Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (27 page)

He was the Lord of the House of Uwanë, raised to war; Gareth had only to tell him which way to ride. The men followed him gladly, crying out his name, and told themselves afterward that he was himself again or nearly so.

Gareth shook his head. The greenish pallor was fading a little from his cheeks. “There’s always border raiding going on,” he said. “Prince Tinán claims his lands stretch all the way down to Choggin, though they never were farmed by anybody before our people started to settle there. It’s been owned by the Thanes of Choggin and their people for more generations than you can count. And of course now everything’s complicated by blood-feuds. No, just the tunic,” he added, as Jenny brought fresh clothing from the press. “And the mantlings—those green ones—and the hood. I have to change and get out there for the victory celebration.” “That was victory?” It had not had the look of victory to her.

“We have to call it one.” Gareth pulled off his tunic, spattered with gore, and reached for the fresh one. He flinched as he handled the soiled cloth, fingers avoiding the blood. “Thank you,” he added, as she gave him a cloth to wash with. “Dear King of the Gods, I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish I could just … just lie down.” He swallowed hard. “Father’s the Pontifex of the Realm, but I have to be there because he forgets. And truly, if there isn’t some show of strength against them, the fell-men only push harder. It isn’t …”

He hesitated, his thin height drooping over her, gray eyes blinking nakedly, for it does not do for a commander to appear in spectacles before the assembled armies of his Realm. His shoulders, under the purple wool of the tunic, had lost some of the weediness Jenny had first known, and his arms had strengthened from diligent sword practice, but there was a terrible sadness in his face. “I wish it wasn’t like this,” he said softly. Then he turned away and made a business of fastening his sword-belt, stamped in gold and set with cabochon emeralds; of adjusting the elaborately dagged and ribboned mantlings that spread like a butterfly’s plumage over his back and made his shoulders seem wider. “I wish it was all as easy as it was when we only had to defeat and drive out a dragon. Like all the ballads, about Alkmar and the other heroes of old. I wish …”

He half-turned back to her, gloves of bullion and velvet and agate in his hands, and she saw what he wished in the weary grief of his eyes. She smiled, as she would have smiled at Ian, encouraging him to go on when the road was difficult.

“I’m glad you’re here.” He put his arm around her again in a bony hug. “I’ve missed you.”

But as Gareth passed through the tent doorway for the procession to the altar of the Red God of War, Jenny sat on the bed again, the memory of her son piercing her heart. He was alive. Trapped in a jewel, as this boy was trapped in the gem of kingship, his will no longer his own.

She pressed her hand to her mouth to stop her tears.

“Shall I bring you gold?” she asked Morkeleb later. She lay against the curve of the dragon’s foreleg, a harp she had borrowed from Gareth resting on her shoulder. In its music, and in the magics the star-drake had shown her, she was able for a time to rest from the nightmare of Ian’s enslavement, to put from her mind Caradoc’s grim little smile as he thrust the jewel into the strangling Icewitch’s mouth. “There is gold in the camp. I can get Gareth to contribute a few golden plates and cups, so you can have the music of the gold.”

I am aware, said Morkeleb’s dark slow voice above her, of the gold in the camp Wizard-woman. He arched his long neck, and the night-breeze that trailed down from Nast Wall stirred the gleaming ribbons of his mane. There are days when I am aware of little else. I saw what gold could do to me four years ago, when the sorceress Zyerne trapped me through the gold in the gnomes’ deep. Sometimes it seems to me that if I accept even a cup or a chain, or a single coin, the longing for gold would conquer me, and I would not stop until I had devastated these lands.

The glowing bobs of his antennae drew fireflies from the twilight woods, and the voice that spoke in her mind had a strangeness to it, as a man’s would have, did that man grope for words. But Morkeleb never groped for words.

Gold laces the rocks of the Skerries of Light, Wizard-woman. Those of us who dwell there breathe our magic into that gold and bask and revel in the wonder that chimes forth. As we travel from world to world, gold is not the only thing we seek, but it is one of the things. When we come to a place that has gold, we remain a long while.

On the Last Isle, there is no gold. I find that I think differently away from its presence, and meditations become possible to me that were not even conceivable before. This was something that the Shadow-drakes told me, years ago. They said that to become one of them one must put gold aside. I did not see why it was necessary that I should, and so I did not. But after Zyerne and the Stone in the heart of Ylferdun Deep made me a slave, I thought again. He fell silent, the run of his thoughts sinking down below words, like the heartbeat of the sea. Finally he said, The Shadow-drakes said also that they gave up their magic, as well as gold. This I do not understand. Magic IS the thing of dragons. Without magic, what would I be? Each night, and many times during each day, Jenny scried for sight of John. Frequently she saw him in the great library of Halnath, a maze of chambers and shelves that had been a temple of the Gray God lifetimes ago. Sometimes she saw the Dragons-bane with the Master of Halnath in the Master’s private study, a round chamber whose walls were lined with books and with lamps of pierced work, scrolls and tablets and books and bundles of pages spread out between them on the table. But sometimes, late in the night, she saw him alone, sitting on the floor, surrounded by volumes or scattered handfuls of notes in unreadable old courthand. Candles stood fixed in winding-sheets of drippings on the shelves or the floor, their light outlining his gleaming spectacles and making shadows in the quiet set of his mouth. Once she saw him press thumb and forefinger to the sides of his beaky nose, eyes closed and face still, as if even in solitude he would show no one what he felt.

In the daytimes more often John and the Master were with the gnomes of Ylferdun Deep, who had for centuries maintained close ties with the Master and the university. Occasionally these glimpses were fragmented or obscured by scry-wards, for the exquisite stone chambers in the Deep of Ylferdun were guarded like those of Tralchet. She recognized Balgub, Sevacandrozardus the Lord of the Deep of Ylferdun; and others, too, of the gnome-kind, engineers by the way they looked at the drawings and diagrams John unrolled before them. They shook their heads and fingered their heavy, polished stone jewelry, and John hurled his diagram on the floor and stormed from the room. Later, she saw him half-naked and covered with grime in a deserted courtyard of Halnath Citadel, checking over the metal shell of a half-built Urchin. So they must, she thought, have come to a compromise. They guarded alloys and engines and secrets jealously, but dragons were dragons.

One of the engineers was with him now, a tiny gnome-wife whose vast cloud of smoke-green hair was pinned up in spikes tipped with opal and sardonyx. She pointed out something in the coldly glittering engine and touched a crank. John shook his head. He asked about something, and held up his fingers to demonstrate an item the size of a gull’s egg. A hothwais, Jenny guessed, charged with some form of energy. The engineer glanced at the two gnomes with them—lords of high rank, whose jewels were even more ostentatious than hers—and all shook their heads again.

John gave up, disgusted, and climbed into the interlocking double wheels of the steering cage.

He hooked his feet into position and grasped the steering bars, and said something, gesturing, to the gnomes. The engineer patted the air reassuringly with her little white hands. John yanked off the brake.

If it was power John was concerned about, he could rest easy on that score. The Urchin, which had a dozen small wheels instead of the four of the original design, leaped away like a racehorse from the starting-post, John clinging to the steering-bars with an expression of startled horror and the gnomes racing behind.

John caught at a lever. By the way it simply gave, Jenny guessed at a serious design flaw. The Urchin whirled like a mad bull for the courtyard wall, and John twisted at the steering bars sending it smashing into the gate instead. The gate crashed open in splintering gusts of wood; the Urchin rolled down the ramp beyond into the dairy yard, milkmaids and cows and chickens scattering in all directions. It crashed through the wooden water trough, hit a dropped dung fork just right, and sent it pin-wheeling through the air; John flung his weight against the steering cage in time to avoid a barrow full of milk buckets and then, with the Urchin headed full-bore for the dairy-house itself, wrenched the cage with all his strength as if to turn.

The Urchin rolled, flipped up on its back with its twelve wheels spinning crazily in the air, and slid into the midden piles, with John hanging upside-down in the cage. Even after the thing came to a stop, half-buried in dung and soiled straw, the wheels continued to churn. John calmly unhooked his feet from the straps and turned in a slow somersault from the bent steering cage to sink knee-deep in muck. The gnomes ran up to join the ring of children, dogs, dairymaids, scullery help, and guards and the still enthusiastically whirring Urchin. John wiped the slime off his face and adjusted his spectacles.

Jenny could read his lips as he said, “You’re right; works fine. Fix the brake, though.”

“Which is as well,” she said, when she told Morkeleb of it later. Another evening, after another day of waiting, another day of scrying landmarks to the north and finding that she still could see them, which would be impossible when Rocklys’ legions approached. Though she would not use her magic against the soldiers of Imperteng—and indeed, Gareth never asked it of her—she did this for him and also laid spell-wards and guards on the new fortifications his men were building on Cor’s Bridge and the dugouts.

With the coming of evening Jenny’s anxiety for Ian always grew. To assuage it she had climbed the hogback ridge behind the camp and sat gazing out over the slow-slanting smoke of the cookfires into the light-drenched distance of fading woodlands and shining streams, her fingers finding almost unthinking solace in the ancient tunes summoned from Gareth’s harp. Old ballads and old tears, the laments of ladies long dead for lords whose names were forgotten. Pain and sweetness rolled together like a southern candy. Darkness filled with the promise of light. In time, the dragon had come.

“Spells of some kind must be laid on the Urchins,” she said at the conclusion of her tale, “if they’re to withstand the magic of the demon mages. The magic of the gnomes is different from that of humankind. It may serve …”

It is not different. The dragon shifted his hindquarters and scratched like a dog at the cable of braided leather he had begun to wear about his body, just forward of the wings. Different to you, yes, as an ass differs from a horse, or a chicken from a hummingbird. But to a demon they are the same. And such a demon as I think these are will breathe them aside, as a child breathes away the flame of a candle.

Sometimes she watched the affairs of Alyn Hold through her crystal; called the images of Adric and Mag while the boy trained in weapons and the girl plagued her nurse and John’s aunts half to death, slipping out to be with her friends or to rig elaborate experiments with pulleys and pendulums in the hay barns. At such times the pain was the worst, for the children were deep embedded in the pattern of her life, and it was hard to be away from them. Ian she tried and tried to see, using all the methods that Morkeleb could teach her. She knew that if she succeeded it would only hurt her worse, but still she made the attempt. Nor would she put it by with failure, but spent weary nights at it, until she fell asleep to the dawn-callings of the birds. Then one evening she summoned John’s image in the crystal and saw that he’d tied a red ribbon through the epaulet of his disreputable old doublet. She said to Gareth, “I have to go. He must have found something.”

“I thought these all were burned.” Polycarp of Halnath unlocked the inner door of his study, revealing a secret chamber, furnished only with a chair, a small table over which a lamp hung, and two shelves of books, each volume chained to a ring in the wall. He cast a nervous glance at Morkeleb, who had reduced himself in size and perched like a jet gargoyle on Jenny’s shoulder. Morkeleb turned his snakelike head and returned his gaze: the Master quickly averted his eyes. “I came across them in a volume of Clivy.” John crossed to the table and lowered the lamp on its counterweighted chain. “Clivy’s the world’s prize idiot on the subject of farming and from what I read of this book he knew even less about women— it’s called Why the Female Sex Must Be Inferior to the Male— but it was one I’d never read before. These were stuck in the middle.” Four sheets of papyrus lay on the table, tobacco-colored with age and cracked down the center where they had been folded.

“As far as I can guess from the date of the handwriting,” said Polycarp, closing the door behind them, “those have to have been written by Lyth the Demon-caller. He was a priest of the Gray God here at the time of the Kin-wars. The Master at the time had him carved up alive for trafficking with demons, and all his books and notes were thrown into the same fire with the pieces. According to the catalogs that particular volume of Clivy was one of the original manuscripts in the library, so it would have been there then.”

“There was any amount of dust on it,” added John, and perched on a corner of the table. “No surprise, considerin’. If I had incriminating notes about me, Clivy’s where I’d stick ’em.” “And did this Lyth traffic with demons?” Jenny touched a corner of the papyrus. Caerdinn had taught her three or four styles of writing, including the runes of the gnomes as they were used in Wyldoom and in Ylferdun, but the old man’s own scholarship had been grievously limited. A word or two of the jagged script leaped clear to Jenny’s perusal—“gate” and “key” she knew, and “erlking,” a word sometimes used for the Hellspawn in the Marches. But more than those, she felt the paper itself imbued with a darkness, as if it had been in a room thick with the smoke of scorching blood.