The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (17 page)

Pella said gravely, “You know they're going to put the blame for all of it on you now—the storm, the abominations, and the failure of the harvest.” She held a fragment of buttered muffin out to Kyssha, and the little dog accepted it with as much condescension as if she hadn't been watching every bite with tears of bogus starvation in her eyes. “If you could work enough magic in the Tower to escape, they'll figure you could work enough to do all that.”

Antryg sighed. “I know. But, of course, I didn't escape by magic. I couldn't use magic—not in the Tower, not with the Sigil welded against my flesh.”

“Then how did you get out of the chains?”

He shrugged. "Picked the locks. Three or four years ago, the Bishop went through some kind of scare and threatened to have me chained; the rings had been in the wall there for hundreds of years. As a precaution, I took apart some of the toys I used to spend my time making and fashioned about a dozen picklocks from the wires in them. I hid them in the cracks of the floor and the walls all around the rings, and down in other areas of the Tower when I could get to them. And since I couldn't pass the Sigil on the door, I pretty much had the freedom of the Tower in those days.

“I picked the locks of my chains fairly regularly, to pilfer things from the guardroom downstairs—the uniform coat and breeches, a razor to cut off my hair and beard, and an outer coat to hide the fact that I wasn't wearing any weapons. I used a razor to whittle a stick to make the right sword-line under my coat—if I'd actually stolen a sword, it would have been missed, and they'd have searched the place. I'd stuff everything up under the rafters when I wasn't working on it. With no windows the place was pretty dark, but of course I can see in the dark and none of the guards, not being mageborn, could.”

“I'd been doing this for over a month—as soon as I got my hands working again, in fact. For weeks all I did was crouch in a corner, mumbling to myself while I grew my beard and worked at my fingers. The Inquisitors had dislocated most of them, but only four were actually broken. I think they'll always be a bit crooked now. I had to wrap them up twisted again so the guards would think I was still crippled and not watch me too closely.”

Caris glanced up cynically from some private contemplation. “And you played mad for the same reason?”

“For a number of reasons,” Antryg admitted, his long fingers moving unconsciously over the dark fur of the velvet robe's cuffs. “The important thing was to keep any of the guards from knowing how I really look. For one thing, I'm nearly six foot three. No matter how I was disguised, I wouldn't have got ten yards if anyone in the Tower had ever seen me when I wasn't hunched over and sitting down. It's why I had the visions of obscure saints.”

“What?”
Pella demanded, half-laughing. Joanna had forgotten to mention to her that conversations with Antryg were apt to contain several wildly disparate topics per sentence.

He regarded her with his mild, mad eyes, as if surprised she didn't see the connection. “Most Church sasenna are halfway to being monks. After two years in a monastery, I could describe saints that only other novices would recognize. Did you know Saint Kalwiddoes was supposed to have a metal nose? He allegedly lost the original for his faith; one calls upon him to cure sinus problems. Eventually I won enough sympathy among some of the Church guards to prod the Bishop into changing the lot every few weeks.”

Caris sniffed disgustedly. “It was all a blind, then.”

Antryg was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Not really.” Outside the window, the bare trees that surrounded Larkmoor thrashed uneasily in the wind, their black branches clawing like witch fingers at the mottled sky. "There were times when it all came home to me—where I was, and what was happening outside... Moments of sanity, I suppose, when I realized the truth of my position and my prospects. But one can't pound on the walls and scream all the time.

“And I was so tired. The Sigil of Darkness not only eats a wizard's magic, it devours him through it. The thing was literally killing me by inches. I could barely eat; I couldn't sleep, and when I did finally pass out from sheer exhaustion, the dreams made me wish I hadn't.” He sat silent again, his head bowed, the white light from the windows glancing across the round lenses of his spectacles like circles of cracked and dirty ice. He had, Joanna noticed, acquired a pair of earrings as well as the Emperor's robe, solitaire diamonds of well over two carats apiece which flickered when he looked up again. “I had to get that thing off me,” he said simply.

“I had to break out. Even if no warrant of execution was ever issued, it was only a matter of time before I became too weak to do so.”

“But the question is,” Caris said suspiciously, “how did you break out? You say no wizard can pass the Seal of the Dead God. But it was on the door of the Tower as well. Even if you'd managed to disguise yourself as a guard, shave off your beard, cut your hair, and dye it, too—What did you use for dye, by the way?”

“Lampblack and dye soaked from the cover of a stolen book of scriptures. I'm told in Trembergil there's a root that will turn gray hair black permanently, if it's eaten, and Queen Darthirambis II once paid four elephants, ten lengths of second-quality silk, and two dancing boys for enough to cover the palm of her hand. The guards were forever stealing things from each other, the Church sasenna from the Council's and vice versa. No one noticed my thefts.”

“But even if you managed to do all that,” Caris said doggedly, “and went down among them with impunity, how did you walk through the door of the Tower?”

Antryg said nothing for a time, absentmindedly rubbing his fingers again. Joanna, glancing sideways at the round, brownish mark that seemed to have been burned into the galled skin of his throat, said softly, “Desensitization, wasn't it? They do that in my world as a cure for phobias.”

A half smile flicked at the extravagant curve of his lips. “It was the one thing I was afraid of—that when it came down to the moment, I wouldn't be able to do it. And I almost couldn't. One never becomes desensitized—not to the Sigil of Darkness. Its hold never slacks. But I'd had it on me, welded against my flesh, for over two months. If I hadn't gone through that—if I didn't know that the alternative of walking past the Sigil on the door was enduring God knows how much longer of it before I finally died—I couldn't have done it. It took me about five minutes of standing there to work up my nerve as it was. But fortunately, I'd already roused the Tower with the news of my own disappearance, and the place was in such chaos that no one noticed.”

He glanced over at Caris, half-apologetically, as if he sensed in the young man's folded arms and crossed knees his furious disapproval. The sasennan had come prepared to perform an heroic rescue and, like Joanna, still illogically felt slightly cheated. “Once I got through the door, I joined in the search while they ransacked the Tower and its grounds. I'd shoved my old robes and my cut-off hair and beard up into my hidey-hole under the rafters so the idea of disguise wouldn't occur to anyone. They thought they were looking for a barefoot and ragged cripple. Without my spectacles, I could see just well enough not to run into walls. Of course no sasennan wears spectacles. I'm told there have been those who've killed themselves as flawed when their eyes began to harden at fifty. Eventually I joined the parties going out to search the hills. Since they'd been changed so often, not only did no guard there remember what I'd looked like when I was brought in, before I grew my beard back, but they weren't able to identify each other by sight, either. After that...” He shrugged. “All that remained was to lose the other guards, put on my spectacles, slip into Kymil through the sewers, and pilfer a hack saw. I had to wait until night, because in Kymil there are plenty of people who would recognize me—aside from the Church dogs, that is. But it's always easy to hide in a city.”

     He subsided back into his chair, the embroidered velvet settling around him like a royal mantle. Cradling his teacup once more in his big, deft hands, he stared into its henna depths as if he could read his own future there, as he had that of countless travelers on the Angelshand road to buy dinner for himself and his companions. And perhaps, thought Joanna worriedly, he could. At any rate, a small upright line twitched into existence between his brows, and he set the cup quickly aside.

She wondered what he'd seen there.

     In time Caris broke the silence. “You know that was your last chance.”

     “Oh, yes.” His deep voice was almost absentminded as his gray eyes flicked back to the young man's face. “By this time, there will be a mad dog warrant out for me. If they find me now, they'll kill me out of hand. So this is quite literally our last chance to stop Suraklin—not merely to destroy his computer, which I'm positive is hidden beneath the ruins of his old Citadel at the node of the energy-lines, but to finish him.” His lips pulled slightly in a smile again, but for one moment his eyes were quite sane—gazing, as he had said, when he spoke of his fits of screaming despair in the Tower, quite truthfully at his position and his prospects.

Then he let it go, and the old, luminous madness of hope returned. “This time we'll just have to succeed.”

“It came on very quickly, didn't it?”

     Caris looked up, startled out of his own reflections, from his absent gazing at the slatey shadows of the doorway through which Antryg and Joanna had passed. Pella had been so silent that for a time he had felt he was alone with the wind-mutter and the ruins of the tea, but now he saw that the tall girl still sat on the pink silk settee where she had been during tea and the subsequent conference, the sleeping Kyssha cradled in her lap.

“Like a storm from out of the east,” he quoted scripture, knowing without asking what the girl meant.

She smiled, half-amused, “Like the second fence of an in-and-out, really, that's hidden behind the first until your horse is just about on top of it.”

He recognized the cant term. “Do you hunt?”

Ruefulness flickered in the fine hazel eyes. “Not really. I've always had too much sympathy for the fox, but the riding was the closest thing to flying I could get. It was another thing Mother and my aunt the Queen never approved of.”

He returned her grin. “Along with being a sasennan.”

“Well, Mother was terrified I'd get a cut on my face. When I was ten I wanted a scar like my cousin Tybal's in the worst way. I've been admiring yours all the way down from Angelshand,” she added sincerely, and Caris touched the old slash on his cheekbone and laughed, picturing the very well-brought-up daughter of the Royal House of Senterwing trying to convince her horrified parents that she ought to have one.

She moved the stiff taffeta rufes of her petticoat and underskirt with her toe, and the shining fabric whispered to itself against a lull in the wind outside. “I suppose putting all our energies into reaching here before the Witchfinder did and worrying how we were going to get Antryg out of the Tower... Is he always like that?”

“He was positively sedate, today,” Caris said dourly, and Pella laughed again.

Then, soberly, she said, “I suppose it hid the real task.”

“Not entirely.” Caris' voice was very quiet. “But it made it possible not to think about it.” It was the first time he had admitted, to himself or anyone else, that it was an event upon which he tried not to dwell.

“Do you think it's at the ruins of his Citadel?”

He sighed again and rose to his feet, Pella getting up too, Kyssha now tucked in her arms. “It has to be,” he said. “I'm going to check the perimeter of the grounds before it gets dark. Would you like to come?”

It was something Caris had done at the posthouses where they had spent the nights or part of the nights, something, in fact, he did automatically when spending a night in an unfamiliar or potentially hostile place. It was a kind of patrol, an investigation of where things were and from what directions danger might or could come. At the posthouses, Pella had come with him on these rounds. He had welcomed this, partly because Pella, with her early training, would be the closest thing to a fighting ally he'd have if it came to trouble. In spite of her apparent clumsiness and absentmindedness in more domestic matters, the girl was silent, deft, and catlike on her feet.

But more than that, he had simply found himself glad of her company. In the gray times of deadness, it was good not to be alone; even outside of them, there had been times when he'd found his awareness of the upcoming battle with Suraklin, the knowledge that he would most likely die in it, more than he could hold at bay himself. He had broken his vows and had not even the strength of the Way of the Sasenna to comfort him. And in any case, he reminded himself, to seek comfort was not of the Way.

Pella slipped a smoke-colored cloak over her gold-beaded green gown; they moved like two shadows from the side door of the house to the nearest of the line of bare elm trees which surrounded Larkmoor on all sides, a windbreak against the cutting Sykerst gales. In the summer, the grass there was scythed close; now along the north and east sides, last week's dirty snow lay in a filthy and broken windrow, a frozen crust wide enough that it could not be leaped by a man. From the shelter of the trees, Caris squinted against the searing wind to study it for tracks, mindful that the sasenna of the Council and now the Witchfinder's men would be everywhere on the moor. But there was no sign of tracks, either on the crusted snow or on the iron-hard earth beyond.

They checked the outside of the stables, unobtrusively avoiding the notice of the grooms and coachmen, and moved on to the fodderbarn, out past the line of trees and commanding the best views both of the nearby hills and of the house. There were no tracks; Caris checked the small chips of wood which he had imbedded in the half-frozen mud of the threshold that morning and found them undisturbed. Pella stood out of the wind against the doorpost, wrapped in the thick folds of her cloak, her breath a blowing cloud of white against the dimness of the barn and the fading light from the moving sky.