Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (30 page)

She was aware, later, of being with Ian, beside him with the wind slashing and streaming through her hair. She felt wild and light and mad, like the young girl she had never truly been allowed to be, watching hilariously as men below poured out of a burning bunker. The white and scarlet dragon Yrsgendl slashed at them with his iron-spiked tail as they stumbled and fell. One of the spiny Urchins raced and trundled toward the dragon, firing its harpoons, silly as a toy. The air seemed colored to Jenny’s eyes, rich greens and purples, luminous, everything edged with colored flame. She could see her own spells woven around the Urchin, a net of dancing light. Pain rose from below, a shiveringly glorious song: music and warmth and love and well-being and power, heady beyond any joy she had ever known.

“I’ll bet they’d run if we pulled those spells away,” she laughed, and Ian joined in her laughter. His eyes were no longer dead, but aglow with lively fire, more alive than she’d ever seen him before. She sensed his forgiveness for all the years of her neglect, sensed his admiration, his approval, his love.

“How about it, Nymr?” he called down to the dragon, and the dragon—both were mounted on the same one, Jenny didn’t remember how—stooped like a falcon. Snatching away the net of spells was as easy, and as fun, as whipping a string away from a cat. The gnome-wardings tangled in the spellwork raveled away as well, and with a whoop of glee Bliaud—or Bliaud’s demon, mounted on Yrsgendl—tossed a Word of Heat at the lumbering machine. It lurched to a stop, whirled, and rocked comically as smoke poured from every vent and crack. Jenny, clinging to her son’s shoulders, hooted with laughter, mirth that was echoed from the others: Bliaud, Yseult, Werecat, and Summer … A man tried to get out, and Yseult drove Hagginarshildim in close, spitting fire at him as he was caught in the hatch. It was like tormenting a snail, distant and ridiculous in its futile tininess: “Whoa, that’ll cook his cockles for him!” whooped Ian, and Jenny laughed until she ached. Firelight flashed on the man’s harpoon-tip and spectacles as he struggled to get free.

The second Urchin was flipped on its side, wheels spinning helplessly. Enismirdal and Centhwevir had ripped the earthen roofs from the bunkers, the men inside churning about like maggots doused in salt, terror and agony billowing up like the bouquet of a summer garden. Laughing, calling out to one another, the raiders spiraled upward into the night, gaudy leaves borne by the updraft of fire.

“We’ll be back!” yelled Yseult, at the confusion of the camp. “Don’t go anywhere!”

And pleasure washed over Jenny, deep caressing waves that penetrated the most secret caves of her body and her mind: contentment, belonging, the promise of reward and the drunken hilarity of power. Power and pain. This, truly, was life. The men in the broken camp raced madly here and there, funny as ants when the nest drowns, trying to put out fires or pulling vainly at the arms and legs of the injured. Dozens more of them simply fled toward the hills— “Do they think the fell-men are going to let them through?” shouted Bliaud, his long gray curls whipping. “I’d like to be there when they try!”

One man, the man who had wrenched himself free from the burning Urchin, got slowly to his feet, leaning on his broken harpoon. Jenny was aware of him watching the dragons as they swirled triumphantly away into the night.

They gave her a young girl, all for her own; probably one of the camp servants or whores. By being judicious in her applications of pain and terror, Jenny managed to keep her alive most of the night.

Deep inside, Jenny was aware of her own horror, aghast, disgusted, sickened at what she saw herself doing to the weeping child. But she was aware that Amayon supped and munched and reveled in her emotions, her revulsion and pity, as much as in the victim’s uncomprehending agony. And Amayon—as is the way of demons—routed his pleasure and delight back into Jenny’s body and mind. Riven and battered, Jenny tried to find some way to fight, but it seemed to her that she could only watch herself performing upon the girl a violent parody of what Caerdinn had done to her when she was that age; watch herself as if she were someone else. But you’re not someone else, whispered Amayon. That’s you, Pretty Lady, my dearest Jenny dear. I don’t make anything from whole cloth. No demon does. Admit it. Ever since Caerdinn beat you and harried you and demanded of you that you do what you couldn’t do— “What do you want from me?” the girl was crying, blood coursing down her face. “What do you want?”

—you’ve wondered how it would feel to have that kind of power. You wanted to be him then. And now you are.

I’m not! screamed Jenny desperately, her voice tiny as the peep of a cricket in a crack. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!

And the demon drank up her tears, mixed with the little whore’s blood, and smacked his lips in delight.

The girl died toward dawn. The sensation was beyond description, a ringing climax of physical pleasure and emotional satisfaction that left Jenny shattered, confused, wrung out like a rag washed up on an unknown beach.

The dragon-mages had tents set a little apart from the rest of Rocklys’ forces, in the camp where the Wildspae curved through the bare gray hills. Lying on the soaked carpets of the tent floor, breathing in the thick blood-odor that permeated them, Jenny— the tiny part of Jenny that huddled weeping like a ghost still clinging to her own flesh—wondered what else had gone on in the mages’ compound, what rewards they had been given for their nights’ work. What Ian had done.

The blue and yellow curtain rippled back. Bland and fresh-bathed, Caradoc stood in the opening, his hard mouth relaxed a little as if even he had been pleased and sated in the night. He went for a minute to the body of the girl, turning it over with the goblin-curved tip of his staff. Jenny heard Amayon—or maybe it was herself—chuckle, and sat up, aware that her face wore the smile of a woman yawning tousled in the bed of a hated rival’s husband or son. “What a little spit-cat she was.” She stretched luxuriously and shook back her matted hair. “Have they got the balneary set up? I’m absolutely sticky.”

Caradoc grinned with the side of that grim mouth, and impure fire flickered in his eyes. It crossed Jenny’s mind, Jenny’s own ousted and terrified mind, to wonder how long the real Caradoc had lasted, held by slow-dissolving ghostly bonds to his own flesh and screaming with horror that this wasn’t what he’d meant when he asked the demons to give him power. Or maybe it was. Maybe after enough time passed you could no longer tell the difference. He chucked Jenny under the chin, as a man would a whore in a tavern. “How’d you like it?” Monster, Monster! she screamed at him, or maybe at herself, desperate and tiny and unheard. Except, of course, by Amayon, who giggled in sated delight that she was still capable of emotion, and savored her horror like a piquant dessert. The demon in her laughed for answer to Caradoc’s question, and Jenny’s hand stroked down her own body in a caressing expression of total satisfaction. Somewhere she heard Amayon reply to the demon— its name was Folcalor, she somehow knew, a bloated thing in which struggled the half-digested whimpering remains of a dozen other imps—that lived behind Caradoc’s eyes. You know how delicious it is, to bring a new one to it for the first time.

And Caradoc—Folcalor—laughed appreciatively. “Roc’s getting on the road soon,” he said. “We’ll hit them again tonight.” Something changed, shifted in his expression, and with a casual air he took from his pocket a green gem, a polished peridot the size of a quail’s egg, which he held out to her like a sweet to a child.

Bastards, bastards! Jenny cried, trying to summon even a fingerhold of power over her own body, trying to thrust Amayon out of her self, her heart, her mind. Though she knew that without this she, the Jenny part of herself, would die, long before anyone could exorcise Amayon, if in fact anyone could do such a thing, still terror gripped her at the thought of being forever their prisoner.

Amayon did something to her, almost thoughtlessly, as a man would strike a child to hush it something that left her gasping with pain. And what’s this? he asked, eyeing Folcalor, eyeing the jewel.

“I have my reasons,” the dragon-mage replied, and flipped the jewel in his palm.

All the teasing, playful cruelty vanished, and Amayon was suddenly cold and deadly as a cobra. Reasons that the Lord of Hell knows about?

The demon-light changed and flickered in Caradoc’s dead eyes. “My dear Amayon …” The voice was a tiger’s purr in her mind, velvet sheathing the threat of razor-clawed violence. “You don’t think I’d do anything here without Lord Adromelech’s knowledge? He is my lord, as he is yours—and if he hasn’t opened his mind and his plans to you, he has at least to me. Adromelech has his plans. Now here, precious”—he held out the stone to Jenny again—“have a little sweet.” Jenny blew a kiss at him (Filth! she screamed at him, at them both, at them all), opened her mouth to receive the stone, and sat smiling and making little faces and playing with it with her tongue while the dragon-mage made magic circles around her, and drew together the curves of power. Inside herself Jenny wept, with what last strength was in her, trying to call together enough power to resist.

She felt herself go into the stone.

Rocklys’ army broke camp with the coming of full light and marched through the day under the wood of Imperteng’s somber boughs. Caradoc, and Jenny, and the other mages summoned an unseasonable fog to cover the land to the foot of Nast Wall. Through this the dragon-mages glided silent as shadow, just above the trees, gray cold wetness hemming them in. Through the latticed structure of the jewel Jenny felt the touch of magic trying to disperse the fog, and she and the others renewed their spells, drawing the vapors thick. When the dragon she rode, a lovely green and gold youngling named Mellyn, descended, Jenny could see with her demon eyes the Commander herself, riding fully armored on her sleek bay stallion, with Caradoc at her side. Now and then they spoke, Caradoc explaining matters in the smooth comforting voice that Rocklys had known for all those years, little realizing that it was the demon Folcalor who actually did the talking.

“This is the way many wizards are, Commander.” The moonstone flashed softly on his goblin-carved staff. “You have to humor them if you want their help. Of course I’m as appalled as you are, but …”

Two or three times in the course of that morning Jenny was troubled by something, some watchfulness she felt turned upon them; she didn’t know what. Scanning the fogs around her, with the magic of the demons that now filled her heart and body, she detected nothing. Yet in that separated part of her, that heart imprisoned within the pale-green crystal in the flat silver bottle that hung around Caradoc’s neck, she knew, and whispered the name. Morkeleb.

He was there. Somewhere. She had seen him vanish, dissolve into smoke, even as her knees and thighs had still felt his scales and spines.

And her imprisoned heart, looking out through her own eyes in the fog as she had once looked out through Morkeleb’s, knew something else as well: the jewel in which she was imprisoned was flawed.

Through the long day she grew to know that jewel as intimately as she knew her own body. In a sense, this was now what it was. She remembered seeing it in the strongbox in Rocklys’ chamber at Corflyn, and she familiarized herself with every molecule of carbon, every milky impurity, every fracture line and energy fault. Knew them and hated them. These were the best you could do? Caradoc had complained to Rocklys. And, I think you were cheated…

Caradoc was right. Rocklys was a warrior, not a mage. Faced with the need to conserve money for her soldiers’ pay, faced with a clever gem merchant and a handful of brilliant stones, she wouldn’t have known how to check each jewel.

Jenny could not have said exactly why a diamond or a ruby was better for the imprisonment of a disembodied spirit than a topaz or a peridot. Nor could she have explained to a layperson why magic must be worked with pure metals and flawless gems in order to be itself flawless. But within her crystalline prison she was able to move a little, and carefully—gently—she began to draw power through the stone’s threadlike fault.

And all the while she was aware of herself, and Amayon, riding the green and gold jere-drake overhead, braiding and gathering spells. Half-seen in the misty world below, the army crept, drenched, as the drifting shapes of the other dragons about her were drenched, in the feral sparkle of demon fire. She was aware that her spells—the demon’s spells—made her beautiful, and being forty-five years old and never a pretty woman, she reveled in that beauty and that power. She rejoiced in the pert breasts and silky skin, in the sudden absence of any need at all to fight migraines, hot flashes, aches, indigestion. She was young and could do whatever she pleased, for none could touch her. And she smiled at the thought of that haughty bitch Rocklys’ surprise, when the time came for the demons to take their pay.

The ground below them sloped gradually toward the river. Above the soft-rolling grayness of the fogs, the sun stood high.

All together, demons, mages, dragons spoke a word, and the fog sank into the ground like translucent dust. Gareth’s camp— blotched with the burns of acid and the soaked blood of the men killed last night—lay naked under the dragons’ shadows.

The army of Bel was ready for them at the outlying defenses of the bridge. The spikes of the gutted Urchins had been laid over the two main bunkers of the camp, and from these, harpoons slashed upward from a dozen salvaged catapult slings. Two wounded the little rainbow-drakes ridden by Werecat and Miss Enk—that semi-trained gnome adept Rocklys had brought in at the last minute from the Deep of Wyldoom—before all the demons, all the wizards pulled about themselves the spells of illusion and confusion, the fractioning of colors, images, shapes. At the same moment there was a great sounding of horns and drums on the northward road, and Rocklys’ mighty voice roaring her battle-cry, “Firebeard! Firebeard!” The paean shook the air as they attacked the redoubts of the bridge, while the dragons struck at the defenders as they tried to rush from the main camp.