The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (7 page)

Joanna used a phrase she'd picked up from the stagecoach drivers on the way to Angelshand and added, “You were obedient to the dictates of the Council when you let your grandfather go to meet him alone, both times, first at the Silent Tower, then at Gary's. Even if he wasn't duping you, do you think your unthinking obedience helped him any?”

The breath steamed from his lips—one, two breaths. His grip didn't change. “When I took my vows as sasennan, I turned my will over to the Council of Wizards,” he said. “Whether your arguments are right or wrong doesn't concern me.”

“Does it concern you that even having Antryg under lock and key, sealed in the Silent Tower under the Sigil of Darkness and driven out of his mind by what they've done to him, the fading of magic, the draining of life, is still going on? If the abominations were Antryg's doing, why are they still appearing?”

“Because he still lives.”
He thrust her toward the mouth of the alley; Joanna pulled vainly against that frightening strength. Terrified at the thought of facing the Council, she forced her mind to focus, not on her fear, but on her rage.

“Dammit, would you act like a man instead of a goddam computer!”

That offended him out of his stony calm. “It is a man who is loyal...”

She finally succeeded in wrenching her arm free of his grip and stood, angrily rubbing it through her cloak. “I've talked to a lot of computers in my time and, believe me, I've gotten more discrimination and judgment out of a six-K ops program than I'm getting out of you!”

They stood close together in the murky shades of the alley, like a fairhaired brother and sister at the tail end of a shouting match. Caris was breathing hard now with fury, his hand half drawn back, as if he would strike her. If he does, she thought, too angry now to let herself fear, so help me I'll rip his ears off.

But slowly, the iron expression on Caris' face faded. Fleetingly, it looked young and troubled—she remembered he was only nineteen—as it had before his grandfather's murder had hardened his soul into the perfection of his vows. Quietly, he said, “It isn't up to me to discriminate or to judge—or even to listen. I know you to be an enemy of the will of the Council. You're here to rescue Antryg, aren't you?”

“You flatter him,” Joanna said slowly. “And you insult me, by the way. I'm here because I know, and you know, that Antryg's old master Suraklin didn't die twenty-five years ago when he was supposed to have been killed. Only two people knew that—Antryg and Suraklin himself. Caris, for the last four years Suraklin was occupying the brain and body of your grandfather Salteris.”

“No.” The flat harshness returned to his voice, the rage to his eyes.

“He told you that, didn't he? To save his own skin. Had I known he had calumnated Salteris so, I would have...”    

“Slit his wrists back at the Tower when he begged you to?” That threw him off balance. She pressed on. “There was a man I knew back in my own world, the owner of the house where we were, the house where all Suraklin's marks were found. After your grandfather died—after Suraklin left his body, imbecile as he left the Emperor's—this man had all the mannerisms and the patterns of speech that I knew in your grandfather. According to your grandfather himself, who else could download his personality from body to body, from brain to brain, except Suraklin? Caris, we got the wrong man. We were both duped. And now we have to stop Suraklin, and Antryg—if we can get him out of the Silent Tower, if we can get the Sigil of Darkness off him—is the only one who might be able to help us.”

“That's a lie,” the sasennan said, his voice like the iron earth of winter. “Antryg murdered my grandfather. He betrayed his trust—he was Suraklin...”

     “Cans,” Joanna said quietly, “wasn't there ever a time when your grandfather—changed?”

     He looked away. “No.... It was because of my grandmother's death. He loved her.” His jaw tightened. For a moment, the grief and anger in him seemed to seethe up beneath the stiff rock barriers erected by the Way of the Sasenna. When he looked back at her, there was something close to hatred in his brown eyes.     “Don't you understand that what I think about it doesn't matter?”

The words came jerkily, as if the very framing of them were difficult. “Your telling me this... I am sworn to be the weapon of the Council and only that. I'm not—qualified—to judge these matters. It is not the Way of the Sasenna to be.”

     Looking up into his face, Joanna suddenly felt very sorry for this gorgeous, muscular young man, this honed and glistening blade. After all, she thought, he had traded in the pain of making decisions for the steady comfort of knowing that in following orders, no matter what they were, he would always be in the right. Pain like that could be turned away from, but it was always there waiting, and now he had no experience in dealing with it.

Her anger at him faded. “I'm sorry,” she said. Turning, she walked away down the alley toward the muddy pavement of the street. Grief and defeat filled her, as exhausting as if she had indeed fought him hand to hand. Caris remained standing where he was, looking after that small, cloaked figure, like a statue, save for the mist of his breath.

Only when she was halfway back to Magister Magus' did Joanna realize that he hadn't, after all, followed his duty and caught her again and only much later that evening did she remember that he had kept her gun.

This is my last chance.
A footman in the emerald green velvet livery of the Prince Cerdic's household opened the door of Magister Magus' anonymous dark carriage, and helped Joanna down—a gesture she had always considered a quaint formality until she'd actually tried getting out of a high-slung vehicle in half a dozen layers of petticoats and skirts. This had better work.

If it didn't, she had no idea where to go next.

She tipped the man the amount prescribed by Magister Magus, that expert in the nuances of Court conduct, and walked up the pink marble steps of the Dower House, one of the smallest of the several palaces which dotted the vast, fairy-tale parklands comprising the Imperial Seat. She found that, on the whole, she felt worse than she had when she'd knocked on Magister Magus' door for the first time. On that occasion at least, she reflected, she'd had the comfort of several courses of action open to her—if not Magister Magus, then Caris; if not Caris, then Cerdic the Prince, first cousin of the Regent and Heir, after him, to the Empire.

She was now down to one, with nothing open to her beyond that, and no way of getting home.

Literally no way of getting home,
she added to herself with a rueful grin, watching the coachman turn the small, single-horse brougham in the drive and move briskly away down the rain-puddled road up which they had come, until it vanished beyond a copse of wet trees. Magister Magus had been horrified by her request to be taken to Court. “Are you mad, girl? With things as they are? The abomination that killed those children in the factory district last night; the rumors in the Sykerst that the religion of the old gods is coming back; the Witchfinders up in arms; pogroms in Mellidane; the Stock Exchange shaky—it always is, in autumn—mutinies on the trade-ships coming back from Saarieque and the Spice Lands; the worst harvest in thirty years... My life wouldn't be worth two coppers if I went anywhere near the Imperial Palaces!”

“But I have to see Prince Cerdic,” Joanna had insisted quietly from the depths of one of the dog wizard's gilded ebony armchairs. “I may not know a lot about Courts and Princes and things, but I do know you can't just walk in off the street and ask to see the dude who's second-in-line for the throne. But he's a friend of yours and he favors the wizards. If anyone could help me get Antryg out, he could.”

“If anyone,” the dog wizard repeated softly. That had been last night, after Joanna had returned from her abortive interview with Caris; they had shared a glass of port in the library while the Magus had read over the various newspapers, broadsides, and scandal sheets from which he gleaned the raw material for his seemingly magical deductions about his clients' lives. “The problem is, child, I'm not sure anyone can help Antryg now. And in any case, I'd hesitate to ask. Part of the secret of dealing with Courts is knowing when to disappear. Now that the Prince Regent is married, he keeps an even closer eye on Cerdic . . ”

“Married?”

“Last month—my dear child, the town rang with it.”

The Regent's high, harsh voice came back to her... that brainless bitch I'm to marry... and Antryg's, in the firelight of the posthouse, Come, Pharos, you know you haven't any use for a woman...

“Pellicida, niece of the King of Senterwing,” the Magus went on. “They say at court his Grace calls her the Black Mare. But until he gets her with child—if he ever manages to—Cerdic is still his heir; and at the moment, both Cerdic and I know it is not the time for Cerdic to be seen associating with the mageborn.”

By dint of coaxing, Joanna had managed to secure the loan of his carriage and a letter of introduction. “Anything else?” the Magus had inquired, with some acerbity. “A team of running-footmen to announce you?
A brass band?
Fireworks, maybe?” But he had flung himself gracefully into a chair before his desk, waved absentmindedly in the direction of the two branches of candles flanking its inlaid writing surface and caused all twelve wicks to burst into a simultaneous flutter of light, then began to write.

His sole condition had been that his coachman wait for her at the gates of the Imperial Park, not at the Dower House where Cerdic stayed when he was in Angelshand. Knowing that the Regent would probably have spies in the stables, Joanna had agreed. Last night, with the rain drumming softly on the roof, this had not seemed like such a good idea, but this morning the soft autumn ship winds had blown again from the southwest, dispersing the clinging mists. The first of the Saarieque trade fleet had finally been sighted, a day or two off the out-islands. Magister Magus, like everybody else in the city, had money invested in their car goes and had cheered up considerably and given Joanna innumerable small pointers about the proper conduct at Court.

It appeared that Magister Magus wasn't the only person in Angelshand familiar with the secret of knowing when to disappear. Pharos' paranoia about Cerdic was evidently only too well-known. After a condescending scrutiny which made Joanna glad she'd invested the remainder of her dwindling funds in a new gown, an elderly majordomo conducted          her to what was apparently the reception room for the better class of petitioners, a sort of long drawing room in oak and red velvet, whose French windows looked out on a vista of wet, brown garden, shivering in             the wind-blown restlessness of the sunlight. The room boasted several          life-sized bronze statues in velvet-draped wall niches, a marble fireplace in which a fire had been newly made up, and not another living soul.          “His Grace is rather occupied this morning,” the majordomo said, with a chilly bow, a statement which Joanna interpreted as a warning that she was in for a long wait. “I will inform him of your presence.” And he departed, bearing her letter of introduction and the sizable tip the Magus had advised would insure its prompt delivery.

At least, Joanna thought, there was a fire in the fireplace, not at all a usual consideration, according to Magister Magus, in the rooms where       the humble waited to present their petitions to the great. Thinking back   on it later, she knew that it should have alerted her that someone else was   on it later, she knew that it should have alerted her that someone else was

Thus the first warning she had was the sound of voices approaching in the garden beyond the French doors. She looked up, startled, in time to    see through the glass Prince Cerdic himself coming up the steps of the    small terrace just outside, looking back over his shoulder to talk to a man behind him.

The second man was Gary.

Joanna was so shocked, so disoriented at seeing Gary—possessed by Suraklin or not, her first impression was that it was Gary—in the context          of this world that Prince Cerdic was actually starting to open the door    before she moved. Her mind was staggering under the realization of what    Suraklin's presence here implied, the collapsing hurt of her last hope and then it was far too late to make it across the room to the inner door.

Her only refuge was in the velvet-draped niche beside the fireplace which housed a heroic bronze of some ancient warrior who bore a startling      resemblance to Tom Selleck, close enough to have reached out and       touched either of the two men as they came to warm their hands at the fire.

     “My dear Gaire, of course he's mad, but why should the nobles care about that?” Cerdic was asking. “As long as he doesn't offend the         Church, retains a favorable trade balance with Saarieque, and keeps the            peasants in line, they wouldn't care if he slept with sheep and pigs, never mind boys.” The young Prince had put on a little weight since Joanna             had last seen him, his round cheeks somewhat rounder against the artful clusters of dark brown curls. But he still had the same pleasant expression in his painted hazel eyes and the same open brow and air of clean,             healthy good looks. Against Cerdic's resplendent mauve satin and clouds     of rose-point lace, Suraklin's dust-colored velvet seemed almost severe.

    
“So far.” The Dark Mage had discarded all of Gary's old mannerisms.

     Even the voice sounded different, though its pitch and timbre were the same. “Nobles favor any man under whose rule they prosper. When they    feel the pinch of lost revenues and when they come to you for money, you'll find yourself a good deal more popular.”

Cerdic nodded in eager agreement. “Of course your investment advice is superb, as all advice from one in touch with the Ancient Powers of   Magic must be.” Suraklin nodded in deprecating agreement. Joanna, in her hiding place and half-suffocated by the heat trapped between the            fireplace wall and the crimson velvet draperies, remembered the young   Prince's slavish adherence to anything Antryg had said, too, and won     dered how she could possibly have considered that kind of unthinking championship anything but moronic.