The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (31 page)

“What happens if it breaks?” Brighthand tipped his head a little to look beyond him, fascinated, at the cold columns of glowing machinery in the chamber's shadows.

“The problem is that we can't be completely sure,” Antryg said, and scratched the side of his long nose. “Let's just be certain that it doesn't.”

Before he slept in the hayloft above the mule barn, to which he earnestly hoped he hadn't been followed, Antryg scanned through the crude sketch maps his Irregulars had drawn for him of the portions of the Vaults they had patrolled. Some of these had registered as dark blurs on the Dead God's multiscanner, others—reality-folds, cold spots, places where strange clangings could be heard—did not, though whether this was due to a flaw in the scanner or to ancient fields of magic in the walls, he did not know. Since he knew now that it was possible anyone in the Citadel, not merely the members of the Council, might be at the bottom of the problem—and there was an outside chance that it was someone like Pothatch or Tom—he knew the possibility existed that one of the maps was false. Still, with a dozen of them searching, and all but three of those unlikely to be deceived by illusion, the odds were good that these maps were reliable.

He frowned. No sign yet of the Circles of Power he knew had to be holding open a Gate—perhaps the moving one, perhaps not. True, it might be down on the lower levels, filled with water now, the enchantments still holding in the haunted dark.

Neither had anyone reported the cloying smell of roses, which all of them had been instructed to flee at once—to flee, and to fetch him. And though four minor Gates—wormholes two or three feet across at most—had been sighted, held by the stabilization field in uneasy stasis in the blacker dark of the twisting maze, no one had reported anything like a Gate the size of the one the librarian, Phormion, and Otaro had seen, nor had anyone heard the confusion of voices and cries all three had witnessed in conjunction with that Gate.

A voice crying out,
Phormion had said. I heard someone shout something ... 1 do not remember what it was, but I remember the fear.

Was it significant that both Phormion and Otaro had forgotten?

It crossed Antryg's mind suddenly that he hadn't seen Otaro lately.

He shuffled to the next map, noted a reality-fold between the tunnel that led to a minor spiral on the fifth level and the long stretch of tunnel on the second where a line of pillars ran down the center. The searcher—Tom, by the laborious and ill-spelled handwriting—had not actually been able to search that spiral on the fifth level. And a small, localized area of thick fog near there, knee-deep.

He shook his head, fighting against a sudden, blinding wave of tiredness. In the barn below, a mule whuffled in the thin light of dawn already filtering through the great windows of the loft. At the far end of the long, low-raftered chamber a cat picked its way over the hay bales, dainty and disdainful—not in quest of anything to eat, Antryg knew, as spells against mice and other vermin ringed the Citadel's outer walls, obliging the feline population to hunt in the fields beyond. There had to be a pattern, some answer to the riddle.

His eyes ached and he took off his spectacles, laid his forehead on his crossed wrists, though part of his mind protested at the folly of so tempting Sleep. And as he had feared, Sleep emerged from the shadows like an assassin with a club and took him unguarded, and he subsided like a broken and garish scarecrow into the hay.

“Can we even know how much time has passed?” Joanna asked, raising her head from Magister Magus' velvet shoulder, where it had rested in silent exhaustion for ... how long? Minutes? A year and a half? She closed her eyes, too tired now for panic or anxiety. “I mean, if this place is ... is an energy-stasis of some kind, years could pass outside. Aren't there any stories about this thing?”

“It is mentioned,” the wizard said cautiously. “But then, the stories generally concern those whose friends and families did eventually get them out.”

“After how long?”

“Well ... I don't remember, really,” he hedged. “Most stories are about things that were simply imprisoned here for good, like the demons.”

Joanna sighed. “Things I'd really like to hear are somewhere in the dark with me. Dandy. And I suppose ... ” She felt a momentary stirring of the old anxiety, but it was too worn to surface. “I suppose I don't really want to know about people who were locked up here for twenty years, either, really. It's sort of like cruising your boyfriend's house to see what cars are outside when he tells you he's got work to do that evening—knowing's worse than not knowing, but you don't know that until it's too late.”

In the ensuing silence Lady Irina's endless, half-heard ramblings drifted like the meaningless purl of a stream. A muscle in Joanna's jaw flinched as all the old questions crept out of the dark: How long would it take for Ruth to give up on her and stop paying her rent? For her friends to move out of L.A.? For the knowledge by which she made her living to become obsolete? What would she return to, if she spent even a year or two in this place?

STOP IT, JOANNA! It will be all right. And if it's not all right, there's not a damn thing you can do about it and unless Security National Bank collapses in the interim, you 're not going to come out of this with no place to go and no money—your account's going to pick up all that much more interest if you can spend the next fifty years here rent-free, so STOP WORRYING.

Worry's not going to help. There is nothing you can do.

She hated that.

Something, not a sound, but a feeling, like a cold dragging somewhere within her chest, made her raise her head, and beneath her shoulder she felt the Magus' rib cage stiffen.

There was silence, terrible silence, and the slow sensation of some dreadful vortex drinking at the very heat of her blood.

“The tsaeati.” Sweat started on her face, on her body beneath the thin cotton of her pajamas. “It's moving this way.”

It can't hurt us,
she thought. If this place was an energy-stasis, it could not draw the lives from them, could not absorb either the electrochemical flickerings of their thoughts or the substance of their flesh.

But still she took Magister Magus' hand, and the two of them got to their feet and moved off silently into darkness that had no end.

“I'm sorry,” the little man said in the doorway, “but you can't stay here for free, you know. We have at least four hundred applicants for the twenty-five rotating openings, and we simply can't afford to turn one of them out for a nonpayer. You understand.”

Antryg sighed and nodded, though he was exhausted and, even in the dream's altered perceptions, very hungry. The wide, straight street behind him was jammed with pedestrians, who brushed the mended skirts of his tattered purple coat, and the air was thick with the peculiarly acrid smell of cheap polyester permeated by old body-sweat, mingled with the chest-burning weight of a third-stage smog alert. In spite of the smell, everything in the dream was very brightly colored and rather pretty—bright pink and yellow polyester tunics, gaily colored neoprene sneakers, green and yellow stucco and paint on the crowded walls of the buildings. Only, upon closer inspection, everything was very dirty, and whirlpools of trash eddied along the edges of the sidewalks with the scuffing of the passing feet or pooled thick and sodden in the damp gutters. The bright red-and-blue buses that rumbled among the crowds belched clouds of black diesel smoke that were barely seen, so thick was the air already with it; most of the people who moved past him, not looking up at him or at one another, didn't seem terribly healthy, coughing or sniffling or rubbing their eyes.

He said to the man in his dream, “Is there some place where I could stay for the night? Or some place where I could find work? I'm really quite respectable, you know.”

“I'm sure you are,” the man said, in that same half-polite inflection, still not looking at him, and shoved into his hand a stapled sheaf of papers on which a list of unreadably tiny government agencies had been printed in a language he could not have deciphered even had the list not been a sixth- or seventh-generation photocopy; the door shut in his face. In the moving mob he was alone and tired, so tired his flesh hurt on his bones and he could barely get his legs to carry him away from the shut door. In the dream he was aware that he had been alone and tired for a long time now, constantly moving, unable to find a place to rest.

The turgid swirl of people swept him on.

The dream changed and blurred, breaking into a series of impressionistic fragments: himself standing in line after line to be told that he hadn't the qualifications for anything except shaling, whatever shaling was ... or fleeing, dodging through those bright-colored, weary, unwashed crowds to escape something or someone that filled him with dread. Once, he glimpsed his own face in the grimy reflective surface of a shopwindow and saw that he was old. Dirty and ragged and unshaven and old, with a look of defeated hopelessness in his eyes. Why he didn't open a Gate and exit this world he didn't know, only that it wasn't possible—either because the Council would find him if he did, or because it was simply not possible in this world, or because he had lost the ability. Or perhaps because in his heart he knew that the next world he entered would be worse.

There was no one who would speak to him, no one who would touch him, no one who would be his friend. Struggling feebly to escape the iron weight of sleep, he sensed in his dream that he had been thus alone for years. Everything he had once known had faded behind him, like a light in a black tunnel, with no light ahead, nothing but age and blind weariness and the slow, creeping onset of pain.

In an alley he glimpsed something brown and curved behind a trash bin where men and women as old as himself were scrounging for food. They snarled at him like half-toothless dogs, warning him from their territory, and he stepped back, but not before he'd seen that behind the bin lay the broken shell of a tortoise, shattered and turning to dust.

Joanna ...
he thought, wanting her more than he could ever remember wanting anything. Wanting to touch someone, to talk to someone ... it had been years since he had talked to anyone, save polite civil servants like the man in the door. But Joanna was dead. Like a leaf in the wind, graying away to rot, he moved on, an eternal prisoner of his own flight.