The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (34 page)

A lie, of course, he thought—he himself had never felt safe—but a lie for which the little Oriental reached as hungrily as he reached for the promise of sleep. The brown hand lowered tremblingly, and Otaro hugged himself like a beaten child, black hair hanging down over his face, catching only the ruby glimmer of the banked embers beneath the boiler; in the bloody light Antryg could see him tremble.

“I'll never be safe.” The magic beauty of the voice was a cracked whisper of despair. “Nowhere. Never.”

“You'll be safe as long as you wear this.” Antryg edged closer, holding out the magnifying glass on the end of its ribbons. Even the smallest thing, he knew, could act as a talisman to a mind unhinged with exhaustion and terror.

“Here,” he said comfortingly, “let me give this to you and get you back to your room. You'll be safe there.”

“You didn't know him,” Otaro whispered, still clutching himself, still not looking up. “I was his only son, his only child. He expected ... so much of me.”

“Yes,” Antryg breathed, remembering the glint of tawny eyes. “Yes, I know.”

“The money I took was his savings. But I had to be free of him. I had to come here, to study, to escape. He would never have let me. Later I sent it back to him, sent it over and over ... ” Tears crawled down the sunken brown cheeks, like droplets of blood in the ember glow, to lose themselves in the iron gray stubble of beard. “He cursed me. He said ... ”

“I know what he said.” Antryg held out one hand, the magnifying lens dangling by its ribbons from one crooked finger in the ink-stained woolen mitt. “You don't need to tell me. I know.”

“I thought I had fled from him,” Otaro whispered, “all those years ago.”

But you never can flee from them,
thought Antryg. Not when they're alive in your mind.

“It was your father's voice you heard, wasn't it,” he asked gently, “coming from the Gate?”

The chubby mage nodded brokenly, seeming to shrink further and further in on himself. He snatched the lens from Antryg's hand and clutched it to him, hugging himself while Antryg put his long arms around those heaving shoulders. “I heard it again, saw it again, and again ... every time I shut my eyes. The Gate, opening in my rooms, rushing at me, pursuing me, swallowing me. And then it was gone. But it would come back ... ”

Turning convulsively, he clutched at Antryg's sleeves, plucked the shabby shawl with hands that could call music to make birds weep and draw clouds down to listen—gripped him with bone-breaking strength, as if fearing some rising flood of blackness would sweep him away.

“Oh, Father.”

Then he doubled over, his hands flying to his temples as if he would smash his own skull like an eggshell, his face ghastly with pain.

Hoping to hell Rosamund had managed to call off Daurannon's orders for his arrest, Antryg half guided, half carried the sobbing, stumbling little man out of the baths, along the darkened North Cloister, and up the tiny stone stepway at its end, between stands of dripping birch and then through a door and a cellar and up another flight to the cellar of the Pavilion, the house on the northern side of the hill where the Singer lived. Though he was fairly certain Otaro was mad, Antryg searched the rooms nevertheless for any sign that the Moving Gate had indeed manifested itself there but found none. Which didn't prove, he reflected, that it hadn't been appearing there at every chime of the clock for the past three days; the house was situated on the Pensykley.

During his search Otaro only sat in a corner, twisting like a nervous child or clutching at his head, sweating and whimpering in pain. But the big downstairs study and the smaller loft where he slept above smelled fusty, shut up, frowsted with long habitation and little air. The sheets on the bed were sweat-damp and twisted, the scrolls and papers oh the desk scattered, crumpled, torn. Not from a search, thought Antryg, turning them over in his long, gloved hands. They'd been hurled about by an angry arm, torn because they'd been there to tear.

In his own days of madness in the Silent Tower, his papers had frequently looked the same.

“Master.”

Antryg looked over the loft's carved rail. Zake Brighthand stood in the open doorway, gray robes freckled with rain.

“He's upstairs.” Antryg clattered swiftly down the narrow twist of oaken steps as the boy came into the room, looking around him at the tumbled papers and scattered books. There was shock and grief in his fatigue-hollowed eyes but little surprise, the expression of a man who has finally nerved himself to open a door behind which he has smelled blood and death. “When was the last you saw him?”

“Yesterday.” Brighthand shook his head, his long hair slapping wetly against his cheeks. “He swore he was well, said there was a plot among the wizards of the Council, that his life wouldn't be safe if I went to any of 'em. I could see he looked bad and begged him to see Issay or Min or one of t'other healers. Then when I came back with food for him last night the door was locked, spelled shut. I didn't know what to do.”

“He's gone mad, you know.”

Brighthand turned his face aside, biting his lips; Antryg guessed that this was knowledge he had been fighting against for some time. “That Gate?” the boy asked after a moment.

“Maybe. I found him in the bathhouse ... ”

“He swore he was well,” the Junior repeated, his slurry docker's drawl breaking a little with desperation and strain. “I been comin' back every few hours to check, try and get him to eat or sleep. This's the first the door's been open. If it hadn't been, I think I'd have disobeyed him and gone for help, and hell with what he said. I just didn't know what to do.”

“Stay with him now,” said Antryg softly. “I'll send Issay over.”

His hand on the cellar door, Antryg added, “He's in pain, and panicky—he may hurl lightning or fire at you, so be ready.”

Brighthand nodded; Antryg could see him mentally going over defenses. He might still be a Junior and a new one at that, and his technical knowledge slender, but for all his quiet, his strength was such that Antryg had little fear of his being hurt.

“He spoke of seeing the Moving Gate here, in his rooms, which may have been a hallucination—or not. By the way, you don't happen to know if Mick and Cylin came back from the Vaults, do you?”

“Oh, aye, hours ago.” Brighthand paused on his way up the steps. “In time for dinner, anyway.”

“Lucky bastards.” Antryg sighed and went down the cellar steps at a run, making his way via attics and cellars and nameless little stairs and bridges around the western side of the hill toward the Mole Hill, where Issay Bel-Caire lived.

The Silent One was still awake, spell-weaving a tisane designed to restore strength badly depleted; the whole floor of the Mole Hill's single room was a labyrinth of power-circles, chalked spirals, sigils of light and silver, with the little physician sitting cross-legged in the middle, long gray mare's tails of hair braided back over thin shoulders and the archaic glass amplification tubes that no one else ever used capping each spidery finger.

After a rapid conference in which Issay warned him of the patrols and demanded to know about the alien energies that whispered now in every stone of the Citadel's ancient bones, Antryg dispatched the Silent One to the Pavilion to look after Otaro. As the slight figure flitted up the vine-choked outer steps and into the rainy darkness, Antryg leaned for a moment against the doorframe, wondering exactly how he was going to assemble sufficient force for a rapid, surreptitious shakedown of the entire Citadel without letting either Daurannon or Silvorglim know what was afoot.

It had to be done soon, and it had to be done quickly—with the energy buildup running dangerously high, the stabilization field should not be permitted to continue more than another twelve hours.

Yet Bentick seemed determined not to let it take place as long as the Witchfinders were present in the Citadel. Antryg thought about that as he made a quick search of the Mole Hill for a jelgeth tisane—as he'd suspected, Issay had concocted one for the conjuration. They were frowned upon by the Council, but all the wizards used them. Exactly what was it that Bentick—or Phormion—feared would be uncovered? Old secrets in the Vaults? Daurannon could screen those from the Witchfinders as he'd certainly screen them from Antryg.

And yet, he thought, his boots thumping hollowly on the enclosed staircase between the subcellar of the Isle of Butterflies and the attic of the laundries, if Bentick or Phormion was behind all this, why not play their trump card and threaten Joanna? Why try to murder him? He'd told Min of two attempts on his life—one in the cellar of the Castle and the other at the Green King's Chapel—but the second attempt might just as easily have been directed against Rosamund, with himself as bait.

As he swung through a trapdoor into the laundry and scrambled down a drying-rack to the floor, he glanced toward the three massively shuttered windows, wondering whether he ought to risk getting to the Porcelain House tonight to warn Rosamund, or try cutting through the garden to wake Min.

And what, he wondered, rattling down a twisted iron stair to the boiler room between the laundries and the baths, did all this have to do with keeping the Moving Gate open in the first place?

Unless, of course, someone had panicked.

Having just dealt with one panicky wizard, he shuddered to think of what could happen to such a wizard's helpless prisoner.

As he descended in the silent warmth of the boiler room, the sound of lowered voices arguing came to him from the baths, the soft-footed rustle of many bodies, the muted creak of belt leather and and the clink of weapons.

“This is outrageous!” he heard Nandiharrow fulminating.

“Be silent!” snapped Silvorglim's deep voice, and Antryg, knowing full well he should head in the other direction as fast as he could, nevertheless stole softly to the open archway that separated the boiler chamber from the long bathhouse with its curtained tubs. “I have received evidence that the Council is harboring a condemned wizard, an outlaw ousted by the Council and turned over to civil justice.”

“No Council mage is ever turned over to civil justice,” the nine-fingered clockmaker began hotly, but Daurannon, who stood quietly beside the Witchfinder as the red-robed hasu led a dozen Church sasenna up the closet ladder to the loft above, said nothing, and his choirboy face was enigmatic and still. A small group of wizards and novices clustered behind Nandiharrow, those who had been awake at this hour and had come to investigate the commotion: by the flickering light of the sasenna's torches Antryg recognized Whitwell Simm, Q'iin and her student Gilda with robes pulled on over their nightdresses, Seldes Katne, Kyra the Red, and, with smoke almost visibly coming from his ears, Bentick the Steward.

“Considering that the Council lied about his fate four months ago ... ”

“It was not a lie!” Bentick snapped furiously. “We were deceived when he made his escape.”

Feet thundered in the loft overhead; through the sound of the rain it was difficult to tell, but Antryg thought he heard more sasenna passing down the pillared arcade outside, sword harnesses creaking softly. He wondered if he had been betrayed or simply followed when he left the kitchen. Anyone could have trailed Pothatch earlier in the evening when he went to Q'iin's for the tisane.

“No one up there, m'lord ... ”

“Enough of this!” Silvorglim swung around, his pale eyes blazing with a kind of haunted glitter; Antryg could see he was almost shaking with suppressed nervousness behind his rage. “From the moment we entered these gates we have met with nothing but deceptions and lies. Captain—have your men search the Citadel. Top to bottom, every room, every chamber ... ”

“By what authority?” Nandiharrow stormed.

“You can't!” Seldes Katne gasped.

“I forbid it!” Bentick snapped. “There are places which ought not to be disturbed.”

“If you know what's good for you, you'll stay out of the Vaults,” Daurannon added reasonably.

“Do you mean, if you know what's good for you, you'll tell us to?” the Witchfinder retorted, turning to stab a finger at the Handsome One. “What is it that you are hiding, besides a man who murders the innocent by magic? Some plot to tempt and twist the minds of every man who ... ”

But Antryg had turned already and was headed for the stair shaft back up to safety. He was halfway there when the almost-unheard whisper of fabric made him glance back; Bentick had slipped through the curtains that guarded the archway and, gathering up his robe, was also striding for the stairs at close to a run. He saw Antryg and stopped, momentarily nonplussed; Antryg was lifting his finger to his lips in a soundless plea for silence when Daurannon appeared in the doorway behind him.

“There he is!” Daurannon shouted, and Antryg bolted for the stairwell like a startled deer. “He'll be making for the Vaults.”

Antryg swore, silently but mightily, as he ripped open the tiny plank trapdoor under the stairs and dropped down it into the vine-choked web of struts and pilings which supported that end of the baths above the steep drop-off of the hill. As he pulled the trap shut above him he felt the wooden floor of the little shaft shudder with the jarring weight of men streaming up the stair; nimbly he swung to the heavy Y-fork of wooden braces below him, and so dropped seven or eight feet into the tangle of vines. This end of the baths, with its little turret and the makeshift covered stairway leading up to the subcellar of the Island of Butterflies, projected out over the drop of the hill. The ground was steep, the night pitch black, and lightening rain pattered briefly on Antryg's long hair and the shoulders of his coat as he scrambled along the outer wall of the buttery, making for the wide windows of the kitchen.

Even as he plunged across the huge, darkened stone cavern with its smells of sugar and batter, it occurred to him to wonder where, exactly, Bentick had been bound when he'd slipped away from the Witchfinders. To report to Phormion? Footfalls thundered in the refectory as Antryg slammed through the pantry door, down the narrow stairs to the storage cellars ...

And stopped, gasping with a sickened wrench of pain and fear, on the threshold of the steps that led still farther down into the Vaults.