The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  Joanna’s stomach curled up in terror at the possibility of capture by the Witchfinders and the thought of facing the Witchfinder Peelbone again. But she knew the Princess was right. She took a deep breath, “Okay. If I’m not back in...”

  Pella handed her the reins. “I’ll go. Can you hold them?” And when Joanna moved to make a totally halfhearted protest, she asked, “What can they do to me if they catch me? I’m the wife of the Heir. What does this backpack thing look like?”

  Joanna told her and held Kyssha back from joining her as the tall girl sprang down from the seat and pushed her way off through the crowd.

  A small black carriage had been brought up to the house doors, enclosed and heavily curtained. Joanna remembered it well. She had ridden in a similar one from the house of the murdered Dr. Skipfrag to the St. Cyr fortress after her own arrest.

  The guards formed a flying wedge around Magus, breasting like swimmers through the crowd to get him there; angry fists were shaken at them, and now and then a stick flailed out of the mob to strike one or another on their shoulders. The Magus cowered in the midst of his guards, with the look on his face of a rabbit in a trap. Remembering his kindness to her and the fact that it was he who had helped Antryg rescue her from Peelbone and his Witchfinders, Joanna felt like a traitor.

  A voice said close to her knee, “You know he’ll be safer with them than he would if he stayed in his house.”

  Startled, she looked down. Caris stood beside the phaeton.

  “What will be done to him?” she asked quietly.

  “Magus?” Caris shrugged, watching the progress of the melee by the steps with a professional eye. “If Cerdic speaks up for him, probably only a public flogging and banishment. But rumor has it that Cerdic’s found himself a new Spiritual Advisor these days.”

  Voices rose, and dung and pieces of broken brick rained down on the closed black carriage as it began to move away. A stray chunk of dirt struck one of Pella’s phaeton team and the horse flung up its head nervously. Caris caught the rein and drew the beast back down, talking gently and stroking the soft nose. A moment later Pella reappeared, the bulk of her tweed cloak appearing even bulkier with the backpack hidden beneath it. She saw Caris and stopped, her brisk competence fading to awkwardness at once.

  “It’s all right,” Joanna said. “At least—I think it’s all right. But we’d probably better get out of here.” The crowd around the Magus’ house was dispersing as three sasenna went back up the steps. One of them removed from the pouch at his belt a bar of red wax and a seal; Joanna suspected reinforcements would be on the way.

  “It’s all right,” Caris assured her. His voice even and impersonal, he went on, “I’ve just heard that Cerdic’s two ships have been sighted coming in past the Chittern Islands. It seems one of them sprang a plank or something and had to put in at Felwip a few days ago. I don’t know what happened with the other, but something similar, some accident that kept them in port in the islands.”

  “Dear God,” Pella said softly. Her green-gold eyes filled with pain, either at the destruction itself or at this final proof of cold-blooded perfidy. Half-subconsciously she put out her hand to touch the flank of her near horse, as if seeking in the animal contact some grounding to the gentler life she had left behind. After a silent moment, she handed the backpack up to Joanna, swung herself up onto the high driver’s seat again, and collected the reins.

  Without a word, Caris sprang up to the groom’s perch behind them. Still in that same automatic fashion, as if she were handling a car instead of two nervous animals, Pella backed her team neatly, turned them, and guided them across the flooded cobbles of the square. She looked stunned. Joanna found herself remembering that most people in this world only half believed in magic, if they believed in it at all. It was one thing, she supposed, to have a love-spell put on you. It was another to see spells used on that scale with that kind of cold-blooded selfishness.

  To Caris, Joanna only said, “Suraklin’s staying with Cerdic. He’s been helping him win money in the gambling halls; Cerdic will have a fortune now to buy friends with. We don’t know, but we think Suraklin means to murder Pharos and get control of the Empire.”

  “That would make sense,” Caris said quietly. “He will be trying to protect himself, if it is in fact his aim to become one of these computer machines.” Then for a long time he said nothing, only held onto the brass railing of the groom’s perch, staring out in front of him as Pella drove through the flooded, half-empty streets of the town. Kyssha put her paws on the seatback and nosed at his hand; Caris stroked her head absently, as if not truly aware of her presence. Then he sighed. “I found this in Grandfather’s house.” He took a revolver from his belt. Glimpsing it there earlier, Joanna had assumed that it was the one he’d taken from her, but she saw now it was a .45, not a .38. She glanced quickly up at his face, and saw it strained and bitter, as if he had taken some scouring drug.

  He had wept, she remembered, over the dead Archmage’s body, sobs that had seemed to tear him apart. “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head, as if he would say something; but after a false start, he was silent.

  Hesitantly, Joanna said, “Maybe if you showed it to the new Archmage...”

  “It wouldn’t do me any good,” Caris said, his voice quiet but hard as stone. “For one thing, it is not for me, as sasennan, even to have investigated; the Lady Rosamund has already told me that the matter is closed. Then, too, most of the mages have left the Yard. They know the storm was caused by magic. They tried to trace it, but weather tampering is very hard to track. They knew they’d be blamed. After their arrest last summer, even the few who stayed in town have kept getaway bags packed. The last of them left before noon.” He sounded remote, as if it barely concerned him; had she trained with him as sasennan, Joanna would have recognized the tone he used when he was injured and trying to speak around gut-tearing pain. Pella glanced back at him, comprehension and worry in her eyes. “Some of them took sasenna with them, but I was one of the ones ordered to stay as a guard against looters.”

  There was a moment’s silence, broken by the milky swish of the wheels in the flooded street and the splashing of the horses’ hooves. Joanna knew it was an unfair question, but asked it anyway. “And will you?”

  He didn’t look at her. “Joanna, you don’t understand.”

  She half turned in her seat, looking up at that tense, beautiful face in the sunless light. “I do understand, a little—at least as much as anyone can understand who hasn’t been brought up with that strong a concept of honor. And after seeing the destruction Suraklin has wrought, I think I understand the vows of the sasenna as analogous to those of the mages; that one who is trained to kill cannot be permitted to choose his own places and times for it, any more than one who has been trained to alter the physical world by an act of his own will. But that doesn’t change what Suraklin is doing. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s got to be stopped at whatever the cost.”

  Keeping clear of the poorer districts near the river, Pella guided her horses through a broad square past a neoclassical domed building that was obviously a bank. Its granite steps churned with businessmen in dark broadcloth like a hosed-out anthill. One young man came quickly down the steps and climbed into a closed carriage as Pella drove past. Through the windows, Joanna could see him, once he thought himself out of sight of his colleagues, bury his face in his hands like a man who has heard the sentence of his own death.

  Behind her, Caris’ voice was desperate. “Don’t do this to me, Joanna.”

  Antryg had said that, she remembered, lying with bound hands, waiting for the wizards to come for him.

  She did not look back at him, only pleated at the knots of green silk ribbon that bordered the sleeves of last night’s ballgown. “Why did you come looking for me, then?”

  Caris sighed, bitter and weary, as if he had not even been sure he meant to speak to her until now. “To tell you that the rumor in the Mages’ Yard is that
Peelbone the Witchfinder left Angelshand this morning, as soon as the wind eased enough to let him travel. He’s heading south, for Kymil.”

  “Are you angry with Caris?” Pella asked later, pausing in her search for a spill of kindling to light the candles in the rapidly encroaching gloom of her apartments. “Because you shouldn’t be.”

  “Not really.” Joanna’s small hands continued to move as she talked, folding the mountains of petticoats, nightdresses, and chemises whose packing she had taken over after Pella had, for the fifth time, gone wandering around the chaos of the room looking for a mislaid glove. “I know he takes his vows as a sasennan very seriously; I suppose it’s like a devoutly religious person being asked to deny God in order to save the life of someone he loves.”

  Pella nodded. “Only of course all sasenna are automatically excommunicate—except the Church’s, that is. They don’t deny God, but they certainly must choose their master’s wishes over the Church’s without an instant’s thought. It’s the same reason they don’t make legal marriages.” Around her feet, Kyssha and the two lapdogs played hide-and-seek among the lace ruffles of half a dozen petticoats tossed carelessly on the floor. “You know it is in the Council’s power to have him killed for disobedience?”

  “I know if a sasennan becomes—flawed, or crippled, he’s supposed to kill himself,” Joanna said slowly, thinking of the Regent’s deaf servant Kanner. “But I don’t think that fear was a factor in Caris’ decision to stay here.”

  “No,” Pella agreed quietly. Forgetting her quest for illumination, she returned to the dense shadows of the bed and helped Joanna dump the latest heap of lace-edged lawn into the trunk at her side. “Do we have to pack all this?”

  “We do if it’s going to look as if you’re heading south for a leisurely change of climate,” Joanna declared. In straightforward matters of animals or physical courage or, Joanna suspected, policy, the Princess had a powerful and instinctive grace like an animal herself, but faced with the nuanced complexities of clothing or behavior, she lapsed into gauchery. Joanna, morbidly sensitive to all the things she herself had been urged to do, felt an overwhelming sympathy. She fished her backpack from the floor and dug from it a notebook, from which she ripped half a page. She twisted the paper into a makeshift spill and handed it to Pella, who remembered what she was about and hurried to the fireplace to touch one end to the small blaze there. “The minute it’s light enough and we’re away from Angelshand, we’re going to leave it behind with the baggage wagons and go on in your phaeton, remember.”

  The Princess froze in the act of touching the lighted end to a candle wick. “The letters of credit for changing horses...”

  “I have them here.” Joanna nudged her backpack with one toe. After watching Pellicida’s absentminded packing all afternoon, she had taken the precaution of stowing everything they would truly need in various pockets of the bulging sack—the aforesaid provision for changing horses en route, a great deal of money, and a sheaf of letters and orders from Pharos, several of which bore his seal which Joanna hoped she’d be able to remove with a hot knife, once she’d forged permits to get in to the Tower itself.

  Returning to the former topic, she went on, “I think it would be easier for one of us to get in to see Antryg if we had a sasennan along to make it look more official...”

  “At a pinch, I could pass myself off as a sasennan,” Pella said thoughtfully. “That is, I’ve had some training. We all did—my cousins and I, back home, though of course, since we would never be allowed to take vows, we were never trained at the higher levels. But I’ve got a uniform and a sword, as well as a clerk’s robe for you.”

  “Are there female clerks?”

  Pella looked startled that Joanna would ask. “Of course. A man doesn’t write with his—er—whiskers.” The spill burned down to her fingers; looking startled, she hastily lit the candle with it and tossed the flaming paper into the hearth. Then she proceeded to rove restlessly around the little bedchamber, lighting the candles that stood in holders of crystal, gilt bronze, and creamy porcelain. “Speaking of writing, I can fill out the text of the passes to get us into the Tower—any clerk would do that—but Pharos’ signature is another matter. I was never any good at drawing. Besides, he’s left-handed.”

  “I think I can manage that,” Joanna said. “At least, I could always forge my mother’s, and she’s left-handed, not to mention signing her name like a Rorschach test. You know, in a way I feel rather sorry for Caris.”

  “Sorry?” Pella bristled.

  “He’s in an almost impossible situation,” she explained quietly. Elsewhere in the palace, on the floor below, voices were momentarily raised and a hurrying of feet was heard; Pella swung around, her greenish eyes darkening, and she stood frozen like a deer in stillness until the sounds passed away. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” the girl said and blushed again. “That is—whenever my mother went traveling, which wasn’t often, my father used to come up to her rooms and bid her goodbye. It isn’t that I expect Pharos to, but...” She stammered to a conclusion, as if realizing how ludicrous the comparison was.

  Her parents must have loved one another a great deal, Joanna thought, torn between cynicism and envy, to have given her such ineradicable hopes about marriage.

  She, too, had been listening for Pharos’ chance coming, though for different reasons. When she went back to her packing, the leftover adrenaline flash made her fingers shake.

  All it would need, she thought, was the smallest suspicion on his part. All it would need was one servant’s rumor, one bit of gossip about his wife’s new friend. For he would recognize her, of course. He might or might not take out his vicious sense of betrayal by Antryg on her, but whatever happened, at a screamingly optimistic least it would mean delay.

  There could be no delay. Not now.

  On their return to the north wing of the Imperial Palace Pellicida had been all for ordering a fresh change of horses for her phaeton and setting forth then and there, in the hopes of overtaking the Witchfinder’s equipage and holding the lead all the way to Kymil. It had taken considerable persuasion on Joanna’s part to convince her to wait for tomorrow morning, as even the most precipitate journey would under normal circumstances. Hence the long and tedious business of packing, of ordering the great traveling coach and a smaller vehicle for the servants and extra luggage, and of sending postriders ahead with orders to prepare Larkmoor, the small royal manor near Kymil.

  Much as it drove Joanna insane to watch the failing of the afternoon light—it was only three-thirty—and to know that they couldn’t leave for another fifteen hours or so, she knew that it was necessary to avert suspicion. She had no idea whether Suraklin was still with Cerdic at the Dower House and no idea if or how intently he kept track of Pella’s movements. Throughout Pella’s packing—or rather Joanna’s packing of Pella’s dungs while the Princess roved abstractedly around the apartment, looking for items Joanna had already packed—Joanna had been burningly conscious of the slow-moving gilt hands of the mantelpiece clock, half-buried under an orgy of enamel-and-gold nymphs, and of the gathering darkness outside. Peelbone the Witchfinder was on his way south, undoubtedly with the final warrant for Antryg’s death in his pocket. At this point, the Council of Wizards was in no shape to prevent it, as Suraklin had clearly intended. And she knew she was doomed to sit in these rooms until enough time had passed for someone to sleep and wake up before she could do anything about it.

  Screaming with frustration will not help, she told herself firmly, with wry and involuntary humor, and will only cause talk among the servants. With the hideous sensation of having her plans ravel once again from her hands, she went back to her packing, wondering how she would pass the night until morning.

  It was seven A.M., black as the pits of hell and bitterly cold, when the Princess’ huge traveling carriage finally lumbered away. To the last, Pellicida had been listening, waiting for some sign of her husband’s coming, some acknowledgment from h
im that her movements mattered to him, and Joanna had fretted herself nearly ill with apprehension. He had not come, of course. Perhaps the girl did not consciously expect that he would, but Joanna could sense her disappointment and her hurt, ridiculous though it was, and was fond enough of the big, gawky girl to feel sorry for her. She herself had been more fearful that Suraklin would choose that inopportune moment to renew his attempt to seduce the Prince’s wife. Then the game would have been up indeed.

  River fog had risen to blanket the palace grounds and the city that lay beyond the walls; through it Joanna could see nothing, but now and then she heard the slop and drip of the horses’ hooves in puddles and knew that the landscape would be one of absolute desolation. It was wretchedly cold in the coach, in spite of heated bricks wrapped up in the fur robes at their feet, and Joanna watched the soft steam of her breath float in the reflected glow of the carriage lamps. The coach was badly sprung; though the Princess’ phaeton, which followed behind, ostensibly for Pella’s use once they reached Larkmoor, was slightly better, she was miserably anticipating several days of jolting discomfort. She tried to keep herself from thinking about Antryg, about what would happen to her if she failed to rescue him, or if, having gotten the accursed Sigil off his throat, she found him permanently mind-broken as Magister Magus had feared. She tried not to think of the Magus, either.

  He would be in the St. Cyr fortress now, in one of the vermin-ridden cells whose walls, like those of the Silent Tower, were spelled against the working of magic, perhaps the same cell in which she and the tiny, decrepit old crone Minhyrdin the Fair had been locked. It had been his spell, she remembered unhappily, that had allowed Antryg to break her out.

  She leaned her head back against the soft plush of the seat squabs and shut her eyes, her head aching. She could think of no way in which she had betrayed him; it was sheer luck that she herself had spent last night at the palace instead of going home to be arrested with him. She could not help him. In fact, tarrying here would put her in danger of arrest herself when the Witchfinders began questioning him, even had Antryg not been facing immediate death. But she still felt guilty at abandoning the poor little quack to his fate.