Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (38 page)

She woke sometime after, exhausted.

Caradoc was gone. The circles he had drawn glowed faintly still in the darkness. Something told her that it was mid-morning in the world outside, the world most people knew as real. Aching with weakness, she dragged herself to the flaw in the jewel and through it poured her consciousness into her distant body again.

There was a very old spell Jenny had learned from Night-raven—not that Nightraven had ever used such a cantrip herself. But the women of the Iceriders sometimes used it, in the places where their magic feathers told them their lovers were meeting with younger and better-favored girls. It was a spell that could be worked with very slight power.

Exhaustion weighed her down, beyond anything she had felt in the hard days at Palmorgin.

Food lay ready on a tray for her: John had used the bread, the boiled eggs, the fruits, and the salt fish to create a dumpy little lady all stuck together with jam, “I love you” squiggled in honey around the rim. But though she laughed, she was barely able to eat, and the bitter memory returned, of John whispering the Demon Queen’s name, oblivious to Jenny’s cries for help. She washed and dressed and collected what she would need for Nightraven’s spell: a curtain weight for a spindle and a basketful of weed-fibers, dust, lint, and the combings of her own hair. These she carried down to the Undermarket. Spreading her cloak in a corner behind the booth of a woman selling gourds— cut and glazed and painted as bottles and dippers—she began to spin thread, and with every turn of the spindle, with every twist of her fingers, she daubed a little magic into the air.

Morkeleb joined her, guised as a gray-haired man. Jenny did not know when. Maybe some spell of unseeing cloaked him; she did not know. But none spoke to either of them, and when the town merchants packed up their goods and the market wardens came around the hall making sure the last stragglers departed, they passed them by as if they were not there. Once the hall was cleared, the bronze doors at its inner end opened. From the hall beyond those doors, carts were trundled out and loaded. Jenny used little magic, but only sat and spun and watched. And in time it was obvious that no one was looking at the end cart of the line, so she gathered her spinning into her basket and slipped into that cart, covering herself with her cloak. She didn’t know where Morkeleb hid, but after the carts had all been rolled into the inner hall and the doors closed and locked for the night, the dragon was there. Guards sat at a little table playing dominoes near the outer doors. The click of the dominoes sounded very loud, and the smell of the cocoa they drank filled the dark: rank, sweet, spicy. There were few lamps in the hall, and they hung on chains dozens of feet from the high stone ceiling. The night below the ground lay heavy on most of the chamber, among the looming shadows of the neatly packed carts. It did not take much magic to collect it a little thicker about herself as she crossed to the doors that led into the Deep.

Morkeleb met her there. He seemed uneasy, drawn in on himself: It is troubling to me, he said, to become of humankind. The things of humans speak loudly in my flesh and my mind, anger and envy, sloth and fear—above all other things, fear. I ask myself things I would never ask: What if we cannot leave this place? What if I do not recall the turnings of the passageways and stairs? What if we are found, or my magic fails me, or we return to discover that this Master of Halnath has indeed listened to the demon in the shell and freed it to take over his flesh? Do men and women truly live in such fear?

Most do, said Jenny. And most of the ills and griefs of humankind arise out of it. And at the bottom of all fears is the knowledge that all will one day end.

Morkeleb said, Ah, and fell silent for a time. At the foot of the stair they crossed a bridge, lacy stone grown in a thousand turrets and columns. Water thundered far below them in darkness. And magic is the anodyne to those fears? The way to braid and weave air and fate and time? Or to give oneself the illusion that one does so?

I suppose it is, said Jenny, startled. I had not thought of it before, but yes. Magic is the weapon we wield against chance and time. And does it succeed? asked the dragon. She said, I do not know.

The world beneath Nast Wall was crossed and woven with rivers, gorges, and bridges where lamps of silver burned. Everywhere, as they descended deeper, Jenny saw latticework windows looking out into those gorges, or opening from smaller dwelling-caverns into larger. Each passageway, each stair, each road was dimly illumined with globes and tall thin chimneys of colored glass, and by the light they shed the gnomes passed by on their business, their long ghostly hair wound up in jeweled sticks and combs and frames, or else left to trail over their bowed shoulders like clouds. None spoke to Morkeleb and Jenny, or seemed to see them. The dragon’s cold hand, with its long claws, held Jenny’s, and he led her unerringly through the ways that he had traversed with his mind and his dreams, when four years ago he had lain in the upper reaches of the Deep on the far side of the mountains, whispering music to be whispered in turn from the gnomes’ gold.

There is too much gold here, he said, pausing to get his bearings at the head of a road through a cavern where the very stones sparkled. The Shadow-drakes were right. I find now that its mere presence is a taste in my heart, a sweetness remembered, and it is difficult. Do any legends speak of where the Dragonshadows might have gone? asked Jenny, to distract him. To distract herself maybe, from the memories of her fear and her dream. Could they have departed entirely from this world?

I think… The dragon began and stopped, and Jenny could feel the currents of his thought check and swirl, like water around rocks. His profile shifted slightly as he looked at her sidelong. She saw in her mind what John had told her of, the Birdless Isle under the crystal brilliance of new morning, heard the slow heartbeat of the sea and the breathing of the wind. Felt their presence as a core of peace that plumbed the foundations of the world.

I do not think they would have departed this world, said the dragon, a new thought naked as a bird-peep, without telling us.

He led her between sparkling mountains of sinter and great pools that stretched like glass. In time they came to a place where a small river fell singing over five ledges of corrugated white limestone, overlooked by balconies cut and fretted into cavern wall. They will be watching her, said Morkeleb. The Wise Ones of the gnomes.

She said once that she comes forth often on her balcony, said Jenny. We will wait.

The dragon looked at her sidelong again, as if he sensed her weariness and hunger, but he said nothing. While they waited, a little to Jenny’s surprise, he told her stories after the fashion of dragons, by speaking in music and images and scents in her mind, as if he would distract her as she had him. She saw a mingled wonderment of violet suns and gray oceans beating endlessly on lifeless shores, felt the different forms of magic, sourced from all those different stones and suns and those different patterns of stars. He told of worlds where livid-colored plants fought and devoured one another, of raindrop and seagull and the creeping life of the tide pools on the Last Isle. He spoke of the Dragonshadows he had known long ago, their deep power, their wisdom, their peace.

They are like the wind and the air, he said. And yet now that I look back I see that they loved us, all of us who thought we chose our own way here.

His hand, white and thin with its long black curving claws, lay on hers, and looking at his face she could not tell whether she saw a man’s face or a dragon’s.

In time Miss Mab came out on her balcony, clothed in a red robe. Morkeleb and Jenny climbed up to her, quietly, through the soft murmuring of the water and the smooth snow-and-salmon curves of the rock.

“A hothwais,” she said thoughtfully, curling her short legs under her robe and looking from woman to dragon and back.

“Would this be safe?” asked Jenny. “Could demons turn a hothwais to harm, were one given them?”

“The very grasses of the field can demons turn to harm, child. I am not sure but that they cannot turn to harm the starlight thou wilt give them, in this hothwais, though I know not any way they can do so. And indeed, anything will be of lesser harm than what they might do with a true thunderstone. Is it true,” she asked, turning her wise pale eyes on Morkeleb, “that stars be as thou sayest, vast storms of light and fire, not solid anywhere? This be a marvelous thing.” “Would it not be possible,” asked Morkeleb after a time, “to place a Limitation on the hothwais itself, that its essence, its nature, fades with the fading of the starlight it holds? Thus the Demon Queen would be left with only a stone, of which one presumes, even in the realm of Hell, they have sufficient for their needs.”

Miss Mab was silent for a long time, turning her huge, heavy rings on stubby fingers. Below the balcony the waterfalls gurgled a kind of endless, ever-varying music. As she had said, there was great power in the stream, power that Jenny felt even sitting on the terrace. Close-by someone played a harp, very different from the gnomish zither, and a woman’s voice, unmistakably human, lifted in a sad and wistful song.

Here, too, thought Jenny, they keep human slaves.

“It should be so,” Miss Mab replied slowly. “The nature of hothwais is permanence, not evanescence, so such is not commonly done. Yet I know of no reason why it could not be done. Let me see what I can do. I will send thee word, Jenny Waynest, at Halnath.” “I misdoubt this will be possible.” Morkeleb spoke up quietly. “With Mistress Waynest’s absence overnight, I think she may not return openly to the citadel. The fear of the Hellspawn is very strong, and she bears their mark.”

Jenny looked, startled, at the dragon, and he returned her gaze with strange galactic eyes.

“It is true,” said Miss Mab, “that mine own people have imprisoned me for a year and a day for even entering the Mirror chamber in the ruins of Ernine.”

“Then send this thing to the camp at Cor’s Bridge,” said Morkeleb. “For there under the Regent’s protection we will surely be.”

Upon those words Miss Mab returned to her chamber and brought out honey-bread and curdled cream, strong-tasting white cheese and fruit, and light woolen blankets, for the air in the caverns was clammy and chill. Jenny slept uneasily, and woke, it seemed to her, more weary than when she had lain down. Morkeleb she did not think slept at all.

The dragon’s prediction about Jenny’s absence overnight turned out to be alarmingly true. When she slipped out of the merchandise cart into the Undermarket shortly before dawn, it was to find the citadel’s soldiers searching the corners of the great cavern—perfunctorily, it was true, as if they truly did not expect to find anyone there. “What would a witch possessed of a demon be doing sleeping here anyway?” demanded one warrior of another, disgustedly pushing back his visor. “She’s probably in Bel by now. And anyway, would we be able to see her?”

Probably, thought Jenny, settling into the darkest corner she could find and freezing. Despite Miss Mab’s spells of dreamless rest the demon Folcalor had returned to her in the night, drawing circles of violation around the jewel that housed her true self, and the effort to keep his power at bay had sapped her strength badly. Still she managed to remain unseen until the guards had gone, then slipped out of the market cavern on their heels and up to the citadel again. She did not know when Morkeleb left her. It was less magic than simply quiet and remaining unnoticed that got her through the service quarters, down the guarded passageway (“I’ve a bit of food from his Lordship the Master for Master John,” she said to the guards, displaying a pot of honey and several rolls on a glazed tray borrowed from the kitchen) to the cell where she guessed, even without reaching forth her mageborn senses, they would be holding him chained. She was right. Morkeleb was right. The chains were long enough that he could lie down, and the cell dry and provided with a pallet, but it was heavily guarded. The chains themselves were wyrd-written to render them proof against all but the most powerful spells. Weary as she was, spent as she was, it took Jenny nearly three-quarters of an hour to fashion a tiny cantrip that would send the guard outside to the privy, where she was able to abstract his keys when he set aside his belt.

“Jen!” John sat up, startled, as she entered his cell. He’d been sitting on his pallet, his back against the wall, reading—Polycarp had left him an enormous pile of books, but because of the manacles on his wrists he had to prop his hands and the book with his knees. “I was afraid some guard hereabouts took it into his head to kill you out of hand. They said you’d been missing overnight.”

“I was in the Deep. They have Miss Mab a prisoner—” “Gah!”

“They’re afraid of the demons, John, and they’ve every right to be so.” She was unlocking the ring of iron around his neck, the spancels on his wrists, as she spoke. The Demon Queen’s mark stood out like a wound. She forced herself not to think about her dream, about the visions of him in those white serpent arms. “Miss Mab is going to make a hothwais to hold the light of a star. A harmless gift for the Demon Queen. But as to the third part of the teind …” “I’ll settle that.” John stood up, hesitating with the book in his hand, clearly loath to abandon it. Then he shrugged and stuffed it into the front of his doublet, adding for good measure another one. “But to do it we’ll have to go to Jotham.”

The camp at the bridge bore every mark of hard usage under the bitter gray downpour of guardian storms. Its palisade protected the stone span but was black with fire, save where new wood gleamed yellow under the wet. And yet the banners of the House of Uwanë flew over the charred dugouts. As Morkeleb swept in low from the cloud-choked canyons, Jenny saw that few tents remained standing. The blackened ground within the defensive work was gashed with trenches, the earth above them giving them the look of long, twisted graves. John, held in the dragon’s claws, waved a white sheet taken from the citadel laundry at the men who came running from the trenches, crying out and pointing their arrows skyward. Only when Jenny saw one man, taller than all the rest and thinner, spectacles flashing in the pale day, emerge from underground at a run and wave his arms at the men did she say softly, “That’s him. We can go in.”