Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (7 page)

Then he was looking at the empty sands of morning, and the dust-devils that whirled and twisted where even the ruins had mostly perished.

The spells they put on the Henge permitted nothing to leave, said Corvin after a time. Not demons, and not the mages themselves. They wove their webs of spells upon the whole of the city, surrounding the Henge in an unbreakable Maze, and the magic that locked Henge and Maze they sourced in their own deaths. There is magic—tremendous power—in any human soul, that can be used when the soul dissolves in death. Greater magic still, if the soul be that of a mage.

Bugger, thought John. Grief for the lost mages pierced his heart as if he had truly seen their deaths and not merely a remembered echo ten centuries gone. As if they had been his friends, when he did not even know their names. Grief for knowledge that had been lost with those ten mages, knowledge that they had almost certainly lacked the time to pass along. The horrors he had seen in the other world, where demons had stalked their prey in the flooded streets, these seven men and three women had seen in their own world a thousand years ago. They'd given their lives to stop it, as he'd have given his life rather than call on the Demon Queen.

When the trouble started, he thought, they'd have had no time to teach their yellow-robed adepts anything but what they must know to do their own part in the spells of ward and mazery. No time to write anything down of all that other knowledge that had made up the length of their years.

Time is long, and words unsaid remain unsaid forever.

“How'd they get out, then?” John asked, determined not to let the dragon hear the sorrow in his voice. “Adromelech, an' Folcalor, an' the rest? I understand about the Dragonstar comin' back, an' the demons usin' it to source spells, but if the spells the mages put on the Henge an' the Maze are still that strong …”

The dragon turned his tassled head and regarded him in surprise tinged with impatience.

They did not escape, he said. Adromelech is still there, with the greater part of his demon horde. Did you think you were dealing with the full might of the Sea-wights, Dragonsbane? What you thought of as the Hell of the Sea-wights is only an enclave, to which Folcalor and his cohort escaped when the Star set for the last time. The gate of the true Hell still lies within the Henge. What else has Folcalor been waiting for these ten centuries but the chance to free his Arch-wight lord; the chance to take command of that Hell for himself?

John thought, Bugger.

All this time we've only been dealin'with the advance-guard.

God's grandmother …

“So to come to power over Adromelech”—he was astonished at how casual he sounded, through the dizziness of horrified shock—“to take true command—Folcalor has to break the Henge.”

Break the HENGE? The words were barely articulated, only the curling wave of the dragon's incredulous scorn. BREAK the HENGE? You speak like a human—think you that anything can break through the magics of ten mages' deaths, like a bumpkin kicking his way through a stable door? Folcalor is a fool.

“Folcalor had a good try at puttin' together the deaths an' souls of at least seven mages,” replied John. “Not to speak of what he'd get if he devoured Aohila—no wonder she sent me along to get you before they did.”

His demons would never have taken me, snapped Corvin, as if he hadn't been trapped by the demons in his burning laboratory in a world where his own magic would barely function. Nor shall he, Dragonsbane. Not me, and not you.

Wind breathed across the remaining fragments of wall, the broken pillars and dry pits, and it smelled of emptiness beyond the endurance of man. John had heard of the deserts that lay east of the plain and steppe that were the farthest marches of the Realm of Belmarie, but had heard of no man crossing them. No tribes or hunters roved them as the Iceriders roved the cold tundra to the north. “Take me back,” he said again, and tried to keep the fear out of his voice.

To the demons that run squeaking through the halls of the palace where I came forth from the prison box? Scorn rippled in the dragon's hot music. You think much of yourself if you fancy you can keep silent when they ask you where I went.

“My friends are there.” John saw Gareth again, asleep in his demon wife's arms. Saw Gareth's daughter Millença, only an infant in white satin when last he'd seen her, she must be three now—and Trey with a dead child in her womb that would be a demon as it was born.

The dragon regarded him blankly, truly not understanding what he meant by friends. In a thousand years, thought John, Corvin had not had friends. Perhaps never. Maybe it was not a thing of dragons—as the dragons said—to have friends, as it was not a thing of dragons to love.

You saved my life, said Corvin. Therefore will I preserve yours. You need not fear that I will not bring you food, and water, from the mountains, though they lie far. For myself there is gold here, abundant gold, hidden in the palace's ancient crypt and the secret treasuries of a thousand nobles. Sweet gold, each coin and necklet and ring singing its own song of the earth it came from, the hands that wrought it, the fire that refined. You will be safe.

“I don't want to be safe!” snapped John. But the dragon spread his wings and lifted weightless from the earth, like a thistledown of silver and black. Like a thistledown, Corvin rode on the desert wind, higher and higher, until he was indeed no larger than dandelion-fluff in the harsh blue desert sky.

Jenny listened to the demons as they whispered in the dark.

So tangled were the passageways of the mines, the narrow tunnels that supplied ventilation and water, that near sounds and far were confused. Even a trained mage like Miss Mab had trouble casting her senses very far into the darkness of the mines. Sometimes a chance whisper near a ventilation shaft a half-dozen levels down would repeat a word nearly in Jenny's ear, startling her to sweat-drenched alertness. Other times the sheer cold massiveness of the mountain's rock deadened even the footfalls of the slave-gangs barely a hundred yards away.

Lying in the darkness, Jenny had a long time to accustom herself to the tricks and echoes of the mines.

Long ago, as a girl-child in the bandit-haunted Winterlands, she had learned to still herself to nothing. To listen, and sort sound from sound, until on summer nights in the attic of her house on Frost Fell she could tell the difference between the rustle wind made in the big hand-shaped leaves of the solitary oak on the south slope of the hill, and the lighter hissing of the birch leaves to the north. Just that sound would tell of the weather for days to come. In those days her powers were slight—this had been before the time of the dragon, before Morkeleb had transformed her into dragon form to fly with him, and in doing so had given her a strain of dragon magic. She had made up for her lack of ability by the most painstaking attention, by long meditation, the study of each star and pebble and raindrop. As Caerdinn had said, the more she knew, the greater would be her power.

This attention, this meditation, returned to her now in the dark. She sorted sound from echo, built words from inflection and rhythm of speech. The stillness in which she listened was like a dream, as if, in sleeping, she passed into the nothingness of the darkness itself. From this nothingness she reached toward the demon voices, bodiless as smoke.

She understood them. That was another thing that the demon Amayon's possession had left in her mind.

“… seven hundred slaves here.” A gnome's voice, deep and vaguely familiar. She thought it might be one of the guards who had shot her when she'd fallen into the pit-trap in the mine. He spoke in the tongue of the demons. “Folcalor will bring another two hundred at least.”

Two hundred? Jenny gasped, appalled. All through the North she had heard rumors for weeks of gnomes buying slaves. Not, as they ususally did, to work in the deeper levels of the mines, but paying good silver for children too young to work, cripples whose families wanted to be rid of their upkeep, grandparents who could no longer contribute to the harsh endless work of the Winterlands farms. The gnomes, as usual, denied these rumors as they denied all rumors of ever having human slaves. John had freed a band of them when he'd passed Tralchet Deep in the North—they'd warned him then of more sinister goings-on. The days were long gone when the King could send men into the mines to investi-gate—or do anything about whatever he might find.

But two hundred slaves? And seven hundred … where? In the Deep? The tunnels, Jenny knew, extended much farther north than most people knew, and there were entrances scattered through the great jagged mountain range of Nast Wall. With the Realm's northern province of Imperteng in rebellion against the King all last summer, it would have been easy, of course, to bring in any number of such slaves. But seven hundred …?

How would they even move them unseen?

Morkeleb, she thought. He would know how far the tunnels of the Deep extended to the north; Morkeleb or Miss Mab. The dragon had gone to the surface, to lie on the black rocks far above the tree line, scrying the wind. Would he take note of a coffle that large coming out of the Wyrwoods? Or a succession of such trains? Or would he consider it not a thing of dragons, to care whether gnomes enslaved humans or not?

“And no luck with the dragon?” A man's voice this time. Again, the timbre was familiar, as if Jenny had heard it before, speaking human words. The gnome must have shaken his head, because the man added a curse. “Unless we find the dragon, we're wasting our time. All this …” By the flex in his voice Jenny knew he gestured to something—what? “… won't give us a toad's spit without her secret name. And you know Folcalor won't listen if we say we can't find him.”

“We'll find him. Stinkin' snake. Even if we don't, those'll give us power to find the catch-bottle that old Arch-Seer made.”

Those what? Surely if they'd blasted a tunnel to trap Morkeleb, they'd have known he escaped.…

“What, in Ernine? With her power over all that land?”

Catch-bottle? The phrase was an old one, a spell Jenny had only heard of in the lore handed down by the Line of Herne. Since Caerdinn hadn't been clear himself what it meant or how it worked—his master Spaeth having left the North with the last troops of the King's last garrison—Jenny didn't know, either.

“Her power can only reach so far. We know the bottle was lost when the mages went into the mirror-chamber. For certain she was never trapped in it, the bitch. So all we have to do is find it. How far can it have rolled?”

The man's voice cursed again. “I'm not going after it, I can tell you.…”

“Folcalor will go, and you'll go with him or I'll know why. With these here and the ones he'll bring, that should give him the power to see through whatever blinds she can weave.”

These what? Jenny's mind groped, and she wondered if she'd missed something in the shifting echoes, and the voices faded as the speakers moved away.

“… two days …” and “… Kings … damned glad to get the gnome-witch at last …”

Folcalor.

Jenny sat up, straining to follow the voices, but only the whisper of air moving in the vent shafts met her ears, and the cluck of subterranean streams.

Two days.

She felt absolutely cold.

Another two hundred slaves … seven hundred HERE. Here in the mines? Obviously in concealment with the collusion of one or several of the Lords of the Deep, but … seven hundred?

Those will give us power …

Those what?

Shakily, Jenny pulled on her skirt and her boots. To get to her feet she had to lean on the curve of the wall. The hip she'd twisted when she fell in the pit-trap twinged hard, making her stagger, but that, too, was already responding to the spells of healing Mab and Morkeleb had laid. Mab had brought a staff so that Jenny could limp as far as the latrine-bucket. Its tip was muffled in leather. Jenny groped it from beside her nest of blankets and hothwais, and stood.

Those will give us power.

Seven hundred slaves.

She listened in the darkness again but heard nothing. Not breath, not the murmur of voices, not weeping, not curses, not cries. Wherever the seven hundred slaves were, it was nowhere near where the two demons had been. So what were “those”?

From beneath the blankets she dug the little chip of hothwais Mab had left for light, and wrapped the cold-glowing stone in the folds of her overskirt, two and three thicknesses deep. So piercing was its light that by unwrapping a fold or two she could keep a muffled glow, like the faintest starlight, just enough and only enough to see.

I was once able to see in darkness, she thought. I should be keener-eyed now in dim light, even if not nightsighted as once I was. She focused her mind on calling that power to herself, calling it out of herself, and wrapped another fold of skirt around the stone. Then she slipped out of the chamber past the layers of straw mat, listening along the corridors for the direction in which she'd heard the voices.

It wasn't far. In the long hours of silence and listening, she'd heard voices coming from that direction before. This was a section of the mines that had been worked out, short tunnels cut like the legs of a centipede off the long main lode. Jenny worked her way carefully from tunnel to tunnel in the darkness, listening and scenting. Even the most silent of slaves must sweat and breathe and piss. The smells of the mine were thin and cold around her, wet rock and clay and the old wood of the props. The sulfurous drift of blasting powder. Now and then the breath of the vent-shafts brushed her face, or riffled the silky black-silver stubble of her hair. She neither heard nor smelled demons, but wrapped another fold of her skirt over the hothwais nonetheless, fearing even the farthest glimmer of light that might alert them—or the mine-guards—to her presence.

How could they POSSIBLY have seven hundred slaves here? Bring them here, feed them, keep them silent …?

She smelled straw. Wet straw and clay.

And the next instant sensed the presence of others around her, other souls, other thoughts. It was as if she'd walked suddenly into an immense crowd, silently watching. But the thin stream of air along the walls had not altered. The echo of walls close on either side of her was unchanged.