The mail rings on the back of John’s gloves rattled sharply as he reached down, and she handed him up his harpoons. There were six of them, in a quiver on his back; the steel of their barbed shafts caught a slither of the early light, save for the ugly black that covered their points. The leather of the grips was firm and tough under her palms. Over his metal-patched doublet, John had pulled a chain mail shirt, and his face was framed in a coif of the same stuff. Without his spectacles and with his shaggy hair hidden beneath it, the bones of his face were suddenly prominent, showing what his features could look like in an old age he might never reach.
Jenny felt she wanted to speak to him, but there was nothing she could think of to say.
He gathered the reins in hand. “If the dragon comes out of the Gate before I reach it, I want the pair of you to leg it,” he said, his voice calm. “Get into cover as deep as you can, the higher up the ridge the better. Let the horses go if you can—there’s a chance the dragon will go after them first.” He did not add that by that time he would already be dead.
There was a momentary silence. Then he bent from the saddle and touched Jenny’s lips with his own. His felt, as they always did, surprisingly soft. They had spoken little, even last night; each had already been drawn into an armor of silence. It was something they both understood.
He reined away, looking across the Vale to the black eye of the Deep, and to the black thing waiting within. Osprey fiddle-footed again, catching John’s battle nerves; the open ground of Deeping seemed suddenly to stretch away into miles of enormous, broken plain. To Jenny’s eye, every tumbled wall looked as tall as the house it had once been, every uncovered cellar a gaping chasm. He would never cross in time, she thought.
Beside her, John leaned down again, this time to pat Osprey’s dappled neck encouragingly. “Osprey, old friend,” he said softly, “don’t spook on me now.”
He drove in his spurs, and the sharp crack of ironshod hooves as they shot forward was like the chip of distant lightning on a summer noon. Jenny took two steps down the loose, rocky slope after him, watching the gray horse and the pewter-dark shape of the man as they plunged through the labyrinth of gaping foundations, broken beams, standing water who knew how deep, slipping down drifts of charred wood chips and racing toward the open black mouth of the Gates. Her heart hammering achingly in her chest, Jenny stretched her mageborn senses toward the Gate, straining to hear. The cold, tingling air seemed to breathe with the dragon’s mind. Somewhere in that darkness was the slithery drag of metallic scales on stone...
There was no way to call the image of the dragon in her scrying-stone, but she sat down suddenly where she was on the loose, charred rubble of the slope and pulled the slip of dirty-white crystal upon its chain from her jacket pocket. She heard Gareth call her name from the top of the slope, but she vouchsafed neither answer nor glance. Across the Vale, Osprey leaped the split ruin of the demolished Gates on the granite steps, cool blue shadows falling over him and his rider like a cloak as the Gate swallowed them up.
There was a flick and a gleam, as the wan sunlight caught in the facets of the jewel. Then Jenny caught a confused impression of hewn stone walls that could have encompassed the entire palace of Bel, a cavern-ceiling bristling with stone teeth from which old lamp-chains hung down into vast, cobalt spaces of air... black doorways piercing the walls, and the greatest of them opening opposite....
Jenny cupped her hands around the jewel, trying to see into its depths, straining past the curtains of illusion that covered the dragon from her sight. She thought she saw the flash of diffuse sunlight on chain mail and saw Osprey trip on the charred debris of blackened bones and spilled coins and half-burned poles that littered the floor. She saw John pull him out of the stumble and saw the gleam of the harpoon in his hand... Then something spurted from the inner doors, like a drench of thrown bathwater, splattering viscously into the dry ash of the floor, searing upward in a curtain of fire.
There was a darkness in the crystal and in that darkness, two burning silver lamps.
Nothing existed around her, not the cool shift of the morning air, nor the sunlight wanning her ankles in her buckskin boots where her heels rested on the chopped-up slope of gravel and weeds, not the wintry smell of water and stone from below, nor the small noises of the restless horses above. Cupped in her hands, the edges of the crystal seemed to burn in white light, but its heart was dark; through that darkness only fragmentary images came—a sense of something moving that was vast and dark, the swinging curve of John’s body as he flung a harpoon, and the cloudy swirls of blinding fumes.
In some way she knew Osprey had gone down, smitten by the stroke of the dragon’s tail. She had a brief impression of John on his knees, his eyes red and swollen from the acrid vapors that filled the hall, aiming for another throw. Something like a wing of darkness covered him. She saw flame again and, as a queer, detached image, three harpoons lying like scattered jackstraws in the middle of a puddle of blackened and steaming slime. Something within her turned to ice; there was only darkness and movement in the darkness, and then John again, blood pouring through the rips in his mail shirt, staring up at a towering shape of glittering shadow, his sword in his hand.
Blackness swallowed the crystal. Jenny was aware that her hands were shaking, her whole body hurting with a pain that radiated from a seed of cold under her breastbone, her throat a bundle of twisted wires. She thought blindly, John, remembering him striding with graceful insouciance into Zyerne’s dining room, his armor of outrageousness protecting him from Zyerne’s claws; she remembered the flash of autumn daylight on his specs as he stood ankle-deep in pig muck at the Hold, reaching up his hands to help her dismount.
She could not conceive of what life would be like without that fleeting, triangular grin.
Then somewhere in her mind she heard him call out to her: Jenny...
She found him lying just beyond the edge of the trapezoid of light that fell through the vast square of the Gates. She had left Moon Horse outside, tossing her head in fear at the acrid reek of the dragon that pervaded all that end of the Vale. Jenny’s own heart was pounding, so that it almost turned her sick; all the way across the ruins of Deeping she had been waiting for the dark shape of the dragon to emerge from the Gates.
But nothing had come forth. The silence within the darkness was worse than any sound could have been.
After the brightness of the Vale, the blue vaults of the Market Hall seemed almost black. The air was murky with vapors that diffused what little light there was. The trapped fumes burned her eyes and turned her dizzy, mixed with the smoke of burning and the heavy reek of poisoned slag. Even with a wizard’s sight, it took Jenny’s eyes a moment to accustom themselves. Then sickness came over her, as if the blood that lay spread everywhere had come from her body, rather than John’s.
He lay with his face hidden by his outflung arm, the mail coif dragged back and the hair beneath it matted with blood where it had not been singed away. Blood lay in a long, inky trail behind him, showing where he had crawled after the fight was over, past the carcass of the horse Osprey, leading like a sticky path to the vast, dark bulk of the dragon.
The dragon lay still, like a shining mound of obsidian knives. Supine, it was a little higher than her waist, a glittering blacksnake nearly forty feet long, veiled in the white smoke of its poisons and the darkness of its magic, harpoons sticking from it like darts. One foreleg lay stretched out toward John, as if with its last strength it had reached to tear him, and the great talon lay like a skeleton hand in a pool of leaked black blood. The atmosphere all about it seemed heavy, filled with a sweet, clear singing that Jenny thought was as much within her skull as outside of it. It was a song with words she could not understand; a song about stars and cold and the long, ecstatic plunge through darkness. The tune was halffamiliar, as if she had heard a phrase of it once, long ago, and had carried it since in her dreams.