The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (44 page)

Lady Rosamund had turned back to the patio doors. Beyond them, Joanna could see forms moving, the stray glint of light on the pool, pale hands uplifting and with laborious concentration making the signs necessary to open one last time the gate in the darkness which separated world from world, time from time. Wind moved the gray draperies and lifted back the dark sleeves from Rosamund's arms. It touched Joanna's cheek and stirred in the graying mane of Antryg's hair. Queer and cold, the smell of the Void filled the room with the terror of the haunted abyss. She thought, but wasn't sure, she heard Antryg whisper despairingly, “No . . .”

Beyond the doors lay nothing, an empty gulf of blackness, as if, beyond the frame of curtain and glass, all the universe fell away.

Caris turned his head. For a moment his eyes met Joanna's. Through the wall of his grief, which was already transmuting into a desperate perfectionism of his warrior's vocation, she saw the last glimmer of his regret-regret at leaving her, perhaps his only nonsasennan friend, and at leaving the possibilities of the strange affairs of the world beyond the perfections of the killing arts. Joanna realized she would never see Caris again. When the Void closed up this final time, it would all be gone-the beauty of dawn on the marshes of Kymil, the twisting, cobbled streets of Angelshand, Magister Magus, and the poor, mad Regent . . . .

With a violent wrench, Antryg twisted free of his guards and made a last, desperate run for the room's other windows. He didn't make two strides. Caris and the mages fell upon him like dogs, bringing him to the floor. Caris' sword flashed as he raised it and brought the weighted pommel down on Antryg's skull with a crack Joanna felt in the roots of her teeth. Then they dragged him to his feet again, still struggling, though he couldn't have been more than half-conscious.

In a chill voice Lady Rosamund said, “Bring him.” Caris and the Church mages half dragged, half carried him through that terrible door and out into the eternal darkness that lay beyond.

From where she stood in the doorway, it seemed to Joanna that she could see them for a long time, vanishing down the endless corridor to nothing. She saw a last glint of light on Antryg's spectacles-or perhaps it was only the glimmer of the water in the swimming pool. The air around her was warm again. The wound in the night was healed.

Only what they had been and what they had done remained, tracked indelibly like footprints across her soul.

She realized it was Wednesday. She'd have to go to work in the morning and unravel the hideous mess left by her disappearance.

It was only then that she shed tears.

She knew she could have lain there on the couch where Antryg had been bound and wept all night from weariness, self-hatred, and the stress of shock after shock. But the detached part of her mind told her it was God knew how late already, and Gary would be coming. Of all the people in the world, the last one she wanted to see, to deal with now, was Gary. The thought of listening to that whining self-pity nearly nauseated her.

If only she'd had some proof, she thought, weary at last to numbness. One clue, one way or the other . . .

Antryg could have figured it out. She recalled the blithe, Holmesian quickness of his deductions. It
has been my misfortune to
be a good guesser . . . . Except, of course, if Antryg were really Suraklin, he'd lie.

But the memory of Holmes' name triggered another thought.

She shook her head, telling herself that, for better or worse, it was over. What she wanted to do was useless. But in spite of that conviction, she felt the sudden lurch of her heart as she realized that there had, in fact, been a way to tell.

As she had felt on the island, with the pistol heavy in her hand, she had the sensation of not wanting to know, of wanting to be powerless because then nothing would be expected of her. After a long time, she mounted the stairs to the computer room again.

Only the small orange lights of the surge suppressors and backup batteries illuminated the darkness, with the ruby gleam of power lights and the green luminosity of the clock. She stood for a long time, looking at the doorframe where Suraklin's mark was. When she had first seen Antryg at the party, she remembered, he had brushed his fingers along the wall, not making the mark, but calling it forth, as Salteris had done only a few hours ago. She'd seen Antryg do the same in the hot, smelly closeness of the rooms upstairs in the Imperial Palace-God, had that been only this morning?-and the Prince's rooms last night. The memory was very clear. All her memories of him were. Antryg in his long, black coat and shabby ruffles, passing his hands in wide sweeps over the lacquered paneling, until his fingers paused on one spot or another . . .

Except for one deliberately placed high up, the marks had all been at only slightly different heights. Hadn't Conan Doyle written in A Study in Scarlet that a man will mark a wall at his own eye level?

With terrible vividness, she saw Salteris in this room again, calling forth Suraklin's mark-at the level of his own eyes, six inches below the level of Antryg's.

It proves nothing,
she thought desperately. If
he'd thought about it, Suraklin could have made his mark at the level of his chin . . . .

But other memories crowded back of hands strong around her throat and the hot stir of breath against her temple at San Serano-and then of how, in the alleys near the St. Cyr fortress, panting and exhausted in the silence of the enclosing fog, she'd had to reach up even to put her arm around Antryg's neck so that their mouths could meet.

The man who'd attacked her at San Serano was a shorter man.

Through the open window, she heard the scrunch of tires on gravel. Headlights tracked across the drive, and the barred shadows of the iron fence chased each other over the flickering surface of the pool.

Gary,
she thought, sickened with a bitter distaste. She could hear his voice now: Hey, babe, you can stay here if you want, you know . . . .

All she wanted was to be alone and to cry for hours, not knowing what it was that she'd done.

The Void was closed.

She would never know for sure if Antryg had told the truth or lied.

No, she thought. If Antryg told the truth-if he was not Suraklin that uncaring deadness would return, to drain the life and hope from the world. And by that time, Antryg would be dead. She pushed aside the hideous details Caris had once given her. On the other hand, it might be that Antryg's-or Suraklin's-death would prevent that from ever happening.

She was back to the quadratic equation again, with positive and negative solutions, and no way of telling which was which.

He would have come back to this world, she thought, to find Suraklin's computer, and the teles relays which powered it.

Or, she thought, to find another dupe.

She hated to leave the darkened sanctum of the computer room. She felt safe in the fortress of those tiny, steady lights, as she always had. They were idiots savants, but in their inhuman way far more reliable than anyone she'd ever met . . .

. . . If it was inhuman reliability she wanted, that is. If all she wanted to get out was what she herself had put in.

She heard Gary moving around downstairs and knew she had to go.

Done is done,
she thought. If Antryg was Suraklin, she had just saved the world.

If he wasn't . . .

There was nothing, literally nothing, that she could do.

Quietly, she descended the stairs.

Gary was sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of red wine before him, the glare of the electric light shining harsh and yellow on his soft brown hair and catching like blood in the highlights of the wine. His elbows were propped on the table, his hands folded before his chin, and his forefingers extended against his lips.

Joanna stopped in the doorway, her first thought only that Gary hated wine.

She wondered where she had seen that forefingers-extended gesture before. Then he looked up at her with an ironic half-smile.

“Joanna, my dear,” he said. “I see you've returned. You should probably telephone your friend Ruth. She's been pestering the police of three states to distraction.”

She thought, Oh, God.

And for a moment it was just that.

The only answer to two and two seemed to be four, and she understood then why the Prince Regent had gone mad at the age of ten.

Praying she was wrong, knowing she was right, she was perfectly sure where she'd heard that alien, unGarylike speech pattern and seen that gesture. She knew then why she had been stalked and kidnapped, why Gary had insisted she come to his party, where Suraklin was getting his computer, who his accomplice had been, and what had happened to that accomplice when Suraklin had gained what he needed.

She said something-she didn't know what. She felt numb and halfdrowned in implications that were pouring into her mind like the sea pouring over a cracked wall; her mind revolved back on itself in a single phrase: Oh, God-oh God ohgod . . .

And she knew that Antryg, beyond any ability of hers to find or save, had been right.

The same personality she had known as Salteris-the one who was, she understood now, the Dark Mage Suraklin-was looking at her out of Gary Fairchild's eyes.

Epilogue

A car swept by on victory boulevard, with a rising roar, then a soft swish of retreating tires. One of the piles of cats on Joanna's mangy fake-fur bedspread stretched a hind leg, shook its head, and settled back to sleep. Bright in the darkness of the room, the glowing green list on the monitor screen reached its end: ZYMOGEN ZYMOLOGY ZYMOSIS ZYMOTIC ZYMURGY OK > .

Joanna sipped her tea, and stared at the screen for some moments in silence.

She thought, Scratch one.

With the calm persistence of one who works with computers, Joanna hit the reset key and began again, opening the modem, dialing up the communications directory, hitting the S on the menu to call up the San Serano mainframe. When the carrier tone whined, she punched in, not her own user number, but Gary's, tracked down out of the membership directory.

PASSWORD? swam into the screen.

She hit the break key, and typed BABY.

It was a long shot, one of several breaker programs she'd devised to keep herself amused while waiting for the engineering department to bring in test results when she was working overtime at San Serano. In spite of the fact that the computer at San Serano contained classified information and was allegedly protected, breaking into it was relatively simple. Once into the computer itself, she had only to get into whatever files Gary was using to program Suraklin's mind, memories, and magic, preparing them for later transfer to whatever computer it was he'd stolen, piece by piece, by breaking shipping codes-the computer that would be fed by the teles relays.

She took a sip of her tea, scarcely noticing that the liquid, dark and strong as coffee, had long gone cold. The green glow of the clock proclaimed it to be 3:48 A.M. She'd have to be up at seven, if she were going into San Serano to report.

Gary said he'd covered for her with management, creating a tale of family emergency. His questions to her regarding her actual whereabouts and activities for the last two weeks hadn't been particularly convincing, but it had confirmed in her mind that he didn't suspect she knew. They were the questions she'd have expected him to ask, the questions she'd have wondered if he didn't. He'd even pestered her to stay with him-for the sake of appearances, she hoped, though it had taken all her selfcontrol to conceal the loathing and terror she felt, looking into those ironic dark eyes.

I doubt one person in ten notices . . . S
alteris-Suraklin-had said. In
time, they cease to remember and don't miss what they've forgotten they had . . . .

She wondered why she hadn't realized then that there was something wrong or guessed it when Salteris had gotten them into the Summer Palace by terrifying the Prince's horses, injuring them and undoubtedly earning a flogging for the innocent grooms. Antryg would never have been that careless of the safety of others.

Around her, the bedroom of her little apartment was silent. The cats slept again across the foot of the bed like a carelessly dropped fur coat; the dark leaves of the plants glistened with the yellow reflections of the street lamps outside. No breeze fingered the curtain of the open windows. In the dimness, the flashing of the green cursor on the CRT seemed very bright.

Program Baby didn't take long to run. When it finished, the words PASSWORD INADMISSIBLE were still shining on the screen, the cursor flashing expectantly.

Joanna sipped her tea again and stared at the screen. She was beginning to have a bad feeling about this. Getting another user's number was easy enough-it was getting the password that went with the number that was the hard part. The files had to be there-there was no other computer large enough to which Gary would have access and on which he could devise programs for something as complicated as all of a wizard's mind, all of his knowledge, all of his personality, and his magic. It would also be child's play for Gary to write these programs so that they would lie about their own existence, assign larger numbers of bytes to other programs on the directory so that the discrepancy of available space would pass unnoticed. Joanna had similar files of her own in the mainframe. To get into them required a password of up to eight characters, and therein lay the hacker's problem.

Joanna's first hacker program consisted of all words in a standard directory of up to eight letters. In spite of the vast number of random combinations of 26 letters plus 10 digits available, most users selected some easily remembered English word as their password, and the program was written to try them all in succession, with the sublime, uncaring patience of a machine. In her spare hours at San Serano, it had gotten her into any number of classified defense files which the United States government and San Serano's management fondly believed to be secure.

That in itself took several hours. Her second program was the contents of a “What to Name the Baby” book, since most users had a tendency to select names as passwords-that of a wife, lover, child, or dog. She had a third, with those random proper nouns culled from popular culture: Tardis, Gandalf, dilithium, Yoda, Mycroft.