The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (16 page)

Joanna went back to the daybed and sat down again. Her knees felt weak.

    
Don't panic, she told herself. Whatever you do, if you panic, you won't be able to do anything. But her mind kept screaming at her, Why me?

Figure that out later,
she told herself firmly, fighting not to think about the implications that she had been stalked. She dug through the contents of her purse, and her hand closed around the reassuring smoothness of her hammer. She set it beside her and checked out the rest-Swiss Army knife, several tin and plastic boxes, a measuring tape, scissors, calculator, wallet, checkbook, keys, notebook, mirror, spare toothbrush, tube of sunscreen, collapsible drinking cup, Granola bars, rubber bands, safety pins, a lipstick that she'd never used, a package of Kleenex, a sewing kit, a bundle of plastic-coated wires she'd gotten from plant maintenance, three and a half pairs of earrings, and two floppy disks.

She selected the hammer and the Swiss Army knife, opened the screwdriver blade, and returned once more to the door.

It was designed to open inward. The hinges were the pin type, though massive and, by the look of them, forged of iron rather than steel. Joanna frowned as she shined the beam of the flashlight over them, recognizing the anachronism but unable to account for it. She knew the recreational medievalists of her acquaintance made their own chain mail, but their own door hinges?

Doubtfully, she cast the light around the room once more. Of course, Southern California was rife with old stone buildings, if you knew where to look for them, but . . .

Later,
she told herself again. Right now the object is to get the hell out of here. Carefully, she began to work the knife's screwdriver blade in beneath the hinge pin . . .

And stopped, at the soft snick of the door bolt being slid back.

She had heard no footfall; but then, she had no idea how thick the walls or door might be. Thick, she thought, for she had heard nothing at all-no traffic sound, not even the subsonic vibration of trucks, no airplane roar, and no tread of footfalls elsewhere in the building. Adrenaline surging through her like fire, she stepped back to where the door would hide her, hammer in hand, heart pounding, but feeling queerly calm. Her last thought was, He's very tall, I'll have to strike high.

The door opened.

He was ready for her, catching her wrist on the downswing and ducking aside, though she heard him gasp as the hammer glanced off his bony shoulder. Like most women who have had little to do with men, she was shocked at the strength of his hands. He knew the tricks too; his arms moved and twisted with hers as she tried to drive her wrist against the weak joint of the thumb to break his hold, and he turned his body to block the knee she drove at his groin. The struggle lasted only seconds. Then something drove into his back from the dark door like a striking puma. A slamming foot behind his knee made his legs buckle. She heard him gasp again and looked up as the newcomer to the fray seized a handful of his hair, pulled his head back, and laid the edge of a knife to his throat.

Joanna pulled away from the suddenly opened grip.

“Are you all right?” The young man barely glanced at her as he spoke. In the skewed glare of the flashlight, his startlingly handsome face looked drawn with strain and exhaustion, lead-colored smudges of weariness around the tip-tilted dark eyes.

“I think so,” gasped Joanna.

He jerked the knife roughly against the thin skin above his prisoner's jugular. His voice was thick with rage. “What have you done with the Archmage?”

The kneeling man remained immobile between them, sweat shining on his face and trickling along his exposed throat. “Nothing,” he whispered. “Caris, listen . . .” His breath stopped with a quick, faint draw; a thread of blood started from under the blade.

“I've listened to you enough, Antryg Windrose.” To Joanna, the young man said, “There's a silk cord tied around under my belt. Take it and bind his hands.”

“Caris, no.” The older man's lips barely moved as he spoke. “You have to get out of here. There's danger . . .”

Joanna's hands were moving quickly, picking apart the knots of the cord. The young man's clothing was black, oddly reminiscent, like the curved sword stuck through his sash, of samurai or martial arts gear, though creased, torn in places, and stained with caked mud and slime. Her first thought that she had somehow been caught up in some kind of role-playing event faded when she saw that, under the torn jacket and shirt, Caris' biceps and pectorals bore a collection of really shocking abrasions and bruises.

She pulled the silk cord free from the crossed sword sash and leather dagger belt. “Look,” she said shakily, “thank you and all that-really, thank you very much-but could you please tell me what the hell is going on?”

Caris' knee dug viciously into Antryg's back. “This man is a renegade wizard,” he said. “He has caused evils and abominations to appear; for what he has done I should kill him here and now.”

Joanna, pausing in the act of tying Antryg's hands, said, “HUNH?”

“Caris, I had nothing to do with your grandfather's disappearance.”

“Then how do you know he disappeared?”

“Look,” Antryg said, turning his head a little against the grip on his hair to meet his captor's eyes. “There isn't time for this. There is danger coming, an abomination beside which the thing you fought in the swamp is as nothing.”

"How do you . . .

“1 know it!”
he insisted furiously. Then, more quietly, “Please believe me.” His long hands caught Joanna's as she tried to put the cord around them, staying her, but without force. “I surrender to you, I'll be your prisoner, do with me whatever you want to-but get out of herel”

Joanna could feel his hands, where they touched hers, shaking. It didn't prove anything; hers were still trembling from the exertion of the fight, and she didn't currently have a knife at her throat. But in the silence that followed his words, she could feel a strange, louring threat, a dread that she had known before in the too-silent corridors of Building Six-a sense of evil, beyond anything she had encountered or could imagine. Beside that amorphous darkness, mere human kinkiness and even quasi-medieval murder cults seemed oddly petty.

She said softly, “Look, I don't know what's going on but-I think he's right.”

Caris glanced sharply at her, but only said, “Draw my sword.”

Joanna obeyed. Whatever the scenario was, it was pretty clearly being played for keeps. There was something living and hateful in the silence that kept her from simply saying, “Count me out of this dungeon thanks,” and walking out the door. As she had at San Serano, she felt again that outside the room lay, not death, but something worse whose nature she could scarcely even conceive.

Caris made sure the sword was ready to hand before he took the knife from his prisoner's throat. “Get up. If you try any tricks, I swear I will feed you your own heart.”

Antryg got to his feet, wiping the trickle of blood from his neck. The tension in him was palpable; fear, thought Joanna, yet she had no sense that he was afraid of Caris, in spite of the fact that the younger man had come within a millimeter of slitting his throat. He whispered, “Stay here,” and made a move towards the door, as if to check the corridor. Caris' swift, small gesture with the sword halted him again, and he regarded the young warrior in irritated frustration.

Knowing there was only one way out of this fox-goose-corn conundrum, Joanna said, “I'll look,” though her stomach curled with dread at the thought of facing whatever might be in the corridor. Part of her insisted that this was absurd, but some deeper part, the part that had cowered in fear in the janitor's closet at San Serano, knew that Antryg was right and that Caris was a stubborn fool not to flee from the darkness that she could sense was gathering somewhere nearby.

Hefting the hammer that she knew would be utterly useless, she peeked around the doorframe.

The corridor stretched away in darkness to her right, unbroken, impenetrable, and hideously ominous. To her left, she thought there were doors, and beyond them, some sense of openness, of moving air. The fear was to her right-abomination, Antryg had said. There was no sound, and she felt she would have preferred anything to that unspeakable, waiting silence.

She ducked swiftly back into what had become a haven of safety. By the flashlight-glare, Antryg looked deathly white and Caris, his fair hair falling into his eyes, like a man grimly fighting his instinct to flee. She swallowed hard. “There's nothing moving out there.”

“Good,” Antryg murmured. In spite of the fact that he was officially a prisoner, he seemed to have effortlessly taken over the expedition. “Joanna, I'm going to have to ask you to douse that light, if you can.”

Joanna, who had picked up her flashlight from where it lay on the floor behind the door, looked up at him, startled, and met only grave inquiry in his gray eyes.

“There is a way of putting it out, isn't there?”

Verisimilitude?
she wondered. But he was frightened-she knew it, could feel it-frightened beyond the point where any role player would forget the bounds of a non-industrial persona and simply say, Shut off the flashlight.

Seeing the doubt in her eyes, he added, “I can see in the dark-so can Caris a little, can't you?”

Caris nodded-it was clearly not something that he even thought much about.

For the first time in that bizarre sequence of events, Joanna felt that she had just stepped off an edge somewhere, into waters deeper than she knew. Up until that moment, she had been sure, not of what was happening, but of the kind of thing it must be. Now for the first time, she doubted, and the doubts opened an abyss of possibilities whose mere existence would have been terrifying, had she believed in them. Later, she told herself again. Shouldering her heavy purse, she took a hesitant grip on the belt loop of Antryg's jeans and switched off the light.

Darkness swooped down upon her like a terror-bird. Her instinct was to shrink against someone for the reassurance that she was not alone, but Antryg had twice tried to strangle her, had kidnapped her from Gary's house, and brought her to this place. She knew she could not afford to tie up Caris' sword arm, even if he'd be chivalrous enough to let her, which she was pretty sure he wouldn't. So she only tightened her hold on the narrow loop of denim and tried to keep her breathing steady.

Antryg's hand touched hers and gave it a quick, comforting pat in the darkness, as if he sensed her fear; then he led the way forward, out into the haunted hall.

To Joanna's infinite relief, they turned left, moving swiftly and surely. Once, putting out her left hand, she felt the cold, uneven stone of a wall and guessed that, see-in-the-dark or not, Antryg was probably using the wall as a guide. Caris' shoulder brushed her bare arm, and the coarse, quilted, black cotton of the jacket was warm against her skin; she could hear the soft rustle of cloth and the creak of leather as that gorgeous young man turned periodically to look back. Once she herself risked such a glance and wished she hadn't.

It's only darkness,
she told herself, the same as the darkness in front of you. Nothing is nothing. But it wasn't. Why it should seem so dense and terrifying she did not know, nor why, seeing nothing, she should have the sense that it stirred, as if with some passing form that even light would not have unmasked. When I get out of this, she thought, wherever the hell I am, I'm taking the first bus hack to Van Nuys, 1 am finding a new apartment, changing my telephone number, and looking for another job, if necessary . . . .

But Antryg knew her now. And Antryg was one of them, whoever they were. Was this, she wondered suddenly, just a put-up part of the game? Was he leading her through darkness to something worse, phase two of some elaborately choreographed nightmare?

It was more logical than what she feared, in some far-back corner of her heart, might be going on.

Something stirred in the darkness. A wind touched her hair, blowing from behind them-a queer, cold smell that she vaguely recognized and which filled her with unnamed terror. She glanced back over her shoulder again and thought she saw, far back in the black depths behind them, some blur of luminosity which illuminated nothing. At the same moment Caris whispered, “Antryg . . .”

Antryg's bare, sinewy arm went around her shoulders, drawing her against him, and she felt by the movement of his body that he had shoved Caris ahead of them. He whispered, “Run!” There was a frantic fear in his voice that could not have been counterfeited; she felt, rather than saw, Caris start to run.

She had no idea how long they ran, nor when the ground beneath her feet changed from stone to earth, and from earth to the silky drag of grass. She stumbled and was hauled forward by main force, gasping for breath and exhausted, her mind blurred by panic of whatever it was that lay behind them. Sometime in that darkness, she was aware that the graveyard fetor that had so unreasonably terrified her had changed to wind and the thick headiness of cut hay; she stumbled repeatedly on the uneven slopes of the ground, trying to match her stride with the much longer one of the man whose powerful arm pushed her inexorably on. Through her terror, she became dimly aware of a dividing horizon between dark earth and dark sky. Then she stumbled, and fell into a final and deeper darkness.

It was just before dawn when she woke. She stirred, and sneezed. The air was thick with the fragrance of hay, with the smell of water and cows, with the twitter of whippoorwills, and with the incessant, peeping chorus of small frogs. For a blank moment, she wondered where she was. Her throat ached with bruises, and her body was stiff with the last, desperate run of the night. She was starvingly hungry.

Looking up, she could see Antryg sitting with his back to a haystack an object which Joanna had never seen in her life outside of pictures, but which was indubitably a haystack. His long legs were drawn up, his arms rested across his bony knees, and he contemplated the glowing eastward sky with a look of meditative calm. Beyond him, Caris lay asleep, like an exhausted god, his sword still under his limp hand.