Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (2 page)

At the moment, Amayon was wearing the body of the dead Lady Trey.

It was the closest John came to being sick with sheer shock.

The blue eyes met his, unmistakably the demon's eyes. The red lips of the thoughtful, rather shy girl John had known curled in a lazy smile, daring him to speak.

“I'm told you refused to drink the water that was given to you this morning,” said the King's Treasurer, folding his chubby arms. Ector of Sindestray was built along the lines of a tree stump, clothed in the blue and white velvet of his House and made more square yet by an enormous set of Court mantlings that draped around him like an embroidered curtain. His gray curls were worn long, after the fashion of the oldest Houses in the Realm, and dressed as if for a State occasion. He smelled of scorched hair and pomade.

“I wasn't sleepy,” said John. There was no point now in husbanding his strength or reckoning chances for an escape in the light of the terrifying enlightenment about just which demon had taken over the body of the dead Lady Trey. He guessed what was coming, and despaired

Ector glanced across at Amayon, who was stroking the round belly of her pregnancy. When she had died, Trey had been carrying Gareth's second child. When the demon guide had betrayed John to Ector, he had worn the form of a slim, curly-haired boy of fifteen or sixteen—Ector had seemed at the time to believe the boy was his nephew, an illusion John guessed the demon had planted in the older man's dreams. Amayon caught John's eye and winked at him, then turned back to Ector and nodded. Ector gestured to the squad captain, and though John knew perfectly well that the outer door of the watchroom was barred, he hooked his bare foot around the booted one of the man behind him, tripped him, elbowed the next man holding the chains that bound him, and made a run for the door, all while the other members of the squad were picking up the clubs that lay on the watchroom table. There was nowhere to run and pretty much no hope of getting out of it at this point, but he couldn't go without a fight.

As the blows hammered him and his consciousness fractured away, he heard Amayon laugh.

The Demon Queen waited for him in that clouded gray borderland on the other side of the pain: Don't be a fool, she said.

I'm doin' me damndest not to be, he replied, and her pale mouth tightened. He had a dim awareness of being roped to something—a ladder?—and carried shoulder high, but it was all hazy now, and all he saw was her face.

You'll let others die, because of your stubbornness?

Lapsing entirely into dream he found himself momentarily in Gareth's room, windows opening onto the terrace of the Long Garden to admit the smoke of plague-pyres still burning beyond the palace walls. Gareth slept, a heavy and unnatural sleep, his graying, thinning hair scattered on the linen of the pillows and his face furrowed with concern even in sleep. Trey sat beside him, the demon-Trey, Amayon-Trey, robed in royal red and white with her small jeweled hands resting on her swollen belly. Another man was in the room, and John felt again that cold, sick jolt of shock, for he recognized Gareth's father, the old King Uriens. The King's mind and consciousness had been eroded, stripped away, reduced to childhood five years ago by the spells of the witch Zyerne, but now he moved briskly. The blue eyes that had seemed so puzzled during last summer's rebellion were bright, sparkling with demon fire. His lips curved under the fleecy amber curls of his beard. “Do you think he'll be surprised?” The King nodded down at his sleeping son. Trey's evil grin echoed his own.

“Why should he be? If old Bliaud the Wizard can wake a girl from the dead—not to speak of her sweet little son”—she patted her belly complacently—“why shouldn't he be able to wake old Grandpa from mere imbecility?” And she reached up to tweak the King's gold beard. “The people will be delighted. I'm sure after the rebellion of his cousin, and plague, and his precious Dragonsbane turning out to be in league with demons, Gareth will leap at the chance to step down from the throne and out of the council-chamber, and go back to collecting ballads.”

They both laughed, the ribald gloating mirth of demons, and John tried to cry out, as if under the muffling weight of sleep.

“They are my enemies, too, my love,” whispered the Demon Queen. She stretched out beside him on the ladder that the guards bore through the barred and guarded gate of the Old Palace, down the cobbled slope of the Queen's Lane, where the crowds trampled last week's snow to thin mush. The air was bitter on his flesh under the thin linen of the shift, and through it he could feel the heat of her flesh. “Folcalor and the one he feigns to serve, the Hell-Lord Adromelech, imprisoned me and mine in the Hell behind the Mirror a thousand years ago. What makes you think I would not do all in my power to avenge myself on them for that defeat? What makes you think I would not help you against them, if you will help me?”

Her fingers stroked his cheek, touched the silvery runes she'd written on his flesh when first he'd sought her help behind the Burning Mirror. The vision changed, and he saw his sons.

They stood on the wall of Alyn Hold in the Winterlands of the North, the place that was his fortress and his home. His heart leaped at the sight of Ian, whom he had last seen fragile and wasted, battered by the aftermath of demonic possession as Jenny had been battered. Ian was on his feet, and though thin and too serious for a thirteen-year-old, he looked well. Adric stood beside him, sword in hand—a boy's sword, but though only nine he handled it like a man—and they were looking down over the battlement. Behind them the roof of the kitchens had been burned, and marks of fire scored the stone walls. Men moved about outside the walls, bandits, besieging the Hold as it had been besieged many times since the power of the Kings had waned in the North. But there was something else in the smoke that wreathed the burning village of Alyn, something fearful that scuttled like a huge rat among the smoldering houses. Something that defied all John's efforts to watch.

“Can you see it?” Ian whispered, and his young brother shook his head.

“It spoke to me last night, though,” breathed Adric. “Spoke in a dream. Said I should kill you, and run down and open the gates. I told it to go bugger itself. It did.” The boy looked queasy. He was John's son, in his red-brown coloring, and even more the grandson of old Lord Aver, stocky and barrelchested already, though like the black-haired and blue-eyed Ian, he had John's thin-bridged curve of nose. “But it still kept looking at me, and laughing; waiting for me to get my sword and kill you. Only I knew even then that you wouldn't really die.”

“No,” said Ian quietly. “No. And that's what it's waiting for.”

One of the guards bearing the ladder stumbled; John felt the cold again, and heard the crowd shouting, their voices bouncing off the walls of the tall houses around the market square. Looking up, he saw the cold gray of the birdless winter sky.

Then the sky turned to darkness, the darkness beneath the earth. Something in the smell of the wet stone, coal smoke, and cooking thick with grease spoke to him of the Deeps of the Gnomes. Ylferdun, he thought. The Deep beneath Nast Wall. Its gates lay a half-day's walk from the King's palace in Bel, one of the great strongholds of the Gnomes in the West of the World.

The place he had gone to five years ago, to fight the dragon Morkeleb, with such curious results.

He smelled blood, too, and the sulfur-stink of blasting powder. Through the Hell-Queen's spells he saw Jenny in the darkness, broken and bleeding in a hollow of the stones. Morkeleb the Dragon was somewhere near—he knew this as one knows things in dreams—but the black dragon had been trapped like her when the gnomes had blasted the mine tunnel.

She is dying, said the Demon Queen. The gnomes shot her with arrow poison. This, too, was the work of Adromelech and his minions. None knows she is there but the demons … and now you.

John's mind cleared, and he heard again the shouting of the crowd. He was bound to the stake—he'd been dimly aware of the six guards doing it, though it had felt like someone else's body through the cloudy horrors of his visions. The cords cut into his arms and ankles and throat, and the air was ice-water cold on his flesh and the raw skin of his scalp. Ector of Sindestray was reading the charges, savoring each with the morbid relish of a doomsayer who has been proven right. “He has trafficked with demons.…”

Even had he been inclined to, John couldn't very well argue with him.

It was to defeat this other lot of demons, see.…

Who would believe that, except Gareth stupefied in his crimson chamber? And maybe the Master of Halnath, wherever he was. But the Master of Halnath, the scholar-lord Polycarp who was Gareth's cousin, had voted also for John's death, knowing the things that had been done in the past by those who dealt with demons.

It was to save Jen, and me son; to keep them from being possessed by demons who would use their wizardly powers.…

But those who called upon demons to aid them frequently did so out of the best of motives.

Such as now.

It was Amayon, bright-clothed in garnet velvet and sparkling with jewels and malice, who handed Ector the torch which he drove into the kindling.

At this distance John couldn't see clearly, and the crowd beyond that flame-like crimson form was only a blur. But he heard their voices, wild over the cracking of the fire. Furious voices, relishing as Ector did the vindication of themselves. They'd been told that the plague was his doing, or the doing of the demons he'd worked for, and they were doubly angry, for there had been a time when he'd been popular in Bel. Dragons-bane— the only man living who had slain a dragon. He had fought the demon-possessed dragons that flew down at the command of the demon mage Caradoc; he had defeated them.

“… pawn of the Hellspawn,” Ector was shouting above the rushing crackle of oil-soaked tinder. “Author of the plague that has swept this land …”

The smoke billowed thick and greasy. The heat was suffocating, and in the smoke she took shape. Beautiful and hideous, wrought of fume and fire, she held out her hands to him, waiting for him to call her name.

I won't. He closed his eyes—not that that did a lot of good; he knew she was still there—and turned his face aside. Airless, all-encompassing heat and pain. I won't. I will die, and Jen and the boys and all the Realm die with me.…

Someone screamed.

He thought, Do they see her? and someone else took up the shriek. More howls—terror, panic. Wind bent the flame around him, whirled the smoke, and he opened his eyes and saw a dragon, huge, fifty feet or more and with a wingspan twice that, silver-streaked and tabbied with black and opalgreen blazing eyes. It was almost on top of him already, and he could do no more than stare up at it in shock as the silver claws lashed down, caught him up, stake, ropes, and all, scattering burning hunks of wood and hay over the heads of the trampling crowd. The beating shadow of wings, the flash of the winter sunlight as they rose above the city's walls and the bitter, freezing cold after the fire's heat. With his hands still tied, John felt a stab of pure dread that the dragon would drop him—Fat lot of difference that would make, given the day I've had so far—and turning his head he saw the city fall away, mossy ice-slicked roofs and bare trees; city fields and the silver loop of the River Clae, shining in the Magloshaldon woods. Brown fields, then brown steppe, then gray sheets of cloud that enveloped them like damp muslin and cold that shredded his bones.

The dragon carried him tucked up under its breast, and without the heat of its flesh John thought he probably would have slipped away into death from the cold, Which I wouldn't have bet two coppers on last night …

Weightless exhaustion. Consciousness that came and went, slipping away to drop him suddenly back to an awareness of hanging suspended in damp gray clouds, over a barely glimpsed landscape of formlessness below. He was only marginally conscious when the dragon descended to a gray-yellow desolation of sand and scattered boulders, of flint hills without vegetation and of twisting scoops of pebble-filled stone that had been watercourses long ago. These he saw only dimly, for the gray light was fading, and his eyesight wasn't good enough to discern details. On a wide plateau in the desolation stumps of pillars marked where a city had stood. Crumbled foundations and lines of broken walls surrounded a stone platform two hundred feet by nearly five, a square rock island in the sand—even he couldn't miss it.

The dragon balanced in the air like a kite and, reaching down, laid John on the ground before the remains of the plat-form's wide stair. Evening turned the vast sky yellow, lilacstained and fading. John felt the stone under him chill as snow through the torn rags of his shift, and knew the night would be brutal. He couldn't imagine where he was, or how far they had come:

Please don't make me walk home.

Still hovering weightless above him, the dragon extended its swan-like neck and with a bill like Death's scythe bit through the ropes that bound him, the chains that fastened his wrists. Then it ascended with no more flurry than a cloud of smoke, wheeled on its silken wings, and flew away toward the west.

Aching with cold, with bruises, with hunger and exhaustion, John raised himself to one elbow and shouted, “CORVIN!” His voice echoed hoarse in the emptiness, not loud enough to startle rabbits, had there been any. The ancient authorities—Dotys, and Gantering Pellus, and others who'd written of dragons—said that to name a dragon's true name would call it, though these true names were in fact airs of music.…

Save a dragon, slave a dragon, went the ancient grannyrhyme: To rescue it from death put it in bondage to its rescuer.

John had never quite known whether this applied to ordinary people—he'd only ever seen wizards do it—and he prayed his guess about the dragon's name was correct. “Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, by your name I charge you, come back!”

He saw the flash of distant silver in the last western sunlight, and the glittering shape of the dragon returning. But before it reached him he fainted from exhaustion and cold.