The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (22 page)

As they moved down the street, Joanna cast a last glance back at the tired-looking children shuffling toward the factory gates.

“Flax mills,” Antryg said softly, falling into step at her side. “They'll work till seven or eight tonight, to take advantage of the daylight. At twopence a week, the owners find it cheaper than hiring men. And then, running a machine doesn't require strength.”

Looking up, she saw in his face the tired bitterness of one who sees suffering which he cannot alleviate and from which he has, by fate, been exempted. Thinking of those hurrying, tiny forms, she knew exactly how he felt.

He went on, “This is their technology, their industry for the betterment of all. To have no magic in politics, in industry, or in trade, to make no exceptions for the few at the expense of the many . . . For this world, we have forfeited what we are and could be.”

“What you could be,” Caris cut in frostily, “is what your master was—a despot who ruled this town by fear for years and who instilled in you the power to do the same.”

Antryg sighed, his hands buried in the pockets of his preposterous coat, the lines of his face settling into an expression that aged him-the weight of too great a knowledge of human sorrow. “Yes,” he agreed, his voice quiet. “But I've never seen that technology or this progress they keep talking about has helped those who must feed its machines. Yours is a world of technology, Joanna; it lies on the other side of a night of time which our eyes can't pierce from here. Is it worth it?”

Joanna was silent for a time, her skirt-entangled steps quick to keep pace with the longer strides of the men, fishing through the dim memories of a period in history which had always bored her. “If you mean, does it get better,” she said slowly, “yes. But that's six, seven generations down the line. And it gets worse.”

“Much worse?” His voice was the voice of a man asking after the fate of his own children, not the sons of men and women three generations away whom he would never know.

“I think so.”

The long, sensitive mouth twisted; he walked along in silence, while the morning brightened and bells all over the city began to ring for the first church services of the day. A couple of country girls passed them, their skirts hiked up to reveal tattered petticoats underneath. One carried a bucket of milk on her head, the other a tray of fish that could be smelled across the street; neither girl looked particularly well-fed. At the end of the broad street, Joanna could see the glint of sunlight on the gray, bulky towers of the city gates and the flash of steel pikes and helmets in their deep arched shadow.

“I suppose there's a certain economy to it,” said Antryg at last. “To sacrifice seven or eight generations for the betterment of ten, or twelve, or a hundred.”

The children of the last generations of downtrodden factory fodder, Joanna thought, had invented the atomic bomb. She said quietly, “Maybe not even that.”

His glance was puzzled and worried-not understanding how, she thought, but understanding what. They were entering the jostling crowds of the square, where half a dozen streets and alleys met before the gate. The din of hawkers, wagon wheels, crossing sweepers, and soldiers calling back and forth was tremendous and masked the soft, deep richness of his voice from any but her ears alone.

“Sometimes I think it would have been better had I not been born with the powers of a mage,” he said quietly. “I see what is happening and I know I am neither intellectually nor thaumaturgically equipped to remedy it. I know that those great, awful laws should apply to all, without exception. And yet, in individual cases-it seems different then.”

Without warning, the strange despair that Joanna had felt two or three times in the last weeks washed over her heart. He was right, she thought -not only about his world, but about her own. She felt suddenly isolated by the pointlessness of it all. This world, working to become what hers suddenly seemed to her to be-colorless, alienated, so impersonal that she herself could disappear and it would be days before her closest friend and her boyfriend-she shied again from thinking of him as her loverknew she was even gone . . . .

Though the warm brilliance of the daylight did not fade, it seemed as if all color, all animation had been drained from it, turning it into a tawdry carnival of pointless despair. Ahead of them, the city gates reared up at the end of the street, a clumsy monolith of dingy stone surmounted by a tarnished clock and cones of moldering slate. All the weariness of the last twenty-four hours descended crushingly on her shoulders. She could see the sasenna standing in the gatehouse shadows now, their black uniforms bearing the red sun-seal of the Church; with them were men in the gray, straitlaced clothing of the Witchfinders. She remembered the man Peelbone, and sudden panic clutched her heart.

But before she could speak, Caris balked and drew back suddenly into the mouth of a narrow lane. Under the grime and faked sores, she saw his handsome face had turned pale. His voice was breathless, "I don't like it.

Joanna shook her head, glad her own terrors were vindicated by the instincts of the warrior.

“We can hide in the quarter of the Old Believers,” Caris went on hoarsely. “They'll know who I am.”

“Don't be silly.” Antryg ducked into the lane at his side. Joanna could see his face, like the younger man's, suddenly clammy with moisture. “Not finding us on the roads, they'll concentrate on the ghetto now.” There was something else in his voice, something that she didn't bother to identify through that queer feeling of panic.

Caris went on, his voice stumbling, “We can't escape. They have the Council; they're destroying all the wizards. We could have gotten out-I was going to use a spell to make them ignore us-it was one of the few magics I could do. But now . . .” He paused, his breath coming fast, as if he fought a panic of his own. “Let's go back.” He started to move down the lane, and Antryg caught his arm in that surprising grip.

“No,” the mage said.

Furious, Caris dragged at his smock for his pistol; Antryg caught his other hand.

“It's left you, hasn't it?” he said softly. “Your magic.”

Caris' eyes shifted. "No. Now move or I’ll…

“You'll what? Shoot me? Fifty feet from the guards at the city gate?” They stood nearly breast to breast, the warrior in his filthy smock staring into the mage's bespectacled eyes in baffled, unreasoning rage. Then his mouth twisted, and his hand plunged for the knife in his boot. Joanna, watching, felt queerly distant from both of them, as if it were all happening to strangers and there would be no consequences. She wondered if the stew at the inn had given her dysentery and these were its opening stages, wondered if she would die of it and, if she died, if she would care. But even as Antryg caught Caris's knife hand, a cry in the street behind them snagged at her attention, though it, like everything else, seemed unimportant now.

Looking out, she saw that a lady, in a spell of crooked humor, had flung a halfpenny for one of the little crossing sweepers under the hooves of an oncoming dray. The boy had made an ill-timed dive for the coin and was now sitting on the edge of the flagway, clutching his bleeding leg and screaming while the drayman shouted at him and passersby turned aside unheeding.

Something within her told Joanna that she should feel something, do something, but it was as unreal as a scene on television. Her head felt strange, as if with hunger, though she had a weird sense that she could eat for hours without filling the gray emptiness of her soul.

At the gates, the sasenna had closed around a young man in the long black gown and braided hair of an Old Believer.

Caris, looking dully past Antryg's shoulder, said, “It's Treman. One of the mages . . . It'll never work! We'll be taken . . . .”

“We won't,” said Antryg quietly, seizing the young sasennan by the shoulder and steering him out of the alleyway, “because we're not using magic to get by the guards. Don't you understand? You're not the only one whose magic has left you. You're not the only one who feels this despair.”

Caris blinked at him, struggling in his mind. “What?”

Antryg hauled the young man's arm around his shoulder. “Lean on me,” he said softly. “You're drunk.”

"It'll never . . .

“I'll knock you over the head and carry you if you don't do as I say.”

Caris made one indignant move to struggle, then shook his head, as if he suddenly realized the perilous stupidity of such a display of temper. He slumped against the taller man's shoulder, his head lolling. “I-I don't know what's come over me,” he whispered. Joanna, clutching the bundle that now looked more than ever unmistakably sword-shaped, fell into step on his other side. "It's as if - . . .”

“I don't either,” said the mage softly, “but whatever it is, it has come over the guards, too.”

“It can't have.” Caris managed a convincing stagger, and clutched at the mage's arm. “It's only because my magic is fading. It's been fading for weeks. It hasn't anything to do with anyone else.”

As they approached the shadows of the gate, Joanna felt almost ill with despair, knowing they would be searched. Even if the Inquisition did not take her, it would certainly take her companions. She would be left stranded in this world, with its filth and peril, unable to make her living, unable to return home . . . Tears of fright and misery blurred her vision. She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to break away and bolt back to the sheltering shadows of the alleyways, and only some small, illogical corner of her that trusted Antryg's judgment kept her moving toward the massed sasenna in the echoing, stony darkness of the gate.

They were still gathered around the man Treman, who was looking terrified and at the same time in the grip of listless apathy. With a sudden oath, one of the guards struck him across the face. The other guards, watching this scene, paid scant attention to the cart and foot traffic clattering in and out of the gates behind them. The shadows were cold; by contrast, the sun on the causeway beyond, when the three fugitives reached it, was oppressively hot. Gnats hummed drearily over the marshes; the sun was blinding on the water. Joanna, Antryg, and Caris were some hundred feet beyond the gates before Joanna even realized they had successfully escaped the town.

“You feel it, too, don't you, Joanna?” Antryg asked quietly, as they lost themselves among the shuffling crowd of the city's poor who came and went on the marsh road, to cut hay or fish for their food among the pools. “And have done so for the last several weeks.”

Joanna nodded, puzzled that he should know. Caris, the gates safely past, removed his arm from Antryg's shoulders and took the bundle of weapons from Joanna. He remained walking between them, looking baffled and strained.

Antryg went on, “I don't suppose that woman back there would ever have thrown a coin under the horses' feet that way-even if the thought had crossed her mind; either inherent decency or, at the very least, fear of what her friends would think of her would have stayed her hand. Ordinarily the boy would have had more sense than to go after it and more skill than to get trampled.” He looked from one to the other of them, his head cocked to one side, like a gray stork's. “Don't you see?”

A passing troop of mounted sasenna kicked dust over them; it clung like flour to their sweaty faces. Joanna saw one tired-looking old farm woman who barely raised her head as the riders bore down on her; and the boy who was with her saw them coming for some moments before rousing himself to pull his mother out of the way. Joanna shook her head, feeling strangely isolated and uncaring.

“It eats life,” the wizard said softly. “It eats magic. It leeches the lifeforce, the energy that holds all life together, from every living thing and leaves in its place only the weary wondering of where it has gone.”

“What does?” Caris asked, a kind of fear struggling against the uncaring dullness in his eyes.

“That,” Antryg said, “is what I mean to find out.”

They traveled for three days, through the green and empty hill country that Caris called the Sykerst, and into the farmlands beyond.

The queer, terrible sense of deadness did not pass off until sometime after noon of the first day. Joanna, asleep in the shelter of the last haystack of the lowlands before the high ground began, felt the fading in her confused dream of being married to Gary, of protesting, But it was all a mistake! I don't want to be married to anybody, and of Gary's smug expression as he said, I'm
sorry, babe, but you did marry me . . . . As if a fever had been lifted from her, she wept. She felt a hand, large but very light of touch, brush her hair comfortingly as she sank into deeper sleep.

Later, as they resumed their walk through the stuffy, clinging heat of the last of the day, she asked Antryg, “Did it affect your magic, as it did that of Caris?”

“I felt it,” he admitted, producing three apples from the pockets of his trailing coat-skirts and tossing two of them to his companions as they walked. “It didn't bleed all the hope from me-madness has certain advantages.”

Joanna frowned up at him. “You mean magic is-is predicated on hope? Because I felt, more than anything, that was what was taken from me-the hope of anything.”

He regarded her with quirked eyebrows for a moment, surprised by her understanding. “Hope,” he said, “and belief in life. We move blindly from second to second through time. Hope, and magic, both involve the casting forward of the soul. In a way, both magic and hope are a kind of madness.”

“Madness also has the advantage,” Caris said, shifting the set of the pistol belted under his faded peasant smock, “of cloaking things which you find it more convenient not to explain-like the fact that you knew of the coming of the abominations, and why you, of all wizards, don't lose your powers to this . . . whatever it is.”

“Handy, isn't it?” Antryg grinned, pleased. He finished devouring the core of his apple and flicked the stem into the nodding weeds of the roadside ditch. “Couldn't have happened better if I'd caused it myself.”

Caris' coffee-brown eyes narrowed, and Joanna had to look away and purse her lips tightly against an involuntary smile.