She staggered, her knees weak from shock, her whole body trembling with exhilaration and cold. The tall, redhaired young man, harpoon still in one hand, moved forward along the walkway, black robe billowing beneath an outsize hauberk of chain mail. Though he was clearly cautious. Jenny thought from the way he looked at Morkeleb that he could have stood and studied the dragon for hours; but there was a court-bred politeness in the way he offered Jenny his hand.
It took her a moment to remember to speak in words.
“Polycarp of Halnath?”
He looked surprised and disconcerted at hearing his name. “I am he.” Like Gareth, it took more than dragons or bandits to shake his early training; he executed a very creditable Dying Swan in spite of the harpoon.
Jenny smiled and held out her hands to him. “I am Jenny Waynest, Gareth’s friend.”
“Yes, there is a power sink in the heart of the Deep.” Polycarp, Master of the Citadel of Halnath and Doctor of Natural Philosophy, folded long, narrow hands behind his back and turned from the pointed arches of the window to look at his rescued, oddly assorted guests. “It is what Zyerne wants; what she has always wanted, since first she knew what it was.”
Gareth looked up from the ruins of the simple meal which strewed the plain waxed boards of the workroom table. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The bright blue eyes flickered to him. “What could I have said?” he asked. “Up until a year ago I wasn’t even sure. And when I was...” His glance moved to the gnome who sat at the table’s head, tiny and stooped and very old, his eyes like pale green glass beneath the long mane of milk-white hair. “Sevacandrozardus—Balgub, in the tongue of men; brother of the Lord of the Deep who was slain by the dragon—forbade me to speak of it. I could not break his confidence.”
Beyond the tall windows, the turrets of the lower Citadel, the University, and the town beneath could be glimpsed, the sunlight on them yellow as summer butter, though the buildings below were already cloaked in the shadows of the mountain as the sun sank behind its shoulder. Sitting on the end of the couch where John lay. Jenny listened in quiet to the debating voices. Her body ached for sleep and her mind for stillness, but she knew that both would be denied her. Neither the words of the impromptu council nor the recollection of the trip back through the Deep with Polycarp and the gnomes to fetch the others had eradicated from her thoughts the soaring memory of the dragon’s flight.
She knew she ought not to let it hold her so. She ought to be more conscious of her own gladness that they were, at least for the moment, relatively safe and more preoccupied with their exchange of information with the Master and with plans for how to deal with the Stone and its mistress. Yet the flight and the memory of the dragon’s mind had shaken her to the bones. She could not put that wild intoxication from her heart.
The old gnome was saying, “It has always been forbidden to speak of the Stone to outsiders. After it became clear that the girl Zyerne had heard of it somehow and had spied upon those who used it and learned its key, my brother, the Lord of the Deep, redoubled the anathema. It has from the darkness of time been the heart of the Deep, the source of power for our Healers and mages, and has made our magic so great that none dared to assault the Deep of Ylferdun. But always we knew its danger as well—that the greedy could use such a thing for their own ends. And so it was.”
Jenny roused herself from her thoughts to ask, “How did you know she had used it?” Like the others, she had bathed and was now dressed like them all in the frayed black gown of a scholar of the University, too large for her and belted tight about her waist. Her hair, still damp from washing, hung about her shoulders.
The gnome’s light eyes shifted. Grudgingly, he said, “To take power from the Stone, there must be a return. It gives to those who draw upon it, but later it asks back from them. Those who were used to wielding its power—myself, Taseldwyn whom you know as Miss Mab, and others—could feel the imbalance. Then it corrected itself, or seemed to. I was content.” He shook his head, the opals that pinned his white hairflashing in the diffuse light of the long room. “Mab was not.”
“What return does it ask?”
For a moment his glance touched her, reading in her, as Mab had done, the degree other power. Then he said, “Power for power. All power must be paid for, whether it is taken from your own spirit, or from the holding-sink of others. We, the Healers, of whom I was chief, used to dance for it, to concentrate our magic and feed it into the Stone, that others might take of its strength and not have their very life-essences drawn from them by it—the woman Zyerne did not know how to make the return of magic to it, did not even learn that she should. She was never taught its use, but had only sneaked and spied until she learned what she thought was its secret. When she did not give back to it, the Stone began to eat at her essence.”
“And to feed it,” said Jenny softly, suddenly understanding what she had seen in the lamplight of Zyerne’s room, “she perverted the healing spells that can draw upon the essences of others for strength. She drank, like a vampire, to replace what was being drunk from her.”
In the pale light of the window, Polycarp said, “Yes,” and Gareth buried his face in his hands. “Even as she can draw upon the Stone’s magic at a distance, it draws upon her. I am glad,” he added, the tone of his light voice changing, “to see you’re still all right, Gar.”
Gareth raised his head despairingly. “Did she try to use you?”
The Master nodded, his thin, foxy face grim. “And when I kept my distance and made you keep yours, she turned to Bond, who was the nearest one she could prey upon. Your father...” He fished for the kindest words to use. “Your father was of little more use to her by that time.”
The prince’s .fist struck the table with a violence that startled them all—and most of all Gareth himself. But he said nothing, and indeed, there was little he could say, or that any could say to him. After a moment. Trey Clerlock rose from the couch in the comer, where she had been lying like a child playing dress-up in her flapping black robe, and came over to rest her hands upon his shoulders.
“Is there any way of destroying her?” the girl asked, looking across the table to the tiny gnome and the tall Master who had come to stand at his side.
Gareth turned to stare up at her in shock, having, manlike, never suspected the ruthless practicality of women.
“Not with the power she holds through the King and through the Stone,” Polycarp said. “Believe me, I thought about it, though I knew I truly would face a charge of murder for it.” A brief grin flickered across his face. “But as I ended up facing one anyway...”
“What about destroying the Stone, then?” John asked, turning his head from where he lay flat on his back on a tall-legged sleeping couch. Even the little he had been able to eat seemed to have done him good. In his black robe, he looked like the corpse at a wake, washed and tended and cheerful with his specs perched on the end of his long nose. “I’m sure you could find a good Stonebane someplace...”
“Never!” Balgub’s wrinkled walnut face grew livid. “It is the source of the healing arts of the gnomes! The source of the strength of the Deep! It is ours...”
“It will do you precious little good if Zyerne gets her hands on it,” John pointed out. “I doubt she could break through all the doors and gates you locked behind us on our way up here through the Deep, but if the King’s troops manage to breach the Citadel wall, that won’t make much difference.”