The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (7 page)

Caris frowned suddenly in the reddish, springing shadows. “And there was no smell of powder,” he said. “No smoke, though it was a still night.”

“Curious,” Antryg remarked softly.

“Caris here saw something that sounds like the Gates that Suraklin used to open in the Void,” the Archmage went on. “Aunt Min thought so, too. Are there wages in other worlds beyond the Void, Antryg, who could open the Void and come here to work mischief?”

“Oh, I should think so.” Antryg looked down into his tea. Salteris was watching that strange, expressive face as the steam laid a film over the thick rounds of the spectacle lenses; but Caris, watching the long fingers where they rested on the teacup's chipped pottery side, saw them shake. “It doesn't necessarily mean he—”

He broke off suddenly, and Salteris frowned, his white eyebrows plunging down sharply over his nose. “He what?”

“He what?” Antryg looked up at him inquiringly.

“The fact that the intruder came through the Void doesn't necessarily mean what?”

Antryg frowned back, gazing for a long moment into Salteris' eyes. Then he said, “I haven't the slightest idea. Did you know that all the wisdom in the cosmos can be found written in magical signs on the shells of tortoises? One has to collect and read an enormous number of tortoises in order to figure it out, of course, and they have to be read in the correct order, but somewhere here I have a collection of tortoise-rubbings . . .”

“Antryg,” Salteris said reprovingly, as his erratic host made a move to search the jumble of shelves behind him. The madman turned back to regard him with unnerving intentness.

“They don't like to have rubbings taken, you know.”

“Quite understandable,” Salteris agreed soothingly. “You were saying about the Void?”

“I wasn't saying anything about the Void,” Antryg protested. “Only that, yes, some of the worlds one can reach by passing through it are worlds wherein magic can exist. In others it does not. And there is continual drift, toward the centers of power or away from them. So, yes, a mage from another world could have opened a Gate in the Void last week and come through for purposes of his own.”

“I thought you claimed you could not feel the Void.” Caris stepped forward, into the circle of the candelabra's light. “How do you know it was last week?”

Antryg regarded him with the mild, startled aspect of a melancholy stork. “Obviously you came here as soon as you knew the problem involved the Void. It's a week's walk from Angelshand to Kymil—unless you took the stage?” He glanced inquiringly at Salteris, who sighed patiently and shook his head.

“Purposes of his own,” the Bishop said suddenly. Like Caris, she had remained in the denser shadows at the edges of the room. Now she came forward, her thick face congealing with suspicion. “What purposes?”

“What purposes did you have in mind?” Antryg dug a long loop of string from beneath the general litter on the table; the multiple shadows of the candle flame danced over his long, bony fingers as he began constructing a cat's cradle.

The Bishop's wary glance slid from him to the Archmage. “To bring abominations into this world?”

Salteris looked up sharply. “Abominations?”

“Had you not heard of them, my lord Archmage?” Her gruff voice grew silky. “All this summer there has been a murmuring among the villages of strange things seen and heard and felt. In Voronwe in the south a man was seen to go into his own house in daylight and was found there an hour later, torn to pieces; in Skepcraw west of here there has been something like a sickness, where the hay has been left to rot in the fields while the people of the town huddle weeping in the Church or else drink in the tavern, not troubling to feed either themselves or their stock. We have sent out the Witchfinders, but they have found nothing . . . .”

Salteris frowned. “I had heard rumor of this. But it has nothing to do with Thirle's murder or the opening of the Void.”

“Hasn't it?” the Bishop asked.

“I scarcely find it surprising that you've found nothing,” Antryg remarked, most of his attention still absorbed by the patterns of the string between his hands. “Old Sergius Peelbone, your Witchfinder Extraordinary, is looking for someone rather than something— if he can't try it for witchcraft and burn it, it doesn't exist. Besides, Nandiharrow and the others at the House of the Mages would have known if unauthorized power were being worked in the land—and in any case, there are sufficient evils and wonders in this world, without importing them from others. Could I trouble you . . . ?” He held out his entangled hands to her and waggled his thumb illustratively.

Irritated, she yanked the string from his fingers and hurled it to the floor. “You are frivolous!”

“Of course I'm frivolous,” he replied mildly. “You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else. And I really haven't much opportunity to be anything else, have I?” He bent to pick up the string, and the Bishop, goaded, seized him by the shoulder and thrust him back into his chair.

“I warn you,” she said grimly. “I can have you . . .”

“You can not!” cut in Salteris sharply. “He is the Church's prisoner, but his person is under the jurisdiction of the Council of Wizards to which he made his vows.”

“Vows that he foreswore!”

“Does a priest who sins pass from the governance and judgment of the Church?” Salteris demanded. For an instant their gazes locked. The wizard was like an old, white fox, slender and sharp as a knife blade against the Bishop's pig-like bulk. But like a pig, Caris knew, the Bishop was more intelligent and more dangerous than she seemed; here in the Tower, Salteris, like Antryg, was at her mercy.

“A priest's sins concern a priest alone,” the Bishop said softly. “A wizard who foreswears his vows not to meddle in the affairs of humankind endangers not only all those he touches, but all those he encourages to follow his example. He can not only be a danger, but he can teach others to be a danger, and if we cannot trust the mageborn to govern their own . . .”

“Can you not?” Salteris replied in a voice equally low. Deep amber glints shone catlike in his eyes as they bored into hers. “Were it not for the mageborn on the Council, it would be Suraklin who rules this city, and not yourself.”

“Suraklin was defeated by the army led by the Prince.”

“Without us, his precious army would not so much as have found the Citadel. Suraklin would have led them like sheep through the hills and, in the end, summoned the elemental forces of the earth to swallow them up. By our dead that day, by this . . .” With a swift move Salteris flung back the long sleeve of his robe. Age-whitened scars blotched his arms, beginning like a sleeve, four inches below his elbow and, Caris knew, covering half his chest. “. . . I have earned the right to say what shall be done with a man who has taken Council vows.”

He turned suddenly back to where Antryg was calmly drinking his tea and taking no further interest in the discussion of those by whose whim he would live or die. “Antryg,” he said. “Has there been movement through the Void in these last weeks?”

“There must have been, mustn't there, if you've seen an intruder,” Antryg said reasonably. He swirled his cup in his hand and gazed down into its dregs. “Do you realize the spells on this tower affect even the tealeaves?”

“I think you're lying,” the Archmage said softly.

Antryg raised his head, startled. “I swear to you I haven't gotten a decent reading in seven years.”

Salteris rested his slender hands among the junk on the table and looked for a long moment down into the madman's wide, bespectacled, gray eyes. “I think you're lying, Antryg,” he repeated. “I don't know why . . .”

“Don't you?” Their gazes held, Salteris' wary and speculative, Antryg's, suddenly stripped of the mask of amiable lunacy, vulnerable and very frightened. The Archmage's glance slid to the Bishop, then away, and something relaxed in the set of his mouth. He straightened up and stood for a moment looking down at the seated man. Light from the candles in their holder, clotted with stalactites of years' worth of dribbled wax, glinted on the round lenses of Antryg's spectacles and caught like droplets of yellow sunlight in the crystal of his earrings.

Then abruptly Antryg got to his feet. “Well, it's been very pleasant chatting with you, but I'm sure we all have things to do.” With manic briskness he collected teapot and cups, stacked them neatly in one corner of the table, and piled papers on top of them. “Herthe, why don't you put a division of your guards at the Archmage's disposal? I'm sure they'll come in handy. Salteris . . .” He looked away from the Bishop's goggling indignation to his former master, and the madness died again from his eyes. In a sober voice he said, “I think the first place you should look should be Suraklin's Citadel. You know as well as I do that it was built on a node of the lines. If there is some sort of power abroad in the land, signs of it will show up there.”

Salteris nodded. “I think so, too.”

For a moment the two wizards faced one another; in the silence between them, Caris was again made conscious of how quiet the Tower was. No sound penetrated from the outside, save a soft, plaintive moaning of wind in the complex ventilation; no light, no warmth, no change. Antryg was not a young man, but he was not old, and Caris was aware that mages could live to fantastic ages. Was this room and the one above it all the world he could look forward to for the next fifty years? In spite of himself, in spite of what he now knew about Antryg, he felt again a stab of pity for that tall scarecrow, with his mad, mild eyes.

Salteris said, “Thank you, Antryg. I shall be back to see you, before I leave Kymil.”

Antryg smiled like a mad elf. “I shall see what I can do about getting us caviar by then. Come any day—I'm generally at home between two and four.” He thought about it for a moment, then added, “And at any other time, of course.”

“Are you?” asked Salteris, in a voice so low that Caris, startled, was barely sure he heard the words. Then the old man turned and, followed by the Bishop and his sasennan, descended the blackness of the narrow stair to the guardroom below.

It wasn't until they were again on the ancient road, shadowed now by the gray, unseasonable clouds that were riding up from the river to cover the town with the soft smell of coming rain, that Caris said, “He was lying.”

The Archmage glanced over at him and raised one white brow.

Caris jerked his head upward, toward the clouds. “He said that he could no more sense the Void than he could the weather. But the first thing he said to the Bishop was that it would rain tonight.”

With a brisk jingling of harness, shockingly loud in the wind-murmuring quiet, the Bishop's carnage passed them by, returning to her palace in Kymil. Counting her outriders, Caris noticed that Herthe had left the two Red Dogs back at the Tower. Through the thick glass of the windows, he caught a glimpse of the lady herself, fretfully rubbing her aching joints as the badly sprung vehicle jolted over the unpaved way. The Bishop did not even spare a glance to the old mage and his sasennan walking in the long grass at the road's verge.

Salteris sighed and nodded. “Yes. I feared it was so. He's hiding something, Caris; he knows something, or there is something he will not speak.” The wind made its soft, thrumming thunder in their ears and lifted the long white hair from his shoulders. The waning daylight glinted in the sepia depths of his eyes.

Caris was silent for a time as they walked on through the dusk. He thought about the practiced ease with which the mad wizard had sparked the tensions between Bishop and Archmage, to make them turn upon one another and cease questioning him. Antryg had said it had been five years since they'd met—Caris wondered how he had known the suspicion would be so easy to arouse, for that touchiness of temper was something which had grown in the old man more recently, he thought, than that. But then, Antryg had known Salteris well.

He glanced back at the windowless tower, its surrounding buildings hidden again by the hills, a single warning finger lifted against the twilight milkiness of the sky. Then he dug in his purse for the lipa and returned it to the Archmage. He was plagued by the odd sixth sense that the sasenna develop, the feeling that there was coming a time when the old man was going to need it badly.

The silence after the print-run finished was like the drop of a cleaver. Joanna looked up, startled as if by a noise.

But the only noise in the cubicle now was the faint, self-satisfied hum of the air conditioner.

Around her, Systems felt suddenly, terrible empty.

In something like panic her eyes jerked to the clock.

6:45.

Her breath leaked away in a small sigh. Not so very late.

You can't keep doing this,
she told herself, shoving off with one sneakered foot against the filing cabinet and coasting in her wheeled swivel chair to the printer to tear off the long accordion of green-and-white paper. The data's going to come in from the SPECTER tests this week, and everybody in the plant is going to be working insane overtime. You can't refuse to do the same on the grounds that you're afraid of the boogieman.

She didn't even look at the graph as she folded it and stashed it on top of the stratified layers of junk on her desk. Her small hands were perfectly steady as she punched through backup and shut down, but she was wryly conscious that she performed the activity in record time.

You can't keep doing this,
she repeated to herself. It's been almost two weeks. Even if they didn't find him, nobody could live in hiding in this building for that long. And they've been over it a dozen times.

But as she stashed her copy of Byte and the massive roll of printout from one of her own programs that she'd sneaked in to run on the Cray, her fingers touched the smooth handle of the hammer that she always carried with her these days. Once or twice in the last ten days, particularly when she was working late, she had had the feeling of being watched, and it came unbidden to her mind that there were a vast number of places in Building Six where someone could hide. The Analysis and Testing building was two stories high, but in most places it had only one floor. Above the labs and test bays loomed a vast loft of space crossed by catwalks where someone could lurk for hours unseen. Joanna knew it well-she had been tempted, over and over, to go there during the periods of gray and causeless depression that had come to her in the last few days, and only her fear of what she might meet there had kept her away. But Digby Clayton, the Programming Department's resident crazy, frequently went there to meditate—and have visions, so he said—and a number of people in the Art Department claimed to have gone up there and made love at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning unnoticed.