The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (12 page)

As they walked on, the old man said thoughtfully, “They say Suraklin could summon the elemental spirits and bend them to his bidding-mould clothe them in flesh of his own devising, so that they could tear and hurt with their uncontrolled anger, instead of just knocking on walls or throwing pots as they usually do. But if that were the case,” he continued, as Caris offered him his hand to help him down a stream cut which gouged the road, “I would not have been able to slay the thing as I did.”

“How did you slay it?” His grandfather's scarred arm felt strangely light and fragile in his grip as he helped the old man up the broken stones and cracked hunks of old pavement. Now at the end of summer, the stream which had cut the road had long since dried-the mud at the bottom bore the marks of the constant trickle of feet, coming and going to the Tower.

The memory of the old man's dark, inhuman eyes as he summoned the lightning seemed as impossible to him as the white heat of his pride and anger against the Bishop had been-as, indeed, was the knowledge that it had been he who had led the assault on the Citadel.

The old man smiled. “With electricity.”

“Electricity?”
Caris' dark brows dove down over his nose.

His grandfather's smile widened. “This looks like a good place,” he remarked, and led the way off the road, between two of the fallen menhirs, his robe slurring softly in the open grass beyond. Limping a little, Caris followed, as he used to follow in his childhood, not asking where they went or why. They passed along a little gully between the round backs of the hills. The dusk closed around them like veils of smoke colored silk.

“Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag has been experimenting for some years with electricity,” Salteris continued, as he picked his way along some unseen track in the deep grass. “It was his experiments, in fact, which first led him to speak with me-though of course we had met at the Imperial Palace in Angelshand. During the conflict with Suraklin, the Prince Hieraldus and I became friends. When he succeeded his father and became Emperor he patronized us as much as the Church and his reputation would allow, and I came to know a good many of the Court. Narwahl was the Emperor's physician, then as now, but he's also a scientist. At first, he thought magic might be some type of electricity, and it was thus that he and I came to speak.”

They crossed the stream bed again-or perhaps a different one; this one had water in it, nearly choked in a brambly tangle of wild roses, around which the last bees of the evening swarmed drunkenly. As he helped the Archmage up the far bank, Caris reflected that he must have picked up his minute knowledge of the countryside around Kymil during the days of the war against Suraklin-he certainly seemed to know every dip and gully of these silent hills. Following along in the old man's tireless footsteps, Caris felt ashamed, not only of his stiff and aching muscles, but of the queer dread he felt in this haunted land. With the starry darkness, the memory of the abomination returned disturbingly to his mind. It had come from nowhere, and he was too aware that there was nothing to prevent the coming of another.

For five years, Caris had trained as a sasennan, a strenuous life, but uncomplicated. Now, moving through the dreamlike landscape of the summer dusk, he felt as if he trod the borders of a land he did not know, fighting unknown things with weapons which would have as little effect upon them as his sword had had upon the swamp thing's iron bones. Ashamed of his uneasiness he might be, but nevertheless he felt glad the Archmage was with him in the blue and trackless emptiness through which they passed.

Salteris moved his fingers, seeming to pluck a raveled thread of light from the air, and cast it before him to float like a glow worm along the ground a little ahead of their feet. “According to Narwahl, electricity can be conducted by water, in the same way that it is conducted by metal; and, moreover, metal or water will prevent the possibility of electricity grounding harmlessly away into the earth. Lightning, he says, is only electricity in its natural form.” The same wry, astringent smile touched his lips. “I shall have to write to him and tell him of the successful demonstration. He will be pleased.”

“And the abomination?” Caris asked.

The old man sighed, the smile fading from his face like the last fading of the daylight.

“Yes,” he said softly. “The abomination.”

For a time they walked in silence, Caris thinking again of that tall, gawky lunatic in his tattered robes and ink-stained beard and of the bright gray gaze behind those heavy lenses. Would a man who had been a prisoner for seven years retain that odd, buoyant calm? The scant experience of his own nineteen years gave him little help. Smelling now the late summer headiness of the night, feeling the touch of straying breezes on his face, he doubted it. Like the breath of a ghost, the memory of the fading of his powers brushed him, the dust-colored uncaring and the terror he felt, knowing that those spells of fading would recur, as they were recurring more and more often. In the end, his powers would never return. Could one whom his grandfather had called the most powerful wage in the world have endured that loss?

Could that, in its turn, have driven him mad?

Or had he never suffered it?

Caris turned to look back over the hills, where the dark shape of the windowless Tower bulked against the sky.

“Here we are.” Salteris gestured, and a clinging frost of light momentarily edged the deep blueness of a little hollow among the hills. A standing-stone had once been planted there, but had fallen long ago and now lay cocooned in wild ivy and bramble. In the lee side of one crowding hill a thicket of laurel and hawthorn rustled with the quick nervousness of birds' wings; on the opposite hillslope, gentler and stretching off into a vague space of dusk that rose toward the deeper twilight of the sky, rabbits paused in their grazing to look down at the brief network of diamonds that the Archmage had cast. Then the swift glow faded, and with it the ravelly blue phosphorescence that had guided their feet. Caris made his way carefully to the fallen stone and sat on the bare place at its end.

“We will wait here,” Salteris' voice said out of the shadows, “until full darkness covers the land.”

His shape melted from the gloom; his face and the silky white mane of his hair were one large blur, his hands, two small ones at his dark sides. “And then, my son, we will return to the Silent Tower, and I will speak to Antryg Windrow myself.”

He settled quietly at Caris' side. From somewhere about his person, he drew his worn black gloves, stitched with shabby bullion on their backs, a present from the Emperor, before imbecility had claimed the man. He began to put them on, then changed his mind and tucked them instead into his belt.

“Are you cold?” Caris asked, and the old man shook his head.

“Only tired.” He undid the small satchel at his belt and took from it bread, cheese, and two small green apples, which he divided with his grandson. Though it was not the Way of the Sasenna to eat on duty-and Caris considered himself on duty-he accepted the food gratefully.

Ruefully, the Archmage went on, “And you must be in far worse caw than I, my son. I apologize, but I must speak to Antryg alone, without the Bishop present, and it must be soon. If he knows something about the abominations, I must learn it, before the Witchfinders take it for their excuse to destroy us all. You heard them today . . . .”

Caris paused in wolfing down his supper to stare at him in surprise. “I did,” he said, “but I had no idea you were there.”

“I wasn't.” The old man smiled. “But a mage can listen along the energy-trails-and I have been particularly watchful of Peelbone lately.” He sighed and stroked the velvet-soft leather of the gloves at his belt. “It is an old trouble.” He sighed. “And the reason, indeed, for the Council vows-the underpinning of the Church's whole attitude toward magic and toward the dog wizards. No society, they say, can exist with both magic and industry-technology-the use of tools and machines. It takes so little magic to ruin the balance of a machine, my son; and magic can be worked by so few. For thousands of years, power lay in the hands of those who were powerful mages themselves, or who could afford to hire them. It was in those years that the Silent Tower was built, and for that reason. It was then that all the binding-spells were wrought, great and small-from the Sigil of Darkness and other things like it which are utterly abominable to the mageborn, down to the little ones which make this or that thing na-aar—metaphysically dead and impervious to magic—like the pistols and crossbows of the Witchfinders, so that no mage can fox their aim or cause them to misfire, and such things as spell-cord and spancels. But it was all politics. The people were no better for it.”

He sighed again. "The Sole God of the Church is not the god of the mageborn, Caris. As sasennan of the Council, you do not make the signs of obeisance in the presence of holy things. In time, the Church raised its own corps of wizards-the hasu-and used their magic to defeat the wizards in a long war which ended on the Field of Stellith, five hundred years ago. And they were aided by other mages, not of the Church, but who could see that, in that, the Church was right; the privileges of the few had to be curtailed for the rights of the many. That is the reason for the Council Vows.

“And since that time . . .” He shrugged. “I fear they were right. Humankind now has great new looms and gins to weave its cloth, in the factory towns of Kymil and Parchasten and Angelshand. They talk about making engines that will go from the power of steam to work them one day. There are new sorts of farm machines to sow the seed better than a man scattering it broad-cast from a sack, and engines to harvest and thrash the grain-who knows, one day they may find a way to power them by steam as well. They have ships built light and strong enough to race the wind that can make the voyage to Saarieque and the East in sixty days, to make men's fortunes in silk and tea and the emeralds of the Isles.”

“But that isn't all!” Caris broke in, distressed at the sadness in the old man's voice. “There is more in the world than-than money in the pockets of the merchants and machines to make things to sell! Isn't there?”

And for a time, only the sweet hush of the long evening answered him -the sleepy twilight cry of whippoorwills from the boggy ground near the stream, the strange, half-hurtful stirring of the earth-magic whispering up out of the ground beneath the grass. He felt, even with his own small and, he suspected, fading resources, the magic all around him, alive and vibrant, and wondered how, even for the good of everyone in the world, it could be for a moment denied. The knowledge that one day soon he would lose it was like the knowledge that he would one day die.

“There is,” the old man said finally. “The will-the fire-the striving. They deny it and claim that it does not exist, until all those who listen come to believe it and do not know how to name it once they feel it quicken in themselves, except by such names as `foolishness,' and `insanity,' and 'badness.”'

“And Suraklin?”

Caris spoke the name softly, within these hills that had been Suraklin's; within sight of the Tower where the Dark Mage had once been chained to await his death. Salteris, an almost invisible shape in the dusk, sighed again, and the last light caught one thread of silver in his hair. It was a long time before he replied.

“Suraklin was the last of the great ones,” he said, “the last of the wizard-kings, born long after his time with the will and the strength to dominate. So much of his power came from the fact that most of those who obeyed him, through fear and, yes, through love, refused to believe that this magic truly existed. And his magic was the greatest-truly the greatest. I knew it. He would have been Archmage, were it not that the others in the Council distrusted the depthless darkness of his soul.”

He turned and faced Caris in the intense, phthalo darkness of the summer night, his eyes nothing but shadows under the star-edged dome of his bald forehead. “That is why I fear now,” he said softly. “Antryg Windrow was Suraklin's student.”

For a time Caris could only stare at him, aghast and silent. For a week he had lived clove to the legends that surrounded the Dark Mage; the memory of Suraklin clung to the land like a decaying ghost. It was hard enough to believe there were people alive who had known him, though Caris knew his grandfather must have. That the mad, oddly charming prisoner in the Silent Tower had been his pupil . . . . He stammered, “But-the Bishop said he was yours.”

“I found him two years after the breaking of Suraklin's Citadel,” Salteris said. “He was hiding in a monastery in the Sykerst. Nineteen years old; no older than you are now, my son, and already a little mad. I taught him, yes, though he had very little to learn. We traveled together for many years, both then and after he was elected to the Council, but always I had the sense in him of hidden pockets of darkness, buried so deep maybe he was unaware of them himself. There was a time when I loved him as a son. But I never underestimated him.”

“Then don't do so now,” Caris said, looking over at the old man's dim shape in the gloom with a sudden qualm of fear. “Don't meet him alone.”

Salteris shook his head. “In the Tower he is not dangerous.”

“You can't know that.”

“Caris . . .” The gentle voice was at once amused and reproving, as it had been when Caris was a child. “Are you now going to protect me? Even if Antryg is the cause of the abominations—even if it was he who shot Thirle as he fled back through the Void-I doubt he would harm me. In either case, I do need to speak to him alone.”

“The guards won't let you in.”

White teeth caught the gleam of the stars as Salteris grinned. “The guards won't see me. No magic is possible within the walls of the Tower itself, but I can still weave illusions in the court.” He got to his feet and shook the bread crumbs from his robe. “Come and watch me.”

Even two years of service to the Council of Mages had not quite prepared Caris for the Archmage's entry into the Silent Tower. The guards who raised the portcullis greeted them respectfully as they stepped from the darkness. Salteris apologized to the captain and said that he had discovered something while crossing the hills which made it imperative that he speak with Antryg Windrose once again. The captain twisted the spiked ends of his red mustache, his eyes glinting like agate in the uneasy saffron torchlight beneath the gate.