Barbara Hambly - Dragonstar

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.