Barbara Hambly - Windrose 3 - Dog Wizard

VIP免费
2024-12-07 0 0 555.56KB 148 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
DOG WIZARD
Barbara Hambly
[18 jun 2002-scanned and proofed for #bookz]
Chapter I
And as for the wizards who use their power to further human ends, even ends which seem to them to
be good, or who sell their skills, even such skills as they themselves deem harmless-they are but
dogs who will feed from any master's hand. Such dog-wizards the Council of Wizards will neither
recognize, nor teach its skills, nor protect from the haters of magic.
-Isar Chelladin
Archmage of the Council
Precepts of Wizardry
"Is your friend really what he says he is?"
There was a carefully casual note in Ruth Kleinfeld's voice that made Joanna hesitate a long time
before replying.
"What has he told you?" she asked at last, cradling the receiver of the telephone against her
shoulder to hit the SAVE key. As an afterthought, she punched through a save and exit, parked the
heads, and took the computer down. Something in Ruth's tone told her this could get complicated.
"And why do you ask?"
There was a pause. Ruth, Joanna guessed, was ensconced in the dingy gray office of her father's
construction company in the cement wilds of South Central Los Angeles, painting her fingernails
and trying to guess the amounts of the checks her father had written on the office account last
week. The temperature down in her neck of the woods-Venice Boulevard and Hoover Avenue-would be
hovering in the nineties. Up here in Van Nuys it was worse, and Joanna, clothed in her oldest
jeans and a black Enyart's Bar & Grill T-shirt with sleeves and neck cut out, was wondering
whether the air conditioner would make it till sunset, let alone till Thanksgiving, when the San
Fernando Valley would finally cool off.
There was no question about which friend Ruth meant. It was just like Antryg Windrose, Joanna
reflected, not to come up with an alternative to the unvarnished truth.
"He says," reported Ruth in a just-the-facts-ma'am tone, "that he's an exiled wizard from another
universe."
Why not? Joanna sighed mentally. Antryg had been considered hopelessly insane by everyone who knew
him in his former life. Why alter things now?
There was momentary silence on the line, something the girls had grown used to over the course of
their years of friendship. On the other side of what had once been her Aunt Rachel's dining table,
Chainsaw yawned and rolled over to a more comfortable position, all four feet in the air, on top
of the pile of documentation Joanna was using to try-vainly, so far-to figure out why Galaxsongs
Records' spreadsheet program refused to work. Chainsaw and Spock deeply appreciated Antryg
Windrose 's arrival on the scene last January, coinciding as it did with Joanna's decision to
become a free-lance consultant and full-time dispenser of cream and catnip. It amused and
interested Joanna that, although the living room had been transformed into a barely restrained
chaos of papers, drawings, physics books, tarot decks, used teacups, animal skulls, dried and
potted herbs, gutted computers, dismantled clocks, pinwheels in various stages of construction,
and an artillery battalion of windup toys, the cats left most of Antryg 's things alone.
After a moment Ruth went on. "Now, I mean, Antryg is definitely not from this universe ... "
Joanna could almost see her tap her forehead, indicative of her frequently voiced suspicion that
Joanna's roommate hailed from the far side of the Twilight Zone. "Is he psychic?"
"Y-yes," said Joanna slowly. He wasn't, exactly, but it was one of the simpler explanations.
She heard Ruth sigh. "I didn't used to believe in it," she said. "But after you were gone last
fall ... I don't know. And there's something about Antryg ... Maybe it's just that he believes it
himself, until you get to believe it, too."
"There is that," Joanna agreed. She recalled Antryg's application for his bartending job at
Enyart's. He'd seen no incongruity in listing "wizard" as a former occupation. "Not that I was
ever paid for it, you understand," he had hastened to explain to Jim, the manager, who nodded and
gave him the job. Jim had lived in L.A. a long time.
"The thing is," Ruth went on, "Jim says he sees auras-personal auras around people, that kind of
stuff. And he says Antryg has the damnedest one he's ever seen. So I was wondering ... "
She hesitated again, and Joanna felt, as clearly as if someone, something, had come up and laid a
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (1 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:18 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
clawed hand upon her shoulder from behind, that she knew what Ruth was going to say.
And the cold fear of it shrank in her viscera, as it had one night two years ago, when she'd
returned to the locked apartment and found a cigarette stub on the edge of the bathroom sink.
"The riverbed ... " She heard the ghost-quick intake of Ruth's shaken breath.
"You've been there?"
Joanna shut her eyes. So Ruth knew about it. That meant it really was real.
She felt cold.
It hadn't been precisely a dream. It had come to her waking and in daytime, like the sudden
recollection of something dreamed days ago, only she knew she had never actually dreamed any such
thing. In a vision-flash of quasi-memory, she had seen herself walking along the bed of one of Los
Angeles' notorious cement-paved rivers, something she knew down to the molecules of her bone
marrow she had never done and would never do. But the memory was so vivid, it nearly blinded her:
the heat of the May sun beating on her tousled, too-curly blond hair, the scuff of her sneakers in
the thin yellow-gray dust, the Hispanic graffiti on the concrete retaining walls that rose around
her, and the pale pinks and greens of the sixties tract houses visible above them. One house,
defiant heliotrope, stood out among them like a biker at a CPA convention.
The very clothes she'd had on at the moment of the vision-the slightly newer jeans and white
tuxedo shirt, currently lying half-folded over the edge of the bed, which she'd worn to
Galaxsongs' office that morning-had clothed her in the ... dream? vision? Please don't let it be a
premonition ...
And more vivid than any of the rest was the memory of the fear that lifted like heat shimmer from
the cement.
She couldn't recall what she'd been afraid of, though she dimly sensed it had to do with something
on the ground: tracks, writing, something drawn among the dry, spreading rings of parching bull-
thorns on the earthquake-cracked pavement of the wash.
But it was the fear that came back to her most clearly now, five hours later, sitting in her
dining-room-cum-office on the phone with Ruth, the sun klieg-light bright outside the half-drawn
drapes on the windows and the heavy, throbbing heartbeat of rising rush hour leaking faintly in
from Victory Boulevard outside.
"Joanna?" Ruth sounded worried at the long silence.
Joanna took a deep breath, telling herself firmly that there was nothing to be afraid of in that
ephemeral series of images which hadn't even been a proper dream. "I haven't been there," she said
slowly. And then, "You mean you know where it is?"
"Sure." Ruth's voice, deep for a woman's, usually a sweet, slow, sexy drawl even when she wasn't
turning on her charm for men, was low and hesitant now, and scared. "That's what spooked me so bad
when I dreamed it last night. That's the Tujunga Wash just north of the Ventura Freeway. My
parents live right over on Whitsett; my brother and I used to get in trouble all the time for
playing down there when we were kids. And it's like that, even that crazy purple house up on the
bank. On my way down to the office this morning, I drove by there."
If your dream was anything like mine, thought Joanna with a shiver, you're a braver lass than I
am, Gunga Din.
Or maybe she just didn't know what could happen.
Ruth hesitated, struggling with a truth, an admission, perhaps, of craziness that she wouldn't
have made to anyone else. Then she said, "Joanna, there's something weird going on down there. I
didn't see anything, but I felt ... "
She broke off, but it didn't matter. Joanna knew what she had felt.
The sense that if she had stood still and listened, she would have heard, in the empty, baked
stillness of the morning heat, breathing other than her own. The knowledge that something was
going to happen that had no business happening in the sane and daylight world of every day.
In a smaller voice, Ruth went on, "I've been sitting here all afternoon wondering if I was crazy."
"No," Joanna said quietly, and that something which had shrunk and shriveled within her tried to
make itself a little smaller, tried to hide behind her sternum for protection-tried to tell her
that if she ignored all this and went about her business, everything would be all right. "No, you
aren't crazy-unless we're both crazy. But I'll get in touch with Antryg. He'll know what's going
on, and he'll probably know what to do."
And she reflected, as she hung up, that that in itself was one of the less comforting aspects of
the situation.
At this time on a Friday afternoon, Joanna knew that Antryg would be "down at the shop"-a shabby
twenties Spanish duplex up on Saticoy Avenue with a sign outside that said:
PALMS READ-TAROT-PSYCHIC COUNSELING.
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (2 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:18 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
The woman who owned the place had recently taken custody of her niece and nephew at her sister's
death, and had cut back her psychic counseling to weekday mornings; she'd been happy to find
someone willing to rent space afternoons and weekends. A Mazda Miata of a shade popularly known as
give-me-a-ticket red sat in one of the two parking spaces in what had originally been the front
yard; Antryg's bicycle was propped, unlocked as usual, against one of the splintery awning posts
of the porch.
The bike was a good-quality Nishiki touring job, purchased with part of the spoils of Suraklin the
Dark Mage's secret bank accounts shortly after Joanna had attempted to teach Antryg to drive a
car. The neighborhood averaged five burglaries a week, but whatever it was that prevented Spock
and Chainsaw from making free with Antryg's pinwheels in the apartment evidently worked on the
local druggies as well. There was a parking place available, too, directly in front of the duplex,
on a street whose proximity to a pre-zoning-law industrial park made walks of a block or more
almost routine.
As she mounted the cracked brick steps to the jungle of the porch, Joanna heard Antryg's voice
through the window screens, a brown velvet baritone like some mad Shakespearean actor's, the drop
and flex of its intonations like the swirl of a stage villain's cloak. He was talking to a client,
of course.
Joanna grinned inwardly. Another of her friends in Antryg's home world, the sasennan Caris,
onetime sworn warrior of the Council of Wizards, once said of Antryg in scandalized tones, "He's
nothing but a dog wizard!" Raised in the purest mainstream of Academic wizardry, Caris meant it as
the basest of insults, for in the Empire of Ferryth the dog wizards were the semi-taught free-
lance mages who refused to take the vows imposed by the Council as a condition of teaching. Lumped
into the same category were the outright charlatans who claimed powers they had not been born with
at all, relying on sleight of hand to deceive their customers ... men and women who used magic, or
claims of magic, for gain.
The Academics, of course, were above such things, even had they not been forbidden by civil law
and their own vows to use their powers to meddle in human affairs.
In a way, Caris and the Academics-who had chucked Antryg out of their highest councils when he was
barely thirty-were right. Antryg Windrose was a dog wizard.
And in this world-in this city, with its scruffy palm trees and limpid swimming pools, its
perpetual stink of exhaust and its shining glass high rises, all pretending like hell that it
wasn't constructed on a desert and a dozen earthquake faults-fugitive and exile and unable to work
the magic that was his in his own universe, he was making a fair living at it.
From the rump-sprung wicker loveseat in the porch's slatted shade, Joanna could see through the
screen door into the room where Antryg talked to his clients. Mrs. Pittman would not have
permitted another swami to use the same rooms she used, nor would Antryg have dreamed of doing
such a thing-an assumption on both their parts that had gone far toward reconciling her to the
whole deal in the first place. Instead they had cleared out what long ago had been the front
bedroom of its years' worth of nameless junk, draped it with mysterious-looking hangings at $1.49
a yard from Fabric Champ, and set up Antryg's private sanctum. The plain wooden table and kitchen
chairs lacked the elegance Joanna recalled from the house of the most famous dog wizard in
Angelshand, the renowned Magister Magus, with its tufted carpets, black velvet drapes, and ebony
throne ... but then, Antryg was just starting out in the business.
She could tell by the pitch of his voice that his formal patter, as he laid out the cards, was
done. The deep murmur of his words was interspersed by a woman's voice, soft and questioning, and
her occasional laughter. After not very long she came out, beautiful in the same leggy,
fashionable, well-cared-for style that Ruth epitomized, a style that always made Joanna unhappily
conscious of her shortness, the prominence of her nose, and the fact that, at the age of twenty-
six, she still had no idea how to put on makeup. In the presence of girls like the one leaving,
Joanna always felt as if she had CAN'T COOK, EITHER printed across her forehead in large block
letters. The absurdity of that image teased her into a grin in spite of herself as she pushed her
way through the screen door and into the wizard's salon.
"My dear Joanna!" He looked up from the new spread he was laying out on the stained and mended
silk of the embroidered tablecloth, his face breaking into the beaming grin of a slightly
pixilated rubber doll. "Don't tell me Galaxsongs' programmers are more competent than their sound
engineers and you actually were able to unwind what they'd done? Or have you come about the thing
in the cement river?"
Joanna stopped in her tracks. Of course, she thought, Antryg would know.
He looked up at her, and behind the mischief sparkling in his eyes, she could see guarded concern
as he studied her face. He wore, as usual, a faded and unwizardly T-shirt with the sleeves cut off-
this one was green, and whatever rock-concert logo it once bore had long since flaked away to
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (3 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:18 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
obscurity-and a pair of senile Levi's. A livid scar marked his bare left arm; just above it, fresh
and blue, the Anheuser-Busch eagle was tattooed on his bicep, the result of an exchange of
services with an artist in Long Beach. She knew that both still hurt. His hands, where they lay
upon the cards, were large, bony, deft, and beautifully expressive despite the twisted fingers and
swollen joints.
For the rest, Antryg Windrose could have been any age from his mid-thirties to his mid-fifties,
though in fact he was forty-three. There was something oddly ageless about the beaky, mobile face,
whose rather delicate bone structure seemed overbalanced by the cresting jut of the nose and the
extravagance of the mouth. The round lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles were thick as the
bottoms of Coke bottles, and behind them his gray eyes, enormous to begin with, were magnified
still further. There were people who attributed his habitual air of demented intentness to the
glasses as well, but this, Joanna knew, was not the case. That was just how Antryg was.
Unkempt curls in the final throes of fading from brown to gray, mismatched earrings of yellowing
crystal, and half a dozen strings of cheap glass and plastic beads in assorted garish colors
around his neck completed the impression of an unreconstructed sixties flower child turned
abruptly adrift in the steel-edged cyberpunk streets of fin de siecle Los Angeles; an impression,
Joanna thought, not wholly inapt. Antryg had the definite air of being in the wrong place and
time, though most people didn't guess quite how wrong. In his own universe, he had been a
practicing wizard since the age of ten.
He laid down the cards-Joanna noticed the two of swords and the chaotic five of wands-and reached
with one booted foot to hook a chair for her.
She said, "Ruth told me where it is."
"Ah." Something changed in his eyes.
Then he reached into the ice chest under the table for a couple of Cokes and, under cover of the
motion, said with unimpaired cheeriness, "I'm delighted to hear it-I had visions of exploring the
entire Los Angeles watershed system by bicycle, and that could take weeks, if I didn't die of
thirst in the process ... though I suppose I could cut my time down by running the location of all
purple houses in the city through a computer."
"What's down there?" Her hand on his wrist brought his head up again-his first instinct when
frightened, she knew, was to duck behind a screen of persiflage.
He widened his eyes at her like a befuddled Harpo Marx. "Nothing," he said, as if surprised she
had asked. Then he handed her a Coke, flipped over the final card of the spread-a nine of swords-
and swept all the cards up into his hand again with barely the flicker of an eyelid. "But it's
east of here, isn't it? Southeast?" He turned his head as he spoke, like a man sniffing smoke on
the wind.
"Did you have the same dream?" Her heart beat more heavily, almost painfully, at only the memory,
and she tried not to recall any of it too clearly to her mind.
"Well," Antryg said carefully, "I don't expect it was precisely the same." He shuffled the cards
lightly together, wrapped them in silk, and replaced them in their carved Indian box.
"Whereabouts, exactly?"
"I'll drive you."
His eyes avoided hers. "That's extremely good of you, but ... "
Thunderous knocking on the outside door interrupted him, followed instantly by a stampede of
sneakered feet. Antryg rose with an odd, disjointed grace for all his gawky height as four small
children barreled in, carrying between them a very grubby cardboard box bearing the legend CHUN
KING SLICED WATER CHESTNUTS on its side. One of the children announced, "We got another one for
you, Antryg. Zylima's mom, she says she got this one from a pet store down in San Diego five years
ago."
"Her name's Ripley," one of the little girls added. Angling her head, Joanna saw that the box
contained an enormous land tortoise. "My mom says she's a girl, but I don't know how she can
tell."
"Here." Antryg gently lifted the tortoise out of the box and set it on the table. "Let's ask her."
He laid his big, crooked hands on the mottled gray and brown shell, half closing his eyes as
though listening. "Definitely a girl." From a drawer in a sideboard he produced a sheet of thin
paper; rice paper, thought Joanna, watching in some bemusement: the sort of paper that
antiquarians traveling through England use to take rubbings of tomb brasses with.
This was precisely what Antryg proceeded to do. He laid the paper very carefully over the
tortoise's shell and, with infinite delicacy of touch, rubbed it lightly with red chalk, while all
four children watched in fascination and Ripley retracted her head and limbs in resigned disgust.
"One has to do this very carefully," he told them as he worked. "If you don't do it exactly right,
it hurts the tortoise-they're really very sensitive, you know, and don't like to be picked up.
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (4 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
Thank you for bringing her here in a box instead of your hands."
"Mom told us to," the older boy put in. "She don't let us pick her up at home." Then, "Antryg? Mom
says she had this dream about you last night. About this place-this place where you was supposed
to go."
"Did she?" Antryg removed the paper and held it up to the light, studying the lumpish pattern of
squares on its surface with a critical eye.
"Yeah. She says it was like down this old riverbed-not a real river with water in it but like one
of the rivers here. She said there was somethin' bad down there-she said it was pretty weird,
'cause usually she doesn't dream about strange stuff, just about going shopping and stuff like
that. Do dreams like that mean stuff, Antryg?"
"Of course." Antryg smiled and returned Ripley gently to her box. She didn't deign to emerge from
her shell, even when he touched the horn-hard carapace lightly and said, "Thank you very much,
Ripley. You have contributed inestimably to the sum total of human knowledge. If your mother
dreamed about it, Jemal, I suppose I shall have to go there. Thank her for me-and thank you. And
Ripley, too, of course."
The children accepted the quarters he passed out to them and started to leave. The girl Zylima
paused in the doorway, frowned up at him with narrowed, mahogany eyes. "You know where that place
is that Mama dreamed about?"
Antryg's imp grin widened. "Of course."
"Course he knows, Zylima," the other girl said. "He a wizard, ain't he?"
And they were gone.
There was a curiously awkward silence as Antryg went to place his newest tortoise-rubbing in the
drawer of the battered old sideboard from which he'd taken the paper. He had, Joanna knew, at
least two dozen similar rubbings in that maelstrom of papers at home. "There's really no need for
you to come with me, you know," he said at length, as if speaking of a beer run. "If you tell me
where it is, I have my bike." Thanks to Joanna, Antryg could drive a car after a fashion, but it
was just as well, she thought, that he preferred an alternative mode of transport.
The memory of the vision was like the dry scraping of a knife along her bones, and she had to
fight not to say, Can't we just go have dinner and forget the whole thing?
But she knew that Antryg wouldn't forget.
She took a deep breath. "I think we'd probably better both go-"
For she had an awful feeling about what was down in that wash and knew that neither Antryg nor
anyone else had any business going there alone.
Joanna's heart began pounding hard again as she braked her old blue Mustang to a stop on the
service road. The white-yellow dust that lifted in a cloud around them settled slowly, soaked in
the long brazen glare of the evening light. Daylight saving time had recently come into force,
lengthening the tepid Southern California twilights far into prime time, and as usual for May, it
was blazingly hot, a pretend-summer that got everyone in Los Angeles scrambling for shorts and
tank tops, heading for the beaches and forgetting-as people invariably forgot-that it would turn
cold and misty again in a matter of days and stay that way till the Fourth of July. Somewhere the
cutting, unmuffled roar of an RV whined in the distance above the far-off rumble of rush hour
going full-swing on the Ventura, yet about them, as Antryg swung one thin, jeans-clad leg out of
the car, hung the baked and heavy silence of the desert. Los Angeles was full of these tiny
patches of urban wilderness, mini-domains of lizard and coyote that served occasionally to remind
the Angelenos that theirs was, in fact, a City of Dreams, an unlikely mirage called forth against
long odds from arid lands.
"I'm going to have to ask you to stay up here, my dear," Antryg said quietly, looking down into
the wash at the bottom of graffiti-scribbled concrete cliffs, cement floor glaring like old bone
under the harsh slant of the sun. "If you see anything happen to me, don't hesitate. Get away
immediately. All right?"
"Happen like what?" Joanna touched his wrist, staying him as he started to rise.
A frown flicked into being between his sparse, reddish eyebrows; then he clambered out of the car,
extracted an old railroad watch from one pocket of his jeans and a compass from another, and stood
for a time comparing their readings.
"If I should turn into a toad, for instance ... or get devoured by giant ants ... " Antryg had
been entranced by fifties science-fiction movies on the late show. Joanna rolled her eyes.
"Though I'd actually prefer being transformed into a tortoise, if it has to be some member of the
reptile family. It would make asking other tortoises for rubbings much less embarrassing. They may
even know something about why all the wisdom of the universe is encoded upon their backs, though I
don't suppose that's at all likely."
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (5 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
Joanna sighed resignedly. "Well, if it happens, don't come around here expecting me to kiss you
and make it better."
"My dear ... "
He leaned down to where she still sat behind the wheel, his lips brushing hers gently, with a kind
of hesitant passion. As he started to pull away she caught him by the back of the head, her
fingers tangling in his long hair, and drew him to her again, frightened for him in spite of his
lightness-frightened of the stillness down below, of the terrible, oppressive exactness with which
the view of the Tujunga Wash duplicated the flashing image of her own vision.
Dammit, even the GRAFFITI's the same ...!
Ruth had been right, too, about the sense of nameless fear that hung over the place, the dreadful
awareness of something, quite close but invisible, that had no place in this world.
He straightened up and turned to look down into the wash again, and she saw by the look on his
half-averted face that he, too, knew or guessed what was down there.
But all he said was, "Now, in Elbertring they used to believe that all the wisdom of the universe
was encoded in the patterns on peach pits, but the mages who were responsible for assembling it
all died of beriberi. Interesting." He tucked watch and compass back into his various pockets. "No
bees around here, either. I'll be back, my dear."
Glass beads glittering in the burnished light, he began to pick his way cautiously down the steep
cement of the bank.
Prey to a sense of desperate protectiveness, Joanna watched him, and the dread grew in her, a
scratching, sawing, sickened apprehension made no easier by the matte glare of the smog-filtered
light. She would in a way have welcomed darkness, for in darkness her cold sense of waiting
uncanniness would at least have been explicable. Down there the dirty daylight seemed to congeal,
hot and still and filled with that terrible air of watching.
What's wrong with this picture?
Up here wind stirred the feathery curls of her blond hair, flattened the dark T-shirt against her
ribs as she stood beside the car, a small, almost delicate-looking young woman, unobviously
pretty. Mousy, people called her-people who didn't know her, or mice, very well. Antryg looked
very small and solitary, kneeling in the midst of that winding ribbon of lizard-colored wasteland
to sweep his fingertips along the cement, as if trying to read a message there in braille, and
Joanna wondered if she shouldn't have detoured by the apartment for the rifle she'd bought in
February.
It had been a revelation, after her adventures of the preceding winter, to find that she'd
actually enjoyed something so alien to her previous experience as learning to shoot a gun.
An even bigger revelation was that she was willing to continue the study in the face of the
disapproval of those few of her colleagues-mostly other hackers-who knew about it, let alone her
mother's horrified and repeated lectures about the number of Americans who ended up being blown
out of existence with their own firearms. But even as she thought about it, her mind trotted out
her usual half-dozen reasons why bringing artillery on this expedition was out of the question,
complete with scenarios of being pulled over by the Highway Patrol and she and Antryg spending the
night in separate County lockups, or shooting Antryg while trying to take aim at the giant ants or
whatever the hell else was going to appear ...
And, she told herself uneasily, she could scarcely justify bringing a gun, because there really
was nothing down in the wash.
But there was.
Antryg was kneeling in the precise spot, Joanna was virtually certain, where she had stood in the
mind-flash of her vision; half closing her eyes, she tried to picture exactly what the skyline of
the wash would look like from that angle. Pale houses, telephone wires waiting like unscored music
paper against the polluted white of the sky, a defiantly purple gable end sticking up over a fence
and SANTOS RULES in elaborate Olde English lettering standing out among the lesser spray-painted
illumination ...
His bent head almost touched the cement, dust, and bull-thorns underfoot; on his bare arms, dusted
with reluctant sunburn, scar and tattoo stood out like a gash and a bruise.
What did he see, she wondered, on the cracked pavement? What had she seen, for that matter? But
even trying to bring the picture back to mind frightened her, and she felt again the desperate
wish that he would finish what he was doing and get the hell OUT of there.
He stood up, Coke-bottle lenses flashing, and though he did not move quickly at first, or dodge to
either side, he backed from the spot for perhaps a dozen feet before turning and striding, now
very fast, up the bank. Joanna was in the car and had the motor running before he reached her; he
nearly ran up the last few feet of the embankment, threw himself into the front seat beside her,
and they were rolling almost before he'd pulled the door closed. Dust boiled around them in a sun-
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (6 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
shot cloud.
"What is it?" The dirt road back up to the street was steep and required careful maneuvering.
"Nothing," he lied.
Her glance flicked to him; he hesitated, then looked quickly away.
In an almost apologetic tone he said, "There really is nothing down there."
But he didn't, Joanna noticed, take his eyes off the rearview mirror until they were nearly a mile
away.
"Can we have the truth now?"
Antryg looked up quickly from where he'd settled on the floor to receive the ecstatic welcome of
Joanna's cats. After the irritating fashion of cats, Spock and Chainsaw had fallen desperately in
love with Antryg at first sight and, at every opportunity, forsook the woman who'd fed them and
paid their rent and medical bills for the past five years to fawn over this relative stranger.
Joanna stowed the leftover kung pao beef and fried rice in the refrigerator and turned, leaning
against the square column that the designers of the apartment had installed at the end of the
counter that separated kitchen from living room. In the slate blue twilight the apartment bore
even more strongly than usual a resemblance to some undersea cave filled with strange jungles of
life: computer cables and radio parts rambled at large, octopuslike, among the documentation on
Joanna's desk and the madhouse of journals, specs, textbooks, and copies of the National Enquirer
which heaped the trestle-mounted door that served as Antryg's worktable; the little windup
Frankensteins and Godzillas, the pigs and dentures and hopping frogs glinted gently in the random
glow of the Lava lamp like bizarre things recently emerged from holes in rocks. On their way to
the Manchurian Panda-Date, Antryg and Joanna had picked up Ruth; now her high heels were clicking
their way down the outside steps of the Chateau Burbank to her second-floor apartment directly
below, leaving silence in their wake.
Antryg eased the cats from his lap and stood up; six feet three, his gangly thinness made him seem
oddly fragile in the slanted yellow light streaming from the kitchen pass-through. His voice was
quiet. "I was afraid you were going to ask for that."
She stood for a time looking up at him, torn between her morbid horror of being a nag like her
mother and her certainty that Antryg and, possibly, she herself were in terrible trouble.
"There is nothing down there," he repeated softly. "Yet. And in any case it's nothing that need
concern you anymore. They couldn't locate me by scrying-crystal, or through dreams, but they could
send out a general Summoning to those close to me, knowing I would eventually hear."
His tone was explanatory and matter-of-fact, as if that made everything right. Like the old joke
about Oh, what you saw was just a UFO, which was thought to somehow lessen the hideous shock of
possible contact with an alien race.
" 'They' who?" Joanna asked quietly. "And what did you see?"
Antryg looked down at his boot-toes and propped his spectacles a little more firmly onto the
bridge of his nose. Then he sighed. "Wizards' marks, written on the concrete. Marks of Summoning.
Lady Rosamund's ... Daurannon the Handsome ... other members of the Council of Wizards. And one of
mine."
"Yours?"
"To bring me there." He looked up at her, his gray eyes tired and resigned behind their protective
wall of glass. "Which means they must know I'm alive." He looked away again and rubbed his hands,
subconsciously trying to work the pain out of the badly healed breaks and dislocations the Ferryth
Inquisition had left in its wake. In the pit of his throat, under the jackdaw beads, Joanna could
see the round discoloration of the scar left by the Sigil of Darkness, like an acid burn on the
thin skin. He had taken poison, she remembered, to avoid the Prince Regent's final sentence.
"Will the marks draw you there?" She came quietly around to sit on the arm of the rough green
couch.
"Well, they certainly did this afternoon." He moved with nervous restiveness to the sliding glass
door that looked out onto the balcony, opened it wide. The night air rolled in around him, warm as
bathwater, bringing with it the incessant thrumming pulse of Victory Boulevard and the freeway
beyond. "In this universe they shouldn't have that power, but there is power and power. The
Council must have known that sending the dreams to you would bring me, if only to make sure that
... "
He stopped himself, as if realizing he was saying too much, then shook his head.
"And you know, the terrible thing is that I'm curious. It takes a tremendous lot of power to open
a Gate through the Void. Very few wizards can do it on their own. Having gotten rid of me once,
would their hatred alone be sufficient for them to track me through it? Or is there some other
reason?"
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (7 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
"Lady Rosamund wouldn't need another reason," Joanna said quietly. "You confessed to murdering the
Archmage. That would be reason enough."
He shivered a little, though he stood in the open doorway, surrounded by the gluey warmth of the
night.
"Antryg," said Joanna, her voice very small now, "don't go back there."
By his silence she knew he'd been thinking about it all through dinner.
"They'll be waiting, and they'll be ready for you. You won't get away from them this time."
And I couldn't stand to lose you, she thought. Not again. Not so soon. Not for real.
Don't let me go back to being what I was.
In a way she knew that she wouldn't, even were he to disappear. In some ways the past four months
had been a roller coaster of new experiences; in others, they had the strange solidity of
something she had done all her life. Like many shy women, she had regarded men as an incalculable
and threatening alien species, though certainly nice for dating purposes, and had wondered why any
sane person would want to live with one. She couldn't have phrased the answer in words, but it was
obvious to her now, at least in this particular case. Following his easy friendliness with
everyone, she had come out of her own reclusive shell; she had discovered that she could after all
talk to people without the feeling that the minute her back was turned they'd roll their eyes and
mutter Jeez Louise!
She would not go back to being what she was, but the thought of the road forward without him
opened a core of sick pain down the center of her being, pain she hadn't known she was capable of
feeling ... or, if she had guessed it, far back in childhood, she'd been very careful not to put
herself in a position to find out.
And above all that, she simply didn't want him to be hurt.
And they would hurt him, a lot, before they let him die. "I know." His voice was barely a whisper.
"But it isn't only that, you see."
No, she thought. It wasn't only that.
A stirring of wind moved the curtain beside him, belling out around him like a pale, oatmeal-
colored cloak and then felling slack again as if the mere effort had exhausted it; outside in the
darkness the yellow lights twinkled-streetlamps, billboards, headlights, neon. Asphalt and
hydrocarbons, the chlorine bite of the courtyard swimming pool and the sudden, nostalgic tug of
charcoal smoke and chemicals as someone fired up a balcony hibachi. Somewhere in the building
someone was playing "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Watching the tall figure silhouetted against the jukebox glow of the city of lights-the City of
Dreams-Joanna realized she had known for months, and the knowledge cut at her, that she could only
distract him from his unhappiness, never wholly alleviate it.
For he was more than an exile. By the very nature of this universe, he was an artist blinded, a
sensualist gelded, a singer whose tongue had been cut out. The studies he had undertaken here, the
studies of physics and optics and computers and whatever details of the physical world he could
get his hands on, though they delighted and fascinated him, were not enough. They would never be
enough.
Her throat hurting with the wish that she didn't care so much, she said, "You'd never get away
from them, Antryg. Even back in your own world, you'd never be able to work magic again. They'd
track you through it, as they did before."
She saw his body relax, leaning against the doorframe as if with his breath he had exhaled the
tension from his muscles, the very strength from his bones, leaving only grief behind.
She barely heard him say, "I know."
She felt the fear and the desperation in him later when they made love and, lying against his bare
shoulder in the drifting aftermath, saw by the reflected glow of the driveway lights below her
window the haunted look of hopelessness in his unprotected gray eyes.
"Antryg," she murmured drowsily as he got up at nine to make the late shift at Enyart's. "You
won't do anything dumb, will you?"
He sighed but didn't pretend that he didn't know what she meant. "It might be best if I did."
"They'd only follow you further." She shook back the tangle of her thick blond curls, drawing on a
rumpled pair of pajamas, as she watched him pull on his jeans. The beads he wore around his neck
glittered against the fair, fine-grained skin of his throat. His arms were marked from elbow to
wrist along the vein with a faded road map of whitening scars. They were nothing like a junkie's
tracks: the flesh had been slit, torn, bitten ... he had a few on his neck and chest as well. He'd
given her a long and patently untrue story about attending a vampire convention when she asked him
what they were.
"You may navigate better than they do in the worlds that lie in the Void, but you know they'll
find you in the end."
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (8 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
And you'll be lonely, she didn't say.
And I'll be lonely, too.
A wry smile touched one corner of his mouth; he leaned down to kiss her hair. "Very well," he said
softly. "I promise I shall consult you before undertaking anything dumb." She heard him lock the
door, and half felt, half heard the creak of his footsteps as he carried his bicycle down the
stairs. At least, she thought, in the Friday-night chaos of Enyart's he was unlikely to run afoul
of wizards from other universes, whatever else he might meet.
Sleeping, Joanna dreamed of the Void.
Dreamed of running through it alone, of trying to cross it; her feet touched nothing, while its
cold ate at her flesh and the blackness all around her whispered with the voices of the abominable
things that slipped through its cracks when the Gates between worlds were open. Her breath came in
gasps, her legs hurt with exhaustion, her chest burned ... the dim speck of light she so
desperately followed receded from her. She stumbled, frantic to reach it, to get out of this place
before she was lost in its airless cold forever ...
And above all else, the terror of the Void itself drowned her, darkness, falling, terror beyond
all conception of terror; the terror she had felt, gazing down into the wash that evening, the
terror of seeing the very fabric of space and air sliver open, split into a lipless mouth spilling
out darkness ...
It was coming at her, reaching to consume her, while the horrors of a cosmic wind streamed out
over her flesh, to eat her unprotected bones.
She woke gasping, staring with huge eyes into the darkness of the bedroom. Antryg was gone.
Somewhere in the building a faint pulse hammer of music still thumped, the lights from the
driveway below still pooled their yellow reflection on the ceiling.
But they could not penetrate the vibrating darkness that had begun to grow-blotting walls,
reflections, furniture, everything of the sane and normal world-like a grinning, all-consuming
chasm of eternity in one corner of her room.
Chapter II
It is said that in the days of the Twenty Kings, the wizard Treegard Galsek had a house in the
northern forests, on a great granite hill called Wizards' Tor. He gathered about him other
wizards, and priests of strange faiths, and they would kidnap travelers, and enchant their minds
so that, believing themselves to be moles, or asses, or beasts of burden, they labored for them,
raising high walls and digging tunnels deep within the rock.
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry
"Antryg ... " Jim Hasselart waved from the inconspicuous, lighted doorway at the far end of the
bar. Antryg dropped maraschino cherries into the two banana daiquiris he'd been concocting, handed
them to the Beautiful Kevin to deliver to table customers, and edged his way past the young
waiter's tightly Jordached and much-admired behind to join his manager in the narrow galley among
the crates of Corona and St. Pauli Girl. "Telephone."
It could only be Ruth, thought Antryg, with a glance at the clock. It was shortly before closing
time, the sixth or seventh hour of the night-he'd just begun to get used to the time conversion in
this world when daylight saving time had come along. There were, of course, talismans by which one
could actually save daylight, but that didn't seem to be what these people meant.
"This is me," he said.
"Antryg?" It was Ruth, shaken and scared and nearly in tears. The Spell of Tongues by which
wizards could understand and be understood-and which he had long ago extended to cover Joanna-
didn't work through electronic media, but in four months he'd mastered sufficient English to
follow telephone conversations and most movie dialogue. "Joanna ... she's disappeared."
Antryg closed his eyes as rage went through him like a wave of heat, smothering thought for a
moment and leaving only cold behind.
For a moment the yammering of a thousand inebriated conversations beyond the door, the clink of
glassware and the sweet, wailing song of what sounded like a male castrato faded from his
awareness. They had dared. They had dared ...
It had been years since he'd felt this angry, angry enough to take every member of the High
Council of Mages by their scrawny necks and ...
The aftermath was just as swift, an ebb wave of horror and dread.
What had they done to her?
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/...ly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (9 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt
Ruth's voice rattled swiftly on, speaking of a scream, of darkness fading away in a corner of the
room, of something retreating along that darkness ... a black cloak ...
Or, he thought with a curious, terrible calm, the black robe of a mage.
They had taken Joanna.
He felt no real surprise. He had been waiting only to hear this, from the moment he had knelt to
see the wizards' marks written on the concrete of the wash. In a way, he had been waiting for this
since the first night he and Joanna had lain together in her apartment, she drifting off to sleep
in the gladness that he wasn't dead, that against all odds he had come to her here in this bizarre
City of Dreams.
And he, a little bemused that, all things considered, he was alive at all.
But all these four months he had spent here, he had kept an eye on the Void. And almost twenty-
four hours ago he had sensed the Void's opening into this world, jolting him awake with a queer,
oblique flash of awareness that had dissolved immediately; it was not until nearly noon that he
had remembered the small-hours vision of Joanna walking down the dry riverbed, something seen as
distant and very far away.
Ruth had had the vision. And Joanna. And Zylima and Jemal's mother, Luann. And Antryg was
perfectly well aware that those visions, those dreams, were not merely to tell him, Come to this
place ...
We cannot summon you, but we can certainly summon your friends.
"It has something to do with that ... that dream about the Tujunga Wash, doesn't it?" Ruth was
saying, the frightened determination in her voice pulling his mind back from its lightning jumble
of anger, thought, memory. "Do you know what's going on? How to find her, how to help her ... ?"
"It's all right," said Antryg quietly. "I'll go down there."
"Do you ... ?" She hesitated, torn between her loyalty to Joanna and her quite understandable
terror of her dream. "Do you need help? Either just me, or I can get the two guys who live next
door to Joanna ... "
"No." Enough people, thought Antryg, had suffered through proximity to him in his run-ins with the
Council-he still had periodic nightmares about the outcome of the Mellidane Revolts, that final
piece of meddling which had gotten him imprisoned by his erstwhile colleagues." But thank you," he
added, realizing how harsh his voice had sounded in that one bitter word. "I know what's going on,
and I should be able to take care of it."
"Trouble?"
He turned, as he hung up, to see Jim Hasselart leaning against the scarified molding of the jamb
of the men's room opposite the telephone. Slightly paunchy and almost perpetually unshaven-looking
even in the white shirt and tie of his managerial office, Jim had a certain watchfulness, a
readiness for trouble, in his coffee-dark eyes.
Antryg hesitated, then said, "I'm afraid so." He untied and removed the black apron that covered
his battered T-shirt and jeans. "Apologize to Kevin for me for not helping him close up-give him
my share of the tips."
"Screw that. I never saw trouble yet that didn't need an extra hundred bucks. Take whatever's
there; I'll make it good to him. Anything else you need?"
Antryg shook his head. "Not even the money, really. If I don't come in tomorrow night ... "
"You phone me when you get back to town," finished Jim.
He was silent a moment, studying his erratic bartender; in a moment of silence between two songs a
woman's voice said, "That's all very well, but it wasn't my underpants he had in his pocket ... "
"You take care," said Jim, and let Antryg out the back door and into the warm blackness of the
alley.
As he swung up onto his bicycle, Antryg remembered how close Joanna had come to being condemned as
his accomplice during the brief time they had both been locked in the Silent Tower, the prison
whose stones were dead to magic. He had only signed his second, and utterly damning, confession on
the condition that the Council of Wizards release her and send her home. He knew he had misused
his magic, had meddled again and again in the affairs of humankind against every command and
precept of the Council, the Church authorities, and the law of the Empire. But that they should
punish Joanna for his misdeeds ...
And by coming here to be with her, by taking refuge in her world, he had exposed her once again to
the Council's wrath.
But truly, he thought as he glided soundlessly down the rutted pavement between reeking dumpsters
and illegally parked Porsches, he hadn't thought the Council would actually have stooped to taking
hostages.
Emerging from the alley onto Matilija Street amid darkened apartment houses and the eerie
turquoise glow of walled swimming pools, he turned right and, with headlights splashing across his
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry...y%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txt (10 of 148) [2/24/2004 10:34:19 PM]
摘要：

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Barbara\%20Hambly%20-%20Windrose%203%20-%20Dog%20Wizard.txtDOGWIZARDBarbaraHambly[18jun2002-scannedandproofedfor#bookz]ChapterIAndasforthewizardswhousetheirpowertofurtherhumanends,evene dswhichseemtothemtobegood,orwhoselltheirskills,e...

展开>> 收起<<
Barbara Hambly - Windrose 3 - Dog Wizard.pdf

共148页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：148 页 大小：555.56KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 148
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注