The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (35 page)

He knew the fear he felt was only Bentick's spell. He could see the Steward's marks glimmering in the utter dark, fussy and neat along the jambs and lintels of the little door that led to the subcellar—marks of torment and terror, marks of ward and guard ... marks that it was impossible to pass. Sweat stood out on Antryg's face; through gritted teeth he whispered,

“This is only a spell, only illusion ... ” But something inside him seemed to dissolve at the thought of putting so much as his hand, let alone his entire body, through that doorway. It was a fear that bypassed the mind entirely and centered in the gut, the flesh, as if it had been the door of a furnace, radiating a bone-stripping heat. A simple counterspell would have dusted that fear away, but the geas bound him, and it did him no good to simply tell himself that the pain would be illusory, the blinding certainty of death and worse than death illusory.

He simply couldn't do it, any more than he could have brought himself to grasp the blade of a running chainsaw with his hands.

Men's voices sounded in the stairway behind him. There was every chance they'd have hasu with them; four strides took him across the room to the square entry-hole of the disused shaft through which building materials had once been hauled up from the courtyard below. The door on it looked old and splintery but was still stout, and it opened inward into the room; drawing it shut after him, he could get his fingers behind the cross-brace and hold on, keeping the door fast with the weight of his body at the same time that he kept himself from sliding down the steep shaft to the foot of the Citadel hill.

The shivery burn of energy all around him was stifling in the granite of the narrow shaft. His eyes closed, he listened in the darkness to the soft, swift pad of footfalls in the storeroom, the rattle of drawn swords, the arguing voices as they searched. Once, they tested the shaft doorway but, finding it would not open, assumed it was locked, not that it was being held shut from the other side. He heard one of the hasu say, “No one has passed these signs,” and in time, the footfalls faded away up the stairs again.

The well shaft in the mule barn, Antryg thought. It went down deeper than the storeroom tunnel, and it hadn't been spelled shut. He had to reach the Chamber of the Glass Pillar before the Witch-finders did, to keep them somehow from interfering with the Dead God's machinery there. With the amount of energy perilously balanced between the magic circles in the North Hall and the oscillators and reflecting screens of the polarization field in the Vaults, the mere thought of what could happen if one or the other side of the equation were knocked away turned him cold. As he slipped out of the shaft and up the kitchen stairs again, moved like a flitting shadow across the empty refectory and out into the darkness of the North Wing's Colonnade, he reviewed his options.

If nothing else, he supposed, he could always listen for their coming, or watch for it on the Dead God's multiscanner, and if they came too near the Chamber let them see him, lead them away into the mazes he knew far better than they. His bones ached at the thought of another game of hide-and-seek, especially in the Vaults, but there was not time even to think about it now. In time one of his friends had to come down to the Vaults, had to deduce that that was where he would go.

But as he strode swiftly down the foot-worn pavement of the North Cloister, he saw something that made the entire question—and most of his other concerns, not to mention the concerns of everyone else in the darkened Citadel—utterly academic.

The rain now drummed the tiled roof of the arcade and glittered dimly with the reflection of the lights in the Polygon as it ring-pocked the standing pools in the courtyard and dripped in a sparkling curtain from the arcade's gutters. Beneath the arcade, the pavement itself was dry, save for a single line of wet footprints, crossing where someone had cut through the courtyard itself—footprints leading to the opened door of the North Hall.

Long coat billowing behind him, Antryg ducked through into the Hall's vestibule. The steady yellow glow of the lamp high on the wall showed him two guards in the black clothing of the Council's sasenna, slumped on the benches at either side of the room; a third lay close to the huge, iron-strapped doors that led into the hall itself. Their faces were peaceful—the stillness whispered with the deep breath of sleep. The wet footprints led between them, to the closed inner doors.

Cold shock sinking in on him, as if all his veins had been suddenly opened, Antryg ran to drag at the massive iron of the handle. The jar of thrown bolts on the other side mocked him. Flattening to the three-inch oak slabs, he could hear, with the hyperacute senses of a wizard, the insectile scratching of broomstraw and holystone beyond, the whisper of a voice speaking words of dissolution, of breaking.

“NO!” His fists slammed the door with a force that nearly broke the bones. “Damn you, don't do it! Don't ... ”

He kicked the panels desperately, reached with his mind to throw the bolt aside, and felt even that simplest of spells crumble to smoke under the geas' black cold. “Stop ... !”

Even as he cried the word he heard behind him the creak of sword belts, the wet squelch of booted feet crossing the vestibule at a run. He dived for the dropped sword of the nearest sleeping guard, but didn't make it. Hands seized his arms, dragged him backward; someone twisted his shoulder to drop him to his knees.

“Break down that door!” he commanded, and such was the authority in his voice that three of them moved to obey before Silvorglim cut them off.

“Hold on to him, you fools! You won't deceive us that way.”

“Dammit, get that door open!” Antryg ordered desperately. “The spells in that room are the only thing holding the Citadel in balance with the flux-spells on the Void.”

“Keep hold of him, dammit!” the Witchfinder snapped, striding into the room through the outer door, raindrops glinting in his fading red hair.

Antryg twisted frantically against the grip on his arms, tried to get to his feet; someone behind him changed the angle of his hold on his wrist, and the pain turned his knees to water. “Please,” he said rapidly, his voice level now and very quiet as he looked up into the Witchfinder's face. “Get in there and stop them.”

“So this is the heart of the secret evil being done?” Silvorglim's pale eyes flickered to the doors. “The center of the Council's plot ... ”

“No ... Yes ... ” Someone grasped a handful of his long hair and jerked his head back, and he felt the razor edge of a sword against the thin skin under his jaw. “It's not a Council plot but if the person in there disrupts those circles the entire Citadel may be destroyed!”

The Witchfinder turned back from the doors with a momentary start of surprise. “Is it so indeed?” he whispered, as if to himself. Then, “A small price to pay, if you speak the truth.” His eyes moved from the shut doors to the eyes of the man behind Antryg with the sword; he gave a quick nod of command. “Do it.”

Antryg felt the guard's muscles stiffen, the first thin stroke of pain—he cried “No ... !” more in fury at their stupidity than fear of his own death.

What happened then in the room was impossible to describe, either then or later. Not a sound, nor a wind, nor a change of light or darkness, save that the flames of the torches held by the sasenna and the small lamp burning high on the wall altered somehow for a moment.

There was a change of pressure, slamming shut the outer door to the colonnade. But it was not immediately noticeable amid the thing, the event, the clap that was not a thunderclap, the reverberation which struck each person in that room as if with the sound of an echoing explosion within his or her mind, and within the mind alone.

The sasennan behind Antryg dropped his sword and loosed his grip on Antryg's hair, jerking his hands up as if to cover his ears. In the grip of the other guards who still held his arms, Antryg flinched, shuddering, knowing it was too late ... he scarcely felt the hot thread of blood running down his neck from where the vein had been barely nicked.

If the man had gone through with it and slashed his throat to the neck bone, he reflected an instant later in that first, terrible, endlessly echoing silence, it would still have been the least of his or anybody else's worries.

In the silence there was not even the draw of breath for a count of fifteen, as each person in that room save one wondered what had happened, wondered what was different.

The rain smell, the earth smell, the smell of wet grass and sky that had seemed to breathe even through the shut door was gone.

The pounding downpour on the roof was gone.

It was Silvorglim's voice, thin and very calm, that broke that dreadful stillness. Quite levelly, he asked, “What have you done, witch?”

But when Antryg, still kneeling among the guards whose grip on his arms was slowly slacking as they realized—as well as they could realize—what must have happened, did not reply, the Witchfinder's own sword seared from its sheath in a single slash of hysterical rage, the point coming to rest in the pit of Antryg's throat. “What have you done?”

Antryg disengaged his hand from the guards' nerveless clutch and pushed the blade aside. Then he climbed slowly to his feet, wiping at the trail of blood from his neck with a corner of Aunt Min's shawl, and walked to the vestibule's outer door. Shaken and shocked, Silvorglim reached to open it again, and Antryg said softly, “Don't do that, Yarak.” After a long moment the Witchfinder's square, red-furred hand dropped to his side.

“Tobin ... ” Antryg gestured to the hasu who stood, chalk-faced, among the sasenna. After a moment's hesitation the man stepped forward and placed his hands upon the door.

In the meantime one of the guards had gone to the vestibule's single small window and stood with face pressed to the glass. “I can't see a thing out there, my lord,” he said, twisting and angling his head. “I can't swear to it, but from here we ought to be able to see the lights of the refectory.”

The hasu Tobin fell back, his hands shaking and his face paler than before, so pale that the brown age spots on his shaven scalp stood out as if painted in the shuddering torchlight. Reaching out to touch the iron handle of the door, Antryg found it cold as ice.

“There's nothing out there,” the hasu whispered, and his eyes, as they moved to the ungainly wizard in his beads and purple coat, showed a rim of white all around the iris. “Nothing ... ”

“No,” Antryg agreed quietly and turned back to face them: Silvorglim with his sword still in his hand; the Church wizard, trembling all over like a whipped horse, at his side; the Church sasenna in their long-skirted black coats; and the Council's three guards, waking now, drawing together as if for protection against some terrible threat that none of them could see.

In a quite reasonable tone of voice, Antryg went on, “Any member of the Council will tell you, Yarak, that it is impossible for me to do anything with magic under the conditions of the geas. On the other hand, I am going to suggest to the Council—if we can find the Council—that they remove the geas from me as quickly as possible, since I would say just offhand that we're all in terrible trouble.”

Face ghastly with shock, the Church wizard whispered, “What has happened?”

“Well,” Antryg explained calmly, “whoever it was who disrupted the circles holding together that spell-field in the other room unbalanced a rather critical equation of forces between the magic which made it possible for the Void-energies to be polarized, and the stabilization field set up by the Dead God's machines down in the Vaults. I did tell you to break down the door and stop him, you recall.” He wiped at his neck again and regarded for a moment the smudge of blood on his fingers before looking up at them all again.

“I'm very much afraid that the result seems to have been to precipitate the Citadel into the Void.”

It is said that Clovis II, the present Emperor's grandfather, was in his youth much given to scandal and riot. Indeed, when he married Nerri d'Arrantsan, daughter of the King of Trusand, during the wedding fete a notorious seventeen-year-old tavern dancer whom he had been keeping in the City drove her sporting carriage up to the great fountain before the Palace steps, and in full view of the wedding guests—including the bride's father—threw into the fountain all of Clovis' coats, shirts, and breeches which he had kept in her apartments.

—Vyrlaine

Imperial Chronicles

“Magus!”

“Joanna!”

“What the hell was that?”

In pitchy darkness hands groped for hands.

“There's movement,” Joanna said, after a long, breathing time. “The air is moving; can you feel it?” After the utter stillness—heatless, coldless, soundless, endless—even the faint drift of breeze was like the falling down of dreadful walls. The soundlessness had changed, too, altering in some fashion too subtle for identification, but it was as if, Joanna thought, what had been utter nullity had suddenly been made somehow finite, defined by ambient echo.

“Come on!”

She sprang to her feet, then turned back impatiently when she felt the drag of the dog wizard's unwilling weight. Without stopping to argue, she hauled him up by his wrist, pulled him determinedly after her in the direction of that soft, drawing breeze. “What's the matter?”

“Do you want to walk into ... into whatever it is?” Even his voice sounded different with the change of air pressure.

“Do you want to stay where you are and keep poor Irina company?” The newness of the air was an intoxicant; Joanna felt suddenly, glitteringly conscious of the texture of the velvet sleeve under her hand, the silk trapunto of the cuff and the cording that edged it. The loose, soft cotton of her own pajama sleeves against her skin seemed new-made, new-textured, as did the cold smoothness of the floor underfoot, the flutter of her own loose blond curls against her cheeks. The very molecules of the air against her skin seemed alive in the changed air pressure. It was all she could do not to run, waving her arms and shouting in the dark down the endless turnings, following the stream of moving air.