The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (23 page)

“What with the things that have been seen, out near the Green King's Chapel, and the filthy unnatural creature Gru and his hunters shot out in the woods near the Imp-Stones,” he nodded back to where Gru Gwidion, the black-bearded chief hunter of the village, and two of his men, stood beside one of the circle of marble pillars that made an inner, headless colonnade around the walls of the room, “I don't blame 'em, but there's more than that. They're saying that your magics are the cause of it.”

“That is ridiculous on the face of it,” Bentick replied crisply from his post to the left of Aunt Min's big carven chair.

“The logic of your villagers overwhelms me.” On Aunt Min's right, Lady Rosamund folded her arms, the fine wool of her sleeves catching a pewter sheen. Antryg noted, not for the first time, that the collar of the shift protruding above her all-encompassing robe was a plain, dark calico, while Daurannon's was white and finished with a modish ruffle. “The same people who have lived near us time out of mind, who have come and gone from the Citadel, whose holidays have been made cheerier by what we've paid them for eggs and milk and meat; the same people whose sons and daughters have worked here among us, who can testify that we cannot and do not tamper with human affairs ever—and I do not know how many village boys have plagued us over the years to sell them love-potions—they think we've suddenly decided to abandon six hundred years of teaching and precepts simply for the satisfaction of plaguing them.” Her delicate oval face was pale with anger, making the black butterfly-wing brows, the sooty veils of lashes, stand out as if inked.

Beside and a little behind her, Daurannon said nothing, but those large hazel eyes, which looked so expressive and were actually such a perfect mask, flicked watchfully from one face to another.

Trukild eyed the Lady unflinchingly. “I'm not saying they're right ... ”

“Are you saying they're wrong? Saying it to them, I mean, when they talk about ... what do they talk about doing?” she added, her low voice, sweet as a struck jade chime, flexing with scorn. “Coming up here with torches? I hope they enjoy long walks in foggy woods! Or do they just plan on selling one another their surplus eggs and butter from here on out? I tremble!”

“Rosie, Rosie,” Aunt Min murmured, raising her faded china blue gaze to her pupil, her head slightly cocked on the bent stem of her spine. “Can you blame them for fearing, when strange abominations are seen in the woods? They say things they could not see attacked children in the twilight near Gruddle Bog, and their cattle are being killed, bled white and half eaten alive. Can you blame them for turning upon that which they do not know?”

“I can blame them for attributing the matter to our malice, after all the years we have demonstrated our goodwill,” her ladyship said in arctic tones. “Like the Emperor's Regent, who turned our people out of the cities, all for the deeds of one renegade dog wizard.” Her glance cut viciously at Antryg, standing, hands in pockets, near the door. “What must we do, to escape blame for all the ills that people do not care to take onto themselves or attribute to impersonal Fate? Surrender our powers entirely? Go live in a place even more deserted than this, if there is one?”

Aunt Min held up her hand, stilling the icy passion of the younger woman's words. Then she turned, to hold out the twisted arthritic fingers to the big man in his crudely painted sheepskin coat who stood before her. Though her knitting basket of willow twigs, running over as usual with hanks of silks and wools spun and unspun, lay at her feet, she had not been working as Trukild had spoken; now she smiled at him, and in it was the echo of the warmth that had drawn nobles from an Emperor's court down to the taverns of the Algoswive quarter where, long ago in another century, another world, she had danced.

“You are good,” she said in her katydid voice, “to come out and give us warning of how your people feel; I swear to you we'll do all to help that we can. Daur, my child ... ”

The younger mage stepped forward.

“Would you see to it that some of the boys and girls take weapons and go out to the woods, and hunt for sight of abominations, along the Brehon Line and out near the Imp-Stones, and near the Gruddle Bog? The Line ... there'll be faulting all along the Line, out to the Green King's Chapel and beyond.”

“Thank you, my lady.” Trukild bowed clumsily amid a creaking of boiled-leather belts. “I'll do such as I can with the village men.” Gru Gwidion and his two hunters stepped up behind him, preparing to follow him from the chamber. Their eyes, Antryg noticed, were hard with suspicion as they scanned the faces of the four wizards gathered before them in the Council chamber's white, sourceless radiance.

“You must pardon them,” the headman added, turning back from the door. “But it's hard not to fear, you know. Yes, we've lived nigh the Citadel for generations, we know you and have heard all the tales from our parents and grandfolks. But you yourself know it's not something you can understand unless you're born in it, raised in it—like a city lady, begging your pardon, my Lady Rosamund, trying to understand us country folk. We're like cattle grazing the banks, watching the dolphins in the sea.”

“Much he knows of it,” Lady Rosamund muttered, after the headman and his bearded hunters had gathered their crossbows and blunderbusses and taken their leave. She touched the raven braids at her temples, the gold pins—the only reminiscence of her girlhood—glinting in the sable flood. “Cows may graze upon the bank, but they do not presume to pass judgment upon the dolphins.”

“Oh, I don't know.” Antryg unfolded his long arms and came forward into the room. “You're presuming a little about cows: have you ever asked one for her opinion about dolphins? Or anything, for that matter? I knew a Whisperer in Pretty Creek once who claimed to be able to converse with cows, though she said on the whole their conversation was extremely boring and morally unedifying ... though not, she said, as unedifying as cats'. Aunt Min ... ”

He bowed to her, and she left off fussing about, trying to reach her knitting basket, to look up at him.

“Antreges.” She used the softened diminutive as Suraklin had. “The abominations out in the woods ... you should know of them.”

“As it happens,” he said, bowing in a great sweep of coat skirts and shawl, “I've been working at a way of stabilizing the field so the situation won't worsen—as it has been doing—and so all things will remain in place while a thorough search can be made, not only of the Vaults but of the Citadel itself and of the countryside around. The nexus of the trouble may be in the Vaults, but since energy is transmitted instantaneously along all the ley-lines—as Trukild was saying, abominations are appearing in the woods north of the village, so obviously ... ”

“No,” Rosamund said, her voice like chipped flint.

“This is balderdash,” Daurannon stated, after a quick glance through the papers he had snatched from Antryg's hand. “These aren't even real spells, the energy isn't grounded off ... ”

“What exactly are you looking for?” Bentick demanded in a voice that bordered on shrillness, and his long fingers quivered as they sought the watch about his neck. Though the Steward had been twitchy for as long as Antryg had known him—well over twenty years—since yesterday his dark eyes had acquired a haunted look, and he'd picked up the trick of glancing nervously around the room. The result of seeing a boy whom he'd taught slaughtered horribly before his helpless eyes? Antryg wondered. Of learning that his own powers could fail? Or from some other cause?

Antryg replied airily, “Oh, I'm afraid I won't know that until I see it.”

“I daresay.” Daurannon studied his face for a long moment, the sheaf of papers held so that their raggedy edges touched his cupid lips. Then Aunt Min stretched forth one shaky, blue-veined hand, and almost unwillingly, the younger mage passed the papers on to her. His eyes never left Antryg's. “And I suppose you're to head up this search and have access to everything that's found?”

Over Aunt Min's shoulder, Lady Rosamund said quietly, “I can't let you do this. I've never seen power-circles like those in my life, you have no idea what they'll do.”

Antryg regarded her with limpid innocence in his gaze. “I do.” He turned back to Daurannon. “Well, that is why you brought me here.”

“The Council voted to bring you here,” replied the Handsome One with icy precision, “for your advice on the problem, not to permit you to rummage through every secret in the Citadel's Vaults. There are things down there even the Archmage no longer understands—but that Suraklin, or his student, might well have been waiting for years to get his hands on.”

“Come with me, then,” Antryg said cheerily. “All of you come with me.”

“I take it,” put in Lady Rosamund, looking up from the scribbled papers like a queen cornered by a barbarian in a sacked palace, “that you came here to ask the Archmage to actually execute these spells of yours.”

“Well,” Antryg pointed out, “I'd be delighted to do it myself, but the geas has made that rather difficult.”

“I should say rather,” Daurannon murmured, “that some member of the Council should head up the search, and that whatever is found is reviewed by the Council as a whole before being passed along to you.”

“An excellent suggestion!” Bentick said, rather too quickly, Antryg thought, but then, the Steward had always distrusted him and had probably been one of the original dissenting votes about bringing him here in the first place. “That way disruption could be kept to a minimum.”

“Disruption?” Antryg's eyebrows vanished into the curly mop of his hair. “You don't consider novices being eaten by monsters in the Vaults sufficient disruption, to say nothing of everyone having to do their own milking and weed pulling? It is a splendid idea, Daur, except that it won't work. I need to be in the Vaults, and I need to see everything—everything—that is found.”

“Because we have only your word on what is important?”

“That
was the entire reason you dragged me here,” Antryg retorted. “Because you do have only my word—my word or nothing. And personally, I would just as soon have this done as quickly as possible, because not only is the situation in the Vaults deteriorating, but the geas isn't the most pleasant thing in the world to live with ... ”

“You speak as if you feel you have some sort of right to be released from the geas afterward,” Bentick said. His dark eyes, which had flickered back and forth from face to face during the discussion, with an anxiety very unlike his usual bossy self, turned cold and prim again. “As if you think that it will be your right to go free ... ”

“THEN KILL ME!” Antryg cried passionately, shaken suddenly with the cumulative effects of fatigue and dream-racked, unhealing sleep. The three wizards fell silent, moving back a step to close ranks against him, suspicious, hostile, and chill. Among them Aunt Min bent calmly over the jumble of notes in her hands, shuffling them and letting them fall from her grip to float like huge, lazy yellow leaves around her chair as if none of this matter concerned her. Not, Antryg reflected, that he was foolish enough to think for a moment that she wasn't paying attention to every word uttered.

After a moment he drew breath and went on, “But not until the field has been stabilized and the entire Citadel, from turrets to Vaults, searched. If the central Gate, be it the Moving Gate or some other we don't know about, is not located and closed, the situation will worsen until ... I don't know what. You know that. I know you know it. If you want to kill me afterward, go ahead—in fact, if you're planning to leave the geas on me I'll probably reach a point where I'd rather you did—but don't stop me from doing this. And please,” the deep, flexible baritone dropped almost to a whisper, “please let Joanna go.”

“She isn't here,” Daurannon replied, with equal softness, his face like some ancient mask of a beautiful god.

There was silence. Then, into it, like the chirp of an insect, Aunt Min murmured, “Hmmm ... power.” She shuffled the papers in her hands again, then let half of them slide off her knees to the floor while she blinked appraisingly up at the tall figure before her, like a shabby and degenerate iris in his purple coat. “Channeled ... illusion ... interesting. Was it Suraklin who taught you to see power in this fashion?”

Antryg bent quickly to pick up the drifted sheets from the floor. “No, actually it was Wilbron of Parchasten's studies of optics and refraction, and a mad kitchen witch in Pretty Creek who held conversations with the stones of her hearth.”

Aunt Min nodded interestedly, though Lady Rosamund's lips compressed with scorn and annoyance to cover her concern. “It will take all of a day,” the Archmage continued. “Yes, the accomplishment of it must come at midnight, so that the power of the day will rise up into it. The North Hall of the Cloister here is on the Vorplek Line.”

“It lies directly above the Basin Chamber on the seventh level,” Antryg said. “The spell-circles need to be aligned with the Dead—er, with my friend Ninetentwo's machines in the Vaults in order to establish the field. I'll need to consult with him and establish the times exactly. The alignment needs to be precise. Everything depends on the spells' balance, or the whole thing will collapse before it starts.”

“Yes,” she murmured, rocking a little in her chair. “Yes, I see that.” Behind her, Daurannon mouthed nonsense and Ben tick fiddled with his watch. In the clear, shadowless whiteness of the Council chamber's light, Antryg was interested to see that a film of sweat had sprung out on the old man's high, balding head.

“I can't let you do this to yourself,” Lady Rosamund said, laying a protective hand on the skinny shoulder before her. “The energy needed to establish these spells is too much for your body to bear. Let me do it. God knows, I understand what he seems to think are the principles ... ”

“You're willing to put that much of your power into a rite you don't even understand?” Daurannon's eyebrows shot up and he glanced, speculatively, across at Antryg again. “One of Suraklin's spells, most like?”

“Pish.” Aunt Min slapped her pupil's hand dismissively, then, to take the sting out of it, patted it like a grandmother. “It has been a long time, Rosie, since I've worked a truly new spell, let alone a spell as great as this one ... Now, don't argue with me! Always arguing ... ” She clicked her tongue and looked vaguely around for her knitting basket and cane.