Barbara Hambly - Dragonstar

His recent journeys through Hell had certainly taught him how to look for gates into places that sometimes existed and sometimes did not.

Being so shortsighted that he could barely see his hand in front of his face didn’t help the situation, of course. He considered marking where he thought the Henge should lie with something large enough for even himself to see at a distance, but aside from the fact that the only thing he had was his cloak, which he needed to keep from freezing to death, he couldn’t be sure when Corvin would be back.

It was just as well the dragon not know what he was up to.

So he took careful sightings on all the stationary landmarks he could, on the shape of distant hills and the exact lines of sight of the corners of that huge stone foundation—it would take an earthquake to shift it—and then began to work his way around the perimeter of where he thought the Circle should be.

Looking for the places where the dust-devils appeared to come from.

According to Gantering Pellus’s Encyclopedia —and his own observations—the gates of Hell are seldom completely tight, and the temperature of the air there is generally either warmer or cooler than that of the real world.

John crept, either on his hands and knees or squatting and stooping in a way that made his knees and back feel as if someone were driving red-hot nails into the bones, back and forth across the huge grayish-dun expanses of what had been the center of the city of Prokep. It was the slow way to do it, but with a clear field of vision that ended less than a foot from the tip of his nose he couldn’t devise a better one. And, for that matter, he reflected, what else did he have to do with his day?

He found the first gate by the flowers.

There were dozens of them, wilted to shreds of brown string on the ash-colored sand. Just a tangly little patch of vegetation that had no business being where it was. Like the Henge , he thought, this gate into the Maze is only in existence—or only visible—at certain times or under certain conditions: I’ll have to watch, and see when the wind sets from this direction. The dessicated wisps of grass, the parched fingerlets of fern, grew in a rough semicircle, as if someone had laid a military cloak on the sand. The gate opens, seeds drift through. They root, they claim a little moisture from the air the next time the gate’s open, but a few suns kill ’em.

He crept back and forth along the flatter edge of the semicircle until he found the place where the small ghostly tracks of what looked like worms or slugs came from and went to, mysterious weavings around the sand that ended as sharply as if smoothed away with a trowel.

The threshold of the gate, he thought, uneasily passing his hand through the air over the spot—of course nothing happened to his hand whatsoever. He drew in the sand the sigil of the gate, which he’d seen Amayon draw, often enough, in their journeys together through Hell. Still no result.

Wrong time of day.

Or of year.

No , he reflected, crawling back to find the most recent of the dead flower stalks. This hasn’t been dead but a few days. A little green lingered at its base. He sat back on his heels, back aching, and squinted at those few stones, pillars, and hills large enough to register in his vision. It opens often, at the time of day when the wind sets from between those two notches in the hills.

Whenever that is.

In addition to three more rabbits and a mountain sheep—which John hung in what had been a ruined guard-chamber beside the foundation’s great stair—Corvin brought him clothing that evening, striped breeches woven in a pattern with which John was unfamiliar, a shirt and sheepskin boots that were all too big for him, and a coat of black and white goatskins. The coat had blood on it. John didn’t ask from whence it had come. Corvin also brought more wood, and when John cooked the meat he rendered what little fat he could out of it, to pour on the ends of sticks to make torches.

The second day he found the treasury, deep in the crypts where Corvin would lie up most of the night on a bed of gold. Sacks of coin long rotted away, so that the bright metal lay in drifts, palanquins and statues and chairs and mirrors of gold or electrum or bronze scattered about and rising through it like the ruin of the city in miniature, gems flashing somberly in the orange glare of the torch. John knew better than to cross the threshold or touch so much as a toothpick. Corvin’s soul would know, and pursue gold anywhere—it had been no coincidence that Aohila, who knew the dragon best, had triggered the spells of his True Name with beads of gold.

In another room he found swords, knives, and arrowheads, though the shafts and bows had all perished. He felt better, once he had weapons, though he knew they’d be little use to him if demons showed up.

And they would show up, he knew. Corvin said they feared Prokep, which had a way, he said, of trapping demons. But John knew better than to believe that Folcalor would give up his dream of ruling both Hell and earth. It would only be a matter of when he would strike.

Better than the weapons, John found spectacle lenses, some of ground yellow crystal and others of brownish glass. Some were set in frames of horn or bronze, mounted on sticks like carnival masks, others lay loose in boxes. He braided a strap from the rags of his discarded execution shift, and mounted the best of them in a bronze frame, but he took care to wear this contraption only after Corvin was gone for the day.

After that, it was easier to seek for the gates to the Maze.

In the end he found several, mostly by sitting on the edge of the palace foundation and observing the dust-devils. The second day he made sure to be poking around in the ruins south of the foundation—on the side away from the Maze—when Corvin flew away in the morning, so that the dragon would think nothing of it if he did not see him before he departed: And where, John thought, would the dragon expect him to flee, anyway? Even the ridge of hills that surrounded the city in a vast basin lay unendurably far off. Flight would be madness, like a child running away from home with two bannocks and an apple wrapped in a handkerchief.

Cautiously, John began to probe at the Maze.

He located three other gates before he entered the one through the Garden of Dawn by observing the dust-devils, but it was the Garden of Dawn he entered through, near the withered flowers, on the fourth morning of watching. The garden was of the same nature as the Hells, a place outside the world of sun and stars. When he wrote the sigil of the door at the moment of sunrise, and smelled the dew and the flowers, he experienced a qualm of apprehension— What if it’s like a lobster pot, that I can walk into but can’t escape?

But given the length of time it had taken a dragon to fly from Bel to Prokep—from mid-morning till sunset without stopping—the city in the desert was something of a lobster pot itself. John stepped across the sigil, and found himself in the Garden of Dawn.

Amayon—and every book he’d read on the subject as well—had repeatedly warned against eating or drinking anything in Hell. Whether this applied to an unworld enclave like the garden John wasn’t sure, but he guessed he’d better not chance it. Fountains bubbled among hillocks of mossy stone, and in places trees bent under the weight of peaches so ripe, he could smell them from the winding pebbled path. It seemed to be midsummer, strange vines and familiar ones bearing gaudy flowers, and the moist air stroked his dusty skin. When a yellow butterfly danced across his path in the soft dawn light he nearly bolted, for he remembered all too clearly the deadly butterflies of Paradise. He listened, but could hear no sound; only the faint stirring of willow leaves in the wind.