The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  Caris, no more than an indistinct shape in the revolting darkness of the alley, turned his head sharply, and Joanna saw the silvery glint of narrowed eyes.

  “I’m not going to run from you the minute you’re occupied going up the wall,” the mage added impatiently. “As much as you do, I’ve got to find out what’s happened.”

  Caris started to make a reply to this, then let out his breath unused. Without a word, he turned, took a running start at the wall, and used it as a momentum to spring for the top and carry himself over.

  “How did you know there was a footing on the beam?” Joanna asked as she approached the base of the wall and saw the sasennan’s catlike silhouette crouched against the slightly paler darkness of trees and roofs. “Another lucky guess?”

  “No. Up until seven years ago I was a—well, not perfectly respected—member of the community of wizards.” The moonlight checkered through the trees beyond the garden wall and silvered the lenses of his specs and the foil HAVOC on his t-shirt. His hands on her waist were large and warm and, as she recalled them on her wrists when they’d struggled, surprisingly strong for his rather gawky appearance. “Up you get.”

  Joanna had always hated heights, hated exercise, and hated having to do things she couldn’t do. Her hands scraped and riven through with splinters, she hauled herself gasping to the top of the wall, half-expecting Caris’ mockery, even as the young man steadied her over. But he simply helped her down, following like a stalking cat into the pungent, laurel-scented darkness of the tiny garden. A moment later, the wall vibrated softly under Antryg’s weight, and he dropped like a spider at their side.

  “Can we risk a light?” he breathed as they entered the dark arches of a very short wooden colonnade that bounded the garden. “The nearest door’s around the corner. That should be the barracks in through there.”

  Caris nodded. Joanna was about to dig into her purse to proffer a match when Antryg made a slight movement with his hand and opened it, releasing a tiny ball of bluish light, which rose from his palm and floated a few feet in front of him, about the level of his chest. His grin at the look on her face in the faint phosphorescence was like that of a pleased imp.

  Joanna said softly, “I’m not even going to ask.” She had, she realized, just seen magic.

  “That’s just as well. Nobody’s ever come up with a satisfactory answer, except the obvious one.”

  “In here,” Caris murmured from the blackness of a small, half-open door.

  Through an open archway to her right, Joanna had a glimpse of a vast room, with moonlight flooding through long windows to lie like sheets of white silk over a disorder of upended trestle tables and fallen branches. In the room to which Caris beckoned them the disorder was worse. All along its narrow length, furniture had been tipped over, books pulled from the shelves that lined one wall, and strange brass instruments—sextants, astrolabes, celestial globes—had been hurled to the floor and lay like twisted skeletons, glinting faintly in the moonlight. The line of wooden pillars that bisected the narrow room and supported an even narrower gallery above it threw bizarre shadows on the intricate inlay of the cabinets that shared with the bookcases the long inner wall.

  “It’s the Church, all right,” Caris muttered soundlessly as he tiptoed the length of the disordered room, opening and closing cabinets as he went. “Only they would have destroyed like this.”

  The ball of witchlight drifting along before his feet, Antryg picked his way after the sasennan through the mess, turning over the torn and scattered volumes. “They were in a hurry,” he murmured. He paused to stoop, and Joanna saw, by the dim pallor of the witchlight, the black stains of tacky-dry blood on his fingers. “Nandiharrow,” he whispered. “Now I wonder why... ?”

  Caris turned from one of the cabinets, a pistol in his hand pointed at Antryg’s chest. “Come over here,” he said.

  Antryg stood perfectly still for one moment, and Joanna prudently moved to Caris’s side to be out of any possible line of fire.

  “And don’t think you can fix the aim on it, or cause it to misfire,” the sasennan went on. “It’s na-aar. Joanna, there are chains in the cabinet behind me—get them out.”

  Joanna’s liking for the mad wizard caused her to hesitate for only a moment before obeying. The chains were light, iron rather than steel, and equipped with bracelets and locks.

  “Look,” Antryg argued, “this isn’t necessary.”

  “Put your arms around the pillar there. Joanna...”

  Keeping warily out of firing line, she fitted the heavy manacles around Antryg’s wrists and pushed them shut. They locked with a cold click. Cans came over and checked them briefly, then nodded to himself, satisfied.

  “Caris, don’t be a fool....”

  “I’m not being a fool.” The sasennan stepped quietly away from him, his pistol still trained on Antryg’s chest. “And I am not sure whether my duty does not lie in killing you here and now. I don’t know what happened, but the mages in Angelshand and other places have to be warned....”

  “You are being a fool if you think that, even traveling by fast horse, you could warn them in time,” Antryg retorted. “The Church has mages who may swear they don’t communicate by scrying-stones, but we all know they do. If the Bishop has gotten permission from the Regent to order the arrest of the mages, it’s because she has convinced him that your grandfather somehow spirited me away from the Tower for sinister plots of his own. That order will apply everywhere in Ferryth. You know Herthe. You know she’ll have no compunction about violating every Church rule about the use of magic for what she considers a righteous cause.”

  “Little suspecting,” Caris said softly, “that it is the other way around.” He stepped forward and put the pistol barrel to Antryg’s temple. “Was that your intention all along? To use the Bishop as cat’s-paw to dispose of the other wizards, once you had made sure my grandfather wouldn’t be there to stop her? Or was that only fortuitous circumstance? Was that why you were so unconcerned about being my prisoner? Why you wanted so desperately to get us away from where I found Joanna—from where you were holding the Archmage... ?”

  Antryg, his head trapped between the gun muzzle and the turned wood of the pillar to which he was chained, gazed straight ahead of him; but in the faint witchlight Joanna could see the sweat that suddenly beaded his face. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  The gun lock clicked, loud in the darkness, as Caris thumbed back the hammer. “Where is my grandfather?”

  “They’ll be in here in a minute asking you that,” the wizard said calmly, “if you pull that trigger. And I’m certainly not going to be able to tell them.”

  For a long, frozen second Joanna held her breath, knowing that, frustrated, furious, and at sea in a wholly unprecedented situation, Caris would have liked nothing better than simply to pull the trigger in revenge for Antryg’s having put him in such a position. Under the film of sweat, moonlight, and travel grime, she saw the young sasennan’s jaw muscles harden and heard the deep rasping draw of his breath. Then he lowered the pistol, still breathing hard, and looked uncertainly toward the window, where the reflected firelight from the gates outside stained the bull’s-eye glass.

  Only Joanna saw Antryg briefly close his eyes with relief.

  “Look, Caris,” she said diffidently. “I don’t know whether I get a vote in this or not, but if all the wizards have been arrested, and if your grandfather’s gone, he is my only way of getting back home.” Caris turned toward her, his agate-brown eyes glinting with the intolerant impatience of a strong man listening to the specious arguments of the weak, but Joanna took a deep breath and went on, “I don’t know too much about the Church here, but I think, if the Church gets its hands on him, you may never locate your grandfather, either. I mean, if I were the Church and I’d just busted every wizard in the country, I wouldn’t try too hard to get the Archmage back into action.”

  There was a long silence while Caris thought about that, and then something
changed in his eyes. “No,” he said quietly. “You’re right, Joanna—however it came about, it’s an opportunity the Church won’t let pass by.” He was quiet for a moment more. Joanna guessed that, for all his skill as a line fighter, he had never been required to think out the larger strategies for himself. He sighed and rubbed the inner corners of his eyes with his free hand, and some of the desperate tension relaxed from his broad shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” he added quietly. “This world must be almost as bad for you to be stranded in as yours was for me.”

  Almost! thought Joanna, with indignant astonishment. It isn’t my world that has the Inquisition and ankledeep horse manure in the streets! Of course, she added ruefully, we do have the bomb and the 405 Freeway...

  “It’s just that...” he began—and stopped himself abruptly from admitting to an exhaustion that it was not the Way of the Sasenna to take into consideration and a love for the old Archmage that it was not the Way of the Sasenna to feel. After a moment he said, “I think the best thing we can do now is to go to Angelshand. The other members of the Council...”

  “Have either been arrested or are hiding in the deepest holes they can find,” Antryg finished. The hammered iron of the chainlinks made a soft clinking against the wood of the pillar as he clasped his big hands around it, almost encircling it with the span of his fingers. “The Bishop will have sent word to the Bishop of Angelshand. They’ll have the Regent’s consent to the arrests by the first post.”

  “Then we shall go to the Regent,” Caris said stubbornly. “Narwahl Skipfrag is a friend of Grandfather’s. He can get the Regent’s ear long enough for me to explain the truth of what happened. And after that, the Witchfinders may have you, for all of me.”

  “Ah,” murmured the mage, leaning against the pillar. “But what is the truth?”

  Caris’ face hardened in the zebra moonlight. “The truth,” he returned, equally quietly, “is what the Witchfinders will have out of you.” He turned to Joanna and handed her the pistol. “Watch him,” he said. “I’m going to have a look around before we leave.” Turning, he strode away down the long moonlit room and out into the darkness of the refectory beyond.

  Antryg sighed and rested his forehead against the pillar, rubbing his long fingers, as if to banish the ghost of some old pain.

  As well as she could, keeping the pistol in hand, Joanna righted one of the chairs, heavy black oak with waffle-crossed straps of leather nailed for a seat, and found a cushion in a corner to put on it to sit down. Her legs were immediately enveloped in a vast rush of pins and needles, and she felt she never wanted to stand up again. After a moment, she asked curiously, “If you’re a wizard, can’t you just break the locks?”

  He looked up at her with a tired smile. “I could,” he said. “That is, I could open them—they aren’t na-aar, metaphysically dead, like the pistol. But the Church has its wizards, too. By this time, they will know I am free and they will be listening, smelling the air for magic, like the terwed-weeds beneath the sea that scent the tiniest ripple of the passing fish that are their prey. They would know and they would come. And then, too...” He paused, thought about it, and let the sentence go unfinished.

  Very gingerly, Joanna folded her legs up under her—at five-feet-almost tall, no chair was particularly comfortable without an accompanying footstool. “But weren’t you their prisoner before?”

  “I was the Council’s prisoner, in the custodianship of the Church. The Archmage...” He hesitated on the title, then went on, “The Archmage fought for my life.”

  “Caris’ grandfather?”

  He nodded. “Salteris Solaris, yes.”

  She frowned a little, her dark, feathery brows pulling together over her nose. “The one you made away with?”

  “I did not make away with him” Antryg insisted doggedly. “I never saw him. He never came there.” But he looked away from her as he spoke.

  There followed a long silence. In the balmy warmth of the night, she wasn’t cold, but all the cumulative aches of the day were beginning to stiffen her unaccustomed muscles, and she had a headache from hunger—bread, cheese, and beer ten hours ago didn’t, she reflected, have a great deal of staying power. It was Sunday night. Well, she sighed inwardly, you didn’t want to go to work on Monday and here you are. But even as she smiled to herself, she shivered.

  She hadn’t wanted to go to work Monday because she had known that she was being stalked. And here she was, with the stalker—where? And more than that...

  “Why?” she asked softly. “Why me? I’ve asked you that before....”

  Antryg looked over at her again and smiled gently. “My dear Joanna,” he said, “if I knew that, I would feel a good deal happier.”

  Then suddenly he raised his head, listening to the silence of that hushed and darkened house. “What...” Joanna began, and he raised his fingers for silence. Strain her ears as she would, she could hear nothing but the faint sough of the leaves of the courtyard trees beyond the arched door and, from somewhere far-off over the wall, the dismal singsong of a kindling-seller’s cry. The faint, bluish gleam of Antryg’s witchlight died, and, like nocturnal hunters encouraged by the death of the light, the shadows seemed to creep forward around them.

  In a voice no louder than the brush of a scrap of silk over footworn stone, Antryg whispered, “The Witchfinders.”

  Joanna knew better than to try projecting a sound that soft—she slid from her chair as noiselessly as she could and stood near enough to him that she could smell the lingering scents of hay and last night’s cigarette smoke in his clothes. “I don’t hear anything.” She did not even vocalize the sounds, but he breathed a reply.

  “At the far side of the house. They have Caris. There will be a key in the top drawer of the desk—Nandiharrow always kept it there.”

  Joanna hesitated. She had, after all, heard nothing herself. Caris would kill her if she let herself be tricked, particularly by something this simple. Presumably, someone like Sam Spade could just narrow his eyes and snarl confidently, “You’re lying, Merlin,” but Joanna had never figured out how to intuit that accurately. Trying to pitch her voice as soundlessly as she could, she asked, “Why would the Witchfinders want Caris?”

  He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the wooden pillar, listening to sounds that, try as she would, she could not hear. “They want the Archmage. They think he knows... Get the key!” he urged, with soundless urgency, his gray eyes opening wide, and added, when Joanna wavered, “I swear it isn’t a trick! Caris...”

  She held up her hand for silence, as he had done, and whispered, “I’ll see.”

  He opened his mouth protestingly, but she had already turned away, and he knew better than to make any further sound.

  It was perhaps that which half convinced her, even before she slipped into the darkness of the refectory across the court and heard the soft voices there. An inveterate reader of spy novels, she followed every half-remembered precept, moving along the wall so that floorboards would not creak, not to mention there being less chance of tripping over miscellaneous furniture along the wall. A nervous, orange reflection of firelight outlined a door behind what must have been the high table and picked out the shining lip of a turned-wood bowl and the metal edge of a tankard, fallen amid a great red stain of dried wine. She caught an indistinct murmur of sound, fought back her instincts to hurry and tested every step. By the time she reached the doorway she could make out the voices.

  “My grandfather had nothing to do with his escape! He would have prevented it if he could!”

  “Either the Sigil of Darkness works or it doesn’t, boy,” a thin, cold voice said, chill and poisonous as crimes committed for righteousness’ sake. “If Antryg Windrose had the ability to spirit the Archmage away, the Archmage would have been able to prevent him from doing so.”

  Very cautiously, Joanna lowered herself to her hands and knees, so as to be below eye level, carefully keeping the pistol she held from knocking against t
he floor, and peeked around the edge of the door. After the soft, moony radiance in the refectory, the low redness of the hearth fire seemed bright. The room had clearly been the library; its half-emptied shelves were littered with torn and fallen books, and others lay thrown in the corners or had been heaped in the fireplace to provide such dim illumination as the room had. Caris was tied to a high-backed chair of spindled wood before the low blaze. Even in the wickering light, Joanna could see the fresh bruise livid on his cheek and the blood on his lip. His sword and three daggers glinted on the table behind them. Beyond, in the shadows, stood three sasenna in somber variations of Caris’ torn and stained black uniform. Like a shadow himself against the firelight, a thin man stood in a narrow-cut gray suit, his lank gray hair falling down over a turned-over collar of white linen. His hands were behind his back—small, hard, lean hands, white as the bands of his cuffs and, like them, dyed red with the gory light of the flame. When he turned his face sidelong to the fire, Joanna caught a glimpse of lean, regular features that indicated he had probably been handsome in his youth, before the habit of self-righteousness had bracketed the thin lips with lines of perpetual disapproval. Another man in a similar suit of close-fitting gray stood beside him; it was to him that first one said softly, “When he tells us where the man Antryg is, take two of the sasenna and kill him. We can’t afford these waters muddied.”

  The other man nodded, as if agreeing that, yes, mad dogs ought to be killed; an agreement that was self-evident. “And him?”

  The Witchfinder glanced casually back at Caris. “Oh, him too, of course—but after we’ve learned where Salteris might be. We have most of the great ones, save that one alone—if this boy is his grandson, we may be able to use him as bait.”

  It was not so much the words he said that affected Joanna, but the way they were spoken, the soft, insidious voice calmly matter-of-fact, as if it were not people at all of whom he spoke. As soundlessly as she could, she backed away, more afraid of being detected and of having that voice speak to her than she had been of anything, even of waking up in the darkness with the print of the strangler’s hands on her throat.