. Jenny groped it from beside her nest of blankets and hothwais, and stood.

Those will give us power.

Seven hundred slaves.

She listened in the darkness again but heard nothing. Not breath, not the murmur of voices, not weeping, not curses, not cries. Wherever the seven hundred slaves were, it was nowhere near where the two demons had been. So what were “those”?

From beneath the blankets she dug the little chip of hothwais Mab had left for light, and wrapped the cold-glowing stone in the folds of her overskirt, two and three thicknesses deep. So piercing was its light that by unwrapping a fold or two she could keep a muffled glow, like the faintest starlight, just enough and only enough to see.

I was once able to see in darkness, she thought. I should be keener-eyed now in dim light, even if not nightsighted as once I was. She focused her mind on calling that power to herself, calling it out of herself, and wrapped another fold of skirt around the stone. Then she slipped out of the chamber past the layers of straw mat, listening along the corridors for the direction in which she’d heard the voices.

It wasn’t far. In the long hours of silence and listening, she’d heard voices coming from that direction before. This was a section of the mines that had been worked out, short tunnels cut like the legs of a centipede off the long main lode. Jenny worked her way carefully from tunnel to tunnel in the darkness, listening and scenting. Even the most silent of slaves must sweat and breathe and piss. The smells of the mine were thin and cold around her, wet rock and clay and the old wood of the props. The sulfurous drift of blasting powder. Now and then the breath of the vent-shafts brushed her face, or riffled the silky black-silver stubble of her hair. She neither heard nor smelled demons, but wrapped another fold of her skirt over the hothwais nonetheless, fearing even the farthest glimmer of light that might alert them—or the mine-guards—to her presence.

How could they POSSIBLY have seven hundred slaves here? Bring them here, feed them, keep them silent …?

She smelled straw. Wet straw and clay.

And the next instant sensed the presence of others around her, other souls, other thoughts. It was as if she’d walked suddenly into an immense crowd, silently watching. But the thin stream of air along the walls had not altered. The echo of walls close on either side of her was unchanged.

No sound of breathing. No scent of sweat. Only the echo of weeping in her mind, the broken clamor of terror and grief and pain.

Utterly silent in the dark.

No smell of demons, either, nor the whisper of claws on rocks. Nothing of the faint shivering chime that their glass shells made when they scraped against stone. Cold air eddied out of the denser darkness of a tunnel mouth, and Jenny made note of her directions, counting right and left by notching the side of the staff with her knife. She slipped around the corner and advanced into the almost absolute dark.

People. The tunnel was filled with people. She knew it. Impossible, she could touch the walls with her hands! Yet she sensed people all around her, felt their presence. But not a whisper did she hear, not a sound. And no smell save that of damp baskets, of clay pots.

Fearing yet to risk more light, she strained her eyes, shifting the focus of them as once she’d learned to as a mage. The tunnel took another turning, and opened into a little chamber of the kind to which Mab and Morkeleb had carried her, a sort of catacomb whose ceiling made her stoop. The movement of the air there spoke of a small space, not a large one.

A few pots and baskets stood against the wall.

And that was all.

Kneeling, Jenny went to the nearest basket and removed its lid.

It was full of jewels.

Jenny blinked. A dream-vision came back to her … when? At the Hold? In the night-camp in the Snakewater Marshes, when she and Morkeleb were on their way here? It had been a dream of Folcalor, whom she’d recognized through Amayon’s memories of the demon rebel: Folcalor dipping his hand into a dish of jewels. A gnome’s hand, she recalled, powerful, the short fingers adorned with huge rings, slabs of opal and turquoise. She saw again how those stubby knotted fingers had stirred and rubbed the jewels, savoring them. This vision had made no sense to her when she’d had it: Folcalor had imprisoned the minds and souls of the mages he’d enslaved in jewels, Jenny’s mind and soul among them, but in her vision there were far, far too many jewels for that.

There hadn’t been that many mages born in all of time.

Hundreds …

She crawled a little farther and opened the next basket. It, too, was full of gems. Rough-cut crystals, glittering coldly in the darkness.

They mine gold in Ylferdun, she thought. Not gems. She scooped up two or three for a closer look.

And nearly dropped them in shock.

Dear gods!

The souls were in the jewels.

Not mages’ souls. She would have felt the magic there, the minds still clear and thinking and aware. But souls nonetheless. Weeping, some of them, as she had wept in her prison. Calling out to their husbands, or wives, or children, or parents, or friends, as she had called John’s name in despair.

She felt their deaths, too—deaths in agony and horror. She recalled enough of her demon sensibilities to recognize that.

Seven hundred, she thought, first blank, then burning with an all-consuming rage. SEVEN HUNDRED …

She sat down between the two baskets in the dark, feeling as if she could not breathe.

“Any who wish to rid themselves of old folks, or cripples, or the simpleminded,” the innkeeper at Eldsbouch had said to her not so long ago, “can earn good silver by giving them over to the brother Kings.…” And as the northern winds had whipped and screamed at the walls of that old stone inn, Jenny and her son Ian had looked at each other in bafflement, wondering why the twin Kings of the Deep of Tralchet would purchase slaves so patently useless. “I think you should let Lord John know of this,” the innkeeper had added.

Dear gods, if only I could!

Jenny’s small hands shook as she pressed the jewels between them, held them close to her lips. Your cries are heard. Your cries are heard. Be at peace. She tried to will comfort to them, but she understood that they were dead, and they could not hear. Tortured by demons, murdered by demons, the moment of death prolonged and suspended in the jewels …

What would become of their souls?

Damn them. DAMN THEM …

It was forbidden to all the ancient Lines of wizardry, to generate magic by the sacrificial death of a human being. But it was known to all of them—certainly to the demons—that it was possible to do so.

Folcalor trapped those deaths, as he trapped the souls of the wizards, and for the same purpose.

To transform into weapons. To use against the Demon Queen, or against Folcalor’s Lord Adromelech …

Those will give us power.

Jenny scrambled to her feet again, trembling, glad that she had the staff to support her shaking knees. She felt as if she had been struck over the head, understanding everything now, sickened and shocked and unable to do a thing. She looked at the jewels in her hand—rough crystals, mostly, hunks of quartz and amethyst and a few garnets, rudely hewed and most with bits of their native rock or dirt adhering to them. Wanting to do something, but not knowing what she could do.

Carry them all away with her? It wouldn’t take the demons, in their gnome or their human bodies, long to track her down if she did that. Destroy them all? It would take hours.…

Hide them? There were two baskets and two pots, none very large or heavy. John had spoken of escaped slaves hiding in the worked-out galleries of the Tralchet mines, and had helped some escape. Presumably the same situation existed in Ylferdun, and the theft could be blamed on them. Jenny stooped to lift the first of the baskets, then froze, scenting, far off, the metallic whiff of demons in the moving drift of the ventilated air.

The tunnel was a cul-de-sac. She slipped the loose jewels still in her hand into her skirt pocket, caught up her staff, and fled. In the main tunnel the smell was stronger, and she flitted back along the way she had come, counting the side-shafts that were like separate abysses, darkness within dark.

Mab would know what to do, or Morkeleb … or John. Surely there had to be something that could be done.

Dear gods, she thought as she made her way back to the comfort of her own small niche, her rock womb in the great rock and darkness that seemed to constitute all the world now. Dear gods, where is John?

And she saw him again as last she’d seen him, disappearing into the blowing snow. Saw the battered grimness of his face and the bitter lines around his mouth as he helped Ian onto a horse, the long wet strands of his hair caught with flecks of sleet. His dark plaids billowed around his body as he mounted his horse, and when he moved suddenly, the thin silvery ghost-trace of the Demon Queen’s marks on his cheekbones caught the faded afternoon light.

On that bitter afternoon he’d been preoccupied with Ian, with getting him back to Alyn Hold before the storm got worse. She hoped that was the reason he hadn’t appeared to notice when she’d slipped her own horse back into the stable, and returned to the house. During the storm that followed she had sunk back into her dreams of the demons that in those days had possessed her with a ferocity that she now could barely conceive.

When the storm was over she’d gone to the Hold, hoping and fearing to see him as well as seeking to see her son. They’d said John had ridden out. Had ridden out after burning his workshop, something he never would have done, she knew, had he not conjured something there that he feared would harm whoever later entered that ramshackle, junk-crammed shed.

She had a terrible feeling that she knew what he had summoned there.

In all the weeks since—through bandit-siege and darkness, during her journey to Eldsbouch and her own disastrous conjuration of what was left of the wizard Caradoc and on until her departure with Morkeleb for the plague-haunted South—John had not been seen.

The Yellow-Haired Goddess, the Horned Goddess, Balyna of the Sea, who was called Hartemgardes in the North, was the goddess lovers prayed to, to reunite them with their loves. But Jenny prayed, as she had come more and more to pray, to the discredited God of Time, the thirteenth God whom old legends said had dreamed the other twelve; and she did not know exactly what it was that she prayed. Time come around, she thought, and make the circle whole; time come around and make the circle whole.

But only the God of Time knew what that circle was.

We have to get you out of here, Morkeleb said when he returned. The tunnels between this place and the warrens of the Arawan clan on the Ninth Level creep with demons. Jenny saw into his mind, and saw the silvery salamander shapes darting along the bases of the rock walls like unwholesome quicksilver in the blackness. She smelled the foul sharp pungence of them, felt the tingle of their dreadful magic, probing for her.

We cannot leave Miss Mab. Nor can we forsake those whose deaths are suspended within the crystals, without trying at least to get them away. The Master of Halnath may know what to do to release them.

The gates of Halnath are shut. Through Morkeleb’s mind she saw from far off the black rings of the university fortress’s walls, adamantine on their black knee of mountain rock. The smoke of cook fires fingered into the gray overcast. The Master is not there. Rumor has it that he is in hiding in Bel, either to traffick with demons and further spread the plague, or to attempt to murder the King or the King’s Heir …

That’s absurd, said Jenny. It was Polycarp who sent me here to the Deep, to learn of the demons from Miss Mab.

The patent absurdity of any rumor, replied the dragon drily, has never yet halted its spread, and I have observed such matters for many lives of men. I look to the palace of the King of Men and I see only the glamours of the demons about it, like shining clouds. Moreover, as I lay on the glaciers above the mines and cast my mind down into the city, rumor came to me that the Dreamweaver of whom you are so fond was taken by the King, and would have been put to death—

John? Jenny’s breath stopped, and she stared disbelieving into the diamond infinities of the dragon’s eyes, which were all of him that were visible in the cave’s dark. How came he …?

That I know not. Had they not been friends, and after long acquaintance used to passing thought back and forth like sisters trading hair ribbons, he would have closed his mind against her, to shut out her awareness of his regret. But she knew the regret was there, and the sadness, that she had chosen mortality and the loves of mortality: even the love of one who had cursed her in silence over the body of their dying son.

The names of dragons are music, threnodies embodying all that they truly are. She heard the regret woven in his name and his soul, at the way her heart skipped just then, hearing John’s name.

Regret and amusement, at himself and at her.

It was he: I heard his name. They say in the town that the demons sent a dragon to carry him off to safety; many in the marketplaces accuse ME of the deed.

He is safe?

This I know not. The dragon may have been a minion of the Queen behind the mirror. Or it may have had a score of his own to settle with your husband, or wanted to discuss with him the Analects of Polyborus or the breeding of pigs. I listened long for him, scrying the winds of heaven. I saw him not.

Jenny sat silent in her blankets, the hothwais of warmth cupped between her frozen hands. Even had she unwrapped the hothwais of light it would have done her little good, for Morkeleb was probably invisible. Still, she saw him clearly in her mind, spined and dark and serpentine, with his antenna-bobs glowing in the blackness, coiled in the small space of her little cave. The dragons she had saved from Folcalor and his demons all owed her fealty, though she had released them of any debt to her. One of them might have saved John—he had drawn out the spikes of quicksilver and adamant from their skulls, where the demons had dwelled. Nymr and Centhwevir, Hagginarshildim and Enismirdal …

But in that case why could Morkeleb not find him? He had said that from the glacier where he lay, on the Wall’s high crest, he could scry vast distances. He knew John well, having come down with him from the Skerries of Light in the summer, dragging John’s sagging and battered flying machine by its ropes. The dragon’s mind saw clear, like a hawk that can identify a rabbit from hundreds of feet in the air. John must be far off indeed if the dragon could not detect the beating of his heart.

And Miss Mab? she said again, and Morkeleb sighed. She put her palm on his narrow, bony forehead, and his thought enfolded her; she felt him cast his mind along the dark of the corridors, seeking for Miss Mab.

But the gnome-wife, when she came at length to what appeared to be a saucer of water on a table in her lamplit room—Jenny saw this only distantly, like a half-recalled dream—refused again to flee from the Deep. “None do I trust here, and none do I let come near,” she said, and she glanced around her, as if at shadows Jenny could not see. “My uncle the Howeth-Arawan, Patriarch of the Ninth Deep, and my cousins and brothers hold too much power for King Sevacandrozardus to send any here, against my will. In fleeing I will lose what I have here—a position in which I might yet do good.”

“Folcalor will be here in two days,” said Jenny. “I think he must be traveling in the train of your Master Goffyer of Tralchet. Miss Mab, it is not inconceivable that Folcalor has taken over the body and the soul of Goffyer himself, for Goffyer is a mage and this would be the demon’s goal. Could you stand against Goffyer, if you had to?”

Mab was silent. Jenny saw, through Morkeleb’s eyes and Morkeleb’s mind, the flicker of refusal in the gnome-wife’s wrinkled-apple face as she pushed the thought from her that her old master would be enslaved as others had been enslaved. Then she said, “If this be so, all the more reason for me to remain. To help him if I can. To help others here, if I cannot. My clan will protect me, as well as any can. I would not have thee, child, nor you, Dragonshadow, put yourselves in danger trying to reach me here, or to rescue me if I encountered demons in the mines in my attempt at flight. So long as I remain here in the warrens among my family, I will be safe. Goffyer …”

Her golden eyes grew sad. “Goffyer was a gnome of great age, a master of lore and a mage of tremendous power. If they could take him …”

Their strength is the strength of the one who fights them, said Morkeleb. It is like shining a light into a mirror. Do not think, gnome-wife, that you can stand against him by strength alone.

And she said, “I will do what I can.”

From that they could not move her. Nor, to tell the truth, could Jenny imagine how they would get to her to take her out of the warrens on the Ninth Deep, for when she listened into the darkness, she could hear the scritching of demon claws on the rock in the silence, in every passageway and tunnel in that direction.

As Mab must hear it, she thought. She wondered how much of the gnome-wife’s refusal to be rescued was due to awareness of that danger to the rescuers, and to herself if she tried now to leave.

After that, Jenny listened long into the darkness of the mines, casting her thoughts to the mains of played-out rock that surrounded them, focusing her attention on the sigh of the vent shafts, on the drip of water from underground springs. Lying on the floor beside her bed like a dog, Morkeleb listened, too, his dragon senses reaching farther and his mind following those senses, like tendrils of smoke through the air. Hear you aught of the Hellspawn, Jenny? murmured his voice in her mind, and she murmured back, Not north of us in the mine. In the Deep, yes, everywhere.

Nor I. Nor yet footfall of guard or scout. Let us see what we can carry away, of these seven hundred dead slaves you feel such pity for.

By the notches she had carved on her stick Jenny was able to find the place again, familiarity aiding her in seeing the shape of the rock walls. She found herself able to identify the little landmarks of ceiling dips and bends in the passageway, barely to be seen by the glow of her thick-wrapped hothwais as once she’d identified sprigs of blossom or saplings beside some Winterlands trail. But the little chamber was empty when they reached it. Not one gem remained on the slimy uneven floor.

Can you scry them? she asked, in distress. Scent them, find them? And she took the two or three crystals she carried in her skirt pocket and held them out to him, for him to feel and sense what they were. He breathed on the stones, his breath velvet on her hand. Then he fell silent for a time, reaching with his mind. She called upon the disciplines he had taught her, and those Mab had spoken of, the powers within her changed flesh and mind, and reached out likewise. She heard, far behind them, the scrape of boots on rock, and a gnome’s voice say something about straw matting. Her heart beat hard, knowing her hiding-place had been discovered.

Morkeleb said nothing. But when he moved off it was northward, not back to her shelter, and she followed. The ways they took, up steep stairways and narrow twisting shafts, told her that he, too, had failed to find any trace of the prison-crystals, for they were going upward through the mountain to the old watchtowers on its flanks. Breathless with her long recuperation, Jenny stumbled, and the dragon’s clawed grip bore her up—she still could not tell whether he wore a dragon’s shape or a man’s. At last they came to a chimney through the heart of the stone, whose hot rising air lifted Jenny’s ragged clothing around her and breathed on her face like some great beast. Morkeleb stepped out into the darkness before her and she saw him hanging there in the utter blackness, dark within dark, with his diamond eyes glittering and his wings spread out like sable silk and all the glowing bobs of his antennae swinging and flickering like fireflies.

In his clawed hands he grasped her, holding her against him as they rose through the abyss, up and up with the rock tube narrowing around them. At last they came out into true night, and freezing air, stars burning hard above Nast Wall’s jagged rim of basalt and ice. This was the world as dragons saw it, clean and untouched, uncomplicated and magical; the world Morkeleb had once asked her to enter, through a door that she was not sure, now, that she would be able to re-pass.

To the east above the horns of the mountain she saw the glowing streak of the comet, the Dragonstar John had watched for these three years now. An unknowable thing, she thought, different in nature from the stars, from the moon, from any thing on the earth. But John, being John, had spent a good deal of time trying to understand it, when it had nothing to do with the duties he had been bequeathed by his father, nor with the affairs of Kings, nor the struggle to survive in the Winterlands.

Morkeleb said nothing, letting her speak first, waiting for her thought.

Jenny said, “Let us go to Ernine.”