The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (29 page)

Swiftly, he ducked into the room allotted him. His peasant clothes were still there-he had exchanged them for the plain, brown suit of a servant or upper-class tradesman provided for him by the Prince's staff and his weapons were where he had hidden them in the canopy of the old-fashioned bed, including the sword which he had retrieved from the meadow after the abominations had, as Joanna predicted, been lured away. He checked the pistol-it was still loaded. Though it was forbidden to bear weapons into the presence of a member of the Imperial Family, he had kept a hideout knife in his boot. He checked it, shoved the pistol into the pocket of his short coat and, sheathed sword in hand, strode soundlessly from the room.

He found Antryg sitting in the darkness of the drawing room of the suite allotted to their use. His own mageborn sight picked out the tall, gawky form, sitting in a chair near the window, dealing cards from one of the Prince's tarot decks in silence onto a small ormolu table before him. There was something in the tired angle of those bony shoulders that made Caris think he had been there some time.

Though the sasennan made no sound and there was only darkness in the hall behind him, Antryg said, without turning his head, “Come in, Caris. Are you prepared to leave tonight?”

Caris tipped his head to one side, suspicious. “You're deigning to grant me a place? Or do you just need someone to look after the horses?”

“Well, yes.” A stray flick of the last daylight winked from spectacle lenses and what might have been the glint of his half-malicious grin. The long hands moved palely in the dark; the soft pat of cards on parquetry was clearly audible in the still blueness of the room. “And then, I doubt I could persuade Joanna to-err-fly with me unless you were there.”

“And her feelings concern you?”

“
Oddly enough, yes.” The wizard's voice was carefully uninflected. “It's very difficult to carry off a young lady by violence and manage a team of horses, too-at least, I suppose an experienced person could do it, but we should probably attract a good deal of attention. The Regent is on his way here, you know.”

Caris frowned and strode forward a step, then paused. “How do you know? He was on his way to Kymil.”

“I expect he turned back at the roadhouse, or perhaps the Bishop and the Witchfinders met him halfway.” Antryg tapped the spread of the cards. Caris could see over his shoulder the king of pentacles reversed, the eight of wands, the five of swords, the lovers . . . . “And he's going to be married,” he added thoughtfully. “Strange sort of thing for Pharos to do, considering, but it does explain a good deal.” Puzzled, Caris was about to ask, Like what? when, with a flick of his fingers, the mage tossed a seventh card down on the reading-death reversed. “Interesting.”

Caris looked down at the cards in silence. As with the vision of wizards in darkness, he saw them without color, shadowless and strange. The Council wages, the academic wages, seldom used the cards, considering them the type of low-class cantrip dealt in by gypsies and dog wizards, but in the darkness he found their arcane shapes disturbing. He asked hesitantly, “Death reversed is . . . life?”

Antryg shook his head, and said softly, “No. It is stagnation.”

His long, light fingers gathered the cards and shuffled them restlessly; Caris could see that his eyes were shut. He laid the six cards with the deftness of a faro dealer in their ancient shape and sat for a long time gazing down at them in the darkness. Looking over his shoulder, Caris saw in the center the hermit crossed by the Dead God, whose sign marked the Sigil of Darkness, flanked by emperor and priest, the knight of swords, and the queen of wands. The signs meant nothing to Caris, but he felt the flinch of Antryg's body through the chair back upon which his arm rested; after a moment, he heard the wizard's breath go out in a sigh.

Then the wizard flicked a seventh card from the deck and sat looking at it for some time. From the open windows, Caris heard the voices of the grooms in the stable yard below, calling to one another as they harnessed the horses.

At last Antryg whispered, “So,” and got to his feet. Even in the darkness, his face looked strained and more tired than Caris had ever seen him. “It's time we went.” Quietly, he left the room.

Caris looked back at the cards, their queer forms as troubling as the voices of things supposed to be dead. The seventh card lay among them —a dead man pierced with ten swords, lying alone in the cold darkness of coming night.

Moonlight streamed between the standing-stones of the Devil's Road, bleaching them where it struck or pitting them with inky shadow, like an endless row of broken and rotting teeth. Antryg drew rein beside a fallen one to whose lower extremity earth still clung. The pit where it had until recently been planted was a torn, black hole in the long grass. Looking back along the line of them, Joanna saw how straight they ran, to the top of a distant hill, and down into the unknown night beyond.

The mage said softly, “Hold the horses, would you, Caris.” The sasennan, after a moment's hesitation, leaped down from the groom's perch on the back of the phaeton and obeyed.

For all Antryg was still officially Caris' prisoner, Joanna reflected, smiling a little to herself as the mage sprang down from the high-wheeled carriage, at the moment he was the nearest thing to a master the young warrior had.

After a few seconds' hesitation, Joanna gathered up her voluminous skirts and the shawl the Prince had lent her and clambered carefully down after him. Her interview with Antryg in the dimness of the drawing room at Devilsgate had left her shaken, not only by the violence of her own feelings, but by their inappropriateness to everything she had liked to think about herself. She had the sensation of being suddenly in deeper than she had thought, part of her wanting to unfeel what she felt for him and, more, to unknow what it was like to feel. It was that part, perhaps, which in Antryg wanted the safety of the Tower. Down to the taproots of her intellect, she knew that both her friendship and her desire for him were alike utterly stupid-not to mention, she added, that none of this was really any of her business. When she went back to her own world it wouldn't matter ...

Except that it did.

He was moving along the double line of the stones, his spectacles and the strings of cheap glass beads around his neck winking palely in the ghostly light.

As when she had killed the two sasenna on the island, she had the feeling of having crossed some line which could not be recrossed. Having seen color, she thought, she would never again be content with black and white.

No wind stirred the long grasses in the shallow dip of ground through which the Road ran; the moon, waxing toward full, outlined not only the stones, but every silken length of grass-blade in sharply contrasting edges of silver and ink. There was a chill on the air, and Joanna hugged her shawl about her; the Prince, a chivalrous young man, had also provided half a dozen dresses for her to wear on the road. Antryg turned at the sound of her step and waited for her, the moonlight picking up a queer, silvery sheen on his outsize black coat. Most of her life, she thought, as she came to his side, she had felt uncertain of her welcome. That, too, had changed.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

He pointed to the ground. In a week, the resilience of the grass had nearly covered them, but the weight and size of the tracks had left their mark in the soft earth. She frowned, studying them, trying to decide what animal could have made them, and looked at last, puzzled, back at Antryg's beaky face in the moonlight.

He shook his head. “I don't know, either,” he said. “But you can see they start here, as if they walked out of a door, then pass close to that fallen stone. The thing must have been massive, whatever it was. Cerdic tells me these high woods are not much frequented, having a bad name in the district. It's very probable its carcass is still rotting up there, while the parasites that lived on it or in it crawled away looking for better fare.”

Joanna shivered. A stray touch of wind stirred the thick, fair tangle of her hair; she jumped as if at the brush of a hand. “A week ago,” she said after a moment. “That was when . . .” She hesitated. “How far away does the Void weaken when it's open?”

“Generally only a few hundred yards,” Antryg replied softly. “But it was open on one of the energy-lines. All things travel along the lines, resonating forward and back; in the old times wages could speak along them or travel down them from node to node, covering hundreds of miles in a day.” He turned his head, looking out along the silent Road with its waving, undisturbed grass. The pale light touched the dark blotch of the bruise on his face and glinted in his crystal earrings. “On certain nights of the year, the peasants still drive their herds along them, you know, in commemoration of the Dead God, though they've forgotten why he died. But for the most part they are shunned, as the mages are shunned. No man will summon the voices of the air, if they do not speak personally to him.”

He reached out and took her hand with a half-unthinking intimacy; she was conscious of the bigness of the bones beneath the flesh, and the deft lightness of his touch. After a pace or two, she stopped, and he halted and looked at her, his eyes colorless in the moonlight.

“Antryg,” she said, “why are you going to Angelshand?”

He hesitated for a long time before replying, his face, which could be so dissimulating, tense with an expression of struggle, as if he debated within himself what he might safely say. Then, bringing out the words with care, he said, “I need to speak to certain members of the Council of Wizards.”

Joanna stood for a moment, not certain what to say. It was the first time he had answered her, she thought, without evasion, but it was not what she had expected him to say. “But most-or all-of them are under arrest.”

He nodded. “There is that,” he agreed, as if she had said, Most of those telephone calls are toll numbers.

“About this-this fading? Or what really happened to the Archmage?” After a long moment, she collected enough nerve to add, “About whatever it is you-or someone else-needs or wants me for?”

In the long silence that followed, Joanna could hear one of the carriage team blow softly through its nostrils and heard the faint, bell-like jingle of harness brasses as it tossed its head. The long, odd curves of Antryg's mouth tightened; for a time, she thought he would not answer her or would turn away, as he so often did, with some bit of informational persiflage about ancient cults or botanical lore. But he finally said, “About something which happened twenty-five years ago.”

“What?”

“Ah,” he whispered, and the old warm, half-demented grin flicked suddenly at the corner of his lips again. “If I knew that, I wouldn't have to ask them.”

He started to move back to the carriage, but Joanna tightened her hand around his to hold him still. The bones of his fingers felt large and clumsy entwined with hers and only thinly covered with flesh; through them she was aware of him, blood and sinew and bone.

She said, “I don't understand.”

“Don't you?” he asked gently. The ghost of his smile warmed a little. “That's good.”

He was not, she sensed, jesting. It came to her again that she was a fool to trust him and an even bigger fool to care for him; for good or ill, she would return to her own world, and it would be as if he were dead and all of this had never happened. Still, when he hesitated to put his arm around her shoulders against the thin chill of the evening, too clearly remembering the interview at Devilsgate, she stepped into the circle of his warmth and slid her own arm around his waist. There was a good deal of comfort in the feel of the ribs beneath the worn velvet and the slight, steady movement of his breathing.

They walked back along the Road to where Caris stood beside the carriage in the brown livery of a groom. Even in the distance, he looked disapproving, his arms folded and tension radiant in his stance.

“Joanna,” Antryg said quietly as they neared the spiky shadows of the carriage and the dark horses cropping the long grass in the moonlight. Even pitched low, for her ears alone, his voice was startlingly beautiful, at odd variance with his eccentric appearance. The fractured lens of his spectacles caught the light like a broken star as he looked down at her. “I have no right to ask you to trust me; in fact it would be an insult to your intelligence to do so, but . . . please believe that I won't let you come to harm.”

“I've always believed that,” she said. They stopped beside the tall conveyance, with Caris still keeping his distance beside the horses' heads. Antryg put his hands to her sides to help her up onto the high step; she shook back the thick masses of her blond hair and looked up into his face again. “Will you return me to my own world?”

His eyes evaded hers. After a long moment, he said, “When I can.” He helped her up. She caught the high brass hand railings around the blue leather tuck-and-roll of the seats and stood for a time looking down on him in silence.

Then he said, “I can't tell you the truth, Joanna . . . and God knows I've lied to you enough. All my life I've trusted too easily. I can't risk doing so now.”

He climbed up beside her and gathered the reins in his sure, strong grip. Caris, who had watched this fete a fete with deep suspicion, stepped back from the horses' heads and sprang up to his high perch behind as they started forward. For a long time, Joanna sat quietly, hanging onto the sides as the phaeton jarred over the rough ground toward the road. She wondered why she had the impression that Antryg was as appalled by his own reactions to that evening's interview as she was by hers-that, like her, he found himself trusting against his every better judgment. And she wondered, as the carriage rattled into the haythick warmth of the still night, what reason Antryg had to think he ought to fear her.

It took them a day and a night and part of the next day to reach Angelshand, a journey which left Joanna, unused to unsprung, horse drawn conveyances, cursing the man who hadn't been born yet to invent shock absorbers and almost wishing they had walked. Angelshand was a far larger city than Kymil; from miles away that morning, she had seen the dirty pall of its factory smoke and, when the wind set off its harbor with the cool salt freshness of the sea, had smelled the fetor of its slums. They approached it through a sprawling network of outlying villages and graceful manor houses set in walled parks. Closer in, the phaeton mingled with a rattling press of city bound traffic, passing through dreary streets of crumbling tenements and the ugly brick edifices of the riverside factories. At Joanna's request, Antryg had taught her the rudiments of driving a team of horses on the country roads, but he took the reins back now; as Kymil's had been, the streets of Angelshand were deep in manure and crowded with drays and carts of all description, driven with a disregard for human safety which appalled even Joanna's Los Angelino soul.