Dragonshadow

For someone a thumb’s breadth under six feet and thewed like a thirty-eight-year-old man who’s spent most of his life riding boundary in cold weather, other strategies would probably be required.

John Aversin flexed his shoulders and listened, hoping to hell Sergeant Muffle and the spare horses were keeping absolutely quiet in the base camp at Deep Beck. Was three and a half miles far enough?

Morning stillness lay on the folded world of heather and stone, broken only by the hum of mosquitoes and bees. Even the creak of his stirrup leather seemed deafening, and the dry swish of Battlehammer’s tail.

Interesting that the greatest hero of legend was described as throwing something at the dragon, rather than nobly slicing its head off with a single blow of his mighty sword and to hell with Selkythar and Antara Warlady and Grimonious Grimblade, thank you very much.

Battlehammer snuffled and flattened his ears. Though the wind blew south off the ruins of Cair Dhû, if the stallion could smell the dragon from here, could the dragon smell them?

Or hear them, in the utter absence of the raucous dawn chitter of birds?

Dragonsbane. He was the one who was supposed to know all this.

John flexed his hands. The walls of the gorge still protected him, and the purl of the stream might conceivably cover the clack of Battlehammer’s hooves. The problem with dragons was that, mostly, nobody knew what worked.

He slid from the saddle, checked the girths, checked the harpoons in their holsters. Lifted each of the warhorse’s four feet to make sure he hadn’t picked up a stone. That’s all I’d need. While he did this, in his mind he reviewed the ruins. He’d checked them a few months ago; there couldn’t have been much change. The dragon would be lairing in the crypt.

He’d have to catch it there, before it got into the air.

Stair, hall, doorway, doorway … How fast did dragons move? Morkeleb had come out of the dark of Ylferdun Deep’s great markethall like a snake striking. Broken walls, the drop of a slope, everything tangled with heather and fallen masonry. Ditches invisible where weeds grew across them … What a place for a gallop. At least he knew the ground.

He settled his iron cap tighter on his head, the red ribbon still fluttering in his hair. Jen, I’m in trouble, I need you, come at once.

Though he supposed if she scried him now she’d get the idea without the ribbon.

He propped his spectacles again, dropped his hand back to touch the first of the harpoons in their holsters, and took a deep breath.

“Strike again, foul worm,” he whispered, and drove in his heels.

At five hundred yards, they knew you were coming, upwind, downwind, dark or storm. That seemed to be the consensus of the ballads. Maybe more than five hundred. Maybe a lot more.

Battlehammer hit open ground at a dead gallop and John watched the walls pour toward him: broken stone, stringers of outwalls, craggy pine and dwarf willow spreading around the ground. Everything broken now and burned with dragon-acid and the poisons of its breath. He saw it in his mind, slithering up those shattered stairways. A hundred feet long … God of the Earth, let them be wrong about that …

It was there in the riven gate. Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Fifty feet in front of him, rising on long hind legs to swing that birdlike head. Blue as gentian, blue as lapis and morning glories, iridescent blue as the summer sea all stitched and patched and flourished with buttercup yellow, and eyes like twin molten opals, gold as ancient glass. The beauty of it stopped his breath as his hand went back, closed around the nearest harpoon, knowing he was too far yet for a throw and thinking, Sixty feet if it’s an inch …

Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold.

The thing came under the gate and the wings opened and John threw: arm, back, thighs, every muscle he possessed. The harpoon struck in the pink hollow beneath the right wing where the skin was delicate as velvet, and he was reining Battlehammer hard away and angling for distance, catching up another weapon, swinging to throw for the mouth.

Alkmar, if you’re there among the gods, I could use the help …

That one missed as the snakelike neck struck at him, huge narrow head framed in its protective mane of black and white, primrose and cyan. Battlehammer screamed and fell and rolled, lifted from his feet by the hard counterswipe of the dragon’s tail, and John kicked free of the stirrups and tumbled almost by instinct. Yellow-green acid slapped the heather at his feet, the stiff brush bursting into flame.

Battlehammer. He could hear the horse scream again in pain but didn’t dare turn to look, only scooped up four harpoons from the ground—as many as he could reach—and ran in.

Keep it under the gate. Keep it under the gate. If it stays on the ground, you’ve a chance.

The star-drake struck at him again, head and tail, spitting acid that ignited in the air. John flung himself under the shelter of a broken wall, then rolled clear, coming in close, fast, striking up at the rippling wall of blue-and-golden spikes. The heather around them blazed, smoke searing his eyes. The dragon snapped, slashed, drove him back, slithered free of the confining walls. He struck with the harpoon, trying to hold it; talons like gold-bladed daggers snagged his leg, hurling him off balance. He struck up with the harpoon again as the head came down at him, teeth like dripping chisels, the spattering sear of blood.

Blind hacking, heat, fighting to get free. Once he fell and rolled into an old defensive ditch only seconds before the spiked knob at the end of the dragon’s tail smote the earth. He was aware he was hurt and bleeding badly and didn’t know when or how it had happened. Only pain and the fact that he couldn’t breathe. He drove in a second harpoon, and a third, and then there was that great terrible leathery crack of wings, and he saw sunlight through the golden membranes, shining crimson veins, as the dragon lifted, lifted weightless as a blown leaf. Desperate, John flung himself for the shelter of a fallen wall and rather to his surprise found he couldn’t stand up.

Buggery damn.

He threw himself under the stone a second before the acid drench of fire poured on top of him: smoke and suffocation, poison. Mind clouded, he fought and wriggled farther into the crack, tallying where he could go from here, how he could get away and wait for the poison to work. Would the flour he’d used to thicken it keep it from doing its job? Pain in his calf and thigh and dizzying weakness told him where he’d been slashed. He fumbled from his pocket one of Jenny’s silk scarves, twisted the tourniquet around his leg, and then fire, acid, poison streamed down again on the stone above him. Smoke. Heat.

It’ll tear the stone away from the top …

He had a belt-ax and pulled it free, cut at the claws that ripped down through the stone and roots above his head. A huge five-fingered hand, eighteen inches across, and he struck at it with all his strength, the blood that exploded out scorching his face. Above him, above the protecting stones, he heard Centhwevir scream, and the stones caved on top of him, struck by that monstrous tail.

Damn it, with all that poison in you, you should at least be feeling poorly by now!

The wall above him gave way. Darkness, pain, fire devouring his bleeding flesh.

Stillness.

His hold on consciousness slipped, as if he clung to rock above an abyss. He knew what lay in that abyss and didn’t want to look down.

Ian’s face, wreathed in woodsmoke and poison fumes, glistening with tears. He couldn’t imagine shedding tears for his own father, not at twelve, nor at sixteen when that brawling, angry, red-faced man had died, nor indeed at any other time. The dreams shifted and for a time the smoke that burned his eyes was that of parchment curling and blackening in the hearth of Alyn Hold. The pain was the pain of cracked ribs that kept him from breathing, as he watched that big bear-shape black against the hall fireplace where his books burned: an old copy of Polybius he’d begged a trader to sell him, two volumes of the plays of Darygambe he’d ridden a week out to Eldsbouch to buy …

His father’s brawling voice. “The people of the Hold don’t need a bloody schoolmaster! They don’t want some prig who can tell them about how steam can turn wheels or what kind of rocks you find at the bottom of the maggot-festerin’ sea! What the hell good is that when the Iceriders come down from the north or the black wolves raid in winter’s dead heart? This is the Winterlands, you fool! They need someone who’ll defend ’em, body and bones! Who’ll die defendin’ ’em!”

Beyond him in a wall of blurred fire—all things were blurred in that chiaroscuro of hearthlight and myopia—John’s books burned.

In the fire he saw still other things.

A distant vision of a tall thin woman, black-haired, frost-eyed, standing on the Hold’s battlement with a gray wolf at her side. Wind frayed at the fur of her collar, and she gazed over the moors and streams of that stony thankless desolation that had been the frontier of the King’s realm. His mother, though he could not remember her voice, nor her touch, nor anything about her save that for years he had dreamed of seeking her, never finding her again. One of the village girls had been her apprentice, skinny, tiny, with a thin brown face half-hid in an oceanic night of hair and a quirky triangular smile.

He seemed to hear her voice speaking his name.

“The poison won’t keep him down for long,” she seemed to be saying. “We have to finish him.”

It wasn’t the blue and gold dragon she was talking about. It was the first dragon, the golden dragon, the beautiful creature of sunlight and jewel-bright patterns of purple and red and black.

And she was right. He’d been hurt in that first fight, too, in the gully on the other side of Great Toby. She’d brought him to with those words. There was no way of knowing whether the poisons would kill a dragon or only numb it temporarily. He still didn’t know. Now as then, he had to finish the matter with an ax.

It took everything he had to drag himself back to consciousness. The mortar that had held together the wall above him had perished with time. Acrid slime leaked through, staining the granite; bits of scrub and weed smoldered fitfully. His body hurt as if every bone were broken, and he felt weak and giddy, but he knew he’d better get the matter done with if he didn’t want to go through all this again.

Body and bones, his father had said. Body and bones.

Maggot-festering old bastard.

He brought up his hand and fumbled at his spectacles. The slab of stone that had knocked him out had driven the steel frame into the side of his face, but the glass hadn’t broken. The spell Jenny had put on them worked so far. He drew breath and cold agony sliced from toes to crown by way of the belly and groin.

No sound from outside. Then a dragging rasp, a thick scratching, metal on stone.

The dragon was still moving. But it was down.

No time. No time.

It took all his strength to shift the stone. Acid burned his hands through the charred remains of his gloves. Broken boulders, knobs of earth rained in his eyes. He got an elbow over the granite foundation, inched himself clear, like pulling his bones out of his flesh in splinters.

The ax, he thought, fighting nausea, fighting the gray buzzing warmth that closed around his vision. The ax. Jenny, I can’t do this without you.

The sunlight was like having a burning brand rammed through his eyes into his brain. He waited for his head to clear.

Centhwevir lay before him, fallen among the ruins, a gorgeous tesselation of blue and gold. Striped wings spread, patterned like a butterfly’s: black blood leaked from beneath one of them. A wonderment of black and white fur pillowed the birdlike head: long scales like sheet-gold ribbons, horns striped lengthwise and crosswise, antennae tipped in glowing, jeweled bobs. Spikes and corkscrews and razor-edged ridges of scales rose through it along the spine, glistened on the joints of those thin deadly forepaws, on the enormous narrow hindquarters, down the length of the deadly tail. It was, John estimated, some sixty-five feet in length, with a wingspan close to twice that, the biggest star-drake he had ever seen.

Music returned to his mind through a haze of exhaustion and smoke. Delicate airs and snippets of tunes that Jenny played on her harp, fragments of the forgotten songs that were the true names of the dragons. With them the memory of Jenny’s ancient lists: Teltrevir heliotrope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold …

Ancient beings, more ancient than men could conceive, the foci of a thousand strange legends and broken glints of song.

Wings first. He forced his mind from his own sickened horror, his disgust at himself for butchering such beauty. A dragon could in a few short weeks destroy the fragile economy of the Winterlands, and there was no way of driving a dragon away as one could drive away bandits or wolves. Jenny was right. The dragons would seek to feed on the garrison herds. Bandits and Iceriders would be watching for any slackening in the garrison’s strength. To drive the King’s men, and the King’s law, out; to have the lands as their own to prey on once more.

Moving as in a dream he found his ax, worked it painfully from beneath the rocks that had protected him. The stench of burned earth and acid numbed him. He could feel his hands and feet grow cold, his body sinking into shock. Not now, he thought. Damn it, not now!

Centhwevir moved his head, regarded him with those molten aureate eyes.

John felt his consciousness waver and begin to break up, like a raft coming to pieces in high seas.

Rock scraped. A slither of falling fragments on the other side of the old curtain wall.

Muffle! John’s heart leaped. You disobeyed and came after me! I could kiss you, you great chowderheaded lout!

But it was not the blacksmith who stood framed, a moment later, against the pallid morning sky.

A man John had not seen before, a stranger to the Winterlands. He seemed in his middle fifties, big and broad-shouldered, with a calmly smiling face. John thought, through a haze of crimson agony that came and went, that he was wealthy. Though he did not move with a courtier’s trained grace, neither had he the gait of a man who fought for his living, or worked. The violet silk of his coat was a color impossible without the dye-trade of the south. The curly black fur of his collar a southerner’s bid for warmth. His hair was gray under an embroidered cap, and he bore a staff carved with a goblin’s head, a white moonstone glowing in its mouth.

If this was a hallucination, thought John giddily, trying to breathe against the sinking cold that seemed to spread through his body, it was a bloody precise one. Had the fellow fallen out of the air? Did he have a horse cached somewhere out of sight? He carried a saddlebag at any rate, brass buckles clinking faintly as he picked his way down the slope. Halfway down the jumble of the broken wall he paused and turned his head in John’s direction. He did not appear to be surprised, either by the dragon, dying, or by the broken form of the man.

Though the distance between them was probably a dozen yards, John could see in the set of his shoulders, in the tilt of that sleek-groomed head, the moment when the stranger dismissed him. Not important. Dying, and to be disregarded.

The stranger walked past him to the dragon.

Centhwevir lashed his tail feebly, hissed and moved his head. The man stepped back. Then, cautiously, he worked his way around to the other side—Yes, thought John, irritated despite the fact that he was only half-conscious. That ball of spikes on the end of the tail isn’t just to impress the she-dragons, you stupid oic. Was this a dream?

He couldn’t be sure. Pain grew and then seemed to diminish as images fragmented through the smoke. He saw his father again, belting him with a heavy wooden training-sword, yelling, “Use the shield! Use the shield, damn you!” A shield the child could barely lift … Probably a dream. He wasn’t sure what to make of the image of that prim gentleman in the violet silk coat sliding a spike from the saddlebag, holding it up to the sun. Not a spike, but an icicle with a core of quicksilver … Now where would he have gotten an icicle in June?

John’s mind scouted the trail of something he’d read in Honoribus Eppulis about the manufacture of ice from salt, trying to track down the reference, and for a time he wandered in smoky hallucinations of vats and straw and cold. So cold. He came out with the music of Jenny’s harp in his mind again and saw he hadn’t been unconscious for more than a moment, for the gentleman in purple was standing on the dragon’s neck, straddling its backbone. Wan moorland sunlight caught in the frost-white icicle as the man drove it into the back of the dragon’s skull.

Centhwevir opened his mouth and hissed again—Missed the spinal cord, you silly bugger. John wanted to go over and take it from him and do it right. It’s right there in front of you. Hope you’ve got another one of those.

But the stranger stepped away, tucked his staff beneath his arm, and took from his bag things John recognized: vials of silver and blood, wands of gold and amethyst. The paraphernalia of wizardry. I thought Jen said you were a girl. Of healing. Centhwevir lay still, but his long spiked tail moved independently, like a cat’s—Dammit, the poison would have worked!—as the man spread a green silk sheet upon the ground and began to lay out on it a circle of power. Despairing, feeling his own life seeping away, John watched him make the spells that would call back life from the frontiers of darkness.

No! John tried to move, tried to gather his strength to move, before he realized what a stupid thing that would have been. Dammit, no! It was a moot point anyway, since he couldn’t summon the strength to so much as lift his hand. He felt the hopeless urge to weep. Don’t make me do all this again!

Was this hell? Father Anmos, the priest at Cair Corflyn, would say so. Some infernal punishment for his sins, that he had to go on slaying the same dragon over and over? And would the gent in the violet coat come over and heal him next, and hand him his ax and a couple of harpoons and say, Sorry, lad, up and at ’em. Was he going to resurrect Battlehammer? What had poor Battle-hammer done to deserve getting killed over and over again in the same fight with the same dragon through eternity?

This ridiculous vision occupied his mind for a time, coming and going with the braided golden threads of that remembered music—or was the mage in the heather playing a flute?—and with the thought of darkness and of stars that did not twinkle but blazed with a distant, steady light.

Then from a great distance he seemed to see Ian, standing where the unknown wizard had stood at the top of the broken wall.

Can’t be a hallucination, John found himself thinking. That’s his old jacket he’s wearing—the sleeve was stained with poisons from last night.

At the dragon’s side, the wizard held out his hand.

Ian jumped lightly down from the wall, strode across the scorched and smoking ground without a blink, without a hesitation, grimy plaid fluttering in the morning breeze. The dragon raised its head, and the mage smiled, and John thought suddenly, Ian, run! Panic filled him, for no good reason, only that he knew this man in his embroidered cap was evil and that he was saving the dragon’s life with ill in mind.

The dragon sat up like a dog on its haunches: its brilliant, bloodstained wings folded. Its injured foot it held a little off the ground. John could see where the slash had been stitched together again. The wizard who had saved its life set aside the flute of bone and ivory.

It was said that if you saved a dragon’s life it was your slave. It was true that when Jenny had saved the life of Morkeleb the Black, the Dragon of Nast Wall, she had done so by means of the dragon’s name. That music, salvaged from ancient lore, had given her power. Save a dragon, slave a dragon …

Ian, go back!

He tried to scream the words, and his breath would not come.

Ian, no!

John raised himself on his elbows, then his hands. It was as if every cord and muscle of his flesh tore loose. Ian …!

The boy paused, as if he’d heard his voice. Turning, he walked over to where John lay and stood looking down at him, and his bright sapphire eyes were no longer his own eyes, no longer Jenny’s. No longer anything human.

With a smile on his face that was almost friendly, he kicked John in the side as a man would kick a dying dog that had bitten him.

Then he walked away.

When John’s eyes cleared, he saw the dragon Centhwevir lowering himself to the earth, saw the strange wizard settling himself a little uneasily among the bristling ridges of the dragon’s back. He stretched down a hand and helped Ian up behind him. Like a dream of cornflowers and daffodils, like lapis and golden music, the star-drake spread his wings.

“Ian …” It was like falling onto a harrow, but John tried to make himself crawl, as if he could somehow reach them, somehow snatch his son back.

The moonstone flashed in the wizard’s staff. The dragon loosed its hold on the world, like the wind taking a kite. Weightless and perfect in its beauty it rose, and John tried and failed to call his son’s name, though what he thought that would accomplish he knew not.

He only knew that the dragon was taking his son.

A dream, he thought, seeing again Ian’s face and the flame of hell in those blue eyes. It has to be a dream.

Darkness took him.

FIVE

“DAMN YOU, JOHN.” Jenny Waynest sank back on the straw tick and covered her mouth with her hands. She was trembling. “Damn you.” For a moment more the images glowed in the fire’s core: the blue and gold dragon stretched dying in its blood, the crumpled form of the man in his battered doublet of black leather and iron plate. Then they faded.

Ian, she thought. Ian must have come. Mages cannot see mages, in fire, water, stone, unless they consent to be seen. Goddess of Earth, let it be that I can’t see now because Ian has come.

Ian was already a good enough healer that it might be just possible for him to save a man’s life. To stop bleeding, anyway; to keep the lungs drawing air. To keep the cold of shock from reaching the heart. John would have forbidden him to follow, but knowing Ian there was a good chance that he had.

She closed her eyes, trying to breathe, trying to abate the shaking that racked her flesh. God of the Earth, help him …

Voices came to her through the window behind her head. Soldiers in the courtyard. “By the gods, I thought he had us last night.”

“Not a chance.” A southerner’s voice, one of the surviving dozen of the twenty-five who’d ridden with her from the Skepping Hills. “He’s just a robber, when all’s said.”

But he wasn’t. Or more properly, someone in his band was more than just a robber’s follower. And it was abundantly clear that John’s information concerning the band’s numbers—and capabilities—was far more accurate than Rocklys’. Well, the southerners would learn—if they lived long enough.

Smoke from breakfast fires stung Jenny’s nostrils, reminding her of her hunger. They had been at Palmorgin, the largest of the new fortified manors in the deeps of the Wyrwoods, when Balgodorus turned and attacked. Fortunately there had been surplus grain in the storerooms. That probably had a good deal to do with the bandit’s choice of target, though Jenny wasn’t sure. They’d have to have known she was following them, and their goal, it was clear, was to eliminate her; to knock magic from John’s—and Rocklys’—armory of resources. Then, too, the fine southern swordblades, arrowheads, and spears stored at Palmorgin made it a target. Early summer—before the harvest was in—was a hard time for bandits as for everyone else. The families from the outlying farms had managed to bring in the remnants of last year’s oats and barley, and a handful had rescued pigs, cows, and chickens, but Palmorgin’s lord Pellanor had nevertheless confiscated the lot and put everything under armed guard. After a week of siege, and no help in sight, Jenny was glad the elderly baron had taken this precaution.