Dragon's Bane

VII

In the week that followed. Jenny returned many times to the crumbling house in the Dockmarket. Twice John accompanied her, but John, for the most part, spent his days in the King’s Gallery with Gareth, waiting for a sign from the King. His evenings he spent with the wild young courtiers who surrounded Zyerne, playing dancing bear, as he called it, and dealing as best he could with the slow torture of waiting for a combat that could cost his life. Being John, he did not speak of it, but Jenny felt it when they made love and in his silences when they were alone together, this gradual twisting of the nerves that was driving him nearly mad.

She herself avoided the Court for the most part and spent her days in the city or in the house of the gnomes. She went there quietly, wrapped in spells to conceal her from the folk in the streets, for, as the days ground by, she could feel the ugly miasma of hate and fear spreading through the streets like poisoned fog. On her way through the Dockmarket quarter, she would pass the big taverns—the Lame Ox, the Gallant Rat, the Sheep in the Mire—where the unemployed men and women who had come in off the ruined farms gathered daily, hoping for a few hours’ hire. Those in need of cheap labor knew to go there to find people who would move furniture or clean out stables for a few coppers; but with the winter storms making the shipping scarce and the high price of bread taking all the spare funds to be had, there were few enough who could afford to pay even that. None of the gnomes still living in the city—and there were many of them, in spite of the hardships—dared go by the Sheep in the Mire after noontime, for by that hour those within would have given up hope of work that day and would be concentrating what little energy they had on getting drunk.

So Jenny moved in her shadowy secrets, as she had moved through the lawless Winterlands, to visit the Lady Taseldwyn, who was called Miss Mab in the language of men.

From the first, she had been aware that the gnome woman was a more powerful mage than she. But, rather than jealousy and resentment, she felt only gladness that she had found someone to teach her after all those years.

In most things, Mab was a willing teacher, though the shape of the gnomes’ wizardry was strange to Jenny, alien, as their minds were alien. They had no Lines, but seemed to transmit their power and knowledge whole from generation to generation of mages in some fashion that Jenny did not understand. Mab told her of the healing spells for which the Deep was famous, of the drugs now sequestered there, lost to them as surely as the dragon’s gold was lost, of the spells that could hold the soul, the essence of life, to the flesh, or of the more dangerous spells by which the life-essence of one person could be drawn to strengthen the crumbling life of another. The gnome woman taught her other spells of the magic underground—spells of crystal and stone and spiraling darkness, whose meaning Jenny could only dimly comprehend. These she could only memorize by rote, hoping that with later meditation, skill and understanding would come. Mab spoke also to her of the secrets of the earth, the movement of water, and how stones thought; and she spoke of the dark realms of the Deep itself, cavern beneath cavern in endless succession of hidden glories that had never seen light.

Once, she spoke of Zyerne.

“Aye, she was apprenticed among us Healers.” She sighed, putting aside the three-stringed dulcimer upon which she had been outlining to Jenny the song-spells of their craft. “She was a vain little girl, vain and spoiled. She had her talent for mockery even then—she would listen to the Old Ones among us, the great Healers, who had more power at their command than she could ever dream of, nodding that sleek little head others in respect, and then go and imitate their voices to her friends in Deeping.”

Jenny remembered the silvery chime of the sorceress’s laughter at dinner and the way she had hurried her steps to make Dromar run after her if he would speak.

It was early evening. For all its cold, the great hall of the gnomes’ house was stuffy, the air stagnant beneath its massive arches and along the faded pavement of its checkered corridors. The noises of the streets had fallen to their dinnertime lull, save for the chiming of the clock towers all over the city and one lone kindling-peddler crying his wares.

Mab shook her head, her voice low with remembrance of times past. “She was greedy for secrets, as some girls are greedy for sweets—covetous for the power they could give her. She studied out the hidden ways around the Places of Healing so that she could sneak and spy, hiding to listen in darkness. All power must be paid for, but she took the secrets of those greater than she and defiled them, tainted them—poisoned them as she poisoned the very heart of the Deep—yes, she did poison if—and turned all our strength against us.”

Jenny shook her head, puzzled. “Dromar said something of the kind,” she said. “But how can you taint spells? You can spoil your own magic, for it colors your soul as you wield it, but you cannot spoil another’s. I don’t understand.”

Mab glanced sharply at her, as if remembering her presence and remembering also that she was not one of the folk of the gnomes. “Nor should thou,” she said in her soft, high voice. “These are things that concern the magic of gnomes only. They are not human things.”

“Zyerne seems to have made them human things.”

Jenny moved her weight on her heels, easing her knees on the hardness of the stone floor through the shabby cushion. “If it is, indeed, from the Places of Healing that she learned the arts that have made her the most powerful mage in the land.”

“Pah!” the gnome mage said in disgust. “The Healers of the Deep were more powerful than she—by the Stone, I was more powerful!”

“Was?” Jenny said, perplexed. “I know that most of the Healers in the Deep were killed with the coming of the dragon; I had thought none of sufficient strength survived to defy her. The magic of gnomes is different from the spells of men, but power is power. How could Zyerne have lessened yours?”

Mab only shook her head furiously, so that her pale, web-colored hair whipped back and forth, and said, “These are the things of the gnomes.”

In those days Jenny did not see much of Zyerne, but the enchantress was often on her mind. Zyerne’s influence pervaded the court like the faint waft of her cinnamon perfume; when Jenny was in the Palace confines, she was always conscious of her. However Zyerne had acquired her power and whatever she had done with it since. Jenny never forgot that it was so much greater than hers. When she neglected what tomes of magic John was able to pilfer from the Palace library to sit with her scrying-stone, watching the tiny, soundless images of her sons skylarking perilously along the snow-covered battlements of the Hold, she felt a pang of guilt. Zyerne was young, at least ten years younger than she; her power shone from her like the sun. Jenny no longer felt jealousy and she could not, in all honesty, feel anger at Zyerne for having what she herself did not, as long as she was not willing to do what was needful to obtain that power. But she did feel envy, the envy of a traveler on a cold night who saw into the warmth of a lighted room.

But when she asked Mab about Zyerne—about the powers that had once been less than Mab’s, but now were greater; about why the gnomes had forbidden her to enter the Deep—the little mage would only say stubbornly, “These are the things of the gnomes. They have naught to do with men.”

In the meantime John went his own way, a favorite of the younger courtiers who laughed at his extravagant barbarism and called him their tame savage, while he held forth about engineering and the mating customs of pigs, or quoted classical authors in his execrable north-country drawl. And still, every morning, the King passed them by in the gallery, turning his dull eyes aside from them, and the etiquette of the Court forbade Gareth to speak.

“What’s his delay?” John demanded as he and Gareth emerged from the arched porticoes of the gallery into the chill, fleet sunlight of the deserted terrace after yet another futile day’s waiting. Jenny joined them quietly, coming up the steps from the deserted garden below, carrying her harp. She had been playing it on the rocks above the sea wall, waiting for them and watching the rainclouds scud far out over the sea. It was the season of winds and sudden gales, and in the north the weather would be sleety and cold, but here days of high, heatless sunlight alternated with fogs and blowing rains. The matte, white day-moon was visible, sinking into the cloud wrack over the sea; Jenny wondered what it was that troubled her about its steady waxing toward its half. Against the loamy colors of the fallow earth, the clothes of Zyerne and her court stood out brightly as they passed on down into the garden, and Jenny could hear the enchantress’s voice lifted in a wickedly accurate imitation of the gnomes’ shrill speech.

John went on, “Is he hoping the dragon will fall on the Citadel and spare him the trouble of the siege?”

Gareth shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m told Polycarp has catapults for slinging naphtha set up on the highest turrets. The dragon keeps his distance.” In spite of the Master’s treason. Jenny could hear in the Prince’s voice a trace of pride in his former friend.

Unlike John, who had rented a Court costume from a shop outside the palace gates which specialized in such things for petitioners to the King, Gareth owned at least a dozen of them—like all Court costumes, criminally expensive. The one he wore today was parakeet green and primrose and, in the uncertain light of the afternoon, it turned his rather sallow complexion yellow.

John pushed his specs a little further up on the bridge of his nose. “Well, I tell you, I’m not exactly ettling to go on kicking my heels here like a rat catcher waiting for the King to decide he wants my services. I came here to protect my lands and my people, and right now they’re getting nothing from the King who’s supposed to guard them, nor from me.”

Gareth had been gazing down into the garden at the little group around the leaf-stained marble statue of the god Kantirith absently, as if not aware of where he looked; now he turned his head quickly. “You can’t go,” he said, worry and fear in his voice.

“And why not?”

The boy bit his lip and did not answer, but his glance darted nervously back down to the garden. As if she felt the touch of it, Zyerne turned and blew him a playful kiss, and Gareth looked away. He looked tired and hagridden, and Jenny suddenly wondered if he still dreamed of Zyerne.

The uncomfortable silence was broken, not by him, but by the high voice of Dromar.

“My lord Aversin...” The gnome stepped out onto the terrace and blinked painfully in the wan, overcast light. His words came haltingly, as if they were unfamiliar in his mouth. “Please—do not go.”

John glanced down at him sharply. “You haven’t precisely extended your all in welcome and help, either, have you?”

The old ambassador’s gaze challenged him. “I drew thee the maps of the Deep. By the Stone, what more canst thou want?”

“Maps that don’t lie,” John said coolly. “You know as well as I do the maps you drew have sections of ’em left blank. And when I put them together, the maps of the various levels and the up-and-down map, damned if it wasn’t the same place on all of them. I’m not interested in the secrets of your bloody Deep, but I can’t know what’s going to happen, nor where I may end up playing catch-me in the dark with the dragon, and I’d just as soon have an accurate map to do it with.”

There was an edge of anger on his level voice, and an edge of fear. Dromar must have heard both, for the answering blaze died out of his own countenance, and he looked down at his hands, clasped over the knots of his sash. “This is a matter that has nothing to do with the dragon, nothing to do with thee,” he said quietly. “The maps are accurate—I swear it by the Stone in the heart of the Deep. What is left off is the affair of the gnomes, and the gnomes only—the very secret of the heart of the Deep. Once, one of the children of men spied out that heart, and since then we have had cause to regret it bitterly.”

He lifted his head again, pale eyes somber under the long shelf of snowy brow. “I beg that thou trust me, Dragonsbane. It goes against our ways to ask the aid of the children of men. But thou must help us. We are miners and traders; we are not warriors, and it is a warrior that we need. Day by day, more of our folk are forced to leave this city. If the Citadel falls, many of the people of the Deep will be slaughtered with the rebels who have given them not only the shelter of their walls, but the very bread of their rations. The King’s troops will not let them leave the Citadel, even if they would—and believe me, many have tried. Here in Bel, the cost of bread rises, and soon we shall be starved out, if we are not murdered by the mobs from the taverns. In a short time we shall be too few to hold the Deep, even should we be able to pass its gates.”

He held out his hands, small as a child’s and grotesquely knotted with age, pallidly white against the soft black layerings of his strangely cut sleeves. “If thou dost not help us, who among the children of men will?”

“Oh, run along, Dromar, do.” Clean and sweet as a silver knife, Zyerne’s voice cut across his last words. She came mounting the steps from the garden, light as an almond blossom floating on the breeze, her pink-edged veils blown back over the dark and intricate cascades of her hair. “Isn’t it enough that you try to foist your way into the King’s presence day after day, without troubling these poor people with politics out of season? Gnomes may be vulgar enough to talk business and buttonhole their betters in the evening, but here we feel that once the day is done, it should be a time for enjoyment.” She made shooing gestures with her well-kept hands and pouted in impatience. “Now run along,” she added in a teasing tone, “or I shall call the guards.”

The old gnome stood for a moment, his eyes upon hers, his cloudy white hair drifting like cobwebs around his wrinkled face in the stir of the sea winds. Zyerne wore an expression of childlike pertness, like a well-loved little girl demanding her own way. But Jenny, standing behind her, saw the delighted arrogance of her triumph in every line and muscle of her slim back. She had no doubt that Zyerne would, in fact, call the guards.

Evidently Dromar hadn’t, either. Ambassador from the court of one monarch to another for thirty years, he turned and departed at the behest of the King’s leman. Jenny watched him stump away down the gray and lavender stonework of the path across the garden, with Bond Clerlock, pale and brittle-looking, imitating his walk behind his back.

Ignoring Jenny as she generally did, Zyerne slid one hand through Gareth’s arm and smiled up at him. “Backbiting old plotter,” she remarked. “I must present myself to your father at supper in an hour, but there’s time for a stroll along the sea wall, surely? The rains won’t start until then.”

She could say it with surety, thought Jenny; at the touch of her spells, the clouds would come and depart like lapdogs waiting to be fed.

Still holding Gareth’s arm and leaning her suppleness against his height, she drew him toward the steps leading down into the garden; the courtiers there were already dispersing, and its walks were empty under the winddriven scurry of fugitive leaves. Gareth cast a despairing glance back at John and Jenny, standing together on the terrace, she in the plaids and sheepskin jacket of the north, and he in the ornate blue-and-cream satins of the Court, his schoolboy spectacles balanced on his nose.

Jenny nudged John gently. “Go after them.”

He looked down at her with a half-grin. “So from a dancing bear I’m being promoted to a chaperon for our hero’s virtue?”

“No,” Jenny said, her voice low. “A bodyguard for his safety. I don’t know what it is about Zyerne, but he feels it, too. Go after them.”

John sighed and bent to kiss her lips. “The King had better pay me extra for this.” His hug was like being embraced by a satin lion. Then he was off, trotting down the steps and calling to them in horrible north-country brogue, the wind billowing his mantlings and giving him the appearance of a huge orchid in the gray garden.

In all, it was just over a week, before the King finally sent for his son.

“He asked me where I’d been,” Gareth said quietly. “He asked me why I hadn’t presented myself to him before.” Turning, he struck the side of his fist against the bedpost, his teeth gritted to fight tears of rage and confusion. “Jenny, in all these days he hasn’t even seen me!”

He swung angrily around. The faded evening light, falling through the diamond-shaped panes of the window where Jenny sat, brushed softly across the citron-and-white satins of his Court mantlings and flickered eerily in the round, facetless old jewels on his hands. His hair had been carefully curled for the audience with his father and, as was the nature of fine hair, hung perfectly straight around his face again, except for a stray lock or two. He’d put on his spectacles after the audience, cracked and bent and unlikely-looking with his finery; the lenses were speckled with the fine blowing rain that chilled the windowglass.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said in a strangulated voice. “He said—he said we’d talk about the dragon the next time he saw me. I don’t understand what’s going on...”

“Was Zyerne there?” John inquired. He was sitting at the spindly desk, which, like the rest of the upper floor of his and Jenny’s guest house, was heaped with books. The whole room, after eight days, had the appearance of a ransacked library; volumes were propped against one another, places marked by pages of John’s notes or odd articles of clothing or other books—and in one case a dagger—slipped between the leaves.

Gareth nodded miserably. “Half the time when I asked him things, she’d answer. Jenny, could she be holding him under some kind of spell?”

Jenny started to say, “Possibly...”

“Well, of course she is,” John said, tipping back his high stool to lean the small of his back against the desk. “And if you hadn’t been so bloody determined to do that slick little baggage justice, Jen, you’d have seen it a week ago. Come!” he added, as a soft tapping sounded at the door.

It opened wide enough for Trey Clerlock to put her head around the doorframe. She hesitated a moment; then, when John gestured, she came in, carrying a pearwood hurdy-gurdy with ivory stars scattered at random over its stubby neck box and playing pegs. John beamed with delight as he took it, and Jenny groaned.

“You’re not going to play that thing, are you? You’ll frighten the cattle for miles around, you know.”

“I’ll not,” John retorted. “And besides, there’s a trick to making it louder or softer...”

“Do you know it?”

“I can learn. Thank you. Trey, love—some people just haven’t any appreciation for the sound of fine music.”

“Some people haven’t any appreciation for the sound of a cat being run through a mangle,” Jenny replied. She turned back to Gareth. “Zyerne could be holding him under a spell, yes—but from what you’ve told me of your father’s stubbornness and strength of will, I’m a little surprised that her influence is that great.”

Gareth shook his head. “It isn’t only that,” he said. “I—I don’t know how to put this, and I can’t be sure, because I wasn’t wearing my spectacles during the interview, but it almost seems that he’s faded since I’ve been gone. That’s a stupid idea,” he recanted at once, seeing Jenny’s puzzled frown.

“No,” said Trey unexpectedly. The other three looked at her, and she blushed a little, like a flustered doll. “I don’t think it’s stupid. I think it’s true, and faded is a good word for it. Because I—I think the same thing is happening to Bond.”

“Bond?” Jenny said, and the memory of the King’s face flashed across her mind; how hollow and brittle he had looked, and how, like Bond, the paint on his face had seemed to stand out from the waxiness beneath.

Trey appeared to concentrate for a moment on carefully straightening the lace on her left cuff. An opal flickered softly in the particolored coils of her hair as she looked up. “I thought it was just me,” she said in a small voice. “I know he’s gotten heavier-handed, and less funny about his jests, the way he is when his mind is on something else. Except that his mind doesn’t seem to be on anything else; it just isn’t on what he’s doing, these days. He’s so absentminded, the way your father’s gotten.” Her gaze went to Jenny’s, imploring. “But why would Zyerne put a spell on my brother? She’s never needed to hold him to her. He’s always squired her around. He was one of the first friends she had at Court. He—he loved her. He used to dream about her...”

“Dream about her how?” Gareth demanded sharply.

Trey shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Did he sleepwalk?”

The surprise in the girl’s eyes answered the question before she spoke. “How did you know?”

The fitful rain outside had ceased; in the long silence, the voices of the palace guards in the court below the guest house windows could be heard clearly, telling a story about a gnome and a whore in town. Even the hazy light of the afternoon was failing, and the room was cold and slate gray. Jenny asked, “Do you dream about her still, Gareth?”

The boy turned red as if scalded. He stammered, shook his head, and finally said, “I—I don’t love her. I truly don’t. I try—I don’t want to be alone with her. But...” He gestured helplessly, unable to fight the traitor dreams.

Jenny said softly, “But she is calling you. She called you that first night we were in her hunting lodge. Had she done so before?”

“I—I don’t know.” He looked shaken and in and very frightened, as he had when Jenny had probed at his mind, as if looking at things that he did not want to see. Trey, who had gone to take a spill from the fire and was lighting the small ivory lamps on the edge of John’s desk, shook out her taper, went quietly over to him, and got him to sit down beside her on the edge of the curtained bed.

At length Gareth said, “She might have. A few months ago she asked me to dine with her and my father in her wing of the palace. I didn’t go. I was afraid Father would be angry at me for slighting her, but later on he said something that made me wonder whether he’d even known about it. I wondered then. I thought...” He blushed still more hotly. “That was when I thought she might have been in love with me.”

“I’ve seen loves like that between wolves and sheep, but the romance tends to be a bit one-sided,” John remarked, scratching his nose. “What prevented you from going?”

“Polycarp.” He toyed with the folds of his mantlings, which caught a soft edge of brightness where the angle of the lamplight came down past the curtains of the bed. “He was always telling me to beware of her. He found out about the dinner and talked me out of going.”

“Well, I don’t know much about magic and all that, but just offhand, lad, I’d say he might have saved your life.” John braced his back against the desk’s edge and fingered a silent run of melody up the hurdy-gurdy’s keys.

Gareth shook his head, puzzled. “But why? It wasn’t a week before he tried to kill us—me and my father both.”

“If that was him.”

The boy stared at him, slowly-growing horror and realization in his face. He whispered, “But I saw him.”

“If she could take the shape of a cat or a bird, putting on the form of the Master of Halnath wouldn’t be beyond her—Jen?” He glanced across the room to where she sat silent, her arm resting across one up-drawn knee, her chin upon her wrist.

“She wouldn’t have taken on his actual being,” she said quietly. “An illusion would have served. Shapeshifting requires enormous power—but then, Zyerne has enormous power. However she did it, the act itself is logical. If Polycarp had begun to suspect her intentions toward Gareth, it would dispose of and discredit him at once. By making you the witness. Gar, she removed all chance of your helping him. She must have known how bitter a betrayal it would be.”

Numbly, Gareth whispered, “No!” struck by the horror of what he had done.

Trey’s voice was soft in the stillness. “But what does she want with Gareth? I can understand her holding the King, because without his support she’d—she wouldn’t exactly be nothing, but she certainly wouldn’t be able to live as she does now. But why entrap Gareth as well? And what does she want with Bond? He’s no good to her... We’re really only a very minor family, you know. I mean, we haven’t any political power, and not that much money.” A rueful smile touched one comer of her lips as she fingered the rose-point lace of her cuff. “All this... One must keep up appearances, of course, and Bond is trying to marry me off well. But we really haven’t anything Zyerne would want.”

“And why destroy them?” Gareth asked, desperate concern for his father in his voice. “Do all spells do that?”

“No,” Jenny said. “That’s what surprises me about this—I’ve never heard of a spell of influence that would waste the body of the victim as it holds the mind. But neither have I heard of one holding as close as the one which she has upon your father, Gareth; nor of one that lasts so long. But her magic is the magic of the gnomes and unlike the spells of men. It may be that among their secrets is one that will hold the very essence of another, twining around it like the tendrils of a morning-glory vine, which can tear the foundations of a stone house asunder. But then,” she went on, her voice low, “it is almost certain that to have that kind of control over him, at the first, she had to obtain his consent.”

“His consent?” Trey cried, horrified. “But how could he? How could anyone?”

Gareth, Jenny was interested to note, said nothing to this. He had seen, however briefly, on the road in the north, the mirror of his own soul—and he also knew Zyerne.

Jenny explained, “To tamper that deeply with another’s essence always requires the consent of the victim. Zyerne is a shapeshifter—the principle is the same.”

Trey shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

Jenny sighed and, rising to her feet, crossed to where the two young people sat side-by-side. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “A shapeshifter can change someone else’s essence, even as she can change her own. It requires enormous power—and first she must in some fashion obtain the victim’s consent. The victim can resist, unless the shapeshifter can find some chink of consenting, some hidden demon within—some part of the essence that wills to be changed.”

The deepening darkness outside made the lamplight even more golden, like honey where it lay over the girl’s face. Under the shadows of the long, thick lashes. Jenny could read both fear and fascination, that half-understanding that is the first whisper of consent.

“I think you would resist me if I tried to transform you into a lapdog, had I the power to do so. There is very little of the lapdog in your soul. Trey Clerlock. But if I were to transform you into a horse—a yearling filly, smokegray and sister to the sea winds—I think I could obtain your consent to that.”

Trey jerked her eyes away, hiding them against Gareth’s shoulder, and the young man put a protective arm around her as well as he could, considering that he was sitting on the trailing ends of his extravagant sleeves.

“It is the power of shapeshifting and the danger,” Jenny said, her voice low in the silence of the room. “If I transformed you into a filly. Trey, your essence would be the essence of a horse. Your thoughts would be a horse’s thoughts, your body a mare’s body; your loves and desires would be those of a young, swift beast. You might remember for a time what you were, but you could not find your way back to be it once again. I think you would be happy as a filly.”

“Stop it,” Trey whispered, and covered her ears. Gareth’s hold about her tightened. Jenny was silent. After a moment the girl looked up again, her eyes dark with the stirred depths of her dreams. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice small. “It’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s me.”

“I know,” Jenny replied softly. “But do you understand now? Do you understand what she might have done to your father, Gareth? It is sometimes less painful to give over striving and let another mind rule yours. When Zyerne first came to power she couldn’t have acquired that kind of hold over you, because you would not come near enough for her to do it. You hated her, and you were only a boy—she could not draw you as she draws men. But when you became a man...”

“I think that’s loathsome.” It was Trey’s turn to put a protective arm around Gareth’s satin shoulders.

“But a damn good way to keep her power,” John pointed out, leaning one arm across the hurdy-gurdy resting upon his knees.

“I still can’t be sure that this is what she did,” Jenny said. “And it still wouldn’t explain why she did the same thing to Bond. I would not know for certain until I could see the King, speak to him...”

“God’s Grandmother, he’ll scarcely speak to his own son, love, let alone me or thee.” John paused, listening to his own words. “Which might be a good reason for not speaking to me or thee, come to that.” His eyes flickered to Gareth. “You know. Gar, the more I see of this, the more I think I’d like to have a few words with your dad.”