The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (8 page)

“Antryg ... ”

He flinched from the soft creak of that ancient voice and kept his face turned away. But he could feel Minhyrdin's pale blue stare, and around his mind, like a tightening silver rope, felt the implacable force of her will. It drew at him, willing him to turn, an ancient power, rooted deep: a tree in the rocks, but a tree whose roots have melded with the roots of the mountain, taking strength from the fire deep within. She was bidding him to meet her eyes.

He kept his face averted for as long as he could, but the Master-Spells, the domination that the Archmage held over every wizard, drew on him, compelled him like the geared wheels of the rack, far beyond the capacity of human flesh to resist. Sweat sprang out on his face as he concentrated on looking down into his teacup, on looking anywhere but into her eyes, and he felt his hands tremble.

Then, through no volition of his own, he found himself facing those twin pale skies of faded aquamarine. Within them he thought he saw, not an old woman, but a girl in tawdry riches, scarcely taller than a child, with a dancer's muscular legs, a saffron tangle of hair heaped on her head and spilling in handfuls upon her shoulders, flashing with jeweled combs. And beyond that the image again of an ancient tree, roots locked to the living bones of the earth and drinking iron from them, so that the core of the tree had grown into steel.

The phylax he had drunk had numbed his ability to use magic, even as spell-cord did, but the power within him remained. He called upon it now, summoning his own strength from the chaotic, murky well of his being, trying to look away, to put the alien presence of her will, of the Master-Spells, from his mind. He tried to think of anything—of Joanna's cats playing, of Joanna herself, a prisoner and in danger somewhere ... scenes from movies, television commercials, rock 'n' roll lyrics ...

He couldn't let them take his powers from him, he needed them to find her.

But the steel strength of that ancient tree, twisted, black, incomparably strong, still gripped his mind. It was the strength of the earth, backed by the Master-Spells, the terrible strength of domination, and against the deep wisdom he saw in Minhyrdin's eyes he could not find anger to fight.

I will not give in to you ... I will not allow you to command me.

His breath thickened, and though there was no pain—yet—he felt as if every muscle in his body strained and cracked.

Joanna,
he thought, trying to summon back Ruth's voice, that panicked description of a vision glimpsed in shadow. A dark robe vanishing down a tunnel of night. One of them has her ... or all of them. They're lying to me ... I can't ...

He clutched at the thought with the desperation of a man clutching the last tree root above an abyss, fighting not only gravity but the dragging of a whirlpool, pulling him down. Like a silver wedge driven in under his fingers, the Master-Spells plucked coldly at his loosening grip.

Don't do this to me .

If he could just turn his eyes away, plunge his mind down into darkness.

But Minhyrdin the Fair would be waiting for him in that darkness. And she'd be here, when he returned.

“Antryg ... ” The voice within his mind was not the scratchy, worn-out creak, but the bell-clear command of a wild-hearted dancer in her garish gown a century out of fashion ... the voice of Minhyrdin the Fair, Archmage of the High Council in her later life, oldest and strongest. She was standing over him now, as he pressed back as far as he could in his chair; he was barely conscious of his body anymore, save that he felt deathly cold and could not turn his head away. He couldn't reply, couldn't release his hold for even the instant it would take to acknowledge. There was pain now, too, or something that read as pain.

“Antryg, you know that we can force your powers from you. I am within your mind now; in a moment I will bring in the others. They will strip you, break you ... ”

“No ... ” His breath came in sobs, fighting for darkness, for silence, for anything other than that terrible shining strength that cleaved his brain like a laser. He didn't know whether he uttered the word or only thought it.

“Surrender, child. It will hurt you less.”

His mind was beyond framing words, beyond even the whisper of denial. It was naked before her, weaponless and paralyzed, overmatched and cut to pieces. Distantly he still remembered that if he let his powers be taken away from him he stood in danger of losing Joanna, of being stripped forever of that quirky, shy, and hesitant love and left anchorless in darkness ... remembered that one—or all—of them had taken her.

But their dark presences hovered on the edges of his mind, waiting behind the small, shining angel of the Archmage's light. He felt their thoughts, like wolves closing on a blood-scent—shadows of enmity, hatred, fear, secrets ... and somewhere, a glimpse of something else, something utterly dark and as filled with desperation as he was himself ...

Even that brief awareness made his concentration slip and crack, and he felt her take another inch of ground. Whether his own eyes were open or closed he no longer knew, and it didn't matter. Those blue eyes, now sharp and filled with color like the killing sky of deep desert, burned like a watching tiger's in his soul.

“I will protect you, from the abominations and from them.”

He was beyond reply, beyond breathing, dizzy and floating, chilled through in spite of the sweat that ran down his face.

"Surrender to the geas of the Council, Antryg; consent to its binding. I will see to it that your powers are later restored.

Hands touched him, slipping in over his shoulders, his throat, his scalp. The darkness of their power pressed in on him, pulling away pieces of his strength as they would have taken useless weapons from hands numbed by pain and shock, their own power glittering like white-hot knives. They would begin to tear him soon, dissecting his mind as the Master-Spells forced it open. Her awareness was burning light, but theirs would be calcining fire.

Joanna ...

He managed to whisper, “Very well.”

For a long time Antryg lay on the rock they called Melliga's Throne after some ancient Archmage or, perhaps, said some accounts, after a local deity of forgotten years—no one recalled which. Whoever she had been, Antryg thought detachedly, she had picked a good place to receive her petitioners or intercept intruders into the Valley of Shadows ... or simply to lie, as he was lying, with the wind now and then stirring his hair, lifting and flattening the thin cotton of his T-shirt against his ribs, the thready sunlight slowly warming his flesh without coming near to dissolving the core of ice and pain locked into his bones.

His powers were gone. He was crippled, cauterized somewhere inside. He hadn't passed out—they wouldn't let him—and afterward he'd even managed to bow shakily and say, “I trust you'll all excuse me,” as he left. He didn't remember much about leaving the Citadel, except hearing the Lady Rosamund's clear silver bell of a voice saying in the Council chamber behind him, “Let him go. He has to come back, you know.”

Yes, he thought. He had to go back.

Here on the rock—the Throne—the pain had hit him, two long, shuddering waves an hour or so apart, as if lungs and spine and nerves were being ripped out in bleeding handfuls: greedy silver knives and long, clever fingers pushing apart the sutures of his skull to dig out portions of his brain. He'd blacked out the second time, come to weak and sobbing with a pulped exhaustion, the warm rock beneath his cheek and the shadows of the long weed stems lying far over on the granite's bleached breast.

Then he had only lain, like a rag on a beach, listening to the sigh of the wind in the endless sea of spruce and ghostly aspen that stretched out behind him and the soft chewing of the Crooked River over its stones below the high platform of the Throne. Listening, and knowing that if he hadn't yielded to the Master-Spells of his own accord, it would have been much, much worse.

Below him he heard a meadowlark's cry, lilting and joyous as the bird flung itself free of the earth. He fetched a deep breath, the air entering his lungs with that cold, startling sharpness that is neither taste nor smell, but rather a sort of awakening; there was a stab of pain deep inside him, as if he had incautiously rolled over onto something sharp, but not nearly as bad as it had been. After a time he struggled up onto his elbows, looking down and back at the Citadel and the country around.

He lay near the edge of the Throne, in reality a sort of natural platform, a blurred and misshapen square of granite overlooking the little break in the ring of high ground that surrounded the Valley of Shadows. The valley itself, an irregular, oblong dale two or three miles long by nearly two wide, was mostly open meadow and not shadowy at all, though the encompassing sprucewoods of the taiga encroached on its northern end and sent a long tentacle of trees down both sides of the Crooked River, which wandered in a series of twisting loops down its eastern edge. Boulders dotted the short grass; from Antryg's vantage point, he could see great patches of frail northlands flowers, lupine and anemones and gaudy, paperlike poppies, as if a gypsy had passed through and left colored scarves lying carelessly strewn in the grass.

There were stories that spoke of some local grand duke-back in the days before wizardry became respectable—who had marched his army against the Citadel in vengeance for some real or fancied slight. His men had camped around the walls of the Citadel for two nights, and on the third night (Bentick's version of the story said that the wizards in the Citadel had warned the attacker repeatedly to take himself away; Suraklin, recounting it to Antryg years previously, had said, Without warning ... ), the waters of the Crooked River had risen in roaring spate, mysteriously prevented from flowing out through the gap between the Throne and the granite hillock opposite, and had drowned the offending grand duke and all his train.

Looking down into the dale, Antryg believed it. Certainly the long fan of strewn rock below the gap in the hills spoke of floods in the past—not one, but over and over. The main wall of the Citadel itself, rising on its great jutting cone of gray rock in the midst of the vale, circled the granite hill just above the level of the surrounding ring, though these days the newer structures—the mule barn and dairy among their web of paddock and fence, the stillrooms and vegetable gardens—lay spread like a lady's train over the lowest slopes and among the clumps of spruce and alder on the valley floor.

Shaggy with its ancient trees, its moss-choked fountains and tiny gardens, the Citadel itself rose, buildings of every age and period clinging like swallows' nests to the steep rock. Suspended over the sheer northeast face, the Conservatory flashed dully in shadow, like a collection of dirty glass. Higher up, triumphant in the daffodil sun of afternoon, the marble turret of the observation platform shone white and blue with mosaic work and flashed with threaded lines of gold.

“Study for the sake of study—pah.” He could still hear Suraklin's soft, even voice saying it. He'd been buttering a scone—the scene was as clear to Antryg as if it had taken place that morning—the slant of early beams through the narrow lights of the sunroom window had turned his eyes and hair nearly the same color as the butter, the honey, the biscuit in his hand. “They like to pretend they have withdrawn from the vulgar world of money and politics and the petty groping for power. But let the Emperor cut one copper of his subsidies to them or try to appropriate the revenues of one of the pieces of property they own in every city of the Realm—let the Church step one inch over the lines they have drawn up for the Church to follow—and you'd see what they've been quietly studying in their peaceful bookrooms all these years. Why should they fight, when they've made the Emperor tamely give them whatever they wanted? Why take the trouble to police their competition, when the Inquisition will do it and let them pretend their lily white hands are clean?”

His own hands, very narrow and long-fingered, wielded the tiny silver butter knife as if he were dissecting a lizard in his workroom; when he was done, he handed the buttered scone to Antryg, who sat, a long, gawky, strange-looking boy of fifteen, at the other side of the pale-scrubbed oak of the little table. It was a gesture of curious kindness beside which the bone-stripping sarcasm, the hideous magics in which he called Antryg to participate, dissolved like shadows in morning sunlight and left Antryg even now—knowing everything that he knew—with the memory only of how warm that illusion of caring had been.

Antryg sighed and shook his head at himself. What a consummate vampire the man had been.

A shadow fell across him. Rolling over, with a little shock of residual pain in his bones, he shaded his eyes and looked up to see the librarian Seldes Katne standing in the long grass that grew from a split in the faded rock of the Throne.

“I've brought you a coat.” She held it out to him—a ridiculous garment from the Citadel slop chest, clearly the former property of some actor or mountebank: broad bands of tarnished red and gold tinsel slashing the worn plum-covered velvet of its extravagant skirts. The small wind stirred its folds and moved Seldes Katne's black robe and ash gray braid. “It's growing cold.”

“Thank you.” He got unsteadily to his feet, Aunt Min's asymmetrical shawl sliding from his shoulders as he accepted the more substantial garment with hands that still felt oddly weak. But the first wave of nausea had faded, replaced by ravenous hunger. By the lay of the shadows, it would be nearly suppertime, and he felt chilled and empty to the marrow of his bones. “And thank you for speaking out for me. It was kind of you—good, too, to go against the Council. That couldn't have been easy.”

Her round, homely face flushed unprettily in the primrose light. “I may not have much power,” she muttered, “but I've been at the Citadel long enough, I should hope, to have a vote.”

She sounded angry and shaken, and would not meet his eyes. For as long as Antryg had known her—which was well over twenty years—Seldes Katne had borne cheerfully the fact that she had only the barest minimum of magical ability. The Library was her bailiwick and the home of her heart, and though she was unable to accomplish three-quarters of the spells and cantrips, the great fields and Summonings and wielding-weirds recorded in its volumes, she had power enough to understand what they were and how they should be done by those who could. It crossed Antryg's mind to wonder whether it was this very mediocrity that had given her sympathy for him: having so little power herself, she had protested the casual violence with which they had ripped his from him.