Dragonstar

5

John Aversin was in Prokep for seven days before the demons came.

Having been told by Corvin NinetyfiveFifty that it was impossible for him to get anywhere close to the Henge, the first thing he did when the dragon flew away to hunt was to wrap himself in his velvet cloak and walk down to where he calculated the Henge had been last night by moonlight and in that morning’s vision. There were places in the Winterlands that were said only to exist under the light of certain phases of the moon, or things that were visible only when the sun and the moon were together in the sky or on certain days of the year—a standing stone on Moonfairy Hill was one of them, two days’ ride north of the Hold. He’d spent the best part of two years visiting the place, again and again, whenever his other duties gave him time, until he’d seen it, in a dell he’d visited a dozen times before.

His recent journeys through Hell had certainly taught him how to look for gates into places that sometimes existed and sometimes did not.

Being so shortsighted that he could barely see his hand in front of his face didn’t help the situation, of course. He considered marking where he thought the Henge should lie with something large enough for even himself to see at a distance, but aside from the fact that the only thing he had was his cloak, which he needed to keep from freezing to death, he couldn’t be sure when Corvin would be back.

It was just as well the dragon not know what he was up to.

So he took careful sightings on all the stationary landmarks he could, on the shape of distant hills and the exact lines of sight of the corners of that huge stone foundation—it would take an earthquake to shift it—and then began to work his way around the perimeter of where he thought the Circle should be.

Looking for the places where the dust-devils appeared to come from.

According to Gantering Pellus’s Encyclopedia—and his own observations—the gates of Hell are seldom completely tight, and the temperature of the air there is generally either warmer or cooler than that of the real world.

John crept, either on his hands and knees or squatting and stooping in a way that made his knees and back feel as if someone were driving red-hot nails into the bones, back and forth across the huge grayish-dun expanses of what had been the center of the city of Prokep. It was the slow way to do it, but with a clear field of vision that ended less than a foot from the tip of his nose he couldn’t devise a better one. And, for that matter, he reflected, what else did he have to do with his day?

He found the first gate by the flowers.

There were dozens of them, wilted to shreds of brown string on the ash-colored sand. Just a tangly little patch of vegetation that had no business being where it was. Like the Henge, he thought, this gate into the Maze is only in existence—or only visible—at certain times or under certain conditions: I’ll have to watch, and see when the wind sets from this direction. The dessicated wisps of grass, the parched fingerlets of fern, grew in a rough semicircle, as if someone had laid a military cloak on the sand. The gate opens, seeds drift through. They root, they claim a little moisture from the air the next time the gate’s open, but a few suns kill ’em.

He crept back and forth along the flatter edge of the semicircle until he found the place where the small ghostly tracks of what looked like worms or slugs came from and went to, mysterious weavings around the sand that ended as sharply as if smoothed away with a trowel.

The threshold of the gate, he thought, uneasily passing his hand through the air over the spot—of course nothing happened to his hand whatsoever. He drew in the sand the sigil of the gate, which he’d seen Amayon draw, often enough, in their journeys together through Hell. Still no result.

Wrong time of day.

Or of year.

No, he reflected, crawling back to find the most recent of the dead flower stalks. This hasn’t been dead but a few days. A little green lingered at its base. He sat back on his heels, back aching, and squinted at those few stones, pillars, and hills large enough to register in his vision. It opens often, at the time of day when the wind sets from between those two notches in the hills.

Whenever that is.

In addition to three more rabbits and a mountain sheep—which John hung in what had been a ruined guard-chamber beside the foundation’s great stair—Corvin brought him clothing that evening, striped breeches woven in a pattern with which John was unfamiliar, a shirt and sheepskin boots that were all too big for him, and a coat of black and white goatskins. The coat had blood on it. John didn’t ask from whence it had come. Corvin also brought more wood, and when John cooked the meat he rendered what little fat he could out of it, to pour on the ends of sticks to make torches.

The second day he found the treasury, deep in the crypts where Corvin would lie up most of the night on a bed of gold. Sacks of coin long rotted away, so that the bright metal lay in drifts, palanquins and statues and chairs and mirrors of gold or electrum or bronze scattered about and rising through it like the ruin of the city in miniature, gems flashing somberly in the orange glare of the torch. John knew better than to cross the threshold or touch so much as a toothpick. Corvin’s soul would know, and pursue gold anywhere—it had been no coincidence that Aohila, who knew the dragon best, had triggered the spells of his True Name with beads of gold.

In another room he found swords, knives, and arrowheads, though the shafts and bows had all perished. He felt better, once he had weapons, though he knew they’d be little use to him if demons showed up.

And they would show up, he knew. Corvin said they feared Prokep, which had a way, he said, of trapping demons. But John knew better than to believe that Folcalor would give up his dream of ruling both Hell and earth. It would only be a matter of when he would strike.

Better than the weapons, John found spectacle lenses, some of ground yellow crystal and others of brownish glass. Some were set in frames of horn or bronze, mounted on sticks like carnival masks, others lay loose in boxes. He braided a strap from the rags of his discarded execution shift, and mounted the best of them in a bronze frame, but he took care to wear this contraption only after Corvin was gone for the day.

After that, it was easier to seek for the gates to the Maze.

In the end he found several, mostly by sitting on the edge of the palace foundation and observing the dust-devils. The second day he made sure to be poking around in the ruins south of the foundation—on the side away from the Maze—when Corvin flew away in the morning, so that the dragon would think nothing of it if he did not see him before he departed: And where, John thought, would the dragon expect him to flee, anyway? Even the ridge of hills that surrounded the city in a vast basin lay unendurably far off. Flight would be madness, like a child running away from home with two bannocks and an apple wrapped in a handkerchief.

Cautiously, John began to probe at the Maze.

He located three other gates before he entered the one through the Garden of Dawn by observing the dust-devils, but it was the Garden of Dawn he entered through, near the withered flowers, on the fourth morning of watching. The garden was of the same nature as the Hells, a place outside the world of sun and stars. When he wrote the sigil of the door at the moment of sunrise, and smelled the dew and the flowers, he experienced a qualm of apprehension—What if it’s like a lobster pot, that I can walk into but can’t escape?

But given the length of time it had taken a dragon to fly from Bel to Prokep—from mid-morning till sunset without stopping—the city in the desert was something of a lobster pot itself. John stepped across the sigil, and found himself in the Garden of Dawn.

Amayon—and every book he’d read on the subject as well—had repeatedly warned against eating or drinking anything in Hell. Whether this applied to an unworld enclave like the garden John wasn’t sure, but he guessed he’d better not chance it. Fountains bubbled among hillocks of mossy stone, and in places trees bent under the weight of peaches so ripe, he could smell them from the winding pebbled path. It seemed to be midsummer, strange vines and familiar ones bearing gaudy flowers, and the moist air stroked his dusty skin. When a yellow butterfly danced across his path in the soft dawn light he nearly bolted, for he remembered all too clearly the deadly butterflies of Paradise. He listened, but could hear no sound; only the faint stirring of willow leaves in the wind.

The gate was clearly visible behind him. He could see the desert—and a corner of the palace foundation—through it, washed with the first pink flush of the new sun’s light, and the gibbous moon just setting above the hills. The wall around the garden was black basalt, laid without mortar, and disappeared among thickets of ivy and poplars. John followed it around as well as he could, and ascertained that the garden itself was some half-mile in diameter, roughly circular, and contained five gates.

Three were in the wall. One was in a stone pavilion on an island in the garden’s miniature lake. The fifth was in a clearing: He located it, as he had the entrance to the garden itself, by the withering of the moss beside it. When he drew the sigil, and passed through, the enclave on the other side was dark and bitterly cold.

The gate behind him disappeared the moment he stepped through it, and he thought, Torches, next time. If there is a next time. Winds savaged him, cold slicing through his jacket and clothing as if he were again clothed only in the thin shift of the condemned. He dropped at once to his hands and knees, felt the contours of the ground behind him—unpaved, rough, rock or dirt—and drew the sigil of the door immediately in the place over which he guessed he had just passed.

Nothing happened.

Damn it, he thought, shivering desperately, don’t do this to me.…

The wind must have knocked him a step or two as he’d come through. He patiently crawled upwind and tried again, and then again. The Old God—who knows everything—only knew what was in the darkness with him, or how far this Hell or enclave extended. If there was a stricture against eating anything you found in Hell there was probably not one against something you found in Hell eating you. After what felt like an hour, John located the gate again and crawled through.

It was still dawn in the garden, delicious with the twittering of birds. And, to judge by the leaf-mold beneath the trees, the relative clarity of the paths among the shrubberies, it was still the year of the last appearance of the Dragonstar, ten centuries ago.

Any gate that’d have a pavilion built over it, he thought, contemplating the spot in the strange little multiroofed structure where the slightly sulfurous stench lingered, can’t be the one the chaps in the yellow robes didn’t want me to walk through. Let’s take a miss on this one. The three in the walls were all neatly kept: None looked more neglected than the others, or more used. In the tangles of white-flowering shrubs that grew to either side of the central of the three gates—they were about a dozen yards apart, all on what appeared to be the north wall of the garden—he found two insects, or what looked like insects. Dead, fortunately, since they were the length of the knuckle of his thumb and equipped with the most comprehensive sets of chewing, stabbing, and gripping mandibles he’d ever seen in his life. He’d encountered such creatures nowhere else in the garden, but a search of the area around the central gate yielded five more dead ones and a live one that struck him, wings roaring, from a tree, dug its claws into the side of his face—it had gone for his eyes, but fortunately he was wearing his spectacles—and began to chew.

When he cut its head off, the head continued to chew. He had to strike fire with the flints and steel that had been in the coat’s pockets, and burn the thing off his cheekbone.

Let’s not go through that gate unless we really, REALLY have to.

John didn’t check the other two gates until the next day. He didn’t really feel up to it.

When he came out of the garden gate it was still dawn. Still—by the finger-mark he’d drawn in the sand, unblurred by wind—the day he’d gone in, which was a relief. Be a bit embarrassin’ if I was gone for a month or a year … I know dragons don’t think much of time, but even Corvin’d notice that. He trudged back to the painted chamber in the palace foundation and made a dressing of rags and sheep-fat for the torn, blistered flesh of his cheek. Then he rested for a time, inventing an explanation for the injury, should Corvin ask, and life-stories for three more of the tribute-bearers who decorated the wall: the chap in the blue with the feathers was named Browdiestomp and had a wife at home whom everyone called the Beautiful Coco, who was fonder of her birds than she was of him—little yellow and green ones who whistled, and a red and black one who told her stories of things far away, which it made up of course because it had never been out of its golden cage in its life. But the Beautiful Coco believed them because she wasn’t much smarter than the birds.

Later he took a box from the armory and in a nest of earth and rags stowed a couple of smoldering coals from last night’s fire, took a couple of unlit torches and went exploring for other gates in the city. He found none that day. In his seeking he had a long while to think of the things the Demon Queen had showed him on his way to the pyre, of Amayon lying in Gareth’s arms, smiling and whispering love and poison into his ear. Of King Uriens greeting the Lords of the Great Houses with hearty cheer: He’d always been a more impressive King than his shy, pedantic son. The Lords of Greenhythe and Yamstrand and the islands would fall over themselves with delight, wanting to believe that he was back and therefore things would be back the way they’d always been.

Of Ian and Adric—and their tiny sister, Maggie, too—trapped in Alyn Hold by the deadly shadows of magic and banditry outside. Did you see it? Ian had whispered. John didn’t like to contemplate what “it” might have been.

Of Jenny, dying in darkness.

He had asked Corvin the second night—when the dragon had returned with the sheep and the clothing—of Jenny. Corvin had said, It is a night and a day since Aohila showed you these things, Dragonsbane. Do you think your woman has lived so long?

“Please,” John had said. “Aohila might’ve been lyin’—she does that. If you can’t see Jen, can you see Morkeleb the Black? He’d be with her, he’s her friend.…”

And had felt Corvin’s incredulity, and, a moment later, like a gust of sea-scent on the wind, the enmity the silver dragon bore for the black. A tangle of opinions—sly, unscrupulous, haughty—sparkled in the music of the silver dragon’s thoughts, and with them, envy and anger, and the ringing sweet music of gold and gems that the black dragon had taken, which the silver wanted, some time deep in the abysses of the past.

To live forever is to remember slights eternally.

Corvin had sniffed, and turned away.

In the painted chamber that night, watching the firelight on the walls, John thought of Jenny, as he had thought of her every night in Prokep. She had told him once—the first time she’d returned from taking the form of a dragon—that she had returned because she knew that if she remained a dragon in body, she would become one in her heart, and would forget what it was to be a woman, and to love.

He saw her then—as she had been then, with the midnight oceans of her hair lying over his shoulder where her head rested, and her small square face like a sunburned acorn looking up into his—as she said, I did not want to forget you, my love. I did not want you to grow old, with me not there.

Her voice was deep, grained through with sweetness, like silver in rock. He couldn’t imagine never hearing it again.

Ah, love, if we either of us live to grow old, it’ll be more than I’d bet on tonight.

When he was young, and she would not come to the Hold to live with him, he used to scream at her, curse her, as he had wanted to curse the Icerider witch who had been his mother and who had left him, too: It’s all you care about, isn’t it? Your magic and your power.

He couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t turned him into a toad, let alone why she’d borne him not one child in those days, but two.

Let her be alive, he prayed to the Old God, watching the dim firelight shift over the shapes of the tribute-bearers on the walls. You can have all that tribute those fellers are carryin’, I promise I won’t keep a penny of it, if only she’ll be alive when I get back.… If I get back.

But he’d lived in the Winterlands too long to believe that things ended happily. He had seen too many people he knew die.

The chap in the red boots there on the end, he thought, turning his eyes back to the wall. He has a wife who’s a witch, and she loves her power—well, not more than she loves him, but as much. Yet she came to his life, and bore him two sons and a daughter, which has to have hurt … she loved him that much. Then one day she turned into a beautiful white dragon and flew away. And she was happy forever.

John reached the Henge of Prokep the following day.

It helped enormously, that time stood still in the enclaves. He could search patiently, drawing the sigil of the door over and over, until he got through; he’d learned to keep a torch burning in one hand the moment he stepped through a gate, and a drawn sword in the other, and—if nothing attacked him, and usually it did not—to immediately turn and mark where the gate lay. He brought water with him, too, in a clay jar slung over his shoulder on a strap of braided rags. At least, from enclave to enclave, there was no worry about whether it was half an hour after noon or not.

The gate on the left, the one immediately to the right of the Gate of Dawn, passed him through into the Salt Garden: stone pavement, beds of glittering salt stretching hundreds of feet in all directions under a pitiless golden sky. There was no gate to be seen there, but at noon, when he had returned to Prokep and was investigating the other gate locations he’d found, he passed through one of them and found himself in the Salt Garden again, and spent a grueling eternity in the heat there until he found by sheer patience where the invisible gate was, that let him into the Maze beyond.

Sometimes the walls of the Maze were hedges—knee-high in places, head-high in others. Sometimes they were stone: gray smooth river stones, or harsh hunks of black basalt like the garden wall. Sometimes the Maze itself was just a gravel path raised between mossy ditches where a little water glittered, curtained by a very fine scrim of mist. John knew better than to step off the path or touch the mist in any fashion. He didn’t know what would happen if he did, but had an idea he wouldn’t like it. From a number of points in the Maze it was possible to see the Henge, huge dark uneven stones showing through whitish fog. As he’d seen by moonlight, and again in Corvin’s vision, they seemed to be about twice his nearly six foot height, rough-hewn and, as he drew nearer, he could see that some of them were embellished with the same crude carvings that he’d sometimes seen on standing-stones on the far northern moors in the Winterlands, spirals and rings and crosses. There were ninety of them, when he counted them from a break in the tall hedges of the Maze. When he came out to where the hedges were shorter and counted again, there were eighty-seven.

Intrigued, he began to count from wherever he could see them, and quickly discovered that if he was on the correct path there were ninety; if the path was leading him to a dead end, or to one of those places where the level of the ground dipped down under sheets of still silvery water, there were either more or less. Why the makers of the Henge would have created a Maze in the first place, John wasn’t sure—it was a far less effective form of defense than the nodes of choice in the gardens—but in two places mists covered the path, and he felt himself watched from the hedges by unseen eyes.

Watching for demons, he wondered? Corvin had set electronic alarms on his Otherworld property that would be triggered by a demon’s presence, and had spoken of such things still active in Prokep. Or was this only his own imagination, fueled by nerves and exhaustion?

The Henge itself stood where it had stood for a thousand years, in the midst of the ruined city. Standing next to its stones, John could see across the barren ground, to the three pillars where a temple had stood, to the pit of the dry lake. To the palace foundation, where Corvin brought new gold every evening from other caches in the city to lie upon; where tribute-bearers walked eternally around the walls of John’s painted room. Standing beside the circle of stones, John wondered if he would be invisible to someone standing in that sand-clogged doorway in the foundation, where he and Corvin had stood four days ago. Wondered if he would have to go back through the Maze to return to the place, and what would happen if he simply tried to walk cross-country to it.

Would the Henge disappear behind him?

Would he disappear?

It was noon, the hour at which he had stepped across the threshold into the Salt Garden.

At a guess, the third gate he’d detected could be opened at sunset. Would the Maze be the same?

He peered cautiously between the stones, into the center of the Henge.

He couldn’t see the little flash of water at the center—probably in a depression in the ground. There was a slight distortion of the air over where it would lie, like a heat-dance. Corvin had told him he couldn’t get into the Henge, and in any case John had been married to a witch far too long to casually step over the boundary of any magical enclosure, let alone one containing even worse demons than those he’d already met. Instead, he walked around it, keeping close to the stones where the air was still, counting the stones: There were ninety-three when he walked sun-wise; eighty-eight when he walked widdershins the first time. A second count yielded still different numbers, to his intense delight. As he’d seen at a distance the stones had been rough-hewn and some of them were carved—he made notes on the clay side of his water jar—and they were all of the same close-grained, faintly bluish stone. They bore no marks of weathering, and varied in height from about eight feet to over twelve.

The sun was visible from beside the Henge, and the shadows of the stones crept out over the sand, but still John backtrailed his way through the Maze, through the Salt Garden and the Garden of Dawn, to reach the city of Prokep again. That night beneath the late-rising half-moon he stood on the great stone foundation and looked out toward the Henge, and saw it clearly, black shadows on the formless ivory of the land.

And now what?

He turned his palms up. In the moonlight the silver traces the Demon Queen had left gleamed thinly on his skin.

You know the way through the Maze. You know what Folcalor has to be planning, you know what Adromelech has all these centuries been waiting to command his servants to do.

You are here in Prokep, a prisoner, and you will die in the desert before you will escape.

Grimly, John returned to his painted room, and by firelight cut the gems from the red velvet cloak, to sell for money should he ever reach human lands again. The tribute-bearers on the walls stalked impassively with the movement of the fire, and didn’t offer him so much as a penny.

In the days that followed, John explored the city, and the Maze, stubbornly turning his mind from the futility of what he did. In time, the demons would come, no matter what their fears of the city’s ancient, hidden traps. Adromelech would bring them.

Folcalor, greedy for vengeance and power, would not stay away.

In the night he dreamed, over and over, of walking that narrow, windless zone around the outside of the ring, and in his dreams he could see the demons inside.

Adromelech, gross and savage, a silvery green shape whose belly moved with the dying remains of those lesser wights he’d devoured, who lived inside him, crying, still. The Arch-wight’s silver eyes watched John as he walked from stone to stone, clever greedy unhuman eyes, with rectangular pupils like the Demon Queen’s: watching and waiting. Sometimes in his dreams John could see Amayon in the ring, as he’d seen him in the Hell of the Shining Things, when terror of true death, real death, had broken his concentration from the illusion in which demons lived, and left him in his actual shape, wizened and shrunken and silver. Sometimes he saw the Demon Queen herself, smiling at him through the pyre-smoke.

In the evenings, when Corvin returned from his flights, John would tell him, “The demons will come. The Dragonstar hasn’t got that long to stay in the sky—accordin’ to my calculations it’ll be gone by the Moon of Winds. If Adromelech’s had his goons out workin’ to stir up whatever powersourcin’ they can for this long, you can bet he’s not gonna sit back an’ say, Oh, too tough, well, let’s just stay here for another thousand years.…”

But Corvin, lying among his gold, only blinked sleepily at him and spoke in that whispery voice in his mind: They will not come. They cannot. The Henge was formed and sourced in the deaths of the ten greatest mages of that time, and there are traps in the city that make it perilous for them to linger here. They cannot find their way through the Maze before it destroys them. They will not come.

And John learned that it was foolish, to try to speak to the silver dragon when he lay dreaming among the music that he called from the gold, even as he’d learned early never to argue with his father when Lord Aver sat late over his wine. He could only return to his chamber and lie awake, watching his painted friends march in their eternal procession, listening for the first sound of trouble and wondering what the hell he could do about it when it came.

On a night of wind he dreamed of the Demon Queen. He saw the Burning Mirror in its chamber beneath the ruins of Ernine, the black enamel that covered it cracked, light and smoke streaming forth. The Demon Queen stepped out through those cracks as if through a door, and as she stepped, fire blasted all the chamber’s rock to splinters. When she walked each step took her miles. She flew with her dark hair a tangled wrack in the night; she lifted from the ground, spread out her arms into the wind, and laughed. Wind and fire surged around her, the air a maelstrom of heat and carnage, and in it John heard a queer, musical zinging, a sigh and whisper, far-off silver chimes. Flying things moved in it, some formed of dust and others of fire; formed, and blended away to dust again.

But fire flickered in the dust.

And the Demon Queen quickened her stride to outrun the fire.

John woke to the metallic whining, and the smell of dust in the wind.

He slipped his makeshift spectacles on, and wrapped around him the cloak that he used as a blanket as well; he slept in his boots. From beneath the bracken he pulled the ancient sword he’d hidden there, and the dagger, hung on a sash of braided rags, though he knew the arms would do him no good against the things he’d sensed in his dreams. He strode down the passageway with the choke of dust in his nose and lungs, and the firelight glowing behind him in the painted chamber showed him the air filled with glittering black specks like blowing sand.

When they struck his face they cut heavier than sand.

Beyond the doorway the night was like falling into a bag of soot. Far off in the darkness he could see flecks of what looked like silver fire, and in the direction that he knew the Henge would lie, a single, tiny greenish flame. Wind lashed and tumbled the air, the grains that blew in it cutting his skin like tiny knives. When John retreated back into the passageway and touched his cheek with his fingers, he brought them away smudged with blood.

Metal? he thought.

And then, Dear gods.

He bolted back to his own chamber, unearthed a torch, and lit it, strode for the Treasury as fast as he could go without killing the wavering flame. As a Dragonsbane, he knew that when you attacked a dragon in its lair, you had to reach him fast, reach him before he got clear of the covered place so that he could not rise in the air above you, either to attack or to get away. He shouted as he ran, “Corvin!” but knew he wouldn’t be heard.

Corvin would be dreaming, breathing his dreams of past joys into the ocean of gold and drinking back the beauty of them a thousandfold, magnified by the gold’s music.

The flying specks of sand in the air were gold.

John knew it instinctively, guessed it. It was what he would do if he could, to trap a dragon and render it too drunk and confused to escape. No dragon could think clearly around large amounts of refined gold—Morkeleb was the only one he knew who had renounced gold completely.

He knew, as Aohila knew, that a dragon’s heart would follow gold, even unto doom.

Dust and particles of sand—gold—hazed the air, even in the Treasury. Not being mageborn himself—or any more sensitive than an old boot, John would have added—he could not feel, as Jenny could, the sweet-singing emanations of the magic blended through and magnified by the gold. All he saw was the great black and silver shape curled on its bed of coin and gems and statuary, glittering in the lamplight like an extension of the treasure itself. Even the bobs of light that would flick and move on the ends of the dragon’s antennae in normal sleep were dimmed, hanging like the grimed raindrops of the other world in which Corvin had hidden so long. The room was thick with the hot, faintly metallic smell of the dragon, and in sleep the hooked silver claws tightened spasmodically, reflexively, around the coins.

“Wake up!” yelled John, walking over and kicking the dragon’s nose. (Bet THAT’s one the heroes of legend never got round to.) “Wake up, damn it, they’re coming!”

And how long’s it going to take them to get round to me, after they’ve got Corvin all secure?

He thought of the Demon Queen and went cold with panic. Even if the demons moving in the dust were not her minions but those of Folcalor, he’d seen demons turn aside from their intended task in order to disembowel bystanders simply for the immediate gratification of hearing them scream.

Demons were dangerous, but they were sloppy hunters. Being deathless, they knew there was always time to go after escaped prey another day. They would not forgo the pleasure of another’s pain, even for their own ultimate benefit.

He’d met people like that as well, of course.

He picked up a silver statue, whacked Corvin on the side of the face, on the blank dark purple-tinted eyelids, with all the strength in his arm. “Wake up, you brainless worm! Demons!”

Still nothing. To the dragon the whole atmosphere must be a drowsy glory of happiness, drowning in gold, forgetting all other things.

“Damn it,” John muttered, picked up the biggest and gaudiest piece of gold he could see—a lamp stand nearly his own height, wrought like a tree with crystal fruit—and, staggering under its weight, started to carry it to the door.

And dropped it, ducking a cat-paw swat from the dragon’s clawed forefoot that would have broken his bones against the wall if it had landed. “Demons!” he yelled, rolling out of the way of Corvin’s slashing teeth. “Demons, coming here!” And fetched up, gasping for breath, against the jeweled back of a golden chair, sword in hand for all the good that was likely to do him.

Corvin stared at him, blank with shock.

“They’re forming up from the dust, they’ve got gold dust in the air for miles! Damn it!” he added, looking down, for a trickle of dust was flowing into the room now, thin and swift as water pouring down the stair.

Corvin seemed to shrink and elongate in size, slithering like a snake up the stairway that was the Treasury’s only entry, moving with a dragon’s terrible speed. John pulled the strip of rag he’d been using for a scarf up over his nose and mouth and followed, throwing aside the torch when the wind snuffed its flame, and ran up blind in the dragon’s wake, one hand on either wall and praying nothing more solid than dust was waiting for him between the Treasury and the top.

There wasn’t, but the wind struck him as he emerged from the stairway onto the top of the foundation, taking him by surprise and spinning him around before throwing him to his knees. The night was utterly black, but above the howl of the wind he could hear a voice calling his name: Gareth’s, he thought.

What the hell was Gareth doing here?

Orange light, like a wind-torn torch. Gareth’s voice shouting again, with a desperate note of panic. “John? John! ” And something about Jenny.

The white dragon that was Jenny’s onetime dragon-shape could have brought him here.

Or the demons could be toying with him, eating up the surging throb of his heart at the thought of rescue and waiting for him to run toward the phantom torch and pitch off the edge of the foundation. The cream of the jest would be that the fall wouldn’t kill him. It would almost certainly break his legs, though, and he’d be weeks dying of thirst at the bottom.

John crawled forward on his hands and knees, feeling the stone before him. Sure enough, the edge dropped off about two feet away, invisible in the gritty darkness. But having reached the edge he was able to grope his way along it, knowing there’d be a stairway eventually—there was one on each of the foundation’s four sides. From there he’d be able to feel his way along the wall.…

Aye, he thought, at the glimpse of a flash and flicker of silver-green. Could the demons counterfeit the silvery glow that rushed up from the pool in the heart of the Henge?

He didn’t know, but the wind and dust were hammering him harder, and if he stayed in the open he’d be blinded in no very long time and suffocated soon after that. If nothing else the air within the Maze would be still.

The fourth gate that he’d found—the one that could be opened at midnight—had been in the palace itself, and stood just on the edge of the foundation platform not far from the northeast corner.

Dust-devils tore him, wind raking his face and his stubbled scalp. Sometimes he thought gritty hands pawed him, seized him, hands wrought of silver fire and dust. He slashed once with his sword, barely able to see, and of course the great looming things in the darkness simply dissolved, to re-form instants later, green phosphor glimmering in their eyes. Once he thought he saw Corvin, or what would have been Corvin, illuminated by the ocherous flare of the burning slime that the dragon spit. Saw a writhing shape high in the air, muffled in a cloud of blackness—dust in his eyes, in his nostrils, the singing hum of the gold confusing his senses, demon-voices ripping through his brain to his heart.

Waiting for him to use magic, so they could seize him through it.

Then darkness again, and John saw no more. But the wind grew stronger, driving him to his knees on the broken stone of the platform. If Corvin had any sense—if he could break free of the demons at all—he’d rise straight up over the dust storm like a balloon and head away fast toward the North. He’d done his duty, fulfilled the geas that binds dragons to their saviors.…

Blinded, John lost sight of the Henge, then saw it again, mercifully in the same place and at the same distance, which unless the demons were being clever with him probably meant it was actually the Henge he saw.…

He fell again, groping at the stone underfoot—the gate was almost exactly at the edge of the platform and you stepped through it as if you were stepping off into thin air. The first time he’d tried it, the night before last, he’d had a braided rope around his waist, which had impeded him severely when he’d stepped through onto the solid ground of an orchard of savagely animate thorned trees. It had been midnight there, too, and if he hadn’t had a torch with him he’d have been cut to pieces before he saw the path away from the gate.

But better that than this, he thought now. In any case, he knew the path ran away to the right and the thorned trees could be dodged, to get to the next gate into the Maze. Monstrous shapes loomed and dissolved in the whirling dark around him, reached ephemeral hands for him, and smiled with malicious, glittering eyes. And why not smile? he thought. From being a prisoner in all the city of Prokep he was now a prisoner on the foundation, and if Adromelech in fact guessed that he knew the way through the Maze, it wouldn’t be long at all before they’d be on him.

Quicker, if they could run him off the edge of the foundation and break his legs for him. After about a week of lying at the bottom he’d probably be pretty happy to talk about which door to choose and where it lay.

Jenny’s voice cried to him, trapped in the hammering storm. Crying his name, crying “I forgive you …,” in a voice that tore his heart. “Please—John, please …!”

He groped along the edge of the platform, sighting on the blurred silver fire of the Henge, wondering how long it would be till midnight or if it was already past. He didn’t think so, but there was no way to tell, and he didn’t think he’d make it until dawn even if he could get down to where the other gate was. Dust smothered him, trapping him in a vortex of winds that circled him like a dust-devil, sucking the air from his lungs. Flecks of flying metal tore his face, and he staggered, feeling hands catching at him, claws cutting his flesh.

The wind changed notes. Lightning split the darkness, the crack of thunder like an ax cleaving the bellow of the wind, and a cold, hard blast of rain struck John in the face. Wind drove the rain, wind straight out of the north, shattering the circling column around him, and lightning struck again, spearing from clouds to earth. Its purple glare showed him the rain, hammering the dust back into the ground; the darkness afterward was like being struck blind.

The next flash showed John the wet shining black and silver shape of the dragon plunging down from the pouring heavens through the rain. He stepped to the edge of the platform and held up his arms; all the demon-light within the Henge had died. The dragon’s claws snatched him hard around the ribs in the darkness, and the ground jerked away beneath his feet. Lightning rimmed Prokep one last time, a skeleton city in blackness.

Then they were flying west under the streaming rain.