Barbara Hambly - Dragonsbane 1 - Dragonsbane

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Dragon's Bane

Barbara Hambly

CHAPTER I

BANDITS OFTEN LAY in wait in the ruins of the old

town at the fourways—Jenny Waynest thought there were

three of them this morning.

She was not sure any more whether it was magic which

told her this, or simply the woodcraftiness and instinct

for the presence of danger that anyone developed who

had survived to adulthood in the Winterlands. But as she

drew rein short of the first broken walls, where she knew

she would still be concealed by the combination of autumn

fog and early morning gloom beneath the thicker trees of

the forest, she noted automatically that the horse drop-

pings in the sunken clay of the roadbed were fresh,

untouched by the frost that edged the leaves around them.

She noted, too, the silence in the ruins ahead; no coney's

foot rustled the yellow spill of broomsedge cloaking the

hill slope where the old church had been, the church sacred

to the Twelve Gods beloved of the old Kings. She thought

she smelled the smoke of a concealed fire near the remains

of what had been a crossroads inn, but honest men would

have gone there straight and left a track in the nets of

dew that covered the weeds all around. Jenny's white

2 Barbara Hambly

mare Moon Horse pricked her long ears at the scent of

other beasts, and Jenny wind-whispered to herfor silence,

smoothing the raggedy mane against the long neck. But

she had been looking for all those signs before she saw

them.

She settled into stillness in the protective cloak of fog

and shadow, like a partridge blending with the brown of

the woods. She was a little like a partridge herself, dark

and small and nearly invisible in the dull, random plaids

of the northlands; a thin, compactly built woman, tough

as the roots of moorland heather. After a moment of

silence, she wove her magic into a rope of mist and cast

it along the road toward the nameless ruins of the town.

It was something she had done even as a child, before

the old wander-mage Caerdinn had taught her the ways

of power. All her thirty-seven years, she had lived in the

Winteriands—she knew the smells of danger. The late-

lingering birds of autumn, thrushes and blackbirds, should

have been waking in the twisted brown mats of ivy that

half-hid the old inn's walls—they were silent. After a

moment, she caught the scent of horses, and the ranker,

dirtier stench of men.

One bandit would be in the stumpy ruin of the old tower

that commanded the south and eastward roads, part of

the defenses of the ruined town left from when the pros-

perity of the King's law had given it anything to defend.

They always hid there. A second, she guessed, was behind

the walls of the old inn. After a moment she sensed the

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third, watching the crossroads from a yellow thicket of

seedy tamarack. Her magic brought the stink of their souls

to her, old greeds and the carrion-bone memories of some

cherished rape or murder that had given a momentary

glow of power to lives largely divided between the giving

and receiving of physical pain. Having lived all her life

in the Winteriands, she knew that these men could scarcely

help being what they were; she had to put aside both her

Dragonsbane 3

hatred of them, and her pity for them, before she could

braid the spells that she laid upon their minds.

Her concentration deepened further. She stirred judi-

ciously at that compost of memories, whispering to their

blunted minds of the bored sleepiness of men who have

watched too long. Unless every illusion and Limitation

was wrought correctly, they would see her when she

moved. Then she loosened her halberd in its holster upon

her saddle-tree, settled her sheepskin jacket a little more

closely about her shoulders and, with scarcely breath or

movement, urged Moon Horse forward toward the ruins.

The man in the tower she never saw at all, from first

to last. Through the browning red leaves of a screen of

hawthorn, she glimpsed two horses tethered behind a

ruined wall near the inn, their breath making plumes of

white in the dawn cold; a moment later she saw the bandit

crouching behind the crumbling wall, a husky man in greasy

old leathers. He had been watching the road, but started

suddenly and cursed; looking down, he began scratching

his crotch with vigor and annoyance but no particular

surprise. He did not see Jenny as she ghosted past. The

third bandit, sitting his rawboned black horse between a

broken comer of a wall and a spinney of raggedy birches,

simply stared out ahead of him, lost in the daydreams she

had sent.

She was directly in front of him when a boy's voice

shouted from down the southward road, "LOOK OUT!"

Jenny whipped her halberd clear of its rest as the bandit

woke with a start. He saw her and roared a curse. Periph-

erally Jenny was aware of hooves pounding up the road

toward her; the other traveler, she thought with grim

annoyance, whose well-meant warning had snapped the

man from his trance. As the bandit bore down upon her,

she got a glimpse of a young man riding out of the mist

full-pelt, clearly intent upon rescue.

The bandit was armed with a short sword, but swung

4 Barbara Hambly

at her with the flat of it, intending to unhorse her without

damaging her too badly to rape later. She feinted with the

halberd to bring his weapon up, then dipped the long blade

on the pole's end down under his guard. Her legs clinched

to Moon Horse's sides to take the shock as the weapon

knifed through the man's belly. The leather was tough,

but there was no metal underneath. Shs ripped the blade

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clear as the man doubled up around it, screaming and

clawing; both horses danced and veered with the smell

of the hot, spraying blood. Before the man hit the muddy

bed of the road, Jenny had wheeled her horse and was

riding to the aid of her prospective knight-errant, who

was engaged in a sloppy, desperate battle with the bandit

who had been concealed behind the ruined outer wall.

Her rescuer was hampered by his long cloak of ruby

red velvet, which had got entangled with the basketwork

hilt of his jeweled longsword. His horse was evidently

better trained and more used to battle than he was: the

maneuverings of the big liver-bay gelding were the only

reason the boy hadn't been killed outright. The bandit,

who had gotten himself mounted at the boy's first cry of

warning, had driven them back into the hazel thickets that

grew along the tumbled stones of the inn wall, and, as

Jenny kicked Moon Horse into the fray, the boy's trailing

cloak hung itself up on the low branches and jerked its

wearer ignominiously out of the saddle with the horse's

next swerve.

Using her right hand as the fulcrum of a swing. Jenny

swept the halberd's blade at the bandit's sword arm. The

man veered his horse to face her; she got a glimpse of

piggy, close-set eyes under the rim of a dirty iron cap.

Behind her she could hear her previous assailant still

screaming. Evidently her current opponent could as well,

for he ducked the first slash and swiped at Moon Horse's

face to cause the mare to shy, then spurred past Jenny

and away up the road, willing neither to face a weapon

Dragonsbane 5

that so outreached his own, nor to stop for his comrade

who had done so.

There was a brief crashing in the thickets of briar as

the man who had been concealed in the tower fled into

the raw mists, then silence, save for the dying bandit's

hoarse, bubbling sobs.

Jenny dropped lightly from Moon Horse's back. Her

young rescuer was still thrashing in the bushes like a stoat

in a sack, half-strangled on his bejeweled cloak strap. She

used the hook on the back of the halberd's blade to twist

the long court-sword from his hand, then stepped in to

pull the muffling folds of velvet aside. He struck at her

with his hands, like a man swatting at wasps. Then he

seemed to see her for the first time and stopped, staring

up at her with wide, myopic gray eyes.

After a long moment of surprised stillness, he cleared

his throat and unfastened the chain of gold and rubies that

held the cloak under his chin. "Er—thank you, my lady,"

he gasped in a slightly winded voice, and got to his feet.

Though Jenny was used to people being taller than she,

this young man was even more so than most. "I—uh—"

His skin was as fine-textured and fair as his hair, which

was already, despite his youth, beginning to thin away

toward early baldness. He couldn't have been more than

eighteen, with a natural awkwardness increased tenfold

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by the difficult task of thanking the intended object of a

gallant defense for saving his life.

"My profoundest gratitude," he said, and performed a

supremely graceful Dying Swan, the like of which had

not been seen in the Winteriands since the nobles of the

Kings had departed in the wake of the retreating royal

armies. "I am Gareth of Magloshaldon, a traveler upon

errantry in these lands, and I wish to extend my humblest

expressions of..."

Jenny shook her head and stilled him with an upraised

hand. "Wait here," she said, and turned away.

6 Barbara Humbly

Puzzled, the boy followed her.

The first bandit who had attacked her still lay in the

clay muck of the roadbed. The soaking blood had turned

it into a mess of heel gouges, strewn with severed entrails;

the stink was appalling. The man was still groaning weakly.

Against the matte pallor of the foggy morning, the scarlet

of the blood stood out shockingly bright.

Jenny sighed, feeling suddenly cold and weary and

unclean, looking upon what she had done and knowing

what it was up to her yet to do. She knelt beside the dying

man, drawing the stillness of her magic around her again.

She was aware of Gareth's approach, his boots threshing

through the dew-soaked bindweed in a hurried rhythm

that broke when he tripped on his sword. She felt a tired

stirring of anger at him for having made this necessary.

Had he not cried out, both she and this poor, vicious,

dying brute would each have gone their ways...

... And he would doubtless have killed Gareth after

she passed. And other travelers besides.

She had long since given up trying to unpick wrong

from right, present should from future if. If there was a

pattern to all things, she had given up thinking that it was

simple enough to lie within her comprehension. Still, her

soul felt filthy within her as she put her hands to the dying

man's clammy, greasy temples, tracing the proper runes

while she whispered the death-spells. She felt the life go

out of him and tasted the bile of self-loathing in her mouth.

Behind her, Gareth whispered, "You—he's—he's

dead."

She got to her feet, shaking the bloody dirt from her

skirts. "I could not leave him for the weasels and foxes,"

she replied, starting to walk away. She could hear the

small carrion-beasts already, gathering at the top of the

bank above the misty slot of the road, drawn to the blood-

smell and waiting impatiently for the killer to abandon

her prey. Her voice was brusque—she had always hated

Dragonsbdne 7

the death-spells. Having grown up in a land without law,

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she had killed her first man when she was fourteen, and

six since, not counting the dying she had helped from life

as the only midwife and healer from the Gray Mountains

to the sea. It never got easier.

She wanted to be gone from the place, but the boy

Gareth put a staying hand on her arm, looking from her

to the corpse in a kind of nauseated fascination. He had

never seen death, she thought. At least, not in its raw

form. The pea green velvet of his travel-stained doublet,

the gold stampwork of his boots, the tucked embroidery

of his ruffled lawn shirt, and the elaborate, feathered

crestings of his green-tipped hair all proclaimed him for

a courtier. All things, even death, were doubtless done

with a certain amount of style where he came from.

He gulped. "You're.—you're a witch!"

One corner other mouth moved slightly; she said, "So

I am."

He stepped back from her in fear, then staggered,

clutching at a nearby sapling for support. She saw then

that among the decorative slashings of his doublet sleeve

was an uglier opening, the shirt visible through it dark

and wet. "I'll be fine," he protested faintly, as she moved

to support him. "I just need..." He made a fumbling effort

to shake free of her hand and walk, his myopic gray eyes

peering at the ankle-deep drifts of moldering leaves that

lined the road.

"What you need is to sit down." She led him away to

a broken boundary stone and forced him to do so and

unbuttoned the diamond studs that held the sleeve to the

body of the doublet. The wound did not look deep, but

it was bleeding badly. She pulled loose the leather thongs

that bound the wood-black knots of her hair and used

them as a tourniquet above the wound. He winced and

gasped and tried to loosen it as she tore a strip from the

hem of her shift for a bandage, so that she slapped at his

Barbara Hambly

fingers like a child's. Then, a moment later, he tried to

get up again. "I have to find..."

"I'll find them," Jenny said firmly, knowing what it

was that he sought. She finished binding his wound and

walked back to the tangle of hazel bushes where Gareth

and the bandit had struggled. The frosty daylight glinted

on a sharp reflection among the leaves. The spectacles

she found there were bent and twisted out of shape, the

bottom of one round lens decorated by a star-fracture.

Flicking the dirt and wetness from them, she carried them

back.

"Now," she said, as Gareth fumbled them on with hands

shaking from weakness and shock. "You need that arm

looked to. I can take you..."

"My lady, I've no time." He looked up at her, squinting

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a little against the increasing brightness of the sky behind

her head. "I'm on a quest, a quest of terrible importance."

"Important enough to risk losing your arm if the wound

turns rotten?"

As if such things could not happen to him, did she only

have the wits to realize it, he went on earnestly, "I'll be

all right, I tell you. I am seeking Lord Aversin the Dra-

gonsbane. Thane of Alyn Hold and Lord of Wyr, the

greatest knight ever to have ridden the Winterlands. Have

you heard of him hereabouts? Tall as an angel, handsome

as song... His fame has spread through the southlands

the way the floodwaters spread in the spring, the noblest

of chevaliers... I must find Alyn Hold, before it is too

late."

Jenny sighed, exasperated. "So you must," she said.

"It is to Alyn Hold that I am going to take you."

The squinting eyes got round as the boy's mouth fell

open. "To—to Alyn Hold? Really? It's near here?"

"It's the nearest place where we can get your arm seen

to," she said. "Can you ride?"

Had he been dying, she thought, amused, he would

Dragonsbane 9

still have sprung to his feet as he did. "Yes, of course.

I—do you know Lord Aversin, then?"

Jenny was silent for a moment. Then, softly, she said,

"Yes. Yes, I know him."

She whistled up the horses, the tall white Moon Horse

and the big liver-bay gelding, whose name, Gareth said,

was Battlehammer. In spite of his exhaustion and the pain

of his roughly bound wound, Gareth made a move to offer

her totally unnecessary assistance in mounting. As they

reined up over the ragged stone slopes to avoid the corpse

in its rank-smelling puddles of mud, Gareth asked, "If—

if you're a witch, my lady, why couldn't you have fought

them with magic instead of with a weapon? Thrown fire

at them, or turned them into frogs, or struck them blind..."

She had struck them blind, in a sense, she thought

wryly—at least until he shouted.

But she only said, "Because I cannot."

"For reasons of honor?" he asked dubiously. "Because

there are some situations in which honor cannot apply..."

"No." She glanced sidelong at him through the aston-

ishing curtains of her loosened hair. "It is just that my

magic is not that strong."

And she nudged her horse into a quicker walk, passing

into the vaporous shadows of the forest's bare, over-

hanging boughs.

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Even after all these years of knowing it, she found the

admission still stuck in her throat. She had come to terms

with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius

in the single thing she had ever wanted. The most she had

ever been able to do was to pretend that she accepted it,

as she pretended now.

Ground fog curled around the feet of the horses; through

the clammy vapors, tree roots thrust from the roadbanks

like the arms of half-buried corpses. The air here felt

dense and smelled of mold, and now and then, from the

10 Barbara Hambly

woods above them, came the furtive crackle of dead leaves,

as if the trees plotted among themselves in the fog.

"Did you—did you see him slay the dragon?" Gareth

asked, after they had ridden in silence for some minutes.

"Would you tell me about it? Aversin is the only living

Dragonsbane—the only man who has slain a dragon. There

are ballads about him everywhere, about his courage and

his noble deeds... That's my hobby. Ballads, I mean, the

ballads of Dragonsbanes, like Selkythar the White back

in the reign of Ennyta the Good and Antara Warlady and

her brother, during the Kinwars. They say her brother

slew..." By the way he caught himself up Jenny guessed

he could have gone on about the great Dragonsbanes of

the past for hours, only someone had told him not to bore

people with the subject. "I've always wanted to see such

a thing—a true Dragonsbane—a glorious combat. His

renown must cover him like a golden mantle."

And, rather to her surprise, he broke into a light, wav-

ery tenor:

Riding up the hillside gleaming,

Like flame in the golden sunlight streaming;

Sword of steel strong in hand,

Wind-swift hooves spurning land,

Tall as an angel, stallion-strong,

Stem as a god, bright as song...

In the dragon's shadow the maidens wept,

Fair as lilies in darkness kept.

'I know him afar, so tall is he,

His plumes as bright as the rage of the sea,'

Spake she to her sister, 'fear no ill...'

Jenny looked away, feeling something twist inside inside

her at the memory of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

She remembered as if it were yesterday instead of ten

Dragonsbane 11

years ago the high-up flash of gold in the wan northern

sky, the plunge of fire and shadow, the boys and girls

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screaming on the dancing floor at Great Toby. They were

memories she knew should have been tinted only with

horror; she was aware that she should have felt only glad-

ness at the dragon's death. But stronger than the horror,

the taste of nameless grief and desolation came back to

her from those times, with the metallic stench of the drag-

on's blood and the singing that seemed to shiver the sear-

ing air...

Her heart felt sick within her. Coolly, she said, "For

one thing, of the two children who were taken by the

dragon, John only managed to get the boy out alive. I

think the girl had been killed by the fames in the dragon's

lair. It was hard to tell from the state of the body. And if

she hadn't been dead, I still doubt they'd have been in

much condition to make speeches about how John looked,

even if he had come riding straight up the hill—which of

course he didn't."

"He didn't?" She could almost hear the shattering of

some image, nursed in the boy's mind.

"Of course not. If he had, he would have been killed

immediately."

"Then how..."

"The only way he could think of to deal with something

that big and that heavily armored. He had me brew the

most powerful poison that I knew of, and he dipped his

harpoons in that."

"PoisonT' Such foulness clearly pierced him to the

heart. "Harpoons? Not a sword at all?"

Jenny shook her head, not knowing whether to feel

amusement at the boy's disappointed expression, exas-

peration at the way he spoke of what had been for her

and hundreds of others a time of sleepless, nightmare

horror, or only a kind of elder-sisterly compassion for the

naivete that would consider taking a three-foot steel blade

12 Barbara Humbly

against twenty-five feet of spiked and flaming death. "No,"

she only said, "John came at it from the overhang of the

gully in which it was laired—it wasn't a cave, by the way;

there are no caves that large in these hills. He slashed its

wings first, so that it couldn't take to the air and fall on

him from above. He used poisoned harpoons to slow it

down, but he finished it off with an ax."

"An ax?!" Gareth cried, utterly aghast. "That's—that's

the most horrible thing I've ever heard! Where is the glory

in that? Where is the honor? It's like hamstringing your

opponent in a duel! It's cheating!"

"He wasn't fighting a duel," Jenny pointed out. "If a

dragon gets into the air, the man fighting it is lost."

"But it's dishonorable!" the boy insisted passionately,

as if that were some kind of clinching argument.

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"It might have been, had he been fighting a man who

had honorably challenged him—something John has never

been known to do in his life. Even fighting bandits, it pays

to strike from behind when one is outnumbered. As the

only representative of the King's law in these lands, John

generally is outnumbered. A dragon is upward oftweJity

feet long and can kill a man with a single blow of its tail.

You said yourself," she added with a smile, "that there

are situations in which honor does not apply."

"But that's different!" the boy said miserably and lapsed

into disillusioned silence.

The ground beneath the horses' feet was rising; the

vague walls of the misty tunnel through which they rode

were ending. Beyond, the silvery shapes of the round-

backed hills could be dimly seen. As they came clear of

the trees, the winds fell upon them, clearing the mists and

nipping their clothes and faces like ill-trained dogs. Shak-

ing the blowing handfuls of her hair out other eyes. Jenny

got a look at Gareth's face as he gazed about him at the

moors. It wore a look of shock, disappointment, and puz-

Dragonsbane

Scale and Structure of a Dragon

(From John Aversin's notes)

1) Mane structure and spikes at joints are thicker than

shown. A bone "shield" extends from the back of the

skull beneath the mane to protect the nape of the

neck.

2) Golden Dragon ofWyr measured approx. 27' of which

12' was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than

50'

14 Barbara Hambly

zlement, as if he had never thought to find his hero in this

bleak and trackless world of moss, water, and stone.

As for Jenny, this barren world stirred her strangely.

The moors stretched nearly a hundred miles, north to the

ice-locked shores of the ocean; she knew every break in

the granite landscape, every black peat-beck and every

hollow where the heather grew thick in the short highlands

summers; she had traced the tracks of hare and fox and

kitmouse in three decades of winter snows. Old Caerdinn,

half-mad through poring over books and legends of the

days of the Kings, could remember the time when the

Kings had withdrawn their troops and their protection

from the Winteriands to fight the wars for the lordship of

the south; he had grown angry with her when she had

spoken of the beauty she found in those wild, silvery

fastnesses of rock and wind. But sometimes his bitterness

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stirred in Jenny, when she worked to save the life of an

ailing village child whose illness lay beyond her small

skills and there was nothing in any book she had read that

might tell her how to save that life; or when the Iceriders

came raiding down over the floe-ice in the brutal winters,

burning the barns that cost such labor to raise, and slaugh-

tering the cattle that could only be bred up from such

meager stock. However, her own lack of power had taught

her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties

and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death.

It was nothing she could have explained; not to Caerdinn,

nor to this boy, nor to anyone else.

At length she said softly, "John would never have gone

after the dragon, Gareth, had he not been forced to it.

But as Thane of Alyn Hold, as Lord of Wyr, he is the

only man in the Winteriands trained to and living by the

arts of war. It is for this that he is the lord. He fought

the dragon as he would have fought a wolf, as a vermin

which was harming his people. He had no choice."

"But a dragon isn't vermin!" Gareth protested. "It is

Dragonsbane 15

the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the man-

hood of a true knight. You must be wrong! He couldn't

have fought it simply—simply out of duty. He can't have!"

There was a desperation to believe in his voice that

made Jenny glance over at him curiously. "No," she agreed.

"A dragon isn't vermin. And this one was truly beautiful."

Her voice softened at the recollection, even through the

horror-haze of death and fear, of its angular, alien splen-

dor. "Not golden, as your song calls it, but a sort of amber,

grading to brownish smoke along its back and ivory upon

its belly. The patterns of the scales on its sides were like

the beadwork on a pair of slippers, like woven irises, all

shades of purple and blue. Its head was like a flower, too;

its eyes and maw were surrounded with scales like colored

ribbons, with purple homs and tufts of white and black

far, and with antennae like a crayfish's tipped with bobs

of gems. It was butcher's work to slay it."

They rounded the shoulder of a tor. Below them, like

a break in the cold granite landscape, spread a broken

line of brown fields where the mists lay like stringers of

dirty wool among the stubble of harvest. A little farther

along the track lay a hamlet, disordered and trashy under

a bluish smear of woodsmoke, and the stench of the place

rose on the whipping ice-winds: the lye-sting of soap being

boiled; an almost-visible murk of human and animal waste;

the rotted, nauseating sweetness of brewing beer. The

barking of dogs rose to them like churchbells in the air.

In the midst of it all a stumpy tower stood, the tumble-

down remnant of some larger fortification.

"No," said Jenny softly, "the dragon was a beautiful

creature, Gareth. But so was the girl it carried away to

its lair and killed. She was fifteen—John wouldn't let her

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Barbara Hambly - Dragonsbane 1 - Dragonsbane

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