Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (36 page)

Clearly a halberd would be of little use. Jenny looked around and caught up one of the buckets of gravel that had been brought to the gatehouse last fall to mend a pothole in the court. In the dark at the end of the passageway crashing and splintering resounded, as something struck the gates again—axes, hammers, maybe only the forces of malignant magic. John lunged with the beam, trying to trip the robot, and the robot swung at him again. Jenny sprang in and emptied the gravel over the thing's center, pebbles and grit bouncing. The robot did not turn, did not need to, only sprang at her, its pincer biting into the flesh of her arm with terrifying violence, ripping through sheepskin, chemise, and flesh as she pulled free. At the same instant it stabbed at John with the axle again, trying to pin him to the wall as with a spear. He slipped past, struck at its feet, then, when it sprang at Jenny, he dropped the beam and went for the capstan.

The robot was on him, like a cat on a mouse, catching his plaids as he tried to duck past. John slithered out of them, threw the yards of dull-striped wool over the center of the thing, where the moonstone was. While the pincer and the hand groped and thrashed at the fabric he yanked on the capstan, yelled something about the gate, gasping against the wind.…

It was too late. With a booming crash the gate's thick planks burst inward, forms crawled and wriggled through. Puggle and Muffle ran forward with their halberds and their flails, but the attackers—gnomes, Jenny saw, at least a score of them—were armed with maces and spears. In the same instant, the robot caught John by the back of the neck, like a cat catching a mouse. Jenny's breath jammed in her throat, knowing the strength of those pincers and knowing, too, that she could not, dare not, use magic to save him.…

But John turned in its grip before it could shake him, caught the pincer in both hands, and did something to it that broke its grip—literally broke its grip, for Jenny saw the hinged crescent jammed open, unable to shut. He dropped to the ground, but before he could jump clear the robot struck him with a foreleg, smashing him against the wall. It made to spring at him, but one of its leg-joints jammed. Jenny heard the furious whine of the voice-box, the robot struggling to go forward—more than one of its joints frozen by the grit locked in them.

The next second the gnomes were around John with halberds ready, like hunters on a speared boar. Amayon's voice—unmistakable—shouted, “Get back! Get back or he dies!”

Muffle, Puggle, and Jenny stopped where they were. Amayon—the only human of the attackers, maybe not human at all, Jenny could not tell—stood over John, looking as he had always looked to her: a slim boy in his teens, curlyhaired, blue-eyed, seductive, smiling. Though the air was bitterly cold in the passage and snow whirled through the hole in the gate the boy wore only a short tunic of quilted black velvet sewn with garnets, black hose, and slippers. Neither the gnomes nor Amayon breathed—in the glare of the cressets that lit the passageway, Jenny could see John's panting breath.

The demon's blue eyes, dark as mulberries, met Jenny's, and he smiled. “Well, darling?” he said softly. “What will you pay me for his life?”

He reached down to take the catch-bottle and the ribbon from John's neck, and John's sword suddenly glinted in the firelight. Amayon sprang back as if he'd been burned.

“I'll pay for me own life,” John said, using the stones of the wall behind him to get himself grimly to his feet. “Thank you very much.” By the way he moved, Jenny guessed the robot had cracked some of his ribs.

The wind ceased. In the cressets' iron baskets the fire flared suddenly, and the next moment sank, as if life itself had been drained from the wood. Through thickening darkness Jenny saw something in the splintered hole in the gate, something that seemed to pour through rather than crawl. Something she could not look at, try as she would. She smelled mold and dust, and the chill breath of wet stone, and without intending to, her eyes flinched away.

When she looked back there was nothing there. But a shadow hovered in the corner near John, the shadow of something tall and stooped; veiled in darkness, it seemed to be, though to her mageborn sight other things were still clear. In a thin cold voice that seemed to come from a great distance away, it said, This man was in Prokep with the dragon.

The gnomes pressed close around John, their halberds a glinting ring of steel.

“Get the woman,” Amayon said, and Muffle struck the hand off the gnome who stepped forward to seize Jenny—the gnome merely looked at him, mildly surprised, and picked up the sword in his other hand while his heart's blood poured out into the churn of mud and snow.

“Leave her be.” In the torchlight, John's eyebrows stood out black against ashen skin.

One of the demon's butterfly eyebrows quirked. “Will we have heroics here? Don't tell me she's got back enough of her enchantments to beguile you still? After deceiving you with half the cavalry corps—”

“I said leave her be.” He lifted his sword, though the halberds had reach on him. In the lantern light the silvery lines on his skin burned as if reflecting the light of an unseen moon. “What'd Caradoc offer to sell you? This?” He held out the catch-bottle.

Amayon's smile broadened, and he extended his hand. But John said, “Not this time,” and stepped quickly past the gnomes to hand the bottle to the gray thing, the thing unseen in the shadows beside him. When he stepped back to grope for the support of the wall again, Jenny could see his hand was unsteady with shock at what he had seen or almost seen.

“Now I said, leave her be. Leave us be.”

The chill, distant voice said, “Bring him. And the woman. We must talk about Prokep, you and I.”

Amayon smiled, and moved toward Jenny again—He knows I'll use magic to save him, she thought dizzily. Or to save myself. I can't, I won't …

John brought up his sword and glanced, with deliberate calculation, at the gnomes around him, as if marking whom he would kill first, and who next. The gnomes backed nervously away.

“It's naught to me what demons do to demons,” John said, in his toughest back-country bumpkin voice, “so be that you let me and mine alone. What is it you'd know about Prokep?”

Morkeleb, thought Jenny, where is Morkeleb …?

The cold-voiced thing said, “The way into the Maze. And the way through.”

“Give me a scrap of aught to draw on and a chalk and I'll draw it,” said John. “It's like them Hells Amayon took me through—”

“It is not, precisely,” replied that chill voice out of the darkness, “but leave it so. It would be best, Dragonsbane, did you journey there with us.”

Me! The gut-strings within the sounding-box raged like swarming wasps, but no articulate sound came forth. With a great squeaking of joints the robot dragged itself forward, and Caradoc's voice screamed in Jenny's mind. You promised me the boy. He is in this place somewhere, he must be! Hiding … Or else he is in the house on the Fell! Give me the boy!

And like the deep thrumming of the wind, the strings of the box formed up the word “… oy.…”

“Leave the boy,” said John. “That's me price, me alone, and I'll take you through the Maze at Prokep.”

Out of the shadows the thing regarded him, barely discernible darkness within dark. “Do not think to play the fool with us, Dragonsbane.” Eyeless and without sound of breath, the voice, like that of the robot, seemed almost to be mechanically produced, like the deceptive whistling of wind through long-bleached bone. “We will know if you delay us in the city, so that its traps may entangle us, or if you slow your steps in the Maze. And we will have no mercy.”

“You haven't any mercy, anyway, that I've ever seen,” retorted John. “So what's that to me? Just leave me family alone, and I'm yours.”

Adromelech promised me the boy, insisted Caradoc, and the sounding-strings groaned again, “… oy …” To let you into the Hold, to give you the trap for Folcalor.

“But you did not give us the trap,” taunted Amayon, “did you?”

You cannot leave me thus! The robot, creaking and shuddering, flung itself at the demon, and Amayon stepped back with a look of surprise, like the gnome whose hand Muffle had cut off. He moved lightly aside from the great iron insect, and in the shadows the gray thing stretched out a finger, white bone gleaming in the dark.

There was a small explosion, and white light speared out between the lattices of the robot's heart. A cracking sound, like glass left in a fire, and, in Jenny's mind, a failing shriek of despair and rage and terror. When she blinked the after-glare of brightness from her eyes, it was to see the robot standing frozen on its wheels, thin smoke trailing up from its metal heart. Inside the moonstone was broken into fragments, as if struck by a hammer. The pieces had the burned, blackened look that the soul-crystals had had, on the hill above the Temple at Ernine.

Of Amayon, and the gnomes, and the shadow-thing, and John Aversin, there remained no sign.

Afterward it took three men to remove the pieces of the robot from the gate-passage and lug them back to the storeroom behind the forge, where Muffle dismantled it. But this Jenny only heard at secondhand.

For within an hour she was sitting between the razor-tipped spines of Morkeleb's back, flying through the cold still darkness toward Prokep.

And all around her in the night, she heard the silken shearing of dragon wings.

On the occasion of his previous journey through Hell in company with a demon, John had asked whether the road they traveled was a standard path: Did one who sought the horrors of Paradise first have to pass through the Hell of Winds, for instance, if his starting point was the world that John knew as reality?

This had seemed to him a reasonable question, but Amayon wouldn't answer, not that John had expected the demon would tell the truth in any case. He had therefore made careful notes of the sigils that marked the doors opening between one Hell and the next, and leading from the Hells into the worlds that they abutted: It was all he could do. Those sigils, as far as he was able to tell, were written on the doors through which he and the demons with whom he now traveled passed on the way to Prokep.

He had no time now to make notes. The demons drove him mercilessly through a Hell whose air clogged wet and almost unbreathably thick in his lungs, as if he were perpetually drowning; where all things seemed to glow greasily in halftwilight and where balls of light swam like schools of fish in the air and fled the sight of the demon band—“Fat lot of good to rush, isn't it?” he inquired of Amayon as he stumbled through knee-deep muck whose composition he could only guess in the dim blue light. “We're going to come out in Prokep pretty much the same time we went in at Alyn, aren't we? I mean, we'll still have three days before the Moon of Winds.”

The demon said, “You know nothing about it,” and kept walking—lightly, on top of the sucking odiferous ooze, moving as if neither it nor the gluey air touched him.

John retorted, “Of course I know nuthin' about it, you silly oic! If I did I wouldn't be askin' you!” But later he guessed the reason. Though time did not alter in Hell—and travelers emerged, as he had noted, at pretty much the same time in the real world as they went in—the corpses of the gnomes that the demon escort rode continued to decay. The flesh of their faces discolored, sagging and puffing up grotesquely beneath moldering beards; the demons seemed to take delight in the growing stink of the flesh, like boys holding farting matches to offend adults. Amayon—presumably a senior in the infernal ranks—treated their behavior with amused contempt, but like them he never offered John any threat. As for the gray thing, it was always in shadow, never clearly glimpsed, gone whenever John turned his head. But he could feel it, always behind him, a cold presence he never forgot.

They passed again through the Hell of the Shining Things, marching for what felt like days along one of the black-rock river-cuts through those desolate red highlands under a scarlet sky. John was stumbling from thirst and hunger, and from the exhaustion of pushing through the Blue Hell, but the demons forced him on. They were afraid here, watching and listening, pushing forward in visible dread. Even before those flaming wheels of light and eyes appeared, John was confirmed in his suspicion: The Shining Things had the power to kill demons. When one appeared on the cliff-top above them in a glitter of ozone and lightning, Amayon and the gnomes and even the gray thing took cover. John himself collapsed onto a silver-flecked rock, desperate only for rest, his drawn sword across his knees. He watched the thing warily, but it ignored him. Instead, it flushed one of the gnomes and pursued it down the gully, the gnome racing in panic and then, when the dead flesh would flee no faster, the demon shucking clear of it, escaping in a long glowing serpent through the mouth and growing legs to run. The glowing wheel overtook it, though—the Shining Things could travel heartstoppingly fast—and ripped it to shreds. John could hear it screaming from where he sat.

A creature belonging to the Lord of this Hell—if this Hell had a Lord? Or was it like a dragon, an independent being, with thoughts and intentions of its own?

If he walked up to it and tried to open a conversation, would he be glad or sorry thirty seconds later?

He leaned his head back against the rock, shut his eyes. It might save him some effort.

A hand fell on his shoulder, gone when he turned his head. “Let us be gone,” said a cold, distant voice, from somewhere behind him. “The Moon of Winds is on us. The stars move to their appointed places.”

“We'll still have three days when we get out, won't we?” he inquired interestedly, but the voice only said, “Come.”

Five or six gnomes emerged from the thorn-bushes, filthy now with clotted blood stringing out of their slashed and perforated flesh, and thrust at him with their halberds, forcing him to his feet. They passed the motionless corpse of the gnome whose demon the Shining Thing had slain, and even the demons who would happily play games with the entrails of their victims walked gingerly around the spot. They pressed on along the watercourse as quickly as John could be driven to march. The huge, leathery carry-beasts raised their heads from the watercourse at the bottom of the gorge like obese birds, watching them pass. Even had John been ignorant enough to drink those rusty waters he suspected the gray shadow would not have let him.