The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  “Do you feel anything?” she whispered to Antryg, and he shook his head.

  “Not from the knees down, anyway,” he added ruefully. “There’s no sign of a roof among the stones—he can’t have left the thing in the open air. Let’s have a look, but I suspect all we’re going to find is a vacant lot.” On that irreverent remark he moved off through the trees toward the damp, bluish stone giants, but he did not, she noticed, sheathe his sword.

  The stone ring on Tilrattin Island was centuries empty, silent and overgrown with ivy and wild grape, but even so, something about it made the hair prickle on Joanna’s nape. She had seen the menhirs that made up the Devil’s Road, and the long tracks that crossed the Sykerst, some of them twelve and fifteen feet high—the bluestone monoliths of Tilrattin towered twenty feet high, dwarfing the humans who trod so warily beneath them. Standing within the innermost circle of trilithons, Joanna had the queer feeling that the ring was bigger than it was and that she stood in some huge courtyard surrounded by watching entities on the verge of speech. In its center, disturbingly reminiscent of that central chamber of Suraklin’s power, a circular pool of water reflected the colorless sky.

  “What was it?” she whispered, hardly daring to breathe. “What was it used for?”

  “Many things.” The frayed hem of his robe swishing wetly through the gray weeds, Antryg moved from stone to stone of the five great inner gates, passing his hands along their surfaces as he had that of the little menhir in the woods. Joanna thought she saw, ephemeral as the silver gleam of snail tracks in the daylight, the flicker of runes beneath his fingers. “Healing. At a node in the lines, a powerful mage could draw back life to the dying, back in the days when you wouldn’t be killed yourself for doing so. Listening. Drawing on the strength of the stones themselves.” His deep voice, always so flexible, had fallen to scarcely a whisper, as if he feared the stones themselves would hear. “They are ruinously old, Joanna. They pass power back and forth among themselves, like cells in a battery. They watch and they listen. They have seen so much that some of them are close to developing voices of their own.”

  “You mean they—they speak?” She followed him to one of the fallen stones of the outer of the three rings, crouched down as he knelt beside it in the dead bracken while Caris remained, forgotten, on one knee gazing into the mist-skimmed depths of the central pool.

  “Not to us.” The mad wizard pressed his palms to the pitted stone as he had to the menhir in the woods, bending his head down as if listening, until the long ends of his tangled gray hair brushed the damp rock. Light seemed to rise up through the stone, a wan foxfire galaxy of crossing lines—Sigils, runes, the marks of mages long dead, glowing palely for a few moments under the coarse winding sheet of lichen, then sinking back again into the stone’s secret heart. “To one another.” Antryg rose, and moved on to the next stone. “We don’t concern them much, though it’s still interesting to listen to what they have to say. It’s a mistake many wizards make to believe that their spells have no long-term cumulative effect upon their surroundings ...Caris!” He turned his head sharply. “Come away from there.”

  The young man looked up from the pool with a start. He got smoothly to his feet; his strides made barely a sound in the wet bracken.

  More gently, the wizard asked, “What did you see there?”

  Caris shook his head. “Nothing,” he lied. He looked gray and sick.

  Antryg tilted his head slightly to one side, studying him; the sasennan’s brown eyes avoided his. After a moment Caris asked in a muffled voice, “They used that pool for divining the future, didn’t they?”

  Like the touch of black silk in the misty cold, Antryg said, “It took a great deal of power to get a true reading. It always does, with water. Most people just see lies, if they see anything at all.”

  The young man looked at him for a moment longer, an orthodox and unwilling pupil to this half-deranged mentor in his diamond earrings and scruffy cavalry coat. It seemed as if he would speak, but he only nodded and turned away. After a time he said, “Could Suraklin have his headquarters underground? Under the island?”

  Antryg shook his head. “The digging would have been far too noticeable and too recent to have covered the signs. Suraklin’s plan has been in preparation for some time, but the physical assembly of it—the computer, the teles-relay, and the conversion mechanism perfected by Narwahl Skip-frag—only took place in the last several months. No, we can only wait—there’s a ruined chapel on the far bank of the river—until the next time the power relays come up. From here we can take a sighting along the lines ...I can’t believe it’s at the Citadel of Wizards itself...”

  Caris swung around, slamming the side of his fist into the nearest stone with a sudden explosion of pent violence. His dark eyes blazed, his voice shook with the strain of being released, once again, from the death-fight for which he must still hold himself ready. “And what then?” he almost shouted. “Take a month to journey through the taiga forest in the dead of winter and knock on the gates pretending to be wandering tinsmiths?”

  Almost before the words were finished Antryg flung up one bent-fingered hand for silence. In the eerie hush Joanna could hear nothing but the distant mutter of the water beyond the trees, but Antryg and Caris both stood frozen, listening.

  Caris breathed, “I don’t...”

  “Sasenna,” Antryg murmured. “Mounted parties, big ones, on both sides of the river, by the sound of it—and coming this way.”

  The young man’s face hardened, and his grip tightened over the sheath of his sword. “Then we’ve been betrayed.”

  Chapter XIV

  JOANNA WHISPERED, “IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN PELLA.”

  As Caris steadied her down the last few feet of rope, he could feel her shaking all over. Though he would rather have died than admit it, his own hands weren’t too steady either. He wasn’t sure whether the place Antryg had picked for concealment from the approaching troops wasn’t worse than an open fight. It had certainly required far more nerve.

  “Who else could it have been?” He wanted to shout the words, furious at her naive trust and at his own. Though the energy-lines would have brought him warning long before they were anywhere in earshot, he strained his ears to catch any sound of the troop’s return through the now-impenetrable blanket of fog that muffled the island. “They couldn’t have seen us approaching—not in this fog—and we hid our tracks. Besides, they were on both banks of the stream. They knew we were here...”

  “Did they?” The double line of rope that dangled against the clammy stone side of the nearest great trilithon shook, and Antryg shinnyed down neatly from the eiderdown masses of cloud-cover only a few feet above their heads.

  The sasenna—several dozen of them, by the sound—had searched the circle and the entire island with unenthusiastic thoroughness, but it had never occurred to any of them to look above their heads, where the vast lintels of the trilithons loomed invisible on their twenty-foot supports. When Antryg had scrambled cautiously up a leaning stone and made that heart-stopping jump across to the nearest of the five monster gateways of the innermost circle, Caris had had to forcibly remind himself that the stones had been standing for thousands of years and were far too heavy and firmly set in the earth to be overbalanced by one man’s weight. But climbing the rope and lying down at Joanna’s side on the four-foot-wide stone lintel had turned his stomach, though in fact the lintel had been as firm as a floor. It was a four-foot jump to the next trilithon. He still didn’t know how Antryg had gotten the nerve to do that.

  Antryg drew on one end of the doubled rope, winding it neatly around his hands. “They searched the circle and the island, yes, but they’re searching the woods as well—” His brisk movements paused, and he seemed to slide momentarily into something like a listening trance, “—out past the Devil’s Road.”

  Caris half shut his eyes, trying to block from his mind his immediate surroundings—the dense, clinging fog and the iron-colored shapes of
the looming stones—trying to hear out beyond the far banks of the river. He hadn’t the power, but did not doubt for a moment that the mad sorcerer beside him did. “But they know we’re somewhere in the land,” he whispered. “They were expecting us, and they very nearly had us...”

  “That doesn’t mean it was Pella,” Joanna responded coolly, falling into step with him as they began their cautious return to the ford. Her voice was very quiet in the deep hush of the fog-bound woods. “Don’t think that because you want it so badly it has to be flawed, Caris.”

  He lengthened his stride, furious at this little mouse of a woman who had never done anything in her life, not caring that she couldn’t keep up...

  Her small hand seized the end of his sword sheathe, checking him. When he swung around on her in blazing wrath she continued, “That’s what I did.”

  It stopped him. For a moment they stood in the dripping underbrush, brown eyes looking into brown, and Caris felt his quick anger cool to bitter slag as he understood that she was right. Hate himself though he might, he realized also that some perverse part of him had wanted it to be true. Then at least he would have been able to justify to himself turning his back on his greatest joy to walk into death.

  She went on, “We weren’t exactly inconspicuous traveling through the Sykerst. After programming in binary for months, Suraklin’s got to be able to put two and two together...”

  Caris shook his head, his whole soul hurting. What she said was true, he thought, but she had not seen what he had seen in the gray waters of the divining pool within the circle. He turned, and Joanna followed him more slowly down to where Antryg waited by the ford.

  “She could have been tricked,” he said, pulling off his boots. “We both know Suraklin is good at that kind of thing.”

  To that Joanna could make no possible reply. The fog was thicker now, summoned back by Antryg as easily as he had sent it earlier away. But listening through it, Caris could hear no sound from the riverbank, invisible beyond its white wall. He waded across, whistled softly, and stood shivering with cold and impatience until the thin little woman appeared wading out of the brown silk waters and mist.

  He put on his boots as soon as Joanna had waded across to stand guard and located the packs where they had left them concealed. The long, thickly quilted coat of the Prince Regent’s sasenna, left behind in anticipation of action in the circle, would cover the lack of insignia on his uniform while he asked information. With as many troopers as it would take to search the area Antryg claimed was under scrutiny, they shouldn’t all know one another.

  “Where are you going?” Joanna asked, shivering violently as she pulled on her boots while he stood guard.

  “The manor,” he replied. “Whatever’s happening, they’ll use that as headquarters. I can listen there...”

  “Try to steal some food if you can,” Antryg put in cheerfully, scrambling up the icy bank, looking for all the world as if he’d just been on a holiday outing, except for the sword unsheathed in his hand. “I’m deathly sick of waybread and hardtack.”

  His soul one well of black pain—at the possibility of betrayal, at what he had glimpsed in the pool—Caris fought the momentary urge to strike him. But in spite of Antryg’s clownish gangliness, Caris had seen the wizard fight and wasn’t entirely certain he’d even be able to land a blow.

  “There’s a ruined chapel on the far bank of the river, down about a mile and a half and inland four hundred and twenty strides or so, in a grove of laurels,” the wizard went on. “If the sasenna are still searching the woods on that side of the river, we’ll fall back to the little range of hills about ten miles north and wait for you on the hill on the west bank of the Spelding Stream. Two stones fifty feet from the camp mean it’s safe by day—two fires if you don’t get there till after dark. Whistle like a nightingale before you come in. All right?”

  Caris nodded ungraciously. Whatever else might be said of the mad wizard—and a great deal certainly could—at least he understood a sasennan’s evasion procedure. “I’ll be there.”

  The crooked hand in its half-fingered glove sketched a sign in the air. “Good luck.”

  It was an old kitchen-magic spell Caris’ grandmother had used to keep cakes from collapsing in the oven. Coming at this moment, from one who had been the Dark Mage’s pupil and was universally acknowledged as one of the greatest mages in the world, it cracked the wall of Caris’ anger and grief and made him laugh in spite of himself. “Don’t tell me you believe in that!”

  The wizard grinned back. “Oh, I believe in everything.” He threw the corner of his cloak around Joanna’s shoulders; like ghosts the two of them faded into the fog.

  During his earlier stay at Devilsgate Manor, Caris had made mental notes of the layout and approaches to the grounds. Naked with winter, the thin screens of trees and the little ornamental groves that dotted the gardens between the woods and the house walls of granite and rose-red brick offered little concealment. The gardens themselves lay like a peasant’s patchwork of umbers and sepias within the spiky enclosures of knee-high box hedges, offering an almost uninterrupted field of vision from the silvery glass of the windows. Here on the higher ground, the river fog had thinned to a mere vaporish white cast to the sky.

  Against the fallow, liver-colored earth, the uniforms of the men who moved through the garden beds stood out in harsh splashes—the black of sasenna, flashing with the glint of gold braid and the blood-crimson of the Prince Regent’s personal guard.

  In the woods beyond the stables, Caris folded up his spyglass and settled back against the warty bark of the elm beneath which he sat.

  So the Regent was coming to Devilsgate.

  That would explain the troops searching the woods for half a day’s walk in any direction, whose sign Caris had crossed again and again on his way to the manor. Pharos was said to fear and suspect everyone and everything. Joanna’s first, disastrous, encounter with the de facto ruler of the Empire of Ferryth had stemmed from the Regent’s insistence upon having any house he entered searched and surrounded before he would set foot over the threshold.

  But the old-fashioned manor was Cerdic’s home, two days’ journey from Angelshand. The Regent was certainly spiteful enough simply to take it away from his cousin on general principles; nevertheless, Caris felt uneasy. What he had seen in the divining well on Tilrattin Island still echoed in his mind, like the harsh, ambiguous note of an iron gong. At the time he had the impression that what he had seen was at Larkmoor, but he realized it could just as easily have been here. The thought turned him cold with anger and hopeless dread.

  Was that what I saw? he wondered bleakly. That he lied to her, deceived her?

  In his heart he hoped that it was. That was, in a way, the lesser of his fears.

  Along the pale streak of road between the gray cutouts of the trees an outrider came cantering, his coat gaudy as outseason poppies against the colorless afternoon. Caris knew what his coming heralded. He rose cautiously to his feet, making sure he was out of clear sight of the house, and began his slow drift through the rim of the woods, edging along the knotted knees of tree roots where he could keep above the frost-stiff mats of leaves between, covering his tracks carefully where he could not. In another hour, he calculated, it would begin to get dark. That should offer some concealment as he crossed the vast brown spaces of the empty gardens toward the house itself.

  A marble gazebo of the sort popular forty years ago stood amid the open lawns to the west of the house; through his spyglass Caris had glimpsed the gold flash of sleeve-braid in its trellised shadows and the glint of a watcher’s glass. He approached the house from the stables on the east; with his own glass, he watched the point at which the half-mile drive from the main road cleared the trees. When at long last the dark bulk of the Prince Regent’s carriage appeared, its lamps primrose in the gathering darkness, Caris folded up his glass, straightened his quilted coat, strode boldly across the open space between the woods and the stable, and thence
along the drive to the house. Sasenna and guards from all quarters of the grounds were converging on the front of the house to greet their master. Those that saw Caris as he entered the kitchen quarters questioned him no more than they questioned one another. Unerringly, he passed along the halls to his chosen destination and place of concealment.

  A fire had been kindled in the room that had been Prince Cerdic’s study. The long curtains of crimson velvet had been drawn over the north-facing windows, cutting out the sight of the dark teeth of the Devil’s Road against the dun-colored hills. Pharos hated the thought of being spied upon. Caris settled himself into a window embrasure, one of his dirks unsheathed in his hand.

  He was prepared to wait for hours, if need be. But a servant came almost at once, lighting a holocaust of candles in every holder and sconce in the room—Pharos abhored the darkness—and Caris felt a twinge of satisfaction that he had guessed aright. In a short while he heard the distant vibration of doors opening and closing and the rattle of the carriage teams being led around to the stables. Then, faint but approaching, high heels clicked on the parquet of the floor.

  Caris had already arranged a small parting in the curtains, natural as a dark fold in the heavy velvet. Through it he saw a man enter from the shadows of the hall; from Joanna’s description he must be the Regent’s bodyguard Kanner, well over six and a half feet tall, scarred, ugly, and armed to the teeth. A former sasennan, Caris remembered, Kanner had been made deaf by a high fever and, instead of killing himself as sasenna did when they became physically flawed, he had recanted his vows to remain as Pharos’ servant.

  Immediately behind him walked a handsome, fresh-faced boy of seventeen or so in white velvet and far too many pearls, and behind him, like a dainty flame of black and gold in the refulgent light, minced the Regent himself, Pharos Giraldus of the House of Destramor, pervert, sadist, and Pella’s rightful husband and lord.