The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (14 page)

Aware that he himself lay just below the crest of the hill, and therefore in its concealing shadow, Caris very slowly rolled a few turns down the hill to the cover of a prickly leaved bush whose scent told him it was a kind of sage. As his eyes grew accustomed to the denser shadows, he saw that the hill slope was dotted with such plants.

The climate was warm enough, he thought, for spices of this kind to grow wild, as they did in the deserts far to the south-east of Kymil, on the road to Saarieque. By the stars, they were further south from Kymil. The Archmage had spoken of other worlds lying beyond the Void. Would they have the same stars?

It didn't matter. The Way of the Sasenna was not to ask questions, but to perform one's task. His sword, miraculously, was still in his hand. Keeping his head down, he crawled downslope to the next sage bush, as Antryg knelt beside the young man's body and passed his hand gently over the dirty, twig-entangled mop of fair hair, feeling the temples and then the pulses of the throat. The young man was nearly naked, but for a pair of extremely short drawers-natural enough, in a climate as warm as this-and sandals on his feet.

The young man stirred and flailed with one hand, which Antryg caught by the wrist. The wizard's voice was clearly audible to Caris in the stillness of the night. “Are you all right?”

Are we in our own world after all?
Caris wondered confusedly. Surely the inhabitants of another would not speak our tongue? But in his heart he knew they were no longer where they had been. Perhaps Antryg only expected a reply because he was mad. But when the young man spoke, it was not in the language of Ferr, but in some other whose meaning Caris heard in his mind, as one hears the voices of people in dreams; and he understood that Antryg was using some kind of spell of understanding, whose field extended far enough to touch him here.

The young man said, “Huh? Sweet Holy Christ, who the hell are you?”

“Are you all right?” Antryg repeated.

“Jesus, no.” The young man made an unsuccessful effort to sit up, and Antryg put a hand under his arm to assist him. The stranger's voice was slurred, as if with drink or drugs-small wonder, Caris thought, that he does not notice that Antryg is not speaking his tongue. “Somebody must have spiked hell out of that punch.” He blinked dazedly up at the wizard, taking in the long, unruly mane and straggly beard, the ragged robes and crystal earrings. Then he giggled. "Hell, I must be stoneder than I thought. You come out of the punchbowl like all the rest of the stuff I been wing?„

“No,” admitted Antryg. “I'm a wizard from another universe, and I'm here to save your world-and mine, I hope-from a terrible fate. Can you sit up?”

The young man laughed again and shook his head. “Crazy.”

“Yes, I am crazy, too.” Antryg helped him to his unsteady feet, the young man hanging on the wizard's shoulder, still giggling vapidly.

“Man, you're about the solidest hallucination . . . . That must be some dope.” He threw a friendly arm around Antryg's shoulders. “My name's Digby-Digby Clayton. C'mon back to the party, man, have a drink.”

Silently, Caris followed them.

From the shadows of the higher ground, he watched them as they found a pale track of dust, which broadened quickly as it turned around the side of the hill to join a dark, smooth roadbed. At some distance along the road, he could see a house, an L-shaped building lying in a pool of brilliance in the darkness, illuminated with blazing light-far too bright and far too steady for firelight. It was like the brilliance of magic, but Caris sensed it could not be. Stunted and rudimentary as his own small powers were, he knew that there was no magic in this world. This sensation was not like the prickling weight of the spells that deadened the enclave of the Tower or the hollow, gnawing grief of those times in which his powers faded. Here it simply did not exist.

Yet magic would have been the only way to explain the house that lay before him in the island of yellow-white glare. In a courtyard behind it lay a huge pool of water, its turquoise reflections playing over the stone and glass of the house walls and the dark plants that grew around the low wall surrounding the court. People moved about on the sides of the water or swam in it like seals-men and women, naked save for bits of glaringly bright-colored cloth, drinking and eating and shouting at one another to be heard over the raucous, pounding music which seemed to come from no source, but which hung over the house and grounds and hills around like the pall of carrion stench.

From the hillside, Caris calculated his cover as his quarry and his drunken host passed through a little iron gate in the low wall to the court. The wall was stone block to half its insignificant height, and iron spindles the rest. The unkempt juniper hedge surrounding it on the outside offered unpromising protection; but, by the look of it, most of the people in the court were far too drunk to pay much attention. The brightness of those lights would blind them to movement in the surrounding darkness.

He had sheathed his sword, but carried the sheath loose in his hand in preparation for battle. He now hooked it to the back strap of his harness and, flattening to his belly, crept down the hill.

Down near the house, the noise was incredible; the heavy, thumping rhythm of the music vibrated in his bones. The air was rank with the sickly odor of spilled beer and the queer, sweetish scent of burning marijuana, such as peasants in the villages smoked when they couldn't get gin. But there was gin-or liquor of some kind-in appalling abundance here; and by the way everyone laughingly accepted what Digby was saying, they had all evidently taken advantage of that fact to the fullest. “This is a hallucination, a genuine, bona fide hallucination,” he was announcing over and over at the top of his voice to those few interested enough to come over and listen. Antryg, Caris could see, was looking about him in fascinated delight.

But for the lack of magic, Caris would have thought the mad wizard had somehow led him through into the Realms of Faerie. The courtyard was an unreal paradise of brilliant light and velvet shadow, of glaring colors, sparkling water, and smooth, bare, golden flesh. Clouds of steam rose from a smaller pool, which bubbled like a cauldron where a man and two women sat dreaming in its warmth. Now that he was closer, Caris could smell the odd, almost metallic tang of the waters, and see the clumps of clothing strewn at random all around the inside limits of the court. He could hear scraps of conversation as well; but, though Antryg's spell of languages gave him understanding of what he heard, it made no sense, even taking into account the thoroughgoing insobriety of the speakers-software and graphics, special effects and video, carburetors, microwaves, and Republicans. Through an enormous wall of glass, Caris could see into the dimness of the house, where people sat clumped around square, dark screens upon which images moved, some of them the shadows of people, like living paintings, others mere collections of swiftly flowing colored dots. Abandoned drinks, bits of food, and the spilled ruin of liquor were everywhere, along with discarded shoes and boots and clothing; and over all was the sourceless, screaming throb of music.

A woman was hanging onto Antryg's arm, her billowy red robe falling open to reveal great amounts of seal-sleek charms. “So you're a friend of Digby's?” she giggled.

“No, actually, I'm a wizard from another universe.” Antryg pushed his spectacles up a little more firmly on the bridge of his beaky nose and regarded her with polite interest.

“You mean like Middle Earth and all that?”

Caris had never heard of Middle Earth. By the look in his eyes, neither had Antryg, but he smiled widely, his teeth gleaming in the tangle of his beard, and agreed, “Yes.”

She moved nearer to him, molding her ample form to his bony one. “Far out.”

He considered the remark for a moment and informed her factually, “Well, in terms of the ultimate centers of power, less far out than this one.”

“Is he friend of yours, Digby?” A woman's voice, speaking close to where Caris crouched, was so quiet it was only because of its nearness that he heard at all. It took his attention, because it was the only sober one he had so far heard. Moving his head a little, Caris could see the speaker standing in an opening formed by a sliding panel in the glass wall, next to Digby, who was supporting himself valiantly against it. A small girl with fair, bushy curls framing the thin bones of her face, she held a thick roll of greenish papers in one hand. Unlike anyone else in the court, she was watching Antryg with wary suspicion in her brown eyes.

“No, Joanna,” Digby slurred happily. “Like I said, he's a hallucination. He just walked right out of this big hole in the air.” He took a long swig from a glass in his hand, throwing his whole body into the gesture; the rippling reflections from the pool shone damply on the bulge of his soft little paunch. “You know Gary's looking for you.”

“I know,” the girl said tiredly. “That's why I'm down here talking to you. My program has an hour and a half to run yet, and he's gone to look for me in the computer room.”

“Oh,” Digby vaguely said, clearly not even hearing the sharp fragment of buried anger in the girl Joanna's voice. Across the court, the woman in red was leading the bemused-looking Antryg into the darkness of the other wing of the house, laughing and saying, “Come show me some magic . . .”

Antryg paused in the doorway, looking around at that garish and noisy scene with his usual expression of pleased interest, like some mad saint with his ink-stained beard and tattered robes. Near him, Caris was aware of the girl Joanna watching Antryg with the same wariness that he himself felt, sensing, as none of the others seemed to, that something was amiss. But it was his own eyes, across the teeming chiaroscuro of the courtyard, that Antryg, for one instant, met. Then a hand reached out from the darkened room behind him and drew him inside.

Caris knew he had been seen.

Perhaps, he thought, Antryg had known all along that he had been followed; perhaps, in that chaotic darkness, he had heard Caris' stumbling steps at his heels. Perhaps this was the reason he had let himself be led to this strange place—so that going inside, he would leave his watchdog to guard the front entrance, while he glided out the back.

Lying in the heavy scents of the prickling juniper, with the dried slime that crusted his torn jacket scratching the wounds on his arms, Caris felt a sudden chill in spite of the evening's warmth. The nightmare run through darkness had terrified him; the echoing depths of nothingness had seemed populated by vast presences and by chaotic horrors, beside which the abomination in the swamp seemed friendly, solid, and familiar; but it came to him now that the dark figure of the wizard whom he had followed was, in fact, his only link with his own world. To lose him would not only mean losing all chance of finding his grandfather-it would mean being stranded in this insane, magicless, noisy world forever, with no way to return to that which he knew.

Cautiously, Caris moved to circle the house, counting exits.

Of these there were appallingly many. There were dozens of windows, some of which he tested and found impossible to open sufficiently to pass a body, while others would have admitted a horse. There were outbuildings, smelling of strange things, and a vast number of big, metal machines which were obviously conveyances and whose wheels had left tracks on the soft dust of the drive, though there was neither sign nor smell of a horse anywhere. More magic? thought Caris, puzzled, in this magicless world? To the south, over the hills, there was a glare in the sky, filling the whole southeastern quarter of the horizon with its reddish reflection, like a mechanical dawn.

Silent as the drift of shadow, he returned to the house, testing, checking. Garden doors led out onto a path that trailed through the straggly dust of the hills toward the dim shape of a shed, far up the nearest rise; pausing beside them, Caris heard voices raised in argument, the blond-haired woman Joanna's and a man's, slurred with liquor and self-pity.

“I'm sorry about what I said, Joanna, okay? I didn't mean it . . . .”

“Didn't you? You may be the only man who's ever wanted me and you may very well be the only man who ever will, but I don't really care to have that pointed out in front of people that I work with.”

“I mean-you know . . .” Although, looking through the half-open doors, at the young woman's rather plain face, with its awkward nose and the first fine scratches of crow's-feet around the brown eyes, Caris could believe that was true, still he felt a stab of the uncomfortable feeling that he was seeing injustice done. It didn't help to recall his own stupid and meaningless cruelty to the girl from the tavern, earlier in the week.

“Hey, I'm sorry, babe. How many times do I got to say it?”

The dim lights of the room picked out the man's shape, nearly nude, like most of the people there, his muscular body speckled with droplets of water from the courtyard pool. The woman, as he had seen in the courtyard earlier, was one of the few people clothed-unbecomingly, Caris thought-in the faded blue trousers that seemed to be uniform for such men and women who wore anything beyond a few bright bits of cloth and a close-fitting white upper garment, which showed off the figure of a diminutive houri.

Her voice was cool and precise, “You can say it as many times as you need to in order to feel that you've made some kind of amends. But it will all be entirely for your own benefit.”

“What's that supposed to mean? You're my sweetheart, babe, I love you.”

“If you didn't keep making fun of me to your other friends, I'd find that a whole lot more convincing.”

It was strange, thought Caris as he moved soundlessly on through the dust-smelling night, that the quarrels and griefs of those who peopled this alien world should be so similar to those he knew in his own.

The house was two story’s tall in its main portion, one story at the wing into which Antryg had gone. Most of its windows, Caris had ascertained, looked inward toward the court, and the doors leading outside could all, he estimated, be seen from the roof of the farthest eastward end -if the stars were right it was east, anyway-of the low wing. Judging by their reactions to Antryg's alien garments, none of the revelers should comment, even if they did see Caris sitting on the roof; in any case the projecting cornices of the house should hide him.