Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

linen of the pillows and his face furrowed with concern even in sleep. Trey sat beside him, the demon-Trey, Amayon-Trey, robed in royal red and white with her small jeweled hands resting on her swollen belly. Another man was in the room, and John felt again that cold, sick jolt of shock, for he recognized Gareth’s father, the old King Uriens. The King’s mind and consciousness had been eroded, stripped away, reduced to childhood five years ago by the spells of the witch Zyerne, but now he moved briskly. The blue eyes that had seemed so puzzled during last summer’s rebellion were bright, sparkling with demon fire. His lips curved under the fleecy amber curls of his beard. “Do you think he’ll be surprised?” The King nodded down at his sleeping son. Trey’s evil grin echoed his own.

      “Why should he be? If old Bliaud the Wizard can wake a girl from the dead—not to speak of her sweet little son”—she patted her belly complacently—“why shouldn’t he be able to wake old Grandpa from mere imbecility?” And she reached up to tweak the King’s gold beard. “The people will be delighted. I’m sure after the rebellion of his cousin, and plague, and his precious Dragonsbane turning out to be in league with demons, Gareth will leap at the chance to step down from the throne and out of the council-chamber, and go back to collecting ballads.”

      They both laughed, the ribald gloating mirth of demons, and John tried to cry out, as if under the muffling weight of sleep.

      “They are my enemies, too, my love,” whispered the Demon Queen. She stretched out beside him on the ladder that the guards bore through the barred and guarded gate of the Old Palace, down the cobbled slope of the Queen’s Lane, where the crowds trampled last week’s snow to thin mush. The air was bitter on his flesh under the thin linen of the shift, and through it he could feel the heat of her flesh. “Folcalor and the one he feigns to serve, the Hell-Lord Adromelech, imprisoned me and mine in the Hell behind the Mirror a thousand years ago. What makes you think I would not do all in my power to avenge myself on them for that defeat? What makes you think I would not help you against them, if you will help me?”

      Her fingers stroked his cheek, touched the silvery runes she’d written on his flesh when first he’d sought her help behind the Burning Mirror. The vision changed, and he saw his sons.

      They stood on the wall of Alyn Hold in the Winterlands of the North, the place that was his fortress and his home. His heart leaped at the sight of Ian, whom he had last seen fragile and wasted, battered by the aftermath of demonic possession as Jenny had been battered. Ian was on his feet, and though thin and too serious for a thirteen-year-old, he looked well. Adric stood beside him, sword in hand—a boy’s sword, but though only nine he handled it like a man—and they were looking down over the battlement. Behind them the roof of the kitchens had been burned, and marks of fire scored the stone walls. Men moved about outside the walls, bandits, besieging the Hold as it had been besieged many times since the power of the Kings had waned in the North. But there was something else in the smoke that wreathed the burning village of Alyn, something fearful that scuttled like a huge rat among the smoldering houses. Something that defied all John’s efforts to watch.

      “Can you see it?” Ian whispered, and his young brother shook his head.

      “It spoke to me last night, though,” breathed Adric. “Spoke in a dream. Said I should kill you, and run down and open the gates. I told it to go bugger itself. It did.” The boy looked queasy. He was John’s son, in his red-brown coloring, and even more the grandson of old Lord Aver, stocky and barrel-chested already, though like the black-haired and blue-eyed Ian, he had John’s thin-bridged curve of nose. “But it still kept looking at me, and laughing; waiting for me to get my sword and kill you. Only I knew even then that you wouldn’t really die.”

      “No,” said Ian quietly. “No. And that’s what it’s waiting for.”

      One of the guards bearing the ladder stumbled; John felt the cold again, and heard the crowd shouting, their voices bouncing off the walls of the tall houses around the market square. Looking up, he saw the cold gray of the birdless winter sky.

      Then the sky turned to darkness, the darkness beneath the earth. Something in the smell of the wet stone, coal smoke, and cooking thick with grease spoke to him of the Deeps of the Gnomes. Ylferdun, he thought. The Deep beneath Nast Wall. Its gates lay a half-day’s walk from the King’s palace in Bel, one of the great strongholds of the Gnomes in the West of the World.

      The place he had gone to five years ago, to fight the dragon Morkeleb, with such curious results.

      He smelled blood, too, and the sulfur-stink of blasting powder. Through the Hell-Queen’s spells he saw Jenny in the darkness, broken and bleeding in a hollow of the stones. Morkeleb the Dragon was somewhere near—he knew this as one knows things in dreams—but the black dragon had been trapped like her when the gnomes had blasted the mine tunnel.

      She is dying, said the Demon Queen. The gnomes shot her with arrow poison. This, too, was the work of Adromelech and his minions. None knows she is there but the demons … and now you.

      John’s mind cleared, and he heard again the shouting of the crowd. He was bound to the stake—he’d been dimly aware of the six guards doing it, though it had felt like someone else’s body through the cloudy horrors of his visions. The cords cut into his arms and ankles and throat, and the air was ice-water cold on his flesh and the raw skin of his scalp. Ector of Sindestray was reading the charges, savoring each with the morbid relish of a doomsayer who has been proven right. “He has trafficked with demons …”

      Even had he been inclined to, John couldn’t very well argue with him.

       It was to defeat this other lot of demons, see …

      Who would believe that, except Gareth stupefied in his crimson chamber? And maybe the Master of Halnath, wherever he was. But the Master of Halnath, the scholar-lord Polycarp who was Gareth’s cousin, had voted also for John’s death, knowing the things that had been done in the past by those who dealt with demons.

       It was to save Jen, and me son; to keep them from being possessed by demons who would use their wizardly powers …

      But those who called upon demons to aid them frequently did so out of the best of motives.

      Such as now.

      It was Amayon, bright-clothed in garnet velvet and sparkling with jewels and malice, who handed Ector the torch which he drove into the kindling.

      At this distance John couldn’t see clearly, and the crowd beyond that flame-like crimson form was only a blur. But he heard their voices, wild over the cracking of the fire. Furious voices, relishing as Ector did the vindication of themselves. They’d been told that the plague was his doing, or the doing of the demons he’d worked for, and they were doubly angry, for there had been a time when he’d been popular in Bel. Dragonsbane—the only man living who had slain a dragon. He had fought the demon-possessed dragons that flew down at the command of the demon mage Caradoc; he had defeated them.

      “… pawn of the Hellspawn,” Ector was shouting above the rushing crackle of oil-soaked tinder. “Author of the plague that has swept this land …”

      The smoke billowed thick and greasy. The heat was suffocating, and in the smoke she took shape. Beautiful and hideous, wrought of fume and fire, she held out her hands to him, waiting for him to call her name.

      I won’t. He closed his eyes—not that that did a lot of good; he knew she was still there—and turned his face aside. Airless, all-encompassing heat and pain. I won’t. I will die, and Jen and the boys and all the Realm die with me …

      Someone screamed.

      He thought, Do they see her? and someone else took up the shriek. More howls—terror, panic. Wind bent the flame around him, whirled the smoke, and he opened his eyes and saw a dragon, huge, fifty feet or more and with a wingspan twice that, silver-streaked and tabbied with black and opal-green blazing eyes. It was almost on top of him already, and he could do no more than stare up at it in shock as the silver claws lashed down, caught him up, stake, ropes, and all, scattering burning hunks of wood and hay over the heads