Free The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard by Barbara Hambly Page B

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 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