The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub

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.

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