The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (22 page)

That done, he fetched a clean shirt and made his way back down the tiny, zigzagging wooden stairways through ivy and raspberry bramble, to the baths stuck like a random half-timbered arm where the Polygon reared up against the southern limb of the hill.

He shaved and bathed and felt rather better, though tired to the marrow of his bones; descending to the kitchen, he begged muffins and tea from Pothatch and sat at the Juniors' table in the big, half-empty hall of the refectory, listening to the talk. There was shock and horror and a huge confusion of rumor about the death of Gyrik; briefly and quietly, he told the story to the half-dozen young people at the table with him. Gyrik had been a well-liked boy, but there was more than that; a nervous undercurrent of glances ran among them at the thought that magic itself would fail.

“I guess that's why Phormion isn't here,” Gilda remarked, glancing along the plastered hall to the small knot of Senior mages at the upper table. “He was one of her best students.”

“I don't know if that was the reason,” Brunus argued, looking up from the lists he'd been studying even while shoveling down bacon, porridge, and fruit. “She hasn't taught the last two days.”

“And she looked terrible that last day when she did teach,” added Cylin, a tall, very serious young Junior from Senter-wing.

Brunus nodded. “Not sick, but nervous,” he explained, at Antryg's eyebrowed question. “She kept looking over her shoulder, though we were up on the observatory platform and the stair from the Library is really the only way up. She must have jumped a foot when Brighthand spoke to her from behind.”

He frowned, earnestly stirring milk into his tea. He was another, Antryg noticed, of what Lady Rosamund, in her own novice days, had referred to only half in jest as “the milk brigade.” The aristocracy, and those of the bourgeois who aped them, drank pale Oriental tea or thick bitter coffee black—pure, the arbiters of tea described it—or at most with tiny amounts of white sugar; peasants swilled honey-laced caravan tea by the tankard and chewed sugar afterward if they could get it, as Antryg was doing now. Cutting tea or coffee with milk was an urban trick, indulged in by low-class tradesmen at best.

Glancing around, Antryg noticed that neither Otaro nor Brighthand was present in the hall.

Nor were Q'iin or Whitwell Simm, Seldes Katne or Issay Bel-Caire or any of several dozen others, or the Archmage herself, for that matter. But still ...

Kyra the Red and Cylin's featherbrained friend Mick joined them, to add their mite to the conversation: very early that morning all three of the Citadel dairymaids and Tom the gardener had gotten lost in the twenty yards of ground between his cowsheds and the stairs up to the back door of the kitchen, wandering helplessly among the weathered fences and sheds full of winter fodder until Tom, by dint of a piece of string he'd had in his pockets, had managed to find his way out of the spell-field and summon Nandiharrow to disperse the magical infusion that hung over that spot. Two of the milkmaids had left the Citadel without even pouring the milk into settling pans.

“Well, one of the first-years might have done that,” Gilda said, and Kyra brushed the suggestion aside with a wave that very nearly overset the teapot.

“I don't think even the youngest of them would play a prank like that on non-wizards,” she said, as Mick and Cylin made simultaneous, rescuing grabs at the crockery. “It's too easy, for one thing. Really, Mick, you're getting very good at that, now, putting down a field that would get a Senior lost ... ”

And there was momentary, contemplative silence.

“How would you keep from getting caught?” Mick asked, lis blue eyes bright.

“You'd need a four-corner talisman system ... ”

“And some kind of a non-personal sourcing ... ”

“I think,” Antryg said regretfully, “that this discussion had better remain academic, at least for the time being.”

They looked disappointed but nodded—Antryg guessed, however, that when the current crisis was over, there would be a time of more than usual navigational difficulties around the Citadel. He recalled the extremely localized rainstorms that had enlivened his and Daur's second summer here. No wonder there were fragments of odd old spells everywhere on the tor, floating back to life.

He made his way back to the Pepper-Grinder, the need for sleep weighing like a triple-thick shirt of mail upon his shoulders. Last night's concoction of jelgeth root had long since worn off; he brewed, on the tiny hearth, a tisane of the second packet of herbs Q'iin had given him, drank it, collected a pillow from his room, and made his way down the concealed stair in the wall to the subcellar. From there a tiny doorway let him, by means of a hidden passage, through into the attic of the Isle of Butterflies, where he made a bed of the contents of a trunkful of ancient coats beneath one of the corridorlike chamber's tiny dormer windows.

The tisane worked quite well, as far as it went; until nearly the end, his dreams were merely disquieting, filled with dripping darkness, filth, and insects, and a familiar voice whispering his name. Once, clear and heartrending, he saw himself walking hand-in-hand with Joanna down the sidewalks of Melrose Avenue through the garish neon darkness and blowing electricity of the Santa Ana winds, while she explained to him the unimaginable contents of shop windows and they giggled so hard they had to prop each other up. But the dream melted, segueing into the face of a woman named Rheatha, with whom he'd stayed during the Mellidane Revolts—a woman who'd been killed by the Emperor's soldiers because she had sheltered him. He saw himself stumbling down a blood-trail in the Citadel Vaults, as he had stumbled through that looted house in the south all those years ago, finding a severed foot, a hand with the rings still bloodied on the fingers ... a head lying in a huge pool of gore that matted its long, curly hair. He tried desperately to prevent himself from picking it up, from turning it to see whose face it was ... He managed to wake up, gasping and shaking all over, before he saw.

Or, waking, he managed to blot the last second from his mind.

A skinny stick of primrose light stabbed obliquely down through the dormer window. Already the sun had shifted west over the peak of the Citadel hill.

“Well,” Antryg murmured shakily, lying back again on the piled scratchiness of old velvets, plush, and braid, “we'll brew that tisane a little stronger next time.”

Returning to the Pepper-Grinder, he collected the books he'd borrowed from Seldes Katne and settled himself in the bare, cleared expanse of the smaller of the two upstairs chambers. Starting, as was his custom, in a corner of the room, he proceeded to work out with chalk, first on the floor, later spreading to three of the four walls, the theoretical constructs of a spell necessary to deceive finite quantities of energy into believing that they should behave in one fashion rather than another. The geas, at least, had not hampered his adeptness with magical theory, and his study of optics and physics in Joanna's world helped enormously; still, at the end of the endless spring afternoon when he ultimately transferred the final procedures, patterns, and power-circles to paper, he felt as if he'd spent the larger part of the day getting himself pummeled to exhaustion in sword practice.

And no nearer, he thought, to locating Joanna.

“I looked for you earlier,” Seldes Katne said, bringing him up tea and honey, bread and soft white cheese just as he finished; they sat on the floor of the upstairs gallery overlooking the small hall below. Kyra had spent the morning down there memorizing her lists but had gone off since to an astronomy lecture given by Pharne Pordanches, in Phormion Starmistress' continued absence. “I'm coming along on the list of teles, but it's slow. Individual mages make reference to them in their grimoires and histories, but no one's made a catalog of them, any more than they'd catalog the dishes in the dining hall.”

“The difference being that one doesn't use the dishes in the dining hall to work magic with,” Antryg said, meticulously smearing cheese on a thick-crusted roll and acquiring long streaks of it on the tarnished gilding of his coat cuffs. “At least, not as a general rule, though Daur and I used to get quite good conjurations using staghorn, nitrous salts, and powdered violets in those little bowls Pothatch cooks jam puddings in. It never seemed to work as well in the salad dishes. It is my eternal regret that nobody here has yet invented peanut butter; if I have time between avoiding the Inquisition, finding Joanna, and locating the power-circles which are keeping the Moving Gate jammed open—if the Moving Gate is in fact the source and not merely a symptom of the problem—I'll have to talk to Pothatch about it.”

“What do you mean,” Seldes Katne asked slowly, “If the Moving Gate is the source of the problem?”

Antryg regarded her with surprise. “Well, it may not be, you know,” he said. “It may simply be another aberrance. I'll be able to tell a great deal once the field is stabilized and I can locate the thing.”

He licked a drop of honey from his long fingers. Pothatch, who was also in charge of the baths, had bandaged his arm for him and patched the skirts and the sleeve of his coat, the squares of green flowered calico standing out glaringly against the plum-colored velvet.

“A pity you can't ... well, use powers from one of the Gates themselves, from one of these other worlds, to get around the geas.”

Antryg hesitated for a long time, frowning into the shadowy spaces of the rafters opposite the gallery where they sat. “It is something I had thought of,” he admitted at last and looked sidelong at the stumpy little woman sitting beside him, hershort fingers toying  nervously with the end of her long, graying braid. He saw in her face what he recognized from shaving his own—the tired lines and bruised look about the eyelids, the mark of poor sleep or none. Her usual placidity had given way to a look of strain and nervousness, but that, he thought, was hardly unique in the Citadel now. With her quarters slap over the Vorplek Line, she must be prey to constant, low-grade spill off from the pressure of the Void.

He did note that she hadn't worn any of the flowers he'd brought her, but then, he hadn't really expected she would.

“It wouldn't answer, you know.” He set down his bread and honey, stared for a time into the mahogany depths of his tea. “I suppose magic could be brought from another universe into our own, though I doubt such magic would overcome the Council's geas on my mind. But even if I weren't afraid of further disrupting an already hazardously unstable situation, I would never try it.”

“I thought you of all people ... ”

He shook his head. “There may have been a time—many years ago—when I might have. But, Kitty, we're already awash here in the effects of our own magic, which we don't understand. Magic from some other universe, some other type of magic, with different rules, different laws from our own ... There are spells in this world that drive those who use them mad or have peculiar side effects like summoning cats or God only knows what. What would magic from another universe do?”

He drank off the tea—it was nearly as bitter as the jelgeth had been, but the caffeine, he reflected, would clear his head—and folded his arms around his knees in their shabby jeans, a scarecrow shape reminiscent of a curled-up crane fly, with his spectacle lenses flashing in the blue-gray dimness of the gallery and his earrings like chips of broken diamond in the tangle of his hair. “If it weren't for the fact that Joanna needs my help, I'd be inclined to agree with the Council in putting me under a geas, you know. I murdered six men and two women by means of magic—they were guards,” he added, seeing the look of shocked horror on her face. “They had orders to kill us and we could not allow ourselves to be taken, not then. Too much depended on us ... at least, if my perception of the situation was correct, it did, though from first to last it might only have been one of my delusions. But the fact remains that I did use my magic to take the lives of people who weren't expecting magic—who probably no more than half believed in it. I was desperate, but that's not really a valid excuse. Some people have very low thresholds of desperation.”

His gaze returned to the shadows of the rafters; situated on the east side of the tor, the Pepper-Grinder was already settling into a soft blur of shadow, though through the windows the sunlight lay jewel-bright on the somber green-black of the pine trees far below and blinked like diamonds on the Crooked River's swift brown flood.

He sighed, not really wanting to admit what he knew to be true. “The thing is, the more I deal with magic, the more I come to the conclusion that the Council is probably right.”

Seldes Katne said nothing, but he could almost feel her thoughts. Easy for you, who have always had magic at your call, to say. And there was nothing much he could say to her of that.

Pockets bulging with scribbled notes, Antryg and Seldes Katne ran Aunt Min to earth in the Council chamber. As they entered the round, white-pillared marble room from the gloom of the stairwell, Antryg recognized the voice of Trukild, the headman of Wychstanes Village, anxiously saying, “Be that as it may, my lady ... all I'm saying is, if it keeps up, I can't be answerable for what may happen.”

Of medium height, broad, square-faced and freckled under a beard like a holly bush, Trukild was a bigger version of his second cousin Pothatch the cook, done in brown rather than red. The ineradicable peasant stench of smoke and cattle emanated from his clothing and person and seemed to fill the room. Since the long ibeks—the barnlike dwellings occupied by three and four generations of Sykerst families plus Dutch uncles, hired hands, and remoter connections—were shared with the livestock down on the ground floor and filled with the smoke of the huge tiled stoves for the seven months of winter every year, this was understandable. Smoke was considered healthy and seldom allowed to escape, and Antryg had never lost his faint nostalgia at that particular pungent combination of stinks.

“It's not just they're afraid to come here through the woods, Lady.” Trukild turned his shapeless felt hat 'round and 'round between callused hands as Antryg and Seldes Katne slipped quietly through the door. As before, the windowless chamber was bathed in soft, cool, shadowless light, picking out every thread of grain in the waxed oak council table, every frayed spot of the Archmage's worn robe and every wrinkle of that dried-apple face.