The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (22 page)

“I don't mean this, particularly,” he said. “I mean...” He hesitated, feeling tripped by what he did mean—so much more than he was prepared to say.

“You mean dealing in life?” Joanna asked softly, “instead of dealing in death?”

He ran his fingers through his short-cropped blond hair, and avoided her eyes. Behind him, the wood shutters of the window quivered under a sharp blast of the sleety wind, the candle flames on the table before him starting nervously in their holders of Kymil porcelain. Like most small manors, this one was built largely of wood from the stands along the Sykerst rivers, exquisitely carved and fretted, but apt to creak. Around them the whole house seemed to be muttering to itself.

“No,” he said evasively. “That is, I've been trained as a killer...”

“I didn't mean other peoples',” Joanna said, toying with the small parchment rectangle that lay between them. “I mean yours.”

Caris was silent.

The girl's small fingers traced the lines of the Sigil, simple as a magic circle on the stiff, cream-colored card. There was no magic in it, for Caris lacked the ability to imbue what little he had in any inanimate thing; he had watched the mages drawing Sigils for years, for various purposes, from small to great, but this was the first time he had ever set out to memorize them for himself.

She went on, slowly, because speaking was no easier for her than it was for him: “Ever since I first met you in Suraklin's hideout you've been—been ready to die. Ready to kill for your cause, yes, but most of all ready to die for it.”

“It is the Way of Sasenna,” Caris said, “to be ready to die at the will of the one to whom you have sworn your vows.”

“I know.” She looked up, the glow of the several candles layering traceries of shadow across her dark eyes. "Since we left Larkmoor, I've had the feeling you're ready to live, but—it's as if you don't know how.

“I know about that,” she continued uncertainly, after a silence broken by the creak of the house beams, and the distracted sobbing of the wind. “I don't know how either, really. This is the first time I've—I've felt like—I don't know, coming out and saying what I feel. To you.
To Antryg. Pella and I did a lot of talking on the way down to Kymil; I don't know why that was easier for me, but it was. It's as if in caring for Antryg I care for other people more, too, and don't want to see them hurt. For so many years I've kind of—of had a lot of reasons for not giving time to people or not saying things to them. Silly things mostly, really simple stuff like, 'I'd like to know you better,' or 'I care about what happens to you.' I don't know what I was afraid they'd say back to me.”

Caris turned his pen over in his hands for some moments, studying the shadow of the quills on the red-gold grain of the table. Then, with half a grin at her, he asked softly, “What were you afraid I'd say back to you?”

Her eyes warmed; he was a little surprised that he'd managed to say the right thing, but evidently he had, for she returned his smile.

Stammeringly, he added, “Thank you.” He set the pen down and looked over at her in the amber and sepia gloom. “It isn't that I don't know how to live—or not just that, anyway. At this point, it would not only be useless for me to learn, but dangerous.”

He thought she would contradict him, but she didn't, only listened in silence, her small hands folded, cold-chapped and so fragile against the coarse linen of her smock sleeves.

“After you shot that Witchfinder on the island near Devilsgate, I told you that sometimes you can't afford to think too much—remember?”

She nodded. He remembered the oppressive heat of the hay barn that night, his own impatience with listening to her stifled sobbing in the darkness, and his sharp jealousy at the thought that she had done the one thing he had trained for but had never actually done—killed a man in a fight. Two men, for that matter. The memory of that childish jealousy still embarrassed him.

“Do you want to learn?”

He looked away from her. To put it into words, he thought, even to deny it aloud, would make it too real for him to stand. “It isn't an option.”

“We don't need a hero that bad.”

He turned back. Small and unprepossessing in her crudely embroidered brown shirt, her feathery blond curls tied haphazardly back with a leather strap, and her brown eyes worried in their sketched fans of crow's-feet, she looked like a mouse in a cheese compared with Pella's splendid handsomeness. Joanna and Pella and Antryg were the only people who had cared about what he thought or felt since he had parted from Salteris in his thirteenth summer. That they did so still surprised him.

The thought of Salteris made him remember Suraklin, and he raised again that cold shield of obsession deliberately before his heart. He might hate it, but he could not afford to put it down. “You do,” he told her quietly. “Believe me, you do.”

The candle flames curtseyed suddenly in the rush of a draft as the door was opened; he could hear Squire Alport's lumbering tread retreat down the stairs to the first-floor hall as Antryg strode in, all his grubby tatters fluttering, absently rubbing at his gloved hands.

“How is she?”

The wizard's long mouth hardened. “Frightened,” he said softly. “With far better cause than she knows.”

Caris had seen the girl when Squire Alport had first offered them hospitality, presenting them to his bride of less than a year. Half her husband's age, her delicate, flaxen beauty was far too thin for her swollen belly. Everything Caris had learned from his midwife grandmother had made his stomach curl with dread at the sight of those too-hollow cheeks and those sunken eyes. Looking up now into Antryg's face, he saw the struggle there; as if everything had been spoken of before, he understood what the wizard was going to ask of him.

He had watched the wizard work minor magics for days, little healings such as granny-wives used, to nudge a bit of extra strength into weary hearts or to hinder the growth of proud flesh on a cleansed wound. Those bits of piseog were undetectable to the Council of Wizards, listening along the pulses of the earth for the whisper of Antryg's name—small things, that lay within Caris' rudimentary powers as well. But such things would never save that frightened girl's life.

Their eyes met and held. Even before Antryg spoke, Caris understood what he was going to be asked, what he had to be asked, and illogical rage surged up in him, a hot flood of anger at the taste of all the things that he would never have.

“You have no right to ask that of me,” he said softly, even before Antryg opened his mouth. “I'm a killer, not a healer.”

The wizard drew in a sip of breath and let it out. Deranged he might be, but he did not pretend not to understand. His flamboyant voice was low in the half dark. “Well, you're only the one masquerading as the other for the time being, I'll admit...”

“You need me for what I am.” Caris' onyx eyes narrowed, blazing into the wizard's calm opal gaze. “Don't make it harder for me by showing me what I know I can never have.”

The gray eyes did not waver. The fact that what Antryg wanted him to do was against the first law of the Council whose sworn weapon he was or the fact that it would make him an outlaw in the eyes of both Empire and Church was not spoken of. In a way, both sensed that it was not the issue, and neither pretended that it was. Gently, Antryg said, “I know it isn't fair to you...”

“Fair!”
Caris' laugh was a harsh explosion, utterly without mirth. “Fair isn't even in it! If I don't learn whatever spell it is you want me to learn, to save her life—if I have the strength to use it...”

“You do,” the mage said calmly.

The sureness in his voice stopped Caris for an instant with a splitsecond's leaping joy and then a rush of even more bitter rage.

“If I don't do this thing,” he went on at last, “you will, won't you? You'll give yourself away to the Council by working magic to save her—give us away. Get yourself tracked and caught and killed, and never mind that Suraklin will go free—all to save the life of some half-educated petty noblewoman we don't even know?”

It was Antryg's turn to be silent. He stood for a moment, his big hands resting on the back of Joanna's chair, the flames of the two or three candles distorting even further the baroque shadows of his lips and nose. Around his neck and over the velvet collar of his patched green coat, his tawdry beads glittered sharply like a galaxy of trashy stars.

Then he said slowly, “I know that I should not—another of those great, awful laws that I can believe in at a distance. But I know myself well enough to—to doubt my own reliability at close range, with the life of another person in my hands.”

“Reliability!
That's rich!” Caris' voice shook with scorn as he turned away, the taste of the small magics he had learned warm in his mouth, and on his hands—things he knew he must not touch, for if he did, he would never want to return to being what he had been. He had been a good warrior, and a good warrior was what they needed. He knew he would never be even an adequate mage, useless against Suraklin's might. To work magic, to touch even the small power of which he was capable, would be like a drunkard's first taste of wine; it would be like lying naked in bed at Pella's side, knowing that he must not put a hand on her.

After a long moment, he turned back to where Antryg still stood silent in the candlelight. “You're such a damned sentimentalist you'd do it, wouldn't you?”

Antryg did not reply.

Disgusted with himself, furious with Antryg, Caris hooked one foot over the rungs of another of the carved chairs and thrust it in the wizard's direction. “I should have killed you in the Tower.”

The spells were a deeper magic than Caris had ever before attempted, almost beyond his grasp; even shaping them in his mind, without putting his power into them, left him exhausted as after hard training. It was the discipline of his training that got him through, learning them as he would have learned a new sword form, and Antryg, trained as a sasennan himself, cast the lesson in those terms, the terms that Caris would unthinkingly understand.

Oddly, Caris trusted him. Antryg was clearly as mad as hatters got after years of breathing the mercury fumes of their trade, tricky, devious, and marked, far back in his soul, by all the dark abominations of Suraklin's magic.

Yet for reasons he did not fathom, Caris had felt drawn to the wizard from their first meeting and, though he knew he ought to guard himself, felt little hesitation in opening his soul to the scrutiny of those daft gray eyes.

Using the magic itself was like flying.

His power was slight, and nothing he or Antryg could ever do would increase its strength. But when the hemorrhaging started somewhere in the endless hell of the girl's childbirth, it took so little to reach in with his mind and close the ruptured vessels. Even that took all his concentration, to focus and transmit the healing light from his own palms to the small, sweaty, twisting ones so desperately clutching at him, summoning the vision of it by rote until sweat ran down his face like rainwater, repeating to himself everything Antryg had said, making himself see, making himself believe... But the power came.

Antryg's voice drifted away somewhere, with the girl's terrified sobs. The blood smell was everywhere, sweetish-sharp in his nostrils as it had been the first time he had killed a man—a thief, bound hand and foot to the big stake in the rear court of the training-hall; Caris still remembered the color of the man's eyes. Through the woman's hands he felt her spirit, feeble and summery and rather stupid, hopeless in the grip of unimagined pain. When he felt that of her living daughter, the shock of it nearly made him lose his grip on the inner chain of light at which he clutched so hard.

Then he heard the child crying.

After it was all over, on one of the terraced balconies on the lee side of the house, heedless of the raw cold that had followed the sleety winds of the night, he put his forehead down on the wooden rail and wept as if his heart had been broken.

Joanna could hear the servants whispering in the hall when the household's single footman came into the sitting room with a tray of muffins. The lamps had been put out. Through the opened storm shutters and the double-paned windows, morning lay on a landscape, messy with patches of snow and sheets of water frozen into plates of gray steel. How Antryg could possibly have demanded breakfast was totally beyond her; after the truly appalling mess of childbirth, she thought queasily that she would never be able to eat again.

He was asleep on the divan now, only a tangle of gray curls and one crooked-knuckled hand in its shabby glove above the dull purple vastness of his patched cloak. Since she was supposed to be his servant, she took the tray from the footman and set it on the table near him, the table still littered with Caris' exercises in Sigil-making; she glimpsed one of the maids craning her neck to see in from the hall as the young servant closed the door.

So much,
she thought wearily, for traveling north unobtrusively.

The events of the night seemed crowded and telescoped in her mind the intentness in Caris' eyes as he drew the Sigils, and the bitterness in his voice, the stink of blood and her own nausea at the primal rawness of the birthing, the squire weeping as he knelt before Antryg, clutching his gloved hands. There should have been something faintly ludicrous about a fat, middle-aged man sobbing and jiggling awkwardly on his chubby knees, but there hadn't been. He had obviously never expected the girl he loved so desperately to survive.

She walked back to the divan, rested one hand on its scrollwork end, and looked down at the man sleeping there. The deep lines around his eyes aged him, as they had when he had worn the Sigil of Darkness; even in sleep he looked worried. Since his escape from the Tower, Joanna suspected that he was less resilient than he had been.

Voices rose in the hall downstairs. Tired as she was, it took Joanna a second to realize that there were far more of them than the small servant population of the house could account for and that their tread, clattering en masse up the wooden stairs, was far too numerous and heavy. Fear stabbed at her and she caught up her backpack from under the divan, fumbling the .38 from its pocket. Caris, where was Caris... ?