She stepped through a door into a dark place that echoed with her breathing.
She had felt cold before, but it seemed nothing now; nothing compared to the dread that congealed around her heart.
She stood in the place she had seen in the water bowl, in the visions of John’s death.
It shocked her, for she had come on it unexpectedly. She had thought to find an archive there, a place of teaching, for she guessed this to be the heart and center of the blank places on Dromar’s ambiguous maps. But through a knotted forest of stalactites and columns, she glimpsed only empty darkness that smelled faintly of the wax of a thousand candles, which slumped like dead things in the niches of the rock. No living thing was there, but she felt again that sense of evil and she stepped cautiously forward into the open spaces of black toward the misshapen stone altar.
She laid her hands upon the blue-black, soapy-feeling stone. In her vision the place had been filled with muttering whispers, but now there was only silence. For a moment, dark swirlings seemed to stir in her mind, the inchoate whisperings of fragmentary visions, but they passed like a groundswell, leaving no more aftertaste than a dream.
Still, they seemed to take from her the last of her strength and her will; she felt bitterly weary and suddenly very frightened of the place. Though she heard no sound, she whirled, her heart beating so that she could almost hear its thudding echo in the dark. There was evil there, somewhere—she knew it now, felt it close enough to leer over her shoulder. Shifting the bulging satchel upon her shoulder, she hastened like a thief across the slithery darkness of the gnomes’ dancing floor, seeking the ways that would lead her out of the darkness, back to the air above.
Morkeleb’s mind had guided her down into the abyss, but she could feel no touch of it now. She followed the marks she had made, runes that only she could see, drawn upon the walls with her forefinger. As she ascended through the dark rock seams and stairs of amber flowstone, she wondered if the dragon were dead. A part of her hoped that he was, for the sake of the people of these lands, for the gnomes, and for the Master; a part of her felt the same grief that she had, standing above the dragon’s corpse in the gully of Wyr. But there was something about that grief that made her hope still more that the dragon was dead, for reasons she hesitated to examine.
The Grand Passage was as dark as the bowels of the Deep had been, bereft of even the little moonlight that had leaked in to illuminate it before; but even in the utter darkness, the air here was different—cold but dry and moving, unlike the still, brooding watchfulness of the heart of the Deep.
Her wizard’s sight showed her the dark, bony shape of the dragon’s haunch lying across the doorway, the bristling spears of his backbone pointing inward toward her. As she came nearer she saw how sunken the scaled skin lay on the curve of the bone.
Listen as she would, she heard no murmur of his mind. But, the music that had seemed to fill the Market Hall echoed there still, faint and piercing, with molten shivers of dying sound.
He was unconscious—dying, she thought. Do you think this man will live longer than I? he had asked.
Jenny unslung her plaid from her shoulder and laid the thick folds over the cutting knives of the dragon’s spine. The edges drove through the cloth; she added the heavy sheepskin of her jacket and, shivering as the outer cold sliced through the thin sleeves of her shift, worked her foot onto the largest of the spines. Catching the doorpost once again for leverage, she swung herself nimbly up and over. For an instant she balanced on the haunch, feeling the slender suppleness of the bones under the steel scales and the soft heat that radiated from the dragon’s body; then she sprang down. She stood for a moment, listening with her ears and her mind.
The dragon made no move. The Market Hall lay before her, blue-black and ivory with the feeble trickle of starlight that seemed so bright after the utter night below the ground. Even though the moon had set, every potsherd and skewed lampframe seemed to Jenny’s eyes outlined in brightness, every shadow like spilled ink. The blood was drying, though the place stank of it. Osprey still lay in a smeared pool of darkness, surrounded by glinting harpoons. The night felt very old. A twist of wind brought her the smell of woodsmoke from the fire on Tanner’s Rise.
Like a ghost Jenny crossed the hall, shivering in the dead cold. It was only when she reached the open night of the steps that she began to run.
XI
At dawn she felt John’s hand tighten slightly around her own.
Two nights ago she had worked the death-spells, weaving an aura of poison and ruin—the circles of them still lay scratched in the earth at the far end of the Rise. She had not slept more than an hour or so the night before that, somewhere on the road outside Bel, curled in John’s arms. Now the drifting smoke of the low fire was a smudge of gray silk in the pallid morning air, and she felt worn and chilled and strange, as if her skin had been sandpapered and every nerve lay exposed. Yet she felt strangely calm.
She had done everything she could, slowly, meticulously, step by step, following Miss Mab’s remembered instructions as if the body she knew so well were a stranger’s. She had given him the philters and medicines as the gnomes did, by means of a hollow needle driven into the veins, and had packed poultices on the wounds to draw from them the poison of the dragon’s blood. She had traced the runes of healing where the marks of the wounds cut the paths of life throughout his body, touching them with his inner name, the secret of his essence, woven into the spells. She had called him patiently, repeatedly, by the name that his soul knew, holding his spirit to his body by what force of magic she could muster, until the med icines could take hold.
She had not thought that she would succeed. When she did, she was exhausted past grief or joy, able to think no further than the slight lift of his ribcage and the crease of his blackened eyelids with his dreams.
Gareth said softly, “Will he be all right?” and she nodded. Looking at the gawky young prince who hunkered at her side by the fire, she was struck by his silence. Perhaps the closeness of death and the endless weariness of the night had sobered him. He had spent the hours while she was in the Deep patiently heating stones and placing them around John’s body as he had been told to do—a dull and necessary task, and one to which, she was almost certain, she owed the fact that John had still been alive when she had returned from the dragon’s lair.
Slowly, her every bone hurting her to move, she put off the scuffed scarlet weight of his cloak. She felt scraped and aching, and wanted only to sleep. But she stood up, knowing there was something else she must do, worse than all that had gone before. She stumbled to her medicine bag and brought out the brown tabat leaves she always carried, dried to the consistency of leather. Breaking two of them to pieces, she put them in her mouth and chewed.
Their wringing bitterness was in itself enough to wake her, without their other properties. She had chewed them earlier in the night, against the exhaustion that she had felt catching up with her while she worked. Gareth watched her apprehensively, his long face haggard within the straggly frame of his green-tipped hair, and she reflected that he must be almost as weary as she. Lines that had existed only as brief traces of passing expressions were etched there now, from his nostrils to the comers of his mouth, and others showed around his eyes when he took off his broken spectacles to rub the inner corners of the lids—lines that would deepen and settle into his manhood and his old age. As she ran her hands through the loosened cloud of her hair, she wondered what her own face looked like, or would look like after she did what she knew she must do.