Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (34 page)

Nausea gripped her, wrenched her; nausea and pain, pain that took her breath.

She—Amayon—began to scream at the top of her lungs: “Rape! Murder! Help! Save me!” And outside the tent men cried out, running.

The stranger flung his cloak around her, dragged her through the tent’s postern door. Frenzied, Jenny sought to break his hold on her, flung out a wailing, desperate cry for Mellyn, for Folcalor, for anyone to help her … And at the same time, gasping in pain, deep in the lightless jewel’s heart, Jenny gathered the dragon-strength, drew and drew at the essences of fire and salt. Though the pain hammered her, she formed them in her mind, and they whispered through the flaw in the jewel, real, as she was real, only without physical body, as she had no physical body … The strength of a dragon stirred in her, reached out to fight Amayon … Water, whispered the voice in her mind. Become water, Wizard-woman. Do not fight him but flow away. Turn to steam and let the wind take you.

Men ran from the tents to drive them back from the camp’s palisade. Jenny saw with her wizard’s sight the rope that hung down against the logs. The soldiers didn’t. Laboriously, as if gathering seeds of millet with hands stiffened by cold, she formed spells of Look-Over-There, spells of Kill-Fire that doused the torches among the tents, spells of clumsiness, of inattention, of trailing bootlaces and dropped weapons. Smoke from the snuffed campfires mingled with white wet unseasonable fog that lifted from the river …

And she felt Folcalor’s spells. The demon-spells of the gross, great thing that rode Caradoc like a dying horse, the thing that she had come to hate in these past five days only slightly less than she hated Amayon—that she loved with Amayon’s bizarre and carnal passion. Spells dispersing the fogs and the smokes, illuminating cold flares of marshlight around them. “Stop them!” Rocklys pounded out among her men, her great black-horned bow in her hands and Caradoc at her heels. Soldiers fell on them, soldiers whom Jenny had taken into her bed for four nights now. The gray-haired stranger was armed with a staff; he used it to fell the first man, and Jenny caught up the soldier’s fallen halberd and dagger. Spells tangled like glowing wool around her, and she fought them off; opened one man’s face from brow to chin, reversed the halberd and broke the jaw of another, clearing the path to the wall.

Overhead she heard the soft deadly beating of wings and knew the dragons were coming. Up the rope, said the voice within her mind.

Kill him! screamed Amayon, and the muscles of her arm cramped with the effort not to drive a blade into the stranger’s back. Arrows thudded into the wall. Mellyn’s voice cried Jenny! despairingly as Jenny groped through the flaw in the peridot, grasped the rope, the silk cloak whirling about her as she climbed. Her rescuer struck and slashed with his staff, and looking down, she bent her aching concentration against his enemies. He would, she knew, have to turn his back on them to climb.

She stayed her climb, sweating, shaking, forming in her mind all the limitations, all the power lines, all the runes of a spell of fire and lightning. She felt the demons drag and drink at the magic, tearing at the spells even as she formed them; saw Caradoc, on the edge of the phosphor-lit clearing among the tents, raise his hand.

Unarmed men, she thought; if not unarmed, at least not ready for magic…

Still she flung her power down on the circle of soldiers around her rescuer, and even with Folcalor’s power fighting hers, even with Amayon dragging and tearing at her mind, fire exploded from the air. Men screamed and fell back, dropping their weapons to claw at their burning clothes. The gray-haired man leapt for the rope, and Jenny saw him climb behind her, bony and lean as if his body had no weight at all. Rocklys’ black-feathered arrow slammed into his shoulder, hurling him hard into the wall. Jenny reached down, grasped his hand, and dragged him up beside her to the top of the wall. Wind slashed and tore at her hair, at the swirling black silk cloak, and she barely dodged aside as a greenish gout of acid splattered on the wall, the wood hissing as it began to burn. Another arrow struck inches from her knee, and Mellyn’s voice cried to her mind in music that ripped her with grief. “Jump!” Jenny said. But the stranger caught her around the waist and threw himself not down from the wall but up. And up, wings cracking open, bones melting and changing. The hands that held her turned to claws. Above her Jenny saw the black glister of scales, the swirl of stars and darkness, mane and spines and iron-barbed tail.

The campfires fell away. They plunged up and still up, into the lightning-pregnant clouds, arrowing away to the east.

It was like being pregnant with some carnivorous thing that gnawed at her womb, seeking to eat its way out.

It was like standing guard on some rocky place alone in the freezing rain, on the second night without sleep, knowing there would be no relief.

It was like lying in bed with a lover in the hot flush of first youth, knowing that to embrace him would be death.

Amayon knew her very well. He had had time to familiarize himself with every flaw in the imprisoning jewel that was Jenny’s heart and body, and it was only a matter of time, she knew, before he triumphed.

The Lord of Time was her enemy, as he was of all men. He was the demons’ friend.

Thunder ringed the citadel of Halnath. Jenny felt in the rain that sluiced her face the Summonings of wizards and welcomed the protection of the lightning and the storm. As Morkeleb descended to the wet slates of the topmost court through the flaring glower of morning, the soldiers around the wall looked askance, but they raised their spears in salute as she walked past them. Someone gave her a cloak, for she wore only the silken rags of her nightgown. The Master waited in his study. “Jenny—” He held out his hand. He wore battered mail over a black scholar’s robe and didn’t look as if he’d slept the previous night.

She gestured him back. The wet wool cloak stuck to her bare flesh underneath, and her wet hair to her face. She must, she knew, look every day of her forty-five years and more, haggard and puffy-lipped with debauchery, weary, soiled. It was hard to bring out the words. “The demon is still in me,” she said. “Don’t trust me. Don’t trust what I say.” “It takes one to know one, love.” She turned, startled, at the voice, and fought to maintain the uncaring dragon-calm that did not release its hold on power for anything. Don’t let yourself feel, she commanded, but it was the hardest thing she had ever done. Amayon is there waiting for you …

John went on, “I’ll know if it’s you talking, or him.” He sat slumped in a chair by the hearth. He looked more tired than she had ever seen him, even more weary than when he returned from the Skerries of Light. The skin at his throat was marked, as if hot metal had been laid there, and deep slits and scratches etched his hands and neck. But it was in his eyes themselves, half-hidden by his straggling hair, that the real damage showed.

They lightened and brightened when they met hers, however; the old gay madness, and the trust of love. He was glad to see her, and it made her want to weep with shame and joy. “They told me you were dead.” She did not add that it was Ian who had said so. She thought about the way she had dealt with that grief, losing her mind to the demon, uncaring. Then, “You went to the ruins.” She didn’t know how she knew it.

“I couldn’t think what else to do, love.” He got to his feet and came to her, carefully, not trusting himself nor wanting to break her concentration. His fingers shook as they touched hers. She knew her own were cold, after the long flight over the bitter mountains, but his were icy against them.

She thought about the things she’d seen, gathered behind the mirror in her dreams. Thought about what she’d read of demons in his books.

“He lay unconscious in the mirror chamber for many hours.” Miss Mab rose from her little tussock before the fire, her thick exquisite jewelry flashing like a dragon’s scales. “Barely was the spell I laid upon him sufficient to bring him forth again.” She glanced back at Polycarp, who looked quickly away.

“I made the best bargain I could.” John propped up his spectacles. “I never was any damn good at the market—you remember that time I bought the stone nutmegs from that feller with the monkey?—but I did try. Miss Mab’s been tellin’ me what exactly I’ve got myself into, and all I’ve got to say is, that Demon Queen ought to be ashamed of herself.”

He turned away from her, fumbling with the battered pouch at his belt. When he turned back, he had something that looked like a seal in his hand, wrought of crystal or glass. At the same moment Miss Mab came from the other side to take Jenny by the wrist. It was well she did. Within her jewel-bound mind Jenny felt Amayon drag and lurch at her arm, and she was overwhelmed with the desire to flee the room, to hide, to use her will and her magic and never be found. She twisted, pulled away, and other hands caught her from the other side. She had a glimpse of the gray-haired stranger’s pale face, the eyes that were nothing but shadow and starshine: Morkeleb in his human guise, stepping through the terrace doors. She understood—Amayon understood—what the crystal seal John held was. Hatred, treachery, poison, murder, pain…

The demon’s voice screamed in her, and like a dragon, she sheathed her mind in diamond and steel.

Leave you, leave you, leave you…

Waves of unbearable pleasure, indescribable pain, swept her. She clutched at John’s arm, at the corner of the table, as she doubled over, sweating, nauseated.

“Hold on, love.” His hand touched her chin, raising her head; she saw he had a white shell in his hand, a common one from the beaches of Bel, and Amayon’s voice within her rose to a shriek. DON’T LET HIM…

A child within her. A desperate, terrified lover-child …

Her mind shut hard, Jenny opened her mouth as the shell was put against her lips. Closed her eyes on the sight of Polycarp, holding a candle to an ensorcelled stick of crimson sealing-wax. Held out her hand obediently, for Mab to slash her palm and smear the crystal seal with blood. The little gnome-witch had to step up onto a chair to press the bloodied sigil to Jenny’s forehead.

THEY WILL TORTURE ME THROUGH ETERNITY!

Jenny remembered the nights of her own torment and replied calmly, Good. And Amayon was gone.

Desolation swept her. She was barely aware of Mab taking the shell from her mouth. Jenny turned away and put her hands over her face, brokenhearted, and wept.

“The demons have asked of Aversin that he bring them certain things.” Miss Mab sat forward in the Master’s big chair, and Poly-carp, seated on the floor beside her, brought up a footstool again.

Nearly twenty-four hours had passed. The gnome-witch wore silk slippers of an astonishing shade of blue, emblazoned with rosettes of lapis and gold and bearing on their toes little golden bells. They jingled when she crossed her ankles. “That was the price he paid for these.” On the study table the crystal seal lay, cold greenish-white, as if wrought from ice. Indeed, by the frost upon it, in which any human touch left a print, it might have been so. The vial beside it had a slippery feel, and Jenny could see that it had burned rings in the tabletop. Now it rested on a saucer of glass. The blue stone box between them, though more prosaic, seemed somehow darker and heavier than any stone of the world she knew, and it was difficult to look at it for long at a time. Dark marks crusted it. Blood, she thought.

The white shell should be there, too, Jenny thought. Amayon’s prison. She was ashamed of her desire to see it. To know if he were comfortable.

Absurd, she thought, burning with embarrassment. Absurd. As if John were not in desperate peril, as if Ian were not still a demon’s slave …

After leaving the study last night she had slept and wakened to find John lying beside her. He had cupped her cheek in his hand and touched his lips to hers, and it was as if all the filthiness and cruelty and lust Amayon had dragged her through were washed from her body and her mind. She wasn’t beautiful—she knew this and had always known it—but she saw her beauty in his eyes, and that was enough.

Her mind still felt detached, as it had when she saw Cair Corflyn through Morkeleb’s eyes. She dwelt still, she knew, within the ensorcelled peridot, and that jewel lay in the silver bottle around Caradoc’s neck. Her hold on her flesh, she sensed, even without Amayon in occupation, was tenuous. The difference was that no demon dwelt in her abandoned flesh, and she could operate herself, like one of John’s machines, through the flaw in the jewel. The relief was greater than anything she had known.

Later they’d slept again, but John still looked tired. There was a haunted look in his eyes, as if he glanced always over his shoulder for something he expected but never saw. “There shouldn’t be much of a trouble about the first.” Sitting on the floor at Jenny’s feet, John squeezed her hand. “There’ll be thunderstones in the treasuries of the Deep, won’t there, M’am?” He glanced over at Miss Mab. “I’ve heard as how the gnomes treasure ’em up. I reckon me credit’s good enough with old Balgub after this that he’d sell me one for not much more than a couple pounds of me flesh.”

He spoke with a quick grin, but the gnome-witch looked away. Jenny felt John’s sudden stillness through her knees against his back.

“No thunderstones lie in the Deep of Ylferdun,” said Miss Mab and looked away from his eyes. “Don’t be daft, M’am,” said John. “Your old pal Dromar spoke of ’em to me, four years ago …”

“He was mistaken,” said the gnome-witch. “All have been sent to Wyldoom, in payment for a debt. And such things are far less common than rumor makes them. And in any case,” she added, as John drew in his breath to speak, “none would they surrender to thee for this matter.” Her old pale eyes met John’s squarely. Silence fell like a single water drop in a dream that spreads out to form a pond, and then a lake, and then an ocean that swallows the world. “It is from the metal of the thunderstones, you see,” she said, “that the Demon Gates are wrought. The metal from the stars holds spells as no other can, to render the Gates impervious to harm.”

“As for a dragon’s tears,” said Polycarp, “I think that’s simply fanciful, for dragons do not weep.”