The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (11 page)

He got to his feet and collected the scabbarded sword propped against the side of his chair. “Believe me, geas or no geas, you are not going down there alone. It's probably better that you stay aboveground, Kitty,” he added, as the librarian made ready to fall into step with them. “Phormion's still shaken up from her brush with that thing, and it was two days ago; you can't be up to dealing with the abominations we're likely to meet down there.”

He spoke with a brisk dismissiveness that brooked no denial. Seldes Katne threw an anguished look at Antryg, then said stoutly, “I didn't see it nearly as closely as ... as Phormion did.”

“Besides, the more the merrier,” Antryg said, who had absolutely no intention of descending to the Vaults with no company but his former friend. “Nandiharrow can come to protect Kitty, can't you, Tick-Tock?”

Nandiharrow stifled a grin at the very old nickname; Bentick twitched as if his chair had become unexpectedly animate beneath him. “Don't be ridiculous! For one thing, we're in the middle of the game.”

“Well, we did vote to bring him here for his knowledge of the Void ... ”

“With which Daurannon is perfectly capable of dealing. Besides, it's late.” The Steward's long fingers fidgeted with the gold watch he wore on a chain around his neck.

“A perfect opportunity to observe the energy lines down there under increased influence of the moon.” Antryg blew on his pinwheel, causing it to spin into a drunken kaleidoscope of color.

“Well, really.” Bentick glanced at his watch again and laid down his cards, fretfully feeling at his belt for his ring of keys. “All this trouble to escort a mere dog wizard ... ”

“They call us dog wizards.”

Like a thread of golden ribbon, the voice laced itself through the fabric of Antryg's dream. Deep in sleep he frowned, trying to escape it, as he had tried to escape it for years.

And for a moment, in his dreaming—in the dream parlor while Daurannon tried to talk Seldes Katne out of going with them and Nandiharrow folded up his cards with the slight clumsiness of one still not used to operating with fewer fingers than he had originally had—it seemed to Antryg that Suraklin leaned against the cobblestone of the chimney face, his long, light brown hair framing those narrow features, topaz eyes gently malicious in the saffron reflections of the fire.

And, as if the Dark Mage had opened the door to some infinite corridor of awareness, for a moment Antryg could see all the way down to the end of the dream and knew what it would be.

He tried to cry out, tried to wake himself, tried vainly to surface from sleep.

There was an old circular turret called the Rotunda attached to the Polygon, which it antedated by at least seven hundred years. An old temple, the ancient records said, though to what god was unknown. It lay on the crossing of three of the major energy lines under the Citadel, the Vorplek, the Brehon, and the Pensyk, and consequently the terrible sense of the Void's nearness was almost unbearable. Prowling back and forth in the brittle moonlight that streamed through the seven oddly shaped windows while Bentick knelt to unlock the square, iron-bound doors in the floor, Antryg had to fight the conviction that there was a Gate within a few yards of him—the Gate whose presence he believed could be anywhere on the Line. In the Library it had been the same, and as they'd descended through the corridor past the doors of the refectory, Seldes Katne had told him that others had reported such sensations elsewhere in the Citadel as well.

Daur and Nandiharrow bent their backs, lifting the iron-bound doors from their bed in the living rock of the floor. Bentick fiddled impatiently with his watch, his keys, his staff. Stepping back out of the range of the witchlight on the Steward's staff, Antryg ran quick fingers over the frescoed plaster of the Rotunda's walls, then, not finding what he sought, laid down his pinwheel and knelt to run his hand along the hewed granite of the floor.

As he sank his perceptions into the tight, igneous fiber of the rock, he could feel the silvery energy of the Vorplek Line, which joined the Polygon with the Library; like putting his hand into water and feeling currents of warm and cold, he sensed also the fierce, terrible strength of the Void's presence. There were other powers as well, locked within the granite, prickly and random but present, like ants crawling wildly over his flesh.

“Are you coming, my boy?”

“Considering the fuss you made about entering the Vaults at this ungodly hour ... ”

“Antryg ... ?”

He scrambled to his feet, scooped up his pinwheel, and trotted to join them in a billow of coat skirts beside the square shadow of the pit that gaped now like the mouth of an open grave in the foot-smoothed floor.

In the real world—as opposed to the dream memory, which tightened closer and closer about him like tangles of colored vapor—the visit to the Vaults that evening had been of short duration. Antryg knew this and tried hard, in the ever-thickening mists of his dream, to steer his recollections to match the reality. The mazes wound, level below level, stairway, drop shaft, spiral, and chamber, deep below the Wizards' Tor in strangely rhythmical patterns that, when examined, turned out to be no patterns at all. All the members of the Council were familiar with their windings; Antryg was one of the few who had made the Vaults a subject of study, seeking explanations for every bricked-up door, devising theories to account for the inexplicable wells and basins, the rooms in which skeletons were buried beneath the flagstone floors or skulls were visible embedded in glass bricks sunk into the walls. Little as there had been to go on in the sketchy records of the most ancient times, the study alone had given him a sense of the Vaults as a whole. Now, following Seldes Katne's lead to the site of her own adventure, he was prey to a strong, uneasy sense of relationship between those half-perceived patterns, those bricked-up doors and unexplained painted chambers, and the places where the pinwheel's shifting marked changes in air pressure, where odd fields of magnetism caused the compass needle to flinch.

And everywhere, he felt the weight of the Void, a slow, nervous crackling along his flesh, as though the very fabric of reality were a breath away from bulging and splitting to let through some horror beyond imagination.

“Which is, of course, absolutely the case,” he murmured to Nandiharrow, in response to the older wizard's question. “The Lines carry the sense here and there in the Citadel, as I'm sure you've noticed, but it seems to be everywhere down here.”

“Then the problem might be somewhere outside the Citadel entirely? The energies could have been drawn here by something within the Vaults themselves? Maybe one of those 'unknown implements of power' Daur is so anxious to keep you from finding?” The Nine-Fingered Mage shifted his sword sheathe in his hand; by the way he held the hilt, Antryg could tell he'd gone back into training recently to relearn the precision and control governed by the grip. Seldes Katne, almost sheltering in Antryg's coat skirts like a little black hen, looked around her nervously, sweat gleaming on her face in the blue glow of the witchlight above their heads.

“It's a theory,” agreed Antryg. “On the other hand, if my chickens were being eaten, the first person I'd speak to would be the man who keeps pet foxes.” Daurannon, walking ahead of them with drawn sword, stiffened slightly but said nothing.

Only once had they been attacked by an abomination. A furred, eyeless thing of claws and teeth and lightning speed flung itself shrieking out of the dark of a side tunnel, slashing at them with razor talons. It hadn't gotten closer to them than a dozen feet—Nandiharrow had flung out his hand, lightning searing from his crooked, black-gloved fingers to bore through the thing like spitting blue-white worms. The abomination—Shriekers, Nandiharrow said the Juniors called them—was flung back against the wall, kicking and writhing and voiding syrupy greenish liquid from a half-dozen orifices. When they'd gone back that way after a very brief exploration of the corridor on the eighth level—which, as Antryg had guessed, did lie more or less along the Brehon Line—they'd disturbed three or four pale orange, sluglike things burrowing their way into the corpse. At the gleam of the witchlight the things crawled hastily away into the darkness.

Antryg had seen abominations before, far worse than these ... that wasn't what troubled him. Dreaming the scene over again now, he tried to follow Nandiharrow and Seldes Katne back toward the main stair, as he had followed them in waking truth.

But behind him in the dream's darkness he heard that soft voice again, like molten gold and steel.

“They call us dog wizards ... ”

At the age of seventeen he'd run away in the night, knowing that if that voice had asked him to remain, to give up his soul and his life, he would have done so.

And now he turned back, as he'd known all along he would.

Suraklin stood under the inky curve of a tunnel which, in waking reality, Antryg knew perfectly well didn't exist in that part of the Vaults.

The pain of the geas, the shredding silvery agony of that violation, flooded back on him: loneliness, bereavement, the lightless, bottomless abysses of despair; the hollow horror of a childhood that had driven him to slit his own wrists at the age of nine; the gentle illusion of caring, the poisoned love, that had saved his life.

“They call us dog wizards ... they call me dog wizard ... ”

I would rather have the pain. I would rather have the emptiness, the darkness, the hollow inside ... I would rather be alone forever than return to you ...

But of course he went, following the darkness through the inevitable tunnel of time.

“A wolf wizard, perhaps,” Suraklin said, smiling his gentle smile. “But then all men call 'dog' a wolf who will not serve them.” They were now in the bottommost chamber of Suraklin's fortress, the room he and Joanna had entered, months ago, to destroy the evil wizard's final hiding place.

But the darkness there was yet undisturbed. The greenish glow of Suraklin's witchlight darted thinly on the waters of the central well. Like a sickly film of frost, it picked out corner and edge of the stained black altar at the end of the room. There were iron rings in the wall, chains ... affixed to one by a tiny wrist was a child of ten or so, a blond girl, bought, Antryg knew, from one of the poor marshfolk who lived in brush shelters around the walls of the city of Kymil. He knew because he'd been there when Suraklin had bought her, suavely promising the child's mother that the girl would be taught good service, raised in modesty and propriety in his household.

The girl's face was hollow and pinched with the beginnings of a lifetime of want, even as her mother's had been. Standing at Suraklin's side—sixteen years old, awkward and strange-looking—Antryg had seen even then in the mother's eyes that she didn't believe but wished desperately that she could. In the little brush shack there were eight other children to feed. As the fifth of twelve himself, Antryg knew too well what that was like. In those days it was something he tried not to think about.

But it was those days. He was sixteen again, standing, as he had always stood, at Suraklin's side.

“Come,” the Dark Mage said softly. “There are other magics besides those taught by the Council. There are possibilities beyond the defenses they establish—other sorts of fire unquenchable by their definition of water. But the power of that fire is too great for mortal flesh to withstand alone. My son, I will need your help.”

Suraklin had never worn the robes of a wizard, dressing instead in the tawny yellow coat and breeches, the crisp linen and silver-buckled shoes, of an old-fashioned bourgeois. He shed his coat, its rows of steel buttons clicking as he dropped it to the stone floor, and removed his shoes, his white-stockinged feet making no sound as he moved. Long and deft, his fingers rolled back the billowing sleeve of his shirt, tucked the ruffles aside. Those fingers were cold on Antryg's skin as he did the same for the younger man—the boy—exposing the arm to the biceps; and all the while the little girl watched with huge blue-green eyes, too terrified to speak or cry anymore.

With a ritually cleansed silver knife Suraklin drew blood from Antryg's arm, then his own, mixing them on the surface of a mirror and drawing figures in the mingled gore upon his own face and his pupil's. Then he pressed their veins together to complete the rite of blood-bonding—to insure that should his own magic, his own strength, the power of his own life, prove insufficient for what the rite would demand, he would have Antryg's to draw upon. He had done it before.

The rite itself was something Antryg had spent a good portion of his adult life trying with only middling success to forget.

He had a good memory for spells and ritual, his natural curiosity and adeptness trained by years of alternating drill and terror. Even now, nearly thirty years later, he could have accomplished from memory what his master had shown him that night, had he been morally bankrupt enough to want to do so.

As a man dreaming, educated in orthodox wizardry, he saw what the boy in the dream did not know: how different were the ritual patterns laid out on the stone floor from anything taught by the Archmage Salteris or any other Academic mage. Every curve, every line, harked to chaos, to darkness, to energies alien to the energies of earth and fire, water and stars and sky. And the latter-day student of physics and particle theory saw what even the Council-trained wizard would not have: energies to coalesce matter of reality other than that of this or any world—energies to spark the growth of a life, an entity, the metaphysical equivalent of an android, the simulacrum of a demon shaped in the image of the only soul Suraklin knew or could imagine.

The drain of the energy was tremendous, the drag of the magic needed to accomplish such an act of will far more than even the greatest of wizards could have borne alone. As the glowing brownish mists curled up from along the twisting ritual paths, Antryg could feel Suraklin's will and strength and magic bend to the Summoning, drawing upon his. When the brown flame began to flicker over the altar, he could feel the pull of it in his own blood and marrow; first tiny fingerlets flickering along the edge, then something no bigger than a hand, rising, glowing terribly, in the center.