The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (16 page)

He set her down and pulled convulsively at the shabby muffler around his throat. Under it she saw by the dim glow of the flashlight the dark ring of the iron collar, harsh against the white flesh and edged with a mottled band of bruises and sores. “Get this thing off me,” he said, breathless, and then, with a wry grin, “You don't happen to have a hacksaw about you, do you, my dear?”

Silently, Joanna dug into her backpack and produced one. He grinned like a pleased jack-o'-lantern, then seized her and kissed her again. “If this is all a hallucination,” he said, his voice shaking slightly, “I'm going to be very disappointed in the morning.”

He dropped to his knees, fumbling with the muffler; Joanna hitched the backpack up onto her shoulder and tucked the dirty green muffler between the iron and his neck. “Caris, can you hold the light for me... ?”

“No,” said the sasennan briefly.

“Quite right,” agreed Antryg, his voice blurred with the bending of his head. “Somebody has to keep watch. The noise may bring someone...”

“Maybe we could ride out first?” Caris suggested.

Antryg, who had taken the flashlight from Joanna and held it in one hand to light the collar, shook his head. “No. Just get rid of this thing.”

It might not have prevented his escape, Joanna realized, but that didn't make the torment of wearing it any the less. It took surprisingly little time to cut through the soldered clasp—the iron had no kind of temper to it—and it made a hellish amount of noise. Joanna had broken two blades practicing before beginning her expedition and had brought several spares, but they weren't needed. The clasp broke apart as Caris whispered hoarsely, “Someone's coming!” Antryg stumbled to his feet, pulling the iron ring from his throat with hands that shook.

“Thank you,” he gasped as Joanna shut off the flashlight. Amid the raw, scabbed flesh of his neck, a circular brown mark showed where the Sigil itself had touched, as if the skin had been burned with acid. Oddly enough, though he held the iron collar in his hands, Joanna had seen that he avoided contact with the Dead God's Seal.

“Hasu,” Caris reported, ducking back in through the but door. “Church dogs.” He scooped up the crossbow from the mud and held it out to Antryg.

Antryg shook his head, pulled a board off the flimsy back wall and snaked his thin form through the gap.

Horrified, Caris gasped, “They can see us in the dark...”

“Of course they can.” Antryg shoved the broken collar into his belt and made a dash toward the causeway.

Voices shouted behind him; they were evidently hasu who knew what Antryg looked like with his spectacles and without his beard. Joanna heard the hrush and whap of a crossbow bolt slamming into one of the nearby huts. Through gritted teeth, Caris snarled, “You're insane!” Antryg cut abruptly sideways between two crumbling board walls.

Through the gap in the back of the hut, Joanna watched him dash through the foot-deep standing water that flooded the ground hereabouts. She saw at once the reason that the water hadn't yet frozen—it trickled out of a sewer outfall just beneath the causeway bridge, a round stone pipe about four feet in diameter. It was, she realized, the way he had intended to enter the city.

On the other side of the hut, she heard the hasu splash by, running surely, unerringly in the dark. In the shadows of the causeway, it was difficult for her to see, but she caught the glimpse of Antryg's dark, spidery shape crouching for a moment before the outfall, and the moonlike flash of his spectacle lenses. Then he came sprinting back through the water, the black coat of the sasennan's uniform he wore billowing like a cloak behind him. He stumbled over some submerged irregularity of the ground, almost falling, but regained his balance and flung himself through the narrow opening in the wall through which Joanna had watched. She pulled the loose plank back over it as the two hasu came around the corner and dashed straight for the outfall pipe.

Beside her, Antryg was leaning against the wall, gasping for breath. His eyebrows stood out like india-ink against a face gone gray with fatigue; he was not, she realized, in any shape for this. In spite of the cold, his face was clammy with sweat, and the makeshift black dye in his hair ran in trickles down the high cheekbones and the dim shape of the scar left by the Regent's whip.

The two hasu jerked to a stop a few feet from the outfall. One of them reached forward hesitantly, then drew back his hand as if it had been burned. As one, they turned and pelted through the water for the little trail that led up to the causeway bridge, shouting for the guards...

“The Sigil of Darkness?”
Joanna guessed, as the two small forms, their robes billowing suddenly red in the torchlight, ran with waving arms into the oven-mouth brightness of the city gates.

Antryg nodded, his old demented grin flickering through the lines of strain on his face. “Certainly superior to beavers, who are said to tear off certain of their bodily parts and throw them at pursuers to discourage the chase, though why it should do so has always escaped me. They're convinced I've gone through the outfall and are going to spend the rest of the night and all day tomorrow tearing apart the town. I hope whatever refuge you had planned for us wasn't in Kymil?” He was shivering violently with exhaustion, nerves, and cold. They were all soaked to the skin and the night was cruel.

She shook her head, “Larkmoor Manor.” His brows dove together as he identified its name, then quirked upward, taking with them a whole ladder of forehead wrinkles. It was the first time she'd ever seen him put off-balance by anything she'd said. “We're guests of Pellicida of Senterwing.”

“Good Heavens,” he murmured, startled and bemused.

“The horses are at the end of the causeway...”

“Just a moment, my dear.”
And turning, he pushed aside the concealing boards. To Caris' utter horror, he dashed back across the open water to the outfall again.

As he came splashing back, Caris snapped, “You're not only mad, you're a fool! Every sasennan in town must be near the gates...”

“Nonsense.”
Antryg scraped the mud gingerly from the thing he held in his hand. “The Bishop had this made specially for me and it would be churlish to throw it away. Put this in your backpack, would you, my dear? We'll wrap it in lead when we get to safety...” He handed it to Joanna. It was the iron collar bearing the Sigil of Darkness.

They made their way back to the horses without further mishap, Antryg cheerfully directing the one group of sasenna they met on the causeway toward the town. Wet, cold, aching and exhausted almost to numbness, she scrambled up onto her horse behind Antryg, put her arms around his waist, and leaned her cheek against his bony back. She felt she could have gone to sleep that way and slept for days as the horses jogged into the windy darkness toward Larkmoor and what she knew would be only a relative and temporary safety.

One more subroutine successfully completed, she thought tiredly. They had rescued Antryg—or Antryg had rescued himself—alive, whole, and sane, or at least as sane as Antryg had ever been.

Now their troubles would really begin.

“So what was it that finally convinced you that I was telling the truth?”

Extravagantly gowned in a robe of plum-colored velvet that had originally been made for the Emperor Hieraldus, Antryg sat at one side of a small table laid for high tea, in the course of which he had made his appearance, interrupting his fellow conspirators. Though it was early yet in the afternoon, the drawing room lamps at Larkmoor Manor had been lit on sideboards of carved maple, the glow of them pale against the uncertain grayness of the stormy daylight outside. Now and then wind would sigh along the northern wall of the house, and Joanna, if she stood too near that wall, found it cold to her touch.

With the blackish dye washed out of it, Antryg's hair was far grayer than Joanna remembered, and with the loss of flesh the tracework of lines around his eyes and running back into his hair had deepened to gullies. In the daylight, he looked thinner and badly the worse for wear. The fur collar of the robe framed a three-inch band of sores and raw flesh around his neck above the too-prominent points of his collarbone; the big bones of his wrists, similarly wealed, stood out from the wasted flesh. Even so, his hands, cradling the creamy smoothness of an eggshell teacup, had all their old lightness; and behind the cracked spectacles, his gray eyes were daft as ever, but at peace.

“We've seen Suraklin,” Joanna said quietly. “You were right. He needed an accomplice from my world, a programmer. No wonder you thought it was me. But he took over Gary, my—my boyfriend.”

“Ah,” Antryg said softly. “The one who got computers to do his stealing for him.”

She nodded a little wearily, recalling the details of Gary's dealings with Suraklin, meticulously cataloged in the DARKMAGE files from the viewpoints of both seducer and seduced. Gary had never stood a chance.

For a moment she sat staring into her teacup, tracing the curves of its gilded handle with one fingertip. Then she took a deep breath, set it down, and plunged into a dispassionate account of her own belated conclusions and adventures, with Pella filling in, awkwardly but without omissions, her own experiences and suspicions of Cerdic's new Spiritual Advisor, the night at the gambling rooms, and the storm.

“The damn thing is that there's no proof,” Joanna concluded. “It's only little things, nothing that can be pointed to. But these—these spells of deadness—are still taking place, though most people don't believe they're objective and not subjective. I'm starting to find that a little hard to believe.”

“Are you?” Antryg said mildly. “Most people are firmly convinced there is a difference between objective and subjective reality and would find it extremely hard to believe otherwise. You're rather like someone looking down at a maze from the top, instead of wandering through it. There's really quite a nice maze at the Citadel of Wizards in the north, by the way. And since there's no proof of when any particular abomination appeared in this world, I suppose they're all credited to me whilst I was roving about loose at the end of the summer. I expect that, now I've escaped, the attempts on Pharos' life will start up again.”

He set down his teacup and rubbed his fingers as if for warmth or to massage away some chronic ache. “I suppose there have been none since my capture? I didn't think so. Verisimilitude has always been Suraklin's strong point.”

He glanced across the table at Caris, dressed in snuff-colored servant's livery and silently buttering and rebuttering a muffin which he clearly had no intention of eating. “I'm sorry, Caris,” Antryg said softly.

The young man raised eyes like those of an injured wolf, ready to savage the hands extended to help him.

Antryg went on, “Suraklin destroyed a man we both loved very much—raped him of body and mind, used them for his own purposes, and threw him away when he was done. But the fact remains that I was the one who killed what was left.”

Caris shook his head. Mufed and unwontedly low, he said, “If I'd found him the way the Emperor now is, I'd have done the same.”

“I suppose Suraklin was counting on that—the fact that I couldn't stay long in that world and would never leave him there like that, helpless among strangers. But of course, whether I killed him or let him live, either way I'd have been blamed for it. Pella...” He looked across at the big girl, who sat quietly stroking Kyssha's head which lay on her velvet lap. “You were as much wronged by him as any of us, and it's worse, I suppose, since you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and married to the wrong person. Thank you for being good enough to help us. Caris, Joanna...” He turned simply to face them. “I do owe you my life. I wish I had a better way of thanking you than immediately hauling you both into greater danger with me, but I haven't. I'm sorry about Gary also,” he added, turning to Joanna, who sat on the tapestried hassock at his side. “From the little I saw of him, he was never much of a man, but I suppose he was the best man he could be under the circumstances that made his life.”

Joanna sighed, feeling as if she were seeing Gary clearly for the first time. “Not even that, I'm afraid.” She reached out and laid her hand over his.

The night had been sleety and cold. In the late autumn dawnlight, Joanna had slipped out of the room Pella had given her, stealing down the silent corridor to the one where Antryg slept. A fire burned low in the grate there, its wickering the only sound but for the moan of the wind around the eaves and brief staccato of rain. Antryg had been in bed under a gray satin comforter, his hair close-curled still with the dampness of washing, profoundly asleep.

It was all Joanna had meant to do—to see him, to reaffirm to herself the fact that against all the odds in the world he was still alive. It had been her litany and her hope for two dreadful, endless months that she hadn't done the irrevocable and that somehow, somewhere, they would meet again.

Tomorrow or the day after, they would have to face Suraklin, break into whatever depths beneath his ancient Citadel housed his stolen computer, destroy him, or, as Caris said—as Joanna uneasily feared—die trying. Her thoughts flinched away from what would happen to her if she survived her own defeat as his prisoner.

But there in that still bedchamber of amber and gray, all of it seemed impossibly distant and very unreal. Yesterday she had been jolting miserably in Pella's phaeton, aching with fear and sleeplessness, feeling that the journey would never end. Tomorrow might see her, Caris, and Antryg dead, all hope and magic perished forever. Today, this morning, went no further than Antryg's preposterous profile against the bed linen, the whisper of his breathing and the spattering of wind and rain.

She had still been standing there, leaning one shoulder against the carved cherrywood bedpost, when his eyes had opened.

He had been sleeping again when she left. In fact, he had slept most of the day, and Joanna had the impression, looking now at the harsh lines around his eyes as he bent to refill his teacup from the ostentatiously garlanded pot, that he could have slept for the next twenty-four hours without trouble. He looked very tired.