Dragonstar

17

On the third morning there was only silence. Outside the barred door of the smithy, Jenny listened beneath the steady hoon of the western wind for some sound within. But if there was no trace of residual magic in the metal body of the robot, neither was there the life that tells a mage of human presence. No breathing, either quick or slow. Neither the rustle of clothing, nor creak of belt or boot leather. Inert, the robot would make no more noise than Muffle’s anvil.

There was nothing to tell her whether the creature was there at all.

She fetched Muffle and John before going in to check, Muffle disgruntled at being barred from his forge for yet another day: “It ain’t like we haven’t plows to sharpen and the harrow-chains to fix, with spring on its way.” This was an optimistic pronouncement, for snow lay ankle-deep in the main courtyard, but the smith liked to be beforehand with his work so he could hunt for wild strawberries in the spring woods. Jenny herself was worried, for only five nights remained until the night of the Moon of Winds, and John was quietly preparing the things he would need to go to Prokep. The cloudclearing wind blowing out of the west signaled, they both knew, the dragon’s return.

In the back of Jenny’s mind, too, was fear for her children. She and John had intended to walk down to the village that morning, to see them before departure, and she had a lively fear that Adric would either slip away and come up to the Hold by himself today, or, even worse, do so after they were gone.

The silver bottle glinted on John’s neck on the end of its long red ribbon among the jumble of scarves and plaids. Jenny remembered the shining chamber within, and prayed that that part of the plan, at least, would go off without a hitch.

Do you like games?

She had no doubt that they would find Folcalor, when the demon came to the haunted city at the full of the moon. But as John had said, they wouldn’t know how to hand the bottle off to Adromelech until they got there, and Jenny flinched from the knowledge that one or the other of them might, in the final chaos, have to operate the trap instead. She had not spoken of this to John, nor he to her, for there was much they dared not speak of with Caradoc so near, but it was in his glance sometimes.

Jenny pushed open the smithy door. The room was dark and deathly cold, for as John had predicted, the ashes had long ago gone out. The thick oak benches were smashed to matchwood, and the flagstoned floor was strewn with lumps of charcoal and twisted rods of iron. A shovel had been broken by being hammered on the wall, and the anvil—mercifully undamaged—lay in a corner: The dents and holes in the wall showed where it had been shoved or slid repeatedly against the stone. The forge itself had been pulled apart, and the stones scattered the floor.

In the midst of all this the robot stood inert. A broken pot of goose-grease lay against the wall in one place, a brush in another. Blots of grease gelled on the floor beneath the thing’s joints. Jenny wondered whether, as the room cooled, moisture had condensed on the steel of the pulleys, crippling it.

Caradoc?

There was no reply.

For three days Jenny had listened, too, for any sign, any whisper that in his fury Caradoc would call on Folcalor or Adromelech—madness, given what they would do with a talisman stone of a wizard’s soul, but it was not beyond possibility that Caradoc was mad, or close to it. And his vanity, she knew, was strong.

She had heard nothing, but did not know whether she would be able to hear such a summons. Her own powers were too new, too unfamiliar, and she had never had the ability of demons and dragons to read human dreams.

They could only keep silent, and wait.

John came in, fingering the silver catch-bottle. He glanced from Jenny to the robot, and raised an eyebrow. “He isn’t dead?” His breath was a cloud of white in the icy gloom.

“I don’t know.” Jenny walked over—cautiously—to the robot, but when she crouched to examine it more closely she kept her skirts gathered tight around her, lest she have to spring away fast. “I don’t think it’s possible to die within the talisman … I certainly can’t imagine how one would do it. Though of course, having been so close to Folcalor’s mind, Caradoc may know something I don’t.”

“I don’t think Folcalor would know, either,” murmured John. “Demons don’t. They know about killin’, but they know nothin’ of death. You saw them in Bel. It terrifies them blind even to think of dying. They’ll go through a thousand tortures rather than let go.”

Like Caradoc, Jenny thought, and backed warily out of the room.

John lingered for a moment behind her, then followed. “Morkeleb should be here by tomorrow,” he said. “If nothing further happens, we’ll have to leave for Prokep the day after, come what may. We’re cuttin’ it close as it is, if we mean to have all in place before Folcalor and his lot arrive.”

“And if they’re there already?”

“I doubt they will be, by what Corvin said.” John’s voice sounded calm, but she could feel the tension where his shoulder touched hers. “It’s an uncanny place. Given the way they attacked Corvin an’ me there—a fast frontal assault with all they had, no sneakin’ around beforehand—I’m guessin’ he was right when he said there was traps there that they don’t want to deal with. But we won’t know a thing, really, till we arrive.”

He paused, to work the bolt back into place and snap closed the lock, chilblained hands clumsy in his gloves. For all the relative warmth of the day, it would still be a long time till spring.

“The least we can do is get this thing out of the forge, before poor Muffle gives birth from frettin’. But when we lock it into the southeast tower dungeon again I’m going to disjoint the legs and take the hand off it, and I still don’t feel right, about leavin’ it here. God knows how I’ll keep Adric away from it, till we get back.”

Jenny glanced up at him, questioning, anxious. She had read all John’s notes, two and three times now, and understood how he planned to cope with Adromelech breaking out of the Henge and Folcalor swallowing him up—or vice versa.

And still she thought, What if it doesn’t succeed?

She—and John—would be standing smack on the doorstep of Hell when the demons poured out.

Her thoughts were in her eyes.

John put an arm around her shoulders, smiled down at her, “You’re not doubtin’ my plan, are you, love?”

“Yes.”

He sighed, crestfallen. “I was afraid you’d say that.” And then, more gently, “Don’t fash yourself, love. It’s got to be done—somethin’s got to be done—and this is the best we can do. We’ll manage. See if we don’t.”

Jenny wished she could believe him.

The robot stood motionless all that day, and all the next. Toward sunset the next day even the western wind faded into stillness, and from the observation platform where John and Jenny had watched for the comet’s coming, many years ago, they saw Morkeleb circle down out of the primrose sky.

All is in readiness, said the dragon, and in accordance with your notes, though Corvin will still have it that flight is possible, and concealment is possible. He perched on the battlement of the tower, like an angular bird, wings spread for balance and seventeen feet of spiny tail hanging down over the wall, switching like a cat’s. I have myself observed this Dragonstar, and it is as you say, wrought of ice and iron. The sigils that have been sourced upon it should hold against the magic of the demons. Whether that will be enough to weave their complete ruin, I cannot say.

“And the Demon Queen?” asked John.

The bobs of Morkeleb’s antennae flickered, small and cold as the comet itself burning in the twilight above the bleak eastern hills. Since she was glimpsed in the Skerries of Light, I have not seen her, and in Prokep there was no sign of her, or of any other of the Hellspawnkind. Yet as I flew back I felt her presence, as if she were always behind my head, visible from the corner of my eye.

John nodded, familiar with the sensation.

For the rest, Prokep is silent, as it has always been silent: If the demonkind came there before us, they fell prey to the dangers of the place ere we arrived. Yet as the moon waxes full so the power of the demons’ talismans waxes, the power of their stored deaths. It will not be long before they can tread its sands with impunity, at least for a time.

“We’ll be ready to leave in the mornin’,” said John. “Did you have a look about you, at those places I marked on my map that felt odd to me? Or that had strange tracks comin’ an’ goin’ from ’em but didn’t seem to be gates?”

I did, replied the dragon. Two of them are places where magic will not work, blind spots in the fabric of the world. The place between the red pillars, and the space to the north of the palace platform. There is a chamber, too, in that platform, where magic will also not work, but it is difficult to come to.

And Jenny felt, and saw in her mind, the visions that the dragon showed to John, adding to the man’s own perceptions and memories of the vanished city, like new colors painted onto a map. To Jenny, it meant little, only fragments of awareness, but she saw John’s eyes widen behind his spectacle lenses, and he said, “That’s gie brilliant, better than computers, even. Is that a thing of dragons, or somethin’ only the Dragonshadows can do?”

It is a thing of ME, replied Morkeleb. And as to the Dragonshadows … I know nothing of them. Not what they can do, not where they are, not whether they are aware of us or not. Nothing. And he was silent for a time, the diamond gaze that could trap and hold the human mind like shining quicksand turned outward upon the darkening horizon, and his own half-seen shape fading slowly into the night.

Then he glanced back down at John and added, as he flickered back into visibility, But I will say, Dreamweaver, that the dragons do not entirely trust you, and Corvin least of all.

“Aye, well,” sighed John, “that puts ’em in company with about three-quarters of the population of Bel.” He shrugged his sheepskin coat closer about him, the tip of his long nose red with cold. “I wish I could tell ’em everything’ll be well, because I’d love to believe it meself. But that’s somethin’ we’ll all have to see.”

In the deep of the night Jenny was wakened by a change in the note of the wind.

Her first thought, still cloudy with sleep, was that despite Morkeleb’s efforts the storm was rising again: ‘Spring is coming’ forsooth. She had dreamed of him, dreamed of him calling out to her as black winds swept him off the tower, drove him far north of the Hold, above the bleak tundra that in this season was like frozen marble beneath the inky darkness. Dreamed of him surrounded by demon voices and demon magic, trying to return.

But his voice was drowned by the happy singing of birds, and she sat in a garden with the demon Amayon, holding Amayon’s hand. He looked as he had always looked to her, like a boy in his mid-teens, dark curls clustering around a beautiful face, wide-set eyes of deep speedwell blue that looked at her with an expression of trust and utter love. She felt protective of him and of that love, as if he were a child: felt his reverent love, the half-awed first love of a boy for an older woman, drawn by her wisdom and her beauty through a gate of delight into a new and different world.

She was, he had told her, the only mortal woman he had ever loved. It was an astonishingly potent fantasy, and it made sense in her heart, even as the seductive little songs that Folcalor sang in people’s dreams made sense. Only he understood that she, Jenny, had had no responsibility for the dreadful things she had done. Only through his love could she be utterly free. He would take vengeance for her upon the world for the hardships of her life.

Why was Morkeleb calling to her, out in the hammering tempest? Wind, he called out to her, and something else.…

Amayon put his hands around her face—over her ears—and kissed her. “I love you, Jenny.…”

And still in her mind she heard the dragon’s voice: Wake up!…

She woke up. The wind had changed. Coming from all directions, it beat now one side of the tower, now another, like the blizzard winds of deep winter. For the first instant, hearing by his breathing that John, too, was awake, she felt shame, as if he had waked because he had dreamed of her with Amayon in the garden, even as she had so often dreamed of him lying with the Demon Queen.

But he whispered, “You hear it? Smell it?”

Yes. There was a different note to the storm’s howling, a kind of thin scream. A smell that was not the scent of snow.

“It sounds as it did in Prokep, when Folcalor came to get Corvin.” The ropes creaked beneath the bed ticks as John rolled to his feet: the harsh slice of cold on her flesh. “Smells the same, too.” The creak of John’s boots, and the soft whump of her skirts and plaids tossed onto the bed where she could get them easily. “I’ll fetch the lads.”

Jenny dragged on her skirt, latched up her bodice. Ran down the tower stairs behind him. One twist of the pitch-dark steps put her at the threshold of the open door of her sons’ room; she saw the dark loom of the big bed and thought, Dear gods, what if the demons are in the village after all?

There was no way of knowing, no way of telling, what Caradoc could and couldn’t hear, how far he could cast the probing tendrils of his mind. He had cried out in his rage that he couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, and yet John had maintained the silence—both in the Hold and the village—concerning the children and anything to do with them … Had that been enough? Would Adromelech’s demons—they had to be Adromelech’s—guess where Ian was, despite all precautions? (Dear gods, she thought in panic, did Adric do something silly …?)

No, she thought, flying down the dark stair as the red reflections of torchlight flashed across the walls far beneath her. Whatever happened, the children were safer in the village than they would be here—if anything Caradoc would assume Ian was staying at her old house on Frost Fell. About Adric and Mag, she doubted he gave so much as a thought.

Another twist of the stair and she was in the hall. Someone had stirred up the central fire and the men of the household—Bill and Cowan and Blunder, and Tabble the kitchen-boy and Ams Puggle and the half-dozen villagers whose week this was for Hold duty—were pulling on their clothes while Bannock and Snuff stalked among them with the hackles dark upon their backs. John was giving orders in a quiet, decisive voice as Jenny darted through, all sounds muffled by the thick hangings that covered the walls and were supposed to absorb some of the drafts and noise and never did, quite. Underfoot the matting of woven straw whispered limply, giving back its smell of dirt and dog-piss; Jenny thought, Spring can’t come too soon, to take this out and burn it.…

If we’re here, in spring.

In the kitchen Aunt Jane opened the door of her little room, in the shadows between the banked hearth and Aunt Rowe’s loom: “What is it?”

“Demons,” said Jenny.

“It’s that thing in the smithy, isn’t it? It called them.” This was something Aunt Jane generally said about any misfortune—she’d ascribed the increased numbers of mice three years ago to Jenny’s teaching Ian to ensorcel herbs for healing—but in this case, she was absolutely right. Jenny pulled her plaid and her sheepskin coat tighter about her, and caught up her halberd from the corner near the door before stepping out into the bricked porch. The wind hit her like a swung plank.

It was hard to hear anything, hard to see, as if dark hands pawed to cover her eyes. She called, MORKELEB! into the wind and got no reply.

He was out there somewhere, impervious to the demon spells that sought to seize him through the magic that he had surrendered. Had they clogged his eyes and his wings with snow, as John had spoken of them trying to overwhelm the dragon Corvin with gold-dust? No chance, now, of a fortuitous thunderstorm to wash the air.…

Fortuitous? Her mind snagged on the thought as she stretched her senses out toward the smithy, around the walls of the stable court. But the thought was driven from her by the effort of reaching, of listening, of trying to hear anything over the wind.

It was useless. She could not even touch his mind in the hammering blindness of storm and magic that surrounded the Hold. Jenny cursed, and worked her way a little distance along the wall, trying to get close enough to see the smithy door. She couldn’t, and waited until the men came out. The robot was an unknown quantity, as far as strength went, but she had seen its speed. Only when Muffle and Cowan were at her back did she struggle to the smithy porch, and see the door standing open. The hinges had been wrenched free, and Muffle, after a quick look around the smithy by the feeble glare of the lantern he bore, shouted, “The axle of the harrow’s gone! It used it as a lever—seven-foot bar of iron.…”

So much, Jenny thought, looking at the splintered oak planking, the torn-out bolts, for guessing the robot’s strength.

The screaming of the wind had covered the sound.

“It’s gone to the gate!” she shouted, and the three of them fought their way across the court, Jenny driven to her knees by the gale, so that her two bulky escorts had to hold on to her arms, to keep her from being thrown back across the courtyard and against the kitchen wall. The cold made her gasp.

And all the time she was thinking, Amayon. Amayon is here.

She could feel him, sense him. Rage rushed over her like heat, at the longings that spun in her mind.

There were spells of confusion in the wind, like turning hands in blindman’s bluff. She could feel them tug at her consciousness, and Muffle turned and tried to drag her down the passageway to the cow-byres. “This way!” she yelled, and he yelled back, “What? No. You’re mixed up, Jen,” and dragged her, hard, the wind pounding them both and the flecks of flying snow obscuring everything into a tangle of blackness and walls. Cowan had already vanished—Jenny thought, He’ll freeze.…

“You’re mixed up!” she called back, and Muffle yelled, “What?”

“This way!”

She could never have hauled the massive blacksmith if he hadn’t trusted her, but he did. He said, “Jen, we’re gonna end up in the armory!” but he followed her all the same, and the wind that smote them grew less. Voices clamored dimly, echoing somewhere in the darkness—nowhere near the gate, anyway. Jenny felt overwhelmed by the momentary conviction that the gates lay to her right—where the storerooms were—and fought it aside, and sure enough, a few moments later the squat archway loomed above their heads, and the stone walls echoed with the crash of iron striking stone.

Spells of confusion, to divert help to the other side of the Hold until it was too late, even as the demon winds had swept Morkeleb away.

Someone shouted, “Johnny!” and there was the clash as if buckets of chain had been hurled down the stairs. Jenny saw, through her unnatural blindness, the spider-like shape of the robot tangling and fighting against the chains that Ams Puggle and Peg the Gatekeeper had thrown over it like a net. Beyond the robot Jenny saw that the portcullis had been raised, and the tarred brown-black wall of the gates was raked and scored with slits, as if struck by axes from the other side. The robot stood between John and the capstan-wheel that held the portcullis chains; a heavy bar stretched across both leaves of the gate, but to get it, the robot would have to cease guarding the portcullis chains. John struck at it with the six-foot wooden beam he held in his hands like a single-stick; the robot got its legs clear of the chains and lunged at him again, swinging the iron axle it held as a weapon.

Clearly a halberd would be of little use. Jenny looked around and caught up one of the buckets of gravel that had been brought to the gatehouse last fall to mend a pothole in the court. In the dark at the end of the passageway crashing and splintering resounded, as something struck the gates again—axes, hammers, maybe only the forces of malignant magic. John lunged with the beam, trying to trip the robot, and the robot swung at him again. Jenny sprang in and emptied the gravel over the thing’s center, pebbles and grit bouncing. The robot did not turn, did not need to, only sprang at her, its pincer biting into the flesh of her arm with terrifying violence, ripping through sheepskin, chemise, and flesh as she pulled free. At the same instant it stabbed at John with the axle again, trying to pin him to the wall as with a spear. He slipped past, struck at its feet, then, when it sprang at Jenny, he dropped the beam and went for the capstan.

The robot was on him, like a cat on a mouse, catching his plaids as he tried to duck past. John slithered out of them, threw the yards of dull-striped wool over the center of the thing, where the moonstone was. While the pincer and the hand groped and thrashed at the fabric he yanked on the capstan, yelled something about the gate, gasping against the wind.…

It was too late. With a booming crash the gate’s thick planks burst inward, forms crawled and wriggled through. Puggle and Muffle ran forward with their halberds and their flails, but the attackers—gnomes, Jenny saw, at least a score of them—were armed with maces and spears. In the same instant, the robot caught John by the back of the neck, like a cat catching a mouse. Jenny’s breath jammed in her throat, knowing the strength of those pincers and knowing, too, that she could not, dare not, use magic to save him.…

But John turned in its grip before it could shake him, caught the pincer in both hands, and did something to it that broke its grip—literally broke its grip, for Jenny saw the hinged crescent jammed open, unable to shut. He dropped to the ground, but before he could jump clear the robot struck him with a foreleg, smashing him against the wall. It made to spring at him, but one of its leg-joints jammed. Jenny heard the furious whine of the voice-box, the robot struggling to go forward—more than one of its joints frozen by the grit locked in them.

The next second the gnomes were around John with halberds ready, like hunters on a speared boar. Amayon’s voice—unmistakable—shouted, “Get back! Get back or he dies!”

Muffle, Puggle, and Jenny stopped where they were. Amayon—the only human of the attackers, maybe not human at all, Jenny could not tell—stood over John, looking as he had always looked to her: a slim boy in his teens, curly-haired, blue-eyed, seductive, smiling. Though the air was bitterly cold in the passage and snow whirled through the hole in the gate the boy wore only a short tunic of quilted black velvet sewn with garnets, black hose, and slippers. Neither the gnomes nor Amayon breathed—in the glare of the cressets that lit the passageway, Jenny could see John’s panting breath.

The demon’s blue eyes, dark as mulberries, met Jenny’s, and he smiled. “Well, darling?” he said softly. “What will you pay me for his life?”

He reached down to take the catch-bottle and the ribbon from John’s neck, and John’s sword suddenly glinted in the firelight. Amayon sprang back as if he’d been burned.

“I’ll pay for me own life,” John said, using the stones of the wall behind him to get himself grimly to his feet. “Thank you very much.” By the way he moved, Jenny guessed the robot had cracked some of his ribs.

The wind ceased. In the cressets’ iron baskets the fire flared suddenly, and the next moment sank, as if life itself had been drained from the wood. Through thickening darkness Jenny saw something in the splintered hole in the gate, something that seemed to pour through rather than crawl. Something she could not look at, try as she would. She smelled mold and dust, and the chill breath of wet stone, and without intending to, her eyes flinched away.

When she looked back there was nothing there. But a shadow hovered in the corner near John, the shadow of something tall and stooped; veiled in darkness, it seemed to be, though to her mageborn sight other things were still clear. In a thin cold voice that seemed to come from a great distance away, it said, This man was in Prokep with the dragon.

The gnomes pressed close around John, their halberds a glinting ring of steel.

“Get the woman,” Amayon said, and Muffle struck the hand off the gnome who stepped forward to seize Jenny—the gnome merely looked at him, mildly surprised, and picked up the sword in his other hand while his heart’s blood poured out into the churn of mud and snow.

“Leave her be.” In the torchlight, John’s eyebrows stood out black against ashen skin.

One of the demon’s butterfly eyebrows quirked. “Will we have heroics here? Don’t tell me she’s got back enough of her enchantments to beguile you still? After deceiving you with half the cavalry corps—”

“I said leave her be.” He lifted his sword, though the halberds had reach on him. In the lantern light the silvery lines on his skin burned as if reflecting the light of an unseen moon. “What’d Caradoc offer to sell you? This?” He held out the catch-bottle.

Amayon’s smile broadened, and he extended his hand. But John said, “Not this time,” and stepped quickly past the gnomes to hand the bottle to the gray thing, the thing unseen in the shadows beside him. When he stepped back to grope for the support of the wall again, Jenny could see his hand was unsteady with shock at what he had seen or almost seen.

“Now I said, leave her be. Leave us be.”

The chill, distant voice said, “Bring him. And the woman. We must talk about Prokep, you and I.”

Amayon smiled, and moved toward Jenny again—He knows I’ll use magic to save him, she thought dizzily. Or to save myself. I can’t, I won’t …

John brought up his sword and glanced, with deliberate calculation, at the gnomes around him, as if marking whom he would kill first, and who next. The gnomes backed nervously away.

“It’s naught to me what demons do to demons,” John said, in his toughest back-country bumpkin voice, “so be that you let me and mine alone. What is it you’d know about Prokep?”

Morkeleb, thought Jenny, where is Morkeleb …?

The cold-voiced thing said, “The way into the Maze. And the way through.”

“Give me a scrap of aught to draw on and a chalk and I’ll draw it,” said John. “It’s like them Hells Amayon took me through—”

“It is not, precisely,” replied that chill voice out of the darkness, “but leave it so. It would be best, Dragonsbane, did you journey there with us.”

Me! The gut-strings within the sounding-box raged like swarming wasps, but no articulate sound came forth. With a great squeaking of joints the robot dragged itself forward, and Caradoc’s voice screamed in Jenny’s mind. You promised me the boy. He is in this place somewhere, he must be! Hiding … Or else he is in the house on the Fell! Give me the boy!

And like the deep thrumming of the wind, the strings of the box formed up the word “… oy.…”

“Leave the boy,” said John. “That’s me price, me alone, and I’ll take you through the Maze at Prokep.”

Out of the shadows the thing regarded him, barely discernible darkness within dark. “Do not think to play the fool with us, Dragonsbane.” Eyeless and without sound of breath, the voice, like that of the robot, seemed almost to be mechanically produced, like the deceptive whistling of wind through long-bleached bone. “We will know if you delay us in the city, so that its traps may entangle us, or if you slow your steps in the Maze. And we will have no mercy.”

“You haven’t any mercy, anyway, that I’ve ever seen,” retorted John. “So what’s that to me? Just leave me family alone, and I’m yours.”

Adromelech promised me the boy, insisted Caradoc, and the sounding-strings groaned again, “… oy …” To let you into the Hold, to give you the trap for Folcalor.

“But you did not give us the trap,” taunted Amayon, “did you?”

You cannot leave me thus! The robot, creaking and shuddering, flung itself at the demon, and Amayon stepped back with a look of surprise, like the gnome whose hand Muffle had cut off. He moved lightly aside from the great iron insect, and in the shadows the gray thing stretched out a finger, white bone gleaming in the dark.

There was a small explosion, and white light speared out between the lattices of the robot’s heart. A cracking sound, like glass left in a fire, and, in Jenny’s mind, a failing shriek of despair and rage and terror. When she blinked the after-glare of brightness from her eyes, it was to see the robot standing frozen on its wheels, thin smoke trailing up from its metal heart. Inside the moonstone was broken into fragments, as if struck by a hammer. The pieces had the burned, blackened look that the soul-crystals had had, on the hill above the Temple at Ernine.

Of Amayon, and the gnomes, and the shadow-thing, and John Aversin, there remained no sign.

Afterward it took three men to remove the pieces of the robot from the gate-passage and lug them back to the storeroom behind the forge, where Muffle dismantled it. But this Jenny only heard at secondhand.

For within an hour she was sitting between the razor-tipped spines of Morkeleb’s back, flying through the cold still darkness toward Prokep.

And all around her in the night, she heard the silken shearing of dragon wings.