The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (29 page)

“You haven't seen me,” he whispered, not as a spell—out of the pocket in the woods he couldn't have wrought a spell anyway—but as a request.

The little cook shook his head vigorously. “Of course, of course ... ”

Antryg perched himself cross-legged on the edge of the stone counter and helped himself to some oatcakes cooling on a platter there. Before slipping in through the pantry door he'd listened for voices but had heard none; only Pothatch's wheezy panting as he hurried from oven to sink to cupboard. “Scullions gone walkabout again?”

“Not a one of 'em showed up today. If it wasn't for Tom and Lady Q'iin, bless her, I'd be going fair distracted. But just as well, what with them here.” His nod in the direction of the refectory doors—and by implication the Council chambers—took in the Inquisitor and his troops. He lowered his voice, as if the Witchfinder could hear through the stones. “They're most of 'em up in the Council chamber with Lord Daurannon, the other High Mages being off lookin' after Lady Rosamund. But their sasenna are in the hall, having lunch and, so Tom tells me, not sitting near our novices nor our warriors neither. And what Lord Daurannon and them others were thinking of, to let them find the Citadel in the first place ... ”

“They'd have to have been dealt with sooner or later,” Antryg murmured, smearing jam on a fourth oatcake with his fingers and adding clotted cream to the mess. “Do they know I'm here?”

Pothatch shook his head. “Not to my knowledge, m'lord. Well, you know how the mages are about letting the Church know any more of our business than they have to. That Silvorglim, he was fratcheting on about abominations showing up in the streets of Angelshand before he even got through the gates, but you? I think they still think as how you're dead.”

“Well, let's hope no one disabuses them of that notion. The death warrant the Regent has out for me was fairly detailed and quite unnecessarily nasty. Leave a door unlatched for me tonight, will you?” He uncoiled his long legs, put his feet on the floor again. “Something tells me I'm going to have to turn into a kitchen wight for a time, stealing food where I can.”

He headed for the door of the scullery, a long, narrow room where knives and boots were cleaned and the painted earthenware dishes stored between meals. A smaller door led from it to a stairway cut through the Citadel rock up to the subcellar beneath the Harlot, whence he could make his way back to the hypocaust under the North Hall. In the North Hall, he was certain, regardless of incursions by the haters of magic, he would find Aunt Min. On the threshold Pothatch laid a round, heavily knotted hand on his wrist, staying him, and looked up into his face with worried hazel eyes.

“You all right, m'lord?”

Antryg sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Fine,” he said, though he didn't feel it. His bones still ached from the death-spells he had so narrowly avoided; moreover, the effects of exhaustion, of too little sleep, of troubled dreams and the geas' continual, grinding, low-grade pain were beginning to tell. “That is, I'll be fine.” He hooked a handful of dates from the painted wooden bowl that stood on a cupboard and disappeared through the pantry door.

As he had suspected, Antryg found Aunt Min in the North Hall, forgotten by everyone, calmly drawing up the preliminary field to a major conjuration. As he slipped through the rivet-studded oak of the great double doors from the Hall's vestibule, he noted that she'd marked out the field in about three-quarters of the long chamber, leaving open the space in front of the door, so that people could enter and leave without automatically violating the limitations and destroying the energies which would later be worked there. The other doors into the room—a small postern and a semisecret panel in an alcove at the back—had been barred from within. Ten feet or so into the room from the main entrance she had drawn the first of the boundary lines, leaving a ritual door, a break in the lines through which others could enter and leave the field up until the time when it was “sealed,” when the true conjurations would begin.

For a moment Antryg folded his arms and stood by the cluster of narrow sandstone pilasters of the North Hall's doorway, only taking pleasure in watching the tiny old woman lay out the cornering-spells and preliminary alignments. Every line, though drawn freehand, was as straight as if ruled; the circles might have been made with a compass. Shaky as the old Archmage's hands were at other tasks, each rune, each sigil, each seal was a minor work of the calligrapher's art.

“You took your time,” she muttered as she finished the northwest corner and turned to look at him; he had entered soundlessly, and as far as he could tell she had not moved her head. Maybe she really did have eyes in the back of it, as all the novices claimed.

“I'm afraid I was unavoidably delayed.”

She fumbled about, collecting her cane and the overflowing twig-basket of her knitting, and came doddering across the length of the light-washed room. Aunt Min always doddered—she'd doddered nearly thirty years ago when Antryg had first seen her, when she'd visited Suraklin in Kymil. But there was something in the careful slowness of her step now that twisted a knife of dread inside him, something in the fallen, weary lines of her delicate-boned face. He shivered—after the warmth of the kitchen the North Hall was chilly, and he'd left his coat and shawl in the woods with Lady Rosamund—and made a move to go help her but stopped himself; the ritual “door” was shut. To have crossed the scribbled line of runes that marked its threshold would have condemned the old lady to another two hours of careful remaking of spells.

Though he could see the knife of meteor iron nesting among the tangled chaos of her knitting, she made no move to open the spell-field and admit him, only stood on her own side of the lines, looking up at him sidelong, her white head cocked a little on its bent spine.

“I don't need you here.” The high, shaky voice was like a piping child's. “I understand well these spells you've made, to fool the very stones into thinking they're what they're not, and I can work well by myself, and bring it all to its proper fruiting at the very turn of midnight.” Pale blue eyes glinted up at him, defying him to offer help. “Nor do I need you to sit with your eyes on that,” a finger like a bent twig moved in the direction of the Dead God's watch, still wrapped around Antryg's wrist, “like a timekeeper at a footrace, to make sure when midnight is, as though I couldn't feel it in the breathing of the earth and the moon.”

“Well,” Antryg said apologetically, “it would be terribly bad manners of me to shove the spells at you and run away to play.”

“As you did with poor Seldes Katne,” Min grumbled, relenting a little and fumbling in her basket, dropping a ball of purple yarn and a packet of herbs to the smooth-scrubbed oak of the floor. “Like a mole she's been, combing through notebooks and memoirs and catalogs of wizards long dead and forgotten, looking to see any mention of which teles belonged to who, and where they got it from ... and you needn't tell me why. Always fidgeting and digging, you are. Not that she hasn't been digging, searching, combing like a woman who's lost a pin in a loft of hay, long before you came among us again ... as she's been digging and searching all her life, poor soul. It's her you should be helping, or be making yourself useful by going back to Pothatch and washing up the dishes.”

She traced the proper signs with the iron knife, unsealing and opening the door. Antryg stepped through, and she closed it once again behind him.

“Here.” She handed him her basket. “It's a long Making we're to be doing today, drawing up the great circles and signs of power from the leys, and from the maze beneath us, and running the power down through the Line itself, to the chamber in the maze below. I'll need a boy to go censing after me, and marking the curves in chalk while I conjure. You'll do for that.”

“I'm honored.” Antryg smiled.

“More than you deserve,” the old lady muttered. “A troublemaker you always were. 'Twill keep you out of trouble with the Witchfinders in any case. Mind you don't step on the lines.”

The long bands of sunlight that fell through the clerestory windows shifted; on the whitewashed plaster of the walls the cinder gray shadows of the lattices shrank from exaggerated gothic spears to lozenges and at last to squares, alternating with squares of light that burned almost too bright to see. To Antryg's account of the events of last night, Aunt Min only shook her head, and muttered, “There now! If it's not one thing it's another, and it's something to be looked into, when all's said and done.” And then, Antryg knew, put the matter completely from her mind, returning all her concentration to the spells she wove on the North Hall's sandstone floor.

Late in the afternoon Antryg heard footfalls in the vestibule outside, entering from the North Wing's stone colonnade; since by then he was sitting in a corner where Aunt Min had ordered him while she executed the delicate paths of power along one of the field's great curves, he left off putting her knitting basket in order and got to his feet, guessing who it might be.

Daurannon entered quietly, carrying, almost absentmindedly under his arm, Antryg's garish coat and shawl. These he dropped in a heap beside the door and walked to the boundaries where Antryg waited.

“I thought I'd find you here.” His voice was barely a whisper in the big chamber's hush, and in the floating gray-blue shadows his eyes were grim.

“Will she be all right?”

The younger mage nodded, but by the way he stood, Antryg guessed it had been a near thing. “The hunters say they shot her in mistake for a wolf—an odd sort of mistake to make. They can't tell quite how it happened.”

“There was a glamour on her,” Antryg said impatiently, “a glamour on us both. She followed me out of the Citadel.”

“I know. Is that why you led her?”

“What? So I could point to her and shout at the hunters, 'Oh, look, there's a wolf!'? It's all I could have done along those lines, as you should know.”

“I know nothing,” Daurannon said quietly, “when it comes to your schemes. The hunters said she was the only one they saw, yet your coat and shawl were found near where she lay.”

“I left them with her. She was going into shock, she needed to be kept warm.”

“She could have found them herself and made the dressing from the lining.”

“I take it she hasn't regained consciousness, then. When she does, she'll tell you.”

“She came 'round for a few minutes, Issay tells me,” Daurannon said. “I've been with the Witchfinders all afternoon, trying to rebuild sufficient goodwill so they'll stop talking about ransacking the Citadel from top to bottom and arresting the lot of us.”

“You didn't offer to buy them off with my body?” Antryg folded his arms casually and blinked across at him.

Daurannon glanced toward Aunt Min, rocking on her knees like a child, whispering as she drew along the lines of power the long interlocking fretwork of sigils, knotting light like an artist crocheting silk. Then his eyes returned to Antryg, a glint of resentment in them at the reminder that Aunt Min would not have stood for such a betrayal.

“She asked after Aunt Min,” he went on, without answering the question. “It was the first thing she said: 'Don't let her hurt herself. Antryg's conjurations will kill her.' ” He folded his own arms, the movement a challenge.

Antryg was silent.

“Or was that your aim?”

“To make Rosie Archmage while I'm still under the Council's geas, you mean?” And he saw Daurannon stiffen indignantly at the suggestion that the Master-Spells might fall to his rival rather than himself.

“That might have been in your mind.”

“Or yours.”

The hazel eyes darted quickly away, then returned, catching and holding the gray. For a moment the two wizards stood on opposite sides of the ritual bounds, graying-haired men who had known one another since they were teenagers, Antryg in a tawdry glitter of cheap beads, crystal earrings, round-lensed glasses flashing where they caught the late slant of the sun, Daurannon somber and elegant, the straight black fall of his robes broken only by the killing sword scabbarded at his waist.

“You know the Master-Spells might just as easily fall on Bentick.”

Daurannon waved off the suggestion impatiently. “He hasn't the strength.”

“He has more than you're giving him credit for,” Antryg said. “And in any case someone lured me out to the Green King's Chapel and set me up to be attacked; and when she comes 'round, Rosamund will certainly tell you that I got her away from the hunters and lured them from her.”

“Or simply went off with them,” Daur returned. “And disappeared at a convenient moment, which argues for at least the ability to work more magic than the geas should allow. Why haven't you been sleeping in your room in the Pepper-Grinder?”

Antryg tilted his head inquiringly to one side. “Why have you been watching the place?”

“Because you're our prisoner.” Daurannon's gaze lingered for a moment on the brown mark Antryg bore in the pit of his throat, the mark left by the accursed Sigil of Darkness. “And because you are not to be trusted.”

“I don't sleep there because I'm afraid I'll wake Kyra with my dreams,” Antryg replied gently, and Daurannon looked away.

“Then where do you sleep?”

“Oh, tut, Daur, that's not a question one gentleman asks another.” Antryg grinned and propped his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. “As for the Witchfinder, I should say that within twenty-four hours we should have the problem more or less in hand. His sasenna might even come in useful for searching the Citadel. I'll want a marked map of every passage and chamber, from the bottom of the Vaults to the top of the observatory platform, with the locations and natures of every Gate, wormhole, spell-field, reality fold and patch of alien moss, once the whole business is stabilized and they aren't appearing and disappearing.”

“Why the Citadel?”

Antryg blinked, surprised. “Why not? The more information we have, the likelier we are to come to a correct conclusion. But I shall need it done quickly.” He nodded back over his shoulder to Aunt Min, who had moved a few feet along the curve, still rocking on her heels and muttering, like a woman tying intricate, invisible bows of light one at a time along some mighty fulcrum beam.