and the air was ice-water cold on his flesh and the raw skin of his scalp. Ector of Sindestray was reading the charges, savoring each with the morbid relish of a doomsayer who has been proven right. “He has trafficked with demons …”
Even had he been inclined to, John couldn’t very well argue with him.
It was to defeat this other lot of demons, see …
Who would believe that, except Gareth stupefied in his crimson chamber? And maybe the Master of Halnath, wherever he was. But the Master of Halnath, the scholar-lord Polycarp who was Gareth’s cousin, had voted also for John’s death, knowing the things that had been done in the past by those who dealt with demons.
It was to save Jen, and me son; to keep them from being possessed by demons who would use their wizardly powers …
But those who called upon demons to aid them frequently did so out of the best of motives.
Such as now.
It was Amayon, bright-clothed in garnet velvet and sparkling with jewels and malice, who handed Ector the torch which he drove into the kindling.
At this distance John couldn’t see clearly, and the crowd beyond that flame-like crimson form was only a blur. But he heard their voices, wild over the cracking of the fire. Furious voices, relishing as Ector did the vindication of themselves. They’d been told that the plague was his doing, or the doing of the demons he’d worked for, and they were doubly angry, for there had been a time when he’d been popular in Bel. Dragonsbane—the only man living who had slain a dragon. He had fought the demon-possessed dragons that flew down at the command of the demon mage Caradoc; he had defeated them.
“… pawn of the Hellspawn,” Ector was shouting above the rushing crackle of oil-soaked tinder. “Author of the plague that has swept this land …”
The smoke billowed thick and greasy. The heat was suffocating, and in the smoke she took shape. Beautiful and hideous, wrought of fume and fire, she held out her hands to him, waiting for him to call her name.
I won’t. He closed his eyes—not that that did a lot of good; he knew she was still there—and turned his face aside. Airless, all-encompassing heat and pain. I won’t. I will die, and Jen and the boys and all the Realm die with me …
Someone screamed.
He thought, Do they see her? and someone else took up the shriek. More howls—terror, panic. Wind bent the flame around him, whirled the smoke, and he opened his eyes and saw a dragon, huge, fifty feet or more and with a wingspan twice that, silver-streaked and tabbied with black and opal-green blazing eyes. It was almost on top of him already, and he could do no more than stare up at it in shock as the silver claws lashed down, caught him up, stake, ropes, and all, scattering burning hunks of wood and hay over the heads of the trampling crowd. The beating shadow of wings, the flash of the winter sunlight as they rose above the city’s walls and the bitter, freezing cold after the fire’s heat. With his hands still tied, John felt a stab of pure dread that the dragon would drop him—Fat lot of difference that would make, given the day I’ve had so far—and turning his head he saw the city fall away, mossy ice-slicked roofs and bare trees; city fields and the silver loop of the River Clae, shining in the Magloshaldon woods. Brown fields, then brown steppe, then gray sheets of cloud that enveloped them like damp muslin and cold that shredded his bones.
The dragon carried him tucked up under its breast, and without the heat of its flesh John thought he probably would have slipped away into death from the cold, Which I wouldn’t have bet two coppers on last night …
Weightless exhaustion. Consciousness that came and went, slipping away to drop him suddenly back to an awareness of hanging suspended in damp gray clouds, over a barely glimpsed landscape of formlessness below. He was only marginally conscious when the dragon descended to a gray-yellow desolation of sand and scattered boulders, of flint hills without vegetation and of twisting scoops of pebble-filled stone that had been watercourses long ago. These he saw only dimly, for the gray light was fading, and his eyesight wasn’t good enough to discern details. On a wide plateau in the desolation stumps of pillars marked where a city had stood. Crumbled foundations and lines of broken walls surrounded a stone platform two hundred feet by nearly five, a square rock island in the sand—even he couldn’t miss it.
The dragon balanced in the air like a kite and, reaching down, laid John on the ground before the remains of the platform’s wide stair. Evening turned the vast sky yellow, lilac-stained and fading. John felt the stone under him chill as snow through the torn rags of his shift, and knew the night would be brutal. He couldn’t imagine where he was, or how far they had come:
Please don’t make me walk home.
Still hovering weightless above him, the dragon extended its swan-like neck and with a bill like Death’s scythe bit through the ropes that bound him, the chains that fastened his wrists. Then it ascended with no more flurry than a cloud of smoke, wheeled on its silken wings, and flew away toward the west.
Aching with cold, with bruises, with hunger and exhaustion, John raised himself to one elbow and shouted, “CORVIN!” His voice echoed hoarse in the emptiness, not loud enough to startle rabbits, had there been any. The ancient authorities—Dotys, and Gantering Pellus, and others who’d written of dragons—said that to name a dragon’s true name would call it, though these true names were in fact airs of music …
Save a dragon, slave a dragon, went the ancient granny-rhyme: to rescue it from death put it in bondage to its rescuer.
John had never quite known whether this applied to ordinary people—he’d only ever seen wizards do it—and he prayed his guess about the dragon’s name was correct. “Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, by your name I charge you, come back!”
He saw the flash of distant silver in the last western sunlight, and the glittering shape of the dragon returning. But before it reached him he fainted from exhaustion and cold.
IN THE DARK beneath the earth, Jenny Waynest dreamed of the Dragonstar.
John had told her about it, on and off, for three years, and in her dream they lay together on the platform he’d built above the moss-fouled leads of the Alyn Hold tower, on one of those hot summer Winterlands nights when the whole world breathed magic and the stars leaned down close over the desolation of moor and stones. “A thousand years ago was the last time it showed up, when Ennyta the Great was the King of Ernine,” John was saying to her. The starlight flashed in the round lenses of his spectacles, and his voice was deep and velvety with odd undertones of huskiness to it, like rocks in a plowed field. Jenny would know it in her dreams, she thought, until she died. In this dream he had half a dozen of his crumbling old volumes scattered about him: he’d spent a lifetime ferreting them from the ruins of old fortresses and towns. The lantern he’d brought up to read them by had gone out.
“Accordin’ to Dotys, anyway—if that thing I have really is a fragment of his Second History—it reads like Dotys, no error, the fussy old prig. He claims he was writin’ from the Golden Chronicle of the Kings of Ernine, but—”
And Jenny asked, “What does he say about it?” because even in her dream John was apparently ready to explain at vast and meticulous
