Barbara Hambly - Dragonstar

But in that case why could Morkeleb not find him? He had said that from the glacier where he lay, on the Wall’s high crest, he could scry vast distances. He knew John well, having come down with him from the Skerries of Light in the summer, dragging John’s sagging and battered flying machine by its ropes. The dragon’s mind saw clear, like a hawk that can identify a rabbit from hundreds of feet in the air. John must be far off indeed if the dragon could not detect the beating of his heart.

And Miss Mab? she said again, and Morkeleb sighed. She put her palm on his narrow, bony forehead, and his thought enfolded her; she felt him cast his mind along the dark of the corridors, seeking for Miss Mab.

But the gnome-wife, when she came at length to what appeared to be a saucer of water on a table in her lamplit room—Jenny saw this only distantly, like a half-recalled dream—refused again to flee from the Deep. “None do I trust here, and none do I let come near,” she said, and she glanced around her, as if at shadows Jenny could not see. “My uncle the Howeth-Arawan, Patriarch of the Ninth Deep, and my cousins and brothers hold too much power for King Sevacandrozardus to send any here, against my will. In fleeing I will lose what I have here—a position in which I might yet do good.”

“Folcalor will be here in two days,” said Jenny. “I think he must be traveling in the train of your Master Goffyer of Tralchet. Miss Mab, it is not inconceivable that Folcalor has taken over the body and the soul of Goffyer himself, for Goffyer is a mage and this would be the demon’s goal. Could you stand against Goffyer, if you had to?”

Mab was silent. Jenny saw, through Morkeleb’s eyes and Morkeleb’s mind, the flicker of refusal in the gnome-wife’s wrinkled-apple face as she pushed the thought from her that her old master would be enslaved as others had been enslaved. Then she said, “If this be so, all the more reason for me to remain. To help him if I can. To help others here, if I cannot. My clan will protect me, as well as any can. I would not have thee, child, nor you, Dragonshadow, put yourselves in danger trying to reach me here, or to rescue me if I encountered demons in the mines in my attempt at flight. So long as I remain here in the warrens among my family, I will be safe. Goffyer …”

Her golden eyes grew sad. “Goffyer was a gnome of great age, a master of lore and a mage of tremendous power. If they could take him …”

Their strength is the strength of the one who fights them , said Morkeleb. It is like shining a light into a mirror. Do not think, gnome-wife, that you can stand against him by strength alone.

And she said, “I will do what I can.”

From that they could not move her. Nor, to tell the truth, could Jenny imagine how they would get to her to take her out of the warrens on the Ninth Deep, for when she listened into the darkness, she could hear the scritching of demon claws on the rock in the silence, in every passageway and tunnel in that direction.

As Mab must hear it , she thought. She wondered how much of the gnome-wife’s refusal to be rescued was due to awareness of that danger to the rescuers, and to herself if she tried now to leave.

After that, Jenny listened long into the darkness of the mines, casting her thoughts to the mains of played-out rock that surrounded them, focusing her attention on the sigh of the vent shafts, on the drip of water from underground springs. Lying on the floor beside her bed like a dog, Morkeleb listened, too, his dragon senses reaching farther and his mind following those senses, like tendrils of smoke through the air. Hear you aught of the Hellspawn, Jenny? murmured his voice in her mind, and she murmured back, Not north of us in the mine. In the Deep, yes, everywhere.

Nor I. Nor yet footfall of guard or scout. Let us see what we can carry away, of these seven hundred dead slaves you feel such pity for.

By the notches she had carved on her stick Jenny was able to find the place again, familiarity aiding her in seeing the shape of the rock walls. She found herself able to identify the little landmarks of ceiling dips and bends in the passageway, barely to be seen by the glow of her thick-wrapped hothwais as once she’d identified sprigs of blossom or saplings beside some Winterlands trail. But the little chamber was empty when they reached it. Not one gem remained on the slimy uneven floor.

Can you scry them? she asked, in distress. Scent them, find them? And she took the two or three crystals she carried in her skirt pocket and held them out to him, for him to feel and sense what they were. He breathed on the stones, his breath velvet on her hand. Then he fell silent for a time, reaching with his mind. She called upon the disciplines he had taught her, and those Mab had spoken of, the powers within her changed flesh and mind, and reached out likewise. She heard, far behind them, the scrape of boots on rock, and a gnome’s voice say something about straw matting. Her heart beat hard, knowing her hiding-place had been discovered.

Morkeleb said nothing. But when he moved off it was northward, not back to her shelter, and she followed. The ways they took, up steep stairways and narrow twisting shafts, told her that he, too, had failed to find any trace of the prison-crystals, for they were going upward through the mountain to the old watchtowers on its flanks. Breathless with her long recuperation, Jenny stumbled, and the dragon’s clawed grip bore her up—she still could not tell whether he wore a dragon’s shape or a man’s. At last they came to a chimney through the heart of the stone, whose hot rising air lifted Jenny’s ragged clothing around her and breathed on her face like some great beast. Morkeleb stepped out into the darkness before her and she saw him hanging there in the utter blackness, dark within dark, with his diamond eyes glittering and his wings spread out like sable silk and all the glowing bobs of his antennae swinging and flickering like fireflies.

In his clawed hands he grasped her, holding her against him as they rose through the abyss, up and up with the rock tube narrowing around them. At last they came out into true night, and freezing air, stars burning hard above Nast Wall’s jagged rim of basalt and ice. This was the world as dragons saw it, clean and untouched, uncomplicated and magical; the world Morkeleb had once asked her to enter, through a door that she was not sure, now, that she would be able to re-pass.

To the east above the horns of the mountain she saw the glowing streak of the comet, the Dragonstar John had watched for these three years now. An unknowable thing, she thought, different in nature from the stars, from the moon, from any thing on the earth. But John, being John, had spent a good deal of time trying to understand it, when it had nothing to do with the duties he had been bequeathed by his father, nor with the affairs of Kings, nor the struggle to survive in the Winterlands.

Morkeleb said nothing, letting her speak first, waiting for her thought.

Jenny said, “Let us go to Ernine.”

John Aversin was in Prokep for seven days before the demons came.

Having been told by Corvin NinetyfiveFifty that it was impossible for him to get anywhere close to the Henge, the first thing he did when the dragon flew away to hunt was to wrap himself in his velvet cloak and walk down to where he calculated the Henge had been last night by moonlight and in that morning’s vision. There were places in the Winterlands that were said only to exist under the light of certain phases of the moon, or things that were visible only when the sun and the moon were together in the sky or on certain days of the year—a standing stone on Moonfairy Hill was one of them, two days’ ride north of the Hold. He’d spent the best part of two years visiting the place, again and again, whenever his other duties gave him time, until he’d seen it, in a dell he’d visited a dozen times before.