The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  Fear-spells. Of course, he thought bitterly. Suraklin had known all the time he was being watched. He’d called Magus aside, given him time to set the trap at the ford by that drawn-out journey, set up this prison...

  If they had taken him prisoner, he thought, it meant Suraklin had a use for him.

  The thought turned his blood cold.

  Or—had his dream been right? Had Suraklin found, instead of a selfish immortality that raped his victims of body and mind, a means of carrying them forward with him?

  Caris shook his head, pushing the thought away as absurd. Why would Suraklin bother? He had already shown he would kill without compunction.

  Yet within him, Caris was conscious of a nagging itch to talk to the Dark Mage, to ask him...

  Ask him what? he demanded of himself in disgust. It was only Suraklin’s influence, whispering to his mind. He wondered suddenly if this was how the wizard had lured Magus’ mind to his, how he had lured Salteris’?

  Antryg, Caris thought. He’ll know by now I’m missing. How long before he attempts to find me?

  Or has he already tried and been caught? His heart beat faster with dread.

  A quick look around his prison served to tell him the room was utterly bare, barred, containing nothing but the bed on which he had lain, a covered latrine bucket, and a small table which bore a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. Being at the top of the house, the room itself was fairly warm; outside he could see patches of new-fallen snow on the slaty roofs of the laundry and buttery wing. He touched the bread, found it fresh, that morning’s. Hungrily, he broke a piece from it, then hesitated.

  He set it down again and smelled the water in the pitcher. There was no scent of drug, but he remembered he was dealing with a wizard.

  He had no experience with these sneakier tricks, the spells to deceive and sway the mind, for they were utterly illegal, unknown to the wizards he had served. Nevertheless he set both bread and water aside.

  It was one of the longest days Caris had ever spent. The daylight was the livid yellow-brown of snow, which occasionally fell, thin as sifted flour, from a sky which seemed neither bright nor dark. His head ached. Not knowing how late in the morning it had been when he had come to, he found it even more difficult to estimate time. Sometimes he could hear movement in the house below him, the comings and goings of the Prince’s sasenna, and now and then a servant’s voice.

  He wondered how long it would be, before Suraklin came up to see him.

  When the draining deadness began, the leaden depression that told him that Suraklin’s mechanical brain was in operation again, his captivity became a thousand times worse. Part of him thought bleakly, So it is here. In the circle, or here in the house itself... Most of him simply did not care. He was hungry and thirsty by that time; with the numbing of his mind he craved even the small activity of eating. The depression whispered to him that it didn’t matter whether the food and drink were drugged or not—Suraklin would have him anyway. At last, unable to stand the temptation any more, he tore the bread in pieces, threw it in the latrine bucket, and poured the water from the pitcher out onto the floor.

  They’d said that Antryg had spent a good deal of his time in the Tower pounding on the walls with his broken hands and screaming. Lying white-knuckled on the bed, Caris knew exactly how he had felt. If this goes on... he thought.

  But it would go on. There was an increasing probability that it would go on, literally, forever. Antryg and Joanna would go to the circle to take their bearing and walk straight into Suraklin’s trap.

  Despair at their naivete, at his own stupidity, and at the hopelessness of his fate drowned him like a velvet wave. They would be killed, he would be enslaved, Pella would be condemned to a living hell of mockery and derision, and what did it matter, anyway?

  He slept, and Salteris sat on the foot of his cot and whispered to him in his dreams.

  The sliding back of the door bolt was so soft that, had he been sleeping even normally—and he was, as all sasenna come to be, a light sleeper—he would not have heard it. But after the passing away of the grayness, his dreams had changed. The despair faded again into images of his grandfather, kindly, gentle, speaking of how they had all misunderstood Suraklin’s intent, while that amber glint of mockery flickered somewhere in the coffee-dark eyes. Troubled, Caris tried to pull clear of the dream. Once he managed to open his eyes, and thought he saw again the wizard’s mark gleaming on the wall near the bed in the semi-dark. But the dreams were strong, dragging him down like the sodden weight of river weeds. Dimly he wondered how long he would last.

  But the slight whisper of slipping iron pierced his consciousness like the first drip of rain from a leaking roof. He was fully awake and poised to spring, a straight leap from bed to door, even as it opened and Antryg drifted through.

  Caris aborted the leap half-made, but he could see his lunatic mentor had been ready for it. Antryg touched his lips, signaling silence, and beckoned with his huge gray eyes. Outside the window the sky was deepening toward final dark. Within, lamps would be kindling.

  “Hold your breath as we go through the main attic,” Antryg whispered, and Caris nodded, not asking why. In the attic outside, a lamp had been lit, illuminating the table where two sasenna slept over a spread of cards. Four more had rolled, unconscious, from various hiding places. A double-baited trap, Caris thought as they moved swiftly through the hazy scrim of lamp smoke, pausing only long enough for Caris to collect a sword. They were expecting a rescue. Suraklin didn’t need me at all, except as bait.

  “An opium compound in the lamp-oil,” the wizard breathed, as they descended the attic stairs, holding close to the wall so the risers did not creak. “Part of my medical satchel. The woods are simply stiff with sasenna—not the Regent’s, either...”

  “Cerdic’s.” Caris kept his voice to a subvocal wind-murmur as they glided along the upstairs hall. “How did you get in?”

  “Thank goodness for the sins of bygone Emperors; there’s a stair from the master bedroom to a passage that runs out to that marble gazebo. From the way the guards are positioned I think they’re expecting me to fire the stables by way of diversion. Did you know the Empress Chananda was credited with having forty-seven lovers during the time that her husband was keeping her prisoner here because of her debauchery? Here we are.”

  “Antryg, Suraklin’s...”

  Caris never afterward could decide what warned Antryg—whether it was natural caution or the magic that allows mages to see other mages in spite of cloaking spells. As his fingers touched the painted porcelain door handle the mad wizard suddenly turned, leaping aside as he thrust Caris back. The narrow corridor echoed with the whopping crash of a crossbow, and the iron bolt came slamming from the shadows at the far end of the passage, punching through the door panels where Antryg’s back had been an instant before. On second look—and Caris knew he had seen no one there a split moment before—Caris saw the figure at the turn of the hall near the stair, dapper in its full-skirted dark coat, the pale green eyes wide and gleaming like a cat’s in the dark.

  Antryg cried, “Magus, no!” as the little dog wizard threw the crossbow aside with a clash on the parquet floor and pulled a double-barreled pistol from his coat.

  The Magus hesitated for an instant, grief and shame contorting his white face. He whispered, “I’m sorry, Antryg,” and leveled the pistol at his friend’s chest.

  At the same moment Caris glimpsed a shadow on the staircase behind the Magus, a blurred impression of emerald velvet and straggly blond curls, Joanna in the uniform of one of Cerdic’s pages ...Even as the pistol cocked she had her arm up, and flung something with all her strength at the Magus’ back.

  Caris heard the tap of it, no louder than if she’d thrown a clot of horse dung, but the result was astounding. The Magus screamed as if she’d thrust a knife in his spine, flung up his arms, and in that one bought second Caris had covered the distance between them. The brief, tangled fight with illusion at the ford
was in his mind, and the long agony of the day, as he grabbed a handful of superfine coat front; the hollow crack of the Magus’ head hitting the paneling seemed to shake the house.

  Downstairs men were shooting.

  Antryg flung open the bedroom door. “Come on!”

  Caris bent to scoop up whatever it was that Joanna had thrown, even as the girl reached for it; before his hand could touch it he jerked back, realization slamming him like the butt-end of a barge pole in the stomach—he almost threw up with shock. It was the Sigil of Darkness.

  Joanna caught it up, shoving it back into its protective lead wrappings and into her backpack as she sprang over Magus’ limp body and ran for the bedchamber door. As he followed her, Caris saw the stains of lampblack on her velvet jacket sleeves—she must have disguised herself as a page to take up the poisoned lamp to the sasenna who lay in wait.

  “He would have killed you...” She flung a last hurt look over her shoulder as Antryg yanked open the section of dark linenfold paneling near the head of the bed.

  “Suraklin,” Caris gasped. “He made the Magus a slave—they were all here together...”

  “Suraklin was here?!” In the darkness of the little cubbyhole behind the panel, Antryg’s gray eyes flared wide with shock. An instant later he was plunging down the narrow stair ahead of them into blackness, suffocatingly hot from the chimney against which it ran.

  “But he couldn’t be!” stammered Joanna. “The computer was up...”

  “It has to be in the house.” Caris’ shoulder brushed the coarse plaster of the wall as they rounded a turn. “He was out at the circle last night; if you didn’t trip over him taking a reading today, this is the only place it could be...”

  Patched coat skirts swirling, Antryg stopped abruptly at the bottom of the stairs, caught Caris by the shoulder, and thrust him against the warm brick of the wall. In the frosty gleam of the witchlight that hung above his head his dilated eyes seemed almost silver. Soft as it was, his deep voice echoed against the close, earth-smelling arch of the low roof. “And did you speak to him?”

  Caris shook his head. Even a few days ago he would have been furious at the implied mistrust; now he understood. “They—Suraklin and Leynart—had already gone to the circle on the island when Magus took me. I don’t know what they were doing there, whether Suraklin wanted me for bait or to use me, whether he came back here or not...”

  “Did you eat or drink anything,” Antryg asked quietly, “whilst you were there?”

  “No.” Caris swallowed hard at the evil recollections. “There was bread and water. I threw them away. The room was marked—I had dreams...”

  Antryg sighed. “So have we all.” Turning, he led the way into the narrow, dirt-smelling tunnel that stretched away into darkness before them.

  “But if Suraklin was here,” Joanna protested, hitching her backpack up onto her shoulders and hurrying at his heels, “the computer has to be somewhere near, and not...”

  “Not necessarily,” the wizard said, striding ahead of them, his sheathed sword gripped sasenna-fashion in his left hand. “Theoretically it could be at any node in the lines. The lines—the energy-tracks—used to be called witchpaths, though few remember anymore how to use them. As it happens, Suraklin was one of the few. He could have walked from Kymil to the circle in a night, and walked back in another...”

  “Kymil!” Leynart’s words came back to him, with the glow of the study hearth and the glint of the forgotten gods’ watching eyes. “Leynart said Suraklin could get him to Kymil before Pharos reached there. Suraklin gave him a love-charm, a rose...”

  “Specializing in it these days, isn’t he?” inquired Joanna viciously.

  Bitterly, he said, “Of course it’s to Cerdic’s advantage to make sure the Regent has a boy and not a woman in his bed.”

  “Don’t be naive.” Antryg paused at the foot of a steep stair, almost a ladder, his tangled gray curls tugged by the draft from the outer air. “That was a smallpox rose. It’s a favorite trick of his. It will trigger an epidemic so virulent it will take out Pharos, Pella, Leynart, most of their household, and a sizable portion of the population of Kymil in the most innocent possible fashion, coincidentally leaving our clean-handed and horrified Cerdic with Regency over his imbecile uncle. When we hit the open air, make for the woods—with luck they’ll all be converging on the house.” The witchlight that illuminated the tunnel faded. Joanna, who could not see in darkness as Caris could, took a handful of the mage’s patched and ragged cloak as they mounted the narrow twist of the hidden stair.

  The gardens above them were alive with sasenna. For a moment they paused in the gazebo, like a miniature marble temple with its fluted columns and domed roof, the dancing rush of light from the guards’ torches splashing over their faces through the lattice of last year’s trellised vines. The woods were over a hundred yards away with no more cover than was offered by the knee-high brown hedges that defined the fallow beds. Caris felt his stomach sink.

  “Don’t run,” murmured Antryg’s deep, confident voice. “Stride as if you knew where you were going and make for the woods. With luck they’ll take us for other sasenna...”

  “Are you...” began Caris, and switched it to, “Not in those robes they won’t.”

  “I’ll have a cloaking spell over us—Joanna, you’re going to have to keep up. Once someone notices there’s something amiss, we can’t get the illusion back.”

  “Sort of like being in love.” She grinned wryly and gave her backpack an extra hitch.

  “Less painful in the long run,” he replied, with the swift flicker of a smile and, cloak swirling, strode down the pink marble steps and across the dark paths of the garden.

  They made it less than thirty feet. “There!” shouted a voice. Turning his head, Caris saw Magister Magus come running from the house, twenty sasenna and guards at his heels. “Kill them!”

  Antryg grabbed Joanna by the arm, leaped a knee-high hedge, and bolted across a brown sward, Caris running, naked sword in hand, at his heels. Around them in the darkness warriors were plunging out of the gloom, white markings dancing on their black uniforms, pale faces above the grass-green of Cerdic’s household troops. Dim starlight flickered across drawn swords, pistol barrels dark with smoking and scratched with the signs of na-aar, the wicked barbed tips of crossbow bolts, closing around them like a tightening noose of razors. From the darkness of the woods far ahead Caris saw others emerging and knew they were trapped.

  Seeing their way blocked, Antryg stumbled to a halt. As Caris took his stance beside him, sword in hands, he glanced back and saw the wizard’s face in the darkness suddenly haggard and ill. The ring of sasenna was thirty yards away, closing, metal glittering in the moonlight. In Antryg’s eyes was the despair of a man whom Fate has defeated against everything that he could do. Wretchedly, he whispered, “Oh, hell.” Sheathing his sword, he thrust it into the sash at the waist of his threadbare green coat. “Hand me the flashlight, would you, Joanna?”

  Caris, settling into fighting stance in the bitter knowledge of useless death, looked back at him and said, “What?”

  As calmly as if he were back at the ruined chapel, Antryg was unscrewing the flashlight’s bulb, tinkering with the cylinder’s innards. In the advancing glare of the torches his eyes, behind their rounds of cracked glass, were invisible, but his mouth, usually flexible and silly as a rubber doll’s, was suddenly hard and set.

  There was a faint zap and hiss, the whiff of ozone as the batteries sparked...

  And the spark leaped like tame lightning, tiny, vicious, living, between Antryg’s forefinger and thumb.

  He held it up before his eyes, the fey purplish light of it for a moment illuminating the lean, ridiculous nose, the tangled hair, the tawdry beads, and the claw-scarred cheekbones that seemed so delicate in that absurd face. Like a physical impact, realization hit Caris and understanding of what was going to happen.

  Since he had first met Antryg, when he was a child of six, and l
ater, when he had encountered the genial madman chatting of tortoise-shell rubbings and playing cat’s cradle in the Silent Tower, he had known by reputation alone that he was a wizard. Though he had learned magic from him, he had never seen him display power of any kind, save in little things that he himself could do. Insensibly, he had come to think of him chiefly as a scatterbrained and devious lunatic, his maddening mentor, Joanna’s lover, cheerfully pursuing a quixotic quest from which he could not hope to emerge alive.

  He had almost forgotten that this man had been Suraklin’s chosen student.

  He remembered it now, as Antryg raised his hand, the spark still nickering, an inch and a half of baby lightning between thumb and finger.

  Uncertain, the advancing sasenna slowed their rush. The wind caught Antryg’s cloak and coat skirts in a bat-wing swirl, edged in that crackling glow. Caris, seeing that drawn face, the serene mouth, and the pain-filled, grief-haunted eyes, understood—it was a face of unhuman power, the most powerful wizard in the world, Salteris—Suraklin—had said, including myself...

  A voice screamed, “Kill them!” and the ring closed.

  Antryg’s arm lashed down. As if he had a whip in his hand the lightning elongated, shattering out from his twisted fingers to smite the earth at his feet and show his face like a demented god’s in the streaming mane of his gray hair. From the ground, the lightning sprang upward, vicious, living, swelling to a whirlwind in which Caris could see eyes, teeth, whips, claws, too bright to look upon in the exploding darkness. In a column of blinding fire it leaped from earth to sky, the sasenna still rushing toward them, as it was the Way of Sasenna to do, unflinching...

  Whatever had taken shape within the lightning fell upon them, and the screaming began.

  Blinded, shaken, shattered, Caris was aware of nothing else until a hand like an iron claw shut around his arm and he was nearly dragged off his feet by strength he never knew Antryg had. The wizard held Joanna by the other arm, dragging them both at a run within yards of the howling electric maelstrom, through the break in the lines of the sasenna it had caused, and across the huge darkness of the gardens, while the shrieks and cries behind them ripsawed the night. As he ran, Caris caught a glimpse of Antryg’s face and saw it was like cut bone, a dead man’s face; in his gray eyes was a terrible darkness over half a lifetime deep.