She woke when the sun lay three-quarters down the sky toward the flinty crest of the ridge. The wind had shifted; the whole Vale smelled of sharp snow and pine needles from the high slopes. The air in the lengthening slaty shadows was cold and damp.
John was asleep, wrapped in every cloak and blanket in the camp. Gareth’s voice could be heard in the woods near the little stone fountain, tunelessly singing romantic lyrics of passionate love for the edification of the horses. Moving with her habitual quiet, Jenny laced up her bodice and put on her boots and her sheepskin jacket. She thought about eating something and decided not to. Food would break her concentration, and she felt the need of every fragment of strength and alertness that she could muster.
She paused for a moment, looking around her. The old, uneasy sensation of being watched returned to her, like a hand touching her elbow. But she sensed, also, the faint tingling of Morkeleb’s power in the back of her mind and knew that the dragon’s strength was returning far more quickly than that of the man he had almost slain.
She would have to act and act now, and the thought of it filled her with fear.
“Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” Caerdinn had said. Her awareness of how small her own powers were terrified her, knowing what it was against which she must pit them. So this, in the end, was what she had paid for John’s love, she told herself, with a little wry amusement. To go into a battle she could not hope to win. Involuntarily another part of her thought at once that at least it wasn’t John’s life, but her own, that would be forfeit, and she shook her head in wonderment at the follies of love. No wonder those with the power were warned against it, she thought.
As for the dragon, she had a sense, almost an instinct, of what she must do, alien to her and yet terrifyingly clear.
Her heart was hammering as she selected a scruffy plaid from the top of the pile over John. The thin breezes fluttered at its edges as she slung it around her; its colors faded into the muted hues of weed and stone as she made her way silently down the ridge once more and took the track for the Deep.
Morkeleb no longer lay in the Market Hall. She followed the scent of him through the massive inner doors and along the Grand Passage—a smell that was pungent but not unpleasant, unlike the burning, metallic reek of his poisons. The tiny echoes of her footfalls were like faroff water dripping in the silent vaults of the passage—she knew Morkeleb would hear them, lying upon his gold in the darkness. Almost, she thought, he would hear the pounding of her heart.
As Dromar had said, the dragon was laired in the Temple of Sarmendes, some quarter-mile along the passage. The Temple had been built for the use of the children of men and so had been wrought into the likeness of a room rather than a cave. From the chryselephantine doors Jenny looked about, her eyes piercing the absolute darkness there, seeing how the stalagmites that rose from the floor had been cut into pillars, and how walls had been built to conceal the uneven shape of the cavern’s native rock. The floor was smoothed all to one level; the statue of the god, with his lyre and his bow, had been sculpted of white marble from the royal quarries of Istmark, as had been his altar with its carved garlands. But none of this could conceal the size of the place, nor the enormous, irregular grandeur of its proportions. Above those modestly classical walls arched the ceiling, a maze of sinter and crystal that marked the place as nature’s work timidly homesteaded by man.
The smell of the dragon was thick here, though it was clean of offal or carrion. Instead the floor was heaped with gold, all the gold of the Deep, plates, holy vessels, reliquaries of forgotten saints and demigods, piled between the pillars and around the statues, tiny cosmetic pots smelling of balsam, candlesticks quivering with pendant pearls like aspen leaves in spring wind, cups whose rims flashed with the dark fire of jewels, a votive statue of Salemesse, the Lady of Beasts, three feet high and solid gold... All the things that gnomes or men had wrought of that soft and shining metal had been gathered there from the farthest tunnels of the Deep. The floor was like a beach with the packed coins that had spilled from their torn sacks, and through it gleamed the darkness of the floor, like water collected in hollows of the sand.
Morkeleb lay upon the gold, his vast wings folded along his sides, their tips crossed over his tail, black as coal and seeming to shine, his crystal eyes like lamps in the dark. The sweet, terrible singing that Jenny had felt so strongly had faded, but the air about him was vibrant with the unheard music.
“Morkeleb,” she said softly, and the word whispered back at her from the forest of glittering spikes overhead. She felt the silver eyes upon her and reached out, tentatively, to the dark maze of that mind.
Why gold? she asked. Why do dragons covet the gold of men?
It was not what she had meant to say to him, and she felt, under his coiled anger and suspicion, something else move.
What is that to you, wizard woman? What was it to me that I returned here to save your life? It would have served me and mine better to have let you die.
Why then did you not?
There were two answers. The one she gave him was, Because it was understood between us that if you gave me the way into the heart of the Deep, I should heal you and give you your life. But in that healing you gave me your name, Morkeleb the Black—and the name she spoke in her mind was the ribbon of music that was his true name, his essence; and she saw him flinch. They have said, Save a dragon, slave a dragon, and by your name you shall do as I bid you.
The surge of his anger against her was like a dark wave, and all along his sides the knifelike scales lifted a little, like a dog’s hackles. Around them in the blackness of the Temple, the gold seemed to whisper, picking up the groundswell of his wrath.
I am Morkeleb the Black. I am and will be slave to no one and nothing, least of all a human woman, mage though she may be. I do no bidding save my own.
The bitter weight of alien thoughts crushed down upon her, heavier than the darkness. But her eyes were a mage’s eyes, seeing in darkness; her mind held a kind of glowing illumination that it had not had before. She felt no fear of him now; a queer strength she had not known she possessed stirred in her. She whispered the magic of his name as she would have formed its notes upon her harp, in all its knotted complexities, and saw him shrink back a little. His razor claws stirred faintly in the gold.
By your name, Morkeleb the Black, she repeated, you shall do my bidding. And by your name, I tell you that you will do no harm, either to John Aversin, or to Prince Gareth, or to any other human being while you remain here in the south. When you are well enough to sustain the journey, you shall leave this place and return to your home.
Ire radiated from his scales like a heat, reflected back about him by the thrumming gold. She felt in it the iron pride of dragons, and their contempt for humankind, and also his furious grief at being parted from the hoard that he had so newly won. For a moment their souls met and locked, twisting together like snakes striving, fighting for advantage. The tide other strength rose in her, surging and sure, as if it drew life from the combat itself. Terror and exhilaration flooded her, like the tabat leaves, only far stronger, and she cast aside concern for the limitations other flesh and strove against him mind to mind, twisting at the glittering chain of his name.