The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (24 page)

“Hunh?”

Both you and Caris assumed it was some problem of your own—doubtless each of these people did as well.“  He gestured towards the fat squire and his wife, the farmer couple, and the two or three laborers, like a Hogarth print in sepia and gold, laughing over some joke in the chiaroscuro of the lamplight.  ”It's another dubious advantage of being mad,“ he added.  ”I understand that what is in my head is real, at least to me."

Joanna considered him for a moment, watching the jump of shadows over the extravagant curves of his lips, nose, and hair.  “Are you mad?” she asked after a moment. Everyone says so, but—I haven't seen it."

“Haven't you?” His gray eyes sparkled appreciatively. “All the experts have said so for the last twenty-five years—but I was always unbalanced. Light-minded, Suraklin used to say, as though gravity were some kind of virtue. And for years I believed it was. I did try to take it all seriously, to become what I thought he wanted me to be . . .”

It was the first time Joanna had heard the Dark Mage spoken of with something other than loathing and fear. Curious, she asked, “Did you love him?”

Antryg turned his head a little to regard her with something like surprise at her understanding. “Oh, yes. I was halfway between being his slave and his son, from the time I was nine and my powers began to come. They came early. I understand now that he would have taken me by force had seduction not served, but it did. There was nothing I would not have done for him, except give up what I was . . . and for a time I did my best to do even that.” His eyes were not on her now, nor on the cavernous gloom of the big room, with its bumbling shadows and the half-seen glint of the copper pan bottoms on the walls. He seemed to be gazing into some private seeing-glass of memory and, she thought, observing the sudden dip of wrinkles across his brow, not much liking what he saw.

“What finally turned you against him?”

He shook his head, and there was distant sadness in his voice. “I never turned against him.” He leaned back against the stone of the chimney breast behind them; the shadows obscured his odd, craggy-boned face, save for the spark on one corner of his spectacles and the star-glint of an earring. “I fled from him and hid, but there was not a night that I did not feel him seeking me through my dreams. Even after Salteris found me, years later, and told me he was dead . . .” He paused, then sighed heavily. “I'm told he had that effect on many people. But I did love him. I suppose that's what made it all the worse.”

Joanna was silent. As if that brown-velvet voice, with its flamboyant richness, could weave for her the smoke-visions that he himself saw, she had a momentary glimpse of a skinny and overgrown boy moving hesitantly in the old man's terrible shadow, trying to kill what he was in order to be what he was told he ought to be. Like a glass sliver caught in a garment, she felt the unexpected stab of her own years of torn striving to conform to the fashions and morals of a peer group she despised.

Not knowing quite why, she asked, “Was he good to you?”

The fervid edge of the light outlined the arched nose as he turned to look at her and gleamed opaque on a circle of glass. “Not really. Obsessive people seldom are. And his obsessions grew with the years, until every instance in which I could not be what he wanted me to be, every mistake I made, every day I played truant to go running to the hills or read poetry, was an insult to him.”

The squire and his lady were making their way up the creaky wooden stairs to bed, their shapes wobbling huge in the reflection of a bedroom candle. The little clerk called for a final round of beer. A beefy young laborer with curly hair looked up and waved to Antryg to come back to them. The mage smiled ruefully at Joanna.

“Funny,” he said, “if you're a mage, they always ask you to read the future, as if knowing it will help. I think three-fourths of all prayers prayed are for two and two not to equal four.” He set his empty tankard on the hearth and got to his feet. Joanna rose to stand beside him, her head, as usual, barely coming up to the topmost tarnished silver button on his threadbare coat.

She glanced up at him curiously, remembering her own fears, doubts, and half-conviction at San Serano that she was either insane or in terrible trouble. Why she felt concerned for him or felt this strange kinship with him, she wasn't sure; he was, she reminded herself, the storm center of terrible and inexplicable events, the man who had brought her to this place, who had twice tried to strangle her, and who wanted her for some strange purposes of his own-the only man, at the moment, who could return her to the world she knew. Yet she found herself asking, “Have you ever prayed that?”

“Oh, frequently,” he murmured, half to himself, she thought, as much as to her. “Frequently. Would you like me to tell your fortune?”

Joanna hesitated, knowing she was already too taken in by the daft warmth of his charm. Then from the yard came the swift clatter of hooves and the jingle of accoutrements, and Antryg turned swiftly, gray eyes wary, as the first of the sasenna entered the posting house.

They wore the gold-trimmed black livery of the Prince Regent, the braid glittering in the darkness like ropes of fire. Joanna had already identified the sounds in the yard as that of a coach, and a fairly substantial one, and was fading as inconspicuously as she could toward the rear door of the posting house. It was only as she reached it that she realized that Antryg had moved back again to the shadows of the bench by the hearth, unable to call her back to him. She got a glimpse of his wide, warning eyes as her hand pressed the latch.

Gloved fingers closed like a metal clamp over her wrist. She whirled, fighting a gasp of shock as a big, iron-faced woman in the black clothes of the Prince's sasenna pushed her back into the room. She stumbled and spun around in time to see among the black-and-gold sasenna and the cluster of crimson-liveried servants at the post-house door a man who could only be the Prince.

“She was sneaking out the back,” her captor said briefly.

The Prince's queer, pale-blue eyes glistened in the shadow. “Was she, indeed?” His voice was soft and rather shrill; none of those at the tables dared move or call to themselves that odd, flickering gaze. The silence that had fallen was absolute, save for the desperate burr of a moth's wings against the hot glass of the lamp.

“A guilty conscience, child?”

Joanna tried to back away and met the hard-muscled shape of the female guard. The ebony satin of the Prince's coat was so heavily laced with gold that it seemed to glitter like black flame as he minced forward over the dirty straw of the floor. For all his diminutive prettiness, as he came close and put one small, moist hand under her chin, Joanna could see that, beneath the layer of cosmetics, his skin was coarse, pale with the pallor of one who has been weeks without sunlight or change of air. The carefully curled golden hair was limp and thin; the skin around the skyblue eyes was painted to cover not only the fact that he was on the wrong side of thirty, but the ravages of sleeplessness and debauchery. In spite of the rouge that coated them, she could see his lips were chapped with nervous biting.

Any other man so dressed and so affected would have appeared ridiculous, but for those eyes.

She became aware that she was trembling.

His thumb and crooked forefinger tightened on her chin. Beneath their curled lashes, his eyes never touched hers. “Answer me, sweetheart.”

Sweat crawling down her back beneath her peasant bodice, Joanna said, “I wasn't trying to run away, your-” What was the proper title for a prince? “-your Grace. Not from you, anyway. I-I'd had a quarrel with someone here, that's all, and wanted to get out.” Not a very good story, she knew, nor, she was afraid, very convincingly told, but it was the best she could do on the spur of the moment. One of the sasenna sniggered. The Prince smiled, and his hand stole like a slug down the side of her neck.

“A quarrel? With a pretty wench like you? How very tasteless of them.”

Instinctively she stepped back, loathing his touch, and his small hand snatched with the nervous quickness of a child playing jacks, seizing a handful of her shift and bodice at the shoulder. Joanna wondered desperately how far she should let this go and how much trouble they'd all be in if she struck him; but at that instant Antryg rose from his seat in the corner and drawled, “Oh, come, Pharos, you know you haven't any use for a woman.”

There was a half beat of shocked, utter silence, as if someone had switched off the sound. Then the Prince threw Joanna from him, his indrawn breath of rage like the hiss of a snake. In a swooping flurry of gold-laced coat skirts and a blazing galaxy of diamond buttons, he strode across the room to where two of his men had already sprung to seize the wizard by the arms. Completely forgotten, Joanna faded back at once into the shadows. But though she knew that Antryg had bought her escape-time at who knew what cost, she could not bring herself to flee.

Had it not been for the utter silence, the Prince's voice would not have been heard, a hoarse whisper that shook with rage. “You dare . . .”

His arms pinned by the Prince's guards, Antryg did not struggle, but Joanna saw in the firelight the gleam of sweat along his jaw. For an instant the Prince stood, speechless-then he reached out and, with a hideous, gentle deliberateness, removed the spectacles from Antryg's face. The glass and wire rattled sharply as he flung them to the stone of the hearth. Then he held out his hand, and a crimson-liveried servant put into it a leather riding-whip.

No one in the inn so much as breathed.

The Prince struck twice, with vicious deliberation, across his defenseless victim's face. On the second blow, Joanna heard the Prince make a little sound in his throat, a whimper of satisfaction or some private, inner pain which sickened her. His hand came back for a third blow. She glimpsed in his eyes the lusting flicker of madness and knew he would go on with the flogging until he lost his already-slipping hold over himself. The candlelight caught the dark ruby gleam of blood on the leather and pouring down Antryg's still face. She thought blindly, I should
run . . . he's doing this so 1 can run . . . . But when she did take a step, it was forward, not back . . . .

The third blow never fell. In the midst of his backswing, the Prince gasped, and his body convulsed as if he had been kicked in the stomach. The whip clattered on the hearthstones as the slender black form doubled over, hands clutching at the barley-gold curls as if to root out an invisible axe blade sunk in his skull. One of the sasenna holding Antryg's arm released his grip to catch his master before he toppled. Chaos erupted as the others crowded forward. To the man on his other side, Antryg said sharply, “Fetch a basin! He's going to be sick in a minute!” and the man made a dash for the kitchen.

Antryg scooped up his cracked spectacles and was fitting them back to his nose as he crossed the room, unnoticed in the fearful hullabaloo.

“Let's go,” he said softly. Taking Joanna's arm, he led her through the unguarded back door and out into the moonlight of the yard.

“What did you do?”

“Migraine headache. Psychotics often suffer from them.” The greenish eyes of the horses flashed at them in the darkness of the stables as Antryg scrambled halfway up the ladder to the loft. “Caris!”

“Here.”

Joanna spun around, her heart in her throat-the sasennan faded from the blackness of a nearby stall. Antryg jumped from the ladder, landing with light springiness on the ground; the wan moonlight turned black the blood running down from the opened flesh of his face and caught in the fracture of his left spectacle lens like a skeleton star.

Caris, Joanna saw, was armed, not only with the pistol, but had his sheathed sword grasped lightly in his left hand, ready to draw and fight. The small bundle of their belongings was strapped to his back. He must have been ready, she realized, from the moment the Prince's sasenna rode into the inn yard.

“Was it the Regent?” he demanded softly, as Antryg led them down the nearly dry stream bed that ran behind the inn. Shouts and neighs and the rattle of gear were already rising into the dark stillness of the hills. Antryg nodded.

“He took a fancy to our Joanna-he might have anyway, even had she not tried to slip out the back. She couldn't have known he'd have the place surrounded before going in. He's suspicious of everyone and sees plots in everything and, as Emperor in all but name, he can do pretty much as he pleases. My only fear was that he'd recognize me when he took my specs off.” He paused and raised his head over the edge of the stream-bank, ridiculously like a lanky, nervous setter dog in long grass. “Ah, good.”

Encouraged, Joanna stood up beside him. Down in its nook in the hills beside the road, the posting house was still visible, but the moving lights that had begun to circle away from it were returning, like indecisive fireflies.

“They're turning back?” Joanna whispered disbelievingly.

“For the moment. There, look . . .” A single horseman went streaking away down the road toward Kymil; a moment later, a second thundered westward toward where Parchasten lay in the fertile valley of the Glidden beyond. “Now what we've got to do is get as far away from this place as we can, as fast as we can, and keep away from the road.”

“I don't understand.” Caris scrambled after him up the stony bank of the stream, giving a hand to Joanna, who followed, cursing the custom of the country that decreed that all women should burden themselves with trailing masses of skirts. “Why aren't they pursuing tonight?”

“Because Pharos suspects a trap-some plot to lure his men away into the countryside while he's attacked at the post house. I suspect the Bishop summoned him with a claim that there's a plot of wizards afoot. He won't be terribly surprised to have stumbled into one.”

“It's what I'd suspect,” Joanna added thoughtfully, “from the way you deliberately baited him at the inn. But-would he have recognized you without your specs?”

“He might have.” Joanna had retrieved her purse from Caris' pack, and Antryg accepted the handful of Kleenex she dug from it, mopping gingerly at the blood on his face. They were moving down through the dense shadows of the hills, where the starlight glittered faintly on stream water only deep enough to soak Joanna's cowhide peasant boots and make the hem of her skirts slap wetly against her ankles, no matter how much she tried to hold it clear. “Wizards don't wear specs-we work our healing spells on ourselves from a very early age. My eyes started to go within weeks of being put in the Tower. I have no doubt, if I hadn't been mageborn, I'd have been blind as a mole from the age of ten.”