The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (40 page)

After a long moment Daurannon said, “He told you this?”

She nodded.

“I wonder why he never ... ” The words were murmured as if to himself; then he drew a deep breath and shook his head. “I suppose Salteris found it in the sack of Suraklin's Citadel. But in that case, why did he not tell the Council?” His eyes remained troubled, as he tried to work out in his mind where and how his master could have acquired such a thing. “There cannot have been two ... ”

“It was Suraklin's, all right,” Joanna said softly and told him of Irina of Kymil, whispering to herself in the dark. Daurannon settled back, leaning one shoulder against the smooth, faintly gleaming side of the oscillator behind him, chewing his lip a little with thought. The smooth sangfroid he wore like a well-tailored suit had been put aside, and Joanna found herself more at ease with the uncertainty that lay hidden beneath.

“I don't understand,” he said after a moment. “If Salteris had found the crystal at the sack of Suraklin's Citadel, why didn't he free this woman then? They all knew she'd vanished.”

“Maybe Salteris didn't find it?” Joanna turned quietly back to her computer screen and carefully inserted the next test wafer. Rather to her surprise, the left side of the screen wiped obediently to the new data; she studied her notes for a moment, then keyed in the instructions for an overlap. In spite of the warmer clothes she'd been given, she still felt cold—over the past half hour, she had begun to wonder whether it was her imagination or whether the temperature was dropping.

“Maybe it had been hidden, and only after Suraklin took over Salteris' body and mind did he dig it up again?”

“You believe that tale of Antryg's?” The bitterness of betrayal in his voice made her look up. In the soft lambence of the witchlight, she could definitely see his breath.

Her eyes returned to the screen to avoid the steely anger in his. “I believe that all the mannerisms, all the speech patterns, of the man I knew—briefly, I'll grant you—as Salteris later turned up in a man I knew well, who'd never had them before. I believe that all the computer programs of information, of personality transfer, were written by Suraklin as part of his plan to live forever.”

“I know nothing of these computers.” Daurannon used the English word, there being no equivalent in the Ferryth tongue. “But I do know that Antryg—like his master before him—can be stunningly persuasive. Witness how he's achieved the goal for which he's been striving since his arrival and has gotten Rosamund to consent to having the geas lifted, giving him the power he seeks again. Witness how he's gotten you to shelter him.”

Joanna looked up again, her brown eyes hard. “Completely leaving aside the fact that I love the man—which I know can happen to anybody and with anybody, God help us—Antryg saved my life, rescued me from the Inquisition, protected and sheltered me. And it was Salteris he spoke of as his master.” Her own words startled her, her tone of voice more so—she tried obliquely to remember the last time she'd argued with a man in authority, a man with power. Certainly in the past she had had to be very angry indeed to argue with anyone, without immediately following up with half an hour's worth of mollifying apologies.

Rather to her surprise, Daurannon didn't point out her stupidity at falling for Antryg's lies but only said, his voice unbending steel, “Whom he murdered.”

“If that was Salteris.” Her hands, resting on the keyboard, were quite steady; she felt she should have been coming unglued under the pressure of his rage and his will but, curiously, felt very little but a kind of hot lightness in her chest. “And if it was Salteris, don't you think, in the sixteen years he was Antryg's teacher and friend, he would have been wise enough to recognize Suraklin? To guess if that was what had happened?”

“Antryg is mad.” There was a doggedness to his answers now, a stubborn anger. Matched, she supposed, by her own stubborn determination that it was his friend, not hers, who had harbored the evil wizard's disembodied mind. “Has always been mad, and more so when Salteris first found him. It's a good cover.”

“All right,” Joanna said reasonably. “Then answer me two things. First: How close were you to Salteris those last four years, between the time when the Emperor went insane—since it's Antryg's theory that Suraklin spent most of his time hiding in the body and brain of the Emperor—and Salteris's own death?”

“Salteris was in Angelshand those years,” Daurannon replied coldly. “I was here. And he was changed by the death of his wife.” He used the Ferryth word for an unofficial wife, far stronger, and with far different connotations, than mistress, but lacking the sanction of the Church. “But those few times I saw him, I could swear he was the man I knew.”

“And second: Where did Salteris get the Brown Star?”

Daurannon was silent for some time. In fact, Joanna never did find out what he would have said. For as he drew in his breath to reply, from the darkness beyond the room's north doors came a sudden, drawn-out cry, a shriek that resolved itself into a man's harsh voice shouting “No! NO!” and the splitting crack of what sounded like a thunderclap, echoing in the enclosed halls. Footfalls thudded, running, stumbling; the two sasenna guarding that door called out, and light flooded into the passageway beyond, the bright, cold glare of magic. Silvorglim and his guards whirled and started for the doorway at a run, swords winking in their hands. The Council sasenna, clumped around Sergeant Hat hen, ran also.

Daurannon sprang to his feet, crying, “Bentick!” as an old man, white hair streaked with blood that ran from it down a face scarcely less pale, stumbled through the doorway and collapsed sobbing on the floor.

If you pay a mage to summon Darkness, be sure to have candles on hand.

—berengis the black

Court Mage to the Earls Caeline

“She is mad.” Bentick's long, ink-stained fingers trembled around the cup Pothatch had to hold to his mouth. “God help me, I tried to heal her. When she tried to murder Antryg in the cellars of the Castle, I knew she was mad, and I tried to heal her. And then the Witchfinders came.”

There was shocked whispering among the half-hundred sorcerers and warriors clustered around them, the old man huddled like a broken doll, the younger mage kneeling over him, the fat little cook with his tea and his damp, herbed rags.

The Steward's breath caught as Daurannon took the cloth, with its stinging astringents, and wiped the blood from his scalp. When he went on, his thin voice stumbled on the words. “I thought that I could heal her—I have healed others before—and that no one would be wiser. That Witchfinder—he would have blamed it all on her, said she was a madwoman ... At the very least she would have been dropped from the Council. Phormion ... ”

He shook his head desperately, as if knowing they would not understand. “Phormion is proud. I owed her at least concealment from them. Then she accused me of trying to poison her—said Rosamund was spying on her, plotting to destroy her rivals for the Master-Spells, were Minhyrdin to die. I couldn't let them find her. I did not think she'd try to hurt me.”

“And exactly when did she begin to go mad?” Silvorglim asked softly, his fox yellow eyes glinting in the soft flicker of the witchlight that hovered in clouds around the wizards' heads. “Who can tell, when a madness begins? A month ago, when the abominations began to appear ... ?”

Sergeant Hathen turned, hand on her sword, and said, “There's six others on the Council who can tell you it wasn't, chum.”

The little Witchfinder's nostrils flared with disdain. “Who will, I'm sure.”

“And in any case,” Daurannon said smoothly, rising to lay a hand on Silvorglim's arm and unobtrusively putting his own body between the Witchfinder's and that of the bristling sergeant, “it's a matter for the Council to deal with. Why don't you sit down over here and be comfortable?”

“Joanna ... ”

She turned quickly at the harsh buzz of Ninetentwo's voice. Leaving the outer edge of the dispersing group, she rejoined the bony monster within the circle of generators.

“Whether one wizard went insane and tried to rip another with her claws—or those pitiful little things you people pretend are claws—it is not the worst of our problems.” His long tail lashed uneasily, and even as he spoke he moved from screen to screen, the maggotlike tentacles of his hands flicking nervously at keys and dials. "The spells of Daurannon and his cohorts cannot keep the field stable much longer. Unless we complete our setup quickly we'll begin to lose parts of the Citadel. My instruments show me wormholes and spell-fields opening everywhere in the Citadel above us, as well as the

Vaults beneath. If the outer parameter of the spell-field is breached, we may get air leakage."

“Christ, I'd forgotten about the air.” Joanna went back to the next reflector screen, withdrew its small data chip, and knelt again to insert it into the computer's entry port. She punched through the memorized sequence, and superimposed the new data lines with the model. “We've got a misalignment here.”

The Dead God moved over to her to check the findings, clicked deep within his huge skull, and made the necessary adjustments, bending over her slim form like some nightmare horror from Special-Effects Hell.

“Even if we don't get a hole in the biosphere of this joint,” Joanna continued, taking the chip from the final screen and running the check, “what happens when the air gets exhausted?”

“It is not something with which we need concern ourselves.”

She brushed back the feathery mass of her hair from her face and sighed with relief. “Thank God for small ... ”

“Long before that happens,” Ninetentwo went on inexorably, “if what Antryg tells me is correct, stabilization field or no, the polarization energies will disintegrate and the enclave bounded by the Citadel's outermost air/stone interfaces—the original parameters of the spell—will dissolve.”

He returned to her side, hunkered down into an angular ball of bones, and reinserted the corrected screen's data chip, looking over Joanna's shoulder to confirm that the adjustment was in line. As he did so he balanced himself on her shoulder with two of his hands. Looking at them, she realized that the thick-muscled strength of his upper set of arms came from the fact that they were actually necks—the tentacles, in fact, were tongues, emerging from mouths in the palms of the claw-armored upper hands. I guess it takes all kinds, she thought queasily.

“Though presumably once the Citadel itself fell into the Void, the faulting along the energy lines in the various worlds would cease,” he continued, as if unaware of her momentary flinch of revulsion. “The reflection that we have saved our universes from abominations will comfort me little when we implode. This should take place in approximately,” he checked a gauge, “two hours.”

“Two hours?” Joanna stared up at him, completely forgetting the ephemera of his appearance in her horror at his words. The rigid exoskeletal face was expressionless. After a moment he turned away to check another set of gauges.

“Look,” Joanna said, when he had finished his final adjustments a few minutes later. “According to Antryg, the whole problem stemmed from one of the Gates in the Void being kept jammed open, right?”

“Correct.” The light node on his forehead flickered, casting a gruesome firefly glow over his big upper hands as he changed one of the air bottles on his breathing apparatus. Joanna noted two other bottles among the general pile of tool kit, spare coax cables, and what might have been extra ammo heaped in the dense shadows behind the backup batteries. “It is his theory that once that link is broken, the Citadel will snap back to its correct position in the time-space continuum, and the entire continuum will return to its normal orientation. Since this Gate seemed to be moving around, probably as a result of being kept open, he established the stabilization field and attempted to chart the Vaults where it had been seen, but he was effectively prevented from completing even that task.”

Joanna squatted next to the smooth, knobby bulk of the alien, half-hidden in the darkness of his gleaming-eyed machines, and folded her arms around her knees in an unconscious mimicry of his own position. “But if your field of study is xchi-particle flux—the energies that were polarized to stabilize the field—were you taking readings before the period of stabilization?”

“Of course. But they wouldn't tell us which of the loci of flux was the Moving Gate. That was the first thing we thought of.”

“No,” Joanna agreed. “But it would tell us something. If nothing else, there might be some kind of pattern to it that isn't obvious until it's laid out. And Tom the gardener tells me Antryg did get some of the Vaults charted, so we can overlay your findings with his, and see where we are. Can you get a three-dimensional graphic on your computer?”

“Four dimensional, if you need it—but no printer.”

“Damn,” Joanna muttered, glancing at the tiny screen. “Looks like it's chalk-on-the-floor time again.” At least, she thought as she stood up and dug in her purse for chalk, it'll give me something to do until Antryg comes back—if he comes back—or the place disintegrates.

It took her only a few minutes to round up most of Antryg's charts. The two Juniors Mick and Cylin had some of them; Tom remembered Antryg emptying a creased wad of papers out of his coat pocket in the baths, and hurried out, candle in hand, through the eastern doorway into the still and waiting blackness of the kitchen to fetch them. After a little asking, Seldes Katne produced the rest. “They aren't complete,” the librarian said, looking worriedly down over Joanna's shoulder as she sketched out in chalk on the planked oak floor the preliminary plans of the several levels of the Vaults. “Brighthand had some, and others were left up in my rooms in the Library.”

“Just what we need,” Joanna said, turning the scribbled charts this way and that to orient their pattern. The situation was made easier when Tom returned, rather white and shaken but bearing a mass of grubby papers, scribbled over in Antryg's looping, illegible scrawl, which Tom obligingly proceeded to decipher for her. The Dead God produced a long, folded readout of greenish flimsiplast with all the readings taken before the field went into effect—sheet after sheet of what looked like a badly photocopied, black-and-white version of Van Gogh's “Starry Night”—and Joanna took notes on the back with a ballpoint pen from her purse, while the physicist keyed through the later screens of data during stabilization.