“I don’t know how much that takes, but I’d guess an awful lot.” She cocked an ear back, listening to the alarm hooters. Was it her imagination, she wondered, or were they more frequent than before? “With all the spare battery packs disconnected—maybe an hour?”
He shuddered again at the endless length of time. “Unless he can break me first.”
The inner chamber of the Citadel, beyond the Gate of the enclave, was crawling with abominations. Pausing on the insubstantial threshold above the pool, Joanna heard them and smelled them in the foul darkness, and all her innards seemed to contract with dread. She whispered queasily, “Can you summon light?”
Antryg shook his head. “Not now,” he breathed. “Joanna, I can’t. He’s in my mind, tearing at it with his spells...”
“Okay. Don’t worry about it.” She unslung the backpack from her shoulder and found her flashlight. Its feeble beam glanced off the obsidian waters beneath their feet and caught the glitter of slime, the flash of mismated eyes. The beam shook as it traveled over them: fat things like monster slugs with foul, dripping snouts; something like a daddy longlegs skittering nervously near the wall, bloated, mutant rats, and things that must once have been cockroaches before some effect of the Void had changed them. She clenched her teeth hard, trying not to make a noise. Beyond them, the door into the sightless mazes of the vaults stood open, and she could sense movement in the darkness beyond.
“We’ve got to close it,” Antryg whispered desperately. “Block it, barricade it...”
Behind them, the grating rumble of the backup battery echoed like a bass thunder; the alarms were hooting faster. If nothing else, thought Joanna, they had to get out of the gateway before it collapsed...
“Here goes nothing.” She pulled open her backpack, removed the first of the DARKMAGE files, and wadded the photocopied pages into a ball. Thank God, she thought obliquely, I brought lots of matches... The abominations shrank back from the fire when she tossed it among them. She lit five more crumpled balls and flung them, some to one side, some to the other.
“Screw the sheets into torches.” Antryg was already doing so as he spoke. “If we can make it to the door...”
“We really have to bar it with us on this side of it?”
“Believe me, Joanna,” he said softly, “I guarantee you it’s preferable.”
She didn’t believe him until they reached the door—ancient, dusty, thick wood strapped and reinforced with iron on the inside and sheeted with copper on the outside. It was hung perfectly on steel hinges and it would swing with a touch. For a moment Joanna stood in the black arch, listening, and heard the footsteps in the passage beyond. They were slow and dragging; once she heard the thud of a body falling against a wall, and the clash of a dropped weapon, then a scrabbling noise as it picked itself up again.
She looked up at the tall wizard beside her, her revulsion stark upon her face.
“Bolt it,” said Antryg softly. “Suraklin’s magic will still be in his flesh.”
Behind them, the abominations closed in. Joanna formed a barrier of wadded paper, crumpling and lighting all the DARKMAGE files, the pounds of paper she’d lugged on her back for hundreds of miles, the last details of the lives of two wizards, an Imperial Prince, and a computer programmer—the final records of their existence. From the enclave gate, still hanging, glimmering, above the pool, the tempo of the alarms had increased, shrieking, desperate, calling help, blocked on the very edge of immortality. All through the horrible shadows of the room the abominations stirred, prowling back and forth, the rats’ eyes gleaming, outsize chisel teeth bared. Listening behind her, Joanna imagined she could hear the approaching footfalls in the hall, stumbling, slurring. Leaning against the door beside her, Antryg looked gray and drawn, his eyes shut, reaming the last strength, the last magic, from the marrow of his bones.
The blow on the door, when it came, seemed to shake the very stone from which the vaults were cut. Antryg flinched, but turned a little, to press his face and hands to the iron-bound wood, his eyes shut and his face twisted with pain. Joanna heard a sharp hissing behind her, smelled damp smoke, and swung around to see a trickle of water from the pool snaking toward the flickering line of her barrier blazes. That was impossible, she thought, terrified, as the abominations moved forward with the lessening of the fire—the floor sloped up...
She pulled more paper from her backpack, twisted it into another torch and lit it. Gritting her teeth, she strode toward the slobbering, pulsing things on the other side of the light, lashing at them with the torch.
The water was indeed seeping up from the pool. Wider, thicker streams of it, like black slime, flowed up the slope of the floor toward their feet, dousing another one of her little fires. Another blow fell on the door, and she saw, close to Antryg’s head, the solid oak timbers heave and crack. Antryg himself seemed hardly to notice; he appeared to be almost in a trance, except for the gasping of his breath and the desperate contortion of his face. Grimly, Joanna stuck the torch into a crack in the wall and twisted another one, then caught at the first as it fell—she could have sworn it had been firmly wedged. With quick-blazing fire in each hand, she swung at the abominations. One of the rats, the size of a dog and grossly fat, hissed at her; for a hideous second, she thought it would leap, but it backed away, its twisted face a nightmare.
Another blow drove a shard of the copper sheathing through the door and made the strapping jerk and pull in the wood. It was Gary out there, Joanna thought as she swung again at a tentacled thing like a groping black wart that edged toward them. Gary with the top of his head blown off, Gary with his nose a bloody mash, Gary with nothing in his eyes but Suraklin’s will...
Antryg made a small sound of pain. At the same instant, Joanna herself felt a stab of sickness, deep in her guts, the burning wrench like poisoned heat. From the enclave, the alarms were screaming, thick and fast now, louder and louder, like a heartbeat skipping out of its rhythm, spiraling up into the danger zone. Blackness swam in front of her eyes, and pain and nausea twisted at her guts as she pulled another handful of paper out, lit it with shaking hands from the last, and swung it at the things that waited greedily in the ankle-deep waters of the flooded floor.
The pounding on the door seemed eerily to pick up the tempo of the alarms, faster, more urgent, more desperate. Antryg cried out again, blood tracking down from the corner of his mouth as his counterspells began to crack under the inexorable pressure of the computer’s strength. The alarms scaled up, blending into a single, screaming note. Beneath the screaming, Joanna could hear voices, like the wicker of colorless flame. Some of them were thin, unformed whispers of minds that had never been human; others were terrifyingly familiar...
Babe, you’re coming out to my place this weekend, aren’t you? I’ve got four new games for the computer, some good beer...new jet system for the Jacuzzi...
You must do as you think best, my son, but I think you would be a better healer than a fighter...
My father won’t hear of it, but if you say Suraklin really is a danger, my lord Archmage, then I am behind you with all the support I can raise...
And far back of them all, half obliterated by those random snatches of memory, an old man’s voice, high and harsh and terrible, whispered, You were my only love ...my only love. Of course I can still love ...I can still feel...I can still taste the wine of life...It’s all in the programs and will be forever. I still live...
The silence falling was like a blow over the head with a club. For an instant Joanna wondered, What now! and turned to look back toward the shimmering gate of the enclave and the distant glitter of the red computer lights that were like evil stars in some impossible darkness. But the lights were gone. With a tired gurgle, the water around her feet had already begun to slither away toward the well again; the abominations, sniffing and hissing, backed further from the crude bundles of burning paper still in her hands. A moment later, like smoke dispersing, the dark gate faded away.
Antr
yg’s voice was no more than a thread. “Entropy always wins,” he murmured. With hands that would barely close, he shoved back the door bolts. Neither of them looked at what lay across the threshold as they began their stumbling ascent once more to the light.
Chapter XVIII
THEY FOUND CARIS LYING where he had fallen, twenty feet or so from the lip of the chasm, a broken black shape in a pool of blood. Joanna knelt beside him and felt his face and his remaining hand, searching against hope for some sign of life. She had thought all emotion wrung out of her by the ordeal in the vaults, but now realized that that had only been the result of the energy drain. Now tears collected in her eyes—for Caris and for the fact that she had left him to die without a backward glance.
It had, of course, been what he would have done—what it was the Way of the Sasenna to do.
The short winter day had passed noon. The sky was a low sheet of steel-colored billows, like the undersurface of murky water; the air smelled of snow.
She heard the crunch of Antryg’s boots on the hard frost behind her. Glancing up, she saw he’d retrieved his cloak from the subsidence where she’d rolled wearing it. In the daylight he looked ghastly, his haggard face tracked with runnels of blood through the sweat-matted dust, and spreading stains of it dark on his left sleeve and side. He moved stiffly, slowly, like an old man. His crooked hands shook as he covered Caris with the cloak.
“We’ll have to get word to Pella,” Joanna said dully.
“I’m sure the wizards will do that.” Antryg knelt beside her and pushed back the short-cropped fair hair from the young man’s still face. “They’ll be here very soon now.”
The thought of the effort flight would entail turned her stomach, but she said, “We’d better go.” She started to get to her feet, then gasped with startled pain. Under her coat and jacket, half her back was burned and beginning to throb. She gritted her teeth, fighting the tears and the wave of faintness that came over her at the pain. It was nothing, she knew, to what Antryg was going through or to what Caris must have gone through, raising himself for that final shot. “We’ve got a lead on them—with any luck they’ll think you and Suraklin destroyed each other...”
Something changed in the air, some shock—blast—impact—as if the reverse side of the universe had been kicked by a giant foot. The air as well as the ground seemed to shudder with a noise that Joanna was not entirely certain was not solely in her own skull, the crying of voices in a dream. She caught Antryg’s shoulder in fear. Dust rose in a white column from the abyss that had been the Citadel vaults, slowly mushrooming into the freezing air, then slowly dispersing.
“The enclave,” Antryg said softly. In the ashy daylight, his face looked as deathly as that of the boy at whose side he still knelt. “He’s used the last of whatever power was left to him to implode it completely—to destroy himself. So he did remember, after all.”
Through the pain in her back and her grief over Caris, it was hard to think, but Joanna said, “Remember what?”
“Why he wanted to live forever.” Tears made a shining track through the grime on either side of his beaky nose. “The operative word in that phrase is not ‘forever,’ but ‘live.’ And living is not only listening to songs, but singing them; not only possessing the wine in bottles, but tasting it in the company of those you love. Part of the beauty of a sunset is the way its colors change and intensify as it fades to night. Maybe he did realize at last that he was only the copy of a copy, a series of subroutines condemned to an eternity of Read Only...” He sighed and pushed up his specs to wipe his eyes with the back of his glove. “Or maybe, like me, he simply couldn’t abide the thought of being locked up once again.”
She looked down at his face, half hidden by his hair, and the grief that haunted his gray eyes. “You still loved him, didn’t you?”
A smile flicked at the corners of his mouth. “Oh, not actively anymore. But I, too, remember.” He sighed and stopped himself sharply, pressing his hand to his side where her bullet had grazed.
Gently he raised Caris’ right arm, the burnt chunk of the gun-butt dropping from the two remaining fingers. Blood oozed stickily from the wound.
Through a blur of exhausted tears, Joanna scanned the barren hills. The iron-colored earth was streaked with snow beneath a leaden sky. Cold wind stirred the singed ends of her hair. Though the landscape was utterly desolate, she had the uneasy feeling of being watched. She said, “We’d better go. The wizards will be here soon.”
“I know.” He folded Caris’ hands on the young man’s breast, and laid his own on top of them, the long, crooked fingers stained with blood. “I can feel them seeking me with their minds, seeking my magic. But here at the node of the lines, there is one more magic that it’s possible for me to perform.” He sat for a moment, gathering the remains of his concentration and his exhausted powers through the staggering weight of pain and weariness. Joanna did not understand what he meant, until his eyes slipped shut and his head bowed, and she realized he had gone into a healing trance.
She stood for a long time at his side, her throat hurting, half-sick with her own pain and exhaustion. Then slowly, painfully, she sat down again on the gray earth. Despite the thick sheepskin of her coat, the quilted velvet page’s jacket, and the lace-trimmed shirt beneath, she felt cold to the marrow of her bones. Tears burning at her eyes, she leaned her head against Antryg’s shoulder and tucked her chilled fingers for warmth around his arm. The wind spat snow at them from the surrounding hills and groaned among the charred bones of the Citadel all around.
After nearly an hour of silence, Joanna saw Caris’ eyelids move, his ribcage rise, sink, and, after a long moment, rise again.
After two hours, with the darkness beginning to thicken in the louring sky, she was wakened from a half doze of sheer weariness by the strike of hooves on stone. She raised her head to see the ring of mounted sasenna who surrounded them, halberds and spears glittering like metal teeth in the failing light. Half a dozen horses stood apart in a group, the black robes of their riders whirling like storm-clouds in the sleety wind. At their head sat Lady Rosamund, her face like stone and her green eyes pitiless as jade.
“It’s odd, you know,” Antryg said quietly, steam blurring his spectacles as he poured bubbling water from the kettle into a cracked earthenware teapot. “The two places I’ve lived longest in my life—really the only two places where I’ve stayed long enough to qualify as ‘home’—have been Suraklin’s Citadel and here in the Silent Tower. Would you care for some tea?” he inquired of the pair of red-robed Church wizards who sat stiffly watching him by the door. Both of them glared and the older of the two, a woman, made the sign against evil.
Antryg sighed, wincing a little at the pinch in his cracked rib, and replaced the kettle on the narrow hearth. He handed Joanna a cup of tea with a rueful smile. “In any case, they can’t put the Sigil of Darkness back on me.” He rubbed absently at the brown mark on his throat. “Have you heard how Caris is?”
Joanna shook her head. The sheer mass and darkness of the Silent Tower oppressed her. Curiously, though the wizards, both Church and Council, who kept guard over her solitary cell on the lower level of the Tower, treated her far better than the Witchfinders had when she had been their prisoner, she found herself far more frightened. Perhaps this was because, when she had been a prisoner of the Witchfinders, she had known Antryg, and Caris, and Magister Magus, were still free and capable of helping her escape, as indeed they had done. She was now without options.
Then, too, she thought, watching Antryg’s tall shadow move across the smoke-stained granite of the ceiling vaults, her sense of utter hopelessness might simply stem from exhaustion, the physical reaction to pain and overexertion, and to the repeated emotional shocks of the previous day. Upon being locked into her cell in the Tower, she had fallen almost immediately asleep, in spite of her wretched conviction that Antryg might very well be dead by the time she woke up. Looking at the weariness that seemed to have ground its
way indelibly into the deep lines of his face, she wondered if he had done the same.
“I know he’s at Larkmoor,” she said in a small voice. “And that they say he’ll live.”
He took the battered and mended chair at her side, and his long, swollen-jointed fingers automatically sought hers. The room in which the Council had imprisoned him was his old study, crammed with his books, his astronomical instruments, and his mechanical toys. In shadow at the far end, Joanna glimpsed a narrow cot, heaped with a haphazard collection of furs and faded quilts. It did not look as if it had been slept on.
“He’ll live,” Antryg repeated softly and sighed again. “Now I wonder why they said that?”
“Because there are certain members of the Council who insisted upon it.”
Both of them looked up quickly at the sound of that cold, sweet voice from the doorway. Lady Rosamund stood there, framed in darkness, immaculate as ever, the red-purple stole that marked her position in the Council sparkling faintly in the fire’s reflected light. The Church wizards bowed to her and stepped past her through the door, though Joanna sensed they were in the narrow stairway still, listening for the slightest rise in her voice to summon them back.
“And because in your latest confession, you swear that he was injured in trying to apprehend you for your attempt upon the Regent’s life. Or didn’t you read it this time?”
“No,” Antryg admitted, with a ghost of his old airiness, at which her Ladyship’s pink mouth tightened disapprovingly. “I didn’t think there would be much point.” He looked down and met Joanna’s frightened glance. “They didn’t hurt me,” he added, seeing the way her eyes darted to his hands, as if to see what new injuries those threadbare half-gloves might conceal. “But I told them I’d sign anything, as long as it contained a clause saying that I had forced you to help me by means of my spells, and that you were not responsible for what you did. At least they didn’t have to tie the pen in my fingers this time.”
The Silicon Mage Page 31
