The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (6 page)

“This is a lipa, ” he said. Looking more closely, Caris saw that it was, in fact, made out of dough. Runes had been scratched into it with a pin or a fine stylus, covering its surface with an almost invisible net of tracery. “Keep it where you can get to it. Should any harm befall me, or should you and I be separated for more than three hours, burn it. The other mages will come.” He pulled shut the strings of the bag again and handed it to Caris, never taking his eyes from the gates of the Silent Tower.

He started to move off again, but Caris held him back, troubled. “If Antryg's a prisoner, he can't work magic against you, surely?”

Salteris smiled. “Antryg is the least of my worries at the moment. No, he cannot work magic in the Silent Tower—but then, neither can I. Once within its walls, I will be only an old man, alone among people whose relations with the mageborn have always been at best a guarded truce. There has been no trouble between the Church and the Council of Wizards since Isar Challadin's time—but the Church is old. They watch and they wait.” His dark eyes warmed with wry amusement. “I should not like to be the first one to hear of a surprise attack.”

Caris looked back along the deserted, perfectly straight road and felt again how isolated the Silent Tower was in these empty hills. Le's words of last night returned to him—how the Church Witchfinders had wanted to burn the Dark Mage alive, and how Salteris had refused to give them the power of life and death over any mage, even the most evil. The Church might say that it forgave, but he knew that it never forgot.

He tucked the lipa into the purse at his belt, and they resumed their walk up the narrow track to the Tower compound. As they approached the gatehouse with its shut portcullis, Caris mentally reviewed the location of every weapon from his sword and the garrote in his sleeve to the hideout dagger in his boot. Glancing back, he saw that, beyond the turning where that track left the straight, ancient path, the old road was almost completely eradicated by grass. Where it passed over the crest of the next hill, he could see that the stones along its verges still stood.

His eyes went to the old man who walked at his side, trying to picture him as he had been twenty-five years ago, when he had led the Council against the Dark Mage. He had been Archmage even then, for he had come young to his power and to the leadership of the Council. His hair would have been black, Caris thought, and the silence that coiled like a serpent within him not so deep. The lightness in him that Caris remembered from before his grandmother's death five years ago would still have been there; the capacity for teasing and jokes that he had loved so well had not yet been replaced by that glint of irony in his eye.

The Bishop of Kymil met them at the gate. She was a tall woman in her fifties who had never been pretty. Her head was shaved, after the fashion of the Church. Heavier than she appeared at first glance, she was robed in velvet of ecclesiastical gray with the many—handed Sun of the Sole God like a splash of blood on her shoulder. As she held out a hand in greeting to the Archmage, she looked him over with a fishy, blue-gray eye. “My lord Archmage.”

Looking past her into the court as the gates were opened, Caris wondered how many of the Church's sworn sasenna were stationed there. Le had said that five of the sasenna from the House of Mages were on Tower duty at a time—Caris guessed there were at least twenty sasenna in and around the small, dreary yard now. The two Red Dogs he had glimpsed stood quietly behind their ecclesiastical mistress, observing him and Salteris with cool, fanatic eyes. The Church called them hasu, the Bought Ones—bought from Hell by the blood of the saints and the Sole God. The less refined among the mages used the feminine form of the word hasur—which had its own connotations.

“My lady Bishop.” Salteris bowed. They touched hands, a formal contact of two fingers quickly withdrawn.

“You wrote that you wished to see the man Antryg Windrose?”

The warriors fell in around them as they crossed toward the tower itself. The place stank of a trap, of the crosscurrents of formality covering the resentments and envy the Church held against the only group ever successfully to defy their law; Caris was conscious in his bones of the portcullis sliding shut behind them. A quick look around showed him that escape from the compound would be difficult; no building was close enough to the curtain wall to allow a jump from roof to battlement, and in any case the drop on the other side was far enough to make breaking a leg a virtual certainty. The air here felt hot and still between high walls of parched gray stone, a bleak and cheerless place in contrast to the hills beyond. The sasenna moved about with somber faces, like most Church sasenna only one step from becoming monks. It was not the Way of the Sasenna to feel pity, but Caris felt it now for anyone who would be held prisoner here for the rest of his life.

At a sign from the Bishop, the captain of the Tower unlocked the massive iron fastenings of the Tower door. It swung open to reveal a dense mouth of shadow, cold even in summer. On the door's inner side, just above the lock, Caris could see an iron plate fastened. Affixed to it was a round plaque of lead, about the size of an Imperial eagle coin and incised and inlaid in some design that lifted the hair from his neck. In spite of himself, he turned his head away, abhorrence clutching at his belly, as if a rat had crawled over his flesh. As his head turned, he saw his grandfather flinch from it also, averting his eyes. The two Church wizards did not even come near.

He did not need to be told what it was. It was the Sigil of Darkness of which his grandfather had spoken, the Seal of the Dead God, which bound a wizard's power like a chain of despair. As the guard carried it away from the door to allow the Archmage to enter, Caris felt for the first time the true power that lay in the walls of the Silent Tower. He knew in himself that not all the harsh discipline of the sasenna could have induced him to touch that Sigil or any door that it sealed, no matter what was at stake. His own powers of magic were small and, he suspected miserably, failing; but through them he felt its influence as they entered those cold blue shadows, with an oppressive sense of horror lurking in the smoke-stained, windowless stone walls. What they must be to his grandfather's greater powers he loathed to think. He understood then why his grandfather had said that he hoped that, after seven years of it, Antryg would still be sane.

At the end of a cold, bare passage was a large guardroom, smoky, dark, and close-feeling in the smoldering glare of torches. The tower was windowless, the air freshened by some hidden system of ventilation that did not work particularly efficiently. They ascended an enclosed stone stair, the treads worn into a long hollow runnel in their center, slippery and treacherous. The two Church sasenna who followed them bore torches. Looking up, his hands pressed to the walls for support on the age-slicked stone steps, Caris could see the low roof entirely crusted with soot.

Owing to the tapering of the Tower, the room above was smaller; but though cluttered and untidy, it was clean, lacking even the stench of the guardroom. All around the walls, boxes had been piled to form crude shelves for the books that filled the place; more books were heaped on the floor in the corners and along the back of the small table that stood against the wall. The tops of these barely cleared the disordered piles of papers burying most of the table's surface; among them Caris could see a pot of ink and a vast number of broken quills, magnifying glasses, yellowing scientific journals, an armillary sphere, two astrolabes and the pieces of three more mingled with the component parts of elaborate mechanical toys. About a dozen cups, scattered through the colossal litter, contained the moldering remains of cold tea. Among the papers, he saw scribbled mathematical formulae and the complicated patterns of the Magic Circles, drawn as if the artist had been memorizing them by rote, although he could use none of them; with them were sketches—a leaf, a bone, the Bishop, the stars at certain times of winter nights, or simply the single many-branched candlestick that reared itself amid the confusion with its long stalactites of guttered wax.

The Bishop stood for a moment in the doorway, looking around the appallingly untidy room with pinched disapproval on her flat, potato like face. Then she said to her guards, “Fetch him down.”

They turned towards a door that would lead, Caris guessed, to another dark seam of stair and a yet smaller, windowless room above. Almost against his will, he felt a twinge of anger at this final violation of the prisoner's privacy. But before the guards could reach it, the door was flung open from the other side, and Antryg Windrow strode into the room in a tattered swirl of mismatched robes.

“My dear Herthe!” Passing between the startled guards as if they had been invisible, he seized and shook the Bishop's hand with old-fashioned cordiality and genuine delight. “How good of you to call! It's been what? Six months? Seven months? How's your rheumatism? Did you take the herbs I prescribed?”

“No!” The Bishop pulled her hand away irritably. “And no, it's no better. I've brought . . .”

“You really ought to, before it comes on to rain tonight. Salteris!” He turned and checked his stride for a moment, looking into Salteris' face with startled gray eyes behind his thick-lensed spectacles. Then he stepped forward and clasped the Archmage's hand. “I haven't seen you in—oh, five years?”

Tall, thin, no longer young, Antryg Windrose had a beaky face in which all the individual features seemed slightly too large for the delicate bone structure, surrounded by a loose mane of graying brown hair and a straggly beard like frost-shot weeds that had been trailed in ink. Crystal earrings glinted in it like the snagged fragments of broken stars; half a dozen necklaces of cheap glass beads flashed tawdrily over the open collars of an assortment of ragged, scarecrow robes and a faded shirt. Behind the thick spectacle lenses, his wide gray eyes were bright, singularly gentle, and not sane. It must have been months, if not years, since he had seen anyone but the Tower guards, but there was neither reproach nor self-pity in the deep, extravagant voice Caris remembered so vividly. It was as if, for him, time had ceased to have meaning.

“Quite that,” agreed Salteris with a gentle smile, though Caris, watching him, thought he glimpsed a kind of wary scrutiny as the Archmage met the mad wizard's eyes.

Antryg cocked his head to one side like a stork's as he returned the old man's gaze; then he turned away. For all his gawkiness, he moved with the light, random swiftness of a water strider on a hot day.

“And—Caris, isn't it? Stonne Caris, your daughter T'helida's boy? You probably won't remember me. You were only about six at the time.”

Caris found himself saying, "No, as a matter of fact, I remember you

very well."

The disconcerting gray eyes flared a little wider, suspicion and wariness that could have been real or feigned in their demented depths. “Indeed? The last time someone said that to me, I ended up having to leave Angelshand in a hurry.” He glanced over at Salteris. “Will you stay to tea? and you, too, my dear Herthe . . .” The Bishop stiffened, evidently not liking being called so casually by her first name by a man who was her prisoner. “. . .and these gentlemen too, of course.” He gestured toward the guards and moved over to the hearth where a kettle bubbled on the small fire. In spite of the fact that it was still summer, the fire was not uncomfortable. The tower was damp, and its shadows cold—little of the sun's warmth penetrated from the outside.

“Is this purely a social call, Salteris?” Steam rose in a mephitic veil around his face as he tipped the kettle into a chipped earthenware teapot on one corner of the raised brick hearth. “Or is there something I can do for you? Within the limits imposed by circumstances, that is.” There wasn't a trace of sarcasm in his voice—he might have been speaking of a prior engagement rather than imprisonment for life. He stood up again, all his tawdry beads rattling. “I'm afraid all I can offer you is bread and butter. I keep ordering caviar, and it never comes.”

The prelate looked affronted, but Caris saw the corners of his grandfather's mouth tuck up in an effort to suppress a smile; at the same time, he was aware that the Archmage had relaxed. “Bread and butter will be quite acceptable, Antryg.”

Antryg turned to extend the invitation to the Bishop's guards; but, at a signal from her, they had stepped into the black slot of the doorway. With a shrug, he took a piece of paper at random from the mess on the table, lighted a corner of it in the fire, and proceeded to kindle the half-burned candles in their holder to augment the sooty torch- and firelight of the dim room.

“My lady,” Salteris said quietly, “may I have your leave to speak to this man alone?”

The Bishop's pale, protuberant eyes grew hard. “I would rather not, my lord. Too often there has been collusion between the mageborn. And my predecessor told me that this man was once your pupil—that it was only through your intercession that he was placed here at all and not executed. As chief prelate of the Empire I cannot . . .”

“She doesn't trust you, Salteris.” Antryg sighed, shaking his head. He blew out the half-burned paper and dropped it back onto the table. “Well, never mind.”

The Archmage had already taken one of the two chairs at the cluttered table; Antryg offered the other one first to the Bishop, who refused it indignantly, then to Caris, as if he had been a visitor in his own right and not merely the sasennan of the Archmage. Refused on both counts, he took it himself, setting his teacup precariously on top of a pile of papers. “What did you want to see me about?”

“The Void,” Salteris said softly.

The candlelight flashed sharply across Antryg's spectacles with his sudden start, his hand arrested mid-motion. “What about the Void?”

“Can you sense it? Feel it?”

“No.” Antryg set his cup down.

“You used to be able to.”

“Outside, yes. In here, I can no more sense the Void than I can feel the weather. Why do you ask?”

Salteris folded his hands and rested his extended forefingers against his lips. “I have reason to believe that someone from another universe passed through it and killed Thirle in the Mages' Yard. Shot him,” he went on, as Antryg's look of grieved shock reminded Caris that he, too, must have known and liked the little herbalist, “Though, when the ball was drawn, it was unlike any pistol ball any of us have seen.”