The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (10 page)

He picked up the square of white pasteboard that had been under Seldes Katne's fingers as she'd scried in the crystal—one of Joanna's business cards, on the back of which was scribbled the start times of “Karate Masters Versus the Invaders from Outer Space” at the Van Nuys Cineplex 24. “If you're trying to keep something secret from a wizard, it probably isn't wise to engage in theurgic gang rape; the victim is as aware of the perpetrator as vice versa. And perhaps that is why it is so seldom that such a geas is invoked ... other than the obvious difficulty in getting the entire Council to agree and getting the culprit where the entire Council can operate in concert—something which hasn't happened for hundreds of years.”

Seldes Katne frowned, turning the small chunk of white quartz over in her fingers. “But you have no idea who?”

“Not the foggiest.”

Through the open window the voices of the Juniors floated up to them as they returned from dinner in the refectory on the second floor of the Polygon. With the exception of the Mole Hill—the squat, shabby cottage where Issay Bel-Caire lived, buried save for its low door under an impenetrable tangle of honeysweet and taiga laurel—the houses on this spur of the tor were given over to the lesser members of the community. The Pepper-Grinder, the Cat Lair, the Cave, the Dungeon, the Isle of Butterflies, and the Yellow House were all connected by an interlocking maze of cellars, windowed galleries, covered bridges, and connecting stairways; in the wintertime, Antryg recalled, no one thought twice about hearing one's neighbors trot through one's downstairs hallway or across one's attic on the way back from dinner or class.

But now their footfalls thumped softly on the wooden steps that led up the sharp slopes from path to doors, or creaked on the jury-rigged plank bridges over the vine-choked gullies and drops. His red-haired housemate Kyra would be out at evening weapons-training—“Going dancing with Miss Maggie,” the novices called it, Miss Maggie being the nickname for the garishly colored Harlot—or else drinking cocoa and talking till late with her friends in the Juniors' Commons. Antryg smiled, wondering if they still engaged in “practicing spell-casting in an emergency”—i.e., while falling-down drunk—as he and Daurannon had done on several memorable instances. Save for an occasional murmur from outside, and the soft, patient rhythm of someone in the Cat Lair playing beginners' scales on a harp, the round stone house was quiet.

“I'm sorry,” Seldes Katne said as the daylight began to fade. “I thought that because this house is on the main Vorplek Energy Line I'd have a little more chance at this, but that doesn't seem to be the case.” She put the crystal from her and did not meet his eyes; Antryg leaned across the table and put his big, bony hand over her fleshy, age-spotted one.

“What's more likely is that she's being kept somewhere that's spelled against observation.” Seldes Katne's crystal, he recalled from somewhere, had belonged to the wizard Gantre Silvas two hundred years ago—the slip of rune-inscribed silver around its base had been added by that mage to increase its receptive powers. “God knows there are any number of places in the Citadel itself where she could be kept a prisoner unknown to anyone—any of the guest quarters above the Great Assembly Hall, or the attics above those, the clock-tower, one of the treasury rooms, the old South Hall. There must be a hundred places here where no one ever goes, and that,” he added quietly, his voice sinking as he turned his eyes toward the window again, where he could see the Conservatory flash like an absurd diamond on the Library's granite flank, “isn't even counting the Vaults. And I'm very much afraid that that's where she is.”

“It would make sense,” the librarian agreed. Then she frowned again, her heavy brows pulling down over her nose once more. “But ... that's where the disturbance is centered. That's where the Moving Gate is.”

“It's more than that,” Antryg said, getting nervously to his feet and beginning to pace, his movements restlessly graceful in his sweeping coat, like some bizarre wading bird. “Most people believe that the labyrinth in the Vaults was dug as a defense—a place where, in the event of catastrophe, the wizards might hide. But the Citadel lies on the node of four energy-tracks, at least one of them—the Vorplek Line, which runs through the Library as you know—extremely powerful. And while in the west, mounds at the nodes of such lines were frequently built with collecting chambers underneath them to hold and channel the traveling energies of the leys, in the east and north they used mazes.”

“I've heard that theory,” Seldes Katne acknowledged, sitting up a little in her chair and putting back her braid, which had strayed forward over her shoulder again. “But no one has ever proven that the mazes worked.”

“Perhaps because we have no idea how they worked.” Antryg leaned on the windowsill again, gazing out into the tangle of vines below. There was a murmur of voices from the windows of the Cat Lair, and someone else took the harp, calling the huge black-and-orange butterflies that had been feeding from the starlike blooms of the honeysweet to swirl upward into a drunken, dancing cloud.

Antryg fell silent a moment, listening to the sheer, glittering mastery of the music; Seldes Katne said softly, “That will be Brighthand—Zake Thwacker, Otaro's pupil. He has ... great skill.”

He glanced back at her downcast dark eyes, the sudden pinch of her thin lips. After her failure to scry Joanna's image in the white crystal, she could not bring herself to say, He has true magic. But the lightness, the delicate strength of the music, ignited the air above the butterfly jungle between the two houses; had he not been afraid of what was happening in the Vaults, afraid that Joanna might be imprisoned down there, Antryg could have easily slipped under the spell of it himself and spent the rest of the evening dreaming on the windowsill, until the last light faded from the northern sky.

“In any case,” he said, turning back from the enchanted sharpness to the deepening gloom within the upstairs room, “I suspect that's why the mazes were dug, level upon level of them ... their patterns are disturbingly similar to the garden mazes I saw in the east, and I know that glass, water, and bone were used by certain sects to further channel power—all things which have been found in the walls down there. And that's what frightens me about a Gate having been jammed open in the Vaults.”

Seldes Katne startled so badly that she dropped the crystal. “Jammed open?”

Antryg blinked at her in surprise in the failing light. “Of course. Isn't it obvious that's what has happened?”

She said nothing, only stared at him, dark eyes wide with shock.

“That didn't occur to you?”

“I ... I thought the Gates didn't remain open for more than a few minutes.”

“They don't,” he said simply. “And it takes a tremendous amount of power to hold one open even for that long, which is as it should be, given the way the fabric of the universe weakens around a Gate. If one were held open even under ordinary circumstances, I'm not sure what the results would be; given the nature of the maze and the presence of the energy lines, the fact that the Gate is moving shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, though it will make it a beast of a job to track.”

He rubbed his hands absently, as if trying to massage old aches from the twisted fingers. “At the moment it seems to be confining its ambulations to the Vaults, which is well and good. But the problem is, I can feel the situation is deteriorating. More Gates and wormholes are opening and closing, strange energies acting on the energies already moving through the Vaults ... and I don't like the idea that Joanna may be imprisoned down there in the middle of it.”

She murmured assent and fumbled to pick up the crystal, which had skidded beneath the rim of a painted blue-and-yellow plate; then her eyes returned to his. “I might try working in conjunction with a teles-ball,” she said after a hesitant moment. “Or you might, though I'm not sure how that will work with the geas. But teles can be used as power-sinks, as you know, and there are several very strong ones here in the Citadel.”

“No.”

The hard decisiveness in his voice made her look up in startled surprise. “What's wrong with a teles?”

Antryg shrugged and resumed his gawky pacing, now more purposefully, hunting around for his shawl. “I've never liked them. I know people use them for all manner of spells, from the summoning of elementals to the sending of messages to non-wizards ... but I've never trusted them.”

She could only stare at him, baffled—rather, Antryg supposed, as Joanna would be by someone who refused to use the telephone out of a professed fear that such devices ate the souls of their users.

“They're only glass and mercury ... ”

“Glass through which magic has been channeled, in which power has been accumulated, year upon year, century upon century,” replied Antryg, finding his shawl at last, wrapped around the teapot to keep the contents warm. The upper room of the Pepper-Grinder, though occupied by him for only a few hours, already had the beginnings of a formidable collection of books and scientific journals, stray flowers pressed for drying and at least two splendid, varicolored pinwheels set in a vase beside the window, turning like enormous sunflowers with the shift of the grass-scented wind.

“I know most of the academics consider it balderdash, but Brynnart of Pleth wrote that glass and mercury in combination have powers of their own, and I happen to believe him.”

“Brynnart of Pleth was insane,” Seldes Katne pointed out.

“So am I. That doesn't mean he wasn't right. And personally, I'm a bit leery of anything which has been imbued with that much magic over that long a period of time.”

She gave an uncertain half laugh. “If you're going to suspect things that have had magic go through them, you might as well hold suspect the ... the,” she groped for an example of absurdity, “the stones of the Citadel themselves.”

He paused in the act of slinging the slightly tea-stained shawl around his shoulders and turned enormous, deranged gray eyes upon her. “Oh, I do,” he said. He plucked one of the pinwheels from the vase, large, delicately balanced, and of a brilliant red and yellow like a hallucinatory sunflower, and blew gently on its curving sail. “Daurannon should be in the Senior Parlor by this time, drinking his evening tea; I think it's high time that you and I had a look at the Vaults.”

“As a theory it's preposterous,” Daurannon had said. “The mazes in the Vaults were dug as a protective measure to guard the old wizard-lords' treasures against invaders, and their more dangerous secrets against the curious, the same way the very ancient lords built mazes into their castles. That's all those garden mazes mimic. And true or not,” he'd added, seeing Antryg open his mouth to argue, “the Council has agreed not to permit you to enter the Vaults without one of us as escort.”

Perched on the arm of the oak chair on the opposite side of the parlor fire, Antryg had experienced—and now, as the scene recurred to him through the smoky overlay of his dreams, experienced more strongly—a sense of odd and painful deja vu. The Senior Parlor, on the third floor of the Polygon, above the level where the classical mass of that great building broke up into a stylistic jackdaw nest of additions and alterations, had been a home to him once upon a time. Asleep and dreaming in his borrowed bed in the Pepper-Grinder, even as his mind played back the scenes of the earlier evening, it tangled them with the memories of those other nights: hundreds of them, thousands of them, when he'd sat in the same fashion, perched, knees up, on the arm of that very chair, with Daurannon slouched comfortably in the opposite seat of heavily carved and age-blackened oak, stirring milk into his tea after the fashion of the lower classes on the western seaboard.

Even the people had been the same, as much a part of the small, cozy chamber as the linenfold paneling, the undressed stone of the fireplace, and the smells of herbs and candlewax. Bentick played piquet with someone, usually Phormion but on this occasion Nandiharrow; Otaro the Singer sat on the raised stone hearth, soft phrases and ribbons of melody flowing from his big old harp with the restful ease of conversation, while Zake Thwacker—Brighthand—a seventeen-year-old docker's son from the Angelshand slums in the gray robes of a Junior, sat at his feet. Pentilla Riverwych was curled up in a chair at the long table beneath the western windows, unconsciously plaiting and replacing the end of her thick brown braid as she read from some obscure history that Seldes Katne had brought her down from the library.

Most of them had been Antryg's teachers, before he'd become a teacher himself. Pentilla, now a Senior, had been his student.

And he was an exile.

Even in sleep, deep in the dreams that brought the scene back to him, that hurt.

“But if my theory that the Vaults are an energy maze is preposterous—which of course it is,” argued Antryg persuasively, “what harm can I do by going there alone? I mean, I'd have gone down through the kitchen—they connect up with the stores-cellar and the room where Pothatch keeps the flour—except it's locked up for the night, which I must say is rather hard, Bentick, on the poor students who just want a cup of cocoa.”

“Considering the things abroad in the Vaults now,” Nandiharrow remarked, judiciously rearranging his cards, “that cup of cocoa could be dearly bought.”

“It isn't the energy from the lines of power that worries us, and I think you know it.” Daurannon set his teacup aside—soft-paste china, white and yellow, from the finest workshops in Angelshand. Everything in the Citadel was that way—either exquisite gifts of past patrons, or rough local work of wool, terra-cotta, or whittled wood. “You know the records are full of rumors and hints and mentions of things that the old mages came up with, things of power that can no longer be accounted for. You know, and I know, that some of these are concealed in the Vaults. That was where you found the Archmage Nyellin's Soul-Mirror, which had been hidden away for centuries.”

“If he has no power ... ” Seldes Katne began.

“Some of those tales speak of things that didn't need the power of a wizard,” Daur replied. “Some of them, we don't know what they were, or whether they'd need a wizard's power or not to cause trouble with them. You know the Vaults better than anyone, Antryg, and I wouldn't put it past you to have located one of these implements in some obscure record and seek it out to lift the geas.”