Dragon's Bane

XIII

“But why?” Squatting before the fire on his hunkerbones, Gareth turned to look at John, who lay in his nest of bearskin blankets and ratty plaids a few feet away. “As far as she was concerned, you’d slain her dragon for her.” He unraveled the screw of paper in which they’d brought the coffee up from Bel, decided there wasn’t enough to bother with measuring, and dumped it into the pot of water that bubbled over the fire. “She didn’t know then that Jenny was any threat to her. Why poison us?”

“At a guess,” John said, propping himself with great care up on one elbow and fitting his spectacles to his dirty, unshaven face, “to keep us from riding back to Bel with the news that the dragon was dead before she could get your dad to round up the remaining gnomes on some trumped-up charge. As far as she knew, the dragon was dead—I mean, she couldn’t have seen him in a crystal or a water bowl, but she could see us all alive and chipper, and the inference is a pretty obvious one.”

“I suppose.” Gareth unrolled his turned-up sleeves and slung his cloak around his shoulders once more. The morning was foggy and cold, and the sweat he’d worked up clearing out the well house close to their camp in the ruined tanneries was drying.

“I doubt she’d have poisoned you,” John went on. “If she’d wanted you dead, she’d never have waited for you.”

Gareth blushed hotly. “That isn’t why she waited,” he mumbled.

“Of course not,” John said. “Dead, you’re not only no good to her—if you die, she loses everything.”

The boy frowned. “Why? I mean, I can see her wanting me under her power so I’d no longer be a threat to her, the same reason she put Polycarp out of the way. And if she killed the two of you, she’d need me to back up her story about the dragon still being in the Deep, at least until she could get rid of the gnomes.” He sniffed bitterly and held out his blistered hands to the fire. “She’d probably use Bond and me as witnesses to say eventually that she slew the dragon. Then she’d be able to justify having my father give her the Deep.”

He sighed, his mouth tight with disillusionment. “And I thought Polycarp stretching a bit of cable over a fence sounded like the depths of perfidy.” He settled the griddle over the fire, his thin face looking much older than it had in the jonquil pallor of the daytime flames.

“Well,” John said gently, “it isn’t only that. Gar.” He glanced over at Jenny, who sat in the shadows of the newly cleared doorway of the well house, but she said nothing. Then he looked back to Gareth. “How long do you think your father’s going to last with Zyerne alive? I don’t know what her spells are doing to him, and I know a dying man when I see one. As it is, for all her power, she’s only a mis tress. She needs the Deep for a power base and fortress independent of the King, and she needs the Deep’s gold.”

“My father would give it to her,” Gareth said softly. “And I—I suppose I’m just the contingency plan, in case he should die?” He poked at the softly sizzling cakes on the griddle. “Then she had to destroy Polycarp, whether or not he tried to warn me of her. The Citadel guards the back way into the Deep.”

“Well, not even that.” John lay back down again and folded his hands on his breast. “She wanted to be rid of Polycarp because he’s an alternative heir.”

“Alternative to whom?” Gareth asked, puzzled. “To me?”

John shook his head. “Alternative to Zyerne’s child.”

The horror that crossed the boy’s face was deeper than fear of death—deeper. Jenny thought with the strange dispassion that had lain upon her all that morning and through the previous night, than fear of being subjugated to the enchantress’s spells. He looked nauseated by the thought, as if at the violation of some dark taboo. It was a long time before he could speak. “You mean—my father’s child?”

“Or yours. It would scarcely matter which, as long as it had the family looks.” Bandaged hands folded, John looked shortsightedly up at the boy as, half-numbed, Gareth went through the automatic motions of forking griddlecakes from the skillet. Still in that gentle, matter-of-fact voice, he went on, “But you see, after this long under Zyerne’s spells, your father may not be capable of fathering a child. And Zyerne needs a child, if she’s to go on ruling.”

Jenny looked away from them, thinking about what it would be, to be that child. The same wave of sickness Gareth had felt passed over her at the knowledge of what Zyerne would do to any child others. She would not feed upon it, as she fed upon the King and Bond; but she would raise it deliberately as an emotional cripple, forever dependent upon her and her love. Jenny had seen it done, by women or by men, and knew what manner of man or woman emerged from that smothered childhood. But even then, the twisting had been from some need of the parent’s heart, and not something done merely to keep power.

She thought of her own sons and the absurd love she bore them. She might have abandoned them, she thought with sudden fury at Zyerne, but even had she not loved them, even were they got on her by rape, she would never have done that to them. It was a thing she would have liked to think she herself could scarcely conceive of anyone doing to an innocent child—except that in her heart she knew exactly how it could be done.

Anger and sickness stirred in her, as if she had looked upon torture.

“Jenny?”

Gareth’s voice broke her from her thoughts. He stood a few paces from her, looking pleadingly down at her. “He will get better, won’t he?” he asked hesitantly. “My father, I mean? When Zyerne is banished, or—or is killed—he will be the way he was before?”

Jenny sighed. “I don’t know,” she replied in a low voice. She shook her mind free of the lethargy that gripped her, a weariness of the spirit as much as the ache of hei body left by the battering of Zyerne’s spells. It was not only that she had badly overstretched her own newfound powers, not only that her body was unused to sustaining the terrible demands of the dragon’s magic. She was aware now that her very perceptions were changing, that it was not only her magic that had been changed by the touch of the dragon’s mind. The dragon in you answered, he had said—she was starting to see things as a dragon saw.

She got stiffly to her feet, staggering a little against the shored-up doorpost of the well house, feeling physically drained and very weak. She had watched through the night, telling herself it was for Zyerne that she watched, though in her heart she knew the enchantress would not be back, and it was not, in fact, for her that she waited She said, “It isn’t the spells that she holds him under that are harming him. Zyerne is a vampire, Gareth—not of the blood, like the Whisperers, but of the life-essence itself. In her eyes last night I saw her essence, her soul; a sticky and devouring thing, yes, but a thing that must feed to go on living. Miss Mab told me of the spells of the Places of Healing that can shore up the life of a dying man by taking a little of the life-energy of those who consent to give it. It is done seldom, and only in cases of great need. I am certain this is what she has done to your father and to Bond. What I don’t understand is why she would need to. Her powers are such that...”

“You know,” John broke in, “it says in Dotys’ Histories... or maybe it’s in Terens... or is it the Elucidus Lapidarus... ?”

“But what can we do?” Gareth pleaded. “There must be something! I could ride back to Bel and let Dromar know it’s safe for the gnomes to reoccupy the Deep. It would give them a strong base to...”

“No,” Jenny said. “Zyerne’s hold on the city is too strong. After this, she’ll be watching for you, scrying the roads. She’d intercept you long before you came near Bel.”

“But we have to do something!” Panic and desperation lurked at bay in his voice. “Where can we go? Polycarp would give us shelter in the Citadel...”

“You going to tell the siege troops around the walls you want a private word with him?” John asked, forgetting all about his speculations upon the classics.

“There are ways through the Deep into Halnath.”

“And a nice locked door at the end of ’em, I bet, or the tunnels sealed shut with blasting powder to keep the dragon out—even if old Dromar had put them on his maps, which he didn’t. I had a look for that back in Bel.”

“Damn him...” Gareth began angrily, and John waved him silent with a mealcake in hand.

“I can’t blame him,” he said. Against the random browns and heathers of the bloodstained plaid folded beneath his head his face still looked pale but had lost its dreadful chalkiness. Behind his specs, his brown eyes were bright and alert. “He’s a canny old bird, and he knows Zyerne. If she didn’t know where the ways through to the Citadel hooked up into the main Deep, he wasn’t going to have that information down on paper that she could steal. Still, Jen might be able to lead us.”

“No.” Jenny glanced over at him from where she sat cross-legged beside the fire, dipping the last bite of her griddlecake into the honey. “Even being able to see in darkness, I could not scout them out unaided. As for you going through them, if you try to get up in under a week, I’ll put a spell of lameness on you.”

“Cheat.”

“Watch me.” She wiped her fingers on the end of her plaid. “Morkeleb guided me through to the heart of the Deep; I could never have found it, else.”

“What was it like?” Gareth asked after a moment. “The heart of the Deep? The gnomes swear by it...”

Jenny frowned, remembering the whispering darkness and the soapy feel of the stone altar beneath her fingertips. “I’m not sure,” she said softly. “I dreamed about it...”

As one, the horses suddenly flung up their heads from the stiff, frosted grass. Battlehammer nickered softly and was answered, thin and clear, from the mists that floated on the fringes of the woods that surrounded Deeping Vale. Hooves struck the stone, and a girl’s voice called out, “Gar? Gar, where are you?”

“It’s Trey.” He raised his voice to shout. “Here!”

There was a frenzied scrambling of sliding gravel, and the whitish mists solidified into the dark shapes of a horse and rider and a fluttering of dampened veils. Gareth strode to the edge of the high ground of the Rise to catch the bridle of Trey’s dappled palfrey as it came stumbling up the last slope, head-down with exhaustion and matted with sweat in spite of the day’s cold. Trey, clinging to the saddlebow, looked scarcely better off, her face scratched as if she had ridden into low-hanging branches in the wood and long streamers clawed loose from her purple-and-white coiffure.

“Gar, I knew you had to be all right.” She slid from the saddle into his arms. “They said they saw the dragon—that Lady Jenny had put spells upon him—I knew you had to be all right.”

“We’re fine. Trey,” Gareth said doubtfully, frowning at the terror and desperation of the girl’s voice. “You look as if you’ve ridden here without a break.”

“I had to!” she gasped. Under the torn rags of her white Court dress, her knees were trembling, and she clung to Gareth’s arm for support; her face was colorless beneath what was left of its paint. “They’re coming for you! I don’t understand what’s happening, but you’ve got to get out of here! Bond...” She stumbled on her brother’s name.

“What about Bond? Trey, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know!” she cried. Tears of wretchedness and exhaustion overflowed her eyes, and she wiped them impatiently, leaving faint streaks of blue-black kohl on her round cheeks. “There’s a mob on its way, Bond’s leading it...”

“Bond?” The idea of the lazy and elegant Bond troubling himself to lead anyone anywhere was absurd.

“They’re going to kill you. Gar! I heard them say so! You, and Lady Jenny, and Lord John.”

“What? Why?” Gareth was growing more and more confused.

“More to the point, who?” John asked, propping himself up among his blankets once again.

“These—these people, laborers mostly—smelters and artisans from Deeping out of work, the ones who hang around the Sheep in the Mire all day. There are Palace guards with them, too, and I think more are coming—I don’t know why! I tried to get some sense out of Bond, but it’s as if he didn’t hear me, didn’t know me! He slapped me—and he’s never hit me, Gar, not since I was a child...”

“Tell us,” Jenny said quietly, taking the girl’s hand, cold as a dead bird in her warm rough one. “Start from the beginning.”

Trey gulped and wiped her eyes again, her hands shaking with weariness and the exertion of a fifteen-mile ride The ornamental cloak about her shoulders was an indoor garment of white silk and milky fur, designed to ward off the chance drafts of a ballroom, not the bitter chill of a foggy night such as the previous one had been. Her long fingers were chapped and red among their diamonds.

“We’d all been dancing,” she began hesitantly. “It was past midnight when Zyerne came in. She looked strange—I thought she’d been sick, but I’d seen her in the morning and she’d been fine then. She called Bond to her, into an alcove by the window. I—” Some color returned to her too-white cheeks. “I crept after them to eavesdrop. I know it’s a terribly rude and catty thing to do, but after what we’d talked of before you left I—I couldn’t help doing it. It wasn’t to learn gossip,” she added earnestly. “I was afraid for him—and I was so scared because I’d never done it before and I’m not nearly as good at it as someone like Isolde or Merriwyn would be.”

Gareth looked a little shocked at this frankness, but John laughed and patted the toe of the girl’s pearl-beaded slipper in commiseration. “We’ll forgive you this time, love, but don’t neglect your education like that again. You see where it leads you?” Jenny kicked him, not hard, in his unwounded shoulder.

“And then?” she asked.

“I heard her say, ‘I must have the Deep. They must be destroyed, and it must be now, before the gnomes hear. They mustn’t be allowed to reach it.’ I followed them down to that little postern gate that leads to the Dockmarket; they went to the Sheep in the Mire. The place was still full of men and women; all drunk and quarreling with each other. Bond went rushing in and told them he’d heard you’d betrayed them, sold them out to Polycarp; that you had the dragon under Lady Jenny’s spells and were going to turn it against Bel; that you were going to keep the gold of the Deep for yourselves and not give it to them, its rightful owners. But they weren’t ever its rightful owners—it always belonged to the gnomes, or to the rich merchants in Deeping. I tried to tell that to Bond...” Her cold-reddened hand stole to her cheek, as if to wipe away the memory of a handprint.

“But they were all shouting how they had to kill you and regain their gold. They were all drunk—Zyerne got the innkeeper to broach some more kegs. She said she was going to re-enforce them with the Palace guards. They were yelling and making torches and getting weapons. I ran back to the Palace stables and got Prettyfeet, here...” She stroked the exhausted pony’s dappled neck, and her voice grew suddenly small. “And then I came here. I rode as fast as I dared—I was afraid of what might happen if they caught me. I’d never been out riding alone at night...”

Gareth pulled off his grubby crimson cloak and slung it around her shoulders as her trembling increased.

She concluded, “So you have to get out of here...”

“That we do.” John flung back the bearskins from over his body. “We can defend the Deep.”

“Can you ride that far?” Gareth asked worriedly, handing him his patched, iron-plated leather jerkin.

“I’ll be gie in trouble if I can’t, my hero.”

“Trey?”

The girl looked up from gathering camp things as Jenny spoke her name.

Jenny crossed quietly to where she stood and took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes for a long moment. The probing went deep, and Trey pulled back with a thin cry of alarm that brought Gareth running. But to the bottom, her mind was a young girl’s—not always truthful, anxious to please, eager to love and to be loved. There was no taint on it, and its innocence twisted at Jenny’s own heart.

Then Gareth was there, indignantly gathering Trey to him.

Jenny’s smile was crooked but kind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure.”

By their shocked faces she saw that it had not occurred to either of them that Zyerne might have made use of Trey’s form—or of Trey.

“Come,” she said. “We probably don’t have much time Gar, get John on a horse. Trey, help him.”

“I’m perfectly capable...” John began, irritated.

But Jenny scarcely heard. Somewhere in the mists of the half-burned woods below the town, she felt sudden movement, the intrusion of angry voices among the frostrimmed silence of the blackened trees. They were coming and they were coming fast—she could almost see them at the turning of the road below the crumbling ruin of the clock tower.

She turned swiftly back to the others. “Go!” she said. “Quickly, they’re almost on us!”

“How...” began Gareth.

She caught up her medicine bag and her halberd and vaulted to Moon Horse’s bare back. “Now! Gar, take Trey with you. John, RIDE, damn you!” For he had wheeled back, barely able to keep upright in Cow’s saddle, to remain at her side. Gareth flung Trey up to Battlehammer’s back in a flurry of torn skirts; Jenny could hear the echo of hooves on the trail below.

Her mind reached out, gathering spells together, even the small effort wrenching at her. She set her teeth at the stabbing pain as she gathered the dispersing mists that had been burning off in the sun’s pallid brightness—her body was not nearly recovered from yesterday. But there was no time for anything else. She wove the cold and dampness into a cloak to cover all the Vale of Deeping; like a secondary pattern in a plaid, she traced the spells of disorientation, of jamais vu. Even as she did so, the hooves and the angry, incoherent voices were very close. They rang in the misty woods around the Rise and near the gatehouse in the Vale as well—Zyerne must have told them where to come. She wheeled Moon Horse and gave her a hard kick in her skinny ribs, and the white mare threw herself down the rocky slope in a gangly sprawl of legs, making for the Gates of the Deep.

She overtook the others in the gauzy boil of the mists in the Vale. They had slowed down as visibility lessened; she led them at a canter over the paths that she knew so 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 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 under the stubble of beard, still somehow upright in Cow’s saddle. He studied the Vale below them with his usual cool expressionlessness. “Zyerne 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 Sarmendes 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—Zyerne 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?”

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 spiraled down into a single inner vortex, like the singleminded 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 leisurely timelessness the men and women running through the crumbled walls of the ruins. She saw each one of them 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 perfectly 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 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 cacophony 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, staring 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-white 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.”

In the square below the gates, Bond was running here and there among the men, stepping over the charred bodies of the dying, gesticulating and pointing up at the phantom 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 Zyerne 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.”

“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, somewhere 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 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, oblivious to burns 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 carry 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 outdistance 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 in the archway would scarcely suffice.”

“One of us could try to get through,” Trey suggested 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 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 stone of the pillar, a bar of sunlight falling through the Gate around her and lying like a pale carpet on the fireblack rubble of the Market Hall. She wondered if Zyerne had ever felt like this, when she had called upon the deep reserves of her powers, without Limitations—helpless before the anger of men.

She doubted it. It did something to you to be helpless.

All power must be paid for. Zyerne had never paid.

She wondered, just for a moment, how the enchantress had managed that.

“What’s that?”

At the sound of Trey’s voice, she opened her eyes again and looked out to where the girl was pointing. The light filling the Vale glinted harshly on something up near the ruined clock tower. Listening, she could pick out the sound of hooves and voices and feel the distant clamor of anger and unthinking hate. Against the dull slate color of the tower’s stones, the weeds of the hillside looked pale as yellow wine; between them the uniforms of half a company of Palace guards glowed like a tumble of hothouse poppies. The sun threw fire upon their weapons.

“Gaw,” John said. “Reinforcements.”

Bond and a small group of men were running up through the rubble and sedge toward the new company, flies swarming thick on the young courtier’s untended wounds. Small with distance. Jenny saw more and more men under the shadow of the tower, the brass of pike and cuirass flashing, the red of helmet crests like spilled blood against the muted hues of the stone. Exhaustion ate like poison into her bones. Her skin felt like a single open, throbbing wound; through it, she could feel the illusion of the Ga^c fading to nothingness as her power drained and died.

She said quietly, “You three get back to the doors into the Grand Passage. Gar, Trey—carry John. Bolt the doors from the inside—there are winches and pulleys there.”

“Don’t be stupid.” John was clinging to the gatepost beside her to stay upright.

“Don’t you be stupid.” She would not take her eyes from the swarming men in the square below.

“We’re not leaving you,” Gareth stated. “At least, I’m not. Trey, you take John...”

“No,” Trey and the Dragonsbane insisted in approximate unison. They looked at one another and managed the ghost of a mutual grin.

“It’s all of us or none of us, love.”

She swung around on them, her eyes blazing palely with the crystalline coldness of the dragon’s eyes. “None of you can be of the slightest use to me here against so many. John and Trey, all you’ll be is killed immediately. Gareth...” Her eyes pinned his like a lance of frost. “You may not be. They may have other instructions concerning you, from Zyerne. I may have the strength for one more spell. That can buy you some time. John’s wits may keep you alive for a while more in the Deep; you’ll need Trey’s willingness as well. Now go.”

There was a short silence, in which she could feel John’s eyes upon her face. She was conscious of the men approaching in the Vale; her soul screamed at her to get rid of these three whom she loved while there was yet time.

It was Gareth who spoke. “Will you really be able to hold the Gate against another charge? Even of—of my father’s men?”

“I think so,” Jenny lied, knowing she hadn’t the strength left to light a candle.

“Aye, then, love,” said John softly. “We’d best go.” He took her halberd to use as a crutch; holding himself upright with it, he put a hand on her nape and kissed her.

His mouth felt cold against hers, his lips soft even through the hard scratchiness of five days’ beard. As their lips parted, their eyes met, and, through the dragon armor of hardness, she saw he knew she’d lied.

“Let’s go, children,” he said. “We won’t shoot the bolts till we have to, Jen.”

The line of soldiers was descending through the labyrinth of shattered foundations and charred stone. They were joined by the men and women of Deeping, those, Jenny noted, who had thrown garbage at Miss Mab in the fountain square of Bel. Makeshift weapons jostled pikes and swords. In the brilliance of daylight everything seemed hard and sharp. Every house beam and brick stood out to Jenny’s raw perceptions like filigree work, every tangle of weed and stand of grass clear and individuated. The amber air held the stench of sulfur and burned flesh. Like a dim background to angry ranting and exhortation rose the keening of the wounded and, now and again, voices crying, “Gold... gold...”

They scarcely even know what it is for, Morkeleb had said.

Jenny thought about Ian and Adric, and wondered briefly who would raise them, or if, without her and John’s protection of the Winterlands, they would live to grow up at all. Then she sighed and stepped forth from the shadows into the light. The pale sun drenched her, a small, skinny, black-haired woman alone in the vast arch of the shattered Gate. Men pointed, shouting. A rock clattered against the steps, yards away. The sunlight felt warm and pleasant upon her face.

Bond was screaming hysterically, “Attack! Attack now! Kill the witch-bitch! It’s our gold! We’ll get the slut this time—get her...”

Men began to run forward up the steps. She watched them coming with a curious feeling of absolute detachment. The fires of dragon-magic had drained her utterly—one last trap, she thought ironically, from Morkeleb, i final vengeance for humiliating him. The mob curled like a breaking wave over the ruined beams and panels of the shattered gates, the sunlight flashing on the steel of the weapons in their hands.

Then a shadow crossed the sunlight—like a hawk’s, but immeasurably more huge.

One man looked up, pointed at the sky, and screamed.

Again the sunlight was darkened by circling shade. Jenny raised her head. The aureate light streamed translucently through the black spread of bones and the dark veins of sable wings, sparkled from the spikes that tipped the seventy-foot span of that silent silk, and gilded every horn and ribbon of the gleaming mane.

She watched the dragon circling, riding the thermals like a vast eagle, only peripherally conscious of the terrified shouting of the men and the frenzied squeals of the guards’ horses. Yelling and crashing in the rubble, the attackers of the Deep turned and fled, trampling upon their dead and dropping their weapons in their headlong flight.

The Vale was quite empty by the time Morkeleb lighted upon the heat-cracked steps of the Deep.