Dragonsbane (22 page)

After a moment’s consideration Gareth said, “The farthest point in Deeping from the Great Gates would be the Tanner’s Rise. It’s at the bottom of that spur over there that bounds the town to the west. I think it’s about a half-mile from the Gates. The whole town isn’t—wasn’t— much more than a quarter-mile across.”

“Will we have a clear view of the Gates from there?”

Confused by this bizarre stipulation, he nodded. “The ground’s high, and most of the buildings were flattened in the attack. But if we wanted a lookout on the gates, you can see there’s enough of the clock tower left for a...”

“No,” Jenny murmured. “I don’t think we can go that near.”

John’s head came sharply around at that. Gareth faltered, “It can’t—it can’t
hear
us, can it?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, not knowing why she said it. “No—it isn’t hearing, exactly. I don’t know. But I feel something, on the fringes of my mind. I don’t think it knows we’re here—not yet. But if we rode closer, it might. It is an old dragon, Gareth; it must be, for its name to be in the Lines. In one of the old books from the Palace library, it says that dragons change their skins with their souls, that the young are simply colored and bright; the mature are complex of pattern and the old become simpler and simpler again, as their power deepens and grows. Morkeleb is black. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like what I think it implies—great age, great power—his senses must fill the Vale of Deeping like still water, sensitive to the slightest ripple.”

“He pox-sure heard your father’s knights coming, didn’t he?” John added cynically.

Gareth looked unhappy. Jenny nudged her mare gently and took a step or two closer to the clock tower, casting her senses wide over all the Vale. Through the broken webs of branches overhead, the massive darkness of the westward-facing cliffs of Nast Wall could be seen. Their dizzy heights towered like rusted metal, streaked with purple where shadows hit; boulders flashed white upon it like outcroppings of broken bone. Above the line of the dragon’s burning, the timber grew on the flanks of the mountain around the cliffs, up toward the mossed rocks of the cirques and snowfields above. The ice-gouged horns of the Wall’s bare and ragged crest were veiled in cloud now, but beyond its hunched shoulder to the east a thin track of smoke could be seen, marking the Citadel of Halnath and the siege camps beneath it.

Below that wall of stone and trees, the open spaces of the Vale lay, a huge well of air, a gulf filled with pale, sparkly sunlight—and with something else. Jenny’s mind touched it briefly and shrank from that living consciousness that she sensed, coiled like a snake in its dark lair.

Behind her, she heard Gareth argue, “But the dragon you killed up in the gully in Wyr didn’t know you were coming.” The very loudness of his voice scraped her nerves and made her want to cuff him into silence. “You were able to get around behind it and take it by surprise. I don’t see how...”

“Neither do I, my hero,” John cut in softly, collecting Cow’s reins in one hand and the charger Osprey’s lead in the other. “But if you’re willing to bet your life Jen’s wrong, I’m not. Lead us on to the famous Rise.”

On the night of the dragon, many had taken refuge in the buildings on Tanner’s Rise; their bones lay everywhere among the blackened ruin of crumbled stone. From the open space in front of what had been the warehouses, it had once been possible to overlook the whole thriving little town of Deeping, under its perpetual haze of smoke from the smelters and forges down below. That haze was gone now, burned off in the dragon’s greater fire; the whole town lay open to the mild, heatless glitter of the winter sunlight, a checkerwork of rubble and bones.

Looking about her at the buildings of the Rise, Jenny felt cold with shock, as if she had been struck in the pit of the stomach; then, as she realized why she recognized the place, the shock was replaced by horror and despair.

It was the place where she had seen John dying, in her vision in the water bowl.

She had done divination before, but never so accurately as this. The precision of it appalled her—every stone and puddle and broken wall was the same; she remembered the way the looming line of the dark cliffs looked against the sky and the very patterns of the bones of the town below. She felt overwhelmed by a despairing urge to change something—to shatter a wall, to dig a hole, to clear away the brush at the gravelly lip of the Rise where it sloped down to the town—anything to make it not as it had been. Yet in her soul she knew doing so would change nothing and she feared lest whatever she did would make the picture she had seen more, rather than less, exact.

Her lips felt stiff as she spoke. “Is this the only point in the town this far from the Gates?” She knew already what Gareth would reply.

“It had to be, because of the smell of the tanneries. You see how nothing was built near it. Even the water tanks and reservoirs were put up in those rocks to the north, rather than here where the better springs were.”

Jenny nodded dully, looking out toward the high rocks to the north of the town where he was pointing. Her whole soul was crying
No! No...

She felt suddenly hopeless and stupid, overmatched and unprepared and incredibly naive. We were fools, she thought bitterly. The slaying of the first worm was a fluke. We should never have been so stupid as to presume upon it, never have thought we could do it again. Zyerne was right. Zyerne was right.

She looked over at John, who had dismounted from Cow and was standing on the rocky lip of the Rise where the ground fell sharply to the dale below, looking across toward the opposite rise of the Gates. Cold seemed to cover her bones like a vast, winged shadow blocking the sun, and she heeled Moon Horse gently over beside him.

Without looking up at her, he said, “I figure I can just make it. The Temple of Sarmendes is about a quarter-mile along the Grand Passage, if Dromar was telling the truth. If Osprey and I go full-pelt, we should just about be able to catch the dragon in the Market Hall, just within the Gates. Saying he’s able to hear me the minute I start down the Rise, I should still be able to catch him before he can get out into the air. I’ll have room to fight him in the Market Hall. That will be my only chance.”

“No,” Jenny said quietly. He looked up at her, eyebrows quirking. “You have another chance, if we ride back now to Bel. Zyerne can help you take the thing from behind, deeper in the caves. Her spells will protect you, too, as mine can not.”

“Jen.” The closed wariness of his expression split suddenly into the white flash of teeth. He held up his hands to help her down, shaking his head reprovingly.

She made no move. “At least it is to her advantage to preserve you safe, if she wants the dragon slain. The rest is none of your affair.”

His smile widened still further. “You have a point, love,” he assented. “But she doesn’t look to me like she can cook worth a row of beans.” And he helped her down from her horse.

The foreboding that weighed on Jenny’s heart did not decrease; rather, it grew upon her through the short afternoon. She told herself, again and again, as she paced out the magic circles and set up her fire in their midst to brew her poisons, that water was a liar; that it divined the future as crystal could not, but that its divinations were less reliable even than fire’s. But a sense of impending doom weighed upon her heart, and, as the daylight dimmed, in the fire under her simmering kettle she seemed to see again the same picture: John’s shirt of chain mail rent open by claws in a dozen places, the broken links all glittering with dark blood.

Jenny had set up her fire at the far end of the Rise, where the wind would carry the smoke and the vapors away from both the camp and the Vale, and worked throughout the afternoon spelling the ingredients and the steel of the harpoons themselves. Miss Mab had advised her about the more virulent poisons that would work upon dragons, and such ingredients as the gnome wizard had not had among her slender stocks Jenny had purchased in the Street of the Apothecaries in the Dockmarket in Bel. While she worked, the two men prowled the Rise, fetching water for the horses from the little well some distance into the woods, since the fountain house that had served the tanneries had been crushed like an eggshell, and setting up a camp. John had very little to say since she had spoken to him on the edge of the Rise; Gareth seemed to shiver all over with a mingling of excitement and terror.

Jenny had been a little surprised at John’s invitation that Gareth join them, though she had planned to ask John to extend it. She had her own reasons for wanting the boy with them, which had little to do with his expressed desire—though he had not expressed it lately—to see a dragonslaying close at hand. She—and undoubtedly John as well—knew that their departure would have left Gareth unprotected in Bel.

Perhaps Mab had been right, she thought, as she turned her face from the ghastly choke of the steam and wiped it with one gloved hand. There were worse evils than the dragon in the land—to be slain by it might, under certain circumstances, be construed as a lesser fate.

The voices of the men came to her from the other side of the camp as they moved about preparing supper; she had noticed that neither spoke very loudly when they were anywhere near the edge of the Rise. John said, “I’ll get this right yet,” as he dropped a mealcake onto the griddle and looked up at Gareth. “What’s the Market Hall like? Anything I’ll be likely to trip over?”

“I don’t think so, if the dragon’s been in and out,” Gareth said after a moment. “It’s a huge hall, as Dromar said; over a hundred feet deep and even wider side to side. The ceiling’s very high, with fangs of rock hanging down from it—chains, too, that used to support hundreds of lamps. The floor was leveled, and used to be covered with all kinds of booths, awnings, and vegetable stands; all the produce from the Realm was traded to the Deep there. I don’t think there was anything there solid enough to resist dragon fire.”

Aversin dropped a final mealcake on the griddle and straightened up, wiping his fingers on the end of his plaid. Blue darkness was settling over Tanner’s Rise. From her small fire, Jenny could see the two of them outlined in gold against a background of azure and black. They did not come near her, partly because of the stench of the poisons, partly because of the spell-circles glimmering faintly in the sandy earth about her. The key to magic is magic—Jenny felt that she looked out at them from an isolated enclave of another world, alone with the oven-heat of the fire, the biting stench of the poison fumes, and the grinding weight of the death-spells in her heart.

John walked to the edge of the Rise for perhaps the tenth time that evening. Across the shattered bones of Deeping, the black skull-eye of the Gates looked back at him. Slabs of steel and splintered shards of burned wood lay scattered over the broad, shallow flight of granite steps below them, faintly visible in the watery light of the waxing moon. The town itself lay in a pool of impenetrable dark.

“It isn’t so far,” said Gareth hopefully. “Even if he hears you coming the minute you ride into the Vale, you should reach the Market Hall in plenty of time.”

John sighed. “I’m not so sure of that, my hero. Dragons move fast, even afoot. And the ground down there’s bad. Even full-tilt, Osprey won’t be making much speed of it, when all’s said. I would have liked to scout for the clearest route, but that isn’t possible, either. The most I can hope for is that there’s no uncovered cellar doors or privy pits between here and the Gates.”

Gareth laughed softly. “It’s funny, but I never thought about that. In the ballads, the hero’s horse never trips on the way to do battle with the dragon, though they do it from time to time even in tourneys, where the ground of the lists has been smoothed beforehand. I thought it would be—oh, like a ballad. Very straight. I thought you’d ride out of Bel, straight up here and on into the Deep...”

“Without resting my horse after the journey, even on a lead-rein, nor scouting the lay of the land?” John’s eyes danced behind his specs. “No wonder the King’s knights were killed at it.” He sighed. “My only worry is that if I miss my timing by even a little, I’m going to be spot under the thing when it comes out of the Gates...”

Then he coughed, fanning at the air, and said, “Pox blister it!” as he dashed back to pick the flaming meal-cakes off the griddle. Around burned fingers, he said, “And the damn thing is, even Adric cooks better than I do...”

Jenny turned away from their voices and the sweetness of the night beyond the blazing heat of her fire. As she dipped the harpoons into the thickening seethe of brew in her kettle, the sweat plastered her long hair to her cheeks, running down her bare arms from the turned-up sleeves of her shift to the cuffs of the gloves she wore; the heat lay like a red film over her toes and the tops of her feet, bare as they often were when she worked magic.

Like John, she felt withdrawn into herself, curiously separated from what she did. The death-spells hung like a stench in the air all around her, and her head and bones were beginning to ache from the heat and the effort of the magic she had wrought. Even when the powers she called were for good, they tired her; she felt weighed down by them now, exhausted and knowing that she had wrought nothing good from that weariness.

The Golden Dragon came to her mind again, the first heartstopping instant she had seen it dropping from the sky like amber lightning and had thought, This is beauty. She remembered, also, the butchered ruin left in the gorge, the stinking puddles of acid and poison and blood, and the faint, silvery singing dying out of the shivering air. It might have been only the fumes she inhaled, but she felt herself turn suddenly sick at the thought.

She had slaughtered Meewinks, or mutilated them and left them to be eaten by their brothers; she remembered the crawling greasiness of the bandit’s hair under her fingers as she had touched his temples. But they were not like the dragon. They had chosen to be what they were.

Even as I have.

And what are you, Jenny Waynest?

But she could find no answer that fitted.