Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar Read Free Page A

was his fortress and his home. His heart leaped at the sight of Ian, whom he had last seen fragile and wasted, battered by the aftermath of demonic possession as Jenny had been battered. Ian was on his feet, and though thin and too serious for a thirteen-year-old, he looked well. Adric stood beside him, sword in hand—a boy's sword, but though only nine he handled it like a man—and they were looking down over the battlement. Behind them the roof of the kitchens had been burned, and marks of fire scored the stone walls. Men moved about outside the walls, bandits, besieging the Hold as it had been besieged many times since the power of the Kings had waned in the North. But there was something else in the smoke that wreathed the burning village of Alyn, something fearful that scuttled like a huge rat among the smoldering houses. Something that defied all John's efforts to watch.
    “Can you see it?” Ian whispered, and his young brother shook his head.
    “It spoke to me last night, though,” breathed Adric. “Spoke in a dream. Said I should kill you, and run down and open the gates. I told it to go bugger itself. It did.” The boy looked queasy. He was John's son, in his red-brown coloring, and even more the grandson of old Lord Aver, stocky and barrelchested already, though like the black-haired and blue-eyed Ian, he had John's thin-bridged curve of nose. “But it still kept looking at me, and laughing; waiting for me to get my sword and kill you. Only I knew even then that you wouldn't really die.”
    “No,” said Ian quietly. “No. And that's what it's waiting for.”
    One of the guards bearing the ladder stumbled; John felt the cold again, and heard the crowd shouting, their voices bouncing off the walls of the tall houses around the market square. Looking up, he saw the cold gray of the birdless winter sky.
    Then the sky turned to darkness, the darkness beneath the earth. Something in the smell of the wet stone, coal smoke, and cooking thick with grease spoke to him of the Deeps of the Gnomes. Ylferdun, he thought. The Deep beneath Nast Wall. Its gates lay a half-day's walk from the King's palace in Bel, one of the great strongholds of the Gnomes in the West of the World.
    The place he had gone to five years ago, to fight the dragon Morkeleb, with such curious results.
    He smelled blood, too, and the sulfur-stink of blasting powder. Through the Hell-Queen's spells he saw Jenny in the darkness, broken and bleeding in a hollow of the stones. Morkeleb the Dragon was somewhere near—he knew this as one knows things in dreams—but the black dragon had been trapped like her when the gnomes had blasted the mine tunnel.
    She is dying, said the Demon Queen. The gnomes shot her with arrow poison. This, too, was the work of Adromelech and his minions. None knows she is there but the demons … and now you.
    John's mind cleared, and he heard again the shouting of the crowd. He was bound to the stake—he'd been dimly aware of the six guards doing it, though it had felt like someone else's body through the cloudy horrors of his visions. The cords cut into his arms and ankles and throat, and the air was ice-water cold on his flesh and the raw skin of his scalp. Ector of Sindestray was reading the charges, savoring each with the morbid relish of a doomsayer who has been proven right. “He has trafficked with demons.…”
    Even had he been inclined to, John couldn't very well argue with him.
    It was to defeat this other lot of demons, see.…
    Who would believe that, except Gareth stupefied in his crimson chamber? And maybe the Master of Halnath, wherever he was. But the Master of Halnath, the scholar-lord Polycarp who was Gareth's cousin, had voted also for John's death, knowing the things that had been done in the past by those who dealt with demons.
    It was to save Jen, and me son; to keep them from being possessed by demons who would use their wizardly powers.…
    But those who called upon demons to aid them frequently