Dragon's Bane

XVI

When Jenny wakened, John was gone.

Like a dragon, in her dreams she was aware of many things; she had sensed him waking and lying for a long while propped on one elbow beside her, watching her as she slept; she had been aware, too, of him rising and dressing, and of the slow painfulness of donning his shirt, breeches, and boots and of how the bandages pulled painfully over the half-healed mess of slashes and abrasions on his back and sides. He had taken her halberd for support, kissed her gently, and gone.

Still weary, she lay in the tangle of blankets and strawticks, wondering where he had gone, and why she felt afraid.

Dread seemed to hang in the air with the stormclouds that reared dark anvil heads above the green distances north of Nast Wall. There was a queer lividness to the light that streamed through the narrow windows, a breathless sense of coming evil, a sense that had pervaded her dreams...

Her dreams, she thought confusedly. What had she dreamed?

She seemed to remember Gareth and the Master Polycarp walking on the high battlements of the Citadel, both in the billowing black robes of students, talking with the old ease of their interrupted friendship. “You must admit it was a singularly convincing calumny,” Polycarp was saying.

Gareth replied bitterly, “I didn’t have to believe it as readily as I did.”

Polycarp grinned and drew from some pocket in his too-ample garments a brass spyglass, unfolding its jointed sections to scan the fevered sky. “You’re going to be Pontifex Maximus one day. Cousin—you need practice in believing ridiculous things,” And looking out toward the road that led south he had stared, as if he could not believe what he saw.

Jenny frowned, remembering the cloudy tangles of the dream.

The King, she thought—it had been the King, riding up the road toward the siege camps that surrounded the Citadel. But there had been something wrong with that tall, stiff form and its masklike face, riding through the sulfurous storm light. An effect of the dream? she wondered. Or had the eyes really been yellow—Zyerne’s eyes?

Troubled, she sat up and pulled on her shift. There was a wash bowl in a comer of the room near the window, the surface of the water reflecting the sky like a piece of smoked steel. Her hand brushed across it; at her bidding, she saw Morkeleb, lying in the small upper courtyard of the Citadel, a small square of stone which contained nothing save a few withered apple trees, a wooden lean-to that had once held gardening equipment and now, like every other shelter in the Citadel, housed displaced books. The dragon lay stretched out like a cat in the pallid sunlight, the jeweled bobs of his antennae flicking here and there as if scenting the welter of the air, and beside him, on the court’s single granite bench, sat John.

The dragon was saying. Why this curiosity. Dragonsbane? That you may know us better, the next time you choose to kill one of us?

“No,” John said. “Only that I may know dragons better. I’m more circumscribed than you, Morkeleb—by a body that wears out and dies before the mind has seen half what it wants to, by a mind that spends half its time doing what it would really rather not, for the sake of the people who’re in my care. I’m as greedy about knowledge as Jenny is—as you are for gold, maybe more so—for I know I have to snatch it where I can.”

The dragon sniffed in disdain, the velvet-rimmed nostril flaring to show a surface ripple of deeper currents of thought; then he turned his head away. Jenny knew she ought to feel surprise at being able to call Morkeleb’s image in the water bowl, but did not; though she could not have phrased it in words, but only in the half-pictured understandings of dragon-speech, she knew why it had formerly been impossible, but was possible to her now. Almost, she thought, she could have summoned his image and surroundings without the water.

For a time they were silent, man and dragon, and the shadows of the black-bellied thunderheads moved across them, gathering above the Citadel’s heights. Morkeleb did not look the same in the water as he did face to face, but it was a difference, again, that could not be expressed by any but a dragon. A stray wind shook the boughs of the cronelike trees, and a few spits of rain speckled the pavement of the long court below them. At its far end. Jenny could see the small and inconspicuous—and easily defensible—door that led into the antechambers of the Deep. It was not wide, for the trade between the Citadel and the Deep had never been in anything bulkier than books and gold, and for the most part their traffic had been in knowledge alone.

Why? Morkeleb asked at length. If, as you say, yours is a life limited by the constraints of the body and the narrow perimeters of time, if you are greedy for knowledge as we are for gold, why do you give what you have, half of all that you own, to others?

The question had risen like a whale from unguessed depths, and John was silent for a moment before answering. “Because it’s part of being human, Morkeleb. Having so little, we share among ourselves to make any of it worth having. We do what we do because the consequences of not caring enough to do it would be worse.”

His answer must have touched some chord in the dragon’s soul, for Jenny felt, even through the distant vision, the radiant surge of Morkeleb’s annoyance. But the dragon’s thoughts sounded down to their depths again, and he became still, almost invisible against the colors of the stone. Only his antennae continued to move, restless, as if troubled by the turmoil in the air.

A thunderstorm? Jenny thought, suddenly troubled. In winter?

“Jenny?” She looked up quickly and saw the Master Polycarp standing in the tall slit of the doorway. She did not know why at first, but she shuddered when she saw hanging at his belt the brass spyglass he had used in her dream. “I didn’t want to wake you—I know you’ve been without sleep...”

“What is it?” she asked, hearing the trouble in his voice.

“It’s the King.”

Her stomach jolted, as if she had missed one step of a stairway in darkness, the dread other dream coalescing in her, suddenly hideously real.

“He said he’d escaped from Zyerne—he wanted sanctuary here, and wanted above all to talk to Gar. They went off together...”

“No!” Jenny cried, horrified, and the young philosopher looked at her in surprise. She snatched up and flung on the black robe she had been wearing earlier, dragging its belt tight. “It’s a trick!”

“What...?”

She pushed her way past him, shoving up the robe’s too-long sleeves over her forearms; cold air and the smell of thunder smote her as she came into the open and began to run down the long, narrow stairs. She could hear Morkeleb calling to her, faint and confused with distance; he was waiting for her in the upper court, his half-risen scales glittering uneasily in the sickly storm light.

Zyerne, she said.

Yes. I saw her just now, walking with your little prince to the door that leads down into the Deep. She was in the guise of the old King—they had already passed through the door when I spoke of it to Aversin. Is it possible that the prince did not know it, as Aversin said to me? I know that humans can fool one another with the illusions of their magic, but are even his own son and his nephew whom he raised so stupid that they could not have told the difference between what they saw and what they knew?

As always, his words came as pictures in her mind—the old King leaning, whispering, on Gareth’s shoulder for support as they walked the length of the narrow court toward the door to the Deep, the look of pity, involuntary repulsion, and wretched guilt on the boy’s face—feeling repelled, and not knowing why.

Jenny’s heart began to pound. They know the King has been ill, she said. No doubt she counted upon their forgiveness of any lapses. She will go to the Stone, to draw power from it, and use Gareth’s life to replace it. Where’s John now? He has to...

He has gone after them.

WHAT? Like a dragon, the word emerged only as a blazing surge of incredulous wrath. He’ll kill himself!

He will likely be forestalled, Morkeleb replied cynically. But Jenny did not stay to listen. She was already running down the steep twist of steps to the lower court. The cobbles of the pavement there were uneven and badly worn, with tiny spangles of vagrant rain glittering among them like silver beads on some complex trapunto; the harshness of the stone tore at her feet as she ran toward that small, unprepossessing door.

She flung back to the dragon the words. Wait for her here. If she reaches the Stone, she will have all power at her command—I will never be able to defeat her, as I did before. You must take her when she emerges...

It is the Stone that binds me, the dragon’s bitter voice replied in her mind. If she reaches it, what makes you think I shall be able to do anything but her will?

Without answering Jenny flung open the door and plunged through into the shadowy antechambers of the earth.

She had seen them the previous morning, when she had passed through with the gnomes who had gone to fetch John, Gareth, and Trey from the other side of the Deep. There were several rooms used for trade and business, and then a guardroom, whose walls were carved to three-quarters of their height from the living bone of the mountain. The windows, far up under the vaulted ceilings, let in a shadowy blue light by which she could just see the wide doors of the Deep itself, faced and backed with bronze and fitted with massive bars and bolts of iron.

These gates were still locked, but the man-sized postern door stood ajar. Beyond it lay darkness and the cold scent of rock, water, and old decay. Gathering up her robes. Jenny stepped over the thick sill and hurried on, her senses probing ahead of her, dragonlike, her eyes seeking the silvery runes she had written on the walls yesterday to mark her path.

The first passage was wide and had once been pleasant, with basins and fountains lining its walls. Now some were broken, others clogged in the months of utter neglect; moss clotted them and water ran shining down the walls and along the stone underfoot, wetting the hem of Jenny’s robe and slapping coldly at her ankles. As she walked, her mind tested the darkness before her; retracing yesterday’s route, she paused again and again to listen. The way through the Deep ran near the Places of Healing, but not through them; somewhere, she would have to turn aside and seek the unmarked ways.

So she felt at the air, seeking the living tingle of magic that marked the heart of the Deep. It should lie lower than her own route, she thought, and to her left. Her mind returned uncomfortably to Miss Mab’s words about a false step leaving her to die of starvation in the labyrinthine darkness. If she became lost, she told herself, Morkeleb could still hear her, and guide her forth...

But not, she realized, if Zyerne reached the Stone. The power and longing of the Stone were lodged in the dragon’s mind. If she got lost, and Zyerne reached the Stone and gained control of Morkeleb, there would be no daylight for her again.

She hurried her steps, passing the doors that had been raised for the defense of the Citadel from the Deep, all unlocked now by Gareth and the one he supposed to be the King. By the last of them, she glimpsed the sacks of blasting powder that Balgub had spoken of, that final defense in which he had placed such faith. Beyond was a branching of the ways, and she stopped again under an arch carved to look like a monstrous mouth, with stalactites of ivory grimacing in a wrinkled gum of salmonpink stone. Her instincts whispered to her that this was the place—two tunnels diverged from the main one, both going downwards, both to the left. A little way down the nearer one, beside the trickle of water from a broken gutter, a wet footprint marked the downward-sloping stone.

John’s, she guessed, for the print was dragged and slurred. Further along that way, she saw the mark of a drier boot, narrower and differently shaped. She saw the tracks again, dried to barely a sparkle of dampness on the first steps of a narrow stair which wound like a path up a hillslope of gigantic stone mushrooms in an echoing cavern, past the dark alabaster mansions of the gnomes, to a narrow doorway in a cavern wall. She scribbled a rune beside the door and followed, through a rock seam whose walls she could touch with her outstretched hands, downward, into the bowels of the earth.

In the crushing weight of the darkness, she saw the faint flicker of yellow light.

She dared not call out, but fled soundlessly toward it. The air was warmer here, unnatural in those clammy abysses; she felt the subtle vibrations of the living magic that surrounded the Stone. But there was an unwholesomeness in the air now, like the first smell of rot in decaying meat or like the livid greenness that her dragon eyes had seen in the poisoned water. She understood that Miss Mab had been right and Balgub wrong. The Stone had been defiled. The spells that had been wrought with its strength were slowly deteriorating, perverted by the poisons drawn from Zyerne’s mind.

At the end of a triangular room the size of a dozen barns, she found a torch, guttering itself out near the foot of a flight of shallow steps. The iron door at the top stood unbolted and ajar, and across its threshold John lay unconscious, scavenger-slugs already sniffing inquiringly at his face and hands.

Beyond, in the darkness. Jenny heard Gareth’s voice cry, “Stop!” and the sweet, evil whisper of Zyerne’s laughter.

“Gareth,” the soft voice breathed. “Did you ever think it was possible that you could stop me?”

Shaken now with a cold that seemed to crystallize at the marrow of her bones. Jenny ran forward into the heart of the Deep.

Through the forest of alabaster pillars she saw them, the nervous shadows of Gareth’s torch jerking over the white stone lace that surrounded the open floor. His face looked dead white against the black, baggy student gown he wore; his eyes held the nightmare terror of every dream, every encounter with his father’s mistress, and the knowledge of his own terrifying weakness. In his right hand he held the halberd John had been using for a crutch. John must have warned him that it was Zyerne, Jenny thought, before he collapsed. At least Gareth has a weapon. But whether he would be capable of using it was another matter.

The Stone in the center of the onyx dancing floor seemed to glow in the vibrating dark with a sickly corpse light of its own. The woman before it was radiant, beautiful as the Death-lady who is said to walk on the sea in times of storm. She looked younger than Jenny had ever seen her, with the virgin fragility of a child that was both an armor against Gareth’s desperation and a weapon to pierce his flesh if not his heart. But even at her most delicate, there was something nauseating about her, like poisoned marzipan—an overwhelming, polluted sensuality. Wind that Jenny could not feel seemed to lift the soft darkness of Zyerne’s hair and the sleeves of the frail white shift that was all that she wore. Stopping on the edge of the flowstone glades, Jenny realized that she was seeing Zyerne as she had once been, when she first had come to this place—a mageborn girl-child who had run through these lightless corridors seeking power, as she herself had sought it in the rainy north; trying, as she herself had tried, to overcome the handicap of its lack in whatever way she could.

Zyerne laughed, her sweet mouth parting to show pearls of teeth. “It is my destiny,” she whispered, her small hands caressing the blue-black shine of the Stone. “The gnomes had no right to keep it all to themselves. It is mine now. It was meant to be mine from the founding of the world. As you were.”

She held out her hands, and Gareth whispered, “No.” His voice was thin and desperate as the wanting of her clutched at his flesh.

“What is this No? You were made for me, Gareth. Made to be King. Made to be my love. Made to father my son.”

Like a phantom in a dream, she drifted toward him over the oily blackness of the great floor. Gareth slashed at her with the torch, but she only laughed again and did not even draw back. She knew he hadn’t the courage to touch her with the flame. He edged toward her, the halberd in his hand, but Jenny could see his face rolling with streams of sweat. His whole body shook as he summoned the last of his strength to cut at her when she came near enough—fighting for the resolution to do that and not to fling down the weapon and crush her in his arms.

Jenny strode forward from the alabaster glades in a blaze of blue witchlight, and her voice cut the palpitant air like a knife tearing cloth. She cried, “ZYERNE!” and the enchantress spun, her eyes yellow as a cat-devil’s in the white blaze of the light, as they had been in the woods. The spell over Gareth snapped, and at that instant he swung the halberd at her with all the will he had left.

She flung the spell of deflection at him almost contemptuously; the weapon rang and clattered on the stone floor. Swinging back toward him, she raised her hand, but Jenny stepped forward, her wrath swirling about her like woodsmoke and phosphorous, and flung at Zyerne a rope of white fire that streamed coldly from the palm of her hand.

Zyerne hurled it aside, and it splattered, sizzling, on the black pavement. Her yellow eyes burned with unholy light. “You,” she whispered. “I told you I’d get the Stone—and I told you what I’d do to you when I did, you ignorant bitch. I’ll rot the stinking bones of your body for what you did!”

A spell of crippling and ruin beat like lightning in the close air of the cavern, and Jenny flinched from it, feeling all her defenses buckle and twist. The power Zyerne wielded was like a weight, the vast shadow she had only sensed before turned now to the weight of the earth where it smote against her. Jenny threw it aside and writhed from beneath it; but for a moment, she hadn’t the strength to do more. A second spell struck her, and a third, cramping and biting at the muscles and organs of her body, smoking at the hem of her gown. She felt something break within her and tasted blood in her mouth; her head throbbed, her brain seemed to blaze, all the oxygen in the world was insufficient to her lungs. Under the ruthless battering she could do no more than defend herself; no counterspell would come, no way to make it stop. And through it all, she felt the weaving of the death-spells, swollen and hideous perversions of what she herself had woven, returning like a vengeance to crush her beneath them. She felt Zyerne’s mind, powered by the force of the Stone, driving like a black needle of pain into hers; felt the grappling of a poisoned and vicious essence seeking her consent.

And why not? she thought. Like the black slime of bursting pustules, all her self-hatreds flowed into the light.

She had murdered those weaker than herself; she had hated her master; she had used a man who loved her for her own pleasure and had abandoned the sons of her body; she had abandoned her birthright of power out of sloth and fear. Her body screamed, and her will to resist all the mounting agonies weakened before the scorching onslaught of the mind. How could she presume to fight the evil of Zyerne, when she herself was evil without even the excuse of Zyerne’s grandeur?

Anger struck her then, like the icy rains of the Winterlands, and she recognized what was happening to her as a spell. Like a dragon, Zyerne deceived with the truth, but it was deception all the same. Looking up she saw that perfect, evil face bending over her, the golden eyes filled with gloating fire. Reaching out, Jenny seized the fragile wrists, the very bones of her hands hurting like an old woman’s on a winter night; but she forced her hands to close.

Grandeur? her mind cried, slicing up once more through the fog of pain and enchantment. It is only you who see yourself as grand, Zyerne. Yes, I am evil, and weak, and cowardly, but, like a dragon, I know what it is that I am. You are a creature of lies, of poisons, of small and petty fears—it is that which will kill you. Whether I die or not, Zyerne, it is you who will bring your own death upon yourself, not for what you do, but for what you are.

She felt Zyerne’s mind flinch at that. With a twist of fury Jenny broke the brutal grip it held upon hers. At the same moment her hands were struck aside. From her knees, she looked up through the tangle of her hair, to see the enchantress’s face grow livid. Zyerne screamed “You! You...” With a piercing obscenity, the sorceress’s whole body was wrapped in the rags of heat and fire and power. Jenny, realizing the danger was now to her body rather than to her mind, threw herself to the floor and rolled out of the way. In the swirling haze of heat and power stood a creature she had never seen before, hideous and deformed, as if a giant cave roach had mated with a tiger. With a hoarse scream, the thing threw itself upon her.

Jenny rolled aside from the rip of the razor-combed feet. She heard Gareth cry her name, not in terror as he would once have done, and from the comer of her eye she saw him slide the halberd across the glass-slick floor to her waiting hand. She caught the weapon just in time to parry a second attack. The metal of the blade shrieked on the tearing mandibles as the huge weight of the thing bore her back against the blue-black Stone. Then the thing turned, doubling on its tracks as Zyerne had done that evening in the glade, and in her mind Jenny seemed to hear Zyerne’s distant voice howling, “I’ll show you! I’ll show you all!”

It scuttled into the forest of alabaster, making for the dark tunnels that led to the surface.

Jenny started to get to her feet to follow and collapsed at the foot of the Stone. Her body hurt her in every limb and muscle; her mind felt pulped from the ripping cruelty of Zyerne’s spells, bleeding still from her own acceptance of what she was. Her hand, which she could see lying over the halberd’s shaft, seemed no longer part of her, though, rather to her surprise, she saw it was still on the end of her arm and attached to her body; the brown fingers were covered with blisters, from some attack she had not even felt at the time. Gareth was bending over her, holding the guttering torch.

“Jenny—Jenny, wake up—Jenny please! Don’t make me go after it alone!”

“No,” she managed to whisper and swallowed blood. Some instinct told her the lesion within her had healed, but she felt sick and drained. She tried to rise again and collapsed, vomiting; she felt the boy’s hands hold her steady even though they shook with fear. Afterward, empty and chilled, she wondered if she would faint and told herself not to be silly.

“She’s going to get Morkeleb,” she whispered, and propped herself up again, her black hair hanging down in her face. “The power of the Stone rules him. She will be able to hold his mind, as she could not hold mine.”

She managed to get to her feet, Gareth helping her as gently as he could, and picked up the halberd. “I have to stop her before she gets clear of the caverns. I defeated her mind—while the tunnels limit her size, I may be able to defeat her body. Stay here and help John.”

“But...” Gareth began. She shrugged free of his hold and made for the dark doorway at a stumbling run.

Beyond it, spells of loss and confusion tangled the darkness. The runes that she had traced as she’d followed John were gone, and for a few moments the subtle obscurity of Zyerne’s magic smothered her mind and made all those shrouded ways look the same. Panic knotted around her throat as she thought of wandering forever in the darkness; then the part of her that had found her way through the woods of the Winterlands said. Think. Think and listen. She released magic from her mind and looked about her in the dark; with instinctive woodcraftiness, she had taken back-bearings of her route while making her rune-markings, seeing what the landmarks looked like coming the other way. She spread her senses through the phantasmagoric domain of fluted stone, listening for the echoes that crossed and recrossed in the blackness. She heard the muted murmur of John’s voice speaking to Gareth about doors the gnomes had meant to bar and the clawed scrape of unclean chitin somewhere up ahead. She deepened her awareness and heard the skitter of the vermin of the caves as they fled, shocked, from a greater vermin. Swiftly, she set off in pursuit.

She had told Morkeleb to stand guard over the outer door. She prayed now that he had had the sense not to, but it scarcely mattered whether he did or not.The power of the Stone was in Zyerne—from it she had drawn the deepest reserves of its strength, knowing that, when the time came to pay it back, she would have lives aplenty at her disposal to do it. The power of the Stone was lodged in Morkeleb’s mind, tighter now that his mind and hers had touched. With the dragon her slave, the Citadel would fall, and the Stone be Zyerne’s forever.

Jenny quickened once more to a jog that felt ready to break her bones. Her bare feet splashed in the trickling water, making a faint, sticky pattering among the looming shapes of the limestone darkness; her hands felt frozen around the halberd shaft. How long a start Zyerne had she didn’t know, or how fast the abomination she had become could travel. Zyerne had no more power over her, but she feared to meet her now and pit her body against that body. A part other mind thought wryly: John should have been doing this, not she—it was his end of the bargain to deal with monsters. She smiled bitterly. Mab had been right; there were other evils besides dragons in the land.

She passed a hillslope of stone mushrooms, an archway of teeth like grotesque daggers. Her heart pounded and her chilled body ached with the ruin Zyerne had wrought on her. She ran, passing the locks and bars the gnomes had set such faith in, knowing already that she would be too late.

In the blue dimness of the vaults below the Citadel, she found the furniture toppled and scattered, and she forced herself desperately to greater speed. Through a doorway, she glimpsed a reflection of the fevered daylight outside; the stench of blood struck her nostrils even as she tripped and, looking down, saw the decapitated body of a gnome lying in a pool of warm blood at her feet. The last room of the Citadel vaults was a slaughterhouse, men and gnomes lying in it and in the doorway to the outside, their makeshift black livery sodden with blood, the close air of the room stinking with the gore that splattered the walls and even the ceiling. From beyond the doorway, shouting and the stench of burning came to her; and, stumbling through the carnage. Jenny cried out Morkeleb\

She hurled the music of his name like a rope into the sightless void. His mind touched hers, and the hideous weight of the Stone pressed upon them both.

Light glared in her eyes. She scrambled over the bodies in the doorway and stood, blinking for an instant in the lower court, seeing all around the door the paving stones charred with a crisped muck of blood. Before her the creature crouched, larger and infinitely more hideous in the befouled and stormy daylight, metamorphosed into something like a winged ant, but without an ant’s compact grace. Squid, serpent, scorpion, wasp—it was everything hideous, but no one thing in itself. The screaming laughter that filled her mind was Zyerne’s laughter. It was Zyerne’s voice that she heard, calling to Morkeleb as she had called to Gareth, the power of the Stone a tightening noose upon his mind.

The dragon crouched immobile against the far rampart of the court. His every spike and scale were raised for battle, yet to Jenny’s mind came nothing from him but grating agony. The awful, shadowy weight of the Stone was tearing at his mind, a power built generation after generation, fermenting in upon itself and directed by Zyerne upon him now, summoning him to her bidding, demanding that he yield. Jenny felt his mind a knot of iron against that imperious command, and she felt it when the knot fissured.

She cried again, Morkeleb! and flung herself, mind and body, toward him. Their minds gripped and locked. Through his eyes, she saw the horrible shape of the creature and recognized how he had known Zyerne through her disguise—the patterning of her soul was unmistakable. Peripherally, she was aware that this was true for every man and gnome who cowered within the doorways and behind the protection of each turret; she saw things as a dragon sees. The force of the Stone hammered again at her mind, and yet it had no power over her, no hold upon her. Through Morkeleb’s eyes, she saw herself still running toward him—toward, in a sense, herself—and saw the creature turn to strike at that small, flying rag of black-wrapped bones and hair that she knew in a detached way for her own body.

Her mind was within the dragon’s, shielding him from the burning grip of the Stone. Like a cat, the dragon struck, and the creature that had been Zyerne wheeled to meet the unexpected threat. Half within her own body, half within Morkeleb’s, Jenny stepped in under the sagging, bloated belly of the monster that loomed so hugely near her and thrust upward with her halberd. As the blade slashed at the stinking flesh, she heard Zyerne’s voice in her mind, screaming at her the back-street obscenities of a spoiled little slut whom the gnomes had taken in on account of the promise of her power. Then the creature gathered its mismated limbs beneath it and hurled itself skyward out of their way. From overhead, Jenny felt the hot rumble of thunder.

Her counterspell blocked the bolt of lightning that would have come hurling down on the court an instant later; she used a dragon-spell, such as those who walked the roads of the air used to allow them to fly in storms. Morkeleb was beside her then, her mind shielding his from the Stone as his body shielded hers from Zyerne’s greater strength. Minds interlinked, there was no need of words between them. Jenny seized the knife-tipped spikes of his foreleg as he raised her to his back, and she wedged herself uncomfortably between the spearpoints that guarded his spine. More thunder came, and the searing breathlessness of ozone. She flung a spell to turn aside that bolt, and the lightning—channeled, she saw, through the creature that hovered in the livid air above the Citadel like a floating sack of pus—struck the tubular harpoon gun on the rampart. It exploded in a bursting star of flame and shattered iron, and the two men who were cranking another catapult to bear on the monster turned and fled.

Jenny understood then that the storm had been summoned by Zyerne, called by her powers through the Stone from afar, and the Stone’s magic gave her the power to direct the lightning when and where she would. It had been her weapon to destroy the Citadel—the Stone, the storm, and the dragon.

She pulled off her belt and used it to lash herself to the two-foot spike before her. It would be little use if the dragon turned over in flight, but would keep her from being thrown off laterally, and that was all she could hope for now. She knew her body was exhausted and hurt, but the dragon’s mind lifted her out of herself; and in any case, she had no choice. She sealed herself off from the pain and ripped the Limitations from mind and flesh. The dragon hurtled skyward to the thing waiting above. Winds tore at them, buffeting Morkeleb’s wings so that he had to veer sharply to miss being thrown into the highest turret of the Citadel. From above them, the creature spat a rain of acid mucus. Green and stinking, it seared Jenny’s face and hands like poison and made smoking tracks of corrosion on the steel of the dragon’s scales. Furiously keeping her mind concentrated against the searing agony. Jenny cast her will at the clouds, and rain began to sluice down, washing the stuff away and half-blinding her with its fury. Long black hair hung stickily down over her shoulders as the dragon swung on the wind, and she felt lightning channeling again into the hovering creature before them. Seizing it with her mind, she flung it back. It burst somewhere between them, the shock of it striking her bones like a Mow. She had forgotten she was not a dragon, and that her flesh was mortal.

Then the creature fell upon them, its stumpy wings whirring like a foul bug’s. The weight of it rolled the dragon in the air so that Jenny had to grasp the spikes on either side of her, below the blades and yet still cutting her fingers. The earth rolled and swung below them, but her eyes and mind locked on the thing above. Its stink was overpowering, and from the pullulant mass of its flesh, a sharklike head struck, biting at the massive joints of the dragon’s wings, while the whirlwind of evil spells sucked and ripped around them, tearing at their linked minds.

Ichorous yellow fluid burst from the creature’s mouth as it bit at the spikes of the wing-joints. Jenny slashed at the eyes, human and as big as her two fists, gray-gold as mead—Zyerne’s eyes. The halberd blade clove through the flesh—and from among the half-severed flaps of the wound, other heads burst like a knot of snakes among spraying gore, tearing at her robe and her flesh with suckeriike mouths. Grimly, fighting a sense of nightmare horror, she chopped again, her blistered hands clotted and running with slime. Half her mind called from the depths of the dragon’s soul the healing-spells against the poisons she knew were harbored in those filthy jaws.

When she slashed at the other eye, the creature broke away from them. The pain of Morkeleb’s wounds as well as her own tore at her as he swung and circled skyward, and she knew he felt the burning of her ripped flesh. The Citadel dropped away below them; rain poured over them like water from a pail. Looking up, she could see the deadly purplish glow of stored lightning rimming the black pillows of cloud so close above their heads. The battering of Zyerne’s mind upon theirs lessened as the sorceress rallied her own spells, spells of wreckage and ruin against the Citadel and its defenders below.

Mists veiled the thrusting folds of the land beneath them, the toy fortress and the wet, slate-and-emerald of the meadows beside the white stream of the river. Morkeleb circled. Jenny’s eyes within his seeing all things with clear, incredible calm. Lightning streaked down by her and she saw, as if it had been drawn in fine lines before her eyes, another catapult explode on the ramparts, and the man who had been winding it flung backward over the parapet, whirling limply down the side of the cliff.

Then the dragon folded his wings and dropped. Her mind in Morkeleb’s, Jenny felt no fear, clinging to the spikes while the wind tore her sopping hair back and her bloody, rain-wet robes plastered to her body and arms. Her mind was the mind of a stooping falcon. She saw, with precise pleasure, the sacklike, threshing body that was their target, felt the joy of impending impact as the dragon fisted his claws...

The jar all but threw her from her precarious perch on the dragon’s backbone. The creature twisted and sagged in the air, then writhed under them, grabbing with a dozen mouths at Morkeleb’s belly and sides, heedless of the spikes and the monstrous slashing of the dragon’s tail. Something tore at Jenny’s back; turning, she hacked the head off a serpentine tentacle that had ripped at her, but she felt the blood flowing from the wound. Her efforts to close it were fogged and slow. They seemed to have fallen into a vortex of spells, and the weight of the Stone’s strength dragged upon them, trying to rend apart the locked knot of their minds.

What was human magic and what dragon she no longer knew, only that they sparkled together, iron and gold, in a welded weapon that attacked both body and mind. She could feel Morkeleb’s growing exhaustion and her own dizziness as the Citadel walls and the stone-toothed cliffs of Nast Wall wheeled crazily beneath them. The more they hacked and cut at the awful, stinking thing, the more mouths and gripping tentacles it sprouted and the tighter its clutch upon them became. She felt no more fear than a beast might feel in combat with its own kind, but she did feel the growing weight of the thing as it multiplied, getting larger and more powerful as the two entwined bodies thrashed in the sea of streaming rain.

The end, when it came, was a shock, like the impact of a club. She was aware of a booming roar somewhere in the earth beneath them, dull and shaking through her exhausted singlemindedness; then, more clearly, she heard a voice like Zyerne’s screaming, multiplied a thousandfold through the spells that suffocated her until it axed through her skull with the rending echo of indescribable pain.

Like the passage from one segment of a dream to another, she felt the melting of the spells that surrounded them and the falling-away of the clinging, flaccid flesh and muscle. Something flashed beneath them, falling through the rainy air toward the wet roof crests of the Citadel below, and she realized that the plunging flutter of streaming brown hair and white gauze was Zyerne.

The instantaneous Get her and Morkeleb! Let her fall passed between them like a spark. Then he was plunging again, as he had plunged before, falconlike, tracking the falling body with his precise crystal eyes and plucking it from the air with the neatness of a child playing jacks.

Charcoal-gray with rain, the walls of the Citadel court rose up around them. Men, women, and gnomes were everywhere on the ramparts, hair slicked down with the pouring cloudburst to which nobody was paying the slightest attention. White smoke poured from the narrow door that led into the Deep, but all eyes were raised skyward to that black, plummeting form.

The dragon balanced for a moment upon the seventyfoot span of his wings, then extended three of his delicate legs to touch the ground. With the fourth, he laid Zyerne on the puddled stone pavement, her dark hair spreading out around her under the driving rain.

Sliding from the dragon’s back, Jenny knew at once that Zyerne was dead. Her mouth and eyes were open. Distorted with rage and terror, her face could be seen to be pointy and shrewish with constant worry and the cancerous addiction to petty angers.

Trembling with weariness. Jenny leaned against the dragon’s curving shoulder. Slowly, the scintillant helix of their minds unlinked. The rim of brightness and color that had seemed to edge everything vanished from her vision. Living things had solid bodies once more, instead of incorporeal ghosts of flesh through which shone the shapes of souls.

A thousand pains came back to her—of her body and of the stripped, hurting ruin of her mind. She became aware of the blood that stuck her torn robe to her back and ran down her legs to her bare feet—became aware of all the darkness in her own heart, which she had accepted in her battle with Zyerne.

Holding to the thorned scales for support, she looked down at the sharp, white face staring upward at her from the rain-hammered puddles. A human hand steadied her elbow, and turning, she saw Trey beside her, her frivolously tinted hair plastered with wet around her pale face.

It was the closest, she realized, that she had seen any human besides herself come to Morkeleb. A moment later Polycarp joined them, one arm wrapped in makeshift dressings and half his red hair burned away by the creature’s first attack upon the door.

White smoke still billowed from the door of the Deep. Jenny coughed, her lungs hurting, in the acrid fumes. Everyone in the court was coughing—it was as if the Deep itself were in flames.

More coughing came from within. In the shadowy slot, two forms materialized, the shorter leaning upon the taller. From soot-blackened faces, two pairs of spectacle lenses flashed whitely in the pallid light.

A moment later they emerged from the smoke and shadow into the stunned silence of the watching crowd in the court.

“Miscalculated the blasting powder,” John explained apologetically.