Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (16 page)

“Not through medicine, no.”

“But she looks—”

“It is the nature of this malady that the child does not appear to be ill, my lord. That is the—the terrible tragedy of it. Only last week, I witnessed a woman walking in the Street of Lanterns, holding her little boy by the hand. The child turned pale, and then crimson; he cried out, and blood poured suddenly from his mouth and nose.”

John pushed the door, very gently, holding his breath, for he recognized the voice. He saw Prince Gareth sitting on the padded velvet lid of the chest at the end of the curtained bed, looking up into his visitor's face with ravaged eyes. In the young man's shock and despair John could see all his own weary pain of early in the winter, when he himself had searched desperately through every volume in his own library, looking for some hope, some guidance in dealing with the darkness of soul that had come close to destroying his son Ian. And then again later he had searched for any reference to the demon plague that Aohila had threatened to call down on the people of the Winterlands, if John did not undertake the quest for the man she sought.

“Of course I rushed over and did what I could,” the visitor went on. “But when the malady advances so far as to actually strike, it is far too late to save the patient's life.” His lined, gentle face was sad, framed in the close-fitting velvet cap of an old scholar, and the hands that clasped before the breast of his blue velvet robe were thin and stained with ink and decoctions of herbs. An old fuddy-duddy, I'd have said, seeing him on the street, John thought.

Maybe a year ago I'd have been right.

And a year ago he himself would have kicked through the doorway in the paneling and yelled, That's a lie and you know it.…

In all his researches into plague and disease, he had never found anything remotely like what the fussy old gentleman described.

Of the seven mages whom Folcalor's demons had possessed in the summertime—the mages of Caradoc's corps that had come so close to conquering the Realm of Belmarie in the name of Gareth's cousin Rocklys—only three now survived. At least, John prayed, Ian and Jenny survive.…

And Bliaud of Greenhythe, whom Rocklys had lured north out of quiet obscurity. He looked much the same as he'd looked the first time John had seen him, in the courtyard of Caer Corflyn with his two sons, checking and double-checking everything in the baggage train and scribbling cantrips and sigils on all the packs, to the obvious disquiet of the guards. And it had been all an act, too, John thought. By that time Bliaud's soul and self were trapped in a shard of amethyst and the thing imitating his finicking mannerisms for the sake of his sons—Tundal and Abellus, their names were, he recalled, a stuffy merchant and a dandy in plumed hats—was a thing that later drew the entrails of captured soldiers like a housewife drawing chickens.…

Well, not quite like, since most housewives killed the chickens first.

After the demons had been driven forth, and sent to amuse Aohila behind the Burning Mirror, John had encountered Bliaud again. And like Ian and Jenny, in the wake of exorcism, when John had met the old man in the fog-shrouded ruins of Ernine, Bliaud had seemed lost in some desperate inner grief.

Even at the time, John had thought, At least Ian and Jen have each other. Maybe each was sunk in darkness too thick to admit any word of comfort, but each would at least know that the other had walked that road, too.

Bliaud had been alone. Every night, listening to Folcalor whisper little rhymes in his dreams.

I don't ever listen, the old man had said.

And John knew even then that he lied.

There was a look in the eyes of the possessed, a look John had come to know hideously well. He'd seen it in his wife's eyes, and his son's. A kind of silvery glitter, and a way of looking around any room they were in, as if tracking the movement of invisible things.

“The doctors will tell you there is no such ailment,” Bli-aud's voice went on, as if trying to hold steady in the face of terrible grief. “And indeed, I have never been able to ascertain whether it is a malady, or a spell. But its mark is on your daughter. She has very little time, my lord. Let me take her to my house—and I assure Your Highness it will be done in all discretion, in all secrecy—and let me see what I can do for her. There are spells, very long spells, very subtle, that can work wonders in cases like these.”

I'll just bet they can, thought John, fury sweeping him again like storm-wind over a field of barley. And when she comes back—and her nurse, too, I'll bet—you'll spend the rest of your life wondering what was changed about her.

Or what's left of your life until they get you, too.

Gareth made no reply, only sat looking down at his big, awkward hands, and turning a ruby ring round and round on his thumb. Bliaud, who had had his back to John most of the time, now turned, and John drew the panel shut. He heard the mage's light steps cross the room to the communicating door—Am I going to have to take him on now, to keep him off the girl? Smash him over the head with a chamber pot? That'll work.—and his voice, addressing the nurse:

“Send for me immediately, at once, at the slightest sign of fever or trembling.” And in a softer voice, presumably turning back to Gareth, “Not that there ever is. But please, if there is any change at all, let me know.”

The Prince said nothing. The mage's footsteps retreated. John pushed open the panel a crack, to see Gareth lying stretched across the top of the chest where he had been sitting, his face hidden in the crook of his arm. He had taken his spectacles off, and they dangled from his fingers by one silver temple-piece, catching the light of the windows as he wept without a sound.

Once entered into the world of men, demons have two goals: to cause pain and death for sport, and to open gates for others of their kind.

Jenny couldn't remember which of John's crumbling old books those words had come out of. He had a scholar's magpie memory, and would argue for hours about who said what and where he'd read it—and whether the Gantering Pellus who wrote the Encyclopedia was the same one who'd written A Treatise Upon Brewing, and why he didn't think this was likely—if he could find anyone to discuss such matters with him.

She closed her eyes, smiling at the recollection of her erratic spouse trading old lore and granny-rhymes with the dotards of every village within riding distance, or getting herself and everything in the Alyn Hold kitchen covered in soot while trying to design a better drawing chimney.

What had he been doing in Ernine?

How had he come there, and when?

Where was he now?

Was he trapped behind the mirror, a prisoner in the terrible, shifting Hell there without the Demon Queen's protection?

Was he, as Aohila had said, Folcalor's prisoner, tortured and enslaved to force his help in trapping Ian? Folcalor had enslaved, and presumably could control, dragons, too. The thoughts went through Jenny like the cold scorch of the arrow poison, bringing sweat to her whole body and images that she could not force from her mind.

She opened her eyes. It didn't matter whether they were open or shut. There was nothing to see. Only the silver walls of the catch-bottle, curving up to the dark, sealed neck overhead.

Would Aohila let her out if she unstoppered the bottle she still held in her hand? Would she be freed automatically? Did the bottle somehow work by magic drawn from her?

The fact that she was no threat to the Demon Queen—once she'd opened the bottle and dispelled the geas that had drawn Aohila into it—wouldn't matter, of course. The Demon Queen was perfectly capable of keeping her sealed in simply to torment her—and to gain leverage over John. John had first entered the Hell behind the Mirror—had first put his soul in pawn to the Queen who ruled it—to save Jenny.

It is the whole aim and purpose of the Hellspawn to find in the world of the living a servant who will be theirs.…

Would he do that again? Now, after what had happened in between then and now? Always supposing he wasn't a prisoner there already, always supposing he hadn't already had his soul enslaved.…

Always supposing he wasn't dead.

She didn't know. She thought of the white shell into which Amayon had been magically drawn, sealed with red wax. Remembered it lying in the midst of the dark-glittering power circle in the mirror chamber at Ernine. Remembered Amayon screaming.

Closed her eyes. Opened them.

If I don't get out of here I can never beg John's pardon, for turning from him in the depths of my own pain.

He would never know. Gareth, and those in Bel who might save the Prince, would never know about the souls of the slaves, their deaths imprisoned in the crystals. How many more would be killed, with Trey's mind and body inhabited by a demon?

And demons were haunting the Deep. Gareth needed to be told of that, as well.

There is no lawful reason for humankind to touch, or speak to, or have traffic with the Hellspawnkind. Rather should that man perish, and suffer his wife, or his son, or his goods all to perish utterly, than that demons be given a gate into this world.

Jenny leaned her head on her arm, stared at the curve of the wall, her heart pounding. The catch-bottle felt heavy now in her hand, and hot. What was Aohila thinking of, remembering?

What had she thought of, all those years behind the mirror?

The Star-Juggler, Aohila had spoken the name casually, as one who knew him well. Perhaps she had. Whoever he had been, he had learned somewhere the Demon Queen's secret name, the shape of the true essence of her secret self. That argued acquaintance.

And knowing her that well, he had been ready to give up the remainder of his life to his empty, living Hell.

Had given up his life, trying to rush the mirror chamber. Had he written down that name somewhere, so that it could be reapplied to the bottle…?

Reappplied? If what? If I open it now … and she for whatever reason opens hers, and lets me free?

Why would she do that?

So she can use me as she tried to enslave John?

To share an enemy does not make of her a friend.

More memories. The Winterlands in summer, when the twilights dwindled endless and unextinguished and Jenny would lie on the thick turf below the harsh black rock of Frost Fell's north face, watching birds dart above the pools of the moor. Ian when he was a small child, a thin little black-haired boy following her about the herb garden, breaking off leaves and crushing them in slender fingers, ecstasy in his face at the scents. The way Adric's tongue protruded from the side of his mouth when he was concentrating on his shooting with that bow that was almost too big for a nine-year-old boy. Redhaired, black-eyed, silent Mag, sitting by a mouse-hole for hours, waiting for the mouse to emerge …

A rush of anger filled her, the mad desire to lurch to her feet, to pace … but the spurt of energy was no more real, or physical, than hunger would have been in that place, and she remained where she was.

Do you like games?

Was this all a game? Jenny had feared the Demon Queen's taunting, but did not know what to make of her silence.

Is she waiting for me to say something stupid like, “Do you promise you'll let me out…?”

Or is she that certain that I will not have the strength to endure?

The power that holds her in the bottle is being sourced from me. From my memory, from my anger, from my fear, from my jealousy … from my love for John and for my children.

Maybe from my life alone, like the power sourced from the gems by the demons.

Did Folcalor destroy the demon mirror, and devour the other denizens of Aohila's Hell? Was John there when he did it? Is she alone now, an exiled Queen in flight from her enemies?

Would it make any difference to me if she was?

Only silence. Jenny closed her eyes, imagining the Winterlands again, and Morkeleb's skeletal black silhouette high and tiny in the twilight sky. Dragons sang of past joys, resonating them through refined gold and drinking in the joy a thousandfold forever. She wondered if doing that would pass the time here.

If I go mad here in the silence, will she laugh?

Laugh forever?

Past and present and yet to come, this thou art.

Jenny got to her feet, drew a deep breath, and with a quick motion, pulled the stopper from the bottle.

John was pushing open the panel into Gareth's room when a shadow appeared in the curtained chamber door. He stepped back quickly, pulled the panel nearly to. It was the nurse, her face troubled in the frame of coif and wimple. Millença pushed past her and ran to her father, holding out her arms. Gareth sat up and caught her to him, her face pressed to the fanciful trapunto of his blue-and-black velvet doublet, his fingers stroking the thick pearl-twined braid of her hair. His gray eyes, naked and vulnerable without the spectacles, blinked in the direction of the nurse with a kind of desperation, as if asking her to make what Bliaud had said be untrue.

In an almost inaudible voice the Prince asked, “Where's her mother, Danae?”

Gaw, no, don't send for Trey.…

“I don't know, lord.” There was a world of private doubt and fear in that carefully expressionless voice.

“Dolly died of the plague, but the doctor brought her back to life,” Millença informed her father, holding up the lacetrimmed poppet in her arms. “See? He said she's not going to die ever again.”

“That's good.” Gareth pushed back the doll's raw-silk hair, peered into the exquisitely painted face. “Yes, I can see she's going to be alive forever now. And she'll always be just as beautiful as she is now. As beautiful as you.”

“Silly,” said Millença gravely. “Dolls aren't alive. She just isn't dead anymore.”

Gareth kissed his daughter, then lifted her down from his skinny knee and looked around for his spectacles, which had dropped from his fingers when Danae and the child had come into the room. They lay on the floor beside the cushioned chest, within inches of his foot. In his situation John wouldn't have been able to see them, either. The young man bent down, groping, and Millença said, “Warmer, Papa,” in the voice of one playing a familiar game. Gareth smiled in spite of his red-rimmed, swollen eyes, and began to hunt all around him in places that were obviously absurd: under his cloak, on the bed, in the bed curtains, with his daughter giving him hints. “Warmer—colder—warmer …” until he found them and put them on again.