The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (14 page)

Seldes Katne was currently engaged in a losing battle to keep the scriptorium on the floor below from turning into an auxiliary library, arguing that the Juniors who worked there ought not to be disturbed by those in quest of what Tiamat the White had written about necromancy or Simon the Lame's ophthalmological spells, and so far she had held the encroachment to one wall. Below the scriptorium, half the Library's cellars, cut into the rock of the tor itself, were given over to the storage of paper, ink, parchment, and the like, while the smainder, built of granite blocks scarcely distinguishable from the native stone, constituted Seldes Katne's own quarters, onto which the absurd gothic gem of the disused conservatory cleaved like a pinchbeck-diamond codpiece set into battle armor.

“Thank you—it's very good of you. And I've put in about two hours this morning, when I should have been up here helping you with these, checking the Assembly Hall building from cellars to attics, including the treasuries and the clock-tower, and nothing to show for it bar a certain amount of evidence that some of the novices have been arranging assignations with the milkmaids in the guest chambers on the second floor.”

Seldes Katne looked so shocked he could not forbear adding, “I deduce that it was the novices because, of course, the Seniors would have left no evidence at all ... and I have it on good authority that when one attains Council rank, tumbling the milkmaids is beneath one's dignity. At least that's what Bentick was always telling me.”

“This packet of notes contains probably the only thing Salteris wrote down about the Void, and it's only the spells of opening it, which he learned from Wilbron of Parchasten—nothing about its nature, or why some people can sense things happening in connection with it and some can't. As far as I know, Wilbron never wrote anything down about that, either.”

“You're sure it was the only one?”

He nodded, and she sighed. “Salteris' house in Angelshand had already been looted when I got there, you see,” she said, turning to set the notes with the others for copying. “Not badly—not like the Witchfinders would have left it. But there were things missing. Books and a few magical implements-things the other wizards in the Mages' Yard said should have been there. And of course, while I was there the order came through from the Regent for all the mageborn to leave the city. I've only been back myself for a few days.”

Antryg frowned, thinking about that tall, soot-blackened old house in its quiet backwater court in the Quarter of the Old Believers—part of the numerous parcels of town property whose rents supported both the mages who lived there and the Citadel itself. Thinking of the years he'd lived there with Salteris and Daurannon ...

“I hope to goodness they don't rent it to some idiot who'll try working magic there,” he murmured. “The situation's serious enough, with little enclaves of old spells and random fields opening here. Who were the mages who were actually involved in opening the Gate for Rosamund to cross the Void in search of me? I know Daurannon was off abomination-hunting ... ”

“Issay and Nandiharrow went with Rosamund through the Void, as you know,” the librarian said, lowering her voice and glancing across the room to the table where the Senior mages were pursuing their research. “Whitwell Simm, Q'iin, and Otaro ... Yes, Brunus?” She looked up as a tall, fat, lunkish-looking young man in his early twenties, still wearing a novice's meal-colored robe, appeared at her shoulder. “Excuse me ... ” She crossed to the shelves under the north gallery that contained all the volumes of preliminary lists and spells. They stood for a time, talking earnestly. Antryg, watching them, noted the desperate urgency of the young man's gestures, and put that together with the color of his robe—novices had usually graduated to Junior status by the time they were eighteen—to deduce that here was another whose powers were small. His shirt collar and boots marked him as lower bourgeois, and the way he stood—even allowing for a fat man's slightly thrown-back stance—as a city boy. Countrymen were more relaxed as a rule. The loss of a son—particularly an only or eldest son—from a small business would almost certainly have caused family trouble ...

That thought brought others, an uneasy spiral of free association that led him, as inexorably as last night's dreams had led him, back to the darkness of the Vaults.

To the dripping silences where niter-smeared blocks of stone were patched now in places with purulent mosses—red, black, or the slowly throbbing orange from which threadlike tentacles followed the movement of body heat; to the alien vermin with sightless, pale eyes and the quivery, hallucinatory thickness of the dark; to the cold ozone smell and all-pervasive weight of the nearness of the Void.

He could feel it here, through the energy line that ran beneath the Library itself. His instincts, his touch on the stones of the Citadel, told him that the situation was deteriorating steadily, but equally his every instinct screamed at him that he had no business down there—even on the upper levels—without massive physical and theurgic defense. Secret objects of power were not the only things rumored to have been concealed in those lightless mazes. Ugly magics had been done there, evil wielded by the Council's cold, implacable power; there were sealed doors in the Vaults, he knew from his own days on the Council, that hid things which could not die and should never have been permitted to live in the first place. From ancient records he suspected that there were things whose creators had taken care never to inform the Council what they had wrought, lest they fall under their peers' displeasure for dabbling in forbidden arts.

Old sorrow and old pain ...

What had been bricked up down there, he wondered, by those who had subsequently pretended it never happened and burned their notes? What energies were being released, now that reality was fracturing along the shear-lines of the leys?

Yet he knew he could not take any member of the Council with him when he went to seek Joanna there. Even Nandiharrow and Issay Bel-Caire, who headed up the team of Seniors searching the most ancient Citadel records for mention of those ancient magics, might have their own secrets or might be allies in some unspoken double game.

Seldes Katne came back to him through the thick slant of the primrose light, her round face creased with concern. “Poor Brunus,” she sighed. “He's failed the Junior exams twice already. He has a genuine feeling for spells, especially of healing. Just ... very little power.”

“You passed them on the third try, didn't you?”

She nodded. “I still don't know how. Probably because I couldn't ... I couldn't see a life outside of this place. Outside of being a mage.” Her square face was sad, and for a moment he glimpsed in her eyes the look of that long-ago girl, short and chubby and unpretty, clinging grimly to her dreams.

“Well, be that as it may,” she sighed again. “He's gotten a little respite because Phormion was to have been his examiner.”

“Ah, yes,” Antryg said. “Phormion.” He recalled the Starmistress' haunted eyes in the Council the previous day. “If Issay and Nandiharrow came with Rosamund, and they needed to get three of the top Seniors to make the Circles of Power here to keep the Gate open, and Bentick was off calming down old Trukild from the village ... ”

“How did you know that?” Seldes Katne demanded, her thick brows locking at the mention of the village headman's name.

“Well, it stands to reason if someone had seen an abomination in the Green King's Chapel ferocious enough for one of the top members of the Council to go chasing it, old Trukild would have been up here shaking his cane in Bentick's face and swearing he'd risk no more of his people by letting them come to work in this den of turpitude ... though, if he didn't, God knows where he thinks half the village would come by its money for iron and salt and sugar at Yuletide.”

“You,” Seldes Katne said severely, “are going to get yourself into real trouble one of these days.”

“I'm pleased you have sufficient imagination to consider powerless enslavement to two extremely vengeful wizards a bagatelle ... to say nothing of the abominations in the wine cellar. Where was Phormion?”

“I don't know. Probably lying down, recovering from her encounter with the Gate in the Vaults. God knows that's what I did.” She shivered and looked away.

“Interesting,” Antryg murmured. “So we have Phormion and Daur unaccounted for, and possibly Bentick ... and Min herself, of course. Odd how one tends to forget where she might be or what she might be doing. Just out of curiosity, where was Brighthand?”

The librarian glanced up at him quickly but said nothing; he saw in her eyes that she, too, had felt the boy's hidden power.

“He will be Archmage one day, you know,” he said after a moment, pulling up one of the beechwood chairs and taking a precarious seat on the top of its back, his boots on the seat in front of him. “Probably not soon, but one day. He's so quiet I'm not sure how many people have noticed him, but the power is there. I don't know when I've seen a novice with that kind of power.”

Seldes Katne did not reply. Looking down at the plump, doughy face with its suddenly closed expression, Antryg remembered that magic was not, and never had been, entirely a matter of study, of work, of diligence. Without all those, and unceasing mental labor, the greatest talent for wizardry would come to nothing, and over the years he had seen dozens of promising novices fail through laziness or overconfidence. But without inborn talent, the work—and the wanting—were simply not enough.

The librarian had dwelt in the Citadel for fifty years, working, memorizing, sweating, wanting ... and was still one of the least powerful.

With the possible exception, he reflected ruefully, of the non-mageborn sasenna, Pothatch the cook, Tom the gardener, and himself.

“Well,” Seldes Katne said after a time, “in the meantime, I don't really look forward to having the Master-Spells which command me being held by either a cold-blooded aristocrat or a slick little social climber like Daurannon Stapler ... not that I'd ever be likely to have cause to feel their use. But you ... ”

“Oh, I don't know.” Antryg smiled reflectively, leaning his elbows on his bony, jeans-clad knees. “Think what a tizzy there would be if Aunt Min should die and everyone wake up in the morning and find our Zake has become Archmage after all. Now, don't laugh,” he added, looking down at her with mock gravity. “Precisely that happened in the reign of Tyron the Second. The old Archmage died and the Master-Spells fell on a chap who was working as a dog wizard in Kymil—well, a court wizard, since that was back in the days when it was more or less respectable all around for nobles to hire mages, but there must have been an amazing scene in the Council here, nevertheless.”

“Beldock the Minstrel!” Katne laughed, recalling that less-than-respectable fragment of history. “Beldock the Unruly ... and a very good Archmage he made, too, by all accounts.” Her dark eyes sparkled at the thought of that old Council's discomfiture, as if its members had included Lady Rosamund and Daurannon the Handsome, and all those other, younger wizards whose abilities had surpassed her own patient, diligent, thankless work.

Antryg smiled a little, too. As scenarios went, it wasn't a terribly likely one ... but it was certainly an improvement on the several that ended with himself being bricked up in a six-by-six pocket of darkness in the Vaults with his geas and a swarm of half-animate, carnivorous demons to keep him company.

He stepped down from the back of the chair and picked up yet another book—unfamiliar to him; Salteris must have acquired it after they had parted. “Good Heavens!” he murmured in astonished delight. “It mentions tortoiseshell readings. Listen! 'It is commonly known among the scholars of the South that all the wisdom and knowledge of the world may be divined in the patterns on the shells of tortoises, creatures whose age and wisdom is the reflection of this divine gift. Munden Myndrex copied these patterns for all the seventy-five years of his wanderings ... ” Kitty, surely the Library has the papers of Munden Myndrex? He died here at the Citadel, didn't he?"

In a swirl of coat skirts he turned toward the shelves of massive, handwritten catalogs chained to the wall; Seldes Katne had to seize a handful of the threadbare velvet to stay him. “Antryg, why would Brighthand—or Daurannon, for that matter—kidnap your lady Joanna in the first place?”

“Well,” he turned back to her, “that is the question of the hour.” One corner of the long, absurd mouth hardened slightly, and for a moment, behind the thick spectacles, the mild daffiness of his gray eyes gave way to something else. “And though it's true we haven't been through all the hidden rooms and deserted halls aboveground in this place by any means, my guess is, she's in the Vaults. And that brings me to the subject of two favors I'd like to ask of you, and please don't slap my face because they're not that sort of favors.”

“What sort of favors are they?” Seldes Katne asked warily.

“Quite easily granted ones, I assure you.” He took her arm and led her over to a book-choked alcove between two of the wide windows. “Are you familiar with the construction of a Talisman of Air?”

She nodded, looking up at him. Beyond the open casements, the steep drop of the Citadel hill fell away to tangled clouds of dark spruce and bright-leaved larch and aspen, interspersed with tiny walled gardens of looserife and lady-fern, buttercup and poppies. Roofs of shingle and tile patched the dark of the trees, punctuated by turrets and stitched together by rickety galleries and stairs. Antryg identified every house and those who lived within them—the pink-walled Pavilion, the ornamental brickwork chain of the Four Brothers, the foliage-covered House of Roses ... and above those, the gray towers and gilt-tipped roofs of the preposterous structure called the Castle, where Phormion Starmistress lived.

Seldes Katne's voice brought him back. “Of course,” she was saying. “Opal, silver, the wing of a butterfly, spelled to hold air about it though it be plunged into water or fire ... ”

“Could you make one for me? This afternoon, I mean?”

She hesitated, as if asking herself why he wanted such a thing and whether Lady Rosamund would countenance putting even that small a device of magic into his unpredictable hands. “Mine were never very good,” she said awkwardly.