Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (28 page)

She drew her hand back, her question answered.

“They kept the matter quiet because of the upheavals,” said Polycarp. “But yes. There were two gyre-killings here in the Citadel, and two recorded during that same time in Ylferdun Deep. One of those was after Lyth was taken prisoner, but when the Master’s men went through and smashed or burned everything in Lyth’s house, there were no more.” “So he used something in his house as a gate,” said Jenny.

“By what it says here”—John nodded to the four sheets of paper—“it seems to have been a glass ball floating in a basin of blood, though God knows what the neighbors said about the flies. Not that they’d say much to his face, I don’t suppose. But he says as how there were other demon gates, and that one of ’em lay in a sea-cave on the Isle of Urrate …” “Urrate?” Jenny looked up sharply. “That’s the sunken island—”

“Just north of Somanthus,” finished John. “Somanthus, as in where Caradoc hails from. Lyth—if it is Lyth—says that particular gate was blocked when Urrate sank in an earthquake, but it accounts for the things I saw comin’ out of the sea in me dream, and out of the well in Corflyn’s court. Anythin’ that’d hold water could be sorcelled into a gate.”

Morkeleb had crept down Jenny’s arm and now crouched on his haunches on the tabletop, his head weaving above the papers like a serpent’s, the diamond reflections of his antennae making firefly spots in the ochre gloom. He hissed, like a cat, and like a cat his tail moved here and there, independent of the stillness of his body.

“Sea-wights, Lyth calls them in his notes,” Polycarp said. “He doesn’t describe them—they weren’t the things that came to him out of the glass ball and the blood. And this is the only other mention I’ve ever seen of the Dragons of Ernine.”

“It doesn’t give Isychros’ name,” said John. “But it says here that ’an ancient mage’ enslaved dragons—no mention of wizards—by a bargain he struck with demons he summoned out from behind a mirror. But this is the most interestin’ thing.” He propped up his spectacles again and hunted through the manuscript. “Here we go: Demons are ever at war with one another, for the demons of one Hell will torment and devour the demons of another Hell, even as they torment and devour men. Thus the magic of the Hellspawn can be used, one against another.” He looked across at Morkeleb. “Had you ever heard that before?”

I had heard it, the dark voice of the dragon murmured in Jenny’s mind. The Hellspawn seek always to find ways into this world, for the hearts and the bodies of the living are to them as gold is to dragons, the medium of an art that gives them pleasure. They drink pain, as the dragons drink the music that dwells in gold. And I had heard also that the demons of one kind can— and do—drink the pain of the demons of another kind.

“Then that may be what the mages of Prokep did, to defeat the dragon corps. Not used human magic at all, but made a bargain with …”

The dragon’s antennae flicked forward, and his eyes were tiny opals, terrible in the gloom.

Do not think, Songweaver, to ride to the ruins of Ernine and seek behind the mirror of Isychros. It is a bad business to have any dealings whatever with the darkling-kind. They give no help without the payment of a teind in return, and the teinds they require imperil not only those who bargain but everyone whose lives they touch.

“Ernine?” Polycarp turned his head sharply. “No one knows where Ernine lay. The records speak of it, but—”

After the fall of the city to the dragons, it was destroyed, said Morkeleb. But later another city rose on its ruins. It was called Syn after the god that was worshiped there. “Syn? You mean Sine, the ruins where the Gelspring runs out of the hills?” Eagerness charged the Master’s voice. “That was Ernine? You’re sure?”

Morkeleb swung his head around, and again Polycarp had to look aside quickly, lest he meet the dragon’s eyes. Jenny saw the ember-glare of Morkeleb’s nostrils and felt the heat of his anger pass like desert wind through her mind. This is what comes, said the dragon, of making myself the size of a ratting dog; grubs whose memories barely compass a single round of the moon’s long dance with the sun ask if I am sure of cities that I saw founded, and laid waste, and founded and laid waste again. Pah!

Thoroughly embarrassed, Polycarp apologized, but Jenny barely heard. She had barely heard anything, beyond the words the magic of the Hellspawn can be used, one against another. Her breathing seemed to her to have stilled, and her heart turned cold in her chest. Ian.

Quietly, John laid a hand on her arm. His voice was a murmur in her ear. “He’s right, love.” She looked up at him quickly.

“Whatever we do to deal with Caradoc and his wrigglies, playin’ one tribe of demons off against another will only make it worse, for us and for everyone who comes after.” She looked aside. “I know.”

But through supper and into the night, reading the scrolls and tablets and books of the library of Halnath, she could not dismiss those words from her mind, nor the thought of Ian, a prisoner in his own body and in a sapphire in Caradoc’s strongbox. When she slept, the thought of him, the image of him, followed her down into her dreams.

In her dreams Jenny came to Ernine, the yellow city where the Gelspring ran out of the mountains, where orchards flowered in the fertile lands of the river’s loop. In her dreams she saw it as it was in the time of the mage Isychros and the heroes Alkmar the Godborn and Öontes of the singing lyre. She passed through the market that lay before the citadel hill and climbed the curved path to the palace of sandstone and marble, where the Queen’s ladies with their gold-braided hair wove cloth among the pillars.

It seemed to her that someone who walked at her heels asked her, “Did you ever wonder who this Isychros was, Pretty Lady? Where he lived, and what kind of a man he was? He was a prince of the royal house, you know. And his eyes were like bright emeralds that catch the sun.” When she turned to see who spoke there was no one there. Nevertheless, as she hurried on, Jenny felt a hand brush her arm.

She was afraid then and wanted John. But John lay asleep beside her, far away in their borrowed bed in Halnath Citadel, and she was here in Ernine, a thousand years ago, alone. She passed down shallow steps and saw the plastered stone blocks of the walls give way to the raw hill’s bones. Gazelles were painted on the plaster, the big black Royal gazelles with six-foot back-curving horns, the kind that were never seen close to Nast Wall anymore. Somehow she knew that herds of them roved within a few miles of the city walls. Close by, someone played the harp, a gentle tune that made her want to weep. As the hotness welled behind her eyes she heard a soft chuckle behind her, laughter at her weakness, and something more. She put the tears away. A corridor was cut in the rock, constellations painted on its ceiling. A comet hung among the stars, trailing its harlot’s hair. Curtains covered the corridor’s entrance, and others blocked it a few feet farther on; still more covered the door at the end, layer on layer. The round chamber beyond was draped with them, all save the ceiling, where the night sky again was painted, and the comet, brighter and colder than before.

The mirror was in the chamber. It was bigger than she’d thought it would be, five feet tall at least. It was wrought of the curious blue-pink opaline glass that one found in the oldest ruins of cities in the south, and what it was backed with she did not know. Whatever it was, it seemed to burn through the glass, so threads of steam rose from the surface, though when she came near there was no feeling of heat. The mirror’s sides were framed in soapy-looking silver-gray metal—it had a disturbing sheen in the dark. Curves and angles drew the eye in an unfamiliar fashion, as if to darkness previously unseen.

The flamelets of the bronze lamp that hung from the ceiling’s center doubled in the burning depths. Beneath them she saw reflected the table under the lamp, and the chair that faced the mirror across the table, and Jenny herself in her borrowed red and blue dress. Though she heard the chuckle of laughter again, close to her ear, the mirror reflected no one else. But someone said—or she thought someone said—Put out the lamps, Jenny. You know mirrors turn back light and blind those who look in them to all but themselves and what they think they know.

She reached with her mind and put out the lamps.

Then she saw, in the darkness, what crowded against the glass on the other side. Watching, and smiling, and knowing her name.

She awoke screaming, or trying to scream, muffled incoherent whimpers, and John shook her, pulled her out of her terror and her dreams. She clung to him in the darkness, smelling the comforting scent of his bare flesh and hearing his voice say softly, over and over, “It’s all right, Jen. It’s all right,” as his hand stroked her cheek.

But she knew that it wasn’t all right.

In the morning, after scrying deep and long in crystal, water, wind, and smoke for any sign of Rocklys’ army advancing beyond the Wildspae, she flew with Morkeleb south to the Seven Islands. Because they passed over the heart of the Realm, Jenny cloaked herself and the dragon in spells of inconspicuousness, something humans were better at than dragons; Gareth had problems enough. In the Wildspae Valley, and the green lands of Belmarie, where the Wildspae and the Clae joined, the farms were rich and the harvest ripening, and Jenny compared them to the Winterlands with bitterness in her heart. Then they passed over the sea to the six fertile islands that constituted the greatest wealth of the Realm, and the spine of gray rocks that marked what had been Urrate.

Morkeleb lighted among the broken pillars of a shrine, all that was left of Urrate’s acropolis.

Waves crashed barely a dozen yards below. Seabirds wheeled and yarked about their heads, and perched again on the lichen-cloaked shoulders of the Great God’s statue. Poppies and sea grass swayed in the wind. Jenny could see the gleam of marble for some distance under the dark of the sea, white as old bones.

The dragon rocked on his tall haunches, swaying his head back and forth above the waves balancing with wings and tail. Jenny kicked her feet free of the cable around his body, slid from his back, and settled herself in the chill sunlight. She closed her eyes, listening with the deep perceptions of the dragon-mind beneath the surge of the waters. Feeling, scenting, following Morkeleb’s mind deeper and deeper, among the waving leathery kelp forests and the shards of the city’s drowned temples and walls. Scenting for the stink of infection. But there was nothing. Above her she heard Morkeleb singing, stretching luminous blue music into the abyss where the sunshafts faded, and in time she heard music answer him. Pipings and hoonings, deep echoing throbs. With Morkeleb’s mind she saw shapes rising, black-backed, white-bellied, wise ancient eyes glittering in pockets of leathery flesh. Great fins stroked the water, guiding as Morkeleb used his wings to guide; great tails that could smash a boat thrust and drove. They all breached at once, fourteen slate-dark backs curving out of the sea, fourteen plumes of steam blown glittering in the sun. Then they rested on the surface, rolling a little, loving the warmth after the cold currents below, perhaps thirty feet from the rocks where the dragon sat, and the eldest of them asked Morkeleb why he had called.

Demons—Morkeleb framed them in his mind. Jenny, watching and listening, absorbed the images and the way the black dragon arranged them: different, very different from the dark voice that spoke to her in her mind. Long slow images of ugliness and hate, of bitter green magic like poison spreading in the water. Sickness, pain, blindness, death. Soul-drowning as a trapped porpoise drowns among the deep kelp. Dark rocks far down under the isle? Heat without light? Steam pulsing out into the sea?

The calves of the abyss replied. Not on Urrate but under Somanthus, far down where the western side of the isle fell away into a great deep: There was the burning gate. Dreams of wisdom for the taking. Dreams of power to summon at will the great warm shrimp-tides, and promise of new stories to tell, rich new songs beautiful and strange. Dreams rising to the men of Somanthus. A man used to walk on the shore to study the waves, or to learn the ways of the dolphins, or with a little sky-tube gaze at the stars. The whalemage Squidslayer did not know what to do, but it was clear, he said, that something must be done, lest greater ill befall. Will you come, Wizard-woman, and see these things?

She surrounded herself with a Summoning of Air and clung to the leather cable around his body as he slid from the rocks. The water was colder than she’d expected. Her hair floated behind her like the kelp, and the whalemages surrounded them, not ponderous at all in their element but weightless as milkweed and swift as birds. They passed through the avenues of the sunken city, where weeds reached up through windows of toppled houses and the marble door-guardians gazed sadly through masks of barnacles and snails. The deeps beyond were icy, and very dark. They did not go too near the abyss where the demons dwelled. Jenny could smell them nevertheless, feel them through the water, and her flesh crept on her bones with loathing and terror. Far down the endless cliff-face a kind of greenish light played around the rocks. On rock-ledges all the way down she could see the little glass shells that the sea-wights shed, and she thought she could see things moving, bloated and spiky, very different from the shapes they took in the upper world.

Chewing through the rocks, she heard Squidslayer’s thoughts in her mind, like slow silvery bubbles. All the underpinnings of Urrate, cut, eroded, dissolved. Years on years on years. Island falling, shutting dark within. Vast ecstatic sobbing of sea-wights at the deaths. And Jenny felt its echo, through the whalemages’ minds, the thunderclap of pleasure at devouring such terror and pain.

Morkeleb turned beneath her like an eel. Surrounded by the whales they gained the surface again, and the wind dried her clothing as they flew through gathering dusk to Jotham. Neither spoke. That night Jenny dreamed again of the vault below ruined Ernine, seeing the things that watched from the other side of the burning mirror. Waking alone and cold with sweat in her little tent, she rose and climbed the hill behind the camp in the warm summer darkness, until against the blue-black sky a blacker shape loomed. She lay down between his great claws and slept, and the dreams of the things behind the mirror left her in peace.