The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (44 page)

The old man shook his head wretchedly. “She is wandering. I ... she ... she said I was trying to kill her. Said we were all plotting to poison her.” His hand strayed to the claw-rakes on his scalp. “She said the Moving Gate was appearing to her in her rooms, that she heard voices within it plotting her death.” He bowed his head, his hands straying nervously again to his watch. “She hasn't eaten or slept ... ”

“Well,” Antryg sighed wistfully, “when it comes right down to it, neither have I. But unfortunately she's one of the few wizards in the Citadel capable of using her full powers at the moment—or any power at all. While she was ill, did you enter all the rooms of the Castle?”

“Yes. She thought that Lady Rosamund had put spies there and made me come with her to search them.”

“Hmn. Well, that rules out the Castle. I had thought ... ”

“Antryg ... ” Joanna looked up from the screen. “We've got it.”

Antryg excused himself, leaving Rosamund and Bentick talking quietly while he went to kneel in the tiny circle of greenish light from the computer screen.

“I'm using as parameters the outer limit of the spell-field you set.” The thin, clawed fingers of Ninetentwo's lower left arm—the only arm not immobilized by wounds or bandages—picked swiftly among the computer keys. “The green spot is the area in question. It isn't a Gate at all, if you'll reexamine the raw data, but a field of some kind surrounding a small wormhole. The wormhole would appear from time to time as a floating area of blackness, not large enough for a human to pass through.”

“Yes,” Antryg murmured, as the Dead God manipulated the knobs to turn the digitalized construct of the Citadel here and there. “I'm familiar with them.”

“I still think it's odd that nobody would have noticed it, if it were in the Citadel,” Joanna said. “Particularly if you and Seldes Katne searched the place for me.”

She looked up at Antryg's face, the amber lines of the graphic reproducing the Citadel in miniature in the lenses of his glasses. In the dark of the electronic ring that surrounded them, the reflection of the single pixel of green burned like telltale fire.

He shut his eyes, and his breath escaped him in a sigh; etched in the pallid flicker of the screens, the lines of pain and weariness in his face seemed to deepen. He brought up his hand under his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, the gesture of a man defeated, comprehending that which he would really rather not comprehend.

“What is it?” Joanna asked worriedly. “Where is the field?”

“In the old Conservatory.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “Adjacent to Seldes Katne's rooms.”

“But wouldn't Seldes Katne have ... ” Her voice trailed and faded, as she understood. “But Seldes Katne doesn't have any power. At least, she's supposed to be the least powerful mage in the Citadel, according to Magister Magus.”

“I know.” He rubbed his eyes again and readjusted his spectacles to look at her, bone-deep weariness and bitter understanding in his eyes. “And that's why she used teles to power the magic-circles which keep it open; why she would have done anything, from discreetly fanning Bentick's fears to attempting to murder me, on up to destroying the stabilization field, to keep the Citadel from being searched, once she knew I wouldn't—or couldn't—help her.”

He stood up, his shoulders bowed tiredly, and looked at the square, blinking wristwatch strapped incongruously to his arm beneath the tarnished beading of his coat cuff. “And I'm very much afraid, judging by how much time has elapsed since the tsaeati's departure, that by this time it will have entered first the Library, then the Conservatory, and devoured the energies of the teles. Technically, it is a teles now, which means that we're going to have to destroy it in order to close the Gate.”

“Unfortunately,” Lady Rosamund's clear, cool voice sliced into the quiet like a trickle of ice water, “it has long been established that nothing can destroy it.”

There was an awkward silence. At length Joanna said, “If nothing can destroy it, Nothing is probably what we need.”

She got to her feet, staggering a little from the cramps of crouching in front of the computer so long, and crossed to them, her arms wrapped around herself against the growing cold.

“Considering that nothing is precisely what we're doing at the moment,” Bentick retorted caustically, “dare I predict a large-scale victory in short order?”

But Antryg and Lady Rosamund were looking at one another, half-worried, half-speculative.

Down by Lady Rosamund's elbow, a piccolo voice said,

“Nothing,” and looking across, Joanna saw Aunt Min, hunched like a bright-eyed little witch in the shadows.

“Antryg,” Joanna said slowly, “you told me once that the Dead God—the real Dead God, not Ninetentwo—was Nothing. The opposite even of Entropy—a kind of antimatter, or antienergy, anti even the movement of randomness ... pure Nothing. Is it possible to summon that?”

Antryg ran his fingers through his long gray hair, his eyes a little absent behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, delving around in the chaotic darkness of his memory. “Theoretically, it's possible to summon anything which can be imagined,” he said. He started to say something else, hesitated a moment, then went on, “I suspect it would kill me.”

“Suspect?” Lady Rosamund gave a single, high-bred sniff. “I can assure you, Windrose, that if you summoned a tithe of the ... the essence of the Dead God, the emptiness, the coldness, the nothingness of absolute Nothing, it would finish you before the words were out of your mouth. And while the sight of you committing suicide in such a fashion might momentarily startle the tsaeati ... ”

“Not did he hold a spell of protection about him,” Aunt Min said, reaching up to grasp her pupil's torn sleeve.

“Don't be silly,” Bentick snapped. “To summon Nothing is more than most wizards can do in the first place. To summon a protective spell powerful enough to hold that Nothing at bay—that Nothing which would swallow even the magic of the teles—would kill the spell's wielder. And to summon half of each would end in leaving the tsaeati sufficient power to swallow you up, protection-spells and all. And in any case, the Summoning of Nothing is impossible.”

“Bentick, Bentick,” Antryg chided, “where's your imagination?”

“In the strict charge of my reason, thank you, where it belongs,” the Steward retorted, tilting his head haughtily.

Joanna looked from one to the other, her heart slamming hard in her chest; from the table where a few candles had been lit, Nandiharrow said softly, “Antryg ... Lady Rosamund ... ” Looking across at him, Joanna could see a scrying-crystal resting between his mutilated hands. He looked exhausted, slime and filth and Daurannon's blood smeared across his face. “There's something moving in the upper floor of the Harlot. Coming back this way.”

Antryg drew a shaky breath. “I'd have to wait,” he said softly, “until the thing was right on top of me.”

Joanna shuddered, not even wanting to picture it. His own death aside, the thought of standing in the darkness, of waiting for the thing whose mindless, devouring malice she had felt in the sightless labyrinth of the Brown Star, froze her to the core of her being. She whispered, “No ... ” but knew he didn't hear.

“Two of us could do it,” Aunt Min piped.

Lady Rosamund's head snapped around to face her. “No! You couldn't ... ”

“Don't make difficulties, Rosie.” The old woman cut her off placidly with a gesture of her clawlike hand. “Do you be telling me now what I can and cannot survive?”

Any other woman, Joanna reflected, would have had tears in her eyes: her Ladyship's were cold and dry and bitter. “I'll go.”

“Because your magic is greater than mine, or because with a hole in your leg and pain throughout your body, you are fitter to withstand this than I? No.” As Rosamund opened her mouth to protest, the old lady reached out and touched her hand. “No,” she said again, softly. “I will do this thing.” The firelight turned the white halo of her hair for a moment to honey gold and caught the gleam of her eyes, brighter blue than they had seemed before, and more alive, the eyes of a wildcat girl who had never feared gods or man. She turned back to Antryg. “It would need a Blood-Bond.” Antryg's gray eyes were sad and bitterly resigned. “So it would,” he said gently, and disengaged his arm from Lady Rosamund's sudden, furious clutch. “It is the only way,” he said to that white, rigid face in the fidgeting torchlight. “The tsaeati has to be hunted down and destroyed if the Gate is to be closed, and we have very little time.”

“Then do as Berengis did and return it to the Brown Star. You don't have to ... ”

He shook his head. “Since the Brown Star's probably up in the Library we'd have to get past the tsaeati to reach it, and anyway at the moment it's breached in a dozen places. If we leave now we can intercept the tsaeati on the bridge between the Harlot and the Junior Parlor—that's the way it went up and seems to be the way it's coming back.”

Dread and panic had risen to a gray roaring in Joanna's ears; she wondered why she wasn't hysterical, and came to the conclusion that she must still be half expecting to wake up. Come on, alarm clock, RING! In the dark of the computer screen, she could see the amber schematic of the Citadel on its hill, the squat, heavy bulk of the Library that wore the faceted Conservatory like an unlikely purse at its side; the vertical, flatiron shape of the building called the Harlot (Why? she wondered obliquely); the narrow, covered bridge that led across to the upper floors of the Polygon at the lower part of the hill.

If Antryg didn't manage to kill the thing, those lines, those final parameters of life in the airless darkness of the Void, would dislimn as though they had never been.

As if another person were acting within her body, she walked over to where the Dead God lay and picked up the heavy weapon from the floor beside him.

Her knees were shaking so badly she could barely stand as she walked back to where the four wizards grouped.

“Look,” she said quietly, “I know I can't put another round into the tsaeati without making it stronger—but if that thing's going to be coming at us across a covered bridge, if you two can't stop it with magic, what would be the chances of precipitating it into the Void by blowing the bridge?”

Antryg's eyebrows vanished upward into the tangle of his hair. “My dear.”

“I know what would happen to the air in there,” Joanna said, looking up into that tired, bespectacled face. “And I know I'd ... I'd be dragged out into the Void by the vacuum, along with you, and it. But would that destroy it?”

There was long silence, as Antryg debated, she knew, the possibility of lying to her, of keeping her from sacrificing herself as he was proposing to do. Then he sighed, defeated, and said, “Yes. Yes, it would.”

“It's moving down the stairs of the Harlot now,” Nandiharrow said quietly.

Antryg shivered, his face turned away from her momentarily, the absurd, sensitive mouth taut and colorless with strain.

“Antryg,” she said gently, “if that thing kills you, I'm going to die anyway when the Citadel collapses.”

“My dear Joanna,” he whispered, “have I ever told you how difficult logic makes things for those of us who are trying to be gallant?”

A Howard Hawks heroine, she supposed, could have come back with some nervy wisecrack to that; she only slung the gun strap over one shoulder and threw her arms around his waist, pressing her face to the shabby purple velvet of his preposterous coat, holding him tight. For a moment his long arm was around her, ropy muscle and the smell of wood-smoke, candles, and the niter of the Vaults; then he said, “Rosamund, you and Magister Magus start weaving a spell of air—you'll have to coach him, Rosie—in case worse really does come to worst. If we do blow out the bridge and the tsaeati is thrown into the Void, the Citadel will be released and will snap back into its own world, but if the air goes, it may be a fortress of corpses when it gets there. You can probably hold what's in this room. Hathen, my incomparable beauty ... ”

The sergeant came over, her square face grave.

“I'm going to need a halberd—not the single-bladed kind, but the one with a point and a cross guard like a boar spear ... Thank you, my dear. Aunt Min ... ” Disengaging himself from Joanna's grasp, he reached down and took the ancient lady by the hand. Brunus and Brighthand rose from their places near the wall and went to open the north door; Otaro had begun to keen again, a high, thin wailing of pain. The Dead God's bazooka weighed like lead on Joanna's shoulder; looking into the utter blackness that lay beyond the stone archway, she was finding it difficult to breathe.

With a sudden movement Lady Rosamund strode to intercept Antryg and laid a white hand upon his threadbare purple sleeve.

Her voice was very low, but such was the silence that Joanna heard her clearly. “If she dies of this, Antryg Windrose, I swear to you that, whoever inherits the Master-Spells—whoever becomes Archmage after her, whether it be myself or Daurannon or whomever—you are a dead man. But not before you discover just why wizards are forbidden to use their powers for vengeance, and hatred, and pain. Do you understand?”

A muscle tugged at one corner of Antryg's mouth, a rueful half smile of memory. Even more softly than she, he replied, “I know why wizards are forbidden to use such powers, Rosamund. There was nothing which Suraklin did not teach me, in one fashion or another. Wish us luck.”

But Lady Rosamund turned away, to kiss the old Archmage, and hold her close, before retreating to the darkest corner of the hall and folding herself into bitter silence.

There are those who say that wizards are subject to temptations and addictions beyond the understanding of ordinary men: the addiction to shape-changing, or to meditation under the influence of certain herbs and conditions of the stars; the obsession with knowledge, and the development of power. Yet this is not so. Temptation is temptation, obsession is obsession, and choice is choice.

—Isar Chelladin

Precepts of Wizardry

Tracking the tsaeati was not a difficult task. Through the north door and across the little vestibule beyond, up the oak and iron of the staircase and across the Junior Parlor, up the three steps to the bridge and so across, it had left its trail of bloody water, slime, fragments of dimly shining flesh and the overwhelming stench of fishy rottenness. Save for the glow of Joanna's pocket flashlight, masking-taped to the barrel of her gun, the darkness here was absolute. Up its three steps, the bridge plunged away into an echoing, aphotic pit. The cold here was bitter; by the flashlight's yellowish beam, Joanna could see the smoke of her own breath. Dimly, somewhere up above, something was moving.