The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (11 page)

“Magister Magus will know how to remove them,” Joanna said. And he'll do it, she added grimly to herself, or I'll know the reason why. He'd be horrified, of course, as he'd been horrified yesterday when Joanna had told him she'd found an ally in the Regent's wife, but it couldn't be helped. If they were to free Antryg, they'd need forged signatures and faked seals to get into the Tower, and she had a shrewd idea the Magus knew who in Angelshand could provide such things at short notice.

And the notice, she thought, looking around her at the sheets of leaden water and at the desperate, angry faces, would be very short indeed. They were people mortally injured, seeking someone to blame. It wouldn't take much of a manipulator to turn that anger against anyone who might stand in his way.

She stroked Kyssha's fluffy head; the dog lay like a little muff across her lap, Pella needing all her freedom of action to control the team in the flooded debris through which they passed. Clumsy and gawky as the tall Princess seemed on foot in her tasseled and overjeweled gowns, she was a steady and light-handed driver. She was careful of her team, too, getting out and testing the deeply flooded patches of street for submerged wreckage; and restive as they were, the horses stood obediently with Joanna's hand on the rein until Pella had scrambled up to the high seat again.

“I helped train them,” she said, when Joanna spoke of it. “We had a marvel of a trainer at home. He taught me everything he could when Mother wasn't looking. I was always more at home in the stables than I was at dancing lessons. At least no one laughed when I tripped over my own feet.” She sighed, looking out across the team's sharp-pricked cars as she guided them around the broken corpse of a tree that blocked half the lane. “I never really cared for being a Princess.”

Down at the far end of the street, voices shouted, a rumble of angry sound punctuated suddenly by a yell. “Lynch him! String him up! Storm caller—he did this!” Other voices joined in like a hellish chorus baying, “Hang him! Hang the wizard!”

“Oh God,” Joanna whispered, knowing what it had to be. Pella exchanged a quick, scared glance with her, then clucked encouragement to her team, who trotted nervously forward with a hissing swish of muddy water.

There must have been thirty or forty people in Governor's Square, men and women both, mostly laborers and servants. They were rudely armed with makeshift clubs, bread knives, and bits of timber from broken shutters. A knot of black-clothed sasenna clustered around the steps of Magister Magus' house, keeping them back.

“. . . behind it all summer!” a man in the long caped cloak and muffler of a cab driver was yelling. “It's him that called up them abominations, those things setting fire to the houses in the Haymarket! Ruined the harvest, belike, too! And now this... !”

The doors opened. Four sasenna and two men in the narrow gray garments of Witchfinders emerged, leading Magister Magus between them. Around the steps, the crowd set up a yammering like the hounds of hell. Clods of dirt and horse dung splattered against the wall on all sides of the door, and Magus flinched, trying to hide his face against his shoulder as best he could in wretchedness and shame. His hands were bound behind him; even at this distance, Joanna saw the blood-bright ribbon of spell-cord twisted through the bonds. She only realized she had half risen in the phaeton seat when Pella pulled her back down.

“There's nothing we can do.”

The mob was pushing in. The sasenna descended the steps, thrusting them back. Two remained by the door with their prisoner, their crossbows leveled on him, as if they expected him to attempt to fell them with a Bruce Lee wheel kick, leap over the heads of the crowd, and make good his escape. The dog wizard's thin face was white against his disheveled black hair; a bruise was already blackening on his temple.

Joanna looked across at Pella, fear kicking hard at her chest. “It isn't that. My backpack's in the house. It's got the program disk in it, the only thing that can take out the programming in Suraklin's computer.”

Pella's full, square lips pressed taut; her eyes narrowed as she scanned the square and the little group before the house. “They'll need their whole force to keep the crowd off him. One of us could get in the back now before they search the house.”

Joanna's stomach curled up in terror at the possibility of capture by the Witchfinders and the thought of facing the Witchfinder Peelbone again. But she knew the Princess was right. She took a deep breath, “Okay. If I'm not back in...”

Pella handed her the reins. “I'll go. Can you hold them?” And when Joanna moved to make a totally half-hearted protest, she asked, “What can they do to me if they catch me? I'm the wife of the Heir. What does this backpack thing look like?”

Joanna told her and held Kyssha back from joining her as the tall girl sprang down from the seat and pushed her way off through the crowd.

A small black carriage had been brought up to the house doors, enclosed and heavily curtained. Joanna remembered it well. She had ridden in a similar one from the house of the murdered Dr. Skipfrag to the St. Cyr fortress after her own arrest.

The guards formed a flying wedge around Magus, breasting like swimmers through the crowd to get him there; angry fists were shaken at them, and now and then a stick flailed out of the mob to strike one or another on their shoulders. The Magus cowered in the midst of his guards, with the look on his face of a rabbit in a trap. Remembering his kindness to her and the fact that it was he who had helped Antryg rescue her from Peelbone and his Witchfinders, Joanna felt like a traitor.

A voice said close to her knee, “You know he'll be safer with them than he would if he stayed in his house.”

Startled, she looked down. Caris stood beside the phaeton.

“What will be done to him?” she asked quietly.

“Magus?”
Caris shrugged, watching the progress of the melee by the steps with a professional eye. “If Cerdic speaks up for him, probably only a public flogging and banishment. But rumor has it that Cerdic's found himself a new Spiritual Advisor these days.”

Voices rose, and dung and pieces of broken brick rained down on the closed black carriage as it began to move away. A stray chunk of dirt struck one of Pella's phaeton team and the horse flung up its head nervously. Caris caught the rein and drew the beast back down, talking gently and stroking the soft nose. A moment later Pella reappeared, the bulk of her tweed cloak appearing even bulkier with the backpack hidden beneath it. She saw Caris and stopped, her brisk competence fading to awkwardness at once.

“It's all right,” Joanna said. “At least—I think it's all right. But we'd probably better get out of here.” The crowd around the Magus' house was dispersing as three sasenna went back up the steps. One of them removed from the pouch at his belt a bar of red wax and a seal; Joanna suspected reinforcements would be on the way.

“It's all right,” Caris assured her. His voice even and impersonal, he went on, “I've just heard that Cerdic's two ships have been sighted coming in past the Chittern Islands. It seems one of them sprang a plank or something and had to put in at Felwip a few days ago. I don't know what happened with the other, but something similar, some accident that kept them in port in the islands.”

“Dear God,” Pella said softly. Her green-gold eyes filled with pain, either at the destruction itself or at this final proof of cold-blooded perfidy; half-subconsciously she put out her hand to touch the flank of her near horse, as if seeking in the animal contact some grounding to the gentler life she had left behind. After a silent moment, she handed the backpack up to Joanna, swung herself up onto the high driver's seat again, and collected the reins.

Without a word, Caris sprang up to the groom's perch behind them. Still in that same automatic fashion, as if she were handling a car instead of two nervous animals, Pella backed her team neatly, turned them, and guided them across the flooded cobbles of the square. She looked stunned; Joanna found herself remembering that most people in this world only half believed in magic, if they believed in it at all. It was one thing, she supposed, to have a love-spell put on you. It was another to see spells used on that scale with that kind of cold-blooded selfishness.

To Caris, Joanna only said, “Suraklin's staying with Cerdic. He's been helping him win money in the gambling halls; Cerdic will have a fortune now to buy friends with. We don't know, but we think Suraklin means to murder Pharos and get control of the Empire.”

“That would make sense,” Caris said quietly. “He will be trying to protect himself, if it is in fact his aim to become one of these computer machines.” Then for a long time he said nothing, only held onto the brass railing of the groom's perch, staring out in front of him as Pella drove through the flooded, half-empty streets of the town. Kyssha put her paws on the seatback and nosed at his hand; Caris stroked her head absently, as if not truly aware of her presence. Then he sighed. “I found this in Grandfather's house.” He took a revolver from his belt. Glimpsing it there earlier, Joanna had assumed that it was the one he'd taken from her, but she saw now it was a .45, not a .38. She glanced quickly up at his face, and saw it strained and bitter, as if he had taken some scouring drug.

He had wept, she remembered, over the dead Archmage's body, sobs that had seemed to tear him apart. “I'm sorry.”

He shook his head, as if he would say something; but after a false start, he was silent.

Hesitantly, Joanna said, “Maybe if you showed it to the new Archmage...”

“It wouldn't do me any good,” Caris said, his voice quiet but hard as stone. “For one thing, it is not for me, as sasennan, even to have investigated; the Lady Rosamund has already told me that the matter is closed. Then, too, most of the mages have left the Yard. They know the storm was caused by magic. They tried to trace it, but weather tampering is very hard to track. They knew they'd be blamed. After their arrest last summer, even the few who stayed in town have kept getaway bags packed. The last of them left before noon.” He sounded remote, as if it barely concerned him; had she trained with him as sasennan, Joanna would have recognized the tone he used when he was injured and trying to speak around gut-tearing pain. Pella glanced back at him, comprehension and worry in her eyes. “Some of them took sasenna with them, but I was one of the ones ordered to stay as a guard against looters.”

There was a moment's silence, broken by the milky swish of the wheels in the flooded street and the splashing of the horses' hooves. Joanna knew it was an unfair question, but asked it anyway. “And will you?”

He didn't look at her. “Joanna, you don't understand.”

She half turned in her seat, looking up at that tense, beautiful face in the sunless light. “I do understand, a little—at least as much as anyone can understand who hasn't been brought up with that strong a concept of honor. And after seeing the destruction Suraklin has wrought, I think I understand the vows of the sasenna as analogous to those of the mages; that one who is trained to kill can not be permitted to choose his own places and times for it, any more than one who has been trained to alter the physical world by an act of his own will. But that doesn't change what Suraklin is doing. It doesn't change the fact that he's got to be stopped at whatever the cost.”

Keeping clear of the poorer districts near the river, Pella guided her horses through a broad square past a neoclassical domed building that was obviously a bank. Its granite steps churned with businessmen in dark broadcloth like a hosed-out anthill. One young man came quickly down the steps and climbed into a closed carriage as Pella drove past. Through the windows, Joanna could see him, once he thought himself out of sight of his colleagues, bury his face in his hands like a man who has heard the sentence of his own death.

Behind her, Caris' voice was desperate. “Don't do this to me, Joanna.”

Antryg had said that, she remembered, lying with bound hands, waiting for the wizards to come for him.

She did not look back at him, only pleated at the knots of green silk ribbon that bordered the sleeves of last night's ballgown. “Why did you come looking for me, then?”

Caris sighed, bitter and weary, as if he had not even been sure he meant to speak to her until now. “To tell you that the rumor in the Mages' Yard is that Peelbone the Witchfinder left Angelshand this morning, as soon as the wind eased enough to let him travel. He's heading south, for Kymil.”

“Are you angry with Caris?” Pella asked later, pausing in her search for a spill of kindling to light the candles in the rapidly encroaching gloom of her apartments. “Because you shouldn't be.”

“Not really.” Joanna's small hands continued to move as she talked, folding the mountains of petticoats, nightdresses, and chemises whose packing she had taken over after Pella had, for the fifth time, gone wandering around the chaos of the room looking for a mislaid glove. “I know he takes his vows as a sasennan very seriously; I suppose it's like a devoutly religious person being asked to deny God in order to save the life of someone he loves.”

Pella nodded. “Only of course all sasenna are automatically excommunicate—except the Church's, that is. They don't deny God, but they certainly must choose their master's wishes over the Church's without an instant's thought. It's the same reason they don't make legal marriages.” Around her feet, Kyssha and the two lapdogs played hide-and-seek among the lace ruffles of half a dozen petticoats tossed carelessly on the floor. “You know it is in the Council's power to have him killed for disobedience?”

“I know if a sasennan becomes—flawed, or crippled, he's supposed to kill himself,” Joanna said slowly, thinking of the Regent's deaf servant Kanner. “But I don't think that fear was a factor in Caris' decision to stay here.”

“No,” Pella agreed quietly. Forgetting her quest for illumination, she returned to the dense shadows of the bed and helped Joanna dump the latest heap of lace-edged lawn into the trunk at her side. “Do we have to pack all this?”

“We do if it's going to look as if you're heading south for a leisurely change of climate,” Joanna declared. In straightforward matters of animals or physical courage or, Joanna suspected, policy, the Princess had a powerful and instinctive grace, like an animal herself; but faced with the nuanced complexities of clothing or behavior, she lapsed into gauchery. Joanna, morbidly sensitive to all the things she herself had been urged to do, felt an overwhelming sympathy. She fished her backpack from the floor and dug from it a notebook, from which she ripped half a page. She twisted the paper into a makeshift spill and handed it to Pella, who remembered what she was about and hurried to the fireplace to touch one end to the small blaze there. “The minute it's light enough and we're away from Angelshand, we're going to leave it behind with the baggage wagons and go on in your phaeton, remember.”