The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  The jolt of the carriage as it lurched to a stop made her open her eyes. At the same time she heard Pella gasp, and the Princess’ big, clumsy hand sought hers under the velvet softness of the furs. Her heart seeming to shrink in her breast to something the size of a filbert, Joanna sat up and followed the younger girl’s gaze through the carriage window, out into the blackness of the iron dawn.

  Dark against the fog, a black shape stood on the verge of the road; a black cloak fell back from a raised arm. The horses drew up, their breath smoking like dragons’ in the cold. Wet gravel crunched under soft boots. The lamps caught the glint of blond hair.

  After an instant’s frozen shock, Pella opened the carriage door. Caris climbed in without a word, the soft leather of his dagger belts creaking as he slumped back into the seat opposite the two girls. He did not look at them, nor did he speak; he just stared furiously out into the charcoal blackness of the mist as the coachman whipped up the horses, and, with a rattle of brasses and leather, they started forward again.

  Chapter VI

  AT THE SUMMER’S END, Caris remembered, it had taken him and the Archmage Salteris Solaris a week to walk from Angelshand to Kymil, ostensibly to seek the answer to the riddle of the mage Thirle’s murder from Antryg Windrose, imprisoned in the Silent Tower. He had made the journey many times before, though that had been the first time he and Salteris had taken that road together. Always, as befitted the weapon of the Council of Wizards, it had been on foot.

  Thus his memories of that journey had a slowness to them, in contrast to the hurried beat of the carriage team’s hooves and the sting of wind on his face; then there had been the rhythm of a foot pace, the long flux of the amber and cobalt wings of summer days and nights, and the taste of dust and dew. The weather was well and truly winter now, the winds like flint and the roads either foul slime troughs or slicked with ice. Joanna and Pellicida were wrapped in rugs and mittens in the Princess’ open traveling carriage, but Caris himself, high on the footman’s perch behind them, barely felt the cold.

  At times, the rage in him felt so hot that he thought he must smother; at others, his whole soul seemed to be nothing, down to its bottommost depths, but a pit filled with broken black ice. He hardly spoke, although, when Pella drew the team to a stop and jumped down to check their hooves for ice balled in their frogs, Caris sprang from his high perch to hold their heads.

  Only that night, when Joanna had clustered all the lamps available on the table of the smoky, stinking, private parlor they had rented at the posting inn of the Plucky Duck to practice forging the Regent’s signature, did he say, “Do you really think that’s going to do us any good?”

  He was weary, and the weariness came out as scorn. Joanna’s head came up, her dark eyes hurt and a little puffy with sleepiness. But there was a spark in them, that spark of anger he had first seen in the alley behind the Standing Stallion in Angelshand, when she had cursed at him to act like a man. “If you’ve got a better plan for getting Antryg out of the Tower, I’d like to hear it.”

  Her fingers were chapped and red—it was very cold in the room, in spite of the grimy fire in the grate—and the imitation of Pharos’ writing wouldn’t have deceived a child.

  He didn’t, but Joanna’s high-handed assumption of command chaffed him like a too-tight sleeve. “You haven’t seen Antryg,” he told her bitterly. “I have.”

  “It’s the Sigil of Darkness...”

  “Pox! It may have been the Sigil of Darkness that pushed him over the edge of madness, but taking it off him isn’t going to restore what few wits he may once have possessed! If you can get it off him at all, which I’m waiting to see, in a Tower full of guards. And he’s physically deteriorating as well...”

  “Whose fault is that?” Joanna lashed at him.

  “You’re the one who put him there.”

  He could see her whole body tense, like the shutting of a fist. In the greasy orange glare of the two or three lamps before her, the thin face seemed to tighten in on itself, cold anger holding itself in. Stiltedly, as if counting out every word, she said, “I know I’m the one who put him there. But there’s nothing that I or anyone can do to change things that have already happened. I can’t know what to do about getting him out until I’ve seen him. For that, I need to get into the Tower...”

  “And you think they’re going to take the Sigil of Darkness off the outer doors to let me pass inside with you? Or that they’re not going to ask about you having a mageborn sasennan with you?”

  Her mouth stayed clamped shut, but he could see the tears of helpless anger gather in her eyes, and her small hands, that could not even wield a quill properly, shake.

  “If that’s how you feel about our chances of success, why did you come?”

  “Because when you try to break Antryg out of the Tower,” said Caris, quiet but suddenly harsh as broken stone, “Suraklin’s going to hear about it. Suraklin will come...” He got to his feet, almost throwing the crude, heavy chair from him. “And then I will kill him for what he’s done to me.”

  She answered him in a voice thinned with spite, “What makes you think you can?”

  He took a step forward, wanting to slap her and hating that new spitfire glint in her eyes “If I can’t,” he said slowly, “then at least I can die as a sasennan should.”

  Joanna drew breath to speak, then stopped. Her brown eyes, in this uncertain light as black as the coffee cooling in its cup between the lamps, met his, narrow and gleaming; around her sharp face, her hair hung like a sulfury cloud. She said nothing. After a moment Caris turned on his heel and strode from the room.

  If she had thrown it in his face that he was sasennan no longer, that he had broken his vows, and deserted the Way to which he had sworn his life, he thought he would have struck her. Sitting alone in the darkness of the inn stables, listening to the groan of the wind in the rafters and filling his nostrils with the clean, warm scents of horses and hay, he felt his rage rise at her, at Suraklin, at the mages who had disappeared from the Yard, at the stolid, silent, unimaginative Princess, and at the fool of an innkeeper who was little better than a robber for charging them a silver bit for a ladleful of stew and a hunk of bread the size of his fist. It was not the Way of the Sasenna to show rage, but he collected his rage, like steaming black liquid in a cup, a bitter drink that was all now that gave him strength.

  It will sustain me, he thought, until we reach Kymil. After that it would not matter.

  “Caris?”

  The deep, husky voice made him realize with a start that he had no idea how long he’d been sitting out here. The sounds from the inn had fallen into muffled silence; the wind had risen, and when the door opened a crack, in the swimming well of shadows below the loft where he sat, he could smell the blowing snow. Mageborn, he could see in the dark when the tousled black head poked up through the ladder hole. He saw her looking around for him, peering in the blackness. He had automatically sought the deepest shadows, as it is the Way of the Sasenna to do, with the best field of fire to cover the entrance to the loft in case of attack.

  He said, “Here,” and the girl turned, tracking his voice without error. He heard the crunch and slither of her boots on the straw and the faint, light patter as she set Kyssha down beside her. He knew very little of this girl, save that she was a good driver, hopelessly disorganized, and that Joanna had somehow convinced her of her story. As the wife of the Regent she was, he realized, the first lady of the Empire, but it was difficult to remember that. For all her height, in her plain traveling dress she was curiously unobtrusive, speaking very little to the tense and preoccupied Joanna and not at all to him.

  Not, he reflected dourly, that he would have made much of a reply if she had.

  “Do you really think Antryg won’t be able to help us?” She settled in the hay near him, drawing her thick tweed cloak about her. A moment later, Kyssha’s small, cold nose came questing at his hand.

  With a rueful smile, he gathered the little dog into his la
p, like a folded marionette. Softly, he said, “You know, I think the hardest thing to give up when I went into training was my dog? Her name was Ratbane.” He sighed, not adding that the closest he had come to crying during the time of his training had been when he’d received news of her death. Of course he had not cried. He had been sixteen by then, and it was in any case not the Way of the Sasenna to mourn even the passing of one’s parents, let alone a shaggy-coated shepherd bitch with one blue eye.

  After a moment he went on, “I don’t know. Joanna isn’t sasennan, and she isn’t mageborn. She doesn’t understand...” His mind shied from the thought of the Seal of the Dead God. It had taken every ounce of strength, every knotted fragment of the hate within him, not to shrink away when they’d fixed the iron collar around Antryg’s throat. The thought of touching the thing made him want to vomit. “The Sigil’s strength is in proportion to the strength of the mage. It broke Antryg. He seemed to come through the torture as well as anyone does.”

  Her voice was quiet in the gloom. “So you think it’s hopeless?”

  Bitterly, he said, “Don’t you?”

  She made no reply, a curiously comforting silence, as if she knew he had more to say and didn’t want to divert the course of it with words of her own. Outside, a gust of wind struck the stable, like the flat-on blow of a monster hand, and below them the horses stirred in their stalls. The air was heavy with their smell, clean and curiously sweet, and the sweetgrass scent of Pella’s hair. Caris knew he should rest, for they would be on the road as soon as it grew light enough for the horses to see, but his whole body felt charged with restless elation, as if he had drunk the zam that professional boxers quaffed before their matches.

  “I want one thing, Pella, and one thing only. I want to kill Suraklin. I...” He hesitated, all the rage that had seethed in him since he had first stood in his grandfather’s study with a handful of alien bullets in his hand taking shape, for the first time, into words. Slowly, stiffly, he said, “I loved my grandfather. A sasennan isn’t supposed to love, but I loved him more than anyone else in the world, maybe—certainly more than my parents, though they were as good to me as they knew how to be. It’s just that they were farmers, and he was... he understood what it’s like to be born with fire inside.” He swallowed, struggling with the memory of those old hurts, wondering how after all the buried years they still seemed so fresh.

  He went on, “I swore my vows to the Council because I loved him. He knew I loved him, maybe the only person I’ve ever told that I did. When Suraklin took over his mind, Suraklin knew that, too. And Suraklin used that, did all the things my grandfather did, things that I loved him for, played at being my grandfather, and used my love. He murdered him, killed him like a—a robber who wanted his cloak, only I was part of the cloak. He used me like a pimp.”

  It was the insult and the hurt, as well as the taking-away of the one person he had loved, Caris realized then, staring into the warm blackness, his blunt, powerful fingers toying with the soft fluff of Kyssha’s ears. In his rage at the murder there was also rage at betrayal, as a man might feel who learns that the woman who came to his bed in darkness was not his wife, but a grinning succubus, counterfeiting the sound of her voice and the touch of her hands, in order to steal his seed. “There is no way back for me now,” he finished softly. “I have betrayed my own vows. I’ll have his life for what he has done and die.”

  They were under way again before dawn, the ice cracking sharply beneath the hooves of the newest relay of horses. Joanna dozed, exhausted from staying up half the night trying to master the techniques of forgery in an unfamiliar alphabet with writing implements she barely understood; when awake, she seemed anxious and preoccupied, as if calculating how long a start the Witchfinder had on them and whether he was able to make better progress than they. At every posting house, she asked news of them, and the news was depressingly the same. Peelbone was moving south fast, not lingering more than was absolutely necessary to sleep or to eat.

  “Can we pick up time by driving through the night?” she asked worriedly as Caris helped her up into the phaeton again after the barest stop for lunch while the horses were changed. “Or part of it, anyway, since we’re going to need some time to work on those orders.”

  Pella and Joanna had both ended up practicing Pharos’ signature. In spite of Joanna’s inexperience with the Fen-style of writing, her efforts, though less than convincing, were still far and away the best. Pella was simply too clumsy-handed to be an artist. An attempt to transfer the Imperial Seal from one document to another had already resulted in cracking one of the three available; the other two were secreted in one of the few corners of Joanna’s backpack not jammed tight with computer programs.

  The backpack never left her these days, its straps wearing grooves in the thickly quilted crimson coat of one of the Regent’s pages which she wore over her gray traveling dress. The scare she’d had when it had been in Magister Magus’ house at the time of his arrest had been enough. Whatever the disk she carried would do to destroy Suraklin’s plans—and Caris, in spite of her explanations, wasn’t certain he understood it—she was determined never again to let it out of her sight.

  Oddly, as he handed the backpack up to her, Caris found in himself no trace of last night’s impatience and scorn. Though Pella had said very little in the stable loft, it was as if her mere presence had allowed him to vent some of the leading edge of his fury and, by speaking of it, to understand himself the hurt and the fear that underlay his wrath.

  Standing by the horses’ heads, Pella looked doubtful. “Even without the clouds we haven’t had much of a moon lately...”

  “If we get anything like a decent team, I can drive them in darkness,” Caris said unexpectedly. “My sight in the dark isn’t as sharp as a true wizard’s, but I can see to drive.” And, seeing the surprise in Joanna’s glance, he added gruffly, “I’m not saying it will do us any good, but I’d be pleased to find out you’re right about Antryg.”

  The words came harder than he’d thought—or would have liked to think—they would.

  What they would do with the mad wizard or what was left of him if the deterioration brought on by the Sigil proved to be irreversible, Caris refrained from asking. Clinging hour after hour to the high footman’s perch, or trading off the reins with Pella—Joanna not being a good enough whip to manage on the fouled roads—Caris watched the blond woman’s sharp, worried face and wondered whether she was aware of the only possible option in that case. If Antryg could not be a help to them, with as powerful a mage as Suraklin alerted to his danger by the rescue, there was no way they could afford him as a hindrance. Caris knew Joanna to be not only learned in the ways of these mysterious computers, but intelligent as well. Her love of Antryg had not blinded her to the priorities of the situation. At least, he thought, it didn’t seem to have blinded her mind.

  And in any case, shooting the wizard like a lamed horse would be a far more merciful death than whatever was commanded by the Witchfinder Peelbone’s warrant. Of that Caris was positive.

  That night Caris got three or four hours’ sleep in the hired parlor of the inn, while Pella and Joanna worked at what Joanna called their penmanship exercises and tried to figure out the tricky business of removing a seal from parchment without cracking it. They set out shortly before midnight in the teeth of a driving wind. Pella had to pay thrice the usual fee to take the horses out; but even driving with great care in the howling darkness, they managed to pick up six or seven hours on the Witchfinder’s equipage. They had left the calmer weather of the Glidden Valley for the fringes of the Sykerst, and by dawn Caris could make out the barren gray hills rising beyond the ghostly clumps of birches beside the road.

  “He’s ten or twelve hours ahead of us,” Pella reported, coming out of the stables of the next posting inn to where Caris and Joanna waited by the phaeton. Unlike those in the Glidden Valley, this inn was not attached to a village; it was a small affair and rather shabby, subsisting entire
ly on the traffic of the Kymil road. Indeed, there were no more villages between here and Kymil, only the bare gray hills of the Sykerst, stripped now even of their summer crop of wandering sheep.

  It was also the inn at which, in Antryg’s company, Caris and Joanna had once encountered the Regent and had been forced to leave the main road to flee his pursuit. Sitting at Joanna’s side, the hood of his brown servant’s cloak pulled well over his face, Caris felt just as glad they weren’t staying. The events of that night had been far too spectacular for anyone not to recognize Joanna as the woman who had triggered them.

  “Then if we drive all night, we can overtake him in the morning.” Joanna looked exhausted. Unlike Caris, she had had no sleep last night, and she lacked Pella’s ability to sleep in a moving carriage. Indeed, it took a special constitution to sleep in a small racing vehicle which could seat only two and was scarcely designed for even the small amount of luggage they carried.

  “Did you come up with orders that will pass muster at the Tower?” Caris demanded.

  She passed her hand over her eyes, pushing back the tangle of her fair hair. In the shadows of her dark green hood, her face looked white beneath the remains of its curious, unseasonable tan. “If we don’t overtake him tonight, he’s going to reach the Tower before we do anyway. I think what we have will do.” Her jaw tightened. In a very small voice she added, “It will have to.”

  Pella swung up to the footman’s stand, in spite of Caris’ shocked admonition. Though no sasennan save those who had specifically sworn it owed allegiance to the Imperial Family, it still horrified his peasant heritage to see the wife of the Regent hanging on the footboard like a common groom. Caris steered the team out of the inn yard and once more onto the road.