The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (25 page)

Vicious little pains knifed his hands and feet like the bite of snakes as he tried to drag himself up the stairs. The power within him, bound and mute beneath the razor wire of the Council's geas, could have resisted those spells, could have thrown off the burning river of sand that seemed to be filling his lungs, could have flung back count erspells of life and light. His heartbeat sounded huge in his ears, a slow, bucking heave that hurt more on every throb. He had to reach the top of the stairs, he thought blindly. It was fifty feet, surely he could make it up fifty feet.

His arms collapsed under him; he barely felt the ragged pain of his cheek hitting the unrailed stone step. One arm dangled over the edge, and he was queerly conscious of the cold airmoving around his hanging fingers. Though the whisper of the death-spells was now very soft, it seemed to fill his mind.

“Stop it!” Another voice, a whisper like the first, inconsequential as the squeaking of bats. The spell shifted a fraction, like a suffocating monster fidgeting its weight. A thread of air leaked into his lungs.

“Let him go!”

“She sent him. He is her cat's-paw. She brought him here that he might do her dirty work, that he might spy and probe ... ”

The spell locked down hard and Antryg cried out a little with the renewed pain. The specks of blinding fire swimming before his eyes blended into one huge slab of killing light.

“Then she'll know if he dies here! Let him go. I'll take care of him ... ”

Air in his lungs. Enough air—he would never, he thought, raise any objections to the smell of coals and mildew again. They were beautiful. Cold granite under his face was beautiful.

The voices were gone. He lay in darkness. He must have blacked out, he thought, gingerly gathering his arms beneath him. If so, he couldn't have been unconscious long, and the owner of the second voice would be back. I'll take care of him ... Aunt Min's protection extended only over those who obeyed her command that he not be harmed, who feared her wrath. Quite clearly, there were those in the Citadel who did not.

Distantly, his straining hearing picked up returning feet, a voice whispering distantly, “Oh, God ... Oh, God ... ” He still couldn't stand but was past caring. Pins and needles racked him, seeming to originate somewhere in the marrow of his bones; every muscle trembled as he crawled and stumbled like an intoxicated rag doll across the cellar, dragged himself through the trap while the door at the top of the long steps was still shut. He fell repeatedly as he made his way through the dark byways, coming at last to open air—he barely noticed how he got to the little rock-cut chamber where he was to spend the night.

For a long while he could only lie there, trembling, as his muscles twitched and burned with cramp and his breathing steadied out to its regular rhythm again. It wasn't the first time such spells had been laid upon him—Suraklin had done so twice, the second time to the point where he'd gone into convulsions—but it was the first time he'd been completely unable to meet them with any magic of his own.

For what must have been nearly an hour he lay, looking out through the screen of lattice to the clear, blue-gray twilight that filled the land like an imbuing radiance. White mists drifted over the river; the taiga forest lay black and formless beyond, broken by the chipped brightness of streams; bogs and ponds reflected the queer glow of the sky in shining sheets. Beyond the trees the cleared fields of the village of Wychstanes slept, coarse and shapeless and gray; smoke rising from the long ibeks marked the settlement itself. And beyond that, deep in the woods of spruce and hemlock, was the Green King's Chapel, ancient shrine of the Lord of Animals, the Lord of the Trees, back when this whole area had been part of the estate of the Earls Boreal. Daurannon had been investigating reports of abominations there—allegedly—when Rosamund had conjured the power to pass through the Void.

Antryg pulled off his coat and wrapped himself in it, pillowed his head on Aunt Min's shawl. While he'd been in the Vaults, it had rained a little, and the warming ground gave back the smell and dampness, a thick sweet strength in the air. Clouds heaped the southern edges of the sky.

He supposed he ought to seek out Aunt Min immediately. At a guess it was Phormion who had tried to kill him, Bentick who had stopped her ... But if Bentick was part of a plot with Phormion, why stop her? Had Rosamund actually brought him here for some ulterior purpose? It didn't seem terribly likely, considering how little she trusted him, but it might account for her having sent Daur away while she was doing it.

Or by she, had they meant Aunt Min?

It was a new thought, and not a comfortable one; and it would account, he thought, for Rosamund's enmity toward him—not that that wasn't sufficiently accounted for already. But why would Min be using him as a cat's-paw against Phormion, if it was Phormion?

Far above him, against the dark bulk of the Library, a yellow glow of lamplight shone in the dirty glass walls of the Conservatory, marking where Seldes Katne still labored over her piled volumes, searching for references to the teles even as Nandiharrow and Issay sought clues to other magics in the Vaults.

And Joanna was somewhere, imprisoned in this maze of deadly secrets. His every instinct warned him that the longer she remained a prisoner, the more danger she'd be in.

He wondered if it was possible to get to Min's cottage at this hour. Rosamund would flay him for waking up the old lady.

But the ache in his body was like lead wrapped around his bones, and the thought of getting up and doing anything at the moment was more than he could bear. He shifted his head on his makeshift pillow and gazed out over the black pelt of the forest toward the Green King's Chapel again. At length he slept, and though he recalled no dreams, he woke up weeping, with the feeling that some irreplaceable thing had been taken from him during the night.

Tom the gardener found him at breakfast, hard on the heels of a near-riot in the refectory. Antryg, cautious now about dealing with any member of the Council, at least without several other persons present, was consuming muffins and tea in a corner of the kitchen after helping Pothatch stir porridge and cut bacon. Furious shouts drew them up the stairs to the pantry behind the serving-hatches.

Through the broad openings from pantry to refectory, Antryg and the cook saw Brunus, usually the most mild-tempered of men, standing a few feet inside the refectory and screaming at Zake Brighthand, who had just entered. Brighthand rounded on the older student with a perfect spate of amazing and barely comprehensible docker's cant, his thin face twisting with rage. Others—not all of them Juniors—rose from their seats at the long trestle tables and came to the open space before the door to fling themselves into the affray; Daurannon, sitting by the broad windows that overlooked the Polygon's main court, got to his feet and started to break things up but, within moments, was shouting at them all, a situation not alleviated by the arrival of Lady Rosamund on the scene.

“It's a pocket-spell, a field of anger.” Antryg grinned at the cook and at Tom, who had just entered from the door that led into the drying-room. The voices were rising, echoing in the big room's scarlet-painted rafters. “Just inside the door, look ... ”

He gestured with his teacup. The Lady, usually frigidly polite to her colleague, was screaming like a fish-hag about “social-climbing little guttersnipes” and “slick traitors who'd sell us all to the Regent for an attic bedroom at Court”; Daurannon in turn abandoned his usual charming mask and made reference to “holier-than-thou aristos who can't stand anyone whose lives they can't run.” Both opinions, Antryg was quite well aware, had been expressed privately at other times.

“My guess is it starts about three paces inside the door and runs to the corner of that table where Kyra's standing. Ah! Here comes Bentick. Now, is he going to fly into the fray or try to get them all out of there so the spell can be dispersed ... ?”

“Will they come, though?” Tom inquired interestedly, folding his arms and cocking his head a little to one side.

Mage, cook, and gardener watched in fascination as the Steward of the Citadel, assisted eventually by Issay Bel-Caire and Sergeant Hathen, coaxed, called, and gestured the assorted combatants away from the open space and in among the tables, where the spell's field did not extend.

“Looks like our Bentick's had a bit of a rocky night,” Tom commented, when the show seemed to be over and Pothatch had returned to his tea urns and muffin batter. This was true: though immaculately shaven and prissy as always, the Steward appeared even more haggard than he had yesterday in the Council chamber and seemed to be scanning every corner of the big, raftered room for something or someone ... probably, Antryg thought, himself.

“I shouldn't be surprised,” Antryg murmured. “Did you happen to see if Aunt Min was about yet?” he added, looking back at the gardener. He knew Min was an early riser and frequently would sit on the terrace of her little cottage to watch the sun rise. If Bentick was here, dispersing the spell-field—which he was doing, assisted by Daurannon and Lady Rosamund, who scrupulously avoided one another's glance—it would be safe to duck over and discuss possible reasons why the Starmistress would want to assassinate anyone who entered the Castle.

Tom shook his head. “I haven't seen her. But there's something I heard, something I thought you ought to know of.”

Antryg set his teacup down and regarded more closely the mournful-looking little man in his rough peasant smock and heavy boots.

“See, one of Gru Gwidion's hunters mentioned to me yesterday that he'd heard a woman's voice crying in the Green King's Chapel. When he went near it, he said, he was too afraid to go in. He said it was his instinct warning him that there was something unnatural there, but I know the mages do that: put spells of fear 'round a place if they want to keep us out—me, and the milkmaids, and Pothatch's kitchen help when he's got 'em. And I know you're looking for your lady.”

“So I am,” Antryg murmured thoughtfully. “The Green King's Chapel.” He recalled the blue twilight on the dark woods, the glimpse of bleached stone like bone chips far off among the trees.

More people were coming into the refectory. Sergeant Hathen, posted in the doorway like an usher at a wedding, was warning them to edge around the wall to avoid the three mages at their rites of dispersal.

Out in the courtyard, the great bronze clock in the Assembly Hall tower struck seven. If Aunt Min started her conjurations at noon, thought Antryg, he would still be back in time to assist her throughout the afternoon ... not that she actually needed it. For all her impersonation of senile vagueness, he had no doubts that she knew precisely what she was doing and would have no trouble following his notes.

And then, after last night's events, the thought of getting out of the Citadel for a few hours wasn't such a bad one, either.

“Kitty will kill me. I did promise I'd help her with the research into the teles-balls, and I've yet to do it. You'll let her know I was called away?”

Tom hesitated for a moment, as if that snagged some thought in his mind, then nodded slowly. “Aye. That is ... ”

Bentick, Daur, and Rosamund lowered their arms with an air of completion; the latter two turned promptly away to seek places at tables in opposite ends of the long room. Bentick made one last scan of the interested faces of the newcomers, then strode in a purposeful billow of black robes toward the serving-hatch to get his morning coffee. Rather hastily, Antryg gulped the last of his tea, shoved two rolls from one of the serving trays into his coat pocket, and said, “Thank you, Tom. You haven't seen me.”

The long purple skirts of his coat flicked around the doorway leading down to the kitchen just as the Steward reached the hatch.

The road from the Wizards' Tor to the village of Wychstanes lay straight, following the track of the Brehon Line: on both sides it was marked with eroded and weed-shrouded standing stones of the sort that in more civilized portions of the Realm had been pit-broken or buried. For most of its length the road sank below the level of the surrounding land, rutted—typically for the Sykerst—with gluey runnels of foot-deep mud. Though winds moved the dark roof of spruces overhead, down in the roadbed itself the air was muggy and still, thick with the murky pungence of nearby ponds and the green shaggy scents of the moss that furred the alders and birch. Feathers of gold light played across Antryg's shoulders and face as he picked a way along the drier center of the roadbed between the ruts, the familiar dappling of warm and cool a reminiscence of home. Even the drag of the mud at his boots was a part of those childhood dreams.

Home. After all these years.

He had spent his childhood in a village very like Wychstanes. There were hundreds of them, scattered among the endless forests and stony, rust red hills—villages wherever tiny pockets of earth could be found capable of supporting crops, and all of them much alike. Life in the barnlike ibeks could be incredibly crude—he remembered clearly helping his brothers dump fodder down the floor hatches to the animals who lived below and listening, through the long winter nights, to the murmurs, coughing, lovemaking, and drunken arguments of the sixty or so uncles, aunts, stepchildren, and thralls with whom he shared the place—but even as a pariah, he had felt a kind of delighted fascination with the complex life of the village itself.

He smiled a little, his gloved hands thrust deep in his pockets. Suraklin had almost scoured the skin off him trying to get rid of the stench of cow dung and smoke—at the time, he would have skinned himself, had it been possible, knowing the peasant smell displeased the old man. Ever afterward, when his master had been angry with him, he'd had the illogical conviction that the smell of his village clung to him yet—to his flesh, to the very marrow-bones of his soul—displeasing Suraklin still: the first of all the many things about himself that Antryg could never sufficiently change to meet the Dark Mage's standards. Even when, under Suraklin's tutelage of love and abuse, his powers had flourished so that he could call sand-demons to sit like birds on his hands or change the bread on a plate to nightshade from the other side of the room, or strike a man blind or mute or breathless with a word, he had never been good enough.