The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (21 page)

Pella shook her head, missing the impish sparkle in his eyes. “They're going to be searching house to house,” she said gravely. “I can keep my servants quiet about a chance visit, but not if you're still here.”

So they had spent the day sleeping and quietly assembling provisions, and departed three or four hours after it grew dark. In that time Caris had seen seven or eight separate patrols on the hills, and two groups—one of Witchfinders, one of Church sasenna—came up to the manor itself, to ask questions. It would only be a matter of time, he thought, before the place was searched.

They traveled as physicians, Antryg wearing the old-fashioned, dull purple robes of a University doctor, torn and mended and stained with gin, Caris the cleaner, if threadbare, gown of a medical student. To his outfit Antryg had added his usual collection of the gimcrack beads of which he was so fond and the long-skirted olive coat of some nobleman's household cavalry, arguing that the hooded cloak of an academic was wholly inadequate; the worst of it was that he was right. Carts looked down his nose at the scarecrow appearance of his purported instructor, but shivered in the cutting wind.

For her part, Joanna was relegated to the rough, baggy trousers, sheepskin coat, and coarse woolen hood of the lowest type of servant, since she could pass herself as neither sasennan nor student.

“That should teach you to learn to read the wrong languages,” Antryg chided loftily, steadying her over the gluey gray mud of the half-frozen potholes with effortless strength.

“Eat hot death, dog wizard.”

“I fear,” sighed the wizard, “that we shall all do that when—or if—we reach the inn at Plikey Wash this evening. The cooking there is notorious for miles around.”

Joanna laughed, her breath a cloudly puff of silver in the cold.

In the event, none of them was obliged to endure the dubious hospitality of country inns. Raised in the populous Wheatlands, Caris had previously had little idea of the frightening isolation of the Sykerst and the knowledge that, if something went wrong, there was almost literally nowhere to turn for medical aid. For all his decrepit appearance and jangling beads, Antryg was welcomed in every village along their road, to tend illnesses, give advice, and often to repair injuries that had been left to fester all summer-injuries brought about by carelessness and exacerbated by the uncaring apathy of the dead times. Again and again, as Antryg examined mortifying flesh or bones set crookedly because they had been carelessly splinted or not splinted at all, Caris heard that tired refrain, “. . . don't know what I was thinking of, that day...”

And rather to Caris' surprise, the lunatic mage proved to be an excellent doctor as well.

“Won't the Council and the Witchfinders be able to trace you by your use of magic?” Carts asked quietly as the wizard bent over the bed of a small boy, counting the pulse in one fragile wrist. The lantern hanging on the rafters not far over their heads threw little light, but both men were mageborn and able to see in the dark.

“They would if I used magic for a cure, yes,” Antryg replied. “But a fever like this can be brought down with ginger and elder; I asked Pella to put some up in the medical satchel she gave me. If they can keep it down until the ailment has run its course, the boy should be all right.” He half lifted the child to a sitting position, and the boy's thin, gasping breath at once seemed easier. Carts folded the limp pillow and frowned. A glance around the loft where the child's bed stood yielded no sign of spare bedding—the family was a poor one—but after a moment he collected several sacks of peas and seed-corn from their lumpish white ranks along the far wall and stacked them up behind the little boy's shoulders, wadding the pillow in over them. Antryg eased the boy gently back.

“It's pneumonia, isn't it?” Carts asked, listening to the thick wheeze of the boy's breath. “But his mother said it was cowpox...”

“It probably started out as cowpox... Thank you, my dear.” Joanna's head appeared above the crude ladder from the room downstairs. She set a steaming tin kettle down by the entry hole and scrambled up the last few rungs. “Pneumonia is a common complication, particularly in children. Elfdock steam should help clear up some of the congestion...”

“His mother asked me if you were going to bleed him.” Joanna hunkered down beside the bed and looked worriedly at the dozing child. Three days on the road had not been kind to her; she looked worn and tired in her coarse smock and heavy boots, and the greasy yellow light picked out hollows under the pointy cheekbones.

“I hope you told her that I was.” Antryg removed from his medical satchel several bleeding cups and dipped a little of the hot water up in one of them. From his boot he pulled his razor, flipped open the blade, and drew off one of the fingerless gloves that he wore indoors and out to keep some of the cold from the damaged tendons of his hands. Carefully he slit across one of the smaller veins of his wrist, and squeezed the blood into the water. “Astonishing what a mess even a little blood will make in any amount of water. Rinse that round all the bleeding cups, would you, my dear?”

“Aren't you
going to bleed him?” Caris asked, shocked.

“Of course not.
The boy needs his strength, but there's no point in having his mother fret.”

Caris frowned, watching Antryg as he crushed up the dried elfdock and kindled his portable spirit lamp to raise the water to steaming again. “Doesn't bleeding bring down a fever, then?”

“Not in my experience. In fact, the only time I ever bleed a patient is if they are intent on getting out of bed too soon and doing something silly.” He thoughtfully ran the razor blade back and forth through the spirit lamp's flame a few times, closed it, and returned it to his boot. “Remind me to mark the boy's back a little before we leave. Otherwise his mother will never believe me when I tell her to keep him sitting up and let him breathe steam.”

From his coat pocket he took a tin flask of gin with which he doused the wound in his wrist; below the pushed-up edge of his sleeve, Caris saw the ragged trail of ancient slits and punctures that followed the vein back up his arm, broken here and there by the distinct scars of small and vicious teeth.

“You speak as if you were a physician at one time,” he commented later, when they were once again on the endless, nameless road from one minute village to the next. That morning a farm cart had carried them a number of miles on their way before turning down a lane that was little more than a muddy slot in the broken and stony land. Around them, like the flanks of sleeping giants, the rolling land rose to rounded crests hundreds of feet high, barren, monotonous, and cold under a slate-hued sky.

Whitish outcroppings among the dead wheat showed how close the granite lay beneath the thin veneer of topsoil; only by the gradual strengthening of the light above the cloud cover could Caris tell that it was nearly noon. The wind blew from the north, smelling of snow.

“Well, wizards do learn something about healing, though we're not allowed to practice it on anyone but one another, and I've passed myself off as a doctor often enough to learn some conventional medicine. The borderlands of midwifery and granny-magic are fairly wide, if shockingly inaccurate in places.” He frowned thoughtfully at the young warrior from behind his cracked spectacles. “You don't do badly at it yourself.”

Caris blushed a little. “Grandfather...” His tongue stalled momentarily on the name, hate and vengeance and grief clutching in him like a fist. But just as suddenly, he remembered Salteris himself, the real Salteris of his childhood, and the anger in him gave way like melting ice breaking. Hesitantly, he went on, “Grandfather taught me enough to help him, when I was a boy. It was more of a game for me, picking out this herb from that and remembering what each of them was good for. Grandmother was a midwife, too.” He grinned reminiscently. “Even before I became sasenna, I was always getting into scrapes, so I started early learning how to care for cuts and broken bones, mostly my own.”

He fell silent after that, for the memories hurt him in an odd way—vivid not only to the way the old man had looked, but to the smell of warm hay and herbs in his robes and the summer's heat on his skin. Caris thrust them aside, knowing that he could not afford to warm himself too much by those memories, as he could not afford to let too near to him all the dozens of small scenes of the last week that burned so clear now in his mind: the warm breath of the horses on his hands while he held their heads so Pella could gouge ice-balls out of their hooves; the lithe way she moved, like a big, splendid panther, as she mounted the footman's stand; the smoky-sweet timbre of her voice and the strength of her arms around his waist that afternoon in the barn. He had felt bitterly sorry for her, left behind to do nothing but wait and feel the child of an unwanted husband growing in her belly. During the last day between their return from the Citadel and setting forth to the Tilrattin node, he had avoided being alone with her, avoided any but the most perfunctory good-bye.

She had not sought him out. She had understood.

She had trained as sasennan, he thought, and smiled as he pictured what sparring with her would be like. She'd probably be a little slow, he guessed, but she'd have a forehand stroke like the blow of a timber beam. In the barn at Larkmoor she had said, “I know you need your hate...” When he had pursued Antryg through the darkness of the Void, he had known that, if he took his eyes from that flitting, tatterdemalion figure, he would be utterly lost. So it was now. Pella knew what he knew—that facing what he faced, to turn his gaze for one second on anything but the pure, sharp strength of his revenge would be a weakness that could be fatal to them all.

And in any case, any turning-aside from what he was now would be hopeless. Not only could he not afford to think of might-bes, but he knew that they could, in fact, never be. She was Pharos' wife and the mother of Pharos' child. As a recreant to his vows, Caris' life and soul were already forfeit. There was nothing for him but to accomplish his revenge and to die, as was the Way of the Sasenna to die, in the process.

Why then, in this gray journey, did he feel, not the grimness of one who seeks only vengeance and death, but a medley of strange and hurtful joys?

The joy of friendship, unlike the hard-edged and competitive friendships of the training-floor, with this woman Joanna, blunt, uncertain of herself, awkward, and oddly logical with the logic of the computers who for so many years had been her only friends. The joy that he had put aside and almost forgotten in his years of training to be a perfect weapon, the painful, puzzling joy of seeing the lives of others, the people of the villages through which they passed as well as Joanna and Antryg. The joy of a reawakened awareness of life, even now, on the threshold of winter's annual death and perhaps of a greater death to come—his own, his love's, the world's. The joy of watching the last dark stringers of geese hastening south high in the pewter air, of the warm smell of stables, or of Kyssha nuzzling at his hands. The odd joy he had felt, standing in the window embrasure, listening to Pella play the harpsichord, with the candlelight dancing off her over-embroidered sleeves.

For years, it seemed, he had seen all things in terms of the Way of the Sasenna, of defense and attack. Only now he saw them in terms of her—a heifer-calf in a stable where they were forced to spend one night, the way the mist clung to the low ground in the morning, and the sound of hunting horns ringing across the hills the night it snowed. He wanted to crystalize those moments in molten glass, string them on a necklace, and carry them back to her. She, who so loved small beauties and simple things, would have wanted to know.

He knew what was happening and he fought it desperately. He could not, he told himself over and over again in the dark hours of the night, afford to let himself soften even a little, let alone fret himself with worrying over what would become of her, married to her spiteful and sadistic little lord.

By Antryg's very gentleness, he suspected that the wizard knew, and hated him for that knowledge, while silently thanking him for not speaking of it. And indeed, there was little anyone could have said.

Woven in and around these other joys and hurts there was the joy of finally, after so many years, touching and using magic, even the insignificant magics of healing that were all that lay within his scope. That was perhaps the greatest and certainly the most dangerous joy of all.

Caris pretended to himself sometimes that it was all in the interests, as Antryg said, of verisimilitude; he was supposed to be a medical student, after all. As a sasennan, he had learned the cleansing of wounds and the setting of bones, and there was, too, the vast, half-forgotten backlog picked up from his childhood fascination with the arts of his grandparents. From Antryg he learned a smattering of standard medical practice—to diagnose ailments from the different pulses of the body and from the colors of the whites of the eyes or of the tongue and the mucus. But threaded through this knowledge, like ribbon through bone, was the laying of spells upon the various herbs and salts to increase their efficacy and the sigils of healing to be written across the life-tracks of the body itself—matters not only outside the physician's knowledge, but outside the law, matters which interfered, however beneficently, with the ways of humankind.

To work magic at all, Caris found, required a softening of the soul, a listening to all things in a manner different from a warrior's instinctive caution—a dropping of one's guard.

What appalled Caris was that he found it so easy.

“I shouldn't be doing this,” he said quietly to Joanna one evening in the ill-lit sitting room of some isolated manor deep in the Sykerst. Their host, the local squire, and Antryg had gone upstairs to see to the squire's wife, a girl of seventeen, far gone in what looked like a very bad pregnancy. Joanna glanced curiously at the little card of parchment that lay before Caris and raised her eyebrows inquiringly. He had been practicing drawing the Sigil of Air—one of the easier ones—from memory, a sign to summon all the qualities of lightness, openness of the veins and heart and mind, and freedom of the soul. He saw the direction of her look and shook his head, pushing the Sign from him.