The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  Suraklin’s back was to her. She could hear Caris still moaning faintly where he lay among the broken, weed-grown pavements, remembered his scream as the gun exploded in his hand and thought detachedly, Thank God I decided against explosives. Had that been a general spell, she wondered as she dug the .38 and the Sigil of Darkness from her backpack, or only against Caris, because Suraklin had seen him? She was shaking so badly she could barely tear the Sigil’s lead wrappings free or hold the gun straight. One shot, she knew, was all she’d get, if she got that much. After that, she reflected in weirdly wry terror, he could not help but notice her.

  The Dark Mage hitched the submachine gun under his arm, switching his left hand from the grip to the trigger. “Killing this body won’t do you any good, you see.”

  Joanna braced the .38 in both hands, straightened her elbows and took time to align the sights as carefully as she had done during her few practice sessions; she pressed the round lead plaque of the Sigil tight against the lock as well as she could while keeping her fingers clear of the cylinder flash. It seemed to take forever; blood and terror pounded in her head, an almost palpable roaring noise that she was certain Suraklin had to hear. The first night Gary had kissed her flitted briefly through her mind, and her elation that for the first time in her life someone found her desirable.

  Suraklin—Gary—braced his weapon under his arm, to aim down. “There’s plenty of time left before it bleeds to death to...”

  Here goes nothing, Joanna thought, and squeezed the trigger.

  She saw the explosion of bone and hair and brain shatter outward as the automaton that had been first Gary, and then Suraklin, bowed forward and fell into the pit.

  Dust still hung heavy in the air as she stumbled to the edge, still clutching her backpack and the gun. She sensed a shifting somewhere in it, not far off, and remembered that there were abominations about, drawn to the smell of blood. Caris, she thought desperately, but did not swerve aside to where the dying sasennan lay.

  Blood was puddled everywhere on the lip of the pit, steaming faintly in the cold air. Her head ached with the weight of the drained weariness that clutched her soul. Her hands, as she fumbled at the pocket of her backpack for the nylon rope, seemed to belong to someone else. And what, after all, she wondered bleakly, would it matter? Suraklin had been right. Killing him—killing Gary, or what was left of Gary—had done no good. The disk was wiped, and she knew that, while the computer was running, she’d never be able to maneuver through the long and complicated process of putting together another worm.

  And the computer would run forever.

  Tears of despair nearly blinded her as she peered down. There was no dust below the level of the ground. She could see Antryg clearly, pressed flat to what had once been the wall of some vaulted room. One hand gripped about three inches of what had been ceiling molding; the other spread out over a sharply sloping piece of stone that offered little if any purchase. One boot toe was wedged into the remains of a broken capital. Below his heels gaped a hundred and fifty feet of straight nothing, with Gary’s body lying smashed like a road-kill at the bottom.

  Her hands shaking, she made a loop in one end of the rope and stumbled back four or five feet to wrap the other end around the nearest broken rocks. Things were moving in the dust, converging on them—abominations, she thought, for they lacked the deadly speed of elementals. But that, she knew, would come soon. Antryg’s overstretched concentration couldn’t keep them at bay forever. She had killed the Dark Mage’s last body, but he was far from dead.

  Antryg came scrambling, gasping, up the rope, crushed her in one fast hug, and planted a kiss on her sweat-soaked hair, even as he was dragging her toward the matted weeds which hid the broken stair. “Caris...” she began, and he shook his head.

  “There’s nothing to be done,” he said hoarsely. “We have a few moments now when Suraklin can’t see us, when he must marshal his influence on the minds of whatever he can—the abominations, for a guess—to stop us. Before he does...”

  “But it’s no good!” She balked, her feet sliding on the ice that had turned the broken rubble of the hidden stair to treacherous glass. “Antryg, Suraklin was right! It wouldn’t take anything to demagnetize the disk; you can do it by leaving one too near the telephone! There’s nothing we can do in there!”

  He stopped on the slippery track below her, looking up; in spite of its coating of dust and grime, his face seemed suddenly very white in the frame of his unruly hair. “Are you positive it’s blanked?”

  She shook her head, the stringers of her wet hair trailing against her numbed cheeks. “But it’s Suraklin’s logical move.”

  He took a deep breath, as if bracing himself, then nodded. Sweat tracked down through the dust on his face, and Joanna realized that, dead though Suraklin’s latest body might be, his magic still lived, pressing against Antryg’s hard-held counterspells with the relentless patience of a computer. It was only a matter of time, she thought, until the human wizard tired, and then...

  He said, “All right. Give me your backpack and get as far away from here as you can. If this deadness doesn’t end, it will mean I’ve failed. Find the other wizards of the Council, tell them everything, make them believe you. If it does, find them anyway...”

  “What about you?”

  His gray eyes shifted away from hers, behind their cracked rounds of glass, then returned, after a moment. “Whatever happens, my life is forfeit,” he said quietly, his long fingers closing around the dirty webbing straps of the backpack. “If it wasn’t when I broke out of the Tower, it has been from the moment I summoned the elemental to hold Cerdic’s warriors at bay. I don’t know whether I’ll succeed or fail, but once I go into that enclave, I won’t be coming out.”

  She heard it as if from some great distance, her soul numbed by exhaustion, terror, and the leaden ache of the energy drain. He started to move off down the ruined stair again, and she tightened her grip on the packstraps, holding him back. “What are you going to do?”

  “Put the Sigil of Darkness where the teles-relay feeds into the electrical converter. It will break the flow of the magic and seal off the enclave.”

  “With you in it,” Joanna said. “Imprisoned alone with Suraklin, forever.” It had, she realized, been his backup plan from the first.

  He looked away again, his face contorting with momentary pain. “I can’t think about that now, Joanna,” he said softly. Desperation shivered in his deep voice. “Now let me go. We’ve wasted too much time already—every second he’ll be rallying new defenses, and I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold them at bay. Can’t you feel the spells around us now? It’ll be worse within the dimensional enclave. If my concentration breaks, we’ll both go up like touchwood.”

  “And the minute your fingers touch the Sigil,” she returned, “all your defenses will vanish anyway, won’t they?” Cold panic and the scorch of adrenaline stifling her, she drew the backpack from his hands and slung its familiar weight once more onto her shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The entrance to Suraklin’s enclave opened directly above the black pool in the stone chamber of his ancient power. Joanna couldn’t see it at all until Antryg reached out over the water and touched it; then it flared into smoky life in the darkness, more like an optical illusion, a trick of mirrors and light, than a real gateway. The burning, unnatural glare of the witchlight that he’d called added to the sense of surreality. Through the clotted darkness of the labyrinths they had heard the lumbering, slurping tread of abominations, closing on the place, tracking them by the scent of their blood, and only the searing radiance of all the light that Antryg could summon had held them at bay. His sword was gone, lost somewhere in the frozen, weedy rubble of the pit where it had fallen when he’d gone over the cliff edge. With the abominations gathering and Antryg’s face growing grayer and grayer from the strain of the tireless spells bearing down upon him, there had been no time to search. Even maintaining the light, Joanna sens
ed, was taxing him, draining his strength like a cut artery. His hand was shaking as he sketched a glowing sign on the wall of the underground chamber.

  “When I tell you to run,” he said, “run for this. Don’t distract me, don’t interrupt me—do exactly as I command. All right?”

  She nodded, the fear in her growing, swelling—fear, and the sense that there was something she was forgetting, some detail knocking at the back of her mind...

  He sprang lightly to the threshold of the gate, his boots resting on the glowing surface that seemed to be no more than a projection in the air. Her heart beating heavily, positive she was going to end up falling through into the accursed pool, Joanna reached across, twined her small fingers in the bone and grubby leather of his hand, and jumped.

  It was deathly cold within Suraklin’s enclave. This didn’t surprise Joanna, in view of the physical preferences of computers, but it depressed her further and weighted her down with a physical exhaustion, as if her very body were unable to produce enough heat, enough life, to keep her going. There was a noise there, too, a kind of whispering hum that tugged oddly at her attention. She sensed the presence all around them of unseen forces, the shift of the stone walls—or were they stone?—in the darkness that stopped the moment she turned her head, and the tingle on her skin that made her wonder in terror what would happen if Antryg’s concentration on his protective spells broke. Once she smelled a burning, a spot of itching on her thigh that swelled suddenly to searing heat. In numb panic, she pressed her hand over it as hard as she could, not daring to speak for fear of distracting Antryg’s mind and making things worse; in a moment the heat passed. We’ll both go up like touchwood, he had said, and panic sweat rolled down her sides under the dirty sheepskin of her coat and the green velvet jacket underneath.

  Then the darkness opened out before them. It swallowed the beam of Joanna’s repowered flashlight, which she’d turned on to save Antryg’s strength; a vast chasm stretched in all directions, colder than the bitterest of the Sykerst nights. Faint and bluish, a glow rose from the double ring of globes on the floor, some of them no larger than a good-sized grapefruit, others the size of soccer balls. Around and between them, like a monster web of brass, glass, and scribbled Sigils of Light, lay the apparatus Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag had invented for converting the ambient energy of life into electricity. The wires spread like weed runners along me floor, interspersed with Sigils and marks written in light, so that the web seemed to sink into the physical fiber of the place itself. Joanna had a sense of those veins of power fanning out over the walls and ceiling of the place, if there were any, hidden in the darkness. And eerily like the trilithons on Tilrattin Island, in the center rose the tripart bulk of what Joanna recognized from articles as an experimental fiber-optic superconductor Cray Three, undoubtedly the one which was rumored to have dropped out of sight early in the year from the Alta Clara Research labs—harder to steal than the 250-odd microcomputers necessary to make up a parallel-process Cube, but far easier to program. Like a vast monolith behind it rose the biggest power conditioner Joanna had ever seen.

  Joanna whispered, “Damn!”

  “What is it, my dear?”

  The whispering in her mind was growing stronger, and with it was the sense of a half-guessed pattern, like an optical illusion of negative space—do you see a lamp, or do you see two faces?

  And whose faces?

  “It’s a UPS—an Uninterrupted Power Source—a backup battery. It means that, even when we pull the plug, the computer itself will be up for at least a day, maybe more. We’ll be able to get out...”

  “But his spells will continue. And he’ll be able to summon reinforcements.”

  Joanna walked forward, her heart slamming against her ribs, loathe to step across the teles-ring. Wan and blue, their sickly light was worse than darkness; as she passed between them, she felt a cold sense of evil, as if she heard the tittering whisper of laughter in the darkness beyond the reach of any light. Her mouth dry, she whispered, “I’m going to check the disk. You start pulling the leads out that connect the power conditioner with the spare battery packs—those small boxes stacked beyond it. They’re to give it still more running-time if the power goes down. Just unfasten the clips and pull the plugs out...”

  Antryg moved to obey, his flowing robe and long-skirted coat incongruous against the hard-edged metal and plastic, his face set now and lined with intolerable strain. Near the chair before the computer’s central monitor, a single teles sat in its copper housing, the focal point of the vast spiderweb of wires and leads. It was by no means the largest; Joanna could have closed her two hands over it, had she dared. But nothing in the world could have induced her to touch the thing. She didn’t know why she felt that it was aware of her, watching her. Old, far older than Suraklin, it was far more evil—and alive.

  Her hands were shaking as she pulled the flat disk box from her backpack. She dropped it twice before she got it open, sweat streaming down her face in spite of the intense cold. And all the while in the back of her mind, that whispering suspicion nagged at her, the feeling of being faced with a quadratic equation, with two solutions...

  She managed to get the disk in the drive, trying not to think about the process of bringing it up, and let her hands go through the motions automatically.

  The disk was blank.

  Resolutely, aware that the computer was Suraklin and might be lying about it, she tapped through the entry sequence, but the machine made no sound.

  Then, before her eyes in the darkness of the screen, the green words formed up:

  WELCOME, JOANNA. I HAVE WAITED A LONG TIME FOR HIM TO BRING YOU TO ME.

  Rage hit her like a falling wall. Betrayal, grief, horror, realization, and fury at herself for not seeing that she had been led all along, tricked into coming to this single place that she had most feared, deceived into walking into Suraklin’s hands at last. Hate exploded in her as she swung around in her chair, her hand diving blindly for her backpack, coming up with the .38.

  He had been Suraklin’s servant from the first.

  The crash of the gun was like thunder in the vast darkness. The bullet took Antryg in the side, knocking him back against the power conditioner—Joanna had not paused to take aim, and the kick jerked her aim awry. He raised his head, the sulfurous glow of the teles turning his spectacles to opaque rounds of gold and glinting in the star-fracture of the left lens. She braced herself carefully for a second shot, aiming for his forehead in the spiral strings of his blood-tipped hair. He had used her, used her...

  She never knew what he shouted at her. Her name, she thought, and some other word, a spell-word that sliced through the calm fog in her mind like thrown ice water. At the same moment, she felt the burning scorch of fire on her hair, her back, and her arms. He stumbled to his feet, caught her, and held her, smothering the heat between her skin and her coat, pressing her to him, heedless of the gun wedged between their bodies.

  After a moment the heat faded again. She brought up her hand from his side and saw her fingers covered in blood.

  She began to shake uncontrollably. “Antryg, I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry—it was a spell—Suraklin’s spell—”

  “Don’t!” he whispered desperately. His breath came as if he fought for every lungful, his face chalk-white with shock and strain. “Don’t say anything. I understand. Put the Sigil in place and let’s get out of here. Someone’s coming. He’s summoned help, and we have to stop them before they get here...”

  “Who...” she began dazedly.

  “Never mind that!” Behind his specs, his eyes were frantic.

  Her hands shaking, Joanna tore open the velcro pocket of her backpack, fumbled with the lead shielding in which the Sigil was wrapped. She felt an increasing reluctance to touch the central teles under which she knew she must place it, a distaste for the whole project—she would be killing the last vestiges of Suraklin, Salteris, the Regent’s father, Gary ...It was murder...

  So w
as your trying to shoot Antryg, she reminded herself disgustedly. And Caris, dying up at the top of the cliff... Antryg made a swift gesture toward her, swiftly repressed; looking up she saw the strain on his face and the sweat tracking down through the grime and blood, and realized that in his mind, too, Suraklin was whispering.

  Her fingers shrinking from the task, she swiftly pushed the teles aside in its copper bed and slid the Sigil of Darkness into place.

  The breaking of the energy drain was like the snapping of a metal band encircling her brain. She felt almost shocked, once more aware of the bone-numbing cold, of the danger in which they stood, and the smell of gunpowder and of Antryg’s blood. The bluish gleam of the teles-balls died, and the scribbled light of the runes on the floor faded. Only the red and green lights of the Cray gleamed, baleful stars in the darkness, picking out Antryg’s nose and lips and spectacles and winking in the haphazard collection of tuppenny beads and Imperial jewels around his neck. The drone of the UPS kicking in filled the black emptiness around them, broken by the shrill hooting of the alarm. At the same time, she felt the power all around her grow; the crackle of inchoate hatred in the darkness was held at bay only by Antryg’s failing spells. Heat seemed to whisper, inches from her flesh.

  “How long?” he breathed as they stumbled through the darkness, back toward the beckoning glimmer of his mark.

  She shook her head. “A battery that size can keep a computer going for about a day.” She felt him shiver and knew he’d never hold out that long. “But he’ll be drawing energy from it for his spells to keep the enclave open for his repair crew, whoever they are, to get in—and to destroy you.”

  Antryg managed a crooked grin. “Added incentive for my death, I see.” He was leaning on her, the sleeve of his coat warm and scratchy on her frozen face, permeated with the smells of sulfur and blood. Joanna realized Suraklin would never have needed an added incentive—Antryg was the only wizard who would have been able to hold out this long against the defense-spells. No wonder Suraklin had tried at every opportunity to have him killed.