The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (38 page)

Only inside, as they left the classical symmetry of the entrance rooms, did the building's age become evident. Though no architect, Joanna sensed that the lower ceilings and rambling, irregular layout of the inner rooms bespoke tastes less self-consciously elegant than those which had renovated the older palace in the classical style. As they moved down a long, narrow gallery, her eye was arrested by an occasional pointed arch or deeply coffered ceiling.

They ascended two or three steps to another hall and from there climbed an old-fashioned, enclosed staircase to the attics in the original wing of the building. “My men brought Narwahl's equipment here, just as it was,” the Prince said as they paused before a thick nine-panel door into one of the attic rooms. “I also obtained your reticule, my dear Joanna-though the Witchfinder wasn't pleased to give it up. It contained devilish things, he said.”

“Floppy disks?” Joanna asked, puzzled at this construction of the diabolical.

“To the pure, all things are pure,” Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus' best soothsayer voice, “and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.”

The Regent sniffed. “Evidently most of the wizards in Peelbone's custody escaped in the confusion you caused. He suspects deep plots.”

Antryg's hand moved for the door handle, and the Prince's small, white fingers touched his frayed sleeve ruffle. The blue eyes gleamed strangely in the gray-white light of the outer attic's small, round windows.

“And so help me, if by some chance he is right,” Pharos added softly, “you will long for the death my father ordered for you as a man in the desert longs for water. Do you understand?”

Antryg was silent for a moment, like a man standing with one foot in a trap not yet sprung. Afraid of the Prince's suspicions? wondered Joanna, prey to the now-familiar sensation of being torn between her affection for him and her better judgment. Or of something else?

In the end he said nothing, but silently turned, opened the door, and ducked under its low lintel to enter the attic beyond.

Dust sparkled faintly in the still air of that long, low-ceilinged room. The place reminded Joanna uncomfortably of the other attic from which they had taken these things, with ceiling and walls splattered with their creator's blood. This room was over twice as long, its far end heaped up with a vast tangle of heavy furniture in dark wood, with closed chests and occasional bolts of thick cloth whose nap and weave were unsuited to the stiff lines of current fashion. The inner walls and ceiling were plastered coarsely; the outer one, in which the three square, high windows were set, was the raw stone of the old Summer Palace. Against this wall stood a table, jammed with the gleaming, Frankensteinian coils of Narwahl's experiments, the archaic workmanship of the components making wonderful the prosaic collection of resistors and connectors. On one corner, her purse lay like a dead and lumpy dog.

Walking over to the table, Joanna began to check the equipment over. It was, as far as she could tell, as it had been in Narwahl's laboratory. She traced the leads and grounding wires, set up the tall sparking rods and the hand-crank generator. Amid the chaos, the queer, shining sphere that had caught her attention before seemed to gleam with a baleful halfluminescence that made her uneasy.

Beside her, she was aware of Antryg's silence. She glanced back and saw that his eyes had been drawn to the sphere; there was recognition in them and an uncomfortable enlightenment, but no surprise.

“What is it?” She pushed aside her pink silk sleeve flounce, whose laces had become entangled in a switch. “All the rest of this I recognize . . . .”

“Do you?”

She nodded. “My whole world runs on electricity.” Her fingers traced the sinuous glass curve of a Volta pistol and brushed the awkward brass vacuum pump, but she found herself shying from the evil refulgence of that quicksilver sphere. “Hardware was never my field, but I know enough about it not to electrocute myself changing the chips on a breadboard-and Gary is a hardware man. So I know what Narwahl was doing. But that-that thing . . .”

As with her bizarre depressions, before she had realized they were something thrust upon her by an outside force, she found herself unwilling to speak of the loathing she felt for it. What has no name isn't real, she thought. She looked for confirmation of her repulsion in the wizard's eyes.

“Yes,” Antryg said softly. He pushed up his spectacles and came forward to where she stood beside the table. “Yes, it is evil. An implement of forbidden magic. Making such spheres is forbidden; passing on to others the knowledge of their making is punishable by the Council by death.”

“Why?” Even as she asked, she wondered why she wasn't startled to hear it.

“It is called a teles.” Antryg's long, light fingers brushed the gleaming surface of the ball. “They have many uses. Suraklin used them . . . .” He hesitated on his ancient master's name, and an expression flickered through his eyes of some old horror, as if he had unexpectedly touched an unhealed wound in his mind. He recovered quickly and went on, “Suraklin linked them into the energy-lines and used them to extend his power over territory beyond his line of sight. He could control . . .” He hesitated again, frowning, and then glanced at the prince who stood in silence, framed in the attic doorway. Kanner, as always, loomed like a crimson shadow in the half-light of the hall beyond. “By the way, Pharos, what is the longitudinal coordinate of the palace?”

“What?”
The Prince stared at him as if he had taken leave of his senses -which, of course, Joanna thought with irrelevant frivolity, he had, but that had been a long time ago.

“The longitudinal coordinate of the palace. Because, if I recall correctly, the energy-line marked by the Devil's Road runs through Angelshand, with a crossing-node of the Kymil line at the old stone circle on Tilrattin Island up the river. Suraklin . . .” He fell silent again, his hand resting on the side of the silvery teles ball. The high, sharp sunlight glinted on the fractured lens of his spectacles and touched Joanna's fingers on the table without warmth.

“Suraklin,” Pharos echoed. “Always, we return to the Dark Mage.”

Antryg's eyes flicked back to the prince. In them she saw again that braced look, as if he knew he walked among his foes. With a forced lightness he said, “Well, Suraklin wasn't the only one who knew how to make them, of course.”

“Presumably,” Pharos said softly, “he taught you.”

“Oh, yes,” Antryg agreed equably. “But it's a tedious and exhausting process. One's laid up for weeks afterward. Suraklin mostly used old ones that others had made centuries before. This one's very old.” Joanna shivered as he picked it up, handling it with the tips of his fingers. “Suraklin had some that were thousands of years old and that had been absorbing power from the wages who touched them until they almost had voices of their own. No one really understands them well. Suraklin certainly didn't. But then, he used a lot of things he didn't understand properly. It was,” he added, with a sudden hardness in his voice, “one of the things which made him so dangerous.”

Pharos' voice was suspicious. “But how did Narwahl come to have one? My father . . .” He stammered on the words lightly. “They should have been destroyed when Suraklin's power was broken.”

“Indubitably.” In a billow of coat skirts Antryg turned with swift, sudden lightness and hurled the teles at the stone wall like a volleyball center spiking down over the net. Joanna flinched with the involuntary reaction as one flinches in the quarter-second between the dropping of a light bulb and its explosion on a concrete floor, but the teles did not break. It hit the stone with a queer, terrible ringing noise and bounced sharply back into Antryg's hands. The ringing seemed to vibrate horribly on in Joanna's skull. “If you can figure out a way to destroy a teles, the Council will be delighted to hear about it. And in any case, this one may not have been one of Suraklin's. My guess is that Narwahl got it from Salteris. According to Caris, they were friends. Obviously, if Narwahl told Salteris enough for him to use electricity against the abomination at Kymil, Narwahl was using Salteris' help and advice for-what?”

“Experiments with the effects of electricity on magic?” Joanna guessed. She touched the concave metal bed in which the teles had rested. Copper wires led out of it, their ends twisted, showing they had been joined to other leads. “Does electricity have an effect on magic?”

“I haven't the faintest idea.” Antryg set the teles back in its bed and looked over the tangle of wires and resistors with interested eyes. “I shouldn't think so. I've worked magic during lightning storms; and, according to the scientific journals I've read, not only is lightning electricity, but the air is charged with it at such times.” He tracked a pair of wires to the generator and experimentally turned the crank.

“Hold on,” Joanna said. “That's not connected to anything yet.” She found the leads to the sparking rods and twisted the wires in pairs. Pharos, who had remained warily in the doorway, stepped forward, but drew back again as Antryg started turning the small generator crank. She saw the fear and suspicion on the Regent's face, as thin trails of purplish lightning began to crawl up the rods, and said, “It isn't magic, your Grace. If I turned the crank, or if you did, it would act the same. Here.” She pushed up her sleeve flounces and took over in mid-turn from Antryg, feeling the stiffness of the crank as more and more power built up. Ghostly in the diffuse sunlight of the attic, the lightning continued to spark. “Don't touch it,” she added quickly, as Antryg advanced a cautious finger towards the rods. “You'll get a hell of a shock.”

She let the crank go. The iron-wrapped wheel whirled itself to a halt.

“So what was he trying to do?” Pharos advanced warily into the room once more. “Use electricity in some way to contain magic or protect against it? Make a shield of this tame lightning through which magic could not pass?”

Antryg, his hands in his jeans pockets, shook his head. “Salteris would have been the first one to tell him it wouldn't work as a protection,” he said. “In fact, if you stood in a field like that and I was a mage who wished you dead, Pharos, it would be the simplest thing in the world to turn that tame lightning inward on you. Joanna . . .”

She paused in the act of tracking the compression on the vacuum pump.

“What does it look as if he was doing?”

She shook her head, puzzled. “I don't know, but it sure as hell appears that he was running electricity either into or out of the teles. Look.” She held up the wires from the teles' dish. “That means the teles is either conductive or is itself the source of electricity. Is it?”

“Not that I've ever heard,” Antryg said, studying the wires emerging from the generator, then looking thoughtfully back at the teles.

Her fingers shrinking a little from touching the thing, Joanna lifted the teles from its metal bed. Aside from feeling slick and queerly cold, there was nothing untoward about it. She set it aside and examined the connections. “That's funny. The ground wire here's a closed loop-as if it was grounding into itself” Frowning, she replaced the ball, then untwisted the generator wires from the sparking rods and connected the teles to the rods.

Not much to her surprise, nothing happened.

“Closed system,” she said simply. “Read only. Nothing going in, so nothing's coming out. Electricity isn't created out of nothing-all power has to come from somewhere.”

“A sound metaphysical and magical surmise as well,” Antryg agreed quietly. “But on the other hand . . .” He reached forward and brushed his fingers along the oily-looking, slightly phosphorescent surface of the ball.

Joanna felt it as clearly as a sudden drop in temperature-like the heroine of The Wizard of Oz, as if she had wakened after the magic and color into a gray world of black-and-white. She felt sick and utterly weary, uncaring about what they were doing, hating Antryg for his lies to her, for his evasions, and for what he had done to her. He had brought her here and taken advantage of her dependence on him. He would keep her there, stranded in this filthy, dreary world in which she had no place . . . .

The rods began to spark. Lightning crawled up them, faster and stronger than before, bright enough to illuminate Antryg's strange, angular face as he stood looking down on them, his earrings flashing like diamonds in the suddenly sickened light of the gray sun.

“Stop it!” Joanna said, suddenly furious at him for doing this to her to satisfy some stupid academic curiosity of his own. “Turn it off. . . .” Some part of her was screaming, This
is important! This is the key to it al!l But smothered in the effects of the experiment, she scarcely cared.

Pharos pressed his hands to his eyes. “So this was it!” His voice shook. “In these past weeks-the morning I spoke to Herthe at the posthouse and last night-I thought it was only me! Only some new phase of my madness!”

“No.” Antryg jerked free the ground wire, which ran so oddly from the teles back into itself. The lightning died on the rods; and like a cloud from the face of the sun, the cold grief lifted from the room. “The lifeenergy was being drained from you, Pharos-as it was being drained from everyone. Not enough to kill, but only enough to maim in a way for which there is no word.”

Eerily, phosphorescent light continued to gleam for a time from the teles itself, shining wanly up through Antryg's fingers where he rested them on the silvery ball. His eyes were focused on some endless distance. Though Joanna could not understand what it was that he saw, she shivered at the reflection of dread, grief, and a knowledge that he did not want that she saw in his eyes.

“It was the whole course of Narwahl's experiments, I think,” he went on after a moment, speaking as if to himself, his voice nearly unheard in the stillness of that sunwashed, enormous room. “It was for this that he was killed-not because he'd discovered how electricity might affect magic, but because he had discovered how to use magic to draw off the life-energy which fills all the earth and use it to create electricity.”

“But why?” Joanna tucked her feet up under the voluminous masses of her rose and cream petticoats to sit cross-legged on the thronelike oak chair Antryg had fetched for her out of the tangle at the far end of the attic. “Why electricity?” Her eyes went from the enigmatic snarl of glass, copper, and iron on the table to the ridiculous and equally enigmatic face of the man perched on the corner of the worktable beside her.