Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9781453216866
Google: g07k3HKuwQIC
Amazon: B004TC149G
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter IX

“STOP.”

Puzzled, Gareth and John drew rein on either side of Jenny, who sat Moon Horse where she had halted her in the middle of the leaf-drifted track. All around them the foothills of Nast Wall were deathly silent, save for the trickle of wind through the charred trunks of what had once been woods to either side of the road and the faint jingle of brass as Osprey tugged at his leading-rein and Clivy began foraging prosaically in the sedges of the ditchside. Lower down the hills, the woods were still whole, denuded by coming winter rather than fire; under the pewter-gray trunks of the beeches, the rust-colored underbrush lay thick. Here it was only a tangle of brittle stems, ready to crumble at a touch. Half-hidden in the weeds near the scorched paving stones of the road were the blackened bones of fugitives from the dragon’s first attack, mixed with shattered cooking vessels and the silver coins that had been dropped in flight. The coins lay in the mud still. No one had ventured this close to the ruined town to retrieve them.

Up ahead in the weak sunlight of winter, the remains of the first houses of Deeping could be seen. According to Gareth the place had never been walled. The road ran into the town under the archway below the broken clock tower.

For a long while Jenny sat listening in silence, turning her head this way and that. Neither of the men spoke—indeed, ever since they had slipped out of the Palace in the small hours before dawn, Jenny had been acutely conscious of John’s growing silence. She glanced across at him now, where he sat withdrawn into himself on his riding horse Cow, and remembered for the dozenth time that day Zyeme’s words—that without her assistance, neither he nor Jenny would be capable of meeting the dragon Morkeleb.

Beyond a doubt John was remembering them, too.

“Gareth,” Jenny said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, “is there another way into the town? Some place in the town that is farther from the Gates of the Deep than we are now?”

Gareth frowned. “Why?”

Jenny shook her head, not certain herself why she had spoken. But something whispered across her nerves, as it had all those weeks ago by the ruins of the nameless town in the Winterlands—a sense of danger that caused her to look for the signs of it. Under Mab’s tutelage she had become more certain of trusting her instincts, and something in her hated to go closer than the ruined clock tower into the sunlight that fell across Deeping Vale.

After a moment’s consideration Gareth said, “The farthest point in Deeping from the Great Gates would be the Tanner’s Rise. It’s at the bottom of that spur over there that bounds the town to the west. I think it’s about a half mile from the Gates. The whole town isn’t—wasn’t—much more than a quarter-mile across.”

“Will we have a clear view of the Gates from there?”

Confused by this bizarre stipulation, he nodded.

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