The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (46 page)

His flesh was cold. His wounds seemed superficial, even the horseshoe-shaped ring of tooth-punctures on his shoulder, but there was no pulse in his scarred and bitten wrist or in the big veins of his throat. The charring of the tsaeati's lightning etched a crooked black line from his temple to the pit 'of his throat; his shut eyes had a naked look, vulnerable, as in sleep.

Joanna whispered, despairingly, “Dammit,” hesitantly located the target spot just below his sternum, and proceeded to administer CPR.

After somewhat less than a minute, Antryg flinched, gasped, and threw up; Joanna sat back, her hands shaking and cold, and for a moment all she could feel was astonishment that the whole process had worked the way she had been taught in class that it would. In time Antryg propped himself up on his elbows, his head hanging so that his dripping gray hair covered his face. In the moonlight his earrings sparkled, bright as the glass shards that scattered the floor.

“Here's your glasses.” Her voice sounded blasphemously loud in the stillness. She fished them out of the pocket of his coat.

His hands were trembling so badly he could barely put them on.

Outside, a nightingale called, a warbling note like the hurtful mourning for a lover long gone. More distantly a wind chime spoke in the breeze.

With a crooked forefinger Antryg turned over one of the shards that strewed the filthy swamp of the bridge's floor and murmured, “Good Heavens. I didn't think they could be broken.”

“Was that the teles?”

He nodded and slowly, achingly, sat up. For a moment he looked ready to vomit again; then he rubbed his hand wearily over his face. “Probably being drained of energy rendered it friable. Trying to break it was an absolute longshot ... There must have been just enough of a link between the semianimate magic of the thing and its original housing to release the last cohesion of its energies when it burst.” Leaning heavily on Joanna's arm, he got to his feet and limped to open the casement. The sweet, heady mixture of rain and wild roses poured in, the endless, silent benediction of the Sykerst night.

Then, moving stiffly and painfully as an old man, he went down the steps to where the Archmage's crumpled form lay.

“Aunt Min?”

Her hand moved a little at his touch upon her shoulders, groped to find his fingers. He lifted her gently. In the vanilla moonlight her face was gray, her lips turning blue under the smears of blood. She whispered, “Rosie ... ”

“Rosamund isn't here, Aunt.”

The old woman smiled a little, and her eyes opened, sunken and huge, transparent in the wan light. “My dearest girl,” she murmured. Her hand reached up, as if to wipe some of the blood-tracks from Antryg's face, but fell back again.

“It will be hard for her,” she breathed. “It always is. Tell her I loved her best.”

“I will.”

“Tell her ... ” she sighed, “forgive.” And her eyes slipped closed.

Antryg stayed kneeling for some minutes, cradling the wasted body to him and rocking her, his head bowed. Standing behind him, though she had barely known the old lady, Joanna felt her throat hurting with tears, with a sense of the passing of something great, some spectacular tale of fire and magic and delight that now she—and others—would only know secondhand, as Magister Magus had told parts of it to her. A dancer or a vixen, or an angel made for sin ...

And now she was gone.

A shudder passed through Antryg's body, his shoulders bowing as if under the weight of some sudden, terrible awareness. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered. When he raised his head, Joanna caught the shadow of shock and dread in his eyes. He murmured again, “Dear God ... ”

“What is it?”

He turned, startled, as if he had momentarily forgotten her presence; then he shook his head. “Just ... never mind. It doesn't need to be dealt with now. I can't stay, my dear.” He bent, laying Aunt Min's body down. “She said forgive,” he added, looking down at the toothless crone face, like new ivory in the moonlight, with its intricate scrimshaw of years. “But Lady Rosamund will never forgive me ... this.”

He got stiffly to his feet and took Joanna's hands. She saw the glitter of blood through the gashes in his green calico shirt and how gray and weary his face looked in the bleached light. He shivered a little, with cold, or something more. “I fear I cannot even take the time to return you to your own world before I seek out the ending to this tale. Afterward ... ”

“I think Lady Rosamund will get me home,” she said softly.

“If she doesn't, Ninetentwo said he had a xchi-flux generator in the Vaults that would open a way through. My dear ... ” He hesitated, and she caught his wrists, suddenly realizing by the pain in his voice that he was bidding her good-bye.

“Will you come back to L.A.?”

He looked down at her, his gray eyes weary and resigned behind the Coke-bottle glasses. “After all that I've led you through,” he said softly, “after nearly getting you killed,” his long arm took in the stinking ruin of the bridge, “or worse than killed, I don't really think that's such a good idea.”

In the dark of the Brown Star, Joanna remembered she hadn't, either. Her hands tightened grimly over his. “Antryg, I put my life on the line every time some stockbroker in Westwood offers me five grand to get on the 405 freeway and come down and reason with his mainframe, and I don't think twice about it.”

He smiled. “Five grand pays your rent.”

“You ... ” She stopped, unable to say what she had been thinking, desperate with the knowledge that somehow, she had to call him back. To convince him ... to say the right thing. She couldn't lose him—couldn't let herself lose the years ahead. For a moment her mind was a blank of panic and pain.

But the only thing she could think of to say was “You make me laugh.”

He looked aside, saying nothing.

Very softly, she whispered, “Don't go.”

He sighed, and there was a wry ness, almost a bitterness, in the flex of the corner of that absurd mouth. “I really should be stronger about this.”

For the second time relief flooded her, an ache of release as deep as the pain of her fear.

“Ah, hell,” she said unsteadily. “Whether or not you come back to L.A., you know that if the Council comes looking for you, they're going to start with me anyway. This way, instead of being apart and miserable, at least we can both get laid while we're waiting for the next disaster.”

The sadness in his eyes vanished into a wicked twinkle, like a star in the gray depths. “My dear Joanna,” he said, “you do have a point. If I can ... ” He turned and picked up his coat from the floor, the hem discolored with water and blood. “When I'm across, blow out the bridge. They won't believe you if you tell them I was killed in the battle. Just tell the Council that I've deserted you and fled. God help me, it will be the truth.”

He leaned down and kissed her, while she put her arms around his shoulders carefully, mindful of the gashes underneath; she could feel already where the blood had soaked into the velvet of the coat. Then he turned and walked away through the Niagara of spring moonlight, and the sparkle of his earrings winked at her as he vanished into the darkness beyond.

Wearily, her heart hurting within her, Joanna took a few steps backward and picked up the Dead God's gun. As Ninetentwo had promised, it didn't kick much. The nightingale outside broke off its songs, shocked by the roaring explosion of flame and shattering wood, and there was a crashing whoosh as the shards of joist and wall and tiled roof cascaded down into the thickets of laurel and honeysweet below.

Night air breathed over Joanna's sweat-streaked face. For a time she stood, gun tucked loosely beneath her arm, inhaling the sweetness and realizing how long it had been since she'd smelled any air at all, let alone this fragile combination of wet ivy and rain and open leagues of freedom.

At last she bent down and drew Aunt Min's shabby, randomly knitted shawl over the little body curled at her feet. Turning, she walked back toward the lower reaches of the Citadel, to find the Council again.

It is a forbidden thing for those born with the powers of wizardry to marry. First, because the children of the mageborn are often mageborn themselves and, in the eyes of the Church and the law, are damned and without souls. Second, because however good his intent, natural feeling would prompt a wizard to use his powers to further the interests of his family at the expense of others.

Third, because wizards in their greed for knowledge frequently desert their families when they travel to seek it. Likewise, it is known that no person-husband, wife, or child—is as precious to a wizard as the search for knowledge and power; thus union with them leads only to grief for all.

—Firtek Brennan

Dialogues

“Kitty?”

Nothing moved in the shadows of the ruined chamber as Antryg slipped quietly through the crumbling wood of the door.

It was breathtakingly obvious that the tsaeati had turned aside from its quest for an illusory grailful of backup batteries at the top of the Library and had come here instead. Slime and niter dripped down the stair from the Library's main floor, water puddled the pitted sandstone flags. Here, in what had been Seldes Katne's private study, chairs and tables had been overturned and heaved aside by the slow, lumbering crawl of the thing toward its goal: the wide French doors leading into the disused Conservatory beyond.

The glass had been burst from the twisted frames and glittered crystalline in the ice-cream moonlight beyond. All around the floor, sodden heaps of notes soaked in the general mess, like soiled leaves raked on the threshold of winter, among the broken-backed corpses of books. Notes, he thought, on the natures and histories of the teles in the Citadel ... not that she'd ever intended to convey the truth to him, even if she'd guessed why he needed to know.

He shook his head. He'd been a fool to trust her.

But it hadn't been until after his walk to the Green King's Chapel that he'd realized the culprit didn't necessarily have to be a member of the Council; even when he'd begun to question the reality of the Moving Gate, he had feared for Kitty's sanity, not questioned the truth of what she said she'd seen.

And then, he reflected, he'd always trusted too easily.

Oddly, he felt no anger. There was only an overwhelming sadness, for he knew perfectly well why she had done what she had done.

Nevertheless, he edged his way cautiously across the room. She was still in possession of the Brown Star—a fist-sized hunk of molasses-colored crystal that Suraklin had kept in an iron box in his study. With the Citadel back to normal, all the Star's Gates would be closed again, and at the moment, he knew he had not the smallest power left in him to resist its imprisoning spells.

Moonlight falling through the dirty panes of the Conservatory showed him a moist line of foot-tracks through the mud and broken glass. He followed to the doors, his shoulders smarting under the sticky abrasion of his clothing. The long-term effects of repeated doses of jelgeth made his bones ache, as if the marrow had been reamed out with a pipe cleaner; if he fell, he thought, leaning for a moment against the jamb of the broken French doors, he felt he would shatter like glass.

Through the burst panes, the air of the old Conservatory breathed upon his face, damp, icy, but still weighted with all the thick green smells of the plants that had been suffered to grow there unheeded in the old forcing pots. Banks of grape vines rioted heavily over what had been an old table; around the tarnished brazen pots of stunted and unpruned lemon and orange trees, leaves had risen in such drifts as to support tiny ecosystems of their own—mushrooms, molds, trailing coleus and pothos, or perhaps those were rooted in smaller pots long since buried in the general mulch. A number of those twisted trees had been heaved over and lay in ruined clouds of leaves, root and branch sticky with foulness and burning slowly from some horrible chemical combustion inside; orange moss thickly coated the trailing vines and shrubs, dissolving all into a foul-smelling black muck.

Somewhere water gurgled, the old pipes still pumping their moss-cysted fountains.

Wind moved his hair, cold and sharp, a silver knife in the rank stenches of greenery, carrion, niter. Someone had opened one of the long windows at the Conservatory's far northern end.

Straightening his aching shoulders, Antryg picked his way through the jungle.

Seldes Katne stood where a little bay had been built out, a curving seat in a shell of intricate glass. Before her, space had been cleared on the floor, further thickening the jungle all around it; in the latticed moonlight he could see the crossing lines of a huge Circle of Power, smeared and fouled now by the slobber of the tsaeati. There were three windows in the bay, looking out over the tor's sheer northeastern face, and the little librarian was silhouetted in the central one, her short arms spread out, crucified across the narrow frame in the lucid silver of the moon.

The light showed her face, rinsed of color, and he was shocked at how fallen it seemed. The dark eyes were smudgy with fatigue, as if someone had ground a thumb into the sockets. Her iron black hair, torn from its braid by the colliding energies on the bridge, hung in a raveled swatch over her plump shoulders. He hadn't realized how long it was, or how thick. Behind her, rags of cloud strewed the sky, the wind a reminiscence of the night's rain, though mostly the storm was heaped up around the horizon like an untidy job of sweeping, iced silvery white. It was a sheer drop from the window to the rocks at the foot of the tor: five hundred feet. The wind moved the ends of her hair.

She sighed but only said, “She's dead, isn't she? The Arch-mage ... ”

“Yes,” he said.

There was silence.

Then, “I take it that when Daurannon first began to experiment with opening the Void—what was it, nearly two months before the abominations began?—the field that appeared up here was one which transformed those of little magic into ... ”

“Into what we all of us want to be.” Seldes Katne finished the sentence, brought her arms down, and folded her plump hands before her girdle knot. The eyes that met his were unapologetic, ravaged. “Yes.”