The dog wizard, p.11
The Dog Wizard, page 11
“I’ll fetch it.” Down in the court the novices had scattered like terrified sparrows. Lady Rosamund was standing amid the cats, dispersing the spells that had summoned and kept them, releasing the nervous and frightened animals back to their accustomed ways. A gust of wind swirled the black skirts of her robe, made a velvet cloud of her witch black hair. The anger that enveloped her at whoever would do such a thing to defenseless animals was nearly as palpable and certainly as dark—a shadow guarding lightning.
Antryg shivered.
“Did you sleep well?” Aunt Min shifted her position a little, tugged his hand as he would have risen to go rattling off down the steps to the kitchens.
“Not very.”
She made a little noise with what few teeth she had left, as if he’d been a novice who’d botched a simple illusion, and stretched out her hand. After a moment he slipped from sitting on the wall to kneeling before her, as he had in the Council chamber, so that her crippled fingers could brush back the graying curls from his temples.
“Old sorrow and old pain,” she clucked. “Like the spells that fill this place, clinging to the teles-balls, clinging to the Vaults, clinging to every stone and kitchen pot. Why do the mageborn always grow up in pain? Why can they never let it go?”
Antryg thought about Lady Rosamund Kentacre, practicing the gentle arts of ladylike deportment and gossip; about his own nightmares; about the golden fifteen-year-old dancing girl they still sang songs about, nearly a century later, in the streets of Angelshand, never knowing what had become of her.
“Perhaps because it can never let them go?”
But at her touch he felt the bleeding grip of last night’s horrors ease.
“A flower sleeps in the earth,” she said, “and dreams of color and sun. But when it blooms, the earth leaves no stain upon it. Maybe you only need to sleep a little longer in the City of Dreams.”
She shook her head again and sighed. “Those things in the Vaults.” She spoke as if the horror Nandiharrow had killed with lightning had been no more than a mouse that had slipped through the spells woven about the Citadel to keep it free of such vermin. “Sad little things, and no more to be blamed than the poor pussies. You really have to do something about it.”
And putting her head down, she fell promptly back to sleep.
“And what will you do,” Seldes Katne asked, out of sheer force of habit straightening the edges of the piles of books Antryg was sorting, “if Aunt Min does die?”
“Run like hell, I suppose.” He glanced at the spine of a crumbling grimoire in the hard slice of butter-colored afternoon sunlight, set it in the largest heap. “Turn this one over to Nandiharrow’s team—it has some mention of early wizardry in it, but I don’t know how much bearing it would have on the current powers at large in the Vaults. The problem is that though she couldn’t track the by scrying-crystal—geas or not, I am still mageborn—Rosamund knows I wouldn’t go far as long as Joanna is a prisoner here.”
The librarian glanced quickly at him across the heaped library table and started to speak, then stopped herself and changed what she was going to say to “You think the Master-Spells will fall to Lady Rosamund, then, and not Daurannon? I know Aunt Min favors the Lady.”
It was a few moments before Antryg replied. To look at Salteris’ books—to help Seldes Katne sort the former Archmage’s water-stained miscellany of demonaries, catalogs, thaumaturgical cookbooks, and experimental notes from sorcerers long forgotten for anything containing reference to ancient magics in the Vaults—brought a yearning ache to his heart, a memory that was both hurt and joy. It had been less than a year altogether since he’d realized that Salteris was no longer alive in any real sense of the word, and less than six months since he had strangled the thing that was left of him. He had taught himself to speak casually of the old man, when speak of him he must, only by thinking of him as someone who was still alive somewhere, someone he would one day see again—scarcely different from all those years imprisoned in the Silent Tower.
“It isn’t a matter of favor, precisely,” he said at last. “Nor is it invariably the strongest to whom they pass. Or perhaps it is, by some definition of strength other than the one we use. And of course, once the Master-Spells do pass to the new Archmage, the question of strength becomes largely academic.”
“But it’s always someone on the Council,” Seldes Katne pointed out doubtfully.
“Well, I think that works backwards,” Antryg said, flipping open a sheaf of notes—yellow and brittle as last year’s fallen leaves—in Salteris’ elegant hand and identifying the spells they glossed. “They usually fall to someone within a certain range of strength, and Council membership merely assures that those with that strength will continue the policies of the former Archmage. And they do seem to fall to whoever is most appropriate, though the Archmage doesn’t will them to a successor. It’s more accurate to say that to the Archmage, at least, the successor is obvious. And speaking of the skulking ’round the woods whilst Joanna is locked up in a tower here...”
“Quite.” Seldes Katne carefully shifted a crumbling old tome on ophidiomancy to the sideboard behind her, to be sent down to the Juniors in the scriptorium for copying. “As you asked, I checked all the attics above here, and the subcellars below my quarters, though I really don’t think anyone could be holding a prisoner there any more than they could hold someone in the Conservatory. They’re just too close to my quarters for anyone to come or go unheard.”
She turned back to him, wiping the dust from her hands and studying the stacks of books still on the table.
Every inch of wall space not pierced by windows in the great library chamber was already covered in an uneven crazy quilt of cabinets built on top of cabinets and shelves of all lengths and sizes, from the floor to the lower side of the gallery that circled the room at the height of twelve feet, and then again, above the gallery, up nearly to the curve of the ceiling. At some time in the distant past the three turrets that opened off the gallery had been used for study rooms, where novices could engage in their endless task of memorizing lists, laws, and songs—the work of every novice’s first five years. Now they, too, were jammed with books, and the novices studied in their own—or one another’s—chambers.
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 remainder, 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 the? 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 the...” 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 Nandihar-row 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 them 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?”
