Dragonshadow
Dragonshadow is book two in the breath-taking The Winterlands – an epic, classic fantasy quartet full of whirlwind adventure, magic and dragons. Lord John Aversin and the mageborn Jenny Waynest continue to battle and study dragons. Many years have passed since their battle at Bel and while they remain strong, their love for one another has begun to wane with the passing seasons. But time moves against them in more ways than one. For a danger unlike any they have ever known in their long years of violence begins to stir. Demonspawn from a dark dimension have learned to drink the magic and the souls of mages and dragons alike, turning their victims into empty vessels. The demons are rising and have stolen the couple’s young son. In desperation, John seeks the help of the eldest and strongest dragon: Morkeleb the Black. But it may not be enough. In the coming struggle, all will question what they believe in, and some may have to sacrifice what they value most in order to survive…Dragonshadow is book two in the breath-taking The Winterlands – an epic, classic fantasy quartet full of whirlwind adventure, magic and dragons.
Читать Dragonshadow онлайн беплатно
DRAGONSHADOW
BOOK TWO OF THE WINTERLANDS QUARTET
Barbara Hambly
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1999
Copyright © Barbara Hambly 1999
Map © Shelly Shapiro
Cover illustration © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008374204
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008374211
Version: 2019-10-14
For J.W.L.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Book One: The Skerries of Light
Book Two: The Burning Mirror
About the Author
Also by Barbara Hambly
About the Publisher
DRAGONSBANE, THEY CALLED him.
Slayer of dragons.
Or a dragon, anyway. And, he’d later found out, not such a very big one at that.
Lord John Aversin, Thane of the Winterlands, leaned back in the mended oak chair in his library as the messenger’s footfalls retreated down the tower stairs, and looked across at Jenny Waynest, who was curled up on the windowsill with a cat dozing in her lap.
“Bugger,” he said.
The night’s first appreciable breeze—warm and sticky as such things were in the Winterlands in summer—brought the grit of woodsmoke through the open window and made the candle flames shudder among the heaped books.
“A hundred feet long,” Jenny murmured.
John shook his head. “Gaw, any dragon looks a hundred feet long if you’re under it.” He pushed his round-lensed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his long nose. “Or in a position where you have to think about bein’ under it in the near future. I doubt it’s over fifty. That one we slew over by Far West Riding wasn’t quite thirty …” He nodded to the cold fireplace, where the black spiked mace of the golden dragon’s tail-tip hung. “And Morkeleb the Black was forty-two, though I thought he’d whack me over the back of the head when I asked could I measure him.” He grinned at the memory, but behind the spectacles Jenny could see the fear in his eyes.
Almost as an afterthought he added, “We’ll have to go after it.”
Jenny stroked the cat’s head. “Yes.” Her voice was inaudible. The cat purred and made bread on her knee.
“Funny, that.” John got to his feet and stretched to get the crick out of his back. “I’ve put together every account I can find of past Dragonsbanes—all them old ballads and tales—and matched ’em up as well as I could with the King-lists.” He gestured to the vast rummage that covered desk and floor and every shelf of the low-vaulted study: bound bundles of notes, parchments half copied from waterstained books found in the ruins south of Wrynde. Curillius on The Deeds of the Ancient Heroes, Gorgonimir’s Creatures and Phenomena. A fair copy of a fragment of the old Liever Draiken sent by the Regent of Bel, a connoisseur of both ancient manuscripts and the tales of Dragonsbanes. Notes yet to be copied—he’d jotted them down two years ago—of a dragon-slaying song sung by one of the garrison at Cair Corflyn, all mixed up with wax note tablets, candles, inkwells, scrapers, prickers, pumice, candle scissors, and dismantled clocks. For the fourteen years they’d been together, Jenny had heard John swear every year or two he’d put the place in order, and she knew that the phrase “put together” must not be taken too literally.
Magpie gleanings of learning by a man whose curiosity was an unfilled well; accretions of useful, interesting, or merely frivolous lore spewed back at random by circumstance and the mad God of Time.
“Some Dragonsbanes slay one dragon and that’s that, they’re in the ballads for good,” mused John. “Others slay two or three, and two of those, as far as I can figure ’em, are within ten years of the singletons. Then you’ll get generations, fifty, sixty, seventy years, when the dragons mind their own business, whatever that is, and nobody slays anybody. This is three for me. How’d I get so lucky?”
