The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (2 page)

For the rest, Antryg Windrose could have been any age from his mid-thirties to his mid-fifties, though in fact he was forty-three. There was something oddly ageless about the beaky, mobile face, whose rather delicate bone structure seemed overbalanced by the cresting jut of the nose and the extravagance of the mouth. The round lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles were thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, and behind them his gray eyes, enormous to begin with, were magnified still further. There were people who attributed his habitual air of demented intentness to the glasses as well, but this, Joanna knew, was not the case. That was just how Antryg was.

Unkempt curls in the final throes of fading from brown to gray, mismatched earrings of yellowing crystal, and half a dozen strings of cheap glass and plastic beads in assorted garish colors around his neck completed the impression of an unreconstructed sixties flower child turned abruptly adrift in the steel-edged cyberpunk streets of fin de siecle Los Angeles; an impression, Joanna thought, not wholly inapt. Antryg had the definite air of being in the wrong place and time, though most people didn't guess quite how wrong. In his own universe, he had been a practicing wizard since the age of ten.

He laid down the cards—Joanna noticed the two of swords and the chaotic five of wands—and reached with one booted foot to hook a chair for her.

She said, “Ruth told me where it is.”

“Ah.” Something changed in his eyes.

Then he reached into the ice chest under the table for a couple of Cokes and, under cover of the motion, said with unimpaired cheeriness, “I'm delighted to hear it—I had visions of exploring the entire Los Angeles watershed system by bicycle, and that could take weeks, if I didn't die of thirst in the process ... though I suppose I could cut my time down by running the location of all purple houses in the city through a computer.”

“What's down there?” Her hand on his wrist brought his head up again—his first instinct when frightened, she knew, was to duck behind a screen of persiflage.

He widened his eyes at her like a befuddled Harpo Marx. “Nothing,” he said, as if surprised she had asked. Then he handed her a Coke, flipped over the final card of the spread—a nine of swords—and swept all the cards up into his hand again with barely the flicker of an eyelid. “But it's east of here, isn't it? Southeast?” He turned his head as he spoke, like a man sniffing smoke on the wind.

“Did you have the same dream?” Her heart beat more heavily, almost painfully, at only the memory, and she tried not to recall any of it too clearly to her mind.

“Well,” Antryg said carefully, “I don't expect it was precisely the same.” He shuffled the cards lightly together, wrapped them in silk, and replaced them in their carved Indian box. “Whereabouts, exactly?”

“I'll drive you.”

His eyes avoided hers. “That's extremely good of you, but ... ”

Thunderous knocking on the outside door interrupted him, followed instantly by a stampede of sneakered feet. Antryg rose with an odd, disjointed grace for all his gawky height as four small children barreled in, carrying between them a very grubby cardboard box bearing the legend chun king sliced water chestnuts on its side. One of the children announced, “We got another one for you, Antryg. Zylima's mom, she says she got this one from a pet store down in San Diego five years ago.”

“Her name's Ripley,” one of the little girls added. Angling her head, Joanna saw that the box contained an enormous land tortoise. “My mom says she's a girl, but I don't know how she can tell.”

“Here.” Antryg gently lifted the tortoise out of the box and set it on the table. “Let's ask her.” He laid his big, crooked hands on the mottled gray and brown shell, half closing his eyes as though listening. “Definitely a girl.” From a drawer in a sideboard he produced a sheet of thin paper; rice paper, thought Joanna, watching in some bemusement: the sort of paper that antiquarians traveling through England use to take rubbings of tomb brasses with.

This was precisely what Antryg proceeded to do. He laid the paper very carefully over the tortoise's shell and, with infinite delicacy of touch, rubbed it lightly with red chalk, while all four children watched in fascination and Ripley retracted her head and limbs in resigned disgust. “One has to do this very carefully,” he told them as he worked. “If you don't do it exactly right, it hurts the tortoise—they're really very sensitive, you know, and don't like to be picked up. Thank you for bringing her here in a box instead of your hands.”

“Mom told us to,” the older boy put in. “She don't let us pick her up at home.” Then, “Antryg? Mom says she had this dream about you last night. About this place—this place where you was supposed to go.”

“Did she?” Antryg removed the paper and held it up to the light, studying the lumpish pattern of squares on its surface with a critical eye.

“Yeah. She says it was like down this old riverbed—not a real river with water in it but like one of the rivers here. She said there was somethin' bad down there—she said it was pretty weird, 'cause usually she doesn't dream about strange stuff, just about going shopping and stuff like that. Do dreams like that mean stuff, Antryg?”

“Of course.” Antryg smiled and returned Ripley gently to her box. She didn't deign to emerge from her shell, even when he touched the horn-hard carapace lightly and said, “Thank you very much, Ripley. You have contributed inestimably to the sum total of human knowledge. If your mother dreamed about it, Jemal, I suppose I shall have to go there. Thank her for me—and thank you. And Ripley, too, of course.”

The children accepted the quarters he passed out to them and started to leave. The girl Zylima paused in the doorway, frowned up at him with narrowed, mahogany eyes. “You know where that place is that Mama dreamed about?”

Antryg's imp grin widened. “Of course.”

“Course he knows, Zylima,” the other girl said. “He a wizard, ain't he?”

And they were gone.

There was a curiously awkward silence as Antryg went to place his newest tortoise-rubbing in the drawer of the battered old sideboard from which he'd taken the paper. He had, Joanna knew, at least two dozen similar rubbings in that maelstrom of papers at home. “There's really no need for you to come with me, you know,” he said at length, as if speaking of a beer run. “If you tell me where it is, I have my bike.” Thanks to Joanna, Antryg could drive a car after a fashion, but it was just as well, she thought, that he preferred an alternative mode of transport.

The memory of the vision was like the dry scraping of a knife along her bones, and she had to fight not to say, Can't we just go have dinner and forget the whole thing?

But she knew that Antryg wouldn't forget.

She took a deep breath. “I think we'd probably better both go—”

For she had an awful feeling about what was down in that wash and knew that neither Antryg nor anyone else had any business going there alone.

Joanna's heart began pounding hard again as she braked her old blue Mustang to a stop on the service road. The white-yellow dust that lifted in a cloud around them settled slowly, soaked in the long brazen glare of the evening light. Daylight saving time had recently come into force, lengthening the tepid Southern California twilights far into prime time, and as usual for May, it was blazingly hot, a pretend-summer that got everyone in Los Angeles scrambling for shorts and tank tops, heading for the beaches and forgetting—as people invariably forgot—that it would turn cold and misty again in a matter of days and stay that way till the Fourth of July. Somewhere the cutting, unmuffled roar of an RV whined in the distance above the far-off rumble of rush hour going full-swing on the Ventura, yet about them, as Antryg swung one thin, jeans-clad leg out of the car, hung the baked and heavy silence of the desert. Los Angeles was full of these tiny patches of urban wilderness, mini-domains of lizard and coyote that served occasionally to remind the Angelenos that theirs was, in fact, a City of Dreams, an unlikely mirage called forth against long odds from arid lands.

“I'm going to have to ask you to stay up here, my dear,” Antryg said quietly, looking down into the wash at the bottom of graffiti-scribbled concrete cliffs, cement floor glaring like old bone under the harsh slant of the sun. “If you see anything happen to me, don't hesitate. Get away immediately. All right?”

“Happen like what?” Joanna touched his wrist, staying him as he started to rise.

A frown flicked into being between his sparse, reddish eyebrows; then he clambered out of the car, extracted an old railroad watch from one pocket of his jeans and a compass from another, and stood for a time comparing their readings.

“If I should turn into a toad, for instance ... or get devoured by giant ants ... ” Antryg had been entranced by fifties science-fiction movies on the late show. Joanna rolled her eyes.

“Though I'd actually prefer being transformed into a tortoise, if it has to be some member of the reptile family. It would make asking other tortoises for rubbings much less embarrassing. They may even know something about why all the wisdom of the universe is encoded upon their backs, though I don't suppose that's at all likely.”

Joanna sighed resignedly. “Well, if it happens, don't come around here expecting me to kiss you and make it better.”

“My dear ... ”

He leaned down to where she still sat behind the wheel, his lips brushing hers gently, with a kind of hesitant passion. As he started to pull away she caught him by the back of the head, her fingers tangling in his long hair, and drew him to her again, frightened for him in spite of his lightness—frightened of the stillness down below, of the terrible, oppressive exactness with which the view of the Tujunga Wash duplicated the flashing image of her own vision.

Dammit, even the GRAFFITI's the same ...!

Ruth had been right, too, about the sense of nameless fear that hung over the place, the dreadful awareness of something, quite close but invisible, that had no place in this world.

He straightened up and turned to look down into the wash again, and she saw by the look on his half-averted face that he, too, knew or guessed what was down there.

But all he said was, “Now, in Elbertring they used to believe that all the wisdom of the universe was encoded in the patterns on peach pits, but the mages who were responsible for assembling it all died of beriberi. Interesting.” He tucked watch and compass back into his various pockets. “No bees around here, either. I'll be back, my dear.”

Glass beads glittering in the burnished light, he began to pick his way cautiously down the steep cement of the bank.

Prey to a sense of desperate protectiveness, Joanna watched him, and the dread grew in her, a scratching, sawing, sickened apprehension made no easier by the matte glare of the smog-filtered light. She would in a way have welcomed darkness, for in darkness her cold sense of waiting uncanniness would at least have been explicable. Down there the dirty daylight seemed to congeal, hot and still and filled with that terrible air of watching.

What's wrong with this picture?

Up here wind stirred the feathery curls of her blond hair, flattened the dark T-shirt against her ribs as she stood beside the car, a small, almost delicate-looking young woman, unobviously pretty. Mousy, people called her—people who didn't know her, or mice, very well. Antryg looked very small and solitary, kneeling in the midst of that winding ribbon of lizard-colored wasteland to sweep his fingertips along the cement, as if trying to read a message there in braille, and Joanna wondered if she shouldn't have detoured by the apartment for the rifle she'd bought in February.

It had been a revelation, after her adventures of the preceding winter, to find that she'd actually enjoyed something so alien to her previous experience as learning to shoot a gun.

An even bigger revelation was that she was willing to continue the study in the face of the disapproval of those few of her colleagues—mostly other hackers—who knew about it, let alone her mother's horrified and repeated lectures about the number of Americans who ended up being blown out of existence with their own firearms. But even as she thought about it, her mind trotted out her usual half-dozen reasons why bringing artillery on this expedition was out of the question, complete with scenarios of being pulled over by the Highway Patrol and she and Antryg spending the night in separate County lockups, or shooting Antryg while trying to take aim at the giant ants or whatever the hell else was going to appear ...

And, she told herself uneasily, she could scarcely justify bringing a gun, because there really was nothing down in the wash.

But there was.

Antryg was kneeling in the precise spot, Joanna was virtually certain, where she had stood in the mind-flash of her vision; half closing her eyes, she tried to picture exactly what the skyline of the wash would look like from that angle. Pale houses, telephone wires waiting like unscored music paper against the polluted white of the sky, a defiantly purple gable end sticking up over a fence and santos rules in elaborate Olde English lettering standing out among the lesser spray-painted illumination ...

His bent head almost touched the cement, dust, and bull-thorns underfoot; on his bare arms, dusted with reluctant sunburn, scar and tattoo stood out like a gash and a bruise.

What did he see, she wondered, on the cracked pavement? What had she seen, for that matter? But even trying to bring the picture back to mind frightened her, and she felt again the desperate wish that he would finish what he was doing and get the hell OUT of there.

He stood up, Coke-bottle lenses flashing, and though he did not move quickly at first, or dodge to either side, he backed from the spot for perhaps a dozen feet before turning and striding, now very fast, up the bank. Joanna was in the car and had the motor running before he reached her; he nearly ran up the last few feet of the embankment, threw himself into the front seat beside her, and they were rolling almost before he'd pulled the door closed. Dust boiled around them in a sun-shot cloud.

“What is it?” The dirt road back up to the street was steep and required careful maneuvering.