Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (6 page)

“You were one of the dragons then,” said John conversationally, “weren't you? One of those Isychros enslaved with the help of Aohila's demons, when he took over the Realm of Ernine.”

“I was the only one to survive,” Corvin replied. “And that, only because the demon who dwelled within my brain understood that the Sea-wights could attack through the magic that was used against them. The others—dragons and wizards alike—died screaming, as the Sea-wights devoured the demons already in possession of those bodies. Devoured them as demons do, taking their substance into their own. Burning up themselves in the process, many of them. The war between demon and demon is too much for the flesh and the mind to survive. It was not pretty to see, even to a dragon who has seen the evils that lurk in the darkness behind the stars. The demon who rode within my brain turned me loose and fled. But afterward she called to me in dreams.”

“And that's why we're here?” John leaned his back against the wall and drank from the clay cup. The water was cold from the night air, even so near the fire, and tasted faintly of iron. “Because you thought in Prokep you'd be safe from Aohila? Or I'd be safe?”

“Even so.” The dragon rose in a fluid movement, like a dancer, and walked down the passageway toward the light. John wrapped the jeweled cloak around himself and limped at his heels. He ached in every muscle and limb but felt much better for last night's food. And just as well, he thought. That Corvin owed him a life didn't mean the dragon wouldn't abandon him here, and half-blind and weaponless he didn't suppose he'd last long.

Corvin had resumed his dragon form by the time John reached the outer air. In the brittle desert light he flashed like a mountain of ash and diamonds, every joint armored with silver spikes, the bird-like head tassled and tufted and horned in subtle colors, iridescent purples and stripes of ivory and red. In the Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World (Volume III), Gantering Pellus had related that as they age, dragons' colors and the patterns of their scales become more complex and beautiful, then grow simpler again, as their magic strengthens and shapes. John had seen Morkeleb the Black, eldest of the dragon kind on earth, colorless and powerful as night; had seen what neither Gantering Pellus nor any other human save Jenny had seen, how Morkeleb was passing now beyond even that darkness, into the realm of shadow and invisibility as his magic transformed past ordinary maturity to somthing else.

Corvin was probably as old as Morkeleb, and as strong. But the difference was there, in the flashing shape of silver muscle and sable wing.

“What does she want of you?” John asked.

The serpent head slewed around, but John was gazing out across the dun formless land to the circle of stones.

“Aohila,” said John. Most men would have been intimidated by the mere presence of fifty-five feet of lethal strength and magic anywhere in their view, let alone within a yard of them, and he suspected Corvin thought that he would be, too. And he was, for he knew better than most men what a dragon could do. But he'd participated in the killing of one dragon, and had more or less befriended another, and he was damned if he'd let Corvin know his fear. After one has had dealings with the Demon Queen, even dragons lose some of their terrors. Besides, he reflected, at this point he didn't have a hell of a lot to lose.

“She possessed you, yes. But why take the trouble to send me to Hell and back to destroy you? To keep you out of Adro-melech's hands, or Folcalor's, obviously … but how could they use you against her? You weren't her servant in Hell, were you?”

No. The dragon's voice was a drift of wind in his mind, but even so was remote with distaste. When one gives one's service in Hell, one does not emerge.

John had guessed that. He wondered how many other men had, given that choice of being burned alive, or calling on a Demon-Lord's name. He turned his eyes from the dragon back toward the stone circle, but could not find it. He thought—he wasn't sure without spectacles—that the lay of the ground had not changed, and somewhere had the impression of that blink of reflected light, but when he looked in the direction he thought it was, there was nothing there.

It appeared to him, though, that the dust-devils veered aside as they neared the place. But that could only be the result of wind currents channeled through the dark-stained broken hills.

“Why take that trouble to trap one dragon,” he went on, “when the Skerries of Light are creepin' with 'em, and all young and bright and too stupid to fly the other way when a demon starts sendin” em dreams? They're all creatures of magic. If the demons could trap you, they can trap them twice as easy.”

He felt the flex of contempt in Corvin's mind, like dark music flowing through his. Most of the dragons with whom he had spoken had talked thus, with few words, like images in a dream. He wondered what their voices sounded like to one another.

But Corvin had masqueraded as human for many years, and the words that came into his mind still rang in that sandwhisper voice.

They? I would crush them. This Aohila knows.

And with the images of his mind John saw clearly what he had guessed before, that it had been the Demon Queen who had possessed this dragon. That her mind had taken root within his. She had used Corvin's magic, and his lore, and his memories as Amayon had used Jenny's.

Looking up at the small bird-like head in its cloud of green-and-silver mane, he wondered if Corvin had longed for the Demon Queen after she had fled, the way Jenny—in spite of herself and in spite of her hatred for the demon and what he had done to her—had longed for Amayon.

Long before Isychros wrought his unholy mirror to open the gate of Hell, I was the most powerful of the star-drakes of the earth. Corvin's antennae flicked, bright-hued whips in the wind. My lore is the deepest. Now added to that lore is the knowledge I have gained in the years of guising myself as human. Alone among the dragons or demons or mages of this world I understand ether-magic. This magic demons cannot touch, for it is sourced from other realities, in the other world. That will be what the demons want of me.

“You think so?”

The green-opal eye slid sidelong to regard John, and the Dragonsbane felt the heat of Corvin's annoyance at the query, but the dragon deigned no reply.

“If demons can't touch ether-magic—don't ken it at all—why would they want it? They're dead lazy, y'know. I can't see 'em takin' the trouble to learn about it from you.”

You speak like a human, Dragonsbane. All the demons have to do is enter into my brain again, to learn all that I know. And this I will never permit, if I have to remain here in Prokep forever. The dragon bristled his scales haughtily, for all the world like one of Jenny's cats, and turned away.

Then, after a time of silence, he asked, In the other world, you told the wizardlings—the League of the White Black Bird—to make the Sigil of the Gate upon a piece of dragonbone, and put a like mark within the Queen's prison box, that I could pass from one to the other, and so be free. What did you think to gain by cheating her?

“Dunno.” John shrugged. “But demons lie, an' somehow that story about you lovin' an' leavin' her didn't listen right to me. I figured somethin' she was that fired up to have me do for her was gie likely to turn out badly for the folk of my world, one way or another. But I didn't know enough about it to be sure, an' in the end it was just a guess.” The carnage in the GeoCorp headquarters, where demon henchmen had tried to seize Corvin, came back to him like a nightmare: bullets shattering those expensive mirrors, tearing through innocent flesh. The smell of blood, like any village raided by bandits or Iceriders. Worse: Three quarters of the people in that room had been too relaxed with liquor and drugs to even dive for cover.

That was what demons did. “Was that what let her trap you in the prison box in the first place?” he asked. “That she'd been in your mind, an' knew all you knew, at least at that time … includin' your true name?”

It is how such things work. Grudging anger, like a bass note under the music of the dragon's thought. Fury at Aohila, as if his subjection had been a few days ago and not ten centuries in the past. My true name was written within the catch box. In its presence I would be called to it, irresistibly.

North and west, rising sun razored shadows among the stones. Details of the landscape unfurled exaggerated ribbons of blue-black, throwing into prominence each minute pebble and hillock. Another dust-devil appeared out of nowhere, skated frenziedly through the piled sand, then petered itself out in the desert beyond.

I confess I was surprised that the magics of those little wizardlings who haunted the computer nets actually worked. I took refuge in that world precisely because magic no longer operated there. The energies of etheric plasma by which those people power their machines has a tendency to damp certain other forms of magic—because of course it is itself a form of magic. But that world's own magic was so attenuated that it was easily snuffed out.

“Doesn't mean people aren't still being born there who could have worked it, had it still existed. You got out of the second box with no trouble, then?”

As if recalling a dream, John glimpsed the image of the dragon emerging like smoke from the duplicate box, which was tucked behind a complete set of Clivy's Speculations. On the same high shelf were concealed the silver bottle in which Aversin had dipped an extra cup or so of the water from the spring in the Hell of the Shining Things, the rune-written sword given him by the League of the White Black Bird, and all the notes he'd made on his travels, grimy rolls and wads of parchment and papers all creased from being stuffed in his doublet pockets. Gareth must have gotten hold of them from Ector's guards.

And like a second dream he saw the young Regent sleeping, as the Demon Queen had shown him, with Amayon in the guise of the Lady Trey sitting smiling beside his bed.

John's belly clenched.

“Take me back.”

Don't be a fool.

“You think every day you delay the demons won't get stronger?” John shaded his eyes to look up at the dragon's haughty profile, high above his head. “Whether Folcalor wins out over Adromelech or t'other way around, whichever one ends up Lord of the Hell beneath the Sea, he'll come after you, son. And either way they'll do whatever they have to do, to get out of you whatever they went into the next world to get. And if you think they won't, you're joking yourself.”

They cannot come at me here.

The dragon spread his wings, and evening sun speared John's eyes, when it had moments ago been only an hour after dawn. The dry air turned moist and thick in his nostrils, laden suddenly with copal, plumeria, and frankincense. He heard men murmuring, and saw the city before him restored in its myriad beautiful hues. Painted walls, pillars of porphyry and malachite, rivaled the flowers on a thousand terraces and vines. Everything was startlingly clear, too, and he understood that he was seeing the dragon's memories. Watching with the dragon's hyperacute sight.

The circle of stones stood where it had been last night. With a dragon's far-reaching perceptions, John could even make out the faces of the ten people in that vast ground, seven men and three women, the youngest of them probably over sixty. They held hands, forming a ring that looked tiny in that open expanse of dun-gray dust. The chip of brightness in the ring's center was indeed water, a puddle that seemed barely larger than John's palm. But it caught the light of the torches, as it had caught that of last night's waning moon. The air above that fleck of water wavered with the greeny-silver luminosity of the Sea-wights; John felt their power, smelled the metallic vileness of them even at this great distance—the dragon's sense, not his own. Wind scoured from the hills, made dustdevils among the encircling menhirs.

Where the comet had wavered in the sky last night, only clean, pale twilight glimmered now.

They were astronomer-priests, as well as mages, said the dragon's voice in his mind. They understood enough of the nature of the Dragonstar so as to be able to hold against the magic the demons derived from it, until the Dragonstar ceased to rise, and its alien power faded away.

Outside the Henge walked others, yellow-robed like those within. Some of them were very young. Some bore the marks of combat, burns and scars and half-healed claw-rakes. One had been marked, as John had been marked, with the silvery half-seen tracery of demon runes, that gleamed strangely in the sun's dying light. Two or three wept as they paced.

They bent to draw signs in the sand between the stones with sticks of what looked like wax or chalk. Jen'll skin me if I don't give her a sketch of that, John thought, and concentrated his borrowed eyesight on the marks, memorizing as he had taught himself to memorize the small differences of animal tracks in the snow of the Winterlands, and the coded signs of hundreds of bandit and Icerider gangs. All these mages chanted and whispered as they traced the symbols, words that John could not make out, and within the stone circle the ten priests swayed, lined, calm faces blanched by the sicklied demon light.

When that light faded, leaving only the shining handbreadth of water, the ten priests retreated from one another, each drawing a circle of protection separate from the others. The silence in the city square beyond the Henge was like doom, though far off John heard a man in the hushed crowd weep.

Each priest within the Henge—within each separate protective ring—took a bottle from the robes they wore. Men and women, they knelt in their individual ward-rings, and drank. Then they lay down, and covered their faces with their cloaks. The torches carried by the warriors who lined the city square burned smoky in the waning daylight. The priests outside the barrier stones were still as the uncarved rocks.

John watched as, one by one, each of the ten mages whose strength had forced the Sea-wights into the shining water at the Henge's center went into a brief convulsion, and died. As each died, faint light licked and glimmered along the edges of the encircling stones, seeming to leap from stone to stone like brightening fire. John said nothing, but he trembled as if he had witnessed a great battle. As indeed he had, he thought. A great battle's end, and victory at a price he wasn't sure he'd have had the courage to pay.