The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (6 page)

Antryg smiled. As a forcing house for fruit trees, the Conservatory was absolutely useless, because it was accessible only through the Library, and hadn't been used for anything for seventy-five years, but the sight of that faceted absurdity always gave him joy.

As he and Daurannon resumed their winding course down the path, he inquired, “Does Seldes Katne still hang her stockings there to dry? Seldes Katne is still librarian, isn't she?”

Daurannon smiled a little at the thought of the stumpy, elderly woman who knew the location and contents of every scroll and grimoire that crammed those shelves. “I think she'll be librarian here when we're all dead and gone.”

“There are worse fates.” Antryg led the way along a raised-plank path over vine-cloaked, uneven ground to a side door of the Harlot: an enormously tall and narrow building faced on all sides with an extravaganza of multicolored ornamental brick and tile. “Chasing abominations and prodding 'round the Void on behalf of the Council with no guarantee of what I'll get out of it, for starters.”

Daurannon halted in his tracks, his grip on Antryg's bare arm sudden and crushing. They stood in the doorway at the top of the Harlot's long stairwell, turn after square turn of sandstone stairs and galleries pillared in painted marble, flooded now with the first golden blast of the morning sun. High above them, the clash of feet and weaponry signaled morning sparring for sasenna and novices training under Sergeant Hathen's terrier-dog bark.

“You weren't told that!”

“My dear Daur, it's obvious I'm not going to be beheaded this morning,” Antryg said. “If the Council didn't have some pressing need for my services, I'd have waked up in a cell on the bottommost level of the Vaults, not in one of the spare bedrooms, and you'd have dosed me with something considerably nastier than phylax root. I know there's been something amiss with the Void for months ... ”

“And how do you know that?”

“I just do. Partly, because you told me that abominations have been appearing. For how long? Just here? No, of course they've been seen in Angelshand, Parchasten, and Kymil, too, because the Citadel sits on a node of the energy-paths, and trouble here would cause faulting all along the Line. No wonder Bentick can't get villagers to cut the grass or sweep the stairs.” He nodded toward the dried stains of crusted mud on the worn sandstone risers, tracks leading upward and down, some of them days old.

“And since my area of expertise is the Void, Lady Rosamund thought ... ” He broke off, his mad gray eyes suddenly distant, a gangly, incongruous shape in jeans and T-shirt beside the younger mage's robed dignity.

“What is obvious to me,” Daurannon said slowly, “is that you know a good deal more than you should.”

“Oh, I always do,” Antryg agreed cheerfully. “And in fact knowing more than we should is the business of wizards.” He turned and clattered down the stairs, Daurannon and his guards hurrying to overtake his longer stride.

“Nevertheless,” Daurannon said, “the summoning of abominations was in your confession.”

“Was it?” Antryg glanced back over his shoulder as he swung around a marble newel. “I didn't read the thing, you know. I'm surprised at you, Daur—hasn't anyone told you you shouldn't believe everything the Inquisition talks people into signing?”

“Not everything, perhaps,” Daurannon agreed. They halted at the bottom of the last flight of stairs. Before them stretched the covered wooden bridge to the Junior Parlor on one side of the Polygon's upper floors. “You also confessed to murdering my master, Salteris Solaris, the Archmage. Was that also something the Witchfinders made up?”

Antryg flinched, looking aside from the sudden naked rage, the pain of grief and loss, in those usually bland, agate-colored eyes.

“There was a reason for that.”

“I've heard your reason.”

Antryg started across the bridge. The hand Daur laid on his arm to stop him was trembling with anger. “Salteris was my master, my teacher, and my friend,” Daurannon said. “He taught me everything I know and made me everything I am. I loved him. At one time you claimed you did, too.”

Antryg sighed. Their footfalls echoed hollowly on the thick oaken planks of the bridge. Beyond it, the Junior Parlor was deserted, gray still with shadow, for it faced northwest, and filled with the smell of ashes from the unswept hearth. The crisscross patterns of its dragon-painted rafters seemed to murmur with all those conversations he and Daurannon had had there over the years, sitting up till dawn discussing spells and philosophy and the variations of plant life and insects; the notes of Salteris' porcelain flute seemed only just to have died away.

“If you've heard my reason,” he said after a time, “you know why I killed him.”

“As I recall it,” the Handsome One said, his voice low enough to exclude the little knot of guards who trailed behind, “you claimed that your former master, the Dark Mage Suraklin, learned the secret of putting his own mind and soul into the body of another—in this case, Salteris. And for that reason you killed him. But it's an argument which cuts two ways, Antryg. And if Suraklin was capable of that, he was also capable of putting his mind and soul into your body ... another very good reason to kill Salteris. And a good reason to summon abominations to plague the wizards who destroyed your own Citadel in Kymil—if you are he—all those years ago, and broke your power.”

Antryg placed a staying hand on the doorway of the stair that would lead them at last, down one final flight, to the small round chamber where the High Council met. “Is that what you think?”

“Let's say it's something which has crossed my mind. Most of the others don't believe Suraklin had that power.”

“Oh, he had it.” Antryg shivered, thrusting other memories from his mind. “He had it. One more question ... ”

The guards had closed up behind them, pressing him on; through the open door he could feel the slow rising of warmth from the Polygon below them, the mingled odors bringing back to him all his own years as a member of the Council, sitting in that chamber at Salteris' left hand ... candlewax and incense, the frowsty odors of old wood and ground-in smoke. Even now, even though he'd strangled Salteris—Suraklin—the mindless husk that Suraklin had left of his master—with his own hands, even now he half expected the old man to be sitting in his carved blackwood chair at the head of the council table, a cup of cinnamon tea at his elbow, making some joke about Antryg being late.

“Where's Joanna?”

Daurannon hesitated, his black brows puckering slightly. Then, “The girl from the City of Dreams?”

“Yes,” Antryg said quietly. “She was kidnapped from her apartment sometime after midnight—kidnapped, from the description, by a mage. And because of the strength needed to open a Gate, it has to have been a member of the Council.” Behind his thick lenses his eyes, usually filled with nothing more than a kind of amiable lunacy, had grown hard.

“We had nothing to do with that,” Daurannon said after a moment. “With you as our prisoner, of course the Council has no need of a hostage. Truly, if something happened to her, it wasn't one of us.”

He looked up at his erstwhile friend, his hazel eyes wide and slightly puzzled with the puzzlement of innocence.

But then, thought Antryg, as he turned down the last spiral of stairs, an appearance of slightly puzzled innocence had always been Daurannon's forte.

Of the Master-Spells, the spells of dominance by which the Archmage holds sway over all others of that kind, great or small, it is forbidden among them to speak.

—Firtek Brennan

Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry

“Well,” Antryg said, breezing through the great bronze doors and into the High Council chamber, “you're probably wondering why I've called you all here.”

Half a dozen pairs of eyes ranged around the worn and battered oak of the council table regarded him fishily. Only Issay Bel-Caire, newest member of the Council, sitting like a disheveled marsh fae down at the table's foot, could be seen to flick a hastily swallowed smile. For the rest, Nandiharrow only watched him gravely; Bentick, Steward of the Citadel, gave a little twitch and shut his eyes, as if at some familiar inner pain; the Lady Rosamund's beautiful lips compressed in deepest disapproval. Down at the end of the table, near Issay, Phormion Starmistress twisted her square, delicate hands ceaselessly within the sleeves of her robe, and at the table's head Aunt Min—Minhyrdin the Fair, Archmage of the Council and eldest of the wizards—woke up, fumbled with her knitting for a moment, then peered the length of the room at the tall, loose-limbed figure in the paint-spattered jeans that had dropped so casually into the chair between Issay and Phormion.

At a sign from Daurannon, the squad of sasenna moved back, filing soundlessly out the door and shutting it behind them; the moment Minhyrdin lifted her head, Antryg was on his feet again, striding up the room to kneel before the old lady's chair. She had a footstool, he saw, its ivory legs retaining fragments of gilt in the carvings, so that those tiny feet of hers in their plain scuffed slippers would not dangle like a child's above the floor.

“Ah,” the creaky voice murmured, and one withered claw reached out to touch his bent, graying head. “It's Suraklin's boy, that gave everyone so much trouble.”

And there was a shocked muttering around the table at mention of the Dark Mage's name.

“Be fair, Auntie,” smiled Antryg, raising his head, and his glasses flashed in the cool, shadowless light that flooded the round white marble room. “Salteris was my master, too, and the master I chose. Surely you won't hold my raising against me?”

“Badly brought up,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Badly brought up, with all the wrong ideas ... You aren't wearing yours emblem of office, the stole of the Council.” Her pale eyes focused more sharply on him.

“I'm no longer on the High Council, Aunt Min,” Antryg reminded her and straightened up to tower over the tiny bundle of black rags and knitting hunched in the great oak chair. His deep voice was gentle. “I was chucked off, oh, eight or nine years ago, for meddling in the quarrel between Lord Surges and the Imperial Governors ... and you aren't wearing yours either.”

“That,” Lady Rosamund snapped witheringly, from her seat at the old lady's right, “is scarcely your place to comment!”

“I never know where that thing gets to.” The Archmage dug aimlessly in her knitting basket, spilling yarns and needles in a wry-colored cascade to the yellowed marble floor. Antryg bent to pick through the hopeless snarl and produced a very much crumpled purple satin band, which he draped tenderly around the old lady's humped, skinny shoulders.

“There,” he smiled. “Now we're official and all in print.”

The faded aquamarine eyes narrowed to sudden sharpness. “And you were dead, too.”

“Well,” Antryg admitted, “that's another story and only partially true. There isn't a chance of getting a cup of tea, is there? Bentick, would you mind fetching tea? I'd go myself except that all those guards won't fit into the kitchen. And do you think,” he added, as the Steward, tight-lipped with indignation, signaled Implek—the only non-mage in the room—to order one of his warriors to comply, “that you could borrow a jacket or something from the Citadel slop chest for me? It's appallingly cold.”

Lady Rosamund opened her flowerlike lips to express her opinion of dog wizards who came to their own trials as if they owned the courtroom, but Aunt Min muttered something about dressing like a heathen savage and disentangled from her workbasket a huge shawl, part-knit, part-crochet, part-macrame, in an apparently random selection of spun and unspun hanks of silk and wool. Antryg slung it around his shoulders and settled himself in Daurannon's chair at the Arch-mage's left just as the younger wizard was stepping forward to take the place himself.

“Now,” he said in a cheery voice, “how long after your first experiments with the Void did the abominations start appearing?”

Had he announced his candidacy for the position of Arch-mage there could not have been a more stunned silence in the marble chamber. Daurannon's eyes blazed with suspicion; Bentick and Nandiharrow exchanged troubled glances; but it was the Starmistress who spoke, her deep voice a hoarse whisper, and she stared straight before her as if she had not heard what he'd said.

“There was a Gate,” she whispered. “Voices crying out.”

“When?” asked Antryg, looking across at that stern, elderly lady who had always reminded him of a short-winged hawk. “Where?”

The librarian, Seldes Katne, spoke up. “Down in the Vaults. On the seventh or eighth level.” She sat with five non-Council members present, their plain, bleached-pine chairs set in the gallery formed by a ring of pillars that circled the room a few feet from its white marble wall. With the exception of Seldes Katne and Implek, they were the very powerful Senior mages, in line for Council position: Otaro the Singer, whose round, brown face curiously blended jolliness and asceticism; the black-skinned, massive Q'iin the Herbmistress; and gentle old Whitwell Simm. “But that wasn't until months after the experiments began.”

“We first started raising power to open Gates in the Void in February,” Lady Rosamund said. “The abominations didn't start appearing until early last month. Nothing we did at that time differed from the earlier spells.”

“What prompted them?” Antryg asked, propping his chin on his hand and regarding her with bright-eyed interest.

Her head lifted a little. “The knowledge that there were worlds, universes beyond the veil of what we know as the light and air of reality. The awareness, brought by your meddling in these matters, that there was knowledge out there waiting to be found.”

“I see.” Down at the far end of the table, Issay and Nandiharrow moved over to make space for Daurannon at Antryg's other side. The younger mage took the vacated chair, but his eyes, still sharp with wariness, never left Antryg's face. “I don't suppose it really matters where in the Citadel you made these experiments, given the number of energy lines which cross here; you could scarcely help shunting the power this way and that.”