The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (49 page)

God does have a sense of humor—but I've encountered more sophisticated ones in some taverns I've visited.

—Minhydrin the Fair

Friday nights were always busy at Enyart's. The lights were low and artistically placed to shed slats of white across the bubble-gum pastels of the walls, an illumination kind to strain-puffed features and fatigue-reddened eyelids. The floor was slick fake marble, the chairs—in the small area along the wall for those who really wanted the more popular combinations of carbohydrates to soak up the booze—slick black Italianate paper clips; the clientele, for the most part, slick refugees from the law offices, real-estate agencies, and production companies along Ventura Boulevard. There wasn't a soft surface in the place, and conversation ping-ponged off the angular walls. In the background, jacked to carry over the general noise level, a ragged-edged Liverpoolian voice wailed Ben E. King's “Stand By Me” over the modern, upscale equivalent of a jukebox.

Standing uncertainly in the doorway Joanna craned her neck to see over the heads of the crowd. After a moment she spotted the flash of round-lensed glasses up behind the bar, the tangle of graying curls half a head over the tallest of his customers, and the silhouette of a long, beaky nose.

Beside her, Ruth said, “You want me to get a table?”

“Not unless you're really crazy about waiting an hour and a half for coq au merde.”

Her voice shook a little. Though she'd found his absurd purple coat and bloodied calico shirt on the bed when she'd come home from Galaxsongs this afternoon, and a note in his careful and nearly unreadable block printing, not until this moment, actually seeing him, did the anxiety truly leave her, the anxiety that had followed her through the dark terror of the Void and all through the twenty-four hours which had followed: the fear that, after all, he would change his mind. That she never would see him again. That all the years to come would be lost.

“I dunno,” Ruth said thoughtfully. “That blond waiter's gorgeous.”

“All
waiters in Los Angeles are gorgeous,” pointed out Joanna. “They're all actors between jobs.”

“That one's not,” Ruth objected, pointing to another.

“He's-working on a screenplay. Come on.”

As she edged her way toward the bar, Joanna, though clad in the leather minidress she believed she'd paid far too much for, felt curiously protected; every male eye in the place zeroed automatically and instantly on Ruth's spectacular cloud of moussed raven curls and the exotic perfection of her face. Not much to Joanna's surprise, Ruth did not make it to the bar with her.

“So you got back okay,” she said quietly, as Antryg turned to catch her eye.

He came out around the end of the bar and bent his tall height to kiss her, and there was a desperate relief in his touch. It was as if he, too, almost couldn't believe he was there. Without a word exchanged, his partner behind the bar, known to all as the Beautiful Kevin, had moved to take over dispensing tequila and Chardonnay. “I'm delighted to make the same observation about you, my dear.”

“I didn't ... ” She hesitated, shy of speaking her true thoughts though she knew that he, of all people, wouldn't laugh. “I was afraid you'd suffered a fit of gallantry and changed your mind.”

“I did.” Antryg looked down at her with a small, wry smile. He was wearing his usual faded Levi's, a shabby T-shirt inscribed broken glass world tour, and earrings that had to have come from some East Valley K mart in the early seventies. “And then I found I couldn't go through with it.”

Her smile was one of genuine amusement, not at him, but at herself, realizing how like her in some ways he was. “Antryg,” she said softly, “tell me this. You'd have believed me if I said, 'I really want you to go.' Why can't you believe me when I say, 'I really want you to stay, in spite of what may come'?”

The rueful answer flickered deep within his eyes. “I suppose because I want it so much.” Then he drew himself up with great dignity and added, “And because it's more gallant to sacrifice all for love instead of sticking around and enjoying it like the thoroughgoing moral coward I am.”

She nudged him in the ribs, gently, for she felt the bandages under the thin cotton of his shirt. “For a man who'd abandon his sweetheart in another universe surrounded by people who are talking about killing him, you should talk about gallantry.”

He sighed and hugged her again; there were bandages on his arms, too, where the worst of the claw-rakes cut, and one still on his hand. Among them his tattoo stood out like the label on a beer bottle. She wondered what he'd told his colleagues ... The truth, undoubtedly.

“Were they?” He shook his head. “I was afraid of that.”

She looked up at him, her arm still around his waist. Over the chatter of the crowd—

“Steven was saying on the set today ... ”

“ ... corporate buy-out's going to result in a bloodbath like the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Accounting ... ”

“You know, baby, I can tell you things about yourself that probably you don't even know ... ”

—she caught a flying wisp of Linda Ronstadt's voice: “Desperado,” a song that always brought a burning to her throat.

“You let Seldes Katne go,” she said, “didn't you?”

And felt again how well she knew him, how well she read him, in the defeated bow of his head.

“Joanna, I couldn't judge her,” he said. “Maybe if I hadn't spent seven years imprisoned in the Silent Tower, unable to use the magic that I knew was mine ... Maybe if the Council hadn't put me under the geas ... Maybe if I hadn't lived here for four months, existing on sippings and dreams.” He shook his head. “And she'd had over fifty years of wanting it, of knowing what it is and seeing everyone around her using it, and not having it, not ever. I don't know what I'd have done in her place.”

Joanna was silent, leaning her head against his chest, standing in the shelter of his arm. The shuddering darkness she'd seen in the corner of her room returned to her, the absolute depth of terror, knowing what was to happen to her ... Seldes Katne had done that. Seldes Katne had given her those hideous hours—days—in the Brown Star's sightless mazes, wondering if she were mad, wondering if she'd be there forever.

And yet, all she remembered of the stocky little librarian from those hours in the darkened refectory was the sad desperation of her eyes. An echo returned to her from her own days in school, watching the pretty girls, watching the girls who were sure of themselves, of their beauty, of their skill with words and wit and social situations, while she retreated into the safety of her books and her cats and the computer games that let her forget about the world outside.

“I take it you opened a way for her into the world where her magic was strong? Where she'd be a powerful mage?”

Silently, Antryg nodded.

Almost as an afterthought, Joanna remembered that Seldes Katne had tried repeatedly to murder Antryg, too.

“Do you think she'll be happy there?”

“No.” His sparse eyebrows quirked a little with regret. “No, I don't think Kitty has much capacity for happiness. She may find that out there—or she may meet someone, or encounter some new situation, which allows her to develop it ... But it would be presumptuous of me to say. The future is the future, Joanna—maybe we all need to spend a little time in the City of Dreams.”

He shook his head, and leaned a shoulder against the wall. Over on the bar's minuscule dance floor, a blond studmuffin with shoulders like a door and, Joanna guessed, an IQ that rivaled his shoe size bobbed and weaved with Ruth to a semi-slow reggae version of “Do You Wanna Dance?”; both smiling, like animals purring under strokes, happy simply to be what they were. In high school, Joanna reflected, she would have hated Ruth without ever speaking a word to her.

In those days she had had very little capacity for happiness herself.

Antryg's voice was very low. “They'll be after me now, you know.”

“Daurannon said no one was going to open Gates in the Void again—that it was too dangerous to tamper with. Of course, he may have been lying.”

“I don't think so,” Antryg said. “Daurannon usually believes what he's saying, while he's saying it. But when it comes to a thing which stands in the way of what someone really wants, people tend to have shockingly bad memories. He truly loved Salteris, as Rosamund truly loved Aunt Min ... and neither of them will ever forgive me.”

If she dies,
Rosamund had said, you are a dead man ...

But Antryg had known that from the start.

“With all the confusion I forgot to ask them,” she said after a time of watching the dancers. “And I meant to ... who inherited the Master-Spells after Aunt Min died? Who did become the Archmage? From the way Daurannon and Lady Rosamund were being polite to each other I have the feeling it wasn't either of them. I take it you know.”

“Oh, yes,” Antryg said softly, and a shiver went through him, although the bar, with its close-packed bodies, its smells of cigarettes and beer and synthetic aldehyde, was warm as a Jacuzzi. In the upside-down flicker of the slanting light his eyes were wide and daft behind his spectacles, and filled with a haunted grief.

“It's a curious thing, the Master-Spells,” he said at length. “No one can tell to whom they will pass until it actually happens, but when it does, most of the Academics know immediately, some of them even without having met that person ... though of course wizards of that strength are usually on the Council, these days. I was rather hoping they would pass to Zake Brighthand, as I'm certain they eventually will. He's a good boy and will grow to be a good man, with a core in him like a note of white music—and he doesn't hold a grudge against me, which is getting rather rare among wizards these days.”

“I take it they didn't,” Joanna said dryly.

“No.” There was a look of pained regret in his face, and he propped his glasses onto the bridge of his nose with a long forefinger. “No, in fact, they didn't. I'm sure Rosie and Daur are going to blame the disruption caused by the surrounding presence of the Void for the feet that neither of them became Archmage, or the fields of alien magic which were everywhere ... all of which, they will say, I engineered. And perhaps they did affect it. In a way I wish they had fallen to either of those two. It would be better for me if they had.”

“Someone who hates you more than they do?” asked Joanna doubtfully. “Who ... not Bentick?” Another thought crossed her mind at the thought of the fields of power, appearing and disappearing in the Citadel during those last hours, giving powers undreamed of to people no one had suspected ...

“Not Seldes Katne herself? Or ... Silvorglim!?”

Down at the far end of the bar someone called his name; Kevin was making change for a platinum blond waitress who was also clearly between acting jobs. Antryg raised a finger in a be-there-in-a-minute gesture and turned back to Joanna.

“No,” he said, his voice small with regret. “Even at that, I might have some chance of being let alone—some chance of escape. But no. I'm afraid they fell to me.”

Joanna was still looking up at him in silence as he reached down to put a knuckle under her chin and shut her open mouth for her. Then he leaned over and kissed her lips and, with a rueful grin, hooked a bottle of Sauza Especial from beneath the counter and strode off to pour drinks.

At various times in her life, Barbara Hambly has been a high-school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in Southern California, with the exception of one high-school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with reading The Wizard of Oz at an early age and it has continued ever since.

She attended the University of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the south of France and worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master's degree in the subject. At the university, she also became involved in karate, making Black Belt in 1978 and competing in several national-level tournaments. She now lives in Los Angeles.