The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (12 page)

The Princess froze in the act of touching the lighted end to a candle wick. “The letters of credit for changing horses...”

“I have them here.” Joanna nudged her backpack with one toe. After watching Pellicida's absentminded packing all afternoon, she had taken the precaution of stowing everything they would truly need in various pockets of the bulging sack—the aforesaid provision for changing horses en route, a great deal of money, and a sheaf of letters and orders from Pharos, several of which bore his seal which Joanna hoped she'd be able to remove with a hot knife, once she'd forged permits to get in to the Tower itself.

Returning to the former topic, she went on, “I think it would be easier for one of us to get in to see Antryg if we had a sasennan along to make it look more official...”

“At a pinch, I could pass myself off as a sasennan,” Pella said thoughtfully. “That is, I've had some training. We all did—my cousins and I, back home, though of course, since we would never be allowed to take vows, we were never trained at the higher levels. But I've got a uniform and a sword, as well as a clerk's robe for you.”

“Are there female clerks?”

Pella looked startled that Joanna would ask. “Of course. A man doesn't write with his—er—whiskers.” The spill burned down to her fingers; looking startled, she hastily lit the candle with it and tossed the flaming paper into the hearth. Then she proceeded to rove restlessly around the little bedchamber, lighting the candles that stood in holders of crystal, gilt bronze, and creamy porcelain. “Speaking of writing, I can fill out the text of the passes to get us into the Tower—any clerk would do that—but Pharos' signature is another matter. I was never any good at drawing. Besides, he's left-handed.”

“I think I can manage that,” Joanna said. “At least, I could always forge my mother's, and she's left-handed, not to mention signing her name like a Rorschach test. You know, in a way I feel rather sorry for Caris.”

“Sorry?” Pella bristled.

“He's in an almost impossible situation,” she explained quietly. Elsewhere in the palace, on the floor below, voices were momentarily raised and a hurrying of feet was heard; Pella swung around, her greenish eyes darkening, and she stood frozen like a deer in stillness until the sounds passed away. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” the girl said and blushed again. “That is—whenever my mother went traveling, which wasn't often, my father used to come up to her rooms and bid her goodbye. It 'isn't that I expect Pharos to, but...” She stammered to a conclusion, as if realizing how ludicrous the comparison was.

Her parents must have loved one another a great deal, Joanna thought, torn between cynicism and envy, to have given her such ineradicable hopes about marriage.

She, too, had been listening for Pharos' chance coming, though for different reasons. When she went back to her packing, the leftover adrenaline flash made her fingers shake.

All it would need, she thought, was the smallest suspicion on his part. All it would need was one servant's rumor, one bit of gossip about his wife's new friend. For he would recognize her, of course. He might or might not take out his vicious sense of betrayal by Antryg on her, but whatever happened, at a screamingly optimistic least it would mean delay.

There could be no delay. Not now.

On their return to the north wing of the Imperial Palace Pellicida had been all for ordering a fresh change of horses for her phaeton and setting forth then and there, in the hopes of overtaking the Witchfinder's equipage and holding the lead all the way to Kymil. It had taken considerable persuasion on Joanna's part to convince her to wait for tomorrow morning, as even the most precipitate journey would under normal circumstances. Hence the long and tedious business of packing, of ordering the great traveling coach and a smaller vehicle for the servants and extra luggage, and of sending postriders ahead with orders to prepare Larkmoor, the small royal manor near Kymil.

Much as it drove Joanna insane to watch the failing of the afternoon light—it was only three-thirty—and to know that they couldn't leave for another fifteen hours or so, she knew that it was necessary to avert suspicion. She had no idea whether Suraklin was still with Cerdic at the Dower House and no idea if or how intently he kept track of Pella's movements. Throughout Pella's packing—or rather Joanna's packing of Pella's things while the Princess roved abstractedly around the apartment, looking for items Joanna had already packed—Joanna had been burningly conscious of the slow-moving gilt hands of the mantelpiece clock, half-buried under an orgy of enamel-and-gold nymphs, and of the gathering darkness outside. Peelbone the Witchfinder was on his way south, undoubtedly with the final warrant for Antryg's death in his pocket. At this point, the Council of Wizards was in no shape to prevent it, as Suraklin had clearly intended. And she knew she was doomed to sit in these rooms until enough time had passed for someone to sleep and wake up before she could do anything about it.

Screaming with frustration will not help,
she told herself firmly, with wry and involuntary humor, and will only cause talk among the servants. With the hideous sensation of having her plans ravel once again from her hands, she went back to her packing, wondering how she would pass the night until morning.

It was seven A.M., black as the pits of hell and bitterly cold, when the Princess' huge traveling carriage finally lumbered away. To the last, Pellicida had been listening, waiting for some sign of her husband's coming, some acknowledgment from him that her movements mattered to him, and Joanna had fretted herself nearly ill with apprehension. He had not come, of course. Perhaps the girl did not consciously expect that he would, but Joanna could sense her disappointment and her hurt, ridiculous though it was, and was fond enough of the big, gawky girl to feel sorry for her. She herself had been more fearful that Suraklin would choose that inopportune moment to renew his attempt to seduce the Prince's wife. Then the game would have been up indeed.

River fog had risen to blanket the palace grounds and the city that lay beyond the walls; through it Joanna could see nothing, but now and then she heard the slop and drip of the horses' hooves in puddles and knew that the landscape would be one of absolute desolation. It was wretchedly cold in the coach, in spite of heated bricks wrapped up in the fur robes at their feet, and Joanna watched the soft steam of her breath float in the reflected glow of the carriage lamps. The coach was badly sprung; though the Princess' phaeton, which followed behind, ostensibly for Pella's use once they reached Larkmoor, was slightly better, she was miserably anticipating several days of jolting discomfort. She tried to keep herself from thinking about Antryg, about what would happen to her if she failed to rescue him, or if, having gotten the accursed Sigil off his throat, she found him permanently mind-broken as Magister Magus had feared. She tried not to think of the Magus, either.

He would be in the St. Cyr fortress now, in one of the vermin-ridden cells whose walls, like those of the Silent Tower, were spelled against the working of magic, perhaps the same cell in which she and the tiny, decrepit old crone Minhyrdin the Fair had been locked. It had been his spell, she remembered unhappily, that had allowed Antryg to break her out.

She leaned her head back against the soft plush of the seat squabs and shut her eyes, her head aching. She could think of no way in which she had betrayed him; it was sheer luck that she herself had spent last night at the palace instead of going home to be arrested with him. She could not help him. In fact, tarrying here would put her in danger of arrest herself when the Witchfinders began questioning him, even had Antryg not been facing immediate death. But she still felt guilty at abandoning the poor little quack to his fate.

The jolt of the carriage as it lurched to a stop made her open her eyes. At the same time she heard Pella gasp, and the Princess' big, clumsy hand sought hers under the velvet softness of the furs. Her heart seeming to shrink in her breast to something the size of a filbert, Joanna sat up and followed the younger girl's gaze through the carriage window, out into the blackness of the iron dawn.

Dark against the fog, a black shape stood on the verge of the road; a black cloak fell back from a raised arm. The horses drew up, their breath smoking like dragons' in the cold. Wet gravel crunched under soft boots. The lamps caught the glint of blond hair.

After an instant's frozen shock, Pella opened the carriage door. Caris climbed in without a word, the soft leather of his dagger belts creaking as he slumped back into the seat opposite the two girls. He did not look at them, nor did he speak; he just stared furiously out into the charcoal blackness of the mist as the coachman whipped up the horses, and, with a rattle of brasses and leather, they started forward again.

At the summer's end, Caris remembered, it had taken him and the Archmage Salteris Solaris a week to walk from Angelshand to Kymil, ostensibly to seek the answer to the riddle of the mage Thirle's murder from Antryg Windrose, imprisoned in the Silent Tower. He had made the journey many times before, though that had been the first time he and Salteris had taken that road together. Always, as befitted the weapon of the Council of Wizards, it had been on foot.

Thus his memories of that journey had a slowness to them, in contrast to the hurried beat of the carriage team's hooves and the sting of wind on his face; then there had been the rhythm of afoot pace, the long flux of the amber and cobalt wings of summer days and nights, and the taste of dust and dew. The weather was well and truly winter now, the winds like flint and the roads either foul slime troughs or slicked with ice. Joanna and Pellicida were wrapped in rugs and mittens in the Princess' open traveling carriage, but Caris himself, high on the footman's perch behind them, barely felt the cold.

At times, the rage in him felt so hot that he thought he must smother; at others, his whole soul seemed to be nothing, down to its bottommost depths, but a pit filled with broken black ice. He hardly spoke, although, when Pella drew the team to a stop and jumped down to check their hooves for ice balled in their frogs, Caris sprang from his high perch to hold their heads.

Only that night, when Joanna had clustered all the lamps available on the table of the smoky, stinking, private parlor they had rented at the posting inn of the Plucky Duck to practice forging the Regent's signature, did he say, “Do you really think that's going to do us any good?”

He was weary, and the weariness came out as scorn; Joanna's head came up, her dark eyes hurt and a little puffy with sleepiness. But there was a spark in them, that spark of anger he had first seen in the alley behind the Standing Stallion in Angelshand, when she had cursed at him to act like a man. “If you've got a better plan for getting Antryg out of the Tower, I'd like to hear it.”

Her fingers were chapped and red—it was very cold in the room, in spite of the grimy fire in the grate—and the imitation of Pharos' writing wouldn't have deceived a child.

He didn't, but Joanna's high-handed assumption of command chaffed him like a too-tight sleeve. “You haven't seen Antryg,” he told her bitterly. “I have.”

“It's the Sigil of Darkness...”

“Pox!
It may have been the Sigil of Darkness that pushed him over the edge of madness, but taking it off him isn't going to restore what few wits he may once have possessed! If you can get it off him at all, which I'm waiting to see, in a Tower full of guards. And he's physically deteriorating as well...”

“Whose fault is that?” Joanna lashed at him.

“You're the one who put him there.”

He could see her whole body tense, like the shutting of a fist. In the greasy orange glare of the two or three lamps before her, the thin face seemed to tighten in on itself, cold anger holding itself in. Stiltedly, as if counting out every word, she said, “I know I'm the one who put him there. But there's nothing that I or anyone can do to change things that have already happened. I can't know what to do about getting him out until I've seen him. For that, I need to get into the Tower...”

“And you think they're going to take the Sigil of Darkness off the outer doors to let me pass inside with you? Or that they're not going to ask about you having a mageborn sasennan with you?”

Her mouth stayed clamped shut, but he could see the tears of helpless anger gather in her eyes, and her small hands, that could not even wield a quill properly, shake.

“If that's how you feel about our chances of success, why did you come?”

“Because when you try to break Antryg out of the Tower,” said Caris, quiet but suddenly harsh as broken stone, “Suraklin's going to hear about it. Suraklin will come...” He got to his feet, almost throwing the crude, heavy chair from him. “And then I will kill him for what he's done to me.”

She answered him in a voice thinned with spite, “What makes you think you can?”

He took a step forward, wanting to slap her and hating that new spitfire glint in her eyes “If I can't,” he said slowly, “then at least I can die as a sasennan should.”

Joanna drew breath to speak, then stopped. Her brown eyes, in this uncertain light as black as the coffee cooling in its cup between the lamps, met his, narrow and gleaming; around her sharp face, her hair hung like a sulfury cloud. She said nothing. After a moment Caris turned on his heel and strode from the room.

If she had thrown it in his face that he was sasennan no longer, that he had broken his vows, and deserted the Way to which he had sworn his life, he thought he would have struck her. Sitting alone in the darkness of the inn stables, listening to the groan of the wind in the rafters and filling his nostrils with the clean, warm scents of horses and hay, he felt his rage rise at her, at Suraklin, at the mages who had disappeared from the Yard, at the stolid, silent, unimaginative Princess, and at the fool of an innkeeper who was little better than a robber for charging them a silver bit for a ladleful of stew and a hunk of bread the size of his fist. It was not the Way of the Sasenna to show rage, but he collected his rage, like steaming black liquid in a cup; a bitter drink that was all now that gave him strength.