Read The Windrose Chronicles 3 - Dog Wizard for Free Online Page A

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 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