The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  “I warn you,” she said grimly. “I can have you...”

  “You can not!” cut in Salteris sharply. “He is the Church’s prisoner, but his person is under the jurisdiction of the Council of Wizards to which he made his vows.”

  “Vows that he foreswore!”

  “Does a priest who sins pass from the governance and judgment of the Church?” Salteris demanded. For an instant their gazes locked. The wizard was like an old, white fox, slender and sharp as a knife blade against the Bishop’s piglike bulk. But like a pig, Caris knew, the Bishop was more intelligent and more dangerous than she seemed; here in the Tower, Salteris, like Antryg, was at her mercy.

  “A priest’s sins concern a priest alone,” the Bishop said softly. “A wizard who foreswears his vows not to meddle in the affairs of humankind endangers not only all those he touches, but all those he encourages to follow his example. He can not only be a danger, but he can teach others to be a danger, and if we cannot trust the mageborn to govern their-own...”

  “Can you not?” Salteris replied in a voice equally low. Deep amber glints shone catlike in his eyes as they bored into hers. “Were it not for the mageborn on the Council, it would be Suraklin who rules this city, and not yourself.”

  “Suraklin was defeated by the army led by the Prince.”

  “Without us, his precious army would not so much as have found the Citadel. Suraklin would have led them like sheep through the hills and, in the end, summoned the elemental forces of the earth to swallow them up. By our dead that day, by this...” With a swift move Salteris flung back the long sleeve of his robe. Age-whitened scars blotched his arms, beginning like a sleeve, four inches below his elbow and, Caris knew, covering half his chest. “...I have earned the right to say what shall be done with a man who has taken Council vows.”

  He turned suddenly back to where Antryg was calmly drinking his tea and taking no further interest in the discussion of those by whose whim he would live or die. “Antryg,” he said. “Has there been movement through the Void in these last weeks?”

  “There must have been, mustn’t there, if you’ve seen an intruder,” Antryg said reasonably. He swirled his cup in his hand and gazed down into its dregs. “Do you realize the spells on this tower affect even the tea-leaves?”

  “I think you’re lying,” the Archmage said softly.

  Antryg raised his head, startled. “I swear to you I haven’t gotten a decent reading in seven years.”

  Salteris rested his slender hands among the junk on the table and looked for a long moment down into the madman’s wide, bespectacled, gray eyes. “I think you’re lying, Antryg,” he repeated. “I don’t know why...”

  “Don’t you?” Their gazes held, Salteris’ wary and speculative, Antryg’s, suddenly stripped of the mask of amiable lunacy, vulnerable and very frightened. The Archmage’s glance slid to the Bishop, then away, and something relaxed in the set of his mouth. He straightened up and stood for a moment looking down at the seated man. Light from the candles in their holder, clotted with stalactites of years’ worth of dribbled wax, glinted on the round lenses of Antryg’s spectacles and caught like droplets of yellow sunlight in the crystal of his earrings.

  Then abruptly Antryg got to his feet. “Well, it’s been very pleasant chatting with you, but I’m sure we all have things to do.” With manic briskness he collected teapot and cups, stacked them neatly in one corner of the table, and piled papers on top of them. “Herthe, why don’t you put a division of your guards at the Archmage’s disposal? I’m sure they’ll come in handy. Salteris...” He looked away from the Bishop’s goggling indignation to his former master, and the madness died again from his eyes. In a sober voice he said, “I think the first place you should look should be Suraklin’s Citadel. You know as well as I do that it was built on a node of the lines. If there is some sort of power abroad in the land, signs of it will show up there.”

  Salteris nodded. “I think so, too.”

  For a moment the two wizards faced one another; in the silence between them, Caris was again made conscious of how quiet the Tower was. No sound penetrated from the outside, save a soft, plaintive moaning of wind in the complex ventilation; no light, no warmth, no change. Antryg was not a young man, but he was not old, and Caris was aware that mages could live to fantastic ages. Was this room and the one above it all the world he could look forward to for the next fifty years? In spite of himself, in spite of what he now knew about Antryg, he felt again a stab of pity for that tall scarecrow, with his mad, mild eyes.

  Salteris said, “Thank you, Antryg. I shall be back to see you, before I leave Kymil.”

  Antryg smiled like a mad elf. “I shall see what I can do about getting us caviar by then. Come any day—I’m generally at home between two and four.” He thought about it for a moment, then added, “And at any other time, of course.”

  “Are you?” asked Salteris, in a voice so low that Caris, startled, was barely sure he heard the words. Then the old man turned and, followed by the Bishop and his sasennan, descended the blackness of the narrow stair to the guardroom below.

  It wasn’t until they were again on the ancient road, shadowed now by the gray, unseasonable clouds that were riding up from the river to cover the town with the soft smell of coming rain, that Caris said, “He was lying.”

  The Archmage glanced over at him and raised one white brow.

  Caris jerked his head upward, toward the clouds. “He said that he could no more sense the Void than he could the weather. But the first thing he said to the Bishop was that it would rain tonight.”

  With a brisk jingling of harness, shockingly loud in the wind-murmuring quiet, the Bishop’s carriage passed them by, returning to her palace in Kymil. Counting her outriders, Caris noticed that Herthe had left the two Red Dogs back at the Tower. Through the thick glass of the windows, he caught a glimpse of the lady herself, fretfully rubbing her aching joints as the badly sprung vehicle jolted over the unpaved way. The Bishop did not even spare a glance to the old mage and his sasennan walking in the long grass at the road’s verge.

  Salteris sighed and nodded. “Yes. I feared it was so. He’s hiding something, Caris; he knows something, or there is something he will not speak.” The wind made its soft, thrumming thunder in their ears and lifted the long white hair from his shoulders. The waning daylight glinted in the sepia depths of his eyes.

  Caris was silent for a time as they walked on through the dusk. He thought about the practiced ease with which the mad wizard had sparked the tensions between Bishop and Archmage, to make them turn upon one another and cease questioning him. Antryg had said it had been five years since they’d met—Caris wondered how he had known the suspicion would be so easy to arouse, for that touchiness of temper was something which had grown in the old man more recently, he thought, than that. But then, Antryg had known Salteris well.

  He glanced back at the windowless tower, its surrounding buildings hidden again by the hills, a single warning finger lifted against the twilight milkiness of the sky. Then he dug in his purse for the lipa and returned it to the Archmage. He was plagued by the odd sixth sense that the sasenna develop, the feeling that there was coming a time when the old man was going to need it badly.

  Chapter IV

  THE SILENCE AFTER the print-run finished was like the drop of a cleaver. Joanna looked up, startled as if by a noise.

  But the only noise in the cubicle now was the faint, self-satisfied hum of the air conditioner.

  Around her, Systems felt suddenly, terribly empty.

  In something like panic her eyes jerked to the clock.

  6:45.

  Her breath leaked away in a small sigh. Not so very late.

  You can’t keep doing this, she told herself, shoving off with one sneakered foot against the filing cabinet and coasting in her wheeled swivel chair to the printer to tear off the long accordion of green-and-white paper. The data’s going to come in from the SPECTER tests this week, and everybody in the plan
t is going to be working insane overtime. You can’t refuse to do the same on the grounds that you’re afraid of the boogieman.

  She didn’t even look at the graph as she folded it and stashed it on top of the stratified layers of junk on her desk. Her small hands were perfectly steady as she punched through backup and shut down, but she was wryly conscious that she performed the activity in record time.

  You can’t keep doing this, she repeated to herself. It’s been almost two weeks. Even if they didn’t find him, nobody could live in hiding in this building for that long. And they’ve been over it a dozen times.

  But as she stashed her copy of Byte and the massive roll of printout from one of her own programs that she’d sneaked in to run on the Cray, her fingers touched the smooth handle of the hammer that she always carried with her these days. Once or twice in the last ten days, particularly when she was working late, she had had the feeling of being watched, and it came unbidden to her mind that there were a vast number of places in Building Six where someone could hide. The Analysis and Testing building was two stories high, but in most places it had only one floor. Above the labs and test bays loomed a vast loft of space crossed by catwalks where someone could lurk for hours unseen. Joanna knew it well—she had been tempted, over and over, to go there during the periods of gray and causeless depression that had come to her in the last few days, and only her fear of what she might meet there had kept her away. But Digby Clayton, the Programming Department’s resident crazy, frequently went there to meditate—and have visions, so he said—and a number of people in the Art Department claimed to have gone up there and made love at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning unnoticed.

  It wasn’t the only place, either, she thought, stepping resolutely into the well-lit blankness of the empty hall. The garage where they kept the fork lifts and electric trucks was accessible from a door near the supply offices. With a pocketful of change, you could live indefinitely from the junk machines—until malnutrition caught up with you, anyway, she added with an inner grin, in spite of her fears. And in the teeth of the much-vaunted security system, thefts had, as the guard said, proceeded regularly—everything from paper clips to computer components to telephone equipment by the metric ton. It would be easy to hide out there and wait....

  For what? Joanna demanded sensibly of herself and, with some effort, prevented her step from quickening. If the man was a thief, he’d have gotten himself out the same way he got in—never mind what it was—and be long gone. Nobody in his right mind would hide out in San Serano for a week just to jump out and strangle people.

  But nobody in his right mind would climb to the top of a University bell tower to take potshots with a scope-sighted rifle at passers-by, either, her mind retorted, or murder perfectly innocent, semiretired rock’n’roll stars just to say they’d done it, or do any of the other gruesome things that had made the headlines within her memory.

  You’re paranoid, Joanna.

  Who told you I was, and why? she retorted jokingly, and glanced once again over her shoulder.

  It was like scratching a mosquito bite, she thought—something that didn’t help, that you shouldn’t do, but you couldn’t stop.

  Uneasiness stalked her, like the faint sound of her sneakers on the carpet. She found herself increasingly loath to pass the darkened openings of rooms and hallways on both sides of the lighted corridor, though she was not certain what it was that she feared to see.

  At the junction of the main corridor she stopped, hiking her heavy purse up onto her shoulder and pushing her soft, unruly hair out of her face. Around her, the plain pastel walls were decorated with walnut-framed blowups of some of the more scenic photographs of the San Serano plant, dramatic in its barren backdrop of chaparral hills and clumps of twisted live oak, the grass either the white champagne of summer or the exquisite emerald velvet of winter rains. The shots, Joanna was always amused to notice, were carefully set up to exclude the parking lots, the barbed wire, and the bluish blanket of Los Angeles smog in the background.

  Down the dim hallway to her right was the main computer room.

  The lights there were still on, though she could hear no voices. No shadow moved across them to blot the sheen of them on the metal of the doorframe. She’d been in the room almost daily since the assault, but there had always been people at the monitors and graphics printers connected to the enormous mainframe, and she had had deadlines prodding at her back. A half-memory from that night tugged at the back of her mind like a temptation she could not quite define—some unchecked incongruity that she had not spoken of to the guards because it was too absurd, and she had feared their laughter, but she wanted to verify it in her own mind.

  It took more determination than she thought it would to make herself walk down the unlit hall toward the glow of the doorway. Knowing herself to be timid and passive by nature, her very reluctance made her go on.

  The trouble is, she thought wryly, stepping up the slight ramp and into the clean-lit, cold vastness of the room, you can’t always tell what fears are irrational and what are only improbable. It would certainly help if this were a movie—I could listen for the creepy music on the soundtrack to warn me whether I’m making a stupid mistake or not.

  The computer was still up. In good lighting it was beautiful, its tricolored bulk looming like the Great Wall of China amid a tasteful selection of add-ons, which included four input desks, several banks of additional memory, and two six-by-six-foot color monitors capable of forming the most exacting of projections. Digby Clayton assured her that Pac-Man played on such a monitor was a truly visceral experience.

  A blue-gray polyester blazer hung neatly over the back one of the chairs, and Joanna identified it, with a slight sinking of the stomach, as Gary Fairchild’s. Better, she thought, to get this over quickly before he returned and asked her what she was doing here. She did not precisely know herself and she was never good at explaining things to people, particularly to Gary.

  She walked a little ways into the room, and knelt on the floor in approximately the place she’d been thrown. Her memory of what she was seeking was a little clearer from down here, as if she’d left it like a contact lens on the carpet. She’d seen the candle in its anachronistic holder, the candle of which the guards had found no sign, sitting in front of the nearest monitor. A precaution, they’d said, against turning on the lights and possibly alerting a passing guard—but a flashlight would have served better, she thought, as she had thought then. There had been a black shadow descending upon her as her own mind darkened and, at the last moment, that glimpse of something on the wall.

  From her angle near the floor she narrowed her eyes, finding the place.

  Of course there was nothing there now.

  She got to her feet again, feeling a bit silly. Brushing off the knees of her jeans, she walked to the spot. It had been a mark, she remembered, like a Japanese pictograph, but definitely not Japanese, about eight inches above her own eye-level and a foot to the left of the doorframe. It had been clear and sharply defined, but somehow unreal, like a spot of light thrown from a stray reflector rather than anything actually written there. She’d only had a glimpse of it, a sidelong flicker from the corner of her eye as she fell, and the memory of it was fogged by panic and terror. In any case, there was certainly no sign of it now.

  She put the side of her face to the wall and peered sidelong at the spot, hoping to see something from the different angle, as sometimes could be seen with glass.

  Still nothing.

  Mentally she shook herself. The janitors would have washed the wall since then, if nothing else, she told herself, or—did the janitors wash the walls here? Probably—the computer room was a favorite showplace of the front-office boys. Or maybe there had never been anything in the first place.

  Alfred Hitchcock’s profile? she wondered frivolously. George Lucas’ signature of THX1138? The footprint of a giant hound?

  When someone yelled “Boo!” behind her, she nearly jumped out of he
r skin. A week of the jitters had, however, schooled her reflexes—her hand was in her purse and gripping the handle of the hammer before she had completely swung around enough to recognize Gary Fairchild.

  “Hey, calm down,” he said, with his deprecating smile. “Did I scare you?”

  She was trembling all over, but, rather to her surprise, her voice came out level and very angry. “Why? Wasn’t that the idea?”

  He looked confused and taken aback. “I—uh—Don’t get mad. I mean—you know.” That explained, he hastily changed the subject. “Were you looking for me?”

  It was in her mind to say, Why would I look for someone who’d play juvenile tricks like that? but there was no point in getting into a fight with Gary. He’d only hang onto her, apologizing like hell for days, until she got tired enough to forgive him. Instead she said, “No, I came back in the hopes of catching the criminal when he returned to the scene of the crime.”

  Nonplussed, Gary said, “But that was days ago, babe. You don’t think he’s lurked around here all this time?”

  “With a mental Oi, veh, Joanna said, “Joke, Gary.”

  Obediently, he gave a hearty laugh. Regarding him—white jeans, Hawaiian shirt bulging just slightly over conscientiously built-up muscles and an equally conscientious tan—Joanna wondered if she’d even like him, if she met him for the first time now.

  In spite of two years of dating him, she had her own suspicions about that.

  “Besides,” she added, surreptitiously sliding the handle of her hammer back into her purse under the heavy wads of printouts, a brush, a mirror, pens, notebooks, screw-cap boxes, and a collapsible cup, “he might have come back. Whatever he was out to steal...”