The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (5 page)

Joanna had betrayed him. Suraklin the Dark Mage, dead-alive for twenty-five years, would devour the life and magic of the world as he had devoured the minds and souls of three men already, would go down the ages as a cold and silent vampire, invisible, untouchable, gloating in his chosen dark. And there was nothing he could do to stop him.

He tried to scream and the pain changed. His bruised arms smarted where they'd hit the pavement of the flood channel, and an egg-shaped lump of agony localized itself at the back of his skull. His hands hurt bitterly in the dawn cold of the room, an echo of the screws the Witchfinders had used seven months ago to dislocate the joints.

Joanna ...

Anger swept back upon him, anger and fear.

Someone, somewhere, had Joanna, frightened and alone.

The first thing of which he had become aware, of course, was that his powers of magic were bound.

He moved his hand, half expecting to find himself still manacled. But it was only the braided silk knots of spell-cord, twined separately around each wrist. His fingers touched the worn softness of old blankets, and he smelled the unmistakable, fusty odor of a straw bed tick under his cheek.

Somewhere a bird sang, plaintive and sweet and achingly familiar.

Meadowlarks.

He moved again, to the muted creak of mattress ropes unevenly tightened.

The air was a threnody of spring foliage, of water, of spruce sweetness and the sour, acidic pong of bogs; of flat distances running untouched to the hem of wind-washed sky; of distant ice.

The Sykerst.

He was home.

The ache of it wrung him, obliterating all else in the hurt of nostalgic joy.

Shadow dimmed the nacreous dawn light that lay across his face.

“Daurannon?” He blinked up, recognizing the man who bent over him. The wide-set hazel eyes, the cupid-bow mouth, the straight nose and coal-black tousle of hair—Daurannon Stapler was one of those men who would look seventeen till the day he died.

“Drink this.” The melodious tenor still had the soft under-purr of a lower-class St. Cyr accent. How many nights, Antryg wondered, had he heard that accent, in the years he and Daur spent studying together under the Archmage Salteris' tutelage? And after that, when he himself had been admitted to the High Council—the youngest mage ever to be so—and had been, nominally, Daur's tutor. He wondered, as he had even then, how much that had bothered the friend who had been only three years younger than himself.

With Daurannon it was always difficult to tell.

The bed ropes creaked as Daur sat beside him, helped him up with a strong arm beneath his head and shoulders; the cold stem of a metal goblet was pressed into his grip. As his lips touched the cup's rim, he smelled the bitter steep of phylax root in the water and drew back.

“If you don't drink it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call the guards and make you,” said Daur's voice behind his head. “I don't want to do this, but we've got to ... now. They'll be in in a minute.”

By the smell of it the concentration of phylax was very strong, enough to strip him of any ability to work all but the most minor magics for at least twenty-four hours. On the other hand, thought Antryg through the pounding pain in his skull, he had no doubt they'd hold him down and pour the stuff down his throat. That was what the Witchfinders had done, anyway, nearly drowning him in the process. With the spell-cord around his wrists, there was no real way he could fight.

Not against Daur, anyway.

Even in that split-second hesitation he heard the door open. He sat up quickly and drained the potion, almost throwing it up again immediately as his head gave a blinding throb. “Dammit,” he whispered, his body bending under the reaction to the pain. Daurannon's hands, firm and warm and sure of themselves, pushed through his tangled hair to touch his scalp, seeking automatically the energy lines and pressure points; he felt the pain shunt away like fluid from a lanced sore, and with it, the worst of the aftertaste of his dreams.

After a few queasy moments he managed to straighten up a little. Around the low, coffin-shaped arch of the small chamber's door he made out the clotted wall of black that was all he could see of the guards.

But even without his spectacles he knew the room. It was the larger of the two upstairs chambers in the round stone house called the Pepper-Grinder, one of the several dwellings in the Citadel of Wizards traditionally given over to novices and Juniors. The lumpish, uneven window, and its sill and jambs of fieldstone, was half-obscured by encroaching ivy and weeds—clearly Bentick the Steward was having his usual problems finding enough village youths willing to help with the gardening.

The casements were open. The air breathed a delirium of dew.

He frowned up at Daur. “Is old Fred still the gardener here?” he asked, squinting. Most mages were able to control or arrest the deterioration of their own vision; he'd lost half his eyesight within a year of the Council's locking him in the Silent Tower. “He must have been seventy when I left, and that was nine years ago.”

A faint, discontented stirring eddied the ranks congregated in the doorway; Antryg held out the cup upside down, a final droplet splashing to the worn, stained planking of the floor. “All gone,” he assured the guards and put up one hand to gingerly massage the back of his neck. “I must say I'm tremendously flattered at your opinion of what a dangerous fellow I am, but I really wish you'd listened to a more realistic briefing about my abilities as a hand-to-hand fighter. Surely you could have informed them, Daur.”

“I wasn't here,” Daurannon said quietly.

He glanced sideways, meeting bland, deceptive eyes beneath their preposterous shelf of lashes. For all his choirboy charm, Daurannon had always been hard to read, and there was an opaqueness to him now, a wariness more pronounced than ever, that hid what lay inside.

“There was an abomination, a hideous thing, they said, at the Green King's Chapel in the forest beyond the village.”

“Ah.” Antryg turned his attention to picking at the knots that bound the crimson welt of the spell-cord to his wrist. “And was there? You can go, by the way,” he added, glancing up at the guards who still lingered in the doorway. They started to obey him, then caught themselves. Daurannon signed assent, with only the slightest, annoyed compression of his lips, then turned back to his former fellow student.

“I saw nothing.” He wore the purple satin stole of the High Council, Antryg noted—he had heard of Daurannon's ascension while he himself was a prisoner in the Silent Tower. A scabbarded killing sword was thrust through his belt. Like Antryg—like all the novices—Daurannon had trained as a sasennan during the first year of his schooling in magic. As of nine years ago, when Antryg had been thrown off the High Council for the final time and ejected from the Citadel for good, Daurannon had still kept up his training. They'd fought each other in hundreds of bouts, with split-bamboo training swords, up and down the long room on the top floor of the house called the Harlot. Antryg remembered that the excellence of his friend's technique, his speed and coordination, had nearly compensated for the fact that, in an all-out fight, Daurannon was basically a coward.

But unlike most cowards he'd admitted it and hadn't, as many cowards did, added bullying and lying to his lack of nerve. Antryg had wondered in later years whether this had stemmed from innate honesty or from the knowledge that nobody can hide on the training floor.

By the look of those broad shoulders under the fine dark wool, he hadn't let his training slide into abeyance.

“If you'd wanted me,” Antryg went on after a moment in a reasonable voice, “you could have sent a letter, you know.” He knotted the ends of the spell-cord together and began the preliminary loops of a cat's cradle over his long, crooked fingers. “The postal system in that universe is marvelous, really almost as good as the Angelshand penny post.”

“Would you have stayed to keep an appointment if we'd written for one?”

“Well ... ”He shifted his fingers, but instead of assuming a new and pleasing shape, the spell-cord deteriorated into a sorry tangle. Antryg sighed and began again. “It would depend on how nicely I was asked. Lady Rosamund had years of deportment lessons as a girl. Somewhere in there she must have learned to write a very convincing letter of assignation.”

Daur reached gingerly over and removed the silky crimson loops from among Antryg's fingers, handling the cords as if they were hot and setting them quickly on the floor beside the bed. “Some of the Council,” he said, “seem to think that you might be behind it all.” He reached into a pocket and produced Antryg's spectacles. The steel frames were bent where Antryg had fallen on them; he took them from Daurannon and straightened them carefully before putting them on.

“Behind the abominations that have been appearing, you mean?”

Daur's black brows snapped together. “Then you know about them.”

“Well,” pointed out Antryg reasonably, “you just told me about one, and since there's been a great deal of activity in the Void lately, it stands to reason there must be others.” He shivered a little—the Citadel of Wizards lay in latitudes far to the north of Los Angeles—and rubbed at the ache in the crooked bones of his hands. “And I do get blamed for things of that nature almost as a matter of course. Was that what decided you to come looking for me?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Daur said, getting to his feet. “Are you ready? The High Council will be waiting.”

“At this hour?” Antryg readjusted the spectacles on his long nose and climbed stiffly to his feet, “I'm flattered that condemning me to death has risen in priority above Bentick's breakfast. And speaking of breakfast, do you think Pothatch would be up to getting us some coffee when we get there? Pothatch is still the cook here, isn't he? And muffins—the Manchurian Panda-Date makes very good kung pao beef but that was an awfully long time ago ... ”

“Don't flatter yourself,” Daurannon cut in quietly, his voice suddenly hard. “You were condemned to death four months ago.”

Antryg sighed. “Another pretension crushed.”

“And in any case,” the younger mage said after a moment, “that isn't why you're here.”

The guards fell in around them as they emerged into the little gallery that bisected the Pepper-Grinder halfway up its tall interior. Spiraling iron steps looped down to the lower floor, half of which was occupied by the usual student clutter of books, crystals, dried herbs, and the endless lists that novices and Juniors had to memorize; the other half had been cleared for the practice of drawing Circles of Power. Secondor third-level Junior circles, Antryg automatically identified them, for minor spells of Summoning, drawn by a tall young woman of upper-bourgeois background from Angelshand who'd never been in love. Three steps led up to the little door; Antryg ducked his head, and his graying curls brushed the lumpish gargoyle carved upon the keystone. The guards crowded behind.

May dawn on the Wizards' Tor. More strongly than ever, the reminiscences of home. “Is old Fred still the gardener?” He looked around him at the jungle of wild grape and hardy taiga laurel that was, as usual, threatening to swallow the dozen or so little houses shared by the Citadel's Junior population. Against the gray-weathered wood and dark stone of the walls, the parakeet green of new-fledged rowan and birch stood out like fresh paint, sharply contrasting with the spruces' clotted darkness.

“No,” said Daurannon. “He retired four years ago; his nephew Tom's taken over. And as usual, Bentick's not having any luck getting him help.”

Antryg's boots, and the following feet of the guards, thumped hollowly on a short walkway of splintery planks across a sharp dip in the rocks to a half-dozen wooden stairs, and so up to the narrow, cobblestoned road that wound its way among the close-crowded labyrinth of buildings and trees.

Between the Juniors' houses—cellar to attic, where the hill was steep—ran a dozen little covered bridges, galleries, and staircases, all ramshackle, tiny, narrow, and needing paint. Nearly everything in the Citadel was connected. Antryg could have climbed from the pillared stateliness of the Council Hall up to the round marble observatory platform that crowned the Library's soaring bulk, six hundred feet above at the summit of the hill, without once going outside, had he cared to take a winding course through kitchen, laundry, cellars, and the bridges that linked nearly all the residences. And indeed, in the cruel months of the Sykerst winters, everyone at one time or another did precisely that.

But in spring, despite the glass-sharp chill in the air, and certainly through the short, soul-hurting magic of the muggy Sykerst summers, no one did so who had a chance to walk outside.

The little road, between its crumbling balustrades of field-stone, came clear of the trees just beyond the house called the Island of Butterflies, after a place in a fairy tale, and Antryg stopped, in spite of Daurannon's hand on his elbow pressing him on.

At this point the hillside dropped below them in a nearly sheer escarpment of granite to the pines clustering below. From here one could look directly across into the upper windows of the Polygon, the Citadel's main edifice, which rose in stately splendor from the easier southern slope: an incongruous-looking building whose lower floors and massive porch columns had been cut out of the living granite of the hill itself. The upper floors, above the columned dignity of the Council Hall, were a curious composite of later styles and materials, piled one on top of the other like a peasant wedding cake, the monolithic stonework and arcades of six centuries ago supporting garish Gothic arches and breezeways, galleries of carved wood weathered gray as pewter by the harshness of the northland winters, encrustations of jewel-like half-timbering, ornamental brickwork, and frivolous rococo turrets added by Pipin the Little, the Archmage who had immediately preceded Antryg's own master Salteris.

Turning, Antryg craned his neck to look up over the intervening walls and clusters of alder and spruce to the steep outcropping immediately above, where the foursquare bulk of the Library, the most ancient portion of the Citadel, loomed pale as old ash against the rising light. Its fortresslike slit windows had mostly been replaced by wide arches of glass, and along its eastern side, cantilevered out over the sheer granite drop of the hill, some nobleman anxious to win the wizards' favor had paid to install a conservatory, a ridiculous jeweled swallow's nest balanced on buttress and pillar, flashing in the new light of day.