The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (36 page)

He stood for a long time, staring at the paneling between the windows, where the mark had glimmered so briefly to life. Then he sighed and shut his eyes.

The Prince glanced nervously over his shoulder. “What is it?”

Antryg turned away and touched briefly the elaborate marquetry dressing table that stood beneath the mark. A branch of candles in the twining shapes of naked goddesses stood on it and beside them a pitcher of creamy, rose-colored porcelain, half-filled with water. “The mark is less than two months old,” he said quietly. He looked suddenly very tired, his mouth taut and a little white, as if he had drunk some bitter and poisoned brew. “This one-” He crossed to the door of a dressing room and brushed a faint, brief shimmer of sign from its topmost panel, “-about ten years. Both by the same wizard.”

“Who?” demanded the Prince, and Antryg shook his head.

“The second mark would reinforce the influence of the first,” he went on, staring up at the place where the mark on the door had been. “But ten years ago . . .” He paused, his eyebrows drawn together over the absurd beak of his nose. “Ten years . . .”

“What is it?”

Antryg looked back at the Prince and shook his head. “I don't know,” he said. “These have always been your rooms?”

“Yes. Since first I was given my own establishment when I was eighteen. I am thirty-five now and I assure you, my lord wizard, that no wage has been in here to make that first mark since they have been mine.”

“Knowing how you've kept yourself guarded, I'd say I believed you,” Antryg said, “except, of course, that one obviously was.”

“They were always about the Court, of course,” Pharos said. “My father . . .”

He hesitated.

“Exactly,” Antryg said quietly. “Your father. And Cerdic later. I know your father had a good deal to do with Salteris, as Head of the Council.” Listening, Joanna wondered if she detected the faintest of flaws in Antryg's voice when he spoke the Archmage's name. “Do you know who else?”

The little man shook his head. “I didn't want to know. I considered it—” He licked his lips, shying again from the subject, and then simply concluded, “I didn't want to know.”

Antryg was silent for a long time, his arms folded, his head down, and his strange, wide, light-gray eyes distant with thought. From somewhere, Joanna heard a clock speak eleven silvery chimes and felt all the deathly weariness of the day closing in on her-flight, fear, and sudden, starving hunger.

Then the wizard sighed and pushed up his spectacles to rub his eyes. “It's very late now,” he said, “and Joanna and I both are very tired. At least I am and, if she isn't, I suggest you hire her as your bodyguard. Unless you're going to lock us away for good, Pharos, there are two things that I'd like to ask of you in the morning. Three things, actually, counting breakfast. Can your cook make muffins?”

It was the first time Joanna had seen Prince Pharos laugh, the pale, pretty face and sinful eyes screwing up in genuine amusement. “My dearest Antryg,” he said, laying what Joanna privately suspected of being an overly friendly hand on the wizard's arm, “if the muffins are not to your satisfaction, I give you full permission to flog the cook. He won't quit, I assure you; he'd never relinquish his position as my cook. It's far more than his reputation would be worth.”

“Excellent.” Antryg smiled and pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose with one bony forefinger. “The second is that I'd like you to send for the contents of Narwahl Skipfrag's laboratory, and the third . I'd like to look at your father's rooms.”

“By the way,” said Joanna quietly, “I never had a chance to say thank you.”

Antryg, sitting in the dark window embrasure of the room the Prince had given him, up under the eaves of the Summer Palace's mansard roof, looked around at her and smiled. A flicker of bluish light appeared in the air of the room between him and the door where she stood; it floated, like a negligent firefly, over to the exquisite ormolu table in the room's center and came to rest on the wick of one of the unlit candles there. His voice was deep in the gloom. “I ought to say it was my pleasure, but diving under that portcullis-I can only think of two times I've been that frightened in my life. It is my pleasure,” he added, “that we're both alive.”

“I wouldn't say pleasure so much as stunned surprise.” She crossed the room to him, and he drew up his feet on the window seat to make room for her. Through the open casement, she could smell the smoke from the lamps and torches of the guards in the courtyard three stories below and, when the wind shifted, the thick green smells of the palace park. “Decent of the Prince to send us up supper.”

“Considering what it took to get lobster patties at this hour,” Antryg agreed. “No matter what the muffins are like for breakfast, I shall have to lie and say I like them. Such a cook ought never to be flogged more often than is necessary, as the Prince says, to keep him smart.”

Joanna chuckled. “Not to mention the clothes,” she added, touching the high, pleated collar of the pageboy's shirt she wore. “He sent me up a gown for tomorrow. I'm wondering where the hell he got it.”

“Possibly one of his boyfriends . . .”

She poked him reprovingly in the knee with her foot and laughed. “Is one of the mages trying to kill him?”

"Oh, yes.”

“To put Cerdic on the throne?”

“If I were the sort of mage who routinely meddled in human affairs,” the wizard said gravely, “it's what I'd do.”

She remembered Cerdic's enthusiastic and unquestioning welcome of Antryg because he was a mage and the blind acceptance of the inherent rightness of wizards, started to speak, then was silent. For a moment, she contemplated that long, peculiar profile in the bluish glow of the witchlight, noticing how the reflections of the fires in the courtyard below touched hard little glimmers in the steel of his spectacle frames and the dreamy grayness of his eyes. He looked a little better than he had, less strained and gray, but the nervous energy that had gotten him through the last several hours was fading, even as it was for her. He looked tired and very vulnerable, sitting with his knees drawn up in the window seat, and she had to resist an overwhelming impulse to put out her hand and touch his arm.

Slowly, she said, “Are we dealing with several problems here or just one? The fading and the abominations-but you said you were coming to talk to some member of the Council? and there's the Archmage . . . . And poor Caris-whatever's happened to him?”

A smile tugged briefly at Antryg's lips in the wan luminescence of the witchlight. “I imagine poor Caris is still waiting for me outside a vacant building on the south side of the river. He's very patient when he's on a trail.”

“One of these days,” Joanna said severely, “Caris is going to murder you-and not because of his grandfather, either.”

“Of course,” Antryg said. “That's been the-” He stopped himself as Joanna's eyebrows came together, then went on quickly, “He's come very close to it twice. As for what we're dealing with here . . .” He shook his head. “There seem to be a lot of events unrelated to one another, except by juxtaposition in time-Narwahl's death, your kidnapping, the Prince's marriage . . .”

“Or things that happened twenty-five years ago,” she said, remembering the old woman in the prison. At his tricks again, that one had said, rocking back and forth, and for the dozenth time Joanna found herself reminded that what Suraklin had known, Antryg undoubtedly knew. There was no way he could have murdered Narwahl-on the night of the physician's death, as far as Joanna could calculate, they had all been sleeping in the hayloft of some posting inn on the Kymil road.

She wondered suddenly whether an examination would reveal wizards' marks in that stuffy, blood-smelling room.

She was aware that Antryg had fallen silent and was looking at her with wary uncertainty in his eyes.

“How did you know I was there, by the way? Thinking about it, I was desperately glad to see you, but I don't think I was surprised; and now I realize I should have been.”

“Not really.” His earring winked in the tangled mane of his hair as he turned his head. “I was looking for mages, remember. Considering the current situation, the logical place to look was St. Cyr. I was loitering around inconspicuously outside when they brought you in. I assume Caris sent you to Narwahl's.”

“How did . . . T” she began, and then remembered saying to the Prince that she knew what the neighbors had found in that hideous upper room.

. . . Or could he?

“Will that screw you up?” she asked after a moment. “All the mages getting away from St. Cyr-or did they all get away?”

He shook his head. “I imagine most of them did. I've spoken to Pharos about releasing the others. There will be time enough to find them and to speak to them, after I've seen the Emperor's rooms.”

“Will having them loose increase your danger?” she asked, and he shook his head absently. “Then you know which one to be afraid of?”

He looked quickly at her, his eyes suddenly wide in the dim gleam from the court below, as if he had suddenly seen that he'd walked into a trap. But it wasn't a trap, she thought, baffled; she had sensed him holding her at arm's length, picking his way carefully over conversationally shifty ground. He was braced for something, she knew, but she only asked, “Why are you afraid of me?”

He started to say something, then checked himself; for some moments, the little room under the eaves was quiet, save for the noises that drifted up from the court below through the opened casements and the faroff creak of some servant's foot elsewhere in the palace. Then he changed his mind and said, “Like the Prince, I'm afraid of a good many things. I've spent most of my life terrified of a man who's been dead for years.”

He got to his feet and helped her to hers. The vagrant foxfire drifted after them as he led her to the door. She paused in its darkness, looking up at him, knowing he was evading her and coming up with an uncomfortable number of reasons why. But none of them accounted for the care he'd taken of her, none of them accounted for risking his life that afternoon to save her from the Inquisition.

She said, “I get the feeling that there's a pattern here somewhere-as you said, some connection between the fading and the abominations and between Narwahl's death and the Archmage disappearing and my being kidnapped. It's all subroutines of a program I can't see. I understand the kind of thing you hope to learn from seeing Narwahl's experiments though they looked to me like perfectly straightforward let's-make-electricity stuff-but what do you hope to learn from seeing the Emperor's rooms?”

He shook his head. “Confirmation, perhaps, of a theory I have.” He leaned against the doorframe, the will-o'-the-wisp light edging hair and spectacles and the curlicue line of shirt-ruffles with their snagged tangle of quizzing glass and beads. “And maybe the answer to something that's puzzling me very much.”

She didn't really expect an answer, but asked, “What?”

After a long moment's hesitation, Antryg seemed to come to some decision within himself. “Why they would send him mad, instead of killing him.”

At two in the morning the terrible, draining deadness began again and tortured Joanna's exhausted dreams with visions of old Minhyrdin until dawn.

“They said it was a judgment, you know.” The prince regent's pale, shifty eyes flicked from the parklike vistas of topiaried garden visible to both sides of the open coach back to the man and woman opposite him on the white velvet carriage seat. The deadness that had lasted until almost dawn had left its marks on him, adding to the keyedup, exhausted nervousness of the previous night. His full-lipped red mouth twitched as he explained, “for his sympathy to the mages.”

“I wouldn't say sympathy was your father's outstanding characteristic at my trial,” Antryg mused. “Hanged, drawn, sliced, and broken-it was years before I could contemplate chicken marinara, not that I was given the chance to, mind you. But then, he never did like me. How did it happen?”

Pharos shook his head. “Would to God we knew,” he said, quite simply. “He woke that way one morning four years ago. He . . .” He swallowed, wiped his moist hands on a black silk handkerchief, and tucked it back up among the sable festoons of his sleeve lace. “We didn't know whether it would go as suddenly as it had come-we still don't, but back then we hoped more than we do now. He used to try and talk then, or at least it looked like talking. In the first day or so, I sometimes thought he knew me. Now . . .” He looked away again, over the sun-splashed morning beauty of those manicured lawns and carefully pruned groves. Then his glance, half-embarrassed and half-warning, returned unwillingly to Joanna. “When you see him,” he said carefully, “you must remember that he is a very sick man.”

Joanna guessed what he meant and suppressed a qualm of apprehensive disgust. It interested her that he would feel enough concern for his father-who couldn't possibly have cared one way or the other-to warn her against showing repugnance. And afraid as she had once been of him, she now felt oddly sorry for this bejeweled little pervert.

Antryg asked, “Who were the wages who were habitually admitted to his rooms? Who would have had access to his bedroom, for instance?”

“No one,” Pharos said promptly. “Well, they might have entered there from the rest of the suite. Rosamund Kentacre-her father dragged her there for him to convince her not to take the Council vows. Thirle, I believe . . .”

“Minhyrdin?”

Pharos sniffed. “That senile crone? My father's interests were in magic, not particularly in those who worked it or who were at one time able to work it. The members of the Council were admitted-Salteris, of course, Lady Rosamund, Nandiharrow, Idrix of Thray, and Whitwell Simm, and you.”

“Not me,” Antryg said. “Well, once, after I'd been elected to the Council, I had to be presented formally to him. But as I said, he never liked me.” He frowned a little. “During the Mellidane Revolts, I had the impression I was not precisely entrapped, but certainly maneuvered. He can't have been that ignorant of what was going on. But I never understood why. From my little acquaintance with him, he was perfectly capable of it, of course . . . .”