human figures marched around the four sides of a room not much bigger than his cell under the King’s prison tower—at least in the gloom they seemed human, though without his spectacles it was difficult to be sure. The background stone was pinkish, and whatever the painted shapes carried in their hands—treasure, presumably—threw back the firelight with gold leaf’s unmistakable dusky brilliance.
He lay on a springy mound of fresh bracken, covered by a red velvet cloak so thickly gemmed and embroidered as to look like a blanket of embers in this ruddy light. A ewer stood by him, silver mountings embracing a red-and-white shell bigger than a man’s head. A beautiful thing, of a species he’d never seen before. There was also a clay cup, and the meat of two or three rabbits, cooked and lying in the cracked curved section of a painted jar.
There was no one else in the room.
Jenny …
In the dream he’d seen her also with the dragon Morkeleb. She wore the dragon form he’d once seen her take, not white but crystalline, as if wrought of crystal lace and bones. They flew low over the ocean, the black dragon and the white, shadows running blue before them on the waves, as alone among humankind he’d seen the dragons fly in the Skerries of Light that lay westward across the sea. The memory of that dream calmed his pounding heart, filled him with a sense of peace.
An old memory? An illusion, sent up by his mind to reassure him?
The vision, perhaps, that both Jenny and Morkeleb had perished in the cave-in, and that in death her soul had become a dragon’s soul at last?
The thought left him desolate.
He had traveled, he realized, for so long since leaving the Winterlands that he had become confused about time. Time in Hell wasn’t the same as time that is ruled by the sun and the stars. On his errantry for the Demon Queen he had crossed from Hell to Hell, the magic of one unworkable in another, and at last from the myriad Hells into that other world where the dragon Corvin had taken refuge in human shape. John felt like he’d been lost for years. Capture, imprisonment, and the specter of an agonizing death had come between him and the longing ache he’d felt, just to see Jenny, to speak to her …
If she’d listen. If she wouldn’t turn away.
When last he’d seen her, at her old house on Frost Fell, it had been the morning after Ian’s try at suicide. He heard his own voice lashing at her, saw her crumpled beside the hearth, beside the nest of blankets they’d made up for their son.
God, I might just as well have gone over and kicked her, he thought, trying to wriggle away from that memory, that shame and pain.
Back then, even with his experience of dealing with the Demon Queen, he hadn’t understood what possession by a demon did to those who survived it.
He wanted to walk back into that room, that time, and knock that man who was himself upside the head and scream at him, She’s hurting, too, you nit! Let her alone!
Don’t let her be dead, he prayed, to the Old God whose name and nature were mostly no longer remembered, save in backwaters like the Winterlands. Don’t let her be dead and not knowing how sorry I am.
He closed his eyes and watched the play of the reddish light on the lids, breathed the fusty sweetness of the bracken and the moldery earth-stink of the covering cloak. His body was covered with bruises like a windfall peach. After a time he rolled gingerly up onto one black-and-blue elbow and devoured rabbit and water, and as he did so saw that broken pieces of wood had been heaped near the chamber’s stone doorway, ready to be fed to the blaze. Boughs thicker than his calf had been snapped into short billets, as if they had been twigs.
Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, he thought, and rubbed a half-healed bullet graze left over from that final firefight in the lab. His shoulder was bruised black from the kick of one of those noisy chattering horrendous guns that could kill a roomful of people in moments.
A dragon hiding in human form. Working as a scientist, of all things, in that alien half-drowned world. Changing identities whenever it became obvious that he wasn’t growing old like everyone else.
He must have been hiding there—or somewhere like it—for a thousand years.
The old granny-rhyme was right. Save a dragon, slave a dragon, at least for a time. Cold flowed through the doorway from the dark of the passage beyond, and with that cold the harsh scents of dust and sand. John gathered the robe about himself—a King’s robe, certainly finer than anything he’d ever had as Thane of the Winterlands, the gods could only guess at where it came from—and limped barefoot and aching down the passageway, the cold growing sharper and more penetrating until he came out under desert stars.
The room was built into that huge granite foundation that rose like a mammoth bench in the midst of the ruined city. Sand had flowed in the inconspicuous doorway, duned against the walls and piled over the threshold so that John had to climb, feet slithering in freezing powder, and bend down under the lintel to emerge.
The city lay before him, reminding him of an old drawing sun-faded nearly to extinction. Between starlight and myopia he could see only suggestions of the nearer walls, and portions of three pillars that stood duty for some vanished palace. A dimple in the ground marked where a lake had been. Some distance away an immense plaza was demarcated from the desert by a ring of stones, water-shaped but uncut by human hand; a minor cavalry skirmish could have been fought inside it. He thought something glinted in the middle of that ring, like a palms-breadth of ice, but it was impossible to see what.
A dance floor? The temple to some god whose very name was forgotten? Wind skated across the barrens of hard-packed earth and around the snaggletoothed rock, everything either silver or blue-black in the moon’s blanched light. How long had it been since the smell of growing things had weighted the night here?
By the taste of the air, dawn wasn’t far off. The cold stung John’s bruises, and his scalp, raw where the guards had shaved off his hair. He wrapped the earth-smelling robe tighter around him and wished his vision were good enough to see stars, so he’d have some idea of where he might be. They’d be winter stars still, only a month or so advanced from where they had stood when he’d ridden out from Alyn Hold in the freezing sleet, to do Aohila’s bidding lest she harm his people and his son. The weeks he had spent following Amayon through the terrible Hell of the Shining Things, through the Hell of Winds and the ghastly dangers of Paradise, all these had dissolved like dreams. Only time had passed when he’d been in the other real world, with its bitter rain and its crowded streets and a woman he might have loved.
High above the first yellowish blush in the eastern sky a comet danced, bright enough to be visible even to him. He had to take it on faith that it was the split-tailed Dragonstar he’d been reading descriptions of, and observing since the summer. Jenny had put a spell on his spectacles that they wouldn’t get broken or lost: the guards had taken them off him when he’d been arrested, and he wondered where they were now and if the spell still worked.
Would a jackal appear in a day or two, carrying them in its mouth?
He’d be in serious trouble if it didn’t.
Not, he reflected, that he wasn’t in serious trouble now.
He retreated down the passageway to the painted chamber, sand whispering under his frozen feet. Save a dragon, slave a dragon, he thought again, and if this is his idea of savin’ me life I only hope he left a couple more rabbits and a map to the nearest subway. Subways were a thing he’d learned about in the Otherworld, strings
