Free Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar by Barbara Hambly Page A

advanced into the almost absolute dark.
    People. The tunnel was filled with people. She knew it. Impossible, she could touch the walls with her hands! Yet she sensed people all around her, felt their presence. But not a whisper did she hear, not a sound. And no smell save that of damp baskets, of clay pots.
    Fearing yet to risk more light, she strained her eyes, shifting the focus of them as once she'd learned to as a mage. The tunnel took another turning, and opened into a little chamber of the kind to which Mab and Morkeleb had carried her, a sort of catacomb whose ceiling made her stoop. The movement of the air there spoke of a small space, not a large one.
    A few pots and baskets stood against the wall.
    And that was all.
    Kneeling, Jenny went to the nearest basket and removed its lid.
    It was full of jewels.
    Jenny blinked. A dream-vision came back to her … when? At the Hold? In the night-camp in the Snakewater Marshes, when she and Morkeleb were on their way here? It had been a dream of Folcalor, whom she'd recognized through Amayon's memories of the demon rebel: Folcalor dipping his hand into a dish of jewels. A gnome's hand, she recalled, powerful, the short fingers adorned with huge rings, slabs of opal and turquoise. She saw again how those stubby knotted fingers had stirred and rubbed the jewels, savoring them. This vision had made no sense to her when she'd had it: Folcalor had imprisoned the minds and souls of the mages he'd enslaved in jewels, Jenny's mind and soul among them, but in her vision there were far, far too many jewels for that.
    There hadn't been that many mages born in all of time.
    Hundreds …
    She crawled a little farther and opened the next basket. It, too, was full of gems. Rough-cut crystals, glittering coldly in the darkness.
    They mine gold in Ylferdun, she thought. Not gems. She scooped up two or three for a closer look.
    And nearly dropped them in shock.
    Dear gods!
    The souls were in the jewels.
    Not mages' souls. She would have felt the magic there, the minds still clear and thinking and aware. But souls nonetheless. Weeping, some of them, as she had wept in her prison. Calling out to their husbands, or wives, or children, or parents, or friends, as she had called John's name in despair.
    She felt their deaths, too—deaths in agony and horror. She recalled enough of her demon sensibilities to recognize that.
    Seven hundred, she thought, first blank, then burning with an all-consuming rage. SEVEN HUNDRED …
    She sat down between the two baskets in the dark, feeling as if she could not breathe.
    “Any who wish to rid themselves of old folks, or cripples, or the simpleminded,” the innkeeper at Eldsbouch had said to her not so long ago, “can earn good silver by giving them over to the brother Kings.…” And as the northern winds had whipped and screamed at the walls of that old stone inn, Jenny and her son Ian had looked at each other in bafflement, wondering why the twin Kings of the Deep of Tralchet would purchase slaves so patently useless. “I think you should let Lord John know of this,” the innkeeper had added.
    Dear gods, if only I could!
    Jenny's small hands shook as she pressed the jewels between them, held them close to her lips. Your cries are heard. Your cries are heard. Be at peace. She tried to will comfort to them, but she understood that they were dead, and they could not hear. Tortured by demons, murdered by demons, the moment of death prolonged and suspended in the jewels …
    What would become of their souls?
    Damn them. DAMN THEM …
    It was forbidden to all the ancient Lines of wizardry, to generate magic by the sacrificial death of a human being. But it was known to all of them—certainly to the demons—that it was possible to do so.
    Folcalor trapped those deaths, as he trapped the souls of the wizards, and for the same purpose.
    To transform into weapons. To use against the Demon Queen, or against Folcalor's Lord Adromelech …
    Those will give us