The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (4 page)

And he, a little bemused that, all things considered, he was alive at all.

But all these four months he had spent here, he had kept an eye on the Void. And almost twenty-four hours ago he had sensed the Void's opening into this world, jolting him awake with a queer, oblique flash of awareness that had dissolved immediately; it was not until nearly noon that he had remembered the small-hours vision of Joanna walking down the dry riverbed, something seen as distant and very far away.

Ruth had had the vision. And Joanna. And Zylima and Jemal's mother, Luann. And Antryg was perfectly well aware that those visions, those dreams, were not merely to tell him, Come to this place ...

We cannot summon you, but we can certainly summon your friends.

“It has something to do with that ... that dream about the Tujunga Wash, doesn't it?” Ruth was saying, the frightened determination in her voice pulling his mind back from its lightning jumble of anger, thought, memory. “Do you know what's going on? How to find her, how to help her ... ?”

“It's all right,” said Antryg quietly. “I'll go down there.”

“Do you ... ?” She hesitated, torn between her loyalty to Joanna and her quite understandable terror of her dream. “Do you need help? Either just me, or I can get the two guys who live next door to Joanna ... ”

“No.” Enough people, thought Antryg, had suffered through proximity to him in his run-ins with the Council—he still had periodic nightmares about the outcome of the Mellidane Revolts, that final piece of meddling which had gotten him imprisoned by his erstwhile colleagues.“ But thank you,” he added, realizing how harsh his voice had sounded in that one bitter word. “I know what's going on, and I should be able to take care of it.”

“Trouble?”

He turned, as he hung up, to see Jim Hasselart leaning against the scarified molding of the jamb of the men's room opposite the telephone. Slightly paunchy and almost perpetually unshaven-looking even in the white shirt and tie of his managerial office, Jim had a certain watchfulness, a readiness for trouble, in his coffee-dark eyes.

Antryg hesitated, then said, “I'm afraid so.” He untied and removed the black apron that covered his battered T-shirt and jeans. “Apologize to Kevin for me for not helping him close up—give him my share of the tips.”

“Screw that. I never saw trouble yet that didn't need an extra hundred bucks. Take whatever's there; I'll make it good to him. Anything else you need?”

Antryg shook his head. “Not even the money, really. If I don't come in tomorrow night ... ”

“You phone me when you get back to town,” finished Jim.

He was silent a moment, studying his erratic bartender; in a moment of silence between two songs a woman's voice said, “That's all very well, but it wasn't my underpants he had in his pocket ... ”

“You take care,” said Jim, and let Antryg out the back door and into the warm blackness of the alley.

As he swung up onto his bicycle, Antryg remembered how close Joanna had come to being condemned as his accomplice during the brief time they had both been locked in the Silent Tower, the prison whose stones were dead to magic. He had only signed his second, and utterly damning, confession on the condition that the Council of Wizards release her and send her home. He knew he had misused his magic, had meddled again and again in the affairs of humankind against every command and precept of the Council, the Church authorities, and the law of the Empire. But that they should punish Joanna for his misdeeds ...

And by coming here to be with her, by taking refuge in her world, he had exposed her once again to the Council's wrath.

But truly, he thought as he glided soundlessly down the rutted pavement between reeking dumpsters and illegally parked Porsches, he hadn't thought the Council would actually have stooped to taking hostages.

Emerging from the alley onto Matilija Street amid darkened apartment houses and the eerie turquoise glow of walled swimming pools, he turned right and, with headlights splashing across his back even at this late hour, headed north into the tepid night.

He reached the Tujunga Wash in the pearly thinning of the night. Even at this hour the freeway was alive, a few cars rushing by very fast with headlights staring, just beyond the graffiti-scribbled embankments; it amazed Antryg that people were still dashing around the streets so late—or so early. A search of the apartment had shown him nothing save that Ruth had fed the cats before going back downstairs to bed—he did not wake her. He hadn't expected to find any sign.

On the concrete of the wash he drew his mark, among the invisible spell-signs left by the Council, then stood back to wait.

The streetlamps above the wash laid their bilious yellow glow over the cement, and a coyote, trotting along the top of the bank, made a move to come down but then seemed to think better of it. Antryg had noticed that there had been no tracks, of cat, opossum, or even lizard, later than the inscribing of the marks.

And they call animals 'dumb.'

It crossed his mind again to wonder if it was his death the Council sought, or something else.

As he waited, the wind fingering his hair, he thought back to those strange stirrings within the Void.

He was, at all times, subliminally aware of activity in the Void, as he was subliminally aware of the weather, the movement of the stars, and half a dozen other matters pertaining to the energies of earth and sky. There was always activity of some kind taking place within that bizarre chaos which drifted between the parallel realities of the cosmos. So far as he knew, none of the other Council wizards—and, in fact, no one else he had ever met—had this awareness, including his ancient master Suraklin, who had taught him the ways of the Void.

For months now he had been aware of something odd happening a great distance away. It had come to his mind as a crimping or catching, like the snag of a stitch in flesh, but he had hesitated to investigate, knowing also that the wizards in his own world were, since the events of last winter, taking more interest in the Void.

It was perfectly possible that if there was some problem—someone from a third universe entirely visiting his home world, for instance, and letting through the sort of abominations that frequently slipped from one world to another when the fabric of the Void weakened in the proximity of the Gates—the Council would blame him, Antryg, for it, not understanding the scope and measure of the Void itself.

If that was the case, he thought wryly, he would have some explaining to do. And even if they did believe him, which he did not at all consider likely, they might decide to arrest him anyway, “on G.P.,” as Joanna would put it.

But in a way it didn't matter. The fact that they were willing to take Joanna hostage to get to him told him clearly enough that his coming here had been a mistake, an act of selfishness that had endangered her inexcusably.

He should really have known, he thought wearily, that it would never work.

Before him, against the paling air, he saw darkness floating like a blossom.

Something—too many somethings—tightened in his chest, like a guitar string wound too straitly around its peg, and resolved into a sense of terrible regret. The night's cool had laid the smog a little, and though its metallic scent still clung in the air, with the stinks of dust and cement and sewage, still the crystal quality of dawn air came to him. All things around him—the world of the living—seemed momentarily new-drawn and magical, and every crack in the concrete, every poky line of all those pastel houses concealing each its own secrets, took on a brightness and clarity that was beauty itself.

He knew what wizards did to other wizards who had violated their laws as comprehensively as he had; for the last portion of his life that wouldn't involve spells of crippling pain he could, he thought, have wished for a better place than a cement riverbed in the heart of the San Fernando Valley.

But at least he could get Joanna off the firing line.

The air of the world split. Darkness swelled and spread like a cloud.

Far away, infinitely deep in the heart of the darkness, he saw the winds of chaos lift and swirl in black robes, dark cloaks ... saw the glint of edged steel. All around him he was aware of smaller spots, rents, and ghosts of that same darkness, flickering in and out of being in the air—the fabric of the universe weakening, straining, all around the opened Gate.

We'd better make this fast,
he thought uneasily. God knows what might drop through.

And then they were before him.

Framed in the gate of the darkness, their faces pale and tense with the shock of the crossing, he recognized the wizards who stood before him, his erstwhile teachers and colleagues. Some of them had been his friends.

The Lady Rosamund never had, of course. The tugging chaos of the Void swirled her raven cloud of hair; she was as beautiful as ever, the cold perfection of her features like marble and her green eyes nearly transparent in the dawn light. The purple stole of Council membership circled her shoulders, the staff of wizardry, of power, was grasped in one well-kept hand.

Beside and behind her he recognized Nandiharrow the Clockmaker—Nandiharrow the Nine-Fingered, he was called these days, after a particularly brutal brush with the Inquisition last year—big and solid and gray-haired, and beside him the wispy, androgynous physician Issay Bel-Caire. Both also wore the stoles of Council membership. They must have elected Issay to the Council after Salteris' death, Antryg thought. Nandiharrow, at least, avoided his eyes.

Behind them ranged the sasenna, the sworn warriors, the small band of trained and dedicated fighters who had given their vows, their lives, to the Council's will. There were nearly a dozen of them, some of them mageborn, youthful novice wizards in training, some of them not. They filed forth quickly from the darkness, surrounding Antryg in a ring of crossbows, pistol barrels, and swords.

“All right, here I am,” Antryg said quietly. “You've proved your point. I can't protect my friends from you—I can only ask that you leave them alone. Joanna had nothing to do with ... ”

“So you wrote in your confession.” Lady Rosamund's voice was like polished silver, as beautiful as her eyes, and as cold. “But we both know that she was an accomplice, not a victim.”

“What I don't want her to be is a hostage.” Looking at that aloof perfection, he felt anger again, the anger that this woman would have used her power against someone like Joanna, who had no defense. “She is ... dear to me. And she never wanted any of this.” The captain of the sasenna, a big, hard, red-faced man named Implek, stood close beside the Lady, holding in his hands a length of manacles and chain, marked with the runes of na-aar—thaumaturgical deadness—and twisted with bright ribbons of spell-cord that would also rob a wizard of his magic. Antryg held out his wrists to him, trying not to think about what would happen to him when they got back to the Citadel. “Just let her go.”

Behind the Lady Rosamund, Nandiharrow and Issay traded a swift, startled glance, but her ladyship raised a quick hand for silence. Implek stepped forward and fastened the bracelets around Antryg's wrists, the touch of them hateful and cold, like the drag of a sudden nausea within him. He fought the urge to flinch.

“Bring him,” she said.

Implek's hand closed around Antryg's arm, pushing him forward, and Antryg balked on the threshold of the darkness.

The cold of the Void breathed across him, chilling the sweat that had sprung forth on his face. “Rosamund,” he said quietly, “I'm not hurting anyone here. I can't work magic—I'm an exile—I have no intention of returning. As far as our world is concerned, I am dead. Yes, I did ... evil ... ” He swallowed, trying to push the memory of what he had done from his mind. “All I can plead is extenuating circumstance.”

She looked up at him with cool eyes like the green ice floes that blocked the northern bays from winter into spring. “All dog wizards plead extenuating circumstance,” she said. “It is the nature of dog wizardry ... and the claim of all whores. Bring him.”

She turned back into the darkness, and the sasenna closed him in. Antryg could sense the field of the Gate beginning to break up—Gates took a tremendous amount of the wizard's power to open, and even more to maintain—but even so braced his feet once more, and felt the prick of sword points through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. “You'll let Joanna go?”

Lady Rosamund paused within the darkness, the pallid glare of the streetlamps above the wash flaring across her face as she drew herself up. “Are you judging us now in terms of your own debasement?” she asked frostily. “We took no hostage.”

The cold sank into him like black ice. “What?”

Her fragile nostrils flared with scorn. “We took no hostage. Did you think we would forget our vows as comprehensively as you have forgotten yours? Now bring him—we're losing the Gate.”

“No!” With a quick twist of his arm Antryg slithered free of Implek's grip—one of the sasenna brought his pistol up, and Antryg used his manacled wrists to strike the man's hand aside. If the Council hadn't taken Joanna, someone had—someone powerful enough to open a Gate.

He lunged against half a dozen pairs of hands grabbing at him, hooked the feet out from under one guard with a sweep of his long leg and smashed another across the face with the manacle chain. He heard Rosamund shout something—probably about losing the Gate—as he twisted clear, ran two steps ... If he could just get some distance, they'd never leave the Gate ...

Weight struck his back, dropping him to his knees; he was trying to rise again when something hard impacted with the back of his head. He later remembered thinking he ought to bring up his chained hands to break his fall to the cement but had no recollection of whether he managed to do so or not.

Pain was the second thing Antryg became aware of as consciousness returned.

For a nightmare time he felt the implacable, mechanical drag of the rack at his joints, dwarfing even the agony of his crushed hands; heard the Witchfinder's whispered urgings, smelled sweat, ink, hot iron, and the acrid stench of the vinegar they'd used to bring him to.