Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

weakly to return Mab’s clasp she saw that though her short fingers, her brown square wrinkled palms, were still marked by the blasts of steam and fire, they were no longer drawn together like claws, but able again to spread and flex.

      There was a touch of arthritis in the joint of her right thumb, where for years she had ground pestle to mortar in preparing herbs for medicine. That was all.

      “Thank you,” she said softly. “When Morkeleb takes me from here, you will come? He’s right, my lady. It isn’t safe for you anywhere in the Deep.”

      “And how safe will any be,” asked the gnome. “Did I leave the heart of the Deep, and flee away to a place where I could not hear what passes beneath the earth? I can come and go from my prison if I am careful, enough to send thee word. I am not in a cell. It is true that there are demons here in the Deep, Dragonshadow”—she turned to Morkeleb—“it is true, that I hear them chitter and scrape in the night. And my question is, What do they hear? What seek they in the Deep, that they cannot have in the City of Men?

      “This would I learn. King Sevacandrozardus has sent for Goffyer, the greatest of the mages of the gnomes and my own old teacher, from Tralchet Deep, in the North. If any will know how to look into your dreams for the memories of the demons, my child, it will be he.”

      Jenny nodded, but shivered again as Miss Mab gathered up her medicines and took her departure. The thought of delving into that part of her consciousness, her memories of Amayon, filled her with a sickened dread. She lay among the sheepskins and tried to sleep, with Morkeleb stretched across the foot of the pallet, chin upon his paws. The last she saw was the lights of his antennae, flicking back and forth in the dark.

       THREE

      JOHN WOKE IN panic, thinking, Jenny!

      And lay in the warm glow of a small fire, trying to breathe.

      The dream had been blazingly clear. Jenny in darkness, bleeding, an arrow through her shoulder and the sweat of death on her face. The Demon Queen’s voice, She has been poisoned …

      He hadn’t been there to protect her, to help her. It was his fault.

      And he would never see her again.

      He tried to sit up, and his head spun. He lay back down, blinked at the stone walls around him in the apricot whisper of the fire. A frieze of what appeared to be human figures marched around the four sides of a room not much bigger than his cell under the King’s prison tower—at least in the gloom they seemed human, though without his spectacles it was difficult to be sure. The background stone was pinkish, and whatever the painted shapes carried in their hands—treasure, presumably—threw back the firelight with gold leaf’s unmistakable dusky brilliance.

      He lay on a springy mound of fresh bracken, covered by a red velvet cloak so thickly gemmed and embroidered as to look like a blanket of embers in this ruddy light. A ewer stood by him, silver mountings embracing a red-and-white shell bigger than a man’s head. A beautiful thing, of a species he’d never seen before. There was also a clay cup, and the meat of two or three rabbits, cooked and lying in the cracked curved section of a painted jar.

      There was no one else in the room.

       Jenny …

      In the dream he’d seen her also with the dragon Morkeleb. She wore the dragon form he’d once seen her take, not white but crystalline, as if wrought of crystal lace and bones. They flew low over the ocean, the black dragon and the white, shadows running blue before them on the waves, as alone among humankind he’d seen the dragons fly in the Skerries of Light that lay westward across the sea. The memory of that dream calmed his pounding heart, filled him with a sense of peace.

      An old memory? An illusion, sent up by his mind to reassure him?

      The vision, perhaps, that both Jenny and Morkeleb had perished in the cave-in, and that in death her soul had become a dragon’s soul at last?

      The thought left him desolate.

      He had traveled, he realized, for so long since leaving the Winterlands that he had become confused about time. Time in Hell wasn’t the same as time that is ruled by the sun and the stars. On his errantry for the Demon Queen he had crossed from Hell to Hell, the magic of one unworkable in another, and at last from the myriad Hells into that other world where the dragon Corvin had taken refuge in human shape. John felt like he’d been lost for years. Capture, imprisonment, and the specter of an agonizing death had come between him and the longing ache he’d felt, just to see Jenny, to speak to her …

      If she’d listen. If she wouldn’t turn away.

      When last he’d seen her, at her old house on Frost Fell, it had been the morning after Ian’s try at suicide. He heard his own voice lashing at her, saw her crumpled beside the hearth, beside the nest of blankets they’d made up for their son.

      God, I might just as well have gone over and kicked her, he thought, trying to wriggle away from that memory, that shame and pain.

      Back then, even with his experience of dealing with the Demon Queen, he hadn’t understood what possession by a demon did to those who survived it.

      He wanted to walk back into that room, that time, and knock that man who was himself upside the head and scream at him, She’s hurting, too, you nit! Let her alone!

      Don’t let her be dead, he prayed, to the Old God whose name and nature were mostly no longer remembered, save in backwaters like the Winterlands. Don’t let her be dead and not knowing how sorry I am.

      He closed his eyes and watched the play of the reddish light on the lids, breathed the fusty sweetness of the bracken and the moldery earth-stink of the covering cloak. His body was covered with bruises like a windfall peach. After a time he rolled gingerly up onto one black-and-blue elbow and devoured rabbit and water, and as he did so saw that broken pieces of wood had been heaped near the chamber’s stone doorway, ready to be fed to the blaze. Boughs thicker than his calf had been snapped into short billets, as if they had been twigs.

      Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, he thought, and rubbed a half-healed bullet graze left over from that final firefight in the lab. His shoulder was bruised black from the kick of one of those noisy chattering horrendous guns that could kill a roomful of people in moments.

       A dragon hiding in human form. Working as a scientist, of all things, in that alien half-drowned world. Changing identities whenever it became obvious that he wasn’t growing old like everyone else.

      He must have been hiding there—or somewhere like it—for a thousand years.

      The old granny-rhyme was right. Save a dragon, slave a dragon, at least for a time. Cold flowed through the doorway from the dark of the passage beyond, and with that cold the harsh scents of dust and sand. John gathered the robe about himself—a King’s robe, certainly finer than anything he’d ever had as Thane of the Winterlands, the gods could only guess at where it came from—and limped barefoot and aching down the passageway, the cold growing sharper and more penetrating until he came out under desert stars.

      The room was built into that huge granite foundation that rose like a mammoth bench in the midst of the ruined city. Sand had flowed in the inconspicuous doorway, duned against the walls and piled over the threshold so that John had to climb, feet slithering in freezing powder, and bend down under the lintel to emerge.

      The city lay before him, reminding him of an old drawing sun-faded nearly to extinction. Between starlight and myopia he could see only suggestions of the nearer walls, and portions of three pillars that stood duty for some vanished palace. A dimple in the ground marked where a lake had been. Some distance away an immense plaza was demarcated from the desert by a ring of stones, water-shaped but uncut by human hand; a minor cavalry skirmish could have been fought inside it. He thought something