The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  “Are you mad?” Caris demanded. “It’s the first place they’ll look—the Witchfinders will be searching house to house.”

  “Tomorrow, maybe. They’ve got a lot of men, but not unlimited numbers. It’s my bet that tonight they’ll be concentrating on the hills themselves and on the roads north.”

  Caris considered the matter for a moment in silence. Joanna guessed he was recalling, too, Antryg’s foxlike skill in lying low and doubling on his own tracks. Tricky, devious, more than a little crazy ...All the fears she had felt for his life and his sanity, all her plans for rescuing him, had vanished in a sort of thunderclap of delight, and it had only been with difficulty that she had restrained herself from laughing aloud by the gates of the Tower. Caris, for his part, looked brooding and angry, as if he felt that Antryg had made a fool of them as well as of his captors—as indeed he had.

  Finally he said, “He’ll have to wait until it gets fully dark, I think. There are people in Kymil who will recognize him, even with those absurd spectacles that were given back to him, if he’s still wearing them. It’s beyond me how he plans to get into the city, but then I’m still trying to figure out how he got past the Sigil of Darkness on the doors of the Tower.”

  He touched his heels to his horse’s flanks and reined back toward the frozen Ponmarish and the city walls beyond. Joanna followed him, grimly reflecting that tomorrow she’d have a whole new set of aches to go with those acquired from four days of jouncing in the carriage. The last horse she’d ridden had been a riding-stable plug at the age of fifteen, and she was already sore.

  As soon as they were well out of sight of the Tower, Pella had ridden back cross-country to the manor of Larkmoor. No further purpose was to be served, she said, by her staying with them to hunt for Antryg. The best thing she could do was to brief the servants with a cover story sufficient to divert the Witchfinders’ inevitable questions about the movements of strangers in the district. While there was still enough left of the waning afternoon light, Caris, like every other of the several dozen sasenna at the Tower, had searched the grounds around the walls for tracks and had found none. The frozen sleet of last night had formed a brittle sheet over the dead grass, breaking like glass at a touch. The only prints were those of the sasenna of the Tower, searching like him without success.

  “You don’t think the story of his disappearance could be just a cover, do you?” Joanna asked worriedly as they left the road and swung north along the edge of the marshes. “The guards said he just vanished—one minute he was chained in his cell, the next minute he was gone. Even the manacles were still locked shut. Could he have been murdered quietly, and all this search be for the benefit of whichever member of the Council has been holding out against his death?”

  “The Council’s in hiding,” Caris said briefly. “You can bet Bishop Herthe knew it the minute the last of them left Angelshand—the Bishop of Angelshand’s hasu would have sent that news by scrying-crystal the same night. They could have slit Antryg’s throat with impunity any time in the last week.”

  “Maybe they did,” Joanna said softly.

  “Then why make a fuss now? No, the Captain of the Tower was genuinely furious.” Through his teeth, Caris added, “And I can’t say that I blame him.” He urged his horse down a treacherous slope to the first iron-hard sheet of ice where the marshes began, scanning the rotted snow, frozen mud, and brittle, black weed stems for the print of Antryg’s feet.

  “He was barefoot, they said, in the Tower,” he went on after a moment, with a kind of grudging compassion in his voice. “He’d sometimes wrap rags around his feet for warmth, or the guards would do it for him when he forgot, but they said he didn’t walk much toward the end. He knows these hills the way a rat knows the sewers—he lived here for eight years with Suraklin—but in his physical condition, he won’t be able to get far. He’ll need food, he’ll need shelter, and he’ll need them before night. It’s coming on to sleet again. He’ll never survive it.”

  He has to, Joanna thought desperately, fear for him swamping again her lingering sense of delight at his escape. Somehow, he has to survive. We have to find him before the Witchfinders do, before the sasenna of the Church and the Council. It crossed her mind to wonder whether he would hate her for what she had done to him. It might not keep him from working with her to accomplish Suraklin’s defeat; she was too familiar with his conscientiousness, his quixotic sense of duty, to think he would reject her help or even be openly hostile. But she had betrayed him, given him over to the savage usages of the Inquisition and the slow torture of the Sigil of Darkness. And, rather typically of Antryg, she reflected with a grin, he had robbed her of the opportunity to display her contrition by a spectacular rescue.

  At least he’s alive, she thought, as the darkness closed round them and the wind began to moan among the hills. Somewhere out there...

  The lingering daylight faded. Brutal cold settled in.

  “My guess is he’ll work his way around and come down from the north,” Caris said softly, as they settled themselves in the lee side of a clump of naked alders on an islet in the marsh. Causeways led from the higher ground of the hills where they had hidden the horses to the tuft of ground where they sat, and thence to the city gates, a few hundred feet beyond. Around them stretched the marsh itself, the green fairyland of ponds and meres Joanna had crossed at the end of summer, now a solid lake of muddy gloom. Behind them, the wind throbbed shrilly over the hills. “They’ll be watching the Angelshand road to the northeast, and the Stone Road that leads to the Tower itself, but this gate isn’t much used. He’ll have to come across the causeway—most of the marsh is frozen hard, but he’d be mad to risk a soaking in an ice bog.”

  “He is mad,” Joanna said quietly. “And he’s pretty desperate.”

  “He’s mad but he’s not stupid. If he got wet now, the cold would finish him long before daylight.”

  Joanna shuddered and tucked her gloved hands under her armpits in a vain attempt to warm them. The city gates were lit with torches and lamps, a promise of warmth and, she thought hungrily, food. The reflected orange glow showed up the cloud of her breath and brushed with fiery chiaroscuro the crumbling roof beams of the long line of trashy little shanties that crouched along the outside of the city wall on both sides of the causeway and its arched bridge.

  “What are those?”

  Caris followed her glance.

  “Poor people live there in the summertime, fishing in the marshes for food. When the waters rise with the rains in winter, they’re forced back into the town again. Most of those huts will be knee-deep.”

  “Could he be hiding in one of them?”

  Caris leaned around the bare, coarse-barked trunk of the nearest alder to scan the dark line of pitiful dwellings. Then he settled back down at her side and whispered, “Someone thinks he might be.”

  Through the scaly trunks Joanna could see a line of black-clothed figures on the causeway. The glow from the gate beyond picked chips of light from the brass hardware of crossbows and pistols and caught the hard line of swords beneath dark, quilted coats. Church sasenna, she guessed, coming in from an unsuccessful search with the increasing cold of the night. One of them pointed down at the huts. “Have those been searched?”

  And it seemed to her that her heart stopped.

  The leader of the party cursed and gestured his men down the track toward the filthy, flooded little shelters. Her eyes on what were little more than black silhouettes, Joanna felt she was going to smother with anxiety, confusion, and overwhelming and impossible certainty.

  “What is it?” Caris whispered, and she was aware that her hand had closed with convulsive strength on his wrist.

  “Antryg,” she whispered. “That was Antryg’s voice.”

  “The guard?’

  It sounded as impossible to her as it did to him, but she didn’t take her eyes off the hut into which the tallest of the sasenna had vanished. It was close under the shadow of the bridge. She could see vag
ue movements, men milling around, now and then caught in the gold lights from the gate. The tall man emerged briefly, wading through the half-frozen slime of marsh water and sewage to go on to another hut. Even at this distance, she could see that he walked with an odd, lithe arrogance, like a dancer.

  “It can’t be.”

  Her mind echoed it, over and over. It can’t be. It can’t be.

  The sasenna reassembled. Somebody said, “Everybody here?” and there was a murmur of assent, though in the darkness, with that large a group, it would be impossible to tell. Scrambling in the slippery mud, they climbed the narrow track back to the causeway bridge.

  Caris breathed, “They’re one short.”

  “The hut there against the buttress. He never came out.”

  Caris was already checking the loads of the pistol he’d pulled from his sword sash. It was a local muzzle-loader rather than Suraklin’s .45; in a stray glint of light from the gates, Joanna saw the runes of na’aar on the barrel. “He’s got a crossbow,” he said softly, and she remembered that, mageborn, Caris could see like a cat in the dark. “At this stage, he’ll probably kill to protect himself.” He rose to a crouch, glanced at the gate to make sure they were unobserved, then paused. “The fact that he’s managed to escape from the Tower doesn’t mean he isn’t completely insane, you know.”

  The hut was low-roofed, half-fallen-in, a blot of darkness clinging like a dirty leech to one of the city wall’s massive stone buttresses. It stood on higher ground than most, but getting there entailed wading through lakes of brown ooze which undoubtedly would have stunk, had it not been so bitterly cold. Joanna, her long clerk’s robe hitched to her knees, was shivering, her toes numb in her boots and her thick woolen hose. Stalking ahead of her, Caris seemed not to notice. In the darkness, she could barely see him and certainly not see the ground. She slipped twice, nearly losing her hold on her ever-present backpack and the flashlight she had taken from it. The reflected glare from the torches at the gates overhead caught with a faint, citrus sheen on Caris’ fair hair and the gold braiding of his coat as he paused before the darkness of the hut door. Then, before she could catch up with him, he stepped around the low doorpost, his pistol pointing into the blackness.

  “Drop it,” he said.

  There was a long silence. Joanna paused, involuntarily frozen into stillness, waiting.

  Then, slow and infinitely weary, Antryg’s voice sounded within the hut. “Hello, Caris.” There was the faint clatter and splat of something, presumably the crossbow, being tossed to the muddy ground. Joanna ran the last few slithery steps to Caris’ side and shined the beam of her flashlight into the hut in time to see Antryg raise his hands in a gesture of surrender, his head bowed and a look on his face of utter exhaustion and the most total defeat she had ever seen.

  He could have shot anyone, she realized, except Caris, who in spite of everything Antryg had never ceased to consider his friend.

  The light flashed across the round lenses of his spectacles and he flinched; his hands, she saw now, in tattered, fingerless leather gloves, were shaking. He reached one of them out abruptly and leaned against the stone buttress for support. His face was cadaverously thin, bone-white against a frame of short, startlingly black curls; the hollows of his eyes were darkened still further with blue-brown smudges of exhaustion. After an instant, he raised his head again, squinting against the electric glare, and saw her.

  Their eyes met. His expression did not change, but something in him seemed to settle into a kind of stillness, as if he were perfectly balanced between heartbeats on a razor’s edge, awaiting the end of the world.

  Caris shoved the pistol into his belt. “Suraklin’s in Angelshand,” he said quietly. “We’re here to get you away.”

  Joanna said, “Antryg, I’m sorry.”

  She thought he was going to say something, but after the first sip of indrawn breath, he forcibly stopped himself. She saw the grief in his eyes, like a man pulling back his hand from that which he knows he must not grasp. In a conversational voice he began, “My dear Joanna...”

  She took two strides forward and flung her arms around his waist.

  In all her hesitant and approval-seeking life, she had never done such a thing, partly from fear of rejection and partly because it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. Typically, she forgot to let go of either the backpack or the flashlight, so the ensuing embrace was lumpy and awkward, but of that she only became aware later. His arms crushed her against him, lifting her off her feet with his greater height. Through layers of quilted coat and pilfered uniform, she could feel the desperate shudder of his breath. His ribs were like a washboard under her grip, and his pelvic bones like those of an old horse. For a time, she had the illogical sensation of wanting to lock their bones together, to meld his flesh into her body and never let him go, and the frantic strength of his embrace told her more than any words could have that her desire mirrored his own. Their mouths met. Had they been able to fuse then, truly lose their physical selves in one another’s bodies, they would have done it. Joanna was aware that she was crying.

  He set her down and pulled convulsively at the shabby muffler around his throat. Under it she saw by the dim glow of the flashlight the dark ring of the iron collar, harsh against the white flesh and edged with a mottled band of bruises and sores. “Get this thing off me,” he said, breathless, and then, with a wry grin, “You don’t happen to have a hacksaw about you, do you, my dear?”

  Silently, Joanna dug into her backpack and produced one. He grinned like a pleased jack-o’-lantern, then seized her and kissed her again. “If this is all a hallucination,” he said, his voice shaking slightly, “I’m going to be very disappointed in the morning.”

  He dropped to his knees, fumbling with the muffler; Joanna hitched the backpack up onto her shoulder and tucked the dirty green muffler between the iron and his neck. “Caris, can you hold the light for me...?”

  “No,” said the sasennan briefly.

  “Quite right,” agreed Antryg, his voice blurred with the bending of his head. “Somebody has to keep watch. The noise may bring someone...”

  “Maybe we could ride out first?” Caris suggested.

  Antryg, who had taken the flashlight from Joanna and held it in one hand to light the collar, shook his head. “No. Just get rid of this thing.”

  It might not have prevented his escape, Joanna realized, but that didn’t make the torment of wearing it any the less. It took surprisingly little time to cut through the soldered clasp—the iron had no kind of temper to it—and it made a hellish amount of noise. Joanna had broken two blades practicing before beginning her expedition and had brought several spares, but they weren’t needed. The clasp broke apart as Caris whispered hoarsely, “Someone’s coming!” Antryg stumbled to his feet, pulling the iron ring from his throat with hands that shook.

  “Thank you,” he gasped as Joanna shut off the flashlight. Amid the raw, scabbed flesh of his neck, a circular brown mark showed where the Sigil itself had touched, as if the skin had been burned with acid. Oddly enough, though he held the iron collar in his hands, Joanna had seen that he avoided contact with the Dead God’s Seal.

  “Hasu,” Caris reported, ducking back in through the hut door. “Church dogs.” He scooped up the crossbow from the mud and held it out to Antryg.

  Antryg shook his head, pulled a board off the flimsy back wall and snaked his thin form through the gap.

  Horrified, Caris gasped, “They can see us in the dark...”

  “Of course they can.” Antryg shoved the broken collar into his belt and made a dash toward the causeway.

  Voices shouted behind him. They were evidently hasu who knew what Antryg looked like with his spectacles and without his beard. Joanna heard the hrush and whap of a crossbow bolt slamming into one of the nearby huts. Through gritted teeth, Caris snarled, “You’re insane!” Antryg cut abruptly sideways between two crumbling board walls.

  Through the gap in the back of the hut, Joann
a watched him dash through the foot-deep standing water that flooded the ground hereabouts. She saw at once the reason that the water hadn’t yet frozen—it trickled out of a sewer outfall just beneath the causeway bridge, a round stone pipe about four feet in diameter. It was, she realized, the way he had intended to enter the city.

  On the other side of the hut, she heard the hasu splash by, running surely, unerringly in the dark. In the shadows of the causeway, it was difficult for her to see, but she caught the glimpse of Antryg’s dark, spidery shape crouching for a moment before the outfall, and the moonlike flash of his spectacle lenses. Then he came sprinting back through the water, the black coat of the sasennan’s uniform he wore billowing like a cloak behind him. He stumbled over some submerged irregularity of the ground, almost falling, but regained his balance and flung himself through the narrow opening in the wall through which Joanna had watched. She pulled the loose plank back over it as the two hasu came around the corner and dashed straight for the outfall pipe.

  Beside her, Antryg was leaning against the wall, gasping for breath. His eyebrows stood out like india-ink against a face gone gray with fatigue; he was not, she realized, in any shape for this. In spite of the cold, his face was clammy with sweat, and the makeshift black dye in his hair ran in trickles down the high cheekbones and the dim shape of the scar left by the Regent’s whip.

  The two hasu jerked to a stop a few feet from the outfall. One of them reached forward hesitantly, then drew back his hand as if it had been burned. As one, they turned and pelted through the water for the little trail that led up to the causeway bridge, shouting for the guards...

  “The Sigil of Darkness?” Joanna guessed, as the two small forms, their robes billowing suddenly red in the torchlight, ran with waving arms into the oven-mouth brightness of the city gates.