Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (10 page)

Nothing happened.

Damn it, he thought, shivering desperately, don't do this to me.…

The wind must have knocked him a step or two as he'd come through. He patiently crawled upwind and tried again, and then again. The Old God—who knows everything—only knew what was in the darkness with him, or how far this Hell or enclave extended. If there was a stricture against eating anything you found in Hell there was probably not one against something you found in Hell eating you. After what felt like an hour, John located the gate again and crawled through.

It was still dawn in the garden, delicious with the twittering of birds. And, to judge by the leaf-mold beneath the trees, the relative clarity of the paths among the shrubberies, it was still the year of the last appearance of the Dragonstar, ten centuries ago.

Any gate that'd have a pavilion built over it, he thought, contemplating the spot in the strange little multiroofed structure where the slightly sulfurous stench lingered, can't be the one the chaps in the yellow robes didn't want me to walk through. Let's take a miss on this one. The three in the walls were all neatly kept: None looked more neglected than the others, or more used. In the tangles of white-flowering shrubs that grew to either side of the central of the three gates—they were about a dozen yards apart, all on what appeared to be the north wall of the garden—he found two insects, or what looked like insects. Dead, fortunately, since they were the length of the knuckle of his thumb and equipped with the most comprehensive sets of chewing, stabbing, and gripping mandibles he'd ever seen in his life. He'd encountered such creatures nowhere else in the garden, but a search of the area around the central gate yielded five more dead ones and a live one that struck him, wings roaring, from a tree, dug its claws into the side of his face—it had gone for his eyes, but fortunately he was wearing his spectacles—and began to chew.

When he cut its head off, the head continued to chew. He had to strike fire with the flints and steel that had been in the coat's pockets, and burn the thing off his cheekbone.

Let's not go through that gate unless we really, REALLY have to.

John didn't check the other two gates until the next day. He didn't really feel up to it.

When he came out of the garden gate it was still dawn. Still—by the finger-mark he'd drawn in the sand, unblurred by wind—the day he'd gone in, which was a relief. Be a bit embarrassin' if I was gone for a month or a year … I know dragons don't think much of time, but even Corvin'd notice that. He trudged back to the painted chamber in the palace foundation and made a dressing of rags and sheep-fat for the torn, blistered flesh of his cheek. Then he rested for a time, inventing an explanation for the injury, should Corvin ask, and life-stories for three more of the tribute-bearers who decorated the wall: the chap in the blue with the feathers was named Browdiestomp and had a wife at home whom everyone called the Beautiful Coco, who was fonder of her birds than she was of him—little yellow and green ones who whistled, and a red and black one who told her stories of things far away, which it made up of course because it had never been out of its golden cage in its life. But the Beautiful Coco believed them because she wasn't much smarter than the birds.

Later he took a box from the armory and in a nest of earth and rags stowed a couple of smoldering coals from last night's fire, took a couple of unlit torches and went exploring for other gates in the city. He found none that day. In his seeking he had a long while to think of the things the Demon Queen had showed him on his way to the pyre, of Amayon lying in Gareth's arms, smiling and whispering love and poison into his ear. Of King Uriens greeting the Lords of the Great Houses with hearty cheer: He'd always been a more impressive King than his shy, pedantic son. The Lords of Greenhythe and Yamstrand and the islands would fall over themselves with delight, wanting to believe that he was back and therefore things would be back the way they'd always been.

Of Ian and Adric—and their tiny sister, Maggie, too—trapped in Alyn Hold by the deadly shadows of magic and banditry outside. Did you see it? Ian had whispered. John didn't like to contemplate what “it” might have been.

Of Jenny, dying in darkness.

He had asked Corvin the second night—when the dragon had returned with the sheep and the clothing—of Jenny. Corvin had said, It is a night and a day since Aohila showed you these things, Dragonsbane. Do you think your woman has lived so long?

“Please,” John had said. “Aohila might've been lyin'—she does that. If you can't see Jen, can you see Morkeleb the Black? He'd be with her, he's her friend.…”

And had felt Corvin's incredulity, and, a moment later, like a gust of sea-scent on the wind, the enmity the silver dragon bore for the black. A tangle of opinions—sly, unscrupulous, haughty—sparkled in the music of the silver dragon's thoughts, and with them, envy and anger, and the ringing sweet music of gold and gems that the black dragon had taken, which the silver wanted, some time deep in the abysses of the past.

To live forever is to remember slights eternally.

Corvin had sniffed, and turned away.

In the painted chamber that night, watching the firelight on the walls, John thought of Jenny, as he had thought of her every night in Prokep. She had told him once—the first time she'd returned from taking the form of a dragon—that she had returned because she knew that if she remained a dragon in body, she would become one in her heart, and would forget what it was to be a woman, and to love.

He saw her then—as she had been then, with the midnight oceans of her hair lying over his shoulder where her head rested, and her small square face like a sunburned acorn looking up into his—as she said, I did not want to forget you, my love. I did not want you to grow old, with me not there.

Her voice was deep, grained through with sweetness, like silver in rock. He couldn't imagine never hearing it again.

Ah, love, if we either of us live to grow old, it'll be more than I'd bet on tonight.

When he was young, and she would not come to the Hold to live with him, he used to scream at her, curse her, as he had wanted to curse the Icerider witch who had been his mother and who had left him, too: It's all you care about, isn't it? Your magic and your power.

He couldn't imagine why she hadn't turned him into a toad, let alone why she'd borne him not one child in those days, but two.

Let her be alive, he prayed to the Old God, watching the dim firelight shift over the shapes of the tribute-bearers on the walls. You can have all that tribute those fellers are carryin', I promise I won't keep a penny of it, if only she'll be alive when I get back.… If I get back.

But he'd lived in the Winterlands too long to believe that things ended happily. He had seen too many people he knew die.

The chap in the red boots there on the end, he thought, turning his eyes back to the wall. He has a wife who's a witch, and she loves her power—well, not more than she loves him, but as much. Yet she came to his life, and bore him two sons and a daughter, which has to have hurt … she loved him that much. Then one day she turned into a beautiful white dragon and flew away. And she was happy forever.

John reached the Henge of Prokep the following day.

It helped enormously, that time stood still in the enclaves. He could search patiently, drawing the sigil of the door over and over, until he got through; he'd learned to keep a torch burning in one hand the moment he stepped through a gate, and a drawn sword in the other, and—if nothing attacked him, and usually it did not—to immediately turn and mark where the gate lay. He brought water with him, too, in a clay jar slung over his shoulder on a strap of braided rags. At least, from enclave to enclave, there was no worry about whether it was half an hour after noon or not.

The gate on the left, the one immediately to the right of the Gate of Dawn, passed him through into the Salt Garden: stone pavement, beds of glittering salt stretching hundreds of feet in all directions under a pitiless golden sky. There was no gate to be seen there, but at noon, when he had returned to Prokep and was investigating the other gate locations he'd found, he passed through one of them and found himself in the Salt Garden again, and spent a grueling eternity in the heat there until he found by sheer patience where the invisible gate was, that let him into the Maze beyond.

Sometimes the walls of the Maze were hedges—knee-high in places, head-high in others. Sometimes they were stone: gray smooth river stones, or harsh hunks of black basalt like the garden wall. Sometimes the Maze itself was just a gravel path raised between mossy ditches where a little water glittered, curtained by a very fine scrim of mist. John knew better than to step off the path or touch the mist in any fashion. He didn't know what would happen if he did, but had an idea he wouldn't like it. From a number of points in the Maze it was possible to see the Henge, huge dark uneven stones showing through whitish fog. As he'd seen by moonlight, and again in Corvin's vision, they seemed to be about twice his nearly six foot height, rough-hewn and, as he drew nearer, he could see that some of them were embellished with the same crude carvings that he'd sometimes seen on standing-stones on the far northern moors in the Winterlands, spirals and rings and crosses. There were ninety of them, when he counted them from a break in the tall hedges of the Maze. When he came out to where the hedges were shorter and counted again, there were eighty-seven.

Intrigued, he began to count from wherever he could see them, and quickly discovered that if he was on the correct path there were ninety; if the path was leading him to a dead end, or to one of those places where the level of the ground dipped down under sheets of still silvery water, there were either more or less. Why the makers of the Henge would have created a Maze in the first place, John wasn't sure—it was a far less effective form of defense than the nodes of choice in the gardens—but in two places mists covered the path, and he felt himself watched from the hedges by unseen eyes.

Watching for demons, he wondered? Corvin had set electronic alarms on his Otherworld property that would be triggered by a demon's presence, and had spoken of such things still active in Prokep. Or was this only his own imagination, fueled by nerves and exhaustion?

The Henge itself stood where it had stood for a thousand years, in the midst of the ruined city. Standing next to its stones, John could see across the barren ground, to the three pillars where a temple had stood, to the pit of the dry lake. To the palace foundation, where Corvin brought new gold every evening from other caches in the city to lie upon; where trib-ute-bearers walked eternally around the walls of John's painted room. Standing beside the circle of stones, John wondered if he would be invisible to someone standing in that sand-clogged doorway in the foundation, where he and Corvin had stood four days ago. Wondered if he would have to go back through the Maze to return to the place, and what would happen if he simply tried to walk cross-country to it.

Would the Henge disappear behind him?

Would he disappear?

It was noon, the hour at which he had stepped across the threshold into the Salt Garden.

At a guess, the third gate he'd detected could be opened at sunset. Would the Maze be the same?

He peered cautiously between the stones, into the center of the Henge.

He couldn't see the little flash of water at the center—probably in a depression in the ground. There was a slight distortion of the air over where it would lie, like a heat-dance. Corvin had told him he couldn't get into the Henge, and in any case John had been married to a witch far too long to casually step over the boundary of any magical enclosure, let alone one containing even worse demons than those he'd already met. Instead, he walked around it, keeping close to the stones where the air was still, counting the stones: There were ninety-three when he walked sun-wise; eighty-eight when he walked widdershins the first time. A second count yielded still different numbers, to his intense delight. As he'd seen at a distance the stones had been rough-hewn and some of them were carved—he made notes on the clay side of his water jar—and they were all of the same close-grained, faintly bluish stone. They bore no marks of weathering, and varied in height from about eight feet to over twelve.

The sun was visible from beside the Henge, and the shadows of the stones crept out over the sand, but still John backtrailed his way through the Maze, through the Salt Garden and the Garden of Dawn, to reach the city of Prokep again. That night beneath the late-rising half-moon he stood on the great stone foundation and looked out toward the Henge, and saw it clearly, black shadows on the formless ivory of the land.

And now what?

He turned his palms up. In the moonlight the silver traces the Demon Queen had left gleamed thinly on his skin.

You know the way through the Maze. You know what Folcalor has to be planning, you know what Adromelech has all these centuries been waiting to command his servants to do.

You are here in Prokep, a prisoner, and you will die in the desert before you will escape.

Grimly, John returned to his painted room, and by firelight cut the gems from the red velvet cloak, to sell for money should he ever reach human lands again. The tribute-bearers on the walls stalked impassively with the movement of the fire, and didn't offer him so much as a penny.

In the days that followed, John explored the city, and the Maze, stubbornly turning his mind from the futility of what he did. In time, the demons would come, no matter what their fears of the city's ancient, hidden traps. Adromelech would bring them.

Folcalor, greedy for vengeance and power, would not stay away.

In the night he dreamed, over and over, of walking that narrow, windless zone around the outside of the ring, and in his dreams he could see the demons inside.

Adromelech, gross and savage, a silvery green shape whose belly moved with the dying remains of those lesser wights he'd devoured, who lived inside him, crying, still. The Arch-wight's silver eyes watched John as he walked from stone to stone, clever greedy unhuman eyes, with rectangular pupils like the Demon Queen's: watching and waiting. Sometimes in his dreams John could see Amayon in the ring, as he'd seen him in the Hell of the Shining Things, when terror of true death, real death, had broken his concentration from the illusion in which demons lived, and left him in his actual shape, wizened and shrunken and silver. Sometimes he saw the Demon Queen herself, smiling at him through the pyre-smoke.