The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (20 page)

The other man nodded, as if agreeing that, yes, mad dogs ought to be killed; an agreement that was self-evident. “And him?”

The Witchfinder glanced casually back at Caris. “Oh, him too, of course-but after we've learned where Salteris might be. We have most of the great ones, save that one alone-if this boy is his grandson, we may be able to use him as bait.”

It was not so much the words he said that affected Joanna, but the way they were spoken, the soft, insidious voice calmly matter-of-fact, as if it were not people at all of whom he spoke. As soundlessly as she could, she backed away, more afraid of being detected and of having that voice speak to her than she had been of anything, even of waking up in the darkness with the print of the strangler's hands on her throat.

Antryg was watching the door with concern in his eyes when she glided back in. The tension relaxed from his shoulders when he saw it was she, but he neither sighed nor, she noticed, moved his hands from where they had been, lest the links of the chain make even the slightest noise. If he, a wizard, could hear the voices on the other side of the refectory, it stood to reason he feared that there were Church wizards there, too, listening for any untoward sounds. After a moment's debate, she shoved the heavy pistol into her purse and slung the unwieldy bag up onto her shoulder again. As she gentled the drawer from the desk, she wondered whether Caris would tell them—or would he realize that, once that soft-voiced man got his hands on Antryg, Caris would never have the chance to find out where the Archmage was or what, if anything, Antryg had done with him?

She came back, key in hand, and touched her finger to her lips for silence. Then she pulled Antryg's t-shirt up over his head and down his arms, to muffle the iron of the lock as she twisted the key. She gestured toward the door and looked a question.

“Peelbone,” he breathed, with almost telepathic quiet. “Witchfinder Extraordinary-special branch of the Church.” His hands freed, he pulled the t-shirt into place and shook his hair back, crystal earrings glinting in the moonlight, and straightened his specs. “An ideal man for his job but gets invited to very few dinner parties-not that he would ever accept, mind you. I wonder why it is that dyspepsia and righteousness go so often hand-in-hand?”

“Perhaps it's what they mean when they say that virtue is its own punishment?” returned Joanna, equally soundlessly, following Antryg through a small door partially shielded by a torn curtain and into a ransacked workroom.

The room faced opposite the direction of the moon and was almost completely lightless; a droplet of luminescence no bigger than an apple seed floated like a firefly behind Antryg's shoulder, edging his long, nervous hands and preposterous nose in a thin slip of silver as he moved from cupboard to cupboard.

“As I thought,” he whispered. “The Bishop's guards came through and sacked the place but didn't take anything away. Afraid to, probably. I wonder the Witchfinders had the nerve to enter the place when they heard Caris moving about.” As he spoke, he was drawing things from cupboards-two packets of powders, a mechanical implement that looked like a wind-up toy, and a small box tied tightly shut. Joanna, nervously aware that the small room constituted a cul-de-sac and the one window was far too narrow to admit even her, kept glancing over her shoulder into the barred and dappled shadows of the study beyond.

“We have to help him,” she whispered, forgetting entirely that Antryg had every reason not to do so.

“If he's in the hands of the Witchfinders that goes without saying,” he replied, the seed of light warming infinitesimally as he bent over the clockwork mechanism, disconnecting a gear and rod arrangement.

Joanna peered worriedly past his shoulder at it. “What is it? It looks like the innards of a clock.”

"It is. Like most mages, Nandiharrow was interested in other things besides pure magic-whatever that may be. This is actually a musicbox mechanism run by a clock spring. . .

You didn't happen to bring along my chains, did you, my dear?"

Joanna shook her head, mystified; he tched under his breath as if she'd forgotten to bring money on a shopping trip and handed her a rag from a corner of the bench. She paused for a moment, hating the silent checkerwork of moonlight and shadow in the room outside and sensing through her skin the shortness of time. Having come in and found Caris, the Witchfinders would be fanning out through the building; it was only a matter of time until she and Antryg were discovered. Moving as quickly as she could without making any noise, she stepped over to the chair where she'd been sitting and where she had put the chains, covered them with the rag, and brought them in, cushion and all. As she did so, she felt, more than heard, the muted tread of approaching feet on the refectory floor, and it was all she could do to keep from breaking into a run back to the workroom.

“They're coming,” she breathed.

He nodded and moved soundlessly to the far wall, passing his hand swiftly down it as she had seen him do in Gary's computer room when the wizard's mark swam into brief, silvery life under his sensitive fingers. This time it was no mark that appeared, but a slit of still deeper black in the shadows. He pushed gently, and a segment of the wall fell back; the tiny light that burned above his head drifted forward to illuminate a very narrow flight of worn and mended steps. He paused, then handed her the clockwork, packets, and box; and to her speechless horror, he turned swiftly and vanished back into the darkness of the study. A moment later he was back beside her, shoving a small wash-leather bag into the pocket of his jeans.

“What is it?” she whispered as he led her into the secret stair.

“Money,” he breathed. “Nandiharrow always cached the House funds under the bottom shelf of the bookcase. We'll need it come morning.”

“For what?” They were ascending the stairs-wood, like everything else in that rambling house, and so narrow there was not even enough slack to creak under their weight.

“Breakfast, of course. I'm starving. Do you have anything like thread or string about you, my dear?”

Silently, Joanna fished into her purse and produced her sewing kit; Antryg swiftly unraveled about five feet of thread and tied one end to the middle of the chain, the other to some projection of the clockwork mechanism he had taken. Very carefully he cranked it tight. Joanna could hear the swift firm stride somewhere below now; she shivered.

“Right,” he whispered. “Would you take the chains down a few steps, my dear? Thank you. Just set them down on the step.” He made an adjustment on the clockwork, stood up, and held out his hand to her. She came back to him, careful not to step on the taut thread, and picked up her purse where she'd left it beside him. The weight of it reminded her of the pistol-he could have easily taken it and used it against her, but the thought didn't seem to have crossed his mind. He pushed open another panel in the blackness, and then they were in a long upstairs colonnade, with moonlight slanting through a series of windows that barred the wall to their right in molten silver and lay like pearl stepping-stones along the worn oak of the pegged floor.

Antryg shut the panel behind them; Joanna thought it blended invisibly with the linenfold of the walls, but in the uncertain light, it was difficult to tell where even unhidden doors lay. Taking her hand, he led her with that same catfooted tread along close to the wall. They were halfway down the hall when Joanna heard, faint but audible, the soft bump and clink of the chain.

“The secret stair's like a sound tunnel,” Antryg whispered as they reached the far end of the gallery. “You can't tell where the noise is coming from. The music box pegs should pluck at the taut thread intermittently enough to keep them looking awhile yet.”

“How do you know about all this?” Shifting the weight of her purse, always considerable and now aggravated by five pounds of metaphysically dead iron, Joanna followed him down a broad flight of steps at the end of the hall, toward a darkness like a velvet well beneath.

“I told you, I used to stay in this house all the time. There are few enough of the mageborn in the world these days-whatever we think of one another, we are all acquainted.” He halted again, this time in the embrasure of one of the stairway windows; for a moment Joanna could see him, like a gangly black spider against the light that picked a steely line along his spectacle-frames and made the lenses gleam like opal when he turned his head. She saw the glint of something in his hands and realized it was the box he'd taken from the workroom.

“It's fortunate for us,” he went on, still in that soft, subvocal whisper, “that since I cannot use my own magic, I can borrow someone else's. There.” He pocketed something-Joanna could see that it was the string that had tied the lid shut. “Whatever you think is happening,” he went on softly, “don't turn aside-just follow me. All right?”

She nodded and took a deep breath. “All right.”

He smiled at her in the moonlight in a way that made her remind herself firmly that he was the villain of the piece. “Good girl.” Turning, he hurled the box outside into the darkness of the garden. Then he caught her hand and started to hasten silently down the stairs.

They had gone three steps when Joanna heard it, and her heart caught and twisted within her. Shocking in the alien night, Gary's voice had a frantic note to it that would have brought her up short but for the insistent drag of that powerful hand on her wrist. “Joanna! Joannal”

There was some kind of commotion below-she heard Caris' voice cry “No!” and the scuffing crash of something falling. Antryg halted short, forcing her to stop, as two men in the black uniforms of sasenna raced past the foot of the stairs. A second later, she heard the crashing of their feet in the garden outside; already Antryg was dragging her down the stairs, and she was stumbling to keep up with his longer stride.

In the ransacked library, Caris was struggling wildly against his bonds, desperation and fury in his face. “Grandfather's out there!” he shouted, as Antryg scooped one of the daggers from the table. “I have to . . . !”

“It's a Crier.” Red light slipped along the blade as the wizard slashed the bonds; he caught Caris by his torn jacket and sword belt as the young man lunged for the garden doors. “An illusion of summoning-Come on!”

“But . . .” Shaken Caris might have been, but not so shaken that he forgot to snatch his weapons from the table as they passed.

“It's true, I heard Gary's voice,” Joanna panted. They were already on the run for the window. Footfalls pounded behind them on the oak of the corridor floors. Antryg kicked open the leaded casement of the window and swung through; Joanna scrambled next, still hanging onto her purse, and dropping a surprising distance into a pair of strong hands.

Antryg was already hauling her back into the shiny, green-black thicket of a camellia bush as Caris dropped from the window; in the tepid night air, the scent of the waxy white blossoms hung thick around them. Caris ducked back to join them, still shoving a last dagger into his boot, the bruise on his face showing up horribly against the exhausted grayness of his skin. Joanna thought about going over the fence again, and her every stiff and aching muscle whined in protest, but the thought of the cool, self-righteous voice of the Witchfinder brought the cold sweat of fear to her face. Remembering it and those chilled and empty eyes, she no longer questioned how an animal could bite off a foot to escape a trap.

Caris whispered, “They're outside, waiting for us to come over.” Indeed, beyond the garden wall, she could hear men shouting in the street. With his teeth, Antryg ripped a corner from one of the sacks of powder and dumped a little into his palm, then did the same with the other. Shoving the sacks into the pocket of his jeans, he pulled a camellia from the dark shrubs around them and ground the white blossom into the mixture.

With a quick glance back at the window above them, he threw the blossom over the fence. Just as it crested the top of the wood, it burst into violent flame. Shouting rose beyond the palings and from the room they had just left. As Antryg dragged her away Joanna could see the sasenna who had run past the base of the stairs leaning from the window, pointing excitedly at the fireball. Running feet pounded the pavement outside the fence.

Very calmly, Antryg opened a small door that led back into the house and led the way at a swift walk down a short, darkened hall, across the ghostly moonlight of a rather bare reception room, and out one of the great doors and into the street outside.

There were no guards. Their abandoned brazier still flickered on the pavement, but Joanna could see them pelting around the corner towards the smoldering glare, their huge, jumping shadows thrown on the tall primrose and blue fronts of the houses opposite. His arm protectively around Joanna's shoulders, Antryg walked unhurriedly across the cobbled square and on into the concealing darkness of the nearest lane, with Caris trailing silently at his heels.

“You're a fool.” Caris cast a nervous glance around the eating house of the Bashful Unicorn as a stout, red-faced serving-woman in a greasy apron brought a platter of stew and breads to the table. “We could have been long on the road by this time.”

“No matter how quickly we'd gotten on the road, the patrols looking for us would have been mounted.” Antryg gravely poured ale from the earthenware jug for the three of them, the grimy, orange glow of the solitary lamp overhead glancing along his spectacles. “Even the ones who remained behind to search the quarter of the Old Believers, under the impression that they'd be likelier to shelter fugitive mages, would never dare risk being caught in a tavern, should their captain ride by.” He raised his dented tankard in a toast. “Confusion to our common foe.”

Caris paused, tankard in hand. “Have we one?”

“I'm sure we do, if we look hard enough.” The mage smiled. “Or should we say, ”To the Emperor's good health'?"

Across the dining room, a well-heeled young man in a mint-green satin court coat slumped forward across the table amid empty bottles and glasses; the two painted strumpets with him instantly ceased their uproarious appreciation of his jokes and got down to the serious business of relieving him of his valuables. In the street outside, the first clattering of the market carts and the crowing of cocks in a thousand backyard hen coops could be heard.