“She possessed you, yes. But why take the trouble to send me to Hell and back to destroy you? To keep you out of Adromelech’s hands, or Folcalor’s, obviously … but how could they use you against her? You weren’t her servant in Hell, were you?”
No. The dragon’s voice was a drift of wind in his mind, but even so was remote with distaste. When one gives one’s service in Hell, one does not emerge.
John had guessed that. He wondered how many other men had, given that choice of being burned alive, or calling on a Demon-Lord’s name. He turned his eyes from the dragon back toward the stone circle, but could not find it. He thought—he wasn’t sure without spectacles—that the lay of the ground had not changed, and somewhere had the impression of that blink of reflected light, but when he looked in the direction he thought it was, there was nothing there.
It appeared to him, though, that the dust-devils veered aside as they neared the place. But that could only be the result of wind currents channeled through the dark-stained broken hills.
“Why take that trouble to trap one dragon,” he went on, “when the Skerries of Light are creepin’ with ’em, and all young and bright and too stupid to fly the other way when a demon starts sendin’ ’em dreams? They’re all creatures of magic. If the demons could trap you, they can trap them twice as easy.”
He felt the flex of contempt in Corvin’s mind, like dark music flowing through his. Most of the dragons with whom he had spoken had talked thus, with few words, like images in a dream. He wondered what their voices sounded like to one another.
But Corvin had masqueraded as human for many years, and the words that came into his mind still rang in that sand-whisper voice.
They? I would crush them. This Aohila knows.
And with the images of his mind John saw clearly what he had guessed before, that it had been the Demon Queen who had possessed this dragon. That her mind had taken root within his. She had used Corvin’s magic, and his lore, and his memories as Amayon had used Jenny’s.
Looking up at the small bird-like head in its cloud of green-and-silver mane, he wondered if Corvin had longed for the Demon Queen after she had fled, the way Jenny—in spite of herself and in spite of her hatred for the demon and what he had done to her—had longed for Amayon.
Long before Isychros wrought his unholy mirror to open the gate of Hell, I was the most powerful of the star-drakes of the earth. Corvin’s antennae flicked, bright-hued whips in the wind. My lore is the deepest. Now added to that lore is the knowledge I have gained in the years of guising myself as human. Alone among the dragons or demons or mages of this world I understand ether-magic. This magic demons cannot touch, for it is sourced from other realities, in the other world. That will be what the demons want of me.
“You think so?”
The green-opal eye slid sidelong to regard John, and the Dragonsbane felt the heat of Corvin’s annoyance at the query, but the dragon deigned no reply.
“If demons can’t touch ether-magic—don’t ken it at all—why would they want it? They’re dead lazy, y’know. I can’t see ’em takin’ the trouble to learn about it from you.”
You speak like a human, Dragonsbane. All the demons have to do is enter into my brain again, to learn all that I know. And this I will never permit, if I have to remain here in Prokep forever. The dragon bristled his scales haughtily, for all the world like one of Jenny’s cats, and turned away.
Then, after a time of silence, he asked, In the other world, you told the wizardlings—the League of the White Black Bird—to make the Sigil of the Gate upon a piece of dragon-bone, and put a like mark within the Queen’s prison box, that I could pass from one to the other, and so be free. What did you think to gain by cheating her?
“Dunno.” John shrugged. “But demons lie, an’ somehow that story about you lovin’ an’ leavin’ her didn’t listen right to me. I figured somethin’ she was that fired up to have me do for her was gie likely to turn out badly for the folk of my world, one way or another. But I didn’t know enough about it to be sure, an’ in the end it was just a guess.” The carnage in the GeoCorp headquarters, where demon henchmen had tried to seize Corvin, came back to him like a nightmare: bullets shattering those expensive mirrors, tearing through innocent flesh. The smell of blood, like any village raided by bandits or Iceriders. Worse: three quarters of the people in that room had been too relaxed with liquor and drugs to even dive for cover.
That was what demons did. “Was that what let her trap you in the prison box in the first place?” he asked. “That she’d been in your mind, an’ knew all you knew, at least at that time … includin’ your true name?”
It is how such things work. Grudging anger, like a bass note under the music of the dragon’s thought. Fury at Aohila, as if his subjection had been a few days ago and not ten centuries in the past. My true name was written within the catch box. In its presence I would be called to it, irresistibly.
North and west, rising sun razored shadows among the stones. Details of the landscape unfurled exaggerated ribbons of blue-black, throwing into prominence each minute pebble and hillock. Another dust-devil appeared out of nowhere, skated frenziedly through the piled sand, then petered itself out in the desert beyond.
I confess I was surprised that the magics of those little wizardlings who haunted the computer nets actually worked. I took refuge in that world precisely because magic no longer operated there. The energies of etheric plasma by which those people power their machines has a tendency to damp certain other forms of magic—because of course it is itself a form of magic. But that world’s own magic was so attenuated that it was easily snuffed out.
“Doesn’t mean people aren’t still being born there who could have worked it, had it still existed. You got out of the second box with no trouble, then?”
As if recalling a dream, John glimpsed the image of the dragon emerging like smoke from the duplicate box, which was tucked behind a complete set of Clivy’s Speculations. On the same high shelf were concealed the silver bottle in which Aversin had dipped an extra cup or so of the water from the spring in the Hell of the Shining Things, the rune-written sword given him by the League of the White Black Bird, and all the notes he’d made on his travels, grimy rolls and wads of parchment and papers all creased from being stuffed in his doublet pockets. Gareth must have gotten hold of them from Ector’s guards.
And like a second dream he saw the young Regent sleeping, as the Demon Queen had shown him, with Amayon in the guise of the Lady Trey sitting smiling beside his bed.
John’s belly clenched.
“Take me back.”
Don’t be a fool.
“You think every day you delay the demons won’t get stronger?” John shaded his eyes to look up at the dragon’s haughty profile, high above his head. “Whether Folcalor wins out over Adromelech or t’ other way around, whichever one ends up Lord of the Hell beneath the Sea, he’ll come after you, son. And either way they’ll do whatever they have to do, to get out of you whatever they went into the next world to get. And if you think they won’t, you’re joking yourself.”
They cannot come at me here.
The dragon spread his wings, and evening sun speared John’s eyes, when it had moments ago been only an hour after dawn. The dry air turned moist and thick in his nostrils, laden suddenly with copal, plumeria, and frankincense. He heard men murmuring, and saw the city before him restored in its myriad beautiful hues. Painted walls, pillars of porphyry and