The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (27 page)

“The Void,” Caris whispered.

Outside, thin and terrible as the death-cry of something that has long since ceased to be human, Father Del's wheezing voice could be heard, scaling up into a thin scream that ended as if dispersed upon the wind.

Joanna said softly, “He's gone.”

Caris raised his torch again and, sword in hand, led the way into the black cave of the church.

After all that had gone before, what was in the sanctuary did not do more than make Joanna gag, but she heard Caris gasp and choke on the fumes that made the air there almost past breathing. From inhabiting the body of the luckless Father Sweelum, now an unrecognizable puddle in a black habit in a corner, the Dead God had used the flesh of his victims to fashion his own body. What was left over lay strewn across the altar, the chancel, the steps leading down to the crypt. Only the deathly cold which the Dead God had gathered about him to preserve his borrowed flesh intact saved the place from being more hideous than it already was. In the crypt, the swollen body of the Dead God lay, a huge sprawl of carrion, beside a stone niche that had once contained some local notable; dry bones lay heaped in a corner, still bundled in the dessicated shreds of gold-stitched winding sheet. In their place, stretched facedown upon the stone, lay Antryg, one arm extended, his fingers still twined with the Dead God's dissolving hand.

“Antryg...” She stepped forward; at the sound of her voice, and the touch of the torchlight, he flinched. Then his hand came up and groped for hers, seeking the touch of a human mind or perhaps only of living flesh. She barely even noticed what it was covered with as it closed convulsively around her arm.

He whispered, “Get me out of here.”

On the outside steps of the church, Caris picked up Antryg's fallen cloak and put it carefully around his shoulders; Joanna dug into the wizard's coat pocket for his tin flask of gin, which he drank like a dying man receiving the elixir of life. Then with a shaky smile he handed it to her, and she decided after two swigs that there was a good deal to be said in favor of the vile stuff after all. Torches had begun to flicker around all sides of the square as dark forms emerged from the shadow—the merchant Pettin, looking white and scared and Greer the mayor, her face filled with concern and joy when she saw the three demon hunters gathered alive and more or less whole on the steps. Of Father Del Joanna never saw anything again.

“D'you suppose our welcome would extend to a cup of tea?” Antryg asked softly at last, when his hands had stopped shaking. He glanced up at Caris, the old impishness returning to his black-circled eyes. “You turned up with remarkable speed for a man we left back at Alport Hall.”

“Don't be a fool,” Caris said roughly. “I followed you here, of course.” He sheathed his sword with a vicious click, but did not replace the scabbard in his sash. “The only delay was in putting Pettin's bully-boys out of the way.”

Glancing around the square, Joanna identified only two of the merchant's hired men; of those two, one was nursing a closed eye and a lump the size of a pigeon's egg on his jaw, and the other was just pulling the remains of makeshift ropes off his wrists.

More gently, the sasennan added, “And you? Will the Council be able to track you through what you did here tonight?”

“I don't think so,” Antryg replied and pushed the blood-tipped ends of his matted hair out of his face. “I did very little actual magic. Perhaps some, in the—the guiding of the Dead God's spirit back into his former body and back through the Void. Like the abominations we saw at Suraklin's Citadel, it was unable to breathe the air here, but for the same reason the organisms of decay here had taken no hold upon it. But the Sigils draw and transmit power of themselves. They are, as Joanna said, symbolic representations of the mind, in a way; they are fueled, like the teles relays, by the ambient magic all around us.”

He frowned, as some other idea teased the back of his mind; his reddish brows pulled together, twisting the crusted claw marks that scored the side of his face.

Caris stood looking down at him for a moment in the uncertain dance of the torchlight. There was some of the sasennan's old exasperation in his face, tempered by understanding and pity. In a low voice, as if for the mage's ears alone, he said, “You know you can't keep it up.”

Antryg glanced up at him swiftly, but there was no question in his eyes.

“It's only a matter of time before you get yourself backed into a corner where you must use your power or die.”

The wizard looked as if he would have shed this remark with his usual lightness, but hesitated on his indrawn breath and then let it go. “I know,” he said, so low that Joanna almost could not hear. He sat for a time, looking at the battered metal flask still clasped in his stained fingers, tiredness settling on him as if some sustaining inner cord had been suddenly cut.

“My greatest fear was that Suraklin would have heard of the Dead God, and gotten here before us,” he went on quietly. "Whether the Dead God joined him as a willing partner or was overcome and dominated as his tool when his consciousness deteriorated with the pollution of those it subsumed, they would have been a terrible combination. The thing is...

He stopped, his gray eyes staring out beyond the torchlight, beyond the darkness, looking, Joanna sensed, at some additional horror, some piece of the puzzle that had fallen into place. So he had looked, Joanna realized, when in the Prince Regent's carriage Pharos had spoken of what had become of his father.

“What?” she asked quickly.

He glanced down at her and shook his head, his eyes avoiding hers. “Nothing,” he murmured. Then, “Do you think we could talk these people out of a cup of tea, some food, and a bed for the night? I'm chilled to the marrow and like to die of weariness.”

But though Joanna, once they were in the bed of sheepskins and quilts in Greer's house, fell almost at once into heavy slumber unbroken even by nightmares, the last thing she saw was Antryg's open gray eyes staring into the darkness of the ceiling. Whatever it was that his encounter with the Dead God had told him or caused him to guess, she was aware that it did not let him sleep that night.

In the ensuing three days Joanna tried to get Antryg to talk about his interview with the Dead God, but found him silent and preoccupied. In Antryg's case silence, like sanity, was always a relative matter; on the road he chatted of the obscure customs of religious sects, the love lives of past Emperors, and the odder methods of divination; or he listened in absorbed silence to her explanations of computer hardware and the best methods of videotape piracy. But she sensed that, behind this gentle barrage of persiflage, he was worried and frightened.

They came out of the Sykerst and down into the lowland countries east of Angelshand, working their way through the brown valleys along the Glidden toward Tilrattin Island and the node in the energy-lines. She had come to understand that Antryg was not a particularly brave man. Like herself, he possessed far too vivid an imagination to contemplate the final confrontation with his ancient mentor with anything like Caris' singleminded fatalism. He had lived with fear for a long time. Then, too, Joanna realized uneasily, he was the only one of the four conspirators who truly knew what they were up against.

“As far as I can tell it looks like Suraklin knew what he was doing,” she said diffidently one evening, looking up from the heap of photocopied programs on her lap in the feeble illumination of a couple of flickering candles. Antryg raised his head sharply from the makeshift pillow of his pack. She had seen the glint of the candlelight in his open eyes, staring up past the broken house beams that sheltered the abandoned cellar where they had made camp, studying the winter stars blazing above the naked trees.

As they had drawn nearer to their destination, they had avoided for the most part the farming villages; but, having left the brutal winds of the Sykerst behind them, this was less of a hardship. Here in the hedgerow country, too, it was far easier to find deserted barns or the ruins of old chapels or farms. Lord Alport and the villagers of Far Wilden had given them as much dried meat and the thick, heavily concentrated waybread as they could carry, so there was little need for them to seek out farmers who would spread word of strangers in the land.

Antryg rolled up onto one elbow and squinted myopically at her across the candles. “I'd certainly like to think so,” he murmured, falling into the conversation, as was their habit now, in the middle, as if it were something they had discussed before. In the dim glow of the candles, his breath formed a little cloud; Joanna pulled her quilted blanket more tightly around her shoulders and brushed with her fingertips the papers that lay in her lap.

“As far as I can figure it without being a mage or a xeno-biopsychochemist,” she went on hesitantly, “the Dead God's problem stemmed from incompatible hardware-software interface—he'd put his consciousness into the physical brains of beings who were not of his species. I gather he was able to tap into human psychokinetic powers at will—which no humans but mages are able to do ordinarily—but he couldn't make the transfer until the human consciousness was absolutely gone—that is, till the poor yutz was dead. And I suspect he was doing it instinctively, rather than as a learned technique.”

Antryg nodded. “More or less, yes.”

“I don't think you need to worry that there will be a similar problem with Suraklin. I don't have anywhere near all the subroutines of personality transfer—I was just pulling them off the disk as fast as I could, and a lot of this stuff is total gibberish to me—but from what I've been able to tell from the ones I can understand, he's got all the personalities digitalized down to the last detail. You're not going to get the kind of organic deterioration we did with the Dead God.”

The wizard fished his spectacles out of their hiding place in his boot, which stood drying by the fire, and eased them carefully on over the narrow fines of bruises and Caris' stitching that marked the Dead God's final, furious attack. His coat, blanket, and cloak around his shoulders, he edged over to look down over Joanna's shoulder at the endless lines of the program.

“You haven't happened to come across any mention of where Suraklin's put his computer, have you?”

“Not yet.” Joanna wriggled her way under the corner of the cloak he held out to her—though still, the night was icy. “I've been looking for it, but you've got to remember there's tons of this stuff. The copy isn't all that hot, either. Toward the end there, I was just photoreducing it, doing a fast cut-and-paste job and having it copied again, double-sided to save space, without looking to see what it was. For that reason, a lot of it's barely legible, but I had to bring as much as I could. And it isn't anywhere near the whole.”

Antryg grinned ruefully and ran his thumb along the edge of the thick stack of unread papers. “That will teach me not to learn to read English.”

She shrugged and smiled back. “Even if you could read English, you still couldn't read programming—the same way I can't understand the spells in here, even if they are in Fortran. At least, since Gary was doing most of the programming as Gary, the programs are in English—probably because Suraklin couldn't get a keyboard in those hearts-and-flowers you people use for an alphabet. I wonder what language he thinks in?”

She shivered suddenly and muttered, “Oh, damn,” as the bitter, creeping grayness of depression whispered in like floodtide over her soul. Antryg's arm tightened around her, the warmth of it only a ghost, a memory that such things ought to bring her comfort rather than comfort itself. She bent her head wretchedly, steeling herself to endure what might be several hours, what might be the rest of a nightmare-laden night, or what might, she realized intellectually, be the beginning of forever. But she was too drained, too weary, to care.

She whispered, “I don't know how much more of this I can take.”

Antryg sighed and rubbed her back with his big hand. “A great deal more, I'm afraid. Good parasites never kill their hosts.” She gritted her teeth a little and rested her head on the bony hardness of his chest. She had never figured out how badly the energy drains affected him, though since they had become lovers, she suspected they did so more than he showed.

“Salteris—Suraklin—said something like that once,” she commented dully. "That people grow accustomed—that in a few years no one will know what they're missing...

Under her cheek, she felt him startle and raised her head to meet the hard, speculative glint in his eyes. “Did he?” Then his lips tightened and his long, narrow nostrils flared with the first real anger she had ever seen him display. He took a deep breath, almost forcibly releasing his hold on it, but there was still a kind of cold purposefulness in his face as he disengaged his arm from around her shoulders and began to dig through the capacious pockets of his great-coat. “Will you excuse me, my dear?”

Joanna nodded miserably, thinking, as he rose to his feet, l should have known he didn't really love me... and then stopped herself irritably from that old and, she knew, quite untrue train of thought. His decrepit robe nearly black in the starlight, Antryg climbed halfway up the fallen rubble and beams at the other side of the cellar and dug from his pocket an astrolabe he'd gotten from Pella.

“Suraklin thought like that, you know,” he said, making a minute adjustment to the rete and sighting along the alidade at the North Star, high in the frosty sky. “He operated on the assumption that he was more intelligent than anyone else. For the most part he was right, of course, but it led to certain habits of thought. He could never be got to admit that there were things he did not understand.”

He turned the astrolabe in his hand, manipulating the rule on the back. Joanna watched him without much curiosity, having seen him take sightings before in the uncertain glimmer of starlight. Now and then he would turn his head, his long nose silhouetted black against the Prussian blue of the sky as he scanned the horizon. Once he turned quickly at the sound of a sharp rustle in the blackened woods that were all around the ruined house, but it was only Caris, returning cold and wet from his nightly patrol. The young man scrambled down the decayed steps, cursing. “Now I can't even move through the woods without making noise! This is all your fault...”