No one pursued them through the woods.
The ford was frozen, the river stilled. Snow lay thinly everywhere on the island, save upon the circle itself. Their feet slipped in it as they climbed the graveled slope of the riverbank. Antryg stumbled as they reached the circle, as if all the strength had gone out of him, and leaned against the bluish granite of the outer ring, his face as gray as the stone. He whispered, “They never had a chance.”
“Neither had we,” Caris gritted through his teeth.
The wizard pressed his gloved hands together against his face, as if by doing so he could still their shaking; a spasm of shuddering wracked him, bowing his whole body. Behind the broken fingers Caris saw the hard glitter of tears.
More gently, he said, “It was them or us.”
Antryg nodded, but his wretched sobbing did not cease. He had sinned, Caris knew, in the true sense of the word. Whether it had been necessary or not to protect them long enough to encompass Suraklin’s defeat, the fact remained that he had turned his magic upon those unable to defend against it.
“An elemental?” Joanna asked softly, and Caris glanced back at her.
“How did you know?”
“They say Suraklin used to call them. I think he called one to destroy Narwahl Skipfrag, when Skipfrag caught him trying to remove his electrical experiments from his laboratory. From me look of it he used broken glass to clothe it, to make its substance.”
Leaning against the stone, Antryg nodded and raised his head as if against the weight of some terrible yoke. “He could use anything,” he murmured. “It was the only thing that would—would remain when we had left the area and that Magus couldn’t brush aside.” His breath blew from his lips in pale steam in the cold traces of glimmering moonlight that were able to pierce the clouds; he had taken off his spectacles. Tear tracks shone on his ravaged face. “They had no magic—most of them probably didn’t even believe in it.” He was shaking as if naked in a place of bitterest cold.
“You can’t think about that,” Caris said quietly.
Antryg shook his head, agreeing without the horror or the grief in his eyes abating one degree.
Joanna said softly, “They’ll be coming after you now, won’t they? The Council can find you...”
“Hence the circle.” The wizard raised his head again and, with trembling fingers, pushed back the hair from his face. He looked spent, more weary than Caris had seen him except perhaps in the Tower after they’d put the Sigil of Darkness on him, all the colored fires of his absurd courage burned to ash by what he had done. “The other mages will guess I’ve used the wizard’s path, but it will take them a while to guess where I’ve gone, and longer to follow. It’s only a matter of time now, but then it has always been.” He moved his shoulders against the cold slab, pushing himself to a standing position once again, his whole body moving slowly, achingly, like an old man’s.
“Antryg, listen,” Caris said quietly. “You and Joanna have to go to Suraklin’s headquarters, wherever it is. I understand that—especially now, while he’s in Kymil with Leynart. But Kymil is where I have to go. If what you say about the smallpox-rose is true, I have to stop Leynart before he delivers it. Does one have to be a mage to use the path? Would I have the power...”
“No,” Antryg said simply. “But it doesn’t matter. While the computer was up, Joanna and I came here to the circle and took a bearing along the line. The energy is flowing back to Kymil.”
Caris stared at him, digesting this information, the implications sinking in... “But we went all through Suraklin’s Citadel,” he protested. “We looked—You looked. That’s impossible.”
“I know.” Antryg replaced his spectacles on his nose, gingerly avoiding the healing wounds of the Dead God’s claws. The ghost of his old lunatic grin brushed his lips. “But that’s never prevented me from doing things before. Now come—it’s growing late.”
Chapter XVI
THE STRANGEST THING about traveling the Witchpath was that there seemed to be nothing strange about it. Though intensely cold, the, night was clear. Only a layer of ground fog clung like white smoke about the feet of the menhirs as Antryg led his two companions across the circle and under one of the great trilithons, and Joanna, clinging apprehensively to Antryg’s hand, shivered and looked around her, waiting for the magic to begin.
Only it did not begin. Antryg simply walked, holding her by the hand and Caris by the arm, along the aisle of broken menhirs. Beyond in the darkness Joanna could see the dark shapes of trees and the occasional patches of snow shining faintly through the gloom. A scrim of light clung like a thin frost about some of the stones nearest them; that was all. She wondered if Antryg would be able to overcome his revulsion at what he had done enough to work the magic that would carry them south. But looking up at him, she dared not speak. His face was set and very tired, his eyes seeming to look inward on some pit of haunted memory. The shimmer of the stones caught like starfire in his earrings, on the gimcrack tangle of his beads, and on the tears that still marked his face.
Give him time, she thought, wondering apprehensively how much time they had. Give him time.
It was only when they had been walking for twenty-five minutes by Joanna’s digital watch and had still not reached the river—at best a hundred feet from the edge of the circle—that she understood. They were on the path already. The magic breathed so softly from the menhirs that neither she nor Caris could detect it. Only Antryg, walking silent between them, knew it was there.
“Can all wizards do this?” Caris asked quietly, and Antryg, at the request for specific information, seemed to rouse himself a little from the dreadful isolation in which he was trapped. “Or could they once?”
“Not all, no.” The mage pushed up his spectacles to rub the smudgy circles weariness had painted beneath his eyes. “How to use them for travel was never knowledge held by more than a few, even in the old days before the Battle of Stellith. How they work, what they are, why journeys along them always take the length of the night, provided they are begun before midnight, why one doesn’t sleep on the path, and can’t do so, in fact, and why at certain seasons of the year they must not be traveled at all...
“There are legends, stories, conflicting accounts. I—I sense things about them, as I sense things about the Void, that I can’t put into words. But I have no proof.”
Joanna looked out beyond the line of light-edged monoliths and wondered where she would find herself if she stepped through one of those weedy gaps. She had, however, no intention of trying. Though the stones leaned tiredly, weatherworn and obviously ruinously old, nowhere did the lines gap, as she remembered them doing in the fields south of Devilsgate. She knew the lines did not run continuously clear to Kymil. Yet from the inside, the track was unbroken. Each stone along the way was individual, shaped and weathered to its own personality; each was cold and damp when she touched it, hard and real under her hand. Weeds grew thickly around them, stiff with frost. They bent and crackled under the brush of Antryg’s heavy cape hem, and now and then Joanna could see in the frosted mud of the track other footprints, running on south ahead of them—the footprints of the Dark Mage.
They rested several times during the night, Joanna glad to be relieved of the weight of her backpack. By this time she had become inured to walking, though the cold troubled her; under her thick sheepskin coat, the velvet uniform of Cerdic’s page was less warm than her coarse laborer’s clothes had been. She felt shaken and depressed, the sight of Suraklin’s footprints—Gary’s footprints—disconcerting her unexpectedly, reminding her that soon they would meet. She tried not to think about that, about the possibility of defeat and enslavement, or about the possibility of her own death. Throughout the last few weeks, even trapped in the stinking Erebus of the Dead God’s church, she had taken comfort in Antryg’s presence. He had seldom used his power, but unlike Caris, she had always been conscious of its possibility and in her heart had never really believed in his defeat.
B
ut though gradually the desperate tension of self-hate eased out of his body, she was conscious, through his gloved hand in hers, of his utter weariness. The power he had used to summon the elemental and to clothe it in lightning had left him spent and ill. Not knowing what to say, she only walked close to him, under the vast purple blanket of his cloak, her arm around his waist. After a moment, like a man seeking warmth, his arm tightened around her shoulders.
Freezing cold and nearly as black as the night they had just left, dawn found the three travelers at the nadir of the gaping pit that had been Suraklin’s Citadel. Throughout the night Joanna had been prey to fears of what awaited them at the end of the Witchpath, entertaining in her mind half a dozen hideous and mutually exclusive scenarios, from entrapment within the Citadel to cosmic rerouting to some distant point.
But when the mists faded around them as they stepped through the gap between the last two menhirs of the line, Joanna saw only the barren sides of the pit tunneling up around her, calcined, charred in places, dangling with stiff black stringers of cold-killed vines. Above the vast circle of the pit’s lips, the sky was the blackish yellow of an old bruise. The air smelled of snow and of the sickening carrion whiff from the rotting doorways all about the pit’s sides. On the ground high above, the wind screamed over the stones. Even down here in relative shelter, it riffled the lead-colored waters of a vast pool of seepage that lay before their feet.
Antryg looked around him, exhausted and baffled, his tangled gray curls shifted by that cutting wind. “It has to be here,” he said softly. “Somewhere—hidden so deep Suraklin wouldn’t even need to guard the place for fear of drawing attention to it. It has to.”
“We’ve been through every pit, every vault, every passage of the few that are left,” Caris said, his voice quiet but hard as chipped flint, “and we have proven to ourselves that it isn’t. If he makes anything like the same time we did, Pharos should be at Larkmoor tonight. Whether you go there or not, Antryg, I’m going to be there to intercept Leynart before he uses that charm of his to trigger a plague.”
“Do that.” Behind his spectacles, Antryg’s eyes seemed to have darkened to smoke color with tiredness, but they studied the young warrior evenly, as if he, like Joanna, realized that, given a choice, Caris placed saving Pella’s life above what might be his only chance for revenge upon the man who had murdered his grandfather. But neither commented on the final breaking of his obsession. There was a brittle, desperate quality about the young man now, like a sword blade bent to the snapping point.
Deep and soft as silk velvet, Antryg continued, “Joanna and I will stay here, search once again—there has to be something I’ve overlooked. If we find nothing...” He hesitated, absently rubbing his crooked hands, then went on, his tone carefully neutral, “...if nothing finds us, we’ll sleep the night at the Silent Tower. In the weeks past, I’ve scried the place by magic. Since my escape, it’s been abandoned. If you don’t come I’ll scry for you...” He paused again, as if his mind stumbled over the promise of that casual use of little magic, the muscles in his lean jaw jumping, as if he had carelessly brushed a raw wound. Then he took a deep breath and forced himself to go on. “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” Caris said quietly. He stood for a time longer, studying his sometime teacher. Joanna could see the hardness of his dark soul armor, an almost visible aura about that muscular, black-clothed form, but his eyes were not the eyes of the young man who had begun the journey north. He had made his choice, whether he articulated it to himself yet or not, that the saving of lives was preferable to the taking of them. “Go carefully, Antryg.” His glance moved to Joanna, and he said, “Take care of him,” and was rewarded with the ghost of her grin.
Joanna and Antryg watched him as he ascended the long, steep ruin of the old stair to the weed-curtained pit rim above. After his black uniform had vanished against the mottled sky, Antryg stood for some time, head bowed, listening intently while the cold deepened and the wind moved his stained cloak and the gray tousle of his hair. Then he sighed and took Joanna’s hand. Together they began again to search the blasted ruin of what had once been his home.
“He’ll be here in a few hours,” Pella whispered.
“I know.” Caris started to rise. “His men were everywhere outside the house.”
Her hand on his bare shoulder drew him down again. The muted reflection of lantern light through the ladder hole in the floor snaked along the gilt braid of his coat sleeves, where the garment lay in a heap with Pella’s plain brown riding dress. Here in the stable loft the warmth from the horses below collected, though the winds groaned outside. Now and then they heard the muffled clunk of a hoof or the distant voices of the grooms cleaning tack at the far end of the stone-flagged passageway. But that was all. Kyssha dozed, Caris knew, like a dropped muff at the foot of the ladder. His arms locked more tightly around Pella’s shoulders; for a time he said nothing, only breathed the flick smell of the hay and the cardamom scent of her hair.
He would have been able to keep his distance from her, he thought, as he had resolved to do, had he only met her in the house. Their situation was impossible, and he knew it. No matter how much he hated the drought—and the hatred of it filled his flesh like slow-burning gunpowder in a flash wound—she was and always would be Pharos’ wife. He had no right to come between them, particularly when he himself was very likely to die in the fight against Suraklin. His frantic love did not want to let this girl go, but fairness and caring told him that it would be monstrous to complicate whatever she and her husband would have with the torment of might-have-beens.
But he had found her, wrapped in her many-caped tweed coachman’s cloak, silently patrolling the perimeter of the house as they had done together, and all his resolutions had come apart like soaked tissue paper at the first hesitant joining of their hands.
At last he whispered, “We’d better go back to the house. If Pharos is coming this afternoon, Leynart has to be ahead of him. You know none of the Prince’s men will keep him out.”
Pella nodded, but caught his hand as he moved to get up. She said softly, “I know. And I know we can’t let Leynart succeed and unleash a plague, can’t let Suraklin rule the country through Cerdic. It’s all—the part of me that wants good rulership, the part of me that still wants to follow the Way of the Sasenna. But—there’s a part of me that doesn’t ever want anything but this.”
He brought her hand up to his lips. “Joanna’s right,” he whispered. “These things have to be done one—one subroutine at a time.” As he had hoped, her friend’s logic made Pella laugh. “Then we’ll see.”
It was a lie, and he knew it. He knew now that there was no way he could go on living without her in his life.
But as they crossed the thin, hard snow toward the house, like a powdering of salt on the ground, he remembered the amber glint of Suraklin’s eyes and knew also that there was very little likelihood that such a contingency would arise. And that, he thought, caught between his present bounding joy and the black emptiness of the future, was probably just as well.
The Regent’s sasenna were in the house when Caris and Pella reached it, slipping quietly in through the kitchen quarters with Kyssha peering inquiringly from beneath the folds of Pella’s capes. Caris said, “Is there a back stairs up to the state bedroom? Wearing this—” He touched his black-and-gold coat. “—was enough to get me close to the house, but if the captain gets a look at me, she’ll know I’m not one of hers. It would only take one of the servants saying they saw me here with Antryg to destroy everything.”
Pella nodded and set Kyssha down, then led the way to one of the several narrow back stairs which allowed servants access to the principal apartments to unobtrusively remove the chamber pots of their betters. As they climbed the enclosed flight, Caris was aware of the subdued turmoil in the house all around them; servants scurried to prepare a meal up to the Regent’s exacting standards, and sasenna prowled quietly through the halls. In the great state bedroom,
the curtains had been drawn and a forest fire of candles lit. Against the old-fashioned, gilt-edged paneling of the walls, the bed hangings of bronze and pink looked like columns of flowers, the embroidered coverlet like an autumn meadow. Standing before that symbol of dynastic duties, Pella’s cheeks reddened as if scalded. Shakily, she began, “Caris...”
He put his fingers to her lips. “Don’t.” Then he took his hand away and put it behind his back, for the touch kindled in him an overwhelming desire to crash her in his arms, drag her to that imperial bed...
He looked away from her, confused and hating himself. Hesitantly, stammering, not sure that he should even be speaking the words aloud, lest he give them power, he went on, “It isn’t that I don’t want to help you, Pella. But I can’t. I am—sasenna—or at least I was, before I went north. But my determination to follow the Way is leaving me—daily, hourly now, I can feel it going, dripping out of me like wine from a cracked cup. It used to be I could—could take a woman ...And take her was all I’d do, and a woman was all she was. That’s not the same with you. It shouldn’t be this way—I shouldn’t let it be this way—but it is. I should be out at the Citadel with Antryg and Joanna now, not here, trying to save you—trying to save Pharos...”
He was, he realized, asking for her help, as he had not asked help of anyone since he had taken his vows. It was not the Way to do so, not even in small things, physical things, let alone in things that truly mattered, things that were not supposed to matter...
The Silicon Mage Page 27
