The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (18 page)

“Why?” Joanna asked, glancing curiously from the wizard to the warrior. “What happened yesterday?”

“There was an abomination in the marsh,” Caris replied, almost grudgingly. He touched the rip in the shoulder of his jacket and shirt, under which the bruised flesh had turned almost as black as the torn fabric. He glanced across at Antryg as they resumed their walking, the bridge sounding hollowly with their footfalls. “He knew it was there.”

“Of course I knew it was there,” Antryg responded. “I'd felt the opening of the Void, and you could hardly have gotten bruised that way brawling in a pothouse.”

Caris' dark eyes narrowed. “You have an explanation for everything.”

Antryg shrugged. “It's been my misfortune to be a good guesser. Would it alleviate your suspicions any if I didn't have an explanation?” He gravely handed the crumpled Granola wrapper back to Joanna. “Tell me one thing, Caris. Who were the other mages abroad the night Thirle was killed?”

The young warrior shifted the scabbard that he held loose and ready in his left hand. “How do you know there were any, if it wasn't you who . . . ?”

“Another guess. Was your grandfather one of them?”

“No.” Caris glanced sidelong at the wizard, his eyes filled with suspicion. After a moment, he said, “Lady Rosamund.” and paused, with a sudden frown.

“What is it?”

He hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing. Just that . . . She was up and dressed, literally moments after the shots were fired. Aunt Min's hair was flattened and mussed, as if she'd just risen from her bed. It was as if Lady Rosamund had been up some time before.”

“Even as you were,” Antryg remarked softly, and Joanna saw the young man look swiftly away. “What wakened you?”

“Nothing,” Caris said, his voice curt. “Dreams. Nothing that has to do with Thirle's death.”

“Oh, everything has to do with everything.” Antryg smiled, shoving his big hands into the pockets of his jeans and kicking at a pebble with one booted foot. “It's one of the first principles of magic.”

Joanna looked doubtfully up at him. “By magic, do you mean like pouf-you're-gone magic?”

He grinned. “Yes-in fact, pouf-you're-gone is precisely the question of the moment.”

“Then why . . .” She hesitated, then went on. “This is going to sound really stupid, but why don't you use magic to escape?”

Caris looked indignant at the question and started to gesture with his sword; Antryg's grin, like that of a slightly deranged elf, widened.

“Well, two reasons. I believe I can convince Nandiharrow and some of the other mages of the Council to believe my side of the story and, at the moment, I feel I'd be safer as a prisoner of the Council than a fugitive from the Church, which has its own mages. At least the Council will listen to me. And then,” he added, more gravely, “if I used magic to escape, the other mages, be they Church or Council, would be able to track me through it eventually.”

“You're forgetting the third reason,” Caris said grimly. “If you try to escape I will kill you.”

“No,” Antryg said mildly, “I wasn't forgetting,” and Joanna had to turn away to smother a grin.

In contrast to the silent and preoccupied Caris, Antryg had a voracious interest in everything and anything and was, for all his talkativeness, a good listener. Joanna had never been at ease with men; but as they walked along the highroad that ran above the marsh, she found herself telling him, not only about computers and soap operas and the Los Angeles freeway system, but about her mother, Ruth, the cats, and Gary.

“Ali, Gary,” he said. “The one with the cruel streak.”

She shrugged, guessing he'd been one of the large number of people who'd overheard Gary's remarks about her. “He probably just thought he was being funny.”

“I'm sure he did,” the wizard said, polishing the spectacles on the hem of his t-shirt. “And that is the worst thing which can be said about him.”

It was, but it surprised her a little that anyone, particularly any man, would see it as she did.

The sun rose to noon, and Caris negotiated with some of the hay cutters to buy a portion of their bread and ale, which the three ate sitting on a half-rotted willow log beside one of the gnat-swarming mores. Joanna found the bread harsh and strong-tasting and sprinkled through with grain hulls and specks of dirt. So much, she thought, picking a morsel of grit from between her teeth, for
the good old days of the old mill by the stream. “Can't you do anything about this?” she inquired, glancing up at Antryg, who was contentedly downing his share of the ale. “I mean, you're a wizard-you should be able to turn this into quiche lorraine.”

“It doesn't work that way.” Antryg half turned to offer the flask to Caris, who, even when eating, stood behind him, one hand never far from the hilt of his sword. Caris shook his head, and the wizard passed it to Joanna. The ale was sweeter than the beer she was used to and considerably above the California limitations on alcohol content. “I could use magic to convince you that you were eating quiche; but when all was said and done, it would be bread in your stomach; and when the spell wore off, you'd still have sand in your teeth. There are wizards and spells which can convert one thing to another-real bread into actual quiche or into gold, for that matter-but they require so much power and take so much strength from the one who casts them that it's really simpler just to change millers.”

“Not to mention,” Caris said quietly from behind them, “that such meddling in even the smallest of human affairs is forbidden.”

“Well,” Antryg agreed blithely, “there is that.”

Caris' face darkened with disapproval, and Joanna, glancing sideways at Antryg, caught the flicker of his smile and wondered suddenly how much of what he said he believed-and how much was simply to get a rise out of his captor.

They had come, Caris said at one point during the long afternoon, from the far southeastern corner of the Ponmarish, where it touched the hills of the Sykerst. It was a long walk up the southward road to the gates of the city. There were few peasants in this portion of the marsh, and what few there were, Joanna noticed, worked hard and closer together than their tasks warranted. They appeared nervous, glancing over their shoulders. Poaching hay illegally? she wondered. On the lookout for the hay police? But by that time she was too exhausted and footsore to ask. The daylong walk, though it was not fast, was extremely tiring. She was a thin girl, but she had done no more strenuous walking in the last several years than was necessary to get from her car in the San Serano parking lot to her office, and by the end of the afternoon she felt a kind of wondering resentment about Caris' tireless, changeless stride. Antryg, she noticed, was more considerate-perhaps because it had been years since he, too, had done any great amount of travel. Caris only fretted and muttered that they would not reach the city before dark.

And it was, in fact, long after darkness had settled on the land that they walked through the sleeping streets of the warm, flat, mosquitohumming city, with its carved wooden balconies and brick-paved alleys that smelled of sewage and fish. The city was walled on its land side, though, in the flickering red torchlight of the enormous gateway, Joanna had gotten the impression that the gates themselves hadn't been closed in years. Caris roused a sleepy gatekeeper and rented a torch, which illuminated the tepid darkness of the narrow streets along which they passed. Down a side lane Joanna glimpsed the bent form of an old man, whose elaborately braided hair and beard would have trailed to his knees had the complicated loops of braid been undone, pushing a cart while he shoveled up the copious by-products of what was obviously a horsedependent civilization. For the rest, the streets were quiet at this hour Kymil, thought Joanna, scarcely qualifying as the Las Vegas of the Empire of Ferryth.

The House of the Mages lay a moonlit chiaroscuro of ice-gray and velvet black, gargoyle-decorated balconies and windows unlighted and silent, like an anesthetized dragon. Under the carved wooden turrets of the main door, a bonfire had been kindled on the flagway, and four sasenna sat around it, muttering amongst themselves and glancing worriedly about them at the dark.

In the mouth of the narrow lane, Caris stopped and swiftly doused his torch in a convenient rain barrel. Antryg, too, had flattened into the shadows along the wall. For a long moment, they looked out into the dim and mingled glows of moonlight and firelight in the square. Then Caris said softly, “Those are Church sasenna.”

Antryg nodded, his spectacles gleaming dimly with the reflected brightness. With a slight gesture, he signaled them back into the alley; Joanna, mystified, followed him and Caris as they wove through a noisome alley where pigs grunted down below the cellar gratings of the narrow houses and around to another side of the square.

There was a smaller side door there. In that, too, armed men sat waiting, huddled more closely about the brazier of coals than the balmy night demanded. Caris glanced up at the tall wizard, his eyes suddenly filled with concern. In an undervoice softer than the murmur of the winds from the marshes, he breathed, “There are no lights in the house.”

“Not even in the sasenna's quarters,” Antryg murmured in reply.

Moonlight touched the tip of his long nose and made a fragile halo of the ends of his hair as he put his head a little beyond the dense shadows in which they stood, then drew it back. Beside them, Joanna could feel, as if she touched the two men, the tension that went through them as they found their common enemy guarding the doors of the house.

Caris said, “It's a good guess there aren't guards inside, then.” He glanced around at the black cutouts of oddly shaped roofs against the velvet sky. “No wonder the neighborhood's so silent. They can't have . . .” He hesitated.

“You yourself said that the danger of the abominations abrogated my right to protection by the Council,” Antryg murmured, leaning one hand against the coarse, dirty plaster of the nearest wall and looking out into the silent square. “Perhaps the Church came to the same conclusion?”

“Come on,” the sasennan said quietly. “We can get over the wall of the garden court-it backs onto the next alley.”

That, Joanna thought wryly a few moments later, had to be one of the Great Traditions of literature and cinema: “We can get in over the wall.” Staring up, appalled, at the seven-foot paling of reinforced cedar and pine, she felt the sensation of having been cheated by three generations of fictional heroes and heroines who could effortlessly scramble up and over eight-foot, barbed wire fences without breaking sweat or scraping off their shirt buttons as they bellied over the top.

And more than that, she felt weak and stupid, as she had all the way through high school, laboring wretchedly along in the distant wake of the class jocks and wishing she were dead.

“There's a footing shelf on the inside where the beam holds the palings,” Antryg whispered. “Caris, you go up first and I'll lift her to you.”

Caris, no more than an indistinct shape in the revolting darkness of the alley, turned his head sharply, and Joanna saw the silvery glint of narrowed eyes.

“I'm not going to run from you the minute you're occupied going up the wall,” the mage added impatiently. “As much as you do, I've got to find out what's happened.”

Caris started to make a reply to this, then let out his breath unused. Without a word, he turned, took a running start at the wall, and used it as a momentum to spring for the top and carry himself over.

“How did you know there was a footing on the beam?” Joanna asked as she approached the base of the wall and saw the sasennan's catlike silhouette crouched against the slightly paler darkness of trees and roofs. “Another lucky guess?”

“No. Up until seven years ago I was a-well, not perfectly respected member of the community of wizards.” The moonlight checkered through the trees beyond the garden wall and silvered the lenses of his specs and the foil HAVOC on his t-shirt. His hands on her waist were large and warm and, as she recalled them on her wrists when they'd struggled, surprisingly strong for his rather gawky appearance. “Up you get.”

Joanna had always hated heights, hated exercise, and hated having to do things she couldn't do. Her hands scraped and driven through with splinters, she hauled herself gasping to the top of the wall, half-expecting Caris' mockery, even as the young man steadied her over. But he simply helped her down, following like a stalking cat into the pungent, laurelscented darkness of the tiny garden. A moment later, the wall vibrated softly under Antryg's weight, and he dropped like a spider at their side.

“Can we risk a light?” he breathed as they entered the dark arches of a very short wooden colonnade that bounded the garden. “The nearest door's around the corner. That should be the barracks in through there.”

Caris nodded. Joanna was about to dig into her purse to proffer a match when Antryg made a slight movement with his hand and opened it, releasing a tiny ball of bluish light which rose from his palm and floated a few feet in front of him, about the level of his chest. His grin at the look on her face in the faint phosphorescence was like that of a pleased imp.

Joanna said softly, “I'm not even going to ask.” She had, she realized, just seen magic.

“That's just as well. Nobody's ever come up with a satisfactory answer, except the obvious one.”

“In here,” Caris murmured from the blackness of a small, half-open door.

Through an open archway to her right, Joanna had a glimpse of a vast room, with moonlight flooding through long windows to lie like sheets of white silk over a disorder of upended trestle tables and fallen benches. In the room to which Caris beckoned them the disorder was worse. All along its narrow length, furniture had been tipped over, books pulled from the shelves that lined one wall, and strange brass instruments, sextants, astrolabes, celestial globes-had been hurled to the floor and lay like twisted skeletons, glinting faintly in the moonlight. The line of wooden pillars that bisected the narrow room and supported an even narrower gallery above it threw bizarre shadows on the intricate inlay of the cabinets that shared with the bookcases the long inner wall.