The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (19 page)

Down the length of the room a glowing ball of red light rolled, a few inches above the floor. Antryg drew back against the pillar; the Dead God seemed to gather in on himself, like a beast coiling for an attack, even his tail drawn close for balance. The light on his forehead died, and it seemed to Antryg as if darkness settled more closely around the dragon shape.

The ball of red light was similar to the ones he had seen before, roughly the size of a grapefruit; it paused above the waters of the small basin in the chamber's center, flickering a little, like the sun's corona in eclipse—paused again in front of the pillar where Antryg and the Dead God sat motionless, its pulsing ruby glow bloody in the Dead God's curved orange eyes, in Antryg's spectacles and earrings. The Dead God's hand moved toward the sensor on his chest, and again Antryg stopped him until the thing had rolled through a low arch in the middle of the opposite wall and away into darkness again.

“What was it?” The God's voice was soft, a barely audible buzz in the upper hollows of that weirdly shaped skull.

“I'm not entirely certain,” Antryg murmured. “But my belief is, it's the animate portion of the residual energies vested in a teles-ball—a device wizards frequently use to hold or convert magical energy. Teles are generally felt to become stronger—better—with age; the magic used in conjunction with them becomes clearer and more precise. But there have been a number of cases in which for no apparent reason wizards have simply gotten rid of teles. In two cases that I know about by bricking them up down here, which, if the Vaults are an energy-collecting device, was probably not the most intelligent thing to do. There have been rumors that now and then teles become 'inhabited by spirits' nobody can get rid of—then they have to be buried or dropped in the ocean or something—but my theory is that the spirits were generated by the teles themselves. Quite a number of teles have dropped out of sight over the centuries—or had their names changed, which makes them a bit difficult to trace.”

“And you believe the xchi-particle flux is ... activating these energies?”

“Yes,” Antryg said softly. “Yes, I do. And other energies down here as well. Energies that were bounded whose bounds are now being sheared and fragmented by the opening and closing of the Gates. These xchi-particles ... are they a sort of random energy which is stronger in stone—and particularly igneous stone—weaker in metal and nonexistent in wood?”

The Dead God nodded.

“Is there a way of manipulating them ... of freezing them, as ice freezes, or crystalizing them, so we could at least stabilize the field and keep the situation from getting worse? Not to mention finding the Moving Gate, of course ... ”

“If I knew what they were. Or how they work.” The nodule of his light twitched again, his eyes gleaming queerly iridescent in the glow. “But since they can't be polarized ... ”

“If they could be?” Antryg leaned his elbows on his knees, his long, crooked hands gesturing expansively in their shabby gloves. “If this energy, which seems to be activated in all the rocks of the Citadel, all the stone of the Vault, could be realigned to behave like ordinary electromagnetic energy ... ”

“Realign the behavior of energy?”

“Temporarily.” There was a kind of mad matter-of-factness in Antryg's enormous gray eyes. “Of course, it would have a tendency to randomize itself after a period of time, but by then we'd have found the source of the problem ... one hopes. Would you be able to create a stabilizing field under those circumstances?”

“Are you insane?”

“Yes. I have been for years, in fact.” He propped his spectacles more firmly onto his nose. “Would you?”

The Dead God emitted a thin, buzzing whistle, the equivalent of a sigh. “I think so,” he said after a moment. “With an oscillator and a series of field-effects transmission screens, provided the area of the field isn't too large.”

“How large is large? Enough to cover the Vaults—could you establish the field within the boundaries of the outermost interface lines between solid and air? That should cover the deepest of the tunnels and will give me a perimeter for the energy-polarization spell as well. I'll need to establish the center point of my own spell directly above your machinery; as far as I know this chamber lies immediately beneath the lecture hall in the North Cloister of the Polygon, but I'll double-check—anyway, they both lie on the Vorplek Line. And the spell must go into effect the moment the energy field is activated, or there'll be a disjoin and the whole thing will have to be done over again. We can synchronize our watches, or at least you can synchronize yours ... Joanna gave me one but I took it apart and hadn't put it back together again before I was kidnapped.”

“I'll lend you one.”

“Thank you.” Antryg's expression of absentminded preoccupation gave way to a smile of great sweetness. “That's very kind of you.”

The Dead God made the gesture equivalent to rolling his eyes ceilingward, a brief outspreading of his lower left hand in petition to the Worm in whom his people no longer believed.

“I'll be back with the details and a map of the Vaults to help you find your equipment caches.”

The Dead God shook his head. “I can run a microscan of the Vaults themselves to establish a digitalized map,” he said. “What I shall need you to do is mark it for me. It will take a number of hours.”

“It'll be hours before I can return anyway,” Antryg agreed and yawned hugely. The jelgeth he had absorbed earlier had begun to wear off; weariness had settled, like a cloak sewn with plates of lead, upon his bones. The night was far advanced. He rose, shaking out his tattered coat skirts and wincing at the soreness in his arm. “I'll knock again. By the way, can you get me a pump-spray dispenser full of some kind of silver-chloride solution? And two more oxygen bottles and some kind of really good goggles?”

“Anything else?” The Dead God rose also, towering over Antryg's six-foot-plus height like a skeletal troll, unblinking golden eyes shining eerily in the bobbing fleck of the light from his forehead.

“Well ... I don't suppose there's a good Chinese takeout in Section Eight-eighty? Ah, well ... thank you all the same. I'll return to make arrangements as quickly as I can.”

As the bobbing whitish light faded down the corridor, Antryg stood for some time, leaning one shoulder against the basalt pillar, feeling as if all the energy had drained from his frame. Somewhere, far off, he could hear the fragile, tittering squeak of the invisible haunters, and elsewhere a kind of blubbering slither, like tons of wet leather dragging itself over stone. He didn't even want to think about what that might be.

Farther off, the infinitesimal trickle and cluck of water came to him, flowing down, flowing into the lowest levels.

Sweet gods of the Dark Below the Ground, I hope that microscan was right.

All around him the Vaults seemed to be whispering, creaking as the building weight of the Void shifted, a vortex of darkness dragging at the fabric of light.

Joanna,
he prayed, I hope you 're not down here.

There were portions of the lower Vaults, he remembered, that were haunted. The moving lights returned to his mind, with a horrible breathlessness of almost-certainty. Animate magic without mind. Spells of evil, of pain, of death being released from their bonds ...

Three mages had seen a Gate that behaved as no Gate he knew. There had to be Circles drawn somewhere, Circles of Power holding that Gate open. If he could only locate those ...

Voices crying out. A beating sound like wings. A cloying scent like roses. The dark sense of secret desperation, glimpsed as his mind went down under a tidal wave of icy pain.

Why?

And, like a vise, the pressure of sheer weariness, of miles of tunnel walked, of evil dreams and incompleted sleep. He felt worn thin, his spirit holed like very old linen ... holed like the fabric of the universe where the Void was breaking through. He really should sleep, he reflected. After all, it was only dreams.

He pressed his face to the stone of the pillar as a wave of trembling passed briefly through his flesh.

Only dreams.

“Put down your weapon.” A quiet voice spoke from the archway behind him. “If you try to flee I will blast you out of existence where you stand.”

He'd heard them coming down the tunnel behind him, quietly as they had moved. And in any case the Dead God had picked them up on his scan.

“Without Aunt Min's permission? My dear Daur!” He raised his head, slipped the cleaver from his belt and set it on the floor, then walked a few paces, his back to it, his hands raised. “Be careful how you handle it. It's Pothatch's best bone-chopper and he'll kill me if anything happens to it.”

Swift footfalls padded behind him. A sasennan, he thought. Female.

“At this hour of the morning all I'm truly interested in is a hot cup of tea and some muffins,” he went on earnestly. “You would have done better to have simply waited up in the kitchen for me, though it's very good of you to come looking.”

The footfalls retreated, and he turned, his hands still raised. With Daurannon in the doorway stood Bentick the Steward, and three young sasenna with drawn swords, one of whom also had the cleaver thrust through her belt. None of them held a torch, by which Antryg guessed that the sasenna were all novice mages in their first year of training—certainly none of them looked over seventeen. Bentick bore a staff, a far deadlier weapon than a sword in the hands of a trained sorcerer; beneath his arm Daurannon carried a shallow lead box, written over with runes of power, of the kind wizards used to carry spell-cord or manacles written with seals that silenced magic.

“I warned them,” said the Handsome One softly. “I warned them that it was all your doing, though before God, suspicious as I was, I did not entirely believe it myself.”

“What was all my doing?” Antryg demanded indignantly. “Just because I happen to be friends with an abomination doesn't mean I caused the rip in the Void.” With a quick move he swept the now-useless Talisman of Air from his head and tossed it deftly into the deep basin of water in the room's center. Daur made a move toward it and stopped—finding out who had made the talisman for him was not, at the moment, worth the trouble it would take to fish it out of fifteen feet of murky water.

Nevertheless, irritation flickered in his eyes. “Hold out your hands.”

“That really isn't necessary,” Antryg assured him. “I'm on my way back anyway to have breakfast.”

The youngest novice, grim-faced and fair-haired, stepped forward, sword leveled a few inches from Antryg's breast.

“Don't be melodramatic, Gyrik, you can't possibly run me through without Aunt Min's say-so and you haven't proven me guilty of any wrongdoing.”

“Not proven?” Daurannon retorted, as Gyrik lowered his blade and stepped back, an expression of embarrassed uncertainty on his beardless face. “We find you in conversation with a monstrous creature from the blackest pits of nightmare ... ”

“LTRX2-449-9102 is a perfectly respectable particle physicist and I'm shocked by your parochial attitude about his appearance.”

“Whoever and whatever it is, you at least have obtained weapons and magical implements in secret, scarcely demonstrating either good faith or innocence. Whatever it is you're seeking here, it's clear to me you'd rather the Council didn't know of it. Now hold out your hands.” The younger mage's hazel eyes glinted with a hardness that completely belied their usual facile charm. “As you know, I am perfectly capable of cutting off your breath to the point where you'd barely have the consciousness to be dragged after us, should you wish to accomplish this the hard way.”

Antryg regarded him mildly from behind his massive spectacles. “It's a long way up all those stairs,” he pointed out. “And if I'd obtained such a power from some lost secret down here, you wouldn't be able to do that anyway, would you?”

Daurannon opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to change his mind, and shut it again.

“Come on.” Brushing aside Gyrik's still half-extended blade, Antryg put a friendly arm around Daurannon's shoulders and started back toward the reality-fold near the Twisted Ways. “It's too damp and cold down here to stand about talking and, as I said, I really would like some breakfast.”

However, despite Antryg's protestations that the reality-fold would take them back up to the second level far more quickly, Bentick and Daurannon insisted on returning to the stair by which they had come. Bentick walked ahead, the tip of his staff unlit—Antryg wondered if the omission was because, being mageborn, they all could see in the dark, or from fear at what the light might attract—and the three novice sasenna followed noiselessly behind.

“And have you found anything in your searches?” asked Daurannon after a time, the echoes of their footsteps whispering after them up a short flight of steps, down a corridor whose walls dripped with yellow slime and stank of strange, sweetish rots. “Anything of this Moving Gate which Otaro saw, or of the powers which might account for its appearance?”

Antryg hesitated, remembering the drifting balls of red and purple light, and how they had hovered before him; remembering Daurannon's purported absence from the Citadel at the time of Joanna's disappearance.

“Or is that the reason you choose to seek that Gate—and to summon your ... friend ... alone?” Dark though it was, he could see his former comrade's eyes narrowed with suspicion; see how he carried the lead box of the spell-written manacles under his right arm, so as to leave his left arm—his fighting arm, in Daur's case—free.

“Would you like me to carry that for you? You're sure? Is it just that you're afraid I'll find some implement that will let me practice magic in spite of the geas, or do you still suspect me of being Suraklin?”

“I haven't dismissed the possibility.”

“Not even after seeing into my mind to lay the geas on me?”

“Suraklin had great power,” said Daurannon softly. “There was no accounting for what he might have been able to do—even as there is no accounting for you. Nandiharrow and Issay contend that with your powers bound, there is no harm in you walking the Vaults alone, but even were that so, I'm not so certain that whatever information you give us would be true.”