Caris skidded to a stop. “Are you mad? If the defenses are anywhere, they’ll be...”
Clear and thin as the cracking of ice, Peelbone’s voice rang across the broken Citadel. “Windrose!” He drew rein momentarily on the edge of the buckled pavement of what had been the court before the main keep, rising in his stirrups, his wispy gray hair streaming in the restless tweak of the wind. His hat had blown off; his eyes were hard and colorless as glass. “I should have known you would come here, back to the hold of your master!” The sasenna and the hasu behind him, galloping hard, had almost reached the edge of the pavement; the Witchfinder put spurs to his lathered horse and started across.
With a thin whine of steel Caris’ sword was in his hand.
What happened then was almost totally without warning. In later nightmares Joanna saw it again in slow-motion and realized then that it was a thing she had dimly taken for a domed hummock of weed-covered stone which moved, bursting upward into the air as the horse trod on it in a flurrying scatter of dirt. But at the time it seemed as if it came from nowhere—as if suddenly it was hanging over the Witchfinder and his terrified mount, a huge, dust-colored thing like a monster jellyfish, slobbering tentacles dangling...
Adrenaline locked her lungs and circulatory system shut even before Peelbone began screaming. Sasenna were converging from all directions. Antryg grabbed Joanna’s arm and made a run for the ragged spill of fallen stone and weeds that had been the head of the secret stair. From the tail of her eye Joanna saw Peelbone’s horse running frenziedly in circles, the tentacles raking its flesh and almost wholly enveloping the shrieking, clawing man on its back as the floating body of the abomination lowered itself, like the canopy of a vast parachute, down over Peelbone’s head.
She had no time to see more. Deep under the weeds were the broken rubble of old stairs. She clung to the brittle stems for balance as Antryg guided her down. Below the level of the pit edge, the weeds ended, leaving only a crumbling spiral of iced and treacherous gravel. Above her, she heard voices shouting, one scream riding over them. Dear God, she thought, how long will it take him to die?
Her feet slipped. She half fell, half rolled the last few yards, down what felt like a ladder of sharp and broken stone. Antryg pulled her to her feet and through a half-fallen archway like a skull’s empty eye socket, Caris panting and cursing at their heels. “What do you think you’re...” the sasennan demanded hoarsely, as Antryg slipped his hand behind a shattered pilaster now barely distinguishable from its parent rock and cursed. He slid his sword scabbard clear of his sash, wedged it like a lever into the masonry and wrenched. Like the cries of some alien bird, the screams still drifted down to them, scarcely human anymore. A dark slot of ground opened in the grayer darkness.
Antryg thrust her unceremoniously through and was slipping after her when Caris grabbed his arm in a crushing hold. “You idiot!”
“Oh, surely not!” the mad wizard protested. “Insane I may be, but not an idiot.” With an easy movement of his elbow, he disengaged his arm from the baffled young man’s grip. Dim daylight flicked along one spectacle rim, picked out the fracture in the glass and the facet of an earring. More soberly, he added, “They’re never going to believe I didn’t summon that thing. Most men would kill Peelbone for the things he did to me. And to Joanna,” he added softly, touching her shoulder in the darkness. “And to you.”
“And that’s your reason for blundering straight into the heart of Suraklin’s traps?” Caris’ whisper was almost a scream of rage.
“Well, the odd thing is,” Antryg murmured, “we don’t seem to have sprung a one.” He slipped the scabbard casually back into his sash; Caris still held his, ready to draw and do battle. “We must needs have come here in any case, Caris. If it’s a trap, it’s a very good one. We might as well see the rest of it.”
They moved forward, into a species of Hell in darkness. It was a darkness that chittered and whispered or, worse, simply seemed to watch them in waiting silence beyond the faint foxlight glow that Antryg called above his head. Twice he killed the light, quickly, and thrust his companions back against the wall. In the darkness, Joanna heard the slimy dragging noise that heaved itself slowly along the passageway and felt the clammy cold that seeped in the creature’s wake. Against her arm, she felt Caris’ muscles tighten in utter revulsion and horror. He was mageborn, she remembered. He could see in the dark.
Other things fled from the light, sometimes white, squamous shapes like naked and legless pigs, other times the more prosaic vermin of this world, swarming black roaches and rats that had clustered around rotting carrion of no shape known to her, whose putrefying stench poisoned the air. In one place Antryg whispered to them not to touch the bubbling orange mold that covered the whole side of one rock-hewn chamber. Snared in it, Joanna saw two or three other abominations of various sizes, all of them rotting, but none of them completely dead. There were rats and roaches there, too, gummed likewise in the putrid growth; by the faint, glittering radiance of Antryg’s witch-light, she could see that several of the roaches were close to the size of dinner plates, and the rats displayed unspeakable mutations.
But throughout that darkness, no magic, no malice, and no trap touched its three invaders. It was a Hell untenanted, save by the abominations that crept, preying stupidly upon one another, through its arched stone passageways. Level by level Antryg led them deeper into the surviving corner of Suraklin’s mazes, and nowhere did they find anything but the long-spent memories of his evil and power. Even the ghosts, it seemed, had been calcined away by the wizards’ wrath.
“I don’t understand,” Joanna whispered.
They had come to the last, deepest chamber of all, a vast black cavern where a broken stone cover showed the inky waters of a stagnant well, and a round block of bluish stone, like an altar, crouched amid darkness that even Antryg’s faint witchfire could not pierce. Beside her, Antryg stood, his full, oddly curving lips now tight and rather gray, as if the aura of the place, like a remembered smell, nauseated him. The blurred remains of a chalked circle were almost eradicated from the floor. Dark stains blotched the top of the altar block and tracked its sides. And that was all.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Joanna asked softly.
Antryg nodded. Under a sudden sheen of sweat, all the muscles of his jaw rippled, like rope under strain, then eased again.
She looked hesitantly up at him, not liking the haunted horror in his eyes. “Do you—do you see something that I don’t?”
“Only the past, my dear,” he murmured. “Only the past.” His breath blew out in a sigh; he turned to her, his eyes returning to the present once more. “Yes, this is where it should be, the centerpoint of Suraklin’s power, the place where he—or I—performed his great magics.”
“You?” The echoes of Caris’ suspicious voice murmured back at them from the hard stone of the walls.
Antryg’s eyes moved to the altar, then away. As if speaking of someone else, he said carefully, “You understand, there is a type of magic which can be drawn from certain—acts—which by then he was too old to perform himself.” He looked around him. “This was the place of his power, and I should say, my friends, that we have all been well and truly taken in.” At his small gesture, an explosion of light filled the room, bright and clear as a sodium lamp, digging like the eyes of God into every bleached, clean cranny of its hewn stone walls and flashing like diamonds in the obsidian waters of the pool. In all the space of that room there was nothing.
“But the abominations...” Caris began.
“They weren’t guards,” the mad wizard said quietly. “Half of them were herbivores, by the look of their snouts—even that thing at the top went for the man nearest it, God help his wretched soul, rather than for us, who were nearer the stair. We’re on a node in the lines. Every time the Void is opened, gaps in it open for a short distance all around it—but when it is opened on a line, the whole line faults. Those poor things are mere blunderers-through, harmless...
”
“Harmless?” echoed Caris indignantly.
“Comparatively harmless.” The light around them faded again to the corpse-candle gleam above Antryg’s head; he turned back to the stygian arch that led once more into the mazes and the hellish walk back to the outer air.
Caris strode after him. “Compared to what?”
Antryg shrugged. “Compared to what’s going to happen when an intelligent one comes through.”
They did not speak again until they had emerged from the pits, by which time darkness had fallen once more outside. From the protection of the passage, Antryg listened, stretching his senses out into the Citadel around them. The Church’s sasenna had retreated, watching from the hills around. No one, no matter what his mission, was prepared to linger in the Dark Mage’s fortress after the fall of night. They found Peelbone’s horse lying half in a gravel pit, with the hacked and burned remains of the thing that had killed it. There was blood everywhere, soaking into the frozen weeds, and wide-strewn rags of clothing saturated with blood, acid, and slime. Elsewhere Caris found part of Peelbone’s hand, most of the flesh eaten from the melted bone. Antryg looked somberly at it, rubbing his broken fingers in their shabby gloves, but said nothing.
It was only when they were on the hills again, having slipped through the scattered guards, that Joanna asked, “If Suraklin’s headquarters isn’t at his Citadel, where is it?”
“Elsewhere.” Antryg sighed, and hunched his shoulders against the cold night. The horses had, of course, been confiscated by the Witchfinders when they had first surrounded the Citadel, and it was a long and tiring trek over the dark hills to Larkmoor once again. “And unfortunately, since now he’ll be well and truly alerted to the fact that I’m at large and looking for it, I haven’t the remotest idea where.”
Chapter X
THEY LEFT LARKMOOR the following night, traveling north on foot.
It was a bad time of year to be taking to the roads, and Caris knew it, worriedly eyeing Joanna’s small, spare form as she stumped along through the bitter darkness at Antryg’s side. It would be worse still away from the main roads. The Sykerst was a land unkind to men.
Antryg’s escape coupled with Peelbone’s death had roused the countryside around Kymil and set patrols along the Angelshand road. But deeper in-country, Antryg argued, among the isolated villages that sprouted wherever there was soil enough to support thin crops of rye, they would stand a better chance of making their way northward in safety.
“There’s another node, a crossing of the energy-lines, on Tilrattin Island about twenty-five miles upriver from Angelshand,” he had explained, when the four of them had sat around a picnic breakfast in the darkness of the deserted fodder barn at Larkmoor, following their return from the Citadel ruins. “Suraklin has to have established his computer at some node in the lines. That one has a lot to recommend it; it’s on Prince Cerdic’s land, for one thing...”
“And what do we do if it isn’t Suraklin’s headquarters, either?” Caris demanded, sitting in the mildewed straw at Pella’s side, moodily stabbing his dagger into the floor. Reaction had set in on him. Having keyed himself for a death fight at the Citadel, he now felt empty, weary, and vaguely cheated. “Walk to the Citadel of Wizards in the taiga forests to check that one as well? And what if it isn’t? What if it’s somewhere on the other side of the world? Have you thought of that?”
“But we do know Suraklin’s trying to take over control of the Empire,” Joanna pointed out diffidently. “So it’s a good guess that’s where it is.”
“I’m actually very taken with the notion of its being at the Citadel of Wizards,” Antryg mused with a dreamy grin. “It is the next nearest node in the Empire. Lady Rosamund would have a seizure from sheer indignation. But going there wouldn’t be necessary.” He gestured with the muffin he was holding, his long legs folded tailor-wise under him and butter dripping on his gold-braided black cuffs. “By standing at a node in the lines when the computer comes up, I’ll be able to feel the direction of the energy-flow and tell pretty well where it’s going. I’d simply stay here eating your cook’s excellent muffins, Pella, until I could do so from the Citadel node, only somehow I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”
Pella shook her head, missing the impish sparkle in his eyes. “They’re going to be searching house to house,” she said gravely. “I can keep my servants quiet about a chance visit, but not if you’re still here.”
So they had spent the day sleeping and quietly assembling provisions, and departed three or four hours after it grew dark. In that time Caris had seen seven or eight separate patrols on the hills, and two groups—one of Witchfinders, one of Church sasenna—came up to the manor itself, to ask questions. It would only be a matter of time, he thought, before the place was searched.
They traveled as physicians, Antryg wearing the old-fashioned, dull purple robes of a University doctor, torn and mended and stained with gin, Caris the cleaner, if threadbare, gown of a medical student. To his outfit Antryg had added his usual collection of the gimcrack beads of which he was so fond and the long-skirted olive coat of some nobleman’s household cavalry, arguing that the hooded cloak of an academic was wholly inadequate. The worst of it was that he was right. Caris looked down his nose at the scarecrow appearance of his purported instructor, but shivered in the cutting wind.
For her part, Joanna was relegated to the rough, baggy trousers, sheepskin coat, and coarse woolen hood of the lowest type of servant, since she could pass herself as neither sasennan nor student.
“That should teach you to learn to read the wrong languages,” Antryg chided loftily, steadying her over the gluey gray mud of the half-frozen potholes with effortless strength.
“Eat hot death, dog wizard.”
“I fear,” sighed the wizard, “that we shall all do that when—or if—we reach the inn at Plikey Wash this evening. The cooking there is notorious for miles around.”
Joanna laughed, her breath a cloudy puff of silver in the cold.
In the event, none of them was obliged to endure the dubious hospitality of country inns. Raised in the populous Wheatlands, Caris had previously had little idea of the frightening isolation of the Sykerst and the knowledge that, if something went wrong, there was almost literally nowhere to turn for medical aid. For all his decrepit appearance and jangling beads, Antryg was welcomed in every village along their road to tend illnesses, give advice, and often to repair injuries that had been left to fester all summer—injuries brought about by carelessness and exacerbated by the uncaring apathy of the dead times. Again and again, as Antryg examined mortifying flesh or bones set crookedly because they had been carelessly splinted or not splinted at all, Caris heard that tired refrain, “...don’t know what I was thinking of, that day...”
And rather to Caris’ surprise, the lunatic mage proved to be an excellent doctor as well.
“Won’t the Council and the Witchfinders be able to trace you by your use of magic?” Caris asked quietly as the wizard bent over the bed of a small boy, counting the pulse in one fragile wrist. The lantern hanging on the rafters not far over their heads threw little light, but both men were mageborn and able to see in the dark.
“They would if I used magic for a cure, yes,” Antryg replied. “But a fever like this can be brought down with ginger and elder. I asked Pella to put some up in the medical satchel she gave me. If they can keep it down until the ailment has run its course, the boy should be all right.” He half lifted the child to a sitting position, and the boy’s thin, gasping breath at once seemed easier. Caris folded the limp pillow and frowned. A glance around the loft where the child’s bed stood yielded no sign of spare bedding—the family was a poor one—but after a moment he collected several sacks of peas and seed-corn from their lumpish white ranks along the far wall and stacked them up behind the little boy’s shoulders, wadding the pillow in over them. Antryg eased the boy gently back.
“It’s pneumonia, isn’t it?” Caris asked, lis
tening to the thick wheeze of the boy’s breath. “But his mother said it was cowpox...”
“It probably started out as cowpox ...Thank you, my dear.” Joanna’s head appeared above the crude ladder from the room downstairs. She set a steaming tin kettle down by the entry hole and scrambled up the last few rungs. “Pneumonia is a common complication, particularly in children. Elfdock steam should help clear up some of the congestion...”
“His mother asked me if you were going to bleed him.” Joanna hunkered down beside the bed and looked worriedly at the dozing child. Three days on the road had not been kind to her; she looked worn and tired in her coarse smock and heavy boots, and the greasy yellow light picked out hollows under the pointy cheekbones.
“I hope you told her that I was.” Antryg removed from his medical satchel several bleeding cups and dipped a little of the hot water up in one of them. From his boot he pulled his razor, flipped open the blade, and drew off one of the fingerless gloves that he wore indoors and out to keep some of the cold from the damaged tendons of his hands. Carefully he slit across one of the smaller veins of his wrist, and squeezed the blood into the water. “Astonishing what a mess even a little blood will make in any amount of water. Rinse that round all the bleeding cups, would you, my dear?”
“Aren’t you going to bleed him?” Caris asked, shocked.
“Of course not. The boy needs his strength, but there’s no point in having his mother fret.”
Caris frowned, watching Antryg as he crushed up the dried elfdock and kindled his portable spirit lamp to raise the water to steaming again. “Doesn’t bleeding bring down a fever, then?”
“Not in my experience. In fact, the only time I ever bleed a patient is if they are intent on getting out of bed too soon and doing something silly.” He thoughtfully ran the razor blade back and forth through the spirit lamp’s flame a few times, closed it, and returned it to his boot. “Remind me to mark the boy’s back a little before we leave. Otherwise his mother will never believe me when I tell her to keep him sitting up and let him breathe steam.”
The Silicon Mage Page 16
