The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  “Only to escape again.” She shook her head, clicking her tongue pettishly, as if at a child’s scrapes. “I knew him, you see—knew Suraklin. I knew them all.”

  “I remember.” Antryg smiled. “In fact I remember you taking a broom-handle to him, the one time you were at the Citadel ...at the time I was shocked to death, of course.”

  The old lady chuckled, her pale eyes warming briefly with a trace of their old color. Then she sobered and said, “It cannot be so again.”

  “I know,” Antryg said quietly. The brown mark left by the Sigil of Darkness showed up more darkly against the whiteness of his face. “Just please get Joanna out of here.”

  “Since we have received no orders from the Regent concerning the girl Joanna,” the old lady said, “though we have no jurisdiction over her, as Archmage I think it best that she be taken back to the place where we came through the Void, the shed marked with Suraklin’s marks.”

  Joanna felt Antryg’s long fingers close tightly around hers; then he said, “Thank you.”

  She was looking up into his face as he glanced past Aunt Min to the shadow of the door and saw what was left of the color there drain away. Her glance flicked after his. Lady Rosamund stood there, silent and disapproving, in her hands a cup made of gold and horn.

  Aunt Min looked, too, and nodded her little head. “Set it down, dear, set it down,” she instructed, making vague little gestures toward the table and dropping her knitting again. Automatically Antryg stooped to retrieve it, then straightened up again as the old lady continued, “And be careful of it, Rosie—it’s poison, you know.”

  Her Ladyship’s beautiful mouth flexed with disapproval as she turned and stalked from the room once again. Aunt Min plucked her knitting needles from Antryg’s yielding hand and said, “You know there is nothing we can do for you. The original sentence of death is still in effect.”

  Joanna remembered Antryg’s airy recital—hanged, broken, skinned, and sliced ...At the time, that day-long public torture had seemed so far away.

  Antryg whispered, “I know.”

  The old lady added, “I am sorry.”

  Antryg nodded and patted her tiny hand where it curled around his own.

  Joanna caught his sleeve, her mind refusing to take it in. It seemed to her that the warmth and the color of the afternoon was still on her and the taste of the deep and nebulous joy of mingled friendship and love. She had the helpless, protesting sense of being suddenly forced to leave a party long before it was over, of losing something which had been, and should have been, part of her for years.

  Aunt Min touched her arm. “You had better come along, my dear. The storm won’t be a long one.” She said it with a serene knowledge that was almost comical, but for the circumstances. “There is no knowing when the messenger will come and then, of course, whatever orders he bears must take effect.”

  Joanna shook her head, her mind a blank of darkness and grief. Antryg folded her gently into his arms and bent his tall height to press his mouth to hers. Her hands tightened over the patched robe and tangled in the long gray hair. For a moment, it was as if she were trying to memorize, once for all, the sinewy movement of the loose-jointed frame, the magpie sparkle of beads and diamonds, cracked spectacles, and those wide, intent gray eyes, and the brocaded flamboyance of his deep voice.

  Then he murmured, “Good-bye, my love.” The word he used in the language of Ferr was the equivalent of Adieu—to God—the long good-bye from which there is no returning.

  Aunt Min took her hand and led her into the narrow darkness of the stair, where she saw that Lady Rosamund waited. As they escorted her down, to lead her far enough away from the Tower so that no chance weakening of the veil between worlds within the Tower itself would permit Antryg again to escape, she looked back at the gold rectangle of the door.

  Through it she saw Antryg standing beside the table, the cup between his hands, his face like chalk in the firelight. As she watched, pulling against the Archmage’s coaxing, she saw him raise the cup to his lips, drain it, and set it down, his fingers shaking uncontrollably. Then he walked back to his bed, lay down in the shadows, and turned his face to the wall.

  Chapter XIX

  IT WAS JANUARY, and late-blowing Santa Ana winds flowed over Los Angeles like a river of silk. After weeks of winter in the Sykerst, the balmy desert warmth was even more disorienting to Joanna, the crystal magic of the air adding to her sense of separation from this world to which she had returned, as well as from that which she had left. That was another thing, she reflected detachedly as she stepped through the double-glass doors of the Building Six lobby and looked out across the tepid twilight of the nearly empty parking lot, that they never mentioned in tales of adventure—the sheer amount of cleaning-up the participants had to do afterward and the gut-wrenching period of letdown.

  Antryg was dead.

  She was young enough never to have lost anyone close to her in her life—certainly not someone as close as he had been. She felt stunned and empty, not only of him but of everything. She had not imagined it possible to miss someone that much.

  As she descended the shallow concrete steps, she thought to herself that she had not realized in the fall how lucky she’d had it. There was a good deal to be said, after all, for fear of Suraklin, terror of crossing the Void again alone, obsessive paranoia, and her frantic mantra that Antryg was not—could not be—dead. At least it had kept her busy. There had been almost no time to think or to feel.

  Now there was.

  During the Santa Anas it was as if Los Angeles had never heard the word “smog.” All around the low concrete bunkers of San Serano, the hills seemed to have crept nearer during the day, vast, rounded cutouts of matte cobalt cardboard against a periwinkle sky. The wind lifted strands of her hair like a sensual ghost; the air was milky against her bare arms. Weeks of freezing, she reflected, did have the one advantage of making her temporarily proof against all but the chilliest evenings. She hitched her massive purse with its dangling tassels and rabbit skins more firmly onto her shoulder, still kinesthetically missing the familiar weight of the backpack. When it brushed the bandages over the worst of the burns she flinched, though after four days the pain had dulled to no worse than a really bad sunburn.

  It was after six o’clock, and most of San Serano’s employees had braved their way onto the freeway an hour ago. Joanna had stayed, as she had stayed late the last two nights. Part of it was catching up on the horrible volume of work left undone at her departure, but a great deal of it stemmed from her unwillingness to face the emptiness that waited for her at home.

  The snow would be deep around Larkmoor now. Aunt Min had assured her that it was possible now for Caris and Pella to be together. She wondered how Pella was, whether they were happy and how Caris was adjusting to the new life that had been Antryg’s final gift to him. She wondered, too, whether Magister Magus had recovered from his slavery to Suraklin, whether Cerdic had helped him regain his ostentatious house, and whether Marquises and Countesses again clustered to his pink-and-black drawing room, waiting to pay him lavish sums to tell them what they wanted to hear.

  She would never know, of course. It was as if they, too, were dead. Sometimes in these last three days her loneliness had seemed to fill the earth.

  Most of the time it seemed as if Ruth believed her. From the gas station near San Serano, she had phoned Ruth to come and pick her up. All the way back to Van Nuys, her friend had not said much, but had looked at her sidelong, where she had sat slumped in the corner of the front seat in her grubby green velvet knee breeches, squalid peasant boots and tattered, lace-ruffled shirt. She must, she knew, have looked very different, besides being much thinner and having three inches of her hair singed off. That first evening Ruth had treated her with a care very much at odds with her usual breeziness and did not dismiss what she said.

  Wherever she had been, thought Joanna wearily, she at least must look as if she’d been someplace. As ever, she had no proof.
>
  She’d gotten something of the same reaction from her colleagues at work who saw her and a great deal of sympathy regarding her fictitious sister-in-law’s three-month bout with terminal cancer. Most, though not all, respected her flat request not to talk about it.

  Slowly she began reacclimating herself to driving a car, gauging traffic speed, taking showers, and having noise around her virtually all the time. It was odd to have possessions again, odd not to be always on the move, and odd not to be terrified of capture half the time.

  But it all felt hollow and strange, as if it, and not the past three months, had happened to someone else.

  Antryg was dead.

  Gary was dead, too, of course, she thought, feeling the residual heat of the pavement radiating softly against her sandaled feet as she crossed the parking lot. But it wasn’t Gary’s voice she remembered, lying awake at night.

  I’ll get over this, she told herself, fighting the wave of grief that threatened to swamp her. It won’t always be this bad.

  She didn’t believe it. She felt a flash of sympathy for Suraklin. It wouldn’t be too bad, she thought, simply to program herself into a computer and forget what it was like to feel.

  She raised her head, scanning the parking lot for her blue Mustang. It sat in solitary splendor beneath one of the tall lamps which, like a network of artificial moons, cast primrose light against a luminous blue dusk.

  Someone was sitting cross-legged on the hood of her car.

  She stopped, regretting the absence of her hammer and reflecting that miscellaneous weirdos were things she hadn’t had to put up with on the other side of the Void. But after Suraklin and the Inquisition, she found the thought of minor hassles of this kind far less frightening than she once had. Then he turned his head.

  She saw the flash of round spectacle lenses, the gleam of a silver-foil rock concert logo on his baggy t-shirt. As every drop of blood in her veins transubstantiated painfully into straight adrenaline, she thought, Supposition A cannot be true. And then: Whoever it is, I’ll kill him for doing this to me.

  She crossed what seemed like twenty acres of black pavement, first quickly, her heart squeezed like a fist inside her, then slower and slower as she came near the spot.

  He unfolded long, jeans-clad legs and scrambled to his feet. The lamp overhead sparkled on the cracked spectacle lens, the diamond earrings snagged in the curly tangle of gray hair, and the strands of gimcrack beads. Even at this distance, she saw there was a bandage on the bare arm where Suraklin’s bullet had grazed.

  “Joanna?”

  Her arms crushed him in a hug before she remembered he had a cracked rib—she could feel the stiffness of the dressing under his. t-shirt. If it was a dream, she thought obliquely as his arms closed painfully around her burned back, it was an awfully accurate one ...His embrace lifted her off her feet.

  When they’d finished the first hundred-year kiss, he managed to say, “Look, I swear I won’t be a burden to you—unemployed wizards can always find work...”

  She dragged his mouth down to hers again, the familiar awkwardness of their mismatched heights convincing her finally that it couldn’t be a dream. She must have caught him on his cracked rib again because his convulsive grip suddenly relaxed. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I forgot about your back...” He looked around at the empty parking lot. “Did they make you stay on after everyone else left as punishment for desertion?”

  He must, she realized, have been sitting on the hood of the Mustang for an hour at least, watching the sun go down. He was wearing only the jeans, boots, and t-shirt he’d had on when she’d first met him, but didn’t seem chilled—like her, he had come from a place of bitterest cold.

  “No. I had some things to finish...” She paused in the midst of her usual excuse, then said, “That’s not really true. I just didn’t want to go home to be alone.”

  “Ah,” he said softly. For a few minutes they didn’t speak, only stood wrapped in one another, as they had done under his grubby cloak in the Sykerst, silent and content.

  After she quit crying Joanna said, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “It’s flattering of you to say so, my dear. I’m speechless with astonishment that I’m not dead.”

  Her arm tightened briefly around his waist. “You’ve never been speechless in your life,” she said, with unkind accuracy. “Don’t tell me the Council miscalculated the distance they had to be away from the Tower when they opened the Void to send me through?”

  He shook his head. “No. It was—rather unlikely. A deus ex machina, so to speak.” He sounded a little shaken, as if it still puzzled him, not only the manner of his escape, but that he had escaped at all.

  “Don’t tell me Cerdic came through at the last minute? Or Aunt Min?”

  He grinned, and shook his head again. “Though I wouldn’t swear Aunt Min was as asleep as she seemed to be when she was allegedly keeping the deathwatch over me. She seldom is, you know.” He rubbed his hands absently, as if trying to massage some old ache from the swollen joints. “No, it was quite literally a deus ex machina.” For a moment he was silent, as if still trying to puzzle it out. At last he said, “It was the Dead God who saved me.”

  A technician, thought Joanna. A scientist. She remembered the rotting tower of borrowed flesh and bones, the gluey, freezing darkness of the haunted church, and the poltergeist knocking, hammering out the numbers of pi. She wondered whether the thing he had built out of the bodies of others had been meant to resemble his true physical form.

  Lamplight snaked along Antryg’s spectacles as he turned his head. “Universal structural theory was his specialty, you know. In fact that was why he got trapped on our side of the Void to begin with, because he was investigating the Gate that was opened, rather than running away from it like a sensible person. After having crossed the Void twice—through and back—he knew of its existence and was doing experiments with it. He picked up the heavy disturbances on his instruments when Suraklin destroyed the enclave and was focused on that area when the Council sent you through. Since he had telepathically touched your mind as well as mine through the Sigil net he recognized you, and he realized you were being sent through under guard and against your will. Having located you, he was able to backtrack the mages to their starting point and locate me.”

  He fell quiet again, staring out into the Prussian-blue darkness, as if through it he could look into some other, deeper night. The lamplight overhead glinted on his earrings, and among the trashy finery around his neck Joanna recognized the necklaces given to him by Pella and earlier by Pharos, delicate as Faberge work among dimestore beads.

  “I had already taken the poison,” he said softly, as if to himself. “Considering what was in Pharos’ warrant, the Council was doing me the greatest favor they could. The Dead God—he told me his name, which is really only an identification sequence—was working on a machine to open Gates in the Void, but it was only in the experimental stages. He ran a considerable risk coming to get me at all. If Aunt Min had been awake, she could have stopped him easily, trapped him on that side of the Void, and destroyed him. But she wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be.”

  I knew them both, the old Archmage had said. Aside from Antryg, Aunt Min was probably the only person living who had known both Suraklin and Salteris well.

  Joanna reached across and put her hand over his. “Are you all right?” Her voice sounded smaller than she had meant, her thoughts on that silent stone room and Antryg lying there alone.

  He brought his other hand around to cover hers, the big, crooked bones of it reassuring. “A little surprised at the Dead God. I hardly suspected him of that kind of sentimentality, or honor, or whatever it was that motivated him. I was nearly unconscious when he fetched me through to his own world and then I was ill for days, living on artificial air while he got the poison out of my system. And then I came here.”

  He put an arm around her shoulders and drew her mouth once more to his. In the midst of the kis
s he added absently, “You know, you really are going to have to do something about your height...”

  “I promise I won’t be a burden on you any longer than it takes me to find something to do for money and my own place to live,” he went on after a few moments. “I can tend bar—read tea-leaves—heave coal...”

  “There hasn’t been a coal heater in Los Angeles since before World War II.”

  “Another promising career blighted. You have to give them numbers to tell them apart?” He dubiously regarded the car as Joanna unlocked the passenger-side door, then clambered in and pulled the door shut behind him. Joanna got in, gave him a brief lecture on the operation of the windows, started the engine, and, blithely disregarding the white lines, roared off across the parking lot, out the gate, and down Lost Canyon Road.

  She braked where the road crested the hill above the Ventura Freeway. Full dark had come, warm and magic; the electric wind had fallen; and in the dry, brilliant air, the San Fernando Valley lay before them in a glittering carpet, with the outlying blaze of the greater city of lights in the distance. Beside her, Antryg was silent, gazing out across the jewel-box glory of the world in which he would now live as an exile.

  Quietly, she said, “Your magic is gone, isn’t it? You have no power in this world.”

  “Probably not.” Against the reflection of the light, his face was only a dark profile of extravagant nose, shining steel spectacle rim, and a point of light caught in the beads at his throat. “Considering the uses to which I put my magic in the past, that may be for the best, at least for a time. Later...” He shrugged. “Is later. Right now I’m only glad that there is a later—or even that there is a now. And in fact, that’s really all there ever is.”

  ‘“Had I world enough, and time,’” Joanna quoted softly, wanting nothing more than that moment, the velvet voice in the darkness, the liquid warmth of the night, and the miles of flame-sprinkled blackness stretching out to the encircling hills that hemmed a flame-sprinkled sky.