The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (20 page)

Antryg sighed, shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, and looked around him at the walls of the chamber through which they passed—nearly black with mildew, but painted over with a pattern of snakes disturbingly reminiscent of patterns half-guessed within the labyrinth itself. “And I'm not certain at all that whatever information I might tell the Council wouldn't be used to the detriment of the situation by whoever's behind this—whoever it was who kidnapped Joanna.”

“A convenient excuse for keeping things to yourself,” sniffed Bentick. “Why on earth would a Council member stoop to taking hostages in the first place?”

“Perhaps because he or she feared that I could persuade someone—let's say Aunt Min for talking purposes, if they considered her to be getting a little foolish in her old age—to lift the geas and let me investigate as I pleased? Perhaps to get me to do their bidding against certain other members of the Council?”

“That's preposterous!” snapped Daur.

“No more preposterous than that I—were I Suraklin, that is—would engineer a rip in the Void smack in the middle of the Citadel of my enemies simply to disrupt their lives.”

“Not 'simply,' ” Daurannon said grimly. “The Citadel lies on the major ley to Angelshand and connects with most of the major cities of the Realm. I presume the Witchfinders are on their way here as a result of abominations that have appeared in that city.”

“Oh, I shouldn't doubt it. They'd hardly be coming to talk about the Imperial government's subsidies to the Citadel.”

Daurannon stiffened with outrage at the casual mention—in front of the novices—of links known only to the Council.

“ ... or for the Council to set them on some dog wizard who's gotten too powerful.”

“That's a ... ”

“Be that as it may, Daur, the fact remains that something—or someone—caused the experiments of the Council with the Void to go dreadfully wrong; that the situation is worsening steadily ... ”

“You say,” cut in Bentick's thin voice.

“ ... and that somewhere in the Vaults a wormhole has opened through to some world whose atmosphere is water.” They had reached the bottom of the upshaft, a stone chimney ascending three levels and entered by three small, crooked doorways. Quiet though they were, their voices reverberated up the long vent above them and back into the darkness spidering out behind, the darkness that was weighted with the uneasy vibration of the nearness of the Void.

Antryg turned to face Daurannon, and there was desperate intensity in his voice. “Daur, if it is you, or Bentick, who has kidnapped Joanna for purposes of your own ... ”

“How dare you!” the Steward gasped, and the young sasenna looked shocked.

“ ... please, please, move her out of the Vaults if that's where she's being kept. Even without the—the things—that I've seen down here, it's only a matter of time before the lower levels flood.” In the graying tangle of his hair his face was haggard and thin, smudged with blue beneath the eyes and streaked with a dried thread of blood from the cut on his forehead.

“Ninetentwo—my friend—said he couldn't get a reading of her presence in the Vaults, but there's always the chance of a shield of some kind around her cell, some spell that protects against any kind of detection. Like you, there are things about this situation I can't account for, nobody can. If she's here, Daur, move her ... or organize a search for her.”

“So that all the Senior mages in the Citadel—the ones who know the Vaults well enough to search—will be kept busy?” The younger mage leaned one shoulder against the rusty iron staples of the ladder, looked up into Antryg's face, the opaque suspicion in his eyes concealing whatever might lie behind. “We've searched before—for the Moving Gate, for clues—and have found nothing comprehensible. What makes you think ... ”

Shreb, the tallest of the three novices, screamed, “Look out!”

Antryg and Daurannon swung around in time to see something huge and soft and dreadful come bursting out of the right-hand doorway into the upshaft, something that sprang with the horrible swiftness of a leaping spider but whose soft, billowing body spread like a jellyfish to reveal a ciliated mass of wriggling, saw-toothed tongues. It showed only for a second, yellow, filthy, wet, and virtually odorless—Daurannon slashed his hand toward it ...

And nothing happened.

No lightning, no power, no help.

Antryg was ripping the novice Shreb's sword away from her even as the abomination fell upon Gyrik, wrapping the boy's body in an obscene billow of dripping flesh. The boy screamed, thrashing and tearing desperately—Daurannon was still staring in shock and unbelief at his hand. Bentick brought up his staff to hurl a bolt of power at the thing, a bolt of power whose destroying nimbus would have undoubtedly enveloped Antryg as well, had any such thing actually issued from the staff. But none did. The third novice, a young man named Nye, had sprung forward, sword flashing like Antryg's, to hack at the bulging membranes of the monster's body.

But the thing was tougher than it looked, and all the while Gyrik was screaming, shrieks of agony and horror passing over into blind animal howls, appallingly muffled in the sticky folds. Blood had begun to run down his legs, and an instant later he collapsed to his knees, Antryg and the two sasenna hacking and tearing at the heaving, clinging flesh of the thing while Daurannon and Bentick stood back, armed only with their magic, making signs that called no power from the black air, speaking words made nonsense by the agonized shrieks that greeted them.

Gyrik stopped screaming with a sobbing gurgle; the creature, its hide slit and shredded by its attackers' swords, backed and rippled from the prostrate body, and slithered away in long, shredded sections that moved independently, like flat, blubbery worms, leaving something that caused Bentick to go suddenly white and Shreb to turn away and vomit. Antryg knelt beside the eaten mess that was left of Gyrik's head and upper body, touched the stripped flesh of the boy's face. After two more sobbing gasps, Gyrik stopped breathing.

“See to Shreb, Bentick,” Antryg said softly, as Daurannon dropped to his knees beside him.

“I couldn't even call fire.” Daurannon's lips were gray with shock. “I couldn't ... I can't ... ”

“Then I suggest we all get ourselves out of this immediate vicinity as quickly as we can.” Antryg stood up—his hands, where he had touched the bloodied pulp that had been Gyrik's forehead, burned a little, and he quickly pulled off his mitts and wiped his fingers on his faded plum-colored coat skirts. “And let's hope this is just a small field effect, like the cat spell or that area of cold Tom told me about on the stairway between the Upper Gatehouse and the Library, or we're all going to be in a lot worse trouble than I care to think about when the Inquisition shows up.”

By the time they had ascended thirty feet up the shaft, both Daurannon and Bentick were able to summon small feathers of burning blue witchlight to the air above their heads; in the phosphor gleam, the older man's high, smooth forehead glistened clammily and the younger man's graying black hair was stringy with sweat. Later the fabric of Antryg's coat skirts turned brown and crumbled in the streaks where he had wiped his fingers, and the following day his fingers were blistered.

But by that time the knowledge that pockets existed where magic's strengths were negated, or reversed, was the least of anyone's worries.

A young wizard named Truvas sought to play a prank on his master by setting up a spell that would cause him to get lost in his own house. The master entered the door, and after a week, young Truvas went in to seek him. Neither was ever seen again.

—The Book of Tethys the Brown

“Curse him ... oh, curse his name ... curse him, oh, curse his name. Oh, dear God, send someone to get me out of here ... oh, curse his name ... ”

The muttering whisper grew louder as Joanna felt her way along the smooth, featureless corridor. A woman's voice, droning and exhausted, low as if the speaker were huddled in some corner, rocking herself like a beaten child to this threadbare litany of despair. Joanna had heard it telling over and over to itself those same few sentences for nearly an hour, as she'd tried to get a fix on it through the darkness—drearily, monotonously—until she was ready to scream. Sometimes it would stop, but always it started again, not even filled with pain ... filled with nothing at all. She had begun to suspect that the woman who crouched there in what could only be more corridor was insane.

But it was a human voice, the first she had heard. And maddening as it quickly became, she made her way toward it.

She had encountered other things besides human voices in her wanderings in the darkness.

She had lain weeping on the floor until she could weep no more, then had slept in her exhaustion and despair. Waking, she found the darkness as impenetrable as before. Neither flashlight, nor light-up digital readout, nor the matches in her purse would work; she still felt neither hunger nor thirst. Fear swept over her in a long, familiar wave, holding her sweating and nauseated for she had not known how long—fear of the clawing demons with their laughter, fear that she was now utterly separated from her point of origin ... fear that these facts did not matter.

After a time—a non-time—she had gotten up and gone on.

Fear had come and gone ever since.

Some of it had been fear of meeting the demons again, or things like them: things that screamed at her, clawed at her, chased her in the darkness. This had happened once more, and now she walked every step in the stomach-clenching dread of the silence around her.

Once, turning a corner, she had encountered something else, something ... She knew not what. Some vast, silent aura of waiting, some sound that was not a sound—as if something huge were holding its breath, a filthy, living silence. But a silence that drew her as if against her will.

As she'd stood there wondering if this was her imagination, if this was madness, she had felt a hideous sensation as if life, energy, her will, and the very electromagnetic heat of her body's chemistry were being pulled at—with a gruesome sensation of inner tugging, as if whatever it was that lay unseen in the horrible night before her wanted the life out of her flesh, down to its tiniest, most animal cellular energies. She had had a sense—and she didn't know why—of obscene vastness, as if she stood close to some enormous black yearning at whose center gaped a well that could never be filled, that would draw everything and anything into itself.

She had backed away, trembling, and in the dark before her, though she still heard no sound, she thought she could sense it move.

And she had run again, run and run and run, desperately turning and twisting in the winding corridors, queasy with the thought that she might have run in a circle and would stumble smack into it—or into something worse—from the other side ...

And then she had heard the whispering, the dreary mutter of another human voice.

And had stumbled, seeking it, her mind conjuring scenario after scenario from the fertile fields of Hollywood horrors.

The dark thing, the silent thing, the energy-drawing thing, could mimic human voices.

Whoever had put her here had put a tape recorder here, too, with an endless tape loop—never mind why. Maybe just to hear her burst into tears of despair when she found it.

She'd find some haggard crone in rags who'd been rocking to herself, muttering to herself, for ninety years.

“Curse him, curse him, oh, curse his name ... oh, God, please get me out of this ... God, send someone to get me out of this ... Oh, curse his name ... ”

“Who's there?” Her own voice sounded loud, queer, unreal in her ears.

“Who is it? Oh, who is it?” sobbed a voice—Not a tape loop, anyway—and a moment later there came a thick, heavy rustling of cloth, the froufrou of taffeta and a fusty smell of powder, perfume, and the slightly dusty odor of silk. A hand touched her extended hand, groping and fumbling in the dark ... Good. It really is dark. I'm not blind. A woman's hand, soft and well cared for, with long nails and a bracelet of what felt like pearls.

“My name is Joanna Sheraton.”

“Are you his prisoner, too?” she whispered. “Is your husband also one of his enemies? I know my husband will give him what he wants.” The hands were all over her, clinging, pawing, patting, like an ill-mannered child's; grabbing handfuls of her hair, fumbling at her mouth, until Joanna seized them by the wrists and pushed them away. There was no resistance, and there was something very childish about that, too.

“When he talks to my husband—to my Gwimat—Gwimat will come to terms with him. His terms aren't so very unreasonable ... it's only the waiting I can't stand. It seems so long ... it seems like I've been here forever ... oh, curse him, curse his name ... ”

“Who are you?” Joanna asked. She felt at the woman's arms in her turn, careful not to let her start pawing again, something Joanna hated because it reminded her of her mother's intrusive, fussy fingering and straightening of her clothes and hair. She felt plump, rounded arms in smooth, slippery fabric, the scratchiness of lace at the elbows. She'd worn dresses like that herself, when she'd been in Antryg's world under his protection. The woman threw her arms around Joanna, clutching her close, her face pressed to her shoulder-slightly taller than she, her long hair disheveled and spiky with jeweled hairpins.

“Oh, curse him, curse his name ... I know it was he. I know he took me prisoner. It has to have been him.” Joanna turned her face aside but suffered herself to be held. Only lately had she realized how desperately most people—herself included—needed to be held. Only, she realized, from the unselfconscious physicalness of Antryg's hugs and her own delight in hugging him in return.

“He knew my husband was working against him, you see; he brought me here, left me here, to blackmail Gwimat. And as soon as Gwimat hears his terms, of course he'll do as he asks to get me back. He'll do anything to get me back. It's just the waiting that's so hard for me, I never had any patience, never. God sent you, my dear, God sent you to help me bear this in patience ... ”