Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online

of peace.
    An old memory? An illusion, sent up by his mind to reassure him?
    The vision, perhaps, that both Jenny and Morkeleb had perished in the cave-in, and that in death her soul had become a dragon's soul at last?
    The thought left him desolate.
    He had traveled, he realized, for so long since leaving the Winterlands that he had become confused about time. Time in Hell wasn't the same as time that is ruled by the sun and the stars. On his errantry for the Demon Queen he had crossed from Hell to Hell, the magic of one unworkable in another, and at last from the myriad Hells into that other world where the dragon Corvin had taken refuge in human shape. John felt like he'd been lost for years. Capture, imprisonment, and the specter of an agonizing death had come between him and the longing ache he'd felt, just to see Jenny, to speak to her.…
    If she'd listen. If she wouldn't turn away.
    When last he'd seen her, at her old house on Frost Fell, it had been the morning after Ian's try at suicide. He heard his own voice lashing at her, saw her crumpled beside the hearth, beside the nest of blankets they'd made up for their son.
    God, I might just as well have gone over and kicked her, he thought, trying to wriggle away from that memory, that shame and pain.
    Back then, even with his experience of dealing with the Demon Queen, he hadn't understood what possession by a demon did to those who survived it.
    He wanted to walk back into that room, that time, and knock that man who was himself upside the head and scream at him, She's hurting, too, you nit! Let her alone!
    Don't let her be dead, he prayed, to the Old God whose name and nature were mostly no longer remembered, save in backwaters like the Winterlands. Don't let her be dead and not knowing how sorry I am.
    He closed his eyes and watched the play of the reddish light on the lids, breathed the fusty sweetness of the bracken and the moldery earth-stink of the covering cloak. His body was covered with bruises like a windfall peach. After a time he rolled gingerly up onto one black-and-blue elbow and devoured rabbit and water, and as he did so saw that broken pieces of wood had been heaped near the chamber's stone doorway, ready to be fed to the blaze. Boughs thicker than his calf had been snapped into short billets, as if they had been twigs.
    Corvin NinetyfiveFifty, he thought, and rubbed a halfhealed bullet graze left over from that final firefight in the lab. His shoulder was bruised black from the kick of one of those noisy chattering horrendous guns that could kill a roomful of people in moments.
    A dragon hiding in human form. Working as a scientist, of all things, in that alien half-drowned world. Changing identities whenever it became obvious that he wasn't growing old like everyone else.
    He must have been hiding there—or somewhere like it—for a thousand years.
    The old granny-rhyme was right. Save a dragon, slave a dragon, at least for a time. Cold flowed through the doorway from the dark of the passage beyond, and with that cold the harsh scents of dust and sand. John gathered the robe about himself—a King's robe, certainly finer than anything he'd ever had as Thane of the Winterlands, the gods could only guess at where it came from—and limped barefoot and aching down the passageway, the cold growing sharper and more penetrating until he came out under desert stars.
    The room was built into that huge granite foundation that rose like a mammoth bench in the midst of the ruined city. Sand had flowed in the inconspicuous doorway, duned against the walls and piled over the threshold so that John had to climb, feet slithering in freezing powder, and bend down under the lintel to emerge.
    The city lay before him, reminding him of an old drawing sun-faded nearly to extinction. Between starlight and myopia he could see only suggestions of the nearer walls, and portions of three pillars that stood duty for some vanished palace. A dimple in the ground marked where a