The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  From his coat pocket he took a tin flask of gin with which he doused the wound in his wrist. Below the pushed-up edge of his sleeve, Caris saw the ragged trail of ancient slits and punctures that followed the vein back up his arm, broken here and there by the distinct scars of small and vicious teeth.

  “You speak as if you were a physician at one time,” he commented later, when they were once again on the endless, nameless road from one minute village to the next. That morning a farm cart had carried them a number of miles on their way before turning down a lane that was little more than a muddy slot in the broken and stony land. Around them, like the flanks of sleeping giants, the rolling land rose to rounded crests hundreds of feet high, barren, monotonous, and cold under a slate-hued sky. Whitish outcroppings among the dead whin showed how close the granite lay beneath the thin veneer of topsoil. Only by the gradual strengthening of the light above the cloud cover could Caris tell that it was nearly noon. The wind blew from the north, smelling of snow.

  “Well, wizards do learn something about healing, though we’re not allowed to practice it on anyone but one another, and I’ve passed myself off as a doctor often enough to learn some conventional medicine. The borderlands of midwifery and granny-magic are fairly wide, if shockingly inaccurate in places.” He frowned thoughtfully at the young warrior from behind his cracked spectacles. “You don’t do badly at it yourself.”

  Caris blushed a little. “Grandfather...” His tongue stalled momentarily on the name, hate and vengeance and grief clutching in him like a fist. But just as suddenly he remembered Salteris himself, the real Salteris of his childhood, and the anger in him gave way like melting ice breaking. Hesitantly, he went on, “Grandfather taught me enough to help him, when I was a boy. It was more of a game for me, picking out this herb from that and remembering what each of them was good for. Grandmother was a midwife, too.” He grinned reminiscently. “Even before I became sasenna, I was always getting into scrapes, so I started early learning how to care for cuts and broken bones, mostly my own.”

  He fell silent after that, for the memories hurt him in an odd way—vivid not only to the way the old man had looked, but to the smell of warm hay and herbs in his robes and the summer’s heat on his skin. Caris thrust them aside, knowing that he could not afford to warm himself too much by those memories, as he could not afford to let too near to him all the dozens of small scenes of the last week that burned so clear now in his mind: the warm breath of the horses on his hands while he held their heads so Pella could gouge ice-balls out of their hooves, the lithe way she moved, like a big, splendid panther, as she mounted the footman’s stand, the smoky-sweet timbre of her voice and the strength of her arms around his waist that afternoon in the barn. He had felt bitterly sorry for her, left behind to do nothing but wait and feel the child of an unwanted husband growing in her belly. During the last day between their return from the Citadel and setting forth to the Tilrattin node, he had avoided being alone with her, avoided any but the most perfunctory good-bye.

  She had not sought him out. She had understood.

  She had trained as sasennan, he thought, and smiled as he pictured what sparring with her would be like. She’d probably be a little slow, he guessed, but she’d have a forehand stroke like the blow of a timber beam. In the barn at Larkmoor she had said, “I know you need your hate...” When he had pursued Antryg through the darkness of the Void, he had known that, if he took his eyes from that flitting, tatterdemalion figure, he would be utterly lost. So it was now. Pella knew what he knew—that facing what he faced, to turn his gaze for one second on anything but the pure, sharp strength of his revenge would be a weakness that could be fatal to them all.

  And in any case, any turning-aside from what he was now would be hopeless. Not only could he not afford to think of might-bes, but he knew that they could, in fact, never be. She was Pharos’ wife and the mother of Pharos’ child. As a recreant to his vows, Caris’ life and soul were already forfeit. There was nothing for him but to accomplish his revenge and to die, as was the Way of the Sasenna to die, in the process.

  Why then, in this gray journey, did he feel not the grimness of one who seeks only vengeance and death, but a medley of strange and hurtful joys?

  The joy of friendship, unlike the hard-edged and competitive friendships of the training-floor, with this woman Joanna, blunt, uncertain of herself, awkward, and oddly logical with the logic of the computers who for so many years had been her only friends. The joy that he had put aside and almost forgotten in his years of training to be a perfect weapon, the painful, puzzling joy of seeing the lives of others, the people of the villages through which they passed as well as Joanna and Antryg. The joy of a reawakened awareness of life, even now, on the threshold of winter’s annual death and perhaps of a greater death to come—his own, his love’s, the world’s. The joy of watching the last dark stringers of geese hastening south high in the pewter air, of the warm smell of stables, or of Kyssha nuzzling at his hands. The odd joy he had felt, standing in the window embrasure, listening to Pella play the harpsichord, with the candlelight dancing off her over-embroidered sleeves.

  For years, it seemed, he had seen all things in terms of the Way of the Sasenna, of defense and attack. Only now he saw them in terms of her—a heifer-calf in a stable where they were forced to spend one night, the way the mist clung to the low ground in the morning, and the sound of hunting horns ringing across the hills the night it snowed. He wanted to crystalize those moments in molten glass, string them on a necklace, and carry them back to her. She, who so loved small beauties and simple things, would have wanted to know.

  He knew what was happening and he fought it desperately. He could not, he told himself over and over again in the dark hours of the night, afford to let himself soften even a little, let alone fret himself with worrying over what would become of her, married to her spiteful and sadistic little lord.

  By Antryg’s very gentleness, he suspected that the wizard knew, and hated him for that knowledge, while silently thanking him for not speaking of it. And indeed, there was little anyone could have said.

  Woven in and around these other joys and hurts there was the joy of finally, after so many years, touching and using magic, even the insignificant magics of healing that were all that lay within his scope. That was perhaps the greatest and certainly the most dangerous joy of all.

  Caris pretended to himself sometimes that it was all in the interests, as Antryg said, of verisimilitude; he was supposed to be a medical student, after all. As a sasennan, he had learned the cleansing of wounds and the setting of bones, and there was, too, the vast, half-forgotten backlog picked up from his childhood fascination with the arts of his grandparents. From Antryg he learned a smattering of standard medical practice—to diagnose ailments from the different pulses of the body and from the colors of the whites of the eyes or of the tongue and the mucus. But threaded through this knowledge, like ribbon through bone, was the laying of spells upon the various herbs and salts to increase their efficacy and the sigils of healing to be written across the life-tracks of the body itself—matters not only outside the physician’s knowledge, but outside the law, matters which interfered, however beneficently, with the ways of humankind.

  To work magic at all, Caris found, required a softening of the soul, a listening to all things in a manner different from a warrior’s instinctive caution—a dropping of one’s guard.

  What appalled Caris was that he found it so easy.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said quietly to Joanna one evening in the ill-lit sitting room of some isolated manor deep in the Sykerst. Their host, the local squire, and Antryg had gone upstairs to see to the squire’s wife, a girl of seventeen, far gone in what looked like a very bad pregnancy. Joanna glanced curiously at the little card of parchment that lay before Caris and raised her eyebrows inquiringly. He had been practicing drawing the Sigil of Air—one of the easier ones—from memory, a sign to summon all the qualities of lightnes
s, openness of the veins and heart and mind, and freedom of the soul. He saw the direction of her look and shook his head, pushing the Sign from him.

  “I don’t mean this, particularly,” he said. “I mean...” He hesitated, feeling tripped by what he did mean—so much more than he was prepared to say.

  “You mean dealing in life?” Joanna asked softly, “instead of dealing in death?”

  He ran his fingers through his short-cropped blond hair, and avoided her eyes. Behind him, the wood shutters of the window quivered under a sharp blast of the sleety wind, the candleflames on the table before him starting nervously in their holders of Kymil porcelain. Like most small manors, this one was built largely of wood from the stands along the Sykerst rivers, exquisitely carved and fretted, but apt to creak. Around them the whole house seemed to be muttering to itself.

  “No,” he said evasively. “That is, I’ve been trained as a killer...”

  “I didn’t mean other peoples’,” Joanna said, toying with the small parchment rectangle that lay between them. “I mean yours.”

  Caris was silent.

  The girl’s small fingers traced the lines of the Sigil, simple as a magic circle on the stiff, cream-colored card. There was no magic in it, for Caris lacked the ability to imbue what little he had in any inanimate thing. He had watched the mages drawing Sigils for years, for various purposes, from small to great, but this was the first time he had ever set out to memorize them for himself.

  She went on, slowly, because speaking was no easier for her than it was for him: “Ever since I first met you in Suraklin’s hideout you’ve been—been ready to die. Ready to kill for your cause, yes, but most of all ready to die for it.”

  “It is the Way of Sasenna,” Caris said, “to be ready to die at the will of the one to whom you have sworn your vows.”

  “I know.” She looked up, the glow of the several candles layering traceries of shadow across her dark eyes. “Since we left Larkmoor, I’ve had the feeling you’re ready to live, but—it’s as if you don’t know how.

  “I know about that,” she continued uncertainly, after a silence broken by the creak of the house beams, and the distracted sobbing of the wind. “I don’t know how either, really. This is the first time I’ve—I’ve felt like—I don’t know, coming out and saying what I feel. To you. To Antryg. Pella and I did a lot of talking on the way down to Kymil; I don’t know why that was easier for me, but it was. It’s as if in caring for Antryg I care for other people more, too, and don’t want to see them hurt. For so many years I’ve kind of—of had a lot of reasons for not giving time to people or not saying things to them. Silly things mostly, really simple stuff like, ‘I’d like to know you better,’ or ‘I care about what happens to you.’ I don’t know what I was afraid they’d say back to me.”

  Caris turned his pen over in his hands for some moments, studying the shadow of the quills on the red-gold grain of the table. Then, with half a grin at her, he asked softly, “What were you afraid I’d say back to you?”

  Her eyes warmed. He was a little surprised that he’d managed to say the right thing, but evidently he had, for she returned his smile.

  Stammeringly, he added, “Thank you.” He set the pen down and looked over at her in the amber and sepia gloom. “It isn’t that I don’t know how to live—or not just that, anyway. At this point, it would not only be useless for me to learn, but dangerous.”

  He thought she would contradict him, but she didn’t, only listened in silence, her small hands folded, cold chapped and so fragile against the coarse linen of her smock sleeves.

  “After you shot that Witchfinder on the island near Devilsgate, I told you that sometimes you can’t afford to think too much—remember?”

  She nodded. He remembered the oppressive heat of the hay barn that night, his own impatience with listening to her stifled sobbing in the darkness, and his sharp jealousy at the thought that she had done the one thing he had trained for but had never actually done—killed a man in a fight. Two men, for that matter. The memory of that childish jealousy still embarrassed him.

  “Do you want to learn?”

  He looked away from her. To put it into words, he thought, even to deny it aloud, would make it too real for him to stand. “It isn’t an option.”

  “We don’t need a hero that bad.”

  He turned back. Small and unprepossessing in her crudely embroidered brown shirt, her feathery blond curls tied haphazardly back with a leather strap, and her brown eyes worried in their sketched fans of crow’s-feet, she looked like a mouse in a cheese compared with Pella’s splendid handsomeness. Joanna and Pella and Antryg were the only people who had cared about what he thought or felt since he had parted from Salteris in his thirteenth summer. That they did so still surprised him.

  The thought of Salteris made him remember Suraklin, and he raised again that cold shield of obsession deliberately before his heart. He might hate it, but he could not afford to put it down. “You do,” he told her quietly. “Believe me, you do.”

  The candleflames curtseyed suddenly in the rush of a draft as the door was opened. He could hear Squire Alport’s lumbering tread retreat down the stairs to the first-floor hall as Antryg strode in, all his grubby tatters fluttering, absently rubbing at his gloved hands.

  “How is she?”

  The wizard’s long mouth hardened. “Frightened,” he said softly. “With far better cause than she knows.”

  Caris had seen the girl when Squire Alport had first offered them hospitality, presenting them to his bride of less than a year. Half her husband’s age, her delicate, flaxen beauty was far too thin for her swollen belly. Everything Caris had learned from his midwife grandmother had made his stomach curl with dread at the sight of those too-hollow cheeks and those sunken eyes. Looking up now into Antryg’s face, he saw the struggle there; as if everything had been spoken of before, he understood what the wizard was going to ask of him.

  He had watched the wizard work minor magics for days, little healings such as granny-wives used, to nudge a bit of extra strength into weary hearts or to hinder the growth of proud flesh on a cleansed wound. Those bits of piseog were undetectable to the Council of Wizards, listening along the pulses of the earth for the whisper of Antryg’s name—small things, that lay within Caris’ rudimentary powers as well. But such things would never save that frightened girl’s life.

  Their eyes met and held. Even before Antryg spoke, Caris understood what he was going to be asked, what he had to be asked, and illogical rage surged up in him, a hot flood of anger at the taste of all the things that he would never have.

  “You have no right to ask that of me,” he said softly, even before Antryg opened his mouth. “I’m a killer, not a healer.”

  The wizard drew in a sip of breath and let it out. Deranged he might be, but he did not pretend not to understand. His flamboyant voice was low in the half dark. “Well, you’re only the one masquerading as the other for the time being, I’ll admit...”

  “You need me for what I am.” Caris’ onyx eyes narrowed, blazing into the wizard’s calm opal gaze. “Don’t make it harder for me by showing me what I know I can never have.”

  The gray eyes did not waver. The fact that what Antryg wanted him to do was against the first law of the Council whose sworn weapon he was or the fact that it would make him an outlaw in the eyes of both Empire and Church was not spoken of. In a way, both sensed that it was not the issue, and neither pretended that it was. Gently, Antryg said, “I know it isn’t fair to you...”

  “Fair!” Caris’ laugh was a harsh explosion, utterly without mirth. “Fair isn’t even in it! If I don’t learn whatever spell it is you want me to learn, to save her life—if I have the strength to use it...”

  “You do,” the mage said calmly.

  The sureness in his voice stopped Caris for an instant with a split-second’s leaping joy and then a rush of even more bitter rage.

  “If I don’t do this thing,” he went on at last, “you
will, won’t you? You’ll give yourself away to the Council by working magic to save her—give us away. Get yourself tracked and caught and killed, and never mind that Suraklin will go free—all to save the life of some half-educated petty noblewoman we don’t even know?”

  It was Antryg’s turn to be silent. He stood for a moment, his big hands resting on the back of Joanna’s chair, the flames of the two or three candles distorting even further the baroque shadows of his lips and nose. Around his neck and over the velvet collar of his patched green coat, his tawdry beads glittered sharply like a galaxy of trashy stars.

  Then he said slowly, “I know that I should not—another of those great, awful laws that I can believe in at a distance. But I know myself well enough to—to doubt my own reliability at close range, with the life of another person in my hands.”

  “Reliability! That’s rich!” Caris’ voice shook with scorn as he turned away, the taste of the small magics he had learned warm in his mouth, and on his hands—things he knew he must not touch, for if he did, he would never want to return to being what he had been. He had been a good warrior, and a good warrior was what they needed. He knew he would never be even an adequate mage, useless against Suraklin’s might. To work magic, to touch even the small power of which he was capable, would be like a drunkard’s first taste of wine; it would be like lying naked in bed at Pella’s side, knowing that he must not put a hand on her.

  After a long moment, he turned back to where Antryg still stood silent in the candlelight. “You’re such a damned sentimentalist you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

  Antryg did not reply.

  Disgusted with himself, furious with Antryg, Caris hooked one foot over the rungs of another of the carved chairs and thrust it in the wizard’s direction. “I should have killed you in the Tower.”

  The spells were a deeper magic than Caris had ever before attempted, almost beyond his grasp; even shaping them in his mind, without putting his power into them, left him exhausted as after hard training. It was the discipline of his training that got him through, learning them as he would have learned a new sword form, and Antryg, trained as a sasennan himself, cast the lesson in those terms, the terms that Caris would unthinkingly understand.