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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



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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.


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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


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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.


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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."


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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-


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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?"


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"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."


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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?



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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


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back even at this late hour, headed north into the tepid night.

He reached the Tujunga Wash in the pearly thinning of the night. Even at this hour the freeway was
alive, a few cars rushing by very fast with headlights staring, just beyond the graffiti-scribbled
embankments; it amazed Antryg that people were still dashing around the streets so late-or so
early. A search of the apartment had shown him nothing save that Ruth had fed the cats before
going back downstairs to bed-he did not wake her. He hadn't expected to find any sign.
On the concrete of the wash he drew his mark, among the invisible spell-signs left by the Council,
then stood back to wait.
The streetlamps above the wash laid their bilious yellow glow over the cement, and a coyote,
trotting along the top of the bank, made a move to come down but then seemed to think better of
it. Antryg had noticed that there had been no tracks, of cat, opossum, or even lizard, later than
the inscribing of the marks.
And they call animals 'dumb.'
It crossed his mind again to wonder if it was his death the Council sought, or something else.
As he waited, the wind fingering his hair, he thought back to those strange stirrings within the
Void.
He was, at all times, subliminally aware of activity in the Void, as he was subliminally aware of
the weather, the movement of the stars, and half a dozen other matters pertaining to the energies
of earth and sky. There was always activity of some kind taking place within that bizarre chaos
which drifted between the parallel realities of the cosmos. So far as he knew, none of the other
Council wizards-and, in fact, no one else he had ever met-had this awareness, including his
ancient master Suraklin, who had taught him the ways of the Void.
For months now he had been aware of something odd happening a great distance away. It had come to
his mind as a crimping or catching, like the snag of a stitch in flesh, but he had hesitated to
investigate, knowing also that the wizards in his own world were, since the events of last winter,
taking more interest in the Void.
It was perfectly possible that if there was some problem-someone from a third universe entirely
visiting his home world, for instance, and letting through the sort of abominations that
frequently slipped from one world to another when the fabric of the Void weakened in the proximity
of the Gates-the Council would blame him, Antryg, for it, not understanding the scope and measure
of the Void itself.
If that was the case, he thought wryly, he would have some explaining to do. And even if they did
believe him, which he did not at all consider likely, they might decide to arrest him anyway, "on
G.P.," as Joanna would put it.
But in a way it didn't matter. The fact that they were willing to take Joanna hostage to get to
him told him clearly enough that his coming here had been a mistake, an act of selfishness that
had endangered her inexcusably.
He should really have known, he thought wearily, that it would never work.
Before him, against the paling air, he saw darkness floating like a blossom.
Something-too many somethings-tightened in his chest, like a guitar string wound too straitly
around its peg, and resolved into a sense of terrible regret. The night's cool had laid the smog a
little, and though its metallic scent still clung in the air, with the stinks of dust and cement
and sewage, still the crystal quality of dawn air came to him. All things around him-the world of
the living-seemed momentarily new-drawn and magical, and every crack in the concrete, every poky
line of all those pastel houses concealing each its own secrets, took on a brightness and clarity
that was beauty itself.
He knew what wizards did to other wizards who had violated their laws as comprehensively as he
had; for the last portion of his life that wouldn't involve spells of crippling pain he could, he
thought, have wished for a better place than a cement riverbed in the heart of the San Fernando
Valley.
But at least he could get Joanna off the firing line.
The air of the world split. Darkness swelled and spread like a cloud.
Far away, infinitely deep in the heart of the darkness, he saw the winds of chaos lift and swirl
in black robes, dark cloaks ... saw the glint of edged steel. All around him he was aware of
smaller spots, rents, and ghosts of that same darkness, flickering in and out of being in the air-
the fabric of the universe weakening, straining, all around the opened Gate.
We'd better make this fast, he thought uneasily. God knows what might drop through.
And then they were before him.
Framed in the gate of the darkness, their faces pale and tense with the shock of the crossing, he
recognized the wizards who stood before him, his erstwhile teachers and colleagues. Some of them


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had been his friends.
The Lady Rosamund never had, of course. The tugging chaos of the Void swirled her raven cloud of
hair; she was as beautiful as ever, the cold perfection of her features like marble and her green
eyes nearly transparent in the dawn light. The purple stole of Council membership circled her
shoulders, the staff of wizardry, of power, was grasped in one well-kept hand.
Beside and behind her he recognized Nandiharrow the Clockmaker-Nandiharrow the Nine-Fingered, he
was called these days, after a particularly brutal brush with the Inquisition last year-big and
solid and gray-haired, and beside him the wispy, androgynous physician Issay Bel-Caire. Both also
wore the stoles of Council membership. They must have elected Issay to the Council after Salteris'
death, Antryg thought. Nandiharrow, at least, avoided his eyes.
Behind them ranged the sasenna, the sworn warriors, the small band of trained and dedicated
fighters who had given their vows, their lives, to the Council's will. There were nearly a dozen
of them, some of them mageborn, youthful novice wizards in training, some of them not. They filed
forth quickly from the darkness, surrounding Antryg in a ring of crossbows, pistol barrels, and
swords.
"All right, here I am," Antryg said quietly. "You've proved your point. I can't protect my friends
from you-I can only ask that you leave them alone. Joanna had nothing to do with ... "
"So you wrote in your confession." Lady Rosamund's voice was like polished silver, as beautiful as
her eyes, and as cold. "But we both know that she was an accomplice, not a victim."
"What I don't want her to be is a hostage." Looking at that aloof perfection, he felt anger again,
the anger that this woman would have used her power against someone like Joanna, who had no
defense. "She is ... dear to me. And she never wanted any of this." The captain of the sasenna, a
big, hard, red-faced man named Implek, stood close beside the Lady, holding in his hands a length
of manacles and chain, marked with the runes of na-aar-thaumaturgical deadness-and twisted with
bright ribbons of spell-cord that would also rob a wizard of his magic. Antryg held out his wrists
to him, trying not to think about what would happen to him when they got back to the Citadel.
"Just let her go."
Behind the Lady Rosamund, Nandiharrow and Issay traded a swift, startled glance, but her ladyship
raised a quick hand for silence. Implek stepped forward and fastened the bracelets around Antryg's
wrists, the touch of them hateful and cold, like the drag of a sudden nausea within him. He fought
the urge to flinch.
"Bring him," she said.
Implek's hand closed around Antryg's arm, pushing him forward, and Antryg balked on the threshold
of the darkness.
The cold of the Void breathed across him, chilling the sweat that had sprung forth on his face.
"Rosamund," he said quietly, "I'm not hurting anyone here. I can't work magic-I'm an exile-I have
no intention of returning. As far as our world is concerned, I am dead. Yes, I did ... evil ... "
He swallowed, trying to push the memory of what he had done from his mind. "All I can plead is
extenuating circumstance."
She looked up at him with cool eyes like the green ice floes that blocked the northern bays from
winter into spring. "All dog wizards plead extenuating circumstance," she said. "It is the nature
of dog wizardry ... and the claim of all whores. Bring him."
She turned back into the darkness, and the sasenna closed him in. Antryg could sense the field of
the Gate beginning to break up-Gates took a tremendous amount of the wizard's power to open, and
even more to maintain-but even so braced his feet once more, and felt the prick of sword points
through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. "You'll let Joanna go?"
Lady Rosamund paused within the darkness, the pallid glare of the streetlamps above the wash
flaring across her face as she drew herself up. "Are you judging us now in terms of your own
debasement?" she asked frostily. "We took no hostage."
The cold sank into him like black ice. "What?"
Her fragile nostrils flared with scorn. "We took no hostage. Did you think we would forget our
vows as comprehensively as you have forgotten yours? Now bring him-we're losing the Gate."
"No!" With a quick twist of his arm Antryg slithered free of Implek's grip-one of the sasenna
brought his pistol up, and Antryg used his manacled wrists to strike the man's hand aside. If the
Council hadn't taken Joanna, someone had-someone powerful enough to open a Gate.
He lunged against half a dozen pairs of hands grabbing at him, hooked the feet out from under one
guard with a sweep of his long leg and smashed another across the face with the manacle chain. He
heard Rosamund shout something-probably about losing the Gate-as he twisted clear, ran two steps
... If he could just get some distance, they'd never leave the Gate ...
Weight struck his back, dropping him to his knees; he was trying to rise again when something hard
impacted with the back of his head. He later remembered thinking he ought to bring up his chained


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hands to break his fall to the cement but had no recollection of whether he managed to do so or
not.

Pain was the second thing Antryg became aware of as consciousness returned.
For a nightmare time he felt the implacable, mechanical drag of the rack at his joints, dwarfing
even the agony of his crushed hands; heard the Witchfinder's whispered urgings, smelled sweat,
ink, hot iron, and the acrid stench of the vinegar they'd used to bring him to.
Joanna had betrayed him. Suraklin the Dark Mage, dead-alive for twenty-five years, would devour
the life and magic of the world as he had devoured the minds and souls of three men already, would
go down the ages as a cold and silent vampire, invisible, untouchable, gloating in his chosen
dark. And there was nothing he could do to stop him.
He tried to scream and the pain changed. His bruised arms smarted where they'd hit the pavement of
the flood channel, and an egg-shaped lump of agony localized itself at the back of his skull. His
hands hurt bitterly in the dawn cold of the room, an echo of the screws the Witchfinders had used
seven months ago to dislocate the joints.
Joanna ...
Anger swept back upon him, anger and fear.
Someone, somewhere, had Joanna, frightened and alone.
The first thing of which he had become aware, of course, was that his powers of magic were bound.
He moved his hand, half expecting to find himself still manacled. But it was only the braided silk
knots of spell-cord, twined separately around each wrist. His fingers touched the worn softness of
old blankets, and he smelled the unmistakable, fusty odor of a straw bed tick under his cheek.
Somewhere a bird sang, plaintive and sweet and achingly familiar.
Meadowlarks.
He moved again, to the muted creak of mattress ropes unevenly tightened.
The air was a threnody of spring foliage, of water, of spruce sweetness and the sour, acidic pong
of bogs; of flat distances running untouched to the hem of wind-washed sky; of distant ice.
The Sykerst.
He was home.
The ache of it wrung him, obliterating all else in the hurt of nostalgic joy.
Shadow dimmed the nacreous dawn light that lay across his face.
"Daurannon?" He blinked up, recognizing the man who bent over him. The wide-set hazel eyes, the
cupid-bow mouth, the straight nose and coal-black tousle of hair-Daurannon Stapler was one of
those men who would look seventeen till the day he died.
"Drink this." The melodious tenor still had the soft under-purr of a lower-class St. Cyr accent.
How many nights, Antryg wondered, had he heard that accent, in the years he and Daur spent
studying together under the Archmage Salteris' tutelage? And after that, when he himself had been
admitted to the High Council-the youngest mage ever to be so-and had been, nominally, Daur's
tutor. He wondered, as he had even then, how much that had bothered the friend who had been only
three years younger than himself.
With Daurannon it was always difficult to tell.
The bed ropes creaked as Daur sat beside him, helped him up with a strong arm beneath his head and
shoulders; the cold stem of a metal goblet was pressed into his grip. As his lips touched the
cup's rim, he smelled the bitter steep of phylax root in the water and drew back.
"If you don't drink it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call the guards and make you," said Daur's
voice behind his head. "I don't want to do this, but we've got to ... now. They'll be in in a
minute."
By the smell of it the concentration of phylax was very strong, enough to strip him of any ability
to work all but the most minor magics for at least twenty-four hours. On the other hand, thought
Antryg through the pounding pain in his skull, he had no doubt they'd hold him down and pour the
stuff down his throat. That was what the Witchfinders had done, anyway, nearly drowning him in the
process. With the spell-cord around his wrists, there was no real way he could fight.
Not against Daur, anyway.
Even in that split-second hesitation he heard the door open. He sat up quickly and drained the
potion, almost throwing it up again immediately as his head gave a blinding throb. "Dammit," he
whispered, his body bending under the reaction to the pain. Daurannon's hands, firm and warm and
sure of themselves, pushed through his tangled hair to touch his scalp, seeking automatically the
energy lines and pressure points; he felt the pain shunt away like fluid from a lanced sore, and
with it, the worst of the aftertaste of his dreams.
After a few queasy moments he managed to straighten up a little. Around the low, coffin-shaped
arch of the small chamber's door he made out the clotted wall of black that was all he could see


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of the guards.
But even without his spectacles he knew the room. It was the larger of the two upstairs chambers
in the round stone house called the Pepper-Grinder, one of the several dwellings in the Citadel of
Wizards traditionally given over to novices and Juniors. The lumpish, uneven window, and its sill
and jambs of fieldstone, was half-obscured by encroaching ivy and weeds-clearly Bentick the
Steward was having his usual problems finding enough village youths willing to help with the
gardening.
The casements were open. The air breathed a delirium of dew.
He frowned up at Daur. "Is old Fred still the gardener here?" he asked, squinting. Most mages were
able to control or arrest the deterioration of their own vision; he'd lost half his eyesight
within a year of the Council's locking him in the Silent Tower. "He must have been seventy when I
left, and that was nine years ago."
A faint, discontented stirring eddied the ranks congregated in the doorway; Antryg held out the
cup upside down, a final droplet splashing to the worn, stained planking of the floor. "All gone,"
he assured the guards and put up one hand to gingerly massage the back of his neck. "I must say
I'm tremendously flattered at your opinion of what a dangerous fellow I am, but I really wish
you'd listened to a more realistic briefing about my abilities as a hand-to-hand fighter. Surely
you could have informed them, Daur."
"I wasn't here," Daurannon said quietly.
He glanced sideways, meeting bland, deceptive eyes beneath their preposterous shelf of lashes. For
all his choirboy charm, Daurannon had always been hard to read, and there was an opaqueness to him
now, a wariness more pronounced than ever, that hid what lay inside.
"There was an abomination, a hideous thing, they said, at the Green King's Chapel in the forest
beyond the village."
"Ah." Antryg turned his attention to picking at the knots that bound the crimson welt of the spell-
cord to his wrist. "And was there? You can go, by the way," he added, glancing up at the guards
who still lingered in the doorway. They started to obey him, then caught themselves. Daurannon
signed assent, with only the slightest, annoyed compression of his lips, then turned back to his
former fellow student.
"I saw nothing." He wore the purple satin stole of the High Council, Antryg noted-he had heard of
Daurannon's ascension while he himself was a prisoner in the Silent Tower. A scabbarded killing
sword was thrust through his belt. Like Antryg-like all the novices-Daurannon had trained as a
sasennan during the first year of his schooling in magic. As of nine years ago, when Antryg had
been thrown off the High Council for the final time and ejected from the Citadel for good,
Daurannon had still kept up his training. They'd fought each other in hundreds of bouts, with
split-bamboo training swords, up and down the long room on the top floor of the house called the
Harlot. Antryg remembered that the excellence of his friend's technique, his speed and
coordination, had nearly compensated for the fact that, in an all-out fight, Daurannon was
basically a coward.
But unlike most cowards he'd admitted it and hadn't, as many cowards did, added bullying and lying
to his lack of nerve. Antryg had wondered in later years whether this had stemmed from innate
honesty or from the knowledge that nobody can hide on the training floor.
By the look of those broad shoulders under the fine dark wool, he hadn't let his training slide
into abeyance.
"If you'd wanted me," Antryg went on after a moment in a reasonable voice, "you could have sent a
letter, you know." He knotted the ends of the spell-cord together and began the preliminary loops
of a cat's cradle over his long, crooked fingers. "The postal system in that universe is
marvelous, really almost as good as the Angelshand penny post."
"Would you have stayed to keep an appointment if we'd written for one?"
"Well ... "He shifted his fingers, but instead of assuming a new and pleasing shape, the spell-
cord deteriorated into a sorry tangle. Antryg sighed and began again. "It would depend on how
nicely I was asked. Lady Rosamund had years of deportment lessons as a girl. Somewhere in there
she must have learned to write a very convincing letter of assignation."
Daur reached gingerly over and removed the silky crimson loops from among Antryg's fingers,
handling the cords as if they were hot and setting them quickly on the floor beside the bed. "Some
of the Council," he said, "seem to think that you might be behind it all." He reached into a
pocket and produced Antryg's spectacles. The steel frames were bent where Antryg had fallen on
them; he took them from Daurannon and straightened them carefully before putting them on.
"Behind the abominations that have been appearing, you mean?"
Daur's black brows snapped together. "Then you know about them."
"Well," pointed out Antryg reasonably, "you just told me about one, and since there's been a great


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deal of activity in the Void lately, it stands to reason there must be others." He shivered a
little-the Citadel of Wizards lay in latitudes far to the north of Los Angeles-and rubbed at the
ache in the crooked bones of his hands. "And I do get blamed for things of that nature almost as a
matter of course. Was that what decided you to come looking for me?"
"In a manner of speaking," Daur said, getting to his feet. "Are you ready? The High Council will
be waiting."
"At this hour?" Antryg readjusted the spectacles on his long nose and climbed stiffly to his feet,
"I'm flattered that condemning me to death has risen in priority above Bentick's breakfast. And
speaking of breakfast, do you think Pothatch would be up to getting us some coffee when we get
there? Pothatch is still the cook here, isn't he? And muffins-the Manchurian Panda-Date makes very
good kung pao beef but that was an awfully long time ago ... "
"Don't flatter yourself," Daurannon cut in quietly, his voice suddenly hard. "You were condemned
to death four months ago."
Antryg sighed. "Another pretension crushed."
"And in any case," the younger mage said after a moment, "that isn't why you're here."
The guards fell in around them as they emerged into the little gallery that bisected the Pepper-
Grinder halfway up its tall interior. Spiraling iron steps looped down to the lower floor, half of
which was occupied by the usual student clutter of books, crystals, dried herbs, and the endless
lists that novices and Juniors had to memorize; the other half had been cleared for the practice
of drawing Circles of Power. Secondor third-level Junior circles, Antryg automatically identified
them, for minor spells of Summoning, drawn by a tall young woman of upper-bourgeois background
from Angelshand who'd never been in love. Three steps led up to the little door; Antryg ducked his
head, and his graying curls brushed the lumpish gargoyle carved upon the keystone. The guards
crowded behind.
May dawn on the Wizards' Tor. More strongly than ever, the reminiscences of home. "Is old Fred
still the gardener?" He looked around him at the jungle of wild grape and hardy taiga laurel that
was, as usual, threatening to swallow the dozen or so little houses shared by the Citadel's Junior
population. Against the gray-weathered wood and dark stone of the walls, the parakeet green of new-
fledged rowan and birch stood out like fresh paint, sharply contrasting with the spruces' clotted
darkness.
"No," said Daurannon. "He retired four years ago; his nephew Tom's taken over. And as usual,
Bentick's not having any luck getting him help."
Antryg's boots, and the following feet of the guards, thumped hollowly on a short walkway of
splintery planks across a sharp dip in the rocks to a half-dozen wooden stairs, and so up to the
narrow, cobblestoned road that wound its way among the close-crowded labyrinth of buildings and
trees.
Between the Juniors' houses-cellar to attic, where the hill was steep-ran a dozen little covered
bridges, galleries, and staircases, all ramshackle, tiny, narrow, and needing paint. Nearly
everything in the Citadel was connected. Antryg could have climbed from the pillared stateliness
of the Council Hall up to the round marble observatory platform that crowned the Library's soaring
bulk, six hundred feet above at the summit of the hill, without once going outside, had he cared
to take a winding course through kitchen, laundry, cellars, and the bridges that linked nearly all
the residences. And indeed, in the cruel months of the Sykerst winters, everyone at one time or
another did precisely that.
But in spring, despite the glass-sharp chill in the air, and certainly through the short, soul-
hurting magic of the muggy Sykerst summers, no one did so who had a chance to walk outside.
The little road, between its crumbling balustrades of field-stone, came clear of the trees just
beyond the house called the Island of Butterflies, after a place in a fairy tale, and Antryg
stopped, in spite of Daurannon's hand on his elbow pressing him on.
At this point the hillside dropped below them in a nearly sheer escarpment of granite to the pines
clustering below. From here one could look directly across into the upper windows of the Polygon,
the Citadel's main edifice, which rose in stately splendor from the easier southern slope: an
incongruous-looking building whose lower floors and massive porch columns had been cut out of the
living granite of the hill itself. The upper floors, above the columned dignity of the Council
Hall, were a curious composite of later styles and materials, piled one on top of the other like a
peasant wedding cake, the monolithic stonework and arcades of six centuries ago supporting garish
Gothic arches and breezeways, galleries of carved wood weathered gray as pewter by the harshness
of the northland winters, encrustations of jewel-like half-timbering, ornamental brickwork, and
frivolous rococo turrets added by Pipin the Little, the Archmage who had immediately preceded
Antryg's own master Salteris.
Turning, Antryg craned his neck to look up over the intervening walls and clusters of alder and


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spruce to the steep outcropping immediately above, where the foursquare bulk of the Library, the
most ancient portion of the Citadel, loomed pale as old ash against the rising light. Its
fortresslike slit windows had mostly been replaced by wide arches of glass, and along its eastern
side, cantilevered out over the sheer granite drop of the hill, some nobleman anxious to win the
wizards' favor had paid to install a conservatory, a ridiculous jeweled swallow's nest balanced on
buttress and pillar, flashing in the new light of day.
Antryg smiled. As a forcing house for fruit trees, the Conservatory was absolutely useless,
because it was accessible only through the Library, and hadn't been used for anything for seventy-
five years, but the sight of that faceted absurdity always gave him joy.
As he and Daurannon resumed their winding course down the path, he inquired, "Does Seldes Katne
still hang her stockings there to dry? Seldes Katne is still librarian, isn't she?"
Daurannon smiled a little at the thought of the stumpy, elderly woman who knew the location and
contents of every scroll and grimoire that crammed those shelves. "I think she'll be librarian
here when we're all dead and gone."
"There are worse fates." Antryg led the way along a raised-plank path over vine-cloaked, uneven
ground to a side door of the Harlot: an enormously tall and narrow building faced on all sides
with an extravaganza of multicolored ornamental brick and tile. "Chasing abominations and prodding
'round the Void on behalf of the Council with no guarantee of what I'll get out of it, for
starters."
Daurannon halted in his tracks, his grip on Antryg's bare arm sudden and crushing. They stood in
the doorway at the top of the Harlot's long stairwell, turn after square turn of sandstone stairs
and galleries pillared in painted marble, flooded now with the first golden blast of the morning
sun. High above them, the clash of feet and weaponry signaled morning sparring for sasenna and
novices training under Sergeant Hathen's terrier-dog bark.
"You weren't told that!"
"My dear Daur, it's obvious I'm not going to be beheaded this morning," Antryg said. "If the
Council didn't have some pressing need for my services, I'd have waked up in a cell on the
bottommost level of the Vaults, not in one of the spare bedrooms, and you'd have dosed me with
something considerably nastier than phylax root. I know there's been something amiss with the Void
for months ... "
"And how do you know that?"
"I just do. Partly, because you told me that abominations have been appearing. For how long? Just
here? No, of course they've been seen in Angelshand, Parchasten, and Kymil, too, because the
Citadel sits on a node of the energy-paths, and trouble here would cause faulting all along the
Line. No wonder Bentick can't get villagers to cut the grass or sweep the stairs." He nodded
toward the dried stains of crusted mud on the worn sandstone risers, tracks leading upward and
down, some of them days old.
"And since my area of expertise is the Void, Lady Rosamund thought ... " He broke off, his mad
gray eyes suddenly distant, a gangly, incongruous shape in jeans and T-shirt beside the younger
mage's robed dignity.
"What is obvious to me," Daurannon said slowly, "is that you know a good deal more than you
should."
"Oh, I always do," Antryg agreed cheerfully. "And in fact knowing more than we should is the
business of wizards." He turned and clattered down the stairs, Daurannon and his guards hurrying
to overtake his longer stride.
"Nevertheless," Daurannon said, "the summoning of abominations was in your confession."
"Was it?" Antryg glanced back over his shoulder as he swung around a marble newel. "I didn't read
the thing, you know. I'm surprised at you, Daur-hasn't anyone told you you shouldn't believe
everything the Inquisition talks people into signing?"
"Not everything, perhaps," Daurannon agreed. They halted at the bottom of the last flight of
stairs. Before them stretched the covered wooden bridge to the Junior Parlor on one side of the
Polygon's upper floors. "You also confessed to murdering my master, Salteris Solaris, the
Archmage. Was that also something the Witchfinders made up?"
Antryg flinched, looking aside from the sudden naked rage, the pain of grief and loss, in those
usually bland, agate-colored eyes.
"There was a reason for that."
"I've heard your reason."
Antryg started across the bridge. The hand Daur laid on his arm to stop him was trembling with
anger. "Salteris was my master, my teacher, and my friend," Daurannon said. "He taught me
everything I know and made me everything I am. I loved him. At one time you claimed you did, too."
Antryg sighed. Their footfalls echoed hollowly on the thick oaken planks of the bridge. Beyond it,


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the Junior Parlor was deserted, gray still with shadow, for it faced northwest, and filled with
the smell of ashes from the unswept hearth. The crisscross patterns of its dragon-painted rafters
seemed to murmur with all those conversations he and Daurannon had had there over the years,
sitting up till dawn discussing spells and philosophy and the variations of plant life and
insects; the notes of Salteris' porcelain flute seemed only just to have died away.
"If you've heard my reason," he said after a time, "you know why I killed him."
"As I recall it," the Handsome One said, his voice low enough to exclude the little knot of guards
who trailed behind, "you claimed that your former master, the Dark Mage Suraklin, learned the
secret of putting his own mind and soul into the body of another-in this case, Salteris. And for
that reason you killed him. But it's an argument which cuts two ways, Antryg. And if Suraklin was
capable of that, he was also capable of putting his mind and soul into your body ... another very
good reason to kill Salteris. And a good reason to summon abominations to plague the wizards who
destroyed your own Citadel in Kymil-if you are he-all those years ago, and broke your power."
Antryg placed a staying hand on the doorway of the stair that would lead them at last, down one
final flight, to the small round chamber where the High Council met. "Is that what you think?"
"Let's say it's something which has crossed my mind. Most of the others don't believe Suraklin had
that power."
"Oh, he had it." Antryg shivered, thrusting other memories from his mind. "He had it. One more
question ... "
The guards had closed up behind them, pressing him on; through the open door he could feel the
slow rising of warmth from the Polygon below them, the mingled odors bringing back to him all his
own years as a member of the Council, sitting in that chamber at Salteris' left hand ... candlewax
and incense, the frowsty odors of old wood and ground-in smoke. Even now, even though he'd
strangled Salteris-Suraklin-the mindless husk that Suraklin had left of his master-with his own
hands, even now he half expected the old man to be sitting in his carved blackwood chair at the
head of the council table, a cup of cinnamon tea at his elbow, making some joke about Antryg being
late.
"Where's Joanna?"
Daurannon hesitated, his black brows puckering slightly. Then, "The girl from the City of Dreams?"
"Yes," Antryg said quietly. "She was kidnapped from her apartment sometime after midnight-
kidnapped, from the description, by a mage. And because of the strength needed to open a Gate, it
has to have been a member of the Council." Behind his thick lenses his eyes, usually filled with
nothing more than a kind of amiable lunacy, had grown hard.
"We had nothing to do with that," Daurannon said after a moment. "With you as our prisoner, of
course the Council has no need of a hostage. Truly, if something happened to her, it wasn't one of
us."
He looked up at his erstwhile friend, his hazel eyes wide and slightly puzzled with the puzzlement
of innocence.
But then, thought Antryg, as he turned down the last spiral of stairs, an appearance of slightly
puzzled innocence had always been Daurannon's forte.


Chapter III
Of the Master-Spells, the spells of dominance by which the Archmage holds sway over all others of
that kind, great or small, it is forbidden among them to speak.
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry

"Well," Antryg said, breezing through the great bronze doors and into the High Council chamber,
"you're probably wondering why I've called you all here."
Half a dozen pairs of eyes ranged around the worn and battered oak of the council table regarded
him fishily. Only Issay Bel-Caire, newest member of the Council, sitting like a disheveled marsh
fae down at the table's foot, could be seen to flick a hastily swallowed smile. For the rest,
Nandiharrow only watched him gravely; Bentick, Steward of the Citadel, gave a little twitch and
shut his eyes, as if at some familiar inner pain; the Lady Rosamund's beautiful lips compressed in
deepest disapproval. Down at the end of the table, near Issay, Phormion Starmistress twisted her
square, delicate hands ceaselessly within the sleeves of her robe, and at the table's head Aunt
Min-Minhyrdin the Fair, Archmage of the Council and eldest of the wizards-woke up, fumbled with
her knitting for a moment, then peered the length of the room at the tall, loose-limbed figure in
the paint-spattered jeans that had dropped so casually into the chair between Issay and Phormion.
At a sign from Daurannon, the squad of sasenna moved back, filing soundlessly out the door and


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shutting it behind them; the moment Minhyrdin lifted her head, Antryg was on his feet again,
striding up the room to kneel before the old lady's chair. She had a footstool, he saw, its ivory
legs retaining fragments of gilt in the carvings, so that those tiny feet of hers in their plain
scuffed slippers would not dangle like a child's above the floor.
"Ah," the creaky voice murmured, and one withered claw reached out to touch his bent, graying
head. "It's Suraklin's boy, that gave everyone so much trouble."
And there was a shocked muttering around the table at mention of the Dark Mage's name.
"Be fair, Auntie," smiled Antryg, raising his head, and his glasses flashed in the cool,
shadowless light that flooded the round white marble room. "Salteris was my master, too, and the
master I chose. Surely you won't hold my raising against me?"
"Badly brought up," she sighed, shaking her head. "Badly brought up, with all the wrong ideas ...
You aren't wearing yours emblem of office, the stole of the Council." Her pale eyes focused more
sharply on him.
"I'm no longer on the High Council, Aunt Min," Antryg reminded her and straightened up to tower
over the tiny bundle of black rags and knitting hunched in the great oak chair. His deep voice was
gentle. "I was chucked off, oh, eight or nine years ago, for meddling in the quarrel between Lord
Surges and the Imperial Governors ... and you aren't wearing yours either."
"That," Lady Rosamund snapped witheringly, from her seat at the old lady's right, "is scarcely
your place to comment!"
"I never know where that thing gets to." The Archmage dug aimlessly in her knitting basket,
spilling yarns and needles in a wry-colored cascade to the yellowed marble floor. Antryg bent to
pick through the hopeless snarl and produced a very much crumpled purple satin band, which he
draped tenderly around the old lady's humped, skinny shoulders.
"There," he smiled. "Now we're official and all in print."
The faded aquamarine eyes narrowed to sudden sharpness. "And you were dead, too."
"Well," Antryg admitted, "that's another story and only partially true. There isn't a chance of
getting a cup of tea, is there? Bentick, would you mind fetching tea? I'd go myself except that
all those guards won't fit into the kitchen. And do you think," he added, as the Steward, tight-
lipped with indignation, signaled Implek-the only non-mage in the room-to order one of his
warriors to comply, "that you could borrow a jacket or something from the Citadel slop chest for
me? It's appallingly cold."
Lady Rosamund opened her flowerlike lips to express her opinion of dog wizards who came to their
own trials as if they owned the courtroom, but Aunt Min muttered something about dressing like a
heathen savage and disentangled from her workbasket a huge shawl, part-knit, part-crochet, part-
macrame, in an apparently random selection of spun and unspun hanks of silk and wool. Antryg slung
it around his shoulders and settled himself in Daurannon's chair at the Arch-mage's left just as
the younger wizard was stepping forward to take the place himself.
"Now," he said in a cheery voice, "how long after your first experiments with the Void did the
abominations start appearing?"
Had he announced his candidacy for the position of Arch-mage there could not have been a more
stunned silence in the marble chamber. Daurannon's eyes blazed with suspicion; Bentick and
Nandiharrow exchanged troubled glances; but it was the Starmistress who spoke, her deep voice a
hoarse whisper, and she stared straight before her as if she had not heard what he'd said.
"There was a Gate," she whispered. "Voices crying out."
"When?" asked Antryg, looking across at that stern, elderly lady who had always reminded him of a
short-winged hawk. "Where?"
The librarian, Seldes Katne, spoke up. "Down in the Vaults. On the seventh or eighth level." She
sat with five non-Council members present, their plain, bleached-pine chairs set in the gallery
formed by a ring of pillars that circled the room a few feet from its white marble wall. With the
exception of Seldes Katne and Implek, they were the very powerful Senior mages, in line for
Council position: Otaro the Singer, whose round, brown face curiously blended jolliness and
asceticism; the black-skinned, massive Q'iin the Herbmistress; and gentle old Whitwell Simm. "But
that wasn't until months after the experiments began."
"We first started raising power to open Gates in the Void in February," Lady Rosamund said. "The
abominations didn't start appearing until early last month. Nothing we did at that time differed
from the earlier spells."
"What prompted them?" Antryg asked, propping his chin on his hand and regarding her with bright-
eyed interest.
Her head lifted a little. "The knowledge that there were worlds, universes beyond the veil of what
we know as the light and air of reality. The awareness, brought by your meddling in these matters,
that there was knowledge out there waiting to be found."


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"I see." Down at the far end of the table, Issay and Nandiharrow moved over to make space for
Daurannon at Antryg's other side. The younger mage took the vacated chair, but his eyes, still
sharp with wariness, never left Antryg's face. "I don't suppose it really matters where in the
Citadel you made these experiments, given the number of energy lines which cross here; you could
scarcely help shunting the power this way and that."
"We worked mostly in the hall on the North Cloister," provided Bentick. "I have the complete notes
of those sessions."
"Thank you. Just out of curiosity, at what point did some one of the Regent's men inquire about
how you'd disposed of my mortal remains? Which," he added earnestly, forestalling Daurannon's
burst of speech, "is the only logical way you'd have of finding out that it wasn't the Regent's
men who'd taken me out and buried me, as you'd probably thought."
There was a momentary, stringent silence, broken by Aunt Min. "The turn of the granny-winter it
was, when the groundhogs come out ... not that I've seen groundhog put his nose from his house any
winter these thirty years."
"In other words," Antryg said, "around the first week of February. Was probing 'round the Void
your idea, Daur?"
The Handsome One, who still appeared far from satisfied at the patness of Antryg's deduction, said
coolly, "The matter was voted on in Council."
"And if our goal was to seek you out for what you had done," her ladyship added, "do you blame
us?"
He widened his deranged eyes at her from behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. "Not nearly as
much as you're blaming yourself, I daresay. I mean, it wasn't my doing that the abominations
started appearing."
"Nor was it ours!" snapped the Lady, rising from her chair.
"Well, only one of us was messing about with the Gates, and there was no percentage in it for me,
you see."
"Was there not?" Daurannon asked softly.
"The openings were done the same way last as first," Bentick added irritably, "and there were no
ill effects-none whatever. We scried very carefully along the energy lines to make sure of that.
It's all here in my notes." And he shoved the thick, leather-bound notebook he'd been cradling
under one arm across the table with the air of a man refuting all possible contradiction. Of
course, reflected Antryg, Bentick did everything, from lecturing on sublunary physics to tying his
shoes, with the air of a man refuting all possible contradiction.
"So when were there ill effects?" Antryg inquired.
"Not for six, seven weeks." Lady Rosamund took up the tale. "Then abominations were reported, foul
things, evil, unknown creatures. They were seen in Kymil, in Angelshand, in the woods near the
village of Wychstanes here ... and here. Monstrous things were seen in the mazes of the Vaults
down below, strange mosses, vermin of other worlds. We began searching the Vaults, to see what
might be the source of these evils."
"And there was a Gate." Phormion's huge eyes, rusty brown and, Antryg recalled, usually steady and
calm for all their overwhelming intensity, shifted as she spoke; he had the impression she was
fighting to keep herself from looking back over her shoulder for the memory of some terrible
threat. "A Gate into darkness."
Phormion continued in the deep, almost masculine voice that was so startling coming from the fine-
boned oval of her face, "I cannot say exactly where, now. I was searching, like the others. There
were things down there, invisible as well as visible; the darkness was alive with their scurryings
and shriekings, like foul ghosts. I slew one creature which came at me." She shook her head; her
brows, still auburn though her hair had lost its color years ago, pinched together, with pain or
memory or the attempt to make sense of something incompletely recalled.
"I heard ... voices. I think voices ... " She raised a small, slim-fingered hand briefly to her
temple and shook her head again. "A great voice called something which I have forgotten. There was
a sound like the beating of wings, like wind in the reed beds along the river. I turned and there
was a Gate, a Gate such as we had opened in the Void when we went into that other world to take
you prisoner for your sins, Antryg Windrose. But the Gate was moving."
"Moving?" Antryg said, startled. "But they don't move. They open and close, and when they do, they
seem to be coming toward one, or going away."
"No," she insisted quietly, "it was not like that." In her sleeves her hands were never still,
scratching, searching, like mice in a sack. "I have seen Gates now. Seen them in the Vaults, some
of them little, holes only. This one ... it rushed toward me like a runaway cart in a city street.
In the black maw of it, I saw moving lights, moving shapes ... voices. It came at me like an ocean
wave which curls down over the head, like a mouth opening to swallow ... "


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Her huge eyes snapped shut, and she turned her face away. Bentick's nervous white hand reached out
to touch her wrist, and she flinched, startled, as if struck.
"I have searched the Library for any information concerning the Void," Seldes Katne said, after a
time of silence. The diffuse, even light of magic that filled the windowless chamber did little to
improve her round, heavy face, plain as a boiled potato; the tight braid of her hair, which lay
across the black of her robe, was the color of fading iron, streaked with ashy gray. "I was in
Angelshand when the manifestations started. There were riots in the dockside quarters; I think if
the Regent hadn't banished all the wizards from every city in the realm we probably would have
been torched out by the mob."
"Banished you?" Antryg's eyebrows shot up with comic surprise.
"From every city in the Realm," Nandiharrow said, with a touch of bitterness in his deep, slow
voice. "Every worker of magic, even some of the dog wizards."
"Good Heavens, Pharos must be mellowing! A few years ago he would have arrested every wizard in
sight and thrown the lot to the Inquisition. I'm pleased everyone got off so easily."
"He would not dare ... " Lady Rosamund began indignantly.
"You don't think so? I can't imagine you know him better than I do, but ... Ah, thank you." A
tall, rawboned, red-haired girl of about Joanna's age appeared at his elbow with a lacquered tray
bearing teapot and cup, which she proceeded almost to spill over him. He caught the edge of the
tray neatly, glanced at the chalk stains on her uncallused fingers, the shape and quality of the
narrow ruffle of white shift collar visible above the edge of her gray Junior's robe, and the
dried leaves adhering to the mud of her shoes. "Kyra, isn't it? My temporary roommate at the
Pepper-Grinder?
"Chamomile," he added, pouring out the tea. "Pothatch remembered, bless his rotund little heart.
Q'iin, did you ever succeed in making a cleanser for wounds from chamomile and fairy-paintbrush? I
was saving fairy-paintbrush for you in Los Angeles-it grows there under another name-but ... "
"If we might return to the matter at hand!" Bentick's rather high voice cut in like chipped
obsidian, and a muscle twitched in his long, clean-shaven jaw.
"Terribly sorry." Antryg gave him his daft smile. "Would you care for tea? Kyra, my darling, we
seem to be short of cups."
"Here," offered the Archmage, unexpectedly coming to life enough to dig into her workbasket and
produce a delicate teacup of soft-paste porcelain, pale green and decorated with roses and a rim
of peeling gilt.
"That's extremely good of you. Is this from Voort of Kymil's workshop?" He was turning it over to
look for the maker's mark on the bottom-with Aunt Min peering over his shoulder-when Lady Rosamund
slapped the tabletop like a gunshot.
"Enough of this foolery!" The edge on her voice was sharp enough to have jointed a deer. Then,
more quietly, she went on. "Seldes Katne brought Salteris' books and notes back from Angelshand
with her. For two days she has been searching, and so far she's found nothing in them about the
Void, or about what could be causing the Gates to be opening and closing this way; nothing about a
Gate which moves. We have all been patrolling the Vaults but have found nothing which seems to
point in any direction but that of chaos. Nothing we have found in the library speaks of the Void
... "
"Well, not a great deal about the Void was ever written down." Antryg shook an arm free of the
shawl's folds to pour tea for himself and Aunt Min, then sat warming his crooked, swollen-knuckled
fingers in the rising steam. "Salteris learned what he knew of it from a dog wizard named Wilbron,
who operated out of Parchasten and made most of his money smuggling. Did you know that one can
temporarily disarrange the internal energy-paths of precious stones to make them pull a magnet, so
they'll act like bits of iron as well as looking like them under a spell of illusion? To the best
of my knowledge whatever books Suraklin had on the subject-and he was the one who taught me-went
up in that bonfire you all built when you razed his citadel in Kymil. Rather a pity."
"Whatever knowledge was contained in the Dark Mage's books," Lady Rosamund responded through
gritted teeth, "was offset by the fact that the things he touched were frequently found to be
contaminated by his influence and power."
"Oh, I'm not blaming you," Antryg hastened to assure her. "Certainly not you personally, since you
were still sewing samplers in the schoolroom at the time. Still, it is a pity. At a guess-and it's
only a guess, because a Gate which actually physically moves, as opposed to appearing and
disappearing, is something I've never heard of before-at a guess, I'd say the Gate was moving
along an energy-track. With four tracks crossing here under the Citadel, the Vaults are stitched
with them. It would help if you could remember where you saw it, Phormion."
The Starmistress shook her head. "I fled," she said simply, though her voice shook a little, and
the cool light glittered suddenly on the mist of sweat that marked her upper lip. "I think I must


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have lost consciousness at some point. I remember lying on the floor near the small downshaft on
level five, near the Painted Halls, though I am sure that I descended past that level in my
original search." Her eyes avoided his again.
Bentick's dark eyes met Antryg's challengingly. "She was exhausted and ill for hours after that.
This was the day before yesterday, and it was at this point that your name arose in the
discussions."
"In what context one can only guess," Antryg murmured, rising and pulling his long, sloppy shawl
more closely around his bare arms. "I suppose the first thing I need to do is to take a look at
the Vaults myself."
"No." The Lady Rosamund made a sign; Antryg heard outside the chamber the faint creak of sword
harness, the movement of sasenna closing ranks about the door. "Given the old legends of objects
of power which were said to be hidden in the Vaults, the first thing you must do, Antryg Windrose,
is to surrender your powers to the geas of the Council."
Antryg's gray eyes widened with shock. He glanced toward Aunt Min, who appeared to have fallen
asleep again, and then back to the slender, beautiful woman standing at the ancient Archmage's
side. His voice was reasonable, if just slightly shaky. "Isn't it sufficient that you've poured
enough phylax down my throat to fail every novice in the Citadel in their exams?"
"No," the Lady said coldly. "It is not sufficient. There were those on the Council who voted
against your being brought here at all; those who argued that you cannot be trusted with power, as
you have shown by your actions again and again. Phylax wears off in three days. All you need to do
is go over the Citadel wall-and believe me, we have all heard of your escapes from the Silent
Tower-and you would once again become a dog wizard meddling in affairs which do not and should not
concern you, bringing the wrath of the Witchfinders yet more fiercely upon every mageborn soul in
the land."
"And if I won't be a dog wizard in your pay," Antryg said mildly, "you'd rather I wasn't in anyone
else's?"
Color flooded to the Lady's silky cheeks. Before she could reply, Nandiharrow interjected gently,
"The Regent hates us solely for what we are, Antryg. You're right-we were lucky to have escaped
with banishment. We exist, to an extent, upon his sufferance, perhaps not for our lives, but for
our peace: the peace to study, the peace to train others in the use of their true arts. The
Council trained you in the proper use of your powers in exchange for vows not to meddle, and you
have broken your vows, not once but over and over again. Surely you must concede our point?"
"I do concede it." Antryg sank back into Daurannon's chair, glanced from the big, gray-haired
man's kindly face to his mutilated hands, and rubbed at the ache that never left his own twisted
fingers. "And I was minding my own business-well, pretty much so-in Los Angeles. But you're asking
me to do a job, and if there is something badly amiss with the Void-and abominations prowling
about the Vaults are a fairly telling clue-I may need my powers on rather short notice."
As he spoke his eyes traveled from face to face, seeking a way out: Phormion still twisting her
hands under Bentick's worried sidelong glance, Nandiharrow solid and grave as an oak, and Issay
Bel-Caire like a sun-bleached bundle of weeds. His eyes touched Daurannon's and met there only
opaque coldness and mistrust. At the head of the table Aunt Min snored gently. "I shouldn't care
to have to reconvene this Council at three o'clock some morning in the face of an unexpected
onslaught of fire-breathing caterpillars."
"He's right." Seldes Katne got to her feet, her round, potatolike face set in an expression of
consternation. "Surely it would be a great mistake to take from him the very powers for which he
was brought here."
"He was brought here for his knowledge and his experience." The Lady's gaze rested impersonally
for a moment on the stout librarian, then moved to Antryg again. "You may call upon any member of
the Council for assistance at any time."
"Oh, I'm sure I can." Antryg drained his tea and studied the pattern of the leaves at the bottom
of the cup. A house-ambition; fire-chaos and change; the rose that foretold a death; and
everywhere the little three-legged track of danger. "The thing is, I'm not entirely convinced that
it isn't some member of the Council who's responsible for all of this."
Had she still been the daughter of the Earl Maritime and not a mage theoretically equal with her
brothers and sisters on the Council, Lady Rosamund would have snapped How dare you? and rung for a
lackey to have him thrashed. As it was she only tightened her lips, but the unspoken words sparked
in her eyes like pitch in a burning log.
"There are members of the Council who are not entirely convinced that it isn't you who is in some
way responsible for all of this, Antryg Windrose," she said quietly. "And may I remind you," she
added, her voice sinking still further, as if she and he were the only two in the windowless,
light-flooded marble chamber, "that you do not have a choice."


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"Antryg ... "
He flinched from the soft creak of that ancient voice and kept his face turned away. But he could
feel Minhyrdin's pale blue stare, and around his mind, like a tightening silver rope, felt the
implacable force of her will. It drew at him, willing him to turn, an ancient power, rooted deep:
a tree in the rocks, but a tree whose roots have melded with the roots of the mountain, taking
strength from the fire deep within. She was bidding him to meet her eyes.
He kept his face averted for as long as he could, but the Master-Spells, the domination that the
Archmage held over every wizard, drew on him, compelled him like the geared wheels of the rack,
far beyond the capacity of human flesh to resist. Sweat sprang out on his face as he concentrated
on looking down into his teacup, on looking anywhere but into her eyes, and he felt his hands
tremble.
Then, through no volition of his own, he found himself facing those twin pale skies of faded
aquamarine. Within them he thought he saw, not an old woman, but a girl in tawdry riches, scarcely
taller than a child, with a dancer's muscular legs, a saffron tangle of hair heaped on her head
and spilling in handfuls upon her shoulders, flashing with jeweled combs. And beyond that the
image again of an ancient tree, roots locked to the living bones of the earth and drinking iron
from them, so that the core of the tree had grown into steel.
The phylax he had drunk had numbed his ability to use magic, even as spell-cord did, but the power
within him remained. He called upon it now, summoning his own strength from the chaotic, murky
well of his being, trying to look away, to put the alien presence of her will, of the Master-
Spells, from his mind. He tried to think of anything-of Joanna's cats playing, of Joanna herself,
a prisoner and in danger somewhere ... scenes from movies, television commercials, rock 'n' roll
lyrics ...
He couldn't let them take his powers from him, he needed them to find her.
But the steel strength of that ancient tree, twisted, black, incomparably strong, still gripped
his mind. It was the strength of the earth, backed by the Master-Spells, the terrible strength of
domination, and against the deep wisdom he saw in Minhyrdin's eyes he could not find anger to
fight.
I will not give in to you ... I will not allow you to command me.
His breath thickened, and though there was no pain-yet-he felt as if every muscle in his body
strained and cracked.
Joanna, he thought, trying to summon back Ruth's voice, that panicked description of a vision
glimpsed in shadow. A dark robe vanishing down a tunnel of night. One of them has her ... or all
of them. They're lying to me ... I can't ...
He clutched at the thought with the desperation of a man clutching the last tree root above an
abyss, fighting not only gravity but the dragging of a whirlpool, pulling him down. Like a silver
wedge driven in under his fingers, the Master-Spells plucked coldly at his loosening grip.
Don't do this to me .
If he could just turn his eyes away, plunge his mind down into darkness.
But Minhyrdin the Fair would be waiting for him in that darkness. And she'd be here, when he
returned.
"Antryg ... " The voice within his mind was not the scratchy, worn-out creak, but the bell-clear
command of a wild-hearted dancer in her garish gown a century out of fashion ... the voice of
Minhyrdin the Fair, Archmage of the High Council in her later life, oldest and strongest. She was
standing over him now, as he pressed back as far as he could in his chair; he was barely conscious
of his body anymore, save that he felt deathly cold and could not turn his head away. He couldn't
reply, couldn't release his hold for even the instant it would take to acknowledge. There was pain
now, too, or something that read as pain.
"Antryg, you know that we can force your powers from you. I am within your mind now; in a moment I
will bring in the others. They will strip you, break you ... "
"No ... " His breath came in sobs, fighting for darkness, for silence, for anything other than
that terrible shining strength that cleaved his brain like a laser. He didn't know whether he
uttered the word or only thought it.
"Surrender, child. It will hurt you less."
His mind was beyond framing words, beyond even the whisper of denial. It was naked before her,
weaponless and paralyzed, overmatched and cut to pieces. Distantly he still remembered that if he
let his powers be taken away from him he stood in danger of losing Joanna, of being stripped
forever of that quirky, shy, and hesitant love and left anchorless in darkness ... remembered that
one-or all-of them had taken her.
But their dark presences hovered on the edges of his mind, waiting behind the small, shining angel
of the Archmage's light. He felt their thoughts, like wolves closing on a blood-scent-shadows of


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enmity, hatred, fear, secrets ... and somewhere, a glimpse of something else, something utterly
dark and as filled with desperation as he was himself ...
Even that brief awareness made his concentration slip and crack, and he felt her take another inch
of ground. Whether his own eyes were open or closed he no longer knew, and it didn't matter. Those
blue eyes, now sharp and filled with color like the killing sky of deep desert, burned like a
watching tiger's in his soul.
"I will protect you, from the abominations and from them."
He was beyond reply, beyond breathing, dizzy and floating, chilled through in spite of the sweat
that ran down his face.
"Surrender to the geas of the Council, Antryg; consent to its binding. I will see to it that your
powers are later restored.
Hands touched him, slipping in over his shoulders, his throat, his scalp. The darkness of their
power pressed in on him, pulling away pieces of his strength as they would have taken useless
weapons from hands numbed by pain and shock, their own power glittering like white-hot knives.
They would begin to tear him soon, dissecting his mind as the Master-Spells forced it open. Her
awareness was burning light, but theirs would be calcining fire.
Joanna ...
He managed to whisper, "Very well."

For a long time Antryg lay on the rock they called Melliga's Throne after some ancient Archmage
or, perhaps, said some accounts, after a local deity of forgotten years-no one recalled which.
Whoever she had been, Antryg thought detachedly, she had picked a good place to receive her
petitioners or intercept intruders into the Valley of Shadows ... or simply to lie, as he was
lying, with the wind now and then stirring his hair, lifting and flattening the thin cotton of his
T-shirt against his ribs, the thready sunlight slowly warming his flesh without coming near to
dissolving the core of ice and pain locked into his bones.
His powers were gone. He was crippled, cauterized somewhere inside. He hadn't passed out-they
wouldn't let him-and afterward he'd even managed to bow shakily and say, "I trust you'll all
excuse me," as he left. He didn't remember much about leaving the Citadel, except hearing the Lady
Rosamund's clear silver bell of a voice saying in the Council chamber behind him, "Let him go. He
has to come back, you know."
Yes, he thought. He had to go back.
Here on the rock-the Throne-the pain had hit him, two long, shuddering waves an hour or so apart,
as if lungs and spine and nerves were being ripped out in bleeding handfuls: greedy silver knives
and long, clever fingers pushing apart the sutures of his skull to dig out portions of his brain.
He'd blacked out the second time, come to weak and sobbing with a pulped exhaustion, the warm rock
beneath his cheek and the shadows of the long weed stems lying far over on the granite's bleached
breast.
Then he had only lain, like a rag on a beach, listening to the sigh of the wind in the endless sea
of spruce and ghostly aspen that stretched out behind him and the soft chewing of the Crooked
River over its stones below the high platform of the Throne. Listening, and knowing that if he
hadn't yielded to the Master-Spells of his own accord, it would have been much, much worse.
Below him he heard a meadowlark's cry, lilting and joyous as the bird flung itself free of the
earth. He fetched a deep breath, the air entering his lungs with that cold, startling sharpness
that is neither taste nor smell, but rather a sort of awakening; there was a stab of pain deep
inside him, as if he had incautiously rolled over onto something sharp, but not nearly as bad as
it had been. After a time he struggled up onto his elbows, looking down and back at the Citadel
and the country around.
He lay near the edge of the Throne, in reality a sort of natural platform, a blurred and misshapen
square of granite overlooking the little break in the ring of high ground that surrounded the
Valley of Shadows. The valley itself, an irregular, oblong dale two or three miles long by nearly
two wide, was mostly open meadow and not shadowy at all, though the encompassing sprucewoods of
the taiga encroached on its northern end and sent a long tentacle of trees down both sides of the
Crooked River, which wandered in a series of twisting loops down its eastern edge. Boulders dotted
the short grass; from Antryg's vantage point, he could see great patches of frail northlands
flowers, lupine and anemones and gaudy, paperlike poppies, as if a gypsy had passed through and
left colored scarves lying carelessly strewn in the grass.
There were stories that spoke of some local grand duke-back in the days before wizardry became
respectable-who had marched his army against the Citadel in vengeance for some real or fancied
slight. His men had camped around the walls of the Citadel for two nights, and on the third night
(Bentick's version of the story said that the wizards in the Citadel had warned the attacker


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repeatedly to take himself away; Suraklin, recounting it to Antryg years previously, had said,
Without warning ... ), the waters of the Crooked River had risen in roaring spate, mysteriously
prevented from flowing out through the gap between the Throne and the granite hillock opposite,
and had drowned the offending grand duke and all his train.
Looking down into the dale, Antryg believed it. Certainly the long fan of strewn rock below the
gap in the hills spoke of floods in the past-not one, but over and over. The main wall of the
Citadel itself, rising on its great jutting cone of gray rock in the midst of the vale, circled
the granite hill just above the level of the surrounding ring, though these days the newer
structures-the mule barn and dairy among their web of paddock and fence, the stillrooms and
vegetable gardens-lay spread like a lady's train over the lowest slopes and among the clumps of
spruce and alder on the valley floor.
Shaggy with its ancient trees, its moss-choked fountains and tiny gardens, the Citadel itself
rose, buildings of every age and period clinging like swallows' nests to the steep rock. Suspended
over the sheer northeast face, the Conservatory flashed dully in shadow, like a collection of
dirty glass. Higher up, triumphant in the daffodil sun of afternoon, the marble turret of the
observation platform shone white and blue with mosaic work and flashed with threaded lines of
gold.
"Study for the sake of study-pah." He could still hear Suraklin's soft, even voice saying it. He'd
been buttering a scone-the scene was as clear to Antryg as if it had taken place that morning-the
slant of early beams through the narrow lights of the sunroom window had turned his eyes and hair
nearly the same color as the butter, the honey, the biscuit in his hand. "They like to pretend
they have withdrawn from the vulgar world of money and politics and the petty groping for power.
But let the Emperor cut one copper of his subsidies to them or try to appropriate the revenues of
one of the pieces of property they own in every city of the Realm-let the Church step one inch
over the lines they have drawn up for the Church to follow-and you'd see what they've been quietly
studying in their peaceful bookrooms all these years. Why should they fight, when they've made the
Emperor tamely give them whatever they wanted? Why take the trouble to police their competition,
when the Inquisition will do it and let them pretend their lily white hands are clean?"
His own hands, very narrow and long-fingered, wielded the tiny silver butter knife as if he were
dissecting a lizard in his workroom; when he was done, he handed the buttered scone to Antryg, who
sat, a long, gawky, strange-looking boy of fifteen, at the other side of the pale-scrubbed oak of
the little table. It was a gesture of curious kindness beside which the bone-stripping sarcasm,
the hideous magics in which he called Antryg to participate, dissolved like shadows in morning
sunlight and left Antryg even now-knowing everything that he knew-with the memory only of how warm
that illusion of caring had been.

Antryg sighed and shook his head at himself. What a consummate vampire the man had been.
A shadow fell across him. Rolling over, with a little shock of residual pain in his bones, he
shaded his eyes and looked up to see the librarian Seldes Katne standing in the long grass that
grew from a split in the faded rock of the Throne.
"I've brought you a coat." She held it out to him-a ridiculous garment from the Citadel slop
chest, clearly the former property of some actor or mountebank: broad bands of tarnished red and
gold tinsel slashing the worn plum-covered velvet of its extravagant skirts. The small wind
stirred its folds and moved Seldes Katne's black robe and ash gray braid. "It's growing cold."
"Thank you." He got unsteadily to his feet, Aunt Min's asymmetrical shawl sliding from his
shoulders as he accepted the more substantial garment with hands that still felt oddly weak. But
the first wave of nausea had faded, replaced by ravenous hunger. By the lay of the shadows, it
would be nearly suppertime, and he felt chilled and empty to the marrow of his bones. "And thank
you for speaking out for me. It was kind of you-good, too, to go against the Council. That
couldn't have been easy."
Her round, homely face flushed unprettily in the primrose light. "I may not have much power," she
muttered, "but I've been at the Citadel long enough, I should hope, to have a vote."
She sounded angry and shaken, and would not meet his eyes. For as long as Antryg had known her-
which was well over twenty years-Seldes Katne had borne cheerfully the fact that she had only the
barest minimum of magical ability. The Library was her bailiwick and the home of her heart, and
though she was unable to accomplish three-quarters of the spells and cantrips, the great fields
and Summonings and wielding-weirds recorded in its volumes, she had power enough to understand
what they were and how they should be done by those who could. It crossed Antryg's mind to wonder
whether it was this very mediocrity that had given her sympathy for him: having so little power
herself, she had protested the casual violence with which they had ripped his from him.
Or perhaps, he thought, it might have been because they had been friends, partners in the wizardly


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greed for knowledge. But then, Daurannon had been his friend, too.
She went on gruffly, "I don't suppose that carries much weight with the likes of Lady Rosamund
Kentacre or Daurannon the Handsome."
"Well," Antryg pointed out gently, pulling the shawl up over his shoulders again, "I couldn't
actually disagree with them, you know, Kitty." And she smiled at the private nickname he'd given
her in his novice days. "I did break my vows, and I have misused my powers ... and perhaps that's
the entire strength of the Master-Spells. To give the Archmage understanding of another wizard's
mind sufficient to obtain that wizard's consent-be it ever so subconscious-to whatever spell she
will cast. Suraklin did that sort of thing, too," he added, and shivered; the evening was cooling,
and the coat she'd given him, for all its outrageous appearance, had been made for the gorgeous
courts of Mellidane and the south.
Her dark eyes rested doubtfully, worriedly, on his face for a moment, and he could see she didn't
really understand. "They still needn't have done to you what they did," she said after a time.
"You're going to need your powers." She stepped closer to him, her small, square hand reaching out
to touch his threadbare sleeve, and her voice sank to a frightened whisper.
"Antryg, I've seen it. I've seen that thing in the Vaults."
"Have you?" Antryg cocked his head, a curiously storklike gesture, and the slanting daylight
flashed across his Coke-bottle spectacles like enormous, insectile eyes.
She nodded and withdrew her hand to clench it nervously before her. "I ... I went down there after
... after you left the Citadel this morning. The downshaft near the Painted Halls leads straight
down to the eighth level. I thought if I could find it, I might be able to convince the others the
danger was real, that you would need your powers."
"Well, I don't doubt they know how real the danger is; they're just not ready for that particular
piece of logical elenchus. Does the Gate move?"
The librarian looked away from him and folded her arms closely; the wind, stronger now, soughed
through the spruces along the river like the passage of a giant hand, bearing on it the knifelike
bitterness of the ice-locked northern bays. The quality of the light had changed across the Valley
of Shadow, as the brightness passed from the poppies and the lupine, and the first slow degrees of
the long spring evening veiled the grass.
"Yes," she said slowly, "yes, it moves. I only saw it ... distantly. That long reach on the eighth
level. I ... I heard voices, shouting something, I don't know what ... saw lights flashing far
away. But it was all coming toward me, rushing at me down that corridor. I ran down the nearest
side tunnel-I was afraid it would come after me, but it didn't."
"Did you see it pass across the mouth of the passage you were in? See it sideways, so to speak?"
She nodded slowly. "Not ... not clearly." She made a small rueful noise, and her coarse, dark skin
reddened a little with embarrassment. "I pressed myself to the wall. When I looked up, it was just
to see something like a cloud of darkness moving across the end of the corridor. I stayed where I
was until the sound of it, the noise of beating wings, a noise like wind, had died away. Afterward
I felt dizzy, but I can show you the place if you like."
"Curious," murmured Antryg. "Curiouser and curiouser. By all means, take me there. But first,
let's see what Pothatch can get me in the way of dinner. I have the uncomfortable suspicion that
it's going to turn into a rather long night."


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

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


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She didn't know how long. But it was long enough for her fear to give way to waiting-and the
waiting to impatience, the perverse desire for something to happen, even something bad.
And eventually, it all gave way to boredom.
Because nothing happened. Only more darkness, and stillness more absolute than anything she had
previously known; temperatureless black air lying against her face, utter silence hanging like a
muffling curtain against the smooth glassiness of the wall against which she sat, the slick unseen
floor.
A silence, a stillness, like a soundstage or the acoustical deadness of a radio broadcasting
chamber-not an echo, not the hum of air conditioning, not the vibration of weight on some distant
floor. Nothing-truly nothing-that elevated even the soft hiss of air through her nostrils to a
distinct variety of note and pitch.
A nothing that never altered.
She didn't feel ready to shout-God only knew what might answer-but she uncurled herself from the
fetal position she'd unconsciously assumed when ... when ... It troubled her that she couldn't
remember the exact mechanism of how she'd gotten where she was.
She remembered jerking to wakefulness in her own bed, sitting up in disoriented horror to see the
blackness of the Void materializing out of the corner of her room. She remembered screaming. As if
half recalling a dream, she had the impression that for a moment she'd known what was going to
happen to her, and that was why she'd screamed.
And then she'd been here, wretched and terrified and weeping in the darkness.
And then she'd still been here, bored.
Well, not bored, exactly, she amended, feeling in the darkness for the thing she vaguely
remembered grabbing for beside her bed ...
And found it, rolled like a lumpy teddy bear of Indian fringe and bunny fur in her lap. She
thought she'd made a final snatch for her purse, which contained, among other things, her Swiss
Army knife and a small can of Mace. What she really wanted was a flashlight. Her small, square
hands sorted deftly through the contents with the ease of long practice till they closed around
the short, smooth cylinder.
She drew it out and flicked the switch.
And nothing happened.
"Son of a ... " She dropped the flashlight back and dug out one of her six boxes of matches.
It was when the matches didn't work that panic stole back on her, a chilly spot of something she
didn't want to think about, as if she'd swallowed a neutron star the size of an apple seed and it
lay there, ice-cold, heavy, tiny, and dead in the center of her chest. She shrank back into her
corner-the join of two smooth unseen walls, facing God knew how large a chamber, occupied by God
knew what-and wrapped her arms around herself, though the air was not particularly cold.
Good thing, she thought, with the oblique part of her mind not occupied by terror, bafflement, the
helpless cry of What the hell is going on?
These pajamas aren't the warmest things in the world.
But the bafflement and fear of knowing that neither the batteries in her flashlight nor the
friction of the matchboxes worked here-wherever here was-wore off, too.
What was her Uncle Morrie's favorite proverb? God protect us from what we may one day get used to.
Somebody will have to come for me eventually.
And then, what felt like hours later ... Won't they?
But they didn't.
After a time-but how much time?-she stood up, feeling along the corner toward a ceiling her
fingers never reached. That didn't mean much, of course; at barely five feet she couldn't even get
into the top shelves of her own kitchen cupboards-unlike Antryg, the show-off. Hunkering
cautiously down to the floor again, she moved outward, passing her hands along the smooth surface
in wide sweeps until they contacted another comer, this one the exterior, rather than the
interior, of a square turn, meaning she'd been in the angle of an L-shaped room or hall.
When you can't figure out everything, figure out the next thing.
So far, so good.
She had groped her way a hundred and twenty of her own footsteps along the wall when she found
another turn; feeling across in the darkness, she ascertained that the opposite wall was still
there. Either a corridor or a hell of a long, narrow cell.
And still no light, no sound, no trace of either rescue or threat. No change of temperature in the
lightless space around her, no movement of air ... not even smells, she thought. No alteration of
the smooth surface beneath her bare feet. Her exploring fingers had found no crack or irregularity
to tell her whether the walls and floor were of stone or wood-or Fiberglas, for that matter. Her
mouth quirked a little: Imprisoned in the Formica Dungeon.


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Well, hell, she thought. If they're not coming for me, I'm going to have a look around. She had
several granola bars in her purse, though she felt no hunger. The thought of water passed uneasily
through her mind, but she pushed it aside: there was nothing to be done about it at the moment.
Time enough to worry when she got thirsty. After a moment's consideration, she fished in her purse
for a spool of thread and a roll of masking tape.
Just call me Theseus.
Hitching her purse more firmly onto her shoulder and hoping to hell she would smell or hear a
minotaur before she stumbled over it in the dark, she set off to explore.


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

"It's quite true that I was badly brought up." Antryg leaned one shoulder against the rounded,
uneven stones of the Pepper-Grinder's windowsill; the day's last brightness flashed wanly in the
crystal dangling from his ear. He'd acquired a pair of much-discolored fingerless writing mitts to
keep his hands warm in the silvery sharpness of the Sykerst spring; with his ragbag shawl and his
age-darkened snake oil-peddler coat, he had the look of a dilapidated macaw in molt.
"And, as Aunt Min says, I was taught all the wrong things. But it wasn't entirely my fault. It's
very good of you to do this for me, Kitty."
"I haven't managed to do anything yet. And you're blocking the light."
Antryg turned from the window, his spectacles gleaming like the eyes of a deranged tarsier. At the
table, among a battlefield of ruined supper dishes, Seldes Katne angled the main facet of her
scrying-crystal to the daylight. Beyond the window the shadow of the tor could be seen, an
enormous cloak of slate blue silk, softening the contours of the Valley of Shadows and blurring
still further the dark spruces in their scrim of white river mist. Overhead the sky still held a
chilly brilliance and would for hours to come, and though the air was sharp, already it breathed
with the peculiar wildness of the wide steppe summer-life gorging itself on warmth against the
knowledge of the long winter waiting.
"Perhaps if I'd been taken in by a Council wizard instead of by Suraklin," Antryg continued
thoughtfully, "it wouldn't have come so easy to me to use magic against what everyone agrees was a
gross injustice being done in Mellidane. And once I'd started ... "He shook his head.
"There are those who'd point out," the librarian said, her attention still on the crystal before
her, "that it was gross injustice to use magic against the non-mageborn, for whatever purposes. I
sometimes think that's why we tend to live among ourselves, not going into the world much at all."
"Well," Antryg pointed out with a faint grin, "the rocks thrown at us in the streets, and the
Inquisition, have a good deal to do with that, too."
She frowned, looking up at him with a kind of indignation. "Well, of course," she said. "But it's
just too easy to take sides. And once a mage starts taking sides out of belief in the lightness of
his or her own cause, how great a step is it to take sides for pay?"
"As great, I suppose, as the step to taking one's own side out of belief in the absolute priority
of one's desires over everyone else's." He returned to the table and selected a strawberry from
the painted clay dish Pothatch the cook had sent up with bread and stew from the kitchen. "First
one's desires," he added quietly, "and, later, one's whims. Yes means yes under any circumstances,
no means no under any circumstances ... and the great problem with strawberries is that one is
never able to dispose of the hulls gracefully. I wonder if Q'iin ever perfected her spells to
ripen peaches in the wintertime? Nyellin the White was said to be able to produce any sort of
fruit at any time of the year, including bananas and mangoes-she could have made a fortune in the
fancy market of Angelshand, if her Council vows had permitted her to do so. And I'd accept the
Council's judgment of me," he went on, veering back to the original topic with an insouciance that
made Seldes Katne blink, "if it weren't for the fact that one of them is lying."
The stout librarian looked up in surprise. "One of the Council?"
Antryg nodded, settling himself into one of the chairs and choosing another strawberry from the
dish. "I felt it, when they," his voice hesitated infinitesimally, then went on, "when they put
the geas on me. Some secret ... some darkness, concealed from the others and from me. One of them
took Joanna, I know that-only a member of the Council would have had the strength to cross the
Void."


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He picked up the square of white pasteboard that had been under Seldes Katne's fingers as she'd
scried in the crystal-one of Joanna's business cards, on the back of which was scribbled the start
times of "Karate Masters Versus the Invaders from Outer Space" at the Van Nuys Cineplex 24. "If
you're trying to keep something secret from a wizard, it probably isn't wise to engage in theurgic
gang rape; the victim is as aware of the perpetrator as vice versa. And perhaps that is why it is
so seldom that such a geas is invoked ... other than the obvious difficulty in getting the entire
Council to agree and getting the culprit where the entire Council can operate in concert-something
which hasn't happened for hundreds of years."
Seldes Katne frowned, turning the small chunk of white quartz over in her fingers. "But you have
no idea who?"
"Not the foggiest."
Through the open window the voices of the Juniors floated up to them as they returned from dinner
in the refectory on the second floor of the Polygon. With the exception of the Mole Hill-the
squat, shabby cottage where Issay Bel-Caire lived, buried save for its low door under an
impenetrable tangle of honeysweet and taiga laurel-the houses on this spur of the tor were given
over to the lesser members of the community. The Pepper-Grinder, the Cat Lair, the Cave, the
Dungeon, the Isle of Butterflies, and the Yellow House were all connected by an interlocking maze
of cellars, windowed galleries, covered bridges, and connecting stairways; in the wintertime,
Antryg recalled, no one thought twice about hearing one's neighbors trot through one's downstairs
hallway or across one's attic on the way back from dinner or class.
But now their footfalls thumped softly on the wooden steps that led up the sharp slopes from path
to doors, or creaked on the jury-rigged plank bridges over the vine-choked gullies and drops. His
red-haired housemate Kyra would be out at evening weapons-training-"Going dancing with Miss
Maggie," the novices called it, Miss Maggie being the nickname for the garishly colored Harlot-or
else drinking cocoa and talking till late with her friends in the Juniors' Commons. Antryg smiled,
wondering if they still engaged in "practicing spell-casting in an emergency"-i.e., while falling-
down drunk-as he and Daurannon had done on several memorable instances. Save for an occasional
murmur from outside, and the soft, patient rhythm of someone in the Cat Lair playing beginners'
scales on a harp, the round stone house was quiet.
"I'm sorry," Seldes Katne said as the daylight began to fade. "I thought that because this house
is on the main Vorplek Energy Line I'd have a little more chance at this, but that doesn't seem to
be the case." She put the crystal from her and did not meet his eyes; Antryg leaned across the
table and put his big, bony hand over her fleshy, age-spotted one.
"What's more likely is that she's being kept somewhere that's spelled against observation." Seldes
Katne's crystal, he recalled from somewhere, had belonged to the wizard Gantre Silvas two hundred
years ago-the slip of rune-inscribed silver around its base had been added by that mage to
increase its receptive powers. "God knows there are any number of places in the Citadel itself
where she could be kept a prisoner unknown to anyone-any of the guest quarters above the Great
Assembly Hall, or the attics above those, the clock-tower, one of the treasury rooms, the old
South Hall. There must be a hundred places here where no one ever goes, and that," he added
quietly, his voice sinking as he turned his eyes toward the window again, where he could see the
Conservatory flash like an absurd diamond on the Library's granite flank, "isn't even counting the
Vaults. And I'm very much afraid that that's where she is."
"It would make sense," the librarian agreed. Then she frowned again, her heavy brows pulling down
over her nose once more. "But ... that's where the disturbance is centered. That's where the
Moving Gate is."
"It's more than that," Antryg said, getting nervously to his feet and beginning to pace, his
movements restlessly graceful in his sweeping coat, like some bizarre wading bird. "Most people
believe that the labyrinth in the Vaults was dug as a defense-a place where, in the event of
catastrophe, the wizards might hide. But the Citadel lies on the node of four energy-tracks, at
least one of them-the Vorplek Line, which runs through the Library as you know-extremely powerful.
And while in the west, mounds at the nodes of such lines were frequently built with collecting
chambers underneath them to hold and channel the traveling energies of the leys, in the east and
north they used mazes."
"I've heard that theory," Seldes Katne acknowledged, sitting up a little in her chair and putting
back her braid, which had strayed forward over her shoulder again. "But no one has ever proven
that the mazes worked."
"Perhaps because we have no idea how they worked." Antryg leaned on the windowsill again, gazing
out into the tangle of vines below. There was a murmur of voices from the windows of the Cat Lair,
and someone else took the harp, calling the huge black-and-orange butterflies that had been
feeding from the starlike blooms of the honeysweet to swirl upward into a drunken, dancing cloud.


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Antryg fell silent a moment, listening to the sheer, glittering mastery of the music; Seldes Katne
said softly, "That will be Brighthand-Zake Thwacker, Otaro's pupil. He has ... great skill."
He glanced back at her downcast dark eyes, the sudden pinch of her thin lips. After her failure to
scry Joanna's image in the white crystal, she could not bring herself to say, He has true magic.
But the lightness, the delicate strength of the music, ignited the air above the butterfly jungle
between the two houses; had he not been afraid of what was happening in the Vaults, afraid that
Joanna might be imprisoned down there, Antryg could have easily slipped under the spell of it
himself and spent the rest of the evening dreaming on the windowsill, until the last light faded
from the northern sky.
"In any case," he said, turning back from the enchanted sharpness to the deepening gloom within
the upstairs room, "I suspect that's why the mazes were dug, level upon level of them ... their
patterns are disturbingly similar to the garden mazes I saw in the east, and I know that glass,
water, and bone were used by certain sects to further channel power-all things which have been
found in the walls down there. And that's what frightens me about a Gate having been jammed open
in the Vaults."
Seldes Katne startled so badly that she dropped the crystal. "Jammed open?"
Antryg blinked at her in surprise in the failing light. "Of course. Isn't it obvious that's what
has happened?"
She said nothing, only stared at him, dark eyes wide with shock.
"That didn't occur to you?"
"I ... I thought the Gates didn't remain open for more than a few minutes."
"They don't," he said simply. "And it takes a tremendous amount of power to hold one open even for
that long, which is as it should be, given the way the fabric of the universe weakens around a
Gate. If one were held open even under ordinary circumstances, I'm not sure what the results would
be; given the nature of the maze and the presence of the energy lines, the fact that the Gate is
moving shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, though it will make it a beast of a job to
track."
He rubbed his hands absently, as if trying to massage old aches from the twisted fingers. "At the
moment it seems to be confining its ambulations to the Vaults, which is well and good. But the
problem is, I can feel the situation is deteriorating. More Gates and wormholes are opening and
closing, strange energies acting on the energies already moving through the Vaults ... and I don't
like the idea that Joanna may be imprisoned down there in the middle of it."
She murmured assent and fumbled to pick up the crystal, which had skidded beneath the rim of a
painted blue-and-yellow plate; then her eyes returned to his. "I might try working in conjunction
with a teles-ball," she said after a hesitant moment. "Or you might, though I'm not sure how that
will work with the geas. But teles can be used as power-sinks, as you know, and there are several
very strong ones here in the Citadel."
"No."
The hard decisiveness in his voice made her look up in startled surprise. "What's wrong with a
teles?"
Antryg shrugged and resumed his gawky pacing, now more purposefully, hunting around for his shawl.
"I've never liked them. I know people use them for all manner of spells, from the summoning of
elementals to the sending of messages to non-wizards ... but I've never trusted them."
She could only stare at him, baffled-rather, Antryg supposed, as Joanna would be by someone who
refused to use the telephone out of a professed fear that such devices ate the souls of their
users.
"They're only glass and mercury ... "
"Glass through which magic has been channeled, in which power has been accumulated, year upon
year, century upon century," replied Antryg, finding his shawl at last, wrapped around the teapot
to keep the contents warm. The upper room of the Pepper-Grinder, though occupied by him for only a
few hours, already had the beginnings of a formidable collection of books and scientific journals,
stray flowers pressed for drying and at least two splendid, varicolored pinwheels set in a vase
beside the window, turning like enormous sunflowers with the shift of the grass-scented wind.
"I know most of the academics consider it balderdash, but Brynnart of Pleth wrote that glass and
mercury in combination have powers of their own, and I happen to believe him."
"Brynnart of Pleth was insane," Seldes Katne pointed out.
"So am I. That doesn't mean he wasn't right. And personally, I'm a bit leery of anything which has
been imbued with that much magic over that long a period of time."
She gave an uncertain half laugh. "If you're going to suspect things that have had magic go
through them, you might as well hold suspect the ... the," she groped for an example of absurdity,
"the stones of the Citadel themselves."


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He paused in the act of slinging the slightly tea-stained shawl around his shoulders and turned
enormous, deranged gray eyes upon her. "Oh, I do," he said. He plucked one of the pinwheels from
the vase, large, delicately balanced, and of a brilliant red and yellow like a hallucinatory
sunflower, and blew gently on its curving sail. "Daurannon should be in the Senior Parlor by this
time, drinking his evening tea; I think it's high time that you and I had a look at the Vaults."

"As a theory it's preposterous," Daurannon had said. "The mazes in the Vaults were dug as a
protective measure to guard the old wizard-lords' treasures against invaders, and their more
dangerous secrets against the curious, the same way the very ancient lords built mazes into their
castles. That's all those garden mazes mimic. And true or not," he'd added, seeing Antryg open his
mouth to argue, "the Council has agreed not to permit you to enter the Vaults without one of us as
escort."
Perched on the arm of the oak chair on the opposite side of the parlor fire, Antryg had
experienced-and now, as the scene recurred to him through the smoky overlay of his dreams,
experienced more strongly-a sense of odd and painful deja vu. The Senior Parlor, on the third
floor of the Polygon, above the level where the classical mass of that great building broke up
into a stylistic jackdaw nest of additions and alterations, had been a home to him once upon a
time. Asleep and dreaming in his borrowed bed in the Pepper-Grinder, even as his mind played back
the scenes of the earlier evening, it tangled them with the memories of those other nights:
hundreds of them, thousands of them, when he'd sat in the same fashion, perched, knees up, on the
arm of that very chair, with Daurannon slouched comfortably in the opposite seat of heavily carved
and age-blackened oak, stirring milk into his tea after the fashion of the lower classes on the
western seaboard.
Even the people had been the same, as much a part of the small, cozy chamber as the linenfold
paneling, the undressed stone of the fireplace, and the smells of herbs and candlewax. Bentick
played piquet with someone, usually Phormion but on this occasion Nandiharrow; Otaro the Singer
sat on the raised stone hearth, soft phrases and ribbons of melody flowing from his big old harp
with the restful ease of conversation, while Zake Thwacker-Brighthand-a seventeen-year-old
docker's son from the Angelshand slums in the gray robes of a Junior, sat at his feet. Pentilla
Riverwych was curled up in a chair at the long table beneath the western windows, unconsciously
plaiting and replacing the end of her thick brown braid as she read from some obscure history that
Seldes Katne had brought her down from the library.
Most of them had been Antryg's teachers, before he'd become a teacher himself. Pentilla, now a
Senior, had been his student.
And he was an exile.
Even in sleep, deep in the dreams that brought the scene back to him, that hurt.
"But if my theory that the Vaults are an energy maze is preposterous-which of course it is,"
argued Antryg persuasively, "what harm can I do by going there alone? I mean, I'd have gone down
through the kitchen-they connect up with the stores-cellar and the room where Pothatch keeps the
flour-except it's locked up for the night, which I must say is rather hard, Bentick, on the poor
students who just want a cup of cocoa."
"Considering the things abroad in the Vaults now," Nandiharrow remarked, judiciously rearranging
his cards, "that cup of cocoa could be dearly bought."
"It isn't the energy from the lines of power that worries us, and I think you know it." Daurannon
set his teacup aside-soft-paste china, white and yellow, from the finest workshops in Angelshand.
Everything in the Citadel was that way-either exquisite gifts of past patrons, or rough local work
of wool, terra-cotta, or whittled wood. "You know the records are full of rumors and hints and
mentions of things that the old mages came up with, things of power that can no longer be
accounted for. You know, and I know, that some of these are concealed in the Vaults. That was
where you found the Archmage Nyellin's Soul-Mirror, which had been hidden away for centuries."
"If he has no power ... " Seldes Katne began.
"Some of those tales speak of things that didn't need the power of a wizard," Daur replied. "Some
of them, we don't know what they were, or whether they'd need a wizard's power or not to cause
trouble with them. You know the Vaults better than anyone, Antryg, and I wouldn't put it past you
to have located one of these implements in some obscure record and seek it out to lift the geas."
He got to his feet and collected the scabbarded sword propped against the side of his chair.
"Believe me, geas or no geas, you are not going down there alone. It's probably better that you
stay aboveground, Kitty," he added, as the librarian made ready to fall into step with them.
"Phormion's still shaken up from her brush with that thing, and it was two days ago; you can't be
up to dealing with the abominations we're likely to meet down there."
He spoke with a brisk dismissiveness that brooked no denial. Seldes Katne threw an anguished look


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at Antryg, then said stoutly, "I didn't see it nearly as closely as ... as Phormion did."
"Besides, the more the merrier," Antryg said, who had absolutely no intention of descending to the
Vaults with no company but his former friend. "Nandiharrow can come to protect Kitty, can't you,
Tick-Tock?"
Nandiharrow stifled a grin at the very old nickname; Bentick twitched as if his chair had become
unexpectedly animate beneath him. "Don't be ridiculous! For one thing, we're in the middle of the
game."
"Well, we did vote to bring him here for his knowledge of the Void ... "
"With which Daurannon is perfectly capable of dealing. Besides, it's late." The Steward's long
fingers fidgeted with the gold watch he wore on a chain around his neck.
"A perfect opportunity to observe the energy lines down there under increased influence of the
moon." Antryg blew on his pinwheel, causing it to spin into a drunken kaleidoscope of color.
"Well, really." Bentick glanced at his watch again and laid down his cards, fretfully feeling at
his belt for his ring of keys. "All this trouble to escort a mere dog wizard ... "

"They call us dog wizards."
Like a thread of golden ribbon, the voice laced itself through the fabric of Antryg's dream. Deep
in sleep he frowned, trying to escape it, as he had tried to escape it for years.
And for a moment, in his dreaming-in the dream parlor while Daurannon tried to talk Seldes Katne
out of going with them and Nandiharrow folded up his cards with the slight clumsiness of one still
not used to operating with fewer fingers than he had originally had-it seemed to Antryg that
Suraklin leaned against the cobblestone of the chimney face, his long, light brown hair framing
those narrow features, topaz eyes gently malicious in the saffron reflections of the fire.
And, as if the Dark Mage had opened the door to some infinite corridor of awareness, for a moment
Antryg could see all the way down to the end of the dream and knew what it would be.
He tried to cry out, tried to wake himself, tried vainly to surface from sleep.
There was an old circular turret called the Rotunda attached to the Polygon, which it antedated by
at least seven hundred years. An old temple, the ancient records said, though to what god was
unknown. It lay on the crossing of three of the major energy lines under the Citadel, the Vorplek,
the Brehon, and the Pensyk, and consequently the terrible sense of the Void's nearness was almost
unbearable. Prowling back and forth in the brittle moonlight that streamed through the seven oddly
shaped windows while Bentick knelt to unlock the square, iron-bound doors in the floor, Antryg had
to fight the conviction that there was a Gate within a few yards of him-the Gate whose presence he
believed could be anywhere on the Line. In the Library it had been the same, and as they'd
descended through the corridor past the doors of the refectory, Seldes Katne had told him that
others had reported such sensations elsewhere in the Citadel as well.
Daur and Nandiharrow bent their backs, lifting the iron-bound doors from their bed in the living
rock of the floor. Bentick fiddled impatiently with his watch, his keys, his staff. Stepping back
out of the range of the witchlight on the Steward's staff, Antryg ran quick fingers over the
frescoed plaster of the Rotunda's walls, then, not finding what he sought, laid down his pinwheel
and knelt to run his hand along the hewed granite of the floor.
As he sank his perceptions into the tight, igneous fiber of the rock, he could feel the silvery
energy of the Vorplek Line, which joined the Polygon with the Library; like putting his hand into
water and feeling currents of warm and cold, he sensed also the fierce, terrible strength of the
Void's presence. There were other powers as well, locked within the granite, prickly and random
but present, like ants crawling wildly over his flesh.
"Are you coming, my boy?"
"Considering the fuss you made about entering the Vaults at this ungodly hour ... "
"Antryg ... ?"
He scrambled to his feet, scooped up his pinwheel, and trotted to join them in a billow of coat
skirts beside the square shadow of the pit that gaped now like the mouth of an open grave in the
foot-smoothed floor.
In the real world-as opposed to the dream memory, which tightened closer and closer about him like
tangles of colored vapor-the visit to the Vaults that evening had been of short duration. Antryg
knew this and tried hard, in the ever-thickening mists of his dream, to steer his recollections to
match the reality. The mazes wound, level below level, stairway, drop shaft, spiral, and chamber,
deep below the Wizards' Tor in strangely rhythmical patterns that, when examined, turned out to be
no patterns at all. All the members of the Council were familiar with their windings; Antryg was
one of the few who had made the Vaults a subject of study, seeking explanations for every bricked-
up door, devising theories to account for the inexplicable wells and basins, the rooms in which
skeletons were buried beneath the flagstone floors or skulls were visible embedded in glass bricks


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sunk into the walls. Little as there had been to go on in the sketchy records of the most ancient
times, the study alone had given him a sense of the Vaults as a whole. Now, following Seldes
Katne's lead to the site of her own adventure, he was prey to a strong, uneasy sense of
relationship between those half-perceived patterns, those bricked-up doors and unexplained painted
chambers, and the places where the pinwheel's shifting marked changes in air pressure, where odd
fields of magnetism caused the compass needle to flinch.
And everywhere, he felt the weight of the Void, a slow, nervous crackling along his flesh, as
though the very fabric of reality were a breath away from bulging and splitting to let through
some horror beyond imagination.
"Which is, of course, absolutely the case," he murmured to Nandiharrow, in response to the older
wizard's question. "The Lines carry the sense here and there in the Citadel, as I'm sure you've
noticed, but it seems to be everywhere down here."
"Then the problem might be somewhere outside the Citadel entirely? The energies could have been
drawn here by something within the Vaults themselves? Maybe one of those 'unknown implements of
power' Daur is so anxious to keep you from finding?" The Nine-Fingered Mage shifted his sword
sheathe in his hand; by the way he held the hilt, Antryg could tell he'd gone back into training
recently to relearn the precision and control governed by the grip. Seldes Katne, almost
sheltering in Antryg's coat skirts like a little black hen, looked around her nervously, sweat
gleaming on her face in the blue glow of the witchlight above their heads.
"It's a theory," agreed Antryg. "On the other hand, if my chickens were being eaten, the first
person I'd speak to would be the man who keeps pet foxes." Daurannon, walking ahead of them with
drawn sword, stiffened slightly but said nothing.
Only once had they been attacked by an abomination. A furred, eyeless thing of claws and teeth and
lightning speed flung itself shrieking out of the dark of a side tunnel, slashing at them with
razor talons. It hadn't gotten closer to them than a dozen feet-Nandiharrow had flung out his
hand, lightning searing from his crooked, black-gloved fingers to bore through the thing like
spitting blue-white worms. The abomination-Shriekers, Nandiharrow said the Juniors called them-was
flung back against the wall, kicking and writhing and voiding syrupy greenish liquid from a half-
dozen orifices. When they'd gone back that way after a very brief exploration of the corridor on
the eighth level-which, as Antryg had guessed, did lie more or less along the Brehon Line-they'd
disturbed three or four pale orange, sluglike things burrowing their way into the corpse. At the
gleam of the witchlight the things crawled hastily away into the darkness.
Antryg had seen abominations before, far worse than these ... that wasn't what troubled him.
Dreaming the scene over again now, he tried to follow Nandiharrow and Seldes Katne back toward the
main stair, as he had followed them in waking truth.
But behind him in the dream's darkness he heard that soft voice again, like molten gold and steel.
"They call us dog wizards ... "
At the age of seventeen he'd run away in the night, knowing that if that voice had asked him to
remain, to give up his soul and his life, he would have done so.
And now he turned back, as he'd known all along he would.
Suraklin stood under the inky curve of a tunnel which, in waking reality, Antryg knew perfectly
well didn't exist in that part of the Vaults.
The pain of the geas, the shredding silvery agony of that violation, flooded back on him:
loneliness, bereavement, the lightless, bottomless abysses of despair; the hollow horror of a
childhood that had driven him to slit his own wrists at the age of nine; the gentle illusion of
caring, the poisoned love, that had saved his life.
"They call us dog wizards ... they call me dog wizard ... "
I would rather have the pain. I would rather have the emptiness, the darkness, the hollow inside
... I would rather be alone forever than return to you ...
But of course he went, following the darkness through the inevitable tunnel of time.
"A wolf wizard, perhaps," Suraklin said, smiling his gentle smile. "But then all men call 'dog' a
wolf who will not serve them." They were now in the bottommost chamber of Suraklin's fortress, the
room he and Joanna had entered, months ago, to destroy the evil wizard's final hiding place.
But the darkness there was yet undisturbed. The greenish glow of Suraklin's witchlight darted
thinly on the waters of the central well. Like a sickly film of frost, it picked out corner and
edge of the stained black altar at the end of the room. There were iron rings in the wall, chains
... affixed to one by a tiny wrist was a child of ten or so, a blond girl, bought, Antryg knew,
from one of the poor marshfolk who lived in brush shelters around the walls of the city of Kymil.
He knew because he'd been there when Suraklin had bought her, suavely promising the child's mother
that the girl would be taught good service, raised in modesty and propriety in his household.
The girl's face was hollow and pinched with the beginnings of a lifetime of want, even as her


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mother's had been. Standing at Suraklin's side-sixteen years old, awkward and strange-looking-
Antryg had seen even then in the mother's eyes that she didn't believe but wished desperately that
she could. In the little brush shack there were eight other children to feed. As the fifth of
twelve himself, Antryg knew too well what that was like. In those days it was something he tried
not to think about.
But it was those days. He was sixteen again, standing, as he had always stood, at Suraklin's side.
"Come," the Dark Mage said softly. "There are other magics besides those taught by the Council.
There are possibilities beyond the defenses they establish-other sorts of fire unquenchable by
their definition of water. But the power of that fire is too great for mortal flesh to withstand
alone. My son, I will need your help."
Suraklin had never worn the robes of a wizard, dressing instead in the tawny yellow coat and
breeches, the crisp linen and silver-buckled shoes, of an old-fashioned bourgeois. He shed his
coat, its rows of steel buttons clicking as he dropped it to the stone floor, and removed his
shoes, his white-stockinged feet making no sound as he moved. Long and deft, his fingers rolled
back the billowing sleeve of his shirt, tucked the ruffles aside. Those fingers were cold on
Antryg's skin as he did the same for the younger man-the boy-exposing the arm to the biceps; and
all the while the little girl watched with huge blue-green eyes, too terrified to speak or cry
anymore.
With a ritually cleansed silver knife Suraklin drew blood from Antryg's arm, then his own, mixing
them on the surface of a mirror and drawing figures in the mingled gore upon his own face and his
pupil's. Then he pressed their veins together to complete the rite of blood-bonding-to insure that
should his own magic, his own strength, the power of his own life, prove insufficient for what the
rite would demand, he would have Antryg's to draw upon. He had done it before.
The rite itself was something Antryg had spent a good portion of his adult life trying with only
middling success to forget.
He had a good memory for spells and ritual, his natural curiosity and adeptness trained by years
of alternating drill and terror. Even now, nearly thirty years later, he could have accomplished
from memory what his master had shown him that night, had he been morally bankrupt enough to want
to do so.
As a man dreaming, educated in orthodox wizardry, he saw what the boy in the dream did not know:
how different were the ritual patterns laid out on the stone floor from anything taught by the
Archmage Salteris or any other Academic mage. Every curve, every line, harked to chaos, to
darkness, to energies alien to the energies of earth and fire, water and stars and sky. And the
latter-day student of physics and particle theory saw what even the Council-trained wizard would
not have: energies to coalesce matter of reality other than that of this or any world-energies to
spark the growth of a life, an entity, the metaphysical equivalent of an android, the simulacrum
of a demon shaped in the image of the only soul Suraklin knew or could imagine.
The drain of the energy was tremendous, the drag of the magic needed to accomplish such an act of
will far more than even the greatest of wizards could have borne alone. As the glowing brownish
mists curled up from along the twisting ritual paths, Antryg could feel Suraklin's will and
strength and magic bend to the Summoning, drawing upon his. When the brown flame began to flicker
over the altar, he could feel the pull of it in his own blood and marrow; first tiny fingerlets
flickering along the edge, then something no bigger than a hand, rising, glowing terribly, in the
center.
Brown droplets of liquid began to form on the stone of the walls, to gather in tiny pools on the
floor.
As a boy he had not known. As a man he knew and turned his face away. Suraklin had, as usual,
chained him to one of the black stone pillars beside the door, distrusting not his courage but,
Antryg realized now through the deeps of his dream, his sense of right and wrong.
The strength of the thing on the altar, when it began to realize its life, was hideous, as was its
rage to destroy, not for anyone's will and bidding, but for its own delight. It fought the chains
of domination Suraklin cast about it, its will cutting and thrashing like a flying cloud of razors
at the strength of the man who sought to bind it-the man who did not realize that its hate, its
wildness, its selfish frenzy for power were the clear and burning mirror of his own.
And the boy Antryg had been willed his strength into that slight, steely form of white and gold,
giving him the strength of his blood, the strength of his magic, the strength of the love he bore.
Had he been alone, Suraklin could never have had the strength to cross to where the little girl
thrashed, screaming like a dying bird, against her chains. He would never have had the strength to
drag her to the now-blazing altar without the strength that Antryg willingly gave.
The demon had eyes now, and teeth; it was dominated by Suraklin's magic and his will.
And just before it descended upon the shrieking child, Antryg saw the girl's face, changed by the


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dream from the face of the child it had been, tear-streaked and stretched with terror, to a
woman's face ...
Joanna ...
His throat would not make a sound; he was too weak, his life too drawn into his master's, to do
more than wrench futilely against the chains that held him to implacable stone. The demon's eyes
were yellow, Suraklin's eyes. The girl's eyes were brown.
It was his own magic that had brought her there.
"JOANNA!"
Darkness shattered like a shell of bone, inside him or outside, he didn't know. He heard something
metallic fall with a muffled clink to the wooden floor.
Blinking, he sat up in a tangle of sweat-drenched pillows, milk blue moonlight plashing over the
linen of the sheets around him and glinting on something that moved near the foot of his bed in
the Pepper-Grinder's upper room.
A knife. Someone rising from the floor, having picked up a dropped knife.
Antryg gave a yelp and flung the nearest pillow as hard as he could, but the black figure was
already turning to flee. He tried to make a straight dive at it over the foot of the bed, but the
tumbled sheets and blankets fouled his knees, sending him crashing against the bedpost. Even
blurred with myopia-his spectacles were God knew where-his wizard's sight could pick out in the
darkness the narrow opening of one of the house's several hidden stairs, just to the left of the
fireplace; the dark form of his would-be murderer plunged toward it in a swirl of black robe and
slammed it shut as Antryg scrambled in pursuit.
It opened, he remembered, by a lever on the other side of the fireplace ... damn whoever had built
this house with half a dozen tricks like that.
Turning, he dove back to the side of the bed to snatch his spectacles from the nearby windowsill
where he'd left them; it took a moment's groping, for unless he was wearing them he couldn't see
the light frames of steel and glass and had to memorize where he'd set them down. By the time he
pulled the trapdoor open, the intruder was well and truly gone. The stair was a seam in the Pepper-
Grinder's stone wall barely wider than his shoulders, leading, if he remembered aright-he'd never
lived in the Pepper-Grinder, having occupied rooms first in the Birdcage with Salteris, then in
the Upper Gatehouse in the Library's tiny outer court-to the cellars, whence two other passages
gave access to the Cat Lair's subcellar and the upper hallway of the Cave.
From there, he was perfectly well aware, the intruder could have fled anywhere in the Citadel.
"Are you quite all right?"
The deep, husky voice, like gravel and honey, made him turn; Kyra stood in the doorway, quellingly
elegant in a brocade dressing gown that made Antryg highly conscious of his own knobby knees
protruding from beneath the hem of his much-patched, borrowed linen nightshirt.
"Perfectly, thank you, my dear." Antryg hooked the final temple piece of his spectacles over his
ear. "It's just that I think someone's been and tried to murder me, and I was wondering if I might
impose upon you to see if you can get a reading of any kind from the frame of this door. I'm
afraid he's taken his knife away with him. Or her, as the case may be."
"Good Heavens." She stepped swiftly into the room, dispelling the elegance of her appearance by
tripping over her own robe hem, and, frowning, ran a searching hand over the jambs and threshold
of the secret door. "I suppose it would be silly to ask who would want to do a thing like that."
"Thank you, my dear," Antryg said gravely.
"Well, I haven't heard those horror stories the Lady Rosamund, Daurannon, and Bentick have been
telling about you all these years for nothing. I can't find a thing."
"Naturally not," Antryg sighed. "If my guest was a wizard, you wouldn't. Damn." He ran a weary
hand through the tangle of his hair. "I'd meant to beg some kind of sleeping draft from Q'iin to
keep the dreams under control, but I suppose that anything really effective is out of court if
someone is trying to stab me in my sleep."
He put on his shawl and descended to the downstairs hall, Kyra parting company with him to return
to her own bed. Then he built up the fire and located in the stacks of volumes on the table an
account of astrological aspects upon spells that had not been in the Citadel Library as of his
departure nine years ago.
"And no all-night movie," he sighed, setting himself into the chair. "I really must speak to
Bentick about getting cable."


Chapter VI
In the town where I was born
There's ladies fair and sweet,


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Like roses in the taverns
On Algoswiving Street.

But out of all those lovelies
There's just one all seek to win,
She'd raise the dead, she's a witch in bed-
She's the dancer they call Min.

A dancer or a vixen
Or an angel made for sin,
A fallen child or demon wild
Is the lady they call Min.
-Old Angelshand broadside

The cottage was virtually the only building on the Wizards' Tor not connected via a subcellar
tunnel, or a shared chimney with secret passage, or even a covered arcade, with some other house.
It perched on the one patch of more-or-less level ground on the precipitous southwestern slope of
the hill, below the turreted rookery of Seniors' houses clinging along the northwestern face;
Antryg had heard that it originally had been a potting shed in the midst of the vast herb garden
which occupied that plunge of rock and soil. A little gate once stood between lichen-crusted stone
posts at the turning of the cobblestoned road, but that was the last concession anyone had made to
convenience with the garden. The paths that threaded at apparent random between the tiny beds of
sassafras and lovage, high John and henbane, were unpaved, and only occasionally planks were
thrown over the worst of the gullies. At the bottom a crumbling dry-stone wall balanced on the
edge of the final drop to the upper courtyard of the Polygon, and against that wall, Antryg could
see Aunt Min warming herself in the late-morning brightness of the sun, with Lady Rosamund sitting
at her side on the low wall itself.
Antryg hesitated for a moment between the posts of the gate. Through his fingertips, bared by the
writing mitt he wore for warmth, he could feel, when he shut his eyes and concentrated, that
strange, crawling sparkle of energy deep within the stone. The threshold between the posts was
yellowish sandstone, left over from the construction of the big arcade on the second floor of the
Polygon and worn almost in half by passing feet. He knelt, sending his mind into the grain of the
stone, but the energy there was fainter, softer; on a thought he hiked up through the hip-high
jungle of sorrel, tansy, and garlic, to press first his hands, then his lips and the side of his
face, against the worn wooden railing that surrounded the Cottage's narrow veranda.
The wood held no vibration of that energy at all, though several other sorts whispered to him
through the fabric of the ancient wood. The door of the Cottage stood open, as it did all summer.
Beneath the small table in the outer of its two rooms, he glimpsed one of the little footstools
that were strewed around Aunt Min's dwelling wherever she frequently sat. Her big cinder gray cat
Fysshe occupied it now; Paddywinkle, her slate blue tom, dozed on the nearby chair. Two or three
other of the Citadel cats sunned themselves on the veranda among a veritable jungle of potted
poppies, geraniums, and spider plants.
Antryg moved along the side of the veranda till he found a patch of the bare granite of the tor
itself and pressed his fingers to it; the rush of the energies was like the nibbling of tiny,
carnivorous fish at his flesh.
"Curiouser and curiouser." Turning, he made his way down the twisty, dropping paths, the air about
him heavy with borage and rosemary, garlic, eyebright, and serpent's sage.
"If you are trying to convince me you're too mad to be of any danger to us," Lady Rosamund
remarked in her cool, silvery voice, "you can save your pains."
"Does one need to be mad to want to touch hewn rock and wood and the living bones of the hill?"
She folded up the small black book she'd been reading and laid it in her lap, shaded her eyes to
look up at him. Beside her, Antryg could see that Aunt Min was asleep, her knitting a spill of
untidy color over her knees. "If one is facing the danger of abominations swarming like rats in
the Vaults-with God knows what to come-I suppose a little concern for the matter at hand is not
uncalled for," the Lady conceded. "Unless there's something about the situation you know that we
don't."
"Oh, I'm quite sure there is," Antryg replied cheerfully, settling on the parapet beside her. "I
mean, the fact that there is, is the reason you brought me here in the first place ... isn't it?"
Her green eyes met his. Tiny lines, feathering through the soft flesh around the lids, might have
betrayed her age to a close-or a malicious-observer; her hair, braided away from her temples and
lying loose at the back, was still the untouched sable of the hardest anthracite. Antryg


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remembered Daurannon telling him once that Lady Rosamund concocted her own ointments of sheep fat
and rosewater with which she anointed her complexion nightly, though personally he couldn't see
why that should be held against her, as the other mage clearly did.
"Of course."
"Nothing to do with revenge?" he inquired interestedly. "Or a desire to ingratiate wizardry as a
whole with the Regent by locating a fugitive from his justice?"
"Wizardry," Rosamund said, in her most arctic upper-class accents, "has no need of the Regent's
grace, nor of his approval, and it is our justice, not his, under which you stand condemned to
death. And if there are social climbers on the High Council who seek to bring wizardry into
fashion again in the circles to which they aspire, you can believe that the rest of the Council
could not be cozened to such a plan. We are independent of the cities of the West."
"Well, scarcely that," Antryg remarked. "Most of the money that supplies this place comes from
rental property, not to mention the subsidies."
She shook her head stubbornly. "It is money we can do without if we must. We have before this.
They may have driven us out-scarcely a surprise, considering the attempt to murder the Regent by
means of magic-but hardly the first time such a thing has come to pass. We will retreat, Antryg
Windrose, but we will return."
"A month, I believe Nandiharrow said," Antryg murmured thoughtfully. "Since the abominations
started to appear." He plucked a poppy from the clusters that grew wild at the foot of the wall,
the sunlight through the delicate, pale yellow petals coloring his crooked fingers like privet-
leaf dye. "I know there are those on the Council who blame me, but what possible object would it
serve for me to be tinkering with the Void?"
"It would give you access to magic," she replied promptly.
He looked up from the flower, pushed up his spectacles, and smiled. "So it was you?"
Her cheeks pinkened, and she replied in a slightly constrained voice, "It was a possibility I
considered. I and others. No magic exists in that smelly hell hole you've exiled yourself to-don't
tell me you haven't hurt for it in the marrow of your bones."
We are what we are, my son, Suraklin once said to him. You know in your heart that there is
nothing we would not do-nothing-to realize our power. We give up everything for it-our lovers, our
parents, our homes ... the children we might otherwise bear, the people we might otherwise be.
There had been a wry glint in the amber deeps of his eyes, a kind of ironic amusement at his own
self-pity, and his voice had flexed as if he had forgotten Antryg's presence and spoken to himself
alone. And we consider ourselves fortunate to be allowed by God to make the trade.
When he'd been ten or eleven, those words had pierced Antryg's heart like a spear, bringing a
sudden understanding of this most powerful, and loneliest, of mages. The knowledge that Suraklin,
too, had his griefs and regrets, even he ...
He always wondered afterward whether the flash of wondering pity and love he felt then had been
his master's intent.
He shrugged and scratched the side of his long nose. "If I have, it's not an unfamiliar feeling,"
he said. "I was without power for seven years, locked in the Silent Tower, and I'm without it now,
so whatever efforts I've made in that direction don't seem to have gotten me anywhere."
"But you are a man who hopes, even to absurdity. And there are those who contend that you caused
this problem, knowing that we would bring you here and give you access to the Vaults and their
secrets." Her haughty glance shifted from him to the tiny black bundle of knitting and straggly
white hair slumped against the wall among the poppies. In the long silence three finches, chirping
wildly, flung themselves in a brown, flashing kamikaze dive from the red-purple leaves of the
nearby plum tree and plunged out into the brilliant gulf of the air. The cool hardness of her
voice was like the smallest of dissecting knives. "Do you know what it cost her, to exercise the
Master-Spells over your mind?"
"Well," Antryg replied mildly, "I know what it cost me." But he reached down with great gentleness
to straighten the shabby old plaid shawl the Archmage had about her shoulders.
Rosamund struck his hand aside. Antryg sat back, startled at the contained fury of the blow-her
ladyship met his eyes for a moment, then looked away. "I'm sorry," she said in a stifled tone. "I
shouldn't have done that. But she ... " She paused, looking down at the old lady dozing in the
sun. "She has been ill a great deal of late." Her voice turned quiet, tender, and a little sad.
"She is very old, over a hundred. She shouldn't have to be dealing with this. If she were anyone
but the Archmage-if she were anywhere but this Citadel-she would have died at the turning of the
granny-winter, when I brought her here from Angelshand."
"When you decided to come after me."
The long, dark lashes lifted, unveiling emerald eyes that challenged him to debate what she had
done. "It was not the only reason for our experiments, and I think you know it," she said. "In a


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way, we hoped to circumvent this situation by gaining knowledge of the Void ourselves." She
reached down to draw up Aunt Min's shawl herself, and as she did so, she spoke without heat, or
violence, or rage in her rose-petal voice. "She overtaxes her body, thinking it can bear the
strain of her magic as it could when she was forty. She will not believe that battling your mind
for dominance, or struggling with the wild magic of the Void, will do her harm. Believe me,
Antryg," she added quietly, "if this does kill her, I swear to you that when she dies, and the
Master-Spells pass to me, I will hold you responsible."
Antryg was silent, wrapping his aching hands in the trailing ends of his shawl. Though there was a
certain division of opinion in the High Council as to whether the Lady Rosamund or Daurannon the
Handsome would inherit the Master-Spells, Antryg himself had no doubt that they would pass to the
woman now seated beside him. His mind and body still ached from the geas-he felt as if his flesh
should bear the marks of it: slashes, bruises, burns. But the force that had left his mind a
shredded ruin had been actuated, he realized, by no malice. Aunt Min had only done what she
conceived needed to be done for the good of all concerned.
And Min, he had been aware even as the darkness had sliced and lacerated him to let the others in,
had been trying quite sincerely to hurt him as little as possible.
Under ordinary circumstances he knew his own powers to be greater than Lady Rosamund's and guessed-
though he was not entirely sure-them to be greater than Aunt Min's would have been, had she not
been what she was. But the Master-Spells that descended from Archmage to Archmage were not
precisely a matter of strength. Few wizards truly knew what they were a matter of.
In any case, he knew that if he were still under the Council's geas-or for that matter anywhere
within the Citadel-when Aunt Min died, he probably wouldn't like what would happen next.
"You love her a great deal," he said gently, and she looked up at him with a chilling bitterness
in her sea-colored glance.
"I would love her," Rosamund said, "even were she not as good to me, as kind, as caring as ... I
would say 'as a mother' but in my case that would be a jest in exceptionally poor taste." She
glanced aside, her face averted from him now and still as marble. "Perhaps I should say, as caring
as the mother I dreamed about when I was doing stitchery with my fingers shaking from hunger
because I'd been clumsy with my silks or talked impertinently to the music master and had been
sent to bed without supper the night before. The mother I dreamed about when I was being trained
to sit straight in my corsets for hours on end doing nothing, because the daughters of earls must
learn to be idle gracefully; listening to my mother and her friends gossiping in the drawing room.
Though I don't know why I call them 'friends.' They would betray one another's most intimate
confidences the moment they thought they could amuse a superior by them."
Her chin lifted, her red lips set as if they were vermilion porcelain rather than flesh. The
absinthe-tinted eyes stared out past him-past the tiny sandstone court spread out below them,
visible beyond the roofs of the North Cloister and its hall, past the dark sweep of the forest,
black and pewter and broken by rusty patches of bog, that stretched out before them to the milky
ice of the horizon. In them Antryg could see the reflection of a young girl, stately and beautiful
as a child queen, and cold within with a grief like frozen tears and mercury.
"I hated it," she whispered. "I used to sneak away and meet her by the kitchen door-she sold herbs
to our cook. Even then she was very old, just a tiny old lady like a little black sparrow, always
fumbling with her knitting. Later I would steal my maid's dress and climb out the window to meet
her at night, to learn. One of the first spells she ever taught me was a sleep-spell, because the
maid shared the room with me-a lady is never alone, never. And she ... "
She looked down at the old lady dozing in the sun with her knitting lax under knotted little
hands.
"I was a fledgling hawk in a gilt cage, with nothing but a linnet's seeds and fruit to eat. She
fed me on my true food through the bars of my prison until I was strong enough to wrest open its
doors."
The green gaze flicked back to him, present again and angry, as much at what she had just told him
as at anything to do with Aunt Min. "You didn't need to fight her as you did."
Something gray and swift flashed along the wall to their right; turning, Antryg saw that it was
the cat Fysshe, followed closely by Paddywinkle and Issay's big red tabby Rufus. At the same
moment a sudden, snarling shriek came from the courtyard below. Looking over the edge of the wall,
he could see Imp, Lady Rosamund's huge black tom, bristling in furious challenge at Spooky Bob,
the tailless charcoal tabby whose usual haunt was the kitchens. Haifa dozen of the other Citadel
cats-Otaro's geriatric calico Lady Dyna, Bentick's Silver, four more of Issay's, and several
belonging to various Juniors-were prowling uneasily around the edges of the skirmish, hissing at
one another and occasionally scurrying away, but never going more than a few feet. Spooky Bob, no
hero, turned what tail he had and bolted but came up short as if at a barrier; turning back, he


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yowled furiously with an air of trapped desperation.
"What on earth ... ?" Lady Rosamund had risen to her feet, was looking down into the court, her
brow a darkening storm of anger. More cats were arriving all the time. A couple of novices in
their meal-colored robes had emerged from under the arcade of the North Cloister, and a gust of
nervous laughter rose on the bright air.
"If it's one of the Juniors causing this I'll flay him!" Rosamund turned on her heel and strode
off for the perilous little stair that led to the Cloister, and so to the court, like a gust of
dark wind.
Antryg remained where he was, pulling the sloppy rainbow of his shawl more closely around his
shoulders and watching the ragged mill of feline bafflement in the court below. Automatically, his
eye traced the line from the stained marble turret of the Rotunda, just visible beyond the roof of
the North Hall, out to a small chapel in the foot of one of the drum towers on the other side of
the courtyard with its skirmishing knot of cats. Though the silver-gray trunks of the pines hid
it, he knew precisely where an arrow-straight alignment of standing-stones lay in the forest,
stumpy and eroded as broken teeth and stretching for miles out of the forest and on into infinity
over the steppe.
"Eh, the poor things." Fingers like the claws of a chicken closed around his own.
Antryg glanced down at the top of that white-crowned skull, at the level of his knee, feathers of
wind fraying its wisps of hair. "The Citadel's stood for nearly a thousand years," he remarked
quietly. "Quite apart from spells the Juniors concoct for fun, there's a lot of very old magic
locked in its stones, and not all of it was made by those who eschewed meddling in human affairs."
"And they brought grief down upon us all," creaked the old woman's voice. "And will again. Nyellin
did spells with cats." She named an Archmage dead six hundred years, a woman rumored to have been
addicted to taking cat-form herself. "And Feldchibbe used to call up demons out of the echoes made
when he'd strike a silver ball. Did Rosie bring my posset? A honey posset ... my old bones ache
... "
"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


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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 me 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 me 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 of 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 smainder, 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


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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 me? 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 me ... " 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 Nandiharrow 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


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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 me 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.


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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?"
In a swirl of coat skirts he turned toward the shelves of massive, handwritten catalogs chained to
the wall; Seldes Katne had to seize a handful of the threadbare velvet to stay him. "Antryg, why
would Brighthand-or Daurannon, for that matter-kidnap your lady Joanna in the first place?"
"Well," he turned back to her, "that is the question of the hour." One corner of the long, absurd
mouth hardened slightly, and for a moment, behind the thick spectacles, the mild daffiness of his
gray eyes gave way to something else. "And though it's true we haven't been through all the hidden
rooms and deserted halls aboveground in this place by any means, my guess is, she's in the Vaults.
And that brings me to the subject of two favors I'd like to ask of you, and please don't slap my
face because they're not that sort of favors."
"What sort of favors are they?" Seldes Katne asked warily.
"Quite easily granted ones, I assure you." He took her arm and led her over to a book-choked
alcove between two of the wide windows. "Are you familiar with the construction of a Talisman of
Air?"
She nodded, looking up at him. Beyond the open casements, the steep drop of the Citadel hill fell
away to tangled clouds of dark spruce and bright-leaved larch and aspen, interspersed with tiny
walled gardens of looserife and lady-fern, buttercup and poppies. Roofs of shingle and tile
patched the dark of the trees, punctuated by turrets and stitched together by rickety galleries
and stairs. Antryg identified every house and those who lived within them-the pink-walled
Pavilion, the ornamental brickwork chain of the Four Brothers, the foliage-covered House of Roses
... and above those, the gray towers and gilt-tipped roofs of the preposterous structure called
the Castle, where Phormion Starmistress lived.
Seldes Katne's voice brought him back. "Of course," she was saying. "Opal, silver, the wing of a
butterfly, spelled to hold air about it though it be plunged into water or fire ... "
"Could you make one for me? This afternoon, I mean?"
She hesitated, as if asking herself why he wanted such a thing and whether Lady Rosamund would
countenance putting even that small a device of magic into his unpredictable hands. "Mine were
never very good," she said awkwardly.
"Well, they're certainly better than any effort of mine in that direction at present." Falling to
his knees on the tight-woven straw matting of the floor, Antryg stooped to clutch the hem of her
black robe. "Would you make one for me if I begged abjectly?" He kissed the hem; she pulled it
from his grip, fighting unsuccessfully to smother laughter.
"You are absurd."
"If I promised to make you the finest pinwheels in all the land so that all other possessors of
pinwheels would swoon away with envy at the sight of your shadow upon the grass? If I swore to
bring you flowers at the first light of morning ... "
"I can pick my own flowers."
"But not as well as I would. I'd sing for you, too." And throwing back his head he caroled:
"In the town where I ... "
"Enough!" she groaned, stepping back. Antryg prostrated himself full-length at her feet and got in
another quick kiss of her hem. Two Juniors, coming from the gallery outside, went over to where
Nandiharrow and Whitwell Simm sat, nearly invisible behind a mountain of ancient scrolls, to ask a
question. They'd all heard stories about Antryg Windrose.
He propped himself hopefully on his elbows. "Does that mean you'll do it?"
"I should have it for you by midnight." She shook her head as he collected his long legs and arms
beneath him and unfolded himself to his feet. "What was the other thing you wanted?"
His voice sobered. "Could you find for me references to what teles-balls are now-and have been in
the past-here within the Citadel? Who had them, and what they used them for, and what became of
them? I'm afraid it's a little tedious," he apologized, seeing her look of startled alarm.
"For what? I mean, the research on some of them goes back a thousand years ... "
"Yes, and unfortunately it's those I'm chiefly interested in. The very old ones, the legendary


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ones. I'll help you with it as soon as I can, but at the moment it is rather critical that I
explore the Vaults as soon as possible, and for that I'm going to need a Talisman of Air ... among
other things. Will you help me?"
The librarian hesitated, her dark eyes raised to the long, ridiculous, bespectacled head, with its
glittering earrings and graying curls. She was, Antryg knew, a woman who had spent her life in
these bastions of Council orthodoxy, a perfect and conscientious servant of the Council for fifty
years.
But she gulped gamely and stammered, "If ... if I can."


Chapter VII
There's no such thing as a wizard who minds his own business.
-Berengis the Black
Court Mage to the Earls Caeline

Antryg paid several other calls about the Citadel as the evening drew on. From the library he made
his way, over plank bridgelets and fern-choked gullies and down long flights of decaying wooden
steps, to the plain little house called the Breadbox, where Q'iin the Herbmistress was candying
lemon peel in the glass porch overlooking the sun-salted slope of the herb garden. From that tall,
beautiful, black woman he begged a supply of jelgeth leaves, and her bright blue eyes narrowed at
the mention of the powerful stimulant.
"Staying up late to study for exams?"
"Something like that."
Her expression softened a little as she read the lines of sleeplessness the previous night had
gouged into the corners of his eyes. "You need help?"
He smiled and shook his head. "Only something to keep me awake ... and something to prevent dreams
when I sleep."
Emerging through the garden door with the two packets of herbs in one pocket, a bag of candied
lemon rind and half a dozen hazelnuts in another, he climbed through lengthening pools of cobalt
shadows to where Tom the gardener was patiently pulling weeds, an almost hopeless task in the
Sykerst's short, lush seasons of growth. Already most of the garden lay in gloaming, though
overhead the sky seemed to have soaked in enough radiance to give it back a good long while. Tom
and Antryg sat together for nearly an hour, sharing the lemon peel and talking idly of this and
that: of Antryg's years in the Silent Tower and how he'd managed to escape; of Tom's sister's
newest baby and the furor in his family about her naming; of the rumors of abominations that had
been rife all about the countryside for a month; and of the return of the wizards to the Citadel,
exiled from their homes throughout the Empire.
"Nothing'll come of it, though," Tom remarked, lighting his pipe and following with huge, mournful
blue eyes the swift-stitching track of a handful of swallows across a willowpussy sky. "The
governors and police chiefs'll get tired of running down every rumor that this person or that is
working magic, like they always do, and Issay, and Whitwell, and Pharne and them'll open up their
houses again before Yule."
"Who brought word of the abomination at the Green King's Chapel the other day, by the way?" Antryg
inquired, pulling a weed stem from Tom's sack and dissecting its leaves with his fingernails as he
spoke.
"Henit the Swineherd saw it-Gru Gwidion and a couple of his hunters brought the word here. There's
not many from the village'll actually come here these days."
"So it was something someone actually saw?"
"Oh, aye ... well ... " Tom scratched the north face of his enormous nose. "Henit thinks he did-my
sister talked to his wife about it-but when he's been smoking moonweed, who knows? But that isn't
what I've been meaning to tell you." He lowered his voice and sat up a little on the uneven log
they'd been sharing as a seat.
"Rumor's going 'round in the kitchen this afternoon that the scryer in the tower's seen the
Inquisition on its way here-the Witchfinders."
"Is it, now?" Antryg murmured, lacing his bony fingers around his knees.
"Oh, aye. And her ladyship's fair waxed about it, too, blaming our boy Daur, and him denying he
had anything to do with sending for 'em. So you want to watch yourself, m'lord."
"It appears I do." Antryg sighed and got to his feet, shaking the grass clippings out of his coat
skirts. "Just what I needed."
On the top floor of the Harlot, where the half-dozen sasenna on night duty were waking one another
up with a quite ferocious sparring class under Implek's bellowed orders, he found Sergeant Hathen,


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the troop's second-in-command. Hathen had always liked Antryg-the big, beefy woman had trained
with him during his novice days, and they'd had a brief and enthusiastic fling the summer before
she'd met the village butcher who was still her lover-and after a little flirting Hathen allowed
that although she had been forbidden to give him a weapon, she might just mislay one in the
Harlot's cellars sometime the following afternoon.
Much comforted by the knowledge, he then proceeded to the kitchen to beg dinner from Pothatch the
cook.
Afterward, upstairs in the Pepper-Grinder once more, he brewed a little of the jelgeth-leaf tea,
to hold off sleep and the oozing horrors of his dreams, and sat by the open windows breathing the
dark crystalline spices of spruce forest and night. Music drifted from the candlelit windows of
the Cat Lair, an old-fashioned kithara played with heart-tearing mastery that had to be Zake
Brighthand's, while a young woman sang a thoroughly disreputable ballad about a unicorn and a sow.
By the light of his own candles, Antryg shuffled his cards, smiling a little at the sprightly
voice next door as he laid down as significator the Queen of Wands. The academic mages, who had
taken refuge in the Citadel to refine and perfect the study of magic away from the choices and
prejudices of the cities, looked upon the cards as a dog wizard's tool, a trick for pleasing
patrons with cheap and easy half truth. "They are seldom accurate," Salteris had told him once,
looking dispassionately down over his shoulder in some low-raftered garret they'd shared in a hill-
country inn long ago-not long after the old man had found him, in fact, and healed him of his
first madness. "And the problem is that when they are accurate, you can't always tell it."
But on that night, and on so many nights thereafter, Antryg had continued to lay card on card,
getting sometimes yes, sometimes no, desperate for an answer to the question that had in those
days consumed his waking hours and stalked him like a grinning ghost in dreams-continued until
he'd fallen asleep with his head on the gaudy layout, his question still unanswered.
It was a bad habit, he knew; and he'd seldom found the cards, even when they were being truthful,
to be of any help.
His big, awkward hands quick as a faro dealer's, he laid four cards around the significator: the
five of swords, the five of pentacles, the two of pentacles, the Mage reversed.
The Mage reversed? He turned the deck thoughtfully in his hands, looking down at the battered and
enigmatic rectangles of pasteboard among the chaos of papers, pinwheels, and half-empty teacups
littering the table's surface.
A reference to the geas that held his own powers in check? To the wizard who, for whatever
reasons, had decided to kidnap Joanna? A Council mage? Someone using a teles as a power-sink? Or
something else, someone else ... someone who was the opposite of a wizard? Or was the message
Wisdom reversed?
Five was strife, conflict, but it also indicated the crossover point at which the spiritual had
absorbed too much of the material ever to go back to being what it was. And pentacles signified
money-or craft. The craft of magic? Of music perhaps? The notes of Brighthand's kithara trailed
through his consciousness like a line of crystal butterflies.
Pentacles was the sign of earth.
Deep earth, and the things of deep earth. Rock, clay, crystal ... enclosed darkness that has never
seen light.
The Vaults.
He gathered the cards.
Joanna, he thought. Joanna would never forgive him.
When first he had escaped the vengeance of the Council and the Regent's death sentence, he had
hesitated a long time before seeking out Joanna in her own strange, noisy, magicless world-in the
preposterous chiaroscuro of the City of Dreams. His friends had suffered before through proximity
with him, and she was a woman who had her own life, her own priorities, her own needs apart from
him. He knew enough of her to recognize how the emotional desert of her childhood had given her a
need for stability, comfort, and orderliness that was as much a part of her as her wry quick wit,
her odd combination of bluntness and shyness, and the calm intelligence of those brown eyes. He
did not want to bring trouble upon her.
But when it came down to the choice, he simply could not bear the thought of not coming to know
her better-of never seeing her again.
Like a selfish fool, he'd hoped it would be all right.
It hadn't been, of course, he thought, laying down the significator of the Priestess and shuffling
again. The Queen of Swords, the King of Wands, the Dancer at the Heart of the World ... and the
Fool. Outside, the novice Gilda's voice tripped gleefully over the words " ... tie my ribbons
'round your tail, my stockings 'round your horn ... ," and Antryg muttered at the cards, "Tell me
something I don't know, already," and gathered them up again.


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And it might very well be, he thought, that he had lost her now for good, whether he found her
safe or not. If she was in the Vaults ...
He shivered at the thought of what he had seen there. In that darkness there was no place that was
safe, no place that was even stable anymore, and it was getting worse as the pressures on the
fabric that separated the Void from its myriad of worlds increased. Did her kidnapper know this?
Did he-or she-care? And why hadn't they contacted him, why hadn't they made a demand of some kind?
Why try to assassinate him in his bed instead?
Or had that been somebody else?
The significator Queen of Swords drew the four of cups reversed, the five of swords, the two of
wands, and the Chain. The geas, he thought; the geas that lay upon his mind like a chain, the foul
whispering of those waiting dreams. Or did the cold Queen of Swords, the dark-haired lady who bore
all her ancient strifes frozen in her hollow heart, labor under some geas of her own forging?
"Tea leaves would probably be more helpful," he muttered, collecting the cards again and making a
move toward the room's small hearth, where a pot burbled softly with water on the boil. At least
tea would be comforting and would warm his aching hands, now that the evening air was growing
sharp.
Damn the Witchfinders ...
And they, too, were on their way.
If there are social climbers in the High Council who seek to bring wizardry into fashion again in
the circles to which-they aspire ...
Would Daurannon have betrayed another wizard to win himself into the Regent's approval? A wizard
who had murdered Salteris, perhaps, but a wizard all the same?
It was a week and a half to Angelshand by horseback. Daur would have to have known that far in
advance that the Council was bringing him here. According to the Lady Rosamund, it hadn't been
decided to bring him until a day or so, at most, before Ruth and Joanna and the children had
started having visions of the Tujunga Wash. But whose suggestion had it been to fetch him in the
first place?
On the other hand, he thought, dealing out, around the King of Wands, the five of wands ("All
right, you've made your point!"), the reversed four of cups, the eight of pentacles ("Well, I knew
that!"), and the doughty seven of wands, since the Citadel lay upon a major node in the ley-lines,
the lines themselves could have faulted as far away as Angelshand. The Inquisitors might easily
have set out to ask the mages a few questions about the sudden appearance of abominations in the
streets of the capital. For a moment he stared down at the last card dealt; "Now what," he
murmured, as he gathered them back like great flakes of colored fire, "is our Daur defending
against all comers? His right to inherit the Master-Spells when Auntie dies? Or something else?
Something in the Vaults, perhaps?"
He set the cards aside. Half rising, he began to search in the chaos of the tabletop for the
little japanned canister of tea that Pothatch had sent back with him. Just in twenty-four hours,
the table had become littered with books Seldes Katne had let him abstract from the Library, with
papers and notes regarding the Void-she was still hunting, she said, for Munden Myndrex's notes on
tortoise-rubbings-with maps of the Vaults he'd drawn to refamiliarize himself with its lower
levels and with sketches of Bentick and Rosamund and the way the vines in the little garden below
twined up around the windows of the Cat Lair ... pens, inkpots, pestles; pinwheels in various
states of construction and experiments with straws and bottles; prisms and chalk and magnets. At
one end of the table, he'd pushed aside the litter to draw in red crayon a compass rose, over
which he'd already dangled a pendulum stone; the stone had refused to move, meaning a) that Joanna
was dead, b) that Joanna was neither north, nor south, nor east, nor west, but, in fact, virtually
beneath him ... i.e., in the Vaults, or, c) that as a method of divination, pendulum dowsing was a
washout. Neither the ritual strewing of the hazel-nuts he'd begged from Q'iin nor the construction
of a feather-circle as he'd been taught by an old granny from the marshes of Kymil had yielded
further information regarding Joanna's whereabouts. Divination with peach pits was supposed to
work, but regrettably, peaches would not be in season until July.
Tea canister in hand, he turned back, deftly sorted his own significator, the Mage, from the pack
and, laying it down, cut and flipped a card at random from the center of the deck.
For a moment he stood, regarding the skeleton on horseback bearing the black banner of the rose,
where it lay in the molten amber pool of candlelight. Of course, he told himself, the Death card
meant many things ... change, transmutation, travel, passage to another world even.
"I really ought to stop doing this to myself." He folded the pack together for the last time and
went to make himself a cup of tea.

By the time he was finished, it was close to midnight. Brighthand's music had ceased but across


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the way in the Cat Lair, the novices and Juniors and a few of the younger sesenna were still
talking, casting spells on one another for the sheer joy of it and shouting with laughter and
triumph. The cats for which the place was named stalked moths and fireflies in the rambling
carpets of wild grape, spruce needles, and fern. Pulling his sloppy rainbow shawl around his
shoulders. Antryg descended through the great downstairs chamber where Kyra was supposed to be
studying her lists but wasn't, slipped through a narrow door to the cellar steps and, from the
cellar, passed through a rough-hewn entrance, up a tunnel in which he had to walk half bent over,
and thence into the subcellar of the Cat Lair.
By attics, side stairs, more cellars, and a generally disused breezeway between the Pavilion and a
tiny pear orchard clinging halfway up the tor, gritting his teeth now and then as he passed over
an energy line and felt once again the stifling prickle of the Void, he made his way up to the
scriptorium in the Library tower.
From the breezeway he'd caught a glimpse of light reflected through the glass panes of the
Conservatory, like the far-off refraction of candleflame through an enormous, dirty diamond. The
light would be in Seldes Katne's rooms, adjoining that ornate gothic folly. There was a rickety
wooden stairway that stitched its way from the attic of the Pavilion, back and forth across the
granite rock face beneath the Library walls, with a door at the top leading into the scriptorium.
As Antryg ducked beneath the low lintel he saw wizard's marks written in a trailing scribble of
faintly glowing magic on the stone doorjambs-Seldes Katne's personal mark. Across the room in the
darkness he could see she'd so marked the door down from the Library above and portions of the
floor as well.
Clearly, he thought, Kitty Katne was taking no chances on Daurannon or Lady Rosamund coming down
here at this hour of the night and wondering why the librarian had been seized with the desire to
make a Talisman of Air.
Dim lamplight gleamed suddenly on gold leaf and leather, picking out a leopard's eye, a skeleton's
hand, carved on a pillar head. The marks had given their warning. The stout little form framed in
the light of the opened doorway turned back for a moment to close it behind her; Antryg remained
where he was, a loose-limbed shadow with his hands in his pockets, watching her as she hastened
across the room.
"Here it is." She held out to him a rough ring of silver on a thong. Even in the darkness the two
opals wired to it seemed to flash with inner fire.
"Thank you. Thank you very much." He took the thong and bound it around his head, centering the
talisman on his forehead. "I shall be on your doorstep tomorrow with a bouquet of daisies and the
finest and most beautiful pinwheels in all the land."
She swallowed a grin she knew was undignified and said gruffly, "Go along with you-don't be
silly."
He regarded her with startled surprise, the talisman on his forehead picking up a thread of
starlight from the window, flashing like a weird third spectacle lens. "Why not?"
The talisman was not a particularly strong one and would allow him at most fifteen or twenty
minutes' extra air, but there was nothing he could do about that. Any of the stronger mages in the
Citadel were ipso facto suspect, and any of the Juniors would not have been able to weave elements
in this fashion at all.
"Are you going into the Vaults tonight?" Her voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced nervously
over her shoulder, though not even a member of the Council could call the image of another mage in
a scrying-crystal without the subject's consent. But this portion of the Library lay on the
Vorplek Line, the main energy-track, and through it Antryg's own sense of the Void's instability
had grown; here in the Library's foundations, it was particularly strong. "Will you ... will you
need help?"
"My dear Kitty, I should be delighted to have you," Antryg said earnestly. "But in point of fact I
haven't the faintest idea how and where I'll be able to find my way into the Vaults, and in any
case, when I do, I shall probably finish by having to run away from something very fast, and I'd
hate to have to be gallant and slow down to let you keep up."
"Run away from what? And how ... "
Antryg swung around abruptly and swept the talisman from his forehead; a moment later the door to
the gallery opened, framing against the starlight outside a tall, thin, solemn-faced garden-rake
of a boy in a Junior's gray robe-the boy whose harping could make butterflies dance.
"Me lord Antryg?" His voice was deeper than most boys' his age, settled already into a black-oak
baritone with the soft, slurry drawl of the Angelshand slums. He was panting as if he'd taken the
long stairs up from the Pavilion at a run. "Kyra said she'd seen you come this way. It's me master
... Otaro. He's seen that thing in the Vaults, that Movin' Gate. The Lady and them, they say you
ought to come."


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Chapter VIII
The great problem with the creation of deathless elemental daemons to do one's bidding lies in
finding a place to put them afterwards.
-Pipin the Little
Archmage of the Council of Wizards

I'm going to kill Antryg Windrose. I swear it.
Joanna sank against the wall, hugging herself as if with cold, though the tepid mildness of the
dark around her had not altered. Nor was it hunger that made her shiver uncontrollably as she
rested her head against the featureless smoothness behind her. Tears rose, a strangling heat in
her chest and throat, and she fought them back. She was tired enough without hysterics adding to
her exhaustion, and she had the hideous suspicion that once she gave way to them, she wouldn't be
able to stop.
Ever.
Or was it, she wondered, that she knew that if she wept, when she did finally stop she would be
precisely where she was now-sitting on a smooth floor in the darkness, with no idea where she was,
or why.
Wearily, it crossed her mind that in a way, she had brought this on herself. If she hadn't been
Antryg's lover-if she hadn't brought him into her life, knowing him to be a fugitive from vengeful
mages in another world, knowing they'd eventually come after him-she wouldn't be here now.
Wherever "here" is.
However long "now" is going to be.
She had begun to be terribly afraid, not of what had brought her here or of what would eventually
happen to her, but of how long they would keep her before anything did.
If anything did.
Ever.
Three times she had rewound the thread on its spool and returned to her point of origin, half
hoping to find some evidence that someone had come looking for her ... food, water, torture-
droids, a human footprint in the sand, a Post-it note from her mother, a troop of armed orcs
tracking her down the thread-anything.
The third time she had had to fight, as she was fighting now, to keep from sitting on the floor
and crying with disappointment, loneliness, and terror.
What if they never came?
Antryg would rescue her, she told herself.
But in her heart she knew that the chief difference between the movies and real life was that the
hero didn't always rescue the heroine.
Antryg, for all his blithe air of lunatic competence, could be dead.
Or locked up back in the Silent Tower.
Stop it, she told herself firmly. You've quite obviously been kidnapped for a reason and the only
reason I can think of is to gain some kind of leverage over Antryg. Being kidnapped at random by
another wizard from some other place on the other side of the Void is stretching the bounds of
probability.
But there were bounds of probability regarding what had happened to her already that were
beginning to make her profoundly uneasy.
Wearily, she got to her feet and, with the utter patience she'd used in conversation with
recalcitrant DOS programs, hefted her purse more firmly onto her shoulder and began to rewind the
thread on the spool once again, following it back to its source. Though her hands were shaky, she
still didn't feel particularly hungry or thirsty-and her common sense told her that she must have
been here for hours already. At times she'd been tempted to eat part of the granola bar she
carried in her purse, more from boredom than anything else. But every time she returned to find
nothing at the point of origin, she put it off.
Besides, it would only make me thirsty, and I haven't come across water, either.
When she'd hit the glow-in-the-dark button on her digital watch-also in her purse-and had gotten
no result, the old panic that she might be blind had returned. But the matches still wouldn't
strike-the problem seemed to be with energy, rather than her own vision.
What the hell is going on?
Antryg, she thought, pushing aside the wave of baffled despair. If I wasn't involved with Antryg
...
If I'd stayed what I'd always been, I might not have been as happy, but at least I'd be safe.


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Is knowing him, loving him, having him in my life worth ... ? Her mind shied quickly from the
first sentence formed, the sentence she didn't want to think about: worth dying this way? She
changed it hastily to, worth going through this? Is having Antryg in my life worth going through
this?
She wasn't doing to die. She told herself that several times as she walked. It would never have
occurred to her to live with a crack dealer, or an outlaw biker, or a terrorist, or anybody else
whose very life-style was a walking invitation to chaos-anybody whose enemies might seize upon
her. But Antryg wasn't like that. The sound of his voice returned to her, that deep, flexible
baritone that would be a part of her consciousness if she lived to be ninety, and the touch of his
fingers along her arm. The way it felt to know he cared about what she did, and the knowledge that
he'd back her up in whatever she chose to do. Gentle, considerate, careful of her feelings for all
that he woke up at the crack of dawn to watch cartoons and sang in bed.
Something moving and cold like a stiff, membranous wing sliced at her face; a shriek like a steam
whistle went off in her ear and claws snagged in her hair. With a scream of shock and terror
Joanna slapped at the thing with both hands, springing back, crashing into the wall.
In the blackness her hands came in brief contact with something chitinous and moving-the only
things that sprang to her mind were the hideous palmetto bugs that rattled 'round the porch light
of her aunt's home in Miami on summer nights. Only this was vastly more huge, the size of a small
child, bumping and crawling on her, grabbing at her hair and laughing.
Screaming, she fled, and it pursued her, vacant idiot laughter fragmenting from the walls.
Sobbing, screaming, gasping, she ran on and on, bruising herself against walls and comers,
stumbling down tunnel after tunnel, hallway after hallway, until somehow it was gone and she
collapsed on the floor, hugging herself in the sudden silence and weeping as if her heart would
break.


Chapter IX
Wizardry lies in naming the true names of things-in knowing what they are, and what they were.
Sometimes when one learns the true name of the thing one seeks to Summon, one loses all desire to
meet it face-to-face.
-gantre silvas
Annals of the Mages

"I do not ... I do not even know how I came to be down there." Otaro of the City of Cranes rubbed
his round, brown face with one hand, small but broad and strong-looking; Antryg knew the fingers
could flick and stop the gold and silver harp wires so that the sound of them danced like spring
rain, stirring the heart to visions or the soul to the peace of sleep. In reminiscence of his
distant homeland, the Singer wore his hair in long, oiled curls threaded with ribbons down his
shoulders and back, and there were plugs of rose-colored jade in the lobes of his ears.
He sat on a bench in a corner of the Citadel's great kitchen. Around him most of the High Council
had gathered: Nandiharrow looking flurried, Daurannon wearing a face of grave solemnity, and Lady
Rosamund with a hint of grimness about the flowerlike nostrils. Bentick's expression was one of
haggard, slightly nervous brittleness; his eyes moving warily, as Phormion's had moved in Council,
his white fingers toying endlessly with his watch. While Otaro was speaking, Issay Bel-Caire came
hurrying in through the pantry door-a secret stair connected the pantry with the storeroom behind
the baths, which was in turn connected, via a covered gallery and a stair up the outside wall of
the Island of Butterflies, with the tangle of interlocking cellars that formed the sub-foundations
of the Mole Hill, the Pepper-Grinder, and the other dwellings of the Juniors' side of the hill.
"Nandiharrow spoke of having killed an abomination in the Vaults last night," Otaro said slowly,
passing his hand across his face again. "I wanted to dissect it, to see what properties lay in its
sinew and bones. He said it was on the second level. I entered through the stores-cellars here,
under the kitchen."
"Those should have been locked up!" Bentick said indignantly.
"As they were," the Singer murmured. "Pothatch ... I asked for the key from Pothatch."
The cook came over from the smallest of the three great stoves, a patented iron cooker sent by one
of the Court's more practical-minded duchesses. A fat little man with a redhead's fair, freckled
face, he handed the Oriental wizard a cup of tea; Otaro's hands shook so that he could scarcely
hold it.
"I didn't see there was any harm in it, sir." The cook glanced worriedly across at Bentick, who
had threatened him with transformation into one of the lowlier orders of amphibians at least once
a month for the past twenty years. During his own residence at the Citadel, Antryg had frequently


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presented the hapless cook with jars of flies and bugs collected from the gardens, Just in case.
"People have been going in and out to search."
After a moment Bentick shook his head and sighed. "No ... quite all right ... "
"I still don't understand what happened." Otaro set his cup down-the tea was beginning to spill-
and ran stumpy fingers through his beribboned curls. From the shadows by the stove, Brighthand
watched with concern in his coffee-colored eyes. "I was on the second level, and then suddenly I
was ... I was in an unfamiliar area of the Vaults. It took me some minutes to realize-I had
somehow come to be on the sixth level, near the Twisted Ways. I know I did not lose
consciousness."
Antryg, prowling along the kitchen's west wall and running his hands over the soot-dyed plaster,
swung around in genuine delight. "Folded reality!" he cried.
Bentick glared at him. Seldes Katne, who had followed him down from the Library and now occupied a
scullion's stool near the gaping hearth, merely looked baffled.
Otaro shook his head. "I do not know ... if you say so. All I know is that suddenly I ... I saw a
darkness rushing toward me. A corridor, it seemed, or a gate, but a gate that seemed to move
toward me, filled with crying voices, with sounds like wind, or the sea. I saw ... I don't know
what I saw. The voices ... "He shut his eyes, his dark brow folding with pain. "I turned, I ... I
tried to flee. I ran down one corridor after another and it pursued me. Every time I looked back
it was there, rushing at my heels, the voice shouting to me."
"I found him down the third level." Brighthand stepped forward and put a hand on his master's
shoulder. "I'd got worried when he didn't come back. He was sittin' up against the wall, and his
color was dead bad."
"Was there a smell?" Antryg inquired, tilting his head to one side like a bird.
"Roses," Otaro said slowly. "Sweet and heavy ... "
Lady Rosamund started to speak, then looked impatiently at the faces around her. "Where is
Phormion? She should be here ... "
"The voices you heard," Nandiharrow moved over onto the seat beside the Singer, "were they human?
Did you understand what they were saying?"
Under cover of Otaro's answer, Antryg stepped back to where Pothatch stood and asked in an
undervoice, "May I borrow the key to the stores-cellars for a moment?"
His attention absorbed in the scene around the table, the fat man produced it automatically.
Antryg slipped into the pantry, unlocked the stores-cellar door-the long, narrow hallway of a room
was entered by at least five doors-and moved back to the kitchen with an unobtrusiveness
surprising in a man six feet three inches tall and wearing a coat like a psychedelic orchid.
"Thank you. May I take this?"
Pothatch nodded, not even looking at the enormous meat cleaver Antryg had removed from the
chopping block.
The pantry was five or six steps down from the kitchen, part of the tangled complex of small brick-
and-half-timber buildings set farther down the hill; from it a very long, very narrow flight of
steps cut straight northeastward into the rock of the tor. Antryg had always suspected the big,
low-ceilinged stores-cellar of being, in fact, the uppermost collecting chamber of the maze
beneath. He threaded his way though the bins of potatoes and onions, and past huge sealed jars of
millet, barley, and wheat, the musty odor of tubers and hanging garlic stirring about him and not
quite curtaining the wet-stone breath from the archway that led down to the Vaults.
Here, as he had up in the cellar of the Library, he could feel the lowering weight, the terrifying
nearness, of the chaos of the Void.
Another short stair, a wine cellar, a passage that turned and wound, descending ...
And then he was in the Vaults.

The Shrieker, Antryg recalled, had been struck down just past the three-way fork near the
downshaft with the brick threshold; all the old landmarks leapt clear to his mind. He pulled the
Talisman of Air from his pocket and tied it again around his head, then hefted the cleaver and
made for the place, listening, scenting, reaching out with all the hyperacute senses of a wizard
that he knew would be his only defense. He did not pause, now, to check air pressure or magnetism;
he knew he had little time here, and had to find some trace of Joanna, some clue to where in the
Vaults she was hidden.
And there was something else he had to find as well.
Slightly more than twenty-four hours had passed since his first visit to the Vaults, but already
he could feel the change. The energy seemed more dense; the strange, shuddery crawl of alien power
in the stones, growing even in the rock aboveground, was nearly unbearable down here. He quickened
his pace, seeking the place where the Shrieker had leaped forth at them.


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And as Otaro had described, he felt a sudden shock of disorientation, the sudden awareness that he
didn't know where he was ...
Only he did.
He was on the sixth level, at the round mouth of tunnel that led into the tangled skein of
isolated spirals known as the Twisted Ways.
Antryg flung out his arms and laughed aloud with sheer delight.
The maze behind him picked up the echoes, reverberating them into a dim, shuddering roar. Far off,
chancy with distance and random reflection of sound, they were answered by a thin, alien, animal
scream.
Antryg fell silent, his heart beating hard, remembering that he was not alone.
The corridor around him was knee-deep in ground fog that curled poisonously about his boots, the
air above it weighted with sulfur. There were pits at this level, places where the floor dropped
suddenly away or descended five or six steps for twenty or thirty feet only to reascend without
apparent reason; heaving, shifting vapors lay like ghostly lakes in such places, shining queerry
in the dark. Antryg avoided them, sidetracking around through dark capillaries in the rock where
niter dripped from the walls. In some places he found the walls and ceilings thick with a moss
that he was careful not to touch; in others, white and yellow things crawled sluggishly away from
the sound of his boots or watched him, gleaming stickily, as he passed. Once he backtrailed up and
down several levels to avoid a hallway-low-ceilinged, he remembered, and painted queerly over
walls and ceiling with skull-headed serpents twining among roses and thorns-that was now entirely
filled with greenish mist; in another place he did the same, though the room that lay before him,
with its odd pattern of glass blocks set into the floor, was apparently empty.
He had no protection, save the minimal defenses of the talisman and the cleaver. He reminded
himself of that and spent a good deal of his time glancing over his shoulder at the dark.
In a corridor that followed the Vorplek Line, he found Otaro's leather satchel, containing
dissecting knives, tortoise-shell jars, oiled paper, and a magnifying lens strung on a ribbon,
which he put around his own neck with the rest of his beads. As he stood up again, the satchel
over his shoulder, movement caught his eye behind him.
It was high up, near the pointed arch of a narrow, sealed door. He flattened against the wall as a
small ball of glowing blue light drifted through the crumbling bricks and into the corridor. It
moved slowly, as if propelled by a wind humans could not feel, losing and gaining altitude a
little like an errant balloon. Antryg held his breath, sweat starting on his face, as the light
paused opposite him, hanging in the air at the level of his chest, and three or four other lights,
some the size of his fist and others no bigger than walnuts, floated like a school of minnows down
the corridor from behind him. Cold with sweat and fighting panic, he remained motionless, half
guessing what they had to be, for some minutes after they had moved on.
"Joanna," he whispered, trying not to think of her imprisoned somewhere down here with those ...
and with the other things, material or immaterial or somewhere in between, that he knew would be
moving through this darkness.
Dear God, Joanna ...
He followed his ancient memories deeper into the maze: knots of tunnels that connected to nothing
but themselves; tiny rooms with mirrored ceilings and walls; glass altars in niches; stairways
descending a hundred and fifty feet to blank walls; pits and deadfalls and odd, fountain-fed
basins. He passed through halls with strange things painted, half-obscured, upon their ceilings;
crossroads marked with pillars of glass or marble or iron; rooms whose floors were mosaics of
tortoiseshell and bone. There were small doorways, long ago bricked shut and written over with
spells of guard and oblivion; Antryg shivered, remembering what Suraklin had told him: in ancient
times the Council had punished rebellious mages by sealing them into such places with restless
spirits, things that would eat human flesh to the bones ... but not quickly.
They pride themselves on their famous rectitude, Suraklin had said, his light voice a little
shrill as he measured out his chemicals with his feminine delicacy of touch, the sunlight through
the west-facing windows of his workroom turning his dust-colored hair to fire. They are like
painters, dabbing new colors over a canvas whose images are no longer the fashion. It was not
mages bent on holding aloof from human concern who built their precious Citadel, and if ever you
chance to visit it, my darling, bid them show you the lists of Archmages of old. You'll find gaps
in the tale, of years they pretend to know nothing about.
Ground fog swirled again around his feet. Passing a downshaft, he felt warm air rising against his
face, smelled a curious odor like metallic flowers. Things scuttered distantly in dark, narrow
ways, and under Antryg's fingers the granite of the wall whispered with the Brehon Ley's silvered
strength; deep beneath it, he sensed the prickly, random energy of the stone itself. Knowing
Suraklin, he found, altered one's perceptions of everything.


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No sign of the Moving Gate. No sign of Joanna.
No sign of the other thing he sought, the thing he was almost certain had to be here-the thing he
had to find if he was to make any progress in this puzzle at all.
In a long chamber whose corbeled ceiling barely cleared the topmost curls of his hair, something
attacked him, something small and red that gave off a bitter, sugary stink when he chopped it away
from his boot leather and crushed it under his heel. The walls here, he saw, were patched with
fungi like human ears and fingers in colors that made him wonder what was considered camouflage in
other dimensions; at the bottom of the pit in the room's center, white and yellow grubs seethed
over something dead.
Clearly, Gates were opening and closing here all the time, now in one place, now in another.
Dammit, he thought, I could be down here for weeks and not run across the Moving one. Something
had to be keeping it open, something drawing the enormous power needed.
Distantly, he heard another shrill cry and wished he'd been able to talk Hathen out of a sword
earlier this evening. In the four months Antryg had Lived in Los Angeles, he had been able to keep
up sword practice at a dojo in Burbank operated by a black kendo sandan and an old Japanese
gentleman who taught iaido to those who understood and preferred that somewhat more esoteric art.
Sensei Jones had looked a trifle askance at him when he'd explained that he'd been trained in a
slightly different style owing to the circumstance of being a wizard in exile from another
dimension-many people did-but several weeks ago Antryg had overheard Sensei Jones remark to Sensei
Shigeta, "You know, I'm starting to believe the sucker?"
He paused by another sealed door, felt the ancient masonry, and shivered at what he sensed inside.
Phormion didn't have this trouble finding the Moving Gate, dammit, he thought, a little
resentfully, as he moved on. Nor did Kitty. Otaro practically walked into the thing. Perhaps I
ought to pretend I'm here looking for mushrooms.
Phormion ... He recalled how her eyes had shifted, how deep the lines of strain had been on her
gray and wasted face. He hadn't seen her all day, and, according to Kyra, the Star-mistress hadn't
taught any of her classes. Bentick said she was ill, but then, the fussy little Steward had always
been Phormion's second in the Starmistress' long duel with life.
And neither Bentick nor Phormion had been present when the Circles of Power had been drawn to
bring him through the Void. Which meant they might have been elsewhere, drawing Circles for an
expedition of their own.
Daurannon ...
He paused in the darkness, remembering the fresh-faced, handsome youth sitting next to him on the
marble terrace of Salteris' house, listening to the old man's words with grave interest in his
hazel eyes.
Always the one to get the last piece of cake on the plate, he thought, and manage at the same time
not to seem greedy as he ate it.
It crossed his mind to wonder how Daurannon was dealing with the probability of having Lady
Rosamund hold the Master-Spells over his mind. The two of them had never gotten on: What can you
expect of a boy who puts milk in his tea? had been her dismissal of him at the beginning.
For that matter, how was Rosamund ... ?
A flicker and a gleam in the darkness caught his eye, something like a thread of moving silk on
the short flight of a half-dozen steps that lowered the floor of the level for no apparent reason.
He turned back, springing up the shallow, worn treads.
And stood staring down at the thing he had seen, his heart shrinking cold within him.
It was what he had feared from the start.
It was a thread of running water.
"Oh, dear," he murmured and leaned down to dip his bare fingertips in it and bring them first to
his nostrils, then to his lips.
Slightly salt, and filled with strange odors, strange flavors-alien and odd. He felt as cold
within as if it had been the river Aa that souls crossed at dying.
On the seventh level he found water flowing again, a stronger trickle this time, smelling and
tasting the same. It was there, too, that something attacked him, something that, even with a
wizard's sight which let him walk in darkness, he could not see: a cold fluttering of air moments
before he saw the sleeve of his coat open in three places as if slashed by a razor. A smell like
bitter cinnamon surrounded him; he wondered if the thin squittering noise he heard was really
there or only his imagination.
A cut seared open on his brow as he fled, a slash so quick he barely felt it; after he'd outrun
the thing, whatever it was, he found the long skirts on the right side of his coat reduced by
neat, parallel gashes to ribbons.
On the eighth level he finally smelled it. The shivery vibration of the opened Void, everywhere


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around him in these dark depths, grew stronger, and as he approached it, a strange and bitter
pungency, coppery and rotted, scorched his nose and lungs. He touched the Talisman of Air on his
forehead, and the silver warmed to his skin. The smell subsided; he quickened his pace, knowing
that if he didn't find what he sought in ten minutes, he might not make his way out of the area of
the poison before the breathable air held around his head failed. Dear God, don't let Joanna's
cell be anywhere near here.
A short flight of steps that curved sharply in the middle, a high, narrow hall whose ceiling was
painted in constellations neither he nor any other mage had ever seen.
Five minutes.
A branch in the tunnel. One fork led to a columned hall with a long basin in it, he recalled, the
other down a blind lead. But the sense of the Void was strongest down that blind alley. Eight
minutes. He was wrong, the lead was blind, and he turned back, cursing, his breath coming more
shallowly now, and dizziness teasing at the edges of his mind.
At the next fork in the passage he halted, and with the back of the cleaver blade, he knocked on
the rock of the wall.
Three strokes, and a pause. One stroke, pause; four, pause; one more, and another pause. Only
silence from the darkness ahead, with its drifting suggestions of yellowish mist; the silence that
had once filled a haunted church where first Joanna had used this signal, to reach the thing that
he knew must come. Silence, and the growing sense that he had overstayed the time allotted by the
talisman. Sweat stung in the forehead-cut left by the invisible attackers, mixing with the blood.
Five knocks, pause; nine, pause; two, pause ...
And then, far off, echoing in the tunnels, an answering knock.
Six times.
Antryg rapped back sharply, five.
Three. The knocking drew closer, and with it, infinitely soft in the deadly hush, a kind of moist,
leathery creak. It was now very difficult to breathe, the smell of the poison thick and all-
pervasive. The yellow mist thickened; the Talisman of Air, which had been warm against the skin of
his face, began to grow cold.
Five, he rapped out quickly and saw, far down the passageway, a sickly corpseglow pallor bobbing
erratically in the nightshade mists.
Eight ...
A thing loomed suddenly from the darkness, a huge shape stooping under the seven-foot arch of the
ceiling. Even the pallid light shed by the nodule that dangled, like a third eye, from the front
of its platycephalic skull threw no more than a firefly sheen on the stretched, squamous green of
its hide. Spider, dragon, and eldritch nightmare; chisel teeth glistened in the lipless muzzle;
four long arms, four massive hands thick with claws between which writhed clusters of wriggling
white tentacles. Those hands, Antryg knew well, could easily crush a man's skull. It raised one as
it stepped forward.
"Do you have any idea," Antryg gasped, leaning against the wall for support, "what the hell is
going on?"
"Not the slightest," the monster replied. "I've got an oxygen bottle and a gas mask."
"Ah." Antryg accepted the proffered breathing apparatus with hands that were shaking. "Thank you."
He gestured back along the passageway with all the aplomb of a weekend lothario at Enyart's. "My
atmosphere or yours?"


Chapter X
Limitations upon spells of forgetfulness:
-The boundaries of the field of the spell, both of area and of depth and height.
-The duration of the spell, for though such things wear away in time, yet some residue will linger
unless the Caster returns to undo what was done.
-Whether the spell will be touched by daylight, wind, rain, the phases of the moon, and the rising
and setting of the stars Vega, Aldebaran, and Spica, which govern matters of the memory and mind.
-The extent of what will be forgotten, for if the Caster be strong enough, passersby will forget
their names and families, how to read or speak; some even will forget to eat, and so starve.
-The personages who will forget, whether it be one person, or all persons, or all living things.
-The duration of the forgetting, and whether anything that be forgot shall be learned again.
-Whether the Caster himself will remember what he has done.
All these things must be woven into the boundaries of the spell, before it be Cast.
-Isar Chelladin
Upon the Casting of Spells


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"So you had nothing to do with this ... This glitch?"
"Glitch ... I like that." LTRX2-449-9102-CF60913-who had first been introduced to Antryg some
months earlier as the Dead God by villagers under the impression that the then-trapped
transdimensional physicist was indeed that entropic deity-folded himself into a compact bundle of
muscle and bone, arms wrapped about unimaginably jointed legs and the long, bony whip of tail
coiled around one of the square basalt columns that ran the length of the narrow Basin Chamber,
and emitted a deep, buzzing chuckle.
"And did you know to seek me here with this magic that you spoke of when last we met, wizardling?"
Since the Dead God's organs of communication were not connected to his respiratory system, they
had decided to continue the conversation in a section of the Vaults uncontaminated by the
atmosphere of his world.
"Not magic, precisely," Antryg said, stashing the oxygen bottle behind a loose stone on the column
head and settling down at the monster's side. "It was a reasonable supposition that you'd be
somewhere here in the Vaults, considering that your specialty is the physics of the Void. At
least, that's what got you into trouble in this universe the last time."
"So indeed it was." The tip of the Dead God's tail twitched, roving over the smooth stone of the
floor like a hand seeking a grip for some unimaginable purpose. "My instruments were picking up
heavy xchi-particle flux in Sector Eight-eighty; I went there half suspecting there would be a
Gate opening. Reports were coming in of ... strange things. Not only strange creatures, but
strange effects, odd and completely localized spots of heat or cold or magnetism in places, or
places where things would happen-voices would be heard, people would be spontaneously transported
sometimes thousands of meters, or vanish entirely-reports of what sounded like Gates opening and
shutting at random, sometimes hundreds of kilometers away from Eight-eighty." In Antryg's mind-
since they were speaking mind-to-mind through the Spell of Tongues-Antryg heard the measurements,
knowing them to be only rough approximations of the yards and miles in which he thought ... which
were themselves only rough translations of yards and miles as Joanna understood them. Sometimes,
he reflected, the Spell of Tongues was simply not very accurate.
"The first thing I did when I entered this place-wherever this place is-was to bring through the
components of the experimental xchi-flux generator I've been working on."
"That thing?" Antryg said, startled. "It filled three good-sized rooms when I saw it last."
"It isn't exactly small now," the Dead God growled. "I've never opened a full-size Gate with it-
merely wormholes-but most of what you saw was guidance. The generator here is slaved to the main
relay in my own universe, so with luck I should not be trapped here again. I've brought batteries-
the thing needs an enormous amount of power-and spare air bottles. They are hidden in three
different chambers, depending on whatever was nearest when the Gate opened. I have no idea where
they are."
"How do you know they're even in the same universe, if the Gate to your laboratory has opened and
closed two or three times?"
The Dead God tilted his sleek, shiny head, the iridescent ocher lenses of his eyes glinting in the
glow of his forehead-light with the expressionless stare of an insect. "The appearance is the
same, for one thing, as are the composition and pattern of the walls. The oxygen mix is virtually
identical." He touched one of the instruments that hung on a bandolier over the ribbed, bony
chest. "That's how I knew I was in your world in the first place, though I had no idea where I was
or what this place is. And the extent of the xchi-particle flux was the same at each reappearance.
I have been searching for a way out of this maze."
"There is one, but it's a bit complicated," Antryg said, leaning forward to study the long, thick
rectangle of the sensory equipment with its dimly blinking lights. "We're under the Citadel of
Wizards. If you can give me a description of the rooms in which you left your batteries and air
bottles and things, I could probably find them for you."
"It would be a help," the Dead God rumbled. "I could locate them with the multiscanner, but it
would take a long while, particularly if they were far away. I carry spare air, but with a weapon,
too ... " He reached back with one long arm, past the four curving tentacles of his breathing
tubes, to where a device like a small bazooka hung on his back to the left side of his doubled
dorsal ridge. "It is all very heavy, and I may need to move swiftly. But you, wizardling ... " The
light-bob on his forehead gave a little twitch, causing their shadows to reel grotesquely in the
pillared gloom. "How is it that I find you here? You said you were going into exile, to the world
of your friend."
"I did," Antryg replied, rather grimly. "And lived as happily ever after as circumstances
permitted ... It's rather a long story. Have you encountered any other Gates in your
explorations?"


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"Four," replied the Dead God. "Also five fields of alien energies. None of them is stable-they
appear and vanish at random. Everywhere I discover organisms with physiologies incompatible to
what I know of your biosystem. Moreover, my instruments indicate the xchi-particle activity
characteristic of Gates." Antryg was aware that the Dead God lacked the capacity to feel the sense
of terror invoked in humans by the opening of the Void. "And they indicate also that this is
increasing and the rate of increase accelerating."
"I know that," Antryg said. "Something has to be done to stabilize it, and soon, to keep the
entire Citadel from being swallowed in a maelstrom of all the magic done here in its past. Your
instruments wouldn't happen to have registered a Gate which moves about? Not appears and
disappears, but physically moves ... ?"
The Dead God signed a negative with one huge hand; the snakelike tail shifted around the pillar's
square base. "My instruments take readings at set intervals of time-they cannot track a single
Gate from place to place or tell whether a Gate has opened first in one place, then another, or
has moved from place to place without closing."
"Damn ... " Antryg folded his arms around his drawn-up knees, and rubbed absently at the drying
blood on the side of his face. His right arm hurt, and looking down, he could see blood on his
sleeve from the slashes dealt him by the invisible haunters. Far off in the darkness something
howled, the narrow runnels drawing out the sound into a shivery wail of terror and hate and
hunger; moving air brought to him a whisper of ammonia and of water trickling in the dark.
"Listen," he said, recalling innumerable television shows, "can that sensor of yours find a human
being? Or at least tell us if there is one, trapped somewhere down here in the Vaults?"
The Dead God tilted his head again, and the gleam of his bobbing headlight slipped wetly along the
leathery breathing tubes that arched from his back to the flat, small gills of his chest. "How far
do these Vaults extend around us? Sideways and down?"
"Two hundred, maybe three hundred, feet top to bottom; say a mile in diameter."
"Not large, then ... "
"Relatively speaking, no. But five minutes isn't very long either, unless you happen to be under
water ... which," he added a little grimly, "is precisely the point of my inquiry."
The Dead God was already cradling the black rectangle of the multiscanner along one forearm while
the tentacles of his palm reached around, like phosphorous-tipped worms, to manipulate its tiny
toggles. On the round screen several lines of figures swam into view, followed by a succession of
blank grids, glowing green lines laid over blackness. On one of them five glowing dots appeared,
moving slowly.
"There. Five humans of your type, moving ... "
"Search party." Antryg dismissed them. "Looking for me, I expect. We need a solitary, stationary
reading."
The Dead God buzzed deep in the back of his skull, went on fanning through the grids. "Nothing."
The tip of his tail moved a little with his thoughts, as if the nerves were wired to some
independent circuit. "Unless the subject is in a room that is somehow shielded against a sub-meson-
wave scan, which is unlikely, considering that requires electrophase polarization."
"Or magic," Antryg murmured thoughtfully. "Still, it isn't terribly likely a wizard would think to
evolve a spell which prevents detection by microscanning ... curious." He leaned back against the
basalt column, deep in thought. The first sensation which swept him was relief so profound that it
was almost exhausting-a sensation that everything was now solved, and he could curl up in a corner
and go to sleep ... definitely, he knew, not the case for a number of reasons.
But if Joanna wasn't in the Vaults, where was she?
In the Citadel itself? The pendulum stone seemed to indicate that, unless for one of the myriad
usual reasons, the pendulum stone wasn't working.
And in any case-unless Joanna's cell was shielded in some way that excluded microscans as well as
magic-his worst fears were momentarily allayed.
"Look," he said after a moment, "these xchi-particles of yours ... "
Something flickered and moved in the darkness. The Dead God's massive head swung around toward it;
Antryg's hand, like a crooked spider in its fingerless mitt, touched the heavy-muscled arm
warningly, but the physicist had already halted his reach for his weapon, knowing he could not
fire it in the close confines of the Basin Chamber. Light gleamed among the double line of square
pillars that stretched down the center of the high-ceilinged, narrow room, but light that shed no
shadows, that did not reach past the columns to the raw granite of the walls. For an instant the
only sound was the faint, humming tick of the Dead God's equipment and the soft intake of Antryg's
breath.
Down the length of the room a glowing ball of red light rolled, a few inches above the floor.
Antryg drew back against the pillar; the Dead God seemed to gather in on himself, like a beast


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coiling for an attack, even his tail drawn close for balance. The light on his forehead died, and
it seemed to Antryg as if darkness settled more closely around the dragon shape.
The ball of red light was similar to the ones he had seen before, roughly the size of a
grapefruit; it paused above the waters of the small basin in the chamber's center, flickering a
little, like the sun's corona in eclipse-paused again in front of the pillar where Antryg and the
Dead God sat motionless, its pulsing ruby glow bloody in the Dead God's curved orange eyes, in
Antryg's spectacles and earrings. The Dead God's hand moved toward the sensor on his chest, and
again Antryg stopped him until the thing had rolled through a low arch in the middle of the
opposite wall and away into darkness again.
"What was it?" The God's voice was soft, a barely audible buzz in the upper hollows of that
weirdly shaped skull.
"I'm not entirely certain," Antryg murmured. "But my belief is, it's the animate portion of the
residual energies vested in a teles-ball-a device wizards frequently use to hold or convert
magical energy. Teles are generally felt to become stronger-better-with age; the magic used in
conjunction with them becomes clearer and more precise. But there have been a number of cases in
which for no apparent reason wizards have simply gotten rid of teles. In two cases that I know
about by bricking them up down here, which, if the Vaults are an energy-collecting device, was
probably not the most intelligent thing to do. There have been rumors that now and then teles
become 'inhabited by spirits' nobody can get rid of-then they have to be buried or dropped in the
ocean or something-but my theory is that the spirits were generated by the teles themselves. Quite
a number of teles have dropped out of sight over the centuries-or had their names changed, which
makes them a bit difficult to trace."
"And you believe the xchi-particle flux is ... activating these energies?"
"Yes," Antryg said softly. "Yes, I do. And other energies down here as well. Energies that were
bounded whose bounds are now being sheared and fragmented by the opening and closing of the Gates.
These xchi-particles ... are they a sort of random energy which is stronger in stone-and
particularly igneous stone-weaker in metal and nonexistent in wood?"
The Dead God nodded.
"Is there a way of manipulating them ... of freezing them, as ice freezes, or crystalizing them,
so we could at least stabilize the field and keep the situation from getting worse? Not to mention
finding the Moving Gate, of course ... "
"If I knew what they were. Or how they work." The nodule of his light twitched again, his eyes
gleaming queerly iridescent in the glow. "But since they can't be polarized ... "
"If they could be?" Antryg leaned his elbows on his knees, his long, crooked hands gesturing
expansively in their shabby gloves. "If this energy, which seems to be activated in all the rocks
of the Citadel, all the stone of the Vault, could be realigned to behave like ordinary
electromagnetic energy ... "
"Realign the behavior of energy?"
"Temporarily." There was a kind of mad matter-of-factness in Antryg's enormous gray eyes. "Of
course, it would have a tendency to randomize itself after a period of time, but by then we'd have
found the source of the problem ... one hopes. Would you be able to create a stabilizing field
under those circumstances?"
"Are you insane?"
"Yes. I have been for years, in fact." He propped his spectacles more firmly onto his nose. "Would
you?"
The Dead God emitted a thin, buzzing whistle, the equivalent of a sigh. "I think so," he said
after a moment. "With an oscillator and a series of field-effects transmission screens, provided
the area of the field isn't too large."
"How large is large? Enough to cover the Vaults-could you establish the field within the
boundaries of the outermost interface lines between solid and air? That should cover the deepest
of the tunnels and will give me a perimeter for the energy-polarization spell as well. I'll need
to establish the center point of my own spell directly above your machinery; as far as I know this
chamber lies immediately beneath the lecture hall in the North Cloister of the Polygon, but I'll
double-check-anyway, they both lie on the Vorplek Line. And the spell must go into effect the
moment the energy field is activated, or there'll be a disjoin and the whole thing will have to be
done over again. We can synchronize our watches, or at least you can synchronize yours ... Joanna
gave me one but I took it apart and hadn't put it back together again before I was kidnapped."
"I'll lend you one."
"Thank you." Antryg's expression of absentminded preoccupation gave way to a smile of great
sweetness. "That's very kind of you."
The Dead God made the gesture equivalent to rolling his eyes ceilingward, a brief outspreading of


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his lower left hand in petition to the Worm in whom his people no longer believed.
"I'll be back with the details and a map of the Vaults to help you find your equipment caches."
The Dead God shook his head. "I can run a microscan of the Vaults themselves to establish a
digitalized map," he said. "What I shall need you to do is mark it for me. It will take a number
of hours."
"It'll be hours before I can return anyway," Antryg agreed and yawned hugely. The jelgeth he had
absorbed earlier had begun to wear off; weariness had settled, like a cloak sewn with plates of
lead, upon his bones. The night was far advanced. He rose, shaking out his tattered coat skirts
and wincing at the soreness in his arm. "I'll knock again. By the way, can you get me a pump-spray
dispenser full of some kind of silver-chloride solution? And two more oxygen bottles and some kind
of really good goggles?"
"Anything else?" The Dead God rose also, towering over Antryg's six-foot-plus height like a
skeletal troll, unblinking golden eyes shining eerily in the bobbing fleck of the light from his
forehead.
"Well ... I don't suppose there's a good Chinese takeout in Section Eight-eighty? Ah, well ...
thank you all the same. I'll return to make arrangements as quickly as I can."
As the bobbing whitish light faded down the corridor, Antryg stood for some time, leaning one
shoulder against the basalt pillar, feeling as if all the energy had drained from his frame.
Somewhere, far off, he could hear the fragile, tittering squeak of the invisible haunters, and
elsewhere a kind of blubbering slither, like tons of wet leather dragging itself over stone. He
didn't even want to think about what that might be.
Farther off, the infinitesimal trickle and cluck of water came to him, flowing down, flowing into
the lowest levels.
Sweet gods of the Dark Below the Ground, I hope that microscan was right.
All around him the Vaults seemed to be whispering, creaking as the building weight of the Void
shifted, a vortex of darkness dragging at the fabric of light.
Joanna, he prayed, I hope you 're not down here.
There were portions of the lower Vaults, he remembered, that were haunted. The moving lights
returned to his mind, with a horrible breathlessness of almost-certainty. Animate magic without
mind. Spells of evil, of pain, of death being released from their bonds ...
Three mages had seen a Gate that behaved as no Gate he knew. There had to be Circles drawn
somewhere, Circles of Power holding that Gate open. If he could only locate those ...
Voices crying out. A beating sound like wings. A cloying scent like roses. The dark sense of
secret desperation, glimpsed as his mind went down under a tidal wave of icy pain.
Why?
And, like a vise, the pressure of sheer weariness, of miles of tunnel walked, of evil dreams and
incompleted sleep. He felt worn thin, his spirit holed like very old linen ... holed like the
fabric of the universe where the Void was breaking through. He really should sleep, he reflected.
After all, it was only dreams.
He pressed his face to the stone of the pillar as a wave of trembling passed briefly through his
flesh.
Only dreams.

"Put down your weapon." A quiet voice spoke from the archway behind him. "If you try to flee I
will blast you out of existence where you stand."
He'd heard them coming down the tunnel behind him, quietly as they had moved. And in any case the
Dead God had picked them up on his scan.
"Without Aunt Min's permission? My dear Daur!" He raised his head, slipped the cleaver from his
belt and set it on the floor, then walked a few paces, his back to it, his hands raised. "Be
careful how you handle it. It's Pothatch's best bone-chopper and he'll kill me if anything happens
to it."
Swift footfalls padded behind him. A sasennan, he thought. Female.
"At this hour of the morning all I'm truly interested in is a hot cup of tea and some muffins," he
went on earnestly. "You would have done better to have simply waited up in the kitchen for me,
though it's very good of you to come looking."
The footfalls retreated, and he turned, his hands still raised. With Daurannon in the doorway
stood Bentick the Steward, and three young sasenna with drawn swords, one of whom also had the
cleaver thrust through her belt. None of them held a torch, by which Antryg guessed that the
sasenna were all novice mages in their first year of training-certainly none of them looked over
seventeen. Bentick bore a staff, a far deadlier weapon than a sword in the hands of a trained
sorcerer; beneath his arm Daurannon carried a shallow lead box, written over with runes of power,


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of the kind wizards used to carry spell-cord or manacles written with seals that silenced magic.
"I warned them," said the Handsome One softly. "I warned them that it was all your doing, though
before God, suspicious as I was, I did not entirely believe it myself."
"What was all my doing?" Antryg demanded indignantly. "Just because I happen to be friends with an
abomination doesn't mean I caused the rip in the Void." With a quick move he swept the now-useless
Talisman of Air from his head and tossed it deftly into the deep basin of water in the room's
center. Daur made a move toward it and stopped-finding out who had made the talisman for him was
not, at the moment, worth the trouble it would take to fish it out of fifteen feet of murky water.
Nevertheless, irritation flickered in his eyes. "Hold out your hands."
"That really isn't necessary," Antryg assured him. "I'm on my way back anyway to have breakfast."
The youngest novice, grim-faced and fair-haired, stepped forward, sword leveled a few inches from
Antryg's breast.
"Don't be melodramatic, Gyrik, you can't possibly run me through without Aunt Min's say-so and you
haven't proven me guilty of any wrongdoing."
"Not proven?" Daurannon retorted, as Gyrik lowered his blade and stepped back, an expression of
embarrassed uncertainty on his beardless face. "We find you in conversation with a monstrous
creature from the blackest pits of nightmare ... "
"LTRX2-449-9102 is a perfectly respectable particle physicist and I'm shocked by your parochial
attitude about his appearance."
"Whoever and whatever it is, you at least have obtained weapons and magical implements in secret,
scarcely demonstrating either good faith or innocence. Whatever it is you're seeking here, it's
clear to me you'd rather the Council didn't know of it. Now hold out your hands." The younger
mage's hazel eyes glinted with a hardness that completely belied their usual facile charm. "As you
know, I am perfectly capable of cutting off your breath to the point where you'd barely have the
consciousness to be dragged after us, should you wish to accomplish this the hard way."
Antryg regarded him mildly from behind his massive spectacles. "It's a long way up all those
stairs," he pointed out. "And if I'd obtained such a power from some lost secret down here, you
wouldn't be able to do that anyway, would you?"
Daurannon opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to change his mind, and shut it again.
"Come on." Brushing aside Gyrik's still half-extended blade, Antryg put a friendly arm around
Daurannon's shoulders and started back toward the reality-fold near the Twisted Ways. "It's too
damp and cold down here to stand about talking and, as I said, I really would like some
breakfast."
However, despite Antryg's protestations that the reality-fold would take them back up to the
second level far more quickly, Bentick and Daurannon insisted on returning to the stair by which
they had come. Bentick walked ahead, the tip of his staff unlit-Antryg wondered if the omission
was because, being mageborn, they all could see in the dark, or from fear at what the light might
attract-and the three novice sasenna followed noiselessly behind.
"And have you found anything in your searches?" asked Daurannon after a time, the echoes of their
footsteps whispering after them up a short flight of steps, down a corridor whose walls dripped
with yellow slime and stank of strange, sweetish rots. "Anything of this Moving Gate which Otaro
saw, or of the powers which might account for its appearance?"
Antryg hesitated, remembering the drifting balls of red and purple light, and how they had hovered
before him; remembering Daurannon's purported absence from the Citadel at the time of Joanna's
disappearance.
"Or is that the reason you choose to seek that Gate-and to summon your ... friend ... alone?" Dark
though it was, he could see his former comrade's eyes narrowed with suspicion; see how he carried
the lead box of the spell-written manacles under his right arm, so as to leave his left arm-his
fighting arm, in Daur's case-free.
"Would you like me to carry that for you? You're sure? Is it just that you're afraid I'll find
some implement that will let me practice magic in spite of the geas, or do you still suspect me of
being Suraklin?"
"I haven't dismissed the possibility."
"Not even after seeing into my mind to lay the geas on me?"
"Suraklin had great power," said Daurannon softly. "There was no accounting for what he might have
been able to do-even as there is no accounting for you. Nandiharrow and Issay contend that with
your powers bound, there is no harm in you walking the Vaults alone, but even were that so, I'm
not so certain that whatever information you give us would be true."
Antryg sighed, shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, and looked around him at the
walls of the chamber through which they passed-nearly black with mildew, but painted over with a
pattern of snakes disturbingly reminiscent of patterns half-guessed within the labyrinth itself.


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"And I'm not certain at all that whatever information I might tell the Council wouldn't be used to
the detriment of the situation by whoever's behind this-whoever it was who kidnapped Joanna."
"A convenient excuse for keeping things to yourself," sniffed Bentick. "Why on earth would a
Council member stoop to taking hostages in the first place?"
"Perhaps because he or she feared that I could persuade someone-let's say Aunt Min for talking
purposes, if they considered her to be getting a little foolish in her old age-to lift the geas
and let me investigate as I pleased? Perhaps to get me to do their bidding against certain other
members of the Council?"
"That's preposterous!" snapped Daur.
"No more preposterous than that I-were I Suraklin, that is-would engineer a rip in the Void smack
in the middle of the Citadel of my enemies simply to disrupt their lives."
"Not 'simply,' " Daurannon said grimly. "The Citadel lies on the major ley to Angelshand and
connects with most of the major cities of the Realm. I presume the Witchfinders are on their way
here as a result of abominations that have appeared in that city."
"Oh, I shouldn't doubt it. They'd hardly be coming to talk about the Imperial government's
subsidies to the Citadel."
Daurannon stiffened with outrage at the casual mention-in front of the novices-of links known only
to the Council.
" ... or for the Council to set them on some dog wizard who's gotten too powerful."
"That's a ... "
"Be that as it may, Daur, the fact remains that something-or someone-caused the experiments of the
Council with the Void to go dreadfully wrong; that the situation is worsening steadily ... "
"You say," cut in Bentick's thin voice.
" ... and that somewhere in the Vaults a wormhole has opened through to some world whose
atmosphere is water." They had reached the bottom of the upshaft, a stone chimney ascending three
levels and entered by three small, crooked doorways. Quiet though they were, their voices
reverberated up the long vent above them and back into the darkness spidering out behind, the
darkness that was weighted with the uneasy vibration of the nearness of the Void.
Antryg turned to face Daurannon, and there was desperate intensity in his voice. "Daur, if it is
you, or Bentick, who has kidnapped Joanna for purposes of your own ... "
"How dare you!" the Steward gasped, and the young sasenna looked shocked.
" ... please, please, move her out of the Vaults if that's where she's being kept. Even without
the-the things-that I've seen down here, it's only a matter of time before the lower levels
flood." In the graying tangle of his hair his face was haggard and thin, smudged with blue beneath
the eyes and streaked with a dried thread of blood from the cut on his forehead.
"Ninetentwo-my friend-said he couldn't get a reading of her presence in the Vaults, but there's
always the chance of a shield of some kind around her cell, some spell that protects against any
kind of detection. Like you, there are things about this situation I can't account for, nobody
can. If she's here, Daur, move her ... or organize a search for her."
"So that all the Senior mages in the Citadel-the ones who know the Vaults well enough to search-
will be kept busy?" The younger mage leaned one shoulder against the rusty iron staples of the
ladder, looked up into Antryg's face, the opaque suspicion in his eyes concealing whatever might
lie behind. "We've searched before-for the Moving Gate, for clues-and have found nothing
comprehensible. What makes you think ... "
Shreb, the tallest of the three novices, screamed, "Look out!"
Antryg and Daurannon swung around in time to see something huge and soft and dreadful come
bursting out of the right-hand doorway into the upshaft, something that sprang with the horrible
swiftness of a leaping spider but whose soft, billowing body spread like a jellyfish to reveal a
ciliated mass of wriggling, saw-toothed tongues. It showed only for a second, yellow, filthy, wet,
and virtually odorless-Daurannon slashed his hand toward it ...
And nothing happened.
No lightning, no power, no help.
Antryg was ripping the novice Shreb's sword away from her even as the abomination fell upon Gyrik,
wrapping the boy's body in an obscene billow of dripping flesh. The boy screamed, thrashing and
tearing desperately-Daurannon was still staring in shock and unbelief at his hand. Bentick brought
up his staff to hurl a bolt of power at the thing, a bolt of power whose destroying nimbus would
have undoubtedly enveloped Antryg as well, had any such thing actually issued from the staff. But
none did. The third novice, a young man named Nye, had sprung forward, sword flashing like
Antryg's, to hack at the bulging membranes of the monster's body.
But the thing was tougher than it looked, and all the while Gyrik was screaming, shrieks of agony
and horror passing over into blind animal howls, appallingly muffled in the sticky folds. Blood


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had begun to run down his legs, and an instant later he collapsed to his knees, Antryg and the two
sasenna hacking and tearing at the heaving, clinging flesh of the thing while Daurannon and
Bentick stood back, armed only with their magic, making signs that called no power from the black
air, speaking words made nonsense by the agonized shrieks that greeted them.
Gyrik stopped screaming with a sobbing gurgle; the creature, its hide slit and shredded by its
attackers' swords, backed and rippled from the prostrate body, and slithered away in long,
shredded sections that moved independently, like flat, blubbery worms, leaving something that
caused Bentick to go suddenly white and Shreb to turn away and vomit. Antryg knelt beside the
eaten mess that was left of Gyrik's head and upper body, touched the stripped flesh of the boy's
face. After two more sobbing gasps, Gyrik stopped breathing.
"See to Shreb, Bentick," Antryg said softly, as Daurannon dropped to his knees beside him.
"I couldn't even call fire." Daurannon's lips were gray with shock. "I couldn't ... I can't ... "
"Then I suggest we all get ourselves out of this immediate vicinity as quickly as we can." Antryg
stood up-his hands, where he had touched the bloodied pulp that had been Gyrik's forehead, burned
a little, and he quickly pulled off his mitts and wiped his fingers on his faded plum-colored coat
skirts. "And let's hope this is just a small field effect, like the cat spell or that area of cold
Tom told me about on the stairway between the Upper Gatehouse and the Library, or we're all going
to be in a lot worse trouble than I care to think about when the Inquisition shows up."
By the time they had ascended thirty feet up the shaft, both Daurannon and Bentick were able to
summon small feathers of burning blue witchlight to the air above their heads; in the phosphor
gleam, the older man's high, smooth forehead glistened clammily and the younger man's graying
black hair was stringy with sweat. Later the fabric of Antryg's coat skirts turned brown and
crumbled in the streaks where he had wiped his fingers, and the following day his fingers were
blistered.
But by that time the knowledge that pockets existed where magic's strengths were negated, or
reversed, was the least of anyone's worries.


Chapter XI
A young wizard named Truvas sought to play a prank on his master by setting up a spell that would
cause him to get lost in his own house. The master entered the door, and after a week, young
Truvas went in to seek him. Neither was ever seen again.
-The Book of Tethys the Brown

"Curse him ... oh, curse his name ... curse him, oh, curse his name. Oh, dear God, send someone to
get me out of here ... oh, curse his name ... "
The muttering whisper grew louder as Joanna felt her way along the smooth, featureless corridor. A
woman's voice, droning and exhausted, low as if the speaker were huddled in some corner, rocking
herself like a beaten child to this threadbare litany of despair. Joanna had heard it telling over
and over to itself those same few sentences for nearly an hour, as she'd tried to get a fix on it
through the darkness-drearily, monotonously-until she was ready to scream. Sometimes it would
stop, but always it started again, not even filled with pain ... filled with nothing at all. She
had begun to suspect that the woman who crouched there in what could only be more corridor was
insane.
But it was a human voice, the first she had heard. And maddening as it quickly became, she made
her way toward it.
She had encountered other things besides human voices in her wanderings in the darkness.
She had lain weeping on the floor until she could weep no more, then had slept in her exhaustion
and despair. Waking, she found the darkness as impenetrable as before. Neither flashlight, nor
light-up digital readout, nor the matches in her purse would work; she still felt neither hunger
nor thirst. Fear swept over her in a long, familiar wave, holding her sweating and nauseated for
she had not known how long-fear of the clawing demons with their laughter, fear that she was now
utterly separated from her point of origin ... fear that these facts did not matter.
After a time-a non-time-she had gotten up and gone on.
Fear had come and gone ever since.
Some of it had been fear of meeting the demons again, or things like them: things that screamed at
her, clawed at her, chased her in the darkness. This had happened once more, and now she walked
every step in the stomach-clenching dread of the silence around her.
Once, turning a corner, she had encountered something else, something ... She knew not what. Some
vast, silent aura of waiting, some sound that was not a sound-as if something huge were holding
its breath, a filthy, living silence. But a silence that drew her as if against her will.


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As she'd stood there wondering if this was her imagination, if this was madness, she had felt a
hideous sensation as if life, energy, her will, and the very electromagnetic heat of her body's
chemistry were being pulled at-with a gruesome sensation of inner tugging, as if whatever it was
that lay unseen in the horrible night before her wanted the life out of her flesh, down to its
tiniest, most animal cellular energies. She had had a sense-and she didn't know why-of obscene
vastness, as if she stood close to some enormous black yearning at whose center gaped a well that
could never be filled, that would draw everything and anything into itself.
She had backed away, trembling, and in the dark before her, though she still heard no sound, she
thought she could sense it move.
And she had run again, run and run and run, desperately turning and twisting in the winding
corridors, queasy with the thought that she might have run in a circle and would stumble smack
into it-or into something worse-from the other side ...
And then she had heard the whispering, the dreary mutter of another human voice.
And had stumbled, seeking it, her mind conjuring scenario after scenario from the fertile fields
of Hollywood horrors.
The dark thing, the silent thing, the energy-drawing thing, could mimic human voices.
Whoever had put her here had put a tape recorder here, too, with an endless tape loop-never mind
why. Maybe just to hear her burst into tears of despair when she found it.
She'd find some haggard crone in rags who'd been rocking to herself, muttering to herself, for
ninety years.
"Curse him, curse him, oh, curse his name ... oh, God, please get me out of this ... God, send
someone to get me out of this ... Oh, curse his name ... "
"Who's there?" Her own voice sounded loud, queer, unreal in her ears.
"Who is it? Oh, who is it?" sobbed a voice-Not a tape loop, anyway-and a moment later there came a
thick, heavy rustling of cloth, the froufrou of taffeta and a fusty smell of powder, perfume, and
the slightly dusty odor of silk. A hand touched her extended hand, groping and fumbling in the
dark ... Good. It really is dark. I'm not blind. A woman's hand, soft and well cared for, with
long nails and a bracelet of what felt like pearls.
"My name is Joanna Sheraton."
"Are you his prisoner, too?" she whispered. "Is your husband also one of his enemies? I know my
husband will give him what he wants." The hands were all over her, clinging, pawing, patting, like
an ill-mannered child's; grabbing handfuls of her hair, fumbling at her mouth, until Joanna seized
them by the wrists and pushed them away. There was no resistance, and there was something very
childish about that, too.
"When he talks to my husband-to my Gwimat-Gwimat will come to terms with him. His terms aren't so
very unreasonable ... it's only the waiting I can't stand. It seems so long ... it seems like I've
been here forever ... oh, curse him, curse his name ... "
"Who are you?" Joanna asked. She felt at the woman's arms in her turn, careful not to let her
start pawing again, something Joanna hated because it reminded her of her mother's intrusive,
fussy fingering and straightening of her clothes and hair. She felt plump, rounded arms in smooth,
slippery fabric, the scratchiness of lace at the elbows. She'd worn dresses like that herself,
when she'd been in Antryg's world under his protection. The woman threw her arms around Joanna,
clutching her close, her face pressed to her shoulder-slightly taller than she, her long hair
disheveled and spiky with jeweled hairpins.
"Oh, curse him, curse his name ... I know it was he. I know he took me prisoner. It has to have
been him." Joanna turned her face aside but suffered herself to be held. Only lately had she
realized how desperately most people-herself included-needed to be held. Only, she realized, from
the unselfconscious physicalness of Antryg's hugs and her own delight in hugging him in return.
"He knew my husband was working against him, you see; he brought me here, left me here, to
blackmail Gwimat. And as soon as Gwimat hears his terms, of course he'll do as he asks to get me
back. He'll do anything to get me back. It's just the waiting that's so hard for me, I never had
any patience, never. God sent you, my dear, God sent you to help me bear this in patience ... "
"Who are you?" Joanna asked again, gently disengaging herself. "And who put you here? And where
are we?"
But the woman was already sinking to the floor in a vast billow of satin skirts and rustling
petticoats, rocking and moaning and cursing the name of the man she would not name, clinging to
Joanna with her perfumed hands and trying to make her sit, too. Try as she would-and she did try
for some time-Joanna could get no sense out of her, only endless wailings and whispered
mutterings, the same few sentences over and over that she had already heard repeated endlessly:
her husband would come to get her out, her husband wouldn't allow him to keep her prisoner-she
found the waiting so difficult.


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After what felt like endless time Joanna extricated herself, not without difficulty, from the
clutching grip and moved away into the sightless labyrinth once again. Her pajamas held the
cloying sweetness of the woman's perfume, a reminder of her presence, like the mumblings fading
behind her. When she was still within earshot she took another spool of thread from her purse and
taped one end to the wall. She might in time, she reflected uneasily, become desperate enough even
to long for such company and want to find her way back.
But as she unreeled the thread-that meticulous guide through the darkness of nowhere, a guide from
nothing back to nothing-she wondered how soon it would be before she herself sat down against some
wall and started muttering.
"Joanna!"
Startled nearly out of her skin, she swung around, flattening to the wall behind her, thoughts
splashing through her mind-the dark thing that drew at her life, mimicry of voices, how did it
know my name ... ? Why does the voice sound familiar ... ?
"Joanna Sheraton?" The voice in the darkness was known but unplaceable, male, a pleasant and well-
trained light baritone. What made her think of an actor ... ?
"It's me. Magister Magus. Is that Joanna Sheraton ... ?"
"Magus!" she sobbed. "Here ... I'm here ... "
A hesitant hand touched her shoulder; she caught the wrist in a gesture that even as she made it
felt horribly like the madwoman she had just left. The arm was cased in what felt like the sleeve
of an expensively quilted and corded velvet dressing gown. To hell with it, she thought, and flung
her arms around the slender waist and hugged the little dog wizard tight. He gathered her to him,
as grateful as she for the human contact in spite of the fact that at their last encounter she'd
been responsible for nearly getting his skull cracked for him. Against her temple she felt the
scratchiness of his close-trimmed black-and-silver beard.
"My dear, dear girl ... "
"Magus, what the hell is going on?" Her words came out as a sob. "Where are we, who the hell was
that woman, what are we doing here?"
She felt his body relax a little in her grip, felt a kind of tension go out of him, his slender
shoulders slumping. His breath escaped him in a sigh. "Oh," he said in a discouraged voice. "You
don't know?"
Dammit, she thought, knowing what he was about to say. Dammit, dammit, dammit ... "You mean you
don't know, either?"
"Well," he said after a moment, "I know where we are, and I've got a good guess who that woman is.
But as to why we were brought here ... "
"Look, right now any information is better than stumbling around in the dark waiting to run into
that ... that thing ... "
"What thing?" But by the uneasiness in his voice she guessed he'd felt its power, too. He had
stepped back, but his hands still held hers; she felt the tapered fingers, forever innocent of
manual toil, stroke the soft skin of her own hands.
"The thing that ... I don't know. Something in the dark. Something that ... it felt like if I got
close to it, it would draw out my life, draw out everything in me."
"Ah," the Magus breathed, "so it wasn't my imagination. I was afraid ... "
As ineffectual as this friend of Antryg's could be in an emergency, her delight in meeting him was
unalloyed. Magister Magus might be a dog wizard, with a dog wizard's uncertain and frequently
inaccurate training-he certainly was no more than a charlatan who made a royal living telling
fortunes and peddling love potions, simple nostrums and fortune-cookie advice to the more
superstitious members of the Regent's court in Angelshand-but in times past he had been a friend
to Antryg and a friend to her when they were in need. Even had this not been the case, even had
the Magus been a total stranger in this dark maze, he was, at least, sane and kind. And he did
know something about the situation.
"What was it?" she asked.
"I believe," he said after a moment, "that it has to have been the tsaeati ... " And the Spell of
Tongues, whose aura still clung to her from long association with Antryg, translated the word to
her mind from some archaic variant of an ancient speech as devourer or glutton.
"It was said to be indestructible. It devoured everything which came in its path and turned
everything-fire, lightning, the magic of the wizards who fought against it-back upon its
attackers, until Berengis the Black imprisoned it in a crystal called the Brown Star, where it is
apparently technically impossible for anything to devour anything."
"And the Brown Star is where we are now?" Joanna asked. "I mean, it may not be impossible to
devour something, but I certainly haven't been either hungry or thirsty since I got here, and I
must have been here for days. And," she added, "the matches in my purse don't work, so there seems


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to be some kind of bar to the transformation of energy ... technically, the sulfur of the match
tip won't oxidize."
"Precisely," the Magus agreed, his voice radiating a scientific cheerfulness Joanna was far from
feeling.
"That still doesn't answer what we're doing in the Brown Star."
She heard him sigh again, felt it through the arm he still held clasped around her shoulders.
"Well ... Berengis the Black was a court wizard to the Lords Caeline, and the Brown Star, after
hundreds of years, must have fallen into the hands of Suraklin the Dark Mage. At least, people
disappeared whose very bodies were never traced-or, on the rare occasions when he did return
someone he'd kidnapped, they could never tell where they had been or how long they had been there.
That woman, whom I believe is Irina Siltrayne, the wife of one of the Dark Mage's enemies, seems
to bear me out. At least, she disappeared literally days before the Council wizards and the
Emperor's men descended upon Suraklin's Citadel. No trace of her was ever found."
"Oh, Jesus," Joanna whispered, horrified. "You mean the poor woman's been in here, waiting to be
rescued, for twenty-five years? With those demons, and that ... that tsaeati ... ?"
"So it appears," Magister Magus said somberly. " I've tried to get some sense out of her several
times since I've been in here ... "
"Oh, God." Joanna shivered. "That long ... " She was silent a moment, trying to comprehend and,
when comprehension seemed imminent, trying not to. "But how did you end up here? And me, for that
matter?"
"Well," the little dog wizard said after a moment, "that's rather a long story. You know that
Salteris, the Archmage, disappeared-and later word reached the mages in Angelshand that he was
dead. Some said Antryg murdered him, which is ridiculous on the face of it. He worshiped
Salteris."
"No," Joanna said quietly. "Yes, he did love Salteris like a father ... but it's also true that he
killed him. I'll explain later."
Magus was silent for a time. Joanna led the way over to the wall and settled herself on the floor
with her back to it, the dog wizard sitting at her side. As he did so his bare foot brushed hers,
and the hem of what was almost certainly a very splendid bathrobe-she thought it was the black
velvet one he'd worn in the mornings, the few days she'd stayed with him in his house in
Angelshand six months ago, plush and luxurious with cuffs and collar of green silk trapunto that
turned to emerald the light, clear green of his eyes.
At length he said, "Well, in any case word reached me that Salteris was dead. I had just returned
to Angelshand after ... er ... a stay on one of Prince Cerdic's estates." He hesitated, the flex
of his voice carrying the unpleasantness of the memory of being enslaved by the wizard Gaire-the
wizard Joanna and very few others believed to have been in actuality Suraklin.
"In any event the mages were in a tizzy-they left the Mages' Yard, and one night I ... Well, to
make a long story short, I broke into Salteris' house in search of what I could find. I was in
quest of books, mostly. I may be a dog wizard, but I do have some powers ... "
"I know," Joanna said softly. "Antryg always said you would be one of the best of the Academics,
if you'd consented to take the Council vows."
"And a lot of good they would have done me," grumbled the mage. "Swearing you'll never make a
living off the one true talent you have in exchange for them teaching you, as if they were
conferring a favor. Well. I ... I wanted more. I wanted to learn, and I wanted ... implements.
Objects. Teles-balls, specifically. Salteris was said to own three. Things that would give me
power enough to prevent being enslaved again or cracked over the head by impudent young sasenna
who ought to have more respect for their elders."
"Have you seen Caris?" interrupted Joanna, ducking discussion of that last, disastrous parting in
the Prince's house at Devilsgate Manor. "Is he well?"
"As well as a sasennan can be who's lost the use of one hand." In spite of his private feelings,
Joanna could hear the genuine pity in her friend's voice. Then, more cheerfully, he continued,
"He's training to be a healer these days, I hear. There have been rumors, off and on, about him
and the Regent's wife, Pellicida, but he's so very stolid and she's so extremely pregnant, that I
suspect they're not really much fun as a source of gossip, and besides, Pellicida seems to be the
only woman the Regent likes or respects. Where was I? Oh, the Brown Star ..."
He sighed. "The Brown Star was one of the things that I found at Salteris'. It was hidden in a
cupboard with a catch and a spring-it must have been masked with spells as well, until Salteris
died. He'd quite clearly picked it up when the Council broke Suraklin's Citadel ... "
"No," said Joanna. "No, I think ... It's a long story. But if Antryg was right-if Suraklin took
over the bodies of first the Emperor, and then years later of Salteris himself, I think the Brown
Star must have been something he brought away from the Citadel himself. But in either case ... "


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"In either case," Magister Magus sighed, "it fell into my hands."
There was momentary silence.
"I think," Joanna said at last, "that I can smell a bad case of Instant Karma in the making."
"As you say." His voice had a discouraged note. "I don't know how long ago it was-weeks, months
... It could have been years; in this darkness it is impossible to tell. I was awakened by a sound
in the middle of the night; I crept down to my study, where I had left the Star, quite well
secured in a secret compartment of my own desk. And ... I don't recall exactly what happened.
Sometimes I think I remember a dark form standing by the desk, turning toward me. Sometimes I
think that's only what I know must have happened. Then I was ... here."
Joanna sighed and gave him an outline of the events leading up to her own nightmare awakening. "So
you see, my being here has got to have something to do with Antryg. You ... I don't know. I
suspect you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and let that be a lesson to you about
swiping magical implements that don't belong to you."
"You're starting to sound like that lunatic lover of yours," Magus said glumly. There was another
silence, broken by the far-off shrieking laugh of demons-other creatures, Joanna guessed, that
some wizard, unable to destroy them by any other means, had simply dumped in here, not thinking
about what else might have been imprisoned in the crystal in the course of the years. She wondered
if the tsaeati had drawn out poor Lady Irina's mind, leaving her mumbling in the remnants of what
few memories were left; wondered if there were others, placed in the crystal by God knew who in
the centuries of its existence and forgotten ... others who had ceased to mutter, who only lay
silently waiting.
"The one shred of comfort I can take from this," Magister Magus said after some moments, "other
than the sheer pleasure of your company, though of course I wish that the meeting were in other
circumstances, and I'm certainly sorry that you have been placed in this horrible position ... "
"Not as sorry as I am, believe me."
He gave the ghost of a chuckle. "The one shred of comfort I do draw is that I have never known
Antryg to abandon a friend. He loves you, Joanna-and he is a very powerful mage indeed. I have
known him for years, and I know that he will attempt rescue at the cost of his life."
"It's inspiring to know that," Joanna said with a sigh. "But if he does attempt rescue, and it
does cost him his life before he figures out where the hell we are ... where does that leave us?"
"I wish you wouldn't say things like that," the wizard muttered, and they lapsed into pessimistic
silence.


Chapter XII
All magic is balance. The power which summons the wind and rain, which calls forth fire, which
alters the random chains of circumstance, must come from somewhere: the energy of the stars, of
the earth, of the blood and bone and life of the Summoner. Likewise all which happens, happens to
something or someone-the rain which nourishes crops, floods streams and prevents messages from
being delivered in time; the fire which warms, consumes the wood; the smallest trains of
circumstance start other trains leading to goals that cannot be predicted. All this must be
remembered by the mage.
-Isar Chelladin
Precepts of Wizardry

Though it could not have been more than five in the morning when a very shaken pair of sasenna
escorted Antryg back to the Pepper-Grinder, daylight was already broad in the sky. He thanked
Shreb and Nye and offered them tea, which they declined after a moment's confusion-it was not
customary to offer sasenna food or drink while they were on duty, any more than someone would have
offered them to a sword that stood in a corner or to a servant: sasenna were considered, by
themselves as much as by those to whom they swore their vows, as a combination of the two. Once
they had gone, Antryg collected his two finest pinwheels-a red one and an astonishing double
spiral that turned in both directions at once-gathered an armful of looserife and poppies bound
together with the trailing vines of honeysweet, and made his way up to the silent bulk of the
Library tower to deposit the whole in the scriptorium before Seldes Katne's locked door.
That done, he fetched a clean shirt and made his way back down the tiny, zigzagging wooden
stairways through ivy and raspberry bramble, to the baths stuck like a random half-timbered arm
where the Polygon reared up against the southern limb of the hill.
He shaved and bathed and felt rather better, though tired to the marrow of his bones; descending
to the kitchen, he begged muffins and tea from Pothatch and sat at the Juniors' table in the big,
half-empty hall of the refectory, listening to the talk. There was shock and horror and a huge


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confusion of rumor about the death of Gyrik; briefly and quietly, he told the story to the half-
dozen young people at the table with him. Gyrik had been a well-liked boy, but there was more than
that; a nervous undercurrent of glances ran among them at the thought that magic itself would
fail.
"I guess that's why Phormion isn't here," Gilda remarked, glancing along the plastered hall to the
small knot of Senior mages at the upper table. "He was one of her best students."
"I don't know if that was the reason," Brunus argued, looking up from the lists he'd been studying
even while shoveling down bacon, porridge, and fruit. "She hasn't taught the last two days."
"And she looked terrible that last day when she did teach," added Cylin, a tall, very serious
young Junior from Senter-wing.
Brunus nodded. "Not sick, but nervous," he explained, at Antryg's eyebrowed question. "She kept
looking over her shoulder, though we were up on the observatory platform and the stair from the
Library is really the only way up. She must have jumped a foot when Brighthand spoke to her from
behind."
He frowned, earnestly stirring milk into his tea. He was another, Antryg noticed, of what Lady
Rosamund, in her own novice days, had referred to only half in jest as "the milk brigade." The
aristocracy, and those of the bourgeois who aped them, drank pale Oriental tea or thick bitter
coffee black-pure, the arbiters of tea described it-or at most with tiny amounts of white sugar;
peasants swilled honey-laced caravan tea by the tankard and chewed sugar afterward if they could
get it, as Antryg was doing now. Cutting tea or coffee with milk was an urban trick, indulged in
by low-class tradesmen at best.
Glancing around, Antryg noticed that neither Otaro nor Brighthand was present in the hall.
Nor were Q'iin or Whitwell Simm, Seldes Katne or Issay Bel-Caire or any of several dozen others,
or the Archmage herself, for that matter. But still ...
Kyra the Red and Cylin's featherbrained friend Mick joined them, to add their mite to the
conversation: very early that morning all three of the Citadel dairymaids and Tom the gardener had
gotten lost in the twenty yards of ground between his cowsheds and the stairs up to the back door
of the kitchen, wandering helplessly among the weathered fences and sheds full of winter fodder
until Tom, by dint of a piece of string he'd had in his pockets, had managed to find his way out
of the spell-field and summon Nandiharrow to disperse the magical infusion that hung over that
spot. Two of the milkmaids had left the Citadel without even pouring the milk into settling pans.
"Well, one of the first-years might have done that," Gilda said, and Kyra brushed the suggestion
aside with a wave that very nearly overset the teapot.
"I don't think even the youngest of them would play a prank like that on non-wizards," she said,
as Mick and Cylin made simultaneous, rescuing grabs at the crockery. "It's too easy, for one
thing. Really, Mick, you're getting very good at that, now, putting down a field that would get a
Senior lost ... "
And there was momentary, contemplative silence.
"How would you keep from getting caught?" Mick asked, lis blue eyes bright.
"You'd need a four-corner talisman system ... "
"And some kind of a non-personal sourcing ... "
"I think," Antryg said regretfully, "that this discussion had better remain academic, at least for
the time being."
They looked disappointed but nodded-Antryg guessed, however, that when the current crisis was
over, there would be a time of more than usual navigational difficulties around the Citadel. He
recalled the extremely localized rainstorms that had enlivened his and Daur's second summer here.
No wonder there were fragments of odd old spells everywhere on the tor, floating back to life.
He made his way back to the Pepper-Grinder, the need for sleep weighing like a triple-thick shirt
of mail upon his shoulders. Last night's concoction of jelgeth root had long since worn off; he
brewed, on the tiny hearth, a tisane of the second packet of herbs Q'iin had given him, drank it,
collected a pillow from his room, and made his way down the concealed stair in the wall to the
subcellar. From there a tiny doorway let him, by means of a hidden passage, through into the attic
of the Isle of Butterflies, where he made a bed of the contents of a trunkful of ancient coats
beneath one of the corridorlike chamber's tiny dormer windows.
The tisane worked quite well, as far as it went; until nearly the end, his dreams were merely
disquieting, filled with dripping darkness, filth, and insects, and a familiar voice whispering
his name. Once, clear and heartrending, he saw himself walking hand-in-hand with Joanna down the
sidewalks of Melrose Avenue through the garish neon darkness and blowing electricity of the Santa
Ana winds, while she explained to him the unimaginable contents of shop windows and they giggled
so hard they had to prop each other up. But the dream melted, segueing into the face of a woman
named Rheatha, with whom he'd stayed during the Mellidane Revolts-a woman who'd been killed by the


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Emperor's soldiers because she had sheltered him. He saw himself stumbling down a blood-trail in
the Citadel Vaults, as he had stumbled through that looted house in the south all those years ago,
finding a severed foot, a hand with the rings still bloodied on the fingers ... a head lying in a
huge pool of gore that matted its long, curly hair. He tried desperately to prevent himself from
picking it up, from turning it to see whose face it was ... He managed to wake up, gasping and
shaking all over, before he saw.
Or, waking, he managed to blot the last second from his mind.
A skinny stick of primrose light stabbed obliquely down through the dormer window. Already the sun
had shifted west over the peak of the Citadel hill.
"Well," Antryg murmured shakily, lying back again on the piled scratchiness of old velvets, plush,
and braid, "we'll brew that tisane a little stronger next time."

Returning to the Pepper-Grinder, he collected the books he'd borrowed from Seldes Katne and
settled himself in the bare, cleared expanse of the smaller of the two upstairs chambers.
Starting, as was his custom, in a corner of the room, he proceeded to work out with chalk, first
on the floor, later spreading to three of the four walls, the theoretical constructs of a spell
necessary to deceive finite quantities of energy into believing that they should behave in one
fashion rather than another. The geas, at least, had not hampered his adeptness with magical
theory, and his study of optics and physics in Joanna's world helped enormously; still, at the end
of the endless spring afternoon when he ultimately transferred the final procedures, patterns, and
power-circles to paper, he felt as if he'd spent the larger part of the day getting himself
pummeled to exhaustion in sword practice.
And no nearer, he thought, to locating Joanna.
"I looked for you earlier," Seldes Katne said, bringing him up tea and honey, bread and soft white
cheese just as he finished; they sat on the floor of the upstairs gallery overlooking the small
hall below. Kyra had spent the morning down there memorizing her lists but had gone off since to
an astronomy lecture given by Pharne Pordanches, in Phormion Starmistress' continued absence. "I'm
coming along on the list of teles, but it's slow. Individual mages make reference to them in their
grimoires and histories, but no one's made a catalog of them, any more than they'd catalog the
dishes in the dining hall."
"The difference being that one doesn't use the dishes in the dining hall to work magic with,"
Antryg said, meticulously smearing cheese on a thick-crusted roll and acquiring long streaks of it
on the tarnished gilding of his coat cuffs. "At least, not as a general rule, though Daur and I
used to get quite good conjurations using staghorn, nitrous salts, and powdered violets in those
little bowls Pothatch cooks jam puddings in. It never seemed to work as well in the salad dishes.
It is my eternal regret that nobody here has yet invented peanut butter; if I have time between
avoiding the Inquisition, finding Joanna, and locating the power-circles which are keeping the
Moving Gate jammed open-if the Moving Gate is in fact the source and not merely a symptom of the
problem-I'll have to talk to Pothatch about it."
"What do you mean," Seldes Katne asked slowly, "If the Moving Gate is the source of the problem?"
Antryg regarded her with surprise. "Well, it may not be, you know," he said. "It may simply be
another aberrance. I'll be able to tell a great deal once the field is stabilized and I can locate
the thing."
He licked a drop of honey from his long fingers. Pothatch, who was also in charge of the baths,
had bandaged his arm for him and patched the skirts and the sleeve of his coat, the squares of
green flowered calico standing out glaringly against the plum-colored velvet.
"A pity you can't ... well, use powers from one of the Gates themselves, from one of these other
worlds, to get around the geas."
Antryg hesitated for a long time, frowning into the shadowy spaces of the rafters opposite the
gallery where they sat. "It is something I had thought of," he admitted at last and looked
sidelong at the stumpy little woman sitting beside him, hershort fingers toying nervously with
the end of her long, graying braid. He saw in her face what he recognized from shaving his own-the
tired lines and bruised look about the eyelids, the mark of poor sleep or none. Her usual
placidity had given way to a look of strain and nervousness, but that, he thought, was hardly
unique in the Citadel now. With her quarters slap over the Vorplek Line, she must be prey to
constant, low-grade spill off from the pressure of the Void.
He did note that she hadn't worn any of the flowers he'd brought her, but then, he hadn't really
expected she would.
"It wouldn't answer, you know." He set down his bread and honey, stared for a time into the
mahogany depths of his tea. "I suppose magic could be brought from another universe into our own,
though I doubt such magic would overcome the Council's geas on my mind. But even if I weren't


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afraid of further disrupting an already hazardously unstable situation, I would never try it."
"I thought you of all people ... "
He shook his head. "There may have been a time-many years ago-when I might have. But, Kitty, we're
already awash here in the effects of our own magic, which we don't understand. Magic from some
other universe, some other type of magic, with different rules, different laws from our own ...
There are spells in this world that drive those who use them mad or have peculiar side effects
like summoning cats or God only knows what. What would magic from another universe do?"
He drank off the tea-it was nearly as bitter as the jelgeth had been, but the caffeine, he
reflected, would clear his head-and folded his arms around his knees in their shabby jeans, a
scarecrow shape reminiscent of a curled-up crane fly, with his spectacle lenses flashing in the
blue-gray dimness of the gallery and his earrings like chips of broken diamond in the tangle of
his hair. "If it weren't for the fact that Joanna needs my help, I'd be inclined to agree with the
Council in putting me under a geas, you know. I murdered six men and two women by means of magic-
they were guards," he added, seeing the look of shocked horror on her face. "They had orders to
kill us and we could not allow ourselves to be taken, not then. Too much depended on us ... at
least, if my perception of the situation was correct, it did, though from first to last it might
only have been one of my delusions. But the fact remains that I did use my magic to take the lives
of people who weren't expecting magic-who probably no more than half believed in it. I was
desperate, but that's not really a valid excuse. Some people have very low thresholds of
desperation."
His gaze returned to the shadows of the rafters; situated on the east side of the tor, the Pepper-
Grinder was already settling into a soft blur of shadow, though through the windows the sunlight
lay jewel-bright on the somber green-black of the pine trees far below and blinked like diamonds
on the Crooked River's swift brown flood.
He sighed, not really wanting to admit what he knew to be true. "The thing is, the more I deal
with magic, the more I come to the conclusion that the Council is probably right."
Seldes Katne said nothing, but he could almost feel her thoughts. Easy for you, who have always
had magic at your call, to say. And there was nothing much he could say to her of that.

Pockets bulging with scribbled notes, Antryg and Seldes Katne ran Aunt Min to earth in the Council
chamber. As they entered the round, white-pillared marble room from the gloom of the stairwell,
Antryg recognized the voice of Trukild, the headman of Wychstanes Village, anxiously saying, "Be
that as it may, my lady ... all I'm saying is, if it keeps up, I can't be answerable for what may
happen."
Of medium height, broad, square-faced and freckled under a beard like a holly bush, Trukild was a
bigger version of his second cousin Pothatch the cook, done in brown rather than red. The
ineradicable peasant stench of smoke and cattle emanated from his clothing and person and seemed
to fill the room. Since the long ibeks-the barnlike dwellings occupied by three and four
generations of Sykerst families plus Dutch uncles, hired hands, and remoter connections-were
shared with the livestock down on the ground floor and filled with the smoke of the huge tiled
stoves for the seven months of winter every year, this was understandable. Smoke was considered
healthy and seldom allowed to escape, and Antryg had never lost his faint nostalgia at that
particular pungent combination of stinks.
"It's not just they're afraid to come here through the woods, Lady." Trukild turned his shapeless
felt hat 'round and 'round between callused hands as Antryg and Seldes Katne slipped quietly
through the door. As before, the windowless chamber was bathed in soft, cool, shadowless light,
picking out every thread of grain in the waxed oak council table, every frayed spot of the
Archmage's worn robe and every wrinkle of that dried-apple face.
"What with the things that have been seen, out near the Green King's Chapel, and the filthy
unnatural creature Gru and his hunters shot out in the woods near the Imp-Stones," he nodded back
to where Gru Gwidion, the black-bearded chief hunter of the village, and two of his men, stood
beside one of the circle of marble pillars that made an inner, headless colonnade around the walls
of the room, "I don't blame 'em, but there's more than that. They're saying that your magics are
the cause of it."
"That is ridiculous on the face of it," Bentick replied crisply from his post to the left of Aunt
Min's big carven chair.
"The logic of your villagers overwhelms me." On Aunt Min's right, Lady Rosamund folded her arms,
the fine wool of her sleeves catching a pewter sheen. Antryg noted, not for the first time, that
the collar of the shift protruding above her all-encompassing robe was a plain, dark calico, while
Daurannon's was white and finished with a modish ruffle. "The same people who have lived near us
time out of mind, who have come and gone from the Citadel, whose holidays have been made cheerier


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by what we've paid them for eggs and milk and meat; the same people whose sons and daughters have
worked here among us, who can testify that we cannot and do not tamper with human affairs ever-and
I do not know how many village boys have plagued us over the years to sell them love-potions-they
think we've suddenly decided to abandon six hundred years of teaching and precepts simply for the
satisfaction of plaguing them." Her delicate oval face was pale with anger, making the black
butterfly-wing brows, the sooty veils of lashes, stand out as if inked.
Beside and a little behind her, Daurannon said nothing, but those large hazel eyes, which looked
so expressive and were actually such a perfect mask, flicked watchfully from one face to another.
Trukild eyed the Lady unflinchingly. "I'm not saying they're right ... "
"Are you saying they're wrong? Saying it to them, I mean, when they talk about ... what do they
talk about doing?" she added, her low voice, sweet as a struck jade chime, flexing with scorn.
"Coming up here with torches? I hope they enjoy long walks in foggy woods! Or do they just plan on
selling one another their surplus eggs and butter from here on out? I tremble!"
"Rosie, Rosie," Aunt Min murmured, raising her faded china blue gaze to her pupil, her head
slightly cocked on the bent stem of her spine. "Can you blame them for fearing, when strange
abominations are seen in the woods? They say things they could not see attacked children in the
twilight near Gruddle Bog, and their cattle are being killed, bled white and half eaten alive. Can
you blame them for turning upon that which they do not know?"
"I can blame them for attributing the matter to our malice, after all the years we have
demonstrated our goodwill," her ladyship said in arctic tones. "Like the Emperor's Regent, who
turned our people out of the cities, all for the deeds of one renegade dog wizard." Her glance cut
viciously at Antryg, standing, hands in pockets, near the door. "What must we do, to escape blame
for all the ills that people do not care to take onto themselves or attribute to impersonal Fate?
Surrender our powers entirely? Go live in a place even more deserted than this, if there is one?"
Aunt Min held up her hand, stilling the icy passion of the younger woman's words. Then she turned,
to hold out the twisted arthritic fingers to the big man in his crudely painted sheepskin coat who
stood before her. Though her knitting basket of willow twigs, running over as usual with hanks of
silks and wools spun and unspun, lay at her feet, she had not been working as Trukild had spoken;
now she smiled at him, and in it was the echo of the warmth that had drawn nobles from an
Emperor's court down to the taverns of the Algoswive quarter where, long ago in another century,
another world, she had danced.
"You are good," she said in her katydid voice, "to come out and give us warning of how your people
feel; I swear to you we'll do all to help that we can. Daur, my child ... "
The younger mage stepped forward.
"Would you see to it that some of the boys and girls take weapons and go out to the woods, and
hunt for sight of abominations, along the Brehon Line and out near the Imp-Stones, and near the
Gruddle Bog? The Line ... there'll be faulting all along the Line, out to the Green King's Chapel
and beyond."
"Thank you, my lady." Trukild bowed clumsily amid a creaking of boiled-leather belts. "I'll do
such as I can with the village men." Gru Gwidion and his two hunters stepped up behind him,
preparing to follow him from the chamber. Their eyes, Antryg noticed, were hard with suspicion as
they scanned the faces of the four wizards gathered before them in the Council chamber's white,
sourceless radiance.
"You must pardon them," the headman added, turning back from the door. "But it's hard not to fear,
you know. Yes, we've lived nigh the Citadel for generations, we know you and have heard all the
tales from our parents and grandfolks. But you yourself know it's not something you can understand
unless you're born in it, raised in it-like a city lady, begging your pardon, my Lady Rosamund,
trying to understand us country folk. We're like cattle grazing the banks, watching the dolphins
in the sea."

"Much he knows of it," Lady Rosamund muttered, after the headman and his bearded hunters had
gathered their crossbows and blunderbusses and taken their leave. She touched the raven braids at
her temples, the gold pins-the only reminiscence of her girlhood-glinting in the sable flood.
"Cows may graze upon the bank, but they do not presume to pass judgment upon the dolphins."
"Oh, I don't know." Antryg unfolded his long arms and came forward into the room. "You're
presuming a little about cows: have you ever asked one for her opinion about dolphins? Or
anything, for that matter? I knew a Whisperer in Pretty Creek once who claimed to be able to
converse with cows, though she said on the whole their conversation was extremely boring and
morally unedifying ... though not, she said, as unedifying as cats'. Aunt Min ... "
He bowed to her, and she left off fussing about, trying to reach her knitting basket, to look up
at him.


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"Antreges." She used the softened diminutive as Suraklin had. "The abominations out in the woods
... you should know of them."
"As it happens," he said, bowing in a great sweep of coat skirts and shawl, "I've been working at
a way of stabilizing the field so the situation won't worsen-as it has been doing-and so all
things will remain in place while a thorough search can be made, not only of the Vaults but of the
Citadel itself and of the countryside around. The nexus of the trouble may be in the Vaults, but
since energy is transmitted instantaneously along all the ley-lines-as Trukild was saying,
abominations are appearing in the woods north of the village, so obviously ... "
"No," Rosamund said, her voice like chipped flint.
"This is balderdash," Daurannon stated, after a quick glance through the papers he had snatched
from Antryg's hand. "These aren't even real spells, the energy isn't grounded off ... "
"What exactly are you looking for?" Bentick demanded in a voice that bordered on shrillness, and
his long fingers quivered as they sought the watch about his neck. Though the Steward had been
twitchy for as long as Antryg had known him-well over twenty years-since yesterday his dark eyes
had acquired a haunted look, and he'd picked up the trick of glancing nervously around the room.
The result of seeing a boy whom he'd taught slaughtered horribly before his helpless eyes? Antryg
wondered. Of learning that his own powers could fail? Or from some other cause?
Antryg replied airily, "Oh, I'm afraid I won't know that until I see it."
"I daresay." Daurannon studied his face for a long moment, the sheaf of papers held so that their
raggedy edges touched his cupid lips. Then Aunt Min stretched forth one shaky, blue-veined hand,
and almost unwillingly, the younger mage passed the papers on to her. His eyes never left
Antryg's. "And I suppose you're to head up this search and have access to everything that's
found?"
Over Aunt Min's shoulder, Lady Rosamund said quietly, "I can't let you do this. I've never seen
power-circles like those in my life, you have no idea what they'll do."
Antryg regarded her with limpid innocence in his gaze. "I do." He turned back to Daurannon. "Well,
that is why you brought me here."
"The Council voted to bring you here," replied the Handsome One with icy precision, "for your
advice on the problem, not to permit you to rummage through every secret in the Citadel's Vaults.
There are things down there even the Archmage no longer understands-but that Suraklin, or his
student, might well have been waiting for years to get his hands on."
"Come with me, then," Antryg said cheerily. "All of you come with me."
"I take it," put in Lady Rosamund, looking up from the scribbled papers like a queen cornered by a
barbarian in a sacked palace, "that you came here to ask the Archmage to actually execute these
spells of yours."
"Well," Antryg pointed out, "I'd be delighted to do it myself, but the geas has made that rather
difficult."
"I should say rather," Daurannon murmured, "that some member of the Council should head up the
search, and that whatever is found is reviewed by the Council as a whole before being passed along
to you."
"An excellent suggestion!" Bentick said, rather too quickly, Antryg thought, but then, the Steward
had always distrusted him and had probably been one of the original dissenting votes about
bringing him here in the first place. "That way disruption could be kept to a minimum."
"Disruption?" Antryg's eyebrows vanished into the curly mop of his hair. "You don't consider
novices being eaten by monsters in the Vaults sufficient disruption, to say nothing of everyone
having to do their own milking and weed pulling? It is a splendid idea, Daur, except that it won't
work. I need to be in the Vaults, and I need to see everything-everything-that is found."
"Because we have only your word on what is important?"
"That was the entire reason you dragged me here," Antryg retorted. "Because you do have only my
word-my word or nothing. And personally, I would just as soon have this done as quickly as
possible, because not only is the situation in the Vaults deteriorating, but the geas isn't the
most pleasant thing in the world to live with ... "
"You speak as if you feel you have some sort of right to be released from the geas afterward,"
Bentick said. His dark eyes, which had flickered back and forth from face to face during the
discussion, with an anxiety very unlike his usual bossy self, turned cold and prim again. "As if
you think that it will be your right to go free ... "
"THEN KILL ME!" Antryg cried passionately, shaken suddenly with the cumulative effects of fatigue
and dream-racked, unhealing sleep. The three wizards fell silent, moving back a step to close
ranks against him, suspicious, hostile, and chill. Among them Aunt Min bent calmly over the jumble
of notes in her hands, shuffling them and letting them fall from her grip to float like huge, lazy
yellow leaves around her chair as if none of this matter concerned her. Not, Antryg reflected,


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that he was foolish enough to think for a moment that she wasn't paying attention to every word
uttered.
After a moment he drew breath and went on, "But not until the field has been stabilized and the
entire Citadel, from turrets to Vaults, searched. If the central Gate, be it the Moving Gate or
some other we don't know about, is not located and closed, the situation will worsen until ... I
don't know what. You know that. I know you know it. If you want to kill me afterward, go ahead-in
fact, if you're planning to leave the geas on me I'll probably reach a point where I'd rather you
did-but don't stop me from doing this. And please," the deep, flexible baritone dropped almost to
a whisper, "please let Joanna go."
"She isn't here," Daurannon replied, with equal softness, his face like some ancient mask of a
beautiful god.
There was silence. Then, into it, like the chirp of an insect, Aunt Min murmured, "Hmmm ...
power." She shuffled the papers in her hands again, then let half of them slide off her knees to
the floor while she blinked appraisingly up at the tall figure before her, like a shabby and
degenerate iris in his purple coat. "Channeled ... illusion ... interesting. Was it Suraklin who
taught you to see power in this fashion?"
Antryg bent quickly to pick up the drifted sheets from the floor. "No, actually it was Wilbron of
Parchasten's studies of optics and refraction, and a mad kitchen witch in Pretty Creek who held
conversations with the stones of her hearth."
Aunt Min nodded interestedly, though Lady Rosamund's lips compressed with scorn and annoyance to
cover her concern. "It will take all of a day," the Archmage continued. "Yes, the accomplishment
of it must come at midnight, so that the power of the day will rise up into it. The North Hall of
the Cloister here is on the Vorplek Line."
"It lies directly above the Basin Chamber on the seventh level," Antryg said. "The spell-circles
need to be aligned with the Dead-er, with my friend Ninetentwo's machines in the Vaults in order
to establish the field. I'll need to consult with him and establish the times exactly. The
alignment needs to be precise. Everything depends on the spells' balance, or the whole thing will
collapse before it starts."
"Yes," she murmured, rocking a little in her chair. "Yes, I see that." Behind her, Daurannon
mouthed nonsense and Ben tick fiddled with his watch. In the clear, shadowless whiteness of the
Council chamber's light, Antryg was interested to see that a film of sweat had sprung out on the
old man's high, balding head.
"I can't let you do this to yourself," Lady Rosamund said, laying a protective hand on the skinny
shoulder before her. "The energy needed to establish these spells is too much for your body to
bear. Let me do it. God knows, I understand what he seems to think are the principles ... "
"You're willing to put that much of your power into a rite you don't even understand?" Daurannon's
eyebrows shot up and he glanced, speculatively, across at Antryg again. "One of Suraklin's spells,
most like?"
"Pish." Aunt Min slapped her pupil's hand dismissively, then, to take the sting out of it, patted
it like a grandmother. "It has been a long time, Rosie, since I've worked a truly new spell, let
alone a spell as great as this one ... Now, don't argue with me! Always arguing ... " She clicked
her tongue and looked vaguely around for her knitting basket and cane.
Antryg picked up the basket, which lay beside her chair. She shoved the notes into it, dislodging
a shower of yarn, needles, and crochet hooks that clattered on the marble floor. As Antryg
collected them, Lady Rosamund handed Min her cane and began to lead her to the door, the old lady
moving with painful, brittle slowness and leaning heavily on the younger one's arm.
They were still arguing about who was going to perform the unknown spells.
Nearly a century ago, the stories went, Minhyrdin the Fair had thrown a chamber pot at the
Emperor's First Minister, who'd been sent to bribe her away from the then-Prince. Like a mad
fairy, they had said; she had caused riots in taverns that spread through half the dock quarters,
had accumulated one fortune by the age of nineteen and spent another.
And then one day she'd met old Tiamat the White, Arch-mage of the Wizards of the West.
Antryg reached under the carved oak chair for a last crochet hook; when he straightened up, arms
full of balls of silk and hanks of unwoven wool, Daurannon still stood before him, arms akimbo and
face smooth and unreadable as ever. "And I suppose," Daur said, "while we're searching the Vaults,
and the Citadel, and all the countryside 'round about, you'd like us to collect tortoises for you,
too?"
"Would you?" Antryg beamed. "I doubt you'll find many at these latitudes, but you know, that would
be the first time I could assemble enough from a single geographical area to get some idea of how
various segments of encoded knowledge are distributed-once I decode them, of course. Thank you. I
appreciate that."


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Turning from his former friend's disgusted gesture, he saw Seldes Katne, who had lingered all this
time near the doorway, almost pushed aside by Bentick as the Steward hastened from the room. The
old man's black robe billowed behind him, vanishing into the dimness of the hall as he passed the
two women and disappeared at a run.


Chapter XIII
Once a thief broke into the house of Pipin the Little, Archmage of the Council, and stole a
talisman of garnets, a golden chain, and a glass ball. But on that night, the thief's woman and
several others at the inn she owned fell down deadly sick; and when the thief tried to prise loose
the garnets from the talisman, the chisel slipped and cut his hand to the bone; and when he tried
to melt down the chain, the crucible broke and burned him sorely, and set fire to the inn. He
returned all the things to Pipin, laying them upon his doorstep and running away, and for long
after that no thief in Angelshand would enter the places where the mages lived.
-Gantre Silvas
Annals of the Mages

The Dead God was waiting for him in the basin chamber, a hulking shape that seemed to unfold
itself like a skeletal flower out of the rock and shadows as he entered.
"There are fearsome things down there," Ninetentwo said, gesturing with two of his huge, clawed
hands toward the doors at the chamber's far end. From the stairways beyond rose strange smells of
wet stone, acrid mosses, and queer, unidentifiable, ozonous wildness. Another clawed hand touched
the black loaf of the multiscanner. "Water is flowing down into the lower levels, seemingly
seeping from the stones themselves in places. My readings show a sharp increase in the number of
wormholes, energy fields, and Gates. I fear the randomization is accelerating still further."
"I've been working on that," Antryg replied cheerfully. "At precisely midnight tomorrow ... Do
your people have digital watches? Excellent! At precisely midnight tomorrow Aunt Min will put into
being a spell to cause the xchi-particle energy in the stones of the Citadel to behave temporarily
like electromagnetic energy, so that it can be polarized into a stable field and we can finally
search the place from top to bottom and see what we've got."
The Dead God made a rumbling noise of disapproval deep in his enormous chest but apparently found
even the starting point, let alone the conclusion, of the argument too alien for quibbling.
"I don't suppose your multiscanner would register fields of energy as well as Gates in the Void,
would it? It would save us considerable time."
"Some types it does, some it doesn't." Ninetentwo unslung the black rectangle of the sensor from
one shoulder, and its small screen gleamed flatly in the pale light of his forehead nodule.
"Personally, I should hesitate to trust my life to any information this gives once the Vaults are
blanketed in a polarization field of any kind. I have moved my equipment through the Gate into
this world and, I hope, sufficient batteries to run it should the Gate close again. But there are
pocket fields wherein neither the batteries nor the equipment, nor this," he touched the massive
weapon that hung strapped to his back, "will work at all. Should such a field manifest itself
around me at the operative time ... "
"Yes, that could get awkward." Antryg scratched the side of his long nose and viewed the masses of
electronics stacked, like the basalt blocks of the ancient wall of Ygron, near the frozen black
slit of the chamber's far door. In addition to the sword he'd found-conveniently abandoned-in the
cellar of the Harlot, he carried a torch, more for a weapon than for illumination; its yellow
light played uneasily over the hard edges, the sightless eyes of the now-darkened gauges and the
blank, idiot faces of empty monitor screens. A dragon tail of cables stretched through the door
and away into the impenetrable dark of the maze.
Slung over one shoulder he carried breathing equipment and the silver-chloride spray pump, which
had, as he'd suspected, not only made visible but incapacitated the haunters that had attacked him
again on the fourth level. He had left the hideous things flopping like gross, misshapen wasps on
the stone floor and descended the switchbacks of the stairs, water trickling in a thin stream
beside his feet.
"Pity about the multiscanner," he went on, turning to install the torch in one of the chamber's
crude sconces. "We're going to have to act quickly once the field is activated if we're to have
sufficient time to dismantle the balance between Circles of Power and the oscillators rather than
let them fall into random decay. Given the energies at large in the Citadel, I'm not entirely
certain what would happen, but it probably wouldn't be pleasant. Once your equipment is set up,
we'll have to put a guard around this chamber."
"Not this chamber." The Dead God moved his great head, iridescent eyes flashing as he gestured


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toward the far door. "The water is rising: if the wormholes through which it is leaking are open
when the field stabilizes, this chamber is too deep for safety"
"True enough," Antryg murmured, and his stomach flinched at the sudden image of Joanna, trapped in
some pitch-dark cell, despairingly watching water trickle in under the door. He thrust the thought
from him even as he felt the sweat start on his hands. The multiscanner would have registered
something.
"The Chamber of the Glass Pillar, then," he said quickly. "It's on the fourth level directly above
this-that will still put us immediately beneath the North Hall. How long will it take you to set
up?"
"Three hours, four hours."
"Splendid! With both fields synched into the ley-lines ... "
His voice must have quickened with his nervousness, or else the Dead God, usually cold-bloodedly
phlegmatic, was more sensitive than Antryg had given him credit for. For after a moment's silence,
the monster laid one tarantulate lower hand on Antryg's sleeve and said, "I have taken two other
multiscan readings at different frequencies and from different points. Never has human presence
shown up that could not be accounted for by those who patrolled seeking you."
Antryg drew a deep breath and let it out, trying to expel with it his awareness of dark waters
rising and the poisoned images of his dreams. "And I expect they'll be seeking me again as soon as
our Daur realizes I've disappeared."
"Here." With a thin shearing of Velcro, the Dead God stripped a timepiece from one of his arms and
held it out. The maggotlike tentacles of his palm, wrapped around the square lozenge of black and
gray, gleamed moistly in the torchlight. "I had thought that we might synchronize electronically,
but with the shifting of the energy fields, I find that radio beams do not always pass."
"Marvelous stuff, Velcro." With a certain amount of difficulty, Antryg fastened the timepiece
around his own far thinner wrist, his quick movements concealing the nervous tremor of his hands.
The Dead God watched him with that great dragonlike head tilted a little to one side, the opaque
eyes and rigid, leathery skin stretched tautly over the bones impossible to read.
"If I could figure out a way to manufacture it here, I should be able to retire from magic-working
completely-not that I haven't been compulsorily retired, at least for the time being, but never
mind. I suppose the High Council would never let me get away with it, or peanut butter, either."
Antryg patted his pockets to assure himself that his spare oxygen bottle was safe and hitched the
breathing tubes up over his shoulder where he could easily get to them.
"I will have the equipment ready and attached to batteries, at your hour of midnight tomorrow,"
the Dead God promised. "Not that I have the smallest belief that it is possible for you to do what
you say you are going to do, but I will do as you ask as if it were."
"Thank you." Antryg took the torch from its holder and held it aloft, the Dead God's grotesque
shadow curtsying hugely across the black faces of pillar and wall. "It is all anyone ever needs
do."
After seeing the Dead God back to the slit of blackness that marked the Gate of his own universe,
Antryg stayed until past midnight searching the lowest levels of the Vaults. In his heart, he
suspected that the alien physicist was right and that Joanna was imprisoned elsewhere, yet he
could not rid himself of the dread that he might be wrong. To his horror and grief, he had been
wrong before.
In places the coiled black tunnels were knee-deep in water, the surface curling with faint ribbons
of steam; in other places, waist-deep or deeper, where small stairways led randomly upward and
downward, or the floors underfoot slanted, or gave way suddenly to unexplained pits and traps.
In a broad corridor, flooded shoulder-deep and thick with choking mists, he called her name
outside a locked door written over in ancient runes, the flame of his torch sinking in on itself
in the woolly vapors and his deep voice echoing across the broken yellow reflections of the
water's surface. If a Gate opened in the cell with her, he thought, she might very well flee
through to save herself, into God knew what other universe, and then she would truly be gone.
The mosses that padded the ceiling in a wet quilt of orange and purple seemed to pucker and shift
at the sound of his voice; a moment later, a low, rolling bow wave lifted the slick surface of the
water near him, and he felt something huge glide past his legs, the water bubbling thickly in its
wake. He shuddered, wishing there were several of Joanna's favorite cinema films he hadn't seen.
In the end he had to be satisfied that Joanna was neither on the ninth level nor the eighth. He
retrieved his coat, shawl, and boots, and climbed, dripping wet and bone-weary, up the spiraling
vent shafts toward the stores-cellars far above. There was a little room downstairs from the main
pantry where he could spend the night, cut into the rock of the hill's eastern face but open, save
for a light lattice, across one side.
But even as he turned toward the minor stair that led there, another thought came to him.


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It was well past midnight now-like most wizards, he could feel that in his bones. Carefully
secreting his sword, spray gun, extinguished torch, and breathing apparatus behind some oil jars,
he ascended noiselessly to the kitchen and began to work his way through the hidden byways of the
Citadel toward the house they called the Castle, over on the north side of the hill, where
Phormion the Starmistress lived.
The trapdoor between the cellar of the Castle and that of the Sea Lady's House-the tiny dwelling
that Pentilla Riverwych and old Idrix of Thray shared-was barely twelve inches wide and a yard
high; a heavier man than Antryg, or a less limber one, could never have made it. The Castle's
cellar ran deep into the hill and was filled, mostly, with bins of wood and coal whose fusty odor
caught at the back of Antryg's throat. There was a huge brick furnace there, to warm the hypocaust
beneath the floors during the bitter winters; a long, unrailed stone stairway ran up one wall,
debouching, if Antryg recalled aright, into a sort of tiled hall between Phormion's rooms,
Bentick's, and those of the two other mages who shared the place. Even occupied as it was by four
Senior mages-pack rats by definition-the Castle, Antryg knew, contained half a dozen unused
chambers, tucked away in turrets at the top of winding iron steps or reachable by spidery back
stairs concealed in walls.
The trick, of course, would be getting up there. He could feel magic all around him in the cellar,
spells of warning, ward, and guard. As far as he could tell there was nothing written on the
trapdoor he'd come through; very few people knew of its existence, most preferring to use the
passage that led through the lowest floor of Bentick's rooms in the north tower. Still, he
supposed, pushing up his glasses onto his nose, the most they could do would be to lock him up for
the remainder of the night and have Daur read him a lecture in the morning.
By clambering over the woodpiles, he was able to reach the foot of the stair without touching any
of the ward-spells on the flagstoned floor. The ghostlike grayness of a cat poured itself at a
startled run up the stairs-one of Bentick's, probably. Ascending undetected himself would be a
more difficult matter.
With a faint clanking of the iron latch, he heard the door above him open. A moment later, a
whisper of magic drifted upon the air.
Antryg's breath seized as if he'd been struck beneath the ribs by the thrust end of a massive
pole; he gasped and caught the wall to keep from falling but felt his knees turn weak. His lungs
felt numbed-pain like the jab of a dull knife seared his chest as he tried to fill them.
Darkness covered his eyes, his vision tunneling down to the few square inches of granite stair
just before his face, but he heard a footstep at the top of the stair, smelled dirty wool
permeated with stale incense and smoke. In the darkness of his blurring mind he heard a hoarse
voice whispering death-spells.
Vicious little pains knifed his hands and feet like the bite of snakes as he tried to drag himself
up the stairs. The power within him, bound and mute beneath the razor wire of the Council's geas,
could have resisted those spells, could have thrown off the burning river of sand that seemed to
be filling his lungs, could have flung back count erspells of life and light. His heartbeat
sounded huge in his ears, a slow, bucking heave that hurt more on every throb. He had to reach the
top of the stairs, he thought blindly. It was fifty feet, surely he could make it up fifty feet.
His arms collapsed under him; he barely felt the ragged pain of his cheek hitting the unrailed
stone step. One arm dangled over the edge, and he was queerly conscious of the cold airmoving
around his hanging fingers. Though the whisper of the death-spells was now very soft, it seemed to
fill his mind.
"Stop it!" Another voice, a whisper like the first, inconsequential as the squeaking of bats. The
spell shifted a fraction, like a suffocating monster fidgeting its weight. A thread of air leaked
into his lungs.
"Let him go!"
"She sent him. He is her cat's-paw. She brought him here that he might do her dirty work, that he
might spy and probe ... "
The spell locked down hard and Antryg cried out a little with the renewed pain. The specks of
blinding fire swimming before his eyes blended into one huge slab of killing light.
"Then she'll know if he dies here! Let him go. I'll take care of him ... "
Air in his lungs. Enough air-he would never, he thought, raise any objections to the smell of
coals and mildew again. They were beautiful. Cold granite under his face was beautiful.

The voices were gone. He lay in darkness. He must have blacked out, he thought, gingerly gathering
his arms beneath him. If so, he couldn't have been unconscious long, and the owner of the second
voice would be back. I'll take care of him ... Aunt Min's protection extended only over those who
obeyed her command that he not be harmed, who feared her wrath. Quite clearly, there were those in


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the Citadel who did not.
Distantly, his straining hearing picked up returning feet, a voice whispering distantly, "Oh, God
... Oh, God ... " He still couldn't stand but was past caring. Pins and needles racked him,
seeming to originate somewhere in the marrow of his bones; every muscle trembled as he crawled and
stumbled like an intoxicated rag doll across the cellar, dragged himself through the trap while
the door at the top of the long steps was still shut. He fell repeatedly as he made his way
through the dark byways, coming at last to open air-he barely noticed how he got to the little
rock-cut chamber where he was to spend the night.
For a long while he could only lie there, trembling, as his muscles twitched and burned with cramp
and his breathing steadied out to its regular rhythm again. It wasn't the first time such spells
had been laid upon him-Suraklin had done so twice, the second time to the point where he'd gone
into convulsions-but it was the first time he'd been completely unable to meet them with any magic
of his own.
For what must have been nearly an hour he lay, looking out through the screen of lattice to the
clear, blue-gray twilight that filled the land like an imbuing radiance. White mists drifted over
the river; the taiga forest lay black and formless beyond, broken by the chipped brightness of
streams; bogs and ponds reflected the queer glow of the sky in shining sheets. Beyond the trees
the cleared fields of the village of Wychstanes slept, coarse and shapeless and gray; smoke rising
from the long ibeks marked the settlement itself. And beyond that, deep in the woods of spruce and
hemlock, was the Green King's Chapel, ancient shrine of the Lord of Animals, the Lord of the
Trees, back when this whole area had been part of the estate of the Earls Boreal. Daurannon had
been investigating reports of abominations there-allegedly-when Rosamund had conjured the power to
pass through the Void.
Antryg pulled off his coat and wrapped himself in it, pillowed his head on Aunt Min's shawl. While
he'd been in the Vaults, it had rained a little, and the warming ground gave back the smell and
dampness, a thick sweet strength in the air. Clouds heaped the southern edges of the sky.
He supposed he ought to seek out Aunt Min immediately. At a guess it was Phormion who had tried to
kill him, Bentick who had stopped her ... But if Bentick was part of a plot with Phormion, why
stop her? Had Rosamund actually brought him here for some ulterior purpose? It didn't seem
terribly likely, considering how little she trusted him, but it might account for her having sent
Daur away while she was doing it.
Or by she, had they meant Aunt Min?
It was a new thought, and not a comfortable one; and it would account, he thought, for Rosamund's
enmity toward him-not that that wasn't sufficiently accounted for already. But why would Min be
using him as a cat's-paw against Phormion, if it was Phormion?
Far above him, against the dark bulk of the Library, a yellow glow of lamplight shone in the dirty
glass walls of the Conservatory, marking where Seldes Katne still labored over her piled volumes,
searching for references to the teles even as Nandiharrow and Issay sought clues to other magics
in the Vaults.
And Joanna was somewhere, imprisoned in this maze of deadly secrets. His every instinct warned him
that the longer she remained a prisoner, the more danger she'd be in.
He wondered if it was possible to get to Min's cottage at this hour. Rosamund would flay him for
waking up the old lady.
But the ache in his body was like lead wrapped around his bones, and the thought of getting up and
doing anything at the moment was more than he could bear. He shifted his head on his makeshift
pillow and gazed out over the black pelt of the forest toward the Green King's Chapel again. At
length he slept, and though he recalled no dreams, he woke up weeping, with the feeling that some
irreplaceable thing had been taken from him during the night.

Tom the gardener found him at breakfast, hard on the heels of a near-riot in the refectory.
Antryg, cautious now about dealing with any member of the Council, at least without several other
persons present, was consuming muffins and tea in a corner of the kitchen after helping Pothatch
stir porridge and cut bacon. Furious shouts drew them up the stairs to the pantry behind the
serving-hatches.
Through the broad openings from pantry to refectory, Antryg and the cook saw Brunus, usually the
most mild-tempered of men, standing a few feet inside the refectory and screaming at Zake
Brighthand, who had just entered. Brighthand rounded on the older student with a perfect spate of
amazing and barely comprehensible docker's cant, his thin face twisting with rage. Others-not all
of them Juniors-rose from their seats at the long trestle tables and came to the open space before
the door to fling themselves into the affray; Daurannon, sitting by the broad windows that
overlooked the Polygon's main court, got to his feet and started to break things up but, within


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moments, was shouting at them all, a situation not alleviated by the arrival of Lady Rosamund on
the scene.
"It's a pocket-spell, a field of anger." Antryg grinned at the cook and at Tom, who had just
entered from the door that led into the drying-room. The voices were rising, echoing in the big
room's scarlet-painted rafters. "Just inside the door, look ... "
He gestured with his teacup. The Lady, usually frigidly polite to her colleague, was screaming
like a fish-hag about "social-climbing little guttersnipes" and "slick traitors who'd sell us all
to the Regent for an attic bedroom at Court"; Daurannon in turn abandoned his usual charming mask
and made reference to "holier-than-thou aristos who can't stand anyone whose lives they can't
run." Both opinions, Antryg was quite well aware, had been expressed privately at other times.
"My guess is it starts about three paces inside the door and runs to the corner of that table
where Kyra's standing. Ah! Here comes Bentick. Now, is he going to fly into the fray or try to get
them all out of there so the spell can be dispersed ... ?"
"Will they come, though?" Tom inquired interestedly, folding his arms and cocking his head a
little to one side.
Mage, cook, and gardener watched in fascination as the Steward of the Citadel, assisted eventually
by Issay Bel-Caire and Sergeant Hathen, coaxed, called, and gestured the assorted combatants away
from the open space and in among the tables, where the spell's field did not extend.
"Looks like our Bentick's had a bit of a rocky night," Tom commented, when the show seemed to be
over and Pothatch had returned to his tea urns and muffin batter. This was true: though
immaculately shaven and prissy as always, the Steward appeared even more haggard than he had
yesterday in the Council chamber and seemed to be scanning every corner of the big, raftered room
for something or someone ... probably, Antryg thought, himself.
"I shouldn't be surprised," Antryg murmured. "Did you happen to see if Aunt Min was about yet?" he
added, looking back at the gardener. He knew Min was an early riser and frequently would sit on
the terrace of her little cottage to watch the sun rise. If Bentick was here, dispersing the spell-
field-which he was doing, assisted by Daurannon and Lady Rosamund, who scrupulously avoided one
another's glance-it would be safe to duck over and discuss possible reasons why the Starmistress
would want to assassinate anyone who entered the Castle.
Tom shook his head. "I haven't seen her. But there's something I heard, something I thought you
ought to know of."
Antryg set his teacup down and regarded more closely the mournful-looking little man in his rough
peasant smock and heavy boots.
"See, one of Gru Gwidion's hunters mentioned to me yesterday that he'd heard a woman's voice
crying in the Green King's Chapel. When he went near it, he said, he was too afraid to go in. He
said it was his instinct warning him that there was something unnatural there, but I know the
mages do that: put spells of fear 'round a place if they want to keep us out-me, and the
milkmaids, and Pothatch's kitchen help when he's got 'em. And I know you're looking for your
lady."
"So I am," Antryg murmured thoughtfully. "The Green King's Chapel." He recalled the blue twilight
on the dark woods, the glimpse of bleached stone like bone chips far off among the trees.
More people were coming into the refectory. Sergeant Hathen, posted in the doorway like an usher
at a wedding, was warning them to edge around the wall to avoid the three mages at their rites of
dispersal.
Out in the courtyard, the great bronze clock in the Assembly Hall tower struck seven. If Aunt Min
started her conjurations at noon, thought Antryg, he would still be back in time to assist her
throughout the afternoon ... not that she actually needed it. For all her impersonation of senile
vagueness, he had no doubts that she knew precisely what she was doing and would have no trouble
following his notes.
And then, after last night's events, the thought of getting out of the Citadel for a few hours
wasn't such a bad one, either.
"Kitty will kill me. I did promise I'd help her with the research into the teles-balls, and I've
yet to do it. You'll let her know I was called away?"
Tom hesitated for a moment, as if that snagged some thought in his mind, then nodded slowly. "Aye.
That is ... "
Bentick, Daur, and Rosamund lowered their arms with an air of completion; the latter two turned
promptly away to seek places at tables in opposite ends of the long room. Bentick made one last
scan of the interested faces of the newcomers, then strode in a purposeful billow of black robes
toward the serving-hatch to get his morning coffee. Rather hastily, Antryg gulped the last of his
tea, shoved two rolls from one of the serving trays into his coat pocket, and said, "Thank you,
Tom. You haven't seen me."


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The long purple skirts of his coat flicked around the doorway leading down to the kitchen just as
the Steward reached the hatch.

The road from the Wizards' Tor to the village of Wychstanes lay straight, following the track of
the Brehon Line: on both sides it was marked with eroded and weed-shrouded standing stones of the
sort that in more civilized portions of the Realm had been pit-broken or buried. For most of its
length the road sank below the level of the surrounding land, rutted-typically for the Sykerst-
with gluey runnels of foot-deep mud. Though winds moved the dark roof of spruces overhead, down in
the roadbed itself the air was muggy and still, thick with the murky pungence of nearby ponds and
the green shaggy scents of the moss that furred the alders and birch. Feathers of gold light
played across Antryg's shoulders and face as he picked a way along the drier center of the roadbed
between the ruts, the familiar dappling of warm and cool a reminiscence of home. Even the drag of
the mud at his boots was a part of those childhood dreams.
Home. After all these years.
He had spent his childhood in a village very like Wychstanes. There were hundreds of them,
scattered among the endless forests and stony, rust red hills-villages wherever tiny pockets of
earth could be found capable of supporting crops, and all of them much alike. Life in the barnlike
ibeks could be incredibly crude-he remembered clearly helping his brothers dump fodder down the
floor hatches to the animals who lived below and listening, through the long winter nights, to the
murmurs, coughing, lovemaking, and drunken arguments of the sixty or so uncles, aunts,
stepchildren, and thralls with whom he shared the place-but even as a pariah, he had felt a kind
of delighted fascination with the complex life of the village itself.
He smiled a little, his gloved hands thrust deep in his pockets. Suraklin had almost scoured the
skin off him trying to get rid of the stench of cow dung and smoke-at the time, he would have
skinned himself, had it been possible, knowing the peasant smell displeased the old man. Ever
afterward, when his master had been angry with him, he'd had the illogical conviction that the
smell of his village clung to him yet-to his flesh, to the very marrow-bones of his soul-
displeasing Suraklin still: the first of all the many things about himself that Antryg could never
sufficiently change to meet the Dark Mage's standards. Even when, under Suraklin's tutelage of
love and abuse, his powers had flourished so that he could call sand-demons to sit like birds on
his hands or change the bread on a plate to nightshade from the other side of the room, or strike
a man blind or mute or breathless with a word, he had never been good enough.
He shook his head. Coming back to the Sykerst had been like coming home. But as Joanna remarked
upon the one occasion they'd driven out to Pasadena to visit her mother, childhood homes had a way
of being haunted by the wan ghosts of former selves, and it was disconcerting to turn a corner and
encounter them unawares.
But in any case, he thought, pausing to consider the broader sunlight of the village's open fields
at the end of the enclosed tunnel of standing stones, taiga laurel, and overhanging trees, in view
of Trukild's warnings it would probably not be a good idea to sashay down the main street. If the
village still preserved its former patterns of crop rotation-and knowing villages, he would have
bet an entire night's tips at Enyart's on it-they'd be plowing the south fields for the spring
seeding and letting the north lie fallow. Thus it would behoove him to cut north through the woods
around the far end of those fields rather than risk an encounter with potentially irate villagers
at this point in time.
Ordinarily, of course, he'd simply have passed through the village under cover of a spell of
illusion, and the goodwives washing clothes or plucking chickens in the yards would have mistaken
him for the baker's wife with a basketful of loaves. But with the geas ...
On top of the road bank beside him, a hare started, springing down through the blackberry brambles
and away into the willow thickets on the other side of the road. A chaffinch flew up, chirping,
and at the same moment Antryg heard the unmistakable stealthy creak of boot leather and the clink
of a buckle against the pommel of a knife. A shape moved behind the screen of moss-thick alders
... two shapes ... a bead of sunlight glinted on the stock of a hunter's gun.
Out of sheer reflex Antryg formed the words of illusion in his mind, the illusion of a mangy brown
tomcat; it had to be Gru and his hunters, they'd know if there were an odd tree or clump of laurel
just here.
He was crossing the road away from their path when he realized the geas still should have been in
force upon his mind.
But none of them-and there were six in all, four of them with crossbows, two with old-fashioned,
bell-mouthed muskets-did more than glance at him, and he knew by the angle of their heads that
those who did saw nothing more than a cat. Even his boot tracks in the deep mud of the lane they
saw as the light, rounded stars of cat pugs.


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Then they were gone.
Antryg let out his breath, shaken with astonishment and, in spite of himself, delight.
For a long moment he hesitated, uncertain; then he held out one big hand and called to the palm of
his ink-stained mitt a small ball of blue light, the lowest-level magic he could think of that did
not involve potentially dangerous elements like fire or wind. When it appeared, he tossed it
joyfully into the air, spun it on the tip of one finger, and slam-dunked it out of sight into the
trees. He knew exactly what had happened.
He had walked into one of those small zones such as had formed within the Citadel, pockets where
the Void had leaked the aberrant magics of other universes, universes where magic had different
rules, different strengths.
The urge to call some greater magic, some wild pyrotechnic of joy, was almost overwhelming-it was
like trying not to gasp in air after emerging from minutes underwater. But that, he knew, could be
appallingly dangerous, particularly here on the Brehon Line; he only hoped the tiny dot of blue
light wasn't triggering a field of darkness, or the spontaneous transportation of perfectly
innocent people, elsewhere on the Line. Keeping the magic down to the smallest possible level, he
called another tiny, heatless star to his palm, walked backward until it flickered desperately and
disappeared, walked forward again-in a fair imitation of John Cleese's Minister of Silly Walks-
until it reappeared and then, in fifteen of his own erratic strides, sputtered and vanished once
more.
Still no untoward side effects or, at least, none in his own vicinity. This pocket must be from a
world whose magic operated much the same as it did in this one. Jumping cautiously over the cart
rut and climbing the northern road bank in the scrambling track of Gru's hunters, he waded through
the thick curls of buckler fern and bracken for perhaps another thirty feet before the glowworm
brightness once again died.
He stood still, thigh-deep in a pool of blackberry brambles, hearing no sound but the whisper of
the spruce and the pounding of his own heart.
It would take him an hour and a half to reach the Green King's Chapel, perhaps that long to return
to the Citadel and find an unguarded scrying-stone of sufficient strength to get through whatever
spells of guard had been established around Joanna's prison. Provided, of course, spells of
scrying wouldn't result in fire or flood or lightning-though, if the magic of this field was
similar, they should be fairly safe. And provided Daurannon or Bentick didn't take it into their
heads either to stop him or accompany him back.
And on the other hand, Joanna might simply be at the Green King's Chapel.
"Dammit," he muttered, "this place might not even be here tomorrow." He glanced around him, taking
note of the dead and leaning trunks of two alders-covered thick with shaggy green moss-that
bounded one corner of the zone, and the zone's relation to three boulders he'd known from years
ago, which he'd always privately described as Aunts Tilly, Milly, and Dilly Having Tea. As he
moved off once more, northeastward toward the brighter afternoon sun beyond the pines, where the
village fields lay, he held out his hand in a last futile effort to summon the star glimmer to his
palm. But nothing appeared-only the sliding, illusory coin of wind-fluttered sunshine.
"Ah, well, easy come, easy go."
He heard the voices of the hunters again as he skirted through the elder thickets, haw, and
horsetails that bounded the north fields: "It's laired near here-we've all seen its tracks."
"Splendid," Antryg murmured, propping his glasses on his nose and wishing he had at least enough
magic to keep the mosquitoes off him. "Wolf or bear, I wonder? Or will I be really lucky and walk
into the latest abomination?"
He spent the next half hour cautiously making his way through the thicker vegetation that divided
the woods from the soft brown earth shawled now with a velvet of tender green. The mud in the
fields would show his tracks if he cut across them; moreover, he recalled how Suraklin had
sometimes put his own perceptions into the eyes of birds, as a means of looking for people-usually
other mages-whom he could not track with a scrying-crystal.
Joanna at the Green King's Chapel. The pentacle on the cards: the sign of earth. A woman's voice
crying. Fear-spells.
Whoever has done this to her ...

The Green King's Chapel lay silent and deserted in the dappled brightness of late-morning light.
The ancient god of its dedication had been among the most popular of the old deities, and his
worship had lasted long-indeed, there were places in the Sykerst where on certain nights the
villagers still drove their livestock in procession down the long aisle of the witch-paths by
moonlight, dragging the effigy of the Green King's sacrificed body upon a cart. The chapel itself,
though long roofless, was a solid ring of stone, its eight high windows nearly obscured by the


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secondary wall of ivy that had grown over the original granite. Against the leathery green of last
year's leaves, patches of new growth sparkled parakeet-bright; Antryg could have spread out his
hand and not covered one of the larger leaves, and the twining stems were bigger around than his
wrist.
There was no sound but a dove's soft mutter and the liquid reply of a cuckoo deeper in the trees.
Antryg moved in a complete circuit of the chapel, pausing frequently to shut his eyes and listen.
No sound of human breath, no smell of human food or human waste ... none of the uneasy silences
that arise among animals when a human being is near. True, he thought, Joanna's prison was spelled
against scrying, and there were ways of covering from nearer scrutiny as well.
He moved in for a closer look. His crooked fingers brushed the ivy, then worked through to the
stonework beneath. The only spells on the building had been laid decades ago. They were fading
now, with the scouring winters and thick-breathed summer heats, with the passage of beasts and
insects to and fro: the scraping of the world's life against the counterflow of old magic.
And they had not been fear-spells to begin with.
Like everything else, the doorway was overgrown with ivy. Squirming his tall, skinny frame
through, Antryg found himself in the open ring of the chapel's uneven floor, of which only a few
moss-clotted tombstones remained. Salmonberry and fire-weed were waist-high in places under the
pallid sunlight; the granite of the altar had not seen sacrifice for almost three hundred years;
the entrance to the crypt gaped to the sky.
"How very odd," he murmured, and picked his way carefully down the narrow, foot-runneled stairs.
Foxes startled and scrambled in the moist darkness of the crypt; an opossum shrank back among the
ivy roots, staring at him with a white, pointed face and lunatic eyes. By the smell of it the
Sacred Well still held water. The place would be a whining inferno of mosquitoes in less than a
month.
But Joanna had never been here. Nor had anyone else, for years.
Antryg stood for a few moments, resting his hands on the crumbled lip of the well curb, the heavy
earth smell of the place weighting his lungs, listening deeply and ever more deeply to the
underground stillness around him and to the wild ringing of every alarm bell his mind possessed.
Tom had lied.
Or someone had lied to Tom.
Or someone had set up the illusion of fear-spells, the illusion of a woman's voice ... Or someone
had stopped Tom on the road this morning and touched his hand, looked into his eyes and planted
there the belief that he'd talked to one of Gru Gwidion's hunters yesterday who'd given him that
story.
It was something Suraklin had done all the time; Antryg had done it, too, and not only in the Dark
Mage's service.
To get him out of the Citadel?
Quite clearly ... So that he'd be well away from Aunt Min's protection and less likely to be found
than he had been last night? Or simply so he wouldn't have a decent account of his doings and
whereabouts for four or five hours?
"Dammit," he said aloud, his voice echoing in the deeps of the well. "I'm getting a little tired
of ... "
"A little tired of what?" demanded a cold, sweet voice from the crypt stairs behind him. He swung
sharply around in a swirl of patched coat skirts; she stood in the bar of sunlight like an
obsidian lily, her hands folded before the buckle of her belt. She'd tucked up the long skirts of
her robe, revealing seven or eight inches of soft boot leather and the dark blue fringe of the
undertunic beneath; her black hair was braided back for easier traveling, and without its usual
frame of glossy curls, the exquisite bone structure of her oval face stood out more clearly. The
light shining through the new leaves of the ivy was not greener than her eyes.
"Well," said Antryg, breaking into a smile of relieved delight, "of being followed, for one thing.
I'm extremely happy to see you, Rosie. You didn't really think I'd run away, did you?"
"So long as the Council's geas lies upon you, no." She looked chillingly down upon him as he
walked back to the steps. "I know that if you flee, you will perforce return."
"Well, for food, if nothing else," he agreed mildly. "Did you follow me for a tete-a-tete-or as
they say in Los Angeles, a one-on-one? Or did you just not want to have breakfast in the same room
with Daur, after your little altercation this morning?"
She stood looking down at him for a moment, her head silhouetted against the hard robin egg blue
of the sky. Then she said, "I followed you to ask that you let me perform these rites of energy
you have designed, instead of Aunt Min."
The steely coldness of her voice was a shield, and in it Antryg heard clearly that she would far
rather have cut his throat than ask him for even the slightest favor. Softly, he said, "Ah," and


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then was silent for a time.
"I think the spells themselves are ridiculous and won't work-but they will draw a great deal of
power. She isn't strong, Antryg. She hasn't been well." She handed the words to him like bleeding
pieces of her own flesh and waited, green eyes watchful as cold stars, for his reply.
"Violets always grew well here, up behind the altar," Antryg said at last and ascended the stairs
past her into the sky-circled arena of the chapel above. "The Duchess of Purlex used to candy them
whole and make a syrup from the leaves which relieved kennel cough in her dogs."
Her ladyship at his heels, he sprang lightly up onto the lumpy dais, where the block of granite,
its carvings hammered nearly away by centuries of winter, still stood under the ruins of its
ancient canopy. Kneeling, he reached behind the altar, and found, as he had in years past, the
shadowy space behind thick with them. "It's a bit late in the season for really good ones, but
they say that if a girl places them beneath a young man's mattress at the dark of the moon and
recites his name three times, he will be drawn to love her as the moon waxes-which gives her a
clear two weeks to fix her interest. Presumably after the full she's on her own. Would you like
some?"
He held out the bunch to her, queer little fairy-faces of plum and blue and white in their nest of
leaves. She disdained to touch them, or perhaps to take any gift from his hand.
"No? I'll take them back to Kitty. Sometimes I think no one ever did give her violets in the
spring, which is a great shame." He perched on the edge of the altar and fished in his pocket for
a rubber band to tie the stems together. "I take it you came after me because Auntie told you not
to be a mother hen?"
"They're your spells. You could find some reason why they would be better done by me."
Antryg braced his shoulder against the heavy trunks of the ivy in the chapel doorway, pushing them
aside for the Lady with his free arm and one boot. She bent to step through, holding her skirts
up. Though she had left the heliotrope stole of her Council rank back at the Citadel, she still
moved through the woods like a cold-eyed queen.
"You think she'd believe me?"
His only answer was the bitter resentment in her eyes.
Catching one boot-toe under a pinecone and flipping it through the sunlit air, he said, "Rosamund,
she wouldn't be who she is if she didn't revel in something new; in seeing if she couldn't make
spells that are ridiculous and chaotic and against all the laws of physics and logic and orthodox
magic actually work anyway. You know that."
"I know that; you know that," she replied quietly. "And that you have always known how to charm
her." Her rose-petal mouth hardened into a brittle line. "Or was that your intent?"
"What, to weaken my strongest supporter?"
"To weaken the linchpin of the geas."
Behind the massive lenses his rain-colored eyes were grave. "I think you're not giving either of
us very much credit."
"Credit doesn't matter much to me in the face of ... of losing her." Her voice shivered a little
on those words, then turned sharp and silvery again. "And why aren't you back there helping her,
at least?"
A wide grin split his face. "Because under the conditions of the geas all I'd be able to do is get
under her feet, and I didn't want to get thwacked with her cane. I came here looking for Joanna;
I'd heard some rather curious news ... "
"You still insist that one of the Council kidnapped her?" Rosamund cut in impatiently, lengthening
her stride through the whispering lace of the bracken. "That one of the Council is behind the
chaos in the Vaults?"
Antryg shrugged. "Well, I've tried hard to come up with a reason why Ruth would lie to me about
seeing a wizard. She's generally a very truthful woman, Ruth-except, of course, when she's
standing dripping wet with a towel about her telling someone over the telephone that she's just
leaving the apartment that minute to meet them for lunch."
"Then why hasn't that person contacted you? Why hasn't there been some demand made, some threat,
some exchange?" Her eyes narrowed in the fleeting splinters of the filtered sun. "Or have they?"
she added softly, "If there is a renegade in the Council-other than yourself, that is-are you
working for him already?"
Antryg paused and pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his long nose. The gleam of a knife
in the moonlight returned to him, the retreating swirl of a long black robe around the closing
door of the passage into the Pepper-Grinder's upper chamber ... the crush of death-spells on his
lungs. She sent him. He is her cat's-paw ... And then there was the whole curious matter of Tom's
story that morning.
"I'm not, of course," he said. "But that has begun to puzzle me. Even if my being under the geas


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put a glitch of some kind in their plans, one would think they'd at least use Joanna to discourage
my investigations. And I may hear yet. But it seems a very awkward arrangement."
He moved off again, the Lady stumbling a little with her lesser experience of rough walking but
drawing her hand aside from his offer of help.
"Holding anyone captive is, you know," he added. "Unless one has an accomplice, though of course
for wizards it's easier because one can use spells to keep the captive quiet. I suppose it's
conceivable that if our hypothetical kidnapper is on the Council, he or she is strong enough to
transform Joanna into a canary, which would solve a lot of logistical problems. Has Phormion or
Bentick recently acquired an unaccounted-for canary? Though of course I doubt it's possible to
transform Joanna into a canary. A cat, on the other hand, would pass almost completely unnoticed."
Lady Rosamund's mouth flexed in exasperation. "Can you truly see Bentick violating his vows so
comprehensively? Or Nandiharrow? Or Issay, or Phormion ... ?"
"Someone violated their vows badly enough to try to murder me last night," he said, and Rosamund's
eyes widened with what appeared to be quite genuine shock.
"Who?"
"I don't know. I couldn't see. It happened beneath the Castle, so it could have been either
Bentick or Phormion, but considering the number of tunnels which run through there it could just
as easily have been our boy Daur. Whoever it was seemed to think ... "
Like the stinging crack of a whipstroke, the heavy, flat roar of a musket smote the air, followed
at once by the acrid stink of powder. Lady Rosamund cried out and fell, clutching the spreading
patch of dark red wetness that splattered suddenly from the torn flesh of her thigh, and from the
woods behind them a voice yelled, "There they are!"


Chapter XIV
Better to sleep among wolves than in a wizard's house.
-Sykerst proverb

Antryg caught the lady in his arms as she fell. Though her eyes were shut, there was
consciousness, if not strength, in the arm she flung around his neck; he took a running leap down
a broken dip of ground, ducked into a thicket of moss-choked alder and blackberry bramble, then
immediately slipped toward the shelter of a small outcropping of boulders forty feet away, running
half-crouched in the waist-deep jungle of fern.
"You see it?" yelled a man somewhere, and another replied, "Two of them, it looked like ... "
"That big gray one with the three white paws ... "
"You see any blood? I swear I hit one ... "
"Stopping the bleeding ... best I can," gasped Rosamund's voice, scarcely a breath in his ear.
"Cold ... dear God, so cold ... "
"Can you hold a cloaking-spell around yourself at the same time?" Antryg shed Aunt Min's seedy old
shawl for her to lie on, slipped out of his patched, tawdry coat to cover her, and hastily ripped
a strip from its lining to tourniquet her leg. Ferns and horsetails grew thick about the boulders,
offering them minimal cover; with luck the men would beat the thicket and pass by this less
obvious place.
The dark head moved against the dull rainbow of tangled color. Her lips already had a grayish
cast; in spite of his makeshift dressing, she was losing blood. If she went into shock or lost
consciousness, he thought, she was through.
"Hold on," he breathed and broke cover, darting through the ferns with the golden blades of late-
morning sunlight sparkling on his earrings and beads. Another musket roared-they'd had time to
reload-and with a snarling, woody twang the steel-and-hornbeam shaft of a crossbow appeared in a
tree trunk inches from his shoulder. He remembered that, when they hunted predators, Gru Gwidion
and his hunters put datura on their arrows; with no magic at his disposal it wouldn't take more
than a scratch to kill him.
Another arrow flashed in the sunlight. Leaping like a scared deer, Antryg cut through the fern and
spruce needles of the soft forest floor, the hunters in full pursuit. They knew the woods as well
as he did-better, for their experience was fresh and not something half-forgotten for nine or ten
years. In any case he couldn't think of losing them yet. They were still far too close to Lady
Rosamund's hiding place.
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


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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 afield, 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


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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


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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


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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 than 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 ... "
"Hemmerteyrne ?"
"Perceptual mirrors ... artificial souls, some people call them. They're round and about the size
of a one-crown piece ... quite serious magic. They transmit the will. And the teles, of course,
have to do with power itself."
"I know," Joanna said, remembering the circle of them around Suraklin's computer, the evil, glassy
gleam of them, the sensation of being watched. "Antryg says they're dangerous."
"Well, of course they are, to someone who doesn't know how to use them. So is a gun. But mages
have been using teles for centuries with no ill effects. Antryg is a little cracked on the
subject, you know. The Brown Star itself is another one of those implements the Council would just
as soon keep to itself."
"It sure did you a lot of good, didn't it?"
"I would never have been overpowered and imprisoned," the Magus said, with considerable dignity,
"had I taken better pains to keep it locked up. The problem was with my study safe, not with any
knowledge or lack of it on my part."
Joanna was silent. Far off, she could still hear the Lady Irina, moaning and weeping and cursing
Suraklin's name. Somewhere even farther the shrieking laughter of the demons trickled to her like
the ghost of mad wind. She wondered who had imprisoned those demons in the crystal and when, and
for what purpose. Simply because they knew of no better way of getting rid of them ... as the
tsaeati had been imprisoned, and the Lady Irina, and this man beside her, and she herself? And God
knows how many others, over the years ... over the centuries ... She clamped her thoughts down
hard to prevent another attack of panic. How many others, imprisoned and forgotten as the crystal
passed from owner to owner-how many owners forgot to mention to their successors the names, and


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the proper extraction-spells, for some of their prisoners? How many times had the crystal been
stolen, as Magister Magus had stolen it, and the names of its prisoners simply lost, as if some
file had been erased?
Don't think about that, she told herself desperately. Antryg will get you out of this mess.
And when he does?
The Magus is right. Wait until you have the choice before you make the choice.
"So tell me, Magus," she said, forcing lightness into her voice, "who was this Vorkhedne the Gray
and what did he do that was so awful? And what did the Council do about him?"
"My dear," the Magus began, "some stories say that he wasn't even human; that he was the result of
an unnatural experiment with a cat by a wizard named Czyram ... "


Chapter XV
When the forces of Crinias the Strong cornered the armies of the wizards and their allies against
the cliffs of Stellith, the Archmage, Isar Chelladin, went forth to beg the pardon of Crinias and
his troops, and to make what terms he could for the preservation of the wizards' lives ...
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues on Wizardry

After the daylong battle on the field before the cliffs of Stellith, Isar Chelladin stood at night
above the battlefield, listening to the outcry of the wounded in the darkness. And he took pity on
the forces of the Church, knowing that they would attack again in the morning and so be destroyed;
and casting his cloak about his face he crossed to the camp of the defeated, to offer them a final
chance of parley ...
-Gantre Silvas
Book of Isar Chelladin

Then Crinias the Strong, general of the Church forces, had the defeated wizards brought before him
in chains and said, "I will give you one final chance of life ... "
-Inquisitor Beron of Kymil
The Defeat of Evil

It was several hours before Antryg managed to work his way back to the Citadel again. He came in
through the kitchens, climbing the old chuteway that had been established to haul building
materials up for the construction of the Harlot and the North Cloister; Pothatch gasped warningly,
"Lord Antryg ... ," and Antryg shook his head and touched a crooked finger to his lips.
"You haven't seen me," he whispered, not as a spell-out of the pocket in the woods he couldn't
have wrought a spell anyway-but as a request.
The little cook shook his head vigorously. "Of course, of course ... "
Antryg perched himself cross-legged on the edge of the stone counter and helped himself to some
oatcakes cooling on a platter there. Before slipping in through the pantry door he'd listened for
voices but had heard none; only Pothatch's wheezy panting as he hurried from oven to sink to
cupboard. "Scullions gone walkabout again?"
"Not a one of 'em showed up today. If it wasn't for Tom and Lady Q'iin, bless her, I'd be going
fair distracted. But just as well, what with them here." His nod in the direction of the refectory
doors-and by implication the Council chambers-took in the Inquisitor and his troops. He lowered
his voice, as if the Witchfinder could hear through the stones. "They're most of 'em up in the
Council chamber with Lord Daurannon, the other High Mages being off lookin' after Lady Rosamund.
But their sasenna are in the hall, having lunch and, so Tom tells me, not sitting near our novices
nor our warriors neither. And what Lord Daurannon and them others were thinking of, to let them
find the Citadel in the first place ... "
"They'd have to have been dealt with sooner or later," Antryg murmured, smearing jam on a fourth
oatcake with his fingers and adding clotted cream to the mess. "Do they know I'm here?"
Pothatch shook his head. "Not to my knowledge, m'lord. Well, you know how the mages are about
letting the Church know any more of our business than they have to. That Silvorglim, he was
fratcheting on about abominations showing up in the streets of Angelshand before he even got
through the gates, but you? I think they still think as how you're dead."
"Well, let's hope no one disabuses them of that notion. The death warrant the Regent has out for
me was fairly detailed and quite unnecessarily nasty. Leave a door unlatched for me tonight, will
you?" He uncoiled his long legs, put his feet on the floor again. "Something tells me I'm going to
have to turn into a kitchen wight for a time, stealing food where I can."
He headed for the door of the scullery, a long, narrow room where knives and boots were cleaned


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and the painted earthenware dishes stored between meals. A smaller door led from it to a stairway
cut through the Citadel rock up to the subcellar beneath the Harlot, whence he could make his way
back to the hypocaust under the North Hall. In the North Hall, he was certain, regardless of
incursions by the haters of magic, he would find Aunt Min. On the threshold Pothatch laid a round,
heavily knotted hand on his wrist, staying him, and looked up into his face with worried hazel
eyes.
"You all right, m'lord?"
Antryg sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. "Fine," he said, though he didn't feel it. His
bones still ached from the death-spells he had so narrowly avoided; moreover, the effects of
exhaustion, of too little sleep, of troubled dreams and the geas' continual, grinding, low-grade
pain were beginning to tell. "That is, I'll be fine." He hooked a handful of dates from the
painted wooden bowl that stood on a cupboard and disappeared through the pantry door.
As he had suspected, Antryg found Aunt Min in the North Hall, forgotten by everyone, calmly
drawing up the preliminary field to a major conjuration. As he slipped through the rivet-studded
oak of the great double doors from the Hall's vestibule, he noted that she'd marked out the field
in about three-quarters of the long chamber, leaving open the space in front of the door, so that
people could enter and leave without automatically violating the limitations and destroying the
energies which would later be worked there. The other doors into the room-a small postern and a
semisecret panel in an alcove at the back-had been barred from within. Ten feet or so into the
room from the main entrance she had drawn the first of the boundary lines, leaving a ritual door,
a break in the lines through which others could enter and leave the field up until the time when
it was "sealed," when the true conjurations would begin.
For a moment Antryg folded his arms and stood by the cluster of narrow sandstone pilasters of the
North Hall's doorway, only taking pleasure in watching the tiny old woman lay out the cornering-
spells and preliminary alignments. Every line, though drawn freehand, was as straight as if ruled;
the circles might have been made with a compass. Shaky as the old Archmage's hands were at other
tasks, each rune, each sigil, each seal was a minor work of the calligrapher's art.
"You took your time," she muttered as she finished the northwest corner and turned to look at him;
he had entered soundlessly, and as far as he could tell she had not moved her head. Maybe she
really did have eyes in the back of it, as all the novices claimed.
"I'm afraid I was unavoidably delayed."
She fumbled about, collecting her cane and the overflowing twig-basket of her knitting, and came
doddering across the length of the light-washed room. Aunt Min always doddered-she'd doddered
nearly thirty years ago when Antryg had first seen her, when she'd visited Suraklin in Kymil. But
there was something in the careful slowness of her step now that twisted a knife of dread inside
him, something in the fallen, weary lines of her delicate-boned face. He shivered-after the warmth
of the kitchen the North Hall was chilly, and he'd left his coat and shawl in the woods with Lady
Rosamund-and made a move to go help her but stopped himself; the ritual "door" was shut. To have
crossed the scribbled line of runes that marked its threshold would have condemned the old lady to
another two hours of careful remaking of spells.
Though he could see the knife of meteor iron nesting among the tangled chaos of her knitting, she
made no move to open the spell-field and admit him, only stood on her own side of the lines,
looking up at him sidelong, her white head cocked a little on its bent spine.
"I don't need you here." The high, shaky voice was like a piping child's. "I understand well these
spells you've made, to fool the very stones into thinking they're what they're not, and I can work
well by myself, and bring it all to its proper fruiting at the very turn of midnight." Pale blue
eyes glinted up at him, defying him to offer help. "Nor do I need you to sit with your eyes on
that," a finger like a bent twig moved in the direction of the Dead God's watch, still wrapped
around Antryg's wrist, "like a timekeeper at a footrace, to make sure when midnight is, as though
I couldn't feel it in the breathing of the earth and the moon."
"Well," Antryg said apologetically, "it would be terribly bad manners of me to shove the spells at
you and run away to play."
"As you did with poor Seldes Katne," Min grumbled, relenting a little and fumbling in her basket,
dropping a ball of purple yarn and a packet of herbs to the smooth-scrubbed oak of the floor.
"Like a mole she's been, combing through notebooks and memoirs and catalogs of wizards long dead
and forgotten, looking to see any mention of which teles belonged to who, and where they got it
from ... and you needn't tell me why. Always fidgeting and digging, you are. Not that she hasn't
been digging, searching, combing like a woman who's lost a pin in a loft of hay, long before you
came among us again ... as she's been digging and searching all her life, poor soul. It's her you
should be helping, or be making yourself useful by going back to Pothatch and washing up the
dishes."


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She traced the proper signs with the iron knife, unsealing and opening the door. Antryg stepped
through, and she closed it once again behind him.
"Here." She handed him her basket. "It's a long Making we're to be doing today, drawing up the
great circles and signs of power from the leys, and from the maze beneath us, and running the
power down through the Line itself, to the chamber in the maze below. I'll need a boy to go
censing after me, and marking the curves in chalk while I conjure. You'll do for that."
"I'm honored." Antryg smiled.
"More than you deserve," the old lady muttered. "A troublemaker you always were. 'Twill keep you
out of trouble with the Witchfinders in any case. Mind you don't step on the lines."
The long bands of sunlight that fell through the clerestory windows shifted; on the whitewashed
plaster of the walls the cinder gray shadows of the lattices shrank from exaggerated gothic spears
to lozenges and at last to squares, alternating with squares of light that burned almost too
bright to see. To Antryg's account of the events of last night, Aunt Min only shook her head, and
muttered, "There now! If it's not one thing it's another, and it's something to be looked into,
when all's said and done." And then, Antryg knew, put the matter completely from her mind,
returning all her concentration to the spells she wove on the North Hall's sandstone floor.

Late in the afternoon Antryg heard footfalls in the vestibule outside, entering from the North
Wing's stone colonnade; since by then he was sitting in a corner where Aunt Min had ordered him
while she executed the delicate paths of power along one of the field's great curves, he left off
putting her knitting basket in order and got to his feet, guessing who it might be.
Daurannon entered quietly, carrying, almost absentmindedly under his arm, Antryg's garish coat and
shawl. These he dropped in a heap beside the door and walked to the boundaries where Antryg
waited.
"I thought I'd find you here." His voice was barely a whisper in the big chamber's hush, and in
the floating gray-blue shadows his eyes were grim.
"Will she be all right?"
The younger mage nodded, but by the way he stood, Antryg guessed it had been a near thing. "The
hunters say they shot her in mistake for a wolf-an odd sort of mistake to make. They can't tell
quite how it happened."
"There was a glamour on her," Antryg said impatiently, "a glamour on us both. She followed me out
of the Citadel."
"I know. Is that why you led her?"
"What? So I could point to her and shout at the hunters, 'Oh, look, there's a wolf!'? It's all I
could have done along those lines, as you should know."
"I know nothing," Daurannon said quietly, "when it comes to your schemes. The hunters said she was
the only one they saw, yet your coat and shawl were found near where she lay."
"I left them with her. She was going into shock, she needed to be kept warm."
"She could have found them herself and made the dressing from the lining."
"I take it she hasn't regained consciousness, then. When she does, she'll tell you."
"She came 'round for a few minutes, Issay tells me," Daurannon said. "I've been with the
Witchfinders all afternoon, trying to rebuild sufficient goodwill so they'll stop talking about
ransacking the Citadel from top to bottom and arresting the lot of us."
"You didn't offer to buy them off with my body?" Antryg folded his arms casually and blinked
across at him.
Daurannon glanced toward Aunt Min, rocking on her knees like a child, whispering as she drew along
the lines of power the long interlocking fretwork of sigils, knotting light like an artist
crocheting silk. Then his eyes returned to Antryg, a glint of resentment in them at the reminder
that Aunt Min would not have stood for such a betrayal.
"She asked after Aunt Min," he went on, without answering the question. "It was the first thing
she said: 'Don't let her hurt herself. Antryg's conjurations will kill her.' " He folded his own
arms, the movement a challenge.
Antryg was silent.
"Or was that your aim?"
"To make Rosie Archmage while I'm still under the Council's geas, you mean?" And he saw Daurannon
stiffen indignantly at the suggestion that the Master-Spells might fall to his rival rather than
himself.
"That might have been in your mind."
"Or yours."
The hazel eyes darted quickly away, then returned, catching and holding the gray. For a moment the
two wizards stood on opposite sides of the ritual bounds, graying-haired men who had known one


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another since they were teenagers, Antryg in a tawdry glitter of cheap beads, crystal earrings,
round-lensed glasses flashing where they caught the late slant of the sun, Daurannon somber and
elegant, the straight black fall of his robes broken only by the killing sword scabbarded at his
waist.
"You know the Master-Spells might just as easily fall on Bentick."
Daurannon waved off the suggestion impatiently. "He hasn't the strength."
"He has more than you're giving him credit for," Antryg said. "And in any case someone lured me
out to the Green King's Chapel and set me up to be attacked; and when she comes 'round, Rosamund
will certainly tell you that I got her away from the hunters and lured them from her."
"Or simply went off with them," Daur returned. "And disappeared at a convenient moment, which
argues for at least the ability to work more magic than the geas should allow. Why haven't you
been sleeping in your room in the Pepper-Grinder?"
Antryg tilted his head inquiringly to one side. "Why have you been watching the place?"
"Because you're our prisoner." Daurannon's gaze lingered for a moment on the brown mark Antryg
bore in the pit of his throat, the mark left by the accursed Sigil of Darkness. "And because you
are not to be trusted."
"I don't sleep there because I'm afraid I'll wake Kyra with my dreams," Antryg replied gently, and
Daurannon looked away.
"Then where do you sleep?"
"Oh, tut, Daur, that's not a question one gentleman asks another." Antryg grinned and propped his
spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. "As for the Witchfinder, I should say that within
twenty-four hours we should have the problem more or less in hand. His sasenna might even come in
useful for searching the Citadel. I'll want a marked map of every passage and chamber, from the
bottom of the Vaults to the top of the observatory platform, with the locations and natures of
every Gate, wormhole, spell-field, reality fold and patch of alien moss, once the whole business
is stabilized and they aren't appearing and disappearing."
"Why the Citadel?"
Antryg blinked, surprised. "Why not? The more information we have, the likelier we are to come to
a correct conclusion. But I shall need it done quickly." He nodded back over his shoulder to Aunt
Min, who had moved a few feet along the curve, still rocking on her heels and muttering, like a
woman tying intricate, invisible bows of light one at a time along some mighty fulcrum beam.
"The Citadel is built on a conjunction of the ley-lines, on top of probably the biggest collecting-
maze in the western world, though I'm told there's a cave system in Djovangg that's been worked up
into a bigger one. They shelter sheep in it these days, for of course the fortress it was once a
part of is long in ruins and forgotten. But with that kind of energy to draw upon, once the
balance is established between the magic circles and the electronics of the stabilization field,
I'd rather not give that kind of a double-feedback loop too long to build up."
Daurannon sniffed. "And you really think that nonsense you wrote will have any effect at all?
Other than getting poor Aunt Min to half kill herself pouring her strength into the kind of
thaumaturgical rathole you invented?"
"Kill myself? Kill myself?" Aunt Min tottered fiercely over to them, ruffled like an offended hen.
"You think I am no judge of my own strength or of another wizard's spells? You think because I'm
an old lady, I can be deceived to my harm by a young man's pretty eyes? Pssh!" She made shooing
motions with her hand and cane, waving Daur toward the outer doors. "Go away, you tiresome boy!
Smile and be nice to the Inquisitors, since your teeth are so white. Come back at midnight, when
this shall be accomplished. Go." She waved her cane again, like a farmwife chasing ducks. "Go."
Daurannon went, nearly colliding with Seldes Katne in the doorway. The librarian got hastily out
of his way, clutching a sheaf of notes to her heavy bosom; she looked after the Handsome One as he
crossed the vestibule and passed through the outer doors to the arcade outside. Thus only Antryg
saw how Aunt Min's face changed, drooping from anger into sudden lines of exhaustion as she groped
with her free hand for the support of his arm.
He caught her quickly, but an instant later she shook him off as the librarian came into the room.
"No," Aunt Min hissed, pulling free of Antryg's grip. "No, I am well; I only need a little rest. A
little rest. Here ... " She fumbled the knife from where it lay beside the ritual entry to the
field and with a hand that trembled unmade the seals. "Go out and speak to her. I only need a
little rest." And she stumbled back to where her knitting basket lay and sat down beside it,
abruptly, as if all the remaining strength had gone from her legs.
Doubtfully, Antryg stepped outside the field and crossed to the doorway where Seldes Katne, notes
still clutched in hand, waited beside the heap of his coat and shawl.
"I've brought you all I could find so far," she said, as he slipped gratefully into the threadbare
velvet. Though sunlight still blazed in its concentrated frieze of squares high on the wall, the


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plastered stonework left the hall far from warm. The wet, heavy heats of the Sykerst summer were
still some weeks off, and in the badly mended bones of his fingers Antryg could feel more rain on
the way. "It isn't complete, by any means."
"Hmmn." He thumbed quickly through the overwritten palimpsests of Seldes Katne's tiny, orderly
writing. "Otaro has two, Issay one, Nandiharrow one ... 'said to be that owned by Spurentas the
Blind ... ' But Spurentas' was the one called Wolperth, which was allegedly 'inhabited by a purple
spirit,' and vanished at his death. Nandiharrow's, I believe, was the one called Varverne, which
used to belong to Berengis the Black and could call around itself the illusion of its owner, which
could talk to people who came to his rooms and even do magic for them. Now Malvidne the Herbwife,
four centuries ago, had one which had similar powers, though it was smaller than Berengis' by all
accounts-and that, I believe, was the one they walled up in the vaults during Tiamat's time
because fires tended to break out in the rooms where it was stored. And as far as I know, Bentick
has two, and there's no mention here of Vyrayana, the one Phormion got from Simon the Lame.
Curious-Vyrayana was one of the most powerful, but perhaps Phormion had it walled up somewhere; it
was always the old ones that became unstable. And I recall some other queer stories about
Vyrayana. Still," he added, smiling assuringly down at her dismayed face, "it is a start, and
considering how many volumes you've had to go through to get the histories of these, it's amazing
you've gotten so much. The seven that Suraklin had, by the way, we can discount-I now what became
of those. I'll write it down for you one day when I have time, if Daurannon doesn't sell me to the
Inquisition first."
Her dark eyes widened with alarm. "Will he?"
"Not as long as Aunt Min's alive." He glanced back over his shoulder, to see that the old Archmage
had taken a loose wad of yarns and silks from her basket and, laying it down as pillow, had curled
up and fallen asleep on the floor among the sigils and curves of power. Antryg sighed. He knew
exactly how much concentration, how much raw power, was needed for the conjuration to be lone that
night, and there was a grayness to the old woman's face that made him deeply uneasy. By the height
of the sun patches on the wall he knew the afternoon was drawing on; the long Sykerst twilight
wouldn't fade until less than two hours short of midnight itself, and after that, he reminded
himself, there would still be the search to do. At least, he reasoned, it was a good excuse not to
go to sleep.
"Kitty ... " She spun as if startled. She, too, had been looking at the Archmage. "Could you bring
us some bread and honey and coffee-strong coffee-from the kitchen, and maybe a little brandy for
Aunt Min?"
"Of course."
"And if you see Captain Implek or Sergeant Hathen, could you arrange for guards to be placed in
the vestibule here, and around the Rotunda, and the stores-cellar entrance to the Vaults? Once
midnight passes and the Circles of Power link with Ninetentwo's stabilization field, I don't want
anything breaking the balance."
After she closed the great oak doors behind her, he could hear her heavy, rather clumsy tread
going off across the little vestibule and the almost-soundless creak of the iron hinges as she let
herself out into the arcade. Wearily, Antryg sank down to the floor, his back to the slender
pilasters beside the door and his head tilted to rest against the stone behind him. Whatever
happened, he thought, it was going to be one hell of a long night.
In about an hour Aunt Min woke up. By that time the lattice shadows were fading. Light still
lingered broad in the sky outside, but it no longer streamed into the hall. Min and Antryg worked
in gathering gloom, for the Archmage was unable to spare the concentration to summon light; the
only illumination came from the phosphoric blue flicker of the light-circles drawn by the old
woman's finger. These spread out like shining concentric ripples among the other Circles of Power-
the Circles of Water, of Smoke, of Silver and Earth and Blood-weaving all together into a glowing
maze, eerily reminiscent of the maze of darkness far beneath their feet. The magic that seemed at
all times to hang whispering in the air of the Citadel thickened, like the scent of hay on a hot
night, and now and then Antryg could see veins of light beneath the plaster of the wall or
gleaming like streaks of niter on the pillars and in the wood grain of the door.
Power was drawn down, called up, summoned forth from the leys that crossed the earth and from the
patterns of the stars overhead. Power spread out, slowly, through the stones of the Citadel
itself, through sandstone, tile, and granite, through terrazzo, marble, and glass, thready silver
webs of it impregnating the igneous bedrock of the tor itself. Deep in the Vaults below, Antryg
knew, Ninetentwo the Dead God would be checking his equipment, wiring oscillators, field
generators, backup batteries and resonating screens, aligning them as if there were energy present
that could be polarized, matching them to the strange patterns of the maze, the sparking points of
long-buried glass and bone. In his mind, or in some corner of his senses, he could see the


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immense, bony form, like the mummified skeleton of a dragon, more hideous than the most insane
tale-weaver's imaginings, moving among the banks of dark metal components, the orange eye-blink of
lights glittering on breathing tubes, weapon fittings, and the alien, glossy hide.
Power reached out to power. Fingers of lightning readied themselves to touch.
In the vestibule, those sasenna who were also novices of magic could feel it. If he closed his
eyes and listened, Antryg could hear their voices mutter and whisper. Farther off, by reaching out
his senses to the whole of the Citadel, other sounds came to his mind, other whispers: Silvorglim
the Witchfinder saying, "It is abominable! Abominable!" Brighthand's voice: " ... hasn't eaten in
two days and won't touch what I bring him." A thread of a whisper murmured in darkness: "Dear God,
what am I going to do?" And, somewhere deep in the Vaults, a thin, despairing shriek. Around him
in the hall the darkness deepened, the sky beyond the lattices the strange, holy blue that seemed
deeper even than night's starry darkness. Min's face by the foxfire glow of the runes appeared to
thin into a strange little skull, framed by the flaring white halo of her hair. The bent old
fingers drew at the power, knitting it, as she knitted yarn, into a glowing net, and in his mind
Antryg saw again the ancient tree of her soul, its black steel roots the roots of the mountain,
drinking iron strength from the iron heart of the earth.
Outside the first stars gemmed the night. Somewhere in the Citadel he half heard a thick, guttural
muttering about poison, plots, and death-then it was gone like smoke when the wind turns. In the
vestibule Kyra murmured, "Can you feel it?" and though Antryg himself felt the coming of midnight
in his heart and bones, still he glanced at his watch, counting down the seconds as he hoped the
Dead God's instruments were likewise counting them down.
Aunt Min, he thought, were she not so absorbed in the horrendous effort of summoning and directing
power, would slap his hand for looking.
In the trained, piercing shriek of a wizard's power the Archmage cried out, rising to her knees
and spreading out her skeletal arms, power tunneling down around her like glowing smoke, sparkling
like a queen's treasure of jewels. At the same moment Antryg, his hands, bare for once, spread out
on the stone of the wall, felt the energies within the stones shift and change ...
A deep shudder seemed to pass through the very stones, so profound as almost to frighten him. The
next instant he jerked his fingers away as a new energy, like fine-drawn, fast-moving wire, seemed
to slice his flesh.
With a sensation of crushing, of dark weight redoubled, he felt the lowering presence of the Void.
In the courtyard beyond the Cloister, the clock finished singing out its twelve tinny chimes.


Chapter XVI
As for the ancient practice of exposing children at their birth, it is utterly forbidden upon pain
of anathema that any parent shall cast out, or cause to die, any child of their bodies, from the
day they first enter the world.

But it is understood that if the child be monstrous-that is, given to perversions, or to base and
abject cruelty to other children, or to the torture of animals, or if that child be found to be
mageborn-then, should the parents cast the child out, or cause it to die, anathema shall not be
pronounced.
-Inquisition of Kymil
Advice to local priests

"There is something being hidden in this Citadel, I tell you-some great plot or secret, whose evil
weights the very air."
At the sound of the Witchfinder Silvorglim's voice, Antryg slowed his steps. "What on earth are
you doing up at this hour of the night?" he breathed, a sound no louder than the droning wing-
flutter of the giant brown moths that beat themselves on the window frames of the Polygon's turret
stair behind him. "You ought to be in bed like decent folks."
He tiptoed forward, a disjointed rustle of velvet and beads, to the concealment of one of the
archway's heavy wool draft curtains that had not yet been taken down for the summer. By angling
his head, he could look down the hall and see into an amber-lit corner of the Steward's office.
The entire Polygon was dangerous territory for him. The darkness of its stairways and passages
would give him no concealment from the hasu, the red-robed Church wizards in Silvorglim's train,
and it was at least even odds they'd know who he was. The Bishop of Kymil had changed guards in
the Silent Tower frequently enough that half the Magic Office would recognize him, by his height
and his spectacles if nothing else. Despite the rather elaborate procedure of breaking, skinning,
slicing, and disemboweling detailed in the Regent's warrant for his death, he suspected that



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Silvorglim would simply settle for slitting his throat on sight, rather than risk his escape on
the way back to Angelshand and a formal execution. An unpleasant thought at the best of times, he
reflected, but with an artificial energy field building up on top of the looped feedback of a
collecting-maze, were he not around to supervise its dismantling before disintegration set in, the
results could be disastrous.
Even through his shoulder, pressed to the linenfold panelling of these upstairs halls, he could
feel it a little. Resting his fingertips on the wood, sinking his mind through to the sandstone
underneath, he could feel it still more: the searing cold, as if his flesh were being scored by a
thousand razors moving too swiftly for pain, and beneath that, a gathering heat.
A search had to be organized, and soon. That Bentick obviously had done nothing in that direction-
or, if he had, was concealing it from Antryg-was enough to make him take the risk of bearding the
Steward in his office, despite the danger of being seen on the way.
"The Citadel is a place of secrets," Daurannon said, his light, pleasant voice smooth with
reassurance. "That was the reason of its establishment-that secrets too heavy for the untaught,
the uninitiated, might be kept in safety, sparing humankind their misuse."
In the saffron rhombus of candlelight he could see them: Bentick at his tall, slanted desk, upon
whose polished surface every inkpot, every quill, every pricker and pumice stone and candlestick
ranged like neat-uniformed guards at attention, winking in the starry glow of the lamp overhead;
Daurannon standing beside him, his gestures as refined, as expressive, as an actor's. And
Silvorglim, taut suspicion in those fox-colored eyes.
"A fine lot of good it has done," the gray-clothed Witchfinder snapped. "Witches and sorcerers
still haunt every large city of the Realm."
"Dog wizards only," Daurannon replied easily, "who call themselves sorcerers out of envy of the
powers they cannot touch without our teaching."
"But wizards still." Silvorglim's arms were folded tight over his broad chest, and his gaze darted
sharply over the books that ranked the circular room floor-to-ceiling, neatly arranged in their
curving shelves. They were, Antryg knew, only the Citadel's ledgers, but it was clear from the
Witchfinder's expression that to Silvorglim they were volumes of arcane secrets, forbidden
learning lying in wait like those balls of dough-coated nightshade that professional poisoners
dropped down wells, waiting to go to work when the culprit himself was long gone.
"But this," Silvorglim went on, "this evil, these creatures which have been appearing, abominable
and terrible ... you cannot claim this is a matter brought about by those without power. And now
your Archmage refuses to see me, you refuse to give me proper accounting of what is taking place
within these walls ... "
"Within these walls," Bentick cut in crisply, "we owe you no accounting. After the Battle of the
Field of Stellith it was agreed that you of the Church would go your way, and we would go ours,
not attempting to meddle with humankind."
"On our sufferance!" Silvorglim's voice grew softer rather than louder, but with the contained
rage in his voice, the words might have been a shout. "On our sufferance, and by our leave, were
the Council's wizards allowed to depart."
"There was no such ... "
"Gentlemen ... " Daurannon raised a hand, then went to the Witchfinder's side and dropped a
friendly pat on the wide, stiff shoulder in its close-fitting gray coat. "It's late in the night
to be arguing about who said what to whom one afternoon six hundred and twelve years ago, you
know. And it's certainly late to go calling on the Archmage." Antryg saw his eyes move, touching
Bentick's, then returning, with casual naturalness, to Silvorglim's. "She'll be asleep, if she's
finished with her studies and meditations."
"Studies and meditations!" The deep voice, so at odds with the spare smallness of Silvorglim's
frame, tightened like the steel bands of an Inquisitor's screwed boot. "Something is going on in
this Citadel. Some power was called forth at the hour of midnight-Elberard and Tobin, the Saved
Ones who accompanied me from Angelshand, have sensed it."
"Of course." Daurannon widened those expressive eyes, as if surprised that the Witchfinder needed
to make a point of the matter-he did it, Antryg thought, quite well. "Anyone here would have told
you that the powers of the universe's balance can be brought to bear on the accomplishment of
great magics, usually at the hour of midnight. But I promise you it has nothing to do with any
affair of humankind. Certainly nothing to do with the purposes of your visit. Come ... "
He put a friendly hand on the back of the Witchfinder's arm-as he had, Antryg recognized with a
smile, on his own arm that first day-and steered him with the same coaxing pressure to the door.
"The Archmage will make it all clear to you in the morning."
Not if Rosie has anything to say about it, thought Antryg, slipping deeper into the concealment of
the curtains as his old friend guided Silvorglim into the hall.


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"She had better." Silvorglim had taken one of the five-branched bronze candelabra from the top of
Bentick's desk as he'd left the room, in spite of the white cone of glowing light Daurannon had
politely summoned over both their heads. The Witchfinder's eyes, pale brown almost to yellowness,
flashed in the glare like those of vermin in an outhouse. "Does she not, I warn you now that I
will order my troops to tear this Citadel to pieces, to find what it is that you are hiding from
us."
"Look," Daurannon said in a lowered voice, "if she doesn't, I can promise you that I'll give you
all the cooperation you need. I know this Citadel's secrets better than any, and I promise you
that whatever happens, you shall have the truth."
Or at least a convincing sop to stop you from asking awkward questions, thought Antryg, watching
the master-wizard's back framed in the arch at the far end of the hall, the bobbing glow of the
candelabra diminishing in the wider stairs at that end. From his position in the curtain Antryg
glanced back, to see Bentick, still sitting at his desk.
The old man had lowered his face to his hands, the high, bald curve of his forehead catching a
spot of the lamplight's sheen; after a moment he drew a long, thick, shaky breath, like a man
steeling himself against sobs. He gripped it as a man would grip a lifeline-then let it out,
measured and controlled, as he measured and controlled all things.
Dark robe billowing about him, Daurannon returned down the hall.
"Has she gone to her house?" Bentick spoke without looking up, barely audible through the
constriction of his throat.
Daurannon nodded. "I saw them crossing the gardens together just after midnight. I would have
intercepted him the minute he'd left her, except that Silvorglim came up to me."
"Damn." The Steward's long, nervous hands snapped into fists as his head lifted with a jerk. "And
now we've lost him."
"I've sent for the guards," Daurannon said quietly. "One thing that stabilizing field will mean-if
the thing actually exists, after all this-is that we won't have to worry about a Gate opening in
his cell and letting him disappear again. But of course," he added, as Bentick started to speak,
"chains and drugs, nevertheless."
The old man nodded, satisfied; Antryg noted with interest how his hands trembled as they fussed
with the golden watch, how his dark eyes darted to the younger wizard's face and then away. "And
Rosamund?"
"She's asleep; she won't be up for days, especially if I report to her that everything's going
well. The Witchfinders will be gone before she knows anything."
"Daurannon ... " Bentick caught his sleeve as Daurannon turned to go with that same natural air of
conclusion with which he had ejected Silvorglim.
Daurannon's brows arched inquiringly. Antryg could almost hear him saying, Me pinch the cakes,
Pothatch?
"You aren't by any chance going to turn him over to the Witchfinders, are you?"
"With the field stabilized," Daurannon pointed out in his most reasonable tones, "we don't need
him. We know what we're looking for, now: Circles of Power involving a teles. And what with the
abominations that have appeared in Angelshand, we may need some kind of spectacular favor to
sweeten the Regent's temper."
"You're not going to go ahead with the search NOW!?" Bentick demanded, horrified. "With the
Witchfinder's men pecking about the place, ready to pounce on the first indication of something
amiss?" His voice stammered a little, and as he turned his head again to avoid Daurannon's
suddenly inquiring eyes, Antryg could see the silvery glitter of beard stubble on the long,
usually immaculate jaw. He went on hastily, "We ... we'd have them running roughshod through every
chamber, every workroom, every study and hallway, disrupting everyone's studies and experiments."
"Then we won't search until they're gone," Daurannon said agreeably. "And if we give them Antryg,
you see, they'll be gone all that much sooner."
Bentick started to stammer something else, some other protest; Daurannon shook his head. "We have
to buy our peace in the coin of the Realm," he said softly. "Quite literally, if you like: you
know as well as I do where the money comes from to run this place, and the Regent and the
Inquisition could do a sight more damage to us by confiscating rental properties and cutting off
donations than they'd ever do by rack and wheel. I don't like turning one of ours over to the
Inquisition any more than you do-it sets an awkward precedent-but he isn't one of ours anymore,
really, is he? Only a dog wizard." The younger mage smiled a little, the cupid-bow mouth flexing
with a bitter little quirk, and laid a suave hand on Bentick's wrist. "And don't worry," he added
gently. "I know Antryg well enough to make sure that when they take him, he won't be able to
talk."



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Avoiding Daurannon's patrols-at this point, mostly the night-watch sasenna anyway-it took Antryg
slightly more than an hour to rally as much of a search party as he could. Tom and Pothatch he
found asleep in their respective alcoves off the dark cavern of the kitchen; Q'iin the
Herbmistress and her novice Gilda, in the herb garden at the bottom of the tor, gathering arnica
by the light of the late-rising moon. Kyra and Nye he found on guard duty in the vestibule of the
North Hall, Cylin and Mick swilling tea and passionately arguing spell-casting technique in the
otherwise-deserted Junior Parlor. Brunus was raiding the kitchen, and Brighthand, his gaunt face
hollowed still further with weariness, sitting awake over a pile of books in the darkened
downstairs chamber of the Island of Butterflies.
With these ten Antryg searched the Vaults until dawn, marking the locations of every Gate into
darkness, every strange anomaly of time and space, every cul-de-sac where alien moss grew thick,
every field of coldness, or strange vapors, or the tingling sense of unknown magics. Water was
flowing now down two of the main stairways, lapping with uneasy whispers and curls of strange-
smelling steam in the downshafts. The weight of the Void pressed heavy everywhere, a constant
presence, an unseen stalker waiting in the shadows, chained now, but patient.
On the fourth level, Antryg introduced Cylin and Mick to the Dead God and left them guarding the
round, painted chamber where he had set up his oscillators and reflecting screens by the pallid
glow of four small lumenpanels wired to the glass pillar in the chamber's midst. "We'll be back
with other patrols later in the morning," he promised, leaning against the jamb of the room's low
doorway, his face gaunt and his eyes black-circled with fatigue in the sickly light. "No one must
be allowed to disturb your machines here, Ninetentwo, nor must they be allowed," he added, looking
back over his shoulder at Kyra and Nye, "to enter the North Hall, or tamper with the Circles of
Power that keep the magical end of the equation in balance."
He reached uneasily to touch the granite of the chamber's wall. Under the smooth plaster, and the
queer, garish scenes of judgment, torture, and death painted upon it, he could feel still more
strongly the sear of the channeled energies and the slow, building heat of power-from the leys,
from the maze, from the Void itself-trapped and growing within.
"Have you ever played ring-of-roses?" he asked quietly, looking from the looming, insectile form
of the Dead God to the faces of the young people grouped in the passage behind him. "Do you
remember how it all works, the circle spinning faster and faster, until someone lets go? We've
brought the power up, and stabilized it, and we can bring it down again."
"What happens if it breaks?" Brighthand tipped his head a little to look beyond him, fascinated,
at the cold columns of glowing machinery in the chamber's shadows.
"The problem is that we can't be completely sure," Antryg said, and scratched the side of his long
nose. "Let's just be certain that it doesn't."
Before he slept in the hayloft above the mule barn, to which he earnestly hoped he hadn't been
followed, Antryg scanned through the crude sketch maps his Irregulars had drawn for him of the
portions of the Vaults they had patrolled. Some of these had registered as dark blurs on the Dead
God's multiscanner, others-reality-folds, cold spots, places where strange clangings could be
heard-did not, though whether this was due to a flaw in the scanner or to ancient fields of magic
in the walls, he did not know. Since he knew now that it was possible anyone in the Citadel, not
merely the members of the Council, might be at the bottom of the problem-and there was an outside
chance that it was someone like Pothatch or Tom-he knew the possibility existed that one of the
maps was false. Still, with a dozen of them searching, and all but three of those unlikely to be
deceived by illusion, the odds were good that these maps were reliable.
He frowned. No sign yet of the Circles of Power he knew had to be holding open a Gate-perhaps the
moving one, perhaps not. True, it might be down on the lower levels, filled with water now, the
enchantments still holding in the haunted dark.
Neither had anyone reported the cloying smell of roses, which all of them had been instructed to
flee at once-to flee, and to fetch him. And though four minor Gates-wormholes two or three feet
across at most-had been sighted, held by the stabilization field in uneasy stasis in the blacker
dark of the twisting maze, no one had reported anything like a Gate the size of the one the
librarian, Phormion, and Otaro had seen, nor had anyone heard the confusion of voices and cries
all three had witnessed in conjunction with that Gate.
A voice crying out, Phormion had said. I heard someone shout something ... 1 do not remember what
it was, but I remember the fear.
Was it significant that both Phormion and Otaro had forgotten?
It crossed Antryg's mind suddenly that he hadn't seen Otaro lately.
He shuffled to the next map, noted a reality-fold between the tunnel that led to a minor spiral on
the fifth level and the long stretch of tunnel on the second where a line of pillars ran down the
center. The searcher-Tom, by the laborious and ill-spelled handwriting-had not actually been able


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to search that spiral on the fifth level. And a small, localized area of thick fog near there,
knee-deep.
He shook his head, fighting against a sudden, blinding wave of tiredness. In the barn below, a
mule whuffled in the thin light of dawn already filtering through the great windows of the loft.
At the far end of the long, low-raftered chamber a cat picked its way over the hay bales, dainty
and disdainful-not in quest of anything to eat, Antryg knew, as spells against mice and other
vermin ringed the Citadel's outer walls, obliging the feline population to hunt in the fields
beyond. There had to be a pattern, some answer to the riddle.
His eyes ached and he took off his spectacles, laid his forehead on his crossed wrists, though
part of his mind protested at the folly of so tempting Sleep. And as he had feared, Sleep emerged
from the shadows like an assassin with a club and took him unguarded, and he subsided like a
broken and garish scarecrow into the hay.

"Can we even know how much time has passed?" Joanna asked, raising her head from Magister Magus'
velvet shoulder, where it had rested in silent exhaustion for ... how long? Minutes? A year and a
half? She closed her eyes, too tired now for panic or anxiety. "I mean, if this place is ... is an
energy-stasis of some kind, years could pass outside. Aren't there any stories about this thing?"
"It is mentioned," the wizard said cautiously. "But then, the stories generally concern those
whose friends and families did eventually get them out."
"After how long?"
"Well ... I don't remember, really," he hedged. "Most stories are about things that were simply
imprisoned here for good, like the demons."
Joanna sighed. "Things I'd really like to hear are somewhere in the dark with me. Dandy. And I
suppose ... " She felt a momentary stirring of the old anxiety, but it was too worn to surface. "I
suppose I don't really want to know about people who were locked up here for twenty years, either,
really. It's sort of like cruising your boyfriend's house to see what cars are outside when he
tells you he's got work to do that evening-knowing's worse than not knowing, but you don't know
that until it's too late."
In the ensuing silence Lady Irina's endless, half-heard ramblings drifted like the meaningless
purl of a stream. A muscle in Joanna's jaw flinched as all the old questions crept out of the
dark: How long would it take for Ruth to give up on her and stop paying her rent? For her friends
to move out of L.A.? For the knowledge by which she made her living to become obsolete? What would
she return to, if she spent even a year or two in this place?
STOP IT, JOANNA! It will be all right. And if it's not all right, there's not a damn thing you can
do about it and unless Security National Bank collapses in the interim, you 're not going to come
out of this with no place to go and no money-your account's going to pick up all that much more
interest if you can spend the next fifty years here rent-free, so STOP WORRYING.
Worry's not going to help. There is nothing you can do.
She hated that.
Something, not a sound, but a feeling, like a cold dragging somewhere within her chest, made her
raise her head, and beneath her shoulder she felt the Magus' rib cage stiffen.
There was silence, terrible silence, and the slow sensation of some dreadful vortex drinking at
the very heat of her blood.
"The tsaeati." Sweat started on her face, on her body beneath the thin cotton of her pajamas.
"It's moving this way."
It can't hurt us, she thought. If this place was an energy-stasis, it could not draw the lives
from them, could not absorb either the electrochemical flickerings of their thoughts or the
substance of their flesh.
But still she took Magister Magus' hand, and the two of them got to their feet and moved off
silently into darkness that had no end.

"I'm sorry," the little man said in the doorway, "but you can't stay here for free, you know. We
have at least four hundred applicants for the twenty-five rotating openings, and we simply can't
afford to turn one of them out for a nonpayer. You understand."
Antryg sighed and nodded, though he was exhausted and, even in the dream's altered perceptions,
very hungry. The wide, straight street behind him was jammed with pedestrians, who brushed the
mended skirts of his tattered purple coat, and the air was thick with the peculiarly acrid smell
of cheap polyester permeated by old body-sweat, mingled with the chest-burning weight of a third-
stage smog alert. In spite of the smell, everything in the dream was very brightly colored and
rather pretty-bright pink and yellow polyester tunics, gaily colored neoprene sneakers, green and
yellow stucco and paint on the crowded walls of the buildings. Only, upon closer inspection,


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everything was very dirty, and whirlpools of trash eddied along the edges of the sidewalks with
the scuffing of the passing feet or pooled thick and sodden in the damp gutters. The bright red-
and-blue buses that rumbled among the crowds belched clouds of black diesel smoke that were barely
seen, so thick was the air already with it; most of the people who moved past him, not looking up
at him or at one another, didn't seem terribly healthy, coughing or sniffling or rubbing their
eyes.
He said to the man in his dream, "Is there some place where I could stay for the night? Or some
place where I could find work? I'm really quite respectable, you know."
"I'm sure you are," the man said, in that same half-polite inflection, still not looking at him,
and shoved into his hand a stapled sheaf of papers on which a list of unreadably tiny government
agencies had been printed in a language he could not have deciphered even had the list not been a
sixth- or seventh-generation photocopy; the door shut in his face. In the moving mob he was alone
and tired, so tired his flesh hurt on his bones and he could barely get his legs to carry him away
from the shut door. In the dream he was aware that he had been alone and tired for a long time
now, constantly moving, unable to find a place to rest.
The turgid swirl of people swept him on.
The dream changed and blurred, breaking into a series of impressionistic fragments: himself
standing in line after line to be told that he hadn't the qualifications for anything except
shaling, whatever shaling was ... or fleeing, dodging through those bright-colored, weary,
unwashed crowds to escape something or someone that filled him with dread. Once, he glimpsed his
own face in the grimy reflective surface of a shopwindow and saw that he was old. Dirty and ragged
and unshaven and old, with a look of defeated hopelessness in his eyes. Why he didn't open a Gate
and exit this world he didn't know, only that it wasn't possible-either because the Council would
find him if he did, or because it was simply not possible in this world, or because he had lost
the ability. Or perhaps because in his heart he knew that the next world he entered would be
worse.
There was no one who would speak to him, no one who would touch him, no one who would be his
friend. Struggling feebly to escape the iron weight of sleep, he sensed in his dream that he had
been thus alone for years. Everything he had once known had faded behind him, like a light in a
black tunnel, with no light ahead, nothing but age and blind weariness and the slow, creeping
onset of pain.
In an alley he glimpsed something brown and curved behind a trash bin where men and women as old
as himself were scrounging for food. They snarled at him like half-toothless dogs, warning him
from their territory, and he stepped back, but not before he'd seen that behind the bin lay the
broken shell of a tortoise, shattered and turning to dust.
Joanna ... he thought, wanting her more than he could ever remember wanting anything. Wanting to
touch someone, to talk to someone ... it had been years since he had talked to anyone, save polite
civil servants like the man in the door. But Joanna was dead. Like a leaf in the wind, graying
away to rot, he moved on, an eternal prisoner of his own flight.


Chapter XVII
One of the strongest supporters of wizards during the first two centuries after the Accords of
Stellith was King Plugard II of Senterwing. He invited them to his court and freely endowed them
with gifts, and from his own privy funds built, in their northern stronghold, the barracks of
colored brick which now houses their sasenna.
When Plugard's nephew Bardelys organized a cabal of reactionary nobles and overthrew him, the
exiled King appealed to the mages for support against his supplanter. To this the Archmage
replied, "It is against our vows to use our powers for good or for ill in the affairs of men. We
shall give you shelter among us for as long as you require it, but we cannot assist you in
reclaiming your throne."
For this reason, when Plugard did rally popular support (for Bardelys was not only oppressive, but
vicious and much hated among the people), he cast out of his kingdom all the mages, even such as
had been his dear friends, and afterward it was many years before any wizard dared return to
Senterwing.
-Gantre Silvas
Annals

Antryg was awakened, far later in the afternoon than he had intended, by the flashing scamper of a
cat bounding across his shins. He moved a little and groaned, aching with the weariness of bad
sleep; the light in the loft was opal-colored and diffuse, and rain drummed softly, steadily, on


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the thatch a short distance above his head. The crooked bones of his hands hurt from the dampness-
it was the pain that had carried into his dreams.
He groped around for his glasses, finding them by memory mostly, and sat for a moment, picking the
hay out of his hair and listening to the rain. The cat he identified as Fysshe, Aunt Min's big
gray tom. There was, by the sound of it, one hell of a mouse hunt going on among the hay bales
that filled the long, low-raftered space above the stalls.
Smiling a little, Antryg sat back, undoing all his former efforts of picking the hay off his coat.
The rain smell wandered among the bales like a heartbroken ghost in search of half-forgotten
memories, trailing in its wake the nostalgia of his own childhood. He had almost forgotten how
much he had loved this country, with its crushing, empty silences, its cool woods and the hot,
muggy, mosquito-ridden magic of its summers.
Not, he thought, leaning back into the pillowing clouds of hay, that mosquitoes would be permitted
within the Citadel's bounds.
Then he sat up, frowning.
As well as mosquitoes, the Citadel bounds were, of course, spelled against mice.
So what was Fysshe after?
Suddenly deeply curious, Antryg got to his feet, hay clinging to his coat like burrs to a dog.
Standing, he could see over the nearby wall of baled fodder, and realized why the cat was making
so much noise. There were, in fact, four cats: Fysshe, Ru, Paddy winkle, and Littlekitty, all
darting and springing among the hay in quest of ...
Tiny abominations? Antryg hooked an elbow over the nearest low rafter and watched until
Paddywinkle flushed her quarry and went pelting across the floor after it.
It was the illusion of a mouse. Moreover, there was something different about this illusion: the
fur was longer and softer, and the color was more like that of a black-and-white cinema film than
the slatey bluish brown of a field mouse's coat. Its smell was stronger, too, a pungence of blood
and mousiness and ... catnip?
He realized then that the illusion was being cast by the cats.
Paddy sprang past Antryg's booted ankles, pouncing with both forepaws ... and the phantasm-mouse
vanished. The cat skidded to a halt, cocked her head, then turned back to where the other three
were still leaping madly around the hay in pursuit of their illusory quarry. Her long tail lashed
... and the phantasm-mouse appeared once more, skittering wildly away-they certainly had the
movement exact-with the hunter in hot and savagely joyful pursuit.
Antryg smiled, delighted, and stepping forward, held out his hand. No dancing simulacra of Fred
and Ginger graced his palm; he shrugged and said aloud, "Well, it was worth a try." Evidently, in
whatever reality that was the source of this field, cats could work magic and humans couldn't.
"And let's just hope there aren't side effects from this," he muttered, as he collected his shawl
and last night's maps from the hay. Somewhere in the Citadel there had to be a field, however
small, which would permit him to at least, very cautiously, work a scrying-stone.
He glanced through the big window at the rain pattering steadily down, drenching the maze of
corrals and dairy yards into a sea of yellow mud. By the light it was midafternoon ... he should
have wakened hours ago, though he felt that the uneasy slumber had done him little good.
Who was guarding the vestibule of the North Hall? he wondered, raking the last straws from his
curls. And had Aunt Min recovered enough to see Silvorglim before the Witchfinder succumbed to
either a coronary or the temptation to institute a pogrom? The Archmage had been exhausted beyond
speaking, bent and fragile, when he had taken her back to the little cottage in the gardens at
midnight and put her to bed. Fortunate, he thought wryly, that Lady Rosamund was still in her own
bed under Issay's care and hadn't seen how badly the old lady's strength had been sapped. With any
luck Min would be on her feet before her heir was; if not, Antryg supposed, clambering down the
ladder from the hayloft, he was in for a bad time.
There was a well in the corner of the big barn, a deep shaft descending far into echoing rock and
darkness; twenty feet down, a tiny door let into a passage connecting with the storage cellars
beneath the kitchens, reached by footholds cut into the living granite of the wall. Pothatch
nearly jumped out of his skin when Antryg stepped silently through the narrow doorway of the
pantry and tapped him on the elbow.
"Save us, Lord Antryg, I was afraid they'd got you!" He glanced swiftly over his shoulder as he
pushed Antryg back through the narrow slit and into the pantry again. "That Silvorglim, he's been
in a terrible state all morning."
"Why? What happened?" Antryg put out his hand to touch the wall, where the granite of the tor
itself underlay the plaster, and the heat of the energy running through it almost seared his
fingers. Coming down the narrow well shaft had been nearly unbearable. The rest of the
investigation had to be conducted and the field dismantled quickly, he thought with a shiver.


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Polarized as it was, there was simply too much energy building up where the leys ran through the
labyrinth ... the Witchfinder's hasu had to have noticed. The suffocating pressure of the Void's
nearness had half the cats in the Citadel walking on pins, the other half retreating to the fields
or the barns.
"I don't know, rightly." The cook scratched his thinning red hair. "But he came down to Lord
Daurannon this morning screaming as how he had to see my Lady Min right that second-and of course
the Lady Rosamund had dragged herself there, leaning on a crutch and looking like death, and got
into it with him proper."
"He stumbled through a magic-field that gave him power." The pantry door slipped open and
Brighthand edged through, his thin face seeming even more gaunt with weariness; streaks of purple
beneath his eyes showed how little sleep he'd had. Why? Antryg wondered. Surely not from
patrolling the Vaults last night?
"Silvorglim?"
"Aye." A wry, tired grin revealed a brief flash of teeth. "He wouldn't say where it was, but it
must've been in one of the tunnels goin' up to the subcellars of the library, 'cos it was dark
enough they were carryin' torches. One of his lads tripped on the stair, like, and dropped his
brand and caught the skirts of his coat on fire-Silvorglim damped it out without thinkin'."
Brighthand used the word gn'iya, the technical term for those acts of crude magic born of panic
and reflex, "and then went into a dither when he realized what he'd done."
He grinned again. While he was speaking, Antryg noticed that he was, in the most matter-of-fact
fashion possible, slipping rolls, apples, and cheese into the pockets of his robe.
"No idea where the field was?"
The boy shook his head. "Just that he came down ravin' to Daurannon, lookin' like he'd seen a
ghost and carryin' on like the field turned him into a eunuch instead of a temporary mage."
"So Silvorglim's been searching the Citadel?"
"Well, sort of patrollin'. But Seldes Katne's got keep-out spells across every door leadin' into
the Library, and Bentick has 'em across all the ways into the Vaults."
In spite of the urgency of the matter, Antryg grinned at the thought of the little Witchfinder's
face when confronted with such spells of ward and guard. It wasn't likely that whatever magical
barriers Seldes Katne might raise across the entrances to the Library could withstand the greater
magic of Silvorglim's two hasu, but Bentick's spells guarding the Vaults would be another matter.
"And no patrols from our side have been organized yet?" he asked, a little grimly.
Brighthand finished his casual pilfering with the appropriation of a small crock of honey. "Only
the ones they got out lookin' for you."
There were two ways to get from the kitchens to within striking distance of Aunt Min's cottage,
discounting of course the direct route through the refectory, along the North Cloister, up the
steps, and among the winding and overgrown beds of the garden. One of them involved several
flights of back stairs through the Polygon, a secret panel beside the fireplace in the Junior
Parlor (which everyone in the Citadel knew about except the dairymaids and Silvorglim), and thence
across the bridge to the lowest floor of the Harlot; the other, a connecting passage between the
Polygon's boiler room and the hypocausts under the Great Assembly Hall, and a succession of
trapdoors and minor staircases through the subcellars of the Senior Mages on the northwest side of
the hill.
Though the route through the Harlot was more direct, Antryg knew that the odds against both the
Junior Parlor and the bridge being deserted at this time of the afternoon were astronomical,
particularly since the Council sasenna-now directly under Daurannon's command-were actively
searching for him. Of course, chains and drugs, Daurannon had said casually. Antryg encountered
only one party of them, in the low-roofed, shadowy maze of columns beneath the Great Assembly
Hall, and was able to pass unseen, crouching in the brick mouth of the tunnel until they'd gone.
Having no desire to encounter whatever spells Phormion might have in the cellars of the Castle,
Antryg came above-ground by means of a narrow stair leading up from beneath the Sea Lady's House,
and stood for a time in the shelter of the little area dug out beneath that house's kitchen,
studying the long, overgrown slope of the gardens under the whispering patter of the rain. He
could see no sign of life under the peach and apple trees that half screened his view of the
little cottage at the garden's top; all the cats in the Citadel, nervous as they were, were doing
their edgy prowling indoors or had retreated in disgust to the barns. But he knew that Daurannon
would, of all things, want to keep him from getting to Aunt Min's protection. After a few moments
he dug in his jeans pocket for a rubber band-not a very good one, since the ones he had were the
small, thin, red sort that came around supermarket fliers-and, fitting one of his divinatory
hazelnuts to its improvised loop, let fly into the thick beds of rosemary that made a gray-green
screen across the garden's center. But he watched the clumps of laurel and hawthorn nearer the


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cottage, and sure enough, at the sharp rustle of the missile in the foliage he saw movement in two
places and, under the leaves, the momentary glimpse of a black sleeve.
"Damn." With infinite care he slipped back down to the cellar, and thence, via a disused well in
the subcellar and a trapdoor behind a cupboard full of old crockery, down to the Porcelain House,
where Lady Rosamund lived.
The Porcelain House had been so named for the slick-glazed white tiles of its downstairs entry way
and for the delicate chinaware capitals of that entryway's slender columns, capitals which also
appeared on five of the seven columns supporting the arcade of the little house's balcony. They
were intricate pieces of artwork, brightly colored-cardamom, cobalt, daffodil, and white-and
wrought in the shape of griffins and chrysanthemums. Antryg suspected they had originally been
ordered by some nobleman who had changed his mind about the design and donated the rejected
samples to the wizards in the hope of some kind of favor, in any case they were the sort of work
that had been intensely fashionable a hundred and fifty years ago in Mellidane, before softer
shapes and colors had supplanted the bright.
The latticework doorway leading in from the balcony was open, and Antryg slipped soundlessly
inside. For a moment, seeing the Lady asleep on the room's plain, narrow bed, he was afraid
Daurannon had talked Issay into drugging her. It wouldn't be difficult, considering the shock she
had suffered and the blood she had lost. But the black cat Imp, curled like a dropped muff in the
hollow formed by the Lady's leg beneath the coverlet, raised his head and regarded Antryg with a
solemn gold gaze, and at the movement Rosamund turned a little on her pillows and opened her eyes.
"What do you want?" She sat up a little, wincing. Her nightgown was plain red calico, faded with
washing, and against it the black braid of her hair was long and thick as a man's forearm. "How
long have I been asleep?"
"Imp ... " Antryg turned to the cat. "How long has your roommate been asleep?"
"Don't make jokes," Rosamund snapped crossly. "Where's Daurannon?"
"I haven't the slightest idea-looking for me, I expect, or having tea with the Witchfinders. And
if you're going to put a geas on me against joking, I really will die of it. I need to see Aunt
Min, and Daur's posted guards in the garden."
"I posted them there." She pushed the tendrils of her hair back from her cheeks. Even pale and
haggard with the loss of blood, her eyelids smudged blue with fatigue, still the beauty was there,
the song of her bones. "I saw to that, first thing this morning. I won't have her disturbed: not
by these Witch-finders, and certainly not by you. You've done enough. And what Daurannon was
thinking of, letting the Witchfinders through our defenses ... "
"What he was thinking of," Antryg said, turning to the room's small, tiled hearth to check the
earthenware teapot being kept warm near the flames, "is how to restore wizardry to acceptance in
the Realm by doing some ostentatious favor for the Regent, a favor that's probably going to
involve my head and a silver plate. He was asking Pothatch for the silver polish, now that I think
of it. Tea?"
"That's nonsense." Her hands were a little weak as she took the plain red cup from him, but her
glance had all its old imperious flash. "You are the Council's prisoner, and he is far from being
the head of the Council. And the very idea that he would turn a Council mage over to the
Inquisition ... "
"Our boy might not be the head of the Council," Antryg remarked, picking up a second cup from the
hearth, sitting cross-legged on the hearthrug to wipe it clean with his shirt-hem and pouring tea
for himself, "but the Archmage is unconscious and you're rather conveniently laid up. Oh, I don't
see Daurannon as having engineered the attack on us for that reason ... At least," he added
worriedly, "I don't think I see it ... "
He got to his feet, took the empty teacup from her hand and studied the leaves for a moment, then
sighed with relief and shook his head. "No. But he's opportunist enough to have seen his chance.
And between Daur wanting me out of the way so I don't have access to whatever old secrets might be
in the Vaults, and Bentick's determination not to conduct a search while the Witchfinders might
poke their noses into things, no search of any kind seems to be scheduled for the foreseeable
future." He set the teacup down beside the bed when Rosamund shook her head at the offer of more.
"The stabilization field has been in place for nearly eighteen hours already." Behind his
spectacles, his gray eyes were deadly earnest as he seated himself on the edge of the bed. "Our
time is limited. Within a day or two at most, the spells that altered the reactions of the energy
within the Citadel's stones will decay, and long before that happens, the entire metaphysical
construct of spells and polarization field will have to be dismantled with the utmost care, to
prevent an unbalance causing God knows what kind of energy backlash. This Citadel needs to be
searched and all anomalies charted from turrets to bedrock, no matter what the danger is or who
might see the results. If I had my way I'd have the surrounding countryside searched as well, at


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least along the ley-lines."
He leaned forward, the chill gray light from the open balcony doors catching a pewter glint in the
beads around his neck. "Rosamund, we can't fool around with this. At the rate the decay was
progressing before the stabilization field went into effect ... "
In the hall below, a door thudded, and boots creaked the oak of the stairs. Dimly, Antryg heard a
deep voice saying, "Don't lie to me, witch, and don't palm me off with excuses! There is an
abhorrence being wrought here, an evil plot to cast the Realm into chaos."
The voices were in the upper hall already; Antryg turned to flee out onto the balcony, but
Rosamund lifted a finger, warning ... in any case, he knew, the guards in the garden would see
him. Her hand made a quick gesture, and Antryg stepped back into a corner and did his best to look
like a lampstand as Daurannon, Bentick, Silvorglim, and one of the red-robed Church wizards strode
through the door.
"And to what," Lady Rosamund demanded, sitting up straighter in bed and flicking her dark braid
back over her shoulder, "do I owe the outrage of this extraordinary intrusion?"
Her voice was like a physical slap; all of them stopped involuntarily, even Silvorglim-even
Daurannon, who had spent over twenty years taking great care not to be impressed with her queenly
hauteur. Antryg saw the hasu's gray-blue eyes linger briefly on him and then wander away; Bentick
and Daurannon, far more powerful mages, did a double-take so perceptible that it might well have
given him away had not Silvorglim claimed center stage by striding to her ladyship's bedside in a
swirl of rain-mottled gray coat skirts.
"Last night I was told that the Archmage, and only the Archmage, could and would answer my
questions regarding the propriety-the legality-of what is being done in this place." His deep
voice was low and level, but there was a shivery edge to it, and his pale eyes glimmered in the
wet light with the anger of a man badly frightened at unimaginable betrayal by his own flesh.
"This morning I was again fobbed off ... "
"She sleeps still," Lady Rosamund cut in coldly.
"As I told your Excellency," Daurannon added.
"Her ... meditations-" Rosamund's ironic inflection, Antryg knew, was aimed at him. "-of last
night were more than a woman of her years should have to endure." Flaked jade could have been no
more cutting than the glance that sheered briefly to him where he stood in his corner, then away.
Daurannon and Bentick traded a look, but it was more than either dared to do, to violate the
Lady's protection.
"As the guards pointed out." Daurannon stepped forward to the Witchfinder's side conciliatingly.
"They had their orders."
"If the Archmage will not-or cannot-see me," Silvorglim's voice dripped sarcasm like a snake's
venom, "perhaps it is time that the Council delegated another to speak. I have been fobbed off,
lied to, even as the Regent, the nobles, the Church, even, put aside our advice and ignore our
warnings."
"Look," Daurannon said reasonably, forestalling Lady Rosamund's frigid rejoinder and Bentick's
almost-spitting outburst of rage, "if we wished to tell you lies, certainly we'd have done so more
believably than this."
"You are a people of lies," returned the Witchfinder, his yellow gaze hardening to a pin-bright
glitter of hate. "Your power is the stuff of lies, the outspewing of devils designed to tempt
human souls to their destruction with the illusion of a power which is and can be the province of
God alone."
"God?" Lady Rosamund drew herself up still further, pride and rage smoking from her like the vapor
that breathes along a mountain of ice. "Don't you mean God's Church, which grudges to see any
wield power but itself?"
"Nor should any," the Witchfinder replied calmly. "The Church, and the Church alone, speaks the
will of the Sole God. All the others you have corrupted, even the Emperor. So don't argue
semantics with me, you apostate whore, and don't pretend to me that an evil isn't going on here in
this Citadel, an evil to tempt and twist true men from what is right. You will find that such a
temptation is unavailing, such a twisting impossible." But his eyes, paled to the color of dead
leaves, flicked from face to face with a nervousness that belied his words, and Antryg thought,
Were you tempted, then? Outside, under the balcony, boots scuffed amid a muted creak of dagger
belts and harness leather, where more of the Witchfinder's guards awaited. The hasu, standing with
folded arms behind Silvorglim's shoulder, was gazing idly in his direction; Antryg felt the crawl
of sweat on his forehead, making his scalp itch and his spectacles slip down his nose.
"I demand to be given the freedom I need, the freedom which my charter grants me, to investigate
..."
"No!" Lady Rosamund cried.


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At the same moment Bentick snapped, "There will be no search of the Citadel save that conducted by
the Council!"
"Take care, then, that I do not return with the full might of the Church ... "
"You take care," Bentick shouted, "should you be fool enough to ... "
"Please!" Daurannon interposed his body between the Witchfinder and the Steward, who looked ready
to seize one another by the throats. The hasu also stepped forward from his post in the door but
hesitated-quite sensibly, Antryg thought, considering he couldn't be more than a medium-strength
wizard, certainly no one to take on three members of the Council. Though he knew that to move
would shatter the spells of misdirection that cloaked him, Antryg saw his chance-their attentions
all looked fully engaged, and the door was now clear. Stepping softly, he slipped past the red-
clothed wizard's shoulder and out into the hall. Daurannon and Rosamund were both too occupied
with the shouted recapitulation of the Concordances of Stellith to stop him as he tiptoed down the
stairs and paused for a moment in the shadows of the lower hall.
Through the door he could see the Witchfinder's sasenna clearly now, gathered under the balcony to
get out of the rain. Across the garden, Antryg could see Seldes Katne leaving the Polygon, a sheaf
of notes clutched under her arm; she paused at the turn of the path up to the Library, peering out
from beneath the protection of her oiled-cloth hood as if scanning the waist-deep wet jungle for
sight of someone ... probably, Antryg thought, himself.
He could, he knew, work his way on up through the cellars to the Library and intercept her there,
to learn whatever it was she had come down to tell him. But the doorways into the Library would be
barred with her spells, and even the ward-words of so slight a mage as Seldes Katne were
sufficient to keep him out ... or to trap him against them, as against a locked door, should
either the Witchfinder's or the Council's sasenna close him in from behind.
Moreover, with the graying of the afternoon the sense had grown upon him of lost time, of minutes
ticking away-of the growing pressure of the energies within the field and of the Void itself. So
he turned his steps downward, edging back through the cellars of the Breadbox and the Assembly
Hall, through the hypocaust, and so to a downshaft from the cellar of the Island of Butterflies
that had escaped Bentick's notice. His hands didn't stop shaking until he was safe in the darkness
of the Vaults again.
Down on the fourth level, Mick and Cylin still mounted guard over the Chamber of the Glass Pillar.
They both looked tired and rather shaken by the things they had seen and heard slipping through
the blackness of the maze all around them. They would feel, too, Antryg thought as he listened to
their account of the night, the growing weight of the Void, the rising shudder of the powers of
the leys fed through the collecting-maze, polarized, turned back on itself in an eternal loop like
the reflections of an endless mirror.
Nevertheless, neither of the young men would return to the Citadel above, offering instead to
continue the charting of the middle levels until they were too exhausted to go on. "It's very good
of you," Antryg said, emptying his kitchen loot from his pockets and dividing the rolls, cheese,
and fruit with them. "If you smell anything like roses, call a spell of winds around you as fast
as you can and get out of the vicinity at once. Find me immediately and let me know where it is.
And if you meet anyone on the Council-or any of the Council sasenna-you haven't seen me. I don't
like this," he added quietly to Ninetentwo, as the two young men vanished around the comer of a
twisted staircase and the dark of the Vaults swallowed them up. "I don't like it at all." Reaching
out, he touched the wall beside him-the energy felt stable to the bare tips of his fingers but
dangerously hot.
"Nor I," the Dead God buzzed softly. "That Moving Gate your mages described-the longer I consider
it in the light of all my experiments with the mechanics of the time-space continuum, the more
aberrant it sounds. According to my computers, it should not even be possible."
"Well, to use a quite hackneyed example, for many years the flight of a bumblebee was considered
to be contrary to all laws of aerodynamics, but it was eventually discovered that not all factors
had been taken into account. Saint Vespaluus, as I recall, is the patron saint of honeybees, but
for some reason the bumblebees have their own patron saint, Saint Olpo, to whom one also prays to
have one's garden delivered from plagues of rabbits. Everything else peaceful?"
The tall arachno-dragon nodded, but his hands, huge and skeletal, shifted unthinkingly along the
thick duraplast of the rifle slung over one shoulder. "According to my readings the sixth level is
deep in water that is still rising."
"Damn." Antryg threw a nervous glance at the chamber's far door, wondering if, somewhere in the
darkness beyond it, he had glimpsed a flicker of moving light. The dim green lumenpanels wired to
the pillar shed a cold, feverish gleam over a small pyramid of spare equipment, extra air bottles,
first-aid kit, and what he dimly guessed to be a portable computer, and the pillar itself
refracted chilly shards of the light across walls and ceiling, touching with ghostly highlights


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the edges of generators and screens.
"The Gate to my own world is up one level from here." The air hoses flexed like obscene
musculature as the Dead God gestured toward the fat hawser of cable that vanished through the
door. "I've run a line up to it, to save the batteries for emergencies. Each battery is good for
one hour, as we reckon hours: roughly two of yours. I've got a com-cable hooked through, too, and
the bulletins I hear from my own world are disquieting."
Antryg shivered, thinking about the cold, floating, half-formed sentiences of the teles-balls that
had over the years "gone bad" drifting through the charged mazes of the Vaults; about the power he
could sense, almost palpably now, streaming through the fibers of granite all about him; about the
dark, straining strength of the Void twisting at the magic that held it in place. The exhaustion
he'd felt in his dream seemed to have carried over into waking: he felt more tired than he could
remember being in years, the pain of the geas a constant, slow gnawing at his bones.
But somewhere in the sightless mazes of the Vaults, somewhere in the labyrinthine tangles of pits
and traps and doors that led nowhere, lay the answer: the Gate from which issued the scent of
roses, the darkness in which voices cried out words that were afterward forgotten ... and the
Circles of Power that held the thing open.
The answer, thought Antryg wearily, and his bones cringed from the thought of more wandering
through this haunted underworld of filthy mosses, unseen demons, drifting ghosts of fog. The
answer would be there. It was the question he had begun to worry about.
"I suppose," he said at length, "that eventually I shall have to go abovestairs again and try to
see Aunt Min. By that time I hope Rosie will have called the dogs off me and convinced Silvorglim
and his myrmidons to go elsewhere-at least, I hope she manages to do that before it comes time to
dismantle the polarization field, because it's going to take all the strength the Council can
raise to do so safely. And I'm beginning to experience a sort of academic curiosity about what
they're going to do with me once this is all solved."
The opaque golden iridescence of Ninetentwo's eyes gleamed at him as the Dead God tilted his head.
"Perhaps they wonder that, too."

Pothatch and Tom were just putting the last of the supper dishes away when Antryg emerged from the
Vaults again. It was almost full dark, and still raining, the sound of it a soft, steady drumming
on the tiled roof above the clumsy rafter shadows. Supper was long over, but the sasenna who would
ordinarily have filled in for the absent servants were still out walking uneasy patrols. Tom
dished up leftover lamb stew that, for once, Antryg was almost too exhausted to eat while Pothatch
slipped out to puff his way up the hill to the Breadbox to beg more dream herbs from Q'iin. In the
deserted bathhouse, with its smells of wet stone, herbs, and soap, there was sufficient hot water
in the boilers for Antryg to bathe and shave and wash his hair; afterward he climbed a ladder in
the back of a stores cupboard to the attic, to sleep for what remained of the night


Chapter XVIII
Better a whore than a wizard, for at least a whore'll give you summat for your coin.
-Ellie Brue
(Mistress to King Pharidon II and one of the most notorious prostitutes in Angelshand)

"Let me alone ... Go away ... I swear to you I never killed you."
Suspended inches, it seemed, above the poisoned seethe of dreams, Antryg opened his eyes and
listened. Up here under the roof tiles the rain was very loud; the air smelled of wet dust where
leaks dripped through and of herbed steam and soap from below.
He heard nothing more for a time, but, reasoning that anything was an improvement over what waited
for him on the other side of the wall of sleep, he got noiselessly to his feet and pulled on his
coat. As he crept to the top of the ladder, he heard a soft bumping, the scrape of furniture as
weight caught at it, and a broken voice filled with terror and grief.
"Please ... please ... I didn't mean it. I never meant you harm."
Otaro's voice.
Antryg slipped down the ladder, put aside the hanging that separated the closet, with its shelves
of terra-cotta crocks, from the main length of the baths.
The Singer of the City of Cranes swayed like a ghost in the middle of the big stone room, holding
a corner of one of the tables for support. He wore only a yellow calico nightshirt, baggy over a
frame that had visibly lost flesh in the past three days; the long black curls hanging down over
his shoulders were matted and filthy. He swung violently around at the scuff of Antryg's boots on
the flagstoned floor, hand raised. "Keep away from me!" he screamed in a voice shrill with terror.



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Antryg froze, seeing the blind panic in the older man's dark eyes. Mages were drilled to use
defensive spells of lightning and fire if attacked-if he moved, he'd be a pile of greasy ash long
before he could reach either Otaro or the door. The Singer's face was pouchy and gray with
fatigue, grimed with beard stubble, and wet with sweat as if he'd dunked it in one of the tubs;
his breath labored in the rain-drumming darkness.
"I'm not here to harm you, Otaro," Antryg said in a low, friendly voice. "I just found your seeing-
glass in the Vaults, that's all." Moving very carefully, he slipped the magnifying lens on its
ribbon from around his neck and held it out. "And I knew you needed help."
The little man backed away, trembling, hand still upraised. Antryg wasn't sure who or what he was
seeing through those fear-stretched brown eyes, but, at a guess, it wasn't the bathhouse. "I don't
need help."
"Of course not," Antryg agreed soothingly, the voice of a healer's spells. "I'm here to protect
you, Otaro-to protect you so that you can go to sleep."
He lowered his voice still more, recognizing his own dreams, his own fears, his own madness in the
Singer's frightened stare. "You're quite safe, you know, and as long as you have your seeing-glass
he can't come for you-he can't come near you. He'll stay dead and underground where he belongs."
That kind of fear, he knew, came only from seeing in dreams one who by all rights and reason must
be long rotted to dust. "Let me give it to you, and then you'll be quite safe."
A lie, of course, he thought-he himself had never felt safe-but a lie for which the little
Oriental reached as hungrily as he reached for the promise of sleep. The brown hand lowered
tremblingly, and Otaro hugged himself like a beaten child, black hair hanging down over his face,
catching only the ruby glimmer of the banked embers beneath the boiler; in the bloody light Antryg
could see him tremble.
"I'll never be safe." The magic beauty of the voice was a cracked whisper of despair. "Nowhere.
Never."
"You'll be safe as long as you wear this." Antryg edged closer, holding out the magnifying glass
on the end of its ribbons. Even the smallest thing, he knew, could act as a talisman to a mind
unhinged with exhaustion and terror.
"Here," he said comfortingly, "let me give this to you and get you back to your room. You'll be
safe there."
"You didn't know him," Otaro whispered, still clutching himself, still not looking up. "I was his
only son, his only child. He expected ... so much of me."
"Yes," Antryg breathed, remembering the glint of tawny eyes. "Yes, I know."
"The money I took was his savings. But I had to be free of him. I had to come here, to study, to
escape. He would never have let me. Later I sent it back to him, sent it over and over ... " Tears
crawled down the sunken brown cheeks, like droplets of blood in the ember glow, to lose themselves
in the iron gray stubble of beard. "He cursed me. He said ... "
"I know what he said." Antryg held out one hand, the magnifying lens dangling by its ribbons from
one crooked finger in the ink-stained woolen mitt. "You don't need to tell me. I know."
"I thought I had fled from him," Otaro whispered, "all those years ago."
But you never can flee from them, thought Antryg. Not when they're alive in your mind.
"It was your father's voice you heard, wasn't it," he asked gently, "coming from the Gate?"
The chubby mage nodded brokenly, seeming to shrink further and further in on himself. He snatched
the lens from Antryg's hand and clutched it to him, hugging himself while Antryg put his long arms
around those heaving shoulders. "I heard it again, saw it again, and again ... every time I shut
my eyes. The Gate, opening in my rooms, rushing at me, pursuing me, swallowing me. And then it was
gone. But it would come back ... "
Turning convulsively, he clutched at Antryg's sleeves, plucked the shabby shawl with hands that
could call music to make birds weep and draw clouds down to listen-gripped him with bone-breaking
strength, as if fearing some rising flood of blackness would sweep him away.
"Oh, Father."
Then he doubled over, his hands flying to his temples as if he would smash his own skull like an
eggshell, his face ghastly with pain.
Hoping to hell Rosamund had managed to call off Daurannon's orders for his arrest, Antryg half
guided, half carried the sobbing, stumbling little man out of the baths, along the darkened North
Cloister, and up the tiny stone stepway at its end, between stands of dripping birch and then
through a door and a cellar and up another flight to the cellar of the Pavilion, the house on the
northern side of the hill where the Singer lived. Though he was fairly certain Otaro was mad,
Antryg searched the rooms nevertheless for any sign that the Moving Gate had indeed manifested
itself there but found none. Which didn't prove, he reflected, that it hadn't been appearing there
at every chime of the clock for the past three days; the house was situated on the Pensykley.


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During his search Otaro only sat in a corner, twisting like a nervous child or clutching at his
head, sweating and whimpering in pain. But the big downstairs study and the smaller loft where he
slept above smelled fusty, shut up, frowsted with long habitation and little air. The sheets on
the bed were sweat-damp and twisted, the scrolls and papers oh the desk scattered, crumpled, torn.
Not from a search, thought Antryg, turning them over in his long, gloved hands. They'd been hurled
about by an angry arm, torn because they'd been there to tear.
In his own days of madness in the Silent Tower, his papers had frequently looked the same.
"Master."
Antryg looked over the loft's carved rail. Zake Brighthand stood in the open doorway, gray robes
freckled with rain.
"He's upstairs." Antryg clattered swiftly down the narrow twist of oaken steps as the boy came
into the room, looking around him at the tumbled papers and scattered books. There was shock and
grief in his fatigue-hollowed eyes but little surprise, the expression of a man who has finally
nerved himself to open a door behind which he has smelled blood and death. "When was the last you
saw him?"
"Yesterday." Brighthand shook his head, his long hair slapping wetly against his cheeks. "He swore
he was well, said there was a plot among the wizards of the Council, that his life wouldn't be
safe if I went to any of 'em. I could see he looked bad and begged him to see Issay or Min or one
of t'other healers. Then when I came back with food for him last night the door was locked,
spelled shut. I didn't know what to do."
"He's gone mad, you know."
Brighthand turned his face aside, biting his lips; Antryg guessed that this was knowledge he had
been fighting against for some time. "That Gate?" the boy asked after a moment.
"Maybe. I found him in the bathhouse ... "
"He swore he was well," the Junior repeated, his slurry docker's drawl breaking a little with
desperation and strain. "I been comin' back every few hours to check, try and get him to eat or
sleep. This's the first the door's been open. If it hadn't been, I think I'd have disobeyed him
and gone for help, and hell with what he said. I just didn't know what to do."
"Stay with him now," said Antryg softly. "I'll send Issay over."
His hand on the cellar door, Antryg added, "He's in pain, and panicky-he may hurl lightning or
fire at you, so be ready."
Brighthand nodded; Antryg could see him mentally going over defenses. He might still be a Junior
and a new one at that, and his technical knowledge slender, but for all his quiet, his strength
was such that Antryg had little fear of his being hurt.
"He spoke of seeing the Moving Gate here, in his rooms, which may have been a hallucination-or
not. By the way, you don't happen to know if Mick and Cylin came back from the Vaults, do you?"
"Oh, aye, hours ago." Brighthand paused on his way up the steps. "In time for dinner, anyway."
"Lucky bastards." Antryg sighed and went down the cellar steps at a run, making his way via attics
and cellars and nameless little stairs and bridges around the western side of the hill toward the
Mole Hill, where Issay Bel-Caire lived.
The Silent One was still awake, spell-weaving a tisane designed to restore strength badly
depleted; the whole floor of the Mole Hill's single room was a labyrinth of power-circles, chalked
spirals, sigils of light and silver, with the little physician sitting cross-legged in the middle,
long gray mare's tails of hair braided back over thin shoulders and the archaic glass
amplification tubes that no one else ever used capping each spidery finger.
After a rapid conference in which Issay warned him of the patrols and demanded to know about the
alien energies that whispered now in every stone of the Citadel's ancient bones, Antryg dispatched
the Silent One to the Pavilion to look after Otaro. As the slight figure flitted up the vine-
choked outer steps and into the rainy darkness, Antryg leaned for a moment against the doorframe,
wondering exactly how he was going to assemble sufficient force for a rapid, surreptitious
shakedown of the entire Citadel without letting either Daurannon or Silvorglim know what was
afoot.
It had to be done soon, and it had to be done quickly-with the energy buildup running dangerously
high, the stabilization field should not be permitted to continue more than another twelve hours.
Yet Bentick seemed determined not to let it take place as long as the Witchfinders were present in
the Citadel. Antryg thought about that as he made a quick search of the Mole Hill for a jelgeth
tisane-as he'd suspected, Issay had concocted one for the conjuration. They were frowned upon by
the Council, but all the wizards used them. Exactly what was it that Bentick-or Phormion-feared
would be uncovered? Old secrets in the Vaults? Daurannon could screen those from the Witchfinders
as he'd certainly screen them from Antryg.
And yet, he thought, his boots thumping hollowly on the enclosed staircase between the subcellar


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of the Isle of Butterflies and the attic of the laundries, if Bentick or Phormion was behind all
this, why not play their trump card and threaten Joanna? Why try to murder him? He'd told Min of
two attempts on his life-one in the cellar of the Castle and the other at the Green King's Chapel-
but the second attempt might just as easily have been directed against Rosamund, with himself as
bait.
As he swung through a trapdoor into the laundry and scrambled down a drying-rack to the floor, he
glanced toward the three massively shuttered windows, wondering whether he ought to risk getting
to the Porcelain House tonight to warn Rosamund, or try cutting through the garden to wake Min.
And what, he wondered, rattling down a twisted iron stair to the boiler room between the laundries
and the baths, did all this have to do with keeping the Moving Gate open in the first place?
Unless, of course, someone had panicked.
Having just dealt with one panicky wizard, he shuddered to think of what could happen to such a
wizard's helpless prisoner.
As he descended in the silent warmth of the boiler room, the sound of lowered voices arguing came
to him from the baths, the soft-footed rustle of many bodies, the muted creak of belt leather and
and the clink of weapons.
"This is outrageous!" he heard Nandiharrow fulminating.
"Be silent!" snapped Silvorglim's deep voice, and Antryg, knowing full well he should head in the
other direction as fast as he could, nevertheless stole softly to the open archway that separated
the boiler chamber from the long bathhouse with its curtained tubs. "I have received evidence that
the Council is harboring a condemned wizard, an outlaw ousted by the Council and turned over to
civil justice."
"No Council mage is ever turned over to civil justice," the nine-fingered clockmaker began hotly,
but Daurannon, who stood quietly beside the Witchfinder as the red-robed hasu led a dozen Church
sasenna up the closet ladder to the loft above, said nothing, and his choirboy face was enigmatic
and still. A small group of wizards and novices clustered behind Nandiharrow, those who had been
awake at this hour and had come to investigate the commotion: by the flickering light of the
sasenna's torches Antryg recognized Whitwell Simm, Q'iin and her student Gilda with robes pulled
on over their nightdresses, Seldes Katne, Kyra the Red, and, with smoke almost visibly coming from
his ears, Bentick the Steward.
"Considering that the Council lied about his fate four months ago ... "
"It was not a lie!" Bentick snapped furiously. "We were deceived when he made his escape."
Feet thundered in the loft overhead; through the sound of the rain it was difficult to tell, but
Antryg thought he heard more sasenna passing down the pillared arcade outside, sword harnesses
creaking softly. He wondered if he had been betrayed or simply followed when he left the kitchen.
Anyone could have trailed Pothatch earlier in the evening when he went to Q'iin's for the tisane.
"No one up there, m'lord ... "
"Enough of this!" Silvorglim swung around, his pale eyes blazing with a kind of haunted glitter;
Antryg could see he was almost shaking with suppressed nervousness behind his rage. "From the
moment we entered these gates we have met with nothing but deceptions and lies. Captain-have your
men search the Citadel. Top to bottom, every room, every chamber ... "
"By what authority?" Nandiharrow stormed.
"You can't!" Seldes Katne gasped.
"I forbid it!" Bentick snapped. "There are places which ought not to be disturbed."
"If you know what's good for you, you'll stay out of the Vaults," Daurannon added reasonably.
"Do you mean, if you know what's good for you, you'll tell us to?" the Witchfinder retorted,
turning to stab a finger at the Handsome One. "What is it that you are hiding, besides a man who
murders the innocent by magic? Some plot to tempt and twist the minds of every man who ... "
But Antryg had turned already and was headed for the stair shaft back up to safety. He was halfway
there when the almost-unheard whisper of fabric made him glance back; Bentick had slipped through
the curtains that guarded the archway and, gathering up his robe, was also striding for the stairs
at close to a run. He saw Antryg and stopped, momentarily nonplussed; Antryg was lifting his
finger to his lips in a soundless plea for silence when Daurannon appeared in the doorway behind
him.
"There he is!" Daurannon shouted, and Antryg bolted for the stairwell like a startled deer. "He'll
be making for the Vaults."
Antryg swore, silently but mightily, as he ripped open the tiny plank trapdoor under the stairs
and dropped down it into the vine-choked web of struts and pilings which supported that end of the
baths above the steep drop-off of the hill. As he pulled the trap shut above him he felt the
wooden floor of the little shaft shudder with the jarring weight of men streaming up the stair;
nimbly he swung to the heavy Y-fork of wooden braces below him, and so dropped seven or eight feet


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into the tangle of vines. This end of the baths, with its little turret and the makeshift covered
stairway leading up to the subcellar of the Island of Butterflies, projected out over the drop of
the hill. The ground was steep, the night pitch black, and lightening rain pattered briefly on
Antryg's long hair and the shoulders of his coat as he scrambled along the outer wall of the
buttery, making for the wide windows of the kitchen.
Even as he plunged across the huge, darkened stone cavern with its smells of sugar and batter, it
occurred to him to wonder where, exactly, Bentick had been bound when he'd slipped away from the
Witchfinders. To report to Phormion? Footfalls thundered in the refectory as Antryg slammed
through the pantry door, down the narrow stairs to the storage cellars ...
And stopped, gasping with a sickened wrench of pain and fear, on the threshold of the steps that
led still farther down into the Vaults.
He knew the fear he felt was only Bentick's spell. He could see the Steward's marks glimmering in
the utter dark, fussy and neat along the jambs and lintels of the little door that led to the
subcellar-marks of torment and terror, marks of ward and guard ... marks that it was impossible to
pass. Sweat stood out on Antryg's face; through gritted teeth he whispered,
"This is only a spell, only illusion ... " But something inside him seemed to dissolve at the
thought of putting so much as his hand, let alone his entire body, through that doorway. It was a
fear that bypassed the mind entirely and centered in the gut, the flesh, as if it had been the
door of a furnace, radiating a bone-stripping heat. A simple counterspell would have dusted that
fear away, but the geas bound him, and it did him no good to simply tell himself that the pain
would be illusory, the blinding certainty of death and worse than death illusory.
He simply couldn't do it, any more than he could have brought himself to grasp the blade of a
running chainsaw with his hands.
Men's voices sounded in the stairway behind him. There was every chance they'd have hasu with
them; four strides took him across the room to the square entry-hole of the disused shaft through
which building materials had once been hauled up from the courtyard below. The door on it looked
old and splintery but was still stout, and it opened inward into the room; drawing it shut after
him, he could get his fingers behind the cross-brace and hold on, keeping the door fast with the
weight of his body at the same time that he kept himself from sliding down the steep shaft to the
foot of the Citadel hill.
The shivery burn of energy all around him was stifling in the granite of the narrow shaft. His
eyes closed, he listened in the darkness to the soft, swift pad of footfalls in the storeroom, the
rattle of drawn swords, the arguing voices as they searched. Once, they tested the shaft doorway
but, finding it would not open, assumed it was locked, not that it was being held shut from the
other side. He heard one of the hasu say, "No one has passed these signs," and in time, the
footfalls faded away up the stairs again.
The well shaft in the mule barn, Antryg thought. It went down deeper than the storeroom tunnel,
and it hadn't been spelled shut. He had to reach the Chamber of the Glass Pillar before the Witch-
finders did, to keep them somehow from interfering with the Dead God's machinery there. With the
amount of energy perilously balanced between the magic circles in the North Hall and the
oscillators and reflecting screens of the polarization field in the Vaults, the mere thought of
what could happen if one or the other side of the equation were knocked away turned him cold. As
he slipped out of the shaft and up the kitchen stairs again, moved like a flitting shadow across
the empty refectory and out into the darkness of the North Wing's Colonnade, he reviewed his
options.
If nothing else, he supposed, he could always listen for their coming, or watch for it on the Dead
God's multiscanner, and if they came too near the Chamber let them see him, lead them away into
the mazes he knew far better than they. His bones ached at the thought of another game of hide-and-
seek, especially in the Vaults, but there was not time even to think about it now. In time one of
his friends had to come down to the Vaults, had to deduce that that was where he would go.
But as he strode swiftly down the foot-worn pavement of the North Cloister, he saw something that
made the entire question-and most of his other concerns, not to mention the concerns of everyone
else in the darkened Citadel-utterly academic.
The rain now drummed the tiled roof of the arcade and glittered dimly with the reflection of the
lights in the Polygon as it ring-pocked the standing pools in the courtyard and dripped in a
sparkling curtain from the arcade's gutters. Beneath the arcade, the pavement itself was dry, save
for a single line of wet footprints, crossing where someone had cut through the courtyard itself-
footprints leading to the opened door of the North Hall.
Long coat billowing behind him, Antryg ducked through into the Hall's vestibule. The steady yellow
glow of the lamp high on the wall showed him two guards in the black clothing of the Council's
sasenna, slumped on the benches at either side of the room; a third lay close to the huge, iron-


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strapped doors that led into the hall itself. Their faces were peaceful-the stillness whispered
with the deep breath of sleep. The wet footprints led between them, to the closed inner doors.
Cold shock sinking in on him, as if all his veins had been suddenly opened, Antryg ran to drag at
the massive iron of the handle. The jar of thrown bolts on the other side mocked him. Flattening
to the three-inch oak slabs, he could hear, with the hyperacute senses of a wizard, the insectile
scratching of broomstraw and holystone beyond, the whisper of a voice speaking words of
dissolution, of breaking.
"NO!" His fists slammed the door with a force that nearly broke the bones. "Damn you, don't do it!
Don't ... "
He kicked the panels desperately, reached with his mind to throw the bolt aside, and felt even
that simplest of spells crumble to smoke under the geas' black cold. "Stop ... !"
Even as he cried the word he heard behind him the creak of sword belts, the wet squelch of booted
feet crossing the vestibule at a run. He dived for the dropped sword of the nearest sleeping
guard, but didn't make it. Hands seized his arms, dragged him backward; someone twisted his
shoulder to drop him to his knees.
"Break down that door!" he commanded, and such was the authority in his voice that three of them
moved to obey before Silvorglim cut them off.
"Hold on to him, you fools! You won't deceive us that way."
"Dammit, get that door open!" Antryg ordered desperately. "The spells in that room are the only
thing holding the Citadel in balance with the flux-spells on the Void."
"Keep hold of him, dammit!" the Witchfinder snapped, striding into the room through the outer
door, raindrops glinting in his fading red hair.
Antryg twisted frantically against the grip on his arms, tried to get to his feet; someone behind
him changed the angle of his hold on his wrist, and the pain turned his knees to water. "Please,"
he said rapidly, his voice level now and very quiet as he looked up into the Witchfinder's face.
"Get in there and stop them."
"So this is the heart of the secret evil being done?" Silvorglim's pale eyes flickered to the
doors. "The center of the Council's plot ... "
"No ... Yes ... " Someone grasped a handful of his long hair and jerked his head back, and he felt
the razor edge of a sword against the thin skin under his jaw. "It's not a Council plot but if the
person in there disrupts those circles the entire Citadel may be destroyed!"
The Witchfinder turned back from the doors with a momentary start of surprise. "Is it so indeed?"
he whispered, as if to himself. Then, "A small price to pay, if you speak the truth." His eyes
moved from the shut doors to the eyes of the man behind Antryg with the sword; he gave a quick nod
of command. "Do it."
Antryg felt the guard's muscles stiffen, the first thin stroke of pain-he cried "No ... !" more in
fury at their stupidity than fear of his own death.
What happened then in the room was impossible to describe, either then or later. Not a sound, nor
a wind, nor a change of light or darkness, save that the flames of the torches held by the sasenna
and the small lamp burning high on the wall altered somehow for a moment.
There was a change of pressure, slamming shut the outer door to the colonnade. But it was not
immediately noticeable amid the thing, the event, the clap that was not a thunderclap, the
reverberation which struck each person in that room as if with the sound of an echoing explosion
within his or her mind, and within the mind alone.
The sasennan behind Antryg dropped his sword and loosed his grip on Antryg's hair, jerking his
hands up as if to cover his ears. In the grip of the other guards who still held his arms, Antryg
flinched, shuddering, knowing it was too late ... he scarcely felt the hot thread of blood running
down his neck from where the vein had been barely nicked.
If the man had gone through with it and slashed his throat to the neck bone, he reflected an
instant later in that first, terrible, endlessly echoing silence, it would still have been the
least of his or anybody else's worries.
In the silence there was not even the draw of breath for a count of fifteen, as each person in
that room save one wondered what had happened, wondered what was different.
The rain smell, the earth smell, the smell of wet grass and sky that had seemed to breathe even
through the shut door was gone.
The pounding downpour on the roof was gone.
It was Silvorglim's voice, thin and very calm, that broke that dreadful stillness. Quite levelly,
he asked, "What have you done, witch?"
But when Antryg, still kneeling among the guards whose grip on his arms was slowly slacking as
they realized-as well as they could realize-what must have happened, did not reply, the
Witchfinder's own sword seared from its sheath in a single slash of hysterical rage, the point


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coming to rest in the pit of Antryg's throat. "What have you done?"
Antryg disengaged his hand from the guards' nerveless clutch and pushed the blade aside. Then he
climbed slowly to his feet, wiping at the trail of blood from his neck with a corner of Aunt Min's
shawl, and walked to the vestibule's outer door. Shaken and shocked, Silvorglim reached to open it
again, and Antryg said softly, "Don't do that, Yarak." After a long moment the Witchfinder's
square, red-furred hand dropped to his side.
"Tobin ... " Antryg gestured to the hasu who stood, chalk-faced, among the sasenna. After a
moment's hesitation the man stepped forward and placed his hands upon the door.
In the meantime one of the guards had gone to the vestibule's single small window and stood with
face pressed to the glass. "I can't see a thing out there, my lord," he said, twisting and angling
his head. "I can't swear to it, but from here we ought to be able to see the lights of the
refectory."
The hasu Tobin fell back, his hands shaking and his face paler than before, so pale that the brown
age spots on his shaven scalp stood out as if painted in the shuddering torchlight. Reaching out
to touch the iron handle of the door, Antryg found it cold as ice.
"There's nothing out there," the hasu whispered, and his eyes, as they moved to the ungainly
wizard in his beads and purple coat, showed a rim of white all around the iris. "Nothing ... "
"No," Antryg agreed quietly and turned back to face them: Silvorglim with his sword still in his
hand; the Church wizard, trembling all over like a whipped horse, at his side; the Church sasenna
in their long-skirted black coats; and the Council's three guards, waking now, drawing together as
if for protection against some terrible threat that none of them could see.
In a quite reasonable tone of voice, Antryg went on, "Any member of the Council will tell you,
Yarak, that it is impossible for me to do anything with magic under the conditions of the geas. On
the other hand, I am going to suggest to the Council-if we can find the Council-that they remove
the geas from me as quickly as possible, since I would say just offhand that we're all in terrible
trouble."
Face ghastly with shock, the Church wizard whispered, "What has happened?"
"Well," Antryg explained calmly, "whoever it was who disrupted the circles holding together that
spell-field in the other room unbalanced a rather critical equation of forces between the magic
which made it possible for the Void-energies to be polarized, and the stabilization field set up
by the Dead God's machines down in the Vaults. I did tell you to break down the door and stop him,
you recall." He wiped at his neck again and regarded for a moment the smudge of blood on his
fingers before looking up at them all again.
"I'm very much afraid that the result seems to have been to precipitate the Citadel into the
Void."


Chapter XIX
It is said that Clovis II, the present Emperor's grandfather, was in his youth much given to
scandal and riot. Indeed, when he married Nerri d'Arrantsan, daughter of the King of Trusand,
during the wedding fete a notorious seventeen-year-old tavern dancer whom he had been keeping in
the City drove her sporting carriage up to the great fountain before the Palace steps, and in full
view of the wedding guests-including the bride's father-threw into the fountain all of Clovis'
coats, shirts, and breeches which he had kept in her apartments.
-Vyrlaine
Imperial Chronicles
"Magus!"
"Joanna!"
"What the hell was that?"
In pitchy darkness hands groped for hands.
"There's movement," Joanna said, after a long, breathing time. "The air is moving; can you feel
it?" After the utter stillness-heatless, coldless, soundless, endless-even the faint drift of
breeze was like the falling down of dreadful walls. The soundlessness had changed, too, altering
in some fashion too subtle for identification, but it was as if, Joanna thought, what had been
utter nullity had suddenly been made somehow finite, defined by ambient echo.
"Come on!"
She sprang to her feet, then turned back impatiently when she felt the drag of the dog wizard's
unwilling weight. Without stopping to argue, she hauled him up by his wrist, pulled him
determinedly after her in the direction of that soft, drawing breeze. "What's the matter?"
"Do you want to walk into ... into whatever it is?" Even his voice sounded different with the
change of air pressure.


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"Do you want to stay where you are and keep poor Irina company?" The newness of the air was an
intoxicant; Joanna felt suddenly, glitteringly conscious of the texture of the velvet sleeve under
her hand, the silk trapunto of the cuff and the cording that edged it. The loose, soft cotton of
her own pajama sleeves against her skin seemed new-made, new-textured, as did the cold smoothness
of the floor underfoot, the flutter of her own loose blond curls against her cheeks. The very
molecules of the air against her skin seemed alive in the changed air pressure. It was all she
could do not to run, waving her arms and shouting in the dark down the endless turnings, following
the stream of moving air.
Half-drunk with hope, she flashed from wild joy to horrible forboding. How long? Ten years? A
hundred years? Please, God, don't make it have been a hundred years. Don't make everything be
different. Don't make me be alone again.
Shaky terror overwhelmed her, and for a moment, she wondered if Magus might not be right. Never
knowing might indeed be better than finding out ... it wasn't so bad, once you got used to it, if
you stayed away from the demons.
Far, far off, she saw light.
Tiny and dim, the round spot of ocher had a wavery quality, like fire- or torchlight, but it was
so bright after the long darkness that her eyes hurt with it. Her hand tightened on Magus' and she
began to run, the thud of her feet on the floor jolting her bones, her purse slapping heavily
against her thigh. Once, as the light strengthened, she looked down and saw its topaz reflection
on her own pumping knees, but it wasn't until she stepped into the room at the end of that long
tunnel that she dared look around behind her, to see her companion's white, thin face, with its
trim black beard and startlingly green eyes.
Then she looked around her, at the place to which the light had led them.
It was no bigger than the minuscule dining-room-cum-office of her apartment. Shelves lined the
walls, filled with neat rows of books; a scrubbed plank table upheld a tidy assortment of terra-
cotta pots containing herbs, plus a few gardening implements. A knitting basket, wrought of twigs
and overflowing with varicolored yarn, rested on a rough chair, and in a corner a small loom
crouched like some kind of bizarre wooden robot, while beside it, tall and angular, stood a
spinning wheel.
On a shelf a pair of tiny pink silk dancing slippers sat, frayed and covered with dust. Coals
burned on a tiled hearth no larger than a good-sized washbasin. A red teapot, a white cup.
Beyond the window, blackness as utter, as complete, as she had known in the halls of her prison.
All around, broken orly by the tiny cracklings of the fire, silence as dreadfully profound.
"A mage," Magus whispered behind her. He had picked up the solitary book which lay among the
potted plants on the table and was turning over its stiff yellowed pages. "And in my own world.
This is written in old High Trebin."
The stillness was horrible, the stillness of death. Joanna tiptoed across the room to push back
the heavy white cotton curtain there. The chamber beyond was even smaller, the wooden walls
likewise banked floor to ceiling in shelves of books. In a little alcove a single bed was half-
hidden by white curtains. Cats prowled uneasily; the largest pushed its flat-skulled gray head at
Joanna's calf and miaowed softly, as if it, too, feared to violate that dreadful hush.
Dim firelight showed her the face of the woman lying in the bed, tiny, pink, and wrinkled,
incredibly old in the thin fan of white hair spread about the pillow.
"It's Aunt Min." She spoke barely above a whisper, not wanting to wake the ancient Archmage. She
felt half-afraid, by the stillness of the little dried-apple features, that the old lady was
beyond waking. A deep sadness seized her, for old Minhyrdin the Fair looked so tired, so ancient,
so isolated from all the world she had grown up in, a time traveler in her own body, far beyond
everything she had known as a girl.
"Good," Magus said, and at the briskness of his voice Joanna turned around, startled. "Well," he
reasoned, "if she's still alive we can't have been prisoners for so very long. Is she still
alive?"
Joanna leaned down, wanting to touch the claw twisted with arthritis and no larger than a child's.
But when it came to it, she didn't dare. "I think so," she murmured. She raised her eyes. A cat
jumped onto the bed, kneaded with soft paws at the old woman's thigh. Through a small window to
one side of the bed alcove-through all the odd-shaped windows of the little room-was only
blackness, impenetrable, silent, and terrible. "There's nothing out there," she asked softly, "is
there?"
Magus had gone to a larger window, looking out with the night-piercing eyes of a mage. "No," he
said softly. "Nothing ... " He turned back to her, his face struggling to remain calm. "So this
really isn't a way out at all."
"Then that means it can't be where the draft was coming from," Joanna pointed out. "When we came


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in sight of the light, we quit following the air current-all we have to do is go back to where we
were and pick it up again." She turned around. Past the half-opened curtains she could see into
the other room, and beyond that, to the narrow slit of darkness that seemed to hover a few feet in
front of the opposite wall: an eyepit into Hell, a crack opening to the haunted abysses from which
they had so newly escaped. Resolutely, she walked back into that room, and selected the two
largest balls of yarn from the knitting basket. She tied an end of one to the leg of the table;
the other ball she secreted in her purse.
"Come on," she said bracingly, seeing Magus hesitate, torn between the certainty of imprisonment
in this lighted cul-de-sac and the possibility of escape through the darkness once more. "There
has to be another way out."

Most of the mages had already assembled in the refectory by the time Antryg, Silvorglim, and the
Witchfinder's guards reached it. Antryg's hands were bound behind him, the steel of the
Witchfinder's manacles laced with scarlet spell-cord despite Antryg's repeated assertions that
under the geas it was impossible for him to work magic of any sort. "And I certainly have no
intention of running away, you know," he added as he strode along in a swirl of coat skirts, the
littler man scurrying in an undignified fashion to keep up with his longer strides. "Turn left
here, and a stair will take us down to the main cellars of the Polygon. For one thing, where on
Earth would I go?"
"For that I have no surety," Silvorglim gritted, and his fox-colored eyes glinted dangerously in
the torchlight. "Nor will I trust what you say you cannot do, or would not do, given the chance."
It was only with the greatest of difficulty that Antryg had talked Silvorglim out of cutting his
throat in the vestibule after all, the Witchfinder reasoning that if he brought his quarry back
into contact with the other mages, he would probably be prevented from doing so.
But he had faced opposition, not only from the three Council sasenna but, unexpectedly, from his
own warriors as well. "He knows this Citadel like the back of his hand, sir," their captain had
said, glancing uneasily at the vestibule door as if he could see through it the dreadful, shifting
darkness beyond. "And he knows what may be going on. And," he'd added, jerking his scarred chin in
the direction of the tall wizard still standing in a thorned circle of drawn steel, "we can always
kill him later."
"That is my point," Silvorglim had said softly. "If we give him his life now, we may not be able
to take it later, as our warrant permits and the safety of the world, I am now convinced, demands.
These wizards all plot with one another, and this man is the worst. I know him."
"Oh, fiddle-faddle." Antryg had widened his huge gray eyes at him behind his spectacles. "We've
met exactly twice and I challenge you to find an etiquette master in the country who'll grant that
putting red-hot irons to a man's feet constitutes anything more than a nodding acquaintance."
Silvorglim had ignored the remark but in the end had had to give in. At Antryg's behest the Church
wizard had finally used his spells to slip the bolts of the North Hall's inner door, by which
time, of course, the Hall itself had been vacant. One of the small doors on the far side of it had
been unbolted, opening into the maze of cellars, communicating tunnels, and tiny stairways that
could lead anywhere in the Citadel; of the Circles of Power themselves, nothing remained of the
curving galaxy of chalk trails and spirals into which Aunt Min had poured her power save scuffed
and muddled fragments here and there upon the smooth sandstone of the floor.
And everywhere, as Antryg led the way through the back ways of cellars and tunnels to the Polygon,
he could feel the shattered energies of the polarization field, the flickering lightnings of
power, darting uneasily through the stones of the Citadel or flashing with a queer, shining, half-
visible deadliness in the close-crowding shadows. Broken from their field, scattered everywhere
under the built-up pressures of the past twenty-four hours, the energies that had been raised and
redoubled and then released, undispersed, from their bounds were far from spent. Their crazy
backlash had precipitated the Citadel into the Void; its pressure and influence still operated on
the swirling bits of spell-field that remained. Even the non-mageborn sasenna of the Church felt
it, and as Antryg led them through boiler rooms and hypocausts and disused staircases, they kept
looking behind them as if subliminally aware of the random stirrings Antryg could so clearly see
moving in the gloom that closed in behind.
For all his appearance of calm, Antryg himself was badly shaken, seeing now and then the lightning
crawl of bluish glow that ran down certain cracks in the walls and hearing the low mutter of
strange sounds in places where no sounds should have been. There were few places in his life he
had been gladder to reach than the long, prosaic refectory with its carved hammerbeams and cold
stone hearth, and few people whose faces he had welcomed more than the furious, beautiful woman
who came limping across the room toward him, black robes swirling like storm cloud around her,
staff clicking on the stones and eyes blazing like green Samhain fire.


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"If this is any doing of yours, Antryg Windrose, I swear to you by the Horns of Hell I'll ... "
"You'll have to stand at the end of a rather long line, I'm afraid," Antryg told her reasonably.
"And by that time I'm sure there will be very little left except soggy bits. Someone got into the
North Hall," he added more quietly, looking down at the Lady, who appeared ready either to order
his execution or box his ears. "I tried to stop them but they'd bolted the doors ... the guards
had been put to sleep with a simple Good-Night-anyone could have done it. Do you think you could
get them to unchain me, by the way? It's tremendously uncomfortable, and I'm certainly not going
anywhere."
"Release him," Lady Rosamund ordered shortly, and, when Silvorglim opened his mouth to protest,
she commanded, "Do it!" in a voice like silvered steel. "Sentence of death or no, we need his
knowledge, his services, for the remainder of this crisis."
"And if he is the man who caused the crisis?" the Witch-finder demanded, his whole creased little
face seeming to tighten, like a dog's before it snaps. "How can we judge what he tells us is truth
and what is lies?"
"We can judge," the Lady retorted haughtily, "because we know something more of magic than the
propaganda dribbled forth by magic's foes. Now let him go."
"Thank you ... there isn't a great deal of time to waste." Antryg rubbed his wrists where the
chain had bruised them, his gray eyes already going to the group of Junior mages gathered beneath
the great chandelier in the center of the hall. The waxlights on that massive triple hoop of iron
and chain had not been kindled; instead, half a hundred shreds and fragments of bluish witchfire
clung to the cold wicks, casting soft, strong, wavery radiance on the faces of those gathered
around the table below.
Kyra the Red was there, and Mick and Cylin; and Q'iin the Herbmistress' student Gilda was tallying
something on a long piece of paper. Scrying-crystals flashed and shimmered like chipped ice in the
pallid light; Antryg could hear Cylin saying, " ... trapdoor into the hypocaust will get you to
the first level of the Vaults at the far end of the buttery, from there you can get into the
kitchen."
"Who's that?" Gilda asked quietly. "Nye?" And at the tall man's nod, she checked something off on
her list. "We still haven't heard from either Bentick or Phormion."
"Zake Brighthand checked in," Mick said, glancing up from his fragment of yellow tourmaline. "He's
in the Pavilion-Otaro's with him, and Issay. Otaro was taken sick, he says."
"Otaro, Brighthand, Issay ... can they get here from the Pavilion? Implek and his patrol haven't
been heard from-that other hasu of Silvorglim's seems to be trapped up in the Juniors' side of the
hill, he doesn't know where he is."
"Well, you scarcely need a crisis for that," Antryg remarked. "It happens to novices all the
time."
"Brunus, can you hear me?" Kyra was murmuring, cradling her lump of pale blue topaz in her palm.
"Brunus, answer ... Brunus, look into your crystal," while in another part of the room, Daurannon
was speaking quietly to a sizable group of black-robed Senior mages gathered around a table as far
as possible from the dreadful darkness of the tall windows that had looked out upon the court.
"Antryg, why?" The Lady Rosamund brushed aside the tendrils of hair from her cheeks-it was the
first time he could recall seeing her when she hadn't dressed her hair. Strands of cobweb clung to
it, to her sleeves and the hem of her robe-she must have come here through the hypocaust under the
North Cloister, as he himself had. "Why would someone destroy the circles? Never mind whether they
believed that disturbing the balance of the spells would do ... this. I didn't believe it myself.
But why would someone want to disrupt the spells that were holding the situation stable? Why
prolong the confusion? It was obviously a wizard, who presumably knew ... "
"It was an act of panic, I think," Antryg said softly. "An act to prevent the Citadel from being
searched at all costs. We'll go into who might have done it later. At the moment it's imperative
that I check the situation in the Vaults-Silvorglim is welcome to send as many guards with me as
he chooses; in fact, I rather hope he will. We're going to need to move the Dead God's machinery
up here if the flooding is getting worse."
"The Dead God?" Silvorglim's thin face paled a little, and his topaz eyes flared wide at the
mention of that uncanny deity. "What pagan lies are these?"
"Not the real Dead God, of course," Antryg explained rapidly. "But he was originally introduced to
me in mistake for the Dead God and you know how first impressions stick. His name is actually
LTRX2-449-9102-CF60913 and I hope you won't be prejudiced by his appearance. His machinery is
probably the only reason the Citadel didn't dissolve completely when the balance between the two
spells was broken, and if anything happens to it, we're likely to be in real trouble."
"And are we not now?"
Antryg paused, startled, his big hands in their stained and ruinous gloves arrested in midgesture;


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then he smiled. "Well, it depends on your definition, of course. I spent twenty-five years not
knowing whether I was in real trouble or not."
"As did the rest of us," Daurannon murmured, coming quietly up to join them with an ashen Seldes
Katne and a couple of Council sasenna in tow. "Rosamund, we need you in the Circle of Spells ... "
"And if you think," Silvorglim added, pushing his way forward into the conversation with a gleam
of half-comprehending malice in his eyes, "that I'm going to let you slip away into the Vaults,
dog wizard ... "
"No, no ... by all means, come with me and bring at least a dozen of your stoutest fellows. I
think I may need one or two of the Senior mages with me as well, if they can be spared. Goodness
knows what's down there now."
"I'll go," the librarian offered at once.
Antryg hesitated, then said gently, "Kitty, thank you-because I know you know how dangerous the
Vaults are now. But I'm going to need someone of near Council rank."
Poorly put-he knew it the moment he'd said it, knew it as she turned away, her lips pressed tight,
blinking back tears of rage and frustration. But there wasn't time, and he couldn't risk someone
whose powers would be unequal to what they might meet. Through his feet on the stone floor,
through his bones, through the air, he could feel the slip and shift of the Void just beyond the
Citadel walls, the movement of terrible energies through the stones themselves, the trapped and
tangled fragments of the disjointed leys, the powers of earth and stars. In the Vaults, all the
gates would be shifting, opening and closing, appearing and disappearing, giving access to God
knew what bizarre worlds.
"Rosie," he added softly, turning to drape a familiar arm around the Lady's shoulders, "a word
with you in private. Excuse us," he added as Silvorglim tried to press closer to hear. "I'm going
to propose marriage to this woman and we really do need a few moments alone.
"Is there any chance, any chance at all, of getting the geas off me?" he whispered, as he drew her
aside into the shadows of the room's great eastern door, which led, through the serving-hatch,
into the kitchens. "I-we all-are going to need my powers if we're going to get out of this."
She looked warily up into his face. Even the strongest of healing-spells could not completely
eradicate the effects of a gunshot wound, and she'd dragged herself here unaided; the stress of
it, and the responsibility for the Citadel itself, made her features like something pared from
bone.
"Look, I swear to you I haven't precipitated this situation to force your hand."
"I believe you." She drew back a little from him and disengaged his arm from her shoulders with a
motion she had to have learned as a debutante.
"Good Heavens!" Antryg murmured in surprise.
"Don't widen your eyes at me, dog wizard, and don't play the fool for my benefit," she continued
icily. "You're devious enough to have created the illusion of precipitating the entire Citadel
into the Void in order to gain your way, but if this all had been illusion, I and all the Council
would have known. I've been scrying through every inch of this Citadel, trying to get in touch
with everyone-novices, Seniors, sasenna, servants-in its farthest reaches, and I know the extent
of the danger we're in. And I don't think you capable of such a baroque ploy."
"And here I thought you considered me capable of anything."
"Anything except a straight answer."
"Well," Antryg smiled, "there is that."
"So I'll give you one. No." Her hand tightened on the ebony of her staff, and her voice shook a
little though her eyes were like cabachon gems. "Aunt Min and I could remove it, but Aunt Min ...
has not been found." She shook her head. "Or the rest of us in concert could do it. But I don't
think Daurannon would consent."
She glanced toward the Handsome One, who had returned to the group of Seniors-Nandiharrow, Q'iin,
Idrix of Thray, Whitwell Simm, and Pentilla Riverwych, in fact, every available mage of any degree
of power. By the patterns chalked around them on the floor Antryg saw that they were raising
spells of stabilization to strengthen the Citadel's boundaries against the dragging dark of the
Void. "And I know Bentick wouldn't, even if he could be found. Neither of them trust you ... "
"The feeling's quite mutual, I assure you. I told you at the outset that the geas was a bad idea."
"Don't jest with me, Windrose." Her voice, so low as to be barely audible, was level again but
cold as an iron ax head in winter. "For the time being I acquit you of malice, and I never truly
have believed Daurannon's contention that you are really the Dark Mage. But as for your sanity,
and for your responsibility for this entire situation, I make no allowances. I don't know who can
be spared from the stabilization spells here. I'll ask."
"I shall kiss your hands and feet at a time when we'll both have the opportunity to properly
relish the experience," he promised. "Until then there's no time to be lost. By the way, has


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Pothatch checked in?"
"He's on his way. He was in the old drying-room with Tom, it's cut off from here."
"There's a trap up to the attic, that connects to the subcellar of the baths, and from the boiler
room he can get into the buttery. When he gets here, you might suggest that he put on water for
tea. I think everyone would benefit from that. And muffins if he has batter standing. Silvorglim!"
He turned and snapped his fingers, raising his voice as if summoning a butler. "Come along, man,
bring your men and don't dawdle. You're always dawdling."
And with the infuriated Witchfinder at his heels, trailed by a dozen sasenna of both Church and
Council and old Whitwell Simm with his flowing silver hair, he strode through the east door of the
refectory and into the kitchen, and so down once again into the darkness of the Vaults.

Below the third level, sanity ended. Alien energies ran like blood down the walls of the ancient
collecting-maze and whispered in the darkness of its endless, curling spirals; strange winds
flicked at Antryg's coat skirts and hair as he led the way down passages echoing with hideous
sounds. Twice he turned aside from the quickest route and led his party on long, circuitous
detours down forgotten stairways and rusty ladders of spikes in fog-choked vent shafts to avoid
places where the darkness seemed thicker than it should, or where some sound or smell in the
shuddering air lifted the hair on his nape without ever becoming clear enough to identify.
The pressure, the presence, of the Void was everywhere, as if a layer of skin had been stripped
from him and his every nerve lay exposed to the shivering vibration of its fear. Niter and mosses
gleamed on the walls; here and there he could see places in the darkness where the very fabric of
the universe seemed to thin, showing through the more dreadful blackness that lay beyond; the air
was filled with strange smells, trace elements and gases, curls'of mist, twinges of static. He
wore slung around his shoulders the tubes of the oxygen mask he'd left hidden on the first level,
and Whitwell Simm, walking at the back of the party, had orders to stand ready with spells of wind
and air at an instant's notice, but Antryg had studied in Joanna's world long enough now to know
that this might not be enough.
And directly behind him in the guttering torchlight, Silvorglim walked with drawn sword and eyes
growing grimmer, more angry with the frightened anger of the self-righteous at every step. Once
one of the Church sasenna cried out in hysterical terror, holding out her two hands and screaming,
then doubling over, clawing at her face, and Antryg, pulling the woman's hands away, saw that the
bones were already beginning to lengthen and deform, the skin to sprout coarse, gray animal hair.
As the other guards stared in frozen terror, Antryg caught the stricken sasennan by the back of
the neck and shoved her, dragged her along the passageway at a run, until she stopped screaming
and clung panting to him, gritting her teeth against the pain.
"It was a pocket field, that's all," he explained, when they stopped and the woman sank, nearly
unconscious but a woman once more, to the floor beside him. "In whatever universe that bulge or
bubble of reality came from, this woman would have been a lycanthrope, a werewolf, just as in some
other enclaves some of us wouldn't have had power at all, and others of us, who haven't it here,
would."
Kneeling at the side of the shaken warrior, he looked from face to face, seeing the fear in the
eyes of the sasenna-mostly young men and women, though several of them, the afflicted woman among
them, were tough middle-aged troopers, scarred like fighting dogs. One or two were surreptitiously
looking at the backs of their hands. "That's all," he added. "That's absolutely all. It has
nothing to do with our world, our reality ... "
"So you say." Torchlight gilded the jump and twitch of the hard muscles around Silvorglim's mouth.
"And you-all of you," his glittering eyes flicked to Whitwell Simm, keeping quiet guard on their
rear, "have taken us out of our world, our reality, haven't you? So that you might do this to us
... and other things."
The sasennan beside Antryg ran her hands hesitantly over her face, finding the sprouting hair
there had vanished and the bones and teeth resumed their normal shape, though Antryg guessed the
flesh would bruise horribly and the woman would ache for days. One of the younger Church warriors
stepped forward and held out a hand to help her to her feet: "We always did say you were a wolf
bitch, didn't we, Gandy?" and the woman slapped his hand aside with a returning grin and got to
her feet by herself.
"So what're we going to do when we walk through the field that turns you into what you really are,
Venk? Buy you carrots?"
"Guard your virtue ... "
They walked on, the sasenna trading filthy and speculative bandinage to cover the aftermath of
their fear, but Antryg could feel Silvorglim's eyes on his back.
Once, when they passed a downshaft that plunged the depth of the Pits, Antryg looked down and saw


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black waters roiling and tossing far below, but not as far, he thought, as the seventh level would
be. Something long and gleaming reached up from the depths, like a faintly shining segmented worm,
ending, not in a head, but in a small coal black hand that groped along the stone of the shaft's
side, then withdrew once again to the water below.
The Dead God was waiting for them in the Chamber of the Glass Pillar. Knee-deep ground fog had
filled the tunnels in this area, cold vapors flowing like water through the archways and pouring
sluggishly around the shining monoliths of the oscillators and pickups, rising in wisps to veil
the monstrous shape of the God himself and glowing with the movement of the light upon his
masklike head. With a silvery rustle a dozen swords were drawn.
"Oh, put those away," Antryg said briskly, striding forward through the mists with his hands held
out. "Ninetentwo my dear chap, I'm delighted and relieved ... "
"I am delighted and relieved that a field hasn't settled upon this room which is inimical to
electricity," the Dead God retorted acerbically, turning upon him golden eyes as unwinking as
those of a shark. "Not to say astonished. I cannot imagine how the batteries stayed in operation
through the first shock."
"Hence my merry men." Antryg swept his arm back at the nonplussed sasenna grouped behind the
Witchfinder and the stunned Whitwell Simm. His glasses flashed in the phosphor lights of the
lumenpanels and the beads on his neck glittered cold and strange, a curious, gawky entity nearly
as alien as the creature standing before him. "The worst of the energy flux, as far as I can tell,
is centered in the Vaults; if we can get the field generators upstairs, we may have a fighting
chance of keeping the Citadel itself stable long enough to find the Moving Gate-or the power
source which is keeping it jammed open-and rectify the whole situation by shutting it down. You,
you, you, and you ... start carrying those backup batteries to the refectory. Whitwell, go with
them and lead the way. How much time will those give us?"
"Two hours apiece ... as hours are reckoned in my world. Antryg, what happened?" Two of the clawed
hands shifted the weapon slung over his shoulder, and the glowing nodule on the Dead God's
forehead flicked back and forth like a cat's tail. "The power cable I had stretched through the
Gate to my own world was cut off cleanly, as if with a laser ... no surge, nothing. Just dead. My
sensors show me Gates opening and closing, strange things, things I have never seen, energies and
concentrations of heat and cold, moving all through the Vaults."
"Oh, peachy," Antryg sighed, lapsing regrettably into language picked up from his colleagues
behind the bar at Enyart's. He ran a weary hand through his hair. The decoction of jelgeth he'd
nicked from Issay's house was beginning to wear off, the exhaustion coming back on him worse than
before, the usual result with repeated doses of the herb.
"God knows what's going on elsewhere here, but I'm sure I'm going to be blamed for it. Someone
deliberately disrupted the circles holding the energies of the Citadel's stones in alignment.
There's been a steady buildup of energy from the feedback loops through the leys-you know that."
The Dead God nodded. "But why on earth would ... ?"
"Why would anyone dismantle the ecology of their planet in order to produce TV trays and hair
spray? Or assassinate a national leader at the outset of a ticklish phase of reconstructing the
country after disastrous civil war? Or marry a person with whom they've been fighting like cat and
dog for five years, or go out and get blotto drunk the night before a critical business meeting?
Because it seemed the appropriate thing to do at the time. If I knew precisely why, my friend, I
should probably have a flying guess at who ... or would if I wasn't so tired I can hardly stand up
straight."
Across the room, a voice called out, "ANTRYG!" and he swung around, his eyes wide with shock and
astonishment, all weariness, for the moment, forgotten.
Joanna and-of all people-Magister Magus stood framed in the narrow black archway that led from the
deeper Vaults.


Chapter XX
It is said that the wizard Simon the Lame lived for five years in the dungeons of the Duke of
Dreghan, coming and going as he pleased to his studies while his guards believed him to be
imprisoned in his cell. It was only when the Duke encountered him in the public marketplace that
the Duke realized that the Archmage had been his guest rather than his prisoner.
-Gantre Silvas
Annals
For that first instant, Antryg was all she could see-thin, gawky, and very tired-looking, a seedy
purple coat hanging loosely over his faded jeans and decrepit green calico shirt, and over that a
shawl which looked as if it had been knitted for him by a spider on bad drugs. She didn't even


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feel terribly surprised ... Of course he'd be here.
The relief was like the curious, dizzy high that comes from the cessation of a blinding headache.
She hadn't realized how worried she'd been about him.
Beyond that she had nothing more than an impression of swirling mists, cold over her bare feet as
she crossed the room at a run: torchlight, men standing around with swords, looming pillars, and
the eerily steady pinpoints of green and amber light from the hard, black shapes of electronic
components. Then he swept her into his arms, his longer stride covering more than half the
distance, her feet leaving the chilly flagstones and his grip crushing her tight ... the taste of
tea and honey and bitter herbs on his lips.
She was safe.
Well, no, she decided a moment later, still locked in his embrace, on tiptoe now to reach up his
loose-jointed height. The shifting, nightmare darkness of the Vaults all around them, the floating
lights and distant screams and the terrible, growing presence of the Void told her that. Not safe,
exactly ...
But Antryg always gave the impression that he knew what was going on and could salvage any
situation.
"Dear God," he whispered, his angular, bespectacled face stricken with sudden guilt. "You were
down here after all?"
She remembered she'd had distinct doubts about ever wanting to be involved with this man again and
wondered momentarily why. She looked past the baggy, smoke-smelling folds of his coat to the room
beyond him. In the glow of half a dozen torches she saw sasenna in the trim black uniforms of the
Church, pausing in the act of picking up electronic components with great care so as to not break
the connections between them; saw, a few feet behind Antryg, a diminutive man in the close-fitting
gray garb of a Witchfinder, drawn sword in his hand and baffled fury in his hard face; and, beyond
him, haloed in stirred vapors that caught the glow of the electronic eyes all about it, a looming
black silhouette hideously reminiscent of the monstrous construction of rotting flesh which had
attacked them once, in a deserted chapel in the Sykerst.
"Is that ... the Dead God?" She looked sharply up into Antryg's face. "What the hell is going on?"
"Ah ... well ... " He pushed up his spectacles to rub the side of his beaky nose. "I'm under
arrest-all those gentlemen are my guards. Joanna Sheraton, Mr. Yarak Silvorglim, Witchfinder
General of Kymil and the Sykerst."
In something of a daze she shook hands with the red-haired man not much taller than herself; like
Caris, her sasennan friend of former days, he offered his left hand, not releasing his grip upon
the drawn sword in his right. He had eyes of yellowish hazel, unpleasantly cold and watching her
now with narrow suspicion.
"And Magister Magus! My dear fellow, I never expected ... "
"I assure you," the little dog wizard said, drawing himself up and pulling more firmly closed the
silk lapels of his exquisitely cut velvet dressing gown, "the lack of expectation is absolutely
mutual."
"Antryg ... " The Dead God's voice was a deep, buzzing whine, the words resounding in Joanna's
head with the familiar echoes of the Spell of Tongues that Antryg had bestowed upon her. "We need
your help in keeping this field straight while it's moved."
"Absolutely ... Joanna," Antryg continued earnestly as he strode back toward the ring of
stabilization oscillators, his arm about her shoulders, "I did search for you, I swear I did, I
searched every inch of the Vaults."
"I wasn't exactly in the Vaults." She checked quickly over the connections between the backup
batteries and the oscillators and generators rigged in series around them. The configurations were
unfamiliar but clearly along the same lines as those of her own world. Same-to-same and inny-to-
outty connections were clearly marked, and it took only a few minutes' study to figure out how
they linked up. "Is this an auxiliary jack to the same circuit? If so, we can keep the connection
going while we replace with a longer main link."
"Right, but we need to keep these three in their current configuration."
"There's an internal backup," the Dead God hummed. "Connection can be broken for up to five
seconds while it's altered without anything going down. The important thing is not to let these
alignment indicators slip out of phase."
"According to Magister Magus, we were in something called the Brown Star, which he got from
Salteris' study."
"Dear God!" Antryg whispered, spectacles flashing as he drew back to look at her in surprise. "So
that's where ... I wondered what had become of it." His long, crooked hands in their fingerless
gloves were working neatly as he spoke, unhooking cables and rewiring, while the Dead God, his
maggotlike palm-tentacles wriggling like infinitely tiny fingers, occupied himself with resetting


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the gauges. "We're going to need something like a litter to carry these on if we're going to keep
the configuration stable."
"I have an antigrav lifter ... "
"But how did you get out?"
Joanna shrugged. Near the chamber's central pillar, Silvorglim and the one of his sasenna not
occupied with scut work stood in postures of armed guard over the unfortunate Magister Magus, the
only other person not required for the assembling safari of electronic goods.
"I really don't know. We just ... got out. There was a change of some kind and ... and Gates
opened."
"When the stabilization field buckled, at a guess," Antryg said, poking his long nose back into
the tangle of wires. "I always suspected the Brown Star of being the Gate to a pocket dimensional
enclave. It must be somewhere in the Citadel, and the shock of the field breaking down just ... "
He paused, then drew back to look at her, his gray eyes wide with shock. "You mean that Gates into
the Brown Star are just standing open?"
"Yeah ... " She thought about that a moment. "Oh, cripes."
From the archway through which Joanna and Magus had first entered the room came the sudden,
shrieking laughter of demons. Antryg was on his feet and headed for that door almost before Joanna
could draw breath, unslinging from his shoulder something that reminded her strongly of an old-
fashioned bug-sprayer, a pump and canister apparatus that he aimed into the darkness as he braced
himself in the frame of the arch. When the demons appeared-and Joanna was horrified at the
swirling, moon-colored shapes, with their flying spiderweb hair and raking claws-Antryg pumped the
contents of the canister at them, a shower of fine, blackish mist that set them screaming,
cringing, clawing at their own flesh and one another's as they blundered back into the eternal
night of underground.
"What is that?" Joanna asked. "Exorcist in a Can?"
"Silver chloride," the Dead God explained, coming up behind her with a sonic extractor in one hand
and a coax cable in another, light nodule flicking nervously over the shining bulk of his head.
"He claims that most ab-material manifestations are allergic to it-I would not know. Such things
are unheard of in my world."
"Not even in legends?" She looked up at his tall bulk, hung with tools, sensors, weapons and with
the gleaming weight of breathing tubes. "You have extra air tanks, by the way?"
The huge, bony skull inclined. "Your concern is appreciated. The antigrav lifter is now refusing
to work. It may be that it simply cannot, in this dimension-or it may be that, being cutting-edge
technology, it has malfunctioned for reasons of its own." The end of his tail lashed with
annoyance, like a cat's; Joanna wondered what bizarre biosphere had selected for his ancestors.
"How long does it take to get a repair person out?" They began, with the help of the three Council
sasenna, laboriously to transfer the oscillator/generator configuration to a makeshift litter
improvised of halberd poles, hampered by the swirling mists that concealed kelp beds of now-
useless cables underfoot. "Not to here, I mean, but usually ... "
"Forty days. The only service center is in Six-ninety."
"Yeah, the company that makes my CD-ROM drive sends its techs out on foot, too."
I should be in hysterics, she thought calmly, instead of standing here discussing repair problems
of first-generation technology with something that looks like It, Terror from Beyond the Stars.
She supposed, as the safari got gingerly under way, that her mind was simply refusing to believe
that this creature-this man-this thing with its shiny green-gray skin, its light nodule, skeletal
tail, and cold, orange, insectile eyes-was not in fact some kind of special effect. Probably, she
thought, she was still subconsciously looking for a zipper up his-back.
Well, what the hell. None of us really needs for me to have hysterics now anyway. Mentally she
resolved to schedule a bout of them later, after a meal, a shower if possible, and a change of
clothes into something more dignified than baggy blue cotton pajamas.
Antryg came striding back through the dark archway, spray gun clutched in one hand and his face,
in the torchlight, pale with shock and strain. The greenish, cloudy brume of ground fog rose
around him and emitted a faintly metallic, carrion smell as he moved. "There's no time to lose,"
he said, glancing back over his shoulder at the dark archway and the tunnels beyond. "We have to
get out of here and get out quickly. For if what you've told me is true, Joanna, we're in much
worse trouble than I thought."
"That's possible?!" she demanded, aghast.
And Antryg smiled, though the nervous horror still lurked in the back of his eyes. "Alas, anything
is possible." And he looped the strap of his weapon over his shoulder and bent to take part of the
litter of components.
And that, Joanna supposed, was why she ought to be still seriously considering having nothing more


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to do with this man-always assuming they made it out of the present crisis alive.
So why is it that every time I look at him, I smile?

"More slowly." Antryg held up his hand, then licked one fingertip and raised it, as if testing the
wind, while looking at his watch.
Joanna heard Silvorglim mutter savagely, "This is absurd," but for the most part, the huddled line
of sweating sasenna watched the wizard's face with strained concentration, knowing that he, and he
alone, was sufficiently familiar with the mazes to get them out.
Nearly an hour had passed. The sense of danger, of chaos, of shifting and pulling in the darkness
all around them had increased. Sometimes Joanna wondered if it was a problem with her own
perception, or if the floor itself was tipping, the focus of gravity slowly moving itself through
the dark rock of the walls. She wondered whether this would be possible at all without the spells
of the wizards in the Citadel above, holding the fabric of the universe together like masking
tape. Once Antryg, who had moved up to the front of the line, ordered the entire party to back up
thirty or forty feet and detour through a spiral of blind alleys thick with moss like dripping
purple velvet before returning to their original course; another time he had led them through a
windingly circuitous side trip only to emerge at a stairway they had seen, down a straight stretch
of corridor, fifteen minutes earlier. Joanna guessed that either the entire energy field was
bending and shifting with the movement of its center point and Antryg was making allowances to
keep it as stable as possible, or that he perceived dangers, or possible dangers, invisible to the
others. But the sasenna muttered among themselves, burdened under the weight of batteries and the
long litter with its oscillators and field generators, or struggling to maneuver the unwieldy
reflectors and screens that had to be borne upright and at a certain angle. In the fitful glare of
the few torches still alight, the sweat-streaked faces were taut with fear and stress.
"Dear God," whispered Magister Magus, who had been pressed into service carrying one end of the
litter and was walking near Joanna, as far from the Dead God as he could get. "Dear God, I think
we were safer in the Brown Star."
"Oh, you were," Antryg informed him cheerfully. At his cautious signal the entire safari moved on
again but with slow care. "A great deal safer. D'you think you could find your way back to it?"
"Like a shot from a gun, my dear Antryg, had I a sizable bodyguard to escort me."
"I shall see what I can do to arrange that."
A high-pitched shriek ripsawed the blackness behind them.
Antryg swung around, and looking back over her shoulder, Joanna could see down a long reach of
corridor the gleam of torchlight on bared and slime-dripping teeth. There was no gleam of eyes,
but something in the darkness bounced and rocked as it ran toward them-A biped, she guessed
dizzily-and dimly, beyond it, she sensed some darker movement, a kind of wet glister and a rotted,
poisonous stink of fish.
"Shoot it!" Antryg yelled to the nearest of the few unburdened guards. "NOW!"
The thing was still a good hundred feet away. The guard, a middle-aged Church sasennan whose lips
and nostrils were swollen with plum-colored bruises, whipped up her crossbow and let fly at the
flickering gleams that were still all of the thing Joanna could see. It was one hell of a shot,
she thought.
There was the soft skidding thump of tumbling flesh, an alien, acrid stink that must be its blood.
Joanna strained her eyes to see in the darkness beyond. Surely that irrational sense of the floor
moving was a trick of the light.
"Magus!" Antryg caught the little dog wizard by the back of his robe, pulled him away from the
litter pole he was carrying. "A spell of misperception, of illusion-quickly! Across the end of
this corridor ... "
"What? But there's nothing ... "
"Of course there's something there-granite, water, mud, and dead flesh among other things, so
weave the illusion, there's a good chap-anything to prevent something at that end of the corridor
from knowing what's at this end."
"Prevent what ... ?" But Magus was down on his knees already, fumbling in his pocket. Silently,
Joanna produced chalk from her purse and handed it to him.
"Mind you," Antryg said hastily, "make it as strong as you can-truly as strong as you can, against
perception of any kind. Gandy, my pearl of delight," he touched the arm of the sasennan who had
fired the crossbow, "do you feel up to staying with Magus until he's finished? You'll get him
safely back to the refectory, won't you? Thank you. Magus, I'm terribly sorry we can't remain."
The dog wizard looked up with a protesting squawk, but the sasennan only grinned and saluted;
Antryg was already herding his little train of bearers on up the corridor, glancing alternately at
watch and compass, sniffing the air, studying the darkness all around him with the skittish


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preoccupation of a demented bird dog and now and then reaching out a hand to pat the stone of the
wall, only to jerk it back as if the contact burned his fingers.
"What was it?" Joanna whispered to the Dead God, as the narrow, randomly twisting corridors gave
way to a succession of dusty cellar chambers filled with jars of oil, barrels of dried fruit, bins
of potatoes, and rows of herbs in clay pots. Antryg was now walking behind them, nervously
listening, his absurd bug-sprayer his only weapon. The only one who would not accept this rear
guard was the Witchfinder Silvorglim, who insisted on walking at the wizard's back, drawn sword in
hand. "Did you see anything on your sensor?"
"Not when the creature was alive and moving, no," Ninetentwo replied, bent easily under the weight
of his end of the litter and carrying his own weapon, like a lightweight miniature bazooka, now at
the ready in one of his other hands. "It happened very quickly; by the time I keyed in," he
gestured with the thick rectangle of the sensor in his fourth hand, "the animal we saw was dead,
and the reading purely residual synaptic reactions. In truth, there are so many strange energies
moving about the Vaults now, it is difficult to calibrate."
"Is something following us now?"
He held the sensor up on his broad palm, the long fingers and two clawed, stumpy thumbs hooked
over the edge to show her the screen as they waited for the sasenna carrying the clumsy reflectors
to maneuver through the doorway at the top of a short flight of steps ahead of them. The little
white manipulator-tentacles slithered around the edge of the sensor to work the two dials; Joanna
could see distance-calibration rings traced on the fine-grained plastic, and the indistinct
whitish blobs of the body energies of the carrying party, fading out as the dials moved on through
the spectrum of possible energies. Colors wavered and moved on the screen. Once, horribly, a whole
river of blue plasma seemed to come into focus, oozing through the walls all around them, but the
tentacles edged the knob calmly past that.
"You see it is difficult to tell," the Dead God said. "Nothing animal."
Looking back at Antryg's scarecrow shape against the blackness, seeing the worry in his eyes,
Joanna was unable to take as much comfort in that information as perhaps it warranted.
Torchlight flickered over an enormous black iron stove, an open hearth redolent of meat dripping,
the flashing eyes of nervous cats. An arch, some shallow steps ... the blue-white, eerie glow of
witchlight streaming through another archway, and a door guard's voice calling out, "They're
here."
Then they were in what appeared to be an enormous dining room, illuminated by the spooky
flickering of balls of witch-light like stray balloons about the intricate rafterwork ceiling, and
occupied by small clusters of black-clothed sasenna, young men and women in gray or mealy brown,
and wizards.
So these, thought Joanna, stretching aching shoulders as she set down her end of the litter pole
near the stack of backup batteries at one end of the chamber, were Antryg's colleagues. His
jailers, his friends, his enemies ... the people with whom he had spent most of his life. The
people who knew him as she, perhaps, never could.
Some of them she recognized vaguely, from the briefest of encounters at the Silent Tower four
months ago: Whitwell Simm, kindly faced and white-haired; the stern and haggard Nandiharrow, black
gloves covering deformed hands. Others she knew about only from Magister Magus' descriptions in
the endless hours of their imprisonment. She certainly knew the Lady Rosamund Kentacre, who strode
across the long hall with a decisiveness unmarred by the staff upon which she leaned so heavily,
her storm of black hair hanging half-braided on her shoulders and her movie star-perfect face icy
and grim. At the sight of the Dead God she stopped, fist going to her lips in quick shock, but she
paused only an instant before going to Antryg. She had been well trained, Joanna smiled to
herself, in the etiquette of not commenting upon people's appearances.
"We've had word from most parts of the Citadel now," the Lady said as the last of the sasenna
carried their burdens over to where the Dead God was already setting up shop. Several teenagers in
brownish homespun robes and a little man in the blue smock and clumsy boots of a civilian were
moving tables back against the wall to make room; another civilian, a fat little red-haired man in
an apron, was dispensing tea and muffins whose warm scent hung like an incongruous blessing on the
air.
"We've established what spells we can to stabilize the Citadel's boundaries, though God only knows
how long those will last. We're still scrying for Implek; he may have been down in the dairies,
outside the Citadel entirely, looking for you. Pordanches and Selim and Shippona-you remember
Nandiharrow's student? the little girl with the braids?-seem to be trapped on the upper floor of
the Four Brothers; there are creatures of some kind in the hall below them. Pordanches has tried
half a dozen spells to get rid of them and they have no effect. No word yet from Bentick or
Phormion; Kyra has gone out to search."


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"Damn," Antryg whispered.
"Joanna," the Dead God said, and she turned. "I need your help, or the help of someone who
understands electronics."
"Well," she said, crossing to the pile of backup batteries, oscillators, and screens, "I can
program a VCR and get a computer to run."
"Good enough. You remember how the jacks hooked together? These three need to be relinked in
parallel."
"Do we need to readjust the ports?"
Someone considerately sent a floating galaxy of witchlight to hover just beneath the rafters above
the pile of backup batteries, shedding a cool, even glow on their work. Several of the mages not
occupied with the stabilization spells came over, wearing either the black of masters or the
shorter gray robes of Juniors, to study the equipment minutely, hands tucked carefully into their
sleeves to keep from touching. One stoutish little woman in her sixties, no taller than Joanna
herself, with her graying hair skinned unflatteringly back into braids, was neatly copying onto a
wax tablet the arcane symbols written on the equipment's sides-presumably, Joanna thought, serial
numbers, voltage information, and brand names.
Voices floated behind them. "My dear Silvorglim, I was ... "
"Don't you try to cozen me, Daurannon Stapler!" Silvorglim spat. Joanna looked up to see the
wizard to whom he had spoken, a tallish man with gray-flecked black hair and the cherubic features
of an aging choirboy, draw back before the venom in the little Witchfinder's eyes. "I have seen
enough of the evils that you have summoned to convince me that you and all your works here are
utterly pernicious! You say you have no contact with the affairs of humankind, but if that is so,
what is that man doing among you?" His finger stabbed viciously toward Magister Magus, who had
just entered and slumped on a bench, to be given tea by the fat man in the apron. "He is the
lapdog and adviser of every heretic at the Court, cringing around the Regent's heir Prince Cerdic,
trading lies and illusion for table scraps ... "
"See here, now," Magus protested, raising his head in feeble indignation.
Daurannon's wide hazel eyes flared wider. "What on earth are you doing here, Magister Magus?"
"Believe me, my lord, had we several hours and an atlas of the world I could list you all the
places I'd rather be. Thank you, one lump of sugar, if you have such a thing."
"Don't feign innocence with me!" Silvorglim said, his voice low and deadly. "I can see now the
link between ... "
"Have you heard from Brighthand and Otaro?" Antryg was asking, ignoring this byplay as he accepted
a cup of tea from the mournful-looking little man in the clumsy boots. "Thank you, Tom."
"There's a ... a fold, a crease, as you described it, in the bridge which leads across from the
cellar of the Pavilion to the House of Roses," Lady Rosamund said. "Brighthand and Is-say have
twice tried to bring Otaro across and both times found themselves up in the Winter Solar. They're
working their way back to the Library to bring him over the bridge into the Junior Parlor and down
from there. Issay dosed Otaro with poppy-he's been raving about the Moving Gate following him,
says that his father is controlling it, his father is coming to get him."
Antryg's voice lowered still more. "And Aunt Min?"
The silence made Joanna look across at them, in time to see the silver-hard brittleness freeze in
that beautiful face.
"I saw her," Joanna said suddenly.
Both Lady Rosamund and Daurannon turned toward her, startled. She stood up, wires trailing from
her hand.
"Magus and I ... when we were wandering through the Brown Star. There was a ... a flaw, or a Gate,
that led us into these two rooms. Aunt Min was sleeping."
"It's true." Magister Magus stepped around and away from Silvorglim and came over to join the
other mages, still carrying teacup and saucer, his dressing gown of sable velvet like an elaborate
parody of their dark robes.
"You're sure she was sleeping?" For the first time, Joanna saw human concern break the flawless
perfection of the Lady Rosamund's face. The fear in her eyes, the desperation and the hope, was
painful to see.
"I checked," she said, a little awkwardly. "And the cats were nervous, but not ... not like
anything had happened to her. This was ... I don't know. Maybe two hours ago? It's hard to tell
time."
"It hasn't been much more than three hours since the binding-spells were destroyed," Lady Rosamund
said quietly. "If she is still in the cottage ... "
She drew a deep breath and suddenly turned away, pressing her fingers to the inner corners of her
eyes as if to still the throbbing of a headache, but Joanna guessed it was so that the gesture


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would cover, for a moment, whatever expression was on her face. But when she turned again, the
jadelike hardness was back, forbidding any to touch. "Will you guide me there, Joanna? Do you
remember the way?"
"It's out of the question." The Dead God rose from behind his oscillators, resting all four hands
like a row of huge green spiders along the top of the generator. "I need someone who understands
electronics. There remains at least an hour's worth of adjustments to be done."
"You'll have no problem once you're inside the Gate," Joanna said. "I kept track of it with yarn.
But it was Magus who guided us in the Vaults."
"Well," the dog wizard modestly said, not seeing his danger, "someone-by all appearances a novice
mage-had very recently passed that way and left wizard's marks all along the walls."
"And I'm sure he'll be delighted to guide you back, Rosie." Antryg draped a friendly arm around
Magister Magus' shoulders in time to keep his friend from bolting like a startled hare for the
nearest doorway.
"And what gives you that impression?" Magus demanded, struggling discreetly. But Antryg, for all
his peculiar appearance and the fatigue worn visibly into his beaky face, was very strong.
"Because it is now imperative that the geas be removed from me," Antryg said, his demented
pleasantness fading and his eyes growing suddenly grave. "And without Bentick, Phormion, or Issay-
nearly half the Council-finding Aunt Min is now our only hope of accomplishing that before what
remains of the energy-polarization field fades out of the stones of the Citadel and we are torn
apart by the forces of the Void."
"How did Magister Magus know that it was the Brown Star in which you were imprisoned?"
Joanna looked up, a little surprised, from the two-color split screen of data she was comparing-
right half to left with an overlay capability whose exactness more than compensated for the fact
that she hadn't any comprehension of what those characters meant-to see the handsome Council mage
Daurannon hunker down at her side.
Running on an internal battery, the Dead God's portable computer was about the size of a first-
generation laptop with massive capacity. Ninetentwo had hand-sketched a sample keyboard in chalk
on the floor, and Joanna, sitting cross-legged on the floor within the shadowy ring of oscillators
and flux capacitors, had jotted copious notes about exactly which keys-only they were tiny levers
that flicked with the quick pressure of finger-picking a guitar-to press to run the alignment
programs on the oscillator's eight transmission screens.
"It was his crystal." She grinned a little at the recollection of the Magus' indignation at his
brush with karma. In addition to a pair of old breeches and a faded calico shirt from the Citadel
slop chest, Pothatch the cook had brought her tea and oatcakes, but she still had a headache,
which, when she thought about it, was scarcely surprising. It occurred to her that with all these
wizards around she could probably get it cured. Even in her own magicless world, Antryg could do
that.
"His crystal?" The black eyebrows pinched sharply down, and a whole network of lines sprang into
being around those calculatedly melting eyes.
She sipped her tea, smoke flavored and almost as strong as coffee, but very good. "Well ... he
sort of swiped it from Salteris' rooms."
"Saltaris' rooms?"
On the other side of the long refectory, Silvorglim and his sasenna were clumped together in a
little island of smoldering torchlight, muttering and whispering. The Witchfinder had protested
volubly against Magister Magus leaving his custody, not to mention Antryg, whom he still spoke of
as his prisoner, and had been roundly ignored. The mages, for the most part, had returned to the
round table directly beneath the chandelier's eerie glow, hunched over their crystals like
freezing men about a fire in their efforts to guide back those who had been stranded in the
farther-flung corners of the Citadel. The murmur of their voices was a fragile surface smoke,
floating on the fearful silence of the night beyond the doors.
After a long moment Daurannon said, "He told you this?"
She nodded.
"I wonder why he never ... " The words were murmured as if to himself; then he drew a deep breath
and shook his head. "I suppose Salteris found it in the sack of Suraklin's Citadel. But in that
case, why did he not tell the Council?" His eyes remained troubled, as he tried to work out in his
mind where and how his master could have acquired such a thing. "There cannot have been two ... "
"It was Suraklin's, all right," Joanna said softly and told him of Irina of Kymil, whispering to
herself in the dark. Daurannon settled back, leaning one shoulder against the smooth, faintly
gleaming side of the oscillator behind him, chewing his lip a little with thought. The smooth
sangfroid he wore like a well-tailored suit had been put aside, and Joanna found herself more at
ease with the uncertainty that lay hidden beneath.


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"I don't understand," he said after a moment. "If Salteris had found the crystal at the sack of
Suraklin's Citadel, why didn't he free this woman then? They all knew she'd vanished."
"Maybe Salteris didn't find it?" Joanna turned quietly back to her computer screen and carefully
inserted the next test wafer. Rather to her surprise, the left side of the screen wiped obediently
to the new data; she studied her notes for a moment, then keyed in the instructions for an
overlap. In spite of the warmer clothes she'd been given, she still felt cold-over the past half
hour, she had begun to wonder whether it was her imagination or whether the temperature was
dropping.
"Maybe it had been hidden, and only after Suraklin took over Salteris' body and mind did he dig it
up again?"
"You believe that tale of Antryg's?" The bitterness of betrayal in his voice made her look up. In
the soft lambence of the witchlight, she could definitely see his breath.
Her eyes returned to the screen to avoid the steely anger in his. "I believe that all the
mannerisms, all the speech patterns, of the man I knew-briefly, I'll grant you-as Salteris later
turned up in a man I knew well, who'd never had them before. I believe that all the computer
programs of information, of personality transfer, were written by Suraklin as part of his plan to
live forever."
"I know nothing of these computers." Daurannon used the English word, there being no equivalent in
the Ferryth tongue. "But I do know that Antryg-like his master before him-can be stunningly
persuasive. Witness how he's achieved the goal for which he's been striving since his arrival and
has gotten Rosamund to consent to having the geas lifted, giving him the power he seeks again.
Witness how he's gotten you to shelter him."
Joanna looked up again, her brown eyes hard. "Completely leaving aside the fact that I love the
man-which I know can happen to anybody and with anybody, God help us-Antryg saved my life, rescued
me from the Inquisition, protected and sheltered me. And it was Salteris he spoke of as his
master." Her own words startled her, her tone of voice more so-she tried obliquely to remember the
last time she'd argued with a man in authority, a man with power. Certainly in the past she had
had to be very angry indeed to argue with anyone, without immediately following up with half an
hour's worth of mollifying apologies.
Rather to her surprise, Daurannon didn't point out her stupidity at falling for Antryg's lies but
only said, his voice unbending steel, "Whom he murdered."
"If that was Salteris." Her hands, resting on the keyboard, were quite steady; she felt she should
have been coming unglued under the pressure of his rage and his will but, curiously, felt very
little but a kind of hot lightness in her chest. "And if it was Salteris, don't you think, in the
sixteen years he was Antryg's teacher and friend, he would have been wise enough to recognize
Suraklin? To guess if that was what had happened?"
"Antryg is mad." There was a doggedness to his answers now, a stubborn anger. Matched, she
supposed, by her own stubborn determination that it was his friend, not hers, who had harbored the
evil wizard's disembodied mind. "Has always been mad, and more so when Salteris first found him.
It's a good cover."
"All right," Joanna said reasonably. "Then answer me two things. First: How close were you to
Salteris those last four years, between the time when the Emperor went insane-since it's Antryg's
theory that Suraklin spent most of his time hiding in the body and brain of the Emperor-and
Salteris's own death?"
"Salteris was in Angelshand those years," Daurannon replied coldly. "I was here. And he was
changed by the death of his wife." He used the Ferryth word for an unofficial wife, far stronger,
and with far different connotations, than mistress, but lacking the sanction of the Church. "But
those few times I saw him, I could swear he was the man I knew."
"And second: Where did Salteris get the Brown Star?"
Daurannon was silent for some time. In fact, Joanna never did find out what he would have said.
For as he drew in his breath to reply, from the darkness beyond the room's north doors came a
sudden, drawn-out cry, a shriek that resolved itself into a man's harsh voice shouting "No! NO!"
and the splitting crack of what sounded like a thunderclap, echoing in the enclosed halls.
Footfalls thudded, running, stumbling; the two sasenna guarding that door called out, and light
flooded into the passageway beyond, the bright, cold glare of magic. Silvorglim and his guards
whirled and started for the doorway at a run, swords winking in their hands. The Council sasenna,
clumped around Sergeant Hat hen, ran also.
Daurannon sprang to his feet, crying, "Bentick!" as an old man, white hair streaked with blood
that ran from it down a face scarcely less pale, stumbled through the doorway and collapsed
sobbing on the floor.



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Chapter XXI
If you pay a mage to summon Darkness, be sure to have candles on hand.
-berengis the black
Court Mage to the Earls Caeline

"She is mad." Bentick's long, ink-stained fingers trembled around the cup Pothatch had to hold to
his mouth. "God help me, I tried to heal her. When she tried to murder Antryg in the cellars of
the Castle, I knew she was mad, and I tried to heal her. And then the Witchfinders came."
There was shocked whispering among the half-hundred sorcerers and warriors clustered around them,
the old man huddled like a broken doll, the younger mage kneeling over him, the fat little cook
with his tea and his damp, herbed rags.
The Steward's breath caught as Daurannon took the cloth, with its stinging astringents, and wiped
the blood from his scalp. When he went on, his thin voice stumbled on the words. "I thought that I
could heal her-I have healed others before-and that no one would be wiser. That Witchfinder-he
would have blamed it all on her, said she was a madwoman ... At the very least she would have been
dropped from the Council. Phormion ... "
He shook his head desperately, as if knowing they would not understand. "Phormion is proud. I owed
her at least concealment from them. Then she accused me of trying to poison her-said Rosamund was
spying on her, plotting to destroy her rivals for the Master-Spells, were Minhyrdin to die. I
couldn't let them find her. I did not think she'd try to hurt me."
"And exactly when did she begin to go mad?" Silvorglim asked softly, his fox yellow eyes glinting
in the soft flicker of the witchlight that hovered in clouds around the wizards' heads. "Who can
tell, when a madness begins? A month ago, when the abominations began to appear ... ?"
Sergeant Hathen turned, hand on her sword, and said, "There's six others on the Council who can
tell you it wasn't, chum."
The little Witchfinder's nostrils flared with disdain. "Who will, I'm sure."
"And in any case," Daurannon said smoothly, rising to lay a hand on Silvorglim's arm and
unobtrusively putting his own body between the Witchfinder's and that of the bristling sergeant,
"it's a matter for the Council to deal with. Why don't you sit down over here and be comfortable?"

"Joanna ... "
She turned quickly at the harsh buzz of Ninetentwo's voice. Leaving the outer edge of the
dispersing group, she rejoined the bony monster within the circle of generators.
"Whether one wizard went insane and tried to rip another with her claws-or those pitiful little
things you people pretend are claws-it is not the worst of our problems." His long tail lashed
uneasily, and even as he spoke he moved from screen to screen, the maggotlike tentacles of his
hands flicking nervously at keys and dials. "The spells of Daurannon and his cohorts cannot keep
the field stable much longer. Unless we complete our setup quickly we'll begin to lose parts of
the Citadel. My instruments show me wormholes and spell-fields opening everywhere in the Citadel
above us, as well as the
Vaults beneath. If the outer parameter of the spell-field is breached, we may get air leakage."
"Christ, I'd forgotten about the air." Joanna went back to the next reflector screen, withdrew its
small data chip, and knelt again to insert it into the computer's entry port. She punched through
the memorized sequence, and superimposed the new data lines with the model. "We've got a
misalignment here."
The Dead God moved over to her to check the findings, clicked deep within his huge skull, and made
the necessary adjustments, bending over her slim form like some nightmare horror from Special-
Effects Hell.
"Even if we don't get a hole in the biosphere of this joint," Joanna continued, taking the chip
from the final screen and running the check, "what happens when the air gets exhausted?"
"It is not something with which we need concern ourselves."
She brushed back the feathery mass of her hair from her face and sighed with relief. "Thank God
for small ... "
"Long before that happens," Ninetentwo went on inexorably, "if what Antryg tells me is correct,
stabilization field or no, the polarization energies will disintegrate and the enclave bounded by
the Citadel's outermost air/stone interfaces-the original parameters of the spell-will dissolve."
He returned to her side, hunkered down into an angular ball of bones, and reinserted the corrected
screen's data chip, looking over Joanna's shoulder to confirm that the adjustment was in line. As
he did so he balanced himself on her shoulder with two of his hands. Looking at them, she realized
that the thick-muscled strength of his upper set of arms came from the fact that they were


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actually necks-the tentacles, in fact, were tongues, emerging from mouths in the palms of the claw-
armored upper hands. I guess it takes all kinds, she thought queasily.
"Though presumably once the Citadel itself fell into the Void, the faulting along the energy lines
in the various worlds would cease," he continued, as if unaware of her momentary flinch of
revulsion. "The reflection that we have saved our universes from abominations will comfort me
little when we implode. This should take place in approximately," he checked a gauge, "two hours."
"Two hours?" Joanna stared up at him, completely forgetting the ephemera of his appearance in her
horror at his words. The rigid exoskeletal face was expressionless. After a moment he turned away
to check another set of gauges.
"Look," Joanna said, when he had finished his final adjustments a few minutes later. "According to
Antryg, the whole problem stemmed from one of the Gates in the Void being kept jammed open,
right?"
"Correct." The light node on his forehead flickered, casting a gruesome firefly glow over his big
upper hands as he changed one of the air bottles on his breathing apparatus. Joanna noted two
other bottles among the general pile of tool kit, spare coax cables, and what might have been
extra ammo heaped in the dense shadows behind the backup batteries. "It is his theory that once
that link is broken, the Citadel will snap back to its correct position in the time-space
continuum, and the entire continuum will return to its normal orientation. Since this Gate seemed
to be moving around, probably as a result of being kept open, he established the stabilization
field and attempted to chart the Vaults where it had been seen, but he was effectively prevented
from completing even that task."
Joanna squatted next to the smooth, knobby bulk of the alien, half-hidden in the darkness of his
gleaming-eyed machines, and folded her arms around her knees in an unconscious mimicry of his own
position. "But if your field of study is xchi-particle flux-the energies that were polarized to
stabilize the field-were you taking readings before the period of stabilization?"
"Of course. But they wouldn't tell us which of the loci of flux was the Moving Gate. That was the
first thing we thought of."
"No," Joanna agreed. "But it would tell us something. If nothing else, there might be some kind of
pattern to it that isn't obvious until it's laid out. And Tom the gardener tells me Antryg did get
some of the Vaults charted, so we can overlay your findings with his, and see where we are. Can
you get a three-dimensional graphic on your computer?"
"Four dimensional, if you need it-but no printer."
"Damn," Joanna muttered, glancing at the tiny screen. "Looks like it's chalk-on-the-floor time
again." At least, she thought as she stood up and dug in her purse for chalk, it'll give me
something to do until Antryg comes back-if he comes back-or the place disintegrates.
It took her only a few minutes to round up most of Antryg's charts. The two Juniors Mick and Cylin
had some of them; Tom remembered Antryg emptying a creased wad of papers out of his coat pocket in
the baths, and hurried out, candle in hand, through the eastern doorway into the still and waiting
blackness of the kitchen to fetch them. After a little asking, Seldes Katne produced the rest.
"They aren't complete," the librarian said, looking worriedly down over Joanna's shoulder as she
sketched out in chalk on the planked oak floor the preliminary plans of the several levels of the
Vaults. "Brighthand had some, and others were left up in my rooms in the Library."
"Just what we need," Joanna said, turning the scribbled charts this way and that to orient their
pattern. The situation was made easier when Tom returned, rather white and shaken but bearing a
mass of grubby papers, scribbled over in Antryg's looping, illegible scrawl, which Tom obligingly
proceeded to decipher for her. The Dead God produced a long, folded readout of greenish
flimsiplast with all the readings taken before the field went into effect-sheet after sheet of
what looked like a badly photocopied, black-and-white version of Van Gogh's "Starry Night"-and
Joanna took notes on the back with a ballpoint pen from her purse, while the physicist keyed
through the later screens of data during stabilization.
"As you can see," he said, "not everything registered on the multiscanner, and some of what did
register was undetectable by human senses. We still don't know what this disruption was, or that."
The massive claw touched the screen with incongruous delicacy.
Anything, she thought as she worked. Anything to keep from looking at her watch, counting down how
little of the two hours was left.
It was definitely growing colder.
Great, she thought, warming her stiff fingers in her armpits. We may not be losing air, but we're
sure as hell losing heat. I wonder why gravity still works ?
Behind her, Daurannon had called the wizards together again for a muttered conference, their
voices carrying clearly into the tense hush of the shadowy room. "According to our scryers the
water's up to the fifth level of the Vaults," he said.


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From somewhere in the dark of the kitchen there came a thin, alien piping, the scramble of unseen
feet. The mages glanced quickly at one another. Daurannon went a little paler, but continued,
"Nandiharrow, take twelve of the sasenna with you."
From the north door came a muttered confusion of voices. Joanna looked up, to see the guards there
step back. Two gray-robed Juniors-a rawboned, red-haired girl and a dark-eyed boy-carried in
between them a stumbling little man in a yellow nightshirt, whose black, greasy hair cascaded like
a woman's down his shoulders. Behind them, haloed by witchlight, flitted the androgynous form of
Issay Bel-Caire.
"Brighthand-Otaro." Daurannon strode across to greet them.
Joanna bent back to her work. This patch of moss and that wormhole were related here in this
configuration, which meant that probably this map went this-way-around, and thus that Gate there
had opened twice ... or two different Gates had opened there a day and a half apart.
"What's that note say?"
" 'Cold field,' " reported Tom.
"Well, they all seem to be lining up."
"It's where the energy-tracks run through the Vaults." The Dead God's shorter, thinner lower hand
snaked past Tom to trace a line on the map fragment. "That chamber is the one with the Glass
Pillar, at one point of the field axis. There are Gates-concentrations of flux-here and here,
outside the Vaults, indeed outside the Citadel altogether."
"Is the cold field on the next map? How about the one that says 'cat magic'?"
"That's over here ... not in the Vaults ... "
Her eyes sneaked to her watch. Forty-five minutes had passed.
"My lord ... !"
The guards on the east door of the refectory stepped aside. Nandiharrow, tall, gray, and grim,
strode through the door in a billow of dark robes, trailed by a very shaken-looking Pot-hatch and
twelve guards. Daurannon put aside the crystal he had been studying for the past ten minutes and
walked quickly to meet him, probably, Joanna guessed, to keep whatever ill news Nandiharrow had to
impart from being called out across an assembly of folks already teetering on the knife-edge of
panic. Silvorglim, at least, had for some time been pacing and fidgeting, staring around him at
the wizards and across at the darkly gleaming circle of oscillators and transmission screens in a
way she did not like.
Daurannon might as well have saved himself steps. The attention of every person in the place, with
the exception of Bentick and the heavily sedated Otaro, was riveted on the dark forms of the two
Council mages from the nine-fingered clock-maker's first utterance.
"There's something moving down there," Nandiharrow said softly. "There are ... things ...
throughout the cellars now, but this seems to be coming up from the Vaults. I've looked and cannot
see it properly, but I felt it ... we all felt it. A drawing, a coldness not of the air, but of
the bones within the flesh ... "
"Oh, Christ," Joanna whispered, knowing instantly what it was that he had seen. Something seemed
to sink and tighten behind her sternum, and her heart began to pound.
Daurannon returned quietly to his chair, and the light that had flickered over his head while he'd
scried grew brighter as he held his crystal once more to its glow. He gazed for a long time, and
the wizards grouped around him in the curious, flickering ring of multiple shadows grew very
silent. By the stronger glare, Joanna could see the sweat glisten upon that short upper lip.
"Miss Sheraton ... "
She came to him, dusting the chalk from her hands. "The tsaeati," she said softly, pronouncing the
word as Magister Magus had done. "That's what it is, isn't it?"
The mage shut his eyes for a moment, not surprised, but with the gesture of a two-pack-a-day man
who'd been hoping the doctor would say, 'Oh, no, that cough's just a summer cold ... '
"I don't know," he said at length. Joanna looked down over his shoulder at the chunk of gray-
yellow quartz the size and thickness of an avocado pit that lay in his well-kept hands. In the
flat, reflected brightness she could see nothing in the glass-smooth facets.
"In the Vaults," Joanna said softly, "one of those two-legged Shriekers came running after us, and
I thought then there was something moving behind it-something I couldn't exactly see. I thought
... I thought almost that the floors bulged up, like the stone itself was alive."
DOG WIZARD
323
Sweat flashed as a muscle jumped in Daurannon's jaw, but he said nothing.
"Antryg had Magister Magus remain behind to put the strongest illusions he could muster across the
passageway, so that nothing on that side could perceive anything beyond them. We had to get the
machine up here."


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"And it has followed," he murmured. "Or perhaps it is only that it sensed the smell of our blood,
our souls, from afar."
He turned the crystal over in his fingers, which remained oddly steady; Joanna herself was a bit
surprised at how calm she felt. "I can see the walls move," he continued in a voice that was
audible only because of the deadly hush that had fallen all around them. "I can see a mound of
water and mud, and out of it the torn limbs and necks and bodies of unknown creatures are waving
and snapping, surrounded by darkness. And past that darkness, I see the arches and brickwork of
the storage cellars."
Across the refectory by the east door, other sasenna had come in, their panting voices clear for
all their quiet: "We couldn't stop it. We had to fall back. It's on its way."
Daurannon got to his feet, counting his forces with his eyes. Without being ordered, all the
sasenna in the room including those of the Church-save the guards on the north door-had gone to
the eastern archway, ranging themselves across it. Their faces were grim, and Joanna reflected
that, though the sasenna trained throughout their lives for a death-fight, in these peaceful times
very few of them-Church, Council, or the private forces of nobles or Emperor-ever actually saw
true combat. Near the north door Otaro stirred in his poppy-induced dreams, mumbled something that
sounded like "Father ... ," and then began to scream, a horrible, harsh, animal noise, and claw at
his face with his bound hands. Brighthand and Issay, who had joined the group around Daurannon's
chair, raced back to him, catching at his wrists-his cheeks and forehead were already a mass of
scabs-and pulling them away; in time the Singer quietened to weeping, and so once again to sleep.
But as if the screaming had raised the temperature of some volatile liquid over boiling point, the
stillness of the refectory, with its shifting patterns of yellow torchlight, pale witchfire, and
shadows, dissolved into nervous convection currents of movement.
"Nandiharrow, Issay, Brighthand ... " Daurannon was moving among them, his choirboy face very
white but resolute. "Gilda, contact Q'iin, get her and her party back here-tell them to come
through the north doors if they can. Whitwell ... "
Seldes Katne, seated near the quilt on the floor where Bentick lay, got to her feet and made as if
to come over, and Daurannon waved her back. Bentick, too, climbed shakily to his feet, catching
the corner of the nearest table.
"Lie down," the little librarian ordered. "You'll kill yourself ... "
"Nonsense. They need everyone with any pretension to strength."
The Senior mages were drawing together, with a few of the Juniors-Brighthand and Kyra-under
Daurannon's quiet-voiced orders. "If it is the tsaeati," he was saying, "it was said to be drawn
by life, to absorb life. Thus we need to form a Blood-Bond among us, to pool our life and our
strength against this thing."
As the mages began to turn up their sleeves and form themselves into a ritual circle, Joanna faded
back to the ring of transmitter screens and generators-Compu-Henge, she termed it mentally-and
knelt beside the Dead God and Tom, who were still laboriously marking and annotating the master
maps. "Back up your data chips and take the computer down," she said softly. "We're going to have
the worst kind of company in a couple minutes and I wouldn't want the disk to crash."
The Dead God swore. Translated by the Spell of Tongues directly mind to mind, some of the images
were fairly startling. "What comes?" he asked, as the screen colors redshifted themselves away
into darkness.
"Something that eats life."
"We all do that." He unfolded himself in long-boned increments and fished his weapon from behind
the main generator. "We can bring the screens inside the main ring and still maintain the
configuration, but if it comes near the oscillator or the batteries ... see?" He showed her the
triggering and targeting mechanisms of the gun, which had clearly been designed for operation by
one upper hand and one lower. "It doesn't kick much, but hold it tucked, this way, and by all
Those Below keep your arm clear of the vent."
Joanna checked the infrared targeting system and found it unfamiliar but comprehensible. When
she'd admitted, to her own embarrassment, a delight in armament, her instructor had demonstrated
some fairly esoteric weaponry. Antryg had generally been more curious about how the stuff had
worked; Joanna, always practical, had merely striven to be able to hit anything with it before
that thing could hit her. Though the gun was awkward to hold, the trigger was no more than a
button, designed for the tiny tongue-fingers of Ninetentwo's kind and easily adaptable to her own
small hand.
Ten feet away, the fifteen or so top mages stood in a chalked Circle of Power, bared forearms
pressed together; here and there, between the joins, slow trickles of blood dripped out. Among the
ashy grays and blacks of their robes, Tobin, the Witchfinder's Dog, stood out like flame among
cinders. Though Joanna could hear no words, she knew there was magic being raised and shared among


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them; could sense it in the quiet stillness of those vastly disparate faces. Teenagers like Zake
Brighthand or fussy old men like Bentick, whatever their feelings about one another, about the
role of wizardry or the operation of the Citadel, when it came down to it, they would back one
another to the death or beyond. They were what they were, and even those who loved them-herself;
her friend Caris the sasennan, Salteris' grandson; Pothatch, Hathen, and Tom-could never fully
understand. Silvorglim the Witchfinder, who had remained seated among the torches and lanterns
when his guards had joined the ranks before the doors, now approached the group with a glint of
protesting fire in his eyes: Pothatch caught him by the arm and whispered, "Not now."
"My lord!" Sergeant Hathen called from the eastern door, and around her the black ranks of the
sworn warriors stirred.
Daurannon raised his head and opened his eyes. As she had briefly during their argument, Joanna
saw the middle-aged man who hid beneath the wizard's smooth disguise-saw, with some surprise, the
naked terror in his eyes. He walked forward, bracing himself for what would come.
The circle of mages re-formed itself into a rough line. Daurannon nodded to the sergeant to get
her warriors back. She signed them to withdraw but remained herself-Joanna saw the big, heavy-
boned woman's glance cross Daurannon's, asking some question; the mage took a deep breath and
motioned her away. After a moment's hesitation she went. Crouching behind the stack of batteries
with the Dead God, the muzzle of the gun protruding between them, Joanna thought that momentary
hesitation-that wondering whether she ought to remain at her master's side in spite of the
creeping coldness, the sensation of slow-building evil that had begun to flow into the room-was
one of the bravest things she'd seen.
Neatly and very rapidly Daurannon sketched signs upon the door with his left forefinger-or
presumably, Joanna thought, they were signs, since she herself could see nothing of them in the
soft whiteness slowly strengthening in the room around them. The waiting line of wizards grouped
closer, heads bowed, some with eyes shut as if meditating. One or two of them, Joanna saw, held
hands, the blood that streaked their forearms staining the clasped fingers.
A stream of bloodstained water began to trickle in under the door.
Daurannon stepped back, panting as if with some strain or exertion, his hands visibly trembling
now. Sweat misted his face and dripped from the strings of his long hair; his lips moved a little
in the torch glare from behind. The witchlight, after its final blaze, began to fade, and like the
cold dark that waited beyond the doors, night closed in.
The bolt across the door quivered, creaking under some massive weight; then from the wood of the
door itself came a scratching, tearing sound, and Joanna saw the heavy oak planks at the bottom
shift and start. Daurannon took another step backward and spread out his arms, gathering what was
left of the light about him until his form was haloed in shuddering wings of brightness against
the gloom. He cried out "Tsaeati, tsaerat, anambo mishia tathet!" and steam began to curl from the
surface of the water still trailing thinly in.
The scratching stopped.
Otaro moaned with terror in his sleep.
Then something smote the door with a blow like a steam hammer, like a freight train slamming at
floor-level, and oak splinters three inches thick went spearing like shattered matchwood in every
direction. A cacophony of howls and screams burst out, and claws pawed and thrust under the
widened space beneath the door, ripping, grabbing at the wood while all around them water, mud,
and blood came pouring in. Daurannon and several others in the line made a slashing pass with
their hands, and blue lightning smote the floor, turning the water to hissing steam and raking at
the searching claws. But the steam itself sprang upward into a cyclone, flung itself in the
Handsome One's face, and as he threw up his arms to protect his eyes, the oak of the door bulged,
swelled, heaved out into an impossible bubble as if the molecules of the wood itself had softened
to liquescent gum.
Then, with a report like a cannon-shot, the door burst, and a monstrous thing, shining slimily
with mold and niter, stinking of rot and curtained in a swirling fog of water from which the heads
and arms and feet of unimaginable creatures snapped wildly and eyelessly, rolled in.
The blast had flung Daurannon backward, a splinter of oak tearing through his left arm like a
javelin head. At a cry from Brighthand, lightning smote the thing again, the darkness that
streamed in with it like noxious fog exploding in a white clap of blinding electricity, and Issay
Bel-Caire dove forward under cover of the bolt, to drag the stunned Daurannon out of the tsaeati's
path. Joanna shaded her eyes against the searing glare as the mages flung the lightning again, and
the thing before them took fire and hurled itself in a swollen, blazing wall of steam and flame
and burning meat at its attackers.
They fell back before it, dragging Daurannon with them. A bolt of lightning leaped from the fog to
strike the Herbmistress Q'iin; she stumbled, and the column of burning mud fell upon her, sweeping


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her along with it, screaming like the damned. The stench of blood and charred meat billowed
suffocatingly from the heaving mass.
"Cold!" yelled Daurannon, struggling to stand. Blood spouted from a severed artery, splashing
Issay and all those near him with gouts of crimson. "Not fire-COLD!"
The mage Whitwell Simm and two of the Council's sasenna had sprung forward, slashing with swords
at the gory serpent heads, the clawed hands, fighting to get to where Q'iin had been. Already the
mud was whitening, stiffening with frost, smoke mushrooming off it as the air temperature plunged
and spreading over the floor of the refectory. For an instant the tsaeati slowed, settling into
immobility ...
And then, as the door had done-as Joanna had half sensed the stone floor of the corridor doing-it
began to move again. There was a creaking, a thin, hideous snickle of shivering ice. From its slow
bulging it burst into horrible speed, pouring itself over the feet of the nearest sasennan. The
man pulled back, hacking at the slithering thing with his sword, but the hairy arms of a Shrieker
reached out to him from it, pulling him to his knees and then forward, screaming, face-first into
the frozen muck. Whitwell Simm leaned down to drag the young man free and the sasennan's hand shot
out, seizing the
DOG WIZARD
329
frail old wizard by the arm and hauling him down inexorably into the slime that heaved up to meet
him. The water was ice, frozen solid and moving, impossibly, like clouded and filthy gelatin-where
she stood behind the batteries Joanna could feel the smoke of cold radiating from it-but the hands
and heads of the abominations, hung now with spines of frost, still lashed and snapped within it,
ripping at Simm's flesh as he twisted frantically to get free. Brunus and the remaining sasennan
managed to hack through the tentacles, the claws-the arm of the warrior it had devoured-and
carried Simm, with gobbets of the thing still clinging to his flesh, back to the far end of the
chamber. Within the thing itself Q'iin's voice screamed on and on as it advanced upon the wizards.
And then, opposite the cluster of generators and screens, it stopped.
And turned.
For a nightmare second Joanna felt as if she were dreaming, separated from self and reality by the
mere fact that this thing, creaking with the scrape of ice as it began to advance on her, was the
embodiment of her nightmares.
Then she realized what was happening and yelled, "It's going for the batteries!" In the same
instant the Dead God loosed a charge into the thing nearly point-blank. Shards of ice and mud
spattered everywhere as the round exploded deep in the gelid mass, Q'iin's voice breaking off with
a hideous, gobbling choke.
Each separate glob, including the one from which the sasennan's torso and legs still projected,
kicking with a horrible life of their own, began to crawl toward them again.
"Dammit, it eats energy!" Joanna screamed. "If it takes the batteries, the whole Citadel will
collapse."
What the hell am I getting so excited about? she wondered blindly, casting a frantic glance at the
group of wizards but too terrified to leave the protective wall behind which she crouched. The
whole Citadel's going to collapse in twenty minutes anyway.
Daurannon shouted something in the trained, booming voice of Power; she had a glimpse of him from
the tail of her eye, clinging to Brighthand and Issay, fighting to stay on his feet, his face
chalky from loss of blood. The air in the long chamber seemed to glitter and crackle with static,
her hair rippled and swirled.
And behind the creature, directly opposite the pile of batteries, another pile of batteries
appeared, twice as large and coruscating with blue flickers of lightning.
A second look showed Joanna it was illusion. Antryg had once told her that there were limitations
on what could be done with illusion, and this one, though clearly very, very good, still looked
wrong in some fashion she could not determine. But for a last-second effort it was far from bad,
and the tsaeati did not appear to be a particularly discriminating judge. It hesitated for an
instant, its various parts melding stickily into the main mass, then slowly started to crawl
toward what it clearly sensed was a still greater concentration of energy.
Daur's voice was a broken gasp. "Open the north door, somebody ... "
Seldes Katne, torn from the immobility of horror, lunged across the monstrosity's path and threw
the huge oak panels wide. The illusory pile of batteries-Joanna noted obliquely that they'd
reproduced the brand logos exactly-flickered, wavered, then reappeared in the corridor outside.
The tsaeati moved toward it in a thick crickling of ice, leaving a horrible wake of bloody, frost-
rimmed water and slime. Daurannon and Brighthand were clinging to one another like drowning men,
kneeling now with heads bowed within the circle of the other mages, focus and laser of their


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power. Joanna saw the Junior's lips move, heard Nandiharrow repeat to the others, "The Library.
The top floor of the Library. It's the farthest place ... "
"No!" Seldes Katne cried in a voice of despair. None of them heeded. The mages of the blood-circle
were all clinging together now, supporting one another, sinking in on each other
DOG WIZARD
331
like the ruins of a burned-out house. Their eyes shut, they poured out the last of their magic
into the maintenance of the illusion, the drawing of power.
Daur's head fell back against Brighthand's shoulder; from under the boy's pressing fingers blood
still pulsed, thick and stinking and redder than anything Joanna had ever imagined. "Issay ...
barriers ... illusion. Keep it from finding its way back." The little mage flitted like a white-
haired spider to the doorway through which the creature had passed and began, with long, emaciated
hands, to form infinitely stronger versions of those same signs that Magister Magus had written
across the corridor in the Vaults not three hours previously.
"Not the Library!" Seldes Katne wailed, standing as close behind the Silent One as she dared.
"They can't ... "
In the corner, Whitwell Simm was still groaning and sobbing as the slimy shreds of the tsaeati
slithered from what was left of his arm and crawled like filthy ribbons toward the door, leaving a
pustulant black mildew behind. Issay stepped aside to let them past, as if they had been no more
than snakes. Beside Joanna, the Dead God set his weapon down and said, "And how long will that
illusion foil the thing's instinct to seek out and absorb whatever it can?"
Joanna, nauseated and trembling with shock, had to lean on the stack of batteries to keep her
knees from giving way. Reaction was setting in, and despair, on top of swirling light-headedness
that left her short of breath. Her own voice sounded weirdly matter-of-fact in her ears as she
said, "In fifteen minutes that question's going to become academic ... "
"What?" The Dead God lunged to check a gauge. 'Nonsense! Barely an hour has elapsed."
Joanna looked at her watch, then up at the tall figure towering above her. "It's been damn near
two by my watch." Then she paused, feeling suddenly foolish. "Oh," she said. "You have different
hours than we do, don't you?" And her knees buckled, and she slipped slowly to the floor. Clawed
hands caught her, lifted her as if she'd been a spray of lilies, and carried her to one of the
piles of blankets heaped along the wall. Though she didn't lose consciousness, in her grayed-out
dizziness Joanna was aware of all things in small vignettes, still-lifes without meaning:
Daurannon's face white as eggshell against the black of his hair while Pothatch ripped open his
sleeve and Sergeant Hathen tourniqueted his arm; the other mages of the Blood-Circle huddled
numbed and shaken on the floor, like the stunned survivors of battle, too shell-shocked to move;
two of the novices holding Otaro back from beating his head to pulp against the wall behind him;
Whitwell Simm, deep in shock, staring at the greenish brown slime slowly thickening on the melted
flesh and half-stripped bones of his arm; a tiny abomination like a bug-eyed purple rat skittering
nervously back and forth along the far wall.
She noted, as if from some great distance off, that all the light had died from the room save the
torches and lanterns of Silvorglim's sasenna-noted how the ruddy glare danced across the face of
the Witchfinder as he called his warriors about him.
She wondered a little distantly why Seldes Katne should be slipping away unnoticed through the
north door.
Then Brighthand called out, "Hold on, what the hell you playin' at?" He staggered to his feet as
Silvorglim and his troops closed in on the bank of batteries. Two of the Church sasenna caught the
young man unceremoniously by the arms, a third struck him hard over the back of the head with the
long, iron-hard hilt of a sword. At the same instant the Dead God, kneeling beside Joanna, snapped
to his feet and sprang like a skeleton dragon toward the Witchfinder. Two crossbows came up and
there was a wicked snap of iron and hardwood; the huge, spiderlike shape collapsed with a crash,
long arms stretching toward the machinery that was all of their lives.
There was a moment's stunned silence. Then, into it, Silvorglim spoke.
"What am I doing?" he said softly, addressing the unconscious Brighthand, the other Council mages
who stood, immobilized-those of them who could stand-facing the ranked crossbows of the Church's
guards.
"I am saving the world. I am doing what should have been done six hundred years ago, no matter
what the cost would have been to the Church and to the free armies of humankind."
In the shadowy torchlight Silvorglim's eyes had the strange, clear yellowness of nearly colorless
amber, cold and hard and without emotion, and in his level voice there was a quality of almost
exaltation.
"Instead, they bargained with the mages-believed their promises of the half use of power, the lie


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of noninterference in human affairs. They let them live-they paid them off, worked with them even,
did their bidding-not understanding that no mage is capable of good, that the use of these powers
to any degree can bring nothing but evil, and plots, and disaster. You say that when those
batteries are destroyed, the Citadel will disintegrate into the Void. So be it. I am destroying
the Citadel of Wizards-destroying wizardry forever and saving the world from its pollution, once
and for all."


Chapter XXII
On the whole, the older a teles is, the more powerful its capacity for magic; yet such implements
must be observed straitly, and tested often. For whenever such spells develop strange fields of
heat and cold, or the random movement of things within the chamber, it has been my experience that
it was when the teles was a very old one.
-Grimoire of Gantre Silvas

Joanna screamed, "NO!" and started to her feet as the Witchfinder strode toward the dark ring of
the oscillators, a silent, blinking rampart in the flickering gloom. A sasennan swung toward her,
crossbow leveled.
And the next instant the darkness was riven by blinding brightness, ozone cutting the stinks of
torch smoke and blood with the searing crackle of lightning. Joanna cried, "NO!" again in the same
instant she realized Silvorglim had cried out, too-cried out in shock and thwarted rage.
As the Witchfinder sprang back from the spitting curtain of purple-white fire that had ripped
upward from the floor between him and the equipment, a deep, familiar voice from the eastern
doorway chided, "Really, Yarak, I had no idea your dedication ran so deep."
Silvorglim rounded like a scorched weasel as Antryg came striding out of the shadows of shattered
wood and darkness, his scarecrow tangle of shawl and coat skirts and glittering beads fluttering
absurdly and a long killing sword stuck casually through his belt. Three more dark shapes
materialized from the dripping hell-mouth on his heels: the Lady Rosamund, leaning heavily on her
staff but with a drawn sword in her other hand, and Aunt Min, leaning upon Magister Magus' arm,
her pale eyes sharp and bright.
The Witchfinder whispered, "You ... "
"Well," Antryg said, "there are two schools of thought on that subject. Don't you think it's time
you took a little nap?" He'd reached Silvorglim by that time-the Church sasenna being momentarily
too nonplussed to know if, or whom, to attack-and extended a mitted hand to touch the smaller
man's forehead.
Silvorglim struck his hand away and nearly suffocated on an enormous yawn. "You can't smother me
with a-aargh ... " He yawned again, his sulfurous eyes blazing with fury even as they fought to
remain open. " ... a cantrip like that one." His hand fumbled at the sword at his belt.
"I realize that, of course." Very casually Antryg dropped his other hand over Silvorglim's sword
wrist and caught the Witchfinder a terrific crack across the chin with one bony elbow,
considerately supporting him as he dropped, stunned, to the floor. The sasenna, taken by surprise,
moved in, but the interval had given time for Sergeant Hathen and her troops to collect their
senses and spread out. There was a swift clatter of weaponry and then the sudden, fraught silence
of a standoff.
"No, no, no," muttered Aunt Min, pulling one fragile arm free of Magister Magus' grip and
doddering purposefully to Antryg's side. "You and you," she pointed to two Church sasenna at
random, "take poor Mr. Silvorglim over to his blankets. Kyra, see what you can do for his
headache, please. Q'iin ... " She paused, and Joanna knew that she was aware of what had become of
the beautiful black lady with the sea blue eyes. "Ah, Q'iin." The old woman sighed and bowed her
white head. "My poor little girl." On the other side of the refectory, the novice Gilda huddled in
a corner, her cheek pressed to the plaster of the wall, weeping without a sound.
Lady Rosamund limped to Aunt Min's side. With the neutralizing of the Church troops she had
sheathed her sword; she put her free arm protectively around the old lady's shoulders as she
looked up at Antryg. "And what now?" Her hair was damp and stringy with sweat, her dark robe torn
and blotched: evidently the route to the Brown Star's gate had been less than easy. Antryg,
despite a makeshift bandage on his left hand and black rings of exhaustion around his eyes, looked
better than he had, as if a weight had been lifted from his bony shoulders. Magister Magus simply
sank down in a corner and put his head in his hands.
"The battle with the tsaeati has exhausted the powers of nearly everyone on the Council without
defeating the creature, and we are where we were before."
"Well, hardly that," Brighthand pointed out, looking up from Otaro's semiconscious form. "Once


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that thing gets to the top of the Library and finds nothin' resemblin' energy up there, it's gonna
be back."
"You had to say that," Tom sighed.
But Antryg had already turned away, to kneel, as Issay Bel-Caire was already kneeling, beside the
great, bony shape of the Dead God. "Ninetentwo," he whispered, his crooked fingers traveling with
feathered lightness over the long bone planes of the alien temples, brushing the heavy clawed
hands and corded wrists. Joanna, coming up quietly on the alien's other side, checked the gauges
on the air tanks. They seemed less than half-empty, and as she watched, the green lights flickered
and varied with the slow draw of breath.
Leaving Antryg and Issay together to bind the wounds the crossbow bolts had made, she returned to
the oscillators and, plagued by a deep sense of embarrassment at what she perceived as truly
unfeeling behavior, systematically checked what she could of every gauge and dial. As far as she
could tell, all the lights that should have been amber were still amber, nothing was blinking or
white ... the equivalent of danger-red. Fortunately, the dials and screen were self-illuminated,
for the witchlight that had been drunk away by the tsaeati's power had not returned, and the great
refectory was sunk in almost total darkness. Only the torches and lanterns of Silvorglim's sasenna
provided a smoky, eerie light, which played nervously across the faces of the wizards while their
shadows loomed and staggered on the walls like shredded battle flags borne by dying men.
Laboriously, she followed Ninetentwo's original instructions, feeding the wafer chips into the
computer's port and overlapping the samples with the actual readings to make sure nothing had
altered. Behind her she was aware of Antryg rummaging through the spare equipment behind the main
oscillator to locate a black plastic case roughly the size of a loaf of bread. Presumably, she
thought, it was the first-aid kit, with drugs and stimulants proper to Ninetentwo's alien
physiology. He wouldn't have known what it was or where it was unless Ninetentwo told him, she
thought, as he strode back to the Silent One and their patient, and allowed herself a hesitant sip
of relief.
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


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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 me 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 me 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."


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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 me 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 me
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."


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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.


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"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.
Joanna looked from one to the other, her heart slamming hard in her chest; from the table where a
few candles had been lit, Nandiharrow said softly, "Antryg ... Lady Rosamund ... " Looking across
at him, Joanna could see a scrying-crystal resting between his mutilated hands. He looked
exhausted, slime and filth and Daurannon's blood smeared across his face. "There's something
moving in the upper floor of the Harlot. Coming back this way."
Antryg drew a shaky breath. "I'd have to wait," he said softly, "until the thing was right on top
of me."
Joanna shuddered, not even wanting to picture it. His own death aside, the thought of standing in
the darkness, of waiting for the thing whose mindless, devouring malice she had felt in the
sightless labyrinth of the Brown Star, froze her to the core of her being. She whispered, "No ...
" but knew he didn't hear.
"Two of us could do it," Aunt Min piped.
Lady Rosamund's head snapped around to face her. "No! You couldn't ... "
"Don't make difficulties, Rosie." The old woman cut her off placidly with a gesture of her
clawlike hand. "Do you be telling me now what I can and cannot survive?"
Any other woman, Joanna reflected, would have had tears in her eyes: her Ladyship's were cold and
dry and bitter. "I'll go."
"Because your magic is greater than mine, or because with a hole in your leg and pain throughout
your body, you are fitter to withstand this than I? No." As Rosamund opened her mouth to protest,
the old lady reached out and touched her hand. "No," she said again, softly. "I will do this
thing." The firelight turned the white halo of her hair for a moment to honey gold and caught the
gleam of her eyes, brighter blue than they had seemed before, and more alive, the eyes of a
wildcat girl who had never feared gods or man. She turned back to Antryg. "It would need a Blood-
Bond." Antryg's gray eyes were sad and bitterly resigned. "So it would," he said gently, and
disengaged his arm from Lady Rosamund's sudden, furious clutch. "It is the only way," he said to
that white, rigid face in the fidgeting torchlight. "The tsaeati has to be hunted down and
destroyed if the Gate is to be closed, and we have very little time."
"Then do as Berengis did and return it to the Brown Star. You don't have to ... "
He shook his head. "Since the Brown Star's probably up in the Library we'd have to get past the
tsaeati to reach it, and anyway at the moment it's breached in a dozen places. If we leave now we
can intercept the tsaeati on the bridge between the Harlot and the Junior Parlor-that's the way it
went up and seems to be the way it's coming back."
Dread and panic had risen to a gray roaring in Joanna's ears; she wondered why she wasn't
hysterical, and came to the conclusion that she must still be half expecting to wake up. Come on,
alarm clock, RING! In the dark of the computer screen, she could see the amber schematic of the
Citadel on its hill, the squat, heavy bulk of the Library that wore the faceted Conservatory like
an unlikely purse at its side; the vertical, flatiron shape of the building called the Harlot
(Why? she wondered obliquely); the narrow, covered bridge that led across to the upper floors of
the Polygon at the lower part of the hill.
If Antryg didn't manage to kill the thing, those lines, those final parameters of life in the
airless darkness of the Void, would dislimn as though they had never been.
As if another person were acting within her body, she walked over to where the Dead God lay and
picked up the heavy weapon from the floor beside him.
Her knees were shaking so badly she could barely stand as she walked back to where the four
wizards grouped.
"Look," she said quietly, "I know I can't put another round into the tsaeati without making it
stronger-but if that thing's going to be coming at us across a covered bridge, if you two can't
stop it with magic, what would be the chances of precipitating it into the Void by blowing the
bridge?"
Antryg's eyebrows vanished upward into the tangle of his hair. "My dear."
"I know what would happen to the air in there," Joanna said, looking up into that tired,
bespectacled face. "And I know I'd ... I'd be dragged out into the Void by the vacuum, along with
you, and it. But would that destroy it?"


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There was long silence, as Antryg debated, she knew, the possibility of lying to her, of keeping
her from sacrificing herself as he was proposing to do. Then he sighed, defeated, and said, "Yes.
Yes, it would."
"It's moving down the stairs of the Harlot now," Nandiharrow said quietly.
Antryg shivered, his face turned away from her momentarily, the absurd, sensitive mouth taut and
colorless with strain.
"Antryg," she said gently, "if that thing kills you, I'm going to die anyway when the Citadel
collapses."
"My dear Joanna," he whispered, "have I ever told you how difficult logic makes things for those
of us who are trying to be gallant?"
A Howard Hawks heroine, she supposed, could have come back with some nervy wisecrack to that; she
only slung the gun strap over one shoulder and threw her arms around his waist, pressing her face
to the shabby purple velvet of his preposterous coat, holding him tight. For a moment his long arm
was around her, ropy muscle and the smell of wood-smoke, candles, and the niter of the Vaults;
then he said, "Rosamund, you and Magister Magus start weaving a spell of air-you'll have to coach
him, Rosie-in case worse really does come to worst. If we do blow out the bridge and the tsaeati
is thrown into the Void, the Citadel will be released and will snap back into its own world, but
if the air goes, it may be a fortress of corpses when it gets there. You can probably hold what's
in this room. Hathen, my incomparable beauty ... "
The sergeant came over, her square face grave.
"I'm going to need a halberd-not the single-bladed kind, but the one with a point and a cross
guard like a boar spear ... Thank you, my dear. Aunt Min ... " Disengaging himself from Joanna's
grasp, he reached down and took the ancient lady by the hand. Brunus and Brighthand rose from
their places near the wall and went to open the north door; Otaro had begun to keen again, a high,
thin wailing of pain. The Dead God's bazooka weighed like lead on Joanna's shoulder; looking into
the utter blackness that lay beyond the stone archway, she was finding it difficult to breathe.
With a sudden movement Lady Rosamund strode to intercept Antryg and laid a white hand upon his
threadbare purple sleeve.
Her voice was very low, but such was the silence that Joanna heard her clearly. "If she dies of
this, Antryg Windrose, I swear to you that, whoever inherits the Master-Spells-whoever becomes
Archmage after her, whether it be myself or Daurannon or whomever-you are a dead man. But not
before you discover just why wizards are forbidden to use their powers for vengeance, and hatred,
and pain. Do you understand?"
A muscle tugged at one corner of Antryg's mouth, a rueful half smile of memory. Even more softly
than she, he replied, "I know why wizards are forbidden to use such powers, Rosamund. There was
nothing which Suraklin did not teach me, in one fashion or another. Wish us luck."
But Lady Rosamund turned away, to kiss the old Archmage, and hold her close, before retreating to
the darkest corner of the hall and folding herself into bitter silence.


Chapter XXIII
There are those who say that wizards are subject to temptations and addictions beyond the
understanding of ordinary men: the addiction to shape-changing, or to meditation under the
influence of certain herbs and conditions of the stars; the obsession with knowledge, and the
development of power. Yet this is not so. Temptation is temptation, obsession is obsession, and
choice is choice.
-Isar Chelladin
Precepts of Wizardry

Tracking the tsaeati was not a difficult task. Through the north door and across the little
vestibule beyond, up the oak and iron of the staircase and across the Junior Parlor, up the three
steps to the bridge and so across, it had left its trail of bloody water, slime, fragments of
dimly shining flesh and the overwhelming stench of fishy rottenness. Save for the glow of Joanna's
pocket flashlight, masking-taped to the barrel of her gun, the darkness here was absolute. Up its
three steps, the bridge plunged away into an echoing, aphotic pit. The cold here was bitter; by
the flashlight's yellowish beam, Joanna could see the smoke of her own breath. Dimly, somewhere up
above, something was moving.
"Can you get a xchi-particle reading on the Conservatory, my dear?" Antryg asked, walking to the
carved archway that led to the bridge. "Is there still activity up there?"
Hesitantly, Joanna examined the Dead God's sensor, which the alien physicist had set for her with
masking-taped marks. "Yes," she said after a moment. "There's still a field reading." Beneath her


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feet the floorboards creaked alarmingly.
Where the tsaeati had passed, the wood had become desiccated, runneled with dry and crumbling
streaks of rot, and only by clinging close to the railings had they been able to climb the
twisted, clapped-out remains of the stair. Niter and slime dripped from the eaten-looking ruins of
carved chairs, filthy water stood in puddles; Joanna shivered and checked her ammo loads.
"What a pity magic itself makes no reading on the sensors," Antryg murmured. "I wonder why that
is? Are you aware, my dear, that insofar as I have been able to decode it, the information in the
patterns of tortoiseshells is of a completely different nature in your world than it is in mine? I
wish I'd had time to unearth Munden Myndrex's rubbings. I suppose we shall simply have to assume
that the tsaeati visited the Conservatory and devoured the teles there."
"It did." Aunt Min's high, fragile voice was decisive as she hobbled painfully forward to stand at
Antryg's side. "It has swallowed all its energy, all its being. It returns now, hunting, smelling
out magic, mindless and greedy as the ghost that was the heart of it, malicious as a demon. It is
time." She fumbled in her knitting basket for a piece of chalk.
Antryg had already given his shawl to Joanna in the dead and terrible cold of the upper floors of
the Polygon; now he shed his tawdry coat, shivering a little at the bite of the air on his
shirtsleeved arms and, taking off his spectacles, tucked them carefully into an inner pocket. In
the dim yellow finger of the flashlight beam Joanna could see the old scars that straggled from
wrist to elbow as he rolled up his sleeve, tiny punctures and slashes, and here and there long,
cockled threads where the veins had been repeatedly slit. Aunt Min drew a circle around the two of
them and pushed up her own black homespun sleeves like a housewife preparing to do dishes; Antryg
drew the sword that was still thrust through his belt. The dim light winked on the blade, then
glinted red-black on the sudden, gleaming lines of the blood. As the old lady marked Antryg's
forehead and wrists, she seemed to straighten a little, and Joanna glimpsed again the wild dancer
in her pale old eyes and recalled, for no reason, a pair of pink silk slippers carefully preserved
on a dusty shelf.
Everyone who had seen her dance was dead now, she thought inconsequentially. And perhaps everyone
they had talked to firsthand, as well.
Though Joanna was usually not conscious of magic, it seemed to fill the room like a strange scent,
a fiery lightness to the air.
Antryg, who had knelt to receive the marks from the old woman's fingers, stood again, and his
voice was very calm.
"Keep the spells of protection around me with whatever you've got. I'm going to have to wait until
it's right in front of me before I do the Summoning ... then it's going to come down on top of me
and draw off the field of Nothingness, and if there's any of it left by the time it's absorbed
everything I can conjure, God help us all."
"God always has helped us, my son," Aunt Min replied serenely. Taking his hands, she made a final,
invisible sign upon the bared tips of his fingers and on the shabby wool and leather of the
writing mitts he still wore. "In all God's forms, and in all of ours."
In the darkness beyond the bridge there was a sudden, dry, scritching crash, the sound of falling
wood and plaster, then more loudly a huge, foul slither, as of some vast quantity of half-
liquescent flesh sliding from great height. A moment later a cloud of stench rolled from the
bridge: plaster dust, carrion, the cold wet stinks of mold and underground.
Soft and terrible, a thin, wailing ululation began, not human, not beast, keening and utterly
mindless, and a thick, wet dragging.
Antryg's hands were shaking as they closed around his halberd. "Protect me," he whispered, his
face ghastly in the dim flashlight beam, and Aunt Min gave a tiny, creaking chuckle.
"If I could protect you all this while from Rosie and Daur, can I not protect you also from a mud
pie?"
With the tiniest flicker of answering smile, Antryg walked forward onto the bridge.
Min followed him to the bottommost step. There she sank to her knees, fumbling a piece of chalk
from her knitting basket; around herself she drew a swift circle, perfect in its roundness with
the perfection of years of practice. Joanna knelt at the far end of the Junior Parlor,
Ninetentwo's weapon braced on her shoulder, and flipped forward the sight. It seemed to her that
Antryg was now silhouetted against a kind of foul purplish glow emanating from the far end of the
bridge; not light, or anything resembling light, it seemed to beat the air with a thousand
vibrating wings and flicker hellishly in the crystal of his earrings and the beads still strung
around his neck.
And in the darkness, something moved in response. Where the tsaeati had been dark, darkness within
darkness within darkness, now it glowed. Its every claw, its every eye, its every drunkenly
lashing fleshless head was outlined in an obscene radiance, sickly yellow and growing brighter,


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stronger, diffused by the fog still clinging about it and fed by the glow that throbbed within the
swollen embolism of water and filth like a ghastly, sulfurous heart.
Antryg cried out once, a handful of words, a spell of summoning in a voice Joanna had heard him
use only once before: the booming bass outcry of a lost and exiled god. His head thrown back and
his arms flung wide, he stood for one instant in the narrow entry of the bridge, earrings and
halberd blade flashing, and light seemed to glance from the rivets of his jeans and the brass
hardware of his boots and from the ends of crooked fingers in their tattered, fingerless gloves.
Then the air around him changed, and Joanna felt that, too: terrifying, leaden cold, a leaching
stillness; darkness beyond concept of shadow, inertia untouched and untouchable by blood heat or
synapse or chemical bond. Nothing. Even in the Void, pressing so close against the frail glass of
the windows, there was a wildness and magic and chaos. He had become a Dead God, and around him
the molecules of air seemed to collapse inward like the crumpling of a punctured star.
Lightning streamed from the shimmering corpseglow shape of the tsaeati, light that elongated
itself, rising above him; then it fell upon him in a devouring wave.
Half-hidden in the glowing fog, Antryg gave back and braced himself, twisting with the halberd
against the raking claws that slashed from the shadow around him. At the foot of the steps, Joanna
heard Aunt Min utter a broken sound of pain. Even when it had had no strength, Joanna had felt the
terrible drawing of the tsaeati's greed; what it was like now, drinking at the energy of Antryg's
magic, she could barely stand to imagine. Across the room she felt it, heat or cold, she could not
tell; wind whipped the fog into a maelstrom of phosphor and darkness, tore and swirled at her
hair, half blinding her, and her chest ached from the vacuum of its presence.
On the bridge Antryg slashed at it, playing it for time, keeping the physical elements of it-
taloned feet, chisel-toothed serpent heads, and here and there, horribly, a human hand wielding a
sword-from tearing at him physically and so breaking his concentration. But the sweat ran down his
face in spite of the terrible cold, and there was desperation in the movement of his arms and
back.
Around them the fog was swallowed in darkness, and the air began to shudder and burn. There was a
noise to it, Joanna thought-or the noise was in her head-a kind of hissing that was almost a
metallic scream, razoring her skull apart, rising in volume and intensity, like wind, like air
escaping, like the fizzing roar of chemical bonding amplified a hundred thousand times. The wind
strengthened and Joanna felt the throb of a pressure headache stab behind her eyes, smelled and
tasted blood running down out of her nose; she could see, silhouetted against the chaos on the
bridge, Aunt Min's black robes lift and pull with the dragging of that chemical wind and the tight
knot of her thin white hair shred into a wild, fragile cloud.
The yellow glow within the tsaeati's dripping bulk flared brighter, then slowly, steadily, began
to dim.
There was blood on Antryg's face, from his nose and from a cut where a chance talon had scored
him. He seemed to be holding something from him on the end of the halberd, the weapon itself
shrouded in blowing clouds of utter dark. A half-rotted serpent head lunged along the shaft, and
he twisted, dodging and, when it struck down to tear at the back of his knee, stomping with all
his strength to shatter the brittle skull. Above the hissing roar of the energy, Aunt Min's voice
rose like the thin, shrill wailing of a storm-whirled gull, crying words of power and protection
again and again, her skinny arms upraised in the roaring sizzle of the air. A glow of light seemed
to swirl around her, streaming from her hands; Joanna shifted the heavy grip of the weapon on her
shoulder, goose-flesh sandpapering her arms and sweat rivering down her cheeks and sides. Come on,
Antryg, keep it off you. I really don't want to have to be dragged out into the dark.
She saw Antryg stumble, as if, within the shadow, whatever he braced against had jerked back.
And the next instant he lunged at the darkness, dropping the halberd and catching with his bony,
crooked hands at whatever he could seize-taloned claws, writhing coils-and dragging at it with all
his weight.
It's realized what's happening, thought Joanna. Demon-ghost-simulacrum of a magic soul ... it
knows it can't help absorbing the field around him, the field that will destroy it. It's trying to
flee.
The screaming roar of the darkness increased, shrieking, keening, a hellish cacophony of whatever
half-living abominations were still imprisoned in the water and slime. The tightening pressure in
Joanna's head made her wonder how long she could last without blacking out from pain or
suffocation. Antryg was still on his feet, blood pouring now from bites and claw-rakes on his
back, his head bowed and his body twisting to avoid what damage it could. A thing like a
barracuda, flesh hanging in long flaps from spine and skull, eyeless sockets filled with orange
mold, curved from the shadows engulfing him and buried its fangs in his shoulder, only barely
missing his neck; it was Aunt Min who screamed.


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The noise had increased to a deafening roar, a wind that filled the bridge and the ruined chamber
before it; the burning, sulfurous glow around the struggling shapes had shrunk and intensified,
then began rapidly to fade.
Dammit, hang on! You 're winning.
Antryg screamed as the thing pulled him off his feet. Blue lightning seared from the darkness,
stitching lines of black down his arms and sides. Something like glowing smoke seemed to fold
around him, but the darkness no longer filled the entire bridge. Beyond him Joanna could see
discarded bits of bone and flesh and nameless things strewing the floor, desiccated and lifeless
as the ruined chairs and tables around her. Wind tore the breath from her lungs, seemed to scour
the very skin from her bones. Beside the steps Aunt Min lay motionless in her circle, save where
the winds tore at her robes and hair. Within the heart of the tsaeati, the yellow light glowed
feverishly bright, and Antryg cried out again as lightning struck him in the chest; she saw him on
his knees, struggling to rise, coils of glowing darkness wrapping him like a crushing hand. He
shouted, "The bridge!" his voice hoarse with his fight for air. "Joanna, blow the bridge!"
She froze. She had, she knew, come for that purpose-and faced with it, she could not make her
finger move on the trigger.
She could not kill Antryg. She could not bring herself to blast away those walls, to feel, even
for the few seconds it would take for her to die, the icy drag of vacuum pulling her out ...
"JOANNA ... !"
Darkness swallowed him.
In the next second, something moved beyond the darkness.
Joanna had only a confused glimpse of a squat black figure at the far end of the bridge, a slick,
glassy gleam of some object flashing through the air ...
And with a shattering report, like the hideously disproportionate explosion of a bursting light
bulb, the object flung by the figure broke as it struck the floor in the midst of the collapsing
field of darkness. A glare of brittle light blanched the smoky shadows to nothing; Joanna saw in a
skeletal flash Antryg's body, the bodies of the semianimate abominations clinging to his flesh in
a tearing pile and, around them, the very fibers of the floorboards, the mortar of the stones.
Then it was all changed.
For the first few seconds, Joanna had the weird sensation that none of it had ever been. Her mind
groped, numb, as if a photo negative had been abruptly reversed, transposed to something
completely different-a different medium, a transposition to another key ... as if a light had been
turned on.
She realized, getting slowly to her feet, her head ringing in the sudden stillness, that a light
had been turned on.
Bright and soft as molten silver, moonlight poured through the bridge's little windows to stream
in a luminous bar over the defiled floor.
She barely heard the footsteps running away, scrabbling up the remains of the stairs, heading back
to the safety of the Library. Still holding the gun, she strode the length of the Junior Parlor to
where water and blood trickled thickly down the steps, a little stream that touched the fingers of
Aunt Min's tiny, outstretched hand.
Antryg lay across the threshold of the bridge, draped in the coils of what appeared to be a many-
legged sea snake at least twenty feet long. His gloved hands still gripped the wrists of two half-
dissolved Shriekers amid a reeking charnel house of portions of whatever and whomever the tsaeati
had ingested. The halberd, haft charred and blade melted, lay a little distance from him.
Everywhere around them glittered fragments of broken glass.
Joanna took one fast look at the sensor and saw that the energy which had marked the tsaeati's
movements was gone. That didn't necessarily mean the tsaeati itself was gone, she thought, with a
sickened throb of fear even as she shed the gun to kneel at Antryg's side.
His flesh was cold. His wounds seemed superficial, even the horseshoe-shaped ring of tooth-
punctures on his shoulder, but there was no pulse in his scarred and bitten wrist or in the big
veins of his throat. The charring of the tsaeati's lightning etched a crooked black line from his
temple to the pit 'of his throat; his shut eyes had a naked look, vulnerable, as in sleep.
Joanna whispered, despairingly, "Dammit," hesitantly located the target spot just below his
sternum, and proceeded to administer CPR.
After somewhat less than a minute, Antryg flinched, gasped, and threw up; Joanna sat back, her
hands shaking and cold, and for a moment all she could feel was astonishment that the whole
process had worked the way she had been taught in class that it would. In time Antryg propped
himself up on his elbows, his head hanging so that his dripping gray hair covered his face. In the
moonlight his earrings sparkled, bright as the glass shards that scattered the floor.
"Here's your glasses." Her voice sounded blasphemously loud in the stillness. She fished them out


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of the pocket of his coat.
His hands were trembling so badly he could barely put them on.
Outside, a nightingale called, a warbling note like the hurtful mourning for a lover long gone.
More distantly a wind chime spoke in the breeze.
With a crooked forefinger Antryg turned over one of the shards that strewed the filthy swamp of
the bridge's floor and murmured, "Good Heavens. I didn't think they could be broken."
"Was that the teles?"
He nodded and slowly, achingly, sat up. For a moment he looked ready to vomit again; then he
rubbed his hand wearily over his face. "Probably being drained of energy rendered it friable.
Trying to break it was an absolute longshot ... There must have been just enough of a link between
the semianimate magic of the thing and its original housing to release the last cohesion of its
energies when it burst." Leaning heavily on Joanna's arm, he got to his feet and limped to open
the casement. The sweet, heady mixture of rain and wild roses poured in, the endless, silent
benediction of the Sykerst night.
Then, moving stiffly and painfully as an old man, he went down the steps to where the Archmage's
crumpled form lay.
"Aunt Min?"
Her hand moved a little at his touch upon her shoulders, groped to find his fingers. He lifted her
gently. In the vanilla moonlight her face was gray, her lips turning blue under the smears of
blood. She whispered, "Rosie ... "
"Rosamund isn't here, Aunt."
The old woman smiled a little, and her eyes opened, sunken and huge, transparent in the wan light.
"My dearest girl," she murmured. Her hand reached up, as if to wipe some of the blood-tracks from
Antryg's face, but fell back again.
"It will be hard for her," she breathed. "It always is. Tell her I loved her best."
"I will."
"Tell her ... " she sighed, "forgive." And her eyes slipped closed.
Antryg stayed kneeling for some minutes, cradling the wasted body to him and rocking her, his head
bowed. Standing behind him, though she had barely known the old lady, Joanna felt her throat
hurting with tears, with a sense of the passing of something great, some spectacular tale of fire
and magic and delight that now she-and others-would only know secondhand, as Magister Magus had
told parts of it to her. A dancer or a vixen, or an angel made for sin ...
And now she was gone.
A shudder passed through Antryg's body, his shoulders bowing as if under the weight of some
sudden, terrible awareness. "Oh, dear God," he whispered. When he raised his head, Joanna caught
the shadow of shock and dread in his eyes. He murmured again, "Dear God ... "
"What is it?"
He turned, startled, as if he had momentarily forgotten her presence; then he shook his head.
"Just ... never mind. It doesn't need to be dealt with now. I can't stay, my dear." He bent,
laying Aunt Min's body down. "She said forgive," he added, looking down at the toothless crone
face, like new ivory in the moonlight, with its intricate scrimshaw of years. "But Lady Rosamund
will never forgive me ... this."
He got stiffly to his feet and took Joanna's hands. She saw the glitter of blood through the
gashes in his green calico shirt and how gray and weary his face looked in the bleached light. He
shivered a little, with cold, or something more. "I fear I cannot even take the time to return you
to your own world before I seek out the ending to this tale. Afterward ... "
"I think Lady Rosamund will get me home," she said softly.
"If she doesn't, Ninetentwo said he had a xchi-flux generator in the Vaults that would open a way
through. My dear ... " He hesitated, and she caught his wrists, suddenly realizing by the pain in
his voice that he was bidding her good-bye.
"Will you come back to L.A.?"
He looked down at her, his gray eyes weary and resigned behind the Coke-bottle glasses. "After all
that I've led you through," he said softly, "after nearly getting you killed," his long arm took
in the stinking ruin of the bridge, "or worse than killed, I don't really think that's such a good
idea."
In the dark of the Brown Star, Joanna remembered she hadn't, either. Her hands tightened grimly
over his. "Antryg, I put my life on the line every time some stockbroker in Westwood offers me
five grand to get on the 405 freeway and come down and reason with his mainframe, and I don't
think twice about it."
He smiled. "Five grand pays your rent."
"You ... " She stopped, unable to say what she had been thinking, desperate with the knowledge


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that somehow, she had to call him back. To convince him ... to say the right thing. She couldn't
lose him-couldn't let herself lose the years ahead. For a moment her mind was a blank of panic and
pain.
But the only thing she could think of to say was "You make me laugh."
He looked aside, saying nothing.
Very softly, she whispered, "Don't go."
He sighed, and there was a wry ness, almost a bitterness, in the flex of the corner of that absurd
mouth. "I really should be stronger about this."
For the second time relief flooded her, an ache of release as deep as the pain of her fear.
"Ah, hell," she said unsteadily. "Whether or not you come back to L.A., you know that if the
Council comes looking for you, they're going to start with me anyway. This way, instead of being
apart and miserable, at least we can both get laid while we're waiting for the next disaster."
The sadness in his eyes vanished into a wicked twinkle, like a star in the gray depths. "My dear
Joanna," he said, "you do have a point. If I can ... " He turned and picked up his coat from the
floor, the hem discolored with water and blood. "When I'm across, blow out the bridge. They won't
believe you if you tell them I was killed in the battle. Just tell the Council that I've deserted
you and fled. God help me, it will be the truth."
He leaned down and kissed her, while she put her arms around his shoulders carefully, mindful of
the gashes underneath; she could feel already where the blood had soaked into the velvet of the
coat. Then he turned and walked away through the Niagara of spring moonlight, and the sparkle of
his earrings winked at her as he vanished into the darkness beyond.
Wearily, her heart hurting within her, Joanna took a few steps backward and picked up the Dead
God's gun. As Ninetentwo had promised, it didn't kick much. The nightingale outside broke off its
songs, shocked by the roaring explosion of flame and shattering wood, and there was a crashing
whoosh as the shards of joist and wall and tiled roof cascaded down into the thickets of laurel
and honeysweet below.
Night air breathed over Joanna's sweat-streaked face. For a time she stood, gun tucked loosely
beneath her arm, inhaling the sweetness and realizing how long it had been since she'd smelled any
air at all, let alone this fragile combination of wet ivy and rain and open leagues of freedom.
At last she bent down and drew Aunt Min's shabby, randomly knitted shawl over the little body
curled at her feet. Turning, she walked back toward the lower reaches of the Citadel, to find the
Council again.


Chapter XXIV
It is a forbidden thing for those born with the powers of wizardry to marry. First, because the
children of the mageborn are often mageborn themselves and, in the eyes of the Church and the law,
are damned and without souls. Second, because however good his intent, natural feeling would
prompt a wizard to use his powers to further the interests of his family at the expense of others.
Third, because wizards in their greed for knowledge frequently desert their families when they
travel to seek it. Likewise, it is known that no person-husband, wife, or child-is as precious to
a wizard as the search for knowledge and power; thus union with them leads only to grief for all.
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues
"Kitty?"
Nothing moved in the shadows of the ruined chamber as Antryg slipped quietly through the crumbling
wood of the door.
It was breathtakingly obvious that the tsaeati had turned aside from its quest for an illusory
grailful of backup batteries at the top of the Library and had come here instead. Slime and niter
dripped down the stair from the Library's main floor, water puddled the pitted sandstone flags.
Here, in what had been Seldes Katne's private study, chairs and tables had been overturned and
heaved aside by the slow, lumbering crawl of the thing toward its goal: the wide French doors
leading into the disused Conservatory beyond.
The glass had been burst from the twisted frames and glittered crystalline in the ice-cream
moonlight beyond. All around the floor, sodden heaps of notes soaked in the general mess, like
soiled leaves raked on the threshold of winter, among the broken-backed corpses of books. Notes,
he thought, on the natures and histories of the teles in the Citadel ... not that she'd ever
intended to convey the truth to him, even if she'd guessed why he needed to know.
He shook his head. He'd been a fool to trust her.
But it hadn't been until after his walk to the Green King's Chapel that he'd realized the culprit
didn't necessarily have to be a member of the Council; even when he'd begun to question the


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reality of the Moving Gate, he had feared for Kitty's sanity, not questioned the truth of what she
said she'd seen.
And then, he reflected, he'd always trusted too easily.
Oddly, he felt no anger. There was only an overwhelming sadness, for he knew perfectly well why
she had done what she had done.
Nevertheless, he edged his way cautiously across the room. She was still in possession of the
Brown Star-a fist-sized hunk of molasses-colored crystal that Suraklin had kept in an iron box in
his study. With the Citadel back to normal, all the Star's Gates would be closed again, and at the
moment, he knew he had not the smallest power left in him to resist its imprisoning spells.
Moonlight falling through the dirty panes of the Conservatory showed him a moist line of foot-
tracks through the mud and broken glass. He followed to the doors, his shoulders smarting under
the sticky abrasion of his clothing. The long-term effects of repeated doses of jelgeth made his
bones ache, as if the marrow had been reamed out with a pipe cleaner; if he fell, he thought,
leaning for a moment against the jamb of the broken French doors, he felt he would shatter like
glass.
Through the burst panes, the air of the old Conservatory breathed upon his face, damp, icy, but
still weighted with all the thick green smells of the plants that had been suffered to grow there
unheeded in the old forcing pots. Banks of grape vines rioted heavily over what had been an old
table; around the tarnished brazen pots of stunted and unpruned lemon and orange trees, leaves had
risen in such drifts as to support tiny ecosystems of their own-mushrooms, molds, trailing coleus
and pothos, or perhaps those were rooted in smaller pots long since buried in the general mulch. A
number of those twisted trees had been heaved over and lay in ruined clouds of leaves, root and
branch sticky with foulness and burning slowly from some horrible chemical combustion inside;
orange moss thickly coated the trailing vines and shrubs, dissolving all into a foul-smelling
black muck.
Somewhere water gurgled, the old pipes still pumping their moss-cysted fountains.
Wind moved his hair, cold and sharp, a silver knife in the rank stenches of greenery, carrion,
niter. Someone had opened one of the long windows at the Conservatory's far northern end.
Straightening his aching shoulders, Antryg picked his way through the jungle.
Seldes Katne stood where a little bay had been built out, a curving seat in a shell of intricate
glass. Before her, space had been cleared on the floor, further thickening the jungle all around
it; in the latticed moonlight he could see the crossing lines of a huge Circle of Power, smeared
and fouled now by the slobber of the tsaeati. There were three windows in the bay, looking out
over the tor's sheer northeastern face, and the little librarian was silhouetted in the central
one, her short arms spread out, crucified across the narrow frame in the lucid silver of the moon.
The light showed her face, rinsed of color, and he was shocked at how fallen it seemed. The dark
eyes were smudgy with fatigue, as if someone had ground a thumb into the sockets. Her iron black
hair, torn from its braid by the colliding energies on the bridge, hung in a raveled swatch over
her plump shoulders. He hadn't realized how long it was, or how thick. Behind her, rags of cloud
strewed the sky, the wind a reminiscence of the night's rain, though mostly the storm was heaped
up around the horizon like an untidy job of sweeping, iced silvery white. It was a sheer drop from
the window to the rocks at the foot of the tor: five hundred feet. The wind moved the ends of her
hair.
She sighed but only said, "She's dead, isn't she? The Arch-mage ... "
"Yes," he said.
There was silence.
Then, "I take it that when Daurannon first began to experiment with opening the Void-what was it,
nearly two months before the abominations began?-the field that appeared up here was one which
transformed those of little magic into ... "
"Into what we all of us want to be." Seldes Katne finished the sentence, brought her arms down,
and folded her plump hands before her girdle knot. The eyes that met his were unapologetic,
ravaged. "Yes."
"And you used a teles to generate the power to hold it open?"
She nodded. "I had two up here, little ones-Freath and Nicarynko. Later I took the strongest, the
oldest I could learn of, from the storerooms: Vyrayana. I was going to Angelshand to look for more
information about the Void, trying to find some way of making the field permanent or of carrying
its effects into ... into the real world. The world outside this room. I had to know its strength
would hold the circles intact until I returned."
"I see," Antryg said softly.
"And then when I read in Salteris' notes about the Brown Star-when I heard that he had had it,
that it was there, in Angelshand ... I conceived the idea of bringing you here, of forcing your


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help. It wasn't difficult, even for me, to locate the man who'd stolen it from Salteris' house,
and take it back. I didn't know then how you ... how you felt. Or that the Lady would conceive the
same idea. Or that the Council would take your powers away. Only that you were a dog wizard at
heart-not one of them."
"You spoke for me," Antryg said. "When they were getting ready to lay me under the geas, you
protested ... I was grateful."
Seldes Katne looked away. "I meant it," she whispered.
"Having so little power of my own ... " She raised her head, her eyes meeting his again. "I do
like you, Antryg. I truly do. It's just that ... "
Antryg looked around him, at the smeared and faded lines of the circles on the floor. "I don't
suppose, once you got back from Angelshand, that you had any difficulty opening a Gate through the
Void from this spot."
"Oh, no," she said. "No, I had no difficulty doing ... anything. Anything at all." There was a
lingering glow of ecstasy on her face, a reflected joy. It faded, and her thin mouth pinched
tight. "Only, when I came back from Angelshand, I found that the teles had ... had changed. It
held more power than I had thought. Sometimes I couldn't even see it. When Daurannon told me about
the abominations, I-I wanted to bring you here, to make the magic permanent, quickly, before more
evil happened. But they were ahead of me. So when Phormion spoke of a Moving Gate, all I could do
was say I'd seen it, too, and keep you from looking anywhere but in the Vaults. And then, when
they put the geas on you, I ... I knew I had to get rid of you, too. Because you did know about
the Void, and eventually you'd find out and tell them."
She spoke simply, her dark eyes in shadow, her voice filled with the logic of obsession, of
desperation-with the knowledge that, in some way, he would understand. "And after what they did to
you, I knew that if they found out about what I had done ... " Her voice cracked a little, despair
strengthening it. "Antryg, if they took even what powers I had from me, it would have been more
than I could bear! I couldn't let them know! I couldn't let anyone know."
Her small hands clenched again on the window's half-rotted frame. "After Otaro saw the Moving Gate-
after you said the situation in the Vaults was growing worse-I did try to replace Vyrayana with
the two little teles I'd had there before. But it-it wouldn't let me near it. And you kept asking
about the teles. Sooner or later you would have found out ..."
"Just tell me this," Antryg said quietly. "If you had succeeded in killing me-either knifing me in
my room that first night in the Pepper-Grinder, or tricking Gru Gwidion into doing it at the Green
King's Chapel, where I would be out of any possibility of protection from Aunt Min-what would you
have done with Joanna? Would you have released her?"
"Yes," Seldes Katne said, startled at the question. "Yes, of course. Not immediately, because-
well, because the Void was becoming so unstable I was afraid to try to cross it again. I followed
Salteris' notes the first time, but I was never-never easy with my power, used in that way. But I
would have eventually, when I'd gotten myself more " ... more straightened out."
"Except that it was impossible to straighten out," Antryg murmured. "It never would have
straightened out-and the power of the Void kept feeding into the teles, distorting and increasing
its power ... "
"I studied," Seldes Katne said desperately. "I read all the notes, studied everything anyone had
written-about the Void and how to cross it; about the teles, about magic ... " She slumped down to
sit upon the window seat, her head bowed, the rain-touched night wind stirring at the ends of her
hair. "What is magic, Antryg? Why are some born with it in such abundance, and others born with
only enough to realize what it is they lack, and will always lack? All my life I wanted magic, the
same way all my life I wanted to be beautiful."
Antryg leaned a shoulder against one of the twisting pilasters that supported the glass-paned
roof. "And had you been beautiful, it would have brought you troubles of its own, you know. Magic
is only magic: it isn't sanity, or goodness, or the ability to be a friend or live a decent life.
Because I was born with talent in magic, I was shunned by my family, and ... Well, I can't say I
was precisely kidnapped by Suraklin, but he would never have used me as he had, had I been ... "
He hesitated, and again she finished for him.
"As untalented as I?"
"I was going to say, had I been of less potential use. For when it came down to it, I was really
only a thing to him. I fought for years to go on believing that there was something more to it
than that. That he would have cared had I not been what I was, but only who I was. But there
wasn't. I suppose dazzlingly beautiful girls get a little of that."
"Maybe," Seldes Katne said softly. "But that knowledge doesn't help us dumpy little squabs, with
our big noses and our coarse hair and our crooked teeth. I would have willingly been a ... a thing
to be used, a vessel to be emptied, to Suraklin or to anyone else, for the sake of having all I


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knew that others like me could have. And when it came ... "
She shook her head, and again the wonderment of it, the memory of that brief and shuddering joy,
illuminated the puffy, square-jawed face. "Can you understand that I couldn't give it up?"
We give up everything for it, Suraklin had said. Our lovers, our parents, our homes ... the
children we might otherwise bear, the people we might otherwise be. And we consider ourselves
fortunate to be allowed by God to make the trade.
"I thought," she whispered, "I thought if I studied long enough, if I searched hard enough, I
might still be able to find a way to transfer some of the powers I had within the field to ... to
be effective outside of it. But all the while you kept getting nearer to the truth ... "
"You never could have, you know," Antryg said gently. "That field was an enclave of another
universe, another place and time-a might-have-been lying parallel to what is for you and me. It is
simply not possible."
She sighed. "I know," she murmured. "Maybe in my heart I knew it then. But Antryg, within the
field my powers were so great. I could cast spells at a distance of miles, shape-change, scry the
wind and summon the darkness. I was powerful enough to ... to be one of those who might inherit
the powers of the Archmage. I've been librarian here for years, Antryg. I've seen students who
were Juniors to me when I was a student, like Nandiharrow, and then students I've taught, like
Issay, sit on the High Council ... children like Zake Brighthand and Kyra the Red, scattering
power like sunlight from their hands. And I just stayed here, reading about power I could only
barely touch, sorting books, making lists, organizing knowledge that to me could be little more
than academic, while Daurannon and Rosamund were spoken of as candidates to become Archmage. And
my hair got gray. And I got fat and got old, and I knew it would never be mine. It was mine," she
said softly. "Just for a little while."
Softly, he reminded her, "Only within the field."
"Oh, yes." She raised her head, to look at him with those sad dark eyes. "Yes. But how different
is that from the others, who only permit themselves to work magic within the bounds of the
Citadel? Just knowing it was mine was enough. Just knowing that for once I was ... was one of
you."
She turned back to the window, her knees pressing the sill as she looked out over the long drop to
the ragged pelt of black spruce that cloaked the stones below. Beyond that window, the sky seemed
to stretch forever, the heart-shivering sky of the far north on the threshold of summer, even near
midnight pulsing with liquid light. "I couldn't let them take that away," she said softly. "And
they would have, if they'd found out. If you'd ... you'd learned. I just ... couldn't let it
happen."
Moving her head, she looked back at him over her shoulder. "Do they know?"
"Joanna will have told them."
"I'm-I'm sorry about Joanna," she said. "About you, too ... She wouldn't have come to any harm in
the Brown Star."
No, he thought. Nor would she have come to good ... or to anything at all. Only a life going on
and on, without ending, without variation, until, like all those others, she went mad ...
"It's on my desk, by the way, in the other room ... I suppose," she added, "they'll be coming for
me." She caught his eye. "For us both."
Antryg sighed. "Yes," he murmured. He was sorely tempted to simply pocket the Brown Star and take
it with him when he left-if Lady Rosamund laid hands on it, the odds were good he himself might
end up trapped in its dark, endless mazes. But it was Rosamund and the Council who would have to
release, and care for, the prisoners Suraklin had left trapped within. The spells of release were
there, in Salteris' notes. He wondered if the Council would heed his written note, begging that
the Star not be used again, at least not on the innocent.
But no, he thought. Simply trapping him would now not be enough for them.
He raised his head, his magpie beads glittering in the moonlight. "For us both indeed," he said
softly. He came forward to Seldes Katne's side and rested his hand on her shoulder, and she looked
up, startled, into his face.

When Joanna reached the refectory again, it was to find all the long windows of its northwestern
side thrown open to the cool stirrings of the night air. Silvorglim and his entire contingent of
hasu and sasenna slept stertorously on the piled blankets in their corner, under the novice Kyra's
calm, sarcastic eye; Joanna had the feeling they'd be sleeping quite some time. Near them,
Magister Magus, clothed in a Wheatlands farmer's bright-colored shirt and baggy breeches that had
quite clearly come from the Citadel's slop chest, engaged in a passionate, whispered argument with
Nandiharrow and Pothatch. Tom, arms folded and his usual expression of mournful interest on his
face, stood by with a couple of small bedrolls and a sack of food.


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" ... can't ride all the way to Angelshand looking like this!"
"Well," the cook said, slightly miffed, "they're the only things your size, Miss Joanna having
taken Tom's spare shirt and all. We could fit you out in a mage's robe."
"Never!" Magus turned pale. "Good grief, it's bad enough that they'll," he jerked a thumb at the
sleeping Witchfinders "be after me for being in league with you lot. D'you think I want to be
lynched?"
Nandiharrow smiled, and there was an ironic but genuine warmth in his eyes. "What, with Tom there
to protect you? I suppose you could ride off in your dressing gown if you chose."
"Very funny. I don't suppose," his voice dropped still further and he leaned closer to the tall,
gray-haired man, "I don't suppose you could ... well ... I know there's spells of forgetfulness.
You couldn't arrange it so that none of them would remember they'd seen me here, could you?"
Nandiharrow shook his head. "It's trespassing the borders of our vows already, to keep them
sleeping. You're a wizard, Magus ... "
"I am not!" the little man insisted, rising to his full five-foot-six. "I am a spiritual
counselor, and the only reason I'm not working such a spell upon them myself is because your
monopoly on the teaching of magic made it impossible for the master who taught me to learn such a
spell."
"Well, if we keep on arguing," Tom reasoned, "it'll be dawn, and that lot'll wake up, and the
whole question about what you're wearin' for the trip'll get a little academic."
Joanna stepped past them, looking quickly around the long room. Torches still provided most of the
illumination, though here and there, feeble threads and feathers of witchlight had begun to burn
in the air. Ninetentwo, she noticed, was up and about, a huge, silently moving troll tinkering
among the innards of the now-dark oscillators, the bandages on his shoulders and back pale streaks
against the smooth-stretched olive sheen of his skin. Closer to Joanna, a little knot of mages
were grouped around an old woman, thin and straight like some elderly warrior-priestess, who
seemed to be subsiding into an uneasy, nightmare-ridden doze. Bentick was holding her head on his
lap, and under the disheveled white mane Joanna could see horrible claw-rakes on the woman's face
and dried blood on the fingernails of her twitching hands. The Steward's face was tracked with
tears.
In a corner, near the sleeping Gilda, the boy Brighthand sat with his head bowed almost to his
knees. He looked up when Joanna touched his shoulder, and in his dark eyes she saw the dry,
brittle deadness of one who has shut out every feeling, every touch of life, rather than endure
the pain inside. In a corner Otaro the Singer moved and whispered fitfully in his sleep;
Brighthand did not even turn his face to look.
"It's the same as your master Otaro, isn't it?" she whispered. The boy nodded, his eyes avoiding
hers.
"It must have been somethin' about the Gate they saw." There was an academic detachment to his
voice, as if he spoke of a stranger. "I should have told someone earlier," he said softly, his
dark eyes sick with guilt. "I should have disobeyed him and got someone to look at him. Then
tonight, when the Gates all closed, I hoped ... when the Citadel went back the way it was ... "
Personally, looking about her at the long, unnaturally quiet room, Joanna doubted that the Citadel
would ever go back to being as it had been.
"It might have done that if magic were the cause of the madness," she said, laying a hand on one
bony shoulder. His gray robe was still patched with stiffening swatches of blood, brown and
smelly. "But it sounds like the madness was caused by a gas of some kind, some sweet-smelling
toxin that came through a wormhole down in the Vaults and caused the hallucination of the Gates
moving, and the voices, and all those other things."
"Maybe." For a moment she thought that would be all and almost turned away, embarrassed to have
spoken, shaken by the absolute deadness of his eyes. But something told her this boy needed not to
be alone, and after a time he raised his head, and there was a faintest flex in the muscles of his
face, like a stone statue reluctantly coming to life.
"You mean like the air of another world, like old Nineten-two breathes?" He nodded toward the
angular, insectile shadow in the darkness, more monsterlike than ever in his ring of electronic
trilithons. Even in his grief, she thought, Brighthand was a wizard. It was his ingrained nature,
as it was Antryg's, to listen to anything and to consider what it meant.
She nodded. "Because of the pain involved and the progressive nature of the paranoia and
hallucinations, my guess is that the gas caused lesions of some kind-hemorrhaging from one area of
the brain into another. That would bring on pressure, and with it, pain and madness and further
hallucinations. I don't know whether, once you located the lesions ... "
His eyes widened-the darkest eyes, she thought, that she had ever seen, suddenly ablaze with a
hope that was painful to see. She had been half-afraid of him, knowing him for a wizard, and with


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the echo of her old reflexive fear of men. Now she saw only how young he was and how scared.
"How?" he demanded, lurching to his feet, towering over her, but the hands that seized her by the
arms were trembling. "Heat? Blood-heat?"
"More likely some kind of disruption of the brain's electrical field. The brain has an aura ... "
"We know that. Issay!"
The little doctor rose from Phormion's side, flitted over with gray eyes inquiring; Brighthand
caught the skeletal arm in a grip suddenly alive with the desperation of hoping again, and the two
of them plunged into a soft-voiced maelstrom of medical theurgy. Joanna stepped back, the weight
of the gun she still carried suddenly leaden on her shoulder. All she wanted to do, like
Silvorglim and his troops, was stagger to the nearest blanket and sleep.
Someone came up beside her. She turned and saw Daurannon, his choirboy face lined with fatigue and
chalky with pain, the streaks of gray in his hair glinting a little in the flickering of the
witchlight around Bentick, Phormion, and the mages of healing. For all the spells of healing that
had been worked upon him, he still looked like ten miles of very bad road.
For a moment she stood, looking up into that face-Antryg's friend, she remembered, so many years
ago.
"Are you all right, love?"
She nodded, and the gun slipped from her shoulder to the floor. "He left me," she said slowly. "He
said ... " She tried to draw breath, but the tiredness came down on her, grief for Aunt Min,
exhaustion at what she had been through, the sudden conviction that she would never see Antryg
again. Idiotically, she burst into tears.
"Here ... " Joanna felt herself drawn into the comfort of a strong arm, surrounded by the familiar
smells of candlewax, woodsmoke, medicinal herbs. "Here, love, we can't have you breaking down now
it's all over with."
Instinctively, she knew that Daurannon was one of those men who always had words of easy comfort
for a crying woman. Still, it was good to lean her forehead on his shoulder and cry, to be led to
a bench and held. As Ruth always said, God gave men those nice pectoral muscles for a reason.
"And I suppose," said a chill, sweet, silver voice above them, "that a few tears are sufficient to
wipe away Minhyrdin's death? Or to make you forget how close the entire Citadel came to
destruction because of that ... that dog wizard and his meddling?"
Joanna raised her head, shook back the tear-matted tangles of her hair from her cheeks. Lady
Rosamund's face looked ravaged, its steely beauty shredded away by the night she had endured. Her
cold green eyes were ringed with the purple of sleeplessness and the red of tears, the first tears
Joanna had ever imagined that the Lady could shed. Her black hair, tangled like a harridan's-or
like an Amazon's after battle-was for the first time visibly threaded with gray. In a strange way
the terrible ruin of that icy beauty made her far more human, and for the first time Joanna pitied
her.
The Lady's voice was bitterly sarcastic as she went on. "Now that I know a few tears are all that
can get around you, Daur," she used the pronoun of social inferiority, as she would have addressed
a dog or a servant, "I'll have to try them the next time I want to put something across you in
Council."
"I'll give you a nice spell to bring them on, then," Daurannon retorted, his arm tightening around
Joanna's shoulders. "You'll need one."
Joanna shook her head, scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. "I'm sorry," she said.
"It's just that ... "
Coldly, her ladyship turned away.
"Don't mind her." Daurannon produced a clean handkerchief out of nowhere-I suppose pulling
handkerchiefs out of nowhere is the first thing they learn in wizard school, thought Joanna
illogically, and had to suppress the urge to giggle. "She's ... "
"No." Joanna got quickly to her feet and followed the Lady down the length of the darkened room,
to where she stood, her back to them all, staring out the window.
The moon was setting above the frivolous marble roofs of the Birdcage and the Pavilion; it had the
matte pearliness that came from the lightening of the whole expanse of sky around it as dawn
breathed gray ness into the dark. Below the windows Joanna could see a wide, flagstoned courtyard,
from which two or three small stairways arose, and one flight of imposing sandstone steps; last
night's rain puddles gleamed with the gray of pussy willows under the growing reflection of the
sky. A stately cloister of yellow sandstone curved along the knee of the hill, and under its
eaves, pigeons and doves began to flutter from their nests.
From under the gateway opposite, a small band of warriors appeared, walking cautiously and gazing
about them-Implek and his missing sasenna. A cat picked its way along a wall. In the tower across
the court, a clock struck five.


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"Lady ... "
Rosamund's head was erect, her profile unflawed as she stared out over the Citadel that was her
home, her domain, the place of her being and her soul. The corner of her strong mouth flinched a
little, but her eyes were dry as she turned.
"When Minhyrdin died," Joanna said quietly, "she told us-told Antryg and me-to tell you that she
loved you best."
Rosamund's mouth tightened with some bitter retort, the delicate nostrils flaring. But she did not
speak, and in the moment of quiet, the hatred relaxed from her and her hands began to tremble
where they rested on the sill; tears filled the pale green eyes and ran down over the perfect
cheekbones when she closed them against the cut of remembrance.
Her lips moved, but it was a moment before she was able to command her voice to utter a sound.
"Thank you."
"She said that she knew it would be hard for you," Joanna went on, gaining a little courage. "She
said that it always is. But she said she loved you best ... and she said, "Forgive."
The Lady sighed, releasing something, it seemed, from the deepest heart of her body. There was no
rage in her voice, no hatred, only a kind of tiredness, and regret. "No," she said softly. "No. I
will never forgive."
Joanna heard Daurannon's step behind her; turning, she saw the look that passed between the two
wizards: question, answer, debate and decision, all in the traded glance of green eyes and hazel.
It crossed her mind that these two were of an age, young for Council wizards, no more than forty.
Had the enmity between them, she wondered suddenly, grown from the fact that once they had both
been twenty, and the most beautiful girl in the Citadel would have nothing to do with the facile
charm of a common wool-stapler's son?
"Come," Daurannon said quietly. "You're tired-you need to rest. You've been brave as a half-sized
tiger. Old Pothatch'll get up a room for you."
"No." Joanna shook her head wearily and shivered a little in her borrowed shirt and breeches,
though the air that whispered through the windows was barely cooler than the spring afternoons in
California. "No, all I want to do is go home."
She felt Daurannon and the Lady speak again with their eyes and felt their silence.
Daurannon drew his breath and let it out; then he said, "It's something we have to talk about. All
this came about through tampering with the Void, you see, and I for one am not willing to do that
again."
And you need a hostage, thought Joanna, to trap Antryg again. Her voice was low and quite
reasonable. "But what about Ninetentwo? He can't stay in this world, and his air supply must be
just about exhausted."
"Well, of course, we'll do for Ninetentwo what we can."
But his eyes avoided hers.
She looked down at the floor and made her shoulders slump a little, and ran a small, square hand
over her face. "Look," she whispered, "can we talk about this tomorrow? I'm just ... " She stepped
back away from his comforting touch. "I just need to rest, all right?"
"Of course," Daurannon said understandingly. "You rest now, love, we're going to be working for
days, sorting out the mess and trying to get the water out of the Vaults, but there's no reason
for you to deal with that. Pothatch'll find you a place to sleep."
But when she left Lady Rosamund and Daurannon, absorbed in intent and quiet-voiced converse by the
windows, she stumbled, not to where Pothatch and Tom were still arguing with Magister Magus, but
to the dark and silent monoliths of the Dead God's ring.
"They're not going to let us go back," she breathed, kneeling beside him where he squatted,
adjusting the wiring in the main generator. "They say it's dangerous to open the Void again, and
they probably have a point. Daurannon claims they can do something about your air."
"I wouldn't let that pack of hocus-mongers guess my weight," came the deep, buzzing voice from
within the Dead God's skull. "They are indeed right. Though the time-space continuum has, as far
as I can ascertain on what equipment I have here, returned to normal, were I in their position I
would hesitate to tamper further with it." He picked up his computer, which he had folded back
into its black box, and straightened up to his seven-foot-plus height, stiffly, like a chilled
insect, a slow unraveling of sinew and bone and breathing tubes. His iridescent ocher eyes gleamed
eerily in the shadows of the coming dawn.
"However, I am not in their position-and I have no intention of remaining in this world and having
my body suffocate and my mind deteriorate into a nameless whirlwind of psycho-kinetic madness, as
it did before." The segmented tail moved in a restless sidewinder crawl, and he nodded toward the
shattered ruin of the eastern door, crusted with the drying strings of the tsaeati's slime and
completely unguarded now that Hathen and her sasenna had divided themselves to patrol the


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resurrected Citadel and to keep guard over Silvorglim and his sleeping beauties.
"It shouldn't take us long to backtrail the tsaeati's wake to find the way into the Vaults; I was
careful to mark the walls there so that I could locate the experimental xchi-flux generator. It
should-I hope-open a Gate into my own world and, at the place to which I originally returned
Antryg four months ago, to yours."
Great, thought Joanna. I get to show up at five in the morning in the parking lot of the San
Serano Missile Plant. She comforted herself with the reflection that at five in the morning, Ruth
would still be up, painting.
They could stop for breakfast at Feeding Frenzy in Reseda.
The thought was so bizarre as to be almost completely disorienting.
The Dead God reached down to pick up his rifle and sling it over his shoulder, and to collect a
last battery. "I've set a timer to fuse the circuitry of all this," he went on, the glowing nodule
on his forehead twitching. "I'll set one likewise on the slave relay which opens the Gate. Thirty
thousand eldacta worth of the Corporation's equipment," he added bitterly, tucking computer,
battery, and gun under his various arms. "But like Daurannon, I feel it will be a good long while
ere I have sufficient nerve to tamper again with the Void. Are you ready?"
Joanna looked around. Dawn light was slowly growing in the long room, making the yellow flicker of
the few torches, the dim blue glow of the witchlight, seem dirty and sleazy. In her chest was the
queer anxiety attendant upon leaving a party far too early, walking away from people she really
wanted to get to know better: Brighthand and Issay, bent anxiously over the thin, skeletal
Phormion, their fingers tracing arcane patterns over her skull while Bentick looked on with
growing hope and the pain of the only love of his life naked in his narrow face; Nandiharrow and
the fat, good-natured Brunus rewrapping Whitwell Simm's arm; Kyra the Red tripping over the
stacked weapons of the sleeping Witchfinder's troops and exchanging a good-natured grin with the
friend-Mick or Cylin, Joanna didn't remember which was which-who steadied her.
By the window, Daurannon and Lady Rosamund were still too intent on their frigidly polite confab
to even look up.
Antryg's world, she thought. The people he'd grown up with, the life, the place, that he knew.
They'd bring Aunt Min's body back here soon and lay her in state in some assembly hall-that
delicate, withered scrap that had once been beauty and power and life.
"Just a minute," she murmured and walked to the door where Pothatch, Tom, and Magister Magus still
stood.
Putting her arm around the little dog wizard's shoulder, she tiptoed to kiss his cheek. Though
they'd spent God knew how long together in the Brown Star, it was only now that she felt the beard
stubble beginning to emerge on that stretch of jaw between Van Dyke and ear.
She whispered, "Good-bye."
Magus looked surprised; Pothatch caught her glance with one bright little porcine eye and winked;
Tom gave her a discreet thumbs-up.
If she was lucky, she thought, she would never see any of these people again.
But she had a feeling she wasn't going to be that fortunate.
She walked quietly back to join the Dead God in the shadows of the ruined east door. "All right,"
she said softly, shivering inside at the thought of the terror of the jump. "Let's blow this
Popsicle stand. I want to go home."


Chapter XXV
God does have a sense of humor-but I've encountered more sophisticated ones in some taverns I've
visited.
-Minhydrin the Fair

Friday nights were always busy at Enyart's. The lights were low and artistically placed to shed
slats of white across the bubble-gum pastels of the walls, an illumination kind to strain-puffed
features and fatigue-reddened eyelids. The floor was slick fake marble, the chairs-in the small
area along the wall for those who really wanted the more popular combinations of carbohydrates to
soak up the booze-slick black Italianate paper clips; the clientele, for the most part, slick
refugees from the law offices, real-estate agencies, and production companies along Ventura
Boulevard. There wasn't a soft surface in the place, and conversation ping-ponged off the angular
walls. In the background, jacked to carry over the general noise level, a ragged-edged
Liverpoolian voice wailed Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" over the modern, upscale equivalent of a
jukebox.
Standing uncertainly in the doorway Joanna craned her neck to see over the heads of the crowd.


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After a moment she spotted the flash of round-lensed glasses up behind the bar, the tangle of
graying curls half a head over the tallest of his customers, and the silhouette of a long, beaky
nose.
Beside her, Ruth said, "You want me to get a table?"
"Not unless you're really crazy about waiting an hour and a half for coq au merde."
Her voice shook a little. Though she'd found his absurd purple coat and bloodied calico shirt on
the bed when she'd come home from Galaxsongs this afternoon, and a note in his careful and nearly
unreadable block printing, not until this moment, actually seeing him, did the anxiety truly leave
her, the anxiety that had followed her through the dark terror of the Void and all through the
twenty-four hours which had followed: the fear that, after all, he would change his mind. That she
never would see him again. That all the years to come would be lost.
"I dunno," Ruth said thoughtfully. "That blond waiter's gorgeous."
"All waiters in Los Angeles are gorgeous," pointed out Joanna. "They're all actors between jobs."
"That one's not," Ruth objected, pointing to another.
"He's-working on a screenplay. Come on."
As she edged her way toward the bar, Joanna, though clad in the leather minidress she believed
she'd paid far too much for, felt curiously protected; every male eye in the place zeroed
automatically and instantly on Ruth's spectacular cloud of moussed raven curls and the exotic
perfection of her face. Not much to Joanna's surprise, Ruth did not make it to the bar with her.
"So you got back okay," she said quietly, as Antryg turned to catch her eye.
He came out around the end of the bar and bent his tall height to kiss her, and there was a
desperate relief in his touch. It was as if he, too, almost couldn't believe he was there. Without
a word exchanged, his partner behind the bar, known to all as the Beautiful Kevin, had moved to
take over dispensing tequila and Chardonnay. "I'm delighted to make the same observation about
you, my dear."
"I didn't ... " She hesitated, shy of speaking her true thoughts though she knew that he, of all
people, wouldn't laugh. "I was afraid you'd suffered a fit of gallantry and changed your mind."
"I did." Antryg looked down at her with a small, wry smile. He was wearing his usual faded Levi's,
a shabby T-shirt inscribed BROKEN GLASS WORLD TOUR, and earrings that had to have come from some
East Valley K mart in the early seventies. "And then I found I couldn't go through with it."
Her smile was one of genuine amusement, not at him, but at herself, realizing how like her in some
ways he was. "Antryg," she said softly, "tell me this. You'd have believed me if I said, 'I really
want you to go.' Why can't you believe me when I say, 'I really want you to stay, in spite of what
may come'?"
The rueful answer flickered deep within his eyes. "I suppose because I want it so much." Then he
drew himself up with great dignity and added, "And because it's more gallant to sacrifice all for
love instead of sticking around and enjoying it like the thoroughgoing moral coward I am."
She nudged him in the ribs, gently, for she felt the bandages under the thin cotton of his shirt.
"For a man who'd abandon his sweetheart in another universe surrounded by people who are talking
about killing him, you should talk about gallantry."
He sighed and hugged her again; there were bandages on his arms, too, where the worst of the claw-
rakes cut, and one still on his hand. Among them his tattoo stood out like the label on a beer
bottle. She wondered what he'd told his colleagues ... The truth, undoubtedly.
"Were they?" He shook his head. "I was afraid of that."
She looked up at him, her arm still around his waist. Over the chatter of the crowd-
"Steven was saying on the set today ... "
" ... corporate buy-out's going to result in a bloodbath like the St. Valentine's Day massacre in
Accounting ... "
"You know, baby, I can tell you things about yourself that probably you don't even know ... "
-she caught a flying wisp of Linda Ronstadt's voice: "Desperado," a song that always brought a
burning to her throat.
"You let Seldes Katne go," she said, "didn't you?"
And felt again how well she knew him, how well she read him, in the defeated bow of his head.
"Joanna, I couldn't judge her," he said. "Maybe if I hadn't spent seven years imprisoned in the
Silent Tower, unable to use the magic that I knew was mine ... Maybe if the Council hadn't put me
under the geas ... Maybe if I hadn't lived here for four months, existing on sippings and dreams."
He shook his head. "And she'd had over fifty years of wanting it, of knowing what it is and seeing
everyone around her using it, and not having it, not ever. I don't know what I'd have done in her
place."
Joanna was silent, leaning her head against his chest, standing in the shelter of his arm. The
shuddering darkness she'd seen in the corner of her room returned to her, the absolute depth of


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terror, knowing what was to happen to her ... Seldes Katne had done that. Seldes Katne had given
her those hideous hours-days-in the Brown Star's sightless mazes, wondering if she were mad,
wondering if she'd be there forever.
And yet, all she remembered of the stocky little librarian from those hours in the darkened
refectory was the sad desperation of her eyes. An echo returned to her from her own days in
school, watching the pretty girls, watching the girls who were sure of themselves, of their
beauty, of their skill with words and wit and social situations, while she retreated into the
safety of her books and her cats and the computer games that let her forget about the world
outside.
"I take it you opened a way for her into the world where her magic was strong? Where she'd be a
powerful mage?"
Silently, Antryg nodded.
Almost as an afterthought, Joanna remembered that Seldes Katne had tried repeatedly to murder
Antryg, too.
"Do you think she'll be happy there?"
"No." His sparse eyebrows quirked a little with regret. "No, I don't think Kitty has much capacity
for happiness. She may find that out there-or she may meet someone, or encounter some new
situation, which allows her to develop it ... But it would be presumptuous of me to say. The
future is the future, Joanna-maybe we all need to spend a little time in the City of Dreams."
He shook his head, and leaned a shoulder against the wall. Over on the bar's minuscule dance
floor, a blond studmuffin with shoulders like a door and, Joanna guessed, an IQ that rivaled his
shoe size bobbed and weaved with Ruth to a semi-slow reggae version of "Do You Wanna Dance?"; both
smiling, like animals purring under strokes, happy simply to be what they were. In high school,
Joanna reflected, she would have hated Ruth without ever speaking a word to her.
In those days she had had very little capacity for happiness herself.
Antryg's voice was very low. "They'll be after me now, you know."
"Daurannon said no one was going to open Gates in the Void again-that it was too dangerous to
tamper with. Of course, he may have been lying."
"I don't think so," Antryg said. "Daurannon usually believes what he's saying, while he's saying
it. But when it comes to a thing which stands in the way of what someone really wants, people tend
to have shockingly bad memories. He truly loved Salteris, as Rosamund truly loved Aunt Min ... and
neither of them will ever forgive me."
If she dies, Rosamund had said, you are a dead man ...
But Antryg had known that from the start.
"With all the confusion I forgot to ask them," she said after a time of watching the dancers. "And
I meant to ... who inherited the Master-Spells after Aunt Min died? Who did become the Archmage?
From the way Daurannon and Lady Rosamund were being polite to each other I have the feeling it
wasn't either of them. I take it you know."
"Oh, yes," Antryg said softly, and a shiver went through him, although the bar, with its close-
packed bodies, its smells of cigarettes and beer and synthetic aldehyde, was warm as a Jacuzzi. In
the upside-down flicker of the slanting light his eyes were wide and daft behind his spectacles,
and filled with a haunted grief.
"It's a curious thing, the Master-Spells," he said at length. "No one can tell to whom they will
pass until it actually happens, but when it does, most of the Academics know immediately, some of
them even without having met that person ... though of course wizards of that strength are usually
on the Council, these days. I was rather hoping they would pass to Zake Brighthand, as I'm certain
they eventually will. He's a good boy and will grow to be a good man, with a core in him like a
note of white music-and he doesn't hold a grudge against me, which is getting rather rare among
wizards these days."
"I take it they didn't," Joanna said dryly.
"No." There was a look of pained regret in his face, and he propped his glasses onto the bridge of
his nose with a long forefinger. "No, in fact, they didn't. I'm sure Rosie and Daur are going to
blame the disruption caused by the surrounding presence of the Void for the feet that neither of
them became Archmage, or the fields of alien magic which were everywhere ... all of which, they
will say, I engineered. And perhaps they did affect it. In a way I wish they had fallen to either
of those two. It would be better for me if they had."
"Someone who hates you more than they do?" asked Joanna doubtfully. "Who ... not Bentick?" Another
thought crossed her mind at the thought of the fields of power, appearing and disappearing in the
Citadel during those last hours, giving powers undreamed of to people no one had suspected ...
"Not Seldes Katne herself? Or ... Silvorglim!?"
Down at the far end of the bar someone called his name; Kevin was making change for a platinum


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blond waitress who was also clearly between acting jobs. Antryg raised a finger in a be-there-in-a-
minute gesture and turned back to Joanna.
"No," he said, his voice small with regret. "Even at that, I might have some chance of being let
alone-some chance of escape. But no. I'm afraid they fell to me."
Joanna was still looking up at him in silence as he reached down to put a knuckle under her chin
and shut her open mouth for her. Then he leaned over and kissed her lips and, with a rueful grin,
hooked a bottle of Sauza Especial from beneath the counter and strode off to pour drinks.


about the author
At various times in her life, Barbara Hambly has been a high-school teacher, a model, a waitress,
a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a
karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in Southern California, with the exception of
one high-school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with
reading The Wizard of Oz at an early age and it has continued ever since.
She attended the University of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In
connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the south of France and
worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master's degree
in the subject. At the university, she also became involved in karate, making Black Belt in 1978
and competing in several national-level tournaments. She now lives in Los Angeles.




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