The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard (9 page)

Or perhaps, he thought, it might have been because they had been friends, partners in the wizardly greed for knowledge. But then, Daurannon had been his friend, too.

She went on gruffly, “I don't suppose that carries much weight with the likes of Lady Rosamund Kentacre or Daurannon the Handsome.”

“Well,” Antryg pointed out gently, pulling the shawl up over his shoulders again, “I couldn't actually disagree with them, you know, Kitty.” And she smiled at the private nickname he'd given her in his novice days. “I did break my vows, and I have misused my powers ... and perhaps that's the entire strength of the Master-Spells. To give the Archmage understanding of another wizard's mind sufficient to obtain that wizard's consent—be it ever so subconscious—to whatever spell she will cast. Suraklin did that sort of thing, too,” he added, and shivered; the evening was cooling, and the coat she'd given him, for all its outrageous appearance, had been made for the gorgeous courts of Mellidane and the south.

Her dark eyes rested doubtfully, worriedly, on his face for a moment, and he could see she didn't really understand. “They still needn't have done to you what they did,” she said after a time. “You're going to need your powers.” She stepped closer to him, her small, square hand reaching out to touch his threadbare sleeve, and her voice sank to a frightened whisper.

“Antryg, I've seen it. I've seen that thing in the Vaults.”

“Have you?” Antryg cocked his head, a curiously storklike gesture, and the slanting daylight flashed across his Coke-bottle spectacles like enormous, insectile eyes.

She nodded and withdrew her hand to clench it nervously before her. “I ... I went down there after ... after you left the Citadel this morning. The downshaft near the Painted Halls leads straight down to the eighth level. I thought if I could find it, I might be able to convince the others the danger was real, that you would need your powers.”

“Well, I don't doubt they know how real the danger is; they're just not ready for that particular piece of logical elenchus. Does the Gate move?”

The librarian looked away from him and folded her arms closely; the wind, stronger now, soughed through the spruces along the river like the passage of a giant hand, bearing on it the knifelike bitterness of the ice-locked northern bays. The quality of the light had changed across the Valley of Shadow, as the brightness passed from the poppies and the lupine, and the first slow degrees of the long spring evening veiled the grass.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, it moves. I only saw it ... distantly. That long reach on the eighth level. I ... I heard voices, shouting something, I don't know what ... saw lights flashing far away. But it was all coming toward me, rushing at me down that corridor. I ran down the nearest side tunnel—I was afraid it would come after me, but it didn't.”

“Did you see it pass across the mouth of the passage you were in? See it sideways, so to speak?”

She nodded slowly. “Not ... not clearly.” She made a small rueful noise, and her coarse, dark skin reddened a little with embarrassment. “I pressed myself to the wall. When I looked up, it was just to see something like a cloud of darkness moving across the end of the corridor. I stayed where I was until the sound of it, the noise of beating wings, a noise like wind, had died away. Afterward I felt dizzy, but I can show you the place if you like.”

“Curious,” murmured Antryg. “Curiouser and curiouser. By all means, take me there. But first, let's see what Pothatch can get me in the way of dinner. I have the uncomfortable suspicion that it's going to turn into a rather long night.”

In the days of the Six Kingdoms, a wizard was put to death by the Lord Caeline for trafficking with demons and lending his body to their uses. But as the wizard was possessed by a demon when he was slain, the demon also possessed his ghost, which bred into a monster, devouring all that it touched. No one could destroy this tsaeati, for whatever power was turned against the demon, the ghost drank, and the demon was able to turn it against its wielders in turn. At last Berengis the Black, the greatest Court Wizard of the land, with his own body lured the creature into a piece of crystal the size of his hand, so that it became lost in the crystal's inner mazes, wandering forever in darkness there, unable to escape.

—Firtek Brennan

Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry

tsaeati—anciently, devourer or glutton

There was darkness, and darkness, and darkness. Joanna didn't know how long she huddled in the corner where she found herself, her tousled blond head buried in her arms, shaking with fear and fighting off the urge to scream, to weep, to give in to the terror of what had happened ...

And that was, she realized eventually, the point.

She didn't know how long. But it was long enough for her fear to give way to waiting—and the waiting to impatience, the perverse desire for something to happen, even something bad.

And eventually, it all gave way to boredom.

Because nothing happened. Only more darkness, and stillness more absolute than anything she had previously known; temperatureless black air lying against her face, utter silence hanging like a muffling curtain against the smooth glassiness of the wall against which she sat, the slick unseen floor.

A silence, a stillness, like a soundstage or the acoustical deadness of a radio broadcasting chamber—not an echo, not the hum of air conditioning, not the vibration of weight on some distant floor. Nothing—truly nothing—that elevated even the soft hiss of air through her nostrils to a distinct variety of note and pitch.

A nothing that never altered.

She didn't feel ready to shout—God only knew what might answer—but she uncurled herself from the fetal position she'd unconsciously assumed when ... when ... It troubled her that she couldn't remember the exact mechanism of how she'd gotten where she was.

She remembered jerking to wakefulness in her own bed, sitting up in disoriented horror to see the blackness of the Void materializing out of the corner of her room. She remembered screaming. As if half recalling a dream, she had the impression that for a moment she'd known what was going to happen to her, and that was why she'd screamed.

And then she'd been here, wretched and terrified and weeping in the darkness.

And then she'd still been here, bored.

Well, not bored, exactly, she amended, feeling in the darkness for the thing she vaguely remembered grabbing for beside her bed ...

And found it, rolled like a lumpy teddy bear of Indian fringe and bunny fur in her lap. She thought she'd made a final snatch for her purse, which contained, among other things, her Swiss Army knife and a small can of Mace. What she really wanted was a flashlight. Her small, square hands sorted deftly through the contents with the ease of long practice till they closed around the short, smooth cylinder.

She drew it out and flicked the switch.

And nothing happened.

“Son of a ... ” She dropped the flashlight back and dug out one of her six boxes of matches.

It was when the matches didn't work that panic stole back on her, a chilly spot of something she didn't want to think about, as if she'd swallowed a neutron star the size of an apple seed and it lay there, ice-cold, heavy, tiny, and dead in the center of her chest. She shrank back into her corner—the join of two smooth unseen walls, facing God knew how large a chamber, occupied by God knew what—and wrapped her arms around herself, though the air was not particularly cold.

Good thing,
she thought, with the oblique part of her mind not occupied by terror, bafflement, the helpless cry of What the hell is going on?

These pajamas aren't the warmest things in the world.

But the bafflement and fear of knowing that neither the batteries in her flashlight nor the friction of the matchboxes worked here—wherever here was—wore off, too.

What was her Uncle Morrie's favorite proverb? God protect us from what we may one day get used to.

Somebody will have to come for me eventually.

And then, what felt like hours later ... Won't they?

But they didn't.

After a time—but how much time?—she stood up, feeling along the corner toward a ceiling her fingers never reached. That didn't mean much, of course; at barely five feet she couldn't even get into the top shelves of her own kitchen cupboards—unlike Antryg, the show-off. Hunkering cautiously down to the floor again, she moved outward, passing her hands along the smooth surface in wide sweeps until they contacted another comer, this one the exterior, rather than the interior, of a square turn, meaning she'd been in the angle of an L-shaped room or hall.

When you can't figure out everything, figure out the next thing.

So far, so good.

She had groped her way a hundred and twenty of her own footsteps along the wall when she found another turn; feeling across in the darkness, she ascertained that the opposite wall was still there. Either a corridor or a hell of a long, narrow cell.

And still no light, no sound, no trace of either rescue or threat. No change of temperature in the lightless space around her, no movement of air ... not even smells, she thought. No alteration of the smooth surface beneath her bare feet. Her exploring fingers had found no crack or irregularity to tell her whether the walls and floor were of stone or wood—or Fiberglas, for that matter. Her mouth quirked a little: Imprisoned in the Formica Dungeon.

Well, hell, she thought. If they're not coming for me, I'm going to have a look around. She had several granola bars in her purse, though she felt no hunger. The thought of water passed uneasily through her mind, but she pushed it aside: there was nothing to be done about it at the moment. Time enough to worry when she got thirsty. After a moment's consideration, she fished in her purse for a spool of thread and a roll of masking tape.

Just call me Theseus.

Hitching her purse more firmly onto her shoulder and hoping to hell she would smell or hear a minotaur before she stumbled over it in the dark, she set off to explore.

Suraklin the Dark Mage's greatest power lay in the fact that it was years before anyone, even his victims, realized that he was doing them harm. It would do to remember this in all dealings with wizards.

—Sergius Peelbone

Witchfinder Extraordinary of Angelshand

“It's quite true that I was badly brought up.” Antryg leaned one shoulder against the rounded, uneven stones of the Pepper-Grinder's windowsill; the day's last brightness flashed wanly in the crystal dangling from his ear. He'd acquired a pair of much-discolored fingerless writing mitts to keep his hands warm in the silvery sharpness of the Sykerst spring; with his ragbag shawl and his age-darkened snake oil-peddler coat, he had the look of a dilapidated macaw in molt.

“And, as Aunt Min says, I was taught all the wrong things. But it wasn't entirely my fault. It's very good of you to do this for me, Kitty.”

“I haven't managed to do anything yet. And you're blocking the light.”

Antryg turned from the window, his spectacles gleaming like the eyes of a deranged tarsier. At the table, among a battlefield of ruined supper dishes, Seldes Katne angled the main facet of her scrying-crystal to the daylight. Beyond the window the shadow of the tor could be seen, an enormous cloak of slate blue silk, softening the contours of the Valley of Shadows and blurring still further the dark spruces in their scrim of white river mist. Overhead the sky still held a chilly brilliance and would for hours to come, and though the air was sharp, already it breathed with the peculiar wildness of the wide steppe summer—life gorging itself on warmth against the knowledge of the long winter waiting.

“Perhaps if I'd been taken in by a Council wizard instead of by Suraklin,” Antryg continued thoughtfully, “it wouldn't have come so easy to me to use magic against what everyone agrees was a gross injustice being done in Mellidane. And once I'd started ... ”He shook his head.

“There are those who'd point out,” the librarian said, her attention still on the crystal before her, “that it was gross injustice to use magic against the non-mageborn, for whatever purposes. I sometimes think that's why we tend to live among ourselves, not going into the world much at all.”

“Well,” Antryg pointed out with a faint grin, “the rocks thrown at us in the streets, and the Inquisition, have a good deal to do with that, too.”

She frowned, looking up at him with a kind of indignation. “Well, of course,” she said. “But it's just too easy to take sides. And once a mage starts taking sides out of belief in the lightness of his or her own cause, how great a step is it to take sides for pay?”

“As great, I suppose, as the step to taking one's own side out of belief in the absolute priority of one's desires over everyone else's.” He returned to the table and selected a strawberry from the painted clay dish Pothatch the cook had sent up with bread and stew from the kitchen. “First one's desires,” he added quietly, “and, later, one's whims. Yes means yes under any circumstances, no means no under any circumstances ... and the great problem with strawberries is that one is never able to dispose of the hulls gracefully. I wonder if Q'iin ever perfected her spells to ripen peaches in the wintertime? Nyellin the White was said to be able to produce any sort of fruit at any time of the year, including bananas and mangoes—she could have made a fortune in the fancy market of Angelshand, if her Council vows had permitted her to do so. And I'd accept the Council's judgment of me,” he went on, veering back to the original topic with an insouciance that made Seldes Katne blink, “if it weren't for the fact that one of them is lying.”

The stout librarian looked up in surprise. “One of the Council?”

Antryg nodded, settling himself into one of the chairs and choosing another strawberry from the dish. “I felt it, when they,” his voice hesitated infinitesimally, then went on, “when they put the geas on me. Some secret ... some darkness, concealed from the others and from me. One of them took Joanna, I know that—only a member of the Council would have had the strength to cross the Void.”