Dragon's Bane Read online

  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

  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

  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

  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,

  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

  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