The dog wizard, p.35
The Dog Wizard, page 35
The sound of Gilda’s sobbing had quieted; Joanna raised her head to see the dark-haired novice being rocked in red-haired Kyra’s arms. Brunus, fat and deft and serious, was applying hot cloths to Whitwell Simm’s ruined arm, steam from the basin beside him rising in wreaths around his kindly face. Nearby a rather shaky-looking Brighthand, his gray robe still soaked with Daurannon’s blood, was holding on to Otaro’s bound wrists and saying something to him in the soft tones of healing-spells, while the mad wizard stirred in his dreams and sobbed incoherently. Lady Rosamund and Aunt Min had gone to kneel beside Daurannon, the Lady binding and stitching the wound in his arm by the light of a tallow dip while the Archmage listened to Durannon’s stifled account of the events of the past hour and a half.
She heard Aunt Min say softly, “And it was not so much then, to face Death when it came?”
Daurannon’s breath whispered in a laugh, as at some old conversation, and he murmured, “Believe me, Auntie, if there’d been any place to run, you’d still be trying to coax me out of it.” But the old lady only smiled.
Magister Magus, Joanna noted, hadn’t moved from his corner near the eastern door, where he was rather numbly consuming a cup of tea under the watchful eye of two of Silvorglim’s guards. The Witchfinder himself slept heavily in his corner among the cluster of torches.
Yet a waiting tension filled the dark room like an indrawn breath. Joanna knew—they all knew—that Brighthand was right. It was far from over.
“He’ll be all right.” Antryg’s deep, flamboyant voice breathed like the soft-brushed note of a temple gong in Joanna’s ear. Turning, she saw that he and Issay had brought the Dead God back to the shelter of his equipment, covering him with blankets. The iridescent orange eyes were open, but since Joanna had never seen them close, she wasn’t sure what this meant. Steam curled from the palms of those huge, toothed hands and drifted in ribbons from along his spine.
“I hope so,” she murmured nervously. “Aside from the fact that he’s the only one who can really tell if anything goes wrong with all the hardware... Dammit, none of this is really any of his fight. I mean...” She hesitated, looking worriedly up into Antryg’s face. “He could have stayed in his own world, you know.”
“Don’t talk foolishness.” The buzzing from the Dead God’s skull was barely louder than a mosquito circling somewhere, invisible, on a summer night. “If you saw a long-odds opportunity to enrich your knowledge by leaping through a Gate into another world, would you not seize an air bottle and leap?”
“Hell, no,” Joanna replied promptly, then realized that it was exactly what she had done in returning to this world last fall, to attempt to rescue Antryg from the Council.
Antryg’s eyebrows shot up, with a kind of startled, nervous question, and she realized she wasn’t the only one who’d considered the implications of their love in the light of the danger it had brought her.
Magister Magus had cautioned her not to make a choice. But her utter joy at having the choice—at having him there to choose—was, she understood, choice in itself.
She added softly, “Not knowledge.”
In their bruised pits, the gray eyes warmed, and he sighed a little, reaching out to touch her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You don’t know how good.”
“Joanna, I’m so sorry...”
She shifted her grip to his coat sleeves and pulled him to her. Their kiss was slower and stronger, without the first unthinking desperation; she felt, for an odd moment, that had things been a little different they would have retired then and there to some corner, curled up together like a couple of puppies, and gone to sleep.
Instead she said, “Now come over here and have a look at this.”
“Filthy French postcards?” he inquired hopefully, and she poked him lightly in the ribs.
“I’ll give you a filthy French postcard. How about a filthy French map of the Vaults, with all your information totted up and whatever I could pull out of the Dead God’s graphics. And I hope you can see some kind of pattern in it all, because I sure as hell can’t. Other than the obvious one, that they all line up along the leys.”
“Yes, but we knew that going in.” He coiled himself down cross-legged to study the nine maps roughly sketched on the floor. “The problem is... where’s Kitty, by the way? She was here when I left.”
Joanna frowned at the sudden memory through the jumbled events of the last half hour. “She dodged out of here right after the fight with the tsaeati—which, as Brighthand so sapiently pointed out, is going to be back as soon as it gets to the top of the Library and discovers there’s no supersonic lollipop up there. She might have had some idea of protecting the books, but I don’t think it would devour them. They aren’t an energy source, are they?”
“Well, some of them are, but that’s another story. What worries me is that there were supposed to be two or three teles stored in the Library. Which ones, and how strong, I don’t know, since Kitty never got a chance to give me the results of her research. What’s this?”
“Just my notes.”
“No, on the back.”
“Ninetentwo’s raw data from before the stabilization field went into effect. You can see the concentration in what has to be the Vaults...”
“Yes,” he murmured, and began to riffle the pages like a cartoon flip-book, so that the images seemed to skate nervously here and there with the rapidly falling sheets. “How did Kitty act?”
Joanna looked at him blankly for a moment, then said, “Scared, like the rest of us. Why?”
“Well...” He frowned and riffled the pages again, watching the illusory movement of all the Gates through the almost-patterns of the maze. Then he looked across at her, the torchlight sliding opaquely across the lenses of his spectacles for a moment, then showing his eyes grave and worried. “You see, two of the three people who actually saw the Moving Gate went mad.”
“You mean from something in the Gate itself?”
Antryg nodded. “Kitty didn’t get as close a look as the others did, and so mightn’t have gotten the full dose of whatever it was—probably an atmospheric poison—but she did get some, because she, too, described the Gate as rushing toward her. Now, there may very well have been some kind of noises and lights connected with it, but...”
“Wait a minute,” said Joanna, catching his hands as he began to riffle the sheets again. “Are you saying that the Moving Gate didn’t move at all?”
His long mouth quirked. “I suspect not. I thought it was impossible at the time, you remember—no, you don’t remember, you weren’t there. Anyway, from what I know of the physics of the Void, for a Gate to slide around in that fashion is extremely unlikely. What is likelier is that the initial hallucinations involved the sense of the darkness of the Gate rushing toward—or in Kitty’s case, away from—the victim; pursuing them, as Otaro described. Then later come pain and increasing paranoia: Phormion’s belief that Lady Rosamund was using the in a plot against her, Otaro’s visions of the Moving Gate appearing in his rooms.”
He glanced across at Bentick, who was helping Brunus with Whitwell Simm. The Steward moved with the jitteriness of the cats that had begun to congregate in every corner of the echoing darkness of the room; his face was haggard under the raked red lines of its wounds.
“I began to wonder about it after I spoke to Otaro, but other matters intervened. It’s been a rather busy night. But looking at all the evidence, it’s quite plain to the that what appeared to be an anomaly was in fact not an anomaly at all, and therefore probably no more significant than any other Gate. In other words, I—we all—have been pursuing a chimera.”
Joanna looked around her at the refectory, the tense, exhausted white faces of the wizards, the stinks of smoke and burnt flesh and blood. Her voice shook. “So we’re back to square one?”
“Oh,” Antryg murmured, returning to riffling through the pages and making all the various Gates move, “I think we have a long, long way to go before we achieve the comfort and security of square one. But if Kitty’s started to go mad from seeing this Gate as well...”
Then he paused, staring down at the top sheet of the pile. Lifting them again, he let them fall, holding them higher and wider, so that not only the closer patterns of the Vaults showed, but, here and there, the dark blurs of fields elsewhere appeared and vanished.
Looking down over his shoulder, Joanna was silent until he’d finished.
Then he said slowly, “Yes.”
“That one spot isn’t moving at all.”
“No.”
“But it isn’t even in the Vaults. I saw it on those charts and thought it was the one out in the Green King’s Chapel.”
Antryg shook his head. “It isn’t anywhere near far enough out for that. By its placement it’s definitely in the Citadel.”
“But if it’s in the Citadel,” Joanna argued, puzzled, “I mean, not in the Vaults—wouldn’t somebody have seen it?”
“Not necessarily. Kitty and I searched all the places in the Citadel where no one ever goes in quest of you, but it’s conceivable that we missed some...”
“Ninetentwo...” Joanna bent anxiously toward the prone shape of the great dragonoid. The nodule of light flickered, then brightened like a feeble star. “Could you show the how to run up a three-D projection of the Citadel and feed in this data?”
“I could,” responded the buzzing voice, the words forming up in her mind. “But it would take the four times as long as it would simply to do it. Bring the computer here.”
“Antryg...” Another voice spoke from the fitful glare beyond the shadows of the oscillator ring.
Antryg rose; Lady Rosamund stood silhouetted in the fitful light. He stepped closer and saw how the shadows showed up the lines of pain around that perfect mouth, the aching soreness in every move she made. Her hand shook where it clutched the staff.
“Brighthand was right, you know,” she said. “The tsaeati will be back, and soon. I have some power, and you also, now, and the mere fact that he could read the marks in the Vaults tells me that Magister Magus is more than the charlatan he pretends to be. But the tsaeati... In all the legends of Berengis’ meeting with it, it is said that the thing cannot be defeated. That it will absorb whatever is used against it, whatever it touches, as poor Whitwell found. It has Q’iin’s magic now, too.”
“Yes,” murmured Antryg, leaning his elbows on the generator that separated them. “And the worst thing about the tsaeati is that it isn’t the worst of our problems. We have to find the Gate—which, as it turns out, is neither moving about nor in the Vaults at all—and we have to find it within the next hour, before the stabilization field starts to disintegrate.”
“Not in the Vaults?” Her dark brows plunged down. “But what Phormion and Otaro and Seldes Katne saw...”
“Was a hallucination which appeared to be more significant than it was. Bentick...”
The Steward, kneeling beside Otaro, twitched as if struck. His eyes met Antryg’s across the room with a kind of shamefaced defiance; then he sighed, and crossed to the dark ring of blinking equipment.
“I never thanked you for saving me from Phormion,” Antryg said quietly. “It was enormously appreciated, in spite of subsequent events, and once you realized she was going mad, I can’t really blame you for doing whatever you could to keep the Inquisition from meddling in the search and finding her. Is she still in her rooms?”
The old man shook his head wretchedly. “She is wandering. I... she... she said I was trying to kill her. Said we were all plotting to poison her.” His hand strayed to the claw-rakes on his scalp. “She said the Moving Gate was appearing to her in her rooms, that she heard voices within it plotting her death.” He bowed his head, his hands straying nervously again to his watch. “She hasn’t eaten or slept...”
“Well,” Antryg sighed wistfully, “when it comes right down to it, neither have I. But unfortunately she’s one of the few wizards in the Citadel capable of using her full powers at the moment—or any power at all. While she was ill, did you enter all the rooms of the Castle?”
“Yes. She thought that Lady Rosamund had put spies there and made me come with her to search them.”
“Hmn. Well, that rules out the Castle. I had thought...”
“Antryg...” Joanna looked up from the screen. “We’ve got it.”
Antryg excused himself, leaving Rosamund and Bentick talking quietly while he went to kneel in the tiny circle of greenish light from the computer screen.
“I’m using as parameters the outer limit of the spell-field you set.” The thin, clawed fingers of Ninetentwo’s lower left arm—the only arm not immobilized by wounds or bandages—picked swiftly among the computer keys. “The green spot is the area in question. It isn’t a Gate at all, if you’ll reexamine the raw data, but a field of some kind surrounding a small wormhole. The wormhole would appear from time to time as a floating area of blackness, not large enough for a human to pass through.”
“Yes,” Antryg murmured, as the Dead God manipulated the knobs to turn the digitalized construct of the Citadel here and there. “I’m familiar with them.”
“I still think it’s odd that nobody would have noticed it, if it were in the Citadel,” Joanna said. “Particularly if you and Seldes Katne searched the place for me.”
She looked up at Antryg’s face, the amber lines of the graphic reproducing the Citadel in miniature in the lenses of his glasses. In the dark of the electronic ring that surrounded them, the reflection of the single pixel of green burned like telltale fire.
He shut his eyes, and his breath escaped him in a sigh; etched in the pallid flicker of the screens, the lines of pain and weariness in his face seemed to deepen. He brought up his hand under his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, the gesture of a man defeated, comprehending that which he would really rather not comprehend.
“What is it?” Joanna asked worriedly. “Where is the field?”
“In the old Conservatory.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “Adjacent to Seldes Katne’s rooms.”
“But wouldn’t Seldes Katne have...” Her voice trailed and faded, as she understood. “But Seldes Katne doesn’t have any power. At least, she’s supposed to be the least powerful mage in the Citadel, according to Magister Magus.”
“I know.” He rubbed his eyes again and readjusted his spectacles to look at her, bone-deep weariness and bitter understanding in his eyes. “And that’s why she used teles to power the magic-circles which keep it open; why she would have done anything, from discreetly fanning Bentick’s fears to attempting to murder me, on up to destroying the stabilization field, to keep the Citadel from being searched, once she knew I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—help her.”
He stood up, his shoulders bowed tiredly, and looked at the square, blinking wristwatch strapped incongruously to his arm beneath the tarnished beading of his coat cuff. “And I’m very much afraid, judging by how much time has elapsed since the tsaeati’s departure, that by this time it will have entered first the Library, then the Conservatory, and devoured the energies of the teles. Technically, it is a teles now, which means that we’re going to have to destroy it in order to close the Gate.”
“Unfortunately,” Lady Rosamund’s clear, cool voice sliced into the quiet like a trickle of ice water, “it has long been established that nothing can destroy it.”
There was an awkward silence. At length Joanna said, “If nothing can destroy it, Nothing is probably what we need.”
She got to her feet, staggering a little from the cramps of crouching in front of the computer so long, and crossed to them, her arms wrapped around herself against the growing cold.
“Considering that nothing is precisely what we’re doing at the moment,” Bentick retorted caustically, “dare I predict a large-scale victory in short order?”
But Antryg and Lady Rosamund were looking at one another, half-worried, half-speculative.
Down by Lady Rosamund’s elbow, a piccolo voice said, “Nothing,” and looking across, Joanna saw Aunt Min, hunched like a bright-eyed little witch in the shadows.
“Antryg,” Joanna said slowly, “you told me once that the Dead God—the real Dead God, not Ninetentwo—was Nothing. The opposite even of Entropy—a kind of antimatter, or antienergy, anti even the movement of randomness... pure Nothing. Is it possible to summon that?”
Antryg ran his fingers through his long gray hair, his eyes a little absent behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, delving around in the chaotic darkness of his memory. “Theoretically, it’s possible to summon anything which can be imagined,” he said. He started to say something else, hesitated a moment, then went on, “I suspect it would kill me.”
“Suspect?” Lady Rosamund gave a single, high-bred sniff. “I can assure you, Windrose, that if you summoned a tithe of the... the essence of the Dead God, the emptiness, the coldness, the nothingness of absolute Nothing, it would finish you before the words were out of your mouth. And while the sight of you committing suicide in such a fashion might momentarily startle the tsaeati...”
“Not did he hold a spell of protection about him,” Aunt Min said, reaching up to grasp her pupil’s torn sleeve.
“Don’t be silly,” Bentick snapped. “To summon Nothing is more than most wizards can do in the first place. To summon a protective spell powerful enough to hold that Nothing at bay—that Nothing which would swallow even the magic of the teles—would kill the spell’s wielder. And to summon half of each would end in leaving the tsaeati sufficient power to swallow you up, protection-spells and all. And in any case, the Summoning of Nothing is impossible.”
“Bentick, Bentick,” Antryg chided, “where’s your imagination?”
“In the strict charge of my reason, thank you, where it belongs,” the Steward retorted, tilting his head haughtily.
