The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (17 page)

After a moment Bentick shook his head and sighed. “No ... quite all right ... ”

“I still don't understand what happened.” Otaro set his cup down—the tea was beginning to spill—and ran stumpy fingers through his beribboned curls. From the shadows by the stove, Brighthand watched with concern in his coffee-colored eyes. “I was on the second level, and then suddenly I was ... I was in an unfamiliar area of the Vaults. It took me some minutes to realize—I had somehow come to be on the sixth level, near the Twisted Ways. I know I did not lose consciousness.”

Antryg, prowling along the kitchen's west wall and running his hands over the soot-dyed plaster, swung around in genuine delight. “Folded reality!” he cried.

Bentick glared at him. Seldes Katne, who had followed him down from the Library and now occupied a scullion's stool near the gaping hearth, merely looked baffled.

Otaro shook his head. “I do not know ... if you say so. All I know is that suddenly I ... I saw a darkness rushing toward me. A corridor, it seemed, or a gate, but a gate that seemed to move toward me, filled with crying voices, with sounds like wind, or the sea. I saw ... I don't know what I saw. The voices ... ”He shut his eyes, his dark brow folding with pain. “I turned, I ... I tried to flee. I ran down one corridor after another and it pursued me. Every time I looked back it was there, rushing at my heels, the voice shouting to me.”

“I found him down the third level.” Brighthand stepped forward and put a hand on his master's shoulder. “I'd got worried when he didn't come back. He was sittin' up against the wall, and his color was dead bad.”

“Was there a smell?” Antryg inquired, tilting his head to one side like a bird.

“Roses,” Otaro said slowly. “Sweet and heavy ... ”

Lady Rosamund started to speak, then looked impatiently at the faces around her. “Where is Phormion? She should be here ... ”

“The voices you heard,” Nandiharrow moved over onto the seat beside the Singer, “were they human? Did you understand what they were saying?”

Under cover of Otaro's answer, Antryg stepped back to where Pothatch stood and asked in an undervoice, “May I borrow the key to the stores-cellars for a moment?”

His attention absorbed in the scene around the table, the fat man produced it automatically. Antryg slipped into the pantry, unlocked the stores-cellar door—the long, narrow hallway of a room was entered by at least five doors—and moved back to the kitchen with an unobtrusiveness surprising in a man six feet three inches tall and wearing a coat like a psychedelic orchid. “Thank you. May I take this?”

Pothatch nodded, not even looking at the enormous meat cleaver Antryg had removed from the chopping block.

The pantry was five or six steps down from the kitchen, part of the tangled complex of small brick-and-half-timber buildings set farther down the hill; from it a very long, very narrow flight of steps cut straight northeastward into the rock of the tor. Antryg had always suspected the big, low-ceilinged stores-cellar of being, in fact, the uppermost collecting chamber of the maze beneath. He threaded his way though the bins of potatoes and onions, and past huge sealed jars of millet, barley, and wheat, the musty odor of tubers and hanging garlic stirring about him and not quite curtaining the wet-stone breath from the archway that led down to the Vaults.

Here, as he had up in the cellar of the Library, he could feel the lowering weight, the terrifying nearness, of the chaos of the Void.

Another short stair, a wine cellar, a passage that turned and wound, descending ...

And then he was in the Vaults.

The Shrieker, Antryg recalled, had been struck down just past the three-way fork near the downshaft with the brick threshold; all the old landmarks leapt clear to his mind. He pulled the Talisman of Air from his pocket and tied it again around his head, then hefted the cleaver and made for the place, listening, scenting, reaching out with all the hyperacute senses of a wizard that he knew would be his only defense. He did not pause, now, to check air pressure or magnetism; he knew he had little time here, and had to find some trace of Joanna, some clue to where in the Vaults she was hidden.

And there was something else he had to find as well.

Slightly more than twenty-four hours had passed since his first visit to the Vaults, but already he could feel the change. The energy seemed more dense; the strange, shuddery crawl of alien power in the stones, growing even in the rock aboveground, was nearly unbearable down here. He quickened his pace, seeking the place where the Shrieker had leaped forth at them.

And as Otaro had described, he felt a sudden shock of disorientation, the sudden awareness that he didn't know where he was ...

Only he did.

He was on the sixth level, at the round mouth of tunnel that led into the tangled skein of isolated spirals known as the Twisted Ways.

Antryg flung out his arms and laughed aloud with sheer delight.

The maze behind him picked up the echoes, reverberating them into a dim, shuddering roar. Far off, chancy with distance and random reflection of sound, they were answered by a thin, alien, animal scream.

Antryg fell silent, his heart beating hard, remembering that he was not alone.

The corridor around him was knee-deep in ground fog that curled poisonously about his boots, the air above it weighted with sulfur. There were pits at this level, places where the floor dropped suddenly away or descended five or six steps for twenty or thirty feet only to reascend without apparent reason; heaving, shifting vapors lay like ghostly lakes in such places, shining queerry in the dark. Antryg avoided them, sidetracking around through dark capillaries in the rock where niter dripped from the walls. In some places he found the walls and ceilings thick with a moss that he was careful not to touch; in others, white and yellow things crawled sluggishly away from the sound of his boots or watched him, gleaming stickily, as he passed. Once he backtrailed up and down several levels to avoid a hallway—low-ceilinged, he remembered, and painted queerly over walls and ceiling with skull-headed serpents twining among roses and thorns—that was now entirely filled with greenish mist; in another place he did the same, though the room that lay before him, with its odd pattern of glass blocks set into the floor, was apparently empty.

He had no protection, save the minimal defenses of the talisman and the cleaver. He reminded himself of that and spent a good deal of his time glancing over his shoulder at the dark.

In a corridor that followed the Vorplek Line, he found Otaro's leather satchel, containing dissecting knives, tortoise-shell jars, oiled paper, and a magnifying lens strung on a ribbon, which he put around his own neck with the rest of his beads. As he stood up again, the satchel over his shoulder, movement caught his eye behind him.

It was high up, near the pointed arch of a narrow, sealed door. He flattened against the wall as a small ball of glowing blue light drifted through the crumbling bricks and into the corridor. It moved slowly, as if propelled by a wind humans could not feel, losing and gaining altitude a little like an errant balloon. Antryg held his breath, sweat starting on his face, as the light paused opposite him, hanging in the air at the level of his chest, and three or four other lights, some the size of his fist and others no bigger than walnuts, floated like a school of minnows down the corridor from behind him. Cold with sweat and fighting panic, he remained motionless, half guessing what they had to be, for some minutes after they had moved on.

“Joanna,” he whispered, trying not to think of her imprisoned somewhere down here with those ... and with the other things, material or immaterial or somewhere in between, that he knew would be moving through this darkness.

Dear God, Joanna ...

He followed his ancient memories deeper into the maze: knots of tunnels that connected to nothing but themselves; tiny rooms with mirrored ceilings and walls; glass altars in niches; stairways descending a hundred and fifty feet to blank walls; pits and deadfalls and odd, fountain-fed basins. He passed through halls with strange things painted, half-obscured, upon their ceilings; crossroads marked with pillars of glass or marble or iron; rooms whose floors were mosaics of tortoiseshell and bone. There were small doorways, long ago bricked shut and written over with spells of guard and oblivion; Antryg shivered, remembering what Suraklin had told him: in ancient times the Council had punished rebellious mages by sealing them into such places with restless spirits, things that would eat human flesh to the bones ... but not quickly.

They pride themselves on their famous rectitude,
Suraklin had said, his light voice a little shrill as he measured out his chemicals with his feminine delicacy of touch, the sunlight through the west-facing windows of his workroom turning his dust-colored hair to fire. They are like painters, dabbing new colors over a canvas whose images are no longer the fashion. It was not mages bent on holding aloof from human concern who built their precious Citadel, and if ever you chance to visit it, my darling, bid them show you the lists of Archmages of old. You'll find gaps in the tale, of years they pretend to know nothing about.

Ground fog swirled again around his feet. Passing a downshaft, he felt warm air rising against his face, smelled a curious odor like metallic flowers. Things scuttered distantly in dark, narrow ways, and under Antryg's fingers the granite of the wall whispered with the Brehon Ley's silvered strength; deep beneath it, he sensed the prickly, random energy of the stone itself. Knowing Suraklin, he found, altered one's perceptions of everything.

No sign of the Moving Gate. No sign of Joanna.

No sign of the other thing he sought, the thing he was almost certain had to be here—the thing he had to find if he was to make any progress in this puzzle at all.

In a long chamber whose corbeled ceiling barely cleared the topmost curls of his hair, something attacked him, something small and red that gave off a bitter, sugary stink when he chopped it away from his boot leather and crushed it under his heel. The walls here, he saw, were patched with fungi like human ears and fingers in colors that made him wonder what was considered camouflage in other dimensions; at the bottom of the pit in the room's center, white and yellow grubs seethed over something dead.

Clearly, Gates were opening and closing here all the time, now in one place, now in another. Dammit, he thought, I could be down here for weeks and not run across the Moving one. Something had to be keeping it open, something drawing the enormous power needed.

Distantly, he heard another shrill cry and wished he'd been able to talk Hathen out of a sword earlier this evening. In the four months Antryg had Lived in Los Angeles, he had been able to keep up sword practice at a dojo in Burbank operated by a black kendo sandan and an old Japanese gentleman who taught iaido to those who understood and preferred that somewhat more esoteric art. Sensei Jones had looked a trifle askance at him when he'd explained that he'd been trained in a slightly different style owing to the circumstance of being a wizard in exile from another dimension—many people did—but several weeks ago Antryg had overheard Sensei Jones remark to Sensei Shigeta, “You know, I'm starting to believe the sucker?”

He paused by another sealed door, felt the ancient masonry, and shivered at what he sensed inside.

Phormion didn't have this trouble finding the Moving Gate, dammit,
he thought, a little resentfully, as he moved on. Nor did Kitty. Otaro practically walked into the thing. Perhaps I ought to pretend I'm here looking for mushrooms.

Phormion ...
He recalled how her eyes had shifted, how deep the lines of strain had been on her gray and wasted face. He hadn't seen her all day, and, according to Kyra, the Star-mistress hadn't taught any of her classes. Bentick said she was ill, but then, the fussy little Steward had always been Phormion's second in the Starmistress' long duel with life.

And neither Bentick nor Phormion had been present when the Circles of Power had been drawn to bring him through the Void. Which meant they might have been elsewhere, drawing Circles for an expedition of their own.

Daurannon ...

He paused in the darkness, remembering the fresh-faced, handsome youth sitting next to him on the marble terrace of Salteris' house, listening to the old man's words with grave interest in his hazel eyes.

Always the one to get the last piece of cake on the plate, he thought, and manage at the same time not to seem greedy as he ate it.

It crossed his mind to wonder how Daurannon was dealing with the probability of having Lady Rosamund hold the Master-Spells over his mind. The two of them had never gotten on: What can you expect of a boy who puts milk in his tea? had been her dismissal of him at the beginning.

For that matter, how was Rosamund ... ?

A flicker and a gleam in the darkness caught his eye, something like a thread of moving silk on the short flight of a half-dozen steps that lowered the floor of the level for no apparent reason. He turned back, springing up the shallow, worn treads.

And stood staring down at the thing he had seen, his heart shrinking cold within him.

It was what he had feared from the start.

It was a thread of running water.

“Oh, dear,” he murmured and leaned down to dip his bare fingertips in it and bring them first to his nostrils, then to his lips.

Slightly salt, and filled with strange odors, strange flavors—alien and odd. He felt as cold within as if it had been the river Aa that souls crossed at dying.

On the seventh level he found water flowing again, a stronger trickle this time, smelling and tasting the same. It was there, too, that something attacked him, something that, even with a wizard's sight which let him walk in darkness, he could not see: a cold fluttering of air moments before he saw the sleeve of his coat open in three places as if slashed by a razor. A smell like bitter cinnamon surrounded him; he wondered if the thin squittering noise he heard was really there or only his imagination.

A cut seared open on his brow as he fled, a slash so quick he barely felt it; after he'd outrun the thing, whatever it was, he found the long skirts on the right side of his coat reduced by neat, parallel gashes to ribbons.