The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (45 page)

“Can you get a xchi-particle reading on the Conservatory, my dear?” Antryg asked, walking to the carved archway that led to the bridge. “Is there still activity up there?”

Hesitantly, Joanna examined the Dead God's sensor, which the alien physicist had set for her with masking-taped marks. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “There's still a field reading.” Beneath her feet the floorboards creaked alarmingly.

Where the tsaeati had passed, the wood had become desiccated, runneled with dry and crumbling streaks of rot, and only by clinging close to the railings had they been able to climb the twisted, clapped-out remains of the stair. Niter and slime dripped from the eaten-looking ruins of carved chairs, filthy water stood in puddles; Joanna shivered and checked her ammo loads.

“What a pity magic itself makes no reading on the sensors,” Antryg murmured. “I wonder why that is? Are you aware, my dear, that insofar as I have been able to decode it, the information in the patterns of tortoiseshells is of a completely different nature in your world than it is in mine? I wish I'd had time to unearth Munden Myndrex's rubbings. I suppose we shall simply have to assume that the tsaeati visited the Conservatory and devoured the teles there.”

“It did.” Aunt Min's high, fragile voice was decisive as she hobbled painfully forward to stand at Antryg's side. “It has swallowed all its energy, all its being. It returns now, hunting, smelling out magic, mindless and greedy as the ghost that was the heart of it, malicious as a demon. It is time.” She fumbled in her knitting basket for a piece of chalk.

Antryg had already given his shawl to Joanna in the dead and terrible cold of the upper floors of the Polygon; now he shed his tawdry coat, shivering a little at the bite of the air on his shirtsleeved arms and, taking off his spectacles, tucked them carefully into an inner pocket. In the dim yellow finger of the flashlight beam Joanna could see the old scars that straggled from wrist to elbow as he rolled up his sleeve, tiny punctures and slashes, and here and there long, cockled threads where the veins had been repeatedly slit. Aunt Min drew a circle around the two of them and pushed up her own black homespun sleeves like a housewife preparing to do dishes; Antryg drew the sword that was still thrust through his belt. The dim light winked on the blade, then glinted red-black on the sudden, gleaming lines of the blood. As the old lady marked Antryg's forehead and wrists, she seemed to straighten a little, and Joanna glimpsed again the wild dancer in her pale old eyes and recalled, for no reason, a pair of pink silk slippers carefully preserved on a dusty shelf.

Everyone who had seen her dance was dead now, she thought inconsequentially. And perhaps everyone they had talked to firsthand, as well.

Though Joanna was usually not conscious of magic, it seemed to fill the room like a strange scent, a fiery lightness to the air.

Antryg, who had knelt to receive the marks from the old woman's fingers, stood again, and his voice was very calm.

“Keep the spells of protection around me with whatever you've got. I'm going to have to wait until it's right in front of me before I do the Summoning ... then it's going to come down on top of me and draw off the field of Nothingness, and if there's any of it left by the time it's absorbed everything I can conjure, God help us all.”

“God always has helped us, my son,” Aunt Min replied serenely. Taking his hands, she made a final, invisible sign upon the bared tips of his fingers and on the shabby wool and leather of the writing mitts he still wore. “In all God's forms, and in all of ours.”

In the darkness beyond the bridge there was a sudden, dry, scritching crash, the sound of falling wood and plaster, then more loudly a huge, foul slither, as of some vast quantity of half-liquescent flesh sliding from great height. A moment later a cloud of stench rolled from the bridge: plaster dust, carrion, the cold wet stinks of mold and underground.

Soft and terrible, a thin, wailing ululation began, not human, not beast, keening and utterly mindless, and a thick, wet dragging.

Antryg's hands were shaking as they closed around his halberd. “Protect me,” he whispered, his face ghastly in the dim flashlight beam, and Aunt Min gave a tiny, creaking chuckle.

“If I could protect you all this while from Rosie and Daur, can I not protect you also from a mud pie?”

With the tiniest flicker of answering smile, Antryg walked forward onto the bridge.

Min followed him to the bottommost step. There she sank to her knees, fumbling a piece of chalk from her knitting basket; around herself she drew a swift circle, perfect in its roundness with the perfection of years of practice. Joanna knelt at the far end of the Junior Parlor, Ninetentwo's weapon braced on her shoulder, and flipped forward the sight. It seemed to her that Antryg was now silhouetted against a kind of foul purplish glow emanating from the far end of the bridge; not light, or anything resembling light, it seemed to beat the air with a thousand vibrating wings and flicker hellishly in the crystal of his earrings and the beads still strung around his neck.

And in the darkness, something moved in response. Where the tsaeati had been dark, darkness within darkness within darkness, now it glowed. Its every claw, its every eye, its every drunkenly lashing fleshless head was outlined in an obscene radiance, sickly yellow and growing brighter, stronger, diffused by the fog still clinging about it and fed by the glow that throbbed within the swollen embolism of water and filth like a ghastly, sulfurous heart.

Antryg cried out once, a handful of words, a spell of summoning in a voice Joanna had heard him use only once before: the booming bass outcry of a lost and exiled god. His head thrown back and his arms flung wide, he stood for one instant in the narrow entry of the bridge, earrings and halberd blade flashing, and light seemed to glance from the rivets of his jeans and the brass hardware of his boots and from the ends of crooked fingers in their tattered, fingerless gloves. Then the air around him changed, and Joanna felt that, too: terrifying, leaden cold, a leaching stillness; darkness beyond concept of shadow, inertia untouched and untouchable by blood heat or synapse or chemical bond. Nothing. Even in the Void, pressing so close against the frail glass of the windows, there was a wildness and magic and chaos. He had become a Dead God, and around him the molecules of air seemed to collapse inward like the crumpling of a punctured star.

Lightning streamed from the shimmering corpseglow shape of the tsaeati, light that elongated itself, rising above him; then it fell upon him in a devouring wave.

Half-hidden in the glowing fog, Antryg gave back and braced himself, twisting with the halberd against the raking claws that slashed from the shadow around him. At the foot of the steps, Joanna heard Aunt Min utter a broken sound of pain. Even when it had had no strength, Joanna had felt the terrible drawing of the tsaeati's greed; what it was like now, drinking at the energy of Antryg's magic, she could barely stand to imagine. Across the room she felt it, heat or cold, she could not tell; wind whipped the fog into a maelstrom of phosphor and darkness, tore and swirled at her hair, half blinding her, and her chest ached from the vacuum of its presence.

On the bridge Antryg slashed at it, playing it for time, keeping the physical elements of it—taloned feet, chisel-toothed serpent heads, and here and there, horribly, a human hand wielding a sword—from tearing at him physically and so breaking his concentration. But the sweat ran down his face in spite of the terrible cold, and there was desperation in the movement of his arms and back.

Around them the fog was swallowed in darkness, and the air began to shudder and burn. There was a noise to it, Joanna thought—or the noise was in her head—a kind of hissing that was almost a metallic scream, razoring her skull apart, rising in volume and intensity, like wind, like air escaping, like the fizzing roar of chemical bonding amplified a hundred thousand times. The wind strengthened and Joanna felt the throb of a pressure headache stab behind her eyes, smelled and tasted blood running down out of her nose; she could see, silhouetted against the chaos on the bridge, Aunt Min's black robes lift and pull with the dragging of that chemical wind and the tight knot of her thin white hair shred into a wild, fragile cloud.

The yellow glow within the tsaeati's dripping bulk flared brighter, then slowly, steadily, began to dim.

There was blood on Antryg's face, from his nose and from a cut where a chance talon had scored him. He seemed to be holding something from him on the end of the halberd, the weapon itself shrouded in blowing clouds of utter dark. A half-rotted serpent head lunged along the shaft, and he twisted, dodging and, when it struck down to tear at the back of his knee, stomping with all his strength to shatter the brittle skull. Above the hissing roar of the energy, Aunt Min's voice rose like the thin, shrill wailing of a storm-whirled gull, crying words of power and protection again and again, her skinny arms upraised in the roaring sizzle of the air. A glow of light seemed to swirl around her, streaming from her hands; Joanna shifted the heavy grip of the weapon on her shoulder, goose-flesh sandpapering her arms and sweat rivering down her cheeks and sides. Come on, Antryg, keep it off you. I really don't want to have to be dragged out into the dark.

She saw Antryg stumble, as if, within the shadow, whatever he braced against had jerked back.

And the next instant he lunged at the darkness, dropping the halberd and catching with his bony, crooked hands at whatever he could seize—taloned claws, writhing coils—and dragging at it with all his weight.

It's realized what's happening,
thought Joanna. Demon—ghost—simulacrum of a magic soul ... it knows it can't help absorbing the field around him, the field that will destroy it. It's trying to flee.

The screaming roar of the darkness increased, shrieking, keening, a hellish cacophony of whatever half-living abominations were still imprisoned in the water and slime. The tightening pressure in Joanna's head made her wonder how long she could last without blacking out from pain or suffocation. Antryg was still on his feet, blood pouring now from bites and claw-rakes on his back, his head bowed and his body twisting to avoid what damage it could. A thing like a barracuda, flesh hanging in long flaps from spine and skull, eyeless sockets filled with orange mold, curved from the shadows engulfing him and buried its fangs in his shoulder, only barely missing his neck; it was Aunt Min who screamed.

The noise had increased to a deafening roar, a wind that filled the bridge and the ruined chamber before it; the burning, sulfurous glow around the struggling shapes had shrunk and intensified, then began rapidly to fade.

Dammit, hang on! You 're winning.

Antryg screamed as the thing pulled him off his feet. Blue lightning seared from the darkness, stitching lines of black down his arms and sides. Something like glowing smoke seemed to fold around him, but the darkness no longer filled the entire bridge. Beyond him Joanna could see discarded bits of bone and flesh and nameless things strewing the floor, desiccated and lifeless as the ruined chairs and tables around her. Wind tore the breath from her lungs, seemed to scour the very skin from her bones. Beside the steps Aunt Min lay motionless in her circle, save where the winds tore at her robes and hair. Within the heart of the tsaeati, the yellow light glowed feverishly bright, and Antryg cried out again as lightning struck him in the chest; she saw him on his knees, struggling to rise, coils of glowing darkness wrapping him like a crushing hand. He shouted, “The bridge!” his voice hoarse with his fight for air. “Joanna, blow the bridge!”

She froze. She had, she knew, come for that purpose—and faced with it, she could not make her finger move on the trigger.

She could not kill Antryg. She could not bring herself to blast away those walls, to feel, even for the few seconds it would take for her to die, the icy drag of vacuum pulling her out ...

“JOANNA ... !”

Darkness swallowed him.

In the next second, something moved beyond the darkness.

Joanna had only a confused glimpse of a squat black figure at the far end of the bridge, a slick, glassy gleam of some object flashing through the air ...

And with a shattering report, like the hideously disproportionate explosion of a bursting light bulb, the object flung by the figure broke as it struck the floor in the midst of the collapsing field of darkness. A glare of brittle light blanched the smoky shadows to nothing; Joanna saw in a skeletal flash Antryg's body, the bodies of the semianimate abominations clinging to his flesh in a tearing pile and, around them, the very fibers of the floorboards, the mortar of the stones.

Then it was all changed.

For the first few seconds, Joanna had the weird sensation that none of it had ever been. Her mind groped, numb, as if a photo negative had been abruptly reversed, transposed to something completely different—a different medium, a transposition to another key ... as if a light had been turned on.

She realized, getting slowly to her feet, her head ringing in the sudden stillness, that a light had been turned on.

Bright and soft as molten silver, moonlight poured through the bridge's little windows to stream in a luminous bar over the defiled floor.

She barely heard the footsteps running away, scrabbling up the remains of the stairs, heading back to the safety of the Library. Still holding the gun, she strode the length of the Junior Parlor to where water and blood trickled thickly down the steps, a little stream that touched the fingers of Aunt Min's tiny, outstretched hand.

Antryg lay across the threshold of the bridge, draped in the coils of what appeared to be a many-legged sea snake at least twenty feet long. His gloved hands still gripped the wrists of two half-dissolved Shriekers amid a reeking charnel house of portions of whatever and whomever the tsaeati had ingested. The halberd, haft charred and blade melted, lay a little distance from him. Everywhere around them glittered fragments of broken glass.

Joanna took one fast look at the sensor and saw that the energy which had marked the tsaeati's movements was gone. That didn't necessarily mean the tsaeati itself was gone, she thought, with a sickened throb of fear even as she shed the gun to kneel at Antryg's side.