The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  Then it was rolling slightly, like a foundered boat, the muddy blobs of its feet sticking up above the slopping water and the tentacles of its head slowly relaxing in death. The pool was filled with crawling currents of nameless fluids and stank like a cesspit.

  Caris buried his face in his arms, fighting the desperate sear of nausea in his throat. The frog-smelling hay scratched his face, and his wet clothes and dripping hair were suddenly cold on his clammy flesh as the battle-rush ebbed from him like blood from a severed artery. He was aware of the aching bruises on his shoulders, the sting of air through his torn shirt and jacket, and the excruciating ache of his right ankle. It was only gradually that it sank in upon him that he was still alive.

  Footsteps approached. His every sinew protested as he did it, but as a sasennan must, he rolled over to meet what might be another attack with a drawn sword.

  It was Le, as he had known it would be, and with her the boy who had guided him to the place and who, he suspected, had thrown the pitchfork, which had distracted the monster’s attention and saved his life. They helped him to his feet, Caris almost unable to stand with the violence of the reaction. He freed himself from their grip and picked up his sword, which was covered, like his clothes, with an unspeakable coating of mud and slime. Dripping like a half drowned sewer rat, he somehow walked by himself to the edge of the pool.

  The Bishop Herthe stood there in the midst of her sasenna, still open-mouthed with horror. Against the gray of her velvet robes, her potato-like face looked pallid and boiled with shock.

  On the churned and muddy brink, the Archmage Salteris gazed at the obscene thing still bobbing and wallowing in the pool. His white brows were drawn over his nose, his dark eyes not only baffled, but deeply troubled. Their expression changed to one of concern as Caris came near him. “Are you all right, my son?”

  Caris nodded. He looked for some moments at the thing in the pool, thinking unbelievingly, I fought that, and wondering how he had dared. It was over twice the size of a horse. His whole body was one vast pain—his soul, too, with the shaken reaction to that single second when he had looked down the thing’s pulsating throat and had known he would die. Shakily, he started to draw another deep breath. But this close, the stench was enough to make him change his mind.

  “What was it?”

  The old man shook his head. “I don’t know, my son,” he said softly. And then, even more quietly, he added, “But I have a suspicion who might.”

  Chapter VI

  THEY FOUND ANTRYG in the guardroom on the lowest level of the Tower, sparring with the captain of the Tower guards with split bamboo training swords.

  The journey to the Tower from the marsh had restored the Bishop to her usual equilibrium—she had begun quarreling with Salteris before they were halfway there. As he leaned against the stone arch that led into the guardroom from the passage, Caris could hear them at it still. Before him, in the jumpy light of a dozen torches, shadows looming huge on the fire-dyed wall, he could see the forms of Antryg and the captain circling like cats. The captain’s loose black jacket and the shirt beneath and Antryg’s trailing robes and beard were blotched with dark patches of sweat; their wet faces caught the yellow glare of the light as if they’d just doused themselves in a rain barrel.

  The mad wizard, Caris was interested to note, didn’t wear his spectacles for the bout, but he moved unerringly and with a dancer’s grace. Caris had worked with the captain of the Tower once in the previous week; he was a huge Church sasennan, taller even than Antryg, fat and flexible and capable of crushing an opponent beneath the weight of his rush. Perhaps because of Antryg’s madness, Caris had not expected the skill with which the wizard sidestepped and returned.

  Looking at that odd face in its streaming tangle of hair, the gray eyes wide and intent with calm madness, Caris had the suspicion that, on the training floor, the mad wizard would be his master.

  Behind him, he was aware of the Bishop’s harsh whisper, “I cannot permit it,” and the impatience in Salteris’ voice.

  “You needn’t fear I will abet his escape.”

  “Needn’t I?” Without turning his head, Caris could almost see the slitting of those shallow blue eyes. “He was your pupil, Salteris Solaris. It was only through your intercession that he was not killed, as he should have been, for meddling in the affairs of men at the time of the uprising in Mellidane. The Council of Wizards exist solely on the sufferance of the Church, a sufferance which depends upon our trust in you to regulate the teaching and practice of your arts and to keep those arts from ever touching the general life of humankind—ever. Look that you do not find the Church’s might turned against you, as it turned five hundred years ago at the Field of Stellith.”

  “You dare...”

  There was a note in his grandfather’s voice Caris had never heard before. He swung around with such sharpness that every pulled muscle of his back twisted with a red stab of pain. The old man’s eyes blazed with wrath and infuriated pride, looking amber as a wolf’s in the firelight. His anger was like the molten core of a star sinking inward upon itself, swallowing both light and time. The Bishop fell back a pace before that sudden fury, her heavy face yellow with fear. In almost a whisper, the Archmage said, “You dare to threaten me?”

  Her own anger kindling, the Bishop snapped, “I dare to threaten any who would break the vows that hold all things in order!”

  Salteris opened his mouth in rage to reply, but Antryg’s voice cut in reasonably, “In that case, we’ll let you handle things the next time an abomination appears in the hay marsh.” He had materialized without a sound at Caris’ elbow, still holding his bamboo training sword. Sweat dripped from the end of his long nose and shone on his bare forearms as he drew the remains of a red Church wizard’s cloak over his shabby robes.

  The Bishop turned furiously on him. “What do you know of it?” she demanded, catching a tattered handful of his robe. Her face was scarlet with anger, as happened when one had been publicly driven to fear. Antryg shook back his sleek-matted hair and put on his spectacles, blinking at her from behind them in mild surprise.

  “There must have been an abomination, mustn’t there, for you to come in force like this to see me, and so urgently that Caris wasn’t even able to change his clothes,” he said. Caris, a little surprised, looked down at his dark clothes, still caked with the residue of mud and slime, though he had washed it from his face and hair and hands. “Whatever Caris did battle with, it was certainly in a marsh, and that marsh must be one of the hay marshes around the town. I’m surprised at you, Herthe—you’re usually so good at the obvious.”

  He started to turn away. With angry violence, the Bishop seized his scarecrow robes and pulled him back to face her. The torchlight gleamed on her shaven skull and in her small, porcine eyes. “Beware, Antryg,” she warned.

  “Beware of what?” he asked reasonably. “I’m safe behind the walls of this Tower. It’s you who have to deal with the things. Would you hold this?” He offered her the long hilt of the bamboo sword still in his hand. Surprised, she took it, releasing her hold on his robes to do so. He said, “Thank you,” and vanished into the darkness of the narrow stair.

  Her face flushed, the Bishop moved to follow, but Salteris laid a staying hand on her beefy shoulder. “No,” he said softly. “It would do little good, with you there.”

  “We can compel him...”

  The Archmage’s voice was suddenly harsh. “No member of the Church—none—has the right to lay hands upon one who has sworn the vows to the Council of Wizards.”

  “The case is different!” the Bishop declared furiously. “The abominations...”

  “The case is not different!”

  For a long moment they stood, staring into one another’s eyes. Caris felt the heat of the old man’s pride and wrath again, as if he stood near the door of a stove, but hidden now, heat without light. The Bishop’s heavy mouth set. Then, as if he realized where they were, without magic in the Church’s pow
er, the old man turned suddenly away. “Come, Caris. There is little to be learned here. But I tell you this, Herthe of Kymil. Should you or Peelbone and his Witchfinders or anyone else move against Antryg Windrose or any Council mage without my leave, I shall learn of it, and then...” His voice sank, and the dark brown of his eyes seemed to glint again with an amber flame, “...you will have to deal with me.”

  It was only when they were walking down the hill in the lingering blueness of the summer dusk that Caris dared to speak. The Archmage was walking very swiftly, his black robes billowing about him. Caris’ hurt ankle jabbed him at every step; but, after five years of training, neither that nor the bone-weariness of stiffening muscles troubled him as much as that terrible silence that still hung about Salteris like the darkness of stormclouds.

  As they reached the foot of the tower hill, Caris asked, “Why?”

  The old man glanced testily at him. Then, seeming to see him for the first time, he slowed his steps. “Are you all right, my son? I’d forgotten—you were hurt....”

  Caris shook his head impatiently. “Why did you defend him? He knows more than he’s telling. If they can compel him to speak...”

  Salteris sighed. “No. For one thing, he’s tougher than he looks, our madman, and far more clever. We could never be sure we were getting the truth, if in fact he is even aware of it himself. For another...” He paused, staring back at the darkness of the Tower against the milky twilight sky. “They are only waiting for that. The Bishop and Peelbone—it is their chance, to establish their jurisdiction over us, to gain a precedent. That is why, above all other things, I must be careful with Antryg.”

  As in another life, Caris remembered the sharp noon sunlight on the desolation of the Citadel and the Witchfinder Peelbone’s thin cold voice in the silence. “Could Antryg be responsible for the abominations?” he asked.

  Salteris walked on in silence for a few moments more, his white brows drawn together, and the look on his face was one of utter bafflement such as Caris had not seen him wear in years. “I don’t know,” he said at last. His soft boots scuffed the long grass that overgrew the edges of the broken pavement of the ancient road. “I don’t see how he could, and I...” He hesitated, then shook his head. “But I am unfamiliar with these things. Though I have crossed the Void, I—I have not the sense of it that Antryg has—or had.” His thin mouth hardened for a moment with something like annoyance. “It might be that they come through the Void—and then again, he could be creating them in some fashion. But in either case, he can neither work magic nor touch the Void from within the Tower. Else he would have escaped long ago.”

  “Would he?” Caris asked suddenly. He halted, hooking his hands through his sword belt, and looked at the old man doubtfully. “A room with an open door is not a cell.”

  There was a long silence. In the old man’s face was the nearest thing Caris had ever seen to surprised enlightenment. Then he nodded slowly to himself. “Trust a sasennan,” he said softly after a moment. “The best place to hide is in plain sight—I had almost forgotten that Antryg was always a genius at that. If he has found some way of working magic from within the Tower, its walls would prevent any other mage from knowing it.” As if another thought crossed his mind, he frowned again and shook his head. “No—it is impossible.”

  “Is it?” Caris persisted. The discipline of the Way of the Sasenna made him unwilling to contradict the Archmage, but something about the dusk and his own stretched weariness lessened between them the barrier raised by years and his vows. As a child, he had trailed gamely after the old man while his grandfather searched for yarrow in the marshes, and had asked whatever he thought. In a curious way, he felt the echo of that old intimacy. “You said yourself there are things about the Void you don’t understand. Perhaps he does. Could he be creating these things, instead of summoning them through?”

  As they walked on, the old man said thoughtfully, “They say Suraklin could summon the elemental spirits and bend them to his bidding—could clothe them in flesh of his own devising, so that they could tear and hurt with their uncontrolled anger, instead of just knocking on walls or throwing pots as they usually do. But if that were the case,” he continued, as Caris offered him his hand to help him down a stream cut which gouged the road, “I would not have been able to slay the thing as I did.”

  “How did you slay it?” His grandfather’s scarred arm felt strangely light and fragile in his grip as he helped the old man up the broken stones and cracked hunks of old pavement. Now at the end of summer, the stream which had cut the road had long since dried—the mud at the bottom bore the marks of the constant trickle of feet, coming and going to the Tower.

  The memory of the old man’s dark, inhuman eyes as he summoned the lightning seemed as impossible to him as the white heat of his pride and anger against the Bishop had been—as, indeed, was the knowledge that it had been he who had led the assault on the Citadel.

  The old man smiled. “With electricity.”

  “Electricity?” Caris’ dark brows dove down over his nose.

  His grandfather’s smile widened. “This looks like a good place,” he remarked, and led the way off the road, between two of the fallen menhirs, his robe slurring softly in the open grass beyond. Limping a little, Caris followed, as he used to follow in his childhood, not asking where they went or why. They passed along a little gully between the round backs of the hills. The dusk closed around them like veils of smoke-colored silk.

  “Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag has been experimenting for some years with electricity,” Salteris continued, as he picked his way along some unseen track in the deep grass. “It was his experiments, in fact, which first led him to speak with me—though of course we had met at the Imperial Palace in Angelshand. During the conflict with Suraklin, the Prince Hieraldus and I became friends. When he succeeded his father and became Emperor he patronized us as much as the Church and his reputation would allow, and I came to know a good many of the Court. Narwahl was the Emperor’s physician, then as now, but he’s also a scientist. At first, he thought magic might be some type of electricity, and it was thus that he and I came to speak.”

  They crossed the stream bed again—or perhaps a different one; this one had water in it, nearly choked in a brambly tangle of wild roses, around which the last bees of the evening swarmed drunkenly. As he helped the Archmage up the far bank, Caris reflected that he must have picked up his minute knowledge of the countryside around Kymil during the days of the war against Suraklin—he certainly seemed to know every dip and gully of these silent hills. Following along in the old man’s tireless footsteps, Caris felt ashamed, not only of his stiff and aching muscles, but of the queer dread he felt in this haunted land. With the starry darkness, the memory of the abomination returned disturbingly to his mind. It had come from nowhere, and he was too aware that there was nothing to prevent the coming of another.

  For five years, Caris had trained as a sasennan, a strenuous life, but uncomplicated. Now, moving through the dreamlike landscape of the summer dusk, he felt as if he trod the borders of a land he did not know, fighting unknown things with weapons, which would have as little effect upon them as his sword had had upon the swamp thing’s iron bones. Ashamed of his uneasiness he might be, but nevertheless he felt glad the Archmage was with him in the blue and trackless emptiness through which they passed.

  Salteris moved his fingers, seeming to pluck a raveled thread of light from the air, and cast it before him to float like a glow worm along the ground a little ahead of their feet. “According to Narwahl, electricity can be conducted by water, in the same way that it is conducted by metal; and, moreover, metal or water will prevent the possibility of electricity grounding harmlessly away into the earth. Lightning, he says, is only electricity in its natural form.” The same wry, astringent smile touched his lips. “I shall have to write to him and tell him of the successful demonstration. He will be pleased.”

  “And the abomination?” Caris asked.

&nb
sp; The old man sighed, the smile fading from his face like the last fading of the daylight.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “The abomination.”

  For a time they walked in silence, Caris thinking again of that tall, gawky lunatic in his tattered robes and ink-stained beard and of the bright gray gaze behind those heavy lenses. Would a man who had been a prisoner for seven years retain that odd, buoyant calm? The scant experience of his own nineteen years gave him little help. Smelling now the late-summer headiness of the night, feeling the touch of straying breezes on his face, he doubted it. Like the breath of a ghost, the memory of the fading of his powers brushed him, the dust-colored uncaring and the terror he felt, knowing that those spells of fading would recur, as they were recurring more and more often. In the end, his powers would never return. Could one whom his grandfather had called the most powerful mage in the world have endured that loss?

  Could that, in its turn, have driven him mad?

  Or had he never suffered it?

  Caris turned to look back over the hills, where the dark shape of the windowless Tower bulked against the sky.

  “Here we are.” Salteris gestured, and a clinging frost of light momentarily edged the deep blueness of a little hollow among the hills. A standing-stone had once been planted there, but had fallen long ago and now lay cocooned in wild ivy and bramble. In the lee side of one crowding hill a thicket of laurel and hawthorn rustled with the quick nervousness of birds’ wings; on the opposite hillslope, gentler and stretching off into a vague space of dusk that rose toward the deeper twilight of the sky, rabbits paused in their grazing to look down at the brief network of diamonds that the Archmage had cast. Then the swift glow faded, and with it the ravelly blue phosphorescence that had guided their feet. Caris made his way carefully to the fallen stone and sat on the bare place at its end.