The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (28 page)

“He did,” said Antryg grimly. “And she's still back there, shot badly in the thigh. She was trying to summon the mages from the Citadel but I don't know if she succeeded ... ah!”

Distantly, down on the road he heard the swift clatter of hooves. “Splendid. She'll be in the ferns behind those two boulders near the first thicket you checked, where the blood is ... she may have a cloaking-spell about her and be hard to see at first ... ”

“Davy, Crim, go on ahead,” Gru ordered, signing to two of his hunters. “There'll likely be some palaver, she needs help fast.”

The red-haired hunter and another shouldered their arms and headed off, flickering swiftly out of sight in the gloom beneath the dark trees. Antryg was already striding to the top of the road bank a few yards away, waving his arms. “Here!” he called out, his deep voice pitched to carry. “Over ... ”

And he stopped. For the riders down in the roadbed were not, as he had expected, Daurannon, Issay Bel-Caire, and a group of sasenna from the Citadel.

Most of them were sasenna, though their traditionally black uniforms were cut in a far more modern style than those of the Council's sworn weapons. Their coats were close-fitting, long-skirted, their black trousers knitted to move silently, easily, with the movements of their wearers. Among them were two riders in the long, blood-colored robes of hasu, Church wizards—Red Dogs—mages who had sworn their services to, and been taught their magic by, the small but powerful Magical Office of the Church itself.

Riding in the lead was a small, lean, broad-shouldered man whose strawy red-blond hair was fading swiftly to colorless-ness, a man clothed in narrow-cut gray—coat, trousers, waistcoat—which also bore, small and discreet upon its collar, the many-handed red Sun of the True Faith.

“Damn!” Antryg ducked behind the screen of alder and hemlock even as the riders beneath him drew rein. In two or three bounds he returned to Gru and his remaining men, caught the chief hunter by the elbow and drew the others with a gesture close about them. “Lead them back to Lady Rosamund and get them to help her—they have mages with them—and take her back to the Citadel. She was hit by a stray musket ball when you were out hunting wolves,” he added, with a small gesture collecting the magic which still hovered over the spot and casting it, a shining scarf of smoke, across their eyes and certain portions of their minds. “You haven't seen me at all.”

So much,
he thought with an ironic inner sigh, for not messing about with alien magic, and for keeping one's vows.

He was out of sight by the time the hunters had gone to the top of the road bank to call out to the riders below.

As a man who had had dealings with most of the representatives of the Inquisition in the Realm of Ferryth at one time or another, Antryg had easily recognized the leader of the party as Yarak Silvorglim, Witchfinder Extraordinary of Kymil and the Sykerst.

“So you weren't ever taught real magic at all?”

“Nonsense, my dear.” Magister Magus' slim, velvet-clad arm shifted under Joanna's shoulders where they rested against the wall. “What is real magic? The Academics—the Council Mages—keep a tight monopoly on its teaching, and have for six hundred years hoarded every book and magical implement they can lay hands upon. But my magic, such as it is, is as real as theirs.”

Hours had passed ... days ... Joanna didn't know. The darkness was unchanged and unchangeable, a black pressure cloaking them in hopeless stillness. Far off she could hear the mad, whispering mutter of the Lady Irina, but though their low voices must have been equally audible to her, she never made the attempt to draw near them. She herself never felt hunger, or thirst, though her throat was sore now from talking to Magister Magus for hours on end.

Yet still she talked. His presence was a lifeline ... and his throat, she reasoned with a wry inner grin, had to be as sore as hers.

There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do, except talk. There was a kind of conversation even in their silences, an enormous comfort in the little diviner's arm around her shoulders, in the soft hursh of his breathing, in the smell of whatever scent steeped his dressing gown and the occasional pressure of his well-kept, slender fingers against hers.

The inaction nearly drove her crazy, but there was, literally, nothing to be done, and even moving around, Joanna guessed, would increase their chances of meeting the tsaeati, or something worse. Once, for no reason, she had cried, cried until she was exhausted—cried from terror, and hopelessness, and the certain knowledge that Antryg had met with something he couldn't deal with and would never get them out ... cried against Magus' shoulder while he'd comforted her with the meaningless words he used to all those rich women who came to him for love-spells and abortifacients and talismans to give success in their endless high-stakes gambling at Court. Later, exhausted and a little ill, it had occurred to her that Magister Magus was probably just as scared as she was. But because they were not and had no intention of being lovers, the bone-deep conventions of the sexes forbade him from crying on her shoulder.

And so they had talked to keep from thinking about how much time had to have passed in the outer world.

She had talked about Antryg, about her mother and the California real-estate market, about being a nerd in high school, about rerigging an AI cube to accommodate CD-ROM, and about clients who wanted her to design coherent spreadsheets for antiquated CPM systems they'd bought used at Lou & Ernie's Kut-Rate Komputer Korner out in Simi. About the difficulties of incorporating any second personality into a life that had heretofore interacted strictly with books, cats, and bulletin boards, let alone something as alien as a man and as random in nature as a wizard.

“For a long time I lived ... I don't know, very closed in,” she said softly. “And I didn't like to be pulled out of that, let alone being kidnapped and having my life in danger. And after that, when I was getting ready to rescue him from the Silent Tower, I made myself learn all this stuff I never even considered learning before: how to shoot handguns and rifles and an assault rifle, for God's sake—I took a course in CPR and learned how to make a fire by flint and steel, which is a real bastard, and how to shoot a crossbow. I was just so scared. Scared of what I'd run into, and scared that I wouldn't ... I wouldn't be able to find him. But the awful thing was—I liked it. But now ... ”

She shook her head. “I keep wondering if I should have done it at all. If knowing him—loving him—is worth ... this. Risking this ... this darkness that isn't even death. My life was good without him, I was comfortable and safe.”

“My dear,” the Magus said softly, “it sounds as if—and please pardon me for my presumption—you're looking for a reason not to need him.”

“I am” Joanna said desperately. “That is ... I don't need him. Not really, I mean ... ”

“You mean you don't want to need him.”

She was silent, feeling by the tightness of her chest, the sudden hurt of her throat, that he spoke the truth. “Him,” she said slowly, when she could again control her voice. “Or anyone.”

The velvet arm tightened about her shoulders; the light, beautiful voice spoke from the dark. “Why not?”

“Because I'm afraid if I need him I'll screw myself up for him,” she replied, with the perfect candor of weariness. “Because I'm afraid I can't think straight around him. Because I'm afraid I'm not doing it right—I'm not being the right kind of person. And mostly because I don't want to need him and then have him leave.”

“Ah, Joanna,” the little man sighed. “My dear child. Do you really consider yourself that foolish or that weak?”

She shook her head, her face pressed to his shoulder, the smells of orris root and velvet and spermaceti oil filling her nose. She whispered, “I don't know what I am anymore. Not with him. And I'm afraid I'm just acting out of—of some kind of hormonal insanity.”

“If love didn't make us insane,” the Magus said gently, “who among us would have the courage to step outside the walls we build to protect ourselves against life? I suggest that you not decide in advance. Just as no woman should make important decisions when she's under the influence of the moon, no one at all should do so when they're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired ... or, I ought to add, in a situation as abnormal as this. When you have the choice again is when you should make it, not before. And then the choice will be obvious.”

She sighed and raised her head. “I suppose,” she said reluctantly. “But ... ”

“No buts.”

She leaned once more into the comfort of his shoulder. “You know—I almost didn't expect it. But you're very wise.”

Magus sighed deeply. “It's my job.”

And they both laughed.

Doing what the Magus did for a living, his talk rambled from Caris and Pella, and the various mages he knew, to Court intrigue, to gossip about the Prince Regent—who was evidently growing madder, more suspicious, and more perverted by the day—and to tips on how to sound like you knew more about a client's personal problems than you did. “They're always terribly impressed when you come out with the name of their lover before they've told it to you, but all it takes is being on good terms with the Palace chambermaids, you know.”

But beneath the charlatanry that made him his living lay the velvet undercurrent, not only of worldly wisdom, but of true magic, the magic he had been born with; the magic he had painstakingly studied, in bits and pieces, from an old card reader he'd apprenticed himself to in Kymil and from various dog wizards who, grudgingly or otherwise, consented to teach him a few tricks here, a few secrets there.

“Not that anyone's ever able to learn much,” he added, with a curious mixture of longing and bitterness in his voice. “The Inquisition's sure to come down on any sorcerer displaying more powers than they like to see—a friend of mine in Kymil used to say the Council tipped them off. And you don't have to be a Suraklin or a Vorkhedne the Gray—he was another of the truly evil ones, my dear, long before my time—to be using powers to make a little money or give yourself and your children a decent life. But as I said, the Council makes jolly sure that every book of spells that gets confiscated ends up in their hands—unless the Magic Office of the Church gets them—and keeps a tight rein on such things as scrying-crystals and water bowls, hemmerteyrne and teles ... ”

“Hemmerteyrne ?”

“Perceptual mirrors ... artificial souls, some people call them. They're round and about the size of a one-crown piece ... quite serious magic. They transmit the will. And the teles, of course, have to do with power itself.”

“I know,” Joanna said, remembering the circle of them around Suraklin's computer, the evil, glassy gleam of them, the sensation of being watched. “Antryg says they're dangerous.”

“Well, of course they are, to someone who doesn't know how to use them. So is a gun. But mages have been using teles for centuries with no ill effects. Antryg is a little cracked on the subject, you know. The Brown Star itself is another one of those implements the Council would just as soon keep to itself.”

“It sure did you a lot of good, didn't it?”

“I would never have been overpowered and imprisoned,” the Magus said, with considerable dignity, “had I taken better pains to keep it locked up. The problem was with my study safe, not with any knowledge or lack of it on my part.”

Joanna was silent. Far off, she could still hear the Lady Irina, moaning and weeping and cursing Suraklin's name. Somewhere even farther the shrieking laughter of the demons trickled to her like the ghost of mad wind. She wondered who had imprisoned those demons in the crystal and when, and for what purpose. Simply because they knew of no better way of getting rid of them ... as the tsaeati had been imprisoned, and the Lady Irina, and this man beside her, and she herself? And God knows how many others, over the years ... over the centuries ... She clamped her thoughts down hard to prevent another attack of panic. How many others, imprisoned and forgotten as the crystal passed from owner to owner—how many owners forgot to mention to their successors the names, and the proper extraction-spells, for some of their prisoners? How many times had the crystal been stolen, as Magister Magus had stolen it, and the names of its prisoners simply lost, as if some file had been erased?

Don't think about that,
she told herself desperately. Antryg will get you out of this mess.

And when he does?

The Magus is right. Wait until you have the choice before you make the choice.

“So tell me, Magus,” she said, forcing lightness into her voice, “who was this Vorkhedne the Gray and what did he do that was so awful? And what did the Council do about him?”

“My dear,” the Magus began, “some stories say that he wasn't even human; that he was the result of an unnatural experiment with a cat by a wizard named Czyram ... ”

When the forces of Crinias the Strong cornered the armies of the wizards and their allies against the cliffs of Stellith, the Archmage, Isar Chelladin, went forth to beg the pardon of Crinias and his troops, and to make what terms he could for the preservation of the wizards' lives ...

—Firtek Brennan

Dialogues on Wizardry

After the daylong battle on the field before the cliffs of Stellith, Isar Chelladin stood at night above the battlefield, listening to the outcry of the wounded in the darkness. And he took pity on the forces of the Church, knowing that they would attack again in the morning and so be destroyed; and casting his cloak about his face he crossed to the camp of the defeated, to offer them a final chance of parley ...

—Gantre Silvas

Book of Isar Chelladin

Then Crinias the Strong, general of the Church forces, had the defeated wizards brought before him in chains and said, “I will give you one final chance of life ... ”

—Inquisitor Beron of Kymil

The Defeat of Evil

It was several hours before Antryg managed to work his way back to the Citadel again. He came in through the kitchens, climbing the old chuteway that had been established to haul building materials up for the construction of the Harlot and the North Cloister; Pothatch gasped warningly, “Lord Antryg ... ,” and Antryg shook his head and touched a crooked finger to his lips.