The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (16 page)

Tea canister in hand, he turned back, deftly sorted his own significator, the Mage, from the pack and, laying it down, cut and flipped a card at random from the center of the deck.

For a moment he stood, regarding the skeleton on horseback bearing the black banner of the rose, where it lay in the molten amber pool of candlelight. Of course, he told himself, the Death card meant many things ... change, transmutation, travel, passage to another world even.

“I really ought to stop doing this to myself.” He folded the pack together for the last time and went to make himself a cup of tea.

By the time he was finished, it was close to midnight. Brighthand's music had ceased but across the way in the Cat Lair, the novices and Juniors and a few of the younger sesenna were still talking, casting spells on one another for the sheer joy of it and shouting with laughter and triumph. The cats for which the place was named stalked moths and fireflies in the rambling carpets of wild grape, spruce needles, and fern. Pulling his sloppy rainbow shawl around his shoulders. Antryg descended through the great downstairs chamber where Kyra was supposed to be studying her lists but wasn't, slipped through a narrow door to the cellar steps and, from the cellar, passed through a rough-hewn entrance, up a tunnel in which he had to walk half bent over, and thence into the subcellar of the Cat Lair.

By attics, side stairs, more cellars, and a generally disused breezeway between the Pavilion and a tiny pear orchard clinging halfway up the tor, gritting his teeth now and then as he passed over an energy line and felt once again the stifling prickle of the Void, he made his way up to the scriptorium in the Library tower.

From the breezeway he'd caught a glimpse of light reflected through the glass panes of the Conservatory, like the far-off refraction of candleflame through an enormous, dirty diamond. The light would be in Seldes Katne's rooms, adjoining that ornate gothic folly. There was a rickety wooden stairway that stitched its way from the attic of the Pavilion, back and forth across the granite rock face beneath the Library walls, with a door at the top leading into the scriptorium. As Antryg ducked beneath the low lintel he saw wizard's marks written in a trailing scribble of faintly glowing magic on the stone doorjambs—Seldes Katne's personal mark. Across the room in the darkness he could see she'd so marked the door down from the Library above and portions of the floor as well.

Clearly, he thought, Kitty Katne was taking no chances on Daurannon or Lady Rosamund coming down here at this hour of the night and wondering why the librarian had been seized with the desire to make a Talisman of Air.

Dim lamplight gleamed suddenly on gold leaf and leather, picking out a leopard's eye, a skeleton's hand, carved on a pillar head. The marks had given their warning. The stout little form framed in the light of the opened doorway turned back for a moment to close it behind her; Antryg remained where he was, a loose-limbed shadow with his hands in his pockets, watching her as she hastened across the room.

“Here it is.” She held out to him a rough ring of silver on a thong. Even in the darkness the two opals wired to it seemed to flash with inner fire.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” He took the thong and bound it around his head, centering the talisman on his forehead. “I shall be on your doorstep tomorrow with a bouquet of daisies and the finest and most beautiful pinwheels in all the land.”

She swallowed a grin she knew was undignified and said gruffly, “Go along with you—don't be silly.”

He regarded her with startled surprise, the talisman on his forehead picking up a thread of starlight from the window, flashing like a weird third spectacle lens. “Why not?”

The talisman was not a particularly strong one and would allow him at most fifteen or twenty minutes' extra air, but there was nothing he could do about that. Any of the stronger mages in the Citadel were ipso facto suspect, and any of the Juniors would not have been able to weave elements in this fashion at all.

“Are you going into the Vaults tonight?” Her voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder, though not even a member of the Council could call the image of another mage in a scrying-crystal without the subject's consent. But this portion of the Library lay on the Vorplek Line, the main energy-track, and through it Antryg's own sense of the Void's instability had grown; here in the Library's foundations, it was particularly strong. “Will you ... will you need help?”

“My dear Kitty, I should be delighted to have you,” Antryg said earnestly. “But in point of fact I haven't the faintest idea how and where I'll be able to find my way into the Vaults, and in any case, when I do, I shall probably finish by having to run away from something very fast, and I'd hate to have to be gallant and slow down to let you keep up.”

“Run away from what? And how ... ”

Antryg swung around abruptly and swept the talisman from his forehead; a moment later the door to the gallery opened, framing against the starlight outside a tall, thin, solemn-faced garden-rake of a boy in a Junior's gray robe—the boy whose harping could make butterflies dance.

“Me lord Antryg?” His voice was deeper than most boys' his age, settled already into a black-oak baritone with the soft, slurry drawl of the Angelshand slums. He was panting as if he'd taken the long stairs up from the Pavilion at a run. “Kyra said she'd seen you come this way. It's me master ... Otaro. He's seen that thing in the Vaults, that Movin' Gate. The Lady and them, they say you ought to come.”

The great problem with the creation of deathless elemental daemons to do one's bidding lies in finding a place to put them afterwards.

—Pipin the Little

Archmage of the Council of Wizards

I'm going to kill Antryg Windrose.  I swear it.

Joanna sank against the wall, hugging herself as if with cold, though the tepid mildness of the dark around her had not altered. Nor was it hunger that made her shiver uncontrollably as she rested her head against the featureless smoothness behind her. Tears rose, a strangling heat in her chest and throat, and she fought them back. She was tired enough without hysterics adding to her exhaustion, and she had the hideous suspicion that once she gave way to them, she wouldn't be able to stop.

Ever.

Or was it, she wondered, that she knew that if she wept, when she did finally stop she would be precisely where she was now—sitting on a smooth floor in the darkness, with no idea where she was, or why.

Wearily, it crossed her mind that in a way, she had brought this on herself. If she hadn't been Antryg's lover—if she hadn't brought him into her life, knowing him to be a fugitive from vengeful mages in another world, knowing they'd eventually come after him—she wouldn't be here now.

Wherever “here” is.

However long “now” is going to be.

She had begun to be terribly afraid, not of what had brought her here or of what would eventually happen to her, but of how long they would keep her before anything did.

If anything did.

Ever.

Three times she had rewound the thread on its spool and returned to her point of origin, half hoping to find some evidence that someone had come looking for her ... food, water, torture-droids, a human footprint in the sand, a Post-it note from her mother, a troop of armed orcs tracking her down the thread—anything.

The third time she had had to fight, as she was fighting now, to keep from sitting on the floor and crying with disappointment, loneliness, and terror.

What if they never came?

Antryg would rescue her, she told herself.

But in her heart she knew that the chief difference between the movies and real life was that the hero didn't always rescue the heroine.

Antryg, for all his blithe air of lunatic competence, could be dead.

Or locked up back in the Silent Tower.

Stop it,
she told herself firmly. You've quite obviously been kidnapped for a reason and the only reason I can think of is to gain some kind of leverage over Antryg. Being kidnapped at random by another wizard from some other place on the other side of the Void is stretching the bounds of probability.

But there were bounds of probability regarding what had happened to her already that were beginning to make her profoundly uneasy.

Wearily, she got to her feet and, with the utter patience she'd used in conversation with recalcitrant DOS programs, hefted her purse more firmly onto her shoulder and began to rewind the thread on the spool once again, following it back to its source. Though her hands were shaky, she still didn't feel particularly hungry or thirsty—and her common sense told her that she must have been here for hours already. At times she'd been tempted to eat part of the granola bar she carried in her purse, more from boredom than anything else. But every time she returned to find nothing at the point of origin, she put it off.

Besides, it would only make me thirsty, and I haven't come across water, either.

When she'd hit the glow-in-the-dark button on her digital watch—also in her purse—and had gotten no result, the old panic that she might be blind had returned. But the matches still wouldn't strike—the problem seemed to be with energy, rather than her own vision.

What the
hell is going on?

Antryg,
she thought, pushing aside the wave of baffled despair. If I wasn't involved with Antryg ...

If I'd stayed what I'd always been, I might not have been as happy, but at least I'd be safe.

Is knowing him, loving him, having him in my life worth ... ?
Her mind shied quickly from the first sentence formed, the sentence she didn't want to think about: worth dying this way? She changed it hastily to, worth going through this? Is having Antryg in my life worth going through this?

She wasn't doing to die. She told herself that several times as she walked. It would never have occurred to her to live with a crack dealer, or an outlaw biker, or a terrorist, or anybody else whose very life-style was a walking invitation to chaos—anybody whose enemies might seize upon her. But Antryg wasn't like that. The sound of his voice returned to her, that deep, flexible baritone that would be a part of her consciousness if she lived to be ninety, and the touch of his fingers along her arm. The way it felt to know he cared about what she did, and the knowledge that he'd back her up in whatever she chose to do. Gentle, considerate, careful of her feelings for all that he woke up at the crack of dawn to watch cartoons and sang in bed.

Something moving and cold like a stiff, membranous wing sliced at her face; a shriek like a steam whistle went off in her ear and claws snagged in her hair. With a scream of shock and terror Joanna slapped at the thing with both hands, springing back, crashing into the wall.

In the blackness her hands came in brief contact with something chitinous and moving—the only things that sprang to her mind were the hideous palmetto bugs that rattled 'round the porch light of her aunt's home in Miami on summer nights. Only this was vastly more huge, the size of a small child, bumping and crawling on her, grabbing at her hair and laughing.

Screaming, she fled, and it pursued her, vacant idiot laughter fragmenting from the walls. Sobbing, screaming, gasping, she ran on and on, bruising herself against walls and comers, stumbling down tunnel after tunnel, hallway after hallway, until somehow it was gone and she collapsed on the floor, hugging herself in the sudden silence and weeping as if her heart would break.

Wizardry lies in naming the true names of things—in knowing what they are, and what they were. Sometimes when one learns the true name of the thing one seeks to Summon, one loses all desire to meet it face-to-face.

—gantre silvas

Annals of the Mages

“I do not ... I do not even know how I came to be down there.” Otaro of the City of Cranes rubbed his round, brown face with one hand, small but broad and strong-looking; Antryg knew the fingers could flick and stop the gold and silver harp wires so that the sound of them danced like spring rain, stirring the heart to visions or the soul to the peace of sleep. In reminiscence of his distant homeland, the Singer wore his hair in long, oiled curls threaded with ribbons down his shoulders and back, and there were plugs of rose-colored jade in the lobes of his ears.

He sat on a bench in a corner of the Citadel's great kitchen. Around him most of the High Council had gathered: Nandiharrow looking flurried, Daurannon wearing a face of grave solemnity, and Lady Rosamund with a hint of grimness about the flowerlike nostrils. Bentick's expression was one of haggard, slightly nervous brittleness; his eyes moving warily, as Phormion's had moved in Council, his white fingers toying endlessly with his watch. While Otaro was speaking, Issay Bel-Caire came hurrying in through the pantry door—a secret stair connected the pantry with the storeroom behind the baths, which was in turn connected, via a covered gallery and a stair up the outside wall of the Island of Butterflies, with the tangle of interlocking cellars that formed the sub-foundations of the Mole Hill, the Pepper-Grinder, and the other dwellings of the Juniors' side of the hill.

“Nandiharrow spoke of having killed an abomination in the Vaults last night,” Otaro said slowly, passing his hand across his face again. “I wanted to dissect it, to see what properties lay in its sinew and bones. He said it was on the second level. I entered through the stores-cellars here, under the kitchen.”

“Those should have been locked up!” Bentick said indignantly.

“As they were,” the Singer murmured. “Pothatch ... I asked for the key from Pothatch.”

The cook came over from the smallest of the three great stoves, a patented iron cooker sent by one of the Court's more practical-minded duchesses. A fat little man with a redhead's fair, freckled face, he handed the Oriental wizard a cup of tea; Otaro's hands shook so that he could scarcely hold it.

“I didn't see there was any harm in it, sir.” The cook glanced worriedly across at Bentick, who had threatened him with transformation into one of the lowlier orders of amphibians at least once a month for the past twenty years. During his own residence at the Citadel, Antryg had frequently presented the hapless cook with jars of flies and bugs collected from the gardens, Just in case. “People have been going in and out to search.”