“I assure you, my dear,” Antryg protested, “It wasn’t me.”
“And it wasn’t you who has been causing the abominations to appear?” Caris demanded sarcastically. “Or who spirited my grandfather away?”
“Of course not.”
“His glove was in your room. I saw it there.”
“He left it when he visited me earlier in the week.”
“He had them with him that evening! I saw them!”
“Both of them?”
“You are lying,” Caris said, and his dark-brown eyes were narrow with suspicion and anger. “As you have been lying all along.”
“Well, of course I’ve been lying all along,” the wizard argued reasonably. “If the Bishop or anyone else had suspected what happens when the Void is breached...”
“What happens?”
Antryg sighed. “It is where the abominations come from,” he said. “When a gap is opened in the Void, the whole fabric of it weakens, sometimes for miles around. Yes, I knew that someone was moving back and forth across the Void for months before Thirle was killed. Not every time, but sometimes, when it was breached, a hole would open through to some other world, neither yours nor mine, and something would—wander through. Sometimes to die, without its proper food or protection against unfamiliar enemies, sometimes to find what food it could. I was aware of it, but could do nothing about it, since I could not touch the Void from within the Tower.”
“Ha!” Caris said scornfully.
Unperturbed, Antryg went on. “I knew that eventually such a weakening had to take place within the walls of the Tower itself. I could only wait.... I suppose, if I hadn’t been mad already, the waiting would have driven me so.”
“You knew this,” Caris said softly. “You knew where the abominations came from and yet you did not tell the Archmage of it?”
“What could he have done about it?” Antryg demanded with a sudden, desperate sweep of his arm. “He couldn’t have stopped it. And they would only have chained me, to prevent my escape. I’d been in that Tower seven years, Caris. I haven’t seen sunlight since before you were sasennan.”
Joanna looked up sharply, hearing it then. The word sasennan came to her mind as weapon, but with a suffix connoting humanness. She understood, for the first time, that the words that she had heard in her mind were not the words that they spoke. She knew, then, that she had passed into some other world, alien to her own.
The brightness of the sunlight of which he had spoken diffused the sky and all the lands around them with pastel glory, flashing like sheet glass on the waters of the meres below. Gray and black geese rose from the rushes in a wimmering flurry of wings. Joanna wasn’t sure, but they looked an awful lot like the pictures she’d seen of the extinct Canada goose.
For a long moment she wanted to do nothing except curl up in a fetal position and hide. She felt bleak, sick, and frightened, as hopeless as she had felt when, as a child, she had walked for the first time into a new classroom filled with strangers. She cried, “Why did you bring me here?”
Caris and Antryg fell silent, hearing in her words the frantic demand, not for information, but for comfort.
It was Antryg who spoke, gently, without the indignant protest with which he had answered the sasennan. “I’m sorry, my dear. But truly, it was someone else.”
“Can you take me back?”
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I’m afraid not. Even as Caris knows that I can’t work magic here, because the other mages will know I’ve escaped and be listening for me, feeling for me along the lines of power that cover the whole of the earth in their net, so I cannot touch the Void now. The—the one who did kidnap you knows you’re gone. That one will be waiting for me to touch the Void again, to find me—to destroy me and you and all of us.”
Joanna looked up miserably into the odd, beaky face in its mane of graying hair and noticed for the first time how deep the lines were that webbed around the enormous gray eyes, running down onto the delicate cheekbones like careless chisel scratches and back into the tangled hair.
Sarcastically, Caris said, “Very plausible. Except that, if you did not kidnap her, who did? Even my grandfather, the Archmage, knew little about the Void and its workings; according to him, there was no one else.” He got to his feet, and walked around to where Joanna huddled in the hay, feeling empty and suddenly chilled. His hand was warm on her bare shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll take him to the House of Mages in Kymil. If necessary Nandiharrow, the Head of the House, will send for the Witchfinders. What he has done has put him outside all protection of the Council. We’ll make him tell what he has done with the Archmage—and when we find him, the Archmage will send you home.”
Chapter IX
IT TOOK THEM UNTIL after dark to reach the city of Kymil.
It was one of the longest days Joanna had ever spent—literally; she guessed that Kymil lay well to the north of Los Angeles, but, even though the summer solstice was passed, the days were still very long. Well before the sun was in the sky, they began walking through the luminous world of predawn to which Joanna had always preferred another two hours’ communion with her pillow. It had been considerably longer than seven years, she realized somewhat shamefacedly, since she had seen the sun rise.
Antryg was like a child taken into the country for the first time, stopping to contemplate cattails in the marshes below the road or to watch the men and women at work cutting hay. If nothing else could have convinced her that she had truly fallen through a hole in the space-time continuum, Joanna thought with a strange sense of despair, the sight of those peasants at work did. No role player, no matter how dedicated, was going to get out of bed at the crack of dawn and do hard labor in the coarse, awkward, bundly clothes they wore.
But in her heart she needed no convincing. She knew where she was.
“Do you want some sunscreen?” she asked Antryg as they stopped on a wooden bridge over the shining counterpane of marsh and hay meadow to watch the first hard lances of sunlight smite the water beneath them like a sounding of trumpets. “Something to keep you from sun-burn?” She dug in the capacious depths of her bottomless bag.
“Thank you.” He studied the crumpled tube gravely. “After seven years of living in the dark like a mushroom, right now I’d welcome any kind of natural sensation, but I’m sure I won’t feel that way at the end of the day.”
Oddly enough, Joanna felt more at ease and able to talk to Antryg, her kidnapper, than to her rescuer. Part of this stemmed from her distrust of extremely good-looking men, part from the fact that Antryg was sublimely relaxed about being a prisoner, far more so than Caris was about having one. Possibly, she thought frivolously, that was simply because he’d had years of practice at it. As she replaced the tube in her bag, Joanna found several granola bars and offered them to her companions. Caris devoured his like a wolf, but Antryg divided his with the sasennan. “After yesterday, I’m sure he needs it more than I do,” he said, as Caris suspiciously took the solidified mass of nuts and raisins from his hand.
“Why?” Joanna asked, glancing curiously from the wizard to the warrior. “What happened yesterday?”
“There was an abomination in the marsh,” Caris replied, almost grudgingly. He touched the rip in the shoulder of his jacket and shirt, under which the bruised flesh had turned almost as black as the torn fabric. He glanced across at Antryg as they resumed their walking, the bridge sounding hollowly with their footfalls. “He knew it was there.”
“Of course I knew it was there,” Antryg responded. “I’d felt the opening of the Void, and you could hardly have gotten bruised that way brawling in a pothouse.”
Caris’ dark eyes narrowed. “You have an explanation for everything.”
Antryg shrugged. “It’s been my misfortune to be a good guesser. Would it alleviate your suspicions any if I didn’t have an explanation?” He gravely handed the crumpled granola wrapper back to Joanna. “Tell me one thing, Caris. Who were the other mages a
broad the night Thirle was killed?”
The young warrior shifted the scabbard that he held loose and ready in his left hand. “How do you know there were any, if it wasn’t you who...?”
“Another guess. Was your grandfather one of them?”
“No.” Caris glanced sidelong at the wizard, his eyes filled with suspicion. After a moment, he said, “Lady Rosamund...” and paused, with a sudden frown.
“What is it?”
He hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing. Just that... She was up and dressed, literally moments after the shots were fired. Aunt Min’s hair was flattened and mussed, as if she’d just risen from her bed. It was as if Lady Rosamund had been up some time before.”
“Even as you were,” Antryg remarked softly, and Joanna saw the young man look swiftly away. “What wakened you?”
“Nothing,” Caris said, his voice curt. “Dreams. Nothing that has to do with Thirle’s death.”
“Oh, everything has to do with everything.” Antryg smiled, shoving his big hands into the pockets of his jeans and kicking at a pebble with one booted foot. “It’s one of the first principles of magic.”
Joanna looked doubtfully up at him. “By magic, do you mean like pouf-you’re-gone magic?”
He grinned. “Yes—in fact, pouf-you’re-gone is precisely the question of the moment.”
“Then why...” She hesitated, then went on. “This is going to sound really stupid, but why don’t you use magic to escape?”
Caris looked indignant at the question and started to gesture with his sword; Antryg’s grin, like that of a slightly deranged elf, widened.
“Well, two reasons. I believe I can convince Nandiharrow and some of the other mages of the Council to believe my side of the story and, at the moment, I feel I’d be safer as a prisoner of the Council than a fugitive from the Church, which has its own mages. At least the Council will listen to me. And then,” he added, more gravely, “if I used magic to escape, the other mages, be they Church or Council, would be able to track me through it eventually.”
“You’re forgetting the third reason,” Caris said grimly. “If you try to escape I will kill you.”
“No,” Antryg said mildly, “I wasn’t forgetting,” and Joanna had to turn away to smother a grin.
In contrast to the silent and preoccupied Caris, Antryg had a voracious interest in everything and anything and was, for all his talkativeness, a good listener. Joanna had never been at ease with men; but as they walked along the highroad that ran above the marsh, she found herself telling him, not only about computers and soap operas and the Los Angeles freeway system, but about her mother, Ruth, the cats, and Gary.
“Ah, Gary,” he said. “The one with the cruel streak.”
She shrugged, guessing he’d been one of the large number of people who’d overheard Gary’s remarks about her. “He probably just thought he was being funny.”
“I’m sure he did,” the wizard said, polishing the spectacles on the hem of his t-shirt. “And that is the worst thing which can be said about him.”
It was, but it surprised her a little that anyone, particularly any man, would see it as she did.
The sun rose to noon, and Caris negotiated with some of the hay cutters to buy a portion of their bread and ale, which the three ate sitting on a half-rotted willow log beside one of the gnat-swarming meres. Joanna found the bread harsh and strong-tasting and sprinkled through with grain hulls and specks of dirt. So much, she thought, picking a morsel of grit from between her teeth, for the good old days of the old mill by the stream. “Can’t you do anything about this?” she inquired, glancing up at Antryg, who was contentedly downing his share of the ale. “I mean, you’re a wizard—you should be able to turn this into quiche Lorraine.”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Antryg half turned to offer the flask to Caris, who, even when eating, stood behind him, one hand never far from the hilt of his sword. Caris shook his head, and the wizard passed it to Joanna. The ale was sweeter than the beer she was used to and considerably above the California limitations on alcohol content. “I could use magic to convince you that you were eating quiche; but when all was said and done, it would be bread in your stomach; and when the spell wore off, you’d still have sand in your teeth. There are wizards and spells which can convert one thing to another—real bread into actual quiche or into gold, for that matter—but they require so much power and take so much strength from the one who casts them that it’s really simpler just to change millers.”
“Not to mention,” Caris said quietly from behind them, “that such meddling in even the smallest of human affairs is forbidden.”
“Well,” Antryg agreed blithely, “there is that.”
Caris’ face darkened with disapproval, and Joanna, glancing sideways at Antryg, caught the flicker of his smile and wondered suddenly how much of what he said he believed—and how much was simply to get a rise out of his captor.
They had come, Caris said at one point during the long afternoon, from the far southeastern corner of the Ponmarish, where it touched the hills of the Sykerst. It was a long walk up the southward road to the gates of the city. There were few peasants in this portion of the marsh, and what few there were, Joanna noticed, worked hard and closer together than their tasks warranted. They appeared nervous, glancing over their shoulders. Poaching hay illegally? she wondered. On the lookout for the hay police? But by that time she was too exhausted and footsore to ask. The daylong walk, though it was not fast, was extremely tiring. She was a thin girl, but she had done no more strenuous walking in the last several years than was necessary to get from her car in the San Serano parking lot to her office, and by the end of the afternoon she felt a kind of wondering resentment about Caris’ tireless, changeless stride. Antryg, she noticed, was more considerate—perhaps because it had been years since he, too, had done any great amount of travel. Caris only fretted and muttered that they would not reach the city before dark.
And it was, in fact, long after darkness had settled on the land that they walked through the sleeping streets of the warm, flat, mosquito-humming city, with its carved wooden balconies and brick-paved alleys that smelled of sewage and fish. The city was walled on its land side, though, in the flickering red torchlight of the enormous gateway, Joanna had gotten the impression that the gates themselves hadn’t been closed in years. Caris roused a sleepy gatekeeper and rented a torch, which illuminated the tepid darkness of the narrow streets along which they passed. Down a side lane Joanna glimpsed the bent form of an old man, whose elaborately braided hair and beard would have trailed to his knees had the complicated loops of braid been undone, pushing a cart while he shoveled up the copious by-products of what was obviously a horse-dependent civilization. For the rest, the streets were quiet at this hour—Kymil, thought Joanna, scarcely qualifying as the Las Vegas of the Empire of Ferryth.
The House of the Mages lay a moonlit chiaroscuro of ice-gray and velvet black, gargoyle-decorated balconies and windows unlighted and silent, like an anesthetized dragon. Under the carved wooden turrets of the main door, a bonfire had been kindled on the flagway, and four sasenna sat around it, muttering amongst themselves and glancing worriedly about them at the dark.
In the mouth of the narrow lane, Caris stopped and swiftly doused his torch in a convenient rain barrel. Antryg, too, had flattened into the shadows along the wall. For a long moment, they looked out into the dim and mingled glows of moonlight and firelight in the square. Then Caris said softly, “Those are Church sasenna.”
Antryg nodded, his spectacles gleaming dimly with the reflected brightness. With a slight gesture, he signaled them back into the alley; Joanna, mystified, followed him and Caris as they wove through a noisome alley where pigs grunted down below the cellar gratings of the narrow houses and around to another side of the square.
There was a smaller side door there. In that, too, armed men sat waiting, huddled more closely about the brazier of coals than the balmy night demanded. C
aris glanced up at the tall wizard, his eyes suddenly filled with concern. In an undervoice softer than the murmur of the winds from the marshes, he breathed, “There are no lights in the house.”
“Not even in the sasenna’s quarters,” Antryg murmured in reply. Moonlight touched the tip of his long nose and made a fragile halo of the ends of his hair as he put his head a little beyond the dense shadows in which they stood, then drew it back. Beside them, Joanna could feel, as if she touched the two men, the tension that went through them as they found their common enemy guarding the doors of the house.
Caris said, “It’s a good guess there aren’t guards inside, then.” He glanced around at the black cutouts of oddly shaped roofs against the velvet sky. “No wonder the neighborhood’s so silent. They can’t have...” He hesitated.
“You yourself said that the danger of the abominations abrogated my right to protection by the Council,” Antryg murmured, leaning one hand against the coarse, dirty plaster of the nearest wall and looking out into the silent square. “Perhaps the Church came to the same conclusion?”
“Come on,” the sasennan said quietly. “We can get over the wall of the garden court—it backs onto the next alley.”
That, Joanna thought wryly a few moments later, had to be one of the Great Traditions of literature and cinema: “We can get in over the wall.” Staring up, appalled, at the seven-foot paling of reinforced cedar and pine, she felt the sensation of having been cheated by three generations of fictional heroes and heroines who could effortlessly scramble up and over eight-foot, barbed wire fences without breaking sweat or scraping off their shirt buttons as they bellied over the top.
And more than that, she felt weak and stupid, as she had all the way through high school, laboring wretchedly along in the distant wake of the class jocks and wishing she were dead.
“There’s a footing shelf on the inside where the beam holds the palings,” Antryg whispered. “Caris, you go up first and I’ll lift her to you.”
The Silent Tower Page 14
