Dragonsbane. Barbara Hambly

reason so few of the King’s champions could be spared. It isn’t only the dragon, you see.” He leaned forward pleadingly. “The whole Realm is in danger from the rebels as well as the dragon. The Deep tunnels into the face of Nast Wall, the great mountain-ridge that divides the lowlands of Belmarie from the northeastern Marches. The Citadel of Halnath stands on a cliff on the other side of the mountain from the main gates of the Deep, with the town and the University below it. The gnomes of Ylferdun were our allies against the rebels, but now most of them have gone over to the Halnath side. The whole Realm is split. You must come! As long as the dragon is in Ylferdun we can’t keep the roads from the mountains properly guarded against the rebels, or send supplies to the besiegers of the Citadel. The King’s champions went out …” He swallowed again, his voice tightening with the memory. “The men who brought back the bodies said that most of them never even got a chance to draw their swords.”

      “Gah!” Aversin looked away, anger and pity twisting his sensitive mouth. “Any fool who’d take a sword after a dragon in the first place …”

      “But they didn’t know! All they had to go on were the songs!”

      Aversin said nothing to this; but, judging by his compressed lips and the flare of his nostrils, his thoughts were not pleasant ones. Gazing into the fire, Jenny heard his silence, and something like the chill shadow of a wind-driven cloud passed across her heart.

      Half against her will, she saw images form in the molten amber of the fire’s heart. She recognized the winter-colored sky above the gully, the charred and brittle spears of poisoned grass fine as needle-scratches against it, John standing poised on the gully’s rim, the barbed steel rod of a harpoon in one gloved hand, an ax gleaming in his belt. Something rippled in the gully, a living carpet of golden knives.

      Clearer than the sharp, small ghosts of the past that she saw was the shiv-twist memory of fear as she saw him jump.

      They had been lovers then for less than a year, still burningly conscious of one another’s bodies. When he had sought the dragon’s lair, more than anything else Jenny had been aware of the fragility of flesh and bone when it was pitted against steel and fire.

      She shut her eyes; when she opened them again, the silken pictures were gone from the flame. She pressed her lips taut, forcing herself to listen without speaking, knowing it was and could be none of her affair. She could no more have told him not to go—not then, not now—than he could have told her to leave the stone house on Frost Fell and give up her seeking, to come to the Hold to cook his meals and raise his sons.

      John was saying, “Tell me about this drake.”

      “You mean you’ll come?” The forlorn eagerness in Gareth’s voice made Jenny want to get up and box his ears.

      “I mean I want to hear about it.” The Dragonsbane came around the table and slouched into one of the room’s big carved chairs, sliding the other in Gareth’s direction with a shove of his booted foot. “How long ago did it strike?”

      “It came by night, two weeks ago. I took ship three days later, from Claekith Harbor below the city of Bel. The ship is waiting for us at Eldsbouch.”

      “I doubt that.” John scratched the side of his long nose with one scarred forefinger. “If your mariners were smart they’ll have turned and run for a safe port two days ago. The storms are coming. Eldsbouch will be no protection to them.”

      “But they said they’d stay!” Gareth protested indignantly. “I paid them!”

      “Gold will do them no good weighting their bones to the bottom of the cove,” John pointed out.

      Gareth sank back into his chair, shocked and cut to the heart by this final betrayal. “They can’t have gone …”

      There was a moment’s silence, while John looked down at his hands. Without lifting her eyes from the heart of the fire, Jenny said softly, “They are not there, Gareth. I see the sea, and it is black with storms; I see the old harbor at Eldsbouch, the gray river running through the broken houses there; I see the fisher-folk making fast their little boats to the ruins of the old piers and all the stones shining under the rain. There is no ship there, Gareth.”

      “You’re wrong,” he said hopelessly. “You have to be wrong.” He turned back to John. “It’ll take us weeks to get back, traveling overland …”

      “Us?” John said softly, and Gareth blushed and looked as frightened as if he had uttered mortal insult. After a moment John went on, “How big is this dragon of yours?”

      Gareth swallowed again and drew his breath in a shaky sigh. “Huge,” he said dully. “How huge?”

      Gareth hesitated. Like most people, he had no eye for relative size. “It must have been a hundred feet long. They say the shadow of its wings covered the whole of Deeping Vale.”

      “Who says?” John inquired, shifting his weight side-ways in the chair and hooking a knee over the fornicating sea-lions that made up the left-hand arm. “I thought it came at night, and munched up anyone close enough to see it by day.”

      “Well …” He floundered in a sea of third-hand rumor.

      “Ever see it on the ground?”

      Gareth blushed and shook his head.

      “It’s gie hard to judge things in the air,” John said kindly, pushing up his specs again. “The drake I slew here looked about a hundred feet long in the air, when I first saw it descending on the village of Great Toby. Turned out to be twenty-seven feet from beak to tail.” Again his quick grin illuminated his usually expressionless face. “It comes of being a naturalist. The first thing we did, Jenny and I, when I was on my feet again after killing it, was to go out there with cleavers and see how the thing was put together, what there was left of it.”

      “It could be bigger, though, couldn’t it?” Gareth asked. He sounded a little worried, as if, Jenny thought dryly, he considered a twenty-seven foot dragon somewhat paltry. “I mean, in the Greenhythe variant of the Lay of Selkythar Dragonsbane and the Worm of the Imperteng Wood, they say that the Worm was sixty feet long, with wings that would cover a battalion.”

      “Anybody measure it?”

      “Well, they must have. Except—now that I come to think of it, according to that variant, when Selkythar had wounded it unto death the dragon fell into the River Wildspae; and in a later Belmarie version it says it fell into the sea. So I don’t see how anyone could have.”

      “So a sixty-foot dragon is just somebody’s measure of how great Selkythar was.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands absentmindedly tracing over the lunatic carvings—the mingled shapes of all the creatures of the Book of Beasts. The worn gilding still caught in the chinks flickered with a dull sheen in the stray glints of the fire. “Twenty-seven feet doesn’t sound like a lot, ’til it’s there spitting fire at you. You know their flesh will decompose almost as soon as they die? It’s as if their own fire consumes them, as it does everything else.”

      “Spitting fire?” Gareth frowned. “All the songs say they breathe it.”

      Aversin shook his head. “They sort of spit it—it’s liquid fire, and nearly anything it touches’ll catch. That’s the trick in fighting a dragon, you see—to stay close enough to its body that it won’t spit fire at you for fear of burning itself, and not get rolled on or cut to pieces with its scales whilst you’re about it. They can raise the scales along their sides like a blowfish bristling, and they’re edged like razors.”

      “I never knew that,” Gareth breathed. Wonder and curiosity lessened, for a moment, the shell of his offended dignity and pride.

      “Well, the pity of it is, probably the King’s champions didn’t either. God knows, I didn’t when I went after the dragon in the gorge. There was nothing about it in any book I could find—Dotys and Clivy and them. Only a few old granny-rhymes that mention dragons—or drakes or worms, they’re called—and they weren’t much help. Things like: