Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (23 page)

The room assigned to Master Caradoc was small, dim, and filled with half-unpacked boxes and bundles. The laundry lay on the neatly made bed, shirts folded, blue robe carefully spread out. And on top of the blue robe lay an embroidered cap.

Puzzled, Jenny looked at John, who was walking quickly from pack to pack, touching, feeling, manipulating the leather and canvas as if searching. “What is it?”

There weren’t many bags. Some appeared to contain blankets, cookpots, and other articles of travel, others books. On the windowsill was what looked like a shell, wrought of thinnest glass and broken at one end.

John twitched aside the knots of one bundle, dug into it like a hound scenting carrion, and straightened up. In his hand was a cup wrought also in the shape of a shell, gold overlying mother-of-pearl as fine as blown glass.

“It’s him,” he said softly. “It’s Caradoc.” Jenny frowned, not understanding.

“The wizard who took Ian. The mage I saw on the isles of the dragons.” John raised the cup. “I saw this in his hands.”

Jenny opened her mouth to speak, then let her breath out unused. Their eyes met in the shadowy chamber.

John said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Beneath a camouflaging plaid, John and Jenny passed the telescope back and forth and watched Rocklys and her men march into the fort with the setting of the sun.

Mailshirts made a muffled leaden ringing when the drums and pipes fell silent. In the back of her mind Jenny heard Caerdinn’s harsh angry voice: A great gray snake of men, with banners on its spine, they were. Marching away to the south. Leaving us to our foes, and to poverty and ignorance afterward. Leaving us without law.

Rocklys rode ahead on her big stallion, and the smoky light made her helmet plumes and cloak dark as blood. John touched Jenny’s arm and pressed the spyglass into her hand. Through it she saw the man who rode at the Commander’s side.

Square-jawed, strong-built, his face was settled into lines of arrogance, the arrogance of money that has always bought unquestioning obedience. A fair match for Rocklys, if she had taken him. Merchants wanting to be aristocrats, she said in scorn … A maid of the House of Uwanë was perhaps the only thing he couldn’t buy. On his hair he wore an embroidered cap; gloves of embroidered leather protected his hands.

The man who’d taken Ian.

Jenny shut her eyes. She should, she knew, feel only pity for the man himself, whatever fragments of his consciousness might still remain. She’d seen what even small wights did to and with those they possessed.

But she could feel no pity. You arrogant, greedy bastard, she thought, knowing she was being unjust, for he must have been as hungry for craft as she. You heard the demon whispering in your dreams, promising power if you just did one simple rite…

Didn’t you know? Couldn’t you guess?

Or didn’t you want to know? Did you think you could control the situation, as you controlled all of your life before?

Her jaw ached and she realized her teeth were clenched. “There.” John nudged her. “Look.”

The column was interrupted for a space, where prisoners walked, hands bound up to wooden yokes set over their necks. Women and children mostly, with the alabaster-fair skin, coarse black hair, and low flattened cheekbones of the Iceriders. But nearer the front, where Rocklys and the southerner Caradoc rode side by side, two prisoners rode bound on horses, a boy and a girl.

Through the spyglass Jenny saw the silver chains, the sigils and wards that lashed their wrists to the saddlebows.

So John’s mother Nightraven must have been brought to Alyn Hold, a prisoner of Lord Aver’s spear.

Those, she thought, and not the protection of the farms, were the reason for Rocklys’ pursuit of the band.

As Yseult must have been Rocklys’ motive in convincing Jenny to seek Balgodorus, while Caradoc took Ian.

To found the Dragon Corps.

Only after the last of the army passed through the thick-planked double gate of the fort, and the gate shut behind it, did the two watchers move. Stealthy as hunters, they wriggled their way down the slope and into the trees, concealed under every ward-spell and guard and Word of Invisibility that Jenny could conjure around them.

“Where are they, anyway?” asked John, as he and Jenny worked their way through the undergrowth toward their camp. “I mean, it’s a bit of a trick to hide a full-grown dragon.” “Morkeleb doesn’t seem to have any trouble.”

Morkeleb awaited them in the deep hollow where they’d hidden the blankets and food they’d taken from Corflyn in departing, though Jenny could see no trace of any living thing. Then something whispered in her mind, and what had been a spiky growth of holly was suddenly revealed, as if by a mere shifting of perception, to be blacker, glossier, harder than holly ever grew. What seemed to be tree branches took on the shape of tall spines and the bristling armory of joints and wing bones and tail. Two flashes of will-o’-the-wisp resolved themselves within a thicket of saplings, and the fireflies that had bobbed there took on the curious unholy glitter of the dragon’s jewel-cold antenna lights. The smell of the pines and the water seemed to blow away, though there was no touch of wind, and the acrid, metallic stink they had veiled gleamed through like the blade of a concealed knife.

And so, Wizard-woman. Did you see your son?

“Ian doesn’t ride with them. But Rocklys has taken two prisoners, Icewitches, to add to Bliaud and poor Yseult. That means Caradoc must make slaves of four more dragons or has already done so. I don’t think Gareth and all the forces of his father can withstand a corps like that.” Jenny felt the heat of his anger again, rising through the accretions of shadow. Not of dragons, he said. And not if they are allied with the Hellspawn.

“Can you bear us south?” she asked. “Take us to Jotham, where Gareth mounts siege before the fortress of the Prince of Imperteng? From him we can gain access to the archives of the Realm and the University at Halnath. Surely there is something that speaks of demons.” Do not count upon even that to help you, Wizard-woman, said Morkeleb. Do you not know how it is among the Hellspawn? You, and cats, and whales, and ants, and every other being that has life: You are all beings of flesh in this world. And we, the star-drakes, we are beings of magic, beings unlike your flesh, bone unlike your bone… but still of this dimension, this plane of existence. We live and we die, and our magic is drawn from this fact.

The Hellspawn are Other. Each Hell, each world, each of those separate and several planes from which they come is Other, from ours and from one another as well. All power is sourced from the things that surround us: Moon and Sun, the patterns of the stars and the way trees grow, our very flesh and the beat of our blood. They have Things in their worlds that are not stars. They have Things in their worlds that are not heat or cold, and to strike flint and steel in one of them will not make flame, though in another perhaps it will. There is neither life nor death in some of those Hells, and in some there is, and in some there is something Else that has its own laws. Thus to do the great magic here they must work through humans who have that magic in their flesh, through dragons who are wrought of magic—through those things attuned to the patterns of power in this world.

There was silence. Jenny touched with her mind the kindling in the firepit, calling a small blaze to being. Though the sky would hold light for hours, it was inky-dark under the trees, and the damp close cold of the low ground rose about them. She unpacked the food while John went down to the spring. Morkeleb backed himself still farther into the dark woods, his thin bird-beak laid upon his claws, and it seemed to Jenny that for a time he ceased to be visible at all. “I don’t like it, Jen,” said John when he came back. “And I’ve been fair crippling meself tryin’ to find another way. But I think you’ll have to go back into Corflyn Hold tonight.” Jenny was silent, gazing into the fire. Thinking of Nightraven standing on the walls of Alyn Hold, gazing away toward the north on nights of storm. Of the two little Icewitches bound on their horses with silver chains. Ian running toward her through the poppies that carpeted Frost Fell in the spring, and John’s face in the morning sunlight as he held his newborn son. “And do what?” she asked softly.

“See the lie of the land.” John set down the dripping water-skin. “And that only. See who this Caradoc is when he’s at home, and how he and Rocklys get along these days. Any money she’s not twigged that it isn’t him anymore? She may have her doubts but not want to know it. It fair kills me to think Ian was in the fortress when we were there this afternoon, but he must have been. See if there’s anythin’ about the demon that would tell us what counterspells to use, always supposing we find counterspells. If there’s a book that says, ’Oh, yeah, Muckwort Demons make their victims turn three times clockwise in a circle before they fall asleep, and they can be exorcised by dandelion juice,’ we’re gonna feel like a fair couple of clots for not countin’ how many times Caradoc and Yseult and Bliaud turned in a circle, and which way they turned. “I don’t know what you’re going to do, love,” he added softly. “I’d go meself—since I’m of no use to Caradoc if he does catch me—but he’s sure as check got some kind of magic guard round the place and I’d never get past it. You can.”

“Morkeleb? I’ll go, but I will need all the help you can give me, to pass unseen. Will a demon be aware of me?”

Of you, Wizard-woman? Yes. Wind began to creep through the trees, a curious icy tugging, and beneath it the frightening undercurrent of heat that accompanies spells of transformation and change. They smell blood. They feel the presence of human minds and human souls through the roots of their teeth.

Leaves jerked and threshed on the trees. The fire in the pit leaned, flattened, stretching yellow fingerlets over the ground as if trying to creep forth from its prison. Rags of mist and smoke whirled among the tugging branches of the trees.

Only a few thousand of us made the journey from our home to this place, this world, to the Skerries of Light. We can ill spare the wisdom of their songs, and still less can we risk giving over those songs to those that dwell on the Other Plane.

The heat was suffocating, worse than the heat of age that periodically seized her flesh. The wind ripped at Jenny’s hair and clothing, freezing where it touched, but doing nothing to dispel the brimstone in the air.

They will be aware of you. It may be that in spite of all that I can do to turn their thoughts aside, they will be aware of me. Wizard-woman, stretch out your hand.

The wind ceased. Fog rose out of the ground, black and impenetrable. Night-sighted, Jenny was barely aware of John’s form beside her, and she saw by the way he reached out his hand that he was totally blind. She caught his groping fingers in hers, then extended her other hand, her left, to where Morkeleb’s silver eyes had gleamed in the dark.

Something flashed and whirled in the mist, and hard strong claws closed around her wrist, dug into her shoulder. She half-felt, half-saw the dark beat of wings near her face. It seemed no bigger than a peregrine but sinuous and glistening as a snake.

Though gripping thorns pricked her wrist, there was no weight on her arm at all.

Give me your name, Wizard-woman, the voice said in her mind, as once I gave mine to you when in the Deep of Ylferdun you saved my life.

And she spoke it in her mind. There was a dragon-name, which he had called out of her four years ago, when she had taken on dragon form and flown away with him from Halnath Citadel, but that was not the name she now spoke. Around the spine of that music were woven other memories: Caerdinn cursing her, and John’s hand lifting her hair; the lance of pain through her bowels when she bore Ian, and her laughter when lying in her bed in the house at Frost Fell, with her cats and her harp and the sunlight of a hundred summer mornings. The smell of roses. Autumn rain.

Pain in her wrist, then blood-heat on her arm. Wizard-woman, what do you see?

Her eyes changed. She saw John.

Bent nose, round spectacles silvered over with mist, the alien contours of his face. A different perspective, like a doubled vision …

The mists dissolved. Perfect, glistening, deadly as a tiny knife of chipped obsidian and steel, Morkeleb sat on her forearm, no bigger than a hawk, silver eyes infinitely alien in the dark. His voice was the same as it had always been, speaking in the abyss of her mind. Open your mind to me, he said. Empty your mind to my voice. If I do not return, at least you will have knowledge of what it is that I see.

He lifted his wings and, releasing her arm, rose like a scarf of black tissue on an updraft, hanging before her face.

What do you think dragons are made of, Wizard-woman? he asked. Does magic have a shape, or a size? Can the will be bottled in a flask?

Then he was gone into the dissipating vapors. Jenny settled herself beside the fire to wait.

She had been a dragon. She knew what Morkeleb meant when he told her to open her mind to his, for it was a thing of dragons: One did not have to look into a dragon’s eyes to hear its voice, or see what it saw. She waited, and her thoughts—which had circled a little around Nightraven, and Ian, and the old worn-weary track of her grief—settled, jewel-clear as a dragon’s, interested without love or grief. She was aware of John sitting by the fire, drawn sword across his knees. Aware that his face was half-turned away, watching her, but watching also the woods all around. She was aware of the forest, of the foxes creeping cautiously out, wondering if the dangers of evil heat and evil smell were gone; of the stupid, timid rabbits coming to feed. Of the smell of the pine-mast and the movement of the stars.

She saw Corflyn Hold from above, a quick glimpse of molten amber light cupped in lapis lazuli, and men moving about. Smoke and horses. Then gone.

Stronger to her nostrils came the smells of wood, dust, and mice; water and mold. She became aware of mouse-magic—she hadn’t even known such a thing existed—and the darker stench that was the magic of rats. Morkeleb’s spells, to keep even rodents from fleeing his approach and so alerting Caradoc.