Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (14 page)

In the morning, after another good meal, John stated his demands: a star-fragment, or thunderstone, which he knew were powerful magic that the gnomes never parted with; a few ounces of ensorcelled quicksilver, something that the gnomes also guarded intently; and incidentally a hothwais charged with heat to keep the Milkweed afloat. The gnome-kings said they would consider the matter. Then he armed himself in his doublet of iron and grubby leather, his iron cap, dagger, and fighting-sword— his bow would be useless in the inky tunnels—slung the satchel of poisons over his shoulder, and set out for the Twelfth Deep, where the “bandit” had last been reported.

As he’d guessed, though only gnome-servants had been in evidence at dinner last night, at least some of the kitchen staff were human slaves, and they’d reported his presence to their brethren hiding in the deeper tunnels. Even before he left the passageways where the lamps burned bright he sensed himself being watched, though that might have been Goffyer. The Twelfth Deep was where the mine-workings began, both the active seams of silver and the abandoned ones that had been flooded or were infested with some of the more unpleasant creatures that dwelled below ground.

They’d given him a lantern, which burned oil rather than carrying a hothwais, and its light seemed to shrink as he passed into the less and less frequented realms. Somewhere a whiff of foulness breathed from a rock seam: damp stone, then the stink of scalded blood and sulfur. Among the rocks the last lights burned blue and small.

Passing these, he carried his single lantern far into the empty mines, then set down his weapons, and stripped off his doublet and cap. As he’d intended—and hoped—when he walked forward into darkness with his hands upraised, the escapees took him fairly quickly. Invisible hands seized him from the darkness and led him to Brâk, who was perfectly happy to bargain with him for enough soporifics to knock out the guards who prevented the slaves from escaping and a good map of the territory that lay between the Tralchet Peninsula and the first of the King’s new garrisons.

“So it’s true the King’s sent his army again,” said Brâk. His voice was deep and musical, with an accent like an educated southerner and a courtier’s turn of phrase. “Good news, for everybody except the slave traders and the bandits and these pigs here.” John heard him spit. “And what of you, my four-eyed friend? Is it true there’s a mad wizard on the loose, raiding the garrisons and stealing horses in a magical iron wash-pot? Or was that just a tale to get old Ragskar to part with a thunder-stone? He won’t, you know. Those are strong magic, I’ve heard; strong enough from time to time to break the scry-wards we’ve surrounded our hideouts with.”

“Oh, I knew that,” John said cheerfully. “What I need is a hothwais, and a strong one, charged with heat to keep the air hot in my balloons. I had to say somethin’, to let them talk me down.” Brâk chuckled, a deep rich sound in the blackness. “We have hothwais here among us that will hold heat for two weeks before we have to sneak back up to the forges and replenish their strength. If we win through to the outer air, we’ll need them less, once we can be away where the smoke of fires won’t show us up. So you’re welcome to them, my friend. We’ll leave them where you leave the maps, on the north side of Gorm Peak near the rear gate of the mines.” So it was that John returned to the brother-kings and excused himself from further search for their “bandit.” “For from what I glimpsed of them in the tunnels—and it was only a glimpse I got—it seems to me there’s a lot of ’em, and I’ll not work to kill my own people, who’re only tryin’ to free themselves.”

“These are not slaves,” said King Ragskar firmly in his strange alto voice. “The bandit is a wicked man who entered our realm with many followers.”

“Be that as it may,” said John. “I’ll not be tricked into workin’ for the profit of slave-drivers, no matter what the cost.”

That was the only time, in the Deep of the Gnomes, that he genuinely thought he might have to fight his way out, which he knew he was in no shape physically to do. He doubted that even such heroes as Alkmar the Godborn would have been able to fight their way through the corridors and guardrooms that separated him from the main gate, and Brâk had warned him of the kings and especially of Goffyer. “Slaving and treachery is the least of the evils to fear from them, my friend,” the deep soft voice had said. “Things we can scarcely guess at are done here. It is best that you get out, and get out quickly. And if you see Goffyer come at you with an opal or a crystal vial in his hand, fight to the death.”

But his performance of the night before had had its effect, and he saw it in the contempt in the gnome-king’s eyes. No one offered to demonstrate Goffyer’s magic opal; they even gave him food before they set him on his way. Regretfully John buried the food without tasting it—Let’s not dig ourselves a grave with our fork, Johnny—and spent the next several hours and the remainder of the Milkweed’s lofting power mapping the countryside around the small rear entrance of the Mines of Tralchet and down the vales below Gorm. He left these maps in the cleft of a great gray stand of granite. When he returned to the place on foot the following day, he found a fist-sized pale stone there, and several smaller ones, the air around them shaking with the heat. Written on the granite below were the words, Thank you. We will not forget, in the hand and style of the Court of the south.

Alkmar the Godborn would probably have done it differently, John reflected with a sigh. But we all do what we can.

On the fifth day after his departure from Alyn Hold, therefore, he lifted off from the rear slopes of Gorm Peak, under heavy ballast, and set forth again to the northwest. By noon he passed the cliffs and glaciers of the hard and terrible peninsula and saw below the green-black water tossing with luminous mountains of ice. Then the land fell behind him, and he was over open sea. Dark waves flecked with silver lace. White birds winging. Whiter still, icebergs carved and cut and hollowed by the action of the water, and the constant thrumming of the wind. Cold and the smell of the sea. Weariness and silence. Checking the compass and checking it again, and praying the adjustments the gnomes had made to the engines would last until he reached his goal. There seemed no strength left in him now, and he did not know what he would do if anything went wrong.

Sunset, and the dark backs of whales broke through the waves, blowing steamy clouds before they sounded again. The shadow of the Milkweed lying on the water for a time, longer and longer, and then twilight and the fairy moon.

Dreams of Jenny. Dreams of Ian.

A dawn of silence and birds.

And after another day of checking the compass, adjusting the engines and the sails and watching the whales and the birds, after another light-filled night, sunrise showed him the rocky fingers of cliffs spiking the sea before him, north and south and stringing away into the west, endless, tiny, dark, and rimmed with white. The new light smote them, seeming to pick glints of silver from the rocks, distant and pure and untouched. And above the twisted cordillera of the Skerries of Light, dragons hung in the air, bright chips of color, like butterflies in the glory of morning.

“M’am Jenny …”

She heard the whispering in her mind, the familiar call of scrying, and let the images of John in his fantastic vehicle fade. He had evidently come unscathed from the fortress of the gnomes, though she had no idea what he had done there.

“M’am Jenny, please …”

Balgodorus had attacked again, fire-arrows and catapults and more of Yseult’s crude ugly spells of craziness and pain. Food was running low. Scrying the woods, Jenny had seen three more of Rocklys’ scouts, hanged or nailed dead to trees. Scraped raw with strain, Jenny understood his strategy, the same strategy he used against the girl who was his slave.

Break her concentration. Wear away her ability to do her part in the manor’s defense.

Rocklys is right, Jenny thought. We do need more mages, trained mages, if we are to defend the Realm. She reached out to the calling.

Yseult stood in the clearing beside the carven stone. The slanted light of evening brazed the unwashed seaweed tangle of her hair. She held her cloak about her, shivering, and glanced over her thin shoulder again and again. Outside her own window Jenny heard the outcry and cursing of the men on the walls, the bandits attacking—yet again, always again.

“M’am Jenny, please answer me!”

“I’m here.” Jenny brushed her hair from her eyes, reached her mind through the scrying-crystal, through the water in the stone.

“I’m here, Yseult.” Sleepiness gritted on her like millstones; her eyes and skin and soul felt scorched with it.

“Come here and get me!” the girl pleaded desperately. “I’m supposed to be sleeping—he only lets me sleep when I’m not with him, with the men attackin’. I said I felt sick, and I do feel sick. He kicked me and said I better not be ailing. I can’t stand it anymore!” She turned, scared, at a sound, eyes huge with terror and guilt. There was a fresh bruise on her chin, and the dark marks of love-bites on her neck.

“M’am Jenny, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I called him after you!” Her voice was hoarse and shaking. “You got no idea what he’s like when he’s mad, and he’s mad all the time now. Mad that you folks are holding out like you are, and mad because Rocklys be sending patrols and killin’ his men, and spoilin’ it for him when he tries to take food and slaves and that. M’am Jenny, I know I was bad but I was scared!”

“It’s all right,” said Jenny, her mind racing. By the noise outside it was a heavy attack, and Pellanor’s half-starved defenders were at their last strength. “There’s an old house where Grubbies used to live, on the edge of Black Pond, do you know it?” The girl nodded and snuffled, wiping her nose. “Can you get there? Did you take some food with you when you left?” “A little. I got bread in my pockets.”

Probably too frightened to hunt for any, and small blame to her.

“All right. When you get to the house, make these marks at the four corners. Make them slowly, and as you’re making them, here are the words to say, and the colors to think about, and the things to hold in your mind …”

It was the simplest of ward-spells, the most basic cantrips of There’s-Nobody-Here and Don’t-You-Have-Pressing-Business-Elsewhere? Still, as Jenny outlined each guardian sigil, repeated the words of Summoning and the focus of power, she wondered despairingly how much of it Yseult’s untrained and undisciplined mind would hold. A word said wrong, a sigil misdrawn or misplaced, would invalidate the spell, and Balgodorus’ men, who surely knew the location of the ruined house as well as she and Yseult did, would find her. Jenny, worn down from battling the crazy effects of the girl’s wild spells, felt a weary urge to slap Yseult senseless, to scream at her for being such a cowardly little fool as to do whatever her master said. Of course she’s a cowardly little fool, thought Jenny tiredly. If you were unable to defend yourself with your magic two-thirds of the time, if you’d been convinced all your life that you needed a man, any man, to run your life and tell you what to do, how brave would you be?

Where the hell was she going to get the strength to turn back the bandit attack enough to sneak out? How was she going to drive them away quickly enough that Balgodorus wouldn’t find Yseult?

What had John learned, or guessed, or seen, that had sent him north in that crazy contraption to seek the dragons in their lairs on the Skerries of Light?

Ian …

She tried not to think about what might have become of Ian. First things first.

“Mistress Jenny!” Someone pounded at the door of her room. “Mistress Jenny, I’m sorry to wake you, but you must help us!”

Smoke stung her nostrils. Jenny wanted to lay one vast comprehensive death-spell on them all. First things first. She traced out a power-circle on the floor, shut her mind to the noises, the smoke, the cold tingling of fear under her breastbone. Brought to mind the place and phase of the moon, calling it clear in her heart and memory, circling it with runes. Brought to mind the magics of the three oak trees that lay due north of the manor, and the ash that stood due south, speaking their names and the names of their magics. Called on the silver energies of the stream, positioning it exactly in her mind, aligning it with the deep, still power of standing water, the courtyard well …

A little here. A little there.

The stars invisible overhead by day. The granite and serpentine of the rock beneath the ground. Her bones, and the gold ribbons of dragon-strength that wound around them and through them, legacy of Morkeleb the Black.

The power of the earth and the stars, feeding the dragon-magic.

First things first. Find the girl Yseult and strengthen the wards around her, so that she would not be found—always supposing this was not a trap in the first place. Then redouble the attack against Balgodorus, sure now that her magic would not be counterspelled. It wouldn’t be easy, and he’d be searching for Yseult. Too much to hope that Yseult would be strong enough to help them against “her man.” Her man forsooth!

At least, without Yseult scrying the woods, a messenger could get through to Rocklys.

Jenny drew a deep breath, the slow fire of power filling her veins. A false glitter, she knew, and one that would take its toll on her later, but later was later. “Mistress … !” cried the voices outside, urgent, desperate. Her consciousness, altered by the concentrations of magic, heard them seemingly from a great distance away. Cold, as if, like the dragons, she floated weightless in the air.

She spun a final scrim of gold about herself, a protection and a balancing, a shawl of light.

Reaching with her magic, feeling where the other woman’s counterspells protected scaling-ladders, weapons, armor, and men. They had been at this game for weeks, shoving and scratching one another like animals in a pen. Counterspells marked the horses’ bridles, the axles, triggers, ropes of the catapults.

The spells, thought Jenny, would have to be placed in the ground, or in the air.

This was more difficult, and far more complicated than the usual battle-magic; this was the point at which a mage of lesser strength, but greater lore, could win over a stronger but less skilled opponent. During all the years of knowing herself to be weak, Jenny had learned any number of work-around magics, in the knowledge that even the simplest counterspell could overset the best she could offer. She went back to them in exhaustion, calling images of the battle in her scrying-crystal and placing spells of fire or smoke or temporary blindness in the air where Balgodorus’ men would cross them in their rush to attack, rather than on the men or the horses or the tools they used. The spells themselves were weak. Even her calling of power had not yielded much to her spent body and fatigued mind. But in her crystal’s heart she saw one of the bandits spring back from the base of the wall as the scaling-ladder burst into flame in his hands;