Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (18 page)

Men are weak, Dragonsbane. When a man has been beset by a stronger man, he can run down the street of his smelly village crying, and others will come out of their doors and strike that strong man, for the weaker’s sake. This is the way of men, who are always afraid. John said nothing for a time, hearing on the rocks below him the voice of the surf. Trying to summon what to say that would draw this alien creature; trying with all the desperate knowledge that if he spoke wrongly, Ian was gone indeed. But all he could find to say was, “Don’t let your hate for me rob her of the son she loves.”

The dark head came swiftly around; John had to look aside fast, to avoid the diamond scintillance of the eyes. You forget that it is not a man to whom you speak. Hate is not a thing of dragons. John said, “Nor is love.”

No. With a snap like the strike of lightning the silken wings spread, catching the ocean wind. The dragon uncoiled his tail from the rocks. It is not.

A moment before the dragon had perched on his pinnacle, like some great glistening bird. Now it was as if muscle and scale and sinew had become shadow only, with no more weight than a scarf of thinnest silk. The wind lifted him easily, and he rose out of the shadows of the peak and seemed to flash all over with jewels as he came into the sun. John watched him with his whole heart crying out, No! The dragon’s wings tilted; he swooped low over the waves, then climbed fast and steep, like a falcon rising above his prey. But he did not stoop like a falcon. He gyred again, high, high against the bright air, and flew west, dwindling to a speck and vanishing into the light.

I’ll have to tell Jen.

The thought was almost more than he could bear.

And then: I’ll have to get the Milkweed back to land.

In a kind of blank numbness John refilled every water container on the little craft at the spring, folded his blankets, and scattered the ash of his fire.

Ian was gone.

The demons entered into Isychros and burned out his heart … Using his magic as a puppeteer uses a puppet.

John touched the fading ache in his ribs.

Whatever was happening—whyever the demon mage had taken the mageborn boy—it was inevitable that they’d show up somewhere: demons, mages, dragon.

And at the moment, only he, John Aversin, knew.

He checked the Milkweed’s air bags and found them buoyant still. Scrambling up the ladder and over the withy gunwale as the craft lifted above the shadows of the surrounding cliff, he felt a curious sadness at leaving the birdless isle.

There was little charge in the engine, and he cranked for some time before it grew strong enough to turn the vessel’s bow toward the largest of the three Last Islands. His first desire was to head east immediately: If the Milkweed came down halfway between the Skerries and the Tralchet peninsula he supposed he could sail her in to the sorry little cluster of huts and ruins on the estuary of the Eld River, but it wasn’t anything he wanted to try. Yet his store of food was low. On the largest island he shot gulls and cooked them, gathered eggs to boil, and set forth again in the westering light. Mind and heart felt blank. He wondered if Jenny could see him in these dragon-haunted isles, and if so whether she knew what he did and what he had learned. Ian was gone.

He closed his eyes and saw his son’s boot-track, and the tracks of the man in the embroidered cap.

They were in the islands somewhere. I could find them…

He thrust the thought away. They’ll turn up, he thought. In the Winterlands, in the south, in the air above Cair Corflyn or Bel, spitting smoke and fire… They’ll turn up. He prayed he could reach Commander Rocklys with the warning before they did. In the pewter twilight of the northern midnight he saw a boy’s face desperate with worry, dyed by the firelight and smoke of the lower court of the Hold: I’m not inexperienced. Saw a red baby’s face no bigger than his own fist, ugly and frowning under a fuzz of silky black hair. Oh, my son.

Demons.

His heart twisted inside him.

According to Dotys in his Histories, and passing references in Gorgonimir, the penalties for trafficking with demons in past times had included being skinned, boned, and burned alive. Gorgonimir listed an elaborate hierarchy of the Hellspawn ranging from simple marsh-wights, Whisperers, gyres, pooks, house-hobs, and erlkings to the dark-wights that bored their way into men’s souls. There are demons and demons, Morkeleb had said. Reading the ancients, John had gotten the impression that most of them didn’t know what they were talking about. What is the way to catch back the souls of those that disease drives out, Dragonsbane? He can’t be gone. He can’t.

Now and then a marsh-wight would take over a child and have to be exorcised. The task left Jenny exhausted and she always treated it with the greatest and most painstaking care, but it wasn’t beyond her powers, and sometimes, if it were done quickly enough, the child’s soul could be recovered, or part of it anyway. Even the little pooks of the marsh could be deadly of course. John knew that in Far West Riding, near the Boggart Marshes, funeral customs involved binding the corpse to the bier until it could be burned, for fear that demons would inhabit it. A demon wizard. Demons more powerful than the spells that wizards used to protect themselves.

He shut his eyes, trying to will away the images that crowded and tore in his mind.

He had heard whisperers in the swamps take on the voices of Jenny or Ian, or one of his aunts. They’d call to him to do this or that, or try to lead him away into the marshes. Easy enough, he supposed, for a Hellspawn to speak to a mage through dreams. Do this rite, speak these words, mix blood and pour it on a heated thunderstone—then you’ll have the power you’ve been seeking … Jenny was not the only one to have been taught that the key to more magic was magic. He knew there had been a time when she would have done anything to obtain greater ability in her art.

Only it wasn’t power that would hiss up out of the steam.

Through the night and the next day and the night again he flew east over the empty seas, sailing when he could and cranking the springs of the engines taut. He watched the compass, and the spyglass, and consulted the charts he’d made, and betweentimes checked the swivels on the catapults and painted the harpoon-tips with poison. Twice he saw she-dragons, swimming and sporting with the brilliant males in the crests of the waves.

Being each of us, Enismirdal had said. Being. Whole galaxies of meanings and shades of meaning attached to being: a hot singular purity, like the dense core of a star, from which magic radiated as light. Dragon-magic such as Jenny had absorbed from Morkeleb in her days of dragonhood, sourced and rooted in adamantine will.

This, too, apparently, the demons could take.

At least I know more than I did, thought John. At least I can go to Jen—if I make it back alive—and say, There was this wizard named Isychros, see, and he made a bargain with demons …

But it was to Rocklys, he thought, that he would have to go first. To tell her that there was a Hellspawn at large wearing a wizard’s body and wielding a wizard’s power. There was a Hellspawn at large, inhabiting the body and the growing powers of what had been his son. He was a Dragonsbane. He was the one who understood, as much as any human understood, how to slay star-drakes.

He was the one they would call upon, when that unholy three—demon-haunted mage demon-haunted slave, demon-haunted dragon—returned from their hiding in the Skerries of Light.

No, he thought, putting the understanding from his mind of what he would in all probability be called upon to do. No.

John put the Milkweed in at an islet shaped like a court lady’s shoe, in the hot glitter of late afternoon, in time to see the bright blink of blue and gold skimming low and fast over the water, and, scrambling to the tip of the peak with his spyglass, discerned the two forms mounted on the dragon’s back.

Heart hammering, he followed them with the glass and saw them settle on another isle perhaps twenty miles to the north. His hands were shaking as he pulled out the dozen scraps of parchment from his satchel: It was a C-shaped island with a central lagoon, according to his earlier glimpse, bright with waterfalls, thickly wooded, and populated by sheep. Build a raft, cross the open sea, and take on the three of them with one fell slash of his mighty blade?

I’ll write a ballad about that.

Wait until they’d gone on and then head east as fast as he could and leave his son, or what was left of his son, in the demon’s hands?

He closed his eyes, his heart hurting more than he had thought possible. Ian, forgive me. Jenny, forgive me.

It was not something, he already knew, that he’d ever be able to forgive himself.

He remained on the peak, waiting, watching, wondering what he’d do if they didn’t fly on, if he had to take the Milkweed up with them still there, through the fey brittle twilight. Then in the morning he saw a flash of luminous blue in the sky, and turning his spyglass eastward saw Nymr the Blue circling down toward the waves, where she-dragons dipped and swam in the lagoons among the rocks, sounded in depths a thousand times darker than the light-filled midnight skies.

Exhausted as he was, blinded and aching with grief, John couldn’t keep himself from turning the spyglass to watch. Did the females come into season, the way mares and cows did, he wondered. Or were they like women, welcoming this male or that for other reasons more intricate and obscure? Why had he seen no babies, no dragonettes? Dotys—or was it Cerduces?— had said somewhere that the younger dragons were bright-hued but simply patterned, in bars and bands and stripes, like the black and yellow Enismirdal, the patterns becoming more and more intricate over the centuries, and more beautiful as the dragon aged. Morkeleb was black. What did that mean?

And what happened after black?

My son is dead, he thought. I stand a good chance of coming down in the middle of the ocean halfway back and then if I make it to land walking from Eldsbouch to Cair Corflyn and THEN having to take on a demon mage and a dragon, and here I am wondering about the love-lives of dragons?

Adric’s right. Dad was right. I am frivolous.

Nymr circled over the sea again, wing tips skimming the waves. The air seemed wreathed with the garlands of the dragon’s music, filling John’s mind, twined with other, stranger airs. Serenading the girls?

But it was not the she-dragons that came. It was Centhwevir.

Centhwevir dropped on the blue dragon like a stooping falcon, plummeting from the white crystal of the noon sky with wings plastered tight to his blue and golden sides, beak open, claws reaching, eyes blank and terrible. Nymr swung, spinning in the air, whipping clear at the last moment as the blue and gold dragon raked at him; Nymr hissed, slashing back with claws and teeth and tail.

And drove up, striking where Centhwevir was not. Was not, and had never been.

Color and lightning blazed and smote John’s eyes, elusive movement and a whirling of the air. Sometimes he could see the two dragons, other times three and four, images of Centhwevir or simply fragments of driving, spinning blue and gold and purple, like the aurora borealis gone mad. They ringed Nymr, who slashed and snapped futilely, furiously, at the air. But out of those planes and whirlwinds of color and lightning fire spewed, spattering Nymr’s sides as he rolled in the air, and blood gushed from claw-rakes that appeared in his belly and sides.

The blue dragon fled. Centhwevir pursued, now visible, now veiled in crazy fractures of illusion, above and behind. For a moment, when the blue and gold drake came visible again, John saw then that not one but two figures clung to his back, wedged among the spikes with their feet hooked through a cable of braided leather passed around the dragon’s girth. His heart stopped in his throat, seeing the dark hair, the weatherstained plaid. The two dragons twisted and clutched, light, illusion, magic searing and glittering between them as well as fire and blood and the spray of the waves. They fell, locked together, spikes and fire and thrashing tails, plunging toward the sea. John bit back a cry. They were close to the whirlpools of the twelve rocks, if Ian came off there would be no saving him …

There is no saving him, thought John, but still he could not breathe.

Nymr made one final attempt to flee, racing south. Centhwevir fell on him from above and behind, tearing and raking, ripped himself by the great spikes and razors of the other dragon’s backbones and wing-joints and neck-frill, and this time Nymr gave a thin hoarse cry—nothing like any sound John had heard from any dragon before—and plunged down into the sea dragging Centhwevir and his two riders with him.

“Ian!” John stumbled panting to the cliff’s beetling edge and knelt among the sea-oats and the poppies. He was shaking all over as he watched the sea where the two dragons, the wizard and his slave, had all vanished under the chop of the waves. Too long, he thought, sickened, unbreathing. Too long to survive…

Fire flashed in the waves. Centhwevir’s head broke the surface, then his glittering back. The telescope showed John the gray-haired mage still clinging to the dragon’s back, holding Ian by the collar of his jacket. Ian was gasping, choking, but he did not struggle. The man’s face was grim but curiously uncaring, as if he harbored no fear of death. His eyes were fixed on the great blue shape of Nymr, whom Centhwevir had fast by the neck and one wing in teeth and claws. Driving himself with his tail, Centhwevir made for the round island. Once John thought he saw Nymr struggle and move his other wing. But he was clearly dying as his attacker dragged him up on the beach.

It was hard to see. John looked around desperately, then ran along the cliff-top to a higher rock, thrust precariously out over the night-blue waves three hundred feet below. Through the lens he saw the dragon-wizard’s face clearly: a cold small mouth, and cold small eyes set close. A clean-shaven man, fastidious and rich—a man with a merchant’s cold eye. He half-carried Ian from Centhwevir’s back and laid him on the sand a little distance away. He didn’t even cover him, just turned back to the two dragons, took from his knapsack the silver fire-bowls and the sacks and packets of powders needed for healing spells and began to draw diagrams of power in the sand.