Dragonstar

19

The sun stood three-quarters of the way to noon. Heat rippled in waves from the sand. Dust crusted on his skin, in his mouth, in his nose, on his spectacles, John forced himself to stand. The ribs Caradoc had cracked in the gatehouse fight gouged him like knives, and he felt eighty years old.

Curiously, he noted that through everything his spectacles were intact. Whatever else could be said about Jenny’s magic, he reflected, that was one spell that worked like a champion. Gingerly, clumsily, he tore strips from what was left of his shirtsleeves and bandaged a cut arm and the lacerated fingers of his right hand: Amayon jeered, “Did we get a boo-boo?” as if to a child, but a shadowy hand slipped around John’s shoulder to steady the rag as he tied the knot. But for the presence of the shadow, John guessed Amayon would have taken advantage of the moment to do more than sneer.

Among the stones all around the silvery glimmer of the demons flickered in the dry glaring sunlight. Dust-devils fleeted on the Blind Spot’s edge like a deadly perimeter, rising and falling, little whirlpools of sharp pebbles stirring and settling. Waiting.

This, thought John, is going to be bad.

“Follow me,” he said. “Keep them off me. The way into the Salt Garden opens only at noon, and only for a few minutes. If we miss it, we’ll never hold out till evenin’.”

“Tell me where it is.”

“It’s up your nose,” retorted John. “Just follow me.”

The dust-devils whirled up again, then settled—possibly at some spell of the gray thing’s, though John as usual could feel nothing; in any case, the men of Bel were waiting, armed, tireless, many of them already dead. He thought there were fewer of them than even the fighting could account for, but it was still going to be a bad run to the gate.

“That bottle, now,” he said softly, speaking over his shoulder. “If Folcalor should show up—”

“Folcalor will come,” whispered the shadow, “when the way is prepared, when his power is at its height. I think not sooner. And I do not believe that his Greatness Lord Adromelech would tolerate it, should another trap the Arch-Traitor and deprive him of the pleasure.”

John didn’t even phrase his first thought—Good—in his mind. If worst came to worst, he’d been prepared to spend the rest of eternity trapped in the bottle with Folcalor, though with Adromelech loose and roving around it was half the battle lost right there: Now he only muttered truculently, “Well, I ain’t keen on gettin’ killed so his Greatness can have the privilege of trappin’ Folcalor after I’m dead,” a remark which the shadow ignored.

Jen, I hope you and Morkeleb got your spells in place while we were all hidin’ out beyond the Gate of Winds.

Because if something had gone wrong, reflected John wearily, he was going to be in tremendous trouble when Adromelech pulled the stopper out of that bottle and disappeared along with his foe. They’re never gonna believe me if I say, “Goodness gracious, how’d that happen?”

He wiped the dust from his spectacles, triangulated on the unmarked spot—he could see it in the distance, about half a mile to the south of the Blind Spot—and shifted the grip of his cramped and blistered hand on his sword.

The moment they stepped clear of the Blind Spot, Folcalor’s demons were around them like sharks around a foundering raft. Whirlwinds and dust blasted them: pebbles, sand, what felt like razor-edged shards of glass. Spells of dizziness, nausea, pain. Counterspells darted, flames searing up through the sand only to be smothered with dust or swept away with wind. Blindness came and went, as if someone repeatedly caught the burning glare of the sun on silvered glass and directed it into his eyes. Out of the blindness and the dust swords slashed at him, never quite coming near enough to get in a counterstroke; he felt as he had when he was a child, when his father would thrust a sword into his hand and drive him hard against the courtyard wall.…

It had taught him. But he hadn’t liked it.

Damned to you lot. If you didn’t get me with semiautomatic submachine guns in Corvin’s laboratory, you’re not going to do it with handfuls of pebbles in wind.

“Hold them off!” he yelled, barely able to see the pillar, the hill, the bulk of the palace foundation that told him where he was. He fell to his knees, dust and rock tearing him, demons shrieking.…

I’d better have this right.

The sun was overhead. On the ground he traced the sigil of the door, that Amayon had traced on every gate from the Wraithmire to Paradise and beyond. Shrieking whirlwinds tore the sign away, and he traced it again.

The demons swept past him, across the sigil.

And disappeared, leaving him alone to face blindness and dust and men slashing out of the whirling brown wall of blown sand with spears.

He killed one, two … then green fire roared up between him and them, and he dove over where the sigil had been and prayed to the Old God and the Old God’s Granny that his calculations were right.

He was on his knees in the Salt Garden. Brushing the dust off his velvet doublet, Amayon sniffed, “Some warrior.”

“All I need to do is get through it alive.” John climbed stiffly to his feet. Beds of salt stretched in all directions around them, granite-bordered, like flower-beds in the Long Garden of the palace at Bel, decorated with winding paths of stepping-stones. The smell of salt burned in the air, and waves of heat breathed from the ground. It was always noon here.

Around them the silvery slumped demons were faded, ashen lizards slowly shriveling in the burning air. John couldn’t see the gray thing, but guessed it was right there behind him as always.

“Let’s go, you lot,” he said with a briskness he was far from feeling. “I want to get done with this as badly as you do.” Turning, he led the way into the Maze.

For days in Prokep he had studied it, trying this route or that one and making notes: Its pathways had changed their appearance from day to day, but the count of the turnings had remained ever the same. Through walls of gray rock or fog-netted hedge, he led the demons swiftly, listening behind him, around him, in the curious stillness of whatever Hell or enclave or world constituted the world of the Maze. He guessed that some of Folcalor’s forces at least had followed them in, and prayed again that Morkeleb and the dragons had put his plan into motion—and that his plan would work. When he was younger he’d comforted himself going into battle by saying, Well, they can’t do more than kill you, but lately he’d found out this wasn’t true.

He wondered where Jenny was, and if she was all right.

And smiled, only thinking about her. That lovely, strange, and solitary lady, wherever she was, whatever she did. He’d kissed her in the alleyway behind the tavern, and felt her arms around him, and she was his lady again.

Blister the lot of you, he thought, glancing back over his shoulder—of course he couldn’t see the gray thing, but the rest of the demons looked paler, smaller, and even Amayon seemed to have lost a little of his glossy look. I’ll survive this to have a life with her yet.

As he threaded the paths of the Maze, and watched the demons around him fade and wither, he understood the wisdom of the mages who had died in the Henge, powering this whole system of traps with their deaths. Of course they’d needed a way to reach the Henge themselves, in case of unforeseen emergencies. The Maze fed on magic, as the demons did. The longer they stayed in it, the more it leached them, their own magic going to feed the strength of the Henge. He toyed with the notion of leading them here and there until they simply disappeared, but dropped it: With the talisman jewels as a source of power, he had no idea how long they’d last, and in any case his goal was to get the catch-bottle to Adromelech. Even without the gray thing’s spells, Folcalor might very well be capable of breaking the Henge from the outside anyway.

The demons had defeated the magic of the wizards by sourcing their power in an alien star.

The answer was to combat them not with strength, but with a thing they did not understand.

The spring day faded, as they wound and rewound their way between the walls of the Maze.

The Moon of Winds stood cold as a bride’s pearl in the dimming sky.

Above the hills—visible, as the broken pillars of the city were visible, as the barren, time-scored foundation of the old palace was visible—the Dragonstar flickered, a diamond speck in the deepening blue.

When they came out of the Maze, the Maze itself was no longer to be seen. Only a suggestion of smoke, glowing in the low places of the ground. The ruined city of Prokep stretched around them, as it had that first night, when Corvin had said, I did not think that I had been gone so long.

Around the Henge, the city itself lay motionless as stone. But moonlight glinted, here and there, on crystals: on the tops of the broken pillars, or on the foundation of the palace, or simply laid in the sand where the sand would cover them within days. More than once during the fighting retreat to the Salt Garden, John had glimpsed runes written on stones that had not been here when he’d searched the city three weeks ago.

Jen, he thought, his heart hammering, this had better work.

The night around the Henge flowed with demons, blue-shining and hideous, and stank of all the foulness of Hell. That cold, strong hand closed on John’s nape again, and he stood still, looking into the ring, feeling the demons gather at his back.

Out of the puddle or ice-chip or whatever it was in the center, a firefly seemed to rise. It danced for a moment among the stones, and tiny as it was, its hot small light picked edges of white fire along the rough rune-scribed menhirs and on Amayon’s smiling, boyish face.

Amayon took the talisman jewels from the gnomes—despite his greater powers he, too, had trouble carrying that many material objects—and moved around the ring, scattering them on the earth like a farmer seeding a field. Far away behind him John heard the gray thing singing, an eerie wail like a dying child, though the hand still gripped his neck. Gaw, what if they decide to use my life as one of those they’re getting power from? He shifted his grip on his sword. If it comes to it, Amayon’s the one I’ll kill.

There seemed now to be half a dozen fireflies, drifting in the blue dusk within the Henge.

Where the jewels lay scattered, lines of light began to burn in the dust. Charred curves and sigils, fingerlets of fire burning up out of the ground. Threads of greenish lightning snaked over the stones; the air crackled with ozone. Somewhere within the Henge a deep voice called out, a bass echo of the gray thing’s thin sobbing, an obscene chuckle mocking primal grief. The two voices merged, separated, and merged again, and white light flashed across the clear sky overhead, and underfoot the earth spoke, a sullen, terrible growling. For a nightmarish instant John had the sickened sense that the ground was about to give way.

The grip on his arms thrust him forward between the stones, and into the Henge.

As when he had stepped through Miss Mab’s Sigil of the Door pasted onto the Burning Mirror’s black surface, everything changed. Once inside the Henge, John saw how what he’d taken for a chip of ice or glass, or a small puddle in its center, was in fact a pool three or four yards across. Its surface trembled with a constant, shivering agitation, and steam billowed from it, flowing out over the ground and veiling the feet of the stones. How many stones could I count from here? John wondered frivolously, and dismissed the thought at once as something likely to get him killed. Through the steam he saw designs traced on the earth, sigils and power-curves and runes, fantastically intricate. If they made them like Jenny did, with whispered spells and power laid on every mark, they must have been at it for weeks.

Or years.

Or centuries.

In a chair beside the pool Adromelech sat. Gross, gelid, he glowed faintly, like rotting fish. He turned yellow eyes on John and the eyes made John feel cold and sick. They were eyes that cared nothing, that wanted everything, eyes that devoured everything they touched. Demon eyes. Eyes you couldn’t look at because if you did, you’d understand things that would cause you to kill yourself later.… John moved his gaze quickly aside. And seeing this, Adromelech smiled, long silver tongue slipping out between dripping teeth.

So you have a sword that will kill, little friend? Amusement deepened in the flat, vile gaze. The smell of the demon was appalling, sewage and carrion and gangrene and carnage, and the demon-stink of burned blood. John knew without being told that what he smelled was the thing’s soul. But you know it won’t be necessary, don’t you? You leave us be, my far-wandering friend, and we’ll leave you be. You’ve done us good service. We are fair.

John clamped his mind shut against the words, And I’m Queen of the May, and said, “I don’t give a shovel of mud if you’re fair or not. Just get me home and leave us be. That’s all I ask.”

And tried very much to sound like the kind of man who’d believe what a demon told him.

Of course. Adromelech’s voice in his mind was almost a purr. In the globe of the demon’s huge belly John could see the half-digested shards of other wights: a staring eye here, a disembodied mouth screaming and another chewing on some organ that was all that it could reach.

Adromelech stretched out his hand, curiously white and childlike—a little girl’s hand. John didn’t exactly see the gray thing, but there was something there by the Arch-Wight’s throne, something he couldn’t look at properly, and a moment later Adromelech held the silver catch-bottle. He chuckled again, gloating, and John thought he’d suffocate, wondering if Adromelech guessed the nature of the trap. But the Arch-Wight stroked and kissed the silver bottle, wrapping his long tongue around it while Amayon prostrated himself at Adromelech’s feet, kissing and licking and sucking, half-hidden by the drifting smoke.

Outside the Henge, silent lightning flashed in the empty sky. Though John could have sworn it had been the shadow thing chanting, now that the creature was inside the ring with him he could still hear its voice outside, calling down power, calling on the lightning, on the Dragonstar. Calling on the full moon and the deaths of those whose souls were locked in the final instant of agony within the talisman jewels. Hothwais of death, he thought, and saw how the jewels glowed on the ground outside, fire within them brightening and dimming in time to the cold far-off chanting voice. No wonder they started with the magic of the gnomes. Still delightedly caressing the catch-bottle, Adromelech began to chant again as well, a clammy bass that spoke like the rumblings in the earth.

Things were coming out of the pool. Curling silver things in glass shells that broke like eggs as the demons within them grew and uncoiled. Things that mutated in shape and in size, tentacled and rubbery, others like glistening lizards. Some floated in the air, blown up like bladders: grinning mouths yammering unheard random words, demon eyes. John glanced behind him and backed as close to the stones as he could, fighting the urge to bolt. In the moment that the Henge was broken, he thought, they would have power, over his body and possibly his mind as well. And he’d better not draw attention to himself one moment before they were completely occupied with other things.

Adromelech laughed in triumph. There were things outside the Henge now as well, glistening half-visible in the twilight, only half material. Grinning things, with eyes that shone like red mirrors. Human things holding jewels in their hands, and each jewel screamed and cried for pity with desperate tiny voices. Overhead, the Moon of Winds climbed to mid-heaven, and the Dragonstar’s twin tails whipped and flickered in the dimming sky. The whole world smelled of scalded blood.

The sigils underfoot began to burn.

John stepped off the marks—it was difficult to find a clear space—and watched the tongues of fire dart from the talisman gems and run up and down those intricate lines. White light stabbed up from the pool, and Adromelech laughed again and raised his hands in triumph.

The heat inside the Henge coalesced, the air at flamingpoint, like being bound to the stake again. Lines of ghostly fire crawled up the stones, sigils burning into the rock, as if brands were pressed on them from the inside, fire eating outward from the core. Half-suffocated, John could see Folcalor’s demons outside, though, pressing against the invisible bounds. Shrieking cacophony, and spells of malice ready to pop like a rupturing blister, to pour poison inward and outward. Jewels glittered in the demon hands: stolen souls. Stolen deaths.

Another deep voice chanted, taking up the time of Adromelech’s and the gray wight’s. A flash of fire, and John saw between two of the stones a mirror with an iron frame, the black enamel of its surface cracked across and across and silver light pouring out of it and surrounding its conqueror in a halo of iridescent dark. Goffyer the gnome mage, arms outflung and Folcalor’s demon grin transforming his wrinkled face. Power flashed around him like whirling knives.

On the edge of the world, the Dragonstar glimmered, a faroff mirror reflecting alien magic and alien hate.

Adromelech threw up his arms and cried out, calling the Dragonstar by its true name: the name it knew itself by, among all the true names of the stars.

With a searing crash the tallest of the standing stones exploded, red-hot fragments of rock spraying like bullets through the Henge. John ducked, sword still in hand, as burning shards tore his face and clothing. Closer to him another stone burst, and another. A column of light, solid as alien rock, burst from the pool and fire rushed into the Henge from outside, demons howling, flame searing up from the ground.

It was time to run for it, and John ran. He knew he’d have only minutes, maybe only seconds, before the demons had their first flush of greedy joy at tearing one another and turned to attack a human. He ducked between two stones as they went cherry-red with heat; they exploded behind him, the shock flinging him forward on his face. He scrambled to his hands and knees, caught up his sword, made for the point in the ring where it was possible to get closest at sunset.

And Jenny was there. She had run up in the very wake of the demons and was now on her knees, huge swoops of her arm sketching a gate-sigil in red chalk on the ground. A silver shape struck at her from the air, and John slashed at it, the scream as it shredded away into fire making the demons still swirling around the outside of the Henge turn, aghast, then flee. But few noticed, for between the red-glowing stones John could see Folcalor like a lean silver-green tiger, shedding Goffyer’s body as Adromelech’s spells exploded it, plunging through the chaos of struggling shadows, plunging straight toward Adromelech.

Jenny scrambled to her feet, looked around—stood still and looked around, and John knew she was looking for him. With what was about to happen, he thought, with what was already going on inside the Henge, she was standing still and looking for him.

She yelled, “John!” and they grabbed hands like two children, plunged away from the stone circle as fast as they could run. Nauseating pain gripped and snapped at him, ripples and eddies of it, and of searing heat, the un-Limited side slips of the demon spells. Magic spread out through Prokep, toxic magic, madness and hate that could cover the world if unchecked. Handfast, John and Jenny plunged away from the Henge, toward the broken shaft of a pillar on whose top gleamed an ice-white crystal, that caught the light of the Dragonstar.

Beyond that pillar they turned and looked back, in time to see Folcalor fall upon Adromelech in a windmill of adamant claws. The Arch-wight flung up his girlish little arms, cried something that John knew to be Folcalor’s true name, the name Caradoc had whispered to the silver bottle.…

And both were gone.

Jenny cried, “Now!” her voice like silver lightning, slicing the night.

At the top of the pillar, the crystal flashed. On a promontory of a broken wall, a second crystal caught the glancing reflection, and on a knee of half-buried stone, a third. In and around the Ring the demons were crying out, shrieking, some still tearing at one another and others casting about, seeking their lords. Around the outer perimeter of the burning stones, crystal to crystal, the icy light flashed, silver light licking across the intervening space, until the Henge was formed again, irregularly shaped and about a hundred yards beyond the original ring: crystals set in rune-written rock, an impassable, burning net.

The whining vibration of ether-plasma stabbed through John’s skull.

“Dear gods, you didn’t tell me about that!” gasped Jenny, pressing a hand to her head.

“Sorry, love.” John wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his wrist, letting go of neither his sword nor her hand. He was trembling, sweat running down his face and so dizzy, he struggled only to stay on his feet, but could not take his eyes off the chaos within the Henge.

Out of the red-chalked Gate that Jenny had drawn in the ground, Shining Things were coming. Drawn by the smell of demons, they rose from the rock, and from the Hell beyond that rock: flashing wheels of wings and eyes, which rolled about among the shattered menhirs, devouring whatever they found. John saw the gray shadow-creature flee wailing, to be caught by a creature like a huge glowing slug, of the kind that had once nearly killed Amayon when the demon was guiding him through that particular Hell. Saw it drawn slowly into the slug’s round, dark mouth. Heard it scream, with the panic agony of the dying, and it died slowly and hard. Smaller things, like burning hoops scattering lightning, darted in packs, encircling groups of demons and shredding them with claws of flame. Demons fled toward the smoking pool of the Hell-gate, but the Shining Things cut them off from it, pitiless and cold. Others tried to escape the Henge and into the outer world, but fell back crying from the burn of the ether, whose Otherworld nature they did not know or understand, and the Shining Things devoured them.

Jenny’s hand closed tight over John’s.

“Jenny!” Amayon fell to his knees only feet away from them, ichor streaming from his ripped back. Amayon as John had first seen him, the beautiful youth with the curly black hair, berry-blue eyes stretched with genuine terror, unknowable pain. “Jenny, let me out! I promise you, I swear to you, I’ll be your servant, your slave! My love, my love, don’t let them—”

Jenny turned her eyes aside, then a moment later looked back, in time to watch the great gleaming slug of silver take Amayon by the foot, and with inexorable leisure—one slow, terrible gulp at a time—draw him in.

The demon felt himself dying. John could see that in his eyes, the expression he’d seen in the eyes of men he’d killed in battle, all those years of defending the people of the Winterlands. He put his arm around Jenny, wishing she didn’t have to see. Knowing there had been a time when she had loved the demon, not because she’d wished to, but because that is the nature of the bond between demons and men.

Jenny said nothing, but he felt her shudder as she pressed against his side.

By the time Amayon was dead, the other demons were gone as well.

The Shining Things rolled back and forth across the parched ground, like Snuff and Bannock hunting for the final crumbs of dinner. They paused, flickering, over the burned-out husks of the soul-jewels that had been crushed and exploded in the course of the fight, and passed on. They clustered briefly around the mirror, which lay knocked on its side between the stones of the old Henge and the chilly crystal lattices of the new, but did not seem to be able to pass through its gate. Nor did they enter the pool. Gleaming with a skeletal light, they flickered out of sight, but the ozone whisper of their presence remained in the air.

Having been summoned to the Henge of Prokep, there they would remain.

The heat that had flowed out of the Henge dispersed rapidly. John didn’t think he’d ever felt so cold in his life.

Jenny pressed her face to his shoulder, and brought up the end of her plaid, to cast around his shoulders to warm them both.

Then her breath caught and she stiffened, and John turned his head, his aching hand tightening again on the hilt of his sword.

He knew already what he’d see.

The Demon Queen stood in the moonlight, just where the shadow of a pillar laid a band of black on the lifeless sand.

John thought she’d been standing there for some time. She looked to him as she’d always looked: a tall, slim woman with an expression older than her face. Things moved in the dark chaotic coils of her hair. They stood up and hissed at him, exactly, he realized now, as had the worms in the black rotting hair of the graveyard wight that had slain King Uriens of Bel.

The gold eyes met his, and smiled.

She crossed the sand toward him, lazily, as if she had all the night before her. Though the air was still, all the smoky veils that wreathed her lifted and blew as if in some private atmosphere, as if she carried her own Hell about with her and was never completely free of it. She must have seen John use the demon sword, and knew its power, but she came straight up to him and stood before him, her smile lingering on her lips.

Then her eyes went to the Burning Mirror, where it lay within the new Henge of ether-light. It was a distance of nearly a hundred feet, from the edge of the Henge to the smoking surface of the enameled glass, and though the Shining Things were not to be seen, their crazy humming blended with the whine of the ether. They were near.

John smiled into her golden eyes and said softly, “Good luck, love.”

And for a flickering instant her smile turned human, like a rueful girl’s. “And you.” She put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed his lips. Then she walked quite calmly across the boundary of the Ether Henge. She seemed to melt into shadow as the Shining Things flashed into being, rolling and swooping toward the place. John saw where her feet burned the sand in one place, two … a flicker of silver mist played over the cracked enamel of the mirror. By the time the wheels of fire reached the spot, it was gone.

Long silence lay over the ruin of Prokep, broken only by the faint hum of the ether relays. Even the wind was still. The cold moon passed its zenith, and the Dragonstar slipped below the undulant dark horizon. For the last time, John knew from his calculations, in a thousand years.

A thousand years from now would the demons evolve some other scheme? It was a good bet they’d do it without either Folcalor or Adromelech, neither of whom—being demons—would release the other, or release the comfort of triumph at being the other’s jailer.

As for the Demon Queen …

Softly, almost below the level of the senses, music whispered in the night. Beautiful music, alien airs glowing like colors: blue and golden, pink and green … black in black in black …

On their broken pillars, their stumps of stone, on the rim of the palace foundation and the ruin of the gate where the Garden of Souls had stood, the ten ether-crystals began to glow more brightly still. The white-green ether-light was swallowed up momentarily in colors, flashing like a rainbow of mirrors. At the top of the pillar beside them, John saw the ghost-shape of wings, the uncoiling glitter of razor spines, catching the spectral moonlight: opal eyes, and the firefly halo of antennae lights. The dragon emerged from the crystal like a butterfly, no bigger than a man’s crossed thumbs—John couldn’t imagine how he saw it as clearly as he did.

But it grew like a silken cloud, rising above the pillar, weightless as shadow against the stars and beautiful beyond earthly conception of glory.

From each ether-crystal a dragon emerged, sparkling as if each scale were a mirror to catch the light of the stars that had been their first home. The night sang the music of their names.

Centhwevir blue-and-golden— John remembered, identified, the tune Jenny had long ago learned by rote upon her harp, in the days before she’d even known who Centhwevir was. Nymr blue violet-crowned—Ian’s dragon partner. Hagginarshildim pink-and-green, and young Byrs of a thousand hues.

The dragons who had been possessed by demons, in the high brightness of summer, when the Dragonstar’s first head had glimmered in the sky.

Morkeleb like a starry shadow, barely seen but in many ways more beautiful than all the rest.

And Corvin black-and-silver, reaching down with his long hind-legs to settle on the earth, tucking his tabby-silk wings against his sparkling sides. From pillar to rock the ether-crystals continued to burn, green-white again, the stream of their alien light unflagging, once called through from its distant world.

It is accomplished, said the dragon who had once been a scientist, and craned his bird-like head on the end of his long neck, surveying the ring of the Ether Henge. The ether-flow from crystal to crystal is stable now, and it should power the spells of Ward indefinitely. Demon magic can’t touch it, since it isn’t of this world, and I think it will be long before any of them dares emerge into the Ring to be devoured by the Shining Things. I did not think they would be able to stand against the combination of magic and science.

It was not your magic, nor your science, Black-and-Silver One, that wrought the doom of the Hellspawn. Morkeleb tilted his head to one side, a characteristic gesture, and the starlight twinkled on the points of his invisible horns. What the Hellspawn could not fight against was the trust that our nestmates had in Mistress Jenny. The certainty that if they entered into the ether-crystals at her behest, to draw the ether from the Otherworld, that it was not a trap or a ruse to make them always slaves.

Corvin’s spines bristled and he said, Trust? as if the word were in an alien tongue. In saving each of them from Folcalor, she held each by his name. They had to do as she commanded.

But she did not command, pointed out Morkeleb. She spoke no word of power, when she summoned each by his name.

What are you saying? Corvin’s nostrils rimmed with flame. That now we must … TRUST … mortal men? Things that are born and perish like the grass, and like the grass change with every wind that turns?

I say nothing, replied the Dragonshadow. Only that trust is not a thing of dragons, and that tonight, it was the saving of us all.

Wizard-woman, Dreamweaver, I shall be returning to the West, to the Skerries of Light. I have learned some things of humankind, and of the Hellspawn, and it is time for me to meditate upon that which I have learned. My nestmates and I shall bear you back to Bel, if you will, to wait upon the new King in his coronation. Or if you will, we shall carry you north to your Hold, if you have had your fill of Kings and demons, of war and grief and Hell.

John started to speak, then glanced at Jenny. “What’ll it be, love?” he asked. “Tea and cream cakes in Bel with old Ector, or Aunt Jane’s bannocks and another six weeks of snow?”

“Gar will need someone,” said Jenny, “to help him order the Realm, in the wake of the damage the demons caused.”

“That’s enough to make me run screamin’ in the other direction,” John sighed, and dabbed a sword-cut tentatively on his shoulder with one hand. “I suppose you’re right, love, if you can contact Ian by crystal, an’ hear all’s well there.” He sheathed the demon blade he still held, and extended his bare arm to the light of the Moon of Winds. Beneath the grime, the silver marks the Demon Queen had traced on his flesh had disappeared. Somehow, he did not feel surprised.

He sighed, and turned back to Jenny. “Speakin’ of cream cakes,” he added hopefully, “I don’t suppose, you’ve any food left, before we start back?”