The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (41 page)

“As you can see,” he said, “not everything registered on the multiscanner, and some of what did register was undetectable by human senses. We still don't know what this disruption was, or that.” The massive claw touched the screen with incongruous delicacy.

Anything, she thought as she worked. Anything to keep from looking at her watch, counting down how little of the two hours was left.

It was definitely growing colder.

Great,
she thought, warming her stiff fingers in her armpits. We may not be losing air, but we're sure as hell losing heat. I wonder why gravity still works ?

Behind her, Daurannon had called the wizards together again for a muttered conference, their voices carrying clearly into the tense hush of the shadowy room. “According to our scryers the water's up to the fifth level of the Vaults,” he said.

From somewhere in the dark of the kitchen there came a thin, alien piping, the scramble of unseen feet. The mages glanced quickly at one another. Daurannon went a little paler, but continued, “Nandiharrow, take twelve of the sasenna with you.”

From the north door came a muttered confusion of voices. Joanna looked up, to see the guards there step back. Two gray-robed Juniors—a rawboned, red-haired girl and a dark-eyed boy—carried in between them a stumbling little man in a yellow nightshirt, whose black, greasy hair cascaded like a woman's down his shoulders. Behind them, haloed by witchlight, flitted the androgynous form of Issay Bel-Caire.

“Brighthand—Otaro.” Daurannon strode across to greet them.

Joanna bent back to her work. This patch of moss and that wormhole were related here in this configuration, which meant that probably this map went this-way-around, and thus that Gate there had opened twice ... or two different Gates had opened there a day and a half apart.

“What's that note say?”

“ 'Cold field,' ” reported Tom.

“Well, they all seem to be lining up.”

“It's where the energy-tracks run through the Vaults.” The Dead God's shorter, thinner lower hand snaked past Tom to trace a line on the map fragment. “That chamber is the one with the Glass Pillar, at one point of the field axis. There are Gates—concentrations of flux—here and here, outside the Vaults, indeed outside the Citadel altogether.”

“Is the cold field on the next map? How about the one that says 'cat magic'?”

“That's over here ... not in the Vaults ... ”

Her eyes sneaked to her watch. Forty-five minutes had passed.

“My lord ... !”

The guards on the east door of the refectory stepped aside. Nandiharrow, tall, gray, and grim, strode through the door in a billow of dark robes, trailed by a very shaken-looking Pot-hatch and twelve guards. Daurannon put aside the crystal he had been studying for the past ten minutes and walked quickly to meet him, probably, Joanna guessed, to keep whatever ill news Nandiharrow had to impart from being called out across an assembly of folks already teetering on the knife-edge of panic. Silvorglim, at least, had for some time been pacing and fidgeting, staring around him at the wizards and across at the darkly gleaming circle of oscillators and transmission screens in a way she did not like.

Daurannon might as well have saved himself steps. The attention of every person in the place, with the exception of Bentick and the heavily sedated Otaro, was riveted on the dark forms of the two Council mages from the nine-fingered clock-maker's first utterance.

“There's something moving down there,” Nandiharrow said softly. “There are ... things ... throughout the cellars now, but this seems to be coming up from the Vaults. I've looked and cannot see it properly, but I felt it ... we all felt it. A drawing, a coldness not of the air, but of the bones within the flesh ... ”

“Oh, Christ,” Joanna whispered, knowing instantly what it was that he had seen. Something seemed to sink and tighten behind her sternum, and her heart began to pound.

Daurannon returned quietly to his chair, and the light that had flickered over his head while he'd scried grew brighter as he held his crystal once more to its glow. He gazed for a long time, and the wizards grouped around him in the curious, flickering ring of multiple shadows grew very silent. By the stronger glare, Joanna could see the sweat glisten upon that short upper lip.

“Miss Sheraton ... ”

She came to him, dusting the chalk from her hands. “The tsaeati,” she said softly, pronouncing the word as Magister Magus had done. “That's what it is, isn't it?”

The mage shut his eyes for a moment, not surprised, but with the gesture of a two-pack-a-day man who'd been hoping the doctor would say, 'Oh, no, that cough's just a summer cold ... '

“I don't know,” he said at length. Joanna looked down over his shoulder at the chunk of gray-yellow quartz the size and thickness of an avocado pit that lay in his well-kept hands. In the flat, reflected brightness she could see nothing in the glass-smooth facets.

“In the Vaults,” Joanna said softly, “one of those two-legged Shriekers came running after us, and I thought then there was something moving behind it—something I couldn't exactly see. I thought ... I thought almost that the floors bulged up, like the stone itself was alive.”

Sweat flashed as a muscle jumped in Daurannon's jaw, but he said nothing.

“Antryg had Magister Magus remain behind to put the strongest illusions he could muster across the passageway, so that nothing on that side could perceive anything beyond them. We had to get the machine up here.”

“And it has followed,” he murmured. “Or perhaps it is only that it sensed the smell of our blood, our souls, from afar.”

He turned the crystal over in his fingers, which remained oddly steady; Joanna herself was a bit surprised at how calm she felt. “I can see the walls move,” he continued in a voice that was audible only because of the deadly hush that had fallen all around them. “I can see a mound of water and mud, and out of it the torn limbs and necks and bodies of unknown creatures are waving and snapping, surrounded by darkness. And past that darkness, I see the arches and brickwork of the storage cellars.”

Across the refectory by the east door, other sasenna had come in, their panting voices clear for all their quiet: “We couldn't stop it. We had to fall back. It's on its way.”

Daurannon got to his feet, counting his forces with his eyes. Without being ordered, all the sasenna in the room including those of the Church—save the guards on the north door—had gone to the eastern archway, ranging themselves across it. Their faces were grim, and Joanna reflected that, though the sasenna trained throughout their lives for a death-fight, in these peaceful times very few of them—Church, Council, or the private forces of nobles or Emperor—ever actually saw true combat. Near the north door Otaro stirred in his poppy-induced dreams, mumbled something that sounded like “Father ... ,” and then began to scream, a horrible, harsh, animal noise, and claw at his face with his bound hands. Brighthand and Issay, who had joined the group around Daurannon's chair, raced back to him, catching at his wrists—his cheeks and forehead were already a mass of scabs—and pulling them away; in time the Singer quietened to weeping, and so once again to sleep.

But as if the screaming had raised the temperature of some volatile liquid over boiling point, the stillness of the refectory, with its shifting patterns of yellow torchlight, pale witchfire, and shadows, dissolved into nervous convection currents of movement.

“Nandiharrow, Issay, Brighthand ... ” Daurannon was moving among them, his choirboy face very white but resolute. “Gilda, contact Q'iin, get her and her party back here—tell them to come through the north doors if they can. Whitwell ... ”

Seldes Katne, seated near the quilt on the floor where Bentick lay, got to her feet and made as if to come over, and Daurannon waved her back. Bentick, too, climbed shakily to his feet, catching the corner of the nearest table.

“Lie down,” the little librarian ordered. “You'll kill yourself ... ”

“Nonsense. They need everyone with any pretension to strength.”

The Senior mages were drawing together, with a few of the Juniors—Brighthand and Kyra—under Daurannon's quiet-voiced orders. “If it is the tsaeati,” he was saying, “it was said to be drawn by life, to absorb life. Thus we need to form a Blood-Bond among us, to pool our life and our strength against this thing.”

As the mages began to turn up their sleeves and form themselves into a ritual circle, Joanna faded back to the ring of transmitter screens and generators—Compu-Henge, she termed it mentally—and knelt beside the Dead God and Tom, who were still laboriously marking and annotating the master maps. “Back up your data chips and take the computer down,” she said softly. “We're going to have the worst kind of company in a couple minutes and I wouldn't want the disk to crash.”

The Dead God swore. Translated by the Spell of Tongues directly mind to mind, some of the images were fairly startling. “What comes?” he asked, as the screen colors redshifted themselves away into darkness.

“Something that eats life.”

“We all do that.” He unfolded himself in long-boned increments and fished his weapon from behind the main generator. “We can bring the screens inside the main ring and still maintain the configuration, but if it comes near the oscillator or the batteries ... see?” He showed her the triggering and targeting mechanisms of the gun, which had clearly been designed for operation by one upper hand and one lower. “It doesn't kick much, but hold it tucked, this way, and by all Those Below keep your arm clear of the vent.”

Joanna checked the infrared targeting system and found it unfamiliar but comprehensible. When she'd admitted, to her own embarrassment, a delight in armament, her instructor had demonstrated some fairly esoteric weaponry. Antryg had generally been more curious about how the stuff had worked; Joanna, always practical, had merely striven to be able to hit anything with it before that thing could hit her. Though the gun was awkward to hold, the trigger was no more than a button, designed for the tiny tongue-fingers of Ninetentwo's kind and easily adaptable to her own small hand.

Ten feet away, the fifteen or so top mages stood in a chalked Circle of Power, bared forearms pressed together; here and there, between the joins, slow trickles of blood dripped out. Among the ashy grays and blacks of their robes, Tobin, the Witchfinder's Dog, stood out like flame among cinders. Though Joanna could hear no words, she knew there was magic being raised and shared among them; could sense it in the quiet stillness of those vastly disparate faces. Teenagers like Zake Brighthand or fussy old men like Bentick, whatever their feelings about one another, about the role of wizardry or the operation of the Citadel, when it came down to it, they would back one another to the death or beyond. They were what they were, and even those who loved them—herself; her friend Caris the sasennan, Salteris' grandson; Pothatch, Hathen, and Tom—could never fully understand. Silvorglim the Witchfinder, who had remained seated among the torches and lanterns when his guards had joined the ranks before the doors, now approached the group with a glint of protesting fire in his eyes: Pothatch caught him by the arm and whispered, “Not now.”

“My lord!” Sergeant Hathen called from the eastern door, and around her the black ranks of the sworn warriors stirred.

Daurannon raised his head and opened his eyes. As she had briefly during their argument, Joanna saw the middle-aged man who hid beneath the wizard's smooth disguise—saw, with some surprise, the naked terror in his eyes. He walked forward, bracing himself for what would come.

The circle of mages re-formed itself into a rough line. Daurannon nodded to the sergeant to get her warriors back. She signed them to withdraw but remained herself—Joanna saw the big, heavy-boned woman's glance cross Daurannon's, asking some question; the mage took a deep breath and motioned her away. After a moment's hesitation she went. Crouching behind the stack of batteries with the Dead God, the muzzle of the gun protruding between them, Joanna thought that momentary hesitation—that wondering whether she ought to remain at her master's side in spite of the creeping coldness, the sensation of slow-building evil that had begun to flow into the room—was one of the bravest things she'd seen.

Neatly and very rapidly Daurannon sketched signs upon the door with his left forefinger—or presumably, Joanna thought, they were signs, since she herself could see nothing of them in the soft whiteness slowly strengthening in the room around them. The waiting line of wizards grouped closer, heads bowed, some with eyes shut as if meditating. One or two of them, Joanna saw, held hands, the blood that streaked their forearms staining the clasped fingers.

A stream of bloodstained water began to trickle in under the door.

Daurannon stepped back, panting as if with some strain or exertion, his hands visibly trembling now. Sweat misted his face and dripped from the strings of his long hair; his lips moved a little in the torch glare from behind. The witchlight, after its final blaze, began to fade, and like the cold dark that waited beyond the doors, night closed in.

The bolt across the door quivered, creaking under some massive weight; then from the wood of the door itself came a scratching, tearing sound, and Joanna saw the heavy oak planks at the bottom shift and start. Daurannon took another step backward and spread out his arms, gathering what was left of the light about him until his form was haloed in shuddering wings of brightness against the gloom. He cried out “Tsaeati, tsaerat, anambo mishia tathet!” and steam began to curl from the surface of the water still trailing thinly in.

The scratching stopped.

Otaro moaned with terror in his sleep.

Then something smote the door with a blow like a steam hammer, like a freight train slamming at floor-level, and oak splinters three inches thick went spearing like shattered matchwood in every direction. A cacophony of howls and screams burst out, and claws pawed and thrust under the widened space beneath the door, ripping, grabbing at the wood while all around them water, mud, and blood came pouring in. Daurannon and several others in the line made a slashing pass with their hands, and blue lightning smote the floor, turning the water to hissing steam and raking at the searching claws. But the steam itself sprang upward into a cyclone, flung itself in the Handsome One's face, and as he threw up his arms to protect his eyes, the oak of the door bulged, swelled, heaved out into an impossible bubble as if the molecules of the wood itself had softened to liquescent gum.