The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  Her mind blurred with terror she ran, stumbling on the rough rise of the ground, racing until she felt her heart must burst toward the staring silver eye of the moon. She had the confused impression that, if she could get her back to one of the bigger standing-stones, she might at least have some chance. Where she had come through the Void, they were only low stumps, like broken fenceposts along the ancient path, if anything remained of them at all. Even as she ran, she cursed herself. Her knife was in her pack; she’d never get it out in time. Caris would never let himself get caught like this...

  She flung herself against the nearest of the large stones, the pitted surface tearing at her hands. Blind with horror, she scrabbled at her pack and ripped free the velcro pocket. The blood was hot on her arm where the creature had cut her. In another second all those dangling claws would be on her. She dropped the pack and jerked the knife free of its sheathe, the blade jamming in its newness. Any second ...Any second...

  Barely able to breathe, she flattened back against the stone and faced her adversary.

  It was gone.

  It was out there in the darkness; she knew it, felt it, and could almost hear its faint, crackling whisper. But there was another sound, a muffled, rumbling thud in the earth, a groan.

  She spun around, looking down the track into the moonwashed slot between the stones.

  A rustling, moving shadow spread over the ground like water. Even with the thin lucency of the moon, it was hard to distinguish shapes, but after a moment she heard the groan again, deep and plaintive, and realized it was the lowing of a cow. Sheep bleated. Straining her eyes, Joanna could make them out now in the shadow: cloudy blobs of whitish wool, the blunted spark of brass horn-tips, and a vertical shape that could only be a walking man. Sweet, cold, and unbearably lonely music curled like a black ribbon into the night, a haunted piping that threaded its way like wind between the stones. Like a counterpoint against the thudding of her heart, she heard the hollow pat of a drum.

  Somewhere beyond the line of stones, out in the huge gulf of blackness that lay like a single velvet entity up to the glowing violet hem of the hill-crowded sky, the abomination waited.

  Joanna remembered Antryg saying that whenever the Void was breached the whole fabric of the universe weakened; holes appeared not only in the vicinity of the Gate, but elsewhere in other universes, and through these holes abominations would drift. In veering from Suraklin’s route, she might have stumbled through a hole opened along one of the energy-tracks that crossed the Empire of Ferryth. Or, she thought with a shiver, she might have fallen through to some other universe altogether, neither her own nor the one she sought.

  Fine, she thought, with half-hysterical irony. I’ve managed to screw up before I even got through the Void.

  She stepped cautiously back out of the main track between the stones, keeping her body still pressed to the icy, uneven surface of the menhir, the cold making her hands ache around the unaccustomed handle of the knife. The bobbing darkness down the track was coming nearer, resolving itself into a blur of dark shapes and green eyes flashing queerly in the moonlight. She smelled dung and dust in the sweetness of the trampled grass; fragile and terrible, the aching, single voice of the pipe tugged at her heart.

  A sheep passed her, then a cow with a yearling calf. More cows followed, jostling one another, one of them so close she could feel the warmth of its body, then sheep in a dusty choke of wool-smell and hay. Dogs trotted between them, silent; then goats, a couple of pigs, a plowhorse the size of a Panzer tank, with a small boy walking nearly hidden in its shadow along that dark and silent track toward the moon. Other men and women walked among the animals, silent as they in the false, quicksilver light; dogs trotted at their master’s heels, and half-grown girls carried cats in their arms.

  In the trampled wake of the beasts walked a line of men, heads dark and disfigured by the horned beast masks they wore. There was something indescribably lonely and terrible about the dirge they played, like no music Joanna had ever heard, mourning for something no one understood anymore. The black horns bobbed and swayed in the ashy moonlight. Under the jutting muzzles gleamed the silvery reflection of masked eyes. If they saw her as they passed her, standing shivering in the black pool of moonshadow, they gave no sign.

  Last of all she saw what she thought was a catafalque made up from a farm wagon, drawn by cows and sheep, though it was almost impossible to tell in the darkness. She thought that on it lay the body of a man, eyes shut, face and hands blackened, clothed in rags, with a deer’s antlers fixed to his dark forehead. She seemed to hear Antryg’s deep voice: “All things travel along the lines, resonating forward and back... On certain nights of the year the peasants still drive their herds along them, in commemoration of the Dead God, though they’ve forgotten why he died...”

  Well, at least, Joanna thought wryly, I’ve come to the right world.

  Fine. Now you have to worry about Suraklin.

  Her first impulse was to follow them, knowing they would lead her eventually back to their village, to shelter and warmth for the night. It was bitterly cold—belatedly, Joanna remembered that, for all its damp and smothering heat in midsummer, the Empire of Ferryth lay well to the north of the latitudes of California. The thin windbreaker wadded in her backpack would be about as much use to her as a pair of lace ankle sox. Swell. You not only screwed up while you got through the Void, but you didn’t do so good before you entered it, either.

  But even as she moved to pick up her backpack and follow, Joanna glanced out into the darkness, and saw something moving, like a floating spider, far out in the darkness, paralleling the course of the stones. Moonlight tipped the end of a floating spun-glass tendril. The abomination, too, was following the funeral of the Dead God.

  Was it the music that drew it? she wondered. Or the smell and the heat of blood? She huddled down again, her back to the blue-black shadow of the eroded stone, trembling as she pulled the useless windbreaker from her pack and prepared to wait out the night. Far off, like the voices of the dead, the pipes cried alone in the darkness.

  Had it not been for the abomination, Joanna might have backtrailed the swathe of trampled grass and animal dung back to the village from which the macabre procession had set out. She felt cold and hungry and, once the first rush of adrenaline seeped from her veins, exhausted; even if the villagers had left watchdogs prowling around their homes, even if they weren’t likely to welcome a stranger snooping about the place in their absence, surely she could take refuge in some friendly haybarn until dawn. But the thought of being in any enclosed place in this black gloom—the thought of being without a clear line of sight in all directions and something absolutely solid at her back—gave her a shrinking feeling in the pit of her stomach; she huddled all the tighter into her thin jacket and stayed where she was. The long trough of the energy-track, marked only here and there with an occasional small menhir in the direction of the village, but as visible in the wan moonlight as a paved highway, stretched away into the shadowy hills. It was a long walk, not knowing what might drift above or behind her in the dark.

  The depression, when it came, turning the fragile beauty of the moonlight to flint, even as it sucked the hope from Joanna’s soul, made everything a thousand times worse.

  Joanna knew what it was and had been expecting it. After all, Suraklin had crossed the Void to use his computer on this side of it, and the computer fed on electricity converted by relays of teles-balls from the energy, the hope, and the life-force of every human being in her own world, this one, and who knew how many besides.

  She, at least, was aware now that the numbness in her soul was externally caused, not the result of some fading within herself, and that put her ahead of literally every other victim of the computer’s far-reaching field. It didn’t help, of course. She was still tormented by the knowledge that she would fail and that what she did was pointless and would result, at best, in her permanent exile to this inconvenient, smelly world and, at worst, in her d
eath or enslavement. She felt a growing conviction that Antryg was, in fact, long dead. It had been a month and more since the wizards had taken him. Even worse was the part of her that shrugged and said, “So what?” That part of her was seized with an impatience to get up and set out through the darkness for the village, half forgetting, as an alcoholic forgets his last bender when the liquor-fumes rise to his nose, that the abomination was somewhere out there. It’s following them—it won’t get me, she thought, resentment at her chapped hands and cramped knees flooding her, and only a mechanical resolution to do everything completely by the numbers made her stay where she was.

  When a steel-colored dawn finally gave her a clear enough view of the surrounding countryside to make sure she was absolutely unthreatened and unobserved from any direction in the crowding shoulders of the hills, she got stiffly to her feet and changed into her dress—not particularly easy to do while keeping an eye on the landscape. The depression that choked her soul like sifted ash had not abated. Since this was Saturday, she didn’t particularly expect it to. Gary—Suraklin—would undoubtedly continue his programming all morning and into the afternoon, and there would most likely be another such spell tomorrow.

  At least, she thought, viewing the bony landscape of granite hills beneath its thin garment of rusty autumn grass, I seem to have come to the right place. But Antryg had said that the Sykerst, the rolling, barren lands of steppe and moor and waving lakes of grass through which they had walked from Kymil to Angelshand that summer, stretched two thousand miles to the east of the more populous areas of the Empire. If she were somewhere in the Sykerst—and these hills looked exactly similar to those she remembered—she could easily be anywhere in them.

  Please don’t let me be fifteen hundred miles from the nearest civilization, she prayed drearily, hoisting her backpack to her shoulder and cursing herself for filling it with paper. Gimme a break, for Chrissake. This is going to be tough enough.

  As she trudged down the trampled path of the Dead God and his followers, the hem of her petticoat swirling around the hightop sneakers she had decided would be better for walking in, the other half of her mind retorted, Don’t bitch, baby, you made it to the right universe, didn’t you?

  Did I?

  I should have taken that nine o’clock bus back to Encino. Oddly enough, a glance at her watch sometime in the course of the night had showed her that, though it had felt as if she had run through the Void for at least half an hour, the time had not registered on her watch at all. As near as she could calculate, she had emerged a few minutes before nine o’clock—precisely the same time that she had stepped in.

  It was now full daylight, the morning hard and clear and hot in the sky, when she saw the village, tucked into a little pocket of semifertile land among the looming gray hills. A few workers toiled desultorily among the tawny grain in the fields; harvesting, guessed Joanna, by the half-shaved stubble, but not going about it with any great enthusiasm. The sun seemed stiflingly hot on her unprotected head. I should have remembered to bring a hat, she told herself irritably, and a groundcloth to sit on last night would have helped, too. But here on the tall slope of a granite hill, she could feel the bite in the wind. She remembered how, all through the tail end of summer, the bleak weariness of these times had kept the haymakers from the fields—a physical exhaustion as much as an emotional one, for the drawing of energy down the paths to Suraklin’s computer affected the body as well as the soul. Part of her recognized that the ruin of the harvest would mean hunger throughout the land. Another part simply did not care.

  All she wanted now was a meal and a bed to sleep in. If possible, she wanted to sleep through tomorrow—to deal with all this later.

  The wind turned; the smell of blood hit her nostrils as if she’d inhaled a dose of ammonia.

  She knew the smell of blood. At the summer’s end, on an island in the sluggish green Shan, she’d shot a Witchfinder at a range of under two feet. The blood had sprayed her as if from a hose. Antryg had dragged her into the water, washed the sticky horror from her clothes and hair almost before what she had done sank into her. But she’d never forget that cloying, sweetish reek.

  Turning her head, she saw the distant clump of gorse on the hillside and how the iridescent cloud of flies glittered around it in the early sun. Not wanting to, but knowing that she’d have to know, Joanna gathered up handfuls of petticoat and skirts in a gesture that was to become second nature to her, and picked her way over the sloping ground.

  It had been a pig. It lay in a little hollow, behind the stiff, gray-green clump of the gorse. Flies swarmed over it, industrial-strength rural flies, some of them two inches long, buzzing like B-52s in the stillness of the sheltered hillslope. The pig’s flesh had fallen in over its bones, like a punctured balloon, as if all the fluids of its body had been sucked forth at once, though Joanna could tell that the kill was fresh, last night. It had not yet begun to stink. Its hide, what she could see of it, was beaded all over with dots of blood, as if it had been pricked with a thousand needles simultaneously. She remembered the floating, angel-hair tendrils of the abomination, reaching out in the shimmer of the moon.

  Stumbling jerkily on the uneven ground, Joanna turned and walked swiftly away from it. She made her way downhill, not toward the village, where people might delay her with questions, but toward the narrow wagon track of ash-colored dust that wound away from it to the south. In spite of the exhaustion that dragged upon her and the dreadful sick weariness that filled her body like a bloating disease, she wanted to get away from this accursed country as far and as fast as she could.

  A wagon was coming from the village, driven brutally fast, with an angry disregard of the horse or the road. Joanna thought, To hell with him, I don’t need that kind of driving, I’ll wait for the next one, and then realized that, as small as this village was, in the midst of the harvest season, this was probably the only outgoing vehicle she was going to catch all week. The fear of the abomination alive in her mind, if not in her numb heart, she ran to reach the edge of the road before the wagon passed.

  “Stop!” she pleaded in English, hoping to goodness the spell of tongues Antryg had once laid on her would hold. “Help me!”

  The driver stopped the horse with a savage yank of the reins; she saw the flecks of foam spray from the beast’s wrenched mouth. The driver was a youngish man who had once been stout, but now had the slightly wrinkled, fallen-in appearance of a fast and unhealthy weight loss; his face was gray and pinched with anger. “What the hell do you be wanting, girl?” he yelled at her.

  Thank God the spell works. “I’m trying to get to Angelshand. We were set on by highwaymen—they killed my brother.” She wished as she said it that she could work up a more convincing delivery, but with the hot buzzing weariness in her head it was the best she could do. “Can you take me to the nearest town where I can get a stage? I have money...”

  “What, that the highwaymen left you?” the driver jeered. “Money you stole from those you worked for, more like, when they turned you off!” He lashed his horse. The wheels flung dust on her as the wagon pulled away.

  Joanna stood for a moment, her throat hurting with tears of resentment and rage. Blindingly, crazily, she wanted to fling rocks after the departing wagon and scream curses at its driver, the horse, and their whole smelly little village. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, she wanted to pull the gun from her pack and...

  LIQUOR-STORE ROBBERS SHOOT THREE, the headlines had said last week, GANG SHOOTING SPREE KILLS FIVE. WOMAN SHOOTS TEENAGE DAUGHTER...

  Among other things, that deadness, that uncaring in the soul, made it very easy to pull a trigger if you happened to have one in your hand.

  Joanna sighed. Beyond a doubt the yokel in the wagon had spoken out of the same bled, gray ache that filled her own heart. After this spell of draining ended, she supposed she’d feel sympathy for him. Right now the rage in her, like the pus of an unburst boil, began its nauseating reabsorption into her body. She scrambled over th
e weed-grown ditch and bank, brambles snagging her petticoat and the backpack straps cutting into her shoulders, and began walking away from the village, but not really caring where she went or why.

  She was almost on top of the wagon before she realized it had stopped and was waiting for her.

  “I’m sorry, lass,” the driver said in a weary, beaten voice. He pushed back his sweat-stained felt hat and wiped his brow with an arm that Joanna could have done chin-ups on, had not such exercises always been beyond her. “I didn’t mean to shout at you as I did.” He extended a hand the size of a small typewriter to help her over the high front wheels to the straw-strewn board of the seat. Puzzlement and exhaustion struggled for a moment behind his clear green eyes, and with them a hidden fear. “It’s just... I don’t know what it is that’s come over me of late.”

  Joanna could have told him, but it was no more believable in this world than it was in her own.

  It took her nine days to reach Angelshand; nine exhausting days of being jolted, first in wagons, then in the public stagecoach, elbow-to-elbow with coarse country squires, broadcloth-suited businessmen, talkative matrons, and bald-shaved prelates, over roads deep in autumnal mud. The gap in the Void through which she had come had opened deep in the Sykerst, hundreds of miles from either Kymil, where she was almost certain Antryg was being held, or Angelshand, where she hoped to find help in rescuing him. Once the weary spell of deadness lifted, as it did late that first afternoon, she realized she was extremely lucky she hadn’t come through on the other side of the world.

  Still, it meant eight nights in some of the worst accommodations she had ever encountered, sharing straw mattresses crawling with bedbugs with whatever other female passengers happened to be on the stage that day—and their babies, if they had them—lying awake, half-choked with the fetor of unwashed clothes and bodies, scratching furiously at flea bites, staring at the dark rafters overhead, and listening to the steady beat of the rain on the shingles. This doesn’t even qualify as one-star, she thought tiredly. I’ll give this two black holes. Why couldn’t I be like those heroines who come through the time-warp or the dimensional vortex at most a day’s walk from where they’re trying to get to?