The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (36 page)

“It has to be there,” said Antryg quietly, raising his chin from his elbows, which were crossed over his knees. He had been sitting in much the same folded-up position in one of the crude wooden chairs in the watchroom of the Silent Tower when Joanna had fallen asleep beside the hearth—hours ago, by the grayish quality of the light. That he'd gotten up in that time she knew; the fire had been replenished, and his cloak lay over her like a dilapidated purple horse blanket. But she hadn't heard him. Weariness that she had carried all the way north crushed her, far more than a few hours' sleep would dispel. Like the bitter cold, it had eaten into her bones, and she wondered if she would ever recover from it.

They had found nothing in the Citadel ruins, nothing but the abominations, hiding deep in the dead ends of such of the underground labyrinth as had survived the wizards' wrath and the attenuated dreams of an evil long calcined to nothing. Not even the Church's sasenna watched the place now; they had long deserted the Silent Tower to the darkness of its memories. And so at last, as the day grew colder with the turning of noon and a thin, dry snow began to fall, they had come to the Silent Tower, the only shelter in all the bitter hills.

“All the signs point to it,” Antryg went on. “It isn't just that the energy of the lines was flowing to the south to Kymil—dammit, Joanna, it's the only place it could have been flowing! I felt it, I knew it was going there! It's other things as well.”

She sat up under his cloak, pulling the thick wool around her shoulders, though the watchroom, built into the thickness of the wall off the arched passage of the tower gate, was warm now. On the hearth she saw a tin teakettle and a big pewter tankard which had evidently been pressed into service as a teapot; an earthenware cup rested on the table near Antryg's chair, though no steam rose now from its long-cold contents. He had refused to enter the Tower itself. Though the Sigil of Darkness had weeks since been removed from its door and taken back to the Bishop's treasure house, the walls of the Tower were still thick with spells that prevented the working of magic—thick too, she thought, with evil memories.

Throughout the day, Antryg had been silent. In his eyes she still saw the darkness of the garden at Devilsgate and the blinding refulgence of the elemental springing to life, clothed in the lightning he'd given it to destroy those whose only defense was metal swords. The memory lay on him like the brown scar left by the Sigil of Darkness that marked his throat among his tattered shirt ruffles, but it was a pain that it would take more than a carbide hacksaw to remove.

He went on, “It's the logical place for it, you know. Yes, the Church has watched it from a distance, but seldom closely, I'll wager. Everyone else would have shunned it. And though there were abominations near the Tilrattin node in the north, they weren't anything near as plentiful as there.”

“That's because the woods wouldn't concentrate them like the pits did,” Joanna pointed out.

“Even given that,” he insisted, “there are still more—many times more. I never felt—easy—going to look for it elsewhere. Everything points to the old Citadel. It has to be there. I know it. I feel it.”

Joanna pushed aside her backpack, which she'd been using for a pillow, and poked at the rock-hard jerky and waybread Antryg had dug from what remained of the guardroom stores. “That's neither here nor there,” she said reasonably. “We've looked twice, and it's not. ”

“Neither here nor there,” the wizard repeated ironically, leaning back in his rickety chair and hugging his knees again. “From here to Tilrattin and back—from your world to mine—neither here nor there...” He paused, his gray eyes suddenly sharpening behind his spectacles; then he sat up straight, unfolding his long legs to the floor. “Neither here nor there!”

His eyes met Joanna's. For a time the silence in the guardroom was so intent that the silken whump of the log crumbling in the hearth sounded loud and individual beneath the chaotic drone of the wind in the passage of the gates outside. Doubtfully, Joanna said, “A—a vest-pocket dimension?”

His eyes widened. “You know of such things?”

“They're in all the comic books.”

“Actually, a sort of enclave between universes, like a bubble in the fabric of the Void. They sometimes occur, but they're fairly short-lived because the movement of the Void pulls them apart. But now that I think of it, your universe and mine have been in phase for a long time, and certainly energy is being drained from both.”

“Could he make something like that? Or find it?”

“Found, probably, and is shielding in some fashion to keep the dimensions together indefinitely and to keep me from being aware of it.” He leaned forward, and the grief that had haunted him for the last twenty-four hours faded from his eyes in the daft glow of a theorist's enthusiasm. “You see, I'm the only person I know who can 'cast through' the Voidsee things on the other side, touch its fabric with my mind. Suraklin never could; though he can cross it at will, he has no sense of how the Void operates. It is actually a rather specialized field of knowledge. Many wizards have them, some of them completely useless, like the ability to summon frogs or sculpt the wind. But all the same...”

“Could you find it?”

He shook his head. “That's the trouble. Before I can see through the spells of unseeing that guard it, I'd need to know what it looked like, know its shape and boundaries, even as I have to know what the Gate to it looks like before I can see it. And, of course, such things exist only in Suraklin's mind.”

Joanna looked up at him, feeling inside her such a blaze of illumination that she wondered her flesh didn't glow. Her voice was not quite steady as she said, “No they don't.” With shaking fingers, she reached out and touched her grubby backpack. “If he's programming it, he can't do it in patterns—only linearly. And I've found graphics programs in here, mathematical equations that translate into three-dimensional shapes—or four-dimensional ones. The human mind can't really picture a four-dimensional shape, but a computer doesn't give a damn whether a thing is supposed to be able to exist or not...”

“Rather like wizards,” Antryg mused, “or madmen. Are all computers insane?”

Joanna hesitated, disturbed by the question for reasons she'd preferred not to examine, and the wizard went on, “Can you graph those equations? Give me a picture of it?”

She nodded, shivering all over with suppressed excitement. “It's really only reverse engineering. I'll need graph paper.”

“There's paper in the Tower. Lines can be drawn on it.”

“It'll take a hell of along time. If I'd known I'd have brought my calculator...”

“I had a set of calculating bones—little slips of ivory about the size of your finger with numbers on them. They're probably still up there. A mathematician in Mellidane showed me how to use them. They work very quickly.”

He got to his feet, collected his cloak from around her shoulders, and started for the watchroom door. Then he stopped, came back to her, and seized her in a fierce hug of mingled joy and desperation, his face pressed against her hair. Her arms went around his waist, being careful of the rib he'd cracked during his encounter with the Dead God. For a long moment, they stood so, while she thought, This
is going to be it. We're really going to have to deal with Suraklin this time. The thought left her weak with dread.

Then he was gone, striding across the courtyard in the failing light with all his old gawky insouciance, the snowy wind whipping his cloak and coat skirts into lunatic billows about his thin form and fraying at his long gray hair. Watching him go, Joanna felt a stab of grief and the burn of tears behind her eyes; for all his height, his loose-limbed strength, and his scatterbrained cheerfulness, it came to her how fragile he seemed. She understood, suddenly, Suraklin's obsessive desire to preserve the things in his life as they were, to hold to those joys no matter who else suffered for them, and to keep the taste of them on the tongue, so they would not slide away into the fast-flowing darkness of time. She forced the feeling down, telling herself, One thing at a time. Caris was right. There were some times when it did not pay to think too much.

Shaken inside, she sat down by the hearth again and began digging through the DARKMAGE files for the four-dimensional equations whose significance she hadn't understood and whose importance, at the time, had seemed to her to be neither here nor there.

It was long past dark when Caris returned to the Silent Tower. Had he not been mageborn and able to see in the dark, he doubted he could have found it at all, for not even stars pierced the black sheet of clouds that covered the sky from horizon to horizon. To his mage's sight, the Tower loomed queerly against the ebon backdrop, black within black, utterly untouched by light. The wind had risen, driving the hard little pellets of snow like a sandstorm against his cheeks; the cold ate through his tunic, jacket, and cloak as if he had worn nothing but a thin shirt of cotton lawn. Nevertheless, he circled the Tower twice, observing the ground and the walls, seeking for a sign. It was only when he climbed the rear wall with the hook and line of the standard sasenna's equipment which he'd gotten from Pella that he saw the blue glow of witchlight from the watchroom's slit windows and the faint shiver of heat above the chimney, before the wind whirled the smoke away.

If they were here, he thought, they had not found Suraklin at the Citadel after all. His heart turned sick inside him. Another time of search, then; how many more weeks of forcing himself to be what he no longer was, of warming himself at a revenge that had grown cold, and of waiting to die?

But it would have been worse, he knew, to have returned and found them not there.

His feet made no more noise than did his shadow as he crossed the court. He stood in a lee angle of the gatehouse passage and listened until he heard Antryg's deep, beautiful voice before slipping up to the door.

Before he could raise his hand to knock, he heard Antryg say within, “Ah, there's Caris.” There was the scrape of a chair, and the door opened to the cool brilliance of witchlight and the warmth of the fire. Caris reflected that there were times when he wanted to hit the wizard up alongside the head with the hilt of his sword.

He said dully, “It's done. I got there in time—Leynart's under guard, and they know about the rose.”

Joanna looked up from the vast graph spread across the table—a bedsheet, in fact, ruled with penciled lines, on which she was marking dots in the midst of half a dozen wax scribbling tablets that were covered with mathematical formulae in the spiky little numbers her people used. “And Pella?”

“She's gone back to Pharos.” Caris stripped off his cloak and jacket and folded himself up beside the hearth, his arms crossed before his chest. There was hard bread and dried beef there. He realized he hadn't eaten all day, save for a few mouthfuls of bread and ham Pella had stolen for him from the kitchen, but didn't care.

Joanna set down her pencil, startled and aghast. “Pharos...”

Roughly, Caris said, “It doesn't matter. It's better. There was nothing for us.”

Except joy,
he thought, leaning his forehead against the stones of the hearth and closing his eyes, feeling the warmth of the fire like the brush of Pella's fingers on the lids. Except joy.

Behind him, Antryg said quietly, “We've found Suraklin.”

“Good,” Caris mumbled. He lay down and drew his cloak over him. At least, he thought, it will then be over.

And on that thought he slept.

He was wakened by grief, dull and uncaring, beyond even the effort of tears. Pella was gone, and it seemed to him that even his pursuit of Suraklin was futile, a waste of his time, a fool's errand. Opening his eyes he saw wet grayish light seeping through the watchroom windows that let into the courtyard, making the small chamber seem dim and frosty, with its stink of old smoke and wet clothes. The vast graph spread over the table was now covered with arcane lines and symbols, with scribbled marginal calculations half-hidden by tablets, by the disgorged contents of Joanna's precious backpack, and by Antryg's little ivory calculating bones. Under the grubby curtain of her straggling blond hair, Joanna's face looked thin and old, as it had by the candle light of the posting houses on their journey south, ravaged by lack of sleep and weariness, the sharpness of her cheekbones and chin emphasizing the awkward nose and the shrew lines around her eyes. She was looking at the strange magic watch that was strapped to her wrist. Antryg, sitting on the bench beside her, seemed strangely subdued.

She said quietly, “It's nine in the morning.”

The wizard glanced across at her, his fingers, as if idling away from his conscious thought, beginning to make a corral of his mathematical ivory bones. “There have been daylight spells before.”

“Not on weekdays. This is Tuesday, Antryg; if Suraklin was still being Gary, he'd have to be at work. He needed to stay working so he could program on the San Serano computer. The fact that he isn't means he's done with that.”

The sleep cleared from Caris' mind, but left it still muzzy, as if he were half-drunk. He realized that his depression and grief were not solely his own. “You mean he's gone into his computer.” He sat up, scrubbing his fingers through his cropped blond hair, wondering why it didn't matter to him that they had lost their race with the Dark Mage.

Joanna nodded. “I think so.” She began folding up her papers, mechanically, as she always did, like a task she was forcing herself to perform. Her eyes were dull; she looked beaten, wretched, and badly scared. “I hate to say it, guys—but I think the system just went on-line for keeps.”

Under a cut-steel morning sky, what was left of the citadel of Suraklin lay cold and bleak, the puddles of slush frozen, and skiffs of hard, powdery snow blowing restlessly over ground barren now of any living thing. Save for those ghostly flurries, even the snow did not lie here, though it blotched the hills all around with white. Joanna, hugging Antryg's patched purple cloak around her, wondered if Hell would look like this after Judgment Day—inhabitants gone, Devil destroyed, even the glamour of evil burned out of it, leaving nothing but a few lines of stones that stank of forgotten corruptions.