The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (24 page)

Antryg picked up the basket, which lay beside her chair. She shoved the notes into it, dislodging a shower of yarn, needles, and crochet hooks that clattered on the marble floor. As Antryg collected them, Lady Rosamund handed Min her cane and began to lead her to the door, the old lady moving with painful, brittle slowness and leaning heavily on the younger one's arm.

They were still arguing about who was going to perform the unknown spells.

Nearly a century ago, the stories went, Minhyrdin the Fair had thrown a chamber pot at the Emperor's First Minister, who'd been sent to bribe her away from the then-Prince. Like a mad fairy, they had said; she had caused riots in taverns that spread through half the dock quarters, had accumulated one fortune by the age of nineteen and spent another.

And then one day she'd met old Tiamat the White, Arch-mage of the Wizards of the West.

Antryg reached under the carved oak chair for a last crochet hook; when he straightened up, arms full of balls of silk and hanks of unwoven wool, Daurannon still stood before him, arms akimbo and face smooth and unreadable as ever. “And I suppose,” Daur said, “while we're searching the Vaults, and the Citadel, and all the countryside 'round about, you'd like us to collect tortoises for you, too?”

“Would you?” Antryg beamed. “I doubt you'll find many at these latitudes, but you know, that would be the first time I could assemble enough from a single geographical area to get some idea of how various segments of encoded knowledge are distributed—once I decode them, of course. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

Turning from his former friend's disgusted gesture, he saw Seldes Katne, who had lingered all this time near the doorway, almost pushed aside by Bentick as the Steward hastened from the room. The old man's black robe billowed behind him, vanishing into the dimness of the hall as he passed the two women and disappeared at a run.

Once a thief broke into the house of Pipin the Little, Archmage of the Council, and stole a talisman of garnets, a golden chain, and a glass ball. But on that night, the thief's woman and several others at the inn she owned fell down deadly sick; and when the thief tried to prise loose the garnets from the talisman, the chisel slipped and cut his hand to the bone; and when he tried to melt down the chain, the crucible broke and burned him sorely, and set fire to the inn. He returned all the things to Pipin, laying them upon his doorstep and running away, and for long after that no thief in Angelshand would enter the places where the mages lived.

—Gantre Silvas

Annals of the Mages

The Dead God was waiting for him in the basin chamber, a hulking shape that seemed to unfold itself like a skeletal flower out of the rock and shadows as he entered.

“There are fearsome things down there,” Ninetentwo said, gesturing with two of his huge, clawed hands toward the doors at the chamber's far end. From the stairways beyond rose strange smells of wet stone, acrid mosses, and queer, unidentifiable, ozonous wildness. Another clawed hand touched the black loaf of the multiscanner. “Water is flowing down into the lower levels, seemingly seeping from the stones themselves in places. My readings show a sharp increase in the number of wormholes, energy fields, and Gates. I fear the randomization is accelerating still further.”

“I've been working on that,” Antryg replied cheerfully. “At precisely midnight tomorrow ... Do your people have digital watches? Excellent! At precisely midnight tomorrow Aunt Min will put into being a spell to cause the xchi-particle energy in the stones of the Citadel to behave temporarily like electromagnetic energy, so that it can be polarized into a stable field and we can finally search the place from top to bottom and see what we've got.”

The Dead God made a rumbling noise of disapproval deep in his enormous chest but apparently found even the starting point, let alone the conclusion, of the argument too alien for quibbling.

“I don't suppose your multiscanner would register fields of energy as well as Gates in the Void, would it? It would save us considerable time.”

“Some types it does, some it doesn't.” Ninetentwo unslung the black rectangle of the sensor from one shoulder, and its small screen gleamed flatly in the pale light of his forehead nodule. “Personally, I should hesitate to trust my life to any information this gives once the Vaults are blanketed in a polarization field of any kind. I have moved my equipment through the Gate into this world and, I hope, sufficient batteries to run it should the Gate close again. But there are pocket fields wherein neither the batteries nor the equipment, nor this,” he touched the massive weapon that hung strapped to his back, “will work at all. Should such a field manifest itself around me at the operative time ... ”

“Yes, that could get awkward.” Antryg scratched the side of his long nose and viewed the masses of electronics stacked, like the basalt blocks of the ancient wall of Ygron, near the frozen black slit of the chamber's far door. In addition to the sword he'd found—conveniently abandoned—in the cellar of the Harlot, he carried a torch, more for a weapon than for illumination; its yellow light played uneasily over the hard edges, the sightless eyes of the now-darkened gauges and the blank, idiot faces of empty monitor screens. A dragon tail of cables stretched through the door and away into the impenetrable dark of the maze.

Slung over one shoulder he carried breathing equipment and the silver-chloride spray pump, which had, as he'd suspected, not only made visible but incapacitated the haunters that had attacked him again on the fourth level. He had left the hideous things flopping like gross, misshapen wasps on the stone floor and descended the switchbacks of the stairs, water trickling in a thin stream beside his feet.

“Pity about the multiscanner,” he went on, turning to install the torch in one of the chamber's crude sconces. “We're going to have to act quickly once the field is activated if we're to have sufficient time to dismantle the balance between Circles of Power and the oscillators rather than let them fall into random decay. Given the energies at large in the Citadel, I'm not entirely certain what would happen, but it probably wouldn't be pleasant. Once your equipment is set up, we'll have to put a guard around this chamber.”

“Not this chamber.” The Dead God moved his great head, iridescent eyes flashing as he gestured toward the far door. “The water is rising: if the wormholes through which it is leaking are open when the field stabilizes, this chamber is too deep for safety”

“True enough,” Antryg murmured, and his stomach flinched at the sudden image of Joanna, trapped in some pitch-dark cell, despairingly watching water trickle in under the door. He thrust the thought from him even as he felt the sweat start on his hands. The multiscanner would have registered something.

“The Chamber of the Glass Pillar, then,” he said quickly. “It's on the fourth level directly above this—that will still put us immediately beneath the North Hall. How long will it take you to set up?”

“Three hours, four hours.”

“Splendid! With both fields synched into the ley-lines ... ”

His voice must have quickened with his nervousness, or else the Dead God, usually cold-bloodedly phlegmatic, was more sensitive than Antryg had given him credit for. For after a moment's silence, the monster laid one tarantulate lower hand on Antryg's sleeve and said, “I have taken two other multiscan readings at different frequencies and from different points. Never has human presence shown up that could not be accounted for by those who patrolled seeking you.”

Antryg drew a deep breath and let it out, trying to expel with it his awareness of dark waters rising and the poisoned images of his dreams. “And I expect they'll be seeking me again as soon as our Daur realizes I've disappeared.”

“Here.” With a thin shearing of Velcro, the Dead God stripped a timepiece from one of his arms and held it out. The maggotlike tentacles of his palm, wrapped around the square lozenge of black and gray, gleamed moistly in the torchlight. “I had thought that we might synchronize electronically, but with the shifting of the energy fields, I find that radio beams do not always pass.”

“Marvelous stuff, Velcro.” With a certain amount of difficulty, Antryg fastened the timepiece around his own far thinner wrist, his quick movements concealing the nervous tremor of his hands. The Dead God watched him with that great dragonlike head tilted a little to one side, the opaque eyes and rigid, leathery skin stretched tautly over the bones impossible to read.

“If I could figure out a way to manufacture it here, I should be able to retire from magic-working completely—not that I haven't been compulsorily retired, at least for the time being, but never mind. I suppose the High Council would never let me get away with it, or peanut butter, either.” Antryg patted his pockets to assure himself that his spare oxygen bottle was safe and hitched the breathing tubes up over his shoulder where he could easily get to them.

“I will have the equipment ready and attached to batteries, at your hour of midnight tomorrow,” the Dead God promised. “Not that I have the smallest belief that it is possible for you to do what you say you are going to do, but I will do as you ask as if it were.”

“Thank you.” Antryg took the torch from its holder and held it aloft, the Dead God's grotesque shadow curtsying hugely across the black faces of pillar and wall. “It is all anyone ever needs do.”

After seeing the Dead God back to the slit of blackness that marked the Gate of his own universe, Antryg stayed until past midnight searching the lowest levels of the Vaults. In his heart, he suspected that the alien physicist was right and that Joanna was imprisoned elsewhere, yet he could not rid himself of the dread that he might be wrong. To his horror and grief, he had been wrong before.

In places the coiled black tunnels were knee-deep in water, the surface curling with faint ribbons of steam; in other places, waist-deep or deeper, where small stairways led randomly upward and downward, or the floors underfoot slanted, or gave way suddenly to unexplained pits and traps.

In a broad corridor, flooded shoulder-deep and thick with choking mists, he called her name outside a locked door written over in ancient runes, the flame of his torch sinking in on itself in the woolly vapors and his deep voice echoing across the broken yellow reflections of the water's surface. If a Gate opened in the cell with her, he thought, she might very well flee through to save herself, into God knew what other universe, and then she would truly be gone.

The mosses that padded the ceiling in a wet quilt of orange and purple seemed to pucker and shift at the sound of his voice; a moment later, a low, rolling bow wave lifted the slick surface of the water near him, and he felt something huge glide past his legs, the water bubbling thickly in its wake. He shuddered, wishing there were several of Joanna's favorite cinema films he hadn't seen.

In the end he had to be satisfied that Joanna was neither on the ninth level nor the eighth. He retrieved his coat, shawl, and boots, and climbed, dripping wet and bone-weary, up the spiraling vent shafts toward the stores-cellars far above. There was a little room downstairs from the main pantry where he could spend the night, cut into the rock of the hill's eastern face but open, save for a light lattice, across one side.

But even as he turned toward the minor stair that led there, another thought came to him.

It was well past midnight now—like most wizards, he could feel that in his bones. Carefully secreting his sword, spray gun, extinguished torch, and breathing apparatus behind some oil jars, he ascended noiselessly to the kitchen and began to work his way through the hidden byways of the Citadel toward the house they called the Castle, over on the north side of the hill, where Phormion the Starmistress lived.

The trapdoor between the cellar of the Castle and that of the Sea Lady's House—the tiny dwelling that Pentilla Riverwych and old Idrix of Thray shared—was barely twelve inches wide and a yard high; a heavier man than Antryg, or a less limber one, could never have made it. The Castle's cellar ran deep into the hill and was filled, mostly, with bins of wood and coal whose fusty odor caught at the back of Antryg's throat. There was a huge brick furnace there, to warm the hypocaust beneath the floors during the bitter winters; a long, unrailed stone stairway ran up one wall, debouching, if Antryg recalled aright, into a sort of tiled hall between Phormion's rooms, Bentick's, and those of the two other mages who shared the place. Even occupied as it was by four Senior mages—pack rats by definition—the Castle, Antryg knew, contained half a dozen unused chambers, tucked away in turrets at the top of winding iron steps or reachable by spidery back stairs concealed in walls.

The trick, of course, would be getting up there. He could feel magic all around him in the cellar, spells of warning, ward, and guard. As far as he could tell there was nothing written on the trapdoor he'd come through; very few people knew of its existence, most preferring to use the passage that led through the lowest floor of Bentick's rooms in the north tower. Still, he supposed, pushing up his glasses onto his nose, the most they could do would be to lock him up for the remainder of the night and have Daur read him a lecture in the morning.

By clambering over the woodpiles, he was able to reach the foot of the stair without touching any of the ward-spells on the flagstoned floor. The ghostlike grayness of a cat poured itself at a startled run up the stairs—one of Bentick's, probably. Ascending undetected himself would be a more difficult matter.

With a faint clanking of the iron latch, he heard the door above him open. A moment later, a whisper of magic drifted upon the air.

Antryg's breath seized as if he'd been struck beneath the ribs by the thrust end of a massive pole; he gasped and caught the wall to keep from falling but felt his knees turn weak. His lungs felt numbed—pain like the jab of a dull knife seared his chest as he tried to fill them.

Darkness covered his eyes, his vision tunneling down to the few square inches of granite stair just before his face, but he heard a footstep at the top of the stair, smelled dirty wool permeated with stale incense and smoke. In the darkness of his blurring mind he heard a hoarse voice whispering death-spells.