The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (38 page)

—Gantre Silvas

Annals

For that first instant, Antryg was all she could see—thin, gawky, and very tired-looking, a seedy purple coat hanging loosely over his faded jeans and decrepit green calico shirt, and over that a shawl which looked as if it had been knitted for him by a spider on bad drugs. She didn't even feel terribly surprised ... Of course he'd be here.

The relief was like the curious, dizzy high that comes from the cessation of a blinding headache.

She hadn't realized how worried she'd been about him.

Beyond that she had nothing more than an impression of swirling mists, cold over her bare feet as she crossed the room at a run: torchlight, men standing around with swords, looming pillars, and the eerily steady pinpoints of green and amber light from the hard, black shapes of electronic components. Then he swept her into his arms, his longer stride covering more than half the distance, her feet leaving the chilly flagstones and his grip crushing her tight ... the taste of tea and honey and bitter herbs on his lips.

She was safe.

Well, no,
she decided a moment later, still locked in his embrace, on tiptoe now to reach up his loose-jointed height. The shifting, nightmare darkness of the Vaults all around them, the floating lights and distant screams and the terrible, growing presence of the Void told her that. Not safe, exactly ...

But Antryg always gave the impression that he knew what was going on and could salvage any situation.

“Dear God,” he whispered, his angular, bespectacled face stricken with sudden guilt. “You were down here after all?”

She remembered she'd had distinct doubts about ever wanting to be involved with this man again and wondered momentarily why. She looked past the baggy, smoke-smelling folds of his coat to the room beyond him. In the glow of half a dozen torches she saw sasenna in the trim black uniforms of the Church, pausing in the act of picking up electronic components with great care so as to not break the connections between them; saw, a few feet behind Antryg, a diminutive man in the close-fitting gray garb of a Witchfinder, drawn sword in his hand and baffled fury in his hard face; and, beyond him, haloed in stirred vapors that caught the glow of the electronic eyes all about it, a looming black silhouette hideously reminiscent of the monstrous construction of rotting flesh which had attacked them once, in a deserted chapel in the Sykerst.

“Is that ... the Dead God?” She looked sharply up into Antryg's face. “What the hell is going on?”

“Ah ... well ... ” He pushed up his spectacles to rub the side of his beaky nose. “I'm under arrest—all those gentlemen are my guards. Joanna Sheraton, Mr. Yarak Silvorglim, Witchfinder General of Kymil and the Sykerst.”

In something of a daze she shook hands with the red-haired man not much taller than herself; like Caris, her sasennan friend of former days, he offered his left hand, not releasing his grip upon the drawn sword in his right. He had eyes of yellowish hazel, unpleasantly cold and watching her now with narrow suspicion.

“And Magister Magus! My dear fellow, I never expected ... ”

“I assure you,” the little dog wizard said, drawing himself up and pulling more firmly closed the silk lapels of his exquisitely cut velvet dressing gown, “the lack of expectation is absolutely mutual.”

“Antryg ... ” The Dead God's voice was a deep, buzzing whine, the words resounding in Joanna's head with the familiar echoes of the Spell of Tongues that Antryg had bestowed upon her. “We need your help in keeping this field straight while it's moved.”

“Absolutely ... Joanna,” Antryg continued earnestly as he strode back toward the ring of stabilization oscillators, his arm about her shoulders, “I did search for you, I swear I did, I searched every inch of the Vaults.”

“I wasn't exactly in the Vaults.” She checked quickly over the connections between the backup batteries and the oscillators and generators rigged in series around them. The configurations were unfamiliar but clearly along the same lines as those of her own world. Same-to-same and inny-to-outty connections were clearly marked, and it took only a few minutes' study to figure out how they linked up. “Is this an auxiliary jack to the same circuit? If so, we can keep the connection going while we replace with a longer main link.”

“Right, but we need to keep these three in their current configuration.”

“There's an internal backup,” the Dead God hummed. “Connection can be broken for up to five seconds while it's altered without anything going down. The important thing is not to let these alignment indicators slip out of phase.”

“According to Magister Magus, we were in something called the Brown Star, which he got from Salteris' study.”

“Dear God!” Antryg whispered, spectacles flashing as he drew back to look at her in surprise. “So that's where ... I wondered what had become of it.” His long, crooked hands in their fingerless gloves were working neatly as he spoke, unhooking cables and rewiring, while the Dead God, his maggotlike palm-tentacles wriggling like infinitely tiny fingers, occupied himself with resetting the gauges. “We're going to need something like a litter to carry these on if we're going to keep the configuration stable.”

“I have an antigrav lifter ... ”

“But how did you get out?”

Joanna shrugged. Near the chamber's central pillar, Silvorglim and the one of his sasenna not occupied with scut work stood in postures of armed guard over the unfortunate Magister Magus, the only other person not required for the assembling safari of electronic goods.

“I really don't know. We just ... got out. There was a change of some kind and ... and Gates opened.”

“When the stabilization field buckled, at a guess,” Antryg said, poking his long nose back into the tangle of wires. “I always suspected the Brown Star of being the Gate to a pocket dimensional enclave. It must be somewhere in the Citadel, and the shock of the field breaking down just ... ” He paused, then drew back to look at her, his gray eyes wide with shock. “You mean that Gates into the Brown Star are just standing open?”

“Yeah ... ” She thought about that a moment. “Oh, cripes.”

From the archway through which Joanna and Magus had first entered the room came the sudden, shrieking laughter of demons. Antryg was on his feet and headed for that door almost before Joanna could draw breath, unslinging from his shoulder something that reminded her strongly of an old-fashioned bug-sprayer, a pump and canister apparatus that he aimed into the darkness as he braced himself in the frame of the arch. When the demons appeared—and Joanna was horrified at the swirling, moon-colored shapes, with their flying spiderweb hair and raking claws—Antryg pumped the contents of the canister at them, a shower of fine, blackish mist that set them screaming, cringing, clawing at their own flesh and one another's as they blundered back into the eternal night of underground.

“What is that?” Joanna asked. “Exorcist in a Can?”

“Silver chloride,” the Dead God explained, coming up behind her with a sonic extractor in one hand and a coax cable in another, light nodule flicking nervously over the shining bulk of his head. “He claims that most ab-material manifestations are allergic to it—I would not know. Such things are unheard of in my world.”

“Not even in legends?” She looked up at his tall bulk, hung with tools, sensors, weapons and with the gleaming weight of breathing tubes. “You have extra air tanks, by the way?”

The huge, bony skull inclined. “Your concern is appreciated. The antigrav lifter is now refusing to work. It may be that it simply cannot, in this dimension—or it may be that, being cutting-edge technology, it has malfunctioned for reasons of its own.” The end of his tail lashed with annoyance, like a cat's; Joanna wondered what bizarre biosphere had selected for his ancestors.

“How long does it take to get a repair person out?” They began, with the help of the three Council sasenna, laboriously to transfer the oscillator/generator configuration to a makeshift litter improvised of halberd poles, hampered by the swirling mists that concealed kelp beds of now-useless cables underfoot. “Not to here, I mean, but usually ... ”

“Forty days. The only service center is in Six-ninety.”

“Yeah, the company that makes my cd-rom drive sends its techs out on foot, too.”

I should be in hysterics,
she thought calmly, instead of standing here discussing repair problems of first-generation technology with something that looks like It, Terror from Beyond the Stars.

She supposed, as the safari got gingerly under way, that her mind was simply refusing to believe that this creature—this man—this thing with its shiny green-gray skin, its light nodule, skeletal tail, and cold, orange, insectile eyes—was not in fact some kind of special effect. Probably, she thought, she was still subconsciously looking for a zipper up his-back.

Well, what the hell. None of us really needs for me to have hysterics now anyway.
Mentally she resolved to schedule a bout of them later, after a meal, a shower if possible, and a change of clothes into something more dignified than baggy blue cotton pajamas.

Antryg came striding back through the dark archway, spray gun clutched in one hand and his face, in the torchlight, pale with shock and strain. The greenish, cloudy brume of ground fog rose around him and emitted a faintly metallic, carrion smell as he moved. “There's no time to lose,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at the dark archway and the tunnels beyond. “We have to get out of here and get out quickly. For if what you've told me is true, Joanna, we're in much worse trouble than I thought.”

“That's possible?!”
she demanded, aghast.

And Antryg smiled, though the nervous horror still lurked in the back of his eyes. “Alas, anything is possible.” And he looped the strap of his weapon over his shoulder and bent to take part of the litter of components.

And that, Joanna supposed, was why she ought to be still seriously considering having nothing more to do with this man—always assuming they made it out of the present crisis alive.

So why is it that every time I look at him, I smile?

“More slowly.” Antryg held up his hand, then licked one fingertip and raised it, as if testing the wind, while looking at his watch.

Joanna heard Silvorglim mutter savagely, “This is absurd,” but for the most part, the huddled line of sweating sasenna watched the wizard's face with strained concentration, knowing that he, and he alone, was sufficiently familiar with the mazes to get them out.

Nearly an hour had passed. The sense of danger, of chaos, of shifting and pulling in the darkness all around them had increased. Sometimes Joanna wondered if it was a problem with her own perception, or if the floor itself was tipping, the focus of gravity slowly moving itself through the dark rock of the walls. She wondered whether this would be possible at all without the spells of the wizards in the Citadel above, holding the fabric of the universe together like masking tape. Once Antryg, who had moved up to the front of the line, ordered the entire party to back up thirty or forty feet and detour through a spiral of blind alleys thick with moss like dripping purple velvet before returning to their original course; another time he had led them through a windingly circuitous side trip only to emerge at a stairway they had seen, down a straight stretch of corridor, fifteen minutes earlier. Joanna guessed that either the entire energy field was bending and shifting with the movement of its center point and Antryg was making allowances to keep it as stable as possible, or that he perceived dangers, or possible dangers, invisible to the others. But the sasenna muttered among themselves, burdened under the weight of batteries and the long litter with its oscillators and field generators, or struggling to maneuver the unwieldy reflectors and screens that had to be borne upright and at a certain angle. In the fitful glare of the few torches still alight, the sweat-streaked faces were taut with fear and stress.

“Dear God,” whispered Magister Magus, who had been pressed into service carrying one end of the litter and was walking near Joanna, as far from the Dead God as he could get. “Dear God, I think we were safer in the Brown Star.”

“Oh, you were,” Antryg informed him cheerfully. At his cautious signal the entire safari moved on again but with slow care. “A great deal safer. D'you think you could find your way back to it?”

“Like a shot from a gun, my dear Antryg, had I a sizable bodyguard to escort me.”

“I shall see what I can do to arrange that.”

A high-pitched shriek ripsawed the blackness behind them.

Antryg swung around, and looking back over her shoulder, Joanna could see down a long reach of corridor the gleam of torchlight on bared and slime-dripping teeth. There was no gleam of eyes, but something in the darkness bounced and rocked as it ran toward them—A biped, she guessed dizzily—and dimly, beyond it, she sensed some darker movement, a kind of wet glister and a rotted, poisonous stink of fish.

“Shoot it!” Antryg yelled to the nearest of the few unburdened guards. “NOW!”

The thing was still a good hundred feet away. The guard, a middle-aged Church sasennan whose lips and nostrils were swollen with plum-colored bruises, whipped up her crossbow and let fly at the flickering gleams that were still all of the thing Joanna could see. It was one hell of a shot, she thought.

There was the soft skidding thump of tumbling flesh, an alien, acrid stink that must be its blood. Joanna strained her eyes to see in the darkness beyond. Surely that irrational sense of the floor moving was a trick of the light.

“Magus!” Antryg caught the little dog wizard by the back of his robe, pulled him away from the litter pole he was carrying. “A spell of misperception, of illusion—quickly! Across the end of this corridor ... ”

“What? But there's nothing ... ”

“Of course there's something there—granite, water, mud, and dead flesh among other things, so weave the illusion, there's a good chap—anything to prevent something at that end of the corridor from knowing what's at this end.”

“Prevent what ... ?” But Magus was down on his knees already, fumbling in his pocket. Silently, Joanna produced chalk from her purse and handed it to him.