The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (40 page)

“Then we'll take your greeting as read,” he said. “Caris told me of you. I must say I am both astounded and relieved beyond expression to see you alive, free, and-in possession of your own mind.”

She stared at the Archmage in shock. “What?”

Dourly, Caris remarked, “I gather Antryg lost no time in getting on the good side of the Regent.”

“The Regent needed his advice,” Joanna said. “He needed a wizard who couldn't possibly have done magic in the last seven years.”

“A convenient, if specious, argument,” Salteris said dryly. “Antryg has been coming and going from the Silent Tower as he pleases for some months now.”

“I-wondered about that.” She stepped back and gestured the old man to the marble seat she had been occupying, a carved bench the size-and function, she suspected-of a love seat, embellished at both ends with cupids and wreaths of carved roses the size of cabbages. Neither it, nor the marble statues in the gardens, she had noticed, bore the usual festoons of bird droppings; the Prince's predilection for flogging his servants evidently had certain valuable side effects beyond his ability to get lobster patties for his guests in the middle of the night. “That is-Antryg always seems to know more than he should and he can't be that good a guesser.”

“No.” The old man gently shook off Caris' efforts to help him down and seated himself at Joanna's side. “He is in precisely the position of a doctor who doses a man's coffee with poison and then claims a miracle cure for producing the antidote-a favorite dog wizard trick. And Pharos, I fear, has placed his trust in him, to the exclusion of every wage who has been abroad in the world. In many ways, Pharos is as credulous as his cousin, though far more dangerous. I am only pleased, my child, to see you safe.”

“Believe me, the feeling's more than mutual.” She glanced up at Caris, who stood quietly at his grandfather's back. “I'm glad he found you safe.”

“I did not find him,” the sasennan corrected her. “He found me. No one finds the Archmage unless he wills it.”

“But where were you?” She looked back at the old man. “Did . . .” But she found herself almost unable to speak Antryg's name.

He must have sensed it, for the dark, severe eyes softened with pity and understanding. “Lost,” he said. “I don't know-the spell was one of confusion. I wandered for days, it felt like, but I had no way of telling how many, for there was neither day nor night where I was. Only darkness . . .” He shook his head. “I don't know. I escaped, but it has left me exhausted.”

Quietly, Caris asked, “Could he have pushed you into the Void itself? To wander between worlds?”

Salteris passed a hand over his brow and shook his head. “I don't know. Suraklin had a black crystal with a labyrinth inside. He could trap a soul within it, to wander forever in the lattices of a gem small enough to pick up in his hand.”

“And Antryg was Suraklin's student,” Joanna murmured, remembering the teles, the elementals that had slain Narwahl Skipfrag, and the abominations . . . .

The Archmage's dark eyes rested on her for a moment. Then he sighed. “No,” he said softly. “No-it is worse than that. Antryg . . .” He hesitated, folding his hands with his forefingers extended against his lips, his deepset eyes gazing out into the sunlit vistas of the garden beyond the shadows. “My child, I fear that Antryg Windrose has not existed for a long time.”

She didn't know why her eyes burned or her throat seemed to constrict with grief; it was grief, she understood, for someone she had never known. In the silence, she could hear the twitter of sparrows marking out their territories among the trees and the far-off clatter of carts beyond the walls of the palace parkland in Angelshand, a quarter-mile away. Words drifted through her mind:

He could break anyone's mind to his bidding . . . He wanted to live forever . . . . . . Where's he been, if he hasn't? . . . I felt him in dreams . . .

Even before the Archmage spoke again, she knew what he was going to say.

“Suraklin had worked for a long time on the notion of taking over the minds of others,” the old man said. “With his slaves, of course, he controlled their minds with his own; those under his influence did as he bade them and were his eyes and ears, without thinking to ask why, and his influence was incredibly strong. That is why I said I am glad to see you still capable of leaving Antryg's side. But he wanted more than that.” The old man sighed, his thin mouth taut and rather white, as if sickened by some unshared knowledge whose bare bones only he would reveal, not out of secretiveness, but out of mercy. “He took the boy Antryg, the most powerful child adept he could find. He taught him everything he himself knew, like a man furnishing a house with his own things . . . .”

“No!” Joanna pulled her mind from the hideous picture that swam there unbidden of a gawky, thin-faced, frightened boy staring with hypnotized gray eyes into the terrible yellow gaze of the old man. Intellectually she knew that she had never truly known Antryg. Why did it cross her mind that the nervous, gentle man, the man who had whispered, “I will not do this . . .” and turned away, rather than take her in his arms when she could not have afforded to say no, even had she not consented, had been in fact that boy and not the mage who had raped him of mind and body so that he could go on living in his stead. “Oh, Christ, no.”

“I'm sorry,” the wizard said softly.

She pressed her hands to her mouth, suddenly trembling, remembering the soft force of Antryg's lips on hers. It was Suraklin who had kissed her, an ancient intelligence in stolen flesh. She thought how close she'd come to lying with him on the road from Kymil to Angelshand and felt almost ill.

Slim and strong, the hand of the Archmage rested upon her arm. “When Caris told me you were with him, I was afraid. I know how strong a hold Suraklin could take, even over those he did not fully possess.” He glanced back toward the irregular roof line of the Summer Palace, visible over the sun-spangled trees. “I fear he has the Prince's trust already; he will consolidate that hold in whatever way he can.”

Sick with disgust, she recalled the mage's mock flirtation with Pharos; a game, she could have sworn at the time. But then, she could have sworn that Antryg's care for her was genuine and not simply the means to some other end.

“Antryg said . . .” She hesitated. It was not, she knew now, Antryg who had spoken. “He said he had loved Suraklin. Was that true?”

“That Antryg loved him?” Salteris nodded. “Yes, very probably. Suraklin had that talent of winning the hearts of those who came in contact with him. Their loyalty to him was unquestioning, almost fanatical, even in the face of evidence that he was not what he said he was.”

Joanna blushed, not, she knew, because she had trusted Antryg, but because there was some large portion of her which cared for him still or, she thought, confused, cared for the man who'd sat by her in the roadside inns and who'd talked with her on those long, weary afternoons on the road about television and computers and friends he'd met during the Mellidane Revolts, the man who'd stood so close to her in the dimness of the drawing room at Devilsgate. Why did she feel it was so absolutely impossible that that man was the Dark Mage?

His voice quiet in the gloom of the arbor, Salteris went on. “That was the thing I never understood, after I found Antryg in the monastery, years after the destruction of Suraklin's citadel-his story that he had fled shortly before the Imperial armies gathered. But I thought . . .” He sighed again and shook his head.

“Twenty-five years ago,” Joanna said suddenly.

“What?” The Archmage raised his head sharply, an amber glint flickering in the onyx depths of his eyes.

“Antryg said he-he had to ask some member of the Council about something that happened twenty-five years ago.”

“So.” The old man nodded. “He feared someone else might have seen or known or guessed. And if he found them, if he learned that anyone had seen Antryg make a final visit to Suraklin before the execution . . .” The dark eyes narrowed. “And did he?”

Joanna shook her head. “He never found another member of the Council-or at least, not that I knew of. Pharos told him that his father had seen something or knew something after the taking of Kymil which changed him; and that seemed to horrify Antryg. But later . . .” She shook her head. “I don't understand.”

“If I were trying to bring the mad Prince under my influence,” Caris sniffed, “and learned his father knew anything, had any suspicion which he might have passed along, I'd be horrified, too.”

“Maybe,” Joanna said slowly. “He did say the Emperor never liked him. Somebody-I forget who-told me the Emperor visited Suraklin several times during his trial. Do you think he could have recognized him in Antryg? Or suspected, at least? Because he did sentence him to death seven years ago.”

The old man sighed bitterly. “And I, to my sorrow, had the sentence commuted. But as Archmage of the Council, I could not permit the Emperor, the Church, or anyone else to hold the power of life and death over any Council mage, be he never so forsworn of his vows. At the time, I believed that that was all there was.” He frowned into the distance again, all the parallel lines of that high forehead seeming to echo and reecho his speculations and his grief. “Hieraldus was a brilliant man and a perceptive one. He would have felt the similarity. So did I, once or twice, at first. But I put it down to the fact that for many years the boy Antryg had been virtually Suraklin's slave. After that . . .” He shook his head, and a stray fragment of sunlight turned the edge of his long hair to blazing silver against the black of his robe. “Perhaps elements of Antryg's original personality survived-enough to keep those who knew him from suspecting the change. No one but Suraklin had really known him well-and then, of course, he was always known to be mad.”

“Useful,” Caris sneered.

Joanna remembered the shadows of the roadhouse hearth and Antryg's lazy smile over the tankard of beer. I
never knew him, she thought. I only knew the lie. Why do I grieve for the lie?

“Was he?” she asked. “Mad, I mean.”

“The original Antryg?” Salteris shrugged. “Who knows? He may have become unbalanced by the struggle against Suraklin's will. Afterward, the reputation was Suraklin's shield and cloak, an armor fashioned to resemble vulnerability. I pitied him, but never suspected-until he struck.” The old man's mouth tightened again, all the delicate muscle of cheek and jaw springing into prominence under the silky cloak of white hair. She understood then that hers had not been the only trust, the only love, betrayed.

“Where is he?” Caris' eyes sought the clustering turrets of the Summer Palace.

“I left him in the attics of the old wing.” She looked down at her hands, folded among the silly profusion of ruffle and lace in her lap. “He -He and I looked over Narwahl Skipfrag's equipment. I don't suppose I told him anything he didn't already know. He's going to program a computer to do magic. With a big enough computer, the scope of the subroutines would be infinite. I think . . .”

She hesitated, then went on, ashamed at how nearly she'd fallen for something that now seemed so obvious. “I think the scenario he planned to use was that some other evil wizard-the one he said had kidnapped you and me and tried to murder the Regent and all the rest of it-was doing it, so why didn't I help him steal equipment and work out programs as a countermeasure. At least that would be the logical course of action. He was working up to it very gradually, winning my trust . . . .” She swallowed, her throat hurting again at the loss of that gentle consideration with which he had, she now knew, baited his trap. “If I hadn't guessed, I probably would have done it.”

Cool and very strong, Salteris' thin hands closed over hers. “It is perilously easy to come to care for one upon whom one is utterly dependent,” he said. “Particularly if he has gotten you out of danger-which he did, didn't he?”

She remembered the vicious whine of Pharos' riding whip in the darkness of the inn and the heartbreaking exhaustion of that last desperate run through the muddy lanes around St. Cyr-remembered, too, Antryg's arms, surprisingly strong around her, and the desperate hunger of his mouth on hers in the fog-bound isolation of the alley. She felt hot all over with shame.

The old man's voice was like a gentle astringent. “He miscalculated your strength, child, and your wits-but it is as well you left him when you did. Because he would not have stopped with simply winning your . . .”

He paused, and Joanna finished for him cynically, “Heart?”

“Confidence, I was going to say. He could have gone into your mind you would have let him-and used your knowledge of—computers?” He pronounced the alien word hesitantly.

Joanna nodded. “Not only computers-systems and program design. That's my job. It's what I do.”

“He could have used your brain, your knowledge, like a tool, even as he could have used your body.”

She glanced up quickly at that, sensing different meanings behind the phrase, but Salteris' dark gaze was already fixed again on the distant vista of parterre and statues and on the far-off glint of the roofs of the Imperial Palace, which rose like a mellow sandstone cliff beyond the trees.

“As he used me,” he murmured. “I was the one who originally told him of Narwahl's experiments with the teles, little suspecting that the dozen or so teles never found of Suraklin's hoard had been hidden away by him.” He shut his eyes for a moment, bitter grief deepening the lines already graven in the soft flesh of the lids. “Narwahl was my friend,” he added in a voice barely to be heard. “It seems that in striving after justice, I have done naught but ill.” The narrow, sensitive mouth quirked, and he glanced beside him at Joanna again, the bitterness of wormwood in those deep eyes. “Like you, I have been victim to that accursed charm.”

She put her hand over his, feeling the warm flesh, thin as silk over the knobby shapes of knuckles and tendon. Archmage though he was, she felt in him suddenly only an old man who knew himself responsible for his dear friend's murder. She hoped he knew nothing of the blood-splattered attic with its tiny shards of glass; but she also knew that the hope was impossible, since he was the Archmage.