The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  Chapter IX

  THOUGH SHE HAD TRAVELED three times through the hills of the Sykerst, Joanna did not believe she had ever seen anything so desolate as the emptiness that surrounded what had once been the Citadel of Suraklin. Elsewhere the hills might be barren, the grass without life or color, combed like a dead dog’s hair by the incessant winds, but at least the terrible silence had been broken by occasional signs of life. From Pella’s carriage, she’d seen the start of rabbits in the thin clumps of naked birches which grew in the small pockets of soil in the bedrock. By the sluggish black streams near the Silent Tower, the prints of muskrat and weasel had latticed the half-frozen mud. At first sight a uniform pewter, the hills had a startling variation of color—mauves and sepias, the cobalt of shadow, and the occasional rich emerald of lichens clinging to the cold-cracked rocks.

  Here there was nothing. In the wide dell with its scattered stringers of broken stone, its buckled pavements long veiled in a wind-flattened shroud of rotting weeds, and its crumbling pits and trenches like suppurating gray wounds, the only sound was the wind thrumming over stone and hissing in the dead grass. The jingle of the bridle-bits sounded very loud as the horses tossed their heads, made nervous by the silence, and the faint creak of Caris’ sword belt as he turned suddenly at a noise that he hadn’t really heard.

  “That’s very odd,” Antryg murmured, frowning.

  Caris looked quickly over his shoulder, then back in the direction of Antryg’s gaze. “What is?” His quiet voice had an edge of fear to it. “I don’t see anything amiss.”

  “Neither do I,” the wizard said. “That’s what’s odd.” He pushed his crazy schoolboy spectacles a little farther up on his long nose and dismounted with the light grace of a cavalryman. “Leave the horses here and follow me,” he said softly. “It wouldn’t do to get separated in this place.” He turned to help Joanna down from her horse; the elderly blue roan, though the quietest Pella’s stables had to offer, was sized for a woman of the Princess’ height.

  “We should split up,” Caris said, his voice rough with nervousness. “You said yourself the spells you showed me this morning should keep Suraklin from scrying me out from afar. As long as Joanna keeps her backpack with the Sigil in it on her, he shouldn’t be able to find her, either, protective wrapping or no protective wrapping. The Church knows whose pupil you were. They’ll be expecting you to come back here. The hasu saw you beneath the walls of Kymil—they know you escaped dressed as a guard. If the Church sasenna see a search party sticking close together instead of spreading out...”

  “Would you wander away from your friends to search Suraklin’s Citadel?” Antryg inquired. “Particularly for an escaped renegade wizard who’s known to be mad? Don’t be obtuse.” He turned away, a lanky figure in the crisp black-and-gold uniform of the Regent’s sasenna, his sword—a real one now, not the whittled fake he’d worn in his earlier disguise—making the characteristic hard line under his long-skirted black greatcoat. “My only concern is that search parties came here yesterday and got caught in the place’s defenses, whatever they are. You stay here,” he added, suddenly turning back and catching his horse’s bridle. He stroked the beast’s forehead briefly. “And you,” he added. His fingers brushed lightly the foreheads of the other two horses.

  Ten yards away, Joanna looked back. The three animals stood grouped together, heads up, ears pricked, looking about them nervously, but they remained in place. She shook her head and followed Antryg along the broken, pitted ground.

  From the hills above, riding down the track from the Silent Tower, the Citadel had been almost invisible—not as if a mist hid it, but as if Joanna’s mind and eyes had simply skipped over that great, broken circle in the shallow dip in the hills. Caris had spoken of that effect, present even long after Suraklin’s power had been rooted from the land. In the Dark Mage’s heyday it was said men could ride straight through the gates and not notice where they were until the iron portals slammed shut behind them.

  As they approached the remains of the outer walls, Joanna was conscious of the hammering the place had taken, the avalanche of power needed to destroy it so thoroughly. Huge sections of the ground had collapsed into the pits dug below, leaving vast, shallow subsidences half filled with rubble and knee-deep weeds. Chunks of stone the size of truck trailers scattered the landscape, half driven into the ground hundreds of yards from the nearest foundations. Weeds covered huge areas, a filthy carpet concealing treacherous breaks in the ground.

  The rain had warmed the air, melting some of the stagnant brown ice where the land lay lowest. The surrounding hills sheltered the place from the wind. As they approached, cautious, ready for anything, Joanna was conscious of the nauseating fetor of decay that hung in the raw air.

  Beside her, Antryg was tense, listening, it seemed, with senses beyond the human, sniffing the air with his long nose as if seeking some characteristic odor that would warn him when the first defenses closed in.

  “Curious,” she heard him mutter. “But logical, when you come to think of it. Too many people come near this place to advertise that there’s something here worth guarding.”

  “And then again,” Caris added softly, “I’ve heard it was Suraklin’s way to lure and lull at the same time by an appearance of harmlessness, until it was too late to retreat.”

  Antryg rubbed one side of his nose. “Well, there is that,” he admitted. “Though with two of us mageborn, I think we’ll have some warning.”

  “And you think that will do us any good?”

  The mad wizard grinned. “Oh, probably not. But the object isn’t to retreat anyway, so we needn’t worry about it.”

  Sourly, Caris touched the .45 and the brace of na-aar pistols shoved in his belt—his sword was naked already in his right hand—and followed them without further comment among the hushed decay of the ruins.

  They had spread out a little, Antryg picking his way unerringly through the maze of broken, knee-high courses of stone which had once been walls, Joanna keeping uneasily close to his side and fighting the urge to hang onto his coat skirts. In one place she saw crumbled slabs of rusted ironwork half buried in black weeds and fallen stone....

  “That was the kitchen,” Antryg explained quietly. “Those pits behind it are where the storerooms stood. I used to hide there when I’d displeased him. Not, of course, that anyone could hide from him for very long, but being mageborn myself helped.” He paused, a frown buckling his forehead as he scanned what was now little more than a reef of shattered rubble, seeing it, Joanna knew, momentarily as it had been—gray, massive, turretted, toothed, the stronghold of the terrible old man he had so desperately feared and loved.

  She said, very softly, “Do you miss him?”

  He looked down at her, startled. His brows, reddish as his hair had long since ceased to be, pulled together for a moment. Then he said, “I’ve always missed him. Missed him as I first knew him, missed what I thought I had. Even when I realized I didn’t—that in fact, the care he showed for me was only because he knew I’d respond to care... I don’t know. I still wanted it. But after that, it was difficult to believe in anyone else’s caring.” He rubbed his hands in their shabby, fingerless gloves, an absentminded gesture as the cold bit into the damaged tendon and bone.

  “It was all right, I thought—I could put up with the beatings, and the bloodlettings, the spells and rites I performed in the dark of the moon, the blackest kind of magic, things I knew were evil beyond description... I could put up with that if he loved me as he said he did. I’d had a rather unhappy childhood. I suppose I felt honored to be given that love, trusted with the emotions so powerful a mage never dared to show anyone else...” The long, sensitive mouth quirked slightly. “Rather like a trout feeling honored to be trusted with an angler’s worm. Because none of them were real. They were only facsimiles, copied from what he had seen others sacrifice themselves for.” He sighed and added wryly, “They were just copied dazzlingly well. He used to take my blood, to bring
some of his—creations—to life. There was a time when I’d have let him take it all.”

  Around them the Citadel waited, wreathed in its uneasy silence. Joanna remembered that it was built on a node where the energy-tracks crossed, lines that would feed the life-forces of two worlds into its magically electrified heart. Perhaps that was what Antryg and Caris listened for, feeling the pulse of intangible forces along the unseen veins of the earth.

  At length Antryg went on, as if speaking half to himself, “Salteris told me they made a bonfire of all his possessions, everything they could find—books, implements of magic, jewels, paintings. Beautiful things, things he had deeply loved. He lived very intensely, you know. Everything about him had a burning quality that drew you and fascinated you. He would get almost literally drunk on the beauty of a cup or a gem or the angle of the sunset light. The high you get from working magic, the fascination of watching people play their intricate social games—he loved them with a passion I don’t believe he ever felt for another human being. But of course, human beings are more difficult to control than possessions.”

  “He managed,” she remarked.

  “Yes.” Antryg sighed regretfully, his eyes returning to hers. “Yes, he did. It never surprised me that he wanted to live forever—that he would do almost anything rather than let that beauty go.”

  Was that why, Joanna wondered suddenly, Suraklin had chosen Antryg as his student, his slave, his victim? Because he, too, had that passionate delight in the mere drawing of breath? But it was not the same. There were things for which Antryg would cheerfully give up that brightly colored life, among them the thwarting of Suraklin’s plans. Awkwardly, because she had never learned the right things to say, she reached out and took his hand and was rewarded with the fleet warmth of his smile.

  “Antryg!” Caris’ voice rang out sharply behind them. “Over here!”

  The wizard swung around in a swirl of gold-braided black coat skirts. Caris stood on the lip of a shallow subsidence, blond hair flattened in a surge of wind, a look of shock and revulsion on his face. Joanna wondered briefly if his appearance might be some kind of trap, a lure set up by the Dark Mage’s defenses, but after an almost imperceptible pause, Antryg put his arm around her shoulders and drew her along with him as he strode through the crunching weeds to see.

  The thing that lay in the wide depression had been dead for weeks. When the wind fell briefly, the stench was terrible; Joanna drew back, nauseated, at the sight of the bloated, blackened face, orifices agape and filled with maggots and worms.

  Antryg and Joanna exchanged a quick glance. Caris said softly, “An abomination. It must have come through the Void and walked straight into one of Suraklin’s defenses.” The track it had left in the weeds was still plain to see, the dead stems broken in a jagged swathe which began at the creature’s body and ended, abruptly, less than a dozen feet away.

  Cautiously, the wizard took a step forward and sank to one knee. “Fascinating,” he said. “The maggots are dead.”

  Steeling herself, Joanna moved to his side. Both Antryg and Caris had been adamant that she not adopt the uniform of a sasennan, on the grounds that she’d never be able to maintain the imposture at close range—she was dressed in the breeches, shirt, and short crimson coat of one of the Regent’s pages, the backpack on her back and the .38 shoved in one pocket. Her boots crackled in the brittle undergrowth as she hunkered down to look.

  “They’re tiny,” she said after a moment. “They must have died the minute they began to feed.” Her revulsion evaporated in academic puzzlement. “Look, there are dead flies on it, too.”

  She frowned at Antryg for a moment, then back at the carcass. “Could—could Suraklin’s defenses have done that? Killed even the maggots that fed on it after it was dead?”

  Antryg raised his head and studied the gray skyline. Like a gun sight on the far hills, the last two stones of the line that stretched toward the Silent Tower notched the pale air. Directly opposite, to the east, a single menhir leaned like a weary drunk. Then he looked back at the unspeakable, rotting thing. “I wonder,” he said softly.

  “More likely this is one of Suraklin’s defenses.” With the tip of his sword Caris touched what was clearly a mouth at the end of a collapsed pinkish tube. Teeth like chisels stood out from the black gums.

  “But in that case, what killed it?”

  Caris shrugged. “Sasenna? Witchfinders? Peelbone was keeping an eye on the place before you ever escaped the first time. There’s a lot of breakage in the weeds around here, but it’s hard to say how old it is.”

  “Odd that he never ran into any defenses.” Antryg stood up again, scanning the ash-colored tussocks of stone and earth around them, his gray eyes narrowed and uneasy behind his specs. “Very odd. Come along, my dear.” He took Joanna’s hand. “Caris, guard our backs if you will. Twelve feet was the usual distance between the trigger and the rear edge of the trap.”

  With these comforting words he began to pick his way cautiously back toward the ruins of what had been the main keep.

  The outer walls of the Citadel keep had been well over fifteen feet thick. Their foundations formed a broken platform in whose splintered and riven cracks grew straggling weeds, now black and brittle as burned wires. From its edge, Joanna looked down into a chasm like an enormous open pit mine, a hundred and fifty feet across and easily as deep. Collapsed spills of rubble tracked its sides and made little heaps on the bottom around the brim of a silent tarn of standing water, enigmatically reflecting the silver sky. In places, fragments of old floors and vaulting clung to the stone sides of the pit, showing how many levels down the Citadel vaults had extended. Joanna counted seven of them. Beside her, Antryg was very silent.

  “Had you ever come here since—since its destruction?”

  He nodded. “Salteris and I came here—oh, years ago, when we traveled together. I didn’t want to, but he insisted. I think he wanted to prove to me that Suraklin was truly dead—to exorcise the fear of him from my dreams. Ironic,” he added, forcing lightness over the sudden flaw in his deep voice, “when you think of it.”

  Salteris’ own experiences with the Dark Mage’s Citadel couldn’t have been anything he particularly wanted to relive, Joanna reflected, remembering the old Archmage’s digitalized memories of what he had found there when he led the triumphant armies in. Yet he had come back to the place to help a frightened and half-demented youth readjust to the world, gently trying to lead him back to sanity. What had it been for Antryg to come into a room in the Silent Tower to greet someone who had cared that much for him and to see Suraklin looking at him from his eyes?

  “I wish I could have known him,” she said softly.

  He glanced down at her with that same half-wary expression, like a nervous horse, afraid to trust. Then he sighed and put his hand briefly on her shoulder.

  “There used to be a stairway over here,” he said after a moment. “It was hidden behind a false niche near the hall fireplace and enough spells to darken the noonday sun. The wizards’ army destroyed the top part of it but never found the rooms below. That’s where it will be.”

  “What about the way you got us out when I first came?” Joanna asked. “An underground passageway...”

  He shook his head. “That was a subsidiary hideout, connected to the main pits by miles of passage. I think Suraklin went straight there through the Void from Gary’s—his mark was all over the room.”

  He took a step away along the brink of the huge pit, then hesitated. “I should leave you here,” he said after a moment. “But I don’t know what defenses will be in operation, or if there’s a delay-trigger and it’s already too late to escape. It’s hard to believe Suraklin would leave it this late—unless he’s down there himself, waiting...” He paused, and Joanna thought that, against his black coat collar with its gilded braid, he seemed very pale. It occurred to her that Suraklin’s aim of killing Antryg might only have been a contingency plan if he could not take him—his first, chosen
, and well-prepared victim—alive.

  “The trouble is,” Antryg went on, “I can’t feel a thing amiss here, and that’s making me very uneasy.”

  “It’s making you uneasy?” Joanna said, with a shaky grin in spite of the uncomfortable slamming of her heart against her ribs.

  He grinned back. “Stay close, and be ready to...” He stopped, his head coming up like a dog’s that scents sudden peril. “Oh, pox.”

  “What is it?” Joanna whispered.

  “The Witchfinders,” he said softly. “Peelbone.”

  “Antryg...” Caris sprang lightly up to the top of the broken platform. “Can you hear it? Along the energy-track...”

  “Peelbone, yes.”

  “Can you use some kind of spell...?”

  “They have hasu with them. Besides, apart from blowing a trumpet I can’t think of a better way to let Suraklin know I’m here. Look, there they are...”

  He pointed at the dark line of shapes on the colorless gray of the northern slopes. There was a red splash, like a drop of blood—a Church dog’s robes. One thin gray form among them spurred his horse and began to canter down the slope.

  “They must have been watching through a spyglass from a distance,” Antryg said, catching Joanna’s hand and hurrying along the top of the platform. “Peelbone knows me, of course. He was in charge of obtaining my—confession.”

  “Look!” Caris pointed to the western slopes above the Citadel; a dozen black forms could be seen riding down them. There was a thin glitter of drawn weapons in the heatless light.

  “Where are Suraklin’s defenses now when we need them?” Antryg wondered aloud.

  “Should we split up?”

  “Good heavens, no! Make for the pits...”