The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  He realized he was looking at Suraklin.

  Chapter XV

  “IT’S JUST THAT IT ISN’T FAIR!” Leynart turned, the snowy embroidery that laced his coat skirts glittering like frost with the movement of his caged pacing. With a passionate gesture, he strode back to the fire where his guests sat, and his words became indistinct to Caris once again.

  Caris had calculated that the boy’s fulsome welcome of the Prince and the two wizards would have given him time to take up his old hiding place behind the study curtains, had he chosen to, but caution warned him against it. It was one thing to spy upon the Regent, paranoid though he might be. It was another to spy upon Suraklin. Instead, he had carefully jammed the sneck of the study door so it would sit slightly ajar and had stationed himself in the disused alcove down the hall, listening for the steps of the four men as they passed. It was his guess that they would not risk the posting of a guard, for fear of the guard doing precisely what he did—listening. But any passing servant in the dark corridor would not know it.

  Through the crack he could see more of the room itself than he had before—dark-paneled in a fashion fifty years out of date, with a deeply coffered ceiling and heavy antique chairs. Its shelves were crowded with books whose titles Caris recognized from his days at the Mages’ Yard—tomes of wisdom and charlatanry ranked side by side. The resinous glow of fire and candles mingled along the edges of the Five Mystical Forms carved from polished hematite, objects of mathematical meditation which had become semi-sacred to one of the more crackpot schools of dog wizardry and gave a queer life to the statues of the twenty-one Old Gods, lurking like watchers among the books of what had once been their faith. Most people these days did not even know their names.

  Caris did. Aunt Min, possibly the oldest mage living and certainly the oldest at the Yard, was an Old Believer, though, like most of that discredited faith, she had only chellim, elaborately wrought slips of paper bearing the gods’ names, pasted to the walls of her little room and now grubby with age and cooking grease. So he knew most of them, those silent watchers of diorite, hematite, malachite, and jade, who guarded shelf and mantle and whose eyes seemed to move with the shadow of Leynart’s feverish stride.

  Suraklin remained seated in one of the gilt chairs near the fire, arms propped before him, hands clasped on level with his chin, and forefingers extended to touch his lips. Caris had often seen his grandfather sit so, though not, when he thought of it, back in the days of his childhood. He wondered now how he could possibly have been so stupid as not to realize something was amiss even then. If nothing else, the mocking glint of irony in those brown eyes should have told him long ago that his grandfather had ceased to be grandfather.

  But what, he wondered wearily, could he then have done?

  Leynart’s voice rose again, fighting for composure. “It isn’t that I begrudge her position, please don’t think that.” His tone was that of a man trying to be just against his every inclination. “But she doesn’t care for him. She can’t. She only wants his affection for the status it will give her, to fulfill some petty, bourgeois moralities. She’ll dull him, stultify him, make him miserable if he tries to please her...”

  “I always thought,” purred Suraklin, the very turn and inflection of his voice recognizable as accents Caris had heard in the Archmage’s, “that a provincial moneygrubber’s niece was hardly the proper choice for a man of Pharos’ stature, even were she virtuous, which of course she is not.”

  Only years of training let Caris suppress the smothering heatwave of anger and stifle the harsh draw of his breath. Wizards had sharp ears and a sixth sense of danger—spying on them could be unbelievably perilous. His only hope was that Suraklin’s mind was occupied with whatever scheme had brought him here and that the man was conceited enough to be at ease among these worshipful victims. The flame-flecked eyes did not even move Caris’ way.

  Pella had told him of her seduction by the wizard, though she was almost certain the child she carried was not his. For that, too, Caris hated the man. It occurred to him that he was within touching-distance of the end of his quest, only yards from the man he had sworn to kill. The butt of his pistol ground against his ribs; he had only to open the door...

  Except, of course, that the pistol was not na-aar. With even an instant’s warning, Suraklin could make it either misfire or blow up in his hand. The house was full of the Prince’s sasenna and household guards; Caris doubted that he would get away, and even if he did, where would he run? The resulting dragnet would pull in Antryg and Joanna. Then, truly, all hope would be at an end.

  All this passed through his mind in an eyeblink, as Suraklin went on, “No, Leynart, it isn’t wrong to begrudge her the Prince’s care. You aren’t taking anything away from her, you know. All you want, truly, is his recognition of your love—which in fact your loyalty deserves.” He moved his hand. Like a whipped hound eager for forgiveness, Magister Magus got hastily up from his unobtrusive seat in the shadows.

  It was the change in Magus that hurt Caris most, hurt and angered him, as if he had seen cruelty to an animal or a child. When he had been the man’s guest in Angelshand, he had despised Magus as a dog wizard who made his fortune while the mages at the Yard ate oatbread and worried about the leaks in their roofs. But the Magus had always dealt with him well, had taken care of Joanna when her presence under his roof had been a clear danger to him, and had helped her as much as he could. Seeing how the dapper little charlatan cringed when he approached his new master, Caris could guess how that fear had been instilled. Once Magus had been arrested, there had been no hope for him. Cerdic and his Spiritual Advisor were the only ones who could have saved him from the Inquisition—and Suraklin needed a slave who was a mage.

  “I have prepared this for you.” Suraklin held out his hand. Magus gave the wizard the box he carried, carved rosewood varnished like satin, then bowed and stepped back out of Caris’ line of sight. The Dark Mage opened it; Leynart and Cerdic looked within.

  “Wonderful!” Cerdic murmured ecstatically and reached into the box. “It’s fresh! Roses like this don’t even grow in Mellidane at this season...”

  “Whoa!” Suraklin drew the box back, laughing. “Don’t touch it, my lord, unless you look to become a good deal fonder of our Ley than you are now!”

  The Prince withdrew his hand hastily and put a few feet between him and the youth for good measure. Leynart bridled at the promptness of the gesture, and the wizard laughed again.

  “Of such stuff are bedroom farces made, my lord. It’s a simple enough spell, but effective.” A mocking gleam of amber danced catlike at the back of the brown eyes. “So have a care, Ley, unless you want suitors all over Kymil pounding down your door and snubbing poor Pella for no earthly reason whenever they see her. And incidentally, don’t touch it yourself, until the moment comes when you lay it upon his Grace’s pillow, where he shall sleep that night. Else all shall be for naught. Do you think you can do it?”

  The youth nodded. His dark ringlets, plum-black in the firelight, swung against his cheeks. “If you can get me to Kymil, my lord Gaire, as you say you can, before his Grace arrives, his Grace’s men will let me into his house.”

  “Trust me, my boy.” The warm brown eyes smiled into the blue. “As I trust you.” The wizard put out a hand and affectionately tucked a stray curl back into the dark mass of Leynart’s hair. His voice was gentle. “I’ve never had the taste for boys—but now I understand it. You’ll be in a position to wield a good deal of power, there on the steps of the throne, little lover. But I trust you’ll do so wisely.”

  “I want no power,” Leynart whispered, his cornflower eyes grave in their gilt and paint. “Only his love.”

  “Well spoken. And that you shall have.”

  So this, Caris thought sourly, was a love-spell—this harmless-sounding manipulation of the heart and the mind. To make Pharos snub his wife again and turn to this perfumed little catamite—to condemn Pella to lifelong humiliation...

&
nbsp; Part of Caris wondered why he should be angry. The thought of Pharos touching Pella, kissing her—the thought of her lying in those thin, flabby arms—had kept him sleepless for two nights. He ought to be thanking the boy. But he knew his meeting with the Dark Mage was very near now, and he knew he would not survive it. It was not fair to want to be the only love she would ever have.

  The Council was right, he thought, his whole body hurting with indecision and grief. Great and small, the affairs of humankind should be safe from meddling by those who had the power to do so. But in his mind he heard the cries of a newborn infant and felt the flash and throb of a tiny soul like primal fire, coming to life beneath his hands, and he did not know what he thought.

  Leynart knelt to kiss Suraklin’s hands. Beside the hearth, Cerdic was beaming like the bride’s mother at a wedding, no doubt thinking, Caris reflected cynically, that with this one coup he had guaranteed himself Heir in the place of those that Pharos would not beget. Or perhaps he was merely sentimentally pleased to be helping his young friend. Blind, fatuous fool.

  “Come.” Suraklin shut the box and handed it to Leynart with a glance at the ormolu clock. “It’s time. It must be before midnight, and there is something yet I must do here. Magus...”

  Caris slipped quickly away as Suraklin and the Magus turned toward the door. With all the silence of his long training, he glided back to the alcove, waited till he heard them pass, then drifted, silent as river mist, through the dim halls and out of the house. Without Pharos’ horror of the dark, Devilsgate was far less well lit than it had been; it proved an easy matter to conceal himself near the stable-yard as grooms brought out three horses, their breath floating in clouds of steam in the yellow flare of the stable lamps.

  Caris’ mind felt shaken, torn as a hound’s on a crossed scent. Everything else aside—Pella, the Regent, his doomed, frantic love—Suraklin was here at Devilsgate. Could Antryg have been wrong about the circle? Was the computer concealed somewhere underground, as Caris had guessed? For that matter, how close did it have to be to the actual node to drink the energy? As Antryg himself had said, all they had to go on was guesses and deduction. None of them, from start to finish, had one shred of actual proof. Antryg hadn’t spoken or worked with Suraklin in twenty-seven years. How would he or Joanna know what was and was not possible?

  Could the apparatus be concealed at Devilsgate itself?

  Reflected lamplight splattered over the wet gravel of the stableyard. He heard voices and Cerdic’s jolly laugh, then Suraklin’s voice, firm and deep: “My lord, forgive me for making you play groom, but in truth I dare not trust another.”

  They came around the corner of the stables, flanked by a servant with a torch. Cerdic, heedless of that servant or the watching grooms, fell to one knee and kissed the wizard’s hand. “Groom? I’ll put my hand under your foot to boost you to the saddle, did it please you, my lord.” Suraklin laughed, raised him to his feet, and clapped an affectionate hand on his shoulders while a footman hastened to sponge the yard mud from the Prince’s velvet knee.

  They were only facsimiles, Antryg had said, copied from what he had seen others sacrifice themselves for... But they were copied dazzlingly well.

  Heart pounding, Caris flattened himself back in the shadows of the coach-house door to watch, wondering desperately what to do. Suraklin, Cerdic, and Leynart mounted. The Prince took from one of the grooms a closed lantern—to maintain the fiction, Caris thought, that Suraklin, or Gaire as he was called, couldn’t call whatever light he wished or see in the dark. The three horses passed through the yard gate, their hooves crunching softly on the ice underfoot. Slipping from shadow to shadow, Caris glided in their wake. If he lost sight of the Dark Mage now, in all probability he’d never be able to locate him again—wizards were notoriously difficult to find. Yet he knew he was completely incapable of dealing with the wizard himself.

  I’m only a warrior! he thought. And out of practice, neglectful, indecisive of heart at that. I’m no match for him...

  Joanna had repeatedly asked, Why me? But she’d always been willing to take on Suraklin, the Inquisition, anyone...

  Whatever happens, at least I can witness it to tell Antryg. Soundless as a moth, he followed the bobbing gold splotch of lantern light across the vast gardens, into the woods, and along the narrow paths that led toward the dark stubble fields of the hedgerow country, and beyond that, the mist-shrouded river. The three men rode single file, Suraklin in the lead, the warm reflection of the lantern tipping his short brown curls and the fur collar of his greatcoat with gold. Cerdic, bringing up the rear and showing a surprisingly good seat on a horse, kept glancing behind him, though more, Caris thought, from nervousness about what people would say than from any real sense of being watched. Once they reached the woods, Caris kept easily out of sight, drifting from tree to stripped and rain-dark tree. Between Prince and wizard, Leynart said nothing, only clutched his precious spell-box to his chest and huddled deeper in this miniver cloak like a cold lapdog on a pillow. Overhead the clouds had grown thick; the scent of snow rode the wind.

  The riders took a roundabout path, changing direction frequently, but at last Caris heard the muffled whisper of the river and dimly glimpsed the white heads of the stones above the dark branches.

  The river was frozen nearly across; the horses’ hooves broke through the thin ice, splashing loud in the black water of the ford. On the island, Suraklin and Leynart dismounted, handing the reins to Cerdic. Caris crouched in the shadows of a copse of birches, and the sable hem of the Prince’s embroidered greatcoat all but brushed across his face as Cerdic rode back, lantern aloft now, still peering fearfully all around him. Suraklin, on the boulder where Antryg had stood, watched him for some moments, while Caris told himself firmly that he was sheltered in that direction from those darkness-piercing eyes.

  To cross the ford—to follow them to the circle and see what Suraklin did there—Caris would have to break cover. By the stars it was nearing midnight. Suraklin had spoken of something which must be accomplished by then, and the roundabout way they had taken here had nearly doubled their time. Did the computer come alive at midnight? Caris wondered. And in that case, would Antryg be drawn to the circle and walk into his trap?

  At last the wizard turned away, vanishing in the darkness almost at once. Still hugging his precious box to him, Leynart followed. There was a momentary blur of white stockings and hat-plumes in the underbrush, then nothing.

  Should he wait? Caris wondered. For how long? Whatever it was they had gone to the circle to do...

  He took a deep breath and stepped from his shelter.

  Cold and crisp, a voice from the woods at his back said, “Take him.”

  Caris swung around, sword leaping as of its own will to his hand. Dark forms he would have taken oath had not been there seemed to rise from the ground all around him, shadowy shapes, glittering steel. He slashed at one and it melted before his blade, cut at another, water splashing icy in his boots as he leaped to avoid the return slash. Steel grated on steel; at least some of his attackers were of human flesh and not illusion. In the woods he thought he glimpsed a slender form, the black splotch of a Van Dyke beard on a white face. He thought, Magister Magus, as movement from the corner of his eye made him spin to meet an attack. As an axe whizzed toward his head and he raised his sword to parry he thought, No sound of that one’s boots in the water...

  But by then it was too late. His turning to defend against the illusion cost him the moment to parry the real warriors on his other side. He cursed himself as a halberd hooked his feet from beneath him. Something struck his head as he fell. He had no recollection of hitting the stony bank.

  Fighting upward as if from black water, Caris thought, Magus hid his men by spells. If I’d been a true mage, I’d have seen them—if I’d been a true sasennan I’d have been more careful...Then he sank again into clouded dreams.

  He was in his grandfather’s house in the Mages’ Yard, in the narrow, low-raftered st
udy; light from the diamond-paned window fell across Salteris’ bald head where he sat before the dull black turrets of his tall desk. “Caris, please don’t think ill of me, please don’t run away,” the old man was saying softly. “Why do you believe that I allowed Suraklin to share my body, share residence in my mind, without my consent? We are guest-friends, my son, not captor and captive. He has let me come with him into immortality. You have no idea of the capacity of the human mind—there is room here for us all. I am not dead, Caris ...only my body that was finished anyway ...Does the butterfly mourn the chrysalis? Come.”

  He held out his hands, thin and strong, the blue veins standing out in the white flesh. His brown eyes were dark and gentle, coffee-colored, like Caris’ own, save for an amber gleam, like the spark of hidden coals, far back in their depths.

  Caris backed away from him, confused. He missed the old man, missed him desperately, all the mourning he had held bottled inside for months welling to the surface in a surge of blinding pain. The magic pounded in his veins, the power to help and heal; a forbidden power, indulged in like unsanctioned killing.

  As if he read his grandson’s mind, the old man murmured, “Caris, I can help you. I too am a healer. I too cared for the sick in secret—we all did. It lies in the palms of your hands.”

  Caris woke up sweating, smothered by a sense of panic. For an instant he thought he saw a silver scribble of light written on the wooden wall by the head of the bed where he lay, gleaming softly in the thin light of foggy dawn. Then he blinked, and it was gone.

  He lay back. His head ached, and his body felt chilled and shaken. A blanket covered him, thrown back by his restless tossings. His weapons were gone. By the slope of the ceiling, he guessed the room where he lay was in one of Devilsgate’s attics. The single window was barred; when he rose and approached it, he found himself shrinking with loathing at the thought of touching the frame or the glass.