The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  “I suppose you can.” Antryg’s voice seemed distant in the darkness, but perfectly conversational, no more ill-at-ease than if they shared a tankard of beer at some alehouse hearth. “Provided, that is, you’re more than semiconscious and still able to take care of yourself. But I don’t think you will be. Human psychic energy is really a rather poor substitute for what you eat in your own world, isn’t it? Not to mention the air.”

  “This flesh tolerates the air.”

  “You’re poisoning yourself and you know it—or you did know it when you tried to cut back on human sacrifices and when you tried all those other things—beef blood or walking out to the Witchpath Stone on the nights the energy ran along it.”

  Joanna felt, through the whispering whiteness of the Sigils’ light, the bloody stir of the Dead God’s anger. “The hunger grows,” it whispered.

  Diffidently, she put in, “That’s common with food allergies.”

  “In my own world I was nothing,” the god whispered. “A technician, a tracker of xchi particles for other men’s research. Here, I have power.”

  “Only as long as you retain your consciousness,” Antryg pointed out. “My magic will give you more power, yes. But it won’t stop the clouding of your mind. At best, you’ll become a random force, a psychic whirlwind that grows with every human mind it devours until someone finally finds a way to destroy you as mad dogs are destroyed. At worst, you’ll be controlled by others, as Pettin controls you now. I don’t see another choice for you.”

  There was a rush, a surge, a blaze of light behind her eyes and half-drunken fury and hate slamming like a wave against her mind. Joanna jerked her hands free of Antryg’s light touch and opened her eyes in time to see the wizard flinch aside with a cry. Though the Dead God had not moved, Joanna saw the fresh claw marks that scored Antryg’s face and jaw, running with blood. As she watched, a second set gouged his neck; the air rumbled with a sound of rage that seemed to come from nowhere, the foggy rage of the Dead God’s half-polluted brain. Antryg bent under the blows, blood streaming from his face and neck, but never took his hands from the curving horns of the Sigil of Shadow.

  The angry rumbling died.

  Her heart hammering, Joanna could not bring herself to touch the Sigils again, but in time she heard Antryg whisper, “Where is the body that you came here in from your own world?”

  The Dead God must have made some reply, for after a time the wizard breathed, “Since it has not corrupted in this world, were I to guide you back into it and back through the Void to a place where you could get help, would they be able to save you?”

  An even longer silence followed; then Antryg, still half in his trance, smiled. “Yes,” he murmured, like a distant echo of his conversations with Caris. “Mad, too. You no more know that I won’t destroy you when you open your mind to me than I know that when I open mine to you, you won’t simply devour it. Do you believe that you need my help?”

  If he was sane he might, Joanna thought desperately. If he wasn’t fogged-out, half-poisoned with the psychic and metabolic garbage he’s been ingesting for weeks ...Don’t do it, Antryg. Don’t give him what he seeks...

  But Antryg took his hands from the Sigils, and climbed slowly, wincingly to his feet. The Dead God loomed over him in the shadows and held out two rotting hands to help him up. Together the gawky wizard and the monster vanished into the black hole of the haunted darkness. The glow of light in the Sigils themselves faded, seeming to sink into the floor, leaving only a smudgy tracing of chalk and the tangled snakes of copper wire, glinting faintly in the flicker of the single candle at Joanna’s side.

  How long she sat alone in the darkness, Joanna wasn’t sure afterward, her every nerve strained, listening for sounds in the utter silence of the distant crypt. The candle burned itself slowly down. Reaction was setting in, after a day’s exhausting walk and only hours of sleep snatched at intervals in the endless childbirth of the squire’s lady the night before. Weirdly enough, the blood that had rained down during the combat with the Dead God had vanished without a trace, though Joanna was at a loss to say when. She wondered whether it had, in fact, ever existed.

  Antryg was alone in the crypt with the Dead God. That he had said nothing to her at their departure didn’t surprise her; she suspected that he was channeling all his strength into maintaining some kind of psychic link with the Dead God’s mind, some lifeline to that lost abomination’s sanity that he dared not lose. The cold deepened. Joanna huddled into her sheepskin coat, watching the mist of her breath, gilded by the dim candle-gleam, and wondering how long she should give it.

  Before doing what?

  The great doors were bolted from the outside. In her heart she knew she’d wait a long time before she dared make her way through the sightless forest of the pillared vestibule down to those ghastly vaults alone.

  The noise, when it came, nearly made her jump out of her skin with shock—the slamming scrape of the door bolts at her back, and a man’s angry curse. Then the night air touched her face, close to freezing but almost warm compared to the icy stillness around her.

  “Joanna?”

  Torchlight fell across the floor over her in a gold bar, sparkling on Caris’ blond hair and the blade of his drawn sword. He fell back with a gasp from the threshold. “What the...”

  “Here!” She sprang to her feet and stumbled to him, her knees almost giving way with the cramp of long sitting. She was shaking all over as he caught her briefly in the circle of his arm. He wore his sword sash and dagger belt strapped over his scholar’s robe; past his shoulder Joanna saw no one in the trough of darkness between church and baptistery save one man slumped unconscious at the bottom of the steps and the arm of another projecting from the shadows of the baptistery door. “Caris, we...”

  “Where is he?” The young man held the torch aloft, looking swiftly around the vestibule, concern overriding for a moment both his nausea and his usual shield of aloof and bitter calm. “Is he...?”

  “He went down to the crypt with the Dead God,” she said. “He was going to try to send the Dead God back, he said ...Caris. You do care for him, don’t you?” For the fear in his face was unmistakable and had little to do with being left to deal with Suraklin alone.

  “He’s the most maddening mooncalf I’ve ever had the misfortune to know,” Caris retorted explosively, not answering the question. “If he’s...”

  He broke off and caught her arm. Around them the freezing darkness seemed shaken suddenly, like a curtain in a wind. Cold terror skated across Joanna’s bones and she clutched tight to the coarse wool of Caris’ sleeve. For an instant, the universe seemed to ripple into breathing nearness around them.

  “The Void,” Caris whispered.

  Outside, thin and terrible as the death-cry of something that has long since ceased to be human, Father Del’s wheezing voice could be heard, scaling up into a thin scream that ended as if dispersed upon the wind.

  Joanna said softly, “He’s gone.”

  Caris raised his torch again and, sword in hand, led the way into the black cave of the church.

  After all that had gone before, what was in the sanctuary did not do more than make Joanna gag, but she heard Caris gasp and choke on the fumes that made the air there almost past breathing. From inhabiting the body of the luckless Father Sweelum, now an unrecognizable puddle in a black habit in a corner, the Dead God had used the flesh of his victims to fashion his own body. What was left over lay strewn across the altar, the chancel, the steps leading down to the crypt. Only the deathly cold which the Dead God had gathered about him to preserve his borrowed flesh intact saved the place from being more hideous than it already was. In the crypt, the swollen body of the Dead God lay, a huge sprawl of carrion, beside a stone niche that had once contained some local notable; dry bones lay heaped in a corner, still bundled in the desiccated shreds of gold-stitched winding sheet. In their place, stretched facedown upon the stone, lay Antryg, one arm extended, his fingers still twined with the D
ead God’s dissolving hand.

  “Antryg...” She stepped forward; at the sound of her voice, and the touch of the torchlight, he flinched. Then his hand came up and groped for hers, seeking the touch of a human mind or perhaps only of living flesh. She barely even noticed what it was covered with as it closed convulsively around her arm.

  He whispered, “Get me out of here.”

  On the outside steps of the church, Caris picked up Antryg’s fallen cloak and put it carefully around his shoulders. Joanna dug into the wizard’s coat pocket for his tin flask of gin, which he drank like a dying man receiving the elixir of life. Then with a shaky smile he handed it to her, and she decided after two swigs that there was a good deal to be said in favor of the vile stuff after all. Torches had begun to flicker around all sides of the square as dark forms emerged from the shadow—the merchant Pettin, looking white and scared and Greer the mayor, her face filled with concern and joy when she saw the three demon hunters gathered alive and more or less whole on the steps. Of Father Del Joanna never saw anything again.

  “D’you suppose our welcome would extend to a cup of tea?” Antryg asked softly at last, when his hands had stopped shaking. He glanced up at Caris, the old impishness returning to his black-circled eyes. “You turned up with remarkable speed for a man we left back at Alport Hall.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Caris said roughly. “I followed you here, of course.” He sheathed his sword with a vicious click, but did not replace the scabbard in his sash. “The only delay was in putting Pettin’s bullyboys out of the way.”

  Glancing around the square, Joanna identified only two of the merchant’s hired men. Of those two, one was nursing a closed eye and a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg on his jaw, and the other was just pulling the remains of makeshift ropes off his wrists.

  More gently, the sasennan added, “And you? Will the Council be able to track you through what you did here tonight?”

  “I don’t think so,” Antryg replied and pushed the blood-tipped ends of his matted hair out of his face. “I did very little actual magic. Perhaps some, in the—the guiding of the Dead God’s spirit back into his former body and back through the Void. Like the abominations we saw at Suraklin’s Citadel, it was unable to breathe the air here, but for the same reason the organisms of decay here had taken no hold upon it. But the Sigils draw and transmit power of themselves. They are, as Joanna said, symbolic representations of the mind, in a way; they are fueled, like the teles relays, by the ambient magic all around us.”

  He frowned, as some other idea teased the back of his mind, his reddish brows pulled together, twisting the crusted claw marks that scored the side of his face.

  Caris stood looking down at him for a moment in the uncertain dance of the torchlight. There was some of the sasennan’s old exasperation in his face, tempered by understanding and pity. In a low voice, as if for the mage’s ears alone, he said, “You know you can’t keep it up.”

  Antryg glanced up at him swiftly, but there was no question in his eyes.

  “It’s only a matter of time before you get yourself backed into a corner where you must use your power or die.”

  The wizard looked as if he would have shed this remark with his usual lightness, but hesitated on his indrawn breath and then let it go. “I know,” he said, so low that Joanna almost could not hear. He sat for a time, looking at the battered metal flask still clasped in his stained fingers, tiredness settling on him as if some sustaining inner cord had been suddenly cut.

  “My greatest fear was that Suraklin would have heard of the Dead God, and gotten here before us,” he went on quietly. “Whether the Dead God joined him as a willing partner or was overcome and dominated as his tool when his consciousness deteriorated with the pollution of those it subsumed, they would have been a terrible combination. The thing is...”

  He stopped, his gray eyes staring out beyond the torchlight, beyond the darkness, looking, Joanna sensed, at some additional horror, some piece of the puzzle that had fallen into place. So he had looked, Joanna realized, when in the Prince Regent’s carriage Pharos had spoken of what had become of his father.

  “What?” she asked quickly.

  He glanced down at her and shook his head, his eyes avoiding hers. “Nothing,” he murmured. Then, “Do you think we could talk these people out of a cup of tea, some food, and a bed for the night? I’m chilled to the marrow and like to die of weariness.”

  But though Joanna, once they were in the bed of sheepskins and quilts in Greer’s house, fell almost at once into heavy slumber unbroken even by nightmares, the last thing she saw was Antryg’s open gray eyes staring into the darkness of the ceiling. Whatever it was that his encounter with the Dead God had told him or caused him to guess, she was aware that it did not let him sleep that night.

  Chapter XIII

  IN THE ENSUING THREE DAYS Joanna tried to get Antryg to talk about his interview with the Dead God, but found him silent and preoccupied. In Antryg’s case silence, like sanity, was always a relative matter; on the road he chatted of the obscure customs of religious sects, the love lives of past Emperors, and the odder methods of divination; or he listened in absorbed silence to her explanations of computer hardware and the best methods of videotape piracy. But she sensed that, behind this gentle barrage of persiflage, he was worried and frightened.

  They came out of the Sykerst and down into the lowland countries east of Angelshand, working their way through the brown valleys along the Glidden toward Tilrattin Island and the node in the energy-lines. She had come to understand that Antryg was not a particularly brave man. Like herself, he possessed far too vivid an imagination to contemplate the final confrontation with his ancient mentor with anything like Caris’ single-minded fatalism. He had lived with fear for a long time. Then, too, Joanna realized uneasily, he was the only one of the four conspirators who truly knew what they were up against.

  “As far as I can tell it looks like Suraklin knew what he was doing,” she said diffidently one evening, looking up from the heap of photocopied programs on her lap in the feeble illumination of a couple of flickering candles. Antryg raised his head sharply from the makeshift pillow of his pack. She had seen the glint of the candlelight in his open eyes, staring up past the broken house beams that sheltered the abandoned cellar where they had made camp, studying the winter stars blazing above the naked trees.

  As they had drawn nearer to their destination, they had avoided for the most part the farming villages, but having left the brutal winds of the Sykerst behind them this was less of a hardship. Here in the hedgerow country, too, it was far easier to find deserted barns or the ruins of old chapels or farms. Lord Alport and the villagers of Far Wilden had given them as much dried meat and the thick, heavily concentrated waybread as they could carry, so there was little need for them to seek out farmers who would spread word of strangers in the land.

  Antryg rolled up onto one elbow and squinted myopically at her across the candles. “I’d certainly like to think so,” he murmured, falling into the conversation, as was their habit now, in the middle, as if it were something they had discussed before. In the dim glow of the candles, his breath formed a little cloud; Joanna pulled her quilted blanket more tightly around her shoulders and brushed with her fingertips the papers that lay in her lap.

  “As far as I can figure it without being a mage or a xeno-bio-psychochemist,” she went on hesitantly, “the Dead God’s problem stemmed from incompatible hardware-software interface—he’d put his consciousness into the physical brains of beings who were not of his species. I gather he was able to tap into human psychokinetic powers at will—which no humans but mages are able to do ordinarily—but he couldn’t make the transfer until the human consciousness was absolutely gone—that is, till the poor yutz was dead. And I suspect he was doing it instinctively, rather than as a learned technique.”

  Antryg nodded. “More or less, yes.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry that there will be a simi
lar problem with Suraklin. I don’t have anywhere near all the subroutines of personality transfer—I was just pulling them off the disk as fast as I could, and a lot of this stuff is total gibberish to me—but from what I’ve been able to tell from the ones I can understand, he’s got all the personalities digitalized down to the last detail. You’re not going to get the kind of organic deterioration we did with the Dead God.”

  The wizard fished his spectacles out of their hiding place in his boot, which stood drying by the fire, and eased them carefully on over the narrow lines of bruises and Caris’ stitching that marked the Dead God’s final, furious attack. His coat, blanket, and cloak around his shoulders, he edged over to look down over Joanna’s shoulder at the endless lines of the program.

  “You haven’t happened to come across any mention of where Suraklin’s put his computer, have you?”

  “Not yet.” Joanna wriggled her way under the corner of the cloak he held out to her—though still, the night was icy. “I’ve been looking for it, but you’ve got to remember there’s tons of this stuff. The copy isn’t all that hot, either. Toward the end there, I was just photoreducing it, doing a fast cut-and-paste job and having it copied again, double-sided to save space, without looking to see what it was. For that reason, a lot of it’s barely legible, but I had to bring as much as I could. And it isn’t anywhere near the whole.”

  Antryg grinned ruefully and ran his thumb along the edge of the thick stack of unread papers. “That will teach me not to learn to read English.”

  She shrugged and smiled back. “Even if you could read English, you still couldn’t read programming—the same way I can’t understand the spells in here, even if they are in Fortran. At least, since Gary was doing most of the programming as Gary, the programs are in English—probably because Suraklin couldn’t get a keyboard in those hearts-and-flowers you people use for an alphabet. I wonder what language he thinks in?”