The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (21 page)

“Who are you?” Joanna asked again, gently disengaging herself. “And who put you here? And where are we?”

But the woman was already sinking to the floor in a vast billow of satin skirts and rustling petticoats, rocking and moaning and cursing the name of the man she would not name, clinging to Joanna with her perfumed hands and trying to make her sit, too. Try as she would—and she did try for some time—Joanna could get no sense out of her, only endless wailings and whispered mutterings, the same few sentences over and over that she had already heard repeated endlessly: her husband would come to get her out, her husband wouldn't allow him to keep her prisoner—she found the waiting so difficult.

After what felt like endless time Joanna extricated herself, not without difficulty, from the clutching grip and moved away into the sightless labyrinth once again. Her pajamas held the cloying sweetness of the woman's perfume, a reminder of her presence, like the mumblings fading behind her. When she was still within earshot she took another spool of thread from her purse and taped one end to the wall. She might in time, she reflected uneasily, become desperate enough even to long for such company and want to find her way back.

But as she unreeled the thread—that meticulous guide through the darkness of nowhere, a guide from nothing back to nothing—she wondered how soon it would be before she herself sat down against some wall and started muttering.

“Joanna!”

Startled nearly out of her skin, she swung around, flattening to the wall behind her, thoughts splashing through her mind—the dark thing that drew at her life, mimicry of voices, how did it know my name ... ? Why does the voice sound familiar ... ?

“Joanna Sheraton?” The voice in the darkness was known but unplaceable, male, a pleasant and well-trained light baritone. What made her think of an actor ... ?

“It's me. Magister Magus. Is that Joanna Sheraton ... ?”

“Magus!” she sobbed. “Here ... I'm here ... ”

A hesitant hand touched her shoulder; she caught the wrist in a gesture that even as she made it felt horribly like the madwoman she had just left. The arm was cased in what felt like the sleeve of an expensively quilted and corded velvet dressing gown. To hell with it, she thought, and flung her arms around the slender waist and hugged the little dog wizard tight. He gathered her to him, as grateful as she for the human contact in spite of the fact that at their last encounter she'd been responsible for nearly getting his skull cracked for him. Against her temple she felt the scratchiness of his close-trimmed black-and-silver beard.

“My dear, dear girl ... ”

“Magus, what the hell is going on?” Her words came out as a sob. “Where are we, who the hell was that woman, what are we doing here?”

She felt his body relax a little in her grip, felt a kind of tension go out of him, his slender shoulders slumping. His breath escaped him in a sigh. “Oh,” he said in a discouraged voice. “You don't know?”

Dammit,
she thought, knowing what he was about to say. Dammit, dammit, dammit ... “You mean you don't know, either?”

“Well,” he said after a moment, “I know where we are, and I've got a good guess who that woman is. But as to why we were brought here ... ”

“Look, right now any information is better than stumbling around in the dark waiting to run into that ... that thing ... ”

“What thing?” But by the uneasiness in his voice she guessed he'd felt its power, too. He had stepped back, but his hands still held hers; she felt the tapered fingers, forever innocent of manual toil, stroke the soft skin of her own hands.

“The thing that ... I don't know. Something in the dark. Something that ... it felt like if I got close to it, it would draw out my life, draw out everything in me.”

“Ah,” the Magus breathed, “so it wasn't my imagination. I was afraid ... ”

As ineffectual as this friend of Antryg's could be in an emergency, her delight in meeting him was unalloyed. Magister Magus might be a dog wizard, with a dog wizard's uncertain and frequently inaccurate training—he certainly was no more than a charlatan who made a royal living telling fortunes and peddling love potions, simple nostrums and fortune-cookie advice to the more superstitious members of the Regent's court in Angelshand—but in times past he had been a friend to Antryg and a friend to her when they were in need. Even had this not been the case, even had the Magus been a total stranger in this dark maze, he was, at least, sane and kind. And he did know something about the situation.

“What was it?” she asked.

“I believe,” he said after a moment, “that it has to have been the tsaeati ... ” And the Spell of Tongues, whose aura still clung to her from long association with Antryg, translated the word to her mind from some archaic variant of an ancient speech as devourer or glutton.

“It was said to be indestructible. It devoured everything which came in its path and turned everything—fire, lightning, the magic of the wizards who fought against it—back upon its attackers, until Berengis the Black imprisoned it in a crystal called the Brown Star, where it is apparently technically impossible for anything to devour anything.”

“And the Brown Star is where we are now?” Joanna asked. “I mean, it may not be impossible to devour something, but I certainly haven't been either hungry or thirsty since I got here, and I must have been here for days. And,” she added, “the matches in my purse don't work, so there seems to be some kind of bar to the transformation of energy ... technically, the sulfur of the match tip won't oxidize.”

“Precisely,” the Magus agreed, his voice radiating a scientific cheerfulness Joanna was far from feeling.

“That still doesn't answer what we're doing in the Brown Star.”

She heard him sigh again, felt it through the arm he still held clasped around her shoulders.

“Well ... Berengis the Black was a court wizard to the Lords Caeline, and the Brown Star, after hundreds of years, must have fallen into the hands of Suraklin the Dark Mage. At least, people disappeared whose very bodies were never traced—or, on the rare occasions when he did return someone he'd kidnapped, they could never tell where they had been or how long they had been there. That woman, whom I believe is Irina Siltrayne, the wife of one of the Dark Mage's enemies, seems to bear me out. At least, she disappeared literally days before the Council wizards and the Emperor's men descended upon Suraklin's Citadel. No trace of her was ever found.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Joanna whispered, horrified. “You mean the poor woman's been in here, waiting to be rescued, for twenty-five years? With those demons, and that ... that tsaeati ... ?”

“So it appears,” Magister Magus said somberly. “ I've tried to get some sense out of her several times since I've been in here ... ”

“Oh, God.” Joanna shivered. “That long ... ” She was silent a moment, trying to comprehend and, when comprehension seemed imminent, trying not to. “But how did you end up here? And me, for that matter?”

“Well,” the little dog wizard said after a moment, “that's rather a long story. You know that Salteris, the Archmage, disappeared—and later word reached the mages in Angelshand that he was dead. Some said Antryg murdered him, which is ridiculous on the face of it. He worshiped Salteris.”

“No,” Joanna said quietly. “Yes, he did love Salteris like a father ... but it's also true that he killed him. I'll explain later.”

Magus was silent for a time. Joanna led the way over to the wall and settled herself on the floor with her back to it, the dog wizard sitting at her side. As he did so his bare foot brushed hers, and the hem of what was almost certainly a very splendid bathrobe—she thought it was the black velvet one he'd worn in the mornings, the few days she'd stayed with him in his house in Angelshand six months ago, plush and luxurious with cuffs and collar of green silk trapunto that turned to emerald the light, clear green of his eyes.

At length he said, “Well, in any case word reached me that Salteris was dead. I had just returned to Angelshand after ... er ... a stay on one of Prince Cerdic's estates.” He hesitated, the flex of his voice carrying the unpleasantness of the memory of being enslaved by the wizard Gaire—the wizard Joanna and very few others believed to have been in actuality Suraklin.

“In any event the mages were in a tizzy—they left the Mages' Yard, and one night I ... Well, to make a long story short, I broke into Salteris' house in search of what I could find. I was in quest of books, mostly. I may be a dog wizard, but I do have some powers ... ”

“I know,” Joanna said softly. “Antryg always said you would be one of the best of the Academics, if you'd consented to take the Council vows.”

“And a lot of good they would have done me,” grumbled the mage. “Swearing you'll never make a living off the one true talent you have in exchange for them teaching you, as if they were conferring a favor. Well. I ... I wanted more. I wanted to learn, and I wanted ... implements. Objects. Teles-balls, specifically. Salteris was said to own three. Things that would give me power enough to prevent being enslaved again or cracked over the head by impudent young sasenna who ought to have more respect for their elders.”

“Have you seen Caris?” interrupted Joanna, ducking discussion of that last, disastrous parting in the Prince's house at Devilsgate Manor. “Is he well?”

“As well as a sasennan can be who's lost the use of one hand.” In spite of his private feelings, Joanna could hear the genuine pity in her friend's voice. Then, more cheerfully, he continued, “He's training to be a healer these days, I hear. There have been rumors, off and on, about him and the Regent's wife, Pellicida, but he's so very stolid and she's so extremely pregnant, that I suspect they're not really much fun as a source of gossip, and besides, Pellicida seems to be the only woman the Regent likes or respects. Where was I? Oh, the Brown Star ...”

He sighed. “The Brown Star was one of the things that I found at Salteris'. It was hidden in a cupboard with a catch and a spring—it must have been masked with spells as well, until Salteris died. He'd quite clearly picked it up when the Council broke Suraklin's Citadel ... ”

“No,” said Joanna. “No, I think ... It's a long story. But if Antryg was right—if Suraklin took over the bodies of first the Emperor, and then years later of Salteris himself, I think the Brown Star must have been something he brought away from the Citadel himself. But in either case ... ”

“In either case,” Magister Magus sighed, “it fell into my hands.”

There was momentary silence.

“I think,” Joanna said at last, “that I can smell a bad case of Instant Karma in the making.”

“As you say.” His voice had a discouraged note. “I don't know how long ago it was—weeks, months ... It could have been years; in this darkness it is impossible to tell. I was awakened by a sound in the middle of the night; I crept down to my study, where I had left the Star, quite well secured in a secret compartment of my own desk. And ... I don't recall exactly what happened. Sometimes I think I remember a dark form standing by the desk, turning toward me. Sometimes I think that's only what I know must have happened. Then I was ... here.”

Joanna sighed and gave him an outline of the events leading up to her own nightmare awakening. “So you see, my being here has got to have something to do with Antryg. You ... I don't know. I suspect you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and let that be a lesson to you about swiping magical implements that don't belong to you.”

“You're starting to sound like that lunatic lover of yours,” Magus said glumly. There was another silence, broken by the far-off shrieking laugh of demons—other creatures, Joanna guessed, that some wizard, unable to destroy them by any other means, had simply dumped in here, not thinking about what else might have been imprisoned in the crystal in the course of the years. She wondered if the tsaeati had drawn out poor Lady Irina's mind, leaving her mumbling in the remnants of what few memories were left; wondered if there were others, placed in the crystal by God knew who in the centuries of its existence and forgotten ... others who had ceased to mutter, who only lay silently waiting.

“The one shred of comfort I can take from this,” Magister Magus said after some moments, “other than the sheer pleasure of your company, though of course I wish that the meeting were in other circumstances, and I'm certainly sorry that you have been placed in this horrible position ... ”

“Not as sorry as I am, believe me.”

He gave the ghost of a chuckle. “The one shred of comfort I do draw is that I have never known Antryg to abandon a friend. He loves you, Joanna—and he is a very powerful mage indeed. I have known him for years, and I know that he will attempt rescue at the cost of his life.”

“It's inspiring to know that,” Joanna said with a sigh. “But if he does attempt rescue, and it does cost him his life before he figures out where the hell we are ... where does that leave us?”

“I wish you wouldn't say things like that,” the wizard muttered, and they lapsed into pessimistic silence.

All magic is balance. The power which summons the wind and rain, which calls forth fire, which alters the random chains of circumstance, must come from somewhere: the energy of the stars, of the earth, of the blood and bone and life of the Summoner. Likewise all which happens, happens to something or someone—the rain which nourishes crops, floods streams and prevents messages from being delivered in time; the fire which warms, consumes the wood; the smallest trains of circumstance start other trains leading to goals that cannot be predicted. All this must be remembered by the mage.

—Isar Chelladin

Precepts of Wizardry

Though it could not have been more than five in the morning when a very shaken pair of sasenna escorted Antryg back to the Pepper-Grinder, daylight was already broad in the sky. He thanked Shreb and Nye and offered them tea, which they declined after a moment's confusion—it was not customary to offer sasenna food or drink while they were on duty, any more than someone would have offered them to a sword that stood in a corner or to a servant: sasenna were considered, by themselves as much as by those to whom they swore their vows, as a combination of the two. Once they had gone, Antryg collected his two finest pinwheels—a red one and an astonishing double spiral that turned in both directions at once—gathered an armful of looserife and poppies bound together with the trailing vines of honeysweet, and made his way up to the silent bulk of the Library tower to deposit the whole in the scriptorium before Seldes Katne's locked door.