The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (39 page)

“Mind you,” Antryg said hastily, “make it as strong as you can—truly as strong as you can, against perception of any kind. Gandy, my pearl of delight,” he touched the arm of the sasennan who had fired the crossbow, “do you feel up to staying with Magus until he's finished? You'll get him safely back to the refectory, won't you? Thank you. Magus, I'm terribly sorry we can't remain.”

The dog wizard looked up with a protesting squawk, but the sasennan only grinned and saluted; Antryg was already herding his little train of bearers on up the corridor, glancing alternately at watch and compass, sniffing the air, studying the darkness all around him with the skittish preoccupation of a demented bird dog and now and then reaching out a hand to pat the stone of the wall, only to jerk it back as if the contact burned his fingers.

“What was it?” Joanna whispered to the Dead God, as the narrow, randomly twisting corridors gave way to a succession of dusty cellar chambers filled with jars of oil, barrels of dried fruit, bins of potatoes, and rows of herbs in clay pots. Antryg was now walking behind them, nervously listening, his absurd bug-sprayer his only weapon. The only one who would not accept this rear guard was the Witchfinder Silvorglim, who insisted on walking at the wizard's back, drawn sword in hand. “Did you see anything on your sensor?”

“Not when the creature was alive and moving, no,” Ninetentwo replied, bent easily under the weight of his end of the litter and carrying his own weapon, like a lightweight miniature bazooka, now at the ready in one of his other hands. “It happened very quickly; by the time I keyed in,” he gestured with the thick rectangle of the sensor in his fourth hand, “the animal we saw was dead, and the reading purely residual synaptic reactions. In truth, there are so many strange energies moving about the Vaults now, it is difficult to calibrate.”

“Is something following us now?”

He held the sensor up on his broad palm, the long fingers and two clawed, stumpy thumbs hooked over the edge to show her the screen as they waited for the sasenna carrying the clumsy reflectors to maneuver through the doorway at the top of a short flight of steps ahead of them. The little white manipulator-tentacles slithered around the edge of the sensor to work the two dials; Joanna could see distance-calibration rings traced on the fine-grained plastic, and the indistinct whitish blobs of the body energies of the carrying party, fading out as the dials moved on through the spectrum of possible energies. Colors wavered and moved on the screen. Once, horribly, a whole river of blue plasma seemed to come into focus, oozing through the walls all around them, but the tentacles edged the knob calmly past that.

“You see it is difficult to tell,” the Dead God said. “Nothing animal.”

Looking back at Antryg's scarecrow shape against the blackness, seeing the worry in his eyes, Joanna was unable to take as much comfort in that information as perhaps it warranted.

Torchlight flickered over an enormous black iron stove, an open hearth redolent of meat dripping, the flashing eyes of nervous cats. An arch, some shallow steps ... the blue-white, eerie glow of witchlight streaming through another archway, and a door guard's voice calling out, “They're here.”

Then they were in what appeared to be an enormous dining room, illuminated by the spooky flickering of balls of witch-light like stray balloons about the intricate rafterwork ceiling, and occupied by small clusters of black-clothed sasenna, young men and women in gray or mealy brown, and wizards.

So these, thought Joanna, stretching aching shoulders as she set down her end of the litter pole near the stack of backup batteries at one end of the chamber, were Antryg's colleagues. His jailers, his friends, his enemies ... the people with whom he had spent most of his life. The people who knew him as she, perhaps, never could.

Some of them she recognized vaguely, from the briefest of encounters at the Silent Tower four months ago: Whitwell Simm, kindly faced and white-haired; the stern and haggard Nandiharrow, black gloves covering deformed hands. Others she knew about only from Magister Magus' descriptions in the endless hours of their imprisonment. She certainly knew the Lady Rosamund Kentacre, who strode across the long hall with a decisiveness unmarred by the staff upon which she leaned so heavily, her storm of black hair hanging half-braided on her shoulders and her movie star-perfect face icy and grim. At the sight of the Dead God she stopped, fist going to her lips in quick shock, but she paused only an instant before going to Antryg. She had been well trained, Joanna smiled to herself, in the etiquette of not commenting upon people's appearances.

“We've had word from most parts of the Citadel now,” the Lady said as the last of the sasenna carried their burdens over to where the Dead God was already setting up shop. Several teenagers in brownish homespun robes and a little man in the blue smock and clumsy boots of a civilian were moving tables back against the wall to make room; another civilian, a fat little red-haired man in an apron, was dispensing tea and muffins whose warm scent hung like an incongruous blessing on the air.

“We've established what spells we can to stabilize the Citadel's boundaries, though God only knows how long those will last. We're still scrying for Implek; he may have been down in the dairies, outside the Citadel entirely, looking for you. Pordanches and Selim and Shippona—you remember Nandiharrow's student? the little girl with the braids?—seem to be trapped on the upper floor of the Four Brothers; there are creatures of some kind in the hall below them. Pordanches has tried half a dozen spells to get rid of them and they have no effect. No word yet from Bentick or Phormion; Kyra has gone out to search.”

“Damn,” Antryg whispered.

“Joanna,” the Dead God said, and she turned. “I need your help, or the help of someone who understands electronics.”

“Well,” she said, crossing to the pile of backup batteries, oscillators, and screens, “I can program a VCR and get a computer to run.”

“Good enough. You remember how the jacks hooked together? These three need to be relinked in parallel.”

“Do we need to readjust the ports?”

Someone considerately sent a floating galaxy of witchlight to hover just beneath the rafters above the pile of backup batteries, shedding a cool, even glow on their work. Several of the mages not occupied with the stabilization spells came over, wearing either the black of masters or the shorter gray robes of Juniors, to study the equipment minutely, hands tucked carefully into their sleeves to keep from touching. One stoutish little woman in her sixties, no taller than Joanna herself, with her graying hair skinned unflatteringly back into braids, was neatly copying onto a wax tablet the arcane symbols written on the equipment's sides—presumably, Joanna thought, serial numbers, voltage information, and brand names.

Voices floated behind them. “My dear Silvorglim, I was ... ”

“Don't you try to cozen me, Daurannon Stapler!” Silvorglim spat. Joanna looked up to see the wizard to whom he had spoken, a tallish man with gray-flecked black hair and the cherubic features of an aging choirboy, draw back before the venom in the little Witchfinder's eyes. “I have seen enough of the evils that you have summoned to convince me that you and all your works here are utterly pernicious! You say you have no contact with the affairs of humankind, but if that is so, what is that man doing among you?” His finger stabbed viciously toward Magister Magus, who had just entered and slumped on a bench, to be given tea by the fat man in the apron. “He is the lapdog and adviser of every heretic at the Court, cringing around the Regent's heir Prince Cerdic, trading lies and illusion for table scraps ... ”

“See here, now,” Magus protested, raising his head in feeble indignation.

Daurannon's wide hazel eyes flared wider. “What on earth are you doing here, Magister Magus?”

“Believe me, my lord, had we several hours and an atlas of the world I could list you all the places I'd rather be. Thank you, one lump of sugar, if you have such a thing.”

“Don't feign innocence with me!” Silvorglim said, his voice low and deadly. “I can see now the link between ... ”

“Have you heard from Brighthand and Otaro?” Antryg was asking, ignoring this byplay as he accepted a cup of tea from the mournful-looking little man in the clumsy boots. “Thank you, Tom.”

“There's a ... a fold, a crease, as you described it, in the bridge which leads across from the cellar of the Pavilion to the House of Roses,” Lady Rosamund said. “Brighthand and Is-say have twice tried to bring Otaro across and both times found themselves up in the Winter Solar. They're working their way back to the Library to bring him over the bridge into the Junior Parlor and down from there. Issay dosed Otaro with poppy—he's been raving about the Moving Gate following him, says that his father is controlling it, his father is coming to get him.”

Antryg's voice lowered still more. “And Aunt Min?”

The silence made Joanna look across at them, in time to see the silver-hard brittleness freeze in that beautiful face.

“I saw her,” Joanna said suddenly.

Both Lady Rosamund and Daurannon turned toward her, startled. She stood up, wires trailing from her hand.

“Magus and I ... when we were wandering through the Brown Star. There was a ... a flaw, or a Gate, that led us into these two rooms. Aunt Min was sleeping.”

“It's true.” Magister Magus stepped around and away from Silvorglim and came over to join the other mages, still carrying teacup and saucer, his dressing gown of sable velvet like an elaborate parody of their dark robes.

“You're sure she was sleeping?” For the first time, Joanna saw human concern break the flawless perfection of the Lady Rosamund's face. The fear in her eyes, the desperation and the hope, was painful to see.

“I checked,” she said, a little awkwardly. “And the cats were nervous, but not ... not like anything had happened to her. This was ... I don't know. Maybe two hours ago? It's hard to tell time.”

“It hasn't been much more than three hours since the binding-spells were destroyed,” Lady Rosamund said quietly. “If she is still in the cottage ... ”

She drew a deep breath and suddenly turned away, pressing her fingers to the inner corners of her eyes as if to still the throbbing of a headache, but Joanna guessed it was so that the gesture would cover, for a moment, whatever expression was on her face. But when she turned again, the jadelike hardness was back, forbidding any to touch. “Will you guide me there, Joanna? Do you remember the way?”

“It's out of the question.” The Dead God rose from behind his oscillators, resting all four hands like a row of huge green spiders along the top of the generator. “I need someone who understands electronics. There remains at least an hour's worth of adjustments to be done.”

“You'll have no problem once you're inside the Gate,” Joanna said. “I kept track of it with yarn. But it was Magus who guided us in the Vaults.”

“Well,” the dog wizard modestly said, not seeing his danger, “someone—by all appearances a novice mage—had very recently passed that way and left wizard's marks all along the walls.”

“And I'm sure he'll be delighted to guide you back, Rosie.” Antryg draped a friendly arm around Magister Magus' shoulders in time to keep his friend from bolting like a startled hare for the nearest doorway.

“And what gives you that impression?” Magus demanded, struggling discreetly. But Antryg, for all his peculiar appearance and the fatigue worn visibly into his beaky face, was very strong.

“Because it is now imperative that the geas be removed from me,” Antryg said, his demented pleasantness fading and his eyes growing suddenly grave. “And without Bentick, Phormion, or Issay—nearly half the Council—finding Aunt Min is now our only hope of accomplishing that before what remains of the energy-polarization field fades out of the stones of the Citadel and we are torn apart by the forces of the Void.”

“How did Magister Magus know that it was the Brown Star in which you were imprisoned?”

Joanna looked up, a little surprised, from the two-color split screen of data she was comparing—right half to left with an overlay capability whose exactness more than compensated for the fact that she hadn't any comprehension of what those characters meant—to see the handsome Council mage Daurannon hunker down at her side.

Running on an internal battery, the Dead God's portable computer was about the size of a first-generation laptop with massive capacity. Ninetentwo had hand-sketched a sample keyboard in chalk on the floor, and Joanna, sitting cross-legged on the floor within the shadowy ring of oscillators and flux capacitors, had jotted copious notes about exactly which keys-only they were tiny levers that flicked with the quick pressure of finger-picking a guitar—to press to run the alignment programs on the oscillator's eight transmission screens.

“It was his crystal.” She grinned a little at the recollection of the Magus' indignation at his brush with karma. In addition to a pair of old breeches and a faded calico shirt from the Citadel slop chest, Pothatch the cook had brought her tea and oatcakes, but she still had a headache, which, when she thought about it, was scarcely surprising. It occurred to her that with all these wizards around she could probably get it cured. Even in her own magicless world, Antryg could do that.

“His
crystal?” The black eyebrows pinched sharply down, and a whole network of lines sprang into being around those calculatedly melting eyes.

She sipped her tea, smoke flavored and almost as strong as coffee, but very good. “Well ... he sort of swiped it from Salteris' rooms.”

“Saltaris'
rooms?”

On the other side of the long refectory, Silvorglim and his sasenna were clumped together in a little island of smoldering torchlight, muttering and whispering. The Witchfinder had protested volubly against Magister Magus leaving his custody, not to mention Antryg, whom he still spoke of as his prisoner, and had been roundly ignored. The mages, for the most part, had returned to the round table directly beneath the chandelier's eerie glow, hunched over their crystals like freezing men about a fire in their efforts to guide back those who had been stranded in the farther-flung corners of the Citadel. The murmur of their voices was a fragile surface smoke, floating on the fearful silence of the night beyond the doors.