The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (17 page)

All around them, the world was bathed in the unearthly blue glow of predawn. Joanna sat up, scratching the straw from her hair. She felt a little cold, shaken, and very unreal. The hills behind them were still shrouded with the clear, purple darkness of the last of the night, but the waters of the marsh that lay in a series of crisscrossed hollows below them and to their left were already picking up the quicksilver brightness of the sky. There was no freeway roar, no growl of jets, not even the faroff moan of a train whistle. The sky was uncrossed by powerlines and, though it was late August, untainted by smog.

“Are you cold?” Antryg asked her, and she shook her head.

“Not very.”

He smiled and touched the t-shirt he wore-black, with the silver-foil logo of last year's Havoc concert inscribed blazing across the chest. She recognized it as belonging to Tom Bentley, the department's would-be heavy-metal rocker. “If I'd known I might have to share, I'd have picked up something more substantial,” he apologized. Then, following her glance to the sleeping Caris, he added, “It hardly seemed fair to escape while he was asleep, at least this time. He would have stayed awake to stand over me if he could; the last twenty-four hours haven't been his fault. In any case I wanted to see the sun rise. I haven't seen that in a long time.”

Without the beard that had hidden most of his face when she'd first seen him at the party, he looked, not precisely younger, but more ageless. Joanna guessed his age at about forty, though his hair-an unruly mop, even when whacked off to less than half of its former length-was faded and streaked with gray, like frost-killed weeds. Behind the spectacles, his gray eyes were intelligent, a little daft, and at the same time very gentle. In spite of the bruises on her wrists left by his grip in last night's struggle and the crushed ache of her windpipe, Joanna felt her fear of him subside.

“Look,” she said, sitting up cross-legged and shaking the last of the hay out of her hair. “Would it be too much to ask what the hell is going on?”

He regarded her for a moment with wary suspicion in those wide, oddly intent eyes. “Don't you know?”

She sighed. “If I knew, I wouldn't have been scared as spitless as I was last night.”

He folded his long hands and looked down at the twined fingers for a moment-mottled with ink, she saw, and, in the slowly growing dawnlight, very white, as if he had spent years without seeing sun. “I suspect you would have been even more so,” he said gently. “But it doesn't matter.”

“Where are we?” She looked around her at the silent fields and dovecolored pools. “And why have you been stalking me? What kind of crazy game was all that supposed to be last night?”

He tilted his head to one side. “Have you been stalked?”

“I don't know what else to call your-your hunting me in the halls at San Serano.”

“It is no game.” Stiffly, Caris sat up and threw a quick, resentful glance at Antryg. Sullenly, he wiped his sword on his jacket and then sheathed it with a vicious snick. Pushing his blond, rumpled hair out of his eyes, he looked over at Joanna. “It is hard for you to understand, since there is no magic in your world. But you have been brought over into our world, into the Empire of Ferryth, for what purposes I don't know, by this man. He is Antryg Windrose, a renegade wizard, and I am sworn by my vows to the Council of Wizards to bring him to justice for the evil he has done.”

Joanna stared at him for a long moment. “You're crazy,” she said.

“No, I'm crazy,” Antryg disagreed mildly. “Caris is only confused. And I'm afraid he's right about your not being any longer in your own world. Doesn't the mere smell of the air convince you?”

Joanna hesitated. There were plenty of places in the San Joaquin Valley, for instance, or up north, where smog was seldom smelled-but not, she had to admit, in the summer. And in any case, if she'd been out long enough to be taken there . . . She dug in her purse and found her watch. The readout flashed to the touch of a button-August 30, the day after Gary's party. She dropped it back into the general confusion of the purse and tried to make the times fit. Unless it was like one of those Mission Impossible stories in which dates had been meticulously rejiggered to convince someone it was last week or next week . . .

The countryside might have been somewhere in California's Central Valley, from what she could see of it-marshy hayfields before them, silent green hills behind, and the long brown curve of a river in the distance-except there were no mountains, not even as a far-off blue line against the sky.

Beside her, her kidnapper and her rescuer were talking softly. The younger, in spite of his dark and battle-shabby warrior's outfit, was handsome with the Nordic gorgeousness of a prince of fairy tales, save for a straight scar about an inch and a half long that marked a cheekbone straight out of a TV commercial for designer jeans. The scar disturbed Joanna, partly because it was the kind of thing that anyone could have had corrected by plastic surgery-and partly because, in spite of her guess at Caris' age as being less than twenty-one, it looked to be several years old. The jocks she had met had given Joanna a deep distrust of young men that good-looking, but Caris lacked the egocentricity she had so often encountered in the self-proclaimed hunks. It was as if his appearance was entirely peripheral to some greater force that dominated his life.

He was saying, “Why did you bring her to this world?”

Antryg, folding his long arms comfortably around his drawn-up knees, considered the matter gravely for some moments and replied, “I can't imagine. Perhaps Joanna could tell us? Joanna . . . ?”

Annoyed, Caris caught the wizard's shoulder as he started to turn toward her and pulled him back. “Don't play innocent. First you murder Thirle-then you kidnap the Archmage-now this woman. I want to know why.”

“I must admit to some curiosity about that myself,” Antryg remarked, disengaging his arm from the younger man's crushing grip with no apparent effort. “I should imagine poor Thirle was murdered simply because he had seen the Gate through the Void-or perhaps because he saw who it was who came out.”

“Others saw the Gate,” said Caris. “I, for one.”

“You didn't know what it was, nor its implications.”

“Aunt Min did. My grandfather did.”

“But by that time, there were other witnesses. It was not simply a matter of silencing one. Joanna my dear, why would someone-let's call it me for talking purposes-have kidnapped you?” He turned those gentle, luminous eyes upon her. “Who and what are you?”

“Be careful,” Caris cautioned, as Joanna drew breath to reply. “He's completely mad, but he's clever. He may have brought you here to learn something from you.”

“I don't know what,” Joanna said, looking in puzzlement from the young man's onyx-dark eyes to the inquiring, bespectacled gray ones. “Even if he wanted a computer programmer for some reason, the woods are full of better ones than I am. But I've been stalked for a week or more . . .” She turned back to Antryg. “What were the marks you made on the walls? You made one at the house, and there was one at San Serano, the night you tried to strangle me there.”

“I assure you, my dear,” Antryg protested, “It wasn't me.”

“And it wasn't you who has been causing the abominations to appear?” Caris demanded sarcastically. “Or who spirited my grandfather away?”

“Of course not.”

“His glove was in your room. I saw it there.”

“He left it when he visited me earlier in the week.”

“He had them with him that evening! I saw them!”

“Both of them?”

“You are lying,” Caris said, and his dark-brown eyes were narrow with suspicion and anger. “As you have been lying all along.”

“Well, of course I've been lying all along,” the wizard argued reasonably. “If the Bishop or anyone else had suspected what happens when the Void is breached . . .”

“What happens?”

Antryg sighed. “It is where the abominations come from,” he said. “When a gap is opened in the Void, the whole fabric of it weakens, sometimes for miles around. Yes, I knew that someone was moving back and forth across the Void for months before Thirle was killed. Not every time, but sometimes, when it was breached, a hole would open through to some other world, neither yours nor mine, and something would wander through. Sometimes to die, without its proper food or protection against unfamiliar enemies, sometimes to find what food it could. I was aware of it, but could do nothing about it, since I could not touch the Void from within the Tower.”

“Ha!” Caris said scornfully.

Unperturbed, Antryg went on. “I knew that eventually such a weakening had to take place within the walls of the Tower itself. I could only wait . . . I suppose, if I hadn't been mad already, the waiting would have driven me so.”

“You knew this,” Caris said softly. “You knew where the abominations came from and yet you did not tell the Archmage of it?”

“What could he have done about it?” Antryg demanded with a sudden, desperate sweep of his arm. “He couldn't have stopped it. And they would only have chained me, to prevent my escape. I'd been in that Tower seven years, Caris. I haven't seen sunlight since before you were sasennan.”

Joanna looked up sharply, hearing it then. The word sasennan came to her mind as weapon, but with a suffix connoting humanness. She understood, for the first time, that the words that she had heard in her mind were not the words that they spoke. She knew, then, that she had passed into some other world, alien to her own.

The brightness of the sunlight of which he had spoken suffused the sky and all the lands around them with pastel glory, flashing like sheet glass on the waters of the mores below. Gray and black geese rose from the rushes in a wimmering flurry of wings. Joanna wasn't sure, but they looked an awful lot like the pictures she'd seen of the extinct Canada goose.

For a long moment she wanted to do nothing except curl up in a fetal position and hide. She felt bleak, sick, and frightened, as hopeless as she had felt when, as a child, she had walked for the first time into a new classroom filled with strangers. She cried, “Why did you bring me here?”

Caris and Antryg fell silent, hearing in her words the frantic demand, not for information, but for comfort.

It was Antryg who spoke, gently, without the indignant protest with which he had answered the sasennan. “I'm sorry, my dear. But truly, it was someone else.”

“Can you take me back?”

He was silent for a long time. Then he said, "I'm afraid not. Even as Caris knows that I can't work magic here, because the other mages will know I've escaped and be listening for me, feeling for me along the lines of power that cover the whole of the earth in their net, so I cannot touch the Void now. The-the one who did kidnap you knows you're gone.

That one will be waiting for me to touch the Void again, to find me-to destroy me and you and all of us."

Joanna looked up miserably into the odd, beaky face in its mane of graying hair and noticed for the first time how deep the lines were that webbed around the enormous gray eyes, running down onto the delicate cheekbones like careless chisel scratches and back into the tangled hair.

Sarcastically, Caris said, “Very plausible. Except that, if you did not kidnap her, who did? Even my grandfather, the Archmage, knew little about the Void and its workings; according to him, there was no one else.” He got to his feet, and walked around to where Joanna huddled in the hay, feeling empty and suddenly chilled. His hand was warm on her bare shoulder. “Don't worry. We'll take him to the House of Mages in Kymil. If necessary Nandiharrow, the Head of the House, will send for the Witchfinders. What he has done has put him outside all protection of the Council. We'll make him tell what he has done with the Archmage and when we find him, the Archmage will send you home.”

It took them until after dark to reach the city of Kymil.

It was one of the longest days Joanna had ever spent-literally; she guessed that Kymil lay well to the north of Los Angeles, but, even though the summer solstice was passed, the days were still very long. Well before the sun was in the sky, they began walking through the luminous world of predawn to which Joanna had always preferred another two hours' communion with her pillow. It had been considerably longer than seven years, she realized somewhat shamefacedly, since she had seen the sun rise.

Antryg was like a child taken into the country for the first time, stopping to contemplate cattails in the marshes below the road or to watch the men and women at work cutting hay. If nothing else could have convinced her that she had truly fallen through a hole in the space-time continuum, Joanna thought with a strange sense of despair, the sight of those peasants at work did. No role player, no matter how dedicated, was going to get out of bed at the crack of dawn and do hard labor in the coarse, awkward, bundly clothes they wore.

But in her heart she needed no convincing. She knew where she was.

“Do you want some sunscreen?” she asked Antryg as they stopped on a wooden bridge over the shining counterpane of marsh and hay meadow to watch the first hard lances of sunlight smite the water beneath them like a sounding of trumpets. “Something to keep you from sunburn?” She dug in the capacious depths of her bottomless bag.

“Thank you.” He studied the crumpled tube gravely. “After seven years of living in the dark like a mushroom, right now I'd welcome any kind of natural sensation, but I'm sure I won't feel that way at the end of the day.”

Oddly enough, Joanna felt more at ease and able to talk to Antryg, her kidnapper, than to her rescuer. Part of this stemmed from her distrust of extremely good-looking men, part from the fact that Antryg was sublimely relaxed about being a prisoner, far more so than Caris was about having one. Possibly, she thought frivolously, that was simply because he'd had years of practice at it. As she replaced the tube in her bag, Joanna found several Granola bars and offered them to her companions. Caris devoured his like a wolf, but Antryg divided his with the sasennan. “After yesterday, I'm sure he needs it more than I do,” he said, as Caris suspiciously took the solidified mass of nuts and raisins from his hand.