Under the warmth of the covers, John’s body was familiar against hers, as familiar as the old temptation to let the chances of pure power go by for yet another day. Jenny was aware, as she had always been, that it was less easy to think about her choices when she lay in his arms. But she was still there when sleep finally took her, and she drifted into ambiguous and unresolved dreams.
XVI
When Jenny wakened, John was gone.
Like a dragon, in her dreams she was aware of many things; she had sensed him waking and lying for a long while propped on one elbow beside her, watching her as she slept; she had been aware, too, of him rising and dressing, and of the slow painfulness of donning his shirt, breeches, and boots and of how the bandages pulled painfully over the half-healed mess of slashes and abrasions on his back and sides. He had taken her halberd for support, kissed her gently, and gone.
Still weary, she lay in the tangle of blankets and strawticks, wondering where he had gone, and why she felt afraid.
Dread seemed to hang in the air with the stormclouds that reared dark anvil heads above the green distances north of Nast Wall. There was a queer lividness to the light that streamed through the narrow windows, a breathless sense of coming evil, a sense that had pervaded her dreams...
Her dreams, she thought confusedly. What had she dreamed?
She seemed to remember Gareth and the Master Polycarp walking on the high battlements of the Citadel, both in the billowing black robes of students, talking with the old ease of their interrupted friendship. “You must admit it was a singularly convincing calumny,” Polycarp was saying.
Gareth replied bitterly, “I didn’t have to believe it as readily as I did.”
Polycarp grinned and drew from some pocket in his too-ample garments a brass spyglass, unfolding its jointed sections to scan the fevered sky. “You’re going to be Pontifex Maximus one day. Cousin—you need practice in believing ridiculous things,” And looking out toward the road that led south he had stared, as if he could not believe what he saw.
Jenny frowned, remembering the cloudy tangles of the dream.
The King, she thought—it had been the King, riding up the road toward the siege camps that surrounded the Citadel. But there had been something wrong with that tall, stiff form and its masklike face, riding through the sulfurous storm light. An effect of the dream? she wondered. Or had the eyes really been yellow—Zyerne’s eyes?
Troubled, she sat up and pulled on her shift. There was a wash bowl in a comer of the room near the window, the surface of the water reflecting the sky like a piece of smoked steel. Her hand brushed across it; at her bidding, she saw Morkeleb, lying in the small upper courtyard of the Citadel, a small square of stone which contained nothing save a few withered apple trees, a wooden lean-to that had once held gardening equipment and now, like every other shelter in the Citadel, housed displaced books. The dragon lay stretched out like a cat in the pallid sunlight, the jeweled bobs of his antennae flicking here and there as if scenting the welter of the air, and beside him, on the court’s single granite bench, sat John.
The dragon was saying. Why this curiosity. Dragonsbane? That you may know us better, the next time you choose to kill one of us?
“No,” John said. “Only that I may know dragons better. I’m more circumscribed than you, Morkeleb—by a body that wears out and dies before the mind has seen half what it wants to, by a mind that spends half its time doing what it would really rather not, for the sake of the people who’re in my care. I’m as greedy about knowledge as Jenny is—as you are for gold, maybe more so—for I know I have to snatch it where I can.”
The dragon sniffed in disdain, the velvet-rimmed nostril flaring to show a surface ripple of deeper currents of thought; then he turned his head away. Jenny knew she ought to feel surprise at being able to call Morkeleb’s image in the water bowl, but did not; though she could not have phrased it in words, but only in the half-pictured understandings of dragon-speech, she knew why it had formerly been impossible, but was possible to her now. Almost, she thought, she could have summoned his image and surroundings without the water.
For a time they were silent, man and dragon, and the shadows of the black-bellied thunderheads moved across them, gathering above the Citadel’s heights. Morkeleb did not look the same in the water as he did face to face, but it was a difference, again, that could not be expressed by any but a dragon. A stray wind shook the boughs of the cronelike trees, and a few spits of rain speckled the pavement of the long court below them. At its far end. Jenny could see the small and inconspicuous—and easily defensible—door that led into the antechambers of the Deep. It was not wide, for the trade between the Citadel and the Deep had never been in anything bulkier than books and gold, and for the most part their traffic had been in knowledge alone.
Why? Morkeleb asked at length. If, as you say, yours is a life limited by the constraints of the body and the narrow perimeters of time, if you are greedy for knowledge as we are for gold, why do you give what you have, half of all that you own, to others?
The question had risen like a whale from unguessed depths, and John was silent for a moment before answering. “Because it’s part of being human, Morkeleb. Having so little, we share among ourselves to make any of it worth having. We do what we do because the consequences of not caring enough to do it would be worse.”
His answer must have touched some chord in the dragon’s soul, for Jenny felt, even through the distant vision, the radiant surge of Morkeleb’s annoyance. But the dragon’s thoughts sounded down to their depths again, and he became still, almost invisible against the colors of the stone. Only his antennae continued to move, restless, as if troubled by the turmoil in the air.
A thunderstorm? Jenny thought, suddenly troubled. In winter?
“Jenny?” She looked up quickly and saw the Master Polycarp standing in the tall slit of the doorway. She did not know why at first, but she shuddered when she saw hanging at his belt the brass spyglass he had used in her dream. “I didn’t want to wake you—I know you’ve been without sleep...”
“What is it?” she asked, hearing the trouble in his voice.
“It’s the King.”
Her stomach jolted, as if she had missed one step of a stairway in darkness, the dread other dream coalescing in her, suddenly hideously real.
“He said he’d escaped from Zyerne—he wanted sanctuary here, and wanted above all to talk to Gar. They went off together...”
“No!” Jenny cried, horrified, and the young philosopher looked at her in surprise. She snatched up and flung on the black robe she had been wearing earlier, dragging its belt tight. “It’s a trick!”
“What...?”
She pushed her way past him, shoving up the robe’s too-long sleeves over her forearms; cold air and the smell of thunder smote her as she came into the open and began to run down the long, narrow stairs. She could hear Morkeleb calling to her, faint and confused with distance; he was waiting for her in the upper court, his half-risen scales glittering uneasily in the sickly storm light.
Zyerne, she said.
Yes. I saw her just now, walking with your little prince to the door that leads down into the Deep. She was in the guise of the old King—they had already passed through the door when I spoke of it to Aversin. Is it possible that the prince did not know it, as Aversin said to me? I know that humans can fool one another with the illusions of their magic, but are even his own son and his nephew whom he raised so stupid that they could not have told the difference between what they saw and what they knew?