The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (18 page)

On the eighth level he finally smelled it. The shivery vibration of the opened Void, everywhere around him in these dark depths, grew stronger, and as he approached it, a strange and bitter pungency, coppery and rotted, scorched his nose and lungs. He touched the Talisman of Air on his forehead, and the silver warmed to his skin. The smell subsided; he quickened his pace, knowing that if he didn't find what he sought in ten minutes, he might not make his way out of the area of the poison before the breathable air held around his head failed. Dear God, don't let Joanna's cell be anywhere near here.

A short flight of steps that curved sharply in the middle, a high, narrow hall whose ceiling was painted in constellations neither he nor any other mage had ever seen.

Five minutes.

A branch in the tunnel. One fork led to a columned hall with a long basin in it, he recalled, the other down a blind lead. But the sense of the Void was strongest down that blind alley. Eight minutes. He was wrong, the lead was blind, and he turned back, cursing, his breath coming more shallowly now, and dizziness teasing at the edges of his mind.

At the next fork in the passage he halted, and with the back of the cleaver blade, he knocked on the rock of the wall.

Three strokes, and a pause. One stroke, pause; four, pause; one more, and another pause. Only silence from the darkness ahead, with its drifting suggestions of yellowish mist; the silence that had once filled a haunted church where first Joanna had used this signal, to reach the thing that he knew must come. Silence, and the growing sense that he had overstayed the time allotted by the talisman. Sweat stung in the forehead-cut left by the invisible attackers, mixing with the blood.

Five knocks, pause; nine, pause; two, pause ...

And then, far off, echoing in the tunnels, an answering knock.

Six times.

Antryg rapped back sharply, five.

Three. The knocking drew closer, and with it, infinitely soft in the deadly hush, a kind of moist, leathery creak. It was now very difficult to breathe, the smell of the poison thick and all-pervasive. The yellow mist thickened; the Talisman of Air, which had been warm against the skin of his face, began to grow cold.

Five, he rapped out quickly and saw, far down the passageway, a sickly corpseglow pallor bobbing erratically in the nightshade mists.

Eight ...

A thing loomed suddenly from the darkness, a huge shape stooping under the seven-foot arch of the ceiling. Even the pallid light shed by the nodule that dangled, like a third eye, from the front of its platycephalic skull threw no more than a firefly sheen on the stretched, squamous green of its hide. Spider, dragon, and eldritch nightmare; chisel teeth glistened in the lipless muzzle; four long arms, four massive hands thick with claws between which writhed clusters of wriggling white tentacles. Those hands, Antryg knew well, could easily crush a man's skull. It raised one as it stepped forward.

“Do you have any idea,” Antryg gasped, leaning against the wall for support, “what the hell is going on?”

“Not the slightest,” the monster replied. “I've got an oxygen bottle and a gas mask.”

“Ah.” Antryg accepted the proffered breathing apparatus with hands that were shaking. “Thank you.” He gestured back along the passageway with all the aplomb of a weekend lothario at Enyart's. “My atmosphere or yours?”

Limitations upon spells of forgetfulness:

—The boundaries of the field of the spell, both of area and of depth and height.

—The duration of the spell, for though such things wear away in time, yet some residue will linger unless the Caster returns to undo what was done.

—Whether the spell will be touched by daylight, wind, rain, the phases of the moon, and the rising and setting of the stars Vega, Aldebaran, and Spica, which govern matters of the memory and mind.

—The extent of what will be forgotten, for if the Caster be strong enough, passersby will forget their names and families, how to read or speak; some even will forget to eat, and so starve.

—The personages who will forget, whether it be one person, or all persons, or all living things.

—The duration of the forgetting, and whether anything that be forgot shall be learned again.

—Whether the Caster himself will remember what he has done.

All these things must be woven into the boundaries of the spell, before it be Cast.

—Isar Chelladin

Upon the Casting of Spells

“So you had nothing to do with this ... This glitch?”

“Glitch ... I like that.” LTRX2-449-9102-CF60913—who had first been introduced to Antryg some months earlier as the Dead God by villagers under the impression that the then-trapped transdimensional physicist was indeed that entropic deity—folded himself into a compact bundle of muscle and bone, arms wrapped about unimaginably jointed legs and the long, bony whip of tail coiled around one of the square basalt columns that ran the length of the narrow Basin Chamber, and emitted a deep, buzzing chuckle.

“And did you know to seek me here with this magic that you spoke of when last we met, wizardling?” Since the Dead God's organs of communication were not connected to his respiratory system, they had decided to continue the conversation in a section of the Vaults uncontaminated by the atmosphere of his world.

“Not magic, precisely,” Antryg said, stashing the oxygen bottle behind a loose stone on the column head and settling down at the monster's side. “It was a reasonable supposition that you'd be somewhere here in the Vaults, considering that your specialty is the physics of the Void. At least, that's what got you into trouble in this universe the last time.”

“So indeed it was.” The tip of the Dead God's tail twitched, roving over the smooth stone of the floor like a hand seeking a grip for some unimaginable purpose. “My instruments were picking up heavy xchi-particle flux in Sector Eight-eighty; I went there half suspecting there would be a Gate opening. Reports were coming in of ... strange things. Not only strange creatures, but strange effects, odd and completely localized spots of heat or cold or magnetism in places, or places where things would happen—voices would be heard, people would be spontaneously transported sometimes thousands of meters, or vanish entirely—reports of what sounded like Gates opening and shutting at random, sometimes hundreds of kilometers away from Eight-eighty.” In Antryg's mind—since they were speaking mind-to-mind through the Spell of Tongues—Antryg heard the measurements, knowing them to be only rough approximations of the yards and miles in which he thought ... which were themselves only rough translations of yards and miles as Joanna understood them. Sometimes, he reflected, the Spell of Tongues was simply not very accurate.

“The first thing I did when I entered this place—wherever this place is—was to bring through the components of the experimental xchi-flux generator I've been working on.”

“That thing?” Antryg said, startled. “It filled three good-sized rooms when I saw it last.”

“It isn't exactly small now,” the Dead God growled. “I've never opened a full-size Gate with it—merely wormholes—but most of what you saw was guidance. The generator here is slaved to the main relay in my own universe, so with luck I should not be trapped here again. I've brought batteries—the thing needs an enormous amount of power—and spare air bottles. They are hidden in three different chambers, depending on whatever was nearest when the Gate opened. I have no idea where they are.”

“How do you know they're even in the same universe, if the Gate to your laboratory has opened and closed two or three times?”

The Dead God tilted his sleek, shiny head, the iridescent ocher lenses of his eyes glinting in the glow of his forehead-light with the expressionless stare of an insect. “The appearance is the same, for one thing, as are the composition and pattern of the walls. The oxygen mix is virtually identical.” He touched one of the instruments that hung on a bandolier over the ribbed, bony chest. “That's how I knew I was in your world in the first place, though I had no idea where I was or what this place is. And the extent of the xchi-particle flux was the same at each reappearance. I have been searching for a way out of this maze.”

“There is one, but it's a bit complicated,” Antryg said, leaning forward to study the long, thick rectangle of the sensory equipment with its dimly blinking lights. “We're under the Citadel of Wizards. If you can give me a description of the rooms in which you left your batteries and air bottles and things, I could probably find them for you.”

“It would be a help,” the Dead God rumbled. “I could locate them with the multiscanner, but it would take a long while, particularly if they were far away. I carry spare air, but with a weapon, too ... ” He reached back with one long arm, past the four curving tentacles of his breathing tubes, to where a device like a small bazooka hung on his back to the left side of his doubled dorsal ridge. “It is all very heavy, and I may need to move swiftly. But you, wizardling ... ” The light-bob on his forehead gave a little twitch, causing their shadows to reel grotesquely in the pillared gloom. “How is it that I find you here? You said you were going into exile, to the world of your friend.”

“I did,” Antryg replied, rather grimly. “And lived as happily ever after as circumstances permitted ... It's rather a long story. Have you encountered any other Gates in your explorations?”

“Four,” replied the Dead God. “Also five fields of alien energies. None of them is stable—they appear and vanish at random. Everywhere I discover organisms with physiologies incompatible to what I know of your biosystem. Moreover, my instruments indicate the xchi-particle activity characteristic of Gates.” Antryg was aware that the Dead God lacked the capacity to feel the sense of terror invoked in humans by the opening of the Void. “And they indicate also that this is increasing and the rate of increase accelerating.”

“I know that,” Antryg said. “Something has to be done to stabilize it, and soon, to keep the entire Citadel from being swallowed in a maelstrom of all the magic done here in its past. Your instruments wouldn't happen to have registered a Gate which moves about? Not appears and disappears, but physically moves ... ?”

The Dead God signed a negative with one huge hand; the snakelike tail shifted around the pillar's square base. “My instruments take readings at set intervals of time—they cannot track a single Gate from place to place or tell whether a Gate has opened first in one place, then another, or has moved from place to place without closing.”

“Damn ... ” Antryg folded his arms around his drawn-up knees, and rubbed absently at the drying blood on the side of his face. His right arm hurt, and looking down, he could see blood on his sleeve from the slashes dealt him by the invisible haunters. Far off in the darkness something howled, the narrow runnels drawing out the sound into a shivery wail of terror and hate and hunger; moving air brought to him a whisper of ammonia and of water trickling in the dark.

“Listen,” he said, recalling innumerable television shows, “can that sensor of yours find a human being? Or at least tell us if there is one, trapped somewhere down here in the Vaults?”

The Dead God tilted his head again, and the gleam of his bobbing headlight slipped wetly along the leathery breathing tubes that arched from his back to the flat, small gills of his chest. “How far do these Vaults extend around us? Sideways and down?”

“Two hundred, maybe three hundred, feet top to bottom; say a mile in diameter.”

“Not large, then ... ”

“Relatively speaking, no. But five minutes isn't very long either, unless you happen to be under water ... which,” he added a little grimly, “is precisely the point of my inquiry.”

The Dead God was already cradling the black rectangle of the multiscanner along one forearm while the tentacles of his palm reached around, like phosphorous-tipped worms, to manipulate its tiny toggles. On the round screen several lines of figures swam into view, followed by a succession of blank grids, glowing green lines laid over blackness. On one of them five glowing dots appeared, moving slowly.

“There. Five humans of your type, moving ... ”

“Search party.” Antryg dismissed them. “Looking for me, I expect. We need a solitary, stationary reading.”

The Dead God buzzed deep in the back of his skull, went on fanning through the grids. “Nothing.” The tip of his tail moved a little with his thoughts, as if the nerves were wired to some independent circuit. “Unless the subject is in a room that is somehow shielded against a sub-meson-wave scan, which is unlikely, considering that requires electrophase polarization.”

“Or magic,” Antryg murmured thoughtfully. “Still, it isn't terribly likely a wizard would think to evolve a spell which prevents detection by microscanning ... curious.” He leaned back against the basalt column, deep in thought. The first sensation which swept him was relief so profound that it was almost exhausting—a sensation that everything was now solved, and he could curl up in a corner and go to sleep ... definitely, he knew, not the case for a number of reasons.

But if Joanna wasn't in the Vaults, where was she?

In the Citadel itself? The pendulum stone seemed to indicate that, unless for one of the myriad usual reasons, the pendulum stone wasn't working.

And in any case—unless Joanna's cell was shielded in some way that excluded microscans as well as magic—his worst fears were momentarily allayed.

“Look,” he said after a moment, “these xchi-particles of yours ... ”

Something flickered and moved in the darkness. The Dead God's massive head swung around toward it; Antryg's hand, like a crooked spider in its fingerless mitt, touched the heavy-muscled arm warningly, but the physicist had already halted his reach for his weapon, knowing he could not fire it in the close confines of the Basin Chamber. Light gleamed among the double line of square pillars that stretched down the center of the high-ceilinged, narrow room, but light that shed no shadows, that did not reach past the columns to the raw granite of the walls. For an instant the only sound was the faint, humming tick of the Dead God's equipment and the soft intake of Antryg's breath.