The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  It was a bitter day, the sky above the hills dark as a roil of ink. Periodic flurries of sleet soaked the road, the horses, and the passengers of the open phaeton, and made driving treacherous; the hard cold froze the road into a sheet of oiled glass. Caris and Pella traded places frequently, for driving under such conditions exhausted them both, and neither would even think of giving the reins to the inexperienced Joanna. Nor would either seek warmth from the bottle of plum brandy Joanna wordlessly produced from her bottomless backpack.

  “I’m a cheap drunk,” Pella admitted with a shy grin. “One glass of May wine and I start to sing.”

  Caris, holding the near horse’s head while Pella picked the balled ice from its hoof, found himself thinking he would one day like to hear her sing. Her speaking voice was deep and husky, but had a sweetness to it, like an alto flute. At the moment there was nothing else sweet about her. Like him, she was splotched from head to foot with mud, her travel-dirty black braids twisted tight beneath her flat coachman’s cap and her heavy mouth and chin pinched with exhaustion.

  “I can’t afford to take any of the edge off my concentration,” Caris added. He and Pella scrambled back to their respective perches, and he took up the reins once more. “By the look of the sky, it’s going to get worse tonight. But thank you.”

  It was four o’clock and graying toward sunset somewhere above the bruised darkness of the clouds, when the gray deadness, the numbness of body and soul, descended like a plague on the land. Joanna cursed, her small fists closing tight. She looked over at Caris, who had let the horses drop to a walk, feeling suddenly overwhelmed with a terrible sense of the futility of it all. “Do you feel it?” she asked, as if she hoped against hope that it was only her own weariness and not the draining of the world’s life.

  He nodded. Suddenly weary, furious with the exhaustion of the journey, he said, “It won’t stop us. We can go on...” He picked up the whip, and Joanna reached out and caught his wrist.

  “No. I think this is only a—a testing-out of one of the programs, rather than a major download. He only does that on weekends. It shouldn’t last more than a few hours.”

  “And if it does?” Caris asked brutally, “Are you willing to risk that?”

  “I think we have to.” Pella leaned forward from her rear perch. “The roads are bad, Caris. It would be too easy to make a mistake and lurch us all.”

  “I’ve never lurched anything I drive...!” he yelled, suddenly furious. Another time it would have cut him to the heart to see her cringe. Now it gave him a kind of savage satisfaction.

  Wearily, Joanna said, “We’ll stop at the next inn and wait till it passes. We can’t risk losing the time an accident might cost us.”

  Furious, frustrated, Caris made a move to lash the horses back into a canter. It was only when Joanna stopped him again that he realized the stupidity of the action in the dark and on such roads. Even so, he drove on, slowly, with blackness in his heart.

  The spell lasted for just over four hours. It was less than half the long night, but sitting in the overpowering warmth of the posting inn’s common room—for the place boasted no private parlors—it seemed to last forever. Pella came over to the inglenook where Caris sat, scruffy as a stagecoach driver in her travel-stained brown dress, with Kyssha huddled shivering in her arms. In spite of the poisoned weariness in his veins, Caris felt the stir of pity for them both, wordlessly facing a pain they could not understand. He moved to put his arm around those firm, square shoulders, then stopped himself, confused. It was not the Way of the Sasenna to give comfort—and certainly not to need it as he did. But even so, he found there was a certain amount to be derived simply from sitting in silence side by side and knowing he was not alone.

  It had passed, and Pella had just paid the usual exorbitant fee to have the horses put to, when the Witchfinder Peelbone walked into the inn.

  Caris heard his voice over the sound of the wind outside in the inn yard. For an instant, he did not recognize it. He was talking to Pella and Joanna by the fire in the nearly deserted common room, his mind on the drive ahead and on the nearly hopeless task of overtaking Peelbone before the Witchfinder could reach Kymil and deliver his warrant. He was aware of figures in the doorway and subliminally aware that he had heard no horses in the yard. Then the voice, thin and cold, said, “It was you who had the charge of such things, Tarolus. Such carelessness speaks ill for your devotion to our cause.”

  Caris’ heart turned to ice in his body.

  “My lord, I told you... I don’t know what came over you...”

  “Nothing came over me save the knowledge that each day Windrose lives, the chances increase of his rescue.”

  Joanna’s head snapped around, her brown eyes wide with alarm. She made a move to leave, and Caris stayed her, knowing it was too late to do so without calling attention to them. Unobtrusively he turned his back to the room, and Joanna turned with him, holding her hands out to the fire. Caris found himself remembering that Peelbone knew them both.

  “Rescue? My lord, surely no one...”

  Behind him, the sasennan heard the Witchfinder’s long tread. In the grimy mirror over the mantelpiece, Caris saw him, thin and middle-sized, a gray man—gray clothing, wispy gray hair. Even his eyes, though brown, seemed flat and colorless beneath the wide brim of his gray hat. He moved like a spider, slightly awkward, but with frightening speed; in his expression there was nothing, save a cold knowledge that whatever he chose to do was correct, and none would gainsay it.

  “You are naive, Tarolus.” The Witchfinder turned to his companion, older and shorter, like him clothed in the close-fitting, colorless suit of that self-righteous order. “There are many who would free him, either from desire to use his power or from mere perverse adherence to the heresy of witchcraft. Now that it is in our power to forestall such an attempt, we should lose no time.”

  “But driving at night...”

  “I see perfectly well in the dark!” The cold facade cracked; for the first time, Caris saw the vanity of the man behind it.

  Beside him, Pella whispered, her voice barely able to contain her glee, “He lurched them! He put them in the ditch somewhere up ahead. They must have been walking for hours...”

  The soaked clothing and muddied boots of Peelbone and Tarolus bore ample witness to this hypothesis. In the mirror Caris saw them making for the fire. His heart thumping heavily against his ribs, he moved away with what he thought was naturalness, still keeping his face averted. Peelbone had once gotten a good look at it, by the red glare of the burning books in the library at the House of the Mages. Kill him, he had said, as casually as if ordering the destruction of a stray dog. We can’t afford these waters muddied. Even clothed as Caris now was in the rather grubby brown corduroy breeches and coat of a rich lady’s groom, he knew the Witchfinder as a man who would not forget a face.

  The innkeeper had come over to speak to the newcomers. Caris heard that chill, hated voice again. “...accident to our chaise... ten miles up the road... broken axle...”

  “He must have tried to drive on after dark, during the dead time,” said Pella softly. Caris remembered his own violent impatience and felt an odd twinge of shame at himself. He would, he knew, have tried to do the same. “It will give us at least six hours...” She turned toward Joanna, but Joanna was gone.

  Caris muttered a curse. They still had several minutes until the phaeton was brought around, owing to the fact that the dead time had triggered in one of the ostlers a great desire to drink most of the contents of the inn’s wine cellar. By remaining in the common room Joanna might have run the risk of being recognized by the preoccupied Peelbone, but disappearing and forcing himself or Pella to go search for her was not usual behavior in travelers, and would rouse more suspicion still.

  Tarolus was arguing, “...a broken man. All he does is weep, and speak to the saints. He could help no one...”

  “He could help anyone who took the time to force from him the secrets of his former power
,” Peelbone retorted, holding out his thin hands to the fire, his shoulder close enough to Caris that the young man could feel the wet cold that radiated from it as it steamed with the heat. “Don’t you understand? In the state he is in now, he is anyone’s tool.”

  From the windy yard outside Caris heard the sharp rattle of harness and the crunch of hooves on the gravel. Peelbone looked up, his cold eyes narrowing. As Pella walked past him he said, “Is that your carriage, my lady? It may be necessary to commandeer it on the business of the Church...”

  “Not at all, not at all,” the innkeeper said hastily, coming back to them, evidently mindful of the amount the Princess had paid. “There’s a chaise your lordship can hire whenever you choose, though, as a wheelwright myself, I can tell you it won’t take but a few hours to fix that axle...”

  With great common sense, Caris thought, Pella did not reply or even remain to listen to this, but walked calmly out the inn door, slinging her massive tweed cloak about her shoulders as she went. Caris, buttoning his quilted coat and pulling up his hood, followed her out.

  Joanna was waiting in the phaeton. The ostlers holding the horses’ heads were shivering in their bulky coats and scarves. The wind had lessened, but still clawed the torch-flames into a jerky wildness of yellow light and darkness; spits of sleet still flew in the air. Caris knew the ice on the roads would be deadly. Still, driving at night here would be better than in the Glidden Valley. At least, there was no fog. He swung up to the seat and took the reins, Kyssha leaping up to snuggle near the heated brick, for which they had been charged extra, at his feet. His boot touched some unfamiliar piece of luggage as he did so. Looking down, he saw a bundle of bound-up cloth beside Joanna’s backpack; a corner had pulled aside to show bright metal within.

  “What the...?”

  “The innkeeper’s wheelwright tools,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your software’s only as good as your hardware. One of the linchpins from the wheels of the spare chaise is in there, too. I replaced it with a stick whittled down from the handle of a kitchen spoon. With luck, it should last a couple of miles and break at least a wheel, if not Peelbone’s neck. I suppose that’s a case of replacing hardware with software. You’d better drive on. First and last, we’ve probably picked up at least a day.”

  “If a day will suffice,” Caris said softly. “And if there’s enough left of Antryg to save.” He flicked the reins gently, picking out in the darkness the vague shape of the road. Beside him Joanna said nothing as they disappeared into the night.

  Chapter VII

  IN THE FEW HOURS of sleep she had gotten huddled under the damp furs and rugs in the carriage, Joanna had dreamed. She had found herself again in a place she knew to be the Silent Tower, this time in a narrow and stinking room where the smoke of the chambers below collected in the darkness under the wheel-spoke rafters, a room chilly and damp as a pit, without fire, almost without light. She was trying to talk to a hunched, sobbing figure chained to the wall, whose crippled hands picked aimlessly at the vermin that crawled in his gray-shot beard and soiled rags. Vacant gray eyes squinted at her from behind a curtain of filthy gray hair. She had cried desperately, “Antryg, it’s me!” and he had only mumbled, pointing off past her at some unseen vision of hypothetical saints. “Antryg, you have to help me! I can’t defeat Suraklin alone!” For she sensed the Dark Mage to be somewhere near, listening in the gloom just beyond the turning of the stair.

  But the figure had only whispered, “I tried to help—tried to help. I couldn’t fight you all...” Awake, asleep, dead fifty years, she would have known his voice. It pierced her with grief for all the years they would never know, and she woke up sobbing, tears running down her face to mat in her tousled hair. Around her the hard gray hills loomed like granite under a sky milky with dawn. Pella was at the reins, the look on her face one of exhaustion that bordered on physical pain; Kyssha, in Joanna’s lap, was anxiously licking her hand.

  Joanna’s first waking thought had been, We have eighteen hours.

  But the dream lingered with her, like the smell of vomit, as she rode out to the Silent Tower in the afternoon gloom.

  The wind had sunk to an indistinct mutter among the hills; the sky was low and threatening, but still. They had reached the Imperial Manor of Larkmoor shortly before noon, and the servants there had been considerably startled when their mistress, as drawn and haggard as her two shabby-looking friends, had ordered three horses saddled at once. “We don’t know what we’re going to find at the Tower or what’s going to be needed,” Pellicida said, shaking out the cinder-hued robes of a clerk in her bedchamber, while Joanna sorted through her forged papers. “After that string of accidents on the road, you know Peelbone’s going to suspect a rescue attempt.”

  She seemed calm and matter-of-fact, for which Joanna was profoundly grateful. After organizing the journey and keeping her head fairly well on the road, Joanna found herself increasingly frightened in the face of the physical danger of what they had come to do. And beyond that, she was hideously conscious that rescuing Antryg—and we will rescue him! she told herself fiercely. We will succeed!—was only the prelude to the true task, the true danger.

  The Silent Tower stood only a few miles from the ruins of Suraklin’s Citadel. Joanna had never seen that, but it loomed like a darkness at the back of her thoughts, shrouding the evil secrets of its past and, beyond a doubt, Suraklin’s computer, the most evil secret of them all.

  Her head emerged from the stuffy wool of the clerk’s robe in time to see Pella putting on a pair of sharply tailored black trousers. The gold-braided tunic and coat of the Regent’s sasennan lay on the bed, beside a neat array of weaponry. “Two sasenna will look more official than one,” Pella had explained, seeing her look of surprise. “Besides, I can escort you while you leave Caris to look after the horses—that way we won’t have any trouble when he can’t pass the Sigil of Darkness on the Tower door.”

  She spoke calmly, braiding her black hair flat against her skull, as some sasenna did in preference to cutting it off. But as she turned away Joanna glimpsed something in her eyes that troubled her then and caused her now, as they rode together over the bleak monochrome landscape toward the Tower, to steal worried glances back at her, trying to read what might be in that stern young face.

  Fear Joanna would have understood—she was scared almost witless herself.

  But why, for one second, had she glimpsed the wretchedness of some buried knowledge, the suppressed tear-glint of a secret pain?

  “There it is,” Caris said softly.

  Involuntarily, Joanna drew rein. Through a notch in the hills ahead she could see it rise against the slaty sky, a finger raised in warning—windowless, weathered, dead to magic, and old beyond speaking—the Silent Tower.

  He’s got to be alive, she thought. He’s got to recover when we get the Sigil off him. Those forged passes have got to get us in there. The guards can’t look at them too closely. He’s got to be able to help us...

  Deliberately, Joanna took several deep breaths.

  I am a clerk bearing orders from the Regent, she told herself, fixing the attitude in her mind. I have every right to be doing what I’m doing, and the words UP TO SOMETHING are not blazoned across my forehead...

  “What’s that?!”

  At the sharp wariness in Pella’s voice, Joanna slewed around in her saddle. Silhouetted against the granite skyline, a small party of riders cantered away from the Tower.

  “There!” Caris barked.

  More men were visible, afoot this time, hurrying toward the Tower from across the barren hills. “Something’s stirred them up.”

  Joanna swore.

  “Do we turn back?” All Pella’s grim coolness dissolved into anxiety. “They’re liable to look more closely at the papers.”

  Caris, too, was looking at her uncertainly, and Joanna felt a twinge of irritation. This whole mess, she thought, came about because she was unable to make a correct decision.

  She took anoth
er deep breath. “No. Those papers won’t look any more convincing tomorrow, and Peelbone’s on his way. We might be able to turn whatever’s happening to our advantage.” Without waiting for Caris to reply, she kicked her horse into a trot once more, hanging on grimly against the jolting pace as she rode up to the gate. Pella fell in at once behind her; Caris, rather unwillingly, brought up the rear.

  The portcullis was open. A little knot of men in the quilted black coats of sasenna stood grouped there, gesturing as they argued; two of them wore the red robes of Church wizards, like those Joanna had seen at the time of Antryg’s arrest. Past the darkness of the gatehouse passage, the courtyard was visible, alive with sasenna, running about, shouting, or fetching horses. A ferret-faced man came striding through the gate to meet them as they drew rein. With what she hoped was official hauteur, Joanna reached for the leather satchel of papers, but the man looked out past her at the two sasenna, and demanded, “Any luck?”

  “Luck?” Caris looked baffled. With a flash of insight, Joanna remembered the Magus saying that the guards on the Tower were changed frequently. With their black quilted coats hiding the Regent’s gold braid, the man thought them part of the Tower guard. Then he took a second look at the cut of their breeches, and frowned sharply.

  “You’re the Regent’s, aren’t you?”

  Pella looked momentarily startled, as if trying to figure out how he had known she was the Regent’s wife. Caris said, “Yes. We’re here to...”

  “Are his men joining the hunt?”

  “Hunt?” said Joanna blankly.

  The man spat, and it froze to a diamond of ice on the granite doorsill of the Tower. “For that damned sorcerer. He’s escaped.”

  “He’ll be making for Kymil.” Joanna drew rein on the brink of a stream which cut the roadbed, black rainwaters rushing with silken silence down the narrow channel between ice and frozen weeds. Behind them, the Silent Tower was a truncated spike against the darkening sky. Cold wind stirred their cloaks, tugging at her blond hair where it strayed free of her hood. Soon it would be night.