The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (36 page)

Half-drunk with hope, she flashed from wild joy to horrible forboding. How long? Ten years? A hundred years? Please, God, don't make it have been a hundred years. Don't make everything be different. Don't make me be alone again.

Shaky terror overwhelmed her, and for a moment, she wondered if Magus might not be right. Never knowing might indeed be better than finding out ... it wasn't so bad, once you got used to it, if you stayed away from the demons.

Far, far off, she saw light.

Tiny and dim, the round spot of ocher had a wavery quality, like fire- or torchlight, but it was so bright after the long darkness that her eyes hurt with it. Her hand tightened on Magus' and she began to run, the thud of her feet on the floor jolting her bones, her purse slapping heavily against her thigh. Once, as the light strengthened, she looked down and saw its topaz reflection on her own pumping knees, but it wasn't until she stepped into the room at the end of that long tunnel that she dared look around behind her, to see her companion's white, thin face, with its trim black beard and startlingly green eyes.

Then she looked around her, at the place to which the light had led them.

It was no bigger than the minuscule dining-room-cum-office of her apartment. Shelves lined the walls, filled with neat rows of books; a scrubbed plank table upheld a tidy assortment of terra-cotta pots containing herbs, plus a few gardening implements. A knitting basket, wrought of twigs and overflowing with varicolored yarn, rested on a rough chair, and in a corner a small loom crouched like some kind of bizarre wooden robot, while beside it, tall and angular, stood a spinning wheel.

On a shelf a pair of tiny pink silk dancing slippers sat, frayed and covered with dust. Coals burned on a tiled hearth no larger than a good-sized washbasin. A red teapot, a white cup.

Beyond the window, blackness as utter, as complete, as she had known in the halls of her prison. All around, broken orly by the tiny cracklings of the fire, silence as dreadfully profound.

“A mage,” Magus whispered behind her. He had picked up the solitary book which lay among the potted plants on the table and was turning over its stiff yellowed pages. “And in my own world. This is written in old High Trebin.”

The stillness was horrible, the stillness of death. Joanna tiptoed across the room to push back the heavy white cotton curtain there. The chamber beyond was even smaller, the wooden walls likewise banked floor to ceiling in shelves of books. In a little alcove a single bed was half-hidden by white curtains. Cats prowled uneasily; the largest pushed its flat-skulled gray head at Joanna's calf and miaowed softly, as if it, too, feared to violate that dreadful hush.

Dim firelight showed her the face of the woman lying in the bed, tiny, pink, and wrinkled, incredibly old in the thin fan of white hair spread about the pillow.

“It's Aunt Min.” She spoke barely above a whisper, not wanting to wake the ancient Archmage. She felt half-afraid, by the stillness of the little dried-apple features, that the old lady was beyond waking. A deep sadness seized her, for old Minhyrdin the Fair looked so tired, so ancient, so isolated from all the world she had grown up in, a time traveler in her own body, far beyond everything she had known as a girl.

“Good,” Magus said, and at the briskness of his voice Joanna turned around, startled. “Well,” he reasoned, “if she's still alive we can't have been prisoners for so very long. Is she still alive?”

Joanna leaned down, wanting to touch the claw twisted with arthritis and no larger than a child's. But when it came to it, she didn't dare. “I think so,” she murmured. She raised her eyes. A cat jumped onto the bed, kneaded with soft paws at the old woman's thigh. Through a small window to one side of the bed alcove—through all the odd-shaped windows of the little room—was only blackness, impenetrable, silent, and terrible. “There's nothing out there,” she asked softly, “is there?”

Magus had gone to a larger window, looking out with the night-piercing eyes of a mage. “No,” he said softly. “Nothing ... ” He turned back to her, his face struggling to remain calm. “So this really isn't a way out at all.”

“Then that means it can't be where the draft was coming from,” Joanna pointed out. “When we came in sight of the light, we quit following the air current—all we have to do is go back to where we were and pick it up again.” She turned around. Past the half-opened curtains she could see into the other room, and beyond that, to the narrow slit of darkness that seemed to hover a few feet in front of the opposite wall: an eyepit into Hell, a crack opening to the haunted abysses from which they had so newly escaped. Resolutely, she walked back into that room, and selected the two largest balls of yarn from the knitting basket. She tied an end of one to the leg of the table; the other ball she secreted in her purse.

“Come on,” she said bracingly, seeing Magus hesitate, torn between the certainty of imprisonment in this lighted cul-de-sac and the possibility of escape through the darkness once more. “There has to be another way out.”

Most of the mages had already assembled in the refectory by the time Antryg, Silvorglim, and the Witchfinder's guards reached it. Antryg's hands were bound behind him, the steel of the Witchfinder's manacles laced with scarlet spell-cord despite Antryg's repeated assertions that under the geas it was impossible for him to work magic of any sort. “And I certainly have no intention of running away, you know,” he added as he strode along in a swirl of coat skirts, the littler man scurrying in an undignified fashion to keep up with his longer strides. “Turn left here, and a stair will take us down to the main cellars of the Polygon. For one thing, where on Earth would I go?”

“For that I have no surety,” Silvorglim gritted, and his fox-colored eyes glinted dangerously in the torchlight. “Nor will I trust what you say you cannot do, or would not do, given the chance.” It was only with the greatest of difficulty that Antryg had talked Silvorglim out of cutting his throat in the vestibule after all, the Witchfinder reasoning that if he brought his quarry back into contact with the other mages, he would probably be prevented from doing so.

But he had faced opposition, not only from the three Council sasenna but, unexpectedly, from his own warriors as well. “He knows this Citadel like the back of his hand, sir,” their captain had said, glancing uneasily at the vestibule door as if he could see through it the dreadful, shifting darkness beyond. “And he knows what may be going on. And,” he'd added, jerking his scarred chin in the direction of the tall wizard still standing in a thorned circle of drawn steel, “we can always kill him later.”

“That is my point,” Silvorglim had said softly. “If we give him his life now, we may not be able to take it later, as our warrant permits and the safety of the world, I am now convinced, demands. These wizards all plot with one another, and this man is the worst. I know him.”

“Oh, fiddle-faddle.” Antryg had widened his huge gray eyes at him behind his spectacles. “We've met exactly twice and I challenge you to find an etiquette master in the country who'll grant that putting red-hot irons to a man's feet constitutes anything more than a nodding acquaintance.”

Silvorglim had ignored the remark but in the end had had to give in. At Antryg's behest the Church wizard had finally used his spells to slip the bolts of the North Hall's inner door, by which time, of course, the Hall itself had been vacant. One of the small doors on the far side of it had been unbolted, opening into the maze of cellars, communicating tunnels, and tiny stairways that could lead anywhere in the Citadel; of the Circles of Power themselves, nothing remained of the curving galaxy of chalk trails and spirals into which Aunt Min had poured her power save scuffed and muddled fragments here and there upon the smooth sandstone of the floor.

And everywhere, as Antryg led the way through the back ways of cellars and tunnels to the Polygon, he could feel the shattered energies of the polarization field, the flickering lightnings of power, darting uneasily through the stones of the Citadel or flashing with a queer, shining, half-visible deadliness in the close-crowding shadows. Broken from their field, scattered everywhere under the built-up pressures of the past twenty-four hours, the energies that had been raised and redoubled and then released, undispersed, from their bounds were far from spent. Their crazy backlash had precipitated the Citadel into the Void; its pressure and influence still operated on the swirling bits of spell-field that remained. Even the non-mageborn sasenna of the Church felt it, and as Antryg led them through boiler rooms and hypocausts and disused staircases, they kept looking behind them as if subliminally aware of the random stirrings Antryg could so clearly see moving in the gloom that closed in behind.

For all his appearance of calm, Antryg himself was badly shaken, seeing now and then the lightning crawl of bluish glow that ran down certain cracks in the walls and hearing the low mutter of strange sounds in places where no sounds should have been. There were few places in his life he had been gladder to reach than the long, prosaic refectory with its carved hammerbeams and cold stone hearth, and few people whose faces he had welcomed more than the furious, beautiful woman who came limping across the room toward him, black robes swirling like storm cloud around her, staff clicking on the stones and eyes blazing like green Samhain fire.

“If this is any doing of yours, Antryg Windrose, I swear to you by the Horns of Hell I'll ... ”

“You'll have to stand at the end of a rather long line, I'm afraid,” Antryg told her reasonably. “And by that time I'm sure there will be very little left except soggy bits. Someone got into the North Hall,” he added more quietly, looking down at the Lady, who appeared ready either to order his execution or box his ears. “I tried to stop them but they'd bolted the doors ... the guards had been put to sleep with a simple Good-Night—anyone could have done it. Do you think you could get them to unchain me, by the way? It's tremendously uncomfortable, and I'm certainly not going anywhere.”

“Release him,” Lady Rosamund ordered shortly, and, when Silvorglim opened his mouth to protest, she commanded, “Do it!” in a voice like silvered steel. “Sentence of death or no, we need his knowledge, his services, for the remainder of this crisis.”

“And if he is the man who caused the crisis?” the Witch-finder demanded, his whole creased little face seeming to tighten, like a dog's before it snaps. “How can we judge what he tells us is truth and what is lies?”

“We
can judge,” the Lady retorted haughtily, “because we know something more of magic than the propaganda dribbled forth by magic's foes. Now let him go.”

“Thank you ... there isn't a great deal of time to waste.” Antryg rubbed his wrists where the chain had bruised them, his gray eyes already going to the group of Junior mages gathered beneath the great chandelier in the center of the hall. The waxlights on that massive triple hoop of iron and chain had not been kindled; instead, half a hundred shreds and fragments of bluish witchfire clung to the cold wicks, casting soft, strong, wavery radiance on the faces of those gathered around the table below.

Kyra the Red was there, and Mick and Cylin; and Q'iin the Herbmistress' student Gilda was tallying something on a long piece of paper. Scrying-crystals flashed and shimmered like chipped ice in the pallid light; Antryg could hear Cylin saying, “ ... trapdoor into the hypocaust will get you to the first level of the Vaults at the far end of the buttery, from there you can get into the kitchen.”

“Who's that?” Gilda asked quietly. “Nye?” And at the tall man's nod, she checked something off on her list. “We still haven't heard from either Bentick or Phormion.”

“Zake Brighthand checked in,” Mick said, glancing up from his fragment of yellow tourmaline. “He's in the Pavilion—Otaro's with him, and Issay. Otaro was taken sick, he says.”

“Otaro, Brighthand, Issay ... can they get here from the Pavilion? Implek and his patrol haven't been heard from—that other hasu of Silvorglim's seems to be trapped up in the Juniors' side of the hill, he doesn't know where he is.”

“Well, you scarcely need a crisis for that,” Antryg remarked. “It happens to novices all the time.”

“Brunus, can you hear me?” Kyra was murmuring, cradling her lump of pale blue topaz in her palm. “Brunus, answer ... Brunus, look into your crystal,” while in another part of the room, Daurannon was speaking quietly to a sizable group of black-robed Senior mages gathered around a table as far as possible from the dreadful darkness of the tall windows that had looked out upon the court.

“Antryg, why?” The Lady Rosamund brushed aside the tendrils of hair from her cheeks—it was the first time he could recall seeing her when she hadn't dressed her hair. Strands of cobweb clung to it, to her sleeves and the hem of her robe-she must have come here through the hypocaust under the North Cloister, as he himself had. “Why would someone destroy the circles? Never mind whether they believed that disturbing the balance of the spells would do ... this. I didn't believe it myself. But why would someone want to disrupt the spells that were holding the situation stable? Why prolong the confusion? It was obviously a wizard, who presumably knew ... ”

“It was an act of panic, I think,” Antryg said softly. “An act to prevent the Citadel from being searched at all costs. We'll go into who might have done it later. At the moment it's imperative that I check the situation in the Vaults—Silvorglim is welcome to send as many guards with me as he chooses; in fact, I rather hope he will. We're going to need to move the Dead God's machinery up here if the flooding is getting worse.”

“The Dead God?” Silvorglim's thin face paled a little, and his topaz eyes flared wide at the mention of that uncanny deity. “What pagan lies are these?”

“Not the real Dead God, of course,” Antryg explained rapidly. “But he was originally introduced to me in mistake for the Dead God and you know how first impressions stick. His name is actually LTRX2-449-9102-CF60913 and I hope you won't be prejudiced by his appearance. His machinery is probably the only reason the Citadel didn't dissolve completely when the balance between the two spells was broken, and if anything happens to it, we're likely to be in real trouble.”