The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (33 page)

“Last night I was told that the Archmage, and only the Archmage, could and would answer my questions regarding the propriety—the legality—of what is being done in this place.” His deep voice was low and level, but there was a shivery edge to it, and his pale eyes glimmered in the wet light with the anger of a man badly frightened at unimaginable betrayal by his own flesh. “This morning I was again fobbed off ... ”

“She sleeps still,” Lady Rosamund cut in coldly.

“As I told your Excellency,” Daurannon added.

“Her ... meditations—” Rosamund's ironic inflection, Antryg knew, was aimed at him. “—of last night were more than a woman of her years should have to endure.” Flaked jade could have been no more cutting than the glance that sheered briefly to him where he stood in his corner, then away. Daurannon and Bentick traded a look, but it was more than either dared to do, to violate the Lady's protection.

“As the guards pointed out.” Daurannon stepped forward to the Witchfinder's side conciliatingly. “They had their orders.”

“If the Archmage will not—or cannot—see me,” Silvorglim's voice dripped sarcasm like a snake's venom, “perhaps it is time that the Council delegated another to speak. I have been fobbed off, lied to, even as the Regent, the nobles, the Church, even, put aside our advice and ignore our warnings.”

“Look,” Daurannon said reasonably, forestalling Lady Rosamund's frigid rejoinder and Bentick's almost-spitting outburst of rage, “if we wished to tell you lies, certainly we'd have done so more believably than this.”

“You are a people of lies,” returned the Witchfinder, his yellow gaze hardening to a pin-bright glitter of hate. “Your power is the stuff of lies, the outspewing of devils designed to tempt human souls to their destruction with the illusion of a power which is and can be the province of God alone.”

“God?” Lady Rosamund drew herself up still further, pride and rage smoking from her like the vapor that breathes along a mountain of ice. “Don't you mean God's Church, which grudges to see any wield power but itself?”

“Nor should any,” the Witchfinder replied calmly. “The Church, and the Church alone, speaks the will of the Sole God. All the others you have corrupted, even the Emperor. So don't argue semantics with me, you apostate whore, and don't pretend to me that an evil isn't going on here in this Citadel, an evil to tempt and twist true men from what is right. You will find that such a temptation is unavailing, such a twisting impossible.” But his eyes, paled to the color of dead leaves, flicked from face to face with a nervousness that belied his words, and Antryg thought, Were you tempted, then? Outside, under the balcony, boots scuffed amid a muted creak of dagger belts and harness leather, where more of the Witchfinder's guards awaited. The hasu, standing with folded arms behind Silvorglim's shoulder, was gazing idly in his direction; Antryg felt the crawl of sweat on his forehead, making his scalp itch and his spectacles slip down his nose.

“I demand to be given the freedom I need, the freedom which my charter grants me, to investigate ...”

“No!” Lady Rosamund cried.

At the same moment Bentick snapped, “There will be no search of the Citadel save that conducted by the Council!”

“Take care, then, that I do not return with the full might of the Church ... ”

“You take care,” Bentick shouted, “should you be fool enough to ... ”

“Please!” Daurannon interposed his body between the Witchfinder and the Steward, who looked ready to seize one another by the throats. The hasu also stepped forward from his post in the door but hesitated—quite sensibly, Antryg thought, considering he couldn't be more than a medium-strength wizard, certainly no one to take on three members of the Council. Though he knew that to move would shatter the spells of misdirection that cloaked him, Antryg saw his chance—their attentions all looked fully engaged, and the door was now clear. Stepping softly, he slipped past the red-clothed wizard's shoulder and out into the hall. Daurannon and Rosamund were both too occupied with the shouted recapitulation of the Concordances of Stellith to stop him as he tiptoed down the stairs and paused for a moment in the shadows of the lower hall.

Through the door he could see the Witchfinder's sasenna clearly now, gathered under the balcony to get out of the rain. Across the garden, Antryg could see Seldes Katne leaving the Polygon, a sheaf of notes clutched under her arm; she paused at the turn of the path up to the Library, peering out from beneath the protection of her oiled-cloth hood as if scanning the waist-deep wet jungle for sight of someone ... probably, Antryg thought, himself.

He could, he knew, work his way on up through the cellars to the Library and intercept her there, to learn whatever it was she had come down to tell him. But the doorways into the Library would be barred with her spells, and even the ward-words of so slight a mage as Seldes Katne were sufficient to keep him out ... or to trap him against them, as against a locked door, should either the Witchfinder's or the Council's sasenna close him in from behind.

Moreover, with the graying of the afternoon the sense had grown upon him of lost time, of minutes ticking away—of the growing pressure of the energies within the field and of the Void itself. So he turned his steps downward, edging back through the cellars of the Breadbox and the Assembly Hall, through the hypocaust, and so to a downshaft from the cellar of the Island of Butterflies that had escaped Bentick's notice. His hands didn't stop shaking until he was safe in the darkness of the Vaults again.

Down on the fourth level, Mick and Cylin still mounted guard over the Chamber of the Glass Pillar. They both looked tired and rather shaken by the things they had seen and heard slipping through the blackness of the maze all around them. They would feel, too, Antryg thought as he listened to their account of the night, the growing weight of the Void, the rising shudder of the powers of the leys fed through the collecting-maze, polarized, turned back on itself in an eternal loop like the reflections of an endless mirror.

Nevertheless, neither of the young men would return to the Citadel above, offering instead to continue the charting of the middle levels until they were too exhausted to go on. “It's very good of you,” Antryg said, emptying his kitchen loot from his pockets and dividing the rolls, cheese, and fruit with them. “If you smell anything like roses, call a spell of winds around you as fast as you can and get out of the vicinity at once. Find me immediately and let me know where it is. And if you meet anyone on the Council—or any of the Council sasenna—you haven't seen me. I don't like this,” he added quietly to Ninetentwo, as the two young men vanished around the comer of a twisted staircase and the dark of the Vaults swallowed them up. “I don't like it at all.” Reaching out, he touched the wall beside him—the energy felt stable to the bare tips of his fingers but dangerously hot.

“Nor I,” the Dead God buzzed softly. “That Moving Gate your mages described—the longer I consider it in the light of all my experiments with the mechanics of the time-space continuum, the more aberrant it sounds. According to my computers, it should not even be possible.”

“Well, to use a quite hackneyed example, for many years the flight of a bumblebee was considered to be contrary to all laws of aerodynamics, but it was eventually discovered that not all factors had been taken into account. Saint Vespaluus, as I recall, is the patron saint of honeybees, but for some reason the bumblebees have their own patron saint, Saint Olpo, to whom one also prays to have one's garden delivered from plagues of rabbits. Everything else peaceful?”

The tall arachno-dragon nodded, but his hands, huge and skeletal, shifted unthinkingly along the thick duraplast of the rifle slung over one shoulder. “According to my readings the sixth level is deep in water that is still rising.”

“Damn.” Antryg threw a nervous glance at the chamber's far door, wondering if, somewhere in the darkness beyond it, he had glimpsed a flicker of moving light. The dim green lumenpanels wired to the pillar shed a cold, feverish gleam over a small pyramid of spare equipment, extra air bottles, first-aid kit, and what he dimly guessed to be a portable computer, and the pillar itself refracted chilly shards of the light across walls and ceiling, touching with ghostly highlights the edges of generators and screens.

“The Gate to my own world is up one level from here.” The air hoses flexed like obscene musculature as the Dead God gestured toward the fat hawser of cable that vanished through the door. “I've run a line up to it, to save the batteries for emergencies. Each battery is good for one hour, as we reckon hours: roughly two of yours. I've got a com-cable hooked through, too, and the bulletins I hear from my own world are disquieting.”

Antryg shivered, thinking about the cold, floating, half-formed sentiences of the teles-balls that had over the years “gone bad” drifting through the charged mazes of the Vaults; about the power he could sense, almost palpably now, streaming through the fibers of granite all about him; about the dark, straining strength of the Void twisting at the magic that held it in place. The exhaustion he'd felt in his dream seemed to have carried over into waking: he felt more tired than he could remember being in years, the pain of the geas a constant, slow gnawing at his bones.

But somewhere in the sightless mazes of the Vaults, somewhere in the labyrinthine tangles of pits and traps and doors that led nowhere, lay the answer: the Gate from which issued the scent of roses, the darkness in which voices cried out words that were afterward forgotten ... and the Circles of Power that held the thing open.

The answer,
thought Antryg wearily, and his bones cringed from the thought of more wandering through this haunted underworld of filthy mosses, unseen demons, drifting ghosts of fog. The answer would be there. It was the question he had begun to worry about.

“I suppose,” he said at length, “that eventually I shall have to go abovestairs again and try to see Aunt Min. By that time I hope Rosie will have called the dogs off me and convinced Silvorglim and his myrmidons to go elsewhere—at least, I hope she manages to do that before it comes time to dismantle the polarization field, because it's going to take all the strength the Council can raise to do so safely. And I'm beginning to experience a sort of academic curiosity about what they're going to do with me once this is all solved.”

The opaque golden iridescence of Ninetentwo's eyes gleamed at him as the Dead God tilted his head. “Perhaps they wonder that, too.”

Pothatch and Tom were just putting the last of the supper dishes away when Antryg emerged from the Vaults again. It was almost full dark, and still raining, the sound of it a soft, steady drumming on the tiled roof above the clumsy rafter shadows. Supper was long over, but the sasenna who would ordinarily have filled in for the absent servants were still out walking uneasy patrols. Tom dished up leftover lamb stew that, for once, Antryg was almost too exhausted to eat while Pothatch slipped out to puff his way up the hill to the Breadbox to beg more dream herbs from Q'iin. In the deserted bathhouse, with its smells of wet stone, herbs, and soap, there was sufficient hot water in the boilers for Antryg to bathe and shave and wash his hair; afterward he climbed a ladder in the back of a stores cupboard to the attic, to sleep for what remained of the night

Better a whore than a wizard, for at least a whore'll give you summat for your coin.

—Ellie Brue

Mistress To King Pharidon II

And One Of The Most Notorious

Prostitutes In Angelshand

“Let me alone ... Go away ... I swear to you I never killed you.”

Suspended inches, it seemed, above the poisoned seethe of dreams, Antryg opened his eyes and listened. Up here under the roof tiles the rain was very loud; the air smelled of wet dust where leaks dripped through and of herbed steam and soap from below.

He heard nothing more for a time, but, reasoning that anything was an improvement over what waited for him on the other side of the wall of sleep, he got noiselessly to his feet and pulled on his coat. As he crept to the top of the ladder, he heard a soft bumping, the scrape of furniture as weight caught at it, and a broken voice filled with terror and grief.

“Please ... please ... I didn't mean it. I never meant you harm.”

Otaro's voice.

Antryg slipped down the ladder, put aside the hanging that separated the closet, with its shelves of terra-cotta crocks, from the main length of the baths.

The Singer of the City of Cranes swayed like a ghost in the middle of the big stone room, holding a corner of one of the tables for support. He wore only a yellow calico nightshirt, baggy over a frame that had visibly lost flesh in the past three days; the long black curls hanging down over his shoulders were matted and filthy. He swung violently around at the scuff of Antryg's boots on the flagstoned floor, hand raised. “Keep away from me!” he screamed in a voice shrill with terror.

Antryg froze, seeing the blind panic in the older man's dark eyes. Mages were drilled to use defensive spells of lightning and fire if attacked—if he moved, he'd be a pile of greasy ash long before he could reach either Otaro or the door. The Singer's face was pouchy and gray with fatigue, grimed with beard stubble, and wet with sweat as if he'd dunked it in one of the tubs; his breath labored in the rain-drumming darkness.

“I'm not here to harm you, Otaro,” Antryg said in a low, friendly voice. “I just found your seeing-glass in the Vaults, that's all.” Moving very carefully, he slipped the magnifying lens on its ribbon from around his neck and held it out. “And I knew you needed help.”

The little man backed away, trembling, hand still upraised. Antryg wasn't sure who or what he was seeing through those fear-stretched brown eyes, but, at a guess, it wasn't the bathhouse. “I don't need help.”

“Of course not,” Antryg agreed soothingly, the voice of a healer's spells. “I'm here to protect you, Otaro—to protect you so that you can go to sleep.”

He lowered his voice still more, recognizing his own dreams, his own fears, his own madness in the Singer's frightened stare. “You're quite safe, you know, and as long as you have your seeing-glass he can't come for you—he can't come near you. He'll stay dead and underground where he belongs.” That kind of fear, he knew, came only from seeing in dreams one who by all rights and reason must be long rotted to dust. “Let me give it to you, and then you'll be quite safe.”