The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (42 page)

He stepped back hastily and shook his head. Then, seeing her startled expression, he flushed a little and explained, “It is not the Way of the Sasennan. We are trained to be what we are, and to do what we do. All this-” He gestured around him at the high tech fixtures of the house, the soft hum of the air conditioner, and the alien richness of the world, “It is not supposed to matter to the sasennan. We are weapons, honed to a single end. That is all.”

She remembered Kanner-remembered, also, Caris' uneasiness at operating without a master, or with only the dottily masterful Antryg to give him orders. In his own way, she realized, Caris was as bad with people as she.

Curious, she said, “But you were mageborn. You were going to be a wizard. Isn't that just the opposite?”

He hesitated, as if it were something he had never quite articulated to himself, let alone anyone else. As he always did when he was trying to say what he really meant, he spoke slowly. “It is, and it isn't. As a mage, one can't give oneself to any of it, either. They say neither the mage nor the sasennan drinks the world's wine, as street-warriors and dog wizards do. So it isn't-” He shook his head. “It isn't safe to sniff at the fumes. At least,” he added more hesitantly, “it isn't safe for me. To be what we are, and only what we are, to put everything into that, is what hones us to a killing edge. Anything else is a softening.”

“The more you do, the more you do.” Joanna sighed. He had a point. It was a definite changing of mental gears to go from dealing with computers to dealing with people, particularly after she'd been programming for hours or days at a time. And indeed, most of the time she did feel more at ease dealing with her IBM than she did dealing with Gary or with any other human being . . . at least, until recently.

Antryg . . .

Not Antryg,
she told herself wretchedly. Suraklin. Suraklin.

Caris turned suddenly. Though he did not speak, Joanna was on her feet and at his side, looking out toward the tiny, ragged outline of the shed.

In the fulvous sunlight, Salteris stood in front of the shed, unmoving save for the wind stirring his black robes and silky hair. After what seemed like a long moment, Antryg came into view above the tawny crest of the hill.

He had changed back into the jeans and scruffy t-shirt in which she had first seen him, here in this house. The slanted afternoon light caught the silver-foil HAVOC across his chest; though she knew it was only the name of a rock group, the word had a grim significance to her, knowing what she now knew. His cracked spectacles glinted as he held out his hand to the unmoving Archmage and took a step closer to him. Joanna thought he spoke; but at this distance, it was impossible to tell.

She could not see whether the old man replied. In her heart she knew her fears should be for Salteris' safety rather than Antryg's.

After a moment, the younger wizard stepped forward and bending his tall form, embraced the old man. After brief hesitation, Salteris' arms came up to return the embrace. Antryg led him gently into the shed.

Beside her, Joanna heard Caris whisper, “No . . .”

She caught him by the arm as he turned away. “He said he had to meet him alone.” She was aware her hand shook.

“He also said that the one thing he feared was Antryg's charm.” He stepped back from Joanna, the first true kinship she had ever seen for her in his face. “I know. I-when I first met him, I trusted him. And I've had to fight all this time to keep from trusting him again. I know.” He nodded towards the silent shed in the puma-gold emptiness of the hills. “Are you coming?”

The air in the patio was hot, in spite of the cooling proximity of the pool. From the iron gate that looked out into the hills, they saw Antryg emerge from the shed and stand for a time, his back leaned against the splintery wood, his head bowed in exhaustion. Caris glanced quickly at Joanna, fear in his eyes; when they looked again, the mad wizard was gone.

Caris, at a dead run, reached the hill long before Joanna did.

Parching and oppressive, the heat of the afternoon seemed to have imbued itself into the coarse wood of the shed, along with the stinks of dirt and old oil slowly baking in the summer silence. Pierced by splinters of blinding light from the chinks in the walls, the shed's darkness defeated Joanna's eyes as she stepped through the open door, but it seemed to her that she already knew what she would find inside.

The Archmage Salteris lay in a corner, behind a crazy pile of splintered plywood and the dismembered parts of a car. He had been laid out carefully, a small, frail form under his black robes. There was dust in his white hair. His eyes had been closed, and his mouth, also, though his face was still a hideous mottled gray-blue with strangulation. Even with the merciful masking of the shadows, Joanna could not deceive herself that he might be somehow revived. She had killed two men. She knew what death looked like now.

The unbearable brilliance of a crack of sunlight outlined Caris' face in gold as he knelt beside the corpse. He stared out straight ahead of him, his face blank with a kind of shock. He had relied on the old man, Joanna realized, as much as he had loved him. His rage at Antryg had come as much from fear of losing Salteris' support as it had been from his fanatical loyalty. He had been able to believe in his grandfather's disappearance, she remembered, but not in his death. He had made himself a weapon for those slender, blue-veined hands. It had always been inconceivable to him that they would one day fall slack.

His face inhumanly calm and still, Caris lifted one of those hands, limp now as a bundle of jointed sticks. He turned it over to look at the white fingers and palms, then laid it as it had been, back upon the breast.

Tenderly, still with that odd, almost wondering numbness, he brushed aside the white silk of the hair and looked for a time at the bruises on the colorless, creepy flesh of the throat.

Joanna thought it was only some final seeking for contact with the old man he had loved, until she heard him whisper, “Why? Was your trust in him so great that you didn't even struggle when you felt his hands around your throat? Could he do even that to you?”

Then suddenly he doubled over, as if some poison, drunk unnoticed, had finally taken grip. The big, well-shaped hands pressed his face, and shudder after silent shudder of grief racked through his body. He twisted aside from the hand Joanna tried to lay on his back and knelt in the stifling dust, hands pressed to his face as if he could squeeze all tears, all sound, all feeling back inside of him, as it was the Way of the Sasennan to do. Barred with sunlight, Salteris' distorted face seemed strangely calm, as if he knew that none of this, nor any further machinations of the Dark Mage, concerned him any longer.

After a long time, Joanna asked, “What can we do?”

Joanna heard Antryg's light footfall in the party room an hour and a half later. Outside the kitchen windows, the afternoon light had slanted further, then taken on the curious crystal quality of evening, as the wind moved the smog further east. She had been sitting and staring out at the changes of the light since returning to the house. She felt empty and cold inside, as if some final illusion had collapsed; her thoughts seemed to have slipped into read-only mode, going round and round until they were exhausted, without producing anything except that, like Caris, she must do what she must do.

But when she heard the footfalls that she knew for Antryg's, it felt as if everything within her were passed suddenly through a wringer.

She heard him pause in the party room. Forcing a calm upon herself she had never known she possessed, she got to her feet, walked to the stove, and poured the water she had heated in the teakettle over the combination of instant coffee and crushed sleeping pills in the cup on the counter. She took a deep breath and conjured again for herself the vision of Salteris' dead, swollen face in the brown gloom of the shed. Then she picked up the cup and went into the party room.

He was standing near the curtained glass of the doors, looking sick unto death.

The naturalness of her own voice astounded her. “Did Salteris find you?”

He looked up at the sound of her voice, and some expression-shock,  dismay, despair of a situation that was hopeless—superseded the misery and exhaustion on his face. He shut his eyes for a moment, fighting some terrible inner weight which seemed to have descended on his wide, bony shoulders, and whispered hopelessly, “You came with him?” Then, realizing that he should not even know of Salteris' presence in this world, he looked at her again and added, “Salteris?”

“He brought me back here,” Joanna said. “He came to me in the garden-he said he had to speak to you. He didn't say why. We went up to the attic but you had gone. So I asked him to bring me back, and he did.”

He closed his eyes momentarily. The lines around them looked as if they'd been put in with a chisel in the discolored flesh. He said, “I wouldn't have left you.”

“I didn't know that.”

He looked so shaken, so drained of all his usual ebullience, that it was absolutely natural that she should hand him the coffee. She had to force her hand to it, force herself to look into his face as she did it, telling herself he was Suraklin. Suraklin! He drank it without a word, grateful for the warmth of it. After a moment he said, “Thank you.” Going to the couch, he sat down as if he had only just recalled that it was possible to do so.

He ran his fingers through his graying hair and seemed to pull himself together. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to leave you long-not even this long. I should have returned earlier than this.” He swallowed, and she saw the muscles of his jaw harden for a moment. “And Pharos would have looked after you, kept you safe. But there was something here I had to find.”

She remained standing in front of him, her arms folded and her heart hammering, but her whole body feeling strangely numb. “And did you?”

He shook his head, a small gesture, defeated. “No.” He looked down, turning the remains of the drugged coffee in his big hands, staring down into the dregs as he had once studied tea-leaves in the posthouses to buy them supper. He asked carefully, “Did Salteris say where he had been?”

“No,” Joanna said. “And frankly, I didn't care.”

He looked up at her quickly, that look she had seen before, with the ruin of all that he had ever sought or hoped in his eyes.

“I don't want anything further to do with this,” she said, fighting to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I only wanted to come home, to get out of whatever is going on. You said once . . .” Her voice faltered. “You said once you'd see I came to no harm. If you meant that, just leave me alone. All right?”

He said nothing for a time, but their eyes held, and for a long moment she had the impression that he wavered on the brink of telling her the truth, of stepping beyond that self-imposed wall and trusting her, as it was still her instinct, fight it though she might, to trust him. Then he sighed, and in an almost soundless voice, agreed. “All right.”

She couldn't help herself. “Will you be all right?” What a stupid question, she told herself an instant later.

He managed the ghost of his old warm, half-demented smile. “Oh, yes.” He set the cup down at his side. “As long as I stay a step ahead of the Council. As long as I can . . .” He paused and shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “I'm sorry, Joanna. But the mark on the wall. .the mark on the wall . . .”

Then he slumped sideways and was asleep.

It was long after dark when he awoke. Joanna was still sitting on the curiously comfortless gray chair beside the couch, her mind blank, her body and bones cold with exhaustion. She almost literally could not believe that she had awakened that morning in the old Summer Palace at Angelshand or that it was only fourteen or fifteen hours ago that she had sat in the Regent's carriage, while he had wept as he'd spoken of his father. It was as if it had happened to someone else.

And in a way, she thought, it had.

The heat of the day had passed off. The party room was dim, illuminated only by the reflected yellow glare of the kitchen's lights. Through the open glass doors of the patio, the smell of chlorine came in off the pool with the warmth of the tepid night.

She saw Antryg stir, fighting his way to the surface of the dark well of his dreams, saw him try to move, and saw how his breath stopped, then quickened when he realized that he could not.

His eyes opened, and he looked up into her face.

“I'm sorry, Antryg.” Oddly enough, she meant it.

He made a quick motion and ceased at once. His wrists and ankles were knotted tight with the plastic-wrapped wire Joanna had carried in her purse and which she'd gotten, weeks ago, from the telephone man at San Serano. With weary irony, she remembered thinking at the time that it would come in handy. More than that, Joanna realized, recalling her own first experience with barbiturates, he must be prey to the grandmother of all headaches. The eyes that stared up into hers were dark with despair and terror, but showed no surprise.

“Caris is summoning the Council,” she said quietly. “Salteris had something called a lipa in his robes.”

His head dropped back onto the cushions of the couch. She saw the shudder that went through him; but curiously, as he closed his eyes, what was in his face was a kind of relief.

“Why?” she asked. “Who were you expecting?”

The bruised eyelids moved a little, but did not open. He whispered, “Salteris.”

Bitter heat went through her as she remembered how the old man had embraced him, just before he'd led Salteris into the shed. Her voice shook. “You know as well as I do that Salteris is dead.”

His eyes opened again and looked up into hers. “You saw?”

“I didn't actually see you strangle him, no-but we saw enough.”

The breath went out of him in a sigh. Two and two, Joanna thought numbly, once again and inevitably equal four. She went on, “But he told us.”

His head turned so sharply that he flinched, and the color drained from his face. In the sidelong light that came from the kitchen, she could see the sweat gleam clammily on his cheeks and the bridge of that absurd nose. “Told you what?”