Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (33 page)

But he had made a bargain, and when Jenny said, “I am done. The room is as clean and as safe as I can make it,” he stood up and matter-of-factly took up the butchering knife he'd brought in with him. Caradoc watched his approach with cynical calm, and in Jenny's mind she heard a whisper:

Remember, my girl, a curse is on the one who smashes the moonstone. A curse of ill fate and dying, and all his loved ones dying with him. You know how strong a source is the death of a mage. And I assure you, if the moonstone ends up buried or locked in a strongbox or thrown in the sea, believe me I'll scream for Folcalor to come fetch me.

And Jenny said to him, It takes a traitor to fear treachery everywhere he looks.

In her mind, Caradoc laughed. Gods save me from a good man doing what he thinks is his duty, girl. There's no treachery he'll stick at.

John and Jenny had both assisted at enough pig slaughterings and deer hunts to find the moonstone within the corpse quickly and easily. If Caradoc felt anything, or thought anything, when they dug through the frozen flesh, he gave no sign of it; Jenny wondered if he had withdrawn that portion of his senses, or whether the dead meat was simply too cold to be anything but numb. John washed the stone in a pail of herbed well-water before seating it in the egg-shaped chamber among the pulleys and wheels that controlled the robot's limbs, and closed the tiny latches.

Then he and Jenny rinsed their hands and arms, shivering in the water's cold, and John dragged sledge and corpse and chair into the storeroom next door again. A coffin and winding-sheet waited there, to make the poor remains fit for burial once spring warmth thawed the ground. Afterward he came back and stood by the forge's outer door, listening to the howling winds of the night as Jenny called back the power from the corners of the room and dispersed the magic of the wards. The thick tallow work-candles had burned low in their sockets by then, amid brown winding-sheets of dribbled wax. Shadow clung around the massive trusses of the roof-beams like cobweb, and loomed across the rough-cast plaster of the walls in distorted echoes of anvil, saw, and hanging racks of tools.

In the midst of it all, in the cleared space beyond the forge, the robot sat, a curious and monstrous shape, like a great insect. The pincers and the hand, rising up out of its center, extended stiff as the arms of a corpse. On top of the egg-shaped talisman chamber the voice-box with its many tuning-pegs gleamed dully of polished wood, mute and sinister. Between the chinks of the talisman chamber's lattice, the moonstone glinted, like a malignant eye.

But all was silent. After his effort at charging the trapbottle with Folcalor's name, Caradoc was too weary, his powers too drained, to make the fine-balanced wheels turn or to set in motion the pulleys and pistons of the robot limbs. Wrapping herself in her plaid for the dash across the snowchoked court to the kitchen, Jenny turned back to regard the thing, remembering her own days of imprisonment, helpless within a jewel.

Remembering the shattered crystal fragments that had littered the temple hill in Ernine.

At least she had known, in the time of her imprisonment, that her body still lived. That there was hope to return to it, even a desperate hope against terrible odds.

Her hand slid into John's, and felt the flesh of his strong fingers icy cold. “I never said thank you,” she whispered. “For saving me as you did. For driving the demon out. For letting me return to my body again, even ravaged as it was. For doing all you did.”

He pushed her plaid back, to ruffle her barely grown hair and kiss her forehead. “They never do say, in the legend, whether the Sleepin' Princess wanted to be waked from her dreams or not, love. Maybe they were better dreams than her life had been, an' the first thing she did comin' out of 'em was to slap Prince Charmin's handsome face for him.”

“As I did?” Jenny put up her hand and laid it along his cheek, bristly with the fine, rusty stubble that was beginning to powder gray.

“We all do as we must, love.” His lips brushed hers. “I'm just glad you're back. I'll keep this,” he added, more loudly, holding up the silver bottle on the end of the red ribbon he'd tied around its neck, and closed the door between them and the thing in the forge. “It's a sennight yet, till the Moon of Winds,” he said more quietly. “If Morkeleb comes in the next day or two, we should be in Prokep well in time. One way or another we'll get this into Adromelech's hands, though Caradoc's right: It'll take some gie wise bargainin' not to come to grief ourselves.”

Jenny would have spoken. But John laid a hand on her lips and, pulling his doublet close around him, opened the door into the whirling night. “Aunt Rowe said she'd have a bath sent up to our room for us,” he said. “I think we deserve it. Let's hope the water's still hot.”

With an end of her plaid wrapped over John's shoulders, they leaned and groped and stumbled their way across the courtyard to the lights of the kitchen, barely to be seen in the mealy scour of the snow. But Jenny could not rid her mind of the black spiky shape of the robot, crouching in the dark blacksmith shop. After bathing, and washing John's back, and lying together in the curtained warm dark of the bed, she dreamed of it: dreamed that the white moonstone eye watched her still.

Before John was awake, Jenny rose. The bedchamber was nearly as dark as the night before, though the innate sense of time that wizards must develop—if they are to source power from where the sun stands in the sky and from the phases of the moon—told her it was morning, an hour when a month ago the sky would have been pitchy black.

The wind still groaned, that frigid northern storm-wind that flailed the Winterlands six months out of twelve: wind which had, two centuries ago, transformed the sweet-blooming heart of the Realm to a wasted backwoods province that not even the Kings thought it worthwhile to hold. The small stone room, its walls covered in smoke-darkened winter hangings that stirred uneasily with the drafts, was warm near the hearth and no place else. The bath and towels and jars of soap and oils remained before the banked embers, and on her way downstairs Jenny put her head in at the kitchen, to ask Aunt Rowe to get Bill to carry them away.

Then she wrapped her plaids around her again, and crossed to the smithy.

Generally the big doors of the workshop stood open, or were only latched against the wind. But when John and Muffle had started work on the robot, John had had a bolt added, and had looked out one of the padlocks his father had traded for from the gnomes. At Jenny's touch it opened, and she slid back the iron bolt.

The low-vaulted stone room was dark. Its shuttered windows held in the heat, and admitted only grayish slits of light. Around the iron fire-bell the ashes in the forge radiated a dense white warmth. Last night when they'd passed Muffle in the kitchen—the blacksmith trying to pretend he'd been sitting there since they'd sent him away, and not keeping unobtrusive guard in the woodshed—John had warned him not to enter the smithy until Jenny had seen the place first. On this icy morning the big man was probably having a comfortable lie-in with Blossom.

Jenny stepped quickly through the door and closed it behind her. She did not need light to see the robot. It seemed to her that shadow lay thicker about it, that the heat of the forge did not penetrate into that end of the room.

“Caradoc?”

The robot moved.

Laboriously, painfully, one of the legs flexed. The cables creaked as they drew through pulleys, pistons grated as they rose. The wheels squealed, a horrible sound. The high kneejoint lifted, then fell as the limb straightened; then the next, and the next. Testingly, as a man will test broken fingers when they first come out of splints. From the gut strings of the voice-box came a deep humming, that scaled abruptly up into a furious insectile whine.

The metal hand—twice the span of a human one—curled in a clumsy half-fist, then spread out wide. The pincers touched the tips of their metal crescent, and gaped with a brittle screech of ungreased rivets.

Then with a mad, buzzing snarl of voicebox strings the robot lunged at her. It jounced across the uneven brick floor with the horrible speed and gruesome, scuttling motion of a bug, wooden feet scrabbling and knocking. Jenny leaped back and out the door, slammed it after her and sent the bolt crashing into place. She heard the robot smash into the thick oak planks, heard the squishy leathern squeak of its feet as it backed for another run, then the rattling, squeaking cacophony of attack again. The whine of its artificial voice boomed eerily from the soundbox, inarticulate, roaring, and at the same time Jenny heard Caradoc's voice shouting at her, shouting in her mind, like the voice in a dream.

Bitch! Cheat! Hellspawn whore! The planks of the door started at the impact of hundreds of pounds of iron, and there was a crashing sound, as if a bench had been kicked or flipped against the nearest wall.

Cheated me! Cheated me! Put me in prison! Bitch, bitch, you and your dunghill bullyboy pimp!

Caradoc, she shouted at him, Caradoc …!

But he was beyond listening, beyond framing words. The bolt jumped and jiggled as she slipped the padlock's crooked arm through the hasp. Spells of pain, of sickness, of blindness, of cramp flapped against her, ineffectual as moths on a glazed window, and the screams of the trapped wizard's rage redoubled in her mind as she flicked those crazed spells aside. Jenny pressed against the door, hearing the crash and clawing within, while over her consciousness sluiced the raw sewage of wrath and indignation and self-pity.

Cheat, cheat, may you both die! Would that Folcalor had used my hands to choke you to death!

More helpless whifflings of pain and ill luck, which whirled into the air and dissipated like a flatulent stink. She felt spells paw at the lock, but it held. Even had it not, she doubted the heavy iron could have been maneuvered out of the hasp that held the bolt. Jenny thought, It takes all the magic that he's capable of mustering, only to move his limbs.

And maybe even that isn't enough.

You call this a bargain? he screamed at her, trapped mind shrieking into hers. You call this LIFE, that you're offering me? Mute, nearly blind … I've been trying all night to reach out into the rest of the Hold, to hear, to sense, to know what's going on. Mumbling, confusion, clamoring far off … Is this what you think I'm worth? Is this the reward you give me, for putting Folcalor into your hands? Is this all you rate me, ME, Caradoc of Somanthus?

What would you have, then, Caradoc of Somanthus? Jenny pressed her thoughts against the red raging stream of his fury. In her mind she could almost see him, for she had been where he was now, conscious of the iridescent lattices of the moonstone around him, as if he stood in a chamber of crystal, seeing the consciousnesses of others outside. Another corpse, and another, to stagger about in the snow until you rot? How long do you think you could keep that up, before your powers failed you utterly or Folcalor's servants found you? What John gave you was the best he had to give.…

Your pitiful fancy-man cheated me, as I'm told he cheated the Demon Queen herself! Best forsooth! The best he had to give is his son, his son's body and his son's magic … yes, and why not? What has that worthless brat ever done of his own volition? What good could he be? Aversin owed me—still owes me! After what I've done …

What you've done you did knowing exactly what you were offered.

Faugh! There was another crash in the smithy, and the hard crash of metal striking stone. The anvil going over, Jenny guessed. Muffle would be furious. I knew nothing! Through the closed oak door Jenny heard the roaring boom of the voice-box that Caradoc had not yet learned to control. This—this THING is a deadweight, a useless chunk of iron! The human body, even dead, has some magic, some vibration, ever in its marrowbones. This thing is not human, never was human. It has no eyes to see, nor ears to hear.…

You're aware enough of where I stood to spring at me, returned Jenny. I notice you have no trouble finding things to knock over.

Bitch! He screamed at her again, and more iron crashed against the door. Hag! Slut! You owe me! You all owe me! I deserve more than this!

The soft tread of boots in the sheltered porch—audible to Jenny's ears, even above the moaning of the winds—made her turn her head, though she recognized John's stride. He'd shaved, and wore one of Aunt Rowe's knitted tunics under his much-battered black leather doublet, a brown-and-white winter plaid wrapped around him for added warmth. “Caradoc,” she answered the lift of his eyebrow, though it was quite obvious what was going on. “He says he deserves more than you have given him.”

“We all deserve more than the bodies that trap us, Caradoc,” said John, raising his voice to carry through the door. “We all deserve more than a hundredweight and a half of meat that has to be fed and kept warm; that drives us to do the damn-all stupidest things when it needs to seed itself, and tells us we're more special than the next man when there's not enough of somethin' to go around. And when all's said in the end none of it does any good, for it's still gonna die on us, no matter who we kill or what we do to prevent it. An' those around us are gonna die, too.”

“He isn't listening, John,” Jenny said quietly, information that was scarcely necessary in the face of the roars, the crash of breaking benches and bins of charcoal hurled and smashed, the vicious clatter of iron limbs against the door. In her mind she could hear Caradoc shouting, Don't fob me off with your puling philosophy, you bumpkin nitwit! I've read everything worth reading on the subject and know more than you even imagine exists!

And the crashing continued, like the fist of an enraged child.

“Can he set fire to the building?” Jenny asked softly.

John thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “Muffle banked the fire pretty good, after we were finished,” he said. “To get it goin' again needs a fine touch with kindlin', an' gentle blowin'. If Caradoc pulls down the forge itself it'll just go out. He hasn't lungs, an' if he did have, that hand isn't near as mobile as a human one, for all it was as fine as I could make it.”