Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

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.”

       FIVE

      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.

      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