The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (43 page)

Lady Rosamund limped to Aunt Min's side. With the neutralizing of the Church troops she had sheathed her sword; she put her free arm protectively around the old lady's shoulders as she looked up at Antryg. “And what now?” Her hair was damp and stringy with sweat, her dark robe torn and blotched: evidently the route to the Brown Star's gate had been less than easy. Antryg, despite a makeshift bandage on his left hand and black rings of exhaustion around his eyes, looked better than he had, as if a weight had been lifted from his bony shoulders. Magister Magus simply sank down in a corner and put his head in his hands.

“The battle with the tsaeati has exhausted the powers of nearly everyone on the Council without defeating the creature, and we are where we were before.”

“Well, hardly that,” Brighthand pointed out, looking up from Otaro's semiconscious form. “Once that thing gets to the top of the Library and finds nothin' resemblin' energy up there, it's gonna be back.”

“You had to say that,” Tom sighed.

But Antryg had already turned away, to kneel, as Issay Bel-Caire was already kneeling, beside the great, bony shape of the Dead God. “Ninetentwo,” he whispered, his crooked fingers traveling with feathered lightness over the long bone planes of the alien temples, brushing the heavy clawed hands and corded wrists. Joanna, coming up quietly on the alien's other side, checked the gauges on the air tanks. They seemed less than half-empty, and as she watched, the green lights flickered and varied with the slow draw of breath.

Leaving Antryg and Issay together to bind the wounds the crossbow bolts had made, she returned to the oscillators and, plagued by a deep sense of embarrassment at what she perceived as truly unfeeling behavior, systematically checked what she could of every gauge and dial. As far as she could tell, all the lights that should have been amber were still amber, nothing was blinking or white ... the equivalent of danger-red. Fortunately, the dials and screen were self-illuminated, for the witchlight that had been drunk away by the tsaeati's power had not returned, and the great refectory was sunk in almost total darkness. Only the torches and lanterns of Silvorglim's sasenna provided a smoky, eerie light, which played nervously across the faces of the wizards while their shadows loomed and staggered on the walls like shredded battle flags borne by dying men.

Laboriously, she followed Ninetentwo's original instructions, feeding the wafer chips into the computer's port and overlapping the samples with the actual readings to make sure nothing had altered. Behind her she was aware of Antryg rummaging through the spare equipment behind the main oscillator to locate a black plastic case roughly the size of a loaf of bread. Presumably, she thought, it was the first-aid kit, with drugs and stimulants proper to Ninetentwo's alien physiology. He wouldn't have known what it was or where it was unless Ninetentwo told him, she thought, as he strode back to the Silent One and their patient, and allowed herself a hesitant sip of relief.

The sound of Gilda's sobbing had quieted; Joanna raised her head to see the dark-haired novice being rocked in red-haired Kyra's arms. Brunus, fat and deft and serious, was applying hot cloths to Whitwell Simm's ruined arm, steam from the basin beside him rising in wreaths around his kindly face. Nearby a rather shaky-looking Brighthand, his gray robe still soaked with Daurannon's blood, was holding on to Otaro's bound wrists and saying something to him in the soft tones of healing-spells, while the mad wizard stirred in his dreams and sobbed incoherently. Lady Rosamund and Aunt Min had gone to kneel beside Daurannon, the Lady binding and stitching the wound in his arm by the light of a tallow dip while the Archmage listened to Durannon's stifled account of the events of the past hour and a half.

She heard Aunt Min say softly, “And it was not so much then, to face Death when it came?”

Daurannon's breath whispered in a laugh, as at some old conversation, and he murmured, “Believe me, Auntie, if there'd been any place to run, you'd still be trying to coax me out of it.” But the old lady only smiled.

Magister Magus, Joanna noted, hadn't moved from his corner near the eastern door, where he was rather numbly consuming a cup of tea under the watchful eye of two of Silvorglim's guards. The Witchfinder himself slept heavily in his corner among the cluster of torches.

Yet a waiting tension filled the dark room like an indrawn breath. Joanna knew—they all knew—that Brighthand was right. It was far from over.

“He'll be all right.” Antryg's deep, flamboyant voice breathed like the soft-brushed note of a temple gong in Joanna's ear. Turning, she saw that he and Issay had brought the Dead God back to the shelter of his equipment, covering him with blankets. The iridescent orange eyes were open, but since Joanna had never seen them close, she wasn't sure what this meant. Steam curled from the palms of those huge, toothed hands and drifted in ribbons from along his spine.

“I hope so,” she murmured nervously. “Aside from the fact that he's the only one who can really tell if anything goes wrong with all the hardware ... Dammit, none of this is really any of his fight. I mean ... ” She hesitated, looking worriedly up into Antryg's face. “He could have stayed in his own world, you know.”

“Don't talk foolishness.” The buzzing from the Dead God's skull was barely louder than a mosquito circling somewhere, invisible, on a summer night. “If you saw a long-odds opportunity to enrich your knowledge by leaping through a Gate into another world, would you not seize an air bottle and leap?”

“Hell, no,” Joanna replied promptly, then realized that it was exactly what she had done in returning to this world last fall, to attempt to rescue Antryg from the Council.

Antryg's eyebrows shot up, with a kind of startled, nervous question, and she realized she wasn't the only one who'd considered the implications of their love in the light of the danger it had brought her.

Magister Magus had cautioned her not to make a choice. But her utter joy at having the choice—at having him there to choose—was, she understood, choice in itself.

She added softly, “Not knowledge.”

In their bruised pits, the gray eyes warmed, and he sighed a little, reaching out to touch her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “It's good to see you again.”

“You don't know how good.”

“Joanna, I'm so sorry ... ”

She shifted her grip to his coat sleeves and pulled him to her. Their kiss was slower and stronger, without the first unthinking desperation; she felt, for an odd moment, that had things been a little different they would have retired then and there to some corner, curled up together like a couple of puppies, and gone to sleep.

Instead she said, “Now come over here and have a look at this.”

“Filthy French postcards?” he inquired hopefully, and she poked him lightly in the ribs.

“I'll give you a filthy French postcard. How about a filthy French map of the Vaults, with all your information totted up and whatever I could pull out of the Dead God's graphics. And I hope you can see some kind of pattern in it all, because I sure as hell can't. Other than the obvious one, that they all line up along the leys.”

“Yes, but we knew that going in.” He coiled himself down cross-legged to study the nine maps roughly sketched on the floor. “The problem is ... where's Kitty, by the way? She was here when I left.”

Joanna frowned at the sudden memory through the jumbled events of the last half hour. "She dodged out of here right after the fight with the tsaeati—which, as Brighthand so sapiently pointed out, is going to be back as soon as it gets to the top of the Library and discovers there's no supersonic lollipop up there. She might have had some idea of protecting the books, but I don't think it would devour them. They aren't an energy source, are they?'

“Well, some of them are, but that's another story. What worries me is that there were supposed to be two or three teles stored in the Library. Which ones, and how strong, I don't know, since Kitty never got a chance to give me the results of her research. What's this?”

“Just my notes.”

“No, on the back.”

“Ninetentwo's raw data from before the stabilization field went into effect. You can see the concentration in what has to be the Vaults ... ”

“Yes,” he murmured, and began to riffle the pages like a cartoon flip-book, so that the images seemed to skate nervously here and there with the rapidly falling sheets. “How did Kitty act?”

Joanna looked at him blankly for a moment, then said, “Scared, like the rest of us. Why?”

“Well ... ” He frowned and riffled the pages again, watching the illusory movement of all the Gates through the almost-patterns of the maze. Then he looked across at her, the torchlight sliding opaquely across the lenses of his spectacles for a moment, then showing his eyes grave and worried. “You see, two of the three people who actually saw the Moving Gate went mad.”

“You mean from something in the Gate itself?”

Antryg nodded. “Kitty didn't get as close a look as the others did, and so mightn't have gotten the full dose of whatever it was—probably an atmospheric poison—but she did get some, because she, too, described the Gate as rushing toward her. Now, there may very well have been some kind of noises and lights connected with it, but ... ”

“Wait a minute,” said Joanna, catching his hands as he began to riffle the sheets again. “Are you saying that the Moving Gate didn't move at all?”

His long mouth quirked. “I suspect not. I thought it was impossible at the time, you remember—no, you don't remember, you weren't there. Anyway, from what I know of the physics of the Void, for a Gate to slide around in that fashion is extremely unlikely. What is likelier is that the initial hallucinations involved the sense of the darkness of the Gate rushing toward—or in Kitty's case, away from—the victim; pursuing them, as Otaro described. Then later come pain and increasing paranoia: Phormion's belief that Lady Rosamund was using me in a plot against her, Otaro's visions of the Moving Gate appearing in his rooms.”

He glanced across at Bentick, who was helping Brunus with Whitwell Simm. The Steward moved with the jitteriness of the cats that had begun to congregate in every corner of the echoing darkness of the room; his face was haggard under the raked red lines of its wounds.

“I began to wonder about it after I spoke to Otaro, but other matters intervened. It's been a rather busy night. But looking at all the evidence, it's quite plain to me that what appeared to be an anomaly was in fact not an anomaly at all, and therefore probably no more significant than any other Gate. In other words, I—we all—have been pursuing a chimera.”

Joanna looked around her at the refectory, the tense, exhausted white faces of the wizards, the stinks of smoke and burnt flesh and blood. Her voice shook. “So we're back to square one?”

“Oh,” Antryg murmured, returning to riffling through the pages and making all the various Gates move, “I think we have a long, long way to go before we achieve the comfort and security of square one. But if Kitty's started to go mad from seeing this Gate as well ... ”

Then he paused, staring down at the top sheet of the pile. Lifting them again, he let them fall, holding them higher and wider, so that not only the closer patterns of the Vaults showed, but, here and there, the dark blurs of fields elsewhere appeared and vanished.

Looking down over his shoulder, Joanna was silent until he'd finished.

Then he said slowly, “Yes.”

“That one spot isn't moving at all.”

“No.”

“But it isn't even in the Vaults. I saw it on those charts and thought it was the one out in the Green King's Chapel.”

Antryg shook his head. “It isn't anywhere near far enough out for that. By its placement it's definitely in the Citadel.”

“But if it's in the Citadel,” Joanna argued, puzzled, “I mean, not in the Vaults—wouldn't somebody have seen it?”

“Not necessarily. Kitty and I searched all the places in the Citadel where no one ever goes in quest of you, but it's conceivable that we missed some ... ”

“Ninetentwo ... ” Joanna bent anxiously toward the prone shape of the great dragonoid. The nodule of light flickered, then brightened like a feeble star. “Could you show me how to run up a three-D projection of the Citadel and feed in this data?”

“I could,” responded the buzzing voice, the words forming up in her mind. “But it would take me four times as long as it would simply to do it. Bring the computer here.”

“Antryg ... ” Another voice spoke from the fitful glare beyond the shadows of the oscillator ring.

Antryg rose; Lady Rosamund stood silhouetted in the fitful light. He stepped closer and saw how the shadows showed up the lines of pain around that perfect mouth, the aching soreness in every move she made. Her hand shook where it clutched the staff.

“Brighthand was right, you know,” she said. “The tsaeati will be back, and soon. I have some power, and you also, now, and the mere fact that he could read the marks in the Vaults tells me that Magister Magus is more than the charlatan he pretends to be. But the tsaeati ... In all the legends of Berengis' meeting with it, it is said that the thing cannot be defeated. That it will absorb whatever is used against it, whatever it touches, as poor Whitwell found. It has Q'iin's magic now, too.”

“Yes,” murmured Antryg, leaning his elbows on the generator that separated them. “And the worst thing about the tsaeati is that it isn't the worst of our problems. We have to find the Gate—which, as it turns out, is neither moving about nor in the Vaults at all—and we have to find it within the next hour, before the stabilization field starts to disintegrate.”

“Not in the Vaults?” Her dark brows plunged down. “But what Phormion and Otaro and Seldes Katne saw ... ”

“Was a hallucination which appeared to be more significant than it was. Bentick ... ”

The Steward, kneeling beside Otaro, twitched as if struck. His eyes met Antryg's across the room with a kind of shamefaced defiance; then he sighed, and crossed to the dark ring of blinking equipment.

“I never thanked you for saving me from Phormion,” Antryg said quietly. “It was enormously appreciated, in spite of subsequent events, and once you realized she was going mad, I can't really blame you for doing whatever you could to keep the Inquisition from meddling in the search and finding her. Is she still in her rooms?”