Dragonsbane (25 page)

I will bargain with you, wizard woman.

She knew, with chill premonition but no surprise what his bargain would be, and her heart quickened, though whether with dread or some strange hope she did not know. She said, “No,” but within herself she felt, like a forbidden longing, the unwillingness to let something this beautiful, this powerful, die. He was evil, she told herself, knowing and believing it in her heart. Yet there was something in those silver eyes that drew her, some song of black and latent fire whose music she understood.

The dragon moved his head a little on the powerful curve of his neck. Blood dripped down from the tattered ribbons of his mane.

Do you think that even you, a wizard who sees in darkness, can search out the ways of the gnomes?

The pictures that filled her mind were of the darkness, of clammy and endless mazes of the world underground. Her heart sank with dread at the awareness of them; those few small images of the way to the Places of Healing, those fragmentary words of Mab’s, turned in her hands to the pebbles with which a child thinks it can slaughter lions.

Still she said, “I have spoken to one of them of these ways.”

And did she tell the truth? The gnomes are not famed for it in matters concerning the heart of the Deep.

Jenny remembered the empty places on Dromar’s maps. But she retorted, “Nor are dragons.”

Beneath the exhaustion and pain, she felt in the dragon’s mind amusement at her reply, like a thin spurt of cold water in hot.

What is truth, wizard woman? The truth that dragons see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncomfortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You know this.

She saw that he had felt her fascination. The silver eyes drew her; his mind touched hers, as a seducer would have touched her hand. She saw, also, that he understood that she would not draw back from that touch. She forced her thoughts away from him, holding to the memories of John and of their sons, against the power that called to her like a whisper of amorphous night.

With effort, she tore her eyes from his and turned to leave.

Wizard woman, do you think this man for whom you risk the bones of your body will live longer than I?

She stopped, the toes of her boots touching the hem of the carpet of moonlight which lay upon the flagstoned floor. Then she turned back to face him, despairing and torn. The wan light showed her the pools of acrid blood drying over so much of the floor, the sunken look to the dragon’s flesh; and she realized that his question had struck at her weakness and despair to cover his own.

She said calmly, “There is the chance that he will.”

She felt the anger in the movement of his head, and the pain that sliced through him with it.
And will you wager on that? Will you wager that, even did the gnomes speak the truth, you will be able to sort your way through their warrens, spiral within spiral, dark within dark, to find what you need in time? Heal me, wizard woman, and I will guide you with my mind and show you the place that you seek.

For a time she only gazed up at that long bulk of shining blackness, the dark mane of bloody ribbons, and the eyes like oiled metal ringing eternal darkness. He was a wonder such as she had never seen, a spined and supple shadow from the thorned tips of his backswept wings to the horned beak of his nose. The Golden Dragon John had slain on the windswept hills of Wyr had been a being of sun and fire, but this was a smoke-wraith of night, black and strong and old as time. The spines of his head grew into fantastic twisted horns, icy-smooth as steel; his forepaws had the shape of hands, save that they had two thumbs instead of one. The voice that spoke in her mind was steady, but she could see the weakness dragging at every line of that great body and feel the faint shiver of the last taut strength that fought to continue the bluff against her.

Unwillingly, she said, “I know nothing of the healing of dragons.”

The silver eyes narrowed, as if she had asked him for something he had not thought to give. For a moment they faced one another, cloaked in the cave’s darkness. She was aware of John and of time—distantly, like something urgent in a dream. But she kept her thoughts concentrated upon the creature that lay before her and the diamond-prickled darkness of that alien mind that struggled with hers.

Then suddenly the gleaming body convulsed. She felt, through the silver eyes, the pain like a scream through the steel ropes of his muscles. The wings stretched out uncontrollably, the claws extending in a terrible spasm as the poison shifted in his veins. The voice in her mind whispered,
Go.

At the same moment memories flooded her thoughts of a place she had never been before. Vague images crowded to her mind of blackness as vast as the night outdoors, columned with a forest of stone trees that whispered back the echo of every breath, of rock seams a few yards across whose ceilings were lost in distant darkness, and of the murmuring of endless water under stone. She felt a vertigo of terror as in a nightmare, but also a queer sense of
déjà vu,
as if she had passed that way before.

It came to her that it was Morkeleb and not she who had passed that way; the images were the way to the Places of Healing, the very heart of the Deep.

The spined black body before her twisted with another paroxysm of anguish, the huge tail slashing like a whip against the rock of the wall. The pain was visible now in the silver eyes as the poison ate into the dragon’s blood. Then his body dropped slack, a dry clatter of horns and spines like a skeleton falling on a stone floor, and from a great distance off she heard again,
Go.

His scales had all risen in a blanket of razors at his agony; quiveringly, they smoothed themselves flat along the sunken sides. Jenny gathered her courage and strode forward; without giving herself time to think of what she was doing, she scrambled over the waist-high hill of the ebony flank that blocked the doorway of the Grand Tunnel. The backbone ridge was like a hedge of spears, thrusting stiffly from the unsteady footing of the hide. Kilting up her skirt, she put a hand to steady herself on the carved stone pillar of the doorjamb and leaped over the spines awkwardly, fearing to the last that some renewed convulsion would thrust them into her thighs.

But the dragon lay quiet. Jenny could sense only the echoes of his mind within hers, like a faint gleam of far-off light. Before her stretched the darkness of the Deep.

If she thought about them, the visions she had seen retreated from her. But she found that if she simply walked forward, as if she had trodden this way before, her feet would lead her. Dream memories whispered through her mind of things she had seen, but sometimes the angle of sight was different, as if she had looked down upon them from above.

The upper levels of the Deep were dry, wrought by the gnomes after the fashion of the tastes of men. The Grand Passage, thirty feet broad and paved in black granite, worn and runnelled with the track of uncounted generations of feet, had been walled with blocks of cut stone to hide the irregularities of its shape; broken statues lying like scattered bones in the dark attested the classical appearance of the place in its heyday. Among the fragmented whiteness of the marble limbs lay real bones, and with them the twisted bronze frames and shattered glass of the huge lamps that had once depended from the high ceiling, all scraped together along the walls, like leaves in a gutter, by the passage of the dragon’s body. Even in the darkness, Jenny’s wizard’s sight showed her the fire-blackening where the spilled oil had been ignited by the dragon’s breath.

Deeper down, the place had the look of the gnomes. Stalagmites and columns ceased to be carved into the straight pillars favored by the children of men, and were wrought into the semblance of trees in leaf, or beasts, or grotesque things that could have been either; more and more frequently they had simply been left to keep the original shape of pouring water which had been their own. The straight, handsomely finished water courses of the higher levels gave place to tumbling streams in the lower deeps; in some places the water fell straight, fifty or a hundred feet from distant ceilings, like a living pillar, or gushed away into darkness through conduits shaped like the skulls of gargoyles. Jenny passed through caverns and systems of caves that had been transformed into the vast, interconnected dwelling places of the great clans and families of the gnomes, but elsewhere she found halls and rooms large enough to contain all the village of Deeping, where houses and palaces had been built freestanding, their bizarre spires and catwalks indistinguishable from the groves of stalagmites that clustered in strange forests on the banks of pools and rivers like polished onyx.

And through these silent realms of wonder she saw nothing but the evidences of ruin and decay and the scraping track of the dragon. White ur-toads were everywhere, squabbling with rats over the rotting remains of stored food or month-old carrion; in some places, the putrescent fetor of what had been hoards of cheese, meat, or vegetables was nearly unbreathable. The white, eyeless vermin of the deeper pits, whose names she could only guess at from Mab’s accounts, slipped away at her approach, or hid themselves behind the fire-marked skulls and dropped vessels of chased silver that everywhere scattered the halls.

As she went deeper, the air became cold and very damp, the stone increasingly slimy beneath her boots; the weight of the darkness was crushing. As she walked the lightless mazes, she understood that Mab had been right; without guidance, even she, whose eyes could pierce that utter darkness, would never have found her way to the heart of the Deep.

But find it she did. The echo of it was in the dragon’s mind, setting up queer resonances in her soul, a lamination of feelings and awareness whose alien nature she shrank from, uncomprehending. Beside its doors, she felt the aura of healing that lingered still in the air, and the faint breath of ancient power.

All through that series of caverns, the air was warm, smelling of dried camphor and spices; the putrid stench of decay and the crawling vermin were absent. Stepping through the doors into the domed central cavern, where ghost-pale stalactites regarded themselves in the oiled blackness of a central pool, she wondered how great a spell it would take to hold that healing warmth, not only against the cold in the abysses of the earth, but for so long after those who had wrought the spell had perished.

The magic here was great indeed.

It pervaded the place; as she passed cautiously through the rooms of meditation, of dreaming, or of rest, Jenny was conscious of it as a living presence, rather than the stasis of dead spells. At times the sensation of it grew so strong that she looked back over her shoulder and called out to the darkness, “Is someone there?” though in her reason she knew there was not. But as with the Whisperers in the north, her feelings argued against her reason, and again and again she extended her senses through that dark place, her heart pounding in hope or fear—she could not tell which. But she touched nothing, nothing but darkness and the drip of water falling eternally from the hanging teeth of the stones.

There was living magic there, whispering to itself in darkness—and like the touch of some foul thing upon her flesh, she felt the sense of evil.

She shivered and glanced around her nervously once more. In a small room, she found the medicines she sought, row after row of glass phials and stoppered jars of the green-and-white marbled ware the gnomes made in such quantity. She read their labels in the darkness and stowed them in her satchel, working quickly, partly from a growing sense of uneasiness and partly because she felt time leaking away and John’s life ebbing like the going-out of the tide.

He can’t die, she told herself desperately, not after all this—but she had come too late to too many bedsides in her years as a healer to believe that. Still, she knew that the medicines alone might not be enough. Hastily, glancing back over her shoulder as she moved from room to dark and silent room, she began searching for the inner places of power, the libraries where they would store the books and scrolls of magic that, she guessed, made up the true heart of the Deep.

Her boots swished softly on the sleek floors, but even that small noise twisted at her nerves. The floors of the rooms, like all the places inhabited by gnomes, were never at one level, but made like a series of terraces; even the smallest chambers had two or more. And as she searched, the eerie sense of being watched grew upon her, until she feared to pass through new doors, half-expecting to meet some evil thing gloating in the blackness. She felt a power, stronger than any she had encountered—stronger than Zyerne’s, stronger than the dragon’s. But she found nothing, neither that waiting, silent evil, nor any book of power by which magic would be transmitted down the years among the gnome mages—only herbals, anatomies, or catalogs of diseases and cures. In spite of her uneasy fear, she felt puzzled—Mab had said that the gnomes had no Lines, yet surely the power had to be transmitted somehow. So she forced herself to seek, deeper and deeper, for the books that must contain it.

Exhaustion was beginning to weaken her like slow illness. Last night’s watching and the night’s before weighed her bones, and she knew she would have to abandon her search. But knowledge of her own inadequacy drove her, questing inward into the forbidden heart of the Deep, desperate to find what she might before she returned to the surface to do what she could with what she had.

She stepped through a door into a dark place that echoed with her breathing.

She had felt cold before, but it seemed nothing now; nothing compared to the dread that congealed around her heart.

She stood in the place she had seen in the water bowl, in the visions of John’s death.

It shocked her, for she had come on it unexpectedly. She had thought to find an archive there, a place of teaching, for she guessed this to be the heart and center of the blank places on Dromar’s ambiguous maps. But through a knotted forest of stalactites and columns, she glimpsed only empty darkness that smelled faintly of the wax of a thousand candles, which slumped like dead things in the niches of the rock. No living thing was there, but she felt again that sense of evil and she stepped cautiously forward into the open spaces of black toward the misshapen stone altar.