The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (47 page)

“And you used a teles to generate the power to hold it open?”

She nodded. “I had two up here, little ones—Freath and Nicarynko. Later I took the strongest, the oldest I could learn of, from the storerooms: Vyrayana. I was going to Angelshand to look for more information about the Void, trying to find some way of making the field permanent or of carrying its effects into ... into the real world. The world outside this room. I had to know its strength would hold the circles intact until I returned.”

“I see,” Antryg said softly.

“And then when I read in Salteris' notes about the Brown Star—when I heard that he had had it, that it was there, in Angelshand ... I conceived the idea of bringing you here, of forcing your help. It wasn't difficult, even for me, to locate the man who'd stolen it from Salteris' house, and take it back. I didn't know then how you ... how you felt. Or that the Lady would conceive the same idea. Or that the Council would take your powers away. Only that you were a dog wizard at heart—not one of them.”

“You spoke for me,” Antryg said. “When they were getting ready to lay me under the geas, you protested ... I was grateful.”

Seldes Katne looked away. “I meant it,” she whispered.

“Having so little power of my own ... ” She raised her head, her eyes meeting his again. “I do like you, Antryg. I truly do. It's just that ... ”

Antryg looked around him, at the smeared and faded lines of the circles on the floor. “I don't suppose, once you got back from Angelshand, that you had any difficulty opening a Gate through the Void from this spot.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, I had no difficulty doing ... anything. Anything at all.” There was a lingering glow of ecstasy on her face, a reflected joy. It faded, and her thin mouth pinched tight. “Only, when I came back from Angelshand, I found that the teles had ... had changed. It held more power than I had thought. Sometimes I couldn't even see it. When Daurannon told me about the abominations, I—I wanted to bring you here, to make the magic permanent, quickly, before more evil happened. But they were ahead of me. So when Phormion spoke of a Moving Gate, all I could do was say I'd seen it, too, and keep you from looking anywhere but in the Vaults. And then, when they put the geas on you, I ... I knew I had to get rid of you, too. Because you did know about the Void, and eventually you'd find out and tell them.”

She spoke simply, her dark eyes in shadow, her voice filled with the logic of obsession, of desperation—with the knowledge that, in some way, he would understand. “And after what they did to you, I knew that if they found out about what I had done ... ” Her voice cracked a little, despair strengthening it. “Antryg, if they took even what powers I had from me, it would have been more than I could bear! I couldn't let them know! I couldn't let anyone know.”

Her small hands clenched again on the window's half-rotted frame. “After Otaro saw the Moving Gate—after you said the situation in the Vaults was growing worse—I did try to replace Vyrayana with the two little teles I'd had there before. But it-it wouldn't let me near it. And you kept asking about the teles. Sooner or later you would have found out ...”

“Just tell me this,” Antryg said quietly. “If you had succeeded in killing me—either knifing me in my room that first night in the Pepper-Grinder, or tricking Gru Gwidion into doing it at the Green King's Chapel, where I would be out of any possibility of protection from Aunt Min—what would you have done with Joanna? Would you have released her?”

“Yes,” Seldes Katne said, startled at the question. “Yes, of course. Not immediately, because—well, because the Void was becoming so unstable I was afraid to try to cross it again. I followed Salteris' notes the first time, but I was never—never easy with my power, used in that way. But I would have eventually, when I'd gotten myself more ” ... more straightened out."

“Except that it was impossible to straighten out,” Antryg murmured. “It never would have straightened out—and the power of the Void kept feeding into the teles, distorting and increasing its power ... ”

“I studied,” Seldes Katne said desperately. “I read all the notes, studied everything anyone had written—about the Void and how to cross it; about the teles, about magic ... ” She slumped down to sit upon the window seat, her head bowed, the rain-touched night wind stirring at the ends of her hair. “What is magic, Antryg? Why are some born with it in such abundance, and others born with only enough to realize what it is they lack, and will always lack? All my life I wanted magic, the same way all my life I wanted to be beautiful.”

Antryg leaned a shoulder against one of the twisting pilasters that supported the glass-paned roof. “And had you been beautiful, it would have brought you troubles of its own, you know. Magic is only magic: it isn't sanity, or goodness, or the ability to be a friend or live a decent life. Because I was born with talent in magic, I was shunned by my family, and ... Well, I can't say I was precisely kidnapped by Suraklin, but he would never have used me as he had, had I been ... ” He hesitated, and again she finished for him.

“As untalented as I?”

“I was going to say, had I been of less potential use. For when it came down to it, I was really only a thing to him. I fought for years to go on believing that there was something more to it than that. That he would have cared had I not been what I was, but only who I was. But there wasn't. I suppose dazzlingly beautiful girls get a little of that.”

“Maybe,” Seldes Katne said softly. “But that knowledge doesn't help us dumpy little squabs, with our big noses and our coarse hair and our crooked teeth. I would have willingly been a ... a thing to be used, a vessel to be emptied, to Suraklin or to anyone else, for the sake of having all I knew that others like me could have. And when it came ... ”

She shook her head, and again the wonderment of it, the memory of that brief and shuddering joy, illuminated the puffy, square-jawed face. “Can you understand that I couldn't give it up?”

We give up everything for it,
Suraklin had said. Our lovers, our parents, our homes ... the children we might otherwise bear, the people we might otherwise be. And we consider ourselves fortunate to be allowed by God to make the trade.

“I thought,” she whispered, “I thought if I studied long enough, if I searched hard enough, I might still be able to find a way to transfer some of the powers I had within the field to ... to be effective outside of it. But all the while you kept getting nearer to the truth ... ”

“You never could have, you know,” Antryg said gently. “That field was an enclave of another universe, another place and time—a might-have-been lying parallel to what is for you and me. It is simply not possible.”

She sighed. “I know,” she murmured. “Maybe in my heart I knew it then. But Antryg, within the field my powers were so great. I could cast spells at a distance of miles, shape-change, scry the wind and summon the darkness. I was powerful enough to ... to be one of those who might inherit the powers of the Archmage. I've been librarian here for years, Antryg. I've seen students who were Juniors to me when I was a student, like Nandiharrow, and then students I've taught, like Issay, sit on the High Council ... children like Zake Brighthand and Kyra the Red, scattering power like sunlight from their hands. And I just stayed here, reading about power I could only barely touch, sorting books, making lists, organizing knowledge that to me could be little more than academic, while Daurannon and Rosamund were spoken of as candidates to become Archmage. And my hair got gray. And I got fat and got old, and I knew it would never be mine. It was mine,” she said softly. “Just for a little while.”

Softly, he reminded her, “Only within the field.”

“Oh, yes.” She raised her head, to look at him with those sad dark eyes. “Yes. But how different is that from the others, who only permit themselves to work magic within the bounds of the Citadel? Just knowing it was mine was enough. Just knowing that for once I was ... was one of you.”

She turned back to the window, her knees pressing the sill as she looked out over the long drop to the ragged pelt of black spruce that cloaked the stones below. Beyond that window, the sky seemed to stretch forever, the heart-shivering sky of the far north on the threshold of summer, even near midnight pulsing with liquid light. “I couldn't let them take that away,” she said softly. “And they would have, if they'd found out. If you'd ... you'd learned. I just ... couldn't let it happen.”

Moving her head, she looked back at him over her shoulder. “Do they know?”

“Joanna will have told them.”

“I'm—I'm sorry about Joanna,” she said. “About you, too ... She wouldn't have come to any harm in the Brown Star.”

No,
he thought. Nor would she have come to good ... or to anything at all. Only a life going on and on, without ending, without variation, until, like all those others, she went mad ...

“It's on my desk, by the way, in the other room ... I suppose,” she added, “they'll be coming for me.” She caught his eye. “For us both.”

Antryg sighed. “Yes,” he murmured. He was sorely tempted to simply pocket the Brown Star and take it with him when he left—if Lady Rosamund laid hands on it, the odds were good he himself might end up trapped in its dark, endless mazes. But it was Rosamund and the Council who would have to release, and care for, the prisoners Suraklin had left trapped within. The spells of release were there, in Salteris' notes. He wondered if the Council would heed his written note, begging that the Star not be used again, at least not on the innocent.

But no, he thought. Simply trapping him would now not be enough for them.

He raised his head, his magpie beads glittering in the moonlight. “For us both indeed,” he said softly. He came forward to Seldes Katne's side and rested his hand on her shoulder, and she looked up, startled, into his face.

When Joanna reached the refectory again, it was to find all the long windows of its northwestern side thrown open to the cool stirrings of the night air. Silvorglim and his entire contingent of hasu and sasenna slept stertorously on the piled blankets in their corner, under the novice Kyra's calm, sarcastic eye; Joanna had the feeling they'd be sleeping quite some time. Near them, Magister Magus, clothed in a Wheatlands farmer's bright-colored shirt and baggy breeches that had quite clearly come from the Citadel's slop chest, engaged in a passionate, whispered argument with Nandiharrow and Pothatch. Tom, arms folded and his usual expression of mournful interest on his face, stood by with a couple of small bedrolls and a sack of food.

“ ... can't ride all the way to Angelshand looking like this!”

“Well,” the cook said, slightly miffed, “they're the only things your size, Miss Joanna having taken Tom's spare shirt and all. We could fit you out in a mage's robe.”

“Never!” Magus turned pale. “Good grief, it's bad enough that they'll,” he jerked a thumb at the sleeping Witchfinders “be after me for being in league with you lot. D'you think I want to be lynched?”

Nandiharrow smiled, and there was an ironic but genuine warmth in his eyes. “What, with Tom there to protect you? I suppose you could ride off in your dressing gown if you chose.”

“Very funny. I don't suppose,” his voice dropped still further and he leaned closer to the tall, gray-haired man, “I don't suppose you could ... well ... I know there's spells of forgetfulness. You couldn't arrange it so that none of them would remember they'd seen me here, could you?”

Nandiharrow shook his head. “It's trespassing the borders of our vows already, to keep them sleeping. You're a wizard, Magus ... ”

“I am not!” the little man insisted, rising to his full five-foot-six. “I am a spiritual counselor, and the only reason I'm not working such a spell upon them myself is because your monopoly on the teaching of magic made it impossible for the master who taught me to learn such a spell.”

“Well, if we keep on arguing,” Tom reasoned, “it'll be dawn, and that lot'll wake up, and the whole question about what you're wearin' for the trip'll get a little academic.”

Joanna stepped past them, looking quickly around the long room. Torches still provided most of the illumination, though here and there, feeble threads and feathers of witchlight had begun to burn in the air. Ninetentwo, she noticed, was up and about, a huge, silently moving troll tinkering among the innards of the now-dark oscillators, the bandages on his shoulders and back pale streaks against the smooth-stretched olive sheen of his skin. Closer to Joanna, a little knot of mages were grouped around an old woman, thin and straight like some elderly warrior-priestess, who seemed to be subsiding into an uneasy, nightmare-ridden doze. Bentick was holding her head on his lap, and under the disheveled white mane Joanna could see horrible claw-rakes on the woman's face and dried blood on the fingernails of her twitching hands. The Steward's face was tracked with tears.

In a corner, near the sleeping Gilda, the boy Brighthand sat with his head bowed almost to his knees. He looked up when Joanna touched his shoulder, and in his dark eyes she saw the dry, brittle deadness of one who has shut out every feeling, every touch of life, rather than endure the pain inside. In a corner Otaro the Singer moved and whispered fitfully in his sleep; Brighthand did not even turn his face to look.

“It's the same as your master Otaro, isn't it?” she whispered. The boy nodded, his eyes avoiding hers.

“It must have been somethin' about the Gate they saw.” There was an academic detachment to his voice, as if he spoke of a stranger. “I should have told someone earlier,” he said softly, his dark eyes sick with guilt. “I should have disobeyed him and got someone to look at him. Then tonight, when the Gates all closed, I hoped ... when the Citadel went back the way it was ... ”

Personally, looking about her at the long, unnaturally quiet room, Joanna doubted that the Citadel would ever go back to being as it had been.

“It might have done that if magic were the cause of the madness,” she said, laying a hand on one bony shoulder. His gray robe was still patched with stiffening swatches of blood, brown and smelly. “But it sounds like the madness was caused by a gas of some kind, some sweet-smelling toxin that came through a wormhole down in the Vaults and caused the hallucination of the Gates moving, and the voices, and all those other things.”