The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (18 page)

“Would you do better to wait a day or two before going out to the Citadel?” she asked, and Caris glanced up from his study.

“We shouldn't have waited this long,” he said bluntly. “Yes, we needed a day's rest; Antryg was at the end of his strength when we found him, and none of us in shape to do what we have to do. But two days, or three days, won't mend that. Suraklin's no fool. According to Joanna, Suraklin will be on the other side of the Void, in her world—or should be. But we have no guarantee of that. And every day that passes increases the chance that he'll come back and hear of Antryg's escape. We might just might be able to make it through whatever traps he's set up to guard his Citadel, for Joanna to poison his computer and then lay in wait there for him. But if he is there before us—if he knows that Antryg is coming—we'll stand no chance.”

“That wasn't what I meant,” Pella said apologetically and brushed a tendril of black hair from her face. “It's just that you might want to wait for better weather.”

Caris stood up and grinned. “We'd be like three birds in a cellar, tucking our heads under our wings and waiting for sunrise. It's not going to be better until spring.”

“Oh.” Pella looked a little blankly out into that bitter landscape, her expression momentarily like that of a child who finds that coffee doesn't taste at all the way it smells.

Caris came over to stand beside her, shaking out the pleated linen ruffles of his shirt cuffs. After the relative shelter of the barn, the wind was stinging on his face, cutting like a knife through the coarse brownish wool of his livery. “I'm told people from the Sykerst miss it when they live in other lands,” he remarked, shaking his head wonderingly. “They can keep it.”

She glanced back at him. “Then you're not from here?”

He shook his head. “I was born in the Wheatlands, the black-earth country down on the Strebwell River. It's open country, but not like this—flat as your hand for miles, with deep black soil. Where there's water, the trees grow thick, in the marshes, and the bottomlands by the streams. It's a safe country—gentle. In the winter, Ratbane and I would wander for miles, with the full moon turning the snow luminous, as far as you can see to the edge of the sky, and the air so still you could hear a dog bark three villages away.”

He stopped, his throat closing hard. It had been years since he'd thought of the country that was his home, years since he'd remembered the aching peace of those still nights.

“They wouldn't have let you ramble alone, would they?” he asked after a time.

Her smile warmed not only her great hazel eyes, but all the strong features of her face, the aquiline nose and the full-lipped mouth. “I wasn't supposed to,” she said, “but I did. I used to sneak away and go bird shooting with my brothers and Cousin Tybal when we were staying in the country; sometimes I'd just go by myself. I enjoyed the clean skill of it—I like using things, tools, weapons—but more than that, I think I just liked to be alone and not have to worry about how I looked. And courts are so noisy.” Her black brows pulled down over her nose, and a pain line like a pin scratch sprang into being between them. “It's as if people can't think of anything better to do with a summer evening and a garden than invite half the countryside to a garden party.”

She was quiet for a moment, staring into the sunless distance, as if past the hills she could see the garden of which she spoke in the apple-green silence of a summer twilight. In her eyes, which were level with his own, Carts could' see the silvery shine of tears. After a time she said, “If Suraklin succeeds in establishing this machine of his, that will all go away, won't it? No one will ever feel that—that magic—again.”

“No,” said Caris. Then, impulsively, “Will you come with us?”

She turned her head quickly; for one instant, he saw the leap of joy in her eyes, the warrior's eagerness for action. Then she looked away, so quickly her black hair made a sharp slithering over the collar of her cloak; he was close enough to her now that he could feel her tremble. “I can't.”

“I'm sorry,” Caris said instantly, realizing belatedly what he had asked. Only for a moment, it had seemed right, and the rightness had answered him from her eyes. “I shouldn't have...”

“It isn't that.” Her eyes met his again. Now, clearly, he saw in them that haunted look he'd seen before in the last day or so of the journey and riding that afternoon in the hills—the despair of some unwanted certainty that could no longer be denied. “If it was just me, I would,” she went on steadily. “It isn't that I want to fight to protect Pharos' life, though I know from what Gaire—Suraklin—was always hinting to me that he is in danger. He's a cruel man, vicious... I suppose I want to do this for—Rightness? Goodness? Do you believe in goodness?”

“I believe in evil,” Caris said quietly. “And I believe that Suraklin has to be stopped.” Here was another, he realized, who was more than a line fighter, more even than a campaign strategist like Joanna.

She looked away from him, her mouth flinching with an effort not to tremble. “It's just that I can't risk it.” She went on, small and remote, as if trying to get quickly over pain or shame, “I think I'm carrying Pharos' child.”

Anger hit Caris like a wave of night, disproportionate, illogical rage and revulsion, as if she had confessed to some filthy act. With an effort, he bit back words he knew would hurt her; she caught his arm as he whirled to storm through the door.

Her voice was desperate. “Caris...”

In the brittle light, tears shone on her face. He was breathing hard, the air cuttingly cold in his nostrils and lungs; everything in him was consumed with smothering heat. Confused, it flashed through his mind to wonder why this should be; the answer hit him like a thrown bucket of ice water, and in the next second, he saw that answer mirrored in her eyes.

It sobered him, the rage dissolving into horror and a grief he could not define. He felt as if he'd stumbled, accidently dropping and breaking something which he'd never known he had until it was gone, and which could never be replaced. In one instant the world was all changed from what it had been. Even then, he knew, there was no going back. Hoarsely, shakily, he stammered, “Pella, I can't do this.”

She didn't need to ask what he meant. It was as if they had both fought the knowledge of it for days. “I know.” Her greenish eyes met his, dark in the sweet-smelling gloom. “I know you need your hate to keep you strong—to keep you alive, maybe, when you go to the Citadel tomorrow. But—” She shivered suddenly, and looked away from him, struggling against tears that it was not the Way of the Sasenna to shed. Tiny and choked, she whispered, “But please don't hate me.”

They stood at arm's length, facing one another in the darkness of the barn while the ashy light bled away outside. He felt a surge of hatred against Pharos for putting that fear into those fearless eyes. Then he stepped back to her and took her in his arms, willing himself desperately not to feel what he felt while she laid her head on his shoulder and cried.

“I had meant not to do this.”

It was dark. Outside, the rain was falling, cold and steady now, with sudden splatterings where the wind flung it against the house wall in handfuls. A couple of candles burned at random out of the dozen or so on the desk and highboy. Antryg had lit them without getting up from the bed when the night began to close in.

“Does that mean you're going to press charges for rape?” Joanna looked up with feigned concern from the circle of his arms.

Antryg drew himself up, very much on his dignity, save for the wicked twinkle far back in his gray eyes. Then he sighed and let his head drop back to the pillow lace, his grip tightening around her shoulders. “It means that I don't want to make things more difficult for you than they already are.”

“Well,” Joanna said consideringly, “we're going out to Suraklin's Citadel tomorrow; we're going to have to get through whatever defenses he's set up around his computer and keep them at bay long enough for me to program the worm into the system. After we take care of that, we settle down and wait for him to show up—if he isn't there defending the thing already. I've got Suraklin after me, and you've got the Church, the Regent, the Council, and the Witchfinders after you, any of whom will be ready to nail me as your accomplice, plus any random abominations that happen to be around... It's hard to see how things could get more difficult, unless we get tangled up with invading aliens from another planet, or a crowd of peasants with torches. But I'll take your word for it.”

He regarded her severely. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“I know perfectly well that you're afraid I'll be hurt.”

“Well, yes,” he admitted, twining a tendril of her fair hair around one of his bony fingers and studying the resultant play of shadows thoughtfully. “But considering what we're up against, there's a good chance we're both going to be hurt and hurt badly. There isn't really anything either of us can do about that, except take the usual precautions and hope for the best. I have a general idea of what waits for us out at the Citadel, since I helped establish many of its original defenses, and it's not something I'd care to take any of my friends into. But I certainly can't deprogram the thing myself, and we need a warrior to watch both our backs. Neither you nor I has the option, as Caris and Pella do, of simply retreating.”

“Caris won't retreat,” she said softly. “Nor will Pella.”

“No,” he agreed. “They are souls who don't know the meaning of physical fear. But for them the danger isn't the same. Though I daresay Suraklin would use either of them as a tool, he wouldn't seek to establish the all—devouring grip on their minds that he did on Gary's—that he seeks to do on yours.”

Joanna shivered, remembering the disjointed recollections of the Dark Mage's slow takeover, inscribed with clinical exactness by both prepetrator and victim in their separate files.

After a moment Antryg went on, “The whole time I was in the Tower, I was desperately frightened for you—frightened that Suraklin would get you under his influence somehow without your realizing what was happening until it was too late.”

She was silent, drawing the soft, tatted pillow lace again and again through her small fingers. It was the screaming of his soul, Magister Magus had said, when the Sigil had touched his flesh, that she had heard in her dream... “You didn't hate me?”

The distant glow of the candles threw the long shadows of his lashes on his cheeks, as his gaze seemed to go out beyond those floating points of light. Then he looked down at her again. “I lived with Suraklin for eight years,” he reminded her. “I grew to manhood in his household. I saw the kind of things he could manipulate people into doing.” His jaw tightened momentarily, with shame and bitter anger. “Myself included. No, I didn't hate you. Mind you,” he added suddenly, “when I was trying to talk you into letting me go, I was angry enough to knock your head against the wall.”

Joanna laughed, and for a time they did not talk. The candles burned down in fluted columns of white wax over the shelled sea goddesses of their holders. Distantly they heard a harpsichord being played somewhere in the rooms below and muffled voices, Caris' and Pella's. A servant's footfalls creaked on a distant backstair. The rain eased to a trickle. In the glowing jewelbox silence of the room, even the wickering of the fire seemed loud.

For all intents and purposes, Joanna thought, the future ended with tonight. This warmth, this silence, might be all that they would ever have.

Tomorrow she would do what she had feared all along she must—walk into the heart of Suraklin's power and put herself in the one place where he could most easily get her.

But like Antryg, standing trapped between the abomination of the Sigil on the Tower door and the knowledge that, if he did not face it, its twin would remain welded to his flesh, she knew she truly had no option. If Suraklin were not destroyed, sooner or later he would seek her.

As if he read her thoughts, Antryg said quietly, “If we manage to demolish the computer without getting ourselves killed, and if it's possible to do so safely, I want you and Caris to come back here tomorrow. I don't think your presence will help me against him...” He hesitated, as if debating within himself how much of the truth to speak, then sighed. “And I don't think I'll be able to protect you from him.”

“I see,” Joanna said softly and did. She reached up and touched his chest, her sun-browned hand dark against the marble whiteness of his skin. “That's why you didn't want to—to tie me more closely to you, to make me feel committed to you—to let me love you. You don't expect to survive meeting Suraklin, do you?”

His gray eyes, enormous without their protective lenses, avoided hers; the candlelight caught a facet of his diamond earrings, held steady for a moment, a burning point of many-colored light. Then he sighed, and looked back at her with a half-rueful grin. “Frankly, my dear, I don't see any way that I can.”

Though she had traveled three times through the hills of the Sykerst, Joanna did not believe she had ever seen anything so desolate as the emptiness that surrounded what had once been the Citadel of Suraklin. Elsewhere the hills might be barren, the grass without life or color, combed like a dead dog's hair by the incessant winds, but at least the terrible silence had been broken by occasional signs of life. From Pella's carriage, she'd seen the start of rabbits in the thin clumps of naked birches which grew in the small pockets of soil in the bedrock; by the sluggish black streams near the Silent Tower, the prints of muskrat and weasel had latticed the half-frozen mud. At first sight a uniform pewter, the hills had a startling variation of color-mauves and sepias, the cobalt of shadow, and the occasional rich emerald of lichens clinging to the cold-cracked rocks.

Here there was nothing. In the wide dell with its scattered stringers of broken stone, its buckled pavements long veiled in a wind-flattened shroud of rotting weeds, and its crumbling pits and trenches like suppurating gray wounds, the only sound was the wind thrumming over stone and hissing in the dead grass. The jingle of the bridle-bits sounded very loud as the horses tossed their heads, made nervous by the silence, and the faint creak of Caris' sword belt as he turned suddenly at a noise that he hadn't really heard.