Dragonshadow. Barbara Hambly

on the other side of the old curtain wall.

      Muffle! John’s heart leaped. You disobeyed and came after me! I could kiss you, you great chowderheaded lout!

      But it was not the blacksmith who stood framed, a moment later, against the pallid morning sky.

      A man John had not seen before, a stranger to the Winterlands. He seemed in his middle fifties, big and broad-shouldered, with a calmly smiling face. John thought, through a haze of crimson agony that came and went, that he was wealthy. Though he did not move with a courtier’s trained grace, neither had he the gait of a man who fought for his living, or worked. The violet silk of his coat was a color impossible without the dye-trade of the south. The curly black fur of his collar a southerner’s bid for warmth. His hair was gray under an embroidered cap, and he bore a staff carved with a goblin’s head, a white moonstone glowing in its mouth.

      If this was a hallucination, thought John giddily, trying to breathe against the sinking cold that seemed to spread through his body, it was a bloody precise one. Had the fellow fallen out of the air? Did he have a horse cached somewhere out of sight? He carried a saddlebag at any rate, brass buckles clinking faintly as he picked his way down the slope. Halfway down the jumble of the broken wall he paused and turned his head in John’s direction. He did not appear to be surprised, either by the dragon, dying, or by the broken form of the man.

      Though the distance between them was probably a dozen yards, John could see in the set of his shoulders, in the tilt of that sleek-groomed head, the moment when the stranger dismissed him. Not important. Dying, and to be disregarded.

      The stranger walked past him to the dragon.

      Centhwevir lashed his tail feebly, hissed and moved his head. The man stepped back. Then, cautiously, he worked his way around to the other side—Yes, thought John, irritated despite the fact that he was only half-conscious. That ball of spikes on the end of the tail isn’t just to impress the she-dragons, you stupid oic. Was this a dream?

      He couldn’t be sure. Pain grew and then seemed to diminish as images fragmented through the smoke. He saw his father again, belting him with a heavy wooden training-sword, yelling, “Use the shield! Use the shield, damn you!” A shield the child could barely lift … Probably a dream. He wasn’t sure what to make of the image of that prim gentleman in the violet silk coat sliding a spike from the saddlebag, holding it up to the sun. Not a spike, but an icicle with a core of quicksilver … Now where would he have gotten an icicle in June?

      John’s mind scouted the trail of something he’d read in Honoribus Eppulis about the manufacture of ice from salt, trying to track down the reference, and for a time he wandered in smoky hallucinations of vats and straw and cold. So cold. He came out with the music of Jenny’s harp in his mind again and saw he hadn’t been unconscious for more than a moment, for the gentleman in purple was standing on the dragon’s neck, straddling its backbone. Wan moorland sunlight caught in the frost-white icicle as the man drove it into the back of the dragon’s skull.

      Centhwevir opened his mouth and hissed again—Missed the spinal cord, you silly bugger. John wanted to go over and take it from him and do it right. It’s right there in front of you. Hope you’ve got another one of those.

      But the stranger stepped away, tucked his staff beneath his arm, and took from his bag things John recognized: vials of silver and blood, wands of gold and amethyst. The paraphernalia of wizardry. I thought Jen said you were a girl. Of healing. Centhwevir lay still, but his long spiked tail moved independently, like a cat’s—Dammit, the poison would have worked!—as the man spread a green silk sheet upon the ground and began to lay out on it a circle of power. Despairing, feeling his own life seeping away, John watched him make the spells that would call back life from the frontiers of darkness.

      No! John tried to move, tried to gather his strength to move, before he realized what a stupid thing that would have been. Dammit, no! It was a moot point anyway, since he couldn’t summon the strength to so much as lift his hand. He felt the hopeless urge to weep. Don’t make me do all this again!

      Was this hell? Father Anmos, the priest at Cair Corflyn, would say so. Some infernal punishment for his sins, that he had to go on slaying the same dragon over and over? And would the gent in the violet coat come over and heal him next, and hand him his ax and a couple of harpoons and say, Sorry, lad, up and at ’em. Was he going to resurrect Battlehammer? What had poor Battle-hammer done to deserve getting killed over and over again in the same fight with the same dragon through eternity?

      This ridiculous vision occupied his mind for a time, coming and going with the braided golden threads of that remembered music—or was the mage in the heather playing a flute?—and with the thought of darkness and of stars that did not twinkle but blazed with a distant, steady light.

      Then from a great distance he seemed to see Ian, standing where the unknown wizard had stood at the top of the broken wall.

      Can’t be a hallucination, John found himself thinking. That’s his old jacket he’s wearing—the sleeve was stained with poisons from last night.

      At the dragon’s side, the wizard held out his hand.

      Ian jumped lightly down from the wall, strode across the scorched and smoking ground without a blink, without a hesitation, grimy plaid fluttering in the morning breeze. The dragon raised its head, and the mage smiled, and John thought suddenly, Ian, run! Panic filled him, for no good reason, only that he knew this man in his embroidered cap was evil and that he was saving the dragon’s life with ill in mind.

      The dragon sat up like a dog on its haunches: its brilliant, bloodstained wings folded. Its injured foot it held a little off the ground. John could see where the slash had been stitched together again. The wizard who had saved its life set aside the flute of bone and ivory.

      It was said that if you saved a dragon’s life it was your slave. It was true that when Jenny had saved the life of Morkeleb the Black, the Dragon of Nast Wall, she had done so by means of the dragon’s name. That music, salvaged from ancient lore, had given her power. Save a dragon, slave a dragon …

       Ian, go back!

      He tried to scream the words, and his breath would not come.

       Ian, no!

      John raised himself on his elbows, then his hands. It was as if every cord and muscle of his flesh tore loose. Ian …!

      The boy paused, as if he’d heard his voice. Turning, he walked over to where John lay and stood looking down at him, and his bright sapphire eyes were no longer his own eyes, no longer Jenny’s. No longer anything human.

      With a smile on his face that was almost friendly, he kicked John in the side as a man would kick a dying dog that had bitten him.

      Then he walked away.

      When John’s eyes cleared, he saw the dragon Centhwevir lowering himself to the earth, saw the strange wizard settling himself a little uneasily among the bristling ridges of the dragon’s back. He stretched down a hand and helped Ian up behind him. Like a dream of cornflowers and daffodils, like lapis and golden music, the star-drake spread his wings.

      “Ian …” It was like falling onto a harrow, but John tried to make himself crawl, as if he could somehow reach them, somehow snatch his son back.

      The moonstone flashed in the wizard’s staff. The dragon loosed its hold on the world, like the wind taking a kite. Weightless and perfect in its beauty it rose, and John tried and failed to call his son’s name, though what he thought that would accomplish he knew not.

      He only knew that the dragon was taking his son.

      A dream, he thought, seeing again Ian’s face and the flame of hell in those blue eyes. It has to be a dream.

      Darkness took him.