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

That fat woman was looking, not at what the smith was doing by the fire, but at the doorway opposite, a low black arch of shadows, sinister as the maw of some Boschian beast.

In time, there was movement in that dark, and the fat woman in gray folded her hands over her stomach and smiled.

The man they brought in was taller than all but two of the guards who held him. When Joanna had stood in the circle of his arms, her head had not come as high as those broad, bony shoulders. Framed in a tangled explosion of graying brown hair, his face was chalky with exhaustion, the wide gray eyes in their bistered hollows dilated with drugs.

The big woman stepped forward, her eyes like pieces of chipped blue glass in the pouchy flesh. “Antryg Windrow,” she said, and the prisoner raised his head.

Without his spectacles, Joanna knew he was half-blind. She saw the swooping network of lines-raying back from eyelids to temples and down over his cheeks-tighten as he tried to get her into focus.

“Antryg Windrow, do you confess to the crimes of which you have been accused?”

He drew in breath to speak, then paused. Sweat shone in the torchlight on his upper lip, the preposterous arch of his nose, and the pit of his throat, visible through the tattered collar of the coarse robe he wore. Asleep, dead-fifty years from now, Joanna knew she would recognize his voice in her dreams.

“Herthe, I don't care what you do to me, but please believe that killing me will not remove the danger you're all in. Suraklin...”

A guard behind him did something to one of his pinioned arms; he cried out and the other guard caught him as his knees buckled. In the crazily leaping shadows, Joanna could see that the first guard was Stonne Caris, the Archmage's grandson.

The woman Herthe stepped forward as the guards dragged Antryg upright again. “Do not name your master to us,” she said softly. “And do not think to frighten us into letting you live. You have already signed the confession of your crimes.” Her voice sank lower, cold as poisoned ice. “Is it necessary that, as Bishop in charge of this Inquisition, I require you to do so again?”

He looked away from that flat stare, and a shudder went through his body. His voice was almost inaudible. “No.”

“Do you confess to violating the first law of the Council of Wizards, to breaking your vows to the Council never to use your powers, either for ill or for what seems good, in the affairs of humankind?”

He nodded, still not meeting her eyes. “Yes.”

“Do you confess to attempting to murder the Prince Regent Pharos by means of magic?”

“Yes.”

“Do you confess to the murder of Salteris Solaris, Archmage of the Council?”

He closed his eyes, fighting within himself against grief, guilt, and despair. It was a long time before he could speak; and then, it was only the soundless movement of his lips. “Yes.”

The Bishop signed to the blacksmith beside the hearth. He straightened up, holding in his hands the thing he had been forging. Those of Antryg's guards whom Joanna recognized by their black robes as wizards fell hastily back. Caris, too, a wizard born, flinched and averted his face from it, though he did not release his grip on Antryg's arm.

Panic and despair flooded the mad wizard's gray eyes. “No,” he whispered desperately, and tried to back away; Caris twisted his arm again, brutally forcing him forward. “Herthe, that isn't necessary. The Sigil of Darkness is on the Tower door; that is enough. I can't touch it, can't pass it, no wizard can...”

“Yet you escaped from this Silent Tower before,” the Bishop said impassively. A spurt of yellow firelight winked balefully on the iron collar in the smith's hands, flaring across the crooked symbol of lead and jewels worked into its center. “The Sigil of Darkness is the Seal of the Dead God, the death of power. It should keep you from escaping again until the time of your execution.”

“I won't,” Antryg said, his voice low and desperate, staring at the thing in the smith's hands as if hypnotized. “I swear to you I won't try to escape, only don't... You don't understand, you're not a wizard, please...”

The smith stepped forward, the iron collar in his hands. It took four guards to force Antryg to his knees, to strip back his faded robes, and to hold him immobile by the hair, the arms, the shoulders, while the smith fixed the collar around his neck and soldered shut it lock. Caris was one of them; but, mageborn as he was, even the proximity of the Sigil left him sweating and gray-lipped. Though his grip never slacked, not once throughout did he look at the thing they were fastening against Antryg's flesh. Only when they were done and the other guards released him did Caris thrust the renegade wizard from him, sending him sprawling to the filth of the stone floor.

Every time she had dreamed this, Joanna fought to leave the shadowy corner where she stood to go to his side. It was like trying to move, not under water, but smothered like a fly in the treacly amber of the firelight. Even her cries were stillborn in her aching throat. For a long minute, there was no sound in that dreadful room, save the cracking of the fire, and Antryg's hoarse, sobbing breath.

Then Caris asked quietly, “Why this?”

The Bishop fixed upon him her clammy blue gaze.

In a face still white from the mere closeness to the Sigil of Darkness, the young man's brown eyes smoldered with hate. “He has confessed and been condemned by the Emperor, by the Witchfinders, and by the Council of Wizards. Why take the trouble of binding his powers, instead of killing him now? Has someone on the Council gotten jealous of the Council's rights to judge its own?”

“You are a sasennan of the Council, Caris, their living weapon.” The words came out as flat and cold as her fishbelly eyes. “It is not for the sword to question the hand that wields it.”

Passion shook his low voice. “Salteris was my grandfather, damn you!”

“Caris.”
Ghostlike, the form of the wizard Lady Rosamund materialized in the darkness of the low doorway, the mage who had led in Antryg's arrest. Behind the glitter of her bullion-stitched stole of office, she seemed little more than shadow within shadow, and those gathered behind her even less than that. “You put that away,” she reminded him, “when you took your vows as sasennan. From that moment, you had no grandfather. It is nothing to you which member of the Council has spoken for this man's life, or why. Until that vote changes, he remains as he is.”

Huddled in the shadows, Antryg had turned his face from the other wizards and covered it with his hands, as if by so doing he could hide from them. Twice Joanna had seen his fingers move toward the iron collar, but he could not bring himself to touch it. His whole body shivered. She thought he wept.

The hearth fire had sunk to a bed of rubies on powdery ash. The smith and his apprentice had already departed. In the blood-colored glare, the Bishop gave that crumpled form one last scornful glance and followed, with her black-clothed guards about her; the wizards faded back into the shadows from whence they had come. For a time Caris alone remained, looking after them, his face like carved bone dyed by the sinking embers, motionless but for the somber glint of his eyes.

Then he turned and walked to where Antryg lay.

The wizard was silent. Only by the shaky draw and release of his breath could Joanna tell that he was alive at all or conscious. The rags of his robe had been pulled down off his shoulders; in the dull carmine light, she could make out the angles of scapula and vertebrae under taut, fine-textured white skin.

Caris knelt beside him and drew his dagger. At the noise, Antryg raised his head, struggling up against some great weight of despair. Seizing him by the shoulder, the young man thrust him back against the stones of the wall. Coppery reflections of the fire glinted on the long blade, on the sweat that ran down Antryg's face and chest, and on the evil jewels in the iron and lead of the collar.

For a time Antryg looked, not at the blade that hung inches from his naked throat, but at the sasennan's eyes. Then very slowly he brought up his hands, and Joanna saw that his fingers were all splinted and bandaged, swollen as if every joint had been dislocated. Gritting his teeth slightly against the pain, with the edge of one wrist he pushed back the sleeve of his robe to expose ropy muscle and veins tracked to the elbows with whitened scars.

“Please,” he said softly. “I'd take it as a great favor.”

In one savage move Caris hurled him aside and jerked upright to stand over him. For that instant, no matter how many times Joanna had dreamed this scene, she thought that he would kick Antryg with fury and frustration and hate. But he turned on one booted heel and snapped the dagger back into its sheathe. The firelight blinked on its hilt as he strode into the darkness of the doorway, leaving Antryg lying alone, like a broken scarecrow in the gathering dark.

After a long time, the wizard crawled to his feet. Holding himself upright against the walls with his bandaged hands, he stumbled toward the door and beyond its darkness to the stair that led to his prison in the Silent Tower above.

The bus lurched to a stop at the gates of San Serano, and Joanna got out. The shuddering heat of the day radiated through the soles of her battered hightop sneakers from the asphalt as she crossed the parking lot to Building Six; the empty hills that surrounded the plant loomed like brownish cardboard cutouts in the smog.

You mustn't think about Antryg, she told herself wearily. Not of the lightness of those big hands as he'd taught her to drive Prince Cerdic's carriage nor those evenings they'd spent at the posthouses along the road from Kymil to Angelshand, drinking ale and talking. Not the tones of that remarkable voice, deep and beautiful like some lunatic Shakespearean actor's nor the desperate heat of his lips against hers. That was one thing nobody ever mentioned, she thought wryly—that the obverse side of learning to care for someone was that you couldn't stop caring when it hurt.

     The straps of the heavy backpack cut into her shoulder. It contained a variety of things, mostly bought out of money pilfered by computer from Gary's various illegal bank accounts—bank accounts he had filled by computer theft from financial institutions across the United States. She'd found everything about them—account numbers, amounts, even the break-in program he'd modemed into all those banking computers after hours—in the programs of his personality in the DARKMAGE files. It hadn't taken much tinkering to help herself. Gary and Suraklin between them—between him?
she couldn't help wondering—had done a good deal of evil. She considered it only right that they should finance her expedition to free Antryg—And he is alive! she insisted desperately to herself. He is! and defeat Suraklin's plan.

She couldn't go on fighting him alone.

So she'd bought cultured pearls and synthetic sapphires and rubies, beef jerky and Granola bars, a lightweight water bottle and a six-inch sheathe knife to go with the Swiss Army knife she already had, duct tape, nylon cord, a bundle of plastic-coated copper wire, carbide hacksaw blades, and various other supplies. From a pair of costumers she knew who catered to the Renaissance Faire crowd, she'd ordered a gown made to the best of her recollections that would pack small, but, once unpacked, would allow her to pass inconspicuously in a society that frowned upon women wearing trousers. The thought of passing herself off as a boy, as so many romantic heroines seemed able to do, had crossed her mind, but one glance in the mirror put the kibosh on that one.

She'd bought a .38 Colt Diamondback and a cleaning kit and had practiced until the blasting roar and the kick no longer twitched at her aim. She had toyed with the notion of going to one of the jock hackers she knew for some kind of portable induction coil simply to degauss the stolen computer's circuits; but from what she had read of its specs, she knew its shielding was up to anything a battery was likely to generate, and there was no guarantee she'd be able to tap into the computer's magical electrical source herself. The idea of high explosive she'd simply discarded; aside from the legal restrictions entailed in acquiring it, she knew herself to be far too inexperienced to use or transport it with anything resembling safety.

But input is input. If Gary—Suraklin—could transfer programs from the San Serano mainframe to his new computer, so could she. So in a special pocket of her backpack, reinforced with metal and wrapped in layer after layer of plastic, was her best and most illegal wipe-the-disk worm program.

For the rest, her backpack was jammed with hardcopy. Some of it photo-reduced and Xeroxed almost to illegibility, some merely shoved in at random as it came off the modem-lines that she hadn't even had time to look at. She'd been hacking into the DARKMAGE files for a month; but owing to the sheer volume of them, there had been so little time. So little time, she thought—but more than enough for Antryg to be...

Stop that!
she
ordered herself. Antryg is alive. He has to be. He has to...

And if he wasn't, she knew, with cold and sinking dread, she'd have to stop Suraklin herself.

They'd already shut down most of the lights in Building Six. Very quietly, Joanna moved down the blue-carpeted corridors of the empty typing pools, between programmers' deserted cubicles. She had stolen back into San Serano this way at least twice a week for the last month, and it always brought up in her a variety of emotions; but paramount, horrifying, in her mind was the knowledge that Suraklin still needed her. He had kidnapped her once before when he was planning to take over Gary's body, and knew he'd need a programmer in his universe under his influence to take Gary's place. Rather, he had gotten Gary to kidnap her and had himself taken her across the Void. Had Antryg not been following him, she would even now be the Dark Mage's helpless puppet and slave.

Almost the last thing Antryg had said to her when they'd finally taken him was to warn her. And of course she hadn't listened.

Nearly ill with the violence of her hammering heart, she walked swiftly along those darkened halls. If he met her now, he'd have her, and every step she took closer to the Main Computer Room made her danger worse.