The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  Her voice was cool and precise, “You can say it as many times as you need to in order to feel that you’ve made some kind of amends. But it will all be entirely for your own benefit.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re my sweetheart, babe, I love you.”

  “If you didn’t keep making fun of me to your other friends, I’d find that a whole lot more convincing.”

  It was strange, thought Caris as he moved soundlessly on through the dust-smelling night, that the quarrels and griefs of those who peopled this alien world should be so similar to those he knew in his own.

  The house was two storeys tall in its main portion, one storey at the wing into which Antryg had gone. Most of its windows, Caris had ascertained, looked inward toward the court, and the doors leading outside could all, he estimated, be seen from the roof of the farthest eastward end —if the stars were right it was east, anyway—of the low wing. Judging by their reactions to Antryg’s alien garments, none of the revelers should comment, even if they did see Caris sitting on the roof; in any case the projecting cornices of the house should hide him.

  One of the metal vehicles stood near enough the wall to give him footing. Its springs gave slightly with his leap, and his back muscles and bruised ankle cried out against the jarring scramble for footing. The roof itself had only a shallow slope, like the houses in Mellidane that knew no snow. In the dark, he felt its surfaces to be some kind of granulose shingle, firm and silent beneath his boots. Crouching, he moved along the edge, where the walls would take his weight and keep the beams from creaking within. Just below the spine of the roof crest, he stretched himself out, achingly glad to be able to rest and chiding himself for that unsasennan-like gratitude. On one side lay the darkness of the hills, the few windows throwing small squares of yellow light to gleam on the shiny metal of the vehicles or pick threads of sherry-colored grass through the soft haze of the dust. On the other lay the court, the music rising up like the blaze of colored light to the watching stars, and drifts of conversation floating above it like isolated wafts of perfume:

  “...so you could boot it warm, but every time you booted it cold you got a B—DOS error...”

  “Hell, you think that’s bad? They had the whole fiberoptic Cray mainframe disappear in pieces from Alta Clara...”

  “I swear to God the guy swings both ways...”

  “...working until two in the morning. You’ll never get her to believe it, but she’s the sharpest programmer San Serano.”

  “You expect Gary to know the difference between auslese and Thunderbird?”

  “...superhero and a mercenary, but in his secret identity he writes children’s books...”

  “Digby might be right about there being a Bermuda Triangle in Building Six. Sometimes that place feels so creepy.”

  “I never found it creepy, but there are times there when I get just about suicidal.”

  “If I worked for Eraserhead Brown, I’d be suicidal, too....”

  Exhausted, Caris felt himself slipping into the trap of relaxing and knew he must not yield to the weariness of his body. He toyed with the idea of trying to steal some of the food that was in such abundance down there, but knew it was too dangerous. Antryg, he thought, might be waiting for just such a distraction.

  Occasionally, the vehicles would arrive or depart, powered, it seemed, by some internal force. Growling with throaty violence, with their yellow headlamps blazing like eyes and a thin cloud of stinking smoke puffing from their tails, they reminded him of flatulent, metallic beasts. Several times he saw red lights moving in the starry darkness of the sky, accompanied by a far-off bass roar that shook his bones, but no one in the court paid the slightest heed. Such matters, then, must be commonplace in this universe. But he flinched every time such a creature passed.

  And above the pain of his wounds, the ache of his muscles, the weary confusion held at bay only by the years of discipline in the Way of the Sasenna, and his growing fear, was the single thought: I must not let him escape.

  A dim light appeared in the large window of the second-storey room in the main wing. It had been cast not by any light in the room, but by the reflection of a hallway light when the door was opened. Caris froze into stillness, for the window was directly opposite where he lay; with the room in darkness, he would be perfectly visible to anyone who came to the window.

  But it was only one of the revelers, looking vaguely about him as he polished his spectacles—Caris was amused to see that with all their wonders, these people still wore spectacles, some of them no different than Antryg’s —on the hem of the close-fitting, short-sleeved black shirt that he wore. The light from the door picked up strange silver runes written across the chest as he replaced the light frame of wire and metal on his long nose.

  The man gazed around him for a moment at the darkened room, with its banks of metal boxes with tiny red eyes glowing in their blank faces; their small, dark screens looked like polished beryl. Then he turned back, not to the door itself, but to the doorframe. With a gesture that reminded Caris curiously of the mages, he brushed the narrow molding of wood with his fingertips....

  A woman’s voice said softly, “It was you....”

  He swung sharply around as a second shadow in the doorway appeared, and Caris recognized the woman Joanna.

  A glimpse of crimson down in the court drew Caris’ eye. It was, he saw, the woman in the red robe again, but of Antryg mere was no sign. Cursing his inattention, Caris waited until the two people in the semidarkness of the upper room were both turned from the window, then slid soundlessly down the rough shingles and dropped, catlike, to the nose of the metal vehicle below and thence to the ground.

  There was no one, now, in any of the rooms of that low wing.

  The uninitiated imputed to the sasenna fearsome powers of profanity when they are in their rage. But the sasenna did not curse in true rage—oaths, like complaints and tears, wasted time and only served to cloud the mind.

  There was no time for them now, if he was not going to be left in this world forever.

  That afternoon, he recalled, he had thought that he had never had to fight for his life before. He realized now, that he had never had to track, hunt, and watch for his life, and he stood in danger of failing, with consequences beyond his power to imagine.

  With painstaking care, he cast for sign all around the house. Even with his slight abilities to see in darkness, it was not easy, and he found nothing—no track, no sign, beyond the circle of the house-lights’ glow, to mark the mad wizard’s passing. Antryg was a mage and had, like all those who took Council vows, been trained as sasenna. Having watched him fight, Caris knew that, unlike many mages, he had not let that training sleep.

  Caris moved as close to the house as he dared and began a second cast. The track of Antryg’s soft boots would be distinctive among the sharp, bizarre patterns of the shoes of this world; all around the hard black pavement where the vehicles stood was a belt of dust and weeds. A long drive ran out toward the main road, but Caris had watched it from the roof and had seen nothing on it but the coming and going of vehicles.

  There was a path, leading out into the hills, toward what looked like a deserted stable or shed, nearly a mile away. Surrounded by the moldering remains of fallen fences, it stood dark and untenanted at the crest of a hill overlooking the house itself. But by the dust at the head of the path, he saw that it was regularly used by a single type of footprint—someone ran there and back, wearing cleated shoes, almost daily. But there was no mark in the starlit dust of the wizard’s boots, nor of the faint slurring that the hem of a robe would cause.

  Caris was beginning to feel frightened.

  Once, close to the road, a vehicle leaving the house in a great jerking roar of wheels and smoke nearly ran him over, its yellow headlights sweeping him as he ducked into the coarse sagebrush for cover. Casting for sign on the hillslope near the iron courtyard gate through which Digby Clayton and Antryg had originally passed, he heard the stifled
giggles of a courting couple in the weeds, and a girl’s voice called out, “Is somebody there?” After that Caris moved back farther from the house again, his unease increasing with the latening movement of the stars. Detection now would mean questions and delay, and delay was what he could not afford. Weariness was closing in on him, the ache in his body exacerbated by a longing for sleep; soon it would begin to impair his survival instincts. If Antryg passed through the Void again before he found him...

  And suddenly, he felt it again—the queer terror, the sense, almost the smell, of worlds beyond worlds, the vibration of abyssal winds in his bones. The Void had been opened.

  Panic touched him, with the knowledge that this was his last chance and he hadn’t the slightest clue what to do....

  Where? he thought desperately, his frantic gaze sweeping the hills in the thin moonlight.

  There was a man, walking swiftly along the path to that distant shed.

  It was the bespectacled reveler from the upper room— the one who had been speaking to Joanna in the half-dark. The moonlight caught faintly on the strange metallic runes that marked his garment and on his spectacle lenses as he paused and looked back at the house with an attitude of bemused delight.

  And as he moved on, with that gawky walk that was somehow light and graceful as a dancer’s, Caris realized who he was.

  What had Salteris said? The sasenna knew that the best place to hide was in plain sight, and Antryg had always been a genius at it. There had been enough stray clothing lying around the house for him to find garments that fitted his tall, skinny frame; without the beard and with his long hair cut, Caris had not recognized him among the others, and had gone off searching the hills, as Antryg had intended.

  Anger surged through him, fed by fears, by his shame at feeling fear, and by his rage at having been duped. It drowned his weariness and his dread of passing through the, Void once more, drowned everything but his determination for revenge.

  Starlight flashed on glass as Antryg turned his head. He quickened his long stride, and Caris, knowing he had been seen, threw caution to the winds and flung himself forward, summoning the reserves of his strength. The wrenched and stiffened muscles of his ankle screamed at him as he crashed through the dry sage and dust of the unfamiliar ground.

  Antryg, instead of running away, turned and headed for the shed. Caris knew it then—the shed itself contained the gate into the Void. Antryg was closer to it than he, with longer legs and fresher strength. Battle rage flooded Caris as he ran. With a sweep he drew his sword from where it hung upon his back....

  The inside of the shed was an echoing well of darkness. The night was too deep for him to see even a little of the place as it should have been—broken partitions, fallen beams, the dismantled metal bones of the strange self-moving machines, and the stinks of oil and dust. But the crumbling lintels framed a hollow, a chasm in which there was neither light nor time—only the endless, amorphous stirrings of the winds that drifted between universes.

  With a yell of rage that did not quite succeed in purging the terror from his heart, Caris flung himself once again into the dark.

  Chapter VIII

  JOANNA WOKE UP IN DARKNESS.

  For an instant she remembered nothing, except that she was cold, sore, and terrified of something she could not recall. The surface she lay upon was unfamiliar, narrow, and hard; under her bare arms she felt tight-stretched, satiny upholstery. She drew a breath and choked with the bruised ache in her throat.

  Terror returned with an almost physical nausea.

  She thought illogically, The marks on the wall!

  There had been one in the computer room in Building Six, when she’d been assaulted by the Man Who Wasn’t There.

  He wasn’t there again today.... The tall, thin, bespectacled form, the brush of long fingers over the doorframe of the upstairs room at Gary’s—the sign that had appeared beneath that butterfly touch, like light shining onto the wood rather than any mark—

  She had known him, of course—Digby’s mysterious hallucination, defrocked and debearded. It had been the robe that had touched her memory at the party. Was that why he’d changed his clothes?

  Joanna didn’t know what was going on, but she wanted no part of it.

  Had he left, after she’d spoken to him in Gary’s upstairs room? She had the impression that he had, but her memory was clouded, events telescoping and confused. She’d come up to collect her program and leave, not wanting to put up with Gary whining at her heels for the rest of the evening, resolving even to unplug her phone when she got home, as Gary made up in persistence what he lacked in tact....

  He’d been there when she’d come in, she remembered, and she had known him then as Digby’s hallucination. Stepped out of a hole in the air... .

  The same black hole of darkness she had seen in San Serano?

  She thought that he’d left, that she’d been sitting alone in front of Gary’s big IBM, waiting for the modem buffers to spit the last information out from the Cray at San Serano. Had he come back later, or... ? She couldn’t remember. Only the sudden, terrible grip of hands around her throat, the hideous gray roaring in her ears, the drowning terror...

  And here.

  Cautiously, she moved her legs. She was still dressed as she had been at Gary’s, in jeans, a white tank-top, and sneakers. The idea that she had been unconscious in someone else’s power made her shudder with loathing, but she could detect no bruises anywhere other than on her neck. Shrinking with inner dread, she put her hand carefully down over the edge of the narrow cot upon which she lay—like a child, she realized ruefully, who knows the boogieman waits under the bed....

  But she only encountered the floor—stone, and very cold.

  Stone? she thought. She sat up, fighting a slight qualm of sickness as she did so, and groped at the sides of what she thought was a cot and which turned out to be a daybed, the eighteenth-century ancestor of the chaise lounge. At one end was a chairlike back, heavily carved; there was more carving on the tops of the thing’s cabriole legs. Feeling along the floor beside it, she reached the familiar, enormous lumpiness of her purse and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Although whoever had brought her here could have gone through it....

  Her digging fingers came in contact with her miniature flashlight. She switched it on, and the yellow light wavered wildly over the room with the shaking of her hand.

  She thought, Oh, Christ, in a kind of frightened despair. The room was stone, small and windowless, like the turret chamber of a castle—or like somebody’s idea of one. The daybed with its frivolous gilded scrollwork and rose-colored cushions struck her as a sinister incongruity, and she muttered, “Kinky,” to herself as she got to her feet. She sat down again, quickly, a little surprised at the weakness and nausea that the heroines of movies never seemed to suffer after a violent assault.

  The room had one door. It was only a few steps away and, not very surprisingly, bolted from the outside.

  Joanna went back to the daybed and sat down again. Her knees felt weak.

  Don’t panic, she told herself. Whatever you do, if you panic, you won’t be able to do anything. But her mind kept screaming at her, Why me?

  Figure that out later, she told herself firmly, fighting not to think about the implications that she had been stalked. She dug through the contents of her purse, and her hand closed around the reassuring smoothness of her hammer. She set it beside her and checked out the rest—Swiss Army knife, several tin and plastic boxes, a measuring tape, scissors, calculator, wallet, checkbook, keys, notebook, mirror, spare toothbrush, tube of sunscreen, collapsible drinking cup, granola bars, rubber bands, safety pins, a lipstick that she’d never used, a package of Kleenex, a sewing kit, a bundle of plastic-coated wires she’d gotten from plant maintenance, three and a half pairs of earrings, and two floppy disks.

  She selected the hammer and the Swiss Army knife, opened the screwdriver blade, and returned once more to the door.

  It wa
s designed to open inward. The hinges were the pin type, though massive and, by the look of them, forged of iron rather than steel. Joanna frowned as she shined the beam of the flashlight over them, recognizing the anachronism but unable to account for it. She knew the recreational medievalists of her acquaintance made their own chain mail, but their own door hinges?

  Doubtfully, she cast the light around the room once more. Of course, Southern California was rife with old stone buildings, if you knew where to look for them, but...

  Later, she told herself again. Right now the object is to get the hell out of here. Carefully, she began to work the knife’s screwdriver blade in beneath the hinge pin...

  And stopped, at the soft snick of the door bolt being slid back.

  She had heard no footfall; but then, she had no idea how thick the walls or door might be. Thick, she thought, for she had heard nothing at all—no traffic sound, not even the subsonic vibration of trucks, no airplane roar, and no tread of footfalls elsewhere in the building. Adrenaline surging through her like fire, she stepped back to where the door would hide her, hammer in hand, heart pounding, but feeling queerly calm. Her last thought was, He’s very tall, I’ll have to strike high.

  The door opened.

  He was ready for her, catching her wrist on the downswing and ducking aside, though she heard him gasp as the hammer glanced off his bony shoulder. Like most women who have had little to do with men, she was shocked at the strength of his hands. He knew the tricks too; his arms moved and twisted with hers as she tried to drive her wrist against the weak joint of the thumb to break his hold, and he turned his body to block the knee she drove at his groin. The struggle lasted only seconds. Then something drove into his back from the dark door like a striking puma. A slamming foot behind his knee made his legs buckle. She heard him gasp again and looked up as the newcomer to the fray seized a handful of his hair, pulled his head back, and laid the edge of a knife to his throat.