Hooves clopped behind her on the charred and broken flagstones. She looked back and saw John, ashen under the stubble of beard, still somehow upright in Cow’s saddle. He studied the Vale below them with his usual cool expressionlessness. “Zyerne out there?” he asked, and Jenny shook her head.
“Perhaps I hurt her too badly. Perhaps she’s only remaining at the Palace to gather other forces to send against us.”
“She always did like her killing to be done by others. How long will your spells hold them?”
“Not long,” Jenny said doubtfully. “We have to hold this gate here, John. If they’re from Deeping, many of them will know the first levels of the Deep. There are four or five ways out of the Market Hall. If we retreat further in, we’ll be flanked.”
“Aye.” He scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully. “What’s wrong with just letting them in? We could hide up somewhere—once they got to the Temple of Sarmendes with all that gold, I doubt they’d waste much energy looking for us.”
Jenny hesitated for a moment, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “If they were an ordinary mob, I’d say yes, but—Zyerne wants us dead. If she cannot break and overwhelm my mind with her magic, she’s not going to give up before she has destroyed my body. There are enough of them that would keep hunting us, and we can’t take a horse into the deeper tunnels to carry you; without one, we’d never be able to move swiftly enough to avoid them. We’d be trapped in a cul-de-sac and slaughtered. No, if we’re to hold them, it has to be here.”
“Right.” He nodded. “Can we help you?”
She had returned her attention to the angry snarl of moving figures out in the pale ruins. Over her shoulder, she said, “You can’t even help yourself.”
“I know that,” he agreed equably. “But that wasn’t my question, love. Look...” He pointed. “That bloke there’s figured out the way. Here they come. Gaw, they’re like ants.”
Jenny said nothing, but felt a shiver pass through her as she saw the trickle of attackers widen into a stream.
Gareth came up beside them, leading Battlehammer; Jenny whispered to the big horse and turned him loose down the steps. Her mind was already turning inward upon itself, digging at the strength in the exhausted depths of her spirit and body. John, Gareth, and the slender girl in the white rags of a Court gown, clinging to Gareth’s arm, were becoming mere wraiths to her as her soul spiraled down into a single inner vortex, like the singleminded madness that comes before childbearing—nothing else existed but herself, her power, and what she must do.
Her hands pressed to the cold rock of the gate pillar, and she felt that she drew fire and strength from the stone itself and from the mountain beneath her feet and above her head—drew it from the air and the darkness that surrounded her. She felt the magic surge into her veins like a reined whirlwind of compressed lightning. Its power frightened her, for she knew it was greater than her body would bear, yet she could afford no Limitation upon these spells. It was thus, she knew, with dragons, but her body was not a dragon’s.
She was aware of John reining Cow sharply back away from her, as if frightened; Gareth and Trey had retreated already. But her mind was out in the pale light of the steps, looking down over Deeping, contemplating in leisurely timelessness the men and women running through the crumbled walls of the ruins. She saw each one of them with the cool exactness of a dragon’s eyes, not only how they were dressed, but the composition of their souls through the flesh they wore. Bond she saw distinctly, urging them on with a sword in his hand, his soul eaten through with abcesses like termite-riddled wood.
The forerunners hit the cracked pavement and dust of the square before the gates. Like the chirp of an insect in a wall, she heard Gareth nattering, “What can we do? We have to help her!” as she dispassionately gathered the lightning in her hands.
“Put that down,” John’s voice said, suddenly weak and bleached. “Get ready to run for it—you can hide in the warrens for a time if they get through. Here’s the maps...”
The mob was on the steps. Incoherent hate rose around her like a storm tide. Jenny lifted her hands, the whole strength of rock and darkness tunneling into her body, her mind relaxing into the shock instead of bracing against it.
The key to magic is magic, she thought. Her life began and ended in each isolate crystal second of impacted time.
The fire went up from the third step, a red wall of it, whole and all-consuming. She heard those trapped in the first rush screaming and smelled smoke, charring meat, and burning cloth. Like a dragon, she killed without hate, striking hard and cruel, knowing that the first strike must kill or her small group would all be dead.
Then she slammed shut before her the illusion of the doors that had long ago been broken from the gateway arch. They appeared like faded glass from within, but every nail and beam and brace of them was wrought perfectly from enchanted air. Through them she saw men and women nulling about the base of the steps, pointing up at what they saw as the renewed Gates of the Deep and crying out in wonder and alarm. Others lay on the ground, or crawled helplessly here and there, beating out the flames from their clothes with frenzied hands. Those who had not been trapped in the fire made no move to help them, but stood along the bottom of the step, looking up at the gates and shouting with drunken rage. With the cacophony of the screams and groans of the wounded, the noise was terrible, and worse than the noise was the stench of sizzling flesh. Among it all. Bond Clerlock stood, staring up at the phantom gates with his hunger-eaten eyes.
Jenny stepped back, feeling suddenly sick as the human in her looked upon what the dragon in her had done. She had killed before to protect her own life and the lives of those she loved. But she had never killed on this scale, and the power she wielded shocked her even as it drained her of strength.
The dragon in you answered, Morkeleb had said. She felt sick with horror at how true his knowledge of her had been.
She staggered back, and someone caught her—John and Gareth, looking like a couple of not-very-successful brigands, filthy and battered and incongruous in their spectacles. Trey, with Gareth’s tattered cloak still draped over her mud-stained white silks and her purple-and-white hair hanging in asymmetrical coils about her chalky face, wordlessly took a collapsible tin cup from her pearl-beaded reticule, filled it from the water bottle on Cow’s saddle, and handed it to her.
John said, “It hasn’t stopped them for long.” A mist of sweat covered his face, and the nostrils of his long nose were marked by dints of pain from the mere effort of standing. “Look, there’s Bond drumming up support for a second go. Silly bleater.” He glanced across at Trey and added, “Sorry.” She only shook her head.
Jenny freed herself and walked unsteadily to the edge of the shadow gate. Her head throbbed with exhaustion that bordered nausea. The voices of the men and her own voice, when she spoke, sounded flat and unreal. “He’ll get it, too.”
In the square below the gates, Bond was running here and there among the men, stepping over the charred bodies of the dying, gesticulating and pointing up at the phantom doors. The Palace guards looked uncertain, but the laborers from the Dockmarket were gathered about him, listening and passing wineskins among themselves. They shook their fists up at the Deep, and Jenny remarked, “Like the gnomes, they’ve had their taste of poverty.”
“Yes, but how can they blame us for it?” Gareth objected indignantly. “How can they blame the gnomes? The gnomes were even more victims of it than they.”
“Whether or no,” John said, leaning against the stone pillar of the Gate, “I bet they’re telling themselves the treasures of the Deep are theirs by right. It’s what Zyerne will have told ’em, and they obviously believe it enough to kill for them.”