Dragonsbane (39 page)

“Jenny—Jenny, wake up—Jenny
please!
Don’t make me go after it alone!”

“No,” she managed to whisper and swallowed blood. Some instinct told her the lesion within her had healed, but she felt sick and drained. She tried to rise again and collapsed, vomiting; she felt the boy’s hands hold her steady even though they shook with fear. Afterward, empty and chilled, she wondered if she would faint and told herself not to be silly.

“She’s going to get Morkeleb,” she whispered, and propped herself up again, her black hair hanging down in her face. “The power of the Stone rules him. She will be able to hold his mind, as she could not hold mine.”

She managed to get to her feet, Gareth helping her as gently as he could, and picked up the halberd. “I have to stop her before she gets clear of the caverns. I defeated her mind—while the tunnels limit her size, I may be able to defeat her body. Stay here and help John.”

“But...” Gareth began. She shrugged free of his hold and made for the dark doorway at a stumbling run.

Beyond it, spells of loss and confusion tangled the darkness. The runes that she had traced as she’d followed John were gone, and for a few moments the subtle obscurity of Zyerne’s magic smothered her mind and made all those shrouded ways look the same. Panic knotted around her throat as she thought of wandering forever in the darkness; then the part of her that had found her way through the woods of the Winterlands said,
Think. Think and listen.
She released magic from her mind and looked about her in the dark; with instinctive woodcraftiness, she had taken back-bearings of her route while making her rune-markings, seeing what the landmarks looked like coming the other way. She spread her senses through the phantasmagoric domain of fluted stone, listening for the echoes that crossed and recrossed in the blackness. She heard the muted murmur of John’s voice speaking to Gareth about doors the gnomes had meant to bar and the clawed scrape of unclean chitin somewhere up ahead. She deepened her awareness and heard the skitter of the vermin of the caves as they fled, shocked, from a greater vermin. Swiftly, she set off in pursuit.

She had told Morkeleb to stand guard over the outer door. She prayed now that he had had the sense not to, but it scarcely mattered whether he did or not. The power of the Stone was in Zyerne—from it she had drawn the deepest reserves of its strength, knowing that, when the time came to pay it back, she would have lives aplenty at her disposal to do it. The power of the Stone was lodged in Morkeleb’s mind, tighter now that his mind and hers had touched. With the dragon her slave, the Citadel would fall, and the Stone be Zyerne’s forever.

Jenny quickened once more to a jog that felt ready to break her bones. Her bare feet splashed in the trickling water, making a faint, sticky pattering among the looming shapes of the limestone darkness; her hands felt frozen around the halberd shaft. How long a start Zyerne had she didn’t know, or how fast the abomination she had become could travel. Zyerne had no more power over her, but she feared to meet her now and pit her body against that body. A part of her mind thought wryly: John should have been doing this, not she—it was his end of the bargain to deal with monsters. She smiled bitterly. Mab had been right; there were other evils besides dragons in the land.

She passed a hillslope of stone mushrooms, an archway of teeth like grotesque daggers. Her heart pounded and her chilled body ached with the ruin Zyerne had wrought on her. She ran, passing the locks and bars the gnomes had set such faith in, knowing already that she would be too late.

In the blue dimness of the vaults below the Citadel, she found the furniture toppled and scattered, and she forced herself desperately to greater speed. Through a doorway, she glimpsed a reflection of the fevered daylight outside; the stench of blood struck her nostrils even as she tripped and, looking down, saw the decapitated body of a gnome lying in a pool of warm blood at her feet. The last room of the Citadel vaults was a slaughterhouse, men and gnomes lying in it and in the doorway to the outside, their makeshift black livery sodden with blood, the close air of the room stinking with the gore that splattered the walls and even the ceiling. From beyond the doorway, shouting and the stench of burning came to her; and, stumbling through the carnage, Jenny cried out
Morkeleb!
She hurled the music of his name like a rope into the sightless void. His mind touched hers, and the hideous weight of the Stone pressed upon them both.

Light glared in her eyes. She scrambled over the bodies in the doorway and stood, blinking for an instant in the lower court, seeing all around the door the paving stones charred with a crisped muck of blood. Before her the creature crouched, larger and infinitely more hideous in the befouled and stormy daylight, metamorphosed into something like a winged ant, but without an ant’s compact grace. Squid, serpent, scorpion, wasp—it was everything hideous, but no one thing in itself. The screaming laughter that filled her mind was Zyerne’s laughter. It was Zyerne’s voice that she heard, calling to Morkeleb as she had called to Gareth, the power of the Stone a tightening noose upon his mind.

The dragon crouched immobile against the far rampart of the court. His every spike and scale were raised for battle, yet to Jenny’s mind came nothing from him but grating agony. The awful, shadowy weight of the Stone was tearing at his mind, a power built generation after generation, fermenting in upon itself and directed by Zyerne upon him now, summoning him to her bidding, demanding that he yield. Jenny felt his mind a knot of iron against that imperious command, and she felt it when the knot fissured.

She cried again,
Morkeleb!
and flung herself, mind and body, toward him. Their minds gripped and locked. Through his eyes, she saw the horrible shape of the creature and recognized how he had known Zyerne through her disguise—the patterning of her soul was unmistakable. Peripherally, she was aware that this was true for every man and gnome who cowered within the doorways and behind the protection of each turret; she saw things as a dragon sees. The force of the Stone hammered again at her mind, and yet it had no power over her, no hold upon her. Through Morkeleb’s eyes, she saw herself still running toward him—toward, in a sense, herself—and saw the creature turn to strike at that small, flying rag of black-wrapped bones and hair that she knew in a detached way for her own body.

Her mind was within the dragon’s, shielding him from the burning grip of the Stone. Like a cat, the dragon struck, and the creature that had been Zyerne wheeled to meet the unexpected threat. Half within her own body, half within Morkeleb’s, Jenny stepped in under the sagging, bloated belly of the monster that loomed so hugely near her and thrust upward with her halberd. As the blade slashed at the stinking flesh, she heard Zyerne’s voice in her mind, screaming at her the back-street obscenities of a spoiled little slut whom the gnomes had taken in on account of the promise of her power. Then the creature gathered its mismated limbs beneath it and hurled itself skyward out of their way. From overhead, Jenny felt the hot rumble of thunder.

Her counterspell blocked the bolt of lightning that would have come hurling down on the court an instant later; she used a dragon-spell, such as those who walked the roads of the air used to allow them to fly in storms. Morkeleb was beside her then, her mind shielding his from the Stone as his body shielded hers from Zyerne’s greater strength. Minds interlinked, there was no need of words between them. Jenny seized the knife-tipped spikes of his foreleg as he raised her to his back, and she wedged herself uncomfortably between the spearpoints that guarded his spine. More thunder came, and the searing breathlessness of ozone. She flung a spell to turn aside that bolt, and the lightning—channeled, she saw, through the creature that hovered in the livid air above the Citadel like a floating sack of pus—struck the tubular harpoon gun on the rampart. It exploded in a bursting star of flame and shattered iron, and the two men who were cranking another catapult to bear on the monster turned and fled.

Jenny understood then that the storm had been summoned by Zyerne, called by her powers through the Stone from afar, and the Stone’s magic gave her the power to direct the lightning when and where she would. It had been her weapon to destroy the Citadel—the Stone, the storm, and the dragon.

She pulled off her belt and used it to lash herself to the two-foot spike before her. It would be little use if the dragon turned over in flight, but would keep her from being thrown off laterally, and that was all she could hope for now. She knew her body was exhausted and hurt, but the dragon’s mind lifted her out of herself; and in any case, she had no choice. She sealed herself off from the pain and ripped the Limitations from mind and flesh.

The dragon hurtled skyward to the thing waiting above.

Winds tore at them, buffeting Morkeleb’s wings so that he had to veer sharply to miss being thrown into the highest turret of the Citadel. From above them, the creature spat a rain of acid mucus. Green and stinking, it seared Jenny’s face and hands like poison and made smoking tracks of corrosion on the steel of the dragon’s scales. Furiously keeping her mind concentrated against the searing agony, Jenny cast her will at the clouds, and rain began to sluice down, washing the stuff away and half-blinding her with its fury. Long black hair hung stickily down over her shoulders as the dragon swung on the wind, and she felt lightning channeling again into the hovering creature before them. Seizing it with her mind, she flung it back. It burst somewhere between them, the shock of it striking her bones like a blow. She had forgotten she was not a dragon, and that her flesh was mortal.

Then the creature fell upon them, its stumpy wings whirring like a foul bug’s. The weight of it rolled the dragon in the air so that Jenny had to grasp the spikes on either side of her, below the blades and yet still cutting her fingers. The earth rolled and swung below them, but her eyes and mind locked on the thing above. Its stink was overpowering, and from the pullulant mass of its flesh, a sharklike head struck, biting at the massive joints of the dragon’s wings, while the whirlwind of evil spells sucked and ripped around them, tearing at their linked minds.

Ichorous yellow fluid burst from the creature’s mouth as it bit at the spikes of the wing-joints. Jenny slashed at the eyes, human and as big as her two fists, gray-gold as mead—Zyerne’s eyes. The halberd blade clove through the flesh—and from among the half-severed flaps of the wound, other heads burst like a knot of snakes among spraying gore, tearing at her robe and her flesh with suckerlike mouths. Grimly, fighting a sense of nightmare horror, she chopped again, her blistered hands clotted and running with slime. Half her mind called from the depths of the dragon’s soul the healing-spells against the poisons she knew were harbored in those filthy jaws.

When she slashed at the other eye, the creature broke away from them. The pain of Morkeleb’s wounds as well as her own tore at her as he swung and circled skyward, and she knew he felt the burning of her ripped flesh. The Citadel dropped away below them; rain poured over them like water from a pail. Looking up, she could see the deadly purplish glow of stored lightning rimming the black pillows of cloud so close above their heads. The battering of Zyerne’s mind upon theirs lessened as the sorceress rallied her own spells, spells of wreckage and ruin against the Citadel and its defenders below.

Mists veiled the thrusting folds of the land beneath them, the toy fortress and the wet, slate-and-emerald of the meadows beside the white stream of the river. Morkeleb circled, Jenny’s eyes within his seeing all things with clear, incredible calm. Lightning streaked down by her and she saw, as if it had been drawn in fine lines before her eyes, another catapult explode on the ramparts, and the man who had been winding it flung backward over the parapet, whirling limply down the side of the cliff.

Then the dragon folded his wings and dropped. Her mind in Morkeleb’s, Jenny felt no fear, clinging to the spikes while the wind tore her sopping hair back and her bloody, rain-wet robes plastered to her body and arms. Her mind was the mind of a stooping falcon. She saw, with precise pleasure, the sacklike, threshing body that was their target, felt the joy of impending impact as the dragon fisted his claws...

The jar all but threw her from her precarious perch on the dragon’s backbone. The creature twisted and sagged in the air, then writhed under them, grabbing with a dozen mouths at Morkeleb’s belly and sides, heedless of the spikes and the monstrous slashing of the dragon’s tail. Something tore at Jenny’s back; turning, she hacked the head off a serpentine tentacle that had ripped at her, but she felt the blood flowing from the wound. Her efforts to close it were fogged and slow. They seemed to have fallen into a vortex of spells, and the weight of the Stone’s strength dragged upon them, trying to rend apart the locked knot of their minds.

What was human magic and what dragon she no longer knew, only that they sparkled together, iron and gold, in a welded weapon that attacked both body and mind. She could feel Morkeleb’s growing exhaustion and her own dizziness as the Citadel walls and the stone-toothed cliffs of Nast Wall wheeled crazily beneath them. The more they hacked and cut at the awful, stinking thing, the more mouths and gripping tentacles it sprouted and the tighter its clutch upon them became. She felt no more fear than a beast might feel in combat with its own kind, but she did feel the growing weight of the thing as it multiplied, getting larger and more powerful as the two entwined bodies thrashed in the sea of streaming rain.

The end, when it came, was a shock, like the impact of a club. She was aware of a booming roar somewhere in the earth beneath them, dull and shaking through her exhausted singlemindedness; then, more clearly, she heard a voice like Zyerne’s screaming, multiplied a thousandfold through the spells that suffocated her until it axed through her skull with the rending echo of indescribable pain.

Like the passage from one segment of a dream to another, she felt the melting of the spells that surrounded them and the falling-away of the clinging, flaccid flesh and muscle. Something flashed beneath them, falling through the rainy air toward the wet roof crests of the Citadel below, and she realized that the plunging flutter of streaming brown hair and white gauze was Zyerne: