Dragonshadow. Barbara Hambly

before him:

      “Dragons come down out of the north, being formed in the hearts of the volcanoes that erupt in the ice. The combination of the heat and the cold, and the vapors from under the earth, give birth to eggs, and the eggs so to the dragons themselves. Being born not of flesh, they are invulnerable to all usages of the flesh …”

      Among the green curlicues, gold-leaf flowers, and carmine berries of the marginalia could be found enlightening illuminations of perfectly conical mountains spitting forth orange dragon eggs as if they were melon seeds, accompanied by drawings of hugely grinning and rather crocodilian dragons.

      “Teltrevir, heliotrope,” whispered Jenny’s voice in his mind and behind it the braided threads of music from her harp, the tunes that were joined to those names. “Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Nymr sea-blue, violet-crowned; Gwedthion ocean-green and Glammring Gold-Horns bright as emeralds …”

      And each tune, each air, separate and alien and haunting. John closed his eyes, exhaustion grinding at his flesh, and remembered a round-dance he’d seen as a child. Its music had been spun from the twelfth of those nameless passages. The twelfth name on Jenny’s list was Sandroving, gold and crimson. The girls had called the dance Bloodsnake. He could still whistle the tune.

      Dotys had more to say. “The star-drakes, or dragons as such things are called, dwelt anciently in the archipelagoes of rock and ice that string the northern seas westward from the Peninsula of Tralchet, islands called by the gnomes the Skerries of Light. These skerries, or reefs, of rock are utterly barren, and so the dragons must descend to the lands of men to hunt, for they are creatures of voracious appetite, as well as archetypes of greed and lust and all manner of willfulness.”

      And they live on what between times? thought John.

      On the corner of his desk Skinny Kitty woke long enough to scratch her ear and wash, then returned to sleep with her paw over her nose. In the cinder darkness beyond the window a cock crowed.

      He touched the sheaf of parchment that the young Regent had sent him. The old ballads had been copied in beautiful bookhand by a court scribe. It was astonishing what coming to power could do for obsessions previously sneered at by the fashionable.

       “‘For lo,’she quoth, ‘do dragons sing

       More beautifully than birds.’”

      Who in their right mind would, or could, make up a detail like that?

       “Southward-flying shadows of fire.”

       “From isles of ice and rock beneath the moon.”

      A candle guttered, smoking. John looked up in surprise and groped around until he found a pair of candle scissors to trim the wick. The sky in the stone window frame had gone from cinder to mother-of-pearl.

      His body hurt, as if he’d been beaten with lengths of chain. Even the effort of sitting up for several hours made his breath short. Most of the candles had burned out, and their smutted light stirred uneasily in the networks of experimental pulleys and tackle that hung from the rafters. It would soon be time to go.

       “… isles of ice and rock …”

      The other volume lay in front of him also. The partial volume of Juronal he had found in a ghoul’s hive, near what had been the Tombs of Ghrai; the volume he had read on his return, two nights ago, as he searched for that half-remembered bit of information that told him what had become of Ian and why he could wait no longer to embark on his quest for help.

      North, he thought. He took off his spectacles and leaned his forehead on his hand. Alone. God help me.

      The key to magic is magic! Jenny flinched away from the hard knobbed hands striking her, the toothless mouth shouting abuse. The dirty, smoky stink of the house on Frost Fell returned to her through the dream’s haze. Caerdinn’s cats watched from the windowsills and doors, untroubled by the familiar scene. The key to magic is magic! The old man’s grip like iron, he dragged her from the hearth by her hair, pulled the old harp from her hands, thrust her at the desk where the books lay, black lettering nearly invisible on the tobacco-colored pages.

       The more you do, the more you’ll be able to do! It’s laziness, laziness, laziness that keeps you small!

      It isn’t true! She wanted to shout back at him, across all those years of life. It isn’t true.

      But at fourteen she hadn’t known that. At thirty-nine she hadn’t known.

      In her dream she saw the summer twilight, the beauty of the nights when the sky held light until nearly midnight and breathed dawn again barely three hours later. In her dream she heard the sad little tunes she’d played on her master’s harp, tunes that had nothing to do with the ancient music-spells handed down along the Line of Herne. Like all of Caerdinn’s knowledge, those spells of music were maddeningly ambiguous, fragments of airs learned by rote.

      In her dream Jenny thought she saw the black skeletal shape of a dragon flying before the ripe summer moon.

       The key to magic was not magic.

      Out of darkness burned two crystalline silver lamps. Stars that drank in the soul and tangled the mind in mazes of still-deeper dream. A white core of words forming in fathomless darkness.

       What is truth, Wizard-woman? The truth that dragons see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncomfortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You know this.

      The knots of colored music that were his true name.

      The kaleidoscope of memory that she touched when she touched his mind.

      The gold fire of magic that had flowed into her veins.

      Plunging herself, dragon form, into the wind …

       Mistress Waynest …!

       This love you speak of, I do not know what it is. It is not a thing of dragons …

       Mistress, wake up!

      “Wake up!”

      Gasping, she pulled clear of the mind-voice in the shadows. Raw smoke tore her throat; the air was a clamor of men shouting and the frenzied screams of cattle and horses in pain. “What is it?” She scrambled to a sitting position, head aching, eyes thick. Nemus, one of Rocklys’ troopers, stood beside her narrow bed.

      “Balgodorus …”

      As if it would or could be anything else. Jenny was already grabbing for her halberd and her slingstones—she slept clothed and booted these days—trying to thrust the leaden exhaustion from her bones. Her mind registered details automatically: mid-morning, noise from all sides, concerted attack …

      “—fire-arrows,” the young man was saying. “Burning the blockhouse roof, but there’s a storeroom in flames …”

       Fire-spells.

      “… as if the animals have all gone mad …”

      Curse, thought Jenny. Curse, curse, curse …

      The stables were in flames, too. She had no idea of the nature of the spell that had been put on the animals, but the horses, mules, and cattle were rushing crazily around the central court, charging and slashing at one another, kicking the walls, throwing themselves at the doors. Bellowing, shrieking, madness in their eyes. The smoke that rolled over the whole scene seemed to Jenny to be laden with magic, as if something foul burned and spread with the blaze.

      Damn her, she thought, who taught that bitch such a spell?

      Scaling ladders wavered and jerked beyond the frieze of palisade spikes. Arrows filled the air. On the north wall men were already being stabbed at and hacked by the defenders within. Slingstones cracked against the walls and an arrow splintered close to Jenny’s head. Someone was bellowing