The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (13 page)

“I'm sorry, m'lord,” he said at last. “It's forbidden to speak to him without the Bishop present, and those are my orders.”

“Very well,” said Salteris quietly. “Be so good as to send for her.”

The captain opened his mouth to speak, but something about the frail old man before him made him close it again. He turned abruptly and bellowed into the watch chamber just within the portcullis, “Gorn! Get out and get a horse saddled.” He turned back to Salteris. “It'll be a time -she's had a good hour's start.”

“I understand,” replied the old man, inclining his head. “Believe me, captain, if it were a matter which could wait until morning I would certainly not put her Grace to this inconvenience.”

The captain grunted and scratched his huge paunch through his loose, dark jacket. For all his faintly slovenly air, Caris noted the polish of the captain's well-worn sword belt and the oiled gleam of the scabbard thrust through it. The blade within, he guessed, would not be one dulled with neglect. “Well, it's a nuisance all around. There's wine in the guardhouse . . .”

“Perhaps.” Salteris favored him with a chilly smile. “But there is also tobacco smoke, for which I wouldn't trade the smell of the summer night. We shall do well here, until it gets too cool.” He took his seat on a stone bench just within the heavy portcullis, where the watchroom door threw a luminous bar of shifting apricot torchlight across the intense blue gloom under the gatehouse.

“As you please,” the big man said. “If there's anything you want wine or food or tea or whatever just give a shout for it. And you-” he added to the young man who appeared in the passage, leading a rat-tailed roan gelding, “-make it smart, hear? If you catch her Grace on the road, it'll be one thing; but if she's sat down to her dinner already, we're all of us going to be what she eats for dessert. Now off you go.”

The hooves thudded on the road, and a faint whiff of dust blew back from the darkness. Then, with a rattle of weight, chain, and counterwheel, the portcullis rumbled slowly down. The gate was dragged shut behind it and the small bar put into its slots; the captain's huge back blotted the rosy watchroom light for a moment, and then was gone into the smoke and frowsy within. In the resulting pocket of utter darkness under the gatehouse, Caris took a seat beside his grandfather on the bench. Through the lighted door, he could see the big man settle himself at one end of the rough wooden tables and pull a quart tankard to him, grumbling as someone shoved him his cards.

He was changing his seat, Caris realized, to watch them unobtrusively through the door.

“Very good,” Salteris' voice murmured, pitched for Caris' ears alone. “We should have over an hour until the Bishop arrives.” He folded his slender hands and settled his back against the stones of the wall behind him, like a man making himself comfortable for a long siege. In the guardroom, someone threw down his cards and cursed richly-there was laughter and profanity-sprinkled banter. The captain threw back his head to join in, but Caris was aware of the tiny glint of his sidelong glance.

He pulled a bit of chamois and an oilcloth wrapped in a rag from his belt purse and set to work getting the mud and dried slime out of the crannies of his sword hilt. Beside him, his grandfather murmured, “How are you at the courtly art of conversation, my son?”

Caris glanced over at him, startled, and again caught the quick glint of the old man's smile in the gloom.

“Do you think you could carry on half of a conversation, as if I were here?”

“You mean, just talk to the air?”

“That's right. It needn't be animated just do as you are doing and, every now and again, address a remark my way or reply to one that I might make if I were here. Don't look into the guardroom,” he added, sensing that the young man was about to cast a glance at the captain; Caris looked quickly down again, concentrating his attention upon the brasswork of the pommel instead.

“Will that serve?” Caris asked softly. “You're in the light . . .”

“And he shall see me in the light,” Salteris replied, his voice equally low. “It's one of the dead giveaways of illusions, if the person next to one takes no notice of it. I shouldn't be long.”

“But—-”

“I'll be all right,” he said softly. “I need you to cover my tracks while I'm gone. I should be able to handle Antryg, even if, as I suspect, he is not quite so powerless within the Tower as he would have us believe.”

“But the Sigil? The Sign of Darkness?”

Salteris smiled. “I shall be able to deal with the Sigil of Darkness. Just stay here, my son, and talk-don't chatter, it looks unnatural-and I shall be back within half an hour. If I am not . . .” He hesitated.

“What?”

“If I am not,” he went on, his voice suddenly deadly serious, “don't risk trying to deal with Antryg yourself. Get the other mages and get them at once. ” He moved to rise.

Caris had to prevent himself from calling attention to them by catching his sleeve. Instead he breathed, “Wait.” The Archmage stood poised, like a dark ghost just beyond the edge of the light. “Will you leave me the lipa?”

Salteris thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “I fear I cannot. For if my worst fears are realized, I may need it myself.”

Then he was gone.

Caris sat in silence for a time, belatedly aware that, with his usual ease, Salteris had duped him into staying out of danger. Perhaps, for some reason, he really had wanted to meet Antryg with no witnesses present perhaps it was only out of consideration for Caris' weariness and injuries, though, Caris told himself stubbornly, they weren't much. In any case there was no way he could follow now without giving the game away; he had to fight the impulse even to look, knowing the captain would be watching him from the door. In the soft twilight of the hills, the Archmage had made light of the peril into which he walked; it was only now that Caris understood that his grandfather, too, knew it for what it was.

But having seen the abomination in the marsh, the old man considered the knowledge Antryg might hold worth the risk of-what?

Caris did not know.

He realized he had been silent too long. No conversationalist even with someone who was present, he stammered, “Uh-did I ever tell you about the time cousin Tresta and I stole the town bull?” and turned with what he hoped was naturalness to the empty place at his side. Beyond, the small square of the yard lay under a thin wash of starlight, the cracks between the flagstones like a thin pattern of spiderweb shadow. He could see the door of the Tower clearly, with its two black-clothed sasenna side-by-side. His small magical powers permitted him to see in the dark after a fashion; he glimpsed a drift of shadow that must be Salteris near the wall. One of the guards at the Tower door sneezed violently as the old man's shadow passed before him; the other, startled, jumped. Caris was not sure, but thought he saw the heavy door open a crack. In the utter darkness of the slit; white hair gleamed like a slip of quicksilver-then nothing. He did not even see the door close, but when he blinked, he saw that it was closed.

He recalled the Sigil of Darkness and shivered. Evidently, he thought, there was some way of dealing with it-at least of getting in. If Salteris knew, there was the possibility that Antryg Windrose might, also.

Remembering what he was supposed to be about, he said quickly, “That's very interesting—uh—grandfather. How did Narwahl Skipfrag get interested in electricity?”

Yet his apprehension did not fade. It ebbed for a few moments, then grew again-not his own fear of detection, but something else, something he did not understand that prickled along his nerves, a sudden uneasy fear that brushed his neck like wind from a door which ought to be locked. It was something he had felt before, somewhere-some evil . . . . He was aware of an odd stirring in the back of his mind, neither nervousness nor fear, but akin to both, a sense of magic and a danger that could not be met with a sword . . . .

Something moved in the archway of lapis darkness that led into the court. Lines of shadow from the stretched ropes of the counterweights brushed blackly across the red robes of one of the hasu as he entered the dark gatehouse at a rapid walk.

Caris bit his tongue, forcing himself to remain still. Being mageborn, the hasu would see that he was alone on the bench; but then, the hasu did not know that there was supposed to be anyone else there. Caris knew he teetered on the edge of discovery-in his finger-ends he was ready to explain or to fight. Robes crimson in the gold glare of the watchroom torches, shaven head catching an edge of the sherry-colored light, the young hasu stood beside the captain's chair, speaking rapidly, worriedly, to the captain, glancing about him, as if he scented danger but knew not where to look for it.

He feels it, too,
Caris thought suddenly. The foretaste of unknown fear blossomed within him. The darkness in the corners of the court seemed to ripple, like sunlight on the open plains in burning heat. He felt again the cold touch of the unreasoning terror that had come over him in the Mages' Yard, as he had gazed into the black eternities that lay beyond the threshold of the world as he knew it, as if those abysses lay suddenly within reach of his hand.

He realized, suddenly, what was happening within the Tower.

It was as if the ground had opened beneath him, plunging him into an icy stream. He was on his feet, rage and fury igniting in him. “No!”

The captain swung around, and in his eyes Caris saw the Archmage's carefully wrought illusion fail and crumble. The big man lunged to the door, brushing aside the slighter form of the hasu-“Where . . .”

Caris was already running across the court, his sword in his hand. “It's a trap! Antryg trapped him!”

Wolf-swift for all his great bulk, the captain of the Tower overtook him even as the guards seized him at the Tower door. Heedless, Caris twisted against their grasp.

“Let me in! The Archmage went in there, he tricked you . . .” Close to the door the feeling was stronger, the cold breath of the Void like a death-spell whispering in his heart. The stupid, stubborn look on the guards' faces infuriated him. “Don't you understand? He thought Antryg was lying out of fear of the Bishop. Can't you feel it? Antryg wanted him alone!”

The hasu came panting up beside him, sweat glittering like a film of diamonds on his shaven forehead. “The strangeness in the air . . .” he began uncertainly, too young to trust in his own judgment.

“Let me into the Tower!”

For an instant the captain glared at him, gauging him with eyes like dark pebbles of onyx. Then abruptly he snapped at the guards, “Open it.”

“But . . .”

“Open it, you fools!” he bellowed. “He's the Archmage-you wouldn't have seen him if he'd kicked you in passing!”

The breath of the Void seemed everywhere now, stirring and whispering in the night as one man removed the dark Sigil from the door and the other twisted the iron key in the lock. Looking back over his shoulder at the courtyard, Caris seemed to see flickering patches of darkness where no shadow should lie, swimming in the air of the court; the guards in the circular chamber at the Tower's base were clamoring with the edginess and anger of frightened men as Caris plunged impatiently through. Terror of the blackness of the Void and terror of what he would find pressed upon him, thicker than the darkness, as he plunged up the narrow, tenebrous spiral of the stair. He shouted, “Grandfather!” and his voice roared back at him in the strait of the walls. “Grandfather . . .”

A hideous darkness filled Antryg's study, like a wavering cloud. Like a cloud, Caris could see through its edges and make out, as if through moving gauze, the shapes of the book-littered table, the overturned chair, and his grandfather's bullion-embroidered glove lying on the corner of the small hearth. Through that darkness, the candles still burned, but the flame was a bleached and sickly white that shed no illumination into the heart of that well of black space that stretched into a falling eternity of nowhere. Far, far along the darkness, he thought he saw a dim figure fleeing, a stir of movement in those terrible depths. The darkness was already beginning to dissipate at its edges, clearing like smoke into the air; the black eye of its center retreated, farther and farther along that distance that never seemed, in all its endless plunge of miles, to reach the opposite wall.

Caris cried again, “No!”

His sword was in his hand as he plunged after that retreating shape into the darkness, and the cold abyss swallowed him up.

The night was soft as silk and warm as bath water. The stars, Caris saw, were the ones he knew. The brilliant Phoenix-star lay on the edge of the dark circle of hills, calling to its mate a quarter of the way up the sky. The tip of the Scythe still pointed to the inner and unmoving heart of the heavens. The air was dry and sweet with the scent of warm dust, underlain by some metallic tang that caught his throat.

He, at least, was safe.

For a long time, his awareness consisted of only that. Kneeling in the thin, dry grass, he fought the wave of shakiness that threatened to wring his meager supper from his guts. It was more than just the utter terror of that long, half-falling run through cold and sightless chasms and that terrible disorientation and the horror of knowing that he could well be lost forever, without even hope of dying, more than the sickening aftermath of fear-induced exertion that had spurred his final, desperate run toward the retreating starlight at the end of the closing tunnel of eternity. He was more weary than he had ever been in his life. His exhaustion after fighting the abomination-had that only been this morning?-seemed petty and laughable now, for then he had been in a world he knew, surrounded by people of whose reactions he could be sure. Then the Archmage had been with him.

He wanted nothing more than to lie where he was and sleep for a week. But it is the Way of the Sasenna to rise and go on.

He managed to raise his head.

The crest of the hill upon which he lay cast a black semicircle of shadow in the dell beneath. Beyond its edge, the smudgy light of a newly risen three-quarter moon lay upon the thin grass of the opposite hillslope, turning it the color of pewter, and illuminated the bizarre figure of Antryg Windrose, standing above the body of a young man sprawled at his feet.