The dog wizard, p.22
The Dog Wizard, page 22
Three spells, he thought, springing down a vine-choked streambed and scrambling up the other side. A major healing-spell to keep blood loss and shock at bay, a cloaking spell to turn aside the eyes of searchers, and a summoning to whomever she could think of in the Citadel... No wonder the Lady could spare nothing for direct action against her attackers. The musket roared again, and the leaves of the hawthorn brake into which he dived shuddered as if smote with a whip. That’ll teach her to put potential defenders under geas.
He crawled through the thick cresses near the streambed as far as he dared, then showed himself again, drawing them after him; Gru Gwidion yelled something about “...big gray with three white paws.” The identical repetition of the words snagged in Antryg’s mind, as much as the words themselves.
“Damn,” he breathed as he cleared the fallen trunk of an alder, half a jump ahead of another arrow, “I do believe someone’s cast a glamour on them and they see me as a wolf.”
Glamours were simple enough to cast. Completely illegal, of course, but Suraklin had used them frequently. Antryg recalled the young son of a Kymil merchant, who had shot his own father in mistake for a deer after the father had crossed Suraklin in a business deal... recalled another instance when the old wizard had disgraced a woman who had made a fuss about him speaking to her child, by casting a glamour on her that made her believe another man was her husband.
In both instances, Antryg recalled, he himself had helped, though he had known even then it was wrong—and that, he supposed, was a glamour of its own.
He remembered that both victims had later killed themselves. But Suraklin had robbed him even of the courage for that.
The undergrowth was thinner here. Antryg elbowed himself carefully from clump to clump of bracken, trying to stick to ground rocky enough not to show tracks. Had the hunters seen Lady Rosamund as a wolf also? Glamours cast with a piece of the object’s clothing often throw a field, Suraklin had said, running through his slim fingers the old merchant’s long black stockings, which Antryg had stolen from the laundry behind the painted wooden mansion. People or objects near them become distorted in the subject’s mind as well. So take care you keep clear of the old cheat. It’s the commonest form of the spell, but crude. I prefer to use the perfume method, myself.
The men behind him had gone quiet, but with the senses of his wizardry he could reach out and hear them, rustling through the willow thickets, their boots a heavy soughing in the carpet of spruce needles and fern.
Or had Lady Rosamund been the intended victim, himself merely the bait? Whoever had laid the first glamour on poor Tom, it wouldn’t have taken much to get Rosamund to follow him out to the chapel.
The bracken had thinned; the spruces grew thicker here, their needles killing undergrowth and at the same time holding his tracks. Swiftly, cautiously, he slipped from tree to tree, following the bare ground where he could or working his way along the more concealing vegetation that clogged the fast-running, ice-bitter streams. That zone of magic, he thought desperately, had better still be in existence when I get there.
He made it to within a mile of the rocks he’d called the Three Aunts Having Tea before the hunters spotted him. He’d heard them behind him all the way, now nearer, now farther; the rustle of their bodies in the blackberry brambles and laurel shrubs as they beat the thickets, the cautious, whistling birdcalls of their signals. Now and then, when the wind shifted, he smelled the cow-and-smoke reek of their clothing. So he was half-ready when the creaking snick of a crossbow alerted him and was able to duck and roll; the bolt took a two-inch gash in the leather of his boot, then he was on his feet and running for his life.
He was long-legged and knew the ground; ducking, weaving, clearing boulders and fallen trees like some grotesque gazelle, too taken up with trying not to trip to concentrate on the sounds behind him and praying one of them wasn’t lying in wait to head him off. The musket roared, but he didn’t see where the ball went, only knew it hadn’t touched him. Sunlight on pine straw; squirrels pouring in fleet red streaks up the trunks of trees; a familiar shape of ground, a landmark tree...
He stumbled within a yard of the fallen trunk he’d taken as a landmark, and even as he struck the ground, he summoned like a thunderclap the spell for the breaking of the glamour. It crumbled like rotted wood from his numb mind, the geas tightening in smothering pain around his brain and nerves. An arrow caught sunflash like a huge wasp as he stumbled on toward the road, the whiffle of it brushing his torn calico sleeve; he gathered his strength about him and called the spell again.
This time it worked. He felt it, flung it back behind him like a glittering net, praying the magic would work as it should. One of the men yelled, “Son of a bitch!” and someone else, “What the...”
Antryg stumbled to a halt, gasping for breath as he dropped to his knees in the pine needles, sweat pouring down his cheeks and aware for the first time of the scratches on his face from holly and bramble, the rips in his shirt, and the bruises on his shoulders and knees.
“Dammit, don’t shoot!” he yelled, throwing up his hands. Turning, he saw the men grouped behind him in the thin tangle of bracken, panting also and gazing at him with startled and frightened eyes.
“It’s a wizard!” Gru Gwidion said, passing one leather-gloved hand across his eyes. “Lord Antryg...”
“He was the wolf.” One of the hunters raised his crossbow to cover him. “He turned himself into... into...” His voice stumbled, hesitant. He lowered the weapon again and looked at his leader, puzzled, sweat trickling down his narrow, red-bearded face. “We... we was after a wolf. But there ain’t been wolves around much this spring. Why’d we think...?”
“No.” Antryg got to his feet, brushing the spruce needles from the knees of his jeans, and shook back his long hair from his face. “And I’m sure if you count your sheep, nobody will find any missing.”
“No, I—I know none of ’em’s missing.” Gru Gwidion came forward, uncertainly holding out his hand, his dark face puzzled and a little ashamed behind the tangles of his black beard. “We ain’t even had ’em out to the far pastures. But... it’s like we was all so sure this morning. Like we’d all talked about it yesterday but now, looking back, I don’t see how we could.”
The others wore that look, too: of men baffled by their own behavior, ashamed, puzzled, wondering how they could have all done such a thing... and on the verge, Antryg knew—like drunkards finding an ironclad justification for their binges—of looking for reasons why their actions had to have been right.
“You were under a spell, all of you,” he said quickly. God, Daur will kill me for undoing six centuries of careful P.R. “You were deceived into thinking that there was a wolf in the first place, and then, when I happened by—as somebody took care that I would—into thinking that wolf was me. That’s all. Can any of you remember speaking to a wizard yesterday in the Citadel?”
Gru scratched his head. Closer to, the smell of him was stronger, but in an odd way it blended with the green smells of the moss and the acidic pungence of the nearby bogs, disappearing into the general scents of the woods. “No, I... I don’t recall it,” he said, looking up at Antryg. The suspicion, and some of the uneasy, baffled shame, had faded from his eyes; they were sharp again with the wary cunning of one who lives by observation. “But if they was a wizard and out to set a trap, I don’t suppose I would recall. I’m damn sorry, my lord, and in that,” he added firmly, with a meaningful glance back at his men, clumped together and muttering among themselves, “I can speak for us all. But wasn’t there two of you? I swear Cappy here brought down what looked to me then like another wolf.”
“He did,” said Antryg grimly. “And she’s still back there, shot badly in the thigh. She was trying to summon the mages from the Citadel but I don’t know if she succeeded... ah!”
Distantly, down on the road he heard the swift clatter of hooves. “Splendid. She’ll be in the ferns behind those two boulders near the first thicket you checked, where the blood is... she may have a cloaking-spell about her and be hard to see at first...”
“Davy, Crim, go on ahead,” Gru ordered, signing to two of his hunters. “There’ll likely be some palaver, she needs help fast.”
The red-haired hunter and another shouldered their arms and headed off, flickering swiftly out of sight in the gloom beneath the dark trees. Antryg was already striding to the top of the road bank a few yards away, waving his arms. “Here!” he called out, his deep voice pitched to carry. “Over...”
And he stopped. For the riders down in the roadbed were not, as he had expected, Daurannon, Issay Bel-Caire, and a group of sasenna from the Citadel.
Most of them were sasenna, though their traditionally black uniforms were cut in a far more modern style than those of the Council’s sworn weapons. Their coats were close-fitting, long-skirted, their black trousers knitted to move silently, easily, with the movements of their wearers. Among them were two riders in the long, blood-colored robes of hasu, Church wizards—Red Dogs—mages who had sworn their services to, and been taught their magic by, the small but powerful Magical Office of the Church itself.
Riding in the lead was a small, lean, broad-shouldered man whose strawy red-blond hair was fading swiftly to colorless-ness, a man clothed in narrow-cut gray—coat, trousers, waistcoat—which also bore, small and discreet upon its collar, the many-handed red Sun of the True Faith.
“Damn!” Antryg ducked behind the screen of alder and hemlock even as the riders beneath him drew rein. In two or three bounds he returned to Gru and his remaining men, caught the chief hunter by the elbow and drew the others with a gesture close about them. “Lead them back to Lady Rosamund and get them to help her—they have mages with them—and take her back to the Citadel. She was hit by a stray musket ball when you were out hunting wolves,” he added, with a small gesture collecting the magic which still hovered over the spot and casting it, a shining scarf of smoke, across their eyes and certain portions of their minds. “You haven’t seen me at all.”
So much, he thought with an ironic inner sigh, for not messing about with alien magic, and for keeping one’s vows.
He was out of sight by the time the hunters had gone to the top of the road bank to call out to the riders below.
As a man who had had dealings with most of the representatives of the Inquisition in the Realm of Ferryth at one time or another, Antryg had easily recognized the leader of the party as Yarak Silvorglim, Witchfinder Extraordinary of Kymil and the Sykerst.
“So you weren’t ever taught real magic at all?”
“Nonsense, my dear.” Magister Magus’ slim, velvet-clad arm shifted under Joanna’s shoulders where they rested against the wall. “What is real magic? The Academics—the Council Mages—keep a tight monopoly on its teaching, and have for six hundred years hoarded every book and magical implement they can lay hands upon. But my magic, such as it is, is as real as theirs.”
Hours had passed... days... Joanna didn’t know. The darkness was unchanged and unchangeable, a black pressure cloaking them in hopeless stillness. Far off she could hear the mad, whispering mutter of the Lady Irina, but though their low voices must have been equally audible to her, she never made the attempt to draw near them. She herself never felt hunger, or thirst, though her throat was sore now from talking to Magister Magus for hours on end.
Yet still she talked. His presence was a lifeline... and his throat, she reasoned with a wry inner grin, had to be as sore as hers.
There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do, except talk. There was a kind of conversation even in their silences, an enormous comfort in the little diviner’s arm around her shoulders, in the soft hursh of his breathing, in the smell of whatever scent steeped his dressing gown and the occasional pressure of his well-kept, slender fingers against hers.
The inaction nearly drove her crazy, but there was, literally, nothing to be done, and even moving around, Joanna guessed, would increase their chances of meeting the tsaeati, or something worse. Once, for no reason, she had cried, cried until she was exhausted—cried from terror, and hopelessness, and the certain knowledge that Antryg had met with something he couldn’t deal with and would never get them out... cried against Magus’ shoulder while he’d comforted her with the meaningless words he used to all those rich women who came to him for love-spells and abortifacients and talismans to give success in their endless high-stakes gambling at Court. Later, exhausted and a little ill, it had occurred to her that Magister Magus was probably just as scared as she was. But because they were not and had no intention of being lovers, the bone-deep conventions of the sexes forbade him from crying on her shoulder.
And so they had talked to keep from thinking about how much time had to have passed in the outer world.
She had talked about Antryg, about her mother and the California real-estate market, about being a nerd in high school, about rerigging an AI cube to accommodate CD-ROM, and about clients who wanted her to design coherent spreadsheets for antiquated CPM systems they’d bought used at Lou & Ernie’s Kut-Rate Komputer Korner out in Simi. About the difficulties of incorporating any second personality into a life that had heretofore interacted strictly with books, cats, and bulletin boards, let alone something as alien as a man and as random in nature as a wizard.
“For a long time I lived... I don’t know, very closed in,” she said softly. “And I didn’t like to be pulled out of that, let alone being kidnapped and having my life in danger. And after that, when I was getting ready to rescue him from the Silent Tower, I made myself learn all this stuff I never even considered learning before: how to shoot handguns and rifles and an assault rifle, for God’s sake—I took a course in CPR and learned how to make a fire by flint and steel, which is a real bastard, and how to shoot a crossbow. I was just so scared. Scared of what I’d run into, and scared that I wouldn’t... I wouldn’t be able to find him. But the awful thing was—I liked it. But now...”
She shook her head. “I keep wondering if I should have done it at all. If knowing him—loving him—is worth... this. Risking this... this darkness that isn’t even death. My life was good without him, I was comfortable and safe.”
“My dear,” the Magus said softly, “it sounds as if—and please pardon me for my presumption—you’re looking for a reason not to need him.”
“I am,” Joanna said desperately. “That is... I don’t need him. Not really, I mean...”
“You mean you don’t want to need him.”
She was silent, feeling by the tightness of her chest, the sudden hurt of her throat, that he spoke the truth. “Him,” she said slowly, when she could again control her voice. “Or anyone.”
The velvet arm tightened about her shoulders; the light, beautiful voice spoke from the dark. “Why not?”
“Because I’m afraid if I need him I’ll screw myself up for him,” she replied, with the perfect candor of weariness. “Because I’m afraid I can’t think straight around him. Because I’m afraid I’m not doing it right—I’m not being the right kind of person. And mostly because I don’t want to need him and then have him leave.”
“Ah, Joanna,” the little man sighed. “My dear child. Do you really consider yourself that foolish or that weak?”
She shook her head, her face pressed to his shoulder, the smells of orris root and velvet and spermaceti oil filling her nose. She whispered, “I don’t know what I am anymore. Not with him. And I’m afraid I’m just acting out of—of some kind of hormonal insanity.”
“If love didn’t make us insane,” the Magus said gently, “who among us would have the courage to step outside the walls we build to protect ourselves against life? I suggest that you not decide in advance. Just as no woman should make important decisions when she’s under the influence of the moon, no one at all should do so when they’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired... or, I ought to add, in a situation as abnormal as this. When you have the choice again is when you should make it, not before. And then the choice will be obvious.”
She sighed and raised her head. “I suppose,” she said reluctantly. “But...”
“No buts.”
She leaned once more into the comfort of his shoulder. “You know—I almost didn’t expect it. But you’re very wise.”
Magus sighed deeply. “It’s my job.”
And they both laughed.
Doing what the Magus did for a living, his talk rambled from Caris and Pella, and the various mages he knew, to Court intrigue, to gossip about the Prince Regent—who was evidently growing madder, more suspicious, and more perverted by the day—and to tips on how to sound like you knew more about a client’s personal problems than you did. “They’re always terribly impressed when you come out with the name of their lover before they’ve told it to you, but all it takes is being on good terms with the Palace chambermaids, you know.”
But beneath the charlatanry that made him his living lay the velvet undercurrent, not only of worldly wisdom, but of true magic, the magic he had been born with; the magic he had painstakingly studied, in bits and pieces, from an old card reader he’d apprenticed himself to in Kymil and from various dog wizards who, grudgingly or otherwise, consented to teach him a few tricks here, a few secrets there.
“Not that anyone’s ever able to learn much,” he added, with a curious mixture of longing and bitterness in his voice. “The Inquisition’s sure to come down on any sorcerer displaying more powers man they like to see—a friend of mine in Kymil used to say the Council tipped them off. And you don’t have to be a Suraklin or a Vorkhedne the Gray—he was another of the truly evil ones, my dear, long before my time—to be using powers to make a little money or give yourself and your children a decent life. But as I said, the Council makes jolly sure that every book of spells that gets confiscated ends up in their hands—unless the Magic Office of the Church gets them—and keeps a tight rein on such things as scrying-crystals and water bowls, hemmerteyrne and teles...”
