The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (12 page)

Brown droplets of liquid began to form on the stone of the walls, to gather in tiny pools on the floor.

As a boy he had not known. As a man he knew and turned his face away. Suraklin had, as usual, chained him to one of the black stone pillars beside the door, distrusting not his courage but, Antryg realized now through the deeps of his dream, his sense of right and wrong.

The strength of the thing on the altar, when it began to realize its life, was hideous, as was its rage to destroy, not for anyone's will and bidding, but for its own delight. It fought the chains of domination Suraklin cast about it, its will cutting and thrashing like a flying cloud of razors at the strength of the man who sought to bind it—the man who did not realize that its hate, its wildness, its selfish frenzy for power were the clear and burning mirror of his own.

And the boy Antryg had been willed his strength into that slight, steely form of white and gold, giving him the strength of his blood, the strength of his magic, the strength of the love he bore. Had he been alone, Suraklin could never have had the strength to cross to where the little girl thrashed, screaming like a dying bird, against her chains. He would never have had the strength to drag her to the now-blazing altar without the strength that Antryg willingly gave.

The demon had eyes now, and teeth; it was dominated by Suraklin's magic and his will.

And just before it descended upon the shrieking child, Antryg saw the girl's face, changed by the dream from the face of the child it had been, tear-streaked and stretched with terror, to a woman's face ...

Joanna ...

His throat would not make a sound; he was too weak, his life too drawn into his master's, to do more than wrench futilely against the chains that held him to implacable stone. The demon's eyes were yellow, Suraklin's eyes. The girl's eyes were brown.

It was his own magic that had brought her there.

“JOANNA!”

Darkness shattered like a shell of bone, inside him or outside, he didn't know. He heard something metallic fall with a muffled clink to the wooden floor.

Blinking, he sat up in a tangle of sweat-drenched pillows, milk blue moonlight plashing over the linen of the sheets around him and glinting on something that moved near the foot of his bed in the Pepper-Grinder's upper room.

A knife. Someone rising from the floor, having picked up a dropped knife.

Antryg gave a yelp and flung the nearest pillow as hard as he could, but the black figure was already turning to flee. He tried to make a straight dive at it over the foot of the bed, but the tumbled sheets and blankets fouled his knees, sending him crashing against the bedpost. Even blurred with myopia—his spectacles were God knew where—his wizard's sight could pick out in the darkness the narrow opening of one of the house's several hidden stairs, just to the left of the fireplace; the dark form of his would-be murderer plunged toward it in a swirl of black robe and slammed it shut as Antryg scrambled in pursuit.

It opened, he remembered, by a lever on the other side of the fireplace ... damn whoever had built this house with half a dozen tricks like that.

Turning, he dove back to the side of the bed to snatch his spectacles from the nearby windowsill where he'd left them; it took a moment's groping, for unless he was wearing them he couldn't see the light frames of steel and glass and had to memorize where he'd set them down. By the time he pulled the trapdoor open, the intruder was well and truly gone. The stair was a seam in the Pepper-Grinder's stone wall barely wider than his shoulders, leading, if he remembered aright—he'd never lived in the Pepper-Grinder, having occupied rooms first in the Birdcage with Salteris, then in the Upper Gatehouse in the Library's tiny outer court—to the cellars, whence two other passages gave access to the Cat Lair's subcellar and the upper hallway of the Cave.

From there, he was perfectly well aware, the intruder could have fled anywhere in the Citadel.

“Are you quite all right?”

The deep, husky voice, like gravel and honey, made him turn; Kyra stood in the doorway, quellingly elegant in a brocade dressing gown that made Antryg highly conscious of his own knobby knees protruding from beneath the hem of his much-patched, borrowed linen nightshirt.

“Perfectly, thank you, my dear.” Antryg hooked the final temple piece of his spectacles over his ear. “It's just that I think someone's been and tried to murder me, and I was wondering if I might impose upon you to see if you can get a reading of any kind from the frame of this door. I'm afraid he's taken his knife away with him. Or her, as the case may be.”

“Good Heavens.” She stepped swiftly into the room, dispelling the elegance of her appearance by tripping over her own robe hem, and, frowning, ran a searching hand over the jambs and threshold of the secret door. “I suppose it would be silly to ask who would want to do a thing like that.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Antryg said gravely.

“Well, I haven't heard those horror stories the Lady Rosamund, Daurannon, and Bentick have been telling about you all these years for nothing. I can't find a thing.”

“Naturally not,” Antryg sighed. “If my guest was a wizard, you wouldn't. Damn.” He ran a weary hand through the tangle of his hair. “I'd meant to beg some kind of sleeping draft from Q'iin to keep the dreams under control, but I suppose that anything really effective is out of court if someone is trying to stab me in my sleep.”

He put on his shawl and descended to the downstairs hall, Kyra parting company with him to return to her own bed. Then he built up the fire and located in the stacks of volumes on the table an account of astrological aspects upon spells that had not been in the Citadel Library as of his departure nine years ago.

“And no all-night movie,” he sighed, setting himself into the chair. “I really must speak to Bentick about getting cable.”

In the town where I was born

There's ladies fair and sweet,

Like roses in the taverns

On Algoswiving Street.

But out of all those lovelies

There's just one all seek to win,

She'd raise the dead, she's a witch in bed—

She's the dancer they call Min.

A dancer or a vixen

Or an angel made for sin,

A fallen child or demon wild

Is the lady they call Min.

—Old Angelshand broadside

The cottage was virtually the only building on the Wizards' Tor not connected via a subcellar tunnel, or a shared chimney with secret passage, or even a covered arcade, with some other house. It perched on the one patch of more-or-less level ground on the precipitous southwestern slope of the hill, below the turreted rookery of Seniors' houses clinging along the northwestern face; Antryg had heard that it originally had been a potting shed in the midst of the vast herb garden which occupied that plunge of rock and soil. A little gate once stood between lichen-crusted stone posts at the turning of the cobblestoned road, but that was the last concession anyone had made to convenience with the garden. The paths that threaded at apparent random between the tiny beds of sassafras and lovage, high John and henbane, were unpaved, and only occasionally planks were thrown over the worst of the gullies. At the bottom a crumbling dry-stone wall balanced on the edge of the final drop to the upper courtyard of the Polygon, and against that wall, Antryg could see Aunt Min warming herself in the late-morning brightness of the sun, with Lady Rosamund sitting at her side on the low wall itself.

Antryg hesitated for a moment between the posts of the gate. Through his fingertips, bared by the writing mitt he wore for warmth, he could feel, when he shut his eyes and concentrated, that strange, crawling sparkle of energy deep within the stone. The threshold between the posts was yellowish sandstone, left over from the construction of the big arcade on the second floor of the Polygon and worn almost in half by passing feet. He knelt, sending his mind into the grain of the stone, but the energy there was fainter, softer; on a thought he hiked up through the hip-high jungle of sorrel, tansy, and garlic, to press first his hands, then his lips and the side of his face, against the worn wooden railing that surrounded the Cottage's narrow veranda.

The wood held no vibration of that energy at all, though several other sorts whispered to him through the fabric of the ancient wood. The door of the Cottage stood open, as it did all summer. Beneath the small table in the outer of its two rooms, he glimpsed one of the little footstools that were strewed around Aunt Min's dwelling wherever she frequently sat. Her big cinder gray cat Fysshe occupied it now; Paddywinkle, her slate blue tom, dozed on the nearby chair. Two or three other of the Citadel cats sunned themselves on the veranda among a veritable jungle of potted poppies, geraniums, and spider plants.

Antryg moved along the side of the veranda till he found a patch of the bare granite of the tor itself and pressed his fingers to it; the rush of the energies was like the nibbling of tiny, carnivorous fish at his flesh.

“Curiouser and curiouser.” Turning, he made his way down the twisty, dropping paths, the air about him heavy with borage and rosemary, garlic, eyebright, and serpent's sage.

“If you are trying to convince me you're too mad to be of any danger to us,” Lady Rosamund remarked in her cool, silvery voice, “you can save your pains.”

“Does one need to be mad to want to touch hewn rock and wood and the living bones of the hill?”

She folded up the small black book she'd been reading and laid it in her lap, shaded her eyes to look up at him. Beside her, Antryg could see that Aunt Min was asleep, her knitting a spill of untidy color over her knees. “If one is facing the danger of abominations swarming like rats in the Vaults—with God knows what to come—I suppose a little concern for the matter at hand is not uncalled for,” the Lady conceded. “Unless there's something about the situation you know that we don't.”

“Oh, I'm quite sure there is,” Antryg replied cheerfully, settling on the parapet beside her. “I mean, the fact that there is, is the reason you brought me here in the first place ... isn't it?”

Her green eyes met his. Tiny lines, feathering through the soft flesh around the lids, might have betrayed her age to a close—or a malicious—observer; her hair, braided away from her temples and lying loose at the back, was still the untouched sable of the hardest anthracite. Antryg remembered Daurannon telling him once that Lady Rosamund concocted her own ointments of sheep fat and rosewater with which she anointed her complexion nightly, though personally he couldn't see why that should be held against her, as the other mage clearly did.

“Of course.”

“Nothing to do with revenge?” he inquired interestedly. “Or a desire to ingratiate wizardry as a whole with the Regent by locating a fugitive from his justice?”

“Wizardry,” Rosamund said, in her most arctic upper-class accents, “has no need of the Regent's grace, nor of his approval, and it is our justice, not his, under which you stand condemned to death. And if there are social climbers on the High Council who seek to bring wizardry into fashion again in the circles to which they aspire, you can believe that the rest of the Council could not be cozened to such a plan. We are independent of the cities of the West.”

“Well, scarcely that,” Antryg remarked. “Most of the money that supplies this place comes from rental property, not to mention the subsidies.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “It is money we can do without if we must. We have before this. They may have driven us out—scarcely a surprise, considering the attempt to murder the Regent by means of magic—but hardly the first time such a thing has come to pass. We will retreat, Antryg Windrose, but we will return.”

“A month, I believe Nandiharrow said,” Antryg murmured thoughtfully. “Since the abominations started to appear.” He plucked a poppy from the clusters that grew wild at the foot of the wall, the sunlight through the delicate, pale yellow petals coloring his crooked fingers like privet-leaf dye. “I know there are those on the Council who blame me, but what possible object would it serve for me to be tinkering with the Void?”

“It would give you access to magic,” she replied promptly.

He looked up from the flower, pushed up his spectacles, and smiled. “So it was you?”

Her cheeks pinkened, and she replied in a slightly constrained voice, “It was a possibility I considered. I and others. No magic exists in that smelly hell hole you've exiled yourself to—don't tell me you haven't hurt for it in the marrow of your bones.”

We are what we are, my son,
Suraklin once said to him. You know in your heart that there is nothing we would not do—nothing—to realize our power. We give up everything for it—our lovers, our parents, our homes ... the children we might otherwise bear, the people we might otherwise be. There had been a wry glint in the amber deeps of his eyes, a kind of ironic amusement at his own self-pity, and his voice had flexed as if he had forgotten Antryg's presence and spoken to himself alone. And we consider ourselves fortunate to be allowed by God to make the trade.

When he'd been ten or eleven, those words had pierced Antryg's heart like a spear, bringing a sudden understanding of this most powerful, and loneliest, of mages. The knowledge that Suraklin, too, had his griefs and regrets, even he ...

He always wondered afterward whether the flash of wondering pity and love he felt then had been his master's intent.

He shrugged and scratched the side of his long nose. “If I have, it's not an unfamiliar feeling,” he said. “I was without power for seven years, locked in the Silent Tower, and I'm without it now, so whatever efforts I've made in that direction don't seem to have gotten me anywhere.”

“But you are a man who hopes, even to absurdity. And there are those who contend that you caused this problem, knowing that we would bring you here and give you access to the Vaults and their secrets.” Her haughty glance shifted from him to the tiny black bundle of knitting and straggly white hair slumped against the wall among the poppies. In the long silence three finches, chirping wildly, flung themselves in a brown, flashing kamikaze dive from the red-purple leaves of the nearby plum tree and plunged out into the brilliant gulf of the air. The cool hardness of her voice was like the smallest of dissecting knives. “Do you know what it cost her, to exercise the Master-Spells over your mind?”