Barbara Hambly - Dragonsbane 1 - Dragonsbane
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Dragon's Bane
Barbara Hambly
Copyright 1985 by 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
13
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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