The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (32 page)

Antryg smiled, delighted, and stepping forward, held out his hand. No dancing simulacra of Fred and Ginger graced his palm; he shrugged and said aloud, “Well, it was worth a try.” Evidently, in whatever reality that was the source of this field, cats could work magic and humans couldn't.

“And let's just hope there aren't side effects from this,” he muttered, as he collected his shawl and last night's maps from the hay. Somewhere in the Citadel there had to be a field, however small, which would permit him to at least, very cautiously, work a scrying-stone.

He glanced through the big window at the rain pattering steadily down, drenching the maze of corrals and dairy yards into a sea of yellow mud. By the light it was midafternoon ... he should have wakened hours ago, though he felt that the uneasy slumber had done him little good.

Who was guarding the vestibule of the North Hall? he wondered, raking the last straws from his curls. And had Aunt Min recovered enough to see Silvorglim before the Witchfinder succumbed to either a coronary or the temptation to institute a pogrom? The Archmage had been exhausted beyond speaking, bent and fragile, when he had taken her back to the little cottage in the gardens at midnight and put her to bed. Fortunate, he thought wryly, that Lady Rosamund was still in her own bed under Issay's care and hadn't seen how badly the old lady's strength had been sapped. With any luck Min would be on her feet before her heir was; if not, Antryg supposed, clambering down the ladder from the hayloft, he was in for a bad time.

There was a well in the corner of the big barn, a deep shaft descending far into echoing rock and darkness; twenty feet down, a tiny door let into a passage connecting with the storage cellars beneath the kitchens, reached by footholds cut into the living granite of the wall. Pothatch nearly jumped out of his skin when Antryg stepped silently through the narrow doorway of the pantry and tapped him on the elbow.

“Save us, Lord Antryg, I was afraid they'd got you!” He glanced swiftly over his shoulder as he pushed Antryg back through the narrow slit and into the pantry again. “That Silvorglim, he's been in a terrible state all morning.”

“Why? What happened?” Antryg put out his hand to touch the wall, where the granite of the tor itself underlay the plaster, and the heat of the energy running through it almost seared his fingers. Coming down the narrow well shaft had been nearly unbearable. The rest of the investigation had to be conducted and the field dismantled quickly, he thought with a shiver. Polarized as it was, there was simply too much energy building up where the leys ran through the labyrinth ... the Witchfinder's hasu had to have noticed. The suffocating pressure of the Void's nearness had half the cats in the Citadel walking on pins, the other half retreating to the fields or the barns.

“I don't know, rightly.” The cook scratched his thinning red hair. “But he came down to Lord Daurannon this morning screaming as how he had to see my Lady Min right that second—and of course the Lady Rosamund had dragged herself there, leaning on a crutch and looking like death, and got into it with him proper.”

“He stumbled through a magic-field that gave him power.” The pantry door slipped open and Brighthand edged through, his thin face seeming even more gaunt with weariness; streaks of purple beneath his eyes showed how little sleep he'd had. Why? Antryg wondered. Surely not from patrolling the Vaults last night?

“Silvorglim?”

“Aye.” A wry, tired grin revealed a brief flash of teeth. “He wouldn't say where it was, but it must've been in one of the tunnels goin' up to the subcellars of the library, 'cos it was dark enough they were carryin' torches. One of his lads tripped on the stair, like, and dropped his brand and caught the skirts of his coat on fire—Silvorglim damped it out without thinkin'.” Brighthand used the word gn'iya, the technical term for those acts of crude magic born of panic and reflex, “and then went into a dither when he realized what he'd done.”

He grinned again. While he was speaking, Antryg noticed that he was, in the most matter-of-fact fashion possible, slipping rolls, apples, and cheese into the pockets of his robe.

“No idea where the field was?”

The boy shook his head. “Just that he came down ravin' to Daurannon, lookin' like he'd seen a ghost and carryin' on like the field turned him into a eunuch instead of a temporary mage.”

“So Silvorglim's been searching the Citadel?”

“Well, sort of patrollin'. But Seldes Katne's got keep-out spells across every door leadin' into the Library, and Bentick has 'em across all the ways into the Vaults.”

In spite of the urgency of the matter, Antryg grinned at the thought of the little Witchfinder's face when confronted with such spells of ward and guard. It wasn't likely that whatever magical barriers Seldes Katne might raise across the entrances to the Library could withstand the greater magic of Silvorglim's two hasu, but Bentick's spells guarding the Vaults would be another matter.

“And no patrols from our side have been organized yet?” he asked, a little grimly.

Brighthand finished his casual pilfering with the appropriation of a small crock of honey. “Only the ones they got out lookin' for you.”

There were two ways to get from the kitchens to within striking distance of Aunt Min's cottage, discounting of course the direct route through the refectory, along the North Cloister, up the steps, and among the winding and overgrown beds of the garden. One of them involved several flights of back stairs through the Polygon, a secret panel beside the fireplace in the Junior Parlor (which everyone in the Citadel knew about except the dairymaids and Silvorglim), and thence across the bridge to the lowest floor of the Harlot; the other, a connecting passage between the Polygon's boiler room and the hypocausts under the Great Assembly Hall, and a succession of trapdoors and minor staircases through the subcellars of the Senior Mages on the northwest side of the hill.

Though the route through the Harlot was more direct, Antryg knew that the odds against both the Junior Parlor and the bridge being deserted at this time of the afternoon were astronomical, particularly since the Council sasenna—now directly under Daurannon's command—were actively searching for him. Of course, chains and drugs, Daurannon had said casually. Antryg encountered only one party of them, in the low-roofed, shadowy maze of columns beneath the Great Assembly Hall, and was able to pass unseen, crouching in the brick mouth of the tunnel until they'd gone.

Having no desire to encounter whatever spells Phormion might have in the cellars of the Castle, Antryg came above-ground by means of a narrow stair leading up from beneath the Sea Lady's House, and stood for a time in the shelter of the little area dug out beneath that house's kitchen, studying the long, overgrown slope of the gardens under the whispering patter of the rain. He could see no sign of life under the peach and apple trees that half screened his view of the little cottage at the garden's top; all the cats in the Citadel, nervous as they were, were doing their edgy prowling indoors or had retreated in disgust to the barns. But he knew that Daurannon would, of all things, want to keep him from getting to Aunt Min's protection. After a few moments he dug in his jeans pocket for a rubber band—not a very good one, since the ones he had were the small, thin, red sort that came around supermarket fliers—and, fitting one of his divinatory hazelnuts to its improvised loop, let fly into the thick beds of rosemary that made a gray-green screen across the garden's center. But he watched the clumps of laurel and hawthorn nearer the cottage, and sure enough, at the sharp rustle of the missile in the foliage he saw movement in two places and, under the leaves, the momentary glimpse of a black sleeve.

“Damn.” With infinite care he slipped back down to the cellar, and thence, via a disused well in the subcellar and a trapdoor behind a cupboard full of old crockery, down to the Porcelain House, where Lady Rosamund lived.

The Porcelain House had been so named for the slick-glazed white tiles of its downstairs entry way and for the delicate chinaware capitals of that entryway's slender columns, capitals which also appeared on five of the seven columns supporting the arcade of the little house's balcony. They were intricate pieces of artwork, brightly colored—cardamom, cobalt, daffodil, and white—and wrought in the shape of griffins and chrysanthemums. Antryg suspected they had originally been ordered by some nobleman who had changed his mind about the design and donated the rejected samples to the wizards in the hope of some kind of favor, in any case they were the sort of work that had been intensely fashionable a hundred and fifty years ago in Mellidane, before softer shapes and colors had supplanted the bright.

The latticework doorway leading in from the balcony was open, and Antryg slipped soundlessly inside. For a moment, seeing the Lady asleep on the room's plain, narrow bed, he was afraid Daurannon had talked Issay into drugging her. It wouldn't be difficult, considering the shock she had suffered and the blood she had lost. But the black cat Imp, curled like a dropped muff in the hollow formed by the Lady's leg beneath the coverlet, raised his head and regarded Antryg with a solemn gold gaze, and at the movement Rosamund turned a little on her pillows and opened her eyes.

“What do you want?” She sat up a little, wincing. Her nightgown was plain red calico, faded with washing, and against it the black braid of her hair was long and thick as a man's forearm. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Imp ... ” Antryg turned to the cat. “How long has your roommate been asleep?”

“Don't make jokes,” Rosamund snapped crossly. “Where's Daurannon?”

“I haven't the slightest idea—looking for me, I expect, or having tea with the Witchfinders. And if you're going to put a geas on me against joking, I really will die of it. I need to see Aunt Min, and Daur's posted guards in the garden.”

“I posted them there.” She pushed the tendrils of her hair back from her cheeks. Even pale and haggard with the loss of blood, her eyelids smudged blue with fatigue, still the beauty was there, the song of her bones. “I saw to that, first thing this morning. I won't have her disturbed: not by these Witch-finders, and certainly not by you. You've done enough. And what Daurannon was thinking of, letting the Witchfinders through our defenses ... ”

“What he was thinking of,” Antryg said, turning to the room's small, tiled hearth to check the earthenware teapot being kept warm near the flames, “is how to restore wizardry to acceptance in the Realm by doing some ostentatious favor for the Regent, a favor that's probably going to involve my head and a silver plate. He was asking Pothatch for the silver polish, now that I think of it. Tea?”

“That's nonsense.” Her hands were a little weak as she took the plain red cup from him, but her glance had all its old imperious flash. “You are the Council's prisoner, and he is far from being the head of the Council. And the very idea that he would turn a Council mage over to the Inquisition ... ”

“Our boy might not be the head of the Council,” Antryg remarked, picking up a second cup from the hearth, sitting cross-legged on the hearthrug to wipe it clean with his shirt-hem and pouring tea for himself, “but the Archmage is unconscious and you're rather conveniently laid up. Oh, I don't see Daurannon as having engineered the attack on us for that reason ... At least,” he added worriedly, “I don't think I see it ... ”

He got to his feet, took the empty teacup from her hand and studied the leaves for a moment, then sighed with relief and shook his head. “No. But he's opportunist enough to have seen his chance. And between Daur wanting me out of the way so I don't have access to whatever old secrets might be in the Vaults, and Bentick's determination not to conduct a search while the Witchfinders might poke their noses into things, no search of any kind seems to be scheduled for the foreseeable future.” He set the teacup down beside the bed when Rosamund shook her head at the offer of more.

“The stabilization field has been in place for nearly eighteen hours already.” Behind his spectacles, his gray eyes were deadly earnest as he seated himself on the edge of the bed. “Our time is limited. Within a day or two at most, the spells that altered the reactions of the energy within the Citadel's stones will decay, and long before that happens, the entire metaphysical construct of spells and polarization field will have to be dismantled with the utmost care, to prevent an unbalance causing God knows what kind of energy backlash. This Citadel needs to be searched and all anomalies charted from turrets to bedrock, no matter what the danger is or who might see the results. If I had my way I'd have the surrounding countryside searched as well, at least along the ley-lines.”

He leaned forward, the chill gray light from the open balcony doors catching a pewter glint in the beads around his neck. “Rosamund, we can't fool around with this. At the rate the decay was progressing before the stabilization field went into effect ... ”

In the hall below, a door thudded, and boots creaked the oak of the stairs. Dimly, Antryg heard a deep voice saying, “Don't lie to me, witch, and don't palm me off with excuses! There is an abhorrence being wrought here, an evil plot to cast the Realm into chaos.”

The voices were in the upper hall already; Antryg turned to flee out onto the balcony, but Rosamund lifted a finger, warning ... in any case, he knew, the guards in the garden would see him. Her hand made a quick gesture, and Antryg stepped back into a corner and did his best to look like a lampstand as Daurannon, Bentick, Silvorglim, and one of the red-robed Church wizards strode through the door.

“And to what,” Lady Rosamund demanded, sitting up straighter in bed and flicking her dark braid back over her shoulder, “do I owe the outrage of this extraordinary intrusion?”

Her voice was like a physical slap; all of them stopped involuntarily, even Silvorglim—even Daurannon, who had spent over twenty years taking great care not to be impressed with her queenly hauteur. Antryg saw the hasu's gray-blue eyes linger briefly on him and then wander away; Bentick and Daurannon, far more powerful mages, did a double-take so perceptible that it might well have given him away had not Silvorglim claimed center stage by striding to her ladyship's bedside in a swirl of rain-mottled gray coat skirts.