The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (27 page)

“You think she'd believe me?”

His only answer was the bitter resentment in her eyes.

Catching one boot-toe under a pinecone and flipping it through the sunlit air, he said, “Rosamund, she wouldn't be who she is if she didn't revel in something new; in seeing if she couldn't make spells that are ridiculous and chaotic and against all the laws of physics and logic and orthodox magic actually work anyway. You know that.”

“I know that; you know that,” she replied quietly. “And that you have always known how to charm her.” Her rose-petal mouth hardened into a brittle line. “Or was that your intent?”

“What, to weaken my strongest supporter?”

“To weaken the linchpin of the geas.”

Behind the massive lenses his rain-colored eyes were grave. “I think you're not giving either of us very much credit.”

“Credit doesn't matter much to me in the face of ... of losing her.” Her voice shivered a little on those words, then turned sharp and silvery again. “And why aren't you back there helping her, at least?”

A wide grin split his face. “Because under the conditions of the geas all I'd be able to do is get under her feet, and I didn't want to get thwacked with her cane. I came here looking for Joanna; I'd heard some rather curious news ... ”

“You still insist that one of the Council kidnapped her?” Rosamund cut in impatiently, lengthening her stride through the whispering lace of the bracken. “That one of the Council is behind the chaos in the Vaults?”

Antryg shrugged. “Well, I've tried hard to come up with a reason why Ruth would lie to me about seeing a wizard. She's generally a very truthful woman, Ruth—except, of course, when she's standing dripping wet with a towel about her telling someone over the telephone that she's just leaving the apartment that minute to meet them for lunch.”

“Then why hasn't that person contacted you? Why hasn't there been some demand made, some threat, some exchange?” Her eyes narrowed in the fleeting splinters of the filtered sun. “Or have they?” she added softly, “If there is a renegade in the Council—other than yourself, that is—are you working for him already?”

Antryg paused and pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his long nose. The gleam of a knife in the moonlight returned to him, the retreating swirl of a long black robe around the closing door of the passage into the Pepper-Grinder's upper chamber ... the crush of death-spells on his lungs. She sent him. He is her cat's-paw ... And then there was the whole curious matter of Tom's story that morning.

“I'm not, of course,” he said. “But that has begun to puzzle me. Even if my being under the geas put a glitch of some kind in their plans, one would think they'd at least use Joanna to discourage my investigations. And I may hear yet. But it seems a very awkward arrangement.”

He moved off again, the Lady stumbling a little with her lesser experience of rough walking but drawing her hand aside from his offer of help.

“Holding anyone captive is, you know,” he added. “Unless one has an accomplice, though of course for wizards it's easier because one can use spells to keep the captive quiet. I suppose it's conceivable that if our hypothetical kidnapper is on the Council, he or she is strong enough to transform Joanna into a canary, which would solve a lot of logistical problems. Has Phormion or Bentick recently acquired an unaccounted-for canary? Though of course I doubt it's possible to transform Joanna into a canary. A cat, on the other hand, would pass almost completely unnoticed.”

Lady Rosamund's mouth flexed in exasperation. “Can you truly see Bentick violating his vows so comprehensively? Or Nandiharrow? Or Issay, or Phormion ... ?”

“Someone violated their vows badly enough to try to murder me last night,” he said, and Rosamund's eyes widened with what appeared to be quite genuine shock.

“Who?”

“I don't know. I couldn't see. It happened beneath the Castle, so it could have been either Bentick or Phormion, but considering the number of tunnels which run through there it could just as easily have been our boy Daur. Whoever it was seemed to think ... ”

Like the stinging crack of a whipstroke, the heavy, flat roar of a musket smote the air, followed at once by the acrid stink of powder. Lady Rosamund cried out and fell, clutching the spreading patch of dark red wetness that splattered suddenly from the torn flesh of her thigh, and from the woods behind them a voice yelled, “There they are!”

Better to sleep among wolves than in a wizard's house.

—Sykerst proverb

Antryg caught the lady in his arms as she fell. Though her eyes were shut, there was consciousness, if not strength, in the arm she flung around his neck; he took a running leap down a broken dip of ground, ducked into a thicket of moss-choked alder and blackberry bramble, then immediately slipped toward the shelter of a small outcropping of boulders forty feet away, running half-crouched in the waist-deep jungle of fern.

“You see it?” yelled a man somewhere, and another replied, “Two of them, it looked like ... ”

“That big gray one with the three white paws ... ”

“You see any blood? I swear I hit one ... ”

“Stopping the bleeding ... best I can,” gasped Rosamund's voice, scarcely a breath in his ear. “Cold ... dear God, so cold ... ”

“Can you hold a cloaking-spell around yourself at the same time?” Antryg shed Aunt Min's seedy old shawl for her to lie on, slipped out of his patched, tawdry coat to cover her, and hastily ripped a strip from its lining to tourniquet her leg. Ferns and horsetails grew thick about the boulders, offering them minimal cover; with luck the men would beat the thicket and pass by this less obvious place.

The dark head moved against the dull rainbow of tangled color. Her lips already had a grayish cast; in spite of his makeshift dressing, she was losing blood. If she went into shock or lost consciousness, he thought, she was through.

“Hold on,” he breathed and broke cover, darting through the ferns with the golden blades of late-morning sunlight sparkling on his earrings and beads. Another musket roared—they'd had time to reload—and with a snarling, woody twang the steel-and-hornbeam shaft of a crossbow appeared in a tree trunk inches from his shoulder. He remembered that, when they hunted predators, Gru Gwidion and his hunters put datura on their arrows; with no magic at his disposal it wouldn't take more than a scratch to kill him.

Another arrow flashed in the sunlight. Leaping like a scared deer, Antryg cut through the fern and spruce needles of the soft forest floor, the hunters in full pursuit. They knew the woods as well as he did—better, for their experience was fresh and not something half-forgotten for nine or ten years. In any case he couldn't think of losing them yet. They were still far too close to Lady Rosamund's hiding place.

Three spells, he thought, springing down a vine-choked streambed and scrambling up the other side. A major healing-spell to keep blood loss and shock at bay, a cloaking spell to turn aside the eyes of searchers, and a summoning to whomever she could think of in the Citadel ... No wonder the Lady could spare nothing for direct action against her attackers. The musket roared again, and the leaves of the hawthorn brake into which he dived shuddered as if smote with a whip. That'll teach her to put potential defenders under geas.

He crawled through the thick cresses near the streambed as far as he dared, then showed himself again, drawing them after him; Gru Gwidion yelled something about“ ... big gray with three white paws.” The identical repetition of the words snagged in Antryg's mind, as much as the words themselves.

“Damn,” he breathed as he cleared the fallen trunk of an alder, half a jump ahead of another arrow, “I do believe someone's cast a glamour on them and they see me as a wolf.”

Glamours were simple enough to cast. Completely illegal, of course, but Suraklin had used them frequently. Antryg recalled the young son of a Kymil merchant, who had shot his own father in mistake for a deer after the father had crossed Suraklin in a business deal ... recalled another instance when the old wizard had disgraced a woman who had made a fuss about him speaking to her child, by casting a glamour on her that made her believe another man was her husband.

In both instances, Antryg recalled, he himself had helped, though he had known even then it was wrong—and that, he supposed, was a glamour of its own.

He remembered that both victims had later killed themselves. But Suraklin had robbed him even of the courage for that.

The undergrowth was thinner here. Antryg elbowed himself carefully from clump to clump of bracken, trying to stick to ground rocky enough not to show tracks. Had the hunters seen Lady Rosamund as a wolf also? Glamours cast with a piece of the object's clothing often throw afield, Suraklin had said, running through his slim fingers the old merchant's long black stockings, which Antryg had stolen from the laundry behind the painted wooden mansion. People or objects near them become distorted in the subject's mind as well. So take care you keep clear of the old cheat. It's the commonest form of the spell, but crude. I prefer to use the perfume method, myself.

The men behind him had gone quiet, but with the senses of his wizardry he could reach out and hear them, rustling through the willow thickets, their boots a heavy soughing in the carpet of spruce needles and fern.

Or had Lady Rosamund been the intended victim, himself merely the bait? Whoever had laid the first glamour on poor Tom, it wouldn't have taken much to get Rosamund to follow him out to the chapel.

The bracken had thinned; the spruces grew thicker here, their needles killing undergrowth and at the same time holding his tracks. Swiftly, cautiously, he slipped from tree to tree, following the bare ground where he could or working his way along the more concealing vegetation that clogged the fast-running, ice-bitter streams. That zone of magic, he thought desperately, had better still be in existence when I get there.

He made it to within a mile of the rocks he'd called the Three Aunts Having Tea before the hunters spotted him. He'd heard them behind him all the way, now nearer, now farther; the rustle of their bodies in the blackberry brambles and laurel shrubs as they beat the thickets, the cautious, whistling birdcalls of their signals. Now and then, when the wind shifted, he smelled the cow-and-smoke reek of their clothing. So he was half-ready when the creaking snick of a crossbow alerted him and was able to duck and roll; the bolt took a two-inch gash in the leather of his boot, then he was on his feet and running for his life.

He was long-legged and knew the ground; ducking, weaving, clearing boulders and fallen trees like some grotesque gazelle, too taken up with trying not to trip to concentrate on the sounds behind him and praying one of them wasn't lying in wait to head him off. The musket roared, but he didn't see where the ball went, only knew it hadn't touched him. Sunlight on pine straw; squirrels pouring in fleet red streaks up the trunks of trees; a familiar shape of ground, a landmark tree ...

He stumbled within a yard of the fallen trunk he'd taken as a landmark, and even as he struck the ground, he summoned like a thunderclap the spell for the breaking of the glamour. It crumbled like rotted wood from his numb mind, the geas tightening in smothering pain around his brain and nerves. An arrow caught sunflash like a huge wasp as he stumbled on toward the road, the whiffle of it brushing his torn calico sleeve; he gathered his strength about him and called the spell again.

This time it worked. He felt it, flung it back behind him like a glittering net, praying the magic would work as it should. One of the men yelled, “Son of a bitch!” and someone else, “What the ... ”

Antryg stumbled to a halt, gasping for breath as he dropped to his knees in the pine needles, sweat pouring down his cheeks and aware for the first time of the scratches on his face from holly and bramble, the rips in his shirt, and the bruises on his shoulders and knees.

“Dammit, don't shoot!” he yelled, throwing up his hands. Turning, he saw the men grouped behind him in the thin tangle of bracken, panting also and gazing at him with startled and frightened eyes.

“It's a wizard!” Gru Gwidion said, passing one leather-gloved hand across his eyes. “Lord Antryg ... ”

“He
was the wolf.” One of the hunters raised his crossbow to cover him. “He turned himself into ... into ... ” His voice stumbled, hesitant. He lowered the weapon again and looked at his leader, puzzled, sweat trickling down his narrow, red-bearded face. “We ... we was after a wolf. But there ain't been wolves around much this spring. Why'd we think ... ?”

“No.” Antryg got to his feet, brushing the spruce needles from the knees of his jeans, and shook back his long hair from his face. “And I'm sure if you count your sheep, nobody will find any missing.”

“No, I—I know none of 'em's missing.” Gru Gwidion came forward, uncertainly holding out his hand, his dark face puzzled and a little ashamed behind the tangles of his black beard. “We ain't even had 'em out to the far pastures. But ... it's like we was all so sure this morning. Like we'd all talked about it yesterday but now, looking back, I don't see how we could.”

The others wore that look, too: of men baffled by their own behavior, ashamed, puzzled, wondering how they could have all done such a thing ... and on the verge, Antryg knew—like drunkards finding an ironclad justification for their binges—of looking for reasons why their actions had to have been right.

“You were under a spell, all of you,” he said quickly. God, Daur will kill me for undoing six centuries of careful P.R. “You were deceived into thinking that there was a wolf in the first place, and then, when I happened by—as somebody took care that I would—into thinking that wolf was me. That's all. Can any of you remember speaking to a wizard yesterday in the Citadel?”

Gru scratched his head. Closer to, the smell of him was stronger, but in an odd way it blended with the green smells of the moss and the acidic pungence of the nearby bogs, disappearing into the general scents of the woods. “No, I ... I don't recall it,” he said, looking up at Antryg. The suspicion, and some of the uneasy, baffled shame, had faded from his eyes; they were sharp again with the wary cunning of one who lives by observation. “But if they was a wizard and out to set a trap, I don't suppose I would recall. I'm damn sorry, my lord, and in that,” he added firmly, with a meaningful glance back at his men, clumped together and muttering among themselves, “I can speak for us all. But wasn't there two of you? I swear Cappy here brought down what looked to me then like another wolf.”