The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (32 page)

“Where are your friends, girl?”

Joanna did not look up. The Witchfinder Peelbone's eyes, like his voice, were thin, pale, and very cold and filled her with the panicky sensation that he knew everything about her; she kept her gaze down on her hands, which lay like two detached white things on the grime-impregnated table top before her. She could feel her heart hammering against her ribs beneath the blue striped cotton of her boned bodice and the crawl of panic-sweat down her back, but some small voice in her mind kept repeating, Don't say anything. He can use anything that you say, but he can't use your silence.

“We know you have them.” She heard, rather than saw him rise from his big, carved chair on the opposite side of the table and heard the rustle of his clothes as he came around toward her. The room was windowless and lit by sconces backed by metal reflectors, one on either side of his chair; his shadow passed in front of one. When he stood beside her in the heat of the room, she could smell his body and the sweat in his clothes. She knew he was going to touch her; but even so, she flinched when he seized her hair and forced her to look up at him. “That's an expensive dress,” he said quietly, and she hated the feel of his hand moving in her hair. “And your hair is clean. You spent last night somewhere. Answer me!”

His hand tightened, twisting at her hair unmercifully. She had forgotten from her grade school days how painful it was to have one's hair pulled. She forced herself to look up into that narrow, handsome face, with the eyes of colorless, austere brown under colorless brows, gritting her teeth against the wrenching pain.

If I don't say A, he can't say
B, she thought desperately. She had always used silence as a weapon in arguments and had found it an effective one against everyone from her mother to Gary. There was a spy novel, she remembered, wherein someone had sat through hours of interrogation in silence . . . .

She remembered what Caris had told her about the Inquisition's methods and felt sick with fear at the thought.

The grip released suddenly, pushing her away with force enough to rock her on the backless wooden stool where she sat. She caught her balance and looked up at the Witchfinder again, trying desperately not to feel like a sulky, defiant child, trying not to think beyond the moment. The cold eyes stared into hers; she was reminded of a shark's eyes, with no more humanity in them than two round circles of metal.

“Such silence can't spring from innocence, I think,” Peelbone said softly. “Very good-we know you are guilty of something. The only question is-what?”

She remembered him saying, We
can't afford these waters muddied. She would ultimately be guilty, she knew, of whatever was convenient for them, even as they would sooner have killed Caris, back at Kymil, rather than risk him cluttering up their case with truth. When she said nothing, she saw the long, bracketing lines around his mouth move a little, like snakes, with irritation.

He raised one white forefinger. Joanna heard the guard behind her stool step forward and didn't resist when she was pulled to her feet; she was fighting a desperate terror, wondering how much they knew already and whether, if they searched her purse, they'd be able to backtrack to Magister Magus' house from Caris' map. She thanked the guardian god of wizards that she'd put the map in her purse instead of her pocket there was so much other junk in there that it could easily be passed over.

The guard held her arms behind her, a hateful grip and terrifyingly strong. She expected Peelbone to strike her, as he had struck Caris back in Kymil. All her life she had managed to avoid physical violence of any kind, and the very unfamiliarity of being touched and handled added to her dread. But the Witchfinder studied her in silence for a few moments, then almost casually reached forward and ripped open her bodice, revealing the thin, sweat-soaked muslin of the shift beneath.

“Child,” he said quietly, “if I had you stripped naked and thrown into the room where the rapists are kept chained, it would not in any way impair your ability to tell us about your friends an hour later.” His disinterested eyes moved to the grinning guard. “Now take her away.”

It took everything she had to bite back the desperate impulse to cry Wait . . . as the guard pushed her out of the room and into the torchlit hall. Her jaw set, she kept her eyes straight ahead of her, forcing herself not to see the leers of the two other guards out in the hall or hear their comments; she saw only the smokestains on the stone arches of the low ceiling and how the shadows of the torches jerked and quavered in the drafts that came down from the narrow stairways to the guardrooms above. The St. Cyr fortress, at the tip of the island which the city of Angelshand had long since outgrown, was an ancient one, and its very walls stank of the lives that had rotted to their ends there.

The cell to which they took her was a dank and tiny stone closet that smelled like a privy. By the light of the torch that burned smokily in a holder near the low door, Joanna could see that it had only one other human occupant, not counting roaches of a size and arrogance to make the San Serano orthoptera blush with shame-an old woman, wearing the remains of the black robes of a mage or an Old Believer, who sat huddled in the corner as Joanna was pushed inside and the heavy wooden door closed behind her. The woman barely looked up as the heavy bolts were shot outside. Joanna, trembling, stood for a few moments at the top of the short flight of steps down into the room.

I can't cry now,
she told herself desperately, her throat suddenly gripped by a surge of betraying pain and her eyes hot. It would weaken her, she knew; unless she kept keyed to this point, she could never face the Witchfinder in silence for the second interview she knew was coming. But neither Antryg nor Caris knew where she was-and even if they did, they would be unable to rescue her. I
never wanted this, she thought, I
never asked for this! I was hauled here . . . .

Antryg had said, You
are in this world under my protection . . . .

Her legs felt weak as she descended the few steps. Raised in the protection of a technological society and under the enormous bulwark of Constitutional Law, flawed though it might be, she had never before found herself in the position of being so utterly without recourse. Her aloneness terrified her. Even if she told them everything they wanted to know and betrayed Antryg, Caris and poor, cowardly, charming Magister Magus to torture and death, she had the horrible certainty that it would not help her. She could not explain how she herself came to this world. She was their accomplice against her will. She had done murder . . . .

You didn't panic then,
she told herself grimly, and it saved you. For God's sake don't panic now.

A faint snore made her look down. The old woman, thin and fragilelooking, was curled up in the corner, sleeping with the light sleep of the very aged. As she watched, Joanna shuddered to see an enormous roach emerge from a crack in the stone wall and make its unconcerned way down the old woman's shoulder. Her hand cringing from the task, Joanna leaned down and swept the thing away with such violence that it shot across the tiny cell and hit the opposite wall with an audible crack.

The old woman's faded blue eyes opened and blinked up at her under lashes gone white as milk. “She was only walking, after all,” she said in a reproving voice. And, when Joanna blinked, confused, the old lady shook her head and gestured with one trembling finger at the other wall, where the enormous insect was just disappearing through a crack. “Not doing harm.”

Joanna swallowed queasily.

“They don't eat much,” the old lady added, “and nor do I-so it's not that they're taking aught from me.” She squinted up at Joanna's sickened face. “Were you raised in privies, likely you'd be loathly, too.”

“Sorry,” Joanna said and then, knowing what the old lady obviously expected, she turned toward the departed cockroach. “Sorry,” she said, more loudly, and the old lady nodded her satisfaction.

For a long moment, those pale, ancient eyes looked up at her in silence; rather gingerly, Joanna gathered up her skirts and sat in the filthy straw beside her. “I'm Joanna Sheraton,” she said, and the old woman nodded.

“Minhyrdin the Fair they call me. Are they arresting the dog wizards now, too? For you're none of the Council's.”

Joanna shook her head. “No-at least, I don't know. I'm not a mage at all.”

The old woman clucked to herself. “Never say so, child; they'll put you in with the street girls or the murderesses, instead of in those cells built to hold the mageborn. They took away my knitting . . . .” She looked fussily around her, as if half expecting to find it hidden under the straw. Joanna shivered and paranoically checked the straw around her skirts, hating the thought that one of the old lady's pet roaches might be crawling in her several layers of petticoat.

You are going to be raped, tortured, and killed,
she thought, and you're worrying about bugs in your skirts? Tears of wretchedness and fear lay very close to the surface, but she couldn't keep from smiling with wry irony at her own capacity for the trivial.

“How did you come here, then?” the old lady asked, as if they'd met by chance at a Mendelssohn recital.

Joanna folded her arms around her knees, finding a curious easing of her fears in talking. “I was trying to see Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag,” she said. “But I-I think he's dead, isn't he? Someone was killed there.” She shivered, remembering that gruesome scene. “In the attic-there was blood splattered everywhere, even on the ceiling. That must have been the arteries. It must have happened days ago but the place still stank of it. The Witchfinder's men . . .” She swallowed. The bruises their grip had left were beginning to ache on her arms.

“It was-it was done by magic, wasn't it? There was broken glass scattered on the floor and embedded in the walls . . . .”

“Ah,” Minhyrdin the Fair whispered. She folded her little hands and rocked back and forth; the few wisps of her thinning white hair swished against her sunken and withered cheeks. “So,” she murmured to herself, “he's at his tricks again.”

“Who?” asked Joanna shakily, looking over at her.

“Suraklin.” She stopped rocking, but frowned off into the distance, as if trying to remember something. “Suraklin,” she said again. “The Dark Mage. He'd call them up, spirits, elementals-hate and rage and destruction-and clothe them in what flesh he chose. He'd cast a handful of pebbles into the whirlwind; and like a whirlwind, they'd grow, till they ripped the flesh from the bone-or fling a handful of water into it, and those drops would multiply, whirling and tearing, till they drowned a man . . . .”

With horrible clarity, Joanna remembered the freshly chipped edge of the wooden table and the nearness to hand of the glass beakers. Easy enough, she thought, appalled, to seize and smash a vessel and fling the shards . . . .

Joanna whispered, “Suraklin is dead.”

“Oh, yes.” The woman began rocking again, her little hands folded on her knees and her tiny, pointed chin resting on the knotted fingers. “Dead . . . dead . . . for all that poor boy of his drove himself mad swearing he wasn't. But where's he been, eh? Just tell me that.”

“Antryg?” asked Joanna, reflecting that Antryg wasn't the only one to be disordered in his wits.

“No!” The old woman looked at her impatiently. “We all know where he's been, meddling and wandering. Suraklin. He's been dead these twenty-five years, but where's he been, if he hasn't, eh?” And she resumed her rocking once more, like a lonely child. When she spoke, her voice had the curious, far-off note of a child's telling a story or a dream. "He wanted to live forever, Suraklin; he hated the thought that he'd die. He ruled all those around him, twisted them all to his will. But he knew he'd die, and it would all fall apart. All fall apart . . .

Joanna frowned, remembering what Antryg had said in the moonlight of the Devil's road. “Is that what happened twenty-five years ago, then?”

“Twenty-five years ago it was,” the old woman murmured, “And the Prince Hieraldus, that was so handsome, and the Archmage, and all the Council of Wizards riding south, with the Witchfinders in arms because they'd been claiming for years it never existed, and the Church lending its hand to us . . . . Ah, those were the days,” she sighed. “Terrible days. The Church and the Witchfinders, they gave us help, but they never forgave us, they never forgave.”

No, thought Joanna. How could they, after years of denying your existence and then having to ask your help? She rested her forehead on her knees, her tired mind trying to fathom the strange whirlpool of darkness into which she had been drawn-kidnap, and flight; the agonizing kick of the pistol against her wrists and the spurt blood on her face; the crawling abominations in the meadow; Antryg's eyes in the wan gray afternoon light . . .

It had been on her lips a dozen times in the last week to ask him, as she had asked that first morning, Why?

I can't tell you the truth and I don't wish to lie to you. I've done that enough.

He had stalked her at San Serano-he had come to Gary's, knowing somehow that she was there.

How? She wondered. He had said, I
have always had the misfortune to be a good guesser.

How had he known about the abominations? What had happened to Caris' grandfather the Archmage, who had vanished into the darkness of the Void with Antryg and who had not emerged from the other side? What did he know about that queer and terrible deadness, that sapping of the life of the world?

She wondered if it would be easier if the mere thought of him didn't shake the bones of her body.

You are in this world under my protection . . . .

As if a blanket of terror had been flung over her head, black darkness fell upon the cell, and the air outside in the corridor was split by a scream of such dreadful agony that Joanna felt as if her liver and lights were trying to leap out her throat.

A second scream followed the first, footfalls thundered, and somewhere a man cried out in terror. The door shook as a running guard blundered into it with a rattle of weaponry; involuntarily, Joanna clutched at the dark bundle of rags beside her, clinging to the frail bones beneath, her heart pounding in her ears so that the hammer of the blood almost sickened her. As if in a nightmare, through a shimmering darkness, she thought she could dimly see the torch, still burning, though its flame was like a wan scrap of white silk, illuminating nothing. Other voices sounded in the corridor, shouts of terror and alarm; under the screaming, Joanna thought the whole St. Cyr fortress was up in arms, blundering in that terrible darkness.