Dragon's Bane

XV

Light watered the darkness, changing the air from velvet to silk. Cold cut into Jenny’s hands and face, imbuing her with a sense of strange and soaring joy. The high cirques and hanging valleys of the Wall’s toothy summits were stained blue and lavender against the charcoal gray of the sky; below her, mist clung like raveled wool to the bones of the shadowy town. For a time she was alone and complete, torn by neither power nor love, only breathing the sharp air of dawn.

Like a shift in perception, she became aware of the dragon, lying along the bottom step. Seeing her, he rose and stretched like a cat, from nose to tail knob to the tips of the quivering wings, every spine and horn blinking in the gray-white gloom.

Wrap yourself well, wizard woman. The upper airs are cold.

He sat back upon his haunches and, reaching delicately down, closed around her one gripping talon, like a hand twelve inches across the back and consisting of nothing but bone wrapped in muscle and studded with spike and horn. The claws lapped easily around her waist. She felt no fear of him; though she knew he was treacherous, she had been within his mind and knew he would not kill her. Still, a shivery qualm passed through her as he lifted her up against his breast, where she would be out of the airstream.

The vast shadow of his wings spread against the mauve gloom of the cliff behind them, and she cast one quick glance down at the ground, fifteen feet below. Then she looked up at the mountains surrounding the Vale and at the white, watching eye of the moon on the flinty crest of the ridge, a few days from full and bright in the western air as the lamps of the dragon’s eyes.

Then he flung himself upward, and all the world dropped away.

Cold sheered past her face, its bony fingers clawing through her hair. Through the plaids wrapped around her, she felt the throbbing heat of the dragon’s scales. From the sky she looked to the earth again, the Vale like a well of blue shadow, the mountain slopes starting to take on the colors of dawn as the sun brushed them, rust and purple and all shades of brown from the whitest dun to the deep hue of coffee, all edged and trimmed with the dark lace of trees. The rain tanks north of Deeping caught the new day like chips of mirror; as the dragon passed over the flanks of the mountain, circling higher, she saw the bright leap of springs among the pine trees, and the white spines of thrusting rock.

The dragon tilted, turning upon the air, the vast wings searing faintly at the wind. Occasional eddies of it whistled around the spikes that defended the dragon’s backbone—some of them no longer than a finger, others almost a cubit, dagger-sharp. In flight the dragon seemed to be a thing made of silk and wire, lighter than his size would lead one to think, as if the flesh and muscle, like the mind and the shape of his bones, were different in composition from all things else upon the Earth.

This is the realm of the dragons, Morkeleb’s voice said within her mind. The roads of the air. It is yours, for the stretching out of your hand.

In the slant of the light they laid no shadow upon the ground, but it seemed to Jenny that she could almost see the track of their passage written like a ship’s wake upon the wind. Her mind half-within the dragon’s, she could sense the variations of the air, updraft and thermal, as if the wind itself were of different colors. With the dragon’s awareness, she saw other things in the air as well—the paths of energy across the face of the world, the tracks that traveled from star to star, like the lines of force that were repeated in the body, smaller and smaller, in the spreads of dealt cards or thrown runes or the lie of leaves in water. She was aware of life everywhere, of the winterwhite foxes and hares in the patchy snowlines beneath the thin scrum of cloud below, and of the King’s troops; camped far down upon the road, who pointed and cried out as the dragon’s dark shape passed overhead.

They crossed the flank of the mountain to its daylight side. Before and below her, she saw the cliff and hill and Citadel of Halnath, a spiky conglomerate of thrusting gray ramparts clinging like a mud-built swallow’s nest to the massive shoulder of a granite cliff. From its feet, the land lay crisscrossed with wooded ravines to the silver curve of a river; mist blended with the blue of woodsmoke to veil the straggling lines of tents and guard posts, horse lines and trenches raw with yellow mud, that made up the siege camps. An open ring of battered ground lay between the walls and the camp, ravaged by battle and bristling with the burned-out shells of the small truck farms that nestled around the walls of any town. Beyond, to the north, the green stretches of the Marches vanished away under a gauze of mists, the horse- and cattle-lands that were the Master’s fief and strength. From the river marshes where pewter waters spread themselves, a skein of dandefoot herons rose through the milky vapors, tiny and clear as a pen sketch.

There. Jenny pointed with her mind toward the battlements of the high Citadel. The central court there. It’s narrow, but long enough for us to land.

Wind and her long hair lashed her eyes as the dragon wheeled.

They have armored their walls, the dragon said. Look. Men were running about the ramparts, pointing and waving at the enormous wings flashing in the air. Jenny glimpsed catapults mounted on the highest turrets, counterweighted slings bearing buckets that burst suddenly into red flame and massive crossbows whose bolts could point nowhere but at the sky.

We’ll have to go in. Jenny said. I’ll protect you.

By catching the bolts in your teeth, wizard woman? Morkeleb asked sarcastically, circling away as some overeager slinger slipped his ropes and a bucketful of naphtha described a curving trajectory, flames streaming like faded orange pennants against the brightness of the new day. What protection can you, a human, offer me?

Jenny smiled to herself, watching the naphtha as it broke into blazing lumps in falling. None of them landed in the town on the slopes below—they knew their mathematics, these defenders of Halnath, and how to apply them to ballistics. For herself, she supposed she should have been terrified, to be carried this high above the reeling earth—if she fell, she would fall for a long time before she died. But whether it was her trust in Morkeleb, or the dragon’s mind that enveloped hers in the thoughts of those who lived in the airstream, she felt no fear of it. Indeed, she almost believed that, if she were to drop, she had only to spread out her own wings, as she did in dreams of flight.

Small as toys on the walls of the Citadel, the machines of defense were being cranked around to bear upon them. They looked, at this distance, like nothing so much as John’s little models. And to think I grew impatient when he insisted upon showing me how every one of them fired. She smiled, half to Morkeleb and half to herself. Swing north, Morkeleb, and come at them from along that ridge. The problem with machines has always been that it requires only the touch of a wizard’s mind to fox their balance.

There were two engines guarding the approach she had set, a bolt-firing catapult and a spring-driven sling. She had thrown her magic before, conjuring images within her mind, to foul the bowstrings of bandits in the north and to cause their feet to find roots as they ran, or their swords to stick in their sheaths. Having seen the mechanisms of these weapons in John’s models, she found this no harder. Ropes twisted in the catapult, jamming the knots when the triggering cord was jerked. With a dragon’s awareness, she saw a man running in panic along the battlements; he knocked over a bucket into the mechanism of the sling so that it could not be turned to aim. The dragon swung lazily from the weapon’s possible path, guided by the touch of Jenny’s mind within his; and she felt, like a chuckle of dark laughter, his appreciation for the ease with which she thwarted the mechanical devices.

You are small, wizard woman, he said, amused, but a mighty defender of dragons, nevertheless.

Throwing her streaming hair back from her eyes. Jenny could see men on the battlements below them clearly now. They were clothed in makeshift uniforms, the black, billowing gowns of scholars covered with battered bits of armor, some of it stamped with the royal arms and obviously taken from prisoners or the slain. They fled in all directions as the dragon drew near, save for one man tall, red-haired, and thin as a scarecrow in his ragged blackgown, who was swinging something to bear upon them that looked for a moment like a telescope—a metal tube braced upon stakes. The walls swooped closer. At the last moment Jenny saw harpoons stacked beside him and, instead of glass in the tube’s mouth, the glint of a metal point.

The lone defender had a burning spill in one hand, lighted from one of the naphtha buckets. He was watching them come in, taking aim—Blasting powder, thought Jenny; the gnomes will have brought plenty up from the mines. She remembered John’s abortive experiments with rockets.

The scene rushed to meet them, until every chipped stone of the wall and every patch on the scholar’s ragged gown seemed within reach of Jenny’s hand. As he brought the spill down to the touch-hole, Jenny used her mind to extinguish the flame, as she would have doused a candle. Then she spread out her arms and cried, “STOP!” at the top of her voice.

He froze in mid-motion, the harpoon he had snatched from the pile beside him cocked back already over his shoulder, though Jenny could tell by the way he held it that he had never thrown one before and could not have hit them. Even at that distance, she saw wonder, curiosity, and delight on his thin face. Like John, she thought, he was a true scholar, fascinated with any wonder, though it carried his death upon its wings.

Morkeleb braked in the air, the shift of his muscles rippling against Jenny’s back. All men had fled the long, narrow court of the Citadel and the walls around it, save that single defender. The dragon hung for a moment like a hovering hawk, then settled, delicate as a dandelion seed, to perch on the wall above the shadowy well of the court. The great hind-talons gripped the stone as the long neck and tail counterbalanced, and he stooped like a vast bird to set Jenny on her feet upon the rampart.

She staggered, her knees weak from shock, her whole body trembling with exhilaration and cold. The tall, redhaired young man, harpoon still in one hand, moved forward along the walkway, black robe billowing beneath an outsize hauberk of chain mail. Though he was clearly cautious. Jenny thought from the way he looked at Morkeleb that he could have stood and studied the dragon for hours; but there was a court-bred politeness in the way he offered Jenny his hand.

It took her a moment to remember to speak in words.

“Polycarp of Halnath?”

He looked surprised and disconcerted at hearing his name. “I am he.” Like Gareth, it took more than dragons or bandits to shake his early training; he executed a very creditable Dying Swan in spite of the harpoon.

Jenny smiled and held out her hands to him. “I am Jenny Waynest, Gareth’s friend.”

“Yes, there is a power sink in the heart of the Deep.” Polycarp, Master of the Citadel of Halnath and Doctor of Natural Philosophy, folded long, narrow hands behind his back and turned from the pointed arches of the window to look at his rescued, oddly assorted guests. “It is what Zyerne wants; what she has always wanted, since first she knew what it was.”

Gareth looked up from the ruins of the simple meal which strewed the plain waxed boards of the workroom table. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

The bright blue eyes flickered to him. “What could I have said?” he asked. “Up until a year ago I wasn’t even sure. And when I was...” His glance moved to the gnome who sat at the table’s head, tiny and stooped and very old, his eyes like pale green glass beneath the long mane of milk-white hair. “Sevacandrozardus—Balgub, in the tongue of men; brother of the Lord of the Deep who was slain by the dragon—forbade me to speak of it. I could not break his confidence.”

Beyond the tall windows, the turrets of the lower Citadel, the University, and the town beneath could be glimpsed, the sunlight on them yellow as summer butter, though the buildings below were already cloaked in the shadows of the mountain as the sun sank behind its shoulder. Sitting on the end of the couch where John lay. Jenny listened in quiet to the debating voices. Her body ached for sleep and her mind for stillness, but she knew that both would be denied her. Neither the words of the impromptu council nor the recollection of the trip back through the Deep with Polycarp and the gnomes to fetch the others had eradicated from her thoughts the soaring memory of the dragon’s flight.

She knew she ought not to let it hold her so. She ought to be more conscious of her own gladness that they were, at least for the moment, relatively safe and more preoccupied with their exchange of information with the Master and with plans for how to deal with the Stone and its mistress. Yet the flight and the memory of the dragon’s mind had shaken her to the bones. She could not put that wild intoxication from her heart.

The old gnome was saying, “It has always been forbidden to speak of the Stone to outsiders. After it became clear that the girl Zyerne had heard of it somehow and had spied upon those who used it and learned its key, my brother, the Lord of the Deep, redoubled the anathema. It has from the darkness of time been the heart of the Deep, the source of power for our Healers and mages, and has made our magic so great that none dared to assault the Deep of Ylferdun. But always we knew its danger as well—that the greedy could use such a thing for their own ends. And so it was.”

Jenny roused herself from her thoughts to ask, “How did you know she had used it?” Like the others, she had bathed and was now dressed like them all in the frayed black gown of a scholar of the University, too large for her and belted tight about her waist. Her hair, still damp from washing, hung about her shoulders.

The gnome’s light eyes shifted. Grudgingly, he said, “To take power from the Stone, there must be a return. It gives to those who draw upon it, but later it asks back from them. Those who were used to wielding its power—myself, Taseldwyn whom you know as Miss Mab, and others—could feel the imbalance. Then it corrected itself, or seemed to. I was content.” He shook his head, the opals that pinned his white hairflashing in the diffuse light of the long room. “Mab was not.”

“What return does it ask?”

For a moment his glance touched her, reading in her, as Mab had done, the degree other power. Then he said, “Power for power. All power must be paid for, whether it is taken from your own spirit, or from the holding-sink of others. We, the Healers, of whom I was chief, used to dance for it, to concentrate our magic and feed it into the Stone, that others might take of its strength and not have their very life-essences drawn from them by it—the woman Zyerne did not know how to make the return of magic to it, did not even learn that she should. She was never taught its use, but had only sneaked and spied until she learned what she thought was its secret. When she did not give back to it, the Stone began to eat at her essence.”

“And to feed it,” said Jenny softly, suddenly understanding what she had seen in the lamplight of Zyerne’s room, “she perverted the healing spells that can draw upon the essences of others for strength. She drank, like a vampire, to replace what was being drunk from her.”

In the pale light of the window, Polycarp said, “Yes,” and Gareth buried his face in his hands. “Even as she can draw upon the Stone’s magic at a distance, it draws upon her. I am glad,” he added, the tone of his light voice changing, “to see you’re still all right, Gar.”

Gareth raised his head despairingly. “Did she try to use you?”

The Master nodded, his thin, foxy face grim. “And when I kept my distance and made you keep yours, she turned to Bond, who was the nearest one she could prey upon. Your father...” He fished for the kindest words to use. “Your father was of little more use to her by that time.”

The prince’s .fist struck the table with a violence that startled them all—and most of all Gareth himself. But he said nothing, and indeed, there was little he could say, or that any could say to him. After a moment. Trey Clerlock rose from the couch in the comer, where she had been lying like a child playing dress-up in her flapping black robe, and came over to rest her hands upon his shoulders.

“Is there any way of destroying her?” the girl asked, looking across the table to the tiny gnome and the tall Master who had come to stand at his side.

Gareth turned to stare up at her in shock, having, manlike, never suspected the ruthless practicality of women.

“Not with the power she holds through the King and through the Stone,” Polycarp said. “Believe me, I thought about it, though I knew I truly would face a charge of murder for it.” A brief grin flickered across his face. “But as I ended up facing one anyway...”

“What about destroying the Stone, then?” John asked, turning his head from where he lay flat on his back on a tall-legged sleeping couch. Even the little he had been able to eat seemed to have done him good. In his black robe, he looked like the corpse at a wake, washed and tended and cheerful with his specs perched on the end of his long nose. “I’m sure you could find a good Stonebane someplace...”

“Never!” Balgub’s wrinkled walnut face grew livid. “It is the source of the healing arts of the gnomes! The source of the strength of the Deep! It is ours...”

“It will do you precious little good if Zyerne gets her hands on it,” John pointed out. “I doubt she could break through all the doors and gates you locked behind us on our way up here through the Deep, but if the King’s troops manage to breach the Citadel wall, that won’t make much difference.”

“If Jenny could be given the key to the use of the Stone...” suggested Gareth.

“No!” Balgub and Jenny spoke at once. All those w the Master’s long, scrubbed stone workroom, John included, looked curiously at the witch of Wyr.

“No human shall touch it!” insisted the gnome with shrill fury. “We saw the evil it did. It is for the gnomes, and only for us.”

“And I would not touch it if I could.” Jenny drew her knees up close to her chest and folded her arms around them; Balgub, in spite of his protest, looked affronted that the greatest treasure of the Deep should be refused. Jenny said, “According to Mab, the Stone itself has been defiled Its powers, and the spells of those that use it, are polluted by what Zyerne has done.”

“That is not true.” Balgub’s tight little face set in an expression of obstinancy. “Mab insisted that the Stone’s powers were becoming unpredictable and its influence evil on the minds of those who used it. By the heart of the Deep, this is not so, and so I told her, again and again. I do not see how...”

“After being fed chewed-up human essences instead of controlled spells, it would be a wonder if it didn’t become unpredictable,” John said, with his usual good-natured affability.

The gnome’s high voice was scornful. “What can a warrior know of such things? A warrior hired to slay the dragon, who has,” he added, with heavy sarcasm, “signally failed in even that task.”

“I suppose you’d rather he’d signally succeeded?” Gareth demanded hotly. “You’d have had the King’s troops coming at you through the Deep by this time.”

“Lad.” John reached patiently out to touch the angry prince’s shoulder. “Let’s don’t fratch. His opinion does me no harm and shouting at him isn’t going to change it.”

“The King’s troops would never have found their way through the Deep, even with the gates unbolted,” Balgub growled. “And now the gates are locked; if necessary we will seal them with blasting powder—it is there and ready, within yards of the last gate.”

“If Zyerne was leading them, they would have found the way,” Polycarp returned. The links of the too-large mail shirt he wore over his gown rattled faintly as he folded his arms. “She knows the way to the heart of the Deep well enough from the Deeping side. As you all saw, from there to the underground gates of the Citadel it’s an almost straight path. And as for the Stone not having been affected by what she has put into it...” He glanced down at the stooped back and round white head of the gnome perched in the carved chair beside him. “You are the only Healer who escaped the dragon to come here, Balgub,” he said. “Now that the dragon is no longer in the Deep, will you go in and use the Stone?”

The wide mouth tightened, and the green eyes did not meet the blue.

“So,” said the Master softly.

“I do not believe that Mab was right,” Balgub insisted stubbornly. “Nevertheless, until she, I, and the remaining Healers in Bel can examine the thing, I will not have it tampered with for good or ill. If it came to saving the Citadel, or keeping Zyerne from the Deep, yes, I would risk using it, rather than let her have it.” Little and white as two colorless cave shrimp, his hands with their smooth moonstone rings closed upon each other on the inkstained tabletop. “We have sworn that Zyerne shall never again have the use of the Stone. Every gnome—and every man...” He cast a glance that was half-commanding, halfquestioning up at the Master, and Polycarp inclined his head slightly, “—in this place will die before she lays a hand upon what she seeks.”

“And considering what her powers will be like if she does,” Polycarp added, with the detached speculation of a scholar, “that would probably be just as well.”

“Jen?”

Jenny paused in the doorway of the makeshift guest room to which she and John had been assigned. After the windy ramparts, the place smelled close and stuffy, as the Market Hall had last night. The mingled scents of dusty paper and leather bindings of the books stored there compounded with the moldery odors of straw ticks that had gone too long without having the straw changed; after the grass-and-water scents of the east wind, they made the closeness worse. The lumpish shapes of piles of books heaped along two walls and the ghostly scaffolding of scroll racks lining the third made her think of John’s overcrowded study in the north; several of the volumes that had been put here to make room for refugees trapped by the siege had been taken from their places and already bore signs of John’s reading. John himself stood between the tall lights of two of the pointed windows, visible only as a white fold of shirt sleeve and a flash of round glass in the gloom.

She said, “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“I can’t be on the broad of my back forever.” Through his fatigue, he sounded cheerful. “I have the feeling we’re all going to be put to it again in the near future, and I’d rather do it on my feet this time.”

He was silent for a moment, watching her silhouette in the slightly lighter doorway.

He went on, “And for a woman who hasn’t slept more than an hour or so for three nights now, you’ve no room to speak. What is it, Jen?”

Like a dragon, she thought, he has a way of not being lied to. So she did not say, “What is what?” but ran her hands tiredly through her hair and crossed to where he stood.

“You’ve avoided speaking to me of it—not that we’ve had time to do so, mind. I don’t feel you’re angry with me, but I do feel your silence. It’s to do with your power, isn’t it?”

His arm was around her shoulder, her head resting against the rock-hardness of his pectoral, half-uncovered by the thin muslin shirt. She should have known, she told herself, that John would guess.

So she nodded, unable to voice the turmoil that had been all day in her mind, since the dragon’s flight and all the night before. Since sunset she had been walking the ramparts, as if it were possible to outwalk the choice that had stalked her now for ten years.

Morkeleb had offered her the realms of the dragons, the woven roads of the air. All the powers of earth and sky, she thought, and all the years of time. The key to magic is magic; the offer was the answer to all the thwarted longings of her life.

“Jen,” John said softly, “I’ve never wanted you to be torn. I know you’ve never been complete and I didn’t want to do that to you. I tried not to.”

“It wasn’t you.” She had told herself, a hundred years ago it seemed, that it was her choice, and so it had been—the choice of doing nothing and letting things go on as they were, or of doing something. And, as always, her mind shrank from the choice.

“Your magic has changed,” he said. “I’ve felt it and I’ve seen what it’s doing to you.”

“It is calling me,” she replied. “If I embrace it, I don’t think I would want to let go, even if I could. It is everything that I have wanted and worth to me, I think, everything that I have.”

She had said something similar to him long ago, when they had both been very young. In his jealous possessiveness, he had screamed at her, “But you are everything that I have or want to have!” Now his arms only tightened around her, as much, she sensed, against her grief as his own, though she knew the words he had spoken then were no less true tonight.

“It’s your choice, love,” he said- “As it’s always been your choice. Everything you’ve given me, you’ve given freely. I won’t hold you back.” Her cheek was pressed to his chest, so that she only felt the quick glint of his smile as he added, “As if I ever could, anyway.”

They went to the straw mattress and huddle of blankets, the only accommodation the besieged Citadel had been able to offer. Beyond the windows, moisture glinted on the black slates of the crowded stone houses below; a gutter’s thread was like a string of diamonds in the moonlight. In the siege camps, bells were ringing for the midnight rites of Sarmendes, lord of the wiser thoughts of day.

Under the warmth of the covers, John’s body was familiar against hers, as familiar as the old temptation to let the chances of pure power go by for yet another day. Jenny was aware, as she had always been, that it was less easy to think about her choices when she lay in his arms. But she was still there when sleep finally took her, and she drifted into ambiguous and unresolved dreams.