The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (41 page)

“I'm sorry,” she said, and some of the bleak horror faded from the old man's eyes.

“We have both been his dupes,” he said gently.

Joanna shook her head. “All I've lost is some illusions,” she replied. “Not-not anyone I know.” Only someone I hoped to know. And the hope, she reflected wryly, was my problem.

His fingers tightened over hers, remarkably strong for so old a man's. “Come,” he said and rose to his feet, the long, dark robe falling straight about him. “It's best we find him, before he learns that I've escaped and am here.”

The Summer Palace was curiously quiet as they approached it; the Regent's high, harsh voice was audible from the terrace, but his words were indistinct with distance. Like three ghosts, they moved through the shrubbery, which, in accordance with the Prince's Gothic tastes and desire for privacy, grew closer around the walls than the formal vistas of topiary which surrounded the new Palace. Away from the graceful symmetry of its remodeled facade, all pretense of the building's modernity faded. The stable and kitchen courts were even to Joanna's untrained eye a jumble of styles and periods, mansard roofs crowding comfortably shoulder to shoulder with the oddly angled gambrels and projecting upper story’s of the Palace's earlier incarnations. “Won't someone ask us what we're doing here?” she inquired, glancing uncertainly at Caris' dark uniform and sword and at the old man's flowing dark robes.

They paused in the gloom of a grove of cypresses opposite the round, gray turret of the stable tower. Through the tower's broad gate the stable court was visible; grooms in the Prince's flame-colored livery were working with neat efficiency to harness a pair of coal-black horses to a light carriage of some kind. At Joanna's side, Salteris murmured, “I scarcely think so,” and made a small gesture with one hand.

The nearer of the two horses, which had been standing quietly up until that instant; flung up its head in panic. A stableboy caught too late at the bridle, and the beast reared, frightening its harness-mate. Men began to run from all directions under the shouted orders of the gray-haired coachman in his gold-and-crimson braid. “Stay close to me,” the wizard admonished. With Caris glancing watchfully in all directions and Joanna holding up the voluminous handfuls of her beruflled skirts, they calmly crossed the drive and passed unseen by the shouting confusion around the carriage.

“It's always easier to enter a house through the servants' quarters,” the old man said softly, “provided you know what you're doing.” The oppressive heat of steam and the damp smells of soap and linen enveloped them as they passed into the shadows of the brick laundries on the far side of the court. Salteris turned unerringly along a brick-paved corridor with a low, groined wooden ceiling, under which the day's heat collected with the mingled smells of smoke, cooking meat, and spices from the kitchens beyond. A man started to emerge from an archway of reflected daylight to their right. Joanna, startled, paused in her stride, but the old man beside her only flicked a finger; from the room beyond came a crashing noise that made the servant turn hastily back, yelling “Not that way, you stupid jolterheadl”

Something stirred in Joanna's consciousness. A dark, cold feeling of half-familiar strangeness, like an unheard sound, seemed to go through her, and she was aware of the sudden hiss of Caris' breath beside her. Salteris checked his steps in the narrow seam of the kitchen passage, his dark eyes narrowing and a flame seeming to spark suddenly in their depths . . . .

Joanna identified where she'd first felt that queer, haunted sense of terror a split-instant before Caris and his grandfather's glances met.

Then they all began to run.

There was a backstairs at the end of the corridor, leading to apartments in the old wing. Salteris, dark robe billowing about his thin limbs, led them unerringly to it, across an unused state chamber with its ancient linenfold and gilded coffer and up the stairs to the attic; Joanna followed in a susurrus of silk taffeta. The memory of the blood-splattered attic in Narwahl's house and of Minhyrdin the Fair mumbling, He'd call them up, spirits, elementals leaped to her mind. Panic chilled her heart as she realized that Antryg had electrical equipment at his disposal.

But when they burst past the startled guard into that vast room, nothing met their eyes-nothing, hanging dark and shimmering where the sunlight had been, as if a hole had been opened in the fabric of the world and the night, momentarily, allowed to breathe through. It grew smaller and smaller, like a shrinking bubble of darkness, even as they watched, seeming to retreat without ever reaching the far wall. Along it, Joanna thought she could see something moving.

Salteris strode forward and Joanna reached involuntarily to catch the black fabric of his sleeve. The smells of woodsmoke and herbs came to her from it as he turned, as they had come from Antryg's-the smells of wizardry that had smothered her at San Serano, with the strangler's grip around her throat. She gasped, “Don't . . . !”

At the same moment, Caris shoved her roughly aside, his sword whining from its sheath. “We'll lose him!” The wind of the Void lifted his blond hair back from his forehead, and anger blazed in his eyes. For a terrifying instant, Joanna saw that her choice was either to fling herself willy-nilly after them into whatever second gap in the Void Salteris should open or to be trapped in this world, with neither good wages nor evil to help her, forever . . . .

She gritted her teeth and tightened her grip on her gathered-up petticoats, ready to run. But Salteris did not move. He only stood watching as the hideous black shimmer of the Void faded and vanished.

“No,” he said. His voice echoed queerly in that enormous room, with its jumble of antique furniture and the sun glinting harshly on the glass tubes and copper wires coiled beneath the window. He turned back to consider them-Joanna in her ruffled and borrowed gown, and Caris with his sword half-drawn, his eyes the eyes of a hawk stooping to its prey. “No. I know where he has gone, my children. I read the marks of Suraklin that guide him like candles through the darkness.” As if he guessed her fears from her grim eyes and braced chin, he smiled and, reaching out, gently touched Joanna's cheek. “I will not leave you alone here, child. Indeed,” he added quietly, “when I cross the Void to trap him, I shall need you both.”

When they reached gary's house in Agoura, they found it empty and silent. Just as well, thought Joanna, watching Caris make a rapid, wary circuit of the den, kitchen, and party room, naked sword blade in hand. The last thing she wanted at the moment was even to see Gary, let alone explain to him where she'd been for the last two weeks and who Caris and the Archmage were.

Letting herself in with the hideaway key, she had a strange sense of deja vu, like the dreams she occasionally had of being in grade school again with her adult knowledge and experience. Some of it was simply aesthetic-her eye, used for weeks to rococo curves and molded plaster ceilings, found the high tech starkness of the place alien and strange, and her lungs gagged on the quality of the September air. But it was emotional as well-a sense of reality-poisoning that was increased by the impersonality of the house, the party room with its ugly, comfortless couches and prominent television set. Everything around her seemed almost audibly to speak Gary's name.

For no reason, she remembered the ragged little mill girls in Kymil, hastening through the silent glory of late summer dawn, and the bitter, weary pity on Antryg's face as he'd asked, “Is it worth it?”

“It's all dead,” Caris said softly. He came back from the big glass-and-chrome kitchen, sword still in hand, cautiously touching television, bar, and couches in passing. “I mean-it never was alive.” He paused, his dark, beautifully shaped brows drawn down over his eyes with puzzlement as he looked at Joanna. “What is it all made of?”

“Plastic, mostly.” She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets and looked around her at the house, realizing at last what it was that had chiefly bothered her about Gary. “It's cheap, and it'll do.”

“But it isn't-it isn't right, ” the sasennan insisted.

Salteris, who had been standing by the patio doors, gazing thoughtfully out at the smog, let fall the drapes and turned back. “I doubt one person in ten notices, anymore,” he remarked, almost casually. “People get used to things. In time, they cease to remember and don't miss what they've forgotten they had.” He came back to where Joanna stood, once again in the well-worn comfort of jeans and t-shirt, and said, “The mark is upstairs, isn't it?”

The mark was at Salteris' own eye level. He brushed his hand along the wood, as Antryg had done on the white, curlicued paneling of the Emperor's suite. Like a glowing pixel, the scribble of light seemed to float up out of the depths of the grain. The wizard stood for a long time gazing at it; even when it faded again, as it did almost at once, he did not move, but remained, as if he could read it still.

“Was that the mark,” he asked her at last, “that you saw in San Serano? In the great computer room there?”

“I think so,” she said hesitantly. She pushed back her unruly blond hair from her face, trying to remember something beyond the terror, the queer, smoky smell of the robes, and the scorch of a man's breath on her temple.

“His influence can be incredibly strong upon the minds of those who know him,” the old man murmured. Sharply through the curtains, a scissor edge of late sunlight rimmed his angular profile, so like Caris', and haloed the free-floating strands of his silver hair. “And even those who do not know him yet-the mark influences their minds, as if he spoke to them when their thoughts were elsewhere. The mark prepares the way. I see his influence in your eyes still.”

She looked away, feeling her face go blotchy red with shame that he should guess.

“You do not want to believe entirely ill of him,” Salteris continued gently. “You search for the reasons he did what he did, motives to make his use of you other than what it was. It says better of you than it does of him.”

Her throat tight and aching as if she had screamed her heart out, she stood staring at the silent red eyes of the IBM in its bank of 20-megabyte disk drives.

“I know, Joanna.” The slender, powerful hands rested on her shoulders. “Even now, even knowing what I know through the memory of the grip of his mind upon mine, even knowing I must meet him again, it is my instinct to trust him. That is the terror-and the strength-of his spell.”

Caris turned sharply from examining the neat shelves of additional ROM and backup floppies, the sunlight slicing through the single chink of curtain bursting against the brass of dagger hilt and buckle. “Must you meet him?”

“He has not yet been here.” The old man folded his hands in the sleeves of his robe. “He will come to this, his mark.”

“Why?”

The dark gaze rested gently on her for a moment before the Archmage replied.

“Perhaps there is something here he wants,” he said. “Perhaps-for very little, if any, magic operates here, and it is hard to say-perhaps because he will sense you near it. But he will come-he must. And I must meet him.”

Caris asked softly, “Alone?” In the inflection of his voice, Joanna could hear that he already knew his grandfather's reply.

Salteris sighed and folded his hands before him, forefingers pressed to his lips. At length he said, “Caris, I am sure of myself. To introduce a second factor, even one that I trust implicitly, as I trust you, would be to increase the danger.”

“But your magic doesn't operate here,” Caris began protestingly.

“Neither does his.”

“But he is twenty years younger than you and a half afoot taller! He can . . .”

“My son,” the old man said, with a smile, “do you think me that defenseless?”

Caris said nothing.

“And then, someone must stay with Joanna.” The dark gaze moved thoughtfully to her in the close, hot gloom of the computer room. “I do not think he will pass me unseen, but he might. If he does, he must not be allowed to speak to her.”

Neither Caris nor Joanna spoke; but judging by the sasennan's face, he wasn't any more thrilled with the idea than she was.

More gently, Salteris went on, “You stand in grave danger still, Joanna. Even knowing what you know, you want to trust.”

She looked away again. Hating herself, she nodded. Dark and compelling, the old man's glance went to his grandson. “If you cannot prevent him from speaking to her in any other way, kill him.” He turned and walked to the window, flinging back the curtain to admit a drench of harsh and smog-stained afternoon light. Beyond the window, the hills that hid San Serano bulked in the haze, and between them, like a gun sight, stood the dusty little shed in which they had stepped from the dark of the Void.

“I will wait for him there,” he said. “He is sly. . . .” He lifted his thin, white fingers at the intake of Caris' protesting breath. “He will not speak with me, if you are near. He has reason to fear you, my son. Trust me.” He looked back at them, the hot sunlight outlining the worn contours of his face, suddenly very fragile-looking in his faded black robe. “I know what it is that I do.”

The light had shifted again to the sharp-edged champagne brilliance of the long Southern California afternoon when Antryg came walking over the hills.

Caris and Joanna were in the computer room, where they had been since Salteris left them, alternately speaking of what had passed since they'd parted at Magister Magus' and watching for movement in the parched ochre vastness of grass and dust.

Caris had turned from the window to regard Gary's monstrous new IBM among its red-eyed banks of monitors and surge suppressors, as he had done at intervals, all afternoon. After some moments, he said, “This is the thing that is your life and the life of all your world? The machine that thinks like a man?”

“Not like a man.” Joanna folded up her legs to sit cross-legged on the corner of the computer table, the weary portion of her mind that was not trying desperately to avoid thinking of Antryg taking considerable comfort in the freedom of jeans. He is walking into a trap, part of her said, and she pushed the treacherous impulse to care aside. “Computers can arrive at the same conclusions a person can, with the same kind of logic people are capable of, when they aren't hoping that two and two won't equal four . . . .” She paused, then went on. “But not like a man.” She reached for the switch on the main terminal. “Would you care to try?”