Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (32 page)

But we all are what we are.

She returned to the stable of the little stone house, where she had left Moon Horse in her usual stall. The west wind had failed, and the storm clouds were scudding gray from the north by the time Jenny reached the Hold again.

In the blacksmith's shop off the main courtyard, John and Muffle were fitting the central gear-box onto John's robot, a sort of iron basket that would hold Caradoc's moonstone talisman and, joined to it by silver wires, the smallest of the succession of gears that would power the machine's six limbs.

“In the movie the robot was made to look like a human bein',” said John, spectacles glaring back the flame of the forge. John had explained that the spell of tongues that Aohila had laid upon him in the Otherworld had only worked with direct human speech, not whatever caused sound to come from the animate pictures alternately called movies and vids—he'd had to guess a great deal of what was happening and why. “God knows why they made it look human. There wasn't a hope of foolin' anybody about what it was. But I tried that, too, back when I first tried to build a mechanical man when I was twelve, and the thing wouldn't even balance, let alone walk, always supposin' I could have powered it somehow.”

He tapped the robot with one booted foot. “I never did get that right in later attempts. This'll at least move about.”

And it probably would, thought Jenny uneasily.

Even as dragons stayed aloft in flight by the magic of their minds, rather than by any physical manipulation of wings and air, so the robot was supported by a pair of wood-and-iron wheels that held up, at the end of a short stake, the eggshaped iron basket that housed the gear-relays and the moonstone that held Caradoc's soul. A knot of pulleys and gears multiplied whatever force the magic of the moonstone would generate to the limbs, which were hollow steel, the lightest and strongest alloy John had been able to obtain over years of trading with the gnomes.

Familiar with John's experiments, Jenny remembered these limbs. They'd originally been part of a system of ballistas that John had alleged would hurl stones from the highest castle turrets without danger to those who operated them. Their pulleys and springs had been rearranged, and they'd been fitted with round wooden feet, padded in leather to give them traction on the stones of the floor. A fifth limb supported John's youthful masterpiece, the five-fingered steel hand whose wheels and pulleys mimicked the arrangement of human tendons and joints. A sixth limb, also projecting upward, sported a simple iron pincer: Jenny had seen John and Muffle working on it the previous day.

“We figured he'd need more than one hand,” Muffle explained. He and John were like a couple of soot-black devils, unshaven, half-naked in the shop's dense heat and streaky with sweat. Jenny was hugely reminded of Ian and Adric, when the boys were engaged in one of their messier pranks. Both men were grinning like schoolboys let loose in a candy shop. Jenny knew neither had had more than a modicum of food or sleep in days and knew that neither cared.

“The thing takes a deal of oilin', see,” added John. “The hand, especially, just about every time it moves. The pincer'll do to daub goose-grease on it, an' work a polishin' cloth.”

“A lot depends on how much weight Caradoc's able to shift just by magic from within the moonstone,” put in Muffle, pointing with his pliers. “How much friction he can push against. D'you have any idea, Jen?”

She shook her head. “How much of magic lies in the flesh, and how much in the mind, I don't know,” she said. “I don't think anyone does. Nor do I know how strong Caradoc's powers actually were, when it was just his own mind in his flesh; nor whether his long possession by Folcalor increased his abilities or lessened them.”

“Well, he couldn't have had much magic as a human, could he?” John turned back to crimp the clamps that held the basket among the nest of gears. Firelight gleamed on the Demon Queen's marks, traced on his bare shoulders and arms. “You've said that's what Folcalor tempted him with, wasn't it? More power?”

“But that doesn't mean Caradoc's power was weak.” Jenny smiled with wry understanding. “There isn't a mage in the world who wouldn't risk his soul—or her soul—trying to secure more. We're stupid that way.”

And John looked down at her and grinned, and wiped the sweat from his face, leaving a long streak of grime. He'd risked his own life too many times hunting for rare books not to understand. “Could you see, Jen, when you were inside the talisman? See an' hear?”

“After a fashion.” Jenny perched herself on the corner of the saw-bench, and shrugged out of her sheepskin jacket, for the low vaults of the ceiling trapped the heat like an oven and with the failure of the daylight a dozen torches had been kindled around the walls. She frowned, trying to remember the weird timelessness of her green crystal prison, of feeling her body and being unable to control it. Of feeling Amayon dwelling in her mind.

She tried to separate those memories from the exhilaration of power, from the deadly sweetness of Amayon's constant presence, the whispering voice that assured her of his love even when he made her do hideous things. Some memories were still hard to sift: Was it her own delight that she remembered, in being utterly without responsibilities, without consequences to any action she took? Or was that, like the recollection of his name, only something he'd left behind?

She shook her head, pulling away from the shame and despair she'd felt in the wintertime, healing now but still close beneath the surface of her mind.

“It wasn't exactly sight, or precisely hearing,” she said. “But I did know what was going on around me. But then, I saw and heard through my own eyes and ears as well. In the talisman I could feel sensations of the body from which I was separated. What it would be like once the body is dead, I don't know.”

“Seems like a gie lot of trouble to me.” Muffle knelt, holding up a water-filled glass lantern to throw magnified light into the egg-shaped seat so that he could hook up the twisted wire cables. “Can't be that painful to die, can it? I mean, within the talisman.”

He spoke jestingly, but the glance he gave her from under his sparse reddish eyebrows was serious, and Jenny spoke seriously in reply.

“That also I don't know,” she said. “I have no idea what Caradoc felt when I speared his body beneath the sea, when the demon went out of it and ceased to keep it alive. The Whalemages sent fish to devour the body, with him alive still in the moonstone talisman. He was there, he must have seen it, as well as felt it. It's no wonder,” she added thoughtfully, “he won't forgive me that. But I think he fears death for the same reason that the demons do: because it is a state that he cannot control, and he cannot be in control. No more than any of us does he know what lies beyond. He does not and will not surrender his power over himself.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” inquired Muffle, after a little silence and a few scatological comments addressed to the pulleys. “It's what kept you alive in the talisman, isn't it? What kept our Johnny alive in the Hell behind the Mirror.”

“I suppose it depends on the lengths you'll go to, to stay alive.”

Cousin Dilly came in, sleet beading her long dark braids, to tell them supper was ready in the kitchen: All three said, “We'll be there in a few minutes,” and immediately forgot all about eating as they started hooking up, and testing again, the final adjustments on the pulleys and cables.

For days now Jenny had watched the thing take shape, her deep misgivings alternating with excitement and interest at this bizarre and curious machine. Years of watching John tinker with mechanical clocks, with flying machines, with selfpropelling sleds and steam-opening doors had given her some familiarity with the workings of such devices, but she had never seen anything remotely like this.

She saw, too, how John's journeyings through another world had sharpened his judgment of mechanical efficiency, and wondered what direction—if they survived the next week—his future experiments would take.

In the ice-cold deeps of the night they dragged the sled bearing Caradoc, propped in one of the kitchen chairs from the Frost Fell house, across the courtyard from the old stable to the forge. Ice-winds were well and truly blowing down from the north by then, and after the heat of the forge the southeast tower dungeon, and the courtyard in between, were like frozen marble.

Stiff-frozen and barely smelling at all now, Caradoc's eyes could not even narrow as he studied the insect-like robot, with its round tiny body and its mismatched limbs. On top, between the two arms, John had set a bulbous wooden sounding-box made from portions of two mandolins, covered with tuning-keys to stretch and adjust the strings of catgut and wire within. “It'll take you a while to learn to sound 'em,” said John apologetically. “It's the best we could do at short notice, understand. But it won't rot, an' you won't have to keep on goin' from body to body.”

The muscles of the dead face twitched against the ice that held them. Jenny could almost hear him thinking, I would not have to keep going from body to body if I could have the body of a mage.…

But even that, she thought, might not be true. There were few enough mageborn, whose human magic could animate the flesh of a corpse and keep it from rotting once death occurred. And none that she knew of who could displace a living mage from his body, and take his place.

But she did not know how to say so to Caradoc without offense. And, in any case, she thought, looking at those glinting, angry eyes, she doubted that he would believe her. He would rather believe the world was conspiring to victimize him, when he'd made only a reasonable request.

They dragged him into the storeroom beside the blacksmith shop, where the cold still gripped, to ensorcel the catchbottle. Jenny set candles around the Circle of Power, and the outer Circle of Ward, as the animate corpse clasped its dead hands around the silver bottle, and bent frozen lips to whisper Folcalor's secret name into its neck.

But the wizard spoke nothing aloud. Within the circles Jenny had drawn, Caradoc drew others, though he was barely able to command his decomposed muscles, and fell and staggered like a drunken man. He marked these circles with sigils she recognized as demonic, and the power she felt in the still cold air of the room seemed to creep along her skin. From the Ward-Circle she had drawn around herself and John she watched the wizard sway, clinging to the back of the chair, and the candle flames burned blue, the darkness creeping in between them. More than ever, now, she was glad she had kept Ian out of the ghoul-wizard's sight. She wished for her son's power, and for the knowledge he had of demons, to check what she could not of Caradoc's sorceries. But not at the cost of the risk she sensed he would run, to be in the same room—or even the same fortress wall—with this unstable and unnatural thing.

At last, Caradoc set the bottle down, and made passes with his hands over it. Then he beckoned her forward. “It is accomplished,” he whispered. He seemed to melt into the chair, and let Jenny unmake the circles, and call back the Limitations and Boundaries of the spells. She could hear a horrible gurgling sound from him, though he did not breathe, and once he turned to her and snapped, “Oh, for the love of the gods, woman, hurry up!”

“So the trap is set.” John stepped carefully from the unmade Circle of Ward, and crossed to pick up the bottle as Muffle peeked cautiously around the door.

“It should fetch him, if he can be fetched.” Caradoc's voice was little more than a gluey slur. The spells had clearly drained him of what energy and power he possessed—energy and power that kept the corpse moving in a semblance of life. “And I warn you both, there's a curse upon my death, a curse sourced in my death. Curse … the one who destroys the moonstone.” He mumbled like a drunken man, head jerking on the dissolving muscles of the neck.

“Where'd you get the thing, Jenny?… old magic, old power … Star-Juggler was the greatest of them all. Only needed the name … Once you seal him in it, what then, eh? Folcalor … he's powerful—tricky. Bottle … needs power—constant source. He escapes, you'll be in trouble.” He cocked an eye up at John mockingly. “Or had you thought?”

John's glance crossed Jenny's, and in his eyes she saw her own thought: He's heard of the catch-bottle, but he doesn't know how it works. Doesn't know it's a double trap.

That means Folcalor doesn't know, either.

And if Folcalor doesn't know, neither does Adromelech.

Both drew a long breath, and let it out, words unsaid.

“Bargain wisely,” muttered Caradoc as Muffle came forward and together the brothers prepared to drag the sledge back through the door to the forge's heat. “Can't hold him yourself … have to sell it … Adromelech. Bargain wisely, and after, you'd better run fast.”

They sent Muffle away, though Jenny, listening, could hear his breath and the beating of his heart in the wood-store just the other side of the smithy. She drew the signs of ward and guard all around the corpse on its sledge, and the spider-like robot in the corner of the smithy; set marks of Limitation in the corners, marks of ritual cleansing to keep ill influences away during the transfer of the moonstone talisman from the body of the corpse into the egg-shaped chamber in the robot's heart. As she laboriously drew out the lines defining what the spells could not do, aligning and focusing the powers of the heavens and the earth with the unexplored magic of her altered body, the corpse on its chair moved its head a little and mumbled. Caradoc's powers were too depleted—or his vehicle too far gone—to be understood clearly, but she heard anger and impatience, and once she caught the words “—needless palaver … wasting time …”

She went on as if she had not heard. But her heart misgave her, that any wizard would disregard the spells that kept magic within its proper bounds, only for his own convenience. With full darkness the storm-winds had risen in earnest, and she felt as if the shop were a bubble of light, adrift in hammering blackness, a tiny hell in which John, and she, and Caradoc of Somanthus were forever trapped. Sitting on a milking stool within Caradoc's circle, arms folded around his drawn-up knees, John watched Jenny work in silence. Now and then the firelight would flash on his spectacles as he turned his head to watch the door or to look at the robot, as if wondering whether he should be party to the extension of Caradoc's life. As always it was difficult to read his face.