Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

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      Now he had the semblence of a dragon, insofar as he had any semblence at all—or perhaps, thought Jenny, it was only her perception in dreaming that saw him thus. The shape of him that she saw was the thin, snake-like body of a dragon, with its long tail like a muscled whip and great thin-boned silken wings folded along his sides. All his joints and spine bristled with spikes, and great scales like razor-edged fans. In the narrow, beaked head burned crystal eyes, mazes of diamonds that you could fall into forever. Among long horns and tufts of mane, antennae flicked lazily, the points of light at their tips the only thing about him that could be clearly seen.

      Not human, she thought. But not a beast, as so many humans considered dragons. The young among dragons were beasts. But they grew, and passed on, with the years, to become other things.

      As Morkeleb had.

      A man would have gone back for fellow men, replied the dragon slowly. Indeed I have met a man who would go back for them, though they were no kin nor friends of his. It is not a thing of dragons, to concern oneself overmuch with the safety of others. I knew their minds were enslaved, and there was little that I could do. We are creatures who look after ourselves.

      Jenny opened her eyes at that. Turning her head, she saw the dragon regarding her with his diamond gaze. “Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” she murmured, and held out her hand. “You saved me in the North, when I was in dragon form, as once I saved you.”

      He did not ask her how she was. He knew that—better than she knew herself: she felt the chill scrutiny of his consciousness touch her bones. But she thought the shadowy outlines of his form became more distinct with the passage of thoughts in his mind. To Mab, he said, She must be moved as soon as may be. And yourself also, Gnome-Witch. Sense you not the passage of demons within these mines? Hear you not, in the still of the night, the scratch of their glass shells upon the rocks as they emerge from whatever pool hides their gate? Smell you not the stink of them, like blood poured onto hot iron? They wait and they listen, and they are strong. Soon or late they will find this place, and take you in the darkness.

      “They are strong,” agreed Miss Mab, rising. “This was the question a thousand years ago, Dragonshadow, and is the question again. That they are strong. Ward-spells that once defeated them, and held them in check, now leave them untouched. Are these new demons, then, bred somehow from the old who destroyed Ernine?”

      Jenny said, “No,” with such conviction that both gnome and dragon turned to look at her in surprise. “No. Amayon remembers the Fall of Ernine. He was there.” It surprised her that she could name the demon who had possessed her without a break in her voice. Without wondering where he was, and what had become of him after John had given him over to the Queen behind the mirror. Without a pang of concern as to whether he was in pain. Perhaps the poison had burned the longing out of her, or the healing had strengthened her heart. She did not know.

      “In possessing me,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “he not only occupied my body, while my mind was imprisoned elsewhere in a green jewel. He occupied my mind itself, the portions of my mind that remained in my body, side by side with his. That—that portion of me shared his thoughts. Some nights I have dreamed his dreams …”

      She grimaced at the dirty memories, the hellblaze of passions and power that still could heat her flesh if she let them. Yet she realized that in her poisoned dreams she had not once dreamed of him. Only weeks ago she had been literally incapable of dreaming about anything else.

      “He was there.” She struggled for breath to speak. “He was one of Adromelech’s demons, that devoured and defeated those of Aohila of the mirror.” She drew the fleece up close, though the cave was warm now, the warmth kept in it by a straw mat hung over the door. A feather of light was allowed to leak from the wrapped hothwais, just enough that she could see. Farther off, on the flowing draft that everywhere ventilated the Deep and the mines below it, she smelled water and stone, and farther off other fires, where the gnomes dwelled, or their slaves who worked the mines.

      Morkeleb tilted his narrow head—he had shrunk himself to little larger than a stag, and sat coiled in the shadows like a gleaming skeleton of diamonds and pitch. Then were I—or another—to search deeply enough in your dreams, it might be that we could understand how the demons were in the end defeated?

      Miss Mab raised her brows, turned her golden eyes to Jenny. “Is this so, child?”

      “Maybe.” Jenny shivered, not liking the hidden suspicion about what she would see.

      “I will search, then,” the old gnome said, and stood, “for spells of dream reading. For spells, too, to guard your mind, child, from too close a sight of the demon’s heart.” When she put her hand on Jenny’s shoulder, Jenny felt how sharp her own bones were under the gnome’s thick palms. Even in the warmth of the cave she felt chilled, as though she had barely any flesh left to her. Her combat with Folcalor beneath the sea, near the gate of the Sea-wights’ hidden realm, had left her scarred, her long black hair burned away and her hands crippled and twisted. As she fumbled 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 СКАЧАТЬ