The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (34 page)

“It's them, my lord.” The captain of the prince's sasenna spoke softly in the black arch of the stone doorway. “We brought them here as you said, instead of back to St. Cyr.”

“Very good, Joris,” the Regent's shrill, edgy voice replied. “Keep the men within call.” A ripple of gold flashed in those inky shadows. Then the Prince stepped into the room, into the dim circle of the charcoal brazier's softly pulsing glow. “And I warn you, wizard,” he added, his words brittle as chipped glass, “at the first sign of trouble from you, Kanner has orders to kill the girl.”

Thanks,
Joanna thought tiredly, fighting tears of sheer exhaustion and fear. The guard who stood beside the chair of ebony and ormolu where she had been tied didn't even move his head at the sound of his own name; his dark eyes wavered from her no more than did the barrel of his pistol. His uniform was crimson, though he moved with the quick-footed grace of the inevitably black-clothed sasenna. His face was a mass of scars and old angers. Joanna looked away from him, shivering. She could not seem to stop shaking with cold, wretchedness, and fear. She felt, as Antryg had once said, a weak longing for the relative safety of the roachinfested cell in the St. Cyr fortress. At least, the Witchfinders were bounded by a sort of law-if nothing else, their self-deceptive righteousness might keep them from the baser forms of cruelty. Looking into the Prince's mad eyes, she knew that what he would do would be done without compunction, for his own pleasure.

Here-wherever this small stone chamber was, at the foot of its twisting stair-they were entirely in his power.

She had thought Antryg was still unconscious, chained by his wrists between the two pillars which supported the central groinings of the ceiling. But he raised his head groggily at the Prince's words, sweat shining along jaw muscles tense with pain. “The girl has nothing to do with this, Pharos,” he said. “She's only my servant. She knows nothing of any of this. I forced her to accompany me.”

“And took two cuts with my whip out of indifference to her fate?” The Prince walked slowly over to Joanna and caught her chin with one small, black-gloved hand as she tried to shrink away. His pale-blue gaze traveled over her throat and half-bared bosom; his mouth widened a little, but what was in his eyes could never have been called a smile. Terrified and loathing him, Joanna felt, as she had with the Witchfinder, that her best defense lay in silence. She met his eyes; it was the Prince who looked quickly away.

He turned back to Antryg. The wizard had gotten his feet under him, taking some of the strain of his unsupported weight from his stretchedout arms. His face was chalky with exhaustion and running with sweat in the hot closeness of the little room; Joanna could see the shift of his knuckles where he held the manacle chains, trying to ease the cut of the bracelets in his wrists. The chains were twisted through with thin red silk ribbon, incongruously gray-spell-cord, she recognized from Magister Magus' description. More of it was twined around the ropes that held her own wrists to the arms of the chair.

Though he was weaving a little on his feet, Antryg's gray eyes were calm. Through his open shirt, Joanna could see the steady rhythm of his breath. If he was even half as afraid as she was, he hid it well.

The Prince asked softly, “Who are you?”

Antryg sighed, and some of the tension seemed to drain from his body. “Antryg Windrose,” he said.

The chill, pale-blue eyes narrowed. “So.” For a long moment the Prince remained still, studying the form chained between the pillars in the ruddy, reflected glare of the brazier. Joanna could see the lines of sleeplessness on his face beneath a thick coating of rice powder and rouge; the dark rings of bister and fatigue made the queer eyes even paler. The Prince wet his lips, as if he feared the wizard, even chained and helpless, and had to nerve himself to approach. Then he stepped forward and, as he had before, reached up one gloved hand and carefully removed Antryg's spectacles from his face. Antryg flinched a little as the metal temple piece nicked the bruises, but his eyes never left Pharos' face.

The Prince folded up the spectacles and set them on the narrow ledge of the pillar's capital beside him. The firelight slid along the soft black leather of the gloves as he put out his hands to frame the wizard's face between them, shoving back the loose lion's mane of graying hair to outline the delicate bones and wide, lunatic eyes.

“So,” he said again. He stepped back. “Is what the Bishop of Kymil said about you true?”

Antryg tipped his head a little to one side. Without the cracked mask of the spectacles, his gray eyes looked even wider and strangely luminous in the dark smudges of fatigue. “Oh, probably not,” he said mildly. “How much of what is said about you is true?”

The white gleam of teeth showed, very briefly, with the parting of the painted lips. “Everything,” the Prince whispered. “I could flog you to death, you know, just to see how long it would take a wizard to die under it. No one would know. My palace-” He gestured to the dark room around them and the shadowy, convoluted vaults overhead “-stands in its own grounds, away from the main Palace and away from that stinking rabble of wizards my father used to surround himself with. Away from prying eyes, away from people spying on me, trying to kill me-yes, even my saintly cousin Cerdic!-whispering among themselves that I'm mad. Of course I'm mad! My father is, isn't he? And I am his true son . . .” His voice sank even lower, so that Joanna, watching that slender black figure, barely heard. “Aren't I?”

Antryg said, his tone quiet and conversational, “You would know more of that than I, Pharos. But being quite mad myself, I wouldn't hold madness against you; one sometimes does it in mere self-defense, you know.”

The Prince's glance cut sharply up to Antryg's eyes for the first time. “What?”

“Goes mad.”

The beauty of that deep voice seemed to calm the Prince; for some moments the blue eyes held the gray.

“Yes,” Pharos said slowly. “Sometimes one must-go mad-or die. They said that you were mad.” His glance shifted away again, as if he could not bear to show even that part of himself to another human being for more than a second or so.

Antryg nodded. Still low, still soothing, he said, “It was-the only thing that I could do at the time.”

“Is it true that you've been a prisoner of the Church for seven years? That you were condemned to death?”

The harsh, metallic voice was uninflected, impossible to second-guess. Antryg said, “Yes,” and the Prince looked back at him again, suspicious, waiting for something. The wizard went on, “The rebels were my friends. The Emperor's dragoons had no right to do what they did. Not to the children. I thought that the Emperor . . .” He paused, for a long moment, then shook his head, weary, defeated by the old memories. “Yes, I was imprisoned under a commuted sentence of death.”

“And the Archmage helped you escape?”

“No.” Joanna saw Antryg's hands tighten again on the chains, holding himself upright against fatigue, shock, and the sick aftereffects of a really appalling crack on the head. In the dead-still, heated air, she could smell the musky stink of the Regent's perfume and the faint sourness of sweat from the guard Kanner, who stood beside her, silent as a statue, so close she could see the runes of na-aar written on the pistol barrel. Antryg moved his head a little, shaking aside the sweat-dampened ends of his long hair, where they clung in little circles to his temples and cheeks. “I escaped when the Archmage disappeared, but I had nothing to do with his disappearance, nor he with my escape. He had neither the intent nor the desire to set me free.”

“No,” the Prince murmured. “He knew our fat Bishop well-he knew the Witchfinders-he knew me. If he had helped you escape, it would have been far better done, wouldn't it? Not leaving you wandering the roads like a vagabond, nor leaving the other members of the Council to take the Church's wrath unaided. And you-you would have risked your life to rescue more than a chit of a girl. You can tell me nothing of them, can you?”

Antryg shook his head exhaustedly, the fatigue telling on him, sapping his strength. His voice remained calm, low and weary with memory and hopelessness. “I haven't seen any of them in seven years.”

“Then why did you come to Angelshand?” the Prince asked, his voice soft now, evil as the Witchfinder's and infinitely more deadly. “Surely, if you are a fugitive from the Council as you say, you would have run in the opposite direction?”

Antryg turned his face away. The gold light of the brazier shining through the damp, thin fabric of his shirt outlined his body as he drew a deep breath, then let it out, struggling, as Joanna had seen him on the road, between trust and silence. Then he looked back at the Prince, his deep voice still level but desperation in his eyes. “I have to reinstate myself somehow,” he said quietly. “I can't go on like this. Not for the rest of my life. I'm a wizard, Pharos, and I haven't been able to touch that reservoir of power within myself for seven years. Even now I can't use it, for they would find me through it-the Witchfinders, the Church mages. I need to speak to them . . . .” He broke off, gazing into the Prince's face, the dark lines of strain suddenly cut deep in the discolored flesh around his eyes, hardening and aging them.

The Prince said nothing for a time, but stood with his gloved hands clasped together, an oily gleam of moisture glazing his maquillage and a sprinkle of reflected flame dancing over the bullion lace at his wrists as he shivered, as if with sudden chill. At last he whispered, “Is it real? This this magic. This mumbo-jumbo—old women calling the weather among the fallen stones on the hills, things that mumble in the crypts, men who can summon storms by looking into a bowl of water-is it real? Not just stories with which to frighten us into obedience as children? Not just charlatans like those fakers my cousin fills his house with? Not just hags deluding themselves from their own helplessness?”

“No,” Antryg murmured. “No, it's real.”

The Prince stepped close to him, his voice hoarse with fear to believe. “Show me.”

Antryg's fingers moved, brushing the spell-ribbon that knotted through his chains. “You've taken care to see that I couldn't,” he said softly. “Surprising care, for a man who believes it's all mumbo jumbo and granny-rhymes. And, as I've said, I would not, even if you released me. They are seeking me-they would find me through it; and believe me, Pharos, I fear them more than I fear you.”

“The Church dogs?” Pharos sniffed with scorn touched by the bravado of one half-afraid himself. “I gave the Church their mandate to act, when they said there was a plot by the Archmage and the Council. I can take it away again. I could protect you.”

“Not from the Council.” Antryg looked down at the Prince, the top of whose golden curls came barely to his lips. “I don't know how many of them managed to escape from St. Cyr this afternoon, but you never had them all, did you?”

Suspicion flared again in the Prince's mad eyes. “What do you know of it?”

The chains clinked faintly as Antryg shrugged. “If you had,” he said simply, “you wouldn't still be afraid. And you are afraid.”

The Regent stood for a moment, his face averted. In the absolute stillness, Joanna could hear how shaky was the draw of his breath. There was a cracked note to his shrill voice as he called out suddenly, “Joris!”

The captain of his sasenna, the tall, heavy-boned, red-haired woman who had captured them, emerged from the utter darkness of the hall.

“You haven't touched magic for seven years,” the Prince said softly. “You couldn't have, not from the Tower, not as their prisoner.” He signaled to the woman Joris.

Taking a key from the nail beside the door, she crossed into the dim circle of the firelight and unlocked the shackles from Antryg's wrists. For a moment, Joanna thought the wizard would collapse without the chains to hold him up, but he only leaned against one of the pillars, rubbing the flesh of his bony wrists where the metal had scraped the skin off it. At a nod from the Regent, Kanner stepped aside, though he did not put down his pistol. Joris came over to Joanna's chair and untied the ropes that held her. When the sasennan left, the big guard remained, his pistol still at the ready, silent as a sword.

During all this, Pharos stood with his hands folded in front of his breast, palms and fingers locked and pressed together so tightly that Joanna could see the knuckles bulge and work through the soft kid of the gloves. His eyes, when in their restless flickering Joanna could glimpse them, had lost their malice and were haunted and anxious; he caught Joris by the arm as she moved toward the door. “Be ready,” he said softly, and the woman nodded briefly. She stepped back through the door into darkness, but in that darkness a shadow moved, and Joanna caught the gleam of pistol barrels, leveled at Antryg's heart.

After a long moment, the Prince began, “I need . . .” He stopped, standing close to Antryg, closer than Joanna would have found comfortable, the closeness of intimacy; but still he did not look at the wizard. It had undoubtedly been a long time, Joanna thought suddenly, since this dainty, evil little man had said, I need to anyone.

He swallowed hard and tried again. “Narwahl,” he said quietly. His voice was very different now from the arrogant and perverted Prince who had held them at his mercy. Caris had said Skipfrag was the Regent's friend. There was a terrible tension in the Prince's words as he tried to speak calmly of that friend's death. “The neighbors heard a shot and then a shrieking like all the souls of the damned. They found . . .” He paused, unable to go on.

“I know what they found,” Joanna said. “Broken and shattered glass. And blood all over everything-the floor, the walls, everywhere.”

The Regent glanced to where she still sat in the carved ebony chair to which she had been tied. The corners of his mouth twitched. “Ah, yes. You were there, weren't you? At least, that's what Joris tells me the Church sasenna said.” He took from one pocket a handkerchief-black, she noted. All his linen was black, an affectation that reminded her irresistibly of a Hollywood pimp. With the care of one long used to working around makeup, he wiped his face, and she saw that his hand shook.