Dragonshadow. Barbara Hambly

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hand. Even the guards had nothing to say, focused through their exhaustion on the open ground beyond the moat. This was the dead hour of night that Balgodorus favored for his attacks. Mosquitoes whined in the darkness, but worn down as she was even the spells of “Go bite someone else” scraped at her, like a rough spot on the inside of a shoe after the tenth or twelfth mile.

      No sign of Centhwevir. Under the best of circumstances it wasn’t always possible to scry dragons, for their flesh, their very essence, was woven of magic. But over the past seven days, she had scried the outposts along the fell country, scried the towns of Great Toby and Far West Riding, scried Alyn itself.

      No burned ground. No tangles of stripped and acid-charred bones.

      And at the Hold, no mourning. But she saw Aunt Jane and Aunt Rowan and Cousin Dilly weeping; saw Adric sitting alone on the battlements, looking out to the south. And John, after his brief interview with Rocklys, had refused to remain in bed, had instead dragged himself next morning back onto his horse and taken the road for home, Muffle behind him scolding all the way.

      Ian.

      Something had happened to Ian.

       Wait till I get there, John. This can’t last.

      She slipped from the room.

      Women and children slept rolled in blankets along the corridor outside her door. She picked her way among them, drawing her skirts aside. Pale blue light glowed around the door handles of other storerooms, warding away touch with spells of dread. Warding away, too, every spell of rats and mold and insects, leaks and fire, anything and everything Jenny could think of.

      In the archway that led onto the palisade she nodded to the guard, and the night breeze lifted the dark hair from her face. Balgodorus’ tame mage hadn’t stopped with illusion. As she passed the roofs of the buildings around the court, Jenny checked the faint-glowing threads of ward-signs, of wyrds and counterspells. In some places the fire-spells still lingered, the wood or plaster hot beneath her fingers. She scribbled additional marks, and in one place opened one of the several pouches at her belt and dipped her finger into the spelled mix of powdered silver and dried fox-blood, to strengthen the ward. She didn’t like the untaught craziness of those wild spells, without Limitations to keep them from devouring and spreading where their sender had no intention of letting them go.

      There had been other spells besides fire. Spells to summon bees from their hives and hornets from their nests in furious unseasonal swarms. Spells of sickness, of fleas, of unreasoning panic and rage. Anything to break the concentration of the defenders. The palisade and the blockhouses were a tangle of counterspells and amulets; the smelly air a lour of magic.

      How could anyone, she wondered, born with the raw gold of magic in them, use it in the service of a beast like Balgodorus: slave trader, killer, rapist, and thief?

      “Mistress Waynest?” Lord Pellanor appeared at the top of the ladder from the court below. He carried his helm under his arm, and the gold inlay that was its sole decoration caught the fire’s reflection in a frivolous curlicue of light. Without it his balding, close-cropped head above gorget and collar looked silly and small. “Is all well?”

      “As of sunset. I’m just starting another round.”

      “Can she see in?” asked the Baron. “I mean, look with a mirror or a crystal or with fire the way you do, to see where to plant those spells of hers?”

      “I don’t think so.” Jenny folded her arms under her plaid. “She might be able to see in a room where I’m not, despite scrywards I’ve put on everything I can think of. She’s strong enough to keep me from looking into their camp. She’s laying down spells at random, the way I’ve done: sickness on a horse or a man, fire in hay or wood, foulness in water. And she wouldn’t know any more than I do how much effect those spells are having.”

      The Baron puffed his breath, making his long mustaches jump. “Where would she have learned, eh?” He started to bite his thumb against evil, then glanced at her and changed the gesture to simply scratching his chin. “I … er … don’t suppose the man who taught you might still be about?”

      Jenny shook her head.

      “You’re sure?”

      She looked aside. “I buried him. Twenty-five years ago.”

      “Ah.”

      “I was the last of his students.” Jenny scanned the formless yards of open ground below. They had fought, daily, over that ground, and daily, nightly, those ragged filthy foul-mouthed men had come back, with ladders, with axes, with brush to try to burn the gates or rams to try to break them. There were, she guessed, nearly twice as many bandits as there were defenders of fighting strength. They attacked in shifts.

      Even now she could see the twinkle of lights from their camp and smell its stink on the breeze. Eating, drinking, resting up for another attack. Her bones ached with fatigue.

      “He was very old,” she went on, “and very bitter, I suppose through no fault of his own.” She remembered the way his stick would whine as it slashed through the air, and the bite of the leather strap on her flesh. The better, he said, for her to remember her lessons. But she’d felt his satisfaction in the act of punishment alone, the relief of a frustration that ate him alive. She had wept for days, at the old man’s lonely death. She still did not know why.

      “He remembered the last of the King’s troops, marching away to the south. That must have been the final garrison from Great Toby, because the others had gone centuries before that. He said his own teacher left with them, and after that he could only work at the books his teacher left. There was no one else in the north who could teach properly—not healing, not magic, not music. Nothing. Caerdinn was too young to follow the legions south, he said. Then the Iceriders came, and everything changed.”

      Pellanor cleared his throat apologetically, as if it were up to him to defend the decision of the man whom history knew as the Primrose King. “Well, Hudibras II was faced with a very difficult situation during the Kin-Wars. And the plague struck hardest among the armies. Your teacher seems to have learned enough on his own to have taught you well.”

      Jenny thought of all those things she’d learned in the south that Caerdinn hadn’t known, the holes in his knowledge she’d struggled with all her life. Spells that could have saved lives, had she known them. But Pellanor had done her no harm, and didn’t understand, so she only said, “So he did.”

      Had the old man’s anger stemmed from that ancient desertion? she wondered, as she moved on into the corner turret. Under her touch the rough-dressed stone walls, the heavily plastered timbers, felt normal—no new spells embedded like embers within. Or had his rage at her been because she was herself untalented, born with only mediocre powers, when he considered himself fit to have instructed the great?

      Had the masters of those ancient Lines truly had some method of raising small powers such as hers—and his—to primacy? Or was that just some fantasy of his own?

      The fact remained that her greater powers had come from contact with the Dragon of Nast Wall. That dragon-magic she sent out now, flowing like thin blue lightning through rock and wood, thatch and tile, listening as dragons listened, sniffing and tasting for that other wizard’s spells.

      There. Summonings of rats, and fleas—good God, did that mage-born imbecile know nothing about the spread of plague? Another fire-spell … No, two. One under the rafters of the main hall. Another in the air in the courtyard, a stickiness СКАЧАТЬ