The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (45 page)

If not A, go to B.

She rubbed her eyes, dialed into San Serano, and punched through Gary's number. The green letters inquired, PASSWORD? and she hit the break key and ran in that third hacker program. As the pixels shimmered across the screen, she massaged the stiffened muscles of the back of her neck, praying this one would work. She'd calculated that trying all combinations of 36 to the eighth power, at the some ten tries per second of which her small desk computer was capable, could take, 3,265,173.5040 days, or roughly eight thousand years. Usually she'd hit pay dirt before that time, but even if it was weeks, she had no way of telling how many days Antryg had left to live.

When she thought about what she knew she had to do, she was perfectly well aware that she was terrified. Throughout the dark hours of the night, since her return from Gary's, intermittent rushes of adrenaline had coursed through her, making her shiver as only social encounters and conversations with her mother or Gary had done, up until two weeks ago.

Caris had told her once that for all his training in the killing arts, he had never, up until a few weeks before, used his skills to protect his own life. Joanna knew nothing about heroism or rescues, but she did know about the patient phlegmatism of computers. As with the problem of the abominations in the meadow, her mind was breaking her task into manageable subroutines.

First, she thought, get the contents of Suraklin's files.

Then stick close enough to Gary to follow him through the Void. Magic wouldn't work on this side of it. He had to go back through. She remembered Antryg's words about Gary's still needing her and shivered. Getting through the Void might be easier than she was prepared to think about at the moment.

Then—Caris? Scarcely likely. The Prince? She shuddered again, recalling the evil glint of those pale eyes. For all his paranoia, he had put his trust once, hesitantly, in Antryg. He would never forgive the violation of that trust.

She pushed the panic urge to hurry to the back of her mind. First things first. You can't get to C until you've gotten A and B out of the way. Part of her wailed, But they'll torture him, and the cool, semicomputerized portion of her brain retorted that there was nothing to do but what she was doing. Hurrying would only make it last at least fifty percent longer.

She hit the reset button, opened the modem, dialed, and selected the S for San Serano from the menu. When the carrier tone whined, she punched in Gary's user number and stared at PASSWORD? flicking into life at the center of the screen. Her finger touched the break key, to interrupt function so she could run the main hacker program through.

I can't do anything else, she told the sudden, anxious misery in the pit of her stomach. It could take days-breaking into the files of an employee at San Serano whom she'd idly suspected-correctly-of being a CIA employee had taken weeks.

Antryg was in the hands of the Witchfinders. He didn't have weeks.

Whether Antryg had killed Salteris or left him alive, imbecilic as the Emperor was, he'd been extremely lucky that Caris hadn't cut his throat on the spot. Perhaps that's what Suraklin had been angling for.

There's nothing else I can do, Joanna told herself again. It will take the time it takes. There are other preparations I have to make in the meantime. If I'm too late . . .

With sinking heart, she knew she almost certainly would be. There were 2,821,109,907,456 possible combinations of eight letters and digits. Even subtracting the some 60,000 entries from the dictionary breaker program and the baby-name program combined, the number remained astronomical . . . and that was only the eight-letter combinations. It could conceivably be smaller. Eight was only the outside limit.

Then she thought, Suraklin has eight letters.

So does Salteris.

She hit the escape key, and typed, SURAKLIN.

PASSWORD INADMISSIBLE.

She muttered a word she'd picked up from Caris and tried again.

SALTERIS.

PASSWORD INADMISSIBLE.

It had been, she thought, too easy. But the ebb of the rush of hope was hurtful, more so than if she had simply put through the hacker program and gone to bed. Her throat aching, she thought, I
can't be too late to save him. I can't. . . .

The cursor blinked at her in the gloom. Across the room, the window was no longer black, but a sickish gray, surrounded by a frame of inky shadow. The tepid air felt clammy and close. She was sorry she had hoped. She had been a fool-as Antryg was a fool. Magic was predicated upon hope, he had once said. And it was upon hope, upon life, that the Dark Mage's computer would feed, draining the life of the world.

Joanna frowned to herself, something snagging in the back of her mind. She looked back at the screen. She had one more try at manually breaking into the password, before turning it over to the hacker program, and it occurred to her there was one other eight-letter combination someone connected with Suraklin might use.

She typed in, DARKMAGE.

The screen went blank, the green shadows of the letters fading sharply out. Then in the middle of the darkness blossomed the words:

WELCOME TO THE SAN SERANO COMPUTER

Her breath went out in a shaky sigh. Her hand a little unsteady with tiredness, she hit the printer switch. The machine hummed to life with a faint, preliminary whirr.

She glanced at the clock again. It was nearly six-time enough to start that long line of subroutines toward a goal too frightening to think about whole.

She typed, PRINT FILES, drained the remains of her cold tea, stood up achingly, and headed for the shower. Behind her, the printer chattered to itself in the darkness.