The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  Oddly, Caris trusted him. Antryg was clearly as mad as hatters got after years of breathing the mercury fumes of their trade, tricky, devious, and marked, far back in his soul, by all the dark abominations of Suraklin’s magic.

  Yet for reasons he did not fathom, Caris had felt drawn to the wizard from their first meeting and, though he knew he ought to guard himself, felt little hesitation in opening his soul to the scrutiny of those daft gray eyes.

  Using the magic itself was like flying.

  His power was slight, and nothing he or Antryg could ever do would increase its strength. But when the hemorrhaging started somewhere in the endless hell of the girl’s childbirth, it took so little to reach in with his mind and close the ruptured vessels. Even that took all his concentration, to focus and transmit the healing light from his own palms to the small, sweaty, twisting ones so desperately clutching at him, summoning the vision of it by rote until sweat ran down his face like rainwater, repeating to himself everything Antryg had said, making himself see, making himself believe ...But the power came.

  Antryg’s voice drifted away somewhere with the girl’s terrified sobs. The blood smell was everywhere, sweetish-sharp in his nostrils as it had been the first time he had killed a man—a thief, bound hand and foot to the big stake in the rear court of the training-hall. Caris still remembered the color of the man’s eyes. Through the woman’s hands he felt her spirit, feeble and summery and rather stupid, hopeless in the grip of unimagined pain. When he felt that of her living daughter, the shock of it nearly made him lose his grip on the inner chain of light at which he clutched so hard.

  Then he heard the child crying.

  After it was all over, on one of the terraced balconies on the lee-side of the house, heedless of the raw cold that had followed the sleety winds of the night, he put his forehead down on the wooden rail and wept as if his heart had been broken.

  Joanna could hear the servants whispering in the hall when the household’s single footman came into the sitting room with a tray of muffins. The lamps had been put out. Through the opened storm shutters and the double-paned windows, morning lay on a landscape, messy with patches of snow and sheets of water frozen into plates of gray steel. How Antryg could possibly have demanded breakfast was totally beyond her; after the truly appalling mess of childbirth she thought queasily that she would never be able to eat again.

  He was asleep on the divan now, only a tangle of gray curls and one crooked-knuckled hand in its shabby glove above the dull purple vastness of his patched cloak. Since she was supposed to be his servant, she took the tray from the footman and set it on the table near him, the table still littered with Caris’ exercises in Sigil-making. She glimpsed one of the maids craning her neck to see in from the hall as the young servant closed the door.

  So much, she thought wearily, for traveling north unobtrusively.

  The events of the night seemed crowded and telescoped in her mind—the intentness in Caris’ eyes as he drew the Sigils, and the bitterness in his voice, the stink of blood and her own nausea at the primal rawness of the birthing, the squire weeping as he knelt before Antryg, clutching his gloved hands. There should have been something faintly ludicrous about a fat, middle-aged man sobbing and jiggling awkwardly on his chubby knees, but there hadn’t been. He had obviously never expected the girl he loved so desperately to survive.

  She walked back to the divan, rested one hand on its scrollwork end, and looked down at the man sleeping there. The deep lines around his eyes aged him, as they had when he had worn the Sigil of Darkness; even in sleep he looked worried. Since his escape from the Tower, Joanna suspected that he was less resilient than he had been.

  Voices rose in the hall downstairs. Tired as she was, it took Joanna a second to realize that there were far more of them than the small servant population of the house could account for and that their tread, clattering en masse up the wooden stairs, was far too numerous and heavy. Fear stabbed at her and she caught up her backpack from under the divan, fumbling the .38 from its pocket. Caris, where was Caris...?

  The door opened. Lithe and deadly in his dull purple robe, Caris stood framed against the brownish shadows of the hall. Beyond him, Joanna could see Squire Alport, like a fat brown bear in layers of heavy tweed. Massed around him were a dozen men and women in the coarse, bundly clothes of peasants, the damp sheepskin of their jackets steaming in the sudden warmth of the house after the cold outside. None of the them were armed. Feeling a little silly, Joanna made a move to pocket the gun, then saw the look on Caris’ face.

  “What is it?” Behind her Antryg sat up and fumbled his spectacles on, to blink at the mob.

  “These people heard about you from that woman whose son you cured of pneumonia back in Bel Gulch,” Caris said quietly. “They want to talk to you about the spells of deadness, and the draining of life.”

  “They want to talk about them?” The wizard’s huge gray eyes widened still further with surprise.

  “You mean someone else has finally noticed that they all happen at the same time?” Joanna demanded.

  “In a way.” Caris’ voice was carefully neutral. “They say they know what’s causing them. It’s at their village.”

  Joanna said, “WHAT?” and thought, panicked, We’re not ready for this yet... Her eyes met Antryg’s and saw in his that he, too, had been taken completely off-guard.

  He turned back to Caris, and asked cautiously, “What is?”

  Expressionless, the sasennan said, “The Dead God.”

  Chapter XI

  “THEY’RE NOT LYING, ANTRYG.” Caris paused at the turn of the stairs, letting the squire lead the delegation down into the manor’s big hall ahead of them. Through its open double doors, wan daylight filtered up to dispel some of the gloom on the landing, showing his face paler than usual against the dark of his eyebrows and his pleated robe. “I’m frightened myself.”

  “It has to be Suraklin.” Joanna glanced worriedly up at the two men. “If he’s established the computer off one of the nodes, off the energy-lines entirely...”

  “Then it wouldn’t work,” Caris finished firmly.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Antryg agreed. “But for that reason it would be a splendid idea if it could be done—and, of course, all we’re going on is guesses about what’s happening, anyway. We haven’t any more proof than anyone does.”

  There was an appalled silence, in which the muted scuffle of voices sounded below, and somewhere in the dim house rose the thready wail of the new baby. Hesitantly, Caris said, “Have we been wrong about everything? It can’t really be the Dead God behind it all—can it?”

  Antryg grinned. “Disconcerting, isn’t it? Caris, for a man who doesn’t even believe in the Old Faith, you’re awfully worried about the return of something that supposedly never existed. I shall have to speak to the Archbishop of Angelshand about the general shakiness of religious training among the sasenna.”

  “Worried?” Caris retorted, his cheekbones staining red with annoyance. “I’m frightened, and if you had the brains God gave a chicken, you’d be frightened, too!”

  The demented smile widened. “Oh, I am,” he assured them cheerfully, “I am.” In a swirl of patched coat skirts and robes he clattered down the stairs ahead of them and into the hall.

  Caris’ fine-cut nostrils flared and his upper lip seemed to lengthen. He started to follow, and Joanna caught his sleeve.

  “It has to be Suraklin.” She heard the uncertainty in her own voice.

  “I agree.” The young man threw a glance down at the brighter rectangle of the hall doorway, where Antryg could be seen, half a head taller than anyone else in the room, polishing on his shirt ruffle spectacles which had fogged slightly in the steam rising from their damp clothes. “They say the Dead God has been demanding his ancient sacrifices, ruling the town through terror. It’s only superficially different from what Suraklin did for years in Kymil. A perfect setup.”

  Somewhere in the house, the baby’s cries soun
ded again, sharp and demanding. There was the faint creak of floorboards, and the cries ceased in a contented gurgle. Looking up into Caris’ face, Joanna saw for one moment in his eyes a look of such bitter yearning, such hopeless unhappiness, that she reached out with involuntary pity to touch his hand.

  His dark eyes returned to her, briefly unmasked by the sound of the first life he had given instead of taken. Then his mouth twisted in a wry smile and he shook his head. With a warrior’s deadly lightness, he strode down the remainder of the stairs to join Antryg in the hall.

  Joanna followed, trying to collect and sort possibilities in her mind—how Suraklin could have organized the energy transfer away from the lines and how his power might be met. But this exercise in logical explanations was hideously evanescent; the tale told by the mayor of Far Wilden and her frightened delegation was bizarre, disquieting, and bore no resemblance to what she knew of Suraklin’s calm methodology.

  It had started, they said, with noises, knockings, and scratchings in the Church. The old priest claimed that the place smelled of death and of the coldness of the Dead God and had refused to enter. The young priest, sent out two years before from Angelshand and still filled with the arrogance of the seminary, had insisted upon performing as usual the services of the Holy Sun, the Sole God.

  “It was known from the beginning what it was, then?” Antryg drooped back in the carved chair by the hearth, his hands in their shabby gloves folded across his middle, his eyelids half-lowered behind the cracked and mended lenses of his specs.

  “Oh, yes, my lord.” Greer, the mayor of Far Wilden, a tough, sun-browned woman in her forties, nodded. Her white linen chemise under an embroidered peasant bodice hung baggy over wide shoulders and the slack breasts of one who has lost weight quickly. Men and women, they all had that look, Joanna thought, sitting curled in silence on the plank floor at Antryg’s side—the slight bagginess of jowls and necks and clothes that no longer fitted as they had. She had grown used to it, traveling through the Sykerst—that, and that crushed-in grayness of stress and uncertainty, of knowing there was something desperately wrong and not quite knowing what it was.

  What she had not seen before was the shadow that seemed to haunt the depths of their eyes, the way they tended to stay away from windows, and the way they always seemed to be listening for some noise in the corridor outside. She felt obscurely glad that outside the heat steamed glass of the windows lay daylight, dreary though it might be.

  “We’re true Believers, my lord,” Greer went on diffidently, folding her big, brown hands, “good children of the light. But the Dead God is different.”

  Thoroughly orthodox in spite of his long association with the mages, Caris looked on the verge of indignant speech, but Antryg motioned him silent with one crooked forefinger. “I know,” he said, his deep voice scarcely louder than the croon of the wind round the eaves. “It’s a belief that sleeps in the ground. And the Dead God was never like the other gods.”

  “No, my lord,” the woman said simply. “Old Father Del, he knew. But in Angelshand the Bishops and the Witchfinders, they don’t like anything that can’t be written in their holy books of the Sun. It’s why they sent out poor Father Sweelum to tell us it isn’t true, to make sure the Green Mass isn’t said in the fields, and to knock down the standing-stones and put fences round the churchyards to keep the conjures out.”

  Her dark eyes narrowed as she studied the tall man who sat by the hearth, his faded purple robe hanging slack over his bony frame like a blanket on a picket fence, the firelight and daylight sparkling on the magpie treasure of glass beads around his shackle-galled neck. “There’s talk you’re a conjure, my lord. Lord Alport said his lady’s life was despaired of, and over to Bel Gulch that boy...”

  Antryg shook his head. “I have worked no magic,” he said softly. “And in any case it would be unlawful for me to do so, even if I could. What became of poor Father Sweelum, who went into the Church to sing the hymns of the Unconquered Sun?”

  Greer’s full lips tightened; she sighed and shook her head. “It was only a matter of time,” she said. “He went there two, three times, evening and morning—cursed Father Del for refusing to set foot over the threshold. It was the Dead God’s eve; Sweelum went in to say services at sundown, though for three days there’d been no one to go into the Church to hear them. I was one of those who stood outside the door. We heard him scream, the first time in fear, the second time... I can’t say, but I’ve never heard a human being scream like that in all my life. When we looked in, he was dead, lying halfway between the door and the altar, blood round his nose and ears, and the look on his face as if he’d seen into Hell itself.”

  “Was this before or after sunset?” Joanna asked worriedly, remembering the hot glare of the slanting light on the San Serano parking lot and crouching in the dimness behind the door, waiting for Gary to pass.

  “Before, surely,” Antryg murmured, and Greer nodded.

  “He’d just gone in to sing the services. He always had them timed fine, the sun touching the horizon on the first word of the Farewell Hymn, and no fadiddling about waiting for it. The light fell nearly straight through the doors on his body when we opened them.”

  Joanna shot a troubled glance at Caris, sitting on the black sheepskin of the hearthrug, his back to the fieldstone chimney; he seemed lost in his own thoughts. “And how long before this had the noises started?”

  Greer frowned, thinking back. One of the younger men of the delegation said, “Three days? Four days?”

  There had been a Tiger missile program review during the week before the Dead God’s eve. Gary—Suraklin—had worked late at San Serano every night. And in any case, the computer had been up and running intermittently weeks before. Joanna subsided, feeling as if pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had fallen out of her hands. Beside her, she could sense the tension in the line of Antryg’s shoulders and see it in the way his bony hand lay on the chair’s carved arm and in the tilt of his head.

  After a moment Greer went on, “We—we went and fetched Father Del. We didn’t go into the Church. The smell of it was something dreadful, rot and corruption and worse besides. It was pretty near dark when we opened the doors again.” Her voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced involuntarily at the window, as if even in daylight she feared what she might see looking in. “He was standing up, my lord—Father Sweelum, with blood running down from his mouth and his dead eyes staring at nothing with the lolling of his head. He said, ‘I am the Dead God. I have returned, as I said I would.’”

  “Ah,” murmured Antryg. “When the last of a thousand candles burns out, the darkness will always return; though a thousand voices sing all the hymns of life, silence always waits upon the inevitable failing of their breath. Yes.”

  From the corner of her eye, Joanna saw Caris, white-faced, sketch the sign of holiness on his forehead and lips.

  “Entropy always wins,” she said softly, and Antryg’s fleeting gray gaze touched her.

  “Precisely.” His eyes returned to the peasants, clustered close now, like sheep who hear the howling of the wolf, though Joanna guessed they were probably the dozen most fearless men and women in the village. “What did he ask of you?”

  He spoke gently and as if he already knew. There was a terrible silence. Then Greer spoke without meeting his eyes. “Life,” she said, her words barely to be heard in the hush of the room. “Lives.”

  “Ah,” Antryg breathed, like a man who sees some piece to a riddle, but his eyes, on Greer’s downcast face, were filled with compassion and pity.

  She raised her gaze to the wizard’s, as if asking that he understand that no horror or accusation of his could equal what she had already felt toward herself. “He would have destroyed us, else.”

  “I know.” Something in the sureness of his voice, the absolute understanding, made Joanna shiver, but it melted some of the woman’s wretched self-hate.

  “And he can,” she said. “He can draw the life out of a man like a fox
sucking an egg, then stand there in its rotting corpse, speaking out of its mouth. He can call down spells of death, of ruin—at least so he told Father Del and the town merchant, Pettin, who spoke with him in the Church. It’s they who tell us his bidding, now.”

  “Aye,” interpolated a younger man, stocky and bearded, who sat near the door. “It’s not Del I mind, for all I think his brain’s been turned. But that Pettin! Him and his sons and a bunch of their hired men keep guard on the Church, and do the Dead God’s bidding, as he does theirs. Three of my sheep he’s had, for his own use and none of the Dead God’s.”

  There was an angry mutter of assent, and Antryg murmured, “Fascinating. But the Dead God has no use for beasts?”

  That silence returned. They had sinned and knew it. Joanna wondered how many people they had given to the terrible thing in the Church and how those had been selected. Then an older man with short white braids said, “None. Only men. Once he asked for a child...” There was an awkward pause, as if all of them heard the echo of some mother’s frantic cries. “It used to be every day. Then none for three, four days at a time. Now he’s had three in three days again...”

  Greer took a deep breath. “You have to come, lord doctor. In the name of God, of whatever gods you worship. The nights he comes out of the church and walks abroad are those nights like we’ve had all the summer, when it’s like all the life goes out of the air, the ground—out of all of us. It’s he who’s been causing them all along. It’s got to be! We’ll hear him, lurching and staggering, and in the morning there’s a trail of slime like a rotting beast was dragged over the ground, out to the Witchpath Stone and back. He’s destroying the village and all the countryside around; they say he’s drinking the life out of all the world.”