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Sweet incense and warmth slowly returning to the innermost hollows of her flesh. The cold star of poison pain slowly fading. The sweetness of herbs.
The Nightraven had not been a good woman, or an easy teacher. Coldhearted and beautiful, she had laid spells over her captor, so that Lord Aver had loved her even when they fought. His sisters, Jane and Rowan, had hated her like death. When she had disappeared, leaving behind her a son, a puzzled, wary toddler who never quite trusted the world, the spells on Lord Aver had remained: he had never loved another woman, not even his former longtime mistress Hollyberry, the town blacksmith’s wife.
Jenny, too, had been left with a hole in her heart.
It was old Caerdinn, the half-mad and rage-filled old hedge-wizard Lord Aver got for his son John’s tutor, who took Jenny as a pupil when she was thirteen. Caerdinn took her into his crumbling stone house on Frost Fell, and taught her how magic was organized. Showed her how to draw power from the sun and the earth and from her own flesh and bones and blood. How to observe, and to name each tiniest flower and grass blade by its true name so that they would be within her power: how to call power from these true names. How to weave Limitations on each spell, so that cows would not run mad, nor birds forget how to fly, nor thatch roofs take fire two villages away when she summoned Power; and how to harmlessly disperse the power she’d called, after her spells were accomplished, lest it linger in the place where she’d raised it and mix with later spells. This was how Spaeth, his master, had taught him, and all the wizards of their Line back to the shadowy ancient warlock Herne.
All magic comes from understanding, Caerdinn had told her, staring at her with his huge pale blue eyes, like a demented goat’s beneath white brows. He seized her by the shoulder, small hands but terribly strong. The long nails stained yellow with the herbs he smoked dug into her flesh. Know the names of each pebble underfoot, and you can call even their tiny magics from them at need. The more of them you know, the more accurately you know their nature, the greater will be your power.
In the darkness, in her pain, in her forty-sixth year, she thought now, There is power in me still.
She breathed in deep, feeling the demons nearby. Their minds circled hers like ravens. She felt the presence of Morkeleb the Dragonshadow, who in his days as a dragon had nearly destroyed this Deep. He had dwelled here for a time after driving the gnomes forth, and knew its every passageway and chamber. His calm strength upheld her, flowing into her lungs and blood.
As her mind and body relaxed she felt the warmth return. Past and present … the glimmer of cold disdain that had been the Nightraven, who had given her the first knowledge of what power was.
Caerdinn’s resentment and bitterness, that had not stopped him from teaching her all the little he knew. Even though they were dead—Caerdinn for certain, and Nightraven for all she knew—Jenny felt them still, a part of her body, her self as surely as Morkeleb’s magic had once been a part of her bones and blood.
And a farther mind, that sweet creaky little voice again, said, Linger till we come, child. Hold my hand.
Mab, thought Jenny, clasping that strong, gentle shadow. Miss Mab, the men of Bel called her: Taseldwyn of the House of Howeth-Arawan, the tough little gnome-wife whose spells had enabled John to pass through the Burning Mirror at Ernine—to survive his first encounter with the Demon Queen.
Mab was still far away. The Wise Ones of the Deep had put her under house arrest in the warrens of her own clan, but in her dream Jenny felt her hand. It was no bigger than a child’s and hard-muscled like a blacksmith’s, thick with the gaudy rings in which the gnomes delighted. There was comfort in her grip, reminding Jenny of all those nights when she’d gone to sleep holding John’s hand.
John, she thought, giddy and frightened. Where is John?
She saw him riding away from her through the blowing snow of a coming storm. Riding down Frost Fell after they’d found their son, Ian: the boy had taken poison, to keep the demons from returning to his flesh. She saw John ride away and felt the darkness that she’d felt then, too despairing even to speak to him or to anyone of her pain.
Morkeleb lifted her. She heard the slither of boulders pushed aside, smelled the brimstone residue of blasting powder and the choke of rock dust. From a great distance she heard the dragon speak her name in that voice like the dark behind the stars, and though she’d already wandered a long way into a quiet gray country beyond the borders of sleep, she could still speak to him, for she was still holding Mab’s hand. I’m here, she said.
His body was warm. Like sleeping near a stove on a freezing night. It flashed through her how cold she was, and she tightened her grip on Mab’s hand: I’m cold, she said.
Endure. The word flowed over her like the tides of the sea.
She didn’t know how she would, but she thought again, There is power in me still. Not really magic, she thought, but power of a kind. She tried weaving a little skein of magic from the name of that black-haired girl-child, running after Kahiera Nightraven along the battlements of Alyn Hold. To that she added a thread of power from the awkward, un-pretty thirteen-year-old who had fetched Caerdinn’s breakfast porridge for him all those mornings when he’d been too crippled with arthritis to rise from his bed. Who had endured his slaps and curses because he was the only one who could teach her spells.
She colored the magic with her endurance then: If I could stand living with him, I can surely stand this.
Magic from understanding. Know the names of each pebble …
The name of this pebble was Jenny Waynest, she thought. What I am is that person who was.
She breathed a little easier, and some more of the coldness in her limbs seemed to abate.
After a long time—more dreams—she smelled herbed smoke and sheepskins. Much closer now she heard Miss Mab say, “Lay her down. A well lies farther along that passageway. Fetch water. I brought a hothwais of heat …” She named the spell-stones of the gnomes, which could be charged sometimes with heat, as if they’d been baked in fire, and sometimes with glowing light: sometimes with other things. “She must be kept warm.”
Jenny had a clear picture in her mind of the place where she lay, though she had not the strength to open her eyes. It was a cavelet barely larger than the smokehouse at Alyn Hold, a nodule deep in the rock of the mines. Air flowed through it, tracking across the stubble that was all that was left of Jenny’s hair after the fight with Folcalor. So the cave must be near the ventilating shafts that riddled all the gnomes’ workings like worm-tunnels. Reaching out with her other senses, she smelled water not far off. Miss Mab had brought blankets and sheepskins as well as her medicines. Even large burdens were of little account to a gnome. She laid some of these down as a bed for Jenny, and moved her onto them. From a box she took a stone as big as a man’s fist, and set it beside her. Passing her fingers across it she whispered the True Name of heat. The stone gave forth no light, but the chill of the cave, and the bitter cold in Jenny’s flesh, grew less.
Will she live? asked Morkeleb. Jenny heard the slosh of water in a gourd, smelled it as it dripped on stone. In her half-dreaming state she could not tell whether the dragon wore his human guise or the serpentine semblance of a dragon in miniature as he sometimes did. He might even have been completely invisible, a state he had returned to more and more since giving up his magic lest the demons take hold of him. In the darkness Jenny was aware of his diamond eyes, no more.
She could see Miss Mab, in any case, a bent little gnome woman with a round face seamed with wrinkles, and eyes the color of sunset beneath a jutting brow. Her pale gold hair she wore dressed in elaborate rolls and bands over a padded frame, and she was dressed in silky trousers, tunic, and a quilted jacket, as both males and females among the gnomes clothed themselves. Only her family’s influence with Balgub King of the Deep had kept her from being killed for abetting John’s quest for the Demon Queen. As it was, she had been imprisoned for a year and a day.
Demons could, of course, being deathless, wait far longer than that to make their presence known in one they possessed. But they never did. Like children they were impatient, and greedy about their pleasures, even to their own detriment. If one immediate plan failed, there was always another.
The Lady Trey is dead, Jenny tried to say. Prince Gareth is sending for one in the city who is said to raise the dead.
But all she could do was whisper, “Dead,” in a voice no louder than the scrape of dried leaves blown across a marble floor. Human ears would not have heard her, but she felt Morkeleb draw near.
Is this what you learned when you went into the city, my friend? Claws touched her, light as spider feet. Tender.
She gathered images together like a sheaf of dried flowers. Herself at Trey’s bedside, and Gareth stretched weeping over his wife’s body. The stink of pyre smoke on the rainy air and Polycarp, Master of Halnath, saying, I don’t like it, as they sat in the Long Garden. Like flowers she handed them to the dragon, thankful that she need do no more than that.
She had been a dragon, once upon a time, transformed into that shape by Morkeleb’s power. For a time the magic of a dragon had filled her veins and her flesh. She remembered how dragons spoke.
With those images, others: the horror of the drowned sailor rising from the water of Eldsbouch Harbor, with the soul of the wizard Caradoc glaring hungrily from its ruined eyes. The tall, gray-haired form of the Baron Pellanor, leading bandit slave hunters through the Winterlands months after his death in battle. Trying to trap her sons.
They are raising the dead. Tell Miss Mab. The demons are raising the dead.
She slipped away into sleep.
She lay for a long time in the cave, like a child in the womb. Morkeleb never left her side. Miss Mab came and went, bringing water sometimes, or gruel, or once another hothwais, this one imbued with white light so strong, she kept it wrapped in several layers of leather sacking. With a silver knife barely as long as a finger, she cut Jenny’s wrist and drew sigils around the cut in ocher and ink. The spells of healing were a whisper rather than a shout, for demons still lurked in the mine. In her dreams, Jenny felt them, slipping green and shining far away among the rocks. Mab was forced to work slowly, dispensing tiny sips of magic, drawing forth the poison a little at a time. In the long periods between, Morkeleb’s smoky presence wrapped Jenny around, and held her in life.
Sometimes Mab spoke to her as she worked, gentle words like a mother, telling her about the road back to healing and life. “Power lies in thee still, child; in thy heart, in thy bones. Call it from what thou art, what thou truly art NOW, not from anything thou wert before.”
When I had the magic of the dragon in me, I had power, thought Jenny. That dragon power was all that I saw. What am I, truly, now? A woman who formerly had the power of a dragon: this I am. A woman who has borne three children, and who loves them now more than she did at their births: this I am.
She took even the headaches and the little spurts of nausea that had tormented her for years, the flushes of heat and the migraines of her changing body, and sought in them for power instead of calling on the power of her youth to suppress them: this I am.
She laughed in her dreams, to feel that power respond.
Once she even called on the power of the poison itself, slowly working out of her body: from death and pain whose name and nature she now understood, weaving strength. This I am.
Opening her eyes she looked up at Mab and though she could not speak, she smiled. The pale golden eyes smiled back.
“Walks the plague still in the City of Men?” Jenny heard Mab ask later, through the dim shadow of sleep.
So deep lies this place within the stone of the mountain, even I cannot hear. Morkeleb’s voice sounded in Jenny’s mind, as she knew it would sound in Mab’s. When I reach forth to listen to those who walk the thoroughfares of the Deep, the rumor is confused. Some say the plague there is ended, and the man who brought it upon the city was killed. Others say no, the demons saved him from the fire, sending a dragon to snatch him away. Others yet say stranger things. The old King who was ill and broken in his mind is now restored, they say, and takes up the reins of power again in his hands. The Warren of your Clan lies closer to the ways of your brethren than this hiding-place, Gnome-Witch, and the tongues of servants are ever ready to gossip. Surely you have heard?
“I listen in the stillness of the nights.” Mab’s warm, stubby fingers paused in drawing the sigils of healing along Jenny’s veins. Her voice was barely a murmur, as though she feared who might overhear. “These rumors have I heard, and others as well. In the City of Men, they say, evildoers rove the streets killing men in their own gateways without reason, without concealing themselves from the justice of the King’s guards. No man now trusts another, nor children their parents, nor wives their husbands. Those whose loved ones were resurrected from the dead try to pretend that the ones who were restored to them were indeed those who were taken away, but they weep in their fear, and dare not speak. All this I have heard.”
Ah, said the dragon softly. This is as it was a thousand years ago, in the Realm of Ernine.
And having been a dragon once herself, Jenny saw into the dragon’s mind, as he had been able to see into hers. She saw the columns of smoke that rose above the walls of that lost golden city, seeing in its prime what she had only glimpsed as ivy-smothered ruins. She saw flame and smoke rising from the roofs in Morkeleb’s memory, and no one came to put out the blazes for fear of the demons they might meet. She saw the bodies of young girls and children left mutilated by the waysides, and how, in time, gangs in the streets would kill without a hand raised against them, until at last barbarians swept in from the East and looted the undefended town.
“Were you there?” asked Mab, and she used the form of words that gnomes use to address Kings, or gods. Somehow to Jenny this did not sound strange.
The dragon replied, I was there.
Then he was silent. Jenny saw the mad wizard Isychros riding at the head of his corps of dragons and wizards, demon light burning from his eyes, as Caradoc later had ridden. The possessed dragons sparkled in the sunshine, crimson and golden and blue and bronze, their magic transfigured by the magic of demons. The wizards scried in water and glass and crystal with fivefold power for any who would plot against them, and those plotters came to terrible grief.
Polycarp, Jenny thought. Fear sliced her at the thought of the Master of Halnath, who had sent her here to the Deep to tell Miss Mab of Trey’s death. Polycarp knew too much of demons for his own safety. Had he been able to escape from Bel, Jenny wondered, before things came to the pass there that they had all those centuries ago in Ernine?
The High King of Ernine had become the pawn and slave of the demons, she remembered, seeing through Morkeleb’s eyes. His two daughters had killed him, but too late to save the Inland Realm from the terrible cancers of mistrust and blood-feud. Even the destruction of the dragon corps, and the death of the wizards whom the demons had taken, came too late. Working against them with demon magic, further damage was done, though no human magic was found that would prevail.
“How was it ended, in the end?” asked Miss Mab at length. She sat on a corner of Jenny’s sheepskins, and Jenny could smell in her clothing the scents of lamp oil from the Warren of Arawan, and the dried herbs of healing. “How were the demons—and the other demons who helped to defeat those called up by Isychros—finally bound?”
That I know not, returned Morkeleb. It was nothing to me, these squabbles of men. In those days I had the sense not to remain in a place of danger, no matter how much gold there was for the taking. I followed the dragon corps south and east, to gather up the gold of men … And in his thoughts Jenny felt the warm, deep strength of that love for gold that is the heart of every dragon, the intoxication of the magic that dragons can breathe through the refined metal, and drink back again in almost unbearable ecstacies of dreams.
When I saw what the demons did, that dwelled within the dragons, I was disgusted, and came away. I returned to the Skerries of Light, to the islands in the western sea where the dragons dwell. I had no more to do with them, nor with the wars of men.
“Were you not concerned,” asked Mab, “to help your fellows among the dragons, who were enslaved?”
Morkeleb did not reply for a long while. Jenny saw them sitting together, though her eyes were closed in sleep: Miss Mab in her green velvet jacket and bright pink trousers, her curly-toed blue slippers glinting with jewels. The dragon curled near the hothwais of heat, like a great half-visible dog before invisible flames. He had been black as a thing of carven coal when first Jenny had seen him, and huge, forty feet from the tip of his nose to the cruel spiked club of his tail. She had not known then that the great dragons, the mages and loremasters among that kind, were capable of changing their size. Among the dragons Morkeleb was foremost in lore, in the spells and wisdom passed along from mind to mind for centuries and millennia, wisdom and power growing in him until at last he had given up his magic, and passed entirely beyond dragon shape.
Now he had the semblence of a dragon, insofar as he had any semblence at all—or perhaps, thought Jenny, it was only her perception in dreaming that saw him thus. The shape of him that she saw was the thin, snake-like body of a dragon, with its long tail like a muscled whip and great thin-boned silken wings folded along his sides. All his joints and spine bristled with spikes, and great scales like razor-edged fans. In the narrow, beaked head burned crystal eyes, mazes of diamonds that you could fall into forever. Among long horns and tufts of mane, antennae flicked lazily, the points of light at their tips the only thing about him that could be clearly seen.
Not human, she thought. But not a beast, as so many humans considered dragons. The young among dragons were beasts. But they grew, and passed on, with the years, to become other things.
As Morkeleb had.
A man would have gone back for fellow men, replied the dragon slowly. Indeed I have met a man who would go back for them, though they were no kin nor friends of his. It is not a thing of dragons, to concern oneself overmuch with the safety of others. I knew their minds were enslaved, and there was little that I could do. We are creatures who look after ourselves.
Jenny opened her eyes at that. Turning her head, she saw the dragon regarding her with his diamond gaze. “Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” she murmured, and held out her hand. “You saved me in the North, when I was in dragon form, as once I saved you.”
He did not ask her how she was. He knew that—better than she knew herself: she felt the chill scrutiny of his consciousness touch her bones. But she thought the shadowy outlines of his form became more distinct with the passage of thoughts in his mind. To Mab, he said, She must be moved as soon as may be. And yourself also, Gnome-Witch. Sense you not the passage of demons within these mines? Hear you not, in the still of the night, the scratch of their glass shells upon the rocks as they emerge from whatever pool hides their gate? Smell you not the stink of them, like blood poured onto hot iron? They wait and they listen, and they are strong. Soon or late they will find this place, and take you in the darkness.
“They are strong,” agreed Miss Mab, rising. “This was the question a thousand years ago, Dragonshadow, and is the question again. That they are strong. Ward-spells that once defeated them, and held them in check, now leave them untouched. Are these new demons, then, bred somehow from the old who destroyed Ernine?”
Jenny said, “No,” with such conviction that both gnome and dragon turned to look at her in surprise. “No. Amayon remembers the Fall of Ernine. He was there.” It surprised her that she could name the demon who had possessed her without a break in her voice. Without wondering where he was, and what had become of him after John had given him over to the Queen behind the mirror. Without a pang of concern as to whether he was in pain. Perhaps the poison had burned the longing out of her, or the healing had strengthened her heart. She did not know.
“In possessing me,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “he not only occupied my body, while my mind was imprisoned elsewhere in a green jewel. He occupied my mind itself, the portions of my mind that remained in my body, side by side with his. That—that portion of me shared his thoughts. Some nights I have dreamed his dreams …”
She grimaced at the dirty memories, the hellblaze of passions and power that still could heat her flesh if she let them. Yet she realized that in her poisoned dreams she had not once dreamed of him. Only weeks ago she had been literally incapable of dreaming about anything else.
“He was there.” She struggled for breath to speak. “He was one of Adromelech’s demons, that devoured and defeated those of Aohila of the mirror.” She drew the fleece up close, though the cave was warm now, the warmth kept in it by a straw mat hung over the door. A feather of light was allowed to leak from the wrapped hothwais, just enough that she could see. Farther off, on the flowing draft that everywhere ventilated the Deep and the mines below it, she smelled water and stone, and farther off other fires, where the gnomes dwelled, or their slaves who worked the mines.
Morkeleb tilted his narrow head—he had shrunk himself to little larger than a stag, and sat coiled in the shadows like a gleaming skeleton of diamonds and pitch. Then were I—or another—to search deeply enough in your dreams, it might be that we could understand how the demons were in the end defeated?
Miss Mab raised her brows, turned her golden eyes to Jenny. “Is this so, child?”
“Maybe.” Jenny shivered, not liking the hidden suspicion about what she would see.
“I will search, then,” the old gnome said, and stood, “for spells of dream reading. For spells, too, to guard your mind, child, from too close a sight of the demon’s heart.” When she put her hand on Jenny’s shoulder, Jenny felt how sharp her own bones were under the gnome’s thick palms. Even in the warmth of the cave she felt chilled, as though she had barely any flesh left to her. Her combat with Folcalor beneath the sea, near the gate of the Sea-wights’ hidden realm, had left her scarred, her long black hair burned away and her hands crippled and twisted. As she fumbled weakly to return Mab’s clasp she saw that though her short fingers, her brown square wrinkled palms, were still marked by the blasts of steam and fire, they were no longer drawn together like claws, but able again to spread and flex.
There was a touch of arthritis in the joint of her right thumb, where for years she had ground pestle to mortar in preparing herbs for medicine. That was all.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “When Morkeleb takes me from here, you will come? He’s right, my lady. It isn’t safe for you anywhere in the Deep.”
“And how safe will any be,” asked the gnome. “Did I leave the heart of the Deep, and flee away to a place where I could not hear what passes beneath the earth? I can come and go from my prison if I am careful, enough to send thee word. I am not in a cell. It is true that there are demons here in the Deep, Dragonshadow”—she turned to Morkeleb—“it is true, that I hear them chitter and scrape in the night. And my question is, What do they hear? What seek they in the Deep, that they cannot have in the City of Men?
“This would I learn. King Sevacandrozardus has sent for Goffyer, the greatest of the mages of the gnomes and my own old teacher, from Tralchet Deep, in the North. If any will know how to look into your dreams for the memories of the demons, my child, it will be he.”
Jenny nodded, but shivered again as Miss Mab gathered up her medicines and took her departure. The thought of delving into that part of her consciousness, her memories of Amayon, filled her with a sickened dread. She lay among the sheepskins and tried to sleep, with Morkeleb stretched across the foot of the pallet, chin upon his paws. The last she saw was the lights of his antennae, flicking back and forth in the dark.
THREE (#uf0dedd6a-6ae6-581a-97f5-2a069c2c2e0b)
JOHN WOKE IN panic, thinking, Jenny!
And lay in the warm glow of a small fire, trying to breathe.
The dream had been blazingly clear. Jenny in darkness, bleeding, an arrow through her shoulder and the sweat of death on her face. The Demon Queen’s voice, She has been poisoned …
He hadn’t been there to protect her, to help her. It was his fault.
And he would never see her again.
He tried to sit up, and his head spun. He lay back down, blinked at the stone walls around him in the apricot whisper of the fire. A frieze of what appeared to be human figures marched around the four sides of a room not much bigger than his cell under the King’s prison tower—at least in the gloom they seemed human, though without his spectacles it was difficult to be sure. The background stone was pinkish, and whatever the painted shapes carried in their hands—treasure, presumably—threw back the firelight with gold leaf’s unmistakable dusky brilliance.
He lay on a springy mound of fresh bracken, covered by a red velvet cloak so thickly gemmed and embroidered as to look like a blanket of embers in this ruddy light. A ewer stood by him, silver mountings embracing a red-and-white shell bigger than a man’s head. A beautiful thing, of a species he’d never seen before. There was also a clay cup, and the meat of two or three rabbits, cooked and lying in the cracked curved section of a painted jar.
There was no one else in the room.
Jenny …
In the dream he’d seen her also with the dragon Morkeleb. She wore the dragon form he’d once seen her take, not white but crystalline, as if wrought of crystal lace and bones. They flew low over the ocean, the black dragon and the white, shadows running blue before them on the waves, as alone among humankind he’d seen the dragons fly in the Skerries of Light that lay westward across the sea. The memory of that dream calmed his pounding heart, filled him with a sense of peace.
An old memory? An illusion, sent up by his mind to reassure him?
The vision, perhaps, that both Jenny and Morkeleb had perished in the cave-in, and that in death her soul had become a dragon’s soul at last?
The thought left him desolate.
He had traveled, he realized, for so long since leaving the Winterlands that he had become confused about time. Time in Hell wasn’t the same as time that is ruled by the sun and the stars. On his errantry for the Demon Queen he had crossed from Hell to Hell, the magic of one unworkable in another, and at last from the myriad Hells into that other world where the dragon Corvin had taken refuge in human shape. John felt like he’d been lost for years. Capture, imprisonment, and the specter of an agonizing death had come between him and the longing ache he’d felt, just to see Jenny, to speak to her …
If she’d listen. If she wouldn’t turn away.
When last he’d seen her, at her old house on Frost Fell, it had been the morning after Ian’s try at suicide. He heard his own voice lashing at her, saw her crumpled beside the hearth, beside the nest of blankets they’d made up for their son.
God, I might just as well have gone over and kicked her, he thought, trying to wriggle away from that memory, that shame and pain.
Back then, even with his experience of dealing with the Demon Queen, he hadn’t understood what possession by a demon did to those who survived it.
He wanted to walk back into that room, that time, and knock that man who was himself upside the head and scream at him, She’s hurting, too, you nit! Let her alone!
Don’t let her be dead, he prayed, to the Old God whose name and nature were mostly no longer remembered, save in backwaters like the Winterlands. Don’t let her be dead and not knowing how sorry I am.
He closed his eyes and watched the play of the reddish light on the lids, breathed the fusty sweetness of the bracken and the moldery earth-stink of the covering cloak. His body was covered with bruises like a windfall peach. After a time he rolled gingerly up onto one black-and-blue elbow and devoured rabbit and water, and as he did so saw that broken pieces of wood had been heaped near the chamber’s stone doorway, ready to be fed to the blaze. Boughs thicker than his calf had been snapped into short billets, as if they had been twigs.
Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, he thought, and rubbed a half-healed bullet graze left over from that final firefight in the lab. His shoulder was bruised black from the kick of one of those noisy chattering horrendous guns that could kill a roomful of people in moments.
