Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (10 page)

“From isles of ice and rock beneath the moon.”

A candle guttered, smoking. John looked up in surprise and groped around until he found a pair of candle scissors to trim the wick. The sky in the stone window frame had gone from cinder to mother-of-pearl.

His body hurt, as if he’d been beaten with lengths of chain. Even the effort of sitting up for several hours made his breath short. Most of the candles had burned out, and their smutted light stirred uneasily in the networks of experimental pulleys and tackle that hung from the rafters. It would soon be time to go.

“… isles of ice and rock…”

The other volume lay in front of him also. The partial volume of Juronal he had found in a ghoul’s hive, near what had been the Tombs of Ghrai; the volume he had read on his return, two nights ago, as he searched for that half-remembered bit of information that told him what had become of Ian and why he could wait no longer to embark on his quest for help. North, he thought. He took off his spectacles and leaned his forehead on his hand. Alone. God help me.

The key to magic is magic! Jenny flinched away from the hard knobbed hands striking her, the toothless mouth shouting abuse. The dirty, smoky stink of the house on Frost Fell returned to her through the dream’s haze. Caerdinn’s cats watched from the windowsills and doors, untroubled by the familiar scene. The key to magic is magic! The old man’s grip like iron, he dragged her from the hearth by her hair, pulled the old harp from her hands, thrust her at the desk where the books lay, black lettering nearly invisible on the tobacco-colored pages. The more you do, the more you’ll be able to do! It’s laziness, laziness, laziness that keeps you small!

It isn’t true! She wanted to shout back at him, across all those years of life. It isn’t true.

But at fourteen she hadn’t known that. At thirty-nine she hadn’t known.

In her dream she saw the summer twilight, the beauty of the nights when the sky held light until nearly midnight and breathed dawn again barely three hours later. In her dream she heard the sad little tunes she’d played on her master’s harp, tunes that had nothing to do with the ancient music-spells handed down along the Line of Herne. Like all of Caerdinn’s knowledge, those spells of music were maddeningly ambiguous, fragments of airs learned by rote. In her dream Jenny thought she saw the black skeletal shape of a dragon flying before the ripe summer moon.

The key to magic was not magic.

Out of darkness burned two crystalline silver lamps. Stars that drank in the soul and tangled the mind in mazes of still-deeper dream. A white core of words forming in fathomless darkness. What is truth, Wizard-woman? The truth that dragons see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncomfortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You know this. The knots of colored music that were his true name.

The kaleidoscope of memory that she touched when she touched his mind.

The gold fire of magic that had flowed into her veins. Plunging herself, dragon form, into the wind …

Mistress Waynest … !

This love you speak of, I do not know what it is. It is not a thing of dragons… Mistress, wake up! “Wake up!”

Gasping, she pulled clear of the mind-voice in the shadows. Raw smoke tore her throat; the air was a clamor of men shouting and the frenzied screams of cattle and horses in pain. “What is it?” She scrambled to a sitting position, head aching, eyes thick. Nemus, one of Rocklys’ troopers, stood beside her narrow bed.

“Balgodorus …”

As if it would or could be anything else. Jenny was already grabbing for her halberd and her slingstones—she slept clothed and booted these days—trying to thrust the leaden exhaustion from her bones. Her mind registered details automatically: mid-morning, noise from all sides, concerted attack …

“—fire-arrows,” the young man was saying. “Burning the blockhouse roof, but there’s a storeroom in flames …”

Fire-spells.

“… as if the animals have all gone mad …” Curse, thought Jenny. Curse, curse, curse…

The stables were in flames, too. She had no idea of the nature of the spell that had been put on the animals, but the horses, mules, and cattle were rushing crazily around the central court, charging and slashing at one another, kicking the walls, throwing themselves at the doors. Bellowing, shrieking, madness in their eyes. The smoke that rolled over the whole scene seemed to Jenny to be laden with magic, as if something foul burned and spread with the blaze. Damn her, she thought, who taught that bitch such a spell?

Scaling ladders wavered and jerked beyond the frieze of palisade spikes. Arrows filled the air. On the north wall men were already being stabbed at and hacked by the defenders within. Slingstones cracked against the walls and an arrow splintered close to Jenny’s head. Someone was bellowing orders. She got a brief glimpse of Pellanor in his steel-plated armor swaying hand-to-hand at the top of the wall with a robber in dirty leathers, as she sprang down the steps to the court.

“Watch out, m’lady!” yelled another soldier, racing along the catwalk. “Them horses is insane!” Curse it, thought Jenny, trying to concentrate through exhaustion and the blurring blindness of a too-familiar migraine, trying to snatch the form and nature of the spell out of the air. There were panic-spells working, too, a new batch of them …

She banged on the shutters of the storerooms where the children hid during attacks. “It’s me, Jenny Waynest!” she called out. “One of you, any of you …”

The shutters cracked. A girl’s face showed in the slit.

“The names of the cows,” said Jenny. She’d have to do this the hard way, with Limitations, not a counterspell. “Quick.”

The girl, thank God, didn’t ask her if she was insane, or if she meant what she said.

“Uh—Florrie. Goddess. Ginger. You want me to point out which is which? They’re moving awful fast.”

“Just the names.” Jenny already knew the names of the horses. “Give me a minute; I’ll be back. Be thinking of all of them.” She sprinted across the court, two cows and a mule turning, charging her. She barely reached the stair at the base of the east tower before them, leaped and scrambled up out of their reach, drew a Guardian on the stonework. Smoke poured like a river from under the eaves of the workrooms between the east tower and the north, but it was better than trying to get past the melee in the court. Jenny swung herself up, darted across the roof, forming counterspells to the fire as she ran and thanking the Twelve that the roof beneath her feet was tile. A man’s body plunged from above, spraying blood.

Get the danger contained, thought Jenny. Madness-spells, fire-spells, get those taken care of first. And then, by the Moon-Scribe’s little white dog, you and I have a reckoning, my ill-instructed friend.

The Limitations quieted the maddened animals, exempting them one by one from the spell. It made Jenny’s head ache to concentrate amid the chaos, the smell of smoke and the fear that any moment the bandits would come over the wall.

From the top of the west wall Jenny picked out Balgodorus himself, a tall man, strong enough to dominate any of his men, dark and with a bristling beard. Men were rallying around him now, ready for another attack. They wound their crossbows, milled and shouted among themselves, working up their anger. Balgodorus was saying something to them, gesturing at the walls … “Probably telling them about all the food and wealth we have in here,” muttered Pellanor, his voice hollow within his steel helm as he came to Jenny’s side. He was panting hard and smelled of sweat and the blood that ran down the steel.

Balgodorus gestured to the woman who stood near him. Jenny said softly, “That’s her.”

“What?”

“The witch. She’s wearing a skirt, and unarmed. Bandit-women dress as men. Why else would she be at the battle? I’ll need a rope.” Jenny strode along the palisade, dark hair billowing in a crazy cloud behind her, Pellanor hurrying after. “I don’t suppose there’s a scaling ladder still standing.”

On all the walls the defenders were panting, resting their spears and their swords against the palisade, wiping sweat or blood from their eyes. Children ran along the catwalk with water; a man could be heard telling them sharply to get back indoors and bar themselves in. Below, in the court, the horses stamped, restless at the smell of smoke and blood, and all around could be heard the faint, frenzied squealing of the mice, the cats, the rats still under the influence of the mad-spell.

“Great Heaven, no!”

She felt for her stones and sling, shrugging her shoulder through the halberd’s strap. “Go back. They’re gathering for another try.” She stepped over a dead bandit, kilting up her skirts. “You can’t seriously think of leaving in the middle of an attack! You’ll be slaughtered!” Jenny had never used spells of illusion in or near the Hold, for fear of the effects they might have on the watchers on the wall, or on the counterspells against illusion with which she’d so carefully ringed the fortress. Last night she had renewed those counterspells after a scout told her there was untoward movement around the bandit camp. She’d had only time for a quick, disquieting glimpse of John, who should have been flat on his back in bed, loading provisions into that horror of an airship he’d built last spring. Muffle had been with him— Muffle, for love of the Goddess, knock some sense into his head!

“An attack is the only time she’ll be concentrating on something else.” Jenny found the rope down which Pellanor had let her climb two nights ago, still coiled just inside the door of the north turret. She checked the land below, and the ruined and trampled fields that lay to the east. No bandits in sight on that side of the keep. Arrows littered the ground, floated in the moat like straws. A single body, the legacy of an attack three days ago, bobbed obscenely among the half-sunk timbers and boughs.

“Whatever you do, hold them now,” she said. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“What if she uses more spells?” asked the Baron worriedly. “Without you to counter them …” “I’m counting on her to do just that,” said Jenny. “It will give me a better chance at her. Hold fast and don’t let anyone panic. I can’t return until after the attack is driven off, but that shouldn’t be long.” She slithered under the dripping, charred spikes of the palisade, hanging onto the rope. “I’ll be watching.”

“May the gods of war and magic go with you, then.” Pellanor saluted and snapped his visor down again. “Damn,” he added, as the noise rose from the other side of the fortress. “Here they come.”

Jenny dropped, playing the rope out fast, thankful that she and John still worked out against one another with halberd and sword. Still, she was forty-one and felt it. No sleep last night and precious little the night before, and when she did sleep, she saw in her mind what John was doing with that monstrosity he’d built …

She pushed away the images, her frantic fear and the desire to break her beloved’s legs to keep him in bed until she got there, forced her thoughts to return to spells of protection, of concealment, as she ran for the fields. Broken crops offered some concealment from the men she could hear shouting beneath the walls.

“At ’em, men!” Balgodorus’ voice clashed like an iron gong. “Make ’em wish they never been born!” He had come around with his forces, sword in hand, and now stood close to where Jenny lay in the broken stubble.

“And you, bitch—” He grabbed the arm of the woman beside him. Girl, Jenny saw now. No more than fifteen. Snarled chestnut hair and the kind of ill-fitting gown common to bandits’ whores, expensive silk stamped with gold, black with sweat under the arms, kilted to show no petticoat beneath and quite clearly worn over neither corset nor shift. A thin little face like a shut door, dead eyes long past either tears or joy.

“You do your stuff or you’ll feel it tonight, understand.”

He thrust her off from him and ran to overtake his men, loping easily, like a big dark lion, sword raising high. A cheer greeted him. Some were already bracing themselves, letting fly arrows toward the walls, and the two or three warriors Balgodorus had left standing around the witch-girl watched, too, cursing and cheering and making jokes.

The girl closed her eyes and made the signs of power with her hands.

No Limitations, thought Jenny, disgusted. No amplifications of power either—she must be calling it all out of her own bones and flesh. The thin face was taut, lost in concentration, expressionless, though Jenny thought she saw the mouth tremble.

No older than she had been herself when Caerdinn had beaten the remnants of his learning into her.

And like her, probably starved for whatever craft she could learn.

It was too easy. Jenny slipped a stone from her purse and into the pocket of the sling, whipped it around her head as she rose to her knees. Timing, timing … The first of the scaling ladders went up against the manor wall, and Balgodorus scrambled up. One of the witch-girl’s watchers yelled, “Have at ’em, Chief!” and raised his fist. The witch-girl’s brows pulled hard together, pain in her face—as spent and battered, Jenny realized, as she was herself. She felt a deep ache of pity as she let the sling-thong slip. The girl twisted as if struck by invisible lightning and fell without a sound.

“You’re mad, Johnny!”

Aversin turned from lashing the boxes, crates, and struts to the sides of what appeared to be a long, narrow boat wrought of wicker—curious enough given the distance Alyn Hold lay from any navigable water—and regarded his half-brother a moment in silence. Then he leaped over the boat’s gunwale, scooped up a handful of packing straw from a broached barrel nearby, and, scrubbing it into his hair, executed a startling series of jigs and pirouettes without sound or change of expression. Sergeant Muffle stepped back in alarm.

“I’d get on me knees and bark like a dog,” said John, catching the boat’s railing for balance and panting, suddenly white, “but I’ve a touch of rheumatism.” He was trembling all over, and Muffle strode forward and caught his arm to steady him.

“You’ve a touch of being torn up by a dragon, and lunacy into the bargain! You can’t be serious about what you’re going to do.”

“Serious as falling over a cliff, son.” He tried to draw his arm away. Despite the summer warmth condensed in the court, his bare flesh was cold against the blacksmith’s big hand. “Falling over a cliff would be a damned sight safer than what you’re proposing. And more useful, too.”