Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (12 page)

Descending with the dragon through the pink-gold radiance of morning, Jenny Waynest could make out the outlines of this second city's temples, tangled in brush and thickets of pine all powdered with snow. She'd seen them before only at night, when in the autumn Moon of Sacrifice John had come here to pay his teind to the Demon Queen, the tithing that would purchase back his soul.

On that occasion Jenny had been too shaken, too sick from the wresting-away of her own demon, to remember much of the city's appearance. But she recognized now the long stair-way that curled up the low hill's flank, and that inconspicuous cave under the vines. She'd sat on the marble step at the top, shivering uncontrollably in the autumn night, hating John and hearing Amayon scream in her mind. Above the stair a hollow square of pillars crowned the hill, their decorated capitals broken and white as the lingering snow patches among the brown of last year's sodden bracken.

This, the Master of Halnath had told her, had been the temple of the Moon-God Syn, who was worshiped in the North in the form of a black sow.

After long days underground Jenny's eyes ached in the glory of morning light. Everything seemed to sparkle and shout with color, even in these leaden weeks of granny-winter. Rowanberries on branches a hundred feet away blazed like fire. Wood that to ordinary view would have been silver-gray appeared to her as a mottling of a thousand subtle hues, lavender and snuff and cobalt. Among the bare trees she glimpsed broken pillars, pink porphyry and marble, and the flash of ice in what had once been ornamental fountains and ponds.

Morkeleb spread his dark wings to circle above the Temple hill, Jenny leaning from his back. She traced the descending stairs and the courtyard near at hand with its frozen pool. “Would the mages—this Arch-Seer the demons spoke of—have come up by the main stair to attack Isychros?”

The palace stood on the hill in those days. In her mind she saw the stair as it had been in her earliest dream of the place—her earliest dream of Amayon. Saw the rich pillars of sandstone and marble that ringed what had then been the Queen's Court, where ladies wove bright-colored cloth and sang among the colonnades. Isychros was the King's Mage, helping the Most High Lord Ennyta to keep his vassals on a leash by means of scrying and cantrips and blackmail. The chambers cut from the hillside were traditionally given to the Court Mage.

Had the dragon walked those courts? she wondered. Climbed that long footworn stair in human guise? How long had he been in the custom of walking in the shape of humankind?

“Would there be a back way in?” she asked. “When Isychros took over power in Ernine, with both mages and dragons at his beck, I can't imagine even an Arch-Seer coming at his stronghold from the front.”

Images shifted in her mind. She saw the palace again as it existed in Morkeleb's memory, like an image painted on silk and hung before present reality. Strange-shaped roofs with painted rafter-ends rose above red-flowering trees whose names she did not know. The shape of the land had not changed much, though the profusion of flowers spoke of warmer summers. Ernine spread farther down the Gelspring Valley than the city that had subsequently covered the spot. The pillared hall that reared on the hillcrest above the Court Mage's chambers—where the Moon-God's temple later would stand—had wide windows on all walls glazed in small panes of clearest glass, so that the building glittered like a heap of diamonds. Jenny smelled the cook fires of the town, and heard an ass bray far off.

“Any wager you like,” said Jenny, shifting her balance between the spiked scales of the dragon's shoulders. “There was a stair coming down to his quarters from the hall above. That was the library, wasn't it, with all those windows? Were I Court Mage it's what I'd have. By the foliage it rains a good deal here.”

And she felt the ripple of Morkeleb's amusement as he banked low over the tops of the bare trees. It is a thing of men, to put themselves in danger by leaving a back way into their dwellings, only to avoid a little water. See where there was a fountain even in those days, hard by the stair? It was out of that water the Sea-wights came, when the mages of the city of Prokep reached a bargain with Adromelech, to drive back Ao-hila's demons behind the mirror.

Wind snapped in the baggy folds of the trousers Miss Mab had brought Jenny in the mines, and in the thick fluttering ends of the plaid she'd worn down from the North. After the warmth below the ground the air stung her face. Morkeleb turned above the higher flank of the mountain, and Jenny saw behind the jumbled roofs of glowing red and gilt the exquisite manicured wilderness of the garden, and all around its edges the workaday buildings of stables, servants' quarters, kitchens.

They would have come in through the kitchen gate—the path up from the town was even in those days much overgrown with trees. She could see where the back ways among the storage quarters provided a safe, quick route from the kitchen to the library.

Then she was seeing the ruin again, the palimpsest of old walls and foundations cloaked in leafless vines.

“There,” she said, pointing. “If a way down to the Court Mage's quarters existed from the library, it would have been somewhere there.”

When the forehead of the palace hill had been cut back, to build the later crypt of the Temple of Syn, the sealed door of the Court Mage's quarters had been covered over by a wall. Only the subsequent razing of Syn's city had opened the way again. Jenny and Morkeleb picked their way down the curving slope that turned into the old sandstone stair, and from there descended to the door behind its curtain of blackened vines flanked by the faded ghosts of frescoed gazelles still dimly visible on the face of the rock. Jenny's own footsteps, and John's, scuffed the corridor's dust.

The doorway from the corridor into the round mirror chamber had been bricked shut in ancient times, the brickwork later stove in by who knew what impulse of foolishness and greed. The hothwais Jenny carried shed a wan light, in which the stars painted on the ceilings of corridor and chamber seemed to dance.

A second set of tracks obscured those she and John had left last autumn. John's again, and recent. There was no mistaking the patched boots.

He'd been here—why? Morkeleb had said he'd been in Bel. When she'd gone to the Hold only a few weeks ago, Sergeant Muffle—John's blacksmith and muster-chief and illegitimate brother—had told her John had gone scouting in the Wraithmire marshes, after first burning his workroom and taking with him only a few days' food. He'd left his horse with old Dan Darrow at the marshes' edge, had gone into the snowy mire on foot. Only ten days ago Jenny had talked to Darrow himself, and the old farmer had been sure of what he saw. Given the nature of the Wraithmire, and Dan's watchfulness of those evil lands, he'd have seen John's tracks emerging from the marsh, and he hadn't.

It was conceivable—barely—that in a few weeks John could have reached Belmarie on horseback. But there had been no word of him in the countryside between. And even such a turn of cross-country speed didn't explain why he'd come here, of all places, before going to Bel and being arrested, sentenced to death, and rescued … by another dragon, according to Morkeleb.

So what had he been doing here?

Visiting the Demon Queen? Jealousy stirred in Jenny's heart like steam on a winter bog. For months now her dreams had been a torment of fantasies of John's infidelity, of John lying in the Demon Queen's arms.…

The mirror stood silent where last Jenny had seen it, its glass painted over black. Framed by the pinkish-blue alien metal of a thunderstone, the long glass itself—a pane some six feet tall by a foot and a half wide, three times the size of any that Bel's craftsmen could produce nowadays—seemed enigmatic under its coating of black enamel, a shut door through which it was possible only to guess at sounds. In the bright light of the hothwais it looked harmless enough. By lantern light it had seemed to smoke or steam. A piece of paper, charred nearly to illegibility, still clung to the matte glass: the sigil Miss Mab had made for John, by which he had passed through into Hell.

Jenny shivered, remembering the silver marks on his flesh, the burn at the pit of his throat. The Queen had marked him, as if claiming him as her own. Deeper still was the shadow that lurked in the back of his eyes Curious, Jenny thought, stepping close to the glass. She had never actually seen the Queen, though she felt as if she knew her well. Now she realized that the image she had of her—tall and black-haired, slender and coldly beautiful—she had only from her own dreams, in which John and the Queen lay together and giggled their derision of Jenny herself. At one time those dreams had been so real, she had been unable to separate them from reality, and had hated John for the pictures that arose out of her own mind.

Perhaps the hatred had sprung in part from the Demon Queen taking Jenny's own demon Amayon away, to torture forever behind the Mirror.

She put out her hand to the black glass, not daring to touch, and thought, He is THERE.

And remembered again how it had felt, to love Amayon.

All those things the demon had whispered to her—his love for her, his need for her, the trust and dependence he placed on her love … Even as they rang false and absurd in her mind, her heart pinched with the poison of that clinging, childlike profession of absolute love.

She turned her head and saw Morkeleb, falcon-sized in the darkness of the round chamber, hanging close to her shoulder with wings spread like a hawk in the air. The hothwais of light made him sparkle, as if carved by a master-craftsman of jet. His eyes caught the light, and the jewel-like bobs on the ends of his antennae flickered in the dark.

The touch of his mind on hers was warm as the comforting pressure of a hand.

Why is it so hard to believe that demons lie? she asked him. It is their nature to lie.

It is their nature to be believed, replied the dragon. And he called on a spell of light, blazing to fill all the chamber. On the other side of the room, a door showed up, which the shadows had hidden before.

Jenny crossed the room to it, walking wide around the mirror. Everywhere she felt the malice of demons. She had assumed—she did not know why—that the circular chamber in which the Burning Mirror stood was the farthest it was possible to penetrate into the hill. When she had gone there with John to pay his teind, and turn over to the Demon Queen the demons they had extracted from the minds of the possessed mages, her powers had already burned away. The door was bricked shut, the lintels remaining but the bricks painted like the rest of the wall. Only magelight would have shown it up, or a mage's ability to see in the dark.

Morkeleb shifted in size, as a shadow alters with the retreat of light. But his claws and muscle were no shadow. He tore the brickwork as if it had been dry wattle. Jenny flinched at the noise of rubble and mortar crashing to the floor and she glanced back at the mirror as if she expected something to come forth angry. Absurd, she thought. If it has held them all these years, why expect they could emerge now? Behind the broken wall a stair ascended, narrow and deeply worn. The sandstone was pitted, and stained black in great pools and dribbles. Walls and stair were charred, as if swept with fire.

They tried this first, she thought, quite calmly, standing at the foot of the stair. The wizards who sought to defeat Isy-chros's dragons and demons. Rubble blocked the ascent no more than a few yards above her. Only after the Arch-Seer—whoever he was—failed to destroy the mirror did they call on the Sea-wights for help. They, or those of their friends who survived them.

This she knew as if she had heard their ghosts telling of their hopeless attack in the dark of the stair.

She stepped through the crack Morkeleb had made, and held the hothwais up, to shed its unveiled light in every corner and cranny.

Just where the lowest step and the wall came together a silver bottle was wedged. Shadow would hide it when torches were borne down the stairs, or carried in from the mirror crypt itself. After the Arch-Seer and his mages attacked Isychros here, she thought, Isychros must have had little leisure to ascend to the library. And after Isychros's defeat the two daughters of the King who succeeded their father must only have wished to have the whole place sealed, with everything inside.

A catch-bottle, the demons had called the thing Folcalor sought. Surely the same object that Caerdinn had told her of, the trap inscribed with the true name of its intended victim, woven with certain spells. It would draw the soul into it like smoke.

She picked the bottle up. It was just larger than the hollow of her hand, and very light. The silvery bulb of it was a globe, the thin neck stoppered tight with something that looked like a crystal, embedded in a petaled rose of hard crimson wax.

We know she was never trapped in it. The name within it will still be the same. The spells will be waiting.

Her heart pounded in her chest, so that she could scarcely breathe.

Aohila.

The Demon Queen.

The dream of her returned, snake-like and sinuous in John's arms. Laughing at Jenny, and making him laugh at her. Saying things like old, and ugly, and spent. Heat rose in Jenny's flesh, the heat and the nausea and the wavering shadows of migraine reminding her that the Demon Queen was right.

It was only a dream, she reminded herself. Only a dream, and MY dream at that. But every time she thought of the silvery serpent whorls and spirals of power on John's flesh, which showed up when the angle of the moonlight was right, every time she thought of the scar in the pit of his throat, as if a white-hot jewel had been pressed between the small points of his collarbone, she remembered those jealous dreams. He had never said so, but Jenny guessed that Aohila spoke to him in dreams, as Amayon sometimes spoke to her.

She knew what it was that Amayon said. Knew the dreams that Amayon sent.

And Folcalor is coming, she thought. Coming with spells of new power, to open the mirror. To trap the Demon Queen and devour her, as Adromelech, his own master, had for untold ages devoured and regurgitated him. Folcalor would eat her power before turning upon Adromelech to become the Sea-wights' lord. And from there, to hold sway over all the Realms of humankind, turning them into their hunting-ground and larder.