The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (48 page)

“Maybe.” For a moment she thought that would be all and almost turned away, embarrassed to have spoken, shaken by the absolute deadness of his eyes. But something told her this boy needed not to be alone, and after a time he raised his head, and there was a faintest flex in the muscles of his face, like a stone statue reluctantly coming to life.

“You mean like the air of another world, like old Nineten-two breathes?” He nodded toward the angular, insectile shadow in the darkness, more monsterlike than ever in his ring of electronic trilithons. Even in his grief, she thought, Brighthand was a wizard. It was his ingrained nature, as it was Antryg's, to listen to anything and to consider what it meant.

She nodded. “Because of the pain involved and the progressive nature of the paranoia and hallucinations, my guess is that the gas caused lesions of some kind—hemorrhaging from one area of the brain into another. That would bring on pressure, and with it, pain and madness and further hallucinations. I don't know whether, once you located the lesions ... ”

His eyes widened—the darkest eyes, she thought, that she had ever seen, suddenly ablaze with a hope that was painful to see. She had been half-afraid of him, knowing him for a wizard, and with the echo of her old reflexive fear of men. Now she saw only how young he was and how scared.

“How?” he demanded, lurching to his feet, towering over her, but the hands that seized her by the arms were trembling. “Heat? Blood-heat?”

“More likely some kind of disruption of the brain's electrical field. The brain has an aura ... ”

“We know that. Issay!”

The little doctor rose from Phormion's side, flitted over with gray eyes inquiring; Brighthand caught the skeletal arm in a grip suddenly alive with the desperation of hoping again, and the two of them plunged into a soft-voiced maelstrom of medical theurgy. Joanna stepped back, the weight of the gun she still carried suddenly leaden on her shoulder. All she wanted to do, like Silvorglim and his troops, was stagger to the nearest blanket and sleep.

Someone came up beside her. She turned and saw Daurannon, his choirboy face lined with fatigue and chalky with pain, the streaks of gray in his hair glinting a little in the flickering of the witchlight around Bentick, Phormion, and the mages of healing. For all the spells of healing that had been worked upon him, he still looked like ten miles of very bad road.

For a moment she stood, looking up into that face—Antryg's friend, she remembered, so many years ago.

“Are you all right, love?”

She nodded, and the gun slipped from her shoulder to the floor. “He left me,” she said slowly. “He said ... ” She tried to draw breath, but the tiredness came down on her, grief for Aunt Min, exhaustion at what she had been through, the sudden conviction that she would never see Antryg again. Idiotically, she burst into tears.

“Here ... ” Joanna felt herself drawn into the comfort of a strong arm, surrounded by the familiar smells of candlewax, woodsmoke, medicinal herbs. “Here, love, we can't have you breaking down now it's all over with.”

Instinctively, she knew that Daurannon was one of those men who always had words of easy comfort for a crying woman. Still, it was good to lean her forehead on his shoulder and cry, to be led to a bench and held. As Ruth always said, God gave men those nice pectoral muscles for a reason.

“And I suppose,” said a chill, sweet, silver voice above them, “that a few tears are sufficient to wipe away Minhyrdin's death? Or to make you forget how close the entire Citadel came to destruction because of that ... that dog wizard and his meddling?”

Joanna raised her head, shook back the tear-matted tangles of her hair from her cheeks. Lady Rosamund's face looked ravaged, its steely beauty shredded away by the night she had endured. Her cold green eyes were ringed with the purple of sleeplessness and the red of tears, the first tears Joanna had ever imagined that the Lady could shed. Her black hair, tangled like a harridan's—or like an Amazon's after battle—was for the first time visibly threaded with gray. In a strange way the terrible ruin of that icy beauty made her far more human, and for the first time Joanna pitied her.

The Lady's voice was bitterly sarcastic as she went on. “Now that I know a few tears are all that can get around you, Daur,” she used the pronoun of social inferiority, as she would have addressed a dog or a servant, “I'll have to try them the next time I want to put something across you in Council.”

“I'll give you a nice spell to bring them on, then,” Daurannon retorted, his arm tightening around Joanna's shoulders. “You'll need one.”

Joanna shook her head, scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just that ... ”

Coldly, her ladyship turned away.

“Don't mind her.” Daurannon produced a clean handkerchief out of nowhere—I suppose pulling handkerchiefs out of nowhere is the first thing they learn in wizard school, thought Joanna illogically, and had to suppress the urge to giggle. “She's ... ”

“No.” Joanna got quickly to her feet and followed the Lady down the length of the darkened room, to where she stood, her back to them all, staring out the window.

The moon was setting above the frivolous marble roofs of the Birdcage and the Pavilion; it had the matte pearliness that came from the lightening of the whole expanse of sky around it as dawn breathed gray ness into the dark. Below the windows Joanna could see a wide, flagstoned courtyard, from which two or three small stairways arose, and one flight of imposing sandstone steps; last night's rain puddles gleamed with the gray of pussy willows under the growing reflection of the sky. A stately cloister of yellow sandstone curved along the knee of the hill, and under its eaves, pigeons and doves began to flutter from their nests.

From under the gateway opposite, a small band of warriors appeared, walking cautiously and gazing about them—Implek and his missing sasenna. A cat picked its way along a wall. In the tower across the court, a clock struck five.

“Lady ... ”

Rosamund's head was erect, her profile unflawed as she stared out over the Citadel that was her home, her domain, the place of her being and her soul. The corner of her strong mouth flinched a little, but her eyes were dry as she turned.

“When Minhyrdin died,” Joanna said quietly, “she told us—told Antryg and me—to tell you that she loved you best.”

Rosamund's mouth tightened with some bitter retort, the delicate nostrils flaring. But she did not speak, and in the moment of quiet, the hatred relaxed from her and her hands began to tremble where they rested on the sill; tears filled the pale green eyes and ran down over the perfect cheekbones when she closed them against the cut of remembrance.

Her lips moved, but it was a moment before she was able to command her voice to utter a sound. “Thank you.”

“She said that she knew it would be hard for you,” Joanna went on, gaining a little courage. “She said that it always is. But she said she loved you best ... and she said, ”Forgive."

The Lady sighed, releasing something, it seemed, from the deepest heart of her body. There was no rage in her voice, no hatred, only a kind of tiredness, and regret. “No,” she said softly. “No. I will never forgive.”

Joanna heard Daurannon's step behind her; turning, she saw the look that passed between the two wizards: question, answer, debate and decision, all in the traded glance of green eyes and hazel. It crossed her mind that these two were of an age, young for Council wizards, no more than forty. Had the enmity between them, she wondered suddenly, grown from the fact that once they had both been twenty, and the most beautiful girl in the Citadel would have nothing to do with the facile charm of a common wool-stapler's son?

“Come,” Daurannon said quietly. “You're tired—you need to rest. You've been brave as a half-sized tiger. Old Pothatch'll get up a room for you.”

“No.” Joanna shook her head wearily and shivered a little in her borrowed shirt and breeches, though the air that whispered through the windows was barely cooler than the spring afternoons in California. “No, all I want to do is go home.”

She felt Daurannon and the Lady speak again with their eyes and felt their silence.

Daurannon drew his breath and let it out; then he said, “It's something we have to talk about. All this came about through tampering with the Void, you see, and I for one am not willing to do that again.”

And you need a hostage,
thought Joanna, to trap Antryg again. Her voice was low and quite reasonable. “But what about Ninetentwo? He can't stay in this world, and his air supply must be just about exhausted.”

“Well, of course, we'll do for Ninetentwo what we can.”

But his eyes avoided hers.

She looked down at the floor and made her shoulders slump a little, and ran a small, square hand over her face. “Look,” she whispered, “can we talk about this tomorrow? I'm just ... ” She stepped back away from his comforting touch. “I just need to rest, all right?”

“Of course,” Daurannon said understandingly. “You rest now, love, we're going to be working for days, sorting out the mess and trying to get the water out of the Vaults, but there's no reason for you to deal with that. Pothatch'll find you a place to sleep.”

But when she left Lady Rosamund and Daurannon, absorbed in intent and quiet-voiced converse by the windows, she stumbled, not to where Pothatch and Tom were still arguing with Magister Magus, but to the dark and silent monoliths of the Dead God's ring.

“They're not going to let us go back,” she breathed, kneeling beside him where he squatted, adjusting the wiring in the main generator. “They say it's dangerous to open the Void again, and they probably have a point. Daurannon claims they can do something about your air.”

“I wouldn't let that pack of hocus-mongers guess my weight,” came the deep, buzzing voice from within the Dead God's skull. “They are indeed right. Though the time-space continuum has, as far as I can ascertain on what equipment I have here, returned to normal, were I in their position I would hesitate to tamper further with it.” He picked up his computer, which he had folded back into its black box, and straightened up to his seven-foot-plus height, stiffly, like a chilled insect, a slow unraveling of sinew and bone and breathing tubes. His iridescent ocher eyes gleamed eerily in the shadows of the coming dawn.

“However, I am not in their position—and I have no intention of remaining in this world and having my body suffocate and my mind deteriorate into a nameless whirlwind of psycho-kinetic madness, as it did before.” The segmented tail moved in a restless sidewinder crawl, and he nodded toward the shattered ruin of the eastern door, crusted with the drying strings of the tsaeati's slime and completely unguarded now that Hathen and her sasenna had divided themselves to patrol the resurrected Citadel and to keep guard over Silvorglim and his sleeping beauties.

“It shouldn't take us long to backtrail the tsaeati's wake to find the way into the Vaults; I was careful to mark the walls there so that I could locate the experimental xchi-flux generator. It should—I hope—open a Gate into my own world and, at the place to which I originally returned Antryg four months ago, to yours.”

Great,
thought Joanna. I get to show up at five in the morning in the parking lot of the San Serano Missile Plant. She comforted herself with the reflection that at five in the morning, Ruth would still be up, painting.

They could stop for breakfast at Feeding Frenzy in Reseda.

The thought was so bizarre as to be almost completely disorienting.

The Dead God reached down to pick up his rifle and sling it over his shoulder, and to collect a last battery. “I've set a timer to fuse the circuitry of all this,” he went on, the glowing nodule on his forehead twitching. “I'll set one likewise on the slave relay which opens the Gate. Thirty thousand eldacta worth of the Corporation's equipment,” he added bitterly, tucking computer, battery, and gun under his various arms. “But like Daurannon, I feel it will be a good long while ere I have sufficient nerve to tamper again with the Void. Are you ready?”

Joanna looked around. Dawn light was slowly growing in the long room, making the yellow flicker of the few torches, the dim blue glow of the witchlight, seem dirty and sleazy. In her chest was the queer anxiety attendant upon leaving a party far too early, walking away from people she really wanted to get to know better: Brighthand and Issay, bent anxiously over the thin, skeletal Phormion, their fingers tracing arcane patterns over her skull while Bentick looked on with growing hope and the pain of the only love of his life naked in his narrow face; Nandiharrow and the fat, good-natured Brunus rewrapping Whitwell Simm's arm; Kyra the Red tripping over the stacked weapons of the sleeping Witchfinder's troops and exchanging a good-natured grin with the friend—Mick or Cylin, Joanna didn't remember which was which—who steadied her.

By the window, Daurannon and Lady Rosamund were still too intent on their frigidly polite confab to even look up.

Antryg's world, she thought. The people he'd grown up with, the life, the place, that he knew. They'd bring Aunt Min's body back here soon and lay her in state in some assembly hall—that delicate, withered scrap that had once been beauty and power and life.

“Just a minute,” she murmured and walked to the door where Pothatch, Tom, and Magister Magus still stood.

Putting her arm around the little dog wizard's shoulder, she tiptoed to kiss his cheek. Though they'd spent God knew how long together in the Brown Star, it was only now that she felt the beard stubble beginning to emerge on that stretch of jaw between Van Dyke and ear.

She whispered, “Good-bye.”

Magus looked surprised; Pothatch caught her glance with one bright little porcine eye and winked; Tom gave her a discreet thumbs-up.

If she was lucky, she thought, she would never see any of these people again.

But she had a feeling she wasn't going to be that fortunate.

She walked quietly back to join the Dead God in the shadows of the ruined east door. “All right,” she said softly, shivering inside at the thought of the terror of the jump. “Let's blow this Popsicle stand. I want to go home.”