Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

bitter, freezing cold after the fire’s heat. With his hands still tied, John felt a stab of pure dread that the dragon would drop him—Fat lot of difference that would make, given the day I’ve had so far—and turning his head he saw the city fall away, mossy ice-slicked roofs and bare trees; city fields and the silver loop of the River Clae, shining in the Magloshaldon woods. Brown fields, then brown steppe, then gray sheets of cloud that enveloped them like damp muslin and cold that shredded his bones.

      The dragon carried him tucked up under its breast, and without the heat of its flesh John thought he probably would have slipped away into death from the cold, Which I wouldn’t have bet two coppers on last night …

      Weightless exhaustion. Consciousness that came and went, slipping away to drop him suddenly back to an awareness of hanging suspended in damp gray clouds, over a barely glimpsed landscape of formlessness below. He was only marginally conscious when the dragon descended to a gray-yellow desolation of sand and scattered boulders, of flint hills without vegetation and of twisting scoops of pebble-filled stone that had been watercourses long ago. These he saw only dimly, for the gray light was fading, and his eyesight wasn’t good enough to discern details. On a wide plateau in the desolation stumps of pillars marked where a city had stood. Crumbled foundations and lines of broken walls surrounded a stone platform two hundred feet by nearly five, a square rock island in the sand—even he couldn’t miss it.

      The dragon balanced in the air like a kite and, reaching down, laid John on the ground before the remains of the platform’s wide stair. Evening turned the vast sky yellow, lilac-stained and fading. John felt the stone under him chill as snow through the torn rags of his shift, and knew the night would be brutal. He couldn’t imagine where he was, or how far they had come:

       Please don’t make me walk home.

      Still hovering weightless above him, the dragon extended its swan-like neck and with a bill like Death’s scythe bit through the ropes that bound him, the chains that fastened his wrists. Then it ascended with no more flurry than a cloud of smoke, wheeled on its silken wings, and flew away toward the west.

      Aching with cold, with bruises, with hunger and exhaustion, John raised himself to one elbow and shouted, “CORVIN!” His voice echoed hoarse in the emptiness, not loud enough to startle rabbits, had there been any. The ancient authorities—Dotys, and Gantering Pellus, and others who’d written of dragons—said that to name a dragon’s true name would call it, though these true names were in fact airs of music …

      Save a dragon, slave a dragon, went the ancient granny-rhyme: to rescue it from death put it in bondage to its rescuer.

      John had never quite known whether this applied to ordinary people—he’d only ever seen wizards do it—and he prayed his guess about the dragon’s name was correct. “Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, by your name I charge you, come back!”

      He saw the flash of distant silver in the last western sunlight, and the glittering shape of the dragon returning. But before it reached him he fainted from exhaustion and cold.

       TWO

      IN THE DARK beneath the earth, Jenny Waynest dreamed of the Dragonstar.

      John had told her about it, on and off, for three years, and in her dream they lay together on the platform he’d built above the moss-fouled leads of the Alyn Hold tower, on one of those hot summer Winterlands nights when the whole world breathed magic and the stars leaned down close over the desolation of moor and stones. “A thousand years ago was the last time it showed up, when Ennyta the Great was the King of Ernine,” John was saying to her. The starlight flashed in the round lenses of his spectacles, and his voice was deep and velvety with odd undertones of huskiness to it, like rocks in a plowed field. Jenny would know it in her dreams, she thought, until she died. In this dream he had half a dozen of his crumbling old volumes scattered about him: he’d spent a lifetime ferreting them from the ruins of old fortresses and towns. The lantern he’d brought up to read them by had gone out.

      “Accordin’ to Dotys, anyway—if that thing I have really is a fragment of his Second History—it reads like Dotys, no error, the fussy old prig. He claims he was writin’ from the Golden Chronicle of the Kings of Ernine, but—”

      And Jenny asked, “What does he say about it?” because even in her dream John was apparently ready to explain at vast and meticulous length why he thought the author of the forty or so sheets of mildew-stained vellum he’d bought from a peddler were in fact Dotys’s Second History and not one of the other ancient authors’ and she wanted to hear about the star.

      “Well, anyway, it’s a double-headed comet,” John said, called back from historical exegesis that could easily have taken the remainder of the night. “The first comet showed up in spring, and the second, in the same place in the sky, in fall. The dragon’s head an’ his tail, they said.”

      On the southern horizon a pale streak showed where the sun was dozing, and all around them the cornfields of Alyn Village resounded with the twitter and warble of sleepless summer birds. In her dream, Jenny still had magic. She could feel the radiance of it, glowing golden in her bones.

      “Accordin’ to my calculations …” He rolled over and grubbed among his books for a much-scratched wax tablet. Only Jenny’s mageborn eyes could have made out the scribbles on it, in the starlight. “… the first head should show itself, the year after next, right there in the Sign of the Dragon …” He put his head close to hers so that she could site along his pointing finger at the cluster of stars hanging low above the toothed black notches of the Wolf Hills. They had been together a dozen years on this particular night, but she still loved the smell of his flesh, and was deliciously conscious of the warmth of his shoulder against hers.

       Oh, my love, how could I have turned away from you?

      Shadow folded around her, like cradling hands. Morkeleb the Dragon had said to her once, Endure, and she now tried to say to him, I will, my friend. The dream faded away. She became aware that she was underground, in darkness, in the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun. That she was dying. Around her the darkness of the Deep was very cold. She was conscious—from what felt like a great distance away—of lying on stone. Gritty dust clogged her throat and her nose, and a small star of cold pain radiated from her left shoulder, pain that no longer seemed to be part of her body. She had been shot with a poisoned arrow, she remembered. Morkeleb had come to save her, whipping down through the passageways of the mines that lay below and to the north of Ylferdun Deep. But it had been a trap, and the gnomes had set off an explosion, caving in the tunnel around him with the blasting powder.

      She felt his mind reach out to hers.

      Endure till I come. He had said that to her before, when they had parted after the loss of her magic, in those terrible days when she could meet John’s silences and anger with nothing more than silence of her own.

      No, she thought now. Morkeleb would try to use magic, the strange powers of a Dragonshadow, to save her and himself. Magic is the heart and the flesh of dragons, and she knew there were demons in the Deep, waiting for him to do just that. In the summer just past she had seen how the demons could use the magic of a wizard as a bridge into that wizard’s mind and flesh, thrusting aside all protective spells as they had never done before. Thus the demon Amayon had entered her. Back when I HAD power, she reflected, without even bitterness, now. The demon lord Folcalor had come close to conquering the Realm of Bel through the wizards he had seized. Had he not, for reasons of his own, chosen to imprison the souls of the mages thus possessed rather than simply drive them out to dissolve, Jenny knew she would never have regained her body and her life.

      Better that she herself should die, she thought, than that demons seize Morkeleb’s mind and power to use as their own.

      Nightmares pulled her back into darkness. The memory of what Amayon had done with her magic