Dragon's Bane

VI

“He’ll have to listen to you.” Gareth perched himself in the embrasure of one of the tall windows that ran the length of the southern wall of the King’s Gallery, the wan sunlight shimmering with moony radiance in the oldfashioned jewels he wore. “I’ve just heard that the dragon destroyed the convoy taking supplies out to the siege troops at Halnath last night. Over a thousand pounds of flour and sugar and meat destroyed—horses and oxen dead or scattered—the bodies of the guards burned past recognition.”

He nervously adjusted the elaborate folds of his ceremonial mantlings and peered shortsightedly at John and Jenny, who shared a carved bench of ebony inlaid with malachite. Due to the exigencies of court etiquette, formal costume had been petrified into a fashion a hundred and fifty years out of date, with the result that all the courtiers and petitioners assembled in the long room had the stilted, costumed look of characters in a masquerade. Jenny noticed that John, though he might persist in playing the barbarian in his leather and plaids among the admiring younger courtiers, was not about to do so in the presence of the King. Gareth had draped John’s blue-and-cream satin mantlings for him—a valet’s job. Bond Clerlock had offered to do it but. Jenny gathered, there were rigid sartorial rules governing such matters; it would have been very like Bond to arrange the elaborate garment in some ridiculous style, knowing the Dragonsbane was unable to tell the difference.

Bond was present among the courtiers who awaited the arrival of the King. Jenny could see him, further down the King’s Gallery, standing in one of the slanting bars of pale, platinum light. As usual, his costume outshone every other man’s present; his mantlings were a miracle of complex folds and studied elegance, so thick with embroidery that they glittered like a snake’s back; his flowing sleeves, six generations out of date, were precise to a quarter-inch in their length and hang. He had even painted his face in the archaic formal fashion, which some of the courtiers did in preference to the modem applications of kohl and rouge—John had flatly refused to have anything to do with either style. The colors accentuated the pallor of young Clerlock’s face, though he looked better. Jenny noted, than he had yesterday on the ride from Zyerne’s hunting lodge to Bel—less drawn and exhausted.

He was looking about him now with nervous anxiety, searching for someone—probably Zyerne. In spite of how ill he had seemed yesterday, he had been her most faithful attendant, riding at her side and holding her whip, her pomander ball, and the reins of her palfrey when she dismounted. Small thanks. Jenny thought, he had gotten for it. Zyerne had spent the day flirting with the unresponsive Gareth.

It was not that Gareth was immune to her charms. As a nonparticipant. Jenny had an odd sense of unobserved leisure, as if she were watching squirrels from a blind. Unnoticed by the courtiers, she could see that Zyerne was deliberately teasing Gareth’s senses with every touch and smile. Do the mageborn love? he had asked her once, back in the bleak Winterlands. Evidently he had come to his own conclusions about whether Zyerne loved him, or he her. But Jenny knew full well that love and desire were two different things, particularly to a boy of eighteen. Under her innocently minxish airs, Zyerne was a woman skilled at manipulating the passions’ of men.

Wry? Jenny wondered, looking up at the boy’s awkward profile against the soft cobalt shadows of the gallery. For the amusement of seeing him struggle not to betray his father? Somehow to use his guilt to control him so that one day she could turn the King against him by crying rape?

A stir ran the length of the gallery, like wind in dry wheat. At the far end, voices murmured, “The King! The King!” Gareth scrambled to his feet and hastily checked the folds of his mantlings again. John rose, pushing his anachronistic specs a little more firmly up on the bridge of his nose. Taking Jenny’s hand, he followed more slowly, as Gareth hurried toward the line of courtiers that was forming up in the center of the hall.

At the far end, bronze doors swung inward. The Chamberlain Badegamus stepped through, stout, pink, and elderly, emblazoned in a livery of crimson and gold that smote the eye with its splendor. “My lords, my ladies—the King.”

Her arm against Gareth’s in the press. Jenny was aware of the boy’s shudder of nervousness. He had, after all, stolen his father’s seal and disobeyed his orders—and he was no longer as blithely unaware of the consequences of his actions as the characters of most ballads seemed to be. She felt him poised, ready to step forward and execute the proper salaam, as others down the rank were already doing, and receive his father’s acknowledgment and invitation to a private interview.

The King’s head loomed above all others, taller even than his son; Jenny could see that his hair was as fair as Gareth’s but much thicker, a warm barley-gold that was beginning to fade to the color of straw. Like the steady murmuring of waves on the shore, voices repeated “My lord... my lord...”

Her mind returned briefly to the Winterlands. She supposed she should have felt resentment for the Kings who had withdrawn their troops and left the lands to ruin, or awe at finally seeing the source of the King’s law that John was ready to die to uphold. But she felt neither, knowing that this man, Uriens of Bel, had had nothing to do with either withdrawing those troops or making the Law, but was merely the heir of the men who had. Like Gareth before he had traveled to the Winterlands, he undoubtedly had no more notion of those things than what he had learned from his tutors and promptly forgotten.

As he approached, nodding to this woman or that man, signing that he would speak to them in private, Jenny felt a vast sense of distance from this tall man in his regal crimson robes. Her only allegiance was to the Winterlands and to the individuals who dwelt there, to people and a land she knew. It was John who felt the ancient bond of fealty; John who had sworn to this man his allegiance, his sword, and his life.

Nevertheless, she felt the tension as the King approached them, tangible as a color in the air. Covert eyes were on them, the younger courtiers watching, waiting to see the reunion between the King and his errant son.

Gareth stepped forward, the oak-leaf-cut end of his mantlings gathered like a cloak between the second and third fingers of his right hand. With surprising grace, he bent his long, gangly frame into a perfect Sarmendes-in Splendor salaam, such as only the Heir could make, and then only to the monarch. “My lord.”

King Uriens II of Belmarie, Suzerain of the Marches, High Lord of Wyr, Nast, and the Seven Islands, regarded his son for a moment out of hollow and colorless eyes set deep within a haggard, brittle face. Then, without a word, he turned away to acknowledge the next petitioner.

The silence in the gallery would have blistered the paint from wood. Like black poison dumped into clear water, it spread to the farthest ends of the room. The last few petitioners’ voices were audible through it, clearer and clearer, as if they shouted; the closing of the gilded bronze doors as the King passed on into his audience room sounded like the booming of thunder. Jenny was conscious of the eyes of all the room looking anywhere but at them, then sliding back in surreptitious glances, and of Gareth’s face, as white as his collar lace.

A soft voice behind them said, “Please don’t be angry with him, Gareth.”

Zyerne stood there, in plum-colored silk so dark it was nearly black, with knots of pink-tinted cream upon her trailing sleeves. Her mead-colored eyes were troubled. “You did take his seal, you know, and depart without his permission.”

John spoke up. “Bit of an expensive slap on the wrist, though, isn’t it? I mean, there the dragon is and all, while we’re here waiting for leave to go after it.”

Zyerne’s lips tightened a little, then smoothed. At the near end of the King’s Gallery, a small door in the great ones opened, and the Chamberlain Badegamus appeared, quietly summoning the first of the petitioners whom the King had acknowledged.

“There really is no danger to us here, you know. The dragon has been confining his depredations to the farmsteads along the feet of Nast Wall.”

“Ah,” John said comprehendingly. “That makes it all right, then. And is this what you’ve told the people of those farmsteads to which, as you say, the dragon’s been confining his depredations?”

The flash of anger in her eyes was stronger then, as if no one had ever spoken to her so—or at least, thought Jenny, observing silently from John’s side, not for a long time. With visible effort, Zyerne controlled herself and said with an air of one reproving a child, “You must understand. There are many more pressing concerns facing the King...”

“More pressing than a dragon sitting on his doorstep?” demanded Gareth, outraged.

She burst into a sweet gurgle of laughter. “There’s no need to enact a Dockmarket drama over it, you know. I’ve told you before, darling, it isn’t worth the wrinkles it will give you.”

He pulled his head back from her playful touch. “Wrinkles! We’re talking about people being killed!”

“Tut, Gareth,” Bond Clerlock drawled, strolling languidly over to them. “You’re getting as bad as old Polycarp used to be.”

Under the paint, his face looked even more washedout next to Zyerne’s sparkling radiance. With a forced effort at his old lightness, he went on, “You shouldn’t grudge-those poor farmers the only spice in their dull little lives.”

“Spice...” Gareth began, and Zyerne squeezed his hand chidingly.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to go all dull and altruistic on us. What a bore that would be.” She smiled. “And I will tell you this,” she added more soberly. “Don’t do anything that would further anger your father. Be patient—and try to understand.”

Halfway down the long gallery, the Chamberlain Badegamus was returning, passing the small group of gnomes who sat, an island of isolation, in the shadow of one of the fluted ornamental arches along the east wall. As the Chamberlain walked by, one of them rose in a silken whisper of flowing, alien robes, the cloudy wisps of his milkwhite hair floating around his slumped back. Gareth had pointed him out to Jenny earlier—Azwylcartusherands, called Dromar by the folk of men who had little patience with the tongue of gnomes, longtime ambassador from the Lord of the Deep to the Court of Bel. Badegamus saw him and checked his stride, then glanced quickly at Zyerne. She shook her head. Badegamus averted his face and walked past the gnomes without seeing them.

“They grow impudent,” the enchantress said softly. “To send envoys here, when they fight on the side of the traitors of Halnath.”

“Well, they can hardly help that, can they, if the back way out of the Deep leads into the Citadel,” John remarked.

“They could have opened the Citadel gates to let the King’s troops in.”

John scratched the side of his long nose. “Well, being a barbarian and all, I wouldn’t know how things are done in civilized lands,” he said. “In the north, we’ve got a word for someone who’d do that to a man who gave him shelter when he was driven from his home.”

For an instant Zyerne was silent, her power and her anger seeming to crackle in the air. Then she burst into another peal of chiming laughter. “I swear, Dragonsbane, you do have a refreshingly naive way of looking at things. You make me feel positively ancient.” She brushed a tendril of her hair aside from her cheek as she spoke; she looked as sweet and guileless as a girl of twenty. “Come. Some of us are going to slip away from this silliness and go riding along the sea cliffs. Will you come, Gareth?” Her hand stole into his in such a way that he could not avoid it without rudeness—Jenny could see his face color slightly at the touch. “And you, our barbarian? You know the King won’t see you today.”

“Be that as it may,” John said quietly. “I’ll stay here on the off chance.”

Bond laughed tinnily. “There’s the spirit that won the Realm!”

“Aye,” John agreed in a mild voice and returned to the carved bench where he and Jenny had been, secure in his established reputation for barbarous eccentricity.

Gareth drew his hand from Zyerne’s and sat down nearby, catching his mantlings in the lion’s-head arm of the chair. “I think I’ll stay as well,” he said, with as much dignity as one could have while disentangling oneself from the furniture.

Bond laughed again. “I think our Prince has been in the north too long!” Zyerne wrinkled her nose, as if at a joke in doubtful taste.

“Run along, Bond.” She smiled. “I must speak to the King. I shall join you presently.” Gathering up her train, she moved off toward the bronze doors of the King’s antechamber, the opals that spangled her veils giving the impression of dew flecking an apple blossom as she passed the pale bands of the windowlight. As she came near the little group of gnomes, old Dromar rose again and walked toward her with the air of one steeling himself for a loathed but necessary encounter. But she turned her glance from him and quickened her step, so that, to intercept her, he would have to run after her on his short, bandy legs. This he would not do, but stood looking after her for a moment, smoldering anger in his pale amber eyes.

“I don’t understand it,” said Gareth, much later, as the three of them jostled their way along the narrow lanes of the crowded Dockmarket quarter. “She said Father was angry, yes—but he knew whom I’d be bringing with me. And he must have known about the dragon’s latest attack.” He hopped across the fish-smelling slime of the gutter to avoid a trio of sailors who’d come staggering out of one of the taverns that lined the cobbled street and nearly tripped over his own cloak.

When Badegamus had announced to the nearly empty gallery that the King would see no one else that day, John and Jenny had taken the baffled and fuming Gareth back with them to the guest house they had been assigned in one of the outer courts of the Palace. There they had changed out of their borrowed court dress, and John had announced his intention of spending the remainder of the afternoon in the town, in quest of gnomes.

“Gnomes?” Gareth said, surprised.

“Well, if it hasn’t occurred to anyone else, it has occurred to me that, if I’m to fight this drake, I’m going to need to know the layout of the caverns.” With surprising deftness, he disentangled himself from the intricate crisscross folds of his mantlings, his head emerging from the double-faced satin like a tousled and unruly weed. “And since it didn’t seem the thing to address them at Court...”

“But they’re plotting!” Gareth protested. He paused in his search for a place to dump the handful of oldfashioned neck-chains and rings among the already accumulating litter of books, harpoons, and the contents of Jenny’s medical pouch on the table. “Speaking to them at Court would have been suicide! And besides, you’re not going to fight him in the Deep, are you? I mean...” He barely stopped himself from the observation that in all the ballads the Dragonsbanes had slain their foes in front of their lairs, not in them.

“If I fight him outside and he takes to the air, it’s all over,” John returned, as if he were talking about backgammon strategy. “And though it’s crossed my mind we’re walking through a morass of plots here, it’s to no one’s advantage to have the dragon stay in the Deep. The rest of it’s all none of my business. Now, are you going to guide us, or do we go about the streets asking folk where the gnomes might be found?”

To Jenny’s surprise and probably a little to his own, Gareth offered his services as a guide.

“Tell me about Zyerne, Gar,” Jenny said now, thrusting her hands deep into her jacket pockets as she walked. “Who is she? Who was her teacher? What Line was she in?”

“Teacher?” Gareth had obviously never given the matter a thought. “Line?”

“If she is a mage, she must have been taught by someone.” Jenny glanced up at the tall boy towering beside her, while they detoured to avoid a gaggle of passersby around a couple of street-comer jugglers. Beyond them, in a fountain square, a fat man with the dark complexion of a southerner had set up a waffle stand, bellowing his wares amid clouds of steam that scented the raw, misty air for yards.

“There are ten or twelve major Lines, named for the mages that founded them. There used to be more, but some have decayed and died. My own master Caerdinn, and therefore I and any other pupils of his, or of his teacher Spaeth, or Spaeth’s other students, are all in the Line of Herne. To a mage, knowing that I am of the Line of Heme says—oh, a hundred things about my power and my attitude toward power, about the kinds of spells that I know, and about the kind that I will not use.”

“Really?” Gareth was fascinated. “I didn’t know it was anything like that. I thought that magic was just something—well, something you were born with.”

“So is the talent for art,” Jenny said. “But without proper teaching, it never comes to fullest fruition; without sufficient time given to the study of magic, sufficient striving ...” She broke off, with an ironic smile at herself. “All power has to be paid for,” she continued after a moment. “And all power must come from somewhere, have been passed along by someone.”

It was difficult for her to speak of her power; aside from the confusion of her heart about her own power, there was much in it that any not mageborn simply did not understand. She had in all her life met only one who did, and he was presently over beside the waffle stand, getting powdered sugar on his plaids.

Jenny sighed and came to a halt to wait for him at the edge of the square. The cobbles were slimy here with sea air and offal; the wind smelled offish and, as everywhere in the city of Del, of the intoxicating wildness of the sea. This square was typical of the hundreds that made up the interlocking warrens of Bel’s Dockmarket, hemmed in on three-and-a-half sides by the towering, rickety tenements and dominated by the moldering stones of a slate-gray clock tower, at whose foot a neglected shrine housed the battered image of Quis, the enigmatic Lord of Time. In the center of the square bubbled a fountain in a wide basin of chip-edged granite, the stones of its rim worn smooth and white above and clotted beneath with the black-green moss that seemed to grow everywhere in the damp air of the city. Women were dipping water there and gossiping, their skirts hiked up almost to their thighs but their heads modestly covered in clumsy wool veils tied in knots under their hair to keep them out of the way.

In the mazes of stucco and garish color of the Dockmarket, John’s outlandishness hadn’t drawn much notice.

The sloping, cobbled streets were crowded with sojourners from three-fourths of the Realm and all the Southern Lands: sailors with shorn heads and beards like coconut husks; peddlers from the garden province of Istmark in their old-fashioned, bundly clothes, the men as well as the women wearing veils; moneychangers in the black gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wanderer’s Children, forbidden to own land; whores painted to within an inch of their lives; and actors, jugglers, scarf sellers, rat killers, pickpockets, cripples, and tramps. A few women cast looks of dismissive scorn at Jenny’s uncovered head, and she was annoyed at the anger she felt at them.

She asked, “How much do you know about Zyerne? What was she apprenticed as in the Deep?”

Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. My guess would be in the Places of Healing. That was where the greatest power of the Deep was supposed to lie—among their healers. People used to journey for days to be tended there, and I know most of the mages were connected with them.”

Jenny nodded. Even in the isolated north, among the children of men who knew virtually nothing of the ways of the gnomes, Caerdinn had spoken with awe of the power that dwelled within the Places of Healing in the heart of the Deep of Ylferdun.

Across the square, a religious procession came into view, the priests of Kantirith, Lord of the Sea, walking with their heads muffled in their ceremonial hoods, lest an unclean sight distract them, the ritual wailing of the flutes all but drowning out their murmured chants. Like all the ceremonials of the Twelve Gods, both the words and the music of the flutes had been handed down by rote from ancient days; the words were unintelligible, the music like nothing Jenny had heard at Court or elsewhere.

“And when did Zyerne come to Bel?” she asked Gareth, as the muttering train filed past.

The muscles of the boy’s jaw tightened. “After my mother died,” he said colorlessly. “I—I suppose I shouldn’t have been angry at Father about it. At the time I didn’t understand the way Zyerne can draw people, sometimes against their will.” He concentrated his attention upon smoothing the ruffles of his sleeve for some moments, then sighed. “I suppose he needed someone. I wasn’t particularly good to him about Mother’s death.”

Jenny said nothing, giving him room to speak or hold his peace. From the other end of the square, another religious procession made its appearance, one of the southern cults that spawned in the Dockmarket like rabbits; dark-complexioned men and women were clapping their hands and singing, while skinny, androgynous priests swung their waist-length hair and danced for the little idol borne in their midst in a carrying shrine of cheap, pink chintz. The priests of Kantirith seemed to huddle a little more closely in their protecting hoods, and the wailing of the flutes increased. Gareth spared the newcomers a disapproving glance, and Jenny remembered that the King of Bel was also Pontifex Maximus of the official cult; Gareth had no doubt been brought up in the most careful orthodoxy.

But the din gave them the illusion of privacy. For all any of the crowd around them cared, they might have been alone; and after a time Gareth spoke again.

“It was a hunting accident,” he explained. “Father and I both hunt, although Father hasn’t done so lately. Mother hated it, but she loved my father and would go with him when he asked her to. He teased her about it, and made little jokes about her cowardice—but he wasn’t really joking. He can’t stand cowards. She’d follow him over terrible country, clinging to her sidesaddle and staying up with the hunt; after it was over, he’d hug her and laugh and ask her if it wasn’t worth it that she’d plucked up her courage—that sort of thing. She did it for as long as I can remember. She used to lie and tell him she was starting to learn to enjoy it; but when I was about four, I remember her in her hunting habit—it was peach-colored velvet with gray fur, I remember—just before going out, throwing up because she was so frightened.”

“She rounds like a brave lady,” Jenny said quietly.

Gareth’s glance flicked up to her face, then away again. “It wasn’t really Father’s fault,” he went on after a moment. “But when it finally did happen, he felt that it was. The horse came down with her over some rocks—in a side-saddle you can’t fall clear. She died four or five days later. That was five years ago. I—” He hesitated, the words sticking in his throat. “I wasn’t very good to him about it.”

He adjusted his specs in an awkward and unconvincing cover for wiping his eyes on his sleeve ruffle. “Now that I look back on it, I think, if she’d been braver, she’d probably have had the courage to tell him she didn’t want to go—the courage to risk his mockery. Maybe that’s where I get it,” he added, with the shy flash of a grin. “Maybe I should have seen that I couldn’t possibly blame him as much as he blamed himself—that I didn’t say anything to him that he hadn’t already thought.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I understand now. But when I was thirteen, I didn’t. And by the time I did understand, it had been too long to say anything to him. And by that time, there was Zyerne.”

The priests of Kantirith wound their way out of sight up a crooked lane between the drunken lean of crazy buildings. Children who had stopped to gawk after the procession took up their games once more; John resumed his cautious way across the moss-edged, herringbone pattern of the wet cobbles toward them, stopping every few paces to stare at some new marvel—a chair-mender pursuing his trade on the curbstone, or the actors within a cheap theater gesticulating wildly while a crier outside shouted tidbits of the plot to the passersby around the door. He would never, Jenny reflected with rueful amusement, learn to comport himself like the hero of legend that he was.

“It must have been hard for you,” she said.

Gareth sighed. “It was easier a few years ago,” he admitted. “I could hate her cleanly then. Later, for a while I—I couldn’t even do that.” He blushed again. “And now...”

A commotion in the square flared suddenly, like the noise of a dogfight; a woman’s jeering voice yelled, “Whore!” and Jenny’s head snapped around.

But it was not she and her lack of veils that was the target. A little gnome woman, her soft mane of hair like an apricot cloud in the wan sunlight, was making her hesitant way toward the fountain. Her black silk trousers were hitched up over her knees to keep them out of the puddles in the broken pavement, and her white tunic, with its flowing embroideries and carefully mended sleeves, proclaimed that she was living in poverty alien to her upbringing. She paused, peering around her with a painful squint in the too-bright daylight; then her steps resumed in the direction of the fountain, her tiny, round hands clutching nervously at the handle of the bucket that she inexpertly bore.

Somebody else shouted, “Come slumming, have we, m’lady? Tired of sitting up there on all that grain you got hid? Too cheap to hire servants?”

The woman stopped again, swinging her head from side to side as if seeking her tormentors, half-blind in the outdoor glare. Someone caught her with a dog turd on the arm. She hopped, startled, and her narrow feet in their soft leather shoes skidded on the wet, uneven stones. She dropped the bucket as she fell, and groped about for it on hands and knees. One of the women by the fountain, with the grinning approbation of her neighbors, sprang down to kick it beyond her reach.

“That’ll learn you to hoard the bread you’ve bought out of honest folks’ mouths!”

The gnome made a hasty scrabble around her. A faded, fat woman who’d been holding forth the loudest in the gossip around the fountain kicked the pail a little further from the searching hands.

“And to plot against the King!”

The gnome woman raised herself to her knees, peering about her, and one of the children darted out of the gathering crowd behind her and pulled the long wisps of her hair. She spun around, clutching, but the boy had gone. Another took up the game and sprang nimbly out to do the same, too engrossed in the prospect of fun to notice John.

At the first sign of trouble, the Dragonsbane had turned to the man next to him, a blue-tattooed easterner in a metalsmith’s leather apron and not much else, and handed him the three waffles he held stacked in his hands. “Would you ever hold these?” Then he made his way unhurriedly through the press, with a courteous string of “Excuse me... pardon...” in time to catch the second boy who’d jumped out to take up the baiting where the first had begun it.

Gareth could have told them what to expect—Zyerne’s courtiers weren’t the only ones deceived by John’s appearance of harmless friendliness. The bully, caught completely offguard from behind, didn’t even have time to shriek before he hit the waters of the fountain. A huge splash doused every woman on the steps and most of the surrounding idlers. As the boy surfaced, spitting and gasping, Aversin turned from picking up the bucket and said in a friendly tone, “Your manners are as filthy as your clothes—I’m surprised your mother lets you out like that. They’ll be a bit cleaner now, won’t they?”

He dipped the bucket full and turned back to the man who was holding his waffles. For an instant Jenny thought the smith would throw them into the fountain, but John only smiled at him, bright as the sun on a knifeblade, and sullenly the man put the waffles into his free hand. In the back of the crowd a woman sneered, “Gnome lover!”

“Thanks.” John smiled, still at his brass-faced friendliest. “Sorry I threw offal in the fountain and all.” Balancing the waffles in his hand, he descended the few steps and walked beside the little gnome woman across the square toward the mouth of the alley whence she had come. Jenny, hurrying after him with Gareth at her heels, noticed that none followed them too closely.

“John, you are incorrigible,” she said severely. “Are you all right?” This last was addressed to the gnome, who was hastening along on her short, bowed legs, clinging to the Dragonsbane’s shadow for protection.

She peered up at Jenny with teeble, colorless eyes. “Oh, yes. My thanks. I had never—always we went out to the fountain at night, or sent the girl who worked for us, if we needed water during the day. Only she left.” The wide mouth pinched up on the words, at the taste of some unpleasant memory.

“I bet she did, if she was like that lot,” John remarked, jerking his thumb back toward the square. Behind them, the crowd trailed menacingly, yelling, “Traitors! Hoarders! Ingrates!” and fouler things besides. Somebody threw a fish head that fucked off Jenny’s skirts and shouted something about an old whore and her two pretty-boys; Jenny felt the bristles of rage rise along her spine. Others took up this theme. She felt angry enough to curse them, but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater curse upon them than to be what they already were.

“Have a waffle?” John offered disanningly, and the gnome lady took the preferred confection with hands that shook.

Gareth, carmine with embarrassment, said nothing.

Around a mouthful of sugar, John said, “Gie lucky for us fruit and vegies are a bit too dear these days to fling, isn’t it? Here?”

The gnome ducked her head quickly as she entered the shadows of a doorway to a huge, crumbling house wedged between two five-storey tenements, its rear wall dropping straight to the dank brown waters of a stagnant canal. The windows were tightly shuttered, and the crumbling stucco was written over with illiterate and filthy scrawls, splattered with mud and dung. From every shutter Jenny could sense small, weak eyes peering down in apprehension.

The door was opened from within, the gnome taking her bucket and popping through like a frightened mole into its hill. John put a quick hand on the rotting panels to keep them from being shut in his face, then braced with all his strength. The doorkeeper was determined and had the prodigious muscles of the gnomes.

“Wait!” John pleaded, as his feet skidded on the wet marble of the step. “Listen! I need your help! My name’s John Aversin—I’ve come from the north to see about this dragon of yours, but I can’t do it without your aid.” He wedged his shoulder into the narrow slit that was all that was left. “Please.”

The pressure on the other side of the door was released so suddenly that he staggered inward under his own momentum. From the darkness beyond a soft, high voice like a child’s said in the archaic High Speech that the gnomes used at Court, “Come in, thou others. It does thee no good to be thus seen at the door of the house of the gnomes.”

As they stepped inside, John and Gareth blinked against the dimness, but Jenny, with her wizard’s sight, saw at once that the gnome who had admitted them was old Dromar, ambassador to the court of the King.

Beyond him, the lower hall of the house stretched in dense shadow. It had once been grand in the severe style of a hundred years ago—the old manor, she guessed, upon whose walled grounds the crowded, stinking tenements of the neighborhood had later been erected. In places, rotting frescoes were still dimly visible on the stained walls; and the vastness of the hall spoke of gracious furniture now long since chopped up for firewood and of an aristocratic carelessness about the cost of heating fuel. The place was like a cave now, tenebrous and damp, its boarded windows letting in only a few chinks of watery light to outline stumpy pillars and the dry mosaics of the impluvium. Above the sweeping curve of the old-fashioned, open stair she saw movement in the gallery. It was crowded with gnomes, watching warily these intruders from the hostile world of men.

In the gloom, the soft, childlike voice said, “Thy name is not unknown among us, John Aversin.”

“Well, that makes it easier,” John admitted, dusting off his hands and looking down at the round head of the gnome who stood before him and into sharp, pale eyes under the flowing mane of snowy hair. “Be a bit awkward if I had to explain it all, though I imagine Gar here could sing you the ballads.”

A slight smile tugged at the gnome’s mouth—the first, Jenny suspected, in a long time—as he studied the incongruous, bespectacled reality behind the glitter of the legends. “Thou art the first,” he remarked, ushering them into the huge, chilly cavern of the room, his mended silk robes whispering as he moved. “How many hast thy father sent out. Prince Gareth? Fifteen? Twenty? And none of them came here, nor asked any of the gnomes what they might know of the dragon’s coming—we, who saw it best.”

Gareth looked disconcerted. “Er—that is—the wrath of the King...”

“And whose fault was that, Heir of Uriens, when rumor had been noised abroad that we had made an end of thee?”

There was an uncomfortable silence as Gareth reddened under that cool, haughty gaze. Then he bent his head and said in a stifled voice, “I am sorry, Dromar. I never thought of—of what might be said, or who would take the blame for it, if I disappeared. Truly I didn’t know. I behaved rashly—I seem to have behaved rashly all the way around.”

The old gnome sniffed. “So!” He folded his small hands before the complicated knot of his sash, his gold eyes studying Gareth in silence for a time. Then he nodded, and said, “Well, better it is that thou fall over thine own feet in the doing of good than sit upon thy hands and let it go undone, Gareth of Magloshaldon. Another time thou shalt do better.” He turned away, gesturing toward the inner end of the shadowed room, where a blackwood table could be distinguished in the gloom, no more than a foot high, surrounded by burst and patched cushions set on the floor in the fashion of the gnomes. “Come. Sit. What is it that thou wish to know, Dragonsbane, of the coming of the dragon to the Deep?”

“The size of the thing,” John said promptly, as they all settled on their knees around the table. “I’ve only heard rumor and story—has anybody got a good, concrete measurement?”

From beside Jenny, the high, soft voice of the gnome woman piped, “The top of his haunch lies level with the frieze carved above the pillars on either side of the doorway arch, which leads from the Market Hall into the Grand Passage into the Deep itself. That is twelve feet, by the measurements of men.”

There was a moment’s silence, as Jenny digested the meaning of that piece of information. Then she said, “If the proportions are the same, that makes it nearly forty feet.”

“Aye,” Dromar said. “The Market Hall—the first cavern of the Deep, that lies just behind the Great Gates that lead into the outer world—is one hundred and fifty feet from the Gates to the inner doors of the Grand Passage at the rear. The dragon was nearly a third of that length.”

John folded his hands on the table before him. Though his face remained expressionless. Jenny detected the slight quickening of his breath. Forty feet was half again the size of the dragon that had come so close to killing him in Wyr, with all the dark windings of the Deep in which to hide.

“D’you have a map of the Deep?”

The old gnome looked affronted, as if he had inquired about the cost of a night with his daughter. Then his face darkened with stubborn anger. “That knowledge is forbidden to the children of men.”

Patiently, John said, “After all that’s been done you here, I don’t blame you for not wanting to give out the secrets of the Deep; but I need to know. I can’t take the thing from the front. I can’t fight something that big headon. I need to have some idea where it will be lairing.”

“It will be lairing in the Temple of Sarmendes, on the first level of the Deep.” Dromar spoke grudgingly, his pale eyes narrow with the age-old suspicion of a smaller, weaker race that had been driven underground millennia ago by its long-legged and bloodthirsty cousins. “It lies just off the Grand Passage that runs back from the Gates. The Lord of Light was beloved by the men who dwelt within the Deep—the King’s ambassadors and their households, and those who had been apprenticed among our people. His Temple is close to the surface, for the folk of men do not like to penetrate too far into the bones of the Earth. The weight of the stone unnerves them; they find the darkness disquieting. The dragon will lie there. There he will bring his gold.”

“Is there a back way into it?” John asked. “Through the priests’ quarters or the treasuries?”

Dromar said, “No,” but the little gnome woman said, “Yes, but thou would never find it, Dragonsbane.”

“By the Stone!” The old gnome whirled upon her, smoldering rage in his eyes. “Be silent, Mab! The secrets of the Deep are not for his kind!” He looked viciously at Jenny and added, “Nor for hers.”

John held up his hand for silence. “Why wouldn’t I find it?”

Mab shook her head. From beneath a heavy brow, her round, almost colorless blue eyes peered up at him, kindly and a little sad. “The ways lead through the warrens,” she said simply. “The caverns and tunnels there are a maze that we who dwell there can learn, in twelve or fourteen years of childhood. But even were we to tell thee the turnings thou must take, one false step would condemn thee to a death by starvation and to the madness that falls upon men in the darkness under the earth. We filled the mazes with lamps, but those lamps are quenched now.”

“Can you draw me a map, then?” And, when the two gnomes only looked at him with stubborn secrets in their eyes, he said, “Dammit, I can’t do it without your help! I’m sorry it has to be this way, but it’s trust me or lose the Deep forever; and those are your only choices!”

Dromar’s long, outward-curling eyebrows sank lower over the stub of his nose. “So be it, then,” he said.

But Miss Mab turned resignedly and began to rise. The ambassador’s eyes blazed. “No! By the Stone, is it not enough that the children of men seek to steal the secrets of the Deep? Must thou give them up freely?”

“Tut,” Mab said with a wrinkled smile. “This Dragonsbane will have problems enow from the dragon, without going seeking in the darkness for others.”

“A map that is drawn may be stolen!” Dromar insisted. “By the Stone that lies in the heart of the Deep...”

Mab got comfortably to her feet, shaking out her patched silken garments, and pottered over to the scroll-rack that filled one comer of the dim hall. She returned with a reed pen and several sheets of tattered papyrus paper in her hand. “Those whom you fear would steal it know the way to the heart of the Deep already,” she pointed out gently. “If this barbarian knight has ridden all the way from the Winterlands to be our champion, it would be paltry not to offer him a shield.”

“And her?” Dromar jabbed one stumpy finger, laden with old-fashioned, smooth-polished gems, at Jenny. “She is a witch. What surety have we that she will not go snooping and spying, delving out our secrets, turning them against us, defiling them, poisoning them, as others have done?”

The gnome woman frowned down at Jenny for a moment, her wide mouth pursed up with thought. Then she knelt beside her again and pushed the writing things across the table at Dromar. “There,” she said. “Thou may draw the maps, and put upon them what thou will, and leave from them what thou will.”

“And the witch?” There was suspicion and hatred in his voice, and Jenny reflected that she was getting very tired of being mistaken for Zyerne.

“Ah,” said Miss Mab, and reaching out, took Jenny’s small, scratched, boyish brown hands in her own. For a long moment she looked into her eyes. As if the small, cold fingers clasping hers stirred at the jewel heap of her dreams, Jenny felt the gnome woman’s mind probing at her thoughts, as she had probed at Gareth’s, seeking to see the shape of her essence. She realized that Miss Mab was a mage, like herself.

Reflex made her stiffen. But Mab smiled gently and held out to her the depths of her own mind and soul—gentle and clear as water, and stubborn as water, too, containing none of the bitterness, resentments, and doubts that Jenny knew clotted the comers of her own heart. She relaxed, feeling as ashamed as if she had struck out at an inquiry kindly made, and felt some other own angers dissolving under that wise scrutiny. She felt the other woman’s power, much greater than her own, but gentle and warm as sunlight.

When Miss Mab spoke, it was not to Dromar, but to her. “Thou art afraid for him,” she said softly. “And perhaps thou should be.” She put out one round little hand, to pat Jenny’s hair. “But remember that the dragon is not the greatest of evils in this land, nor is death the worst that can befall; neither for him, nor for thee.”