The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  She shivered suddenly and muttered, “Oh, damn,” as the bitter, creeping grayness of depression whispered in like floodtide over her soul. Antryg’s arm tightened around her, the warmth of it only a ghost, a memory that such things ought to bring her comfort rather than comfort itself. She bent her head wretchedly, steeling herself to endure what might be several hours, what might be the rest of a nightmare-laden night, or what might, she realized intellectually, be the beginning of forever. But she was too drained, too weary, to care.

  She whispered, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  Antryg sighed and rubbed her back with his big hand. “A great deal more, I’m afraid. Good parasites never kill their hosts.” She gritted her teeth a little and rested her head on the bony hardness of his chest. She had never figured out how badly the energy drains affected him, though since they had become lovers, she suspected they did so more than he showed.

  “Salteris—Suraklin—said something like that once,” she commented dully. “That people grow accustomed—that in a few years no one will know what they’re missing...”

  Under her cheek, she felt him startle and raised her head to meet the hard, speculative glint in his eyes. “Did he?” Then his lips tightened and his long, narrow nostrils flared with the first real anger she had ever seen him display. He took a deep breath, almost forcibly releasing his hold on it, but there was still a kind of cold purposefulness in his face as he disengaged his arm from around her shoulders and began to dig through the capacious pockets of his greatcoat. “Will you excuse me, my dear?”

  Joanna nodded miserably, thinking, as he rose to his feet, I should have known he didn’t really love me... and then stopped herself irritably from that old and, she knew, quite untrue train of thought. His decrepit robe nearly black in the starlight, Antryg climbed halfway up the fallen rubble and beams at the other side of the cellar and dug from his pocket an astrolabe he’d gotten from Pella.

  “Suraklin thought like that, you know,” he said, making a minute adjustment to the rete and sighting along the alidade at the North Star, high in the frosty sky. “He operated on the assumption that he was more intelligent than anyone else. For the most part he was right, of course, but it led to certain habits of thought. He could never be got to admit that there were things he did not understand.”

  He turned the astrolabe in his hand, manipulating the rule on the back. Joanna watched him without much curiosity, having seen him take sightings before in the uncertain glimmer of starlight. Now and then he would turn his head, his long nose silhouetted black against the Prussian blue of the sky as he scanned the horizon. Once he turned quickly at the sound of a sharp rustle in the blackened woods that were all around the ruined house, but it was only Caris, returning cold and wet from his nightly patrol. The young man scrambled down the decayed steps, cursing. “Now I can’t even move through the woods without making noise! This is all your fault...”

  “Nonsense.” Antryg repocketed the astrolabe and slid lightly down from the beam to pull on his boots. “If my calculations are correct, the energy-line should lie about three miles southwest of us. There’s something I have to check, now, while the energy’s moving.”

  “You mean you could have sighted along it any time, anywhere, not on the node?” demanded Caris furiously. “We’ve come all this way...”

  “Because I enjoy hundred-mile hikes in the dead of winter, yes.” The wizard straightened up, shaking back his straggly gray curls; behind the spectacles Joanna saw the gleam of annoyance in his eyes.

  Caris, who had drawn breath to say something else, let it out and looked away. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “It’s just that...” He let the words trail off.

  More gently, Antryg said, “I know.” He held out his hand in its stained and ragged glove. “Joanna? Will you come with me? It isn’t dangerous, but if what I fear is happening, it’s better that I know.”

  They traversed the woods in silence. There was a village not far away—at one point Joanna could see the pinpricks of its lights across the stubble fields, like the dying glow in the heart of a burnt-out log—but on these cold and lifeless evenings there was little likelihood of anybody’s being abroad so late. And it was not truly so late, Joanna thought, glancing at her watch in the starlight. Back in California, primetime television would barely have started. It was only here, in this bleak world, that the nights went on forever... here where she would be trapped...

  She tried to shake off the depression, but knew it would do no good. Throughout the days of their journeying, the spells of deadness had become more frequent and longer, descending every few days as Suraklin completed, tested, and downloaded more and more of his programs. It was only a matter of time before he made his final transfer and, she suspected, not very much time at that. Her heart turned cold at the thought of it.

  Our last chance, Antryg had said. At times like this, with her soul melting into a cold puddle of despair, she knew that she had no chance at all.

  She felt nothing of the movement of the energy-line when they reached it, but Antryg evidently did. In the wet, brittle thickets of the woods he halted abruptly, looked this way and that in such thin starlight as filtered through the bare lattices of trees overhead, and turned west, holding Joanna’s hand to help her over the rolling roughness of the ground. She’d forgotten to put on her mittens after repacking her backpack—laboriously rewrapping her Xeroxed files in plastic only because she’d made it a rule to do everything by the numbers when the depression was upon her—and her hands were almost numb save where his warmed them. She’d far rather have remained back in the cellar camp with Caris, but had come with Antryg, obscurely craving his company and now, in spite of herself, heartily resenting his preoccupied silence.

  “Ah,” he murmured at last. “Here we are.”

  Under a snarl of brown ferns and ivy stems a little standing-stone could be seen, like a child’s coffin half embedded in the earth. The trees grew thick around the spot, sapling maple and elm. Antryg pulled off his gloves and waded through the dead underbrush, which rustled sharply as small animals darted away. He pulled loose handfuls of the stone’s brittle shroud, baring the surface, then knelt before it, his spectacles gleaming in the cold starlight as he pressed his hands to the pitted rock. After a moment he leaned forward and touched his forehead to it, as if listening. Under his fingertips Joanna glimpsed the scratchwork shadows of traced Sigils and runes.

  Shivering and weary, she folded her arms and bit back a number of smartass remarks. They stemmed, she was only too aware, from the gray exhaustion of her soul and her fear of that enormous woodland silence. What he could be seeking she could not imagine, but when he came back to her, she could see the anger in his movements, frustrated rage she had never seen in him before.

  “Damn him,” he whispered viciously, as they started back to camp. “Damn him. He may be the greatest mage in the world but he’s a complete and utter fool...”

  “What is it?” She had to hurry her steps to match his furious strides. Seeing this, he slowed immediately, offering her again a corner of his cloak for warmth. Beneath her encircling arm she could feel the jut of his ribs through several layers of coat and robe and the ripple of the muscle as they walked.

  “It’s difficult to explain...” He paused, looking down at her in the wan lace of star shadows. “No—it’s difficult to believe. That is—you probably believe that objects are inanimate. So does Suraklin.”

  “Uh...” Joanna said, reminded once again that, in spite of his intelligence and charm and in spite of the fact that she loved him, Antryg was in fact several bricks shy of a load.

  “Well,” he said simply, “I don’t. By the way, my dear—in your reading of the DARKMAGE files, did you ever find mention of where Suraklin hid the teles-balls that he collected over the years, the teles that he’s now using to draw power—life-magic—down the energy-paths to convert to his computer’s electricity?”

  Joanna nodded, remembering on
e of those many cold little lists of facts that comprised all that was left of Suraklin’s personality. “Something called the Bone Well?”

  Antryg shuddered. “I was afraid of that. I can understand why no one wanted to look very closely there.” She felt the shiver of his body against hers, and he started walking again, heading back to camp. In the starlight his face looked drawn and a little ill.

  Glancing back, Joanna saw the little stone still standing like a stumpy dwarf. Pale against the black nets of ivy, the bald patch Antryg had torn seemed to glimmer in the darkness. Joanna could see no scratch on it, no mark of the faint web of signs that she had glimpsed beneath Antryg’s hands.

  It was, she realized, one of the first markers of the Devil’s Road, the arrow-straight track that ran to Tilrattin Island and the crossing node of the lines.

  Softly, she said, “Do you think he has them at Tilrattin Island? The teles-relay and the computer? Do you really think he’d put them that close to Angelshand?”

  “He would, if he thought he could get the Archmage and the Council run out of that city—which of course he has done.” He picked his way over the rocks that crossed a shallow stream, sluggish now with winter, the water like ink between beds of frozen mud lined with rims of ice. He held out a hand to Joanna, and she noted, among the tracks on the bank, the small, deformed footmark of something unknown and hideous, a track that the marks of weasel and cony gave wide berth. “But from here, away from the node, I simply can’t tell.”

  “In a way I hope they are there.”

  He glanced at her, his brows raised but no surprise in his eyes to hear her say it.

  Stammering, she explained, “Time is on Suraklin’s side. It isn’t that I’m eager to face off with him, as Caris is. But if that computer’s up and running when we get there—if Suraklin’s already programmed himself into it—I don’t know how much conscious control he’ll have over his input.”

  “You mean he may simply spit it out.”

  Joanna grinned unwillingly at the anthropomorphic image. “Well, he can’t, not physically. It’s the trade-off he’s made for virtual immortality and a limitless capacity for knowledge. He’s at the mercy of his input. He can defend himself from a worm in the way computers fight human interference—with passwords and tricks and codes—but with enough time, and enough concentration, those can be worked through. The problem is that, with the teles relays in operation, such concentration is the first thing to go.” She swallowed hard, frightened just to be saying it, thinking it and its implications. “If we get there while the computer’s down, we’re home free. But if that computer’s on-line, I’m going to be making a lot of mistakes. And any delay’s going to buy him time to bring up whatever second-line defenses he’s got.”

  “I see.” Antryg sighed and pushed up his spectacles to rub his eyes. “I think there’s one last thing he needs to do before he goes ‘on-line,’ as you say—before he becomes his computer. But he may have done it already, whilst we were skulking about the Sykerst, pretending to be doctors. I wish I knew. I have a frightening feeling that time’s getting very short.”

  He stopped, listening in the thin, starry darkness between the trees. Though one piece of woods still looked much like another, especially at night, Joanna thought she recognized the environs of the fallen cellar. She knew he was listening for any sound, any clue of danger. Still oppressed by the energy drain, physically weary and shivering with cold, she felt a flash of impatience and the urge to jerk on his sleeve and tell him not to bother. She forced herself silent until she felt, through his big hand in hers, his body relax, and they moved forward again.

  She asked softly, “Is that what’s been bothering you?”

  He shook his head. “No. Since talking with the Dead God I’ve been uneasy about it, and feeling the energy-flow in the stone tonight I’m now sure. Between his hardware and his software, with his input, once Suraklin enters his computer there is a very good chance that he’ll be insane.”

  They reached Tilrattin Island two days later in the middle of a morning drowned in pearl-colored mist that limited visibility to a few feet. Moving cautiously through that clammy opal world, Joanna wondered if the fog itself were not some defense that Suraklin had thrown around his headquarters, but Caris shook his head. “It’s always foggy in the river basin at this time of year.”

  “Convenient,” Antryg murmured, pausing for the dozenth time since they’d entered the shaggy tangles of river-bank woods to listen. Though no countrywoman, Joanna remembered these woods at the end of summer with their myriad of bird calls, the hum of gnats above the boggy places, and the splash of fish in the streams. All was silence now, save for the muted clucking of the river itself, invisible in the fog. “Of course, tampering with the weather is very difficult to trace or even to detect, but if someone is watching from the island, all the fog rolling suddenly away so that we can see where we’re headed is going to be a little hard to miss.”

  “Swell,” Joanna muttered, tucking her mittened hands into her armpits for warmth. Beside her, Caris said nothing, but his narrowed dark eyes moved here and there about them, trying to pierce the milky vapors. Since the spell of deadness the night before last, the cold armor seemed to have risen around his heart again, black and impenetrable. He had resumed the loose black fighting garb of the sasenna and seemed glad to have put the distractions and the temptations of passing for a healer behind him with his purplish student’s robe. When one is getting ready to die, she supposed, one cannot think too much about living.

  “Tilrattin and, in fact, all the woods between here and the Devil’s Road have been shunned for centuries,” Antryg went on after a moment. “If it’s been anything near what it was like at Suraklin’s Citadel, the concentration of abominations won’t have improved its reputation any...”

  “This is getting better and better.” Joanna threw a nervous glance over her shoulder. They had, in fact, come across the carcass of one abomination and what Antryg took to be evidence of another—a fairly extensive grove of oak trees which within the last few weeks had been burned to their stumps, pulled down and fired until nothing remained.

  “Still,” the wizard continued, “I doubt we’re going to encounter any traps until we set foot on the island itself. Suraklin wouldn’t want to call attention to the place—not this close to Angelshand, not this close to the manor at Devilsgate.”

  “He has Cerdic fetching his shoes for him,” Caris put in bitterly.

  “That’s only been since the end of September,” Joanna reminded him. “He was setting up the computer before then—pity you didn’t check Devilsgate for Suraklin’s marks when we were there.”

  “I did,” Antryg replied. “It was in the study, and quite old—twenty or thirty years—but it hadn’t been reactivated; at least it hadn’t then.” He looked around him again, scanning the matte dove-colored mist, the flattened cutouts of the trees that faded back into pencil tracings, streaked here and there with rust. “But I don’t feel anything and I don’t hear anything, except...” He frowned, his gray eyes narrowing behind his specs. But he only said softly, “Come on.”

  Caris slipped his sword sheathe from its sash, holding it loosely in his left hand, his right held ready at his side. Stained and blotched with weather and patched with coarse brown and butternut fustians, the dull purples and greens of Antryg’s coat and cloak seemed to blend uncannily with the fog as he moved away. Joanna followed, picking her way carefully over the carpet of frost-stiffened leaves.

  They shed their packs at the edge of the river, with the exception of Joanna’s ever-present backpack. The water was low, and a long series of crescent-shaped riffles like brown glass marked the ford. The island itself was invisible beyond a wall of fog. Caris cursed, and Antryg shook his head.

  “Use the shielding spells I taught you,” he breathed, pulling off his boots and hose and shivering as he kilted up the skirts of his long robe. “I’ll whistle if it’s safe.” He drew his sword and began to pick his way
gingerly down the ice of the bank. Over his shoulder he added softly, “If you hear a great deal of splashing, but no whistle, I suggest you look for another way across.”

  “Thanks,” Caris said bitterly as the wizard vanished into the grayish wall of water and mist.

  After what seemed like twenty minutes but which was, by Joanna’s digital watch, less than five, the sound of the wizard’s low whistle drifted across the smoky water. Feeling horribly like a character in a science fiction TV show (“Gee, the Captain’s vanished utterly so we’d better beam down the second-in-command to exactly the same coordinates to see what happened to him!”), Joanna pulled off her boots and rolled up the legs of her trousers, gritted her teeth, and waded into the icy river .38 in hand.

  But when the dark wall of the wooded bank materialized in the mists before her, only the solitary shape of Antryg was visible there. He was balanced on a rock above the water, still barefoot, she saw. He helped her up and ordered curtly, “Put your boots on.” Thankful for this display of male chauvinism, she obeyed, then stood guard while he did the same. At Antryg’s whistle, Caris appeared out of the fog a few moments later, shivering a little and tense as stretched rope. The fog seemed thicker here, as it naturally would, Joanna reminded herself, surrounded on all sides by water; the silence of the crowding black trees was frighteningly oppressive.

  “The island’s less than half a mile across,” Antryg remarked softly. “If Suraklin’s here, I suspect he knows by this time he’s got company, so I think we can dispense with the element of surprise.” As he spoke, Joanna felt upon her face the chilly brush of wind that seemed to come from nowhere, and gradually, gently, the fog began to drift and part. Over the water it remained thick, a rolling wall of white cobwebs, but before them trees emerged, scabby greenish elms and oaks whose coarse bark was nearly black with dampness, a wiry carpet of knee-deep sepia underbrush beneath their feet. Through the trees, startlingly close, rose the pale heads of the stone circle.