The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (3 page)

Relax,
she commanded shakily. You've done this a dozen times.

She was still shaking all over by the time she slipped into one of the programming cubicles across the hall from the mainframe.

You've done this a dozen times...

Left work with everyone else, to stash your car in a parking lot, en route, but never the same parking lot, and sneaked back here by bus to take a roundabout way back into the plant to wait... Spent your time raiding computer files and toting around twenty pounds of backpack...

Altogether,
she thought wryly, to quiet the shakiness in her chest, this had damn well better not be a hallucination after all.

She felt a little like a white-robed cultist who, having sold everything he owns, stands expectantly on his mountaintop, awaiting the end of the world. And I'm going to feel just as silly, she added, trudging down home again...

Feet swished softly on the carpet outside. Joanna flattened her body against the wall behind the cubicle's half-open door and angled her head sideways to look through its crack. For one flashing instant she identified Gary as he passed.

The Gary who was no longer Gary now, in the absence of anyone who had known Gary, didn't bother to keep up the pretense. In spite of years of conscientious weight-lifting, Gary—of medium height and slender build, despite a recent tendency toward paunchiness—had never looked particularly comfortable with his body. He walked now with an animal grace subtly at odds with the sensible gray polyester trousers and the pale quiana shirt.

Joanna saw he was carrying a briefcase, and her heart turned perfectly cold within her.

It was, after all, going to be tonight.

She'd guessed it when she'd tapped into the DARKMAGE files early this morning and found large sections of them gone. No modem-lines stretched across the Void. He was doing his programming on the San Serano mainframe, but he had to transfer his files across the Void by hand.

She felt the terrified urge to cry. Don't think about it, she told herself severely and tiptoed soundlessly across the darkened cubicle to the phone. To her infinite relief, she got Ruth's answering machine. It had been a good bet she would—Ruth was rarely home—but the last thing she wanted right now was questions.

She said, simply, “Ruth, this is Joanna. Use your key to my place. There's a manila envelope on the table, with some instructions. Please carry them out. I'll explain when I see you, but that might not be for a few weeks. I'm not in any trouble. 'Bye.”

Paranoid, schizo, obsessive, insane.

Why does it have to be me?

Antryg, she thought, must have felt the same.

Then something changed in the air. It was a sensation she would have been totally unable to describe—an unreasoning terror, a strange tingling of the nerves, a sense of standing on a beach whose shoreline is not water but the black drop-off into eternity. But once felt, it could not be mistaken for anything else. Dark winds seemed to whisper across her bones; she felt she could hear the murmuring echoes of unknown forces, moving in blackness.

The Void between the universes was being bridged. Suraklin was going across.

She was keyed to the shaking point as she slid out the cubicle door. 1 can't let Suraklin see me, she thought desperately. As of now I've disappeared and left a plausible story for why I won't be seen for a couple of weeks. No one will look for me.

But of course, if Suraklin took her now, it wouldn't matter if the search started tomorrow. No one would find her until she returned, her mind not her own.

Cold white light poured through the computer room door into the darkened corridor. The backpack with the purse strapped to it now dragged her shoulders, but she scarcely noticed. She thought, quite reasonably, There's a nine o'clock bus back to Encino... and put her head around the door.

And the good news is,
she thought half-hysterically, it wasn't all a hallucination.

That is, unless I'm having a hallucination now.

There was darkness in the computer room.

Darkness, hideously, surrounded by the fluorescent blaze of the lights; like a cloud of gas, but definitely not a vapor, not a substance at all.
A darkness that seemed to stretch away, never reaching the rear wall with its banks of green-eyed monitor lights, but seeming to extend far past it, a ghostly corridor that stretched to the abysses of infinity. Far off, along that great gulf of nothing, she sensed movement.

There was no one now in the computer room. At its edges, the darkness was already beginning to disperse.

And the bad news is...

. . . It wasn't all a hallucination.

And you're going to have to walk into it.

A small voice within her suggested timidly, Can't I just go home and forget the whole thing?

Not allowing herself to think any further about that very real option, Joanna strode forward into that darkness.

It was beyond a doubt the most frightening thing she had ever done. She hadn't gone two steps when she wanted to turn around and go back, but she knew already she dare not even look over her shoulder to see if it were possible. Far in the lightless Void ahead of her Gary's—Suraklin's—yellow polyester shirt was a flitting blur. If she lost sight of that, she would be lost indeed.

Vertigo swamped her, the sensation of falling, the terror of feeling nothing beneath her feet. She struggled forward, half-running, half-swimming, tractionless and desperate to keep that pale will-o'-the-wisp in sight, smothering in darkness such as she had never known. Tears burned her eyes, tears of terror and resentment. When she had gone through to that other world the first time she had been unconscious; coming back, Salteris'—Suraklin's—thin, strong hand had been her guide.

Don't think,
she told herself. Caris could follow a man through the Void unguided, you can, too. Cold that was not really cold was leeching the strength from her veins. She ran/swam/flew through the darkness, fighting frantically not to lose sight of the man who would destroy her if he found her now.

The darkness was alive. She knew it, felt it, sensed the vast amorphous things that floated in that frozen emptiness; she heard the dry, glittery whisper of something close behind. Panting, wheezing breath, she wondered, or her own desperate gasping as she struggled to keep Suraklin in sight? Her sweat, dripping from her hair in icy droplets, cold on the bare flesh of her arms, or... ?

She ran harder, sobbing, not daring to look behind her. Only the fact that she could not stop to get her breath prevented her from screaming Suraklin's name, pleading with him to come back and fetch her. If he needed her services as Antryg had said, he couldn't let her be lost in the Void.

He was gone.

Darkness was around her, wind—or something else—clawing the ends of her flying hair. There was no blur ahead of her, only plunging darkness, livid with the sense of writhing things. Far off to her right, something bright caught her eye, fragile, milky light, and she sensed the smell of rain. Though it was nowhere near the direction she had last seen Suraklin, she veered toward it, running as she had never run before, running in heartbursting panic, with the pack dragging her shoulders, like the weighted flight of nightmare. Something swooped at her, some winged and flabby thing whirling out of the aphotic pits of this nonbeing; she felt it cut her arm, felt blood hot on the cold flesh. She didn't look, only ran harder. Time had stopped; she felt as if she had been running for hours, aimless and in terror. What if she had been? she wondered frantically. What if the light before her vanished as Suraklin had? What if it was only a lure? What if she never got out, if this would go on until she died? What if she didn't die? Her hair tangled in her eyes, the pack was dragging on her, pulling her back, and the light was drifting away, fainter and fainter...

Then it was clear before her, a white moon burning full and clear in a wide-flung double ring of ice mists above a broken line of standingstones. Sodden grasses whipped Joanna's calves as she ran; cold sliced her arms, damp and raw. Behind her she heard the chitter and hiss that had filled her ears in the Void. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she saw it, as much of it as there was to see—something dark and floating, a chitinous tangle of long, knobby legs, with moonlight edging an aureole of floating tendrils like a woman's long hair in water. The tendrils reached out toward her, and, in the knot of darkness at the creature's center, things like specks of faceted glass caught the moonlight.

Her mind blurred with terror she ran, stumbling on the rough rise of the ground, racing until she felt her heart must burst toward the staring silver eye of the moon. She had the confused impression that, if she could get her back to one of the bigger standing-stones, she might at least have some chance. Where she had come through the Void, they were only low stumps, like broken fenceposts along the ancient path, if anything remained of them at all. Even as she ran, she cursed herself. Her knife was in her pack; she'd never get it out in time. Caris would never let himself get caught like this —

She flung herself against the nearest of the large stones, the pitted surface tearing at her hands. Blind with horror, she scrabbled at her pack and ripped free the velcro pocket. The blood was hot on her arm where the creature had cut her. In another second all those dangling claws would be on her. She dropped the pack and jerked the knife free of its sheathe, the blade jamming in its newness. Any second... Any second...

Barely able to breathe, she flattened back against the stone and faced her adversary.

It was gone.

It was out there in the darkness; she knew it, felt it, and could almost hear its faint, crackling whisper. But there was another sound, a muffled, rumbling thud in the earth, a groan.

She spun around, looking down the track into the moonwashed slot between the stones.

A rustling, moving shadow spread over the ground like water. Even with the thin lucency of the moon, it was hard to distinguish shapes, but after a moment she heard the groan again, deep and plaintive, and realized it was the lowing of a cow. Sheep bleated. Straining her eyes, Joanna could make them out now in the shadow: cloudy blobs of whitish wool; the blunted spark of brass horn-tips; and a vertical shape that could only be a walking man. Sweet, cold, and unbearably lonely, music curled like a black ribbon into the night, a haunted piping that threaded its way like wind between the stones. Like a counterpoint against the thudding of her heart, she heard the hollow pat of a drum.

Somewhere beyond the line of stones, out in the huge gulf of blackness that lay like a single velvet entity up to the glowing violet hem of the hillcrowded sky, the abomination waited.

Joanna remembered Antryg saying that whenever the Void was breached the whole fabric of the universe weakened; holes appeared not only in the vicinity of the Gate, but elsewhere in other universes, and through these holes abominations would drift. In veering from Suraklin's route, she might have stumbled through a hole opened along one of the energy-tracks that crossed the Empire of Ferryth. Or, she thought with a shiver, she might have fallen through to some other universe altogether, neither her own nor the one she sought.

Fine,
she thought, with half-hysterical irony. I've managed to screw up before I even got through the void.

She stepped cautiously back out of the main track between the stones, keeping her body still pressed to the icy, uneven surface of the menhir, the cold making her hands ache around the unaccustomed handle of the knife. The bobbing darkness down the track was coming nearer, resolving itself into a blur of dark shapes and green eyes flashing queerly in the moonlight. She smelled dung and dust in the sweetness of the trampled grass; fragile and terrible, the aching, single voice of the pipe tugged at her heart.

A sheep passed her, then a cow with a yearling calf. More cows followed, jostling one another, one of them so close she could feel the warmth of its body, then sheep in a dusty choke of wool-smell and hay. Dogs trotted between them, silent; then goats, a couple of pigs, a plowhorse the size of a Panzer tank, with a small boy walking nearly hidden in its shadow along that dark and silent track toward the moon. Other men and women walked among the animals, silent as they in the false, quicksilver light; dogs trotted at their master's heels, and half-grown girls carried cats in their arms.

In the trampled wake of the beasts walked a line of men, heads dark and disfigured by the horned beast masks they wore. There was something indescribably lonely and terrible about the dirge they played, like no music Joanna had ever heard, mourning for something no one understood anymore. The black horns bobbed and swayed in the ashy moonlight. Under the jutting muzzles gleamed the silvery reflection of masked eyes. If they saw her as they passed her, standing shivering in the black pool of moonshadow, they gave no sign.

Last of all she saw what she thought was a catafalque made up from a farm wagon, drawn by cows and sheep, though it was almost impossible to tell in the darkness. She thought that on it lay the body of a man, eyes shut, face and hands blackened, clothed in rags, with a deer's antlers fixed to his dark forehead. She seemed to hear Antryg's deep voice: “All things travel along the lines, resonating forward and back... On certain nights of the year the peasants still drive their herds along them, in commemoration of the Dead God, though they've forgotten why he died...”

Well, at least,
Joanna thought wryly, I've come to the right world.

Fine.
Now you have to worry about Suraklin.

Her first impulse was to follow eventually back to their village, to them, knowing they would lead her shelter and warmth for the night. It was bitterly cold—belatedly, Joanna remembered that, for all its damp and smothering heat in midsummer, the Empire of Ferryth lay well to the north of the latitudes of California. The thin windbreaker wadded in her backpack would be about as much use to her as a pair of lace ankle sox. Swell. You not only screwed up while you got through the Void, but you didn't do so good before you entered it, either.