If there was anything worse than the pain of despair, she thought, it was the pain of hope. At least despair is restful. Her own heart was hammering as she brushed aside the russet hair from John’s forehead, almost black-looking now against the bloodless flesh. Her mind was racing ahead, ticking off the remedies Mab had spoken of: distillations to slow and strengthen the thready heartbeat; salves to promote the healing of the flesh; and philters to counteract poison and give him back the blood he had lost. There would be spell-books, too, she thought, hidden in the Places of Healing, words with which to bind the soul to the flesh, until the flesh itself could recover. She could find them, she told herself desperately, she must. But the knowledge of what was at stake lay on her heart like stones. For a moment she felt so tired that she almost wished for his death, because it would require no further striving from her and threaten her with no further failure.
Holding his icy hands, she slid for a moment into the outer fringes of the healing trance and whispered to him by his inner name. But it was as if she called at the head of a descending trail along which he had long since passed—there was no answer.
But there was something else. In her trance she heard it, a soft touch of sound that twisted her heart with fright—the slur of scales on rock, the shiver of alien music.
Her eyes opened; she found herself shaking and cold.
The dragon was alive.
“Jenny?” Gareth came nattering over to her side, his hands full of creased bits of dirty papyrus. “I found them, but—but the Places of Healing aren’t on them.” His eyes were filled with worry behind the cracked, crazy specs. “I’ve looked...”
Jenny took them from his hand with fingers that shook. In the firelight she could make out passages, caverns, rivers, all marked in Dromar’s strong, runic hand, and the blank spots, unmarked and unlabeled. The affair of the gnomes.
Anger wrenched at her, and she threw the maps from her. “Damn Dromar and his secrets,” she whispered viciously. “Of course the Places of Healing are the heart of the Deep that they all swear by!”
“But—” Gareth stammered weakly. “Can you—can you find them anyway?”
Fury welled up in her, of hope thwarted, first by fear and now by one gnome’s stubbornness, like molten rock pouring through the cracks of exhaustion in her soul. “In those warrens?” she demanded. For a moment anger, weariness, and the knowledge of the dragon claimed her, tearing at her so that she could have screamed and called down the lightning to rive apart the earth.
As Zyerne did, she told herself, fighting for calm. She closed her fists, one around the other, and pressed her lips against them, willing the rage and the fear to pass; and when they passed, there was nothing left. It was as if the unvoiced scream had burned everything out of her and left only a well of dark and unnatural calm, a universe deep.
Gareth was still looking at her, his eyes pleading. She said quietly, “Maybe. Mab spoke of the way. I may be able to reason it out.” Mab had also said that one false step would condemn her to a death by starvation, wandering in darkness.
Like an answer, she knew at once what John would have said to that—God’s Grandmother, Jen, the dragon’ll eat you before you get a chance to starve.
Trust John, she thought, to make me laugh at a time like this.
She got to her feet, chilled to the bone and feeling a hundred years old, and walked to the packs once more. Gareth trailed along after her, hugging his crimson cloak about himself for warmth and chattering on about one thing and another; locked in that strange stasis of calm, Jenny scarcely heard.
It was only as she slung her big satchel about her shoulder and picked up her halberd that he seemed to feel her silence. “Jenny,” he said doubtfully, catching the edge of her plaid. “Jenny—the dragon is dead, isn’t it? I mean, the poison did work, didn’t it? It must have, if you were able to get John out of there...”
“No,” Jenny said quietly. She wondered a little at the weird silence within her; she had felt more fear listening for the Whisperers in the Woods of Wyr than she did now. She started to move off toward the darkness of the shadow-drowned ruins. Gareth ran around in front of her and caught her by the arms.
“But—that is—how long...”
She shook her head. “Too long, almost certainly.” She put her hand on his wrist to move him aside. Having made up her mind what she must do, she wanted it over with, though she knew she would never succeed.
Gareth swallowed hard, his thin face working in the low ruby light of the fire. “I—I’ll go,” he volunteered shakily. “Tell me what I should look for, and I...”
For an instant, laughter threatened to crack all her hard-won resolve—not laughter at him, but at the wan gallantry that impelled him, like the hero of a ballad, to take her place. But he would not have understood how she loved him for the offer, absurd as it was; and if she began to laugh she would cry, and that weakness she knew she could not now afford. So she only stood on her toes and pulled his shoulders down so that she could kiss his soft, thin cheek. “Thank you, Gareth,” she murmured. “But I can see in the darkness, and you cannot, and I know what I seek.”
“Really,” he persisted, torn visibly between relief at her refusal, awareness that she was in fact far better suited than he for the task, a lifetime of chivalric precept, and a very real desire to protect her from harm.
“No,” she said gently. “Just see that John stays warm. If I don’t come back...” Her voice faltered at the knowledge of what lay before her—the death by the dragon, or the death within the maze. She forced strength into her words. “Do what seems best to you, but don’t try to move him too soon.”
The admonition was futile, and she knew it. She tried to remember Mab’s words regarding the lightless labyrinths of the Deep and they slid from her mind like a fistful of water, leaving only the recollection of the shining wheels of diamond that were the dragon’s watching eyes. But she had to reassure Gareth; and while John breathed, she knew she could never have remained in camp.
She squeezed Gareth’s hand and withdrew from him. Hitching her plaids higher on her shoulder, she turned toward the shadowy trails through the Vale and the dark bulk of Nast Wall that loomed against a sullen and pitchy sky. Her final glimpse of John was of the last glow of the dying fire that outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness.
Long before she reached the Great Gates of the Deep, Jenny was aware of the singing. As she crossed the frostskimmed stones of the ruins, bled of all their daytime color by the feeble wash of the moonlight, she felt it—a hunger, a yearning, and a terrifying beauty, far beyond her comprehension. It intruded into her careful piecing together of those fragmentary memories of Mab’s remarks about the Places of Healing, broke even into her fears for John. It seemed to float around her in the air, and yet she knew that it could only be heard by her; it shivered in her bones, down to her very finger ends. When she stood in the Gates with the blackness of the Market Hall lying before her and her own shadow a diffuse smudge on the scuffed and blood-gummed refuse of the floor, it was almost overwhelming.
There was no sound to it, but its rhythm called her blood. Braided images that she could neither completely sense nor wholly understand twisted through her consciousness—knots of memory, of starry darkness that sunlight had never seen, of the joyous exhaustion of physical love whose modes and motives were strange to her, and of mathematics and curious relationships between things that she had never known were akin. It was stronger and very different from the singing that had filled the gully when the Golden Dragon of Wyr lay gasping its last. There was a piled strength in it of years lived fully and of patterns comprehended across unknowable gulfs of time.
The dragon was invisible in the darkness. She heard the soft scrape of his scales and guessed him to be lying across the inner doors of the Market Hall, that led to the Grand Passage and so into the Deep. Then the silver lamps of his eyes opened and seemed to glow softly in the reflected moonlight, and in her mind the singing flowed and intensified its colors into the vortex of a white core. In that core words formed.