The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (3 page)

“Nothing,” he lied.

Her glance flicked to him; he hesitated, then looked quickly away.

In an almost apologetic tone he said, “There really is nothing down there.”

But he didn't, Joanna noticed, take his eyes off the rearview mirror until they were nearly a mile away.

“Can we have the truth now?”

Antryg looked up quickly from where he'd settled on the floor to receive the ecstatic welcome of Joanna's cats. After the irritating fashion of cats, Spock and Chainsaw had fallen desperately in love with Antryg at first sight and, at every opportunity, forsook the woman who'd fed them and paid their rent and medical bills for the past five years to fawn over this relative stranger.

Joanna stowed the leftover kung pao beef and fried rice in the refrigerator and turned, leaning against the square column that the designers of the apartment had installed at the end of the counter that separated kitchen from living room. In the slate blue twilight the apartment bore even more strongly than usual a resemblance to some undersea cave filled with strange jungles of life: computer cables and radio parts rambled at large, octopuslike, among the documentation on Joanna's desk and the madhouse of journals, specs, textbooks, and copies of the National Enquirer which heaped the trestle-mounted door that served as Antryg's worktable; the little windup Frankensteins and Godzillas, the pigs and dentures and hopping frogs glinted gently in the random glow of the Lava lamp like bizarre things recently emerged from holes in rocks. On their way to the Manchurian Panda-Date, Antryg and Joanna had picked up Ruth; now her high heels were clicking their way down the outside steps of the Chateau Burbank to her second-floor apartment directly below, leaving silence in their wake.

Antryg eased the cats from his lap and stood up; six feet three, his gangly thinness made him seem oddly fragile in the slanted yellow light streaming from the kitchen pass-through. His voice was quiet. “I was afraid you were going to ask for that.”

She stood for a time looking up at him, torn between her morbid horror of being a nag like her mother and her certainty that Antryg and, possibly, she herself were in terrible trouble.

“There is nothing down there,” he repeated softly. “Yet. And in any case it's nothing that need concern you anymore. They couldn't locate me by scrying-crystal, or through dreams, but they could send out a general Summoning to those close to me, knowing I would eventually hear.”

His tone was explanatory and matter-of-fact, as if that made everything right. Like the old joke about Oh, what you saw was just a UFO, which was thought to somehow lessen the hideous shock of possible contact with an alien race.

“ 'They' who?” Joanna asked quietly. “And what did you see?”

Antryg looked down at his boot-toes and propped his spectacles a little more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. Then he sighed. “Wizards' marks, written on the concrete. Marks of Summoning. Lady Rosamund's ... Daurannon the Handsome ... other members of the Council of Wizards. And one of mine.”

“Yours?”

“To bring me there.” He looked up at her, his gray eyes tired and resigned behind their protective wall of glass. “Which means they must know I'm alive.” He looked away again and rubbed his hands, subconsciously trying to work the pain out of the badly healed breaks and dislocations the Ferryth Inquisition had left in its wake. In the pit of his throat, under the jackdaw beads, Joanna could see the round discoloration of the scar left by the Sigil of Darkness, like an acid burn on the thin skin. He had taken poison, she remembered, to avoid the Prince Regent's final sentence.

“Will the marks draw you there?” She came quietly around to sit on the arm of the rough green couch.

“Well, they certainly did this afternoon.” He moved with nervous restiveness to the sliding glass door that looked out onto the balcony, opened it wide. The night air rolled in around him, warm as bathwater, bringing with it the incessant thrumming pulse of Victory Boulevard and the freeway beyond. “In this universe they shouldn't have that power, but there is power and power. The Council must have known that sending the dreams to you would bring me, if only to make sure that ... ”

He stopped himself, as if realizing he was saying too much, then shook his head.

“And you know, the terrible thing is that I'm curious. It takes a tremendous lot of power to open a Gate through the Void. Very few wizards can do it on their own. Having gotten rid of me once, would their hatred alone be sufficient for them to track me through it? Or is there some other reason?”

“Lady Rosamund wouldn't need another reason,” Joanna said quietly. “You confessed to murdering the Archmage. That would be reason enough.”

He shivered a little, though he stood in the open doorway, surrounded by the gluey warmth of the night.

“Antryg,” said Joanna, her voice very small now, “don't go back there.”

By his silence she knew he'd been thinking about it all through dinner.

“They'll be waiting, and they'll be ready for you. You won't get away from them this time.”

And I couldn't stand to lose you,
she thought. Not again. Not so soon. Not for real.

Don't let me go back to being what I was.

In a way she knew that she wouldn't, even were he to disappear. In some ways the past four months had been a roller coaster of new experiences; in others, they had the strange solidity of something she had done all her life. Like many shy women, she had regarded men as an incalculable and threatening alien species, though certainly nice for dating purposes, and had wondered why any sane person would want to live with one. She couldn't have phrased the answer in words, but it was obvious to her now, at least in this particular case. Following his easy friendliness with everyone, she had come out of her own reclusive shell; she had discovered that she could after all talk to people without the feeling that the minute her back was turned they'd roll their eyes and mutter Jeez Louise!

She would not go back to being what she was, but the thought of the road forward without him opened a core of sick pain down the center of her being, pain she hadn't known she was capable of feeling ... or, if she had guessed it, far back in childhood, she'd been very careful not to put herself in a position to find out.

And above all that, she simply didn't want him to be hurt.

And they would hurt him, a lot, before they let him die. “I know.” His voice was barely a whisper. “But it isn't only that, you see.”

No, she thought. It wasn't only that.

A stirring of wind moved the curtain beside him, belling out around him like a pale, oatmeal-colored cloak and then felling slack again as if the mere effort had exhausted it; outside in the darkness the yellow lights twinkled—streetlamps, billboards, headlights, neon. Asphalt and hydrocarbons, the chlorine bite of the courtyard swimming pool and the sudden, nostalgic tug of charcoal smoke and chemicals as someone fired up a balcony hibachi. Somewhere in the building someone was playing “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Watching the tall figure silhouetted against the jukebox glow of the city of lights—the City of Dreams—Joanna realized she had known for months, and the knowledge cut at her, that she could only distract him from his unhappiness, never wholly alleviate it.

For he was more than an exile. By the very nature of this universe, he was an artist blinded, a sensualist gelded, a singer whose tongue had been cut out. The studies he had undertaken here, the studies of physics and optics and computers and whatever details of the physical world he could get his hands on, though they delighted and fascinated him, were not enough. They would never be enough.

Her throat hurting with the wish that she didn't care so much, she said, “You'd never get away from them, Antryg. Even back in your own world, you'd never be able to work magic again. They'd track you through it, as they did before.”

She saw his body relax, leaning against the doorframe as if with his breath he had exhaled the tension from his muscles, the very strength from his bones, leaving only grief behind.

She barely heard him say, “I know.”

She felt the fear and the desperation in him later when they made love and, lying against his bare shoulder in the drifting aftermath, saw by the reflected glow of the driveway lights below her window the haunted look of hopelessness in his unprotected gray eyes.

“Antryg,” she murmured drowsily as he got up at nine to make the late shift at Enyart's. “You won't do anything dumb, will you?”

He sighed but didn't pretend that he didn't know what she meant. “It might be best if I did.”

“They'd only follow you further.” She shook back the tangle of her thick blond curls, drawing on a rumpled pair of pajamas, as she watched him pull on his jeans. The beads he wore around his neck glittered against the fair, fine-grained skin of his throat. His arms were marked from elbow to wrist along the vein with a faded road map of whitening scars. They were nothing like a junkie's tracks: the flesh had been slit, torn, bitten ... he had a few on his neck and chest as well. He'd given her a long and patently untrue story about attending a vampire convention when she asked him what they were.

“You may navigate better than they do in the worlds that lie in the Void, but you know they'll find you in the end.”

And you'll be lonely,
she didn't say.

And I'll be lonely, too.

A wry smile touched one corner of his mouth; he leaned down to kiss her hair. “Very well,” he said softly. “I promise I shall consult you before undertaking anything dumb.” She heard him lock the door, and half felt, half heard the creak of his footsteps as he carried his bicycle down the stairs. At least, she thought, in the Friday-night chaos of Enyart's he was unlikely to run afoul of wizards from other universes, whatever else he might meet.

Sleeping, Joanna dreamed of the Void.

Dreamed of running through it alone, of trying to cross it; her feet touched nothing, while its cold ate at her flesh and the blackness all around her whispered with the voices of the abominable things that slipped through its cracks when the Gates between worlds were open. Her breath came in gasps, her legs hurt with exhaustion, her chest burned ... the dim speck of light she so desperately followed receded from her. She stumbled, frantic to reach it, to get out of this place before she was lost in its airless cold forever ...

And above all else, the terror of the Void itself drowned her, darkness, falling, terror beyond all conception of terror; the terror she had felt, gazing down into the wash that evening, the terror of seeing the very fabric of space and air sliver open, split into a lipless mouth spilling out darkness ...

It was coming at her, reaching to consume her, while the horrors of a cosmic wind streamed out over her flesh, to eat her unprotected bones.

She woke gasping, staring with huge eyes into the darkness of the bedroom. Antryg was gone. Somewhere in the building a faint pulse hammer of music still thumped, the lights from the driveway below still pooled their yellow reflection on the ceiling.

But they could not penetrate the vibrating darkness that had begun to grow—blotting walls, reflections, furniture, everything of the sane and normal world—like a grinning, all-consuming chasm of eternity in one corner of her room.

It is said that in the days of the Twenty Kings, the wizard Treegard Galsek had a house in the northern forests, on a great granite hill called Wizards' Tor. He gathered about him other wizards, and priests of strange faiths, and they would kidnap travelers, and enchant their minds so that, believing themselves to be moles, or asses, or beasts of burden, they labored for them, raising high walls and digging tunnels deep within the rock.

—Firtek Brennan

Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry

“Antryg ... ” Jim Hasselart waved from the inconspicuous, lighted doorway at the far end of the bar. Antryg dropped maraschino cherries into the two banana daiquiris he'd been concocting, handed them to the Beautiful Kevin to deliver to table customers, and edged his way past the young waiter's tightly Jordached and much-admired behind to join his manager in the narrow galley among the crates of Corona and St. Pauli Girl. “Telephone.”

It could only be Ruth, thought Antryg, with a glance at the clock. It was shortly before closing time, the sixth or seventh hour of the night—he'd just begun to get used to the time conversion in this world when daylight saving time had come along. There were, of course, talismans by which one could actually save daylight, but that didn't seem to be what these people meant.

“This is me,” he said.

“Antryg?” It was Ruth, shaken and scared and nearly in tears. The Spell of Tongues by which wizards could understand and be understood—and which he had long ago extended to cover Joanna—didn't work through electronic media, but in four months he'd mastered sufficient English to follow telephone conversations and most movie dialogue. “Joanna ... she's disappeared.”

Antryg closed his eyes as rage went through him like a wave of heat, smothering thought for a moment and leaving only cold behind.

For a moment the yammering of a thousand inebriated conversations beyond the door, the clink of glassware and the sweet, wailing song of what sounded like a male castrato faded from his awareness. They had dared. They had dared ...

It had been years since he'd felt this angry, angry enough to take every member of the High Council of Mages by their scrawny necks and ...

The aftermath was just as swift, an ebb wave of horror and dread.

What had they done to her?

Ruth's voice rattled swiftly on, speaking of a scream, of darkness fading away in a corner of the room, of something retreating along that darkness ... a black cloak ...

Or, he thought with a curious, terrible calm, the black robe of a mage.

They had taken Joanna.

He felt no real surprise. He had been waiting only to hear this, from the moment he had knelt to see the wizards' marks written on the concrete of the wash. In a way, he had been waiting for this since the first night he and Joanna had lain together in her apartment, she drifting off to sleep in the gladness that he wasn't dead, that against all odds he had come to her here in this bizarre City of Dreams.