Barbara Hambly - Dragonstar

“Folcalor had a good try at puttin’ together the deaths an’ souls of at least seven mages,” replied John. “Not to speak of what he’d get if he devoured Aohila—no wonder she sent me along to get you before they did.”

His demons would never have taken me , snapped Corvin, as if he hadn’t been trapped by the demons in his burning laboratory in a world where his own magic would barely function. Nor shall he, Dragonsbane. Not me, and not you.

Wind breathed across the remaining fragments of wall, the broken pillars and dry pits, and it smelled of emptiness beyond the endurance of man. John had heard of the deserts that lay east of the plain and steppe that were the farthest marches of the Realm of Belmarie, but had heard of no man crossing them. No tribes or hunters roved them as the Iceriders roved the cold tundra to the north. “Take me back,” he said again, and tried to keep the fear out of his voice.

To the demons that run squeaking through the halls of the palace where I came forth from the prison box? Scorn rippled in the dragon’s hot music. You think much of yourself if you fancy you can keep silent when they ask you where I went.

“My friends are there.” John saw Gareth again, asleep in his demon wife’s arms. Saw Gareth’s daughter Millença, only an infant in white satin when last he’d seen her, she must be three now—and Trey with a dead child in her womb that would be a demon as it was born.

The dragon regarded him blankly, truly not understanding what he meant by friends . In a thousand years, thought John, Corvin had not had friends. Perhaps never. Maybe it was not a thing of dragons —as the dragons said—to have friends, as it was not a thing of dragons to love.

You saved my life , said Corvin. Therefore will I preserve yours. You need not fear that I will not bring you food, and water, from the mountains, though they lie far. For myself there is gold here, abundant gold, hidden in the palace’s ancient crypt and the secret treasuries of a thousand nobles. Sweet gold, each coin and necklet and ring singing its own song of the earth it came from, the hands that wrought it, the fire that refined. You will be safe.

“I don’t want to be safe!” snapped John. But the dragon spread his wings and lifted weightless from the earth, like a thistledown of silver and black. Like a thistledown, Corvin rode on the desert wind, higher and higher, until he was indeed no larger than dandelion-fluff in the harsh blue desert sky.

Jenny listened to the demons as they whispered in the dark.

So tangled were the passageways of the mines, the narrow tunnels that supplied ventilation and water, that near sounds and far were confused. Even a trained mage like Miss Mab had trouble casting her senses very far into the darkness of the mines. Sometimes a chance whisper near a ventilation shaft a half-dozen levels down would repeat a word nearly in Jenny’s ear, startling her to sweat-drenched alertness. Other times the sheer cold massiveness of the mountain’s rock deadened even the footfalls of the slave-gangs barely a hundred yards away.

Lying in the darkness, Jenny had a long time to accustom herself to the tricks and echoes of the mines.

Long ago, as a girl-child in the bandit-haunted Winterlands, she had learned to still herself to nothing. To listen, and sort sound from sound, until on summer nights in the attic of her house on Frost Fell she could tell the difference between the rustle wind made in the big hand-shaped leaves of the solitary oak on the south slope of the hill, and the lighter hissing of the birch leaves to the north. Just that sound would tell of the weather for days to come. In those days her powers were slight—this had been before the time of the dragon, before Morkeleb had transformed her into dragon form to fly with him, and in doing so had given her a strain of dragon magic. She had made up for her lack of ability by the most painstaking attention, by long meditation, the study of each star and pebble and raindrop. As Caerdinn had said, the more she knew, the greater would be her power.

This attention, this meditation, returned to her now in the dark. She sorted sound from echo, built words from inflection and rhythm of speech. The stillness in which she listened was like a dream, as if, in sleeping, she passed into the nothingness of the darkness itself. From this nothingness she reached toward the demon voices, bodiless as smoke.

She understood them. That was another thing that the demon Amayon’s possession had left in her mind.

“… seven hundred slaves here.” A gnome’s voice, deep and vaguely familiar. She thought it might be one of the guards who had shot her when she’d fallen into the pit-trap in the mine. He spoke in the tongue of the demons. “Folcalor will bring another two hundred at least.”

Two hundred? Jenny gasped, appalled. All through the North she had heard rumors for weeks of gnomes buying slaves. Not, as they usually did, to work in the deeper levels of the mines, but paying good silver for children too young to work, cripples whose families wanted to be rid of their upkeep, grandparents who could no longer contribute to the harsh endless work of the Winterlands farms. The gnomes, as usual, denied these rumors as they denied all rumors of ever having human slaves. John had freed a band of them when he’d passed Tralchet Deep in the North—they’d warned him then of more sinister goings-on. The days were long gone when the King could send men into the mines to investigate—or do anything about whatever he might find.

But two hundred slaves? And seven hundred … where? In the Deep? The tunnels, Jenny knew, extended much farther north than most people knew, and there were entrances scattered through the great jagged mountain range of Nast Wall. With the Realm’s northern province of Imperteng in rebellion against the King all last summer, it would have been easy, of course, to bring in any number of such slaves. But seven hundred …?

How would they even move them unseen?

Morkeleb , she thought. He would know how far the tunnels of the Deep extended to the north; Morkeleb or Miss Mab. The dragon had gone to the surface, to lie on the black rocks far above the tree line, scrying the wind. Would he take note of a coffle that large coming out of the Wyrwoods? Or a succession of such trains? Or would he consider it not a thing of dragons , to care whether gnomes enslaved humans or not?

“And no luck with the dragon?” A man’s voice this time. Again, the timbre was familiar, as if Jenny had heard it before, speaking human words. The gnome must have shaken his head, because the man added a curse. “Unless we find the dragon, we’re wasting our time. All this …” By the flex in his voice Jenny knew he gestured to something— what? “… won’t give us a toad’s spit without her secret name. And you know Folcalor won’t listen if we say we can’t find him.”

“We’ll find him. Stinkin’ snake. Even if we don’t, those’ll give us power to find the catch-bottle that old Arch-Seer made.”

Those what? Surely if they’d blasted a tunnel to trap Morkeleb, they’d have known he escaped.…

“What, in Ernine? With her power over all that land?”

Catch-bottle? The phrase was an old one, a spell Jenny had only heard of in the lore handed down by the Line of Herne. Since Caerdinn hadn’t been clear himself what it meant or how it worked—his master Spaeth having left the North with the last troops of the King’s last garrison—Jenny didn’t know, either.

“Her power can only reach so far. We know the bottle was lost when the mages went into the mirror-chamber. For certain she was never trapped in it, the bitch. So all we have to do is find it. How far can it have rolled?”