Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (34 page)

Jenny flinched, remembering her own rage and sorrow at summer's end, immediately after she had slain Caradoc's body, and the scarring from the steam-burns had crippled her hands.

I was the lord of the dragons corps! Caradoc screamed in her mind. I mastered them, through life and death! I rode in triumph at the head of the most feared force in the world. I subdued and defeated every mage in the west of the world.…

No, thought Jenny, though she did not project the thought into the maddened wizard's mind. No, you're forgetting. That was Folcalor who did and was all those things. Using your body, as you wish to use my son's.

“I'm that sorry for him,” John went on. “I really am. I think he expected it would be sort of like the robots in the movies I saw. That it'd have balance, an' deftness—all those other things it takes a human mind five or seven or ten years to work up to, when it's born into a little lump of pink flesh called a baby—that it'd have 'em right away. It's got to be hard.”

Only now, under the influence of the gentle magic of Ian and Miss Mab, was Jenny beginning to regain mobility in her fingers, and their joints still ached. Still, she had found she could weave a cat's cradle in play with her daughter Mag last night, and manipulate the tiny seed-pods of poppy and flax. Last night, while John had drowsed in the bath, she had taken her harp from the corner of the bedroom, tuned its strings, and played a simple air—played it very badly indeed. Still, it had given her joy.

“He still wants Ian, more now than ever.”

“Well, he won't have him. The children are safe enough with Sparrow, and I'm gie glad for this storm—not that I thought I'd ever say I was glad of any storm—because if anything could keep Adric away from comin' up here, it's that. I'll go in and have a word with Caradoc later, after he calms down some. Not that I think it'll do a twilkin' bit of good.” And he fingered the silver catch-bottle, strung on its red ribbon around his neck. He wore it, Jenny saw, outside his doublet, as if he wanted it to be seen, and it gleamed like far-off ice in the cold storm-light that leaked in under the smithy's porch.

“He's got what he wanted, anyway,” Jenny said as John double-checked the door and the bolt, and the hinges as well, before putting an arm around her shoulders to lead her back to the kitchen to breakfast. “He is immortal—and probably indestructible, in that iron body. How long will he be able to keep it moving, do you know?”

John shook his head. “He'll have to grease himself up pretty often—that's what I want to tell him, among other things—but there's a lot of weight to contend with. In damp weather like this, the friction'll build up fast. God knows how the folks in the Otherworld kept their robots from rustin'. It was damp there as a swamp, you know, an' now that I think on it I don't think I saw much rust anywhere, not even down the dead subway tunnels.” And he frowned, puzzling this over.

Jenny said, “Without the residual magic he was able to glean from his corpses, Caradoc may very well lose any ability to move the robot's limbs at all.”

“Leavin' him exactly where he was.” John bent his head, hunched his shoulders against the slashing wind as they struggled across the court. “Just in a bigger moonstone, that's all.”

For a few minutes neither spoke, breathless with cold, until they fetched up in the kitchen. Aunt Jane was just taking the day's first bread out of the oven, and the whole long room smelled of it, and of the herbed ointment Cousin Dilly was daubing on the blisters Muffle had acquired during the construction of the robot. Snuff and Bannock thumped their tails and rolled on their backs, like small shaggy horses wanting their tummies scratched, which John obligingly knelt to do.

“So what do we do,” asked Jenny, unwinding her sleetflecked plaids, “if this is the case? What do we do when he realizes this?”

John glanced up from tussling with Snuff, and smiled. “We watch him.”

The storm lasted another two days. Like John, Jenny could only be thankful for the hammering winds and sleet—like John, she knew their second son too well to think he'd be kept away from anything as fascinating as a robot by any lesser force. Her one fear was that the iron monster would, if it succeeded in escaping the smithy, make its way to the village in search of the boys, and she went to the smithy door a dozen times that first day, listening for the scrabble of wooden feet on the stone floor, the squeal of the pulleys and wheels.

Sometimes she heard the angry clanging of Muffle's tools as they were thrown or kicked about.

Sometimes she heard the buzzing of the voice-box, now loud, now soft, ranging up and down from shrill squeals to bass drones without ever coming into semblance of words.

Sometimes she heard nothing.

If there was punishment for the mage who had touched off the whole circle of horror, she thought—from the kidnapping of Ian through the possession of the wizards by demons, and so to the nightmare in Bel of the walking dead—this was close to what she might have envisioned. She wondered what was in Caradoc's mind now, and if he still thought he could bargain or think his way back to the true power he had always craved.

She did not know, for after that first morning he made no further attempt to put words or thoughts into her mind, or to communicate with her in any way. Sometimes, when she stood next to the door, listening to the scrapings and draggings within, she would feel a sharp stab of cramp in her sore hip, or get a blurring glitter of migraine in the corners of her sight. She could always tell when these were Caradoc's doing, and was easily able to brush them off her like dust. Muffle sometimes came with her, asking worried questions about how much damage the robot could cause to his tools:

“Anything else I can mend, mind, but if he breaks the anvil we're all in a fix.” He winced at the dull crack of charcoal or stones flung at the door. “And mind you, I'm not looking forward to putting the forge back together again.”

In the nights Jenny would listen, bending her thoughts toward the courtyard and the forge, trying to hear under and through the shriek of the wind. By day she would talk to Ian, through the medium of a scrying-crystal and the mirror her sister's husband had bought from a trader, and her son reported one or two disquieting dreams that might have come from Caradoc: dreams of Jenny's death at the hands of demons, or of terrible misfortune falling upon the Hold.

“Last night I dreamed of magic,” the boy told her on the second day. “Like when Black-Knife attacked the Hold: fires breaking out in the thatch and the wood-room, and people's clothing catching fire, and the animals going crazy in their stalls. I woke up positive that this was actually taking place, because in the dream there was the wind howling around the walls, and I knew the only way any of you could be saved was by me going up there right then.”

He grinned, sidelong and shy and heartstoppingly reminiscent of John. He was sitting in the kitchen of Sparrow's house, which had belonged to Sparrow and Jenny's mother before. Firelight flickered over his face, and Jenny could almost smell her sister's cooking. “He always overdoes it,” he said. “Caradoc. Because of course I scried the Hold and everything was fine. But you watch out for him, Mother. He's up to something.”

During this time also Jenny tried to communicate with the Whalemages, sinking deep into meditation in the small, thickly curtained cubbyhole that was her own library and workroom off the bedchamber she shared with John. She reached out with her mind over the windblasted miles of the Winterlands, across the bare black of the rock and the scoured white of snow, to where the snow piled the brown margins of the sea and the foam pounded bleak miles of empty coastline. Reached into the waves opaque as obsidian, down into dark water, calling on those great gentle weightless lords in their murmuring kingdom, asking for news.

She thought once Squidslayer answered her, though her power was not strong enough to make out such word-thoughts as the whales used. She had a glimpse of endless dreamy songs in which years and centuries blurred and it was impossible to determine whether one had come in at the beginning or not. She thought she recognized, as in a dream, the black rocks of those deep abysses that lay west of the Seven Isles of Belmarie, where Folcalor and his demons had concealed themselves for centuries in what appeared to be caverns but were in fact a separate Hell, an enclave in which they'd taken refuge a thousand years ago, separated from the real world by a gate they could not pass unless summoned by name.

She wondered, even as she saw this place, whether it was her own vision she saw or Caradoc's. She had killed him hereabouts, pinned his body to a rock with a harpoon in billowing clouds of scalding steam. If it was Caradoc's vision, what she saw might not be the truth. She saw where the demon gate had been, that Folcalor and his band of demons had come through, ostensibly to begin the process of rescuing Adromelech and opening the gate of their true home, their great Hell. It was blocked now, sealed with the stones that Squidslayer and the other Whalemages had driven into it. Even the glowing demon fishes seemed to have gone.

And as she drifted out of the vision, she thought, They have gone to wherever Folcalor is keeping the dead men of Bel, until it is time for them to go to Prokep.

They will come there at the Moon of Winds, as Aohila said, to break the Henge.

On the third morning there was only silence. Outside the barred door of the smithy, Jenny listened beneath the steady hoon of the western wind for some sound within. But if there was no trace of residual magic in the metal body of the robot, neither was there the life that tells a mage of human presence. No breathing, either quick or slow. Neither the rustle of clothing, nor creak of belt or boot leather. Inert, the robot would make no more noise than Muffle's anvil.

There was nothing to tell her whether the creature was there at all.

She fetched Muffle and John before going in to check, Muffle disgruntled at being barred from his forge for yet another day: “It ain't like we haven't plows to sharpen and the harrow-chains to fix, with spring on its way.” This was an optimistic pronouncement, for snow lay ankle-deep in the main courtyard, but the smith liked to be beforehand with his work so he could hunt for wild strawberries in the spring woods. Jenny herself was worried, for only five nights remained until the night of the Moon of Winds, and John was quietly preparing the things he would need to go to Prokep. The cloudclearing wind blowing out of the west signaled, they both knew, the dragon's return.

In the back of Jenny's mind, too, was fear for her children. She and John had intended to walk down to the village that morning, to see them before departure, and she had a lively fear that Adric would either slip away and come up to the Hold by himself today, or, even worse, do so after they were gone.

The silver bottle glinted on John's neck on the end of its long red ribbon among the jumble of scarves and plaids. Jenny remembered the shining chamber within, and prayed that that part of the plan, at least, would go off without a hitch.

Do you like games?

She had no doubt that they would find Folcalor, when the demon came to the haunted city at the full of the moon. But as John had said, they wouldn't know how to hand the bottle off to Adromelech until they got there, and Jenny flinched from the knowledge that one or the other of them might, in the final chaos, have to operate the trap instead. She had not spoken of this to John, nor he to her, for there was much they dared not speak of with Caradoc so near, but it was in his glance sometimes.

Jenny pushed open the smithy door. The room was dark and deathly cold, for as John had predicted, the ashes had long ago gone out. The thick oak benches were smashed to matchwood, and the flagstoned floor was strewn with lumps of charcoal and twisted rods of iron. A shovel had been broken by being hammered on the wall, and the anvil—mercifully undamaged—lay in a corner: The dents and holes in the wall showed where it had been shoved or slid repeatedly against the stone. The forge itself had been pulled apart, and the stones scattered the floor.

In the midst of all this the robot stood inert. A broken pot of goose-grease lay against the wall in one place, a brush in another. Blots of grease gelled on the floor beneath the thing's joints. Jenny wondered whether, as the room cooled, moisture had condensed on the steel of the pulleys, crippling it.

Caradoc?

There was no reply.

For three days Jenny had listened, too, for any sign, any whisper that in his fury Caradoc would call on Folcalor or Adromelech—madness, given what they would do with a talisman stone of a wizard's soul, but it was not beyond possibility that Caradoc was mad, or close to it. And his vanity, she knew, was strong.

She had heard nothing, but did not know whether she would be able to hear such a summons. Her own powers were too new, too unfamiliar, and she had never had the ability of demons and dragons to read human dreams.

They could only keep silent, and wait.

John came in, fingering the silver catch-bottle. He glanced from Jenny to the robot, and raised an eyebrow. “He isn't dead?” His breath was a cloud of white in the icy gloom.

“I don't know.” Jenny walked over—cautiously—to the robot, but when she crouched to examine it more closely she kept her skirts gathered tight around her, lest she have to spring away fast. “I don't think it's possible to die within the talisman … I certainly can't imagine how one would do it. Though of course, having been so close to Folcalor's mind, Caradoc may know something I don't.”

“I don't think Folcalor would know, either,” murmured John. “Demons don't. They know about killin', but they know nothin' of death. You saw them in Bel. It terrifies them blind even to think of dying. They'll go through a thousand tortures rather than let go.”

Like Caradoc, Jenny thought, and backed warily out of the room.

John lingered for a moment behind her, then followed. “Morkeleb should be here by tomorrow,” he said. “If nothing further happens, we'll have to leave for Prokep the day after, come what may. We're cuttin' it close as it is, if we mean to have all in place before Folcalor and his lot arrive.”