The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (37 page)

“And are we not now?”

Antryg paused, startled, his big hands in their stained and ruinous gloves arrested in midgesture; then he smiled. “Well, it depends on your definition, of course. I spent twenty-five years not knowing whether I was in real trouble or not.”

“As did the rest of us,” Daurannon murmured, coming quietly up to join them with an ashen Seldes Katne and a couple of Council sasenna in tow. “Rosamund, we need you in the Circle of Spells ... ”

“And if you think,” Silvorglim added, pushing his way forward into the conversation with a gleam of half-comprehending malice in his eyes, “that I'm going to let you slip away into the Vaults, dog wizard ... ”

“No, no ... by all means, come with me and bring at least a dozen of your stoutest fellows. I think I may need one or two of the Senior mages with me as well, if they can be spared. Goodness knows what's down there now.”

“I'll go,” the librarian offered at once.

Antryg hesitated, then said gently, “Kitty, thank you—because I know you know how dangerous the Vaults are now. But I'm going to need someone of near Council rank.”

Poorly put—he knew it the moment he'd said it, knew it as she turned away, her lips pressed tight, blinking back tears of rage and frustration. But there wasn't time, and he couldn't risk someone whose powers would be unequal to what they might meet. Through his feet on the stone floor, through his bones, through the air, he could feel the slip and shift of the Void just beyond the Citadel walls, the movement of terrible energies through the stones themselves, the trapped and tangled fragments of the disjointed leys, the powers of earth and stars. In the Vaults, all the gates would be shifting, opening and closing, appearing and disappearing, giving access to God knew what bizarre worlds.

“Rosie,” he added softly, turning to drape a familiar arm around the Lady's shoulders, “a word with you in private. Excuse us,” he added as Silvorglim tried to press closer to hear. "I'm going to propose marriage to this woman and we really do need a few moments alone.

“Is there any chance, any chance at all, of getting the geas off me?” he whispered, as he drew her aside into the shadows of the room's great eastern door, which led, through the serving-hatch, into the kitchens. “I—we all—are going to need my powers if we're going to get out of this.”

She looked warily up into his face. Even the strongest of healing-spells could not completely eradicate the effects of a gunshot wound, and she'd dragged herself here unaided; the stress of it, and the responsibility for the Citadel itself, made her features like something pared from bone.

“Look, I swear to you I haven't precipitated this situation to force your hand.”

“I believe you.” She drew back a little from him and disengaged his arm from her shoulders with a motion she had to have learned as a debutante.

“Good Heavens!” Antryg murmured in surprise.

“Don't widen your eyes at me, dog wizard, and don't play the fool for my benefit,” she continued icily. “You're devious enough to have created the illusion of precipitating the entire Citadel into the Void in order to gain your way, but if this all had been illusion, I and all the Council would have known. I've been scrying through every inch of this Citadel, trying to get in touch with everyone—novices, Seniors, sasenna, servants—in its farthest reaches, and I know the extent of the danger we're in. And I don't think you capable of such a baroque ploy.”

“And here I thought you considered me capable of anything.”

“Anything except a straight answer.”

“Well,” Antryg smiled, “there is that.”

“So I'll give you one. No.” Her hand tightened on the ebony of her staff, and her voice shook a little though her eyes were like cabachon gems. “Aunt Min and I could remove it, but Aunt Min ... has not been found.” She shook her head. “Or the rest of us in concert could do it. But I don't think Daurannon would consent.”

She glanced toward the Handsome One, who had returned to the group of Seniors—Nandiharrow, Q'iin, Idrix of Thray, Whitwell Simm, and Pentilla Riverwych, in fact, every available mage of any degree of power. By the patterns chalked around them on the floor Antryg saw that they were raising spells of stabilization to strengthen the Citadel's boundaries against the dragging dark of the Void. “And I know Bentick wouldn't, even if he could be found. Neither of them trust you ... ”

“The feeling's quite mutual, I assure you. I told you at the outset that the geas was a bad idea.”

“Don't jest with me, Windrose.” Her voice, so low as to be barely audible, was level again but cold as an iron ax head in winter. “For the time being I acquit you of malice, and I never truly have believed Daurannon's contention that you are really the Dark Mage. But as for your sanity, and for your responsibility for this entire situation, I make no allowances. I don't know who can be spared from the stabilization spells here. I'll ask.”

“I shall kiss your hands and feet at a time when we'll both have the opportunity to properly relish the experience,” he promised. “Until then there's no time to be lost. By the way, has Pothatch checked in?”

“He's on his way. He was in the old drying-room with Tom, it's cut off from here.”

“There's a trap up to the attic, that connects to the subcellar of the baths, and from the boiler room he can get into the buttery. When he gets here, you might suggest that he put on water for tea. I think everyone would benefit from that. And muffins if he has batter standing. Silvorglim!” He turned and snapped his fingers, raising his voice as if summoning a butler. “Come along, man, bring your men and don't dawdle. You're always dawdling.”

And with the infuriated Witchfinder at his heels, trailed by a dozen sasenna of both Church and Council and old Whitwell Simm with his flowing silver hair, he strode through the east door of the refectory and into the kitchen, and so down once again into the darkness of the Vaults.

Below the third level, sanity ended. Alien energies ran like blood down the walls of the ancient collecting-maze and whispered in the darkness of its endless, curling spirals; strange winds flicked at Antryg's coat skirts and hair as he led the way down passages echoing with hideous sounds. Twice he turned aside from the quickest route and led his party on long, circuitous detours down forgotten stairways and rusty ladders of spikes in fog-choked vent shafts to avoid places where the darkness seemed thicker than it should, or where some sound or smell in the shuddering air lifted the hair on his nape without ever becoming clear enough to identify.

The pressure, the presence, of the Void was everywhere, as if a layer of skin had been stripped from him and his every nerve lay exposed to the shivering vibration of its fear. Niter and mosses gleamed on the walls; here and there he could see places in the darkness where the very fabric of the universe seemed to thin, showing through the more dreadful blackness that lay beyond; the air was filled with strange smells, trace elements and gases, curls'of mist, twinges of static. He wore slung around his shoulders the tubes of the oxygen mask he'd left hidden on the first level, and Whitwell Simm, walking at the back of the party, had orders to stand ready with spells of wind and air at an instant's notice, but Antryg had studied in Joanna's world long enough now to know that this might not be enough.

And directly behind him in the guttering torchlight, Silvorglim walked with drawn sword and eyes growing grimmer, more angry with the frightened anger of the self-righteous at every step. Once one of the Church sasenna cried out in hysterical terror, holding out her two hands and screaming, then doubling over, clawing at her face, and Antryg, pulling the woman's hands away, saw that the bones were already beginning to lengthen and deform, the skin to sprout coarse, gray animal hair. As the other guards stared in frozen terror, Antryg caught the stricken sasennan by the back of the neck and shoved her, dragged her along the passageway at a run, until she stopped screaming and clung panting to him, gritting her teeth against the pain.

“It was a pocket field, that's all,” he explained, when they stopped and the woman sank, nearly unconscious but a woman once more, to the floor beside him. “In whatever universe that bulge or bubble of reality came from, this woman would have been a lycanthrope, a werewolf, just as in some other enclaves some of us wouldn't have had power at all, and others of us, who haven't it here, would.”

Kneeling at the side of the shaken warrior, he looked from face to face, seeing the fear in the eyes of the sasenna—mostly young men and women, though several of them, the afflicted woman among them, were tough middle-aged troopers, scarred like fighting dogs. One or two were surreptitiously looking at the backs of their hands. “That's all,” he added. “That's absolutely all. It has nothing to do with our world, our reality ... ”

“So you say.” Torchlight gilded the jump and twitch of the hard muscles around Silvorglim's mouth. “And you—all of you,” his glittering eyes flicked to Whitwell Simm, keeping quiet guard on their rear, “have taken us out of our world, our reality, haven't you? So that you might do this to us ... and other things.”

The sasennan beside Antryg ran her hands hesitantly over her face, finding the sprouting hair there had vanished and the bones and teeth resumed their normal shape, though Antryg guessed the flesh would bruise horribly and the woman would ache for days. One of the younger Church warriors stepped forward and held out a hand to help her to her feet: “We always did say you were a wolf bitch, didn't we, Gandy?” and the woman slapped his hand aside with a returning grin and got to her feet by herself.

“So what're we going to do when we walk through the field that turns you into what you really are, Venk? Buy you carrots?”

“Guard your virtue ... ”

They walked on, the sasenna trading filthy and speculative bandinage to cover the aftermath of their fear, but Antryg could feel Silvorglim's eyes on his back.

Once, when they passed a downshaft that plunged the depth of the Pits, Antryg looked down and saw black waters roiling and tossing far below, but not as far, he thought, as the seventh level would be. Something long and gleaming reached up from the depths, like a faintly shining segmented worm, ending, not in a head, but in a small coal black hand that groped along the stone of the shaft's side, then withdrew once again to the water below.

The Dead God was waiting for them in the Chamber of the Glass Pillar. Knee-deep ground fog had filled the tunnels in this area, cold vapors flowing like water through the archways and pouring sluggishly around the shining monoliths of the oscillators and pickups, rising in wisps to veil the monstrous shape of the God himself and glowing with the movement of the light upon his masklike head. With a silvery rustle a dozen swords were drawn.

“Oh, put those away,” Antryg said briskly, striding forward through the mists with his hands held out. “Ninetentwo my dear chap, I'm delighted and relieved ... ”

“I am delighted and relieved that a field hasn't settled upon this room which is inimical to electricity,” the Dead God retorted acerbically, turning upon him golden eyes as unwinking as those of a shark. “Not to say astonished. I cannot imagine how the batteries stayed in operation through the first shock.”

“Hence my merry men.” Antryg swept his arm back at the nonplussed sasenna grouped behind the Witchfinder and the stunned Whitwell Simm. His glasses flashed in the phosphor lights of the lumenpanels and the beads on his neck glittered cold and strange, a curious, gawky entity nearly as alien as the creature standing before him. “The worst of the energy flux, as far as I can tell, is centered in the Vaults; if we can get the field generators upstairs, we may have a fighting chance of keeping the Citadel itself stable long enough to find the Moving Gate—or the power source which is keeping it jammed open—and rectify the whole situation by shutting it down. You, you, you, and you ... start carrying those backup batteries to the refectory. Whitwell, go with them and lead the way. How much time will those give us?”

“Two hours apiece ... as hours are reckoned in my world. Antryg, what happened?” Two of the clawed hands shifted the weapon slung over his shoulder, and the glowing nodule on the Dead God's forehead flicked back and forth like a cat's tail. “The power cable I had stretched through the Gate to my own world was cut off cleanly, as if with a laser ... no surge, nothing. Just dead. My sensors show me Gates opening and closing, strange things, things I have never seen, energies and concentrations of heat and cold, moving all through the Vaults.”

“Oh, peachy,” Antryg sighed, lapsing regrettably into language picked up from his colleagues behind the bar at Enyart's. He ran a weary hand through his hair. The decoction of jelgeth he'd nicked from Issay's house was beginning to wear off, the exhaustion coming back on him worse than before, the usual result with repeated doses of the herb.

“God knows what's going on elsewhere here, but I'm sure I'm going to be blamed for it. Someone deliberately disrupted the circles holding the energies of the Citadel's stones in alignment. There's been a steady buildup of energy from the feedback loops through the leys—you know that.”

The Dead God nodded. “But why on earth would ... ?”

“Why would anyone dismantle the ecology of their planet in order to produce TV trays and hair spray? Or assassinate a national leader at the outset of a ticklish phase of reconstructing the country after disastrous civil war? Or marry a person with whom they've been fighting like cat and dog for five years, or go out and get blotto drunk the night before a critical business meeting? Because it seemed the appropriate thing to do at the time. If I knew precisely why, my friend, I should probably have a flying guess at who ... or would if I wasn't so tired I can hardly stand up straight.”

Across the room, a voice called out, “ANTRYG!” and he swung around, his eyes wide with shock and astonishment, all weariness, for the moment, forgotten.

Joanna and—of all people—Magister Magus stood framed in the narrow black archway that led from the deeper Vaults.

It is said that the wizard Simon the Lame lived for five years in the dungeons of the Duke of Dreghan, coming and going as he pleased to his studies while his guards believed him to be imprisoned in his cell. It was only when the Duke encountered him in the public marketplace that the Duke realized that the Archmage had been his guest rather than his prisoner.