The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  Wind thrummed in his ears and stirred his soft, fair hair and the mane of his horse; cloud shadows moved like torpid and amorphous ghosts across the land. The silence oppressed him. “It can’t be this far, surely.” For aside from the perfectly straight track of the old road, there was no sign that habitation had ever touched these bleak lands.

  “It’s a few hills over.” Le, usually as calmly matter-of-fact as a pistol ball, did not raise her voice against that windswept hush. “You can’t see it until you’re nearly on top of it.”

  Caris shivered. He was conscious of how small he and the woman were in these hills, two black-clad forms in that empty silence. He looked around him for he knew not what. Old spells still clung to the land, the Dark Mage’s might lingering in the stones. Squinting into the wind, he could see where another line of standing-stones crossed the far hills. Antryg had said to the Archmage that the Citadel was a node in the lines. The rudimentary stumps of Cans’ own slight magic could sense the movement of power along this ancient road, and he realized that the Citadel had been built by some people far earlier than Suraklin along one of the energy-tracks that crisscrossed the earth.

  The mages called them paths or lines or leys. Few understood what they were, and none knew why they existed. But exist they did—straight lines of energy along which magic could move, linked in some vast, unknowable grid. All magic—and all life, in some ways, the Archmage had told him once, back in the days when he had hoped to be a mage himself—was connected through them. The House of the Mages in Kymil lay in the line of this one—undoubtedly the Mages’ Yard in Angelshand did the same with the line of stones called the Devil’s Road. He felt, like a brush of wind, the touch of that moving power in his soul as he clucked to his horse and rode on.

  The Citadel of Suraklin lay in the midst of a cup-shaped valley among the hills. Judging by the extent of the ruined walls, Caris could see that in its day it had been a great place indeed, yet he completely believed what Salteris had said—that without the help of the wizards, the troops of the Emperor’s Heir, twenty-five years ago, would have wandered helplessly around the hills, unable to locate it, until the dark and nameless magic of that evil wizard had overtaken them. Though Suraklin had been dead these twenty-five years, some terrible spell of concealment clung about the place, and Caris literally was unaware that he was near it until Le called out, “Caris, watch out!” He woke from some momentary private daydream to find himself a yard from the vine-covered brink of an enormous pit, in the midst of a sprawling network of fallen stones that covered half a square mile of ground.

  “It takes me that way sometimes, too.” She rode up beside him as he cautiously kneed his horse to the very edge of the chasm. “Be careful—the ground isn’t too good here.” She glanced around her, her hand straying instinctively to the hilt of her sword.

  The horses, knee-deep in the tangle of vines that cloaked much of the ruins of the Citadel like a rotting shroud, were clearly nervous as well. Caris felt a good deal of sympathy for the beasts’ sentiments as he listened for some sound in the windless hush or scanned the skeleton outlines of stone walls still visible—hall, tower, workrooms outlined like the broken bones of a half-eaten carcass. Weeds forced apart broken paving-stones in what had been a vast court and lay in traceried circles of stringers. But mostly the ground had been torn open by the cumulative wrath of the wizards of the earth, and the pits that had underlain the Citadel gaped bare.

  “They must have feared him,” he said softly, “to leave no place where one course of stones stands upon another.”

  Le’s curving mouth tightened. “You didn’t live in these parts when his power covered the land,” she said. “They said his ears were everywhere, and there was no telling who might be his agent; I know for a fact my Uncle Welliger was involved in one of the attempts to contact the Archmage, with men he trusted—his own kinsfolk and his wife’s, all men who’d had their goods taken or some member of whose family disappeared. But Welliger went blind before he could set out for Angelshand.”

  An odd gust belled in Caris’ black jacket, flattened the thin shirt beneath against his ribs, then dropped to stillness again. Cloud shadows walked over the sun. Looking down into the pits, he could see down a number of levels, with shattered doorways with ivy and weeds. A tumble of white stones lay at the bottom like knocked-out teeth. It had been his grandfather’s wrath that had called down the lightning to blast this pit—his might, which had turned the tide against the cold evil that had so long festered here. It was hard to imagine it of the slender, quiet man who was his grandfather.

  Like the final echo of the Dark Mage’s decaying spells, wind sighed again in the nodding weeds. And without knowing quite how, Caris knew that someone was coming.

  He glanced sideways at Le. She started to speak of something else, oblivious, and he signaled her silent. Though she was the elder and higher ranked, she obeyed his sign. They dismounted and led their horses down a crumbled ramp to what had been a shallow cellar, the only cover in that blasted ruin. After a few moments, Caris heard what had only whispered in his mind—the soft swish-swish of hooves in the tangling vines and voices which, in spite of their involuntary hush, sounded loud in the still air that hung over the Citadel.

  A man’s said, “Our men have followed him here thrice this week, my lord.”

  “So.” That, too, was a man’s, though higher and cold as the touch of metal on bare flesh. Caris was aware of Le’s quick glance. Silent as a cat, he slipped forward, up the half-ruined ramp to the edge of the cellar pit. Lying flat in the wiry brambles, he could look along the ground to where the newcomers sat their horses at the edge of the ruins. “One may ask for what purposes. Abominations multiply in the lands...”

  Somewhat diffidently, the first speaker, a middle-aged man in the plain gray breeches and narrow-cut gray coat that Caris recognized with sinking heart as the uniform of the Witchfinders, said, “The abominations have been seen for weeks, my lord; since long before the Archmage came to Kymil.”

  “He is a mage,” the second man said. He turned his head. Against the summer sky, Caris recognized the ascetic profile and scant gray wisps of hair under the wide-brimmed shadow of the hat. It was Sergius Peelbone, Witchfinder Extraordinary to the Church. He felt something chill along his veins.

  Peelbone went on, almost disinterestedly, “They say that the mages could move along the energy-lines at their will, traveling hundreds of miles in a day, to do a deed in Kymil when they had been seen that morning in Angelshand. And certainly it will be difficult for him to prove that he has not done so, particularly if it can be shown that he has been to this place.” He scanned the desolation that lay about him. A scud of wind flicked the standing weed stalks by the broken stones, and his horse flung up its head with a nervous start. The Witchfinder’s powerful hand twisted, dragging cruelly on the heavy bridle bit to force the beast to stillness. Even at that distance, Caris could see the smudge of blood that dripped to the grass.

  “My lord,” ventured the other Witchfinder, “it was the Archmage himself who brought about the ruin of this place and brought the Dark Mage down in defeat. It could be argued...”

  “Anything can be argued,” Peelbone said. “The old legends speak of the power of this place, before the Dark Mage raised his walls here; the old spells that linger are themselves enough to tempt in his dotage the mage who battled them in his youth. That, and the growing number of abominations in the land, should be enough to convince the Regent to give us the power we need, Tarolus—the power to put them all under arrest and to extirpate the heresy of witchcraft from the Empire.”

  The two horses moved off through the ruins. Caris slid cautiously down to where Le waited, her hand over her mare’s muzzle, her dark eyes hard. Caris found himself chilled all over with rage, both at the slandering of Salteris and at the calm deliberation with which Peelbone had spoken. As sasennan of the Council, he was powerless to do anything, for a weapon does not strike in anger, but he said softly, “
Let’s go. The Archmage should know about this.”

  They moved silently through the trenches of the broken cellars, leading their horses as far as the nearest ridge before mounting. Even so, as Caris glanced back at the silent ruins of the Dark Mage’s Citadel, he could have sworn that the taller of the two mounted figures below turned to watch them as they disappeared over the hill.

  “My lord! My lady! Please stop!”

  Caris drew rein at the cries, looking down at the three or four men and women who came scrambling up the weedy, overgrown side of the marsh causeway from below. His horse, even before these people appeared, threw up its head with a snort, and Caris saw the white rim of fear around its eyeball. He cast a quick, semi-automatic glance down the other side of the raised roadbed, making sure it was not an ambush of some kind. There was no reason for it, but it was not the Way of the Sasenna to take chances. Then he and Le reined a step nearer to the panting farmers who came stumbling to their side.

  “You are sasenna,” the man gasped—little more than a boy of sixteen, stripped to his breeches for the haying, without stockings or shoes, his bare calves plastered in bog mud. “You must help us! Please! There’s a thing—a thing in the marsh...”

  “We can’t stop,” Le said coldly. “We are sasenna—we cannot strike without the command of our masters....”

  Caris held up his hand and leaned from the saddle. “What is it?”

  “An evil—an abomination...” One of the women, stout and fortyish, with her voluminous skirts tucked up to reveal legs as muddy as the boy’s, grabbed at the bridle of Caris’ horse. The gesture made him nervous, even though he knew there was no ambush planned. “Oh, dear God, it’s got Shebna!”

  “Caris...” Le said warningly as Caris dropped from the saddle and pulled his sword sheath from his sash. “It is not for us...”

  “My grandfather would command me to help them,” Caris said. “I know it. He’s the head of the Council....”

  Le’s voice was sharp, “That decision is not yours to make!” Technically, he knew she was right; the anger in her voice stemmed from her own indecision. “Your sword is not your own to draw.”

  One of the women sobbed, “Oh, please!”

  An older man shouted, “Look, you heartless bitch...”

  Caris caught that man by his bony shoulder. “No,” he said. “She’s right, but I’m coming anyway. Le—get the Archmage or Nandiharrow—or anyone.” Hands were tugging at his sleeves, the faces all around him tallowy with terror and panic under the smearing of mud. He felt his own heart begin to pound with the rising lift toward battle. “Go on,” he added as Le hesitated, her instincts to help warring with a lifetime of discipline in her sharp-boned face. He was turning back to the farmers before she had even lashed her horse to gallop away. “Where is it?”

  It interested him to see how well his own training held. In spite of the cold excitement that surged through him, he found himself able to think clearly as they led him to the edge of the road and down the steep bank to the watery tangle of willows in the marshes below. For five years he had trained to become sasennan, yet now he was aware, with knife-blade clarity of thought, that, for all his training, he had never yet truly fought for his own life. The Empire was at peace; unlike many sasenna, he didn’t seek brawls in taverns. Beside him, one of the women was sobbing, “It’s the curse of the Dark Mage! He’s left his curse upon the land! His devils are buried in the pools....”

  The smell of the marsh and the thick humming of the gnats that swarmed where the sunlight struck the scattered pools brought back to Caris his own childhood days of slogging after his parents at haying. His sword-sheath carried loose in his left hand, he cursed the head-high grasses that forced him to continually occupy his right hand in pushing a path—if there was an abomination here, the instants occupied in grabbing for his sword hilt might cost him or one of the people with him their lives.

  “It’s a devil,” gasped the older man who had cursed at Le, his breath rasping with the effort of keeping up. “It’s the Bishop we must be sending for, and the Witchfinders....”

  “Tell her to bring a sword, then,” Caris snapped, still annoyed with him. “I may need...” His words ended in a gasp, as he stepped into the open shade of the willows.

  The rank, standing sweet-hay had been cut for a little way along one side of a broad pool whose clouded brown waters showed how vast a thing had heaved itself up from their depths. The stubble, the felled hay—even the leaves of the willows above—were all dappled with the crimson brightness of splattered blood; it lay in little swirls in the water around the crushed skulls of the two men who sprawled on its verge. The thing on the far bank of the pool was holding a third person—a girl of thirteen or so—between its pad-fingered paws, her cracked skull still between its dripping mandibles. Blood overlay the reddish, tripy folds of its massive body like a glittering slime. At the sound of Caris’ sword sliding from the sheath, it raised its crayfish head, rubbery, semitransparent pendules swinging his way for an instant; then, before Caris’ shocked mind had a chance to do more than stare, it struck.

  For all its size, it moved hideously fast. The water of the pool erupted in a surge of mud on both sides as it plowed through; Caris, used to the onrush of a man, had only time to gauge the paws and the stumpy, squamous, green-blotched tail before it was on him. Though his mind screamed to know what it was and from what obscene depth of insane horror it had risen, as sasennan his business and his training were simply to deal with it as an objective threat, a challenge like any other. That training saved him, letting him time the thing’s incredible rush and spring aside, cutting down at the slender neck that connected that sagging, squidlike head to the rugose mass of body. The thing was turning even as he sprang, and the sword sliced through the dangling, stumpy tentacles that surrounded the mouth—or what might have been the mouth. Clear slime burst over him from the wounds, and the putrid fetor of the thing nearly made him gag as he twisted aside again and cut at the paddy, grasping, knotted paws.

  His feet skidded in the mud. He was peripherally aware that, save for himself and the creature, whatever it was, the glade was deserted—the peasants had very sensibly fled. They’re unarmed, he thought, desperately evading another lurching lunge, and God knows, even armed and trained, how can I touch this thing? Its long arms outreached him, and it moved with a horrible speed. His sword came down on the thin wrist and jarred on the bone—the blade that could cut off a man’s leg with a single swipe. He felt the vibration of it through the bones of his arms to his shoulders, as if he had struck an iron bar; it crossed his mind to wonder if it had bones as he leaped aside. He splashed knee-deep in the muddy water and wondered, with sudden horror as the tepid liquid slopped over the tops of his boots, if there were more like this, buried in the immemorial black mud of the pool.

  Something turned and rolled underfoot, and he staggered, hacking at the thing and trying to splash back to firmer ground. It was before him, churning in the shallows like an enormous cow, throwing filthy water up over his face, and he realized he was being driven. The water slowed his movements; his wet garments tangled stickily to his limbs. He cut at the grabbing paws again and opened one of them to the bone, but the sword jarred, unable to sever, and stinking, ochre slime leaked down the striated arm to pool like oil on top of the water. He sprang back and stumbled; something underfoot held for an instant, then shattered. His foot dropped into some cavity below and broken branches gouged his ankle through the boot leather. The next second, mud covered, slime-dripping paws closed bone-breakingly around his shoulders.

  Waist-deep in water, pinned and nearly suffocated by the thing’s stench, his hand fumbled for a dagger, even as he knew his own short life was over. He felt the massive strength of the thing tearing him free of the pool’s bottom, lifting him toward the dripping beak, the slime running hotly down over his face as he tried to strike upward.... Then with a lurch the thing staggered, and the hideous vise of its grip slackened. Caris twisted and
fell; mud half blinded him, but he saw the haft of one of the haymakers’ pitchforks standing upright in the thing’s back, flung at the last second by someone on the bank. As the creature tried to paw it loose, Caris rolled clear, scrambling desperately through the heaving waters that were now tobacco-colored with a mixture of blood and mud. There were people on the shore, many people.... He had a clouded impression of Le, of the Bishop Herthe standing in open-mouthed shock, and of the Archmage.

  Salteris’ voice cut like cold acid through his thickening senses. “Get out of the water!” The creature whirled and came slavering after him once more. Brown ooze streamed from it; the pitchfork bobbed and jerked in its back. Caris, still somehow clutching his sword, half crawled, half threw himself up on the bank among the damp, rank pads of the bloody hay. There was no time to get to his feet to run—he rolled over and over, inland, until he fetched up with a bruising wallop against the roots of a tree.

  Thus he saw Salteris stride forward, his empty hand upraised. In the frame of silver hair, the thin features were very white, the dark eyes wide and somehow inhuman, calling down power as he had called it down against Suraklin. There was a leap and a crackle from the clear sky overhead, the harsh sizzle and stink of ozone, and thunder like a hand slamming Caris’ ears. Blue in the daylight, lightning struck the brown waters of the pool. The creature was still knee-deep in them. For an instant, it seemed that the bolts crawled up over the whole of that hunched, hideous form. Then the thing convulsed, bending backward, all the remaining, pendulous tentacles round its head stiffening out for an instant in a hideous corona around the flabby, desperately working mouth. The stench clutched Caris’ throat and belly, even as the thing sprang and twisted, the pool waters heaving up around it in a brown and filthy wall.