The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (10 page)

Caris' fisted hands tightened until the bones hurt.

And Suraklin had gotten away with it.
He was still at large. Bound by his vows to the Council, there was nothing Caris could do.

Though the storm-darkness still blotted the windows, Caris knew it would soon be time for morning training with the other sasenna. Quietly, he wrapped both guns in the oiled cloth, along with the bullets. Then he rose and slipped the catch from a window nearby, to account for the rainwater that had dripped from his clothes. Retracing his steps to the window at the back of the house, he scrambled out again into the storm, taking guns and bullets with him.

The storm, the worst in human memory, lasted until early the following afternoon. Joanna watched its fury from the secrecy of a small boudoir attached to Princess Pellicida's rooms in the north wing of the Imperial Palace, a hidden love nest furnished for some forgotten princely mistress of the last generation and enterable only through a hinged wall panel near the head of Pella's bed. The previous night she and the Regent's wife had arranged to meet at a masked ball at the merchant prince Calve Dirham's extensive townhouse near the palace park. They had talked until nearly four in the morning, watching Prince Cerdic, who probably believed himself incognito behind a mask of seashells and pearls, winning thousands of Imperial Eagle coins in the gambling rooms while Suraklin had looked on, his suit of old-fashioned blue velvet and lace transformed into a macabre incongruity by the grinning mask of a skull.

The Prince's streak of uncanny luck at cards, at dice, and at roulette Dirham's gaming room had boasted a roulette wheel, which for some reason reminded Joanna of the arcade-size videogame which Gary Fairchild had made available to his guests—had lasted for four hours, causing Joanna to remark, “I bet that's the real reason they outlawed wizards meddling in human affairs.” She'd seen Cerdic's old suit of magic-proof armor, and wondered facetiously if there existed, in the attics of the nobility, na-aar roulette wheels, dice, and card decks.

It was not until this morning that she understood the true reason.

By the time she and Pella had discussed plans for freeing Antryg, the wind had begun—violent, unseasonable, arctic. Rather than have Joanna go seeking a cab in the pouring rain or scandalize the entire servant population into an orgy of gossip by instructing Pellicida's coachman to drive to Magister Magus' house, Pella had offered her the hospitality of the little hideaway in her suite. “You don't have to worry about Pharos,” the Princess said, as the carriage had pulled away from Dirham's in the pitch-black, screaming darkness. “He stays in his own palace. I'm told he's even given his paramour Leynart rooms there.”

Joanna had laughed. “I don't imagine Pharos even knows where your rooms are.”

Beneath the trailing black-and-white feathers of the mask she still wore, Pella's mouth had tightened. She looked away. Her voice sounded very small. “He does.”

Joanna blushed hotly in the darkness of the coach. Whatever brief honeymoon this girl had known with the Regent, Joanna thought, as a first experience Pharos would undoubtedly tie for last with Jack the Ripper. No wonder Suraklin had found her easy prey. As they drove slowly through the palace park, blind with the rain and stopping continually as huge branches and even young trees were literally ripped from their roots to come careening like drunken witches through the howling air, Joanna could see the dim lights of the Regent's palace, glimmering through the thick trees that hemmed it in. She wondered if he were in his study reading a good book—the Marquis de Sade, for preference—or merely spending a quiet evening in the basement, whipping his servants.

“I wish it didn't matter to me,” that sweet, curiously husky voice went on after a long time of silence. “I wish I could just—I don't know. Shut my eyes and not care whether someone murdered him or not. Then I could be rid of him, and not—not have to put up with... with all this.” She sighed, and looked back at Joanna, her white wig, mingled with the long black feathers of the concealing mask she wore, starkly pale against the dusky oval of her face in the reflected glow of the carnage lamps. “The thing is, I know he's a good ruler. I've seen good rule at home. Senterwing isn't a very large country, but Uncle Tye makes the most of what he has. He's always spoken well of Pharos' policies. Pharos understands trade and industry and all the things landholders aren't supposed to concern themselves with. That's why he married me, because Senterwing is a country of factories and banks. It's just that—I suppose being a good ruler is different from being a good man.”

“I know,” Joanna said. “And as a matter of fact, it's because he's a good ruler—or a strong ruler, anyway—that Suraklin wants to get rid of him and put Cerdic on the throne. Cerdic would sure as hell let him run the country.”

Pellicida sighed. “It sounds—I don't know, pompous I suppose—to say so, but it's one reason I want to help you. It isn't fashionable here to be concerned about it, but I was brought up to believe in good rulership. So much depends on it.” She toyed with her fan, her big, awkward hands dwarfing the delicate confection of ivory and silk, keeping her eyes on it rather than meeting Joanna's. Silhouetted against the sodden gloom, her strong-featured face seemed older than its eighteen years, momentarily the face of a woman and a queen. Then she ducked her head—Joanna sensed rather than saw her blotchy, unbecoming blush. “And then these times of deadness, these drained patches, that you say are caused by this machine of Suraklin's... One of them took place not too long after I let him seduce me. I came very close to killing myself then. Not out of guilt—not really. Just a kind of hopelessness. It seemed to me that from then on there would be nothing else for me but that, going from lover to lover because there was nothing else to do here. It all seemed so stale and dirty. And I wonder how many other people have felt like that during those times, and how many went through with it?”

The Princess was out when Joanna woke. It was eleven o'clock by the digital watch stashed in the pockets of her petticoats and by the delicate ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, but there was a covered breakfast tray in the empty sitting room. A fire burned in the small marble grate, warming the little suite; indoor plants clustered near it like fragile children shunning the rough world outside. The place was cluttered and cozy, filled with knickknacks and pets: a cageful of ornamental finches whose aimless twittering gave Joanna a whole new insight into the term “birdbrained”; Pella's two fat pugs about whom Joanna, a cat person, privately agreed with the Regent; and, to Joanna's great delight, a five-foot boa constrictor dozing in wintry torpor in a big glass cabinet built into the side of the chimney. “Mellachior spends most of his winters asleep,” Pella had remarked, tapping the glass gently; the shinning earth-colored coils within did not shift. “They laugh at me around here, but I was brought up with animals. As things worked out, I'm glad I brought them along.”

Wind still ravenned at the windows, though, by the sound of it, the storm was lessening. Pella's two fat pugs, clearly unhappy at the tumult, crouched beside Joanna on the windowseat as she looked out across the devastated park. The naked shrubs had been stripped of most of their branches and whole trees snapped off short, to lie tangled and dead in the slate-colored lakes of the flooded paths.

Joanna pulled more closely about her the overlong plush robe she'd borrowed from her hostess and shivered. Through what little had remained of the dark hours, she'd listened to the rain slashing against the secret room's small, round window. It had come to her then why the interference of wizards in human affairs was—and should be—punishable by death.

The door opened. She glanced up as Pella entered, Kyssha pattering restlessly at her heels. The little dog dashed over to greet Joanna, then to engage in an orgy of sniffing and licking with the two lapdogs. Pella only stood like an outsize bird of paradise in her primrose and green riding dress, her face somber and her eyes filled with sorrow and concern.

Pella was the daughter of merchant kings. Joanna guessed that she, too, had understood what the storm had done.

“It destroyed the trade-fleet,” she asked quietly, “didn't it?”

Pella nodded. She seemed stunned, shedding her enormous greatcoat and shaking the last flecks of the fitful, windblown drizzle from her coarse black hair. “All the first-comers, the ones that would have put in today to get the cream of the market. God knows how many others out among the islands.” She dropped her gloves and her coat, moving as if the loss, the tragedy, were hers and not others'. “Autumn's a quiet season,” she went on. “Fogs and rain, yes, but never winds like that. The whole harbor is one lake of fouled masts; they've pulled hundreds of bodies out so far. They say Calve Dirham hanged himself this morning, rather than face his investors.”

Joanna remembered him vaguely from last night, a jovial little man, vulgar but anxious for everyone to have a good time. Wrath stirred in her, the hot wrath she had felt yesterday while watching Suraklin smiling through poor Gary's mouth. She felt the cold of the window glass breathe against her back as she leaned against it. Her voice came out surprisingly level. “Were any of the ships Cerdic invested in wrecked?”

The Princess shook her head wearily. “I don't know, Joanna. There were so many...” Then she stopped, realizing what Joanna had asked. She stared at her in silence, her hazel eyes wide with first shock, then dawning horror. “That's impossible.”

“Think about it.” In her mind Joanna saw Suraklin again as she had seen him last night—the skull smiling above blue velvet and lace.

“He couldn't, ” Pella whispered. “I know Cerdic's ships were supposed to be far in the rear, but... Most of the fleet was wrecked, Joanna! Hundreds were killed...”

“It wiped out fortunes, didn't it?” Joanna folded her arms across her drawn-up knees, regarding the gawky young Princess in her coat of daffodil velvet, still standing beside the hearth and the gilded snake cage.

"And people who lost their year's income will be turning to a man who has money. You saw how much he won last night, and I'd be willing to bet none of the ships he invested in were in the harbor last night. I don't think Cerdic's going to let himself believe Suraklin did this to buy him power, and Suraklin's probably going to come up with some plausible explanation so Cerdic doesn't have to believe it. But I think that's what happened.

“I didn't really understand before,” she went on, standing up, the folds of the robe falling thickly around her feet, “why the Council would make it punishable by death for the mageborn to interfere in human affairs.” She kicked the dragging weight of the lavender velvet out of the way and crossed to where Pella stood. “Even watching Suraklin making the cards fall right for Cerdic, or spinning the roulette wheel his way... Maybe there are people who'd even forgive a love-spell or two, like the one he put on you. So what? they'd say. But I know now the kind of thing that they meant, five hundred years ago, when they fought the Battle of Stellith over it; I know the potential for destruction of someone really powerful who doesn't give a damn, so long as he gets what he wants. And do you know what else I know?”

The Princess looked at her apprehensively, this small, outlander woman with her tangled blond curls hanging over the robe's gray fur collar, her arms folded over her breasts.

“They're going to find some way to blame it on Antryg.”

“The Prince won't ask questions if I say I'm going to one of the royal residences near Kymil.” Pella deftly steered her chestnut team around the ruins of a chimney which had literally been blown into the street, the long wreckage of brick stretching like a snake across the flooded cobblestones and on into the tangle of glass, broken shutters, and ruined goods in a shop window. “Everyone makes jokes about Senterwing being a swamp, but it's warmer than Angelshand. I can probably get away with saying I can't stand the cold.”

With her black hair braided up under a close-fitting cap and her tall form muffled in a many-caped cloak such as coachmen wore, the Princess was sufficiently anonymous at the reins of her unmarked phaeton. The masculine style suited her far better than her frilled court dresses did; by no longer trying to apologize for her square jaw and wide mouth, she gave them dignity and a kind of severe beauty. Joanna, huddled beside her on the high seat with a cloak covering the elaborately silly gown she'd worn to the ball last night, had leisure to look around at the swamped streets of the town.

Most of them were flooded right across, and the phaeton's wheels threw up little wings of water as it passed servants and laborers working ankle-deep at clearing away the wreckage of broken trees, fallen chimneys, and scattered roof tiles. In the poorer districts of the town south of the river, Joanna thought, the damage would be worse. She remembered the rickety tenements that leaned so perilously against one another and the vendors' stands in the streets. Even in the relatively affluent neighborhoods near Governor's Square, there was a silence, an air of calamity, and a ghastly realization that money borrowed or spent against the expectation of those investments was truly gone.

But in the poor quarters it would not be a question of money, but of husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons, dragged dead out of the broken tangle of fouled spars and lines that stretched for miles along the smokecolored waters of the harbor. It was a question of marginal poverty turning into starving destitution and of cold beds and children who would never see their fathers—or days without hunger—again.

Joanna shivered, oppressed as she had been her first morning in Kymil, by the sense of being brought face-to-face with intolerable situations which she had no power to rectify—except, she thought, by doing what she was doing, by attending to the matter at hand. “Can you get a copy of Pharos' seal?” she asked and Pellicida nodded. For all her youth she had a bluntly matter-of-fact grasp of the essentials.

“He keeps the seal itself guarded, I don't know where. But I have two or three letters from him with it on the bottom.”