The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (42 page)

Then, with a report like a cannon-shot, the door burst, and a monstrous thing, shining slimily with mold and niter, stinking of rot and curtained in a swirling fog of water from which the heads and arms and feet of unimaginable creatures snapped wildly and eyelessly, rolled in.

The blast had flung Daurannon backward, a splinter of oak tearing through his left arm like a javelin head. At a cry from Brighthand, lightning smote the thing again, the darkness that streamed in with it like noxious fog exploding in a white clap of blinding electricity, and Issay Bel-Caire dove forward under cover of the bolt, to drag the stunned Daurannon out of the tsaeati's path. Joanna shaded her eyes against the searing glare as the mages flung the lightning again, and the thing before them took fire and hurled itself in a swollen, blazing wall of steam and flame and burning meat at its attackers.

They fell back before it, dragging Daurannon with them. A bolt of lightning leaped from the fog to strike the Herbmistress Q'iin; she stumbled, and the column of burning mud fell upon her, sweeping her along with it, screaming like the damned. The stench of blood and charred meat billowed suffocatingly from the heaving mass.

“Cold!” yelled Daurannon, struggling to stand. Blood spouted from a severed artery, splashing Issay and all those near him with gouts of crimson. “Not fire—COLD!”

The mage Whitwell Simm and two of the Council's sasenna had sprung forward, slashing with swords at the gory serpent heads, the clawed hands, fighting to get to where Q'iin had been. Already the mud was whitening, stiffening with frost, smoke mushrooming off it as the air temperature plunged and spreading over the floor of the refectory. For an instant the tsaeati slowed, settling into immobility ...

And then, as the door had done—as Joanna had half sensed the stone floor of the corridor doing—it began to move again. There was a creaking, a thin, hideous snickle of shivering ice. From its slow bulging it burst into horrible speed, pouring itself over the feet of the nearest sasennan. The man pulled back, hacking at the slithering thing with his sword, but the hairy arms of a Shrieker reached out to him from it, pulling him to his knees and then forward, screaming, face-first into the frozen muck. Whitwell Simm leaned down to drag the young man free and the sasennan's hand shot out, seizing the

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frail old wizard by the arm and hauling him down inexorably into the slime that heaved up to meet him. The water was ice, frozen solid and moving, impossibly, like clouded and filthy gelatin—where she stood behind the batteries Joanna could feel the smoke of cold radiating from it—but the hands and heads of the abominations, hung now with spines of frost, still lashed and snapped within it, ripping at Simm's flesh as he twisted frantically to get free. Brunus and the remaining sasennan managed to hack through the tentacles, the claws—the arm of the warrior it had devoured—and carried Simm, with gobbets of the thing still clinging to his flesh, back to the far end of the chamber. Within the thing itself Q'iin's voice screamed on and on as it advanced upon the wizards.

And then, opposite the cluster of generators and screens, it stopped.

And turned.

For a nightmare second Joanna felt as if she were dreaming, separated from self and reality by the mere fact that this thing, creaking with the scrape of ice as it began to advance on her, was the embodiment of her nightmares.

Then she realized what was happening and yelled, “It's going for the batteries!” In the same instant the Dead God loosed a charge into the thing nearly point-blank. Shards of ice and mud spattered everywhere as the round exploded deep in the gelid mass, Q'iin's voice breaking off with a hideous, gobbling choke.

Each separate glob, including the one from which the sasennan's torso and legs still projected, kicking with a horrible life of their own, began to crawl toward them again.

“Dammit, it eats energy!” Joanna screamed. “If it takes the batteries, the whole Citadel will collapse.”

What the hell am I getting so excited about?
she wondered blindly, casting a frantic glance at the group of wizards but too terrified to leave the protective wall behind which she crouched. The whole Citadel's going to collapse in twenty minutes anyway.

Daurannon shouted something in the trained, booming voice of Power; she had a glimpse of him from the tail of her eye, clinging to Brighthand and Issay, fighting to stay on his feet, his face chalky from loss of blood. The air in the long chamber seemed to glitter and crackle with static, her hair rippled and swirled.

And behind the creature, directly opposite the pile of batteries, another pile of batteries appeared, twice as large and coruscating with blue flickers of lightning.

A second look showed Joanna it was illusion. Antryg had once told her that there were limitations on what could be done with illusion, and this one, though clearly very, very good, still looked wrong in some fashion she could not determine. But for a last-second effort it was far from bad, and the tsaeati did not appear to be a particularly discriminating judge. It hesitated for an instant, its various parts melding stickily into the main mass, then slowly started to crawl toward what it clearly sensed was a still greater concentration of energy.

Daur's voice was a broken gasp. “Open the north door, somebody ... ”

Seldes Katne, torn from the immobility of horror, lunged across the monstrosity's path and threw the huge oak panels wide. The illusory pile of batteries—Joanna noted obliquely that they'd reproduced the brand logos exactly—flickered, wavered, then reappeared in the corridor outside.

The tsaeati moved toward it in a thick crickling of ice, leaving a horrible wake of bloody, frost-rimmed water and slime. Daurannon and Brighthand were clinging to one another like drowning men, kneeling now with heads bowed within the circle of the other mages, focus and laser of their power. Joanna saw the Junior's lips move, heard Nandiharrow repeat to the others, “The Library. The top floor of the Library. It's the farthest place ... ”

“No!” Seldes Katne cried in a voice of despair. None of them heeded. The mages of the blood-circle were all clinging together now, supporting one another, sinking in on each other

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like the ruins of a burned-out house. Their eyes shut, they poured out the last of their magic into the maintenance of the illusion, the drawing of power.

Daur's head fell back against Brighthand's shoulder; from under the boy's pressing fingers blood still pulsed, thick and stinking and redder than anything Joanna had ever imagined. “Issay ... barriers ... illusion. Keep it from finding its way back.” The little mage flitted like a white-haired spider to the doorway through which the creature had passed and began, with long, emaciated hands, to form infinitely stronger versions of those same signs that Magister Magus had written across the corridor in the Vaults not three hours previously.

“Not the Library!” Seldes Katne wailed, standing as close behind the Silent One as she dared. “They can't ... ”

In the corner, Whitwell Simm was still groaning and sobbing as the slimy shreds of the tsaeati slithered from what was left of his arm and crawled like filthy ribbons toward the door, leaving a pustulant black mildew behind. Issay stepped aside to let them past, as if they had been no more than snakes. Beside Joanna, the Dead God set his weapon down and said, “And how long will that illusion foil the thing's instinct to seek out and absorb whatever it can?”

Joanna, nauseated and trembling with shock, had to lean on the stack of batteries to keep her knees from giving way. Reaction was setting in, and despair, on top of swirling light-headedness that left her short of breath. Her own voice sounded weirdly matter-of-fact in her ears as she said, “In fifteen minutes that question's going to become academic ... ”

“What?” The Dead God lunged to check a gauge. 'Nonsense! Barely an hour has elapsed."

Joanna looked at her watch, then up at the tall figure towering above her. “It's been damn near two by my watch.” Then she paused, feeling suddenly foolish. “Oh,” she said. “You have different hours than we do, don't you?” And her knees buckled, and she slipped slowly to the floor. Clawed hands caught her, lifted her as if she'd been a spray of lilies, and carried her to one of the piles of blankets heaped along the wall. Though she didn't lose consciousness, in her grayed-out dizziness Joanna was aware of all things in small vignettes, still-lifes without meaning: Daurannon's face white as eggshell against the black of his hair while Pothatch ripped open his sleeve and Sergeant Hathen tourniqueted his arm; the other mages of the Blood-Circle huddled numbed and shaken on the floor, like the stunned survivors of battle, too shell-shocked to move; two of the novices holding Otaro back from beating his head to pulp against the wall behind him; Whitwell Simm, deep in shock, staring at the greenish brown slime slowly thickening on the melted flesh and half-stripped bones of his arm; a tiny abomination like a bug-eyed purple rat skittering nervously back and forth along the far wall.

She noted, as if from some great distance off, that all the light had died from the room save the torches and lanterns of Silvorglim's sasenna—noted how the ruddy glare danced across the face of the Witchfinder as he called his warriors about him.

She wondered a little distantly why Seldes Katne should be slipping away unnoticed through the north door.

Then Brighthand called out, “Hold on, what the hell you playin' at?” He staggered to his feet as Silvorglim and his troops closed in on the bank of batteries. Two of the Church sasenna caught the young man unceremoniously by the arms, a third struck him hard over the back of the head with the long, iron-hard hilt of a sword. At the same instant the Dead God, kneeling beside Joanna, snapped to his feet and sprang like a skeleton dragon toward the Witchfinder. Two crossbows came up and there was a wicked snap of iron and hardwood; the huge, spiderlike shape collapsed with a crash, long arms stretching toward the machinery that was all of their lives.

There was a moment's stunned silence. Then, into it, Silvorglim spoke.

“What am I doing?” he said softly, addressing the unconscious Brighthand, the other Council mages who stood, immobilized—those of them who could stand—facing the ranked crossbows of the Church's guards.

“I am saving the world. I am doing what should have been done six hundred years ago, no matter what the cost would have been to the Church and to the free armies of humankind.”

In the shadowy torchlight Silvorglim's eyes had the strange, clear yellowness of nearly colorless amber, cold and hard and without emotion, and in his level voice there was a quality of almost exaltation.

“Instead, they bargained with the mages—believed their promises of the half use of power, the lie of noninterference in human affairs. They let them live—they paid them off, worked with them even, did their bidding—not understanding that no mage is capable of good, that the use of these powers to any degree can bring nothing but evil, and plots, and disaster. You say that when those batteries are destroyed, the Citadel will disintegrate into the Void. So be it. I am destroying the Citadel of Wizards—destroying wizardry forever and saving the world from its pollution, once and for all.”

On the whole, the older a teles is, the more powerful its capacity for magic; yet such implements must be observed straitly, and tested often. For whenever such spells develop strange fields of heat and cold, or the random movement of things within the chamber, it has been my experience that it was when the teles was a very old one.

—Grimoire of Gantre Silvas

Joanna screamed, “NO!” and started to her feet as the Witchfinder strode toward the dark ring of the oscillators, a silent, blinking rampart in the flickering gloom. A sasennan swung toward her, crossbow leveled.

And the next instant the darkness was riven by blinding brightness, ozone cutting the stinks of torch smoke and blood with the searing crackle of lightning. Joanna cried, “NO!” again in the same instant she realized Silvorglim had cried out, too—cried out in shock and thwarted rage.

As the Witchfinder sprang back from the spitting curtain of purple-white fire that had ripped upward from the floor between him and the equipment, a deep, familiar voice from the eastern doorway chided, “Really, Yarak, I had no idea your dedication ran so deep.”

Silvorglim rounded like a scorched weasel as Antryg came striding out of the shadows of shattered wood and darkness, his scarecrow tangle of shawl and coat skirts and glittering beads fluttering absurdly and a long killing sword stuck casually through his belt. Three more dark shapes materialized from the dripping hell-mouth on his heels: the Lady Rosamund, leaning heavily on her staff but with a drawn sword in her other hand, and Aunt Min, leaning upon Magister Magus' arm, her pale eyes sharp and bright.

The Witchfinder whispered, “You ... ”

“Well,” Antryg said, “there are two schools of thought on that subject. Don't you think it's time you took a little nap?” He'd reached Silvorglim by that time—the Church sasenna being momentarily too nonplussed to know if, or whom, to attack—and extended a mitted hand to touch the smaller man's forehead.

Silvorglim struck his hand away and nearly suffocated on an enormous yawn. “You can't smother me with a—aargh ... ” He yawned again, his sulfurous eyes blazing with fury even as they fought to remain open. “ ... a cantrip like that one.” His hand fumbled at the sword at his belt.

“I realize that, of course.” Very casually Antryg dropped his other hand over Silvorglim's sword wrist and caught the Witchfinder a terrific crack across the chin with one bony elbow, considerately supporting him as he dropped, stunned, to the floor. The sasenna, taken by surprise, moved in, but the interval had given time for Sergeant Hathen and her troops to collect their senses and spread out. There was a swift clatter of weaponry and then the sudden, fraught silence of a standoff.

“No, no, no,” muttered Aunt Min, pulling one fragile arm free of Magister Magus' grip and doddering purposefully to Antryg's side. “You and you,” she pointed to two Church sasenna at random, “take poor Mr. Silvorglim over to his blankets. Kyra, see what you can do for his headache, please. Q'iin ... ” She paused, and Joanna knew that she was aware of what had become of the beautiful black lady with the sea blue eyes. “Ah, Q'iin.” The old woman sighed and bowed her white head. “My poor little girl.” On the other side of the refectory, the novice Gilda huddled in a corner, her cheek pressed to the plaster of the wall, weeping without a sound.