The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (15 page)

“Well, they're certainly better than any effort of mine in that direction at present.” Falling to his knees on the tight-woven straw matting of the floor, Antryg stooped to clutch the hem of her black robe. “Would you make one for me if I begged abjectly?” He kissed the hem; she pulled it from his grip, fighting unsuccessfully to smother laughter.

“You are absurd.”

“If I promised to make you the finest pinwheels in all the land so that all other possessors of pinwheels would swoon away with envy at the sight of your shadow upon the grass? If I swore to bring you flowers at the first light of morning ... ”

“I can pick my own flowers.”

“But not as well as I would. I'd sing for you, too.” And throwing back his head he caroled:

“In the town where I ... ”

“Enough!” she groaned, stepping back. Antryg prostrated himself full-length at her feet and got in another quick kiss of her hem. Two Juniors, coming from the gallery outside, went over to where Nandiharrow and Whitwell Simm sat, nearly invisible behind a mountain of ancient scrolls, to ask a question. They'd all heard stories about Antryg Windrose.

He propped himself hopefully on his elbows. “Does that mean you'll do it?”

“I should have it for you by midnight.” She shook her head as he collected his long legs and arms beneath him and unfolded himself to his feet. “What was the other thing you wanted?”

His voice sobered. “Could you find for me references to what teles-balls are now—and have been in the past—here within the Citadel? Who had them, and what they used them for, and what became of them? I'm afraid it's a little tedious,” he apologized, seeing her look of startled alarm.

“For what? I mean, the research on some of them goes back a thousand years ... ”

“Yes, and unfortunately it's those I'm chiefly interested in. The very old ones, the legendary ones. I'll help you with it as soon as I can, but at the moment it is rather critical that I explore the Vaults as soon as possible, and for that I'm going to need a Talisman of Air ... among other things. Will you help me?”

The librarian hesitated, her dark eyes raised to the long, ridiculous, bespectacled head, with its glittering earrings and graying curls. She was, Antryg knew, a woman who had spent her life in these bastions of Council orthodoxy, a perfect and conscientious servant of the Council for fifty years.

But she gulped gamely and stammered, “If ... if I can.”

There's no such thing as a wizard who minds his own business.

—Berengis the Black

Court Mage to the Earls Caeline

Antryg paid several other calls about the Citadel as the evening drew on. From the library he made his way, over plank bridgelets and fern-choked gullies and down long flights of decaying wooden steps, to the plain little house called the Breadbox, where Q'iin the Herbmistress was candying lemon peel in the glass porch overlooking the sun-salted slope of the herb garden. From that tall, beautiful, black woman he begged a supply of jelgeth leaves, and her bright blue eyes narrowed at the mention of the powerful stimulant.

“Staying up late to study for exams?”

“Something like that.”

Her expression softened a little as she read the lines of sleeplessness the previous night had gouged into the corners of his eyes. “You need help?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Only something to keep me awake ... and something to prevent dreams when I sleep.”

Emerging through the garden door with the two packets of herbs in one pocket, a bag of candied lemon rind and half a dozen hazelnuts in another, he climbed through lengthening pools of cobalt shadows to where Tom the gardener was patiently pulling weeds, an almost hopeless task in the Sykerst's short, lush seasons of growth. Already most of the garden lay in gloaming, though overhead the sky seemed to have soaked in enough radiance to give it back a good long while. Tom and Antryg sat together for nearly an hour, sharing the lemon peel and talking idly of this and that: of Antryg's years in the Silent Tower and how he'd managed to escape; of Tom's sister's newest baby and the furor in his family about her naming; of the rumors of abominations that had been rife all about the countryside for a month; and of the return of the wizards to the Citadel, exiled from their homes throughout the Empire.

“Nothing'll come of it, though,” Tom remarked, lighting his pipe and following with huge, mournful blue eyes the swift-stitching track of a handful of swallows across a willowpussy sky. “The governors and police chiefs'll get tired of running down every rumor that this person or that is working magic, like they always do, and Issay, and Whitwell, and Pharne and them'll open up their houses again before Yule.”

“Who brought word of the abomination at the Green King's Chapel the other day, by the way?” Antryg inquired, pulling a weed stem from Tom's sack and dissecting its leaves with his fingernails as he spoke.

“Henit the Swineherd saw it—Gru Gwidion and a couple of his hunters brought the word here. There's not many from the village'll actually come here these days.”

“So it was something someone actually saw?”

“Oh, aye ... well ... ” Tom scratched the north face of his enormous nose. “Henit thinks he did—my sister talked to his wife about it—but when he's been smoking moonweed, who knows? But that isn't what I've been meaning to tell you.” He lowered his voice and sat up a little on the uneven log they'd been sharing as a seat.

“Rumor's going 'round in the kitchen this afternoon that the scryer in the tower's seen the Inquisition on its way here—the Witchfinders.”

“Is it, now?” Antryg murmured, lacing his bony fingers around his knees.

“Oh, aye. And her ladyship's fair waxed about it, too, blaming our boy Daur, and him denying he had anything to do with sending for 'em. So you want to watch yourself, m'lord.”

“It appears I do.” Antryg sighed and got to his feet, shaking the grass clippings out of his coat skirts. “Just what I needed.”

On the top floor of the Harlot, where the half-dozen sasenna on night duty were waking one another up with a quite ferocious sparring class under Implek's bellowed orders, he found Sergeant Hathen, the troop's second-in-command. Hathen had always liked Antryg—the big, beefy woman had trained with him during his novice days, and they'd had a brief and enthusiastic fling the summer before she'd met the village butcher who was still her lover—and after a little flirting Hathen allowed that although she had been forbidden to give him a weapon, she might just mislay one in the Harlot's cellars sometime the following afternoon.

Much comforted by the knowledge, he then proceeded to the kitchen to beg dinner from Pothatch the cook.

Afterward, upstairs in the Pepper-Grinder once more, he brewed a little of the jelgeth-leaf tea, to hold off sleep and the oozing horrors of his dreams, and sat by the open windows breathing the dark crystalline spices of spruce forest and night. Music drifted from the candlelit windows of the Cat Lair, an old-fashioned kithara played with heart-tearing mastery that had to be Zake Brighthand's, while a young woman sang a thoroughly disreputable ballad about a unicorn and a sow.

By the light of his own candles, Antryg shuffled his cards, smiling a little at the sprightly voice next door as he laid down as significator the Queen of Wands. The academic mages, who had taken refuge in the Citadel to refine and perfect the study of magic away from the choices and prejudices of the cities, looked upon the cards as a dog wizard's tool, a trick for pleasing patrons with cheap and easy half truth. “They are seldom accurate,” Salteris had told him once, looking dispassionately down over his shoulder in some low-raftered garret they'd shared in a hill-country inn long ago—not long after the old man had found him, in fact, and healed him of his first madness. “And the problem is that when they are accurate, you can't always tell it.”

But on that night, and on so many nights thereafter, Antryg had continued to lay card on card, getting sometimes yes, sometimes no, desperate for an answer to the question that had in those days consumed his waking hours and stalked him like a grinning ghost in dreams—continued until he'd fallen asleep with his head on the gaudy layout, his question still unanswered.

It was a bad habit, he knew; and he'd seldom found the cards, even when they were being truthful, to be of any help.

His big, awkward hands quick as a faro dealer's, he laid four cards around the significator: the five of swords, the five of pentacles, the two of pentacles, the Mage reversed.

The Mage reversed? He turned the deck thoughtfully in his hands, looking down at the battered and enigmatic rectangles of pasteboard among the chaos of papers, pinwheels, and half-empty teacups littering the table's surface.

A reference to the geas that held his own powers in check? To the wizard who, for whatever reasons, had decided to kidnap Joanna? A Council mage? Someone using a teles as a power-sink? Or something else, someone else ... someone who was the opposite of a wizard? Or was the message Wisdom reversed?

Five was strife, conflict, but it also indicated the crossover point at which the spiritual had absorbed too much of the material ever to go back to being what it was. And pentacles signified money—or craft. The craft of magic? Of music perhaps? The notes of Brighthand's kithara trailed through his consciousness like a line of crystal butterflies.

Pentacles was the sign of earth.

Deep earth, and the things of deep earth. Rock, clay, crystal ... enclosed darkness that has never seen light.

The Vaults.

He gathered the cards.

Joanna, he thought. Joanna would never forgive him.

When first he had escaped the vengeance of the Council and the Regent's death sentence, he had hesitated a long time before seeking out Joanna in her own strange, noisy, magicless world—in the preposterous chiaroscuro of the City of Dreams. His friends had suffered before through proximity with him, and she was a woman who had her own life, her own priorities, her own needs apart from him. He knew enough of her to recognize how the emotional desert of her childhood had given her a need for stability, comfort, and orderliness that was as much a part of her as her wry quick wit, her odd combination of bluntness and shyness, and the calm intelligence of those brown eyes. He did not want to bring trouble upon her.

But when it came down to the choice, he simply could not bear the thought of not coming to know her better—of never seeing her again.

Like a selfish fool, he'd hoped it would be all right.

It hadn't been, of course, he thought, laying down the significator of the Priestess and shuffling again. The Queen of Swords, the King of Wands, the Dancer at the Heart of the World ... and the Fool. Outside, the novice Gilda's voice tripped gleefully over the words “ ... tie my ribbons 'round your tail, my stockings 'round your horn ... ,” and Antryg muttered at the cards, “Tell me something I don't know, already,” and gathered them up again.

And it might very well be, he thought, that he had lost her now for good, whether he found her safe or not. If she was in the Vaults ...

He shivered at the thought of what he had seen there. In that darkness there was no place that was safe, no place that was even stable anymore, and it was getting worse as the pressures on the fabric that separated the Void from its myriad of worlds increased. Did her kidnapper know this? Did he—or she—care? And why hadn't they contacted him, why hadn't they made a demand of some kind? Why try to assassinate him in his bed instead?

Or had that been somebody else?

The significator Queen of Swords drew the four of cups reversed, the five of swords, the two of wands, and the Chain. The geas, he thought; the geas that lay upon his mind like a chain, the foul whispering of those waiting dreams. Or did the cold Queen of Swords, the dark-haired lady who bore all her ancient strifes frozen in her hollow heart, labor under some geas of her own forging?

“Tea leaves would probably be more helpful,” he muttered, collecting the cards again and making a move toward the room's small hearth, where a pot burbled softly with water on the boil. At least tea would be comforting and would warm his aching hands, now that the evening air was growing sharp.

Damn the Witchfinders ...

And they, too, were on their way.

If there are social climbers in the High Council who seek to bring wizardry into fashion again in the circles to which-they aspire ...

Would Daurannon have betrayed another wizard to win himself into the Regent's approval? A wizard who had murdered Salteris, perhaps, but a wizard all the same?

It was a week and a half to Angelshand by horseback. Daur would have to have known that far in advance that the Council was bringing him here. According to the Lady Rosamund, it hadn't been decided to bring him until a day or so, at most, before Ruth and Joanna and the children had started having visions of the Tujunga Wash. But whose suggestion had it been to fetch him in the first place?

On the other hand, he thought, dealing out, around the King of Wands, the five of wands (“All right, you've made your point!”), the reversed four of cups, the eight of pentacles (“Well, I knew that!”), and the doughty seven of wands, since the Citadel lay upon a major node in the ley-lines, the lines themselves could have faulted as far away as Angelshand. The Inquisitors might easily have set out to ask the mages a few questions about the sudden appearance of abominations in the streets of the capital. For a moment he stared down at the last card dealt; “Now what,” he murmured, as he gathered them back like great flakes of colored fire, “is our Daur defending against all comers? His right to inherit the Master-Spells when Auntie dies? Or something else? Something in the Vaults, perhaps?”

He set the cards aside. Half rising, he began to search in the chaos of the tabletop for the little japanned canister of tea that Pothatch had sent back with him. Just in twenty-four hours, the table had become littered with books Seldes Katne had let him abstract from the Library, with papers and notes regarding the Void—she was still hunting, she said, for Munden Myndrex's notes on tortoise-rubbings—with maps of the Vaults he'd drawn to refamiliarize himself with its lower levels and with sketches of Bentick and Rosamund and the way the vines in the little garden below twined up around the windows of the Cat Lair ... pens, inkpots, pestles; pinwheels in various states of construction and experiments with straws and bottles; prisms and chalk and magnets. At one end of the table, he'd pushed aside the litter to draw in red crayon a compass rose, over which he'd already dangled a pendulum stone; the stone had refused to move, meaning a) that Joanna was dead, b) that Joanna was neither north, nor south, nor east, nor west, but, in fact, virtually beneath him ... i.e., in the Vaults, or, c) that as a method of divination, pendulum dowsing was a washout. Neither the ritual strewing of the hazel-nuts he'd begged from Q'iin nor the construction of a feather-circle as he'd been taught by an old granny from the marshes of Kymil had yielded further information regarding Joanna's whereabouts. Divination with peach pits was supposed to work, but regrettably, peaches would not be in season until July.