The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (37 page)

“Did you know him before . . . ?” began Pharos, then stopped himself. “No, you couldn't. You were Suraklin's student. Perhaps that was the reason.” The dappling sunlight passed like a school of shining fish over his bright hair as the carriage moved through a grove of maples whose leaves were already edging with blood-red autumn flame. It was difficult to believe that beyond the park walls in three directions stretched the sprawling gray city, the dingy factories, and the crowded wharves of Angelshand.

The strain and tiredness were apparent in the Prince's voice as well as his face. Joanna heard the harsh, shaky shrillness of last night still there, held rigidly in check, as it had been, she thought, for weeks-perhaps for years. After a moment, he went on, “He never would have handed down a judgment like that before-before he rode with the Archmage to Kymil, you know. He-changed afterwards.”

“If he saw anything of Suraklin's Citadel,” Antryg murmured, “it would be surprising if he hadn't.”

“No.” The Prince's voice sank. “Sometimes he spoke of it-of the things Suraklin kept in darkness, things that he bred or called up, things that he fed on the blood from his own veins . . . .”

Beside her, Joanna felt Antryg flinch at some memory, but he said nothing. Back in Kymil, she'd noticed the old, tiny scars that marked the veins of his arms like a junkie's tracks.

“But I hated him for it,” Pharos continued, “as much as I had loved him before. And I did love him. It's strange to say, but since he has become an imbecile, oddly enough, I love him now.” He swallowed and passed his hand over his mouth, a nervous gesture. He spoke from behind the white, delicate fingers with their bitten nails, as if from behind a barrier. “They said of Suraklin that he had a terrible, almost unbelievable influence over the minds of all who had to do with him. They said he could break anyone's mind to his bidding, if given his chance . . . . But looking back, I realize it was only the things that he'd seen . . ”

His voice faltered. Feeling Antryg's eyes on her, Joanna turned her head and caught again the wariness and fear that lurked in the watergray depths. After a moment, Pharos went on, his words coming rapidly to cover old guilts. “But I was only a child and a fanciful one-I understand that now. It must have been only that I was ten . . .”

“You were ten?” Joanna had been watching Pharos, but the note in Antryg's voice drew her eyes, as if he had shouted the words instead of whispering them almost inaudibly. There was shock on his face, as if he had been physically struck-shock and a terrible intentness that Joanna was at a loss to understand.

Pharos nodded, too sunk in private nightmares to notice the wizard's reaction to his words, the presence of the coachman on the box, Kanner on the footman's stand, the scrunch of the horses' hooves and the carriage wheels on the gravel path, or Joanna. Hands pressed to his mouth, he stared out ahead of him with the glittering gaze of madness.

“What happened?” Antryg whispered, leaning gently forward to take the Prince's hands. He drew them down, denying Pharos that hiding place, and asked again, “What was it that happened twenty-five years ago when you were ten?”

“Nothing.” The Prince shut his eyes, squeezing the painted lids together like a child hoping desperately to deny the reality of what he was helpless to fight. “That's it-nothing happened.”

“Except that you went mad.”

“I was a child.” The words came out as if strained by main force from a throat so constricted it barely passed the air of life to his lungs. “There was nothing I could do, no one even that I could tell. I used to dream about him, after he came back, and in my dreams . . .” He broke off again, his hands trembling violently in Antryg's sure, light grip. The mage said nothing, but his wide eyes were filled with horror, grief, and enlightenment-not for the Prince's sake, but as if, looking into the younger man's madness, he had seen the terrifying reflection of his own.

Blurtingly, the Prince sobbed, “In my dreams he was not my father!” Tears tracked down through the heavy paste of makeup; he wrenched his hands from Antryg's and fumbled for his handkerchief again, his body racked by tremors of grief and horror he could not stop. “I was only ten,” he repeated, “and there was no one I could tell; they wouldn't believe me. But for years, I believed that the wizards had somehow stolen my father and put someone else in his place. And afterwards, when I realized it couldn't possibly be true-when I realized it was all charlatanry and faking-I hated them for that! God, how I hated them!”

Bitterness scorched his voice. As if something had broken in him, and he could not stop, he continued to sob, thrusting Joanna's comforting hand roughly away and huddling in his corner of the carriage, fighting alone for control over himself, as he had always fought alone. Antryg, perhaps understanding that the Prince would take comfort from a man that could not be taken from a woman, moved over beside the Regent and put his hands on those quivering black satin shoulders; though the touch seemed to calm the Prince, the tears would not stop flowing-a reservoir of them, dammed for years.

As for Antryg, his face was that of a man who has spoken a spell-word in jest and seen hell open before his eyes.

“He changed,” the Prince whispered wretchedly. “How could I ever trust? There were other things to it . . . .”

“I'm sure there were,” Antryg murmured, as if he spoke to himself of some hideous vision that only he could see.

“But that was the source of it. I'd loved my father, and they took that from me forever. In dreams . . .” With a final sob, the Regent sat up and made a clumsy effort to mop his face. “Curse it, there's the Palace.”

With some startlement, Joanna saw that they had almost reached the gilt-tipped gates of the Imperial Palace's marble forecourt. His hands shaking, Pharos wiped with his black silk handkerchief at his smeared cheeks. “I must look like some sniveling girl.”

Antryg managed to grin, the enlightenment and the horror alike gone from his eyes, except for their shadow lurking somewhere far down in the water-gray depths. “I'm sure your father won't care.”

From the short flight of marble steps, guards in white and gold were descending to meet the carriage as the shadows of the Palace's vast wings enfolded them. Rows of eastward-facing windows blazed with the reflected sun, and the gilded spines of the roofs sparkled like a frieze of fire.

The bitter rictus of a smile pulled the Prince's mouth, “No-not that he cares about anything. But . . .” The expression softened. Joanna saw that the Regent had spoken the truth; whatever hatred and fear he had borne his father through his adolescence and early manhood, the love of his childhood had been able to reassert itself since their roles had been reversed, since he had now become the stronger, and since his father was dependent upon him for care.

“And if any of the servants comments,” Antryg added cheerily, as the footmen stepped forward in matched unison to let down the carriage step, “you can have him flogged.”

The Prince shot him a devil's grin as they descended. “Ah, you know how to gladden a man's heart,” he retorted. Joanna followed them, wizard and prince, up the palace steps.

From what he had said last night, Joanna had expected Antryg to make a careful investigation of the Emperor's rooms; but either he had misled her or something had caused him to change his mind. The Emperor Hieraldus occupied a suite of rooms on the third floor of the north wing, reached by a small stairway from the State Rooms on the second. “One of my less creditable ancestors furnished them to house his mistress,” the Regent explained sotto voce as he opened a painted panel in the gilded oak wainscoting by the fireplace of what was referred to as the Emperor's withdrawing room-a chamber the size of some barns Joanna had slept in during the course of the last two weeks. “He had the stair built-it's overlooked by the guard outside the door there. Father and Grandfather both used the rooms as their private living quarters, since they're more comfortable than the State Rooms.”

Antryg looked around the huge withdrawing room, with its stately dark furniture and elaborate tapestries. “In the wintertime, I should imagine it would be difficult to find anything less comfortable. Your father always lived upstairs, then?”

The Prince nodded. Since his breakdown in the carriage, much of his suave deadliness had deserted him; Joanna, though she knew he was perverted, mad, and cruel-though the bruises of his whip had not yet faded from Antryg's face-found herself almost liking as well as pitying him. As she followed mage and Regent up the narrow stair, holding up the inevitable voluminous ecru petticoats, she shook her head at herself. First you
fall
in love with Antryg, she thought, and now you like the Regent. I see you're batting a thousand on this trip.

“He is looked after constantly,” she heard Pharos say as he turned the gold knob of the door at the top of the flight. It was typical of the Palace, Joanna thought, that even the doorknob was a minor work of art, with gilded scrollwork and a tiny cloisonne painting of mythical gods disporting themselves among giggling nymphs. “None of his attendants have reported anything amiss.”

“No,” Antryg said, almost absently. “No, they wouldn't.”

His examination of the rooms was almost cursory. Chamber after delicate chamber was crammed with all the beautiful things a man with unlimited wealth and good taste could accumulate, from delicate clocks to exquisite paintings, oppressive with the trapped, unventilated heat of early autumn, and pervaded with the sick, musty odor of a body that had ceased to look after itself.

The Emperor himself, led out by a careful and cheery attendant, did not shock Joanna nearly so much as she had been afraid he would. He was only a man of about her father's age, his scanty white hair clean and combed, his tidy clothes, apart from fresh food smears down his plain, dark waistcoat, speaking worlds of diligent and neverending care on the part of his guardians. His mouth hung slightly open, and he stared straight ahead of him with blank eyes that barely tracked movement, but Joanna, who usually felt unease bordering on revulsion in the presence of the crippled or retarded, was a little surprised to find in herself nothing but an overwhelming sense of pity.

“Were the rooms marked?” she asked as they descended the steps once more, with courtiers bowing to them when they passed through the State Rooms and headed once more toward the courtyard where the carriage waited.

Antryg glanced at her, as if startled from a reverie of his own. "Oh, yes.

“Did it confirm your hunch?”

He hesitated, and she sensed he was trying to decide whether to tell the truth or to formulate some other evasion, and suppressed a strong desire to shake him. At length he said, rather carefully, “No, it didn't. I'd thought that the rooms would have been marked to-to do that to him by means of a spell. I don't think that was the case.”

“Then what did happen?”

With his usual care, he helped her up into the carriage again and swung up to settle himself beside her; the Prince looking rather pensive, was handed in by his footmen, and the carriage started off again. “I'm not sure,” Antryg replied, a trifle too airily.

“Look,” Joanna began, exasperated, but Pharos cut her off.

 
                 “Is he in danger?”

“I don't think so,” Antryg said. “Not as long as you're alive, at any rate. Whoever wants you out of the way doesn't want to contest the issue of the succession yet. The Regency will do.”

“Of course,” Pharos said thinly. “There would be civil war before the nobles would assent to dear Cousin Cerdic being crowned, unless he had a nice, long Regency to get them used to the idea. I take it that is the plot?”

“Something of the kind, yes.” Antryg's long fingers steepled over his chest. He had, she noticed, acquired a chain of sapphires and gold, a gift from the Prince that stood out like Faberge work against dime store finery among his other tawdry necklaces. His voice was light, but his eyes, Joanna saw, were still deeply troubled, as if the information the Prince had supplied him, which had meant so little to her, had given him an answer to questions he did not want to understand. Typically, he pursued another subject. “Who knew of your marriage?”

Pharos sniffed. “Few enough.”

“Did Narwahl?”

“He was my physician.” The blue eyes narrowed within their discolored sockets. “Of course he knew. You're not saying it was because of that knowledge that-that he was killed?”

Antryg was silent for a moment, studying the Prince's face, as if calculating what would be best to say. Then he said gently, “I doubt it. I think he was killed because of what he was doing in his experiments. The intruder was standing beside his worktable when Narwahl surprised him . . . .”

Pharos, who had been looking out across the park toward a miniature pavilion beside a toy lake, whirled with the suddenness of a mad dog, suspicion and rage blazing in his eyes. Before he could speak, Joanna, familiar by now with Antryg's Holmesian reasoning, said hastily, “He'd have to have been. The pistol ball was lodged in the wall just above the worktable.”

“Of course,” Antryg said, a little surprised the point would need further elucidation and blithely oblivious to how close he'd come to a quick trip back to St. Cyr. “At fifteen feet in the dark, Narwahl's shot could have gone wide, even if he wasn't shooting at a mage-and even in broad daylight at half the distance, the mageborn are notoriously hard to hit.”

“So he could have told any one of the mages about the marriage,” Pharos said, after a moment, his mouth suddenly wry with distaste. A mad flicker of suspicion danced like flame in the back of his eyes for a moment, and he added, “He could have been in a string with them too, couldn't he? All of them-Cerdic, the Council . . . .”

“In that case, it's hardly likely they'd have killed him.”

The carriage drew to a stop before the old Summer Palace, on the far side of the grounds from the vast Imperial edifice. In the daylight, Joanna could see no sign of its greater age, except perhaps in the somewhat irregular lines of its facade. Like the greater Imperial Palace, this smaller building was faced with mellow, red-gold stone and trimmed with white marble. The statues of its niches were made of several particolored stones which reflected the Regent's more outre tastes.